I Don't Want to Die in Here

“She was lost there and forsaken on the day the pirates came. She was hiding in the darkness, out of sight, alone, afraid. [...] They killed her father, and her mother, and her brothers all the same. She was the sole survivor on the day the pirates came.”

-from “The Day the Pirates Came”, traditional spacer song

Once again, Yan found herself waking up after some unknown amount of time had passed. She was still in the little room. She was laying on the bed, and as she opened her eyes, she saw the plain stone of the ceiling, and the bare bulb that illuminated the place. It hummed annoyingly in her ears.

Her whole body hurt. Yan tried to pick her head up to look around, and she found that she couldn't. Her neck was as stiff as a piece of wood.

Her neck.

She raised her arm, and though it was weak and felt floppy, she could at least do that. She touched her throat, then traced her hand around to the back of her neck where it pressed against the mattress. The whole thing felt hot and inflamed. She squeezed her hand beneath her neck to touch it. There was a thick raised line where she had cut herself wide open, but there wasn't any more open wound. Either she had been knocked out for an absurdly long time, or someone had patched her up.

On the outside, at least. She couldn't move her head, so that was a real problem.

"You're awake," someone said. It was a man's voice, speaking in heavily accented Old Imperial. Yan tried to turn, couldn't because of her neck, then struggled to sit up. "No, don't bother. I'll come over to you."

Yan was still struggling. The chair that was in the room scraped across the stone floor with a horrible shrieking sound, and a man's face swam into her field of view. She was pretty sure it was the same man who had taken her on the shuttle. Yan hated him.

"You did a very bad thing to yourself, didn't you?" he asked, then clucked his tongue. If Yan had the strength to punch him, she would have reached out and done so.

Yan finally was able to prop her elbows up underneath her. As she started to rise, the man put his hand back on her stomach. She froze up, not even able to turn to look at him directly. His hand slid up her body, then pressed her shoulders back down, overcoming the feeble tension in her arms to push her back onto the mattress.

"No need to strain yourself," he said. "You need to recover your strength."

Her strength. Her strength was in the power. Yan reached for it, and again was assaulted by the massive pain that she was growing all too familiar with. Seeing her face contort with the agony of it, the man clucked his tongue again. His fingers traced her throat, the same path that her own had taken just moments before. But this was invasive, and he wasn't gentle.

"That chip was as much for your benefit as it is for mine, you know. You'd have a real problem on this planet if you took it out for too long."

Yan refused to give him the satisfaction of a response, but she was also afraid that her voice wouldn't work. After all, the muscles in her neck were destroyed. Her voice might be gone, too.

The man brought his hand down her throat, drifted across her collarbone, over her shoulder, and down her arm. He gripped her wrist, and raised it.

"Feel this," he said. Yan couldn't see exactly where he was bringing her arm, but Yan clenched her hand into a fist so that she wouldn't be able to touch whatever it was. "Oh, no," he said. She felt his power move into her, and force her hand to open. She was disgusted by all of this. Her hand was on the back of his neck; she could feel the coarseness of his short hair. She tried to pull away, but his grip on her arm was tight. On the back of his neck was a lump just like hers; he had a chip as well.

"Of course, mine still lets me use the power," he said. "But it's important. You need one to stay sane on this planet."

He dropped Yan's hand, and it flopped weakly onto the bed.

"I put yours back in, but deeper this time. I don't suggest you try to remove it."

Yan couldn't resist. "Where?" She asked. Her voice was barely a creak. She realized how thirsty she was, how dry her mouth and lips were.

She realized immediately that she shouldn't have asked. His hands were back on her body, this time trailing up her neck to just behind her left ear. He tapped her skull, just behind her jaw. "Right there," he said. "Underneath."

Yan couldn't feel anything, but she hadn't had a chance to run her fingers over the area and feel for an incision scar. She hadn't had the chance to do much of anything. Her sense of time was totally destroyed.

