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Sawyer

Sent message

Encryption: 0

Translation: 0

From: Sawyer (path: 7466-314-23)

To: Eyas (path: 6635-448-80)

Hi Eyas,

I hope you don’t mind me sending you a note. I found your scrib path in the ship’s directory (you’re the only one with your name!). Anyway, I wanted to thank you again for your advice the other day. I’d just signed up for sanitation work when I met somebody outside the job office looking to hire workers for a salvage project. It’s just a gig right now, but it might be more. Plus, this crew’s been the only group of people other than yourself to offer to show me the ropes. They seem like fun folks. So I’m on board with them now, but don’t worry! My name’s still in the sanitation lottery. I took what you said seriously, and I’ll help out when I’m needed. Thanks for steering me in the right direction.

Sawyer

*

He should’ve been sleeping. Sleep was the smart thing, the responsible thing. He was worried about not screwing things up that day, and he knew that if he was smart, he’d still be in bed, because being well-rested would help him actually accomplish that. But instead, he was up during the artificial dawn, standing in his bedroom in the otherwise unoccupied home, turning this way and that in front of the mirror, cycling through the five shirts he owned and liking none of them. They didn’t look like what Exodans wore. They were too bright, too crisp. They lacked that degree of sincere, inoffensive wear that Exodan clothing always had, that reminder that new cloth only came around every so often. His clothes, cheap though they’d been, simple though he’d thought them, were made too well. He hadn’t known that when he’d packed his bags back on Mushtullo, but he knew it now, just like he knew that his accent put people off, and that even though he shared the same DNA as everybody else here, they saw him as something other.

I should’ve bought new clothes, he thought irritably as he pulled off his shirt with a sigh. He’d meant to, but he’d been so busy brushing up on Tinker that he’d run out of time. He backed up to the edge of his bed and sat down, holding the garment in his hands. Red and brown threads, woven together in a breezy fashion, perfect for the sticky days back home. He’d bought this shirt at Strut, one of his favourite shops down in Little Florence. He’d been with friends at the time – Cari and Shiro and Lael, blowing their creds and getting drunk in celebration of yet another payday at the shitty stasie factory.

Of all the things he’d anticipated in leaving Mushtullo, homesickness hadn’t been one of them. He didn’t feel it with a pang, but with an ache – a dull, keening ache, the kind of thing you could ignore at first but that grew less tolerable every day. There was a lot about his homeworld he didn’t miss. The crowds. The grime. The triple dose of daylight that made shirts like the one he held a necessity. But he missed the people. He missed Lael, with her incessant puns. He missed Cari, always good for the latest gossip. He even missed Shiro, the cranky bastard, garbage taste in music and all.

He’d left for good reasons, he told himself. He’d left for the right reasons. What was there for him on Mushtullo, beyond working jobs he didn’t care about so he could buy drinks he’d piss away and shirts he wouldn’t like later? What was there beyond a drab studio in a drab residence block, in a neighbourhood where people shoved guns in your back and took your creds? What meaning was there in that? What good?

Even so, he missed his friends. Stars, he missed having friends.

He wondered, cautiously, if he’d made a mistake. If he was still making one. Maybe Eyas had been right. Maybe the folks at the job office had been trying to tell him that he didn’t have the right stuff to become part of the Fleet. He knew where the transport dock was. He only had five shirts. It wouldn’t take him long to pack.

Sawyer shook his head. What was wrong with him? He was starting a job today! A job! With people! With Oates, who’d liked him! Muriel seemed to like him, too, and Len seemed all right, and . . . okay, Dory was scary, but maybe she’d come around. Maybe he was what they were looking for. Maybe they’d welcome him in.

Sawyer realised that was what was scaring him. He was afraid of getting his hopes up, of putting too much stock into this new thing. He’d learned, in the past few tendays, that deciding ahead of time how a thing was going to go was setting yourself up for a faceplant.

So, fine, he didn’t know how it would go . . . but he knew what he wanted from them. A posse. A crew. A real crew, like he’d seen in vids and sims. People who looked after each other. People who were messy sometimes, but could pull together when stuff got tough. People who would laugh at his jokes, and give him a nickname, maybe, who would knock on his door late at night because they knew where they could go with their problems. People who always had a spot at the table for him. People to whom he mattered.

It was too big of an expectation to put on one job offer, he knew that. But he looked at himself in the mirror, and he felt some confidence creep back in. If it was a matter of either getting his hopes up or glooming himself to the edge of going home – well then, hopes up it was. He took a breath and put on his shirt. His clothes were fine. They would do. The crew of the Silver Lining would like him. He’d do a good job. He’d use the last of his creds and buy everybody a drink after. He’d be cool and funny, and they’d want him to come back again.