Part Three: Loss of Home
Nobody was at Galaxy Garrison to take their phone calls, or at least nobody was awake at the phone center. Katie downloaded the photo to her laptop and ran it through every program she had. There weren't a lot of major landmarks in the photo to mark where on Kerberos they were, but she did have enough stars in the picture to reverse engineer their orientation to confirm that yes, this picture could only be taken from Kerberos. The space suits were accurate down to the last detail, and while Dad's face was a little garbled Matt and Shirogane's were clear enough to run through a facial recognition she had written one summer for fun. It was them. It was really them. They had made it, and the Garrison had lied about it.
Mom drove them down first thing in the morning and Katie marched through the door, laptop in hand, and slammed it down on the desk of the secretary, demanding to speak to the person in charge so he could explain this.
They were taken to Lieutenant Commander Iverson's office. The man had deeply tanned skin, a thick nose, and a barret that made him look intimidating. Katie would not be deterred, however, not with hope in a .jpg form in her hand, not with the sliver of an idea that she wouldn't be alone to suffer her mother any more, not with the vaguest chance that her nightmare could end, not with the thought of her family up there in space while she was stuck in a house feeling sorry for herself. No. Not an option. She slammed the laptop down in front of him.
"There was no crash," she asserted. "Whatever instruments you had were wrong."
"What is this?" Iverson demanded.
"This is an email that's traveled five billion miles and change and took six months to get to me. This is a selfie taken by my brother Matt with my dad and Captain Shirogane. This is proof that they never crashed. Now do you want to explain why you lied to the public and to us and what actually happened?"
Iverson looked at the laptop for a long time, one eye squinted shut before looking up to glare at Katie. Katie glared right back, because he was nothing more than an obstacle blocking her from her father and brother. She had a goal now, something outside of watching Mom try to kill herself to convince her daughter to stay by her side, something outside of waiting for Mom to pass away before she could be free – she could be free with her brother, but first she just had to get to him.
"Colonel," Iverson said, and a man in uniform all but appeared by his side. "Take our two guests to the conference room to get their statements. I'll have to take the laptop and have it surveyed by our IT, make sure this isn't a hoax."
"Sir, yes, sir!"
Mom didn't have much to say, but this was Katie's show. She told them about the family communications, about the emails she and her brother traded. She talked about the software she had run the photo through on her laptop to confirm it's authenticity. The colonel nodded and wrote it all down, but otherwise gave no indication that this was more important than noting a meteor shower or Haley's comet.
"Don't you get it?" Katie demanded, leaning in on her chair. "They're alive. That means they're out there somewhere, we have to see who's on the international space station, see if anyone there has the qualifications for a deep space rescue. We have to find out what really happened to stop communications. They could be hurt up there – they have enough food rations for now if they're careful but we have to hurry and scramble a team to save them. What about that new prototype that was circulating the space journals? Has construction started on that yet or do we have to use the XJ061? We can at least use those high-efficiency engines that came out last month, the fuel projections would shave a good two weeks off the journey and that's assuming we don't stress them too much and—"
"You know an awful lot about our program," the colonel said.
"That's my dad up there," Katie said, "You know, Commander Holt? Spent a third of his life in deep space? And that's my brother, Matt up there. Of course I know!"
They sat there, the colonel recycling his questions over and over, and Katie was fed up with telling them everything when it was so obvious what needed to be done. It was three hours later when Iverson came in, squinting at the two women with a carefully controlled look of contempt.
"You led us on a merry chase, Ms. Holt," Iverson said. "But our computer geeks are smarter than you think they are. They're impressed, it's a very good fake, but it's still a fake."
… What?
"What? What?!"
Katie was on her feet in an instant. "It's not a fake!"
"It is," Iverson said. "You've wasted time and resources and pulled your own mother into this farce. What did you expect to gain from it?"
Katie was beside herself. "Why are you lying?" she demanded. "Why are you trying to tell me this was a fake unless-" It clicked in her head, and the shock of it nearly took the wind out of her. The shock quickly turned into fire, however, and after that all she saw was red. "What are you hiding?" she demanded. "What do you know that you didn't tell the press, that you didn't tell us? That's our family up there! We deserve to know!"
"Colonel, escort the Holts out of here."
"Sir, yes sir."
Katie ducked the arm that wanted to guide her. "You can't be serious! You can't seriously expect me to just walk out of here and not post this everywhere! The entire world is going to know that you're covering something up!"
"Not if you don't have any evidence," Iverson said.
Katie blinked. The laptop, the laptop, where was her laptop? "What did you do!" she shouted, moving around the table. "What did you do to my laptop?"
"Nothing, Miss Holt," Iverson said. "You'll get it when you leave."
"I'm not leaving!"
"Katie."
And survival instinct made her freeze, color draining from her face as she turned to face her mother.
