Everything hurts.
The ache in Prakesh’s legs radiates upwards through his spine. His arms are in agony. It’s his shoulders that hurt the most–every time he takes a step, the enormous bag of soil presses down on them.
He concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other, blinking away the sweat dripping into his eyes. Then he’s at the mustering point, the other bags of soil appearing in his field of view. With a groan, he rolls the bag he’s carrying off his shoulders. It thumps on top of the rest, starts to slide back. For a horrible moment, Prakesh thinks it’s going to slide right off–he’ll have to pick it up, and that means crouching down, which he’s not sure he can do at that moment.
The bag comes to a quivering halt. Prakesh straightens up, tries to ignore the pain in his upper body. He places his hands at the small of his back, rolls his neck.
“Move it,” the guard says.
He’s sitting on a nearby crate, elbows on his knees, and his voice has a high-pitched, needling quality to it that Prakesh has already learned to hate. The guard has told him to move it every time Prakesh has brought another bag of soil, and he doesn’t vary his tone no matter how quickly Prakesh heads back to the other side of the hangar.
Out of the corner of his eye, Prakesh sees another prisoner stumbling towards him, almost collapsing under the weight of the bag of soil. Prakesh sidesteps smartly, but something under his shoe causes him to slide, a slick of oil, maybe, and he overbalances. His windmilling left hand brushes the bag on the worker’s shoulders, and he has to stop himself from grabbing hold. He finds his balance, exhaling hard. The worker glances at him as he offloads the bag. He looks brittle, like his bones are made of thin glass. Every prisoner is like that, moving as if each step will make their shins crumble.
“Move it.”
Prakesh walks back across the hangar, past the line of trudging workers, back towards the dwindling pile of soil bags. He’s counted twenty-eight prisoners here besides him, plus six guards spaced around the hangar. He wonders how many people are actually on this ship, the ratio of prisoners to guards, but then realises he’s too tired to care. The gruel they ate a couple of hours ago barely registered inside his body, and his throat is screaming for water.
The hangar is in the centre of the ship, and it’s enormous–not as big as the Air Lab, but still a couple of hundred feet from end to end. It’s baking hot, shimmering with a wet, sticky heat. There are stacks of crates everywhere, rusted together, their tops and sides ripped off in places. A disused forklift is parked near the wall, missing two of its wheels. There’s even a plane in a corner of the hangar, hulking and silent, covered with frayed netting like a captured animal.
Most of the floor space is given over to huge troughs, filled with soil, running wall to wall. The troughs are badly made, little more than sheet metal clumsily welded together. The soil is poor quality. The few living plants that Prakesh can see are wilted, feeble things: tomatoes and beans and cabbage and squash.
The irony is, there are a dozen ways he could improve the yield: space the plants properly, introduce interplanting, create better fertiliser. He tries to think about the procedures, hoping to distract himself, but he’s just too damn tired.
Prakesh reaches the first pile of soil sacks. He focuses on the one he has to pick up–the pile is low to the ground now, and the sack is at knee level. Like the others, it’s made of thin brown fabric, harsh on the hands, with grains of dirt leaking out between the fibres. He’s going to have to crouch after all.
Move it, Prakesh thinks, and bends to pick up the sack.
There’s movement in front of him, flickering at the edge of his vision. He looks up to see one of the prisoners fall–a woman so thin that her collarbone appears to be holding up her body like scaffolding.
The woman hits the ground with a staggered thump, her arms splayed out on either side of her. She gives a thin, rattling breath, then falls still.
Prakesh tries to cry out, but his throat won’t cooperate. He takes a step towards the woman, reaches out to her—
A hand lands on his chest, pushes him back. One of the guards, her face utterly bored. She has long hair running down her back, deep red in colour.
“Back to work,” she says.
Prakesh stares at her. “She—”
“I said, back to work.”
And Prakesh knows that the woman is dead. Knows it down to his bones. Is he really the only one who sees this? He looks over his shoulder–the other prisoners are looking at him, glancing up as they trudge, but nobody is coming to help. Not a single person.
The scene swims in front of him, and a burst of nausea propels itself up from his stomach. He reels in place, bent double, aware that he has to throw up and not sure how to stop himself.
The guard doesn’t tell him again. She doesn’t wait for a response. Prakesh senses that she’s raised her rifle, that she’s turning it in her hands. Any moment now, the butt is going to crash into him, and that’ll be that. If she hits him, he’s not getting up. Not that he can do anything about it.
At least I’ll see Mom and Dad, he thinks. Maybe Riley, too. He’s aware that he’s trembling, but he doesn’t know how to stop.
“No!” It’s a different voice, high and reedy. The speaker steps between Prakesh and the guard. “He’s n- he’s n-”
Whoever it is gulps, two quick sounds, then says, “He’s n-n-new. He d-d-doesn’t kn-kn-know how it w-works, that’s all.”
There’s a pause. The guard’s rifle doesn’t crash into him.
A canteen appears, raised by a thin, grimy arm. Somehow, Prakesh gets hold of it, and manages to drink. It’s a few seconds before his throat responds, and then it’s almost too much, like he’s trying to drink the ocean.
Somehow, he manages to keep it down. When he lowers the empty canteen, he sees the kid with the freckles staring back at him. He’s just as emaciated as the others, but his eyes are alive. The guard, the one with the tattered boots, is standing off to one side, looking sour. The woman’s body is still there. Two of the guards are bending down for it. (Her, Prakesh thinks. Not it.) The man holding the wrists says something Prakesh can’t hear, and his partner actually laughs.
The kid with the stutter bends down, and with a grunt, hoists a sack of soil. Prakesh does the same, trying hard not to look at the body, trying not to think about what he just saw. The thoughts come anyway. How long before you end up like that? How long before they work you to death? A month? A week?
He and the kid trudge back to the empty troughs in silence. It’s only when they’re halfway there, when no guards are nearby, that that kid speaks.
“J-J-J-” he says, scrunching up his face, trying to get the word out without raising his voice. “Jojo. My n-n-n-name’s J-J-Jojo.”
“Prakesh.”
They reach the second pile of soil bags, and heave their loads onto it. A puff of dirt shoots up from the pile, the motes floating in the air in front of them. As Prakesh looks up, he sees that the two nearby guards are turned away, muttering to each other.
Prakesh speaks as quietly as possible, keeping his head down, aware of the guards. The water is having an effect, and his head is starting to clear. “How many guards?”
“Wh-what?”
Prakesh gestures to the nearest one, then raises a questioning eyebrow.
Jojo bows his head, hunches his shoulders. He starts walking a little faster, and Prakesh has to up his pace to stay level. Jojo shakes his head–a quick, almost imperceptible movement–then his mouth forms a single word.
Later.