Alysha's Fall Read online

  “Blacklight,” Alysha said, stopping. “My mother goes into Blacklight?”

  Meriisa drew away, then nodded. Her bright blue bow struck an incongruous note against the weary gray alley.

  Alysha crouched in front of the girl and held out a hand. “Do you follow her any further?”

  Meriisa glanced down the alley, then shook her head. “My mamme wouldn’t like that.”

  “I would think not,” Alysha said, glancing back down the alley.

  “Lunch is gonna be over soon. . . . ”

  “You’re right.” Alysha drew herself up. “Let’s go.”

  They turned their backs on deserted, ugly Blacklight, and yet all the way to the school grounds, it hung in front of Alysha’s eyes.

  She did not bother to open the fence that evening after school, but climbed over it after tucking her bag into the hollow of a nodding meringel’s roots. Sliding down the other side, Alysha turned and padded up the alley, avoiding the puddles collecting against the sagging buildings; their fetid odor suggested more than water, and she had only this one pair of shoes left.

  Alysha paused where the alley opened onto the street, pulling her cloak tightly around her. She leaned cautiously against the brick wall beside her and glanced at Blacklight. Everyone knew about it: how this district had been part of town when it had first been built, how the seedier industries had come to inhabit it until the town proper pulled itself away, leaving the areas nearest it abandoned and finally in ruins. The perimeter of Blacklight had a ghostly aura, and that the district had never run any illegal establishments made the town’s rejection of it more enigmatic.

  A neon light buzzed into life across from the alley and Alysha blinked, adjusting to the falling dark. The shadows of Blacklight’s first few visitors fell across the sidewalks. She waited in the dark as more and more people joined the others in the streets, faceless, avoiding the light. Many of them were cloaked, as she was; others so outrageously attired Alysha couldn’t decide whether she could call them clothed. She recognized several stages of inebriation in the wanderers from glimpses of her mother’s indiscretions—when they’d still had the money for alcohol.

  All of them had the desperate look of people trying too hard to enjoy themselves.

  Alysha slipped into the crowds, pulling her cloak around her so it wouldn’t brush against anyone. Only the badly maintained storefront signs cast any light on the streets; the clouds smudged away the moon and starlight. She let the knot of people guide her past bars and stores and establishments that veiled their purposes with coy names and darkened windows. Her flesh pebbled with more than the damp cold.

  When her unease finally overwhelmed her, she drifted out of the crowd to lean against the façade of a bar named “Sapphire Slippers.” Resting her cheek against the cold brick, Alysha stared at the windows; the faint forms of people moved across their surfaces like shadows over a wall. Pushed by an emotion she couldn’t name, she stepped to the entrance and looked inside, squinting through the candle and smoke haze. Waitresses threaded through a maze of tables, wearing tight corsets with flounced waists that barely reached their thighs. The light grazed the winking blue sequins that adorned shoes with absurdly high heels . . . the waitresses’ only other ornament.

  The bar’s patrons hunched over their tables, their sneers oddly disconnected from the emptiness of their eyes. Of the women serving them, being pulled into laps, spit at, pawed or groped, not one had any spirit left to animate her eyes or footsteps. They walked as if dead, their hips swaying as if programmed.

  Shuddering, Alysha drew away from the entrance. She stumbled back to the alley and over the fence into the park, stopping only to grab her bag before running to the willow by the brook. Panting, she dropped to her knees and splashed water over her face. Tugging down the collar of her tunic and discarding the cloak, she washed her throat and shoulders, leaning into the water until the brook gripped her to the elbows.

  Alysha panted, staring at the shadow of her reflection on the moving water. The ache below her ribs was hunger; the one beneath them, she couldn’t name. Her flesh shivered in the damp wind, and the sky rumbled—like the growls her father used to warn her with, loving, stern, brooking no argument.

