Mama and Daddy. They were shot first. In their heads.
So much screaming.
My brother, Cairo, stood in front of me, trying to protect me, but it didn’t make a difference.
“Paris?”
I didn’t want to remember anymore. I ran to a corner.
Days like this. Back and forth. Do you remember anything else? They all wanted me to remember until I screamed at them to stop it.
Then they said they were going to send me away from the station. That someone wanted me. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care anymore.
“Your name’s Paris, and this family is going to take you to their ship to live. They found you and they care about you. We’ll check in a little later, okay? But you can go with them now.”
“How old are you now?”
I held up my hand, fingers spread.
“Five years old. That’s good. Do you know your name?”
“Paris.”
“How about your last name?”
I didn’t want to say it.
These people weren’t my family, even though they said they were now.
I thought of the map of Earth that I’d coloured. A planet I’d never been to. It was nothing like Meridia and its rocky ground, where Daddy and Mama and my oldest brother, Bern, worked at the mines.
“It’s going to be Rahamon,” the lady said. She called herself Captain Kahta. “That’s your last name,” she said. “Look here on this ID tag. You always wear this around your neck, okay? Paris Rahamon. The newest crew member of Chateaumargot.”
Everything was muddy in my mind for a long time. I only knew what the captain and her mister said about how they’d caught a signal from a moon. They found me shot in the back outside my home, but I was still breathing. When they said those things, it was like they were telling me a story from a slate, one that someone else made up, except I didn’t have pictures to go with it. Maybe there was a drawn image of what my colony looked like, but I didn’t see it, couldn’t remember, and nobody let me look it up. The captain and her mister took me to a station and got me help. After a while, when I was fixed, they came back to get me and the station let me go. They said I had a new life now and it was good. Nobody would make me go back to the other life anymore.
I didn’t want to talk about my real family anyway.
I didn’t want to talk about the things I remembered before they were all gone. Everything was going to fade. For a while, after first waking up, I barely remembered anything. Then it started to come back and that was worse.
Back and forth. Remembering and forgetting. Remembering.
They wanted me to like Chateaumargot. They bought me toys and clothes, and at first I didn’t have to work. Their teenaged daughter looked after me when the captain or her mister weren’t around. Sanja played with me and took me around the ship to show me the garden and the games and the gym. Captain Kahta saw me when she finished work, and Mister Chandar cooked for me or showed me how to build models of ships and stations, though he said I would have to grow older before I did other stuff. He probably meant work.
For a few months aboard the ship, life was like that and I forgot most days after they passed. Captain Kahta said that was okay. They seemed happy having me, even though I didn’t talk much and hardly ever felt like playing games with them. They stopped trying to force me to play games when I took their toys and threw them against the wall. For a few days all I did was break the things they gave me, so then they gave up.
On my first birthday with them, I hit Sanja in the eye and she screamed. I didn’t mean to give her a black eye but she’d forced me to sit and do math. I hated math. It was frustrating and she kept pushing. I told her she wasn’t my mom so she needed to stop. She said Captain Kahta wanted me to learn math, and I said Captain Kahta wasn’t my mom either. Sanja got this look in her eyes like she was mad even though it was true, and she put the slate back in front of me and told me to stop being a brat and do my work. So I punched her face.
Mister Chandar locked me in my cabin alone. My stomach was growly by the time Captain Kahta came in. She sat on my bed next to me.
“Paris, why did you hit Sanja?”
I stared at my hands.
“Paris?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do. Sanja says you don’t want to do the math work.”
I shrugged. What did it matter?
“Paris. Look at me.”
I looked at Captain Kahta. Her dark eyes looked sad. For me. The dot on her forehead seemed to judge me. The people on the station had looked like that too, from what I remembered. I wished they would stop.
“Paris, you can’t go around hitting your sister.”
“She’s not my sister!”
Captain Kahta leaned back as if I’d hit her in the face too.
“She’s not my sister and you’re not my mom!”
“Okay, okay.”
“I don’t care about math!”
“Paris, sit down.”
I started to run around the cabin. She couldn’t stop me. Not until she grabbed me around the waist and held me down on the bed. I kicked and screamed at her. Mister Chandar came in and held me down too. They said things to each other, but I wasn’t listening. Sanja came in with an injet and pressed it to my arm.
Everything slowed down. Even me.
The ship was big. Tall, cold corridors, all white and grey. There were lots of adults but some kids too, older than Sanja or younger, like me. Every sixth day a vid screened in rec and we got extra treats than what was usually available from the galley. Sometimes I stayed
