I asked for the jacket.
Elodie couldn’t help but feel Royce’s death was her fault, but even as she mulled it over, she kept second-guessing herself. None of the other prisoners said anything when she glanced briefly around.
Everyone appeared lost in their own thoughts or passed out because there was no better way to spend their time. No one paid her or Gunner any attention, and no one met her eyes. She was almost convinced that she had missed something and was positive that more happened in the dark than she had realized.
So how did he get his jacket back?
The androids stepped out of Royce’s cell and began to clean the area beyond. They split into two groups, each going down the pathway in opposite directions, and as they continued her excitement grew. The aerosol that shot out from their hands filled the spaces in and around the bars, the floor, the walls, and settled on the layers of dirt that clouded their surfaces. The brig was being cleaned for the first time since she arrived. Elodie didn’t even mind when one of the robots stood before her own cage and misted the chemicals all over her, making her cough, and didn’t mind when their scanners beamed in afterward and disintegrated the grime. The lasers made her eyes hurt.
The robots moved on to Kallan’s cell and those beyond.
She was still filthy after they were done but cleaner than she’d been in weeks. Her eyes followed the bony curves of her fingers as she rubbed the palms of her hands. They were no longer sweaty and sticky, but smooth to the touch and pale. She touched her hair next where it still hung in strands around her ears, still thickened with grease but now lighter and softer. Elodie took in a deep breath, loving that for a moment, she smelled nothing.
“So your hair is blonde,” Gunner murmured.
Elodie let her short hair fall over her face and pressed her cheeks into her bent knees, hoping to smudge up her face some more.
“And here I thought you had light brown locks. Goes to show first impressions are rarely accurate.”
She didn’t answer him, still uncertain whether it was in her best interest or not, but he kept slithering his voice into her ear.
“So we’re back to silence?” His voice was lower than before. Her eyes darted to the working androids, unsure if they were far enough away to hear him.
“You’re a smart one, Ely, but they can’t hear us, won’t record us.”
She frowned.I’m being too easy to read. How does he know?Her frown deepened.How does he seem to know everything? Why isn’t anyone else noticing him?Something was just out of grasp and the more she reached for it, the more unsure she reallywantedto understand.
Elodie focused on her grey space as the image of milky eyes, bleeding over in red, fought to consume her thoughts. She pressed her palm into her forehead where Gunner had breathed on her hours prior.
I still feel it. Him.The spot burned.
The androids walked past her cell and headed for the doors, meeting up with the others who had finished at the same time in perfect synchronization. They left in unison, stepping out the door before it fully opened, and when it closed behind them, quiet conversations picked back up throughout the brig. The ventilation system turned on, sucking the remaining haze away.
“Well that was fun,” Kallan chuckled. “Can’t say I’ve seen that happen yet.”
“How long you’ve been in here anyway?” Gunner called out to him.
“Hard to say, a month maybe? Longer than the rest.”
“What about you, Ely?” Gunner asked her next.
Kallan answered for her. “Ely got here, what now? Two, three weeks ago? It’s hard to keep track of time when most cycles blend into the next. Came in here with the rest of these fuckers who didn’t fight back.”
Two and a half weeks ago.
“They’re part of a mining crew coming back from Andromeda with a full load of ore to Gliese,” he continued. “They were attacked and boarded right outside commercial space.”
“We couldn’t warp without a wormhole with our capacity at overload,” another chimed in. “We couldn’t flee for the same reason and were outnumbered.”
“Did you send out a distress call?” Gunner asked.
“Fuck yeah, we did, and you’d think being right on the outskirts we’d have gotten the attention of one of the patrol ships, but no one answered. None of the other mining ships were nearby either. They barraged us with fire, taking out our thrusters. Our drives came next. It shot our life support systems into effect and we shelled up, trying to wait them out, to wait for help. But we weren’t prepared and our stores were already on the low end at that point. Our shit-brained captain bargained our lives if we gave up, little good that did him. He and the bridge crew were all killed on site. Glad they were.”
She remembered when it all went down; she was with her dad repairing the giant excavators and haulers. They had been so deep in the machines at that point—she and a few others who sat in cells of their own in the brig—that they had no idea what was happening in the upper decks. When going on repair for machines massive enough to harvest continents, they sometimes didn’t emerge for days at a time.
They would pack enough food and supplies to go on a prospector investigation, bringing with them the bare minimum of necessities, because whatever was brought had to be maneuvered through a labyrinth of gears and metal. The behemoths she often worked on were their own little graveyards on a mining ship. She and her dad had come upon more than one corpse lost within the metal.
Their small team had emerged to strangers pointing guns at them, and guns that continued to be held on them until they were walked off their ship and into where she sat now.
