She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t take her gaze off Mylis.
“Your sister exposed him for the rat he is.” Iliana’s lip curled. “It’s unfortunate that dear Selene didn’t know who your allies were, but no matter. Rats have a way of overhearing things, and with the right amount of pressure…”
Kalie’s heart thundered as Wright set the bloody whip down and picked up a metal rod. As he flicked a switch, crackling arcs of electricity burst from the end of the staff. Wright rammed it into Mylis’s back. He convulsed helplessly, and his shrill screams sliced through Kalie.
“Stop!” she howled. She lunged towards Mylis, but her hand clawed through thin air.
“They break,” Iliana said, as Wright pulled the rod away, leaving Mylis spent and gasping for breath.
Blood dribbled down his shredded skin. Chains clinked together as he trembled, looking so lost and broken that a sob tore from Kalie’s throat.
“Let him go,” she pleaded. Her voice broke.
As Wright jabbed the crackling rod into Mylis’s back, Kalie’s blood ran cold, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. His agonized scream came again: desperate, terrified, alone. They yanked the rod away, and Mylis slumped forward, thrusting all his weight onto his contorted shoulders. Soft sounds of anguish slipped from his lips. His toes brushed against the puddle of filth, but the millimeters between his burned feet and the stone tiles seemed like an impossible chasm.
Tears seeped from Kalie’s eyes.
“You bitch!” Zane snarled, storming across the catwalk.
“Zander Wells, is it? Selene told me about you. I’m more than willing to let Grant go, to let all of you go, if Kalista turns herself in.”
“No way.” As Zane shifted in front of her, a vein in his neck jutted out. “I won’t allow it.”
Mira stepped to his side. “Not happening.”
Through the gap between their shoulders, Kalie stared helplessly at Mylis. Wright shocked him again. And again.
Iliana’s face could’ve been carved from stone. “Perhaps I should throw you in there with him. Let the traitors bleed together.”
Mira’s reply warbled around her, and something about her distant words made alarms sound in Kalie’s head. Her eyes were glued to Mylis thrashing in his chains, her thoughts were a muddled mess of horror, and what had Mira said, anyway? An offer of some sort, a trade, herself for…
“You’re of no interest to Carik.”
Mira laughed darkly. “No,” she said, in a hollow voice that didn’t sound at all like her, “no, I guess I’m not. But Hannover’s not going to turn herself in, so you might as well forget it.”
“Ah. I guess Grant is disposable. Perhaps…”
The video of Mylis shimmered and dissolved, but before Kalie could stammer a protest, another cell took its place.
The shadowy room was empty except for a pile of rags, lurking in the darkest corner.
None of the others were paying attention; Nadar had vanished, Mira murmured into her comm, and Julian conferred with someone outside his holo. Zane’s eyes were distant again. Frowning, Kalie turned to the empty cell.
The heap of rags shifted, and someone moaned.
The sounds reached her ears first—a screeching door, thudding boots, and pitiful shrieks. Legionnaires entered the frame. A swollen, bluish hand emerged from the rags, as if to fight them off, then dropped to the floor. A legionnaire tore a rag aside, revealing a bald figure with awful scars carved into its skull. The exposed gashes were the color of rot. Infected.
Kalie cringed.
Then the figure looked up, and every part of her body seized.
Her lips moved, but no sound came out. A weight pressed down on her chest. She desperately tried to move, but her numb legs cemented her to the spot.
The woman’s blackened eyes were swollen shut. Inflamed gashesand vicious burns surrounded sparse patches of pale skin. Her lips were two jagged streaks of blood, and her nose was a smashed, bloody mess, but her heart-shaped face gave her away.
Kalie gasped in a breath of pungent air. She tried to reach for her, but her arm was a limp, useless mass dangling at her side. The cavernous bridge faded away, the alarms popped out of existence, the shouts vanished into nothing. She alone existed in the world—she, and the video shimmering before her, and the woman whose face she saw every time she looked in the mirror.
“Ar… Ariah?” she croaked.
