The Color of Rain (18 page)

“Apologies,” Johnny says. “Wrong screen.” His fingers tap the panel, and the view switches to a bare metal room with a pair of massive sliding doors.

An airlock.

And in the middle of it, Lo's tiny frame. On her knees and sobbing.

“Johnny, don't take this out on—”

“She's a distraction, Rain. That's what your little midnight stunt proved to me. If you can't have her on this ship without sneaking out then we can't have her on this ship. Haven't I already told you the lesson of having nothing to lose?”

My mouth opens, but nothing comes. He really means to launch her out the airlock.

“This is just a trick,” I blurt. “You brought her onboard to hold over me. You were never interested in trading her or—”

“You're right. She was here to help you learn to separate from everything else.”

Was?

“Before my father marooned me on Entra, he gave me my own ship to captain for three weeks. Later on, he admitted that he wanted me to have it all before I had nothing.” Johnny's brow creases into a knot. “A genius maneuver. If I hadn't known that I wanted to be captain, I wouldn't have tried to regain it. Build from the bottom. Nothing to lose. Everything to gain.”

“I get it, Johnny. Your dad was . . . right. I'll forget I even know her. I promise!” I look to where Lo is ripping at her hair.

“I tried the same tactics with my father. ‘Let me stay onboard. I'll work up from the lowest crew position. . . . '” His voice drops, and he stands. “Eleven minutes to the next automatic dump. You'll have enough time to say good-bye. Probably. As long as you stop wasting it blathering on, trying to make me change my mind.”

I sprint so fast that my vision fragments—images blurred by the wetness in my eyes. The silver-walled halls. Black flight suits. The docking bay and the smashing clatter of my footsteps on the grated walkway.

Lo is in the last airlock.

I break against the porthole, pounding on the thick glass pane.

“LO! LO!”

She stops tearing at her hair. Her filthy cheeks are whipped with tear tracks, and she comes to the window slowly.

“Rain.” She presses her hand to the glass. A few ripped-free strands of her pink hair hang from her fingernails. I throw myself against the wheel lock on the door without budging it a fraction.

“Rain.” Her voice is muffled to a whisper, and I press my forehead against the porthole to hear it.

But the rolling clank sounds first.

She looks back at the doors. “Don't trust the Mec. He's not telling you the truth.”

“Lo! Don't . . .” But I have nothing but her name. “Lo.”

Clank. Clank. Clankclankclank . . .

“Those are our people, Rain.” She takes out her mother's picture from her shirt and smashes the scrap against the window. But there's no hope. Lo's mother is going with her now no matter what. They'll lose their existence as one.

The
snap
sounds, fracturing the seal on the door.

“Sweet freakin' mess,” she mouths as the doors break apart.

And Lo flies backward . . .

. . . falling head over heels into the Void.

M
y body swings to a lewd rhythm. If I rock forward, I can see silver-white stars through the tiny passenger room window. If I rock back, I face a dingy ceiling and a spidery water stain.

And he likes it best when I rock back.

So I do. Over and over in ugly syncopation until his grunts climax with a wrenching squeeze of my hips.

“Rain,” he moans.

“Don't use my name.” I slip out of my voided state and slide off him. My feet touch the ground in the exact spot where I shed my clothes to begin with, and I'm redressed in a move so refined that Lo would be proud. Now I know what she meant about doing it without feeling it. Sex can be nothing.

It can be
it
.

I button my shirt to my collar and hold on to the edge of the bunk. Remembering Lo no longer makes me sob, but I get dizzy . . . spun up like some fist is twisting all my insides, and though I'm the best at deluding myself, there are still moments when I cannot turn my brain off. When I'm too aware of all that I've lost.

“I said,
here
.” Tobern thrusts a fistful of coins. I drop them in
my pocket while he fingers the ends of my ratty hair. “You're looking like shit.”

I tug my matted curls and force them into a rubber band. “Same night next week?”

“Just take a shower before then.” He sags back on his pillow and folds his hands behind his head. He stretches and groans, and though the room is small and he's not a big man, he seems like an acre of flesh.

I'm about to duck out the door, but I pause. On a small shelf, a bit of white glass is shaped like a heart.

“Go ahead,” Tobern says. “I've been seeing you eye that every time you're in here.”

I pick up the beautiful, light trinket. “What is it?”

“It's a bit of that Mec glass that their whole city is built out of.”

“This is from the Edge? You've been there?” I love the touch of the glass so much that I sit back on the lip of his mattress just to hold it for a few more minutes.

“This stuff is amazing. You tell it what to do. What to be.” He takes the glass from me. “Spoon,” he commands. The glass slides out of its shape and into the shape of a spoon.

“Wow.” I take it back from him. “What's the Edge like?”

“Hard to say. I've only seen the spacedocks. They don't much like Earth Cityites just walking around.”

I try to avoid looking my clients in the eye, but I look at Tobern now. He's probably thirty, and he has a decent chin. That's the best that I can think of him. “You're from Earth City? So am I.” I look back to the glass. “Coin,” I say, and the glass slips into the new shape. “Is the Void what you thought it'd be?”

