+Chapter Five+
It could hardly be called sleep.
Harper made more noise that night than he usually did in waking, and given Harper's gift for nonsensical ramblings, that was saying something. Every minute dream-movement was acted out by shaky limbs, every frantic fumbling caught Harper up in his fever-drenched sheets. He spoke a lot, but not clearly enough that one could hear what he was saying, were one to listen.
Through the nightmare that disturbed his dreams, Harper relived everything that happened to him way back when as vividly as the first time. Even more vivid than the first time around, if that were possible.
--
Seamus' father first took him to the sewers when he was five. His mother had fallen ill and could not go to work, and the family had a debt to pay to some of the capos- mudfoots like themselves that were given authority over the rest in the refugee camp by the overseer Nietzscheans. Seamus had lay awake in the corner of their crowded tent at night, pretending to be asleep, listening to his young parents argue in whispers in the darkness. His mother, who was seventeen, gaunt and pale, had a look of defiance and disgust as his father tried to persuade her.
There was something in the young man's eyes as well, a sort of troubled defeat. In retrospect, Seamus would never see the carefree, jovial, brilliant young man that had been his father again. All that was left was this stunted, tired old dotard in a young man's body.
So here he was, five years old, tripping over his own feet to keep up with his father's stride down the dark sewers of Quincy.
They weren't Nietzschean, the men they went to meet. They were mudfoots, too. They must have been capos.
He was too young, too tired to follow the conversation. All he really remembered was the pained look on his father's face, the defeated sweat dripping off his brow.
He remembered looking up, between his father and the two capos, watching the fear and defeat radiate off his father in waves.
The young man cringed and sputtered and wouldn't look at his little son. "I don't...I mean I can't...you have to understand that I'm only doing this because-"
"Like I fucking care." One of the capos said, sneering a little, so skinny he looked like he was going to snap under the weight of his thin sweater.
Seamus' father grasped his shoulder carefully, his hand shaking ever so slightly. "Shay," He almost-whispered. "I need you to do something. For Mommy and me."
And, sure, the first time it hurt. Be he got used to it. Afterwards, they'd always give him some industrial glue solvent.
--
Harper woke up and for a little while he didn't know where he was, it was dark and cool and he thought he would hear the ocean somewhere in the background, but he didn't feel like he was dirtbound for a surfing trip. Usually after a day of surfing he was worn out and aching in a different way, a better way. He usually wore sunscreen, too, he might be stubborn but he wasn't an idiot.
Jesus. Ouch.
He got up slowly, painfully, and almost collapsed right back down the low billowy pallet. His right leg hurt like a bitch, and he eventually stopped trying to move it.
He edged to the foot of the bed, still sitting sullenly, wincingly. Harper hardly noticed the chain on his good leg; he felt his way up to a standing position, leaning against one wall. He was naked. He ran his hands down burnt flesh and relieved himself, wincing.
It was too dark to notice the blood in his urine. He collapsed back down on the blood, trying not to weep, and fell back into the clutches of his past.
--
Tyr was still awake well into the night.
He had a room in a higher part of the estate, built on the side of where the courtyard and servants' quarters were. It was big, and lavishly furnished, with rich dark colours. The high wooden bed was covered with many quilts and woven blankets, the walls were hung with tapestries of spectacular sceneries.
He lay on his side, his hair splayed out over the pillows, staring out the wide windows at the unsettling large white moon. There was a spacious, luxurious balcony outside his window doors; the ocean breeze played with the silk curtains casually. The moon hung low in the sky, pure virgin white, reflected in the ocean's waves.
He couldn't sleep.
He closed his eyes. The moonlight is too bright, he told himself. But there was something comforting in that light, something innocent and virginal and familiar. A shining white light from the deep black space that had become his home.
Home.
Tyr fought down the feelings of guilt and depression. He didn't need anybody else. He didn't need the crew of the Andromeda, he would survive on his own. The only reason he hadn't found a way off this rock already was because leaving Harper in his condition would have made Tyr no better than bastard beta Dragons.
Yes.
A big dark fist balled up pristine crimson sheets and Tyr leaned over, curling up more than he usually did in his sleep.
He wasn't worried about the boy.
He really wasn't!
Harper had been through worse. He had survived death sentences that Tyr had been spared from. And Tyr had already risked his own life for the boy- if it came to it, he wouldn't do it again.
Tyr's face darkened at the thought, subconsciously, and his brow furrowed. He wouldn't. He'd take the opportunity to find a way off-planet.
If there was a way off-planet.
But he would have to stop thinking like that. He had survived on mere dreams before.
He was sure Harper had, too.
Tyr sighed, breathlessly, almost inaudibly. He had agreed to fight a war for these people. A war, in his opinion, that was useless, greedy, expansionist, and a threat to everyone, including himself. And the only way out was to will Harper back to health and tell them he was retiring to his mountain estate, wherever the hell that was, and hope the real General Anasazi wouldn't show up. On that subject, however, he was strangely serene. He didn't have the knowledge that the real General Anasazi had died. No one did. He had resolved himself to simply killing the real General if he ever found him, preferrably before Lord Amasai did. It wasn't the most distasteful thing he'd ever had to do. Besides, the General had a reputation of killing mostly the women and children of his conquered. He was obviously a beta at best.
But before they could do anything, Harper would have to get better.
Damn that boy for always finding trouble! It would be a blessing if he would just make up his mind on whether or not to simply die and leave Tyr be. But no-
He wasn't worried about the boy. He wasn't. He was worried about himself.
