The Color of Rain (33 page)

My heart snaps back and forth in its rhythm. What will he do to those girls?

What won't he do?

Stride
's common room is lined by shadowy figures. The crew member who met us at the airlock isn't the only zombie-like presence on the ship; there are dozens of them. All wearing a distant, weary look.

A large fire sits in a metal pit at the center of the room, casting orange light at the faces huddled around it. The two green girls hold each other, and Leland examines them from the other side of the flames where he lounges across an oversized chair. He seems disappointed.

He seems to have me on his mind.

I ignore the constant needling of his gaze, lying against Johnny's knees while he drinks a black, sugary-smelling liquor with his brother.

“You tell our father I won't do another run for less than sixty a head.” Johnny's voice is getting wilder with each drink. “Tell him I'll find another buyer. I'll go to the Gate myself.”

“You wouldn't dare,” Leland responds. “You still think of
Imreas
as your passenger ship, but if you take her out of Void space to the deep outposts, you'll lose all your valued respectability. Don't pretend to be rash, John. You're too vain for that.”

Gate. Deep outposts
. I make a mental list to run by Ben, but then I realize that I won't be able to. I'll never have the chance if he jumps ship and hides on
Stride
before we leave the Pass.

I may never see him again.

I glance at the glass in Johnny's hand. At his wide thumb and
its unique print. Ben only needs something that Johnny touched, but how would I get it to him before Ben needs to act?

“You're just like father.” Johnny's voice has begun to slur. I try to take his drink from him, and he hits my hand.

Leland laughs and the sound streaks around the room like a rabid animal. “You're running your mouth because you're drinking. You need food.” He snaps his fingers, and one of the shadowy forms step forward with a tray of yellow bread. He yanks on the crew member's uniform, bringing him down to eye level. “You will serve each person here from this tray,” he says. “Don't step through the fire.”

How ridiculously specific.

The crew member walks around the pit, approaching the girls first. The smaller one shrieks. He comes to me next, and I wait for him to lean all the way down to where I sit. What could be so scary about him?

My fingers stop over the tray while my gaze locks onto unfocused eyes. The crew member's jaw is slack and his hands shake.

“He's Touched!”

Johnny and Leland laugh together. “Don't look so shocked, Rain,” Johnny says. “What would they be worth if we couldn't work them?”

“But how is he following directions? The Touched on Earth City can't manage the smallest of tasks.”

Leland's eyes glint. He snaps his fingers twice this time, and another zombie-like crew member steps forward. This one is a woman—or really just a girl a few years older than me. Her hair has been shorn unevenly, and her eyes are empty, but this doesn't
hide the fact that she was once rather pretty.

Leland tugs her arm until she's across his lap. “They're easily manipulated. You just have to adjust their brains a tad.” He takes her chin in his hand and rotates her face in the light, revealing three fingernail-sized puncture scars across her forehead.

“Adjust?”

“With this.” He pulls a small pick hammer from his belt and tosses it over the flames. I fumble to catch it, and the tip pricks my palm. A bead of red swells instantly.

I seal my hand into a fist and look over the tool. Its wooden handle is stained with old blood. “You mean, you use this to . . .”

“Lobotomize them. Ingenious, isn't it? It's my own design.” Leland's voice is tickled with pleasure, and Johnny laughs as he downs more of his black drink.

A sickening taste fills my mouth. I can't stand to touch the tool a second longer, and I throw the pick hammer back.

Leland catches it out of the air effortlessly. He tucks it back into his belt and then slips his hand between the missing buttons of the girl's flight suit. He caresses her chest while staring me down. “Do you want to watch me do one?” he says in a tone so low that the words feel like they only find my ears.

Do one?
Does he mean lobotomize one of them or . . .

“Don't let my brother fool you, Rain. They're still worthless.” Johnny is officially drunk. “You have to be so damn specific with your orders, and they work themselves to death sooo easily.” He laughs like this is the crowning joke to a wonderful evening.

This is far worse than I ever imagined. Does Ben know about
this
? Does anyone know that these people are not just abducted and enslaved, but tortured and warped into vacant robotic shells? How could the people who sell the Touched be okay with something this inhumane? How could anyone?

“I don't understand,” I say. “How is this possible? How come no one stops you?”

Leland is pleased by my honesty. “John, have you never explained the business of this universe?”

Johnny groans. “I don't care.”

“The people who own Earth City—”

“Own?”

“Don't be so naïve. The planet is owned by a corporate industry on the Gate. They take care in making things run smoothly, and there's nothing less smooth than people cutting out of work to care for ailing family members. Think of the chaos!”

I stare into the red-orange embers of the fire pit. “They're shipped away so that Earth City keeps producing.” That's why they took my mom. And Jeremy. He wasn't even Touched, but he was in the way, and they took him just the same. I feel Lo's picture between my breasts. This is so much more than losing your existence. This is having it stolen.

And raped.

“Everything has a purpose in this universe, little whore,” Leland adds into my silence. “Weren't you relieved to find yours between your legs?”

