SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

These days, he says once my vocational training is done, he’ll formally request me for a position. They’ll pay me peanuts, but maybe one day, one day , I’ll earn enough for my passage away from this place. But I’m not holding my breath.

I take out my latest project from the storage lockers lining the back wall. Tokala once asked me what it’s supposed to be. Told him I didn’t know, but that’s not true.

I lay everything out on a workbench. Overlapping metal and plastic feathers riveted together. Kept in segments to hide the truth. The light catches the silver and bronze rivets, the polished edges of the plastic. My chest constricts at the sight of my wings.

Dr. Veler says it’s healthy to have a creative outlet for all the emotions locked up inside. They need to get out, to be free. Let your mind soar, she told me once, and it will be easier to forget my prison. I haven’t told her about these. She’d probably say something like because I’m so secretive about them, I don’t know, I must have an unhealthy fixation on their symbolic nature or some crap like that.

There’s no winning with psychiatrists.

Dinner’s usually tinned military rations or rehydrated nutrition bars pressed into molds with a rotating array of sauces dumped over top. The convicts are kept busy enough it doesn’t matter so much what they eat, so long as they do. Orphans aren’t so lucky.

I take my tray and join a woman in an orange jumpsuit, ankles hobbled by magnetized shackles. She has brown hair going gray and a face that was once beautiful, now unremarkable. But a small smile changes all that when she sees me and slaps the plastic chair beside her.

“Zhen. How was school today?” Shima asks.

I scoff. The “school” is the minimum required by law since the mining company realized too late they’d be responsible for any offspring their penal workers had. Dr. Veler’s been giving me extra work to do for months so I’d have an easier time getting caught up if I ever left this place. Not that it matters now.

Shima chuckles into her water. “You should’ve seen it. I was called into the shift leader’s office today—”

“What was it this time?”

“Hey. What’s with you? I could’ve done something good. You ever think of that?”

I raise my eyebrows. Shima said what she did wasn’t so bad to warrant sterilization, same with many of the other convicts. That’s why she was given the opportunity to work off her sentence. But she never told me how much time she had left. I always assumed it was until her body finally quit on her.

Shima holds up her hands. “Fine. I’ve been a couple of seconds late with my timing on the line. Marty thinks it’s my joints, repetitive stress, whatever. Gotta appointment with the company doc tomorrow. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.”

I take a bite of some sort of loaf covered in a thick yellow sauce with green specks.

“While I was in there, the foremen asks Marty to come to the observation room when his shift’s over. I give Marty a hard time about it—ask him what he’s done wrong. He tells me there’s been a research vessel in the area. To examine how Saturn affects Titan’s orbit or something.”

She leans toward me. “But get this. They refused the staff’s greetings and offer to socialize even though they’re moving through the area slow enough to stopover. Marty denied it, but I think he was disappointed—bet they’re starved for fresh faces.”

“Huh.”

Shima’s eyes twinkle despite the cafeteria’s tinny light. “Like a bunch of uptight scientists would have anything to do with the morons here. Ha!”

“Still, new faces couldn’t hurt.”

She nods. “Marty said after this the staff may need to reinvigorate the social life on the rig for ‘morale’ since our next shipment isn’t for another month.”

I roll my eyes.

“I know. Me and the others are still annoyed they busted up the gaming ring a few months ago.”

I push around the so-called food on my plate with my plastic fork. “But didn’t someone die?”

“What’s good for morale is different for us. And death ain’t so bad when you’re chained to the line.” Shima frowns into her cup.

I bite my lip. “Dr. Veler contacted my relatives on Earth to see if they’d sponsor my travel to one of the other colonies or something.” The words rush out of me. “Your parents are dead.”

Shima snorts. “I could’ve told you that.”

I blink up at her. “You knew?”

“Well, yeah. They’re my parents.”

And my grandparents, but I guess that’s never occurred to her. I shove back from the table.

She looks up. “What’s with you?”

I square my shoulders, electricity crackling under my skin. “Told Tokala I’d help him in the shop.”

Her eyes narrow, then she smiles. “You’re a good kid, Zhen.”

I don’t know what to say to that. We’ve never been close. We don’t talk about these kinds of things, so when she does act motherly—the times I can count on one hand—I freeze up, hyperaware of the awkwardness.

I settle on, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Back to the machine shop. The only answer for today.

Tokala’s closed things up. But he gave me the override code within six months of first letting me onto the floor.

I get out my wings. I can’t ignore what they’re supposed to be. Not any longer. Dr. Veler said it herself. I need to find a way to fly from here, rise up from my past. I don’t care if my poor impulse control’s taking over or not.

When we learned in school that on Titan, people can fly, I started working on my wings. And I guess subconsciously I’ve been waiting for a reason to see if the rumors are true.

With the last rivet welded into place, my metal and plastic feathers in perfect order, I have my wings. I just need a subzero suit.

Those are kept in the maintenance bay. It’s not hard to bypass the door security—orphans learn to do that early on—and I grab the first suit I find. I get it on, seal it up tight, then fit the wings’ rubber and canvas straps over my shoulders. Like two halves of a heart, the wings run the length of each arm, the tips jingling against concrete floors as I make my way to the upper deck.

I stand on the railing. The thick atmosphere settles over me as door alarms protest. The other orphans—and the convicts—are always setting them off. I’ve got a few minutes at least to work up my courage before security comes. I stare into Titan’s haze.

There’s nothing here for me. I knew that for a while, but…now is the time to do something about it.

I jump off the railing, higher than I ever could’ve managed inside the rig. My heart stops as my ascent slows, and I tip forward into the sky.

The drag of the wings digs the straps into my shoulders almost immediately. Opening my arms wide, I hold them like that for a count of three, and wait for that fraught moment when I’ll know just how good my handiwork is.

The wings hold. I pump my arms, fly a few feet higher, and lean right to angle myself toward my future.

If the research vessel is here to monitor Saturn’s interaction with Titan, that makes it easy to navigate. I just have to aim for the yellow-orange disk eclipsing the sky. With luck, I’ll catch up to the ship before it gets too far.

The suit keeps out the cold—true. But the heat my body exerts to keep me aloft is thick inside the layers, slow to escape. Sweat pricks my eyes as I flap and glide and flap some more.

I fly around clouds of hydrocarbons when I can. Titan’s covered in them. Methane, ethane, tholins…it’s cold enough they behave like water on Earth—collecting in clouds, raining down on the surface, and then returning to the atmosphere where the process starts all over again.