Fighting Gravity (26 page)

“Solitary? That’s the punishment for fighting?”

“For everything.”

“You manage it,” I said with a shrug, but I couldn’t suppress a shiver.

He shook his head. “Solitary work detail. One day is bad enough. Fightin’ gets you two, and it compounds with each incident.”

“What’s so bad about it?”

“You haven’t been out there yet, have you? At the end of the work detail today, come back and see if you don’t already know the answer to that.”

A loud alert signaled the end of breakfast and I walked with Enten, joining the crowd to leave the residence facility. The couple-hundred or so inmates divided off into groups filing into smaller rooms where suits and equipment were stored. Enten took my elbow and stopped at a display panel.

“Right. I thought you might be assigned to us,” he said, indicating my designation in a column with his. “Our team’s been short a man since Fen was spaced.”

I didn’t ask why Fen was “spaced,” or even what “spaced” meant. I figured I had a good idea.

Enten guided me through suiting up, along with the other ten members of his less-than-talkative team. “Here’s your air and your backup tank. Here’s the emergency sealer, for suit penetrations, though you’re probably only going to use it on someone else. If it happens to you, not likely you’ll be in a condition to do much about it. You’ve got isolators here and here, though what good this one would do you I don’t know. Hardly seems worth messin’ about with survivin’ if your balls get frozen off.”

He grinned. “Your boots keep you on the surface, but this here will throw out a line that will connect you to the nearest person in a suit. Don’t panic and throw one ‘cause you think you’re flyin’ away as soon as you walk out of here. Lots of people do that, mind you, but we’ll laugh at you at dinner tonight if you do. Best if you don’t.”

He pulled my wrist around to show it to me. “Here’s your com controls. You’re online with your team automatically. It’s weird out there, so we keep up a conversation. Don’t chatter and drive us all crazy, but if you got something to say, say it. You can talk to someone else by pressin’ here and sayin’ their designation. Everyone’s got it on their helmet. See?”

He held mine up so I could see the “J23” already painted on the side.

“Now, that’ll cut off your line to your team, so just use it when you need it. No long lovers’ chats.”

“Lovers’ chats?” A cold sweat washed over me.

“You ain’t been here long enough, but you might think of it before you get shipped off again. The rest of us have to make do. It’s not a bad selection, all things considerin’. And after a while, even the ugly ones start lookin’ nice when you just want someone to scratch the itch.”

He chuckled and went back to donning his suit. I stood motionless for long enough that he turned back to me.

“It’s not that hard, mate. There’s pictures there on the wall.” I didn’t tell him I hadn’t even thought of the suit in my hand, or noticed the diagrams. I was looking around for Kafe and her men.

He resumed suiting up, and I started putting my gear on, as well.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” he said. “In all the time I’ve been here, only four have died out there. And one of them could have gotten himself killed inside a padded box.”

We waited, a suited-and-sealed group, as they cycled us through the airlock and onto the surface. I saw what Enten meant about solitary. It was overwhelming, the feeling of being out there with only millimeters of poly between me and the vacuum. I wanted to grab something, hold on to something. There was a definite appeal in the idea of throwing out a line and being connected to
someone
.

We entered a sloping tunnel leading down into the asteroid’s crust, where we worked at glorified rock-moving without a break until the end of the workday was called. Then we shuffled as a tired group back into the facility.

“There are more efficient ways to do that stuff,” I said to Enten as we unsuited.

“Of course there are. You think we’re out here because they need anythin’ off this rock? The work’s to keep us busy,” he said. “Something to do till we die.” He shrugged. “There are worse things.”

As I watched him put his gear away, I realized that I agreed.

-

A week passed in which Kafe did no more than watch me. But after what she’d done to me the first night, and the way one of her lumps of muscle seemed to always be at my elbow, her silence was little comfort.

One evening, as I was walking through the common room, she stepped into my path.

“Have you figured it out yet?” she asked.

I swallowed on nausea and the twist of anger in my gut. “What’s that?”

