32nd of Uirra

Rain beat against the freighter's main cargo deck, sheets of water lashing at us with malevolent force, plastering clothing to skin, sluicing over bent shoulders, running in rivulets from brow and chin. Between the dark and the rain, the dingy yellow glow of the deck flood gas lamps on the main smokestack only succeeded in casting deep shadows, rendering everything in blurry shades of sulphur and ink. Beyond the edge of the railing there was an absolute darkness that swallowed the light of the searchlights on the bow of the freighter.

The lights were blinking. One long flash, one short, a pause, then the same again.

I buried my nose in the crook of my arm, breathing in the damp space between my elbow and the soaked wood of the deck. Fierda hunched next to me, doing much the same. It was the only way to get a real breath as we waited, fifty girls and twenty men lined up ten to a row, all of us on our knees with our foreheads to the floor while the rain tried to wash us away.

I took another lungful of tar-scented air and tried to calm the clacking of my teeth. Questions wheeled through my brain, but it wasn't as if I could ask Ugly Face why we were signaling to a harbormaster's tower instead of passing cargo off to another ship like Obyrron had mentioned in his journal. So I sat there, shivering, grimly trying to keep from sliding away with every roll of the slippery deck as the ship steamed slowly past a breakwater and into the quiet water of a harbor.

Finally, the freighter cut its engines and began a lazy swing to port. There was a bump of docking pads, and then Beetlelegs began shouting at us, prodding at our bent backs with a long, pointy stick, "Up-up-up-up!"

In doing so, he was getting soaking wet just like the rest of us, which made me smile.

My smile died as I got to my feet and fiery needles erupted down my numb calves, the heat of my own blood scalding as it coursed into frigid muscles. Swaying, I reached for the length of chain separating me from Fierda. She pulled back, offering resistance, and together we steadied each other – the better to keep from being singled out and beaten.

For being slave drivers, the Panesians didn't seem to care if we had marks on us or not. As Ugly Face liked to say, he had already been paid for our transport, so our survival was up to us. They were careful not to hit our faces, though, I had noticed. Just backs, and thighs, and knees, and buttocks. Hard enough to bruise, not hard enough to break.

These were the things we were told to be grateful for.

These were the things I kept in my list.

Ugly Face gave a command from somewhere behind us, and Beetlelegs began barking, "You! Move!" shoving and smacking at us, aiming a thick finger at the starboard railing. The first girl in line staggered forward, then the next, and then all of us were shuffling along like a string of wooden windup toys, trying to keep from slipping on the deck or tripping on our chains as we made for the boarding gate that the Piglet opened for us, then down a steep gangplank and onto a loading platform, toes stubbing into the crosspieces that were meant to be stairs.

The Piglet and Beetlelegs came down after us, and immediately the poking and prodding began again. Get in a single file line. Start walking. Don't stop. We marched down the length of the loading platform, and straight into the open end of some sort of warehouse or hangar. All I got was a vague impression of dimly lit dark grey walls. The fact that there was a roof somewhere overhead and the rain wasn't hitting me anymore was all I cared about. I kept my head down, concentrating only on the bare feet of the girl ahead of me, stepping when she stepped so I could stop when she stopped.

The Piglet bellowed the command to halt, but when several of the others automatically began to kneel, he smacked them with his stick. "No! Up! Hands out!"

I swayed where I stood, dumbly grateful my knees had been too stiff to bend, and lifted my hands, holding them palm up.

My fingers were wrinkly and pale. I couldn't make them stop shaking.

Beetlelegs was coming along the line, stopping in front of each person, unlocking their wrist shackles, and disconnecting them from the chain that linked all of us, while Piglet made sure we stayed in line.

As if any of us had the strength to run.

It took forever, but then the Piglet stepped up behind me, delivering a warning shove to my ribs with the butt-end of his switch. I kept my face carefully blank as Beetlelegs unlocked the left wrist cuff of my shackles, his fingers impersonal and efficient.

I didn't look up. It had ceased to surprise me, that indifference. Beetlelegs had never been particularly cruel, but he was never kind, either. To him, we were cattle. Dogs, maybe.

He dropped my hand and stepped to the left to do the same to Fierda.

For the first time since I had woken up in the bin, I was standing free. The urge to run flared for exactly one second before petering out, stifled by experience. I would get about ten steps before the Piglet caught me. Then I would get a whipping, and so would two other people.

