Act Two
Scene One"Breeendan..." Something crawly landed on her grubby neck and she lazily rubbed it away. Her head hurt. "Brendaaan...get uuuuup," Beka managed to crack her eyes open in the brown-dusty haze of early Earth morning.
Seamus was standing over the figure of his slumbering cousin, shifting restlessly from side to side, toeing the older man with his newly bandaged foot. "You gotta go t'work, mannn..."
"G'back to sleep, Shay," Brendan murmured blearily, rising slowly to his feet. Beka regarded him from her spot on the dingy floor, for a moment having forgotten where, exactly, she was.
"Ozzie came by, he said he got in trouble 'cause'a you bein' late,"
"Did he now? That's a shame." Something in Brendan's voice revealed that, really, it wasn't. He looked over to where Beka was sleeping, and she smiled nervously up at him. A slow, tired grin spread across his handsome face and he didn't turn away from her when he said: "Shay, go get some food for our friend here,"
Seamus rolled his eyes and huffed off, muttering something like "Way outta my league..."
Brendan watched him go, silently, a little softly, and then wandered over to where Beka was still lying. On the floor of one corner of their little alcove she lay, near Joy's cradle, covered in her leather jacket. She hadn't noticed the giant, dusty spiderweb just by her head, and it was all for the better that she hadn't.
"I'm sorry about your sleeping conditions. I should've gotten somebody to walk you back to your ship. I know it's not what you're used to."
"No, I..." Beka trailed off when she realized she really had nothing to say to that.
"Look, I..." Brendan kicked his bare feet in the dirt a little. "I'm sorry about yesterday. I mean...all that stuff I said about you and...Shay. It was...I was drunk," he hastily explained.
"Ah," was her response, like that really explained everything. Truth be told, the encounter had knocked a particularly big chip off her shoulder, and she was still reeling, so the apology felt good, almost empowering.
Of course, anything would feel empowering around these people.
"I don't know what I was thinking. I...had a stupid idea and..." He sighed. "It's not unheard of; other kids have gotten married off Earth, but..." Beka wanted to say something to make him stop his little tirade of self-torture, but she really had no words. Brendan looked like he wanted the earth to swallow him up. "I wouldn't do that to him!" He cried adamantly, hungover, exhausted tears springing to his beautiful blue eyes.
"No! Brendan, I...I know..." She felt worse than she ever had before, in a different way than ever before, and she sprang to her feet. "I didn't...I never thought that. I know you're just looking out for him."
"He's a good kid. He's smart." Brendan dug the heels of his palms into his ancient, weary eyes. "He deserves better than..." He heaved a great, sobbing hitch. "I hafta go to work. I'm going to get a beating as it is,"
Horrific images ran through Beka's mind and she winced, but she didn't say anything. Without a second word, Brendan was out the portal of the little subway alcove, and a little while later, while Beka was dusting off her leather jacket and shrugging it back on, Seamus reappeared, grinning like he'd just invented the wheel and holding a small loaf of bread.
"Here," He cheerfully handed her half of the hard, stale bread, like he was handing her the Engine of Creation. He almost giggled when he took a small bite of his own, the hardness of the bread evident in the sound his teeth hammering into it made.
"Uh..." /Hide your distaste, you selfish bitch/ Her inner self yelled at her. "I have some canned stuff back on my ship...how about we go back there for breakfast?"
"Really?" His glassy blue eyes widened, not the sort of widened that a child gets at the prospect of a present, but rather the sort of suspicious cock-eyed widening. "Are you sure?"
"Sure I'm sure." She sighed when she saw the suspicion in his face. "Look, I'm not going to poison you or anything. I'm completely trust-worthy. You took me into your home and let me spend the night, it's the least I can do,"
Seamus cheerfully led her out of the winding subway tunnels and down the dusty, eroded streets of Boston towards the sand flats. By the time they got there she felt like she had walked through a dirt devil and wanted nothing more than to spend a few hours washing and brushing through her hair.
