So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth ... so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; ... in other words, ... so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.

— Victor Hugo - Les Misérables (Prologue)


Chapter 1
The Lativerna
Year: 3792

"This is all your fault!" Gran declares, stomping her bare foot on the grated floor.

"Shh!" Jav puts a hand to his sister's mouth and peaks around her shoulder.

Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!

They can hear the echoing thuds of nearing guard boots. Jav lowers his hand. "Come here." Three years older than she, he's easily able to lift Gran onto a pipe built into the corridor wall. He points to pipes that criss-cross the ceiling. "Climb!" Jav commands; and Gran does.

He scales the wall after her and swings himself effortlessly atop the pipes. Like a spider, Gran crawls up to him.

Thunk! Thunk! The guard rounds the corner at the end of the corridor.

Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! His steps draw closer.

Thunk! Thunk! He is right beneath them. Gran wiggles into Jav's side, but remains dutifully quiet. Jav wishes, pushes mentally, wills the guard not to look up. He hopes their dusty gray prison uniforms will make sufficient camouflage if the prayers don't work.

Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! The guard moves on, his steps growing faint. Soon, he rounds a corner and disappears.

"This is still all your fault!" Gran whispers to Jav in a way that makes it clear she would prefer to be yelling.

"Well, griping won't change it." There's not much space, but with several practiced wiggles, Jav flips onto his back. His nose nearly touches the ceiling. "Try to get some sleep."

Gran sighs and flips over too, having an easier time of it than her brother. She doesn't say anything, just lays, silent. Jav lays silent too, save the grinding of his teeth.

It is a particular skill, laying silent like this, shared among victims and those in hiding. It's not a stretch to say that all of the children aboard the Lativerna, The Fleet's minimum-security prison ship, share this uniquely useful skill.

The tooth-grinding, however, comes directly from the fact that Gran is right—it is all Jav's fault they've been locked out of their quarters. However minimal the security, the Lativerna is still a prison ship, after all, and that includes a curfew with doors locked behind.

While none of the children aboard the Lativerna—often not-so-affectionately referred to as The Lat' due to the similarity with the word latrine—can technically be said to be inmates, New Earth law views them as the property of their inmate parents and, as such, they are expected to follow such simple rules as Don't Leave the Detention Area and Obey the Nightly Curfew.

The guards wouldn't punish them if caught outside of curfew—just deliver them home—but their father certainly would. So the two lay silent, cold pipes against their backs, and watch the ceiling.

"Jav?" Gran's voice crawls to him through the dark and pulls him from the edge of sleep.

"Yeah?" Barely a sound.

"Will you enter the program?"

Jav is silent—and thankful for the darkness as his face reddens; it's exactly the topic he'd been contemplating when sleep overtook him. Finally, "No."

"You don't have to stay for me. I can watch out for myself." She scoots closer, but her body pins Jav's arm and he scoots away to free it.

Jav chuckles softly. "Like tonight?"

Gran glares at Jav's profile. "That was your fault."

"It was Kalil," Jav protests, knowing it's an excuse.

"Don't blame Kalil." Her glare softens. She pauses, thinking. Thinking, perhaps, that her brother may be more of a person than she'd previously allowed for. Finally, "Is Kalil why you're staying?"

Jav jerks involuntarily and kicks a piece of vertical piping. It comes loose and spews steam to the tune of a piercing scream.

"Quick!" Jav cries as he crawls beside Gran to the edge of the piping. He hangs by his hands and drops to the floor. Gran follows.

Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! Boots approach from the aft-end of the corridor. Jav takes Gran's hand. Barefoot, they run down the grated corridor, turning blindly at a T junction...and right into the crisp blue uniform of Guard Captain Gagnon.

The large man turns, the movement more momentous and laborious for his enormous physique. He smiles. Cruelly.


Jav knew it had been the guard captain's intent to worsen the beating, not get him off the hook, when he had kindly explained to their father that the two were late because they had been asking about the Correctional Officer Training Academy program—COTA for short. A program that provides the only guaranteed ticket out of inmate life for children born to prisoners through training as correctional officers.

It's a topic that's been on Jav's mind a lot lately as one may apply when they are twelve years old and his twelfth birthday has just passed.

