The Creative Fire: 1 (Ruby's Song) (21 page)

31: Lessons

Onor and Penny and the few others from the barracks who participated in the late-night training sessions dragged home so late that he expected to find everyone still asleep the next morning. He hobbled into the shared galley for a glass of water and found Nia, the other exiled student, sitting quietly in a corner. Either she hadn’t slept or she had risen very early. Since she usually ignored him he didn’t bother to say hello.

To his surprise, she came over and offered him a cup of water. Her voice sounded soft and hesitant as she asked, “Are you okay?”

“Sure. Tired.”

“They make you work this hard to clean?”

He hesitated. “I . . . went for a run.”

She took the empty cup from him, refilled it, and handed it to him afresh. She averted her eyes, and her small hands slid slowly from the cup.

“Thank you.”

“You look very tired,” she said.

“I am.” He looked more closely at her. Circles darkened her cheeks under her pretty black eyes. “Are you okay here, Nia? How’s work?” He was stumbling, sounding awkward. “Can I do anything for you?”

When she looked back at him he saw a little shred of hope in her eyes, like the tiny pride he’d taken in being able to lap Conroy.

He had been wallowing in himself. Perhaps the reason she had not met his eyes wasn’t about him at all. Even though he still felt depressed, he was getting better. He didn’t wake up at night and stare at the ceiling for hours anymore. Good enough, at least, to see that someone else might be in pain, too. He chided himself for being a self-centered bastard and asked her again, “Can I help you?”

She shook her head.

“Want to just talk? About anything?”

She swallowed and nodded, like the word
yes
was too much to say.

The barracks included a large common room, but it was surely half full of people. “Would you like to take a walk?” he asked her.

She nodded again. “Can we go to the park? I heard that one of my friends goes there sometimes in the mornings and I’d like to see if she’s there.”

He felt way too tired and achy to get there easily. “Of course.” He set his cup down and grabbed his journal.

Onor led Nia through the corridor outside the barracks. “I haven’t seen the park here yet,” he mused. “Have you?”

“No, but aren’t they all alike?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only seen two.”

“Oh.”

Nia spoke almost hesitantly. “I almost feel like I shouldn’t be going to the park. Like we’re not good enough for that now. We’re exiles.”

“No,” he said. “I mean yes, I don’t think they’ll stop us from going to the park. I haven’t seen reds on guard between us and where we used to live. Just between pods.”

In the bright light of the corridor Nia looked pale and smeared out. She kept up with him pretty well, trying to stay where she could look at his face. It made him feel like he was taking and constantly retaking a truth test with her, like she was trying like hell to trust him but wasn’t quite sure she did, or could.

Eventually he asked her, “What did you leave behind? What were you going to be?”

She laughed bitterly. “Married. In a week. I was going to work in the gardens and harvest and prepare food to store and to eat. I should be chopping tomatoes and washing fruit.”

“What’s your boyfriend like?”

“Fiancé.” She spoke the word like a sigh. “Leff? He’s tall and thin. He’s handsome in his own way. At least I think so. Some of the girls don’t, but that’s their loss. He’s sweet, too. Kisses me goodnight on the cheek. He asked me to marry him the day before everything broke. He’s two years older, so he’s already working, back in B. He works in clothes.”

“Clothes?”

“Sure. Where do you think your clothes come from? Someone has to make them.”

“I just . . . thought it would be robots.”

“If robots made them, clothes wouldn’t be so scarce.” She reached out and touched his uniform shirt, the fingers hesitant and quickly withdrawn. “Besides, they make the red and blue uniforms too. And green ones.”

He thought of Joel.

“Anyway, Leff told me to stay away from you and Ruby and everybody. He said you’d cause me trouble.”

Onor had a vague memory of Nia studying with them for the last few sessions. “You didn’t, did you?”

She shook her head. “I liked how Ruby talked pretty. The way she said it could all be better and we didn’t have to let the reds push us around.”

He bristled at Nia’s tone. “We don’t have to.”

