After taking her three kilometres to Baron, the drone had disappeared into a repository on the side of a familiar warehouse. With the roar of the generator, the gentle mumbling of the manufactured atmosphere, the proximity to the island’s hubs, it was the perfect place to hole up until the launch — still, Mal hesitated to go in. It would be perfect, if it were anyone but Goose.
Clover kicked her hard, like she was trying to spur on a horse. She took a galvanizing breath and approached the side door, stepping into the mud room. She quickly decontaminated at the wide plastic sink, scrubbing the dirt from her hands before pulling off her snorkel. The recycled air was smooth and scent-free, but compared to the air up north it had a taste, like licking plastic; Clover was of the same mind, snuffling the air with a discerning frown as Mal mopped her face and washed her little hands.
Behind a fluttering plastic sheet, the warehouse was almost exactly as she remembered it: a maze of half-finished projects with barely enough space to move around, the expanded-metal mezzanine tinging the air with the smell of rust, and the furthest corners of the building disappearing into the gloom of localized light. The only change was that now three guitars were hanging on the wall over Goose’s queen bed: an unassuming acoustic with nylon strings that had belonged to Rowan, a striking-but-faded orange base that had belonged to Sulien, and a semi-hollow that belonged to Goose, the upper shoulder carved to look like a bird’s wing.
The spare bed was exactly where she had left it, cordoned-off with heavy curtains for privacy but otherwise untouched. A sense of unease was making it hard to look away from the mattress and the threadbare blanket, making her queasy. It was the air, the plasticky taste that wasn’t fading into the background like it used to — she was too accustomed to the un-recycled air up north, the kind that let some dust and grime accumulate. The lack of it here made the bed seem locked out of time, like it was only yesterday that Mal had burrowed under Gwenh’s smoky belongings, hoping that she might die too.
She turned away from the painful memories and approached the dark terminal further down the wall. Instead of a three-keyed binary pad Goose now had a full keyboard, though most of the keys were either missing or too weathered to determine their denominations, and the monitor booted up immediately instead of stalling for twenty minutes. Clover whined and hid her face from the blinding white page, but Mal leaned closer and pecked at the keys randomly, hoping to discern a pattern to the layout that she might remember for next time.
“I think some payment is due.” Goose’s Dún Laoghaire inflection hadn’t thinned a bit. “Since you dinged my Hammerhead, and all.”
“Decommissioning drones is a time-honoured moral obligation, I require no payment.” English came easier than Kanien’kéha, and she tried not to feel bitter about it as she turned to face them. Instead of crutches, they sat in a wheelchair decorated with orange bandanas and brass charms that matched their jewellery. They had swapped out their cornrows for a loose, natural style that suited their square face, with a long fringe that almost covered their wide eyes — wide eyes that didn’t look nearly as exhausted or sad as she remembered. Their brown skin looked less sallow under the streaks of motor oil absently and accidentally smeared across their forehead, and the crow’s feet and smile-lines that thirty years of life had gifted them hinted at a happier existence. “It’s good to see you, Goose.”
“Barely noticed you were gone,” they replied absently, leaning away with a dubious expression. “You have a baby.”
“This is Clover — I found her at the flea market.” Clover whined impatiently, reaching out to greet this new stranger. Mal swayed on her feet to calm her down, but her daughter was always looking to meet new people. “Want to hold her?”
Goose seemed equal parts pleased and horrified, hurriedly taking off their gloves as she passed her daughter into their lap. Clover regarded them with the same distrust she had for most strangers, brow furrowing as she weighed their standing as friend or foe. Eyes locked, Goose remained perfectly still, even as Clover slowly reached for the magnifiers hanging from their neck, and snapped the cord with one hard yank.
Mal stifled a laugh at the ensuing struggle, lifting her camera to capture the moment. The picture would be glorious, once it was developed: the light was amber and gold as it snagged on the crack in her lens, throwing a longhouse-halo around Goose’s indignation and Clover’s tight grip. When she lowered her camera, Goose had reclaimed their glasses and was holding them over their head, looking harried and anxious. “I’m done holding your goblin.”
“How dare you,” Mal chastised, propping her daughter back on her hip, smiling as she wrapped her tiny fist around her camera strap. “She’s an angel, I’ll hear nothing less.”
They snorted and turned away, heading back for their work bench. “Your timing’s excellent; I need a tester.”