She could only trust that he was telling the truth, that there was indeed a new chip freshly embedded in her skull. If she tried to dig that out, she would surely destroy much more than the back of her neck. She had been willing to cut there, but she wasn't ready to dig past her actual skull. She probably wouldn't be able to, anyway. She was sure that this man and whoever was working with him would reconsider keeping her anywhere near anything she could improvise a weapon out of. Or maybe it had been a test.

"What are you doing with me?" Yan croaked out, struggling to string together the Old Imperial sentence. Though it was a language she had learned in childhood, she didn't use it particularly often. Her brain felt like it was slowly being massaged by the gears of a food mill she had once used in the Iron Dreams kitchen.

"I don't think it would be wise for me to tell you," the man said. "In fact, I've probably already overstayed my welcome." He put his hand underneath her chin, and his face came back into view. She tried to thrash away, but his power held her down.

"Don't try to take that out again. I had enough trouble putting you back together as it was. I'm not a doctor."

"You-" Yan couldn't describe what he had done to her neck. She couldn't move it.

"You did this to yourself," the man said. "I only tried to fix you up as best I could. You're lucky I was around. It could have been worse. Maybe it'll teach you not to make knives."

He patted her cheek paternally and stood. "Try to behave, will you?" His chair scraped across the stone floor, and his footsteps sounded near the door. By the time he released her from the power, he was too far away for Yan to try to grab at, even if she had the strength. He opened the door, probably with the power since it didn't have a doorknob, and walked out, slamming it behind him with a dull, thick, thud.

Yan was alone again, and that was almost worse. She struggled to sit up once more.

In most ways, the room was unchanged. The trash can was gone, obviously. She was still chained to the floor by her ankle. There was a small cardboard box on the table. She was still wearing the clothes she had been given before, or, actually- she felt around the collar of the shirt, and tugged on it until she could see the back of it. There was no dried blood, so it was clean version of the same clothes. Someone had changed her. The thought of being naked and unconscious still roiled her stomach, especially considering the way that man insisted on laying hands on her, but she couldn't do anything about the past. Especially not for a past she hadn't been present for. If anything had happened, she just had to pray that she wouldn't ever find out about it. Was that a bad way to feel?

Yan decided that she was already in a bad enough situation. Worrying about what had happened to her body while she wasn't present in it wasn't something that she could realistically handle at the moment. She had enough on her plate worrying about what had happened to her body while she was in it. She felt her neck again. It was easier now that she was sitting up.

There was the original incision from when the chip had been put in, the thin vertical slice with the crusty stitches. It was still there, though it was raw feeling and swollen now. It had clearly been jostled when she was performing her own emergency surgery. The whole back of her neck was hot, and that heat crept up underneath her hair and down her back. It was inflamed, and if Yan had a mirror to check, it probably would have been bruised and ugly looking. The cut that she had made was closed, clumsily. It was as though someone with no experience in surgery had sewn the ragged pieces back up. The stitches were nothing like the ones on the original wound. Then that man had gone back in with the power, and had knit everything back together. A little, anyway.

Yan stood up from the bed, her whole body feeling faint and shaky. She slowly made her way toward the sink. There, on the floor underneath it, was a brown patch. Her blood had stained the stone. Though it had clearly been scrubbed, the rock must be extremely porous. Great. Of course she would have to look at that for the rest of her stay here. She splashed water on her face, then drank. She would have bent down and put her face under the faucet, but her neck was immovable. No matter how much she felt like she was straining to turn it, nothing moved. So she just cupped her hands and took many long sips, occasionally needing to steady herself on the side of the sink.

She had lost a lot of weight, she noticed. It was a testament to how long she had been drugged. Yan had been thin before (tall spacers tended towards the slender, on the whole), but now she felt positively skeletal. It wouldn't surprise her if she hadn't been given enough nutrition, purposefully to keep her weak. Not that it mattered. Without the power she was practically useless.

Food. It had taken Yan so much energy just to sit up and hobble over to the sink that she hadn't looked closely at the box on the table. She walked over, chain dragging behind her, and almost collapsed onto the chair. She opened the box, fingers unusually clumsy. Inside was a granola bar, a sandwich, and a small bottle of juice. All of the packaging was plain white, no labels. If Yan had to guess, she would say that it had been stripped so that she wouldn't be able to guess what planet she was held on. Not that it would have mattered. She was feeling pretty hopeless.

