Carrion Dawn

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Mal was shivering by the time she reached the ship, though she didn't really notice it. Just like it hadn't occurred to her that she'd stolen the transport, or smeared blood all over it (hers? or his?), or still clutched the knife, her knife in one hand.

She hadn't really thought of anything on the way back, except that her head hurt, and she had to check on Foka, and then she was going to take a very, very long nap. That was all that was really wrong, she knew. She felt funny, floaty and far away, like someone else was controlling her body, and she was just trailing along behind, watching someone else live her life. But she knew she was just tired. It'd been too long since she'd slept. Maybe she'd call in sick to the garage. Just one day. Just a few hours, even. Maybe Foka would be well enough to call. She hoped so. She wanted him to be okay. She needed him to be okay.

She left the blood-stained transport parked under the loading dock for the ship and trudged up the gangplank, already half asleep on her feet. It occurred to her she wanted Foka to still be sleeping. Because he needed to sleep, and she needed to sleep, and she didn't want to talk about the fight club, or the lies, or anything right now. Not Samson. Especially not Samson.

Mal felt a shudder rip down her spine so violently, it hurt. Her ribs felt hot and swollen under her arm. Her neck was slick with blood from her chin, and there was a growing lump at the back of her head. Her shirt hung, heavy, damp, red and white, almost to her knees, the hem stretched beyond the frayed edges of her blood-stained shorts. She'd have to wash these clothes, or maybe just throw them away. But later. Sleep, first.

No. Foka first.

Hoping, praying, she called his name, cautious.

"Foka? Are you okay?"

She hoped he was okay. She hoped he was still sleeping. And if the knife hadn't still been clutched in one crimson-soaked hand, she might have crossed her fingers, too.
 
Mal had come back. Foka heard her call his name, and made a more determined effort to find her, to walk -- hobble -- down the rest of the corridor to meet her there. When he came to the corner and finally did see her, she was holding her knife and was covered in blood. He thought it was beautiful -- and yet completely wrong. On the inside, he chided himself for finding her blood-soaked state attractive. If he was ever going to change, he needed to do more than just not kill people.

This was still wrong, either way.

"Mal?" He called, his voice still distorted by a busted nose. He looked her up and down, wide-eyed with some surprised, perplexed expression on his face. The last few steps he took to reach her consisted of a stumble and a limp, but he managed to stay upright and not put too much weight on her when he took her by the shoulders. "Mal, vhat... Vhat happhend?" Her clothes were torn, if what she was wearing could really be considered 'clothes'.
 
She heard him coming before she saw him and had to hold her breath to keep from crying. It wasn't fair. She just wanted to sleep. To forget everything that had happened. She wanted to forget Foka's promise that they would start over...and how badly they'd both failed. She wanted to forget that it only proved she was right -- she'd been a monster all along.

Mal watched him walk in, a faint flicker of concern crossing her face. And she let him get close enough to touch her, because she thought he needed it. She almost kept from flinching completely when he put his hands down on her shoulders, but she stepped away after that. No more touching. Not right now.

She shook her head. "Let's just...I want to lay down, okay? I'll call Mason, I'll tell him you're sick, I'm stuck home looking after you, and then lets just go to sleep, okay? Please? I..." she trailed off, and then a thought, delusional, half-worded, jumped into her head, and green eyes flicked up to his, wide, desperate, edging toward hysterical.

"Or we can go. We can just leave here, right now, before...we could go. I can fly us out of here, Foka. I remember the way. We...it's not too late...to start over. Again. We can go. Can we go? Please? Please..."
 
She was nearly rambling, again. The way she did when things were so bad. How did he remember this?

He acknowledge that she didn't want to be touched, didn't want to be held. She had been done in, again.

"Mal... Stohp." He wished that his body worked well enough to take her to her makeshift room, to where she had made a place for herself. It was what she needed. She didn't need him, she needed sleep, she needed familiar and safe. She didn't need to be devoured by a monster. "You... N'heed sl'heep." And he needed her. No, he wanted, and did not need. He could live without her while she healed. He could wait.

