Cagebird Read online

  The track lighting right above us had blown out two days earlier. Yellow glow backlit his body, so I couldn’t see his eyes. His fingers squeezed. I didn’t say anything and maybe he thought I hadn’t heard, because he repeated it.

  I thought of the bodies back home, on our Moon, and the way they’d lain there as if somebody had forgotten about them. I twisted the blanket in my hands. “Why? Papa, why?”

  “Their shuttle went to another camp.”

  “Why?”

  “Damn bureaucrats,” Papa said. “Their transit station thought they were from a different colony and redirected them to another planet. And now they have to sort them from some other colonists and the whole damn thing is taking too damn long…” He rubbed his cheek, blinking and unshaven.

  I didn’t know what he meant. “Can’t someone go get them? Why can’t the Rim Guard go get Mama? You said Mama would be meeting us here!”

  My voice echoed. Someone five rows down started to cry. Papa held both my shoulders now.

  “Yurochka!” He gave me a little shake. “That’s enough. They’ve put your mother and Jascha somewhere else, and it’s going to take a while for them to sort it. In the meantime we are here, you and your sister and me. We will have to make do.” He released me and smoked and looked around. “We will make do.”

  I asked about Babushka, and he didn’t answer for a long time. He just sat on the edge of my cot, looking across the cafeteria as if he expected someone to wave at him. I put my cheek against his arm, and after a few moments he gathered me to his side. Then he said, “Babushka’s dead, Yurochka. She died in the house. Part of it fell on top of her.”

  And maybe it was the calm way he said it, or maybe it was because I was too tired and numb, but the words went through me like a ghost and left behind nothing but an absence.

  Sometimes Babushka told me stories about my parents, like how they grew up together on Plymouth Station. Dedushka was friends with Papa’s otyets, his father, they both worked in the loading bays, and Jerzy Terisov used to complain about Papa, his son, to Dedushka. “Head in the stars, that one. What am I to do? You’re so lucky that Ilyana has her eye on a good solid career. I don’t want Mikhail to end up like me. I want him to go to Austro or even Pax Terra, you know?” Babushka told me this and I never believed Papa could have had his head in the stars. He was always looking at the ground, or his cigrets, and only sometimes seemed to really look at Mama. But Babushka said when he was young he used to write stories and poems to Mama that made Dedushka roll his eyes until Babushka reminded him about their dusty picnic. All the poems worked because Papa proposed to Mama when they were nineteen. When Mama was in university, Papa took an office job to help her through it because it was expensive. And then Mama got a job on Plymouth Moon to work with the environment team, and Papa went with her to work in another office; and then I was born, and Jascha, and soon after that, Isobel. And I grew up in that house on the Moon with the sandbox on the front lawn that Mama had made for us. Grew up for four years.

  And I remembered a lot of it, sitting there with Papa in the big cafeteria, with strangers handing us food as if we were poor, and it was cold in there even with Papa’s arm around my shoulders. Everywhere was so big it echoed, and I could even see my breath.

  Now Babushka was dead, and Mama was lost. The strits might have broken us up, but everyone else kept us apart.

  2.11.2181 EHSD—The Camp

  I have a lot of memories of sitting at lake’s edge with my dog Seamus. I ditched boring school a half hour after Papa dropped me off, bundled in secondhand coat and scarf and hat, and picked my way through the brightly colored rocks along the shore. Seamus wasn’t really my dog, it wasn’t like I owned him in any sort of records, or that he was even given to me. He just found me one afternoon down at the shore and followed me around when he wanted. When he got tired of me he loped through the slant-roofed buildings of the Camp, nosing under porches and around the cafeteria doors for scraps and affection. Once he’d had a collar because the short brown fur around his neck was permanently flat, though the rest of him was haphazardly fluffy. But nobody in the Camp claimed him. Maybe his owner had died, like people did every month—frozen or sick or just in despair. Or maybe his owner just didn’t want him anymore.

