Chapter 5
Keandra
Iwake before the room’s light cycle shifts, the same as always.
For one strange, disorienting second, I forget what I did last night.
Then reality settles back in. The red notice is still on the wall.
The heater still rattles. The air still smells faintly of dust and metal.
My stomach still aches. Nothing in the room looks or feels different.
My wrist tag chimes. I jerk upright so fast the blanket knots around my legs. Another chime follows, then another. My heart starts pounding.
For one horrifying second, I think something has already gone wrong. The contract was revoked. I signed something wrong. Someone changed their mind during the night and now I am right back where I started, only crueler this time because I let myself believe it was real.
My fingers shake as I open the display.
Transfer received. Relocation advance deposited. Travel preparation notice is active. Report to the Tigris liaison office by fourteen hundred.
Below it, the credit balance stares back at me.
My breath stalls in my lungs. I The number on my wrist tag makes my stomach twist in disbelief.
have never seen that much money attached to my name in my life.
Not when my parents were still alive. Not after they died.
Not even in the small, brief stretch after the inheritance they left me dropped into my account and I thought maybe, if I was careful enough, I could make it last.
This is not wealth. Not to people in the higher sectors.
But to me, it looks enormous. It looks impossible.
It looks like food and medicine and heat and rent and not having to count every mouthful before I swallow it.
I stare until my vision blurs. It is real.
That is the first thought that fully settles into my body.
Real. Not a dream. Not a trick. Not some polished lie meant to bait desperate women. Real.
A sound comes out of me before I can stop it. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a sob. Something thin and rough in between.
I press the heels of my hands to my eyes and breathe through the sting building there.
Five years. Five years of scraping and stretching and praying that one more day of effort might somehow drag me out of the hole.
And now, in one quiet morning, the weight on my chest loosens just enough for me to finally understand how heavy it has been.
My stomach twists hard, reminding me I’m still hungry. This time, when I look back at the balance on my wrist tag, hunger doesn’t come with panic. It comes with choices.
I throw on my coat and leave the building so fast I forget to braid my hair.
The market strip is only just opening. Shutters rolling up. Stall screens lighting. Steam rising from cooking units. Delivery carts humming down the lane.
The same place that looked gray and cruel yesterday feels strange under my feet now. Unreal. Like I’m walking through the shell of a life I already started stepping out of.
I go straight to the nearest hot food stall and almost stumble when I reach the counter, I'm so used to scanning for the cheapest thing that it takes me a second to understand I don’t have to today.
The vendor looks bored.
“What do you want?”
I swallow hard. The menu glows in bright rows. Egg wraps. Grain cakes. Protein strips. Sweet bread. Hot tea. Real fruit cups flown in from greenhouse sectors. I can’t remember the last time I had fruit. My eyes catch on it and stay there.
“Two egg wraps,” I say, then change it in the same breath because the old fear still moves faster than the new relief. “No. One. And tea.”
The vendor gives me a bored look.
“That all?”
I stare at the menu again. The number on my wrist tag feels almost unreal.
“And the fruit cup.”
When the food comes, wrapped and steaming, I carry it to the edge of the strip and sit on a low metal barrier near a service pipe.
I open the wrap carefully. The smell hits me so hard my stomach clenches.
Eggs. Spice. Melted fat. Warm bread. My first bite almost undoes me.
It is too hot and too rich and too much all at once.
I have to lower it and blink hard a few times before I trust myself to keep eating without crying in the middle of the market.
I eat everything. Every bite. Every smear of sauce. Every piece of fruit, sweet and cold and so fresh it almost hurts my tongue. I drink the tea slowly, feeling the warmth slide down into my belly, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I feel full enough to sit still without pain.
That is what breaks something open in me. Not the money. Not even the contract. The food. The simple fact that I bought it without fear. Ate it without counting the cost against rent or tomorrow or the day after that. Ate until I was warm and full.
I sit there with the empty container in my hands and realize how bad things really became, because no one should feel this grateful over breakfast.
By the time I stand, something else is moving in me now. Purpose. A list forming.
I go first to the building office and pay the overdue rent.
The clerk takes the credits, clears the reclaim notice, and barely looks at me.
The red warning vanishes from my wall unit in real time.
Just like that. Weeks of dread wiped away with one tap of a screen.
I stand there a second too long, staring at the cleared balance.
“You done?” the clerk asks.
I nod and step aside.
Done. The word feels sharp. So strange I almost laugh again.
Next, I buy supplies. Not foolishly or in a frenzy. Poverty trained that out of me too well. But carefully. Deliberately. Holding tight to the fact that this is allowed now.
A new underlayer set. A warmer pair of leggings.
A secondhand travel coat with real lining inside it.
