So, it's been a long time since I made Cages. It was a wonderful, beautiful story and I had a lot of fun writing it. I thought a lot about going back and editing it (because it definitely needs some work) but my writing skills are just too different from when I started writing Cages. So this story is going to be an entire retelling of Cages using original characters. This is the teaser chapter. Unfortunately, I will NOT be able to post the rest of the story on this site because of it's restrictions on explicit content, but the story will be available on Archive Of Our Own under the penname ryoko21.
And so I present to you the first part of The Long Leash Arc, entitled The Long Leash: Perfect Zero
Chapter 01 – Zero
It isn't the cold that wakes me. The chill has sunk into my bones, and by that point I barely feel it apart from the ache that it causes in my extremities. But I know that I am cold, just as I know that I am currently contained in a pod just large enough to fit me and the necessary instruments to keep me alive. I know that if I were capable of moving anything, I'd only be able to move it an inch in any direction before I hit into the solid metal of my container. But the alternative, being set adrift in space with no protection, is still the less agreeable option. Although not by much.
It's an incessant beeping that wakes me, pulls me out of my artificial slumber, makes me peel one eye open and glance at the monitor in front of me. The numbers, now at twenty-eight minutes and thirty-seven seconds, only tell me how long I have before the door will open. The relevant questions – where I am, who is out there – are left unanswered.
I force myself to blink again, then to turn my head. There is a mask over my face, a tube down my throat, and I can hear the sound of air being ventilated into my chest, although the cold made it so that I really don't feel it. I try to look down, forcing the tube in my trachea to bend with me, and that does cause a spike of pain that I feel even through the numbing cold. I force my neck to bend until my forehead rests against the opposite wall of my pod, only an inch in front of my face. My throat burns, the icy tube feel like it has scraped me raw. It doesn't matter. In less than half an hour that door will open, and my new owner will expect me to walk out of this container on my own. It isn't an easy prospect, but I know from experience that it can be accomplished.
Once I can see my fingers in the dim light from the clock, I focus on getting them to move. I have to put my attention on my left hand first. My view of the right hand is blocked by a blue plastic cuff on that arm. I can see the cuff, but I couldn't actually feel where it is attached to me, where its ports have punctured my veins, filtering the toxins from my blood and checking my oxygen levels. It has stopped injecting me with a light sedative, just enough to keep me calm and allow me to drift, likely in the last few minutes since the hatch has been queued to open. Another person might take hours to fully metabolize the drug, but my body can process it much faster. Recovering from the near-hypothermic state I am in, however, will take nearly all of the time I have left. In the past, I had been able to recover with only seconds to spare, pulling myself out of the pod on legs that shook, using my arms for balance because my fingers wouldn't close around the grips. I'd been fast. The slower ones had been eliminated.
But it is fine. This is routine. I've done this before, and I know that once the fingers of my left hand are moving, I can slide my left arm across my body and massage my right fingers into motion. I won't have the dexterity to get the cuff off, but I can pull it free when the door opened. It won't take much to get it to release, although pulling its probes out of my skin always leaves that arm bleeding and partially paralyzed. I would need to get feeling back into my legs, though, and once I could move my arms and increase my circulation it would be easier to force my leg muscles to move.
The trickiest part will be releasing the harness that keeps me strapped to the seat. The buckles are difficult with my numb fingers, and there is no way to see it with the breathing mask still on. I will have to fumble around and listen for the click of the locking mechanism to tell me when I am free. It would be easier without the mask on, but that will come off last, in case the oxygen levels in the pod are too low. If necessary, I can get out of the pod with it still on, although it only has a few inches of tether and would be jerked off of my face when I step out of the pod.
I can do this. I've done it before. This is routine.
Never in this bad of shape, though. I try to recall all the injuries I sustained before I was been dispatched, and I feel my heart rate pick up. I try to steady it, try to catalogue what I remember. I had been beaten, but not expertly. The men had been angry. I had failed, but I was still a valuable asset. They had beaten me out of anger, but they hadn't irreparably damaged me. I hadn't fought back. I would have been killed if I had. I wonder, idly, if I'd regret that choice.
