VAI

On the parked shuttle with Warpaint nearby and my father standing over me, the last thing I expected was for the old man to pull me to my feet and embrace me. For a moment, I froze. I had barely touched my father since I came out of stasis.

This time, I didn't have the chance to decline. Maybe I wouldn't have, anyway. He pressed me close. I patted him on the back half-heartedly.

"What in the hell were you thinking, Vai? I can't leave you alone for three damn days? Three days?"

His touch forced me to wrestle with the contradictions of his tenderness and his anger, and the fact that I loved him and at the same time hated him for what he'd done to me. I resented that. I didn't want to think about those things.

I pulled away, and he guided me back into my seat like I was some frail thing, sat down next to me with his hand on my shoulder. Commander Ragear's touch had been warm, empathetic. My father's was rough.

"I get it," I said glibly, "it's all my fault. I'll try to avoid being drugged and beaten by criminals in the future."

"Of course it's your fault," he snapped. "You could have avoided it this time."

I could have. But I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of saying so.

"I asked you to do three things. Stay home, stay out of trouble, get on the shuttle to Jupiter Station. This should not have been difficult, even for you."

"Yeah, well, my friend was in trouble" -- he wasn't my friend -- "and when my friends are in trouble I do something about it. Would you mind taking your hand off me?"

He looked at me, and I looked back coldly. I thought I saw him vulnerable, for just a moment, as he turned his face away from mine in frustration. It made me think I still had the power to hurt him, and that . . . wasn't entirely unpleasant.

"Fine," he said, going cold himself. "Well, Warpaint filled me in on the basics while you were having your screaming fit." My father briefly ran through the day's events. I left the estate after receiving some mysterious damn message from Thrissko, that kid I spent time with at the gym, ending up at some little Bundu-jo tailor shop. There I got handed my ass extravagantly by some local crooks, who drugged me, nearly killed me, and eventually I showed up for the shuttle, late my father added, with a variety of broken bones, screaming like a maniac for no discernible reason . . .

He said these things counting them off on his fingers, and finished with, "Exactly what the hell went on in the basement of this little shop?"

"I'm exhausted," I said.

"Vai."

"Point me at the nearest bed. Let's yell at each other tomorrow, what do you say?"

He slapped his okulus around his forearm, and it went cylindrical. "Why can't anything ever be easy with you? Fine, you want it the hard way? So be it. Volo, ostendo." His volo swiveled and projected a square of light into the air showing the display of my father's okulus. I watched as he accessed a second okulus—mine, and navigated to my messages.

A sudden feeling of despair hacked at my guts. "What do you think you're doing?" I didn't want him digging through my private communications. They were for me, just for me. This was a violation, a kind of awful theft. "Stop it," I said. "Get out of my okulus. Whatever I do, it's none of your business."

Technically, until a citizen of the Gathering was 18 years old, a guardian could access the contents of their okulus, but it was something that almost never happened.

"None of my business? I'm your dad."

"My dad? You're not my dad. My dad was this guy who cared for me and taught me about life!" I didn't know why I put such an emphasis on the word life. I heard the words spilling out and couldn't stop them. They seemed connected to very little, to no specific coherent thought or idea, just to the anger that had been with me for as long as I could remember. "You're my kidnapper. You're the sicko who put me in a box for 79 years. You're a stranger."

"This is getting rather personal," Warpaint noted unhelpfully.

"Don't say things you can't take back," said the old man. He pulled up the last messages between me and Thrissko and displayed it.

«I'm in Papa's shop, humaktra. They told me they could custom make boxing gloves for me. You know how hard it is for me to find ones that fit and don't get ruined fast, but something feels off. I think the people in here aren't customers, but part of Papa's gang.

«Leave. You can probably beat them in a fight, but we don't want to bring attention to the police. Just leave. My message had been read, but I didn't receive a response until an hour later.

«If you want to save your friend, come alone.

That had been the last message. I had my suspicions then and now that they had lured Thrissko to get to me, but I didn't know why. Just to give me the zek? A drug that was supposedly destroyed decades ago? It didn't make sense.

"Oh, Vai," father said, rubbing his temple. "Why can't you ever just use your brain? And do the safe, smart thing?"

"What was I supposed to do? Just leave my friend?"

