Welcome Home
“You come to expect negativity from every direction, and you can either let it suck you under or try to become immune to it.”
I had been on the flight deck with Carolina, both of us deferring to the other at first, insisting on who should be strapped into the Captain’s chair.
“Possession being nine-tenths of the law,” Carolina said, “the Yankee-Chaos should be yours, Burch. I did abandon her out on the flats when the Trasp arrived.”
“I suppose it doesn’t much matter where we’re going,” I told her. “Not unless we get into some unexpected scrape along the way. In which case neither of us will be flying her.”
So I sat where I sat and Carolina sat where she sat, and we did our best to catch up, captain to captain. I thought it best to start small, like our trip into Trasp space to get Leda back, that we’d returned to the vault, that Kristoff had gone back to Charris for the time being. All the talk of the future could wait until we met up again with Rishi and Nilius. Our story was a whole lot to take in one sitting, especially on faith.
Carolina told me all about their various adventures around the Letters, trying to figure out the origins of the war. They’d had a lot of stops along the way. I told her that someday I wanted to see Lime Harbor, and she told me I didn’t, not in the near future anyway.
We talked for hours.
“I could use something to drink, Burch,” Carolina said after we’d been underway for a long spell, “a cup of tea?”
“Sure,” I agreed, and we floated our way back to the atrium.
It was quite a sight to see around our table—two old Etteran warriors sitting across from a much younger Trasp Captain, and between them, at either end of the table was perhaps the worst living casualty of the war I had ever seen, in the person of Sōsh, and then there was Ren, whose emotional scars were nearly as deep as Sōsh’s physical scars. This Draya, I didn’t know much about. But the rest of them, by all rights, they all should have been cutting each other to pieces. Two years ago, they would have. But today, they were talking.
For me it was a lifetime ago—this war. For them it was two years. It occurred to me that an awful lot had happened. I didn’t know anyone around that table back then except for Sōsh. Now the connections that enabled this strange collection of people to peaceably assemble were deep and entangled, in all their psyches. I paused to marvel.
Transom’s eyes drifted over my way as I floated with Carolina toward the commissary.
“Omar was just telling us how deep into the lions’ den you went, Burch. And after all that, Leda didn’t come home with you.”
“She’s got her work,” I answered Transom. “We’ve all got our work.”
“I was just asking your friends here, Burch, how it was you came to be in the war,” Omar said. “For us, you see, it was compulsory. Both Dr. Ren and Sōsh had compelling reasons for joining the Letters Service.”
“Yeah,” Ren joked, “I was compelled.”
“They didn’t know how you came to sign,” Omar continued. “I’m not sure about my Etteran counterparts here, but for me, it is curious why anyone would choose to join a war that wasn’t theirs, meaning no offense.”
“None taken,” I said.
“Would you enlighten us?” Omar asked.
“I was just getting a drink,” I answered, looking over toward the commissary where Carolina was already making tea.
Carolina looked back at me as though to suggest we join them, build a little camaraderie.
“I suppose I’ve been focused on the present and the future so much, I haven’t had all that much cause to dwell on the past.”
“You don’t mind?” Omar asked me.
“No. I don’t suppose I do.”
I sorta laughed to myself, thinking about that question—how I got all stitched up in this war, the start of it.
“Come to think of it,” I said, “part of it was my own damn fault. Part of it wasn’t.”
I shook my head.
Carolina gestured for me to settle in at the table, that she would bring my tea over. Funny, a lifetime apart and she could talk to me with a look. So I floated over, pulled myself down to one of the open spots, and strapped myself in.
“It’s a complicated story,” I told them, because it was.
I hadn’t talked about it in ages, really. Fact, I couldn’t recall talking about it with anyone. So I took a deep breath and began at the start of things.
Everyone knows the Deltas are sparsely populated. Mostly everyone who knows any of the systems know about Delta-Omega and Delta-Fina, but most people think that’s about it. We few folks from the Deltas know there’s quite a few more populated systems than that. But there aren’t many habitable planets, and my system—Delta-Kei—was one of those places with no habitable rock. We were just a sleepy little cylinder group with less than one million people living in a cluster of twenty-five structures orbiting the rocky interior planet of Kei-3. It was a pretty nice place to grow up—well outside the consciousness of the war.
We didn’t really manufacture anything useful to a war effort, not ships, not bots, not even people really. And we were certainly so far from the front that there wasn’t any strategic interest. For us, the war was more a thought experiment than any concrete circumstance. Sure, we used to debate the issues in our civics seminars as students—even a bit in our real politics, small as our government was even by Delta standards.
So it’s a fair question. How does a young man from Delta-Kei end up signing up to get his legs and arms blown off, and more.
I guess it started at Kei Day, which was a bit like the half-year mark celebration during our winter months, about six months out from Founders Week.
A much younger version of me made the trip over from my home, C-13, to C-1, where they were hosting the bulk of the youth celebrations. You’d have to picture a much handsomer version of this Hale Burch, mind you, one with no scars, all his parts in working order, a fuller, darker head of hair, and a brighter and more innocent outlook on the galaxy and his fellow humans.
I had a sweetheart over on C-1. So Founders Week and Kei Day, I wouldn’t miss it. They ran extra shuttles and all kinds of events. And I took advantage of all that to see April as much as I could. Sometimes we’d stay at the events together, sometimes we’d sneak off. She was from C-1, so she had a pretty good sense of where we could go to be alone together.
Last night of the celebration, they had a big drone show up in the main level. It was always quite a spectacle—music, dancing, lights, and tens of thousands of drones racing overhead leaving streaks of light all across the interior of the drum. A living sea of colors. Best night of the year.
About halfway into the celebration, holding hands in the dark, April pulled me away to a lower causeway, probably four flights down—seemed more like a service walkway than any public access. I didn’t ask questions. I was sure sweet on April Haynes. I’d have followed her anywhere she pulled me. Like I said, innocent outlook.
It was dim down there and quiet. We could hear the echoes of our footsteps about as clearly as the hum and beat of the music up in the main room.
We were only there together for maybe ten minutes or so before something shook the whole cylinder, something that sounded like an explosion.
