"Why didn't the enchantments work?" Jim asks, though he knows that Hunter likely won't have the answer. "I thought it was supposed to protect us against something like this."

He doesn't get much warning before he's no longer in Hunter's apartment, sitting on his couch. He's in a dark cave, sitting side by side with another boy.

"Where's Starfleet?" Tommy asks, not for the first time. The left side of his face is swathed in filthy rags, torn from his own shirt to cover the phaser burns, and Jimmy can see the red swelling of infection creeping out from under the cloth. Tommy's going to lose his eye, he's pretty sure of that. But that won't matter if they die in this shithole.

"They're supposed to protect us from stuff like this," Tommy continues, his remaining eye bright with a growing fever. "This doesn't happen in the Federation."

"Obviously they fucking don't," Jimmy snaps, so fucking sick of hearing the same bewildered, naive questions over and over. "Starfleet's not coming. They don't give a shit about us and they never have. The only one who's going to get us out of this is you and me. Stop waiting for fucking miracles."