Chapter Text
Space is dark, and cold, and a lot louder than Adam was expecting.
It might be different on a passenger ship. The nice ones had furnished parlors with sound dampening. Even on the cheap ones, you'd be pressed up against the next person on the bench, too close to be cold.
In a transport ship, in the cargo bay, the bare metal walls echo back every sound, and there's a lot of them. Machinery clanking away. Distant shouts of crewmen at work. A loud constant hum, oppressive, like it's coming from right on top of him, although he can't see anything that would be making it.
He doesn't spend a lot of time checking. He pokes his head out of his crate once, after it had stopped moving, after the sounds of the crew had died out and he'd gotten enough used to the remaining clunks and buzzes and whistles to be pretty sure there's no one outside. With the crate lid up one careful inch he gets his first look at his surroundings. Not a massive cargo bay, the kind they have on long haulers; he'd picked a regional transport, the kind that spends days rather than months in between stops. He didn't need to go far; he just needed to go.
The cargo bay he'll spend the next two days in is large enough it could hold a half a dozen personal transport ships, maybe. The cargo isn't anything so interesting, just more crates stamped with Company codes that mean nothing to him.
There's a freezer unit right up against his crate. It would probably be warmer somewhere in the middle of the cargo bay, but he doesn't see anywhere else big enough for a twelve-year-old to hide in, even a scrawny one.
He pulls the lid shut again. He'd rigged a little latch on the inside of the crate to keep the lid on, after he'd pried out the nails so he could get in. He slides the latch into place and hunkers back down in what was left of the bolts of cotton fabric after he'd tossed enough of them to make room for himself.
He'd made it on board.
That was the hard part. He made it on. Now all he has to do is wait. Two days and they'll be planet side again, and someone will unload his crate, and he'll be somewhere new, and it'll all be over. All he has to do now is sit, in the dark, and not get caught.
He tries to fall asleep, because he's exhausted, because it would make the time pass, but his heart rate never gets slow enough for that. He keeps his eyes shut anyway, so they aren't straining to see in the dark of the crate, but without anything to even look at, there's nothing to distract him from how he feels.
He'd thought his split lip was mostly better by now, but when he licks his lips it stings again, a bright flare of pain. The throbbing around his eye never really went away, or the ache in his left pinkie and ring finger, under the splint. There's some pang that comes and goes on his side, in his rib cage maybe, that he can't identify. His legs start to cramp after a few hours stuck in the same position.
It isn't fair that there's a new pain. Not when he still has the others. Not when he's so close to getting away.
There hasn't been a sound from anyone else in hours. Nothing happened when he opened the crate before.
He slides the latch open and lifts off the lid.
He climbs most of the way out before he stumbles, cramped leg seizing up when his foot hits the ground. He falls and lands with a thud. The impact reverberates through him, making him gasp when it pulses through his broken fingers.
The gasp is quiet enough to be drowned out by the ever-running machinery.
The thud he made when he fell...
He pushes himself back up to his feet, wincing and holding his breath to listen for any noise beyond the damn freezer unit humming. He almost thinks he's gotten away with it.
And then a door opens.
"...hearing things, loser," someone says.
There's a smack of flesh against flesh.
"I think you mean yes, boss," someone else snarls. Adam misses the rest of the comment, tumbling as fast as he can back into the crate and pulling the lid on. Footsteps approach and he falls completely still, doesn't dare move even to shut the latch.
"...waste of my time," the first voice complains.
"Your time isn't worth shit."
The lid lifts up off of the crate.
Adam stares, frozen, through the one eye that isn't swollen shut.
There's a boy standing over him, about his age, wearing a Company uniform. He has a look of annoyance on his face that stiffens quickly into something else.
Adam can't breathe in enough air to speak. Does it matter? What can you say to someone that holds your life in their hands?
The boy drops the lid back down onto the crate.
"A fucking broom fell over," he calls back to the second voice. "You're right, that was a really good use of my time," and then his footsteps fade away.
Adam covers his mouth with both hands and gasps in, hard. His shaking fingers find the latch and slide it into place.
