Nova (9 page)

She turns back to her closet and starts pulling stuff out. Skirts, slacks, tops, sweaters; by the time Teal is done, I have a heap of clothes on my lap, all things Teal claims she no longer wants or wears. I gape at the pile in astonishment and shake my head, but Teal isn’t any better at taking “no” for an answer than Michael is, and by the time she’s through, I’ve got a bag with two more skirts, three tops, a pair of sweatpants, a sweater, and some tights. Once again I feel a twinge of guilt, like I’m accepting things under false pretenses, but only a twinge. Teal doesn’t seem to like me enough to give me anything she’s truly fond of. The guilt vanishes altogether the moment Michael walks into the room.

He looks me up and down, a slow smile spreading across his face, and whistles. “Wow! You should borrow Teal’s clothes more often, Lia. You look cosmic. Really cosmic.”

The look in his eyes echoes his words, and I can feel a blush spreading over my face. “Thanks.”

Teal glances between the two of us and rolls her eyes. “Should I leave you two alone now?”

If possible, I only blush harder. Michael just shrugs. “Be my guest! I never wanted a little sister, anyway.”

Teal makes a face at him as she leaves—just a typical little sister’s taunting, it appears at the outset—but there’s something in her eyes, something concerned, almost grave, that speaks of deeper sentiment than simply the typical brother and sister exchange. An answering gleam flickers in Michael’s eyes, and though I can’t quite read either expression, I can sense the strength of their affection.

A pang of envy hits me as I watch Teal go. “You guys really love each other.”

Michael glances at me sharply, surprise shining in his eyes along with something else, something I can’t quite define. At last he gives me an embarrassed shrug. “Gran, my friends, Mom and Dad—they’ve come and they’ve gone. Teal, on the other hand . . . Teal is the constant. Teal and I have always been together.”

And that pretty much seems to say it all.

It makes sense now, Teal’s ongoing animosity toward me. For years it’s been just her and Michael. To have his former best friend show up out of the blue, to practically resurrect from the dead and walk back into his life . . . .No wonder she doesn’t like me! She’s afraid I’ll come between her and Michael. I can’t blame her for that. Not at all.

From the minute I walked onto this station, I never wanted anyone. Not a family member, not even a friend. Until now. Now, I can’t help wishing with everything in me that I could have what they have.

We hang out for a couple more hours until Michael reluctantly admits he has homework to do. Michael accompanies me down to the station, though I’d insisted I could go alone. The whole way he keeps glancing at me, eyes dancing, a smile pushing at his lips though he tries to keep it in check. When I ask him what’s going on, he just shakes his head. “Oh, nothing.”

Stepping into the station, I am ready to bid Michael goodbye when he suddenly grabs my hand. “Come on!”

Instead of leading me to the platform though, he drags me past a young couple to a door panel set into the wall. It’s no wonder I didn’t notice it last time, for with the door painted to match the walls, only its seams give away its presence. Even the access panel has been painted to match the wall. Michael waves his chit in front of it. The door pops open, and with a tug on my hand, he pulls me through.

I look around as the door closes behind us. In front of us stretches a long, metal tunnel.

“Where are we?”

“After your reaction to the SlipStream last time, I thought you might want to walk this time.”

“
This
leads back to the hub?” I ask, amazement bubbling up as we begin walking down the corridor.

Michael is practically bouncing up and down beside me. “Yup. Gran knew about it. She mentioned it when you and Teal were doing the clothes thing. She said that when she was a kid, the SlipStreams were always breaking down. The station had only been operational for a year before her family moved here, you know. So whenever they broke down, everyone had to walk. I wasn’t sure if her old access code would even work, but I guess it’s not that the tunnel is off-limits, just that no one has a reason to use it anymore.”

“How long is it?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Pretty long, I guess. I figured you’d prefer it to the SlipStreams, but if it’s too long for you, especially now that you’ve gone all girly . . .” He motions at my skirt, a challenging gleam in his eyes.

“Girly? I can do anything
you
can do, Michael!” The words shoot from my mouth without conscious thought.

“Oh, yeah? Prove it!”

He suddenly takes off down the tunnel, and without thinking, I launch myself into a run after him. Michael sees me coming and pushes himself faster. I laugh and run harder. Michael may think he’s fast, but I’m faster.

