Sail

According to Moon, as of that morning the police only wanted to question me about the robbery. Maybe the guy with the red backpack who’d snapped my picture had made a detour on his way to the police station or he’d had a Mind-I malfunction. No one seemed to know about the dead man in the forest, but Moon agreed to call in an anonymous tip once I was safely off Mayvel. Whether he’d tried to kill me or not, I couldn’t leave him there to rot.

I’d slept under the professor’s desk in the chemistry lab last night, courtesy of the key I may or may not have swiped my first day at Smixton. Moon had called early and told me to meet her in the appearance modification booth at the edge of campus.

“Shove over,” Moon ordered when she arrived, knocking her hip into mine so she almost sat on my lap.

The booth barely had the capacity for one person, and my side pressed painfully into the unforgiving wall. I swiped the identification card Moon had given me and hovered a finger over the female button on the large screen in front of us, but Moon slapped my hand away.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“You said you needed to blend in, and as Absidy Jones, wanted thief, I’m sorry, but you just don’t,” she said. “As a boy, though, you could fool everyone.”

Wanted thief, not wanted murderer. Not yet anyway. “I’m not getting a sex change, Moon,” I said with a sigh.

“Don’t worry,” she said, chuckling. “You can still keep your girl parts. We’ll just go with a male look, that’s all. Plus, you have to be a boy to get off this planet.”

I wrinkled my forehead. “No, I don’t.”

“As a chef’s apprentice son aboard a transport ship headed on a similar route as your sister, yes, you do.”

Right. How could I forget? My ticket off Mayvel was through one of Moon’s uncles who wasn’t really an uncle and who’d just taken a chef position aboard a ship called the Vicio because the old chef up and quit. His real son, who was also a real apprentice, “decided” not to go with him. The chef must’ve been surprised to learn he had another son last night, who also happened to be his new apprentice. An apprentice who was neither a boy nor had any experience inside a kitchen. Pretty sure Moon had shelled out some major credits to get both him and his son to agree to that kind of nonsense.

“Besides, the police won’t be looking for a boy.” Moon dropped her hand from the screen to squeeze my elbow, her expression softening. “You don’t have to go, you know. We could find another way. You could just explain—”

“No.” There was no other way, and even if there was, there wasn’t enough time to find it. Not with the dead body in the forest with my leaked blood in the snow around it and the red backpack guy’s picture of me with him. And especially with Ellison and the Saelis. She might’ve already been… I cleared my throat hard enough to expel that thought for good. “You came up with a good plan, and I’ll owe you forever, but do you think it will work?”

“Of course it’ll work. You’ll have to lose the chains and the silver eye paint.” Her eyes tracked over my chest. “Put a muffle on your ladies there and voila.”

“Voila. Excellent,” I said dryly.

“The rest is called acting, Absidy. Act like a boy and people will think you are a boy. Grunt to communicate. Feed your face during meals. Think about sex all the time. It’s simple, really. They’re simple, which is why I like them so much.”

But Pop wasn’t like that at all. He spoke more eloquently than most of my professors, had impeccable manners with utensils, and… probably only thought about sex twice while conceiving Ellison and me. I grimaced. I supposed she was right, but I didn’t have any other basis for comparison.

“Okay, push the male button,” I said, because hopefully they really were simple and the trip to deep space would be a breeze.

Moon did and skipped her fingers over the hair options. “No. No. Not fire. No live snakes. Just a simple, typical boy cut…” Her finger flipped past picture after picture until the model’s head blurred across the screen. “There.” She stopped on a cropped haircut not even an inch long. “That one.”

Imagining that hair on top of my head knotted my throat. All my hair would be gone after I’d fought so hard to keep the rest of it. I’d begged Pop for chains to fill in the large gaps in my scalp so I didn’t have to cut my hair off because I’d wanted it to be like Ellison’s, flowing down to my butt in soft, dark curls. I’d never had any of it cut my entire life just for that reason. And now, cutting it all off would mean slicing free my last physical tie to Ellison.

