A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2)(60)
‘I’d like that,’ Sidra said. The kit smiled. ‘I’d like that a lot.’
JANE, AGE 14
‘Jane?’ The lights came on in the most annoying way possible. ‘Jane, it’s long past time to wake up.’
Jane pulled the covers over her head.
‘Jane, come on. There isn’t that much daylight this time of year.’ Owl sounded tired. Whatever. Jane was tired, too. Jane was always tired. No matter how much sleep she got, it was never enough.
‘Turn off the lights,’ Jane said. She’d figured out a long time ago that Owl had to obey direct commands related to the ship.
She couldn’t see Owl’s face, but she could feel it: frowning and frustrated. Through the edges of the blanket, Jane saw the lights switch off. ‘Jane, please,’ Owl said.
Jane sighed, long and loud. Pulling the direct-command card was a jerk thing to do, and she knew it. Sometimes it felt good though, especially when Owl was being annoying. Owl was annoying a lot lately. Jane pulled the blanket off her face. ‘Turn the lights back on.’ The room lit up; Jane winced.
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ Owl said.
Jane caught a glimpse of Owl. She looked hurt. Jane pretended to not notice, but she felt kind of bad about it. She didn’t say that, though. She shuffled off to the bathroom. Stars, she was tired.
She peed, not bothering to flush. The filtration system was going to fizz out soon, and until she could find a replacement (or something she could hack into a replacement), flushing was on the list of things she could only do when there was something other than pee to deal with. It was gross, but when you did the math, it was either that or not washing the dogs she brought home. There was no way she wasn’t washing the dogs.
She sucked in water straight from the faucet and swished it around her mouth, trying to get rid of the hot inside-out sock feeling. There had been dentbot packs on the shuttle when she’d first got there, but those had run out forever ago, and she hadn’t found more. She missed having teeth that didn’t hurt. Sometimes she thought back to the factory, where they’d had these bland little tabs they sucked on to get the fuzz off their teeth. Those had been good. Not everything in the factory was stupid. Most things. But not all things.
Soap. That was the other thing she missed. She showered as often as the water supply would allow, but she could still smell herself, sour and musky. The dogs were way worse, but they weren’t so different. Mammals smelled, Owl had said. That was just the way of it.
Jane hadn’t smelled bad when she was a kid. At least, she didn’t remember smelling bad. Her body had changed a lot, and Owl said it would keep changing for a while. Still, though, Jane hadn’t been changing in quite the way Owl had said – not like other Human girls did. She’d gotten taller, sure, and she had to make new clothes a lot. But she wasn’t all curves and circles like the pictures Owl had shown her of adult women. Jane was still as skinny as a kid, and she didn’t have big round breasts – just small bumps that ached all the time. Her hips were wider, kind of, but sometimes she thought she looked more like a boy (except for the whole between-the-legs thing, but that was just a big bunch of weirdness no matter which bits you had).
Jane hadn’t started bleeding, either, but Owl didn’t think she would. They’d figured out from her med scans a long time ago that Jane had a single chromosome, which was apparently one short from the usual. So, probably no bleeding, which was fine, because that sounded like the absolute worst thing ever if you didn’t have meds to shut that down, and she obviously did not. Oh, and she couldn’t make kids. Bleeding was a maybe, but kids was a definite no. Owl had been kind of cagey when she’d told Jane that, but it was hard to care about not doing something you didn’t know you could do in the first place. Jane had learned that she couldn’t make kids in the same conversation where she’d learned that making kids was a thing. She hadn’t been made the way most Humans were, which had weirded her out at first, but was no big deal, really. There’d been a stretch when she was a kid where she’d been real curious about how and why the Enhanced had made her the way they did. She and Owl had puzzled it out together then – Owl using what she knew about Enhanced Humanity societies, Jane telling her what little she could remember about medical stuff at the factory, both of them looking at samples of Jane’s spit on the little scanner. Jane didn’t have any huge tweaks, chromosomes and no-hair aside. She had a super-buff immune system, though, which was not a usual thing, and it also made Owl stop caring so much about getting the decontamination flash working. All in all, the Enhanced had probably cooked her up out of some grab-bag gene junk and pulled her out of a gooey vat, along with the other disposable girls. The Enhanced. What a bunch of f*ckers.
Owl had given Jane access to sims meant for adults, and that was how Jane had learned about swearing. Owl had said it was important to know how swearing worked, and it was okay under the right circumstances, but that Jane shouldn’t swear all the time. Jane definitely swore all the time. She didn’t know why, but swearing felt f*cking great. Owl only had eleven adult sims in storage, but Jane didn’t mind playing them again and again. Her favourite was Scorch Squad VI: Eternal Inferno. The best character was Combusto, who used to work for the Oil Prince but was a good guy now, and he also used to be a pyromancer in a previous life – which was true for everybody on the Scorch Squad, but let’s be real, Combusto was the one who took the oath most seriously before he was reincarnated – so he had visions of the past sometimes and his eyes caught fire when he got mad, which was all the time, and his ultimate attack was called Plasma Fist, which made bad guys explode. He also had the very best swears. Jensen, get your f*cking helmet on before they blow your skull out your ass! Yeah, that was the stuff. She could play that sim all day.