There's an old story about canaries that were used to check for gas leaks in mines. Obviously they don't bother with birds anymore, not when it's easier to let slaves die. Still, just because the bird isn't there doesn't mean you can't hear it go silent.

Rat barely noticed the guards withdraw from their posts. This happened from time to time when the next shift was late, but she did notice as the minutes passed that no replacement came.

The canary stops chirping when the air turns from oxygen to something more lethal. In these mines there was no risk of an invisible blanket of carbon monoxide lulling them to sleep. The threat was a bit more acute and for a moment, Rat could imagine the scent of the trace gasses that floated in the air, causing slaves and guards alike to keep any flames low.

Rat ran for the exit. She had just stepped over the threshold leading outside when the first sounds of the explosion started rumbling up the mine shaft.

When she awoke her skin was burning. There was far less blood than she’d expected; the flames had sealed her wounds, leaving her fair skin in more pain than the lacerations would have caused. She’d broken her legs often enough in the past that she didn’t need to test the limb to confirm that her left was more than sprained.

The mine entrance could have passed for a collapsed mountain, with little sign that a large structure had ever existed. There had been no survivors and the carnage almost forced a snarled laugh from the depths of her throat.

She pressed her head against the rock, the sunbaked earth cooler than her skin. The overseers would wait the mandated two weeks following an explosion to ensure no follow up accident claimed the lives of the far more important officials.

So Rat crawled back to the camp. The days and nights blended together, one hand forward, then one knee, then another hand, until the mine lay miles in her wake. She didn’t remember catching and killing the lizard until her stomach had finished with its meager flesh and demanded more. She didn't remember finding her way back, coated in mud and dried blood, but she did remember the guard hoisting her up by her hair and putting a gun to her temple. And oh, did she remember how that guard quivered when he saw her red eyes filled with desperation and rage, her hair tangled with bones, and what little skin showing through the mud either angry red or ghostly pale. The guard picked her up, brought her inside, cleaned her off, and treated her injuries without a word. He left her with a crutch to return to her hovel. She later heard that he proceeded to burn all of his gear and spent nights weeping to multiple Gods, including a certain sacrilegious goddess of disaster and misfortune. Whether that was true, Rat didn’t know. She did know that he transferred out three weeks later. And, like a ghost, Rat returned to what could charitably be called a life, until-

Rat gasped and her whole body spasmed, a pulsing shock of pain ripping through her head. The images faded away, and with them the lasting phantom pains across her skin.  She sat back, head pounding, and leaned against the wall.  Her headache was bad enough to be blinding but it didn’t really matter cause there was jack all to see here.

Then her heart jolted as she realized she didn’t have a clear memory of where ‘here’ was.  What was the last thing she remembered and why was it a mine explosion from years ago?

“Think stupid, think,” she hissed, pressing a hand to her forehead.  Her words were absorbed by the air around her, like they’d been pulled from her mouth.  She groped around her for something grounding, anything more than the smooth wall behind her and the rough floor.  Her fingers brushed something soft and wet-

The sweet smell of rot and the sound of rats scampering had replaced light and vision as Rat’s starved senses struggled to navigate the quarantined mine. She was one of the lucky ones, not struck as hard or as quickly by the plague, but the other sick didn’t want her aid, so she sat alone by the door to the mine and counted her breaths, each a little harder to draw in. Finally, with an earth-shaking groan, the mine door swung open, signalling the quarantine’s end. Blinding light poured into the large entrance.

Rat struggled to her feet, squinted through the light, and stumbled outside. The warmth soothed her freezing skin and the fresh air, no matter how dusty, calmed her shudders. Finally, her eyes adjusted. A few of the officials, investigators and scientists, peered past her into the cave. The rest fixed her with horror. When Rat turned to look at what had them so shocked, she saw nothing but bodies.

Something thick and sticky coated her hand. Mold? Slime? Then the smell hit her nose, of pus and mucus and she gagged.

