Disclaimer: The Starkillers Cycle contains strong language and graphic content. It is not intended for readers under age 18.
Blood was a lot stickier than Mel remembered.
And shivs were a lot messier.
With one knee digging into Kress’s emaciated gut, Mel used the shiv’s toothbrush handle to prod the bloody hole in his neck. Afternoon heat coiled off the prison’s black asphalt, and the jungle humidity sank into her gray prison coveralls.
Blinking away sweat, Mel leaned in close to Kress. The prison ID numbers stamped along his uniform collar were fading beneath an endless stream of blood. The shiv’s blade had gotten wedged below his Adam’s apple. Now she needed to get it back out.
Otherwise, this asshole was going to die.
But it wasn’t the blood loss that would kill him. It was the poison she was pretty positive he’d laced along the razor’s edge.
“Was it Plutax?” she asked, poking again at the slice in his neck. More blood oozed, dribbling as halfheartedly as her attempts to find the razor. “Or was it just good old fashioned arsenic?”
Kress groaned; his sunburned eyelids fluttered open. “Bitch,” he gurgled out.
“Never heard of that one.” She pushed off Kress, flinging aside the toothbrush and sinking into a crouch. He’d always been a small guy, but he looked really small prostrate and bleeding like this. “If you don’t give me a real answer, Kress, then I can’t get you an antidote. The guards will show up any second now, and they’re gonna have a lot of questions.”
“They can’t help … anyway,” he rasped. “It’s … Vips,”
Vips—slang for Viprizec, a popular poison for all one’s execution needs. No antidote, a lot of pain, death in minutes … and Kress had just tried to use it on Mel.
Well, fuck trying to save his life.
It felt like only seconds ago that she’d scarfed back her lunch and slunk out here. She did it everyday—and all the inmates knew to stay the fuck away so she could have her five minutes of peace and quiet. Even the guards let her wander out alone since they could see her on their ten million security cams, anyway.
But Kress had brilliantly decided to hide in the shadow of the women’s bathroom twenty paces away and slice her up from behind—or try to slice her up. It was a really dumb move, even for Kress.
Eyes narrowing, Mel shifted her face toward the nearest camera at the top of the bathroom’s brick wall. The lens was angled in the opposite direction.
Her gaze snapped further on, to the nearest of eight metal towers that stood sentry along the compound’s edges. Scaffolding webbed around each tower—reinforcement added after the earthquake six years back—and every inch of steel was covered in roving cams. And yet not a single building, beam, doorways had cams facing her either.
Maybe not quite as dumb a move as she’d thought. It would seem Kress had found a blind spot—which meant that no one would see she’d fought in self-defense. The guards would just assume it was cold-blooded murder.
After all, that was what had landed her in prison two years back.
Mel’s head whipped back to Kress. “How the fuck did you know this was blind?” With eight gleaming high-rises and hundreds of buildings between, the cameras picked up everything the prisoners did on the compound—from pissing to showering to fighting. “No way this was just luck.”
He laughed—or tried to. The blood bubbling between his teeth made it hard.
“Who set you up for this?” she demanded.
“You really have … no idea … do you?” He coughed; blood sprayed onto her chin, mixing with her sweat.
She bit back a frown. Blood on her hands was one thing—she’d killed enough people to stop caring if it got under her fingernails. But blood on her face …
She dragged a sleeve over her chin. “I’ve only got a few minutes before the guards notice this, and you’ve got even less time than that. I know P.G.E. is the reason I’m in prison, and I know you just tried to kill me. What I don’t know is why.”
“Fuck … you.” His lips twitched up, and even as his eyes rolled back in head, his wicked satisfaction was clear. “I was on death row anyway, but you just … hit … ten. Have fun on Rix … ” The end of the name vanished beneath a choked gurgle.
“Well, shit.” Mel pushed into a standing position, dragging her bloodied hands down her coveralls.
Have fun on Rixion—that’s what he’d been about to say. It was the highest security prison planet in the entire Federation of the Cavillis Axis, and a guaranteed death sentence. Not from the convicts sentenced there, but from the hard labor—mining, forging, and shipping steel. Compared to Rixion, the prison-planet of Hatha was a five-star hotel.
Mel’s teeth clenched together, gritting in her ears. Ten strikes guaranteed her a one-way ticket to Rixion. And to think, she’d only been at eight strikes before lunch. Now, two stale sandwiches and a bloody round of self-defense later, she was one strike over the finish line.
She threw another glance at the mess hall … then in the other direction. The security fence loomed a hundred yards away. It was an easy scramble—only fifteen feet of chain-link. Tall ferns towered beyond, unmoving in the thick, humid afternoon. Even the usual screech of insects seemed dulled. A quarter mile further, past a dense sprawl of scrub and secondary growth, the jungle’s tree line began, fat gray trunks blending into a wall of greenery.
“Shit,” Mel repeated, louder this time. When she’d woken up this morning and knocked back her UV-tabs before working the cattle fields, she had not imagined striking out into that Hathan jungle beyond the fence … and then getting her name struck off the Warden’s list of prisoners.
Strikers, everyone called them—the prisoners stupid enough to choose Hatha’s jungle over its prison, to choose scarce game over tasteless gruel, to face the so-called monsters that occasionally got through the fifty-foot concrete wall around the prison farms and nearby jungles.
The Warden didn’t give two shits if people chose the life of a Striker. It was their death wish and one less mouth to feed. He even made it easy to escape: there was always at least one section of fencing that had its electricity switched off.
And today, it was that piece straight ahead—as if this had all been planned just for Mel. As if someone wanted her to live out there instead of rotting in the compound.
Mel kicked into a jog toward the chain-link fence, pulse dancing dangerously fast. That wouldn’t do—oh, no. She had to get her adrenaline under control stat.
The rest of the plants blurred into a mass of green as Mel honed in on a single fern. Its fingerlike leaves seemed to beckon to her, taunting.
At ten paces from the fence, she eased to a stop and inhaled deeply into her stomach. Her pulse slowed, her awareness increased. The sound of insects and distant prison conversations grew sharper as the layout of the jungle separated into navigable pieces. She’d cross the fence, run toward that spiky hedge, twirl behind it, and then keep close to the ground until she hit the tree-line.
A door slammed with a resounding clang! The mess hall; the other prisoners had finished their sandwiches. They’d march onto the rec tarmac at any moment, then around the women’s shower after that—and then the guards would definitely see Kress’s body.
After one more controlled breath—the boot steps of Mel’s fellow inmates stomping nearer—she bolted into action.
In half a moment, she reached the fence. A single jump later, and her fingers were locked around the chains, her boots shoved in as she scrambled up. The fence rattled—clink, clink, clink.
She reached the top, came face to face with the fern, and then she was leaping over. The air whizzed past her ears.
She slammed into the ground. Her ankles screamed and her knees popped, but Ronin’s training took over. She propelled forward, transferring gravity’s power into a roll.
Before the other prisoners had even reached the outhouses, she was back on her feet and sprinting full-speed, sweat burning her eyes. The soft soil cushioned each step as she flew through leaves and tall grass, over tree stumps and hedges..
Yet as Mel ran, gaze focused on the ground ahead, ears on high-alert, she started to smile—teeth bared and everything.
Because she was a Striker now, and this was the first time in her entire twenty-four years of living that she’d ever had a taste of absolute freedom.
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