So I stared at the floor between my bare feet. It was made of cobblestone, not wood, and I watched the rainwater drip off my drenched petticoat, gather into a puddle, and run along a crack, where it joined another trickle, then another, forming a miniature river that flowed toward a drain a few dozen meters away. So much fresh water, all going down a hole. I swallowed. After two months on reduced water rations, it seemed almost a tragic waste.

No. It's not tragic. What is tragic is you thinking you have to drink all that water to keep from wasting it...

Something was happening farther up the line. The Piglet was shoving people around again, and I shot a haphazard peek in that direction, hoping to avoid being shoved.

He was separating the men from the women, herding the men off toward a partition of canvas that hung from the lofty ceiling.

There were other people there.

I hadn't noticed them before. Two men and a woman, all dressed in long blue frock coats; the woman had a writing tablet in the crook of her arm and a neat little cap perched on her head. She looked like a secretary about to take a report.

In my head I lifted my lip in a sneer when she did exactly that, jotting down notes as the male slaves came toward the partition and the two men in frocks began ordering them around in Altyran, "Stand here! Arms up! Head back!"

The Piglet barked the order to move, and I looked away, my ankle chains clanking as I shuffled after the girl ahead of me again, this time toward another partition and another set of people in blue frock coats.

There were five girls between me and the front of the line. I watched from under my lashes, my attention sharpening, as they were given the same orders as the men: "Stand here! Arms up! Head back!" while a tall, thin man looked at their teeth, felt their throats for swellings, pinched their arms.

When the thin man was finished cataloging things, that first girl was shoved behind the partition, where she was stripped - forcibly - of every last scrap of her clothing by a team of other women.

My heartbeat began kicking up. I had never been naked in front of anyone, but in that moment, that wasn't the thing I was afraid of. They would find Arramy's pendant. I dared a glance at the Piglet. He was watching too closely. He would see if I lifted my hands to slip the pendant cord from my neck.

There were only two girls left between me and that tall thin man.

Out of desperation, I angled my body slightly away from the Piglet, dropped my chin to my chest, grabbed the necklace cord between my teeth, and inched it upward until the pendant was in my mouth. I was still working the knot in the leather with my front teeth when the thin man finished with the girl in front of me.

Long, large-knuckled fingers wrapped around my shoulder, drawing me forward when I didn't move to stand in front of the thin man fast enough. "Come on, lass... let's have a look at you."

The voice was softer and smoother, but that almost-familiar lilting brogue made my head snap upward in spite of my determination to finish chewing through the cord.

Storm blue eyes peered down at me from behind a pair of thick spectacles, and for a split-second I stared up at him, my stupid heart skipping. But while his face was certainly lean, his cheekbones were too prominent and his nose too long. Still, his features hinted at mountain heritage, and combined with the accent, I found myself hanging there, frozen, waiting just to hear the man speak again.

He frowned instead, bushy brown eyebrows dipping behind the metal rims of his spectacles as his gaze homed in on the leather between my lips. Still holding onto my shoulder, he caught hold of the cord with his other hand and gave a firm yank.

I bit down hard, but he just kept pulling until it became a choice between the pendant or my front teeth. A tiny sob ripped from my chest as I let go and he jerked the necklace free hard enough to tear cord from my neck.

I brought my fingers to my aching mouth, glaring at him and blinking away the sting of tears as he flipped the pendant over in his palm, holding it in the light from the overhead lamps.

He glanced at it briefly, then closed his fingers around it. "No sign of lumps," he called over his shoulder to the man with the writing board. "She's had the Red River Fever, though. Another one for Ag... S'all she's fit for. Can't find good stock anymore."

The man behind him scribbled that in his ledger, reached into one of the boxes on the table next to him, and handed the tall thin man a red metal tag on a string. The tall thin man tied the tag around my right wrist, and that was that. The entire exchange took less than a minute, and then two of the stout women came bustling out from behind the partition and began pushing me into the stripping area.

Distracted, I went along with them, my eyes still on the tall, thin man. He had just lied. He hadn't checked my throat for lumps. He hadn't even asked me to raise my arms. There were no scars from Red River Fever anywhere on me because I had never had it. Why had he lied?

I swallowed hard. He had also pocketed Arramy's necklace. It wasn't in his hand anymore as he directed Fierda to stand there and raise her arms.

