Cagebird Read online

  The walls blocked all but the most distant racket from overhead. Booms and echoes. Every once in a while the lights flickered.

  The teenager leaned down near me and put his hand on my hair. “What’s your name?”

  I couldn’t answer. He rubbed my head for a second, then straightened and spoke to a man at his elbow, maybe his father, who gave him a slim packet from a shelf overhead. Now they both looked down at me as the teenager handed me the packet, squeezing out the straw for me. I grabbed it and drank, and he asked when I was done, “What’s your name?”

  “Yuri Mikhailovich Terisov,” I said. “Have you seen my mama or my papa? Have you seen Babushka?”

  “Mikhail Terisov,” the man said to the teen. “Did you see him down here earlier?”

  The teenager shook his head. “I can go walk around again.”

  The man said, “No, stay here with the boy. I’ll go look.” And he disappeared among the elbows and legs.

  “I pee `you mad,” I said, twisting my clothing.

  “Yeah,” the teenager said. “It’s okay. Yuri, right? I’ll get you something new. Take off the wet things.” He started to move away.

  “No, don’t go!” I grabbed at his leg.

  He stopped and put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s all right. I’ll come back, I promise. Just stay here, okay?”

  I didn’t believe him, so I just stared at him. He had blue hair under the lights and very dark eyes. His skin looked like chocolate and I thought of Mishka and the tears all came down again.

  “It’s all right.” He hugged my head for a bit and patted my back, then set me against the wall. “Stay here and I’ll be back in, like, thirty seconds. Promise.”

  I put my thumb in my mouth and he went off. The other man didn’t come back. I waited, biting my finger, pulling at the skin on the inside of my elbow with my other hand. When the teenager showed up again he kind of frowned, then smiled. “I told you to take off your wet clothes.”

  “I didn’t want to.”

  “Embarrassed, huh?” He set some folded clothes on a shelf next to my head and reached to tug at my sleeves. I let him.

  “You were gone a long time,” I told him.

  “It’s crowded. And I came back anyway. See?”

  He smiled again but I didn’t smile back. I didn’t feel like it. And I didn’t think he felt like it either.

  He helped me remove all the pee-smelling clothes, then ripped open a little package and shook out a square of scrubby. He handed it to me and I rubbed myself all over like Mama would tell me to do in the shower with the soap. The scrubby smelled like—fresh. Like Mama’s garden. I sucked up the tears so I wouldn’t cry in front of him and just ground the scrubby into my skin. It came away black and brown and yellow. From the sand and the destruction. And the pee. Then he helped me dress. The soft sweater and pants were just a little too large, but I didn’t care. I reached up to him and for a second he paused. Then he lifted me up by the waist and let me hug him around the neck.

  He said, “It’ll be all right, Yuri. The strits’ll go away and we’ll get to go back home. My dad said so. He was here when they attacked the last time, and the time before that.”

  I didn’t want to hear about any attacks. I just wanted to see Mama and Babushka again. And Jascha and Isobel. And Papa.

  I was scared to see Mishka. Or her mat. And the way her mat had picked up her arm like it was a toy.

  I fell asleep on his shoulder, and my dreams were nothing but noise and red.

  Papa woke me up. It was Papa leaning over me with a hand on my shoulder, shaking it. I shot toward his chest and hung on. He held me for a long second with one hand, then disengaged my grip and stood, pulling me to my feet. I blinked in the dim light, saw him supporting Isobel in the basket of his other arm. Behind him stood Mishka’s mat, holding Mishka in her arms. Mishka was asleep on her mat’s shoulder and there was a plug of bandages on the nub where her arm had been. A monitoring chip attached to it blinked colorful little dots.

  We weren’t where the teenager had sat with me. All around were grown-ups and kids on thin stretchers, hooked up to doctor pods. All the pods were full, so some of the injured people leaned against walls, cradling themselves. Blood stained the floor in places. It was quiet like a church, and the murmuring around me could have been prayers. Except the smell was ugly, like burned or dying things.