Yan ate the sandwich first, slowly. Her jaw hurt as she chewed, and she probed with her fingers the area that the man had indicated. There was a small, closed incision there, and the whole area felt raw and tender. There wasn't a big lump like the previous chip had, but maybe they used a smaller version of it, in order to make it fit. Either way, she wasn't going to go digging around in there for it. At least not at the moment.

She drank the juice. It was orange, but it tasted reconstituted and watered down. It didn't matter. She hadn't eaten real food in… Well, she had no idea how much time had passed, and that was driving her crazy. She couldn't even count on the passage of time from the healing of her wounds. Once the power got involved, anything was possible. So all she had to judge was the somewhat wasted state of her body, which did indicate she had been out of things for a while. A while.

People were definitely looking for her. She wondered if they were making any progress. She hoped they were.

She stood, clutching the side of the table for support, and walked over to the sink to refill the juice bottle. It was made of plastic so thin that it crumpled as soon as it was empty, so there was no way she could use it as a weapon. She could at least get herself a cup so she didn't have to drink water with her hands. It was harder than she had thought to fill the bottle. Since her neck refused to bend, she couldn't see what she was doing as she turned the handles of the faucet and put the neck of the bottle underneath the stream of cold water. It took trial and error to get it in the right place. She sat back down at the table. The granola bar she would save for later. She didn’t know when her next meal would come.

That was something else, the extreme uncertainty of her life. At any moment, someone could come in and decide to kill her, or torture her. They hadn't shown any signs of wanting to do that yet, aside from kidnapping her in the first place, but her life could lose value at any moment.

And what was that man, she was going to have to think of a name for him, saying about the chips? Was he a prisoner too? Clearly not, because he could come and go, and he was the one to bring her down here. And he could use the power. But if the chip wasn't stopping his power, why did he have it? Who was he? Why did he have such a thick accent that sounded so unfamiliar? Who was he working with, or for?

There were too many questions, and she would drive herself crazy if she thought about them. There was absolutely no way for her to learn the answers, after all. It was a waiting game. At least until she saw some new opportunity to escape. Just because her first plan had failed didn't mean that whatever her second one was wouldn't.

She drummed her fingers on the table, trying to think of avenues for escape. There weren't any that she could see, but that didn't stop her from imagining. The drumming was a good way to try to get more coordination back into her hands. She felt like she had lost half of her agility, or more, since she had been kidnapped.

Her thoughts drifted back to that night. She didn't even remember much of it. She had been so drunk, probably drugged as well, considering how the power refused to come to her call. It must have been one of the colonists who did it, slipped something into her food. She hoped that everyone else who had been aboard the ship was alright. Pirates had obviously carried her away. She knew that much from the snippets of conversations she heard. She just hoped that the pirates who took her hadn't also taken the chance to attack a fat target like the Tranquility. In other circumstances, they might have, but Yan was holding out hope that the pirates had wanted to escape with their new, valuable acquisition rather than going after a Guild ship.

If that was true, it meant that Yan was more valuable to them than a stardrive.

That was a terrifying thought, but it was definitely better than the alternative: wondering if the thousands of colonists and crew aboard the Tranquility had been killed. That ship’s passenger list included people she knew.

Yan wondered how Iri was holding up. Iri had certainly faced worse than just having her ward kidnapped, but Yan hoped she hadn't been hurt or brought up on charges or anything. Halen probably wouldn't do that, would he? Or maybe that wasn't anything in Halen's control.

It was odd who her thoughts jumped to first. Iri, then Halen, then they meandered their way through her little family, Sylva, Aymon, Sid, Kino, Maxes, all her cousins, her friends from the Academy. Had they buried her in their hearts yet? Did anyone expect her to come back?

Her fingers tapped frantically on the table, the thin wood making a paltry sound. She was worse than Kino was, but she didn't have anything else to distract her. Were they really not going to give her books to read, or anything to entertain herself with while they kept her here? Of course they weren't. Maybe she should have asked the man for some, but she couldn't think when he was in the room.