She was silent for a moment, and then she said, “Look, I know you love Ruby. It’s been written on your face from the first time I saw you. But maybe there’s never anything more for us than this.”

Even though they were close to the park, he stopped her right there in the metal corridor, putting a hand on her slender shoulder. “Meaning you’re content never to see Leff again?”

Her eyes widened. “Of course not.”

“Or for some red to decide you’re cute and he wants to sleep with you?”

She took a step back from him. “They’ve never done anything like that.”

He lowered his voice. “You’re lucky. Some of the reds back home beat us, and one of Ruby’s friends was raped over and over and she died in Ruby’s arms. That’s why she’s so passionate about all of this. She knows how much it hurts.”

Nia stared up at him, keeping her distance. She shook a little.

He was almost whispering now. “Look, I know it feels dangerous.” He licked his lips and wished he’d thought to bring water. He couldn’t talk about the insurrection army he had just finished running with. “It is dangerous. That’s why we’re here. But we can’t just give up.”

“Can we go to the park now?” she asked, her voice small.

“Of course.” He should be doing more, convincing her that she had to fight. But before they even made it to the park he had a different thought. Maybe they couldn’t all be warriors. Maybe Nia wasn’t ready to be anything else. But he wasn’t just getting in shape and learning to fight for himself. He was doing it for Nia, too, even if she didn’t know how much it mattered. Maybe they were all fighting for Nia, and for the old, and for the babies in the crèche.

Nia was a little ahead of him as they rounded the last corridor into the park. It did look a lot like the one on C, where the sky had literally fallen, except there were a few more trees and they were younger. Stylized symbols of suns and stars and space had been carved into one bench and a simple tree into another.

Nia wanted to walk, so he walked. The exertion warmed his legs up and loosened some of the sore spots. “Tell me about your family?” he asked.

“My mom and dad are both good. Dad works in the common kitchen and Mom’s a teacher and they’ve always done that.”

“What do they do when they’re not working?”

“Mom likes to dance. She and her sister dance. Dad works out a lot and runs in the park. That’s part of why I like coming here.” She was craning her head, looking around. Probably looking for her friend. “What about yours?” she asked.

“They’re dead. They had an accident, but people say they were killed by the reds.”

She looked at him hard, and what he imagined he saw in her eyes was something like,
no wonder you’re a revolutionary
. She didn’t say that, but she did start walking a little further away from him, as if his wanting them all to be free was a sickness that might rub off on her more than it already had.

He tried to restart the conversation. “Do you have brothers or sisters?”

“No.”

“What do you like to do?”

“Do you mean what did I like to do?”

He swallowed. “Sure.”

“I liked to grow things. I kept my own garden in the hab. I had basil and oregano and lavender.”

She and Kyle would like each other.

She went on. “It’s probably all dead.”

He wanted to put an arm around her and comfort her, but there was a palpable coolness between them still. He settled for saying, “I hope not.”

They went on quietly, Nia still looking for her friend. This was part of the problem. He was prepared to fight for someone like Nia, but she might fight him back. She had listened to Ruby, but only until it cost her. Now she seemed to wish everything were like it had been. “I don’t like the work—who wants to just clean all day?” he said. “But now the reds’ve shown how cruel they are.”

“They wouldn’t have hurt us without you three leading us into trouble.”

“They would still control us.”

She walked quietly for a while longer and he thought she was done with the conversation, but then she said, “I was happier before.”

“Maybe we should sit down for a minute? Watch for your friend to run by?”

She led him to a bench. “You remind me of my dad. Working out and running until you’re too tired.”

“It helps me clear my head.”

“Dad used to say the same thing.”

“What do you do to feel better?” he asked her.

“Nothing. I don’t feel better. Some days I don’t think I’ll ever feel better.” She was looking away from him, the light breeze of the park’s air circulation system blowing strands of dark hair across her face. After a while she said, “I’ll just get used to it. But it feels like I’ve been thrown away for nothing.”

