Talia
PROLOGUE
The cuffs have wornthe skin raw around my wrists.
I stopped feeling the sting somewhere around hour thirty. Now there is only the pressure of metal against bone, the way my pulse beats against the restraints like a trapped animal throwing itself at cage walls. My hands are cuffed to a rail that runs the length of the cargo hold, wrists rotated inward, palms facing up. Mechanic's hands. My father's hands, copied onto a woman's frame. The calluses across my palms have gone white where the blood flow has been cut. The burn scar along my right thumb, the one I got at fourteen when I touched a plasma coupling before it cooled, looks almost silver in the emergency lighting.
These hands have rebuilt ion drives from salvage. Rewired navigation systems with nothing but spit and copper thread. Held my father's face the last time I saw him, palms against his cheeks, feeling the stubble he always forgot to shave before a run.
Now they are inventory.
Forty seven hours since they took me. Twenty three bodies in this hold, pressed onto metal benches that run inparallel rows like pews in some industrial church. Eleven women. Twelve men. The youngest might be sixteen. The oldest has white hair and shaking hands and has not stopped crying since we left the station.
The air in the hold tastes recycled and wrong, too much carbon and not enough oxygen, the signature of scrubbers running past their maintenance window. I could fix that. Give me three hours and access to the environmental systems and I could have this whole vessel breathing clean. But my hands are cuffed to a rail and I am cargo now, so the air stays thin and everyone's lungs work overtime and the woman two rows up has developed a wet cough that echoes off the metal walls.
The engines hum beneath us, a low frequency vibration that travels up through the floor and into my spine. X-7 configuration, if I had to guess. Old but reliable. The kind of engine my father loved because the parts were cheap and the mechanics were simple. "Elegance in engineering isn't about complexity, Tally. It's about understanding what needs to move and removing everything else."
His voice in my head, as clear as the day he said it.
I shut it down. Shove it into the locked room in my chest where I am keeping everything that will destroy me if I look at it directly.
I'll be back in three weeks, Tally. Standard run.
That was five weeks ago. He never came back. And two weeks after his ship went silent, the debt collectors arrived at my door with documents I had never seen and figures that made no sense and men with shock batons who did not care that I was screaming about forgery while they dragged me to the transport.
The girl beside me shifts, her shoulder pressing against mine. She is young, maybe nineteen, with dark skin anddarker eyes and a tremor in her hands that has not stopped since we were loaded into this hold. She smells like fear sweat and something floral, some perfume that is fading by the hour, a ghost of whoever she was before this.
"How long?" she whispers.
I do not answer. I do not know if she means how long until we arrive or how long we will survive or how long until hope becomes a liability we cannot afford.
The answer to all three is probably the same.
The view port at the end of the hold is small, barely larger than my hand span, but it is enough. Enough to see the stars sliding past. Enough to see the darkness between them, vast and cold and indifferent. Enough to see, now, the shape materializing out of that darkness like a leviathan rising from deep water.
Veridian Seven.
The station is enormous in a way that makes scale meaningless. My mind tries to parse it into components I understand. Docking rings. Habitat modules. Processing centers. But the whole of it defies reduction, a structure so massive it generates its own weather systems in the atmospheric sectors, its own gravity in the spinning rings. The exterior is metal and glass and something else, something that catches the light of distant suns and throws it back in shifting patterns of azure and cobalt and that particular shade of blue that makes you think of freezing to death, of ice forming in your veins, of beauty that kills.
Someone behind me whispers the name like a prayer or a curse.
"The Sapphire Cage."
The station fills the view port now, and I understand the name in my bones. It is not a station. It is a trap. It is a mouth. And we are sliding down its throat.
The comm system crackles to life, startling half the hold into whimpers. The voice that comes through is male, bored, the particular cadence of someone who has said these words so many times they have lost all meaning.
"Attention cargo manifest seven four two. You are now approaching Veridian Seven, processing hub for the Torrence Syndicate. Your previous debts and obligations have been legally transferred to Syndicate holdings under Galactic Commercial Code section twenty seven, subsection nine, pertaining to inherited financial burden and collateral asset seizure."
The words wash over me. Legal. Transferred. Seized. Pretty language for kidnapping.
"Upon docking, you will be processed and assigned work details commensurate with your debt value. Resistance to processing will be met with immediate corrective action, up to and including spacing."
The crying woman makes a sound like a wounded animal. The girl beside me has gone very still, her fear sweat sharpening into something chemical and primal.
They will throw us into the void if we fight. Shove us through an airlock and let the vacuum do what vacuum does. Thirty seconds of consciousness while the moisture boils off our tongues and the pressure differential turns our lungs inside out.
I have seen bodies that were spaced. Recovered them during salvage runs with my father, when we would find abandoned cargo ships drifting silent through the black. The cold preserves them. Freezes them in that final moment of terror, mouths open in screams no one heard, eyes crystallized into something that is no longer human.
