of them letters and phrases—so many that Rasc didn’t know whether to look at him or try to read him. He even had a few of them on his face, including three words written in bold letters across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose—fuck my life.
It was a sentiment Rasc could get behind.
“Yes, I wanted to see you. My name is Rasc Centarlo, and I’m here to—”
“I know who you are and why you’re here. I got the word from Rhaegar. What I don’t know is what the fuck it has to do with me.”
“All right, you don’t like small talk. I can work with that. I’m here to make you a deal.”
Pax shifted his eyes toward Rasc suspiciously. “What kind of deal? What do you have that I could possibly want?”
“How about a way out of here?”
He actually turned his head this time. “To do what? I’ve got nowhere left to go.”
“Rhaegar Barbosa will take you back. You can live on his planet—maybe even have your own ship again.”
Pax made a rude noise. “My own ship? Not as a fugitive. No man would want to serve with me, and we’d be hunted all over the galaxies.”
“Not if you received a full pardon from King Davos.”
Now Rasc got the full power of the pirate’s dark gaze. After a short, tense silence, he gave Rasc a suspicious glare. “Just how do the likes of you know Davos? Or Rhaegar for that matter?”
“I don’t. But I know people who do. People who can work out a deal.”
“People like who?”
“Like Davos’s son, Prince Larz of Laltana.”
Another tense, drawn out silence and then he spoke so softly, Rasc had to strain to hear.
“I didn’t leave on the best of terms with Rhaegar.”
“It doesn’t matter. He’s already said you could come back.” In actual fact, he hadn’t, but Rasc felt sure that Larz and the brother who’d married the man could talk him into it. It was a small lie, but he really thought he could make it work. Mostly because he had to.
“How do you plan to arrange an escape from this place?”
“Leave that to me. I don’t actually have a plan yet, but all I can tell you is that it will happen. And the Tygerians will help make it happen.”
That seemed to get his attention, and he whipped his head around to stare at Rasc. “This got anything to do with them two Tygerian boys over on the island?”
“It has everything to do with the Tygerians. But what island are you talking about? I haven’t been able to find them here at the prison.”
He glanced around at the guards and then whispered the name. “That’s because they’re not here. They’re on the island. Zargoff.”
“Zargoff? But there’s nothing out there except jungle.”
“The commandant of this penal colony built his home there. Overlooking the sea. He keeps a small facility there for the ones he terms ‘incorrigible.’”
“Incorrigible? And the missing boys are over there?”
“Yeah, they’re over there. Says so on the board.”
Rasc gave him a blank look. “Board?”
“The board the guards use to keep up with us. Another way the Gatifreyan guards keep control. They like that we section ourselves off into gangs. Haven’t you noticed they never try to break it up? It allows us to be better “managed” with special attention to our uh…affiliations. Once they identify us, they put us in cells together or in the same areas to keep down the fights. Like those damn ‘designations’ they like so much. Slavers in one group, Lycans and Leerians in another, pirates like me and slavers like your bunch. They give us colors to code us and hang the code badges up on the board to show where we are at any given time.”
He glanced over at Rasc and then back by the door, where there was indeed a board hanging on a wall near the guards. It had small colored cards on it, each card hanging on a hook.
“You slavers are red. My boys are black, and so on. That way, they can put you with groups they know won’t fight too much. Then the guards can modulate our location, our freedom, and our level of surveillance. The Tygerians you’re looking for are coded orange. That means they’re on Zargoff.”
“Why is that? Because they’re Tygerian?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “It has to do with what they did to get put in here or what they’ve done since they’ve been here.”
“What did they do?” God, it was like pulling