“What the hell was that?” I asked April, looking out of that side hallway into that dim causeway. “Sounded like a ship must’ve crashed into the cylinder.”
“It’s part of the show,” she told me, pulling me back toward her.
But I smelled something, and I could hear voices. It sounded like they were screaming.
The music stopped.
“Hale,” she said to me, pulling my chin back toward her.
“Sounds like people shouting. Screaming.”
“It’s nothing. Just cheering.”
“Never been a part of the drone show before.” I started sniffing. “That’s smoke, April.”
“Fireworks maybe?”
Up above us, we could hear people cry and shout as they began to pour into the upper causeway. But down where we were, it was only echoes of footsteps, shouts, screams and panicked voices.
We made our way up there, this time me pulling April by the hand, and as we got closer to the voices and footsteps, she pulled back at me.
“I think we’re going the wrong way, Hale.”
“We can always turn back,” I told her, still climbing.
We came to the stairway that led up to the main public causeway. I guess we were still in the service access—maybe for city workers or maintenance bots. I didn’t know the 1 well enough to know how the layout went back there. I was just following the noise.
I caught something out of the corner of my eye as we were passing the second level down from the main causeway. It was starting to get smoky as well, so April was pulling against me, uncertain about going up any further. But down the hallway a little, there was a figure kneeling down working at something.
I looked over and started to wander down that way.
“Hale,” April protested. “Let’s get out of here.”
The noise above us was growing more dire. It was clear this wasn’t some fireworks show gone awry. This was something different.
As we approached that figure down the corridor, the main lights went off and the emergency lights took the dim hallway down a few levels in luminosity. It was a dull, dull orange now.
I could see the figure from behind, and he was working some equipment into a storage bag of some kind. He was on one knee with a helmet on the floor beside him facing us.
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
“Shit!” he exclaimed, exhaling as he turned around, nearly falling over from shock.
“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to startle you. Is that?”
“It looked like one of April’s friends I’d met a few times, but I didn’t remember his name.”
“Jace?” she said. “What happened? Are you all right?”
“I don’t know. Some kind of explosion. Something blew up. Then people started running everywhere. Don’t go up there, April. Go down and out the back way.”
“Sorry to sneak up on you like that,” I told him. “We didn’t mean to startle you.”
“It’s all right. Hale, was it?”
“That’s right. Most of my friends call me Burch, though.”
“Sure. Burch. I was just checking my stuff. See if I lost anything in the panic. I had gear for the show.”
I knelt down and offered him a hand, pulling Jace back to his knees, then to his feet. I bent over and picked up his helmet—it looked like a pretty advanced piece of racing gear, so I figured he must’ve had drones in the show. That, or he was monitoring the show with his racing gear. A lot of people liked to record that way.
I handed the helmet to him. “Nice gear.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I’m going to run. The network’s overloaded or down or something. Maybe from the blast. I don’t know. I gotta go.”
April looked up at me. I looked up at the staircase, which was still lightly puffing out smoke toward us.
“My parents, Hale. They’ll be worried sick.”
She tried to pull up a screen from her wristband, but Jace had been right. It was all red.
“All right,” I told her. “Let’s get you home safe.”
And I followed her down the dark back causeway into the lower residential levels where April’s family lived.
April was reluctant to let me walk her to her door. She was insistent that with coms being spotty and the chaos coming out of the main hall that I try to get home to the 13 on the first shuttle I could catch so I could let my family know I was all right. That seemed like a good idea, but I was left with a funny feeling about April’s family, like maybe I wasn’t welcome there for some reason, maybe she didn’t want to introduce me.
That didn’t seem so important in the moment. People all around me were distraught. Tears, shaking, disbelief, anger, theories, shouting. There were emotions rarely seen before in Delta-Kei. On top of that, it was hours upon hours of frustration just trying to get off the 1. The festival schedule was set up expecting people to arrive and leave in steady waves, not a flood of everyone desperate to get off in one direction all at once. Even the tram was backed up beyond reason, and all the people standing there on the platforms trying to board were dead nervous, a quiet dread about being in the crowd.
“The Trasp. The Trasp. It had to be,” somebody would say.
Then somebody else would shush them.
“They’re here among us.”
I hardly knew what to think, standing there alone in that crowd. It was big enough that I didn’t see a familiar face for hours. I also hadn’t been in the main hall when the bomb went off, so I didn’t know how to react. It struck me that there was a whole lot of crying and screaming, but from what I’d heard it was one device, and all these people couldn’t have been that close to it. So it confused me why they were all so inconsolable.
When I finally did get aboard a shuttle, the captain announced it was going to drop off anyone through the teens. That was seven stops, and owing to the orientation of the cylinders at that point in the cycle, the 13 was dead last. I didn’t get home finally for three more hours.
What April had said, about my family being worried about me, I had thought it might be true. Maybe my mother was a little, sure, but it was more mild concern than worry. My two younger sisters, they pretended to be disappointed that I didn’t get blown up. They followed the lead of my older sisters Adara and Jira, who still hadn’t grown out of their genuine childhood resentment of my existence. Really it was Adara who was the ringleader. But even with those two out of the flat, Giesa and Min wouldn’t so much as extend a genuinely kind look my way. I never thought they really disliked me, though. They were just following.
I ate, lay down, and listened to what the news feed had coming in about the incident at Kei Day. “Nothing definitive” was the catch-phrase everyone kept repeating. The leading theory was that it was some sort of Trasp incursion. But I doubted that. It was too small a thing for the Trasp to even bother doing. To what purpose? We didn’t produce anything useful. We were light years from any contested area. We were so far out of the way from any vital interests, even hiding resources in our system wasn’t practical. That was part of what made Delta-Kei so special.
The following morning, when I woke up, the news had changed. I wasn’t really paying all that much attention to it, because I had a football match, but then that football match suddenly got cancelled. So I checked the news to see if something else had happened, but that was not the case. I couldn’t figure out why the league would cancel our match, seeing as it was on the 9. The news was saying the D-KCC were looking for a group of locals who’d worked together to orchestrate what they were calling a deliberate bombing of the festival. Four people had been killed by the explosion itself, and twelve others trampled to death in the rush to get out of the main hall after. There were thirty or so people with major injuries still hanging on. Countless others had cuts and bruises, scrapes, sprained ankles, ruptured eardrums and the like. For a place like Delta-Kei in a time like that, for me, all this was unthinkable.