"Yes, you contact his parents and leave it to them."

I rolled my eyes. Thrissko didn't talk to his parents. They had no idea Thrissko spent his leisure time in the boxing gym with a human.

My father let out a low sigh and shook his head. "Fine. Let's finish this." His fingers moved on his okulus, and on the projection I could see that he was trying to bring up my volo's recording of what happened in the shop. He played through the recording of my interaction with the young Bundu-jo woman behind the counter at 10 times speed, not listening to the conversation, but waiting to see where the violence began. I didn't say anything. It got to the point where Warpaint exited the shop, and the security shutters slammed down over the windows and doors, then it went blank, displaying only static.

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"What happened, where's the rest?"

"Scrambler field," I sighed.

"Warpaint, let's see what happened in that tailor shop."

"Don't," I commanded.

"Sir, I must remind you that I belong to your son, not to you. It is my duty to protect him, and displaying my recording of those events seems inconsistent with that mission."

"Inconsistent how?" my father snapped. "It's not going to hurt him."

"I believe it might. Emotionally."

"Warpaint, pareo," my father said wearily.

"Damn you," I said, and punched the seat in front of me.

A recording appeared on the square of light projected by his volo. We saw, from Warpaint's point of view, Warpaint prying at the security shutters over the door. Trying to bend the edges with his fingers.

I felt like I was being ripped apart. Even I hadn't seen this yet. This was wrong. This was a man I didn't trust invading the spaces within me that I wanted protected, that I didn't want to share, that I wanted to keep for myself.

I began to cry silently to myself as we watched the recording unfold. It was the helplessness, the being powerless to stop it. Earlier today, I had been free to exercise my own judgment, and to operate within the parameters of my own self-confidence. Hell, I'd been proud of myself for acting with courage. Now that was all being ripped down, and my mistakes were being laid bare for examination and reprobation.

This wasn't right. I was 17 years old, not some kid.

My father put me to sleep for 80 years, and my friends died, and the world changed, and I woke up afraid, not understanding what had happened. The light was different, and the air smelled different, and his voice coming over my okulus telling me Son? I have to explain some things now that you may find upsetting was insufficient to the violation of it. A violation for which he had never apologized. And which, I suspected, I would never fully recover from.

This new one took a number.

Warpaint narrated. "After being separated from Vai, I tried for several minutes to break my way into the tailor shop. By this point in the recording, my activities had surely been noticed by many passersby, and I thought it very likely that at least some of them must have interpreted my intentions to be criminal, if not murderous, and contacted the peacekeepers. I worked with great haste, as one of my subparameters is to avoid interactions with peacekeepers whenever possible. Finally I was able to bend back one of the—"

"Without the narration, please," said my father.

"Yes sir."

The recording showed sparks showering against Warpaint as he ripped the security shutters aside and powered through the door in a maelstrom of bent metal and shattered glass. The young woman who had let me into the storeroom was gone. I didn't remember seeing her come into the basement, and no other exits were apparent, but the shop itself was empty.

Warpaint raced toward the interior door and found it locked. He pried at its edges with his fingers, his hands searching frantically at its seams.

"Skip this," my father said.

The recording jumped ahead. Warpaint entered the basement storeroom and saw overturned shelves, cloth littering the floor like enormous bits of confetti, broken equipment jutting raggedly against the walls. The place was trashed, showing evidence of violence I simply did not remember happening. I was there in the center of the mess, on my knees, my torso moving in disturbing contortions. Blood was everywhere, my face was so shredded apart I could see my teeth through the wounds, and one of my eyeballs was hanging loose from its socket. The zek floated around me in swirls of pink.

"Don't stop! Keep going!" Papa was shouting.

Except for Thrissko, who was on the ground writhing in pain, the exoskeleton of his right arm visibly cracked, the rest of Papa's gang were standing around me in a circle. They held their hands over me like puppeteers, and they all made the same sound, not chanting exactly, but singing the same atonal vowel. "Oooooooo." The fact that Papa wasn't shouting strange words from an arcane book was, somehow, the most surprising thing about all of this.

"Clear away from the elder," said Warpaint on the recording.

Papa drew a pistol. "Don't stop!" He began to fire on my mechatronic. Red stripes of light danced across the distance between them.

