Chapter 3

NEVER EXPECT MORE FROM YOUR CROWN, YOUR PARLIAMENT, YOUR STATE, OR YOUR GOD, THAN YOU WOULD EXPECT FROM A FRIEND. CONTRARY TO IDEALIZATION, THE TRUTH CAN BE AS MUCH A CAGE AS IT IS A FREEDOM.

-G. L. NWENDON, IN PROTEST OF THE CRIMINALIZATION OF STATE SECRECY, PG 188.

.•° ✿ °•.

“These are your quarters?” Her tone rang dry with disappointment, as though her mind’s eye had drawn a much more impressive picture. Lilt ran her fingertips over the seams in the wall where panel met patchwork cut-out, her eyes seeking out the details of my living space... that curious gaze falling over my desk with the teacup and pot from the not-so-distant past, then my kitchenette with the top cupboards empty due to my inability to reach and use them, and finally through the open door to my bed, spartan, utilitarian, bars on three sides with the forth side lowered to touch the floor.

“Not what you’re expecting?” I asked cynically. What was Lilt expecting? She had to know that I was supposed to bring her into Skipper Command, that she was a literal walking security breach, and that this was a favor, a kindness, a stay of execution as it were.

“I’m just like everyone else on the station, Lilt, why would I have any special treatment? We’ve all given up things we’d prefer not to have. It wouldn’t be fair for me to have anything else.”

“Because!” she started, her voice raising in excitement, in passion. She wasn’t a groupie, was she? Oh, heavens me. “Because you’re a Skipper, because you swore your life to protect every single person on this station, Cadence. You should be living in luxury!”

I would have been - I used to, too - but there were sensory complications with certain smells, sensations, touches. This was the best way to handle things, because the very things about me that made me a hero were the same things that made me frail and fragile. We were getting off topic, though; we were drifting, and Laurent was going to wonder where the frick I was if I didn’t draw this shipwreck into port.

“Lilt. You said you knew who I was?” I guided the conversation back to more productive topics. “I need you to think very carefully about that, about the information you had, the things that you told me. The Skipper program has a lot of public-facing facets, but our ability to operate safely rests on our ability to control the flow of information, too.”

“Was I wrong?” She was smirking like she’d figured out a puzzle, like she was ready to spin the wheel one more time before solving, even though her hubris may have lost her everything.

I watched her, but she was watching me, she was staring at me, gazing into my clouded purple eyes, eyes that caught every detail of her motions in return. The way she looked at me, from too-young face to too-small body to disconcertingly visible joints in my elbows and knees and the thick area around my waist where my uniform pulled in through the center of my thighs.

“You weren’t wrong,” I confirmed. Why was she looking at me like that, “and knowing what you know could get you in a lot of trouble, Lilt. I can try and use the fact you were honest and passed on your sources to get you a lenient sentencing, but you need to think very quickly about the-“

“I asked you to the dance. The Berry Barn Dance. Remember? You were nine, the dance was just before your birthday.” Beneath her asymmetrical tuft of crimson hair, she smiled, her eyes lit up, she watched me with the same level of attention I’d been putting into her. Lilt analyzed me like a good Skipper should, watching the confusion on my face, watching cogwheels turn. It was a pity she was never going to be a Skipper.

“Pulse Wesley Jackson asked me to the Berry Barn Dance...” She had some of the details wrong, and I didn’t blame her - Pulse was an androgynous boy with an androgynous name. Whatever intel she’d been working from could have easily gotten that wrong.

“Hi, I’m Lilt Jackson.” Lilt? Pulse didn’t have any siblings, his parents lived in the center of tainted soil, and... Oh.

“Wow.” Wow? “You look... different.”

“And you look exactly the same. Well. More-or-less. How the shit is that even possible?”

I had to focus on what she said, I had to focus on her without staring, without making it entirely obvious that I hadn’t aged a day and she’d still been the one to blow my mind. Life as a Skipper in the remnant economy didn’t exactly leave a lot of time for social graces, decorum, or political correctness, and I was afraid I was going to say something offensive.

“I’m a Skipper, Lilt.” I sat on the edge of my bed before locking my gaze right into the center of hers, our conversation and her curiosity having led us from living room to bedroom.

