She flicked the lighter alive and let the flame burn her palm. Tears pricked the corners of her eyes.
Oriana had expected to wake up and be home, bundled up in two blankets and a comforter as the wet season's rain pattered against her window. To see her mother taking surveys of the top soil, hidden in her thick white raincoat stained with mud. To keep teaching herself cooking that wasn't done with food recyclers, and to flip flop on whether or not she should go on another date with Amir.
But the lighter licked at her palm, and her mother didn't come to stop her. It was supposed to have been a nightmare, a trick her mind played on itself, yet Ori was in a cramped bunk, lying on a thin synthetic mattress, the fire making her cry.
How many words had been left unspoken?
Someone knocked on the plastic flap to her bunk, and Ori jumped and clasped the lighter closed. "Dinner in the mess hall." Ori had never heard of a mess hall until a week ago.
The same five words were repeated over and over, becoming a little softer each time as the soldier went down the line.
Dinner was always at six, or '1800 hours' as she'd heard the buzz cutted, muscle armed, thin lipped soldiers call it. Breakfast was at six too, but that one was '0600 hours', and lunch came at twelve, '1200 hours.' She didn't know why the times were called that in the UNSC, but she did know that they were all wrong. At home, Ori and her mother made dinner when they felt like it, and that usually came around ten or eleven when the sun was beginning to dip below the canopy of their red-green jungle. Sometimes they didn't make dinner, and Ori got to spend the evening learning about three-headed iguanas that flew with winged membranes in the dry season.
She always loved those nights the most.
Ori pocketed the lighter and crawled out of her bunk. Grey walls on grey walls. The mess hall wasn't far, and she'd walked the trail over twenty times already. During the second day she'd decided to just stay there with how often she was shuffled over, and on account of the fact the benches of cold, hard metal were just as comfortable as the bunk she'd been given. Not two minutes after resting her head a soldier had come by and, with a clipped but apologetic tone, told her she couldn't remain in the mess hall after eating hours. No one had told her what the 'eating hours' actually were, and she'd started sobbing when she returned to her bunk.
Ori found herself in the mess hall, the short walk seemingly erased from her memory like it'd been the last fifteen times, shoulder to shoulder with people she'd never seen in her life until last week, but had the same blackness around their eyes that she saw the very few times she'd looked in a mirror. She'd been hit by some instinctual thought the first time she'd seen herself after getting on the ship, an interesting but nonsensical simile: It's like I've got crunched tea leaves for makeup. Tea leaves were green, and her eyes were two beady little singularities in ever growing black holes, but it was something her mother would say when someone like Lars left her nursery.
That guy? He uses crunched tea leaves for makeup. And the two of them would laugh at him and not feel guilty, because Lars made it his job to find something wrong with everything and everyone, and because her mother hated people like that, so Ori hated them too.
The thought that Lars was probably dead choked her, and those funny quips became mean-spirited jabs, and the nonexistent guilt became as real as a knife digging into that spot between her shoulder blades she couldn't quite reach.
It had been six days since that revelation and the stinging pain in the middle of her back had only grown.
The soldiers, all quite a bit taller and quite a bit wider than her, with strides longer than her mother's and voices louder than her teachers', parted for the crunched tea leaf parade, eyes averted, feet shuffling. Men and women capable of killing at the immediate order (as Ori assumed people learned to do in the UNSC) couldn't bear to look a teenage girl in the eyes, not once within the week she'd been on the ship.
In the beginning she'd been confident it was something wrong with her, like not following some protocol, or breaking some unspoken, military rule, and they were too embarrassed to tell the girl trying her best that she was fucking everything up. But on the third day, after her eighth visit to the mess hall, she'd seen the soldiers doing it to an old, old woman she'd overheard had been part of the UNSC once, who surely would have known all the rules and regulations necessary to properly walk through a ship. That's when it clicked. It wasn't embarrassment—it was pity. Ori had never been pitied before. The word felt wrong in her head. It was an action people took on documentaries she watched about broken families or endangered animals.
