Through the Cracks by Laurel Hanson

Orphan Petra tries to survive in a space station where her kind are hunted.

Image generated with OpenAI

Petra hid in the darkness watching the jumbled stream of beings, both human and otherwise, milling in the central walkway. Sooner or later, it seemed, all the lost souls of the galaxy washed up in Under Haven Station to join those unlucky enough to be born there.

When she spotted the shine of gold winking from a Verengian's flowing garment, she hesitated. Cloven-footed, with skin as dark as the mines, Verengians moved like broken dolls put back together wrongly, almost human, but just a little slantwise. They frightened her more than any other aliens. But then, everything frightened her.

Still, gold was gold. Slipping onto the walkway, she threaded between the station hands and starship crews, cut a wide circuit around a group of Bellecti tourists in their unwieldy exo-skins, and merged seamlessly with a cluster of humans whose iridescent clothing told her they were from the Farness colony. She matched their movements, the better to hide from the Eyes, all while keeping her own eyes trained on the disjointed shape of the Verengian. When a Carnic trader dropped his communit with a clatter that turned heads, she made her move.

Just as Petra slipped the thing she'd stolen into her sleeve, the Verengian turned, its eyes nictating wetly down at her from the dark planes of its face. She spun away to sprint through the press of bodies and almost immediately realized her error. One of the circling Eyes, sensing the sudden motion, pivoted in her direction. Tucking her head down, she slowed her pace to a leisurely stroll in the shadow of an enormous man in the neon coveralls of a station engineer and listened for the soft whine of the approaching surveillance bot. She attempted a look of nonchalance, of someone with nothing to hide. It wasn't easy. She had so much to hide, her very existence in fact.

The mines had generated a lot of orphans like her. Her father had died in a drilling accident, and her mother was little more than the faint memory of labored breathing that had stuttered to a halt one night long ago. But according to GenCorp, the children of miners hadn't signed the contracts their parents had signed, so the company had no legal obligation to them. When GenCorp had pulled out of Under Haven, they'd abandoned the children along with the mines.

Under Haven's directors had immediately converted the deserted mining complex into a massive trade zone, but they hadn't wanted the orphans any more than GenCorp had. It was bad for business they said, and they brought in the Eyes to hunt them down. Petra had never learned what they did with the children they took away.

All she knew was that the first orphan taken was her little brother. Teffon had been foraging in the refuse bins behind Scumm's eatery when one of the Eyes had spotted him. It had hovered over Teffon's head, demanding his identification. How was a five-year-old supposed to respond? He'd been so terrified, he'd begun to scream. The piercing cry had brought her running, had filled the corridors even after the station guards arrived in their sharp blue uniforms and took him away. It only stopped when he disappeared into the maw of the Guardians wing and the heavy metal doors slammed shut before she could reach them. By then it had already shattered her heart.

She realized she'd been holding her breath and let it out slowly. The chemical signature of her exhalation would reek of fear and attract the attention of the Eye roving overhead. She was lightheaded by the time she sucked in another breath of Under Haven's stale air. Darting a swift glance upwards, she spotted the orb circling over a small pale woman with the confused look of a tourist who just wanted to buy some little trinket for her family back home.

Seizing the moment, Petra ducked into an abandoned shaft and slipped away into the dark. She could navigate the tunnels by feel, running her fingers over the spiral imprint left by the drill. Skipping over the void of two passages forking off to the right, she stopped at the third. Almost as soon as she turned down it, the ridged walls became jagged shards from a long-ago tunnel collapse. She wriggled over the heaped debris into her own bolt-hole on the other side, the one place in Under Haven she could curl up in safety, away from the Eyes.

When she flipped on her scavenged perma-bulb, the sudden brightness made her eyes water. Blinking, she turned to appraise the thing she'd stolen. Worthless. Just a flat disc of some bright metal that weighed almost nothing. Verengians had tech she could have bartered for credits - their nanoware was in particularly high demand - but instead, she'd stolen this useless token that wasn't even gold.

"Then perhaps you should return it."

Startled by the voice, she let the bauble slip from her fingers. It pinged lightly on the stone and rolled into the shadows where two yellow eyes watched her. The Verengian's broken-doll body melded with the dark, but then it leaned into her stolen light, nostril flaring. It had tracked her scent, Petra realized, and cornered her in her own bolt-hole.

Extending a thin digit, the Verengian delicately suctioned up the shiny trinket and returned it to the folds of its garment. "You stole something of value from me." The accusation filled the tight space, thrumming into Petra's skull. "I must steal something of value from you in return."

She swallowed and forced out words that were little more than courage wavering on a knife-edge. "You can try. I don't have anything worth stealing." She held up her empty hands.

The nostril flared again, as if scenting for the truth. Colorless membranes slid across its eyes several times, and then its thin digit tapped her forehead. With a jolt, a door inside her mind was flung open, and the Verengian's mind slipped in. She could feel its alien presence shuffling through her memories, weighing them the same way she had weighed its token in her palm. It paused when it sensed the memory of her prized possessions secreted away in her hiding place. Then it laid bare the contents of her little bundle with its words. "Four white stones and two pieces of Carnic glass - very pretty. A rusted chain and a key with no lock. An old cup - much dented. Quite a treasure."

Her 'treasure' was what was too worthless to barter. She opened her mouth to protest, but the off-worlder still held her mind in its grasp. The thin wheeze she produced was like the faint mewling of a kitten she'd once found that had died soon after.

Hot shame pushed against her chest as the alien casually scrolled through her thoughts like someone reading a menu. She could do nothing but stare her defiance into its yellow eyes where her own reflection stared back, a small and quivering thing.

"Little human, you stole my emblem thinking to feed the other children, didn't you?"

Petra managed a nod. She was the oldest and did her best, but she was always so tired, so hungry and afraid. She squeezed out an answer. "There used to be more of us but the Eyes took them."

"Such a responsibility." Its nostril puffed a green scent in her face. She'd smelled something like it once when she'd tried to steal food from the hydroponic farm. The clean scent of growing things had held her captive. Like a fool, she'd just stood there in front of the green towers breathing it in until she'd been chased out. The lab had updated its security system after that.

When the Verengian spoke again, its voice lilted like the soft music she could dimly remember of a mother singing to a child. "Little human, I will steal from you something you hold onto even more tightly than your treasure."

Petra's throat closed and she squeezed her eyes shut. She had nothing else. Only her life.

The stink of her fear wrapped itself around her while she waited, her nerves snapping beneath her skin. For a moment, nothing happened. Then a burst of light shattered behind her lids. She reared back, shaking with the expectation of worse things to come, but heard only the hollow resonance of the mines.

When she opened her eyes, the Verengian was gone. It had taken something from her mind, but she didn't know what. She could still recall the cool smell of the hydroponics lab, the soothing murmur of a mother's lullaby, the softness of the kitten, the feeling of a full belly from that one night when the recycler had malfunctioned. The pages of her life seemed intact, but how would she know if they weren't? Would she feel the empty hole left behind by the loss of a memory? Sense the jagged shapes of its absence?

"Wait!" she called down the tunnel. "What did you take?"

Her own voice echoed back at her, -ache, -ache, -ache.

Petra listened to it fade into silence. She wasn't sure when she noticed the peculiar stillness cradling her heart. The frantic vibration that had always trembled in her chest was stilled. The tension that had always strung her nerves as taut as wire was gone.

But something else was blossoming within her, an expansion, a weightlessness she'd never known. The fear that had always held the pieces of her heart in its grip was missing, and through the cracks of its loss, light was shining.