The stench of sulfur was everywhere, and it made her nauseous. Maybe that was part of it. No, it was never the cold-blooded killer inside of her that she had to wrestle with, though somewhere--and exactly where, she didn't know and would maybe never know--somewhere she was still part human. But the maniacal, murderous part of her she had come to terms with long ago and accepted it, embraced it, even. But no slam ever before had made her nauseous or ...as docile as she found herself becoming.
This thought woke her up one night. Her eyes hammered open and she gasped in sulfurous air, burning air. Could it even be called oxygen? She didn't think so. She clutched her hand to her chest and inhaled, slowed her breathing and sat staring into the dark. The lights had been turned out for the regulatory three hours. Then they would be on for the rest of the day, even during the heat wave when the sun came up.
That was one thing about Crematoria: the sunrises. When the sun left it was three hundred degrees below zero, and when it rose again the planet's surface came alive, bursting and crawling with rock and explosion and fire, endless rivers of fire. The sun tore up the already-scarred land, ravaged it left and right and straight down the magma-lined middle, and somehow they were thirty or forty kilometers underground. Senna had been to a double-max prison before, that had been a mile underground, but that was because an actual population existed on the surface, one that truly didn't appreciate having a prison on their planet.
It was hard enough dealing with being so far underground. And how she escaped she was already beginning to lose; she hadn't done it alone, but she had done it. She'd seen daylight again, drank the free air, and left for five years before being caught again. And the next time she had seen a Merc ship, she awoke inside of it, chained to a specialized seat in the back, pumped full of tranquilizers, and on her way to Crematoria. Just one more payday for those Merc bastards, the ones who'd ghosted her. It wasn't even a fair fight.
Her first night on Crematoria had been the worst she'd ever passed. She remembered it as clearly as she remembered killing her first man, the tang of fresh blood in the back of her throat, the rocks cutting her hands and the stale air burning on the way in and out. She fought well enough, had enough strength left in her to fend off the other murderers, criminals, all the rest of the scum of society, at least long enough until she found a crevice to crawl into. Her lungs were deflated and her muscles torn and bleeding. She'd climbed nearly two stories to find the small hole that she had scarcely been able to fit into, but it was sheltered and in darkness, so she stayed. She stayed there for two days, only coming out for water and to snatch whatever food she could get, and slept. She slept off the bad dreams. At night she wasn't able to sleep because of the noise of the generator that swapped out air, the baying and hair-raising whistles that the Hell Hounds used to communicate with one another. With the sounds of men and women alike, killing and murdering and raping one another. She remembered the sound of flesh grating on stone, and then the sharpness cutting through her as bone touched rock. One did not likely forget such a noise.
When she felt well enough to try again, she got up and set about establishing herself around the slam. She found anybody she could and tore them to pieces. She must have broken ten limbs that day, and smashed however many heads open on the rock walls. She didn't quite remember... but either way she got her point across. She wasn't there to fuck around.
She found friendship in someone they called Gov, short for Governer, a man of distantly Irish descent who seemed to run things. He regarded her carefully at first, as if not sure in which category to put her in. Troublemaker or enforcer? He took one look at her slam-hardened face, the ropes of muscles lining her arms, and knew that if he couldn't judge her at first, he would at least give her the respect she craved.