CHAPTER 13
JAELA
Iwake up with dirt in my mouth and blood in my ears.
Everything hurts. My ribs grind like broken tiles. My left eye’s swollen half-shut, and there’s a taste on my tongue like old metal and bile. Something warm trickles down the side of my neck. Not sweat.
I open my eyes.
Regret.
The ground’s black tarp, greasy with engine oil and gods-know-what else. Smells like piss and exhaust. The tent above me groans in the wind, pieced together from stitched-together polyfiber sails and bone lattice—ribs and femurs lashed tight with wire and sinew. Real bones. I count six different species without even trying.
“Unngh…”
That was me. Big mistake.
A boot nudges my ribs. I don’t move. Play dead.
Voices mumble nearby. Not proper speech—more like gutter code run through broken throat chips and old war slang.
“—caught her slippin’—crash dust still hot?—”
“—smelled clean. Earthskin. Tender?—”
A laugh. Wet. Ugly.
“Gonna break easy, that one.”
Something coils in my gut. Not fear. Not yet. Just the rage before the panic.
I keep breathing shallow, let my eyelids flutter just enough to see shapes. Four of them. One big—massive, really. The others hang back like mutts waiting for scraps.
The big one’s the chief. You can tell by the skulls wired into his chest plate and the extra set of cyber-jaws fused to his real ones. Glitching open and shut like a busted bear trap.
He’s looking at me like I’m meat he’s not sure how to cook yet.
My fingers twitch. Bad idea.
He crouches. His breath hits my face—smells like rot and motor grease.
“Awake now, little squeal?”
I don’t answer.
He grabs a fistful of my hair and jerks my head up. My neck screams. I bite my lip hard enough to draw blood and don’t give him the sound he wants.
“Feisty,” he grunts. “Bet that mouth’ll sing after we gut them shiny parts outta you.”
I see it then—the glint of salvage in his eyes. Not just lust. He sees my black-market implants, my subdermal ports, the barely-hidden neural linkages.
He seesprofit.
And pain.
He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with.
They bind my wrists with some kind of rust-wire tech—old repurposed cuffs running on a closed-loop spark battery. Enough to fry a lesser nerve stem. Too bad mine’s fried already.