Regardless, Tyr still didn't sleep that night, staring up at the pale white virgin moon that hung so solemnly low in the black starry sky.
--
In his dreams, in the past, in the sewers of Quincy, Seamus' childhood was stolen from him in the way that was still unique in the world of abject poverty, but not unique enough that it was a surprise to anyone else who knew.
It was the sort of growing up that children in the mines and the factories were, sometimes, spared. It was the sort of growing up that would have made Seamus jaded and soulless and dead, if he remembered it. Even after he left Earth, he still had a bitterness and deep-rooted passion for his home planet, but it was for different reasons, reasons typical to any other Earther. This particular situation was blurred and lost and dissolved away by the acidy burn of sniffed glue, and Rave. Which was just as well, because Seamus would have gone insane much earlier if not for Rave and glue. Rave and glue. Rave, Trance, Sparky, and glue. Surfing. Spaceships. Hoverboards. Clear blue oceans and sandy moon deserts that he would, at one point, rip across in banged-together buggies. Drinking and weed and dancing and girls and boys and Beka. The Commonwealth. And the Maru. And the Andr...
Oh, God. He had so much to live for, once.
Not when he was six. Or it would have been a lot worse. When he was six, the small burning baggie of glue solvent at the end of each ordeal in the shadows of the sewers was all he had to look forward to, and he took it, happily.
He shared his glue with Rave, that was one of Rave's stipulations.
Rave was nine. A big kid. One of the older boys that didn't go out of his way to make Seamus' life hell. Before they relocated closer to the city, Seamus didn't have any friends besides Rave. But Rave found him in the sewers once, after he had been with the capos, when he was waiting for his father to come back and get him. Seamus sat shivering, his clothes torn, his body bleeding and probably broken. And Rave was there.
"You don't have to do it next time," He said. He was older, sure, but he still spoke like a child, his voice soft and slightly accented, his eyes glazed and dull in the darkness.
"Huh?"
"I'll do it. I'll come find you next time, and I'll do it."
"Why?"
Rave shrugged. "Just nice, I guess. But share your glue with me, okay?"
--
Tyr came to Harper's room the next morning before any of the other slaves did, and found the boy tossing and turning on soiled sheets, his skin red and raw and pussy and boiling, a stinking stain of blood and urine on the pristine, stucco white wall opposite the bed.
His immediate reaction was to draw back, away from the stench of death and disease, the spores of waste and rupture that threatened to choke his lungs. He didn't envy Harper for a minute, not like he ever did before, and his first instincts were to put the boy out of his misery, leave this place, fend for himself without the burden of a diseased child.
But there was something else, something more, holding him in the doorway of that small white room in a strange estate on some backwater planet. Something virginal and pale like the moonlight, something tender and a little sad. It was a feeling that Tyr hadn't experienced before and it disturbed him. If it were a creature, he would have wanted to kill it, or at least lock it away someplace where it wouldn't endanger him. But it wasn't a creature. It lived inside him, in his heart. So he'd have to learn to adapt to it.
"Is he very sick?" The two children had come up behind Tyr so quietly that even with his superior hearing he hadn't noticed them. He hid his surprise and turned slowly, and there was Okasha's boy, standing with a tray with a simple arrangement of food that couldn't possibly help Harper heal. "Zay? Is he going to be all right?" The boy asked timidly, shaggy dark hair framing impossibly wide eyes.
Behind him a little ways stood the girl, Geeia's servant, leaning against the opposite wall almost insolently, her unattractive green eyes boring a defiant hole right into Tyr.
"He has not improved since last night," Was all Tyr said.
The boy nodded, a little sadly. He reverently held out the tray for Tyr to take. "I will...I will get my master. He...I know the healers don't know what's wrong with Zay, but my master...you just can't tell anyone, okay?"
Tyr nodded, not letting his confusion show. The boy nodded back, vigorously, and ran off down the hall, like a kitten after a butterfly.
The girl didn't move. But something in her unattractive green eyes changed when she looked at Tyr.
Hate?
--
The next time Seamus' father took him to the sewers, two days later, Rave almost didn't come and Seamus was almost very mad. But Rave did show up, after his father had left, after the capos stood there looking at him with desperate, lecherous look. Rave smiled engagingly.
He was a slim boy, taller than Seamus, with thin black hair and an exotic face, darker than anyone Seamus had seen in Massachusetts. Occasionally slavers would go through town with bodies raided from the south, dark and tan and black and exotic children and women who looked like Rave.
Seamus didn't even have to do anything when Rave arrived, the attention of the capos was drawn towards him almost inexplicably. They were so close when they did it, when they tore the rags off him, when they pushed him into the slag and sludge, that Seamus figured he must've been a ghost to them. He stood there and watched, somehow, his young child's eyes watched what they did to Rave, what they did in their pathetic, unloved desperation to a child who writhed and arched and, if it had been Seamus, would've cried.
Rave didn't cry. He stared up at the top of the dark sewers, his eyes adult and dead and angry all at once. Seamus leaned his little head to the side, confused, so close he should've been able to feel the pressure of the capo's backs and feet on his limbs.
But he didn't. It was like he wasn't even there.
Rave didn't make any noise, and they were done quickly; the painful, sad and quick release of those so desperate and loathsome that they would fall to this, not even the lowest common denominator.
Seamus at some point realised he wasn't even watching anymore. His eyes glazed out and all he could hear was the sound of laboured breathing and flesh slapping and sweat slowly trickling down impoverished bodies.
