“Maybe if you played something better,” Sam said. “Try a jig.”
Tito scoffed.
“He doesn’t even know what a jig is,” Axel said.
“What are you guys talking about?” I asked again.
“Sam’s stupid chicken,” Lulu said without looking up. “He’s trying to figure out her magic talent. He thought maybe they would dance or something. I should never have grabbed the things.”
“We don’t even know if those were the magic chickens,” I said.
“They were,” Sam said. “I can feel it. Come on, Betty Sue. Show us what you got.”
Betty Sue ignored Sam and continued to peck at the ground.
“You can’t train chickens to do anything,” Axel said.
“That’s absolutely a lie,” Sam replied. “Lulu, sing. Maybe their magic trick is duets.”
“I am not going to sing for your chicken.”
I took another drink from the vodka bottle. “Where’s Harriet?” I asked, changing the subject.
This was a conversation we’d been having a lot lately at band practice, and asking the question felt comfortable. When she and Sam had started dating over a year back, she’d been a regular at our weekly practices, though she, Rosita, and Lulu would usually end up outside. Once she’d gotten pregnant, she’d stopped coming.
Lulu, despite not having been in the band for a few years, wouldusually hang out with us. Ariceli would come sometimes, too, when she was in town.
“She’s in shelter one with Miguel Mustache and Mrs.Gonzales,” Sam said.
I nodded. Rosita was also over there, but she was on work duty, helping the honeybees add insulation to the tops of the shelters. Roger had analyzed the type of beam the ship had used to explode that rhino and seemed to think proper insulation could possibly protect the buried shelters. I really doubted it, but it would also give them protections from more standard explosions, and we needed that, too.
It’d only been a few hours, but Miguel was doing better, though from what I heard he was in a lot of pain. He was asking to come back out and help fight. That wasn’t going to happen.
“Fuck this,” Lulu suddenly said. She stood and strode off back toward the control room. We watched her go.
“She’s mad because she’s not allowed to say anything on the net anymore,” Sam said.
“Yeah,” I agreed, watching her. “She’s pissed. She doesn’t like being told what to do.”
“It’s more than that,” Axel said. “Did you hear what Roger said to her?”
“No,” I said. “What’re you talking about?”
“Roger asked Lulu if he could borrow money from her. Earth money.”
“What?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Axel said. “This just happened a few minutes back. He said he knows she has an Earth bank account, and he wanted her password and permission to spend the money. He wants to rent a computer server or something for intelligence gathering. Something about being able to do a lot of searching on that side of the gate. That way it hides all the bandwidth. She ended up giving it to him, but she was pissed.”
“Shit,” I said. She hadn’t said anything to me. That money was hers. She’d earned it. I looked toward where she’d gone, wondering if I should follow her. Roger clearly knew how she was earning that money, but him actually acknowledging it had to have been a strange conversation.
But beyond that, that money—however much it was—represented something to my sister. It was her escape plan. It was her hope.
I hadn’t really spent too much time thinking about the implications of what was happening beyond the immediate. Even if we somehow survived, did that mean my sister would never be able to follow her dream? Even though I had never really approved of the idea of her going to Earth, I knew it was what she wanted more than anything. Would she even be allowed to leave the planet after this? Would the quarantineeverget lifted? I took yet another sip of the vodka.
“You better leave her be,” Sam said, seeing where I was watching. “She probably wants to be left alone.”
“Maybe,” I said, still looking toward where she went.
