Surety
"Your own mind is the most difficult obstacle; it deceives you; it tells you that you need to quit when you still have more left; it tells you that you can’t when you can."
Jenna Fortunata, like most teenagers, was a deep sleeper. She didn’t sleepwalk or suffer from night terrors or other genuine sleep disorders, but it wasn’t uncommon for her, when visiting her aunt in Dafina or sleeping over at a friend’s house, to wake up and find herself suffering through an unusually long period of disorientation. It passed fairly quickly, though, usually within the minute, through which time she often sloughed off the tail end of dreamlike visualizations and struggled to remember where she was and how she got there. She never cried out or got over-anxious about it, because she’d always awakened somewhere safe.
Radial-Helix-N was no such place.
Jenna’s first blurry visions were of a holding pen that seemed like a jail cell. She thought she was dreaming, and she thought she was floating. She’d never been in trouble before, so it couldn’t have been a real jail. Her memory was utter blackness, clean black—at least back to Islod the day before, sometime in the afternoon. They were going to do something. It didn’t have anything to do with weightlessness. She couldn’t be in space anyway. It’s a dream within a dream, she told herself. Then she felt the headache. She’d never felt anything so awful.
“Stricha’s coming down for those two before the magistrate gets here,” Jenna heard an older woman’s voice say. “This one can’t be a day over thirteen. Poor thing.”
Jenna turned her head toward the sound of the woman’s voice. She opened and closed her eyes a few times. The light was bright white, artificial.
“Ow,” Jenna whispered, recoiling from the light.
“Shh,” the old woman said. “Shh-shh-shh.”
The old woman gave Jenna a gesture to close her eyes.
“The girl and the boy?” a man’s voice answered. “Definitely underage.”
Jenna was still processing, but it no longer felt like a dream. She was sixteen, not thirteen. She was just small and plenty sick of being mistaken for a child still, but something in the urgency of the old woman told her it was definitely smart to keep her eyes shut instead of pressing the issue.
She was beginning to remember. She’d gone to Islod with Karo for the closing festival the previous afternoon. Where was Karo, she wondered. She didn’t see him there in that brief peek.
“What about the rest of them?” Jenna heard the man say.
“The usual. That one in the corner had some jewelry with some tech in it. Maybe a rich uncle. The rest of them…” The older woman must have shrugged or left the rest unsaid.
“Okay, Mal,” the man said.
Jenna waited to hear footsteps, but then she realized that wasn’t likely in space. She was in space. It hit her. She’d been abducted by these people.
The old woman was pulling on her arm.
“Okay, sweet pea, wake up and listen good,” she said. “I don’t know how you got here, but you are in danger. If you’re still here when Stricha’s people come for you, your life will be over. Misery like you cannot imagine.”
The woman tugged on Jenna’s arm. Jenna began to flail all over the place, swinging her limbs to get control of her body.
“Have you never been in space before? What kind of child are you?”
Jenna shook her head. Her dad was the traveler, occasionally he brought mom along. They were going to take her to Aldura for graduation in two years. She’d never been weightless herself.
“You’ll need to learn fast,” Mal said. “Stop. Calm your body. Listen.”
The woman pulled her arm forcefully to bring Jenna’s head level with hers.
“Your life is at stake, girl. You do not belong here. Hold onto the rails and pull yourself along behind me. Listen.”
The older woman began to float off through the exit to the holding area. Jenna had just that brief chance to look back. There were perhaps twenty people there, all older than her, but still young. Late teens, early twenties. They were all fast asleep, floating aimlessly in that pen. She’d never heard of such a thing.
The woman—Mal—she led Jenna down a corridor and then around another corner. Then she punched open a grate in the side of the wall. It seemed to be some kind of access panel.
“When you feel gravity again, that is when we are close to Moffinga. Here.” The woman thrust a clear container filled with water into Jenna’s hands, then gestured for her to fly into the air duct. “Four days. Do not come out until we get to Moffinga. Stay cool and stay quiet in there. When we get there, do whatever you can to get off this city. Whatever you can. Whatever hell you suffer in there these next few days, I promise you will long for that misery if you get caught, girl.”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” Jenna said. “I think somebody drugged me.”
“I know, sweet pea.”
“Your name is Mal?”
The woman nodded and gestured toward the air duct.
“I’m Jenna. Thank you, Mal.”
“Remember, don’t come out. And if they catch you, none of this never happened. You woke up alone and you floated away.”
Jenna nodded and tried to float her way into the duct, which was plenty wide enough for someone as petite as her. But she was still awkward in weightlessness. She felt Mal pushing her backside and then her thigh and ankle. Then she felt herself tumbling into the tight tunnel, down into darkness. She heard the panel close behind her, though she couldn’t fully turn her body around to see it. Jenna just clutched the water, thinking that if she let it go, she might never grab it again in the darkness.
There was nothing about what had happened that had seemed fake, but shortly after that woman Mal had shoved her into the vent, Jenna’s mind, in the quiet of that dark space, began guessing and second guessing about what could have happened. Daviston, Jenna’s home, was as safe a city as there was in the Mid-Kappas. And Kappa-Aynor was a nice, residential planet. Nothing bad ever happened there. Two boys from Daviston got into a fight a few years back, and the city council literally held a city meeting to discuss ways to tamp down youth violence. Jenna had no barometer for the things the woman was saying—the hell she would suffer, misery like she couldn’t imagine. Jenna had read stories, listened to old novels from Earth. She knew what murder was. But she’d never woken up in a bad place, not like this bad dream.
She’d snuck off with Karo the previous afternoon—she remembered that part clearly. They’d taken the tram into Islod. They’d planned to watch the fireworks and take the tram back to Daviston like she’d done a hundred times before. Karo hadn’t been in that room with all those other people where she’d woken up. She wondered where he could be. And she wondered how the hell she’d gotten to space. There were four tether lines over Islod that Enuncium had lowered for the four weeks of harvest. Four space elevator cars, and she must have gotten on one somehow.
Jenna had about a million things going through her head, and she had all the time in the world to think them through, it seemed. Four days, the woman had said, to Moffinga. She was pretty sure Moffinga was a city somewhere in the Alphas or Betas. She’d heard her father mention it before when talking about a business trip.
The woman had told her, stay quiet and cool. That was what she’d best do, she figured. So she inched her way down the vent. Jenna needed to find a place to sit tight, where she could think about what the hell had happened to her and what she could possibly do about it.
