Part 1

With one final smash against the dirt, my body jerked to a stop. I curled onto my side to throw up, nearly blind with pain. Through blurry vision, I saw that my bike had landed nearby—or at least what was left of it. The metal was dinged and dented. The chains hung off the front gear. One of the brake lines had snapped.

Once I’d managed to push myself to my feet, I shakily wheeled my bike the rest of the way to Reseda Complex. Littering was a cardinal sin on JSS; I couldn’t leave the bike there to rust.

With each limp and pang, my frustration grew—at Johnny and his goons, at Hannah, at my mom, at Fern, at this place, at my bike, at the sand and sea and fish and planet. At the tiny Free Space and the loneliness of losing my home.

Muttering angrily to myself, I shoved my way through the gate into the Free Space and stormed over to the disposal unit to throw my bike in, but I was too weak to lift it high enough and ended up just chucking it against the wall.

“Whoa, Slim, what’s going on?” My mom was rushing through the Free Space toward me, probably just getting home from work. I kept my body turned away to hide the scrapes and bruises and tears. “What happened to your bike? Why aren’t you talking to me, honey?”

She reached over and grabbed my arm to turn me toward her. I jerked away, wincing, but faced her anyway, clutching my side. Her eyes widened and panic flooded them. “Oh, my stars, Slim, what happened? Who did this to you?”

“Nobody,” I grumbled, attempting to push past her. But Ma was too smart for that, too swift.

“Slim, talk to me. I can’t help unless you tell me what’s going on.”

Everything exploded out of me, all of my ire now aimed at my mom. I banged my fist against the side of the building, the pain barely even registering through everything else. “You don’t care what’s going on!” I shouted. “You just want to hear that everything’s fine! That I love the sun and I’m making friends and never want to leave!”

“That’s not fair.” Ma’s voice was not as loud as mine, even though her lungs were not currently recovering from a beating.

“Yeah, and it was fair bringing me here? It was fair dragging me away from home with no way to go back? Real fair, Ma.”

My mom didn’t answer right away, but when she did, her voice was quiet and calm. “You’re right. It wasn’t fair. I’m sorry. But I want to help you, tell me what you want me to do.”

My yelling devolved into sobs, through which I said, “I just want to go home,” over and over again until my mom led me up to 5B and forced me to shower and then sleep despite the sun’s presence in the sky. I left my miraculously in-tact tablet in our two-person community space, knowing that Hannah would probably try to get ahold of me.

In the morning, my tablet still neglected, I dragged my sore body out of bed and drank some juice with Pain-Gone powder mixed in. If we had money like that rich kids group Hannah and Johnny were a part of, my body would have the invisible healthcare alteration that could immediately deploy certain medicines and vaccines when prompted. I studied my face in the bathroom mirror, and it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be. My body had taken the majority of the fall—my ribs and arms the worst—but I had a couple long scratches on my cheek and a huge dark bruise on my forehead where I’d hit the rock.

When the Pain-Gone kicked in, I left our family compartment to finish disposing of my bike, which I’d just left on the ground. I had to do something to distract myself from my foggy mind and painful memories, things that Pain-Gone couldn’t fix.

I didn’t have to go far to get to my bike. Still dinged but now cleaned and repaired, my bike leaned against the wall next to our door. Huh.

Instead of typing in a request or message on the touchscreen, I knocked on the Fixer’s door. I heard a gruff voice invite me in, so I cautiously swung the door in and took a step. The room was small, full of tools and various tech parts, and cut in half by a clear sliding door which was partially opened. The Fixer faced away from me behind that partition, hunched over his desk and surrounded by thin sheets of something stiff and off-white—a type of cloth? On them were black markings I couldn’t make out from where I stood.

“Did you fix my bike?” I asked the back of the old man’s head.

“Yes,” he answered with a sharp “ess” sound.

“Well, thank you, Mr…?”

“Noriyuki.”

“Mr. Noriyuki,” I repeated slowly. “Thank you. I’m surprised you had parts to fix something so old.” I strained my neck to peer at the Fixer’s task more closely without intruding.

The Fixer shook his head and finally looked over his shoulder at me. “No ‘mister’, just Noriyuki.”

“Oh, sorry. Hey, what are you doing with that cloth?”

“Not cloth,” Noriyuki said. “Paper. Come look.” He waved me over with a friendly look on his face. He was holding what looked like a stylus, but the end was sharpened to a point and was dripping something black. On the top right corner of the desk was a small vial of the same black liquid.

The sheets of thin white material were decorated with rows of symbols, some of which looked vaguely like the letters on a screen. Most, though, were foreign to me—curly and with varying thicknesses. Some were long and loopy, others were small and compact. “What are these symbols?”

