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"Where's Anthy?" My heart pounds.
I left my five charges safe in our bunkroom when a crewmember called me out to move boxes in one of the holds. Now I am staring at only four children.
"Where's Anthy?" I repeat. I catch Jun by his straight, black hair and slam him against the bulkhead. He is seven and old enough to understand the rules.
His eyes widen with fear. "I didn't see."
"See what?" My panic rises. Anthy is three and capable of getting into lots of trouble.
"I didn't see him leave," Jun stammers.
"He left with the shiplady," Appa pipes up behind me. I swing about to look at the five-year-old. Her eyes are large and innocent. "The sad one. Anthy went with her."
I release Jun and put my hands to my sides to keep the others from seeing how much they shake. Why? What did that woman want with him? Crew contact with us is strictly limited. The first night, when they herded us out of the shuttle and into the ship, they gathered us in the hangar, a small knot of weeping, terrified children, and the Captain told us: no one spoke, touched, or interacted with us unless it was ship business. He brought Old Pieter to the front and told us the short, grizzled old man was in charge of us—that he knew how to take care of us. Old Pieter nodded and said we must listen to him, do what he said, and tell him if anyone in the crew bothered us. If we did not tell, terrible things would happen to us when he found out. Old Pieter always found out, the Captain warned. He squeezed his eyes narrow when he looked at us to let us know he meant it. We moved closer together and believed him.
Old Pieter told us he was not our Momma or Papa. He was better. He knew how to take care of children because he was special-trained. There was no sense of kindness to him, only a sense of responsibility. He was an old man who walked with a heavy limp. He did not smile, but he did not get angry and yell at us, either. He firmly repeated what he wanted done until we did it.
Or he punished us terribly if he thought we deserved it.
"You stay here!" I tell the four youngers. I am beginning to sweat as I turn and run back up the dim passageway. The metal grid under my feet rings softly with the impact of my weight.
Where is Anthy?
They tell us not to trust the adults around us, which is not difficult after what they did to our families. The distrust has grown even deeper since I talked to children from other groups who have been here longer. They tell me stories about what happens when they are taken out on the docks at night when the ship puts into a port. I am horrified. I am afraid for me, yes, but for the younger children more. I and the others from New Bounty are farm children; we understand some of what the others tell us better than they do. It is wrong. We know that. We are only children, however. We cling to what we know, and what we know now is this ship and its crew. They hold us prisoner, but they also feed and care for us. Old Pieter tries to make us feel a part of the ship. He slips us small, secretive kindnesses, rebuffs us with harsh words, then pulls us back with a rare, crooked smile. One of the older boys, Jon, has warned me: it is all cleverly meant to draw us in. We will learn to do what we are told to do, or we will die.
My heart races with fear for my little brother.
I turn down an intersecting corridor and run through pools of light and shadow, past dark metal walls until I come to the children's showers. My heart pounds as I step inside the humid room. Bad things have happened here: the older kids have told me. Once, a crewman cornered a kid... They said the Captain put the man into an airlock without a suit and opened the outer doors. They forced the children to watch so they would understand that no one except the "clients" could touch them. It does not stop an angry older kid from attacking a younger occasionally. When that happens, the older kid disappears. I hear whispers they go to lower levels of the ship. That below our deck they keep adult Humans to sell for labor. Sometimes the victim is put back in with the other children; sometimes the victim disappears, too.
Anthy is not in the shower room.
I step back out, frantic, and look up and down the passageway. As I turn to run further in my search, I see movement at the lighted intersection far up the way.
***
I WOKE TO THE SOUND of crickets.
Crickets.
In all my years in the Vasty, I had forgotten the sound of insects chirping on a warm planet night. Someone had delved deep into my subconscious to find I would respond positively to that sound.
The realization that someone was rummaging in my brain sent a shot of adrenalin through me. I lifted my head to look around.
A white-walled room the size of the total living quarters on the Hand told me I was planetside. Room on stations was too valuable to give over to more than function required. I rested in a gravity sling, a device used in medical facilities to aid healing, and there was no chrono or calendar in sight to add the pressure of passing time.
