Ysira pointed at the eye. “What does that mean?”
“I am a servant of the Firstborn Empire. You’ll have to kill me first.” Ysira twisted the woman’s arm behind her back until the shoulder dislocated. She screamed yet still refused to answer. But Ysira had enough information—and the woman’s terror—on which to make an educated guess.
“Hold still.”
Ysira held her by the neck with one hand, steadying her face as she pried open her eyelids. The woman choked and struggled uselessly with her good arm, left eye wide with horror as Ysira scooped out the right. The optic nerve tore, insubstantial as a spiderweb. She put the eyeball in her breast pocket. Then she slammed the woman against the wall like she’d done to Ertagaz.
Ysira returned to the panel and pressed the number7,then4.She held up the eyeball when prompted. The room—the elevator, though this was far different from the docks in Zivora—shot up.
The doors opened on a dark corridor, similar to the one near where Ysira had awoken. She stepped out, clutching the hammer, her every nerve alight and trembling.
She caught the first two men by surprise. They wore uniforms like the one behind her, whose remains still dripped down the walls. One let out a strangled yell. The other lunged. She shoved him. He hit the wall with acrunchand slid bonelessly to the floor.
His fellow stumbled. Before he could reach for a weapon, Ysira swung the hammer at him. It caved in his chest. Stuck there as he gurgled and died. She wrenched the hammer free. Half a ribcage came with it, shredded meat and fabric hanging off the bone.
“Drop it!” screamed a third man, though his face had gone stark white. “On your knees!”
A team of six flooded into the corridor after him, all small and slender with ridged faces and pointed ears. They pointed short, cylindrical devices at her. Clearly some sort of weapon. The way they sighted her evoked archers choosing a target. But where was the projectile? How would it reach her? The man’s confidence gave her pause.
She ran at him anyway. There was a noise like thethrumof a low-pitched instrument. Something hot and bright struck her in the stomach. He hadn’t touched her, hadn’t even moved. But she’d endured far worse than this. She shrugged off four more projectiles—several missed, as if they’d been too slow to sight her—and closed the distance.
Ysira had learned to fight in ankle-deep sand and heavy armor, under a vicious sun, against opponents two at a time and twice her size. In Zivora, that made her an above-average threat. Here . . . she moved between opponents moment to moment, breath to breath. She ducked and wove and spun, throwing themin front of each other’s weapons, shattering bones, not pausing until she reached the other end of the hall.
They hadn’t touched her. They never stood a chance.
Ysira broke the neck of the last man standing—one swift jerk that left his head hanging by scraps of sinew. As her passenger healed the cuts on her hands from his fragmented spine, she picked up his weapon. She quickly deduced how it worked, copying the motions she’d watched the others take.
A second team advanced around the corner. She turned the weapon on them. It proved intuitive. Projectiles of bright yellow light scorched limbs, melted innards. They died screaming, and all Ysira could think wasGood.
At the end of the hall, she limped into a vast open area, dragging her left leg as a ragged hole in her thigh knitted shut. The lights were so bright, she had to squint and shield her eyes. The area reeked of death—not natural decay but the way a corpse smelled after Ogden had stripped it and scrubbed it with lye. The stench of something sterile masking irreversible rot.
It stopped her in her tracks. And then . . . She remembered.
Tharanoth hadn’t dwelled on this memory; she hadn’t stayed on this station long before they moved her back to the canyon, but perhaps he’d knocked it loose when he was digging around in her head. Perhaps it was simply the shock of standing there again, eleven years later.
Every citizen of Zivora had asked themselves these questions:Where do the Harvested go? What happens to them?Ysira had long had her suspicions, and she’d already been forced to relive her own fate. But never in a thousand years could she have put words to this—at last, the answer.
It would have broken her to try.
A maze of box-shaped cells, glass walls streaked with dirt and grease. People riddled with tumors, gasping for air, clutching frozen, blackened appendages. A man with eight limbs, splayedon the ground like a spider. A woman slowly roasting beneath a poisonous orange light, the air around her rippling with heat. Someone who appeared to be growing an exoskeleton, sobbing against the wall of their cage. A pile of corpses—or was one still breathing?—melded together and mutilated beyond recognition.
In the cage beside the corpses, a little girl put her hand against the glass. She was no more than six years old, with a shaved head and a large birthmark on her cheek. Her empty eye sockets were ragged and bloody, but she appeared to sense Ysira’s presence. She opened her mouth as if to speak—or to scream—but only a stump remained of her tongue.
Ysira shot the cage. The brilliant gold projectile dissipated into the glass, harmless. She tried the hammer next, then her fists, beating against the barrier until her muscles trembled and she realized it was futile. She couldn’t free them. These prisoners had to be held by the highest security measures, because they wereherpeople. The Harvested. So much stronger than the monsters who kept them there, and rendered helpless all the same.
The girl turned her back on Ysira and sat. Shoulders slumped. Defeated.
Don’t stay, don’t look, you can’t help, find Neri.Ysira dragged herself away, repeating the words in a vain attempt to drown out everything else.Find Neri. Find Neri. Find Neri.
What if she was too late? She began to run. She had to check every cage before she moved on, had to be certain. She found no sign of him. Unless?—
Her heart shuddered and skipped a beat. The lone individual outside a cage had been pulled apart to the point they were barely recognizable as human—yet still alive. Attached to a myriad of tiny silver nodes, they had been made into a web of their own components. Their eyes, pulled far outside their skull, beheld Ysira with a horror so profound, she could not look away.
Blue eyes. Not Neri’s.
Ysira had bitten through her lip so hard, she tasted blood. She summoned the will to do what she’d have wanted for herself. She turned her weapon on the thing that had been a person and fired at every exposed organ and artery, until horror faded to a silent, final relief.
The next team of soldiers caught her off guard. Projectiles struck her twice. Three times. The pain was nothing compared to the blistering rage inside her. She slaughtered them one by one. When her stolen weapon stopped working and she lost track of the hammer, she used her bare hands. After a while, she stopped running. It made no difference. They caught her, and she killed them.
