Riddick needed out of this prison. He needed out of this hellhole, this confinement, this goddamn rat's warren with too many places a person could hide and jump out at someone else with a shiv and cut their throat in the darkness. The DNA results weren't back yet, and they wouldn't even list all the offenders. He wanted them dead. He wanted every last person who'd been in that room dead.

She was safe for now, at least. Doc had her in the infirmary, would keep her until he could come and collect her and take her to bed. And she was starting to talk again, although she still barely seemed as though she saw anyone else in the room. Disturbing.

Equally disturbing were the Doc's words of earlier, reinforced after he'd finally crawled out of the shower with her dragging along behind him. Had he really seen these effects and behaviors before, and never recognized them? Rape was one of the staples of prison life, like bad food and callous guards and the nightly pit fights he'd enjoyed watching up until a few days ago. But it had never really touched him. He'd made enough of a reputation the first day by killing the first person who'd tried to push him around, just beat the man into a bloody pulp. The second one got a shiv in the belly; he was still alive, although he had a shitbag permanently attached to his hip. One after another, they'd gotten the message before it had ever come down to trying to get Richard B. Riddick up against a wall.

He surrounded himself with people who were just as mean as he was, or so different that the normal rules didn't apply. Doc was an example of the latter, Lawson and Fantine examples of the former. At least she had been, until she'd been revealed as a woman taking on a man's world on their terms. Men didn't tolerate that kind of thing. He'd known that, he'd known it instinctively, and he'd still let her go through with it. Now he was starting to think he should have just stopped her after her first melee pit fight.

But she wouldn't have tolerated it. He knew that now, and he'd probably known it then. She was still damn lucky she hadn't been outed and raped right there in the opening melee. The second day – his mind raced, trying to figure out the whys and wherefores of everything – the second day she had been labeled as his. They'd both even laughed about it at the time. Nicole, trying to piss a circle around what she thought was hers. And he'd walked in and completely upset her plans, but he was preferable, Fantine had said. He knew better than to try and claim her for his own.

It didn't matter. Nicole had spread the word in a day: Fantine belongs to Riddick, hands off. And as cold and troublesome a bitch as she could be, Nicole had been useful in that respect. She'd kept the predators from circling with just the rumors of territory. For a while. Until Fantine had been outed and then it was open season on the freak. The one person to challenge custom and culture.

"You broke the rules..." Even Riddick acknowledged it, although he thought the rules were bullshit at the best of times. Not just the Slam's rules, anyone's rules. The only rule that mattered was survival. But here, survival meant following the rules or not getting caught. And she had gotten caught. "You broke the goddamn rules!"

His fist made a loud, hollow noise as it slammed against the canteen wall.

Riddick stood there for a long time before he finally went in. Keyes and Lawson were there, as he'd known they would be. It was breakfast time, or as close to it as it ever got. He'd lost track of how many hours he'd been awake.

"Hey, there you are. We didn't see you after..." It didn't take too many steps forward for Lawson to see the stony lack of expression on the bigger man's face. "What?"

"She's in the infirmary." They rarely used her name when she wasn't there. Only one woman was so important, so comfortable they took her for granted. "She got wolfpacked in the canteen."

Of both the other men's reactions, it was Keyes who surprised Riddick the most. First the flush of anger, and then the pallid whiteness of fear and recognition. Lawson only stared at him in shock, with which Riddick was all too familiar. It had been impossible for him to believe, too, and he'd seen it.

"No..." Lawson shook his head. "You can't..."

"I was there, Lawson. I saw it. I had to get her to the Doc..."

"She couldn't..."

"Of course she could..." Keyes, little Joey Keyes, spoke up. His voice was more forceful than they'd ever heard, and bitter, and very hard. "Of course she could. All they needed was a reason. Enough bodies will get to anyone if they want you bad enough."

Both men stared at him, but Keyes didn't say anything further. Riddick just went over to the wall and punched out a meal, quick and jerky movements displaying not only his anger but also confusion and shock.

