Claire’s cruise ship had risen into orbit several hours ago, with a quietness that seemed deafening to Claire, instinctively braced for propulsion jets and engine burn. She’d waited for several hours in the room she’d been shown to, shivering in her wet tunic and stroking Kit’s shivering form. She didn't want to remind anyone that she was here until she had to. Thankfully the burn of the rain only lasted a few minutes, though her skin felt tight and sunburned now.

Eventually, mostly dry and very hungry, Claire ventured out of her room, hoping to find one of the aliens she'd talked to in the loading bay.

In the hall, which seemed both too narrow and too tall, another Spo crew member sent her along to a mess hall.

The hall was pretty clearly divided between Merith and Spo, with Spo food on a counter against one pale green wall, and Merith food against the opposite wall, a violent orange. Small round tables filled the middle space, with the kind of stools and squats favored by both species.

She sat alone, feeling the weight of antagonistic stares the whole time she scarfed down the food. It tasted strange, but anything solid and textured was bliss after years of mush.

After dinner, she returned to the room she’d been shown to, and gave some fruit to Kit. He climbed onto her shoulder and his fur tickled her ear.

“We made it, Kit. This is better, right? You didn’t want to stay with Faal and be bred and studied and exhibited. Of course not.”

He finished his slices and slid down in front of her, to be cradled like a baby.

“You are ridiculous,” Claire said. “You must have been genetically engineered to be cute, and I love you anyway.”

She stroked his furry belly and he purred.

But then her roommates began to arrive, and Claire’s stomach began to churn. They gave her brief nods, but no one tried to talk to her, and she didn’t want to antagonize anyone by trying to make small talk.

She tried to lie down and sleep, and the weskit curled up on her chest, but it was no good. Her stomach felt horrible. Claire sat up quickly and the weskit slid off onto the floor. She grabbed the recycle bin between her bed and the next one and vomited into the small container. Her throat burned and her head felt like it would split open behind her eyes.

“It’s sick,” said the Merith in the next bed. “Foul.”

“I’m sorry,” Claire choked out, spitting into the square container. Another wave of nausea hit her, and she threw up again, the last of her dinner leaving her system.

"I apologize," Claire said again, when she could speak.

She would be sharing the cabin with these three Merith females, and she didn’t want them to resent her.

“Are you done, bruck?” said the Merith next to her. She was the crew chief who had gotten Claire this spot, and when she'd introduced herself Claire had been so muddled she hadn't quite caught her name. It sounded something like Kitten, which Claire thought was faintly amusing. She’d never seen such a heavily-muscled Merith. If they had weight lifting competitions, she felt sure Kitten could win.

“I’m done,” Claire said. Her stomach felt weak, but better. “I think I ate the wrong things. I don’t know what to eat here.”

“I’ve seen your kind,” said Kitten, casually. "I bet it was the rain. Your skin is too thin for it."

Another Merith woman spoke up, the one who had changed out of a wet jumpsuit when she got there. "And ours isn't? Only the Vel are unaffected by the alkaline rain. And still we were sent to load in the storm!" The Merith woman took out a bottle and began to cleanse her eye, which looked red and swollen.

Suddenly Claire looked back at Kitten. “Wait. You’ve seen my kind? Where? How long ago?”

Kitten lay back against her bed again.

“You’ve been in the Council news. The Spo sponsored you into the Council, yes?”

“They were supposed to... But no one seems to recognize me, so I thought perhaps they failed.”

“No, your species won their trial,” Kitten said. “You didn’t know?”

“Then humans are part of the Council, one of the ten?” Claire asked.

“Yes, but it isn’t ten any longer,” Kitten said. “Thirteen? Fourteen? There are a lot of new species these last few years. The Rik, you Humawns, the Melifleurs. Now there are new species in the reports every circuit.”

“Do you know where my planet is?” Claire asked.

Kitten rolled over in bed. “Don’t you know where your own planet is?”

“Well...no. I didn’t know much about space travel when the Spo took me. And their ship took us to Spo mainspace, but I don’t know how close that was to Earth.”

 “Well, I have no idea. Our cycle begins and ends at Selta, and I don't think it's anywhere near there," Kitten said. Her arm muscles rippled as she gestured to the recycle bin. “Clean that out before you sleep.”

Claire didn’t sleep any better after that, and when she did doze off, she kept waking with a heart-pounding jerk. When she finally dropped off for good, she had the dream again.

It wasn't so much a dream as a memory, but then, it was a memory she'd dreamed so often that sometimes she wondered if she still remembered the details or created them.

The dream started in the Spo barracks, where she'd lived during her one year as a cadet. She'd slept badly that night too, and woken in the middle of the night with a pounding headache and overwhelming thirst. In her dream, she climbed down from the top bunk in the dark and slipped between the rows of beds towards the communal bathroom.

She was sweaty from tossing and turning. Her hair stuck to her neck and forehead and the stone floor felt blessedly cool against her bare feet.

She made it to the bathroom and almost to the row of sinks, when she heard scuffling in the outer hall. The Spo had put mirrors on the floor and walls of the bathroom, not understanding human mirror usage, and she saw her reflection below her as she walked to the hall door. It held out hands, trying to stop her, but she couldn’t stop. She walked past the sinks and swung open the door.

The first thing that met her eyes was another cadet, Jenelle, struggling with their mentor.

Jenelle was a pretty, red-headed girl. Claire had spent time with her in the past year, but she was reserved and Claire still didn’t know her very well.

Their Spo mentor had stuffed a rag in Jenelle's mouth. With one clammy hand he held her right arm, twisted up behind her back, and in the other hand he held a gun.

Claire had frozen, taking in the scene that she clearly wasn't meant to see.

 “Jenelle?”