Coms were all back up again, so I pinged April to see how she was. She didn’t answer initially, which wasn’t like her at all. She’d always pick up or message me right away to tell me why she couldn’t talk. Instead, I waited about an hour through breakfast before I finally heard back from her.
“It gave me a lot to think about,” she told me. “A girl on the Mistin floor got killed, Hale. She was my sister’s age—twenty-four. She was going to get married.”
“That’s a damn shame,” I said. “Whole life ahead of her.”
“Not anymore,” April replied. “I was up all night thinking. We don’t have time in this life for anything that’s not important, not meaningful.”
“Maybe so,” I agreed.
“Hale, I’m sorry, but I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”
“What?”
“I just … our relationship was never going anywhere anyway. Don’t get me wrong. I like you, Hale. But it’s just that. We had fun. We should leave it at that.”
“I wasn’t thinking of leaving it at all,” I told her.
I was blindsided.
“It was never anything serious for me,” April said. “I think you knew that.”
“Not till now I didn’t. Is this about the bombing?”
“It’s about living the kind of life I want, Hale. That’s all. Living every day to the fullest, and I’m not sure we should be together anymore. I don’t think you’re a part of that.”
I didn’t fuss about and cry and feel sorry for myself over April, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t angry and confused about the sudden shift in her feelings toward me. So I did what I usually did back then when I had nothing to do and something to work out. I called my friend Wind and asked him if he wanted to get a workout in.
Wind was a good teammate of mine and probably my best friend in the 13. He’d even been over to the 1 with me a few times and met April and her friends. So as we were doing reps, I told him about April.
“Wait?” he replied. “You were over on the 1 when the bomb went off, Burch?”
“I guess,” I told him. “We snuck off into the lower levels.”
“Did you see anything? Hear anything?” Wind asked me.
“Nothing really. I mean, we passed her friend Jace on the way up to investigate the noise, but he told us to go the other way. Plus, there was smoke all over the place. So we got out of there. That’s all.”
“You must have been pretty close if there was smoke in that causeway.”
“I suppose,” I agreed. “What of it, Wind?”
“It’s funny, I guess, Burch. Something like that happens—first real thing that’s ever happened in Delta-Kei in centuries—and all you can talk about is April Haynes dumping you.”
“I don’t know if I’d call that dumped.”
“Oh, that’s what it is all right, my man. You got dumped. Get over it. Next set.”
Wind and I probably worked out for a good couple hours, resistance training and then sprints. It was a leg day if I remember correctly, ironically enough. And then as we were leaving the athletic compound a news alert popped up on every floatscreen in the place—all over the walls too. The audio played cylinder-wide, and given we were on the 13, it must have been playing all over Delta-Kei.
“Authorities are looking for a group of activists of potentially thirty people or more.”
Wind and I couldn’t help but stop and watch. It was the only real news. Like he’d said, first thing to happen out there in ages.
“The group is technologically sophisticated. Many of the 1 cylinder’s internal monitoring systems were disabled. Delta-Kei Community Compliance is seeking anyone with pictures of individuals wearing masks like this or anyone who can identify anyone who owns one.”
I damn near choked. Right up on the floatscreen was the same damn mask I’d handed back to Jace in that dim hallway—a cross pattern over the nose and eyes.
“Real flash racing gear,” Wind remarked.
Then he looked over at me as I was staring at the floatscreen, speechless.
“Burch, what’s up? You’ve gone white.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know. Nothing.”
“Doesn’t look like nothing.”
“Probably it ain’t nothing. Let’s get some lunch.”
We ate down by the aperture, heavy on the greens and aminos after a workout. And the whole damn time that picture flashed up everywhere. I don’t know why I didn’t tell Wind at the time. It was probably one of those cases where your subconscious is smarter than you are even though you don’t know it. I guess maybe I didn’t want to get Wind mixed up in something the way I must’ve known I was on some deeper level. But I was still in denial. I’d met Jace a few times. He seemed like a decent guy. Funny. Easygoing. You couldn’t picture him being associated with the type of people that would try to blow up Kei Day. Plus, he was young. Our age, maybe a year older. They were looking for proper adults with political motivations.
Anyway, I kept my mouth shut about it to Wind. He didn’t have to ask me what I was thinking about either. I think he just assumed I was sore about April.
But for the rest of the afternoon, all I could think about was Jace and that mask of his. Kei Day, you know, a lot of people would dress up for it, so I had some doubt. Maybe it was a popular new mask. I hadn’t seen one like it before, though.
At the time, I liked reading those Vance comics. I’m not sure whether they had them anywhere but the Letters, but they were popular out our way, that’s for sure. And usually, I could dive into one of those for hours. But I could hardly make it a few panels before the thought would pop up again. What was Jace doing down there in that back causeway all alone? What was that gear he was fussing with? Did he look a little nervous to see us, or really, to be seen by us?
I couldn’t hardly stand it anymore, so I did what I thought was a sensible thing, and I pinged April.
“I don’t want to talk to you, Hale,” she said to me after she pulled up my stream.
“Oh, fine,” I said back. “I don’t mean to say nothing about us, April. I was just wondering if you saw that alert popping up everywhere. It was all over the 13, so I figure it must be there too.”
“What about it?”
“Didn’t you find anything funny about it?”
“Nothing about this is funny, Hale.”
“Not funny, I mean strange. Nothing out of the ordinary?”
“None of it is ordinary.”
“All right. I’ll just say it then,” I told her. “That mask. It sure looked familiar to me. You didn’t recognize it?”
“Why would I?” April asked me, and in her tone, I could definitely detect a genuine hesitancy—certainly a lack of conviction.
“Your friend Jace had a mask just like it when we met him in the causeway. I swear it’s the same one.”
“That’s ridiculous, Burch. You shouldn’t talk that way. You’ll get someone into real trouble.”
Then she flipped off the channel and didn’t answer when I pinged her back.
