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  Novels by Karin Lowachee

  Warchild

  Burndive

  If you purchase this book without a cover you< should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Copyright © 2005 Karin Lowachee

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Aspect is a registered trademark of Warner Books

  Cover design by Tony Russo

  Book design by Giorgetta Bell McRee

  Aspect Books

  Time Warner Book Group

  1271 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Paperback Printing: April 2005

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Amber van Dyk and Nancy Proctor,

  creative godmuses to Yuri and Finch,

  even in the eleventh hours (and there were a few).

  THANK YOUS

  2003 Blue Heaven Novel Workshoppers, incredible writers all, who critiqued and supported past the waters of the Isle: Christopher Barzak, Tobias Buckell, Roger Eichorn, Charles Coleman Finlay, Paul Melko, Cathy Morrison, Nancy Proctor, Mary Rickert, Benjamin Rosenbaum, James Stevens-Arce, and Amber van Dyk

  Angela Boord

  Hannah Bowen

  Sue Glantz

  Yukiko Kawakami

  Jaime Levine

  Shawna McCarthy

  Derek “D’Ado” Molata

  Monkeylint (Sock Monkeys, Sporks, and extra Lint)

  Steve K. S. Perry

  Devi Pillai

  Matt Stawicki

  The Team at Warner Aspect

  Winifred Wong

  My readers and street team (Sympathizer Network and Soljet Corps), from Mississauga to Malaysia.

  And all my family and friends who support and love me even when it’s difficult to understand what I’m doing, even when I’m a moody hermit soul, especially when I’m embedded in a book.

  What did I feel that night? You are curious. How should I tell?

  Does it matter so much what I felt? You rescued me—yet—was it well

  That you came unwish’d for, uncall’d, between me and the deep and my dream.

  Does it matter how many they saved? we are all of us wreck’d at last—

  ‘Do you fear?’ and there came thro’ the roar of the breaker a whisper, a breath,

  ‘Fear? am I not with you? I am frighted at life not death.’

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  “Despair”

  1881

  CONTENTS

  ME

  CURIOUS

  RESCUED

  WRECKED

  THE DEEP

  A BREATH

  MY DREAM

  When I was fourteen I got the scarlet fever, at least that’s what I called it and that’s how I think of it still. It’s not really the scarlet fever, not the one you read about in history files. Mine is just this feeling, and scarlet is its color. Red. You get so hot you have to release it, but it’s the heat of a cold sweat. The fever eats you up inside and you shake like you’re winter, like your blood is made of ice water and you need to see it run. You need to touch it and feel its warmth—because it has to be warm. Nobody is this dead inside.

  When it comes out along your skin there isn’t any pain. Just relief. Just the tiny red rivers of life. And you can breathe again, seeing that. You can look up. You can spread your arms and touch the edges of your emotions and maybe they touch back, like something new and curious. Or something old and almost forgotten.

  And you think, This is who you are, Yurochka. This is what you’re made of.

  ME

  2.25.2198 EHSD—Kalaallit Nunaat Military Prison

  “Yuri Mikhailovich Terisov,” the woman says to get my attention. Haven’t heard that name, Terisov, in years—which is what she’s counting on. I’ll remind you of who you were, she might be thinking. I bet she thinks it. Let me remind you of who you aren’t anymore. Yurochka. Terisov. But we all change whether we want to or not, our names are only a part of it, so her words don’t cut. They fall between us like promises, hollow and encumbered.

  I sit in a room the color of dirty ice, wrists cuffed to the table, arms spread and palms up like a martyred deity. She talks in deliberate paragraphs that’re supposed to wrap around my head and smother me with authority. At the end of it, when I yawn, she says, “You’re in here on consecutive life sentences with no opportunity for parole. You’re only twenty-two years old. You should take this conversation more seriously.”

  I should, yeah. Except she’s so serious she’s funny. Her fixed attention on my face is downright entertaining. She thinks she can intimidate me just because she’s a polly, but her stare isn’t that different from all the stares I’ve ever gotten in my life.

  The face of an angel and the eyes of a corpse, Falcone liked to say.

  People look at me if I walk like I want to be noticed or smile like I want to be touched. Some people would just do anything for me—or anything to me—if I let them.

  People are so easy. The galaxy’s full of whores.

  This polly woman thinks she can come in here, drag me to this shiny, sterile room, and pump me ’til I bleed emotion?

  I can bang my head ’til I bleed a thought, but my real thoughts wouldn’t interest her. Nobody’s interested in hearing a whore speak. That’s not what you buy them for.

  But she waits for me to say something. I should respond to her Offer, like the prosecutor of my case had an Offer—which wasn’t really an Offer, just a pat on the ass without the penetration. A reduced sentence for rolling on my contacts?

  No. How many times, woman? No. You can’t afford me.

  Maybe once upon a time it was possible. Maybe in some fairy tale I thought about Offers, dreamed about the pass they could give me if I just rolled over and bit the pillow. But there’s the morning after and all those furtive glances, and instead I chance juries, I chance lawyers, I let a lawyer talk hyperbole about how I was “torn from the loving arms of family and delivered into the clutches of a sadistic pirate” and that saves me from the death sentence. That saves me in a military prison where even pirates might have access. Because I know They can get me anywhere, and it’s better They think I didn’t help anyone, that I’m here against my will.

