Verdant Ink 🏳️‍🌈 (wlw)

12: The Daughter

Pelin itched at her shaven head, her sudden movement stirring the bored Shiva patrol officer into action beside her.

The patroller waved her pulser in the air with a waggle of her thick eyebrows, a reminder for Pelin not to try anything. Across the lab, a high-collared lab assistant busied herself snipping Pelin's shorn lengths of hair with fine scissors and tipping the pieces into a huge round-bottomed flask lined with boiling chips.

Midori lay curled on a stretcher in the far corner of the lab, another Shiva patrol officer's pulser pointed at her face. A third patroller sat alongside Midori's stretcher, tossing a pulser from hand to hand.

Pelin didn't understand why frail and sickly Midori had two patrollers guarding her. Why did the Alliance fear her potential escape more than they did Pelin's? Pelin had chloros in her blood, yet it still seemed to be all about Midori.

Pelin cursed it all. Attempting to send Midori away on the freighter had pushed her deeper into peril, and had focussed the Alliance's efforts. Despite having rendered her non-viable, the Alliance were still bent on chasing Midori to the ends of the Universe.

A shrill buzz cut the air of the room as a lab assistant approached Midori with a set of hair-clippers. Midori began to struggle, the two patrollers gripping her arms. Pelin winced as the lab assistant put the blades to Midori's forehead and shaved a clean stripe straight through her centre-parting. Beautiful black tresses fluttered to the ground as she manoeuvred Midori's head back and forth to gain access, until every last perfect strand had fallen to the lab floor.

Silent tears flowing, Pelin's hand itched for her knife in her boot.

The thick-eyebrowed patroller approached closer. "You'll be pleased to hear that General-four got her eye back. And as for this," she held aloft a lump of brown wood, "I think we'll sell this in the Markets. Looks like Earth-wood."

In the chaos of their retrieval by the Alliance warship, the hairbrush's green buds had been snapped off, leaving black rotten knots. Most of the brush-pins had been lost. The patroller picked at the last withered bud on the ash handle. It came away from the wood like peeled skin. She inspected it with distaste and flicked it onto the floor.

"I'm sorry, Yildiz," Pelin whispered under her breath. She asked herself what Midori would do. Then, she let out a poorly-suppressed snort. "Sell it. See what you get."

A wave of irritation passed over the patroller's face. She eyed the broken hairbrush with suspicion before tossing it across the lab floor. Its skidding journey was halted by Midori's stretcher, the final brush-pins popping off and skittering away into crevices in the floor's steel sheeting.

The patroller slumped back onto her chair and, like her colleagues sitting opposite her, she too began the idle game of tossing her pulser from palm to palm.

Midori lay weeping and clutching at her shaven head while the lab assistant swept the black locks into a bag.

The chief patroller motioned to her colleagues. "Take her to the cells."

"No!" Pelin rose up from the floor. "She's sick! She needs me!"

The three patrollers locked their pulsers onto Pelin in unison, their fingers twitching as she very slowly resumed her prone position on the floor.

"Commander's orders. Outlaws are kept in the cells."

Outlaws. The escapees from Earth who couldn't afford to colonise on Alliance-terraformed planetoids. Even in outer space, the Bottom Billion were kept at the bottom.

"She's not an Outlaw! She's an Alliance navigator!"

"She lied to you, Madame General-thirteen," the patroller spat. "I bet you loved that she was a Verdant National. Did it give you a thrill to touch her? Is that how she got you to commit treason for her?"