Bound by the Tyrant

Wren Aris

An odd sound pulled me from the dark depths of nothingness. The high, metallic scream grated against a deeper, stuttering hiss. It was the noise of something dying, now shrieking inside my head, and it was the only thing blooming within my universe of understanding.

I gasped, and it was like swallowing knives of ice. My lungs seized, a painful, tearing spasm that left me choking on air colder than any I had ever known. My body was a block of it, a solid, immovable weight. I tried to lift a hand, to flex a finger, and nothing responded. The command dissolved in the space between my mind and my flesh.

Panic, thin and sharp, tried to rise, but it was too cold to gain purchase. It froze halfway up my throat.

There was no memory swimming in my thoughts. Not a name. Not a face. Not a place. The space where a life had resided was a hollow, echoing void. I was a consciousness adrift in a frozen shell, defined only by the shriek of failing equipment and a profound, cavernous ache.

Innate pain was the only thing that felt like it belonged to me. It was a loss so complete, so absolute, that it had a physical presence. It sat in the center of my chest, a cold, heavy stone where a heart should be beating.

Something was gone. Someone. The shape of their absence was the only thing I had.

I tried to picture a face to go with the pain, but the canvas of my mind was blank. I tried to hear a voice, a name, but there was only the groan of metal and the ragged sound of my own breathing. Each puff of air I drew became a white cloud in the tight, dark space.

My eyelids sat open. I didn’t remember opening them. They stared, unblinking, at a curved surface inches from my face. It was white, the kind of sterile, functional white that belongs in a place where people are not people.

A faint light flickered, casting long, dancing shadows that made the space feel like it was breathing. I blinked, and the motion was slow, syrupy. My lids felt like they were scraping across my eyes.

Slowly, painfully, the surface swam into focus. There were letters. Black, stenciled, impersonal. They were slightly distorted by the curve of the wall, the words marching in a neat, clinical line.

CONSIGNMENT 734-A

The word meant nothing. A number. A designation. I traced the shape of the letters with my eyes, my mind too sluggish to process them as anything more than symbols. My gaze drifted lower, to the next line.

FERTILITY GRADE: PRIME

A jolt, not of electricity, but of ice-cold comprehension, shot through me. It was the first warmth I’d felt, a sickening, internal heat that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with violation. The words were a clinical assessment of my biology, stripped of any humanity.

Prime. Like a piece of meat at market. The ache in my chest sharpened, the sense of loss now tangled with a rising, chilling horror.

Who had written that? Who looked at me, at my body, and reduced me to a grade?

My eyes found the last line, though I didn’t want to look. I had to. I had to know the full shape of the confinement I had woken to find.

BUYER LOT: 9

Buyer. Lot. Seriously? What the fuck?

The basic words slammed into me, one after the other. A fist to the gut, a boot to the ribs. They were the key that unlocked the meaning of the others.

Consignment. Grade. Inventory.

I wasn’t a person. I was a product. Packaged, labeled, and sold. The hollow space in my mind where my identity should have been was now filled with their definition of me. I was property.

A surge of something hot and raw tore through the ice in my veins. It was rage. Pure, undiluted, and utterly defiant. It was a volcanic eruption in the frozen landscape of my being. It thawed my muscles, sent fire stinging through my limbs, and gave me a purpose. Before I had a name, before I had a past, I had this: a burning, cellular refusal. No.

Not just no… Fuck, no!

The rage gave me strength. I pushed with my hands against the curved wall in front of me. My palms were slick with condensation, the metal biting cold. My muscles screamed, weak and atrophied, but the fire inside me was stronger. I grunted, the sound raw in the enclosed space.

Nothing happened.

I tried again, planting my feet against the opposite wall. My legs trembled with the effort, the muscles bunching and protesting. I put my shoulder into it, using my entire body as a ram. The door, or whatever the hell it was, groaned. A thin crack of darkness appeared along the seam, and with it, a new smell. Damp earth, rotting vegetation, and something else, something alien and sharp.

The smell of a world that wasn’t this white, sterile coffin.

I shoved again, a guttural cry tearing from my throat. The hinges screamed in protest. The crack widened. A thick, humid air pushed its way in, offering a stark contrast to the refrigerated chill of the pod. A cryo-pod. I was inside a pod. A pod someone had put me in—someone I didn’t remember.

I twisted my body, wedging my shoulder into the opening and pushed with every ounce of strength the rage gave me. Metal shrieked against metal, and then, with a final, shuddering pop, the seal broke.

The door swung open, and I tumbled out, landing hard on my hands and knees. The ground was soft, spongy, covered in a mat of damp leaves and slick moss. The air was a heavy, wet blanket that clung to my skin and filled my lungs. It was hot and steaming. I was shivering violently. The transition from the cryo-pod’s deep freeze to the jungle’s oppressive heat was a shock to my system.

