Under Far Galaxian Skies

Please read the content warnings if you have any triggers related to self-harm and/or suicide ideation. Chapter 1 contains mild spoilers for Quarantine Thirteen.

Chapter 1

Fingernails pierced the skin on my arm and Elin screamed. I kicked and rolled my way out of the stall. Elin’s fists rained down on me. I got to my feet and stared into the cubicle. The mare danced around with her fine brown head in the air.

Elin’s boyfriend lay still. He didn’t emit a sound. My heart stopped beating. He lay face down. The back of his head had an odd indent. It was hoof-shaped. A lump built in my throat. The sour taste of bile followed. Raven landed on a bale of hay.

“Ba-ba bad,” it crowed.

The bird’s hoarse voice echoed in Balfour’s mind. He stared at the blood-and-tear-stained page in his notebook. The words had become fuzzy where he had rubbed to erase them.

Pain. It gnawed at his bones. His stomach writhed with nausea. The smell. The squelching, crunching sound of the hooves crushing Matthius’ skull repeated in a never-ending chorus.

“I’m a murderer.” The words escaped Balfour’s lips in a hush. Mix Chamile, his therapist, had been wrong. Writing it all down didn’t help. Not this time.

He clenched the stumpy pencil. He didn’t let up the pressure when the tip broke his skin. Old scar tissue meant hardly any blood trickled from the hole on his palm. His teeth ground together so hard his head vibrated.

He hadn’t meant to murder Matthius. But what did it matter? He had murdered Elin’s boyfriend when he found them way too engaged. His baby sister wouldn’t even look at him during the trial. Ola, their granddad, had done the talking.

Balfour opened his palm and stared at the pencil sticking out from it. Buried well past the ragged tip which he had sharpened with a knife.

Uneven, round scars riddled his hand. It didn’t hurt. It might as well have been the hand of someone else. Someone who one month ago had been found guilty of manslaughter. One whose high-ranking granddad had managed to negotiate a six month labour job on a merchant ship followed by two years of disposal service.

Balfour shivered. He hated the stench coming from the disposal tunnels under the floating city of Amule – the city he had come to call home after eleven years of living there. Not that he had ever seen Quarantine Thirteen as his home even though that was the planet he had been born on. But he had betrayed Tara and Merlon. Failed his rescuers turned adoptive parents.

They should have left him on the island, alone. There was a reason his birth parents had left him to die. I’m a monster. Mummy had been right all along.

He jerked the pencil from his hand and slammed the notebook shut around the blood-covered writing instrument. Shimmying back under the rough blanket, he stared at the bunk above. The breathing wood of the merchant ship sighed quietly around him. But his mind still circled back to the past.

The island. The place his birth parents, and Elin’s and Cary’s too, had left them. The three of them had not been right. Children born on Quarantine Thirteen were tested and probed to see if they carried the pox. The deadly disease that had threatened humanity on several Earths.

It was the reason his parents had been shipped off to a quarantine planet – only to be allowed to return to their home on Earth Seven once no new children carrying the mutations were born. Those mutations that allowed the children to remain healthy and spread the malady. The mutations Balfour had.

The time on the island was fuzzy in his memory. He had been starving within a week. Any food he found, he had given to Elin, his biological cousin.

She had been so little. If only she had kept her mouth shut. Balfour had told her time and again not to let any adults know the storks looked purple and blue rather than black. But he had forgotten to tell the five-year-old she couldn’t draw the storks’ colours either.

Then he had slipped up himself, trying to protect her. Mummy had known already of course, and Auntie Bethy whom Balfour lived with for his last months in the village. But one day Auntie Bethy had to go to the city to sign some papers. Daddy had come with the mayor to take them away. Balfour had fought to keep Elin from being shipped off. But he had failed. Daddy sailed them out to the island, just like Cary had been months earlier.

Cary, who was older and cleverer. Who hated everyone but still fed Balfour and Elin raw fish and fruits when he found them a few days after they had been abandoned.

Balfour shook the past from his head and rubbed at his eyes. They were dry, but hurt. So many tears had been spilled this past month.

He had thought missing the captain’s exam would be the worst thing he could do to Merlon and Tara. They hadn’t even blamed him but had raged and pleaded with the headmaster. Since Balfour had sustained injuries from the captain's teens beating him around until he was late, he had been allowed to sit the exam the week after. He didn’t make it that long before doing worse.

He had only ever wanted to do them proud. Merlon and Tara had cared for him and Elin like they were of their own blood. Yet he returned their love by committing the highest offence.

How could he ever return to Amule and look them in the eye? He was a criminal now. By all rights, he should be tier-less and imprisoned for the rest of his life. Only Ola’s eloquence and high-tier status had saved him from that fate.

