Starchild- Exile, page 2
A scream echoed from somewhere else in the school.
This was no respite from the eerie silence. Then a woman Kalh didn’t know was thrown into the room, tumbling across the floor. No, the cameras would offer no protection.
Kalh glanced subtly at the miin again, hoping for some sort of reassurance, but he ignored her. That did reassure her slightly.
Taiberos had an air of indifference to everyone around him, as if perfectly immune to social pressures. Somehow she both envied and despised that quality. “You know who I am.”
The room was silent in reply. Everyone, including Kalh, kept their eyes down, unfocused.
“They used to call me the Witch Hunter. Do you know why?” His smile was pleasant, as if insanity were about to spread.
Kalh put her hand again to her neck and touched that vial of sand, as if the thought of home would steady her. That was all she really wanted—a safe place to call home.
She hadn’t even noticed herself doing this until Taiberos, walking behind her, suddenly stopped. Directly behind her. As if he knew. But how could he have known?
Her breath caught in her throat, and she put her hand down on the table, out in the open. She wanted to look at him, see what he was doing, but instead she held still and forced a breath through her nose. Even breathing seemed vile, like food to a retching stomach. She thought of that forbidden melody, hoping its notes could calm her down.
He slammed her head into the table with a crack that made her ears ring.
Right in front of everyone.
Stars zoomed past, and for a moment life became blurry. Surely the blow had left a red mark.
Taiberos’s cybernetic grip locked around her neck. Right in front of everyone.
And in that blurriness, she didn’t think about whether they had evidence on her or not. She didn’t consider her favorite words from Master Jyngsoo: What would you give your life for?
She didn’t decide at all.
She simply reacted.
Her core ignited like a furnace. Her skin burned with heat. And the fire inside flowed out through her eyes as a glow of white so that her irises and pupils seemed to vanish.
They knew her now.
“Get her!” Taiberos’s mechanical fingers squeezed into her neck.
With a snarl of white teeth, she snapped her hand into a clawing position, pointed at Taiberos. Though her hand was still an arm’s length away, she could feel his neck between her fingers. She gave it a good shove.
Taiberos’s neck jerked backward, and he smacked hard into the window before falling on his knees. His expression remained surprisingly passive as his fingers scraped at the skin of his own neck, feeling for something to pull away. But there was nothing—he was being throttled by a ghost.
Keeping her grip flexed, fingers still pointed at Taiberos, Kalh jumped onto the table. Unfortunately, her heart beat much too rapidly for her to surge.
One of the white-clad Witch Hunters leveled a stun gun at her. The snub-nosed weapon coughed a low, rumbling boom, like a single beat smashed against a terrible drum. The blast moved so fast it caused the air to ripple in a tight cone as it zoomed across the room. When it hit, her muscles locked.
She collapsed onto the table with a bang, unable to slow her fall.
Several other teachers near her had been hit by the shot’s collateral range, and they slumped over in their chairs.
The Witch Hunters rushed at her.
As their hands gripped her body, touching her all over, she thought about what she’d done. Fighting had been futile, and now her muscles were knotted, clenched painfully, and she couldn’t move.
She should’ve run when she had the chance.
At least she felt some satisfaction knowing her grip still clung to Taiberos’s throat. It lasted only a moment longer though, until she lost her sense of his position.
Taiberos then stood, his hand rubbing his throat. “Well, ████. She’s more valuable than I thought.” He said it so matter of factly—she hated how he always seemed so composed.
The redhelms piled on top, crushing her and pulling her hair. She saw one last window of light through the mass of bodies, and then she completely surrendered. As her muscles started to relax, she felt perfectly at ease, and her heart slowed its beat as well. Maybe she still had a chance to surge.
Taiberos had been in this situation before, and he was a step ahead: “Get her on the exhaust quick. I’ll bet she can surge too.”
She closed her eyes, as if praying to surge immediately from this room into the floor below, but she was too late. She opened her eyes a crack and saw a hand gripping a mask, moving toward her face. She struggled, but they pinned her head back, and the mask closed over her mouth and nose. She had to breathe it in.
Almost immediately, her hazel eyes closed, though this time she wished they wouldn’t.
Darkness creeped in from the corners, and she lost awareness of her body altogether, leaving her to wonder when the kids would get the rest of the lesson. Tanie needed to hear it. She’d prepared it mostly for him. But she couldn’t even take care of herself, much less someone else.
Then a white monster clawed into her biceps and pinched the nerves next to her bones, and her shadow rushed past her from one side to the other, time and again, at the speed of her heart, which still beat much too fast. She was no longer herself. She wasn’t any self. And then the sky peeled back, exposing her brain. If they could touch that, she’d lost everything. She was just a thing. An object. A slave. Her heart raced, exhausting her, and yet she couldn’t fall asleep, so maybe waking was the answer.
She fought for consciousness, but sleep wafted like a vapor around her, and she couldn’t help but inhale it. At least she was still breathing. Still breathing. And she could open her eyes if she wanted. She could. She knew she could. She felt cold, gray dust beneath her fingers. Powdery dust. And she herself felt cold too. And completely alone. Alone for cycles and cycles. Only she couldn’t see the place where she’d arrived. Not without opening her eyes.