"We're leaving."
"But Mom!"
"Say another word," her mother threatened. "Go ahead. Say another word."
And just like that it was over. They walked out of the building, handing Katie her laptop, and were escorted to their car and followed until they were off the campus. Katie opened her laptop and started booting it up, immediately searching for the file. It wasn't there.
"They deleted the file," she muttered. "Okay let's see how good those 'computer geeks' think they are." She dug deep into her harddrive, sifting through her custom made partitions and firewalls, but there was nothing. Even old files that were partly overwritten were wiped. They had reformatted her hard drive and zero'ed out her memory. Those bastards! Cursing, she pulled out her phone and opened her email, but they had done more than work on hardware, her email account had been scrubbed of all mail from her brother, even the countdown emails, even the emails that had come from before the "crash." She opened a backdoor to the server of her email and looked through her account that way but even backups had been erased. The bastards had even used her wi-fi connection to clean out her very phone, every scrap of data that had to do with her brother was gone. Even the apartment searches.
"... they deleted it," she mumbled. "They deleted all of it..."
In a fit of rage she slammed her laptop into her lap, the stinging slap throbbing through her body as she did it again and again. How dare they. How dare they...!
"Mom, we need to go back, we need to hack into their computers, find out what they did with all my files and logs, they hold one of the space stations backup servers, there might be data there to explain why-"
She saw her mother's face, and it felt like Katie stepped out of her own body, finally drifted outside her world of moral outrage and righteous indignation and realizing she was already swimming in bloody waters. Replaying the morning from an outside perspective – specifically Mom's perspective – and she realized just how she sounded. And for Mom in particular, who was so hyper sensitive about people falsely-judging her, now witnessing people judging her daughter as crazy and making her look bad... This was a betrayal. Katie wanting her family back was about to be twisted into a betrayal of the highest order, the screaming would last for hours, and Katie couldn't back down from this, couldn't let her mom walk over something this important and sweep it under the rug... and since Katie wouldn't apologize for her transgression Mom would push harder and harder to get what she wanted. Would she disown her again? Threaten to kick her out of the house? Promise to stop taking her medication? Try to kill herself again? Katie's band-aided fingers throbbed at the very thought.
Her mother hadn't yet come down off of the roller coaster yesterday, plus the emotional upheaval when Katie had woken her in the middle of the night to tell her the good news, and now the good news was twisted to something else, and all Katie wanted to do was run away.
As soon as they were in the house her mother started yelling, and for the first time in her life she yelled right back, unwilling to believe the lie that Iverson had told, unwilling to accept that her father and brother were dead with all of Matt's messages talking about Shirogane being careful and the selfie that her own mother saw to confirm they had survived the landing. She would make as much noise as necessary to save her family.
"Why can't you understand?"
"No," Katie said, "Why don't you understand that they're alive and out there?"
"Why are you so desperate to hurt me? Why do you want to see me suffer?"
"I don't want you to suffer! I want to get Dad and Matt back!"
"At the expense of me!"
"And they are worth it!"
And Katie was slapped across the face again, hard enough for her neck to snap to the side.
"Why do you always do this to me? Why do you hate me so much?" And then her mother just screamed, loud enough to reverberate around the house, the right pitch to set Katie's entire nervous system on edge. She took a breath and just screamed again, and a third time, and a fourth, and Katie ran to her room, the only safe place she could think of, hid behind her bed and tried to unhear the noise.
The screaming subsided, eventually, but Katie didn't dare leave her room, was too scared to even go the the door and lock it – no matter how much she needed to and no matter how little use it was now that she knew her mother could break down the door if needed. The silence was almost worse than the screaming, Katie didn't know what she was supposed to do, see what happened to her mother or wait for her mother to come looking for her? The safest thing to do was find her mother and listen to the vitriol, it would be worse if her mother expected her to come and she didn't.
Katie took a deep breath, and another, and another. Finally, her legs allowed her to move, and she stood. The door took another round of deep breaths, but she managed to open it.
The silence was deafening after so much noise, and Katie's socks padding over the carpet of the house seemed to have a hollow ring to it. Her mother was still in the kitchen, sitting at the table, staring off at nothing. Just like when she had come back from the hospital. She had gone away again, lost in her own mind.
Katie could only feel relief – for a few minutes she would have a reprieve.
(She didn't think about whether or not she should feel guilty about that feeling, or whether it was healthy for her mother to just go away like that.)
She went back to her room, shaking, and sat behind her bed again. It was hard to think, her brain was stuffed with other things, so many things, but she knew that everything was different now. She couldn't stay in the house if her family was out there in space, waiting to be rescued – that was untenable. She needed to get out there, she needed to save them, she needed to bring them back so she could survive her mother. But how could she do it? How would she even know where to go, with Galaxy Garrison having wiped everything off her phone and cloud accounts?
