Page 11 of Devin
"Can you imagine me pregnant with a huge alien baby? I'd never survive!" Maryland protested.
"She's contemplating using door number 2," Spike explained.
Val inferred they were talking about the roof exit.
"So she'd rather kill herself than take her chances?"
"Stupid, I know. But it's either that or starve."
"I don't understand. Why would she starve?"
Spike grabbed Val's wrist. She pointed to the ID chip they’d embedded under her skin. "Because of this. Didn't they tell you? Every time you scan, you get a database check. You want to live like a queen? Or you want out of here fast? Scan away. Because until you hit forty, every time you want to eat or watch a vid or go out into the yard for a few hours, you gotta scan. You better pray for us Blues not to get into any shit, because if there is a lock down, it's just you and your wrist between starving or alienation."
Instead of once a year, she’d be entered nearly every day. The thought should have scared her, to get hooked up with an alien warrior, but instead, it calmed her. If there were only two doors out of this place, and one was throwing yourself off a roof, she had no alternative. Alien stud it was. Val walked up to the scanner and didn't even flinch at the loud beep when it flashed from a blue to green and spat out a replicated meal. The color was slightly off, but Val had eaten worse. She carried her tray to an empty table, and threw a roll in Maryland's direction.
Val sat. "Space balls. I hear they taste like chicken."
"Spicy's got her own balls of steel, it seems," Spike laughed.
Chapter 6
Val
Forty-two days. Forty-two breakfasts where the potatoes were indistinguishable from the scrambled eggs. Forty-two days of crappy network vids and the same five films that some guard had rummaged from a sale and played on an old cassette machine that had already been old in Val's mother's time. Forty-two lunches and forty-two dinners. Val had learned just to watch the poker games. All the Blues cheated and they played for serious pocket credits.
She'd only written twenty-seven letters, however. They were honest-to-goodness, paper-and-pen, hand-scrawled creations (they weren't allowed any connected access). All of them to lawyers and politicians and organizations that ought to give a crap that she'd been railroaded through the justice system in less than two hours. For a while, she thought the guards were simply taking the letters and tossing them in the can, but then she got back a response. It was a canned response, citing no time or ability to look into the merits of her case. She got two more canned responses before a human actually answered. It wasn't a positive one. In fact, it was the exact opposite.
"Unfortunately, you were caught red handed impersonating Esmeralda Blake, daughter of His Right Honorable JudgeIgnatious Blake." That was all Val needed to read to know that she was screwed. A judge would never let any of the blame fall on his daughter, and as the poor patsy that they had chosen, Val was a loose end. Even if she did try to fight it, and found someone to listen to her, getting out and making a stink would be even more dangerous for her health.
Yes. It was best to just keep scanning her arm and getting one after the next entry into the lottery. She'd have to find safety at the far reaches of space with an alien husband. Knowing her luck, she'd end up in a warship that got blasted out of space just as she was about to die delivering her alien baby. Yeah.
The women mostly left her alone. Her credits still hadn't come through, so she earned some here and there for doing favors for the Blues. Anything she could get with scans, that they had to buy with credits, was fair game. Notebook paper, pens, decks of cards, she traded them for bits of candy and other bits to make life more pleasant. She was used to working. Val was used to having her time spent with activity, but here, there was little to do and a lot of time to do it in.
The garden helped. She wasn't a great outdoor person, but Spike, surprisingly enough, was an avid gardener. Maryland hung around too, scooping up whatever free food she could manage. It wasn't until Day Forty-two that Val had any real problems.
"Bitch," she heard someone call. It wasn’t Spike or Maryland.
Val popped her head up from the row of zucchini she had been pruning. She saw an Orange that was evidently addressing her. Val had never seen this woman before, but she was clearly speaking to Val.
“Pardon?” It probably wasn’t the cleverest thing to say, but Val just wanted to make sure she’d heard right. This woman was a solid mass of muscle and tattoos and it was probably best not to piss a gal like that off.
“Bitch. A literate bitch.”
Did she mean literal bitch? Val was down on all fours gardening, but for some tatted up tank to just try and pick a fight with her was hard to conceive. Val kept her head down and mostly to herself.
“I hear someone’s been writing letters.”
Oh. That.
“I’m not really all that literate. I didn’t go to college and honestly-”
The woman picked Val up by the front of her shirt and got all up in her grill. Val was hauled up onto her tiptoes like a rag doll. It was intimidating as fuck. Apparently, this woman hadn’t heard about her ball biting background, or she just didn’t give a flying fuck because her balls were not swinging where a knee could easily access.
“We only saying this once. Stop it with the letters,” the woman ordered.
“We?” Val asked.
The woman didn’t take kindly to being questioned. Val got no warning except the slight drop as the woman let go of her shirt and pulled her arm back for a punch. There was no time to duck or fight back. The next second, her face was on fire from the force of the punch.
