Dove Arising (24 page)

Not quite.
Home has never been anywhere other than apartment number 808, Theta complex. This new apartment will simply be where I sleep.

28

I SPREAD MY FEET AS WIDELY ON THE FLOOR of the Law lobby as I can without looking absurd and point in a haughty manner to the insignia on my chest. Several of my Militia subordinates line the walls, giving me an extra incentive to look authoritative.

“I’m here to pay Mira Theta’s bail.”

The middle-aged receptionist flips through the touch screens around her desk. She has smooth, dark skin and a wide nose that looks proportional when her lips stretch into an even wider smile.

“You’re her genius older daughter, no? She told me stories about you.”

I drop my stiff Yinha face, taken aback.

“I’m usually with the prisoners, keeping them in line—well, Mira never needed to be kept in line. Today is my desk day.”

We shake hands; she pulls back as soon as my profile appears on her handscreen, intimidated by my Militia rank. Glancing down at my handscreen, I learn that she’s Deima Upsilon, Penitentiary warden.

“Now put your left hand up on the counter. . . .”

I pull up my family’s loaded bank account and present her with my handscreen.

“This is a great day for Mira. She’s getting out of custody
and
finding out her daughter’s a captain.”

Is she worried?
She sounds overly optimistic.

Deima taps my handscreen and presses her thumb to it. The touch screens on her desk flash the words,
BAIL
AUTHORIZED
. Without the bail money, my family still has more than two hundred Sputniks to spare. Good.

“All righty,” says Deima. “Your mom’s trial just got moved up about fifteen months, to this August the twenty-fourth, 17:00, in Law Chamber 144. Sound good?”

I’m so relieved I could skip across the lobby. My family now has a year and a half less to wait. Maybe the change means Law will treat Mom with mercy. I breathe slowly, fighting the sudden hope. It’ll probably lead to disappointment.

“
Mira
culous.” Deima laughs at her own pun. I can see why Mom got along with her. “Enough dallying. Come with me.”

Deima takes me through the lobby and two sets of doors into the dimly lit Penitentiary tower. We board an elevator with graying walls.

“I’m not supposed to let people into the prison area, but you shouldn’t have to wait any longer to see your mom. Besides,
Captain
, you’re part of the 0.2 percent of Base IV’s population that’s allowed up here.”

Deima’s clever. I’m glad that Mom had her.

We get off at the fourteenth floor. My pupils dilate as soon as the elevator doors close behind us. Floor 14 is completely dark and completely silent. Using my handscreen for illumination, I discern long spans of identical doors curving into the distance on my left and right. Militia guards are positioned every fifty meters or so along the wall. The halls branch off quickly. The architects of this place did a good job ensuring that it would be difficult for anyone to get in or out.

Deima stops at Cell 1494. What an unlucky number.

“Don’t be scared when you see your mom. I . . . I didn’t do this to her,” Deima says. “It was the other wardens. Really, don’t be scared.”

Her words don’t have the effect she intends. They terrify me.

Deima presses her thumb to the scanner, sticks her tongue out for another contraption to verify, and says slowly into some sort of microphone, “Deima Epsilon.”

All three detectors blink green. One by one, three sets of double doors slide open to reveal a tiny white cylindrical cell so small that my arms can span its radius. There’s a stool in the center of the room, with a sad little pail pushed underneath to hold human waste. Other than that, there’s something I can barely identify as a person, curled on a ragged mat, robes torn and browned with grime. She seems to be sleeping, if it’s possible to sleep while in such a state.

My mother’s waist-length hair is gone. Black fuzz covers her skull; her head is small and bumpy, unrecognizable. But the intelligent eyes that fly open when the doors slide apart are indisputably my mother’s, as are the flared nostrils and the overall expression of disbelief.

“Phaet—you came for me.” My mother stretches out her hand, but I’m too paralyzed with joy to do anything but stare. “Welcome to my luxury apartment.”

“I’m here to evict you,” I fire back, pulling her into a hug and doing my best not to crush her. I’ll never let go of her again.

“You two are free to go,” Deima says. “Good luck with the trial, Mira.”

“Thank you.” Mom takes Deima’s proffered hand and stands. She puts her hand on my cheek, as if checking to see whether this strange soldier is really her offspring. She squeezes the skin over the bone, as she used to do when I was younger, but it hurts far more than when my face was fleshy and her fingers weren’t feeble twigs coated with greenish skin.

Deima claps her on the shoulder. “You’re my favorite inmate. I’m going to miss you.”

“You were my favorite warden. I’ll miss you as well, but I hope I never see you again.”

All three of us laugh.

I take her arm, and we shuffle back the way I came. My mother slips every few meters, her legs clumsy with disuse. Seemingly smaller than ever, she positions herself behind me whenever we pass a helmeted guard, like a novice private caught in enemy fire. The Beetles ignore us, except to salute in response to my insignia.

When we reach the bustling Atrium, Mom staggers again from the sudden increase in sensory input, shuts her eyes, and jams an index finger in each ear.

I pull her to a bench on the side of the dome, as she used to do for me when I was younger and all the people in the Atrium frightened me. If everything were as nature meant it to be, Mom wouldn’t lean on me for another twenty years.

In the security mirrors, I see people staring at us with morbid inquisitiveness, drawn by the irony of what probably looks like a streaky-haired crone guiding a starved, black-haired boy to refuge.

Mom points at the insignia on my chest. “Congratulations, my girl.” She sounds anything but happy. “Militia—of all the things in the universe . . .” Mom sits on her handscreen, lowers her voice to a whisper, and puts her lips by my ear. “Do you have friends there? Do you feel safe?”

