Guards didn’t stick around during lunch—it was basically a free-for-all and where the fights generally broke out. Holly sometimes wondered if a maximum security prison was a safer place for prisoners.
She scrambled to her feet, ignoring the ache in her side where she’d crashed into the tables both times, her throbbing skull that had taken the brunt of the tray, and her shoulder where Jalia’s foot had smashed into her. This chick was tough. No wonder they thought the dining area was theirs—they could claim it and defend it. But hell, when had that even happened? Why hadn’t anyone else mentioned it to them?
As she turned to face Jalia, she saw that Korla had also risen to her feet. The shorter Constie glowered at Holly.
“I didn’t start this,” Holly said, trying to figure out a way to avoid the fight. “Should we call it a truce?”
In answer, Korla grabbed a chair and charged at Holly, swinging it wildly at her.
Holly jumped behind an overturned table and crouched behind it to shield herself. The chair crashed against it, the reverberations concussing into Holly and shocking her.
She cocked her head to the side, trying to hear what Korla was doing. How was Holly going to get out of this? The longer the fight went on, the better their advantage became, because there were two of them and one of her. She’d tire out faster than they would.
“Holly,” Charly whispered, suddenly kneeling beside Holly. Holly jumped, startled by Charley’s sudden appearance.
“Shit. You scared the hell out of me.”
Charly’s face was bright in anticipation of the clash. “I can’t let you do this alone. It’s ridiculous. I can fight for myself.”
“That’s not the question. You want to get out? Then you can’t fight.”
“OK, confession. I don’t want to leave you behind, either.”
“You can come back and visit. That shouldn’t be what you’re worried about. Now go!” Holly shoved Charly by the back of the neck away from the shelter of the table.
“You’re next, Charly!” Korla screeched as she came around the table and Charly ducked away with a frustrated roar. Korla was still holding onto the chair and preparing to swing it downward. Holly dove and rolled away as the chair crashed hard into the ground behind her, right where she’d been sitting. She had to keep track of both of the women. As she got her feet under her in a crouch, Holly spun around to face Korla and the idea struck her then, what she needed to do.
With a loud grunt, Korla swung the chair down at Holly. Once more Holly dove away, but felt the chair clip her on the back of the foot. She cried in pain, but managed to leap to her feet before Korla recovered the chair all the way. Holly grabbed a chair of her own and squared off at Korla.
“Aha, now we’re even,” Holly said.
“I’ve got your back, Holly. Tap me in, tap me in. Please!” Charly called.
“Stay back, woman” Holly said. “You’re getting out this week. It’s my homecoming present. Don’t fuck it up,” Holly said, flashing a scowl at Charly.
“Go around behind her,” Korla ordered Jalia.
In that moment Holly caught the look of irritation in Jalia’s face. The taller woman hesitated. This was the work of a dictator, and Jalia didn’t like it.
“Two against one—you guys don’t fight fair. Of course, chairs as a weapon, not fair either. But I get it, Korla. Jalia’s your servant? Right? That’s how you guys do this? Did Jalia even want to have a fight today? Or was that all you, Korla?” Holly didn’t know what she was saying, exactly. It was meant as a distraction. Jalia, who had been doing as she was told, stopped in her tracks and looked at Korla, as though she were waiting to make sure Korla hadn’t changed her mind.
“Get her!” Korla said, dropping her chair in exasperation. This was the opening Holly had been waiting for. They were heavy chairs—Holly’s muscles were quivering from holding one up for even a few seconds.
But that was when her opportunity came. Though Jalia was closer, Holly leapt and swung her chair at Korla. It connected with the side of the other woman’s head. Korla grunted and crumpled to the ground. Meanwhile Jalia had closed the distance between them, and kicked Holly hard in the gut. Holly gasped and fell, though she tried to fight the instinct to curl around her stomach. Jalia leapt on top of Holly before she could roll away, and with the advantage all hers perched on top of Holly’s stomach, the Constie pounded Holly in the face. A lot. Stars flew and fireworks went off in Holly’s head. The roar of the crowd filled her ears, and then the punching stopped.
