If they found it easier to pretend, she would pretend. She lived in her rented room but went home for dinner whenever she could bear to or was too hungry not to go. Occasionally she went to Grandma Gregoria’s. No one ever said anything about what she was doing, though both Pa and Grandma carped about things in general and Fringe’s many failings in particular.
When she couldn’t face going home and wasn’t too hungry, she spent her time using junk and discards from the weapons shop to make complicated little machines that spun and glittered and were company of a kind. She rather longed for a pet but could not afford to feed one. Though she knew herself to be unattractive (Zasper said that wasn’t true), male companionship was offered from time to time. Each encounter left her feeling more alone than before, and she told herself she was safer without. She was less likely to make idle comments that others took as commitments or insults, less likely to let her insecurity bubble up in teasing gibes that only made others angry. Alone, she didn’t make mistakes that came back to haunt her. Except for her friendships with Zasper and Bloom, she hadn’t the hang of relationships. People always wanted her to be something else.
“Men don’t work out for me,” she told Zasper when he asked her about her love life. “I don’t have the right … oh, I don’t know, Zasper. It doesn’t feel right, that’s all.”
He shook his head, but he did not argue with her. Perhaps love didn’t work for her. There were people like that. Zasper thought he himself was probably one of them.
Besides, she told him, she got plenty of company at work, where they did approve of her.
Her job included the provision of target accuracy certificates for repaired arms. Most of the technicians used a firing stand, but Fringe preferred to shoot from the hand, becoming so skillful that her customers came to rely upon her work and her opinion. Even Zasper said, half in jest, that a girl with her target scores was wasted in a repair shop. To hide her pleasure at this, she remarked offhandedly she’d probably inherited the skill from some Guntoter forebear on Earth, thousands of years ago.
Then one afternoon she went to Grandma Gregoria’s and tried to be mannerly over a plate of grilled fish while Grandma snarled with more than usual vituperation about Fringe’s Trashish and unforgivable behavior and how beneath himself Char had married.
“If it hadn’t been for your ma,” said Grandma. “If it hadn’t been for those Tromses, you might have turned out to be something….”
Fringe had been much alone recently. The plate before her was the first food she had had in several days. She was still very young and often frightened. Day by day, she tried to keep bewilderment at bay, tried not to think about anything except the next minute, the next task, holding herself together with endlessly frayed and continually patched resolve. At the sound of the carping voice, something inside her tore. She felt it rip, felt the fabric of her life tear asunder, letting something molten and horrid show through.
“If I’m a Trasher,” she blurted, “it’s because Pa is so fucking arrogant he took on more than he could manage. Then even though he looked down his nose on the Tromses just like you did, he let them raise me! Then he despised me because I turned out to be just like them. Who else would I have been like? Take your tongue off me and my ma, Grandma, because we both turned out just the way you and Pa made us!”
It had been then that Gregoria, eyes bulging and mouth spraying fragments of fish in all directions, told Fringe to get out of her sight and never come into it again.
Fringe went in a mood of cold desperation, not so much angry as chilled and shocked, as though she were bleeding inside. She couldn’t stop trembling. She couldn’t get warm. The only warm place she could think of was Bloom’s, so she went there, or near there, stopping in an alleyway nearby because her stomach cramped, bending her double, and she couldn’t move.
“Are you sick, Fringe?” asked a voice.
For a moment she thought it was Nada. The voice had some of that quality, though without any whine to it. The speaker was half-hidden in a doorway, wearing the kind of cloak and hood that tourists sometimes wore in the Swale, tourists who wanted to see without being seen.
“I’ ll be all right,” gasped Fringe, waving the nosy intruder away.
“Something happened,” said the hooded woman. “Something bad.”
“Something,” agreed Fringe, taking deep breaths, suddenly remembering that voice. It was Jory—the old woman who’d followed her around back … back when she was only a kid. “What are you doing here?”
The old woman put back her hood and came closer, ignoring the question. “You’ve been hurt,” she said. “By somebody who shouldn’t have hurt you, but did.”
Fringe’s mouth dropped open and for a moment she forgot to breathe.
“What’s your second name?” the old woman asked. “I don’t remember your second name.”
“Dorwalk. Fringe Dorwalk.”
The cramp surprised out of her, Fringe moved around, trying to get a good look at whatever it was behind the woman, something large and shadowy moving there, just out of sight. A mystery. That’s all she needed right now, another mystery intruding on her life.
The old woman reached out, lifted Fringe’s chin, dried her face with the backs of her old hands. “I’m going to give you a