We even had a song about our hair we wrote when we were little, and we’d sing it every time we brushed each other’s.

Lots of locks make pretty socks,

Wind it ’round your toe-sies.

Stretch it o’er your heels and pray

You can grow some moresies.

Not exactly literary gold, but the words melted into my head under Ellison’s gentle hands. She loved my hair as much as I did, so to see chunks of it tangled on the floor the night of my fifteenth birthday must’ve hurt her as much as it did me. I saw it in her drooped shoulders and the thin press of her lips. It looked like she was choking back a scream, though I did enough screaming for both of us.

“It’s too short,” I mumbled.

Moon put a hand over my folded ones in my lap. “It’ll grow back. Or when this is all over, you can get new hair.”

It’ll grow back. That was what Pop had said too. The day after my hair had been ripped out by a particularly malevolent ghost, I sat in front of him and Ellison in the living room of our house on Wix. Ellison held a pair of scissors in one hand, and the other worried the collar of her doctor’s uniform. “I want this hair,” I’d said to them, and they’d agreed I could keep what was left and fill in the huge gaps with whatever I wanted.

I decided on delicate iron chains soon after Ellison told me consuming iron would keep away the ghosts. Not because wearing iron did anything to protect me like consuming it did, but because I became obsessed with the metal and the safety it provided.

I fisted my hands and pulled them from under Moon’s. “Cutting my hair…getting rid of my chains… It will change who I am.”

“Only the outside.” She leaned the side of her head against the wall above the seat to look at me. The screen’s glow painted half her face in shadow, and on the other, a perfect rectangle reflected against the gleam of the black hair that fell across her cheek. “You’ll be the same eccentric I’ve known and loved for a year and a half on the inside though.”

Her soft voice threaded calm through the small booth. I closed my eyes and breathed it in, hoping to still the throbbing lump at the back of my throat. “You don’t know me.”

“I don’t know everything, true, but I know most things. I know there’s a reason behind the metal. I know you have a good soul. Jezebel confirmed it for me when she didn’t try to eat your face off the first night in the dorm. She knew right away.”

At the mention of that furry little blue beast, I had to smile. Oh, Feozva, I would miss her and my sexcapading roommate like crazy.

“Besides, living with the Iron Maiden kind of bumps up my social status.”

I cracked open an eye. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She tipped her head up and studied me. “Think about it, Absidy. You’re a recluse who’d rather lock herself in the chemistry lab than go to class. You have chains implanted in your scalp. You wear metal. You eat metal—”

“It’s a condition.”

She arched an eyebrow. “It’s why your voice has that sexy deep rasp to it, isn’t it? I know you don’t smoke.”

I blew out a breath, unable to find a starting point to begin explaining, and not wanting to anyway because she might not believe me. My gravelly voice was the result of damaged vocal cords caused by too much screaming when I was younger, not because I ate metal, not exactly, and not because I was sexy. Even Ellison couldn’t heal my voice.

“Mm-hm,” she said, flashing a grin. “Do you know how many guys I’ve lured to our room because I’m your roommate?”

“I’m not even going to dignify that comment with another thought,” I said with a shake of my head.

Moon looked at me for a long moment, her expression sad. “You really don’t have to do this.”

I nodded. Even though my hair held as many memories of Ellison as my mind did, I was afraid if I let it go and never found her, I would forget everything about her. The way she plucked stray eyebrows when deep in thought, how she curled her hands around a mug of hot tea with a serene smile, the way she truly listened to all of her patients, including me—all of it would vanish if I cut my hair. I knew it didn’t make any sense, but she had poured so much of herself into me and the gaps where my real hair used to be. She’d saved me, and I needed to save her right back. Who else would since the Ringers thought she’d turned rebel traitor and sailed?

“I do.” My voice came out rusted, so I cleared my throat and tried again. “Push the button.”