Sure enough, as we fly down the path toward the hub, I start gaining on him. Five more meters, and I’ll have him.

I bear down on him, my legs pumping harder, my skirt flying out around my knees and a crazy grin spreading across my face. Michael may have been good at sports, but he never
was
much of a runner. No, that was always me.

Me?

I pull up short, legs pinwheeling as I try to maintain my balance after jerking myself out of a sprint. Up ahead, Michael slows when he realizes I stopped my pursuit. He leans again the tunnel wall laughing. “I thought for sure you had me! What’s wrong, Li-Li? Lost your touch?”

No. No, what’s wrong is that I am not Lia, and never was her, though I borrowed her mind for a short time. Yet for a minute, it was as though this dead girl took possession of my mind. Infused me with her thoughts and personality and made me act as she would act, speak as she would speak, move as she would move. I think back to other times I slipped up, caught myself thinking as though I was her. I know I’m not Lia. So why do I have to keep reminding myself of that?

“Lia? You okay?” Michael walks back down the tunnel toward me.

“Sudden cramp,” I lie, grabbing my calf to corroborate my story. “I’ll be fine. I just need to walk it off.”

“I’m sorry, it was a deficient id—”

“No, it’s fine, it was just me. I guess I’m not used to running.”

I start down the tunnel at a slower pace this time, Michael beside me. An awkward silence falls. Maybe I’m not really Lia, but I suddenly wish I were.
Lia
would know what to do right now.
Lia
would know what to say.

Beside me, I can feel Michael’s gaze on my cheek, as tangible as a touch. I summon up a smile for him, something to smooth over the strangeness. It slips from my face, though, as I catch sight of his expression, pensive and intent. “What?”

He stares at me awhile longer. “It’s just . . .” he begins, then shakes his head. “Nothing.”

I shouldn’t ask, but I do anyway. “What is it?”

“It’s just sometimes it’s almost like you’re two people. At times, you’re just Lia, the girl I knew back on Aurora, and then others it becomes clear you’re someone completely different.”

He knows.
My heart freezes at the realization. Somehow he figured it out. He knows I’m not Lia.

“All this time I’ve been trying to pretend you’re just my friend from Aurora,” Michael continues, “only you’re not her anymore. Or at least, not just her. You’re also the Lia who watched her parents die, the one who spent two years in an internment camp. This Lia I don’t know at all.”

So he didn’t figure it out after all. I mentally breathe a sigh of relief until he adds, “You know, you haven’t talked about it even once. What it was like living in the internment camp, losing your parents.”

My mouth goes dry. This is the part where I’m supposed to bare my soul to Michael. To tell him all my painful memories about the attack on my home and living as a prisoner and losing everyone I ever loved. Only I can’t tell him any of this because it’s not my past to reveal; it’s not my pain to share. You can’t tell what you don’t know. Even as I make a half-hearted reach for Lia’s memories, I already know what I will find.

My name is Lia Johansen, and I was a prisoner of war.

“I can’t tell you,” I finally say, because I have no other answer.

“Oh.” Michael nods and doesn’t say anything else, but I can sense his hurt at being so summarily shut out. I remember the way he talked about his parents before, the way he shared his fears about being drafted, and I feel a twinge of shame that I can’t return the confidence. That I can’t be to him what he is to me. Not that I’m even sure what that is.

We walk in silence for a while longer.

“A power relay blew at Tiersten yesterday,” I say suddenly, the words floating up from nowhere. “I saw it on the news. It wrecked the entire spaceport, turned it into a cinder from the inside out.”

Michael stops, stunned. “Oh my God, Lia! Was anyone hurt?”

“They said there were casualties, but they didn’t say how many.”

“Are you okay? You must have known people there.”

“No, no one that I—”
Remember
, I was about to say, and settle for, “I mean, not anymore. But if it had blown just weeks earlier, who knows? Maybe I would have been there. Maybe I would have been one of th—”

“Well, it didn’t,” Michael interrupts fiercely, “and you weren’t there.”

“Maybe not this time, but what if that’s my fate anyway? What if there’s nothing more to my life than to die in a fiery blast, no family, no friends, nothing to leave behind?”