"...I've never been inside a real spaceship before, you know," Seamus said shyly when they reached it. "I...and I mean, yours looks different than the other ones."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Beka had taken too many cracks about the Maru as a child, and she wasn't ready to start that all over again.
"Well, I mean, it looks...realer. More...more authentic. Those other ships that take off over here sometimes, they're just so big and silver and...I mean, they don't look like anything around here, you know? And a lot of their parts are made in our factories. So I don't really believe they're real." He smiled. "This, though...is just so freakin' cool!"
Beka tried not to beam.
"I bet it's nice inside," Seamus went on.
"Well, come on in, see for yourself,"
"Oh, no," he said with the humility of one who had probably been turned away from countless doorways. He looked down at himself, and Beka could have sworn she saw him looking scornfully at his hands. "I'd just dirty it up,"
"You can get a shower." Seamus blinked at her and she realized, again, it was just another word to him. "You can bathe. Wash all that crap off," Seamus blinked even harder. "It'll feel good, trust me. And I'll...well, we'll beat off your clothes, anyway."
It was obvious Seamus still had no idea what she was talking about, but he came in anyway.
"Wow..." There was an awed hush-ness about him when he took it all in. All the connecting rooms and walkways were relatively small, almost as small as his own home, but much cleaner, and, well, obviously the whole thing could fly. Imagine that. Living in a flying home.
Beka popped her head into the sleeping quarters. "Bobby," She whispered. He didn't move from where he slept face down on one of the bottom bunks. "Bobby! One of the kids who's gonna work for us is here,"
"Mmm," Was his reply.
"We're going to have breakfast and be here a while if you want to come meet him. I think you should. This is a partnership, after all," She coloured the word 'partnership' a little more harshly than she had intended to.
"Fuck off..." Whatever.
"This is the coolest thing I've ever seen!" Seamus yelled from the bathroom. Obviously he had found the shower. He stood in there, fully clothed, staring up into the showerhead like he'd just seen the face of God. "You have a freakin' clean water well in your home, Valentine! Do you know how awesome that is?" He opened his mouth to the stream.
"Seamus, that water's not for drinking, it's for bathing," She winced at the memory of the soapy tasting water and the feel of it on the back of her throat, but Seamus was still esctatic.
"What?" He looked like a bedraggled wet kitten, standing there in the running water, his dirty, muddy clothes plastered to him, a constant stream of grime and soot running down the drain with the water.
"Ugh," Beka managed to keep it to a very low murmur and just started peeling the clothes off him.
"What're you doing?" He squealed.
"You have to be naked in this or you're not going to get clean,"
"No way! Do you know how sick that's gonna make me?"
"You're not going to get sick," She muttered, and then proceeded to do the most awkward thing she had ever had to do. She bathed a squirming, protesting street kid from the Planet Freakin' Earth. She tried not to notice his myriad scars and bruises, or the way his bones stuck out, or how he could have been very attractive if he had some meat on his bones.
She did smile, however, when his stubbly hair came clean and was revealed to be a light blonde, and she wondered if Brendan's natural colour was the same.
Seamus was eerily silent when he sat on the toilet in a towel seven sizes too big for him, waiting for his clothes to dry out from where they hung on the side of the shower door, and for Beka to finish changing the bedraggled bandage on his foot and his hands.
"Why aren't you saying anything?" Beka asked softly. She was afraid she had offended him somehow; she was only trying to help him, and she would have stopped if he had asked.
"I'm trying not to breathe right now." Seamus said innocently, and he was being serious.
"Why not?"
"I'm all wet. Don't want to let the bugs in."
She tried not to laugh, she really did. "That's ridiculous. Even if you were in danger of getting sick, that's not going to help them."
"Easy for you to say," He squeezed out through clenched teeth. He snapped his mouth shut immediately afterwards. "You have IT. You never get sick."
