Known.
Cary was not some artificial hope Audrey had invented to keep herself moving. She’d stood in this place. Breathed this air. Survived this machine somehow. If Cary had been here, her mother truly had brought her back to Nepra after the fire. She was the only thing on the other side of this place that still felt real enough to survive for. And her sister was somewhere inside this world, real enough to find.
It wouldn’t be easy. Mihail hadn’t seen Cary in years, and Emerson was loath to talk. Cary was smart, strategic, and clearly hard to find. If anyone could track her twin, it would be Audrey, though. She knew her sister as well as she knew herself.
The days continued to run together, and she saw others, too—officers, workers, officials—some dragged in bleeding, some shaking, some trying to bargain.
By the time Ryker finished with them, she no longer knew whether she was hearing confessions or sentences.
That was the part that disturbed her most. Some of the people dragged through these rooms were clearly brutal. Some were bureaucrats who had hidden behind paperwork when children went into the Fields and didn’t come back. Some might have signed orders that built places like this one, but what Ryker did to them was abhorrent.
One day, they brought in a man instead of Taryn. He looked as if he’d been up all night and was in bad shape.
He wore Aggregate security black, though most of it had been burned away. His eyes were open too wide. His mouth kept trying to form the same word, failing. When Audrey knelt next to him, he clutched her sleeve hard enough to tear it.
“Don’t let them test you,” he coughed out. “Not everyone can do what he needs.”
He muttered other things, too, things she didn’t understand.
“He doesn’t want all of them dead. He needs certain ones alive. The rare ones. The anchors,” he said, grabbing at his hair, his eyes wide with fear. “I told him about memories I didn’t know I remembered.”
She could only nod.
Then he started confessing to things Audrey had a hard time following—lists, disappearances, children processed through intake like inventory. But the shape of it emerged anyway. Ryker was a monster, yes, but some of the men he broke belonged to something uglier than she’d imagined. Someone, somewhere, had been deciding who was worth keeping, testing, and using.
Shortly after confessing to a litany of crimes, he died.
The next woman lasted long enough to share what she had done before Ryker opened her mind. She signed children into Field intake under false categories, rerouted names, and looked away when the weak ones vanished.
By the time she died, Audrey still wanted Ryker dead. She just no longer believed every person he broke had been innocent.
Audrey sat back on her heels, blood drying below her nails. Taryn had returned, and they both stared at the bodies as the guards took them away.
“That officer deserved to die, but he was right. Ryker is trying to build something with other Voíríans, and not everyone fits into his plan,” Taryn whispered after the door shut, leaving them alone.
“What exactly is his plan?” Audrey held her breath, waiting for the answer.
Taryn shrugged. “They said he needs stronger minds. Better ones. Linked ones.”
Audrey didn’t know exactly what he meant by linked ones, but the words conjured people connected by something deeper than blood—a network of minds able to do things an individual never could.
“Did they mention gold triads?” Audrey asked.
Taryn looked at her lap but didn’t respond right away. “Gold triads aren’t sent to the Fields. They’re fought over.”
“By who?”
“Everyone,” Taryn murmured darkly. “And if you said the Magister told you this is the year, then they’ll start taking the strongest first. So, if they move you downstairs for testing, don’t show them everything you can do.”
Then she crawled into bed, leaving Audrey to stew alone.
Home Field wasn’t just a base, and whatever waited for her in the sterile white questioning rooms she saw in the memories wasnot interrogation. It was an intake, part of a larger machine built to sort the useful from the disposable.
And she was still alive inside it.
If Cary had survived this place, she had done so by being moved, hidden, or claimed by someone. Audrey would learn how this machine handled the women it valued.
After, she would get to her sister first.
