Post by Blank on Sept 23, 2009 21:36:23 GMT -6
WARNING: RATED R FOR SWEARING, EXPLICIT VIOLENCE, SEXUAL SITUATIONS (NOTHING GRAPHIC), AND ALL SORTS OF OTHER STUFF. READER DISCRETION ADVISED
She comes into the world screaming. Doctor doesn't even need to give her a smack to get her going. She wails all the same, red and wrinkled, black head of hair already growing. The name was decided beforehand, and when they call that screaming child Grace, it's already bordering on irony.
But they're so happy to have her. Father looks to mother, and they both look to Grace, who's busy telling the world that she's here and she's not happy.
Grace is four years and six months old and she hates her new sister. It was bad enough when it was her and Constant, but now there's Hope and mom and dad keep talking like there's going to be another dumb kid around here. It's not fair. She used to get all the food and toys and she only had to share with one, but now there's Hope and she's got to share with her too.
She tells her mother that they should get rid of Hope and it'll be just her and Grace and daddy and maybe Constant too. But her mom just gives Grace a swat on the bum and tells her that she's going to have to get used to sharing.
Grace goes out into the street. She throws pieces of brick at the rats and she sulks around the factory where they play. The other kids find some money and they go to the store and buy candy. Grace comes along and while the shopkeeper is busy ringing them up, Grace shoves a handful into her pockets and walks out with the crowd.
She eats them sitting on a doorstep and wipes her runny nose on her sleeve. If mommy and daddy aren't going to get rid of Hope, and Grace is pretty sure they already like the little smelly monster, than Grace is going to have to deal with it. Taking things seems like a pretty great way to deal with it.
Grace is throwing rocks at windows when a bunch of girls come running by, yelling loudly and kicking over a trashbot. The rusty looking thing falls over and starts screaming, trying to right itself. Grace watches as they turn around and start messing with the 'bot, shoving it around and yanking on it's arms.
She knows better than to talk to the gangs, but Grace is in a foul mood. Her mom was supposed to bring a baby home from the hospital, but they came back with nothing but an empty box and some anti-depressants. She's been looking for a fight for days.
Grace walks over. They're big girls, way older girls, but they're cool and some of them are even smoking. On the back of one, Grace can see a tattoo. The girl turns around, noticing Grace, "Hey, scram."
"You scram. I was here first." Grace says, since she's not afraid of anything. She doesn't back down to anybody, not even kids older than her. Sometimes she goes home with a blood nose and a bruised face, but lots of time she doesn't.
"Look at this pipsqueak." She says, and the rest of the girls turn around to take a look at Grace. Grace crosses her arms and looks back at them. "Do you know who we are?"
"Dunno. Don't care." Grace says and a few of them even laugh. One says "Look at her, what a little snotbag".
The first girl flicks her cigarette to the ground. She's taller than Grace and older, and Grace knows she's probably their leader. "We're the Molls."
"I thought the Molls were supposed to be badass." Grace gestured to the trashbot, which was missing an arm and squawking about that, "Everybody can beat up the trashbot. Even Billy can, and he's slow."
There are some ooo's from the other girls, a bit of laughter. And the girl says, "You want to see badass? Alright. We'll show you badass."
Three hours later, Grace is tired and has cuts on her hands from the broken window they climbed through when breaking into the corner store, and she's got three new best friends (including Jane, the girl that Grace started backtalking) and she's happier than she's ever been.
They drop Grace off at home and Grace pounds her fist with Jane's. They're going to swing by the house tomorrow and pick her up, take her along when they go to do something new. She heads upstairs, nearly floating above the ground. She's eight years old and Grace is on cloud nine.
She's nine and she's getting her first tattoo, and it hurts like hell. Grace is no wimp though, so she bunches her hands into fists and bites her lip and doesn't make a noise as Fanny brings that buzzing tattoo gun across her back and goes back to filling in a petal. She smokes as she does this, running the gun with one hand and tapping ashes into a tin can with the other.
Her girls are with her, Sally who will be gone in one year and Jane who will be gone in two and Sweet Polly who is with her until the end. There's Ruth leaning against the wall and Alice telling stories about her own tattoo, which is still fresh and raw, and Anabelle helping Fanny with the gun.
Grace has never seen a real lotus flower. None of the Molls have. But they get them anyway, because that's the sign, the proof that you're really one of them instead of just some stupid hanger-on. There are real flowers in the Top, real lotuses. Maybe one of these days, she'll get to go to the Top and see them. Probably not.
Grace makes it through every petal on her lotus flower without a single sound or tear. When it's all over and her back is bandaged, they take her to Sally's home. It's twelve stories up, high enough that you can see the big floating lights right in front of you. They give her some of Sally's mom's homemade moonshine and peek under the bandages at the red raw flesh.
In two weeks time, she'll be taking a lighter to her fingertips to burn away the prints. It'll hurt more than the tattoo, but she'll suffer it the same, make her way through it. Because when she finishes, when turns her fingers into nothing but smooth pale flesh, she'll be just like the others.
Jill will laugh and show off her own burnt tips, and they'll drink and dance and celebrate being young and fierce and unafraid of the world.
It's good being a Moll.
Grace is running from the cops, Sweet Polly coming up the right and Jane just ahead. Her coat is packed full of stolen chocolate bars and cigarettes and if she's caught, it's off to rehabilitation and the boot camps. The cops are big and fast but Grace is faster and what's more, Grace knows the nooks and crannies of this place better than those big lugs ever could have.
They go dashing into the old steel plant, Jane heading up the stairs and Sweet Polly going out the back door, and Grace grabbing onto the old furnace and climbing. They'll have to pick one target or split up and risk losing them all.
They pick Grace.
She can feel them trying to grab her ankles but she's faster and she tucks them up as she climbs on top of the furnace and into the sooty chimney. She scrabbles up it, faster than any monkey, and goes as high as she can, barely breathing to keep the dust out of her nose and mouth. They try to follow, grabbing at her and knocking dust all down on themselves, and then they bang on the pipe. She closes her eyes and keeps going up, using ancient footholds left by some other kid.
Grace emerges on the forth floor, hitting the floor. A cloud of black soot just rolls off of her. She clears her eyes and heads to the window. The narrow walkway is there, and on the other side is Jane. "Come on! Grace!"
She hurries on up, getting out the broken window and across the catwalk. The cops come up the stairs, yelling. As soon as Grace is over, Jane dumps the walkway, cutting off access. They run through someone's apartment, Jane laughing and Grace leaving a black trail behind as some woman screams at her.
They meet up at Jane's place. Sweet Polly is already waiting there and she sighs when she sees Grace, "You're a mess." Grace hugs her, getting black all over Polly and Polly gives her a shove, laughing.
Grace sits in the shower, water running over her. It turns black and slowly filters down the drain. Polly takes the sink and Jane sits on the toilet, divvying up what they've grabbed. Smokes, chocolate, some painkillers, a few aerosol cans and three box cutters. A pretty good haul for them. They'll sell the cans to the huffers and keep the rest for themselves.
Jane gives Grace an extra bar of chocolate, "That's for climbing up the smokestack. Real peachy of you to be bait."
"Fik you." She says, drying herself with a grey towel, but there's no heat in her voice. The chocolate is great. She eats it in Sally's living room as they watch the trials and laugh at the ones too stupid or too slow to run away from the cops. One day, it'll be them standing there, but for now, they'll eat and laugh and not worry about what will happen the day they aren't faster than the cops.
At ten, Grace is spitting on cops, telling the pigs to go find someone else to shake down because they've got nothing on her. Grace is third-in-command and nobody's going to make her rat out the Molls, especially not that fat fik who thinks he runs their neighbourhood when he can't even run his own house. Everybody knows his daughter runs zip-guns right under his nose and yet here he is, giving Grace a hard time.
He's got nothing and they both know it. Nobody's got any proof that they've been breaking windows. Nobody's got any proof they took that truckload of fruit either. They sold what they didn't eat, which was still more than half. The smell of strawberries made her feel sick for a few weeks afterwards, but it was all worth it to have real fruit.
"How do you think you mother will feel?" The pig says, like it's some sort of threat.
Grace's mom has four other kids to take care of, and another on the way. "I think she's not going to give a shit."
She's right. Her mom shows up and doesn't bother pretending she cares what the pig has to say. She just takes Grace home. She's got plenty of other kids to worry about. Grace can take care of herself.
On the way back, Grace carries Hope on her back. She loves her little sister a lot, more than her stupid brothers. One day, when she's old enough, Grace is going to help Hope get into a gang too. A good one, like the Molls. Or maybe by then, Grace'll be a big shot. Maybe she can get Hope into a real school, like the rich kids.
Hope says, "I lost my doll."
"I'll get you a new one." Grace says and means it. Two days later, she comes home with a new doll. This one's head comes off if you pull it hard enough and it has eyes that open and close. It's the coolest thing ever, and Grace knows she's the best big sister in the whole world.
It's Sweet Polly that comes to Grace's house after Jane quits and tells her the news. Grace is furious when she finds out that Jane has gone and got herself knocked up by her fikin useless boyfriend and now the Molls don't have a leader. It was bad enough with the Goomars moving in on their territory.
They go to Sweet Polly's home and Grace rages, screaming and swearing and kicking the shit out of a table, breaking one of the cheap plastic legs. Polly lets her, sitting on the arm of a couch and watching.
And when Grace has got it all out, she sits down and leans her head against Polly. One hand runs over Grace's hair, and Grace says, "What are we going to do?"
"You tell me." Sweet Polly looks down at Grace, "You're the new leader."
"What? No." Grace shakes her head, "Don't fiking joke."
"I'm not. We took a vote. The girls want you."
Grace looks at Sweet Polly and sees that she's not making it up. She gets to her feet, "If this is their bullshit way of not letting you be leader, tell them they can stuff it up their-"
"I don't want to be leader."
"But you're second in command! Polly, you served under Sally and Jane! It means it's your turn to run. You're older than me, and you know more."
"I'm not a leader." Sweet Polly slides onto the couch and pulls Grace down beside her, "I don't want to be a leader. I like being second. You've got the drive. Half the plans we've done in the last year have been from you."
