Vagabond (16 page)

Mari giggled. “In our Colony, there’s this game called Marco Polo. Met—“
 

“Don’t you dare tell her my old name! It’s stupid!” Polo interrupted.
 

“Awe. I kind of miss it—“

Oldie intersected, “Let the boy keep his secrets, Mari. If you’re allowed to keep your name to yourself, so can he.”

Polo stuck his tongue out and rubbed his hands over the fire as if he was trapping warmth in his calluses to save for later. Mari laughed at Polo’s contorted face, and I wondered what it’d be like to have a little brother? I’d always felt at fault for my parents never getting their permits renewed. If they’d been licensed to have another, I wondered what inside jokes and sacred secrets I’d share with a little brother or sister? What arguments we’d get into?
 

“Okay. Okay. Anyways, it’s a game that happens when you blindfold one person, and the blindfolded person has to trust their ears to find the others just by sounds. Polo, over here, had the best ears in the entire Colony. He could find anything and anyone just by pausing and listening. I mean, great hearing was already a genetic quirk for our Colony, but Polo took the prize there.”
 

Mari and Polo were so likable and free with their happiness. They easily admitted they used to be Citizens, and they easily confessed they chose this life over the other. I wished I could tell my story too, and I wished I could talk about my memories of the Colonies the way they did. It seemed to make their life less painful, because they could remember together. There’s a trace of ache in every story, because as much as we were free out here, ex-Citizens had trouble letting go of the good that was. We had to relearn to find the good in what we now had.
 

Through Mari and Polo’s stories, I figured they were from the south where crops and farming were popular trades. I only knew this because of my work with plants. I had to order all my seeds from the 40
^th
.
 

“We had this chicken coop.” He laughed. “A new chick was born, and we kept hearing its squeak but couldn’t find it. Even our parents looked. Everyone was tossing up hay and upending pallets, because Mari was so upset. ‘It’s a baby! It’s scared,’” Polo mimicked his sister perfectly.
 

“But Polo just stood still and listened,” Mari cut in. They told stories like this often. It was like a verbal coin toss, and, out of habit, they picked up sentences where the other dropped them. “He heard and followed his ears. He found the yellow fluff caught between the wall. It had climbed through a rat hole and got trapped in between the planks! He pulled it out and saved it. Papa found it so funny and started calling him Marco Polo…” Mari’s story drifted away on that note. Secret nicknames were the staple of most families who built up stories into their foundations— those shared anecdotes and jokes that tie people together. Polo’s name was an homage to his parents, and it was the only name he’d worn since he left the Colonies.
 

“Can you teach me how to play it?” I asked.
 

Ono. I wouldn’t pry into the rest of that name. I didn’t want to know, because I only wanted what he was willing to share. It was more of a gift that way.
 

“Knucs, huh?”
 

“Best name I’ve ever been given. Mind if I keep it?”
 

Hurt crossed his face. “You don’t trust me—“

“It’s not that. I just don’t want my old name anymore. It belongs to my parents. I want them to keep it, and if I give it to you, I take it from them.”
 

“You miss your parents?”
 

“Don’t you?”

“No.” The malice that escaped the small word surprised me. “I would miss my mom if I knew her. She was a Cel—,” he inhaled. It looked painful. “I never met her, and I never got a foster mother. And. I don’t miss my dad at all.”
 

I frowned. I couldn’t imagine not missing Daddy. I missed him everyday. I missed him more than Mama even. Not that I didn’t miss and ache for her, but Daddy was always so much easier to talk to. He never pressured me the way Mama did. He was always pleased with me, just the way I was.
 

Ono’s mother though? A Celebrity? And, as for his Dad, what could have happened to make him so unfeeling towards him? The way he said, “Dad” was so flat, like two pieces of metal trapped between the tracks and the wheels of a train.
 

Xavi grinned and held up the two coins. One was small and brown in color. The face of the First Chancellor was on it. The other was silver and held a picture of the Great Disaster. Money. It was change from a paper note he used to buy toothpaste at the super market. Inside our satchel rattled other things, things we didn’t pay for— like the water purifier we’d swiped. It was rare to snag one because stores kept it locked behind the counters. But this one? It was on display, and Xavi snagged it so fast, no one noticed while I distracted the clerk. I exaggerated the fact that I couldn’t reach some box on the top shelf. My height came in handy sometimes.
 

It’d been hard for me to laugh since Celeste left us. I’d missed her so much already, but Xavi’s laughter was contagious.
 

In the store, Xavi made me do all the talking, and once we were out of the Colony’s reach, he burst out into accolades. “Niko! Such grammar! It’s perfect.”
 
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that despite my perfect grammar, being a flagged Citizen negated most of the things I did well, and compliments made me feel awkward.
 

He began to mimic my voice as I kept telling the clerk he was grabbing the wrong box for me. I channeled Celeste as I did it, masking all shivers of fear with stupid demands.
 

He laid the two coins on the rail, one on top of the other.
 

“What are you doing?” Even I knew better than to waste. Two small coins could add up to other items we’d need.
 

“Marking the occasion. We make a pretty great team, and I want you to remember it.”

“This isn’t a time to be symbolic. We need that money,” I rolled my eyes.
 

He shook his head and stepped back into the trees. “Just watch, okay. It’s pretty neat. Our race has been doing this since trains were invented.”
 

“They have?”

“Yes. You’re about to witness a small piece of Track history. Travel in time with me. I like to imagine all the people who’ve done this before me. Hundreds upon hundreds of years before me, in fact. There’s even a transition of coins if you hop into the time machine with me. Look at the coins from the Republic, then think of a time before the Amnesty Wars, before the United Front, before the Great Disaster, and before the Deletion Cancers. There was a civilization called the United States, and even they had their own coins. Even they did this tradition.”
 