I put on my eyepiece and stared back into the panels of my comic, again hardly making any progress in the story. I had to switch it to auto-narrate in order to get anywhere. Still, I was only half focused on the images right in front of me. My head was still in that dim causeway, thinking long and hard about that memory. April was right about one thing, saying I recognized that mask would’ve caused a stir. The D-KCC were taking this incident about as serious as they could. I’d heard they were pulling people for interrogation who were marked in the vicinity, even if they were only there hours before. D-KCC were hungry for any information they could get.
About an hour after our conversation, April sent me a message: “You’re crazy, Hale,” it read. “Don’t ever ping me again.”
“Subtle,” I muttered.
I was more upset at that point than when she dumped me. I couldn’t figure how a person could up and turn on me like that. Yesterday, it seemed like April couldn’t get enough of me. Now, she seemed to hate my guts.
I spent a good part of that evening walking around the 13, and, I have to say, things seemed different. It wasn’t anything I could put a finger on. I certainly couldn’t articulate it. But the place had an unusual quiet coldness about it, like everyone was taking a second look at each other, maybe trying to place a mask over each neighbor’s face, to see if it would fit. In my lifetime, that’d never been our way.
That night, Jace pinged through to my eyepiece. He’d heard from April, apparently.
“I’ve only met you a handful of times, Burch, but the thing about living in a cylinder group like Kei is that there isn’t anywhere to hide here. You should think about that before you do anything you regret.”
“Who’s hiding, Jace?” I asked him. “Not me. I’ve got nothing to hide from.”
“That’s good,” he answered. “Something to think about preserving. Some things, once they’re gone, they’re gone.”
“Do you have something to say to me?”
“I just said it, Burch. I hope you heard. I’ve got friends, you know. Real friends.”
“Well, congratu—” he cut the feed on me, “—lations.”
At the time, I thought it was an odd conversation. I guess it was a little bit intimidating. I sure wasn’t any kind of fighter back then. But again, we were all so innocent, something like that you don’t think anything real could ever come of it. I didn’t anyway. We were learning.
The following day, there was more news. The D-KCC had found a manifesto. It was really clever. There weren’t a lot of ways to leave a fully anonymous message for the authorities without getting yourself caught. But they’d somehow programmed a binary signal to go off in the laser panel on the main light bar. Nobody noticed it till the evening, but it had been flashing on repeat, drowned out by the daylight of the main bar. At twilight it appeared on the wall near the explosion site, and somebody took enough of an interest to record it and decode it using the city’s central AI.
They didn’t release the whole message, but the portions they did quote left little doubt. The whole thing was political, designed to get the people here to pay attention to the war. In their view, we were all too happy to pretend the slaughter of millions of people wasn’t happening, going about our happy lives undisturbed. They urged action, which I thought was a strange idea back then, after all, what action could even a million of us do to sway the fate of that whole war. Collectively, we could’ve barely scraped together the resources to form a small armada of well-armed cruisers. The way things were going along the lines—Burning Rock and Richfield, or back on our side, what had happened at Verio—the Delta-Kei battle force would’ve been space debris in minutes.
Things were getting funny in our peaceful little enclave. All over the cylinders people were talking, assembling, holding meetings, official and unofficial, taking sides, fuming at those who took the other. This seemed to happen so spontaneously, even as a teenager I had a funny feeling as to how spontaneous it had really been.
That afternoon, there were people gathering at the apertures in nearly all twenty-five cylinders. And to my shock, these gathering groups, well-planned all, were coming together in support of the terrorists. On the 13, they were all young, near about my age and older. I even knew a few of the faces that got spread across the network. Meanwhile, there was the disgust of my mother and father, who both vehemently disagreed with the ideology and the methods of the terrorists. My dad had always believed the Trasp had staged the start of the war. He thought we Lettered Systems all should have banded together with Etterus and put them down at the start and ended the war outright decades ago. Every day the war pounded on he considered a sign of our leaders’ cowardice and an affront to humanity. Most people in his generation agreed with him.
Me and Wind didn’t go down there to all that chaos at the aperture. We got another workout in, only talking about the news sparingly. But even him, I could tell he was paying attention. I think he was like me, wondering why we even had to choose a side in the first place. Wasn’t our war.
I didn’t hear from April or Jace that day. I didn’t talk to nobody about them either. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about it. I guess I hoped the D-KCC would do their jobs right, catch the group outright without my needing to accuse anybody of nothing.
By the following morning, though, the indication was that the authorities were floundering. They hadn’t pulled in any real suspects, just random witnesses, and this made the entire cylinder group uneasy—that a bunch of dissidents who would bomb their own would be walking around among us, waiting for their next opportunity to strike. And given the remorseless tone of their manifesto, it sure could’ve come at any time.
My parents started noticing that I was paying a lot of attention to it. Usually, they didn’t hardly notice anything about me at all.
And then suddenly, mid-morning of the third day, as I was getting ready to meet Wind for a workout before practice that day, the D-KCC showed up at the door, forcing a message to our interior screens demanding I come out and speak to them. They marched me out in front of my parents, my sisters, down the causeway on our floor in plain sight of all the neighbors, all of them whispering to each other, pointing. There was plenty implied in that simple action—all those eyes staring at me suspiciously. The CC didn’t have to say anything. Everyone assumed it was about the bombing, and damned if I didn’t look like I had something to hide. Hell, I felt guilty myself, and I hadn’t even done anything. But in my head, the whole way down to their headquarters, even on their tram car, once the eyes of the public were off me, the officers’ eyes were heavy on me. No words. Their eyes said all they had to say.
Then, when I got down to the CC station on the 13, the captain there told me I was going to be shipped over to the 1.
“Am I under suspicion of something?” I asked him. “Because I didn’t have anything to do with that bombing.”
“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have something to do with that bombing, young Mr. Burch. You’ll be questioned at the 1.”
“Don’t I have rights?”
“Everyone has rights,” the Captain responded. “Doesn’t mean you won’t get investigated and prosecuted for your crimes.”
