She’d told Arkady that she couldn’t change the baby’s genes without more calories than they had on the ship, and she had been telling the truth. But the child was growing, its genes making new decisions every moment of every day. Pendt couldn’t force it into a new pattern, but she could watch as it built itself up from two cells into a person, and in watching, she learned how she could shape it, if she only had the calories to do so.
Arkady asked her frequently what she had learned, and Pendt always had a ready answer about some disease or a broken bone. She never lied; she was still too much a Harland for that. She knew better than to admit that she was starting to think her magic, though different, was more powerful than her aunt’s.
She had also started to read non-medical texts in her studies. The library on the Harland was one big system, so it wasn’t like she was going somewhere she wasn’t allowed to be. As long as she was on time for her shifts in the galley, no one ever questioned her decision to read as much as possible. Her brothers didn’t even make fun of her for it, largely because they didn’t know how to.
She read history and stellar cartography, learning about the Stavenger Empire and the vast swaths of space they had once claimed to rule. She learned about the oglasa, which used to fill the void between the stars and were now reduced to a fraction of their former numbers. And she puzzled her way through legal documents until she fully understood how, with its dying gasps, the Stavengers had locked their subjects into place. Each station had a family, the way the Harland did, only locked to the family’s DNA and controlled by the Y chromosome. It was an entirely new way of thinking for Pendt. On the Harland, girls were inherently more valuable, as they maintained custody of their children over any paternal claim. The ships wanted daughters and the stations wanted sons, though most of the people who lived and worked in less powerful positions didn’t really care.
Pendt also came to understand that the Stavengers had done her a favour with at least one of their decrees. In order for a generation ship to maintain contracts with the stations and mining installations, they must be able to prove that they were not exploiting child labour. No one under the age of eighteen could be contracted into anything outside their own family. As soon as a person turned eighteen, the head of their family had all the rights to decide everything from their working situation to their living arrangements. Pendt knew that when Arkady made decisions about her, it would be for the Harland’s best interests, not anything so unimportant as Pendt’s well-being. Tanith had shown her that. She was ten years older than Pendt, and an electro-mage too, and her body was not her own.
A chime sounded and Pendt closed the file on developmental psychology that she was reading. The concept was alien to her. The only things that developed on the Harland were skills to keep the ship going and sense to stay out of everyone’s way. Encouraging a child by promoting its hobbies was entirely foreign. Pendt had needed the dictionary to learn what a hobby was.
The chime meant that it was time for the graveyard shift to start—the skeleton crew who maintained the engines and the Harland’s course while everyone else slept. Pendt needed to go to sleep too, or she would be too tired to work tomorrow, and might lose her reading privileges. The medical bay was dim and quiet, empty for now since everyone was well. Morunt went about her tasks with little chatter, as always. Pendt got ready to leave so that the doctor could seek her own bunk, but she seemed in no particular hurry this evening.
“I’m glad we’re close to Brannick Station,” Morunt said, absently putting the needles into the medical sterilization unit. “It’s been a long couple of decades and I need to replace some things. I’ll have to work on my requisition forms, but the captain is pleased with our ore haul, so I’m cautiously optimistic. Four more weeks.”
Four weeks to Brannick Station, and Pendt’s life would change, even though she didn’t know all the details about how. Her birthday would fall around that time, and her aunt would contract her out. She might never see the Harland again. And to be perfectly honest, she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to.
Leaving the Family behind had once filled her with fear. Now, it was merely another wretched situation she probably couldn’t avoid, only this time with people who bought her, and therefore probably appreciated her presence just a little bit. If she had been going somewhere new to cook and clean, or even to do Dr. Morunt’s job, she might have welcomed the idea of a change, even if it was intimidating. But as Tanith’s form reshaped itself around the new life she carried, Pendt understood that her future had always been her body. Her family would rent out her ability to grow healthy children. The idea of being reduced to that was bad enough. She knew how pregnancy wreaked havoc on the body, medically and from observation. She didn’t want that to be her whole life. If they knew that she was pretty sure she could design children, or at least select their genetic progress with some deliberation, she’d never be free.
Dr. Morunt had given her a warning. She understood and appreciated it. She had four weeks. If she was ever going to anything, it would have to start now.
In the quiet of the medical bay, reading files she wrestled into understanding, Pendt Harland discovered that she knew more things now:
Family was everything; her ship was home; her aunt’s authority was absolute; and as her birthday crept closer, her already limited freedoms became more and more curtailed.
Pendt looked down at her fingernails, and made a plan.
* * *
• • •
In the end, it was both ridiculously easy and impossibly hard. Pendt saved one gram of oglasa from her dinner portion every day for four weeks. It was all she could spare. Her body was already running close to the margin, operating at peak efficiency thanks to eighteen years of training. Any more than a gram per day, and her work would suffer. She might be caught.
She felt the loss of that gram every moment. Worse, she knew exactly where her hoard was, and that she could eat it at any time if she wanted to. It haunted her, and her dreams were full of giant fish that mocked her as they floated in the black of space. But she stayed strong. She was only going to get one chance at this, and there would be no going back. She did her best to put the growing pile of calories out of her mind.
The part that almost made her laugh was that the whole scheme was only possible because of circumstances she had caused. If she hadn’t regrown her fingernail all those years ago, they never would have had to trade for more food at Alterra. They never would have ended up with Talbor. Their food supplies would be endless protein packets, not the densely nutritious oglasa. She didn’t even have to wrap it or keep it somewhere cool. Oglasa didn’t spoil. She could have stored it next to the engine, and four weeks later, it would still be edible.
The rest of her escape was fairly straightforward. Pendt had witnessed several dockings now, and she knew how this one would go. The Harland would make port, the engines would cut off, and Arkady and Lodia would go aboard the Brannick Station. No one else would leave the ship, no Harland, at least. But the doors below, in the hold where the passengers had stayed and possibly died during the extended years of the voyage, those doors would open. And no Harland cared what or who went through them.