She stood looking at the palm-sized plate for a long sick moment, then she sighed and canceled the read.  If they'd bothered to locate and erase those files, she'd have had a sliver of hope that she could get out of this.  They hadn't.  Even the overt record was untouched.

She crawled back on the cot and sat with her legs dangling, the fingers of her right hand moving around and around the old burn scar on her left wrist, a scar she'd gotten when she was nearly four and being punished by her foster mother for something or other, she couldn't remember what, but it was about two months before Adelaar came for her.  When she noticed what she was doing, she stilled her fingers and smiled at the scar, a fierce feral grin.  Bolodo doesn't know you, Mama, nooo indeed, you'll blow the bastards out of their skins before you're finished with them.  Hmm.  Better for my self-esteem if I don't sit around sucking my thumb waiting for you to show up.  Problem is, what do I do and how do I do it?

She pulled her legs up onto the cot, pushed herself along it until she was sitting with her back against the hold wall, then started thinking about contract labor.  Like everyone else, she'd accepted its existence as something morally reprehensible but generally necessary.  Blessed be the Contractor for he takes away the ugliness of life.  Societies always have those they class as criminals, anything from mass murderers and big time thieves to heretics and skeptics who question the way things are.  Your average citizen, he's more comfortable if he doesn't have to look at the poor, the handicapped, the mildly crazy and wildly crazy, the drunks and druggers, the different, the dregs.  Why not keep your citizens happy, reduce taxes, remove focuses of disturbance - all that in one fine swoop?  A way of using what would otherwise be a drag on the economy, a way of protecting the comfortable assumptions of the majority from any sort of challenge.  Besides, new colonies need labor they can eject when the job is done so the workers won't pollute the paradise, heavy worlds need miners whose health they don't have to worry about, everywhere an infinity of uses for workers who can't object to miserable conditions and miserly pay.  And there you have it, contract labor.  A marriage of greed with respectability.  Blessed be the Contractor (but don't let him live in my neighborhood).

On her left a youngish man was stretched out, sleeping.  Some time ago his hair had been sprayed into lavender spikes, there was a lavender butterfly tattooed on the bicep next to her; his hands were square and muscular with short, strong, callused fingers.  There was a heavy silver ring on his little finger; she couldn't see much of it, but the design looked familiar.  A friend of hers on University had hands like those and a habit of giving rings like that to his students.  Sarmaylen.  He was exploring an ancient and long neglected form of sculpture, working every kind of stone he could get into his studio, threatening the neighborhood with silicosis from the dust he was raising.  She leaned over, tried to see past the collapsed spikes; as far as she could tell, she didn't know the boy (she smiled, getting old, woman, when you look at a man like that and see a boy), he was young enough to be only a year or two out of school and she wasn't much into Sarmaylen's life these days.  Snuffling marble dust didn't appeal to her; besides, she wasn't really interested in the more exotic varieties of the arts, couldn't talk to him about them because he snorted with disgust at every word she said.  That was one of the reasons Sarmaylen was only an occasional sleeping companion though she found the touch of his callused, work-roughened hands electrifying.  She smiled at the memory of them, smoothed her fingers across and across the burn scar.  His hands were eloquent, his tongue was not, at least in the public sense, a pleasant change from her other friends and lovers.  She was fond of him; if she never saw him again, she'd hurt a lot, but she could no more live with him than she could with her mother.  Their casual off again on again relationship seemed to suit him as well as it did her, though she sometimes wondered what he was getting out of it besides the sex, which was something he'd have plenty of without her.  She frowned at the boy.  A student of Sarmaylen, a sculptor.  How did he wind up here?  Artists and artisans like him never signed with Contractors.  Not voluntarily.  Trashed like me, I suppose.  Or was he just out and out snatched?