I pushed myself up, my limbs shaking uncontrollably. A mixture of condensation and sweat soaked through the thin, gray jumpsuit covering my body. I stood in a small clearing, surrounded by colossal trees with bark like wrinkled gray stone. Their canopy was so dense that it blotted out the sky, leaving the world below in a state of deep, green twilight. Light struggled through in dusty, slanted beams, illuminating clouds of tiny, iridescent insects that danced in the still air.

Wreckage was everywhere. Twisted plates of metal hull, some as large as a shuttle, were half-buried in the mud. Splayed wires sparked feebly, their sizzle a counterpoint to the thrumming chorus of the jungle. And there were other pods. Dozens of them, identical to mine, scattered across the clearing. Some were shattered, their doors ripped from their frames. Others were half-submerged in pools of dark, stagnant water. They looked like seeds thrown from a careless hand, left to rot in the fertile ground.

My rage cooled, replaced by a vast, chilling dread. Each pod was a container. Each one held, or had held, a person. A piece of inventory. I took a stumbling step toward the nearest one, my bare feet sinking into the soft earth. The door was gone, and the inside was empty. A cold, dark space that echoed the void in my own head.

A sound cut through the insect hum. A muffled cry, followed by a frantic, rhythmic banging. It was metal on metal. It came from my left, further into the debris field.

Someone else was alive.

The thought propelled me forward. I scrambled over a buckled sheet of metal, my hands slipping on the slick surface. I moved through the wreckage, my eyes scanning the scattered pods. The banging grew louder, more desperate. Just over a sheet of metal, next to a large tree root, a pod canted at a sharp angle, its base buried in the soft ground. The door was dented inward, jammed tight in its frame. Through the small, frosted viewport, I could see a smear of movement. A face, pale and terrified. A woman.

I reached the pod, my breath coming in ragged bursts. “Hello?” I called out, my voice a raw croak. I pressed my face close to the viewport, but the condensation was too thick to see clearly.

The banging stopped. A voice, thin and muffled, came from inside. “Help me! Please, I can’t… It’s stuck.” A sob broke loose from deep inside her chest. “Don’t leave me!”

“I’m here,” I said, my hand flat against the cold metal of the door. “I’ll get you out.”

I searched for a handle, a release lever, anything. There was nothing, only a smooth, seamless surface. The locking mechanism must have been internal, or powered. And the power was clearly gone.

“You have to push,” I yelled, my voice echoing slightly in the humid air. “From the inside. Push when I pull.”

“I’m trying!” She cried, her voice cracking with panic.

The banging started again, a frantic, desperate rhythm.

I found a handhold on the warped edge of the doorframe where it had been bent by the impact. I dug my fingers in, the sharp metal biting into my skin.

“Now!” I shouted. “Push now!”

I pulled, leaning back with all my weight. My feet slid in the mud, and for a moment, nothing happened.

Inside, I heard her give a desperate cry of effort. The door groaned. A millimeter of movement.

“Again!” I yelled, repositioning my feet for better leverage. “Together!”

I pulled. She shoved. The metal shrieked, a high, piercing sound that set my teeth on edge. The gap widened to an inch. I could see her fingers, white-knuckled, jammed into the space.

“Don’t stop!” I gasped, the muscles in my back and shoulders burning. We fell into a rhythm. A grunt of effort from inside, a gasp from me outside.

Pull. Shove. The shriek of tortured metal. The gap widened. An inch. Two inches. Enough.

The door finally gave way with a sudden, violent lurch. I stumbled backward, landing hard in the mud. A woman tumbled out after me, collapsing in a heap. She was gasping for air, her body wracked with shivers even more violent than my own. She had dark hair plastered to her forehead and wide, terrified eyes. She wore the same thin, gray jumpsuit.

She pushed herself up, crawling a few feet away from the pod as if it might snatch her back. Her eyes darted around the clearing, taking in the wreckage, the impossibly large trees, the other silent pods. Her gaze was wild, uncomprehending. She looked at me, her eyes filled with a thousand questions, but the one that broke through was the most basic.

“What is this place?” She whispered, her voice trembling. She hugged her arms around herself, trying to ward off a chill that wasn’t there. “Where are we?”

I pushed myself to my feet, my own body aching and raw. I looked from her terrified face to the stenciled label on my own open pod, the black letters a stark, brutal truth in the green twilight. The rage was still there, a low, steady burn beneath the fear and the confusion. It was the only thing that felt solid.

“I don’t know,” I said, the words tasting like grit in my mouth. My gaze swept over the scattered pods, the silent tombs of women who were graded and sold. “But I know what they think we are.”

“What?”

I met her eyes, letting her see the cold fire in mine. “Cargo.”