She wanted to tell him that wasn't true, because it wasn't, she still got sick- it was just never a problem. A headcold would probably mean death to him.
Seamus didn't protest when she gave him one of Bobby's old shirts to hang around in, his eager smile showing that he understood it was only temporary. That angered Beka a little bit/I can be generous/ she thought. /God dammit, I am generous/
He was positively drooling when she gave him breakfast, and it really wasn't all that much- a carton of orange juice, a muffin, some hashbrowns. He ate like there was no tomorrow and she swore to God he came when he drank that orange juice.
"Thank you so much, I don't- I don't know how I can repay yo-" He suddenly stopped and a look of horror crept onto his face.
It took Beka a moment to figure out what was going on. "Oh no. No, no, Seamus! It's on me, I'm not taking it out of your pay. I already gave that to Brendan, anyway."
"Okay." He still didn't look too trusting. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Go 'head,"
"This your first time on Earth?"
That caught her off guard. She stared into her coffee. "Yeah."
"Don't like it, huh?"
Beka shifted uncomfortably. "It's different."
Seamus looked down at his empty plate. "I don't like it either," He shrugged. "But I've never been anywhere else, so I can't really say." He paused, his chin sticking out proudly. "I'm going to leave one day, though. I'm going to get out of this hell and make a lot of money and come back and save all my cousins and friends." He smiled sadly at the thought. Beka watched him closely and allowed herself to smile too. "I'm going to come back and kill them all, all the Nietzscheans here," Beka looked at him sharply. "And all the Magog that come down and raid us and kill us and lay their eggs, and all the-"
"Seamus..." She put one of her hands on his before she screamed.
"Sorry," He said quietly, dropping his eyes. He was silent for a good long while. They both were; an awkward, viscous silence that only got more and more unbearable. "Hey," he said, after what felt like an eternity. "Do you think if I saved the thousand thrones I have now and kept picking up jobs like this, I'd be able to buy a ship like yours one day soon?"
Beka couldn't look him the eye. "The Maru has been my home for as long as I can remember. I couldn't tell you how much my father paid for it, and I sure as hell couldn't tell you how much I'd sell it for." She shrugged a little. "Technically, it is worth a lot less than those ships you see in the spaceport, though, so..." That was all Seamus needed to know. He smiled broadly.
Beka just looked away and wished he hadn't asked her that.
Scene TwoBeka took her own shower after Seamus had left. He had felt so good after the shower and meal, he told her, that he was eager and rearing to go get working on digging his well. She had mentioned before he left, candidly, wrongly, that something was wrong in the temperature controls in the shower and apologized if it was too hot or cold. He had smiled, in the confused sort of 'too hot?' kind of way and offered to fix it for her. Beka had blinked, and eventually accepted the offer, as long as she could pay him.
He had grinned even wider and she could swear to God she saw plans for a fleet of spaceships in his impressionable, sleep-starved eyes.
How was Beka supposed to tell him that a thousand thrones was child's-play when dealing with spacecraft? Sure, in a general sort of sense a thousand thrones was a lot of money, and it was obviously a freakin' fortune when it came to the people who lived here. But in the world of real spacecraft, it meant nothing.
Beka toweled off her nano-infested hair and stared at her pale, sullen face and thought about her life. She had spent, or wasted, so much of it trying to avoid ending up like her father.
And she succeeded. She had. She was living her own life, independent, free from the sort of danger and hassle and recklessness he had brought upon himself and everyone who needed him.
Sort of.
She still couldn't remember the last time she had spent two weeks single. She always had someone, and they almost always controlled the primary aspects of her life at the time. It was Bobby's idea to start running illicit again, it was Bobby's idea to pick up this particular job on this particular shithole, it was Bobby that kept her here, making her feel this way.
And he was all Beka had. She didn't have a family like Seamus or Brendan. Her mother having left when she was a child, her father being…less than desirable as far as those traits go. She hadn't seen Rafe in God knows when, and she hadn't actually felt close to someone in…well…ever?
