Madlands

29. Rage & Wonderment

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She was glad not to be furthering one of the Empire's goals, or even helping with a tiny aspect their daily maintenance, but doing nothing was its own kind of torture, especially with her mind devoid of anything but regret.

The only distraction afforded to her was a narrow window in the door of her cell. If she tucked herself right into the edge of the sleeping bench, against the rear wall, she could see part of the more-active corridor that connected to the one that held her cell. It still wasn't of great interest, but the occasional Trooper or officer would brusquely walk down it. Three times so far, she'd seen other prisoners being moved—moved in and not out, by the looks of it—as they were marched in the direction of her hallway. With no duraplex in the opening, instead only a fine, wire mesh, she could hear them, too—boots clacking, muted orders delivered, and one time the sad protestations of the newest inmate, swearing on his life that they had the wrong man.

Taking a break from all that nothing to do even deeper nothing, Grey was lying on the hard bench, staring up at her featureless ceiling. When the corridors were quiet it felt almost like sensory deprivation—just endless white and her own breath. She couldn't even smell the all-pervasive fuel anymore, but she figured that was only because she'd become accustomed to it.

She wondered if she would become accustomed to all of it—the twice daily blob of food-gruel dropped inside her door, the brief sonic shower blasting out of slots in the wall on a twenty-six hour interval, never seeing a plant or a smile or feeling the sun, formless days if not years of nothingness. Or, would the despair of all of that, on top of the grief for her wasted life, simply turn her into nothing too. Perhaps, she would grow so formless herself, that one day, when the inaudible acoustic waves of the shower powered up, they would smash the lazy atoms of her body into a fine mist.

As Grey imagined her new mist-body dissolving freely into the air, she heard a voice that didn't belong.

It had a twang. A man's voice with a distinct twang. And staccato syllables, and a general self-satisfaction that barely concealed an uncertainty. He was telling his hosts that they'd made a big mistake, that they would regret this.

She shot upright and slammed herself into her corridor sightline spot, wincing at the wound on her side, but she was too late. She caught only a flash of the white and black of the arm of a Trooper as the group passed out of frame.

While there was simply no conceivable way that the owner of that voice would have ended up here, across the sector, at the same time as her, there was also no conceivable way that that wasn't the voice of Cyrin Toh.

Of course, this could be the first sign of a nothing-fuelled madness that would eventually consume her. Her curiosity felt like a life-line. She had to know.

When the guard came by to drop her dinner blob on the floor, she informed him that she was ready to work.

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Work duty, on this rather mysterious incarceration station, was, thankfully, central cleaning duty. She felt a little better that she wouldn't be assembling weapons or manufacturing Trooper gear. There were three main zones on the shop floor—laundry, disinfecting, and dishes.

Grey quickly learned that dishes was considered the worst assignment, laundry the second worst, and disinfecting the least worst. None were good, but that was the hierarchy. She'd been assigned to laundry, which was also the biggest group. They loaded anything and everything that arrived in one of the huge bins into the sonic washers, made sure nothing got jammed and that everything came out fully clean, sorted it by all by type, neatly folded and arranged each type, and packaged the clean piles into the appropriate steri-chests.