After

Nolikka Toin was running, and then she wasn't.

The bit in between never did come clear.

A lot of the rest came back. Slowly, but it came back.

One morning she woke from a dream about swimming with a million fish turning and diving in perfect concert, and found the memory, clear and hard as a pearl in the palm of her hand, of Haraila swearing like a dockhand as the calm voice of the newscaster talked about Noir, about Malkalen, about war.

That was the first time she had anything in between brushing her teeth at the basin, shrip-flavoured toothpaste sharp on her tongue, and the crushing pain as  they showed her how the collar worked.

She'd been told about the war, of course. It was why she was there, the pallet thin between her spine and the concrete floor every night, scooping the scant mouthful of sour casein meal from the bowl they dropped in front of her every morning, shuffling with the others to the laboratory.

Remembering it didn't make it feel any more real, even if now it was something she'd heard on the news rather than something someone had told her. War. Ships firing on each other and exploding in the deep dark of space.

Insane.

But here she was.

Haraila swearing and the recall order and the noise breaking out all around them in the corridors as they ran for the ship, voices raised, Gallente accents ...

Running.

And then not.

Lying in the dark with a headache making spots of light pulse and dance behind her eyes. A man saying Lie still. They hit you. Do you remember?

Not that she could tell it was dark, of course, except she could. She'd always been able to, although neither she nor the doctors could ever explain.

The man - Oinola, he said his name was, a doctor - thought it was the blow to the head. Nol was too dizzy and sick to correct him.

He swore at their guards ... their wardens. Called them war-criminals, told them You've blinded this girl.

She heard the dull slap of the shot and the heavier thud as he fell.

No-one else spoke.

Useless, one of them called her, and Nol felt the gun come up. A surge of terror got words past the thickness of her tongue.

Her name.

Her rank.

Her speciality.

Not, most definitely not, useless.

The gun went down.


The guards put the collars on them, after that. And showed them all what the collars could do.


Time passed, measured by bowls of gruel, by cold nights, by loosening clothes and stinging sores. In the laboratory, though, time didn't pass. In the laboratory Nol could disappear into the equations and the harmonics as she always had, could slip away from the guards and the cowed whispers of the others who, like her, had not been quite fast enough to reach their ships before the captains blew the docking clamps and lit out for safer space.

She tried, when she could, to bend things just a little, just enough so there would be some small, fatal problem down the line.  It was hard, though. She wasn't always Caldari first and scientist second.

There had been a time when those two things were a perfect complement.

Before she had been running, and then not.

Not after.