The hose was cold. Jay unhooked it from the aft bulkhead, dragged the nozzle back across the mess deck, and sprayed the deck plates down while the crew finished their coffee at the long table like she wasn't there. The water ran pink and then clear, and she bent at the waist to push it toward the drain grate with the flat of her hand, her tits swinging under her, and nobody looked. That was the thing about a working crew. You were furniture until somebody wanted you, and then you were a hole, and then you were furniture again. She liked that. She liked it more than she had any word for.

Djuna wiped the counter down and tossed her a rag. "Grate too. The last whore left it."

"There was a last whore?"

"There's always a last whore." Djuna hung the towel on its hook and didn't look at her. "He got married on Meridian. Now he sells insurance."

Jay laughed — a short one, surprised out of her — and got down on her knees and scrubbed the grate with the rag until the grime came up. When she stood, her back cracked. It was past midnight by the galley clock. The crew had drifted off one by one, Imani last, and Imani had paused in the doorway and said goodnight to her like she was a person, and Jay had said goodnight back, and that was that.

She rinsed the hose and coiled it and hung it on its hook and walked the passage back to her berth with her boots in her hand because the deck plates were cold and she liked the sting. The end berth had no door. Just a bulkhead cutout with a curtain rail and no curtain, and a rack bolted to the wall, and a locker, and a porthole the size of two hands with the station's running lights sliding across it slow and red and green. She dropped the boots. She peeled the skirt off and let it fall. Her cock was still half-hard from the whole night of it and she didn't touch it. She lay down face first on the mattress with her arms out and her cheek on the thin pillow and the smell of the mattress in her nose — old foam, other people's sweat, ship air — and she was gone before she could think of one more thing.

She dreamed of the Vixen. Not the bad rooms. The rest bay. Birdie's hand on her wrist in the dark, Birdie's voice saying we could just, and Jay saying no, and the two of them lying there with their backs to the wall and their knees up like kids in a fort. She dreamed that the fort was a real fort and the wall was real and outside it nothing could touch them. She dreamed Birdie laughing at something Jay said, and the laugh was so clean it woke her up halfway, and she rolled her cheek on the pillow and was gone again.

The pain came before the waking did.

A thick blunt pressure at her hole, spreading her, and then IN, and her whole body lit up wrong and right at the same time, and she was awake with her mouth open on the pillow and her hands fisting the mattress and a sound coming out of her that wasn't a word. Something was inside her. Something big was inside her and it was still going. Her asshole was still loose from the night — loose and wet and used — and it took him anyway, took him without tearing, took him the way a hole takes a thing it was made for, and her hips came off the mattress an inch and her back arched and she tried to say wait and what came out was oh.

The shape. She knew the shape. The blunt flare at the head, the long slide, the ridge that caught just inside the ring of muscle and dragged on the way past. Her heart went cold and fast and her eyes came open in the dark and for one whole second she was back in Cassiday's chamber, strapped to the steel frame, the doctor's voice saying hold still, this is the part you'll remember, and her body was already answering the cock inside her the way it had answered his, opening, dripping, welcoming, and she thought he found me, he found me, he found me —

— and then the cock pushed deeper and she felt the difference.

This one was scarred. The head had a seam across it, a raised line like a weld that hadn't been finished, and past the first ridge there was a second one, and a third, and the whole shaft was a map of old damage under the skin. Cassiday's horse cock had been smooth and hot and clean, a crafted thing, a doctor's thing. This was a working animal's cock that had been through a war. And the man behind it was heavy. That was the other difference. Cassiday had been thin and light and precise. This weight came down on her the way a door comes down on a latch.

Jay turned her face in the pillow and screamed.

It went into the foam and came back at her muffled and animal and she screamed again, not stop, not the word, just the sound, because the sound was the only thing left in her that wasn't being pushed open. Deeper. The flare of him went past where she thought her body ended and kept going. Her abdomen, still carrying the soft swell the Dracon births and the months of service had left her with, pressed flat against the mattress under her, and she could feel the head of him moving inside her belly through the wall of her own gut, a slow hard lump traveling up, and she sobbed into the pillow and ground her hips back against him without deciding to.