“What you are?”

“What I am? I’m a physicist, or hadn’t you heard?”

She leaned close, her breath hot against my cheek. “Not anymore.”

I was holding my breath, my fingernails digging into my palms.

“Do you really not remember? You used to know what you were. Before that fancy man came and convinced you they’d let you be one of them. Have you whored yourself out for their approval so long you don’t even remember?”

I sucked in a breath. “Fancy man? What do you…what do you mean? What do you know about that?”

She made a sound of disgust and walked away.

“What are you talking about!” I yelled after her.

She stopped, and turned slowly. “Tell me,” she said, “did you even bother to find out where Carrie was buried?”

I launched forward and grabbed her shirt, shoving her back against the wall.

“How do you know about Carrie?”

One of her well-muscled shadows grabbed my collar from behind and dragged me off her. I threw an elbow back into his gut and he
umphed
but didn’t let go. One of the guards, who never seemed to be nearby otherwise, shoved between us, and the next thing I knew, the goon was gone and my arm was twisted up my back.

“Shoulda known you’d be trouble,” the guard said before he hauled me back to my cell and threw me inside, locking the door behind me.

-

I spent two days on solitary work detail.

I used to dream about the stars, when they were the closest things I could imagine to the angels and gods of myth and religion. Then I traveled among them, and the experience was as amazing as I’d dreamed it would be. But when I was alone with them—only me, the stars, and an unforgiving amalgam of minerals and ice—they became not just a thing to respect, but a thing to fear. The silence screamed in my ears to the pulse of my heart beating behind my eyes. There was no one. No one to see or hear. I realized what it meant to be completely, utterly alone.

-

Four days later, a man shoved me to the floor in the food line and he and several others swore it was in self-defense. I spent four days alone on the surface. I tried to hide how I trembled suiting up each morning, but by the fourth day I was shaking so hard I had trouble getting my things on. Enten helped with a silent, grim pity.

Three days later, when I turned in the hall just in time to see and duck a punch, again witnesses swore that I’d been the instigator.

That time, I begged. I could have saved myself the indignity. I served six days of solitary work detail. I cried through the entirety of the fifth day. I tried to distract myself with calculations, but my mind kept going back to calculating the (pitiful) amount of gravity, both natural and artificial, holding me to the asteroid, how far I was likely to drift before I died if I lost contact with the surface (not far, relatively), and the odds of them sending a ship to rescue me (low). The sixth day I kept having hollow, heavy impulses to release the boots and just let it all end, forever.

For the next two days I didn’t leave my cell except for work. Enten agreed to bring me my meals. I would lie on the bed, trying not to breathe too loudly so I could hear the echoes of voices from the common room, an indistinct assurance that I wasn’t alone.

The next day after work detail, I was summoned to Captain Saubers’ office. I didn’t allow myself to speculate on what awaited me there. It would be either less or more horrible than what I could imagine. For a strange, confused moment, I wasn’t sure which I preferred.

He was sitting behind his desk and he nodded to the guard escorting me to leave his office.

“Not going so well, is it?” he asked.

“No sir.” I kept my voice as respectful and neutral as possible.

“Dead End isn’t supposed to be pleasant, but you’re getting the worst of it. And I’m not stupid enough to believe you’re the one doing it.”

A warm rush of relief made me weak. I met his eyes, wanting to drink in the sight of human compassion, or at least understanding.

“There’s not much I can do, though, if the other prisoners keep swearing you’re the one breaking the rules. So I’m going to put surveillance on you, and announce that to the general population. I’ll review the data before issuing any punishments and anyone found trying to set you up will get a double sentence. Hopefully that will put an end to it.”

“Thank you, sir,” I breathed.

“Don’t be so quick with that,” he said. “It’s not a perfect solution and I can’t promise it will stop things. There’s more going on here than a few disgruntled inmates.”

I shivered. “I figured.”

He nodded. “Stay out of trouble,” he said.

