Cat Out of the Bag Read online

  “I’ve got just enough credits to get into a game,” I said. “But if I had more, I could buy us a banquet.”

  “Why don’t we give half our credits to Mango and keep the other half for a platter of shish kebabs,” Toby suggested.

  “Here,” Hilde said, slamming her credits onto the table. “It’s worth it just for the entertainment.”

  Unlike Sho’kin, the gnome wasn’t there for tax debt. The gnomes still had their homeland, as far as I knew. It was rumored that she was hiding from something, although I couldn’t verify whether or not that was accurate.

  “You can have my credits,” Toby said, handing them to me with a look on his face that he seemed to be wearing more and more. I wasn’t sure what it’d meant at first, and I had wanted to ask Pappi about it but changed my mind when I’d finally figured out what it was. As much as I hated to admit it, I was beginning to believe my best friend in the whole world was falling in love with me.

  “Thank you, Toby.” I grabbed the credits off the table.

  I scanned the room, looking for a game. I had to find somebody willing to put up credits to get players interested. As far as I could tell, no one was playing. I gritted my teeth, and my ears twitched. I was going to have to start the game myself, which always came with a greater element of risk, because the game starter always put up the initial pot. But if I wanted to feed my friends and fill my own belly with much-needed meat, I was going to have to do it. I’d gotten Hilde and Toby to believe I would win a game, and I wasn’t going to let them down.

  “I have fifteen credits here that says I can best anyone at dice. Three to one. Winner takes all.”

  I held my credits in the air, and the curious sized me up.

  “I’ll take that bet,” said a scruffy-looking dwarf with a scar running from his right eye to his lip.

  “And so will I,” said an elderly Sho’kin woman. Her bloated gut billowed out over her belt. Her eyes were blurry with drink, and her fur hadn’t been groomed in quite some time.

  Several others accepted the bet. The human tavern keeper instructed his security guards, a team of scary-looking goblins, to bring out the dice table.

  They slid the table into the middle of the room, and I slammed my fifteen credits down on it. The other five players anted up the same bet of fifteen credits. We each grabbed a pair of dice. All six sides had a different symbol. The combinations of symbols represented a high or low bet. The symbols were stone, flower, fish, bird, cow, and king, with values ascending in that order. If you got two kings, it was an automatic win after the first throw.

  I shook the dice in my hands, observing the other players. The dwarf threw his dice and got a bird and a stone, with a total score of five. The Sho’kin woman threw her dice getting a bird and a cow with a total score of nine. The others took their turns and got a stone and a stone, a flower and a cow, and two fish. I bit my lip, feeling the dice in my hands. When it finally felt right, I threw my dice and got two kings. I’d won the first round.

  Everyone groaned and grabbed their dice. We began to shake them again, and that time, the Sho’kin woman went first, rolling a stone and a flower. There was a roll of two fish, and the dwarf man rolled a bird and a cow. Another roll came up with a king and a stone. I threw my dice again and hit a cow and a king. The dwarf and I had tied.

  No one won the first round, so we all rolled again, the dwarf and I going first. We rolled at the same time. In the second round, any bird was a loss, and a king was an automatic win. I rolled two cows, and he rolled a bird and a flower. He grumbled, and I smiled to myself. The third round started, and we each cast our dice. That time, I was growing nervous and threw two birds and was beaten by the dwarf man and the Sho’kin woman. The dwarf went first, rolling two cows. The Sho’kin woman rolled a stone and a king, winning the round.

  It was two to one. I just had to win one more game, and I would win all the cash. Toby was standing behind me, his hands gripping my shoulder. I could feel the heat of his breath on my back and smell the scent of excitement from his skin. I couldn’t have asked for a better friend. I wished in that moment that things could stay as they had been when we were kits and everything was so much less complicated.

  The players threw again, and I got a king and a bird. My score tied with the Sho’kin woman, who threw two cows.

