The ship was black with golden sails tied up against the masts. It sat low in the water, heavy and dark, and soldiers stood on deck with their guns. A gangplank led from the dock into the shadow inside. Children walked up it in a slow line. Ezra showed his paper, and a soldier waved him through.
His foot touched the wood. It creaked. Water slapped the dock underneath. The whole ship moved a little, side to side, and he grabbed the rope railing to keep his balance.
The hold was one long room with small windows near the ceiling. Gray light came through in strips. The air was warm and thick, full of bodies and old wood and something salty he didn't recognize. Children sat everywhere—on benches, on the floor, against the walls. He counted forty-seven of them before he stopped.
Guards walked between them. Their boots were loud on the wood. They didn't talk to anyone.
Ezra found a spot by one of the windows and sat down with his back against the wall. He looked out at the water. The dock was getting smaller. The ship was moving. He hadn't noticed at first. The motion was gentle, like being rocked, and he didn't know if he liked it or not.
He watched the water for a while. Gray and flat in some places. Darker in others. Sometimes silver when the sun came through the clouds. It kept going and going, further than he could see, and that was strange. Everything in the Pit had an end. A wall. A door. A dead end. This didn't.
He was still watching when the hold got quiet.
The murmuring stopped. Children turned their heads toward the front. Guards had gathered there, standing in a loose circle, looking down at something on the floor. One of them laughed. It wasn't a nice sound.
Ezra stayed where he was. He watched.
The guards moved apart a little, and he saw her.
A girl, maybe fourteen. Brown skin. Black hair that fell over her face, chains on her wrists. She sat on the floor with her legs crossed, very still. She wasn't looking at the guards. She wasn't looking at anyone. Just sitting there like she'd been sitting there for a long time and could keep sitting there forever.
Then a guard grabbed her chin and forced her face up toward the light.
And Ezra saw her eyes.
They were dark blue, but not just blue. There were other colors in them, violet, pale silver, something that looked like starlight caught inside glass. The colors shifted when she turned her head, as if there was something underneath the surface, something deep and slow, and the blue was just the top layer.
He'd never seen anything like them.
The children around him started moving back. Pressing against the walls. Whispering.
"Zalari."
He'd heard that word before. On the screen. On posters. The moon-touched. The ones the city said were gone. The ones they'd made sure there were none left of.
But here she was.
She didn't react to the whispers. Didn't react to the guard's hand on her face. Didn't react to anything. Just sat there with those strange eyes and that still expression, like none of it touched her.
Ezra didn't move back. He didn't press himself against the wall. He just sat where he was and looked at her.
She turned her head.
Their eyes met.
She looked at him for a second. There wasn't a smile nor a nod. No sign that she felt anything at all about him. Just looked, and then looked away.
The guards closed in around her again. Someone shoved the children back to their places. The hold went back to its low murmur, everyone talking about the girl with the galaxy eyes, the freak, the one who should have died.
Ezra went back to watching the water.
But he kept thinking about her eyes. Not because they were beautiful—he didn't know if they were or not. Because they were strange. Because she was strange. Because he was strange too, with his silver hair and his hollow cheeks and the way people's eyes slid off him like he wasn't there.
He didn't know what that meant. He didn't know if it meant anything.
He just knew he'd remember her face.
The guards lost interest in the girl after a while. One of them kicked her chains to make sure they were tight, another spat near her feet, and then they turned away, their attention drifting to other things. The hold went back to its low murmur, everyone talking about the Zalari freak, the one who should have died, the one with the eyes like something from a nightmare.
Ezra watched them go without meaning to. He'd learned years ago that watching guards was dangerous, that the best way to survive was to make your eyes go soft and your face go blank and let yourself become part of the furniture. But his gaze kept following the soldier who'd grabbed her chin, the one who'd laughed when she didn't flinch. There was something about the way the man moved—a kind of loose-limbed confidence that said he'd never been hit back, not really, not by someone who meant it.
The soldier turned around.
Ezra looked away too late. Their eyes met for just a second, long enough for the soldier's expression to go flat and cold, the way a cat's eyes go flat when it's decided the thing it's looking at is small enough to kill. Then Ezra dropped his gaze to the floor and made his shoulders small and kept his breathing even, the way he'd been doing since he was five years old.
It didn't matter.
He heard the footsteps coming toward him, heavy boots on the wooden floor, and he didn't look up. He could feel the soldier standing over him, could smell the cheap spirits and sweat, could feel the weight of the man's attention pressing down like a hand on the back of his neck.