"Take me," she said. It came out wrecked. "Use me. Fuck me hard."

He didn't answer. He put both hands flat on her shoulder blades and pressed her down, and her tits squashed against the mattress and her cheek turned and her mouth opened against the sheet, and he started to move. Slow at first. A long pull out until just the flare of the head held her open, and then the long push back in, and every push rearranged something inside her and she felt each one as a separate event with a beginning and a middle and an end. Then faster. Then the rhythm broke and became a fuck — wet, heavy, the slap of his balls against her own, the creak of the rack bolts in the bulkhead, the air pushed out of her in grunts that weren't words. She got one hand under herself and found her own cock and it was so hard it hurt and she didn't stroke it, she just held it, because if she stroked it she'd come and she didn't want this to be over.

"You are nothing but a disgusting filthy whore," the man whispered into her ear. The voice was low and wet and close enough that his breath moved her hair. "A hole to be used."

Okonkwo.

Jay's whole body knew it before her mind did. The weight, the gut resting hot and heavy against the small of her back, the size of the hands. Okonkwo, who had spent the whole night in the mess with his eyes on the wall behind her, who had not looked at her once, who had drunk his coffee standing up and left before the Dracons had even finished with her. Okonkwo, who had a sister. Okonkwo, who Djuna had told her to leave alone. Okonkwo, balls deep in her ass at two in the morning with a cock like a horse's, calling her a hole.

She laughed. It came out as a sob and then it came out as a laugh and then it was both at once, and she pushed her ass back against him hard enough that the slap rang off the bulkhead, and she said, "That's it. That's it. That's what I am. Fuck the hole, Okonkwo, fuck it, it's yours —"

He grunted and drove in harder. The hands on her back slid down and took her hips and pulled her up onto her knees, and the angle changed and he was in her deeper than anyone had ever been, so deep her breath stopped, and she opened her mouth and nothing came out at all. His gut came off her back and she felt the cool ship air hit the sweat there and then he was over her again, covering her, and his balls — big, heavy, hot — swung against hers with every stroke, and she counted them without meaning to, one, two, three, the way she had counted men on Cassiday's deck, and she stopped counting because she lost the thread.

On and on. The clock in the passage said nothing. Time was the cock in her ass and the weight on her back and the wet sound of him pulling out and the slap of him going back in. Her knees slid on the mattress. Her face was wet — tears or sweat or both, she didn't know and it didn't matter. Her asshole had gone past pain into a hot ringing openness that felt like the whole rest of her body had been reorganized around this one hole, and every time he pulled out she felt the cold air go in and every time he pushed back she felt the air come out of her like a sigh.

"Harder," she said. "Please. Harder."

He gave her harder. The rack bolts squealed. The porthole lights slid past red and green red and green. Somewhere down the passage a hatch opened and closed and nobody came. His breathing had gone rough and ragged and she could hear it over her own, and his hands tightened on her ribs hard enough to bruise, and she wanted the bruises, she wanted to find them in the morning with her fingers and know exactly where he'd held her.

Then he slammed in to the root and stopped. Grinded. She felt him twitch inside her — once, twice, three times — a hard pulse against the wall of her gut, and then the heat. It came in a flood, a wash of it, so much that she felt it move up inside her like water finding a new level, and her abdomen was full of him, warm and heavy and hers, and she came. Not from her cock — from her ass, from the inside, a long roll of it that took her by the spine and shook her, and she made a sound she had never made before, high and broken and grateful, and ground back against him one last time to keep every drop.

They stayed like that. Both of them breathing. His weight came down on her fully and she took it, flattened under him, her cheek on the wet sheet, and she could feel his heart going against her back through his chest and her own going against the mattress, out of sync, slowing.

