Chapter 18
Ten Years Ago
“We’re leaving.” Madlyn yanked me off the mattress.
“Leaving where?”
She shoved rations into our worn packs. “Clothes, blankets, water, anything you can carry, put it in here.” She shoved the pack into my arms. “Fast. We need to get the fuck out of here.”
“Why? Maddy, what’s going on?” Although I had questions, I didn’t stop doing exactly what she said. Maddy wouldn’t be packing if it weren’t worth panicking over.
We didn’t have much. Apartments in the Colony were simple.
A single room large enough for our mattress on the floor to be shoved against the wall.
A table full of games and garbage sat between the bed and our holo screen on the wall that decided randomly if it wanted to work.
I dug out a holo frame from upper ring trash, the frame slightly broken, so our family picture flickered on and off.
In the bathroom, Maddy ripped the hidden compartment out of the wall to dump all the synthetics she could into the pack.
“Those are Benno’s. What are you doing?!” I stood in the bathroom's threshold, bewildered.
“Benno is gone, Lucky, got it? Left us all to rot, the bastard! The least he can do is help us out now that he fucked us all over. We’re selling this at the first port we can and maybe, just maybe, we’ll have enough to hide ourselves in the middle of fucking nowhere.
” Maddy slung the full pack over her shoulder and went for the door.
“Let’s go. We need to take the first transport out of here. ”
“We don’t have passports or the credits. Maddy, Maddy!” I ran after her, out of our dingy apartment and into the Colony slums.
The Slums were a part of every colony on every asteroid, the place where the workers slept in their tiny cells and wandered its dirty streets.
Any runoff from the mining equipment dripped from the rusting pipes to leave the streets perpetually damp.
Smoke filtered over the rooftops and through the streets, a smog that would poison the lungs of everyone, eventually.
Maddy knew the streets better than anyone. She swerved in and around the subsets, keeping us out of the flickering lights. She had us palm off our commlinks for cheap. A total ripoff, regardless of how busted and old they were, that I told her about but she didn’t care.
“Don’t you get it yet? Benno is gone. Syrox is taking over.” She slammed a hand against my chest to press us against the nearest wall. On the next street, a group passed snickering, and armed. Syrox’s group. They weren’t meant to be on this side of the Colony.
“Plenty of these fuckers have come and gone. They always absorb the last ones that were here,” I countered.
She took my hand, gripping tight, and had us run across the street to the other side. A worker transit blared a horn at us, ripping by on the rails.
“Typically, yeah, but Syrox isn’t typical.
” She flinched as a series of screams ripped through the slums. They weren’t unusual.
Death in the Colony was more real than the recycled air we breathed.
She shouldn’t have been bothered, shouldn’t have grown so pale, but then she whispered, “He’s killing everyone who ever worked for Benno.
We get out of here, or we’re dead, simple as that. ”
It wasn’t as if we hadn’t been threatened before.
Working for the biggest crime syndicate in the Colony wasn’t a safe job.
However, Maddy and I made do running the synthetics.
It was the simplest of the work. We went to the warehouses, got the stash, snuck around to drop them off to the dealers and went on our way.
Most left us alone. The big issues came when someone couldn’t afford their fix, when they thought going after us was the last resort.
That’s why Maddy and I always worked together, one on the run and one on lookout.
“Won’t he have people watching transports for this situation exactly?” I asked when we took the path leading to the old tunnels.
They were used for mineral transport from a ruined section of the mine, closed off after one of many collapses. No different from the one that took our parents. None of the old tunnels were safe, which meant they were perfect for sneaking.
“Would you rather we wait around for him to find us?” She tugged off the covering of the old tunnel and looked back at me, face smudged with grime.
She wasn’t wrong. I understood that, but couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t stop glancing over my shoulder, wanting to return home to crawl into bed and pretend none of this was happening.
Maddy took my hand, firmer and stronger than I could ever be. “We’ll take the Yellow Tunnel. It goes over the transports. There has to be one we can smuggle onto.”
“People have tried before. They’re caught at this port or the next and are sent back,” I argued.