Bobby was sitting up in the mess hall when she was done, sipping orange juice from a container slowly, sitting in the same seat that Seamus had occupied about an hour earlier.
"…morning," He said softly, trying not to meet her gaze. She just looked back at him. "I…I'm sorry about last night. I just sorta wigged out on you. I was tripping. I'm sorry,"
Beka only stared at his bowed head a little longer, felt a deep rage bubble up inside her and then suddenly subside, disappearing to be replaced by a hot embarrassment, and a sort of shame. Why would he apologize to wigging on out her when she was induced it? She shouldn't have kept a journal if she didn't want people reading it.
"S'okay," She muttered, approaching him a little slowly.
"I'm sorry I didn't come to meet that kid this morning. I was still feeling a little sick. I shouldn't have left you hangin' like that,"
"S'alright," She was standing in front of him now, a little to the side.
"You met with a bunch of them last night?" He finally looked up at her, the pearliness gone from his eyes, his gaze steady for the first time in months.
"Yeah,"
"And?"
"They know who he is. They might know where to get it," She offered a faint smile. "Brendan, the ring leader, he's talking with them today, figuring a plan out. We'll know tonight,"
"I wanted to be done by now," Bobby said.
"Oh, well, you sure went about the right way!" The anger was back. How dare he-
"I'm sorry," He said again, and snagged her wrist. "I…I was useless, I know. I won't leave you hanging like that again. We're in this together,"
She didn't resist when he pulled her down on his lap. "We'll be all right," Bobby said, with the same charm she had seen in him back at that party on that drift, the charm that had been missing as of late. "We won't have to do stuff like this again. We'll make a name for ourselves. It's a lot of money, Beka," He kissed her brow. Five hundred million thrones was a lot of money, an amount of money she was beginning to think didn't exist after spending time here on Earth. "I won't do this to you again, Beka. I promise."
Beka looked up at him, red hair framing her angular face. "You promise?"
"Yeah. I promise."
She smiled and kissed him back.
-
"Well? What do you think?"
They had stolen another 'lunch hour', rushing through petro-chem to find Ozzie and hiding behind an insect-hive dumpster in one of the many alleys behind the arms factory.
"I don't know…" Ozzie said, in that whiny little voice of his. Carol slumped her shoulders and dropped her head and made an audible groan from her throat. Ozzie looked up at her. "What? It's dangerous."
"Not so bad. You can get in his office, it'll be easy to find." Brendan sat across from Ozzie on a garbage gun, baby Joy strapped on his back, leaning forward and pleading with his friend.
"Fuck right!" Was the heavily sarcastic response. "Like any of us 'assistants' know what he's up to. We're fucking guinea pigs, Brendan," He interrupted when Brendan opened his mouth, compelled to by the cynical look on the man's face. "Have you forgotten about Cailean and the acid-face fiasco?"
"No. No, I haven't," Brendan stressed the last word. "Look, I'm not asking yourself to blow something up or kill someone, Ozzie, you know I wouldn't do that."
Ozzie sighed, the boy was right. He was passive to a bloody fault.
"Look, there's a lot of money in it," Brendan's voice softened. "This woman gave Shay a thousand thrones to come to the ceidlidh. She gave me a thousand thrones to tell her that Kago Goyashu was the petro-chem overseer. She's loaded."
"Oh, yeah, She Who Has Everything." Ozzie wasn't impressed. "Like you can trust someone like that. I thought you were smarter than that, Bren." He stopped whatever it was he was about to say next when he say the exasperated look on Carol's face. "What? He asked defensively.
She stared at him a moment, rolled her eyes, and crossed her arms.
"Look, I know it's a lot of money, but…" He sighed. "I really don't think I could help. Find a disc. That's a load of information for me to work on, right there," He glared at Brendan.
