The Crossing

POV Red

The processing facility smells like cheap soap and something rotting underneath that won't wash away. A man at a folding table never looks up from his book as he takes my life away piece by piece: my watch, my earrings, the twenty-three dollars in my wallet, and the wallet itself.

"Next," he says, like I'm already gone.

A woman in a grey uniform cuts the laces from my shoes. They fall into a bin with a thousand other strings. I stand there staring at my feet, wondering how I'll keep them on when I walk.

"Move along," she says. "You're not the first and you won't be the last."

The room is a dim cave of misery. Some women are crying. Others have gone somewhere behind their eyes where no one can follow. I don't cry. I'm building a wall inside me, and if it breaks now, I know I'll never put it back together.

A guard barks numbers instead of names.

I'm 1847.

We're loaded into transport wagons before dawn. The city I've known for three years flashes past the wooden slats in pieces: a familiar corner, a streetlight, the smell of diesel and salt. The ship waiting at the docks is bigger and darker than I imagined, a giant shadow against the grey wharf.

Below deck, the air is thick and stale. Hammocks line the walls like cocoons, with just a narrow aisle between them. A single window near the ceiling shows a tiny slice of morning. As the engines start up, a woman nearby begins praying in a language I don't recognize.

I find a spot and sit, watching the chaos settle down.

That's when I see her.

She takes the space across from me like she owns it. She's in her mid-twenties, dark-haired, with a face so alive it doesn't belong in this grey hell. She doesn't look away when our eyes meet.

"Como te llamas," she says.

"Rosemary," I answer. "Rosemary Jensen."

She tastes my name like it's something foreign, her tongue stumbling over the r. Then she looks at my hair. In the dim light from the window, the red strands glow like embers.

She points. "Roja. I call you Red. Si?"

"Sure," I say. "Yeah. Okay."

"Nadia," she says, tapping her chest. "Nadia Ferrer."

She doesn't offer her hand. There's no room for that here. Her eyes scan me from head to toe, figuring out what I'm worth and where I'm weak. Apparently, I pass. She leans back against the hull, her English heavy with Spanish.

"You're new to this," she says.

"Is it that obvious?"

"You look like you're waiting for someone to fix it." She taps the corner of her eye. "Esa mirada. That look. It goes. Usually by the second week, it's gone."

"It won't go," I say.

She looks at me like I'm a child who believes in Santa Claus. "That's what they all say."

I want to argue, but the ship rolls, and the sudden lurch of open water hits my stomach before my brain can catch up. My throat tightens. The dock is gone. Nadia closes her eyes. I sit and listen to the engines, the praying, and the rhythmic slap of waves.

The first day is hell. The second is worse.

The hold becomes an oven. The air sticks to my skin like wet wool. Water comes twice a day in a bucket we all share. Bread comes once, thrown by a guard who treats us like animals. Nadia becomes my translator for the things no one says out loud. She hears the threats in the guards' French, the danger in their casual talk.

"That one," she whispers, nodding toward a guard named Leconte who lingers by the stairs, "he smells fear." She glances at me. "No seas tonta. Don't be stupid."

"I'm not afraid," I say, though my heart is pounding.

She looks at me, really looks at me, for the first time. "I know. That's why I'm talking to you."

Over the next few hours, I learn about my new world. Nadia's from Valencia, convicted fourteen months ago on charges she won't name. She talks about the penal colony like a doctor describing a disease.

"There's a Commandant," she says. "He's a ghost. The Lieutenants are his shadows. And then there are the guards."

"What about the guards?"

"The guards." Her voice drops to something low and dangerous. "They can do almost anything. And there's almost nothing anyone can do about it. Better you know this now."

"And the Commandant?" I ask. "Does he know what they do?"

Nadia's mouth curves into something that's not a smile. "He knows everything that happens on that island. Everything."

"Then why doesn't he stop it?"

"Because stopping it would mean he cares. And men like that stopped paying for caring a long time ago."

I think of Leconte's hungry eyes. My chest feels tight.

"Whatever you do," Nadia adds, "don't let them see you cry. Don't let them see you're afraid. Afraid means available."

The horror comes on the third night.

I'm awake, watching the stars through the grate, when footsteps echo on the iron stairs. Two guards, not Leconte, move through the dark without lights. They know where they're going. They stop three berths down, at the small, grey-streaked woman who's been praying since we left the dock.

A low command in French. A muffled "no." The woman pulls her threadbare blanket tight.

I'm sitting up before I can think. Nadia's hand clamps onto my wrist, her fingers like iron. Her eyes are wide, urgent. She shakes her head once.

No.

I know she's right. The knowledge burns like acid.

The first guard hauls the woman out by her arm. She clings to the frame, her "no" rising into something raw and desperate.

"Please," she says, in accented English, like someone in the hold might help. "Please, I have done nothing. Please."

He answers by grabbing the front of her dress with both fists and ripping it open. The fabric tears like a whipcrack, buttons scattering across the iron floor. She stands exposed, arms flying up to cover herself. He shoves her arms aside.

The second guard moves behind her. His hand drives down beneath what's left of her clothing, tearing through it, and she lurches forward with a sound that doesn't belong to any language I know. She claws at the first man's face, raking four deep lines down his cheek that well up with blood.

She screams. It's a raw, jagged sound that tears through the hold and doesn't stop.

I'm half off the berth when Nadia's other hand slams against my chest, shoving me back. Her face is inches from mine.

"No," she breathes. It's the most violent word I've ever heard.

"Nadia." My voice comes out cracked and barely human.

"No," she says again. "You can't help her. You'll only join her."

"There are forty of us," I say.

"And they have guns. And tomorrow there will be more of them and still forty of us, and you'll be the one who started it." Her grip on my wrist tightens. "No."

The woman wrenches sideways, still fighting, and brings her open hand hard across the first man's face. The slap is clean, loud, and final. For one heartbeat, the hold holds its breath.

She stands in the aisle, dress hanging in ruins, chest heaving, blood from his cheek bright on her knuckles, hand still raised in defiance.

What he does next takes less than three seconds.

His fist connects with her jaw and her head snaps sideways. She staggers. The second blow catches her across the temple and she goes down hard, her skull meeting the iron floor with a sound I'll hear for the rest of my life.

She doesn't move again.

He stands over her, breathing through his nose, pressing two fingers against the lines she opened on his cheek. He looks at the blood on his fingertips with something closer to irritation than rage. He says something to his comrade.

They drag her by the ankles toward the stairs, her ruined dress bunching beneath her, her head lolling, leaving a thin smear across the iron floor. The second guard picks up her legs to clear the first step.

Then they're gone.

The hatch closes.

The hold is a tomb of forty women refusing to breathe.

Nadia pulls me back into the shadows of my berth and holds me there. I let her. My blood has turned to ice. My hands are shaking and I press them flat against my thighs but it doesn't help.

"Respira," Nadia whispers. "Breathe, Red."

I try. The air tastes of iron.

In that silence, I understand the fundamental truth of the Ile de Couverture. We're not people. We're cargo. Numbered, laceless cargo. And cargo that malfunctions gets discarded.

"She fought back," I say.

"Yes."

"And it didn't matter."

Nadia is quiet for a long moment. "It mattered to her," she finally says. "But it didn't save her."

By morning, the woman is gone. In her place is a dark stain soaked into the grooves of the iron floor, and beside it, three small buttons from her dress that no one has collected. The thin smear from her head leads to the base of the stairs and stops