Loop, stitch, repeat. Lines of red thread began to fill in the space bordering the interior of a white hexagon. Once completed, I pulled some white embroidery thread from the spool and threaded my embroidery needle. Next, my quick, repetitive movements gave the thread the shape of a white circular mouth rimmed with teeth. At least, that was how I'd always imagined the First Order insignia looked. A creation of childhood imagination that I'd never completely shed with age. Loop, stitch, repeat. Machine precision produced the outline of the insignia patches and rank bands, but it was slave fingers that carried out the finer detail work. It ensured that our work was never truly finished and that we rarely had the chance to be idle.

Across the small work table sat my silent companion in this tedious task, Dakan, and he was not speaking to me today. I didn't care. Dakan talked too much, and we had a lot of work to do. On the tabletop between us sat the container of unfinished rank armbands. There were hundreds to get through by tomorrow, when they would be used for a mass promotional ceremony.

Another line was finished and that one joined the small stack of completed patches inside of a separate container. I grabbed another from the box, this one an armband for a lieutenant with white Arabesh lettering on black, reading "Power".

Inspiring.

My fingers moved quickly, passing the needle through the fabric and out the other side, line after line. In a few minutes, that one was finished as well. I grabbed another.

With so much practice, Dakan and I were making quick work of it. At our current pace, we might even be able to finish in time for the evening newscast. If I was careful I would be able to listen from the outer edges of the group of personnel as they attended. It was my only line to the galaxy and the countless worlds that existed outside of this one. The galaxy seemed to be a savage place. Certainly more so than the ordered, sterile corridors an interior structure of Starkiller Base. It was not easy, but it was better than being subject to the lawless frontier outside of First Order control.

Another band was complete. If Armatta had been assigned this task with me instead of Dakan, doubtless the chore would have taken twice as long. I glanced up to the dark-skinned male slave across from me surreptitiously. I could see that his brow was tense with worry. I could practically smell it on him.

As though he could sense me looking at him, his eyes flickered up to mine before quickly looking away, a learned reflex. I might have been a few years younger than he, but I had an advantage: my Gaze. The Gaze, a childish, private name for my talent. Whereas most slaves were impotent in their anger I had been granted, by some trick of fate, a weapon that gave my emotions more weight. When I willed it, my eyes could cut into another as deeply as a knife, or at least hurt like one. It had not won me any friends, but I didn't care.

I let my eyes linger on Dakan, my hands never slowing in their task, before lowering them once more. One line of white embroidery thread followed another until a letter was filled. With hours to go before we were finished, my thoughts began to wander again as it had been doing with more frequency the last few days.

For sixteen years, almost to the day, I had been in service within the First Order's hidden stronghold. My thoughts of late had been on the day that I was recruited, or what little I could still recall of it. Another armband was finished as though on autopilot, this one reading "Tarkin."

I knew that I was the product of a raid on the town that was once my home, one among countless others. Of course, they wouldn't call it raiding or pillaging. It was a 'resource gathering mission,' routine and methodical. It didn't matter that those resources were originally in the possession of the colonists. That day, I became well-acquainted with death.

I was too young to really understand what was happening. I just knew that the soldiers in white armor were efficient and pitiless, and in their wake they left ruin. They weren't indiscriminate in their death-dealing, to be sure. Children, human children, up to five years old, were taken along with anything else of value. The ones who didn't fit that profile were not so fortunate. I had a family one moment, and the next I had nothing.

I did not resist when the white soldiers took me with them.

I remembered the faces of the other children who'd been with me. There were two boys and two other girls. The soldiers watched over us all with identical, impassive faces, and I remember thinking that that their helmets looked like skulls. Monstrous skulls, though, with angry eyes and mouths that grinned and frowned at the same time. I didn't realize that they were all human underneath until much later.

While the other children wailed, beside themselves with too much terror and grief for their young minds to comprehend, I watched our captors silently. I made myself like the troopers were: blank, unreadable, protected behind a shell. I was four.

I felt something then, but it was not what I expected to feel, nor what thought I should be feeling; despair, shock, or terror. Instead, deep inside of myself, I felt the first spark of anger.

Prior memory was lost to the horrors of that day. I could not remember details of my past life, but I would never forget the smell of burning corpses. I could almost smell it again, now curling in my nose.

