Aokan shuffles back through the yards toward the reflection building. It's an overcast day today, with the chill of the summer's departure infusing a crispness into the air. But the sweat is building under Aokan's arms. Why did stupid Pek have to go and do some kind of stupid hunger strike?

He moves through the washed-out lights of Reflection Intake, where they pat him down.

"You need protection gloves?" one guard asks.

"Nah," Aokan says.

They look at each other.

"You usually do reflection with Pakani, right?" the same guard ventures. "Not Wula?"

"I'm fine," he says. "All right? I'm a nonviolent offender. The worst thing I heard today was I got a guy fired."

They step aside. Past them, then, and their whispering, and into the unventilated heat and cheap incense smoke of the main chamber. An irregular ring of crannied easy chairs, overstuffed and threadbare. Aokan fills a cup with cold-brewed tea—the tea is very good, at least; they want to keep you physically comfortable during this part—and approaches the center of the room, where his torturer waits on a high scaffolded seat, a stopwatch in one claw. The other reaches down.

"Workbook," she says, in a low monotone.

Aokan hands it over and listens to the rustle of the pages turn. A strident beep emerges from Wula's stopwatch and she climbs from her seat, into the shivering dark. He watches her lift the chin of an inmate, scanning his glistening eyes and his choked sobbing with the appraising detachment of a food critic. Her eyes flash at the man. "Two more minutes," she says, and releases her grip on him to drop him back into his sorrow.

Aokan squares his shoulders and watches Weeping Wula return to her station. She climbs back into her seat with his workbook under her arm. Here it comes.

Be resolute. Remember how you feel right now. You would do it all again for her. Remember that.

Flash. "Begin your reflection period." Wula holds the book out. "Twenty minutes. Ponder the harm you have caused. Imagine yourself in the place of the people you hurt. Do not turn away yet."

Aokan had begun to peel off. He refocuses on Wula's face in time for another massive pulse of red.

"Concentrate especially on Rushar Fanik," she says. "Go now."

Fucking asshole, he thinks, gripping so tight on his tea that he's bending the soft silicon cup. But his steps are already faltering as he finds his spot. The first foreboding wash of remorse catches him as he sits in a vacant chair.

He opens the workbook across his lap. There's Sarna of Penn first. That's a mercy. He imagines fraught meetings in offices after hours, crumpled papers, canceled plans. He thinks about all the times Sarna didn't come home until it was dark outside, because of what he did. The merits and the promotion slide through his mind, and he scrambles for purchase on them. But Weeping fucking Wula's compulsion is like a freezing river, like black ice, and they spin away on the treacherous tide.

And here comes Rushar. Aokan curls his head between his knees like he's bracing for a crash. The despair slams into him, the regret. The letter of severance, the uprooting. Everything in boxes. How many friends will he never see again? How many places did he promise himself he'd go? How many futures foreclosed on? He thinks of a woman breathing her last in an unlit room, of farewells and parting secrets and final assurances of love that were never stated and never can be, locked away from this life forever by tyrannies of time and distance.

His hands shake. His eyes screw tightly shut. My fault. I did this. It's my fault. It's my fault. It's my fault. It's my fault. It's my fault. It's my fault.

He tries to shake it off, tries to move on, but his mind stays stuck in it, in an unnatural feedback loop, like a hand being held to a hot stove, trapped in a spinning typhoon of guilt and grief and Rushar's inherited rage against himself. He curls in on himself and feels the hot tears drip down his face.

With one deafening final exhale, the gauntlet squeezing his mind releases and he opens his eyes. He shakes his head and glances further down the page, blinking the sodden sorrow out of his tear ducts. His grip on himself left marks from his fingernails. He should have put the damn gloves on.

"Stop."

A crisply cuffed hand lands on the page. He looks up. Wula is standing before him, timer in hand. Has it already been twenty minutes? He glances at her stopwatch. God, it's only been five.

Flash. "You haven't pondered Rushar long enough, I think," Wula says. "Two more minutes. Then your timer starts again."

She pads back to her seat.

Usually, it takes only a few minutes on the drydock to cure Aokan of his reflection mood. He likes working on the drones, powerwashing the grit and swapping the modulars. It's the sort of stuff he used to do on the outside and hopes to do again. The fountaining sparks, the chatter and laughter of his fellows. He likes the welding goggles. They remind him of anticomps, make him feel a little less helpless.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

But the pall hanging over him after Weeping Wula is harder to penetrate, and only half-shaken off by the time the shift buzzer calls him to the cell block for lunch.

He sees the knot of guards and his feet instinctively crave to take him across the avenue or down a different street or into shelter. But there's none of that here. There's only the one road, and they're already looking at him and pointing him out to one another. So he does what he did the first time a bunch of guys in riot armor grabbed him and shuttled him away; he lets them bear him and imagines himself standing somewhere high and clear, with the wind all around him and the sky vast before him.

They take him into a bare interview room. He's been in one of these plenty of times. Investigators checking his story or some such. Always the same shell chairs, the same table, the same camera in the corner.

The huge pink alien is new.

"This is him?" the alien asks, in flawless Taiikari. Implant maybe.

"Yes, Majesty."

"Majesty." Aokan intends it as a question, almost, but it comes out too tight and full of disbelief. Bow, idiot. He bows.

The giant smiles through the fur growing on his face and extends his hand. "Prince Grantyde of the Black Pike. You know my wife already."

A curt nod from the woman standing next to him. Aokan registers her for the first time. Oh, God.

