“Can I sleep here?” she asked.
The healer held out a thin white robe. “Get those dirty clothes off, put this on, and then yes, you can sleep here. In fact, I won’t let you sleep anywhere else.”
“Oh, good.”
The robe was as soft as baby’s breath. The bed was softer still.
“You’re too young for this,” the healer said as he cleaned around her eye.
“I’m old enough to load ships,” she mumbled.
“Not tomorrow, you’re not. Bed rest.”
“I can’t. I’ll lose my job.”
“Better than losing your brain, child.”
Something hissed against her wrist, easing the throbbing in her head and quieting the complaints of her muscles. Freed from the pain, she fell into a welcoming darkness.
9
TACTICS
As promised, the healer kept her in bed the next day. Rahel protested, but it was hard to be convincing when her body felt so heavy and she kept dropping off to sleep.
“You’re working too hard,” the healer said. “You’re not yet grown. There’s a reason honorable merchants don’t hire underage cargo loaders. Your body is not meant for this kind of stress.”
“I can manage.”
“Yes, you look like you’re managing very well.”
“That’s from the fight.”
“Not all of it, child.” He sighed and tucked away his reader card. “I’ll have to release you tonight, but I want you to think about this very seriously. Whatever you’re running from, or whatever you’re running to, you won’t get very far with a broken body. You may cause yourself damage now that we can’t fully repair.”
“Well, you’ve made sure I won’t work for a while. I won’t have a job to go back to after missing work today.”
“Ask for a temporary work permit from your caste. Then you can find work that pays better than what you’re getting now, with far less potential damage.”
Another solution that required parental permission. It was as if the whole world was conspiring to keep her down.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, just to get him out of her room.
Mouse was more clever than she. “That could work!” he said excitedly.
Rahel stretched her arms overhead, glad to be back home even if the couch wasn’t as comfortable as the healing center’s bed. Outside, city lights marked the shore of Wildwind Bay while the docks blazed with the crowded lights of moored ships. Beyond them lay the vast darkness of the bay, broken only by scattered, distant stars of fishing boats leaving port and larger ships coming in, each making its lonely journey across the waters.
“No, it won’t,” she said. “My parents would never help me get a temporary work permit from the warrior caste.”
“Stop thinking like a merchant. Think like a warrior. Think tactically.”
She frowned at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t ask them to help you get a permit from the warriors. Get a permit from the merchants. They’ll probably be overjoyed.”
“But I don’t want—”
“And then find a job working at a training house.”
She snapped her mouth shut and stared at him. “Fahla’s farts, that’s . . .”
“Genius, I know.” He sat back against the couch with a pleased grin. Then he giggled. “Fahla’s farts? You’ve been working on the docks too long. It’s time to get you employed somewhere else.”
“That really could work! Somebody must need help with accounting, or membership records, or . . . shek, I’d sweep the floors and clean the mats. Anything would be better than loading cargo. And I’d have access to a training house again!”
She had sorely missed her times in the centering room, and the mats and equipment. But more than that, she was worried by last night’s fight. It had shown all too clearly that one cycle of training was not enough. Had the big attacker not been so unskilled, she would never have gotten him off her. And if the third boy hadn’t been too scared to use his knife . . .
It was all luck. She might not be that lucky again.
If she could find work in a training house, she could keep training. The warriors would never teach her without parental permission, but there were books in the library, and she could watch some of the classes. All she needed was the space to experiment and practice.
Mouse was happy to help her draft a message to her parents. They laughed over the carefully chosen phrasing, in which she sounded conciliatory and ready to think about her future, even while making it clear that she would not return home. She also apologized for the stolen daggers, explained that she had sold them in order to finance her residence in Whitesun so far, and promised to repay their value when she had inscribed and could make regular wages.
She had never imagined telling anyone about those daggers, but Mouse not only understood, he said it was the most sensible thing she had done that night.
“I took jewelry,” he said. “Figured it was the least they owed me. It paid for almost five moons before I had to start working.”
They sent the message the next day, using one of the public vidcom units in the library. All responses to those units were collected at the library’s communication desk, and Rahel was surprised to find an answer the very next morning.
From her mother.
“Harsh,” Mouse commented. “He won’t even speak to you by written message?”
She began reading. “He’s furious about the daggers. But Mother thinks he’s feeling guilty about me running away and covering the guilt with anger.”
“Do you think she’s right?”
She remembered her father throwing away her library books and shook her head. “I used to be able to sense that he loved me. That’s not supposed to change, is it? It never did with Mother.”
“I don’t know,” Mouse said. “I never sensed it at all.”
She touched his shoulder in sympathy, then looked back at the text before the moment got too awkward. A piptick later she let out a cry of elation.
“He did it!”
Heads turned all across the communication room, and she clapped a hand over her mouth as she read through to the end. Tears blurred her vision.
