Poverty Wants Few Things
Kerr’s Thermabulle provided some measure of warmth, but Lusa couldn’t help feeling that something icy had formed between them.
Truly, that was for the best. Lusa was the one who had said they couldn’t act on their attraction anymore, but she still found herself missing it.
It’s just craving validation, she thought. It’ll pass.
Lusa was an expert in managing her feelings – catastrophe happened if she didn’t. The incident with Danica proved it. And Alana had gone straight to Talia.
She remembered being marched across the silty stretch of meadow to an old MobilePod she’d believed to be long abandoned. Sesi sat at a warped table, orange sunlight filtering through dirt encrusted windows, giving half of her face an ominous glow. Talia sat her down across from her and left.
Sesi drew a curved blade across a whetstone, but never took her eyes from Lusa. “Your mom prefers bullet knives. And Cat says you’ve been a little too enthusiastic with those garden kukris, but me?” Sesi dragged the round knife slowly, exaggerating the scrape. “This one’s mine.”
Lusa blinked, but her throat was too dry to form sounds. She didn’t have to ask which mom she was talking about. Talia had trained both her and Pinga how to turn the sickle-shaped blades grandma Cat used for harvesting for defence, but only Lusa had taken to them naturally.
Sesi held it up to the light. “Callie used this once, but it’s really not her thing. She set it down. The symmetrical blade looked like it hungered to bite into the table. “We’re not going to tell her about this, by the way.”
“Why not?” Lusa had the urge to bite her fingernails, but resisted, keeping a brave face.
Sesi took a thoughtful breath. “It would only worry her.” She was probably right. Callie always worried whenever Lusa did something rough or dangerous.
“It’s an ulu.” Sesi rolled her shoulders, sore from hunching over the whetstone. “Your grandmother’s, then mine. I tried to convince your uncle Siku to take it to help him in the kitchen, but he said he wasn’t a woman, so he couldn’t.”
“That’s stupid.” Lusa knew she shouldn’t have said anything, but it had come out anyway.
Sesi’s smile only grew. “Is it?”
Lusa shrunk back into her chair. It creaked in protest.
“Instead,” Sesi continued, “it stayed with me.” She picked up the ulu.
The dying sunlight shifted from orange to red as it travelled along the edge.
“I used it to take the fingers of the man who killed my mother. It’s skinned a few people too.
Slashed a few throats.” Sesi drew the knife through the air, mimicking the action before placing the flat on her daughter’s arm.
Lusa wanted to pull away, but she refused to flinch. Nodding, Sesi accepted her bravado.
She slid the edge across her skin. Nearly invisible hairs fell away. Eyeing the follicular carnage, Lusa still refused to move.
Satisfied, Sesi lifted the ulu. “To think,” she sighed. “It could have lived a peaceful life chopping vegetables.” Sesi slipped the ulu into a worn leather sheath and snapped it shut.
“Why are you telling me this?” Lusa found she was only able to whisper.
Sesi answered with her own question. “Have you ever seen that knife before?”
The slightest shake of her head was all she was able.
“It’s not for vegetables.” Sesi leaned forward, tucking the sheathed ulu into her pocket. “Neither are you.” Sesi relaxed back into her chair. “But you will be if you can’t learn to control yourself.”
Lusa dropped her head. The other mothers had been apprehensive around her for as long as she could remember. This shame was something else entirely.
“She’s all yours, Talia.” Sesi stood, taking the ulu with her.
The flimsy door swung open. “I told you threats wouldn’t work.” Talia stepped into the old MobilePod. It wobbled slightly with her added weight.
“She’s too much like you,” Sesi mocked as she left.
Talia sat. “She’s right.”
Lusa loved all of her mothers, but Callie always got the most attention. Sesi was second – affectionate, but often busy. Talia was always more standoffish. Present, but closed off. She taught you things, but had an intensity and a hesitation to her.
Folding herself into the seat across from her, Talia leaned her elbows on her knees. “Remember when you would throw tantrums.” Lusa was almost as tall as her now.
She remembered, but vaguely. “Not really?”
“They used to get me whenever you had an episode.”
The memories started to return. Suddenly, everyone around her would be afraid or angry and she wouldn’t be able to breathe.
And then Talia would be there. She never said anything or tried to stop her.
And when it was over, they always did something together.
That hadn’t happened since she was a kid.
Talia tilted her head toward the door. “Let’s get out of here.”
Lusa smiled.
“Oh, you’re not off the hook,” Talia warned. “You have to listen to me talk while you train.”
Lusa was sceptical, but in the end, it worked.
Talia told her things, dark things, she’d never told anyone else.
It gave Lusa the vocabulary for her feelings.
Every time Lusa needed, she sat on a birch log, sharpening kukris with a file until Talia noticed her swearing in time with the scrape of metal on metal.
They would train for hours while Lusa yelled her problems at a damaged pell.
Together, they’d forged the links that bound Lusa’s darkness.
But in the end, knowing what was there, she was more alone than ever.
And Talia wasn’t here. The illogical desire to have something with Kerr wouldn’t be shoved back into place. No amount of reasoning or rationalising made the feeling disappear. Lusa didn’t know how long she could hold onto it before it came out again. She had never had to for this long.
“Over here.” Kerr pointed to an abandoned subway station.
Lusa parked the bike.
“The station’s the closest access hatch to Chalice’s office.” Kerr lifted the helmet off her head.
Lusa turned away before her heart could flutter at the marks the helmet left on her cheeks. “You have offices?”
“They built all sorts of things down here when they ran the conduits, yeah? They couldn’t very well pop above ground every time they needed to talk about blueprints or whatnot, could they?
“I guess I’d never thought about it,” Lusa admitted.
