Nyara’s lips twisted. “Yeah.” She lifted her chin toward the other cells. “There are over a hundred of us here. Humans, Pandraxians, others. Most of the Guardians you’ve seen—the silver-skinned ones—they are the result. Created by taking women like us and making us bear what should never have lived.”
I looked around again, really looked. A woman with pale green skin crooned to the air, as if rocking an invisible child. Another lay curled on the floor, a drone hovering beside her, tubes feeding into her arm while her eyes rolled back with exhaustion. The buzzing hum of machines filled every silence, tracking pulses, recording data, always watching.
I pressed my forehead to the bars. “How long?”
Nyara’s eyes were hard. “For me, mooncycles—months. For some, suncycles—years. The Ohrurs don’t waste their investments. They keep us alive as long as we can keep producing.”
My throat burned, and my body trembled with fury, but fury was useless without escape. Still, I couldn’t stop the words. “I won’t let them do that to me.”
Her laugh was sharp and entirely humorless. “You think you’ll have a choice?”
I flinched but held her gaze.
Across the row, another prisoner whispered something in a language my translator didn’t catch. Nyara respondedwithout looking, a short reply that ended the exchange. She turned back to me, but before she could say a word, several of the guards—Ohrurs, according to Nyara—passed again. Their oversized heads bobbed, and their nostril slits flared as they sniffed the air. One stopped at my cell, tilting his head as if weighing me. Then he tapped his tablet, murmured something, and walked on.
Nyara muttered under her breath, “He likes what he sees. Be careful. They choose who goes first.”
The implication hit like ice down my spine.
I sank to the floor, wrapping my arms around my knees, my whole body shaking. I thought of Zaph, his hand on mine, his voice promising,You are not alone.He didn’t know where I was.Ididn’t even know where I was. But if I had anything left to cling to, it was him.
So I closed my eyes and whispered into the void,Zaph… please.
The hours blurred. Or maybe it was days—I couldn’t tell. There were no windows, only the steady pulse of light panels above us, dimming and brightening without pattern. Time was whatever the Ohrurs wanted it to be.
Food came twice, shoved through a narrow slit in the bars: a gray paste that tasted like wet chalk. Some women ignored it until they fainted. Then the drones came and fed them intravenously. I forced myself to swallow. If I got weak, I was lost.
Nyara talked. Maybe to pass the time, maybe because she liked it. “Do you know where you are, Ella?”
I shookmy head.
“Morrakbarr,” she said. “A hub for filth. Cryons, Moggadesh, Ohrurs, all of them use this place to trade. You’ve heard of the Cryons?”
My gut twisted. “Yes. They’re the ones who—” I stopped. I didn’t want to remember the cages, the auction.
Nyara nodded anyway, as if she could see the memory on my face. “They take. The Ohrurs build. And the Moggadesh enforce. Together, they make empires bleed. And we,” she gestured at the cells around us, “we are just raw material.”
A woman across from us coughed violently, doubling over. A drone zipped to her cell, extended a thin needle, and jabbed it into her arm. She sagged back against the wall, unconscious, while the drone beeped in satisfaction and moved on.
I hugged my knees tighter. “Why did they take you?” I asked.
Nyara’s jaw hardened. “Because we Pandraxians are strong. Our bodies endure what others cannot. That makes us valuable. But it also makes us dangerous.” Her eyes glinted. “We don’t break as easily as they think.”
Her words lodged inside me like a seed. Dangerous. I wanted to believe it.
Another prisoner leaned closer to her bars, a human woman with hollow cheeks and short-cropped hair. “Don’t fill her with false hope, Nyara. No one gets out. Not alive.”
Nyara didn’t flinch. “Maybe. But hope is the only weaponthey can’t strip from us.”
The human scoffed and curled back into her corner. I sat there, my back pressed to the cold wall, listening to the hum of the drones, the shuffle of prisoners, and the metallic echo of the Ohrurs’ long limbs clicking as they walked the rows. The place felt less like a prison and more like a factory.
I thought of Zaph again. His arrogance. His infuriating smirk. The way his eyes had burned amber when he looked at me. I clung to that image like a lifeline, whispering his name in my mind, though I still didn’t know if he could hear me.
Because if he couldn’t… then the Ohrurs had already won.
I lay curled on the cold slab until my muscles finally loosened, bribed into an uneasy sleep by the Ohrurs’ drugs and the drone’s steady hum. The cell was a blur of faces and breathing—small islands of light and shadow—and for a while, the world narrowed to the dull throb behind my eyes.
Then a voice cut through the fog like a blade.
