Excerpt: Savage

An excerpt from Savage by Liz Shipton

(Thalassic Series Book 0.25 - can be read as a standalone)

Chapter One

Jameson Briggs stretched and blinked. The night air, coming fresh and invigorating through a porthole in the crew quarters, lapped the edges of his face, and the boat tilted around his hammock.

He was waking up from a very pleasant dream about Lillita con Curva, the girl he had most recently bed in Pocosín. It had been over two weeks since Jameson had seen her and he was anxious to get to shore and find someone new to take his mind off her. He could still smell the pepper and jackfruit scent of her hair.

He was rubbing sleep from his eyes and nodding the stiffness out of his neck when the sour scent of smog on the wind sat him upright and turned his gaze out through the porthole to the horizon.

Storm clouds were brewing. But the Turf was within sight—the Joshua would be in Qanat in just a few hours. He squinted at the ancient digital clock mounted on the wall across the cabin. He had a few minutes until he was supposed to be on watch. Jameson lay down and crooked his elbow behind his head.

As he did, an ear-splitting bang resounded through the hull and the Joshua shuddered so forcefully that he was tipped out of his hammock.

He staggered to his feet as another hear-rending crack split the air and he lurched sideways from the force of some impact against the ship. Bracing himself against the wall, he stumbled out of the quarters and down the corridor toward the companionway steps that led above deck. The tiny, bald figure of the ship’s master of coin toppled out of a door ahead of him as the ship listed to starboard.

“Sterling! What the hell was that?” Jameson yelled.

“What the hell do you think?” Sterling yelled back. “We hit something.”

The two of them fell up the stairs to find the ship’s captain, Slocum, behind the wheel and Roue wrangling the sheet that controlled the mainsail. Jarvis was climbing down the mast, pale-faced and trembling.

Jameson clapped his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes. Jarvis. The new kid had been on watch.

“What happened?” he demanded, as Jarvis reached the bottom of the mast and hopped onto the deck.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Briggs!” he cried. “I didn’t—I didn’t see it!”

“No shit, Jarvis!” Jameson shoved past the skinny boy, making for the bow. He sensed Jarvis scurrying along behind him.

“I—I’m really sorry!” the kid was saying. “I didn’t…I don’t know what happened!”

“You fall asleep?” Jameson demanded, not looking at him. They reached the rail at the very front of the boat and Jameson put his hips against the metal and leaned out over the side to check the hull for damage.

“I don’t know….maybe,” Jarvis mumbled.

“Great.” Jameson let his feet lift off the deck and hung nearly upside down, scanning the waterline for holes or cracks in the fiberglass. Seeing none, he swung himself back up and went to the other side.

“It was…I was thinking about…I don’t know—”

“Jarvis, I do not give a shit what you were thinking about.”

Jameson put his hips against the rail on the other side of the boat and leaned out to check the waterline. But there was no damage on this side either.

“Shit,” he said, setting his feet back on the deck. “Shit, shit, shit.” He rounded on Jarvis. “Would you like to know what I was thinking about, Jarvis? Not three minutes ago I was thinking about Lillita con Curva’s spectacular ass. I was thinking about her perfect skin and her voluminous hair. And do you want to know what I’m thinking about now?”

Jarvis, trembling, shook his head.

“I’m thinking about all the ways I’d like to murder you, Jarvis. I’m imagining your head, mounted like a trophy above my hammock.”

“I didn’t mean to, Mr. Briggs,” Jarvis whispered, “I’m really—”

“Sorry, yeah, I know. You’re sorry, I’m sorry, we’re all flogging sorry.” He pushed Jarvis out of the way and stalked back to the cockpit. He wasn’t sure who he was more furious with—Jarvis or himself. It was Jarvis’s fault for not paying attention. But as the ship’s first mate, Jameson ultimately had to take responsibility. He shouldn’t have left Jarvis on watch. The kid wasn’t ready. He should be ready; he was fourteen, and at that age, Jameson had already been taking watches alone for two years. But Jarvis wasn’t Jameson. He was a Turf Rat. He was soft.

“What’s the damage?” said Slocum when Jameson swung himself behind the helm next to her. Her weathered old hands were tight around the wheel and her pale face was grim. Behind her, Roue tugged off his bandana, revealing a head of coiled gray hair, and mopped his wrinkled brown face with it. Sterling’s half-sized silhouette was halfway up the mast, Jameson assumed to put an eye out for anything else they might hit.

“I don’t see anything,” said Jameson. “Not above the waterline.” He stepped around the helm and aimed for the companionway steps. “I’m going to check below.”

As he put his foot on the top step, the boat again lurched with a heart-wrenching crunch, and he staggered sideways into the wall.

“God dammit!” He turned his furious glare on the tiny bald man halfway up the mast. “Sterling! What the hell is going on out there?”

“There’s nothing!” Sterling yelled back. “I don’t see anything in the water. I don’t know what we could have hit.”

Another impact shuddered the boat. Jameson exchanged a baffled look with his captain.

“Get below,” she said. “Check the internal hull for damage. I’ll try and figure out what the hell we keep hitting.”

“Or what keeps hitting us,” said Roue, darkly.

Jameson didn’t have space in his brain to ponder those words. “Jarvis, with me!” he yelled, and dived down the stairs.

As he pounded back down the corridor to the crew quarters, he realized he was still barefoot. He decided he didn’t have time to put on his boots and began pulling open hatches in the floor.

“Get to the galley!” he snapped, when he realized Jarvis was hovering anxiously behind him, contributing nothing. “Find out if there’s water coming in. Pull up the floorboards if you have to!”

Jarvis nodded tremulously and took off down the corridor.

Hatch after hatch opened revealed no leaks, and Jameson was beginning to wonder if this whole thing was some sort of weird hallucinatory dream when Jarvis’s panicked shout issued from the galley.

“Mr. Briggs!”

He scrambled to his feet and sprinted toward the voice. He reached the galley to find Jarvis standing ankle-deep in water.

