Laura Marie
Chapter 1
The harvest combine’s machinery slowed and the dull roar of it settled as Azzan wriggled free of the crawlspace. On either side of her was barely any space keeping her from the wires, moving parts, and gears that worked together to harvest the grain. She felt her legs, toes, and torso all cramping and tired, but as the din quieted she hollered, “I fixed it! Finish the shutdown!”
Far in the front of the enormous machine was a small cab full of levers, dials, and panels of maintenance alerts. She saw the silhouette of Seesaw there as he was pulling a large, sticky lever that created a long, loud slowing of the final moving parts. She wrestled herself into the cab near Seesaw’s feet. “You know,” she said. “Your job is easier than mine.”
“That’s true,” Seesaw grinned. “But yours would be even harder without me.”
“I like mine better too,” Azzan said. “I never stuck my hand in a rotor before today. We managed it, didn’t we? A new record for functionality!”
“Yep. A whole day without shut-downs. We probably processed twice the corn we normally get through,” Seesaw wiped his forehead, which was drenched in sweat. The Harvest Combine was hot even on the best of days, and today it had run all day with no opportunity to vent the interior. Seesaw opened the roof hatch gratefully, watching hazy lines escape the hatch into the cooler air outdoors. They could not scramble out fast enough.
Above them there were miles and miles of air and the improbable blue sky with the sun shining low in the west. It still grabbed Azzan by the thorat when she saw something so improbable – so much of any atmosphere, taken so for granted. She had grown up under a low-hanging sky, in the orbiting space city above the planet, and just the memory of it felt closed and box-like. The brightness of the life here on the farm planet was almost too much for her at times, but she kept her face impassive. Seesaw was given to great swings of emotion, always ranting about this or that, but she knew better than to spend her time talking about her thoughts.
They made an odd pair sitting up there atop the enormous machine: Azzan was slender, no wasted flesh anywhere on her body, with dark brown skin that gleamed with all the sunshine she got here on the planet. Seesaw was short, rounded in all the places that she was lean, with light skin covered in tan freckles, face turned pink from all the heat inside the harvest combine. They even looked like they’d lived different lives; he wore his ease in his manner, and she wore her experience in the callouses on her hands and elbows. Life had dealt them different things, but for once it wasn’t holding them apart from each other, if only for a moment.
They sat for a moment on the edge there, looking at the sky and saying nothing. The whole surrounding landscape was corn: cornstalks that had been cut that past day, releasing the heavy, sharp odor of living things interrupted, corn that was to be harvested the next day, corn that was farther afield and not yet ready for harvesting, and even some far off fallowed fields that were now putting up new shoots. The large squares of plants stretched out as far as the eye could see, but just at the edge, even with the horizon, Azzan could make out the thin thread of the grain elevator, a spindly column rising up into the sky.
“It must be time for it to dock,” Seesaw mused. Sure enough, a large smudge in the sky was connecting with the top of the grain elevator. It seemed stunning that everything that mattered to Azzan, all her struggles and pain and everyone who mattered to her, were encompassed by that small smudge. From the things they’d been told, the large smudge, the orbiting space city called The Slats, automatically slowed down it’s orbit to dock and unload and reload cornbrick bundles from the planet when some were available. Today was one of those days. It seemed insane that they could work from dawn till dusk just to produce enough grain to feed the souls on the Slats, but such was the life they now lived. Seesaw and Azzan had different places on the Slats, but both had eaten from the bounty of the planet, the planet called Harvest.
“You miss the Slats, don’t you?” Seesaw said, looking at Azzan’s distant expression. “You really wish you were still there instead of here.”
“I don’t miss it,” Azzan replied, never one to speak about her inner feelings. “You are the one who is always moping about missing the Slats.”
“Well,” he said sheepishly. “This is supposed to be prison, not some kind of vacation.”
Azzan didn’t reply, just swung her legs over the edge and climbed down the ladder. She knew in her heart that he couldn’t understand how much of a vacation it was, and how much she had to get back to the Slats as soon as she could.
The first time Azzan had been sent to jail hadn’t been fun at all. She’d been caught on Midslat, the main commerce and manufacturing sector of the Slats. She knew that it was always risky for her to go there, given how people looked down on Downslatters there, but there she was, arms full of cornbricks and a jug of corndrink. The owner of that market stall might have let her off with some cornbrick out of pity, but corndrink was expensive and definitely not for children. The fiery stuff was mostly made of alcohol, and while it was combined with water and additives to make beverages for adults, the idea of children making off with it was unacceptable to anyone. She was fast, but the police officers caught her as she headed back toward Downslat.
Awaiting her trial, she had lots of time to think about what had happened, and why. Azzan was the de facto leader of a street crew – all of them orphans, all of them younger than she was. They had a home base in a narrow alley between two processing plants on Downslat. Many of the crews had older children and even adults to protect them, but Azzan was only 16 and the eldest member of her crew. She’d gotten this corndrink specifically to try to get a 20 year old Loner to keep an eye on her crew’s area while they were out, just to prevent their stashes being stolen. Whenever she’d done this in the past, she’d just used cornbrick to bribe someone, but they were rarely vigilant and she got robbed a lot. Corndrink had been her hope to win better loyalty.