  I don’t know where I got the name from. A story or a song, but he came to me when I called him. Most of the time I followed Seamus around as he gnawed at mermaid-hair seaweed that had washed up on the rocks, bloodred curls streaming from his jaws. The water stank around the Camp from pollution or a lack of whatever was needed during the broken terraform process. We were told strictly not to drink it, but Seamus seemed unaffected by the things that slithered up from its depths. He bit them and shook them about with his jaws like one of his wild ancestors from Earth, and I trailed along after him, sometimes using his damp furry back to steady my footing along the churned-up rocks. They lay tumbled and jagged in places, remnants left behind from melted, receding ice.

  One day Seamus led me to Mishka. She sat on a black, overturned dropbin that was cracked from time and weather like a tombstone. Its insides had long been gutted of nonperishables. She faced the gray water and curled her one hand in her lap. The brisk wind whipped her hair across pale skin blotched red by the weather’s abuse. Her mat let her run wild in the Camp, too sorry or too tired to restrict her. Poor Mishka, our neighbors said. Even Papa and her mat said it. All the time. Even when she threw tantrums during meals and damaged our cabin.

  We had our own home now, with our own stove, since a couple of months ago some company somewhere donated a bunch with independent energy cells. Papa always sat at the tilted table and smoked the sweet leaf our neighbors grew under the noses of the Camp administrators. Mishka’s mat steamed eggs and onions for breakfast, and sometimes had to clean it all up when Mishka decided to pitch it on the floor. Papa never said anything to Mishka’s tantrums, but once when I told her to stop it, and Mishka’s mat had yelled at me, Papa told her never to speak to me like that or he would ask Administration to find her and Mishka another cabin.

  The silence between our families sometimes fell thick like the snow, or ran as cold as the lake water.

  Mishka didn’t look up when Seamus pushed his nose into her hand. She didn’t pet him or push him away. I tottered up behind him and scratched my nose with a mittened hand. She didn’t wear a mitten and her coat was open. She looked made of ice, so white and hardened on the edges. But I thought if I pressed her skin she’d flake apart, and beneath would be the pale redness of an unhealed wound.

  Our clothes were old, not the latest lightweight skin-clingers. Her wrist jutting out from the padded sleeve looked like one of those sticks you cracked and shook to get light, except she wasn’t see-through or glowing. She was pale and opaque.

  “Hi,” I said, stopping just in front of her with a hand on Seamus’s back. He nosed at something near her booted feet.

  She looked up at me, but she didn’t say anything. Her gaze slid to the rolling water. Her lips were stripped white from the wind and hurt to look at.

  “Mishka,” I said. “How come you don’t go to school?”

  She breathed out, ran her tongue over her bottom lip. “You don’t go to school either, Yura.”

  I leaned against the bin and toed a black pebble lodged in the ground between us. “Sometimes I go. But you never do.”

  She didn’t speak for a long time. I thought she might’ve forgotten I was even there. I tossed rocks into the lake and watched Seamus bound after them. Then she said, “I bet your mama’s dead. And Jascha.”

  I looked at her and forgot about the rocks. “Don’t say that.”

  “I bet the aliens killed them.”

  “Papa said they’re on another colony. So shut up.” I wanted to hit her, but I saw her flat sleeve where her arm should’ve been and just curled my fingers inside my mittens. “Why do you say things like that? Why’re you so mean?”

  She got up and walked to the shoreline, squatted and tuc
ked her elbow against her stomach. Just stared at the horizon of water rippling under the wind.

  “They say we’ll never go home,” she said, and I had to step closer to hear the creak of her words bending in the air. “I heard them. They say the strits won’t let us go home because the Moon used to belong to them. They say the war started because of the Moon, and the strits are still mad about it. That’s why they attacked. And they’ll never stop attacking.”

  Her one hand fingered the loose, empty sleeve of the other.

  “Your babushka’s dead too,” she said. “Isn’t she?”

  I hit her.

  She didn’t make a sound, so I hit her again across the shoulder. And I started to cry even though it didn’t hurt me at all. She was the one with the missing arm and the hollow eyes. She was only five like me, and I’d loved the way she used to be so nice to my brother, the way she used to smile at me. But now she never smiled, and she screamed sometimes, or threw things, or she hid herself away, and now she told me my brother was dead and she didn’t even seem to care.

