The train was cold.

Callie tugged on the carriage window to open it. Air blasted her. Eyes closed, she bit down on her cigarette, then spat it at the passing mountains.

‘Hedge,’ Mickman said, behind her.

‘Mick.’

‘Are you out?’

Callie could barely hear him over the rush of wind. She watched a trawler mount a cliff-face then keel to catch the ensuing rubble on its side. Most trawlers were a hundred feet tall. This one was nearer a thousand. She then dug into the pocket of her jumpsuit and pushed an empty cigarette packet at Mickman.

‘I’m out,’ she said. ‘What’s the price for a dead woman?’

Mickman turned over a second packet of dreyfyll. ‘Thirty.’

‘I don’t have that. I’m contracted.’ She paused, smiled cutely. ‘We could fuck again.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Kidding. I’ll give you twenty.’

Mickman scowled. ‘Fine.’

Callie stuffed her last cash into his hand and snatched the dreyfyll cigarettes. Mickman left his fingers there to catch hers. ‘It was one time, Mick. Don’t tell me you got a boner from that.’

‘I—’

‘Lord above.’

Callie bit into a fresh cigarette. Lit it by the lighter in her pocket, then waited ten seconds for the high to hit before she kept moving.

‘We are—’

‘You’re just the dealer, man. But it was a magical night. But you find yourself a pretty lady when you get home.’

‘I have fifteen thousand hours left at the foundries. Five on a trawler.’

Callie span round, walking backwards. She watched Mickman’s sheepish look. The boy was lanky, thin of face and hair. ‘Oh, you actually are interested.’ She laughed. ‘Brother, I am not spending my last night with you.’

Mickman stopped. ‘I never missed a package for you.’

Smirking, Callie bowed. ‘And the Patrimini Corporation thanks you for your service.’ She turned and bolted to the next carriage. Three guards watched her in blue uniforms. Their gloves tightened on their pistols. ‘I’m flattered,’ Callie grunted.

She walked another carriage, and another, another. The first was for fine diners, guests of Patrimini. The next housed good labour stock like Mickman. The third was for jumpsuits like her. Each was wristbanded with papers scrunched in their hands, nervous looks in their eyes. Callie walked through them.

She looked out the window again. They had passed the trawler now, into the embrace of a blizzard, toward the peak of the mountains. A warship throttled overhead, occluded in the smog of the foundries. Then, a second.

All she could think about was how cold it was. The dreyfyll wrapped her mind in fog, like the invisible cities beneath them, the factories in the fog at the foot of the mountains. The cities seemed to hang upside down from the cliffs. The workers commuted by cable down to the surface, their faces occupied by respirators so as not to die daily.

All so they could make machines that killed other people and things daily. A cute existence. Callie tugged open another window. The jumpsuits didn’t pay her mind, thinking instead on their contracts.

A duty officer walked across her, slid the window back into place. ‘Windows aren’t for cargo.’

‘Is that what I am?’

‘Far as Patrimini is concerned, yes, young lady. You are. Contractually, you died the minute you stepped aboard this train.’

‘Well, that’s lovely. What would that make me if I walked back out the door?’

The duty officer looked down at his board, pursing his lips as he did, then out the window. ‘Still contractually dead for the eighty-odd seconds until you hit the ground. Then, just dead. Name?’

‘Callie Hedge.’

‘Age?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘What was your assignment?’

‘I was on Walter Cliff, served in the Sache foundry.’

‘What’s the charge?’

‘I discharged a mining laser at the foreman. He lost an eye… and a leg, and some other bits.’

The duty officer rolled his eyes. ‘You can see the Executor.’

The next carriage slid open and Callie ducked a low hanging lamp. She drew her arms in tight. Grime smeared the pipes funnelled around her. She looked up at the light, then down, and the Executor smiled there at her.

‘Hedge, Callie,’ Callie said. She nearly choked, stuffing her last puff of cigarette into her insides.

‘Are you alright Ms Hedge?’

Callie cleared her throat, smiled. ‘Yes.’ Her wit wouldn’t wash here. The Executors had the aura of kings. They were just slaves of the company, like everyone else, but this particular slave wielded life and death, but with the ceaseless, dead-eyed look all bureaucrats wore. This one was old. Callie thought it was a woman, but she’d be lying to say she was sure.

‘I have your papers here. Nasty business on the mine. Murder and battery. Possession with intent to distribute.’

‘I don’t deal anymore.’

‘Yes, but I think the nature of prosecution escapes you, my dear. Crimes are typically punished for having had happened, not something that is currently happening.’

‘Right.’

