Starkillers Cycle

Chap 1 (Mel)

Blood was a lot stickier than Mel remembered.

And shivs were a lot messier.

With one knee digging into Kress's emaciated gut, Mel used the shiv's toothbrush handle to prod the bloody hole in his neck. Afternoon heat coiled off the prison's black asphalt, and the jungle humidity sank into her gray prison coveralls.

Blinking away sweat, Mel leaned in close to Kress. The prison ID numbers stamped along his uniform collar were fading beneath an endless stream of blood. The shiv's blade had gotten wedged below his Adam's apple. Now she needed to get it back out.

Otherwise, this asshole was going to die.

But it wasn't the blood loss that would kill him. It was the poison she was pretty positive he'd laced along the razor's edge.

"Was it Plutax?" she asked, poking again at the slice in his neck. More blood oozed, dribbling as halfheartedly as her attempts to find the razor. "Or was it just good old fashioned arsenic?"

Kress groaned; his sunburned eyelids fluttered open. "Bitch," he gurgled out.

"Never heard of that one." She pushed off Kress, flinging aside the toothbrush and sinking into a crouch. He'd always been a small guy, but he looked really small prostrate and bleeding like this. "If you don't give me a real answer, Kress, then I can't get you an antidote. The guards will show up any second now, and they're gonna have a lot of questions."

"They can't help ... anyway," he rasped. "It's ... Vips,"

Vips-slang for Viprizec, a popular poison for all one's execution needs. No antidote, a lot of pain, death in minutes ... and Kress had just tried to use it on Mel.

Well, fuck trying to save his life.

It felt like only seconds ago that she'd scarfed back her lunch and slunk out here. She did it everyday-and all the inmates knew to stay the fuck away so she could have her five minutes of peace and quiet. Even the guards let her wander out alone since they could see her on their ten million security cams, anyway.

But Kress had brilliantly decided to hide in the shadow of the women's bathroom twenty paces away and slice her up from behind-or try to slice her up. It was a really dumb move, even for Kress.

Eyes narrowing, Mel shifted her face toward the nearest camera at the top of the bathroom's brick wall. The lens was angled in the opposite direction.

Her gaze snapped further on, to the nearest of eight metal towers that stood sentry along the compound's edges. Scaffolding webbed around each tower-reinforcement added after the earthquake six years back-and every inch of steel was covered in roving cams. And yet not a single building, beam, doorways had cams facing her either.

Maybe not quite as dumb a move as she'd thought. It would seem Kress had found a blind spot-which meant that no one would see she'd fought in self-defense. The guards would just assume it was cold-blooded murder.

After all, that was what had landed her in prison two years back.

Mel's head whipped back to Kress. "How the fuck did you know this was blind?" With eight gleaming high-rises and hundreds of buildings between, the cameras picked up everything the prisoners did on the compound-from pissing to showering to fighting. "No way this was just luck."

He laughed-or tried to. The blood bubbling between his teeth made it hard.

"Who set you up for this?" she demanded.

"You really have ... no idea ... do you?" He coughed; blood sprayed onto her chin, mixing with her sweat.

She bit back a frown. Blood on her hands was one thing-she'd killed enough people to stop caring if it got under her fingernails. But blood on her face ...