I’ve had five years to learn.
I cut across the canyon floor, staying low where the stone breaks my silhouette, moving through narrow channels where the wind smells of mineral dust and old rain that never actually falls. My feet know the path without my eyes. There’s a rhythm to it—step, slide, pause; step, slide, pause—because the turrets sweep in patterns like bored gods and they don’t care if you’re innocent or guilty or just unlucky.
The automated turrets are visible up close if you know what to look for: small dark bulges on ridges, a faint glint where the barrel housing catches sun, the occasional soft click as the system resets.
I stay just outside their envelope.
The air changes as I approach the perimeter. The hum in the ground becomes sharper, like a note tightening on a string. Thehair on the back of my neck lifts, scales along my arms prickling under the wind.
I stop at a ridge line and flatten behind a slab of stone that still holds the morning’s warmth. Below me, the open killing field spreads toward the station, bare and unforgiving—dust, scattered boulders, and the faint shimmer of the field itself when the light hits it at the right angle.
Prisoners gather at the edge like shadows. Some pacing. Some crouched. Some staring toward the station with that dead-eyed hunger the rations give them.
And then the cruiser shifts.
Dropships detach, black specks falling fast.
A distant thud vibrates through the rock, followed by another. I feel it in my ribs. Hear it as a dull pressure more than a sound.
Then the station lights flicker.
My jaw clenches.
“Don’t tell me,” I mutter. “Don’t?—”
The containment field’s hum stutters.
For half a second, the note wobbles, a sick little tremor that makes my teeth grind.
Then it drops out completely.
The sensation is like someone suddenly taking a hand off the back of my neck. The pressure vanishes so fast my balance shifts, my body bracing for resistance that isn’t there.
The shimmer in the air collapses.
And every prisoner in sight reacts like a single organism.
They surge.
They run.
Not toward freedom—nobody runs toward freedom out here because there isn’t any. They run toward the station because it’s light and structure and maybe, just maybe, shelter from the things that stalk the wilderness.
But I know what a trap looks like.
The field doesn’t “fail” like that. Not on accident. Not without alarms and escalation protocols and at least one incompetent tech screaming into a comm channel.
This is a switch being thrown.
This is bait.
I exhale slowly, tasting dust and ozone, and the thought arrives as clean and cold as a blade:Somebody wants bodies on camera.
The first shots crack across the open ground.
Energy discharge—sharp, bright flashes that leave pale afterimages against the thin sky. The sound reaches me late, a series of distant snaps and booms, distorted by the air’s thinness. The smell reaches me next: scorched dust, hot metal, that acrid tang that crawls up the back of the throat and lingers.
The prisoners hit invisible lanes of fire and drop like wheat under a scythe.
