I slam my body against the locked Closet door, begging to be let out just like I’d done as a toddler. I press my ear to the door and  hear the muffled sound my guardian and Aunt Isla tearing into each other. I can only pick up some choice words like “your fault” and “he knows” and lots of “fucks.”

After a  while I stop listening and lie down on the hard cot. I was exhausted and hadn’t eaten anything all day.

I  start thinking about what this meant.

Firstly, it meant my birthday hadn’t actually happened yet and I  was still only 15-years-old. I’d always felt like I was smaller than the rest of the guys in my class and now I knew it was because I was a year and a half younger than everyone else.

But more importantly I was Phoenix fucking Maxwell.

I have two rich and powerful parents. I had an older sister.

The style media streams often did features about Gemma Maxwell; her favorite clothes, how she decorated her home, what kind of car she drove and all the adventures she had. Gemma had grown up like a royalty--I should have had that life too. I should have had the entire world and not an 700 sq ft cabin with someone who’d lied to me every single day of my life.

After a while it  goes quiet and I hear my guardian repairing his bedroom door. I knock to be let out but he doesn’t answer. I call through the door that I’ve calmed down but he doesn’t respond.  I’m not sure how long he’s going to keep me in here and after a while I fall asleep. When I wake up  my empty stomach is ravenous and my head hurts. I knock on the door some more and  still don’t get a response.

I search the dark Closet for food but it’s empty. I replay the events of this afternoon in my head and how I’d screwed this up. I should  gone to the authorities, not tried to be a vigilante--but then again it appeared the Head Deputy was in on this.

With nothing to do I go back to sleep and when I wake up next it’s to the sound of the key in the lock. I sit up as the door opens and my guardian’s eyes land on me.

“You didn’t eat anything today,” he says. Or asks, I’m not sure. “Sky...I’ll explain everything.  Are you okay ? ….Nevermind.”

I don’t know how to react or approach any of this. I’m scared shitless so I just revert back to the obedient kid I’d always been. I follow him out of the Closet and to the breakfast bar where my lunchbox is sitting. Ms. Walker must have brought it back from where I’d left it at school.

A quick glance at the clock tells me it’s a little after 1AM, I’d been in there for almost 12 hours.

He walks to the opposite side of the breakfast bar and leans towards me on his elbows.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his tone defeated. “I shouldn’t have locked you in there but I--I shouldn’t have done any of this to you. Fuck. I knew this would happen one day.”

“Am I really Phoenix Maxwell ?,” I ask, taking the Thermos out of the lunchbox.

He studies the counter. “Yes.”

“They….my parents think I’ve been locked in a room somewhere being tortured for over a decade ?”

“Well with the way you yelled at me and threw your presents away this morning you’d think I had been torturing you,” he says glibly.

I couldn’t believe he was bringing that up when he’d just confessed to committing one of the most prolific crimes of the last decade.

“Why ?” 

”Kenneth Maxwell wronged me a long time ago,” he says coolly.  “I wanted him to hurt so I stole you. I thought of you as a thing that was his. The way he reacted when he saw those recordings every year….it almost made this all worth it. I wanted to hurt him. Not you.”

President Maxwell had barely lasted in the presidency for a week after Phoenix—after I—was kidnapped. He was so determined to find me and so grief stricken when I wasn’t found that he resigned and had never even got a chance to do the job properly.

“Was this about something in the  RLA ?,” I ask. I’d thought on it during my 12 hours in the Closet, it was their only possible connection.

He looks at me and he seems far away.

“Yes."

I can tell he won’t tell me anymore about it so I switch tactics.

“How did you do it--how did you take me ?”

“I...I have cartel connections,” he says. “It was easy enough to pay a nanny to let you walk off. We were going to drop you off at an orphanage but they’d just test your DNA and you’d be back so we had to keep you.”

“We ? You mean you and Aunt Isla ?”

“No. Isla knew but had nothing to do with it. Our grandmother died soon after we took you and Isla got the job offer for Atlas Star so I decided to come too. The search was intense then. The Star was a good place to hide. I joined the Atlas medical training program. The Cartel has connections with the Morgan,Dory&Billings and was able to get our names off the manifest so Maxwell wouldn’t find us. It was supposed to be temporary but hen I started to like it here.”