She knew one thing for sure, though. She was grateful to that woman Mal. Grateful that she was here instead of finding out what that man and Stricha had planned for her. She understood there were bad things in the universe, and she’d sensed almost immediately that she’d somehow, at least for the time being, escaped one of them.
Jenna didn’t know anything for certain, floating in that vent, but she thought it was important for her state of mind to decide on a story—a set of operating assumptions. She was certain she was aboard one of the Enuncium ships. Their city was all anyone on Kappa-Aynor had been talking about since it was announced the fleet-city would be visiting them.
Because their visit was such a big deal on Kappa-Aynor, Jenna knew a little about Enuncium’s history. It had originated as an independent shipyard. At the start of the war, rather than being conscripted to continue making ships for the Trasp, the peoples of Enuncium worked to build a mobile civilization consisting of hundreds of ships, all custom-designed to lock together into a gigantic cylindrical superstructure whenever they arrived at a new system. They became traders and travelers instead of foundry workers and shipbuilders. The story throughout the Indies and the Letters—at least the stories Jenna had heard from media and lessons—was that these traders lived a peaceful, adventurous existence, moving from system to system, selling food, tech items, and other commodities as they passed from place to place.
On Kappa-Aynor, they’d timed their arrival with the harvest. Their visit had been an ongoing festival in Islod for nearly a month, culminating in Carnival week, which concluded for the peoples of Enuncium, on J’ouvert, which was how they celebrated each departure.
Jenna had gone into Islod with Karo. They’d gotten their hands and their faces painted. She hadn’t really been out with Karo before, so she remembered feeling shy—nothing elaborate like some of the girls she saw there from Lindley or Islod itself—she’d chosen a simple decorative pattern over her left eye. And the design on her hands, she remembered now, had come off in the washroom.
What did she drink?
Karo had been distant, awkward. A night she’d hoped for forever—the longest crush of her life. She’d just thought he was as nervous as she was. Where was Karo now, she wondered.
They must have somehow been convinced to go up one of the city’s tethers. A lot of people were going up to the clubs on Enuncium, but she’d never have gone up alone and never have gotten in to the clubs at sixteen.
They had gone dancing in Islod. She remembered a purple-colored dance floor with bots and holograms on it. Karo had been there for certain. He’d gotten them drinks. The rest was a blur.
Four days to Moffinga. Jenna’s coaches, both in athletics and academics had the same program—an objective for every session.
Objectives now? Stay quiet and hidden; ration water; don’t lose hope; find an exit from the vent for when the gravity comes back on; wait until there’s activity on the city; as soon as there’s enough happening to provide cover, escape. Run.
That was Jenna’s story.
Jenna had never truly understood it till now. Something her football coach would say to the girls when they thought they were too tired to finish shuttles at the end of practice: “Your own mind is the most difficult obstacle; it deceives you; it tells you that you need to quit when you still have more left; it tells you that you can’t when you can.” Sometimes coach Hallisey would even make them scrimmage after, when they were so tired hardly any of them could still kick a ball. But they always got through it. That was the lesson. But at least then, there was another obstacle—a ball, a field, a goal, other girls. Here, it was true, the only obstacle was Jenna’s own mind. It told her she had a splitting headache. It told her she felt sick. It told her it was all a bad dream. It told her that woman had been lying, playing a trick on her. It told her she had to pee, had to get out of the dark, had to find someone who would listen, explain herself. It told her to give up, to come out, that surely someone would listen to her. There had to be adults there who cared.
Jenna heard herself thinking all this. Then she thought that if she were wrong on any of those counts, and if that woman was telling the truth, her life would probably be over the second she came out. Nobody would know where she was except Karo. By the time her parents got back from Alpha-Bassur in two weeks, they’d have nothing but Karo’s word to go on, and if he didn’t tell them the truth, there was only a chance they’d think to look for her on Enuncium. It was possible the city would still be orbiting Moffinga by then. But maybe not. Who could know what would happen to her in that time? Certainly Jenna didn’t. But she had a sick feeling in her gut that she knew had nothing to do with whatever drug she’d been given. It was the feeling of a life ending, a cold death hanging out in front of her indefinitely.
And if she was wrong about that feeling, she wasn’t going to dare to find out about it until she absolutely had to. She could last four days, she told herself. She could do anything she had to. She did have to pee, though. That was a problem.
After a short time simply hiding and sitting still in that narrow ventilation shaft, Jenna began to sweat. Stay cool was one of the main things Mal had told her. Jenna was thinking it through as she pulled herself along the shaft with her one free hand. If she kept sweating in there, the single container of water Mal had given her wouldn’t be enough for four days. She’d die in there. She had to move in the darkness.
When Jenna finally reached a junction, she could feel the airflow across her face before she sensed the opening. The air from three other shafts and hers was all flowing into a larger vent shaft. She couldn’t tell what was up or down and had no way of knowing where the opening would lead, but because it was a larger duct with air flowing into it, Jenna guessed that it would give her more options. So she followed it, carefully and quietly, always slow.
Find the cold, she thought. Don’t exert yourself in the heat. Hold onto the water.
She’d progressed down that larger shaft only a short way before seeing a dim light ahead. The larger shaft led to another junction, where two other large air shafts joined it at a round access port that had a dull blue light-ring. Both the other air streams were cooler and the air flow down that tunnel was fast enough it almost felt like a breeze. Jenna decided that if she could find a way to stay there, fixed in that place, she could cool down enough to survive four days.
The light seemed very bright to her, but she guessed that was only because she’d been immersed in total darkness. She looked at the bottle of water—the most precious thing in all the universe now—and she decided that if she could find some way to estimate time, she could work out a system for when she was allowed to drink. Thirst would not be it. She was already thirsty. Now the battle with her own mind began again. Four days was not an eternity, she told herself.
She found a metal protrusion with a loop under it near the hatch. She ran the belt from her overcoat through the loop, fixing her weightless body in the airstream, which took her hair in every direction in the flowing draft.
Jenna settled in. She’d been working on a story for a writing class about a girl her age from Hellenia whose family moved out into the Letters in the century following the Schism. She had four days to think about their new life in the early colonial era. That was Jenna’s favorite period in all of human history. So much potential. So many people with hopes and dreams. Jenna dwelt there for hours as she floated.