The women didn't bother with undoing laces or buckles or togs. They came at me with sheers and began cutting, slicing my thin work blouse at the shoulder and down the sleeves, their long rubber gloves slipping and sliding over my wet skin as they peeled away what was left of my soaked petticoats and ratty old chemise, holding each stinking garment at arm's length, their faces pinched with disgust as they fed the scraps into a furnace.

I stood there and let them do it, knowing that resistance would only earn rough treatment. I didn't have Arramy's necklace. Absurdly, that loss was worse than losing my clothes, or being shoved this way and that by big, cross women who looked at me like I was some sort of dirty insect. It had been there, a warm, subtle weight on my skin, reminding me that I had a link to a life outside that bin while Ugly Face and his crew tried to break me down into a little quivering shade of myself. That link had kept me alive in the dark, and I hadn't even been able to fight for it.

So I didn't put up a fight for anything else. Not my clothes. Not my dignity. Not my hair.

As soon as I had been stripped of my clothes, they chopped all my hair off with the same sheers, cutting down to the scalp. Then they slathered me from head to toe in delousing paste, stood me in a line against a concrete wall with ten other naked, short-shorn women, and hosed us all down with steaming hot water. After that, another bunch of women handed us each very similar piles of clothing ­­– a denim jumpsuit that matched the color of our tags, with legs that fastened down the inside to accommodate ankle chains. Five minutes to get dressed before they began yelling, then we were all shoved down a long corridor of metal partition walls.

I wondered dully if this was what livestock felt like on market day.

Up ahead, the corridor ended in a broad, open area cordoned off into sections with more metal panels. In each section, there was a wooden chair set up under a bright mirrored lamp. Strange chairs without backs, that had black straps on the legs and more straps on a wooden plank in front. The chairs, planks, and straps were designed to keep a human being bent forward.

Ten slaves at a time were being made to bend into those strange chairs, where ten people wearing long rubber aprons worked over them beneath the light of the lamps.

There was shouting at the end of the corridor, where the first few groups of slaves coming from the changing rooms were met with more orders and threats and shoves, and several big men in frock coats waved switches and batons, moving this person here, that person there, checking wrist tags as they went.

"What now?" Fierda whispered behind me as our little group of ten shuffled forward, approaching the end of the corridor.

"I think they're separating us by color," I rasped, glancing at her quickly. "I'm red. What are you?"

She stared at me, then looked down at the tag on her wrist as if she had only just realized it was there. "Green."

My stomach twisted. We looked at each other for a moment. Six weeks locked up in a stinking cargo bin together, steadying each other, helping each other survive, and this was where we parted.

Fierda dipped her head in a small, shaky nod. "We will meet again, Larra Anderfield."

Always the optimist. I tried to give her a smile, but the tug of my mouth felt strange, so I reached out and brushed her hand with mine.

For a second our fingers tangled. Then we reached the end of the corridor, where I was made to stop and wait with a group of stocky, sturdy men in line for the red section, and she was sent off to the right, her skinny arms wrapped around her ribs, her eyes wide with fear as she joined the smaller group of girls with green tags.

I ground my teeth and watched the tops of the hempen shoes they had given me, grimly adding Fierda to my list of names.

Several long minutes later, the man in front of me was next. He struggled when the two big, burly, red-frocked men in our section came for him, snarling curses in Caraki while they slammed him down into the seat and got him strapped into the chair.

Then a slender straw-blonde woman proceeded to give him a tattoo. She bent over him, working quickly and calmly no matter how he hissed and strained to get away from the humming instrument in her hand, tracing a shape on the back of his neck like she had done it a million times. The straps held him still, and a few minutes later she was finished, and he was set free, stumbling forward like a newly shorn and branded calf.

I was told to sit.

I sat.

One of the big, burly men adjusted the plank down so he could lean me over and strap my head to it. My right arm was next, strapped at wrist and elbow, palm up, sleeve yanked up.

The plank smelled like sweat. And vomit.

There was a frigid splash of astringent on the back of my neck, and I sucked in a gasp. Then she pressed that humming metal instrument to my skin, and what felt like a thousand beestings erupted wherever it touched.

I closed my eyes, deliberately leaning into that pain, refusing to let any tears fall. I didn't even cry when she shifted to the delicate skin on the underside of my wrist. I had plenty of practice, now, finding that distant place inside my head where no one could reach me, or change me, or tell me what I was. Let them think they had won. Let them think they had taken everything. It would only make it that much easier to be underestimated. To be overlooked. To be ignored. That was the first step.

