Chapter 6

The room within was small. It held a desk, a large Tozren sitting in a chair behind the desk, and absolutely nothing else. The walls bore no decorations. There were no windows. Sol had nothing to look at as the man behind the desk spoke in Tozrai with Sol's guard, so instead he studied the Tozren. He was beginning to realize that Remma, huge as he was, was actually on the small side for a Tozren. The one behind the desk had arms so massive they made Remma's look puny.

Sol's headache intensified. He was sweating a little from the heat. He almost wished the Tozren would just go ahead and kill him, because it seemed inevitable that they would kill him in the end. Just get it over with—end the suspense. He liked being alive, though. He would do everything he could to stay alive for as long as he could manage.

With a final few words to the boss, Sol's guard left. Sol was alone with this man who would determine his fate.

"So," the Tozren said. He had a face like a mushroom, pale and bulbous. "You are Remma's friend."

He spoke with what Sol was learning to recognize as a Tozrai accent. Remma didn't have one, and Sol wondered how hard he'd worked to get rid of it, and why. "I thought we were friends."

The man's mouth curled into a smile. There was no warmth or kindness in it. "And now you think you were wrong? It's hard to be disillusioned." He leaned forward and folded his hands on the desk. "My men were fools to bring you here, but now you're here, so I may as well make some use of you. Your mother, I'm told, will pay handsomely to get you back."

"I'm her only child," Sol said. That, at least, was true.

"Which implies what? That she'll pay, or that she won't? You'll have to forgive my ignorance. I'm not well acquainted with human customs."

"She cherishes me." An awkward thing to say, but true enough while avoiding any lies. He wanted to lie as little as possible, because it was too easy to get your lies confused and end up in hot water.

"So will she pay," the Tozren said, with a flat look. "Or not?"

No wriggling out of it. "She will," Sol said, with as much confidence as he could muster. With what imaginary money, he didn't know—but that was a problem for the future. Or for Remma, who had proposed this scheme in the first place.

The Tozren snorted. "Of course you say that. If you were to say otherwise, you know I'd dispense with you." He looked at Sol, his gaze so intent and searching that Sol fought to maintain eye contact. "My name is Dennamerussen, human. I own this ship, and everyone on it works for me. Including your friend. Stay where you're put and don't even think about trying to escape, and maybe you'll live. Do you understand me?"

"I do," Sol said tightly.

"Good. I'll deal with you when I have time, and right now, I don't." He reached over and touched a knob on the wall. "Camma will take you to your quarters. Do us both a favor and don't make any trouble for me. I won't enjoy dealing with it, and neither will you."

"Understood," Sol said. Good grief, he'd gotten the message the first time.

The door slid open. The same Tozren came in, still wielding his gun as though Sol, entirely unarmed, posed any threat whatsoever to two aliens twice his size. "Let's go," Camma said with an impatient gesture.

Sol followed him into the ship's winding corridors again. Other Tozren passed without a glance, so maybe word had spread fast. Sol hoped for a glimpse of Remma, but none of the people going by was him. It seemed unlikely that Sol would see him again. Sol would be alone until his fate was finally decided for him.

The corridors emptied out as they walked, until they were in what seemed to be a deserted section of the ship. If Sol didn't know better, he would have sworn the walls moved in and out, like the motion of breathing.

Camma took him to a door at the very end of a hallway and grabbed a knob on the wall beside it. The door slid open, revealing a small room. With a rough shove, Camma pushed Sol inside.

"Someone will come by twice a day to bring you food and water," Camma said. "You need anything, you ask then." Without waiting for a reply, he closed the door.

Sol took stock of his new prison cell. There was a bed, a low platform that curved out from the wall, with a single blanket folded up at one end. There was a table and a stool, and a set of drawers embedded in one wall. All of the drawers were empty. An attached room boasted a toilet, a sink, and a deep tub for soaking, which seemed oddly luxurious. The pirates didn't seem prepared for prisoners, so maybe this room was just what they happened to have on hand.

The room contained nothing else. No screen for watching vids, no speaker for listening to music. None that he could see, at least.

He sat down on the bed. It was firm beneath him, unyielding as a slab of stone.

Well. Here he was.

