Cagebird Read online

  He falls off the chair. I kick his ribs twice and a circle of men surround us as if they were called. Gladiatorial shouts and animal grunts erupt, and I’ve got maybe ten seconds before the guards pull me off him. He tries to grab my legs from his position on the floor, but I step aside, reach down to seize his shirtfront and pummel his face a few times. Wet thuds and cracks. Finch’s voice behind me rises above the rest. “Yuri, stop it before they—”

  But nobody’s going to punish me. Not if Lukacs wants his plan to work. So I trust the agent just a little. I trust I’ll get something out of this even while he gloats.

  Wex on the floor, bleeding. I kick him again before official hands wrench me back and shove me facedown, yanking my arms behind me. Prison boot gray, then the shinier black of the guards swarming among them. The noise level declines all at once, and I’m laughing as they haul me up. Wex is still on the floor, cursing at me and dripping red. I spit on his lap.

  “Go near him again, and I’ll make you so pretty even Dulay will want up your ass.”

  “Shut up, Terisov!” Mr. Guard slaps my head and wheels me about, a brisk march back to my pod. Finch runs up beside me, glancing over his shoulder. Some of the prisoners laugh—at Wex. Wait until word gets to Dulay and Jones. I can count the seconds.

  “You’re locked down,” Mr. Guard says, propelling both me and Finch inside. The door slams. A command into his commstud makes our pod beep. No leaving now. But also no getting in.

  I go to the sink, turn it on, and stick my bruised knuckles under cold water. I hear Finch pace behind me.

  “Quit prowling, it’s annoying.”

  He stops. Doesn’t reprimand me because beating the shite out of Wex is what I’m supposed to do, and it’s sent a clear signal that I’m back with all previous rights and privileges.

  Finch sits on the bunk, head in his hands. And I know exactly what happened in those two weeks I was gone.

  As does Lukacs. Who put me in solitary so it could happen. So he could hang it over my head. So I could hate my decisions.

  I almost reach out to put my hand in Finch’s hair, but he turns away, still not looking up, and lies on the bunk with his back facing me, nose to the wall and arm tucked up under the pillow.

  Go away, Yuri. You and your questions. He doesn’t care about Ops now. But he’s glad I’m back, in a way. I can tell by the way he refuses to look at me.

  In darkness we can talk. Lights out, each of us in his own pocket of black and shifting restlessness, I stare up at the ceiling I know is there but can’t see. His voice winds and twists up toward me like smoke from the bunk below.

  “Why do you want to know?” he says. About Hephaestus.

  Because Lukacs dropped the hint to make me feel dirty, dirty enough to get into bed with his kind. And why don’t you hate me for what I did to you. Why don’t I hate you for what you asked me to do.

  “I’ll tell you after you answer me.” Some of it anyway. Enough so he doesn’t mess up the deal.

  He’s quiet for a long few minutes. Then, “You know about Hephaestus Shipyard?”

  “It’s on the Rim and services mostly Guard stations. Right?” It was a target for pirates now and then, to get parts. I don’t reckon it’s a paradise.

  “Yeah. No… I mean…you know about my parents or—”

  “Yeah. But your CO?”

  A long breath out. “It’s a rough place. Sort of like here. In here. I used to get into scuffles with him. You know…fights. Bloody fights. I don’t know, for whatever reason he liked to get at me for one thing or another. Either I did my work too well, or I was too quiet, or…whatever.”

  Because you look like you can’t take care of yourself, Finch. But his defiance is the kind that brews.

  “So one shift he got into me too much, and I jabbed him. With a live cutter. And that was it.” He sniffs a little but not quite in remorse. Reliving the decision, maybe. Sorry to be in here because of it, but not sorry that he doesn’t have to put up with the CO anymore. And probably his lack of shame made the sentence harsher.

  “How’d he used to get into you?” There are a lot of ways to haze somebody.

  “You know.” Now he’s irritated. “Taunts and shite.”