“Calligraphy. Words made by hands and ink.”

“How are these words? I can’t read them.”

Noriyuki gestured to a second chair pushed against the wall, which I dragged over to the desk. Noriyuki dipped the sharp stylus into the black liquid—“ink”—and drew the symbols nimbly with a few flourishes of his hand. He drew the calligraphy alphabet with the screen equivalents next to them and set it in front of me with a blank paper and my own sharp stylus. “Smooth movements. Trust your hand to finish the line without hesitation. Decide the start, journey, and finish before you start.” Then he returned to his own calligraphy.

After watching him for a moment, I dipped my stylus into the ink, clumsily dripping on the table as I brought it over to my paper, and began drawing calligraphy letters haltingly. The ink bled every time I paused, making my alphabet splotchy and rough. I glanced over at Noriyuki again. The only time he ever hesitated was before he began to draw. Once he’d pressed the stylus to the paper, his hand moved fluidly, connecting the letters of a word together to create one long symbol.

Turning back to my paper, I took a deep breath, used my eyes to trace the path my stylus would travel to draw a calligraphy S, and then put the stylus to the paper. My hand followed that path smoothly, because I’d already decided where it was going to go. Before I knew it, I was engrossed in the calligraphy. My mind slowed down, focused only on drawing the letters.

When Noriyuki leaned back in his chair, I straightened out my back and stretched, surprised how stiff I was. “What time is it?” I asked.

Noriyuki patted his stomach with a small laugh. “Late enough for food. You should go home, so your mother doesn’t worry, yes?”

“Yes,” I agreed reluctantly. I didn’t want to break the peace I’d found in this small room over the past few hours.

Noriyuki capped the ink vial and placed it in a delicate black box along with a fresh stylus, blank papers, and the alphabets I’d already drawn. He held it out to me.

“Are you sure you want me to take this?” I asked, reaching out with both hands. It seemed like something sacred, something I shouldn’t be trusted with.

“Practice,” Noriyuki said with a nod.

And I did. I spent the next month avoiding Hannah and Johnny at school, and hiding out in Noriyuki’s room after school. He let me stay there even if he was out fixing something. Over those weeks, he told me about his mom, who had taught him how to draw calligraphy. How it was a family tradition passed down from his Earthen ancestors. How his family had been forced to emigrate to Calif when the Wars of Lost Faiths started because Earth became too dangerous. I hadn’t realized people lived on Earth so recently in the past. Historical information made it seem like Earth was a thing of long ago, but on a small pocket of land called an “isle,” a small population of humans stayed until the United Human Federation forced them to relocate to the nearest habitable planet—Calif.

I didn’t offer much in return while I practiced drawing calligraphy—which I learned was called “writing”—and read what Noriyuki had written. Now that I knew what each symbol meant, I could read the papers he left around. They all had small poems of three lines, some with just the one poem in the middle and the rest of the paper decorated with swirls and flowers and other patterns, some with several poems linked together, and others with different versions of the same poem. All had nature imagery, and all talked about some mysterious “she.” Noriyuki offered no explanations, and I didn’t ask for them.

Soon enough, the Festival of Falling Stars was coming up, and the school was putting on a huge event complete with music, food, and decorations. We spent an hour the Thursday before the Festival folding origami stars to hang from the gymnasium ceiling. The school had decided that an outdoors activity was too much of a liability, so there would be no taking advantage of the citywide power-down that allowed for Quadrant-wide stargazing. Though there was usually no meteor shower the day of the festival, it was still tradition to look up at the stars and remember where we came from, and where we were yet to go.

I was sitting in Noriyuki’s room, watching him fix up someone’s tablet with the same deftness he brought to his calligraphy, when he commented, “Lots of excitement right now, no?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said noncommittally. I hadn’t really been taking part in anything except the mandatory star-making. The Festival of Falling Stars wasn’t really celebrated on JSS, though we acknowledged it as a holiday. It was hard to watch for “falling stars” when your entire home was falling through the stars.

“Are you going to participate in the festivities?”

I sighed, miffed that Noriyuki had brought my school world into this space. Hannah had asked me to go with her, and I’d declined, on account of her ex and his goons itching for a reason to beat me up again. “No, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“You don’t want to go?” He stopped his tinkering and looked up, pushing his magnifying glasses up to his forehead.

“No, it’s not that.” I knew I couldn’t lie; Noriyuki was like a human lie detector. “I just wish I could go without anyone knowing.”

“Like in disguise?”

“Yeah, like in disguise.”

