I slide back to lean against the wall.

"You remember, Dean, right?" I play with the fringe of my cotton-blend gown. "He's the one you scared the shit out of that first time we met. He didn't do anything stupid to piss you off. That was me. But you remember him, right?"

John shudders down into passive resting.

"You'd like him. Most people do. I did. I still do. I really like him." We fall into silence as I remember the favorite parts of Dean that I like the most.

"I was so jealous," I say to the room again. "It's unfair that getting out of trouble was so easy for him. So easy, he made a job out of it. I wonder how he's going to get out of this one." I rest my hand on my belly.

There's nothing else to do but try and sleep. The ground, though being bare, is soft. It's as if it cushions me just slightly as I lay my hand on an arm and stare at my cellmate. "Is there anyone you love back at home?"

A bubble forms across John's open mouth. It expands more and more until it pops, dripping more orange slime on the ground. Little nuggets of his drool covered in dust litter our cell.

I close my eyes and hope that my dreams are filled with something other than the anxieties swimming around just beyond my peripherals.

The Crust—are they getting worse? What will happen if they all escape again?

The shipment—are we receiving everything we needed? It seems as though our acquisitions will be done before my incarceration is done. I'll be holding us back. Whether it's by a few hours, a few days, or a few years, I don't want to be the reason for our sluggish crawl across the galaxy. 

I groan. This was never part of the brackets – no one put their hard-earned credits on "Incarceration" when it came to the "How Will ARC10 Fare" game. Hell, it wasn't even on the board. For a second, I'm glad that that at least the winning ticket wasn't "black hole".

I close my eyes, but my brain rises with activity as if switched on by the darkness. Dreams don't appear, but scenarios I know are possible. The same ones from before launch when I thought of ARC10 on fire, Dean's retreat, NOHA's questionable existence—they all return as they do a normal part of my week. On schedule, they're never late. But this one is new.

It's ARC10, old, decayed, a mausoleum in memoriam of the people of Earth who were never able to get off the ground again. In my dream, the pieces of my ship fall off when winds rock the shell too hard. The wind sounds oddly familiar.

With a quick crack of a single eyelid, I notice John in the same place he was when I had first closed them. The irritating whizzing that I thought was inhospitable wind is his. It rattles from under him.

"Can you keep it down? Some of us aren't battery operated. We need sleep." When I try to turn over and put my ear to the ground to drone out his irritating hissing, I can still hear it beat against the ground. I hit my head against it, hoping to knock myself out enough to pass out and finally get some peace.

Nothing. Hours wheeze by with the incessant racket.

"Have you always been this annoying?" I scream at John. As I lie on the ground, my arms over my head with my biceps squeezing my head, I mourn the fact that I can still hear the noise through my own skin and muscles.

"Commander Lorn, you are the one who has been shouting at the Xani who cannot speak in return. It is not the Xani that is acting as an irritant," comes the forced, monotone voice from behind the rock wall.

I try to adjust again. The noise doesn't stop.

"Don't tell me you don't hear that too. It's deafening."

"Commander Lorn, the only noise I hear comes from you."

I huff an angry sigh.

It doesn't stop.

"That's it!" I shout, attempting to sit up. "I've had enough. What the hell is that?" I stand to glower over John. His legs titter and in the whiz of his hydraulics, rises.

"Commander Lorn, what are you doing?" The rock curtain descends and I see my wide-eyed captor staring from behind the opening. "You must not be hurt by the Xani. Do not do it harm as well. There will be more time added to your sentence. You do not want more time in addition to the time in your current sentence. The Reprimand for your first crime will happen in the near future."

John's head swivels on his neck as it spins to look up at me. I've seemed to anger him. With crashing clanking that unnerves my previous confidence in the peace between us, he rears above me. His blades spin inches away from either ear as his neck crackles down to stare me down eye-to-eye.

Before I realize they're there, the Tadj are behind me with weapons pointed. They make noises from their mouths like the hissing of steam. John's attention snaps to them and pauses as if listening.

On raised legs, he clicks into place between me and the Tadj. He turns so that his mechanical belly faces me and his slimy biology stretches and extends until he's making a full arch of his neck to stare at the tall Tadj guard in the eye. The clicking hydraulics emitting from his mechanical body make flickering noises that the Tadj seems to be contemplating.

This is my chance to back away unnoticed by John, to retreat into my corner and continue to eye my prison-mate with leery apprehension when something catches my attention.

