The Candy Bandits: A Tale from Tantalus II

The Candy Bandits

 

By Raven Green

 

Nylar

 

Saetia Prime had nothing like the BangBangCrunch.

I’ve tasted every kind of chocolate bar, jelly morsel and hard sucker my lame homeworld had to offer. Zuggan’s. The Glopstick. Tam n‘ Edie’s. They were pedestrian, compared to the BangBangCrunch. It wasn’t the nuts or the little bits of sugarfig- those were good, but you could get those anywhere. What made the BangBangCrunch special was, no other planet made a candy bar shaped like a .45 caliber semiautomatic. There were laws against that kind of thing where I was from. But not here. Here, you could by a candy bar shaped like a gun. You could even leave the silver wrapping on, and pull it out in a situation like this, if you had nothing left to lose.

And that’s exactly what I did, as the offroaders and the quad bikes arrived, and the sky filled with bicopters and a sound like a swarm of electric hornets. The Phantes Security Firm was arriving in full force. The ground vehicles screeched to a stop and armed men in black and yellow uniforms leapt out. In the near-distance, the heat distorted the air above the pale red dust-covered road, causing it to warp and waver.

“I guess this is it,” I said to Rosita. I looked at the silver-wrapped chocolate pistol in my hands, and wished it was a real gun. I tried to imagine how it would be differently weighted if made of metal. I gripped the handle and tried to bear its imagined weight, make it look seem more realistic. This was a performance now. We had to be good actors.

“You gonna eat that?” she asked me.

“I’m not hungry,” I told her. I raised the chocolate gun to her head. “Pretend I’m gonna shoot you,” I said.

Rosita smiled for all a half a second, then assumed a terror-stricken face, and screamed.

A Tantalite folk singer I admire, the great Calderon Noel Cesettogna, observed that the world began in Eden, and ended on Tantalus II. He never clarified exactly what he meant, but he didn’t have to. That was what made it poetry.

Rosita turned me onto other music- Grotto, Culture Drone, Killjoy and the Fault Lines. We showed each other where we stole our shit. At sixteen, we mutually decided to fall in love, because neither of us had been in love before, and we figured we were each other’s only chances. We were both too fucked up to be with anyone else. We were the oldest kids in the Home, and no one was going to adopt our delinquent asses. No one wanted us.

Now it was a year and a half later and we were on another planet. A planet where they had candy bars shaped like guns. And I was pointing one at my girlfriend, while a private security fleet surrounded us. The flashy yellow car we arrived in was burning on the nearby road, a yellow blaze on red sand. Beside the car, the driver’s body lay, a bullet through his head, blood trickling, wetting the sand, a different shade of red. It was mid-day, 1400 hours exactly, and Tantalus II’s sun was in the highest point of its climb.

Blood Noon on Tantalus II. It sounded like it would have made a kick-ass holomovie. Like I should have written that down in my notebook. But if this were a movie, Rosita and I would be Rigelian, and rich. And the gun would probably be as real as the dead body on the side of the road.

 

Rosita

 

I had my first boyfriend at sixteen, when I came to the Home.

His name was Nylar Gantz, and he had the most beautiful scowl I ever saw.

He never smiled, and his only laughter ever was a cruel echo from some hollow cave inside him when he saw someone else get hurt. He had deep dark eyes, a set of vicious black bangs, and a scruffy, feral look like he was an animal trapped in a cage. He was the only one of us at the group home whose caseworker made him wear an electronic tracking bracelet. It was dented and scratched from all the times he’d tried to take it off by force.

It was like he was from another planet- a cooler planet- and he was being persecuted on this one.

Wait. I should back up.

When I was fifteen, and I still lived on my homeworld of Saetia Prime, I discovered the best way to piss off adults was by implying I was having sex and there was nothing they could do about it. I wasn’t, not yet, but that wasn’t important. I was a good liar. Male teachers would get uncomfortable and hand me off to female teachers. My dad would get uncomfortable and hand me off to my mom. My mom finally handed me off to a therapist. So that’s when I started just making crap up.

I invented allegations against my asshole dad that split him and my mom up. I guess it was my way of punishing them. It’s not like they were true; he never touched me that way, but there were bruises from the times he’d punished me, and she had let him do it, and that was enough for the caseworker to petition Family Court for my removal.

I was sixteen, then, and no one was going to adopt me, so I went to the Home, and that was where I met Nylar Gantz. He first assumed I was just another nympho girl from a broken family. When he found out I’d never had sex and that I was the one who broke my family, he was more impressed. He called me an “anarchist.”

