I thought the worst part of prison transport would be the food, or the utter lack of bathroom accommodations and clothing. But it’s actually the fact that I can’t stretch, and that the top of my cell—it’s a cage, really—is just three inches above my head. I haven’t been able to stand in days, and even sitting, I can’t fully straighten my legs. And I’m not a tall woman.

But at least I’m on the top row. The women in the two rows beneath me have it far worse. Every time I think about that, I slip a little deeper into madness. So, I try not to think about it.

At the end of my row, Leda taps one long, dirty fingernail on the slatted metal floor of her cell. She’s been doing that for hours. At this point, I want to break out of my own cell just so I can rip her fingernail off with my teeth.

Space travel isn’t what I expected it to be.

Growing up on an agricultural planet—technically, a moon—I wasn’t presented many opportunities for interstellar voyage, and because my parents didn’t own the farm they worked on, I couldn’t afford any of the opportunities that did pop up. So, the irony of my first trek off-world being a one-way trip to Rhodon was not lost on me.

Rhodon. The Red Rock. Devil’s Eye. Rhodon is the galaxy’s waste bin—where civilization throws away its trash. There’s no way off the planet, and every sentence is a life sentence. Unless it’s a death sentence.

“How long do you think we’ll be stuck in here?” Leda asks, and all around me, other women groan. Leda hasn’t stopped tapping or talking in hours. I wish she’d go to sleep. Or pass out. But she only shuts up when—

A familiar groan rumbles from behind me, and I twist around to see a slick metal panel sliding open in the wall that forms the back of my cell. The compartment being revealed holds a small, flat protein cake, a clear vitamin capsule, and a soft pouch of water tethered to the compartment with a thin steel cable.

I snatch the cake and shove the capsule into my mouth, then wash it down with the water. But after I’ve swallowed the pill, I keep drinking. We only have one minute to drink before the pouch will retract by its tether into the compartment, which will slide shut.

In the beginning, I ignored the water because there are no bathrooms. When one of my fellow prisoners has to go, she just…goes. Those of us lucky enough to be on the top row don’t get peed on, but everyone else…

Well, it’s considered poor form to let loose anywhere except the back right corner of your cell, so the ladies below you won’t accidentally get showered—or worse. But this is a prison transport. Everyone here is a convict, and many of those convicts don’t care who they pee on—or worse.

To avoid that indignity, I’d refused to drink anything for three days. But then thirst and the length of our journey got the better of me. As bad as the transport is, Rhodon will be worse, and I won’t be doing myself any favors if I arrive dehydrated or malnourished. So now I gulp from my bottle along with the rest of the ladies. Every day, I swallow my vitamin, and once the water is gone and the compartment has closed, I take my time chewing my tasteless protein cake.

“Why do you think they give us vitamins?” Leda asks around a mouthful of her own dinner. Or lunch. Or whatever you call the only meal we ever get. “I mean, why do they care how healthy we are, if they’re just going to dump us on some forgotten planet to die?”

“They don’t care,” the woman below me says. She’s thick and sturdy, and I suspect she’s also tall. Which is part of the reason I was hesitant to drink too much water. When we get out of here, there’ll be nothing to keep her from stomping the smaller woman who accidentally peed on her—or worse—into the ground. “They’re just following regulations. Now shut the fuck up.”

They’ll feed us on Rhodon too. At least, that’s what I was told when I was sentenced. But I have no idea what form that food will take, or how often it’ll come, so for now I’m grateful for the predictable, if miserable, quality and quantity of the prison transport food.

In the cell to my right, the tiny brunette nibbles her protein cake like a mouse. Her long, tangled hair obscures some of her nudity, and I’m a little jealous of that. But she doesn’t seem to have anything else going for her, so I guess that’s fair.

Assuming our food comes twice a day—though the word “day” means little in deep space…

Assuming our food comes once per guard shift, and assuming two shifts per standard space “day,”—based on the length of a day on Earth, humanity’s home world—we’ve been in transport for a week, but the girl to my right hasn’t said a word yet. And a girl is all she is, really. If she’s legal, it’s only barely, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that someone got her age wrong.

She’s the size of my little sister, who hasn’t even finished school yet.

“What do you think it’s like on Devil’s Eye?” Leda sucks crumbs from her fingers and tucks her knees up to her chest in the corner of her cell. “I’m hoping for lots of trees. There aren’t many on my planet, because the terraforming didn’t really take off like it was supposed to.”

“This isn’t a fucking vacation,” someone snaps from below me and to my left.

“Both of you shut the hell up,” another voice calls out, and suddenly everyone’s shouting. Everyone but me and the tiny brunette, who shoves the last of her protein cake into her mouth then covers her ears with both hands. She squeezes her eyes shut and scoots to the back of her cell, as if she can block us all out, but she doesn’t stop chewing.

She may be fragile, but she wants to live.

I finish my meal while the cacophony dies down, then I try to sleep. But it’s too warm in here and my sweaty skin sticks to the metal beneath me. Then, just as I’m about to doze off, the little brunette begins to whine.

I glance to my right as she spins on her bony butt to face the back of her cell, hands covering her face.

Shit. She did that yesterday. Just before—

A series of metal cylinders descend from the ceiling. A drop of moisture clings to the nozzle nearest me. Heart pounding, I spin around just as the spray begins.

