Tracer (19 page)

He stops. For a second, I think the audio has cut out again, hope it has, but he’s just pausing. He leans close to the microphone – close enough for us to hear his breathing.

“The next two days are going to be so much fun. We—”

Another burst of static rattles through “… cut the signal! Cut it!”

Janice Okwembu’s voice is urgent. I catch
a glimpse of a screen as we cut through one of the lower corridors. She looks flustered, her veneer of control cracked. But she nods to someone off camera, and stares at the screen. Her eyes are made of steel.

“I heard what you all just heard,” she says, and her voice is strong. “Let me make this clear. We will find Oren Darnell. We will bring him down. You have my word on that. For now, please
try to stay calm. We will all get through this.” She pauses, and the screen reverts to the station logo.

As the broadcast ends, I can hear shouts from behind us. Fear becomes panic in seconds, washing across the crowd. Prakesh and I keep moving. What else is there to do?

Suddenly, I remember the woman on the catwalk. Grace Garner. Whatever she had to tell me looks more important by the second
– a possible piece in the puzzle of Gray, Darnell
and the Sons of Earth. I should have listened to her then. I should have made her tell me.

I turn to Prakesh, quickly explaining what happened and what Garner looks like, but his expression is puzzled. “A woman? No, sorry, Ry, she didn’t show up. Just as well, right?” He barks a laugh and looks away, and it suddenly occurs to me just how much
the loss of the Food Lab must hurt him. There are dark circles under his eyes, and it’s not just the smoke and the exertion that’s made him look so drawn, so tired.

He shakes his head, as if trying to bring himself back. “If she had something to tell you about Darnell, then we need to find her,” he says.

I nod. “We should get cleaned up first. Get some water. And we’ve got some food back at
the Nest.”

I start down the corridor, but Prakesh shakes his head. “You go. I need to check on my parents.”

“Are you—”

“I’ll be fine. Go link up with the rest of the Dancers. When you’re together, come and find me.”

I give his hand a squeeze, and he turns, jogging off down the corridor.

Without his support, my legs feel numb, soft as a wedge of tofu, and I nearly collapse to the ground. My
mouth is coated with thick saliva. I realise I’m still wearing my pack, and I reach back for the water tube, but it’s dry, without even a single drop left. I shoulder the pack into a more comfortable position, and head down the corridor, distant shouts from the galleries chasing me.

The Dancers are there when I reach the Nest, and as I haul myself up through the trapdoor, Kev sticks his head
out the door. There’s uncharacteristic anger on his face. “Where you been?”

I cut him off. “I’m OK. The others?”

“Here.” He throws open the door, revealing the rest of the crew. Carver is leaning against the wall, flexing his arm, his hand clasped on his shoulder. Yao is at the workbench, rummaging through the drawers. And in the centre of the room stands Amira, hands on hips, anger on her face.

“Tell me you’ve got some food in that pack,” she says. I shake my head, and she grimaces.

It’s then that I see the pile of food on the table; they must have raided every corner of the Nest to see what we had left. It’s shockingly little, barely enough to last us three days. Some ancient potatoes, tinged with green and already sprouting little nubbly shoots. A few protein bars. Two withered carrots.
A small pile of hoarded sugar shots, little jellies in thin cups. Behind the pile, a dirty bottle of homebrew. Yao reaches up, and dumps a small pile of dried fruit on the bench – apples, it looks like.

Carver says, “Well, at least we won’t die hungry.”

“Oh come on,” Yao says. “You don’t believe he can actually pull it off?”

We all stare at her. “What?” she says. “He’s a guy with a camera,
and now everyone on Outer Earth thinks he’s a god or something. I ain’t scared of him.”

“Save it, Yao,” snaps Amira. Her patience seems to be exhausted. I want to tell her about Garner, about Prakesh, but before I can say anything she passes me a cup of water. “Have a drink, then I need you back out there. I want you working the market: that goodwill you stored up after we caught Darnell? Time
to use it. Yao, Kevin, I want you on the gallery floor. There’s got to be some people there who need something transported.”

I take a slug of the water; it’s warm, but soothes my throat, and I have to force myself not to gulp, to take slow sips.

“Are you going to be OK? Your arm isn’t going to fall off, is it?” Yao asks Carver.

