CUT OFF FROM ALL THE WORLD

A piece of the wall fell off beside me, clanging like a cymbal as it hit the floor. The floor hit my palms hard as I fell backwards, recoiling from the clamor.

Dirty fingers reached out from within the wall, curling around the edge. The nails were cracked and yellow. A head of thick, dark hair emerged, the locks trailing over shoulders and down the side of the wall.

The creature from inside the ship flipped out onto the floor and rose to her feet, shaking wild hair out of her face. It was a woman, the bones of her face standing out sharply, pale brown eyes large in her hungry face.

All movement in the room ceased. We stared at her as she stared at us, with just as much surprise.

Then she dropped her head back and screamed.

CHAPTER TWO:

Three Convicts and a Generous Opportunity

Let me be clear: that ship should have been empty. If that hadn’t been the case, we would’ve never been sent there.

A week before a ghost-woman screamed at me on an abandoned spacecraft, some men in suits arrived near midnight to take me from my cell. I didn’t think the Republican authorities on the planet Parnasse were prone to ‘disappearing’ illegal refugees who were accidental thieves and repentant almost-murderers, but it wasn’t totally outside the bounds of possibility. Still, I’ve spent a lot of my life being hauled around by authority figures, so I’ve learned when kicking up a fuss won’t do me any good. I followed them onto some cargo elevator that stopped between floors and emptied out into a hallway without cameras. This was the most interesting thing that had happened since the take-down a week ago, which had been full of police officers shouting orders in Sister Standard so tersely and with such heavy Republican accents that I’d almost had trouble understanding them. The guns pointed at my head and Benny’s had made their meaning clear enough, in the end.

“Where’s Benny?” I asked as we started down the hallway. I got no response.

Maybe they couldn’t speak, or couldn’t understand. I tried my question in Kystrene, and Illenich, and Patrene, and once in what I was pretty sure was the local dialect of sign language, but they gave no sign of understanding, which meant they were probably just ignoring me. Fine, I was used to being ignored. Only a handful of Kystrene had escaped the subjugation of our homeworld, and promptly been absorbed by a Republic that preferred pretending nothing had ever happened to facing the fact that they’d abandoned our planet to its fate. Averted eyes and shut doors were commonplace; a little feigned blindness wasn’t about to stop me.

My escorts paused in front of a closed door. It was a perfectly ordinary door, like every other door in the camera-less hallway, but I had some reservations about opening it.

“Did you know there are dialects of sign language?” I asked my escorts, staring at the handle for that door. “There’s a standardized version, thanks to the Ministers, but it varies by region anyway. Visual languages follow the same rules as spoken ones—”