‘The standard for murder, irrespective of these other charges is solitary and execution.’

‘What’s the sol?’

‘One year.’

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

‘And with the other charges?’

‘You’re looking at two, Ms Hedge.’

‘Can I pay labour?’

‘The exchange for solex [1] to hours doesn’t really work. You’d be looking at half a million hours which is more life than you have left. And given the nature of your offence, on company time, against an employee, it’s out of the question I’m afraid.’

Callie skewed her lips. ‘Listen, Sir… Ma’am, I listen to the dailies. Patrimini’s not doing well, and sol is expensive.’

‘You’re asking for a straight execution? That’s a soft option, Ms Hedge.’ The old woman gave an angry look. ‘Patrimini is contracted for the servicing of prisons and executions. If we start rolling back on either of those things, it won’t end well for any of us.’

In what world does this end well for me regardless, thought Callie. This was the trouble with private courts. She had no higher authority to which she could protest, only the facelessness of Patrimini. Or in this case, the one rather ugly face in front of her.

‘Do I have right of appeal?’

‘Your guilt was determined by the JP who filed the report, and…’ She looked down at her note. ‘…Thirteen eyewitnesses who corroborated.’

‘What if they were coerced?’

Callie couldn’t tell if the woman was amused or irritated.

‘These are protests I’ve heard a hundred times a day for sixty years, Ms Hedge.’

‘You can offer me something? Some concession? Please. Look at my record, spotless ‘till then, I have twenty-two thousand hours, and four more voluntary overtime. That’s worth something, no?’

The Executor furrowed her brow. She turned through more papers. Anything to avoid solitary, Callie thought. A year, alone, was worse than death, lower than madness. She’d go to the war camps on the Eastern hemisphere, fight if she had to.

She clenched her chest, blurted, ‘I’ll do anything.’

The Executor’s papers froze in her hand. ‘Anything is quite a promise.’

‘Then, I promise,’ Callie said, half-high, mindless of what she may have pledged herself to.

‘You understand you don’t wiggle out of this in any way. Patrimini owned your life the minute you boarded this train. All of your life.’

Callie nodded. ‘I understand that I will die. But not in solitary. Please Miss.’

‘You’ve got more heart than head. If you want a settlement that avoids solex, I can offer two options.’

At once, Callie shuffled to the chair opposite the Executor’s desk and knelt upon it. She leaned over, crooked backed. The Executor handed her two papers.

‘Your choices are deployment to Weirdune—’

‘Weirdune is the centre of the war. That planet is hollow. I wouldn’t survive.’

‘Precisely. You’ll be frontline,’ the Executor said matter-of-factly.

‘Or?’

‘The second option is cryo. Deep space ejection.’

‘To where?’

‘Nowhere.’

‘I don’t understand.’

The Executor stood and glanced out a window. Callie followed her look.

‘You made a point that Patrimini doesn’t have the resource to solex every dissident that comes aboard this train to the Holdings. Space is a much larger prison.’

‘You mean you leave me in space? Forever?’

‘Until the cryo cell fails and you run out of air in two days. Or the fuel cells crack and poison you in your sleep. You’d be aboard a Trych shuttle.’

Callie had heard of them. Skinny, rickety little things that they were. Orbit was a success. Was it cheaper to throw shuttles at space than it was to run the prisons, or Holdings as Patrimini called them. A sad state of affairs.

‘Sounds gross,’ Callie said. She lit another cigarette, expected the Executor to tell her off but she did not. ‘S’the catch?’

‘Catch?’

‘Death in my sleep. What could be better?’ She puffed, then ate on the fumes. ‘And this way I wouldn’t technically be dying in my twenties.’ She stole a look at the Executor. Her face folded, unimpressed.

‘You’d be among the first. The Trych shuttles are being phased out, it’s why—’

‘I’m in. Done. Let’s sign.’ She gestured for a pen and the Executor stood back, surprised. Callie scanned the contract. For why, she did not know. But here eyes caught one phrase, “in perpetuity”.

She felt a tingling of something. Some distant feeling, buried under the high swallowing her brain. Was it shame? Callie swallowed, then scribbled her name by the pen.

‘Lovely,’ said the Executor. Callie wondered if she got bonuses for signing convicts onto something other than solex. ‘You’ll be escorted to your shuttle on arrival at the Holdings.’

Callie nodded.

‘You can go,’ the old woman said, prodding the table. Callie shifted back whence she’d come, three carriages back, to the same window she had yanked open. She let the cold bathe her neck, and puffed her cigarette, looking at the packet as she did.