  The boy with the chocolate-colored skin was nowhere in sight. But it was okay. Papa was here.

  He said, “Yurochka, we have to go. You aren’t hurt, you can walk, yeah?”

  “Yes, Papa. Where’re we going? Are we going home?”

  “No.” He glanced at Mishka’s mat.

  “Where’s Mama?” I wished he would pick me up, even though he held Isobel. “Why can’t we go home?”

  “Mama is waiting for us in our new home, Yurochka. Come now. Come.” He held out his hand, gripping my sister with the other.

  Up above went boom.

  “I don’t want to go to a new home…” I looked up at the blue ceiling. “Why can’t we go back home? Where’s Babushka?”

  “Yuri!” he snapped, shaking his hand at me. “No more questions! We’re leaving now, and I don’t want another word out of you!”

  Isobel bawled. Papa grabbed my hand and tugged me to the exit. Mishka’s mat followed, silent.

  “Where’s Mama?” I looked all around at the people, all of them walking like zombies in little groups under the watery light. Going somewhere. Going up to where it boomed. “I want Mama!”

  “Yurochka! I won’t tell you again.”

  He didn’t look at me; he watched above the heads of everyone, where I couldn’t see. His grip on my hand hurt. Isobel still cried, her voice joining others, babies and babies. Scared. I wished I could cry like that, but I wasn’t a baby anymore.

  I pressed up against Papa’s side as we shuffled around the shelter. We didn’t seem to be going anywhere. The bits of floor I saw through the feet lay dirty and shadowed.

  Then the booming stopped, and we all shifted. Somebody’s bag jabbed into my back. I tried to twist away, but Papa tugged me to the right, and soon we were going up concrete stairs. One step at a time. Up and stop. Up and stop. A flickering yellow light beat above us like something was flying in front of it. It got brighter as we got higher. Voices buzzed. When we broke from the shelter it was like God had come to guide us to the next life. A man shouted into something that made his words fall around us like little bombs.

  I didn’t know where we were. It didn’t look a thing like the Moon and our home. All the houses stood gap-toothed and burst open. The long corridor was puckered and bumpy with debris, unrolling into a black mouth that swirled and blinked with lights. Red-uniformed Rim Guardians walked around holding big, long guns. A dozen of them choked one section by the wall, checking people as they went through the tall, bent doors leading out from the residential area. People went through those doors when they had to work in the mines or the port or the school and the offices. But Papa wasn’t going to work now. People bled. People hardly spoke. A lot of them wept.

  The man with the God voice told us to stay in line and board this shuttle, and if we were missing family it would be sorted out on the transit station, and if not there, then at Grace. There were two shuttles going. We would all be reunited on Grace.

  I looked up at Papa. Where was Grace? Would Mama meet us on Grace? Would Babushka?

  But he didn’t answer me. He didn’t look down. And through the legs of all the grown-ups, there among the patrolling Guardians in their bloodred uniforms, lay bodies of other mamas. Other parents. And children. I didn’t see Mama or Jascha among them, even though I looked. I stared until the broken, mashed-up people seemed to stare back.

  Except I knew they didn’t.

  In the shuttle I looked out the oval window beside my seat. Down below was our colony. It was far away and small, round and gray like blind eyes. The long grooves in the ground, where the adults used to mine and dig and
carve, could have been the trenches me and Jascha made in our sandbox.

  My home lay cracked and jagged, shoved into the Moon like a giant had stepped on it.

  2.27.2180 EHSD—Basquenal Rimstation 19, Transit Center

  We waited in line, on the floor, while field officers from the EHRRO asked questions and issued IDs. I asked Papa what “aero” meant. He said it stood for EarthHub Refugee Relief Organization. I asked him what “refugee” meant. He said, People who are forced to leave their homes because of war or persecution. Then he told me not to ask any more questions, even though I wanted to know what “persecution” meant.