"You've been in that office so many times! You've worked for Kago Goyashu for, what, seven years?"
"Yeah, and it was seven years of hell,"
"You don't think stuffing death powder is hell?" Brendan almost yelled, and Carol's acid glare accompanied it.
An uncomfortable silence descended on the trio, like a ghost had just walked through their midsts.
"I know….he keeps all his tech locked up." Ozzie glanced up at Brendan. "I know I could get into it if I had enough time to figure it out. The problem is that I can't tell any of the tech apart and fucked if I knew what to do about it."
Brendan sighed and stared at the ground. "Damn. You're right. We will have to get Shay in on this,"
"Oh, no," Ozzie started up again. "You already told me he was out. I thought that was the condition, there'd be no kids in this," He looked up at Carol. "And don't even think for a minute that you're going to-" His lover stopped that sentence when she slapped him in the face.
Ozzie froze, and rubbed his cheek and looked up at her. Carol pulled at the cable in her lips, and flipped him off.
She was telling him that she knew something they didn't, that she had known for years, that she couldn't speak of because of her physicality, that she couldn't write to them because of her lack of knowledge.
So Ozzie swallowed his pride, and his fear, and he swallowed the protectiveness over a lover that losing a child gives to a man. He sighed.
"Fine," he muttered. "But if She Who Has Everything screws us over, Bren, may it be forever on your head!"
Scene ThreeHe got a lot of strange looks, admittedly, being so clean and prim and proper and digging a godforsaken hole in the ground with this big, shit-eating grin on his face.
Seamus Harper, for his part, never felt better. Having eaten the best meal in his life and a thousand thrones stowed safely away for his sparkling wine future, he dug happily, eagerly. Some strength had returned to his underdeveloped bones and his emaciated muscles, a strength that had probably always been absent. He had been a sickly baby, of course, but as a rule he was a freakishly healthy Earther- most died before their fifth birthday. It wasn't exactly a blessing to live past that birthday, however.
He was hours into his work before he stopped and looked down at his feet, now surrounded with pooling water. "Oh my God…" He breathed, and he leaned down and scooped some of the water up in one work-calloused, scabby hand.
It was cool. And clear, he could see all the way through it. Seamus sniffed at it curiously, it smelt a little like urine and a little like moonshine; it probably had both of that in it.
Oh, well- it was better than nothing! Considering the diets of himself and his colleagues, urine was typically mostly water anyway. And there ain't nothing wrong with moonshine.
Seamus bit back a squeal of delight and refrained from tasting it. It might have arsenic in it, or cyanide, or any other runoff from the arms factory or the mines or the sweatshop.
He knelt down in the mud now, scooping up more and more of the cool, clear water as it welled up in unparalleled amounts. He laughed, until he realized that he had struck water early, and that meant he had to adjust all his former plans that weren't even written down anywhere, and that he didn't have any of his materials here. Seamus was suddenly afraid that he couldn't build the well fast enough and his gold-well of water would be lost.
But he kept laughing.
"That does not sound like the typical attitude to be taken when digging a brother's grave, boy," A frighteningly familiar voice came up behind him. Seamus froze, and slowly turned around, his clean little body covered in clean cool water.
"I…I was surprised, sir. I lost track of how deep I was digging and- I'm sick, see?" He put a hand to his forehead for emphasis.
"Sick, huh? Perhaps that's because you've been bathing." The Niet sneered the last word out, showing his distaste at whomever would allow a kludge to bathe in their water.
Seamus screwed up his face, tried not to curse loudly, and wished very hard that either he or the Nietzschean were dead right now.
"Why aren't you working in the mines, boy, or the arms factory?"
Seamus thought fast. "They said I was too small f'the mines. T'stupid for the factory." The Niet sneered, "You're not too ugly for the brothels, though,"
Seamus' breathing started getting faster and he felt the hot red blood of fear rip through his veins. His wit had finally escaped him and he was about ready to cry when Big Ugly descended upon him with fist and palms.