  I couldn’t touch her, even when I hit her. She didn’t make a sound.

  9.10.2184 EHSD—Cigrets and Cookies

  I got in the habit of avoiding Mishka and her mat. Every other day I skipped school, hung out by the lake with Seamus or skulked around the Pediatric Ward looking pitiful so the nurses gave me extra food and sweets. Most of the time I took it all back to Isobel, who was nearly five years old now, a pale-skinned girl with hair the color of brown sugar and eyes that seemed too large for her face; they stretched the skin around her sockets and made her look older than she was. She didn’t go to school, I think because she screamed the entire day when Papa had tried to drop her off, so instead he sat with her at home and read books with her from the primary slate he got from the school. Sometimes she read on her own, or traced the animation with her finger, tucked into the corner of the bed we shared. Sometimes she talked to her doll. She invited me to play but mostly she occupied herself, which gave me some freedom to explore the Camp.

  Not that I didn’t know every square meter of it already, like where the guards went when they wanted to do something illegal like smoke a leaf or screw someone while on duty. One time around the EHRRO Staff Dormitory I caught this guard with his face up some orphan girl’s skirt, and I just laughed and pointed. She must’ve been barely sixteen and ran off when she saw me. The guard chased me all the way back to the family cabins and kicked me to the gravel. But I never saw him around the dorm again.

  Bo-Sheng found me when I sat covered in pebble dust, scraped bloody. I was picking at a flap of skin on the palm of my hand and blowing on the red underbelly when this boy crouched down beside me, black-haired, black-eyed, and sharply angled like an adult even though he didn’t seem much older than me. Maybe nine.

  “You all right?” he asked, blowing smoke in my face. Then I saw the rolled leaf between his fingers. The smell was like Papa’s, except with something tangy underneath, as if he’d just eaten an orange.

  “Yeah…stupid guard.” I spat on the path where the guard had gone. It was an impressive gob, and I grinned at the boy.

  He made a face. “What’s your name?”

  “Yuri.” I stood.

  He looked surprised and got up too, and I was glad that I was taller than him. “I thought you were a girl,” he said.

  “You’re stupid.”

  “Well your hair’s so long,” he said, squinting at me. Then he said, “My name’s Bo-Sheng. Want one?” He offered the cigret leaf.

  I shrugged and took it. Papa never let me smoke, but he wasn’t around. I put it to my lips and it tasted like orange and burned leaves and that honey sweetness. Maybe the orange was from Bo-Sheng. I sucked on it and immediately started to cough. Bo-Sheng laughed and tried to take it back but I shoved him one-handed and tried again. After about five times it started to get easier. He let me have it and took out another roll from his dirty pants pocket and lit it with a blackened fingerband. I liked how his cheeks hollowed when he sucked on it. It made him look tough. His skin was brown from being outside a lot, and his hair fell into his eyes in jagged black spikes.

  “I got cookies,” I told him. I dug out the packet the nurse had given me and ripped it open.

  He took one and ate it in two seconds, then held out his hand for another. The packet had four.

  “One’s for my sister,” I said.

  “There’s three left,” he said.

  I guessed I could get more. So I gave him a second. He ate it just as quickly, then started to walk away. “C’mon,” he said over his shoulder.

  So I followed him.

  6.17.2185 EHSD—Bo-Sheng

  Bo-Sheng was an orphan. He had grown up in the Camp since he was two. He didn’t remember anywhere else. His homeship had been destroyed in some battle long ago, and he didn’t know details. The woman who’d survived with him died when he was five, and he was too young to look at his own records. They wouldn’t let him. He knew the Camp and all the guards and aid workers, even when they’d just rotated on planet, and he grew his own sweet leaf in a long box on the windowsill above his bunk. He went where he wanted because he was fast and smart and didn’t have to answer to anybody. There were older kids in his cabin and adults who kind of tried to get him to go to school, but like me, he preferred to wander.

