Spin the Sky (33 page)

Trevor hears a crowd roaring to the left.

Maybe there is a tether tantrum game going on? Is it time for the Nullball Tournament? He’s been out of sorts the last few days and can’t remember if the tournament has started yet or not. Maybe there is a group watching it on a vidscreen down there.

Trevor can’t remember ever hearing of a Lazar House team in previous tournaments, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t watching the game. After debating it in his head for a whole half a second, Trevor decides to go investigate.

As he gets closer, Trevor realizes there is something wrong with this crowd. This isn’t some kind of celebration. That isn’t cheering he heard.

These people are angry.

The roar of the crowd has been one of rage. As he walks down a street mobbed with people, he can make out someone speaking over an amplifier to the jeers of the crowd.

It’s a girl.

She looks about Trevor’s age, maybe a little younger. She has long brown hair curling down her back like a river of caramel. Trevor thinks she is cute, but she’s also the first foreign girl he’s seen that isn’t a cowgirl working for his mom. She has a nose shaped just like a pinto bean and bright green eyes. But why is someone so young up in front of this mob and why are they so angry?

She is saying in a dramatic, clear voice that echoes across the little courtyard jammed full of people, “Like you, we seek to live in peace here on Lazar. We want only to make you welcome, but we cannot accede to these demands. Lazar just doesn’t have the facilities. We must learn to live together. If you set yourselves apart, it will only end in disaster for all of us!”

Trevor thinks she should maybe tone it down a little, but he remembers getting carried away when making a speech himself. There was one time, after a truly spectacular Spacerbase win, that he went on for ten minutes about the sanctity of defensive snipers. He gets the impression this girl is worked up about something slightly more important, though.

“None of your threats, leper!” a man near Trevor screams at her.

Trevor sees the fuming man is wearing long flowing white robes and an orange headband. Looking around, Trevor sees that most of the men and women are wearing loose white robes or saris and orange headbands are very popular. They all tend to be shorter and darker than Trevor and many of them are holding long ropes of prayer beads.

The girl speaking to the crowd looks totally out of place, even without her pale skin and blondish hair. She has on Spacer pants, grav boots and a depiction of the six-armed Hindu elephant god Ganesh playing drums on her chest.

He recognizes it as a concert shirt for
The Angry Yogis
. He likes their music too. Trevor knows he looks totally out of place too. He is also wearing grav boots and a too-big set of Mike’s old gray coveralls. Some of the people in the crowd are eyeing him and muttering irritably.

Trevor knows he should get away from this crowd and head towards the house Cesar sent him here to find, but somehow he finds himself edging toward the girl at the center of the courtyard. She continues to speak to the crowd. She pleads with them to disperse peacefully, but they don’t seem inclined to do it.

Trevor is no more than five feet from her when the flaming bottle comes flying out of the crowd. It hits the girl squarely in chest. He sees her look down in shock and pain before flames engulf her.

He doesn’t even think before he leaps forward. He snatches a jacket from a woman next to him and throws it over the burning girl to smother the flames as the crowd roars and surges. Trevor realizes that if these people choose to attack, there is precious little he can do to protect himself or the girl. Fortunately, the crowd as a whole hasn’t wound itself up to a murderous pitch yet.

Still, they are tossing Molotov cocktails, so its time to get out of here. Hands reach out to pinch and push him, but Trevor grabs the girl and starts pulling her away from the center of the mob.

There are more flaming bottles, followed by shouting and what sounds like muffled gunfire from the opposite end of the courtyard. The crowd roars and surges away from Trevor.

He doesn’t stop moving. Trevor has seen what flechette bullets can do during gun practice at home. He doesn’t want to feel them. A spray of hard rubber bullets pelts the crowd behind him. He’s thankful that the maniac firing into a crowd was at least smart enough to use non-lethal rubber bullets. But then again, Trevor imagines that no one was eager to draw blood at the Lazar House.

Trevor just keeps his head down and continues dragging the girl. The jacket is still over her head and her clothes are still smoking. She squirms, driving bits of broken glass into Trevor’s leg and arm. It hurts. He is starting to get annoyed.

Who does she think she is? Gandhi? Why on earth does she think antagonizing an angry mob is a fun thing to do? Stupid girl.