Foka held out a hand, still leaning against the wall, his other hand supporting him while he gestured down the corridor. Perhaps he could make it to the cockpit, if he tried. If he didn't stop, he could likely walk with her, be close to her until it was time for her to rest. He didn't want to let her go though, not even then. He wanted her, there was no denying. He had declined the many whores that had tried to find their way down his pants, into his pockets. What money they had seen, though, was for his new start, was for him and Mal. But, their new start was ruined by how badly he had failed, and judging by the blood that covered her, Foka guessed that Mal wasn't doing too well either.
 
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Mal just stared at him for a moment, face blank though her mind was struggling to string thoughts and images together. He was...right. About a lot of things. Wrong about a lot, too. A lot more, even. But none of that mattered now. They were in trouble. She knew that somewhere deep down inside of her, though she couldn't think of how or why, or how to fix i. Maybe she didn't want to fix it. Certainly not now, and maybe not ever. Now, there was Foka. And then sleep.

He held out a hand to her, and her eyes dropped slowly, almost lazily down to his palm, his fingers, before floating back up to his face. She took a step back, shook her head, eyes wide as they were unfocused.

"No..." she said quietly, frowning slightly as she tried to remember just why this was so wrong. "You...you're hurt. You have to...have..." She trailed off, shook her head again. She knew he wouldn't hurt he. Not now. She wasn't afraid, or not of him, but...

But if she kept arguing, he was going to collapse, and she didn't think she had the energy to put them both back together.

"Okay," she said finally, and started down the hall, his hand hanging in the space behind her. That, she couldn't do. Not yet.
 
She still didn't want to touch him, though, given what he didn't know, he wasn't sure he blamed her. So he fell in line behind her, wheezing quietly, still needing to rest heavily upon the wall as he hobbled along. Foka watched her back as they walked down the hall. Eventually, he came to his own room, and stopped at the door. He still didn't want her to go. He wanted to stay with her, felt the need to reach out to her again... But she still didn't need him.

"Mal," he called, having to stop for the burning in his nose. "Ve ah'r still ah'lright..." They had to be. They were still alive, still moving, even if only barely. They were surviving. His face burned and ached, his chest felt like it was about to cave in on itself, and Mal was covered in someone's blood. Foka knew it was someone else's, by the way he had seen her clutching the knife, by the way she had rambled when he had first seen her. That wasn't the way she was when it was her own blood.

Thinking about it, Mal was likely to panic -- if she hadn't already -- about how soaked in blood she was. If she had killed someone, they would both be in for a rough time. She would start talking again about how she was a monster, and he wouldn't know how to comfort her any way other than to remind her what kind monster she could have been. Then they would both talk about such horrible things. Foka would have to brace himself, and none of that included him telling her about how he had lied to her. For now, though, neither of them had the strength to deal with the other. He would have to accept that.

Foka touched the control panel and the door to his room slid open. He looked to Mal one last time before going inside, leaving her to herself.

Sleep would be good, even though he had technically just woken up. There wasn't much else he could really do in his current condition. He had spent enough time in the shower already, there would be very little surprise if he suddenly grew fins. There would be no cooking for a while, at least until Foka could make it to the kitchen at the very least. Mal... Mal needed time. So, Foka was going to sleep away some time, let it waste away without him. It sounded like a good idea for the moment...
 
She thought for a long time about leaving. It would be easy, or quiet, or subtle. Foka would hear the ship starting up and know she was running again. neither of them would know where to, or for how long, or far or fast. But Mal didn't really care about that right now. Right now, she was just sitting, and she was sure it was going to drive her insane.

And maybe running wouldn't be so bad. They'd gotten pretty good at it. Starting over was out of the question, but they were good at what they did. It was just...bad for other people. Because Foka was going to get himself killed, and Mal...would she just keep killing? There had to be some middle ground, some way to get back to where they had been, where death and danger were sidenotes instead of end goals. Maybe they should never have met each other in the first place. Maybe...maybe...