  There was a big crowd ahead of us, in this long blue room with its bright lights high up on the ceiling. They’d led us off the shuttle and walked us through narrow corridors to this room, then made us sit and wait while people talked to us one by one, or family by family. It felt like nowhere, like we were in a room that nobody knew about and nobody could leave. Rim Guards stood at the exits. We’d been waiting for a full shift already. They’d fed us rounded little meals of wet vegetables and meat patties, but it seemed like too long ago, and I was hungry again. Isobel fell asleep on Papa’s lap. Mishka sat against the wall with her legs stretched out, ankles slack, staring across the aisle at another little girl who rolled marbles on the floor between her feet. I tried not to look at Mishka’s nub, all bandaged and thick and wanting. Mishka’s mat had her arm around Mishka. I wondered where Mishka’s missing arm was and if they would ever put it back on. I asked Papa.

  “Don’t ask such things,” Papa said, then he looked over my head at Mishka’s mat.

  Mishka suddenly screamed and hit me. “Don’t talk about it!” she yelled. “Don’t you talk about it!”

  Isobel woke up and started to cry.

  I moved away from Mishka’s fist, against the wall.

  Everyone in the center looked at us. A Rim Guardian came over, her rifle pointed down.

  “What’s the problem here?”

  “My daughter, she is just upset,” Mishka’s mat said, patting Mishka and hugging her, even though Mishka just sat there now, quiet like before. I stared at the floor. A pair of high heels approached. Not a Guardian.

  “What about some food? Are you hungry?”

  They were passing out drinks and packets of biscuits. They still hadn’t gotten to us. But maybe now they thought it would shut us up. The lady in the high heels took some wrapped squares and envelopes of drinks from her plastic box and gave a set to each of us. The silver box had a symbol stamped on it in white—a ring of stars with an open palm in the center.

  “Thank you,” Papa said to the woman.

  She smiled at us. Her eyes were sad, as if we were never going to eat another meal again.

  Papa took me and Isobel up to the desk when our number was called. There was a man there, younger than Papa, and he looked at us with watery red eyes. I wondered why he would be crying. He hadn’t been on the Moon.

  “Name?” he said.

  So Papa gave him all of our names. Then Papa said, “My wife. My wife and other son. Have they arrived? Ilyana is her name. And Jascha. Jakob. They were on the other shuttle.”

  The man didn’t even look down at his slate. “The other shuttle’s been redirected to Rimstation Twenty-three. Once they’ve been processed, you will all be sent to Colonial Grace in the Spokes. I’m sure you’ll see your family there.”

  “When?” Papa asked, jiggling Isobel, who was fretting. “When will we be going?”

  “A Guardian ship will take you to the relocation colony as soon as everyone here is registered.”

  “I need more food for the baby.”

  “One of our health service officers will bring that by. I’ve noted it here.” He tapped his pen on the slate. It beeped. The other people in their silver EHRRO shirts all had similar slates. Passing information about us back and forth.

  I tried to look at what he input, but he slid his hand over it as if by accident. I looked up into his face. He said, kind of soft, “It won’t be long.”

  He gave Papa a holocube and explained that it was supposed to tell people who we were and where we came from and where we needed to go now that our home was destroyed. It told people we were Hub citizens, we weren’t criminals, and that we had a right to be helped.

  I wanted to know why we couldn’t stay on this station. But Papa said that Rimstations didn’t have the facilities to take on refugees forever. So we were going to a planet. Where it was safe. And Mama would meet us there with Jascha, and we would be together.

  With Mishka and Mishka’s mat too. But I didn’t want that. I didn’t say anything though. I didn’t say that if I had to look at Mishka and her no-arm all the time, I was going to be sick.

  4.30.2180 EHSD—Colonial Grace

  The planet was called Colonial Grace because it had started to be a colony for EarthHub, one they had planned to make into a green paradise. But now it was just a half-terraformed rock that the Hub had abandoned when the war started decades ago. But they didn’t want to just leave it empty, so now it was a refugee planet buried somewhere in the Spokes, far enough away from the main theater of war that its transplanted citizens didn’t have to fear more alien attacks.