This was becoming the longest conversation we’d ever had, he was talking to me like I was a person  and not his problem. I’d never known anything about him really.

“So, does the whole ship knows about me ?,” I ask.

He shakes his head.

“Of course not. Just a few people who  also have cartel connections and things they wanted to runaway from. Like Summer Walker--”

“And Deputy Dawes ?”

The corner of his mouth lifts as he shakes his head.

“Colfax doesn’t know the specifics, but he knows enough to know you are not who I said you were...I have him on a short leash.”

“Are you guys like... in a relationship or something  ?,” I ask

“It’s complicated.”

“More complicated than me finding out I’m not a foster kid but a kidnapping victim ?,” I say. “I know about adult relationships,  you could have just  told me you were seeing someone. I would have been cool with it.”

Although I’m not sure that’s the whole truth. I had liked our life the way it was for the most part.

“We are not seeing each other,” he says firmly. “ I’m--what I mean is Colfax pays to spend time with me. So do a few others on the ship. People have needs.Do you understand what I mean by that ?”

I try not to choke on my food. It had never even occurred to me until I opened his nightstand drawer that he even did something like that and now I was never going to be able to look him in the eyes again.

“I thought the med center paid you--”

“I had a life before you,” he cuts me off. “I’ve known Colfax a long time, he has the type of privilege that when he did something unspeakable at his job on Earth he got a promotion as far away  as humanly possible. It’s the kind of privilege you’ll have  if you want to be Phoenix Maxwell."

“I won’t be like that,” I tell him.

“So, you want to go back, then ?”

“Yes,” I say. “They’re my family, I want to go back to where I belong. I think I deserve that.”

“Do you think they’ll love you ?,” he asks, almost teasing. “Do you think they’ll  hug you and be so excited to see you and tell you a day hasn’t gone by that they haven’t thought about you ?”

I hated how well he knew me. I wanted all those things, I’d wanted them for years.

“Because they will,” he says. “That’s what you want, right ?”

“Yes,” I say. “It’s literally the only thing I’ve asked you about for the last few years.”

“Maybe this is for the best...I wasn’t sure how I was going to hide you when you turned 18.”

“I know about the Infinity.”

“That was my last resort. I never wanted to get on that ship.”

“So, you’ll take me back to my family ?,” I ask. “Just like that ?”

“I can’t personally  take you back,” he says. “They’ll shoot me in the street and  Summer, Isla and the others will spend the rest of their lives in a penitentiary for conspiracy. We’ll have to work something else out for when we dock in a few weeks. A way for you to go back without implicating us...otherwise I’ll have to get on the Infinity to hide.”

I nod.

“Whatever happened...between you and Maxwell ? Was it bad ?”

“Yes,” he says. “But it had nothing to do with you. You’re his son, he’ll love you...You probably don’t believe me, but  if I could go back I wouldn’t have taken you.”

---

The conversation my guardian and I have the night he tells me the truth is the longest and most honest conversation we’ve ever had but the next day he goes right back to his usual aloof self, except now I know when he says he’s working anything over an 8 hour shift he’s not really in the Medical Center. I notice how other passengers, mostly men, stare at him.

The Star doesn’t  land for two weeks and for those two weeks I don’t have to go back to school. My guardian tells the school I  have a stomach bug and at first it’s fun to spend all day playing games and beating his high scores just to annoy him but then I get stir crazy.

I  try not to look up too much information about my real family but I obsess over the few interviews of President Maxwell, his husband, Major Prescott and Gemma together. I just wanted to see how they  interacted together and where I would fit in.

They have an easy back and forth, sometimes ignoring the interviewers questions when they get too into a topic. She was the center of their universe, and I hoped she didn’t think I was taking her Dads away.  In almost every interview they ask about me, about where they think I am and what they would say to me. Each time they say the love me and they want me to come back home and plug the reward money for anyone who helps with my safe return.

---

-2-

On Landing Day we dock at the  Panhandle Base Camp in the Eastern State. Most of the base camps were the same--- an expansive grassy era set up beyond the landing pad that becomes a mini-festival designed by the locals to sell stuff and show off their part of the world.

