Iona didn’t normally dream when she was in cryostasis. What usually happened was that Gage walked her to the capsule, and gave her a hand up like he was a footman helping a lady into a carriage. She slid into the seat and he buckled her up inside. She liked it when he buckled her. It was a four-point harness (a five-point if she wore pants instead of a dress into the cryochamber), and his hands around her waist and between her legs gave her a nice buzz before he filled the chamber with gas. The truth as she saw it was that she’d rather have Gage touch her before she fell asleep than tell her a dumb scripted story that Sleeping Beauty Inc. used to trick hyper-idealistic types into taking contracts with them.
Though it was true that Iona wanted to be treated like a princess, she found all that cornball stuff to be unnecessary and completely lacking in substance. She liked math and the numbers of the bidding rounds were what really lit her torch. It was a manifestation of her worth in a way that could be calculated and all the cobwebs were pushed aside for a dollar amount that no one could argue with. She was worth an insane amount of money.
And what was a story if not a tool meant to distract someone from where the money was moving? She had done that herself for years. She got the dollar amount the bidder paid. Sleeping Beauty Inc. took their cut, but Iona got the rest of the money. Aside from that, she often convinced her buyer to give her a million little gifts during the time he owned her. When she started taking corporate clients, she got more gifts because then she could scrape the employees of the company she worked for, but also all the clients she served. Iona had three storage spaces on Ganymede that were essentially locked boxes at a bank filled with expensive clothes, jewelry, and gifts.
She hadn’t been back to check on them for years and they were the last things on her mind when Gage put her to sleep with his story and his kiss.
For as long as she could remember, she had never dreamed while she was in cryostasis, until this one time.
She dreamt she was in Ganymede. She was wearing her favorite dress that was currently in one of her storage containers. It was a metallic pink halter dress with a huge silver belt around her waist. The skirt was a short pencil skirt with a huge, separate, ruffled train in the back. Whenever she put on that dress, with huge hoop earrings, glitter all over her face, crystals in her hair, and her Cinderella glass slippers on her feet (the one accessory from Sleeping Beauty Inc. she actually liked and the reason she had been willing to be categorized as a Cinderella model), she felt like she had finally become herself.
This was who she really was. On the red carpet with spotlights shining down on her, with camera flashes in her face. Some faceless man was escorting her, but no one cared about him. All eyes were for her!
“Who is she?”
“Why is she worth so much?”
“Can’t you see why? There is no one more dazzling than her.”
“I want her!”
“I want her!”
“I want to be her!”
Except, Iona couldn’t live in that moment because the show always ended. It couldn’t last forever and after the show, after the lights, after everything went dark, there was always the moment after the party when she was alone. She was in a hotel room bathroom with a vision of herself in the mirror that had to be faced. She had to take off her makeup and see what she was without it. She had to take off her dress like it was a skin of hers that had never really belonged to her. How could that dress mean anything about her if she could take it off so easily? She had to take off the Cinderella slippers and face the fact that no prince had come for her.
Even if a man bid on her, the longest contract Iona had ever taken was for 18 months. That wasn’t forever. It wasn’t happily ever after.
The truth was she wasn’t even as loved as the little girls who had fairy tales told to them all tucked up in bed.
For a hideous moment, she was back to being the little girl who had gone to sleep every night in a dead dog’s bed.
In her dream, she left the bathroom with bare feet and an oversized T-shirt over her panties. Her grayish blonde hair was knotted into a braid that didn’t make sense. She had done it herself and she didn’t know how to braid. The floor was cold, the air chilled her and she moved from the white tile flooring of the hotel bathroom to the kitchen of her childhood. Cracked glass windows, mice in the attic, bats under the floor, grime between her toes, and the light and screams from a horror movie being played by the neighbors across the way. The white light of the empty fridge hurt her eyes. She got a glass of water in a paper cup. The water poured from the sink was yellow and ugly compared with the clear water advertised everywhere on flashing screens. The door creaked and Iona ran to hide. Crunched between the washing machine and the dryer, she threw clothes over herself. If she could stop herself from trembling, if she could quiet her breathing… they might not find her.
She woke up with a start.