It was almost beautiful.
He had to see the beauty of it. Or he would go mad.
Then his father was there, kneeling in the sludge before him, anxiously, asking, softly, carefully: "Are you okay?"
Seamus blinked, and there was a hot little plastic bag in his hands, and the capos were gone, and the sewers were eerily still and dark, an oppressive heat riding off the covered hot water pipes.
"I'm fine, Da, it's okay."
"Did they hurt you?" He asked it every time. And every time it was the same answer. Except today.
"No, Da. I didn't...Rave went and-" And then he looked over his shoulder and Rave was gone, and he was standing in the spot where they had beaten the boy and stolen his soul. And he looked down on himself and his rags were torn up more than they were when he awoke that morning, and there were scars and gashes on his arms, and he was aching.
But it wasn't so bad as before.
--
They had taken him into town. Tyr had stood there and nodded and pretended to know what the fuck they were talking about, and agreed to let them take Harper, sick and delusional, without Tyr's guidance or help or presence to stop him from being a damned idiot, and took off.
Okasha had been worried, Tyr could see it in the man's face. There was a bit of sadness, too, guilt almost, but it was hidden well by the other man's joviality and good naturedness. The boy, Lim, had begged his master to come along, but Okasha had forbidden it. Town was dangerous for boys like him, he had said. Tyr had stood there and nodded agreeably, still wondering what the fuck they were talking about, and why the town would be dangerous for a boy like Lim but not Harper or the girl, Geeia's servant, who had helped wrap Harper's fevered thrashing form in new sheets and prepared the cart for him.
Tyr had to stay in the estate because he had a meeting with the Lord Amasai. Now he sat in his room, alone, maps of Casiija spread out before him on one of the many deep polished wood desks they had given him.
The estate, and it's corresponding town, were on the western coast, almost right in the middle. The rest of the country spread out in all directions away from the ocean vastly, covering mountains, savannah, deserts and forests. There were several small farming communities cropping up here and there. To the north lay several smaller friendly nations, and after that another stretch of water, a large inlet. Then the map ended. But after that, he was told, were the big enemies, the major unfriendly nations, who were backwards and blasphemous that the only good thing they could offer was free labour off the backs of their stolen children.
Well. That was a rather pessimistic role to take. But Tyr was still having a hard time swallowing his disgust and distaste at such obviously navel- gazing beta creatures, still having a hard time wrapping his head around the long standing institution. He understood the economical benefits of bonded labour, he understood it because he had lived it once himself, he understood it because conquered tribes had always laboured under the Kodiak heel, but they were never slaves.
They were never deprived their identity, their families, their heritage. Even if they were kludges.
There was a stretch of mountains starting in the south, where General Anasazi apparently resided. It snaked its way eastward, twisting north a bit, cutting a curvy line across the country, separating the northwest and the southeast. In that pocket of isolated southeast lay the rebelling land. Okasha's constituency.
Tyr heard a quiet rustling towards the door. Instead of raising his head in vigilance and reaching instinctively towards the knife that was no longer carried in his boot, he remained where he was, regarding the maps and notes before him. He had picked up that particular shuffling sound as that of the servants. He was probably the only master here who could hear it at all.
"You can come in," He said after the entity had lingered timidly in the doorway for several minutes.
He heard more than he saw the boy, Lim, draw back into himself a little bit before shuffling into the room, his feet bare of the little softwood sandals. "I...I'm sorry about Zay, sir," He said quietly. "It was my fault."
"I know," Tyr said, still not looking up. Again, he heard more than saw Lim flinch.
"I...I thought he might like this. You know. To make him feel better."
Tyr turned at this, and Lim was standing there with outstretched hands, in which scrambled a mewling little kitten. "This was mine," Lim said, like that explained anything. "But...I went back and I couldn't find any of the rest. I think they died."
Tyr looked suspiciously, with disdain, at the kitten in Lim's clutch. Lim stood with his outstretched arms and flinched a little, and looked very embarrassed all of a sudden.
"Thank you," Tyr said curtly, saving him. He took the kitten from the boy and set it on his lap, where it immediately began batting at one long braid.
Lim stifled a smile and quickly looked down at his bare feet, clasping his pale hands behind his equally pale garmented back. "I'm sorry," He said. "I didn't mean for Zay to get sick. My...my master is punishing me. He cut my meals and gave me a curfew and...I'm sorry." And he genuinely was. He had a sweet, fifteen year old innocence that could only come from growing up in the kitchens of such a wealthy, isolated estate. "Please don't punish Zay," he went on. "I think...I know he's not going to come up with me again anytime soon, anyway." A half-hearted attempt at a smile that Tyr returned gracefully. "I...I'll go now." And he slipped out of the colourfully furnished room without another word.
--
"WHERE THE FUCK AM I?" Harper yelled, and he yelled good.
"Shit!" A large black man who was most definitely NOT Tyr clamped a big arm around Harper's chest, pinning his arms, trying to keep him on the cot where he had been placed.
"Let me GO, you fucking sterile freddie!" Harper tried to bite him but it didn't really work out.
"Zay, please, calm down!" A girl, some girl, a slim pale girl with ugly puke green eyes and hair that was so long it would have been antisocial in any reasonable civilisation, put a still, gentle hand on his splintered shin and he kicked her away, ignoring the spikes of pain jolting up from his fractured leg.
"Who the FUCK are YOU?" He struggled again anew, trying to jab his captor in the ribs, but that didn't really work out either. "Let me GO!"
