The Paragon of Eden
Chapter 1

Deelia… Deelia… Deelia…

The sand was never this fun to play around again…

Deelia…

The cakes would never taste the same again…

Deelia…

Will she ever see her mother again? Her father?

No…

The guards had a rough hand. Was that what you called the people who took you and your kin by the arms, by the neck, by the chains, to your cell? Deelia didn’t know where she was going. There was always a part of her that could ignore the worst of a situation. People said she was a nice person. She was always happy, on her home world. The cityscapes were full of color, the land was full of nature, and the sky was full of stars. Life was full of joys. How couldn’t you be happy?

And when you saw what the rest of your life would look like, even if it was bound to be short, how could you not miss your old home?

Deelia watched the machinery pass her by as she was nearly dragged along. She had heard their remarks on her beauty, her innocence. They mocked her, told her the things they would do. She looked around, at the dark and rusty metal, the stained resins, the dented pipes, and blinking lights. There was a constant sound of beeping and a shrill, industrial screech. Everything was dirty. The men were dirty. She didn’t remember seeing any women…

And the mind that developed this kind of architecture, if that was what this was called, would be put to shame by nearly any other invention of man. This place reflected its purpose: to house and support the lowest of the low in the galaxy. There was no thought behind these structures because there was no intention for art. It must have started out as a pragmatic solution to an expensive economy, and then it turned into the aesthetic of the space pirates and their rotting teeth and their stinking breath and their snide insults…

And they would go on and on and on about how she was going to be their toy…

No. Don’t think about that. Think about home, about father and mother. Think about the happiest of days. She remembered tasting the new flavors at her favorite ice cream parlor with her friends on a night out in the city square. The space jets burned their blue thrusters above them, leaving the atmosphere and creating a signature of bright blue twirls to decorate the scenery of blinking stars. The neon lights of the homes in the skyscrapers glowed pink and green and purple. The mirror windows reflected the atmosphere of the hoi polloi, and the hoi polloi kept their spirits high. And though her friends had told her that the store was going out of style, she was happy to be there and in the moment. And they all seemed to appreciate that for itself. Despite the fact that the store was going out of style.

And her life was going out now, too, huh?

They went down a few more tunnels, each one harboring the musty atmosphere of all the fuming drugs the hedonists of space indulged in. They talked to a few more people, in a language that she couldn’t understand, saw a woman among the men.

She was nearly naked, and her body bore scars, and her eyes looked dead.

They went down a few more tunnels, each one getting dark as they went lower into the layers of this massive vessel. The rust and gunk accumulated here with a ferocious abundance, a clue to the neglect that this place was shown. The smell was even worse, suggesting more than just the refuse of constructs. They were almost at the cell.

The man who dragged her now, though she wasn’t sure if he was still the same one who had been taking her this whole time, grabbed her by her long hair. It wasn’t clean anymore, like it used to be.

“We gonna give you a special little place down ’ere. Don’t squeal ta loud.” He brought his hand across her face in brutal fashion. She whimpered at the pain but kept quiet. “That’s ta get ya used ta dis. Now, in ya go.”

He threw her past a wall of iron bars. She didn’t quite notice, however. And she didn’t cry or scream. It had finally settled in, the absolutely soul-crushing despair of her fate. It was not just over for her. It was going to hurt, and the girl she had always been was going to die and she was going to watch while it happened. There wasn’t any kind of event that had prepared her for this. It was too much.

She curled up into a fetal position on the floor. It was smooth and cold and hard. For these precious few moments, she could let that feeling take her and all her worries away.

“Oi!” The prisoners yelled from the cell across from her.

She ignored them.

“Oi! Girl! You see how there’s seven of us in here and not seven of us in there?”

She ignored them.

“You reckon they givin’ you things their own cells now?” The others laughed. “Like some prison under government rule? A men’s section and a wench section?” They all laughed harder.

It was difficult for Deelia to pretend she didn’t exist when this was happening. And yet, it was a matter of how little she tried. She compelled herself to sleep in her consciousness, to drift away in a vast sea until she wasn’t there anymore so that when she felt the approaching shock of her fate, she wouldn’t be too sad to lose something that was already gone.

