Then the voice of the corrections officer sounds to my left.
“Worms! We’re approaching your new home. This is merely a dump of cargo. Therefore we need make no touchdown. We’ll hover approximately three meters over the deposit site where each of you will disembark.”
It sounds like they won’t be rolling out the plush carpets. Someone whimpers underneath his hood. I hear the corrections officer kick him in the gut.
“Quiet! You will stay at the deposit site until retrieval. If you attempt escape, you will be executed. If you do not follow all instructions, you will be executed. If you cause any problem in any way that might look bad on one of my reports, you will be executed. If on the off-chance you are able to escape the shooters, you have nothing but a continent of frozen tundra and endless dark in every direction. May the Elder Stars watch you. May the ancestors pray for you. No one else cares. Welcome to the Wendigo.”
The carriage door opens, and a blast of icy air slams me even through the neoprene bodysuit I’ve been issued. I can barely breathe. Someone pulls me to standing. Bodies around me shuffle toward the cold air. My hood is ripped off, and I find myself at the open door of the sondi. All is darkness and stars, millions of pinpricks of sapphire in the black firmament, each a sun with worlds, and those worlds full with people. I dream those people are kinder than the ones here. Someone shoves the small of my back, and I fall.
I hurtle toward the ground but don’t travel far. I try to tuck my chin and roll, but with my hands bound and the disorientation of the cramped twelve-hour journey, my effort is more of a spastic flail than anything else.
“Roll, maggot!” someone yells.
I try but am quickly grabbed by the scruff of the neck. A guard yanks me away just in time to avoid another falling body as it slams into the icy hardpack.
I stand in a small pool of light next to the scaffolding of a tower. Ice and snow swirls everywhere. I curl my arms close and huddle next to the other wayward souls. A wall of darkness is all that is beyond the patch of dim light from the tower. No horizon, just a formless and impenetrable curtain stretching to eternity.
“Stop!” the armored guard who pulled me to my feet screams.
A fellow prisoner sprints into the darkness.
“Stop or we fire!” the guard yells again, but the runner is gone.
Then the red dot of a laser sight alights. Bang! The shot is fired from the tower above. The guard beside me holds up his wrist communicator. “You get ’em, Greelo?”
“Got ’em, Sookah,” the voice chimes back.
I look to the tower. Greelo sets the high-powered sniper rifle against his shoulder calmly.
“Listen up, maggots!” Sookah holds a voice amplifier to his snow mask. “You will form a line here.” He points at the ground.
We shiver and shuffle slowly into place. Bang! The rifle echoes again.
The man behind me drops. “My leg! They shot my leg!”
“Move faster next time,” Sookah says. “Or next aim is your skull.”
“I prefer to blow the stones!” Greelo’s voice cuts in over the communicator. Sookah guffaws.
I lift the injured man from the ground. He’s small and dark-skinned, an islander like me. He can no longer walk unassisted with the bullet lodged in his thigh.
“Thank—”
“Shut up!” I hiss through my teeth. My lips crack in the freezing cold.
“Hook your bindings to the belt of the man in front of you and prepare for descent,” announces Sookah.
“Descent?” the injured man whispers.
“Quiet!” I reiterate. “Or you’ll get us both killed.”
The man looks no older than fifteen because of his diminutive stature, but the lines on his face are etched deep, denoting a lifetime much longer than my own. I clip the chains from my wrist bindings to a loop on the belt of the man in front of me. The guard walks back to inspect the line. He stares at me as I shoulder the weight of the scrawny man behind me.
“Man can’t move on his own,” Sookah says. “Best leave him to drag, otherwise you’re both done.”
“I’ll take my chances,” I reply.
The guard pulls a humbaton from his belt. He cracks me across the ribs with it. I wince as I feel bone break. “I didn’t say you could talk, maggot,” he growls. He straps on a pair of infrared goggles as he leads our shuffle from the pool of light into black.
It feels even colder once the lamplight is absent. I’m disoriented in the pitch, as if swimming in a dark tub of ice. A cry of desperation sounds in front of me. My arms are yanked forward. My footing falls away. I tumble down an icy slope. It feels like forever as ice and rock abrade my skin. The slide finally stops, and I try to stand, but I’m bruised, my ribs broken. My foot slips on the ice. I feel myself about to fall over the edge of something and into a chasm. The scrawny man behind me pulls me back, saving me.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Call it even,” he whispers back. “I’m Toshiro Kodai. Friends call me Toshi.”
“Edmon,” I say in return.
“Leontes?” he questions. “I thought I recognized your face in the light a moment ago!”
There is a loud clicking sound, and lights suddenly blind us. We’re standing on the edge of a hole bored into the ice about ten meters wide and far deeper than my eyes can see. An ice arcology, I think. A string of intense fireglobes illuminates a sheer drop into blackness. The frozen rungs of a rickety metal ladder are bolted to the side of the chasm. I kick a stone into the pit. I wait. Finally, a pop echoes back from the black.
“Start crawling, maggots!” Sookah yells, pointing at the icy ladder.
A burly, scarred man with tattoos at the front of our chain eases himself down the first of the metal rungs. I nod to Toshi. He saved me from the fall; I’ll make sure he gets to the bottom alive, even with the wound in his leg. My eyes adjust to the Nightside darkness. I look up and out onto the horizon, and I can barely make out several blinking lights. They don’t move, so they must be attached to some kind of structure.
“What’s that?” I whisper.
The guard called Greelo, who has come down from rifle duty in the tower, sees me point. I feel rather than see him smile underneath his mask. “The Citadel, maggot. Pray you never do time there.”
The lights of the Citadel blink back. I can’t make out the shape of any building, so if there’s something out there, it’s as dark as the night.
I feel a tug on my bindings. It’s my turn to descend the ladder. The guard raises his humbaton as if to strike me for my idleness. I could rush him, take the weapon from him, beat him with it, blast the sonic pulse to scramble his brain, but then what? I’d be dead. This is all a game. A game where I am the weak worm. I must make him feel powerful in order to survive.