It was no use, he couldn't get free. He was helpless and naked and hurting and cornered on all sides, and all of a sudden he was back in those sewers in Quincy with the bastard capos and Rave, and he saw it and he knew what happened and he understood for the first time in his life, and he had never been more scared.
Calm down, Harper. Trance's familiar voice commanded him. Harper stilled and looked up and she was standing there, apparently unseen by his captors, leaning against the opposite wall, her hair done up with sparkly clips, smiling serenely at him. Her mouth didn't move, but he heard her voice. They're here to help you. Just calm down and do as they say.
Harper didn't respond but he stared incredulously at the spot on the wall where Trance leaned casually, his eyes wide in his skull, a deep sort of unidentifiable sadness washing over him. Then they pushed him back down on the cot and he whimpered, and he would have thrashed again if it weren't for Trance's soothing voice in his head, shhh.
Another man, a crazy looking man, big and fat and black with a head of short dreadlocks punctuated with colourful beads, and a long red and blue garment in dizzying patterns, appeared and smiled and Harper supposed he was trying to comfort him, but it wasn't working. The big strange man put a hand to Harper's head and chuckled and produced a bottle. "Give this to him to drink," He said. "He has a gukama spirit in his gut. This will drive it out."
"WHAT?" Harper screamed, taking it to mean that they were going to take something vital out of him.
He knows what he's doing, Harper. Trance's voice soothed him. Just trust him.
Harper still looked warily at the stout brown bottle that the strange man was opening as his captor spoke gruffly. "Fine. You know how to contact me for payment. And you," He pointed with his free hand at the girl standing anxiously across from him. "Had better not tell anybody we were here."
"No, sir," She said, with a rehearsed air that would have made Harper think she had been through this before, if he had been paying attention to that. "Of course not."
And then his captor held Harper back more and pried open his mouth and they poured the most god-awful concoction down his throat.
--
"Jesus," He said, sipping a small cup of orange juice spiked with vodka. "Hair of the dog, eh?"
Trance, sitting across from him in the mess hall of the Maru, smiled. "You should know better than to drink so much, Harper."
"I know, I know, poor little Harper can't say no, right? Don't you worry about me, your purpleness, the Harper can handle his substances well enough to serve his purposes."
Trance smiled again, in the innocent schoolgirl way she had when he flirted with her. "Do you feel better."
"Hell, yeah," he said, toying with the flexi chips in front of him. "I feel fucking great. Like I woke up from a coma or something." He smiled. "So I guess you're here to give me some advice, huh?"
"No. You're just dreaming."
Harper's smile disappeared, a little quicker than he intended. "So...those other times, you weren't contacting me? Was I just hallucinating?"
It seemed like Trance had difficulty answering the question, but Harper didn't know how much of that was true and how much of it was Trance being an engineered enigma.
"Well, you have been hallucinating a little, you were awfully sick. But...I've been trying to help you." She smiled again. "But that medicine knocked you out pretty good. Still not a natural sleep, but your virus should be going away, so you should be getting better, eventually, anyhow. Right now is a dream. I'm...just memories."
Harper toyed again with the flexis, passively. "But you're out there, right?"
"Yes."
"And right now is just a dream?"
"Yes."
"So it would be pointless to ask you if Beka and Dylan and Rommie are okay?"
Trance blinked. Sadly. "It would." She said. "Right now is just a dream. And every dream has to end sometime."
He looked up at her, his eyes gleaming severely. "That's the saddest thing I've ever heard anyone say."
Trance smiled again, but this time it wasn't happy, or innocent, or girlish. It held the hardness of a millennia of heartbreak. "Truth hurts," She said. And she leaned over the table and kissed him on the cheek.
--
Harper woke up, but it wasn't with any strangled sob or surprised gasp. It was almost natural.
Harper woke up in a much nicer pallet than the last one, with more substantial blanket, feeling marginally better than he had before.
He wasn't in his own room, though. This one was much bigger, or it seemed so anyway, the way his breath wafted away from him instead of coming back to stifle him. The sound of the ocean was louder here. A bright virgin whiteness shone in from the big heavy low moon outside the balcony.
His pallet was next to a large, high dark polished rosewood bed. He struggled to lean up on his elbows, and it wasn't as cumbersome as every other time he had tried to do it. He listened to the breathing of the person in the bed, and decided that Tyr was awake, but was waiting to see if Harper had awoken or just stirred.
"Tyr?"
"Yes, boy?"
"You woke up when I woke up, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Am I supposed to stay here in this room with you, then?"
"Yes."
"Okay." He paused, adjusting the sheets and blankets around him a little more. "Tyr?"
"What?" A little irritated now.
"I'm sorry I went out like that when you told me not to. I'll listen to you from now on."
A deep, heavy, almost confused sigh. "Good," Tyr said.
Harper collapsed back on his pallet and burrowed himself under his sheets. Suddenly something small and furry jumped up on the pallet and started nuzzling his still sunburnt arms.
"Hello," He whispered, trying not to disturb Tyr. "Where did you come from?" He reached out to touch the kitten's head and it nosed his hand happily, purring freakishly loud. "I guess you like me. Well, I like you, too. Now what should I call you?" He couldn't make out the kitten's colours in the dark, but the creature shimmered a little, a little bluishly, greenishly. "Jungle?" The kitten mewled a little, happily, and snuggled a little under Harper's lower back, becoming a little ball of fluffy, purring heat.
Harper smiled, a little, and went to sleep.