“I’m jealous,” he said, as we enjoyed a storm on the balcony. “It’s like you dove in backwards. You could probably do even more damage if you had a plan.”

Lightning crackled like fireworks, exciting me, like the conspiratorial tone in his voice.

“What’s your plan?” I asked him.

“I turn seventeen next week. Emancipation papers are in. I don’t even have to finish school. My cousin knows a place I can squat. When’s your birthday?”

“A month,” I said.

“I’ll wait for you,” he promised.

“What about money?” I asked him.

“You let me worry about that,” he said. “Just lie low for the next couple weeks until you’re out. Tell the caseworker what he wants to hear. Make him think you’re ready to live a productive life or whatever. Then come find me at the Old Tower Theater.”

His hand was on my leg. The lightning lashed again like a lethal plasma weapon.  His hand moved toward my crotch.

“Stop that,” I said. I moved away from him.

“I forgot,” he said. “Sorry.”

We still hadn’t had sex. I wasn’t ready.

“You can get with other girls,” I said. “If you need to. It doesn’t matter to me.”

“I don’t want other girls,” he said. “You’re the only one.”

“Then you need to wait,” I told him firmly.

“Okay,” he said, trying not to sound frustrated.

So, I kissed him, with tongue, to shut him up.

 

Nylar

 

My first diagnosis was Prolonged Childhood Disruptive Presentation, which was just psychobabble for “this person should not be allowed around other human beings, but we can’t put him in juvenile detention because he hasn’t actually committed a crime.”

I had already committed several crimes, but the psychologist didn’t know that.

My first crime- not counting kiddie crap like stealing candy from the papi store- was arson. There was one company on my entire crooked planet that still made strike-anywhere matches. They were rare, like, kids would pay upward of twenty yawlings for a box of these matches. There was this guy who sold candy, paperbacks and holocomics out of a stand on the corner of Dourif and Seite. His name was Stanislaw, and he was an asshole. He never let me just read the comics, and I didn’t have the money to pay. So, I paid a late-night visit to his shuttered-up stand with my matches, and the next morning, he arrived to find his place of business and his inventory reduced to charred boards and ashes.

I was eight. By then, I was categorized as someone with Persistent Disruptive Conduct Presentation. This meant that now they knew I was of a criminal mind.

Two years later, I decided arson was stupid, unless you were getting paid. It was better to profit from crime. So, I borrowed my dad’s 9mm Sergeant Pounder and robbed my first convenience store.

Being a stupid kid only interested in candy and cash, I got caught again, and spent the next three years in juvie, learning to be a better crook. At fourteen I was released- the institution had nothing left to offer me. Everyone responsible for me figured I had no future anyway, so I told them all to choke and went back to my dad’s. But he was dead, and another family was moved into my old house, so I had nowhere to go. It wasn’t long before I was arrested again, and this time, they sent me to the Home. I spent a couple years hating everyone there until I met Rosita. She was pissed off, like everyone else, but she had half a brain, and I could stand talking to her for more than five minutes.

She was cool, and she knew how to fuck with people. She was the best liar I ever met. We liked the same candy. So, we decided to fall in love.

I promised to wait for her to age out, and I did. I lived in that squat above the abandoned theater for three weeks, pulling scams to get cash and dreaming of Tantalus II.

Tantalus II is the most powerful planet in the sector. It’s a free republic, with no laws. No rules, no cops, no prisons. You could be anything you wanted on Tantalus II, if you were willing to work for it. There were no limits. At seventeen, we were adults now, Rosita and me. We could do what we wanted, go where we wanted.

Money was no object is you knew how to get it. I’d been robbing convenience stores since I was ten. I didn’t have my dad’s Sergeant Pounder, so the first order of business was getting a gun. But I needed money for that, so I had to steal something else. I decided on a car, a green Fiesta G. A Tantalite model. All the cars on my planet were Tantalite. It fetched enough in the undermarket for me to buy three guns- a .45mm Slayer for myself, a sleek and pearly Hitchcock for Rosita, and a .57 caliber chain-rifle. By the time Rosita’s birthday came and she moved in with me above the theater building, we were in a good position to earn enough for two one-way tickets off-world.

The night before we left for the spaceport, we finally had sex. I don’t know why she agreed. It wasn’t like she was into it. She kept her eyes closed most of the time, and when she wasn’t, she was staring at the ceiling. She kept staring at the ceiling after I pulled out of her, wouldn’t look at me.