… Galaxy Garrison...
Katie knew what she had to do.
She disguised the trip as telling her mother she was meeting with her robotics class, that it would take all day and she'd be back late. Katie had been very careful, kept her laptop out of her mother's view at all times, listened extra hard and expressed extra sympathy over all the day to day worries. She agreed that she was at fault, that she should never have shown Mom the message and wasted their time over a cruel fake. She promised that she would be more considerate of Mom's feelings.
None of it was true.
Instead Katie brushed up on her calculus, looked over the latest programming code and protocols for space travel, read every page and subpage of the website.
Hacking Galaxy Garrison remotely had lead to people coming to her house and giving her a stern talking to in front of her mother. The explosion after that lead to more incoherent screaming and disappearing, Katie wasn't going to back down, and it was worth the abuse if she picked up anything from the depths of the Garrison server. When that didn't work she waited until nightfall, took a bus all the way to the garrison, and snuck in to hack their intranet. That had lead to Iverson escorting her out and calling her mother again, but at this point she had given up listening to her mother. Only one thing mattered: finding Matt and Dad. Mom threatening to disown her? Accusing her of not loving her? Wishing she were dead? Trying to take another knife to her wrist? Having low blood sugars and screaming when someone talked to her? Katie went through all of it because she knew that once she found her brother and father it would all be worth it, that she would have a way to come back home and... and be okay.
Because nothing was okay right now.
It hadn't been okay. Not for years. Perhaps not since Katie was born.
Instead she said she was with the robotics club for a summer project and biked three hours to the high school the next town over. Everyone was assigned a room and given a test booklet. Katie looked at the bubble sheet – from the dark ages, really? - and gave a lot of thought to her name.
Pigeon was the obvious choice, she would at least answer to it, but writing the name of an animal wasn't going to fly. The first syllable, Pig, was still an animal, and adding the e for Pige would have been a pain for people to know how to pronounce. Instead, she wrote Pidge. Last name? Well, this wasn't about her education, it was because Iverson had lied for some kind of shit reason – or rather, a dung reason. She rearranged the letters, dung reason, to Gunderson, dropping the a. She bubbled it all in, listed her birthday as one year prior to her actual birth to meet the age requirements, and giving her own address and praying nobody would cross check it with her real name. She looked at the gender box and took a long, deep breath. If Iverson was looking for a girl, if she was dressed as a girl, then he would recognize her. Better to be as different as possible. Male.
The entrance exam was... easy wasn't the right words. Even though she was a year younger than she was supposed to be she knew every question on the exam, the work wasn't hard, but she kept expecting someone, Iverson or some similar phantom, to come in and drag her away. She kept expecting the proctor to ask why her gender was flipped on the test. She kept expecting something to go wrong. But it didn't.
She waited three agonizing weeks, checking the mail religiously, waiting for the ruse to fall apart, for something to go wrong.
But, Pidge Gunderson got his acceptance letter. Katie didn't feel relief, just satisfaction that her next step was going to be put in motion. She told her mother absolutely nothing, and simply planned.
Essentials: a few days of clothes, toothbrush and toothpaste, Matt's old glasses, her contacts, her laptop, the small satellite dish she had made. Her photo of her and Matt at the space station. She wished very badly she had a photo of her dad that was personal and not from the news, something with her in it. Underwear, deodorant, one shampoo bottle.
She very carefully pulled out an old luggage bag and hid it under her bed. She wrote all the things she would pack on a sticky note as a checklist and placed it there. She pulled up maps to Galaxy Garrison – it was a two hour drive, she was afraid how long it would take with just her bike. No, her bike would be recognizable, she needed a replacement for it. That had caused a lot of stress for three days before she bought a bike off of a little boy a few streets over and stashed it an hour from the house.
She could check into hotels under Gunderson's name, but that was assuming she looked enough like a boy to pass. She put on her gym clothes, cutoffs and a loose tee, and decided she was passable enough if she cut her hair. She ran her fingers through her tresses and... not yet.
She went to the bank and drew from her account – only to discover that her mother somehow knew her account information and had been pulling from it – that was why Mom's accounts looked okay, she had been pulling from Katie's college funds. Katie couldn't even feel surprised, nothing in that house was really hers except her laptop and her satellite dish, both hand crafted by her and never once touched by her mother. Everything else, even her own room, were part of Mom's domain as the queen subfunction, and Mom therefore had a right to all of it. That was why locking doors meant nothing, it was her mother's house and Katie therefore had no right blocking her from anything. Staring at her bank account, she liquidated it and closed the account, putting the money in her luggage bag under her bed and quietly packing the other things on the list.
Clothes and toothbrushes would have to be the last minute.
She bought a disposable phone and transferred all her numbers over to it in case her mother was smart enough to track her with the cell's GPS. It was cheap and not nearly as powerful as her old one, but it would make her invisible.
