Shivren

The sirens fade by degrees.

Not stop. They just sink behind the walls, swallowed by distance and old metal.

By the time Marek finally stops, we are somewhere beneath the eastern docking ring, between a coolant tower and a row of shuttered food stalls. Station dawn has started to touch the glass overhead. Beyond the pressure barrier, Serathiel crests over the curve of Karth Knox.

Marek notices me looking at the conduit still in his hand and drops it. It hits the ground with a hollow clang. Classy.

I bend forward, hands on my knees, and try to breathe. My lungs burn. My cheek stings where the soldier's shot threw metal into the air. My jacket is torn at the collar, half my tips are gone from running, and I am fairly certain I have fled a Dominion inspection with a loan shark who had wanted me dead by breakfast.

So, naturally, I ask the important question.

"Why did they want that guy so bad?"

Marek looks at me. "What?"

"The one in white. Pretty. Talkative. No card sense. Why did they almost turn the whole casino into scrap over him?"

Marek's mouth twists. "Empire always want things."

I could correct him. Yet I have recently watched him knock a soldier unconscious against a wall, so I don't. "Do they?" I ask instead.

"Do they not teach you history?"

"Not the important stuff, I guess."

Marek looks away from me toward the pressure glass. The sunrise makes the side of his face look tired. Less polished, somehow. The Freeborn edges in his voice feel sharper out here, away from the laughter and music of the casino.

I catch myself staring at him. Like I could read his mind and figure out what he was going to do with me. Maybe sell me to the Dominion for papers. I end up focusing on the way his eyes squint towards Serathiel. The pressure glass tints just enough that no one looking out of it goes blind from the star. But he squints anyway.

He has to be closer to forty than thirty—well, for humans. But I knew that already. Rumors traded over drinks and whispered between the hands of cards. The Freeborn Traitor who was old enough to have fought when Umbra burned. Meanwhile I was eight and catching lizards and wondering when my father would come home. I was totally oblivious to what went on in other galaxies. In some ways I still am.

"The Empire of Seo does not send people like that to places like this for games," Marek says.

Right. Umbra. The Dominion too, long ago, though they call it something softer now instead of war. Probably for the kids who were taught about it. Stabilization. Protection. Unification. Before rights. Before uprisings. Before people who looked exactly like Marek carved freedom out of empires. These days, the governments still hate each other in all three galaxies. Just enough, but never tipping the scale far enough for war. But that still doesn't explain what that guy did, except go somewhere without permission. His stupidity, and mine for running, could get us both killed.

"So what?" I say. "The pretty idiot is Seo."

Marek gives me a look, head tilted slightly. "Pretty idiot?"

"Yeah. The other one at the table. He hit on nineteen."

"That is what concerns you?" His eyes move toward the underside of the docking ring, where red inspection lights pulse in the distance. "Whatever he is, whatever they are, you are not involved," he says.

I stare at him. Then I laugh. It comes out sharp and ugly and a little breathless.

"I'm not involved? I fled a Dominion inspection, and now I'm hiding under the dock ring with a man who threatened to kill me."

"I did not threaten."

"Horatio did it on your behalf. Very efficient management style."

A voice crackles from a station speaker overhead.

"Docking ring E through H: remain sealed by order of the Sovereign Dominion. All unauthorized persons are to submit for inspection."

The speaker hisses, then repeats the message in three languages, one of them Umbran. Marek's expression does something bitter when he hears it.

"Come," he says.

"Again?"

"They will search this level next."

"And where exactly are we going?"

He starts walking away from me. "Somewhere they will not look."

Somewhere they will not look turns out to mean somewhere I would not look, either.

We move through the station's lower rings. Not running. Not exactly. He knows which bulkhead seams are wide enough to slip through if you turn your shoulders. I follow him because I do not have a better idea.

The station changes around us. The casino levels are polished metal and recycled air. Down here, the walls sweat. The lighting shifts from clean white to the amber-brown of old bulbs. Pipes run exposed along the ceiling, humming and clanking.