The first time she dozed off, it was unintentional. Jenna’s hand was what triggered something in her brain to snap to. She’d let go of the water bottle and instinctually grasped for it, only to find an empty hand. Her eyes popped open wide and she gasped, looking for the bottle frantically. The water was nearby, just above her head, floating away slowly in the air current. Jenna went for it and found it just out of reach, her waist fixed in place as it was by her overcoat’s inner belt. The bottle was flying away faster than she’d realized at first. Jenna’s hands shook as she attacked the fastener on her belt, breaking free, and flying off toward the bottle, which she quickly snatched up again and held tight to her chest.
Jenna turned back toward the hatch, floating back into place, and reaffixing herself. That brief moment of terror had been overwhelming. She wanted to cry. She felt it coming on. She felt herself giving into the urge, the emotional release, the comfort of it. She thought about it for a moment. Something in her subconscious told her to bottle it up. The water in her tears. I’m going to need that more, she thought—I’m not going to give that to the air: it’s mine. She pulled her coat open at the neck and shoved the water bottle inside her shirt, tightening her belt and closing her collar. Not a drop was slipping away from her.
Jenna slowed her breathing, thought about the colonials, and allowed herself to drift off again.
A full sleep was how she told herself she was going to count the days. Such long days as these she’d never known or imagined. A few minutes alone in the quiet of a solitary place—without purpose; without company; without a sun, a moon, or a star to mark the passage of time—even brief periods of isolation like that could seem like ages. This felt like eons. Only the dull background hum of the ship and the passing air informed Jenna that this ship was even operating, moving through the stars. She’d never been off world before. Maybe that had been it—how Karo had talked her into riding up the zipcars on one of the Enuncium space tethers. It still hadn’t come back to her.
She thought it was still the first day, but it had been hours since she’d fled into the vents. And with whatever drug they’d given her still floating around her system, she dozed in and out several times.
When it finally came time for her to drink, she was very deliberate about the process. She pulled on the spout with her lips, enough to fill her mouth twice. That was it for the day. She’d get three pulls at it each of the next four days—that would leave some for an emergency.
The water was warm, not nearly as refreshing as she’d hoped it would feel. She was disappointed for a moment and then grateful. It took down the temptation level enough that she convinced herself she didn’t want more anyway. Two sips.
The girl in her colonial story was named Grace. In the beginning, when they’d first left Hellenia, she’d been spoiled. She was learning how to build things and pitch in on the new settlement. She was gaining a sense of pride that came with being a part of a community. That was the part of the story Jenna was struggling to work out. What had changed Grace?
When she woke up again after a full night’s sleep, Jenna felt clear-headed. Quite a few other sensations came along with that clarity. She was as thirsty as she’d ever been in her life. That was the worst feeling. Next, her stomach ached from the hunger. And the urge to pee, which had gone away the previous day after hours fighting it, was back with a vengeance. It was funny to her: clearly, she was in a survival situation, and here she was struggling with her own modesty in a place she couldn’t possibly be observed.
When she took her second mouthful of water, she spit out a few small drops, right into the air stream just to see what would happen. As she suspected, the air current drew the droplets down the air shaft. She thought about her colonial counterpart Grace, struggling with challenges in a rugged new world. New things, none of them ideal or fun. Jenna knew what to do.
That second day, the hunger was the main challenge. She’d never felt anything like it. Jenna had heard of people fasting for health and self-discipline, and she’d even considered trying it once. But that challenge had only lasted until her family’s housebot Bartholomew made her mother an onion soup that wafted through the entire house. The thought of it now made her jealous of her past self—that Jenna who could end her fast on a whim with such a heavenly pleasure—a crust of baked cheese on the surface and fresh baked bread to dip into the hole she’d made with her spoon.
Dear God, the pain of wanting. She’d never felt anything like it.
When she woke up again on the third day, the hunger had subsided. She was thirsty, but Jenna had found a certain peace with that thirst. For much of the first two days, she’d genuinely doubted whether she’d be able to make it. Her mind had done nothing but try to sabotage her—to throw up roadblocks in the form of reasons she’d never make it, reasons why she should just step outside the vent shaft at the nearest opening and declare herself to the first person she saw there.
This day, though, day three, she told herself, was hers. Jenna knew she could make it, would make it. She had more than half her water left after her morning sips. The hunger had subsided to the point it was tolerable. She’d been present with her true friend Grace on several colonial adventures she’d orchestrated in her own mind. They all worked out for Grace in the end, even though Jenna knew, things don’t always work out like that in the real world. Some people never make it home.
Day four was tougher. Her mouth had been dry for two full days, but her lips didn’t start to crack open until that fourth morning. And she was so thirsty it was almost impossible to resist the urge to gulp away at the remaining water without any discretion.
Some of the demons returned. They tried to convince her that she’d made the whole thing up in her mind. That the morning in that pen with all those other young people had been some crazy hallucination—a story she’d cooked up in her mind. Mal? Had that person even been real. Why would she put Jenna in a vent? Or help her at all, for that matter?
Jenna wasn’t sure where those questions were coming from. She was starting to think they were real voices. She whispered words into the air stream just to see what it sounded like—real spoken words versus the things she thought she was hearing.
“You are going to make it,” she said softly at one point. “When the gravity comes, you go.”
Then she fell silent again and waited for midday. When midday came, she could have another two sips of water. Until then, she resisted the urge to lick her cracking lips.
Much later—who knew how long—something changed. The ship began to vibrate. Then it got still and hummed in a different way.
Jenna guessed that they’d completed their jump and were entering the system, or had entered it at sublight. She wasn’t sure.
She waited, keeping her senses tuned to the vibrations in the walls of the vent, the metal of the hatch. After a long while, the ship began to make turns, a sharp bank that put her body slightly against the wall and then pulled her away from it. Then, for a period of about thirty minutes, there were loud banging noises that shook the bones of the vessel. Jenna knew what it was: the city was reassembling.
Before they’d come to Kappa-Aynor, she’d watched an immersive video on her glasses about Enuncium’s docking process. The entire city was made up of jump ships, each about a half kilometer long. They were all specifically-designed pieces that fit together like a puzzle. They would arrive in a system, fly into formation, and assemble, one ship at a time, into the cylindrical city of Enuncium. All of these hundreds of precise maneuvers were automated, perfectly-timed orchestrations. When Enuncium had arrived over Kappa-Aynor, it had appeared like a little bright cylindrical star taking up orbit. Jenna imagined that when they left a system, they looked more like a bright structure in the sunlight dissolving into a cloud of stardust.
She was hours now from Moffinga. She’d thought her plan through. She needed to wait until the place was bustling with visitors, until there were people from Moffinga coming up to the clubs. That’s when she’d move.