  Because I am, really. Against my will.

  Everyone knows my past, they put it in a File (there’s always a File for my kind) and spread it out for me like it’s a mirror above my head. I lie back and see it over me like Truth, and the one delivering it to me—the one delivering me—is also screwing me blind.

  But she calls me mister as if she respects me. She claims she works for EarthHub, but maybe she hasn’t gone farther outsystem than Pluto. Maybe she thinks “geisha” in my record refers to some female Japanese entertainer.

  Protégé. I look at her and think it.

  Falcone’s.

  The Khan.

  Don’t you know what I am?

  Maybe she knows a little. She wants what’s in my head.

  “Mr. Terisov,” she says, using my dead name again. She doesn’t blink, and her eyes remind me of Finch’s, my cellmate—black, Go game pieces. Her dark hair’s pulled back in a tail to emphasize a wide mouth and a masculine jaw. Not pretty, but pleasing. Beneath the brown sweater her tits make shapes like two healthy, hydroponic oranges. She can look at my
face and wait all day for my confession, but I’ll look at those and we’ll see who breaks first.

  “Mr. Terisov.” She sighs. “If you don’t talk to me, I can’t help you.”

  I yawn again and flex my fingers. Need a smoke, manita. These damn cuffs pinch my wrists, and the good pain’s gone bad. I guess it’s time to play now. “What agency did you say you work for?”

  Her jaw tightens, just a small twitch, presaging a lie. She doesn’t think I see it, so she lies anyway. “EarthHub Department of Justice.”

  So not a polly, technically.

  Not a polly at all.

  I nod my head like a slowpoke. “Uh-huh. Department of Justice. You a lawyer then?”

  No lawyer has her eyes and her bearing. When she walked through that door her body language screamed polly. They announce themselves in small, telling ways, even the undercover ones. I never met a skin I couldn’t finger, and she smelled just like one.

  But now…not quite so badged.

  Military?

  “I do work for the Department of Justice,” she says, without the twitch, convinced in her lie. Trying to convince me. “And I have the authority to table a deal with you, but you need to interact here, Mr. Terisov. You need to look at the facts of your situation.”

  I sniff like she’s a drain of snot staining my good shirt. “What the hell d’you know about my ‘situation’?”

  She blinks, leans back, and folds her arms loosely, probably wishing for distance in this enclosed room. “I know they had to place you in solitary confinement for your own safety.”

  It’s all on the slow, like she’s wasting my time. “Sure they did. It was for their own safety. And for the safety of those two-bit criminals they shacked me with.”

  This doesn’t impress her. “Deal with me, Mr. Terisov. Cut the games and deal. You can rot in here with your pretty words, or you can seize the opportunity in front of you.”

  “Seize the opportunity.” It makes me laugh. “You write for vids or what?”

  Her cheeks tighten. “Help us dismantle the pirate operations in space, and we’ll lessen your sentence by a good portion.”

  “I heard this song before. It’s tuneless.”

  She says, like a threat, “They’re going to put you back in the general population once you walk out of this room.”

  Among the mundane murderers and pedophiles. Among ex-military men who were trained to hate people like me.

  I don’t blink, only smile. I speak to her slowly like I’m drugged or dumb. “You think that scares me?”

  “It should. I know you have a big mouth and a misplaced sense of invulnerability, but it won’t save you.”

  She keeps being funny.

  “I was in genpop for three months, manita, here. Not in transfer. I don’t like to brag, but it ain’t all that hard.”

  She gestures to the shallow, precise scars on my forearms, tail ends curving to my wrists. Some are older than my time inside. “What are those then?”

  “Boredom.”

  “You did that to yourself?” Sickened by it. Superior about it.

  I shrug. I know it pisses her off. “The library here is shit.”

  “You honestly think you can survive a life sentence, much less more than one?” Abstract curiosity now.

  And now I’m done playing.

  “All my thoughts are honest, bitch.”

  The last straw, or maybe someone gives her an order on the silent bud in her ear. She rolls her chipsheet with my file in it, stands, and walks out.

  Either way, I guess she’s had enough of this pirate.

  Poor, dishonest woman from the so-called EarthHub Department of Justice. Didn’t anybody tell her? Doesn’t she know the way it is?

  You don’t fuck with Falcone’s protégés, ever, even though the bastard’s dead.

  They leave me to stare at my blurry reflection in the polished gray tabletop. No guard to take me back to my cell, no God-voice through the intercom to pronounce my fate. No torture crew to come in and encourage my confession. Just the tabletop and me. Tiny white scratches mar the surface, somebody’s defiant fever in a similar situation, who knows, but the marks are like everything. Imperfection is everywhere, in everybody. All the devils are in the details and you can exploit them—twist, stroke, or squeeze out what you want. Pollies and govies need optics to see those imperfections, but a good criminal knows them from the inside out.