She trailed behind, shuffling through the maze of clutter and hanging projects, her attention pinned firmly on her feet to keep from tripping. “It’s not that yarn-spinner again, is it? It has a mind of its own.”
“I put that away — after you stuck your hand in the wheel it gained a taste for human flesh.” They swung themself around to park at their bench, hunching over a horrifically familiar shape. “You coming?”
She had frozen in place at ten feet, staring at the drone lying on the table, its chest cracked open as though in the midst of an autopsy, its face painted with a stripe of orange — not a Hammerhead, but a war drone. Humanoid, armed, and programmed to kill. Clover squeaked as her mother’s arms tightened around her.
“Where did you get that?” She could barely hear her own voice.
“It was giving off a low battery signal from this dump in Bayonne, so I asked Adelaide— do you know Adelaide?” They shook their head before she had a chance to process the question. “Actually, you wouldn’t, she arrived after you left— anyway, I asked her and her crew to go and get it for me.” They pulled on a pair of glowing gloves and started to dig around in the chest. “It’s dead, is what I mean.”
Their words weren’t reaching her, not when she was absolutely certain that the drone would get up and attack her if she so much as blinked. Her heart was crawling up her throat at the betrayal — it was as though they’d forgotten that a war drone like this had killed Gwenh, how could they have forgotten—
“Mal.” With a serious expression, they picked up a wrench and clocked the automaton across the skull; the impact became a relay of reflexes, trailing down the body and jolting through its leg, but beyond that it was stiller than the dead. “I killed all of them, remember?”
They tossed the wrench back on the table with a dull thud, breaking the spell; Mal swallowed dryly, and loosened her grip on her grumbling daughter. Her heart shrank back in her chest, still gnawing on her ribs, but she could stand a few teeth. “It’s creepy.”
They ripped out a gasket and flung it across the room. “No more so than what you do, touching dead bodies all day.”
“Undertaking,” she corrected, fighting back the old impulse to deflect and hide as she cautiously approached — Goose was not entrenched in the city’s suspicion of undertakers, and their friendly jabs were nothing serious. “Mine go back to the earth. These go to the scrap heap.”
“Can’t argue with that,” they grunted, reaching deep inside and under the thoracic motor to disconnect a key wire, every motion dominated by tens of little decisions that seemed to take them no time at all. With one hand still rooting around in the chest cavity, they reached under the table and pulled out a ragged cardboard box, filled to the brim with palm-sized pagers: some were black and grey, but most had transparent, colourful casings, scratched-up and cracking with age. She selected one with a green case and accepted the cylindrical battery they handed over next, snapping it into place and watching hello world scroll across the grey, single-line screen.
“Where’d you find these?”
“It’s a very boring story. Try sending a message, will you? I’m trying to get the stupid conduit to work.”
She brought the device closer to her face, the button-covers clicking pleasantly beneath her thumb as she scrolled through some of the pre-programmed phrases: acknowledged, on my way, answer soon, send help, be safe. She selected as many as would fit into one message and hit SEND: the device grew almost painfully hot in her hands, and the war drone went airborne with the force of its spasms. She leapt back with a curse, arms tightening protectively around her daughter; Clover cried out in annoyance and thankfully not much else. She turned to glare at Goose, who was too busy observing the spasms to notice. “A little warning, next time?”
“Right, sorry.” They handed her a second pager and dove back in — the drone had fallen still and was beginning to smell of burning plastic. The motherboard they pulled from the chest cavity was half-charred and summarily flung into the nearest garbage can. “Is that the message you sent?”
“Yes.” She massaged her aching chest, barely keeping her tone civil. “Can you cover that up, or something?”
Their easy smile turned solemn, and they pulled a length of fabric over the automaton’s body. “So— you’re here for Niña?”
Something in her chest recoiled, turning defensive. “We are.”
“What made you want to go again?”
“I never stopped,” she replied, choosing not to admit to the years spent convincing her loved ones otherwise — it sounded bad in her head, and it would sound much worse out loud. “I started walking, as soon as I heard.”
“Long way to walk.”
“Well, it’s a long time to wait if I miss it again.” Twenty-five years, if she was lucky, if there were people left to build the next generation. There were a hundred-and-forty-nine other crafts launching some time in the next year, but it had taken Goose’s family almost ten months to get from Liverpool to Kjipuktuk to the city. For people coming from Hong Kong, like Tai-Song’s family, the journey could be as long as two years. Niña would be her one and only chance.