Then he pulled out.

Slow. She felt every inch of it come back out of her, the ridges dragging, the flare catching at the ring, and when the head came free her hole stayed open around the empty air and she felt the first of his cum start to run out of her and down over her balls and onto the mattress. She turned her head on the pillow and looked back over her shoulder.

Okonkwo knelt behind her on the rack. He was a big man — she'd known that from the mess, from the way he filled a doorway — but she hadn't known how big. Dark skin, a broad hairy chest gone soft over hard, a gut that hung heavy, arms like a dockworker's. And between his legs, hanging down and still half-hard and shining wet with her, was the cock that had just been in her. Long. Thick. The head flared wide and blunt like a horse's, the shaft ridged and scarred along its length, the balls below it huge and drawn up tight. It was the most beautifully ugly thing she had ever seen.

"Okonkwo," she said.

He didn't answer. He was looking at the wall. His jaw was working. He looked like a man who had walked into a room and found himself standing over a body.

Jay turned over onto her back — slow, because her ass was gaping and everything inside her shifted when she moved — and sat up on her elbows and looked at him, and then she reached out and put her hand on his thigh. He flinched. She kept her hand there anyway.

"Let me clean you up," she said.

"You don't have to."

"I know." She got off the rack and went down onto her knees on the cold deck plates in front of him, and the cum ran out of her and down her thigh and she didn't wipe it. "I want to."

She took him in her mouth. He was still wet from her ass and the taste was her own — salt and musk and the sour note of everything she'd had done to her tonight — and under it the man himself, skin and sweat and soap. She went slow. She licked up the underside of the shaft and found the seam on the head with her tongue and traced it, and then the first ridge, and then the second, learning him the way she'd learned the shape of him in the dark. His hand came down and rested on the back of her head, not pushing, just there, heavy. She looked up at him with her mouth full and his eyes were finally on her, and they were wet.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Jay pulled off him and held the head of his cock against her cheek. "Don't be. I asked for it."

"I didn't — I was going to leave you alone. Djuna told me what you are and I said I wouldn't. I said I'd wait a week. I said —" He stopped. His hand was still on her head. "I heard you in the mess. I heard you take all of them and then I heard you say where's the hose hookup like it was nothing, like you were glad, and I went back to my rack and I lay there and I couldn't —"

"Couldn't what?"

"Couldn't stop thinking about it." He said it like a confession. "About you. About the way you took them. I've never — I don't do this. I'm not —"

"You are now." Jay smiled with his cock still against her face. "You came in here in the dark and put that thing in my ass and called me a hole. That's the truth of it. You can hate it in the morning if you want. But you came."

Okonkwo's jaw worked. Then he did something she didn't expect. He put both hands on her head, gentle, and tilted her face up, and looked at her for a long moment, and then he said, "Open."

She opened. She thought he was going to fuck her mouth. Instead she felt the first hot jet hit her tongue, and then the next, and she understood, and she swallowed. Once. Twice. Three times. He held her head steady while he emptied his bladder into her mouth and she took every mouthful of it and swallowed it down and when he was done she licked the last of it off her lips and off the head of his cock and swallowed that too, and he was still hard in her mouth, and she stayed there on her knees with him on her tongue until he pulled away and sat down on the edge of her rack with his head in his hands. “Thank you” She whispered.

Jay wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She got up off the deck — her knees popped, her ass was aching and open, her belly was full — and she sat down next to him, close enough that their thighs touched, and she didn't say anything for a while.

"Where'd you get it?" she said finally.

"What."

She looked down at his lap. "The cock. That's not a thing a man is born with."

He was quiet for a long time. The porthole lights slid past, red and green. Down the passage somebody coughed in their sleep.

