Chapter 309: Four for the Hour.
"You lot don’t know anything about tough." The voice came clear through the noise. "I’ve seen tougher shit than any of you have imagined."
A wall of protest came back at her from four or five men at once, that particular kind of shouting people only do at somebody they’ve already decided they like—loud, overlapping, almost affectionate in its aggression.
The hallway ran under a low red light that made everything in it look like something else. Skin the colour of old brick. Eyes too dark. The air was warmer here, thicker, carrying the continuous low roar of the factory floor ahead of us and the sharp edge of machine oil that had never quite left the walls.
I think we’re properly trapped now.
Venna’s thought arrived while we walked, clean and private, and she was right, and I didn’t have a way to tell her so.
Trapper stopped at the far end, at a heavy curtain hanging where a door should have been. The fabric was dark and thick, the kind that swallowed light. Whatever Bagins was building, it was on the other side of that. The chanting poured through the gaps around the edges in continuous waves.
Behind us Linn was mumbling continuously, a low unbroken stream of complaint aimed at nobody—the rope, the walking, the whole night, the particular unfairness of still being alive inside it.
The tattooed boy squeezed past us from the back and reached Trapper, pulled the curtain aside a hand’s width, and the light that came through was white and hard after the corridor. It cut a bright rectangle across the floor and turned the dust in the air into slow, shining points.
The boy gestured for us to follow and stepped through.
We went after him.
The room was enormous. An old factory floor, machinery long gone, the concrete scarred with the ghosts of bolt holes and oil stains that had outlasted whatever used to stand there.
Hundreds of people spread across it in loose groups. Talking. Laughing. Sitting on crates and against pillars with the specific looseness of people on a break between things.
Working lights hung from the high ceiling in uneven clusters, throwing hard white pools across the floor and leaving the upper corners in shadow. The air smelled of sweat, dust, and the particular metallic tang of too many bodies in a space that had never been designed for living in.
I kept my eyes on Venna’s back as we threaded through. The blue of her hair was the only fixed point I trusted. Whatever else happened in here, I wanted to be able to see her.
Then I heard it properly.
"I fucked a crazy man outside the walls." My head turned and I found her, sitting up on a stack of pallets with her boots swinging. The light caught the edge of her grin. "That was the last thing he ever did. Died happy."
Mercury.
She didn’t see me. She was mid-story with six men around her and every one of them shouting her down, and she was enjoying it enormously—shoulders loose, hands moving, the same restless energy she’d carried in the car the day we walked out of the yard full of bodies.
The men around her were laughing and protesting in equal measure. She looked completely at home.
She walked out of Sinn’s office yesterday morning and this is where she landed.
Behind me Linn pressed up against my back as we walked, and I lost the angle, and then the crowd closed and Mercury was gone behind it—swallowed by shoulders and crates and the continuous low roar of the place.
We came to the front of the room. Nobody paid us any attention at all. Four people with their hands tied being walked through the middle of them and not one head turned, which told me more about this place than anything else had. People here had already decided what mattered and what didn’t. Four more bound bodies were just inventory.
The boy went through another door and we followed.
A small room. Somebody’s office once. Cobwebs across the corners in long, undisturbed sheets. A thin table in the middle, the wood scarred and uneven.
A heavy-bearded man sitting behind it, the beard going grey at the edges, the eyes above it sharp and tired and completely without surprise. The light in here was lower, yellower, the kind that made the cobwebs look almost decorative.
"Welcome back." He smiled at the boy. The smile didn’t reach the eyes. "Sit down, all of you."
The tattooed boy stayed standing, his weight shifting once from one foot to the other.
The rest of us took chairs. Venna beside me—close enough that her knee found mine. Trapper right up against the table, jaw still set, the silence on him denser than before. Linn at the far end, closest to the door, which I noticed she’d chosen on purpose. Her eyes kept moving to the exit and back.
The boy moved behind us and untied our hands, one at a time, unhurried. The rope left raw, pale bands across my wrists. Blood returned to my fingers in a slow, tingling rush.
"What have you brought me, boy?" the bearded man asked. His hands were folded on the table. The knuckles were scarred.
"Four ability users." Real pride in it. The boy’s chest lifted a fraction.
"Four." He sat back. The chair creaked. "Four in the last hour. The professor is going to be very pleased." He turned to us and started with Trapper. The eyes moved slowly, assessing. "What’s your ability?"
"Pussy leaker," Trapper said flatly.
All three of us went, badly, despite everything. The laugh tore out of me before I could stop it—short, raw, completely without dignity. Venna’s shoulder shook once against mine. Even Linn made a sound that might have been the start of one before she killed it.
The bearded man didn’t move a muscle.
"You think that’s funny."
He turned back to the boy. The smile was gone.
"Submit their report to the professor. He’ll meet us at the stage."
"Yes, sir."
The man stood up from behind the thin table. The movement was slow and deliberate. The chair scraped against the concrete. He looked at each of us in turn—Trapper, Venna, me, Linn—and the assessment in the look was complete and impersonal, the way a man looks at tools he’s about to put to use.
"Come with me," he said. "All of you. You’re going to be baptised into the camp."