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The man smirked, “I would imagine so, after the fall you took and a bullet to the arm.”

Jesse’s eyes widened and he felt for his arm. It was covered in bandages, but it didn’t hurt as much as he would have thought. Granted, it still hurt plenty.

“Just a graze, barely worth wrapping.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“As close as you will get in a place like this. Army medic, but everyone calls me Doc anyway.”

“You treat the prisoners?”

“The ones that can pay me,” he looked meaningfully at Jesse.

Jesse shook his head, “I can’t pay you.”

“Your bill has already been paid.”

“I-I don’t understand.” And that was the truth. He didn’t understand. Who would have paid his bill? And how could he be expected to have money? How did the prisoners get money?

“That much was made clear last night when you sassed the only man in the prison who can have you killed with a single word.”

Jesse paled and swallowed hard, “You-you mean the-the big man?”

“Yes. Most newbies call him the King, but the rest of us call him El Toro; the Bull. He is the one who brought you to me. He paid your bill or I would have dumped you back into the dirt where he found you. Your impudence caught his attention, but in the best of ways. You are one lucky boy.”

Jesse didn’t feel very lucky. The doc read the expression on his face. He frowned, “Get up.”

He did so, albeit slowly and painfully. Just the simple act of sitting upright had him gasping for breath. His ribs were on fire.

“Come here and tell me what you see,” the man said, gesturing out the window. The young man shuffled to stand before it. He looked out the grime-covered glass to see a grime-covered shanty town. As far as the eye could see was an enormous slum, filled with poorly-constructed houses. The border was a giant wall that encircled them. At the center was the mine. Men walked slowly to and from it. They were covered in black coal-dust. Everything was covered in it. Even the places the sun touched were still black as midnight. It was the darkest place Jesse had ever seen.

“I see...black.”

“You look, but you don’t see. What is out there is a world that is different in many ways from the world you know, but it is the same in all the most important ones- the strong rule over the weak, to be rich is to be powerful, to eat you must work, and the thing a man wants most at night is a woman.”

“But, I don’t understand. This is a men’s prison. There is no money here, and there are no women.”

“On all accounts you are wrong. This is a prison work camp, but it is also a coal mine that supplies half of the cities on this moon. You are a prisoner, but you are also free labor. Without reward, a man will only work hard enough to survive, but the ones who run this prison are smart. They’ve got a system set up. Mining coal earns you credits. The credits are stored to your shackle and there are transfer scanners throughout the camp.”

Jesse glanced down at the black band around his wrist. They had locked it on him when he arrived. He had assumed it was some sort of tracker. The prison guard had bothered to tell him when he asked, and he’d had more important things on his mind. At least now he knew what it was for, and what it was called- a shackle, how appropriate.

The doc continued, “Each coal bucket weighs fifty pounds and is worth one credit. It takes 2000 pounds to fill a 1 ton coal car. You fill a coal car in a day, you walk away with 40 credits to spend. One hot meal costs 10 credits. You want three meals a day, well, that’ll cost you 30 credits and that's just about as much coal as the average man can mine. But they’ll work hard and go hungry to get even just a little bit ahead cause once you get some credits tucked away, you can afford some niceties; a lock for your door, a blanket for the winter, some nice socks, new boots, playing cards and a bottle of moonshine. There’s lots of things a man wants beyond his needs. But, more than those things, what is it the one thing a man wants most?”

Jesse shrugged because he was overwhelmed.

“A woman.”

“But there are no women.”

“Look closer.”

Jesse squinted through the filmy window and for a long moment he just watched. Men came and went from the mine. They were not allowed to take their equipment outside the fence around the base of the main shaft. Jesse shuddered to think about a prison full of violent convicts having unrestricted access to sharp pickaxes. They checked their lights, helmets and axes in and then exited through a pair of metal gates. Just outside the gates, a number of smaller men waited. For what, he couldn’t tell, but they weren’t dressed anything like the miners. In fact, he couldn’t seem to figure out what they were wearing. It kind of looked like bedsheets?

Finally, he just asked, “What are those men wearing?”

“Dresses.”

A cold ache began in his belly as he continued to watch. The smaller men preened for attention from the tired miners as they filed out. Every so often one would stop to talk and it ended with a husky miner throwing his arm over the littler man’s skinny shoulders. They walked away together.