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After a featureless eternity of first lying on the bunks or the bulkheads, then of sitting staring at scratched, dirty hands, Wyn forced herself to move.
"At least with a hangover you can throw up," Ellie moaned.
There were people all about them who had not reached the sitting, staring, or moaning stage. Some never would. Later that "day," CD Marines herded trusties in to remove the bodies before people started to panic.
Thereafter, bunks were not at all scarce in Wyn's bay.
The 'cast Wyn had seen on BuReloc showed men and women earnestly about the business of rehabilitating themselves and making themselves fit colonists. She wondered who dreamed mat one up.
She thought she could understand the convicts who suddenly began screaming and hurling themselves against the bulkheads. Certainly, she could understand the man whose wife died and who, next time the call came for work crews, went out and never came back. Either he'd run wild or-and Wyn hoped this-he'd seized the chance to enlist in the CD forces.
The filth, the uncertainty, the threats of violence, even the "days" and "nights" that passed, perceptible only by a diminution of the light from scarred panels roused her first into fury, then into frenzy she could not express. The woman in the bunk beside hers had foul breath; Wyn lay awake one night plotting how to suffocate her.
Ostensibly, a prison ship was just that-bare bones. In actuality, if you had money or valuables, you could buy almost anything . . . or anyone. Mindful of Dr. Ryan's advice and Ellie's street smarts, Wyn guarded what was in her bookbag, doling it out to the men on work crews to trade for medicinals, even an occasional treasure of food or drink, anything that would make her life and the lives around her a little less bleak.
She tried to rough out articles she'd never write, even a chapter of the book she had started before her arrest. But she would forget critical words in the Greek texts she had known by heart since she was a girl, and, overpowered by the confinement, the stink, and the hopelessness, her arguments raveled and faded into apathy. She began to think she had enough tranks left, probably, to kill herself: better so, perhaps.
"You think you're fooling me, Boston?" Ellie asked. "I've seen it when a girl gets like you. She's thinking of cashing in. And you know what I tell her?"
Let the old whore babble, Wyn thought. Maybe it would tire her out and she'd let everyone alone.
"I tell her to live long enough to spit on the bastards' graves, that's what I tell her. And what I'm telling you. You've done good here. We got a kind of law in this bay, and we all mow it's you. If you check out, what's that mean to everyone else?"
Wyn raised a heavy eyelid. "What makes you think I care?" she asked.
"Boston, you're full of shit. 'Course you care. You got 'good citizen' all over you."
Wyn glanced down at herself. She had gotten very thin in the past months; that happened when you gave away your rations most of the time. "What I have written all over me is dirt," she snapped.
"Then clean up your act, will you? Thin as you are, how you going to survive the next Jump? And you got some graves to spit on, remember?"
"That's a long way back," Wyn objected.
"Then you're going to have to be in shape to make the trip."
There was no way back; Wyn had known that in her bones from the time she had boarded. But Ellie's mouth wobbled, and she . . . my God, she was even crying. No one had ever cried over Wyn before. And now that she thought of ft. she realized how quiet it was around where she lay, as parents kept their children quiet around her, hoping she would make the turn away from despair and back to them.
Wyn sighed and levered herself up. It seemed about a light year to the head, where she traded a gold pen for the chance to take a brief, blessedly hot shower. Thanks to a man released from cleaning detail, she had ship's chow from the CD galley and ate it with more appetite than she'd had for weeks. It gave her the strength to stomach ordinary rations the next day and all the days afterward. As soon as she could walk about the bay without staggering, she forced herself to do isometrics and to increase the time she spent exercising in the days that passed.
Another Jump, and she survived it. Now, she found herself restless, as she had in her first days on board. After prowling about the bay so often that people were heartily sick of it, she hacked her hair short and volunteered for cleanup duty.
It wasn't as if women were exempt from "volunteering." Usually, the Marines recruited female convicts for galley work or for cleanup in a place where they needed someone small, with a lower center of gravity. What else the women did in some cases was a matter of rumors-plus what Wyn personally considered the fairy tales of Marines and even officers falling for a particularly pretty girl.
With her hair cut short, scrawny as she was, her face pallid from long confinement, Wyn didn't think she was a sight to break the heart of some hapless CoDo officer, while midshipmen were a whole lot likelier to run the other way.
It was a relief to leave the bay, to thread through corridors and passageways she hadn't seen, but that she marked in the too-keen scholar's memory that even despair hadn't taken from her. The bite of antiseptics came as a positive pleasure, and so did the warmish water and watching the grimy bulkhead gleam beneath her scrubbing hands.
She gri
She was kneeling on the deck, rubbing away at a particularly tough smudge when a kick from a boot sent her sprawling.
"Can't believe my luck!" came a voice Wyn had last heard thickened by blood after he'd been punched.
She levered herself up from the deck, murder in her eye, and the boot kicked her flat again.
Where had she seen that face before? Above a gray coverall . . . smeared with blood. That was right. He had been a trusty, one of the men who'd spaced Nina's father and raped her.
Pretend you don't recognize him. Lie your way out, she told herself.
"I said I'd get ya. Never thought I'd find you alone, though, and on your knees. Good place for you."
Wyn glanced down the hall. To think that a moment earlier, she'd been glad the Marines were nowhere in sight. She drew her breath for the loudest scream of her life, but the man pounced forward. A needle-thin knife flashed before her eyes as he grabbed her coverall with his other hand. The wet, flimsy fabric ripped, and Wyn gasped.
"Quiet, bitch! You're coming with me."
"What do you think you're doing?" she demanded.
"Getting some of my own back. You cost me a soft berth. Now you owe me, gotta make it up to me."
"That's stupid. You were breaking the law," she snapped. "What good does this do?"
"Good? Because I can. Like I could with the girl."
Adrenaline washed through Wyn. "Look at the man," she hissed. "Too bad they didn't space you too."
He backhanded her and she spat blood at him as he dragged her down the corridor.
Wyn struggled, trying to stamp on his instep, trying to bite the hand that held her, to pull free so that she could scream and run, but always, there was the knife in front of her face. It wasn't death she feared, nor being cut . . . it was her eyes! What if he blinded her! The fear made her tense her muscles so her bladder wouldn't give way.
A port was coming up, and he shoved it open onto what was little more than a closet. Long enough, Wyn found, for her to fall full length onto the deck, and for him to fall upon her. He barely kicked the door closed.