Her mind fritzed like two gears jamming against each other before one crashed through the other and she remembered… something.  The plane, the mission, the ship, the errant security system.  The Butcher King.

“I'm just sending you somewhere no one has returned from.”

Fucking Deathless. This already wasn’t worth his promise.  For a moment, anger burned past nausea and she could take a deep breath. Her nostrils filled with the scent of the sick and dying.  Dread gripped her stomach.  She didn’t even remember the feeling of the symptoms but she remembered the hot, accusatory eyes on her.

But sitting still and moping was never a luxury afforded to slaves, not when there was a job to do. By now her eyes had adjusted to the darkness and she found herself at the bottom of a very tall, very narrow room. There was a tiny opening on the ground, maybe a little crawlspace, and above her, way at the top of the shaft, a doorway.  Bracing her hands against the sides of the wall, she tried to climb her way up. Then the room shifted and trembled. She threw her arms above her head instinctively, causing her to fall down the chute. In a panic, she abandoned the doorway. She made herself as tiny as possible and squeezed into the crawlspace. It was actually a short tunnel, sloping downward. Not ready to face the cave in, she turned and followed the tunnel.

After a short, tight squeeze she emerged into a huge room and was greeted by a gust of freezing air. The room was alive with colored winds swirling and twisting, colors she knew in shades she’d never seen. Calling one blue or green or red would be doing them a disservice. Around her, the walls curved up gradually all around her and she felt very much like she were at the bottom of a huge sphere. She couldn’t even see the ceiling. 

Had the ship been this large on the outside? Why couldn’t she remember what it looked like? Why was her first memory still that mine explosion?

A chill ran wild in Rat's bones as another gust hit her and a dread cold set in her gut.  There was no exit and when she turned, the tiny passage was gone. The Butcher King had warned that the ship had an errant security system… Was the shifting, surreal layout and persistent memories part of that? Another chill crawled across her back. This was just the start of what the ship had to throw at her.

Trembling but resolute, she blocked out her running doubts and worries and started walking up the curved wall. It seemed to curve back behind her, like a sphere rolling as she ran. She ran faster and faster, watching the roof curve up and up and-

She fell on her face, hard, but instead of the hard, cold ground of the sphere, the floor was soft, spongy.

Warm.

She pushed up onto hands and knees and found herself in a long pulsating tunnel. The interior morphed and shifted, twisting and mutating before her eyes and under her feet and throbbing harder and harder and harder. Pressing her fists to her eyes did nothing to stop the pulsating and her headache grew with each one. She opened her eyes, looking each way down the tunnel. To her left, the tunnel was more organic, the ground becoming more like skin, but pockmarked and full of holes. To her right was rockier, more natural, like a cave tunnel. Down that way, she heard a squeak-

Terror flooded her system at the noise and she turned, running down the organic tunnel as if the rocky path might somehow catch her. Around her the walls shifted to a synthetic flesh. Strange organs and arteries pulsed and glowed dull colors behind a thin membrane of mucus. Bones of steel and coiled wires bent at odd angles and the ground heaved and revolted against her footsteps. Underneath the pulsing she heard a soft groan and a wet gasp.

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Rat huddled in the watchtower as the acid rain deluged from above. She buried her nose in her knees, peering across the field at the metal shed the other slaves had hidden in.  There hadn’t been room, they’d told her, and so she’d run, the acid eating pockmarks in her skin until she’d made it to the tiny glass room.  From there she could only watch, shaking as the acid trickled down the windows, waiting for them to eat through…

By the time the rain had stopped, Rat found herself alive, the glass barely cracked.  She waited for enough of the acid to wash away from the path before exiting her shelter.  Heart hammering in her ears, she rushed to the shed to give the other slaves a piece of her mind, show them her burns.  But the metal of the tiny building had been no match for the hour long shower.  Only one of the slaves was still alive, barely recognizable in the mess of melted and warped bodies.

The slave tried to ask for help but Rat knew if she touched him to roll him away, she’d burn too. She watched the acid continue to dissolve his body until he finally stopped moving.