I'd taken several hits to the face, before I'd gone to ground to protect myself. The cold is the most likely reason that it hasn't swollen, but I have no doubts that half of my face is bruised. I remember the taste of blood, and speculate on a split lip or a broken cheekbone. When I had hit the ground, they'd started kicking me, and I likely have cracked ribs that the cold prevents me from feeling. The rest of the damage is from old and partially healed slashes on my legs and arms, all from previous fights and missions. I disregard them as unimportant.
My left hip aches, even through the cold, but that's an old wound. Nothing left but ugly scars as proof that I'd been hit with a pulse rifle and survived, although it had broken every bone and blood vessel on that side of my pelvis. I'd survived that, and this isn't as difficult.
There is a routine, I remind myself. Fingers first. Think logically. Follow the plan.
But the person on the outside doesn't know the plan. I hear the hiss of the hydraulics on the door at twenty-five minutes and my pod floods with warm air and bright light. I feel air being forced into my lungs as I forget to breathe. Caught unaware and unready, I freeze. In a battle, I would attack as soon as the door begins to open. But here, I'm helpless. This isn't how this is supposed to go. I'm not ready.
The light from outside blinds me and I close my eyes. Strong, warm hands touch me. The mask comes away first, and the latches release easily under experienced fingers. The hands hold my face as the tube comes out of my mouth, but I retch anyway. Bile comes up, as there is nothing in my stomach, and my face is turned just enough that the vomit lands beside me and not on me. I listen to how quickly it splatters and calculate full gravity. We're in a personal ship, then, not the cargo bay at a storage facility, where gravity is kept low to make moving cargo easier. I've been purchased by a new owner, most likely one looking for a short-term asset. I'd probably be beaten to death.
I blame it on the cold, that I feel nothing about that statement.
Next comes the harness, and I can't feel his fingers working but I hear the click of the latch and then the movement of the straps. The harness falls away, freeing me completely. I try to stand, succeeded only in twitching my foot. The movement sends a lance of pain up my leg, and tells me that it will be several minutes more before I regain control of my legs. I doubt my new owner will be patient while I recover myself. He is distracted for the moment with my cuff, and I can feel him slowly peeling back the plastic and pulling the probes from my arm. I try to move my leg again, but the second twitch is less successful than the first.
He is doing something, then, along my abdomen. I pry my eyes open and glance down. I had forgotten that they taped my documents to my chest before they jettisoned me. I watch him through my lashes as he picks at the tape and then slowly pulls it away, leaving a red strip across my skin. I can't feel it, not even when he pulls the packet of papers off of me and tosses it out of the pod. I hear it hit the floor somewhere outside, and repress the urge to advise him that he will want that, later. Maybe he won't. Maybe I'll be dead before he had any use for it.
"You're going to be okay," I hear him say, and I am suddenly glad that I'm nearly paralyzed with cold. Otherwise I might have made a noise of derision.
But then he's pulling me out, and my body screams at the movement. I feel him stumble under my weight and try to stand on my own, but my legs won't respond. His skin feels like fire against my own as he grips my arm and around my waist. My consciousness fades and I fight to hold it, manage to pull myself back when he sets me down on a table. No. The padding tells me that it was a gurney, and the scent tells me it's new. I glance around and everything I can see tells me expensive. I close my eyes again, trying to give the illusion that I am still fighting for consciousness. It doesn't seem to matter if I appear weak. If he hasn't killed me for it already, he isn't likely to.
He lays me out gently, making sure all my limbs are comfortably positioned, but then he straps me down. The straps around my wrists and ankles are made of a cloth-like material, scratchy and synthetic. It doesn't take much to guess Velcro, which is fairly standard in personal craft medical rooms. In the event of an emergency, it will keep a patient from landing on the ceiling if gravity goes out. I can pull free of them once feeling returns to my limbs. Until then, it will keep me on the table while my body is wracked with tremors in the process of returning to normal temperature.
I blink my eyes open again, glance at my new owner. He has moved away from me and is pulling something out of an overhead cabinet. His profile is athletic and slim. Not a fighter's body, but keeps in shape. Mid-thirties, roughly, with short blonde hair that hangs around his face. His eyes are blue, bright with intelligence. His clothes are as new as this ship, but he wears them comfortably. Old money, then, but on a new venture. He turns to me and I let my eyes slip half-closed. He doesn't glance at my face.