Aokan doesn't take the Prince's offered handshake; he bows again, bows lower this time, forehead almost to floor, like he bows every morning in the cell.

He straightens to see the Prince return his hand to his side with an odd look on his face, and the Princess of the entire goddamn Black Pike sector, looking at him like he's something that got on her shoe.

"Aokan of Lilek," she says. She is not smiling. "Sabotage, blackmail, coercive threats, illegal operation of a sweep-fitted vessel."

He doesn't know what to say to this litany.

"We are here to give you a choice." She folds her arms. "One my kindly husband feels you are worthy of."

"We've asked the Shakami facility managers," Prince Grantyde says. He looks—shaken? Fidgety. Like he doesn't like what he's seen of this place. "And they report that you've been a model prisoner. Even if you were uncooperative during your original interviews to the point of compulsion. Which I'll mark down to loyalty to your union, and excuse."

The Princess of the Black Pike—the actual fucking Princess Sykora—exhales through her nostrils at that and glances away. Aokan thought maybe there was artistic liberty being taken with the picture of her on the wall, but no; she is as gorgeous in the flesh as she is in portraiture. Even moreso, maybe.

"You have the option of finishing your term at Shakami," Grantyde says. "Or, if you want, you can depart, and serve the rest of it in indenturement."

Aokan's stomach divebombs. Indenturement. He refocuses on the Princely giant. "To you?"

Prince Grantyde shakes his head and steps to one side. The interview room door swings open again. The calcified shell Aokan grew over his heart cracks in half and crumbles away.

Dirty blonde hair framing a smirking, world-weary face. The little scar marring her upper lip, the one she got in a bar fight, she told him. The cock of her hips under the blue sash she's tied around them.

She came for him.

"Howdy, soldier boy," she says.

His legs wobble.

The room swells into him as he loses his steadiness. He's caught and helped into the plastic shell chair in front of the interview table. And Corska is here, Corska Ondai, who has come for him, who has fulfilled her promise. Her arms thrown around him, her scent.

"It's okay," she whispers. "It's okay. I'm here. My brave soldier. You're coming home, Aokan." Her breath tingles the skin of his neck. "I'm here to take you home."

He's in a landcar, now, with a black bracelet welded around his wrist and a starched change of clothes in his lap. The sun has dipped beyond the great mass of Ptolek. A red subsurface-scattered light paints the rolling countryside. Just the two of them on this lonely stretch of road.

"You've got a lot of people excited to see you," Corska says. "Everyone knows what you've done for them."

"It was all for you," he says. "Just you, Corska."

"I know." She glances from the road. "And I'm so fucking proud of you. We are going to have such a goddamn rager for you tomorrow."

"Tonight I just want to sleep," Aokan says. "In an actual bed, not an elevated bunk with a towel on it."

Corska nods, eyes on the road, hands on the wheel. He listens to the whoosh of traffic in the opposite lane, like the tide. He watches the stripes of highway light filter across the woman who saved him.

"That was Prince Grantyde, huh?" he asks.

"That was him," she says.

"I heard he was handsome but dim."

"I did, too."

"He's handsome, anyway."

"He is."

"Is he dim?"

"I think dim is a useful reputation for a man with a face like his to have," Corska says. "The firmament loves a naive dunce with broad shoulders and a smile, and he seems to know it. He's one of the organizers on Qarnaq's exo ring."

"What's Qarnaq?"

Corska chuckles. "You really have been out. Qarnaq is the key, is what Qarnaq is. Qarnaq's what puts food on everyone's table for a kilocycle."

Aokan clicks his tongue. "So we can control him?"

"Not openly, and not brazenly," Corska says. "And not easily. He has advisors and he isn't as naive as he looks." She takes a hand off the wheel to squeeze Aokan's knee. "But we have our inroads. I got him to let a jailbird like you out. If we play our cards right, that alien is exactly what we've been waiting for."

He's been so wrapped up in what she's saying that he doesn't realize she's taken an exit until the wheels chunk onto the lowland road. "Where are we going?"

"I told you," she says. "I'm taking you home."

He glances at the unfamiliar lights in this neighborhood. "This isn't the way to my apartment."

"Well, you're indentured." She grins. "My property, remember?"

He scoffs. "Come on, chief."

She stares at him with a funny expression on her face. She kills the engine. "Do you want me to take you home?"

"Do you…" He looks out his window, at the apartment block she's stopped in front of. Looks like one of the studio prefabs. Shared kitchens, single beds. "Do you even have a bed for me?"

"Mine," she says.

"What?"

"I have my bed for you," she says.

"And you take the couch?"

She steps out of the car and moves around to his door. She unbuckles his seatbelt. "Come on, Aokan."

Aokan's stomach flutters. "You said—"

"I know what I said." Her hand slides across the black indenturement bracelet that's been sealed around his wrist. Her forefinger curls around it. "I've thought about it. What you told me when you went inside. I've thought about it every day, Did you think I was using you?"

"I didn't care." Her touch sends prickles of electricity along his fingers. "If you were, I wouldn't mind. I told you that."

"I was," she whispers. "I was using you, Aokan. And you let me." Her fingers interlace with his. "You ate shit for all of us. A score of people. You let us all be free. I used you."

She gives a gentle tug. He steps from her car. He's moving as if in a dream. The sure steps of a compelled man, without the flash.

"Come upstairs with me." Corska pulls him to the threshold. "Use me back."

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.