3. Althea
ALTHEA
They feed me on the second day, and that's how I learn I'm worth more alive than dead. For now.
A meal is information. On Armstrong, who eats and who starves tells you the shape of a place faster than any map, so when the thin one slides a bowl through the gap in the hatch I read it like a contract.
Real grain. A strip of something smoked I decide not to ask about.
They haven't decided to kill me. They've decided to wait.
"You're not supposed to talk to me," I say, because his ears flatten the second I look at him.
"I'm not talking. I'm leaving food." He sets the bowl down like it might go off.
His eyes aren't the furnace I expected up close; they're soft, almost shy, lit like a coal you could warm your hands at.
"Eat it. Vasha checks the bowls. If yours comes back full she'll decide we poisoned you, and then she'll want to do it right. "
"Is that a joke?"
He's already gone.
So I eat, and I watch, because the hatch has a grille and the grille looks onto a junction, and over the days that junction tells me everything they'd never say.
Here's what the stories on Armstrong promised: cruelty as a hobby, blood on the walls.
Here's what I get instead. Guards who are bored.
Guards who carve while they sit, peeling curls off scrap with knives as long as my arm and turning out small careful shapes — a bird, a leaf, a face.
Two big ones arguing an hour over a coolant line and sharing a flask when it's fixed.
The snapped-horn female stopping every shift to press her hand flat to a stretch of carved wall, eyes shut, three breaths, before she moves on.
Monsters don't carve birds. Monsters don't keep soup on the burner. I keep waiting for the kindness to turn into the cage I'm being fattened in, and it doesn't, and that's worse, because now I've got nowhere to file it.
On the fourth day the captain comes. I hear it before I see it — the guards straighten, the air seems to make room — and then he fills the grille and the store-room shrinks around me.
He doesn't crouch the way the thin one does. He stands and lets me crane up at him, and I work out it isn't arrogance. It's distance. He's keeping the whole length of himself between us on purpose.
"You are being treated well," he says. Each common-tongue word set down carefully, like he doesn't trust the floor to hold it.
"I'm being kept. Those aren't the same thing. You'd know it if you'd ever been on the locked side of a door."
Something crosses his face and is gone. "You'll be released at the next station. Unharmed. My word, for whatever a Reaper's word buys you."
"Then why the guards?" I stand, so he's got less of a head start on me.
"If I'm cargo you're dropping off, put me in a bunk.
But you've got three of your people watching a half-starved human who tried to hitch a ride.
That's not what you do with cargo." Closer to the grille now, close enough to see the names — I'm sure they're names — carved down one horn.
"That's what you do with something you're scared of. "
The ridge of bone over his nose tightens a fraction. "You should be the one afraid."
"Been afraid my whole life. It's boring." I hold his eyes the way I did on the bridge, because it's the only thing I own that visibly costs him something. "What I can't work out is what a thing your size is scared of. And it's me. Why?"
He doesn't answer. He holds my eyes until one of the guards shifts, uneasy, and then he's gone, and the air comes back, and I sit down with my pulse doing something I refuse to examine.
That night the guard change comes and no one takes the post. I look out, and it's him.
The captain, on an overturned crate across the junction, a knife and a scrap of metal in his hands, not carving, just holding them, his back to the wall and his eyes on my hatch like it's the only thing left worth guarding.
He thinks I'm asleep. I let him.
He stays until the lights go gray, and he never comes closer, and that's the part that finally scares me. Not his size. Not his eyes. A thing that lonely keeping that careful a distance from the one door he can't stop watching.