As she’d said, everyone had them inside Perdition, crimes for which they’d never been charged or convicted, sins that had driven them to darker deeds. There was some solace in the bottom of the abyss; this was where people rolled to a stop after an interminable fall.
After the fight, they didn’t speak again. She led the way quickly through the other borders, and she didn’t stop until they reached the dubious safety of Queensland. The sentries snapped to attention as she crossed with the three men behind her.
“Anything to report?” she asked.
“Nil.”
Sometimes it was a colossal pain in the ass to guard so much ground. On bad days, it felt futile, like conflict they invented to keep themselves from going mad from the realization that their lives were pointless. Such nihilism would destroy her if she let it.
Dred nodded at the guards and led the way past into the heart of Queensland. She tried to imagine what it looked like to the fish—tawdry, she supposed, and full of delusions of grandeur, relics of Artan’s rule. This had been a fitness room at some point, where the workers could train on the machines or run laps if they preferred. It was a good-sized space, and she’d divided it up in sections for various functions. Everyone had a job to do, as work kept her men from killing one another. Well, most days. If the tensions ran too high, she ran death matches to settle grievances. The betting distracted the convicts. Most of them were simple souls with rotten teeth and low aspirations.
“Get something to eat,” she told Einar and Tam.
It was a dismissal; they left without a second look.
“You’ve carved out quite a kingdom here,” the man beside her said.
“Not me. I only stole it.”
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Isn’t that what they say?”
“It is, but that doesn’t mean I built this.” After listening to Tam’s advice, she’d made some improvements, though. Artan’s idea of organization had been somewhat lacking.
He shrugged. “In here, keeping it seems like a fair achievement.”
“Don’t pretend to be kind. Don’t flatter me. I brought you here because I recruit the best of the dregs, which is why my territory doesn’t lose a single centimeter.”
“Oh, I like you,” he purred. “What’s your name?”
“Dred.”
“That must be a prison handle. No mother would name her daughter Dread.”
“It’s a nickname. D-R-E-D.”
“Must be short for something.” He cocked an inquiring brow at her.
Dresdemona Devos, she thought. But she didn’t confide such things in her fish.
“Must be,” she agreed aloud. “What should I call you?”
“I’m Jael,” he answered.
“JL? What does that stand for?” The moment she asked, she recognized the tactical error, as she’d done the thing she just chided him over.
“Whenever you feel like exchanging stories, queenie, we can brew a nice cuppa, share our deepest feelings, and give each other matching tattoos.”
She offered her sweetest smile. “The hydroponics lab does keep us in sweetleaf tea. It’s not the finest blend, but the plants are hardy. Even gross mismanagement can’t kill them.”
“Splendid,” he muttered. “And it’s J-A-E-L since you were kind enough to share a spelling lesson with me.”
“Excellent. Now I know how to write your name when it comes time to draw lots for the worst missions.”
He suppressed a smile, as if her acerbic nature delighted him. Dred didn’t want him to approve of her; she only needed him strong and willing to fight. Yet she sensed this man did as he pleased and only pretended to obey. She couldn’t claim he hadn’t warned her.
Back in Shantytown he’d said, I have issues with authority. In Perdition, however, that was like saying, I kill people. Other convicts would just shrug because it was a given. They didn’t send people to a whitefish lockdown like this one for stealing baubles.
“Does this place have a still?”
“In fact, it does. But you’ll have to earn your ration cards. I can’t have all my men drunk at once. Bad for business.”
“Death is your business.”
Her smile widened. “And business is good.”
“I knew you were going to say that.” Dred saw how he choked his response, buried the flare in his blue eyes that looked like a tiny spark, flickering within the purest heart of flame.
“So you’re Psi as well,” she said, deadpan. “Precog, I suppose? Tell me, how does my story end?”
“Not with a bang but with a whimper.”
“That’s how everyone goes out, I reckon. Unless they’re gurgling.”
“I never whimper. Or gurgle.”
“What’s your specialty?” she asked, sobering.
It wouldn’t do to like him, or to encourage teasing. She’d learned not to get attached. People died all the time in border battles, invasions . . . sometimes by their own hands. Over time, she’d discovered it was easier to go numb. The convicts who chose to live in Queensland weren’t her people. They were pawns to be used or sacrificed according to her convenience. She’d do well to remember that.
“Unarmed combat.”
“That’s convenient, as we’re fresh out of guns.”
Before Dred formulated her next move, walleyed Wills broke from the curious onlookers; it was hard to talk to him because she never knew where to look. His head offered a plethora of unfortunate features from the carbuncle on his neck to the nose that sat nearly sideways on his face from so many untreated breaks. And there were his eyes . . .
Of course, he held his bag of bones. And he wouldn’t go away until she let him read what they presaged about this new arrival.
“Is this a good time, ma’am?”
Not really. It never was, but Wills got downright irrational if she refused to let him exercise his gift. As psychoses went, this one was relatively harmless . . . and preferable to his setting things on fire. Wills made up for the annoyance by being able to fix damn near anything.
“Never better,” she said, humoring him.
Jael fell into the spirit of the thing, leaning forward as Wills dumped the fine bones into his palms. They came from rodents that infested the ship. They’d come in with some shipment of supplies, turns ago, and multiplied like mad. She ate them when she could catch them, but the things had mutated over the turns, likely due to exposure to radiation from the aging ship. The only blessing was they could no longer fit in the ducts and panels to chew the wiring.