“We all get it the same down here. And I can’t believe you just went right under the eyes of these people with that body.” He paused for a moment, and his voice became colder and deeper than the shrill giggle it had been before. “I think they wanna preserve that precious innocence in ya. I think they want to make it hurt when they take it all from ya. I think they wanna give you the hope that peace brings, and then they wanna take it all from ya!” They all started laughing their ugly laughs in discord. “And look at ya! That perfect, naked body! Did you think they would let ya go? It’s a joke like nothin’ I ever heard!” Their joy seemed to contain no bounds.

“I don’t suppose, girly, that they forgot about your cellmate.”

Deelia’s eyes opened, and her body went stiff.

“That’s right, girl! I bet they’re gonna regret leavin’ ya here with no clothes on. He’s a master in brutality, that one. Heard he killed his fellow cellmates. Heard that the ones here forgot he was there out of necessity, for their own safety. He’s the type of man they got stories goin’ round, about how he killed monster and such with his fists. Heard the filth fears him, so that’s why the floor there is always so clean. He’s got a mind to murder a world, and he’s gonna have his way with ya! And we’re gonna watch!”

Deelia slowly turned her head. Past the threads of her tangled, messy hair, she saw the darkness of the cell hide something in the corner. There was a bed, and on the bed was this person. She could not tell his size or anything about this brutality she heard of, but the darkness had left her imagination up to the task.

He stood up, and she realized that he was a woman. No. He was a man, but the stories were not true. He was short and slim, and his hair reached past his shoulders in silky waves. How was he so clean in this place?

He spoke: “You said the filth runs away from me?”

“Oh! Why, looks like they put two beauties in there for the big man. He’s—”

“Listen, numbskull, I cleaned this damn room. With my damn hands.” He showed them his hands, and they were fair and pristine. He had a fair figure, proportionally pleasing to some extent. Then again, could anything be pleasing to Deelia again? But this man…

“Look, he sayin’ he cleaned that room with those hands!” The others laughed again. “And you did that because you wanna please your man, ya twink. Didn’t ya?”

“I did this by myself, for myself. You all could do yourselves a favor and blow your brains out to clean your heads of all the worthless dirt in there. And that would benefit who?”

The other prisoners looked at him confused. They didn’t know where this was going, but they recuperated and said: “It--.”

“Me! It would benefit me! And while I would like to say how you should all live and die for me, just about the only thing you lot can do that would benefit anyone at all is die. Hear me? The world will probably be better without you all. But let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about how I would be better without you. Not in the sense that we shouldn’t be seeing each other anymore, but instead because I think I should never have the chance of seeing you around anymore at all. So, if you all are smart enough to understand what I’m saying, then I should see you all off to it once I break us all out of here.”

After a moment’s pause, the other prisoners howled with laughter. They each began their jokes and mockery all at once, all hidden behind a cacophony of laughter that was too loud to make any of it out. Or maybe Deelia was just too out of it to pay enough attention.

The man walked back into the darkness and lay on the bed again. There was an idle air to the atmosphere, saying that it might just be okay to relax, to dream again. Once the laughter stopped, there was the silence that should accompany the mood. Even the other prisoners in all the other cells had gone quiet. Did something reach all of them? Did they believe that plan of escape?

“Hey,” said the leading prisoner. “You gonna do her?”

Deelia’s heart dropped, but there was no response from the other side of the room.

“Hey, twink! You gonna put it in her or what?” The prison began laughing again. “You see, we’re all a little starved down here. Haven’t had action in forever, haven’t even seen it. You wanna set us free? We don’t wanna be free! But we ain’t got no girl to play with ourselves. If we all had one, you’d think they could save themselves a lot of trouble trying to keep us in.” They were all laughing now, but the chaos began to take a form. They all chanted, “Action! Action! Action! Action! Action!”

The man picked himself up from his small bed, walked over to Deelia, and laid his hands on her shoulders. He picked her up with surprising ease, and the cells all grew silent. There was tension all around, but the man’s face contained no unreasonable intent.

“I wasn’t lying about breaking out,” he said. The whole prison heard him, but they didn’t laugh this time. “What has it been? A week or so? Any good armed organization wouldn’t have the gall to mess with things they didn’t understand. That being said, if I had actually let the UPOA get their grubby hands on my things, They would have found at least a few secrets in a week’s time without blowing themselves up.”

Just then, a massive explosion sounded all around them.