“Oh, I thought I’d chill out here for a while, sweetie,” Carver
replies, flashing a smile which turns into a grimace. “Let you do some work for a change.”

Amira glares at him, then turns back to us. “We don’t know how long this situation is going to last. Even if the stompers find Darnell, food’s going to be hard to come by for a while. So we carry on as normal. Trade runs for food –
only
food. It’ll be tough out there, but take whatever you can get.”

Nobody
says anything, but the glances we share speak volumes. Amira’s right. With the Food Lab down, it’ll be hard enough even for those who have access to mess food. For tracers like us, who have to our find our own food?

I’m about to tell Amira what happened back on the catwalk, but as she glances at me I pause. That can wait. Right now, survival is more important. Wherever Garner is, Prakesh will
take care of her.

“Something you want to say, Riley?” Amira’s voice is impatient, testy.

I shake my head. “No. Let’s do it.”

Prakesh’s parents live on the edge of Gardens, close to the white lights and clean surfaces of Apex. They have their own hab, a comparatively large unit with a double cot and its own bathroom. Ravi Kumar’s long-service awards still hang on the wall, strips of black metal engraved with the dates he spent in the space construction corps. His wife has decorated the hab with pot plants
– some given to her by Prakesh, some grown by her alone.

“You – inside, now,” Achala Kumar barks when she opens the door to Prakesh. He’s momentarily stunned, but no sooner is the door shut than she’s hugging him tight, her face buried in his shoulder.

“When they said – and then that man …” she manages, and then she’s sobbing, her tears soaking through the fabric of his shirt.

Prakesh’s father
is seated on the edge of the bed. The left leg of his red pants is knotted tight below the knee, his cane resting easily across his lap.

“It’s OK,” Prakesh says, lifting his mother’s face towards him. “We got out all right.”

“No, you didn’t. Look at you!” She wipes at his face, smearing the soot.

“Achala, leave the boy alone.” Ravi Kumar stands up, rising off the bed with an experienced grace.
His cane taps as he limps towards them, his eyes boring into his son’s. “How bad is it? The damage?”

“Bad.” Prakesh reaches around his mother to one of the shelves, snags a canteen. He’s more thirsty than he’s ever been in his life, and sinks at least half the water in the bottle.

“You two got enough food?” he says to his father.

“Don’t ask him,” his mother says, jerking a finger at the older
Kumar. “He doesn’t even know how to fix the chemical toilet when it goes on the fritz.”

“Achala.”

“Well, you don’t. It’s just like the plasma cutter all over again, when you were working on the
Shinso Maru
.”

“Again, you bring this up?”

Prakesh can’t help smiling. It’s easy to forget that his mother was his father’s boss, a long time ago. He talks over them, his ravaged throat aching. “Someone
tell me what your food stocks are like.”

“We’re fine,” his father says. “We have a little stored away.”

“How little?”

“Enough. We’re fine Prakesh, and you need to go.”

“No, I need to …” Prakesh stops. He has no idea what he needs to do. By now, the Air Lab will be insane: the temporary growth operations will need all the hands they can get, and Suki and company can only keep them going for
so long. But Riley sent someone to him – someone she needed to keep safe. And then there are his parents. He doesn’t believe that they’ve
got enough food left. Not even close. He should stay, help them keep going.

He shuts his eyes tight. He opens them when he hears the click of his father’s crutch, feels his hand on his shoulder.

“Prakesh,” says Ravi Kumar. “We’re fine. You need to be back
out there.”

He sighs. “I know.”

“And not just in the laboratory,” his mother says. “You should be out in the rest of the sector. Making sure this
kutha sala
Darnell doesn’t get inside people’s heads.”

“What?”

“I always said you should be involved in politics,” Achala says, folding her arms. “People trust you.”

“Only in the Air Lab,” Prakesh says. He can feel his cheeks getting hot. “Only
when I’m talking about trees.”

“Nonsense. People look up to you. You might prefer to ignore it, but they do. And you can’t afford to be afraid. Not now.”

“But what if—”

“Go,” they both say at once, then glance at each other. Achala Kumar has a strange smile on her face. “We can take care of ourselves,” she says.

