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  “The Fed will cover our passage. We’ll have to hop lifts on their ships, though. It’s just over two weeks to Hyperion if we head straight there. But if we took the scenic route…”

  “You’ve already worked it all out, haven’t you?”

  “No. I thought we’d be looking to go in two weeks. I’ll have to recalculate. Or we could just wing it. We don’t have to be there for a month and a half. Are we really doing this?”

  “We better. And soon. Before I have a chance to panic and back out.”

  I know Dee isn’t joking about backing out and I want out of here anyway, so I book us on the first ship out on the day we’re out of solitary. It doesn’t travel in the right direction, but it will take us to a nexus where we can get a ship to pretty much anywhere. My plan is to hit as many sites as we can on the way there, in case we don’t get another chance like this. It will mean only stations rather than colonies, because we just don’t have enough time to stray that far off the beaten path, but it’s an opportunity I never thought I’d have and I can’t wait to go for it. I thought Dee might like the idea, but she doesn’t even let me tell her about it.

  “Honey, I trust you, but I’m terrified. Just lead me by the hand until I tell you to let go.”

  “Don’t you want to get out of here?”

  “Yes. But I’ve been here so long that here is all I know. If we need any travelling clothes, make sure my pants are brown.”

  Dee jabs a finger just below my right shoulder blade. It hurts like hell because she’s poked me right where my muscles knot up when I’m stressed out. As her finger starts to move, the pain recedes slightly. It still hurts, but it doesn’t feel as if my entire body is revolving around it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Walking through the security gate is the weirdest thing ever. On one side of the line, we’re inmates of a Fed institution, as we’ve been for years. As soon as we cross it, we are transmuted into Fed Citizens. They even call us Citizens. We are Citizen Pax and Citizen Isaaq. They can’t pronounce Dee’s name for shit, but at least they try.

  The Captain of our ship comes down the ramp to meet us and smiles at us. The set of her face suggests that she spends most of her time smiling anyway, but right now she’s smiling at us. A guy walks up to me and takes my bag. I nearly lump him one before realizing that he’s helping me, not mugging me. He isn’t really helping: my bag is so light that a baby could carry it. I let him take it off me anyway, purely for the novelty value. We are getting treated like people. I don’t know what to do with myself.

  They lead us right to the bridge and let us sit in the back while they’re doing whatever it is they do with the controls. The guy who took my bag brings us two drinks “to pass the time while we’re waiting.” I down mine in one gulp and I nearly cough my lungs out. Dee sips hers cautiously, but her eyes still tear up. I guess this is what they call alcohol. What I have no idea about is why people would drink it.

  Dee clutches my hand.

 

 

 

 

 

  We take six weeks to make a three-week trip. We manage to take in five stations, but most of our time is spent on-ship, travelling only vaguely in the right direction. It’s a grotesque waste of our time, it doesn’t get us any closer to becoming financially self-supporting, it’s bending Fed rules almost to the breaking point, and it’s fucking glorious.

  I’m no groundling. I’ve been on ships before. Hell, I’ve spent all my life in space, one way or the other. I’ve never been on a ship where I wasn’t little more than cargo, though. Dee has been on a ship a grand total of once, and that was the trip that brought her from her colony to Alecto, so this is all new to her, too. We get as much food as we can eat, no schoolwork or chores, unlimited access to terminals and screens, a room that locks from the inside, and a ‘fresher just for us. We get treated so well that we don’t know how to deal with it.

  Dee gets caught by the ‘fresher: she spends so much time in there that I become convinced she’s channeling a mermaid. She only gets over it when I remind her that on ship, like anywhere else, all water is recycled, but that the recycling process on ship is a tad more direct and a lot less refined, particularly for non-potable water. The prospect of splashing merrily in people’s hastily-sanitized urine gives her the impetus she needs to fight her addiction to ablutions. She still enjoys them, though.

  She is adapting much better than me: I get caught by everything. It starts the moment I wake up after my first night on ship and realize that if I want I could stay in bed all day, every day, until the trip is over. I’d be missing my meals and my bladder would eventually give up on me, but those are my only impediments. I can rest when I’m tired. I can eat when I’m hungry. I can read and watch whatever I want. I can stare at my ceiling and think about whatever passes through my brain without having to worry about someone demanding to know what I’m up to.