I tried to connect with the world system, to discover where I was, but the chips inside my head did not pull any information back to me. The walls shifted to a darker shade of gray, a color intended to sooth, and I realized I had been down this path before, after things went bad off Vacca. I was in a rehab facility. All the effects, including tech connections, or the lack thereof, were meant to calm me.
Because discovering the extent of my injuries and their long term effects would distress me.
An image of yawning space flashed before my eyes and the machines monitoring my vitals took over, pumping stuff into my body to force calm. The flood of chemical oblivion could not stop the images of Idwal, Saurubi, the ghost ship, the kid, the pain, or the emptiness of the Vasty this time. It all needed to come out sooner or later, and someone had determined the medical diagnosis for me was the old EA combat treatment philosophy of "sooner."
Get it out; get it over with. Move on to solutions. Ooh-rah.
I had been through this before; I knew the logic, and I knew how it must resolve.
I fell into a dark time, second only to watching a ship explode off the Zephyr Isles, as I faced down my memories, sorted things out, and healed.
The walls of the room slid with kaleidoscoping color.
***
I BLINKED AND THE WALLS shaded a dark, stormy gray.
There was movement at my left shoulder. Twisting my head, I discovered a large mudslide covered in medical whites tweaking the settings on my monitors.
I breathed out a sigh of relief.
Everyone knows that the Xix, or Zeeks, as we Humans call them, run the best medical facilities in the Whooex Union. The lumpy, brown, two-and-a-half meter tall creatures look similar to big piles of dirt and gravel, but their understanding of life and what makes it work is unsurpassed. Their expertise in the physiology of Humans is legendary.
Which is a supreme irony, since the Xix were once a conquering terror. They spread out across star systems, decimating countless populations and worlds. Then they discovered how other lifeforms functioned.
Zeeks have only two states of being: living or dead. They can overcome minor damage to their bodies, but there is no healing their heavy, soil-like forms if they experience extensive damage. Discovering that other creatures' bodies could mend and heal was a transformative event in their social evolution. They began a fervent study of biology and science and, over several hundred of our years, became the most competent doctors in the Whooex Union. Now they nurture their fragile fellow unionists with the gentle care of a gardener tending precious plants.
The creature beside me reached over a brown hand five times the size of my own and patted my left shoulder reassuringly.
My left shoulder.
That snapped me to another level of reality. I lifted my arm, twisting it to stare at my left palm. The flesh was as smooth and pink as baby skin. The Xix had put me through regeneration! It would take a lot of wear and tear to acquire my arm's original state of aged toughness, but, by the Mother Universe, it was there! I rolled my shoulder to feel the movement, then laid my head back in the gravity sling so I could put some order to the emotions that flooded me.
The Zeek made a soft trilling sound I recognized as laughter.
"Thank you." I turned my head to look up at it. "Thank you."
The creature blinked its three brown eyes and gave a slight downward gesture of its brown, lumpy head in acknowledgment. It was like watching a bank of earth fall toward me.
The Zeek resumed fiddling with a bit of handheld tech while I took some time to compose my thoughts. With so many questions burning in my brain, I found it hard to focus. I could see my personal feeds in my left side peri-vision—they read normal—but my ship feeds were missing. The one in my right eye, which gave me information on the external world, was dead. I tried to make a connection with the world system. Failed.
The attendant stopped its work and stood watching me, anticipating my need.
"Can you tell me where—" I rasped. My throat felt scaly from disuse.
Before I could finish my question a commotion in the hallway outside the room pulled the Zeek's attention away from me.
No. No interruptions! I needed to find out where I was. And Saura! How long had I been here? A regen this major generally took ninety days. Ninety days! I needed to find Saura, then locate the kid.
I tried to raise my voice, to reclaim my attendant's attention. "Where—?"
The Zeek swung toward the door. I heard a rumbling sound of protest from another Zeek—too low for my translator to interpret—then a hissed snarl of response.
My translator picked out the word "illegal."
My attendant emitted an unhappy sound and took a step toward the hall. He stopped short as the door flung open and a tall, dark form swept into the room.
Any mental comfort I had gained from my present environment fell to zero.