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Four

Molly McCade bit her lip and refused to cry. She'd done a lot of crying during the last few days and it didn't do any good. The pirates didn't care, and the other girls were just as scared as she was. She didn't know where the boys were and hadn't seen any since the attack.

Molly rolled over, careful not to wake anyone who might be asleep. Sleep was a precious commodity for the children. It was a time of much needed rest and escape from the horror of the ship's small hold.

The girls were packed into four-foot-high sections, with cold metal gratings under their backs, and very little room to move around.

They were allowed to leave the hold twice a day. First came the scramble up ladders to the pressurized launch bay, then a bowl of tasteless protein mush, followed by fifteen laps around the hangar. Then they were forced through a bank of over-used chemical toilets, an antiseptic spray, and returned to the gratings.

And since everything was done in alphabetical order, there was no hope of a better position on the gratings.

Poor Susy Zobrist. She was stuck on the bottommost grating and cried all the time.

Some kids threw up a lot, others had to go to the bathroom all the time, and whoever lay just beneath them took the brunt of it.

But some dribbled past, and ended up at the very bottom of the hold where it coated everyone and everything.

From the pirate point of view it was an extremely efficient low-cost way of transporting a lot of people at once. Not only that, but when the gratings were removed, the hold could still be used for more conventional cargoes.

Looking up through the dark crisscross of metal gratings, and the black sprawl of supine bodies, Molly could see the glow of a single greenish light.

It reminded her of the night light in her room on Alice. As long as the light was on nothing could sneak up and hurt her. There had been two greenish lights originally, but one had gone out two cycles earlier, and now Molly feared that the other one would too.

"Oh, please, God," she prayed, "don't let the light go out. And if Mommy's with you, tell her I miss her, and I'm trying to be good. And, God, if Daddy's coming, tell him to hurry."

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Framed