So far, none of the women have been criticized, but I can tell from the tension rolling off Lilli, across the aisle from me, that she’s far from sure that will last.
The female guard finishes with the woman to my right, then steps in front of me. My pulse rushes so fast that for a second, her face blurs in front of me. She reaches for me, and I flinch away.
The guard’s eyes narrow angrily on me.
Danna makes a soft distressed sound on my left, and I stiffen my spine. I can’t get everyone else in trouble.
This time when the guard reaches for me, I grit my teeth and hold still.
She runs one hand into my hair from the back of my neck, feeling of my scalp. Her gaze takes in my face, evidently looking for flaws. Then she frowns at my lips. “Open.”
I open my mouth, and she grabs my chin and tilts my face up toward the light, inspecting my teeth. She inhales inches from my mouth, then she lets me go and moves on to Danna, evidently satisfied.
Lilli seems relieved when both guards make it to the end of the aisle without complaint.
“All right, move it!” the female guard shouts.
The experienced women turn toward the door, and my fellow novices and I follow their lead. We head out of the dorm and form a single line down the center of a wide metal hallway. At the end of the hall, a third guard holds a door open for us.
We march down another length of metal hallway, past a double set of doors, through which I hear running water and the clang of pots and pans. The other closed rooms are all silent.
At the end of the hall, we turn a corner and head through another door held open by yet another guard, and this next hallway is…
I feel like I just stepped through the door onto another planet.
Gone are the metal-paneled walls and sterile white tile.
My steps make no sound on the plush red carpet beneath my bare feet. The walls are covered in red-veined black fabric thick enough to absorb the voice of the guard at the head of our line, and I hope I’m not supposed to hear whatever she’s saying.
Our line slows as we approach a series of doors set into the walls on either side of us. They’re made of solid slats of real wood, as far as I can tell, set into frames of the same material, all sanded and stained a dark, rich color. The effect is archaic opulence. Above each door is a plaque listing a room number.
My pulse begins to race along with my thoughts. We’re not here for the guards. Universal Authority no doubt pays its guards good money, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the authorities turn a blind eye to whatever recreational opportunities they take with the prisoners. But there’s no way the perks even approach this level of organization and luxury.
Universal Authority is renting out female inmates to… To whom?
Who would fly all the way to Rhodon to hire a prostitute?
“Calm down,” Danna whispers at my back. Which is when I realize I’m breathing too hard. And too loudly. “You’ll be fine. Just do whatever he wants. Or whatever she wants. If you’re lucky, it’ll be a woman.”
If I were lucky, I wouldn’t be here.
Hinges squeal open down the hall and I lean to the left to see one of the wooden doors swinging open the old-fashioned way. The female guard escorts a woman inside, and a male guard follows her. A few seconds later he steps back into the hall holding her clothes, which he drops into a cloth bag another guard holds open for him. Then he closes the door and rattles the knob to ensure that it won’t open.
My heartbeat thuds in my ears as we slowly make our way down the hallway, losing woman after woman to room after room. By the time I get to the front of the line, I feel like I’m going to throw up. Which may be why they haven’t fed me yet.
Or maybe I don’t get food until I…cooperate.
Maybe this clean, richly appointed hell isn’t so different from zone four after all.
The female guard glances at me, then points to the open door on my left. I look into the room. It appears to be unoccupied. “Go on,” she snaps.
My hands tremble as I step through the doorway, and though my eyes refuse to focus on anything other than the thick carpet beneath my feet, this room feels every bit as luxurious as the hallway.
“Clothes,” a male guard demands, and I flinch, even though I was expecting the command. Keeping my back to him, I pull my shirt over my head. My hands are shaking so hard I can’t untie the drawstring at the waist of my uniform pants, and finally, with an irritated grunt, he spins me around by one shoulder and picks at the ties himself. “No more double knots,” he grumbles as he shoves my pants over my hips.
I step back, out of the puddle of material, and he snatches it from the floor, then hurries back into the hall. “Do as you’re told,” he warns me as he slams the door shut. The knob rattles, but the door doesn’t move.
I’m locked in.
For a moment, it takes all of my focus to concentrate on breathing slowly and evenly, to keep from hyperventilating. When I’m sure I’m not going to pass out, I turn and take in my surroundings.
The large room is actually a suite. There’s a bathroom immediately to the left of the door, decked out with natural stone surfaces and expensive plumbing fixtures. The glass-walled walk-in shower is spotless and gleaming. A robe hangs from a hook on the back of the door, reflected at me in the mirror. I want to put it on, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t intended for me.
One corner of the main room holds a full bar, with a variety of snacks displayed neatly on the counter. There’s fresh fruit—the first I’ve seen since I was arrested. Bottled water. Gourmet cheeses I’ve never even heard of.
My stomach growls. I turn away from the food before the temptation becomes too much. The food probably isn’t for me either.
In front of the bar is a cluster of couches arranged to face a wall of glass. What appears at first glance to be a single huge window pane is actually three very large panes, stretching the entire length of the room, and through them, I see a broad, flat lawn of red-tinted grass, painted even redder by light from the rapidly setting sun. The lawn is bordered by a large metal wall. Peeking over the wall at the far end of the lawn is an enormous, unbroken stretch of what appears to be untouched forest.
