Aetherbound - E.K. Johnston Page 0,6

stepped into the lift. Her cousins had started whispering things about her being left behind. It was marginally better than when they suggested Arkady might just airlock her and get it over with.

“No, little cat,” her mother said. The use of the name was not a comfort, less a bargain and more a threat. “When you’re eighteen and can sign a contract on Brannick Station, you’ll be worth so much to us.”

That vague promise or something like it was all Pendt ever got. She didn’t know why she would suddenly be worth more when she was eighteen, except that she would be able to enter into contracts. Her oldest cousins could do that if they wanted, though they didn’t need one to work on the Harland. Dr. Morunt was under contract, but Pendt’s mother never talked like she was planning to give her daughter medical training. The cook had no gene-sense to speak of, relying on Morunt’s calculations to determine who ate how much. It must have something to do with food, though. Everything always came back to food.

Pendt continued to wonder about it while she worked in the galley preparing lunch. She was best at measuring out portions, so the job was usually given to her. This required much less heavy lifting, but she could still make mistakes by being imprecise or by dropping things, so her rate of punishment had not decreased.

Pendt fetched the containers from the galley stowage and arranged the trays being assembled for everyone’s meal. Each tray had a coloured chip on it, indicating who the meal was for, and Pendt’s job was to make sure the calories on the plate matched Dr. Morunt’s recommendations. The food was divided up by type: protein, vegetable, starch. Each package was made of fibres that would be recycled into wires and such. When it was emptied and cleaned, Pendt put it into the compressor. All told, it was tedious work. But it didn’t result in getting burns from the stove and there was no point in complaining, so Pendt did it.

Sometimes, Pendt’s life felt like an eternity of peeling back lids and scooping out the nutritious matter inside. The rational part of her knew that it had only been a few years and that she had too many more to get through to be thinking so defeatedly, but occasional irrationality was her only escape, and so when her job was particularly boring, she let herself drift while she was doing it.

The spatula scraped against the bottom of the container Pendt was holding, and she added it to her stack of empties. There were enough to put through the recycler—a machine that extracted the last bits of edible calories from the packaging and sent them to hydroponics for use as fertilizer—so Pendt added that to her rhythm. As they started to emerge from the recycler, Pendt placed the sanitized containers into the compressor, the last time she had to worry about them. Her attention split between the trays, the recycler, and the compressor, Pendt did not anticipate the danger she was in until it was too late.

She reached a fraction of a centimetre too far into the compressor or maybe she withdrew her hand a fraction of a second too late. She never knew. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that her index finger got caught in the gears that controlled the speed of the machine.

Time seemed to slow down, and she was aware that what was about to happen was going to hurt. A lot.

Her finger was crushed between two pieces of metal and she screamed. She pulled her hand back, but the nail caught on a jagged edge, and tore all the way off. She turned away from the trays, determined to bleed only on the floor, and cradled her hand against her chest. Her jumpsuit turned red and the cook and the other galley workers were screaming at her, but she couldn’t understand them. All she knew was pain.

It was in her hand, in her finger. It was dripping out of her onto the floor and soaking into her shirt. The pain was everywhere, but it was also laser-focused in her fingertip, and her fingertip was something she could reach.

Without meaning to and beyond all control, Pendt sank into the code she usually worked so hard to ignore. She found the part of her that hurt and saw the magic that would make the hurting stop. It was behind a wall. A barrier she wasn’t strong