Ignoring the comment, Kerr bounded off down the steps.
It became immediately apparent why the subway station had been abandoned – it should never have been built in the first place.
Whatever drainage had been planned had been wholly inadequate for dealing with melted permafrost and the subsequent freeze-thaw cycles.
Wall tiles littered the corners, having popped off buckling concrete walls.
Even the graffiti was sparse. Only the most desperately houseless would notice the appalling state of the building and decide to use it anyway.
Which, Lusa supposed, described the Chargers. At least, how the Chargers used to be.
Kerr hopped over the turnstile, likely rusted in place before she had been born. Lusa had more difficulty. There were advantages to being small.
Rubbish blew in with the snow, but Kerr seemed to take no notice.
Instead, she crouched near what Lusa assumed to be a snow drift until it turned to face her.
By the time Lusa reached hearing distance, Kerr had already helped the man to his feet.
Or one foot. The capacitors in his prosthetic leg had lost power.
“Just inside this door is a place you can tap to charge it. Then ask for Beezer. Tell him Kerr sent you.” She helped the man hobble into the access hatch.
Lusa couldn’t watch this. She couldn’t allow herself to see Kerr’s kindness on display. That would weaken her resolve to keep her feelings isolated and compartmentalised. She needed to find and draw from her well of cynicism that anesthetised her heart and kept it protected. “One of yours?”
“No.” Kerr arched an eyebrow. “Though he might be if he recovers.”
The frisson that travelled along her nerves wasn’t the drug she’d hoped for.
Thankfully, Kerr didn’t notice. “We’re the rejects, Lusa. The Chargers only exist because we survive together, no matter what condition we were in when the corps decided they were finished with us, yeah?”
“You never worked for a corp, though, did you?”
“No, I haven’t.” Kerr clipped her words.
“Most of them were gone or on their way out by the time I was born.” She leaned against the filth covered wall.
Several more tiles fell, the high-pitched shattering of ceramic echoing around the empty train station.
“You can think I’m a spoiled rich kid all you want, but it’s not like I chose to be born here. ”
Lusa stared for a moment, trying to figure out how anything Kerr had just said made sense or what it had to do with what she was asking. “What?”
“Sorry,” Kerr mumbled, shoulders softening into the wall.
“I’m sorry,” Lusa said. “I think. I didn’t mean to imply…” she gestured impotently. “Whatever I implied.”
“It’s okay.” Kerr straightened a bit. “I’m being oversensitive. Chalice used to act like a dick about it, yeah?”
There was no reason for Lusa to care, but now she wanted to know. Curiosity, she told herself. Not because you care about her. “You can tell me. If you want.” Sure, that sounds like curiosity, Lusa scolded herself, but it was too late. The words had already escaped.
Kerr didn’t seem to mind Lusa’s sudden burst of compassion. “After a while, Chalice stopped apologising for cheating on me and blamed it on her Chem addiction – told me I didn’t know what it was like.” She inhaled sharply. “And it’s true, I don’t.”
“She didn’t seem addicted to anything.” Lusa wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to say, but now it was there.
“She’s not.” Kerr sucked her teeth. “She was never addicted. She lied about that too. I suspected as much, but I was too afraid to call her out, yeah?” Her head tucked into her chest. “I thought I’d look like an arsehole if I was wrong.”
Lusa had the urge to scoop Kerr into her arms. To tell her everything would be okay. But it wasn’t her place. She wasn’t anyone to Kerr. Attraction, lust, sex, it didn’t mean anything. She balled her fists. “Sounds like her and Pinga are a match made in heaven.”
“We should probably get them before they kill each other.” Grinning, Kerr started down the tunnels.
Lusa walked cautiously toward a patch of lighter-coloured darkness. Her monocle did not have the same light compensating capabilities as Kerr’s Opti. “How do you see down here without tech?”
“We don’t. Everyone has Optis,” Kerr explained. “But we also have to memorise the tunnels before you get your scars.” She pointed to the two round red marks below her eye. “It’s part of the initiation.”
“Huh.” Lusa leaned in closer than she should, but it was hard to see. “I thought those were freckles. What happens if you don’t pass?”
“We’ll still take care of you, but you don’t get a say in how things are run.”
Voices up ahead interrupted their conversation. Kerr’s fingers wrapped around her arm and then her lips against her ear, but the words didn’t match the intimacy. “That’s Chalice’s office, but that’s not her.” She strained her hearing, but couldn’t detect Pinga either.
“Hide,” Kerr pointed to an old power converter. “Behind that.”
Lusa did as she was told, the weeping concrete moistening her back uncomfortably as she slid behind the humming machine. From this spot, she could see directly into Chalice’s office.
The steel door had been left wide open, so their conversation couldn’t be that private, could it?
Two men she didn’t recognise, one with half of their jaw replaced by prosthetics and the aggro boosters corporate SecTac teams were fitted with.
Thankfully, the Chem canisters were missing.
The other had both arms replaced, though the right was a much newer model than the left and also several centimetres shorter.
Both men wore IntelArms pistols at their hips.
Two others stood across from them – Styx, with their DocPod altered green eyes and fangs.
Both armed, but they appeared to be relaxed.
In the light of the room, filtering through the concrete dust and damp, she could make out Kerr crouched behind the door jamb.
She must have noticed the surprise in Lusa’s eyes because she mouthed what?
Kerr had no idea that Styx were in Chalice’s office, apparently invited. Lusa attempted to communicate via a combination of hand gestures and facial expressions to no avail.
Then a fifth man spoke. He sat too far away for Lusa to see, but she recognised that voice. The same vaguely threatening voice she’d heard years ago when she and Pinga had first visited Tyton.
Cinder.