When she finally sat, when the water rose to her chest and the shower hammered against her skull, something inside her cracked. Not bone this time. Something deeper, something that had been clawing its way to the surface.
The first cry surprised her. It tore from her throat without permission, raw and broken. Her hands came up to cover her face, and that’s when the rest came—great heaving sobs that made her broken ribs scream, that sent fresh blood trickling from split skin.
She saw them behind her eyelids. Saw every single one of them. A silent choir of the dead. The woman with the swollen eye, voice raised in trembling song until that single shot turned everything to chaos. The man with no legs, spine straight against the floor, chin lifted in one last act of defiance. The young one, too young, handing away his gruel with a smile before they’d painted the walls with his blood.
They died because of her.Because of her failure. If she’d killed Greyson, if she’d pulled that trigger, she would’ve never been in that prison, would’ve never told them what she’d done. They would’ve never started singing.
She didn’t want this.
Didn’t want to be anyone’s symbol, to be anyone’s leader. But in that moment, when the first note rang out, she knew they’d made her one. With their voices raised in that forbidden anthem, with their blood spilled, they’d turned her into something she never wanted to be. Given her a responsibility she couldn’t carry.
The weight of that truth suffocated her.
They’d given their lives for something greater, something bigger than her or Greyson. They’d given their lives for hope of a better future.
Shadera had no hope for New Found Haven.
She curled forward, her knees drawn to her chest despite the agony it caused, and let herself break completely. Her shoulders shook with the force of it, tears mixing with water and blood. Daggermouths don’t cry, but here, if only for a moment alone in this obscene luxury, she let herself be human.
Jameson would have held her through this. Even when she snarled at him not to touch her, even when she insisted she didn’t need anyone’s comfort, he would’ve wrapped those scarred arms around her and refused to let go. He knew her tells, knew when her anger was really grief wearing a mask. She could almost feel his presence, the way he’d press his forehead to the back of her neck and just breathe with her until the storm passed.
Now she’d dragged him into danger all because she couldn’t see past her need for revenge. Those drones following him were her fault. If Maximus decided to make an example, if he leveled the clinic where Jameson volunteered—
Another sob ripped through her. How many more would die because she’d hesitated? Because she’d wanted Greyson to see her face when she killed him? Her need for that moment of recognition, of making him understand why she was ending him, had cost everything.
The water turned pink around her, tinted with blood that kept seeping from various wounds. She watched it swirl, remembered how it’d pooled on the prison floor.
One wrong word, one act of defiance from her now, and Maximus would burn the Boundary to ash. He’d kill hundreds, maybe thousands, just to prove he was in control.
She pressed her forehead to her knees, water cascading over her curved spine. Some trauma carved itself so deep, it became part of your skeleton. She would carry those prisoners’ faces forever, would see them every time she closed her eyes. Their sacrifice was hers to carry now, and she would not let them down.
“I just wanted to kill him,” she whispered to the water, to the steam, to the void. “I just wanted to watch him die.”
Instead, the Executioner still breathed while those who’d sung for her were being shoveled into mass graves.
The sobs gradually faded, their ragged edges blurring to silent tears, then to nothing at all. She sat in the cooling water until her skin pruned, until the shower’s endless cascade numbed into white noise. When she stood, every muscle protested. And when she finally turned off the water, the silence felt like another kind of drowning.
The clothes Chapman left were nothing like her own—soft fabric that didn’t know what work felt like. Shadera dug through the pile, settling on an oversized T-shirt. She groaned as she pulled it over her head, the material ghosting over bruises as if it was afraid to touch them. No pants, just the shirt that fell past her thighs.
Her legs carried her over the threshold of the bathroom to the bedroom, her feet moving through muscle memory alone. The mattress was another obscenity—thick enough it could be sliced into ten separate sleeping pads to fill the rings’ clinics with a thread count that probably exceeded most Boundary credit accounts.
She fell onto it sideways, not bothering to pull back the covers, not bothering to find a pillow. Her body simply stopped working, stopped responding to any command except collapse.
The floor-to-ceiling window stretched beside the bed, offering a view of New Found Haven that she’d never seen before. The city sprawled below in concentric rings of light—brightest at the Heart, dimming as it spread outward until the Boundary was just a smudge of neon and dotted fires at the edges. From up here, you couldn’t see the suffering. Couldn’t smell the rot. It all looked clean, organized,controlled.
Her eyes grew heavy watching those lights, counting the levels between her and the ground.
Seventy-eight floors.
Even she couldn’t survive that fall. The thought should’ve disturbed her. Instead, it felt like comfort, knowing there was at least one exit they couldn’t lock.
Sleep took her quickly between one breath and the next, dragging her down into nightmares of singing voices and spreading blood.
Dawncamelikeviolencethrough the window. Not gentle, not gradual—just sudden light striking her swollen eye and sending pain straight through her skull. Shadera jerked awake, body rigid with the expectation of attack.
Every injury announced itself in a symphony of agony. Her ribs had stiffened overnight, making each breath feel like swallowing glass. The fractured collarbone had swollen further, the entire left side of her torso now a singular territory of hurt.
She pushed herself upright, teeth clenched against the whimper that wanted to escape. Movement below caught her attention—shadows flowing through the plaza like water finding its level.Elites. Hundreds of them, gathering in the morning light, forming neat lines with the practice of those who’d done this before.