I had no idea what to say. Fortunately, she spoke first.

“That wasn’t as bad as I thought,” she said.

I tried to tell if she was lying, but I wasn’t sure. My previous sex partners were much more enthusiastic, but most of them were virgins before I made it with them, so it’s not like they had anything to compare it to, either.

“I mean, I’d like to do that again. But not now,” she said.

“We’re leaving the planet,” I said. “We’ll have all the time we need on Tantalus.”

She yawned. We both relaxed in the stained futon we dragged across the floor and used as a bed. The room, with no electricity, was lit by candlelight. Our money was hidden under the futon- three thousand and six hundred yawlings, garnered from a string of robberies, the last five we did together. She took to the work quickly, enjoying the sense of power over another that only a gun could bring. I think she liked that better than sex. We had that in common.

 

 

Rosita

 

I knew if I didn’t do it, I’d never make it off-world with him. It felt empty, like I’d always imagined when I heard my dad grunting and my mom moaning through the thin walls of our apartment. I always hated the sounds they made. Was that what love sounded like? I suppose I expected something cleaner, more definite, like the gunshots we’d pumped into the air earlier that day when we needed to get a cashier’s attention and show him, we were fucking serious.

When I rolled away from Nylar on the futon we shared, I was still high on that feeling I’d had all week that I’d joined him on his jobs. It made it bearable. I knew he was disappointed, but not as much as he would have been if I’d said no again. But it also meant I’d have to say yes more.

I hoped I didn’t sound like my mom.

 

The dropskiff at the spaceport looked like a four-legged pumpkin covered in black heat-resistant tiles. Steam radiated from the nozzles of its boosters. I knew it was only a dropskiff, but it was disappointing; I’d hoped my first spaceship ride would be something cool-looking, but I knew enough about space to know that the actual ships never landed; they stayed up in orbit, and cargo and people were transferred using these stupid looking thermal-tiled black pumpkins.

We presented our tickets, which we’d purchased at the port’s foyer, and took our seats in the passenger cabin, lying parallel to the ground with our legs stuck out and Y-harnesses over our chests. I held my breath at first as we lifted off, then began to breathe slowly as the dropskiff shook on its way upward. I couldn’t see outside; there were no windows. I imagined the blue sky turning black and twinkly with stars. I imagined a clean and modular ship, the Tantalite freighter Ursula, like an ice cube tray studded with antennae, rockets, solar panels, and ringed by a jump drive, but I had no idea what it really looked like. Space travel didn’t look like it did in the movies. It looked like long silent stares at walls, like blinking lights and illegible, flickering datascreens. It looked like Nylar trying to pretend he wasn’t stealing glances at the girl three seats over, and it looked like me pretending not to notice. Finally, after the smoothness of a zero-gravity flight, I felt our dropship clamp onto the side of something bigger- the freighter. I waited for the flight attendant to tell us we could remove our harnesses. I gripped the handrail to pull myself forward weightlessly, through the set of airlock hatches, into the main corridor of the ship.

We were assigned our berth- a sleeping cubicle in the aft section and given meal credits. The meals were meager, and artificial. There was nothing to do onboard for seven days while we coasted through the system to clear the gravity well for the FTL jump. It was boring, so we had more sex, and it did get a little better, but I missed crime. I couldn’t wait to get to Tantalus II. Unfortunately, we’d have another eight days after this week, following the nine-lightyear jump.

We didn’t expect the weirdness of an FTL jump. Neither of us knew anyone who ever traveled to another solar system before, so no one warned us about the strange mental effects of existing for a fraction of a nanosecond in two sets of space-time coordinates at once. It was like living inside a mirror. No. It was like being a mirror and staring at yourself, like one of those pictures with a reflection inside a reflection, inside another reflection, and so on. Only, it wasn’t so much something I saw as something I felt, like in my skin and bones. My senses were crossed. Random moments in my life jumbled together, like a collage, or a dream, and everything was painted blood red with a low, threatening buzz. I relived the lies I told my therapist, the false things I said about my dad. For the first time in my life, I felt bad about it. My heart pounded. The redness seeped through my skin. I wanted to die. Then everything turned into a kaleidoscope before shattering, and I was jolted out of it by our sudden return to normal space on the other side of the wormhole.

I didn’t talk about it with Nylar. I was afraid to know what he experienced. It couldn’t have been good, because he was sweating, and his eyes looked like poached eggs. For the next couple of days, I heard a lot of the other passengers in the aft section complaining about their experiences. Apparently, no one prepared them, either. I thought about asking a member of the freighter’s crew, but decided against it, since it felt intrusive and I didn’t want to get in their way. I’d have plenty of time to learn from the Tantalites once we were on the surface.