She didn't know when she'd fallen asleep. She hadn't gotten more than a couple hours in two weeks now, and hadn't gotten any at all last night. Foka had been fighting, then she'd been fighting, and Samson had tried to take off her shirt, reveal who -- what -- she was, and she'd panicked.

When she closed her eyes now, there was nothing first but darkness, then, in a grow red light, and island surrounded by blood and build on dead bodies. Tex. Samson. Taj, Ash. Both her parents.

Foka.

Mal screamed and sat up, feeling sweat run down her face and back as the dream slowly faded from her mind's eyes...then came rushing back as she realized she wasn't covered in sweat...but blood.
 
***
​
There was blood everywhere. Samson wasn't mangled, but he was most certainly quite dead.

The officer put her hands on her hips, frowning deeply. She was the only human in the room, other than the cadaver. The other officers were Sectid; large, insect-like bipeds. They had arrived approximately an hour and a half after Samson's T.O.D. and had just spent another half an hour examining the scene. Thankfully this particular crime wasn't going to be too hard to solve - someone had just left to pull the security camera and check the footage. They'd find the culprit there, the human woman knew. It was a rather simple form of surveillance, but then, none were really going to dig too deeply into any of the refugees. Practically every one of them had a past that they were escaping from. As long as they had something of value, such as information, the Sectids didn't care what the people had done in the past. The present and future was what mattered...

***
​
Foka slowly blinked awake several hours later. He had laid on his back, so the sights he was greeted with once his vision came into focus was the bland ceiling of the master bedroom. Some more time passed before he started to really move, looking from side to side, checking everything out. He was alone. There was no Mal, no Mama, no fighters and no whores.

His chest still felt like it could collapse in on itself, but Foka felt the need to get up and move. Probably take a piss while he was at it. So, with a great amount of effort, he managed to sit up, and eventually slide off the bed and onto his feet. To the bathroom first, and then to go find food...
 
She had no real memory of getting there, which was maybe for the best. Mal was pretty sure if she'd been thinking on the way to that cold, dark room, she'd have bolted. Maybe taken the ship and run, or maybe just into the streets, screaming. Neither really felt all that wrong.

But then she'd come to again, found herself in that room where she and Foka had spent two long, cold, painful nights. There was still blood on the floor. Appropriate. She wasn't sure what she'd been planning on doing there -- maybe sleeping? How could she still be so tired? -- but she'd seen the blood, and the strength had just...gone out of her. Her legs buckled and she let them, and then she curled up again in precisely the same spot, her back to the wall, her knees to her chest, blood congealing in her torn clothes, in her hair, under her chin...

It was cold here, and she couldn't stop shivering. It seemed everything was moving backwards. Which somehow also felt appropriate, because at this point, going back to prison almost seemed like a blessing. She had said, after all, that she was going to start over.
 
Foka let his eyes droop as he watched his glass fill up with water from the sink faucet. He was a little late in turning off the flow, and the water spilled over the rim, over his hand to swirl around the drain.

Right. Turn it off. Wasting water wouldn't be the greatest thing to do. So, with a turn of the knob, the water stopped running, and Foka brought the rim of the glass to his lips. He hadn't put any of his piercings back in yet, so there was no 'clink!' Of metal on glass.

Somewhere down the hall from the kitchen, a door slid open.

Foka turned his back to the sink, placing his left hand on the rim, holding the glass of water with the left. He barely got in a second sip when three uniformed officers burst into the room, energy riffles aimed at the disheveled Russian. "Hands up!"

The glass shattered against the kitchen floor as his hands flew up, his brain not making their usual, violent connections to the situation. As a matter of fact, what in the hell was he even doing? In the background, four other officers continued on, down the hall. They were searching for someone. Foka wondered if they had found the underground fight club, or... Perhaps, Mal really had killed someone? Had he really doubted the fact?