Moon watched me from under dark lashes while she crept a finger closer to the screen. I chomped down on the inside of my lip to keep myself from changing my mind. The glow from the computer teased the tip of Moon’s incoming finger.

“I’m going.” The words sounded so much more confident than I felt, but they helped steel my spine even more. I secured the leather strap hanging from the bench across my torso, surprised my fingers weren’t shaking. “Push it.”

She did.

“Scanning,” a soothing male robotic voice said. A thin red laser shot from the low ceiling and swooped over my head then down my face and torso. It double-pulsed like a beeping heartbeat as it read my hair, as if to say, “Too late, too late, too late.”

I closed my eyes and didn’t move.

“You want me to—” Moon started.

I streaked a hand out and caught her leg under my fingernails so she couldn’t leave me.

“Okay then.” She unclamped my hand and slid hers into it. “I didn’t need that leg anyway.”

A smile waved over my mouth then disappeared. The dig of her shoulder against mine eased. Did she scoot away from the lasers? Probably. She didn’t need a haircut, though she hadn’t been scanned so they wouldn’t touch her anyway.

“Preparing localized painkiller,” the robot said. “Please remain still.”

Something whined above my head, but I didn’t dare open my eyes.

“Localized painkiller in three, two, one.”

I sucked in a breath. Needles thrust into my scalp all over my head. A sharp burning sting chased tears from my eyes. The stinging lessened; the tears didn’t. With one hand squeezing mine, Moon knuckled them away as fast as she could.

“Preparing surgical laser. Please hold still.”

A deep mechanical whir sounded from above. A cold tremble shook through me. I swallowed several times in quick succession since my heart had beat itself into my throat. Too late, too late, too late.

“Stop shivering, Absidy. You can’t move.” Moon stopped brushing away my tears long enough to rub feeling back into my arms, even though I wasn’t cold. Just scared, though this kind of scared felt different than any other kind I’d felt before. More uncertain and with far fewer screams.

I shifted the iron in my mouth and willed calm through my body. Inhale. I didn’t need the chains anyway. Exhale. I’d melted down enough bite-sized iron last night in the chemistry lab to last me a long while. Inhale. I would rescue Ellison. Exhale. I would clear my name after I brought her back safe and sound.

“Surgical laser in three, two, one.”

A muffled sob escaped my pinched lips. Despite the painkiller, I still felt the laser biting through my head. Burning flesh filled the cramped booth, searing my nose, forcing me to choke on a gag. One of my chains zipped down my shoulder and tinkled to the floor. More and more followed the same path. All my memories of Ellison, all the love she put into saving me, lay useless at my feet.

“Preparing hair-reducing laser. Please remain still.”

A high-pitched whine sounded over my head then stopped. Now for the painful part. I crushed Moon’s hand with mine.

“Hair-reducing laser in three, two, one.”

Lots of locks make pretty socks.

Hair tumbled down my shoulders in whispers.

Wind it ’round your toe-sies.

Cold air dashed over my head and neck, numbing the tops of my ears. I tried not to shiver, but involuntary trembles racked through my body.

Stretch it o’er your heels and pray.

What if I couldn’t find her? What if I never saw her again? What if my only link to her was being cut from existence? What if?

You can grow some moresies.

A soft touch brushed wetness from my face. “It’s over. You can open your eyes now.”

“I don’t want to see it,” I said through clenched teeth.

“Okay. I think that’ll do well enough.” Moon’s tender voice mismatched my jagged one. She unlocked her hand and plucked the stray hairs from my clothing.

Something beeped and rumbled around my feet. I fought with the leather strap to free myself, but my chains, hair, and part of my soul had been whisked away. I could have kept some of it, I could have melted down the chains, but it was all gone.

A quiver raced across my shoulders since zero hair reinforced my decision to chase after Ellison. But also because without my normal blanket of warmth, the air pricked a chill from my scalp to my toes. No wonder Pop wore a stocking cap all the time.

Moon opened the folding door, and stabs of early morning sunlight burned red behind my eyelids.