She had plenty of time to think now. So what should she name him? Most of the names she could think of were the names of her extended family. She didn't want to curse one of her cousins with that. She started running through all the names of historical figures that she knew. Scientists, characters from literature, anybody who had ever had a song written about them, classmates at the Academy she didn't particularly like, actors, politicians, the names of animal species she found unpleasant… It was an exhaustive process, but more often than not, Yan found herself stumbling and feeling like there was something on the tip of her tongue. She became more and more frustrated every time she came to a name that she thought she should know but had slipped from her mind. There was a constant buzzing in her head. She didn't know if it was from residual drugs, or weakness from being asleep for so long, or from the chip that was buried underneath her skull, but it was driving her crazy and making it almost impossible to think straight.

She decided after a while to call him the Green King. In the Song Cycle, which was the foremost religious text, the Red King was an evil ruler who twisted the laws of nature to make himself like God. He was eventually defeated. Yan couldn't quite be so sacrilegious as to call her captor the Red King directly, but he had bright green eyes, and that was enough for her to seize upon. And it wasn't really a name, so if she found out his real name later, well, she'd be able to start thinking of him by that too.

He wasn't a king, of course. He probably wasn't even in charge. But he was the only person Yan had seen, so his was the only face she could connect to her whole imprisonment. He might as well be the only other living person in the universe, for all anyone else could access her here.

Now, that was a sad thought. To be alone in the universe with just that maniac. The way he touched her made her skin crawl, just thinking about it. She wouldn't have minded if Sylva- oh, she couldn't think about that.

Would anyone else come see her? Were the people in charge of this going to come deal with her? She didn’t really want to think about what that could entail.

She continued to drum on the table, trying to drown out violent thoughts. Thinking about different ways she could be tortured was not a productive use of her time, and all it served to do was make her more miserable.

Yan needed to find some way to pass time. At least, even if she didn't have the power, she could still meditate. She stilled her fingers and breathed deeply, closing her eyes. It was hard to clear her thoughts, and it was hard to let go of the feeling of her body. It seemed like every ache and pain, every bruise, every tender patch of skin was itching and alive. Yan focused in on one narrow sensation, dragging her fingertip across the smooth surface of the table, trying to block out everything else. Just that feeling.

How long did she sit there, clearing her mind? There was no feeling of time passing, since her surroundings didn't change. Everything stretched on and on. She sat there with her eyes closed, just breathing and feeling, until she grew tired.

Exhaustion wasn't a reliable measure for how long had passed. She was so weakened that she probably was getting tired faster than usual. She shook herself like a dog, thinking of Iri's silly hound, Bebop. She wondered how he was. Iri had said before she left that her brother was taking care of him. She hadn't wanted to bring him on another trip off planet. The dog was well behaved, but Iri hadn't enjoyed wrangling managing his transportation. Yan was glad that Bebop at least was safe at home.

She went to lay down on the bed. There was no pillow or sheets, and she was unexpectedly cold. She curled onto her side, one arm under her stiff neck, the other tucked as close to her knees as she could. Yan scrunched her eyes shut again and prayed her nightly prayer. She had no idea if it was night or not, but she was going to sleep, so she would pray whatever she could.

It was hard to sleep. The light stayed on, the room was cold, the bed was uncomfortable, her neck made her feel stiff and defenseless. She didn't want to wake up again with someone else hovering over her. She didn't want to wake up in this place again at all, but the alternative of waking up somewhere else was definitely worse.

If she could have tossed and turned, she would have, but she didn't have the ability. It was a restless night.

Yan woke up. She didn't know what had woken her. Maybe it was some small noise out in the hallway beyond her cell, maybe it was a need to pee. She stiffly clambered to her feet. It should have been easy to get out of bed, especially when unencumbered by blankets, but her sore muscles had clamped up during the night. It was part of healing, but it made her feel horrible and sluggish.

The room was mostly the same. She hadn't expected anything to be different about it, but she saw on the table a new box, with new food in it. On one hand, that was good, and her stomach grumbled at the thought, but on the other hand… Yan clearly saw what the plans for her were. She was to be left alone in this cell, probably until she went crazy.

