She found the part of the code that made her eyes green, and focused on it. She knew what blue looked like, both in someone’s eye and in the code, even though no one had ever explained it to her, because her blue-eyed cousin was standing close by. She reached for that blue, strengthened by the four grams of protein, and wrote it overtop of her own green code. It felt as natural as breathing to do it, but experiencing the change made her uncomfortable in a way she couldn’t articulate. How could something so easy feel so wrong? Was she going to be the same person after this? What right had she to do it, and what right had her captain—her aunt—to ask.
She opened her eyes, and Lodia gasped, a soft sound that might have been a sob, except Harlands didn’t cry. The captain’s face hardened.
“Pendt, you must listen to me,” she said. Her tone was unmistakable now. Arkady had stopped thinking of her as Family and saw her only as part of the Harland.
“Yes, sir,” Pendt said.
She didn’t know what she had done wrong. She had done exactly as Arkady asked. Maybe it was the wrong shade of blue. She couldn’t see her own eyes, of course, but Pendt was sure she’d matched her cousin’s eye colour when she’d changed the code. Maybe she should have gone with Arkady’s shade instead. Maybe her aunt had wanted her to be more creative. Pendt tried reaching for the blue again, and she could see it just as clearly as before, but something inside her knew that if she tried again, without the protein, it would only hurt her in the long run.
“You must never use your gene-sense again,” Arkady said, giving name to Pendt’s curse. “Do you hear me? Never use the æther, unless I have given you permission.”
“You mean until I get lessons?” Pendt asked. Surely there was a version of Spark for her to play, now that she knew what she could do. The colours called to her, choice beyond measure, and she couldn’t answer that call. “I’ve been doing my best to instruct myself until—”
“I mean never,” said the captain, abruptly cutting her off. It wasn’t the colour. It was the fact that she could do it. “Your skills will not be useful to the Harland until you come of age. Until then, you will do what you are told.”
Pendt wanted to cry, but some instinct told her that crying wouldn’t help, and she clung to it, even as her Harland-ness seemed to fall away from her. If she was useless, then there was nothing that would help. She would be a blue-eyed burden forever.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Pendt said. Her voice was very small. “I’m sorry I’m not better. For the Harland.”
“I am sorry too,” Arkady said. She spoke like she’d already forgotten who Pendt was and didn’t look in her direction. She looked at Lodia instead. “You’re dismissed.”
* * *
• • •
Pendt remembered nothing about the lift ride back down to Family quarters. Her mind was struggling to absorb everything she had seen: the lights and sounds, the coldness of her aunt’s look, the way her cousins gazed right through her. Lodia didn’t hold her hand.
“You only have bio-sense, nothing electrical or star-born, or even mathematical,” Lodia said when she and Pendt got back to the Family quarters. “That’s what gene-sense means. Before the æther was purged, the Stavengers called it grain-sense, and mostly used it for farming. We have no need of that here. It’s not worth it to spend the calories on you.”
Pendt said nothing. The part of her that wondered about the future and dreamed about flying a ship with her siblings was dying, and the part that was growing in its place was a silent, waiting thing.
“You won’t be useful until you’re eighteen and can work legally under the shipborn rules,” Lodia continued. “Then you can be hired out. Until then, you will be worthless. The captain will decide what you can do to earn oxygen.”
Pendt understood only that she was useless, and that she didn’t deserve to breathe as a result. She knew that eighteen was far away, more than ten years, and she knew exactly how many calories and how much atmosphere a person consumed in that much time.
Then her brain fixed on the word hire. They would get her a job on another ship. She’d have to leave everything and everyone she had ever known and go to a place where she wasn’t Family. She would never belong again, and that was the worst fate she could possibly imagine. She wasn’t much of a Harland, to her shame, but in all of her dire imaginings, she had never considered losing her name. She’d rather face the airlock.
* * *
• • •
The next morning, Pendt was taken to the galley instead of the crèche. She would miss the quiet times she’d spent learning about Harland operations, but she wouldn’t miss her brothers. Or the way everything in the room reminded her that she was useless. Or the constant feeling of disapproval from whatever elder cousin was in charge of training. Really, she could read anywhere.
She was too young to be of good service doing maintenance, and the galley was moderately safer anyway, though Pendt was never sure if that had entered into Arkady’s calculations. The children didn’t get jobs until they were twelve unless they showed remarkable aptitude, and Pendt had no aptitude for anything. It was known immediately by everyone who saw her, family and otherwise, that her position was a mark of some terrible failure on her part.
The cooks made her stand on a stool to pass them things or carry pots that were too big for her. When she made mistakes, she was reported immediately for punishment. She didn’t hold it against them. They would be punished far worse if they coddled her, and they had no reason to. Even shamed, Pendt was Family and they were not. That meant she was the Family’s to use as they saw fit. Arkady ruled in the galley as much as she ruled everywhere else, and her edict regarding Pendt was wordless, but clear nonetheless. Still, she was small, and she was clumsy, so Pendt made many mistakes.
“There is nothing in the void,” said Lodia as she locked Pendt into one of the supply closets for having dropped three grams of vege-matter on the galley floor on the fourth afternoon of her new life. It wasn’t her last infraction. She didn’t like the small space or the confining dark, but she was coming to appreciate the solitude. She’d been forced to eat the matter as part of her own rations, of course, so there hadn’t been any waste, but such behaviour couldn’t go unpunished. “You have to be more careful.”
Pendt held her chin up and took it like a Harland.
Three days and two more stints in the cupboard after that, she overheard her cousins discussing if their mother was going to airlock her.
“It would be much more economical,” Donalin argued. “Otherwise we’re going to feed her all these years to bring us dinner. Usually, we make people pay us to do that, just for the privilege of being on our ship.”