Goose held out their hand for the pagers. “I’m glad I get to see you before you go, then.”
“You’re staying?” That was disappointing. “Don’t you have a free pass?”
“You have to work for a least a year before qualifying.” Out of habit they turned their head to where the guitars were hanging, kissing their fingertips in tribute to Sulien’s memory. “And it doesn’t seem so grand to me, anymore — just more of the same.”
They were probably right: with the kinds of people who got to go first, the chances of waking up in a utopian society were slim to none. Hopefully a pristine world would be worth the status quo. Her train of thought was interrupted by Goose’s grumbles of annoyance as they shook out their hands, pulling back their fingers to flex their wrists — she had forgotten how much they were slowed down by their overstressed joints and frequently-numb fingers, how much it frustrated them to have to pause and stretch. “How’s the pain?”
They held up their hands, eager to show off their gloves: each knuckle had a nodule that glowed a faint red and hummed gently with electricity. “These send pulses into my fingers to keep them from locking up. I’m working on a bigger array for my wrists and shoulders, but using it for too long gives me the shakes.” They cut off themself off from what was sure to be a long-winded tangent and gestured vaguely at her instead. “How fares the Great White North?”
“I refuse to respond to the question if you call it that.”
“Fine, how fares Canada?”
“Akwesasne is a sovereign nation, and does not recognize the legitimacy of such colonial institutions as Canada, or The United States of America—”
“If you don’t meaningfully engage in my attempts to be social, I’m going to knock you on your ass. How’s Akwesasne, how’s your family, tell me about your life, et cetera. Catch me up.”
“It’s nice, they’re good, you’ve seen the extent of the exciting things in my life.” She shifted on her feet, stuffing down the feelings of guilt she carried constantly, and tried to come up with something they’d find interesting. “Dad’s a radio host for the local station. Undertaking is a lot different over there — a lot more varied — but Baba’s pretty trained-up in all the different methods by now.”
“Must be a busy job.” They turned away, cleaning up their workspace to keep their focus on the conversation. “Undertaking, I mean.”
“Not really. People get sick or hurt, but—“ She was struggling to find the words. She had been struggling to find the words for the past nine years, trying to understand how life in that place could be so different with the same hard times — how it could be that in nine years, she had seen barely two dozen deaths. “They usually just— get better. The ones don’t are usually seventy or eighty years old.” Goose snorted in disbelief. “It’s true! Old Beau is eighty-nine years old this year, and he could kick my ass.”
“Is it because you call him Old Beau?”
“Everyone calls him Old Beau — he calls himself Old Beau.”
“Sure. Are you an undertaker over there as well?”
“No.” She had once thought that it would be her path, but she wasn’t like her Baba, who could adapt and relearn every skill from the ground up, who naturally belonged no matter where se was. The many methods of Akwesasne were too different from what she was used to, and she was too set in her ways to do more than watch from the outside. “I do what I can — building, gardening, that sort of stuff.”
“I bet they’ll miss having you around.”
“Eh, probably not — I wasn’t very good at most things.” She stared down at the ground like her eyes were cinderblocks. “I didn’t tell anyone that I was leaving, either. The memories are probably sour by now.”
“Really? No one?”
“I mean — I told my parents.” Her arms wrapped more securely around Clover. “They made me promise not to warn them before I went, to wait until they were asleep and sneak away in the night, but I think they understood why I had to leave.”
“Had to?”
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, dodging the guilt again. “I never belonged there. I had friends, but—” But every story about the city had seemed to suck the air out of the room, and when news of Niña finally reached Akwesasne, stories about the city seemed to come up daily. “I don’t want to live in a place where everyone knows all of my secrets. I’m tired to being treated like I’m fragile.”
She dreaded the day Clover started to ask why her mother was so sad all the time, that developmental stage between asking existential questions and understanding that people don’t like being asked existential questions — but at least no one would go around telling her daughter the truth on Proxima, and that would buy her some time to prepare for the inevitable fallout. She wanted as many good memories to hold onto as possible, when Clover learned what really happened and renounced herself as Mal’s daughter.
Goose had paused in their cleaning, their back still turned. When they looked back at her, it was as though they could hear the thoughts gathering in a grief-ache behind her eyes. “If that’s really what you want—“
“It is,” she said sharply.
“If that’s really what you want,” they stressed, turning away to hide everything but their quavering voice, “Then I wish you safe travels.”