"But-"
Polly puts an arm around Grace's shoulders, "Come on. I know you want it. You're going to be great. You just have to say yes. I'll be your second, just like I was for Jane and Sally."
Grace looks at her hands. She does want it. She wants it so badly she can damn near taste it. Except there's someone else she wants just as badly. Grace looks at Polly. "I don't want you to be my second."
"Grace-" Sweet Polly sighs and then Grace just leans in and kisses her. It's not that much of a risk. Everybody knows Sweet Polly isn't sweet on boys. And Grace can't think of anything worse than being dumb enough to let some boy put it in her and get her knocked up.
When they stop kissing, Grace presses her forehead against Polly's. "I want this."
"You can have both." Sweet Polly just holds onto Grace, "Second's a pretty general term."
Turns out second can mean whatever you want it to.
This is not a love story. Love stories have confessions and heartbreaks and romance. There's very little of that to be found. Grace handles a relationship the way she runs a gang; brutal and efficient. Sweet Polly is no damsel and she handles a knife better than anybody, even Grace.
They drive the Goomars out of old territory. Girls go back to their leader with broken fingers and noses and a promise that if they're caught in the wrong territory again, they'll go back with something much nastier than a broken arm. Grace and Sweet Polly drive out the Dragons when they start sniffing around for girlfriends. They end up being the shit out of the leader with a baseball bat, the wonderful hollow sound of the aluminum bat breaking three of his ribs. They don't come back.
The cops don't even try chase Grace anymore. The fat fik and his zip-gun dealing daughter get sent up the system and slowly, Grace widens their turf, one fight at a time. She knows what fights are worth it and what fights aren't. They don't mess with people in the neighbourhood, just vendors and shops that won't pay protection money.
Grace starts saving her cash. She's got plans for this place, plans for the Molls. Plans for her and Sweet Polly.
They sleep in the same bed, a tangle of awkward limbs and scrapes and old bruises. Sweet Polly's apartment is always empty, her mom is always out and her dad is long gone. They get drunk and throw empty cans down on the street, laughing and catcalling at the boys. It's all just a never ending game. Lots of times, they go to Grace's house, and Sweet Polly helps with the dishes and the babies. Her parents don't quite understand but they're just happy to have Grace spending her time with someone nice.
She and Polly have plans. Grace is going to take Sweet Polly to the top, and they're going to look at the sky and then stare down those lovely glass towers, and they're going to see real lotuses. Just as soon as their territory is secure, just as soon as she has enough money, they're going to go and see what it's like to live where the sun reaches.
Grace wakes up when they drag her away from a sleeping Polly, when they pin her to the ground, three girls on her and another three holding Polly. She screams and fights, but they're at Polly's house, and there's nobody around.
"Hey bitch." A voice says. The face comes into view. Dorothy fiking Allen. The bitch leader of the Goomars.
"You fiking gash!" Grace surges up and she almost gets away before they get a better grip on her arms and slams her down, "You cowardly slut!!"
"Grace, stay cool." Polly says, afraid and terrified.
"I heard you were a lez, didn't realize both of you were." She pulls out a switchblade, "This is going to make this more fun."
"When my gang gets here-"
"We already visited them. All of them." Dorothy comes back into view, waving the switchblade, "See, we played a little game. And now we're going to play it with you. I think you know it. See, it's called face or gut."
"oh shit." Polly moans softly. Grace says nothing, staring at Dorothy. You did Face or Gut to traitors, to girls who ratted out the gang or played stoolie. You didn't do it to other gangs. You didn't come to them at night when they were asleep.
"When they hear about this, they're going to come down on you like hell." She says, voice tight and vibrating with rage, "The Sadgrrls, the Babydolls, even the Squeens. They're going to kill you for this."
"No, they won't. They're going to stay where they are. Because tomorrow they're going to find out that the Goomars have an alliance with the Dragons, and if anybody steps foot in our new territory, they'll have to deal with us and the Dragons, and we all know what they do to girls."
"You fiking bitch." She hisses.
Dorothy motions to the other girls to drag Polly closer. With Polly watching, Dorothy put the blade against Grace's eyeball, "Beg."
"Fik you."
"No, not you." She looks at Polly, "Beg me to cut your whore's face up."
"no." Polly shakes her head.
"Beg me to cut up her face, or I'm going to gut her."
Polly shakes her head again, but Grace knows what's going to happen. They're going to do this for hours if they have to, they're going to break Sweet Polly and she's going to beg them to cut Grace up because she won't want them to kill Grace instead. And if they cut her face, then it's all over. A girl with scars on her face is low, lower than whores, lower than huffers. A girl with scars is somebody you can spit on and beat and rape and nobody is going to say boo.
So she takes it into her own hands.
"Hey Dorothy, is it true about your old man?" Grace says, as casual as she can with a knife right against her eyeball. Dorothy looks at Grace, really looks at her, eyes a bit wild. And at once, Grace knows all the rumours are right. She grins at Dorothy, more of a baring of teeth than a smile. "Oh mega sick."
"Shut up. Shut the fik up you fiking lez-"
"Everybody knows. Everybody. We were just laughing about it the other day-" Dorothy's knife falls back and an empty hand slaps Grace right across the face. It's hard and makes her brain rattle a bit, but she laughs through it and through the sudden flood of copper in her mouth.
"Grace, no!" Sweet Polly says, already seeing where this is going.
"Damn girl, I though you'd hit harder than that. You daddy would be real ashamed of you." Another blow rocks Grace. Her face feels hot and red. Still, she laughs. You had to laugh.
"Shut your whore mouth, or I'll carve her eyes out." Dorothy turns the knife to Sweet Polly, pressing the curve just under Polly's beautiful blue eyes. But her voice is shaking and Grace goes in for the kill.
"Yeah? You got a lot of experience carving things out? 'cause I heard what they carved out of you thanks to daddy dearest-"
She swings her arms and the knife goes through her skin like butter. It's a sharp hard pain, completely unlike anything she's felt before. She gasps, and Dorothy put her face right against Grace's. "Squeal, bitch."
Grace takes the opportunity, closing the distance and biting Dorothy's face. Dorothy tries to scream, but the right half of her mouth is caught in Grace's teeth, along with a chunk of cheek. Through the pain, Grace bites down hard and wrenches her head back. The other girls hit Grace, trying to make her let go. There's a rip and Grace goes tumbling back while Dorothy screams. It was a nasty wet sound. Grace spits out the skin stuck in her teeth and tries to fight her way out.
The second stab isn't too bad. The third hurts like a bitch. And she goes a bit grey during the forth one. She can hear Sweet Polly screaming too, but it's far off, like something underwater. All Grace can feel was the knife going in and out of her. And then the sound of footsteps as they leave.
When the colour comes back into the world, she's alone with Sweet Polly. Grace's mouth is bitter and she can't taste anything but blood. Her guts are aching bad. She takes a look down, and then quickly looks away before her brain can register what she's seeing. So instead, she reaches out a hand, grabbing onto Polly.
"hey." She says. "hey, polly."
"damnit grace." Polly manages to spit out. There's blood on her lips. Grace can see her insides hanging out her shirt. They're so pale. She looks away. Polly's smiling, awkward lopsided thing, so Grace smiles back. "damnit grace."
"i'm going to get help. i'm gonna-" She gets a foot under her, rises up. Falls back down. She gets a hand on her stomach. Hurts like hell, but she keeps it there. She can feel her own insides. Can't have them swinging around. "polly, you stay here. you stay awake."
"you're going to die. i'm going to die."
"nobody is dying." Grace crawls over to Polly and kisses her on the lips. "stay here. i'll be back."
With that, she gets to her feet. She takes it one step at a time, right hand on her stomach and left hand on the wall to keep her upright. She staggers out through the open door and into the hall. There are doors on either side, but she knows nobody will answer at this time of night. Nobody's that stupid.
She takes the elevator. There's a clinic up the street, open all night. Like the dead, she stumbles toward it, leaving a trail of blood behind her to mark where she's been. Out of the lobby she goes, bloody hand-print on the glass. Nobody's out this late at night. Nobody but the twelve year old holding her guts in with one hand.
Grace walks as far as she can, powering along even as black spots fill her vision, even as she has to slide along the walls because she can't stay straight. Her legs keep pushing. Her hand keeps her guts in, and her guts feel like they're on fire, like someone tossed a flare into them and set it burning. She has to get the clinic. She has to make sure they find Sweet Polly.
When she can't walk, Grace crawls. She crawls the whole last block, dragging her insides on the ground when she needs both hands to keep moving. The trail of blood is thick and dark, leading back to the apartment. Her vision is nothing but a tight tunnel, one faint light at the end of it: the clinic. She has to get to the clinic.
And she does, collapsing just inside the sliding doors. They come to her, the nurses and orderlies, pulling her up off the ground and and setting her on a cot. She talks to them the whole time, repeating Polly's address, slurring her words as she tells them they have to hurry up because they can still save Sweet Polly. Grace is a goner, she knows it. She tells them to stop wasting their time, even as they put the air mask over her face, even as they give her a dose of tranqs. The black closes in and Grace passes out, still telling them that Polly's alive, they have to save her.
Whens he wakes up, it's two weeks later, she's in a clinic in the Inbetween, and Polly's in a plastic bag at the morgue.
Six months later, and Grace is taking an elevator to the Inbetween. All her possessions are in a single bag and she wears the only clean clothes she has. There was another set, but she had to leave them behind. The blood soaked all the way through them, and no amount of washing was ever going to get that blood out.
There's still dried blood on her skin, under her fingernails and the creases in her fingers, the edges of her body where she didn't scrub hard enough in the shower. It's Dorothy's blood, and the blood of the other Goomars. She didn't have much time to get her things together, not after the pigs came crashing into Dorothy's apartment.
They caught her in the act. Dorothy was barely alive by then, holding on only because Grace wouldn't let the bitch go. When they came in, knocking down the door, Grace let her knife slip and make sure Dorothy wouldn't somehow survive, wouldn't come looking for revenge. And then she'd gone out the window in her bloody clothes, clutching Polly's knife.