He didn’t know what to say. She’d never be strong like the people he ran with under the very same place they were sitting now. Not unless something big changed her, like she got hurt or someone she loved got hurt.

He wanted Ruby, her spitfire and courage and the beauty of her determination.

The roof of the park here was a steady blue with a few fake clouds wandering across it from time to time, as if a wind he couldn’t feel blew through the
Fire
. Being with Nia—so much the opposite of Marcelle and Ruby—had taught him more about who he was becoming than he had learned in all the year before.

He jerked as Nia leapt up next to him, waving wildly at a young blond woman jogging toward them in the middle of a wide area of the park path. “Shell, Shell!”

As Nia called her friend, the sheer joy in her voice was so unlike anything Onor had heard from her that it underscored how lonely she must be in their day-to-day barracks existence.

Her friend broke into a crazed grin as she recognized Nia. Onor recognized her from class, a year-mate. She hadn’t studied with them in common, but she had been there the day they took the test, watching from near the back of the room. Because he remembered the look on her face that day, he wasn’t surprised when the wide grin that had emerged when she saw Nia turned to a grimace when she saw him.

She stopped in front of them.

Nia threw herself into her friend’s arms, the two moaning as if their separation had lasted months or years instead of weeks. They eventually detangled one from the other and held each other at arm’s length, saying, “How are you?” at exactly the same moment.

Then they both started talking at once, and finally Nia said, “You first.”

Shell glanced at Onor then back at Nia, a question clearly written on her face.

Nia glanced at him, and Onor half expected her to ask him to leave. But she managed to give him a pale smile before answering Shell’s look. “Onor and I live in the same place. A lot of people live there; one of the lower barracks. I asked him to bring me up to see you, and well, it worked. You’re here.”

“How come you don’t talk to me on your journal?”

“I haven’t been able to. Or to get any news. It’s like being in lockup, even though I’m at the crèche during the day. But my ID doesn’t let me get anything in or out there either, like I was a kid.” She sped up, words following words as if they’d been stuck in her throat forever. “They let me go out with Onor today. Not that anyone directly stops you; they just make it clear you shouldn’t wander around. I’ve taken a few short walks, but never this far. There’s a lot of robots down there, and I never know if they’re watching me. And I’m so tired when I get home.”

Onor broke in, asking Shell, “What happened to you? In the reassignment?”

Shell narrowed her eyes. “Nothing except I ended up here. I was studying to work in the water plant and I do. Just a different one.” Shell turned back to Nia. “They made it hardest on the fools who followed Ruby.”

Nia winced and said, “Have you seen Leff?”

“How? He’s not here.” Then her voice softened. “Surely they’ll let you go back soon. You’ve gotten permission to get married.”

“Before they banned it.”

Shell’s face hardened. She gave Onor an accusing look, but said nothing.

Onor turned away to let them talk without him.

“Wait,” she said. “I have news for you.”

Onor turned around, apprehensive.

“Ruby abandoned you. She left you all.”

He stiffened. “No.” Surely she hadn’t.

Shell stopped and looked at him. “I overhead two reds talking. There’s more around now, so they must come from the other level. I mean they don’t just grow them.”

He hadn’t seen more reds, but then he spent all his time in the lowest levels of gray.

Shell looked like she was enjoying the uncomfortable way he felt. “They said they heard her sing wherever they come from.”

Well, good. He wasn’t surprised. He’d been worrying, but he’d have known if she was dead. Surely he would have.

“Her lover came out for her and took her inside.”

Onor kept his feet planted. “Fox. I know.”

“He lives with her. He’s making her into something special. The two reds sounded jealous and a little in awe, like she’d somehow gotten lucky. He must be a big thing there.”

Shell was enjoying this far too much.

Onor’s mouth tasted bitter. “She hasn’t forgotten us. You don’t know her. Maybe she can’t figure out how to get us in there yet, but she will.”

“She’s not coming back,” Shell said. “Ever.”