You can't help but pity them. She'd heard the phrase enough times, she understood it, but being pitied made her throat constrict and the stinging in her back worse.
She went to school and loved bugs. Pity wasn't for her. It couldn't be.
The food was in front of her. A kind of hard but sort of soft curry that tasted faintly of basil and quinoa. She hated it. Her mother had been teaching her how to make the best curries with six hundred year old recipes and utensils she hadn't bothered to learn the name of at the time. Thinking about the nameless cookery worsened the pinching in her back. She hated that too because it shouldn't have mattered—they shouldn't have mattered. But it was something she had done with her mother so of course it did, and that made the hate even stronger, because there were so many amazing memories she had of her mother so why the fuck was she thinking about some fucking pieces of metal and not the amazing memories?
She finished her last mouthful and set the fork down harder than she intended.
A wrinkled, dark hand patted her arm. Omar.
"You're okay. You're okay." Ori left the table, where the others like her sat, without a word. Omar always said those things like they were true. She'd asked herself if it was because of her age, if he thought she was stupid enough to believe him, if he thought she didn't realise it wasn't just her life that'd been kicked into the waves like a sandcastle, but Omar's eyes wobbled in their sockets when he looked at her, and his voice cracked whenever he spoke above a whisper.
She punted the bowl into the recycler.
"Careful, you'll jam it doing that," said a soldier getting his food from the kiosk. He said it softly, like if he spoke to her normally the air would shatter her into a million tiny pieces.
"Sorry," Ori said, and brushed past him.
Omar had watched his children die. Two of them, eight and ten. He'd said it himself.
How could he pity her? If she were Omar she'd despise herself. How come this girl gets to live and not either of mine?
Why did Omar get to live, and not her mother?
The second day on the ship Ori couldn't stop believing her mother was still alive. There were only 25 of them, herself included, on this ship, but there'd been five ships that had rescued people. Frenetically, she'd gone around with a forthrightness she'd never had before, asking soldiers to find out who was on the other four ships. Every time they came back with nothing. Names, yes, but not the one she so desperately needed to be there. The revelation hadn't hit her until the night after combing every name she'd been given.
332 rescued on five ships.
Hat Yai, the planet she was born on, had lived on until a week ago, had been home to 70,000.
That, somehow, made her less sick than thinking about her mother. She was a bad person for that, she knew, and it was why she'd stopped talking to the other 24 afterwards. They shouldn't have to care about her, a selfish kid that cared more for her mother than the tens of thousands who'd died and didn't deserve to.
She left the mess hall and headed for her bunk, but stopped at the door to the berths. He was there, near another door, talking with a woman who was probably important because she had grey hair and he was standing with his back straighter than an arrow. Gage. The 'trooper'—not soldier—that had saved Ori's life. The childish part of her demanded she go up and thank him because that's what you were supposed to do when someone did something nice for you, but the newer, rawer part hissed in retaliation. Why would he want to talk to a girl like her? Gage saved lives, what good was she? Why couldn't he have saved her mother?
Ori gasped and unclenched her fists. She'd balled them up so hard one of her nails pierced the skin. She wiped the blood away and covered it. When she looked up, Gage and the woman were looking at her. Cursing, she slipped into the berths and hopped in her bunk.
She sucked on the wound, refusing to let any blood drip onto the mattress. The thick plasma scar on her cheek rubbing against the ball of her palm was still an alien feeling. She was thirteen. Thirteen year old girls didn't have scars, they travelled the galaxy saving worlds alongside their dashing love interest in amazing stories, and got split lips that healed in a day playing sports in the rain because Valerie always fucking shoulder checked her against that one tree and Valerie and her little sister and their parents were dead and Ori was punching the plastic ceiling of her bunk and her knuckles were bleeding and she was screaming-
"You're hurting yourself, you're hurting yourself."
She was pulled from her bunk by strong, heavy arms. Ori flailed against them, but she was thin, small, and breaking at the seams. "Get off me!" she cried, but whoever had taken her ignored her words.