She had thought before that the Green King had come in just to bring her food, but since this food had been delivered while she was asleep, it seemed more likely that her captors were going to avoid as much interaction with her as possible. What had the Green King said? That he'd overstayed his welcome?

Not that Yan liked him, far from it, but having someone else around broke up the monotony of the six white stone walls around her. And another person could tell her about the passing of time. She didn't want to think about being trapped here for however long, slowly feeling more and more alone, losing all sense of the outside world. What would happen to her brain? What would happen to her?

Yan had always considered herself to cope well with being alone, but that was after her mother died. Being alone in your little room that you're free to leave at any time, being alone when your family is right on the other side of the ship, that was a totally different feeling than being alone in enemy territory. She would just have to keep herself as busy as possible.

She hobbled over to the sink and cleaned herself up, performing what she could of a morning routine. There was soap and water and toilet paper, so she bathed herself in the sink as best she could. The cold water woke her up, and shocked her thoughts a little bit away from despair. She made a plan. She would eat her food, or part of it, anyway. Maybe she would have the granola bar she saved from the night before and keep the rest for later. Then she would focus on getting her strength back.

Any exercises she could do by herself in this room, she would do them until she was tired. Then she would pray, or meditate, or sing, or probably all three. Just to kill time. Then, if she was hungry, she would eat more of the food that had been provided. If she had the strength, she would work out more. If not, she would go to bed and sleep. Maybe more food would come. She wondered if it would come on a set schedule, or if whoever brought it would come when she couldn't see them. She hoped it was the former, but there was no way to know without seeing a pattern.

She put her plan into motion. The granola bar was pretty disgusting tasting, but it was food, and that was what she needed. Then she tried to work out. It was difficult for several reasons. First of all, she was weak and stiff. Second, most activities were made more difficult with the chain around her ankle. It was really beginning to annoy her. She started out with stretches, trying to ease the stiffness out of her body. Then she moved on to trying sit ups, pushups (which she couldn't do), leg lifts- every exercise she had hated in her gym class at the Academy. Still, as an adult with a reason to work out, she wasn't going to give up on this until she was well and truly burned out. She got tired a lot faster than she had hoped, so she got off the floor and just paced the room.

Her thoughts churned meaninglessly, and she made circuit after circuit of the room. The whole place was a rectangle, and she could walk across it the long way in six normal strides. She had to turn around so often that she was already starting to get too good at the pivot and hop that was required to clear the chain as she switched directions. She alternated silence and talking to herself. There were plenty of prayers she had memorized, plenty of poems and songs, so she muttered them until she ran out of breath, then lapsed into quiet. The chain rattled on the ground, and her bare feet slapped the stone. She was forced to look straight ahead as she walked. Her neck didn't move, so she couldn't even stare at the floor. Her eyes were the only things that could wander, and she usually just let them rest on the opposite wall. She started to creep as close to the walls as possible as she walked, just brushing against it at first, then coming closer at each pass, until she ended her steps in each direction by pressing her nose and forehead onto the cold stone.

She didn't count her laps, it would have been too depressing. She probably paced for hours. It was the only thing that she had. She walked until her legs started to really hurt, then took a break and sat down at the table. She drank her juice, ate her dry sandwich, and saved the granola bar for the next day. Was it really going to be the same meal over and over again? She hoped not, but she didn't have any control. There wasn't even anyone around for her to complain to.

She supposed she could shout at the hidden microphones and cameras that were almost certainly somewhere in the room, but there wasn't any point. It wasn't as though her captors were going to be interested in listening to her complaints. If they actually cared about her well being, they wouldn't have kidnapped her.

She ate her sandwich. She stared at the white wall. She closed her eyes. She meditated. She prayed. She went to bed.

The next day was the same.

The next day was the same.

The next day was the same.

The next day was the same.

The next day was the same.

