Cagebird Page 6

  “He’s important to you,” Lukacs says. Now we talk, with the wind blowing around us sharp enough to cut. This white world with its serrated edges giving back nothing but nature.

  I just look at the bastard.

  “You realize,” he says, “that since he’s here now, he can’t leave.”

  “Leave this island?”

  Lukacs smiles. “Leave your side. You’re going to take him aboard Kublai Khan with you.”

  Among pirates? “No. I’m not.”

  “Doubtless you’ve told him who we are. Or at least what we are. He’s come this far with you. I don’t want him running around free. So either I kill him when he’s out of your sight, or you take him with you. I’m being generous, Yuri. Clearly you feel something for the boy, so I’m giving him a chance.”

  He’s leverage.

  “Besides,” the other man speaks for the first time. Blue-eyed and chilled in his tone. With the rifle comfortably strapped off his shoulder, aimed. “He’s a criminal.”

  His words are nearly drowned out by the approach of an insect-bellied small transport. The wind kicks up worse under its descent and I have to shield my eyes. Through the scissor gap of my fingers I see Lukacs approach it first. The starboard ramp yawns with an unfurled tongue that tastes the snow with a soft lick. Inside is red-lit steel.

  The other agent gives Finch a shove forward, after Lukacs. As I start to hobble after them, the man grabs my arm. Swift words, whipped free by the wind like a tattered banner.

  “Watch him.”

  Finch or Lukacs? Meaning what exactly?

  But he shoves me. I glance at his eyes, and there’s nothing there but ice-hard impassivity.

  I step up into the red interior. Finch is seated already in one of the forward-facing chairs, strapped in. He looks at me through the tint, but all of his questions, maybe his fear if he feels fear, he should be feeling fear…all of it is swallowed by the metallic scent and cold scrape of the air. And I have no answers now. We both face the same shadow. I hold on to the overhead grips and turn as the ramp begins to shut. The other agent climbs back inside the truck. Not coming with us to space, at least not now. Only Lukacs, who grabs my arm to shove me into a seat across from Finch.

  Outside the truck tilts and half circles before tearing off in a straight line away from our transport. Soon it disappears over a rise of jagged land. The blue glow of the repulsors melds with the awakening sky.

  Then the door completely shuts and I am inside the red.

  CURIOUS

  2.25.2180 EHSD—Plymouth Moon

  I fell in love for the first time when I was four years old, if it can be called love at that age. Maybe it was just proximity and appearance, but either way she had most of my attention. She was a blond pixie named Mishka and her mat worked in the Transplanetary loading office with my papa. Sometimes Papa invited them over for dinner unexpectedly and Mama always frowned and complained under her breath to Babushka while Babushka chopped the vegetables with mild, silent violence. “He never comms ahead to tell me that woman’s coming,” Mama said, and Babushka made a soft noise while the knife went chop and chop. “Yurochka,” Babushka said. “Stop lurking and take this salad out to the table.”

  So I held the bowl with both hands and backed out of the kitchen to the round table that nearly overlapped into the family room. There, three-year-old Jascha sat waving his arms in front of the vid so it changed colors. My year-old sister Isobel lay tummy down on a blanket by his feet, grasping at his toes. If Mishka and her mat weren’t visiting I’d go over there and bug them, but instead I reached up to try and put the bowl on the table without it toppling onto my head. My papa sat there smoking a cigret that always seemed to be near its filter, even when he just put it to his mouth, and Mishka’s mat propped beside him with her cat green eyes and shadowed stares, blinking a lot. “Mishka,” she said. “Help Yurochka with the food.”

  Mishka slid off the chair beside her mat and came round to take one side of the salad bowl and together we both managed to slide it onto the table. She had her mat’s eyes but with a shy gaze that never looked at me for long. She was only a couple of months older than me, born February 3. At her recent birthday party Mama made me kiss her cheek so they could vid it to Mishka’s papa, who was on station above our Plymouth Moon. I smiled at her now because I remembered how she’d smelled like chocolate cake.

  “Hi, Yura,” Mishka said, smiling back in her serious way.

  “Hi. Wanna play outside?”

  She nodded. Her silky ponytail, tied up with a blue bauble, swung up and down.

  “Papa, can we play outside until supper?”