  I guess this is freedom: as long as we don’t do anything that would endanger the ship or cause distress to those in it, our time, bodies, and minds are our own. I have dreamt about living like this for years, but the reality of it is far more intense than anything I could have pictured. Maybe it’s because I never really thought I could get this, never really believed that I could make it. I kept working and wishing, but I always knew that my wishes were fragile, dangerous things, knives that could be turned against me. The only way I could protect them and myself was to keep them secret, to stop them from coming anywhere near the reality outside my head. Having them inside me and never letting them out killed me a little bit every day, but also kept me alive. Every now and then I'd manage to feed them, making them burn a bit brighter and hotter inside me, and that’d feel good. Maybe that’s what hope is: something you feed chunks of your heart to, but also something that feeds you when you have nothing else keeping you going. When you’re still hoping, you know that someone hasn’t given up on you, even if that someone is you. Even if you’re pretty useless to deal with something, having someone in your corner can make all the difference. It’s infinitely better than nothing, anyway.

  Now all of that is gone. My time is my own. My body is my own. My head is my own. There are costs to everything, as always, but I can do anything I want, or nothing. I can be whoever I want. Of the things I can’t do, the only one that bugs me is that I can’t explain, even to myself, how big a deal this is, how wonderful and how terrifying. Dee is the same: I keep catching her staring at nothing, her eyes wide and glistening. It makes me wish I could hug her, but I’m not good at that kind of thing. We hold hands a lot, though, and the physical contact seems to make her feel better. I know it helps me, though I hate that. We’ll both get over it, soon, anyway: we’re just bawled over by the sheer enormity of what we managed. We crossed a yellow line painted on a floor, and now we’re free.

  FED P
atrol Academy, Hyperion, Year 2468 Terran Standard

  1.

  It all works out great, until it doesn’t.

  I could not anticipate our ship breaking down. We’re lucky they found the fault before we took off, really. We could have been stranded in the middle of fucking nowhere, waiting to see whether a repair crew would reach us before the life support stopped working. Instead we got to spend an extra couple of days at a nexus, getting looked after like princesses.

  I keep reminding Dee of that. She keeps telling me that she knows, and it’s OK. Why would she care if we get there late? We can catch up with stuff. They’ll have to understand, and if they don’t, then they’re assholes. We’re not going to be there that late, anyway. A few days at most. It won’t make any odds.

  We seem to go through that exchange with increased frequency with every passing hour. We tell each other that we don’t care so often that I’m starting to wonder whether we actually do, but that can’t be right. It wouldn’t make any sense. We’re better than that.

  When they finally put us on a ship that is capable of actual movement, I ask the crew when exactly we’re going to reach Hyperion, just so I know. Dee was right: we won’t be that late. We’ll be late enough for people to notice, though. Although my brain doesn’t really care about it, my stomach seems to. I don’t enjoy a single moment of the trip there. Neither does Dee, by the looks of it, which is highly unusual; she can normally find joy in anything, but something about this trip is rubbing her the wrong way and making her cranky.

  When we finally land on Hyperion – the first landing on a planet for both of us – I can’t tell whether my nausea is caused by the g-force changes or by my body letting me down and succumbing to the unreasonable, unjustifiable tension I’ve been feeling. Dee seems to share my urgency. We’re first in line to disembark and we rush through security as fast as they’ll let us. When we get out of the space port my plan is to get to the Academy with all possible speed. I only realize the flaw in it when, three steps into the bubble proper, my legs nearly give up on me.

  The bubble is huge. It hangs over us, impossibly high, cutting the sky up into a jumble of slices. The sky is impossibly high, too, but it looks like it’s going to stay up there. The bubble doesn’t: it looks like it could come down any second and crush us into the dirt. I know that it’s bullshit, that the fucking things are designed by engineers to withstand ridiculous amounts of pressure and that their failure rate is minimal, but I only understand that with my brain. The lower half of my body has decided that it’s in danger, and that the correct response is to turn to jelly.

  Dee squeezes my shoulder. “Honey, we can’t dillydally.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Are we lost?”

  “No. Dee, it’s so big.”

  “Not really. It’s way smaller than my home bubble. I think they did that to fit it on the crater.”

  “What crater?”

  “The crater we’re in. Look.”

  She points behind us. I turn to see what she’s on about. I look up. Then I look higher up. I manage to crane my neck so I can see all the way up the top of the crater wall, where the bubble starts, when her hands on my back stop me from landing on my ass.

  “Honey, are you OK?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine. Stop asking.”

  “We have to get going.”

  “Sure. No problem.”

  “I don’t know the way.”

