NEZAVEK
The Bone Collector's trail has gone cold.
I taste it in the warehouse air: his particular brand of frozen cruelty, days old now, mixed with the fresher stench of desperation and greed. Another dead end. Another failure to add to centuries of them.
The warehouse thrums with a hundred heartbeats. A Zelthani merchant watches the stage, poison sacs pulsing beneath his jaw. A four-armed Korthani taps calculations into his wrist display. They're here for flesh, for service, for whatever fantasy they've constructed about owning a human.
None carry the Collector's signature, that specific chill that makes reality itself recoil.
I turn to leave. One more wasted journey. One more…
The world shifts.
Not physically. Something deeper. A resonance that cuts through the void's hungry whispers and makes my dispersing consciousness snap back into focus. I pivot toward the source.
A woman stands on the auction block. Silver hair. Scarred hands. She holds herself like someone who knows exactly how many ways she can kill with ordinary objects. But that's not what pulls me.
It's the frequency humming beneath her skin.
I send a testing pulse through the void, invisible to everyone but her. She doesn't flinch. Doesn't even blink. The resonance bounces back clean and strong.
Perfect.
The auctioneer drones through her specifications. The bidding starts low. The Zelthani raises a webbed hand. The Korthani counters. They see meat. I see salvation wearing a silver dress and an expression that promises violence.
"Fifty thousand," I say.
The warehouse goes quiet. Even the air seems to pause.
The auctioneer recovers first, voice cracking slightly. "Fifty thousand. Going once, twice." A pause. "The choice of patron falls to the asset, as is tradition."
She looks at the Zelthani. At the Korthani. Then her gaze finds me in the shadows, and something passes between us. Recognition, but not the kind she thinks. She lifts her hand and points directly at me.
"Him."
The word carries across the warehouse. Deliberate. Calculated.
I study her as I approach the platform. No fear in her posture. No trembling. Just that coiled readiness of someone waiting for the right moment to strike. She thinks she's hunting something.
How interesting.
YORIKA
ONE HOUR EARLIER...
The antechamber stinks of desperation and cheap perfume. Fifteen women wait on stone benches, backs straight, hands folded. We're not supposed to speak, but the silence is its own conversation: shallow breathing, rustling fabric, the quiet sob someone's trying to swallow.
A scrying mirror dominates the far wall, black obsidian polished to impossible smoothness. It shows the auction floor in real-time, no sound, just images. A girl stands on the platform now, maybe twenty, wearing a yellow dress that washes out her complexion. The dress was probably her best. Now it looks like surrender.
The bidding must be active. Shapes in the crowd raise hands, tentacles, whatever passes for agreement in their species. A Vorn steps forward when the auctioneer gestures. The girl nods quickly, desperately. A murmur runs through our antechamber. Vorns have reputations for being gentle. Sometimes the stories about lucky brides are even true.
The woman beside me has been smoothing the same wrinkle in her dress for ten minutes. Brown hair, calloused hands, the kind of worn-down tired that comes from years of factory work. She introduced herself earlier, Lessa, though I didn't ask.
"Three thousand credits," she whispers, watching the mirror. "That's what they said I could get. Three thousand would get my brothers out of the textile district. Maybe apprentice them somewhere clean."
Her brothers. Always someone's brothers, sisters, parents. The Shift left humans at the bottom of everybody's food chain, and we've been selling pieces of ourselves ever since. At least she has people worth selling herself for.
I had a sister once.
