Scott Cleveland - Pale Boundaries

Terson’s throat constricted. He gripped the edge of the table as the room swam around him, unbidden memories of his first incarceration welling up in an inexorable tide.

“Just between you and me,” the magistrate continued, “the two cadets that jumped you are thugs. What you did was justified to a degree, considering what they might have done to someone without your… background, but I have no doubt that you would have killed one or both of them if their plain-clothed friend hadn’t interceded. Rest assured that they will be dealt with appropriately, but make no mistake: you are absolutely worthless to this society as you are. I’ll let you walk out that door once, but if you cross paths with this court again, ever, you might just as well hang yourself.”

Terson lay across the hydrojet’s impeller engine cowling fighting a new fuel pump into place. His fingers located the bolt hole by touch and he maneuvered the pump into place. Supporting it with his other hand, he reached out for the bolt and found—nothing. “Son of a bitch! Fuck!”

“Hey, watch the dirty talk!” a feminine voice quipped.

Terson peered under his left armpit to find Virene watching him from the dock. “Do me a favor?”

“You’ll have to do more than talk dirty,” she warned.

“Yeah, ha ha. There’s a bolt on the deck down here somewhere. Will you get it for me?”

She hopped onto the boat and peered around. “What kind of bolt? There are a lot of them.”

“About twelve centimeters long.”

“Male centimeters, or the real ones?”

“Geez,” Terson barked. “You never quit!”

“Not when I’m winning. This one?” She handed it over and rubbed the grease off her fingers against the pier’s weathered surface while Terson got it started.

Terson stood and peeled off his shirt, wadding it into a ball as he scrubbed the worst of the oil and grime from his hands, stalling until his fastidiousness became awkward.

“You don’t get much sun,” she observed. Terson’s face and hands were darker than the girl’s own honey complexion, but his skin was white as ivory from neck to wrists, unblemished except for a crosshatch of scars.

“I guess not. You want a beer or something?”

“Sure.”

Terson took two bottles from the deck cooler and twisted off the tops. “So what brings you here?”

“Curiosity,” Virene shrugged. “I wondered what happened to you.”

“Bragg give you my address?”

“He uses his wife’s name for his password. Your file didn’t say anything about jail, so I figured you must have gotten off.”

“The magistrate sentenced me to college,” Terson shrugged. “I guess he pulled some strings to get me into the Spaceflight Training School at Malone.”

“That’s amazing,” she smiled. “I had you pegged for a plant psychiatrist specializing in thorny shrubs and nettles, the bane of geraniums and flowering houseplants.”

Terson smiled despite himself. “You think you’re funny?”

The tips of her ears reddened. “I hope you think so.”

Terson finished his beer. “I’ll have the engine together in an hour,” he said. “Want to go for a ride?”

“I’d love to,” she smiled. “Or did you mean in the boat?”

The channel between the reef and the island’s shore looked like the miss-stroke of an artist’s brush, a slash of blue amid the pale green of shallower water. Terson blinked his eyes irritably. His brain chose the damnedest times to remind him that the shadows were just a bit too sharp, the light too intense. He couldn’t blame it all on his brain, though; he’d pretty much ignored it during the long post-wedding party the night before. He flared back later than he should have and the hydrojet met the ocean with a jar. Beside him Virene opened her eyes, awakened by the slap and bounce of the craft’s hull as it settled into the water.

The small island was formed by a minor volcanic vent that emerged five hundred kilometers west of the main archipelago. It boasted two cones, one a little over one hundred meters above sea level, the other slightly less than fifty. The forces that created them had been dormant for centuries, and the sea worked at the windward bulwark of black cliffs relentlessly, grinding them down one millimeter at a time.

Virene smiled at her husband as the growl of impellers drowned out the rhythmic assault. He was a sharp contrast to the man she’d met a year earlier. Tanned skin accentuated coils of muscle in his arms and legs where once the very idea of exposing limbs was foreign. Around strangers he stood reserved, but no longer surly. He’d softened over time, but was by no means tamed. Her parents had made their disapproval painfully clear from the moment they learned of the affair. He was dangerous, they said, undisciplined and lawless. Virene did not disagree: they were the very attributes that made him so attractive.

Rough rock walls slid past. The island’s lagoon was the remnant of a volcanic crater. At some point the ocean had worked its way through the hardened magma, creating a thirty-meter long curved canal nearly invisible from outside the reef. The bottom sloped to a depth of four meters, and then dropped off into blue, impenetrable depths. Along one side of the lagoon a huge tree had fallen into the water. Eventually tunneling sea worms would break it up, but in the meantime it made a serviceable dock.

Virene jumped out and made the boat fast while Terson held it snug against the tree with the impeller. He slid out the gangplank and gave her a hand back aboard, and they slipped into each other’s arms. She flicked her tongue past his teeth teasingly as his hands slid down her back and fingers slipped beneath the waistband of her shorts.

She stepped back with a grin. “You’ve still got that kind of energy after last night?”

“Warming up.” He stood back, ogling her. “That outfit looks uncomfortable. Why don’t you slip out of it?”

Virene pointed at the equipment locker behind the cockpit. “I think you’ve got some work to do, first.” She turned with a grin and vanished below deck. “Call me when you’re done!”

Terson pulled the tent from the locker without enthusiasm. Virene found camping a great adventure. Terson, conversely, had spent his share of time among creatures that flew and bit, crawled and bit, and swam and bit. Given the choice, he preferred the boat’s cabin. He carried the tent onto the beach and checked his rifle before slinging it across his back and taking a machete to the overgrown campsite.

The blade sang as it sliced through tender regrowth, eliciting pleasant ghosts of home. When he closed his eyes and sucked in the hot, humid air he could almost be home, except that the wind smelled like salt instead of jungle rot.

Rivulets of sweat streamed down his chest by the time he finished assembling the tent, the most irritating sign that his body had acclimated to the new environment. He walked back down to the hydrojet where Virene stretched out on the front deck wearing nothing but the skimpy thong she’d purchased a few months after they met, the only compromise she was willing to make with the authorities after repeated arrests for sunbathing in nothing at all. Terson leaned over the edge of the boat to fill a bait bucket with water and slipped along the walk between the guardrail and the main cabin wall.

A torrent of water hit him from above.

“I knew your intentions weren’t honorable,” Virene laughed. Terson’s counterstrike left her soaked and sputtering, dark red bangs plastered to her forehead.

“Never talk when you should run,” Terson advised.