Marek stops at a junction, listens, takes the left passage without explaining why. We come out in a vending alcove. Four machines built into the wall of a corridor that probably has a name that nobody remembers. Two of the machines are dark. One sells nutrient packs with labels faded past reading. The fourth still has a working screen, cycling ads for something called FizzBlast. The floor is sticky. The air smells like old coolant and something sweet.

Marek wedges his fingers behind the frame of the darkest machine and pulls. The panel shifts, just enough to show a gap between the machine and the wall. Behind it, a maintenance crawlspace runs back into the station's guts, lined with exposed conduit and insulation. A thin mattress pad that might have been blue once. A dented storage crate. A battery lantern that looks like it survived two wars.

"No," I say.

Marek's hand lands on my shoulder and moves me through the gap anyway.

I catch myself on the far wall in a space too small to turn around in. Elbow on conduit. Knee on the crate. The mattress smells like someone else's life.

Marek follows, pulls the panel shut behind him. The alcove goes dark except for a thin seam of corridor light. He finds the lantern by touch, clicks it on. Yellow. Weak. Makes everything look worse, including him.

I sit on the mattress because there is nowhere else to sit.

"Is this where it happens?" I ask. "Because I have to say, I expected more atmosphere."

Marek does not answer. He crouches at the crate and unlatches it like a man who has opened this exact crate under worse circumstances. My hands are shaking. I fold my arms so he will not see.

He pulls out a shirt, folded, dark, too large, and an orange, and does not throw either one gently.

I turn the orange over in my hand like it might do something. "Why the orange?"

"Because it is what is in the crate."

That is somehow the most honest thing he has said all night.

His own jacket comes off next, folded and set on the crate lid with more care than he has shown anything else. His shirt underneath is dark with sweat at the collar.

I put the shirt on. The sleeves swallow my hands. The hem falls to mid-thigh. I look like a child in someone else's laundry.

Marek sits against the opposite wall, legs out, and closes his eyes.

I take the stolen money out of my jacket. Chips, a few loose high-mark notes. Not much after running. Enough that if I had to guess what it was worth against eighty thousand marks, I would guess "an insult."

I hold it out anyway, because I want to see what he does with it. "Here."

He opens one eye. Looks at the money. Looks at me.

"Put it away."

"That's not a no."

"Not enough to matter tonight." He closes the eye again. "Account we discuss later. When there is account left to discuss. Not in a hole."

"So I still owe you."

"You always owe me. Tonight changes nothing."

I sit with that. It is not the answer I wanted, and it is the only answer that makes sense—the debt does not dissolve because he liked being pulled out of gunfire. I put the money back in my jacket.

"You could have let them take me," I say. "Would have solved your accounting problem."

"Would have solved nothing. Dead men do not pay debt."

His jaw does something small. I decide not to push it, mostly because the crawlspace is too short to run away if I say the wrong thing.

The silence goes on long enough that I have to fill it or start thinking about worse things.

"They'll check employment logs," I say. "They'll check the cage. They will notice I am gone, and you. They will see I have been sending money to a medical station. They will—"

"Callisto."

"They'll—"

"Stop."

I stop. My hands are still shaking. The orange is still in my left hand, and I have been squeezing it without noticing, and now my palm is wet with something sharp and clean and nothing like this crawlspace.

I think about my mother.

She is probably awake. She wakes early now before the lights shift to simulate morning. Waits for me to call, because I always call. She will notice in the way she notices things now—not the reason, just the absence. She will ask the nurses when I am coming. They will tell her what they always tell her. She will forget and ask again.

She thinks that I am safe and clean and sending money from a desk somewhere. If the Dominion traces that money, if they find her, if they stand in her room and ask her questions about a son she cannot quite hold onto—

I stand up too fast and hit my head on the ceiling. I wince but don't care.

"I have to get to her."

Marek opens his eyes. "Sit down."

"She’s sick. She doesn't remember things—"

"I know this." Two words. He does not spend more on it than that.

I sit, mostly because my head hurts and there is nowhere else in this hole to put myself. "I need off this station. I need to get to her first."

Marek is quiet long enough that I think he is not going to answer at all.

"Not tonight," he says finally. "Station listens for name, for ticket, for anything moving toward the exit. You will die faster."

"So it's no."

