SOMA (LGBT-scifi-romance)

Chapter One: Leanne

Soma knew he shouldn't start fires. This one... this one wasn't his fault.

He hid under his cot while the doctor took a slow survey around his glass cell and gathered up his charred toys and drawings. She whispered a bad word, and covered her eyes. The hems of her lab coat quivered. Soma wriggled out and offered his ragdoll cat with sooty, blistered hands. "I'm sorry," he blurted. "I didn't know doctors can be sad too."

The doctor wiped her face. "Clean this up," she ordered. "I'll be back."

That night, she returned—but it wasn't to give Soma needles before bed. She gave him a cocoa bar instead, bundled him in a gray bed sheet, and smuggled him out. From between the fabric, he saw a dozen glaze-eyed children in identical glass cells, each with tubes in their arms and burn scars across their hands. The doctor stole an unmarked ship and they pulled out of the orbital compound. They dodged a fleet of black-sailed patrols and left their asteroid colony. Soma bounced in the co-pilot seat, babbling about how much bigger Old Earth looked outside picture books. The doctor listened, brushed silver hair out of her pale eyes, and gave him tight, thin-lipped smiles whenever he paused to breathe.

Two naps and a pee-break later, they arrived at a dirty outer-ring colony that smelled like old socks. The doctor stashed Soma in a jagged crevice under an Indian take-out restaurant, and gave him his ragdoll cat. "No matter what happens, little brother, remember. No fire."

"I have to pee again," Soma announced. "No gravity is so weird!"

The doctor laughed, and then left him. Her ship drew a long, slender wake.

Soma clutched his cat, nerves bleeding into excitement. He'd never left his glass room before, or been without artificial gravity, or seen stars. He climbed out of the crevice and stared.

The colony was made of thousands of floating rocks—lunaroids—with nanocables webbed between them. When Soma squinted, he saw that the larger lunaroids had been hollowed out and turned into houses and local shops, with bottle-nosed ships anchored alongside. Occasionally, there were man-made structures—grinding wheels and eccentric factories that looked like animal skulls. Old Earth hung overhead, like an enormous ceiling made of burnt toast, with the inner colony ring a trail of cream across it. Soma grinned, determined to love it all. He crawled back under the restaurant, finished his cocoa bar, and dreamed of loud noises.

By the next day, his giddiness faded. The doctor didn't come back.

At first, Soma stayed in that crevice. The restaurant owner gave him empty rice boxes and curry packets to drink from. If Soma had been a little older, a little smarter, he would've smiled sweetly and asked to stay. Instead, he was afraid and miserable. After a while, the owner chased him off. Soma cried, because he knew the doctor would never find him after that.

The people in this colony talked and moved like wind-up toys. A few passersby threw things at Soma. He was too little to climb the nanocables very well; the twenty-meter carbon ropeways felt immense and impossible. Oxygen didn't cycle regularly there. Soma's head felt hot, his burns festered, and he couldn't see through the pillows of orange clouds. At nights, he clung to the bottoms of lunaroids to keep grounded. He licked bitter frost from smokestacks and crawled in garbage chutes and chemical closets to look for leftovers. Eventually, he tried to eat wadded newspapers from trash spheres, and gnawed on the slimy corpse of a sky fish crushed by passing ships.

He was very skinny then. His belly was hard. He hurt when he moved, and he'd lost a few fingernails. He'd lost his ragdoll cat too. It wasn't so bad, though. He didn't feel hungry or thirsty anymore. Sometimes, he didn't even feel cold.

One night, a solar storm enveloped the colony edge. Each lunaroid had a different static charge. Climate generators chugged to counteract the roiling magnetic weather. Artificial stars snuffed out. Trash spheres ruptured. Ships tugged against their anchors. Lashes of nitrogen winds cut into Soma's arms and face. A vicious gust blew him clear, and he went tumbling across space, colliding with debris. Because everything moved so fast, even brushes against grits and plastic scraps cut up his legs and the remnants of his bed sheet.