Warpaint closed on Papa with incredible speed. He knocked the weapon away, wrapped Papa's hands in his own, and crushed them. There came the terrible crunch of breaking bones. Papa began to shake, and his eyes closed, and he fell over backward and lay grotesquely across a mannequin.

"Do not fire weapons at me," Warpaint said neutrally.

The Human girl was the first to break away from the circle. She ran at Warpaint. Her body left the ground and arced toward him with one leg extended. It was a perfect execution of a flying martial arts kick. I wasn't sure what she hoped to accomplish against a mechatronic that had clearly been designed for war. But then, she hadn't seemed particularly sane.

Warpaint brought his huge right arm down and hammered her leg out of the air. Again, there was the sound of breaking bone, and she hit the ground with a thump like a bag of flower being tossed onto a stack.

"Do not engage in violence," Warpaint said.

She began to scream.

Warpaint stepped over her, broached the circle, and lifted me into his arms. "What are you doing? This man is very old and very frail. Have you no decency? Do not stand over a nonagenarian wiggling your fingers."

Then the Starwatcher in the gang stepped back and shrieked, "No! Put him back!" and grabbed at one of Warpaint's arms.

The rest of the gang, at varying speeds, seemed to awaken from their shared trance.

"I will not put him back," said Warpaint. "He is late catching his shuttle."

"Yes!" shouted the Starwatcher. He clung to Warpaint's arm now, his feet swinging up off the ground.

"Certainly not." Warpaint smashed him into the wall, and he let go of Warpaint's arm and slid back down to the floor, moaning.

Warpaint turned away from them and, cradling me, ran toward the door.

They began to shout and fire on him. More lines of red light flashed all around us. As he ran, he hunched his back protectively. Bursts of red sparks fizzled off him. They were hitting him. It didn't slow him down. He went up, and as we ascended the stairs, the pink smoke simply melted off me and trailed back down the steps. That was when I began to scream.

We went through the wrecked door at the top the stairs. We crashed through the shop, knocking aside displays. He dangled me ahead of him with his two left arms, and twisted out onto the street without slowing down.

"Off," my father said.

The recording disconnected.

My father touched his okulus, and it went dark, too, leaving his volo projecting a square of light with nothing on it. He reached out and batted his volo with one hand. "Come on, dummy." And the projection blinked off. The volo chittered amiably as it flew around to hover behind him.

I picked up my shirt and cape and pressed the bloody bundle to my face, drying my tears. I hoped no one had noticed that I was crying, however briefly, but I was sure that they had.

The old man stood up and ran his fingers through his shaggy silver hair.

"You're not supposed to be here," he said. "It's key crew only. The preparations for launch are ongoing. No civilians were supposed to be aboard until tomorrow night. So what the hell do I do with you?"

"Well—can I stay?"

He looked at the floor. "I'll find out."

There was a period of silence, during which I stared at Warpaint to see if I could see any sign of the beams that had hit him. I couldn't. "You okay, Warpaint?" I asked.

"Yes. Thank you for asking."

"You got shot, like, a bunch of times."

"I am equipped with a miniature energy shield that neutralizes the frequencies of the four most commonly-used small-arms lasers in Gathering space. I am not damaged. But please do not get into another situation such as that one until I have had the chance to recharge my shield, or we will both likely perish."

"Don't worry," I said. "I have no plans for any such adventures."

"Warpaint," my father said, "you may erase your memories from the time you first entered the tailor shop to now."

"Oh, no thank you," Warpaint said.

"You can't be serious," I objected. "You can't erase that, that's part of my life. I still want to examine—"

"Warpaint, that's an order. Pareo."

"Very well, sir," said my mechatronic. "The memories you ordered me to erase are gone now." Warpaint turned to me. "You look exhausted. You should go to bed. Oh, look, we're on the shuttle. We made it after all."

My father looked at me, deep concern showing on his face. "I shouldn't have let you see that," he said. "I should have had better foresight than that. I'm sorry."

"Old man," I said, "you've got a lot of things to be sorry for, but that isn't one of them."

"You can never tell anyone what you just saw. Do you understand? Don't share any part of it with anyone, ever. This secret doesn't belong to you anymore."

"Yeah, well," I said bitterly, "what the hell does?"

"Swear to me."

"Get stuffed."