Property of the Leviathan (Offworld Meat Market #1)

Chapter 1

I kept running my hands over the armrest like an idiot, but I couldn’t stop.

Leather. Actual leather, soft and broken in.

I’d only ever seen leather like this in corporate advertisements beamed down to Krackus like postcards from a life we’d never touch.

And here I was, sitting in it, sinking into it, while the stars outside the viewport stretched into pale ribbons as we punched away from the only world I’d ever known.

A planet of thirty-seven billion tons of mineral wealth buried under gray dust and gray everything, where people went to work and went to die, and sometimes, if the corporation was feeling generous, got to do both on the same day.

I was done with it. We were done with it.

“Cyrion.” Zayne grinned back at me from the pilot’s seat, his dark eyes catching the glow of the console. “Stop petting the chair, man. You look deranged.”

“I am deranged,” I said. “This chair is the first truly soft thing I’ve sat on since….since forever. I might cry.”

“Please don’t.”

“Too late. Tears are forming.”

Milo kicked his feet up on the dash from the co-pilot’s seat and laughed. “You think the chairs are nice, wait until we find the bar. Rich boy definitely had a bar on this thing.”

“Rich boy definitely had a lot of things on this thing,” I said, leaning back.

The leather creaked under me. My spine popped in three places.

Four. A grinding ache had taken up permanent residence in my lower back years ago.

I’d stopped noticing because there was nothing to do about it but admit I was falling apart at twenty-three.

But the chair was helping. A little.

The three of us had met when we were twelve.

Krackus had a way of pushing kids together, the ones who survived anyway.

Our parents had all been lured in by the same colonization lie.

These were people with heavy debts that the Krackus mining company promised to pay off their debts while they helped build the colony of tomorrow!

When they arrived, they were given quotas they had to meet based on how much debt was paid.

Work the quota and buy your freedom. A simple promise.

Clean. Except the quota moved every quarter, always just out of reach, and in the meantime, the corporation provided everything you needed, all of it priced just high enough to keep you in debt and just crappy enough to remind you where you stood.

My father had worked the deep shafts. Twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, breathing in rock dust that settled into his lungs like cement. He started coughing when I was nine. By the time I was eleven, the coughs had blood in them. By twelve, he was gone. Dropped mid-shift.

Mom lasted longer. She was tougher than him in some ways, softer in others.

She held on until I was nineteen, and even at the end, lying in that company-issued cot with her skin pulled tight over her bones, she still looked like someone who should’ve had decades left.

Like life had been siphoned out of her and what remained was just the frame.

She made me promise to leave. Not try to leave or hope to leave. Leave. Do whatever it took, burn whatever bridges needed burning, and never look back at this place.

“Anything and everything,” she said.

“Anything and everything,” I told her.

So, when I spotted the corporate shuttle parked on the executive landing pad belonging to some prince from the parent company making his annual tour of the assets, I went straight to Zayne and Milo.

“That’s our ship,” I said.

They didn’t even hesitate.

Now here we were. The rock was long behind us and the only thing between us and the rest of our lives was open space.

I’d punched in a course the second we cleared the atmosphere.

It didn’t matter where or what system. Just away.

The nav computer had locked onto something and I let it run.

We’d figure out the details later. Gamma System, the outer reaches, wherever.

Mom had filled my head with pirate stories when I was a kid.

That was the plan. That was the whole plan.

It wasn’t much of a plan. But it was ours.

“Let’s fly!” Zayne said, cracking his knuckles over the console.

He didn’t wait for a vote. His fingers moved across the console, tapping through menus I didn’t recognize, and then…

The weight left.

It happened all at once. One second the leather was pressing against my back, and the next I was lifting off the seat like something had cut the strings holding me down. My stomach lurched. My arms floated up on their own. A laugh punched out of me that I couldn’t have stopped if I tried.

The pain left with the gravity. That grinding in my lower back and the dull ache in my knees that I’d carried since I was old enough to haul ore carts, all of it just released.

My spine decompressed, or whatever the medical term was for suddenly not hurting for the first time in years.

I stretched out and my whole body sighed.

Zayne pushed off from the pilot’s chair and tumbled slowly through the cockpit, laughing.

Milo was already doing some kind of terrible backflip near the ceiling.

I watched the tension drain from their movements too.

The way Zayne unclenched his jaw, the way Milo stopped favoring his left shoulder.

We’d all been born on that rock. We’d all been breaking down since childhood.

And none of us had ever said it out loud because what was the point?

Everyone on Krackus was in pain. It was just the tax you paid for being alive.