She knows there are bulletins looking for her, maybe even a little reward money. They won't find her. Grace has cut her hair all off, and she's dressed in her brother's clothes. In the bag, she's got Polly's knife and Polly's ashes, and thirty credits, and a photo of her parents. She's going to find a ship. She's going to let them think she's a boy until it's too late. And she's going to leave this shithole behind.
At first, she thinks it's just a large light above her. But it gets bigger as the elevator gets higher, and then Grace realizes that she's high enough to see the sky. Her hands press against the glass and she stares at it, the expanse of blue slowly appearing as the elevator rises. It's bigger than it looks on holos, bigger than in pictures.
The elevator opens and she steps out onto the walkways of the Inbetween. Grace stares up at the sky, tears rolling down her face. She's here with Polly. They're out of the Below.
Grace wipes her face and heads down the docks, looking for a ship to take her.
It takes Jenos Holo three months to realize that Forjacks has a first name, and even more importantly, that Forjacks is a girl.
She gets herself injured when she's knocked back into an exposed piece of metal and it cuts up her chest. Grace fights with him as he drags her to the mess to patch her up. The reasons become clear when he manages to get the shirt off of her and discovers that she's packing b-cups, wrapped tight to her body by beige elastic bandages.
First thing he does is kick her out of the bunks and makes her sleep in engineering. They're out near Corus, so it's not like he can just dump her there and let her fend for herself. For one thing, Grace can't even swim. And the spaceport is only half-built. So she stays on board, but gets moved out of the bunks.
At first, Grace doesn't even mind it. She's spent years sharing rooms with people. The chance to have one all to herself is great. Except, as it turns out, Grace has spent too many years sharing rooms. And when she lays down in her bunk, she can't sleep. The engine hums too loudly, and she can't hear anybody breathing.
She doesn't tell Holo. Telling would be whining and she didn't whine when she was a boy, why would she do it as a girl? So she powers through the lack of sleep and she does her work, even though Holo keeps trying to find reasons that she can't lift crates and why she should be in the mess helping the cook.
He does manage to shove her in the kitchen. Halfway through cleaning the grill, she passes out and narrowly misses doing a faceplant into the superheated grill. Instead she only hits her head on the floor and opens up a gash on it that bleeds like a stuck pig.
Holo gives up on his plans to try protect her and moves her back in with the men. Everybody leaves Grace alone and it's just like normal again, only now she can grow her hair out if she wants. It's nice.
Grace is fourteen and pointing a gun at the head of another man. Holo's picking himself up off the floor. His nose is bleeding but Grace doesn't take her eyes off the man in front of her, the traitorous bastard that just tried to start a mutany.
"Grace, it's over." Holo says, touching his nose, "He failed."
There's already one dead guy on the cargo bay floor. She killed that one first, shot him in the chest. Grace can hear Charlie throwing up. The dead guy was named George and he liked to play cards with Grace. Apparently he also liked to think of ways to kill Holo and take control of the ship.
The guy in front of her is Dan. Dan's got his hands up and he's talking quick, saying over and over, "Please don't. Please don't."
"He just tried to take your ship." Grace says. Her voice is flat, toneless. She's not angry. She's not afraid. She knows how to deal with traitors, how to deal with people who take what's yours.
"Grace." Holo says, and steps in, carefully putting a hand on her arms, making her lower the gun, "It's okay. We'll drop him planetside as soon as we hit Heimdall."
"Holo, you can't trust him. There's one thing to do." She looks at him and Holo stares at her. He's never seen this side of her before. She's Gracie to him, the kid who's practically a mascot, the little girl who works twice as hard as the boys and tells ridiculous stories about living in the Below. And for the first time, he's realizing that you don't become leader of a gang, any gang, just by being adorable.
You become a leader by being ruthless.
"Grace, that's not how I do things." He says, and gets the gun out of her hands. They lock Dan up in the brig (which is also the laundry room) and throw George's body out the airlock. Grace watches them both with no emotion and when that's done, she goes to her bunk and crawls up inside.
Sweet Polly's still living in a plastic bag, and she presses it against her chest, holding tight onto the ashes.
Holo has no family. Grace figures that's why the man gets so attached to her so fast. The mercenaries come and go, and there's just her and Charlie and Tom (the pilot) and James who stay on all the time. James is alright, and Charlie's dumb but harmless, and Tom gives her the creeps but he knows better than to try anything because Holo would turn his face to ground meat.
At first, she figures he's sniffing around her, trying to get what she wouldn't give to any of those dirty Below boys. But eventually she connects the dots and realizes it's just Holo's way of trying to be a father. Grace doesn't need another dad, she's already got one. But it's not bad having someone to watch her back.
Her mom sends Grace letters and photos, and Grace sends home her paychecks. It's not like she needs much living on the ship. Holo doesn't even take her board and food out of her pay anymore, and at first she got mad, but now she just accepts that if he wants to give her extra money, who is she to tell some old guy what to do with his cash? He's not poor, and Grace has a family to take care of.
She gets the new photo of her baby sister and shows them off, proud as she can be. Prudence looks just like Grace, hair the same shade of black, and she makes the whole crew look at it, and photos of the rest of her family. Holo laughs at how proud she is and ruffles her hair. He doesn't have any family, so she sends him copies of hers. A guy needs photos of somebody to have set up in his room.
Her family doesn't end up there, but she sure does. Photos of Grace and Holo standing on the surface of Antheia in front of the body of a bear. Grace is beaming, and she's holding the still-smoking rifle in her hands. Photos of Grace on Corus, a handful of feathers from someone's wing. She's got a bruise on her cheek, but she's still grinning proudly, content in the knowledge that she managed to keep a grip on those robin feathers.
Grace doesn't need a father, but Holo sure as hell needs a daughter, and she fills the role perfectly, reckless and ruthless and charming in her own particular way.
The problem with someone seeing you as a daughter is that they start treating you like one. And while every other man is allowed to go out drinking and whoring, Holo manages to figure out reasons to keep Grace aboard.
Oh sure, he makes the excuses sound good. It just always happens that he's got business to attend to and that he can only trust Grace to look after the ship for him. At first she doesn't mind it, but after a while she figures out what it really means and she's pissed. There's no reason to be treating her like that. She can drink most of the guys under the table. Grace grew up drinking Below brew, sweetened with antifreeze, and she had a girl before most of the guys even knew what to do with one.
Grace doesn't throw a fit. Instead, she looks at herself long and hard in the mirror and decides that maybe it's time she starts using what she's been given instead of hiding behind baggy shirt and short haircuts. She's fifteen and about ten centimetres over over a meter and a half (a little shorter than she wanted to be, but this is as tall as she's getting) and she's been layering sports bras for the past three years. If they will not treat her as a boy, than she will make being a girl work for her.
Holo leaves her to guard the ship when they dock at the mass of ships that will one day become known as the Underworld. Everyone goes to check out the whores, everyone except her and Charlie. He got caught huffing paint so he'd stuck on the ship as punishment. Charlie is twenty and dumb and harmless, and most importantly, he's an easy target.
Grace finds him in the mess hall. He's sorting through canisters of cooking spray. "Hey." She says. Charlie turns around, clearly expecting her to yell at him. Instead he drops the cans and stares at her. He gawks a her, mouth opening and closing as his brain fails to find the words. She walks toward him, feeling cold and kinda frightened, but full of a new, strange power. She pushes him up against the cupboards and says, "Why don't you do something useful?"
Later, she's lying in Charlie's bunk, Charlie half-lying on top of her and snoring. Grace is tired and sore, but content. Turns out sex with boys isn't all that bad. She might even like it.
Holo blows his stack when he catches them a few weeks later, making out in the engine room. They have a fight, their first real full-blown one, loud enough that the whole damn ship hears. But Grace stands her ground. She's not a child and she's not his daughter, and if Holo won't treat her like a real crew member, then she's going to find some other ship.
And he actually backs down. Of course he finds ways to cover it up so it's not so damn obvious to the crew that he's backing down from a fifteen year old, but he admits that maybe, just maybe, he was treating her wrong and that she deserves better.
The next time they go ashore, Grace goes with. Holo locks up the ship and comes along, and Grace shows them all how Lowers party.
The first, and last, indication that there's something wrong is when she feels this horrible pain in her guts, and she goes running to the doc. She says, "I think something just broke." And then her legs go and give out on her as it gets even worse. The man gets her up on the dinner table and peeks at her insides.
And what he sees under those scars is a mess that damn near takes his breath away. The pain hurts so bad that Grace starts crying, and they have to put her under. Holo turns around and heads back to Terra because even the doc can't fix this. It looks like something just split in her guts and there's a chunk of small intestine missing.
They make it. Holo knows a Below doctor who owes him favours. They break into a 'Tween clinic and the friend and the ship's doctor get her open and operate on her. It's the damn stab wound. Her insides were well and truely fiked up after she'd been knifed. The bits that hadn't been nicked had been dragged on the pavement, through the filth and dirt. They'd taken out bits and replaced parts of her intestine with a cheap substitute. It was only meant to last four years. They'd figured she would be dead before then, so nobody bothered to tell Grace that maybe she needed to keep a close eye on her insides.
They replace over half of her intestine with a better synthetic. While they're in their, they note down what she's missing. One ovary, one kidney, and an appendix. They slap in a synthetic filter to replace the kidney, and don't bother messing with the other two. Then they sew her back up and get out of the hospital before they're caught.
Grace wakes up in someone else's apartment, lying on a bed. Holo's sitting in the chair beside her bed, head forward, snoring softly. He's brought Sweet Polly with him, and she's sitting in a real nice jar that Grace got when they were on Antheia. Her head is pounding and her insides hurt like a bitch, but she feels alright seeing him and Polly there.
They give her x-rays and papers, and she pours over them, learning what her insides look like. She should be okay, but they've got a list of stuff not to do and Grace reads it only once, scowling at all the suggestions and how much stuff she's not supposed to do now. She ignores it, of course. Hell, the synth-kidney is better than the real thing.