  We rolled the second round, and I got a bird and a fish, automatically causing me to lose. She waggled her eyebrows at me. The score was tied at two. Toby gripped my shoulder more tightly. If I lost all the credits, it was unlikely I could get them back.

  We threw another round, and I rolled two cows. The Sho’kin woman rolled a bird and a king. I bit my lip as I shook my dice for the second round. If I just got one king, I would win the whole thing. We rolled. She rolled two birds, and I rolled a cow and a flower. Her next throw was a cow and a bird, and I rolled two cows.

  Toby, Hilde, and Pepper cheered for me as the other players grumbled that they’d been cheated. The goblin bouncers pushed the credits toward me and escorted the other players away from the table before quickly pushing it back to the wall. The bartender offered the losers a small drink on the house, just a token to keep the peace. Gambling brought business and money into the tavern, and as long as the Landlords allowed it, the garbage collectors would continue to play their games. But it was up to the tavern keepers to keep everyone calm, and the loss they took from offering the losers a drink was a small price to pay. The Sho’kin woman glared at me as she limped away on her cane, moving toward the bar to get her conciliatory drink. I shoved the credits in my pocket after giving everyone back their share plus a little extra. I went to the bar and ordered four shish-kebab platters with all three sauces, just as I’d promised, and another pitcher of ale.

  Winning at dice with a fifteen-credit bet was small potatoes compared to what riders won in the hover-bike races. But at least it would keep food in my belly and hope in my heart. I’d been cheated at dice and cards more than once. But the investment of a contending speeder was considerable compared to any losses I’d had at the game tables. The barmaid brought out our platters and ale, and I poured everyone a round.

  We even gave a few extra kebabs to Pepper, who’d chosen to keep her credits to herself. I couldn’t blame her. I’d lost enough games in my day that I had disappointed more than a few friends when I’d convinced them to lend me my bet. Pepper had been one of them, so I didn’t hold it against her. We ate our feast as a traveling bard began to play a song on his harpsichord, and the barmaid began to clap and sing.

  “I wonder if she needs batteries.” Hilde laughed, still overcome by the joke earlier in the evening. I shook my head and smiled, taking a bite of kebab. Even in the dark places, there were still moments of light and happiness with friends and music and a good hearty meal. A Sho’kin could recover from just about anything with that.

  Chapter 5

  “You better get up,” I heard Pappi saying as he tapped the loft with his cane. “It’s already twelve thirty. What are you still doing in bed? Were you out carousing with those no-good hooligans again?”

  I groaned and turned over, rubbing my eyes. The no-good hooligans he was talking about, Toby and Pepper, had been my friends since we were all kits in Sho’kin Forest. They weren’t any less good than I was. But I suppose for Pappi, anyone who wasn’t doing exactly as they were told at any given moment was no good, including me.

  I rolled out of bed and slipped on my shoes, the memories of the night before slowly sinking in. I’d won at dice and fed everyone a platter of shish kebabs. I smiled at the memory, feeling like the hero of the day. Then I remembered losing the race to Jym Boe, and I groaned again.

  “You were drinking ale,” Pappi said from below. “I can smell it from here.”

  “I’ll be down in a minute. And then I’ll get out to the junkyard.”

  “You’ve already wasted half a day. Most of the pickers have been out since dawn. The buyers won’t be very generous by afternoon when the sun is high. Yo
u know the early bird gets the worm.”

  I frowned, thinking about getting worms, which weren’t exactly appetizing. But maybe that was next up on the menu for Pappi and his poverty cooking. I sniffed and started down the ladder to the main room. Pappi was stirring cactus stew on the stove, and I scrunched up my face. There was no way I was eating that again, especially when I still had credits in my pocket from last night’s win. I put my hands in my pocket, feeling the welcoming sensation of cold, hard cash as the chips slipped through my fingers.

  “I’ll eat later,” I called as I made my way to the door. “I’ll bring you something.”

  “I don’t want any of your ill-gotten gains,” he called after me.

