Chapter 3
I woke up drowning.
Cold dark water, pressing in from every direction, flooded the suit through a tear I couldn’t see.
It poured into my sleeves, the gap where the torso seal had split on impact.
My lungs seized. My mouth opened on instinct and salt water rushed in.
I gagged, thrashed, and the movement sent white-hot lightning through my ribs.
Something was broken in there, multiple somethings.
The bones ground against each other when I twisted, and the pain was so sharp and immediate that it almost overrode the panic of not being able to breathe.
Almost.
I clawed at the helmet. My right hand was a useless, swollen club, Zayne’s boot had seen to that, so I used my left, jamming my fingers under the seal and wrenching it sideways until the lock disengaged and the helmet ripped free.
It sank into the dark below me, tumbling end over end, swallowed in seconds.
The suit was next. I fought my way out of it with one working hand and a body that screamed at every movement, peeling the waterlogged fabric off my arms and kicking free of the leg panels.
Each motion cost me something: ribs grinding against each other, my wrist sending sharp jolts up to my elbow every time I flexed it wrong.
I broke the surface gasping.
The sky was enormous. That was the first thing: how much of it there was, stretching in every direction, pale blue fading to white at the edges where it met the water.
No clouds, no land, nothing man-made anywhere.
Just ocean, flat and endless, rocking me in gentle swells that lapped against my chin.
I treaded water with one arm and two legs that didn’t want to kick. My ribs screamed every time I inhaled. The salt stung my eyes and the raw skin on my knuckles where bone pushed too close to the surface. I turned in a slow circle, scanning the horizon, and found exactly what I expected.
Nothing.
I’d never even learned to swim properly. Everything I was doing right now was improvised desperation, and my body was running out of fuel fast.
Something brushed my leg.
I jerked so hard my ribs shifted and I nearly went under. It was just current, probably just current, maybe a fish, maybe nothing, but the thought of what might be down there in all that blue emptiness, rising toward me and opening its mouth—
A sound, low and mechanical, barely audible over the slap of waves. I turned toward it and saw a boat.
It was a flat-bottomed skiff with a patched hull and an engine that coughed black smoke every few seconds. It sat low in the water, loaded with rust and salt corrosion, and it was coming straight for me. I could see figures on deck, three, maybe four, silhouetted against the sky.
“Hey!” I tried to shout but my voice cracked and what came out was closer to a wheeze. I raised my left arm, and I bit down on a groan. “Hey, over here!”
They’d already seen me. The skiff adjusted course, engine sputtering, and as it drew closer, I could make out tanned, rough, weathered faces like the old miners back home dressed in scavenged layers of mismatched clothing.
“Thank the gods,” I breathed. “Thank the fucking gods.”
A net hit the water next to me and I grabbed on for dear life while two of them grabbed the net and heaved, and I came over the side of the skiff in a tangle of rope, landing hard on the deck. I curled onto my side, gasping, and tried to speak.
“Please, I’m hurt, my ribs are broken.”
Hands grabbed my arms and wrenched them behind my back. I screamed. The sound tore out of me raw and ugly, and nobody flinched. Rope cinched around my wrists, tight and fast.
“What are you…stop, stop—“
“Shut up.” The man tying my wrists didn’t look at me. His hands moved fast, jerky. He smelled like engine oil and dried salt. “We gotta move. Now.”
“Before the Blotters come,” another one said. He was already back at the engine, cranking something that made the whole skiff shudder. “We’re too far out. They’ll have seen the splashdown.”
“I know.”
“Then move faster.”
The skiff lurched forward. The engine coughed and caught, and we were moving, bouncing hard over the swells. I lay on my side with my hands tied behind me and my cheek pressed against metal hot from the sun, and I watched the sky bounce and blur above me.
How could it end like this?
Just this morning before we left. Zayne stood in the corridor outside our bunks, his hands on my face, and he’d kissed me slow and said, “After today, everything changes.”
He was right about that.
All those nights he had pulled me against his chest in that narrow cot and told me it was going to be okay, that we’d get out, that the three of us were going to make it.
And Milo, that bitch.
He had been my best friend since we were twelve.
Two skinny kids at the bottom of every pecking order on a planet that respected nothing but size and strength.
We’d gotten our asses kicked together more times than I could count, shoved into walls by miners’ kids twice our size, called every name in the book for being the smallest and the skinniest, the two who looked like a stiff breeze would snap them in half.
And it would have broken me, all of it, if Milo hadn’t been right there beside me, bruised and bloody, grinning, saying at least we’re pretty.
I made a sound against the deck that I never wanted to make again.
The skiff slowed. I opened my eyes and saw a really large starship
A battered, angular thing hovering just above the ocean surface, its hull scorched and patched in so many places it looked like a quilt made of different metals.
Rust streaked down from the portside vents.
The landing struts were half-extended, skimming the wave tops, and the whole vessel hummed with the low, arrhythmic pulse of an engine that had been repaired too many times.
A ramp extended from the ship’s belly, hanging just above the waterline. The men hauled me up by my arms. I screamed, every broken part of me competing to see which could hurt the worst, and they dragged me up the ramp onto the deck.
The captain was waiting.
He stood at the top of the ramp with his arms crossed, watching me get dragged aboard the way someone watches cargo get loaded.
He was tall and broad across the shoulders in a way that spoke to a life of actual use, not the bloated bulk of the overseers on Krackus.
Dark skin, dark eyes under days-old stubble.
He wore a long coat over layered tactical gear: gunmetal fabric, reinforced at the joints, a holstered weapon on each hip that I didn’t recognize.
Scars marked his forearms where the sleeves were rolled back.
Nothing clean or surgical about them. He’d gotten those from living hard in places that didn’t care if he survived.
He looked like what I was supposed to become.
That gutted me worse than the ribs. Standing there on his own ship, armed and answering to nobody: that was the future I’d been building toward.
The pirate stories my mother told me, the ones about captains who carved out their own territory in the Gamma System and lived by their own rules.
I was supposed to be him. I was supposed to have those scars and that whole life. This is mine and I dare you to take it.
Instead, I was on my knees with my hands tied, bleeding from places I’d stopped counting, getting delivered to him like fish.
He looked me over for about two seconds, then jerked his chin toward the interior of the ship. “Put him below.”
That was it. No questions. No interest. I was cargo.
A woman appeared from somewhere behind him, tall with a wild tangle of dark hair pulled back from a face that was all sharp angles and zero patience.
She wore a fitted camo suit threaded with lines of faint blue light that pulsed in a pattern I couldn’t track, some kind of tech I’d never seen before.
She grabbed my arm and hauled me to my feet, then marched me through a corridor that smelled like engine coolant.
“Please,” I said. “My ribs…I think they’re broken—“
She didn’t slow down. Her grip on my arm tightened, completely indifferent to whether it hurt. We went down a set of metal stairs, then another, deeper into the ship where the light got worse and the hum of the engines took on a low, rattling vibration that I could feel in my teeth.
The brig was at the bottom. A row of cells with metal-grate floors and bars that had been repaired so many times the welds didn’t match. The air down here was damp and stale, thick with rust and shit. She opened the nearest cell and shoved me in. The door closed behind me without a word.
I hit the grated floor with my knees, and I folded forward until my forehead touched the metal.
The grate was cold. It pressed a crosshatch pattern into my skin. Below it, I could hear water sloshing, either bilge or ocean leaking through the hull. The smell was stronger down here, mildew and the faint copper tang of old blood.
I stayed like that for a long time.