“Shit,” he said again. “Shit, shit, shit. Jarvis, get on the radio and hail someone.”

“Who?” said Jarvis.

“I don’t care!” he snapped. “Just…hail someone.”

He took off back to the cockpit.

The storm clouds that Jameson had noticed from his bunk before the first impact were piling over the horizon. He silently cursed. They had been no problem when Joshua was hunky dory and Qanat was less than a few hours away. But they would become a big problem very quickly if they didn’t get some reins on this situation.

Slocum needed nothing more than to look at Jameson’s face to know something was wrong.

“How bad is it?” she said.

“Bad,” said Jameson.

Roue’s head snapped up. “How bad?”

“Ankle-deep-water-in-the-galley bad.”

Slocum’s face went taut. “Are we going to lose the ship?”

Jameson returned her frank look with one of his own. “I don’t know.”

She drew a sharp breath and nodded once. Another impact rocked the boat, sending them all sideways again.

“God dammit!” Jameson yelled as his shoulder came up hard against the side of the cockpit. “What is that?”

Sterling’s reedy shout from the top of the mast answered him. “Orcas!”

Jameson gaped up at him. “Orcas?”

Sterling pointed toward the stern. “A pod. Looks like about four.”

Jameson dragged his hand through his hair and looked wildly over the side. In the seven years he had sailed with Joshua and the twenty years he had been on the planet, he had never encountered orcas. He had heard rumors, sure—stories about ships being attacked in the waters near the Med. But those were urban legends.

“Orcas are extinct!” he screamed up at Sterling.

“Not these ones!” Sterling yelled back.

Roue was standing at the side, looking down into the water. Jameson threw himself against the rail next to him and peered down too, and sure enough, a big, black beast emerged from the depths. It rolled onto its side, exposing the white patch around its beady eye, the blaze of white flesh along its belly. As Jameson watched, it raised a fin. Jameson could swear that eye was staring directly up at him.

“It’s toying with us,” muttered Roue.

Jameson shook his head. “That’s…no. It’s an animal.”

Roue scoffed. “Have you seen how they hunt? Sadistic sons of bitches. They’ve been sinking sailboats since the early twenty-twenties.”

“They can’t sink us.”

“Of course they can.” Roue paused. “They are.”

“What the hell are we supposed to do?” Jameson said.

“Not a lot we can do.”

“Can’t we drive them off?”

“We could try.” Roue scratched the gray stubble around his jaw. “But I’ve heard it’s nearly impossible. Once they decide you’re going down…there’s not a lot you can do to stop them.” He squinted at the dark water. “By the time we get the upper hand, we’d be pretty gone.”

“So we just…what?”

“From the number of hits we’ve taken and the look on your face when you came up from the galley, I’d say there’s only one thing we need to worry about,” Roue said quietly. “And that’s which unlucky bastard gets to tell our captain her ship is going down.”

Jameson braced his hands against the rail and dropped his head. He felt like he couldn’t comprehend what was happening. It made no earthly sense. All the storms they had weathered, all the fights they had won, the scores they had taken, the enemies they had made. And now they were going to be taken out by a pod of flogging whales?

He shut his eyes and took a deep breath. “I’ll do it.”

Roue didn’t try to argue.

Slocum bit her lips into a hard, tight line and shook her head fervently as he broke the news.

“Mm mm.”

Her fierce old eyes were trained on some distant point on the horizon that Jameson couldn’t see. “Mm mm,” she said again.

“Slo…” He put a hand on her shoulder. “There’s nothing we can do.”

“What do you mean there’s nothing we can do? Get down there and fix it!” she shouted. “Get below and fix my damn boat.”

“I can’t…Slo, it’s—”

“Get on the radio and hail someone!”

“We have, but…come on. You know the situation.”

Jameson knew as well as she did that nobody was coming for them. There were no reliable emergency services since the collapse. Zenith could barely assemble a peace force to keep the rule of law together on the Turf—they certainly didn’t have the resources to be sending boats out here. It was an unspoken fact widely accepted by everyone that any fool who got themself into trouble out on the volatile and unpredictable Salt was on their own and deserved everything they got.

Another impact shuddered the boat and Slocum shut her eyes. Jameson could see every thought in the old woman’s head, etched across her face. Her whole life was in this boat. When it was gone, she would have lost a piece of herself as well. More than a piece. Perhaps everything. And if that was the case, she might as well go down with—

“Don’t you dare,” he said, as the last thought made itself visible. “Don’t you dare think for one minute that I’m going to leave you to drown on this boat.”

Her eyes opened and found his. “I’ll have nothing, Jamie,” she whispered.

“You’ll have me. And Sterling, and Roue. And Jarvis if I don’t slit his throat and put his head on a spike.”

“It wasn’t his fault,” she murmured. “How would he have seen them?”

In the corner of his eye, Jameson saw Sterling shimmy down the last few feet of the mast and hop to the deck. He, Roue, and Jarvis gathered just behind Jameson, hanging back, as though afraid to approach.

“What's the plan, Jame-o?” said Sterling quietly.

Jameson raised his eyebrows at Slocum. She shook her head and worked her throat, keeping her fierce, bright eyes straight out over the bow. He carefully pried her fingers loose from their death grip around the wheel and took her hands in his. He was struck by how frail they felt. How old and thin.

“Sterling, get the ditch bags and get the skiff in the water,” he said over his shoulder. He squeezed Slocum’s hands and let them go. “We’re abandoning ship.”

Slocum seemed unable to function as they retrieved the small motorized skiff and lowered it into the water. When it came time to board, she gripped Jameson’s arm with a trembling hand and leaned on him with all her weight as he helped her into it. Her frailness alarmed him. This feeble old woman wasn’t his captain. It was like the life had gone out of her.

Roue, Sterling, and Jarvis hopped down after them and Roue kicked on the motor, snatching up the tiller and aiming the skiff away from the listing hull of the Joshua. The little dinghy moved slowly and sat low in the water—they were too heavy, and too far from shore, but Jameson forced those thoughts to the back of his mind and set his gaze firmly ahead at the smudge of Turf on the distant horizon. Dark was falling rapidly and the storm clouds were nearly upon them now.