  Gathering herself, Alysha pulled away from the stream. She craned her head back to stare at the sky, a fragment of cloud withdrawing enough to allow a star to wink at her. A fragile smile touched her lips, and she rose. The bag swayed against her sharp hip as she made her way out of the park . . . the cloak, soiled somehow beyond redemption, she left to the elements, and her father’s care.

  The mortarboard’s sharp edge chafed her fingers as Alysha carried it home from the ceremony. She chose her footsteps carefully, having lost her last pair of shoes a month before graduation—at least, that seemed the most obvious reason for how slowly she took the paths leading back to the tiny broken house. Strangled scarlet rays pressed at the omnipresent gray clouds, struggling to advertise the sun’s passing; Alysha ignored them, ignored the cool wind that plucked at the thin white gown mandated by traditions older than the Pelted as the proper garb for accepting academic honors.

  She did not know what words she’d use on her mother for not attending graduation. She knew Selina had lost interest in her long ago; was it fair of her to demand that her mother go through the motions? Or was she relieved that her mother hadn’t even bothered? Was it better to be lied to, and know the lie, or to accept bald and unpleasant truths?

  The Pelted of the Exodus had known the answer: they’d sung their children to sleep with unpleasant truths about never seeing home again, never being able to play again on the world they’d left.

  Alysha sighed as she stepped up to the door, resting the flat of her palm beside the check-panel and closing her eyes. The wind ran cool, soft fingers through the bottom edge of her hair. She pressed her hand to the panel and opened the door.

  The scent hit her like a wall: imported Hinichirel pears like the ones her father had bought for her mother when they’d had money for small luxuries, when they’d been happy. Alysha walked on bare, stiff feet to the kitchen, shaking, the mortarboard clutched in her free hand.

  Reclining in a chair and reading a data tablet, Selina Forrest nibbled on the sandy flesh of a pear, thin body nearly lost in a lush velvet robe. Three pits shone on the table, stripped completely to their black shells.

  Alysha reached past the woman to pick up the last of the pears, her stomach so taut with longing she grew nauseated. She stared then at her mother.

  Selina’s pinched face dared her to voice a reprimand, eyes darkened as if she resented being made to feel shame. “I suppose you can have that one.”

  “I,” Alysha said, setting the pear down on the table with a shaking hand, “do not want your charity.”

  “Okay,” Selina said, picking it up and biting into it. The rich aroma pierced the air between them, and Alysha stepped back, dizzied. Her eyes locked on the floor to give her reeling world an anchor, found instead a flash of blue peeking from beneath the hem of her mother’s robe: the tip of a gaudy shoe, decorated in scintillating sequins.

  Alysha stared at her, then grabbed the data tablet on the table: sleek, so new no scratches marred its finish. They hadn’t been able to afford such things for years. While her mother ate, she skimmed to the bank her father had left her money in: money for the Academe. Money for her future. When the reply showed her only a handful of fin, enough only for a few small meals, she was not surprised.

  The tablet slipped from her enervated fingers and clattered against the kitchen table.

  “Problem?” Selina asked, looking at her over the swollen belly of the pear. Her tiny pink tongue licked at the wound she’d opened in it.

  Alysha met her eyes and saw only emptiness: the emptiness of Blacklight, the desperate self-negation of Sapphire Slippers. She placed her mortarboard on the table and searched her mother’s gaze for any spark of the woman who had been her father’s wife, singer and maker—who had once had en
ough life in her to kindle another in her womb. She saw nothing.

  “Goodbye, Mother,” she said, and turned away.

  She had nothing of value left in that house; nothing she regretted leaving behind. Barefoot and wearing only the linen shift from the ceremony, Alysha walked off the front porch and onto the path, never looking back. She hiked to the monorail station in the dark, the damp wind stroking her gown and her hair, and ignoring the worried glances awarded her by the employees bought the lowest fare ride to Terracentrus. The Academe had scholarships and work-studies. She would find a way.

  Half an hour later, Alysha stood on the back balcony of the monorail, holding onto the pole and watching her home recede from sight. It began to rain, soft pattering drops slanting to strike against her face and cheeks. She remembered her father leaning over her, crooning in Meridan, singing her star lullabies and spinning the true stories of the exodus.