32: A Moment of Freedom

Bells started so soft Ruby could barely hear them even though she was awake on the soft bed, ear cocked, naked. The bells grew steadily louder until they engulfed her. She let them keep rising, drawing frustration up her spine with each peal.

She’d asked to choose the alarm settings herself, and Fox had laughed and played five or six choices for her. She had almost no access to the controls for her own house. She could tell the kitchen to start the dishwasher or heat water. Fox, Ani, Dayn, and maybe other people had access, and they directed the systems for her.

The bells rang louder in her ears, as if shaking her awake.

She was alone in her warm bed, but Fox had been beside her until an hour or so ago.

She shouldn’t hate the bells. At least she had them. Grays had far fewer voice commands, and they couldn’t wake to bells, or the high female-voiced song she had liked, or even the default tones that sounded way too happy for her to stand them.

“I’m awake. Ten minutes.”

The room responded, breaking a tone just after it started.

She stood up, naked and still a bit sore and warm from the ways Fox had touched her body the night before. She still smelled of him, too, of sweat and sex and heat. She slid into undergarments and pulled a long sleep shirt over her head. No point in letting Dayn see what she gave to Fox. Dayn had been getting flirty lately.

After she dressed she lay back down and waited for the bells to go off again. She stretched one arm and then the other, one leg and the other, pulled her arms one by one up beside her ears, and arched her back. Her schedule included KJ’s class today, and she lay stretching until the bells grew loud enough to force her from bed.

Dayn stood in the kitchen, sipping from a nearly empty cup of stim. He smelled good as she walked past him, and she did her best to keep a body thickness of distance between them. The way he attracted her just by standing around and being insolent stiffened her back. There were women, like her mother, who went from man to man easily. She wasn’t going to be one of them.

“What do I do next?” she asked him. “Studio?”

He laughed. “Not my day to keep you. Ani’s on her way.”

“What if I want to do something no one has a plan for?”

“You have no idea how lucky you are.”

Sure she did. She was alive. “You make too many choices for me.”

Dayn gestured around the hab. “You could decorate.”

“I could have permission to set my own wake-up choices.”

He laughed. “Probably a couple of other ways you could develop a spine, too.”

She stopped and stared at him, her gaze level and her top teeth worrying her bottom lip. He was right. She was taking this gentle captivity lying down. Some would say that with a sneer and double meaning, and she might have said it that way about anyone else. Her cheeks grew hot. She shouldn’t be mad at Fox. She should hate herself instead.

She didn’t hate Fox. She didn’t.

There was no reason to—he was soft and sweet with her. Damn. She crossed her arms and stood straighter. “All right, Dayn. What do you suggest?”

He shook his head at her. “I’m not that disloyal. But changing your alarm clock’s not exactly the defiance I expected you to want.”

“You sleep in my living room just because he tells you to.”

“I didn’t tell you to rebel against Fox.” He was laughing at her, but there was an edge in his voice. “Your song sounded like you had a cause, but I’m not so sure. I don’t think you really care much about your friends slaving away under your feet.”

She grabbed her cup of stim and held onto it tight, biting her tongue and blinking back unexpected tears. Angry ones.

He continued, leaning over her close enough that she could smell the stale stim and sleep on his breath and the soft sweat that beaded his forehead. “As far as I can tell, the only person you love is yourself.”

“No,” she said, evenly and louder than she meant to.

“Oh, yes.” He grinned at her again, clearly having a great time baiting her.

She wanted to yell at him so badly; she could taste the bitter words on her tongue. How did he know who she cared about? He didn’t know anything about her or about her friends or about her life. Sure, she’d told them all a few things, but Dayn wasn’t gray, and he didn’t know what it was like to be afraid. “What do you care enough about to pick a fight over?”

He lost the laughter on his face and in his voice. He gave her a long, rather uncharacteristically somber look before answering. “You. We came for you and fought some people with power for you, and Fox comes almost every night for you, but you’re not who I thought you were at all.” He was still close, his breath warm on her scalp above her ear. “You’re not very brave or very smart or very anything at all. Fox is already getting a little bored of you.”