Yan was beginning to go crazy. Those first days she had imagined that it would be bad. She had known that solitary confinement made people lose their minds. That was why the Empire didn't practice it. It was considered humane to send people to work on mining colonies, rather than to lock them up alone. That had always been the justification for the mines, anyway. Even for criminals that couldn't be kept in with the general population, it was more humane to kill them than to keep them alone like this.

A body needed another. That was the whole story of the second song in the song cycle. Terae had been the only human created by God, and they hadn't been able to understand themself without companionship. Just as God had created the darkness in order to give light shape and meaning, Terae pleaded with God to create someone other than themself.

Yan had started pleading with God.

She would silently beg inside her head, she would reason aloud, sometimes couching it in prayer, and sometimes she would scream just to hear her own voice. When she closed her eyes, God was a pillar of light in the center of the room. Or was that just the buzzing light of the bulb overhead?

Sandreas's voice came back to her. "God will hold you close," he said in her ear.

"Shut up," Yan said, uncharacteristically testy. "You don't know anything."

"I don't?" Sandreas asked. "Are you sure?"

"Don't tell me about your long dark night of the soul. I don't want to hear it."

"What do you want to hear?"

"I don't know."

Sandreas walked away. Yan heard the sound of footsteps on the floor. She stopped pacing and the footsteps stopped. Oh.

She was getting her strength back, at least. Her body didn't like wasting away, laying on a bed, not eating. She probably slept more than once a day, because she rarely seemed to be too hungry. They fed her enough. She thanked her captors for that, anyway.

Every day she spent time trying to smash the chain on her ankle with the bedframe of the bed, but even the whole force of throwing herself down onto the corner wasn't enough to crack it. Whatever it was made of, it seemed intent on not letting her go.

She stopped praying. Yan would still sing, and often talked aloud to anyone listening, but it seemed more likely that the Green King would hear her than God would.

Halen goaded her on when she did her workout. He used to make them run a little, in their training. While they had focused on using the power, it was still important to know when to run, how to scramble across obstacles, how to get away. Yan wished she could get away.

"Five more. You can do five more, can't you?" Halen said, standing over her. It was hard to do pushups when she couldn't move her neck. Her head was stuck stiff out from her back. Her chest heaved as she knelt on the floor, taking a break. Halen nudged her arm.

"Why?"

"It's good to be strong, isn't it? If you aren't pushing yourself, you aren't living."

"But I don't want to."

"Don't want to live? Give me a break, Yan."

"I don't think I can do it."

"Try. Here we go, up."

Yan' s body felt light as Halen pushed her up, hands under her shoulders. Her arms creaked as she lowered herself back down.

"Four more."

She did it again, and again. Halen talked to her the whole way. She collapsed on the floor at the end, nose pressed into the cold stone, teeth grinding, her jaw pressed back. If only her neck wasn't fused in position. She cursed the Green King for doing it to her, but she probably bore equal blame.

"Can you fix it, Halen?"

"Not right now." He put his hand on her head. She could feel it, right there. "Someday, maybe."

"I just want to go home," Yan said.

Iri's voice rang in her ears. "The past is not a home you can go back to."

Yan rolled over onto her back. The sweat that soaked her shirt chilled her. Goosebumps rose all over her arms. She stared up into the light, blinking her eyes so rapidly that she thought she could see it dancing.

"Look at the stars," Halen said.

Yan peered out the front window of the shuttle. The whole thing was beat up and cobbled together. The console looked ancient. Halen sat in the pilot's seat. A young Halen. Barely older than she was.

He was holding something in his hand. "What is it?"

The young Halen held up a granola bar in an unmarked package. "The last one."

"There's nothing else?" Yan asked.

"I could start eating the seats."

Yan stroked the pilot's chair. "I think it's fake leather. The plastic stuff."

"Could eat it anyway." Halen put the granola bar on the top of the console. It taunted them both.

"How long have you been out here?" Yan asked.

"Three weeks," Halen said. "No one's coming to get me."

"No one?"

"They're all dead."

"How do you know?" Yan asked. "They might not be."

"It's never been more than four days before."

"What are you going to do?" Yan asked.

"I'm not gonna die in here." Halen said. "I'm not gonna die in here."

"You make it out alive," Yan said. "I know you do."