  “And from that you just assume that when you get into prison, you ask your cellmate to shag you for protection.”

  The dark can make you speak secrets.

  I need to be clear, if for nothing else than my own guilt. “So your CO fucked with you.”

  He doesn’t answer, at least not verbally.

  He either let me do him, or it would be a dozen others, and life is all about the lesser of the two.

  “So why did you?” he says eventually. “You didn’t want to, so why did you?”

  “Who says I didn’t want to. You’re sort of cute.” We’re having this conversation now when I never wanted to know before.

  Before. Before a bastard in a nice suit showed me footage and said, This is where we control.

  The minutes feel like heavy boots leaving imprints on my chest. A long march until tomorrow.

  “You started walking,” Finch says. “After.”

  “I’ve always walked.” Not really.

  “You walk in your sleep, and you talk to me. And it started after.” His voice sounds hollow with the lack of light.

  “Yeah, I told you about my dog, right?” The first time, he said. Then he never told me again what I said to him while I spun asleep.

  “That’s not all you talk about.”

  “Then what else?” Maybe my voice is a bit too sharp.

  “Your life,” he says, and it sinks like an anchor.

  Sarcasm keeps me unmoved. “I was born, I grew up?”

  He ignores it. “I told you about Hephaestus. So now what the hell was that optic?”

  “Ops. They wanted to make a deal with me.” If anyone’s listening, they know this already.

  “Black Ops.”

  “They’re sending me back to space.”

  “Why?” Alarm. Thinking of his own skin, probably.

  “Don’t worry, the deal includes your safety. He said he’d protect you, and once I’m off-planet I’ll have resources. I can follow up and make sure he does.”

  Why, is the silent question, but he doesn’t ask it, and I don’t offer. Why would you bother, Yuri.

  “Won’t people look for you?” he says instead. “How are they going to get you out? What does he want you to do once you’re back in space?”

  “You don’t need to know all that.”

  “Well…when?”

  Now the black feels oppressive. “Tomorrow.”

  “They’re just going to waltz in here and free you?”

  When are people like Lukacs ever that generous? “No. No, first they’re gonna make me hurt.”

  The lockdown lifts for breakfast, and Finch and I go to the mess hall with looks and murmurs biting at our heels. The little humility lesson has become common gossip. Morry the Guard eyes me with something between fear and disdain—with a hint of something else that I read as smugness. Whatever he’s smug about.

  “There’s Dulay,” Finch murmurs, as we take our end of the table with our trays of prison gourmet.

  I don’t bother to look.

  Start something, I think at them. Get it over with.

  But they won’t now. They’ve got better ideas, all electrified by EarthHub Black Ops.

  It’s an hour before lights-out and common lockdown, Finch is off in the shower, and I need his absence. There was a dread following behind us the entire day and maybe he saw it in me, felt it, because he hovered in the pod when I decided not to leave it. No games, no exercise, no idle benign deals with fellow inmates. And I didn’t tell him to go; we were silent attendees to the same party, watching the festivities from the safety of the wall. But now he’s off in his routine and I need a shank. Its weight could fool me into thinking I have defenses, but there are none when it comes to the fever and a deal. There’s nothing but that itch and t
he heat, and the finality of a promise.

  I crawl over to his bunk and edge my hand behind his pillow and down to the iron frame. There, right where I left it, a sharpened tip of a toothbrush. I yank it from its taped housing and lean back against the bunk, breathing hard even though it took no effort. My hands shake, my grip sliding damp against the plastic length. It’s been a long time. I had nothing sharp in solitary.

  But old friends or old sicknesses don’t need introductions. They house in you like breath in your lungs.

  I hold mine in until I let out the scarlet fever. A long line across my skin with that sharp point, and it doesn’t really hurt. The path is familiar, the relief so strong I almost bone from it. My leg stops shaking and my eyes half shut. And my mind slips to that one time I had him and the way his hair smelled like cheap prison cigs, not like my spacer brand at all. Not like space. I ran those dark waves through my fingers and thought about the stars. How they winked with promises, but they always lied.

