Chapter 4 Talia
Talia
The woman in processing bay seven is missing three fingers on her left hand.
I notice it because she's trying to calibrate a plasma coupler with her right, and the tool keeps slipping.
Every time it does, the guard nearest her taps something on his wrist display.
A tally. Demerits, maybe. Or deductions from whatever pittance she's earning toward a debt that will outlive her.
I shouldn't be here.
The access corridor between the debtor labor pools and the residential ring has a security checkpoint that should have stopped me, but Zane's mark does strange things to locked doors on this station.
The scanner read my throat and the barrier retracted without a sound.
I don't know if that means he programmed me into the system or if the mark itself carries some kind of passive clearance.
Either way, I walked through, and no one stopped me. No one even looked twice.
Now I'm standing behind a observation rail on the mezzanine level, looking down into the mechanical guts of Veridian-7, and I'm understanding for the first time what I was worth before he pulled me off the auction floor.
The labor pool stretches the length of a cargo hangar.
Rows of workstations, each one a different station in what I recognize as a component reclamation line.
Ship parts, mostly. Drive cores stripped for rare minerals.
Hull plating broken down and resmelted. The air is thick with the smell of scorched metal, and beneath it, something organic.
Sweat and exhaustion and the particular staleness of bodies that haven't been given enough time to wash between shifts.
There are maybe two hundred people down there.
Humans, mostly, though I spot a few Empri with their bioluminescence dimmed to almost nothing.
Stress response, I think. Or maybe they just don't have the caloric intake to keep the light burning.
The humans look worse. Gaunt faces, mechanical movements, the economy of energy that comes from knowing every calorie counts.
They work in twelve-hour rotations. I know this because the shift board is visible from up here, and I can read the schedule.
Twelve on, six off, repeat. Two meals. One water ration above minimum.
I recognize faces from the transport.
The man who'd been two rows ahead of me, the one who kept whispering prayers to a god whose name I didn't know.
He's on the smelting line, and his prayers have stopped.
The teenager, the one who couldn't have been older than sixteen, is sorting components into bins with hands that move too fast, the kind of speed that comes from fear of falling behind.
And at the far end, near the waste processing chute, a woman catches my eye.
She was in the holding cell with me. I remember her face.
Older, maybe forty, with the kind of bone structure that suggested she'd been beautiful before whatever brought her here stripped it away.
She looks up at the mezzanine like she can feel me watching.
Our eyes meet across sixty feet of recycled air and human misery.
She mouths a single word.
Lucky.
I taste bile at the back of my throat. Metallic and sour, like I've bitten through my own cheek.
Lucky. Because a crime lord decided my mouth was worth more forming words than screaming over a plasma torch.
Because my father's ghost carries enough currency in this world that my body got rerouted from the labor line to a bedroom suite with real sheets and filtered water.
Lucky.
I grip the railing until my knuckles ache and I make myself watch for another ten minutes.
I owe them that. The people down there, breaking themselves apart for someone else's profit.
I owe them the discomfort of witnessing, because three days ago I was one of them, and the only thing that separates us is the bruise-colored mark on my throat and the random calculus of a monster's interest.
"You're his, aren't you?"
The voice comes from my left. I'm in a corridor junction on the way back from the labor pools, trying to memorize the route, and I almost miss her.
She's sitting against the wall in a maintenance alcove, legs stretched out, boots unlaced.
Her hair is cropped close to her skull, dark brown, and there's a healing cut above her right eyebrow held together with adhesive strips instead of proper medgel.
"Excuse me?"
She nods at my throat. "The mark. That's Torrence ink. I've seen it on cargo, on doors, on the necks of people who belong to the family." She says belong to without flinching, like it's just vocabulary here. A descriptor. A fact. "You're the new one. His."
"I have a name."
"I'm sure you do." She stands. She's my height, maybe an inch shorter, with the kind of lean muscle that comes from the labor line.
Her forearms are mapped with small burns, the constellation pattern of someone who works too close to smelting equipment.
