Wormhole Pirates on Orbis (18 page)

Theodore never did things on his own, and whenever
we
wanted him to do something, something that he considered risky, we usually had to drag him by his feet. But here he was traipsing off to see whomever to do whatever. It made me feel off-balance in a weird way. This wasn’t the way my world usually worked.

I waited behind Max and Ketheria to get my tap.

“Hey, Softwire,” someone hissed. “Come here.”

I looked around and spotted the burly little alien, the one so intent on meeting a Space Jumper the cycle before, waving at me from under a stairwell. “What do you want?” I said.

“It’s me, Nak. Come here!”

I grabbed my tap and walked over to the guy. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Max toss her tap and turn to leave, but Ketheria grabbed her by the elbow and dragged her toward me. I felt my stomach hollow out. I wished I hadn’t seen that. The alien was waiting with a group of three friends.

“Tell them. Tell them what you told me,” Nak demanded excitedly.

“Tell them what?” I protested.

“Tell ’em about the Space Jumper. You’re a Space Jumper, aren’t you?”

“He’s not a Space Jumper,” Max corrected them.

“No, no, it’s all right,” he whispered. “It’s burnin’. Don’t worry. Show ’em, Dass.”

Nak elbowed his tall friend to the right. Dass’s skin was smooth and thin, like that of an onion. He proceeded to pull his leather collar down and expose a tattoo of the symbol of the wormhole pirates. The marking glowed with different colors, changing from blue to purple to green.

“You’re a wormhole pirate?” I gasped.

“No, no, no, no, no, no. But it’s burnin’, isn’t it?” Nak replied.

“Why would you do that? What if you get caught?”

“My brood would skin me alive, but that’s half the fun, isn’t it?” Dass grinned, exposing an extra row of teeth.

“Tell us about the Space Jumper!” Nak pleaded.

“Space Jumpers are disgusting,” Max spat. “They’re just as bad as wormhole pirates and just as violent as Neewalkers.”

Max grabbed Ketheria and marched off, mumbling something I couldn’t hear. I turned to follow her, but Nak grabbed my arm again.

“What?” I said, trying to shake him off.

“Neewalkers are burnin’, too!”

“Let go!” I wrenched my arm free and ran after Max.

“When are you gonna play again?” I heard Dass call out.

I was late for study spoke, and so I had to sit in my pod alone. Part of me wondered if Theodore was even there, or off using the tetrascope again. It was impossible to concentrate on the screen in front of me, thinking about Theodore and Max. I was going to have to do something. I knew I
had
to talk to Max about what had happened. She might be able to pretend it was nothing, but I couldn’t. I felt like something had changed between us, and I didn’t like it. When the spoke ended, I found Ketheria at the locker.

“You ready to go home?” I asked her.

“I’m going to play Quest-Nest with Max,” she replied.

“But I thought Charlie said we were supposed to go straight home.”

“Max is in charge right now.” Ketheria turned to me. “Just talk to her.”

“I have been!”

“You’ve been talking, but you haven’t said a word to her about how you feel.”

“I don’t know what that is!”

Ketheria shook her head and swiped at the numbers of her locker. “Give it time; you will.”

Ketheria was now Max’s new partner in Quest-Nest. Just like that, too. No comment. No
We’ll play later.
Nothing. It made my brain boil. A few cycles after Charlie got back home, we all went to the Labyrinth to watch Max and Ketheria play.

It didn’t help that Max and Ketheria were simply awesome, easily beating their opponents. In fact, they never lost as a team. It was really amazing. Usually only students came to watch the school league matches, but more and more Citizens began coming to watch their matches.

“Your girlfriend’s good,” Ceesar said one cycle, standing behind me at our usual table.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I argued. Ceesar made me feel uneasy. I looked and saw Athooyi. He was watching me, too.

“Why aren’t
you
playing?” Ceesar whispered.

“I need a different kind of helmet. Mine’s busted.”

“Go see Tinker. He’s the best. He’ll take care of you. Tell him I said I’ll pay for it.”

“I can pay for it myself.”

“No, you can’t. Get a helmet,” he ordered, and slipped back with Athooyi as Charlie returned.