Slocum sat opposite him in the bow, staring white-faced over his shoulder at the sight of the Joshua slowly sinking into the Salt.

“Slo.” He shook her by the shoulder. “Put your eyes on me.”

She did. But they were distant. They looked through him, past him, as though she was still seeing the contents of her life lifted by the water as it rose relentlessly and thoughtlessly up through the floorboards. There was nothing on this planet so cruel and insidious as water, Jameson thought.

He squeezed her shoulder. “We’ll find another one.”

She shook her head, looking more tired than he had ever seen her. “I think I’m done, Jamie,” she sighed. “I think that’s it for me.”

“What?” He frowned. “No, there isn’t—”

The skiff jolted with a stomach-shuddering bang. Jameson lurched forward and landed on his elbows and knees on top of Slocum at the bottom of the hull. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Roue clutching the tiller with both hands, struggling to maintain their course.

“They’re coming after the skiff!” yelled Sterling.

Barely had he gotten the words out when another impact rocked the tiny boat. A crack appeared in the hull and water began to spray through it. Thunder rattled the clouds.

Jameson scrambled to his feet and pulled Slocum back to her seat. He looked frantically around at Jarvis, Roue, and Sterling. Jarvis’s eyes were wide enough to show the white all the way around. Lightning cracked open the sky, and in the momentary flash, off the starboard stern, a curved black fin split the water and disappeared again.

“What do we do?” whispered Jarvis.

Another orca hit the skiff, and Jameson sat down hard on his seat again. He turned to Slo. Her face was set in a grim smile.

“Looks like I’m going down with my ship after all.”

Jameson shook his head. He turned around, pushing Jarvis and Sterling aside, and reached into the stern next to where Roue was still trying to steer. He threw open the lid of the emergency supply box and dug through it until he found the flare gun.

“There’s no one around to see you send up a flare,” said Sterling.

“I’m not sending up a flare.” Jameson loaded the gun and got to his feet again, training it on the water.

Roue hissed through his teeth. “You’re just going to piss 'em off with that, Son.”

Jameson wasn’t listening. He wrapped both hands around the handle and braced his feet wide to steady himself against the rolling of the boat beneath him. The next time a curved black fin cut through the surface, he squeezed the trigger.

The flare blazed across the water, lighting up the night as clear as day, and sank into the slick black flesh of the whale’s back. It thrashed, sending up a sheet of spray, and slammed its tail against the surface as it dove. Jameson braced against the side of the skiff as the wave from the creature’s impact came at them. It tipped the boat violently sideways and left them see-sawing in the aftermath as the creature’s tail disappeared and the water settled.

An eerie calm came over the Salt.

“Was…that it?” whispered Jarvis.

Jameson lifted the flare gun and trained it on the water again. He held his breath and strafed the barrel across the inky depths, staring hard into the darkness, trying to see.

The whale breached less than three feet from the side of the skiff.

It launched through the surface like a missile, shedding water in sheets, its great white belly looming over them like a monument. Jameson swung the gun up wildly and squeezed the trigger, but it was too late. The beast was upon them. It came down hard on the stern of the skiff and Jameson’s world went swiftly underwater as the hull severed and he was dragged into the Salt.

Chapter Two

Seven Years Earlier

I found a broken bird one day

And took her under wing.

But soon that bird had flown away

I never heard her—

“Briggs?”

Jameson looked up from his device, where the lines of his poem were sewn like tidy stitches across the screen. He blinked once and looked around.

At the front of the classroom, the teacher—a railroad spike in a severe gray pencil skirt and tight-fitting charcoal cardigan—pinned him with her dreadful glare. Two arched eyebrows perched atop her spex like cats upon a branch, spying on a mouse.

“Uh…yes?” he said.

Snickers rustled around the room. The teacher breathed through narrow nostrils—everything about her was narrow—and folded her thin arms across her tiny bosom.

“Would you care to enlighten us as to what is so enthralling about that screen?”

Jameson’s face turned red and he sank into his chair, drawing his chin into his crisp white collar. “No, Miss.”

“It must be very interesting,” she continued, “to be captivating all your attention while I’m up here trying to educate you. I didn’t realize the Polytheistic Revolution was such a bore. Do forgive me. And please, do share your little find there with the class.”

“That’s okay, Miss,” he mumbled.

“That wasn’t a request.”

The boy next to Jameson raised his eyebrows and covered his mouth with one hand. In the back of the room, one of the older boys said, “Come on Jame-o! You pansy!”

A rumble of laughter began to murmur from the children, but a single bony finger raised by Miss squashed it. In the ensuing silence, Miss clasped her hands in front of her and fixed those dreadful eyes on Jameson, waiting. The cats above her spex flicked their tails.

Jameson’s face was as hot as if it had been cooked by the sun. At least, he imagined it was—he had never seen the sun. But when he had learned about the solar system in fourth form last year, he had been told that the surface of the sun was almost six thousand degrees Celsius. He had no reference point to even begin to imagine how hot that actually was—nobody does—but he assumed his face was approaching that temperature now.

He pushed his device around on his desk with his finger and stared daggers at it.

“Chop chop,” said Miss.

Keeping his eyes down, Jameson picked up the device and began to mumble the words.

“I can’t hear you,” said Miss. “You’ll have to speak up. In fact,” she stepped to the side and swept her arm toward the spot she had just occupied, “why don’t you come up here where we can all see you?”

His heart seized and the contents of his stomach threatened to make a sudden and dramatic exit, possibly through both points of egress. He flicked his eyes up to hers. She couldn’t possibly be serious. Miss was tough, but she wasn’t cruel. Not usually.

Jameson stood on trembling legs and tripped down the row to the front of the class. He turned to the sea of assembled faces—far too many of them in the overcrowded classroom—and his lunch again threatened to make an unwelcome appearance. He felt dizzy and out of his body, as though he were standing on the surface of the moon.