I'm no engineer, not like the Freyers, but I do know my way around a motor. Even in an alien mechanism like this, I can still spot a loose piston ring when I see one. Even if it looks nothing like any piston ring I've tinkered with before. It's loose, vibrating, rattling against the oil-streaked surface in my face.

This must be what the noise is.

That strange need washes over me again. The one that says I need to tell John it's going to be okay.

The heated clicking between John and the Tadj fill the cell.

I reach out. My fingers, for the first time, are bare and scrape across the cold, slick metal of the Xani skeleton.

John stops and in a flash, swings his crackling neck to come down on me. Centimeters away, enough for all of my vision to be filled with his face, he watches me. With the exception of the horrible noise that got us into this predicament in the first place, he doesn't make any other noises.

His face up close is nice. I can't help but let that word infiltrate my mind as my quiet scrutiny overtakes the moment. It's nice—soft features that don't directly imply anything nefarious.

"John," I say, "I can help you. Will you let me?"

The Tadj taps the band around its head a few times. His previous monotone voice bellows forth. "Commander Lorn, it cannot understand the words you speak. It does not speak your language."

"Then translate for me."

In my peripherals, I watch him switch his channels again.

"Tell him that I can fix the problem. I think I know what's wrong."

Muttering like rocks in a shaken can infiltrate the tense moment.

From his legs, John responds.

"The Xani doubts this. It has seen you try to fix things before."

Oh really? John wants to give me shit about the quality of my mechanical ability?

I glare into John's eyes and, reaching down to the hem of my smock, I pull it up to my teeth and rip. The tear continues around the bottom until the garment is significantly shorter. Still glaring, I never let us break eye contact as I grab him by the piston and raise an eyebrow.

Pulling hard, the piston emerges from his body. John flinches hard, pulling away from me. The top piston ring slumps down, completely limp and loose. I tear the gown into a smaller shred and wrap it around the groove where the loose ring had been rattling before. Securing the little metal band again, I press it snug into its divet and push the part back into place.

Silence. Blesséd, blesséd silence.

The Tadj, John, and I wait for someone to make the next move. We don't know what to do now that our problems have been solved.

"Feel better, asshole?"

John tilts his head.

"The Xani says it will wait for something to go disastrously wrong with your repair in the near future."

I flick John off and return to my corner.

"How do you do that?" I turn to my captor. "How are you able to translate?"

"Tadj are masters of the ports. We must be able to speak all versions of language."

"Does it come from that?" I point to the silver band running across his jaw. The delicate, glassy piece looks thin enough to shatter by chewing too hard or laughing.

"The band is a transmitter—similar to wiring. It takes our natural penchant for communication and transmits them from our brain to our mouths." The Tadj pulls back his lips in a devilish smile. The wire attaches to clear sparkling gems for teeth. "These are our vocal chords. They act as amplifiers for what our brain is able to communicate."

The teeth are dazzling. The universe is so fucking weird.

The cell is visibly more relaxed. The Tadj, realizing his attention is no longer required, returns to his place behind the stone curtain that has fallen back into place. I slip back into my seated position against the wall, knees up and hands resting around my belly. John, however, does not take the opposite space that he did before. He's still in the middle of the cell, rearing up on his back four legs with his two blades rotating lazily in the air. He dribbles from his top lip to the ground in another jelly puddle.

I kick dirt over it.

John descends, releasing steam and slinking into a compact pile of gears. He takes up much less space as his legs curl under him and his head once again flops like dead weight to the ground. He watches me upside down with his slack bottom jaw jutting out and drooling.

A large goo-bubble expands and pops from his open mouth.

I can't help it. I laugh. It's one minuscule, involuntary burp of laughter, but it's enough to garner his attention.

Propping my head up on an elbow, I watch him.

He blows another bubble that pops and runs down his forehead. It's gross, but insatiably hysterical at the same time.

The bubbles don't stop. He makes big bubbles from his mouth and nose that entertain me for a while until I laughed myself sore. My sides hurt, my face stings from tears that speared through my eyes. The muscles around my mouth ache. There's an emptiness that the raucous laughter fills. The sudden mirth squeezes into the space that felt so cavernous before. I wipe off a runaway tear.

Closing my eyes, I yawn and settle in to try and get a few minutes of rest before I spend the rest of the time overthinking all the problems of the world.

When I rise, it's because Knuckles is gently rubbing my arm.

"Wake up, Cell-erella. It's a beautiful day in prison and I've been told you haven't graced anyone with your waking presence in nearly twenty hours. The Tadj requested I visit to ensure you aren't dead."