We had 21 base camps around Earth and this one is one of my favorite because it included part of the beach.

During Base Camp days school was cancelled since most families either flew home to visit relatives or stayed in the resort towns that had popped up around base camps. Administration opened the satellite to tours. Since I was never allowed to leave Base Camp I usually spent my time sleeping in a tent just outside the Star or enjoying having the run of the mostly empty satellite.

But this time I offboard with my guardian, Aunt Isla and Ms. Walker.  My guardian is wearing his hair down--which he never does and he’s wearing new looking sneakers, snug dark green pants and a cropped black sweatshirt that  shows a large strip of his midriff that is also tattooed in colorful ink. The clothes looked expensive--I’d never seen him dressed so nicely before.

We go through the hour long process to have our bodies reacclimated to Earth’s atmosphere and then go through the Base Camp gates. There is always a massive sea of people at Base Camp gates. I’d never been this close to the crowd. Lots of people have cheeky alien themed signs to welcome their loved ones back from space.

I have to concentrate not to lose everyone in the crowd. We had to get vaccines as part of the offboarding and I was still feeling a loopy from the laughing gas my guardian insisted they give me.

“I need a Cuban !,” Aunt Isla declares once we make it through the thickest part of the crowd.

“Sandwich, cigar or  person ?,” Ms. Walker grins.

“Ideally all three,” Aunt Isla responds dryly. “And not necessarily  in that order. Plus add a margarita.”

“A-fucking-men,” Ms. Walker adds, like she’d forgotten she was my teacher.

Then again, she wasn’t going to be my teacher anymore.

We’re approaching the small downtown area and the vastness is overwhelming; the tall light poles, bright signs and billboards, rough sidewalks, the smell of grass, soaring train tracks  and the cars. The streets are lined with sleek black cars from rental agencies, I’d seen cars before but never so many and never going so fast. I try not to gawk too much but it was all so much--- I was starting to feel like an  alien.

“Hey,” a deep voice calls in our direction.

A man lithely jumps out of a bright teal convertible with big round headlights and strides confidently over to us. He’s tall and broad shouldered, built like a comic book superhero in a white shirt, gray pants and dark mirrorshade glasses.

My guardian walks briskly over to meet the man halfway and the man playfully punches my guardian on the shoulder. He  leans up to whisper something into the man’s ear and  the man suddenly picks him up, wrapping his arms around my guardian’s  lower back as his legs encircle around the man’s waist.

The lift happens so nimbly and so quickly like they’d done that a million times.

My guardian smiles down at the man, kisses him and then whispers in his ear. The man staggers a little bit, locks eyes with me, frowns and then my guardian gently climbs out of the man’s arms.

The man approaches me and lifts his mirrorshades, I recognize him from the locket I’d found on my guardian’s dresser. He looks me up and down, crossing his arms.

“Can’t believe it’s been 12 years…. Hey, look at me, kid.” he orders me and his eyes suddenly go blank as a tablet screen for a moment before flickering back to the bright color. “Fuck, Lex. This is going to be a lot of work.”

“This is Luce Grace,” My guardian says to me looking up at the man. “He’s my fiancé and he's a hacker. He’s going to help us get you  back without implicating any of us on the Star.”

“What ?”

“He’s a cyborg and a hacker, we need him to deactivate--”

“No, I mean...You’re engaged ?,” I say, surprised and he just shrugs it off.

“12 years and fucking counting,” Isla sighs.

That was the same  amount of time I’d been kidnapped. I don’t have time to process any of this new information because we’re walking again.

Lead by Isla we all go to a restaurant called The Sunset, Star passengers are packed into the small outdoor patio. Everyone clamored to eat outside when we were docked so Isla leads us away from the patio and  down to the basement. We end up at  a dark booth in the far corner.

A waitress brings us water and Aunt Isla orders a pitcher of  cherry margaritas for the table. There was wine and beer available for limited purchase on the Star but hard liquor was strongly discouraged.

I pick up the menu, surprised by the size. When I was 14 my guardian made me get a job and I worked a few hours a week in  the Star’s Food Services division. The behind the scenes of the operation was impressive considering all the limitations on fresh food. We always had a good selection to accommodate all the passengers but the menus were never this expansive.

