Rumours.
If they had proof, I’d already be in chains. If they had proof, I wouldn’t be sitting in a locked room, waiting my turn. Thissmells like fishing. Dangerous fishing, sure, with the Crown holding the line, but still.
That means silence is safer than cleverness.
Or maybe not silence. Total silence can provoke its own kind of interest. But careful answers. Small answers. Boring answers. The kind that make a man seem useful but limited. A fixer. A trader in favours. A human who knows how to pass through districts because he pays the right guards and keeps the right machinery running, not because he’s moving people under the city.
I’ve done that version of myself before. I can do it again.
The hatch in the door slides open with a metal scrape, and I look up.
A pair of eyes studies me through the slot. Blue skin. Glowranth. Male, I think, though with the angle and the light, it’s hard to tell.
“You’re awake,” he says in his native tongue.
My throat is rough when I answer. “Observant.”
He doesn’t react.
“Prepare yourself. You will be questioned soon.”
The hatch slams shut.
That’s it. No threat. No timeline. No attempt to rattle me. Which is, somehow, worse.
I get up and pace the length of the cell twice, which is exactly four strides each way if I don’t want to clip the cot with my shin. My ribs object. My head objects. I ignore both.
Questioned soon.
Soon in places like this can mean ten minutes or six hours depending on whether the person armed with questions enjoys anticipation.
I crouch by the bucket, splash some water from the small jug beside it onto my face, and use the edge of the blanket to wipe away as much dried blood as I can. My reflection in thewater is no help. Brown skin gone ashy under bad light, one cheek swollen, shoulder-length locs half falling out of the tie I’d dragged them into this morning. There’s a bruise blooming at my temple and another across my jaw.
I look like someone who got jumped in the street, which is unsurprisingly accurate. I retie my hair with shaking fingers and sit back on the cot.
Waiting is its own kind of violence. There’s too much space in it for memory.
Thomas slips in where I don’t want him because he often does when I’m trapped somewhere and can’t move enough to outrun him. Not the good bits, such as they were. Not Coventry or Melbourne or the early days when I was twenty-four and stupid enough to mistake being chosen for being loved. What comes back is always the same handful of moments: the way he could switch from charm to contempt in the space of a breath; the cold embarrassment of covering a bruise with long sleeves despite the 42°C heat; the disbelief the first time he shoved me hard enough to send me into the kitchen bench and then made me apologise for “provoking” him.
I used to think surviving him made me hard to frighten. Terrafeara cured me of that. But it also changed something else. It taught me there are worse things than fear.
Helplessness. Ownership. Being useful to the wrong people.
That, more than anything, is why I will not talk.
A human in this world is valuable in all the wrong ways. Humans bind strongly, adapt strangely, get dragged into rift nonsense often enough to be treated as either resources or threats depending on who’s doing the looking. The Queen would love to know what the rebellion has learned from us, through us, because all her power is built on controlling what arrives through the tears in the world and who gets to profit from it.
The thought of giving her even a crumb of that makes my skin crawl.
Hours pass. Or maybe only one. Without windows, time becomes a rumour. Eventually the hatch opens again, and this time the bolts draw back.
Two guards step in. Both Glowranth, both in Crown armour, both armed. One gestures with a growled “Come.”
I stand carefully. My legs are steady enough. Good. I’d rather not fall in front of them.
They don’t bind me. That says something too. Either they think I’m too broken to be trouble or they want me to understand that resistance would be pointless.
Probably both.
