I'm here because I sleep in silk sheets while people I arrived with sleep on metal shelves, and the guilt finds me at three in the morning when Zane's breathing has gone slow and even beside me.
The labor quarters sit three levels below the main concourse, accessed through a service corridor that smells like machine oil. My clearance chip gets me through the first two checkpoints without question. The guards scan my neck, see the access tier Zane's people coded into my file, and wave me through with the bored efficiency of men who process bodies all day and stopped seeing faces years ago.
Down here, the lighting runs blue-white and institutional. None of the warm amber tones that soften the upper levels where the syndicate conducts its business. Down here the station doesn't bother pretending to be anything but what it is: a machine that runs on people.
The ward itself is a long room sectioned off by curtains that might have been white once. Twenty beds, maybe more, most of them occupied. The air is thick with the sound of labored breathing, quiet conversations conducted in the careful tones of people who've learned that being overheard can cost you, and somewhere toward the back, a cough that sounds like it's coming from the bottom of a well.
Kira finds me before I find her. She materializes from behind a curtain partition, her brown hair pulled back tight, her face thinner than the last time I saw her. There's a sharpness to her now that wasn't there before, the kind of look people get when they've been subsisting on station rations and bad sleep and the particular exhaustion of having no control over anything that happens to their body.
"Well." She looks me over, her gaze cataloguing every detail. The clean clothes. The way my hair is washed and brushed. The fact that my skin has actual color to it instead of the grey undertone everyone down here wears like a uniform. "Look who remembered where she came from."
The words land exactly where she aimed them.
"I came to see how things are down here."
"Things are the same as they've always been, Talia. We work, we eat what they give us, we sleep when they let us. Some of us get sick. None of us get better." She folds her arms across her chest, and I can see the debtor mark on her wrist, dim and static. No pulse to it. No glow. Just the flatbrand of someone who belongs to the station's balance sheet. "But you didn't come for the tour."
She's right. I didn't.
But I also didn't come with a plan, and the space between wanting to help and knowing how stretches wider every second I stand here breathing air that tastes like other people's illness.
"I have access," I say. "I thought maybe there's something I can do."
Kira's expression doesn't soften. If anything, it sharpens further, and I realize she's been waiting for me. Waiting for me to show up with my guilt and my clean clothes and my access chip that works on doors hers doesn't, because she needs something and I'm the only tool available.
"Come with me."
She leads me to the back of the ward, past curtains that part to show me things I'll carry behind my eyelids for days. A man with a chemical burn across his forearm, the skin blistered and weeping, wrapped in bandages that should have been changed two days ago. A woman staring at the ceiling with the hollow focus of someone who's gone somewhere inside herself and might not come back. A kid who can't be older than nineteen, sleeping with his knees drawn to his chest like he's trying to take up as little space in the world as possible.
The coughing gets louder.
Behind the last curtain, a woman lies on her side with her knees curled up and her arms wrapped around herself as though she's cold, though the ward is stuffy and overheated. Her skin is damp and sallow, and each breath produces a thick, rattling sound that I can feel in my own chest just from listening. Her lips have a bluish tint that has nothing to do with the lighting.
"This is Renna," Kira says.
Renna opens her eyes. They're glassy with fever, unfocused, but she sees me. Sees my clothes, my clearance chip, the mark on my neck that pulses faintly with a light hers doesn't have. She knows what I am. What I've become. Zane Torrence's woman.
His pet. His project.
"How long has she been like this?" I ask.
"Eight days. Started as a cough. Now she can't keep food down, and her fever spikes every night." Kira's voice is flat, controlled, but her hand on the curtain frame is white-knuckled. "I've put in three requests for medical transfer. They won't even process them. Debtors in the labor tier get basic triage. Antibiotics when there's stock. There hasn't been stock in two weeks."
I look at Renna. She's looking back at me with the resigned calm of someone who's done the math on her own survival and doesn't like the answer but has stopped being surprised by it.
"There are full medical facilities on level six," I say. "I've seen them. They have everything."
"Those are for syndicate personnel and premium debtors." Kira's mouth twists on the last two words like they're something rotten. "Which means they're for people like you. People someone upstairs has decided are worth keeping alive."
The silence between us fills with Renna's breathing, each inhale a small war.
"You're in his bed," Kira says. Not an accusation but worse: A calculation. "You have power, Talia. More than anyone else down here has ever had. Use it."
"It's not that simple."
"It is exactly that simple. You ask. He gives. That's how power works when you're close enough to touch it."
I want to tell her she's wrong. That proximity to power isn't the same as having it. That being in Zane's bed means he lets me stay, not that I get a vote. But Renna coughs again, a sound like wet fabric tearing, and I taste bile at the back of my throat, and the argument dies before I can make it because it sounds too much like an excuse.
