I wandered around the ship when I wasn’t supposed to, but I didn’t like being minded all the time. Sanja handed me off to the other older kids sometimes and none of them liked it when I acted up. Sometimes I didn’t mean to act up, but everything grew frustrating. All of these rules about where I wasn’t supposed to go, and checkups in medical, and toys I was supposed to be interested in, and food I was supposed to eat. These faces weren’t the faces from my storybook memory. When I had nightmares, nobody came to save me.
Sometimes I remembered riding on the back of a four wheeler, holding an older boy around the waist. He’d tell me, “Don’t fall off, Puppy!” My brother Cairo. But I couldn’t remember his face anymore.
I had a lot of nightmares. The lady on the station said to record them when I woke up and send them to her, but I didn’t like to put words to them, so most of the time I didn’t. Mister Chandar or Captain Kahta was supposed to talk to me about them and help me record them, but after the first six months they stopped. I guessed they got busy. The ship travelled a lot and I didn’t check in all the time with the lady on the station. I didn’t ask Captain Kahta about it. If I didn’t need to do these things anymore, then maybe that meant I was okay. Or they didn’t care. I didn’t think they had to care since they weren’t my family.
My brothers Cairo and Bern. And Mama and Daddy. Now every time I thought the word “family,” I also thought of the word “dead.”
I turned seven on Chateaumargot. Captain Kahta and Mister Chandar threw a party. All the kids came, even the ones who called me weird and talked behind my back. Sanja tried to put a cardboard hat on my head. I knocked it away. After that, nobody was happy. They weren’t happy with me and the ice cream melted all over my cake. I felt a little bad so I was nice for the rest of the party and even hugged Captain Kahta afterward so she would smile. She hugged me back real tight.
“Are you happy, Paris?”
I didn’t really know what she meant by being happy, like maybe if I liked my cake and the presents. The games and new clothes.
“Yeah. Everything’s good.”
She touched my hair and smiled, like she knew I was lying.
The other kids on Chateaumargot didn’t stay nice. But neither did I. I got into fights a lot until every week Mister Chandar locked me in my quarters. I sent some of the kids to medical and sometimes I went to medical. Bruises and cuts and a couple black eyes shared amongst us. Then one shift when we’d docked at a station, Captain Kahta came to get me after breakfast and took me by the hand. She walked me to my quarters and told me to pack some of my favourite things. My clothes and whatever toys I liked.
“Why?”
“I’ll help you, honey.”
“Help me with what?”
She cried and held me, so I couldn’t do anything but stand there and let her be. Everything felt dark and silent, like someone had covered my ears and eyes.
She and Mister Chandar took me off the ship, and we went down the dock to another ship’s airlock. That ship let us inside the airlock but not quite inside the ship. We met another woman. She introduced herself as Madame Leung. She was shorter than Captain Kahta and had dark eyes like me. Madame Leung took me by the shoulders and smiled.
“You look just like your picture, Paris.”
What picture? Captain Kahta crouched down in front of me and told me to go and live with Madame Leung now.
“Why? Why?”
Captain Kahta’s eyes were shining, and she just shook her head. “You’ll be better here with Madame Leung,” was all she said. Then she straightened up, and they said things to each other in a language that I didn’t know. Mister Chandar squeezed my shoulder and then they left the airlock.
They left me on this new ship and I couldn’t do anything about it.
So I screamed.
Madame Leung dragged me to quarters inside her ship. Another woman joined her to wrangle me. They locked me in, and through the intercom she said, “I’ll come back when you’re done.”
That was it. No matter how much noise I made, nobody came.
Madame Leung told me everything. Captain Kahta and Mister Chandar didn’t feel they could provide me with the best, they didn’t know how to handle me, and they feared for the other children on board because of the fights I got into.
The idea of saving me wasn’t as good as the reality.
“You’re getting worse,” Madame Leung said. “That won’t happen here.”
Captain Kahta wouldn’t take me back to the station from long ago, and the lady who had given me away in the first place didn’t ask.
“We’re busy ships!” said Madame Leung. “Who wants to go all the way back to a station to deal with that shit?”
It was easier, out here in deep space, to hand me to another family ship like Madame Leung’s. Her ship, Dragon Empress, transported medical drugs to far-flung stations and colonies in need. But Madame Leung and her crew weren’t a part of EarthHub’s humanitarian organizations.
“We’re not pirates,” she said. “I don’t attack places and murder people. We just provide a service.”
“Why do you want me?”
She crouched down in front of me. I was sitting on the bunk. The quarters were smaller than what I’d had on Chateaumargot. The lights were narrow pricks in the ceiling, like sunrays through bullet holes.
“I like kids, Paris. Kids grow up to be good soldiers. Like my boys. I have a lot of boys here as it is, they know their work. You’ll do great with them, you’ll see.”
Madame Leung