TBC
It could hardly be called sleep.
Harper made more noise that night than he usually did in waking, and given Harper's gift for nonsensical ramblings, that was saying something. Every minute dream-movement was acted out by shaky limbs, every frantic fumbling caught Harper up in his fever-drenched sheets. He spoke a lot, but not clearly enough that one could hear what he was saying, were one to listen.
Through the nightmare that disturbed his dreams, Harper relived everything that happened to him way back when as vividly as the first time. Even more vivid than the first time around, if that were possible.
--
Seamus' father first took him to the sewers when he was five. His mother had fallen ill and could not go to work, and the family had a debt to pay to some of the capos- mudfoots like themselves that were given authority over the rest in the refugee camp by the overseer Nietzscheans. Seamus had lay awake in the corner of their crowded tent at night, pretending to be asleep, listening to his young parents argue in whispers in the darkness. His mother, who was seventeen, gaunt and pale, had a look of defiance and disgust as his father tried to persuade her.
There was something in the young man's eyes as well, a sort of troubled defeat. In retrospect, Seamus would never see the carefree, jovial, brilliant young man that had been his father again. All that was left was this stunted, tired old dotard in a young man's body.
So here he was, five years old, tripping over his own feet to keep up with his father's stride down the dark sewers of Quincy.
They weren't Nietzschean, the men they went to meet. They were mudfoots, too. They must have been capos.
He was too young, too tired to follow the conversation. All he really remembered was the pained look on his father's face, the defeated sweat dripping off his brow.
He remembered looking up, between his father and the two capos, watching the fear and defeat radiate off his father in waves.
The young man cringed and sputtered and wouldn't look at his little son. "I don't...I mean I can't...you have to understand that I'm only doing this because-"
"Like I fucking care." One of the capos said, sneering a little, so skinny he looked like he was going to snap under the weight of his thin sweater.
Seamus' father grasped his shoulder carefully, his hand shaking ever so slightly. "Shay," He almost-whispered. "I need you to do something. For Mommy and me."
And, sure, the first time it hurt. Be he got used to it. Afterwards, they'd always give him some industrial glue solvent.
--
Harper woke up and for a little while he didn't know where he was, it was dark and cool and he thought he would hear the ocean somewhere in the background, but he didn't feel like he was dirtbound for a surfing trip. Usually after a day of surfing he was worn out and aching in a different way, a better way. He usually wore sunscreen, too, he might be stubborn but he wasn't an idiot.
Jesus. Ouch.
He got up slowly, painfully, and almost collapsed right back down the low billowy pallet. His right leg hurt like a bitch, and he eventually stopped trying to move it.
He edged to the foot of the bed, still sitting sullenly, wincingly. Harper hardly noticed the chain on his good leg; he felt his way up to a standing position, leaning against one wall. He was naked. He ran his hands down burnt flesh and relieved himself, wincing.
It was too dark to notice the blood in his urine. He collapsed back down on the blood, trying not to weep, and fell back into the clutches of his past.
--
Tyr was still awake well into the night.
He had a room in a higher part of the estate, built on the side of where the courtyard and servants' quarters were. It was big, and lavishly furnished, with rich dark colours. The high wooden bed was covered with many quilts and woven blankets, the walls were hung with tapestries of spectacular sceneries.
He lay on his side, his hair splayed out over the pillows, staring out the wide windows at the unsettling large white moon. There was a spacious, luxurious balcony outside his window doors; the ocean breeze played with the silk curtains casually. The moon hung low in the sky, pure virgin white, reflected in the ocean's waves.
He couldn't sleep.
He closed his eyes. The moonlight is too bright, he told himself. But there was something comforting in that light, something innocent and virginal and familiar. A shining white light from the deep black space that had become his home.
Home.
Tyr fought down the feelings of guilt and depression. He didn't need anybody else. He didn't need the crew of the Andromeda, he would survive on his own. The only reason he hadn't found a way off this rock already was because leaving Harper in his condition would have made Tyr no better than bastard beta Dragons.
Yes.
A big dark fist balled up pristine crimson sheets and Tyr leaned over, curling up more than he usually did in his sleep.
He wasn't worried about the boy.
He really wasn't!
Harper had been through worse. He had survived death sentences that Tyr had been spared from. And Tyr had already risked his own life for the boy- if it came to it, he wouldn't do it again.
Tyr's face darkened at the thought, subconsciously, and his brow furrowed. He wouldn't. He'd take the opportunity to find a way off-planet.
If there was a way off-planet.
But he would have to stop thinking like that. He had survived on mere dreams before.
He was sure Harper had, too.
Tyr sighed, breathlessly, almost inaudibly. He had agreed to fight a war for these people. A war, in his opinion, that was useless, greedy, expansionist, and a threat to everyone, including himself. And the only way out was to will Harper back to health and tell them he was retiring to his mountain estate, wherever the hell that was, and hope the real General Anasazi wouldn't show up. On that subject, however, he was strangely serene. He didn't have the knowledge that the real General Anasazi had died. No one did. He had resolved himself to simply killing the real General if he ever found him, preferrably before Lord Amasai did. It wasn't the most distasteful thing he'd ever had to do. Besides, the General had a reputation of killing mostly the women and children of his conquered. He was obviously a beta at best.
But before they could do anything, Harper would have to get better.
Damn that boy for always finding trouble! It would be a blessing if he would just make up his mind on whether or not to simply die and leave Tyr be. But no-
He wasn't worried about the boy. He wasn't. He was worried about himself.
