Seventeen Days to Launch
There was nothing familiar about the new arrival that had joined them in the night, but all the same Mal could not shake her fascination with the woman’s long, badly-tangled auburn hair or her way of slouching around like a prowling lion. She spent the morning trying to get a look at her face instead of the work she was meant to be doing, but the woman seemed to have eyes on the back of her head and a strong aversion to people in general. The others seemed to have an aversion to her as well — everywhere she went, people gave her a wide berth.
When the lunch bell rang, the woman collected her food and retreated to an empty table without a single person getting in her way. Mal sat down beside Isaiah with her own lunch — a dry sandwich with inscrutable insides, nothing like the kana'tarokhón:we and gravy she was hankering for — and nodded in greeting to the three workers already sharing his table. The woman was plump, dark-haired, and quick to smile back, the man was ash-blond, serious, and skinny, and the boy was the same that had paid for her food the day before: shaggy strawberry blonde hair, a round, youthful face, and green eyes that were uncaring to anything besides his lunch.
Mal cleared her throat and nodded to their new arrival; she had lit up a cigarette, holding it delicately between shaking fingers and taking gentle puffs in between bites of her food. “What’s that one’s name?”
“Not worth knowing,” the woman replied. The man snorted in agreement. The boy’s head remained studiously bent to his groaning plate.
“2103. We call her Twenty-one.” Isaiah was looking over a stack of handwritten notes, transferring his lunch onto the boy’s plate piece-by-piece. “Not sure she speaks English.”
Not to you, she thought — the voice from last night had definitely spoken English, though she was still unsure of the accent. “Why is everyone so skittish around her?”
“She’ll tear your head off for showing your teeth,” the man said conspiratorially. “Like a chimpanzee.”
Isaiah hummed, somewhere between neutrality and agreement. “We’ve heard some troubling rumours about why she was removed from the munitions floor.”
“What kind of rumours?”
He tilted his head at the young, mean-looking guard by the door; his left eye was bloodshot, and parallel pink scars raked from eyebrow to cheekbone. “The kind that were confirmed when she tried to scratch out Anthony’s eyes.”
The boy flinched and began to stuff his mouth faster, clearly hoping to dodge the topic altogether. Mal made a mental note to ask him about it later, one-on-one, and cleared her throat. "Maybe I should introduce myself," she said idly, more to gauge Isaiah's reaction than anything else.
He finally looked at her, and empathically shook his head: she had the sense that he knew that she was purposefully testing a boundary. “I would strongly urge that you leave her alone.”
She rallied on, still not convinced: “Does she attack us?”
The woman frowned. “No, but does it matter? The guards work hard — they don’t deserve to be mauled. Anthony’s the one who got the drone away from you, you know.”
“Don’t try and make friends,” Isaiah repeated, going back to sorting his notes. “There’s plenty of other people here who would enjoy your company more, and most of them don’t bite nearly as hard.”
She doubted she would be able to hold herself back — she was never good at evaluating risk. The bell to end lunch rang dully from above the door, and she robotically rose to follow the crowd back to the rows of tabletop planters, eyes on Twenty-One’s back. All she wanted was to see her face, to sate her curiosity; once she knew what the woman looked like, that would free up space to focus on more important things.
It was another hour before disaster struck, maybe two: all Mal really knew was that her peppermint plant had jumped off of the table and was now on the floor, smashed beyond repair. She had no idea how it had happened — she had been preoccupied with a splitting headache and keeping Twenty-One in sight at all times, and whatever her hands or elbows had been doing was a complete mystery. A more immediate problem was that Anthony was coming at her fast with a mean expression on his face: running away was an extremely short-term solution, and her lack of other options kept her rooted to the floor and hunching in on herself.
Twenty-One stepped out in front of her, a protective barrier for Anthony to smash against. Her entire posture had changed, her slouching back straightening like a ruler as she achieved her full height of taller-than-everyone-else. One hand, with broken, dirty nails and knuckles latticed with scars, reached back to push Mal into the safety of the crowd; when Mal proved incapable of moving, rooted to the spot and nearly suffocating on the cloying scent of tobacco, Twenty-One switched gears and kicked a shard of terracotta at Anthony's feet.
“I dropped a plant.” English, just like the night before. Twenty-One's voice was low and raspy from disuse, and Mal's heart squeezed as she recognized the accent as Welsh.
He scoffed. “You expect me to believe that?”
“2112 couldn’t have done it — she’s all the way over there.” The lie probably would have worked, were Mal brave enough to leave Twenty-One’s shadow: instead she continued to cower behind her, staring at the tangles and mats beginning to form in the long strands of her hair. “I’m just trying to help you out, Andy. This one belongs to Render, but no one cares if you rough me up. I won’t even hit you back.”
Anthony's face coloured, no doubt reminded of the scratches she had left behind last time. “I already know what you scream like. Move aside.”
She spat on his boots as he approached, and didn’t brace herself or even flinch as he raised his baton and struck her once on the bicep. She rocked slightly but stayed defiantly in his path, and he raised the baton again, aiming for her head; she held like steel until he was moving too fast to pull back, and when his entire body was thrown into the strike she stepped aside and grabbed his wrist, fingers arching and digging into the soft flesh. He dropped the baton with a yelp as she wrenched him toward her, smashing a flower pot against his skull.
Everyone turned to watch openly instead of out of the corner of their eyes as Anthony crumpled to the floor with a groan. Twenty-One took a single long breath in the stunned silence and stepped over his prone body, turning her back on the guards Claudia and Rhys as they rushed to apprehend her. She knelt down, stuffing the mint plant into her pocket before folding her hands behind her bowed head, and Mal finally saw her face.
