Elizabeth Bear - Scardown

Genie turned to face her sister as Leah came into the room, checkered skirt flipping around her knees, transiently lovely as girls on the edge of adolescence can be. “Leah, what's jambalaya?”

“Like rice and stuff?” Leah glanced at Elspeth for confirmation, tossing her carryall at the bench in the corner. She was already almost as tall as the older woman. “Can I have a—. Oh, thanks.” She giggled and dragged a stool beside Genie's as Elspeth slid the second plate across the bar. “Have you talked to Dad?”

“Just an hour or so ago. He and Jenny are safe on the ship. He gave me coordinates. We can look up tonight with the telescope and see it.” Elspeth dialed coffee on the tap and fixed herself a cup before walking around the counter to sit beside the girls. I need to bring some tea over, she thought, and grinned privately. If Gabe's going to come home to my toothbrush and towels, I guess a few things in the kitchen cabinet won't hurt .

Typical. Wait till the boy is seventy, eighty vertical miles away to move in. “What do you two want to do after homework?”

“I've got flight simulation,” Leah said. “At six, at the lab.” She sighed, absently touching the shiny interface hidden under her streaked wheat-straw hair. “It's so weird being at the office with Dad gone.”

Elspeth leaned her elbows on the sealed and brushed concrete breakfast bar. “Have you found out when you're supposed to go up to Clarke? Any of your group of trainee pilots?”

Genie poked Leah. Leah caught her sister's hand and pressed it against her side, finishing her sandwich with the other hand. “Ellie, I don't know if they're even planning on taking us up. Training and simulations, and flying the mock starship here and there and mostly into planets. But they won't tell us if we're ever going up or not. Or even which of us are getting picked for the enhancements. There's like a hundred candidates, and I've only met the thirty or so in my class.”

“You will be,” Elspeth said, turning her mug on her fingertips, hiding her worry. Leah had already had the much less invasive surgery to ready her body for a neural virtual reality hookup. The nanosurgeons that produced the augmented reflexes and senses of a starship pilot were much more dangerous — derived from the same alien tech as the Montreal 's faster-than-light drive — and the process was very poorly understood. “They'll need all of you trained eventually. I expect they'll have Jenny teach you. She used to be a drill instructor.”

“I know,” Leah said, and let Genie's hand fall. “I miss Richard, Ellie.”

“I know,” Elspeth twisted her fingers together, feeling the uselessness of someone relegated to observerhood, someone whose work is done. “I miss him, too.”

12:34 AM

Saturday 4 November, 2062

Bloor Street

Toronto, Ontario

I should go home, Elspeth thought, shutting Genie's bedroom door. It beats sleeping on the sofa . She crossed the living room, past the small telescope they'd just brought back down from the roof, and ran a hand over tan tweed. Leah was almost fourteen, after all. And responsible for her age. And Elspeth was only a message away.

Half absently, Elspeth walked around the end table. Back down the hall past the girls' rooms, to the door standing ajar at the end. She laid a finger against it and let it drift open, creaking softly. “Lights up,” she said under her breath.

The bed was unmade, Gabe's robe thrown across the blue down comforter. Clothes draped pegs and chairbacks, and Elspeth smiled around a sting. “Screw it,” she whispered. “Lights down.” The head of the bed was below the window. She climbed up on it and leaned against the headboard, breasts on her arms, forehead warm against the glass. Outside, for once, no rain was falling, and the Toronto night glistened. She imagined she heard the creak of autumn branch on branch in a fickle wind. There would be frost by morning. Her apartment seemed very empty, and very far away.

She looked up, picking out a few bright stars through the city glow, closing her eyes to imagine the single gleaming fleck that was the Montreal, arcing out and away from Earth with Gabe and Jenny and Richard within its aggressively engineered hull. A hull that seemed fragile as a soap bubble blown into the void.

Without bothering to pull her jeans off, Elspeth lay down in Gabe Castaign's empty bed and pulled the comforter up to her chin, burying her face in his pillow.

Afternoon

Sunday 5 November, 2062

McCaul Street

Toronto, Ontario

It was cold in the city, colder than Razorface thought of November as being. A wind picked at his collar as he walked aimlessly along the sidewalk, watching traffic and pedestrians with half his attention. He was in Toronto to deliver a little justice: the sort of justice you only got if you made it happen yourself, because nobody was likely to care if a few street kids got ground up in the corporate machine.

The problem was that he had the feeling he'd bitten off something much bigger than his head, and he didn't exactly know where to start chewing on it.

His boots scraped heavily on the sidewalk. The inflated cast on his broken ankle put an uncomfortable hitch in his stride, and he paused in front of a Canadian Army recruiting office to glower at the green-uniformed soldiers in the projections flickering between the layers of window glass. Maker would know what to do.

But Maker had other things to worry about. And Razorface was too old to baby-sit.

He was turning away again when the storefront of the recruiting office blew out.

The explosion was too loud to hear, over before Razorface could react. He felt himself hit the street and the stones and shatterproofed holo-glass thump onto his back like angry fists and boots. He didn't quite manage to get his arms over his head, and his right temple felt the way the inside of a blood orange looks: pulpy and purple-black.

He opened his eyes. It was almost as dark outside his head as in and he tasted brick dust along with blood and the usual tang of steel. His fingers came away sticky when he pressed them against his shaved-slick scalp. He blinked grit from his eyes, smelling cold garbage and smoke. Nothing seemed broken.

“Fuck me,” Razorface grunted, and put a massive hand down flat on the pavement. Broken glass scored his palm. He pushed himself to his knees, scraps of broken brick and mortar sliding from black leather as — hobbled by the inflatable cast — he struggled to get his right leg under him. A small hand appeared in front of his face. He looked up into a pair of black-brown eyes. “Rough town,” he said to a young Oriental woman who didn't flinch from the glitter of his teeth. He grabbed her outreached hand; she dragged him up with surprising strength.

“You wanna stay away from government offices today,” she said. “Guy Fawkes Day.”

“What's that?”

A siren kicked up, somewhere close. She gave him a sidelong grin and walked away without a backward glance, dusting her hands on her trousers. Reminding him of his friend Bobbi Yee: pretty, maybe twenty-five. Razorface spat through the rows of prosthetic steel teeth that gave him his name, and turned away from the smoking facade of the recruiting office. The pigs would be along any second, and he didn't want to be identified as a witness any more than he wanted to think about what had happened to Bobbi. Questions would lead to more questions, and inevitably to the unanswerable one: what he was doing in Canada without having passed an official border post.