His bunk, much like the pipes, is small enough that Jav's nose nearly touches the ceiling or, more precisely, the bottom of Gran's bunk. He swings out and stands up. Gran lays in her bed and stares blankly upward. Blood, frozen in a coagulated dribble, betrays the cut on her eyebrow.

"I'm gonna see what Kalil's up to," he says.

She doesn't respond, just continues to stare.

"Maybe he'll have another crazy disguise to try and fool the guards..." He pokes her shoulder playfully.

She turns her head away from him.

"Okay," Jav says.

He opens the small hatch to the communal space of their family's quarters. Beads, crystals, spheres, and bones fill the shelves that dot the metal walls. Jav's mother, her hair braided and beaded in its typical style, lights a stick of incense. She blows out the flame and, behind it, sees Jav leaving his room.

"Come here," she gestures to him, and he has no choice but to follow and sit across from her. She places the incense between them. Jav watches the smoke curl up to the discolored ceiling. "Hold out your hands," she says.

Jav does as his mother says, holding out his hands, palms up. He's familiar with her fortune-telling routine. "You know I don't buy—"

"Psh!" She silences him. Placing her hands atop his, palm against palm, she leans her head back. When her neck can take no more, her eyes follow, rolling into her head until only the yellowed scleras peer from her emaciated face.

A moan escapes her throat, pushes past her lips; it carries a note. Another moan, another note. Faster and faster they come, tuneless, random; she shakes with the effort.

She falls forward. Jav catches her before she knocks the incense over. He looks at her and raises an eyebrow. "Future tell ya anything?"

She pushes herself away from him. Her nod is exaggerated and the beads in her hair clack loudly. She points between his eyes. "You will pursue a life of a crime, and it will end you!"

Jav swats her hand down. His expression remains incredulous. "Looks like Gagnon was right then—I should join COTA."

She hits him across the face with an open hand. The fact that Jav's mother, like all careful inmates, wears her rings with stones palm-side to hide their value from the casual passerby, makes the slap significantly more vicious than it may otherwise seem to a reader unfamiliar with prison ship custom.

Face bleeding, Jav storms from the family's quarters, putting in his best effort to slam the hatch behind. He huffs as he marches purposefully down the corridor to a destination he hasn't yet determined.


"Damn Jav," Kalil yells down the corridor as he approaches, "that's one hell of an eye you got."

Jav rubs the swollen socket and winces. "Fucking Gagnon."

Kalil lives one level up and two blocks over from Jav, not that blocks over and up are much help in navigating a multi-level ship where all the hallways look the same, save the debris of life scattered outside each hatch. He's thirteen and, as such, has missed his chance to apply for COTA and won't leave the Lativerna until he reaches eighteen, if ever.

"What's that?" Kalil snatches a paper from Jav's hand.

He'd been holding it carefully, trying not to cause wrinkles. The swift movement slices into the webbing between Jav's thumb and forefinger. "Ow!" He punches Kalil.

Kalil falls, but he's laughing. He reads the paper while laying on the floor.

"You're not really gonna do this, are you?" Kalil sits up as he talks. "I mean, you just got the application 'cause you're twelve and that's what you do... But you're not actually gonna go, are you? Be one of them blue turds?"

As Lativerna, goddess of thieves, was nicknamed to be synonymous with a latrine, so those children coming from her—that is, those such as Jav, Gran, and Kalil—are often given clever nicknames that all boil down to excrement. The general view of such children, and the adults they become, mirrors this language in near identical fashion.

"Better a blue turd than a gray one," Jav says, snatching the application back. It's now hopelessly wrinkled so he folds it and puts it in his pocket. He sucks the cut on his hand.

Kalil thinks on what Jav has said as he stands, mulling it over as if it had come from Confucius or Ghandi. After a moment, he shakes his head. "My conclusion is that you are a dumbass."

"Am not! Just 'cause being stuck here is good enough for you doesn't make it good enough for me. And disagreeing doesn't make me a dumbass!" Jav huffs in the aftermath of his outburst.

"Well only a dumbass would consider turning his back on his friends and family in exchange for a government"—he spits out the word as one might rotten food—"paycheck!" Kalil pauses for breath. "A dumbass, or a traitor. You a traitor?"

