Chapter 19

  It was well past noon by the time I got back down to the lower decks, the Bottoms as the locals called them. Weird name, considering we were in space. Who was to say who was on top or bottom?

  I’d been given a set of local clothes, not from the school’s stores but from the Dean herself who’d called one of her staff into the room and asked them to acquire something for me. What she came back with was a thick, layered thing made of dull brown and rusty red fabric, a cross between a robe and work overalls that both insulated and hugged the body enough to not get in the way. ‘Outer wear’ the lady had called it, because it was big enough to go over other stuff and those that favored this kind of thing lived on the outer layers of the station, away from the warmness of the core. The difference in temperature tended to be only about ten degrees or so, but folks in those parts of the station had made a fashion out of it. The boots were similar, heavy, modest, and with a good amount of insulation.

  Dad’s jacket, sadly, needed major repairs. Also cleaning. We both did, actually. I was feeling funky with all the blood, sweat, and…. Juices I’d been exposed to during my exploits. When you came down to it, we were all walking juice boxes waiting to be punctured, squished, or sliced open, and I’d done a fair bit of that recently. I forcefully rejected replaying the memories from last night in my head. No, I’d be seeing a bit too much of that in my sleep, I was sure, along with all the old, familiar nightmares about darkness, armored spiders, and undead dragons.

  Back to the immediate: I needed a bath, and until I could find a good solution for laundry, the jacket had to go into spatial storage. The Dean’s look of pained resignation when the jacket disappeared was a thing to behold. Maybe she’d thought I was lying to her about being a non-combat class to gain some kind of advantage or something, but whatever hope she had for that to be true died in a flash of light. She was stuck with me and all my baggage for better or worse.

  After I was dressed, the Dean’s staffer escorted me down to the lower decks. She walked a significant distance from me and didn’t say much, probably because of my aforementioned need of a bath. Then again, her standoffish nature could have been attributed to all the looks we were getting from the guards. They glared at us, following us with their tinted visors while their hands drifted to their service weapons menacingly. A few of them, I was sure, were part of the group that had tried to bring me down, especially the ones wearing armor that was slightly older and grimier than the others, the spare sets I would guess. My drones and I were not easy on the pristine, white stuff from last night. We’d cracked these dudes open like shellfish.

  Yeah, it was safe to say security was going to hold a grudge.

  Once over the bridge, my escort bid me farewell, directing me to the stairs where I’d need to climb, once more, to the top to get to my destination. The tubes in the Bottoms were an iffy thing most of the time, according to her, working sometimes, others not so much, crowded even on a good day. I sighed when I heard that part. I wasn’t out of shape or anything. I was just really done with climbing. I’d just spent an entire night climbing, and it hadn’t ended particularly well. I was tired, not just physically but mentally. Torture tended to take it out of a guy, but it wasn’t just that either. Despite my previous efforts my mind conjured flashes of people screaming in fear and pain.

  I’d hurt people. It was in self defense, but I’d still hurt them.

  They’d hurt me back.

  I stopped just before I put my foot on the first step. Several people that had been walking behind me brushed past, a couple sparing me an annoyed look but that was all. My foot hovered there.

  I needed a moment. I needed more than that. How long had it been since I’d actually slept? Not knocked unconscious or suffocated by gas. Actual sleep.

  The thought was like a rock tossed into a pond. It shattered the stoic front I’d been putting on since I’d left my cell and just left me feeling empty. The effect was almost immediate. The gravity on the station increased tenfold. It pulled at my feet, and my body began to sag.

  I wasn’t ready for this. Not as I was.

  Maybe some sleep then we can throw ourselves into the meat grinder again.

  So, instead of following the Dean’s advice and reporting to Lt. Colonel Whatshisface, I stuck with what I knew. It didn’t take long to get directions to the general area of the station I was looking for. No one knew the clinic I was talking about when I mentioned Doc, but lots of folks knew Devil’s Due. Once I got to that neighborhood, it was only a matter of backtracking until I was back on Doc’s doorstep.

  The outer door slid open to the waiting room, and the smell of incense and antiseptic wafted over me and stole away the rest of my will to continue the day. The place was packed with folks waiting in the chairs to be seen by Doc or one of his people, unlike how it had been last night. The receptionist recognized me after I gave her the Mr. Smith cover name, and I asked about Isea.