Charlie asks her if this means he's sleeping with a robot, and she hits him hard enough to bruise his arm for a week. It's the beginning of the end for them. Charlie gets kicked off the ship a few months later when Holo catches him trying to huff brake cleaner, which is the dumbest thing he has ever done. They leave him on Corus and he cries and promises Grace that he's going to call her everyday and that he's going to save up for a wedding ring and marry her as soon as she's legal. Grace tells him her answer to save him some money and he just weeps even harder.
He waves at her as the bay doors close and keeps on waving, even after Grace has turned away. She forgets him as soon as they leave atmo and, for a while, Grace thinks he's done the same.
But she's wrong. She is unbelievably wrong.
The whores all hate Grace the first time they meet her. Even when the other women are telling the new girl to give Grace a chance, she can see the twist in their features. Grace doesn't blame them. She's seventeen with long black hair, young and beautiful, and all their minds see is competition, even though Grace would never fik for money. They think she's going to steal their men, or humiliate and embarass them to make herself look good.
But Grace is here for the same reason the men are. And eventually they warm up to Grace once she starts buying them drinks and talking with them. The men pay to have the women sit on Grace's lap, and suddenly the frowns and scowls disappear as they realize they've just found a new cash-cow to milk. Grace isn't preforming for the boys, but hell, as long as they keep their mouths shut, she'll let them watch a little.
She never takes the women back to the ship. Ever. This works out well enough since most of the ladies have their own chambers or shuttles to entertain in, but there are always a few who want to see the ship. Grace never takes them back. She's not here looking for love, just a quick fik and then out the door.
There aren't many men at the bordellos. Oh, there are always a few, but men who want other men rarely have trouble getting that for free. It's the same reason Grace never has a trouble sleeping with men for free, but rarely sleeps with a women without paying upfront.
Sometimes she wishes men were as easy as that. They get clingy. They act like she belongs to them. A fist fight broke out a few weeks ago on ship. Grace had been sleeping with two men at the same time. They both knew about each other. They'd both promised her they were okay with it. And yet, she was the one who walked in and found William bashing Jeffery's head into the table, all because they got into a pissing match about who she liked more. They got left at the nearest port and Grace went down to the engine room with a padd and talked to Hope for a solid hour about how much she hated men sometimes.
Grace doesn't worry about what Polly would think. She knows Polly would understand. The girl in the jar is the only person Grace has ever really loved. All the girls and all the boys are just a distraction until they day they're together again. They made a promise. When she dies, she'll go to the old freeway and find Polly sitting underneath the rusty overpass sign. And then they'll go on to whatever comes after that and tear up the town.
Eighteen means she's legally an adult by Terran standards, though Grace has been an adult in all but name for eight of those years. Time has worn down the rough spot, and sharped her edges, and now she knows not only how to be an adult but how to look and act like one.
There are new challenges. Sexism exists still, and though Grace has never read a book on the subject, she can tell you exactly what it means. It means men expect you to do twice as much as they do, for half the share. It means they stare at your tits and then call you a whore for letting them look at them. It means they fight over you like a dog over a piece of meat, and then treat you the same, something to chew up and slobber on.
The new ones are always worst because they're still trying to find their place and they think she's the perfect place to start. Prove you're better than the girl, secure your place so they all know you're not the lowest rung on the totem pole. They think they can get Grace angry, get her all riled up so she does something stupid, or maybe they think if they pester her enough, she'll spread her legs and give them a prize for being the dumbest loudest brute on the ship. She usually puts them straight and after a month or so, they smarten up and learn that Grace is more dangerous than any other man on the ship.
But then along comes Al. He doesn't learn. And as time goes by, it just gets worse. He can't keep his mouth shut, and there's too many times he 'accidentally' tries to come into the showers when she's in them, or 'accidentally' opens the curtains of her bunk. Even a solid boot to the junk doesn't make a dent. Holo will be pissed if she guts him, so she does the next best thing.
She picks him as her partner on salvage duty.
Grace is always the first to step up. Used to be you'd fight over who got to go on salvage, but nobody wants to be the first through a ship hull these days. It's all 'cause of the plagues. You never know if the ship you're cracking lost an engine or lost air, or if they all died choking on their own snot and gobs as the 'nza chokes them alive. That's not the official name, which is nothing but a bunch of letters and numbers, but everybody calls it the 'nza anyway. Nobody wants to step into plague ships these days.
But you can't go alone. So Grace volunteers and she picks Al. She can see a little fear come into those dumb eyes of his, and then it's replaced with a little glee. The man now thinks maybe he can get Grace alone, get a good look at what she's been denying him. He can't risk that around the other men, they'd castrate him, but here... alone on a ship? She can see it in his eyes. He's thinking about what he's going to do when he gets her suit off her.
She goes first. And once inside, Grace gets as far away from the airlock as possible. So by the time the Al comes in, she's gone, a ghost in the dark. She loots quietly and efficiently, and listens as Al fumbles his way down the corridors. He starts out by asking where she is, then starts laughing, asking if she's scared of the monsters, if she needs somebody to hug her. Grace doesn't radio back, doesn't make a fiking noise, and then the laughter all dries up. She swims circles around him. The vents in these cargo ships are big enough for maintenance men, more than enough for Grace, so she zips from one room to another.
Grace floats silently by a dead family, child's face blue and strained in death, and leaves them floating right in front of the door. Two minutes later, he cracks the door open from the outside, and she can hear him give a sickened and terrified moan. Any dreams of assaulting her are long gone. If either of them takes off the suits, they'll be dead. The plague is so contagious that Terra shoots down all ships who are suspected to have it.
While he's occupied with the dead family, she finds another body, just a few doors open, and pulls him into the previously empty corridor. When Al comes floating back out, she gives the body a shove. She goes one way. He goes the other, floating down toward Al. Al turns around just in time to see that bloated leering face as the body collides with him, and his bloodcurdling scream echoes through the ship.
She returns to the airlock and goes through decontamination. It takes ten minutes, and that's ten minutes the lock won't open for Al. He screams and cries like a child, begging for them to not leave him there in the ship. When Grace finally emerges and takes her helmet off, the suit and loot both smell strongly of alcohol and disinfectant. Holo's standing there with the boys.
"Should we let him in now?" Holo asks her casually. He knows what's been going on, or at least, he knows bits of it. Grace nods.
Al's finally let in. They can all see the terror in his eyes, and the flash of rage when he sees Grace standing there. She waits until the airlock finishes with him, and when he comes stumbling out, she says, "Where the hell's your salvage? What the fik were you even doing?"
"You-" He says, but he goes quiet, looking at what she's got. He has no idea how quickly she gathered all this, but she knows he thinks she took longer than she did. No way she could be haunting him when she was busy combing over the ship. And the fear comes back, twice as hard.
Al never bothers her again. Doesn't even look at her, never speaks to her unless he has to. That suits Grace just fine. And when the new men come on, and they start into it, they others pull them aside and point to Al, whose hands shake and who gets afraid of the dark, who flinches when Grace smiles at him. That's all it takes to get them to lay off.
She starts looking at ships of her own after she realizes she's doesn't want to be Holo's first mate.
It's not that he's offered it to her or anything. But she knows that when James leaves in two months time to spend time with his new wife, Holo's going to look at Grace and give her the position. And there were times when she was sixteen and seventeen when she really wanted it, wanted it so bad she could taste it.
Except... except being first mate means still following Holo's orders. And she's gotten tired of that. She loves the man, considers him her best friend in all the world, but the way he conducts business is so outdated. He won't do supply runs to Nox or Glacies, even though they pay through the nose for totally legal items. And he won't hire non-humans, even if they're perfect for the job. He's set in his ways, and he remembers a time before humans had contact with other species, back when they just saw distant images through their telescopes.
He understands. When she starts asking him advice, or showing him ships she's looking at, he helps her out, tells her which ones are worth it and which ones are shit. He was a mechanic, and she's seen the very first ship he ever built. It's a damn deathtrap, held together with duct tape and rubber cement and spit, but it flew and if Holo could make that piece of crap fly, then he'll be able to help her find something.
She learns how to fix the engines, how to diagnose the problems and how to jury-rig it until you hit planetside and can get a professional to fix it for you. For months, she does nothing but look at ships and talk to men in spaceports and figure out how much she has to spend on a ship. Holo introduces her to men who have ships for sale and when she finds reasons why she doesn't like them (too ugly, too old, too big, too small, just... not right) he doesn't need explanations. He just nods.
"You'll know when you've got the right ship." He says one night while they're playing Hearts. Grace is kicking his ass, but she's always been good at this game. "You'll know it because you'll fall in love with it. Now stop pissing around and focus."
They play out their hands. She picks up all the penalty cards, including the Bitch, and Holo curses and everybody adds 26 points to their score. Grace just laughs and kisses the Queen of Spades, leaving a faint red smudge on the card.
She finds her ship the very next day, those sleek silver curves, the strange and already-outdated style, quickly tossed aside for boxy models with no heart or charm. and Holo's right. It is just like falling in love.
Grace buys it, no questions asked. Holo grumbles on about inefficiency and uselessness and how it's all ass backwards, but Grace doesn't give a shit what he thinks. She's in love with it. The old owner called it Populuxe which is the dumbest name Grace has ever heard. Two minutes after the sale's complete, she officially registers her ship as the Queen of Spades.
"You're going to get tired of that name." Holo says to her, watching as the registration comes back.
"Never." She says and knows she's right.
On her twentieth birthday, she and Holo go out and get staggeringly drunk. She even manages to find them some old Bottom Brew beers, much to Holo's horror ("I remember this shit from when I was your age") and by the time the evening's over, they're barely keeping upright, mostly only because they're leaning on one another, staggering through the Inbetween's walkways.
"I'm so proud of you." He slurs, ruffling her hair with one hand (and ruffling her face when he misses). "You're a good kid. Great kid. Shit, you'll be fine."
Grace does not say anything similar back but she does hug him tightly, which is more than she's ever done for Holo. He rubs her back and keeps on telling her about the time he and one of his long-lost girlfriends used to go up to the 'Tween and spit down at people passing by on the lower levels. She laughs until she's damn near crying. Then they go home to their separate ships.
She doesn't sleep. Instead she drunkenly staggers around the circular hall of her ship, up the stairs, down the stairs, around the circle, dragging her hands on the walls. Sometimes she speaks, says "Captain Forjacks" or "get off my ship", just to hear how it echoes. Then she passes out in the captain's chair and sleeps soundly, happy and content.