  And he said, “Are you done?” with his cheek turned into the pillow so I could barely hear the words. But his neck was red from my marking him with my teeth, deep and damaged enough that anyone who saw it would know. You’re mine. Are you done. No, this is just the start of it. The rest of my life in here, and some dark passing of yours.

  But I climbed out from his bunk and went to the sink and drank from the tap. I leaned a hand on the edge and expected to hear him turning to the wall, but instead I heard nothing and when I looked over he was staring at me, unmoved.

  “What’re you doing in here?” I asked him.

  “I don’t really have a choice.”

  He was answering the silent question, the thing I’d just done to him, but it wasn’t what I asked. And maybe he just couldn’t stomach the idea of men like his CO doing the same, and I was young at least. On the surface, I was young.

  When I went back to the bunk I saw how still he got, how the shadows from the dim light cut his body into sharp edges. And I knew if I touched him again he would make me bleed.

  Like I’m bleeding now, except with a cut along your arm you don’t feel that stillness in anything but yourself. Nothing gazes back with that black judgment except that thing you see when you shut your own eyes. And my heart settles.

  When I hear the door slide open I want to smile and say to Finch, C’mere. Because this is the last time before I go, and I promise it won’t hurt. Not you, at least. Sex is no antidote to death, but it can give it a buzz.

  “Pirate,” they say, and it’s not Finch’s voice.

  I open my eyes. Inside the cell are three men. Wex, Jones, and Dulay.

  “Look,” Dulay says, “he started without us.”

  The blood runs down my arm in a delicate rivulet. And everything it carried surges back to me in a rush.

  In that interview room Andreas Lukacs sat across from me and said, “You’re going to have to be killed. The only way to get you out of this prison without causing suspicion is through the morgue.”

  And I laughed, because at the time it was funny. And appropriate.

  “It’s the only way,” Lukacs said, with this agreement between us, as raw and hard as a rape.

  “You don’t have to be so smug,” I said. “They can kill me for real, and that won’t get you anywhere.”

  “No,” he said. “I gave specific instructions. And they have a stake in it. Cred, for one.”

  So Andreas Lukacs is my first Black Ops cocktail. But I doubt this drink will go down smooth. He says there are guards he can use. There are men I have to face. And there’s pain I have to take, but it’s all right, after that I’ll be free. Like a soul on its way to heaven, if you believe that sort of shit.

  I don’t even believe in hell. But I think hell believes in me.

  I get to my feet as they edge in, two large men and one wiry sadist with a bare moustache. We all know why we’re here and retaliation is only a small part of it, the official part of it. The part that will hit the Send and convince the govies until someone figures out the truth. Wex or his partners don’t say a word. They look at me, waiting for some reason. For me to move, maybe. Or run. Because running game is much more of a challenge.

  But there’s nowhere to run, and that’s not part of the deal.

  When someone beats you until you’re unconscious, you stop feeling the blows long before the dark. These men are military. They’re trained. They know exactly where to kick.

  “Keep his face clean,” one of them says. “Leave the head.”

  Brain damage is nearly impossible to repair. But everything else—

  Dulay and Jones hold me by the arms and the hair, on my feet, and Wex works up a sweat with his boot and my body.

  This pain fucks you from the inside out. Deeper than sex and more intimate than a kiss.

  It feasts like an animal. I feel every bite.

  Wex finally knees me in the groin, and they let me fall. On my knees and then on my face, and everything is a jumbled, pulsing netherworld. Sound pools around me and congeals to distant noise. Voices. Violent words. A kicking foot and a banging door. And I’m back in my memory to the first time I was ever on the floor like this. My cocktail slammed the toe of his boot into my side. My back, my thighs. Then he stroked my hair and called me pretty as sin.

  “Yuri,” he says. “I never should’ve left.”

  A strange, brutal thing to say.

  “Yuri. Stay with me, stay awake. One of you assholes get the doctor!”

