Free Nest of Worlds by Marek S. Huberath

you were there the first time—only then, yes?—and didn’t want me to strip.” She became anxious. She tried to rub her numb hands. He helped her.
    “On the twenty-fifth.”
    “That’s right. I knew at once that it was you. Later it was just her, and I kept saying it was against the rules, so she gave up about the stripping. But in revenge for that she put me in the cell. I protested, I screamed. Then they beat me, that Ross and some others. Out of the whole transport, only you came for your white wife. She had me tied as a farewell present and kicked me and kicked me. She had it in for me, that black bitch. The shirt and panties too, tear them off.” She said all this in a toneless monologue as Gavein tried to free her elbows from the disgusting cloth.
    In the bathroom, the water roared in the tub. The stink was overpowering.
    “It’s a good thing you didn’t make a complaint about the guards beating me. That was a trap. They would have carried me back, for medical treatment, and I wouldn’t have got out of there alive.”
    “I never imagined our meeting like this,” he said, massaging her nerveless hands. She twisted and hissed when the circulation returned to them.
    “You thought we would jump into bed, you poor idiot?”
    “Something like that.”
    “I’ve forgotten how. So many years. I’m so old . . .”
    “You’re my contemporary now,” he chided. “And I don’t feel old.”
    He threw what remained of her blouse and panties into the garbage bag.
    “The panties we can save. It’s only piss; it’ll wash out. My own piss, that’s all right.”
    “The bra is fairly clean, only full of sweat.” He put it on the kitchen counter.
    “My hands hurt so much. As if they’re breaking. I can’t take it.”
    “Can you stand up?”
    “No. I lay on cold metal for more than a day, and that was after Anabel was finished with me.”
    “The eye, she did that too?” he asked, putting his arms around her. She was tall, had always been slim but now was skinny. It felt good to hold her.
    “That too. Before she knocked me down.”
    Ra Mahleiné was covered with bruises and scrapes. When he set her in the tub, she began to hiss with pain.
    “It burns. Aah . . . The water’s good . . . My hands . . . Over there, is that a mirror?” She squinted, like a nearsighted person trying to focus. “No, it’s a good thing I can’t see myself. I must look like a starving nag.”
    “I’ll buy you glasses.”
    “The black bitch stepped on them. I told her you would buy me glasses better than the ones she had on her nose.”
    “That’s when she hit you?”
    “That was during. I hope I didn’t get an infection from all the filth in that damned cell,” she said, changing the subject. “On the floor there was a layer of it . . . diarrhea.”
    “Those scum.”
    “They call this the final stage of resocialization. So the whites will understand they have no social category here. I never saw my passport.”
    “How is that?”
    “The passports of whites are kept by the police, so they won’t lose them. In Davabel the whites are like children.”
    He stopped listening to her chatter. Perhaps she was nervous because of her nakedness. He hadn’t seen her for a month, but she hadn’t seen him—for four years. He ran a careful eye over her skin. Bruises everywhere, but there seemed to be no bones broken.
    “I’ve aged, haven’t I?”
    “A little . . .” He couldn’t say she hadn’t. Ra Mahleiné looked dreadful, but it was the quarantine that had done that. Women like her aged slowly and kept their looks.
    “You’re lying. Tell the truth,” she insisted. “Though . . . you won’t. This was the stupidest idea in my life.”
    “Traveling with compensation?”
    “Of course. I had no idea. Brainless nanny goat.”
    She lay in the water, her head rested on an edge, her legs stuck out at the other end—too long for the tub. He had washed her hair; it was darker when wet. The water was brown, the suds