They rolled their chair deeper into the warehouse, one sleeve dragging across their eyes as they turned a corner and disappeared. She bit down on the urge to follow them, to explain herself, to rationalize; it was better to keep her distance until they were ready to talk again.
She turned away to climb the stairs. From the mezzanine she could better see the array of lamps below, swaying lazily like fireflies; if she squinted, the light’s haze on the dimness was almost like the muggy teenaged summer she had helped to build new houses on the south shore of the river. It had been three months of the hardest work of her life: when her days were often full with couriering firewood and groceries, she usually joined the evening crew to frame up as many homes as they could before the colder weather set in, and they would often work into the small hours of the morning. The hardest work of her life, but also the most satisfying: in between framing and sheathing and installing windows and doors, she and the other workers would compete to see who could balance the longest on the bare beams, who could cross the fastest carrying the heaviest load, who could do a cartwheel across a strut no wider than the length of her foot. She had never felt more useful to the community, and she had rarely felt that satisfaction since.
“That blanket is nice,” Goose called from below, somewhere in the maze.
“It was a maternity gift from Clover’s donor,” she called back, running her fingers along the fibres that still cocooned her daughter. With soft brown wool sourced from a visiting Navajo party, Kaia had spent months knitting the strands into a basket-weave, replicating the textures of the fancy baskets that every auntie and uncle of a certain age seemed to own, with a latticed border that looked like sea shells. All throughout there were silky ribbons pulled through the purls of yarn, and dead-centre was an Haudenosaunee-style chain in green. Even though Kaia’s gift was out-of-place for the fashion and means of the city and the world she was heading for, she was loathe to leave it behind — it was a big step up from the blanket she had been wearing around her shoulders for the last fifteen years, a quilted piece that was slowly falling apart and was irreparably stained in most places.
“Come closer, I can’t hear you.”
She came back down to ground level, cringing at the red dust the railing had left on her palm. “Their name’s Kaia — you’d like them.”
“I wasn’t aware that donors were so involved.” Their voice was loud enough to follow to their smaller work desk, where they were hunched over a mess of wires and fuses. “Any troubles with custody?”
“No, they’ve been very respectful. I wasn’t sure the gifts at first either, but it’s not like I would have kept them apart — Clover’s always going to know the truth.” It helped that the gifts were coming from skilled artisans. She especially loved the baby blanket that Kaia’s father had given to her a week after she announced the pregnancy, having wordlessly accommodated the city’s tradition of leaving one corner unfinished, and her own aversion to the colour blue. Her tears had soaked the material through by the time she was done stitching Clover’s embroidered square into the empty space, thumb brushing over the spiny maroon blossoms and thinking bitterly about the day she would have the snip apart the threads and hand the blanket off to another family. “What are you working on?”
“Diagnostics scanner.” Their mouth was tight with focus. She estimated it would be roughly two minutes before the work consumed them entirely. “Yuen-Fa’s going to jailbreak the ship’s computer and trick the AI into accepting new passengers, and this is how she’ll do it.”
“Yuen-Fa?”
“Right— Yuen-Fa used to be Tai-Song’s brother, but now she’s his sister. Anyways, she dropped it off yesterday; she wanted Tai-Song to do it, but apparently he’s gone missing. Again.”
It was good to know that Tai-Song was still making her look better by comparison. “Are you mad she didn’t ask you to do it in the first place?”
“A little. Everyone knows I’m better at meeting deadlines.” Their gloves pulsed, accidentally spot-welding a pair of exposed wires together. “Tai-Song just does whatever the hell he wants.”
Mal hummed in tired agreement — Tai-Song had many quirks, and a familial affection was not enough to smooth them over, in most cases. “You talk to him lately?”
“Not in several years.” They paused, head tilting to the right as they chewed on a thought. “He showed up here a while ago, drunk. Yuen-Fa managed to catch him before he broke down my door, and I never did find out why he was so upset.” They shook their head and returned to their work. “Speaking of Yuen-Fa, you’d better tell her that you need a seat; she needs RVSPs.”
“Alright. Is it okay if we crash here until the launch?”
“I’d like nothing more.” Their sincerity was giving her heartburn as she retrieved her cradleboard. “I have tons of canned beans — you like beans, right?”
“That I do.” She straightened up, shifting her weight to wake up her feet. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Thanks for keeping the bed.”
“Oh.” They glanced at her cot with a faux-puzzled look. “I meant to throw that out, actually.”
“You should be a comedian. Don’t wait up.”