She took a step back from him and then realized what she had done. She set her cup down, then stepped back forward, even closer to him. “You don’t have to stay, you know.”

“Sure I do. Who’s going to tell your hab what to do for you?”

If she’d still had the cup in her hand, she’d have thrown it at him. “I’ve got class today. I’m going to change.”

She didn’t let herself cry until she was in the shower, and she managed to stop again during the whisper of time before her water allocation shut off. As she dried the tears and water from her face, her eyes were still red. By the time she’d dressed in loose clothes and pulled her hair back in a band she looked collected.

When she got back out to the kitchen, Ani stood there. She gave Ruby a quizzical look. “What’d you do to Dayn? He laughed on the way out the door and told me to watch you extra closely today.”

Ruby kept her voice even as she cut out a protein slice and picked a handful of orbfruit from the fridge. “I just asked him for help, that’s all.”

“You can trust him,” Ani said. “Drink some water. You need to be hydrated for class.”

Frustration stopped Ruby’s hand midway through its work of putting breakfast on a plate. “Who are you people when you’re not with me, and what do you do?” She leaned back, the counter a hard stop just at her waist. “What am I to you anyway?”

Ani let out a long sigh. “Can you just accept that I’m your friend? For now? This talk needs Fox.”

Ruby put an orbfruit in her mouth, hoping its sweetness would help her stop sounding bitter. She wasn’t really mad at Ani. Ani just happened to be here, now, and her family wasn’t, and Ani wasn’t Onor or Marcelle, and she wished she knew how they were. She finished her fruit, swallowing hard. “I want to run my own house and I want to be alone from time to time and I want to have at least the freedom I had back home.”

Ani nodded, only looking a little surprised. “So what do you want?” Ani asked. “I mean from me, now.”

Ruby finished her fruit. “Information. I want to understand what makes this ship tick and what people do and how it’s going to be when we get to Adiamo and what Fox wants to change and why Dayn is so pissed off at me.”

“I’ll tell you what I can on the way to class. Some of those questions aren’t mine to answer.”

“I heard you the first time.”

Ani grimaced. “Don’t be mad at me.”

“I’m not.” Ruby took two deep breaths. Had Dayn really upset her that much? “Sorry. I guess I’m making everyone mad this morning.”

“Dayn looked amused.”

Great. But Ruby shut up and buckled down to her light breakfast, waiting for Ani to offer up information.

Ani didn’t look at her, but looked at the door instead, as if wanting to make sure no one came in.

After the silence had gone on a while, Ruby spoke softly. “At home, Ix can’t hear inside our habs. Is that true here, too?”

Ani gave a soft smile. “That’s a lie on gray levels, too. But there are rules that keep Ix from passing what it hears inside habs to the peacers. I doubt that still applies if Ix thinks it hears anything really dangerous.” She waved a hand at the air, as if the AI were all around them. But that wasn’t what she meant at all. “This is your home now. You live here. This is the central logistics level, which is why so many of us are blue. That’s the work that gets done here. Out a level—that’s the physical work. The
Fire
was designed to be purely that way—for all the body labor to be out there and all the head work and planning to be here, and the command is inward again.”

“Wait—they don’t teach us this. They don’t teach us anything. They even act like the design of the
Fire
is a secret.”

“You have the same access that any of us in logistics had as kids. Go study.”

Ruby sat back. “What do you mean?”

“Ask your journal. Ask Ix. It’ll tell you.”

“I hate Ix.”

“Ix is the glue on this ship.”

“Then Ix is in a unique position to make things fairer by giving up a little more information.”

“Ship AI’s are controlled by a set of rules they aren’t allowed to change. Otherwise they might decide they don’t need us.”

“But Ix is here to protect us!” Suri had told her that from the time she was a baby.

Ani laughed. “So do you hate Ix or do you like Ix?” She didn’t look like she expected an answer, which was a good thing, since Ruby wanted to say she hated Ix, but it had felt like a lie when the same words slipped across her tongue earlier.
Something to think about.