“Who’s that?” Charlie asked. “He looks like the guy from your match.”

“He isn’t,” I lied. “I need to get a helmet if I’m ever gonna play again.”

“I thought they had them at school.”

“Not for softwires,” I informed him.

“But you’re only going to play in the school league, right?”

“Yes, Charlie.”

Ketheria went with me to Tinker’s. Theodore was nowhere to be found, and Max said she was busy. I knew it was an excuse, but I was beyond making an issue of it now. Charlie made the chits available for my new helmet and programmed my skin to allow us to go. We headed to Tinker’s place at the Labyrinth right after our study spoke.

“You and Max play really well together,” I told her outside the arena.

Ketheria grabbed one of the glass pods and said, “Not as good as you two.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Are you going to ever shake this mood?”

“What mood?”

“You’ve been negative about everything since the kiss at the Labyrinth. I’m sure you’re beginning to annoy people.”

I spun around in the pod. I felt my face grow hot. “You know?”

Ketheria closed her eyes and shook her head. Of course she knew. If she didn’t pick it up from one of us, I was sure Max had said something. And worse still, she was right. The fact was I had started to annoy
myself.
I tried to shake it off, put the incident behind me, but my thoughts wouldn’t let me. I kept playing every possible scenario over and over in my head, everything I could have said, and everything I could have done — until my brain was mush.

“Maybe Quest-Nest will help,” Ketheria offered.

“I’ll try anything right now,” I confessed.

We stood in front of the oval counter where Tinker worked, but no one was there. A different alien, humanoid and female, finally came out to help us.

“We’re here to see Tinker about a helmet,” I informed her.

“Tinker doesn’t make helmets anymore,” she said, her voice very soft and frail. Her head was covered in soft silks of white and cream that draped over her shoulders.

Ketheria looked at me, waiting for me to say something. “Don’t look at me like that. It was Ceesar’s reference,” I protested.

Ketheria turned to the girl and asked, “Do you know where we can get one? A helmet for a softwire?”

The girl cocked her head to the side and said, “A softwire?”

“Yes. Ceesar said Tinker would help us.”

“Please remain here for just a moment,” she said, and slipped through a door at the back of the oval.

“I don’t like that guy,” Ketheria said with a scowl.

“Who, Tinker?”

“No. Ceesar. He’s not a good person. He’s hiding something.”

“That lumps him in with just about every other Citizen on this ring, Ketheria. You must feel that way about a lot of people you meet.”

“Mostly just him,” she replied as the young girl returned.

“Tinker will meet with you. Please come this way.”

The girl tapped a small device on the counter, and part of it disappeared just like most doors did on Orbis.
Are all the doors on Orbis simply holographs?
I wondered.

My first thought on entering Tinker’s workshop was that Max would have
loved
this place. It was a high-tech electronics lab stuffed with computer parts and alien gadgets. Light spilled into the room through four arched windows behind his workbench. At the far end of the room, Tinker stood over the bench with his back to us. I couldn’t tell if the tools fastened to his hands were his actual fingers or not. There was no skin visible on Tinker except for his shiny head. I wondered if that was why he was bald. With those hands, combing his hair seemed like an impossible task.

“I’ll be just a moment,” he said, his voice deep and creamy.

Shallow lines marked the walls like rolling waves. They were the same designs carved into the walls at our home.
Cosmic streams of energy,
Max called them.
Tinker must also be a believer,
I thought.

“There, that should do it,” he announced before turning to us.

Tinker’s long blue apron dragged on the littered floor as he moved toward us. His skin was bone white and his crimson mouth cut deeply along his cheeks as he spoke.

“Thank you for your patience. I so hate leaving the flow. It’s quite difficult for me to return to it.”

I simply stared at him. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

“Um . . . I need a helmet,” I informed him.

“And I’ve been told Ceesar’s going to pay for it?”

“I’ll pay for it myself,” I told him coldly. “I have enough chits.”

I didn’t like the idea that Ceesar had been talking to Tinker behind my back. It immediately made me suspicious. Tinker produced a device to read the chip inside the skin I was wearing and waved it over the vest.