Halen looked at her, staring deep into her face. "Then so will you."

"But you have the power, and I don't."

"You'll find a way."

"Show me the stardrive?" Yan asked, changing the conversation topic.

Halen got up from his seat in the pilot's chair. Yan could see all the blank displays showing how empty the nearby space was, and all the familiar instruments showing the craft's status. Yan wanted to take the yoke in her hands and send the shuttle spinning off into the unknown- an unknown an immeasurable distance away.

Even as a youth, Halen was massive. He towered over Yan in the small shuttle, and drifted past her in the gravity free environment. She followed him. He was wearing a jumpsuit so similar to the one that she wore aboard the Dreams that it made her homesick. It was a dull red instead of olive green, but the style was the same. Why was it red if his ship was called the Bluebeetle? Or was that his family's old ship? She couldn't remember.

There was the stardrive, sitting harmlessly in the back of the shuttle. It thrummed with power, just like a heartbeat. It glowed with the light of a star. Yan blinked.

The ceiling swam into focus above her, the white stone blocks threatening to crush her. The light buzzed overhead. She was still just on the ground. Her arms felt floppy from so many pushups, and not from drifting in the zero gravity shuttle. There was no Halen, there was no stardrive ready to take her away. The light blazed in her eyes. She was tempted to smash it, but then she would be in the dark, and what good would that do her?

She stood. The bulb wasn't one that could be unscrewed, even though she could reach it easily by standing on the chair. It was stuck to the ceiling firmly, with no visible method of opening it. It was a shame. Even if she wanted to, she probably wouldn't be able to electrocute herself on the wiring. She didn't want to die, she just had hopes that a jolt of electricity could fry the chip in her brain. Of course, applying mains voltage directly across the most delicate organ in her body sounded like an excessively stupid idea, even to her desperate self. And that was considering she had already performed an emergency surgery with a prison shank to get the thing out in the first place. She was no stranger to stupid, dangerous ideas. But there was a part of her that was glad that the light was so sealed off that there was no accessing it. She didn't know if she could resist the temptation if it wasn't.

Yan stood and resumed her pacing. Six steps across the room. Turn, hop over the chain, six steps back. Repeat until her legs gave out underneath her. She imagined herself wearing a groove in the stone below her. How much walking would it take until her bare feet finally wore away the brown splotch of the uncleanable blood stain?

She had taken to folding the boxes her food came in into little shapes. She had never been particularly good at arts and crafts, but she needed something to do with her hands as she walked, so she improvised. If her first attempts came out looking more like blobs than animals, well, she had plenty of time to practice. It was difficult, though, because in order to see anything she had to hold things up in front of her face, keeping her arms raised. When she was sitting down at the table she could at least lean her whole body forward and keep her elbows on the table, but while she walked she either had to make strain her eyes looking down, or strain her arms holding things up. When one part of her body got too tired, she switched to the other.

The constant light was tiring to her. It, along with the impossibility of tracking the passage of time, dulled the line between waking and sleeping. A while into her captivity, Yan had no idea how long, she decided to try to do something about it. Yan pushed the bedframe as close to the wall as possible, then pulled the mattress off the top and slid it onto the floor underneath the bed. There was just enough room there that she could lay flat on her back without touching the wooden board that usually held up the mattress. She took long strips of toilet paper and tucked them in between the board and the metal bedframe, creating as much of a curtain as she could. She didn't have enough toilet paper to make the whole thing lightproof, but when she crawled underneath it, it diffused the light enough to disguise the ever present white stone. She hoped that there would be more toilet paper put up the next day. It had been refilled before when she ran out.

Yan woke to an odd sound. A shuffling. Was that her feet? She checked. No, she was laying in her cave. Her body told her her feet were still. She couldn't turn on her side, and she couldn't turn her neck to see what was happening outside her constructed shelter. Was there someone there? Was this the person who brought her the food? Was it the Green King?

The empty toilet paper tube fell to the ground. Yan heard it roll toward her. She assumed that was what the sound was. Footsteps. Breathing. Yan wished she could turn her head to look. The toilet paper covering her rustled. Yan tried not to breathe. Please don't go. Stay here.