It isn't very long before his legs start to cramp again. He stays exactly where he is.
-
It's a long, long, long time before he hears a soft tap on the crate.
"Hey." The boy's voice is so low that Adam can barely hear it over the ambient noise. "It's me."
Adam doesn't respond. It is the same boy as before. That doesn't mean he's the only one out there.
"Look, there's no one else here, but -- fuck, you gotta come out, you can't stay in there." He sounds almost as desperate as Adam feels, and that more than anything gets him to open the crate.
He scans the room, as much of it as he can in the low light, between the tightly packed cargo, before he turns his attention back to the Company boy. They really are alone.
"You didn't tell anyone?" he asks.
"What do I look like, a snitch?"
"You look like Company."
"What the hell do you know, idiot?" the boy demands. "What the fuck are you doing here, do you know what they do to stowaways?"
Adam says "I know."
The boy's shoulders slump, the fight draining out of him. "You can't stay here," he says again. "You're going to get caught."
"It won't happen again. I can be quieter." He can.
But the boy shakes his head. "The captain goes through the cargo every time we take on new inventory and skims some off the top. He was on the bridge all day dealing with some clusterfuck, but tomorrow he's going to come here and he's gonna want to make sure he gets the best shit. He's going to check everything."
Adam goes numb. His body trying to get ready, maybe. He wonders if it hurts, when they shove you out an airlock. It's supposed to be a fast death, at least.
"So come on," the boy says. He takes a step and Adam stumbles after him, only realizes that the boy has taken his hand and is tugging him forward when he looks down at his feet and tries to catch himself. He still can't feel his hands. "You need to get out of here."
Where else is there to go? There's only one way off the ship.
If he can't feel his hand, he definitely can't pull it free. He lets himself be pulled along, deeper into the cargo bay, weaving between towering stacks of Company goods. The boy leads them to a corner in the back of the room, where there's a dark rectangle in the wall. He crouches down, and Adam's eyes adjust enough to see that it's the opening to one of the work pipes, where the crew can access the deepest guts of the ship. It can't be more than two feet wide and completely dark inside. From the dim light of the cargo bay Adam can just see bolts sticking out, where they'd jab at anyone who wasn't extremely careful.
"Follow me and keep your mouth shut," the boy orders, and then he crawls into the tunnel and out of sight.
If he's lying to Adam about the captain, then he's got his own agenda and Adam is likely dead already anyway. If he's telling the truth, Adam has a better chance going somewhere then he does staying here.
Adam crawls after him.
He has no idea how long they're in the pipes. There's only the faintest bits of light when they pass another opening, and that's only what can slip through the grates covering the openings. He isn't cold anymore, but he stopped being grateful for that fast -- it's too warm, but more than that it's humid, and he'd be sweating just from the endless work of pulling himself along even without that. His broken hand pulses in time with his heartbeat. No matter how careful he is, he still scrapes himself on what feels like every bolt and rough edge in the long metal corridor.
They finally, finally, emerge into a room. It's more storage space, much smaller than the cargo bay, and full of tools and mechanical parts rather than trade goods. There's a metal sink and toilet on one side of the wall. A hammock hangs in one corner of the room, at a bit of an angle. The hammock is longer than the room is wide.
The boy is already at the room's one door when Adam sticks his head out of the pipe one wary inch.
"You can come out." The boy isn't loud, but he isn't trying so hard to be quiet like he was in the cargo bay. "The door's locked. No one needs to get in here until morning shift starts."
Adam stays put. "What happens at morning shift?"
The boy turns on the sink, splashes water up his arms. He's covered in some kind of grime, and when Adam looks at his own hands he sees the same dark smudges. He rubs his fingers together but can't tell what it is, except that it's oily enough it's going to be a pain to get off.
"You can go back in the pipes in the morning," the boy says, scrubbing at his arms with a rag. "No one ever goes in there except me."
"Really." Adam's voice is flat. It's too convenient to be true.
The boy wrings out the rag viciously. "No one else fits in the pipes. Why do you think they hired a kid?"
"They're easier to push around than adults," Adam says, but it's a decent point.