Rather than admit to each other what we experienced during the jump, we talked about Tantalus II, and how great it would be. Nylar knew everything about Tantalus- he loved gangster holos, and VR games about gangsters, and pretty much anything set on Tantalus. He knew about the ranks and the honor code of their most revered and feared Familial Organizations. We both spoke Tantalite- everyone on Saetia did, since we did so much business with them. We knew how to act around Tantalites. It would be easy to fit in, once we exchanged our yawlings for pesos.

The day before we arrived, Nylar finally told me what he saw during the jump. He wanted to know what I saw, but I made him tell me first.

“Fire,” he said. “I saw fire. I don’t know what it meant. I mean, I didn’t just see fire, I was fire. And I was the light it cast, and the shadow, and my dad was there. He was holding his hand over me, and it was burning, but he didn’t scream or anything. He was crying. He just clenched his teeth together and tried to put me out with his tears. But he couldn’t. I just kept spreading, and everything burned. I wrote about in my notebook.”

I knew he wrote in a notebook. He only recently stopped hiding it from me. It was impossible for him to hide it on the freighter, since we shared only a tiny sleeping cubicle. He told me it was the ninth notebook. He maxed out all the pages in the other ones with ideas for holomovies and poetry.

“I saw pieces of my life,” I said. “Fragments. It was confusing, and I think Deus or the Great Spirit or whomever wants me to punish me. I’m no good to people.”

He blew through his lips dismissively. “I’m no good either,” he said. “But I don’t care. There’s no point in trying to be someone you’re not.”

“What did you dad do to you?” I asked him. His dad must have done something. All dads were guilty of something.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing ever happened to me. I’m just an asshole.”

“No,” I said, and I kissed him on the cheek. “You’re an anarchist.”

 

We had sex again, and this time, I enjoyed it. I was glad he told me what he saw. I was glad he could trust me like that.

 

Nylar

 

There are no immigration checkpoints on Tantalus II. There’s no test for citizenship. No one even needs to carry identification. A “citizen” is anyone living there at the present time. Once we landed, that was us. It was up to us to build a life for ourselves, using whatever talents Deus gave us. And of course, a planet that doesn’t practice gun control didn’t stop us from taking the chain-rifle, the Hitchcock and the Slayer with us all the way from ship to surface in our luggage.

I was good at a number of useful things: cheat-circuiting cars, exchanging them for guns, and robbing convenience stores. None of these things were illegal, but the convenience store owners on Tantalus II were more heavily armed than on Saetia Prime, so the chain-rifle saw more action in what we soon stopped bothering to call our “crimes.”

We arrived during summer on the southeastern continent, and the first car we stole was a GX4 Caballero. We stole it from outside a club in the Go-Zone in the city of Qurut. It was purple and white, with gold trim on the wheels, a sunroof, and sound system better than the one inside the club. These newer cars were easy to cheat-circuit. I didn’t even have to unscrew the direct access panel. The damn plastic things snapped right off. Once we had a vehicle, we set our sights on a lonely charge port/minigrocery at the edge of town. I had the Slayer handgun and Rosita had the chain-rifle. The private security at the spaceport won’t let you take weapons in, but they’re not willing to confiscate guns from arrivals because gun control is anathema on this planet. We demonstrated with a spray of bullets from the chain-rifle and demanded the money from the pair of cashiers. They handed over their cashbox, and we sprayed the air with bullets again and left. We ditched the Caballero then, and I cheat-circuited a less conspicuous car. It was a silver Jupiter 2000 coupe with gullwing doors and a damaged fender, which we slept in that first night, under the stars.

 

We stole quite a bit of money that first week, and life was good. We rented a motel room in the Northwestern Octant, and took advantage of Tantalus II’s utter and unsurprising lack of laws against underage drinking to test the limits of our stomachs. But we found that being drunks made us less competent robbers, so that got old fast. Yellow Dust was better for spree work, anyway, it cranked up our senses while slowing down our perception, made everything like one of those movies with weird color filters and canted angle shots. Yellow Dust made me feel like Casnwar Tomaine, the star of Andreas Bolte’s Eleven and a Half Bullets, as I stormed through doors and emptied shots in the air like his character, Sylvan Friesz.

In retrospect, it was kind of stupid how we wasted so many bullets, but we wanted to have fun with this.