Her face was on fire. Holly fought to open her eyes and saw that Charly had Jalia around the neck in a chokehold. She had dragged the other woman off Holly.
Korla groaned somewhere near Holly.
Holly gritted her teeth and crawled to her feet and, against the pain of her injuries, hobbled to Charly’s side. “That’s enough Char. That’s enough. Drop her. Let’s get out of here.”
TWO
HOLLY stood in front of the steel security door the next morning, wearing the black trousers, pale blue dress shirt, and loose tie that she’d worn the day she checked into prison well over a year ago. The clothes hung more slack on her body than she remembered but anything was better than that god-awful turquoise jump-suit. The door hissed open with a slow expiring gasp of air. Holly’s heart raced. Was this happening? It had to be a joke. There was no way—
“Jesus, Holly, what happened to you?” Meg asked, standing on the other side of the door with her arms crossed. Her leg was out at a cocky angle and there was a bulky aether gun on her hip. Her bright face and blonde hair—pulled up into a ponytail—were both such a comforting sight. Though Meg and Holly were sisters, Meg had inherited the light complexion and hair color of their mother, while Holly got the black hair and olive skin tones of their father.
Dressed in her standard dark form fitting pants, small-heeled calf-high boots and a blazer over a button-down shirt, Meg was all business, like she’d just left work to grab her sister. Her hologram detective badge glowed from the belt on her waist.
“No ‘hey sister! Missed you.’” Holly gave her a quick hug, and in a surge of either bravery or stupidity, went further. “Not even a ‘sorry you were unfairly stuck in prison for eighteen months for defending yourself?’”
Meg laughed, but there was a self-conscious sound to it. “Yeah, no, none of that. You’re getting out now. That’s the main thing.”
“The main thing for you. Now that your guilty conscience is salved. Why am I getting now, anyway?” Holly asked, flashing her sister a sarcastic smile as she took her belongings out of the box on the guard’s desk. The female prison guard watched the proceedings with a neutral expression. She was a Constie, with porcelain-white skin that glittered like there were diamonds in it. She watched Holly with an eyebrow cocked in disbelief. “It was self-defense. Not murder,” Holly said as though the guard didn’t believe her. She’d repeated that exact line more times than she cared to count.
“I’m sure it was, sweetheart,” the guard said. “I’m sure it was.”
“Not here. Let’s talk about it later,” Meg said with a polite smile. “But I do want to know what happened to your face.”
“A fight. Yesterday at lunch. Two stupid whores tried to jump my friend Charly. She gets out in two days. Don’t worry about it. Not my proudest moment.”
“You started a fight?”
“Like I said, not in the mood to talk about it.”
Meg gave her a look. One that meant, really?
“Whatever happened just accept that it made sense at the time.” Holly collected the rest of her things from the box on the guard’s desk—her palm-sized communicator, which no longer had service, her cross-shoulder bag, and wallet. She checked quickly and found that the wallet was empty of novas. There’d been a few in it when she’d gone in. At least, she thought so. It was hard to remember anything from that day. She’d been in a daze.
The last thing she pulled out of the box was the photo of her elementary schoo
l class that another teacher had sent during the trial, along with a card full of encouraging sentiments from the kids. Seeing the scrawled handwriting and the faces of the kids again made Holly’s eyes burn. She clutched the card and pushed it quickly into her bag. That part of her life was gone forever. She swallowed against a hard lump in her throat and turned to head out. “Can we get out of here now? Please?”
“Hey Azden, thanks again. See you around,” Meg said to the guard. She turned to Holly. “Let’s go, then.” Meg led the way through the security doors, through the long hallway and out past the prison yard and the tall fence that surrounded it.
Holly scanned the yard and spotted Charly standing next to a weight bench.
“Hey Charly! I’m out. Find me, or I’ll find you in a few days,” Holly called.
“This is perfect, woman. I’ll see you soon!” Charly shouted.