The needle in his hand isn't surprising, considering that he's brought me to a med bay, but it does pose an alarming number of possibilities. Attached to a long tube and a bag labeled as saline, it looks like he is going to give me an intravenous drip, although I can't guess for what purpose. I contemplate the nineteen different ways I can kill him with that needle. I lay still as he slips it into my vein in a move that has a practiced ease, but not the fluidity of an expert. I doubt I'll be used as a science experiment, then. It is a slight relief. Out of all the possible things he could do with me, that idea is the least appealing. I've had enough experience with that to know that I would rather avoid it.
I lay quietly as he tapes the tubing to my arm and hangs the bag beside the bed. The surface under me is warm, and I realize belatedly that he has heated the bed beneath me. When he puts a blanket over me, I feel my body break out in shivers. I am suddenly glad that he's strapped me down, because the temptation to curl into a ball is strong.
He puts a clear, medical-style mask over my face, and it's a lot less restricting than the one in my pod, resting lightly over my nose and mouth. The air inside is warm and wet and has the smell of chemicals. I can't guess what he feels that I need to breathe, but I don't feel any lack of oxygen, so I disregard it as unimportant.
I am so preoccupied with the mask that I don't see him fill a syringe, don't notice it at all until he moves to inject it into the line in my arm. I do flinch this time, but it only flexes the muscles of that arm and hardly pulls on my bindings. I strain my eyes but there is no way to know what he's injected me with. There are too many clear liquids possible to narrow the scope. I suppose that I'll know if it's acid soon enough.
My flinch must tip him off that I'm awake. A moment later, he's shining a light in my eyes. I open them both to let him know that I'm aware. He pulls a seat next to me and sits down.
"Can you hear me?" he asks. I nod, not sure if I can trust my voice.
"Do you know where you are?" I shake my head. Beyond the obvious, that I am in a personal ship, I have no idea. We could have gone anywhere before he pulled me from my pod, it is impossible to tell how long I had been adrift.
"You're in my ship, just outside of Satellite 16. It's day 279 of the 59th year."
I had only been adrift five days, then. It must be my injuries that are slowing my recovery.
"Do you…" he trails and hesitates, then asks, "What can I call you?" My brain feels muddled. What did he give me? It doesn't matter. I have to answer the question verbally. The way he asked it, I can only think to respond with the name that my former own called me. It's the same thing everyone calls me.
"Zero," I tell him, and my voice comes out raspy but lacks the pain that I know I should be feeling when I speak.
"I'm Zeke. Ezekiel Price," he clarifies, although I doubt that I'll be allowed to call him that. "Do you know why you're here?"
"You bought me," I respond. "I'm your asset." I wonder, hazily, if he thinks I'm new to this. Does he think that he's my first owner? Or – I glance around – maybe I'm his first slave? It's possible, considering my last failure. New owners are generally given broken assets for their first buy. It takes a bit of practice to keep slaves alive, or so I've been told. But then, I'm hardier than most.
I can feel the drugs working in my system, feel the lethargy steal over me. My temperature is rising, and I am overcome with tremors as my body tries to help the process. It looks like my new owner wants to ask more questions, but he glances at my shaking form and reconsiders.
"Get some sleep," he advises. "I've given you enough sedative that you should be able to sleep through the worst of your recovery. In a few hours, when you wake up, I'll have questions for you."
It is easy to give in to his order, the same one that my body had been giving me since he pulled me out of the pod. I don't know if I should tell him that my body metabolizes sedatives faster, that I'd likely be awake before he plans. I stay silent as he dims the lights and leaves the room. I give a half-hearted tug at my restraints, already feeling the sedatives steal my strength. When I wake, I think, I can try to free myself. If nothing else, maybe I can give myself a quick end, or convince him that I'm too much trouble to keep around. I am tired of being tortured, of being asked to torture others. I don't want to die, not really. But living is so tiring. I just want to rest.
These mind-games are no better.
This master is no better.
I am so tired.
Once again, please find the rest of this fic (and any new chapters) under The Long Leash by Ryoko21 on Archive Of Our Own. I will not be able to post more than the teaser here because of restrictions on explicit content. Thank you for reading!