The boy snorts. "They can fucking try to push me around."
An adult could crawl through the pipes they'd just passed, but only if they were a small adult. Even for Adam, it's tight enough quarters to feel like a trap. He doesn't try to escape it, just yet.
"Why are you doing this?"
The boy throws the rag into the sink. "What kind of question is that?"
No other answer is offered.
Adam crawls the rest of the way out of the pipe. There's no graceful way to do it; he has to let his head and shoulders more or less fall the last foot to the ground, trying to catch most of his weight on his good hand and then inch forward until he's got his legs free.
By the time he's emerged, the boy is lying in the hammock. He's thrown his arms over his face.
With nothing better to do, Adam picks up the discarded rag and tries to wash up a bit. It's hard to tell how good of a job he's done, when the light is so low.
He turns the water off. Without the sound of it, the ship is still loud. The first several times footsteps approach the door, he jolts, but they always recede again without stopping. Night shift going about its business, maybe, except what is night on a transport ship? He wishes he'd asked the boy when morning shift was supposed to start.
Over all that, he can still make out the sound of the boy breathing like someone pretending to be asleep.
Adam curls up in a corner of the room. His legs complain about being drawn up again, but there's not enough space to lay flat out, not unless he laid down underneath the hammock. At least there's a small bit of comfort to take from drawing himself in, being slightly less exposed.
The cold and the stress keep him from getting much sleep. He worries if he does ever fall asleep, he'll be out like a dead thing, but the bell that rings is loud, loud enough to cover his panicked yelp as he startles awake.
The boy rolls up out of the hammock and lands on his feet without batting an eye. This must be morning shift.
He unscrews the grate and opens the pipe in the wall again. He doesn't climb in himself, just gestures for Adam. "Go until you find a turn off." He speaks in something lower than a whisper.
Adam mouths which way?
"Any way. Just hang out somewhere you can't see any light." He gestures impatiently, so Adam crawls inside the pipe. The grate clangs shut behind him the second he's gotten his feet clear.
Adam crawls until he finds a turn off, counting each inch forward, and then he crawls further still, until the second time he hits an intersection in the pipes. Paranoid, he keeps running back over the directions to the boy's room, even though he had only taken two turns, as though he could forget.
It's a long morning in the pipes. They're tight, only about four inches of headspace above him and a few more inches to either side. He feels hideously exposed: the sounds of the ship at work are all around him, footsteps thundering over his head, the clash and clatter and clank of tools, operated by people making indecipherable conversation somewhere, instead of dumb machinery running on its own. He's starving and exhausted and he can't tell the difference between when his eyes are open and when they're shut.
He realizes, belatedly, that he has no idea when it'll be safe to return to the room. He hears what might be a bell ringing out a new shift, distorted from bouncing around metal before it reaches him, but he doesn't dare act on it. What if he's wrong, what if that isn't what the bell means, or what if it is but there's some third shift, some other thing he's waiting to be done before he can emerge. He wishes he'd thought to keep time, count down minutes, but what good would that do when he doesn't know the length of the shifts, the length of the hours, what planet's clock this ship keeps?
In the end the boy has to come fetch him. Adam sees light approaching from around a bend in the pipe, blinding after hours in the dark, nothing he can do but stay put and hope it's the boy.
It is. He glares at Adam, pure poison anger shining brighter than the small light in his fist. He gestures, this way, and the outrage isn't diluted even by watching the awkward maneuver he has to pull off to turn around, crawling backwards and then wiggling around in the intersection of two tunnels.
Adam copies the ridiculous movement, follows the boy back along the route he obsessively and needlessly memorized. The door is already locked by the time he emerges into the storage room; he has just enough time to confirm that before the boy gets up in his face.
"You weren't where I told you to be."
"I went further in," Adam says. "Isn't that safer?"
"Next time go where I tell you."
That doesn't answer the question. Adam wants to point that out, wants to argue his point, until he realizes that he absolutely doesn't know whether he was safer further in. Maybe he'd gone somewhere more trafficked, less soundproofed, putting himself in more danger trying to avoid it.