But as Prakesh looks at his parents, all he can see are the things that hold them
back. It’s not just his father’s leg, which keeps him a virtual prisoner in Gardens, which has kept him away from the spacewalks he loved so much. It’s the wrinkles around his mother’s eyes, the way her neck and upper back are stooped. They were middle-aged when they had him, and the years since then haven’t been kind.

His anger at Riley, his frustration, has found another target. He can almost
feel it physically moving in his gut, swinging around to focus on Oren Darnell. He’s trying to make everyone
on the station suffer, and it’s people like his parents who will suffer the most.

His mother is right – he does need to get back. But he’s not just thinking about the Air Lab. He’s thinking about the woman Riley sent to him. The woman who said she knew something.

The Air Lab can wait.
If there’s even the slightest chance that she could help stop Darnell, he has to find her.

It’s amazing how everybody suddenly knows exactly how long we have left. Of course, it’s not forty-eight hours any more. It’s forty-four hours and thirteen minutes – at least, according to a man I passed on the way to market. His friend disagreed, said it was eleven minutes, waving a homemade watch around like a holy book.

The nervous energy has built up, kettling in the corridors and
pushing at the walls of the galleries, thrumming with awful power. Rumours are everywhere, changing and mutating in the space of minutes, stories of possible sightings and citizen watch groups and computer hacks. I’ve never felt the station like this.

As I approach the market, winding my way through the bottom-level corridors of Apogee, I hear two people talking. They’re husband and wife by the
look of it, and she’s cradling a baby, wrapped in tatty blankets, fast asleep.

“If they’ve hacked the Apex comms feed, then it won’t be long before they take the control room,” says the woman. “And when they do …”

The man interrupts her. “I refuse to believe that every single escape pod is gone.”

“They are. You know that. But we could always take one of the tugs,” the woman replies. There are
dark circles under her eyes. “If there are enough of us, we could …”

Her words fade as I slip past. I almost want to go back, tell her not to bother. The tugs, which we use for shipping asteroid slag into the station when the catcher ships come into our orbit, don’t have nearly enough range. You’d run out of fuel long before you reached Earth. And it’s not as if we can call the asteroid catcher
ships for help.

There are only two of them left now: enormous vessels which track the rocks through space, pull them in, drag them back to be processed down into slag. We depend on that slag for our minerals, our building materials. Their missions take years, and right now, both of them are in deep space. If this had happened ten or twenty years ago, they might have been closer, on the moon or
on Mars. But the resources that were being brought back weren’t good enough, so the catchers were retrofitted to snag asteroids. Even if we sent a distress signal, and they came back for us, they’d never get here in time.

I expect the market to be insane, even to see looters wrecking the stalls, but it’s the same as it was yesterday, and the merchants are doing a roaring trade. Food is going
for a premium, and several stalls have crowds around them, with impromptu auctions breaking out for mouldy onions or a single protein bar. I cut through a narrow gap between two stalls, earning an angry shout from the merchant. I raise a hand in apology, and as I glance behind me I notice two people in the crowd staring angrily at me, as if memorising my face. Strange.

I find Old Madala near
the bar. He’s at one of the tables outside, nursing a cup of homebrew. The cup sits on the table
in front of him, his hands resting either side of it. I grab a chair, and sit down opposite him. He looks up, surprised.

“Now, about that job you mentioned …” I begin, but he jumps to his feet, knocking over his chair. It clatters on the metal plating as he quickly walks away. I stop, confused, before
pushing my chair back and following, cutting in ahead of him.

“Madala, what is it?” I say, but as he turns to me I see fear in his eyes, and it stops me cold.

“Go away. You can’t be here,” he mutters, and turns away again. Worry coils in the pit of my stomach, and I reach out for him, but he jerks away, the fear turning to anger in his eyes. “Go!” he shouts. “I not talk to you.” He moves away
into the market, his shoulders hunched, not looking back.

All at once, it feels like the noise of the market intensifies, crowding out my thoughts.

A job from Madala would have scored us some food, some more dried fruit or some green beans. Now, I’m going to have to find someone else, someone who might not be so inclined to trade for something good. I push through a crowd yelling out for what
looks like a block of tofu, set on a counter behind a heavily tattooed seller, facing them with his arms folded.