I didn’t mean to say this. I didn’t even know I was thinking it! The words just crawled up on their own from some small, cold place inside of me, and I find I’m no longer speaking for Michael or even Lia. I’m speaking for myself.

His warm hand takes mine. “That’s not the way it’ll be,” Michael says, his words echoing through the passage, confident and secure. “It’s not your fate to die friendless and alone.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because you have me.”

That simple statement, so matter-of-fact and assured, touches something deep within me; and in the quiet world of this tunnel, a world devoid of everything but two people, a boy and a girl walking together, it occurs to me that for once it isn’t Lia’s hand Michael’s holding. It’s mine.

And that’s almost enough to make me believe him.

Almost.

13
TONIGHT I HAVE MY FIRST
dream since coming on the station. At least, the first one I remember afterward. It’s not a normal dream, the sort where you never even question that everything is real, only realizing when you wake that it was too nonsensical to be anything but a dream. No, it’s the sort of dream that walks the line between sleeping and wakefulness, where you believe you’re awake even though you know you’re dreaming. Almost a daydream. Except you must have been sleeping, you realize when you wake, because your conscious mind could never have come up with such strangeness.

My eyes open in the half light of the cargo bay, awake though my mind is still half-asleep. The dream wafts on the edge of my consciousness, its images already beginning to flit away as though it knows its time is over. I close my eyes and drift, that I might prolong the dream, trick it into staying another minute.

An exam room in a medical facility. A man is there, a doctor. I watch his hands, large-knuckled and firm, as he turns my arms over one at a time and runs his fingers lightly over the skin of my forearms. Seemingly satisfied, he releases them. I lift my eyes to his face. His lips make no expression, but the look in his eyes is ineffably sad. He opens his mouth and speaks.

I am in the cargo bay again. It is early morning, the lights already lit for the first risers but kept dim in deference to everyone else. Shadows fall against the cargo crate next to my cot, vague and indistinct and unmemorable, not unlike the images of the dream. Even closing my eyes, I cannot picture them anymore. The knowledge of what I dreamed is still there, though. The words the doctor spoke still linger in my mind.

You may be their only hope.

For a long time I lie there on my cot, knowing there was so much more to the dream yet unable to recall the rest. But the dream is gone, and there is no pulling it back this time. With a sigh, I sit up. It was just a dream; it means nothing. And yet there’s this lump of misery balled up so tightly in my chest I almost can’t breathe. Maybe the dream was false, but the pain is real.

I press my hand to my chest as though I could physically force it out, and after a few minutes it begins to subside on its own.

“Are you all right, dear?”

It’s the elderly woman whose cot sits near mine. Her husband is still asleep, but she’s half-sitting, watching me with concerned eyes.

I nod, unable to form words. She reaches under her headrest and extends a handkerchief. I stare at it dumbly until she motions toward her eyes with it. My lips part in surprise as my fingertips skim across my cheek and encounter wetness. I must have cried in my sleep.

With a nod of thanks, I take the cloth square and wipe my face with it. The woman turns onto her other side and lies back down, as if to give me privacy with my grief.

Grief? How can I grieve for something when I do not even know what that thing is? It is as though my heart knows something my head does not. Of course, my head knows so little I suppose there must be a lot of things my heart knows that still remain a mystery to me.

My mood brightens when I remember the new clothes I got from Teal. I wait in line to use a shower unit, even breaking open the special lilac soaps Taylor gave me. Afterward, I throw on one of Teal’s outfits—skirt, top, and tights—and head out into the hub. While the clothes make me stand out in the bay, they do the opposite on the rest of the station. No longer am I one of the poor refugees in the gray jumpsuit. Now I’m just another teenager living on the station.

I’m on the lift passing into Level Six when a commotion catches my attention. On the spur of the moment, I step off the platform to check it out. The fuss is coming from one of the docking rings. I cautiously creep forward, flattening myself against a bulkhead as a group of medical personnel rush by. The coast temporarily clear, I dare to slip in after them.

Inside the ring, it’s chaos. A ship is docked there, ugly gray smoke wafting from the opening. A dozen people in matching shipsuits and various states of disarray fill the ring. A man with a bloody leg is being supported between two women, who look little better off judging by the stains on their uniforms, and another man leans against a crate, barely able to stand. One woman’s hands are a bloody, burned pulp, and several people are coughing from the smoke. A medic leans over a stretcher on the floor, the man beneath him more burn than skin. As I watch, the medic looks up and shakes his head at a tall woman with a winged insignia on her shipsuit. A freighter’s guild badge; I recognize it from the time I spent exploring the hub.