He pictures, suddenly, the moment that the boy must have had, crawling out into the dark guts of the ship to retrieve him. Finding him gone. Wondering if Adam had been found, if they were about to both get thrown out into space.
"All right," he says, "I will."
"Here." The boy tosses something at him that Adam catches reflexively.
It's a packaged bar, rations, and his empty stomach clenches so hard and fast that it cramps. He'd salivate if his mouth weren't so dry. He wants to tear into it and devour it.
"Where's this from?" Adam asks.
"The canteen."
"They just let you take food?"
"That's what a canteen's for," the boy answers, leaves the you dipshit merely implied.
Adam is pretty sure the Company doesn't just let their employees take as much food as they want. This is either stolen, or else it's part of the boy's rations.
He tosses the bar back. "I don't need you to feed me. I can wait until we get to the planet."
"You can wait two weeks to eat?"
His heart stops.
"Two weeks?" Adam asks, horrified. "But -- this ship's going to Silver Peak, that's two days -- "
"Silver Peak's under quarantine," the boy says. "We're skipping ahead to our next stop."
Quarantine. How could he have gotten this so wrong? He'd planned, he'd waited, he'd passed up ships that came sooner and had less security, making a trade off for the shortest possible time as a stowaway -- and after all that he'd gotten it wrong, signed himself up to starve to death in a cargo bay over the course of two weeks -- or no, he wouldn't have, because he would've been found by the captain this morning and thrown out into space.
The boy throws the rations back at him. Numb, Adam catches it and tears open the package. He eats without being aware of the flavor. It's gone in three bites; his stomach cramps up again from how fast he ate.
"Thanks," he says, voice dull. The boy just shrugs and turns the light off.
Adam sits, slowly, in the corner of the room.
Two weeks, in the cold, in the dark, with the challenge of escaping off the ship unseen at the end of it.
He doesn't know how he's going to make it.
He isn't going to, he can't possibly, and just when he's decided that, wide awake and shivering in the night, the boy sighs loudly. "Just get up here already."
Adam squints up at him. "What, you want to share a hammock?"
"It's better than listening to your teeth chattering all night," the boy says, and adds, before Adam can snarl at him, "we'll both be warmer."
He has a blanket, and he's up off the metal ground that's leeching the heat out of Adam's body. But he has a blanket, and just a hammock and a couple of feet between him and the freezing floor.
Adam climbs into the hammock -- a cautious balancing act that nearly spills them over before he gives up and just tumbles in next to the boy. He tries to hold himself apart, but it isn't possible; he tries to hold himself stiff, sure that if he relaxes too much he'll send them both tipping over onto the ground. But it is warmer, next to someone, and without his approval his muscles slowly relax until he falls asleep.
So it is two weeks of days spent in the dark, crawling into the pipes when the morning shift starts, hiding silent in the dark, lying so still that it's physically painful to get back on his feet after, clenched all over in the terror of being discovered.
But it's two weeks of nights where the boy locks the door, and brings Adam back out of the darkness, and shares his food with him, and keeps him warm at night in a bed and a room and a life that's too small for one person, let alone two.
-
On the sixth night, after Adam has fallen asleep -- he's gotten good at that, can fall asleep before the hammock even stops swinging -- he jerks violently awake with his heart in his throat, because someone is knocking on the door.
The boy scrambles up. He nearly sends Adam tumbling out after him; Adam thinks that the fact he manages to stay in the hammock has less to do with physics and more to do with his panic over what the thud that his body would make, hitting the floor.
"Go away, it's my fucking sleep shift," the boy barks, while he gestures for Adam to go, go, in. Adam doesn't need to be told; he's already scrambling, trying like mad to move fast and silent at the same time.
"Let me in," a man says from the other side of the door as Adam reaches the pipe. "Engineer needs to get at the equipment stores."
"He can wait until it's not my fucking sleep shift." The boy screws the grate shut over the opening, the way he does at the start of the morning shift, except then he has all the time he needs and no one listening.
"Open up, you little shit. What'd you lock the door for, you jacking off in there?"
"Yeah, I'm thinking about that time your mother blew me."
