The Creative Fire: 1 (Ruby's Song) (8 page)

10: Reclamation

As the train approached C, Onor slid his helmet closed and drew in a deep breath that smelled of sweaty body and the clammy metallic scent of a suit that needed cleaning bad. They were supposed to get the day off tomorrow, and if they did, he was going to spend time scrubbing it down. Cleaning everything. Frankly, his nose was so irritated that he’d almost prefer going suitless, even in the reportedly unstable life support of the damaged pod.

Lya sat next to him, looking lost in thought, her long blond hair tangled and twisted down her back. In truth, it wasn’t just their suits that needed cleaning. They hadn’t had a day off since the festival two weeks ago. She nudged him gently. “Do you believe Ruby?”

“About what?”

“That we can test into a new life? That someday we won’t get beat up just for existing?”

“I saw the other levels. They exist.” When Ruby talked about them, they sounded fabulous.

“What if we die trying?” Lya bit her lip. “Hugh could’ve died when they beat him up. We might not have made it to the train. He was so heavy I was sure we’d have to stop. If I’d been hurt, too, or even twisted an ankle, he would have died. Maybe we would both be dead.”

Onor put his arm across her shoulders. “This kind of talk makes me think of my parents. They died fighting for what Ruby believes. If I stopped, I’d feel like I was letting them down.”

“I guess I want to live more than I want to win.”

“I want to do both,” he said, trying to sound as sure of himself as he could. “Look, we’re almost there. Try and have a little fun today. Find something good.” He swung his helmet up and strapped it on.

She dropped her faceplate down, his last sight of her mouth a grimace at her own smell. Or at knowing they were in for another long, hard day. Lya almost never looked happy, except when she was with Hugh.

When Onor climbed off the train, he split from Lya, going to his own detail of five people. There were a hundred total, but they’d been grouped in fives and sent all around the pod with different jobs. Lya spent her days cleaning out habs and bagging stuff to be sent to families.

Onor had been assigned back to the reclamation plant on B, under Conroy, who trained in from F-pod. Just like the old days, except not at all. During the first few chaotic days after the pod-wreck, as people now referred to the failure of the joining bolts and joists that kept the interior of the ship together, they had been surveying damage: cataloging angles that were wrong, blowing pipes for leaks, checking valves, and testing the cleanliness of the liquids at every inflow point. They hadn’t found anything totally gobbed up, just stressed metal and a few joins between pipe and tank pulled apart by force.

Everything appeared fixable or replaceable.

In spite of that, the blues had ordered the system closed up and the water partly redistributed. The first few days, there hadn’t been enough containers. More had been made and sent in. Water was heavy. Water sustained, grew food, and served as ballast and shield.

While his team and the plant’s bots moved water, other people moved cargo around, some of it nonsensical on the surface except that it followed Ix’s particular math of balance and weight. It felt all wrong to Onor. Too fast. Since he first started school, it had been burned into his head to do things slow and right, not to rush and take risks.

He’d asked Conroy about it. The big man had said, “Ix seems to know what it’s doing,” but Onor had a sinking feeling from Conroy’s slitted eyes and slight hesitation in answering that Conroy didn’t really think so. He just wasn’t going to tell Onor anything.

This morning, Conroy looked like he wanted to kick something. Onor couldn’t see Conroy’s face well through the helmet, so Onor read the older man’s mood in the stiffness in his limbs. And his voice, of course. “We’re dismantling today. Begin with the offices, remove anything that could be useful.”

Conroy called Onor’s name.

“Yes?” he answered.

“Start with my old office. The bots will have already wheeled in some boxes for you. Rex can take the crew room beside you. The rest of us will head into the tanks and get the extra parts.”

Great. He’d rather be working in among the big tanks. Instead, Conroy treated him like a green baby and stuck him with Rex the Lazy. Onor knew not to argue. His old boss sounded as foul and edgy as Onor himself felt. Maybe Conroy didn’t want to be stuck in this new life either. In fact, maybe it was worse for Conroy—he’d been important as shift boss. Now what would he be?

Rex the Lazy was already ahead of him down the hallway, so Onor caught up and then passed him. There were two crew rooms: the office that Conroy had shared with the other shift bosses and a communal room for anybody assigned office work. The rest of the space included a small galley, showers, and a restroom.

Boxes sat in the middle of each room, placed just inconveniently enough to need stepping around. Dumb robots.

Onor checked that Rex had started working and then stood in the doorway to Conroy’s office. He’d been in the room before, but never alone. It looked bigger and emptier without Conroy’s bulk filling the center of it.

