“Sorry, Levi.”
I check the blade in my boot, the knife at my hip, the Kevlar under the dark jacket and move through the darkness, silent in my rubber soles.
The first alpha doesn't hear me as I slash the blade across his throat. I lower him slowly into the weeds. Chemical-copper up close, not human-copper. The smell sits metallic and synthetic on my tongue. It's wrong, but I keep moving.
The second male sees me. He comes at me fast. Too fast. His pupils are pinpricks. We grapple in the gravel. I land wrong on my shoulder and hiss through my teeth. He gets a fist into my ribs that would have cracked them if I weren't in Kevlar. I get an elbow under his jaw. His head snaps sideways and he staggers and for one clean second I have him, I have him, I'm back inside the body I trained for fourteen years, muscle memory taking over as the blade comes up. I drive it in under his ribs and twist. He drops.
A third male comes from my blind spot. He's big, all jacked-up muscle, chemical scent. I get my blade up and he goes through it like the steel isn't there. He throws me down, driving the breath out of my lungs.
I throw elbows, teeth, knees as he comes down on me. I bite down on a forearm and taste blood. I get one hand free and reach for the blade in my boot. Another male bears down on me. Something sharp goes into the side of my neck.
Cold hits first. Then heat blooms through me in slow, sick waves. My body stops responding like I’ve been severed from it somehow. My hands still exist. They just won’t close.
My tongue thickens behind my teeth. Aluminum and lemon coat my mouth — the chemical taste of heavy sedatives crawling up my throat. The ground pitches beneath me even though I know I’m lying flat.
“I'd kill this bitch if he didn't want her alive,” a male pants.
“Then you'd be on that chopping block instead of her,” another replies, spitting blood.
My scent goes thin and sour underneath the ozone flooding in.Kev. Aubrey. Espie. Lex. Ez—I should have stayed.
Darkness.
I come back in pieces. The floor is moving, my whole body swaying to the tune of wheels over rails. The rhythm tells me I'm on a train. I'm upright and seated in a metal chair, wrists cuffedto the armrests, ankles cuffed to the front legs, the chair bolted to the deck. Whoever built this has done it before.
My boots are gone, the jacket, the blade, the knife, the watch, the belt. Everything useful has been stripped. I crack my eyes to see the bare inside of a cargo hold.
A gradient change comes up through the deck as the train slows, the oscillation lengthening, the pitch dropping. Down, down, down we go. It takes a while before we ease to a stop with a hiss and a soft final jolt. The silence after is absolute.
The bulkhead door opens. Two bulked-up males step inside, carrying the same chemical-ozone wrong-scent as the ones at the loading dock. They don't speak. One unlocks my ankles. The other keeps both hands on my shoulders and I test his grip and he doesn't move a millimeter. The drug is still in me. My legs aren't fully mine yet.
“Get up, bitch,” the first one says.
The second alpha puts a hand on my arm to move me toward the door and I wrench sideways, one hard pull, and for about one second I have my arm back. He slams his fist into my cheek. The world goes white as my legs buckle. My ear rings. The taste of blood spreads across the back of my tongue where I've bitten my cheek.
“Walk,” he says. Same flat voice.
My legs don’t work right, so they drag me through the connecting vestibule into the next car. The smell of unwashed bodies and fear-sweat stings my nostrils as the males drag me past a wall of cages bolted to the carriage.
In the first cage, a woman has her knees pulled to her chest. The bruising along her shoulder has gone yellow-green, which means it's been there at least a week. In the second cage, a young man sits vacant, track marks inside both elbows. In the third cage, two omegas share the space, holding each other and silently crying.
The fourth cage holds Isla Wilson. Her hair is matted and she's shaking. Her eyes find mine before she drops her face to her knees, hugging herself.
The alpha pulls me forward, off the train and onto a platform. Green tile, cracked, worn smooth in the center, with iron fretwork above black with grime.
One wall has a space where letters used to be. The mounting holes are still there. Someone pried the letters off and scratched at the tile underneath, trying to erase what was there. They did a bad job. The ghost of the letters is right there in the paler grout: A-S-H-C-R-O-F-T. This is Ashcroft station but found nothing.
The train pulls out. The rising pitch, the displacement of air in the tunnel, the diminishing hum of the wheels. Isla, moving away into the dark.
“Where are they going?” My words are thick.
One of the males lifts his lip. “None of your fucking business.”
He jerks me to move with him. Two exits are visible from here: the tunnel where the train pulls out of and a sealed archway at the far end. The males drag me to the archway. Beyond it, a short corridor. At the end, a lift with a scratched blood-red floor.
The males push me in. The doors close. The lift descends. The number five lights on the panel, and we come to a jerky stop. The doors open onto a corridor that smells of antiseptic. Strip lighting overhead, one tube stuttering at the far end. The betas walk me to a door on the left, key it open, push me through.
The room is small with concrete walls, another metal chair bolted to the floor, a drain set into the concrete beneath it, and a single bulb in a wire cage overhead. There is nothing else.