Regardless, Tyr still didn't sleep that night, staring up at the pale white virgin moon that hung so solemnly low in the black starry sky.
--
In his dreams, in the past, in the sewers of Quincy, Seamus' childhood was stolen from him in the way that was still unique in the world of abject poverty, but not unique enough that it was a surprise to anyone else who knew.
It was the sort of growing up that children in the mines and the factories were, sometimes, spared. It was the sort of growing up that would have made Seamus jaded and soulless and dead, if he remembered it. Even after he left Earth, he still had a bitterness and deep-rooted passion for his home planet, but it was for different reasons, reasons typical to any other Earther. This particular situation was blurred and lost and dissolved away by the acidy burn of sniffed glue, and Rave. Which was just as well, because Seamus would have gone insane much earlier if not for Rave and glue. Rave and glue. Rave, Trance, Sparky, and glue. Surfing. Spaceships. Hoverboards. Clear blue oceans and sandy moon deserts that he would, at one point, rip across in banged-together buggies. Drinking and weed and dancing and girls and boys and Beka. The Commonwealth. And the Maru. And the Andr...
Oh, God. He had so much to live for, once.
Not when he was six. Or it would have been a lot worse. When he was six, the small burning baggie of glue solvent at the end of each ordeal in the shadows of the sewers was all he had to look forward to, and he took it, happily.
He shared his glue with Rave, that was one of Rave's stipulations.
Rave was nine. A big kid. One of the older boys that didn't go out of his way to make Seamus' life hell. Before they relocated closer to the city, Seamus didn't have any friends besides Rave. But Rave found him in the sewers once, after he had been with the capos, when he was waiting for his father to come back and get him. Seamus sat shivering, his clothes torn, his body bleeding and probably broken. And Rave was there.
"You don't have to do it next time," He said. He was older, sure, but he still spoke like a child, his voice soft and slightly accented, his eyes glazed and dull in the darkness.
"Huh?"
"I'll do it. I'll come find you next time, and I'll do it."
"Why?"
Rave shrugged. "Just nice, I guess. But share your glue with me, okay?"
--
Tyr came to Harper's room the next morning before any of the other slaves did, and found the boy tossing and turning on soiled sheets, his skin red and raw and pussy and boiling, a stinking stain of blood and urine on the pristine, stucco white wall opposite the bed.
His immediate reaction was to draw back, away from the stench of death and disease, the spores of waste and rupture that threatened to choke his lungs. He didn't envy Harper for a minute, not like he ever did before, and his first instincts were to put the boy out of his misery, leave this place, fend for himself without the burden of a diseased child.
But there was something else, something more, holding him in the doorway of that small white room in a strange estate on some backwater planet. Something virginal and pale like the moonlight, something tender and a little sad. It was a feeling that Tyr hadn't experienced before and it disturbed him. If it were a creature, he would have wanted to kill it, or at least lock it away someplace where it wouldn't endanger him. But it wasn't a creature. It lived inside him, in his heart. So he'd have to learn to adapt to it.
"Is he very sick?" The two children had come up behind Tyr so quietly that even with his superior hearing he hadn't noticed them. He hid his surprise and turned slowly, and there was Okasha's boy, standing with a tray with a simple arrangement of food that couldn't possibly help Harper heal. "Zay? Is he going to be all right?" The boy asked timidly, shaggy dark hair framing impossibly wide eyes.
Behind him a little ways stood the girl, Geeia's servant, leaning against the opposite wall almost insolently, her unattractive green eyes boring a defiant hole right into Tyr.
"He has not improved since last night," Was all Tyr said.
The boy nodded, a little sadly. He reverently held out the tray for Tyr to take. "I will...I will get my master. He...I know the healers don't know what's wrong with Zay, but my master...you just can't tell anyone, okay?"
Tyr nodded, not letting his confusion show. The boy nodded back, vigorously, and ran off down the hall, like a kitten after a butterfly.
The girl didn't move. But something in her unattractive green eyes changed when she looked at Tyr.
Hate?
--
The next time Seamus' father took him to the sewers, two days later, Rave almost didn't come and Seamus was almost very mad. But Rave did show up, after his father had left, after the capos stood there looking at him with desperate, lecherous look. Rave smiled engagingly.
He was a slim boy, taller than Seamus, with thin black hair and an exotic face, darker than anyone Seamus had seen in Massachusetts. Occasionally slavers would go through town with bodies raided from the south, dark and tan and black and exotic children and women who looked like Rave.
Seamus didn't even have to do anything when Rave arrived, the attention of the capos was drawn towards him almost inexplicably. They were so close when they did it, when they tore the rags off him, when they pushed him into the slag and sludge, that Seamus figured he must've been a ghost to them. He stood there and watched, somehow, his young child's eyes watched what they did to Rave, what they did in their pathetic, unloved desperation to a child who writhed and arched and, if it had been Seamus, would've cried.
Rave didn't cry. He stared up at the top of the dark sewers, his eyes adult and dead and angry all at once. Seamus leaned his little head to the side, confused, so close he should've been able to feel the pressure of the capo's backs and feet on his limbs.
But he didn't. It was like he wasn't even there.
Rave didn't make any noise, and they were done quickly; the painful, sad and quick release of those so desperate and loathsome that they would fall to this, not even the lowest common denominator.
Seamus at some point realised he wasn't even watching anymore. His eyes glazed out and all he could hear was the sound of laboured breathing and flesh slapping and sweat slowly trickling down impoverished bodies.