“Yes, you do,” he remarked. “But a helmet for a softwire costs much more than that.”

Suddenly I wanted to leave. Charlie would have known the price. Why did this guy want more all of a sudden? I took Ketheria’s hand and turned for the door. “Sorry to have bothered you,” I replied.

The wheels and wires in Tinkers chest whirled and rattled in sync with his laugh.

“Please stop,” he called to us when we were at the door. “Not everything has to involve
money.
” The word rolled off his tongue like an insult.

“I just want to buy a helmet,” I said.

Tinker turned his attention to Ketheria. “Come here, child,” he whispered, sitting on a stool so he was a little more at her height. It was a very short stool, so Tinker’s knees almost reached Ketheria’s shoulders. He reached out for the metal headpiece wrapped around her head.

“What are you doing?” I objected.

There was a
click,
then a suction sound, and the front of the device, the part with the crystal, fell into Tinker’s big metal hands.

“Don’t do that,” I protested. “You can’t have that.”

Ketheria closed her eyes and took a deep breath. It looked like her head was filling up with air more than her chest.

“Take it all in,” he whispered to her. He smiled and then turned to me. “This, for example.” He cradled the stone in his metal fingers and let it catch the light. A rainbow of colors exploded on the walls. “What do you think the cost of this was?”

“I don’t know. The Keepers put it on her.”

“To please the Citizens.” His voice was icy.

I looked at Tinker closely. There was no Citizen insignia anywhere to be found. “Are you a knudnik?” I asked him.

He closed his eyes at the mention of the word. “I was.”

“Then you must be a Citizen now. I thought after your work rule you became a Citizen.”

“I chose not to,” he replied.

Why would someone stay here if he didn’t want to be a Citizen?

“Don’t try to figure everything out, Johnny. Just accept it. There is a reason for everything,” Ketheria said. She could read my mind again, although I was pretty convinced she had been doing fine even with that thing on.

“You made that, didn’t you?” Ketheria asked Tinker.

He moved the metal and crystal device through his fingers with expert ease. “I did,” he replied softly. “This is special to me. Everything I make is special to me. But this . . .” He held it up again. “This is very special. This is truly my best work.”

In the light I could see an OIO symbol carved into the metal behind the crystal. Tinker touched the symbol with a razor-sharp finger and then touched it to his cheek. This guy really did like his work.

“How much did they pay you for it?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he murmured. “Yet it is priceless.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It never does.” Tinker attached the piece to Ketheria’s head again.

“How much more will my helmet cost?”

“It’s not always about money.”

Tinker was talking in circles, and I didn’t like it. Was I supposed to bargain with him? It was obvious he liked his work, but I just wanted a helmet to play the game.

“Come here,” he said.

I followed Tinker to his workbench, and he pulled several helmets off the wall. They, too, possessed the same bulky piece around the collar as the one Dop had given me, and I knew they were for softwires.

“How many softwires have you made helmets for?” I asked him.

“Only one,” he answered.

The first helmet fit perfectly, as if it were sculpted for my head. “How did you know this would fit me?” I gasped.

“It’s a price
I
may have to pay one day,” he said.

More double-talk. He was beginning to sound like Ketheria. I felt a surge of energy around the base of my skull, and the visor blinked on.

“Can people scope me with this?” I asked him.

“Of course.”

“Do you have any helmets without that capability?”

Tinker passed the wand over my vest, deducting the amount of chits for the helmet. “That is not the way,” he said, and handed Ketheria another helmet. “This will fit better than that bulky one they’ll make you wear,” he said to her.

Ketheria tried the helmet on and smiled. It fit perfectly over her telepathic blocker.

“Thank you, Tinker,” she responded.

Tinker smiled and closed his eyes.

“How much for that one?” I asked.

“A gift.” He sighed, placing his hands on our shoulders and moving us toward the door. “You will have to come back and visit me again, won’t you?”

“Definitely,” Ketheria said, but I was rather glad to be leaving.

At the door I turned to him quickly and said, “Wait. I want to know more about Ceesar. You know him, right? Who is he? Is he a wormhole pirate? What’s he doing here?”

Tinker frowned. “Come back and we may talk some more. Right now I have work to do.”