And somehow she finally managed to.
Dim light poured into her eyes, seeping in from overhead.
Gray walls stood in front of her, all around her, moving slowly, or hardly at all.
As she became aware, she realized they’d stripped her. She was naked. And she couldn’t even remember when or how it had happened.
She pulled her knees up close and wrapped her arms around them, trying to cover herself so that the gray walls wouldn’t see her. Even alone in this room, she felt so exposed. And violated. They might’ve done anything to her while she’d been out, like she wasn’t even her own property anymore, like the sanctity of her own body had been forcibly taken. It felt so gross, so disgusting. She wanted to vomit.
She squinted, still fighting to feel fully awake.
She put a hand to her neck, feeling for her necklace—that small bit of home. It was gone too, taken from her, just like her real home, and replaced by a collar locked tight around her throat, one that fed a toxin into her system at regular intervals.
Then nausea hit her again as she realized something else was missing.
She reached up to touch her hair—and felt skin.
Her hair was gone.
Gone.
Completely gone.
Her shoulders curled forward as she put her desperate hands over her skull, bowing her face down into her knees.
She’d never felt so vulnerable. Never touched this close to her own brain.
She turned to the side as her body heaved, and she spewed rancid liquid onto the floor. The odor wafted through the air.
The PSD had done this to her. They’d made it illegal to be her. They said the populace would be better off with people like her in prison. But she hadn’t done anything! It wasn’t right! It wasn’t right to sacrifice an innocent to make the populace safer.
She just wanted to be left alone. To have a quiet place where she could live her life. A place she could call home. Her elbows pulled together to shield her further. She needed protection.
She needed a safe place.
She felt sleepy, dreadfully sleepy, but she fought to stay in this nightmare reality.
She began to rock forward and back. A gentle rhythm of calm waters against a painful shoreline. She knew she should feel anger, but it was lost behind stronger emotions. Never before had she felt so frail. So mortal. So naked.
And so very, very afraid.
Soon the collar would shoot another dose into her neck and she’d lose consciousness.
Her eyes squeezed shut and tears dropped, leaving dark splotches on the concrete floor.
2. CPC4K3
“Nak, why are you in here again?” asked CPC4K3.
“I’m avoiding the clients.”
Nak sat in an easy chair made of scuffed leather aboard his ship, The Spirit. The chair had seen better cycles. One of its arms had a dark, brownish-red stain on it, but he let his hand rest there anyway. The recliner was completely out of place in these sterile surroundings. The floor was a metal grating that clanked when he walked on it. The walls were a circle. It wasn’t a large room, but large for so small a ship. At the room’s center stood the bulky cylinder of the ship’s surge drive, which extended high overhead and dropped below the grated floor. The surge drive was directly between his chair and the door—he’d done that on purpose. Access panels and lights lined the circular walls. Everything in here was metal, sharp, and freezing cold. Yet Nak loved it in here.
Which was good. Because if he didn’t like metal, sharp, and freezing cold, then he might not like her either.
“You’ve barely slept for two isochrons in the last twenty.” CPC4K3’s voice came from a tiny cube, barely as wide as Nak’s little finger, clinging magnetically to the cylindrical surge drive. Well, nearly a cube, anyway. Each of her lines were slightly rounded, each corner just larger than ninety degrees. He once said she was like a cube who’d put on a little weight. She didn’t like that description at all.
“Yep,” he said.
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“You keep ignoring my warnings about building sleep debt.” Someone who spent too much time awake could start to hallucinate without even realizing it. “PSD standards are ten isochrons every thirty.”
“████ the PSD.” In one hand, he gripped a dread mask. The upper half had big, round Shadowlyss goggles. The lower half was a grinning mouth with tusk-like fangs curling out, but he wasn’t paying any attention to it.
The truth was, CPC4K3 couldn’t actually see any of this. After all, she was just a tiny cube with no eyes. Instead, she connected to the ship through the phantomlink and could use all its peripherals. She was the ship, in a way, because of it. And outside the ship, she could see really clearly. Whereas inside the ship, she only had a mic and a speaker; she could only listen and speculate on what was going on.
So she hated when he just sat there in silence.
Hated it.
But if she brought that up, she knew he’d just tell her to work on the Le Encor Gambit. And she could, of course. She even wanted to work on it, but she wanted to talk to someone a little more. She decided to risk breaking the silence: “What are you thinking about?”
“I don’t know.”
Sometimes communicating with him seemed like navigating a maze too. “Just give it a try.” She said it with snark in her tone. Maybe a touch of flirtiness. In what she considered a sexy voice—one of the few options she had for displaying any personality. “Please?”
“It’s hunger.”
“The olioges on the starboard side are ripe.”
“It’s not my stomach. More like my soul.”
“What does a soul eat?”
“If I knew that, I’d eat it.”
