The stranded, p.10
The Stranded, page 10
Halfway along the deck, there’s an old, orange-hulled lifeboat raised on a stand. A relic of the time when all the passengers were supposed to make it off the ship. Most of the ship’s lifeboats were stolen decades ago, and either reused or broken down for scrap. You can still see some of the lurid orange roofs nestled in the flotilla.
Alex jumps up on the railing and checks for airborne drones.
“You’re making me nervous,” I say.
“Everything’s fine,” he says.
Alex punches a code into a number panel attached to the side of the lifeboat’s hull. The door swings upward, and he climbs in. Keeping my feet firmly on the deck, I poke my head in after him, blinking while my eyes adjust to the gloom.
Cardboard boxes are piled in columns, floor to ceiling. Every space rammed so that there’s barely room for passengers. On the side of each, the words Humanitarian Daily Ration are stamped alongside the Stars and Stripes. Inside the nearest box, I find meals vacuum-packed in silver foil. The first one I pick up is labeled red beans and rice.
“Think of it like an emergency survival kit.” Alex takes the ration pack from me and closes the box lid. “And it’s all organized, so don’t mess with it.”
“This isn’t a survival kit. This…this…” I scan the piles of boxes. “It’s enough to feed someone for months.”
He pauses and turns so that we’re face to face. “It’s enough to feed two people actually.”
My face flushes.
“Or more. It’s to keep us going if there’s a food shortage. Lots of people have them.”
“Lots of people have an extra bag of pasta. This—where did it all come from?”
He’s moving boxes around. “Been saving for years. Every time someone paid me for tutoring, I bought food and stashed it here.”
“Is that legal?”
He hesitates. “It’s not exactly illegal.”
“But the Coalies wouldn’t like it.”
“Probably not, but it’s worth the risk.”
I’m so distracted by the towers of food, I don’t realize Alex is pulling my comglove off until it’s gone.
“Hey!”
Cold air plays over the skin of my hand. I flex my fingers and compare my hands. The skin on my comglove hand is sickly pale.
My skin puckers in the cold. Without that glove, I’m vulnerable. No money. No way to communicate. And no ID. If I get stopped by the Coalies, I won’t be able to prove that I’m me. Or that I’m not a criminal.
“I need that!” I say.
“This way no one will know who we are. You’ll be OK without it for an hour,” Alex says, taking his comglove off too, and stowing both of them behind a box. And then, as though he’s done it a thousand times before, he produces another comglove and puts it on.
“If you get caught pretending to be someone else, they’ll throw away the key,” I say.
“It’s just a fake ID. And I don’t plan on getting caught.” He gives me a straight-toothed grin. “Your mouth’s open.”
I snap my teeth together. “We’ll be thrown out the program if Corp finds out.”
“Can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs,” he says, sitting down with his back to me, so I can’t see what he’s doing. This does not feel right. It feels dangerous.
“If we run into trouble on the way, let me do the talking,” he says over his shoulder.
The Arcadia can be a risky place to live, and it feels even riskier since I found out a boy with criminal connections knows me well enough to call me by my name. I can count the number of people I trust on one hand. May. My parents. Corp is borderline. Alex? I trust him.
“All right,” I say.
“That’s my girl.” He finishes whatever he was doing and jumps out onto the deck. “It’ll be fine,” he says. I step out of the way as he closes the door and punches in the code to lock the lifeboat.
Alex bounces excitedly ahead as we take the stairs down, passing each numbered door until I feel panic in the pit of my stomach. “We’re getting awfully low. Want to tell me where we’re heading?”
“We’re here,” Alex says. I stop dead in my tracks halfway down a set of stairs, and stare at the door on the next landing down: Service Corridor. This isn’t turning into a good kind of surprise.
“Are you serious?”
“Always.” He reaches out to open the door, but before his fingers touch the steel handle it swings open. And in the space of a second we’re face to face with ourselves—reflected in the cold visors of a Coaly patrol. Terror lurches in my stomach. It grips my throat. The thing I was most afraid of is here and real and far, far, worse than my nightmares.
I clench my naked, comgloveless hand and shove it behind my back.
Alex snaps to attention. He stares ahead.
Don’t scan us. Please don’t scan us.
“Officers,” Alex says. He gives them a wholesome smile, and his cheeks are ruddy like everyone else’s, and somehow it makes him look healthy instead of wind-battered.
There are two of them. I stare at myself in one of the visors. Wind-ruffled hair. Reddened cheeks.
The Coaly’s visor creeps from my face to my boots and back. It lets go of its weapon, a black rifle slung from a strap, and reaches a black-gloved hand toward me. I close my eyes and try not to faint. Trust Alex. He told you to trust him, now trust him.
The Coaly moves the front of my jacket aside to look at my uniform underneath. It taps the double snakes of the caduceus badge.
“State your business, medic.” Coalies only have one voice. Deep and desolate. Not quite human.
“There may be a measles outbreak on this deck. We’re here to determine whether to quarantine,” Alex says. Smooth and convincing and like he owns the place. But Corp didn’t give us this assignment, and there’s been no report from this deck. He’s lying.