"You're safe, you're on the Sunset, nothing's gonna hurt you." He wrapped himself around her, clasping her arms to her sides.
Ori kept shouting, "Get off me! Get off me!" but her inability to move beyond her own pathetic thrashing was quick to quell her outburst. She collapsed into him, sobbing like a baby, her tears wetting his shirt. But he didn't move, didn't let her go. He was a wall, utterly incapable of collapsing. Each second that ticked by made it easier to let her muscles relax, some invisible part of her recognising that she didn't have to keep herself up anymore because he was doing it instead. The sobbing turned to soft cries and whimpers, and she hunched over until he shrouded her entirely from the ceiling light.
Eventually she stopped altogether, and before she realised it she was asleep.
When she awoke, she was in a familiar place. A gratuitously soft bed, the inconspicuous beep of a heart monitor, and the synthetic plastic sleeve up over her left arm administering a cocktail of drugs that'd help her the most.
Ori opened her eyes and Gage was there, back straight and hands resting on his thighs. He wasn't a striking man, not like the people in the shows she watched on her chatter; it was clear whatever training the UNSC subjected him to hadn't been kind. His eyes were flanked by wrinkles, and his lips seemed hoisted in a constant, subtle frown, and yet, despite his intimidating frame and unfriendly face, he had saved her life. And yet, despite him being an elite trooper of the UNSC, of which she had heard many politicians and friends alike denounce for its oppression, had consoled her for no apparent benefit.
He had been there when she lost everything. Came from another world with guns and the unrelenting firepower of the UNSC, just like all the vids said they would, but not to oppress or kill her. Gage was alien. In the world that should have been they would never have met. She was a girl from an outer colony, he was a lackey of the very thing so many people she knew fought against.
Sitting in front of her in the hospital bed was an embodiment of everything gone wrong in her life. Her mother, her home, the raging infernos, the devils in the shadows that had killed her friends without mercy.
He'd saved her life, and the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach just from looking at him told her that she hated him.
Ori didn't know if she was okay with that. She did know that she wanted to punch him, though.
When she curled her knuckles again there was a tiny jab in her arm, and the little spark of anger ready to turn into something worse dissipated. Was it the drugs they were pumping into her? Had to be.
"Hey, Oriana," Gage said.
She swallowed. Hard. The prospect of talking to him was, strangely, like talking to the enemy.
With the sedatives in, sleep was quickly becoming the most appealing option. "Hey," she said, anyway.
"How're you feeling?"
"Tired." No point in lying.
"Yeah," he said, then chuckled. "Can't blame you for that."
"Yeah."
He rubbed his hands on his legs and said, "Uh, a lighter slipped out of your pocket when I was taking you to the med bay." Gage placed her inscribed lighter on the bed and stood. "It's not exactly within regs but, figured it was important to you."
Ori picked it up without looking at it. "Thank you."
"Yeah, no problem. I uh, have duties I need to get done." He motioned towards the med bay's door.
"Okay," Ori said, and flicked the lighter open.
When he was at the door Gage turned around. "Oriana, if you do ever need to talk you can access the UNSC waypoint with your chatter. Just search for 'Yevgenny.' You'll find me no problem."
"Okay," Ori repeated.
Gage left without another word, and Ori was alone in the med bay.
She wasn't going to message him.
It was an odd, presumptuous proposal. Maybe it was born of kindness, but to her it was little more than someone trying to take advantage. Was this what her mother had warned her about? People, a lot of the time men, finding someone vulnerable and inserting themselves into their life for selfish reasons? There'd been a lot of discussions about it at home, but she'd never truly believed people could be like that.
She flicked the lighter to life.
How many good people had burned alive in front of her?
Flicked it closed.
Why couldn't she have died, too?
Flicked it alive.
Anyone was capable of anything.
When she slept she had nightmares of her mother burning alive, her face wracked not with pain, but disappointment.
A week later, the Sunset had made it to Reach.