“I’m telling you, you’re sleep deprived.” Her voice was high toned and a little raspy, which matched her size at least. “Just go to sleep.”
“I need to talk to the clients.”
“Why?”
“Got to find out more about this girl we’re rescuing.”
“Then what are you doing in here?”
“Cup—”
When he said her name in that tone, she stopped immediately. She knew how to push him, and she knew when to stop.
She aimed her magnets till, with a clack, she snapped downward one body length, still clinging to the metal wall, but now with a different face. It took a moment to redirect her magnets, and then she tilted forward once again—another snap. This was basically her form of walking. It wasn’t difficult, just tedious, rolling her cubish self along the walls. To go from here to the cockpit would take 988 clicks. Knowing there was a much easier way frustrated her. If Nak would just listen. He never would though. He’d pretend to listen, and then he’d say it was safer for everyone if she was limited to movement along the ship’s metal, like he thought she wouldn’t be loyal if she had the option to leave. He was wrong though. She suspected it had to do with other CP units being unstable, but he wouldn’t talk to her about that either.
She imagined Nak lying there with his eyes closed as she clacked her way down the surge drive’s shaft. “I wish I had someone to talk to while you were gone.”
Nak leaned his chair back and put his feet up. “You can talk to diagnostics.”
“He’s a slave processor!”
“So?”
“He’s not interesting.”
“Who do you want to talk to then?”
“Everyone!”
“That’s because you don’t know everyone like I do. If you knew them, you wouldn’t want to talk to them either.”
“Yes I would.”
She had once been a completely white cube, but her worn edges and corners now exposed her metal color. Not only that, Nak had drawn a face on each of her six surfaces—six ways for her to show her emotions: Happy, sad, shocked, angry, excited, and neutral. After he’d put her back down and told her what they were, she’d immediately clicked to the angry-face side and said, “I can’t believe you drew on me,” and that wasn’t a joke. Graffiti was not funny. She’d never gotten a good look at herself through The Spirit’s external sensors though, so she didn’t know how good a job he did.
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She’d never admitted this aloud, but the faces he’d drawn turned out to be useful, once she got over the affront. All she had to do was roll the appropriate side so it was facing out. It was actually pretty genius.
She stopped descending when she was directly in front of him, right at eye level. She rolled one last click to the side, showing her face with a hand-drawn grin. “I get lonely, okay? When there’s nothing to do.”
“We’ve been through this.” She could tell he hadn’t opened his eyes to look at her either.
“But Nak…” Her voice came out with a bit of a whine. “I could talk to the clients for you.”
He sat the recliner back up, put his feet on the floor, and leaned forward. “Cupcake, I cannot emphasize this enough: You can’t talk to strangers. I mean it. No strangers. If you do, you force me to choose between you and The Spirit. Don’t make me do that, okay?”
She clicked one face over, revealing her sad face.
“Sorry, Cup.” He sighed, leaned back again, and rested an arm over his eyes. After a short silence, he said, “You’re lucky I didn’t get a slave processor for the whole ship instead.”
“Then I wouldn’t be able to think.”
“And you wouldn’t talk so much.”
“But Nak, you don’t believe in slavery.”
“Mmm.”
“So are you glad you got me then?”
“Still deciding.”
“How long’s that going to take?”
“At least another percent.”
“That’s so long.”
“You better be good then.” The chair squeaked as he shifted in it, probably into a more naplike position.
The steady hum of the surge reactor became the only sound.
As it hummed, she thought and thought, wanting so badly to say more, to communicate, which she might’ve still gotten away with if she said the right thing, if she didn’t nag, but nagging was really all she felt like doing right now.
Maybe she could work on the Le Encor Gambit for a bit.
Captain Le Encor became the maneuver’s namesake because of how many lives he took.
Nak had told her the story. To travel across large distances in a ship like The Spirit, you had to get away from other gravitational sources. Otherwise it caused a three-body problem, and the hashes were too complex to calculate. Usually this just meant your ship couldn’t go anywhere, but Le Encor somehow forced it. Instead of his ship surging to its destination like it was supposed to, it created a whirlpool in spacetime that sucked in a whole fleet.
And none of them ever came out the other side.
Maybe Le Encor had done it on accident. It was hard to imagine someone actually wanting to lose everything like that. No one who’d ever solved the puzzle had stuck around to explain why they did it. CPC4K3 herself only liked the puzzle from a theoretical standpoint. It was a fun challenge. Plus maybe if she solved it, she could keep anyone else from doing it to The Spirit. And Nak encouraged her to work on it too, but if she acted too interested, he’d shut down the conversation with, “Don’t get any ideas.”
The puzzle kept her occupied during the silences at least.
In theory, any Bloody Wing could do it. CPC4K3 thought she could probably do it if The Spirit were sitting still for about ten percents, but there was no way Nak would spend a tenth of his life just sitting there. Besides, Le Encor hadn’t done it that way. He’d somehow found a method that wouldn’t overtax the surge drive. It meant finding a quicker route through a maze of data. CPC4K3 crunched the numbers over and over, trying to find that faster pathway.