[ONE]
She comes into the world screaming. Doctor doesn't even need to give her a smack to get her going. She wails all the same, red and wrinkled, black head of hair already growing. The name was decided beforehand, and when they call that screaming child Grace, it's already bordering on irony.
But they're so happy to have her. Father looks to mother, and they both look to Grace, who's busy telling the world that she's here and she's not happy.
Grace is four years and six months old and she hates her new sister. It was bad enough when it was her and Constant, but now there's Hope and mom and dad keep talking like there's going to be another dumb kid around here. It's not fair. She used to get all the food and toys and she only had to share with one, but now there's Hope and she's got to share with her too.
She tells her mother that they should get rid of Hope and it'll be just her and Grace and daddy and maybe Constant too. But her mom just gives Grace a swat on the bum and tells her that she's going to have to get used to sharing.
Grace goes out into the street. She throws pieces of brick at the rats and she sulks around the factory where they play. The other kids find some money and they go to the store and buy candy. Grace comes along and while the shopkeeper is busy ringing them up, Grace shoves a handful into her pockets and walks out with the crowd.
She eats them sitting on a doorstep and wipes her runny nose on her sleeve. If mommy and daddy aren't going to get rid of Hope, and Grace is pretty sure they already like the little smelly monster, than Grace is going to have to deal with it. Taking things seems like a pretty great way to deal with it.
Grace is throwing rocks at windows when a bunch of girls come running by, yelling loudly and kicking over a trashbot. The rusty looking thing falls over and starts screaming, trying to right itself. Grace watches as they turn around and start messing with the 'bot, shoving it around and yanking on it's arms.
She knows better than to talk to the gangs, but Grace is in a foul mood. Her mom was supposed to bring a baby home from the hospital, but they came back with nothing but an empty box and some anti-depressants. She's been looking for a fight for days.
Grace walks over. They're big girls, way older girls, but they're cool and some of them are even smoking. On the back of one, Grace can see a tattoo. The girl turns around, noticing Grace, "Hey, scram."
"You scram. I was here first." Grace says, since she's not afraid of anything. She doesn't back down to anybody, not even kids older than her. Sometimes she goes home with a blood nose and a bruised face, but lots of time she doesn't.
"Look at this pipsqueak." She says, and the rest of the girls turn around to take a look at Grace. Grace crosses her arms and looks back at them. "Do you know who we are?"
"Dunno. Don't care." Grace says and a few of them even laugh. One says "Look at her, what a little snotbag".
The first girl flicks her cigarette to the ground. She's taller than Grace and older, and Grace knows she's probably their leader. "We're the Molls."
"I thought the Molls were supposed to be badass." Grace gestured to the trashbot, which was missing an arm and squawking about that, "Everybody can beat up the trashbot. Even Billy can, and he's slow."
There are some ooo's from the other girls, a bit of laughter. And the girl says, "You want to see badass? Alright. We'll show you badass."
Three hours later, Grace is tired and has cuts on her hands from the broken window they climbed through when breaking into the corner store, and she's got three new best friends (including Jane, the girl that Grace started backtalking) and she's happier than she's ever been.
They drop Grace off at home and Grace pounds her fist with Jane's. They're going to swing by the house tomorrow and pick her up, take her along when they go to do something new. She heads upstairs, nearly floating above the ground. She's eight years old and Grace is on cloud nine.
She's nine and she's getting her first tattoo, and it hurts like hell. Grace is no wimp though, so she bunches her hands into fists and bites her lip and doesn't make a noise as Fanny brings that buzzing tattoo gun across her back and goes back to filling in a petal. She smokes as she does this, running the gun with one hand and tapping ashes into a tin can with the other.
Her girls are with her, Sally who will be gone in one year and Jane who will be gone in two and Sweet Polly who is with her until the end. There's Ruth leaning against the wall and Alice telling stories about her own tattoo, which is still fresh and raw, and Anabelle helping Fanny with the gun.
Grace has never seen a real lotus flower. None of the Molls have. But they get them anyway, because that's the sign, the proof that you're really one of them instead of just some stupid hanger-on. There are real flowers in the Top, real lotuses. Maybe one of these days, she'll get to go to the Top and see them. Probably not.
Grace makes it through every petal on her lotus flower without a single sound or tear. When it's all over and her back is bandaged, they take her to Sally's home. It's twelve stories up, high enough that you can see the big floating lights right in front of you. They give her some of Sally's mom's homemade moonshine and peek under the bandages at the red raw flesh.
In two weeks time, she'll be taking a lighter to her fingertips to burn away the prints. It'll hurt more than the tattoo, but she'll suffer it the same, make her way through it. Because when she finishes, when turns her fingers into nothing but smooth pale flesh, she'll be just like the others.
Jill will laugh and show off her own burnt tips, and they'll drink and dance and celebrate being young and fierce and unafraid of the world.
It's good being a Moll.
Grace is running from the cops, Sweet Polly coming up the right and Jane just ahead. Her coat is packed full of stolen chocolate bars and cigarettes and if she's caught, it's off to rehabilitation and the boot camps. The cops are big and fast but Grace is faster and what's more, Grace knows the nooks and crannies of this place better than those big lugs ever could have.
They go dashing into the old steel plant, Jane heading up the stairs and Sweet Polly going out the back door, and Grace grabbing onto the old furnace and climbing. They'll have to pick one target or split up and risk losing them all.
They pick Grace.
She can feel them trying to grab her ankles but she's faster and she tucks them up as she climbs on top of the furnace and into the sooty chimney. She scrabbles up it, faster than any monkey, and goes as high as she can, barely breathing to keep the dust out of her nose and mouth. They try to follow, grabbing at her and knocking dust all down on themselves, and then they bang on the pipe. She closes her eyes and keeps going up, using ancient footholds left by some other kid.
Grace emerges on the forth floor, hitting the floor. A cloud of black soot just rolls off of her. She clears her eyes and heads to the window. The narrow walkway is there, and on the other side is Jane. "Come on! Grace!"
She hurries on up, getting out the broken window and across the catwalk. The cops come up the stairs, yelling. As soon as Grace is over, Jane dumps the walkway, cutting off access. They run through someone's apartment, Jane laughing and Grace leaving a black trail behind as some woman screams at her.
They meet up at Jane's place. Sweet Polly is already waiting there and she sighs when she sees Grace, "You're a mess." Grace hugs her, getting black all over Polly and Polly gives her a shove, laughing.
Grace sits in the shower, water running over her. It turns black and slowly filters down the drain. Polly takes the sink and Jane sits on the toilet, divvying up what they've grabbed. Smokes, chocolate, some painkillers, a few aerosol cans and three box cutters. A pretty good haul for them. They'll sell the cans to the huffers and keep the rest for themselves.
Jane gives Grace an extra bar of chocolate, "That's for climbing up the smokestack. Real peachy of you to be bait."
"Fik you." She says, drying herself with a grey towel, but there's no heat in her voice. The chocolate is great. She eats it in Sally's living room as they watch the trials and laugh at the ones too stupid or too slow to run away from the cops. One day, it'll be them standing there, but for now, they'll eat and laugh and not worry about what will happen the day they aren't faster than the cops.
At ten, Grace is spitting on cops, telling the pigs to go find someone else to shake down because they've got nothing on her. Grace is third-in-command and nobody's going to make her rat out the Molls, especially not that fat fik who thinks he runs their neighbourhood when he can't even run his own house. Everybody knows his daughter runs zip-guns right under his nose and yet here he is, giving Grace a hard time.
He's got nothing and they both know it. Nobody's got any proof that they've been breaking windows. Nobody's got any proof they took that truckload of fruit either. They sold what they didn't eat, which was still more than half. The smell of strawberries made her feel sick for a few weeks afterwards, but it was all worth it to have real fruit.
"How do you think you mother will feel?" The pig says, like it's some sort of threat.
Grace's mom has four other kids to take care of, and another on the way. "I think she's not going to give a shit."
She's right. Her mom shows up and doesn't bother pretending she cares what the pig has to say. She just takes Grace home. She's got plenty of other kids to worry about. Grace can take care of herself.
On the way back, Grace carries Hope on her back. She loves her little sister a lot, more than her stupid brothers. One day, when she's old enough, Grace is going to help Hope get into a gang too. A good one, like the Molls. Or maybe by then, Grace'll be a big shot. Maybe she can get Hope into a real school, like the rich kids.
Hope says, "I lost my doll."
"I'll get you a new one." Grace says and means it. Two days later, she comes home with a new doll. This one's head comes off if you pull it hard enough and it has eyes that open and close. It's the coolest thing ever, and Grace knows she's the best big sister in the whole world.
It's Sweet Polly that comes to Grace's house after Jane quits and tells her the news. Grace is furious when she finds out that Jane has gone and got herself knocked up by her fikin useless boyfriend and now the Molls don't have a leader. It was bad enough with the Goomars moving in on their territory.
They go to Sweet Polly's home and Grace rages, screaming and swearing and kicking the shit out of a table, breaking one of the cheap plastic legs. Polly lets her, sitting on the arm of a couch and watching.
And when Grace has got it all out, she sits down and leans her head against Polly. One hand runs over Grace's hair, and Grace says, "What are we going to do?"
"You tell me." Sweet Polly looks down at Grace, "You're the new leader."
"What? No." Grace shakes her head, "Don't fiking joke."
"I'm not. We took a vote. The girls want you."
Grace looks at Sweet Polly and sees that she's not making it up. She gets to her feet, "If this is their bullshit way of not letting you be leader, tell them they can stuff it up their-"
"I don't want to be leader."
"But you're second in command! Polly, you served under Sally and Jane! It means it's your turn to run. You're older than me, and you know more."
"I'm not a leader." Sweet Polly slides onto the couch and pulls Grace down beside her, "I don't want to be a leader. I like being second. You've got the drive. Half the plans we've done in the last year have been from you."
"But-"
Polly puts an arm around Grace's shoulders, "Come on. I know you want it. You're going to be great. You just have to say yes. I'll be your second, just like I was for Jane and Sally."