I focus on the epaulette on the Coaly’s shoulder. Seconds stretch out painfully.
After what seems like hours, the Coalies step around us and continue on their way.
Alex grabs my hand and holds me in place. “Wait,” he whispers. Their footsteps fade away. The door separating the staircase from one of the decks slams above us.
“Jerks,” Alex mutters. “Come on.”
“If they’d scanned us, we’d be on our way to the cells right now.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. That shouldn’t have happened. But everything’s fine now.”
“Can we please just go back and get my glove?”
He hesitates, turning to face me. “We’re almost there. If we go back, we might run into them again.”
I look up at him, weighing Alex’s steady reassurance against the nakedness of my hand. “OK,” I say.
He grins. As he leads me through the door, I nurse a nasty hollow feeling. My instinct’s telling me something is very wrong. I’ve only been in the service corridor once before, and it’s as crowded and smelly and unpleasant as I remember. It’s so busy, so full of shuffling people and scared animals. Worst of all, it’s almost impossible not to touch strangers. The mixed odors of food and unwashed humans are so unpleasant I clap my hand over my face. If there was ever an outbreak of the Virus down here, it would be impossible to slow the spread.
Alex pauses outside an unused elevator. The steel shell of it is stopped permanently on this floor, and just visible inside is an old woman. The walls are wrapped in plastic sheeting. The woman spots us. “You’re late,” she says.
Alex pushes me forward. Inside, the light is dingy, and something rancid is half masked by the smell of disinfectant. There’s an examination bed in the center of the elevator identical to the ones we use in the infirmary. It’s bathed in yellowish light from a lamp that’s suspended from a hook in the ceiling. The woman sits on a stool, gloved hands held up in front of her. The plastic sheet on the floor crackles beneath the stool’s wheels.
“Jump up, darlin’. Let’s have a look at you.”
She pats the bed. She grins at me. Her teeth are unblemished white and look like they belong to someone else. Her eyes flick to the caduceus badge on my uniform. “Not often I meet a fellow medical professional.”
It clicks. She thinks she’s a dentist.
Too late, I step back toward the corridor, but Alex stops me from running.
“Give it a chance,” he whispers, taking me by the arm and steering me back into the elevator.
“It’ll cost a fortune,” I say.
“Don’t worry. I’ve got some credits saved up.”
“I’ll never be able to pay you back.”
He stops and looks me in the eye, surprise raising his eyebrows. “You don’t have to pay me back. It’s ours. We’re in this together.”
There’s a lump in my throat and pressure building behind my eyes, so I bite my lip until I don’t feel like crying any more.
The pillow is covered with splashes of yellow and brown. A hundred heads must have rested there before mine. I imagine lice burrowing into my hair.
Alex shrugs off his coat and spreads it over the pillow. Outside the elevator, a crowd of Neath kids has gathered to watch me climb onto the bed.
“Open wide,” the woman says. She holds a magnifying glass over my face in one hand, a thin flashlight in the other. “Been a lot of you down here recently,” she says to Alex.
“Medics?”
“Coalies. More bots too, truth be told.”
“We’re not Coalies.”
“As good as. There any truth to these rumors the Oceania’s been sunk?”
“How would we know?” Alex says.
“No need to get snippy. Just thought your friends might keep you in the loop.”
“We aren’t friends with Coalies. We’re being trained by the Federated States.”
“In my day, we called it collaboration.” The old woman sniffs, still looking into my mouth. She wheels backwards. “How’d this happen?”
“I fell. Cracked my face on the railing.”
Alex shifts somewhere near my head. He’s accepted the story that I slipped on a patch of wet deck and smacked my face as I went down. It’s believable. But I catch him watching me sometimes, like he’s trying to figure me out.
“Yep, that’d do it. Not enough left to save the tooth. But I can yank it out from the root and give you another one.”
Yank it. A tremor runs through me.
“From where?” Alex says.
The woman glances past him at the kids jostling to see. They whisper and giggle. “Depends on your resources. Extraction for half a day’s rations. A pre-loved organic canine will set you back a full day.”
“She’s not having a second-hand tooth.”
Second-hand tooth. I grip the sides of the bed.
“My transplants are all good quality. Freshly erupted, checked for caries and cleaned of plaque. I’ll send out for a donor if you want one.”
I never understood the gappy smiles of the Neath kids. So many of them have missing teeth, I assumed it was due to poor nutrition. The truth is so much worse.
“No way,” I say with a sob, pushing myself up. “I won’t take a kid’s tooth. People live with worse than this.” I shake my head and try not to break down.
“Give us a minute?” Alex says to the woman. She purses her lips and wheels herself away on the stool.
Alex leans over me. In the murky light, I can see the stubble on his chin. “Think about it. Would Corp be without a tooth? Would anyone from land? They’re going to assess everything about you. Grades. Late marks. Demerits. We can’t give them any reason to reject us. And May’s graduation ceremony is coming up. Anyway, you shouldn’t have to live with it.” He takes my hand, running his thumb over mine. “You deserve better.”