“Hm.” Noriyuki glanced at the ink on his desk and then over at my face.

I soon learned two things that I never thought would be pertinent to my life: 1) The organic ink Noriyuki used for calligraphy was safe to use on human skin, and 2) the Golden Planet had a very special tradition for the Festival of Falling Stars.

Despite my worries, when I arrived at the school Lunchroom, I was far from the only one with a painted face. Though I suspected I was the only one who had used calligraphy ink.

Noriyuki had practically painted me a new face. It was as if my entire face was made up of the same intricate swirls that adorned his poetry. On my forehead were three stars.

Through the noise and crowd and dim lights, I craned my neck to find Hannah. Someone tapped me on the back, and I spun around with the expectation of seeing an unfriendly face. Instead, I saw a beaming smile and face decorated with small stars and glitter around the eyes.

“Interesting take on face paint,” Hannah said, taking my hand and leading me into the crowd. I let her pull me along, smiling dumbly. Most people had either subtle or colorful decorations on their faces. Many faces shimmered with metallic paints. I was the only shadow.

Hannah dragged me to a table on one side of the decorated Lunchroom. Containers of shiny face paints sat on top, the black tablecloth underneath absolutely covered in splatters of the stuff. Hannah made sure I stayed put and dipped two fingers into the gold face paint. Then she traced those two fingers in a shape that I assumed was a star around my left eye, trailing down my cheek to create the tail of a comet. Then she used one finger to make dots underneath my right eye.

“There. Now you look more like a star than the night sky.”

“Why thank you,” I said mock-formally. “Whatever would I have done without a native Califan to show me your ways?”

She laughed at my lame joke, like she usually did, and gestured to the crowd. Everyone danced to a beat that I couldn’t find in a song I’d never heard before, but I still followed Hannah through the crowd. On the way, I saw Fern, and raised a hand to wave hello. They quickly turned the other way. Ouch.

“Hey, I’m sorry about Johnny and his friends,” Hannah said, arms around my neck and lips near my ear. “I wish we could do something.”

With a small shake of my head, I leaned back so she could see my mouth. “Let’s not talk about him.”

I took advantage of the pause in our conversation to spin her around, rewarded by her radiant smile and giggle. When she spun back, Hannah stumbled a little. She grabbed my shoulders and I tried to steady her with my hands on her waist. My mouth opened to ask if she was okay, but then I glimpsed a sly smile on her face. Hannah had more moves than I did. And better ones.

After a surprisingly fun hour of attempting to dance with Hannah and her friends, she leaned in and shouted in my ear, “Want to go outside? The power-down starts soon!”

I nodded and then pointed to the bathroom, indicating I needed to stop there before leaving. Really, I just wanted to see what she had painted on my face before it started flaking off. The metallic paint had a completely different feel to it than the calligraphy ink—drier, rougher.

As I looked in the mirror, I realized I hadn’t felt what she’d drawn correctly. The shape around my eye was a heart in the middle of an explosion of light rays, the “comet tail” an arrow shape. My hand wandered up to my cheek but I stopped myself before I ruined anything.

The door burst inward and two guys wearing obnoxiously large star costumes barreled toward a locked stall in the corner of the bathroom. One star pounded his fist on the door until it opened, revealing none other than Johnny, who was also in a star costume. The two guys were his goons. All three of them looked ridiculous. “Hey, man, what’s taking so long?”

“Relax, I’m almost ready. Just give me a second,” Johnny answered impatiently.

“Okay, but hurry up, man.”

I ducked my head to keep the two stars from recognizing me, but they were too caught up in shoving each other for trying to go through the door at the same time. As I looked down, I noticed a large tub of dark metallic gray face paint.

It was a bad idea. I knew it was a bad idea. I also knew that Johnny deserved it.

Lifting the bucket was difficult, and as I quietly climbed up on a stool there were several moments it nearly tipped onto me instead of my target. Using my belt and the knowledge I’d gained on the trip to Calif by watching the recent remake of an old movie called The Parent Trap, I rigged the bucket over the stall door.

Stepping down on the balls of my feet to keep quiet, I heard the lock click on the other side of the door. I had just enough time to duck behind the sink as the door swung open.

Whoosh! Johnny’s blonde hair and face and stupid puffy star costume were now the gunmetal gray color of the JSS’s outer walls, a color only meant to be seen by the stars and the Fixers. When he opened his mouth in shock, the paint dribbled onto his white teeth.  

“What the—?” Johnny was cut off by the sound of my belt snapping, sending the bucket itself clanging onto his head for a grand finale. I snorted a little too loudly, and Johnny’s eyes darted over to me. He shouted what I assumed was some sort of slur or curse, and I jumped up from my spot, giving up on my attempt to hide.

