“A dead warden is still useful, and killing your kind keeps our secrets. Secure him.”
The men holding their rifles on him stayed put. Several Daijalans obeyed her order, approaching him from the direction of the trucks. Soren took a step back, hands curling into fists as his eyes darted back and forth, looking for any way out of this mess.
“I wouldn’t try it,” the woman warned.
Behind her, a pair of automatons walked their way, Zip guns locked on Soren. He grimaced and didn’t fight the Daijalan who grabbed him by his good arm and yanked him forward. The man’s partner kept his pistol aimed at Soren’s head, not willing to touch his bloodied arm. They hauled him before the woman, who looked at him like he was a specimen in a lab to be studied and not a living being.
It reminded him of his days as a tithe, locked inside the tiny room where the transmutation process occurred after every injection of alchemy concoction was given him.
She reached out with her mechanical hand, the metal cold against his throat as she slid the prosthetic fingers beneath the collar of his shirt. Soren froze when she pulled free the vow he wore, the gold medallion bright against the black metal of her hand.
“This is the crest of the House of Sa’Liandel,” the woman said, tapping a metal finger against the roaring lion face on the medallion.
Soren met her gaze without blinking. “Is it? I wouldn’t know.”
“Doubtful. What’s a warden doing with something like this?”
“I took it off a body in the bogs,” Soren lied.
The woman stared at him for a long moment, some sort of recognition eventually seeping into her gaze. When she smiled, there was a shadow of cruelty to it that made Soren want to be anywhere else but within her reach. “Or it was given to you. Perhaps some years back as a thank-you for saving a particular prince’s life?”
Soren shrugged, ignoring how the motion made his arm hurt. “I deal with the dead, and sometimes that means keeping what they no longer have any use for.”
“You can keep it in your grave. I have orders to run all trespassers through the death-defying machine. No one can save you from that, not even a prince.”
She let the medallion go, and it hung heavy from Soren’s neck. He tried not to show his relief about keeping it. Losing Vanya’s vow would have left him feeling unmoored. He’d not taken it off since the morning Vanya gave it to him, the promise a reminder that had gotten him through the long hours of border patrol.
Losing it like this would’ve been unacceptable.
The woman stepped back and made an imperious motion with her metal hand. “Bring him to the warehouse, along with the rest of the debt slaves. Put the bodies in the quarry.”
The rifles still trained on him meant it would be foolhardy for Soren to attempt an escape. The Daijalans tightened their grip on his arms as they hauled him after the woman, heading to the nearest warehouse. The automatons took up guard position in the area, Zip guns swiveling around on their turrets as the machines kept watch.
Soren blinked to adjust his vision quicker as they came into the warehouse. He craned his head around, taking in the space with a quiet sort of horror that left him feeling sick to his stomach, the taste of bile in the back of his throat.
The cages that lined the walls of the warehouse were full of debt slaves, all of them alive and huddled together. Workers in fully enclosed suits were patching a hole in a holding area connected to a massive machine with a chamber at its center. The welding tools they used let off sparks that faded before hitting the floor.
A body in the holding pen was riddled with bullet holes, more raw meat than human-looking. Soren knew what a burst of Zip fire could do to a body, and it seemed whoever that person had been, they’d taken the brunt of such an attack.
“What is that?” Soren asked, heels skidding against the dirty floor as the Daijalan dragged him forward. A sharp tap from a pistol’s barrel against his skull made Soren reluctantly pick up his feet.
The woman ignored him, calling out in Daijalan at the people around her. Soren wasn’t fluent in that language, and he let the words wash over him, ignorant of their meaning. When the woman looked back at him, he didn’t much care for the anticipatory gleam in her eyes.
“Put him in the chamber.”
The barrel of a rifle dug into his spine as the man holding his uninjured arm dragged him forward. Soren didn’t know what the machine did, but he knew he didn’t want to find out. He dug in his heels and tried to twist out of the man’s grip. The pressure of the rifle left only to return in the form of a blow from the stock to his lower back.
Pain from the brutal hit had Soren hunching over, a throbbing agony spreading across his back and down his left leg. Soren gritted his teeth against the pain and managed to slide free the stiletto in his boot. When he came up again with the thin blade in hand, he lodged it between the rifleman’s ribs, piercing his heart.
He got one hand around the barrel of the rifle and yanked it free of the dying man’s hand. Before he could use it, something slammed against his head with enough force to make the warehouse spin and melt along the edges.
“Should we kill him?” someone asked.
“Let the death-defying machine do the honors,” the woman replied.
Soren went to his knees, breathing heavily through his mouth. Hands hooked under his arms and hauled him halfway to his feet before pitching him forward with brute strength. Soren landed on his hands and knees inside the wide chamber, the space large enough to house a dozen people, at least.
He stumbled to his feet, spitting out saliva and trying to breathe through the sudden nausea swirling in his gut. He staggered toward the opening, but before he could reach it, the door was slammed shut, locks sliding into place and sealing the only way out.