She had it all planned out: leave the night before. No note, no word, just disappear.
All she had to do was last until the end of summer.
All the had to do was last.
All she had to do...
She couldn't do it. She couldn't stand the idea of being with her mother for that long, not knowing the family that... (mattered loved her understood her didn't yell at her thought she was worth something) knowing that family out there needed her and she wasn't doing anything.
It started on a Wednesday. Katie had come to go to the pharmacy to pick up Mom's prescriptions, two of them. She picked them up but the pharmacist said that the third wouldn't be in for a while yet. Katie didn't know what that meant but shrugged and biked back to the house. She left the groceries on the kitchen table and went up to the office with the prescriptions to give to her mother.
"Here you go."
Mom opened the bags while Katie waited for dismissal.
"Wait, why do you have my humalog?" she asked. "I just put that order in this morning, I'm shocked they even have it. Where's the lisinopril?"
Katie shrugged her shoulders. "You wanted me to pickup two prescriptions," she said, ticking her head to one side as the bottom of her stomach dropped out. "They gave me two prescriptions."
"But this isn't the one I ordered! I mean I did order it but you wouldn't have known that. Did you ask about the other prescription?"
Katie blinked, thinking back. "Well, the pharmacists did say one of them wouldn't be ready until later."
"And you didn't think to ask what she meant?" Mom asked, her voice rising.
Katie shook her head. "I was picking up other things, I wanted to make sure I remembered them."
"Well you're just selfish!" her mother hissed.
Katie stared for a second as the entire day crystallized in her head. She had seen this so many times she could predict the events: The morning would be the silent treatment and the only reprieve she would get. Mom would post about all her woes online and receive support – maybe – from her followers and then at lunch the drama would begin. Mom would shuffle down while Katie was cooking and tell her not to bother with cooking her lunch, say she's too depressed and had decided to stop taking her insulin. Katie would spend anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour coaxing her to eat because of her diabetes and to make sure that she took care of herself, and then lunch would be tensely silent while Mom made verbal digs about nobody supporting her and wishing someone cared about her, trying to manipulate Katie into saying she cared and then segueing into why she didn't.
Katie wouldn't do that, however, and wouldn't apologize for being a normal human being and not asking a question because other things were on her mind. That would lead to Mom dialing up the pressure, until she either walked in on Katie in the middle of the afternoon to express her feelings or dump it all on her while Katie was cooking and effectively trapped in the kitchen.
Katie predicted all of this, and for the first time in her life she asked herself, is it worth going through?
Her response? No.
It wasn't worth being childishly ignored, it wasn't worth being manipulated into apologizing for something that was normal, it wasn't worth being yelled at and demeaned and diminished. It wasn't worth trying to defend herself to have everything she said metaphorically erased because Mom's feelings mattered and Mom's feelings were more important and Mom's feelings had to be forgiven because she spent her entire life abused and Katie needed to be more understanding and supportive and love Mom enough to meet her needs because she was sacrificing so much and to be so disrespected was an insult and she should never have had her and she was just as bad as her father and she was selfish unthinking uncaring irresponsible insensitive stupid and ugly like your father and I've wasted my money trying to raise you and I wish I died in that coma and maybe if I died you would know how good you had it!
Katie went to her room, pulled out her luggage bag. She changed into her gym clothes and grabbed four decent outfits to throw in. Her laptop and satellite dish went in an over-the-shoulder back. She took her pillow from her bed and silently padded downstairs, putting on her sneakers and wrapping it all up on her bike. She walked her bike down the street, and down the next street, and then got on it and pedaled for everything she was worth.
That was how she Escaped.
That was how she started her Mission.
That was how she became homeless.
Katie biked hard, working up a sweat and not stopping until she was two hours away. She went to a sandwich place and changed to new clothes in the bathroom. Between that and the new bike and the disposable phone she should be a new person. She pulled her hair into the tightest french braid she could muster, making her hair look a lot shorter and clipping it up in one of her brother's old baseball hats. When she looked in the mirror, green shapeless shirt and hat, she considered it a pass until she could cut her hair. She ordered a foot-long with a lot of meat, she would need the protein, and ate half of it before storing the rest and the bag of chips with her electronics and started biking again. She had started later than she had initially planned when she outlined the Escape, and that meant it was almost midnight before she found the motel she was looking for. She tried to go in but the door was locked, a sign saying check-in time had ended hours ago.
Katie moaned and rubbed her sweaty face, still breathing hard and not knowing what to do. She had assumed hotels would check in customers whenever, she hadn't even thought to research something like that.