He cleared his throat and began. In a whisper of a voice, he traversed the lines of the poem he had written as though they were a bed of nails. When he came to the end, he spoke the word he hadn’t finished writing, then lowered his hands to his sides, gripping his device in one sweaty palm and glaring at the floor.

It was quiet for a few moments. Then Miss said, “Did you write that?”

“Yes, Miss,” he whispered.

More snickers rippled across the classroom, but Miss held up her finger again and hissed them into silence. Jameson was aware of her gaze on the side of his face. Her eyes were like the points of two bright and terrible stars. Stars that Jameson had also, in his twelve short years on the planet, never seen.

“It’s very good,” Miss snipped, and then swept her hand in the direction of his seat. He stumbled back to it and sat down hard.

Miss tapped her left temple to pull up the next page of lesson notes on her biochip. “Everyone please turn to the next section.”

As Jameson filed out of the room forty-five minutes later, Miss raised a finger to beckon him to her desk, where she leaned with folded arms, like an umbrella propped on its pointy end.

He dragged his feet across the room and stood in front of her, stoop-shouldered, staring at the floor.

“I apologize for making an example of you today,” said Miss, and he squinted up at her in surprise. “It was unfair.”

He swallowed and looked at the wall just behind her, nodding. He could feel his face getting hot again and possibly even tears beginning to press behind it. He scowled and tried to will them away. If he cried at school again, Stark and Jag would have a field day.

“It really was a good poem,” she said, as if that were some sort of apology. He nodded again, looking at the floor. Miss sighed, walked around the desk, and sat down in the chair on its other side. “Did you get the homework?”

Jameson pulled out his device, tapped it open, and swiped through a few pages. He saw the homework file, dated March 4th, 2172, and nodded.

“Is it going okay, still using your device? Some of the other students who aren’t chipped are struggling to keep up.”

“It’s fine, Miss,” he mumbled.

She looked at him another long moment. Then said, “Good,” and gestured to the door.

In the quad outside he waded shoulder to shoulder through a mob of students toward the school gate. High above him, the UV-LEDs that lit the city from the cave ceiling beamed, cold and bright. The tunnel that would take him across town to his neighborhood appeared in snatches through shoulders and the backs of people’s heads, and he pushed sideways, ducking elbows and stepping on toes and apologizing profusely, until he popped out of the crowd into the mouth of it and could breathe again. It was too busy. It was always too busy. There were too many people here.

The sound of the crowd faded behind him as he hitched his pack on his shoulders and started walking. The footsteps of commuters ricocheted off the high-ceilinged sandstone walls around him. Someone bumped his shoulder as they hurried by, not bothering to look back or apologize. He walked with his hands on either strap of his pack, watching his shoes.

He couldn’t understand why Miss had been so cruel today. It’s not as though he was the only one in class who wasn’t paying attention to her boring lesson. He was just the only one still using a device. The only one she could still catch. Most of the other kids had biochips now. All they had to do was tap their temple or touch an eyebrow to pull up the Net and look at whatever they liked. And you had no idea they were even doing it. There was nothing Miss could do to stop them.

Unfair, that’s what it was. The whole thing was brutally unfair.

“Coin?”

A small voice pulled him out of his brooding. Jameson looked up to see a girl about his age sitting against the tunnel wall on a square of cardboard. She had greasy black hair and the edges of her bones tented her brown skin like sticks holding up canvas. She wore no shoes, and when she smiled and held out her hand, he saw that her palm was filthy and she was missing a tooth.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, and kept walking. “I don’t have any.”

The girl made a sharp sound of disbelief, and in the corner of his eye he saw her fold her arms.

“Yeah right,” she said, loudly.

Anger flickered in his chest. He wheeled around to face her, clutching his pack straps.

“I don’t,” he said, fiercely. “You need a biochip to use Ubicoin.”

“You have a biochip,” the girl replied, glaring. “Look at your clothes.”

Jameson scowled at her. “What about my clothes?”

“They’re nice,” she sniffed, and shrugged. “So you must be rich. Rich enough to afford a chip.”

Jameson shook his head in disbelief at her audacity. His dad always said the refugees were rude and entitled. “I don’t have a chip,” he said. “Do you?”

“What do you think?”

“How are you planning to receive coin if you don’t even have a chip? It’s a transfer. It requires that both parties be online.”

“‘It requires that both parties be online’,” she mocked, pulling a face and affecting a high-pitched voice, wiggling her head from side to side as she said it. “You learn to talk like that at your fancy private school?”

Jameson flushed scarlet and pulled his pack tighter on his shoulders. “Goodbye,” he said, and turned around.

“No, wait!” The girl scrambled to her feet and caught him by the elbow. He looked down at the black marks her fingers had made on the clean white linen of his shirtsleeve and she withdrew her hand quickly. “I’m sorry.”

She was smaller than him—and he was small, so he knew what that meant. It meant she was starving, like most of the climate refugees crowding the streets. Her brown eyes were sunken and wary and too big for her face. Up close, he could see the fear in them. He shifted on his feet and adjusted his pack again.

“I have some credit at the market,” he mumbled. “My mum and dad let me go there by myself sometimes. Would you like a…sandwich or something?”

The girl grabbed his elbow again and gripped it hard, nodding.

When he had bought and paid for the sandwich, he sat next to her on her piece of cardboard with his back against the warm stone wall of the tunnel. People streamed by, some registering the duo with a slight frown or raised eyebrow. He hoped one of his mum’s friends didn’t walk by and see him sitting on the ground like this.

“Where did you come from?” he asked the girl.

“Aridia,” she said with her mouth full. “On the other coast.”

He stared at her. “Western Australia?”

She nodded, cramming more of the sandwich into her mouth and not looking at him.

“How did you get all the way over here?”

“Caravan,” she mumbled, bits of bread spraying onto the cardboard in front of her. “Mum had an electric vehicle that barely made it. It’s dead now.”