Rat clenched her fist so hard that her fingernails broke skin and she was back in the hall. The man’s warped face lingered in her memory a while longer. Could she have helped him? Had she actually even cared about him? Had she cared about any of the people crushed in the explosion or killed in the plague or melted by the rain?

It didn’t matter. It hadn’t been her fault. Slaves died all the time. Their moans and cries were just background noise in her brain, playing on loop, something to be ignored. She had to keep going.

Satisfied for now that she’d pushed the memory down, she opened her eyes. In retaliation, her head exploded in pain, her vision going white. She stumbled, but caught herself before she fell. When the pain receded to a manageable level she let out a long breath, growing dizzy as her lungs expelled the stale carbon and rushed to greet the stale oxygen of the ship. A vein throbbed in her temple, keeping beat with the pulsing of the bulbous tissue in the wall.  She had to keep moving.  She wasn’t gonna die here.

Deeper and deeper the tunnel twisted. The floor changed from viscous scar tissue to sticky orange clay. She smelled the sharp tang of iron, of copper, and stopped, heart pounding.

No.  Not this one. Rat turned her head, to go back, but from behind her heard the trill of a rat. A sharp squeak and maybe the sound of an animal, gnawing on bones. Between the two, Rat knew which she’d rather face.

She hurried forward towards the scent of metal, through the tunnel until it opened up on a giant shore. Where she had expected to see veins of ore and precious stones, instead lay a viscous lake of blood, populated by pale fish that occasionally broke the surface. She laughed, a bit hysterically, with relief. What horrific nightmare hell was complete without a giant pool of blood?

The only way across would be to swim. She stepped in but recoiled at the unexpected heat and the hot sweat on her back washed away the momentary relief. Something squirmed in the liquid. It brushed past her ankle before writhing and latching onto her foot. She pulled back and saw a white finger wrapped around her big toe. The lake bubbled and the fish, what she’d optimistically - stupidly - thought were fish, rose to the surface. Bodies floated and twitched as though alive. Rat put her foot back in the gory sludge.

The bodies pooled, staining the reservoir scarlet. The slaves stood in single file as the Deaconess picked each one up and wrung them out over the water before throwing them in. Then she beckoned for the next.

She snapped from the memory hard as she fell forward into the lake. Her wrists screamed in protest as she caught her full body weight on them. The body parts, the slimy flesh, clung to her and for a moment, she considered letting them pull her back down. Why hadn’t she been picked?

It wasn’t until a full year after the Deaconess’s punishment that water stopped tasting like blood.

Why had she been spared the wrath of the Deathless then?

The slaves gagged at the taste and for days refused to drink. They poured their meager water supply on Rat’s head whenever she claimed her share. After all, hadn’t she caused-

It should have just been her. But she had survived and she wasn’t going to die now. Slaves died all the time. A Deathless flooding their water supply with bodies, it was no more than they should have expected.

Rat pushed herself up and continued wading across. The blood never rose above waist high, even as she crossed the center. On the other side of the lake sat an ugly mass of black iron and flaming heat. The flames roared but she didn't care. She couldn’t care. She had to make it past, had to make it to the ship’s core. That was her job. That’s why she was here. As she got closer, she saw that it wasn’t iron but rather charred, black wood.

It was night when they arrived at her door. Their hushed whispers woke her long before they intended. She was as ready as a child could be, the rusty knife, hidden and sharpened for months, in her hands. The slaves were superstitious but she’d never minded them being afraid of her until she survived the plague. That’s when the whispers had started. Whatever they were planning to get rid of her was coming soon, and she barely slept for days, crouched in her bed, ears peeled for any noise.

When they burst through the door, the fire they carried masked their faces with shadows. The first that reached for her got his throat cut for his troubles, but the next one took it in her chest, and as she fell, stole away the knife. Rat fought tooth and nail with all the fury a cornered teenager could muster, but a single fifteen-year-old girl against a mob only has one outcome.

