A twelve-hour train ride separated Patience Dobson from serving the six consecutive life sentences that awaited her at Stillwater Mining Colony. Stillwater prison was rumored to be impenetrable, unescapable, so utterly hostile, no inmate had ever finished their sentence alive. Dobson wagered no inmate had ever finished their sentence dead, either, but those were the sort of details the rumor mill never clarified. Built at the center of a desolate planetary satellite, in a solar system too remote to warrant a proper name, life at Stillwater was the death penalty with extra steps.

  Certain death may have bothered the six other inmates shackled aboard the prison transportation train, but not Dobson. She was used to being told what she could do and, by extension, what she could not. And then she would often do it anyway. Simply for the spite of it. This sort of can-do attitude was partly to blame for the six life sentences stacked against her. Dobson blamed the multiple murder convictions personally.

  That, and Gritstone.

  Dobson bristled at the name. The mere mention of her former employer sent dark thoughts rippling across her mind. Gritting her teeth, she took a calming breath, reminding herself that to get back at Gritstone, she first had to escape Stillwater. A feat that required both an undistracted mind and a strategic plan. Of which, currently, she had neither.

  With her trusty book of crosswords clasped in one hand and twirling a stolen blackball pen in the other, Dobson glared at the open page. Neat rows of black and white boxes stared brazenly back at her. The blank puzzle mocked her uncharacteristic lack of concentration. ‘How are you supposed to pull off a daring escape when you can’t solve a simple word puzzle?’ it taunted.

  That was the issue with the advanced puzzles. The second clue relied on the results of the first. Dobson couldn’t move on until she’d settled on an eight-letter word that rhymed with orange. She could have simply flipped to the next page, skipping the impossible puzzle entirely. Or, better yet, put her concentration towards something more meaningful, like an escape. But that was the problem with stubborn people. They didn’t give up easily, oftentimes to their own detriment.

  And Dobson was as stubborn as they came.

  It wasn’t like she tried to be this way. She attempted to think of other things—what sort of force it would take to break her chains, when the next guard patrol would pass by, and how she was going to break free and crawl her way back to the surface afterwards—but, inevitably and without fail, her mind always drifted back to the same thought. Orange, orange, orange. What rhymes with orange?

  Dobson’s lack of concentration was disrupted by the cell door sliding open and shut across from her. From over the top of her blank page, she saw a pair of black, polished boots stride into view, stopping at the reflective yellow strip painted along the scuffed floor. “Dogasted, Dobson!” an agitatingly familiar voice said. “Again? This is your second one this week!”

  Dogasted, sadly, did not rhyme with orange and was therefore as useless as the person currently demanding her attention.

  Sheriff Strife, the scrawny scarecrow of a man standing before her, was Dobson’s personal security escort. Customarily, the handover of dangerous convicts was conducted on the surface, before the prison train began its arduous twelve-hour journey, but Sheriff Strife would not be swayed. He stubbornly insisted that personally delivering the infamous Patience Dobson to the end of the line would be worth its weight in bragging rights alone.

  Dobson wondered who’d planted such a ludicrous idea in his head. The sheriff was a simple man. The type predestined to fail upwards, all while misattributing his success to hard work and determination. In reality, the man’s mind was a vacuum. Naturally void of original thought, the few ideas ping ponging about the inside of his skull had been taken from an outside source and wrongfully claimed as his own.

  Dobson suspected Strife was not here for the sake of intelligent conversation. “Can I assist you with something, Sheriff?”

  “Can you help me with something? Oh, that’s rich, Dobson. As it happens, there are a number of things you could help me with.” Sheriff Strife’s nasally voice buzzed like a fly trapped in the windowsill on a hot summer afternoon. A dramatic foot stomp emphasized that he meant business. “You could stop staring at that book for one thing, and tell me what Barry did to deserve this, huh?”

  “You want me to tell you what Barry did?” Dobson repeated, allowing the words to roll from her tongue slowly. She stopped glowering at her blank crossword and lifted her gaze. It didn’t settle on Sheriff Strife so much as it bored straight through him. He flinched, but didn’t retreat, placing more confidence in the scuffed yellow line than it rightfully deserved.

  They stared one another down for several heartbeats before Dobson humored the sheriff, stating matter-of-factly, “Barry cut his way through a brothel up in Calloway. Being his official security escort, I assumed you would have known that.”

  Sheriff Strife gesticulated with animated vigor at the stiff corpse near Dobson’s feet, lying face down in a pool of its own vomit. “Is that why you killed him?”

  “No,” Dobson said flatly. “He chewed with his mouth open.”

  Sheriff Strife’s gray and white push broom mustache twitched in irritation. The sallow skin around his nose took on an unbecoming red undertone. “You can’t keep killing your cellmates.”

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  The solution, Dobson found, was surprisingly simple. “Stop assigning me cellmates.”

  Prisoners aboard the train were kept in pairs. Chained together, each pair shared a locked cell fitted with a single bench, limited leg room, and a painted yellow ‘do not cross’ line. The chain on Dobson’s left wrist ran through a bolted eyelet on the wall and then back down to her cellmate. Supposedly, this was done to inhibit movement, preventing a prisoner from escaping, and so on. In the end, all the chain did for Barry was offer a convenient means with which to strangle him.

  Dobson’s unenthusiastic gaze swept past the sheriff and focused on the iron door at his back. The narrow viewing window revealed several guards lingering in the corridor, nervously awaiting the order to barge inside and prove their mettle. Dobson blinked hard. Nothing happened. Frustrated, she tried again, holding her eyelids closed until the mechanism embedded within her skull clicked into place.