The Dust raised our heartrates and out temperatures, which made the getaway more exciting. We’d ditched the silver Jupiter for a black offroader yesterday and moved motels because some guys in suits were asking about us. We knew some of these places we were robbing had protection, but we didn’t know which ones. It wasn’t like there was a central database or something. Not on Tantalus. You just had to pay attention. So, at the end of the week, we threw our stuff in the back of the offroader and set out for a town called Syhaleez, three hours away from Qurut. We robbed one last grocery on the way and stocked up on candy and pesos for the trip. That was when I discovered the BangBangCrunch- the jiepho of chocolate bars. I decided I’d save it for the last leg of our trip. But we didn’t make it. The offroader’s electric motor broke down a few minutes after a candy-stop. We were stranded on one of the privately owned roads connecting the two cities. I was hungry. No one was going to pick us up when we were carrying the chain-rifle, so we got rid of it and concealed our handguns. We stuck out our thumbs and waited for our deliverance, which came in the form of a thin man with braids driving a flashy yellow car. He was darker skinned than the mostly Northern Tantalite crew of the freighter Ursula, but lighter than most of the Southern Tantalites we’d seen since landing on the Southeastern Continent. He wore yellow-tinted sunglasses and a dark blue beret. He looked like a middle school history teacher, trying too hard to be cool.

“I don’t usually pick up hitchhikers, but you two obviously aren’t from around here. Saetian?” he asked.

“Yeah, we’re Saetian,” said Rosita. She was sitting in the back. I was in the front passenger seat.

“My ex-co-husband was Saetian,” said the driver. “I’m Hess. Just got discharged from the Militia. My sister set me up with a job in Syhaleez.”

“What are you gonna be, a teacher or something?” asked Rosita.

“I’m a bounty hunter,” he said. “My sister owns the largest chain of minigroceries in the district. But four of her Qurut shops got robbed last week. So, you know, there’s a headprice involved. I’m not the only one on the chase. You two pissed a lot of people off.”

My hand started crawling toward my concealed holster, but Hess grabbed my wrist before I could reach my gun.

“You ever shoot a man who’s driving the car you’re in?” he asked. “No, you haven’t, because you’re alive. Here’s how this works. I’ve got dead-man sensors from three planets hooked up to my heart, transmitting my vital data to a chip in a bomb in my trunk. Kill me and you kill yourselves.”

He picked up his phone from the slot between the driver and passenger seat and made a call.

“I got’em. Yeah, two Saetian kids. Dreamers,” he told the person on the other end. Then have them coordinates and said he was three minutes away.

“That was the Phantes Security Firm,” he told us, putting down the phone. “I’m going to ask you now to disarm yourselves. Have your girlfriend pass me her gun, and then you give me yours.”

We had no choice. We gave him our guns. I was hungry, so I dug in my pocket for whatever candy we had left, and that’s when I felt the pistol-shaped outline of the BangBangCrunch. I fingered a fruit-flavored hard candy instead, slipped it out of my pocket, unwrapped it and popped it in my mouth.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” said Hess. “I’m going to stop this car. You and your girlfriend will go with security. I’ll get paid, and never see you again.”

“What happens to us?” I asked.

“Two ways you do this. Resist, and they shoot you. Cooperate, and they’ll probably put you in a stasis tube, launch you on a shuttle, and ship you off to somewhere else where you’re no longer their problem,” said Hess. “You’re not the first dumb kids to come to this planet thinking it’s a playground, you know. We might not have laws, but we have honor. Contrary to popular stereotype, we’re not anarchists,” said Hess.

I wondered how many idiots before me thought this was a good idea.

“I need to piss,” I lied.

“I need a bathroom, too,” said Rosita.

“We’re two minutes away,” said Hess. “You can piss when I pull over.”

“It’s not my bladder,” said Rosita. “I’m bleeding. You know.”

“Aw, verv!” hissed Hess. I turned my head around to see she was telling the truth; she was bleeding through her panties, right on the leather seat.

Hess continued to mumble angrily about how difficult it would be to clean up the blood as he pulled over to the side of the road.

 

Rosita

 

“Wait,” Hess told us, before we got out. He clutched a black leather bag in front of Nylar’s seat, brought it to his level, and pulled out two electronic tracking bracelets.

“Put these on,” he said.

I put mine on while Nylar stared at his like an old nemesis. It wasn’t identical to the one he wore, but it served the same function.

“Now,” urged Hess.