Cursing, she kicked the door and pulled out her phone, trying to find somewhere else to sleep that would take in clients at this hour. Most of them didn't, and those that were still open Katie had already struck from her list of possibles because their online reputations made the idea of someone as young as her being in five miles of the place a distinctly bad idea. She ate the rest of her sandwich – she was ravenous – and downed her third bottle of water. She had been biking for six hours, and was roughly halfway to Galaxy Garrison. She thought of just pushing through the night and biking the last six hours, but she knew that if she did she would pass out wherever she stopped, and without a place to sleep she wasn't about to leave herself that vulnerable. She had to think about this logically.
The best option would be a shelter, those were open 24/7, but they were probably notified to keep an eye out for her, and Katie wasn't yet sure she passed as a boy yet. She did a few quick searches – she didn't want to be on the internet too long even with a disposable phone – but the nearest homeless shelter was still another hour away. There was a shelter fifteen minutes away for battered women, and Katie stared at that the longest but... she wasn't battered. Her mother had slapped her all of twice in her life, and words had very little value except to hurt people, and it wasn't like anyone would believe fourteen year old Katie or even fifteen year old Pidge Gunderson. She wasn't in crisis, she was just on a Mission to find her family. She knew exactly where to go and what to do, she just needed to get through the next couple of... weeks... until the next term started.
Katie did consider, briefly, going back. Having nowhere to sleep was scary, and options were limited, and Katie didn't know yet what to do, but she knew that she would rather have nowhere to sleep than go crawling back to her mother. She wouldn't emotionally survive that and she wasn't sure she would work up the nerve after an explosion that bad.
Frowning, Katie looked around. Her legs were burning from the exertion and she knew from experience prior that she would be sore all over tomorrow, but for now she needed a safe place to sleep. Her eyes trailed up. Nobody would be on a roof...
But were there fire escapes anywhere?
Katie eventually found an alley with a fire escape. She learned the cruel reality of being short, and had to stand on her bike in order to reach the ladder and prayed her weight was enough counterbalance. It was, and she grabbed everything off her bike and lugged it up to the roof. She couldn't bring her bike back up, and there was nowhere to lock it to, and Katie took a deep breath and gambled that it would still be there when she woke up.
On the roof, above all the street lights, she looked up to the stars, barely visible for the light pollution, and silently told Matt and Dad that she was coming.
She laid out her luggage bag like a sleeping blanket and pulled out one of her sweatshirts. Her last task was to pull out her phone and send a pre-written email to her Mom, explaining how to buy food and what items would be needed for the next week, as well as instructions on how to cook all the meals and where to find the house cleaning stuff. She laid back in her sweatshirt, and was asleep in minutes.
It was midmorning when she woke up, and everything ached.Her legs could barely move and her back and shoulders hurt for all the weight she had been carrying for so long. Moaning, she rolled over to fumble for her phone on the nightstand and instead hit gravel. Blinking, she opened her eyes and didn't find galaxy posters or lists of famous women in science, but instead saw the gravel asphalt mix of a roof, and the memory of yesterday resonated over her.
For a split second she felt… but it was gone too quickly to name as she sat up and focused on getting to work. She had another six hours to bike, assuming she still had her bike, breakfast to buy, and a place to stay for the next night. All of her searches had been dependent on when she would get up, when she would leave, and Katie hadn't realized that life wouldn't let her plan that deep. She should have been up and gone two hours ago. Her stomach rumbled, not satisfied with the half sandwich and chips for supper, and she rubbed at her face, recollecting all of her things (and thank god she had thought to bring her pillow) and rearranging them so they could fit in her backpack, even her laptop and satellite dish. It put more weight on her shoulders, but it was better than carrying so many bags. It took some clever folding and full use of all the side pockets - the backpack bulged a little but she could now ditch the luggage bag and look like a more normal teenager.
After that she climbed down to street level. Her bike was still there, her gamble had worked.
She breathed a sigh of relief, and walked it up the street to a coffee place. She bought four bottles of water and an over priced cinnamon roll, hoping the sugar would wake her up. Sitting at a tiny table she stretched her calves and feet, trying to limber them up for the next grueling part of her journey. The local news was on, and no sign of an amber alert. Did Mom not notice she was missing? Or was she simply waiting for Katie to come home?
Katie pulled out her phone and saw no less than eight emails from her mother. She read all of them, even the ones that insulted her and belittled her, and the cinnamon roll sat heavily in her stomach.
… I can only take responsibility for three things: pulling you into Dad and my arguments, because the false judgements he would make was putting me into despair. He gave me no reason for living, none, and he could be that bad! He falsely judge his mother, too! He caused me to be desperate and for that I am sorry!...
… This despair made me feel so worthless, and such a failure and I so needed a way out. Yes, I felt guilty going to you and Matty for I knew I shouldn't do it and when Dad pushed me to the brink, anyone would have become suicidal, anyone! At the same time the both of you hearing that was awful for you and for that I am sorry even though it was your father who drove me to it!...