A hair comb without broken teeth. Soap that smells faintly of cedar instead of chemicals.
A packet of nutrient bars for the hours before departure, because some habits do not disappear in a morning, and I want food I can keep close.
At the clothing stall, I stop over a simple dark blue dress.
Soft enough to fold small. Clean enough to look respectable.
I almost put it back twice before I buy it.
I have no idea what wives of alien kings wear. The thought is so absurd heat creeps up my neck. Even so, something in me wants one thing that is not only survival. One thing that is not patched or stained or chosen because it was the least terrible option.
When I leave the stall, the bag in my hand is light. It still feels heavier than the years behind me.
At midday, I go back to the room and clean it.
Not because I have to. No one will inspect it after I’m gone.
No one will care if the sink is wiped or the blanket folded.
But this room held me through the worst years of my life.
Cold, yes. Mean, yes. Too small. Too thin.
Too hard. But still the place where I survived when others did not.
It deserves better than one abandoned glance over my shoulder.
I fold the blanket. Wipe the shelf. Stack the things I am not taking into one neat pile for donation or reclaim.
There is not much. An old mug. Two shirts too thin to keep. My mother’s scarf, faded and soft from years of handling. A small metal box holding the last papers from my parents’ deaths. Clinic notices. Debt printouts. Release forms.
I sit on the bed with the box in my lap for a long time. My fingers rest over the papers without opening them.
At fifteen, I thought adulthood was something you walked into slowly.
A job. A room. A family of your own someday.
Choices made in order. I did not expect adulthood to begin with funeral debt, hunger, and trying to calculate how long a dead family’s money could keep one girl alive in a city that charged for every breath.
In the end, I open the box. The papers look the same as always. Cold official text. Dates. Charges. But the scarf on top still smells faintly of the soap my mother used to stretch until the final thin sliver.
I press it to my face and close my eyes.
“I’m leaving,” I whisper into the fabric.
Saying it out loud makes it real in a different way. Not just a contract. Not just money transferred into an account. Leaving.
Leaving the city where my father died trying to find medicine. The hallways where my mother’s footsteps faded one season at a time. The world that took all of them and nearly took me too.
The grief comes then. Low. Quiet. Heavy. Not enough to stop me. But enough to bend me for a while under everything I don’t get to carry neatly into the next life.
By the time someone knocks, I have put the scarf into my small travel bag and wiped my face.
Marai steps in, glances around, and lifts her brows at the cleaner room.
“So it’s real.”
I nod.
Her eyes move to the new coat draped over the chair, then to the cleared wall unit.
“Looks real.”
“It is.”
“How much time?”
“I have to report this afternoon.”
She lets out a low breath and leans her shoulder against the frame.
“That’s fast.”
“I think they don’t want women changing their minds.”
Marai snorts once.
“Smart of them.”
I almost smile.
She studies me for another second.
“Are you scared?”
“Yes.”
“Are you still going?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, that’s good.”
The simple answer settles something in the room.
Marai steps farther inside and holds out a small wrapped parcel.
“For the shuttle.”
I blink.
“You already fed me.”
“That was yesterday.” She presses it into my hand. “Take it.”
Inside is warm bread again, this time with a salted filling tucked into the center. My throat tightens so suddenly I have to look down.
“Thank you,” I say quietly.
She shrugs, but her face softens.
“You find a life where people don’t see hungry women as easy targets, all right?”
I swallow.
“I’ll try.”
After she leaves, I sit on the bed with the parcel in my lap and look around the room one last time. The walls are ugly. The window slot lets in weak light. The heater coughs and rattles like it might die any day now. But the room does not feel hopeless anymore.
Because I am leaving. Not into safety, I know that. Not into love. Not into anything certain. But into movement. Into possibility. Into a world where breakfast was real, the rent was paid, and a contract somewhere in a polished office already has my name beside the name of a king.
I should be terrified. Instead, what I feel is stranger than that. Fear and grief twisted together with a relief so deep it feels almost unreal. I didn’t understand how close to breaking I truly was until something finally reached underneath me and held.
When the departure notice pings my wrist tag, I stand.
I put on the blue dress and the lined coat.
Brush my hair until the dark waves fall down my back instead of knotting at my shoulders.
I pack the nutrient bars, the scarf, the bread, the comb, the soap, and the papers I still cannot leave behind.
Not much. Only what fits.
At the door, I stop. The room is quiet. No red warning on the wall. No panic in my stomach. No counting what I have left. Only the sharp edge of leaving and the bigger edge of whatever waits beyond it.
I wrap one hand around the strap of my bag, open the door, and step out.
Mars does not try to stop me. But for the first time in years, it does not own the next thing that happens to me either.