‘I’ll miss you,’ she said. Then, she turned and looked down from the train. Another behemoth rolled overhead, grey-bellied and the tracks shook by the thunder of its engines. There was just smog to see. Smog and mountains. Then her eye was caught by the glow of smelting someway down towards the surface.

They must be close to the Holdings District now, she thought. Left, the slopes thinned ahead. Maybe it was her imagination, or she could see the stacks of Patrimini’s holdings. Wiry tower blocks. Hundred rooms to a floor. And a hundred floors. Each room had a bastard in solitary.

All they could do there was think. Think and shit. And then suddenly they would die when the room flooded with hydrogen chloride, no warning. Patrimini would then repatriate their bodies to the state, to hollow them into zombies of war. The longest death.

Unlike her, they probably deserved it though, snapped Callie’s thoughts. Because she didn’t deserve it. She bit on her finger.

She missed dad. That was the shame, she realised. She was leaving him in the soil, in his dead delusion that she was a daughter to be proud of.

Callie never got to go to space. Dad had promised it, but then the fucker got arthritis, and heat exhaustion in the mines. Callie missed that part of the story out.

The foreman scolded her dad. Berated him.

‘HEDGE!’ he screamed. His voice cracked. A stout little man was Foreman Elliket, emboldened by his baton.

But her dad just sank to his knees at the edge of the tunnel, his legs seized by age and dust.

‘I can’t—’ he said, panting. ‘I can’t move.’

Callie watched Elliket, sweat beading down her face, skin bronzed from a week’s overtime at the smelter. ‘He’s exhausted, man. He needs medlift.’

‘Every minute he’s not working, is a minute I’m owed. It’s a minute the company is owed.’

No doubt, he had his own numbers to meet, Callie thought, just as her and dad did.

‘Then give him half an hour. He’ll finish his hours.’

‘Or how about now, and we all get to go home on time.’

Callie groaned. Other hands took notice. Eyes shot her way. She said nothing, tended to her father, who waved her off.

‘I just- I just- I just need— Need water. Water,’ he whispered. ‘You go on. Don’t get in trouble for me.’

Elliket moved her on to the next section, a cutaway under one of the larger cliff-faces, where there was more ore.

She returned five hours later, at dusk, where the low sun struck the dust-choked air orange, to walk her father to the lodgings as she always did.

But he was horizontal this time, lain upon a medlift, a stretcher suspended waist-height or so. Callie looked at him. Her mining laser dropped between her feet.

His skin had been left to dry and his face was as warm to the touch as the air. His weathered features looked thinner. The lines deeper.

Callie cried silently, and held his hand as she did, until someone moved the lift on. She blinked until the tears stopped, feeling a fist around her heart. Her chest might burst, but she said nothing.

‘Hedge.’ Elliket’s awful voice squeaked behind her.

‘You goddamn gutter-licking motherfucker,’ Callie whispered.

She drew her mining laser into her hand, didn’t even think before she did. Her finger squeezed, and the heat blasted her eyes without the coggles.

Elliket fell. Callie didn’t awfully care if he was dead or not. She then knelt, and placed her hands behind her back as she did. There she waited, until the oranged dust was silver in the moonlight, for someone to take her away.

Callie knelt by the window of the carriage. She thought about tugging the window all the way down and falling through. How rational the idea felt for half a moment. But she couldn’t do that to him.

Space could have her, she thought. Maybe dying forever was what she deserved.

‘You were so— kind,’ she whispered. ‘Who’d be kind on Arga? I don’t know what I’d tell you if you were here but I think it’s funny the last thing you said to me was ‘don’t get in trouble for me. I’m a stubborn motherfucker. In my defence, you hated him too.’ She paused. ‘Tell me a joke. Ha. That’s a good one. You know my favourite joke. Callie Hedge.’ She waited for someone to tell her otherwise, but she was the only person in the universe who gave a shit, or knew who she was for that matter.

She felt the train begin to slow. A passing billboard greeted her from the window. Mikka County Welcomes You: The Home of Patrimini Holdings. The Holdings were clearly visible now. They unsettled, if only for the knowledge of how many screams their walls heard. She could also see a long runway, suspended as high as the tower blocks. Two ships fizzled with steam, a third rolling along a taxiway to be erected beside them. The train station sat upon the underside of the runway. She wondered if her ship was here yet, how many days she’d have to wait.

There could be some comfort in dying in the reach of the stars, Callie decided. Dad could be proud of that in a sort-of way. But better, in cryo she could outlive every little fucker that sent her there. And that would be good.

[1] Solex – solitary and execution