***​
 
Somehow, Mal made it to the kitchen when she heard glass breaking, people shouting. She still hadn't showered, but she remembered that part. Even a prison this size, they'd hose her down before she got anywhere near the other inmates.

"Leave him alone," she said dully, and they all of them shouted over her as she tried to explain she was the one they were looking for. As if the blood everywhere hadn't made it obvious.

She had her hands up before she ever heard them say the words, and in a matter of seconds, they were yanking her arms back down again, twisting them behind her back. A refugee camp couldn't afford handcuffs, of course, so she got a zip tie that cut into her wrists, but she didn't mind that so much. It was getting difficult to feel anything but cold.

She wanted to talk to Foka before they made her leave, perfectly understanding she might not get the chance to do it again, maybe ever. She wanted to apologize, tell him he hadn't been the only one to lie, that she was back to old habits, too, and she was being punished for it. She wanted to tell him not to follow her, not to come for her, not to go back to the club. There was still time, he could still make a change, be a different person. They didn't have to be monsters. He'd told her that.

She looked at him, and the words wouldn't come. Instead, she said:

"Try and get some sleep, okay?"
 
They were both tired. The scene unfolded before Foka like a slow-motion action sequence in an old film. Mal was there, and the officers had turned their attention from him to her so quickly. Or, at least, it seemed quickly, despite the tar in his head.

He stood there for a moment, dumbfounded, opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water, trying to think up words. "Mal!" She was giving up, turning herself in. What did she think he was going to do? Give up? Let her go? There was no fucking way. He was just beginning to come around to the idea that maybe he loved her, and she was going away? Now?

Try and get some sleep, okay?

"Stop!" He sneered, balling his hands into fists and surging forward. An officer turned to him, and Foka was ready to beat the mans face in. It would have been a quick strike, but the sluggishness that came with the frequent state of exhaustion slowed him down. The only thing he caught was the scowl on the officers face before it was blocked by the butt of his gun.

Crack!

Foka crumbled to the floor, both hands over his face. However much his broken nose had began to heal was suddenly undone. Blood and mucus ran down the lower half of his face once again, and he let out an agonized groan. All of the beatings, all of the abuse and the trauma. It could take a lifetime for the both of them to truly recover. They were so bruised and battered, so deep in some metaphorical trench, Foka wasn't sure they could ever get out. Between Mals rape, the torture and the sleep deprivation they both endured, the lies and secrets, the lack of hope... What hope was there?

The intruding men turned away from him as he laid on his side on the floor, his knees drawn up to his chest. What could he do? They were taking her from him, but he couldn't stop them, not the way he was. He was outnumbered, outgunned, there was simply no way...

His whole face hurt, a bright, searing pain. All he could taste was copper and salt. The voices around him made almost no sense; not that they needed to. The blood got everywhere; on his clean shirt, smeared all over his face, soaked his hair and coated his trembling hands. Mal had said to get some sleep, and sleep still sounded so good. It was obvious in the way he looked, dark lines under his eyes. But, they were still taking her from him. He couldn't sleep through that.
 
Mal saw what he meant to do possibly even before he realized it and started forward on some impulse she didn't understand. She was tired and hurt and cuffed and ashamed. Foka had been wrong about her. She was every bit the monster he'd promised she wasn't. She wanted nothing more than to leave this place, even if it meant going back to prison.

And yet she fought for him anyway. Or she tried to. She yelled out almost on top of him, and his voice drowned her's out.

"Foka, don't -- "

And then he was screaming, crumpling to the ground, and she was watching, helpless all over again. The men chuckled and scoffed to themselves, and she was disgusted, even as she couldn't take her eyes from the mass of blood and bone Foka's face had become, maybe blurred behind tears she couldn't remember asking for. There was a sharp, painful tug on her shoulders, an animal's reminder that she was prey, she should be walking.

She stopped.

"Let me help him." Her voice was wretched with tears and anger.