She had two more sips of water. About a fifth of the container remained. She’d drink the last before stepping out. Jenna had it all worked out. The last thing she needed to do was find her exit before the city began to spin. She didn’t want to get stuck in the air ducts with no way to climb out.
Jenna didn’t know exactly what to avoid, but she had some ideas. She’d have been on camera in multiple places—definitely to board the elevator. They might have taken a retinal scan or fingerprints when they’d put her in that holding pen. So her goal wasn’t to move fast but to move as inconspicuously as possible—first, off that specific ship; second, off the city itself.
She was shocked at how fast gravity came back. It was bizarre how it blended immediately back into the fabric of her reality. Her senses re-attuned. Her body began to sing with it. And as exhausted as she knew herself to be, she found the strength to push open the air panel. Adrenaline carried her along—first down a small corridor, then two bigger ones, then a large causeway filled with people.
She walked in the middle, her hair still a frizzy mess from the weightlessness. She was using it to shield her face, walking closely behind people to keep out of view.
When she came to the first threshold between Enuncium’s ships, Jenna crept up behind a taller man, so her face was hidden behind his torso. She pulled her hair over half her face and pretended to rub her eyes so she could hide from the cameras she assumed to be monitoring the crowd there.
She passed between ships without anyone stopping her. She wanted to walk at least two ships more before trying to board the tram to the nearest tether. It was incredible to her, this network of ships—so enormous they had their own internal transport system. The nearest of the four space elevators could have been tens of kilometers away for all she knew.
Jenna wasn’t certain how many of the people there were from Enuncium, but there were enough people on the causeway looking around in wonder that she gathered many of them were tourists up from Moffinga. It was a good sign. She passed two more ships the same way without tripping any alert in the cameras.
Again the doubts came back to her. What are you doing, Jenna? Why don’t you just go talk to somebody? Ask for help. She remembered then what Mal had said: get off on Moffinga. That was the plan. Don’t leave Enuncium to chance. Get off the damn city.
She asked an older woman sitting on one of the benches along the causeway whether the tram cost money.
“I’m from Moffinga,” Jenna said. “I need to get back to the tethers.”
The woman gave her a funny look and said it was free. She was about to say something more, but Jenna said thank you and walked off toward the Tram before she could.
Jenna covered her face as best she could when she boarded, sitting in the corner, feigning a headache.
“This is Radial-Helix Q,” the PA announced. “The Next stop is Radial-Helix R.”
The tram doors closed, and Jenna breathed a sigh of relief that quickly turned into a wash of anxiety when the tram didn’t move. She tried not to overreact or look around nervously, but she was nervous.
“Please remain seated,” the PA announced. “Service will resume shortly.”
Two uniformed men appeared at the door to the tram with an all-purpose model beside them. The bot pointed in Jenna’s direction when the door opened. She was in the corner. No way out.
“This one?” one of the two men said. “Jesus, you’re a little thing. How old are you?”
“I’m just lost,” Jenna said. “I need to get to Moffinga.”
“There’s a bond on you over on N. You need to come with us.”
“Come with you where?” Jenna said.
“To see the magistrate.”
“Magistrate? I didn’t do anything. I need to call my parents. I want to go home.”
“Come with the nice men, please, young lady,” the bot said in a commanding tone Jenna had never heard from a robot.
“I just want to go down to the planet so I can go home.”
The two men picked her up off the seat, each grabbing her by the arm and pulling her off the tram.
She tried to resist, but they were too strong. She cried out for help, and all the people there on the tram looked at her with such disgust. Jenna couldn’t imagine what she had done so wrong to have people look at her that way, like she’d become a whole different category of person than the one she’d been her whole life. Maybe not even a person anymore. When they pulled her from the tram, it seemed a relief to everybody else. Then the doors closed and the tram zipped away.
“If you try to run, I am authorized to shock you into compliance,” the bot told her when they sat Jenna on their cart—the two men up front and the bot with Jenna in the back, gripping her around the wrist. There wasn’t any fighting it.
She sat with the bot for nearly two hours on a bench outside the magistrate’s office. It did give her a bottle of water. When she explained she hadn’t eaten, it explained they had no food there and that she’d have her needs met after the proceeding.
The magistrate came into the offices with two other men, who all went into the door where Jenna was seated. Then, after a few minutes more, the magistrate came back to the door, and the bot brought her inside.
The security bot seated her at a small table inside what Jenna presumed was the magistrate’s office. The room looked somewhat official, with screen panels on the wall displaying legal statements, a title sign for the court of Enuncium, flags on stands in the corner, the ship’s name and number: Radial-Helix N 4771. The magistrate was seated beside her, while the bot stood just behind her. The magistrate had a small projected namebar on the table: John M. Cole, City Magistrate. Mr. Cole looked over at the other two men and addressed them by name. Then he turned to Jenna. He reached over and took her by the chin, turning her head to inspect her.
“Pretty little thing,” he said, before smiling at the others. Jenna scowled at him.
When the official proceeding began, she didn’t fully follow the conversation, which mostly took place between the magistrate and the man the magistrate addressed as “barrister.” The third man didn’t really say anything, except yes or no when the magistrate addressed him directly, but Jenna gleaned that he was a representative for a man named Marshall K. Stricha. All these men seemed to know each other well. Jenna could tell that. They were all friends.
At one point, she interrupted to ask whether she shouldn’t have someone to represent her. “I’m a minor,” she told the magistrate.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m your representative in this case because your parents were unreachable. Now be quiet until I address you.”
There was something called a surety bond that had been put on her. That was why they’d stopped her at the tram. She couldn’t understand how that would happen, that a person could just put something like that on her. It didn’t make sense.
“When do I get a chance to speak?” Jenna interrupted again after a few more minutes she didn’t comprehend. They were talking about sums of money that maybe her dad’s business dealt with, but she couldn’t see how any of this was relevant to her life.
“Ms. Jenna Fortunata, we have your name as; home planet as Kappa-Aynor; sixteen years old? Is all that correct?” the magistrate said.
“Yes.”
“Your bond has been purchased by Marshall Stricha for 1.2 million L-Cr.”
“One point two million? What does that mean?”
“That’s the payment for the release of your bond. It’s an estimate based on a number of financial factors. You are here because you stowed away without fare. Mr. Stricha has paid your fare and you are now bound to repay that loss. You may present evidence now that you can present the full amount of the bond, or you’ll be remanded to Mr. Stricha’s representative here.”
