“Hearing things over there, sweetheart?”
He ignored my mockery. “We might be close to the exit or leaving behind whatever is blocking our comms to begin with. We’ve rested long enough.”
“You’re the one that needed the rest, still do based on your huffing.”
“Worried that you may have to prove your threat and leave me behind?” He challenged with his back to me. The med spray wore off, nodoubt quicker because of our continuous sweating. Blood and pus wet the back of his shirt. The exoskin hung at his waist, broken and flickering. Squeezing through the caves didn’t help. My exoskin held up while his deteriorated little by little, leaving a path of broken pieces, a trail of our slow demise.
“As if you wouldn’t leave me the moment the opportunity arose,” I grumbled.
Roys faced me, his expression slack. “I had the opportunity yesterday, didn’t I?” He ran a hand across his jaw, over the beard that practically sprouted overnight. It was ridiculously attractive, making my mind ponder what it’d feel like to have that beard rubbing against my thighs.
“You think I got all this from my own stupidity?” he growled.
“Yeah, actually.”
“You’re…”
“A dick?” I smiled while slinging the water canister over one shoulder.
Shaking his head, Roys wandered off the cavern shelf to continue through the maze. Multiple times he attempted to call, to no avail. His vexed chuffing echoed in our low pathway where the rocks curved inward and around. Our steps reverberated, a reminder of our isolation, that we could die down there, where no one would find us, rotting away to become part of The Planet. At least it was a better way out than the Colony, another body on a lost asteroid that no one cared about.
Here, we would be feed for the soil, for the flora, some of which grew along the cavern walls. They were a distinctive purple color, creeping through cracks and wet from the damp air. Those worms from earlier crawled through them. They’d crawl through our bones eventually, illuminating our slow decay, one I envisioned every time I blinked.
“How did you get them then, the scars?” I asked, swallowing hard. My throat felt too tight, the cavern walls too close. I swear they were closingin around us and all I wanted to do was run, crawl, scrape my nails against the rocks and dig my way out even if I breached the outside world with my bones breaking out of my skin.
Roys stopped at a fork in the path. His scanner indicated the left, and we continued. “No need to feign curiosity. I know you don’t care.”
“True, but I am bored, and we’ve been walking for hours, so prove it wasn’t your stupidity that fucked up that ugly mug of yours.”
We both knew that last part was a lie, or at least I assumed he knew he was entirely fuckable.
“My first tour was on Xenothasyllius-673.”
See? Stupid names. I doubt he pronounced that right.
“Straiers love hand to hand combat, prefer it above all else, and when our troop was captured, I was given the opportunity to free someone for every straier I put down,” he finished, though his voice got progressively lower.
I flipped the canister to my opposite shoulder to give the other a rest. “Bullshit. Straiers are ugly fuckers to make up for being twice our size and built like tanks.”
“Clearly, I didn’t get out of there unscathed.”
The scars on his back were the most vicious, cutting across in harsh, jagged lines. Straiers preferred weapons of old, ragged blades that tore through flesh rather than seared. If the cradle couldn’t heal them completely, then they were wounds that would have killed. The cradle could piece us up fairly well, but even it couldn’t rid us of every scar. Well, not the ones the militia employed, older renditions that did the bare minimum and would be used until they imploded. As long as the cradle had our bodies working at a reasonable time, then that was all that mattered.
“And I only spared three, but those three made it back on speeders and got us out of there. This one though,” he tapped the scar along his cheek. “Was from a superior officer. He liked having his way with the cadets, the youngest ones.”
“So you tried messing him up but got fucked up in the process?”
Roys smiled viciously. “I shattered one of his kneecaps and broke three of his ribs. Nearly got kicked out too, except the colonels learned about it. The other captains couldn’t shield what the bastard did with all that attention, so the situation was dealt with.”
Dealt with. Not solved. They never were.
Roys’ story was one in a million. Every cadet had a tale of a superior officer using their position to get their way, whatever that way was. One of ours enjoyed betting on fights, rounded the new cadets in the middle of the night to beat the shit out of each other. They made us believe we’d be expelled if we didn’t comply. When so many of us had nowhere else to go, well, getting a broken rib was easy. In my case, I was pretty goodatbreaking ribs. Took nearly six months before the ring was broken up. Our commander wasn’t dismissed, simply reassigned, as they always were, so they could pick up from where they left off in another galaxy and the cycle repeated.
“So itwasyour stupidity. Got some kind of death wish?” I asked, stopping when he did.
We came upon a thin walkway. It took all my willpower not to hurl at the thought of squeezing through another one. Each time, I envisioned the walls squeezing us until our eyes popped. I thought of bones shattering under an immense weight, our lungs aching, aching, aching.
Roys moved in first, giving me a stern look. He thought I was being a pain on purpose, and I would let him believe that rather than admit thatmy knees were about to give out, that any moment, I feared my body would betray me and snap under the pressure.