“Why do they keep all the food in the back ?,” I ask Aunt Isla

“Aw, I forgot you've never been to a restaurant,” she replies, refilling her margarita glass. "Fajitas. I think we need Fajitas.”

I don't ask anymore questions after that so I don't look dumb, sit quietly for most of the meal, sipping on the margarita that Aunt Isla says I may as well have.

My guardian must be practicing for when he finally gets rid of me because he  seems to have completely forgotten I exist.

He’s in the corner of the booth, straddling his fiancé's lap, their chests inches from each other. They whisper to each other and exchange long kisses through the entire meal. By the time the check comes the second margarita pitcher is empty and  I can’t follow Aunt Isla and Ms. Walker’s conversation anymore.

Luce makes a quick swipe motion with his hand to pay, he doesn’t even ask how much it costs.

After the restaurant I follow them to a motel room where I retreat in a corner to eat the dessert I’d ordered to go---a white chocolate brownie with walnuts and ice cream--- and read a book while they all drink more. It’s not even 2PM  before they are all knocked out, which was early even considering that we always got extreme “jet lag” when we offboarded.

The hotel room has two king beds and I think I’m supposed to sleep on the couch but my guardian and Luce fall asleep on top of each other on the couch.  His face is buried Luce’s stomach and Luce has one arm behind his own head and the other on my guardian’s back.  It was so weird seeing him like this. I was so pissed that even after everything he’d told me he never mentioned he had a fiancé.

Then again I probably wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it.

***

In the morning it’s all business.

I’m woken up by my guardian snapping his fingers loudly in my face.

His hair is in a ponytail and he’s wearing his work uniform, which was unusual because he never worked when we were docked.

“It’s getting late,” he tells me.

I look around and it’s just us and Aunt Isla in the hotel room now. And then within minutes it’s just Aunt Isla and I.

I sit at the desk and eat the cereal and cut up fruit that was sitting out. Aunt Isla is lying on the couch in the same floral dress she’d been wearing last night with a portable  IV drip in her arm for her hangover.

“Are you excited to meet your real parents ?,” she asks after a while.

“Yes,” I say and I was. Most foster kids never got the chance. “I mean not that you haven’t been good but--”

“No, I get it,” she smiles. “Alex kind of sprung all this on Luce and he said  it’s going to take him a few hours to get everything he needs to help  you get back and keep us out of prison. You should go out. Have some fun.”

“I might go to the beach,” I say, I could watch the tide all day.

“Don’t bother,” she says sitting up. “The beaches in Ft. Perch are a million times better than this one. You should be getting a last look at everything else.”

“Last look? I’m just going back to my parents not to another planet.”

“You may as well be,” she says. “You can’t ever  tell them you were on the Atlas Star or they’ll find the rest of us. Today’s probably the last day you’ll ever see it.”

I hadn’t really thought about it like that. As part of my guardian’s plan I knew that I wasn’t going to be allowed to tell my parents where I’d been but I was so focused on what I was gaining I hadn’t thought about what I’d be leaving behind forever

I finish eating and walk back to base camp and into the Star, squeezing myself past the wide-eyed tourists on the walking tour. We were telling people I was going to a college-prep boarding school so  my bedroom had been packed away.

There wasn’t really anything I wanted from the cabin, nothing had ever felt like it belonged to me anyway.

Except maybe Starlight the Unicorn. I consider taking him with me but then get a better idea.

I take him out of the Closet and tuck him under my guardian’s covers. I don’t know if it will make him laugh or piss him off but either way I won’t be around to see the reaction.

I take a leisurely tour through the Star, stopping in all the places that had meant something to me and all the hidden alcoves and passageways I’d discovered along the way.

I’m wearing the Syndicate my guardian had bought for me and just as I’m walking past my old primary school classroom I get a message.

come back now, time to go.

“Who is that?,” I blurt  out when I walk back into the hotel room.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I came back but I didn’t expect to see an unconscious boy around my age lying awkwardly on a beach towel.

At least I hoped he was just unconscious.

“Don’t worry about him,” My guardian says, which only makes me worried more.

The boy is wearing the same uniform our waitress at The Sunset had been wearing.

“Let’s do this.” Luce says gruffly, gesturing for me to sit on the edge of the other bed.