Piled boxes surrounded sparse furniture. Just a desk and three chairs, and walls full of monitors that used to show activity throughout the plant. All dark now, the power off. He sighed—a half a day’s work, at least. Maybe more. He unscrewed lamps from the walls and took apart chairs, packing away the pieces in boxes that were the wrong size. After two hours he stank even more, and sweat dribbled down his back.

When he needed a break, he found Rex slumped in one of the chairs in the crew room, only one box filled in the time it’d taken Onor to finish two. Onor started toward him to make sure he was okay. Rex looked up and waved him away.

Well, whatever. Rex was senior, and bigger. Onor went back and started to carefully remove monitor screens from the walls.

He dropped a heavy screen on his right foot and pain shot up his leg. When he cursed, his helmet fogged over and he tripped and almost fell.

He ripped his helmet open and breathed in the greasy air of the plant, a smell far better than his own stink. He set the helmet close enough to reach.

His foot hurt. At least the monitor hadn’t broken; his boot had taken the brunt of the drop. The suit hadn’t been breached, either. The foot had a hard surface, top and bottom.

He ran his hand across the edges of the monitor, making sure there weren’t any cracks.

His finger encountered a sharp ridge.

He picked up the monitor and angled it so he could see the ridge. It was dark, like the frame, but a slightly different dark. He tried to pluck it out with his bulky gloves but it was well and truly wedged.

He glanced at the door, listened. Then he compounded his safety sins by pulling his right glove off. He slid his index finger under the slender dark object.

A data stick?

He closed on it with his thumb and pulled.

It barely moved.

He tried again. On the third try, it slid loose into his palm. It looked like a data stick. If so, it had been well hidden. But what better place to hide something than in a monitoring room where the watchers sat, not being watched?

Footsteps sounded in the hall outside. More than one set.

Conroy poked his head inside the room, frowning behind the clear bubble of his helmet’s face shield. His voice snarled across the comm. “Onor!”

Onor slid his glove on, hiding the slender stick in the middle finger between the first and second knuckles.

“I’ll report you.”

No, he wouldn’t. Onor buckled his helmet and spoke to Conroy through the microphone. “I dropped this on my foot and had to check out my suit to be sure it’s not torn. I needed my finger free to tell.”

“Someday you’re going to push me too far.”

“Yes, sir.”

Conroy didn’t bother to answer. Onor’s job was nearly done and Rex was only halfway through his task. But as if he needed to make a point, Conroy insisted on helping Onor finish while the other two helped Rex. “How’d you get done so fast?” Onor asked.

“Didn’t. We filled the boxes. The bots didn’t come when I called for replacements, so I figured we’d come help you and maybe then they’d be done.”

The stick slid around in Onor’s glove, almost stabbing him.

Whatever was on it had better be good.

11: Lila Red the Releaser

Ruby tried to sound nonchalant as she told Daria, “I plan to go to Kyle’s for dinner.” Ruby had just brought Daria tea, and now she stood beside her, watching Daria’s hands as she polished a silver scrap-art pendant.

Daria looked up and gazed at Ruby, silent.

Ruby stood still, looking back as placidly as she could even though it seemed like Daria was trying to see inside of her.

Daria’s lips thinned into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Have fun.”

Maybe Daria was sick of babysitting, or maybe she just wanted to compose herself for Suri’s imminent arrival. Her reasons didn’t matter to Ruby. She knelt down and gave her aunt a brief hug. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”

Daria nodded, her attention already returned to her jewelry.

Ruby had the odd sense that Daria knew she was planning an assault on the status quo and that her aunt was maybe even a bit proud of it. But Daria never talked about what Ruby did away from her, even though she insisted Ruby be in early every night.

As she wandered down the hall, Ruby cataloged successes and failures to go over after dinner, when she and her friends would get down to real planning. She and Marcelle had talked some of the other students into believing in the test, or at least into working with them to study the other levels. Not as many as they’d hoped for, but maybe a quarter of the people in their class in this pod. Ix appeared to be offering occasional help in the form of stories or poems that would show up on her journal all by themselves. They gave her vague clues, but nothing concrete.

She didn’t feel ready at all, and the end of the school year wasn’t that far off.

When Onor greeted her, he seemed full of a great secret. Inside the room, Marcelle and Hugh and Lya and The Jackman had all gathered into the tight quarters of Kyle’s living room, oriented toward the vid screen.

She had only expected Marcelle and Onor. “What’s this?” she asked, perching on the edge of Marcelle’s chair.

“Something I found,” Onor said. “Something about an old story you told me once.”

Really? She settled back.

The recording opened up with a woman’s round face looking serious and filling the screen, her green eyes flecked with gold and her hair so red it looked more drawn than real. The camera backed up, showing the woman standing. She had an air of authority that was only partly because of her red uniform. A red woman with red hair. Ruby’s lips parted and a name fell from them. “Lila Red the Releaser.”

