Meditation always helped Reva to calm herself and focus on the problem at hand. She sat cross-legged on the cold metal floor with her hands folded palm-up in her lap. By shutting out everything around her and focusing on her breath, she was able to fight back against the panic and find a place of peace in her mind to serve as an anchor. Time became fluid and mutative, but it didn’t seem like long before her mind was clear and the confusion was gone.

A wave of revulsion passed through her as she remembered how the man in white had touched her. Back home, such an obscene act would have been unthinkable. A whole host of taboos and social mores governed how people could and couldn’t touch each other in public, and in the space of just a few seconds, that man had violated almost all of them. But the thing that disturbed her most was the total lack of shame with which he’d done it. To him, she might as well have been a robot. He’d shown absolutely no regard for her as a human being, and that scared her most of all.

It was clear to her now that the people in the hallway hadn’t been staring at her tattoos, but at her uncovered body. It wasn’t normal in this culture to go bare, and that meant that these people had all sorts of perverse notions of what going bare actually meant. None of them had touched her, but all of them had wanted to. They had all groped her with their eyes. The realization sickened her almost as much as if they had touched her.

She had to escape—that was abundantly clear. But how?

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As thoughts like this raced through her mind, heavy footsteps sounded outside on the grated floor. A man entered her cell, this one different from all the others. He was tall and balding, with sunken eyes and a hooked nose. The fabric of his second skin was crisp and white, and his expression was cold and impassive, his mouth downturned in a frown that seemed like a permanent fixture.

The strong men stood by the hatch, clearly deferring to him as some sort of leader or administrator. He ducked through the hatchway as he entered, but once he was in, he regarded her coolly with eyes that seemed to penetrate right through her.

“Hello?” she said, struggling to sound confident. “My name is Reva. Who are you, and what do you want with me?”

He said nothing, but walked around her, taking in everything from her toes to the top of her head. At first, she thought he was admiring her tattoos, but from the glint in his eyes she wasn’t quite so sure.

“I asked, what do you want with me? Why are you treating me like this?”

He spoke a single word, calling for silence. Even though she didn’t understand the language he spoke in, the meaning was clear from his tone. She took a deep breath and stood awkwardly as he finished circling her.

Without warning, he reached out and pinched her breast. She gasped in surprise and knocked his hand away.

“Hey! What the hell are you—”

Stars flashed across her vision as he slapped her cheek with the back of his hand. The force of the blow nearly sent her to the floor, and the pain stretched across the whole side of her face. She rubbed her cheek as her shock turned to fear.

The man reached out and felt her again. She tensed and tried weakly to push him away, but he took her firmly by the wrist, squeezing just hard enough to make it clear that struggling against him was a very bad idea.

Stop! Please, stop!

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Who are these people? Reva wondered as the strong men marched her down the narrow corridor. With her cheek still stinging and the two men gripping both her arms, she felt less like she’d been rescued and more like she’d been taken prisoner.

The corridor opened up to a wider hallway, with portholes on one side. The stars were dim, and Reva saw no sign of any planet or space station. At twenty meter intervals along the wall, three circular emergency chutes took the place of the portholes. From her father’s engineering work, she knew that they led to the escape pods, which meant that she was on a starship. But judging from the length of the hallway, the ship must be huge—almost the size of Anuva Station, if not larger.

They passed a handful of people along the way, all of them wearing second-skins. Most of them were men, and all of them stopped to stare at her. She thought it was the tattoos at first, but then she noticed that some of them were snickering. What was their problem? Had they never seen tattoos before? Or was it something else?

They entered a cylindrical elevator chamber with grated floors that clawed at her bare feet. The air was much cooler than she was accustomed to, making her shiver. Even in the elevator, the strong men refused to release her.

Where are they taking me?

They marched her into an empty chamber with a desk and a computer terminal. The strong man on her right pulled out a keycard and held it against an access panel next to another set of doors, which opened to reveal a short, narrow corridor. Holding cells for prisoners lined either side. Reva could tell what they were from the heavy deadbolts built into each one. The doors were actually more like hatches, since they sat on hinges and were raised about half a meter above the floor. They each had a small porthole with bars over the front of them. An ozone scent in the air told her that they were electrified.

So I am a prisoner.

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At that moment, two other men entered the room. They were both tall and muscular, much more so than either the doctor or his apprentice. Like the doctor, they also wore second-skins that covered almost their entire bodies. These ones were thicker, though—hard and black like beetle shells. They looked so silly that Reva couldn’t help but laugh. When the men looked at her, though, it was clear they didn’t find it funny.

“Sorry,” she said, covering her mouth. “It’s just, you don’t …”

The strong men ignored her, focusing instead on the doctor. As her voice trailed off, Reva noticed a frown of concern on the doctor’s face. The apprentice stood behind him and glanced from her to the strong men and back. Reva tensed—something was clearly wrong here.

The apprentice took out the covering again and held it out to her, this time all but pleading for her to put it on. For a second, she considered doing it just to set him at ease, but that would mean covering her henna tattoos. She smiled and waved him away as politely as she could, ignoring the almost frantic look of concern on his face.

The strong men finished with the doctor and walked over to her. One of them took her by the arm and pulled her forcibly to her feet.

“Ow!” she said, trying in vain to free herself from his grip. “What are you doing?”

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Who are these people? she wondered. Clearly, the older man was a doctor, which meant that the younger was probably his apprentice. The room itself seemed like a bathroom in a medical facility, though not at all like the one at home. But that was what her father had told her, wasn’t it? That when she awoke, she’d be far away from everything she knew?

“Hello,” she said again. “My name is Reva. Can you understand me?”

From the stupid way the young apprentice smiled at her, it was clear that the answer was “no.” As if to confirm this, the doctor spoke to him in a language she’d never heard before. His words sounded so foreign that she couldn’t make any sense of them.

So I am far from home.

The doctor took her by the arm and gently led her through a tall doorway. They walked down a short corridor to a boxy, windowless room with a screen on one wall and a series of modular compartments in the other. He pulled out a retractable table and motioned for her to sit. As she did, a spiderlike medical bot descended from the ceiling and unfolded its spindly arms. She flinched, but the doctor snapped his fingers and it retreated into the far corner.

The apprentice came in and pulled a piece of folded fabric from one of the wall compartments. He unfolded it and held it out to her, and she saw that it was a body covering like the ones they wore. She shook her head and waved it away, but he held it out insistently.

“No,” she said firmly. “I don’t want it, thank you.”

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