I nod, even though both my friends and true safety are now far away.

It’s enough for Mom. She straightens again. “Would you come home, maybe once a week?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

She looks away. “This might not be justified—but I worry that you’ll change, Phaet. You’re so strong and brave, and I like to think I’ve taught you well . . . but what if you forget where you come from?” She pulls back the sleeve of her stained robe to expose open cuts and half-formed scabs. “My guards seem to have forgotten.”

I lean back, repulsed by her festering wounds, even as grief constricts my trachea.

“Full-powered Electrostuns, Phaet. They sliced my hair with a dagger, and my scalp along with it.” Mom’s voice rises. “They drugged my water, giving me dreams of you three—distorted and hazy dreams. And they laughed—they thought everything was funny—seemed to enjoy tormenting me—”

“Mom, stop!”

“—and I could hear them playing handscreen checkers when they were done with me. Checkers.”

Mom spent fifteen years sheltering me from the darker departments. She’s always hidden the important things—like when I had a sister on the way; I didn’t know until I asked Dad what was wrong with Mom’s belly.

Mom’s head droops so that her chin nearly touches her visible sternum. “I’m sorry I told you these horrible things, Phaet. But you’re growing older, and you deserve to know all about the organization you’ve joined. Oh, I wish you hadn’t! In training, you could have been paralyzed, or dead, or made mentally ill for the rest of your life.”

“All for you.” She’s doing something that I’ll never understand, something that mothers inexplicably do: agonize about their children in the most hypocritical of instances. She shouldn’t concern herself with my health; she can hardly stand, while I’m stronger than ever.

“I can’t find words in this Journalist head of mine to sufficiently thank you for it.” Mom squeezes my hand hard; the gesture seems to use up all the strength in her body. She rises, takes a few staggering steps, and then looks back. “Let’s go to Cygnus and Anka.”

I tail her and latch onto her arm. Although she smiles back at me, her eyes glaze over and avoid contact with mine. Now that I’ve become a captain, she can’t look at me the way she used to. She can hardly look at me at all.

I watch Mom sleep for two hours and sixteen minutes while Cygnus and Anka drift in and out of her bedroom. Mom clenches her fists and kicks the covers so frequently that I’m relieved when she finally sits up, sweating but shivering. Despite her exhaustion, wakefulness seems more peaceful than reliving the horrors of Penitentiary in her dreams.

“Tell me this is real, dear,” she rasps.

Indeed, she’s safe, with not a Beater in sight. I mop her brow with a scrap of cloth torn from one of Anka’s old robes. Now that Mom’s woken up inside her own home, maybe she’ll realize how much better things are.

She begins to laugh and finishes with a cough. “You didn’t answer. That’s how I know it’s really you.”

As her knobby hand tucks a strand of gray hair behind my ear, her eyes flick to the mole beneath my bottom lip. Then she catches sight of my jacket’s black collar, and her left hand darts under the covers.

“I apologize—my guards wore the same black jacket. For a while, I’ll be confused as to where I am.” Her voice is a whisper that hardly makes it past her throat. “Is your brother home from Primary?”

I point toward the kitchenette, where my brother is toying with his handscreen and our Hemispherical Registered Processor, or HeRP. He’s probably blowing off homework to mine a department or two for information that’ll help in the trial; tunneling is more urgent than ever now that the date has been moved up.

Mom’s eyes are cast downward. “Can you fetch him?”

She must want me to leave; she wants to enjoy being home without a reminder of how she got here.

Miffed, I walk into the living room. As I pass the kitchenette, my boots clack and echo. Four and a half pieces of leftover sushi wither on the table. After months of eating bland root vegetables, my siblings couldn’t stomach the riot of flavors that Yinha so easily swallowed down.

Anka looks up from her handscreen, upon which she’s doodling a floral pattern, with the same scared expression she wore when Wes first visited Theta 808. For her sake, I relax the muscles in my face before proceeding.

As I suspected, Cygnus hunches over our outmoded HeRP, waving his hands over the dome-shaped structure like some Earthbound fortune-teller. The HeRP is about as big as the top of his head; its entire surface is a screen that sheathes the other working parts. A spotted banana peel lies limp on his lap.

Coming closer, I see the screen is pistachio-colored rather than the white I remember. What’s he
doing
? I squat beside the HeRP, tuck my left hand between my knees, and gesture until Cygnus notices me.

“Hi,” he says, sitting on his handscreen and continuing to work with one hand. “I’ve been trying to jailbreak this thing for a week. ’Cause the processor’s a lot faster than the one on our handscreens. That’s why the color’s all weird.”

“Hmm.”

“I’m going to remove the limits of the civilian operating system. We’ll be able to change the wallpaper to whatever we like, upload stuff, run searches, contact anyone. Maybe I can even find out what they
say
Mom wrote. Just in case it’ll help prove she didn’t write a thing, yeah? I jailbroke my handscreen a few years ago, remember?”

“Altering HeRPs is riskier,” I observe. The punishment for his trick must be hefty, and I hope he found a way to hide it.

“Not a problem.” With his index finger, Cygnus drags a red box labeled
ENCRYPTED
KEYSTROKES
to the top of the hemispherical screen. As he types, incomprehensible letters, numbers, and symbols roll across the box. “This is a Keyscrambler. After I started the jailbreak and removed the downloading restriction, I could finally get it. Generates gibberish so no one can see what I’m typing.”