It was almost beautiful.
He had to see the beauty of it. Or he would go mad.
Then his father was there, kneeling in the sludge before him, anxiously, asking, softly, carefully: "Are you okay?"
Seamus blinked, and there was a hot little plastic bag in his hands, and the capos were gone, and the sewers were eerily still and dark, an oppressive heat riding off the covered hot water pipes.
"I'm fine, Da, it's okay."
"Did they hurt you?" He asked it every time. And every time it was the same answer. Except today.
"No, Da. I didn't...Rave went and-" And then he looked over his shoulder and Rave was gone, and he was standing in the spot where they had beaten the boy and stolen his soul. And he looked down on himself and his rags were torn up more than they were when he awoke that morning, and there were scars and gashes on his arms, and he was aching.
But it wasn't so bad as before.
--
They had taken him into town. Tyr had stood there and nodded and pretended to know what the fuck they were talking about, and agreed to let them take Harper, sick and delusional, without Tyr's guidance or help or presence to stop him from being a damned idiot, and took off.
Okasha had been worried, Tyr could see it in the man's face. There was a bit of sadness, too, guilt almost, but it was hidden well by the other man's joviality and good naturedness. The boy, Lim, had begged his master to come along, but Okasha had forbidden it. Town was dangerous for boys like him, he had said. Tyr had stood there and nodded agreeably, still wondering what the fuck they were talking about, and why the town would be dangerous for a boy like Lim but not Harper or the girl, Geeia's servant, who had helped wrap Harper's fevered thrashing form in new sheets and prepared the cart for him.
Tyr had to stay in the estate because he had a meeting with the Lord Amasai. Now he sat in his room, alone, maps of Casiija spread out before him on one of the many deep polished wood desks they had given him.
The estate, and it's corresponding town, were on the western coast, almost right in the middle. The rest of the country spread out in all directions away from the ocean vastly, covering mountains, savannah, deserts and forests. There were several small farming communities cropping up here and there. To the north lay several smaller friendly nations, and after that another stretch of water, a large inlet. Then the map ended. But after that, he was told, were the big enemies, the major unfriendly nations, who were backwards and blasphemous that the only good thing they could offer was free labour off the backs of their stolen children.
Well. That was a rather pessimistic role to take. But Tyr was still having a hard time swallowing his disgust and distaste at such obviously navel- gazing beta creatures, still having a hard time wrapping his head around the long standing institution. He understood the economical benefits of bonded labour, he understood it because he had lived it once himself, he understood it because conquered tribes had always laboured under the Kodiak heel, but they were never slaves.
They were never deprived their identity, their families, their heritage. Even if they were kludges.
There was a stretch of mountains starting in the south, where General Anasazi apparently resided. It snaked its way eastward, twisting north a bit, cutting a curvy line across the country, separating the northwest and the southeast. In that pocket of isolated southeast lay the rebelling land. Okasha's constituency.
Tyr heard a quiet rustling towards the door. Instead of raising his head in vigilance and reaching instinctively towards the knife that was no longer carried in his boot, he remained where he was, regarding the maps and notes before him. He had picked up that particular shuffling sound as that of the servants. He was probably the only master here who could hear it at all.
"You can come in," He said after the entity had lingered timidly in the doorway for several minutes.
He heard more than he saw the boy, Lim, draw back into himself a little bit before shuffling into the room, his feet bare of the little softwood sandals. "I...I'm sorry about Zay, sir," He said quietly. "It was my fault."
"I know," Tyr said, still not looking up. Again, he heard more than saw Lim flinch.
"I...I thought he might like this. You know. To make him feel better."
Tyr turned at this, and Lim was standing there with outstretched hands, in which scrambled a mewling little kitten. "This was mine," Lim said, like that explained anything. "But...I went back and I couldn't find any of the rest. I think they died."
Tyr looked suspiciously, with disdain, at the kitten in Lim's clutch. Lim stood with his outstretched arms and flinched a little, and looked very embarrassed all of a sudden.
"Thank you," Tyr said curtly, saving him. He took the kitten from the boy and set it on his lap, where it immediately began batting at one long braid.
Lim stifled a smile and quickly looked down at his bare feet, clasping his pale hands behind his equally pale garmented back. "I'm sorry," He said. "I didn't mean for Zay to get sick. My...my master is punishing me. He cut my meals and gave me a curfew and...I'm sorry." And he genuinely was. He had a sweet, fifteen year old innocence that could only come from growing up in the kitchens of such a wealthy, isolated estate. "Please don't punish Zay," he went on. "I think...I know he's not going to come up with me again anytime soon, anyway." A half-hearted attempt at a smile that Tyr returned gracefully. "I...I'll go now." And he slipped out of the colourfully furnished room without another word.
--
"WHERE THE FUCK AM I?" Harper yelled, and he yelled good.
"Shit!" A large black man who was most definitely NOT Tyr clamped a big arm around Harper's chest, pinning his arms, trying to keep him on the cot where he had been placed.
"Let me GO, you fucking sterile freddie!" Harper tried to bite him but it didn't really work out.
"Zay, please, calm down!" A girl, some girl, a slim pale girl with ugly puke green eyes and hair that was so long it would have been antisocial in any reasonable civilisation, put a still, gentle hand on his splintered shin and he kicked her away, ignoring the spikes of pain jolting up from his fractured leg.
"Who the FUCK are YOU?" He struggled again anew, trying to jab his captor in the ribs, but that didn't really work out either. "Let me GO!"