“The drought is very bad there,” said Jameson.

She rolled her eyes so hard he thought they might roll out of her head and said, “No shit.”

Jameson’s eyebrows jumped. He had never heard someone his age say ‘shit’ before. Especially not a girl.

“It’s not as bad as the tornadoes on the north coast, or the lightning above ground here, though,” said the girl.

Jameson shrugged. He didn’t know anything about the lightning above ground. He had never seen it. “How long have you been in Grike?” he asked.

She tilted her chin up to contemplate the cave ceiling, which was so high above them it was impossible to see. “Three months.”

“Do you like it?”

“The people are shit,” she said. “But the lake is nice. Never seen an underground lake before.”

“It’s the last one left in the world.”

“Yeah, duh, I know. Everyone knows that.” She eyed him. “Thought you’d be learning more interesting stuff than that at your fancy school.”

“How do you know I go to a fancy school?” Jameson shot back, feeling annoyed.

“You’re wearing the uniform.” She lifted an eyebrow at the emblem embroidered onto his lapel. “I thought you were supposed to be smart.”

“I never said I was smart,” Jameson snapped, and then he frowned because he wasn’t sure if that was a comeback or if he had just insulted himself. “I am smart,” he mumbled.

She stuck the last bite of sandwich into her mouth and wiped her filthy hands on her filthy pants. “If you’re so smart, name all the Harbor Cities,” she said.

Jameson scoffed. “That’s easy. Grike, Alluvium, Brume, Pocosín, Zhīliú, Qanat, Krepost’.”

“You forgot Île Tor,” said the girl.

“Île Tor doesn’t count,” he countered, smugly. “It’s an island and the people don’t even live on it. They live on boats. And it doesn’t have its own fresh water. They have to make desal from the Salt.”

She folded her arms. “Not all the Harbor Cities have a water source.”

He laughed out loud this time, relishing her stupidity. “Yes they do. That’s the whole point of them. They’re the only places that do.”

“Okay,” she said, pinning her eyebrows to her hairline, “then what are they? The water sources.”

“Grike has the underground lake. Brume harvests fog, Alluvium has the estuary, and in Pocosín it still rains. Zhīliú is on the only remaining river and Krepost’ has ice caves.”

“Aha!” She threw a triumphant finger in his face. “You forgot Qanat.”

“Did not!” he shot back. “Qanat has…” He trailed off, frowning. How did the people of Qanat get their water? He knew he had learned it but he couldn’t remember. He rummaged through his brain while the girl observed him with a malicious grin, and when he couldn’t find the answer he said, “Well, they have something.”

“Briggs!”

A deep-throated shout from somewhere along the tunnel snapped his head up. A fist closed around his heart as he clocked the pasty white face, thick black hair, and broad bosom of Mojave Stark striding down the crowded tunnel toward him. At her heels trotted beefy Stetson Sturgis and the wolf-eyed, wiry, evil-looking Jag Starley.

“What are you doing, Briggs?” crowed Stark, as the trio came level with where Jameson and the girl sat on the cardboard. She rolled the sleeves of her school uniform over her thick forearms and stood with her hands on her hips, sweating and leering down at them. Her lips were lacquered with black lipstick, a smear of ink on a severe page.

“I’m not doing anything,” Jameson mumbled, rolling to his feet and grabbing his pack. He made to step around Stark, but the bigger girl blocked his path.

“Is this your girlfriend?” she crooned. Behind her, Jag snickered.

“I always knew you were strange Briggs,” said Sturgis, “but I never took you for a miggrant-lover.”

Jameson flinched. The refugee, still sitting on the floor next to him, sucked in a small breath.

“You shouldn’t call her that,” he whispered.

“Why not?” said Stark. She addressed the girl over Jameson’s shoulder. “Go back where you came from, miggrant. We don’t have space for you here.”

Jameson couldn’t look at Stark or the refugee. He kept his head angled awkwardly sideways, not looking at anything.

“Leave her alone,” he said to the floor. “She’s not hurting you.”

“Yes she is.” Stark’s tone became indignant. “They all are. They’re hurting everyone in the city by being here. Taking our resources. Clogging up the streets. Spreading disease.”

“We are not!” The girl flew to her feet. She balled her hands into tiny fists and glared up at Stark.

Stark looked down at her with the manner of a rhinoceros contemplating a fruit fly, then stretched out one finger and shoved the little girl hard by the shoulder. The girl tripped backward a step and came up against the wall.

“At least she has some nerve,” mused Stark, turning her ugly black leer back to Jameson. “What are your mummy and daddy going to think about this, Briggs? Fraternizing with climate refugees?” Her eyes roved over the little girl again, taking in her obvious bones, her loose clothes, the scrap of cardboard. Her gaze seemed to stick on something on the ground, and she frowned. Jameson followed the line of her sight to the sandwich wrapper.

“Did you feed her?” demanded Stark.

“He bought me a sandwich,” said the girl.

“I wasn’t talking to you, miggrant.” Stark grabbed Jameson by the cheeks and squashed his lips together. She bent down and put her face very close to his so that he could smell the grubby, plastic whiff of her makeup. “Did you write her a poem too, Briggs?”

“I don’t write poems for other people,” said Jameson. “They’re my private thoughts.”

Sturgis barked out a laugh. “Jesus Christ, what a pussy.”

“What’s wrong with you, Briggs, hm?” said Stark, turning his face from side to side, studying it. “It’s like you want us to hate you.”

Her face was so close to his that their lips were almost touching. He scrunched his face, trying to pull away, but she was almost fourteen and built like a tank. There was no pulling away once she’d trained her sight on you.

“Do you even know what a pussy is, Briggs?” she said softly.

Jag snickered. Jag always only snickered—unless he was hurting people.

“He doesn’t know,” said Sturgis. “He’s a Mummy’s Boy.”

“Leave him alone!” cried the refugee, and took a hard step toward Stark. Jag surged forward with the speed and suddenness of an eel and pinned her hard against the wall with his forearm.

