“What?” he echoed back, the corner of his mouth tilting upward as if giving coordinates to his eyes. Clouded by smoke and whatever wandering thoughts he let off the leash.
“You said something. A name.”
“Uh—”
“Azarcon?” My name. My first world. Of course, he didn’t know.
“Don’t you read? Your head’s in that slate so damn much.” His hand flit, making the smoke from his sweet leaf cigret carve the air. “Captain Cairo Azarcon. EarthHub’s latest bulldog of deep space.”
I thought I was done collecting worlds. I thought Madame Leung had tied me to hers for the rest of my living days, one of her soldiers, one of her boys, all of the security and sanctimonious criminality of a group of people with no loyalty but to their own. Who needed more?
But this fourth world crashed into me and sheered to the side the next moment, casting me against my own armour.
“Captain Cairo Azarcon,” I said, like an invocation of the devil.
My brother lived.
When Captain Kahta had found me, had there been no others? Hadn’t she seen Cairo? Or had the pirates who had taken our colony also taken the one member of my family who’d lived and left nothing but the dead and thought-dead for the Chateaumargot to find.
There was nobody to ask.
I went on a treasure hunt around the Send. I excavated and saved every possible mention, note, and passing criticism lobbed toward my resurrected older brother. I became an Azarconologist, twice divorced from the name but like any spouse rendered obsolete by a new mate, I looked back with judgment. On myself if not on the one who’d left me.
I wanted to judge. I found shoddy pictures of a handsome man attached to reports of bravery and ruthless alien strit killing. He tended to avoid cams, so the only people who had a clear picture of him also had access to his military records or his daily life. But there was enough to see a resemblance. Dark eyes and dark hair. Tall. The kind of carriage in the spine that would rarely bend for anybody. He was the young scourge of aliens everywhere. He made his name as a fighter pilot but now commanded the spacecarrier Macedon. Specific corners of the Send said he was one to watch, like they were talking about a celebrity. The deep space war made military heroes.
My corner of the galaxy didn’t bow down to heroes. I didn’t care about the war.
He was a new father. Captain Cairo Azarcon was married and had a son.
I was an uncle.
What did blood mean?
I wanted to hate him. Didn’t he look for me? Couldn’t he have found me? In the entire galaxy, why didn’t his honed military skills somehow raze the stars for his little brother? Who told him I was dead, and why did he believe them? Why didn’t he refuse to stop looking until he had tangible proof of my death?
Neither of us were children now, and maybe, with so many years behind him, my brother also preferred to forget.
At Basquenal Rimstation 19, I met a woman at the bar and shacked up with her in a private den. After sex, she told me she was an investigative journalist and she’d been looking into my ship. She said this while smoking a cigret in my face. I was uniformly unsurprised. For some reason, when you had sex with a stranger, anything they said just seemed to go along.
“You think my ship’s a pirate? Because it isn’t. It’s not interesting enough to be a pirate.”
“No,” she said. She’d only told me her first name: Mabel. Her hair was long and silver but her face was young. Maybe from suspended aging treatments, so there was no telling her real age. Not that it mattered. “No,” she repeated. “Not a pirate, but they do recruit in unconventional ways.”
“Yeah?” I took the cigret from her and dragged. I could tell she was trying to read my eyes, but I’d been told enough times that I was “stoic,” that my stare walled people off and forced them to lay siege. So I watched her building a siege tower word by word.
“I found a node on the Send. Where the children are traded.”
She squinted at me as if this was supposed to mean something. When she didn’t get anything, she pressed on.
“They disguise it, of course. It looks like a parenting node where people are just talking about their kids. Getting advice. Arranging meetups at various stations. But there’re codewords. Pictures and codewords. These people know what to look for and how to ask for it.”
“Why are you telling me this? You want me to spy for your story?”
“No—but Paris, your name was there.” She glanced at my tags.
“My name Paris? Lots of kids are named Paris.” But my stomach began to form an ice rock, deep in the centre.
“Isn’t your last name Rahamon?”
I hadn’t told her that. It wasn’t something you told to someone you just shacked with. And maybe she could read my eyes after all.
My last name wasn’t Rahamon. I was reminded every time I heard it.
She said, “I recognized your first name and your face. Your picture had been posted. You were a little boy but the resemblance is obvious.” She climbed off the bed and went to her clothes, which were strewn on the floor in our haste to get together. Her body was flawless in a way that probably spoke of enhancements, but I hadn’t really noticed in the act. Now, as she leaned down to fish something out of her jacket pocket, I just wanted to get away.
But I couldn’t seem to move from the bed. This room. Or out of my own skin. She returned, sliding back beside me with a slate in her hand. She brushed at it, and soon lines of text and an image popped up.
A photo of me. As a child. I knew my own face like you did a vague stranger. Difficult
