Imprisoned Read online

  Though she scanned the crowd for her brother, Jak was nowhere in sight. He must have eaten on a different shift. As BleakHall was so big, there must be at least two or maybe even three separate seatings for each meal, she reasoned.

  Ari sighed. Well, they couldn’t have gotten away together tonight anyway—her plan required a clear, open sky above to work. But still, it would have been nice to see her older brother. It had been over six solar months since he’d hugged her goodbye on his way to sell the tulsa crop and had gotten captured by pirates and sold to the Yonnite mistress who eventually sent him here.

  Putting the memory aside, she scanned the Mess Hall.

  There were about thirty long tables arranged in five rows of six which ran the length of the large, echoing room. The walls were made of black metal, just like the holding area and all the rest of the prison, at least as far as Ari could see. Near the front of the room was a long countertop with a plasti-glass shield running the length of it.

  Inmates took a battered metal tray and cup from piles near the front of the counter and walked through the line, shoving the tray in front of them. As they went, long, silver mechanical arms protruded from under the plasti-glass shield and deposited lumps of food on the trays. At the very end was a cooler filled with cloudy liquid—presumably water—where each man could fill his cup.

  None of it looked very appetizing from where Ari was standing but she was well aware that she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since that morning before arriving at the BleakHall gates. Even now she was beginning to feel a little faint. If she didn’t get some nourishment, she was going to have a hard time staying alive and unmolested until she could get to Jak tomorrow.

  Reluctantly, she went to the back of the line and grabbed a tray and a cup from the stacks and began pushing it along the counter. She kept her face bowed and her head low, hoping not to attract any attention along the way. Though she snuck glances from side to side, no one seemed to be noticing her and no one bothered her—apparently her strategy of keeping a low profile was working. Ari breathed a sigh of relief and kept going.

  She soon found that she couldn’t spend too much time looking around her, though, because the rusted mechanical arms coming out from under the plasti-glass shield were creaky and none-too accurate. Ari had to be fast to catch the globs of food they scooped out, maneuvering her tray around quickly as the arms delivered it with herky-jerky motions.

  Wow, these really need some maintenance work! she thought as she caught the last scoop. I wonder how long it’s been since they had a tune-up?

  A little while in her lab back home and she bet she could have come up with a fix for them, but of course, home was too far away to even think about right now. In the meantime, she just tried to keep her tray out of the mess—there were sticky smears and slimy trails all up and down the long counter, proving that not all the prisoners were as quick as she was at catching the food.

  Of course “food” was a relative term, she thought as she reached the end of the counter and looked down at what her tray contained. There was some pinkish, spongy cubes swimming in thin black gravy that might have been meat and a scattering of dirty orange things that might once have been some kind of vegetable. For dessert, there was a smear of bright green pudding with purple specs in it that looked suspiciously like insect parts.

  Ugh! Ari thought as she filled her cup from the vast, burbling cooler of cloudy water. This looks horrible! I’m really glad this is my only supper here.

  But no matter how bad the stuff looked and smelled, she could feel her stomach growling and she knew she needed to choke at least some of it down for energy. Grabbing a bundle of plasti-utensils, she scanned the vast, echoing Mess Hall, looking for a place to sit.

  The tables were numbered from 1 to 30 but most of them looked occupied. Still, Ari saw inmates crowding into them and the prisoners sitting at the tables were surprisingly accommodating about making room for the newcomers. Well, that was nice but she still didn’t want to try squeezing into any of the mostly full tables.

  She couldn’t help looking at table 13—the one the big Kindred had ordered her to sit at. It wasn’t nearly as full as the rest of the tables—however the people who were sitting there looked extremely odd.

  Not all the prisoners at BleakHall were humanoid apparently and it seemed that most of the ones who weren’t had chosen lucky number 13 as their preferred seating. Ari saw a purple creature with eight tentacles sitting there—it was using four of them to shove food into its beak-like mouth and the other four were exploring the length of the table, including its immediate neighbors.

  One of those neighbors was a male so vast he took up most of one side of the bench himself. He had bright green skin and he was wearing some kind of harness that fit over his shoulders and ran down his back. Poking out of the harness were vials of green fluid that ran in a ridge along his spine. Was it some kind of fluid delivery system, Ari wondered. Or was there some other reason for the strange vials?

  Sitting across from the green-skinned male was one with orange skin. Aside from the strange skin color, this one looked vaguely humanoid. He even had a tuft of straw-like blond hair on his head and he was holding a small communications device in one tiny hand and tapping at it with his thumbs. In between bites of food he appeared to be yelling at the other males at the table, none of which were listening to him.

  Ari couldn’t hear what he was saying but she decided she didn’t want to. Why had the big Kindred ordered her to sit at the one table in the Mess Hall which appeared to have the strangest occupants?

  Probably so he can isolate me and get me to himself, she thought with a shiver. Well, no thank you—she was going to sit where she wanted, Ari decided. And what she most wanted right now was to be alone.

  With that in mind, she turned and spotted exactly what she was looking for—a completely deserted table. It was the far one in the right corner of the Mess Hall—table number 30—and she was glad to see it. Surely there she could eat her dinner in peace—or as much of it as she could stomach anyway. Then maybe she could find a good hiding place and try to stay away from Tapper until it was time for lights out.

  What exactly she was going to do once she was assigned to a cell for the night, Ari had no idea. She had a vague hope that maybe she could hide and skip being assigned at all. If she could just hang around the edges of the prison until it was time to go out in the exercise yard, she could find Jak and get them out of here.

  Seating herself in the middle of the empty table, she began picking at her food with a blunt plasti-utensil. She had almost gotten up the nerve to try one of the orange vegetable blobs when a tray was plunked down to her right with a loud clatter. Then one was deposited to her left and, as Ari looked up, the entire formerly-empty table began to fill with hard-faced felons, all wearing the same ominous looking serpent tattoo in purple ink across their foreheads.

  Suddenly Ari became aware that someone was standing right behind her. She didn’t know how she knew—she just knew. Maybe it was the crawling sensation between her shoulder blades or the expression on the face of the man across from her. Whichever it was, she put down her plasti-utensil and turned to see a tall, impossibly thin male standing there. He was looking down at her with a blank expression on his long, thin face but Ari heard the man to her left mutter, “Holy shit!” as he scooted a little farther away from her.

  “I believe,” said the stone-faced man who was as thin as a skeleton and twice as frightening, “That you are sitting in my seat.”

  Eight

  The crawling sensation between Ari’s shoulder blades got worse, spreading up along her body to make her scalp prickle with fear. Clearly this “empty” table she had sat down at wasn’t empty at all. In fact, if the purple serpent tattoo she saw on all these inmates’ foreheads was any indication, she might have sat herself directly in the territory of some kind of cult or gang.

  “I…I’m sorry,” she said, picking up her tray and starting to stand up. �