"It is not yet." He says it like the word costs him something to hand over. "When we are off this station, then we talk about your mother."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only one I have that does not get you killed tonight."

It is not what I wanted. It is, I am beginning to suspect, the only kind of honesty he has.

I sit back down. My head throbs where I hit the ceiling. My eyes sting, which I will blame on the dust in here for as long as that lie holds up.

Marek looks at me for a moment too long.

"We have word for you. Where I come from." He says it plainly, like it costs him nothing. "Shivren."

"What's that mean?"

He is quiet, fingers curling like he's pulling the definition out by the root. "Child who wants now. Who does not wait. Everything is emergency to them."

"That's insulting."

"Yes."

"I saved your life tonight and you're calling me a brat."

"Yes." No softening in it. "You are still shivren. This is not contradiction."

I peel the orange because I need my hands to do something that is not shaking. The rind comes off in pieces I drop on the floor. The fruit is dry, a little bitter, and it is still the best thing I have eaten in days.

The dream comes in pieces.

An ocean somewhere that reflects stars. The water is black, something huge moving underneath the surface, making the waves crash harder against a shore I don't recognize. I try to look at my hands and can't. Somewhere behind me, close enough to touch, someone is saying my name in a voice that almost fits.

I jolt awake as something heavy lands on my chest.

For a second I don't know which dark I'm in—the one with the ocean or the real one, cramped and smelling of orange rind. My heart is going too fast. My hand comes up and closes around the fabric before my mind catches up with my body.

A jacket.

I sit up, and the tiny room comes back into focus by degrees. Marek is crouched near the gap, already moving like he never went to sleep in the first place. He's in a different jacket, longer than the one he was wearing last night, dark and worn at the elbows.

I hold the jacket out in front of me. Like the shirt, it's much too big for me. I can already tell the cuffs will swallow past my wrists. But at least it looks short enough to land roughly around where the shirt lands.

My mouth is dry and my lips are chapped. My throat sounds cracked when I speak. "Are we leaving?"

The next thing thrown at me is a pack. I don't catch it cleanly, fumbling it into my lap.

Marek looks unimpressed. I don't blame him. "Dock inspection is done," he says. I assume that means yes. He crouches at the crate and closes it. The lantern disappears into his bag without a glance. I try not to think about how many other hidden spaces this exact routine has happened in.

I get the jacket on and wrestle the strap of the pack over my shoulder. I follow him out through the gap behind the vending machine.

Then it's left at another junction that goes nowhere obvious. Down a service ladder, through a bulkhead seam that requires turning sideways.

"Where are we going?" I say, mostly to hear my own voice.

"Docks."

Bold plan. Very detailed.

"And once we're there?" I ask.

Marek doesn't answer that one. I don't know if that means he has an answer yet. That's somehow worse than if he'd lied.

The air at the docks is thin and metallic. The cold of space presses in through a hull that has seen better decades. Cargo haulers sit like sleeping animals. A few dockhands are back to work, shouting numbers between them. Nobody looks twice at two more bodies in dark jackets. It's almost normal, which is the strange part. Dominion soldiers stand posted at two of the berths, looking bored.

Marek slows at the mouth of the last row and presses a large hand flat against my chest to stop me before I can round the corner behind him.

"Wait."

He looks for a long moment until I shove his hand away.

"Dominion ship. Berth eleven." His voice has gone flatter than usual. "Military transport."

I lean past his shoulder to look. He's right. Sleek and black and armored in a way that makes the haulers around it look like toys. The boarding ramp is down. Two soldiers stand at its base. An officer moves along the row towards us, unhurried and stopping every dock worker he passes, glancing at whatever they are holding out to him.

Papers. He's checking papers.

"They always do that," I say quietly.

Marek doesn't stop my sudden confidence as I straighten my jacket and step out into the row like I have every right to be in it.

The officer reaches us before I've finished deciding what my fake name is.

"Papers," he says, already holding his hand out, already looking past us. Bored. This is good. Bored means routine.

I reach in my pocket. I don't actually have anything useful in it. My work permit for the station was the only identification I had on me at the casino. It was still in my other jacket that I had left behind and I am realizing this just now.

Marek's arm comes across my front and moves me back half a step.