“I don’t got any crimes,” I insisted, shaking my head. And that wasn’t the only thing shaking—my hands, my legs, my foundation. Hell, I was on the verge of tears, and they hadn’t asked me a single question.
I got put on the CC’s short shuttle over to the 1. And, of course, there were people watching, posting pictures, the news spreading like wildfire. What I didn’t know at the time was that they were pulling in a whole bunch of other people at the same time, but the investigators staged it so that every single one of us felt like the whole system was looking at us, like we were the main suspect.
When I got there, they put me in a closed room by myself on the penitentiary floor to let me sweat, only I wasn’t sweating. It was freezing in there. I was shivering something fierce, my core shaking with nervous energy and frigidity by the time the investigators came in, both about fifty years old, one male, one female, neither particularly friendly looking.
“So, Mr. Burch,” the female detective began. “This is your opportunity to tell us about Kei Day. What would you like to tell us?”
“Do you suspect me of something, ma’am? Because I haven’t done anything wrong.”
They looked at each other with well-practiced doubt.
Then she glared at me with a skeptical eye, and in that tone that let me know she was somebody’s mother, she said, “Everybody’s done something wrong, Hale. I’d like to know about you. And don’t you lie to me, boy. Even if we didn’t have you on infrared right now, I wouldn’t need the AI to tell me when you’re lying. I’d know.”
“Aw, hell,” I said. “I’m not going to lie to you. But I ain’t talking to you either. I know my rights.”
“That won’t look good for you,” the male detective said. “Not one bit.”
“Nope,” the female detective agreed.
They hadn’t even introduced themselves properly. Didn’t matter who they were.
“Juries of one’s peers don’t like uncooperative people,” she continued.
“Not one bit,” he agreed, nodding.
“Are you going to charge me with a crime?” I asked.
They looked at each other and didn’t answer.
“Well, then stuff it!” I told them. “This ain’t how you treat somebody who did nothing wrong.”
“Suit yourself,” the male detective said.
And they walked out of there without giving me the slightest indication of what they thought I’d done, if anything. My mind started going wild, thinking I was going to get charged with the bombing. I was freezing and couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t slow my mind. I was one scared shitless kid. I went over and sat in the corner, put my head to my knees and started crying. I was terrified, which I guess was their objective, trying to get me to spill my guts.
And they let me stew in it, didn’t give me a sip to drink or a bite to eat or a friendly word. The longer I sat in there, the more I calmed down and got my head about me, though. One thing I’d read about in my Vance comics was a lot of crime stories. I started thinking about how the worst thing you could always do to get yourself into worse trouble was to talk to these people. They always had ways of tricking criminals into talking. And to me, in the comics, it always seemed almost unbelievable why they would do themselves in like that, add to the evidence by running their mouths. Now I understood. I was still certain I hadn’t done a single thing wrong, yet every instinct in my body was compelling me to try and talk my way out of something I hadn’t even done. At worst, I’d delayed coming forward with something that might not even have been a real lead.
Well, they kept me boxed up there in the cold for a few more hours before coming back in. This time it was just that female detective. She called me back to the table.
“I ain’t got nothing to say to you,” I told her. “Not without representation.”
“You don’t get assigned representation if you haven’t been charged with a crime, Mr. Burch. And we haven’t charged you yet. Sounds like you did commit a crime though. Perhaps we’re just figuring out what to charge you with. Are you sure you don’t have anything to tell us?”
“As I said, you can stuff it. I ain’t done nothing. I just know my rights is all.”
“Good to know. I’m sure that’ll be a relief to all your neighbors when the next bomb goes off. Hale Burch may not give a damn about their lives or about the community, but damned if he doesn’t know his rights. I’ll be the first in line to let everyone know. Hale Burch knows his rights.”
“Screw you, lady. Am I free to go?”
“Does it look like you are free to go? No, you are not. You are being held as a person of interest in a terrorism investigation. We can hold you without charging you under the charter.”
“How long?”
“I guess you’re going to find that out, Mr. Burch. You’re going to count every second, I’m sure.”
Well, either they were at the end of their time or she was giving me a hard time to get me to cave in, because it wasn’t too long after that they marched me out of there. And damned if they didn’t march me right past April, who was sitting on a bench down one hallway. No accident those investigators did that, probably just to see our reaction. April just about stared a hole through me.
And as I passed, I guess she couldn’t contain whatever anger was building up inside of her.
“You rat! Hale Burch! You did this!”
I just looked back at her and shook my head.
Then those CC assholes dumped me outside the precinct where about a hundred people were hovering around. I don’t know whether they were journalists or just nosy busybodies with nothing better to do, but they harassed me all the way to the tram, and a few even followed me onto the tram and back to the shuttle bay. I could see them staring at me with their eyepieces, taking pictures, posting them to their feeds, no doubt.
You see that too in the comics, when someone gets put into public like that after getting pulled. People try to hide their faces, for all that’s worth. And I have to say I had that instinct too. But I didn’t. I wasn’t a criminal. I wasn’t a rat. And I didn’t have any reason to hide who I was and what I was about. So I kept my eyes to myself and my head up and my mouth shut and headed home.
If I felt unwelcome in my own home on normal days, this kicked it up quite a few levels. Both Giesa and Min had caught whatever fever was going around the network with some of the younger kids, supporting the cause of those terrorists. Now they had reasons from outside the house to justify the way they’d always acted on the inside. They learned the word rat from somebody’s feed, and with plenty of April and Jace’s friends calling me that with no cause, they adopted it. I never got much love from them before that, but I got called rat every time I left my room to eat, or any other time I left the room for that matter. And whenever times like that bothered me before, I could usually just go out, walk around, or ping Wind or somebody else on my team to get a workout in. But after what happened on the tram ride home from the D-KCC, I didn’t want to go out either.
The following day, mid-morning, I was reading my comics, skipping out on my lessons I was already falling behind in, and I heard a commotion outside. One of the girls screamed and I heard my dad shout about something. Then I heard a voice outside our flat shouting something I couldn’t make out. So I stepped out my room and into the flat to see my sisters and my dad already gathered at the front door and my mother walking up behind them with her hands in her hair, her face in utter shock.
“Hale!” she shouted at me. “What the hell is this?”
