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Anya had been raped.
It was such a simple term for an unspeakably hideous truth. The word stuck in her throat like a bitter mixture of bile and mouthwash, a reality she couldn’t get herself to choke down, and constantly weighed her down. It was a pill she couldn’t swallow, poisonous sludge that was forced inside her, and she gasped for air with tears in her eyes.
Everything hurt — her mind, her body, her soul. With trembling hands, she wrapped her fingers around her protruding stomach and held an unnatural life in her palms in this world filled with death. This ship was no place for a baby, and it was clearly no place for a woman either.
She knew it was risky from the first time she stepped on board, although her crewmates certainly wouldn’t have noticed. She was used to being surrounded by male doctors at work, but these men had a whole different type of credential. People in her line of work were tasked with healing, but there was only room for destruction in this pathetic monument to capitalism’s horrors.
Upon first impressions, the one she was initially scared of was actually Swansea. He was a classic case of a worn-out recovering addict. He was cold and blunt, tough and mean, and she never once saw him smile unless it was at someone else’s expense. He said what he meant, did what he wanted, and was honest about his intentions. This was a dead end job for him, nothing more and nothing less. He was transparent and predictable, and that made him easy to read once she got used to him. She couldn't say the same about some of their crewmates.
His intern Daisuke, on the other hand, was the complete opposite. He was the first crew member she felt secure around. How could she not? He was young and bright, too sweet for his own good, and glowed with warmth. He was the sole comforting presence in these uneasy halls filled with tension. He wasn’t built for a job as nasty as this one, and everyone knew it except for him. That little glimmer of joy he provided definitely wouldn’t last long before getting forcefully extinguished.
The other beacon of hope among the crew was its leader, Curly. His positivity came burdened with more realism than Daisuke’s, like he had been hardened by years of experience. He was kind but fair, productive and hardworking, and he was determined to find a realistic solution to every problem. In the end, that was the issue with him — there were some things he couldn’t just fix, and someone like him would never be able to understand that fact. Maybe he didn’t know as much as he thought he did.
In comparison to the others, there was nothing remarkable about Jimmy at first. In fact, the most significant thing about him was just how little he stood out. Curly was their dedicated captain who’d seemingly do anything to protect them, Daisuke was the spark of optimism keeping them all together, and Swansea was reliable despite his rough exterior. One thing did get under her skin about Jimmy, though.
No matter what he was doing, no matter who he was talking to, he always had such soulless eyes.
That dead expression was unnerving. It set her on edge. There was never anything behind his stare — he just looked at her with the intense glare of a predator carefully watching its prey.
He made her nervous, but she tried to pretend he didn’t.
Anya did a lot of that; she was always covering her feelings up for the sake of these men who didn’t care about her. She had gotten good at pretending. She had to do that to survive in a work environment like this one.
When it happened, the fragile facade of normalcy the crew had built on this nightmarish ship fell apart in an instant. It was all like some sickening play orchestrated by Polle the Pony himself, and the entire act all came crashing down.
She would never fully remember the events of that night, but her bruised and battered body told the story her mind couldn’t bear to admit to her. She ached with a type of soreness she had never felt before, a whole body and soul kind of pain. She spent hours, days, lifetimes, just staring at the wall. Every little crack and chip in the ceiling paint became an ugly blemish she could suddenly never unsee, and she was frozen in place hugging a body that wasn’t fully hers anymore.
Anya’s whole life had been destroyed, but the world just kept spinning and the Pony Express kept chugging along towards its pointless destination. She was just one dead pixel lost in the corner of an endless stretch of space.
It wasn’t fair, but nothing much was.
At first, she dared to believe that she could still be saved. Once she finally told Curly, the one person who could do something about this, he looked at her with the same dead eyes she saw on his best friend.
“That doesn’t sound like the Jimmy I know.”
“I’m sure there’s some way to resolve this.”
“I need to hear his side of the situation.”
With the pointless ways he claimed he would help her, he might as well have just spat in her face. At the end of the day, he was still a man — and there would always be a clear divide between men and Anya, no matter how caring she wanted to believe they could be.
Sometimes she wondered why such an experienced captain never noticed that the door to her sleeping quarters didn’t have a lock.
Maybe she really was making all of it up. It could have been another one of those strange nightmares, like the ones she had about cannibalistic obsessions and twisted birthday parties. She could be making a fool of herself, and the last thing she needed was to lose her job for being a hysterical woman. She couldn’t afford to risk her career over something like this, even if she hated it; she would never have any other options for work. All those false promises a bystander like Curly made never came to fruition, and Anya was left to believe that her biggest mistake was telling someone the truth.
What Jimmy did wouldn’t define him, she decided, because if she didn't get past this she was going to go utterly crazy for the rest of the ship's trip — if she wasn’t already. Curly’s lack of action wouldn’t make him a monster, even if he was a man's friend before he was a woman's captain. Her own paranoia was just part of the job, and she didn’t need to question the blood on her bedsheets or the homebrewed alcohol she didn’t remember drinking.
Everything was going to be okay, even when Jimmy’s “one bad night” piled up into months and months of them.
That was until all of the dead pixels on the ship bubbled up and exploded into a fiery problem so big that it could no longer be ignored. Some stains couldn’t be washed out, no matter how deeply they were cleaned, and 99% of germs were infectious on the wrecked Tulpar.
The crash left Curly’s body as shattered as Anya’s mind, and both acts of violation had the same vile perpetrator. Jimmy was a master at playing the victim and useless at taking responsibility for his actions. Nothing could ever be his fault because he was the Pony Express’s self-appointed captain now, and who could ever have the right to say otherwise?
Maybe Jimmy had always been in charge, even when Curly claimed to control the power of the crew. A hidden dictator had manipulated his way into everyone’s minds, even his boss’s, and he quietly ruled with a hidden iron fist. Anya was the only one who saw their small world for the prison it was before broken vents and echoing gunshots entered the equation.
She had always had a knack for picking up on the little details, after all.
Life had already left her eyes long before it was freed of this distorted body. As the cracked walls spun around her for the millionth and final time, a part of her distantly wondered about the future she was leaving behind. Her grip tightened around her stomach — her disgusting, grotesque, constantly overlooked stomach — and she realized that the most merciful act of motherly love she could ever give her unwanted daughter would be saving her from living as a woman in a world this cruel.
Anya couldn’t help but relax a little, as much as it hurt. For the first time she could remember, she was reclaiming her agency and brutalizing her body on her own terms. Her fate was her own choice, and as her eyes slipped shut, she knew she made the right decision.
She would race wild and free, alone and safe, riding on a horse towards an eternal dream that couldn't hurt her anymore.