  I heard the grown-ups call it the Camp. Not Grace.

  It was barren until you looked a little closer at the knuckled land; lifeless until you felt the striking hand of wind on your cheek and knew it came from across the lake that edged up against this eyelid of homes. Houses? They were boxes that hugged one another against the cold. Gusts swept in from the wide expanse of unpopulated country, given free rein from the lack of development.

  That’s where we were—in the dregs of an idea.

  It wasn’t much of a home, nothing like they had on most stations or even on planet Earth, the oldest of homes. The Camp was quickly built, barely maintained, and not made to accommodate the hundreds of refugees they crammed in there. Most were children like me. Most were orphans because their parents were soldiers who’d died or were too injured to care for them, and the nearest stations were too overcrowded.

  But the Camp was overcrowded. There was one toilet for every twenty people and not much to do but run around with a stray dog or toss pebbles into the water. I avoided the EarthHub Army guards because they were usually bored, peeved, and weary at this dead-end assignment, frustrated at our questions, and sometimes mean. The relief workers were generally harried, understaffed, underfunded, and traumatized by being around us in these conditions. The medical center was filled by sick kids and adults with nightmares too real to be swept away with drugs. People roamed the dirt paths between buildings, remembering the things they’d seen, muttering about them, while the guards sat on porches or walked the edges of the Camp, smoking and silent.

  Mama wasn’t there when we arrived. I went to the landing pad every day, as far as the guards let me, and peeked through the wire. But the shuttle didn’t come. For weeks.

  In other hours sometimes I went to school and listened to some worn-out adult drone on about subjects that had nothing to do with the fact I was always hungry, dirty, and cold. School had no link to the Send or other colonies or stations because the sat hookup in the Camp had been busted for months, and the govies hadn’t sent anyone out to fix it. The military or the other adults never could keep it running for long. Not when the proper parts took years to get, or so the adults said.

  Instead, govies dropped bins of nonperishable food into the Camp, and everyone had to line up on distribution day to get our ration. Once a week there was enough food and energy to have a hot meal of rice and beans and some sort of meat. And every once in a while some charity group from some No-Name Station sent secondhand clothing or handmade blankets and we were supposed to be grateful for how generous people were, how lucky we were that we were away from the strits and the rest of the Hub hadn’t forgotten about us.

  The guards should’ve been out there killing aliens, not standing around looking at us to make sure we didn’t caus
e trouble with the relief workers. Why weren’t they looking for Mama? Every day Papa went to Administration to ask about Mama and Jascha, but they told him they didn’t have that information yet, that the shuttle was always Coming, and he would just have to be patient.

  Isobel cried a lot. Sometimes Papa handed her off to Mishka’s mat, or to me, and went outside to smoke. For the fresh air, he’d say. But I saw how sometimes his face got red when Isobel refused to stop crying, and I’d usually take her from Mishka’s mat because she was my sister, and she’d go quiet when I held her. I liked to hold her.

  Two months after we landed in the Camp, Papa found me under a pile of blankets on the cot they’d given us in the big, peeling cafeteria. There were about fifty of us jammed up nearest to the wall with the huge silver EHRRO seal painted on it. We weren’t yet assigned a home. The Camp administrators had hustled most people into prefabs until things could be better sorted, but some of us were still left in public until the EHRRO dropped more prefabs. I’d gone to sleep while Papa and Mishka’s mat sat up talking on the floor. Papa had held Isobel against his shoulder, and Mishka slept with her head on her mat’s lap and her one nub of an arm stretched out, as if it searched for the rest of itself.

  When Papa woke me he was smoking, even though there were signs that said you weren’t allowed to smoke indoors. But nobody really cared. He leaned down and touched my shoulder, and said, “Mama and Jascha won’t be coming.”