Boneyard by D.M. Darroch

Author:D.M. Darroch [Darroch, D.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: D.M. Darroch
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

The excitement over, the crew had cleared out back to the Line where they set to repairing the blocks Dusty had damaged. Jan Oh had stayed behind to help me with the field work.

“Kominsky, you know.”

He waved his left arm. Meaning Kominsky would be here digging beside us if he had the use of two arms.

I grunted in reply, relieved to have something to do with my body. Watching Dusty hit the ground, the sound of it—how had he not broken every bone in his body? And Maduro had dragged him away in his usual rough way with no thought of what injuries Dusty might have suffered. I was seething with anger—at Nelson, at Maduro, and at my friend for losing it, again. Frankly, I was tired, exhausted of being angry and on guard. I was always watching my back and hating my life. Being angry took so much energy, but on the Line, anger was all I had. My ability to seed thoughts in another’s neural mesh was my sword. Anger was my shield.

Kominsky dug quickly, efficiently. I watched his technique, how he moved his slight body with intent, adding its weight to the shovel, breaking the hard pan with the edge of the metal like it was nothing. I mimicked his movements but eventually gave up, resorting to the brute force I was used to.

He hummed while he worked. The monotonous tune relaxed me somehow, and I forgot for a while that I was nursing a headache. After a time, he broke the comfortable quiet between us.

“That one is zhong shi.”

“Sorry?”

“The crazy one.”

“Dusty?”

“Zhong shi de peng you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It means faithful friend. That is rare in society. Even less common here, on the Line.”

I scoffed, hiding behind my anger. “He’s an addicted hundan.”

Jan rarely spoke, at least not to me. He started humming again, and I figured we were done.

“Kominsky is also zhong shi de peng you. I take care of him. You take care of Dusty. You are each other’s strength.”

He said nothing more, which gave me plenty of time to think about his words. He wasn’t wrong about Dusty: that hezui was a lot of things, but loyal was at the top of the list. The more I thought about it, the more guilty I felt. I shared most things with Dusty. He was my self-appointed coach, cheering me on as my mental strength grew. But I had kept one thing secret from him. One very important thing.

Since landing in corrections, I’d been trying to crack reception, mainly, how to block it. Nelson wasn’t stingy with his PAP alarms. In fact, he was worse than the most button-happy prison guard. The alarms overloaded my dendrites and seemed to affect me more painfully than the others. I needed to figure out how to interfere with the reception, if not to block the alarms completely, at least to mute them. It was a matter of self-preservation.

Several times, Dusty had asked why I was holding my breath. I hadn’t realized I was tensing up, trying to muscle my way through the problem.

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