Johnny slipped and slid on the shiny paint, giving me a head start out of the bathroom. Focused on trying to keep my pants up as I sprinted haphazardly through the thinning crowd, I didn’t notice Hannah until she grabbed my arm and used my momentum to swing me around. Before she could ask, I yelled over the noise, “As you wish!”

I didn’t get a glimpse of her expression but I knew she saw the three stars chasing me, shoving their way through the crowd. There was no time to get on my bike, but I knew the hilly path to Reseda Complex like the back of my hand. And the absolute darkness of the power-down meant they were as blind as I was.

The pounding of feet and heavy breathing and vague threats got closer and closer as I ran. The delight of seeing that bucket thump Johnny on the head waned as my energy lagged. There was no way I could beat them to the front of Reseda Complex, so I headed to the easily climbable fence around the back of the Free Space.

Once I was close enough to see the fence by the light of the stars, I was near collapse. I launched myself up onto the woven metal, fingers hooked through the lattices, and pulled up the rest of my body only to be yanked back down.

I sprang up from the ground, fists raised to protect my face. But it wasn’t my face that needed protecting. Johnny’s metal fist connected with my gut before I even saw his face. All of the air whooshed out of my lungs, leaving me gasping for breath. Banking on the element of surprise, I straightened up and hit him square in the eye before Johnny sent me flying with his expert kick. How could someone in such a cumbersome costume move with such dexterity?

Before I could push myself to my feet, Johnny’s goons lifted me by the arms, holding me in place as Johnny landed punch after kick after punch. Each one hurt more than the last until the pain overtook my entire body. My legs and arms went limp. Another punch to the gut and I flew back against the fence. My body hit the ground chest-first. A wheeze squeezed itself out of my lungs.

A towering gray star kicked me in the side. A black boot hovered over my face, about to stomp down on me. Suddenly, the boot was gone. Something hit the ground near the fence.  

My mind stuttered through the scene. A gray-haired figure singlehandedly fought off the stars. Easily using their own momentum and weight against them, blocking their expert kicks and punches. A chop to the back of the neck. A kick to the knee. A puffy star with arms and legs fleeing back up the hill.

A stinging sensation on my forehead jarred me awake. My entire body felt bruised and battered, but the sting on my head persisted. I sucked in a breath and blinked my eyes open. The ceiling was low and textured, and it smelled familiar—like ink.

Noriyuki leaned over me, rubbing something on my head that stung. It smelled like coffee. “Good morning,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“Like I fell down five hills,” I answered honestly, pushing myself into a slouched sitting position. The previous night’s attack was still fresh in my mind and I remembered—no that couldn’t be right. Could it? “Was that you, last night? Who beat up those three guys?”

“There was no beating,” Noriyuki said calmly, dipping his fingers into a small container and rubbing the coffee-smelling ointment onto my heavily bruised elbow.

“Except for the one on me.”

Noriyuki chuckled. “True.”

I reached over to touch the shiny balm on my elbow and Noriyuki slapped my hand away. “Don’t touch. It speeds up healing.”

I did as he said. “So you know Bin-son?”

Noriyuki nodded, continuing to rub that salve onto my wounds, even forcing me to lift my shirt to expose the black-and-green bruises on my ribs. This time there was no question—the bruises looked as bad as they felt. “I wish I could fight like Johnny and his friends. They deserve to get a taste of their own medicine.”

“No,” he said as screwed the lid back on the ointment container and set it aside. “You need to learn to defend yourself. Then the problem is solved.”

I snorted and swung my legs over the side of the table I’d been perched on. “Well, the only place to learn around here teaches offense, offense, and more offense.”

“Sounds like there’s no good places to learn, then.”

With an inkling of an idea forming in my mind, I turned back toward Noriyuki. “You could teach me. Right?”

“No,” Noriyuki said firmly.

“How am I supposed to ‘defend’ myself, then? If there’s nowhere to learn?” I threw my arms up in the air and immediately regretted it, holding my bruised arm against my stomach. “Should I just march down there and tell their instructor that he’s teaching wrong?”

With no hint of sarcasm, Noriyuki nodded again. “Now you’re using your head as more than a target.”

“Oh, come on. I was joking.”

“Hm,” Noriyuki said, standing up and going to the sink to wash his hands. “Not very funny.”