"What happened?" Lawson finally asked, having worked his way through the fact that his friend, the strongest woman he knew, had been attacked. "How..."

"I don't know." Riddick sat back down and closed his hands into fists. "I walked by the other canteen and there were guards outside..."

"There are never guards outside..."

"I know. And they didn't look happy to see me. I went in..." There wasn't any more. It stuck in his throat even as the memories flashed through his vision. He hadn't wanted to see that. He hadn't wanted it to happen. Stupid, he berated himself, of course you didn't want it to happen. But he hadn't wanted to see it happen either, and he felt more than a little ashamed because of that.

"Who?"

Of course that was Lawson's next question. And Riddick didn't remember a single face in the room. "I don't know who. I'm going to find out, though." The Doc would tell him. Thoughts of how the Doc would find out bled into thoughts of the exam. How she'd twisted and writhed as the Doc had done arcane things to her that he couldn't even watch. To say he'd never seen her like that before was to say the center of a sun was a little warm. It was incomprehensible, repulsive, terrifying.

"Good..." Lawson nodded softly. "And you said she's with the Doc?"

"Yeah. He's got her in the quarantine room, away from the insanity." The infirmary was usually a mess, with poor sanitation by the standards of any hospital even though it was clean by the standards of the prison. There was always at least one person screaming their life away. The quarantine room was soundproof; it even had its own separate air system. It wasn't a permanent solution but it was a good place to put her after the attack. Some place where she wouldn't be subject to loud noises, screaming. The jerky movements, the thousand-yard stare, they stuck in his mind like a blood stain that wouldn't come off. In the quarantine room she could rest.

"Good..." Lawson was nodding. "Good idea. She'll need... some place quiet. Some place safe." It was an echo of his own thoughts, but instead of making him feel better that he'd found some agreement it only made him more ashamed.

"She should have been safe here. She can take on any ... she took on the whole fucking lot of you her first night here. She should have been safe..."

Keyes was shaking his head. "You don't get it. You just... she wasn't safe. The second that hood came off she was fresh meat." He sounded frustrated; more than anything he sounded as though he wanted one of them to ask why. So Riddick obliged.

"What are you talking about?"

"She... the fighting. Women don't fight in the pit fights, they don't fight in any of the major arenas, you know that. You both do. What did you think was going to happen, they'd cheer her on and praise her skills and hail her as the next Jennet Lane? This isn't the real world, this isn't even the military. No one's equal in here no matter how much we like to think that the only bottom line is power. The second, the very second that hood came off the first word that went through everyone's mind, the first name for her was 'freak.' They wanted to bring her down, to make her pay, to show her that she couldn't get away with it. And they did."

"Broke the fucking rules..." Riddick muttered. He'd told himself as much a few minutes ago. And at the same time. "That doesn't matter. That shouldn't matter. She's worth any ten of them..."

"Any hundred? Any two hundred? Riddick, you don't get it. If they want you, they're going to get you. And half the fucking Slam wanted her. So they took her, plain and fucking simple. The only reason you haven't been taken by now is because you're not unusual. You're not special, you're not worth the trouble it would take. And up until she got put on display in the ring, neither was she."

Neither of the other men didn't know what to say to that. Keyes... little Joey Keyes, they'd thought of him. He'd never survive a direct fight unless his back was to the wall and a shiv was in his hand, and even then the odds weren't good. He hardly ever raised his voice to any of the other three, staying in the background for the most part. He'd never asserted himself like this before, never exploded. Now he was white-faced, angry, belligerent. They didn't understand. They didn't know what to do.

"So... what do we do?" Riddick asked, more by way of asking what Keyes wanted them to do, trying to figure out what had triggered that outburst.

Joey closed his eyes, shook his head, looked as though he wanted to scream. He stood up so violently that the bench squealed back, rocking Lawson nearly off the metal slab. The palms of his hands dug into his eyes as he paced back and forth. "God, Riddick..." Exhausted, exasperated. "God..."