“What the hell is what?” I asked her. “I was in my room.”
And as I come around the corner, I could see, there at the open door, there was a smashed plate on the ground, and a pile of noodles on the doorstep with a few half-hanging off the two halves of the slid-open front door. In the causeway outside, there was some guy in a dark racing facemask shouting all kinds of names at me, most of which were some form of the word rat with other colorful adjectives attached.
“What do you have to say about all this?” my dad said, looking over at me angrily. “Your sisters are upset.”
I looked up at them, and they did seem genuinely rattled. This was sure a first for our family—getting plates of noodles thrown at our door.
But I wasn’t all that upset about something that looked like a half-baked prank. I was more upset that I was sitting in my own room minding my business, and they were all looking at me like I’d thrown the plate of noodles at my own front door myself.
“Damn shame,” I answered my dad, looking down at the doorstep. “Looks like a waste of a pretty decent plate of noodles.”
“You’re going to clean this up, smartass,” he said.
“Like hell,” I shouted at him. “Let the housebot do it. That’s what it’s there for.”
And then I went back in my room, shut the door, put my headset on and didn’t hardly come out till dinner.
But that wasn’t the last incident like that. Delta-Kei’s community network wasn’t so secure as places like Athos or Hellenia where there were billions and billions of people across each metropolis and hundreds of thousands on each residential cylinder. So there were hackers and pranksters who had ways to bypass residential network security. There were people who could force a notice the same way the D-KCC called me out of the house. That evening, after it got late, we had five or six forced messages. Same things like what that kid who threw the noodles was saying, rat and all that. But they got progressively more threatening. It was to the point my mother called the CC herself complaining about it. And before they even arrived, another one came in that just said over and over, “Rats leave the ship.” Not a great thing to hear when you live on a space cylinder.
When the officer came out, a local model CE-bot standing beside him, he didn’t look so concerned, shaking his head, reluctant to even file a proper report, much less do anything.
“Isn’t this a crime?” I asked him. “Harassing someone involved in an investigation? Isn’t that witness intimidation or something?”
And he looked at me, grinned, and said, “We have it on good authority that you’re not any kind of witness, Mr. Burch. Sorry, but there’s nothing we can do. Have a nice night.”
And they turned and left.
“If you’re not a witness, Hale, what are you?” my dad asked.
“He’s a rat!” Min shouted at me.
My parents ignored her.
“You’re not a suspect, are you Hale?” my mother shouted at me. “Did you have something to do with that bombing? Tell me you’re not a suspect.”
I couldn’t believe them. Not the CC assholes, not my annoying little sisters, not my parents. That they all thought I was a part of this madness? I was furious.
I turned and walked back to my room, put on my headset and tried to get to sleep.
And as the week pressed on with no suspects arrested and people still harassing us at night, everyone in my family seeming to blame me for all the backlash—and even maybe in some part for the bombing itself, I didn’t get any relief.
My mother was getting dirty looks from her friends. The neighbors were after my dad to explain what was going on, whether he was harboring the bomber in his home.
Then that female detective from the 1 Cylinder started pinging me, leaving me messages, telling me she just wanted to talk. I sent her a message back, saying she could have talked to me from the beginning, but they didn’t seem so interested in my story before freezing me out and treating me like a terrorist. So stuff it.
About the only one in those days I could count on for anything other than dirty looks or noodles thrown at my door was Wind. I’d tell him what was going on, and he’d shrug and just say, “Man, Burch, that’s something.”
I couldn’t tell how he felt about much either way, but I figured if he thought I was mixed up in this bombing, he wouldn’t have still been working out with me. I didn’t ever feel like I had to convince him of my innocence or anything. I’d just told him the truth as it played out from the jump.
About an hour before the whole thing unraveled, I got a message from April that just read: “This is all your fault, you rat! I’ll never forgive you, Hale Burch. I wish we’d never met.”
I think I just laughed at it. You get enough thrown at you, stuff eventually just starts bouncing off. You come to expect negativity from every direction, and you can either let it suck you under or try to become immune to it. I did the latter. And I don’t claim it’s through any kind of virtue or anything. It wasn’t that at all. Nothing noble. I was just really really pissed off, and I was bloody defiant. People calling me a rat everywhere I turned, throwing noodles at my door, force-messaging my flat at all hours, threatening me? Screw them all, I figured. And screw April, too. Did she think I was happy I’d met her at that point? That thought was worthy of a laugh. Sure. April Haynes, the galaxy’s gift to the cylinders all right.
Word broke right after that message that a whole crew of people across the cylinders got pulled in as suspects for the bombing. Nobody from the CC pinged me to tell me I was in the clear, but I was still home, on the outside, watching the news with everyone else. So for the moment, I figured, that was some relief, and maybe things might get back to normal a little, at least for me anyway.
By that time, though, still only a week or so following Kei Day, this terrorist group had cut a division down our little system that was deep and only growing deeper. They had supporters in every cylinder, passionate supporters. And the thing about something like that is it only grows. Passion is magnetic, and you never see people out anywhere protesting on behalf of the status quo. So they got opposed directly by the other faction—the join the war faction. And in most places, it didn’t amount to much more than a bunch of rowdy teenagers and young adults yelling at the older folks who were shouting back at them. But on the 4, it turned ugly. There, only a handful of these dissidents turned out to deface a mural in the park space with anti-war slogans. And a bunch of neighbors who lived near the park came out and let them have it. A couple of those protestors got beat pretty good with their own helmets. The neighbors all got pulled in on assault charges, and the dissidents ended up getting what they wanted, sympathy from impressionable kids like my younger sisters.
From there, the temperature in the system only got turned up. With all that going on, I figured, who was going to bother about me anymore? People should forget, I thought. I resolved to be scarce and keep my mouth shut. Let it all blow over. Maybe someday some of the people close to me who looked at me cross-eyed might be big enough to tell me they were sorry.
Then, the names came out. They were leaking out in bits on the network, but nothing official until the D-KCC released the list of offenders and charges.
I was not shocked to see Jace’s name on the list as one of the conspirators—one of the inside actors, running surveillance on the crowd so the bombers had clearance to do what they did, setting up the bomb, I guess.
