Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

“Do it,” she hissed at him. “The sooner we get there, the sooner you can eat.”

Her temple hurt as she concentrated. I am a shadow, she thought. Just a shadow. She backed up against the plastic frame of an alley wall, tiptoed, and waited as Jared grunted and yanked at the manhole cover.

She slit the paper with a pocketknife and stepped through. She sealed it back up with several tiny pins fished out from her pocket and looked around. A few weeks ago this was someone’s apartment. A dead woman lay on the bed, the back of her head staved in. Spoiled cans of fish lay underneath the bed.

The manhole cover rustled outside. Jared grunted, then paused. “Kara? Are you sure we’re allowed to do this? This goes in .”

Someone had tried to eat the cans of fish, then thrown up.

“Kara? Where are you? Please don’t leave me. I’m sorry. I won’t complain again.”

Kara cut two small eyehole slits and watched the street as Jared turned around in a slow circle, looking for her. She could hear muffled sobs. Kara swallowed the lump in her throat, squeezed her wet eyes.

Sorry, Brother, she thought.

After another moment of crying Jared stopped, looked with a few sniffles, then unslung the knapsack and unzipped it. Kara looked down the street and saw what she’d been fearing: a wiry man with a bat walked down along the torn paper wall toward Jared.

She waited, waited until the man’s shadow crossed the paper in front of her, then burst out with the penknife. She stabbed him in the back with the four-inch-long blade as hard as she could, thrusting at his shadow through long, ragged strips of paper wall. The blade sunk in with a sickening puncturing sound and her victim screamed. He backhanded her, reaching up for the knife.

Jared sat and stared as Kara sprang off the ground. The man got hold of the knife and screamed again as he pulled it out.

“Get in the manhole, quickly.” Kara grabbed the backpack and zipped it. Jared looked up at her in something approaching awe. And fear.

They clambered down the ladder into the skin of their world, aiming for the hull.

“Faster,” she ordered her little brother. Neither of them had the strength to replace the manhole cover from inside. Soon someone would come after them. Either the man she’d stabbed, or someone else noticing the racket.

It was quiet down here. And sterile, like the inside of a house, but on and on and on. No natural sounds, just a steady thrum. Biolights ran along a track on the floor and a strip over their heads. The smoothly bored rock walls with metallic vacuumseal sprayed on were physically painted blue with red or green numerals indicating where they were, just as Kara had hoped.

Stratatoi would soon realize they had intruders in the heart of their domain, inside the warrens and corridors honeycombing the great hull of the world. She had mumbled the words to shut down the telltales inside her that would report where she was, but she wasn’t sure she had done such a good job on Jared. Thankfully they couldn’t see through his eyes; she’d taken his contacts out the day the Catastrophe had fully realized itself.

Kara kept Jared moving with expert shoves and a kick or two. He stumbled a lot. Eventually he sat down, refusing to go farther.

“We’re lost,” he cried.

“No, we’re not,” Kara snapped. Then, softer: “I know where we are. Trust me.”

“We’re lost and they’re going to find us.” Jared clutched the sack.

If they stayed here, giving up, then, yes. Kara grabbed his arm and squeezed it. “You get back up or that man will come after us and kill us for sure. I can leave you here for him.” Jared got back up. “Keep going straight,” Kara said, her voice cracking.

Somehow he’d forgive her. For know, she just wanted to make sure he lived. Her little brother was all she had left.

They went deeper in, following mental maps. Twice she used her invisibility trick to avoid stratatoi walking the corridors. She would hold a hand over Jared’s mouth, lean against the cold wall, and freeze. The stratatoi were looking for something. She hoped it wasn’t them.

Jared’s stomach growled loudly enough for her to hear several times. She wondered if that would give them away at some crucial point.

They finally got to it: a small access door leading to what looked like a utility room. Kara stood and stared at it for a second, looking at a tag that told her the door was more than it seemed. She walked forward and kissed the cold metal.

Did the stratatoi know about this place? Her parents had found the location when digging around ancient hand-drawn pictures from the original colonists, the pireties. History was frowned on but protected by the general Emancipation. People like her mom and dad pieced together what they could from records hidden deep in human-made lamina. And they’d found this alternate control room. The primary control room had been destroyed in a suicidal fight between the hopolites and the stratatoi two weeks ago when the hopolite insurrection against the habitat’s Satrap began. The hopolites had slowly been exterminated ever since. The Satrap was rumored to have moved into the secondary control center and reinforced it with hordes of stratatoi.

But the great engineers who had designed Agathonosis did so in triplicate.

When Kara convinced the first door to open, her breath caught. The doors were several feet thick, not the standard utility inch that they seemed to be. They groaned loudly, echoing through the corridors as they opened, one after the other.

“In, in, now!”

They ran in, sideways, squeezing themselves into a twenty-by-twenty-foot room. Dusty control panels ringed the entire room, and several chairs with illegal neural jacks sat in a corner.

“Jackpot,” Kara whispered, even as she spoke the riddles and poems to close the two sets of doors behind them. She started crying. “Jackpot.”

She’d been a zombie until now, just focused on getting here, hoping to make it, doing anything to make it.

The doors sealed behind them. She walked over and started waving panels into life. Jared looked at a display that showed the outside corridor.

“When they come for us, we won’t be able to get back out,” he said, furrowing his brow. “There’s only one way out.”

“I know.”

“How long can we stay in here?”

Kara unsealed the knapsack and helped Jared lay out the contents. “A few days,” she said. “That’s long enough. Long enough for someone to reach us.”

The can of beans made her salivate just looking at the picture. She also took out several dried, salted small fish, and some crackers in packets.

And a dirty cloth doll, with red, clumpy hair. Jared snatched it away.

“Can I eat?” Jared stared at the can of beans and licked his lips. His hands trembled.

“The fish.”

Kara handed them to him and packed the crackers and beans away. Jared needed protein right now. But more than anything they were both going to need fruit soon enough. She was pretty sure he was getting scurvy. Or maybe a half dozen other types of malnutrition problems.

Jared took the fish off to a corner and began eating, smacking his lips noisily in a way that, several months ago, she would have hit him for. And the doll, that Raggedy Andy doll, she would have snatched it from him.

But that was all he had now, and he clutched the doll protectively under an arm.

She turned to the panel by the door, put her thumb to it, and the corners of her mouth tugged up. When the stratatoi came to the doors, trying to shoot or hack their way in, they’d find she’d locked them shut with some old security codes. Ones that would only allow the doors to open from an inside command.