The girl choked and beat at him, but he just turned his evil, wolfish leer down on her and said, “Be quiet, miggrant. Or we’ll make you quiet.” The girl went quiet and Jag stepped away from the wall and released her. “Run along,” he said, as though he were fifty and not fifteen.

The girl glanced at Jameson, and for a moment he thought to try and stop her. To ask her for help. To tell her not to leave him there, alone. But before he could open his mouth she had shaken her head with a small, apologetic look, and bolted away down the tunnel.

“Hold him down,” said Stark.

The next part was almost painfully predictable. Well, it was painful, at least. Taking an arm in each of theirs, Jag and Sturgis hauled Jameson around the nearest corner and pinned him to the wall by his shoulders. As she came around the corner after them, Mojave Stark was rolling her sleeves all the way above her elbows and making a show of cracking her thick neck. She squared up in front of Jameson and delivered a blow to his gut that would have doubled him over had Jag and Sturgis not been holding him against the wall.

Gasping, with water leaking from the corners of his eyes, Jameson watched as his vision went sideways, then black. His legs went completely out from under him, and as Stark delivered the second punch, to the right side of his ribs, it was really only Sturgis and Jag that were keeping him in position for her.

A third blow to the side of his head turned his face so abruptly against the wall behind him that his eyebrow split against it, and he felt warm blood trickling down his eyelid as they dumped him on the floor, each spit on him once, and ran off.

In spots and dabs of light and dark he lay, still trying to pull air into his lungs. He felt as though his chest had collapsed, which he thought was odd, considering he had been hit in the stomach. He wondered briefly if he would die, lying there in the dirt in an alcove off some tunnel leading away from city center, struggling to breathe.

But almost as quickly as that thought occurred, his solar plexus stopped spasming and his diaphragm started working again, and his lungs filled suddenly and he choked and sat up.

He dragged the backs of his wrists across his face and waited until he could breathe well enough to stand. He felt stupid for wondering if he would die. He knew he wouldn’t. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. The only reason he even knew the words ‘solar plexus’ and ‘diaphragm’ were because he had looked them up last time.

He walked around the corner to the refugee girl’s flattened piece of cardboard. His pack and the sandwich wrapper were still strewed there. As he picked up his pack and eased it painfully onto his shoulders, the thought occurred to him that he had never asked the girl what her name was.

Chapter Three

It took him longer than usual to walk home on account of the pain in his ribs. By the time he stepped through the archway that led out of the tunnel network into the vast neighborhood of the north quadrant, he was sore all over.

The slums sprawled across the cave floor before him like spilled bricks. Stacks of single-room buildings that housed mostly refugees, stretching all the way to the other end of the underground chamber, which was so far away Jameson couldn’t see it. The walls sloped up and away from him on both sides into darkness, slits of warm light shafting through windows in the rock face. Enormous sets of stairs were carved into each wall, switch-backing up and up until they too disappeared. Jameson put his foot on the bottom step of the closest set of stairs and started to climb.

By the time he reached the door to his family’s penthouse, cut directly into the wall of the cave at the very top of the stairs, he was sweating. The slums were so far below him that he could no longer make out the people walking there. He placed his hand on the palm scanner to the right of the door and it sighed open with a small, satisfied hum.

“Welcome home, Jameson,” said a sparkly, androgynous voice from somewhere up in the ceiling.

“Is that Jameson?” came a disembodied call from the kitchen.

“Yes, Nema,” he replied as the door whispered closed behind him. Kicking off his shoes, he hurried across the bright lobby and through the living room before the housekeeper could round the corner and see the ruins of his face. Diving down a hall to his left, he padded quickly along it until he came to the bathroom, pressed his hand to the scanner, and ducked inside, slinging his pack onto the floor and dropping to a seat on the lid of the toilet.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor and then three knocks came through the door.

“Everything okay?” said Nema.

“Yes,” he called.

“Would you like something to eat?”

“No, thank you.”

A few seconds of silence and then, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes!” He balled up his hands and glared at the closed door. “I’m fine.”

“Okay.” Nema’s footsteps didn’t move. He listened to the silence of her standing on the other side of the door until she finally repeated, “Okay,” and retreated to the kitchen.

Jameson stood up and turned to the mirror. His white-blonde hair was mussed in the back and sticking to his forehead in the front. A dribble of dried blood caked his left eyebrow. It had dripped down his cheek and onto his collar. His shirt was gray and filthy on one side. His right eye was blackening. He gingerly put up one arm and lifted his shirt. A bruise the size and shape of a melon purpled his ribs.

He ran the tap and washed his face, wincing, until the blood was gone, then tiptoed to the door, opened it, and quietly stuck his head out to check for Nema. Ascertaining that the coast was clear, he scurried across the hall into his room.

A few hours later, he heard the androgynous voice welcome his mum home. He heard Mum kicking off her shoes, dumping her large leather purse onto a table by the lobby door, sighing, and greeting Nema in the kitchen. Nema would be handing her a large, iced glass of gin. A few minutes passed while Jameson strained to hear what Nema and his mum were saying in the kitchen, and then he heard the sound of more footsteps in the hallway outside.

Three more soft knocks on the door.

“Jamie?”

He didn’t move from the spot on his bed that he had been lying in for the last three hours. He continued to stare up at the ceiling and said, “Yes.”

“Are you alright?”

“Yes, Mum.”

“Can I come in?”

“Why?”

“I haven’t seen you all day. Can I have a hug?”

He felt an abrupt and unwelcome welling of tears threaten to explode out of the front of his face. What he wanted, more than anything else in the world right now, was a hug from Mum. But he could also hear Sturgiss, in the back of his head, saying “Mummy’s Boy.” He rolled onto his side, facing away from the door, and scowled at the wall.

“No.”

Mum was quiet for some time. Then she said, “Jameson, open this door, please.”

He huffed and rolled off the bed. Stomped to the palm scanner and slammed his hand against it. Stood scowling in front of the door as it slid open between them.