  “I’ll see you this evening,” I said as I closed the door. I still had twenty credits after buying everyone shish kebabs and paying them back. And I could afford a platter for Pappi and myself that night, without a doubt.

  Out in the glare of the day, I covered my eyes from the sun and squinted into the dusty brown expanse of the desert and the junkyard. Beyond the heaps of garbage and scrap that was dumped there by the Landlords and the Imperial ships alike, I looked longingly at the racetrack. Races weren’t held on the first day of the week. It was considered bad luck. I would have to wait three more days to compete again, and I still didn’t know how I was going to adapt my speeder to account for the flaw in my design. Pappi, who used to be quite a gifted mechanic himself, wouldn’t help.

  If I could have afforded a transformer, I could run the power for the turbo boost around the intake system and completely avoid the hover core. Such transformers cost at least five hundred credits straight out of the scrap heap, more for new or even merely functional. Five hundred credits would take me months to amass by garbage sifting, and I just didn’t have that long. My only other chance was to find one in the trash heap. My odds were terrible. Few people threw away transformers, even if they were completely dysfunctional. They would be scrapped for parts first.

  “You are a summoner,” the voice whispered, so clearly inside my mind that I could have sworn someone was speaking directly in my ear. That dream I’d had, combined with the continuing intrusive voices, made me begin to fear that I was losing my mind.

  I thought about going to speak with the shaman, but I had already missed half a day of work. The early-bird pickers would have already been all over the fresh garbage that had been dumped that morning. I would be lucky to make five credits. The things I hated most about garbage picking were that the hours were long, the pay was terrible, and nobody gave us any respect.

  There wasn’t much to like about it, but it was my life. And if I ever wanted to get back to Sho’kin Forest, I needed to suck it up and do what I had to do, which meant going out to the garbage heap every day, sifting through garbage, and making enough credits to afford parts for my racer and the entry fees for the races. Winning one of those races was my only hope for getting out of the desert, my only hope for saving Pappi’s eyes and getting us back home.

  I threw on my wide-brimmed hat and marched toward the stinking trash heap that was piled up high in the sky like a mountain.

  I saw Jym Boe, who was employed as a guard, holding his rifle and sneering at the garbage pickers who passed. The Landlords employed dozens of goons just like him. Their official job description was to keep the peace, but everyone knew that the guards were there to intimidate any garbage picker who dared to ask for fair treatment. If we took our finds into the city or to one of the other worlds the buyers sold to, we would make ten or twenty times more, but we weren’t allowed. And in the garbage heap, we made a pittance for our work. They called it a fair trade, since the Landlords paid for our hovels. But if not for their increased taxes, most of us in the garbage heap would still be in our ancestral homes.

  I grabbed a basket from the stack and started climbing. The garbage heap smelled like rotten meat and death mixed with oil and toxic chemicals. All manner of garbage was thrown together indiscriminately. Many workers had fallen sick, and many more had gone blind from the constant glare of the desert sun. I used my long, pointed stick to stab and sift the garbage, looking for anything remotely valuable in the pile of mess. I shifted through old, torn clothing with fabric so degraded its color was indistinguishable. I found a bent fork that was partially rusted, but the steel could be scrapped. I threw it in my basket, knowing I would need to do much better than that if I wanted to make any money.

  I continued walking up the heap, avoiding the large groups of people who worked together for company. It wasn’t that I wanted to avoid the company, but I knew that if I was picking near everyone else, the chances of finding anything good were slim.

  I was looking for a transformer, even though I knew it would be a miracle to find one. There was no harm in hoping, at least that’s what I always told Pappi, and I believed it to the bottom of my heart. I pushed my headphones into my ears and flipped on the music player in my pocket. It was one of the small luxuries I’d managed to hold onto in pursuit of building a speeder that could win a race. I couldn’t live without my music. If I didn’t have my tunes, life just wouldn’t have been worth living.

  I listened to the rousing melody of the Sho’kin band Cat Scratch, who lived in one of the Imperial cities as free performers. I often imagined what it would be like to have a life like that, filled with adventure and freedom onstage.