She had assumed that everything would slow down, when she let herself dream of seeing Gwenh again, the seconds crystallizing like honey as they locked eyes across a crowded street. Here and now — where she had to clumsily push her glasses out of the way to be sure of what she was seeing, where the distance that separated them was a mere three-and-a-half feet, where an unconscious man lay crumpled between them — her thoughts were racing so fast that they all blurred together, taking up all the space she might have used for breathing, for speaking, for doing anything besides standing there with her mouth agape.
When her voice returned, it was a croak. “Gwenh?”
She raised her head sharply, looking surprised to hear her own name — as though she had forgotten what it sounded like. Claudia snarled at her to keep her head down as she forced her hands behind her back, but she didn’t heel or look away, fixing Mal with a furrowed brow. Beyond the confusion, her expression was uncommonly resigned, but those were her faraway eyes, that was her rosy birthmark — those are her ears, go for broke and bet my boots—
“Gwenh!” Her exalted cry was more of a sob as someone grabbed onto her, roughly pulling her away from the scene. Gwenh’s eyes grew clearer as she suddenly staggered upright, and Claudia wasted no time flipping the cap off of a long syringe and plunging it into her thigh. Mal struggled fruitlessly to break free as Gwenh sluggishly thrashed and eventually sagged into unconsciousness; she didn’t realize she was holding her breath until Gwenh had been carried out of the room. The hands around her elbows continued to drag her away, and her eyes slid to the pair of paramedics that had arrived to load Anthony onto a gurney.
“Where’s he going?” When she had cut herself on her shears that morning, one of the other workers had produced a bandage from his pocket and told her to wrap it up quickly before any of the guards noticed.
“Sinai, offsite hospital.” Isaiah said, falling into step beside her. The boy kept a secure hold on her arm, looking nervously behind him as they retreated — the dark-haired woman's grip had loosened slightly, enough to Mal to twist free. “He’ll be fine. You, on the other hand, need to be a little more honest this time around.”
Guilt and anger stuck to the walls of her chest like tar, and she roughly pulled away from the boy's grip. Loathe as she was to admit it, Isaiah was right: she should have known it was Gwenh the minute she arrived, the moment she spoke, the second she was close enough for Mal to see her narrow, scarred hands and take in the smell of cigarettes. She should never have let herself believe that Gwenh was dead. “What will they do to her?”
“Three days of solitary,” Isaiah said, jaw tense. She sensed that she had lost all of his goodwill. “Start talking.”
“We were close, once. That’s all you need to know.” She could see the fourth guard, Lou, sitting by the door and lazily watching over the room, as though one of his colleagues hadn’t just been maimed. She turned to the boy. “Who was she protecting, when she last attacked Anthony?”
He stepped back from her with a start, searching her face for some kind of manipulation. “I broke a conveyor last week,” he hesitantly admitted, despite Isaiah’s warning glance. “She picked a fight with him before he could come and check it out.”
"I've never heard her speak so much," the woman said, keeping her head low as she watched the paramedics leave with Anthony. "I didn't realize she even knew how, it's always—"
"She knows," Mal said sharply. "She sings and writes, she speaks English and Welsh, but if she doesn't like you, then she's not going to bother." She shook her head and did her best to calm herself down. "When she attacked Anthony, did she call him a Saes? Cachu iar?"
The boy shrugged uselessly. "I don't know."
"What about—" She screwed up all of her concentration to recite the curse as accurately as she could, one she could easily imagine Gwenh shouting mockingly as she was dragged away from a fight — Mal had used it once or twice while playing lacrosse, painstakingly translated into Kanien'kéha, to the choked laughter of her teammates. "Dos i chwarae efo dy nain?"
He blinked, and tilted his head. "Fuck, you do know her."
She nodded definitively and turned for the door. Isaiah grabbed her elbow before she could go far, disappointment writ plainly on his face. “She’s not how you remember her, Mal.”
“She’s exactly how I remember her.” She jerked herself free of him and turned away, straightening her clothes as she made her way to the door. The guard saw her coming but stayed seated as she unsubtly sized him up: he was young, face still bare of anything more than peach fuzz, fingers still twitchy and undisciplined as he lay his hand on his baton. She halted at six feet with her hands raised. “Can you pass along a message?”
He raised an eyebrow, making no move to stand. “If it’s worth my time. I only trade in scrip.”
She sighed and withdrew her life’s savings from her pocket: three scrips, good for three square meals. “One?”
He smirked, standing up and crossing his arms. “Three.”
Like everyone else in this godforsaken place, he had more than half a foot on her, and coercion was clearly as natural to him as breathing. She straightened her back in turn and schooled her expression into business-like neutrality. “Two.”
His smirk grew — it occurred to her, too late, that maybe a guard would have no material need for these scrips, that demanding everything she had was an exercise in dominance rather than trade. “Three, or I walk.”
She hummed irritably and looked down at her meagre offerings. A guard with scrips to trade had a different kind of power over the workers, and as she thought of what desperate people would do for food she found herself unwilling to feed into the system. She looked back at Lou; he was staring expectantly at the paper in her hand, waiting for her desperation to win out.
“Tell Render I’m interested in renegotiating my contract." She took her three scrips and tore them to pieces, letting the flimsy confetti flutter to the ground — three missed meals wouldn't kill her. "Do that, and I won't tell him or Twenty-One about you extorting me.”