Ix had helped Fox find her, but it had also helped betray her on test day.

Ani poked her gently. “Look, we’ve got to go soon. What do you want to know?”

“Command. You said there’s a command. That’s another level?”

“That’s the heart of the
Fire
.”

“Can we go there? Is that the only other level—so there’re three? Does it have a color?”

Ani laughed. “No, we can’t go there, not easily.” She must have seen the look on Ruby’s face, since she added, “No, no rules between logistics and workers, like you faced. We can go easier than you got here. Fox went once, when he was about your age. Maybe ten years ago?”

Ruby picked up her plate and put it away. “How did he get there?”

“Someone’s daughter thought he was cute.” Ani drifted toward the door. "KJ hates it when we’re late.”

“All right. Have you been there? To command?”

Ani laughed. “I’m not very influential.”

Ani didn’t offer anything else on the way to work out.

Ruby had taken to working near the front of the class, close enough to admire the blue and gold in KJ’s eyes and to watch the way he folded the whole class into his very being. A look from him could deepen a stretch, raise a jump, or help a student remember to tighten the top of their thigh to keep from falling out of a one-legged stretch.

Ani stayed near her, and by now they were nearly even, the main difference a bit more grace on Ani’s part as they transitioned from stretch to stretch. Ani clearly adored KJ, the look on her face as she watched him showed admiration at least, maybe more. She softened more for KJ than for Fox, although both men clearly attracted her.

At the end of class, KJ didn’t walk off like he usually did. He stood, watching the room empty, and Ani stood as well. After the other students had gone, KJ came over to them. His hand fell familiarly on Ani’s shoulder, and he asked her, “Do you have a few minutes?”

Ruby stood, slightly stunned that he apparently wanted to talk to Ani and not to her.

“I can find my way home,” Ruby blurted out.

Ani bit her lip and gave a meaningful glance at Ruby, as if KJ should intuit that she couldn’t be left alone.

“I won’t tell Fox.”

KJ chose to stay silent, watching.

Ani said, “She needs to be protected.”

KJ still said nothing, but his look indicated disapproval for Ani’s position.

The longer he was silent, the more indecision took over Ani’s face. Ruby could feel how much Ani wanted to stay and be alone with KJ.

KJ had the kind of quiet grace that drew women to him. In spite of that, and in spite of the fact that Ani really did find him attractive and had said so over and over, the tall black woman shook her head.

Ruby interrupted. “Really. I’m a big girl. I can find my own house.” She didn’t wait. It was the first chance she’d had to walk this level by herself, and she was going to take it. She didn’t let herself look back until she passed through the door, sure by the silence that the others had not followed her.

Normally, when they got back to the main level, she and whoever Fox had set to “help” her through class turned left.

Ruby turned right.

No one followed her.

At first it looked very much like the same corridor she should have taken: offices filled with people and interface sets, a mess hall like—but not the same as—the one in which Fox had faced down Ellis. She passed a few knee-high service bots that ignored her completely as they whined and whirred down the hall and a more humanoid bot that reminded her of the one that had fallen through the sky the day she met Fox. She almost expected it to be carrying food to someone, like a servant, but it had a bucket of metals that looked destined for the reuse bin in one hand and a broken chair in the other.

She peered into a long, fecund room that turned out to be an herb and vegetable garden. A few yellowed leaves lay on the floor, wasting without being composted. Water pipes hung from the walls and ceiling, visible. More proof that the
Fire
had never been designed for one level to be separated from the other.

She glanced up, sure that the next level inward, command, hung above her head in the same way that logistics hung above the work spaces she had grown up in. It existed. Onor would want to know, and for the second time that day she wanted to see him so much that the separation was pain.

She turned into a corridor just as a bell rang and people poured into the hallway, going both ways, knotting into groups and chatting with each other. She walked with purpose, pretending she knew where she was going, managing not to flinch at the crowd around her. She’d been in this kind of crowd on this level before, but always with Dayn or Fox or Ani or Jaliet.