The Spo's arms tightened with anger and frustration, and Jenelle panicked. She struggled, kicking backwards and trying to claw his face with her left hand, but the Spo was much stronger than her. He planted his four legs and wrapped his arm around her torso, capturing both her arms, and lifting her completely off the floor. He shoved the rag deeper in her mouth with the gun, and then pointed it at Claire.

“Go back to bed, Claire. Right now.”

Jenelle’s eyes were huge, the whites reflecting like milk in the pale light of the hallway.

“But where are you taking her?”

“Go back. Or you will go instead.”

Claire had felt stricken, unable to look away from the gun. She knew what the pellet gun could do, they’d been target training this week.

“But where will she – ” Claire tried once more, but she hadn't been able to look Jenelle in the eyes again. Some part of her had already decided to walk away.

“Stop speaking,” the Spo hissed, his voice commanding but not loud. “Step through the door.”

Claire never did look Jenelle in the eye.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and stepped back into the bathroom.

She listened to the nearly silent tussle as Jenelle was carried away, only once hearing a squeak, as if Jenelle had gotten her feet down and was trying to pull against her captor. The sounds retreated down the hall and around the corner, and then it was silent.

Claire leaned her head against the bathroom wall, shivering uncontrollably. She kept licking her lips with her tongue, feeling the rag that must be nearly suffocating Jenelle. She wanted desperately to do something for her, and she wanted desperately to go back to bed and pretend she'd never gotten up.

But who would she tell? There was no authority here except the Spo. She could tell the other cadets, but what good would that do? Or more accurately, what bad would it do? They were all completely subject to the rules and discipline of their mentor. His command was literally law. Claire went with shaking hands to the sink and cupped her hands to get a drink of water. What should she do? She splashed water on her face and tried to still her shaking. In the mirror, her reflection was crying.

Claire never found out whether she would have found her courage or not. The bathroom door swung open again and Claire gasped. Her mentor was back.

He grabbed her arm before she could run. "You've caused a problem.” He pointed the gun at her this time, and motioned to the hall. His large hand wrapped around her upper arm and his claws brushed her skin.

In her surprise and horror, Claire said the worst thing that had ever come out of her mouth. "Take Jenelle! Not me. Take Jenelle.”

Sometimes the dream stopped there, sometimes it kept going.

The Spo clapped a hand over her mouth and this time she was the one dragged down the hall, and her feet squealed uselessly against the smooth floor. She was spared the rag in the mouth, and when he threw her into his private office she saw why.

Jenelle lay on the floor, eyes open and glassy. There were bubbles around her nostrils and her lips were blue. Claire flinched away, refusing to take in any more of the details that indicated the girl was dead.

"You killed her," Claire whispered.

"Apparently she had breathing difficulties," her mentor said coldly. "If you had not come upon us, I would not have gagged her so severely."

“But what are you – why?” Claire gasped for breath. "Why either of us?"

She saw a crate in the corner, one of the large ones used to carry Spo trouncers. It was dark inside the cage, and still smelled of bleach.

Claire was so terrified by then, she didn’t even have the strength to resist as he pushed her head down and shoved her into the crate.

“You can’t do this!” she said.

"Of course I can. Cadets die. Sometimes even two at a time, though that will be harder to explain." He washed a frustrated tangerine color. “But that is my problem.”

 He sprayed her with something that smelled floral and wrong and the last thing she saw was Jenelle’s red hair against the stone floor. When she woke up, she was securely tied with rope in a space ship she'd never seen before.

Faal sat before her, studying her intently.

Sometimes the dream stopped here, but sometimes it kept... “Bruck, wake yourself, wake!”

Claire opened her eyes, and lashed out at the Merith leaning over her, going for the large, vulnerable, blue eye.

Kitten blocked her with a solid strike to Claire's forearm, and caught her hand in a massive fist. Claire jerked her hand free and rolled off the other side of the bed. She ducked beneath it, to put something between her and...and...

Claire closed her eyes.

After a moment, she slowly scooted out from under the bed and looked up at Kitten.

“I’m sorry,” Claire said, between gasps. She had probably yelled in her sleep just then. She stood up slowly, her heart still pounding. The other Merith women in the room were staring at them.

“You are violent in your sleep,” Kitten said. “Is it the space sickness?”

“No,” Claire said, scraping her sweaty hair away from her neck. “I’m just... I don’t know.” Faal would say she was broken, and he was probably right, but she wasn’t going to say it out loud. Claire looked at her hands. No blood, but she still shuddered, glad to be spared the end of the dream.

Kitten nodded. “Perhaps you ought to learn to fight. Going for my eye was good, but predictable to a Merith. Going under the bed was very bad. Your movement is limited and you cannot run. You should study some form of self-defense. If you fight while you’re awake, perhaps your mind will rest when you sleep.”

Claire nodded tiredly and crawled back under her thin blanket. That was good advice, but she hadn’t had much chance to learn in the last few years.

The other Merith went back to sleep, but Claire lay awake.

Claire didn't exactly blame herself for Jenelle's death. She hadn’t known when she stepped into the hall that it would end with Jenelle’s suffocation. But she did blame herself for offering Jenelle up at the last moment. Sometimes her mind got stuck on a litany of excuses for what she’d done: I was startled, I was terrified of our mentor, I was trapped in a situation that no one should ever have to deal with...

Claire moaned and rolled onto her stomach. Maybe if Jenelle had just disappeared Claire could have lived with her self-justifications. But instead, Claire had ended up living the life she would have doomed Jenelle to. Everything that happened to Claire, every time it got worse or more unbearable, she knew it was what Jenelle would have suffered. Every time she had the dream, she remembered... I would have done this all to her.

“You’re free now, Jenelle.” Claire whispered into the darkness. “We escaped. Maybe you can forgive me now.”