After drying his hands, Noriyuki opened his mini icebox and handed me a cold pack to hold to my elbow. The cold burned at first but soon started numbing the injury. “You could come with me,” I suggested. The scary-looking soldier guy who led Johnny’s Bin-son class was unlikely to listen to a scrawny kid, but Noriyuki was his equal, maybe even his elder. We didn’t really care about that kind of thing on JSS, but Calif seemed slightly more traditional. It was worth a shot. “Maybe he would listen to another instructor.”

“I’m not an instructor.”  

“Yes, you are! You instructed me how to draw—I mean write—calligraphy. You could instruct me in Bin-son, too.” I saw Noriyuki begin to shake his head again and interrupted. “You fought them off. You could at least see it through with me.”

With a sigh, the older man patted his gray hair anxiously. “Okay, Slim. I will see it through.”

Late the next morning, Noriyuki and I hopped on a shuttle transport to the Community Center. He had given me a small amount of the salve to reapply, and even though I was still sore, the bruises and scrapes were significantly less irritated.

My tablet had informed me that the next high-level Bin-son class took place just before midday, which is when the two of us arrived at the Community Center. My heart pounded as we walked down the hallway. Noriyuki was poised as always, back straight and head high. He stayed that way even as he opened the door and entered the Bin-son Boxing chamber. I slunk in behind him, not even attempting to stand up to my full height. Hunching over was the only way I could stand without my ribs screaming at me.

Every single head turned toward us as the door clanged shut. Despite the discomfort of all those eyes, it was satisfying to see Johnny’s black eye and the knee brace on one of his goons.

As Noriyuki studied the fighting words displayed on the wall, Johnny pointed at me and whispered to his instructor. The instructor then crossed his gigantic arms over his chest, a tattoo of an angry-looking hawk on his bicep. I hadn’t noticed it the first time because it was faded, as if done the traditional way decades before. Lots of soldiers had similar markings, usually realistic renderings of constellations. There was a bird constellation visible in the Calif sky, but it was an owl, not a hawk. I wondered if it was a constellation he’d seen somewhere else—from a planet or ship on which he’d fought, maybe.  

Hawk Guy marched over toward us in his black Bin-son suit. Bin-son suits were typically a light gray. “My students tell me you beat them up last night,” he said to Noriyuki.

“They are mistaken. I was merely defending Slim.”

Hawk Guy turned his head to appraise me. He towered over me, now close enough that I could read the name stitched onto his suit, near his heart: Kive. “You certainly are slim. You have to have an old man pick your fights?”

My jaw clenched and I stepped forward to respond, but Noriyuki put an arm out to hold me back. “Only to even the odds. Three against two is much more fair than three against one.”

“If the odds are your problem, why don’t you let the boy fight his own fight this time? Jonathan, front and center!”

Like a soldier in training, Johnny marched up to the line painted down the middle of the chamber, meant to bisect the fight space, and also where opponents bumped knuckles as a sign of respect before the fight. If you were fighting for sport, of course, and not your life.

Johnny slapped his hands to his sides and stood at attention, staring at a spot past my head. Then his eyes shifted to lock onto mine, a smirk lifting the corners of his mouth.

“The odds are not fair still. Your students fight in this chamber every day. This is not neutral territory.” Noriyuki blinked twice, the only indication that Kive intimidated him at all. I could do nothing but stand behind Noriyuki and watch the conversation.

“What do you suggest, little man? Name the time and place.” Kive was no longer barking out these orders. He seemed amused.

Noriyuki pointed to a screen on the wall next to the door, which was displaying an advertisement for a Calif Quadrant 3, Division 1 Bin-son Boxing Tournament. “Tournament. No fighting between students until then. Deal?” Noriyuki held out a fist, offering his knuckles.

I wanted to protest but risked looking even more cowardly than I already did. I’d never done any formal boxing. Our class had been run by a Community Coordinator on JSS, not an official instructor. We sparred with each other, but never actually fought or competed. There weren’t enough people on JSS to fill a tournament roster. But an entire planet quadrant? That could be hundreds or thousands, depending on population density.

Kive bumped knuckles with Noriyuki with a slo-mo punching motion as if a casual fist bump were beneath him. “Deal.”

My eyes wandered back to Johnny. The bruise made his one eye seem to glow a brighter blue, and his smirk was full of arrogance. He was looking at me like I was a fish on his plate, and he was ready to pluck out my bones from his teeth after eating me. This was an expression he must have learned from his instructor; no student had any reason to hate someone that much.

I had three months until that hatred was unleashed in front of thousands of people, with no defense beyond what I could learn from a book and vague memories.

Well, shit.

TO BE CONTINUED…

-Ryn PB

*This story is a retelling of The Karate Kid (1984).*

Note: I decided to keep the name Johnny from the original film because I love the name. I think it fits the character so well.