Iona was in the cryochamber. The light that shone through the glass above her was indecipherable as the world was always a little upside down whenever she woke up from cryosleep. She wasn’t that little girl anymore. She was a modern princess with men throwing their cash at her just to impress her. She coughed. It was fine for her to cough. She didn’t need to hide. She could just cough and no one would be bothered by it. It was fine. When she was sick now, she was cared for by a beautiful gentleman named Gage. She was safe and all that old stuff was over. She breathed and opened her eyes wide.
That was the moment when she was awake enough to realize that there was a problem. Gage hadn’t woken her with a kiss the way he usually did. What had happened?
Cryochambers used in outer space were fancier than the ones that stayed on the surface of a planet with their sole purpose to keep the models looking young. Iona’s could be used as an escape pod in an emergency. She pressed a few buttons on the ceiling above her.
Using the panel, the computer on board informed her that her cryochamber was still aboard the Cannonball III and they were now on Io. She got a message on her little green screen from Gage saying that they had crashed and it would be a few minutes before he could get to her to let her out. He sent her the info pack she needed to release herself if she was in a hurry.
Iona opted to try to go through the procedure that would let her out of the cryochamber. She clicked on the button to start the process on her screen.
“Would you like to disengage the artificial gravity inside your cryochamber? Y/N?
“Yes,” she clicked. Obviously, she would need to do that if she was going to open the hatch.
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Immediately, her whole body slumped to the right and hard against her restraints. Gage said they crashed. He had not said that they crashed on their side. Iona rubbed at the condensation on the glass above her that fogged up the windows. As she thought, the room looked exactly the same as it had when it was right side up, because the whole thing was on its side. She glanced out the glass lid and inspected the room more carefully. The bed had broken the bolts that held it in place and it was now against the wall, but the mattress was in a position where she could jump to it. Even if Gage came to help her, he’d probably just tell her to jump onto the mattress.
She turned to the computer to answer the next question.
“Would you like to depressurize the cabin? Y/N?”
Iona hadn’t been aware that there was any pressure put on the cryochamber, but if the computer said there was, then there probably was.
She clicked yes and immediately her ears popped. There was a hissing sound and the next thing that happened was that she could smell the yellow sands of Io. She’d forgotten how much she hated that smell. It was on everything on Io. It was like sulfur or brimstone because of all the volcanic activity on the moon. The best thing about being on Io was the sight of Jupiter. It was enormous in the sky, filling your view because every human longed for something huge to hang in the sky. That was why she forgot about the smell and decided to come to Io. Who didn’t love Jupiter?
That was what she told herself as she read the next question.
“Is it safe to open the hatch? Y/N?”
It was as safe as it was going to be, so she pressed yes.
The hatch opened slowly and Iona waited for it to open all the way before she undid her harness and positioned herself above the mattress. The mattress looked awfully small on the other side of the room, but Iona was not afraid of heights and leaped. She landed well.
“Good job,” Leviticus clapped for her, poking his head through the remains of the door frame. It had shattered on impact. “Care to walk on the wall to join me?”
Iona had never walked on a wall before as she came toward him. When she got to the door frame, the wall crumbled under her weight and she ended up falling between the studs of the wall and onto the opposite wall of the hallway circular connecting room.
“These are some rickety ships!” she complained from the place she’d fallen.
Leviticus agreed, helping her to her feet. “Gage says we’ve got to get out of here, but he’s still in his cryochamber making calls and putting out fires. He says you and I should go outside and take a look around. He says we should be able to see the biggest volcano on Io from here. It’s called Loki.”
“I’ve never seen Loki,” Iona said, following Leviticus. “Are you walking on the studs?”
“I would if I knew where they were. As it is, we’ll know not to step somewhere if I put a foot through the wall.”
They made it to the spiral staircase that led to the cargo bays. Turned on its side, it had become a slide that had an upward curve at the end. Iona went first. She had to stand on the smooth surface of the wall, slide, and then heave herself up through the doorway. After that, Iona and Leviticus had to walk down a long hallway. On its side, the orientation didn’t allow for a tall enough space for the two of them to stand upright. Iona gave up trying to walk and dropped to her hands and knees. She wasn’t worried about falling through the walls because the walls of the cargo bays were made out of bolted metal since they sometimes had to open to outer space.