It was no use, he couldn't get free. He was helpless and naked and hurting and cornered on all sides, and all of a sudden he was back in those sewers in Quincy with the bastard capos and Rave, and he saw it and he knew what happened and he understood for the first time in his life, and he had never been more scared.
Calm down, Harper. Trance's familiar voice commanded him. Harper stilled and looked up and she was standing there, apparently unseen by his captors, leaning against the opposite wall, her hair done up with sparkly clips, smiling serenely at him. Her mouth didn't move, but he heard her voice. They're here to help you. Just calm down and do as they say.
Harper didn't respond but he stared incredulously at the spot on the wall where Trance leaned casually, his eyes wide in his skull, a deep sort of unidentifiable sadness washing over him. Then they pushed him back down on the cot and he whimpered, and he would have thrashed again if it weren't for Trance's soothing voice in his head, shhh.
Another man, a crazy looking man, big and fat and black with a head of short dreadlocks punctuated with colourful beads, and a long red and blue garment in dizzying patterns, appeared and smiled and Harper supposed he was trying to comfort him, but it wasn't working. The big strange man put a hand to Harper's head and chuckled and produced a bottle. "Give this to him to drink," He said. "He has a gukama spirit in his gut. This will drive it out."
"WHAT?" Harper screamed, taking it to mean that they were going to take something vital out of him.
He knows what he's doing, Harper. Trance's voice soothed him. Just trust him.
Harper still looked warily at the stout brown bottle that the strange man was opening as his captor spoke gruffly. "Fine. You know how to contact me for payment. And you," He pointed with his free hand at the girl standing anxiously across from him. "Had better not tell anybody we were here."
"No, sir," She said, with a rehearsed air that would have made Harper think she had been through this before, if he had been paying attention to that. "Of course not."
And then his captor held Harper back more and pried open his mouth and they poured the most god-awful concoction down his throat.
--
"Jesus," He said, sipping a small cup of orange juice spiked with vodka. "Hair of the dog, eh?"
Trance, sitting across from him in the mess hall of the Maru, smiled. "You should know better than to drink so much, Harper."
"I know, I know, poor little Harper can't say no, right? Don't you worry about me, your purpleness, the Harper can handle his substances well enough to serve his purposes."
Trance smiled again, in the innocent schoolgirl way she had when he flirted with her. "Do you feel better."
"Hell, yeah," he said, toying with the flexi chips in front of him. "I feel fucking great. Like I woke up from a coma or something." He smiled. "So I guess you're here to give me some advice, huh?"
"No. You're just dreaming."
Harper's smile disappeared, a little quicker than he intended. "So...those other times, you weren't contacting me? Was I just hallucinating?"
It seemed like Trance had difficulty answering the question, but Harper didn't know how much of that was true and how much of it was Trance being an engineered enigma.
"Well, you have been hallucinating a little, you were awfully sick. But...I've been trying to help you." She smiled again. "But that medicine knocked you out pretty good. Still not a natural sleep, but your virus should be going away, so you should be getting better, eventually, anyhow. Right now is a dream. I'm...just memories."
Harper toyed again with the flexis, passively. "But you're out there, right?"
"Yes."
"And right now is just a dream?"
"Yes."
"So it would be pointless to ask you if Beka and Dylan and Rommie are okay?"
Trance blinked. Sadly. "It would." She said. "Right now is just a dream. And every dream has to end sometime."
He looked up at her, his eyes gleaming severely. "That's the saddest thing I've ever heard anyone say."
Trance smiled again, but this time it wasn't happy, or innocent, or girlish. It held the hardness of a millennia of heartbreak. "Truth hurts," She said. And she leaned over the table and kissed him on the cheek.
--
Harper woke up, but it wasn't with any strangled sob or surprised gasp. It was almost natural.
Harper woke up in a much nicer pallet than the last one, with more substantial blanket, feeling marginally better than he had before.
He wasn't in his own room, though. This one was much bigger, or it seemed so anyway, the way his breath wafted away from him instead of coming back to stifle him. The sound of the ocean was louder here. A bright virgin whiteness shone in from the big heavy low moon outside the balcony.
His pallet was next to a large, high dark polished rosewood bed. He struggled to lean up on his elbows, and it wasn't as cumbersome as every other time he had tried to do it. He listened to the breathing of the person in the bed, and decided that Tyr was awake, but was waiting to see if Harper had awoken or just stirred.
"Tyr?"
"Yes, boy?"
"You woke up when I woke up, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Am I supposed to stay here in this room with you, then?"
"Yes."
"Okay." He paused, adjusting the sheets and blankets around him a little more. "Tyr?"
"What?" A little irritated now.
"I'm sorry I went out like that when you told me not to. I'll listen to you from now on."
A deep, heavy, almost confused sigh. "Good," Tyr said.
Harper collapsed back on his pallet and burrowed himself under his sheets. Suddenly something small and furry jumped up on the pallet and started nuzzling his still sunburnt arms.
"Hello," He whispered, trying not to disturb Tyr. "Where did you come from?" He reached out to touch the kitten's head and it nosed his hand happily, purring freakishly loud. "I guess you like me. Well, I like you, too. Now what should I call you?" He couldn't make out the kitten's colours in the dark, but the creature shimmered a little, a little bluishly, greenishly. "Jungle?" The kitten mewled a little, happily, and snuggled a little under Harper's lower back, becoming a little ball of fluffy, purring heat.
Harper smiled, a little, and went to sleep.
TBC