  The cot I’d occupied the day before, however, was taken, not literally since I’d broken it. What the receptionist meant was that the clinic was full.

  That was okay. I knew where to find a cot.

  —--------------------

  “Hey! Wake up!”

  For the second time in as many days, someone stole a perfectly good nap from me, one where I’d been dreaming of something other than being chased through a dark corridor.

  Something jolted the cot underneath my body. Then came a colorful stream of curses as the person shuffled around, hobbling on a stubbed toe. I was a heavy guy. It would take more than a kick to move me. In fact, if I’d not fixed this cot the day before, I’d probably not have trusted it to hold me up and chosen to sleep on the floor instead.

  “Hey! I don’t have time for this! And why does it smell like the inside of a grat’s ass in here? Get! Up!” The final two words were punctuated by two more kicks, gentler this time. The woman’s voice was gravelly but not deep. She sounded like one of those people that had spent her life yelling at one thing or another, and it had taken its toll over the years, maybe a smoker, though I had a hard time believing life in space was conducive to that kind of habit.

  I cracked an eye open and found a stocky, middle-aged woman standing over me with her hands on her hips. She was wearing work coveralls that were about 70 or 80% patches and sewn rents, and her hair was tied back under a blue cloth. Her face was as weathered as her clothes, but that didn’t take any of the fire out of her angry expression.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  She kicked my cot again.

  “Up! Some of us gotta work for a living, kid.”

  “Okay, okay.” I croaked. My throat felt like I’d gargled sand.

  “Doc needs to pay you kids better if you’re sleeping in the closet now. Sorry, but I need that cot. Got my mover parked outside, and I need to start loading before the rats around here start getting ideas.”

  I sat up and held up my hands in surrender. There was a stitch in my ribcage. “Ow. Sorry. Yeah. I’m up. Did you have to go right to kicking? I have ears.”

  Her eyes flicked to my prosthetic and back, and they narrowed with suspicion. “Who are you?”

  “Ryan,” I answered. “Isea’s friend.” It was only a little lie. I mean, I wouldn’t mind being friends with the guy, but I wasn’t sure if he would consider me one after last night’s adventure.

  What I’d said made the woman even more suspicious.

  “That boy’s got infamously questionable judgement. You just move on in after a night out on the town? Are you even supposed to be here?”

  Wow. Right to the accusations.

  I did appreciate the blunt approach, though. I’d had my fill of hidden meanings and double edged statements from the upper crust recently.

  “I’m not sure, actually,” I admitted. “I was a patient yesterday, and Doc seemed like a good guy. I figured he wouldn’t mind me getting some shut eye as long as I wasn’t in the way.”

  “I don’t know about what Doc would think, but you’re certainly in my way,” was her reply.

  I held my hands up again then rubbed my good hand across my bleary eyes. “Okay. I’m up. Sorry.”

  I bent down and folded the cot, careful not to let the tear in the fabric get any worse from moving it around too roughly. Then I picked up a stack of an additional four.

  “Where to?” I asked.

  She seemed confused at first at my offer to help, the angry frown she’d been wearing since we’d met morphing into something more complicated. She looked me up and down… mostly up since she was much shorter than I was. Then she gave my metal hand a little tap with her fingertips.

  “That’s fancy work. Where’d you get it?” She probed.

  The change of subject didn’t fluster me. I wasn’t awake enough to overthink things yet.

  “That’s a weird story,” I replied. “Woke up with it one day.”

  That threw her for a loop. Her face scrunched up as she considered what circumstances could lead to such a thing. Then she seemed to remember why she was there.

  “Just- uh- hand them to me then. I’ll take them- Hey. Where’s all the broken cots?”

  I looked down at the bundle in my arms then over my shoulder at the rest of the stack. My repair tool was hanging on the bar of one of the ones near the bottom. Isea and I had gotten through most of them before knocking off for the night.

  “Oh,” I said, shifting the bundle in my arm so that I could brush the hair out of my eyes. That was a mistake, since it came back absolutely filthy. Grimacing, I tried to hide the offending appendage behind my back.