“Have a nice day,” the robotic voice said.

“Fuck you.” A butchering was not my idea of a nice day.

I stood and reeled into Moon. The tiny booth pitched and swayed under my feet. Without the weight of my hair and chains, my head felt lighter, like it might float to the ceiling and pop. Rusted balls, that was a bad analogy for someone who was about to hurl themselves into deep space. I braced a hand against the seat back and waited for my equilibrium to adjust.

“You okay?” Moon whispered over her shoulder.

“The worst is over,” I said, and I hoped that was the truth with everything I had.

She nodded and took a step outside, shifting her body so she blocked me. “Stay in here to pull your hood up and wrap the boob hugger around yourself tight. Then count to twenty and meet me by the river bean stand in the marketplace.” She closed the folding door behind her.

The “boob hugger” was actually a roll of wide, white tape that squeezed the girls to my chest enough to make them vanish under my baggy sweatshirt. Comfortable? No, but at least they were contained.

After I finished adjusting, I started counting. Moon was kind of good at this. The whole sneak around and don’t get caught thing seemed natural to her. She’d learned it from her mom, or rather because of her mom, a biometric security officer on Mayvel. Any role Moon slipped into looked completely normal on her, a good thing since her major was theater. Maybe she should be the boy chef’s apprentice, not me.

On twenty, I slid the hood over my head, grabbed my suitcase, and followed my nose through the pockets of people in the marketplace to the river bean stand. The large wooden crate always stood downwind of the rest of the market because the smell of fresh river beans made some people violently ill. To me, their earthy scent reminded me of Saturday night movie marathons on the Nebulous with Pop and Ellison and a plate full of fried river beans.

Moon pretended to pick through the white button-looking things when I stepped up. She puckered her mouth and trailed a hand behind her along the wooden cart as she skirted around the other side, most likely to pretend she didn’t know me.

“The chef’s name is Randolph,” she said, and the carried voices of the rest of the marketplace and the drone of the commercials above nearly drowned her voice. If anyone happened to glance over at her, it would probably appear that she was speaking into her Mind-I. I didn’t have one, but no one would know that by looking at me.

“I guess you can call him Dad if you want to,” she continued. “He’ll call you James because that’s his son’s name, and it’s what your new identification card says.”

She glanced at the ancient vendor who sagged in his chair, asleep. “His older brother was my first kiss. He was fourteen, and I was…not. You look a lot like him at that age.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s not creepy at all.”

A slow, conspiratorial smile curled over her mouth. “I could tell you were wondering.”

I thumbed one of the beans, and the soft hairs tickled my skin. Was that what my head felt like now? I shoved my hand in my pocket since I didn’t want to know.

“How did you get Randolph to agree to this?” I asked.

Moon picked a few river beans and plopped them in a paper bag. “I paid him and the real James a lot of credits. Plus, Randolph owes me a favor, so…”

“I’ll pay you back.”

“No, you won’t. Consider it payback for the best year and a half of my life. The stars aligned quite nicely when Smixton College paired you with me and Jezebel. You were exactly what I needed after eighteen years of my mother’s tyranny.”

“You’re the best,” I said, and I truly meant it.

She shrugged. “I know.”

This whole transformation and pretend you’re-a-fourteen-year-old-boy thing was taking too long. Meanwhile, Ellison’s clock ticked on. “When does the Vicio get here again?”

“At quarter to four. Randolph will meet you there. He’ll be wearing an orange Smixton vest, so pretend you know him when you see him. I told him not to ask too many questions of you.” She pursed her lips together while she selected another river bean. “But Absidy?”

“What?”

“He agreed to take you aboard only if you help him cook. You’ll be his apprentice. Can you cook?”

Ah, shit. I’d never cooked anything in my life except my own hands by mistake. With Pop and Ellison on Wix and the amazing chef on the Nebulous, I never had any reason to learn. I would, though, if it meant I’d brush past the same stars as Ellison on my way to find her. It couldn’t be any different or more dangerous than baking aluminum thermite in chem class. That explosion had crisped the entire lab to an inoperative mess. Good times.