* * *

Despite the grimcircumstances he'd found himself in, Sol was exhausted from the lack of sleep the night before followed by the desperate race through the woods and the even more desperate climb. He lay down on the bed, pulled the blanket over him, and fell asleep.

Some indeterminate amount of time later, he woke with a start when the door slid open. He sat up and wiped dampness from the corner of his mouth. It was Remma, or at least he was pretty sure it was Remma—he wasn't great at telling Tozren apart, and he'd seen so many in the last few hours that he doubted his own assessment.

"Can I come in?" the Tozren asked. Yeah, it was Remma.

"Do I have the option of telling you to fuck off forever?"

Remma grimaced. "Well, sure, but I'm hoping you'll let me explain myself."

"What's there to explain?" Sol wrapped his arms around his knees. He was sweating and irritable after his interrupted sleep, and he didn't want to hear whatever pathetic excuses Remma might come up with. "You betrayed me and everyone else in the colony. You pretended to be our friend, for a year, and the whole time you were scheming with pirates. I don't know what about, but it doesn't really matter. There's something on the moon they want, I take it."

Remma sighed. "Yeah. We intercepted—it doesn't matter. Denna's giving up on it for now. We're already out of the system."

"Out of the system," Sol repeated dully. Off to who knew where, and he'd be lucky if he ever got home again. One diversion would turn into another, and the pirates would never return to Mirolasor. Even if they kept him alive, he'd just live out his days in this barren, windowless room as the ship voyaged around the far reaches of space.

Remma looked guilty. Good, Sol thought with a stab of viciousness he barely recognized as coming from himself. He didn't think he was a cruel or petty person. He wanted Remma to suffer, though, as much as Sol was going to.

"We'll be back," Remma said, although he didn't sound certain. "They want the—what they think is on the moon. It's valuable. They won't just give up on it."

"You say ‘they' like you aren't one of them," Sol said. "Did they force you to join them?"

Remma's mouth worked. Sol knew the answer already, and was unsurprised when Remma said, "No. It was my choice."

"So then say ‘we.' We want what we think is on the moon. What is it?"

"It's a—a part, from a merchantman who went down on the moon a while ago. We happened to be in the system and picked up the distress signal before it crashed. The forest interfered with orbit-to-ground scanning, so our next best plan was to send me down to search for it. I never found it, though. Might have been on the other side of the moon because it never showed up on any of my scans."

"Must be really valuable for you to waste an entire year of your life screwing around in the colony."

"It's valuable," Remma said grimly. "It would have been well worth it, if we had found it. But even so, I didn't see it as wasting a year. I liked the colony."

You liked fucking me, Sol thought but didn't say. "You should have sent a shuttle down to use low-altitude scanners. That would have picked it up easily."

"We were worried about getting shot down if we spent that much time flying around." A glance toward the wall, quick sideways motion of Remma's eyes. "Since some of the colonies have active missile defense systems. Shuttles aren't cheap."

Were they being listened to? He was surprised Remma was telling him so much, then, but it made sense that the Tozren didn't think there was any harm. He wasn't going to escape, after all, or be released before they found the whatever-it-was.

And for all he knew, Remma was lying to him. There might not even be a single kernel of truth in what he was saying.

His head ached. He didn't have the temperament for subterfuge. He wanted to go back to sleep and wake up when this was all over.

"You should have risked it," he said. "And stayed away from us."

"I'm sorry. I didn't ever plan to hurt any of you, all right? I was going to find the part and send the coordinates back to the ship, and then I'd just slip away in the night and you'd never know what happened to me. I didn't think I was doing any harm."

"Well." Sol gestured vaguely at the room and himself trapped inside it. "Congratulations."

"I know. I don't expect you to forgive me." Remma looked down at his hands. "All of you became people to me."

"We were people all along." Sol lay down on the bed. He was so tired. "Will you get word to Loden somehow? So she doesn't think I just ran off or vanished."

Remma's mouth formed a downturned line. "You aren't going to die. We'll get you home."

"That seems unlikely, but okay. If you say so."

Sol was done talking. He closed his eyes.

Remma sat in silence for a minute or two, waiting for what, Sol didn't know. Then Sol heard the quiet noise of the door sliding open as Remma left the room.