Mum tutted and knelt in front of him, putting her hands around his shoulders. “What have they done this time?”

Jameson burst into tears.

She closed her arms around him and put one hand on the back of his head to pull it against her shoulder. She smelled like soap and a little bit like gin. Then she picked him up and sat him on the bed. She sat next to him and smoothed his hair while he hiccuped and sobbed and dribbled snot and furiously wiped his eyes on his sleeves and tried not to cry.

When he had gotten the worst of it out, she said, “Was it Mojave Stark?”

Jameson nodded.

“And those two boys?”

He nodded again. Mum drew a long breath through her nostrils and sighed it into the back of her throat. “I’ll call the school again tonight.”

“I hate them.”

“I know, Sweetheart.” She pushed the hair back from his face.

“I wish they were dead.”

“No you don’t,” she said gently. “It isn’t nice to wish that on anyone. No matter what they’ve done to us.”

He ducked his head away from her hand, scowling. “I want to learn to fight.”

Mum sighed again. “Fighting only leads to more fighting. We’ve been through this. You have to find another way to deal with them.”

“There isn’t another way.”

“Jamie, listen to me.” She gripped his face in both hands and turned it to hers. “Those children are savages. You can’t let them bring you down to their level. You are a smart, sensitive, brilliant little boy and you have a bright future ahead of you. Don’t let them get to you. You’re better than that. Don’t let them turn you into a savage.”

“What if I want to be a savage?”

“I’m sure if you think about it, you don’t really.”

He folded his arms. “I do. I want to kill them. I want to tear their faces off. I want to poke her eye out.”

“Jamie!”

“Well, I do.” He pulled his face free from her hands.

“Poking Mojave Stark’s eye out won’t make you feel better,” said Mum. “Not in the long run. You might think you feel better for a while, but eventually, you’ll just feel worse. Trust me.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

She sighed. “You have to rise above it. You have to do the right thing, even if it’s hard. Fighting might feel like the best thing. But there’s a difference between the right thing and the best thing. Learn how to forgive them.”

“Forgive them?” He glared at her.

Mum watched him with a sad expression for what felt like a long time and then said, “Have you thought that Mojave Stark must be very unhappy if the only way she knows how to express herself is by hitting people?”

“So?” He kicked his heels against the side of the bed.

“So, if you can find it in your heart to be compassionate, you might surprise her enough that something gets through. And if you can forgive her, I promise it will feel a thousand times better than poking her eye out.”

“No it won’t,” he said. “Why would I do something that makes her feel better?”

“Forgiveness isn’t something you do to make other people feel better, Jamie,” she said. “It’s something you do for yourself.”

He rolled his eyes. “What does that even mean?”

The front door sighed open and a sparkly, androgynous voice said “Welcome home, Mr. Briggs.”

“Your dad’s home.” Mum held out her hand to him. “Let’s go and see what he has to say. Nema’s made digger’s stew for dinner.”

At the dinner table, Jameson rested one side of his head in his hand while he shoved potatoes around with his fork. Nema stood in the corner like a marble statue in her crisp, white uniform, holding a condensation-covered jug of water. His mum and dad were talking about the referendum. They had moved on to the subject after Jameson had told them the reason Stark and her crew beat him up was that he had given food to a refugee.

“The refugees be gone soon enough,” Dad was saying. “The vote is in a few days and my sources tell me it’s swinging toward an ousting.”

“Everywhere?” said Mum.

Dad nodded and sipped his wine. “In Brume and Zhīliú, certainly. Here too, most likely. Quite right, too. There just isn’t space. Qanat never let them in in the first place, you know. Very sensible, if you ask me. Anyway, that Nation woman made an announcement today that Zenith is funding the construction of more settlement camps outside cities. Move them all out there. Give us a bit of breathing room.”

Mum grimaced and shook her head. “Axioma Nation is really starting to overstep her role. She’s a CEO, not the godsdamn president of the world, for Christ’s sake. What authority does she have to mandate where the refugees end up?”

“She has more authority than the shambles of the bloody government,” Dad said. “The Big Four have all the money and the resources. And her company’s biochip thing is taking off. They’ve got something like eighty-seven percent adoption in Brume.”

“Zenith are a bunch of cowboys,” said Mum, and she swigged her wine. “This chip. This…thing they’re putting in people’s heads. How do we even know it’s safe?”

“We don’t,” said Dad. “Which is why we’re not putting it in our heads. Right, Jame-o?”

Jameson glanced up at Dad, who was raising an eyebrow at him. Jameson rolled his eyes, scowling, and turned back to his plate.

“Anyway,” Dad reached out and jostled his shoulder, “don’t worry about the refugees. Like I said, they’ll be gone soon enough.”

“I’m not worried about the refugees,” muttered Jameson, feeling that his dad had missed the entire point of his story about Mojave Stark.

Mum and Dad’s conversation turned to the weekend. They should take the boat out, Dad said. It had been weeks since they’d been out on the lake. He reached out to shake Jameson’s shoulder again.

“What do you think, Jame-o? Take Moxie out for a spin?”

Jameson shrugged and kept picking at his food. He didn’t like sailing. Sailing was Dad’s thing. Dad said it was good bonding time for them, but Jameson knew it would only end up with him screwing something up and Dad yelling at him. He was too small to handle the lines properly. Too weak to be of any use. The wind that funneled down the canyon into the underground lake from the Salt outside was too strong. It knocked him down sometimes.

Dad always seemed to forget that, though. He seemed determined to make Jameson a sailor. Determined that they should have something to share. Jameson wished they could share something that he was interested in, but Dad had made it pretty clear he had no interest in poetry.

When they finished dinner, Nema came to collect the plates, then Mum stood and excused herself to her office to do whatever it was she did in there for long hours during the evening and late into the night. Dad pulled out his device and sipped his wine while he swiped at the screen.

Jameson stared at the empty table in front of him, feeling unsatisfied. He still didn’t have a solution for the Stark problem. Mum’s answer wasn’t really an answer. Do the right thing. Ignore them? How well had that been working? Forgive them? Why on Earth would he do that?