Jav shakes his head. Kalil, still unhappy, shoves his friend aside and turns into his family's quarters. It's difficult to slam a full-size hatch, and a malnourished thirteen-year-old has no chance, but Kalil gives it a valiant shot at any rate. After a moment, Jav pulls the wrinkled and folded application from his pocket and drops it on the ground, a memento of his decision for when Kalil does open the door again, and walks away.


Jav jogs, huffing, up to his family's quarters. The trip from the warden's office took longer than he'd anticipated and he very nearly missed curfew for the second night in a row.

The warning bell for curfew sounds. Three minutes. Still breathing heavy, Jav watches the speaker until the bell sound ends. Steeling himself, he opens the hatch and walks inside.

Gran sits opposite their mother, the incense extinguished now, and eats from a bowl with her hand. Jav's mother nods to him and points to another bowl of food resting on the table. He sits in front of it, on a pillow, and scoops the gruel paste with his fingers and into his mouth.

"This is disgusting," he says, dropping the bowl. He wipes the leftover gruel paste on his uniform.

The main hatch bursts open and Jav's father, a man surpassed in size only by Guard Captain Gagnon, thunders into the tiny room. Gran scrambles to the corner and pulls her knees to her chest. Their father rounds on Jav.

"Is this what I have for a son?" he thunders, waving a crumpled piece of paper—the application Jav left in front of Kalil's quarters.

Jav scoots back, his head tilted up at an awkward angle.

The big man steps around the table. "You tryin' to get away from me, boy?" He pauses, ends a step short. A smile comes over his face and Jav whimpers. It's not a friendly smile.

Jav's father steps around the boy, so small compared to the grown man, and grabs the trembling little girl in the corner by her arm. Gran squeals in pain and surprise. He shakes her like a puppet to make his point.

"Who'll watch out for her if you leave?" he screams. Gran's cries punctuate his words. "You wanna know what happens if you leave her?" He shakes Gran more violently and pulls her toward the main hatch. "I'll show you what happens!"

Jav scrambles up, follows his father and sister out the door. Gran's cries are softer now; she's regained control. Jav sees a guard patrolling ahead. He runs up and shouts, "Please, help, I think—"

The nightstick attacks, seemingly from nowhere, and the blue blur of the guard fades as Jav falls to the floor. "Obey your father, boy," the guard spits at him.

Gran cries and, fast as he can, but much too slowly, Jav stands erect and finds his balance. He follows Gran's whimpers around a corner and sees his father dragging her down a ladder to the lower decks. Jav reaches for his sister but she shakes her head.

"He's holding my ankle," she whispers before climbing further down.

Jav crouches, looking at the empty hole where his little sister disappeared. A voice drifts up. Joking. Hostile. "You'll miss the good part!"

Jav climbs down the ladder and follows his father to the entry hatch of a storage unit. The big man knocks and the hatch is opened by a toothless inmate with so many age spots on his bald head he'd have no need for a toupee—if he cared about such things, which he does not.

Jav's father lifts Gran by the arm until her feet dangle helplessly in the air. She whimpers, but doesn't cry out. "I have a treat for tonight's party," he says. And then, tossing his head to indicate Jav, he adds, "And a new initiate."

The old man grins wide enough to reveal the black spots on his single remaining tooth. He grabs Gran's free arm—she cries out involuntarily at in pincer-like grip—and leads Gran away.

The large room, perhaps more correctly described as a small warehouse in the belly of a converted prison ship, is ringed with makeshift wooden balconies. Jav stares as his father leads him upwards, wondering how the inmates gained access to so many nails.

The answer is obvious as soon as Jav's father takes him to the edge of the balcony and he sees the main stage in its entirety: A boxing ring, surrounded by prowling inmates and guards, inside a cage made of wire fencing. He sits next to his father, legs dangling off the unrailed edge of the ramshackle platform, and watches the guards circle among the inmates. The nightsticks in their belts instead of their hands and the smiles on their faces show they're here for entertainment, not enforcement.