But the person stood, the breathing retreated. Footsteps. The door opened, and slammed shut again.

Yan cried.

She had known, of course, that there had to be someone bringing in food to her, and taking away her garbage, and replacing the toilet paper, but this was the first time she had seen them. And she hadn't even seen them. She knew she was desperate for someone else to be around, but she didn't understand exactly how much her body needed it. She was sobbing and choking on her sobs. She would have done anything to have that person come back for just one second, just to see their face, hear their voice.

She knew that she was thinking of other people, imagining them with her, but she had thought that was a product of only boredom. With a room filled with almost nothing, she had to imagine something to occupy her time. If she imagined all the people she knew, that was normal, right? But breaking down into sobs over not even seeing a total stranger, someone who was keeping her in captivity? That was a something that Yan hadn't realized would hit her quite so hard.

She lay there in the muted light underneath the bed and cried herself to sleep.

The next night, or whatever Yan was calling nights, she resolved to stay awake. If she pretended to sleep, maybe she could catch a glimpse of the person who delivered her food. She rearranged her room again, putting the mattress back on the bed. She lay on her side, tucking her arms underneath her head.

It was easy enough to lie there in the light with her eyes closed, but what was harder was to stop muttering to herself. She did it almost constantly. Singing and talking to herself were the only things that drowned out the buzzing of the light overhead, and she had no reason not to narrate her every thought aloud. She thought it was keeping her sane, but she knew that if anyone else was watching her, and they almost certainly were, they would think that she was already crazier than she actually was.

In the end, she had to bite her tongue, physically, to stop herself from talking. Maybe that was how they knew she was asleep; she wasn't saying anything. Her mouth filled with blood. She had bit down too hard, but it didn't matter. She listened to the buzzing of the light and tried to clear her mind, stay awake, and be ready for when the mysterious person appeared.

It took a while. They must know down to a science how long she usually slept for, because they waited plenty of time before sending in the person. Yan heard the door open, and it took all her willpower not to jump up, to open her eyes wide, to shout. Her teeth ground into her tongue. She allowed her eyes to open a tiny bit, just to catch a glimpse.

She wasn't the Green King. She was a short woman, with brown skin. Her hair was cut in an ugly way, as though she had hacked it off herself, or it had been shaved and grew back unevenly. Her head was flat all along the left side, and the skin on her face on the right was slack. She must have had some sort of massive injury in the past, but she puttered around the room quietly, picking up Yan's trash from the table and replacing it with new food. She examined the little folded cardboard shapes that Yan had made, and nudged them into a line. She walked with a slight limp.

After she had put the food down on the table, she turned to look at Yan. Yan was surprised, and she didn't have the thought to close her eyes all the way. The woman came a little closer. She was wearing cloth shoes that were soft and slippery sounding on the stone floor, and a long dress sewn out of one big piece of fabric. She reached out toward Yan, and gently tugged free one of the toilet paper strips that decorated the side of the bed; it had gotten caught underneath her as she lay there. Yan couldn't resist, and she opened her eyes all the way. The woman looked up from smoothing out the toilet paper, and their eyes met. She squeaked and jumped in fear, running out of the room as quickly as the door could open.

And then she was gone, and Yan was alone again.

She was back with Halen in the shuttle. The same as before, holding something in his hand.

"What's that?" Yan asked.

Halen showed her the picture. "My mother," he said.

But it wasn't Halen's mother. It was the brown and beautiful face of Yan's mother, tiny braids falling around her ears, her smile as wide as the space between the stars.

"Will you see her again?" Yan asked.

"Not in this lifetime."

"But someday?"

"Probably not."

“Why?”

"Because I'm gonna die in here," Halen said, gesturing around the shuttle.

"How long has it been?"

"Six weeks."

"But the stardrive?"

Halen got up from the pilot's seat and led her into the back of the shuttle. The stardrive was chained there, with wires going every direction. It throbbed like an open wound, or the flashes of a heartbeat on a monitor.

"It will tear me apart when I use it," Halen said.

"But you have to use it anyway."