"How dare you try to deceive me, you little wretch!" He yelled, beating about Seamus' face. "I know you're worth something to me, kludge, and as soon as I can prove it-"
"What are you doing to my slave?" The angelic god-send feminine voice stopped them both. Seamus looked up gratefully through blood.
Big Ugly got up and looked cynically at Captain Valentine. "Yours?"
"Yeah. He's mine. And I paid good money for him, too, so I'd appreciate it if you kept your hands off him,"
The Niet crossed his spurred arms and glared at her. "Who did you buy him from?"
"His family. Who else?"
"Why? He's worthless. Look at him." It was obviously a ruse to get Valentine to sell. High level labour. Seamus shook with fear.
"Look at him? Why do you think I bought him?" A lecherous grin spread across Valentine's face, and Seamus had to admit that it looked pretty good on her. The Niet looked down at Seamus, who looked back up, fearfully, wiping all signs of intelligence from his glassy blue eyes.
"He makes trouble. Get him off-planet and out of my sight as soon as possible." There was no missing the threat in his voice.
"Done," Valentine replied. "C'mon, Shay."
He stood up hastily, wiping mud of himself and avoiding Big Ugly's gaze.
"Shay." He heard the Nietzschean mutter behind them, and he hated the way the word tasted in the man's mouth.
"Want to tell me what that was all about?" Valentine asked as soon as they had turned a corner.
"What what was?" Seamus asked back, still in play-dumb mode.
"That back there. Or do Niets always target you?"
Seamus only looked at her and didn't respond. There was no good answer for that question.
Valentine sighed. "Look, are you sure you're up to this?"
"What do you mean?"
"This job. You couldn't even defend yourself back there, and I promised your cousin I wouldn't put you in danger."
"What? I can plenty defend myself!" The old Harper attitude was coming back, and Seamus winced and kept his voice down. "I just chose not to there."
"Chose not to? Wh-"
"Look, you have to choose your battles," Seamus explained quickly. "It's how you survive. I can't just attack a Nietzschean, they'd feed me to their dogs." He wasn't exaggerating, but he was sure Valentine thought he was. "Besides," He went on. "It'll be a miracle if Brendan even lets me help. But I am up for it. I can handle myself," His voice went smooth and he smiled at her, trying to look suave, but he got the feeling he just looked like a skinny little kid with an idiot grin.
"Well…" Valentine stood there, regarding him. "We'll talk to them all tonight and find out there. In the meantime, do you want some lunch or something?"
Seamus grinned even wider and thought that, if he wasn't already in love, that was the clincher.
-
"I don't know," Ozzie said again. Everyone in the room sighed.
"What's not to know?" Seamus was close to losing it.
"Shay, shut up," Brendan spoke up. "Let Valentine finish, at least, Ozzie?"
"They're Betas, the guards always are." The redheaded captain went on. "They'll be swayed by money. They feel the need to prove themselves, and money is the only way left to do that. Me and Bobby can make up some elaborate story to sell them, we're good at that," Ozzie rolled his eyes, but Valentine didn't seem to notice. "You all go in together, stay where you're inconspicuous, and slowly break up. Ozzie gets into the office and does some routine work, you have Seamus in the vents in contact with Ozzie by headsets, he picks up the disc, hands off to Brendan in the hallways, who hands off to Carol somewhere else in the factory, and we'll meet her in the alley. It'll be fine."
"No. Uh-uh. I don't want Seamus involved." Brendan's demeanor was rocky.
Carol made a sound somewhere in her throat and nudged Ozzie. "Shay's the only one who's going to know what we're looking for, Bren," he said a little nervously.
"It was Seamus' idea," Valentine said, unhelpfully. Brendan shot his little cousin a withering glare. Seamus smiled weakly and waved at him.
