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help a fellow gutter dweller.”
    “Actually, you are pretty different from me,” I said. I was certain that we were nothing alike. I would wager that not even anything in our DNA could be similar.
    He offered the box to me again. I could not be picky. I dipped my fingers into the box. The maggots clung to my fingers like leeches, and when I popped them into my mouth, they crunched. My body was grateful, and although looking at them sickened me, I forced them down.
    They tasted like sweet potatoes.

 
    6
    The longer I was stranded, the more I lost all of my feelings except for one.
    Numb.
    I was numb. If you asked me, I could not remember if a week or a month or a year had gone by. There was only making it to the next day. I could only remember to fight for my life. There was only one rule I lived by: Survive.
    I tried to get used to my new reality.
    I lived in the very bottom of the Yertina Feray with the others who had nowhere to go and no way to leave. I did not have a home, per se; it was more like I had a bin. I didn’t mind squatting in the underguts because it meant that every currency chit I earned I kept. I was interested in leaving, not making a home here.
    But the underguts were not an easy place to live. It was dirty and dark and there were noises that I could not identify, which on my first nights scared me. The only noise that did not frighten me was the familiar knock of Heckleck’s appendage against the side of my bin.
    I preferred not to know most of what Heckleck dealt in. I was just his errand girl. I knew that Heckleck dealt in the more shady areas of trade, finding the things that no one else wanted to. He had no problem with the dark and the perverse. The fact that I had excelled in that first errand had made me invaluable, but he never asked me to do something with body parts ever again. Not knowing about the darker parts of his business was the only way that I could bear to be in his company. He respected my feelings about that, and whatever the bulk of his dealings were he did not speak of them with me. It was a silence between us; a silence that always stretched to the limit of what was acceptable between two people who still only cautiously called each other friend. But a silence that allowed us to have trust.
    So he spoke to me about the small things that seemed unimportant. Things that my heart could handle. The gossip overheard in Kitsch Rutsok’s bar. The quality of the harvest in the arboretum. The varieties and kinds of waters and salts he’d traded that day. The amount of time he’d logged in the Sunspa.
    “We’re in for a treat tomorrow,” he said as we walked through the arboretum. “There’s to be a hocht.”
    “What’s a hocht?”
    I still had so much to learn about the Yertina Feray and living among aliens.
    “Ah, a hocht,” Heckleck said. “Let this be one of your first introductions to the delights of the station and its ways of keeping the peace among its citizens. Sometimes there are quarrels between aliens and satisfaction can only be gained by a fight.”
    “It’s a sport?” I asked.
    “No. It’s not exactly a sport,” Heckleck said. “This hocht has been called because a Per who lives in the underguts is demanding satisfaction from another Per who lives in the upper quarters who denied him entry to his sister’s wedding because of his low grade status.”
    “So it’s a duel?” I asked.
    Heckleck cocked his head to his side as the nanites in him worked to help translate the English word I’d slipped in. Then he nodded.
    “Yes, let’s agree it’s the same,” he said.
    “So I could have challenged you to a hocht over the plant?” I said.
    He smiled, or rather what I knew now for his species passed as a smile.
    “Interspecies fighting is forbidden.”
    “Why?” I asked.
    “No two alien species are equally matched. One species always has an advantage. When two species fight, one always ends up dead. The hochts are meant to settle the minor