And she had fire now. Audrey felt it coiled somewhere deep inside her, restless and waiting. The heat triggered something in her memory—smoke, shouting, the smell of something burning that wasn’t wood. Audrey shoved the thought away before it could form.
Then the truth settled in, though, refusing to be ignored.
The fire inside her didn’t feel new—it felt remembered.
What the hell have I become?
Across from her, Taryn’s wide eyes followed the burn along Audrey’s thigh and the bruising on her face. Audrey gave her a crooked, bloody smile.
“It’s fine. Totally fine,” she said, which made no sense even to her.
Taryn crawled carefully over the metal floor and gently used her shirt to wipe the blood off Audrey’s mouth.
The simple tenderness stunned her. Audrey tried to say thank you, but only broken air came out. Taryn nodded as if she understood anyway. Audrey didn’t know what to do withthe kindness from someone who owed her nothing. It felt more dangerous than cruel.
They rode in that metal box all day, jostled like bodies in a mass grave, thirst gnawing at their tongues until they barely felt like their own. Then, they stopped.
Audrey glanced through the dirty glass window. Nepra had grown darker and colder the closer they got to Home Field—an iron lung of a planet. The trunk bed’s door squeaked open.
Nikos’s smile was gone.
His eyes were coals.
“I hope Basir’s doing well,” Audrey taunted, baring her teeth.
Nikos lugged her from the truck by her shirt as if she weighed nothing. “Don’t say another word. Your life is about to become extremely uncomfortable. And this was supposed to be the easy part.”
“Aww, Nikos.” Audrey batted her lashes mockingly. “I’m a terrible captive.”
He gave her his fist instead of a reply.
Enjoyable was notthe word for the days that came after.
She and Taryn received one meal a day—barely food, it was just scraps of simple dried meat and stale bread with so many seeds inside that Audrey almost gagged on one. Water came in the tiniest of droplets.
Worse, their wrists were zip-tied to bedposts at night whenever they stopped at a safe house.
The cuffs dulled what she could do.
The zip ties meant they didn’t trust dulling alone.
Sometimes they drove until they reached a breaking point, with Nikos pushing them harder every day to reach Home Field.
Basir—horrifyingly still alive—woke with fresh enthusiasm for watching them bathe, leering and rifling their naked bodies with hands and eyes. Audrey caught the bitter edge of something behind his gawking—a need to confirm he still had power, maybe, after nearly dying. Nikos had mentioned one night that Basir's wife ran off with an Aggregate security enforcer years ago. Ever since, he’d proven himself with cruelty, insisting he was harder and more loyal than anyone else. Now, his eyes crawled with both hunger and old, pervasive resentment, as if punishing them made him less the victim of his own history.
Audrey had never felt so humiliated—not even in prison. At least there, cruelty followed rules.
Here, cruelty was in the air.
She listened to Taryn’s muffled screams at night, her voice breaking against the thin walls, and prayed—actually prayed—that Emerson was somewhere out there, closing in as Audrey led him toward Ryker. By the bruises on Taryn’s face the next morning, they were already torturing her for information. They hadn’t even waited for Home Field.
Every time Audrey looked at her after that, Taryn looked smaller and harder at once.
The closer they got to the main base, the more Audrey’s hope lived on a thread, and she was almost out of thread.
Every part of Nepra looked the same: dust, metal wind, a sky that never brightened.
After four days in the truck, they set out on foot, walking until Audrey’s injured thigh burned, her hunger changed into nausea, her thoughts fraying. Her mouth was gagged, which was Nikos’s personal gift for “talking too much.”