"I was a POW," he said. "Ten years ago. The war. I was on the Alcubierre when she got taken." He rubbed his forehead. "There was a doctor on the prison ship. Human. Old. He liked to — he said he was studying compatibility. He said we were all just raw material and he wanted to see what a human body would do if you gave it the parts of something else." He laughed, and it wasn't a laugh. "I was one of the early ones. Before he had it down to a science. That's why it's scarred. The first three tries didn't take and he had to do it again."

Jay sat with that. Then she reached over and put her hand flat on his chest, over his heart, and left it there.

"Cassiday," she said.

Okonkwo turned his head and looked at her. His eyes were wide.

"That's the doctor," Jay said. "The one who did it to you. His name is Alistair Cassiday. He's still alive. He's on a pirate ship with a man named Silas Jones and he's still doing it. He did it to me." She took her hand off his chest and turned around on the rack and pulled her own ass cheek aside so he could see the tattoo. "Horseshoe. That's what he marks the ones he fucks with his horse cock. He fucked me with his six months ago."

The silence went on so long she thought he'd left. Then she felt his fingers, light, on the ink, tracing the curve of the horseshoe.

"Small galaxy," he said.

"Yeah."

He took his hand away. She heard him stand up, and she turned back around, and he was pulling on his trousers in the dark. He was a big shape against the porthole lights. He looked at her for a moment and she couldn't read his face at all.

"I'm sorry I called you that," he said.

"Which part."

"The whore part."

Jay lay back on the rack with her knees up and her hand between her legs, two fingers pushing gently at her own hole, feeling how open it still was, how much of him was still in there. She watched him from the pillow.

"Don't be sorry for that," she said. "I liked it. And it was true."

He stood in the doorway of the doorless berth with his shirt in his hand. "Was the rest of it true?"

"Which rest."

"That you wanted it."

Jay pulled her fingers out and looked at them, wet and shining in the station light, and then she wiped them on her thigh and put her hand behind her head.

"Everything I said was true," she said. "That's the whole thing about me, Okonkwo. That's the only thing about me. I don't lie about what I want. I want what I am."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, the way a man nods when he's decided something he isn't going to say out loud. “Please use me again, not now, but sometime, when you want to.”

He looked at her a moment and nodded before pulling his shirt on over his head and went out into the passage, and she heard his bare feet on the deck plates going away toward the crew quarters, and then a hatch closing, and then nothing.

Jay lay still. The station lights slid past red and green. Her ass was gaping and leaking and she could feel Okonkwo's cum still warm inside her, moving when she moved, and the ache in her hips where his hands had held her was already starting to bloom into bruises she would find in the morning. She put her hand back between her legs and pushed three fingers in and felt how easily they went in, barely touching the sides of her stretched out rectum, how the hole that had been wrecked an hour ago by eleven crew members and then an hour later by a man with a horse's cock just opened for her like it was thanking her.

She thought about the Vixen. About the rest bay, and Birdie's hand on her wrist, and the plan they'd made to die together. She thought about the steel frame in Cassiday's chamber and the primer in her veins and the word fuckmeat in her ear. She thought about the Warspite, and Pell's careful hands, and Okafor's journal sitting in her duffel with twenty pages written and the rest blank, and Reyes's red panties folded in a case, and all of it felt like a story about somebody else. She thought about the tattoo Halvorsen was going to give her before undock, some word she hadn't chosen, put on her skin by a woman who had hired her for exactly this and nothing else.

And she smiled. Lying on her back in a doorless berth on a patched freighter with a station sliding past her porthole and a crew of eleven who used her like a thing and a captain who'd renamed her Whore and a man with a scarred horse cock who'd just fucked her ass and then pissed down her throat and then apologized for the one true thing he'd said — and she was smiling. Not the way you smile when something's funny. The way you smile when you've been looking for a place for a long time and you finally put your hand on it and it's solid.

She'd been looking for a home since the day Emma Vance walked into that bar. She'd thought home was a berth and a paycheck and a crew that needed a mechanic. Then she'd thought home was a frame and a primer and a doctor's hands. Then she'd thought home was a captain's bed on a Star Service ship and a woman who told her to take care of herself. None of it had been home. She'd known that the whole time.