Grace looks at her hands. She does want it. She wants it so badly she can damn near taste it. Except there's someone else she wants just as badly. Grace looks at Polly. "I don't want you to be my second."
"Grace-" Sweet Polly sighs and then Grace just leans in and kisses her. It's not that much of a risk. Everybody knows Sweet Polly isn't sweet on boys. And Grace can't think of anything worse than being dumb enough to let some boy put it in her and get her knocked up.
When they stop kissing, Grace presses her forehead against Polly's. "I want this."
"You can have both." Sweet Polly just holds onto Grace, "Second's a pretty general term."
Turns out second can mean whatever you want it to.
This is not a love story. Love stories have confessions and heartbreaks and romance. There's very little of that to be found. Grace handles a relationship the way she runs a gang; brutal and efficient. Sweet Polly is no damsel and she handles a knife better than anybody, even Grace.
They drive the Goomars out of old territory. Girls go back to their leader with broken fingers and noses and a promise that if they're caught in the wrong territory again, they'll go back with something much nastier than a broken arm. Grace and Sweet Polly drive out the Dragons when they start sniffing around for girlfriends. They end up being the shit out of the leader with a baseball bat, the wonderful hollow sound of the aluminum bat breaking three of his ribs. They don't come back.
The cops don't even try chase Grace anymore. The fat fik and his zip-gun dealing daughter get sent up the system and slowly, Grace widens their turf, one fight at a time. She knows what fights are worth it and what fights aren't. They don't mess with people in the neighbourhood, just vendors and shops that won't pay protection money.
Grace starts saving her cash. She's got plans for this place, plans for the Molls. Plans for her and Sweet Polly.
They sleep in the same bed, a tangle of awkward limbs and scrapes and old bruises. Sweet Polly's apartment is always empty, her mom is always out and her dad is long gone. They get drunk and throw empty cans down on the street, laughing and catcalling at the boys. It's all just a never ending game. Lots of times, they go to Grace's house, and Sweet Polly helps with the dishes and the babies. Her parents don't quite understand but they're just happy to have Grace spending her time with someone nice.
She and Polly have plans. Grace is going to take Sweet Polly to the top, and they're going to look at the sky and then stare down those lovely glass towers, and they're going to see real lotuses. Just as soon as their territory is secure, just as soon as she has enough money, they're going to go and see what it's like to live where the sun reaches.
Grace wakes up when they drag her away from a sleeping Polly, when they pin her to the ground, three girls on her and another three holding Polly. She screams and fights, but they're at Polly's house, and there's nobody around.
"Hey bitch." A voice says. The face comes into view. Dorothy fiking Allen. The bitch leader of the Goomars.
"You fiking gash!" Grace surges up and she almost gets away before they get a better grip on her arms and slams her down, "You cowardly slut!!"
"Grace, stay cool." Polly says, afraid and terrified.
"I heard you were a lez, didn't realize both of you were." She pulls out a switchblade, "This is going to make this more fun."
"When my gang gets here-"
"We already visited them. All of them." Dorothy comes back into view, waving the switchblade, "See, we played a little game. And now we're going to play it with you. I think you know it. See, it's called face or gut."
"oh shit." Polly moans softly. Grace says nothing, staring at Dorothy. You did Face or Gut to traitors, to girls who ratted out the gang or played stoolie. You didn't do it to other gangs. You didn't come to them at night when they were asleep.
"When they hear about this, they're going to come down on you like hell." She says, voice tight and vibrating with rage, "The Sadgrrls, the Babydolls, even the Squeens. They're going to kill you for this."
"No, they won't. They're going to stay where they are. Because tomorrow they're going to find out that the Goomars have an alliance with the Dragons, and if anybody steps foot in our new territory, they'll have to deal with us and the Dragons, and we all know what they do to girls."
"You fiking bitch." She hisses.
Dorothy motions to the other girls to drag Polly closer. With Polly watching, Dorothy put the blade against Grace's eyeball, "Beg."
"Fik you."
"No, not you." She looks at Polly, "Beg me to cut your whore's face up."
"no." Polly shakes her head.
"Beg me to cut up her face, or I'm going to gut her."
Polly shakes her head again, but Grace knows what's going to happen. They're going to do this for hours if they have to, they're going to break Sweet Polly and she's going to beg them to cut Grace up because she won't want them to kill Grace instead. And if they cut her face, then it's all over. A girl with scars on her face is low, lower than whores, lower than huffers. A girl with scars is somebody you can spit on and beat and rape and nobody is going to say boo.
So she takes it into her own hands.
"Hey Dorothy, is it true about your old man?" Grace says, as casual as she can with a knife right against her eyeball. Dorothy looks at Grace, really looks at her, eyes a bit wild. And at once, Grace knows all the rumours are right. She grins at Dorothy, more of a baring of teeth than a smile. "Oh mega sick."
"Shut up. Shut the fik up you fiking lez-"
"Everybody knows. Everybody. We were just laughing about it the other day-" Dorothy's knife falls back and an empty hand slaps Grace right across the face. It's hard and makes her brain rattle a bit, but she laughs through it and through the sudden flood of copper in her mouth.
"Grace, no!" Sweet Polly says, already seeing where this is going.
"Damn girl, I though you'd hit harder than that. You daddy would be real ashamed of you." Another blow rocks Grace. Her face feels hot and red. Still, she laughs. You had to laugh.
"Shut your whore mouth, or I'll carve her eyes out." Dorothy turns the knife to Sweet Polly, pressing the curve just under Polly's beautiful blue eyes. But her voice is shaking and Grace goes in for the kill.
"Yeah? You got a lot of experience carving things out? 'cause I heard what they carved out of you thanks to daddy dearest-"
She swings her arms and the knife goes through her skin like butter. It's a sharp hard pain, completely unlike anything she's felt before. She gasps, and Dorothy put her face right against Grace's. "Squeal, bitch."
Grace takes the opportunity, closing the distance and biting Dorothy's face. Dorothy tries to scream, but the right half of her mouth is caught in Grace's teeth, along with a chunk of cheek. Through the pain, Grace bites down hard and wrenches her head back. The other girls hit Grace, trying to make her let go. There's a rip and Grace goes tumbling back while Dorothy screams. It was a nasty wet sound. Grace spits out the skin stuck in her teeth and tries to fight her way out.
The second stab isn't too bad. The third hurts like a bitch. And she goes a bit grey during the forth one. She can hear Sweet Polly screaming too, but it's far off, like something underwater. All Grace can feel was the knife going in and out of her. And then the sound of footsteps as they leave.
When the colour comes back into the world, she's alone with Sweet Polly. Grace's mouth is bitter and she can't taste anything but blood. Her guts are aching bad. She takes a look down, and then quickly looks away before her brain can register what she's seeing. So instead, she reaches out a hand, grabbing onto Polly.
"hey." She says. "hey, polly."
"damnit grace." Polly manages to spit out. There's blood on her lips. Grace can see her insides hanging out her shirt. They're so pale. She looks away. Polly's smiling, awkward lopsided thing, so Grace smiles back. "damnit grace."
"i'm going to get help. i'm gonna-" She gets a foot under her, rises up. Falls back down. She gets a hand on her stomach. Hurts like hell, but she keeps it there. She can feel her own insides. Can't have them swinging around. "polly, you stay here. you stay awake."
"you're going to die. i'm going to die."
"nobody is dying." Grace crawls over to Polly and kisses her on the lips. "stay here. i'll be back."
With that, she gets to her feet. She takes it one step at a time, right hand on her stomach and left hand on the wall to keep her upright. She staggers out through the open door and into the hall. There are doors on either side, but she knows nobody will answer at this time of night. Nobody's that stupid.
She takes the elevator. There's a clinic up the street, open all night. Like the dead, she stumbles toward it, leaving a trail of blood behind her to mark where she's been. Out of the lobby she goes, bloody hand-print on the glass. Nobody's out this late at night. Nobody but the twelve year old holding her guts in with one hand.
Grace walks as far as she can, powering along even as black spots fill her vision, even as she has to slide along the walls because she can't stay straight. Her legs keep pushing. Her hand keeps her guts in, and her guts feel like they're on fire, like someone tossed a flare into them and set it burning. She has to get the clinic. She has to make sure they find Sweet Polly.
When she can't walk, Grace crawls. She crawls the whole last block, dragging her insides on the ground when she needs both hands to keep moving. The trail of blood is thick and dark, leading back to the apartment. Her vision is nothing but a tight tunnel, one faint light at the end of it: the clinic. She has to get to the clinic.
And she does, collapsing just inside the sliding doors. They come to her, the nurses and orderlies, pulling her up off the ground and and setting her on a cot. She talks to them the whole time, repeating Polly's address, slurring her words as she tells them they have to hurry up because they can still save Sweet Polly. Grace is a goner, she knows it. She tells them to stop wasting their time, even as they put the air mask over her face, even as they give her a dose of tranqs. The black closes in and Grace passes out, still telling them that Polly's alive, they have to save her.
Whens he wakes up, it's two weeks later, she's in a clinic in the Inbetween, and Polly's in a plastic bag at the morgue.
Six months later, and Grace is taking an elevator to the Inbetween. All her possessions are in a single bag and she wears the only clean clothes she has. There was another set, but she had to leave them behind. The blood soaked all the way through them, and no amount of washing was ever going to get that blood out.
There's still dried blood on her skin, under her fingernails and the creases in her fingers, the edges of her body where she didn't scrub hard enough in the shower. It's Dorothy's blood, and the blood of the other Goomars. She didn't have much time to get her things together, not after the pigs came crashing into Dorothy's apartment.
They caught her in the act. Dorothy was barely alive by then, holding on only because Grace wouldn't let the bitch go. When they came in, knocking down the door, Grace let her knife slip and make sure Dorothy wouldn't somehow survive, wouldn't come looking for revenge. And then she'd gone out the window in her bloody clothes, clutching Polly's knife.
She knows there are bulletins looking for her, maybe even a little reward money. They won't find her. Grace has cut her hair all off, and she's dressed in her brother's clothes. In the bag, she's got Polly's knife and Polly's ashes, and thirty credits, and a photo of her parents. She's going to find a ship. She's going to let them think she's a boy until it's too late. And she's going to leave this shithole behind.