"Mine," he says, and holds out a transit chit before the officer can ask twice.

The officer takes it without much interest, thumbs to the edge to wake the display, and I watch as he raises an eyebrow. Bored, I could work with. But now he just looks annoyed. “Marekilyan Tavarion Severin Othava—”

His eyes keep moving, his mouth does not.

I almost snort.

"This is expired," he says. "Six months." The officer turns the chit around to prove his point, already reaching for the comm at his collar with his other hand.

"Is not."

"It says right here—"

Marek's hand catches the side of his head before he finishes the sentence. No windup. Just the flat of his palm, and the officer's knees go out from under him into the bulkhead. Then a heavy boot comes down onto the transit chit. Smart.

Down at berth eleven, someone shouts.

Marek doesn't wait to see if it's about us. His hand closes around my jacket and hauls me sideways, away from the unconscious officer, toward a hauler two berths down.

We're three steps up the ramp when I hear it—not the shout from berth eleven, which has already faded back into the general noise of the dock, but something closer. A voice, still bored, still doing its job.

"Hey!. You two!"

Neither of us stops.

Marek doesn't even turn around. He shoves me up the last of the ramp ahead of him, one hand flat between my shoulder blades, and the voice behind us goes from bored to something else entirely.

"Hey! Stop! Dock security, hold position—"

We don't hold position.

Inside, the hauler is dim and cramped, cargo netting strung along one wall, crates lashed down in rows. Marek hits the ramp control without breaking stride.

"Cockpit," he says. "Now."

I don't ask which direction. I follow the only corridor that looks like it goes anywhere, past a narrow galley the size of a closet, into a cockpit built for someone with fewer opinions about legroom than either of us has. Marek drops into the pilot's seat like he's done this exact thing before, hands already moving across a console that isn't lit up yet.

I'm already crouched at the panel beside him before he finishes reaching for it. "Move," I say.

"What?"

"That's a Corvel-series ignition stack. You're about to flood the primary line." I don't wait for him to argue. My hands go to the console. My mother used to be an engineer. Something like this used to live at her kitchen table in pieces while she talked me through what each one did before dinner got cold. "You bypass the safety lock first."

Marek stares at me like I've started speaking Umbran.

I don't remember most of what happens next in order. There's the Dominion ship peeling off from berth eleven behind us, a warning shot that isn't a warning so much as a suggestion we stop existing. There's Marek's hands doing something complicated and fast to the console while swearing in Umbran, low and constant, a sound I'm starting to recognize as concentration rather than fear. There's the moment the atmosphere catches the hull and everything starts shaking hard enough that my teeth click together on their own.

The whole viewport gone the color of a struck match as we hit cloud layer, then storm, then something below the storm that comes up much faster than a planet is supposed to.

I wake upside down.

This seems worth mentioning before anything else, because it takes several seconds to understand why the floor is above me. Blood is doing something wrong in my head, pooling somewhere it shouldn't, and my ankle is doing something worse. The hauler groans around me, settling into whatever it's settling into. Water, somewhere close, moving slow and thick against the hull. Rain on metal, heavy and constant. And, threaded through all of it, a smell—sharp, sweet, everywhere.

Oranges.

Not one orange. Not a crate of oranges. The entire cargo hold's worth of oranges, split open across what used to be the ceiling, rolling and rocking gently in ankle-deep water with every settle of the hull.

"Marek."

No answer. I twist and find him a few feet away, already moving toward me through the wreckage with blood at his hairline.

"Do not move," he says.

"I wasn't planning that."

He gets a hand under my arm anyway and pulls me free. My ankle screams the second weight touches it, and I hear myself make a sound I'm not proud of. Marek doesn't comment on it. He just takes more of my weight than I offered him.

"Careful," he says. "Ankle is bad."

"I noticed. Thank you. Very helpful."

He looks past me, at the hold, at the hundreds of split and rolling oranges soaking in rainwater that's found its way in through some seam. It takes me a second to place it, because it looks wrong on him, like a language his face doesn't usually speak.

He looks delighted.

"Marek?"

He crouches, ignoring the very recent fact of our shared near death, and picks one up out of the water like it's something precious. Turns it over in his hand. Presses his thumb into the peel and breathes in.