  My body is a wet cocoon, upside down, hanging from my feet. All the blood rushes to my head. It must be there because I hear it flow through my ears. A loud roar, pulling at me, dashing me against a rocky shore. But someone’s breath is in my face. Someone’s breathing for me. Trying to anchor me, but I just want to float. To disappear in the dark where it’s safe. But it’s a kiss of rain on my tongue. I remember the taste from my childhood. Out by the lake, under gray skies. Cool droplets caressed my skin in misty touches. Gentle as tears.

  And after that I die, but it’s nothing I haven’t felt before.

  It’s nothing at all.

  The first night I carried on a conversation with Finch in my sleep he said I’d slid down from the top bunk and went to the sink, drank water from the tap, then started to pace the width of the pod. He asked me what was wrong, and apparently I said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.” He asked me what I meant by that, and I answered, “I won’t do it again.” And I walked around and around the perimeter of our space, tracing my hand over surfaces, telling him about the dog I had on Colonial Grace. After an hour I climbed back up into bed and didn’t speak for the rest of the night. I woke up the next morning, took a piss, looked over at him half-hidden under blankets and he was holding the sharpened toothbrush in his fist, his back to the wall. I threw my towel at his face to wake him up. I asked him if he’d had an urge to brush his teeth in the middle of the night or what.

  And he stared at me with his dark eyes, and said, “What was all that shit about your dog?”

  I didn’t know. I was asleep. He must’ve been high.

  He said, “You circled this pod like a whirling dervish and wouldn’t shut up about your dog.” And then his voice dropped. “About your ship.”

  Then I remembered sometimes on Genghis Khan, and later on my own ship, I used to sleepwalk through the corridors and talk to people—vacant-eyed, they said. I never remembered what I said. Sometimes it was gibberish, they told me. Sometimes it wasn’t. Apparently one time I knifed somebody. It spooked them because I knew them and the ship, even without lights. And when I walked I made no sound.

  Finch looked at me that morning as if I’d died and come back to life. Like he wasn’t sure if something else had returned with me, or if I had returned at all.

  Somebody’s stroking my hair with icy fingers. I open my eyes to a dim white light glowing from the table beneath me, casting close shadows around my body. It isn’t a gentle hand on my head. It’s just the cycled air tinged with the breath of outsi
de. Cold freedom.

  I’m in the prison morgue, on a metal drainage table, covered with a sheet up to my chin. Above are round medical lamps and an examination arm leaning over me like a curious industrial dragon. I know it’s the morgue from its chill air, its silence—the sarcophagi nothingness of a place where only the dead are kept. I’m naked. And the pain is a multitude of sharp fists pushing into my body, all over from the neck down. Beneath my skin and the transparent aidtape is the incessant itch of industrious bot-knitters, fiery nano-ants with healing purpose.

  They gave me drugs. I feel them sailing through my system, hydroplaning, but they didn’t last long enough to keep me asleep. I can’t move though. I try to lift a hand, twitch it, and the sheet falls open. The frosty air against my skin makes the swollen areas around my bruises come alive. With teeth.

  My breath sounds loud. After a moment I realize I’m crying.

  The most useless thing.

  But it’s just pain and drugs, and it passes, like everything.

  A door bangs open on my right, throwing light over me in shards. I squint. It shuts, and footsteps approach. A woman says, “You’re awake? Good. That will make it easier.” She grips my shoulder.

  I flinch and jerk to the side, uncontrolled, one flop like a fish. The movement kicks me in the gut. All movement now is nothing more than extended abuse.

  “We have to hurry,” she says, and calls up a dim glow of yellow all around the room.

  “Screw it.” My throat is raw, my words like little icicles falling to the floor. Shattering in syllables.

  She grabs my arm and tugs me to sit up. I flail a fist, hissing. It isn’t much of a fight. I end up slumped against her shoulder, her hand gripping the back of my hair to get my face from her neck. And I recognize her clean female scent. Lovely Dr. Jorgasson, prison nightingale.