The tall woman swears angrily, checks herself, then runs back into the ship. A minute later she reemerges, another shipmate draped over her shoulders. They are followed closely by a med team bearing a woman on a stretcher. The tall woman releases her shipmate into the care of another med team, and before long injured crewmen are being rushed out of the ring. Their exodus is soon followed by the arrival of a pair of military officers. They zero in on the tall woman where she sags against the wall.

“Lieutenant Derrick Ito,” the first one introduces himself.

“Marissa Kerr, captain of the freight hauler
Damascus
.”

“Is this everyone?” Ito asks, his voice pitched loud to be heard over the din.

I can’t quite make out the captain’s answer, but I see the nod of her head.

“What happened? Was it the Tellurians? Did they violate the ceasefire?”

“No, yes. I don’t know!” She shakes her head. “I don’t have time for this right now. The blasts damaged my refrigeration units. If I don’t get this cargo moved now, I’m going to have nothing left to show for my run.”

She brushes past the officers and barks an order at one of her men. He nods and immediately speaks to the other two crew members remaining in the ring. The three head into the ship. The captain sighs, glancing around the bay as though her dismay could conjure up more manpower. Her eyes land on me.

“You!” I take a step back, startled at being directly addressed. “Yeah, you! You want a job?”

“Captain,” the lieutenant begins.

“You want to do something useful?” Kerr barks at him. “Then, help!” She glances back at me. “Well? You in, girl?”

“W-what do I have to do?”

“Come with me.”

Without waiting to see if I’ll follow, she plunges back into the ship. After only a moment’s hesitation, I follow her. My curiosity is piqued too much to leave now. Besides, it’s not like I have anything else to do.

As I pass the officers, I hear the second one mutter about uppity freighter captains who don’t know their place. However, the force of the captain’s personality is enough to get them inside, and soon we’re all arrayed in the ship’s cargo bay. Kerr quickly arranges us into a makeshift assembly line, some unpacking the units while others transfer the goods to cargo sleds. My job is to truck the full sleds out to the docking ring where I’m met by a crewman who’ll bring it to the new storage unit on the station. Another member waits there to pack the cargo into the new unit.

Time passes in a blur as we work, our focus solely on rescuing as much cargo as we can. It soon becomes clear the captain gave me the easiest job. The sleds are self-propelled and only need someone to guide them. Plus, it takes less time for me to take a sled out to the ring and switch it with an empty one than it takes the crewmen to pack them, so I get a respite between each haul. Even so, the work is harder than anything I’ve done since arriving on the station, and I’m sweating by the time the pace begins to slack.

Wiping my forehead, I lean against a bulkhead for a moment to rest. Before long, another sled is full and I force myself to straighten.

“I got this one, kid,” someone says. “We’re almost cleared out here. Why don’t you take a break?”

It’s one of the soldiers the officers called in to help. They slipped in some time during the whole fiasco, interpolating themselves into the assembly line with ease. I look around for the captain, but not seeing her, turn back to the soldier.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, we only have about one or two loads left. Take a breather. You earned it.”

With a nod, I make my way out of the ship. There are no chairs anywhere in the ring, so I sit on the edge of the entrance ramp to rest, watching as the last couple sleds are exchanged. Not long after, the remaining workers begin filtering out, heading for hygiene units or water or both. A couple of them give me a pat on the shoulder as they pass. When the captain returns, I’m the only one visible.

She frowns. “Is that it? Already?”

I nod, and for the first time since seeing her, the stern look on her face relaxes. She starts to speak, only to be cut off as Ito returns.

“Captain Kerr. I trust your cargo has been properly stowed?” At her affirmative, he continues, “Then I’d appreciate hearing your report.”

Kerr nods, moving over to join him. “I suppose I owe you that.”

I creep quietly down the ramp to listen, ears pricked as the captain begins her story.

“We were doing a run down to Kiva—nothing contraband, mind you. As you know, the Tellurian borders were just opened a few weeks ago. We knew the run was a bit risky, with the ceasefire being so short-lived, but we figured it would be safe enough. No risk, no gain, right? Turns out we were wrong.”