  She opened her eyes and her vision shifted. Color bled from the walls, transforming her surroundings into dull shades of gray. Mech vision activated, Dobson scanned the nervous trio, noting the lack of internal cybernetic pings. The guards were unenhanced, one hundred percent unaltered human flesh and bone.

  Useless, in fewer words.

  The sound of gagging drew Dobson’s attention back to the sheriff. Her mech vision sent a faint tremble through the back of her skull, highlighting the sheriff’s bionic knee replacement in a pulsing ghostly blue glow. It was a basic replacement. No hidden weaponry or enhancements to concern herself over. Dobson could already feel the start of another strain-induced headache. Masking the pain from her face, she blinked hard again and her vision switched back to standard mode.

  “Good gracious.” Sheriff Strife glanced at Berry’s bloated corpse and then swiftly looked away again. He ran a liver-spotted hand down his face wearily, muttering, “What am I going to do with you?”

  Dobson offered her thoughts on the matter with a curled upper lip. “Toss him onto the tracks and be done with it. Barry wasn’t worth your pity.”

  “You, Dobson! Not the bloody corpse! What am I going to do with you?”

  Sheriff Strife’s cage was so easy to rattle, it almost took the fun out of it. Almost. “I suppose you’ll have to tack on another life sentence,” Dobson replied. “Surely a seventh will drive the point home.”

  “I think I have something different in mind,” Sheriff Strife’s tone changed. It was firmer, resolute, uttered with the sort of underserved confidence that would have made a more pathetic creature cower. “You’re not the only troublemaker on this godforsaken train. Seeing as you find yourself lacking stimulating company, I think I’ll introduce you to the other thorn in my side. She might just be the match you’ve been looking for.”

  Dobson allowed the silence to convey her feelings on the matter. Still twirling her pen, her attention returned to the puzzle clutched in her hand. She revisited the first clue, eyes skimming over the black letters, no closer to a solution than she had been the first hundred times she’d reread the blasted thing. The riddle gnawed away at her concentration like a rat on a stale crust of bread.

  “That’s it then? Nothing else to say?” The sheriff lingered several awkward seconds longer before shaking his grizzled head. Disgusted, he turned for the exit. “I don’t know why I even bother talking with you.”

  Dobson waited until he was almost to the door. “Actually, there is something you could help with. A question, Sheriff. If you would.”

  Sheriff Strife glanced over his shoulder, his expression a mix of curiosity and trepidation. He sensed a trap, and yet, despite a woefully underdeveloped survival instinct screaming at him to get the hell out of dodge, he stayed, overcome with curiosity. The sheriff licked his lips nervously. “Well? What is it? I haven’t got all day.”

  Dobson tapped the end of her pen against the paper and stared at the ceiling, as if caught in thought. “What rhymes with orange?”

  The old man’s face wrinkled in confusion. “What?”

  “An eight-letter word that rhymes with orange,” Dobson recited the clue from memory. “For the death of me, I can’t think of anything that rhymes.”

  Sheriff Strife was uncharacteristically silent.

  Dobson’s stare dropped from the ceiling and settled over the scrawny sheriff with the weight of an iron anvil. She motioned to the lifeless corpse sprawled across the tile at her feet. “Barry was good with puzzles. I should have asked him before, well, you know.”

  Sheriff Strife’s expression darkened. “I’d tell you to rot in hell, Dobson, but hell’s a paradise compared to where you’re headed.”

  He stormed out, barking at the guards stationed outside to earn their pay. The trio barged inside all helter-skelter, decked head-to-toe in Stillwater’s trademark orange and white uniform. The first guard kept his rifle trained on Dobson, teeth gritted, trigger finger itching for action, while the two others collected the body. Ducking down, the pair unshackled Barry’s corpse before dragging him out between them, leaving a trail of slick body fluid in their wake.

  The guard with the gun followed, firearm still locked on Dobson, glaring daggers at her through the reflective visor of his helmet. He stepped clear of the track, and the heavy iron door rattled shut with a slam. The bolt scraped against the inner mechanisms with a gravely screech, like a rusted blade dragged across a sharpening stone, and then locked in place, securing Dobson inside.

  Dobson returned to her crossword as if nothing had happened at all. The trio, she noted, had come equipped with full riot gear.

  How flattering.

  Not that basic body armor and helmets would have put up a fight against Dobson’s augmented body, but surely it was the thought that counted. At a staggering seven feet tall, built like a brick house, and with enough reinforced titanium spider mesh to render her human meat sack more metal than flesh, Dobson would have felled the trio in four minutes flat.

  What waited for her beyond, however, was what prevented her from snapping their necks and breaking free. It wasn’t the average security officer she feared, but the unaverage ones, the kind in her profession referred to as Company Men. On paper, the employment of weaponized cyborgs was strictly forbidden, of course, but Dobson had no doubt that Stillwater kept a small army of Company Men on their hidden payroll for security purposes.

  By her estimation, there had to be two, possibly three, stationed aboard the train somewhere.

  In her prime, she would have been an equal match for Stillwater’s overpowered goons, but those days were no more. The law had stripped her augmented body to the bare essentials, taking both weapon and serum alike. Escaping, and better yet, surviving said escape, was going to take careful calculation and a well-executed plan. No place for human error. For it, she would need her full concentration.

  An eight-letter word that rhymes with orange…

  The pen snapped between Dobson’s fingers. Black ink trickled down her clenched hand and seeped into the cuff of her sleeve. Sighing, she snapped her book of crosswords shut and stashed it into the front pocket of her festive gray jumpsuit.

  This was going to be harder than expected.