Page 36 of Reaper Said Mine

"It is not bad."

"I am full of wisdom."

"I have seen evidence of impatience and sarcasm."

"Wisdom often wears those clothes."

The next interview comes from a refugee clinic tucked behind an old loading station where the walls have been painted with bright colors that cannot quite hide old burn marks. The clinic smells of antiseptic foam, nutrient broth, clean bandages, and the faint sour odor of fear that lingers wherever people wait to discover whether safety intends to last. I speak with a medic named Yara, a human woman from a failed Badlands colony whose right arm is mechanical from the shoulder down. She moves between cots while we talk, checking vitals, adjusting blankets, and speaking gently to patients who flinch at footsteps.

"How many come through here?" I ask.

"Depends on the week," Yara says. "Thirty if things are quiet. Two hundred if some company relocates a labor site by abandoning everybody not useful enough to transport."

"And Gnash allows open intake?"

Yara gives me a look over her shoulder. "Allows? He built the ledger."

"What ledger?"

"The refugee ledger. Tariff penalties, contraband seizures, auction fines, docking violations, salvage percentages. A cut goes to resettlement, med care, food, and work placement."

"That is public?"

"It is public if you ask somebody who can read station accounts and isn't paid to misunderstand them."

A Reaper woman on a cot nearby opens one eye. Her left side is bandaged from shoulder to hip, and her voice comes out rough. "He came for us."

Yara moves toward her. "Salla, you should rest."

The Reaper woman ignores the instruction. "Helios had us in a labor pit near Vorn's Teeth. Said we owed transport debt. Said our children owed it too. Gnash hit the site with six ships and cut open the barracks himself."

I step closer, keeping my compad lowered. "Do I have permission to record your account?"

Salla’s eye focuses on me. "You will show my face?"

"Only if you consent."

"You will not make me look weak?"

"No."

"Then record."

I do.

Her story does not come smoothly. Pain interrupts her. So does anger. So does the kind of memory that refuses to become neat for a stranger’s convenience. She describes the labor pit, the air so dry it cracked children’s lips, the shock collars, the Company ration blocks that tasted like chalk and old blood, the way everyone stopped believing help would come because help is a story told by people who already have it.

Then she describes Gnash arriving.

"He was laughing," she says, staring at the ceiling as Yara checks her bandage. "Not happy. It was worse than happy. He tore the gate out and laughed while they shot him. The energy bolts hit his hide and burned, and he kept walking. I thought he had come to kill everyone. Then he picked up my son and gave him to a warrior behind him and said, 'This one breathes free now.'"

My hand tightens around the compad.

"What happened to the guards?"

Salla looks at me, and the clinic feels suddenly smaller. "Do you need me to pretend mercy happened?"

"No."