He pressed his throbbing, bleeding hand against his eyelids. The pain drew him back to the present. Two hours until his next shift began. Sleep was evasive on the best of days. Nonetheless, sixteen-hour shifts on a merchant trader left him physically exhausted and sleep eventually pushed through his haunted thoughts.

☼

“Ba-Ba-Bad Balfour! Ba-ba…”

The echo of Raven’s hoarse crowing rang through Balfour’s head when someone shook him awake.

“Get up, eat.” The second mate pressed a bowl of gruel into Balfour’s hand.

With a hiss and jerk he clenched around the raw, pencil-inflicted wound.

Yrion raised an eyebrow at him, opened his mouth as if to ask, then shook his head. “Get on deck in ten. Weather’s bein’ tricky. Cap’n’ll want all hands soon.” The second mate gestured at the bowl again and stepped back.

Balfour stared at the food. His stomach growled but his throat constricted with a rising nausea. He didn’t deserve to eat. Didn’t deserve the continual kindness from Yrion. Didn’t deserve to live.

“Eat,” Yrion commanded again.

Balfour frowned after the boots vanishing up the ladder that led to the main deck. What made Yrion take interest in him? Did he have a child Balfour’s age? One who had killed a seventeen-year-old boy too? Unlikely.

Somehow, the sailor reminded him of Merlon. He could see his foster dad acting with the same compassion. Merlon made a point of hiring troublemakers. He then let them work their way up and sent them on to better positions on other ships once they had come around. Some stayed, like Uncle Fabian.

Balfour could never work his way up. Criminals could only take the lowest paid jobs within their tier. The dream of becoming a captain was gone forever. He could be a common sailor, a harbour warehouse worker or become a shipwright assistant. But only after finishing his six months exile labour and two years as a disposer.

Gingerly, he opened his fist and stared at the round wound in the middle of his palm. Pink and white scars and scabs crowded around the new sore. Yellow puss crusted around the edges.

Balfour extracted the green-hilted knife Tara had given him when he turned nineteen earlier in the year. He bit into his cheek and scraped the infection away with the edge of the blade. Hands trembling from the pain, he wrapped a rag tightly around his palm. He was disgusting. Useless.

The continual growl of his stomach made him pick up the bowl. Tongue thick and dry, he forced a spoonful down. Wasting food was out of the question. And an empty belly made him anxious, nausea or no.

He thought the meal was well-salted and even had a sprinkle of something else, nutmeg or cinnamon, on it, but it all tasted the same. Using a fingertip, he cleaned the bowl of every last bit of gooey buckwheat porridge.

Tara would have shouted at him for doing that. “We have more, donae lick the bowl like a rat.” She would pinch his neck lightly and kiss his ear after scolding him. She always did.

Elin was better, she had learned proper meal manners a lot easier than Balfour. Maybe it was because he had been older when Tara and Merlon found them after months of slowly starving to near death. But he had always thought it was because Elin was smarter.

Making his way to the head to relieve himself, Balfour tried to force the images of Elin at the trial out of his head. Tears had been streaming down her cheeks. Not for her brother’s fate. No, she had cried for the boy he had shoved under a horse to break them apart.

Balfour wasn’t like that. He never fought anyone. He kept asking himself why he had jumped Matthius for kissing his sister with a hand under her shirt. But he knew why. Because Elin and Cary and he were from Outer Universe. Because he was scared of Ola’s warning that she might be able to get pregnant without fertility pills.

He stared at the darkness surrounding the ship as he buttoned up his trousers again. If there hadn’t been netting under the planks he balanced on, would he have had the courage to let himself fall?

Plummeting into the unknown of outer space. There were worse deaths.

Unlike an Inner Universe human, he couldn’t survive away from the ship’s breathing wood. He would choke to death before he could freeze or starve. Not nearly as much suffering as he deserved. No, staying alive was his punishment.

“All hands on deck! Get up you stinking rats!” The first mate shouted through the hatch.

Balfour staggered past his bunk, muttering, “rats aren’t stinky. Neat freaks, really.”

“What’s that, Convict? Talking te yeself again?” Someone leered.

Balfour blinked and looked around. A sailor slapped another on the chest, and both women threw their heads back, jaws pumping in time with their roaring laughter.

Ducking his head, Balfour rushed past them and up the ladders. His right hand thrummed from the infection.

Lanterns flared when a sailor ran from one to the other, rubbing the white powder between her fingers to light them. Balfour squinted against the sudden bright flashes.

They were in a dark zone in between two cities. Not far from Amule, one galaxy over. The darkness had been a blessing. Balfour’s skin burned easily from the sharp rays in Amule. Although the air quality here left him wanting. Even on the ship he found himself struggling for breath on busy days.