"But…all that aside…I mean, this isn't exactly the kind of thing we do everyday, 'y'know?" Ozzie went on. "What if one of us screws up? What if I screw up?"
"Don't worry, Ozzie," Seamus said. "Look, it's easy. All you have to do is trust yourself. And me. And the…aliens." He jerked his head in the direction of Valentine and her menacing looking boyfriend, who still hadn't said anything.
Alien was the perfect term to describe them, too. They knew nothing about the world they were caught up in.
"Aliens, yeah." Ozzie snorted. "Can we trust you?"
"We'll pay you each four thousand thrones," Bobby finally said something.
A startled silence fell upon the room. Seamus saw Brendan's eyes widen. Four thousand thrones was the most amount of money Seamus had ever heard someone talk about. It was foreign to him, unreal, as alien as the in-house clean water well and packaged orange juice.
Valentine seemed a little startled at first, too, but then something changed in her face and it became neutral again. She didn't notice when a black fly landed on her wrist, and Seamus wondered at that.
"Four thousand thrones…" Ozzie whispered.
"Please, Brendan?" Seamus asked softly.
Brendan looked troubled. "I…" He trailed off. "What about you, Oz?"
"For four thousand thrones? Jesus, you'd better believe I'm in!" Carol nodded her assent as well.
Brendan looked over at his little cousin again, regarding him a long time. Seamus was still pleading with him silently.
"Well…" He said slowly. "It's not exactly like we have anything to lose, is it?"
Seamus grinned and bounded across the small alcove and crushed his big cousin in a hug.
It was his lucky day. He was getting off this hellhole of a planet.
He was.
Scene Four"Today's the day," Seamus said softly. The early morning light burned through the pollution and shot through the tendrils of dust and dirt that floated through the hair. Seamus squinted his sickly blue eyes through the airborne grime at his cousin, who's short blondish hair was almost glowing in the oblique rays of the twilight.
"Mmhm," Brendan murmured shortly, staring down at the small piece of hard bread he had scavenged the night before. He broke off a part and handed it to Seamus silently.
Seamus sighed and stared down at the measly little crumb of sustenance, thinking sadly about the lush breakfast he had had the day before.
"What's your problem now?" Brendan asked sharply. The two were sitting across from each other on the floor of their tiny alcove in the morning light.
"What? Nothing." Seamus had angered Brendan somehow, he could tell, but he didn't know how to remedy it. "What…what are you gonna do with Joy today?" He asked neutrally.
"Take her with me. Only thing I can do." Brendan replied, still not meeting Seamus' gaze.
"Oh," Seamus said. He still didn't touch his 'bread'. "How do you do it, Brendan?"
"Do what?"
"Work twenty hours a day for those Niets and then go to a ceidlidh and then work another twenty hours?"
Brendan shrugged. "That's all the life I have, Shay. It's always been like that. You know that."
"Yeah, but…"
"We can't all be freakin' geniuses like you." That was a little hurtful. "We can't all teach ourselves to read and then go around building wells and flirting with spacers."
Seamus winced. He had lost a lot of friends in the refugee camp when he learned to read, they saw him as elitist and snobbish, even if he was the only one who knew what those words meant.
"You're right not to work for them, you know," Brendan went on. "You're right to make trouble for them. You're better than that," The double meaning, better than us, was still loud and clear.
"I'm sorry, Brendan, I didn't-"
"No, no, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to…I'm nervous." Brendan said softly, looking up at his cousin for the first time that morning.
"I know." The two said in amiable silence for a moment. Seamus took a breath. "It's going to be okay. You'll see." He smiled. "I'm going to get off-planet after this. I know that. I'll come back one day and make them pay and-"
"Shay!" The boy stopped. Anger had stated to well up in his voice. He looked down sadly.
"Sorry." He muttered.
"You know I don't like hearing you talk like that," Brendan said. "What have I told you about feeling that way about them?"
/You're not my father, you hypocritical bastard/ Seamus thought bitterly, but he didn't say anything.