Blinking furiously, she dropped her hand and cleared her throat. “Mother says he won’t come to meet me—which I guess is supposed to be a punishment.”
“If only he knew.” Mouse had been forced to talk her down the previous night, when she was panicking at the very idea of having to speak with her father and carry off the deceit in person.
“I never thought I’d say it, but thank Fahla for his temper. All I have to do is go to the merchant caste house and pick up the permit. He expects regular reports—”
“Oh, those will be fun to write.” Mouse grinned.
She stared at him, her heart swelling with affection and gratitude. He had seen so much pain in his life and had few chances for an easier future, yet envy or bitterness never seemed to cross his mind. He was genuinely happy for her.
“Mouse, thank you. Thank you so much. You’ve saved me. I can’t imagine where I’d be right now without you.”
“Probably in the water. I don’t know how you got away with sleeping on that ship as long as you did.” His grin faded. “You don’t have to thank me. You almost died for me the other night. No one has ever cared that much. This . . .” He waved at the message. “This was nothing.”
“This is everything,” she corrected. A whole cycle of freedom and legitimacy. With her merchant caste work permit, she would be able to subscribe to the library and take books home. She could work anywhere. She was safe from the City Guards. She could get herself and Mouse better lodgings, where they didn’t have to depend on a building owner who would look the other way when they had no caste ID to present.
“Come on,” she said happily. “We’re going to the merchant caste house.”
10
SIXTEEN
The next cycle passed in a golden haze. With
the pressures of surviving as an outcaste lifted, Rahel came to see Whitesun as a city of opportunity rather than a place of predators and prey. She and Mouse had found new rooms less than a length from their old ones, slightly farther from the bayfront but with much larger windows and a second bedroom. The lift worked, the lobby was clean, and she didn’t have to look over her shoulder for thieves or bullies every time she opened the building’s front door.
They shared the rent, with her half coming from her job at the Moonbird Training House. Her experience in her father’s shop, combined with her previous cycle of training and demonstrated ability to handle financial accounts, made her very employable. She had been shocked to receive offers from two houses, and enjoyed the unthinkable luxury of having a choice.
She also enjoyed the irony of working at a place named for the bird a bully had once called her in insult. Moonbirds had brilliant breeding plumage, but as her new supervisor said, the colors were not the point; the graceful courtship dance was. His goal was to teach his students to be just as graceful in their dance of combat.
Hasil was a good instructor. Rahel watched his classes as often as she could, soaking up the lessons and putting them to practice in the evenings after the students went home. Having a training room to work in made her feel whole again, and when she rolled out a mat in the centering room, her mind found its level of peace faster than ever before.
After the first two moons, Hasil could no longer restrain himself from pointing out the flaws in her technique and correcting them. He never mentioned her lack of parental permission, and she never called him by the honorific for an instructor, each of them maintaining the fiction that he was not teaching her. When she asked how he would disarm an attacker holding a knife—theoretically, of course—he merely nodded and proceeded to show her three different methods.
She brought home so many books from the library that the Head Librarian knew her by sight. One day, when Rahel passed by her office, Deme Isanelle came out with a stack of books for her. Each had been carefully chosen not just to match the tastes her previous selections demonstrated, but also to make up some of the classes she was missing by not attending school.
As with Hasil, Deme Isanelle never indicated that she was offering any sort of charity. She merely made selections, and when Rahel returned the first stack of books and mentioned a few of the things she had found interesting, they spent half a hantick discussing them.
It took four discussions before Rahel realized that Deme Isanelle was teaching her. The form of instruction was so different from what she had experienced in school that she had not recognized it as such, but this kind of learning sank into her brain and stayed there. She came to love their discussions, and though they never met anywhere but in the Head Librarian’s office, and never spoke of anything personal, she thought of the austere woman as a friend.
Between her job, her warrior training, and her studies, Rahel had no more free time than when she was working the docks. But she reveled in her new life, and her body responded with new levels of energy and strength. By the end of the cycle, she had grown a full handspan and put on considerable weight, all of it muscle. Her forehead ridges looked more solid, and her cheekbone ridges were beginning to cast shadows on her face in the right light. Mouse seemed even smaller to her now, and she hated his clients for their predilections.
He never complained about the necessity of selling his body or his lack of future options. His dream was to be a design engineer in the builder caste, and his bedroom was festooned with drawings of imaginary buildings, fantastical versions of skimmers and transports, and, in pride of place, the house he would build if he could. But challenging into the builder caste required a level of education and apprentice experience that he would never have.
She asked him once why he didn’t consider challenging into the merchants on his eighteenth birth anniversary, or accept a place with the producers, his birthright caste, just to keep from being an outcaste. It was the only time she ever felt anger from him. After he asked her sharply why she didn’t do the same, she never broached the subject again. But on the days when she came home to find him moving too carefully, grimacing when he thought she couldn’t see while his discomfort leaked past his front, she clenched her fists and fantasized about avenging him.