“Look, stop wiggling,” Trevor snaps at her. “Just keep moving and we’ll be out of this soon. Then you can go throw yourself out an airlock or something.”

“What?” she cries. “Who the hell are you?”

The girl pushes the jacket off her head and stares at him with outrage, but Trevor doesn’t even slow down as he drags her along. There are entirely too many people still following them.

The sound of breaking glass is followed by screams and muffled shots from someplace close by. The crowd around them scatters. Trevor takes advantage of the confusion and ducks down an alley. He grabs her shirt and yanks her after him. Her shirt catches around her throat and the girl gives an indignant squawk. Twisting to check behind him as they lurch along, Trevor doesn’t see anyone following them.

It’s getting harder to hold onto her now that she is pummeling him, but Trevor isn’t ready to slow down until he finds someplace secluded to catch his breath. Letting go of the girl becomes a more and more attractive idea, however.

Then he spies an open doorway leading into the kitchen of a little diner. A large swarthy man listlessly scrubs a pot. He raises his eyebrows at the pair, but makes no other indication that he cares about their existence.

Trevor pulls himself into a confident posture and nonchalantly walks to the tables at the front of the diner. He shoves the girl into a seat and then collapses into the chair opposite her. The girl glares at him like she thinks her eyeballs are lasers and the fact that Trevor’s head isn’t melting away right now is a personal affront.

Trevor catches his breath, trying to think of the best way to open up a conversation with this crazy girl about what he just wandered into out there. He is hoping she’ll just start explaining, but instead she keeps glaring.

With a sigh, he gives her his most charming grin and says, “Well I think one of us owes the other lunch right now. We just have to figure out which is which.”

The girl’s jaw drops.

Her brow furrows as her mouth forms a shocked pink ring. Trevor finds himself grinning because she is just so wicked cute. Then she frowns, straightening up. She looks just like Lupe when the old lady is about to start yelling and smacking him with a dishrag. Trevor looks for the exit. That’s when the swarthy Bonalu man from the kitchen lumbers up, muttering something about ordering or getting out.

Trevor could have hugged him.

She orders chai, dal and roti. While Trevor orders coffee and samosas, he thinks of a new way to start conversation. As soon as the waiter guy trudges away, Trevor leans over and asks her, “Are you hurt?”

This elicits the type of response Trevor was hoping for. The girl smiles at him and then quickly pats her hands over her hair and her arms while giving a little wiggle.

“Oh, I think I’m pretty good, actually. Couple of bruises. Missing some hair, I guess.” She holds up her charred hair sadly.

Trevor says solemnly, “Well, I’m sorry about that, but it could have been worse.”

It is a pity. Her hair is definitely missing some chunks and no longer has that shiny bounciness he admired earlier. Trevor still has a few bits of broken glass lodged in nasty oozing cuts on his arm, but he doesn’t really want to make them into conversation pieces just now.

The girl gives her face a quick scrub with the napkin on the table. Trevor decides to move the conversation towards more important topics.

Leaning forward, he asks casually, “So what was all that just now? An angry mob almost immolated you. You trying to earn style points with the martyr crowd? Do they not have Ether on this orbital and you got bored?”

On some level, Trevor knows he has what his mom likes to call “a smart mouth.” He knows it gets him into trouble. He just can’t seem to turn it off.

Fortunately, the girl doesn’t frown or yell at him. Her eyes get round as saucers and she sighs dramatically, throwing what is left of her sooty mane over one shoulder. “I was trying to prevent a riot and save our community from a violent war, actually,” she half-whispers to him, nodding for effect.

“Huh,” says Trevor.

“And you rescued me,” she breathes as though she relishes every word. “I totally owe you lunch.”

Trevor grins. He was hoping she’d come to some conclusion that involved eating. He’s starving.

The waiter appears rather abruptly by their table for a man so large. He dispenses plates and cups and leaves, mumbling about going out back for a smoke if they need anything.

Trevor sips his coffee. It is surprisingly good.

He can feel the caffeine do its jittery-jangly dance down his nerve endings. He isn’t sure how much he should tell this girl about himself. Fortunately she’s too busy talking to ask him any stressful questions.