  She thought she would carry that memory far longer than any vision of her mother.

  The last lights winked out, obscured by a hill, and utter darkness took sight and left only sound and touch. Alysha turned her face into the oncoming rain, the singing wind, toward the path before her.

  Two Uniforms

  Alysha Forrest stepped off the monorail after three weeks spent gathering laundry and serving meals to passengers who’d had the money to pay for the trip to Terracentrus. The tarnish of the recent months fell from the Karaka’An’s shoulders as she lightly touched down on the pavement and jogged out of the station to get her first glimpse of the city. What she’d seen of its skylines against the growing dawn had only whet her imagination, delicate curves and spires thrusting into the pale cloud banks. She slipped past the few people in her way and out as the glass doors irised open for her.

  Sunlight poured over her body as Alysha stared at the vista. People of all races streamed up and down the streets, mottled pelage in shades of gray and brown, orange and red. Above their bobbing heads rose the buildings, edges streaked with buttery-rich yellows, spiraled towers beside the fluted blocks of sun-pale edifices. Thin bridges threw themselves across impossible spans, woven from seeming spider-webs that glittered fiercely in the new light.

  Hundreds of scents spilled across her nose as the Karaka’An stood stunned at the doors of the monorail station: rich meat pastries shot through with alien spices, the tantalizing odors of creatures from other worlds mingled with the more familiar smells of Karaka’A and Seersa, and through it all a breeze lightly touched with the weight of water, moving, always moving. The sounds proved equally disorienting, the muted roar of a busy street, voices blending into one great symphony.

  Shading her eyes, Alysha stepped into the tumult, her heart rising until she thought it would burst from her chest. She strode to the edge of the monorail station and ducked into the respite of an info-stop.

  “May I help you?” a delicate Tam-illee asked, her wheat-blonde hair swinging lightly around her white chin.

  “I’d like directions to the Academe, please,” Alysha asked, offering a smile in return.

  The female foxine chuckled softly, “Ah, another cadet-to-be, I see? We get a lot of those. Would you like hardcopy or transmission to your data tablet?”

  Alysha waited for the foxine to notice her empty hands. She’d long since disposed of the graduation gown, and had only her stretchsuit and the small balance in her bank to her name.

  “Pardon me,” the Tam-illee said, large ears coloring. She tapped a button, then presented a flat card to Alysha, tracing the route. “This is where you are, on Millennium Walk. Millennium is one of the center lanes for the city . . . along with six other streets, it bisects all the walks, streets, and boulevards in Terracentrus. Just walk east until you begin to reach the fringe of the commercial area. You’ll pass a few residential areas, and then it’ll clear up and you’ll find yourself at the gates of the Fleet Complex.”

  “A long walk?” Alysha asked, trying to gauge distances.

  “Maybe forty-five minutes, if you’re light on your feet,” was the reply. “We’re on the eastern edge of the city here.”

  “This is only the edge of the city?” Alysha asked, incredulous. She couldn’t help glancing back over her shoulder at the high-rises.

  The Tam-illee laughed kindly. “One day you’ll have to visit Center Walk where it intersects Main Street. Then you’ll see the real city.”

  Tucking a strand of hair behind her shoulders, Alysha nodded. “Thank you, alet.”

  As she turned to go, she heard a quiet “Wait.” Curious, she stopped and glanced over her shoulder only to find the Tam-illee offering her a gold fin.

  “Take it,” the female urged gently as Alysha hesitated. “Please.” The Tam-illee smiled, her ears ruddy. “I have two children, one near your age. It’s a long walk, and he gets hungry every fifteen minutes. You look hungry as it is.”

  Alysha’s lips twitched, torn between a sheepish smile and a grimace. She’d eaten lightly on the way to Terracentrus to spare her account. She took the coin respectfully, then said again, “Thank you, alet.”

  “Good luck.”

