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“And the unattached adults?” Eagan asks.

“Men for labor assessment. Women to the domestic registry, unless they volunteer for the blood banks. Anyone who’s sick goes to the infirmary first.” He pauses. “I don’t want corpses stinking up my processing center.”

My nails dig crescents into my palms as they talk about people. Mothers, daughters, fathers, sons. Human beings with names they haven’t bothered to learn.

“Why?” They both glance at me as if they’d forgotten I was standing here. I point toward the children being counted below, a cluster of small bodies huddled together, when I notice that none of the children wear chains like the adults. “Why would you buy children? What use could a child be to the Vampire King?”

Kylian’s expression doesn’t change. Not a flicker of guilt, not a trace of discomfort. He looks at me the way one might look at someone who has asked why the sky is blue, with faint, impatient condescension.

“Because one day they grow into working adults and blood donors.”

I open my mouth to spit something venomous back at him, but my gaze catches on movement below, and the retort dies on my tongue.

A guard is carrying a toddler.

Not dragging, not shoving, carrying the child balanced on one hip. His small fist clutches the collar of the guard’s uniform while the guard walks him toward the children’s area, shaking a toy to make the kid giggle. Another guard is unlocking the chains on a man while another boy cries and points in his direction. He can’t be older than eight. The guard uncuffs the man he is pointing at and removes the shackles entirely rather than just loosening them. The man rubs his wrists, and the guard says something to him, something I can’t hear from this height, but the man nods and walks to the children’s group on his own, scooping up the child, which must be his son. He is then led to an area where a few other families were taken.

A woman clutching two children is sorted to the left, and instead of separating her from her kids, the guard writes something down and waves all three of them through together. The woman’s face crumples with relief, and she holds her children tighter as she’s led away.

The contradiction makes my head ache. Because this is still monstrous. They are still prisoners of our cruel world. Still being sorted like grain. But the children aren’t shackled. The families aren’t torn apart. And the sick are being sent to an infirmary rather than left to rot in a hold.

I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know how to hold the image of a guard carrying a toddler in the same mind as the knowledge that these people are being processed as property. The two truths grate against each other, and I want to reject one or the other, but I can’t because both are happening simultaneously right in front of me.

A group of men, perhaps twenty, are unchained from the main line and directed toward a separate path leading away from the quadrangle. They’re the healthiest of the lot, broad-shouldered and standing straighter than the rest, their expressions ranging from resigned to defiant. Guards flank them on both sides, leading them toward a stone building farther down the road.

“Where are they taking them?” I ask, my voice steadier now though my stomach churns.

Kylian follows my gaze. “Labor camps. They’ll be assessed for skills and assigned work. Construction, farming, fishing, whatever the kingdom needs. They earn wages, small ones, but enough to buy provisions and eventually, if they behave, better housing.”

“So they’re servants who get paid,” I say flatly.

His jaw tightens. “They’re alive,” he says, and there is something in his tone that almost sounds like he’s daring me to argue the point. “Which is more than Zander would give them. His labor camps don’t come with wages or provisions as you saw in Purgatory for the last two years.”

I hate that he has a point. I hate that every time I try to build a wall of righteous anger, he finds a crack in it and forces something complicated through. Because he is right. I know Purgatory Island like I know the back of my hand. I’ve seen firsthand the flesh markets, been in the cages, witnessed the way humans are discarded like waste. This is still chains and ownership, but it is a different shade of it, and the distinction sickens me because it shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter that the cage is cleaner if it is still a cage.

The thought makes me feel like a traitor to everyone back home, and I grip the railing harder, watching the last of the humans being led away in their separate directions. Which direction would Sable have been sent? Which table would she have stood at? Which guard would have grabbed her jaw and checked her teeth? Would her mismatched eyes have made them pause or write her off as damaged goods?

My throat closes around a sound I refuse to make, and I stare at the emptying pier while the clanking of chains fades into the growing dark. A shout rings out loudly, sharp enough to jerk my attention from the emptying pier to the flurry of movement near the far end of the dock where the last stragglers from the ship are being processed.

A guard is struggling with someone. Not the careful, mechanical handling I’ve been watching for the past hour, something appears to be happening as a scuffle breaks out, drawing every eye on the pier. I lean forward against the railing, squinting through the fading light, a man is hunched and bloodied, his clothes so soaked through with grime and dark stains that it’s impossible to tell what color they once were. He’s lean but muscular, yet he struggles to walk as if his legs are barely holding him up.

The guard shoves him, and the man staggers, his chained hands catching the edge of a crate as he tries to keep himself upright. He fails. His knees buckle, and he hits the wet stone of the pier hard enough to make me gasp. The guard looms over him, saying something I can’t make out, and I expect the man to stay down. Anyone with sense would stay down. Anyone who has survived long enough in this world to end up in chains knows that the ground is the safest place when a predator stands above you.

He doesn’t stay down.

His hands press flat against the stone, arms shaking violently, and he pushes up slowly. Every inch of the agonizing movement shows that whatever they’ve done to him hasn’t been enough. The guard’s fist connects with the side of his face, making me cringe, and the man’s head snaps sideways. Blood arcs from his mouth in a thin spray that catches the torchlight. He drops again, harder this time, his body crumpling into the mud that has formed where stone meets dock water.

And still he rises.

Something in my chest cracks watching him, because I know what that kind of stubbornness costs. I know the way your body screams for you to stop and your mind screams louder to keep going, because staying down means surrendering the last scrap of yourself that hasn’t been taken.

Footsteps stomp behind me, and Eagan moves to the balcony’s edge to find out what is going on, his ledger tucked away now. A faint smirk plays at the corner of his mouth as he watches the commotion below with the detached amusement of someone watching a dog chase its own tail.

“He’s going to be fun to break, that one,” Eagan says, leaning his forearms on the railing. “Apparently he’s been giving the guards hell since we left Malachor despite his injuries. Won’t eat, won’t sit, keeps fighting them any chance he gets like he wants them to kill him. He had to be restrained three times during the voyage.”

Kylian barely glances down, his lip curling with something between irritation and disinterest. “Gives too much trouble, he’ll find himself drained at the blood bank and in a shallow grave.”

“It would be a shame. He’d be a good worker,” Eagan says. Kylian turns his head slowly, one brow rising.