“How do you know so much about history?”
 

He grinned. “My father, before he left the Colonies, was a historian and law maker. He said the more we understood about the past, the less likely we’d be to make the same mistakes in the future. That’s why he left. He said we were about to repeat some of the most fundamental of human mistakes by trusting the G.E.G. completely.”

That argument sounded familiar. There were radical Politicians who believed the G.E.G. had served their purpose and now only hoped to hold onto power.
 

“History and science,” he continued. “They never seemed to get along, because history tells us what science is trying to do will fail. Societies only take so much control before they start to feel the pressure of questions. My father helped create many of the laws the Republic abides by currently. He used history to predict the reactions of the Citizens to every law laid out by science, but questions are brewing, Niko. Questions the Republic fear. Do we really still need the G.E.G.? Are the rumors true? Can the G.E.G. modify DNA however they like in the embryos now so we can break up the Colonies and give complete choice back to the people? Or, is choice dangerous since human nature dictates a need to be confined so chaos doesn’t break out? Does the G.E.G. protect us from a Genetic Terrorism or does it protect us form ourselves?”

My jaw dropped. Of course we needed the Genetic Engineering Guild! Of course we needed to maintain proper genetic lines or a degeneration
 
would begin. I’d seen it in my pigs. I’d been working on their stem cells, and ended up causing more mutations than I fixed. We couldn’t completely modify DNA yet, and those rumors were dangerous. Mutations would run rampant, and the human race would—

Xavi interrupted my thoughts with a laugh. “History isn’t exactly working for us, is it? Coins mark the path of power. Think of all the faces that graced every form of money, and in the end, they all end up being markings without meanings. They are faces stamped onto metal, and when you bite into a coin or feel it in your fingers, the metal feels so solid and immovable. We don’t need physical money anymore, because Citizens have their tablets and their ration cards, but those who rule want us to carry mini-reminders in our pockets that they exist and have power over us. They want us to remember the ‘truths’ they’ve fed us with something tangible, but they forget truth doesn’t matter. They forget that, under the right kind of pressure and heat, all metals are malleable. It’s how the very faces of the Republic found their way onto these coins. They put the right amount of pressure on the world and inflicted the right amount of heat on the people. My father? He was a master coin maker…”

“But—“ I tried to interrupt. I tried to tell him about the time I thought I’d figured it out, but I hadn’t. Aeschylus actually laughed when I showed him my proposal for my genetic modification research. He told me to keep trying, and we’d meet again that next week. But, that next week, everything changed, and I was no longer a Citizen.
 

“Either way, the Republic needs the G.E.G., huh? Without structure, human nature takes over and chaos follows. They need to believe in something. They need a cause to fight for. My father worried that people thirst for change during every cycle of power. When the idea of change roots in the head, it multiplies. It’s why my father left. When people fear corruption, they begin to see it everywhere, and they want to uproot the balance of power. It’s how leadership changes hands… How coins change faces…”
 

“You don’t know though. You couldn’t. The G.E.G. cannot modify DNA so completely! They’re trying. I’ve tried— We
 
need the G.E.G. to protect us from genetic anomalies.“

“Look at where you are, Niko. Look at who you’ve met. Do they look like they care about anomalies? Vagabonds see the world differently, and they are willing to fight for what they see.”
 

“He was an idiot to leave you,” Ono whispered.
 

Ono. It was funny how quickly the name shifted in my brain. It felt more appropriate than Flea now, because he wasn’t a nuisance any longer. Even in the way he defended me against the invisible Xavi told me he was in my corner.
 

The train rumbled past and disappeared into a dot before we ran up to the tracks. “Let it cool first,” Xavi said.
 

We looked at where the coins bled into each other on the rail. Copper on silver, a mushed oval that used to be perfect circles. The copper bled over one side a little where the coins shifted under the wheel, and it made two divots.
 

Xavi pulled out some fishing line while we waited. “If you lay them just right, it makes this part easy.” He picked up the coins— or coin, wrapped the fishing line around it a few times on the divots, and tied it off. He dangled the strange necklace in front of my face before he pulled it around my head. The line dug a little on the back of my neck, but eventually I’d forget it was there. “You see, Niko. When all is said and done, a coin is just a coin. It can change faces just as easily as people can, and, sometimes, you can’t get back the face that used to be there. Sometimes, you have to accept change, even if it means change is forever. You can’t go back to that old world, because it’ll never be as it was for you. You’ve seen too much. You’ve changed too much. And you have to accept that. You don’t have to forget who you were, because it helped you become who you are. But you do have to let it go to a degree, because you can never, ever get it back.”
 

I didn’t realize the tears were there until one fell right on the smashed coins in my hands. It glistened against the smooth metal. It ran against the clear fishing line. I tucked the medallion under my shirt, next to my heart, knowing that even my heart was forever altered.
 

“Thanks. That means a lot,” I whispered. “I know I—“

But a movement caught my attention, and I jumped to my feet. It was a brown, frayed bag making its entrance, followed by a pair of dirty, grungy hands.
 

The boy, when he entered, took a moment for his eyes to adjust, and his smile grew wide when he saw us. “Hey there! Mind if I hop on?”

Chapter Eleven

The new boy had green eyes with a gray look. Shadows grew where his eyelids pooled, and I could tell he hadn’t been getting much sleep. I didn’t know how I felt about the intrusion, because I knew it meant I should say goodbye to Ono. “My bared teeth are broken chains,” the boy had said within the first few minutes, and I shook my head. If Ono was looking for the Rebels, this boy was his chance. It’d be wrong of me not to let him take it, and I began to think of a way to let Ono in on the revelation.
 

“Name’s Gray,” he said with a look of disappointment.
 

“Knucs. This is Flea.”