“I need to call my parents. They have money. Maybe not a million cronors, but my dad can get it. He’ll get it. He will. I just need to call them. They’re traveling—on Alpha-Bassur. My housebot knows how to get hold of them. It would only take a few hours.”
“You don’t have any financial assets here on Enuncium, Miss Fortunata?”
“No. I’ve never been here. And I didn’t stow away. I was drugged. I was abducted.”
“I reviewed the footage of you from the elevator car willingly entering the city. You and a boy got on together. Then you stayed long past fair warning that Enuncium was departing. There’s no question you were at fault.”
“I was drugged.”
“There’s no evidence of that.”
“I have no memory of even getting on the elevator.”
“Alcohol will do funny things to a young mind. None of this is in question. The only question here is one of financials. You can either produce the bond amount, or you’ll be placed in Mr. Stricha’s custody until his surety bond is repaid in full. How you repay him is between you and Mr. Stricha.”
“One million cronors for a ride to Moffinga?”
“The fare is fifty thousand. The bond price reflects the financial risk for fronting your fare, plus the cost of the estimate for additional fares you may incur before repaying your bond value, as well as housing you, feeding you, all the expenses of life on a city such as Enuncium.”
“I need to call my parents.”
The magistrate grinned.
“So, no. You can’t pay.”
“One million cronors? Of course not.”
“Then I’m remanding you to Mr. Stricha’s representative. You’ll be in Mr. Stricha’s guardianship until further notice,” the magistrate said, turning to smile at Stricha’s man. “I’ll come pay her a visit soon, Serra. See how she’s settling in.” Then the magistrate turned back to Jenna again. “After he cleans you up.” Then he took her hair, rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger.
Jenna’s skin crawled at his tone and the way he looked at her, the sick grin.
The barrister and the magistrate left the room, leaving Jenna sitting at the table with Stricha’s man. He waited for a moment after the door was shut. Jenna couldn’t tell why. Then the courtroom displays on the screens went off. The official proceeding had ended.
“You will call me Mr. Peters,” the man said.
He held up a small black object in his hand, rectangular, and it looked to Jenna like it was made of some kind of plastic. “Do you know what this is?” he said, getting up from his chair and coming around the table toward Jenna. She shook her head.
“I hope we only have to do this once.”
He pressed the black box to Jenna’s shoulder sending a shockwave through her body that dropped her from the chair to the floor. Every muscle in her body convulsed. She found herself gasping for air. After a few seconds, the man started talking down to her from above.
“You will not talk back to me or Mr. Stricha. You will not raise a hand to me or Mr. Stricha or anyone who works for us including the other girls. You will not bite or spit. You will not speak unless spoken to. You will not be disrespectful to us. You will do exactly what we tell you to do when we tell you to do it. Those are the rules. Very clear. Very easy. I am only going to tell you these rules this once, so if you have any questions about them, you’d better ask me now. Do you have any questions for me?”
He looked down at Jenna, pausing for her response. She was only just able to breathe again and move her arms. Her limbs ached. She’d never felt such pain in her life.
“No questions,” Jenna said, her limbs shaking.
“There’s no way off this city for you. Your biometrics are recorded in the trams and the elevators. The cars won’t move with you in them unless you have Mr. Stricha’s permission to go. Understand that if you break the rules, it just gets harder for you. Much harder than this. Now stand up, girl. Do it now.”
Jenna rolled to her knees and struggled to get her feet under her. Mr. Peters didn’t help her up. He waited there until her legs stopped shaking enough for Jenna to stagger to her feet, like he’d done that so many times he was tired of it.
“Okay,” he said. “Follow me.”
They walked out the offices and back into the causeway. None of this could be legal, Jenna thought. But that had been the magistrate for this section of the city. Cole—something Cole. Her head was ringing. She didn’t know the legal system on Kappa-Aynor, much less Enuncium. It didn’t matter anymore if it was legal, though, really. The man, Mr. Peters, told her to walk, so she walked.
They walked a long way, down many hallways. Jenna couldn’t have found her way back to those offices if she tried.
Finally, they came to a narrow hallway with a lot of doors and small rooms. They walked about halfway down the hall before Mr. Peters waved open a door. Inside was an older girl in an airy dress with her hair done up nicely.
“Nika, this is the new girl,” Mr. Peters said. “Clean her up, and take her up to Mr. Stricha. You know what to do if she runs.”
Then he tossed the little black box onto her bed and waited for Nika to pick it up. Mr. Peters pushed Jenna into the room, turned, and left. The door shut automatically behind him.
Nika looked over at Jenna. In her eyes was a sad kind of pity, not compassion exactly. Jenna couldn’t quite place the emotion.
“Come here,” Nika said. “Sit.”
There was a chair in front of a mirror. As she sat down, Jenna got her first look at herself in days. She looked horrible—the ink still smudged on the left side of her temple and forehead from the face paint. Her eyes were sunken in, the skin underneath them almost gray.
“My God, you smell awful,” Nika said. “What happened to you, sweetie?”
“I’m from Kappa-Aynor. They took me. I was hiding in the vents.”
“How old are you, honey?”
“I turned sixteen two months ago.”
Nika looked down at her, again with that same piteous look, only this time tinged with doubt. “I’m not going to lie. The next couple days will be the worst few days of your life. But you will get through them. Tell me your name, honey.”
Nika helped Jenna clean herself up. She didn’t have much to eat, but she gave Jenna the few snacks she had tucked away in a drawer. Nika promised to get her fed after she saw Mr. Stricha.
Jenna knew what this place was. She was naïve and perhaps a bit innocent, but she wasn’t stupid. It was still surreal for her to hear it spoken into reality by a living girl, though, here before her in flesh and blood. It was even more surreal for Jenna to realize that it was happening to her. She had to get that through her head, Nika told her. There wasn’t any other way.
Nika helped Jenna brush her hair back. She was very concerned about Jenna’s cracked lips. Not for Jenna’s sake, but what Mr. Stricha would think of her for bringing Jenna to him in that condition. Nika kept layering lip gloss on her.
“Okay,” Nika said, showing Jenna the little black box in her hand. “I know you’ll want to run, Jenna. I know. I remember. But it’s just going to make everything worse. I hate it, but I will shock you when I catch you, and even if you get past me, I’ll just call Mr. Peters who’ll call the security officers, and you’ll end up right back where you’re going to be anyway. Please, for everyone’s sake. Just walk with me.”
