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To serve as a staging ground for war.

2

LOLA

Please come. Please.

I run my hand over the cold marble floor, wishing I could teleport, wishing I could escape my body, wishing I could escape what was coming for us. Every one of us abandoned servants is going to die. Everyone still left on this damned planet will be ripped to shreds by Scorp claws.

I’ve dreamed of a noble Aurelian triad every night in the year I’ve toiled as an indentured servant for a merchant baron. It’s the only thing that keeps me sane. I’ve got nine more years ahead of me. I just turned twenty, and everyone says I look young, but I won’t for long. By the end of a ten-year contract, my hands will be wrinkled from long days scrubbing, my body wiry and lean…

But every night, I’ve been planning my escape.

We’re one planet over from Elsinor. There are two ships in Baron Paulus’ shipyard that can get me there, and from there, I can go to Colossus. When the other servants are asleep in our quarters, I hide under the blankets, and take out the smartwatch my father gave to me off his own wrist, the last possession he had.

Then I read on the holographic display of the watch. I read ship’s manuals and coordinates. I ran simulations, learning to fly. I’ve never done it before, and I’ll have one chance to escape…

Had one chance. It’s all gone now. All gone. No use thinking about it.

They say triads of Aurelians are brutal and dominant. That they treat their harem women like toys. I’ve seen the pure white marble streets of their homeworld, the buildings flowing together in magnificent architecture, even the most humble restaurant or shop a work of art. Aurelians are beautiful. Noble. Honorable. And they live to protect. It is my dream to start a career there. Just to be in that magnificent planet, where everything is beautiful and clean, where there are no Scorp, where the strength of the Empire protects you. Maybe I’d find a triad there, but I wouldn’t be their little toy. It would be a tragic love, as they stayed young and strong and I aged, but I know human men. A tragic love would be better than being with controlling, lecherous brutes like Paulus.

My mother always spoke well of Aurelians. She sensed that the universe was growing dangerous, and she told me that if things devolved into chaos, I should go there. I loved those private talks we had, where she gave me advice as an equal, just wanting the best for me.

I wish I had listened.

You don’t have to join a harem if you get to Colossus. That’s just a hateful rumor, spread by foolish men who have some national pride in Trebulous, who think we were right to become Independent, who until just two days ago would have slapped you if you badmouthed their King and Queen.

I know what the other servants think of me, but this is no naïve girl’s dream. It is they who were naïve. Now the Royal Family, the King, the Queen, the princesses, are gone. The three most powerful families who owned ninety percent of the planet are gone. The rich are gone.

Everyone with a ship is gone.

I count my heartbeats.One. Two. Three.

When it gets to twelve, the sirens blare out again. They wail out, uselessly. Every person on this planet has been alerted. Now, it’s just a reminder that we’re all dead.

Thirty heartbeats, and Toa has swept her way across the room. Another thirty, and she’ll be back to the far wall of Paulus’ grand hall, where he used to sit at the throne that is now inhabited by Jess, another servant who would have been whipped if she was caught there. Jess is splayed out like a queen, impertinent on the guilded throne.

There’s no one to whip us.

I want to scream, cry, yell, sob like some of the other servants, but it’s useless. I keep quiet instead, just like I did for my first year of service, stealing rations and stockpiling them. It would have been a long journey to Colossus, and I needed to prepare. Dense, high-calorie bars that the guards chewed at night were my choice. I’d pilfer them, just enough not to be noticed, and hide them in a sack in a hole in the wall of his estate. My smartwatch went there, too, once I had trained myself over and over, until I knew that I could pilot a ship with my eyes closed.

I liked the other servants, well, most of them, and if they gossiped behind my back or heard rumors of my father’s fall from grace, they didn’t say them to my face. Most of them had month or year-long contracts, and they couldn’t relate to a decade-long servant like me, except for Rachel, who was on the final year of hers before we got word of the Scorp attack. She’s smart, that one, but I’m not sure anyone else sees it except me. She’s got a look on her face like she’s two steps ahead of everyone else, and she keeps to herself as well, doing her time.

Ten years of indentured service. That was my fate, because my father trusted Paulus. I had beauty. Beauty enough my father would tell me how I could be wed to a local Lord, or a prominent businessman. He wasn’t greedy. He just wanted a good life for me. A good future.

He owned a refinery. It made us a good living, and we had servants and a happy home, until my mom got sick, sick from something not even the most expensive doctors on the planet could fix. She was so beautiful. So beautiful, even as she wasted away, telling my father not to waste any more money on her, as he sold everything, his refinery, the jewelry, all the fine dresses and gifts he gave to her over their marriage. He gave up everything. She died in a cotton robe.

Then Paulus came to our empty house, in a fancy ship, surrounded by guards and men, and offered my father a deal. A deal to hire him to open another refinery with his years of experience, one that he would own equity in. It was foolproof. He had one last chance to give me a future, and he took it.

I was the only collateral he could put up. A formality. He asked me to agree. I did.

Paulus betrayed us. The refinery was bought cheap, the machines that looked so powerful on their last legs, and my father didn’t see it, because he was blinded by the thought of gaining back his fortune and giving me the life he said I deserved.

When it went bankrupt, I was shipped off to Paulus’ estate.

My first day, one of the other servant women, Summer, took me aside. She had sharp, intelligent eyes, and she looked me up and down, and warned me to stay away from Paulus, as much as I could. That the disgusting old man got a servant girl pregnant, and she disappeared. The official report was that she ran away in her sixth year of service. It made no sense—she was almost done with her eight-year contract. I pray that he made some arrangement to set her up in a town with the baby, but I sometimes got the crawling feeling that Paulus didn’t like loose ends.

Every day of the last year serving, Paulus would stare at me. I knew the lecherous old man thought about me while he lay with his wife, just like the guards stared holes through my white servant’s robe whenever I walked past them.