Page 61 of Seven Oars
Despite the stress, the women organized their lives as best they could around mealtimes and the shower.That water filter was a godsend.
Rosamma was the last one yet to avail herself of a bath. She kept putting it off, and putting it off.
For starters, it was so cold here. She shivered day and night under her ripped thermal blanket. The thought of getting under the cold spray made her body rebel.
Then there was the thought of undressing. Taking off her meager layers filled her with an irrational fear of losing protection. She was already vulnerable. She didn’t want to be naked and vulnerable.
Rosamma discreetly sniffed her underarm.
She smelled.
Which, all things considered, was rather par for the course in this place. Everyone here smelled, stank, and reeked, including that unholy robot with its rotting wig and the vinegar-smelling lubricant it constantly leaked.
No one cleaned anything, either. The grimy station had stunk when they got here, and it went on stinking.Rosamma’s underarms weren’t even a blip in the revolting atmosphere.
She wouldn’t have bothered, except there was her period.
She glanced at Eze, who was again fiddling with the controls of the filtration system that malfunctioned more than it worked. Next to Eze, the narrow door to the bathroom stall hung open, revealing a dark, gaping hole.
Rosamma shuddered.
“Is it working?” she asked Eze.
The tank holding water bulged above them.
“I think so. You’ll have to wait for it to cycle through. Alyesha used up all the clean water. You’d think she was at a spa retreat, splashing away.”
“That’s okay, I’ll wait.” Rosamma’s lips curved in irony. It wasn’t like she had anywhere else to be. She wished she did. Literally, anywhere else in the Universe.“Will you show me how to get the filters working?”
By the time Eze finished showing her, the filtration had completed a cycle.
Resolutely grabbing the rag the women shared for a towel, Rosamma breached the door-hole and stepped into the stall.
Naturally, no lights worked inside, leaving her no choice but to keep the door ajar. It smelled of sulfur and mildew—unpleasant, but not awful.
It seemed colder inside the metal stall, and the sounds appeared amplified. The persistent scraping of the great mechanism, theoar, against something was louder, clearer, underscored by clicking and whirring that came at regular intervals.
A peculiar feeling overcame Rosamma. Without the lights, she felt thrown into a dark hole. Despite the station’s reliable gravity, she was weightless, hurtling, not toward a new life like she had been after leaving Meeus, but toward a swift end.
Her sense of self disappeared, and she became unmoored.The past fell away.There was no future.She was a nobody, an unknown being in an endless tunnel, screaming silently into the dark void, falling, falling…
The sensation was so real that Rosamma stumbled, catching herself on the stall’s rusty wall.
Unsettled, she turned the water on and, taking a deep breath, pointed the old, hardened hose with peeling wrapping at her body.She rubbed her skin in the dark, wanting to rinse off oily dirt and sweat, and the smears of Phex and Anske’s dried blood.
She wondered if Phex would consider washing. It would be a moment of vulnerability, she knew. But she imagined he would welcome being clean.
Poor Phex.
The pirates didn’t allow him to heal properly before beating him again. They kept him weakened and disoriented, toying with him in their cruel way, testing his endurance.
They would kill him in the end.
Tears leaked from Rosamma’s eyes. What to do? How to help?
Even at his strongest, it would’ve been one Phex against nine of them.Such insurmountable odds.
Five weeks. That time had seemed terrifyingly long when they’d first started from Meeus.