  Only the Sho’kin who had lived in our ancestral forest had become indentured servants. I’d even heard rumors that some of the Sho’kin had managed to remain in their villages after gathering together all of their wealth and paying off up to a dozen families’ debts in one shot. But no one knew if that was true or not. Little news came from Sho’kin Forest. The Landlords didn’t want us to know anything about what happened there. They wanted us to forget it all and live out the rest of our meager lives on the trash heap.

  I kept shifting through the garbage and came across a stack of busted computers. My eyes went wide as I knelt by the cases. There were multiple chips and cards still in them, and I hurriedly removed them with the tools from my belt, carefully unscrewing any of the equipment that might be functional. I even took the motherboards, some of which had been cracked in half. The components could still be scrapped and reused. I was so happy to have found the computer parts that I was almost ready to quit for the day, but then I saw Jym Boe intimidating some old ladies at the top of the heap.

  The stooped, elderly Sho’kin women were covered in shawls and leaning on canes. Like most of my father’s generation, they had aged far too quickly, and they were easy marks for intimidation, having been thoroughly broken by the burden of life in the garbage heap. I knew that if I didn’t get out of there soon, I would share their fate. I wanted to rush up there and stab Jym Boe in the eye with my screwdriver, but I knew it wouldn’t do me or the old ladies any good. I would get arrested, and the old women would be smacked down just for the fun of it.

  I watched him out of the corner of my eye as an Imperial cruiser slid past in the distance. He saw the cruiser, too, and left the women alone. I rolled my eyes, continuing about my business. I had enough scrap for the day, and my luck had definitely turned around. Maybe if I kept looking, I could find what I needed for my bike. It was out there, and I was going to find it.

  I was so caught up in my fantasy that I didn’t hear Toby calling to me until he was right in front of my face.

  “Hey, what is it?” I asked, looking up at him in the heat of the bright sun. I was sweating like a hog and hadn’t showered since yesterday, but Toby looked at me as though I was the most beautiful woman in all the worlds. I could sense in his scent that he was ready for matching up and mating. Maybe I was naïve, and maybe I was a little bit behind other Sho’kin my age, but I hadn’t reached my first heat and was definitely not interested in mating, especially with my best friend.

  “What do you have there?” he asked, nodding toward the computer parts.

  I smiled and winked. “Dinner. Pappi needs a decent meal fo
r once.” I glanced into his basket. “What have you found?” He had some decent-looking textiles. Cloth didn’t usually go for much, but certain kinds of high-tech textiles were sought after for their durability, and they could last in the trash heap for decades.

  “Just a few feet of reinforced mylar,” he said. “It looks like you found the mother lode.”

  “Yeah, I was lucky.”

  “I just wanted to ask you if you’d heard the news that the Landlords are going to start charging the pickers rent on the hovels.”

  “What?”

  “It was on the bulletin board this morning. Everyone’s in a tizzy about it. Those ladies up there were complaining, which is why Jym Boe was harassing them.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I said, almost needing to sit down. “The free rent was one of the few reasons that we could even survive on what they pay us.”

  “There is an increased cost of bringing the garbage in from other districts, so the Landlords are passing it on to us.”

  “This can’t go on.”

  “Most of the young people have already decided they’re going to leave,” Toby said. “Pepper’s been saving her credits for years. She wants to go to the Imperial city. Sho’kin are free there. We can get jobs. We could have a normal life.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “Most of the older people are too old and sick and scared to leave. Many of them are still holding on to the notion that we’re going to get back to Sho’kin Forest.”

  “Don’t you want to go home?”

  “I haven’t been there since I was five years old. I barely remember it. Besides, everyone knows the Landlords already cut down the trees and bulldozed our farms. It happened a long time ago. The idea that we’re going to get back there somehow is what’s keeping us all here like slaves. If you believe it’s still there and want to pay the taxes, you could get a decent job in the city and pay it off much faster.”