I was shocked to see April Haynes’s name on the list as an accessory. I couldn’t believe it, actually. Never in a million years. She was nasty to me, sure, after she dumped me. But I could only think of that sweet, cute girl I’d been attracted to in the first place.
I started thinking, though—first about some of the political things she’d let slip every now and again. I’d never probed too deep at the time when she said them, because I didn’t much care for politics, but I also didn’t want to mix up a good thing by getting into an argument with her. The next thing I started thinking about was that night of Kei Day itself. I started thinking about that coincidence of April pulling me down about four stories for some alone time in those tunnels exactly ten minutes before that blast went off. Accessory? She must’ve known. And that thought—well, that thought turned my head around. I didn’t know what to make of that.
I stewed on all that for about a day, and then, suddenly, that detective forces a ping through to my headset, intruding on a comic I was quite enjoying. I still wasn’t going out much.
“Mr. Burch, we understand you had no prior knowledge of the incident. I hope you’ll understand that we were just trying to get to the bottom of a tragedy that cost some very good people their lives. Now they’ll have justice.”
“If that’s what you want to call it, ma’am. I’d say it’s good to know you care about what I think, but I know better. Why are you bothering me? I got nothing to say to you.”
“I wanted to let you know you are going to be called in to testify as a prosecution witness, and the prosecutor is hoping that you’ll do so willingly.”
“And get called a rat some more by my own family? No thanks.”
“The prosecutor reserves the right to call you as a hostile witness. And sincerely, that will not go well for you in this case. The bench can compel your testimony against rights, and if you really push your luck, the prosecutor may charge you as accessory after the fact.”
“Great. More good news.”
“That’s where you stand.”
“Good luck to me, I guess.”
And she closed the channel on me. Just like that. No “sorry Burch”; no “we’d appreciate your cooperation”; no “your community needs you.” Nope. Just show up in court or we’ll slug you one more.
And things in the month leading up to the start of the trials didn’t get any better from there. My sisters started hissing at me, apparently because they thought rats hissed or something. I don’t know what they were thinking. I even pinged Adara and Jira to see if they could get their younger sisters to back off a little. Those two were only concerned about how my connection to all this made them look at work and to their friends.
And in the community, divisions didn’t die down, the tensions just sorta simmered there, right at that high temperature. I did my best to keep to myself and stay out of crowds—even after workouts with Wind, we’d take our post-workout meals back to his place. Wind’s dad was about the only adult on the whole 13 who made it a point to listen to me, hear me out, understand my perspective.
“Well,” he said, “hardship teaches us valuable lessons, Hale. You’re getting an awful tough one for a young man, but I’d say you’re doing admirably. I’m proud of the way you’ve handled yourself.”
“That means a lot,” I told him. “Sincerely.”
Two days after that conversation, five days from when the first trial was scheduled, me and Wind got jumped by five other guys in masks on the causeway down to his family’s floor. I was a little bigger and stronger than Wind and he was a little faster than me, but that boy had some fight in him. Still, neither of us knew how to fight and we were well outnumbered. We got kicked around pretty good before they ran off.
“They’ll catch them,” Wind assured me as we were assessing each other’s knocks and bruises. “CC’s not messing around with this stuff anymore.”
“You gave almost as good as you got, Wind,” I told him.
“Pretty good scrape,” he said, shaking out his sore knuckles. “Would’ve busted one of those suckers bad if they hadn’t been wearing those heavy masks. Gutless.”
“I guess so,” I told him.
“I’ve been listening, you know. But I guess I didn’t realize how bad it’s gotten for you, Burch.”
“Yeah. The latest twist in the saga. This one’s not quite as funny as noodles thrown at the door, for the record.”
“I imagine not,” he said. Then he shrugged and smiled. “I tossed lunch as soon as I saw what was up.”
Wind went over and picked up the package he’d thrown to the side of the causeway, assessed the situation, and nodded at me.
“Still good?” I asked him.
He grinned. “That’s what’s most important.”
I didn’t get called in to testify till the third day of the first trial. The way the system worked on Delta-Kei was that I only had to testify once, so long as the other defendants’ advocates didn’t have any further cross examination on my testimony. And thankfully, that never happened. The first defendant wasn’t Jace or April or any of the lesser players at that trial. It was the main planner of the whole thing. Every last person in the system was watching.
I did see April on the way in, giving me the stink eye. She was holding hands with some other sucker for a pretty face, only he had a lot more information than I did and still got suckered in. I stank-eyed her right back and walked in without another thought about April Haynes until I got asked about her on the witness stand.
On principle, I refused to talk. When the bench asked me why, I told them I didn’t do anything wrong and got beat up, got noodles tossed at my door, my little sisters hissing at me and calling me a rat, threatened by the terrorists, stank-eyed by more people than just April Haynes and her friends, and on top of that, the damn detectives didn’t even bother to speak to me like a decent human being.
The bench asked me if I realized this was a murder trial with multiple victims and their families relying on true and accurate testimony.
I told the bench I was sorry about that fact and still reserved my rights.
Then the bench compelled me. Testify or get prosecuted.
For the first time, I told everything that happened how it happened, April and I sneaking off, the explosion, meeting Jace in the causeway, the smoke, the helmet. And I was willing to go on, but that was all they wanted to know about.
And that was that. I only found out later that it was April who’d broke the case open. They’d lied to her about what I’d said, convinced her I’d talked, and tricked her into giving up Jace, who gave up most of the others. From there, they got everyone.
By then, I knew better than to think it was suddenly all going to be fine again, some happy little life on Cylinder 13. No. All those little dissidents who thought it was edgy to support the people who blew up their neighbors to make a statement about the war? Were they suddenly going to buy a clue? Start acting like adults? About as much chance of that as my sisters doing the same.
There were a handful of people who did quietly tell me they were glad I’d testified against the bombers. But I certainly didn’t come off well. It was the detectives and the D-KCC who got all the accolades. And I continued to get plenty more stink eye from everyone with an affinity for that terrorist faction, which only grew in the weeks and months following their sentencing.
The whole thing turned them into martyrs for the cause in the minds of their followers.