Those words burned in Jenna’s ears as she walked, for all purposes, to her death, or at least to the death of the person she was always meant to be. Nika walked beside Jenna down that first corridor into another hallway. Jenna remembered it from the walk in. Eventually, she knew, it would lead to the main causeway. And, she thought, if she was certain to die a kind of death like that, she wasn’t going to walk to it willingly—not her own death. She was going to make everyone out in that causeway watch as they dragged her away. All of those people would see her one last time and have to decide whether they turned their eyes away while it happened. They would see her.
Jenna looked at Nika, smiled, and bolted. She was small, yes, but she was fast. The fastest girl on her football team. Even after four days starving in a vent, she knew Nika wasn’t going to catch her. In two steps, she ran right out of the oversized heels Nika had put her in.
She ran out the mid-corridor, barefoot, down another similar hallway, and back into the main causeway, where crowds of people from Moffinga were filtering in. She could hear club music coming from some of the venues lining the causeway, lit as it was now for nightlife. She ran clear across the main floor to the other side of the tram line. When Jenna looked back, Nika was forty meters behind her, struggling to catch up through the crowd.
In the moment, Jenna thought a million things: that she could never get away; that she couldn’t get off the city; and, she calculated where she should run to cause the biggest scene when they inevitably grabbed her again. She thought about shouting. The tourists might listen. They didn’t know anything about this place. They had to know. But then she thought it would be harder to catch her in the crowded, dimly-lit causeway if she wasn’t calling attention to herself.
Nika had already pointed her out to security officers in the causeway. That made Jenna’s choice easy. She turned and ran the other way, sprinting toward the next ship in that God-forsaken city.
She ran far enough and fast enough that she crossed the threshold between ships, for all the good that did—into Radial-Helix O—Jenna guessed. There were security officers rushing toward her from the causeway’s periphery. Jenna tried to run deeper into the crowd. There were people all along that endless strip of restaurants and clubs.
As the officers got closer, Jenna began to weave through the tourists. She was out of breath, but she kept running. Up ahead further, she could see, approaching from the side of the causeway beside a decorative park with fake trees, there were two more security officers and a bot. She couldn’t outrun a bot.
She jumped to the other side of the tram line and tried to lose them in the crowd, weaving through the people at top speed. Behind her maybe thirty meters or so, two of the security officers were gaining. As she was looking behind her, still sprinting, Jenna crashed into something that felt like a wall. She’d never been hit so hard in her life, and she crumbled to the floor.
As she looked up, the man she’d run into looked down at her with the darkest, angriest eyes she’d ever seen in her life—a killer’s eyes. He seemed gigantic and terrifying. Behind him, there was a bright-haired young woman, another man alongside her, and an old bot. Jenna was breathless, but all those people, wide-eyed, seemed to be looking down at her for an explanation. She met eyes with the young woman, who seemed to be the only one sympathetic enough to realize that something here was truly wrong.
“Help me,” Jenna said. “I’ve been kidnapped. I don’t belong here.”
She turned to see the security officers closing in. Jenna got up and kept running. As she was running off, she heard the young woman shout to the dark-eyed man, “Go get that girl and…”
Jenna was already bolting again.
It couldn’t have been more than another hundred meters before one of the security officers caught up and clipped her ankle from behind, sending Jenna crashing to the floor. She wanted to cry out and cause a scene, to let them all hear it, to tell everyone what they were trying to do to her, but she couldn’t get any air back into her lungs. Her chest burned. If they wanted her to move, they were going to have to move her.
Two officers approached, the closest one holding one of those little shock boxes in his palm. “Are you going to come with us willingly,” he said, “or are you going to make this difficult?”
“No,” was all Jenna could manage to say.
That was when the dark-eyed man appeared behind them.
“Walk away, boys,” he said. “Or this will be the worst night of your lives.”
He had a peculiar accent Jenna had never heard before.
They turned and looked at him. He didn’t look nearly as big to Jenna standing near those security officers, but neither of them seemed to know what to do.
The man snatched at the wrist of the closest of the two officers, applying the shock box right to the officer’s own throat, sending him flopping to the floor. Then the stranger just glared at the other officer, who ran back into the crowd, shouting for backup. The stranger knelt down and pulled the shock box from the officer’s hand. Then he came over to Jenna, picking her up from the floor by her ear like she was some unruly child and leading her back the way she’d come. Jenna was almost delirious, with stars spinning in her eyes. She didn’t know what she was seeing and hearing. She stepped as far as she could go, back to the feet of those people in that crowd. She saw that blonde woman again, an almost angelic face. She scolded the man, Jenna thought, for the way he was treating this girl. “Sebastian, let her go,” she’d said. Then the pain and pressure on Jenna’s ear vanished, and she dropped to the floor. Better this way, she thought. Better this way, as the whole world went dark.
In the foggy minutes that had ensued, Jenna wasn’t certain what had transpired. She woke up in a small room in a place she thought couldn’t be Enuncium. It seemed like a different ship. She had a vague recollection of that blonde girl screaming at the officers, the dark-eyed man knocking somebody out with his fist, and a half-metal man picking her up and carrying her away alongside and old robot.
“Hey,” a woman’s voice said as she looked around the room. It was a kind voice. Jenna could tell immediately. “You’re okay, love. You’re safe.”
“They drugged me,” Jenna said. “They tried to force me—”
She couldn’t finish the sentence. The woman who was floating beside her began to cry with her and held her. “I know, love,” she said. “I know what they did to you. We’re taking you home.”
The woman was a doctor. She told Jenna that she’d checked her all out. She had a minor concussion, extremely low blood sugar levels, and traces of a drug called syratinoprel in her system. Dr. Ren had given her fluids, and when Jenna explained that she hadn’t eaten in five days because she’d been hiding in the vents, she helped Jenna out to the table in the main room and asked her what she wanted to eat.
“Anything,” Jenna said, looking across the table at the man strapped in one of the seats there. It was the half-metal man who’d carried her from Enuncium. “You are real.”
He smiled. “Last time I checked. My name’s Sōsh. You were a little loopy the last time we met.”
“It’s been a tough week.”
“So I heard. Carolina said we’re taking you home, though. Kappa-Aynor? That’s home for you?”
“Is that her name, Carolina?”
“Yeah. You don’t remember talking to her?”
Jenna shook her head.
“You missed quite a scene. I’ve never seen her so furious. She even called the mayor down and lit into her. I thought she was going to have Transom cut open that woman’s windpipe in the middle of the concourse. There were like, veins popping out of Carolina’s forehead. Never seen that before.”