She’d never seen Lila on video. She’d seen a sketch, once, on a teacher’s wall. A few days later, she’d found a photo of Lila’s face on her journal, but she had never been able to find it again.

On screen, Lila moved with confidence, stepping back, taking Ruby along as if she walked beside the woman. Other people crowded Lila from time to time, offering handshakes and hugs or just reaching out a hand to trail fingers along her uniform. Lila gave them back gracious nods and small touches, but she didn’t slow at all. She was in one of the parks, although neither of the ones Ruby knew. She spoke at the camera, “This is our last night of gathering. This is the last time I’ll talk to you this way, for tomorrow we’re going to change the way things are. And I hope you’re going to help.”

Lila walked away from the camera, heading for a bench that had been draped with white so that when she stood on it dressed in red, with black boots and green eyes and hair as red as Ruby’s, she stood out from the landscape like a feral flower.

The sounds of a crowd settled away; the hundreds of people who had come to hear Lila had gone largely quiet, with only an occasional whisper disturbing the pregnant moment.

Lila stood and spoke. “We have almost a third of the ship so far, from every level. Mostly from here, from gray, from where the real work happens, from you. You are the magic that will matter as we shine light on change.”

She waited, and the crowd reacted, hooting and calling and clapping.

Lila Red the Releaser continued. “There are too many of us for the traditionals to move against us anymore. I have been in lockup and I am free, and you have been in lockup, all of you, all of us together. Tomorrow we will be free.

“Tell your friends and your family, tell anyone who is not yet with us. Tell them that
we will win
and
we will become free
. We will lock up the leaders and make new ones who represent us all, including grays.”

In the pause after her words a murmuring started and slowly grew louder.

Just as Ruby felt the need to urge Lila to stand taller and raise her arms, she did, and a great rush of applause filled the video speakers.

Lila lowered her arms and the sound subsided.

“When we finish this, we will feast, and then we will work together as equals, side by side with all our brethren. We will take off our colors. Blue shirts will work the reclamation plants and greens the crèche, and side by side we will all carry water and bring food and design new games and read star charts. Women will not be raped anymore. Young men will not die for fighting or for feeling their oats or back talking another young man in a different color shirt.

“We will all be free together!”

Lila extended her arms toward the crowd, palms up.

The crowd repeated, “We will all be free together.”

“We will all be free together,” she called to them.

They replied again, louder, “We will all be free together.”

And then Lila lifted her hands and called for the crowd to say it again and they did, the sound from the vid filling the room.

Ruby felt complete awe. So brave, so strong. And shame, because she wanted to be that brave but wasn’t.

The Jackman said, “That was her last speech.”

The words were hammers, taking the breath from Ruby. The woman on the screen had been so alive. Marcelle gave Ruby a white-faced look, and Onor looked sick to his stomach.

Ruby stared at The Jackman. “Tell me about her.”

The Jackman took another cookie and a water bulb. “I used to think she was a legend, something made up by someone who wanted hope. It’s not just Lila—she may not have even been the leader. She was just the one everybody knew, the face of the Freers. That’s the name of the revolution. The Freers. The formal story is that Lila Red betrayed her own, a whole level, and then the captain himself killed her. That’s all part of the legend around why no one’s lived in A-pod for a very long time.”

“The captain?” Onor asked.

“The man who tells Ix what to do.”

“Who is that now?” Ruby asked. “Who tells Ix anything?”

“Garth. Garth Galesman, but he’s a lousy captain even though he wears the uniform.” The Jackman stretched and looked uncomfortable.

“He’s the one who killed Lila?”

“No. He couldn’t be. It was too long ago.”

“Tell me about Garth anyway?” Ruby asked.

“No. And we don’t want to make Lila’s mistakes either.”

They were all silent until it felt awkward. Ruby mused, “Lila was a hero. I want what she wanted.”

The Jackman’s face grew hard and full of warning. “She failed. And she was one of them. A red. She had more chance than you do.”

Ruby imagined people fighting through the corridors of the pods, inside the habs where people lived, shooting weapons across common. She could hear the yelling and the fighting, smell the blood and the fear. “How would anyone win a battle in a ship? There aren’t enough people for all that death.”

The Jackman stood up and shouldered his pack. “After she died, the levels were shut completely, like now. That’s why you’ve never talked to a blue.”

“I have.”

“That doesn’t count. It wasn’t his fault he fell on you.”

She managed not to lunge at The Jackman only because he was four times her size and she knew he was trying to bait her. Instead, she stared him down as he plucked the data stick out of the player and put it carefully in a box that he folded into his pack.

After he left, Ruby whispered. “He knows things he’s not telling us.”