The toothless old man, still dragging Gran, shoves his way through the milling crowd around the boxing ring. Jav feels a million miles away, yet somehow close enough to see the terror in his sister's eyes. She refuses to climb into the boxing ring so a guard picks her up and tosses her roughly in.

"Careful!" the old man scolds. He, too, climbs into the ring and drags Gran, now crying harder than ever, to the center. "Stay here," he says to her. And then he walks away, through the crowd, out the gate to the pen. He shuts the gate; locks it.

"Gentlemen!" he calls to the caged crowd. "And not-so-gentle men! This is a special one-time treat donated to us by Jarlath Eyre and his son Jav. Eat up!" He puts a whistle to his mouth and blows.

Gran's frightened form, smaller and smaller as the men approach, shakes violently in the center of the boxing ring. The first man—a guard, and not even a blue turd—rips the worn prison uniform from her frail body. Jav covers his face, unable to look.

"You will watch," his father growls and rips the hand nearest him away from Jav's face. "You will see what happens when you abandon your sister."

Fear and pain overcome Gran's resilience and she cries out, sharp and terrible. Jav instinctively covers his ears, but quickly lowers his hands when his father looks over.

Obediently, Jav watches and listens until the old man blows the whistle and opens the gate. As the men, no, monsters leave the cage, he pushes his way inside and climbs onto the boxing ring.

No longer in the center, the broken, naked form of Gran Eyre lolls against a corner post. Jav runs to her, through the puddles of blood, and wraps her in his arms. Her head rolls away from him, eyes half open but unseeing. He feels her chest. No breath. No heartbeat. Dead.

"No!" He screams the word and it echoes, magnifies, dies. The men, the inmates and guards, pause momentarily to listen. The cry of anguish is answered by echoes of laughter.

Jav lowers his forehead to Gran's still chest. "I'll do it," he whispers to his sister between sobs. "You're right. You don't need me. You can watch out for yourself."


"You went to the party?" Kalil asked.

He had appeared at Jav's family's quarters that morning, full of the forgiveness typical to young boys and their good friends. The two spent the morning arranging a heist of the guards' laundry in order to pad Kalil's wardrobe of disguises. They're currently walking the corridors, timing the guards' patrols.

Jav only nods in answer to Kalil's question.

"Damn, my dad's only taken me once," he says, "and he made me wait 'til I was thirteen so there'd be no chance of me goin' blue turd first."

Jav walks silently, thinking. "What would you think if I did?" he asks after a moment.

"If you what? Went blue turd?" Kalil scoffs. "You already know what I think. But..." He trails off.

"But what?"

"I dunno." Kalil stops walking and lowers his voice. Jav moves closer to hear. "I mean, the party's firm and all, sealed, but... I just can't help thinkin' about Gran. Kinda makes me wanna go blue turd too, ya know?"

"Well, doesn't matter, 'cause my old man'll never let me go." Jav moves away, continuing their walking conversation.

"How's he s'posed to stop you?" Kalil asks. "He can't keep 'em from accepting you."

"No, they already did that." Jav lets out a mirthless laugh. "He found out that if I miss my flight I get no chance to reapply."

"When's your flight?"

"This afternoon." Jav sighs. "Never. No way I'm getting past him."

Kalil is silent for a moment and then shoots his pointed finger into the air. "Ah-ha! I have a solution!"

"What's that?" Jav isn't hopeful, or at least, he doesn't want to be hopeful.

"A disguise!" Kalil declares with an air of triumph. Surely he heard a majestic and celebratory fanfare accompanying the pronouncement.

Jav scoffs, sighs, hangs his head. "You're useless."

"No, I'm serious," Kalil insists. "If we can pull off this plan to get our hands on some guard uniforms, I bet you could just walk right past your dad and onto the shuttle no problem!"

"A guard's a guard..."

"Right. I doubt he'll give you a second glance."

Jav hears footsteps, looks around, sees a guard in regulation blue uniform. "If he's here," Jav says, "then the laundry is unguarded. Run now I bet we could snatch a couple."

Guard behind them, the two boys walk away, conspicuously nonchalant. Once around the corner, they burst into a laughing run.

As predicted, the guards' laundry is unwatched when the boys arrive laughing and panting. Just one detail they'd forgotten to account for: The workers inside.