“Ease up the flying jib!” Captain Tovu shouted left and right. “Convict boy!” He jabbed a finger at Balfour. “Sort that luffing main sail! Be quick about it.”

The air didn’t quite satisfy his lungs when Balfour sucked down a breath. He ran across the main deck, head spinning. It was worse than usual. Nothing Inner Universe humans would pay attention to, but for an Outer Universe human, every breath rammed sharp needles through his chest.

Calm down, deep breaths, like Ola taught you. He closed his eyes, letting his hands adjust the halyard lines from memory. Slow, long breath in through his nose. He leaned down, closer to the breathing wood of the railings. It helped. But there was a smell. Familiar and old.

Balfour’s eyes snapped open. He whirled to stare at the sails. “It can’t be…”

“Get a move on, Convict!” A sailor bored an elbow into his side.

Balfour staggered. His vision swam. The breath had stopped where his throat constricted. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. He remembered this. The forceful forward pull and downward push of the energy that made the sails flare in a rainbow of strong energy currents.

“It’s a pirate trap,” he croaked.

Yrion paused his work a couple yards away. “There aren’t pirates in Haven Galaxy. None with skill to make a trap, anyway.”

Balfour shook his head. The lack of air made him dazed. Holding on to a halyard was all that kept him from falling face-first onto the deck. Fainting would be a first.

“It’s a pirate trap.” He spoke louder this time.

“Shut it, Convict boy!” Captain Tovu chopped his hand. “I know what a trap looks like.”

“Have you ever been in one?” Balfour could have bit his tongue off. It had to be the dizziness that made him speak up. Corporal punishment was illegal, unless you were a prison labourer. He could almost already feel the stick whipping his back. The captain wouldn’t throttle him, would he?

The sails flared in a sudden burst of colours, then went dark. Balfour’s stomach lurched, and fear shot through his veins. Pictures of the past jumbled through his brain.

He had clung to Elin when Lucia, Merlon’s ship, dropped. Air had been expelled from their lungs when they hit the bottom with a crash. Dust had billowed and gravel rained. They had nearly never made it back out. And that trap had been devoid of pirates.

In anticipation of Balfour taking the captain’s exam to advance from the sailor’s tier, Merlon had taught him how to avoid a trap, along with everything else a seasoned captain knew. All the signs of a trap were there. And that smell. Musty, stale. The lack of air movement that made his vision lurch and his head ache.

He flexed his shoulders and looked Captain Tovu straight in the eye. “Captain, please. It’s a trap. We need to turn to starboard, anchor at half diversion and we might be able to escape.” That was what Merlon afterwards had determined they should have done. It was their best chance.

Sailors stared from across the deck. Balfour hadn’t raised his voice once in the weeks they had been underway between Amule and Haven Galaxy’s capital, Sikner. In fact, most hadn’t heard him speak at all. He got called enough names for being a criminal, no need to give them more fodder by speaking up.

He had a faint accent. Same as Ola’s, an Earth Seven accent. Mixed with Merlon’s upper-tier Amulean and Tara’s strong Trachnan dialect on certain words, he had been teased plenty in sailor’s school. Amule – and the Twin Cities Galaxy in general – didn’t have a lot of immigrants from further afield than Haven or at most Fristate Galaxy. None who were granted residency at any rate.

Captain Tovu’s mouth twisted into a rage. His boots rammed against the deck as he stamped towards Balfour. “I knew ye were a sickly boy, but I wasn’t told ye’re a dimwit too.” He stopped in front of Balfour. All eyes were on them.

Yrion took half a step forward, one fist clenched by his side. “Cap’n, the boy may be quiet, but he was set for takin’ the captain’s exams as the first sailor-tier in living memory. He can’t be a complete fool if he was allowed that.”

“Don’t tell me what I know!” Tovu whirled, bushy brows dancing in his fury.

A flicker across the sails drew Balfour’s attention. Downward energy. The trap was about to spring. He gulped. Maybe he deserved slavery or death, but none of the other people aboard the schooner did. Not even the close-minded captain.

“Captain,” he gestured at the sails, “it’s nearly too late. Please, put the anchor on half diversion.”

“I told ye to shut it!” Tovu raised a beefy arm.

Balfour turned his head, better if the blow didn’t hit him straight on. The sails brightened. He clenched the halyard he used to steady himself. The wound on his palm sprung open. “Hold on!” he screamed.

The ship plummeted.

Thank you for reading this far!

If you enjoyed the first chapter of Under Far Galaxian Skies, consider adding it to your goodreads or pre-ordering the book on Amazon. The book releases on April 23, 2024 but eARC copies will be available via bookfunnel by early March. Please check back here or check @NatalieKelda on twitter for updates.

In the meantime, why not check out book 1, River in the Galaxy, or some of my FREE Inner Universe short stories?