… After Dad and Matty died there were many times I wanted to put him in a good light because he did have good qualities. Well, I failed every time because all my resentments came to the surface. Many times afterwards I would mentally kick myself for that is not what I wanted to do!...
… But your world is so filled with distortions and non truths and situations lumped together, making me out to be the worst child abuser! If you actually cared and took the time to think about it YOU are the one who is abusing ME!...
Your father's false judgements did a number on me, and your false judgements are doing a number on me too and that is when you see me react!...
… You have never been to despair, because if you had you most certainly would understand what I was dealing with and shown compassion and understanding...
… You have become so toxic since your father and Matty died. You are filled with hatred and false judgements and I've become the victim of you!...
… You just pacified me and judged me falsely, too!...
… There were times I thought of leaving your father but things would have been far worse for you, and me, too. Dad's biggest flaw was that he was judgmental. Many, many times he threw me into despair, to the depths of suicide but what stopped me was both of you. You were my reasons to go on. Believe me, he did have me wishing I died and he always had the attitude he was always right and he was narcissistic and he wouldn't share with me. I could go on and on about why Dad was the problem, the instigator, not me but you have already judged me as the culprit so what is the use!...
… In many ways I was too soft on the both of you!...
… You are making me out to be this abuser! I NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER said I should have beaten you as children! NEVER! That is NOT TRUE! That is a complete and total over reaction and fabrication!...
… I DID NOT DESERVE THIS...
… You didn't even think to let me know how to cook supper or where to find things at the market!...
… And I need my toenails cut, you know how I can't reach them!...
Katie felt sick to her stomach but managed to snort when she saw that line, and it was enough to pull out of reading the train wreck of emails her mother wrote. She went to the bathroom, was sick, and drank her first bottle of water in the hopes that her stomach wouldn't be mad for losing its nutrients for the next several hours.
Taking a deep breath, she began the next leg of her journey.
She didn't get nearly as far as she had planned, her legs barely moved and she was well below her average biking speed. Even after the ache burned away and she could pump her pedals she didn't make her second checkpoint at noon like she had planned, but closer to two o'clock. That was a late lunch and she knew she would have to spend more money to replenish her nutrients. She was already through two of her water bottles, she bought two more and had a super-sized takeout meal. The taste was awful but her stomach thanked her anyway. She gave herself an hour break, stretching her legs and redoing her french braid and tucking it under her hat. Her phone told her that an amber alert still hadn't been raised, but Katie knew she was on borrowed time at this point. She was still a minor and her mother was completely detached from reality.
She planned her afternoon more carefully, looking at the list of motels she had chosen and doing some mental math based on how (not) fast she was traveling. If she pushed she could make it to the Garrison, but that ran the risk of not finding a place to sleep and she didn't want to go through that again.
By that night her phone was buzzing an amber alert every half hour, and Katie knew her time was up. The description was in her old clothes and bike, and Katie was glad she had changed. She took a deep breath and knew that Katie had to disappear completely. She wasn't Katie anymore, she was Pidge. Pidge. Pidge. Pidge…
Pidge walked into the motel she had chosen and said she - he - wanted a room for the night. He said he would pay in cash, and the doorman gave a small, slow, blink, saying they only took check or credit card. Damn.
Pidge went to the next motel on his list, and they did take the cash, and Pidge locked the door and moved the one nightstand over to the door to be safe. She slept in a real bed with her own pillow, and for a moment she could pretend she was back in her room, the closest thing she had to a safe space, and the scent of her pillowcase lulled her to sleep.
Katie, Pidge, got up earlier this time, and knew she - he - only had an hour's bike this time before he was at the town that "housed" Galaxy Garrison. The base itself was a good ten miles away from the town, but after everything Pidge had done that would be a light trip compared to the grueling dozens of miles he'd put in just to get there. He rode into town and saw the amber alert still active, not only on his phone but also on the local news. Everywhere he looked her picture was plastered on a screen, and he kept his head way, way down when he saw a law-enforcement officer or a black-and-white drive by. He pulled out a map and looked for parks, malls, places kids his age would normally hang out during summer vacation, somewhere to blend in.
He walked the shopping district up and down, explored the stores once his bike was firmly locked up and very carefully bought a school uniform - not cheap, given how little money he had, but utterly necessary. He got used to walking into male stalls and Katie got eyefuls of things she wasn't used to seeing at the unstalled… toilets. She shook it off as much as she could, knowing she couldn't let her facade break, and acted as naturally as Pidge Gunderson, a boy all his life, would.
Pidge got very good at keeping his head down, not looking up was something Katie had done all the time at home, so there wasn't much transition, but it was very weird looking people in the eye when he talked to them. Even something as innocuous as a cashier caused her a little bit of fear, of what if they recognize me, but he was also absurdly good at not letting it show, and as the day waned he thought there might be a sliver of hope.