Nylar clicked the bracelet around his wrist, despite the sheer resentment I could see in his eyes. He looked like a trapped animal again, his brown all sweaty, his lips parted in an anxious quiver.

“Take a piss,” said Hess. “I’ll wait.” He handed me a clump of paper towels.

“Sorry we’re not near any clean facility,” he said to me, like he was almost genuine.

“Whatever,” I replied. I got out of the car and followed Nylar to a spot several dozen meters away from the road, where he unzipped his pants and pretended like he was peeing. But he didn’t really need to pee.

“Shh,” he whispered, and he showed me the butt of the candy-bar gun.

“It’s a candy bar, Nylar,” I whispered back.

“It’s all I’ve got,” he said.

And for the first time since I’d been with him, I thought, He’s gonna get me killed.

Nylar turned around without even zipping up his fly and pointed the chocolate gun at Hess.

“Drop the pistols and kick them away,” he ordered the older man.

Anger flashed in Hess’ eyes, and I realized with the sun casting the shadows it did, the photorealistic foil wrapper might just fool him. I watched as Hess detached my Hitchcock and Nylar’s Slayer from the clips on his belt, hoping that he would drop them on the ground. For a split second it looked like he was going to call our bluff, but Nylar didn’t waver. He kept pointing the gun-shaped candy bar at our captor, who finally set the two real guns on the ground and back away from them, toward his vehicle.

“Give us the code for the bracelets,” said Nylar. He didn’t want anyone else tracking us.

“Five, seven, three, four, nine,” said Hess.

We entered the code on the bracelets’ keypads, and they unlocked.

Then Hess said, “It’s pointless, you know. Phantes is on their way. They have my coordinates. There’s nowhere to hide out here. They’ll spot you from a copter and door-gun you.”

Nylar cocked his head toward me and said, “Get the guns.” I ran over to where Hess dropped them and scooped them up in my hands. Hess must have realized at that point that the chocolate gun was either fake or not loaded, because he tried to stop me, but I was too quick, and when he bolted toward me, I pulled back the cocking handle and chambered a round.

Hess stumbled forward, then upon hearing the gun being cocked, tried to scramble backwards again. I raised the gun and targeted his head.

“Shoot!” shouted Nylar. “Shoot him!”

I had never killed a human being before. Robbing stores was one thing- we sprayed bullets to show we were serious, but neither of us ever actually had to shoot someone. The cashiers were trained to hand over the money. But this was a matter of self-defense, and that had always been theoretical. The only person who ever hurt me was my dad, and when he did it, I told myself he’d had the right. I never even thought about resisting.

“Fuck, Rose, shoot him!” Nylar demanded. “Shoot him!”

I knew if I didn’t shoot, if I showed I couldn’t use the gun, then Hess would simply charge me, steal it back, and detain, or worse, kill us. I was armed. Nylar wasn’t. The Hitchcock, familiar to my grip, felt like a part of my body. Maybe I didn’t have to think about this, the less thought the better, just summon the action, like one of our robberies. Let my emotions take over. I imagined my dad’s face on Hess’s body. It was comical- he had been a large man, and Hess was a stalk. But it did the trick. My trigger finger started to curl inward, to squeeze. Hess lunged at me, and the next thing I knew, he was on the ground with a hole in his head, and I was staring at Nylar, who was staring at the horizon.

The horizon looked a hornet’s nest. The black shapes of bicopters appeared first in the air, their buzzing followed by the whines of electric motors as a small fleet of offroaders and quadbikes burned rubber toward us. Private security was approaching on the privately owned road, and I had just very publicly murdered someone on their payroll.

Was it even called murder, though, on Tantalus II? I’d never heard a Tantalite use the word. They always just said “kill.” Or sometimes, “assassinate,” if it was a political thing. Or “hit,” if it was a mob thing. We’d heard talk, in the we spent in Qurut, of a group called “Redscarves.” People called them “terrorists,” and “anarchists.” Said they targeted the powerful, carried out assassinations. If they were anarchists, I wanted to meet them.

The Phantes Firm might have called themselves “private security,” but I’d seen uniforms like theirs before. On my planet, we just called them cops. The black-uniformed security personnel carried carbines and wore traditional blades on their hips. They surrounded us, their weapons drawn, with their leader speaking through a megaphone from a distance.

“Alright, you two. Game’s up. Drop the guns,” the leader of the uniforms said.