I muttered something about that to Wind a few weeks after the trial while we were working out.
“Well, at least it’s all over now, Burch,” he told me. “Thing’s will die down eventually.”
“What if I don’t want them to die down, Wind? You know?”
“What do you mean?”
“See, it’s a lot like your dad said. I learned a few things these past couple months—seen some people I didn’t really know for who they really were. There’s a few people, like you and your family, well, now I know who you are. Sad thing is I know the opposite about my own family, all the people who claimed to be my friend and vanished as soon as my name fell in the mix of that thing. Now I’m just supposed to walk around here, looking them all in the eye?”
“I bet with some time, you’ll find a way to forgive them.”
“Maybe,” I said. “It’s not like I want to walk around here holding a grudge the rest of my life. But the way I see it, they gotta ask first. You run around forgiving people who don’t have the least bit of remorse for what they’ve done, or even worse are so clueless they aren’t even aware they’ve done anything? No. Screw those people. They don’t deserve absolution.”
“Aren’t you just going to be angry every time you look at them?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Then what? You can’t walk around bitter the rest of your life, Burch.”
“I been thinking.”
“Of what?”
“Getting out of Delta-Kei altogether.”
I remember Wind looking at me wide-eyed, like of all the crazy stuff that’d been going on, just the thought of leaving Kei was the wildest.
“There aren’t a lot of ways out. You got some finances I don’t know about?” he joked.
I told him about the Service. He was shocked, assuming I was planning to sign up for Letters Service, get myself all caught up in something like happened at Verio. But I told him about the local Guard. He didn’t even know we had one in the Deltas it was so small. I told Wind how it was, that we shared local resources with the Gammas and that they couldn’t press us into use in the Alphas or the Boundary Systems, not unless there was and emergency declaration of some kind.
“The thing I’ll never forget about Kei Day,” I told Wind, “was the sound of those screams—the tone, like nothing I’ve ever heard. The desperation in people’s eyes. Real fear. I’ve thought a lot about that, and I wonder what a sleepy little system like Kei would do if the Trasp ever do show up. Maybe they never do come, Wind, but somebody should be watching.”
At the time I was getting called a rat, and I knew I wasn’t that. But I thought, If you’re not a rat, Burch, then what kind of animal are you? And I come up with the idea that I wanted to be a dog. You know, maybe if something bad came along, little Delta-Kei couldn’t do much to fight off anyone serious, but I knew I could sure bark like hell and run toward a threat, maybe do somebody some good that way. Posture up and scare them off. Give a few people time to get out. Never figured I’d get sent into the real shit.
Anyway, that’s how I decided to get the hell out of Delta-Kei. Signed with the Delta-Gamma Guard a few months later, and I never looked back.
I finally stopped talking, and I looked over at Carolina, realizing I hadn’t touched the tea she’d made me, which had all but gone cold. I didn’t like the way she was looking at me.
“Don’t look at me like that, Captain,” I said. “I don’t need anybody’s pity.”
“It’s not pity,” she said. “It’s just … I’m sorry that happened to you. I had no idea.”
“How could you?” I asked. “Anyway, that’s all way in the past.”
“So let me get this straight,” Transom said, grinning and getting that look in his eye. “You only had one friend, and his name was Wind? Hell, Burch, you’re even sadder than I thought.”
The whole damn table started roaring, Sōsh especially.
“None of you’ve never met anyone named Wind?” I asked them.
Everybody looked back at me funny, shaking their heads.
“Must be a local thing,” I guessed, shrugging. “I always thought it was a cylinder thing that happened all over the Battery Systems—people naming kids after forces of nature they’d never witness themselves. I must have known ten girls named Rain on the 13 alone when I was a kid.”
“Was one of the Rains your next girlfriend after April?” Ren asked, grinning to let me know she was teasing me a little.
“No,” Transom said. “Burch’s next girl was Thunder.”
Aw, hell. I started cracking up on that one. Omar was laughing so hard he teared up. Carolina too, nearly.
When the laughter died down, Sōsh turned my way.
“You ever talk to him still, your friend?”
I shook my head. “It’s been ages. Before I got clipped. I’m sure of that.”
“Your sisters?” Ren asked.
“I haven’t really talked to anyone from Delta-Kei for …” I paused, because it was harder to remember now, that lifetime in between, or at least it seemed that way. “Last person I talked to from home was my mom, I think. Came down to cry over my bed on Alpha-Megara when I was just laid up fresh at the body bay. They hadn’t even fixed me up with legs yet. I told her the same as I just told Carolina. I didn’t want her pity. She just kept crying, so I told her to go back and do it at home. I didn’t have the energy to keep living and console her at the same time.”
Carolina was shaking her head. I think she was shocked by my bluntness. She looked like she was about to cry herself but also to speak.
“Don’t say it,” Sōsh said, looking over at her. “Don’t say anything, Captain. Carolina was going to say she was sorry again, Burch, but I’m not, meaning no offense. I’m damn grateful all that happened to you. A man doesn’t survive what you went through at the body bay if he doesn’t know hardship first. All that you went through as a kid, telling those assholes to screw off? Same kind of cussedness keeps someone half blown to hell from giving in. Gives him the stones to tell the devil he’s going to have to wait. I never said this then, but I saw you, those clunky units they gave you to lumber around on, walking like a busted warehouse workbot, getting on with your day like there was nothing more they could ever do to you to break you, and I figured, hell, if Burch can get the hell up and get on with things then I damn well better too. So that’s how it was. I’m sorry I never said that before.”
“Thanks, brother,” I said, and I looked back down the other end of the table at Transom, and he had that look in his eye like he was fixing to say something real smart.
“You shut it,” I told him. “Don’t press your luck.”
He just put his hands up, pleading innocent, grinning.
Ren started laughing. I should’ve known better, but I looked over at her inquisitively, wondering what she was laughing about.
“Transom was just wondering how long it was going to be before Sōsh broke out the Vodkaberry.”
They all started roaring again.
“Vodkaberry?” I asked her.
Then I looked over at Sōsh.
“Good to have you back, Burch,” Sōsh said. “Welcome home.”