Qellsala was still reeling from what had happened. For a bit, she failed to react. Not when they dragged her by the fin, or hoisted her up, or tossed her down in a dark den in the belly of the ship, or when they sealed the den shut behind her. What was the point? She could fuss, sure, but they knew they had nothing to fear from her now and she was not sure how to handle that. Never in her life had she felt powerless like this. It was frightening.

Qell pushed herself up from where they had dumped her. The ground of the den was stooped down from the entrance that they had sealed off and made the space a shallow basin. It was filled with water, but there was not even enough to cover halfway up the sides of Qellsala’s tail. Her tail was resting flat on the bottom and she grimaced. Mierne needed water. They could survive outside of it for a time but drying out was deadly. Still, she had been pulled from the ocean just long enough ago that her skin and scales drank in the meager amount of moisture available.

When she glanced up, Qell’s spirits plummeted further and she shrank back. She knew she was not the only miernes aboard the ship, but there were easily over a hundred pairs of eyes staring at her. Each set belonged to a to a miernes who was equally encased in a skeletal brace, shaved and scrawny. Many bore fresh injuries or the scars of past ones. There were so many of them that there was hardly any room to move without brushing one another.

It was not just the abysmal conditions and mistreatment of her people that was unsettling, but the numbers. Mierne were typically quite solitary. Sometimes there were small family or friend groups that stayed together, but it was not uncommon for a miernes to live with alone or with a mate and no one else. They were too territorial most of the time to tolerate the presence of a stranger for long. But here, crammed in like this…Qellsala felt ill and her ears flattened with distress as she tucked herself into a defensive curl and watched the others.

Another miernes who was curled up near by uncoiled and began to drag himself over. He smelled at least a decade or two older than Qell herself, but even though there was no malice in his scent or anger in his movement, Qellsala still bared her fangs and flared her sail in warning.

“Peace,” he rumbled in a deep voice that echoed from deep in his chest. “There is no aggression here. Hard to claim territory when there is nowhere to go and little room to move. Not that we could assert over one another anyway, as I am sure you have just recently learned.”

Qell hissed at the reminder and flexed her fingers again. It should have been reassuring that she would not get attacked, but it was not. Her people were not animals, they were capable of complex thought and reasoning, but she did not enjoy how helpless they had been rendered.

“What is your name?” the other asked.

Qell sized him up before responding. His scales were a dark indigo and his tail and spinal fins were almost jet-black. She wondered what his plasma looked like with colouring so dark, but it did not matter. His gaze was like that of shale rocks in the coastal shelves and he definitely outmatched her in size and weight. Not that they could fight for that to matter, but it made her unease. “Qellsala,” she relented finally.

He nodded and pressed a hand to his chest before twisting it out in her direction. “Xixnal,” he introduced. As he turned his head slightly, she could see the dark black symbols marked into his neck, right on the scaleline, just like they had done to her. There were four symbols, though Qell did not know their meaning, that were encased in a box of the same dark lining. Her hand came unconsciously up to her own neck, which was still swollen and tender, and she hissed. So that was what they had done.

Rather than respond further, Qell pressed her lips together and looked away. She had nothing against the male miernes, but she was not interested in making friends. Her only priority was getting back to her children. And she hated staring at the way the brace clung to his body, over his head and the sides of his face. It was a stark reminder of her own enforced limitations.

A limitation that she was ready to be rid of. The human leader had declared that the braces could not be removed, but Qellsala did not believe that. Maybe humans were too feeble to remove it by hand or perhaps she had bluffed figuring any miernes would take her word for it when faced with everything else that the brace could do, but Qell was not going to believe it until she tried for herself. She twisted and grabbed one of the curved metal arms of the brace.

Before she could begin pulling at it, Xixnal leaned forward and grabbed her arm. Qell glowered at him and her ears lowered in warning. “It is not a good idea,” he advised solemnly.

She hissed at him and wrenched her arm from his grasp. She did not care for his opinion on the matter. So what if the humans got upset? Why should she care? She was going to tear the brace to pieces and then she was going to do the same to the first human to open the sealed entrance to the den, and any others who got in her way on her way back to the ocean. Then, she was going back to her den and moving her children somewhere safer, deeper, far away from the clutches of human beings.