He sighed and hopped down from his chair. But as he passed Dad’s chair toward the door, Dad put out an arm and caught him by the elbow. He pulled up, startled. Dad set his device face down on the table and pulled Jameson around to face him. He gripped Jameson’s shoulders and set his mouth into a grim line.

“That Stark girl’s a mean bitch, isn’t she?” he said.

Jameson’s eyes went wide. He felt the same way he had felt when he heard the little refugee girl say shit. He nodded nervously.

“What did your mum tell you?” Dad said. “What did she say to do?”

Jameson looked at the floor. “She said I have to do the right thing and not the best thing. She said I should try to ignore them. And forgive them. She said if I was nice to them maybe it would surprise them.”

“And how do you feel about that?” said Dad.

Jameson shrugged.

Dad picked up his wine glass again and drained the last of it. “I bet you’d like to give that Stark girl a piece of your mind, wouldn’t you?” He set the glass down. “I bet you’d like to make her sorry for what she did.”

Jameson nodded.

Dad nodded too. He looked at Jameson for a long time. “Your mum’s right,” he said. “In theory. You can’t fight fire with fire. Violence isn’t the answer. But…” He rubbed his chin with one hand. “It can be a last resort.”

Jameson frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Dad, “that if all else fails, a well-aimed kick to the ribs might be the only thing that Stark understands.”

“She’s too tall to kick in the ribs.”

Dad snorted. “Yes. She is. But I think with some practice, you might be able to find somewhere to hit her that would get the message across.”

A spark of hope ignited in Jameson’s tiny heart. He tried not to let it read too obviously on his face. He wasn’t sure if Dad was saying what he hoped he was saying or not.

“So here’s what I think we should do,” said Dad. “A guy at my gym knows a boxing coach. I think he would agree to come here and give you a few private lessons. Show you a few things. We’re not going to turn you into a prize champion or anything, but I think we could arm you with some better tools. How does that sound?”

Jameson’s eyes were almost as big as his smile. He bobbed his head eagerly.

“Now this is a last resort,” Dad repeated. “I want you to take everything your mum said seriously. You try everything you can to reason with those yahoos before you pull out the big guns, hear me?”

Jameson nodded, making his expression serious to show Dad he was listening.

“All that stuff about doing the right thing, I want you to think on that, too. That’s important.”

Jameson nodded again.

Dad put his hand on the back of Jameson’s neck. “And you’ll take these lessons seriously. Listen to the teacher and do everything he says. Understand?”

Again, Jameson nodded. He was so filled with excitement, he could hardly stand still.

“And whatever you do,” Dad said, gripping his shoulders firmly between his big hands again, “absolutely, under no circumstance, are you to tell your mother about this.”

____________________

The boxing coach turned out to be a woman, which surprised Jameson. He found her standing in the middle of the living room when he came home from school the next day and was so confused he thought he had walked into the wrong house.

“Come in,” said the woman, as though he had walked into the wrong house.

Jameson watched her warily as he crept into the room and set his pack on the couch. She was shorter than Mum or Miss, with tanned skin and brown hair pulled into a very tight pile on top of her head. Her arms and the middle of her stomach were bare and shiny and he tried not to stare at the unnerving lines that her muscles made beneath her skin there. All of her clothes fit very tightly and she was barefoot and wrapping bandages around her knuckles. As he came closer, he could see that her nose was crooked and that one of her eyebrows was divided by a white scar.

“Are you Jameson?” she said, and her voice was short and firm.

He nodded, terrified.

“I’m Hawk,” she said. “I’m here to teach you to fight.”

He stood as though transfixed while she finished wrapping her knuckles and turned to him again.

“Do you have any workout gear?” she asked.

“What’s workout gear?”

Her eyebrows lifted slightly and she sighed. “Do you own pajamas?”

He frowned and nodded.

“Those will do. Go change.”

He returned five minutes later in his pajamas, feeling silly. He hadn’t been able to find his usual checkered ones, so had been forced to don the ones with little rainbows printed all over them. They were too small for him and exposed about two inches of his ankle. He stood in front of Hawk, his face red, but she didn’t seem to care about the pajamas at all.

“The most important thing to remember about boxing,” she began immediately, circling him while she spoke, “is to maintain a strong core. If your core is strong and your feet are planted, your aim will be true and your hits will be powerful.”

“What’s a core?” said Jameson.

She shot out a hand and placed it hard against his stomach. His eyes went wide.

“This is your core.” She tapped him twice on the belly. “The muscles in your stomach. They help you balance, they help you move your arms and legs correctly, and they will be the thing that we focus on during most of our time in here.”

“There are muscles in your stomach?” said Jameson. “Like your diaphragm?”

Hawk ignored him. “Stand with your feet hip-width apart,” she said.

Jameson widened his stance, uncertainly.

“Good.” She reached out suddenly and pushed him hard by the shoulder and he stumbled sideways, tumbling to his knees. The marble floor banged painfully against his kneecaps and he yelped.

“Stand up,” said Hawk.

Jameson looked up at her and got slowly to his feet.

“Again,” she said.

He frowned.

“Widen your stance,” she clarified.

Jameson did. Again, she shoved him by the shoulder, and again he went down to the floor, banging his knee even harder this time.

He glared up at her. “Stop doing that!”

“Stop letting me,” she replied. “Get up. Again.”

Jameson felt the sharp fire of angry tears rise up suddenly in his chest and swallowed them. Scowling, he got up and stared at Hawk long and hard before he widened his stance. He couldn’t see how this was supposed to help him confront Stark at all. Hawk just seemed like another bully.

Hawk’s hand came out to shove him by the shoulder, and this time, he tensed his body against it. As she pushed, his legs contracted and the muscles in his abdomen went rigid. For just a moment before he fell over backward, he resisted.

Hawk held out a hand to pull him to his feet. “Good,” she said. “Let’s begin.”

Keep Reading