“The Tellurians opened fire on you when you tried to cross into their space,” Ito guesses.

“No, that’s just it. We entered their space without a problem. They fired on us when we tried to leave.”

Ito frowns. “Did they refuse to give you departure clearance?”

“No, we
had
clearance. Our cargo had been certified by the docking inspector; everything was in order. We broke orbit without a problem. If anything, they seemed glad to have trade restored. It wasn’t until we neared the border into the Celestial Expanse that we were attacked. A Tellurian warship dropped in on us just as we approached the jump path. They told us to turn around and head back the way we came, or else.”

“Did they say why?” Ito asks.

Kerr shakes her head. “Nope. They didn’t make any charges, didn’t try to board us. They weren’t even interested in seeing our clearance documents or checking with the port on Kiva. It’s like the cargo was the least of their concerns. Just said if we tried to leave Tellurian space they would fire on us.” She shrugs. “Well, since we were close to the jump path, we decided to make a run for it. As you can see, we
mostly
made it.”

“And this was a warship? A
Tellurian
warship?”

“Yeah, but . . .” The captain hesitates. “There was something off about it. About them.”

“Off? In what way?”

“Well, for one thing they didn’t demand to board, though that’s usually standard military procedure in cases of suspected smuggling. In fact, when I offered to let them check our cargo for themselves, the captain practically bit my head off.”

“Strange. So you think they weren’t military at all, but pirates or some such who managed to grab a Tellurian vessel?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve met a few pirates in my day, and they didn’t have nearly the discipline these people had. No, I’d lay odds they were military.” Kerr frowns. “Even now I’m not sure what they really wanted. Not our cargo, not even us. It was as though they were after something or someone else entirely, and we just happened to be in the way. Maybe I was imagining things, but they didn’t strike me as a crew in the middle of a ceasefire, alert but at ease.”

“No?”

“No, they struck me as a desperate people continuing to fight a war they already knew was lost.”

“Maybe the Tellurians took worse losses than we thought. That would explain their offer to open negotiations over New Earth.”

The captain’s first mate returns to the ring then and the discussion halts. After making arrangements to speak more later, the officer departs, leaving Kerr to take care of her ship and crew. I sit quietly and try to digest the conversation I just heard. Does the Tellurians’ behavior have anything to do with my mission here? If it does, I don’t see the connection. Not that it matters. My mission failed and nothing their war vessels might do can change that.

“Learn anything useful?”

I glance up. The freighter captain is walking toward me. “I didn’t mean to spy—”

Kerr laughs. “Of course you did. As one of my foster brothers used to say, how will you learn anything important if you don’t listen in when you have the chance?” She drops onto the ramp beside me. “So what’s a nice station girl like you doing down in the freighter bays? Just curious, or are you interested in the business?”

I bite my lip and reluctantly admit, “I live here. In one of the other cargo bays, I mean. I’m one of the Tiersten prisoners.”

I’ve surprised her; it’s evident in her tone. “One of the refugees, huh? Where you from originally?”

“Aurora Colony.”

Kerr lets out a low whistle. “Tough break, kid. You doing okay?”

Am I doing okay? I’ve been asked that a few times since I came onboard the station, but this is the first time I don’t immediately know the answer. Between my failed attempt at going Nova and my butchered memory, the obvious answer is no. Until I think about Michael, about Taylor’s kindness and Teal’s generosity, that is. Somehow when the words, “I’m doing okay,” come out, I realize I actually mean them.

Kerr nods and activates her chit. She keys in a few things and, grabbing my hand, uplinks to my chit.

Startled, I tug my hand away as soon as she lets go. “What’s this?” I ask, checking my chit to see what she’s done.

“I hired you for a job, and you did a great one. Never let it be said that Captain Kerr stiffs her people.”

She transferred funds to my chit—two hundred milicreds to be exact. I stare at the balance in surprise. Refugees don’t have money. But now I do.

“Don’t transfer it all in one place,” Kerr says with a wink. Getting up, she heads up the ramp into the ship. She pauses as she reaches the entrance. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to all of you, but if you ever find yourself in need of a job, look me up. I might be able to help.”