Xixnal frowned, but ultimately shrugged and backed off. “You will learn for yourself.”

But Qellsala was not listening to him. Instead, she had begun yanking at the brace. At first, she felt the arm shift, and then it and all the other ones tightened as if trying to cling on, so Qell pulled harder. But the harder she pulled, the tighter it squeezed until she felt woozy with the inability to breathe and her bones ached and burned and threatened to snap. Gritting her teeth, she pulled a final time, only for an electric jolt to shoot up her back and cause searing pain behind her eyes.

With a cry, Qell collapsed and her body twitched. She tried to pick herself back up, but the brace had frozen her once more.

Xixnal clucked his tongue. “It does not come off,” he stated. “Many of us have tried removing our own and each other’s. All it does is hurt you and if you refuse to relent, it shocks you and stills you for a while until you have settled. If you still do not give up, it will do it faster. Best you accept it as a part of yourself now.”

Qell wanted to snarl at him, but her body sagged. The brace still gripped her tightly and she had no doubt that trying again would only repeat the experience. The brace was made of a thin, but strong metal that she would need more time and strength to break than she could muster when it was compressing her ribs and cutting off her ability to breathe.

Tears burned in her eyes as it finally eased off and she could pick herself up out of the puddle of water they were all lying in. She hated this. “I cannot stop trying,” she whispered. “There has to be a way out of these things and off this ship.”

Xixnal shook his head. “Do you think you are the first to try? I have seen several good mierne nearly lose their lives to wrestling with the brace, ones far stronger than you. You will wear it until you die, which will be far sooner than you could normally thrive.”

“I have to get back,” Qell growled. “I must return to my children.”

She whipped around when another miernes clucked their tongue. This one was another male, scrawnier than Xixnal, with coppery scales and lime fins. Beside him, was a female with charcoal eyes that contrasted hauntingly against her albino scales and translucent fins.

“They are dead,” the male said.

Qell growled at them. “I am going to get back, they are going to live.”

Then the female shook her head. “I thought so too, once,” she agreed. “But it is best to think of them as already dead. They will perish without you and you will never see them again. And if you do…well…you will wish they were dead. Death is a kinder fate than this. You will understand soon.”

This time, it was distress that flattened Qellsala’s ears. “You are a mother?”

The female nodded. “Gingalrin,” she introduced. “And I used to be. I had a son. I called him Oscuri, after the darkness of his scales. He was young, only just starting to explore alone in the silt fields just beyond our den. We lived very deep. But there came a time when I heard crying. So many mierne had gone missing from the area that I assumed it was a child lost from their parents. I ordered Oscuri to remain in the nest and not to leave for anything while I went to see.” Gingalrin bared her teeth, but her dark gaze glittered with sorrow. “It was a trick, and I never saw him again. He is gone. Just as yours are. Hold them in your heart but cast them from your mind, because there is nothing you can do. It is better that they perish peacefully.”

Qellsala hissed again. She could not just accept fate and leave them to die alone.

The male beside Gingalrin sighed and shook his head. “Leave her be. She will have to learn the hard way. We all do at some point.”

Gingalrin’s eyes were full of sorrow, but she sighed and nodded before curling back up. The male offered no introduction and followed her lead.

She frowned. Her people were solitary, but this sort of behaviour was out of sorts. When she glanced back at Xixnal, he shrugged. “Do not mind them. It is hard to form a connection with new mierne here. Many of the faces you see now will be gone before long. We do not live long here.” Then he frowned as a loud beeping noise cut through the silence and many of the mierne shifted. “Duck your head,” he advised.

“Why?”

Then he lunged forward and shoved her head down. “Just do it,” he growled before a sharp click echoed in the space and then a huge volume of icy water thundered down on them with such force it felt like each drop was a small rock buffeting her.

Qell tensed up and bit her lip. From the chaos, she heard one miernes cry out. Then the alarm beeped again and the torrent of water tapered off. Qell gasped as she sat back up and shivered. She could hear most of the water draining away until all that remained was the volume that had been in the basin already. “What was that?”