"Walk," said a voice behind her. Something put the butt of the gun to her back. She didn't move. What did she have to lose?

"Let. Me. Help. Him," she said again, "or this'll be a lot messier. Cops are cops. Give me two seconds to sweet talk your boss, I'll make sure he knows what you did."

There was some deliberation. They took the cuffs off her and replaced it with the barrel of the gun cold on her neck. She shivered then dropped to her knees beside Foka.

She didn't say what she thought she would.

"You can still run," she said quietly. She didn't bother hiding it from the officers. "You can still start over."
 
He was still holding his battered face when Mal kneeled next to him. Besides wanting the pain, the fatigue to go away, he wanted her to stay, so he managed to turn just enough so he could look up at her. There were tears in those green eyes.

She was crying. Fresh, salty tears had wet her cheeks and stained her shirt while she watched them take him from her. It wasn't the first time police had come to her doorstep looking for him, but it was the first time they had shown up claiming that Foka had done such a horrid thing.

Murder.

And so they were taking him away.

For a moment Foka thought he understood then. They were taking her away this time. This time, they had come for the one that he was trying to protect, trying to love.

He didn't sound at all like himself. Between the broken nose, the tears he himself was choking back, Foka sounded like someone else entirely when he said the words: "Don't leave me".

Everything they had gone through together; the paranoia of thinking that Mal was a spy sent to thwart his plan to escape from prison. The way she had impressed him, stabbing herself to provide a distraction for that escape. His willingness to keep her with him while she healed that eventually gave way to everything else. Foka remembered then the way he felt, watching as Tex led her away, leaving him behind to be tortured for information about some device. That very night, Foka had started to see Mal as something more than just another person. He had seen himself in her that night, as a young boy, cowering in the corner waiting to be beaten again. They had escaped that together as well, just like the prison. And then he blew it: cooking Tex up and serving him to Mal, bringing her back to health with his flesh. It had been such a hard time, and yet they made it through, once again, as a team. And now they were falling apart. How could they fail so badly while their intentions were so good? He had just been trying to provide, trying to get them what they needed the only way he knew how. Was it just because he had kept it from her? If that was so, he could learn, couldn't he? If he could do it over again, he wouldn't make the same mistake. He wouldn't splash the frying oil on his supervisor, he wouldn't beat his co-workers face in. He wouldn't have accepted that ringmaster's offer. Most of all, Foka thought, he would tell Mal the truth.

His hand was still trembling when he reached up to touch the side of her face. Don't leave me... "Mal, I love you..."
 
She took a step back and she told herself it was so that she didn't feel tempted to hit him.

She did. But it had nothing to do with the foot of space suddenly between them now.

Now? Now he was telling her this? Of all the things he might have said to her -- good things, useful things -- this was one she'd never have expected.

Right?

"You...what?" she repeated slowly, dumbly. As if she'd misheard him spelling a name, or asking about the weather. Stupid.

One of the guards yanked impatiently at her arm. She let him pull her up, only because she couldn't think clearly enough to fight. But her eyes never left Foka's face.

"What?" she demanded again, her voice still hovering between confusion and shock. Awe. "What...what do you mean, you -- ?"

"Help him or don't," a voice growled. She didn't turn away, but her thoughts drifted. Help him what? Help him understand he was wrong? Help him understand the meaning of infatuation? Remind him just how much of a monster she really was? How he'd been wrong after all?

She didn't fight when they dragged her to her feet. What else could she do? What else could she say? They were yanking her at the door, and she was still staring, dumb-founded, at Foka, vaguely remembering how gentle he'd been after Tex.

She shivered, and for the second time, she said something different than what she'd been thinking.

"Foka...I...I'm sorry..."

And then she was gone.
 
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Foka's ice blue eyes watched as Mal recoiled from his confession. I love you. Sure, that wasn't exactly what it sounded like, with the broken nose and the emotions lodged in the back of his throat, but he had thought he was understandable enough. So then, what did this mean? Was she rejecting him? After all they had been through? After all the tenderness he had shown her?