  Papa didn’t hear me right away. He was talking in a low voice to Mishka’s mat. I saw the smoke curling to the ceiling as he held his cigret, letting it burn as if he’d forgotten it.

  “Papa!”

  “What, Yurochka?” He peered down at me with a weary blink. He had tiny black points in the centers of his blue eyes. Sometimes Mama said that I had his eyes, and for some reason I never liked to hear it.

  Mishka’s mat leaned over and plucked a baby radish from the salad bowl and popped it into her mouth. She let her teeth hold it for a second, and the white round end looked out at me like a blind eye before she pulled it into her mouth and crunched down.

  Ew.

  “Papa, can we play outside? Please?”

  “Only if your mother doesn’t need you in the kitchen. Go on, ask her.”

  I thought he just wanted me out of sight, which I didn’t understand, but I pushed open the tall narrow door and poked my head into the kitchen.

  “Mama, can I play outside with Mishka?”

  She was talking at the hot-table to tell it what to do and ignored me. Babushka still sat on the high stool by the counter, chopping green onions and tossing them into the big silver pot beside her. She smiled at me, and I smiled back. Babushka had scars on her face from a flight accident way before I was born, one on her chin, another on the left corner of her mouth, and one on her cheek. It made her look like she was frowning all the time, even when she wasn’t. At night sometimes when she tucked me into bed I’d ask her to tell me about the day she’d gotten them.

  She was a pilot for our Moon’s hauling company, Quadstar Transplanetary Shipping. Papa’s suit had the pin emblem on his lapel, the red streak across four gray circles. Babushka’s uniform had the same emblem patch on her arm, with wings. One time just before I was born she was on a normal run up to Plymouth Station with a load of ore that was going to be picked up by a merchant at the end of the week. She’d smile at the beginning of the story; she said she always looked forward to these runs because Grandpa (she said “Dedushka”) lived on station and she’d get a couple of days with him before flying back to the Moon. If I wanted, she would tell me stories about how she met Dedushka, how he’d “wooed” her with a picnic facing the stars, somewhere on a dusty part of the station that happened to have a viewport, and how she’d sneezed and “drank wine until the stars outside looked like tiny pearls in an ocean of night.” Babushka loved these stories. She’d smile, then she’d pause, and her eyes would go far away and soon the smile would die.

  And then she always held my hand as she told me how she got those scars, years after the picnic. How when the strits attacked the station they blew out an entire section. She ran to her shuttle and knew the section was the off-loading bay where Dedushka worked. And she never got to her shuttle. The strits kept attacking, and as she ran the corridor caved in. Pieces of metal and parts of people hit her face and her body, and she fell unconscious. The Rim Guard drove back the strits, and when she woke up she was in the station hospital and the doctor told her Dedushka was dead.

  She said she didn’t want to fix the scars. She said the scars on her body were a journal of her life, and even when she cried she remembered how she’d fallen in love with Dedushka at that dusty picnic years ago. She liked to tell me stories of her life. She said it was the way we remembered, and she never wanted to
forget Dedushka. She’d kiss my head after telling the stories and say I reminded her of Dedushka, with my bright eyes and dark blond hair and the way I smiled right before I did something sneaky. She never said I looked like Papa. I was my mother’s son.

  Now she smiled at me while the silver pot whistled and shook and Mama talked to the hot-table. Babushka said, “Go play with Mishka, Yurochka, and we’ll call you when supper’s ready. But kisses first.”

  So I ran up and threw my arms around her legs because that was all I could reach as she sat on the high stool. But she picked me up by the waist and noisily kissed my cheek. Then she set me down, plop.

  “Go on.” She slapped my bottom, and I ran out.

  “C’mon!” I grabbed Mishka’s sleeve as I passed, and she followed, munching on a carrot stick that she’d stolen from the salad bowl.

  “Me too!” Jascha said, pushing himself up from the family room floor, butt first.

  “No, you can’t come,” I said.

  “Yurochka,” Papa said, in a Tone. “Take your brother with you.”

  Isobel burbled and smiled toothlessly at me. Surely they wouldn’t make me take her out too? I’d never get to play with Mishka if I had to babysit them.

  Jascha came up to me and took my hand, so I sighed and looked at Papa, but he didn’t say I had to take Isobel. I pulled my brother out the front door before Papa changed his mind. Mishka followed, holding Jascha’s other hand.