He felt stupid, and Richard B. Riddick didn't like to feel stupid. There was something he wasn't getting here, something that was eluding him about Keyes on a rampage and Fantine in the infirmary. It was a blank spot in his mind, something that he kept sliding around but couldn't look at directly. Insulting to think that he couldn't face anything directly, head on. Lawson was staring at Joey Keyes in abject horror. What had happened that was so horrible? What else had happened? He wasn't sure he wanted to know.

"Joey..." Lawson started. Riddick didn't even know who he was talking to at first.

"Don't."

Lawson shut up. They all stared at each other, Riddick and the red-head over the table, Keyes pausing in mid-pace and still looking pallid and harried.

"What now?"

Keyes just stared at Lawson, but didn't give him the same abrupt treatment he'd given Riddick. "Take care of her. Keep an eye on her, take care of her. It's going to be a long time before..." He didn't specify. Riddick filled in what he thought was the rest, before everything goes back to normal again. "She's strong. Resilient. You can take care of her, make sure nothing else, nothing worse happens. Keep an eye on her, make sure she doesn't do anything stupid. Maybe she'll come out of this better..." He didn't finish that sentence either.

"How?" That brought Riddick back to an earlier revelation. Remembering how he'd tried to help, and she'd just started screaming. "How..."

"I don't know. You just have to wait and see. And pay attention. God..." Keyes laughed, and it wasn't funny. "You have to pay attention. Pay close attention. She won't want to talk about it. She won't tell you anything, and you can't drag it out of her. You just have to wait and see."

Lawson was nodding as though it made sense to him. "We can walk her just about everywhere. Keep an eye on her that way, I guess for the rest of it we'll just have to... I don't know. Just hang around, like you said. We can take it in shifts, she can stay in the infirmary with Doc Weller if ... it's not like we have anything better to do..." That was the wrong thing to say, somehow. Keyes threw the man a killing glare. "We'll take care of her."

Joey Keyes shook his head. "You'll figure it out," he muttered, although Riddick still wasn't sure what he was missing. He looked up, found Keyes staring at him as though expecting something of him. He hated that. Keyes blinked, and the look was gone. "Go. Get out of here, go to bed. You look like shit."

She looked worse. "Thanks," Riddick muttered. "Doc wanted me to pick her up, stay with her the night. I guess I'll head back to the infirmary, then."

"Your pod or hers?"

It was one of those subjects they'd managed to skirt around so often in conversation, rarely if ever talking about it, and Riddick was actually surprised Joey had brought it up. But he didn't have the energy to get upset at the smaller man, even if Lawson was staring at them both as though he expected a fight to break out any second.

"Mine, probably. Quieter there."

"Okay." Joey nodded. "We'll come get you tomorrow morning. You both need your rest..."

Riddick nodded. Anything, at this point, to get away from the strangled feeling of Joey's words and the half-knowledgeable, half-helpless look from Lawson. Part of him was berating himself for being so stupid, even now. He'd expected that they'd go off and slaughter the offenders together, and everything would be okay. He'd really expected that. His mind now made mockery of the idea by presenting him with the though that they could all go back like savages and show Fantine the heads of her attackers on spikes. It didn't work that way, he knew better. But he'd still hoped.

"See you tomorrow," he muttered, and made a quick exit. Maybe Doc would have found a way to make it all simple, a miracle cure for life. Maybe, more realistically, he'd have something to help them all sleep.

She was going to prison, no doubt about that. The only question had been, where. Eventually she had wound up at some penitentiary city or another. Somewhere gray with bars, it didn't matter where.

Fantine started at the gates. Big, steel, surgically clean. She was marched in with a line of other people whose faces and sexes were indeterminate. Their clothes were a riot of color but for some reason, for whatever reason their faces didn't matter. After a while she just stared at the ground, since nothing she looked at but their clothes seemed to have any importance. And she'd already memorized the outfits of the ten people before and behind her.