Up here, floating on a stolen ship, I could finally feel how bad it had gotten.

“First thing I’m doing,” Milo announced, rotating slowly with his arms spread wide, “when we start making real money? I’m getting a plate.

A big plate. Biggest plate you’ve ever seen.

And I’m filling it with everything. Roasted meat.

Actual fruit.” He pointed at me. “Cyrion, have you ever had fruit?”

“Once,” I said. “I think. When I was little.”

“See? That’s criminal. I’m getting a plate of fruit the size of my head, and I’m going to eat it so fast I throw up, and then I’m going to eat more.”

“Inspiring,” Zayne said, drifting past me upside down. “Really painting a picture.”

“What about you?” I asked him.

Zayne’s expression went somewhere softer for a second. “Earth,” he said. “I want to see Earth. Just once. The birthplace of the human race. I’ve never even been in the same system.” He shrugged or tried to. Shrugging in zero-G looked more like a full-body twitch. “Someday. We’ll swing by.”

“And you?” Milo pointed at me. “What’s the big dream?”

I looked at both of them. Milo, who’d shared his ration pack with me the first day we met when I was too proud and too hungry to ask. Zayne, who held my hand at my mom’s funeral and didn’t say a word, just stayed, because he knew that was the only thing that would help.

“This,” I said. “I’ve got everything I need. You two and a direction.”

“Gay,” Milo said.

“Incredibly gay,” Zayne confirmed.

“I will vent both of you into space.”

The three of us tumbled through the cockpit like kids, bouncing off walls and spinning each other around until our ribs ached.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I realized this was what joy felt like when it wasn’t rationed.

When you didn’t have to earn it or hide it because later might be worse.

We’d stolen a ship from a corporation so powerful they probably had kill teams scrambling right now to find us, and I couldn’t bring myself to care.

Let them come. Let them try. We were out here in the black and we were free and that was enough.

For a while, it was enough.

Eventually I noticed the empty bottles rolling around the cabin.

“You animals,” I said. “You already drank all of it?”

Milo didn’t even have the decency to look guilty. “There were only two bottles. And Zayne drank most of the second one.”

“I did not.”

“You absolutely did.”

I pushed off toward the corridor. “I’m checking the cargo hold. A ship like this has to have more stashed somewhere.”

“Bring back anything good,” Milo called after me.

The corridor was something else. I’d lived my entire life in concrete blocks and corrugated steel tunnels, and this ship was smooth paneling and recessed lighting that shifted color as I floated past. The floor, which I was not currently using, was some kind of dark composite that looked like polished stone.

Doors lined either side that I hadn’t explored yet, rooms I’d get to later, whole sections of this ship that were bigger than the apartment I’d grown up in.

I reached the elevator at the end of the corridor and pulled myself inside. An elevator. On a ship. There were buttons for three decks. I pressed the lowest one and felt a gentle magnetic pull as the platform dropped. Or I dropped. It was hard to tell without gravity.

The cargo level opened up below me, wide and tall, stacked with crates and containers strapped to the floor and walls.

Emergency lights lined the baseboards in pale blue strips.

It was cold down here, colder than the upper decks, enough that my breath came out in thin clouds even through the recycled air.

I pushed myself off the elevator ceiling and drifted between the rows of cargo, reading labels I mostly didn’t understand.

Corporate serial numbers and shipping codes.

I ran my hands over a few crates until I found one that looked promising, smaller than the rest, latched but not locked, with a temperature seal on the lid that suggested something perishable.

Food, maybe. Or more wine. Either one would’ve made me happy.

I was working the latch when I heard it.

A mechanical groan, deep and low, vibrating through the floor and up into my hands. Then a hiss as pressurized seals released in sequence, one after another, like a countdown.

The main cargo door between space and me was opening!

The first crack split the silence open. A thin line of black appeared at the base of the far wall, and the pull came with it, immediate and violent.

Air rushed past me in a roar and every unsecured thing in the hold ripped free and flew toward that widening gap.

Packing material, a coil of cable that whipped past my head close enough to tear hair from my scalp.

I grabbed the nearest strut and held on.

My voice was gone, swallowed by the vacuum howling through the bay.

I couldn’t think. I couldn’t process why this was happening or what had triggered it because all I could do was hold on as the air screamed past me.

The door kept opening, wider and wider, and beyond it was nothing. Stars and the void.

Then the intercom crackled.

“I’m sorry, Cyrion.”

Milo’s voice.

“This is the beginning of our new lives, and I intend to take advantage of it.”