Year 8: (Wed)
Barin just lay on the ground of the forest outside the cave, allowing the rain to wash over her, but doubting it would ever wash her clean. Her white dress was covered with diluted green dots and orange streaks of blood. She wanted to get up, to dress the cuts on her body, to stop the bleeding, but she couldn't. The pain was too much. For the past three years, since the incident on the night she tried to escape, she'd had a permanent limp. She suspected they broke her leg when they beat her that night, based on how much it hurt to walk on it after that, but she knew what would happen if she said anything, so she didn't, and eventually, walking became bearable again. Until last night.
After her failed escape attempt, she had been sold for the pleasure of a smuggler, a Tellarite. Though he wasn't actually a member, he was a friend of the Syndicate, and when he wasn't smuggling goods from one world or another, he lived on a little backwater planet outside the jurisdiction of any major power in her world and just barely inside the shipping lanes. The people there kept to themselves, and did pretty much as they wished. Last night, he broke into the 'goods' he was smuggling and found some very potent, very illegal alcohol. In the three years she had been here, not a day had gone by that he had not beaten her or used her in some other way for his own pleasure, but last night was different. Worse. Last night, he'd had friends over. Last night, they were all drunk. Last night, they had held her down while he breathed his hot, rancid breath in her face and carved his initials into the flesh of her stomach. He had told her that that meant she was his property. That was just before she passed out from the pain, or the fear, or maybe a combination of both. She didn't know what he had done after that—what any of them had done, though judging by the amount of blood on her when she came to, she decided that maybe it was better that she didn't know. She had always had a vivid imagination.
She had forced herself to get up, with a mind to assess her injuries and clean herself up, but when she found the Tellarite passed out nearby, along with two of his buddies, that thought fled. She picked up the knife, which had fallen from his hand in his stupor, and with deliberate malice, plunged it into his heart and twisted it. The three were dispatched in a matter of minutes, and she walked out of that house, as far as she could go, not looking back, until she collapsed where she was lying now, letting the rain do what she could not. She knew she couldn't stay. She had to go before someone found her. Before the others returned.