I didn’t have an answer sufficient to express how much I wanted to do just that.

-

The next evening, I sat alone in the middle of the crowded common room. I was too afraid to talk to anyone, but equally unwilling to be alone. Kafe sauntered up and slid into a seat across from me.

“Enjoying yourself yet?” she asked. My whole body tensed.

I didn’t answer her. I was too busy trying to stop the trembling in my hands.

She grinned and examined me like a shark planning the first bite.

I just held her eye and said nothing.

“Ask me, then,” she said. “And I might answer.”

“I don’t want to know anything. At first I thought you must know something, since you brought up Carrie. But then I realized it’s there in the vid-data for anyone to find. So now I figure you’re just a bully, and I really don’t care.”

She sat back, tucking her legs up under her, and watched me.

“It’s not there, actually, information about your sister. Your public file starts with your Selection.”

I felt my eyebrows rise, but I didn’t want to ask. I wanted her to go away.

“It’s just you. The other kids in your year have parents and siblings listed, towns and cities, awards won. But you? They pretend that you didn’t exist until they could paint you up to make you look like one of them, and then pretend you’d been there all along.”

“So you really knew her?” I couldn’t stop myself.

“I knew her. We weren’t friends, but I knew her.”

I felt a powerful surge of longing, but I didn’t want to believe her. “Isn’t it a bit of a coincidence, someone who came from my neighborhood at the exact camp I was sent to?”

“Oh yes,” she rolled her eyes, “what are the odds of two kids from Abenez ending up on Dead End.” She made a noise of disgust. “I knew who you were back then, you know. Before you left. You probably wouldn’t remember me. You always thought you were better than us. I saw you that day, when they took you with them. I felt sorry for you. What could they possibly want with one of us? I knew they were just taking you away to do something awful to you. To use you for whatever they wanted. They did, too. You still haven’t figured that out, have you? You got to be too much trouble, so they threw you away. See?” She gestured around the room.

“It’s not like that,” I said, with a sick sense of déjà vu and the sound of my own voice yelling at Pete ringing in my head.

“It’s exactly like that. You’re just an idiot. Did you really think they cared about you? That you’d ever get whatever it was, fame or fortune or a class-up? Did you really think they’d give one of us anything at all?”

“You don’t know anything,” I said, my pulse pounding in my ears.

“Do you even remember Abenez? Or were you always so busy trying to get out that you never noticed what you really were?”

“I remember Abenez,” I snarled. “I remember being cold, and hungry, and frightened all the time. I wasn’t trying to get out. I didn’t even know it was possible. But I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t happy to go. Whatever you think, I wasn’t trying to get out so I could have better things. It’s not…you wouldn’t understand.”

“’Cause I’m not as smart as you?”

My palms were sweating. She smirked. A rush of anger made me sit up straight, suddenly steady and strong. I glared at her.

“You know what I’m afraid of? I’m afraid that when they Settle me somewhere after this, they’ll somehow cut me off from science. That I won’t even be able to pursue it as a hobby. That I won’t have access to research materials, or contact with other scientists. That’s what I’m afraid of. Not you. If you hate me because I knew I didn’t belong in Abenez, and they gave me the chance to do what I was supposed to be doing and I was glad, then hate me. Even if I could go back and change things, I wouldn’t. No matter where I’ve ended up.”

“You’d give up Carrie again, then?”

I sighed, deflating in a rush. “They didn’t exactly give me a choice. But, yes, I suppose. She couldn’t have come with me, and it wouldn’t have done either of us any good for me to have stayed.”

“She might have survived. She might not have suffered what she did. You certainly wouldn’t have been in a position to give her to that man.”

“What?” My breaths were coming in short, panicked gasps. “How do you know about that?”

“Oh I know everything about you, Jacob Dawes. I know things even you don’t know.”

I shook my head feebly.

She laughed and stood. As she brushed past my chair she leaned down and whispered, her breath hot against my ear.

“And don’t you forget it.”