"I don't want you to get your head stuck up in the clouds. Four thousand thrones isn't going to buy you a spaceship. Eight thousand thrones isn't going to buy you a spaceship. You know that."
Seamus blinked his eyes slowly, his insides shattered. Brendan was right.
"I don't mean to hurt you or anything, kid, you know that. But I don't want to see you get your hopes up either. It'll hurt even worse when you come down."
Seamus nodded sullenly. "I hate this," He said, barely a whisper.
"I know," Brendan conceded. "So do I. Come on," He softly took his cousin's arm and the two left the maze of zig zagging subway tunnel shanties.
-
"This is it," Brendan said softly, ominously, after the spacers had left to 'distract' the exterior guards and the four were left in the back alley. "You have them ready, Shay?"
"Yeah," The boy replied half-heartedly, shaken and disillusioned by their earlier conversation. He had two tiny wireless headsets, hastily slapped together by stolen tech scrap, for himself and Ozzie. Brendan smiled. "You really are a freakin' genius," He said softly, and an almost-smile crept onto Seamus' face, the term still carrying the baggage of the refugee camp children mocking him. He hadn't figured out a way to save his cousins. He hadn't been able to save his parents from…
He could build headsets and wells. Oooh.
Brendan looked away for a second. "I'm sorry I said that stuff to you, okay?" He leaned down to make up for their height difference, his voice low. "This is gonna be fine. We're gonna make a fortune. And you just keep dreaming if that makes you happy." He pulled Seamus in for a hug. Seamus screwed up his face and pushed his cousin back.
"You're makin' me nervous," He said haughtily, smoothing out his ragged hoodie. He handed Ozzie his headset and helped him put it on, hiding it under the man's fuzzy, curly hair. When everyone was ready, Brendan and Ozzie lifted Seamus up on their shoulders, and he disappeared into the ventilation system.
Once he was inside he spent a few minutes scrambling around, trying to get his bearings in the darkness. "Ozzie?" He hissed a whisper. "Can you hear me?"
-Yeah, Shay. What's up?"Where are you?"
-Still in security. Shut up for a minute.The voice had dropped much lower. Seamus listened intently to the shuffle, moving ahead slowly.
-There, I'm through. I've got a distance to go 'till I get to the office. I'll stay in the waiting room until you can see me, all right?
"Sounds like a plan," Seamus whispered, hiding his excitement/fear. He slowly crawled down the pipes, carefully, peering into each room. Eventually he found the rather posh waiting room of an office, and his eyes widened. That's where Ozzie worked? Jesus. No wonder he was so worried about getting got.
There was no sign of Ozzie, however, so Seamus continued on. He had seen a rather impressive looking door on the side, and headed in what he presumed to be the direction of that room.
He got to the vent opening and peered down, in on- oh shit. It was the Nietschean who had attacked him in the streets the day before.
His body jerked involuntarily, remembering the assault.
Big Ugly suddenly looked up, his superior hearing picking up every minute scratch that Seamus was now making.
"Fuck!" He whispered. "Ozzie! Ozzie! Go get Valentine!"
-Shay? What's going on? "Oh, man!" His breath had started hitching, heaving, his throat felt like it was being fused shut. His voice was that of a terrified five-year-old girl. Big Ugly was now standing, his force lance poised at the disturbance in the wall, waiting for another sound to surface. "I screwed it up, Oz. I'm so sorry."
-Shay? Seamus didn't hear anymore as a fiery hole was ripped all around him and he fell into his worst nightmare.
-
Brendan looked up from the line suddenly, and over at Carol.
Their hearts skipped simultaneously, but neither was to know that.
Something terrible had happened.
Second Intermission
(Musical Interlude)
Gotta sky that looks like heaven
Gotta Earth that looks like shit
Getting hard to tell where
What I am ends
And what they're making me begins
-The Eels "Climbing Up To The Moon"