“That your friend?” Meg asked.
“That’s Charly,” Holly said as they reached the outer gate.
“She looks tougher than you,” Meg said, arching her eyebrow as she squinted to see between the layers of fences.
“She is. She loves a good fight. I hate them.”
“The bruises on your face say otherwise.”
In the distance, the spires and tower tops of The City of Jade Spires shot into the sky like hundreds of knife-tips. They glittered in the early afternoon sun and the yellow-orange hue of reflected light from Ixion, the gas giant planet taking up a fourth of the faintly blue sky. The Centau race who settled the six moons called the planet Muibaus which meant “pale mother” in their language, but humans had started calling it Ixion at some point in their shared history. Classic human. Take an alien concept and imbue it with human history.
Meg continued to lead the way to the nearest trolley stop, past the rows of gardens and greenhouses where some of the prisoners worked—it was owned by a company run by a Druiviin, two humans, and a Constie who allowed the inmates to come learn the large-scale, sustainable farming methods. Holly had taken advantage of it seven weeks after arriving in prison, when it began to look like she’d be staying awhile. Back then, she’d thought of it as a way to pass time. As the days ticked by, she began to see it as a back-up plan. Or, well, a plan. Since there were no others. She’d also taken some online business courses. A person with a record might have a hard time getting someone to hire them. But a person with a prison record could start a business of some kind.
“Why am I out, anyway? I still had three and half years. After yesterday’s fight, I expected to have more time tacked on.” Holly took a breath. Something about the air outside prison was different from the air inside it, even though she was now only seven hundred feet away from the pen and it was, essentially, the same air.
“An order from higher up that you should be released. They sent me, the logical choice.”
“Because you’re my sister.”
“Right. And also it came from within my department. Gabe could have come along with me, but I see enough of him as it is, these days.”
“So, thanking you for getting me out wouldn’t be exactly right. Since it was an order,” she thought aloud. “Well, anyway, thanks for coming to my release day.”
“I visited as often as I could,” Meg defended, picking up on something in Holly’s tone. “And I’m here now.”
“Once a month or less.” Holly smiled. “But it’s fine. I understand. Let’s not even mention mom and dad.”
“I work a lot. And yes, that’s as often as I could do. Lucy also takes a lot of my time. And I rarely talk to mom and dad.”
Holly shrugged. “I would have loved to see Lucy. I probably won’t even recognize her, it’s been so long.”
“You don’t have a kid, so I don’t expect you to understand, but I would never bring her here. I don’t even like it that she has an idea of what happened.” There was a guilty tone in Meg’s voice along with the matter-of-fact one that felt a bit like a punch to Holly’s gut.
A surge of defensive emotion rippled through her over what her life had become, over what her sister thought of her, over what her parents thought of her, over what her niece thought of her . . . over all of it. But an argument was pointless. It wouldn’t make her feel better. It was clear that Meg was conflicted over the matter. So Holly lapsed into the silence of her own thoughts to avoid a fight and to simply try to enjoy being on the outside again.
At the edge of the farms, they waited at a marked trolley stop. A few other people waited as well—off-duty prison workers and farm-laborers. Holly took another deep breath, catching just a hint of the fragrance of dirt and earth. Even when she’d worked on the farm herself occasionally, that scent had meant freedom. It reminded her of the now-distant memories of her grandmother’s homestead at the edge of the Sliver, the least volcanic section of the moon Kota, the moon that cradled the City of Jade Spires and all the people living in it.
Soon the trolley arrived and they boarded along with the other waiting humans and Constellations. The trolley took off smoothly, rambling along with a soft bounce as it wound through the streets of the city, which stretched for miles. There would be two more exchanges before they got back to Meg’s apartment.
The two of them rode in silence—Holly didn’t feel like having a chat with the audience aboard the trolley. In a way, it was still weird to her that she’d been in prison, that she was now out, and that she essentially had nothing to go back to. No home, no job, and no prospects for a job—who would hire someone with a prison record that had killed someone? Let alone hire them to teach their elementary school age children? That was a pretty significant mar on her character.