The girl inhales a plate of beans and flatbread while explaining to Trevor that, during the War, Lazar House took in hundreds of refugees. She had Trevor pegged for a foreigner immediately. Most of the refugees were from Betel Bonalu, a nearby Hindu orbital that produced the best betel and betel-related products in the spheres before heavy action in the War rendered it a slowly venting death trap. These particular Hindus are very passionate about their religion and their caste system.

The Bonalus took to cotton farming and the Lazars took to their Hindu food and ideas on reincarnation. After living together in relative harmony for over a decade, the original Synthlep Lazar colonists and the Hindu refugees are having issues.

Recently, the Bonalus have been agitating for separate water supply and food processing plants so they won’t catch Synthlep. The original Lazars feel that after creating an entire little world to accommodate their affliction, they don’t really want to go changing everything for a bunch of uninvited houseguests. The Bonalus insist this is their home now too and the whole conversation degenerates from there along predictable routes until today they are throwing flaming bottles at each other in the streets.

Trevor eats his samosas and the plate of curry he orders after that and also what she doesn’t finish on her plate. The girl is very pretty and her cheeks flush when she gets excited about her topic. It’s slightly distracting, but Trevor feels he’s following the gist of the thing. She was out at a rally, the crowd turned against her and that’s how they ended up here.

“I’m Nausicaa, by the way.” She announces, wiping one hand on her shirt and stretching it out to shake his.

“Really?” he replies, one eyebrow arching. He shakes her hand. “Is that a common name here?”

His dad told him about some kid named Nausicaa. What are the odds?

Nausicaa shrugs and sips her chai. “Don’t think so. Never heard of anybody else with the same name. Why? Is it common where you’re from? Where are you from, anyways? Not here, obviously.”

“No,” says Trevor. “It’s just that my dad sent me here to see some people, Al and Arete I think he said, and they have a little kid named Nausicaa. I guess you don’t know them. I hope they still live around here.”

Nausicaa grins. “They do live here and I do know them. My folks are Al and Arete.”

“Oh,” says Trevor, at a loss. “I thought you were six years old or something.”

“No. Sixteen.”

“Oh. I’m seventeen.”

“Oh.”

That seems to be enough conversation for the pair of them and they lapse into covertly glancing at each other over their cups and blushing furiously. They keep that up until the waiter starts hanging around their table, muttering about folks who take up the good tables for hours and don’t leave tips. He makes an unconvincing show of wiping off the tables near theirs with a greasy rag.

Nausicaa pops her eyes wide and shakes herself like she’s waking from a nap. “We should go back to my house,” she decides, swiping her thumbprint over the credit strip before Trevor can even offer to pay his half.

“Is it safe?” asks Trevor, peering out the window at the front of the diner. There are people milling around, but they don’t look like an angry mob.

“Well, I think so,” says Nausicaa, peering out as well. Then she thinks of something important.

Turning to him, she asks, “Hey, why are you looking for my parents?”

Trevor blushes and shuffles his feet. When he got off the junker, he was dying to tell someone about his adventures, but now that he has the opportunity, he finds he doesn’t want to go through it all.

Trevor shrugged and says, “Things are a little dicey at home right now and my dad thought maybe I could stay with you guys for a little while until… things get less dicey, I guess. He met your parents a few years ago when he was a tinker ship captain delivering meds and they were on a runaway ship or something.”

Nausicaa gives a little gasp, “Oh my gosh! Your dad is Cesar Vaquero? Wow!”

Trevor inhales sharply. She knows his dad’s real name. His dad didn’t give her and her family a fake name. A pang of jealousy shoots through him.

“Yeah, I’m Trevor Vaquero,” he mutters.

“Oh, wow!” she says, bouncing with excitement. “My folks are so gonna want to meet you. Let’s go!” She grabs his shirt, pulling him into the street.

“So, you’re from Ithaca then?” she calls over her shoulder as she drags him along like a bull with a ring through its nose. She doesn’t wait for him to answer.

“We’ve heard about all the attacks and sabotage on Ithaca,” she announces, stopping to peer down an alley. “Everybody in the spheres is talking about that pirate attack last week. If they can do that to Ithaca, what does it mean for the rest of us? People are really scared. I think that’s part of our troubles here too. But if your dad sent you here, it must be even worse than we thought.”