The Defiant

A few minutes later, Seven and I wandered through what appeared to be the main marketplace of the station. Booths lined the walls of a cavernous deck, filling the air with noise and the smell of food cooking. Customers roamed from booth to booth.

We bought some pastries from a tiny woman covered in flour, in a booth below a blue awning. We ate them while surveying the other booths, which advertised everything from Valhalla-metalworked jewelry to what appeared to be jars of human blood sold by a creature that looked like a giant boulder.

Seven squealed suddenly, dragging me by the arm over to a booth filled with every art supply imaginable, and lost herself in a table filled with rows and rows of differently-colored pots of paint. I stood by, waiting patiently, but was soon distracted by the sight of a tiny booth with a deep purple awning I could swear hadn’t been there before. It almost seemed to call to me. I wandered over to it, keeping an eye on Seven, who was still engrossed in the paints.

The mysterious booth contained tables lined with a haphazard selection of fascinating devices. I saw a primitive med-scanner from decades ago, a pottery shard inscribed with wording from a strange language, a perfectly smooth sphere the size of my fist of what looked like polished emerald, and many other strange treasures. My fingers closed on a small, flat silver disk.

I turned it over, finding a tiny switch on the bottom, which I flipped. On the other side, a small holographic presentation began with the smallest speck of something on the surface of the silver. Tiny, nerve-like white roots extended down from the speck, and a thin, green bud unfolded itself from what I had determined must be a seed. As I watched, a stem grew, followed by a gorgeous pearly pink flower that scarcely opened its petals before closing and shrinking to a seed.

The operator of the booth, a tall, statuesque woman with coal-black skin decorated with painted gold lines, approached me and smiled, flashing a row of very white teeth. I held the silver disk out to her for inspection, and, though I had no practical use for the thing, asked,

“How much?”

The woman simply shook her head and returned the disk to me, curling my hands over it. Suddenly hearing Seven’s exuberant laugh, I spun around, reassured when I saw her, still at the booth of art supplies. When I turned around to thank the woman, the booth was gone. Startled, I returned to the main thoroughfare, looking up and down for its nondescript purple awning, as though it had teleported. Finding nothing, I went back to meet Seven, and we soon returned to shopping, Seven not having noticed that I had disappeared.

A tall, skinny creature covered in slimy blue-green skin juggled flaming torches in the center of the marketplace. A smaller individual, possibly a child, of the same species, carried a hat around for change. Its hands were webbed, and its wide-mouthed smile revealed rows of tiny, needle-sharp teeth. A blink showed completely black eyes, with no iris or sclera.

“Sedha,” Seven whispered to me as we moved off, after depositing some change in the hat.

I looked back at the pair, startled to find the smaller Sedha still watching me, its head turned completely around, like an owl’s.

Seven and I explored the station for another hour. We visited several booths, including a bookseller’s and several clothiers’, before I got the comm.

“Hey, One.” Three’s voice. “Can you come bail us out?”

“What?” I exclaimed.

“I’ll tell you the story when you get here. We’re at the end of the marketplace, past that fire-juggling fish guy and the chick selling basilisk venom.”

I started to ask another question, but the feed cut off.

I rolled my eyes at Seven, and we set off back through the station, passing the Sedha again and a woman who was indeed selling vials full of a poisonous-looking green liquid.

At the back of the station, near the entrance to the docking port where we had come in, we entered a waiting room of sorts. A bored looking brown-haired man sat behind a counter set into the wall.

“I’m looking for my friend? Bruise on her forehead? This tall, dark hair?” I said, holding my hand a few inches above my head.

The man pressed a button without even looking up and we passed through the now-open backdoor.

The walls were lined with the barred doors of jail cells, but all seemed to be empty. We reached the last on the line, which contained Six and Three, sitting on a bench in the corner, neither of whom looked injured besides the bruises and bandages from the Kryllian attack.

“What part of ‘try not to call attention to yourselves’ didn’t you get?” I asked exasperatedly. “What did you even do?”

“Some creep at the bar touched my ass. So I punched him,” she said with relish.

“And?”

“And what?”

“They didn’t throw you in jail just for punching some drunk pedophile. What else did you do?”

She grinned sheepishly.

“I may have also roundhouse kicked some of his friends.”

“And?”

“And Six cracked some heads, too.”

“Great. Ever think that when we’re fleeing from the law after kidnapping a few members of the Eranian royal family, we won’t want people to be able to recognise us?”

She shrugged. I sighed, and walked back to the front desk.

“I’d like to bail my friends out.”

“Two hundred universal currency units. Type your password,” the brown-haired man said, still not looking up from his computer.

I did as directed, hearing the click down the hall as the jail cell door unlocked.

Seven, Three, and Six joined me at the desk and retrieved their shopping bags, which had been confiscated when they were arrested. The guy still didn’t look up.

“I admire your selfless attention to your duty,” I said scathingly as we left.

He ignored us.