“I wouldn’t have blamed her if Carolina had let Transom slice her open,” Ren said, floating up behind Jenna with a warm dinner pouch. “Macaroni and cheese?”
Jenna nodded and took the pouch in her hands, immediately putting it to her lips.
“Drugging children to work in brothels,” Ren said as Jenna inhaled the food. “I could dream up a lot worse things for those monsters then Transom’s knife.”
Jenna inhaled the food while Ren floated beside her, exhorting her to take it slow. There wasn’t a chance of that happening. Instead, Ren went back to the commissary bar and warmed another dinner.
In a breath between the food and the drink pouch, Jenna asked Sōsh what had happened.
“I think Carolina ended up paying your bond. Burns me to think those bastards made a single cronor off what they did to you, but I guess Carolina thought it was the best way to resolve the situation in the moment.”
Jenna heard a deep voice from the corner say, “There was a bank transfer. A trail. I wouldn’t worry too much about anyone associated with that account living long happy lives off of that money.”
Jenna turned to see that dark-eyed man, floating into the room from the front of the ship. She shrank in her chair at the sight of Transom’s face. Sōsh cast half a reassuring look her way. Then he smiled at her in a way that made her feel safe.
“I did my part,” Jenna announced, grinning. “Not much but I let them know what I thought of their city in my own way.”
“Oh?” Sōsh said.
Ren arrived at the table with Jenna’s second course. She too was enquiring with her eyes.
“I shat in their air purification unit.”
“Come again?” Sōsh said.
Jenna looked at him and smiled, nodding.
All four of them fell out laughing. Jenna could tell it was about the last thing they were expecting an innocent-looking girl like her to say.
“I was in the ventilation system for four days. What can you do but find a place with a down-draft and hope that every last asshole on that ship tastes it in their mouth for a month?”
“I like this kid, boss,” Sōsh said, looking toward the front, where Carolina had just poked her head in. “Can we keep her?”
“She’s going home for now,” Carolina said. “But I’ve got plans for this one, Sōsh. You can bet on that.”
About halfway through the four-day trip back to Kappa-Aynor, Sōsh explained what had been puzzling Jenna about the dynamic on Carolina’s little ship, the Yankee-Chaos. Jenna thought it was strange—about Carolina—not strange that this beautiful young woman could be captain of a nice ship like this, with a very unique crew to say the least. It was the way they treated her. They didn’t just take orders from her because she was the captain. They followed her, revered her. It was almost like she was a princess or a queen or something.
“You don’t know who she is, do you?” Sōsh said when Jenna asked him what was so special about Carolina.
Carolina Dreeson, he told Jenna. Barnard Dreeson’s daughter. Pretty much the princess of Athos. It explained a lot—how they treated her, how she carried herself.
Carolina asked Jenna up to the flight deck on the third day to talk about her future.
“That operation back there,” Carolina told her. “We’re going to break its back, Jenna. Eventually, I promise you we will. But it’s a symptom of the rotting core at the heart of the Greater Battery, and that rot all bleeds out from the war. We’re working on the war right now, but we’re going to be cleaning up the fallout from it for decades. We’re going to need fighters to do that, and I think you can be one of those fighters.”
“How can I help?”
“You’ve seen my bodyguard Sebastian. You’ve seen the way he scares people. He’s very intimidating, no?”
“Sebastian is terrifying.”
“Do you know the person in my father’s administration who truly strikes fear into the hearts of my dad’s enemies?”
Jenna shook her head.
“She’s a little old lady about seventy years old named Rina Tomashi. She’s the best forensic accountant in the entire Battery. You catch people like the ones who hurt you by going after their money. There’s always a trail with every transaction. Those trails tell the story of civilization. Money is what gives people freedom and debt is what enslaves them, as you found out firsthand.”
“Ms. Dreeson, I can never properly repay you—”
“Please, Jenna, it’s Carolina, and it was a blessing for me to be able to get you out of there. But what would be a bigger blessing is if you went back home, aced the rest of your basics courses, and made your way to my alma mater at Ithaca on Athos and studied something useful. Sebastian is good to a point for certain jobs—the best really at what he does. But I’d trade a hundred of him for a single Rina Tomashi. So, please, Jenna, tell me you like numbers or at least like the law.”
“Yes, ma’am. I like them both. Love them, in fact.”
“Good then,” Carolina said. “You know what to do. In a few years, when you’ve learned how to be deadly, we’ll break every one of their evil backs together.”
Carolina had the AI set the ship down just outside Daviston when they got back to Kappa-Aynor. Jenna didn’t even know whether her housebot would have reported her missing. She didn’t know whether her parents would have suspected a thing.
Jenna hadn’t ever been to space before, so it was quite a sight for her to sit up front with Carolina while Yankee-Chaos came in.
Jenna had thoughts, dropping into the atmosphere and watching the landscape come into focus when they passed beneath the clouds.
“Kappa-Aynor,” she said to Carolina. “We have this motto: ‘A beautiful little world filled with good people.’”
“That’s nice,” Carolina replied. “A little quaint, but nice.”
“See, I can’t stop thinking about the festival,” Jenna said. “Enuncium coming here for four weeks and staying in orbit. All those people dancing in their clubs. And those people back on that ship making money off those girls. How many of the good people of Kappa-Aynor kept those monsters in business while they were here? How many of my neighbors, Carolina? My father’s friends?”
Jenna teared up, shaking her head. Carolina reached over from the captain’s chair and held her hand as the ship came in.
When they landed, Carolina’s man Transom—or Sebastian as she called him—he told Carolina that he’d feel better if he personally escorted Jenna to her door.
“Take Sōsh with you,” Carolina said, drawing a grateful look from Jenna, who didn’t want to be alone with him.
Carolina told Jenna she’d check on her progress in her lessons soon. She demanded perfect scores. Ren gave Jenna a generous hug and a peck on the cheek. The old bot, a genuine Maícon, merely bowed as she stepped down the back ramp and off the ship.
Jenna was still uncomfortable around Sebastian, but she felt safe walking from the airfield. This was Daviston, her home. And Sōsh was with her. It felt utterly bizarre to be walking the streets of her hometown with these two fierce warriors.
They were maybe two hundred meters from the ship, with Sōsh walking between them when Sebastian said to Jenna. “Carolina told me to take you home directly. Would you like to know a secret, young Jenna?”
She looked over at him and then at Sōsh.