When she was done, the woman wiped the tattoos with a thick, smelly ointment, and then the man in the red frock coat unbuckled all the straps, pulled me up off the seat, and pushed me toward the group of people huddling at the end of the red section.

Men, young women, boys, nearly indistinguishable from each other except by size with their shaved heads, empty eyes and red-washed denim jumpsuits.

I joined them, finding a space toward the back where I wouldn't be seen as I rolled my sleeve up and took a look at my right arm.

My wrist now sported three horizontal lines, marked out in angry, puffy flesh, with a distorted birdlike shape above it. No. Not a bird. Flowers? The swelling made it difficult to figure out. I squinted at the elongated streaks at the upper end of what could be either a pair of stems or wings. More of a scythe than a flower. Crossed scythes. With rows of foreign letters and numerals beneath it.

None of the slaves on the island had tattoos like that. NaVarre had rescued them before they got this far. Neither NaVarre nor Orrelian had sent any of their agents directly into the Coventry's clutches. It had been too much of a risk, and quite probably a suicide mission. From here on out, I was on my own.

Not for the first time, that realization wrapped around my chest and threatened to choke the air out of me. I swallowed hard and began ticking off names, pressing my thumb to a fingertip with each one, forcing myself to focus on the familiar cadence: Snowdrop. Raggan. Father. Fierda. Gadia —

"I need that one."

My heartbeat tripled as a rolling mountain brogue rang out, and the slaves in front of me began shuffling quickly out of the way, avoiding the pointy end of the Piglet's switch.

"Nai. The little one hiding toward the rear. She'll do nicely," the tall, thin Northlander in the blue frock coat ordered, one long, knobby finger aimed right at me.

The Piglet's mean, small-eyed glare fastened on my face, and then he took hold of the collar of my jumpsuit and hauled me forward.

"Good," the tall man mumbled around the barrel of a medical infuser. He was peering through the side of a small green-glass bottle, swirling it against the light.

I gaped, mouth gone bone dry as he took the infuser out of his mouth, tipped the bottle upside down, pressed the infuser needles through the rubber membrane in the stopper, and loaded the infuser with whatever was in there. Then he started toward me, his face set in bland, clinically disinterested lines.

For a split second I tugged against the Piglet's grip, only to get a quick shaking and a growled, "Behave!" as he yanked me upright, making me stand there while the tall thin man wrapped his bony fingers around my elbow and pulled my arm up.

The infuser bit into the muscle of my shoulder.

"There. All done," the Northlander said, face blank. He didn't even look at me, really, he just turned and began writing in a small ledger, lanky legs carrying him off toward wherever he had come from.

The Piglet grunted and let me go with a last, rough smack to the back of the head, forcing me down into a bow.

I stayed like that, breathing hard and ragged, an odd warmth spreading down my arm and creeping through my chest as whatever the Northlander had dosed me with began traveling my bloodstream. It didn't do anything else. Just a vague warmth, and a fierce, aching knot in my shoulder. What he had left in the curve of my fingers was of more concern. I tightened my hand, pressing cool metal into my palm. I knew that shape. It was branded into me more surely than any tattoo. He had given me back Arramy's pendant. 

...................................

A.N. So, you may be wondering, "Why all the long pauses between updates, Anna?" (I totally just said that in a weird, squeaky falsetto...)

Well, you see, I have recently relocated from our house in Wisconsin, where we had perfectly reliable high speed internet, to a beautiful house in the Virginian countryside that does not have any sort of internet whatsoever. Most days, the closest I get to the World Wide Web are the ones made by the spiders in my bathroom closet. Right now, I'm relying on my phone's hotspot, which is taking me back to the days of dialup. 

#firstworldproblems

I am so spoiled.

Anyway. I still have my trusty iMac and I haven't stopped working. I just have to hoard my bandwidth, because 'unlimited data' actually means They start reducing things as soon as I try to use it.

So. I feel a bit like this chapter got jumbled. I wrote part of it in PA while waiting for our nightmare of a home buying experience to settle down (which is another tome for another day). The rest of it got squeezed in between unpacking all our crap, and crazy days at the beach. Because that's what previously landlocked humans do when they move to a state with ocean shoreline: unpack, and march like lemmings to the sea. I'm hoping that doesn't come through too much, but if you saw anything that seemed off, or confusing, don't hesitate to stab a finger at it.  

As always, thanks so much for reading! I appreciate all of you more than I can say :) 

Sincerely,

Anna