“This is my third run from one side to the other,” he says. “And every time, I'm blown away by how crazy things can get out here, but you get used to the crazy. Then the crazy is normal. Boring, even.”

I hand the bit of glass back to him, wanting desperately to keep it.

A piece of the Edge. What I wouldn't give to show it to Walker.

“Stay the night if you need. I've got room on the floor,” he says kindly.

“Thanks, but no. See you next week.” I tuck out the door and into the muted light of the late evening. No one is in the passenger halls at this hour, not even the other blue girls, and that's the way I like it. They work so hard to have clients who keep them on for weeks or months, but I'd rather drift from bed to bed.

I have to keep moving to escape the reality that my body is no longer mine.

I tug my sleeve over the sapphire light coming from my wrist. The color no longer reminds me of the spacedocks above the old pier—of starships or Walker or my dreams of the Void. Instead, it speaks Lo's name and the blue engines that backlit her freefall until her body was lost to the blackness beyond.

The color also echoes the screams that ripped me in pieces while I collapsed beneath that porthole, my wrist blinking from green to blue.

I knew then that I had to move or it would become yellow. I had to move or I would soon be watching Walker's pod fall into the stretch between the stars. Johnny's game was just getting
started, and I was already behind. So I came straight from the airlock to the passenger levels and became a real working girl.

And it only took me these few weeks to get the rhythm.

I head across the deserted common room and deposit all but two of my coins in an ornate box. The other girls wait for Johnny to hand in their money, but I get slivers of joy in denying him the chance to see me in my new situation. I'll keep it up until we reach the Edge, if I can.

My body begins to fold inwardly as I think about needing to keep this up, but then I remember the cameras. Cameras everywhere. And I push myself onward.

Johnny doesn't get to see me fall apart. I wait until no one is in the backroom at the Rainbow Bar for that. I slip in and shake so hard that my bones rattle. There's no way he can see me then . . . I think.

My shoes slosh with the sound of coins, and I curl my toes over them. I've been amassing a secret hoard from my nightly collections, and I'll use it to bribe a crew member to get my brother off this ship. Johnny may have a good lock on me because of this damn bracelet, but Walker could still be freed.

Everything may have changed since I trudged through the streets of Earth City, but I still need a faithful plan. Hope remains my sharpest tool.

I head to the Rainbow Bar where Lionel, the bartender, sleeps with his head dropped on the countertop like he went down in the middle of serving: a rag in one hand, a glass in the other. I pull his shoulders up until he looks around with sagging lids.

“Come on, scrawny lion. To bed.”

“Righty, Dara,” he mutters. I take him to the storage room and drop him on his bunk, tucking the holey blanket up to his neck. Lionel and I have a decent relationship. He calls me his barmaid, and I help out, using the place to find clients and then coming back here to sleep.

He's never tried to sleep with me, and I love him for it. Although he does call me Dara when he's topped-off drunk. I've gathered enough to know that she was his daughter from a now distant life before the Void, and I let him think so. In fact, being his Dara stand-in is one of the only warm things left in my very cold life.

I clear away the rest of the glasses, shut the door, and turn off the colored strings of lights. Now the only glow comes from the far window, and I drag the most comfortable couch underneath it and tuck myself in for the night, staring at the ghostly strings of the Void. I haven't seen the edges of the wormhole in a while, and they remind me of Ben.

His eyes have that kind of sheen—at least that's the way I remember them. I haven't seen him since that day I was sent off with Proffers. Johnny might've found out about our connection and killed him along with Lo. Or he's avoiding me.

I now know what Ben meant when he spoke of the Void's inherent loneliness. I feel it. The Void is a hollow place that breeds hollow existences. To be fair to the other working girls, the other blues, they've tried to be friendly. But I refuse to learn a name or take a favor. If Lo's and Kaya's deaths taught me nothing else, they proved that I cannot afford friends on this ship. Or they can't afford me.

I settle into the beaten cushions, ignoring the stench of spilt liquor and an aching in my joints, but I can't avoid my yearning for Walker. I press my hands between the folds in my knees and watch the dancing weave of the Void until I hear something.

The bump of a chair against a table.

I catch my breath just as a shadowy man leans over me. His hand closes over my mouth, and I jerk out of my seat, biting and kicking until my attacker stumbles. I crawl to an empty bottle and swing it against his head.

He goes limp.

I hold the spot in my chest where my heart is trying to riot free and poke at the outline on the floor. I step over the toppled chairs, gripping the bottle high and ready to conk the bastard again. But there's something familiar in his sturdy legs and toned body.

Not to mention the boots and cargo pants.

“Ben?” I drop my weapon and slide the table away. I shake his shoulders, but he's out cold. I grab a glass of water from behind the bar and dump it on his face.

He jolts awake, fists up. “For hell's sake, Rain.” He spits water and lowers his hands. “You didn't have to attack me.” He touches the knot now swelling above his temple. “I covered your mouth so you wouldn't cause a riot.”

I fetch a rag full of ice for his head from behind the bar and hand him the bundle. “At least I didn't pop your eye again.”

His eye has healed over our weeks apart, and his hair sticks forward as though it was actually combed before our tussle. I can't help taking in each piece of him by the window light, and he seems to be doing just the same with me.