At first, she thinks it's just a large light above her. But it gets bigger as the elevator gets higher, and then Grace realizes that she's high enough to see the sky. Her hands press against the glass and she stares at it, the expanse of blue slowly appearing as the elevator rises. It's bigger than it looks on holos, bigger than in pictures.
The elevator opens and she steps out onto the walkways of the Inbetween. Grace stares up at the sky, tears rolling down her face. She's here with Polly. They're out of the Below.
Grace wipes her face and heads down the docks, looking for a ship to take her.
[TWO]
It takes Jenos Holo three months to realize that Forjacks has a first name, and even more importantly, that Forjacks is a girl.
She gets herself injured when she's knocked back into an exposed piece of metal and it cuts up her chest. Grace fights with him as he drags her to the mess to patch her up. The reasons become clear when he manages to get the shirt off of her and discovers that she's packing b-cups, wrapped tight to her body by beige elastic bandages.
First thing he does is kick her out of the bunks and makes her sleep in engineering. They're out near Corus, so it's not like he can just dump her there and let her fend for herself. For one thing, Grace can't even swim. And the spaceport is only half-built. So she stays on board, but gets moved out of the bunks.
At first, Grace doesn't even mind it. She's spent years sharing rooms with people. The chance to have one all to herself is great. Except, as it turns out, Grace has spent too many years sharing rooms. And when she lays down in her bunk, she can't sleep. The engine hums too loudly, and she can't hear anybody breathing.
She doesn't tell Holo. Telling would be whining and she didn't whine when she was a boy, why would she do it as a girl? So she powers through the lack of sleep and she does her work, even though Holo keeps trying to find reasons that she can't lift crates and why she should be in the mess helping the cook.
He does manage to shove her in the kitchen. Halfway through cleaning the grill, she passes out and narrowly misses doing a faceplant into the superheated grill. Instead she only hits her head on the floor and opens up a gash on it that bleeds like a stuck pig.
Holo gives up on his plans to try protect her and moves her back in with the men. Everybody leaves Grace alone and it's just like normal again, only now she can grow her hair out if she wants. It's nice.
Grace is fourteen and pointing a gun at the head of another man. Holo's picking himself up off the floor. His nose is bleeding but Grace doesn't take her eyes off the man in front of her, the traitorous bastard that just tried to start a mutany.
"Grace, it's over." Holo says, touching his nose, "He failed."
There's already one dead guy on the cargo bay floor. She killed that one first, shot him in the chest. Grace can hear Charlie throwing up. The dead guy was named George and he liked to play cards with Grace. Apparently he also liked to think of ways to kill Holo and take control of the ship.
The guy in front of her is Dan. Dan's got his hands up and he's talking quick, saying over and over, "Please don't. Please don't."
"He just tried to take your ship." Grace says. Her voice is flat, toneless. She's not angry. She's not afraid. She knows how to deal with traitors, how to deal with people who take what's yours.
"Grace." Holo says, and steps in, carefully putting a hand on her arms, making her lower the gun, "It's okay. We'll drop him planetside as soon as we hit Heimdall."
"Holo, you can't trust him. There's one thing to do." She looks at him and Holo stares at her. He's never seen this side of her before. She's Gracie to him, the kid who's practically a mascot, the little girl who works twice as hard as the boys and tells ridiculous stories about living in the Below. And for the first time, he's realizing that you don't become leader of a gang, any gang, just by being adorable.
You become a leader by being ruthless.
"Grace, that's not how I do things." He says, and gets the gun out of her hands. They lock Dan up in the brig (which is also the laundry room) and throw George's body out the airlock. Grace watches them both with no emotion and when that's done, she goes to her bunk and crawls up inside.
Sweet Polly's still living in a plastic bag, and she presses it against her chest, holding tight onto the ashes.
Holo has no family. Grace figures that's why the man gets so attached to her so fast. The mercenaries come and go, and there's just her and Charlie and Tom (the pilot) and James who stay on all the time. James is alright, and Charlie's dumb but harmless, and Tom gives her the creeps but he knows better than to try anything because Holo would turn his face to ground meat.
At first, she figures he's sniffing around her, trying to get what she wouldn't give to any of those dirty Below boys. But eventually she connects the dots and realizes it's just Holo's way of trying to be a father. Grace doesn't need another dad, she's already got one. But it's not bad having someone to watch her back.
Her mom sends Grace letters and photos, and Grace sends home her paychecks. It's not like she needs much living on the ship. Holo doesn't even take her board and food out of her pay anymore, and at first she got mad, but now she just accepts that if he wants to give her extra money, who is she to tell some old guy what to do with his cash? He's not poor, and Grace has a family to take care of.
She gets the new photo of her baby sister and shows them off, proud as she can be. Prudence looks just like Grace, hair the same shade of black, and she makes the whole crew look at it, and photos of the rest of her family. Holo laughs at how proud she is and ruffles her hair. He doesn't have any family, so she sends him copies of hers. A guy needs photos of somebody to have set up in his room.
Her family doesn't end up there, but she sure does. Photos of Grace and Holo standing on the surface of Antheia in front of the body of a bear. Grace is beaming, and she's holding the still-smoking rifle in her hands. Photos of Grace on Corus, a handful of feathers from someone's wing. She's got a bruise on her cheek, but she's still grinning proudly, content in the knowledge that she managed to keep a grip on those robin feathers.
Grace doesn't need a father, but Holo sure as hell needs a daughter, and she fills the role perfectly, reckless and ruthless and charming in her own particular way.
The problem with someone seeing you as a daughter is that they start treating you like one. And while every other man is allowed to go out drinking and whoring, Holo manages to figure out reasons to keep Grace aboard.
Oh sure, he makes the excuses sound good. It just always happens that he's got business to attend to and that he can only trust Grace to look after the ship for him. At first she doesn't mind it, but after a while she figures out what it really means and she's pissed. There's no reason to be treating her like that. She can drink most of the guys under the table. Grace grew up drinking Below brew, sweetened with antifreeze, and she had a girl before most of the guys even knew what to do with one.
Grace doesn't throw a fit. Instead, she looks at herself long and hard in the mirror and decides that maybe it's time she starts using what she's been given instead of hiding behind baggy shirt and short haircuts. She's fifteen and about ten centimetres over over a meter and a half (a little shorter than she wanted to be, but this is as tall as she's getting) and she's been layering sports bras for the past three years. If they will not treat her as a boy, than she will make being a girl work for her.
Holo leaves her to guard the ship when they dock at the mass of ships that will one day become known as the Underworld. Everyone goes to check out the whores, everyone except her and Charlie. He got caught huffing paint so he'd stuck on the ship as punishment. Charlie is twenty and dumb and harmless, and most importantly, he's an easy target.
Grace finds him in the mess hall. He's sorting through canisters of cooking spray. "Hey." She says. Charlie turns around, clearly expecting her to yell at him. Instead he drops the cans and stares at her. He gawks a her, mouth opening and closing as his brain fails to find the words. She walks toward him, feeling cold and kinda frightened, but full of a new, strange power. She pushes him up against the cupboards and says, "Why don't you do something useful?"
Later, she's lying in Charlie's bunk, Charlie half-lying on top of her and snoring. Grace is tired and sore, but content. Turns out sex with boys isn't all that bad. She might even like it.
Holo blows his stack when he catches them a few weeks later, making out in the engine room. They have a fight, their first real full-blown one, loud enough that the whole damn ship hears. But Grace stands her ground. She's not a child and she's not his daughter, and if Holo won't treat her like a real crew member, then she's going to find some other ship.
And he actually backs down. Of course he finds ways to cover it up so it's not so damn obvious to the crew that he's backing down from a fifteen year old, but he admits that maybe, just maybe, he was treating her wrong and that she deserves better.
The next time they go ashore, Grace goes with. Holo locks up the ship and comes along, and Grace shows them all how Lowers party.
The first, and last, indication that there's something wrong is when she feels this horrible pain in her guts, and she goes running to the doc. She says, "I think something just broke." And then her legs go and give out on her as it gets even worse. The man gets her up on the dinner table and peeks at her insides.
And what he sees under those scars is a mess that damn near takes his breath away. The pain hurts so bad that Grace starts crying, and they have to put her under. Holo turns around and heads back to Terra because even the doc can't fix this. It looks like something just split in her guts and there's a chunk of small intestine missing.
They make it. Holo knows a Below doctor who owes him favours. They break into a 'Tween clinic and the friend and the ship's doctor get her open and operate on her. It's the damn stab wound. Her insides were well and truely fiked up after she'd been knifed. The bits that hadn't been nicked had been dragged on the pavement, through the filth and dirt. They'd taken out bits and replaced parts of her intestine with a cheap substitute. It was only meant to last four years. They'd figured she would be dead before then, so nobody bothered to tell Grace that maybe she needed to keep a close eye on her insides.
They replace over half of her intestine with a better synthetic. While they're in their, they note down what she's missing. One ovary, one kidney, and an appendix. They slap in a synthetic filter to replace the kidney, and don't bother messing with the other two. Then they sew her back up and get out of the hospital before they're caught.
Grace wakes up in someone else's apartment, lying on a bed. Holo's sitting in the chair beside her bed, head forward, snoring softly. He's brought Sweet Polly with him, and she's sitting in a real nice jar that Grace got when they were on Antheia. Her head is pounding and her insides hurt like a bitch, but she feels alright seeing him and Polly there.
They give her x-rays and papers, and she pours over them, learning what her insides look like. She should be okay, but they've got a list of stuff not to do and Grace reads it only once, scowling at all the suggestions and how much stuff she's not supposed to do now. She ignores it, of course. Hell, the synth-kidney is better than the real thing.
Charlie asks her if this means he's sleeping with a robot, and she hits him hard enough to bruise his arm for a week. It's the beginning of the end for them. Charlie gets kicked off the ship a few months later when Holo catches him trying to huff brake cleaner, which is the dumbest thing he has ever done. They leave him on Corus and he cries and promises Grace that he's going to call her everyday and that he's going to save up for a wedding ring and marry her as soon as she's legal. Grace tells him her answer to save him some money and he just weeps even harder.