But . . . she was out. She was done with that chapter of her life. And she had everything to look forward to.
A fresh start.
She needed to think of it like that. With relief, with excitement at the chance for new opportunities. She couldn’t dwell on the past because that was a shitty place. The kids, she’d loved them. Absolutely adored their little faces. Their eager eyes. The wonder with which they saw everything. But, really, that was the only good part about her past.
During the darkest times she hadn’t just given up and let him win. That was one thing she held onto, tightly. It was the flame in her heart that justified what she’d done.
Anyway, the fact that Holly no longer had a place to live made her sick to her stomach. That was too much uncertainty.
“You’ll stay with Lucy and me for a few months,” Meg said, suddenly, as though she’d been reading Holly’s thoughts. “As many months as you need.”
“Thanks,” Holly said, sighing. “I thought you didn’t want Lucy to know what I did.”
“It’s too late for that. She’s too young to understand it. That’s all. I just want to shield her from the shit of my day-job for as long as possible.”
“Fine,” Holly said, shrugging.
It was Meg’s turn to sigh. “What now?”
“Nothing,” Holly said quickly, then, “I hate to impose.”
“Holly,” Meg said, staring at her, slack-jawed. “Really.”
“What?”
“Don’t you dare talk to me about being an imposition. OK? Yeah, I didn’t want to bring Lucy to see you. But that doesn’t mean for one single fucking minute that I don’t think you were justified when you fought back. And that you did not deserve to be stuck in there.” Meg glanced around at the other passengers. Most of them avoided eye contact, but a few eyed Meg and Holly as though wondering where “there” was. Meg sighed and ignored their glances.
A brief rush of warmth filled Holly’s stomach. That was good to hear. Those ideas. Those things that she’d been telling herself for months. It was good to have someone else say them to her, for once. Sometimes she almost stopped believing that she’d been wrongfully imprisoned and that her self-defense was justified.
“Thanks,” she muttered, grabbing the overhead bar as the trolley wheeled around a curve.
“You alright?” Meg as
ked at her side, leaning close with the motion of the trolley. Meg smelled clean and radiated power and hope. All three of those things seemed odd, after being around a bunch of women who had done questionable shit.
“Yeah, thanks. Thanks for doing all this for me. I really appreciate it. I’m just thinking about what’s next for me.” She avoided her sister’s gaze.
Meg straightened as the trolley evened out. She slipped one arm around Holly’s shoulders and pulled her close.
THREE
TWO trolley stops later, and they arrived at the base of one of the residential towers in the Ice Jade district. The exterior was lit up and covered in very pale, almost translucent jade. Interspersed between the 175-story towers were a few shorter ones, to give relief to the eye and the skyline. At one intersection, there were four towers grouped close together, which made a plaza where vehicle and trolley traffic were diverted and sent another way. Clustered around the plaza there were food carts covered with signs for tacos, curries, ramen, croissants, kabobs, and bahn mi, and the streets bustled with hundreds of people dressed in colorful attire, in styles native to the various home planets of the races.
“Lunch,” Meg shouted as they pushed through the crowds to reach her apartment. Soon, the Constie food vendors would take over the streets. And then later, the Druiviins and Centau, because the Centau had decided it was the best way to organize the plazas and the crowds. It kept things cleaner. Ensured that there was a method to the madness. But many of the races appreciated food fusions or eating the cuisine from nonnative worlds. Holly loved tacos done up with seared vegetables from Yaso, the Druiviin homeworld. There were drinks that Holly also loved from Yaso, like the hot brewed drink kasè, a white beverage that could be sweetened or enjoyed slightly bitter.
They rode the elevator up to the 117th floor, and went into Meg’s four bedroom place. “Did this get bigger while I was gone?” Holly asked, falling backwards onto the couch. She dropped her bag on the floor and sighed. It was luxurious after having just a hard futon for a couch and a bed for the past eighteen months.
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