Short Stories: The Sum of Your Parts

i. 

She is not a pretty girl, all long limbs and spindly fingers and hair that hangs lank around her shoulders. Cut-glass cheek bones, whipcord muscles, her skin is still pale and it still has an unhealthy grey tinge, as though the dust from her home world has ingrained itself in to her very being.

The reddy-purple uniform she wears still makes her skin crawl, it still feels like a farce and there’s a tremor in her bones because she’s still waiting for the carpet to be yanked out from beneath her. She’s still waiting for someone to find her out, to lock her up and throw away the key even though part of her knows that’s not going to happen.

The captain nods as he passes by and she salutes automatically.

“Take off in five, Lieutenant,” he says.

She inclines her head, “Sir,” and locks in their co-ordinates.

They’re heading back to Earth, the first officially sanctioned mission of its kind. She’s come a long way in twenty-some years.

 

ii.

She’s born on Earth, four years before the Intergalactic Planetary Alliance decides it’s not fit for human habitation. Her parents are poor so they don’t get any say in where they’re moved to so they’re shoved into the outer reaches of the galaxy, living in terra-domes on a back water mining planet. She doesn’t remember much from before, from Earth, but she clings to her accent and wears it like a badge of honour: born on Earth, the cradle of life.

Nothing lives on the surface of Donn, nothing that they haven’t put there anyway. The landscape outside of their tiny domes is dull and rocky and mostly dark, criss-crossed with transport tubes to other domes and the mining stations. Tam only goes out there once, with her dad and brother.

Her mama tries to make Donn as homely as possible, she bakes Earth delicacies but the soil on their planet is barren and all the fruit is synthetic. Nothing ever tastes right but at least it’s a burst of colour amongst the blacks and greys. Everything’s grey on Donn, even the people. Their skin is pale from the lack of sun and grey from the dust that seems to find its way into their dome no matter how many reinforcements they put up.

The need to escape is woven into her bones, it crawls under her skin every time she watches a ship take off, every time she watches their flickery holotele.

She resolves to leave when she’s fourteen, stows away on the supply ship that comes twice a rotation, leaves her parents a hastily scrawled note. The IMEA ship lands in their systems capitol city and she hitchhikes her way to Nyx.

 

iii.

Becoming a criminal is surprisingly easy, she’s had experience squirreling away food from the mayor’s house after all. She joins the crew of a small trading vessel that mostly works in the black and occasionally pulls of successful heists. Her captain is tall woman with white-gold hair and nasty scar on her cheek. She tells Tam she was from Earth too, that makes them sisters of a kind.

The captain’s first mate doesn’t like her, thinks she’s too impulsive, too trigger happy. Maybe she is but Tam doesn’t have sympathy for their victims, they’re mostly wealthy cruise ships or exotic traders who have far too much money for their own good. Besides, her kill count is pretty low, considering.

It’s the thrill she gets when she sees the fear in their eyes. She knows that’s all kinds of wrong but the only time she thinks about it is when they’re drifting between jobs, and the blackness of space is all she can hear.

 

iv.

She writes home often, sends money from her successful jobs. She keeps every response her mother writes; her mother only uses the best parchment, writes out everything in careful cursive and signs every letter with: come home soon, love.

 

v.

It comes to an end, as all good things must and even now she’s sure that it was the first mate that turned her in.

She’s working a job on Thesan, a resort planet, when two galactic officers snatch her off the street. They bundle her onto their HQ ship and throw her in a cell until their Captain comes to interrogate her. She’s already steeled herself, set her jaw, she has well rehearsed answers and enough profanities to make even the hardiest officers wince. She’s not prepared for the man walking into to her tiny room to be the pilot of the ship she escaped Donn on though. She’s not prepared for the look of disappointment in his eyes.