Xixnal grimaced and tilted his head up. “It is how they keep us hydrated. It will come again before long. The best thing you can do is hunker down and endure it.”

Qell shivered again and her heart constricted. “Why?”

“We are expendable,” Xixnal replied.

“It is to keep you weak,” Gingalrin commented after. “There is not enough water to keep us properly hydrated here, so they dump it from above every so often. It makes it hard to rest, hard to stay warm. It will weaken you, mentally, mostly. You are easier to control then.”

The acid scald of bile bubbled in Qell’s gut and climbed up her throat as she shuddered. She had known that humans were abducting mierne and that they saw them as monsters and animals, but this…this was worse than being utilized in a war. Even Qellsala, who was raised to hunt and kill without hesitation, who was not afraid to fight brutally over territory and food, would never treat another living being like this, not even the smallest fish who swam right into the open mouth of a waiting predator deserved a fate like this one, and she could not fathom how the humans stomached it.

This time, when Xixnal placed a hand on her arm, Qell did not shrug him away or growl. She had hit a breaking point and simply did not have the energy.

“The first day is always a lot,” he acknowledged. “You should try to rest while you can, it will only start to get worse and far more gruelling, and you will need to have your wits about you to avoid an unpleasant demise.”

Qellsala shivered at the ominous warning. Her gaze drifted back to the sealed gap that had shut them into the space. “How does it open?” she inquired.

Xixnal coughed. “It does not. Not from the inside anyway, it only opens from the other side, and humans must do it. You are trapped here until they come. The brace will prevent the use of teeth and claws from damaging the walls.”

That was the final blow Qellsala needed to hear. He had been right about the brace and had shown her no reason to suspect deception, so she knew he was being honest now too. She was tired and she had endured a lot already, and until a human entered the holding space, there was no way out. She could not think properly without a recharge and she would need to come up with some way around the limitations of the brace so that she could get off the ship.

With a defeated sigh, Qell curled up into a tight ball and tried to press herself as flat to the floor as she could so that she could submerge more of herself in the water. As a miernes, she did not sleep the way humans and other land-dwelling animals did, but she did rest in a state where she was only partially aware of her surroundings and conscious thought was reduced. She needed to rest now.

Before she could get fully settled in, the water around her sloshed and she cracked one eye open to watch Gingalrin pull herself closer. She offered Qellsala a weak smile and coiled up so that their sides were brushing and she could rest her chin on Qell’s side.

“I thought you all kept your distance?”

Gingalrin shrugged. “Many do,” she agreed. “But I know the pain you are in and none should be alone through it. Where is your mate? Mine got caught before I did, but I believe on a different ship, for he was never here.”

Qell’s heart sank further. “There are other boats?”

“Yes,” Gingalrin confirmed. “Too many. I do not anticipate I will see my mate again, but what of yours? Are they still out there to care for your young?”

Qell grimaced. “I have no mate,” she admitted. “My children have different fathers…I never wanted a mate. They were the only thing I ever wanted.”

She snuck a glance at Gingalrin, who was staring at her knowingly. There was sorrow glittering in her gaze. “I am sorry, Qellsala.”

“Qell,” she whispered back. She decided that as far as company went, Gingalrin and Xixnal were not so bad. “I tend to go by Qell.”

Gingalrin hummed in acknowledgement. “You may call me Ging, if you like.”

Qellsala hummed. “I want to find a way to escape this vessel, Ging. There has to be a way. Humans may have unfair tools at their advantage, but we are not helpless, this should not be allowed to keep happening.”

Ging sighed. “I do not know. Many have tried in the past. You have not been here long enough to understand. I…I cannot bring myself to hope again, it was too painful the first time. But…but if you find a viable way…I will assist you.”

That was all Qell could ask for. She could not expect Gingalrin to put herself at risk for a stranger. There was nothing more that needed to be said, so Qell lowered her head down and shifted slightly, trying not to show how nice it felt to have Gingalrin’s warmth against her back.