  I pull my eyes down to the ground, then straight up in front of me. I tell my brain to shut the fuck up with the alarmist crap and bring up the map of the bubble. I’ve looked at it enough times that it shouldn’t be a problem.

  “We’ve got to go straight to Landing, in the middle, then take the main avenue on the right. The Academy is about halfway down. We can’t miss it: it’s a hell of a heap of a building.”

  “Are you OK walking?”

  “Of course I am.” I tell my legs that they can come along or be left behind, turn around somewhat unsteadily, and manage to take a couple of tentative steps away from the crater wall. I can feel its mass looming behind me, putting an odd pressure on my bladder, but I make myself ignore it. Not running away from it is the hardest thing ever, but I know that if I start I won’t be able to stop until I’m out of breath.

  Dee feeds her arm through mine. I resist the temptation to latch onto her for dear life.

 

  We set off walking. A few steps in, when the bubble fails to come down on us and crash us, my body seems to get on board. So far, so good.

 

  She shrugs.

  Looking at the bubble map had given me no idea of its scale. It’s a hell of a distance from the port to Landing; it takes us over a quarter of an hour to get there. I’m glad we don’t have much luggage to carry. The bubble gets higher over our heads the nearer we get to its middle, but I manage to make myself ignore that, though I still wonder how people can choose to live in these conditions. When we get to Landing, which is the largest open space I’ve ever been in, it takes me no time to find the avenue we want. The whole colony is on a radial pattern. Landing is in the middle, and the four main avenues stretch out from it. My brain is finding it easier to adapt to it than my eyes are; they are just not used to focusing at long range.

  Another ten minutes or so see us in front of the Academy without any mishaps. I have to have another discussion with my insides about stepping through the gap between the two towers at the entrance; they seem ridiculously tall until I spot how much higher the bubble wall is, which puts that pressure on my bladder again. I’m so fed up with these theatrics that I decide to ignore the whole thing. It’s a building. It’s tall. Maybe it’ll come down and crush us, but I’d prefer that to being caught out here wetting my pants.

  As soon as we’re back indoors, my normal brain functions cut in. Dee beams at me, gives me a squeeze, then lets me go.

  “Welcome back. Where to?”

  “The first lecture doesn’t start for another half hour. The main lecture hall is at the opposite end of the building. If we go via the laundry, we might be able to pick up our uniforms.”

  “Security through obscurity?”

  “You know it. This way.”

  I thought picking up whatever we’re supposed to wear would be easy, but I forgot how small I am. Back on Alecto it wasn’t a problem because I just wore kids’ clothes, but cadets join the Academy the year they turn nineteen. The smallest top they have in stock looks like a tent on me. I can’t wear any of their trousers without tripping up. The laundry staff look panicked until Dee, who picked up the first set of uniforms she could get her hands on and looks fabulous in it, sees me and starts guffawing.

  “Oh, honey! If you could see yourself!”

  “I don’t think I need to.” I lift up my arms and flap six inches of spare sleeve around.

  “You’ll grow into that.”

  “I hope not. Hey ho. It’s a look.”

  “Yes, but it’s not a good look. What are we going to do?”

  I smile at the quivering girls behind the counter. “You got scissors?”

  One of them finds her tongue. “No. I have a knife?”

  “That’ll do great. Thank you.”

  I slice chunks off the trousers and tops, manage to find a tie so that the trousers won’t fall down, and I emerge from the laundry looking only marginally ridiculous and with two allies amongst the service staff.

  “Dee, those girls thought I was going to yell at them.”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “But it’s not their fault if they don’t have shit that fits me.”

  “It sure isn’t.”

  “So why would I take it out on them?”

  “I don’t know, honey. I guess that around here people do.”

  “Then people a
round here are assholes.”

  She looks down at me and purses her lips. I doubt anyone heard me, though, not that I’d care. The hallway is crammed with people, but they’re all busy rushing in the same direction. I’m cool with that: it saves me the bother of looking for the main lecture hall.

  When we get there, my stomach has another episode. I expected the room to be large, what with it being capable of sitting the whole student body, but I didn’t expect it to be so fucking deep. The stage, still vacant, is right at the bottom of a vertiginous slope of seats.

  Dee grabs my arm.

 

 

 

 

  We take our seats in the back row, right at the edge of the room. I sink into the back of mine and try to disappear or blend in, but I can’t: every time I look up my eyes snag on someone staring at me.

  Dee rests her hand on my leg.

 
  <800. Plus a coupla hundred second- and third-years on specialized tracks. We’re super-duper special. Elite and all that.>