His bloodied fingertips didn't touch anything, simply hung there in the air where Mal had been. It happened just like that. Mal was gone, and Foka was alone, on the floor, blood and snot coating his chin. What had he done to stop this? Not much of anything, really. What could he have done? In his current condition, Foka still wasn't sure he could have really done anything, at all. In the future? Well, they had both broken out of prison before this. It would take time, and healing, but it would be possible...

***​
 
----
By the end of the first week, she'd changed cells four times.

The refugee camp was small, meant to be tucked away in the shadows of the universe. The people who came there were few, but they were hearty and hard. And those that ended up in the camp prison were, by necessity, of a different breed entirely.

Mal had been so out of it, so tired, so confused, so utterly lost on her first night, she hadn't fought when her mates in the holding cell mobbed her. The guards found her the next morning, still streaked in blood, tucked into the farthest corner of the cell. She wasn't cowering, quite. She wasn't do anything, aside from staring, and breathing just shallowly enough to keep her alive.

But when they'd tried to touch her, she'd screamed and put a broken plastic spoon almost through one of their hands.

She'd spent the next two nights in what they called the medical facility, but was really no more than a one room cubical that smelled a little more like disinfectant than the rest of the warehouse.

The next night, she spent with a woman who claimed to have stolen a ship and crashed it somewhere while high. Mal didn't care. She hardly listened. She hadn't eaten in three days, and hadn't slept in almost four. She spoke so little, there were rumors going around the prison something was wrong with her.

Even Mal couldn't remember precisely what happened between her and her second cell mate. One minute, the woman was yapping on about some man she'd cheated, how she'd fucked him for some drugs -- the next, they were pulling Mal off of her, and she was screaming. They put something in her arm, and then she did sleep.

She'd lost ten pounds at the end of the first week, and the prison wardens were at a loss over what to do with her. She could hear them talking outside her cell, vacillating between referring to her as a wild animal and a piece of meat. She didn't care. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

She could only hear Foka's last words, repeating in her head, over and over and over again.

--

Technically, inmates at the camp prison were only allowed guests once a month, and only after their second month of good behavior. But Lieutenant Warden Griffon did not think his newest inmate would make it that long.

He had heard she roomed with someone, a man they'd told him had been part of the fight club that had been disbanded just two days prior. It was at the end of the girl's second week -- they still didn't know her name -- when she was in danger of starving to death he had his men go find the man.

The girl had killed a man, but Griffon was not the type to repay and eye with an eye.

Besides, these prisoners were here for a higher cause. They just didn't know it yet.
 
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In the two weeks since Mal had been taken away, Foka had done everything in his power to recover as quickly as he could. Sleep was hard to come by and difficult to keep, but he managed to rest enough that the bags under his eyes disappeared and he was able to focus much more easily. His nose was slightly crooked still, but he sounded enough like himself that he could be easily understood.

When the officers returned to the deactivated ship, Foka wasn't home. He had been out for the day, making himself useful. To the community, or for his own goals was yet to be seen. The point was that Father Russia returned to find men in the same uniform that had taken Mal, patiently waiting for him.

He stood in the doorway, a handful of credits in his pocket and an icy glare in his eyes. His visage was once again littered with bits of metal, two in his lip, several in his ears, a few in his brow. There was a thin white bandage across the bridge of his nose, which was a mixture of a faded purple and several shades of brown, instead of the normal, metal studs. It still ached from time to time, but looking at him, standing there as he stared down the officer that had come to greet him, there was no telling that he was in any kind of pain.

The conversation had been quick and sweet, and Foka had even dropped his glare once he was told that he was being allowed to visit Mal. Most of the credits in his pocket were tossed into the "starting over" jar before he left. That glass jar had continued to fill up, slowly but surely. Putting his earnings into it was becoming something of a ritual, something that reminded him that there was hope, even if he couldn't name what that hope was sometimes.