My guardian nods and I go over to Luce, he  presses something hard  and disc-shaped to the back of my neck. His eyes go blank again and he starts doing something on a tablet.

My eyes wander over to my guardian who was sitting on the couch with Isla who has started braiding a strand of his hair. He looking at Luce and I with a cold distance. I couldn’t believe just a few hours ago they’d been all over each other.

After an hour I feel something like a shock in the back of my head and Luce yanks the disc away.

“His patch has been deactivated and reset to factory settings. Any Atlas software traces  will self-destruct by the time they think to check for it,” he says and turns to my guardian.  “I’ve installed a small focalware that should cause a slight distortion of  his face in any newsfeeds coming through Atlas. If his mug is all over the newsfeeds no one on board will recognize it.”

“Okay, let’s get this over with, then,” My guardian says approaching me with a small white box that has Property of Atlas Star Medical Center engraved on it.  He presses a button and two needles slide out of either end of the box.

My stomach turns and I feel the tremors coming on.

“What is that ?” I ask standing up and backing away.

“ It’s a blood transfusion machine,” he says. “Our red blood cells are less oxygenated than earthbound people, they’ll know you’ve been on a satellite. We just need to mix some of your blood with someone who’s been earthbound and is not a cyborg.”

I turn to the unconscious boy on the other bed. They were just going to pump his blood into me without his consent.

“…how do you know he’s not sick or something ?”

“I checked,” Luce says. “He was taking his lunch break alone on the beach, we’ll put him back and he won’t know the difference unless you take so fucking long that he wakes up.”

“Luce,” My guardian says in an annoyed tone I thought was reserved for me.

“Do you really think they’ll check the oxygen in my blood ?,” I ask.

“They'll check everything. This will only hurt for a second.,” he says. “I had to steal this from work and I couldn’t steal it and nitrous oxide.”

He tells me to lie down and  close my eyes and I do.  I try to be brave about the little needle at the end of a long catheter but I can’t. Ms. Walker and  Aunt Isla have to hold me down when it goes in  and my body shudders as the new blood goes in.

When it’s done, Luce takes the boy back to the beach where they’d found him and  I shower with a harsh detergent that gets rid of any fiber or particles that may have resided on my body. I change into a dark blue t-shirt and gray jogging pants Ms. Walker purchased from a used clothing store 100 miles away and then there is no trace of my life on the Atlas on me.

It’s nighttime when my guardian and Aunt Isla walk with me to the Panhandle Base Transportation Depot and up to the line for the 76 bus. We go through the plan once more and then my guardian hands me the small Syndicate I’m to wear for now and destroy later. Luce had coded it so I could ride transportation but have it not make a record of me.  

The last thing he says to me is an address I should go to only if something goes wrong. He makes me memorize it and repeat it back to him.

“Can’t believe we’re doing this again,” Aunt Isla sighs, hugging me in that distant one armed way of hers and then turning to my guardian she shoves him playfully. “No more stolen babies for us.”

My guardian laughs and I begin to wonder if the always steal a baby everytime  someone crosses them.

As I board the bus my guardian and I share a look and I don’t know if it’s a look of regret or of  apology, of hate or of love. He just looks at me through the window and then turns away to

start walking back.

No goodbyes.

I felt a stab of sadness that I knew I shouldn’t.  He’d kidnapped me. Stolen me from a family that loved me and thought about me everyday.

The bus is driverless and completely empty because it’s a local bus. I’m to ride the local bus to the edge of the city, change buses and then ride it to the train station so no one sees me coming from Base Camp.

My instinct is to look out the windows, I’d never seen so much of Earth before but they’d told me not to look to much--it would look suspicious. Instead I play games on my Syndicate, but the games on the Syndicate are all standard pre-loads and boring.

When I get to the train station  I board the 134 train for Star City and pick a single seat in the back. It’s a five hour ride and this time I try to read but I can’t access any of the books I had on my tablet, and I regret not making a list of the ones I was reading. I look out the window, but make a point of doing it lazily.

The scenery outside looks black and white in the night, when the sun rises it’s all desolate, quiet greenscapes with the occasional geometric buildings rising from the uniform grass. Multiple train tracks run over and underneath our train, all headed to the different cities around the coast. The sky was so blue and amazing. Even more so than it was at base camp.