  We had a small porch made of smooth cement. Farther out was a square patch of grass, edged up against a wide road that separated our homes from those across the street. You couldn’t go outside on the Moon without a suit on, so all of our play areas, everywhere we went, were closed in. But it was still big. The ceiling arched above us, sprayed blue and broken by ovals of windowed black space. Trees dotted every corner, carefully monitored and attended by environmental engineers like Mama. Our section of grass had low lamps with thriving flowers beneath, their petals spread like painted lips to the light.

  Mama had made us a multicolored sandbox just right of the porch. I let go of Jascha and jumped in, digging for toys. Mishka sat on the rim with her feet together and traced a finger in the rainbow grains. Jascha helped me dig even though he didn’t know what we were looking for. Eventually I uncovered my plastic hunter-killer and all of my Battlemech Bear figures, five of them. Mishka liked Bear the best, so I gave her the one that had the movable armor, and she smiled and knelt down beside me in the sand. I carved a trench and put Kit the Cat Commando in it, to guard the Bear.

  Jascha tottered right through it. “Yura,” he said, “I can’t find Panda. Can you find me Panda?”

  “You just messed up my trench!” I pushed him out of the way, but Kit was facedown already and half-buried from Jascha’s fat feet.

  He sat hard in the sand and hit my arm. His eyes squinted up like he was going to cry, but Jascha wasn’t much of a crybaby. He said, “Don’t do that!”

  “Find Panda yourself.”

  Panda Paratrooper was his favorite because Panda had a big round head, and Jascha liked to chew on the ears.

  “Here,” Mishka said, leaning to the corner of the box where Panda’s black paw stuck out from beneath a ripped parachute. She dusted off the toy and held it out to Jascha, and it made me feel bad for pushing him.

  Jascha took it and growled Panda at my Kit.

  “Say thank you,” I told him, like Mama always told me.

  “Thank you, Mishka,” he said.

  “We can all play,” Mishka said. “Panda can help dig another trench.”

  She always had ideas like that. So we dug another trench, and when the hunter-killer came in to shoot we all pow-powed it back until it crashed nose-first into the sand and blew up. Jascha liked making blown-up noises. He jumped up and down on the hunter-killer until it was super destroyed.

  And then I thought it would be fun to bury Jascha, so I tickled him into the sand and sprinkled it all over his bright yellow hair. Mishka laughed, but she didn’t help. So I sprinkled some on her too, and Jascha jumped on my back and wrapped his arms around my neck. I went down in surrender.

  The front door opened, and Mama called, “Yurochka! Supper!” Then she got a good look at us. “Boys! I told you not to mess up before we eat!”

  It was a standing order. Her forehead wrinkled when she was displeased. I tried to shake Jascha off, but he giggled and pulled my hair and I yelped.

  “Yurochka!” Mama snapped. “Get in here now and clean yourself up!”

  It was always Yurochka, Yurochka, even when I wasn’t the only bad one.

  “Jascha!” I elbowed him. “Stop it!”

  Mishka was giggling. I couldn’t really be mad at Jascha when Mishka smiled at me like that.

  When she smiled at me.

  Before the world erupted and it was branded into my memory with heat and flame.

  I don’t remember the explosion, but I remember waking up, being deaf. My little brother lay facedown in the sand with singed holes on the back of his T-shirt. I reached to touch him, but somebody lifted me up. Mama. I grabbed on to her blouse, feet flailing until her arm went under me, and she crushed me against her breast. She was screaming, or it was something else in my head going off like an alarm.

  I looked down over Mama’s shoulder. Mishka stood in a circle of red sand. The sand was red because she was bleeding. She wasn’t crying. She had only one arm, and her eyes were wide and unblinking, and the sand kept getting redder at her feet, making a dark puddle. The ragged sleeve on her left side was empty and soaked black.

  The drops of blood seemed to fall in a slow warp, making a crash as they hit the sand.

  My mouth opened. The air tasted burned. I coughed and looked away, pressed my cheek to Mama’s.

  Mama turned, and I saw Jascha with colorful grit all over his face. He was crying, kneeling in the box, holding Panda Paratrooper in a little fist. Mama bent to gather him up, trying to pick him up and hold me at the same time. She set me on my feet, and I twisted my fingers in her pant leg. Mishka’s mat stumbled out of our cracked front door with her mouth open. She looked as if someone had sucked all the color and the life from beneath her skin, leaving only white bone. She held Mishka to her side with one hand and picked up Mishka’s arm with the other. Mishka’s arm.