"You," the soldier said.
Ezra said nothing.
"I said, you." A boot nudged his knee, not hard, just enough to say I'm here and you're not ignoring me.
Ezra raised his head. The soldier was young—younger than Ezra would have expected for someone with that kind of deadness in his eyes, maybe twenty or even less. His face was narrow and pale, with a scar through one eyebrow and the kind of mouth that smiled easily at other people's pain.
"White hair," the soldier said, like he was tasting the words. "Silver, almost. What are you, some noble's mistake they dumped in the pit or did your mother spread her legs for something that wasn't human ? "
Ezra didn't answer. He'd learned that questions like that weren't really questions. They were performances. The soldier didn't want information. He wanted to watch Ezra squirm.
The soldier crouched down, bringing his face close to Ezra's. His breath was sour. "I asked you a question, gutter-rat."
"From the Pit," Ezra said. Quiet. Flat. Giving nothing.
The soldier's smile widened. "Yeah? And what's a Pit-rat doing with hair like that? You born with it, or did you steal it off a corpse?"
Ezra said nothing.
The soldier's hand moved fast—faster than Ezra expected—and grabbed a fistful of his hair, yanking his head back. The pain was sharp and immediate, radiating from his scalp down his neck. He didn't make a sound. He'd learned not to make sounds.
"Maybe I'll take it," the soldier said, still smiling. "Maybe I'll scalp you right here and see if it grows back."
Behind the soldier, the other guards were watching. Some were grinning. Some had already lost interest. The children around Ezra had pressed themselves against the walls, making themselves small, making themselves absent. The girl with the galaxy eyes was looking at him from across the hold, her face unreadable.
The soldier let go of his hair and stood up. For a moment, Ezra thought it was over—that the man had gotten whatever he wanted from the interaction and was moving on. But then the soldier's hand went to his belt and came back with a gun, black and sleek, and he pressed the barrel against Ezra's temple.
Everything else fell away. The hold, the children, the creak of the hull, the slap of water against it—all of it collapsed inward and disappeared. There was only the cold circle of metal against his skin and the finger resting on the trigger, light pressure, patient, the finger of a man who had done this before and found no reason to hurry.
Ezra had learned in the Pit what a gun did to you. It reached across the distance between you and whoever held it and reminded you, very simply, that your life had always been in someone else's hands. The gun just made it impossible to pretend otherwise.
The soldier's boot came down on his thigh, slow and grinding. Ezra didn't move, didn't flinch, didn't make a sound. Sounds told people where to push harder. First lesson, free of charge.
"I asked you a question," the soldier said again, conversational now, like they were old friends. "Where'd a gutter-rat get hair like that?"
Ezra's mouth was dry. His heart was loud in his ears. He could feel the gun against his temple, could feel the slight tremor in the soldier's hand—not fear, just the natural shake of someone who drank too much.
"I don't know," he said. The words came out before he could stop them.
The soldier's eyebrows went up. "That's it? No story?"
Ezra shook his head slightly, as much as he could with the gun pressed there.
The soldier made a sound of disappointment. "Boring. You're boring me, gutter-rat. That's not a good place to be."
Then, somewhere across the hold, a small sound. Not loud. Just the shift of chains, metal scraping against wood, the kind of sound that said someone had moved when they weren't supposed to.
The soldier's head turned.
The girl had shifted in her chains. Not much, just enough to draw attention. She was looking right at the soldier, those strange layered eyes unblinking, her face completely still. She didn't look afraid. She didn't look angry. She just looked at him, patient and steady, like she had all the time in the world.
The soldier stared at her for a moment. Then he smiled, a different smile than before, hungrier. "Well, well," he said. "The freak wants attention."
The gun left Ezra's temple. The soldier holstered it and walked toward her, already gesturing to the other guards. "Look at this one. Chains on a girl who can't be more than fourteen. What'd you do, sweetheart? Kill someone?"
The guards laughed. The soldier crouched in front of her, grabbing her chin the way he had before, forcing her face up toward the light.
Ezra sat there on the floor, his scalp still burning, his heart still pounding. The soldier had forgotten him already. He was just another child, just another body, just another piece of furniture. He let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding and looked across the hold at the girl. She wasn't looking at him anymore—her attention was on the soldier, patient and still—but he knew. He knew she'd made that sound on purpose. She'd pulled the soldier's attention away from him.
He didn't know why. He didn't know what it meant. He just knew that she'd done it, and that he was still breathing because of her.