From what I can see, the trees have the typical crimson foliage, which—along with abundant rust-colored seas—are what give the Red Rock its nicknames.
I’ve just turned to confront the huge bed taking up the other half of the room when the door opens at my back.
I freeze, hands clasped over my breasts, as footsteps clomp into the room behind me. Someone whistles, and I flinch.
“She’s a little skittish.” I recognize the voice of one of the male guards. “Just got here today. And she looks pretty young. So a little patience might be in order.”
“Nonsense,” a new voice declares. “I am a personal friend of Warden Shaw, and I paid the security deposit. I’ll do whatever I want with her. Get out.”
“Yes, sir,” the guard says, and I’m trembling all over by the time the door closes again.
Breathe. I suck in one long, slow breath after another, waiting for… something. An order. A touch. Whatever form this hell is going to take. But for nearly a minute, there is only silence. Then, finally, he exhales.
“Turn around.”
2
CALLUM
The clang of metal wakes me up—the slamming of a cell door. Though using the word cell for the pens in this windowless dungeon is giving them credit for more than they deserve.
I’ve counted around six hundred shift changes since I got here. Assuming the guards work half-day shifts—and they seem to—and that my count is anywhere near accurate, with no good way to keep track, I’ve been here about a year, including the months before I started counting shifts.
At first, I marked the days on the back wall of my cell in my own blood, from a scratch on my hand. But they hose down the cells once a week, which kept washing my hashmarks away. And it seemed reckless to keep reopening a
wound, with the risk of infection in a place like this. Especially considering that if I got sick, they would just let me die.
This is death row.
Universal Authority doesn’t invest much in the inmates they’re just going to execute anyway.
“New guy?” Graham asks from the cell across from mine, as the clang of metal fades from my ears. He doesn’t bother to sit up, or even open his eyes. Like me, he’s tall enough that the ceiling of his pen is only a few inches above his head when he stands, which gives him just enough room to stretch out on the concrete floor to sleep. The cells are each a perfect cube made up of concrete floors, ceilings, and walls, except for a front wall of bars. Plus a hole to squat over in one of the back corners.
Below us, a constantly running stream of water washes the waste away, eliminating both the diseases and stench that would come with a bucket, as well as the possibility of clogs and malfunctions that would come with actual toilets.
“Yeah,” I tell Graham. “End of the row, on your side. Skinny kid. Won’t last a week.” I’m not sure why they even brought him here. Most inmates sentenced to death are simply executed at their sentencing, on whatever planet they hail from. It costs money for Universal Authority to transport inmates across the galaxy to Rhodon, and there’s no point in that for murderers who won’t live long enough for their deaths to be exploited.
I’d bet what’s left of my life—to be fair, that isn’t worth much—that the kid at the end of the row killed someone who was incapacitated. Or he shot someone in the back. However he did it, his crime obviously didn’t involve brute force or any great feat of strength or endurance. He was not meant for the enclosure.
The humane thing would be a needle in his vein. Or a club to his head. But they’re not big on humane here.
“Shift change.” Graham sits up and leans against the concrete wall at the back of his pen as the heavy metal door at the end of the aisle opens. The guard patrolling the wide aisle taps the curved screen strapped to his wrist and looks visibly relieved to realize that his shift is over.
“Anything to report?” the new guard asks, while he holds the door open for an inmate pushing a metal cart. Dalton’s coming on duty. Fuck.
I don’t speak the common language, but I understand what the guards are saying to each other, because it’s a variation of the same things said at every shift change, which Graham has translated for me hundreds of times.
“Nothing interesting,” the outgoing guard replies. Then he adds a statement I don’t understand, and Dalton replies with more unintelligible syllables.
“They’re talking about the new prisoner on the end,” Graham says. “They think he’s too skinny, and they’ll have to bulk him up.”
Dalton makes an impatient gesture at the inmate pushing the cart, and the outgoing guard squeezes past them and out the door.
There’s rarely more than one guard on duty on F block because under normal circumstances, there isn’t enough work here for any more than that. This place is designed so that we have no physical contact with each other, or with the guard on duty. And there’s nothing in our cells except a soft, refillable water pouch and the clothes we’re wearing.
Black boxer briefs. That’s all we get.
While the inmate with the cart starts serving gruel at one end of the row, Dalton marches down the aisle, careful to stay within the set of parallel red lines painted along the center. Within those lines, he can’t be touched by inmates reaching between the bars. Though he can be touched by something thrown between the bars. And there’s only one thing inmates have to throw, other than our water pouches.
The last time someone threw a handful of shit at a guard—if memory serves, it was at Dalton—he was hosed down under a high-pressure stream, then beaten to death while he was still wet, by six guards wielding electrified batons.
Now, the only people who fling shit are men tired of waiting to die. Those who’re ready to get it over with. Those unwilling to die for someone else’s entertainment.
I understand the impulse. But if I’m going to die here, I’m going to take as many guards with me as I can.