A voice called her name, also faceless and sexless. She stepped through the gates and into a blast of cold air, walking across a courtyard that just seemed to extend further and further the more she walked into it. And then, suddenly, she was in the door and through the other side. It was a white room with gray square pillars, she saw that much. There was a desk at the far end, and two men who shouted at her that her toes belonged on the other side of the white line painted onto the floor. They itemized and took her belongings, including her underpants. They put them in a box and locked them into a bank vault with a door as thick as her waist.

The next room was a bathroom. Gray steel and white tile all over the place. Cold water hit her like a fist to the stomach, fountaining out of a thick fire hose. She screamed a little as it hit her, trying to curl up and protect her chest. It didn't work, and her breath started to come fast and labored as her body tightened from the shock. Her eyes squinted open again as she started to trip, automatically trying to see enough to catch and keep herself from falling. The water was bloody as it ran down the drain. She couldn't figure out where she was cut.

They picked her up next in a giant crane and dropped her into a vat of delousing powder. It got everywhere: her eyes, her mouth, up her nose. Burning her skin, stinging her scalp. It all fell out a hole in the bottom, and she tumbled out shortly after into a pile of powder, blind.

She was lying on a slab. The door, tunnel, whatever she had tumbled out of at the end had put her on a slab, and the delousing powder was gone. She was still blind, though; had she been permanently scarred by it? Fantine realized suddenly that she was about to find out. The familiar hum and whine of the medical scanners was coming closer. Hands that tasted of latex and sterility forced themselves into her mouth, putting a gag down her throat, restraints on her arms and legs. Her eyes were pried open, but she still couldn't see. And yet in her reflection she saw eyes as black as Riddick's, but without the mirror shine.

They passed the scanners over her and then they started in. Every measurement that could possibly be taken was done. Inside and out, they probed and poked her for signs of illness, for reactions, for reasons she didn't know and wasn't willing to guess at. All through it the only thing she could hear was the humming, the whining, the slow and steady beep of machines that recorded all of her vital functions. There was a background surruss of voices, but she had no idea what they were saying. The small part of survival instinct left to her told her in Riddick's voice that she didn't want to know. If she could just close her eyes it would all be over, but the tiny metal clamps still held them open.

The buzzing started. She felt the touch of the tattoo needle just above her knee. It didn't even hurt, although she could feel the blood pooling underneath her. She could feel the numbers they were marking into her skin: 655321. The tattoo needle moved just as it was about to score her most sensitive places. It carved the same number high between her breasts. Marked for everyone to read.

The slab tilted upwards until her face was pressed ever so lightly against a panel of glass. The lights came on, and suddenly she could see again even if she had to squint to do so. Her body was still restrained, the gag was still in place although it couldn't be seen from the outside. Her ears felt plugged with wax.

"Now this..."

Footsteps echoed down the hall and stopped where she was imprisoned. Someone touched a button and the glass panel receded upwards, sending her collapsing to her knees.

"This is unusual. You see here we have a creature out of its element, unwilling to be restrained to its customary place. An anomaly, but not an uncontrollable one. We are currently studying the central nervous system to see if there has been a malfunction..."

Fantine had gotten to her feet and was going to walk away. There weren't any restraints, no holds on her, she could walk away except that when she stood completely the area on which her feet were placed lit up. Glass paneling came down, neatly bisecting her into ten slices, ten slides. She felt them touching her, fingers on the slides of her brain, one hand running over her chest as though to make sure it really was there.

"Fascinating. It doesn't seem to be in any way outwardly different, yet..."

She was in pieces. In slices, like so much sandwich meat. The terror came rushing back in surges, spilling into her. She wanted to open her mouth to scream, but her lips were on one slide, her tongue in two pieces, her vocal cords split between two panes of glass. Her lungs moved frantically from three different places, and she could feel every moment of it. No sound came from the glass, and the dispassionate voices went on and on.