They continued their visits to the grocer’s bins, though it was now once per nineday rather than every three days. As Mouse said, just because they had more income was no reason to spend it unnecessarily, and besides, it was good to keep in practice. Rahel agreed with him most of the time, but on the few occasions when she had to fight some newly arrived bullies who didn’t know her reputation, she wondered if saving the cinteks was worth it.
One thing she happily spent her cinteks on was rajalta, the spicy drink made with shannel and toasted seeds for which Whitesun was famous. Mouse introduced her to both rajalta and the best places to get it: the little shannel shops that sold hot and cold drinks and simple, inexpensive foods that outcastes could afford.
The first time she met with her mother was over two cups of rajalta in a cozy bayfront shannel shop.
It was the day after she had picked up her permit, and she was swept into a warmron the instant her mother saw her. Rahel melted into it, trying not to cry with the relief of sensing that familiar love. Not until this moment had she known how much she missed it.
Her mother had a thousand questions, which Rahel worked to answer without betraying Mouse’s occupation or her own visit to the healing center. She asked after her brother and sister and tried not to be bitter when she heard, in more detail than she wished, how perfect their lives were.
When all other topics of conversation had been exhausted, her mother apologized, first for her birth anniversary and then for her father’s absence.
“We should have handled that differently,” she said. “But your father—the shop is his life. He was so happy when you showed your skill for the business. It meant you could take it over someday. All three of you would be safe. When you put that in jeopardy, he . . . didn’t react well.” She shook her head. “I should have done more to bridge the two of you. But we’re both so relieved you’re growing up, even if it took you leaving to do it.”
Rahel gaped at her. She had never considered why her father was so set on her becoming a merchant, other than his desire that she choose his caste.
“You have my whole life planned,” she said slowly. “You took away my dreams so they could have theirs.” Goddess above, she was nothing more than a tool. Conceived and designed to run the shop and provide a comfortable living for her brother and sister while they pursued their crafts.
No wonder she had stopped sensing her father’s love. Who could love a tool that refused to do what it was built for?
“You always were dramatic. We’ve done nothing of the sort; you can have your dreams just like anyone else. You just need to—”
“Make sure they pass Father’s inspection.”
“Rahel . . .”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She couldn’t. If this conversation went any further, she might not be able to hide her true intentions. But if there was one thing she knew for certain, it was that she would never run her father’s shop. Not even if that was the only thing standing between her and starvation on the streets. Her siblings could shekking well find someone else to sell their wares.
Then her mother asked to see where she was living, which raised another difficulty. Rahel did not want her anywhere near the toilet hole they were still occupying at that time, but more than that, she couldn’t let her meet Mouse. His size would make it instantly apparent that he wasn’t working the docks as she had claimed, and the knowledge of one lie would unravel all the others.
“We’re moving soon,” she said, which was true although they hadn’t started looking yet. “I’d rather you see the new place.”
The rest of the visit was awkward, filled with too many silences and not enough comfort. When Rahel returned ho
me and found Mouse singing over a pan of sizzling fish, she realized that she felt more at ease with him after two moons than she did with her mother.
By the time her mother returned the following moon, they were in their new apartment. Mouse had absented himself for the afternoon in preparation, enabling Rahel to bring her mother home without fear. It was strange to see her in this environment, as if two worlds had collided.
“I’m impressed,” her mother said as she looked around. “It’s clean, organized—and you’re thinking like a crafter. This is a very creative use of limited resources.”
“That’s Mouse. He wants to be a builder. He’s good at scavenging things and putting them together.”
“He does sound like an accomplished young man. When will I get to meet him?”
“I don’t know. He works an irregular schedule, so it’s hard to plan ahead.” Rahel was becoming very good at half-truths and lies of omission.
“Perhaps next time, then.”
Her mother visited every moon after that, always alone. Having satisfied herself that Rahel was in a safe and clean place, she was content to meet in a shannel shop over cups of rajalta. They talked about the happenings in Brasalara, though Rahel could not bring herself to care about a town she never wanted to see again. In return, she told her mother sanitized versions of her adventures with Mouse, repeated some of the things she was learning from Deme Isanelle, and tried to show that she was doing all she could to build a future.
The awkwardness of that first visit was a thing of the past. Rahel looked forward to their meetings now, often planning in advance the things they could do. They went for walks on the docks and through Whitesun’s rich neighborhoods. They took boat trips on the bay. They visited museums and historical locations, and always they shared an evenmeal before going their separate ways. Given the distance between Whitesun and Brasalara, her mother found it easier to stay the night in the crafter caste house before returning home the next morning.