I shrugged. “How hard can it be?”

Moon quirked an eyebrow. “So…no?”

“Not really.”

“Let’s just hope you don’t kill anyone.”

My stomach clenched at her choice of words. The memory of the dead vendor’s empty stare dug my fingers into the cart. He was dead because of me, and that truth carved spoons into my heart.

“Sorry,” Moon said, flinching. “That was a stupid thing to say.” She took one of the tiny coolers edging the bottom of the booth used to keep the smell contained and plopped her full bag of river beans inside. “This is for Randolph, aka Daddy-o. Take it to him, but don’t open it or…” Her mouth snapped closed and she stiffened.

From the corner of my eye, a figure dressed in black marched straight toward us. A policewoman.

My mouth went arid. Was she coming for me? Did she know who I was? I curled my fingers into the river beans piled in the stand until they snapped, and red, sticky goo oozed down my wrist. Her footsteps grew louder. I pressed myself into the side of the cart as if to become one with it while I clamped down on my tongue because even my breathing sounded guilty.

I kept my gaze locked straight ahead as she neared my side. But she went right on by behind me without even slowing.

I sagged against the cart while Moon blew out a silent exhale. That had been way too close.

“The rest of the marketplace could be crawling with them,” she said, turning toward the sleeping vendor with her currency card and the cooler. “Meet you outside the Sky Dock. And hurry.”

* * *

Randolph stood as the doors rolled open in the Waiting Room at exactly three forty-five. His orange Smixton College vest pooched out around his sturdy frame while, with shaking hands, he shrugged into a heavy, black coat. A persistent flush bloomed bright on his sagging cheeks, but instead of giving him a youthful glow, it made him look older than he probably was. Forty maybe? A head full of thick, dark hair glided over bushy eyebrows when he turned to look down at me with a sympathetic smile. “That’s us…son.”

I whipped around to face Moon. This was it. It was time, and though I knew I had to go, uncertainty spiked my heartbeat.

She slipped her fingers under my elbow and pulled me up from the specks of red seating on the pristine carpet. Like blood in fresh snow. How much had changed since yesterday when I’d sat in this very spot with my chains in a cute baby’s mouth, waiting? What hadn’t changed? In the course of less than a day, my entire existence had been rusted out.

Moon’s teeth scraped over her bottom lip. “You can still change your mind.”

I fluttered a hand to my hood, but couldn’t bring myself to touch what was underneath. Or what wasn’t underneath. My hair was already gone. I refused to allow Ellison to vanish, too.

“Then find her and come back,” Moon said to my silence and threw her arms around me to crush me to her.

I just stood there, arms slack at my sides, while a burst of emotions swelled around my heart. My friend, the only friend I’d ever had, believed in me with such unwavering conviction that tears misted my eyes. I gazed out the high windows where the lights of the Vicio shined a path through the stars, stars that hid behind the sun’s rays, but I knew they were there. It was a new path. A frightening, uncertain one. I prodded the iron in my mouth with my tongue, checking to see if it was still there.

“I will,” I said, and it had to be true.

“Son, we really must be going. The captain will be waiting to pass us through his ship’s security.” An apologetic smile twitched under Randolph’s mustache, and he shifted his gaze to Moon. “Keep in touch, Moon Dragon.”

“Of course,” she said, nodding. “With you both.”

My hands went cold. I instinctively reached for a comforting chain, but all I found was a handful of baggy sweatshirt underneath Franco’s coat.

Randolph took a few steps and waited for me to follow, clenching the cooler of Moon’s river beans and a duffel bag. I fumbled in my pockets to squeeze my stash of iron, letting it and Moon’s encouraging smile fuel my immediate actions. Then I took my suitcase, followed the man who wasn’t my Pop, and stepped through the door of no turning back.