"Armata was gone all night again," Dakan said, startling me out of my thoughts. The smell of smoke faded and I found myself back beneath the sallow lighting of our quarters.

"Yeah, so?" I returned to my task, disgruntled that . He sighed. The sound of his breath was loud and grating to my ears.

"Aren't you worried that-" he started.

"No," I interrupted. "I'm not worried. She's probably in some petty officer's bed."

"You shouldn't be so quick to judge her, Riala," he said. Astonished, I stopped what I was doing and looked at him. His eyes were conspicuously down. Was he looking for a fight?

"I'm not judging her. I don't care what she does with her body, as long as I don't have to hear about it." I glanced around to the dingy grey walls of our tiny living space, but found no sign of the monitoring equipment we were told was everywhere. I looked back down to the fabric in my hand and started another line. "If some low-rank decides to hit her after he's done with her, it's her own fault."

I saw the whites of Dakan's eyes in my peripheral. He stared at me with what was most likely an expression of dramatic horror. I ignored him.

"You might begin to understand her more soon enough," he said. I opened my mouth to tell him something mean, something that would sink beneath his skin and shut him up, when the door to our quarters opened and interrupted me. We both turned to look.

A young woman entered with haste. She was crying. I caught a flash of warm, tan skin beneath shredded fabric, disheveled black braids before she disappeared into the bunks in the back of the room.

Dakan and I exchanged glances, and then my eyes narrowed as I anticipated what he was going to say.

"Don't say anything," I said to him with a warning in my tone. His lips screwed up into a pursed half-frown. He finished his cloth patch and took another, his quick, jerky movements a clear sign of his anxiousness.

I followed suit, trying to tune out the sounds of running water in the next room and Armata's muffled, breathy weeping. Despite the contempt I felt for her, I found concentration difficult. I might not have told Dakan my thoughts on her had I known she would be returning so soon.

Whether or not Dakan realized it, I didn't fully believe that she was at fault for the things that happened to her, or even for the choices she made of her own volition. She was beautiful, strikingly so, and people noticed. First Order personnel were not immune to such things. If making subtle passes at officers, or positioning herself in places that she would be noticed and perhaps approached for companionship meant that she could enjoy more privileges, I didn't blame her. It was an unfortunate reality of the classless that any means could be necessary to survive, or thrive. No, what I hated about was her smugness. Her ego.

She actually believed that she deserved more based on the merit of her appearance. So, for every bruise she wore after stepping out of line or acting too self sure, she had five boasts about the favor she gained attending an officer's party, or the romantic propositions she received. To me, she was a conceited idiot, and probably a liar. When she wasn't whining to me or Dakan about the cruelty of our masters, she was given to delusions that she would be discovered some day for the lost core world noble she was and rescued from this life.

She was one year my senior, but I had no patience for her nonsense. Dakan, for reasons unknown to me, humored her. So when the door to the bunk opened again, I knew that my warning to him would be ignored.

Armata, still sniffing, moved over to the bench between Dakan and I and rested her downcast face on her hands. I shifted further away from her and kept working. My hands were shaking.

There was a moment of awkward silence.

"What happened?" Dakan asked, finally. I tensed, the angry grip in my chest tightening.

"Cadet training," she moaned. The grip tightened further and my hand slipped so that the embroidery needle pierced the skin on my thumb. I sucked in a sharp hiss and stuck my fingertip in my mouth.

"Cadets?" Dakan asked, concern softening his confusion over the ambiguity of the term. "What class?"

"Primary," she replied, as though this admission weren't as damning to her melodrama as anything. Dakan made a quiet noise of acknowledgement, but I knew that even he was surprised. Primary class cadets ranged in age from eight years to twelve. Children. My eyes flickered up to her. I could see bruises darkening her tan skin, a few shallow scrapes on her elbows. Nothing major, and certainly nothing to warrant her current behavior.

Before I could stop myself, I snorted in derision.

Suddenly, I found myself the center of attention. I hadn't necessarily meant for them to hear it, but I supposed that now that I had their attention, I might as well fulfill their expectations.

"It appears that you are not dead," I said, stabbing the needle through the fabric, pulling the thread through until it was taut, then piercing the other side. "Nor are you incapable of walking."