I grinned at Nylar and started speaking nonsense in Saetian, figuring they wouldn’t know our language, and we could stall for time by making them fetch an interpreter, but the leader just drew a massive silver pistol and took a shot mere centimeters from Nylar’s feet, causing him to yell “Verv,” which was our favorite Tantalite curse we learned in our first week.

“So, you do speak Tantalite, after all,” said the leader.

“I do,” said Nylar. “She doesn’t.”

Good call, Nylar, I thought.

“Drop the guns, Rose,” he said to me, in Saetian.

I put the Slayer and the Hitchcock on the dusty red ground.

“Tell her to kick them away,” said the leader.

Then, Nylar turned the chocolate bar gun on me. I was staring down the foil-wrapped barrel of a BangBangCrunch, trying to figure out what the fuck was going through my boyfriend’s head.

“I’ll shoot her and myself,” declared Nylar.

“That’s not the way we do things,” said the leader. “We don’t want to hurt you. But the person whose stores you robbed paid the man you killed to deliver you to us, so she can do what her honor demands.”

“What does honor demand?” asked Nylar.

“That’s for her to decide. First, she just wants to talk to you,” said the leader. “It’s not my problem. For the moment, you are."

“This woman- we killed her brother,” I said to Nylar, in Saetian, to maintain my cover.

“I don’t have a plan, babe. I just want to be alive one more minute than not,” he replied, also speaking Saetian.

“Speak Tantalite, or not at all!” bellowed the leader of the uniforms, through his megaphone.

“Okay,” said Nylar, in Tantalite, to the leader. He promptly began to peel the foil wrapper off the BangBangCrunch, and took a bite out of the barrel, causing the leader of the uniforms to laugh.

“It’s a candy bar, gentleman. A BangBangCrunch,” he said to his troops, who also laughed. When they were done laughing, the leader relaxed his megaphone and approached us. He picked up the guns from the ground and admired the engraved handle of my Hitchcock.

“I bought my wife this model,” he said. “Good choice. Suits you.”

“Thanks,” I said, in Tantalite. He grinned like a cat that finally caught a vore.

We had no choice but to go with him.

 

Syhaleez was bigger than Qurut but lacked a spaceport. The Phantes people took us to a mid-sized tower in the center of the city, and escorted us to the fifth floor, to a modest suite of offices belonging to the Piel Vendor Supply Firm, which owned four of the stores we robbed. They brought us before a woman who looked like a slightly older, female version of Hess. She was a mixture of Southern and Northern Tantalite, with a skin tone intermediate between brown and olive. She wore the same stupid yellow tinted glasses. It was hard to look at her, because all I could think of was the bullet going through Hess’s brain, a vision in my head that wouldn’t go away, not like a movie, but a nightmare.

She sat in a brown leather chair behind a wooden desk in an office whose walls were covered in cork board. It looked like her company just moved offices. Her desk, and the room, were bare, and there were several unpacked boxes in the corner.

We sat uncomfortably in two cheap chairs with peeling wood, our hands manacled behind our backs.

“So, you’re the two kids that ripped off my stores and killed my brother,” said the woman, whose nameplate outside said LEEANDER IACOCCA, CEO.

“We’re sorry about your brother,” I said. “I know he was just doing his job.”

“Barely!” shouted Leander. “I gave him a chance to do one thing right in his life, and he verved even that up. Now I’m down a car and some good equipment I can’t return.”

I didn’t exactly expect her to say that. It left me confused. I looked at Nylar, who was giving her a cold stare.

“How many stores have you robbed?” she asked.

“On this planet? Or Saetia?” Nylar inquired. She just stared at him.

“You can’t remember, can you?” she asked, sounding pleased. “How would you two like a job?”

 

Nylar

 

So, we broke legit, Rosita and me. We went to work for the grocery chain, advising them on security. They even let us stage robberies to train their staff. It was awesome. We earned enough for an apartment, then took out a home loan, settled down, and a had couple of kids. We had enough adventure behind us now for one life. We’d been criminals on Saetia, and bandits on Tantalus, and now we were corporate security. I guess we can’t call our first Tantalite career “criminal,” though. Maybe, “pre-vocational.” And I guess it’s easy to stay a criminal when crime pays, but there were better ways to make money on a planet without cops, and it was true what the Tantalites said- they were the freest of the free.

I didn’t used to respect property. But I do now that I have my own. That’s what it’s all about on Tantalus, and why we are so free here. We agree to respect each other’s property rights. And for everything else, we afford liberty.

