Episode Two Banished Down Below

N adira

As we hover Down Below, I keep my breathing steady, my gaze out the front viewscreen, and my back straight. I learned at an early age to reveal nothing. Showing emotions never fails to get me in trouble.

Women are nothing more than money and status machines for their fathers. Most families contain one son to carry on the family name—and shepherd generations of accumulated wealth—and as many daughters as possible. It's a free resource. Create as many daughters as you can and sell them to garner money and status. It costs next to nothing to feed and clothe them. We're all kept far too slender and given only these ridiculously thin gowns to wear.

I've grown so full of hate at the way things are, I'll be better off when I'm finally dead.

Although that thought has been in my mind since I was young, facing the impending hour of my death is still terrifying. I wipe my sweaty palms on my gown as I shift in my seat, not wanting Armstrong to know prickles of fear are racing along my veins.

Maybe it would have been better if my father hadn't extracted the senator's promise not to kill me. What kind of world do we live in that forcing your daughter's future husband to promise not to kill her is the most fatherly thing that man ever did?

Death by the senator would be far preferable to what he's sentenced me to, though. Hundreds of years ago, we'd polluted our planet to the point it was killing everyone. That's when enormous towers were built to house the rich.

The wealthiest, most powerful people lived on the top floors. Those with lower income and status were housed toward the bottom. Before anyone moved in, though, they realized they needed to bring some of the lower classes in. Who would clean their floors and serve their food and be their bodyguards?

Some poor people were allowed in, and in the intervening centuries, this system of buying women became one of the most useful currencies to move up the food chain in the Up Above.

Down Below was so befouled that the inhabitants mutated somewhere along the line, although I've heard more nefarious explanations for how the cataclysm happened.

I've heard rumors about what awaits me Down Below, but the rumor mill is short on facts. One word that comes up repeatedly has certainly lodged in my mind. Monsters.

Although I know little, I don't have to know more than what I was told in the breakfast room. Alliana went Down Below for a two-week punishment and didn't return. Even the powerful armed guards sent to retrieve her didn't come back. That tells me all I need to know.

"Still full of arrogance?" Armstrong accuses as we leave Tower One behind and descend toward Earth.

I don't need to glance at him to know his lip is curled into a sneer.

"Senator Quarren gave no instructions about your treatment other than I was to take you Down Below and leave you. You're crazy if you think, even for a minute, that you could flaunt your body in front of me and not get what you deserve."

He scrubs his mouth with his palm as he contemplates. "You may be too old for your husband, but you're still ripe enough for me. That old bastard doesn't pay me well enough for me to buy a nice piece of ass like you. Just once I'd like to see how the other half lives."

I count my breaths, keeping the inhalations and exhalations measured. I don't want him to see my rising panic.

"When we set down on that forsaken dead planet, I'm going to stick it to you in every hole, over and over, until I can't get it up anymore. Then I'm going to leave you to the monsters."

His rape threats barely register. What could he possibly dish out that I haven't had to endure since I reached the age of consent at age sixteen and was given away like a party favor by my father, and then for the past eighteen years by my husband?

It's the threats of mutants and monsters that chills the blood in my veins. I pray they kill me fast.

I glance at Armstrong. He's a bastard. They all are, but some of them hide their baser tendencies. This man never bothered.

It strikes me that if I fight him, he'll kill me. I heard his instructions myself. My husband gave him free rein. I'd rather be killed by Armstrong than torn to bits by whatever monsters inhabit the Down Below.

If I get to make one decision in my life, let it be how I die.