Kalil watches the hall, listening for the footsteps of the returning guard.

Jav peers through the puffs of steam that fill the room. Inmates scrub blue uniforms in giant tubs of hot water. Others, farther back, fold the clean and dry clothes. Jav crouches low, below the level of the large washing tubs. Wet and soapy uniforms will do them no good. He eyes the folding tables at the back of the room, but the distance to them is impossible without being discovered.

An inmate wheels a large laundry trolley, stacked high with dirty uniforms, to a worker at a nearby washing tub. Moving between the tubs and the wall, Jav crawls through the tight space until he reaches the gap by the tub he wants. Just in front of it, at the end, stands the cart piled high with ubiquitous blue uniforms.

Moving slowly, quietly, in that mousy way known to victims and the hunted, he reaches the corner of the square washing tub. The inmate is busy scrubbing, his eyes fixed on the work in front of him.

Jav reaches out, tentatively, slowly, and pulls a shirt from the cart. The inmate doesn't notice. Faster, more sure, Jav reaches for another shirt. Then a pair of pants.

"What are you doin' there?" a voice asks behind him.

Jav turns, realizing he'd put his back to the working inmate.

"Tryin' ta getcha some blues?"

Jav backs away, hugging the clothes to his chest like a prized possession. The inmate advances.

"Well you better be puttin' those back 'cause if any o' them go missin', well, who you think they gonna blame?" The inmate shakes his head. "Not some weaselly little piece of Lat' sludge, that's for sure."

The inmate snatches at Jav, but not fast enough. The boy burrows behind the washing tubs. The inmate reaches in, too large to follow, fingers stretching to grab anything they can. Jav scurries to the door and, with only a whoop to grab Kalil's attention, runs off with his prizes: Two guard shirts and one pair of guard pants.


"You should've grabbed a belt," Kalil grumbles as he rolls the waistband of the pants inward. Prison uniforms, being jumpsuits, don't require belts, which are considered a suicide risk among the inmate population.

Jav stares nervously down at himself. It's obvious he's only a child playing dress-up in an adult's clothes. It didn't help that he'd apparently taken Guard Captain Gagnon's uniform, a near-tent of fabric custom altered to fit the giant's bulging frame.

Kalil gives up on his task. "Fuck it. You're gonna hafta just hold 'em up by one hand."

Jav sighs. "Like a real guard."

"Damn right like a real guard." Kalil winks.

Jav peeks out from the alcove where he hastily buttons the gigantic blue shirt over his prison coveralls. He watches his father pace a few feet in front of the gated entrance to the shuttle bay. The first gate, made of wire fencing identical to that used to construct the party's cage, stands open. Armed guards to either side discourage unauthorized exits from the detention area. A second, locked gate, made of sturdy steel bars, stands beyond the first.

"Maybe if I time it with his pacing, he won't even see me until it's too late," Jav says.

"You'll only have one shot though," Kalil points out.

"I only have one shot anyway," Jav says.

He watches his father. Forward. Away. Forward. Away. The large man seems to grow angrier, visibly redder, with each pass. Forward. Away. Forward. Away.

Forward. Approach. Turn.

Jav dashes to the gate as soon as his father's back has turned. His feet, colored with coal dust meant to simulate shoes, slip when he leaves the grated flooring of the corridor. His father sees him and lunges. Jav slips sideways, using the coal dust to his advantage.

"Yes! Go Jav!" Kalil cheers from the corridor.

"Let me through!" Jav screams to the guards as he dodges another lunge from his father. "I'm an applicant! Let me through!"

He runs through the first gate, followed closely by a father nearly foaming at the mouth.

"Back sir." The voice is calm, yet forceful, and moments afterward, Jav's father is yanked to a halt that takes him from his feet.

Jav reaches the steel gate and beats on the bars. "Let me though! I'm an applicant!" He points to a small vessel bearing the shield icon of the Madaean—the ship that houses COTA. "That's my shuttle!"

Jav's father grunts and rages as the guards, two to an arm, drag him back into the detention area. Slowly, the steel gate swings open. Feeling the cold floor beneath his feet for the first time, Jav steps into the shuttle bay.

Clang! The gate swings shut behind.