I could steal again. I know who not to steal from now. But why would I want to? I have a life here, more than I ever could have had on Saetia. Rosita is with me and this year, we’re finally getting married. The Rigelian Orthodox war-priests will marry nonmembers if they already have kids, so we’re on the docket this summer. Our oldest son, Jeremiah, is twelve. He’s going to be the swordbearer.

If we’d stated on Saetia, I imagine, we’d both be in prison.

Out of curiosity, I went to a psychologist. I paid for an evaluation. I told him about my past diagnoses and behavior. He listened, but I don’t think he believed me. The diagnosis he gave me was Attentive Disorder with Hyperactive Presentation, by history.

“By history?” I asked him, the next week, when I picked up the eval. “What does ‘by history’ mean?”

“It means there was probably something unfulfilled in your youth, but now you’ve managed to fill that gap, and your behavior doesn’t seem to impair your functioning, but for the purpose of medical billing I had to give you a diagnosis,” he said. He pushed air through his teeth. “It’s all oxshyke, anyway. I’m retiring next year. Bought myself a houseboat.”

“So, you’re saying I was just an impulsive and reckless teenager?” I asked him. I didn’t want to believe that. I wanted something to be wrong with me. I wanted an explanation for why I did the things I did. When I look back on it, it’s like I was another person, and I’m watching that person in a holomovie, like a character, and I’m trying to get into that person’s head, but I just can’t. Some people can. But not me.

“More impulsive and reckless than most,” the doctor said. “But not off the spectrum for your planet, or Tantalus. You’ll have to forgive me, I don’t have the benefit of your cultural experience, but on this planet, we don’t practice medicine through the lens of a pathologized ‘criminal mentality,’ as they might call it on Saetia. That’s an alien concept. I don’t apply it to my patients. No, Mr. Gantz, you had some strange relationship with boredom. But you grew out of it. I don’t expect to see you on the evening news, holding up convenience stores.”

I shrugged and thanked him. I never saw a psychologist again.

When I got home, Rosita was crying. The newsstream made it clear why: the housing market collapsed. And that meant the bank would liquidate our home.

Our youngest was six- old enough to travel. We didn’t talk about it, not with each other. It was like we were in telepathic communication, reading each other’s thoughts. Rosita was the only person in the world whose thoughts I could read. Everyone else was just a blank slate I pasted movie actors onto in my head. Even our kids. But we didn’t have to talk. We just packed up our things. The kids had questions, and we told them we couldn’t live there anymore, that it wasn’t ours. Our youngest didn’t understand, but our oldest, by then, was twelve, and he knew enough about the world to know what a home loan was, and what happened if we couldn’t pay it.

The next nearest convenience store that wasn’t owned by a major player with a security connect was on LantCorps LLC Highway 2. I felt the metal of my Slayer on my hip while Rosita drove. I was looking forward to a BangBangCrunch. I promised one to each of the kids.

 

Rosita

 

At sixteen, I decided to love a boy who I knew was good for no one, because I was good for no one too. And somehow, we made it, for all of twelve years. But at thirty, me, my husband, and our three kids were homeless, and there was only one thing to do about it.

I could pretend it was some kinda revelation, about my true nature, or whatever, but something Nylar said to me a long time ago stuck in my head: maybe I was just an asshole.

When you’re sixteen, seventeen, and you hate the world, you have an excuse, maybe. But I was an adult, and so we he, and we had nothing, not even excuses. All we had were each other, and there was no one I’d rather be an asshole with than Nylar Gantz.

After the first robbery, I felt momentarily bad about taking the kids with us, but we couldn’t just abandon them, and there was no one we knew who could take them in. So, we decided it was time for them to learn the trade. Like we decided to fall in love. Like we decided that a life on Tantalus II was better than one on Saetia Prime. Like I decided to break up my family.

A decision doesn’t have to be the right thing. It can be whatever keeps you alive, moment to moment, as Nylar and I well knew. We decided a lot of things in a hurry, and most of it amounted to “You know what to do, I know what to do, there’s no point talking about it.”

We talked more with the kids.

The car sped forward toward the next district. The dust made me sneeze. We passed a hitchhiker, without stopping.

Maybe I’m just an asshole? I thought to myself again. Maybe everyone’s an asshole.

I guess I didn’t really feel all that different now than I did then.

I drove, and we all ate chocolate guns, and Nylar told the kids stories of the things we’d done before. Jeremiah said he wanted to learn how to cheat-circuit cars, and Nylar said he would teach him. A bicopter appeared in the sky, but it passed us without incident. The road stretched far ahead through the red, dusty desert, to the plains.