Pidge walked into his motel and balked to realize the internet wasn't accurate with the rates. If he had liquidated his full account it wouldn't have been a problem, but after Mom had pulled from it she knew she would be out of money at least a week before the next semester actually started. She pulled out her phone, but the other establishments she had chosen for the town closest to the garrison were even more expensive. She grit her teeth and made the reservation online, signing all the digital documents on her laptop where she could fake the e-signatures with some programs she had written.
Pidge went in and asked if his dad had made a reservation, his meeting was running late and Pidge needed to pick up the key and start unpacking.
They wouldn't let her in without the father.
Pidge was cursing up a storm as she left, dragging her bike along and trying to figure out what to do next. The shadows were getting pretty long, sun still set late at night but now she had to think a little faster. Katie was about to pull out her phone before the streetlights came on, as well as the neon signs of the businesses on the street. Red outlines caught her vision, and she realized there was another motel, literally next door, to the one she was standing in front of.
She took a breath and entered. They took her money for a three week stay and didn't ask questions. She knew what that meant, and once she got her keycard and took the elevator to her room she dragged another nightstand to the door to block it. That would have to be her new nightly ritual to keep herself safe. She propped the bike up against the window as a deterrent/noise maker there, though the third floor was less inviting for rude entry. Moderately safe, she pulled apart her backpack, plugged in her laptop, connected to the motel wifi, and immediately hacked the security to make sure there were no cameras in her room. There was only one, and she fed it a harmless loop to give her a modicum of privacy.
After that was a shower to wash off two days of sweat, grime, and roof gravel with complimentary hand soap and the one bottle of shampoo she thought to bring. She put her pillow on the bed, set up her satellite, and pointed it out the window and put on her headphones. The curtains were drawn for her privacy, but she listened to the white noise loop, the repetition, and thought of her family lost on space.
The thought of food and an intense rumble of the stomach dragged Katie... Pidge... out of bed. The foreign room startled her at first, it wasn't the color and lines she expected; the light came from a different place, and she was confused when she couldn't see her brother's empty bed. She sat up and rubbed at her eyes before everything snapped into place, and she moaned into her hands. Pidge pulled on a grey pair of cutoffs and a green and white shirt – formerly her brother's.
For the first week Pidge stayed in his room. He wandered the internet, sniffing around the garrison's servers, careful to leave no trail. If he wasn't doing that he was sneaking up to the roof to point his tiny satellite dish up to space, angling to where Kerberos was and picking up the repeating pattern. Pidge wasn't completely safe, one window was dedicated to the news feed of her amber alert, but runaways didn't garner much news attention after the first few days, and so long as she kept her head down she should be fine. She didn't talk to the people at the front desk, only left to get a few boxes of cereal and peanut butter crackers, something to keep her fed that was cheap and could be bought in bulk. The second week Pidge forced himself out to the local hangouts, sitting with his laptop and watching skateboarders and basketball games while he poked at his dish. With nothing to do but wait for the term to start, all of his mental energy was dedicated to the problem now, and Pidge was fairly sure the loop wasn't a bug in the software, and that made him wonder how to decode it.
The third week was a little harder. Pidge was running out of money and she knew her stay was going to be up. She couldn't exactly stop eating, and even if she did that didn't add more than two days to her stay. Frowning, she fretted over what to do. She took up a few odd jobs in the shopping district, errands mostly to make even a couple of extra bucks and cursed herself that she hadn't thought of that sooner. She went to bed at night stressing over the money and then dreaming about her family and waking up sick to her stomach.
The fourth week the stay at the hotel was out, and she still had four days before the start of term.
It was because she was ticking down the days obsessively that she realized she had a boon. Pidge was staring at the road leading to Galaxy Garrison trying to figure out what to do when she realized there was a small pulse of traffic going down the road leading to it. Frowning and more focused now, Pidge started tracking and saw that yes, a few cars were going to the garrison.
… Why?
Pidge biked the ten miles to the complex, done in no time and pulled up at the main gate, where a pickup truck was, talking to the person manning it.
"Woohoo! I'm in! I'm so totally in! Look out Garrison – you now have Lance McLain to deal with! Watch as I conquer everybody here!"
Pidge stared flatly at the flailing arms and jumping body attached to the voice, a teenager in the back of the pickup, unable to contain his excitement.
Did... did the garrison take students in early?
Pidge pulled out her phone and dug through the website and... yes. It did take students up to a week before opening ceremonies, with rolling orientation classes and free meals. Pidge's mouth watered.
She – he – continued biking down and asked what he needed for check in. He showed the student ID that Pidge had faked and his acceptance letter, and he just... walked on campus.