"Kira. Three months in. Mechanical reclamation, line four. "
"Talia."
"I know." She falls into step beside me like we've been walking together for years. Like this is normal. "Everyone knows. You're the only human in the residential ring who isn't staff or family. Word travels fast when there's nothing else to talk about."
We walk in silence for a few paces. The corridor hums. Gravity generators, I've learned, run on a slightly different frequency in the lower levels. You feel it in your teeth, a faint vibration that never quite resolves.
"How bad is it?" I ask, and I mean the labor pools, and she knows I mean the labor pools.
"Depends on your definition." She flexes her burned hands, examines them like she's reading a text she's memorized.
"The work won't kill you fast. It's not designed to.
Dead debtors can't pay off their contracts.
So they keep you alive. Just. The food is enough to function.
The sleep is enough to not collapse. The medical care is enough to patch you up and send you back.
It's not cruelty for cruelty's sake. It's efficiency.
" She pauses. "That's worse, actually. Cruelty you can hate.
Efficiency just grinds you down until you forget you were ever anything else. "
"How long is your contract?"
"Five years." The number sits between us like a stone.
"I had a business on Meridian Station. Took a loan from the wrong people.
The wrong people turned out to be a front for Torrence operations.
When I defaulted, they didn't send collectors.
They sent a ship." She shrugs. The gesture is practiced, casual.
The kind of shrug you build like a wall.
"Three months down. Fifty-seven to go. If the terms don't change. They like to change the terms."
We reach another junction. She stops, leans against the wall, and looks at me with eyes that are too sharp for someone who should be broken.
"You're different, Talia. You know that. You're in his quarters. That means you have access to things the rest of us never see. Schedules. Codes. The layout of the upper levels. Who comes and goes."
The implication hangs in the corridor's recycled air.
"I'm not a spy."
"No," she agrees. "You're a debtor with a better cage.
But cages have doors, and doors have locks, and locks have patterns.
I'm just saying." She pushes off the wall.
"If you ever feel like sharing what you see up there, there are people down here who could use the information.
To survive. That's all. Just to survive. "
She walks away before I can answer. Her boots make almost no sound on the metal grating. Three months on this station and she already moves like she was born to it. Like the place has gotten into her bones.
I watch her go and I think: she's using me. She spotted an opportunity and she's working it. I don't blame her. I'd do the same.
I am doing the same. Just in a different direction.
There's a balcony on the level above, a transitional space between the public areas and the residential ring. A young woman stands at the railing, looking down at me. She's maybe nineteen, twenty at most, with pale skin and pale eyes. No blue undertones. No bioluminescence. No Empri markers at all.
Human.
She's human, and she's standing in the residential ring of an Empri-controlled station like she belongs there.
Her clothes are expensive, real fabric, not the synthetic blend the rest of us wear.
Her hair falls past her shoulders, dark brown and wild, and she holds herself with the careful posture of someone who was taught to be watched.
Our eyes meet.
She doesn't look away. Most people do. When you catch someone staring, the social contract demands a flinch, a redirect, a manufactured reason to have been looking in your direction. Her gaze stays on mine, and there's something in it I can't quite name.
Not hostility. Not indifference.
Something closer to hunger, but not the predatory kind. The hungry look of someone who hasn't seen something familiar in a long time and can't stop staring at it.
Curiosity, maybe. Recognition, though we've never met.
I hold the eye contact for three seconds, five, seven. Then she tilts her head, just slightly, and the corner of her mouth shifts, acknowledgement bordering on a smile.
She turns and disappears into the residential level.
"Who is that?" I ask a passing worker.
"You don't recognize Elissa Torrence?" he asks. "You must be knew."
"She's a Torrence?"
"She's adopted." He looks at his holo board, searching for something. "Malachar's."
Malachar's adopted daughter. Human. Living in the family quarters of a man who disappeared. And she watched me like I was the most interesting thing she'd seen in months.
"Where are you supposed to be?" He asks me, narrowing his eyes.
I have an excuse ready on my lips, but I'm saved by someone else.