He waves at her as the bay doors close and keeps on waving, even after Grace has turned away. She forgets him as soon as they leave atmo and, for a while, Grace thinks he's done the same.
But she's wrong. She is unbelievably wrong.
The whores all hate Grace the first time they meet her. Even when the other women are telling the new girl to give Grace a chance, she can see the twist in their features. Grace doesn't blame them. She's seventeen with long black hair, young and beautiful, and all their minds see is competition, even though Grace would never fik for money. They think she's going to steal their men, or humiliate and embarass them to make herself look good.
But Grace is here for the same reason the men are. And eventually they warm up to Grace once she starts buying them drinks and talking with them. The men pay to have the women sit on Grace's lap, and suddenly the frowns and scowls disappear as they realize they've just found a new cash-cow to milk. Grace isn't preforming for the boys, but hell, as long as they keep their mouths shut, she'll let them watch a little.
She never takes the women back to the ship. Ever. This works out well enough since most of the ladies have their own chambers or shuttles to entertain in, but there are always a few who want to see the ship. Grace never takes them back. She's not here looking for love, just a quick fik and then out the door.
There aren't many men at the bordellos. Oh, there are always a few, but men who want other men rarely have trouble getting that for free. It's the same reason Grace never has a trouble sleeping with men for free, but rarely sleeps with a women without paying upfront.
Sometimes she wishes men were as easy as that. They get clingy. They act like she belongs to them. A fist fight broke out a few weeks ago on ship. Grace had been sleeping with two men at the same time. They both knew about each other. They'd both promised her they were okay with it. And yet, she was the one who walked in and found William bashing Jeffery's head into the table, all because they got into a pissing match about who she liked more. They got left at the nearest port and Grace went down to the engine room with a padd and talked to Hope for a solid hour about how much she hated men sometimes.
Grace doesn't worry about what Polly would think. She knows Polly would understand. The girl in the jar is the only person Grace has ever really loved. All the girls and all the boys are just a distraction until they day they're together again. They made a promise. When she dies, she'll go to the old freeway and find Polly sitting underneath the rusty overpass sign. And then they'll go on to whatever comes after that and tear up the town.
Eighteen means she's legally an adult by Terran standards, though Grace has been an adult in all but name for eight of those years. Time has worn down the rough spot, and sharped her edges, and now she knows not only how to be an adult but how to look and act like one.
There are new challenges. Sexism exists still, and though Grace has never read a book on the subject, she can tell you exactly what it means. It means men expect you to do twice as much as they do, for half the share. It means they stare at your tits and then call you a whore for letting them look at them. It means they fight over you like a dog over a piece of meat, and then treat you the same, something to chew up and slobber on.
The new ones are always worst because they're still trying to find their place and they think she's the perfect place to start. Prove you're better than the girl, secure your place so they all know you're not the lowest rung on the totem pole. They think they can get Grace angry, get her all riled up so she does something stupid, or maybe they think if they pester her enough, she'll spread her legs and give them a prize for being the dumbest loudest brute on the ship. She usually puts them straight and after a month or so, they smarten up and learn that Grace is more dangerous than any other man on the ship.
But then along comes Al. He doesn't learn. And as time goes by, it just gets worse. He can't keep his mouth shut, and there's too many times he 'accidentally' tries to come into the showers when she's in them, or 'accidentally' opens the curtains of her bunk. Even a solid boot to the junk doesn't make a dent. Holo will be pissed if she guts him, so she does the next best thing.
She picks him as her partner on salvage duty.
Grace is always the first to step up. Used to be you'd fight over who got to go on salvage, but nobody wants to be the first through a ship hull these days. It's all 'cause of the plagues. You never know if the ship you're cracking lost an engine or lost air, or if they all died choking on their own snot and gobs as the 'nza chokes them alive. That's not the official name, which is nothing but a bunch of letters and numbers, but everybody calls it the 'nza anyway. Nobody wants to step into plague ships these days.
But you can't go alone. So Grace volunteers and she picks Al. She can see a little fear come into those dumb eyes of his, and then it's replaced with a little glee. The man now thinks maybe he can get Grace alone, get a good look at what she's been denying him. He can't risk that around the other men, they'd castrate him, but here... alone on a ship? She can see it in his eyes. He's thinking about what he's going to do when he gets her suit off her.
She goes first. And once inside, Grace gets as far away from the airlock as possible. So by the time the Al comes in, she's gone, a ghost in the dark. She loots quietly and efficiently, and listens as Al fumbles his way down the corridors. He starts out by asking where she is, then starts laughing, asking if she's scared of the monsters, if she needs somebody to hug her. Grace doesn't radio back, doesn't make a fiking noise, and then the laughter all dries up. She swims circles around him. The vents in these cargo ships are big enough for maintenance men, more than enough for Grace, so she zips from one room to another.
Grace floats silently by a dead family, child's face blue and strained in death, and leaves them floating right in front of the door. Two minutes later, he cracks the door open from the outside, and she can hear him give a sickened and terrified moan. Any dreams of assaulting her are long gone. If either of them takes off the suits, they'll be dead. The plague is so contagious that Terra shoots down all ships who are suspected to have it.
While he's occupied with the dead family, she finds another body, just a few doors open, and pulls him into the previously empty corridor. When Al comes floating back out, she gives the body a shove. She goes one way. He goes the other, floating down toward Al. Al turns around just in time to see that bloated leering face as the body collides with him, and his bloodcurdling scream echoes through the ship.
She returns to the airlock and goes through decontamination. It takes ten minutes, and that's ten minutes the lock won't open for Al. He screams and cries like a child, begging for them to not leave him there in the ship. When Grace finally emerges and takes her helmet off, the suit and loot both smell strongly of alcohol and disinfectant. Holo's standing there with the boys.
"Should we let him in now?" Holo asks her casually. He knows what's been going on, or at least, he knows bits of it. Grace nods.
Al's finally let in. They can all see the terror in his eyes, and the flash of rage when he sees Grace standing there. She waits until the airlock finishes with him, and when he comes stumbling out, she says, "Where the hell's your salvage? What the fik were you even doing?"
"You-" He says, but he goes quiet, looking at what she's got. He has no idea how quickly she gathered all this, but she knows he thinks she took longer than she did. No way she could be haunting him when she was busy combing over the ship. And the fear comes back, twice as hard.
Al never bothers her again. Doesn't even look at her, never speaks to her unless he has to. That suits Grace just fine. And when the new men come on, and they start into it, they others pull them aside and point to Al, whose hands shake and who gets afraid of the dark, who flinches when Grace smiles at him. That's all it takes to get them to lay off.
She starts looking at ships of her own after she realizes she's doesn't want to be Holo's first mate.
It's not that he's offered it to her or anything. But she knows that when James leaves in two months time to spend time with his new wife, Holo's going to look at Grace and give her the position. And there were times when she was sixteen and seventeen when she really wanted it, wanted it so bad she could taste it.
Except... except being first mate means still following Holo's orders. And she's gotten tired of that. She loves the man, considers him her best friend in all the world, but the way he conducts business is so outdated. He won't do supply runs to Nox or Glacies, even though they pay through the nose for totally legal items. And he won't hire non-humans, even if they're perfect for the job. He's set in his ways, and he remembers a time before humans had contact with other species, back when they just saw distant images through their telescopes.
He understands. When she starts asking him advice, or showing him ships she's looking at, he helps her out, tells her which ones are worth it and which ones are shit. He was a mechanic, and she's seen the very first ship he ever built. It's a damn deathtrap, held together with duct tape and rubber cement and spit, but it flew and if Holo could make that piece of crap fly, then he'll be able to help her find something.
She learns how to fix the engines, how to diagnose the problems and how to jury-rig it until you hit planetside and can get a professional to fix it for you. For months, she does nothing but look at ships and talk to men in spaceports and figure out how much she has to spend on a ship. Holo introduces her to men who have ships for sale and when she finds reasons why she doesn't like them (too ugly, too old, too big, too small, just... not right) he doesn't need explanations. He just nods.
"You'll know when you've got the right ship." He says one night while they're playing Hearts. Grace is kicking his ass, but she's always been good at this game. "You'll know it because you'll fall in love with it. Now stop pissing around and focus."
They play out their hands. She picks up all the penalty cards, including the Bitch, and Holo curses and everybody adds 26 points to their score. Grace just laughs and kisses the Queen of Spades, leaving a faint red smudge on the card.
She finds her ship the very next day, those sleek silver curves, the strange and already-outdated style, quickly tossed aside for boxy models with no heart or charm. and Holo's right. It is just like falling in love.
Grace buys it, no questions asked. Holo grumbles on about inefficiency and uselessness and how it's all ass backwards, but Grace doesn't give a shit what he thinks. She's in love with it. The old owner called it Populuxe which is the dumbest name Grace has ever heard. Two minutes after the sale's complete, she officially registers her ship as the Queen of Spades.
"You're going to get tired of that name." Holo says to her, watching as the registration comes back.
"Never." She says and knows she's right.
On her twentieth birthday, she and Holo go out and get staggeringly drunk. She even manages to find them some old Bottom Brew beers, much to Holo's horror ("I remember this shit from when I was your age") and by the time the evening's over, they're barely keeping upright, mostly only because they're leaning on one another, staggering through the Inbetween's walkways.
"I'm so proud of you." He slurs, ruffling her hair with one hand (and ruffling her face when he misses). "You're a good kid. Great kid. Shit, you'll be fine."
Grace does not say anything similar back but she does hug him tightly, which is more than she's ever done for Holo. He rubs her back and keeps on telling her about the time he and one of his long-lost girlfriends used to go up to the 'Tween and spit down at people passing by on the lower levels. She laughs until she's damn near crying. Then they go home to their separate ships.
She doesn't sleep. Instead she drunkenly staggers around the circular hall of her ship, up the stairs, down the stairs, around the circle, dragging her hands on the walls. Sometimes she speaks, says "Captain Forjacks" or "get off my ship", just to hear how it echoes. Then she passes out in the captain's chair and sleeps soundly, happy and content.
I'm really glad you liked it! 