  Alysha smiled, then ducked out of the stop and into the sunlight again. She looked into her palm where the fin nestled, then wrapped her long fingers around it. Orienting herself by the sun and the direction of the streets, Alysha faced east and followed her nose to a pastry shop where the fin bought her a meat pasty. Card in one hand and brunch in the other, the Karaka’An felt exhilaration rising again, and she started off at a smart pace. Perhaps there was something to be said for casting off one’s life and walking empty-handed, or nearly so, into a new one.

  Alysha’s attention warred between her directions and the color of the city. She learned from the map that all walks ran east-west, all streets north-south, and all boulevards diagonally. The map also demonstrated how little experience she had with cities of the scale of Terracentrus. She tried to calculate the distances from the size of the map and found she could not hold an image of the city in her head. It was too large: only fitting for the summer capital of the Alliance.

  Alysha tucked the card in her waist-pocket, the route etched into her mind, and let her fingers occupy themselves with holding together the hot pasty. The first bite brought a low sigh of pleasure. It had been several months since she’d had hot food of this caliber, or any meat. The pasty didn’t last long; the Karaka’An licked her fingers clean in her enthusiasm before returning her gaze to the cityscape, watching the people now past. She’d never seen so many people, and of so many varied kinds. Her hometown had sported a good mix of Karaka’A and Seersa with the rare Tam-illee or Asanii, but Terracentrus was an object lesson in the diversity of the Alliance. She even spotted one of the alien Sirelanders, slender tentacles swept back from its head.

  Competing with the people for her attention scrolled a never-ending row of shops, and she often paused to glance in at the vendors. Clothing stores made her wish, briefly, for something a little looser than her stretchsuit. Other stores sold jewelry, still others appliances and commodities, real estate and personal recreational vehicles. A place selling personal tech almost pulled her inside with its data tablet display, and it was only with effort that she set on her course again.

  It was too rich a banquet for one morning. Alysha drank her fill and felt heady, but a steady tugging drew her away from the sights and sounds and scents. She jogged steadily down the walk until the tall buildings faded away, replaced by low scrolling gates and entrances to housing developments. The breeze fell more easily through the crannies of the city here, and it threaded fingers through her dark hair, pulling it astray. Alysha drew long breaths as she continued, straining her eyes for any sight of her destination.

  She found it ten minutes later: a clearing at the end of the walk, and then a large gated complex behind which rolling melds and towering trees broke from the cityscape and recalled the roots of nature. A collection of low-lying buildings occupied the northernmost edge of the estate; as she drew nearer she
saw a regal house rising against the fringe of the southern side. As she approached, she saw two guards, dark Hinichi with stern expressions, tails rigid despite the wind. Behind them on three tall poles, the Academe flew the Alliance flag, the Fleet’s, and Fleet Academe’s.

  Alysha strode to the gates and stopped, uncertain. The guards looked more like statues than people until one of them broke and asked, “Good morning. How may we serve?”

  “I’m looking for the application office,” Alysha said, ears pointing forward and shoulders back.

  “That’s inside and directly to the right.”

  Alysha glanced past the guard. “In the guard tower?” she asked.

  “Just so.” She thought she detected humor and smiled in reply, then walked past the guard and onto the threshold of the Academe. She was so near her hair stood on end. Eagerly, the Karaka’An stepped into the guard tower, a squat round structure of stone that stood only a story and a half high.

  Sunlight flooded the interior of the tower from a window in the northeast. A long desk ran half the circumference of the tower, and several people worked behind it. Alysha approached one of them.

  “Good morning. How may we help you?”

  “I’d like to apply,” Alysha answered.

  She received a warm smile in reply. The Seersan waved her to a seat and said, “You’ll have to fill out this application here. How will you be paying, monthly, biannually, or annually?”

  Alysha froze. “I forgot. . . . I need to apply for a scholarship.”

  Though the other operators continued working, she was certain that silence reigned within the tower office. The Seersan said, “I’m sorry, but all scholarships have been handed out for this academic year. You’ll have to wait until this time next year to apply.”