My heart skips. He seems so determined to look after me. I trace the spike of tooth with my tongue, and I wish he was wrong. Maybe no one will care that I have a broken tooth. Or maybe they’ll put a big red rejection stamp on my application form.
I can do this. For med school. For my future.
“Sorry to interrupt your tête-à-tête, but I’ve got other patients to see,” the dentist says.
“OK,” I murmur.
Alex grins at me. “Give her a synthetic implant.”
“Three days’ rations.”
The woman holds her hand out to Alex. There’s a ping as the funds are transferred between their comgloves. The kids gasp at the cost of it. All I can feel is relief that I won’t be getting a secondhand canine.
The woman lifts up a syringe, squirting a drop of liquid. Alex grabs her hand. “That black-market crap causes nerve damage.”
She sneers, tosses the syringe on to a tray and picks up a pair of pliers. “This is going to hurt.”
Fear, primal and creeping, claws at my chest.
Chapter 17
Nik
May passes me a sheet of brown paper cradling three steaming bao. I wrap my fingers around the buns and lean back, one foot against the wall. May stands next to me, looking past so that she can see the service hatch without having to crane her neck. It’s a huge rectangular metal door with a circular handle in the center, and it takes two people to swing it open.
“What’s the time?” She blows steam between her lips as she eats and talks.
“Fifteen fifty-five.”
“It’ll be docking now.”
On the other side of that service hatch is the main gangplank. A long, sloping runway that goes down to the ocean. Once a day, dead on at 4 p.m., the supply barge comes up close to the Arcadia, attaches itself to the end of the gangplank and unloads enough food to feed the ship. Well, they pretend it’s enough food. Really, there’s plenty of people on the Arcadia that go to sleep hungry. The shipments bring other stuff too. Crappy secondhand clothes. Electronics that were state of the art ten years ago.
I look down the corridor. The air’s hazy with the smog of old cooking oil from the fish and chip stand, and the busker that wanders the length of the corridor is somewhere close by with his out-of-tune fiddle. Disused elevators line both sides of the corridor like the spines of vertebrae. A little over a week ago, I got shot and plummeted down one of those shafts. Nerves tighten in my neck. Don’t remember the slam of the bullet. Don’t remember the fall.
Usual policy is to stay a long way away from any Coaly patrol. Today, that’s exactly who we’re waiting for. May takes another bite of dumpling, showering dough on to her scarf, and watches the hatch.
“By the way, all that stuff you asked for is ready. It’ll be at the safe house. Don’t think you’ll need it though,” I say.
“Fail to plan, and plan to fail,” she says without taking her eyes off the hatch.
Her training kicks in whenever we’re on one of these missions. It’s like she has an instinct for it. She can watch without it looking like she’s watching. And you should see her with a rifle. She’ll hit an empty bean can from 200 yards.
“You sound like my mother,” I say.
“It’s a contingency plan.”
“You need to believe you can pull this off.”
“I do.”
She flicks a glance at me, and—for the briefest second—I see through the swagger: she’s seventeen and scared and about to go on the adventure of her life.
What I won’t tell her is that my mother hasn’t got another way of completing May’s mission. If May fails to bring back what we need, the next part of our plan is going to be 100 percent more dangerous.
So fast I don’t even see it happening, May twists around and grabs a pickpocket by the wrist.
“Don’t mess with cadets, kid,” she says quietly, hard as steel.
The girl looks terrified. She’s about eight with blonde hair matted into a single braid.
“Next time, just ask.” May folds the paper over what’s left of her buns and presses it into the girl’s hand.
The kid stares for a second, then sprints off, gathering other hungry kids as she runs. Just before she disappears, I see her cramming the food into her mouth.
We’ve been staking out this supply delivery for the last three weeks because May needs to feel like she’s taking action. For her, it’s not enough to have a mission to complete at some point in the future. She needs to stick it to the Federated States now, even if it’s just going over the mission plans like we’re doing at this moment. That’s what started the leaflet drop. She came up with the idea, and I went along for the ride. In hindsight, the whole thing’s caused way more trouble than it’s worth. But at the time I wanted to make her happy. And I guess I was pleased to be actually doing something for the cause instead of hiding away in the engine room, tinkering with the machines and plotting Hadley’s downfall.
“Where do your parents think you are this afternoon?” I ask.
“At war-games training.”
“Didn’t Hadley cancel that class months ago? Something about not wanting guns to fall into the wrong hands?”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t bother to enlighten my parents.” She scans the width of the corridor. “Look for bots, will you?”
I turn to face her so that I can look over her shoulder and try not to get distracted by how close together we are. I check the corners of the mold-blotched ceiling as far as I can see, looking for the spidery legs of mobile surveillance bots, then switch to scanning the ground. Nothing but a scraggly ship’s cat going after a mouse.
“You need to tell your sister about the mission now,” I say.
I’ve been feeling more than a little guilty that Esther got a bomb detonated under her life, and she doesn’t even know why. Maybe, if she knows about the rebellion and how we’re going to make things right for everyone, she might feel better that her world’s imploding.