  Like optics. They surround where I sit, embedded black eyes in the grid lines of the walls, giving a three-sixty view of my immobility. If I fart they’ll smell it somehow, that’s the level of their attention in rooms like this. But what do optics really show them about me? They might gauge my body temperature and my voice stress, zoom on my dilated pupils, but nothing will tell them what the last thirteen years of my life were like.

  I told one person, and he still put me in here.

  Better to keep your mouth shut.

  I learned long ago what it means to take favors from charitable people. No different from a cocktail who picks you up in a bar somewhere and screws you standing in the closest den. They all want to feel good. Even so-called service martyrs don’t want to admit that they’re whores for gratitude, but ultimately they’re looking out for their own salvation. They believe their good works will get them to heaven.

  Religiosos are pirates in denial. They’ll broker your soul before the prayers are past your lips, but they don’t call it that. They call it charity.

  High moral ground always gives me a nosebleed.

  Govies and their deals aren’t much different from religiosos. They greet you with smiles and Offers in an attempt to hide flanking attacks. I still sit here because they aren’t finished maneuvering. I know it for sure when the door opens and a beautiful man steps in. The woman didn’t work, so they send a different thing. And beauty’s a tool, like a knife or a drill or the little metal files you use to dig dirt from beneath your fingernails. This man knows it. His eyes fix on me as he shuts the heavy door behind him and walks up to the table, expensive shoes echoing on the floor. He holds a razor slate with both hands like a priest holds the word of God, standing in front of me to give a blessing or a curse. The tailored navy blue suit and white shirt make him look like some damn Universalist missionary, except there are no stars on his collar, no badge of peaceful intentions. The silk collar folds open at his neck like petals, revealing a column of swarthy skin. Above that, a smooth youngish face, deep-set dark eyes faintly rimmed by shadows more to do with race than fatigue. Thin lips smile with seeming honesty.

  He knows I’m looking. Distantly interested, if not wholly affected—both of us are. Because he looks at me too, with a selective kind of scrutiny: my coin-round blue eyes and pale spacer skin; my naturally bruised lips and shoulder-length, beaten-gold hair, which I haven’t combed except with fingers. You have to know your face to a narcissistic point, Falcone said. It’s the only way to control it.

  “My name’s Andreas Lukacs,” he says with an accent I don’t recognize. Still smiling, but not the grin of a politician or a player, though I don’t doubt he might be both. He sets his slate on the table with no particular emphasis. The display is dead transparency. He takes out a key from his pants pocket and points it at my cuffs, right and then the left, pressing the trigger.

  The cuffs beep and fall away.

  Now this is interesting.

  He holds out his hand to me. I know this protocol, though it’s not the culture of every ship or station. I take his hand and squeeze it, just so I can feel the temperature of his grip—warm against my cold fingers, dry and firm. I hold on and look up into his eyes, match his smile.

  And then I kiss it, the back of his hand, and lick his skin in a long wet track.

  Mmm, salty.

  He jerks back with a disgusted frown.

  Not so self-assured, are we?

  “Yuri,” he says, with more control than most would’ve mustered. He doesn’t even blink. “Don’t do that.”

  Like he�
��s talking to a child.

  “Andreas.” I spread my arms on the table, palms up, free. “You can cuff me again if you want.”

  “No,” he says. “You might like it.”

  I gift him with a grin and travel my gaze down his body. A long holiday. “Uh-huh. Then take a seat. Or not.”

  He decides to sit, but without haste or evident discomfort. Very neat in the way he pushes away both sides of his suit jacket so they don’t bunch around his middle. The slate stays deactivated. He folds his hands on it and looks at me with the nice smile reasserted. Not a perfect set of teeth, one incisor’s slightly crooked. So he isn’t vain enough to spend cred on cosmetic work, despite the expensive suit.

  “You gave my colleague quite a jar,” Andreas Lukacs says. Soft like a sigh.

  He came in armed, yeah. Not like that straightforward woman and her bullet-shaped vocabulary. He uses different weapons.

  I fold my arms on the table, lean on them toward him, like a friend. “So you’re from the Department of Justice too?”

  His head tilts to the side a fraction. “No.”

  “Was she?”

  A narrower stare, a flattening of the smile. “Yuri, I think you mistake why I’m here.”

  “I don’t know why you’re here, Andreas, so how could I mistake it?”

  “I think you know.”

  He looks like a lawyer, but he’s too comfortable with me. As if I don’t pose a threat.

  “You wanna offer me a deal like her? What, didn’t she explain my point of view?”

  He studies my face as if checking for flaws. “No,” he says eventually. Maybe he found one. “I think she didn’t explain mine.”

  So he was the eyes on the other side of those optics all the while she sat in here with me. He tested me on weaker prey.

  Not a lawyer. Or a polly.

  A crooked govie?

  I don’t open my mouth. Predators like him you have to watch in silence.

  He wears a gold wedding band, caresses it with his thumb, and loses his smile. He leans back and presses the corner of his slate. The display lights up with a scroll of words. Black on white.