Midslat had a complicated relationship with the Alleyfolk orphans living on Downslat; they didn’t begrudge them a few swiped blocks of cornbrick. Midslatters were wealthy enough to afford food synthesizers and the basic array of chemical enhancers that made cornbrick more than just a dry, crumbly foodstuff and actually made it taste good. When she was first put in MidSlat jaily, she saw the ubiquitous flyers: “Adopt an Alleyfolk orphan today!” “Save a child from a life of poverty!” These posters weren’t new though; it had been years since the last government push to get more adoptions and clear out the alley crews. The problem was that the cute, smudge-faced kids on these posters were now growing up, and weren’t adoptable – as accomplished teenage thieves, they were so hardened to a life of fights and stealing that Azzan could hardly blame the Midslatters for having no interest in adopting her.
The jail was a simple building, like so many on the Slats, but with no accouterments to make it feel home like – it was bars, and metal holding cells, and uncomfortable steel benches. She sat with many other young thieves, many of them girls. She recognized two other crew leaders; normally she would feel the obligation to insult or fight them but these two also had crews that included young children, which made them all uneasy allies in an ongoing war against crews made up of older kids.
Azzan’s sentencing was similar to all the sentences she’d heard about from orphans on Downslat coming out of jail: she was walked out of the holding cells into the opulent Hall of the Slats, which was filled with paintings and descriptions of the illustrious history of the space city, and the judge looked her up and down while reading the charges against her. He furrowed his brow about the corndrink, muttered something to himself about the younger and younger criminals in his courtroom, and gave her two weeks in the jail. He said there was an option for spending the time in a corndrink rehab center, but she shook her head. She didn’t bother to describe the bribe; a judge would not understand how complex keeping her crew safe could be.
She slept and ate and dreamed in the sad space of the jail, wondering if the members of her crew were getting in fights. After two weeks, she was let loose, given a small pile of papers talking about “child support services,” and headed back to her crew. She knew that since that fateful day, 10 years before, when the parents of so many children mysteriously vanished in the night, the child support services in the Slats had been chronically overworked and unable to handle the many children who came to them. At this point, there was no other life for her than Downslat.
She walked the spacious streets of Midslat, full of two-level shops and businesses, where the owners and proprietors lived in apartments above the places they worked, or else rented apartments and went to work elsewhere in Midslat or Downslat. The children here all went to schools; they wouldn’t grow up to be fancy Upslat rich people, but they would get jobs. The streets were cleaned, and people took pride in this space, Azzan thought, as she headed into the tunnel that led her back to Downslat. She should have grown up on Midslat, in a place that was warm and indoors with parents who could care for her. Her throat tightened as she quickly descended the ladder into an exhaust shaft, the preferred means of transit for the orphans moving between Slats. There was a public stairwell, but she disliked being stared at. She barely remembered ever living in a house like those Midslat dwellings, though she knew that back, far back, she must have.
The exhaust pipes carried filtered air and water vapor from the processing areas in Downslat into the atmospheric bubbles surrounding Midslat and Upslat. She had seen that the exhaust vents between Midslat and Upslat were covered with smooth metal mesh to keep people like her out, but between Downslat and Midslat there were no such screens; if you wanted to go to Downslat at all, you belonged there.
Downslat hadn’t been built for habitation, which was once again quite apparent to Azzan as she entered with new eyes. It was supposed to be a place for all the factories, processing plants, and machinery of the whole space city, the sustainable marvel of the future. Instead, Downslat became the seedy hideout for all kinds of people who didn’t belong on the politer Slats, including the hundreds of Alleyfolk orphans who had formed into crews. The industrial complex had very narrow streets between buildings, which gave the alleyfolk their names. The roads had trash in them, and no one cleaned them. She gravitated, with quick steps, back to the last location of her crew, a nook between a cleanser production facility and an air filtration factory. Her crew always smelled like cleansing chemicals, but it was better than some of the places they could be.
Azzan entered the alley and saw the familiar prize possessions of her crew: a few pieces of foil blanket, a pile of children’s toys in arious stages of disrepair, and disguised behind a control panel, a stash of cornbrick wrapped in paper to make it unclear that it was food. There were three kids who jumped up when she entered, as if to defend the place. Instead, they softened when they recognized her. “You’re back!” one boy said, running straight into her arms. “It wasn’t even a long time!”
Clint, the boy, had been her toddler brother when her parents left, but now he was 11 years old and she could hardly believe how he had grown, almost appearing to gain an inch while she was in jail. It twisted her to think that only two weeks of separation was enough to be positive to him, when she’d spent the whole time hoping he was alright. She shoved the emotion away with all other thoughts. “How are things?” She asked. “You got some grub, that’s good.”
“Yep, I didn’t have to raid either – some of the other crews gave us just a little, to last us till you got back,” Clint said. She knew that crews with young children in them tended to get more help from other crews when they were really bad off; there had probably been some hungry nights while she was away, but she was glad that Clint hadn’t tried to raid without her. She knew that it wasn’t smart of her to run all the theft in their crew, but she couldn’t help wanting to protect him as long as possible.
She didn’t say much to them, just settled back in. She took two of the precious loaves of foodstuff and wrapped them up with a piece of child support services paper. Soon, she would be back out trying to find a Loner, someone without a crew, to defend their area, and soon she’d have to figure out where their next few meals would come from, but for now she was happy enough just to be back, for them to be safe.
When she got caught a few months later, though, things had been different. That fiasco hadn’t landed her 2 weeks in Midslat Jail. It had gotten her sent to the farming planet, Harvest, for a sentence that could be more like 4 years. That was a different story.