“I don’t always do what I’m told,” he said. “You see there’s something really bothering me about your story that I just can’t leave unresolved.”
“Please, Sebastian, I—”
“This friend of yours Karo. I wonder about him, how much he knew. It would take me about a minute, and then you’d know for sure, for the rest of your life, no doubts.”
“Transom,” Sōsh said.
“Butt out of this, metalface. It’s the girl’s call.”
“You aren’t going to hurt him?” Jenna said.
“Oh, most definitely I’m going to hurt him,” Transom said. “But I won’t hurt him any worse than what happened to you, and I probably won’t kill him. Almost definitely, I won’t kill him. Not unless he really deserves it.”
“I don’t think so,” Jenna said.
“Or, we’ll pay his house a visit and find out that he’s stuck on that fleet-city too. Maybe his parents are worried sick looking for him, and we’ll tell them where to find him. All you gotta do is lead the way, and we’ll settle this business clean and simple.”
“It’s my call?” Jenna said.
“Kid,” Sōsh said, casting a look her way.
“It’s your call,” Transom agreed.
After a long pause, Jenna said, “I think I want to know.”
Sōsh didn’t say anything, but his body language told Jenna enough. She’d known what Sebastian was from that first glimpse of him, and she thought, as Carolina had said, that a man like him might be the best thing for certain jobs. And she damn well wanted to know about Karo, walking around that town for the next few years. She wanted to know.
They walked up and down the streets of Daviston, a couple kilometers, this nice little city on this nice little world full of good people. For Jenna, it actually felt good to walk, even as nervous as she was about what would happen when she got to Karo’s house.
The walk took about an hour, and hardly a word was said among them. Except at one point Sebastian turned to her and said in that Etteran accent of his, “Nice little city, you live in, kid. Nice little world. God.”
Karo’s parents’ house was at the end of a cozy development stretching into the red rock hills just outside the main square. It was new enough the trees were all small. These two men were as out of place here as Jenna had been in that cramped dormitory hallway on Enuncium.
When they got to the house, Sōsh turned his metal half away from the house and stood out at the street while Jenna walked up to the McGlinchie residence with Transom trailing directly behind her. The bell rang as she approached the door. Karo’s mother answered.
She looked surprised to see her. “Jenna, oh. Um, Karo told me that you two had a fight the other night.”
“Can you get him for me?” Jenna said. “I need to talk to him.”
“Let me check.” Karo’s mother cast a long look at Transom and then a brief look out to the street. “I’m not certain he wants to see you, Jenna. Just a moment.”
She shut the door.
“I’ll give them exactly a minute,” Transom said.
It wasn’t nearly that long before Karo’s father opened the door with a Harold standing beside him and Karo looking out from behind.
“Come on out here, boy,” Transom said. “Miss Jenna here has a few questions for you that you’re going to answer.”
Jenna could see him in there shaking his head, telling his father something under his breath.
“Okay,” the father said looking at Transom and then out at Sōsh in the distance. “I think you folks should go. Karo doesn’t have anything to say to you right now, Jenna.”
Transom started toward the door, and the Harold stepped toward him. “The McGlinchies have asked you to leave the property.”
“Oh, cute,” Transom said. “A housebot.”
The Harold reached for him with incredible speed, and before their eyes could even process what had happened, the Harold was on the ground, deactivated with Transom standing over him, the little black shock box in hand. The bot had collapsed in the doorway, and with one hand, Transom reached inside, grabbed Karo by the shirt, and threw him down to the walkway out front. Then he proceeded to pull the head off the Harold and toss it halfway across the McGlinchies’ yard as he stepped back over the bot’s inert body.
Transom walked ever so calmly outside and pulled the kid to his feet.
“Questions,” he said.
The boy turned white.
“You can’t lie to a man like me, boy,” Transom said, pulling his knife from his pantleg. “I already know the answer.”
“You said you wouldn’t kill him,” Jenna said, approaching but not getting between the Etteran and young Karo.
“I did say that. All I want is the number, Karo. How much was your friend Jenna’s life worth to you? And while you’re thinking about lying to me, also be thinking about the things of value that I can take from you. I promise you place a higher value on these things than you got paid by those flesh traders. Think very carefully before you open your mouth and tell me a lie.”
The young man looked back toward the doorway, where his parents looked out in horror, completely befuddled by the scene unfolding in their peaceful front yard.
“Ten thousand L-Cr,” Karo said. “I didn’t know everything, I swear. They didn’t tell me what would happen.”
“Ten thousand?” Transom said, grabbing the boy behind the neck, raising the flat metal blade toward Karo’s face with his right hand.
“No please!” the mother shouted, tripping and crawling over the body of the decapitated bot in the doorway. “Please, not my son.”
“You know what he did?”
“I promise you please, if he did what you said he’ll face justice. Please, let him face justice.”
Karo’s father stepped out behind her but didn’t approach.
“Justice?” Transom said pointing the knife down at the woman, who was crawling on her knees toward his feet. “Just what universe do you think you’re living in, lady?”
He turned away from her suddenly, startled by Jenna, who was standing now on the other side of him. She reached up, placing her hand on Transom’s shoulder, gently brushing against him to pull him back.
“I wanted to know,” she said. “And now we know. Now we know. And they know too.”
Jenna pulled his other wrist from behind the boy’s neck and tugged at it, slowly leading Sebastian away.
As she walked with him out to the street, Sōsh turned toward the family, looking at them dead on. A half metal man like him was a sight not one of them on Kappa-Aynor had ever seen.
People were starting to come out of their houses to see what the commotion was all about.
Jenna Fortunata released Sebastian’s wrist and just kept walking beside him down the McGlinchies’ street. By the time they got to the intersection at the end of the road, it was all behind them. They were just three people walking in Daviston.
A few minutes later, about halfway home, Jenna turned to Sebastian and said, “I want you to know, Transom, on Enuncium, aboard Radial-Helix N, in addition to Marshall K. Stricha—the man who bought my surety bond— and Stricha’s employee Serra Peters, there’s also a city magistrate named John M. Cole. If you ever find yourself back on Enuncium, you should know with one hundred percent certainty, that John M. Cole, the city magistrate, was in on the entire operation. There was also a woman there named Mal who saved my life, and I don’t know why.”
He took a deep breath and looked away. After a few more steps, Sebastian, looking over the sloping red landscape, down toward the center of town, turned and said to neither of them in particular, “Sure is a quiet little town here. A nice, nice little world.”