She knelt on one knee, her eyes colder than ever as she held my neck like she did when we were kids. On the nights when we were cold and hungry, had nothing to get us by, she hugged me and sang. Horribly, but Dad liked to sing. A little nightly routine when he would tuck us in, if he was home, and sing a little song just for us.
I’d never hear that again from either of them.
“I thought you were dead all these years,” she whispered, looking at me as if she, too, saw a ghost. “After those fuckers dragged me off, I thought you would save me, but you never did, so it only made sense that you were dead. You needed to be; otherwise, that meant you left me, and you didn’t bother to think of getting me out. That made your memory easier. Deep down, I think I knew it wasn’t true but didn’t want to face it because then that meant you were… this. Pathetic.”
She stood, spat on my back, and walked away.
I sat there, face stinging, chewing my cheeks until I imagined all I would ever know was the taste of copper.
I knew I’d dream of what had happened that night. I just didn’t think it’d be the real thing.
018
Ten Years Ago
“We’releaving.”Madlynyankedme off the mattress.
“Leaving where?”
She shoved rations into our worn packs. “Clothes, blankets, water, anything you can carry, put it in here.” She shoved the pack into my arms. “Fast. We need to get the fuck out of here.”
“Why? Maddy, what’s going on?” Although I had questions, I didn’t stop doing exactly what she said. Maddy wouldn’t be packing if it weren’t worth panicking over.
We didn’t have much. Apartments in the Colony were simple. A single room large enough for our mattress on the floor to be shoved against the wall. A table full of games and garbage sat between the bed and our holo screen on the wall that decided randomly if it wanted to work. I dug out a holo frame from upper ring trash, the frame slightly broken, so our family picture flickered on and off. In the bathroom, Maddy ripped the hidden compartment out of the wall to dump all the synthetics she could into the pack.
“Those are Benno’s. What are you doing?!” I stood in the bathroom's threshold, bewildered.
“Benno is gone, Lucky, got it? Left us all to rot, the bastard! The least he can do is help us out now that he fucked us all over. We’re selling this at the first port we can and maybe, just maybe, we’ll have enough to hide ourselves in the middle of fucking nowhere.” Maddy slung the full pack over her shoulder and went for the door. “Let’s go. We need to take the first transport out of here.”
“We don’t have passports or the credits. Maddy, Maddy!” I ran after her, out of our dingy apartment and into the Colony slums.
The Slums were a part of every colony on every asteroid, the place where the workers slept in their tiny cells and wandered its dirty streets. Any runoff from the mining equipment dripped from the rusting pipes to leave the streets perpetually damp. Smoke filtered over the rooftops and through the streets, a smog that would poison the lungs of everyone, eventually.
Maddy knew the streets better than anyone. She swerved in and around the subsets, keeping us out of the flickering lights. She had us palm off our commlinks for cheap. A total ripoff, regardless of how busted and old they were, that I told her about but she didn’t care.
“Don’t you get it yet? Benno is gone. Syrox is taking over.” She slammed a hand against my chest to press us against the nearest wall. On the next street, a group passed snickering, and armed. Syrox’s group. They weren’t meant to be on this side of the Colony.
“Plenty of these fuckers have come and gone. They always absorb the last ones that were here,” I countered.
She took my hand, gripping tight, and had us run across the street to the other side. A worker transit blared a horn at us, ripping by on the rails.
“Typically, yeah, but Syrox isn’t typical.” She flinched as a series of screams ripped through the slums. They weren’t unusual. Death in theColony was more real than the recycled air we breathed. She shouldn’t have been bothered, shouldn’t have grown so pale, but then she whispered, “He’s killing everyone who ever worked for Benno. We get out of here, or we’re dead, simple as that.”
It wasn’t as if we hadn’t been threatened before. Working for the biggest crime syndicate in the Colony wasn’t a safe job. However, Maddy and I made do running the synthetics. It was the simplest of the work. We went to the warehouses, got the stash, snuck around to drop them off to the dealers and went on our way. Most left us alone. The big issues came when someone couldn’t afford their fix, when they thought going after us was the last resort. That’s why Maddy and I always worked together, one on the run and one on lookout.
“Won’t he have people watching transports for this situation exactly?” I asked when we took the path leading to the old tunnels.
They were used for mineral transport from a ruined section of the mine, closed off after one of many collapses. No different from the one that took our parents. None of the old tunnels were safe, which meant they were perfect for sneaking.
“Would you rather we wait around for him to find us?” She tugged off the covering of the old tunnel and looked back at me, face smudged with grime.
She wasn’t wrong. I understood that, but couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t stop glancing over my shoulder, wanting to return home to crawl into bed and pretend none of this was happening.
Maddy took my hand, firmer and stronger than I could ever be. “We’ll take the Yellow Tunnel. It goes over the transports. There has to be one we can smuggle onto.”
“People have tried before. They’re caught atthis port or the next and are sent back,” I argued.
“Then you better hope we get caught at the next port and we fight our way out. I can’t sit around, Lucky. Syrox and his goons know this place as well as we do. There isn’t anywhere to hide. I wouldn’t be surprised if his group search these tunnels at some point.”