While I wait for my meal, I drop to the floor of my cell for a set of pushups. Exercise is required at the Resort. Sit-ups. Pull-ups from the bar stretching across the top of every cell. And, of course, the endless running in place. Because they want us in good shape, but they’re unwilling to let us out of our cages. The whole thing requires a delicate balance. Guards hold back your food and water if you don’t exercise enough. But if you do too much, you burn more calories than can be replaced by the high-calorie, nutritionally sound but tasteless slop served once a shift in this shithole.
Dalton stops in front the new guy’s cell. “Name?”
I know that word too.
The new kid is only three down from me, so I can see him standing in the center of his cell, arms crossed, silently refusing to answer. Then he backs out of sight, and when Dalton’s gaze tracks downward, I gather that the kid is sitting against the rear wall.
The guard taps something on his wrist device. “William Truman,” he reads from the screen. Then he says more words I don’t understand.
“He’s eighteen, in Earth-standard solar units,” Graham translates. “Convicted of stabbing his father to death in his bed.”
By F block standards, killing one man in his sleep hardly even registers as a crime. The man two down on my other side raped and murdered twelve women in an eight-month period. The man to Graham’s left killed and ate five people at a terraforming outpost on a largely unpopulated planet. And the man at the far end on my side was part of the maintenance crew of a small freighter who chopped up every single crew member on his ship, then packaged the parts and delivered them to the victims’ families.
“Dalton wants him to do pushups,” Graham adds.
Finished with my own pushups, I turn over to start a set of bicycle crunches, while, across the aisle, Graham does a handstand against the rear wall of his cage, then dips into the first in a set of vertical pushups.
I finish my crunches just as the inmate pushing the cart stops in front of my cell. He pours several big scoops of gruel into a large paper bowl, then he sets it on the ground and uses a stick with a curved piece on the end to push it across the red line toward an open slot at the bottom of the door to my cell. The bowl stops within arm’s reach.
“Any news?” I whisper as I reach through the slot and pull my meal into my pen, and Graham translates my question into the common language.
The server is a short, thin man wearing a clean standard-issue prison uniform. Which means he’s not on death row; he’s just unlucky enough to be serving his time here, instead of in the open population. Or maybe he considers that lucky. Here, his day is dictated to him by a work schedule, but he doesn’t have to fight for food and shelter.
He says something I can’t understand, then moves on to the next cage.
Graham’s feet thump to the floor of his cell, then he squats and reaches through the slot to claim his own meal. His gaze finds mine as he translates. “You’re up. Tonight.”
I nod, and though the knowledge that my execution is hours away shouldn’t be good news, the thrill it sends through me is undeniable. I knew my time was close. I’ve been here longer than anyone left on F block.
I lift my bowl and pour dinner into my mouth. Gruel isn’t really solid enough to chew, and we don’t get spoons, which means we drink most of our meals. The slop has no true flavor, except for the bitter aftertaste of whatever protein and vitamin supplements they add to keep us from losing muscle mass.
After all these months, I can hardly even remember what real food tastes like. Mattresses are more a fantasy than a memory. And I would cut off my own arm for one glimpse of the sun, instead of the stark white overhead lighting. Though I can’t understand what most of them are saying, my neighbors seem to feel the same way.
“You ready?” Graham lifts his paper bowl to his mouth.
“Does i
t matter?” Tonight’s the night, whether I’m ready for it or not. And the truth is that there’s no way to get ready for what’s coming, other than eating the gruel and staying in shape. And visualizing the hell I’m going to unleash on whoever’s been selected as my executioner.
“No,” Dalton growls when the inmate with the cart tries to feed the kid at the end of the aisle. I can’t understand the rest of his words, but I know what he’s saying.
No food until you exercise. A skinny kid won’t last in the enclosure.
But the kid isn’t hungry enough yet to cooperate.
I finish my meal and drop the paper bowl down the waste hole, where it’s washed away in a stream of foul water. Then I stand and grab the bar overhead for some bent-knee pull-ups while I try not to think about anything.
For the first few months I was here, I tried to think about everything. To remember every song I’ve ever known and book I’ve ever read, word for word. To remember every punch I’ve ever thrown and every girl I’ve ever touched, to keep from going crazy, trapped in my own head. But living in the past, mired in all the things I’ll never have again, began to slowly chip away at my sanity.
Now I find it much more calming to think of nothing but the next motion. To count reps and focus on form. On isolating individual muscle groups and maximizing the efficiency of the exercise.
From the cells around me come grunts as the other inmates work out. I doubt some of them even know why that’s required. The guards here don’t tell us anything, and if it weren’t for the inmate pushing the cart, I wouldn’t have any idea why I was shipped across the galaxy instead of given a lethal injection at my sentencing.
A little later, the inmate returns, this time pushing a much smaller cart. When he gets to my cell, I stand and take off my shorts, then I slide them through the slot at the bottom of the cell door. The inmate rakes them over the red line, then picks them up and drops them into a cloth bag hanging from the cart. Then he plucks a clean pair from the stack and pushes it across the floor toward my cell with his stick.
Hunter Page 2