"This entire cargo," he says, reverent in a way I did not know his voice could do, "is oranges."

"…Yes."

"Do you know how much these cost? In Dominion space. Fresh. Not the—" he makes a face "—the paste. The tube paste they sell as fruit."

"No."

"A fortune." He's already pulling more free of the water, stacking them in the crook of his arm like a man filling a basket at a market. "A small fortune. For this many. On Karth Knox, no less, where nothing grows because everything wants to eat you first."

"You do remember we crashed."

"I remember." He doesn't stop collecting oranges. "I also remember I have not had a good orange since I left Umbra."

"You gave me one last night."

"That one was old. Bruised. Sad orange." He says this with genuine mourning, like he's speaking of the dead. "These are perfect."

I stare at him—blood still at his hairline, jacket torn, standing ankle-deep in swamp water and fruit—and something in my chest does an unhelpful, complicated thing that I decide to blame entirely on the head injury.

"You are bleeding on my oranges."

"I'm bleeding on your oranges. Not the ship's oranges. Yours already."

"Yes." He says it like it settles something. "Mine."

He finally seems to remember my ankle exists, straightens, and gets his shoulder back under my arm.

"We should probably prioritize finding shelter over your fruit hoard," I say.

"Can do both."

"That's not—that's not how carrying an injured person works, Marek."

"Is exactly how it works. Watch."

Outside, he sets me down against what's left of the hauler's landing strut, more or less gently .I take the moment to actually look around, because up until now my entire understanding of Karth Knox has been a purple smear through a viewport and a very bad few seconds of falling.It is, unfortunately, exactly what it looked like from orbit.

The ship has come down at an angle in what I can only describe as a swamp—black water stretching out in every direction between roots the size of buildings, everything fermenting in a way that means something is always rotting. The rain hasn't stopped since we hit the atmosphere. It falls warm, like the planet itself has a fever. Somewhere out past the treeline, something makes a sound I don't have a word for and don't want to learn one for. Violet light bleeds through the canopy from the storm system.

"Marek," I say. "This is a swamp. We should—"

No answer. I look over just in time to watch him disappear back up into the wreck without a word, still holding his armful of oranges like they're something that might get taken from him. He's gone long enough that I start doing the math on how far I could get on one working ankle, which is not a comforting number. Then he reappears, one hand working at the peel of an orange, already halfway through it, chewing. I clear my throat.

He looks up, mouth full, makes a small questioning noise that is somehow both a word and not a word at all. His pack looks considerably heavier than it did an hour ago. He crouches, adds the last of the oranges from his pockets into it, then holds the whole bag out to me.

"Carry," he says.

I look at the bag. I look at him. "Why?"

He turns, taps his own shoulder without further explanation. "Up."

"No way, I can walk."

"Then I guess you die in swamp."

I look at him. I look at my ankle, which has settled into a steady, unhelpful throb. I look at the swamp, black and endless.

"This is extortion," I say.

"Is transportation."

"You're holding me hostage to a piggyback ride."

"You are holding yourself hostage. To ankle." He crouches in front of me. "Come. Before something in water decides you look like dinner."

That, unfortunately, is a very good argument.

I get the bag looped over one of his shoulders instead—oranges shifting inside—and use the strut to push myself upright onto one leg. Marek doesn't wait for me to figure out logistics. His hands find my thighs, hauling me up and onto his back. His hand settles briefly under the curve of my ass to hitch me higher on his back, and I go rigid enough that he must feel it.

"Your hand is on my ass."

"Is holding you up. Is different thing."

"No it’s not."

"Different purpose." He says. "You want I drop you instead? Prove different purpose?"

"No. No. Keep the current purpose."

"Thought so."

I settle my chin against his shoulder because there is nowhere else, arms looped loose around his neck. I try very hard to focus on the throb in my ankle instead of how warm his back is.

"If you drop me," I say, mostly to have something to say, "I will never forgive you."

"Then I will not drop you."

"That's not a very convincing."

"Is only promise you get." A branch cracks somewhere off to our left, and something large and unseen moves through the water in a way that makes Marek's pace pick up. "Hold on, shivren."