This was home. This.

A rack with no door. A hole that didn't close. A name that was a job. A crew that walked past her with their coffee and their paperwork and their watch schedules until they wanted a mouth or an ass or something to piss in, and then used her and went back to work, and left her on the deck with the hose and the grate and the cold water. Nobody on this ship wanted her to be anything but exactly what she was. Nobody on this ship was going to try to save her. Halvorsen had written it into the log — free use, no exceptions, stop means stop, report coercion — and that was the whole shape of it. A whore's berth on a working ship, with rules that protected the whore, and eleven people who would use her exactly as much as they wanted and not one ounce more or less.

She pulled her fingers out and wiped them on the sheet and lay with her hands behind her head. The cum had stopped leaking. The ache had settled into something warm. She could hear the ship — the hum of the air handlers, the tick of the hull cooling, the far-off sound of somebody in the galley moving a pot. Ordinary sounds. Working sounds. The sounds a place makes when it's going somewhere.

"Whore," she said, out loud, to the dark. It came out right. It came out like her name.

She turned over onto her side and pulled the thin blanket up over her shoulder and put her hand under the pillow and closed her eyes. She had galley cleanup again at 0800 and she was on the watch roster after that and she was going to be sore and tired and used and she was going to walk into the mess in the morning and pour her coffee and say good morning to whoever was there and then stand there drinking it with her cock soft against her thigh and wait for somebody to want her. That was the job. That was the whole job. And for the first time since she was a man with grease on his knuckles in a bar on a station she couldn't remember the name of, she knew exactly what she was for.

She slept. She didn't dream about the Vixen. She didn't dream about anything. She just slept, warm, full, open, on a bunk with no door, on a wet mattress stained with filth, on a ship that was going to be a perfect home.

The passage was cold and the lights were on half, and Jay walked it barefoot with her boots still in her hand because the deck plates had gone from sting to something like comfort and she wasn't ready to give that up. The cargo hold hatch stood open at the end of the run, a rectangle of brighter light, and she could smell it before she saw it — isopropyl, the sharp green bite of stencil ink, the low mineral hum of a sterilizer cycling. Halvorsen sat on the lip of a loading crate with the kit unrolled across her knees: a coil of transfer paper, a razor, a squeeze bottle of surgical soap, a small chrome gun in a case like a jeweler's. She had her sleeve rolled and her wrist bare and she was testing the gun against her own forearm, one short pulse, a blue dot blooming on the skin above her glove line.

"You're early Whore," Halvorsen said, without looking up. "Sit."

Jay crossed the hold and sat down on the crate opposite her, close enough that their knees almost touched, and put her boots on the deck and her hands on her thighs and turned her left hip out toward the light — the farrier's horseshoe, the block capitals below it, the whole map of her that other people had already drawn. Cum leaked slowly from Jay’s sphincter. Halvorsen's eyes watched it leak, unhurried, the way she'd read the log on the concourse. “How many loads have you taken this morning?”

"Two already."

"Two different somebodies?"

"Mm."

Halvorsen set the gun down and picked up the razor and turned Jay's hip with two fingers, thumb pressed just inside the tattoo's curve, reading the skin like a page.

“What will it be?” Jay asked nerviously.

“Have you let Okonkwo take you yet?”

Jay blushed “Yes”

“Then I think another horseshoe would be appropriate dont you?” Halvorsen indicated a spot on her right hip the mirror image of the tattoo that already adorned her left. “and since you seem to enjoy it how about if we put “FREE USE” down here?” She indicated a spot at the base of Jay’s arse where it meets her thighs. A spot that would be covered by a skirt whilst standing but that would be exposed with the slightest bend at the waist.

“Yes Captain” Jay replied, the thrill of it causing his cock to harden already.

“Good Whore, now bend over and let get started.”