On the last hour of my train ride I ask for a  soda and discreetly drop the Syndicate into it. The biological material  disintegrates when it hits the soda  and I drink it, grimacing as I swallow the larger pieces left behind.

Star City comes up as a massive sprawl, the cityscape was  just as bright as an actual star, every building was reflecting the sun overhead. I glimpse the streets, they are uniform and clean with hundreds of people inhabiting the public areas.

When the train pulls into Star City station I’m tempted to take a quick walk around the city, from the train window I saw so many things I had never seen in person before  but I do as I was told and  follow the signs in the train station to the Former Western Republic Public Transit Border Checkpoint.

A small crowd is walking through the turnstiles to the border checkpoint, their syndicates being scanned by an overhead scanner as they head for the trains that go to the Former Republic.

I follow them, putting a blank look on my face and  mixing into the flow of the crowd. When I step through the turnstile  a harsh sound plays and a glass partition seals off the entrance to the Former Republic side. People start looking around confused as  a border patrol agent, dressed in camouflage and wearing an intimidating face shield,  pulls me by my elbow out of the line.

The border patrol agent runs over my body with his  LED wand, which makes the same harsh sound as the gate.

“Where is your Syndicate ?,” he barks, through a speaker in his mask.

I don’t say anything.

That was the key part of the plan my guardian and Luce had made. The plan that would  get me back to my family and keep everyone on the Star  protected; I was to keep absolutely silent until I was accepted back into my family.

I was to only answer two questions, one of which the border agent asks me next.

“What is your name ?,” the agent asks..

“Phoenix Maxwell,”  I say, it’s the first time I’ve ever said it and I sound so unsure.

“Don’t get smart me with me, boy.” the agent snaps. “Are you traveling alone ?”

I don’t answer that.

“Where is your Syndicate ?,” he asks, scanning the wand over me again. “You a neo-luddite ? You have one of those  plastic IDs ? You know you can’t cross the border without an ID.”

I don’t answer that.

“How old are you ?”

Another question I could answer.

“16--I mean 15.”

“Which one ?”

“15,” I remember, grimly.

“Where are you supposed to be ?”

“I’m Phoenix Maxwell.”

They call the Star City police--which my guardian had told me would happen.  

After giving the police the same answers, an annoyed police officer puts me in the the back of the car and I have to pretend this isn’t my first time in a car. When we get to the station they have a nice social worker and three more police officers ask me more questions that I don’t answer unless they are my name or my age.

It’s almost 6 hours later  when they get their boss’s approval to put a cotton stick my mouth and test my DNA.

“Holy shit, kid where the hell have you been ?,” the social worker says the moment the cotton stick is in a reader and it matches almost immediately.

***

-3-

After that I go a lot of places.

First to a bigger police station, then a federal services office, then to a CIA office then I’m on a private jet to Ft. Perch. We actually go through a hatch that opens up in the bubbled city, though the bubble is too thin to really  see. It’s comforting to be back in the sky, but the jet is claustrophobic and it’s eerie flying so close to Earth.

The plane lands on top of the Ft. Perch Members Only Health and Wellness Complex, which was really just a hospital. Nobody had mentioned going to a hospital. I don’t even know why we are here, but I don’t say anything.

I’m escorted into a room that looks more like a hotel suite than an exam room and meet a woman who introduces herself to me as  Dr. Hayworth but she’s wearing a United Auxilary Forces military uniform and the nurse referrers to her as General Hayworth.

They leave me alone  to  change into a hospital gown and it’s only in those few minutes that I see Dr. Hayworth’s picture on the wall---she was the Surgeon General for the Federation.

I hate hospitals and I start to ponder an exit plan but I’m also vaguely aware of  the mirror off to the side wall of the exam room that was definitely a two way.

Dr. Hayworth takes my blood pressure and gives me a standard check up. She asks me if anything hurts and I say no. She asks me if I'm sexual active and I shake my head. She asks if I've been been sexually assaulted and I say no quickly, but wants to check anyway and I let her.  Then she leaves the room.

When the door opens a few minutes later my biological parents are standing in the doorway.