“I think you’re in the wrong place. I think you don’t understand this. I think you made a mistake coming here, and I don’t think you realize what it means to be a Skipper. What you leave behind, what you give up.”

“You give up your social life, Cadence,” she said gravely, somberly. “You give up your social life, your love life, your future, your freedom, your right to choose anything at all. You become public domain, property of the station, a beacon of hope at the cost of everything you are, even your humanity! You give up your humanity to save everyone else’s right to preserve it.”

“You should go, Lilt. I’m going to tell Skipper Command that you no showed. It was nice seeing you...” Was it? I didn’t even know this girl - I just knew a person she once was in another life. I knew a memory and that was all she knew of me. Time changed everything. War changed it more. And annihilation flipped the whole Etch-a-Sketch over and back again.

“I want to be a Skipper.”

“You don’t.”

“I do.”

“I know you think you do,” I sighed “but you don’t, alright? You don’t. And you’re too old anyway.”

“Oh, I am?” she replied cynically.

“You are.”

“Huh,” she smiled - it was just a little bit lopsided, a little bit off-kilter, unconventional and uniquely charming. I felt like I could see it even when she turned away from me and leaned over to take away at the communication panel. I both loved and hated that darn smile and I’d only seen it once, I hated that it reminded me of that dumb country youth that asked me to the stupid barn dance. Horns and trumpets and celebratory fireworks broke me out of the wistful memory, and a familiar voice announcing something I’d grown quite sick of hearing brought me fully back to reality.

“...celebrating her twenty-fifth year of protecting your humanity, join Skipper Cadence Cassandra Collins and her Skipper Colleagues at 11g this Friday!”

What did she want me to say? Was I supposed to be impressed?

“Oh no, you played a commercial vid that everybody on the fricking station has heard sixteen times a day since last shift change. Why are you still here, Lilt?” I didn’t mean to be catty, but I didn’t have time in the present for phantoms of the past, however cute those ghosts might have glowed up to be.

“Twenty-fifth year of service, right?”

“So?” I asked, irritated. She wasn’t getting to the point. This whole meeting was a mistake.

“That means you were twenty when you became a Skipper. Funny how there is literally nothing in Centra about that.”

“So?” I repeated flatly.

“So why did Skipper Command order you to interview me if I’m too old?” Her smile said check and her tone said mate. Centra said we were all children and left it at that, without the details, without the truth. The idea was romantic, the idea was sacrificial in the way that inspired the resistant soul of humanity, the notion burned a fire in us all.

Selling our future to save it.

It was a nice thought, but...

“Skipper Anjel was thirty-six,” she insisted, “Skipper Caesen was thirty-nine!”

“And you’re forty-five and you don’t even know what this means, you idiot! It’s obvious we’re not kids, it’s obvious we’re processed into being the perfect set of variables, alright, everyone knows it, nobody talks about it, because if you stopped to fricking think about it, you’d never be able to live with your damn selves!”

My right arm fell to the floor and bounced in front of my feet when I stood up to tell her off. In the echo of the freakish moment the both of us stood there, saying nothing. The split was clean, the ball and socket detached, there wasn’t blood, there wasn’t an injury - I was designed this way.

“Holy shit, Cadence. What the actual fuck...” Her voice dripped with something between awe and disgust.

“I’m a Skipper,” I replied coldly. “You can leave now.”

“Wait...”

“NOW!”

I didn’t mean to yell. I didn’t want to scare her. I didn’t want her to see me this way, either, even if it was my own fault for not keeping up on my maintenance. There was a lot that the public was allowed to know about us. We were child-like. Our bodies were altered. We saved their lives, and we paid a price in flesh and freedom to do that. But for everything they knew, there was so much they could never be allowed to find out.

We were humanities brightest light, and its darkest little secret.

And as for Lilt, I just didn’t know what else to say to her - she had a life ahead of her, she’d made someone of herself, she’d obviously found what made her happy. Why would she want to be a Skipper?

When she left, I collapsed on the floor and picked up my arm, waving the doll-like hand in front of my face with a deep sigh.

You really screwed up this time, Cadence.