At the end of the hallway, there was a staircase that led down to the bottom hatch.
Leviticus opened it with some effort and after a look outside, he turned to Iona and smiled. “Well, that’s pretty good.”
He hopped out and Iona saw what he was so happy about. It was only a small jump to the sand. They could have crashed in such a way that the exit hatch was twice the scary jump that Iona made when he jumped out of her cryochamber.
“That’s lucky,” she agreed.
“I doubt it’s lucky. That guy would have crashed us this way on purpose.”
Iona chuckled at Leviticus calling Gage ‘that guy’. “Really?” she asked aloud.
“He’s not a dick brain. He would have crashed us in the most thoughtful way possible.”
“Hey, you said you were sold together with him. What does that mean exactly?”
Leviticus pulled a pair of orange-tinted sunglasses out of his coat pocket and put them on as if the orange lenses could protect him from showing any feeling. “I don’t know if it means anything, just that we know each other’s moves. I would have crashed us well, so I know he would have. He’s an idiot with a brain like mine.”
“He’s less mouthy,” Iona observed.
“Yes, well, I would be a lot less mouthy if I was your slave too. I’d say anything you wanted to hear.” Leviticus hesitated. “What is that wretched smell?” He covered his face with the sleeve of his jacket. “I thought it was the smell of the crash when we were inside, but it’s not, is it?”
“Welcome to Io,” Iona wheezed, thinking of how Gage never said what she wanted to hear. There was no way these two ‘brothers’ were as identical as Leviticus thought. She told him about the sands and the volcanos and the constant tectonic shifts that kept Io warmer than the other moons of Jupiter.
“I’d rather freeze my ass off than smell this. It’s going to seep into my clothes, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “You can either stay inside, once we get somewhere, or you can get air filters put up your nose.”
“Can’t I do both?” he whined.
“I’d get one put in your throat too,” Gage advised as he dropped from the hatch, still wearing this armor, except for the helmet.
“Are you okay?” Iona asked, rushing him.
“Of course, I am,” he said with an easy smile. “I’m the pilot. I’m supposed to be asking you if you’re alright. You look fine, you little acrobat.”
“Nobody asked if I was okay?” Leviticus grumbled.
Gage ignored him. “I crashed, and considering the error feeds the Cannonball III was putting out, our crash is classified as a shipwreck. I called the closest wrecking crew. and they’re on their way. Iona, they’re offering triple retail price for every piece of clothing you brought with you if you’re interested in selling. I’d sell if I were you. Since we’re shipwrecked, they get wrecker’s privilege, meaning that they’ll just steal anything you aren’t willing to sell to them and claim it was ruined anyway. I told them you’d talk it over with them when they got here, and you might want to hang onto your box of lacy panties.”
“There’s no point to those if you’re not willing to rip them apart with your teeth,” Iona said with a smirk.
“That’s one of the things that I could’ve been doing?” Leviticus wondered noisily.
“No!” Iona and Gage said in unison.
“I’m just as good as him!” Leviticus said moodily. “It’s not like it matters who’s banging you if you’re paying for it.”
Iona’s breath caught.
Leviticus didn’t know it, but the words he said casually completely destroyed the system Iona used to value herself.
She gave no sign that the towers she’d built inside herself were falling. She was a professional woman so when her pride came tumbling down, there was no sign on her face. Her pride had many towers. Her beauty? Others were beautiful too. She was calm? Maybe that was because she was numb inside. Her power over men? What power did she have? If they couldn’t have her, they just bought someone else? Dante bought three girls to have at his beck and call. Sherman had more. How could any of their models feel special if they were being used like they were objects? Anyone would do.
And she was one of them.
Leviticus and Gage could see it easier because there was less about them that was unique.
Iona slid downwards and placed her bottom on the yellow sand of Io. The air was chilly and the sky was dark as they were so far away from the sun, but the ground was warm. Io had a beating heart and lava blood that pumped for Jupiter. Much of the moon’s heat and light was due to Jupiter’s awesome power in the sky. He had dominion over little Io and no matter how much she loved him, she could never get any closer to him.
Did anyone get what they wanted?
Iona put her face in the sand. It stank.