  She said, “We’ll fix it, darling, we’ll fix it,” as if the words were separated from her voice.

  Half-buried in the sandbox was an arrow of sheetmetal with red on its edges.

  “Wrap it, Katarina!” my mother said. “You must wrap it tight! Quickly! Do it, woman!” And she pushed Jascha against me so she could help Mishka’s mat.

  I held on to Jascha. He wailed. He never really cried, but now he opened his mouth and lost his voice among the sirens.

  Our corridor was destroyed. Across the street four houses lay like broken teeth in a row of rubble, spilling their pieces all the way to our patch of grass. I could see past the houses and into the wall. It was black and fiery, and lights flashed in red and yellow emergency colors. The outer walls had closed. In school drills Mrs. Glantz had told us that if the colony was ever breached, we would not die from the outside moon environment. The extra outer walls would shut tight to block up any holes.

  There was a hole in Mishka’s sleeve with nothing to block it up. She just bled.

  Papa was there now, cuts on his face, holding Isobel’s tiny head against his shoulder. She was covered in her animal-print blanket. The dust and burned smell swirled around me and my hand was frozen to Mama’s pant leg. Jascha’s grip on my waist hurt like claws. Papa said, “The shelters—”

  People ran, spilled from their houses like they’d been tipped over the side of a table. A deep voice talked from overhead but it was too noisy to hear any words. Papa said again, “The shelters!” but he didn’t grab Mama. He took Mishka’s mat by the shoulder. And for a second Mama seemed to stop and grow dark, like someone had shut off the lights around her face. Papa started pulling Mishka’s mat down the street.


  “Hold on!” Mama said, sweeping Jascha up into her arms. Jascha’s arms went around her neck like a knot, and we all ran. Mishka’s mat was ahead of us with Mishka, but Mishka couldn’t wrap her arms. Mishka stared down at me with her wide eyes. Red rivers swept down her mat’s arm. Mishka’s mat still held Mishka’s arm with its bits of white and black and red on one end, like wet, mashed-up popcorn.

  “Babushka!” I cried. “Mama, where’s Babushka!”

  But she didn’t answer, she held Jascha with one arm tight around him and clutched my hand with her other, and we ran after Papa.

  It was so loud by then I couldn’t hear our footsteps, couldn’t hear the voice from the ceiling, could barely see Papa ahead of us cutting through the dust, lit by fires that licked the smooth walls.

  “Slow down!” Mama said, coughing. I couldn’t feel my hand, she held it so tight. But it was okay. Just as long as she held it.

  Papa didn’t slow down. People gathered around us running too until I couldn’t see the walls and barely saw the ceiling. Only bodies stampeding in a herd, shouting, screaming, and streaks of faces blurred by tears. The press of flesh and clothing nearly squeezed out all my breath.

  Then Mama let go of me.

  People sliced between us. I couldn’t see her anymore. They pushed from behind, moving me along, but they were so tall, and Mama disappeared in the shadows of the crowd.

  “Mama!” I screamed.

  The sirens swallowed my voice.

  “Maaamaaa!”

  The sounds were like a raging beast, like all the enemies of Battlemech Bear were falling to our Moon. The world was crashing down. And I couldn’t see anything. I cried so hard that everything melted and bled away, and Mama didn’t find me, Papa didn’t find me. Babushka was lost, and Mishka was bleeding, I saw her standing there with one arm gone. It was just in my mind, but it was all I saw.

  Huddled in the corner under the shelter’s aqua light, I peed myself. The stream of heat cascaded down my legs, and I shifted. I tugged on my pants and the bottom of my shirt, wringing it. A teenager standing nearby looked down at me, then all around at the talking groups of people, the families in their pockets of self-protection. People went deep through the narrow corridors and rooms of this solid building. The shelter was one of three and I didn’t know if my parents were in this one. I’d stopped calling when nobody answered, when nobody could help, and ran away to the corner. If they looked, they would find me, I wasn’t going to move. I clawed at my arms with blunt fingernails, looking up at the tall, milling grown-ups. I couldn’t speak anymore. My throat was swollen by too many tears.