"What is your point, Riala?" Armata asked, unable to stop herself from inviting my opinion.

"My point," I said, finishing the last part of the arm band. "Is that we have work to do, Armata. So if you're not going to die of your injuries, perhaps you should take yourself to the medbay instead of bothering us. As you can see, we have a lot left before tomorrow."

"Armata, don't-" Dakan started, weariness filling his every intonation. But it was too late. Armata was fuming. Her large, molten-gold-colored eyes were simmering with temper. Not for the first time, our bunkmate had found himself in the middle of our conflict.

"Perhaps tomorrow you will have other things to worry about," she said. I steeled myself against what would come next. "Your first Active Duty assignment, for example."

I threw the finished patch into the completed bin, but did not retrieve another. I felt my normally calm expression begin to slip. With perfect aim, she'd managed to get to the heart of what had been occupying my thoughts for the past few days.

"It might not be so bad," Dakan offered. The pity in his tone was worse than Armata's contempt.

"She'll find out," Armata said. I could hear the smile in her voice without looking at her. "There's talk amongst the other active slaves that the Lieutenant-General is looking for fresh talent. I hear he likes the ugly ones best."

I took a deep breath to steady my pounding heart, watching my fingers fidget with each other. Her insult didn't bother me. I didn't need to ask to which Lieutenant-General she was referring. Lieutenant-General Hux was said to be ruthless and corrupt. How else could he have risen through the ranks at so young an age? If rumors were to be believed, he was anything from a rapist to a cannibal, and while such speculation defied common sense, I couldn't help but feel an additional edge of fear to think of his attentions falling on me after my active duty was officially instated. The blood from my pricked thumb had dried and crusted, but the movements of my worrying hands reopened it.

"I thought so," she said to my silence.

"Armata, that's enough," Dakan said, his voice soft.

"All I'm saying is that active duty is not easy. Riala would be wise to accept it." Though the heat was gone from her words, and I thought I even heard the hint of remorse, the damage was done. She had won this exchange. I felt the anger twist inside of me until I felt choked. I looked up and met her eyes. She faltered.

"You should leave," I said to her, the threat evident in my tone. For a moment, she looked as though she might argue. Instead, as I knew she would, she stood from the bench and swept away, back into the back bunk room. The door shut behind her. Dakan watched her go and then turned to me.

"If you'd only try to be nice, maybe she wouldn't say things like that," he said.

The pity and judgment in his voice triggered something in me. When I met his look, I felt the prickling of pressure behind my eyes.

A searing line of fire arced from the seat of my anger through my eyes and he flinched as if he'd been physically slapped. His face became ashen, and without further word, he pushed himself away from the table and rushed to the bunk room as though the floor were collapsing behind him, leaving his half-finished First Order insignia patch on the table.

I could hear muffled conversation in the next room. I reached into the container of unfinished arm bands and tried to maintain the semblance of composure. My hands still shook. A couple minutes later, the door to the bunk opened. I didn't look up when they hurried past and into the corridor outside of our space. The door closed behind them and suddenly I was alone.

I breathed more easily. Without witnesses, I let my façade of calm fall away. The only reason Armata's words had hit me so hard was that at least some of what she'd said had been true. No matter what age a slave is when they are recruited, once they reach twenty, they are no longer merely in training.

Sixteen years of conditioning, obedience and passivity training, lessons in menial tasks, would come to an end. My past had been so heavily on my mind because, according to First Order acquisitions records, tomorrow was when I turned twenty. I would receive my first active duty assignment, and all of my speculations would meet reality.

I couldn't focus. My stomach growled, and I realized that by chasing away Dakan, I'd destroyed my chances of finishing the job in time to catch the newscast. I'd heard that Hux himself would be making a statement, and now more than ever I wanted to at least see what the man looked like.

Horror stories of slaves being passed around like favors behind closed doors at officer's parties, of being experimented upon by the research division to horrific results, of being set loose on the cold surface and used as cadet target practice flashed through my mind. I shook them away. Armata was a fool and I would succumb neither to her fear mongering nor the unfounded rumors circulated, it seemed, specifically to unsettle slaves in training.

I forced my hands to cooperate and set to work on what would likely be a long night.