An ice cold, straight-line jet of water hits my back like a thousand needles, and the sensation is so sharp that at first, I don’t even feel wet. I just feel assaulted. The spray slowly tracks up my back, over my neck and onto my skull. Water blows my hair into my face. I suck in a quick breath, but I get as much moisture as air.

Then the jet starts back down, not so much drenching me as pressure-washing every bit of grime from every inch of skin it touches. And from my cell as well.

When I’m soaked and dripping, gasping to catch my breath and bruised from the water pressure, the cylinders descend even lower and wash out the two rows of cells under mine, until filth runs beneath the bottom row of cells and swirls down a drain in the floor.

This is why we don’t get clothing. Or toilets. It’s cheaper and easier for them to hose us off once a day and let us drip dry. Which takes longer for the women on the bottom row, as the top two rows drain onto them.

Finally, the sprayers recede into the ceiling, and I turn back to the brunette to my right. She lets her soaking hair hang in her face. It’s even more tangled than before, but not much cleaner, because they haven’t yet figured out how to make us face into the sprayers. “Hey,” I whisper, scooting closer to the wall of bars our cells share. “You knew that was going to happen, didn’t you?”

She doesn’t even look up.

“How did you know?”

The brunette cowers away from me, hunched over so that all I can see is the pale arch of her bony spine and a tangle of hair. Fair enough. She’s probably terrified. So I curl up on my side and try again to go to sleep. By the time I finally manage, my hair is nearly dry.

* * *

“We should probably make some kind of alliance, don’t you think?” Leda says. “I mean, the only thing we know for sure is that we’re the new guys. I know there are no murderers in the open population on Devil’s Eye, but there must be—”

“There’s no one convicted of murder in the open population,” the woman below me says. “That doesn’t mean you won’t be rubbing elbows with killers on Rhodon. Or on this transport.”

“Right.” Though Leda seems a little less eager to make friends now, she swallows thickly and presses on. “But that’s even more reason we should make an alliance before we land. If it’s every woman for herself out there, we’ll get… Well, it’ll be a lot safer if we stick together.”

“Shut the fuck up, or I’ll kill you myself,” someone snaps from my left.

In general, I support the sentiment. But Leda has a point. I have no idea what Rhodon is like. Whether we’ll be living in buildings or making shelter out of tree branches and local flora. All I know is that it’s an open world prison—no cells or on-the-ground guards—and that based on the prisoner number tattooed on the heel of my right palm, at least four million prisoners have been sent to Devil’s Eye since it was designated a prison planet a few decades ago.

Though who knows how many of those are still alive?

But an alliance with someone untrustworthy—or with someone who has nothing to offer—would be worse than being on my own.

Right?

I decide to keep quiet. To my surprise, Leda follows suit.

Hours later—or maybe minutes; it’s really hard to tell—the brunette to my right begins to whine again. I watch her, expecting her to spin and put her back toward the sprayers again. I’ve decided she has really good ears, and she can hear water being pumped toward us or something. But it’s too early for another shower. We haven’t even been fed yet.

“Hey,” I whisper to her. “What’s going on? Do you hear something?”

This time she actually lifts her head and looks at me, and her eyes are huge and brown, and swimming in fear. Which makes her look even younger.

“My name’s Audra,” I continue, trying to get her to talk to me. To tell me what she hears. “What’s yours?”

At first, she only stares at me. Then she blinks. “Maci.” Her voice is little more than a suggestion of sound, and she might actually have said “Tracy.” Or “Missy.”

“What do you hear, Maci?” I ask, and when she doesn’t correct me, I decide I heard her right. “Another spray?”

She shakes her head, and brown hair falls over half her face. “We’re here.”

“What—?” But before I can even figure out how to phrase my question, I can feel it. Movement from beneath me. From all around me. I haven’t felt the ship move since we made the jump into light-speed, which can only mean…we’re slowing. Stopping.

Maci’s right.

We’re here.

Shitshitshit. I’m not ready. I know damn well this is real, but it’s been easy to pretend, at least on some level, that the prison transport has been one long nightmare. Yet once we land… Once the ship leaves, and I’m stuck on Rhodon…

My nightmare will become an unending, quite possibly unendurable reality, until the day I die. Because on Devil’s Eye, every life sentence eventually becomes a death sentence.

The door slides open, and a guard appears in the doorway—the first person I’ve seen since boarding the transport, other than my fellow cell-bound prisoners. He’s wearing a dark gray Universal Authority uniform, because Rhodon isn’t just a prison planet. It’s one of several privately-owned prison planets belonging to UA, which makes a fortune “housing” prisoners for the government.

“Wake up, ladies. I’m pleased to inform you that we have emerged from light-speed and are approaching the planet Rhodon. Or, more specifically, Station Alpha, one of four guard stations that orbits the planet. There, you will be debriefed and issued clothing and supplies, then you will board a shuttle bound for the surface. Southern hemisphere, zone four.”

For a second, silence meets his announcement. Then everyone starts talking at once.

“What’s zone four?”

“What kind of supplies will we get?”

“Are there beds? Are there buildings?”

“Are you going to feed us first?”

The guard holds up one hand for silence, and the fact that everyone obliges him tells me I’m not the only one scared shitless. “You’ll get whatever answers corporate decides you’re entitled to at Station Alpha. I’m really just here to say… Welcome home.”