Chapter 4
Tears came eventually. They started as pressure behind my eyes, then heat in my throat that I couldn’t stop. Before I knew it I was lost. Really crying, from somewhere deep in my chest, the ugly kind that doesn’t care about dignity.
I cried for my mother, who died on a company cot making me promise to leave.
For my father, who coughed his lungs out in a mine shaft and never even got a marker.
I cried because I’d kept the promise, I’d done everything she asked, anything and everything, and this was where it got me. Another cell on another planet.
And I cried for Zayne. For the stupid, undeniable fact that even now, with my hand broken and the memory of his boot still fresh, some pathetic part of me was waiting for him to show up.
To walk through that door and tell me it was a mistake, that he’d come back for me.
I hated that part of myself. I hated it more than I hated him.
I curled into the far corner of the cell where the shadows were deepest, and I let it take me. All of it. Every sound I’d been holding since the cargo door opened. I rocked and cried until my eyes were swollen shut and there was nothing left inside me but hollow scraped-out silence.
“Hey.”
The voice was quiet. Close. Coming from the cell next to mine.
I didn’t answer.
“I know you’re in bad shape. But I’ve got water, if you want it. Passed some through the bars earlier but you were out cold.”
I still didn’t answer. I pressed my face into the corner and pulled my knees tighter against my chest.
A pause. Then: “My name’s Ronan.”
Silence.
“You don’t have to talk. That’s fine. But I’m going to talk, because I’ve been down here alone for six days and I’m losing my mind a little. So just bear with me.”
I heard him shift on the grate. Heard the bars creak as he leaned against them.
“I would tell you everything is gonna be okay but that would be a lie.”
I opened my mouth. My voice came out cracked and barely there. “Nothing is okay. Not anymore.”
“Yeah,” Ronan said.
He let that sit. Didn’t rush to fill it, didn’t try to fix anything. Just let the words hang in the damp air between our cells.
“I’m going to give you some space,” he said. “But first I need to tell you something, because nobody told me the first time and I would’ve given anything for a warning.”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t move. But I was listening, and he knew it.
“This ship is headed to the Sept.”
The name meant nothing to me.
“Septimus,” he said. “Desert planet in the Korr System. You ever heard of the Alien Meat Market?”
I shook my head against the wall. The motion ground my ribs together.
“That’s where we’re going. That’s what we are: livestock.
The Sept is where every species in this sector goes when they want to buy something alive and don’t want anyone asking questions about it.
No federation oversight, no laws at all outside of one: if you’ve got the money, you can buy whatever you want. Whoever you want.”
He paused. I heard him scratch at something: the wall, the bars.
“It’s a bidding market. You get dragged out onto a platform in front of a crowd and they bid on you.
Aliens, humans, doesn’t matter. If you’re breathing, you’re merchandise.
And the buyers...” He trailed off. Started again.
“There are two categories. Labor and consumption.
Labor means you get bought as a slave. You work for whoever owns you until you die or they get bored of you. Consumption means—“
“Food,” I said. My voice was flat. Dead.
“Food,” he confirmed. “Some species out there consider humans a delicacy. I watched a man get purchased by a Greth merchant while I was on that platform. Big guy, a fighter. I thought he’s be sent to the fighting pits but instead the poor bastard was butchered on the spot.
They dragged out a grill and roasted him up with some sauce.
Smelled pretty good if you ask me…I was really hungry that day…
” He chuckled before clearing his throat.
The cell was quiet except for the bilge water sloshing beneath the grate.
“I escaped,” Ronan said. “ Took me eleven months to get off that planet. Got picked up by a trade ship, worked my way across the sector, and ended up here after joining a team diving for treasure. Apparently the blotters….or Kraks… whatever you call the aliens here, has a shit ton of the stuff below.” A pause.
Bitter. “But all we did was starve and those fuckers decided to sell me to recoup their losses. Now I’m destined to head right back there. ”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because the Sept breaks people.” His voice had changed.
The easy, conversational tone was gone, replaced by something harder.
Leaner. “It broke me, the first time. I spent the first three days in a holding pen with my face in my hands just like you are right now, and I almost didn’t make it out because I’d already given up before I hit the platform.
The people who survive that place are the ones who walk in with their eyes open. ”
“Maybe I don’t want to survive it.”
“Yeah, you say that now.” I heard him lean back against the wall.
The bars rattled. “Everyone says that. I said it. And then they drag you out under those suns and you’re standing on that platform with a hundred alien species looking at you like you’re a piece of inventory, and something shifts.
Because slavery is an abstract concept right up until someone’s bidding on your body.
Then you care. Trust me. Then you care a lot. ”
I didn’t answer.
“You’re going to want to be ready when that happens,” Ronan said. “ And if you haven’t figured out your plan by then, you’re fucked.”
“If I’m going to be sold then what plan will stop that?”
“I made myself ugly, squeezed my way to the back of the line, covered my face and body with Bratha shit until I could escape. The planet is harsh but the desert folks are helpful. That’s what I’m gonna do again.”
The ship hummed around us. Somewhere above, boots crossed a metal floor.
“I’ll leave you alone,” Ronan said. “But drink the water. It’s by the bars.”
I heard him settle into his cell. The creak of the grate under his weight, then stillness.
I closed my eyes. And I let go of every plan I’d ever made, every promise I’d ever kept. All of it.
It was easier than I thought it would be. Letting go. Like falling asleep after a long day of breaking rocks. You just stop fighting it and the dark takes you.
I was so goddamn tired.