  “Uh- Most of them are fixed already. Sorry Isea and I didn’t let Doc know before things got weird.”

  “Fixed!” The woman was scandalized. “Fixed by who! Did that cheeky quack go around me? We’ve had an agreement for years, and if he just up and took his business elsewhere, I would at least expect a goddamned heads up.”

  “No. No. Doc doesn’t know,” I pleaded. “We fixed them last night- Uh- Hey!”

  She snatched one of the cots from the top of my stack and dropped it to the floor before tipping it over and running her hands along the material. Her head shook side to side, disbelief slowly overcoming her.

  “This is… You’re messing with me,” she accused.

  I shrugged sheepishly. “They’re good as we could make them.”

  “I can see that,” she barked. “I mean you’re messing with me that you did this in one night. With what? You got a foundry tucked behind your ear or something?”

  Then her eyes flicked back over to my metal hand, the gears visibly turning inside her head. “That’s not local work,” she observed. Then she fixed her jaw and glared disapprovingly into my face. “You’re not local either.”

  I grimaced and sucked air through my teeth. “Fraid not.”

  She put her hands on her hips and entered full scolding mode. “What the hell are you thinking staying down here, then? This is no place for you. There are people down here that will slit your throat if they find out you’re one of them.”

  I sighed, wishing I was still sleeping. “Yeah, I know. I think I have a pretty good picture about how Exotics are viewed around here, but I needed to sleep and… Brightside isn’t an option. I didn’t really have anywhere else to go.”

  The woman chewed on her lip, and her eyes drifted to the floor as she thought. When she spoke again, her tone wasn’t quite as harsh. “You one of them?” she asked.

  “One of who? Exotic? Yeah.”

  “Academy brat,” she clarified.

  I winced at the venom she put into those words. “Technically, no,” I said. I thought about stopping there, but something about this woman told me to be a little more forthcoming. “I’m going to be, but the Marshals are doing their best to make sure I never make it.”

  There was a long pause as she scanned my face, jaw set, gaze keen to find any form of deception or weakness, but, eventually, her eyes softened and she let out a breath, taking a second to close her eyes as she gathered her calm. Then she cast a glance around the room, at the blades Isea and I had sharpened, the grinder, my casting bowl full of sharps, then back at me. She leaned forward, tilted her head, then, in a surprise move, reached up to wipe something off of my chin with her callused thumb.

  The touch was surprisingly tender.

  “You’ve got blood on you, you know,” she said.

  I shied away from her touch, not entirely comfortable with someone just up and cleaning blood off my face. The woman seemed to take notice of my discomfort and went back to words.

  “That’s pretty good work,” she said, pointing down at the cots again.

  “Thanks. I was just doing a favor for Isea.” I resisted the urge to do the hair brushing thing again. I seemed to do that a lot when I was uncomfortable.

  “I take it that since you’re sleeping here, you’ve got nowhere else to stay? No family?” she guessed, her tone reproachful but not harsh.

  I shook my head. I still had to find accommodations down here, and I was very much not liquid at the moment. Lots of money but not anything spendable.

  My pride wouldn’t exactly let me say I was lost and broke, though. “I have a recommendation from Brightside to get into Dive work,” I said.

  The woman scoffed, looking almost like she wanted to spit on the floor, only stopping out of respect at being in a place of healing.

  “Hell, hat won’t give you a door to lock, not yet at least, even if you live through your first dive,” she stated matter of factly.

  Again, I shrugged. “Maybe not, but it’s what I’ve got.”

  “Not anymore.” For the first time since we’d met, a ghost of a smile touched her eyes. “What was your name again?”

  “Ryan.”

  She nodded. I could tell she was actually filing my name away this time as something worth remembering. “Well, Ryan. I’m Tilly. If you can do that-” she pointed to the pristine metalwork on the cots. “I think we can help each other.”

  Hey. Thanks for giving In my Defense a chance. New chapters will be posted Tuesdays and Thursdays, eventually ramping up depending on the amount of interest we can generate here.

  As of right now, Patreon is about 30k words ahead of Royal Road. Additionally, patrons have the dubious honor of access to my audio tracks where I do silly voices and pretend to know what I’m doing.