Pidge was beside herself, walking his bike through the complex as another car drove by and a line of families gathered by the main entrance to the school. One super-large guy in yellow was in a tearful embrace with his parents and the guy from the pickup was running around shrieking like a crazy person. Pidge ignored them and instead quietly walked to the line that was forming at a table set out by the doors. Pidge showed his ID again and was asked where his parents were.
"Mom's dead," she answered flatly. "Dad's in the hopsital."
There was a noise of sympathy and Pidge signed all the forms herself before being given a keycard with a room number. Already familiar with this in motels, Pidge made her way inside and followed the map she was given. No one else was in her room, and Pidge locked and blocked the door while she took another shower and put on her boy's uniform. She brushed out her hair and put on Matt's glasses, looking at herself in the mirror.
"... First day of 'school,' " she muttered to herself.
It took more effort than she realized to cut her hair, it had been long her entire life and to willingly have it so short... she had forgotten now naturally curly her hair could be when it wasn't pulled down by it's own weight, and everything slowly started to fluff out as her hair dried, creating a thick mass of honey brown... foof that looked ridiculous. But it was short, and Pidge would have to get used to it. It wasn't like she was Katie anymore.
Hair cut, she unblocked the door and pulled out her laptop, powering it down and plugging it in before deliberately leaving behind the things that she had religiously guarded for almost a month. Her dorm was her home now, she had to make herself feel safe enough to leave it there.
… She made it three feet before she grabbed her laptop and satellite.
Then she went to the spot on the roof Matt had told her about.
And she listened to the stars.
From Galaxy Garrison, Pidge learned many things:
Academics were nowhere near as hard as Matt made it out to be.
Physical fitness was infinitely worse than Matt made it out to be.
Their servers were much harder to crack into when thinking about getting caught.
And Pidge was surrounded by idiots.
Pidge made a perfunctory effort at doing the work as a show for his dorm mates, but the minute lights were out he was up on the roof studying the signal because he hadn't come here to learn, he'd come here to escape her mother and find her family. The signal was the next best thing, because it was repeating: if it was repeating then it was man made, if it was man made it could be reverse engineered, and if it was reverse engineered then Pidge might learn something about her family. Schoolwork, no matter how easy, was the bottom of the priority list.
Her world rocked when she realized the signal wasn't man made. She spent a week staring dazedly in class, trying to wrap her mind around the fact that she had, by complete accident, performed her father's lifelong dream: discovering life in space. She completely bombed two tests in a row and was placed on a flight team for simulation as punishment.
And if the student body as a whole wasn't composed of idiots, the two she had been stuck with were the most idiot of idiots she had come across. The big guy, Hunk, was nice enough and really knew his hardware, but flight was the furthest thing from his capability, and Lance was this cocky arrogant showboat, all bluster and no substance, and Pidge was left trying to do all the work, except he was so damn short he couldn't reach everything he needed to. Pidge was well trained to never confront something like this head on, but without the ever looming fear of a witch subfunction all the color commentary that usually ran through the brain started to run through the mouth.
Everything ended in a crash because Lance couldn't pilot for crap and Hunk ended up doing more harm than good and Pidge tried so hard to compensate but just couldn't do everything. Simulations to the Mars station or the fifty year old exploration of Saturn's rings were disasters, and Pidge didn't overly care because he was too busy trying to figure out how to get to Iverson's office in student uniform and put a USB transmitter on his computer. Maybe being terrible was actually a good thing...? Didn't Matt get pulled into talking to Shirogane because he had broken rules?
And then there was a simulation of Kerberos.
And then the two idiots found Pidge on the roof.
And there was a crash.
And there was Captain Shirogane.
And there was... Voltron.
Author's Notes: ... The difference between Pidge's escape and ours comes mostly from age. We were adults when we finally left, and were homeless in a hotel for nine days before we found a place to live. Pidge, being significantly younger and without a job, had to be monstrously more careful. But the actual arc: forgetting prescriptions, being called selfish, seeing the day and asking if it was worth it, and leaving the house, that is true and actually sanitized compared to what happened to us. We were caught trying to leave. It went... very badly.
But the good news is that Pidge is away from the abuse, and now she has to come to terms with what happened to her and put in in perspective - not an easy feat by any stretch of the imagination, but there's a fundamental relief in not being at the source of pain that can't really be described in words. As stressful as it was fining a place to live, everything was easier because we weren't there for the emotional blow up and tirade and threats. For the first time our stress was normal for the situation, not exacerbated by someone else.
Also, to the person who felt cheap for sharing their pain: don't feel cheap. Don't compare your pain to ours, because yours is just a valid, just as real, and sometimes saying it out loud is the hardest thing to do, but now that it's been done it can be done again. And again, until you find the help you need.
Next chapter: The team has varying reactions to Pidge explaining her life, because normal people don't understand that mothers can and do hurt their children.