I clap eyes on Leland, feeling the stirring of my long numbed rage. “I'm more than Johnny's girl,” I whisper. I don't know if he hears me, but Johnny's sudden snores snap the intensity of the
room like a taut wire.

Leland's ravenous gaze clicks onto my body until I have to tuck myself beneath Johnny's arm. The protection works, but the dead weight of Johnny doesn't block out the looming figures of
Stride
's lobotomized crew, nor the sound of Leland playing with his two new girls.
Ripping
sounds. Snivels and crying.

And the intermittent punctuation of his
shhh
that sends ice down my spine.

He leaves much later, taking the girls with him. I want to be relieved by his absence, but I feel nothing close to it. He'll torture them. Kill them. And not via a frozen death out the airlock . . . something much more horrid.

I picture Walker's small face, and I can't help but imagine puncture scars on his temples and a tray in his hand . . . and I begin to throw up. I stumble from beneath Johnny and heave my guts in the corner, choking on my breath until almost everything inside of me spills out. When I finish, I find the Touched girl who Leland fondled standing near me. Her eyes are dead and flat in the light from the fading fire, but she still looks like a person. A very, very lost person.

“Can you talk?” I whisper.

She doesn't move.

“Can you only follow commands?”

Still nothing. “Scratch your nose,” I try, and she obeys. “Can you take me down to the airlocks?”

Nothing.

“Take me down to the airlocks,” I command. She turns and leaves the room, and I snatch the first thing out of Johnny's
pocket that I can find, Ben's dose rod, hoping that it has a good fingerprint.

I hurry to follow the girl. I have to hurry because the lives of Johnny's cargo depend on it . . . the souls of 913 Touched.

And one Mec.

I
leave the Touched girl in
Stride
's rusted-out airlock.

“Wait here. Don't move. And don't tell anyone that you helped me,” I command as I cross into
Imreas
. I don't like ordering her around, but there's no time for anything else. At least, for once, I don't have to worry about security alarms or cameras. All the technology on
Imreas
is as dead as the engines.

The ships and everyone onboard are like ghosts through the static fog, and I feel like a ghoul myself as I move around them. The catwalk jangles beneath me, and I steal a candle from one of the handrails, trying not to look below into the eerie shadows of the ship's unknown depths.

I find
Melee
, holding up my candle so that I can make out the door. I bang once. Twice. “Come on, Ben. You have to be in there!”

After the third knock, Ben struggles to shoulder the door open, making it click against its rails. For all the Mec's genius,
Melee
was clearly not meant to function in the Pass.

“Who's there?” he calls even though he's looking straight at me.

I hold the candle up to my face. “It's me, you idiot. Get out of the doorway.”

He takes a few steps back, but his brow folds. “What are you doing here? What's going on?” He almost falls on the armrest when he backs up to sit on the captain's chair. I set my candle down on the command panel. It's the only light in the room.

I force the door closed. “I don't have a lot of time. I just snuck out of
Stride
. Damn, Ben. It's so much worse than I imagined. . . . It's a living hell. The
living
being the worst part.”

He looks past me.

“Quit making that face. Are you even listening?”

“Of course I'm listening, Rain. I just can't see a damn thing!” he yells. He looks in my general direction, without really focusing on me.

“But you can see in the dark. You've got the hardware in your eyes. Why . . .” It dawns on me far too slowly. “It doesn't work in the Pass.”

“Didn't you wonder why the K-Force didn't come soaring into the fog to solve this slaving crisis? That's
why
they do their business here. Mecs are as useless as paraplegics without our technology. Without our vision. I'm useless.”

“Well, don't go feeling sorry for yourself. It's ugly,” I say, stealing one of Lo's favorite phrases.

Something like a smile creeps up his face, but he fights it down. “What are you doing here?”

“I've come to help. You need a fingerprint. I've got something with loads of them on it.”

Ben gets up and crosses the room so fast that he bumps right into me. “What do you have?” He puts his hands out, palms up. I place the dose rod in his hand and he carefully sets it on the bunk.

“It'll have to be a clear print.” He fumbles to find a roll of clear tape and a small square of glass. He wraps a piece of tape around the rod and pulls it free, holding it up. “Did it work?”

Through the candlelight, I see many smudge marks. Too many. “It's a mess,” I say. “There's no clear print.”

He crumples it up. “Fuck! Well, there goes that long shot.”

“Wait. You could take it from skin, right? I haven't washed.” I mumble the last few words, ashamed.

Ben sits down and almost misses the edge of the bunk. “Hell, Rain. You'd need a spot that you knew for sure he'd pressed down on. Hard.”

“Hard enough to leave a bruise?” I yank my shirt up, looking at the purple mark on my hip where he gripped me the night before . . . gripped me so hard that I haven't been able to bring my pants within three inches of it all day.

He pauses. “He bruises you with his
fingers
?”

“Don't fake surprise.” I'm glad that he can't see what I'm showing him. “Will it work or won't it?”

“We can try.” Ben fumbles with the tape while I step closer, tucking my shirt around my stomach. “You're going to have to help me.”

I guide his hands over the spot, his fingers brushing my skin and making strange places on my body tickle in response. Below my ears, for one. The backs of my knees, for another.