***
​
One man in uniform stayed by the door, riffle cradled in his arms with the barrel pointed at the ceiling while Foka made his way to the provided seat. The room was bland, like the rest of the facility. The chair was metal, the table the chair was seated at was metal; everything was cold and grey and lifeless. No, that wasn't the right word. Life existed in the form of the bacteria that thrived in the darkest corner of the room.

Metal scraped against the rooms flooring as Foka pulled the chair out, the back at a right angle to the table as he slid into the seat, hands clasped together on the tabletop in front of him. Blue eyes flicked from one corner of the room to the next, examining the greenish stain on the wall in the one corner for just a second before finding the door opposite the one he came through. Mal was supposed to come through that door. For just a moment, Foka heard his pulse in his ears. He let out a deep breath through parted lips, broken nose still healing.

All that was left was to wait. She would show up, Foka knew. He just, didn't know how patient he could be.
 
They hadn't told her where she was going -- they rarely did anymore -- or maybe they had and she just hadn't been listening or had forgotten. It was hard to tell. It didn't seem to matter.

Whatever part of Mal still made sense would have been disgusted if she could have seen herself now. She moved like a ghost or a zombie. She spent all her time in bed, but never slept, heavy, dark circles forming under her eyes. Her cheek and collar bones stood out in stark contrast to whatever curves she'd had before entering the prison. Mal was pretty. She'd always been pretty. But she'd always had a reason to stay pretty. After the murder -- after Foka -- she'd given up.

She felt cold and empty and angry all the time. Nightmares were constant. She knew she ought to want to get out, to find her way back to freedom, but she couldn't make herself care. She could only think of Foka and what he'd said and what she'd said. And how she'd never hear him say it again.

Monster.

She lashed out again suddenly -- she'd been doing that a lot lately -- but they'd assigned a double team of guards to her, and she was weak from hunger. They had her pinned against the wall in an instant, and whatever spark of life had flared into her green eyes flickered out soon after. They waited for her heartrate to slow (the beeping of the bracelet they'd given her last week faded to nothing; she hadn't asked why she alone of the inmates she knew had a heart monitor. It hadn't seemed to matter) and then they were off again.

The lights in the unfamiliar room were brighter than they were in the rest of the prison. Somehow, she saw that right away, and when she looked up, there was an almost hopeful cant to her gaze.

Then she saw Foka. She stopped, frozen, staring, her breath sounding too loud in her ears.

Her legs went out from under her, and she might have fallen had not one of the guards stopped her decent with a hand like a vice around her upper arm.

"Get up," he growled. She hardly heard him. He guided her to the chair, and she saw down hard, still staring, wordless at Foka.

There was a long, silent beat.

And then she said, "You're not supposed to be here."
 
Foka surprised himself with the fluttering in his chest when Mal was finally escorted into the room. He would have chided himself, silently, in his head, but any thought of that was overwritten when he realized the condition she was in. She looked half dead; starved and tired.

Foka remembered when their journey had first started, after Mal had stabbed herself. He remembered that he had let her carry the bag of supplies, not wanting her to feel any weaker than she already was. The same thought did not apply this time around however. When her knees had given out and she had almost fell to the floor, Foka found himself standing suddenly, his hands on the table though he was about to run to her side. This time he did scold himself.

Muscles in his arms flexed slightly as he eased himself back into his chair, never taking his eyes off of Mal. She looked malnourished and moved like she was in a daze, even after she had seen that he was there.

You're not supposed to be here.

It was the first thing he had heard from her since she had been forcibly taken from the ship. It wasn't the most encouraging thing she could have said, but then, she was the one in need of encouragement, wasn't she? Mal was the one locked up in a cell, starving, facing whatever godawful people this prison had to offer.

"Mal, vhat did they do to you?" Foka asked, practically ignoring her first statement. He leaned over the table, on his elbows. His arms were bare and a shade darker than the last time he had seen her. His current job involved staying in the sun.
 
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