The grate only slightly muffles the conversation. Adam doesn't have the chance to scoot more than a couple of feet down the pipe; he shouldn't be visible through the grate, not unless someone comes right up to it and peers in. It's as far as he can get before the boy opens the door.
Footsteps of a man striding into the room: a clear sound. A slap of skin hitting skin: another clear sound, and Adam can picture it like he'd seen it, the boy getting smacked across the face, because he'd talked back, because he'd stalled, for Adam.
There's other sounds, less clear, clanking and rummaging and bodies moving around. He waits through every agonizing moment that it takes the man to get what he needs and leave, not without another slap.
The boy doesn't have to come after him that time. When Adam hears the panel being opened, after several minutes of silence in the room, he crawls back out himself, backwards, and lands feet first on the floor.
The boy's left cheek is red enough it shows even in the dimness of the room. Adam takes the rag off the sink, wets it, hands it over to the boy, mute, who presses it up to his face and pulls it away again.
"Yours is worse."
"Mine's already bruised," Adam says. "That won't make a difference."
The boy makes a face, wincing slightly but not enough to stop him from making the face. "It's not gonna make a difference either way," but he presses the rag to his cheek for a few minutes, before its meager chill wears off.
They climb back into the hammock and lie there, wide awake. Adam knows his breath is shallow, noticeably so when they're pressed together this close. The only thing that makes the shame bearable is that the boy's breath is fast too, both of them rattled and terrified after their near miss.
After a while -- heart rate slowed but only slightly -- the boy asks, "What's your name, kid?"
"Kid? You've got to be my age, at most."
"I'm a crew member and you're just a stowaway," he replies snottily. "So tell me your name."
"Why do you want to know?"
"Because some day I'm going to tell everyone about how I fucked over the Company, and how this kid gave me a fucking heart attack."
"Adam." They were already whispering, but that word comes out as something softer than a whisper. "When I tell everyone about the craziest boy I ever knew and how he liked to piss off the Company just for fun -- "
He thinks, maybe, that the boy isn't going to answer, but after a long, long moment, he returns the word, just as fragile as Adam's. "Ronan."
It's a little easier to sleep, maybe, just knowing who has their back.
-
That's the only time that they're almost caught, but they're always ready for it. They don't talk much, after that night. Adam crawls a bit further back into the pipes. Ronan only comes to get him just before it's time to crawl into the hammock for the night.
Two weeks pass before the ship docks anywhere, like Ronan said. Adam counts days in his head, not because he doubts him, at this point, but he doesn't have much else to do besides count.
So when Ronan comes to get him the last night and nudges him forward instead of back, Adam doesn't ask any questions. He follows Ronan's pointed directions back to the cargo bay they had met in, lets Ronan give him a hand climbing back into the crate.
He reaches for the lid to pull it back on, but Ronan keeps a hold on it.
"You can't just pop out whenever, okay? Wait for me -- wait for me to let you out," asks the boy who has, every night for two weeks, come and pulled him out of the darkness.
Adam nods.
When he hears the sounds of Ronan nailing the crate shut, he digs his fingers into his leg and doesn't let panic take over.
-
It's a few hours after Ronan leaves before he hears new people in the cargo bay, shouting at each other and hauling things around. Another half an hour after that before he feels his crate jolt as it's lifted off the floor, several long sweaty minutes of being jostled around as the temperature spikes, and at least another hour after he's dropped to an abrupt halt before the crate pops open.
The light and the heat are both extreme, and sudden enough they confuse Adam's senses; for a moment, his ears ache from the force of a sound that doesn't exist. He blinks frantically, manages to adjust to the bright new day just in time to see Ronan toss a crowbar aside.
He says, "go."
Adam scrambles out to freedom, feet hitting coarse sand that's baking hot even though the soles of his shoes. There's no one around that he can see, but they're standing amidst a mountain of cargo that surely won't be left attended by only one junior member of the crew for long.
Ronan says again, "go," and Adam runs.
The first cover he sees is a thin wall of stubby stunted trees at the edge of the canyon. He tears through them without slowing, slides down down down down into the open mouth of the earth, without looking back.