The Iron Maiden Read Free Page B

with the passage money. Then the men of the refugees took over and steered the bubble onward--but discovered there was not enough food. Spirit and Hope and his friend Helse counted the food packs, and found there were only half enough. They had to ration it.
    Then there was the first pirate raid, under a brute named Horse. That was a horror, because the pirates tied up Hope and their father, then gang-raped Faith while all of them watched. Spirit was as shocked as the others; she had never seen sex at all, and this was worse than anything she might have imagined.
    After that they organized to fight pirate boarders. Spirit participated in a spot course on resisting a rapist, whose operative principles were that girls had knees and rapists had groins; girls had fingers and rapists had eyes; girls had teeth and rapists had noses. Spirit loved the little play, especially where she plucked out a fake eyeball, but she understood the message: pirates would rape women or girls or children, and the females had to be ready to stop them. They had to fight back effectively.
    Hope had a surprise for her. He told her that his friend Helse was not a boy but a girl masquerading as a boy. At first Spirit didn't believe it, but Helse showed her breast-filled chest band. Then Hope left, and Helse told Spirit how to play the part of a boy. Helse was sixteen, and actually quite a pretty girl. She told Spirit something of her history, about how she was the plaything of an old man who liked really young girls, and how she had learned all the ways of sex, but finally had grown too old had had to go.
    “Too old for sex--at sixteen?” Spirit asked, amazed.
    Helse nodded. “That's why I'm going to Jupiter. To find a new career.”
    Something else occurred to her. “You--my brother--sex?”
    “No,” Helse said gently. “At least, not yet. He is a very nice boy.”
    Spirit suppressed a surge of jealousy. “Not yet?”
    “Sex is an option, to be used when it has to be.”
    “Like with my sister Faith?”
    “No, Spirit, no! Rape is always wrong. But sometimes abstinence can be wrong, too. A girl just has to judge cases, and do what is right in the circumstance.”
    “I don't understand!”
    Helse smiled. “Maybe that's best. Now let's see if we can make you into a boy, so that you never face the question.”
    But Spirit couldn't let it go. “You mean like when the men are going to do it anyway, so she shouldn't fight, so as not to get beat up as well as raped?”
    “That might be a case, yes, but there are others. I don't blame you for being frightened of the prospect.”
    “I'm not frightened!” But she was.
    “Well, I am. That's why I'm being a boy.”
    “You?” Spirit asked, astonished. “But you said you had all that sex!”
    "Yes. And I think I will never be able to love an older man, because of that. Maybe I can't love any man.
    So I'll be happy not to be touched again. But I've learned not to say 'never.'"
    Spirit realized that she had been trying to misjudge Helse, because of the way Hope was taken with her.
    She was indeed playing the part of a boy, and had fooled all of them. If she was afraid of what might happen, she surely had reason. The specter of Faith's rape gave warning to them all. “Okay,” she said.
    “Make me into a boy.”
    “First, you have to think of yourself as male. That starts with your name. Mine is ambiguous, so I can get away with it, but yours is too much like a girl. Who do you want to be?”
    Spirit considered. Six months ago she had had half a crush on a handsome older boy named Sancho. She had never given any hint, knowing the futility; what would a boy her brother's age want with a girl of eleven, going-on-twelve? Even if there could have been anything between them, her parents would have squelched it immediately. But mostly it was that though the changes were occurring in her body, the pace seemed glacial, and she didn't want to embarrass herself. Her breasts were not a quarter the mass of