She was grabbed by four men who carried her out of her hovel through the screaming mob. They jeered at her, spit on her, cursed her.

“You’re insane, you’re all fucking insane. I didn’t fucking do it, any of it! No, please!” Her anger gave way to terror as the words broke her throat. They ignored her and carried her to a wooden pole where they bound her. They laughed at her.

“This won’t help anyth-,” she started but they plugged her mouth with a cloth so hard she gagged. It wouldn’t help, killing her wouldn’t help, someone had to fucking see that.

"The little witch is afraid," one of them shouted, and the rest of the mob cheered. A woman started piling wood at Rat's feet. A desecrated limb of wood scratched against her legs and she whimpered, dizzy, realizing how much more that wood was about to hurt.

A man in a black hood stepped out of their ranks and stood beside Rat. "Today," he screamed into the crowd, "we rid ourselves of a threat amongst our ranks!" His face was a mess of elation and victory and desperation. The crowd cheered and hollered as Rat tried to force another stupid, useless plea through her gag. "Today, we destroy a symbol of our oppression! Today, we strike a blow against the tyrants who think themselves above us, who think they can control us with this puppet God!"

The crowd flew into a frenzy. Someone handed the hooded man a torch. He looked Rat in the eyes and she saw reflected in them a wretched creature, responsible for so much pain and agony.

He dropped the torch.

The gag couldn’t stop her scream now as she gnashed her teeth at it in a mindless panic. As the sparks ignited the cloth, it fell from her mouth and she screamed until the interior of her throat was raw and bloody as the flames crawled up her.

The crowd close enough to watch grew concerned and then distressed. The facade should have dropped. Why would a God, sent to torment them, remain in such a frail body? Why did this evil sound so much like a burning child?

They fled. To escape her childlike screams, to celebrate their victory, to revel in their shitty lives remaining largely the same, despite the burning of one unlucky slave girl.

Rat was left alone on the pyre. Her hair and clothes turned to ash as her skin began to burn. The thinner, weaker tissues, her eyelids, ears, lips, were the first to begin blackening as she tried to save herself. She pulled against her bonds, the strength of years of slavery summoned in one, frantic jerk. Her wrist broke but so did the singed leather ropes that held her hands. She scrambled out of the fire, rolling in the dust and grime of the ground around her. A web of burns laced across her skin, landing on each possible nerve ending. Though the flames had partially blinded her, she could still hear the celebrations of her death. She curled in a ball, clutching her knees, tears steaming off her hot skin as the flames on her pyre grew dimmer and dimmer, fading into embers.

It took a few minutes for her to register the growing light again. Were they coming back for her? But no, some scattered wood and straw, left over from the pyre construction had sparked alive. Her eyes followed the fledgling fire’s natural path, a scrap of clothing, a scarf, some kindling, all the way up to a nearby tent. Her palms ached as she pulled herself over to the tent, racing the spreading flickers.

Inside the tent she heard snoring and mumbling, mumbling in a voice forever seared to her mind and body. A voice that, just hours ago, shouted of freedom from oppression. The voice of a man more willing to incite a riot against a stupid, cursed girl than their actual enslavers. A chill ran up her body, from her toes to her skull, freezing her, heart racing, for a single moment.

In that instant, the tent ignited. The man had no chance as the burning canvas fell on him. The fire spread to the next one in line, then the next, then the next, a whole row of tents burning, the flaming inferno too wild to be contained to merely the clothen housing. It leapt to the next row and the next. To the huts and sheds, to the wooden fences and gates. A minute after Rat had recognized the man’s voice, the entire compound was on fire. The only buildings spared were those significantly far from every other structure: the latrines, a well, and Rat’s own hovel.

The heat from the burning tent barely tickled her damaged nerves, but she knew that inside once lived the man who burned her, and for one flickering moment, she felt a dark and twisted joy overtake her.

Only then, over the sound of the fire roaring, did she finally start hearing the screams.