Too many.
Someone grabs the back of my jacket and hauls me upright. I swing again, but it’s pointless.
A spear haft slams into my ribs. Another fist crashes into the side of my head, and the world tilts violently.
Voices shout around me.
“Hold him!”
“Don’t let him reach the door!”
I try to push forward. Try to break through them. But there are too many bodies pressing in now.
A wall of armour and muscle.
The last thing I see before everything fades is the warehouse door. So close. Just a few metres away. Then something heavy smashes into the back of my skull.
And the world goes dark.
CHAPTER
FIVE
I come backto myself in stages.
First there’s pain.
Not sudden—not immediately. Just a deep, ugly ache spread across half my body like something large and methodical has gone through me and tested every rib for weakness. My head throbs in time with my pulse, heavy and wrong, and there’s a copper taste at the back of my throat that tells me I’ve either bitten my tongue or bled enough into my mouth to make the difference irrelevant.
Then there’s the cold.
Stone underneath me. Damp in the air. The sort of chill that creeps into your bones and stays there.
I keep my eyes shut for another second and take stock the way I’ve taught myself to do in bad situations. Fingers. Toes. Breathing. Nothing feels missing. That’s a nice start. My right side hurts when I drag in a deeper breath, which probably means bruised ribs and maybe one cracked. My shoulder is on fire. My head feels like someone tried to split it with a crowbar. There’s dried blood stiff in my hair near the base of my skull.
So.
Not dead.
Not yet.
I open my eyes.
The cell is smaller and cleaner than I expected. Not spotless—there’s mildew in the corners where damp has been allowed to settle into the mortar, and the bucket in the far corner smells exactly as bad as buckets in cells always smell—but it isn’t a dungeon from an old fantasy film either. The walls are fitted stone, pale grey under the weak light spilling in through the barred hatch in the door. There’s a narrow cot bolted to one wall with a thin mattress on it, the kind designed less for comfort than for reminding you that someone else decides whether you sleep at all.
No windows.
No visible way out.
The air tastes faintly metallic.
I push myself upright too quickly, and the room lurches. Black spots crowd the edges of my vision for a moment, and I sit very still until they pass. My wrists aren’t bound. That’s something. My boots are gone, though. Jacket too. They’ve left me in my shirt, which is ripped at the shoulder and stiff with dried blood and canal muck.
I touch the back of my head carefully and hiss.
Yeah. That’ll do it.
For a while I just sit here with my feet on the floor, elbows braced on my knees, breathing through the pain and trying not to think too hard about how badly this could go.