“Then you better hope we get caught at the next port and we fight our way out. I can’t sit around, Lucky. Syrox and his goons know this place as well as we do. There isn’t anywhere to hide. I wouldn’t be surprised if his group search these tunnels at some point.”
“I know. I just…”
I was scared, terrified, thinking we’d end up the same as our parents, another body dead on an asteroid, never knowing what sun or rain felt like. No one would care. Nothing would change. Our bodies would be incinerated, and nothing would remain, as if we had never existed.
“Me too,” she whispered. “I’ll go first. Stay close to me, okay?”
I nodded, then we crawled and crawled, making our hands black with soot and run off.
Every movement made the tunnel groan. Rust fell from the ceiling.
Three times we stopped, waiting for the tunnel to give out and send us falling to our deaths.
It was far above the ground, left to decay because it didn’t matter if it fell into the slums. No one there mattered.
But we made it out and above the transports, where Maddy shoved the covering off.
We crawled over and behind piping, careful not to attract the dockworkers’ attention.
Down and down we went, feet hitting the dock behind boxes full of minerals that would fly throughout the galaxy.
Dozens upon dozens of ships lined the port, each of them off to a place better than here.
“We should board one of the big ships, Katlan or Luxi. They’re mostly manned by AI with only two pilots.
It would be easier for us to stow away.” Maddy’s eyes darted about the docks, her mind conjuring a thousand plans.
“If they’re like our AI ships, they dock themselves.
Droids will unload the materials, and they’re not programmed to care about stowaways, so we’ll just have to worry about pilots and dockworkers. ”
Which there were plenty of. No matter what plan she divulged, it didn’t matter if we couldn’t get over the docks to the ships. The docks never had a quiet hour, never a moment of rest, eyes always watching.
“See those boxes? They’re going to the Katlan.” Maddy pointed at the nearby shipment. “We can crawl under them. They’re slow, so we should be able to keep up.”
“Maddy…”
“I know.” She gave me a stern look, the same way she gave after our parents died and she promised we’d do just fine. “We've got each other’s backs, right?”
I swallowed hard. “Right.”
Watching the dockworkers, she lingered a moment longer, then we took our chance. We made it ten paces before Maddy screamed.
Her hand fell from mine. I turned and there she was, lying broken, the bone of her right leg shattered and barely clinging to her. Blood pooled around her, fragments of bone sprinkled into the crimson mix.
“You aren’t going anywhere, brats!” One of Syrox’s goons — no, thirteen of them — came from everywhere. Three behind her. Three on our left. Four on the right. Three at the back.
The dockworkers wouldn’t intervene. They saw situations such as ours at thousands of docks. They made way for Syrox’s thugs, ignored the blasters, and kept themselves scarce to avoid injury or death. It was me, Maddy, and a group of murderous thugs.
“Lucky,” she whimpered, hand up, tears in her eyes and blood all over. “H-Help, I can’t… my leg…”
In that moment, I saw our future: two corpses wrapped in tarps tossed into the incinerator with all the others.
We’d be ash shot into space, utterly forgotten.
No one would notice our absence. None would mourn.
If I went to her, they’d shoot, and we’d be done.
Even if I somehow grabbed her, then what?
There was no stowing away, no way she would survive, no way we would survive together.
But I could.
“What are you doing…” Her eyes, wide, terrified, crying. She reached for me. “Ethin!”
I ran. Her screams followed.
“Ethin!”
Their lasers chased. I grabbed a droid, using its body as a shield. The blast burned a hole into the droid’s sternum. One shot scraped my arm. The adrenaline made it so I didn’t feel a thing, even as I smelled my burning skin.
Behind me, materials moved back and forth, blocking my escape from their sight. Syrox’s goons took chase, hooting and hollering, having fun. I rolled under a cart, avoiding their blaster fire, and broke into a run for the Katlan.
Past the dockworkers, around the packages, I ran and ran. Katlan’s cargo bay doors were closing. I threw myself across the dock, narrowly squeezing in before the doors closed and fell into the back, alone. And I hid alone, waited alone in the cargo bay, replaying that moment over again and again.
Maddy was gone. I left her there. She was dead. If I could leave my sister to die, I could do that to anyone…
And I would, so long as it meant I wouldn’t be next.