Nobody was left to come looking for me anyway. When Madame Leung smiled at me, it was like she knew it too.
As far as Madame Leung was concerned, I was a Dragon. No longer a Rahamon, and definitely not an Azarcon. She never asked about my actual family or where I came from. I doubt she would’ve cared if Captain Kahta had offered the information. Captain Kahta, who trunked me off as someone else’s responsibility, likely hadn’t explained much about my origins.
I was physically healthy and mentally able to handle complex tasks. Madame Leung made me one of her boys and that was that. One in a crew of four hundred men and boys who followed her lead. The drug queen of the Dragons, the Dragon Empress. Deep space depended on her, she said, to cure it of its ills.
She didn’t mean the war or the aliens or the pirates. If you couldn’t change anything, you could at least anesthetize.
I dreamed of my family. My parents’ faces, their presence, blurred out from my memory like a vid not quite calibrated right. But my brothers, my protectors, they remained vivid.
I didn’t believe in guardian angels because seeing them only in my mind’s eye was more like hell.
Over the years under Madame Leung’s tutelage and the hammering of her “boys” to make me into her version of a good soldier, one who kept his mouth shut and evaded authorities on station, the memories trickled back. Like the first bits of dust that were the only evidence of an exploded star, the further I went into deep space with the Empress, the closer I came to my own past.
Maybe it was because of these adopted “brothers,” foisted on me, equipped with powers of loving persecution. Unlike the kids on Chateaumargot, Madame Leung’s gang accepted me with a rough sort of respect. The lady herself handpicked me, and though they didn’t spare me when she disciplined my rebellious nature, they offered security and freedom at the same time.
I carried a gun. I learned the trade of drug trafficking, of clandestine meetings on stations and in half-forgotten refugee colonies. Some of our clients were even EarthHub soldiers, more wary-eyed than we were but equally invested in the market. Some used our pharmaceuticals for their intended purposes, others didn’t. As long as they paid us, it was none of our business.
Adolescence passed in a haze of tattoos, training, and tradecraft. The colourful ink emblazoned on my arms and back were needle tapped in the ancient way, not with a gun. I marked my years by the images that flowered across my skin: a tiger, an Earth mountainscape, a constellation of stars, and of course, the elaborate golden dragon winding its way down my spine. Sometimes, at the height of my pain, when I lay across the horishi‘s table, I heard my brothers’ voices, their ghosts whispered back in those moments.
Pain begat pain. What was the antidote for it? I’d been closest to Cairo. My oldest brother Bern held a more distant place, a peripheral shadow in the shape of our father. He’d fought back too, and the laser bolt slammed between his eyes.
Cairo’s voice surfaced with each needle puncturing into the shallow points beneath my skin.
He said, “Run, Puppy!”
His nickname for me. Because I was the baby.
Once, in the middle of the tattooing, I shoved at the pain. At the horishi. Blood scored across my skin, ruining the line she’d been drawing. I made her start on a new image. I’d seen it in the ship’s educational files while voraciously reading about an ancient civilization from a country I’d never seen.
I told her to ink an Egyptian ankh over my heart, and she didn’t ask.
Age was a meaningless thing in space, especially on a ship. Maybe I was some form of adult, chronologically in my twenties. But to look in the mirror was a different story altogether, with pictures that didn’t match up. Still a teenager to outside eyes. My own face reminded me of the ones who swam back to me in the dark, in sleep, in blissed out moments with occasional drugs in my system. We all took part, never to excess, but skating that line was a part of this world.
My third world. One was my heart, the second was my armour, and the third was my artillery. Two of those things protected the other.
I hung out with a boy named Soochan. He was a little more gentle than the other boys, probably because he was addicted to sweet leaf. He tended to smile, even when shit was going down around him, a beatific expression like a saint in the throes of religious epiphany. Once when a buyer tried to shaft us, Soochan was almost sorry. He made her face the wall of the station tunnel where we’d been doing the deal; his voice was so soft. “Just close your eyes, baby, and this won’t hurt a bit.” He whipped her once with his gun and kicked her a few times, then stole what he could off her body—an old platinum ring, her data dots. “Madame Leung don’t like stiffers,” he said. Still smiling.
On this ride between deals, the ship’s drives hummed like a hive of bees all around us. Soochan sprawled on my bunk, blowing smoke rings to the ceiling between slurred rambles. I tried to read, but the words upended and crawled over one another like roaches running from the light. Nothing made sense. Maybe it was the drugs, but the nightmares had been plentiful lately, taking my concentration into the dark.
In the middle of Soochan’s words, he said, “… Azarcon …”
My lulled focus sharpened like a shiv. From my seat on the deck with my