  I liked how his hands were always sprinkled with gray dust in the summer. He liked to pick up rocks and toss them against the sides of buildings. He could throw them hard. We started to toss rocks into the water a lot, and he always pitched them farther than me.

  But I could get food from the nurses. They liked to comb my hair and fuss about how I needed a shower. A nurse lady named Nancy called me “child” a lot, and took my ripped clothes and sewed patches along the collars and on the knees of my jeans. Sometimes she tied my hair back for me with black elastic. Bo-Sheng said they must’ve thought I was a girl. We fought sometimes about it, when he said that, but I didn’t mind too much. I could wrestle better than him. He was nice to Isobel though. Sometimes I took her with me out to the lake, and Bo-Sheng would always give her his ratty jacket if he thought she was cold. And he’d sit there shivering on the shore until I leaned against him to share the warmth.

  And it was nice like that. It was better than the cigs.

  9.9.2185 EHSD—School

  Papa asked me once at breakfast, before school, “Who is that boy I always see lurking outside the classroom? Doesn’t he go in? Is he a friend of yours?”

  I said, “Yes,” and left it up to Papa to figure out which question I meant to answer.

  Papa sighed. “Yurochka, the teachers have been telling me that you sneak out of class in the mornings and don’t go back. Is this true?”

  I chewed the inside of my cheek and pushed the cereal around in my bowl, letting the milk glop-glop from the spoon and typhoon against the wheat flakes. “School’s boring. And everyone’s noisy and never pays attention. And the teachers always yell at us.”

  “That’s because you don’t listen. They have to yell.”

  “Why do I have to go anyway? I’m never going to do anything with it.”

  He leaned over and put his hand on my arm to stop me from playing with the food. “What do you mean?”

  “We’re never getting out of the Camp.”

  “That’s not true,” he said.

  But the tightness of his fingers on my arm said another thing. He “worked” with some EHRRO crew in inventory, but he wasn’t getting paid, and it made his back hurt, lifting boxes. Sometimes when I came home in the evenings, after playing in the cool hours with Bo-Sheng, I caught him hunched over the table with a scratched and dented slate in front of him, writing. I’d go and hug him, and he’d kiss my hair and pat me a few times, but then he’d tell me to go to bed. Up close, I caught glimpses of the words he input.

  Every day gets longer on this planet until I think it will outlast my own life. And my children’s.

  But I didn’t tell h
im I saw that. Instead, I said, “Look how long it’s been and they haven’t even brought Mama back.”

  He squeezed my arm tighter. “They will. And if you don’t go to school, then why don’t you stay home with me in the mornings, and we can read together. You, me, and Isobel. Yeah?”

  I shrugged.

  “I’d like it if we could,” he said. “We can play games too.” Then he leaned over and kissed my hair, smoothing the back of it with his hand.

  I looked at him, tiny smile. He hugged me more since we left the Moon. Maybe he missed Mama and Jascha as much as I did.

  Since I didn’t go to school in the mornings, but stayed with Papa and Isobel, after a week Bo-Sheng got in the habit of rapping on my bedroom window after lunch to draw me out. We walked along the lakeshore and he gave me a pack of cigs and a fingerband that he said he stole from one of the older boys in his cabin, who’d got them from a guard.

  I wiped my nose with the back of my hand, then lit one of the sticks. It took a few tries because the fingerband was too large and kept slipping down before I could get a decent spark.

  The water rolled in gray at our feet, and I felt the cold tickle even through my boots. Seamus sniffed my ankles for a bit, then loped off to dig among the rocks. Bo-Sheng led me to an abandoned dropbin and we climbed on and lay back on its dented surface, looking up at the sky. I could see a round patch of pale blue, the only break in the clouds, like an eye. The wind always sounded hollow when you were lying down.

  “I wonder if the war’s over,” I said.

  Bo-Sheng laughed. “The war’s not over. We’d hear about it.” He blew a stream of smoke up toward the clouds, to join them. “I wish I was up there killing some strits.”

  I chewed the edge of my thumb where the skin cracked and frayed. “Like you could kill a strit? Maybe with your ugly looks.”

  He nudged me with his elbow. “I could. All you need is a gun.”