I catch the first one at the second junction. A male, young, still strong despite years in the pens. He sees me coming and tries to fight.
Mistake.
I open my channels. Let the power flow through the scarification patterns on my hands. My palms split along familiar lines, weeping power, and when I grab his arm, his blood answers my call.
He screams.
They all scream, at the end.
The drain takes seconds. His blood floods through my channels, fuel for the power I carry, life-force converted to magic with brutal efficiency. His body collapses when I release it—empty, hollow, nothing left but a husk of skin and bone.
Two more.
The second escapee is faster. Smarter. He’s made it almost to the surface levels before I catch up, and when he hears me coming, he doesn’t try to fight. He throws himself at a window—narrow, barely wide enough for a human body—and I think he might actually make it through.
My hands close around his ankles and pull.
This one, I tear apart. Physically. The Matron wanted a message, and messages require spectacle. His screams echo through the corridors as I separate him from himself, piece by piece, painting the walls with what used to be a man who dared to want freedom.
One more.
The female is the hardest to catch. She knows the tunnels—must have been mapping them in her head for months, maybe years—and she uses that knowledge well. Twice she doubles back on me. Three times she nearly loses me in the warren of service passages beneath the main structure.
But I’m faster. Stronger. Made for exactly this purpose.
I corner her in a dead-end maintenance alcove. She’s pressed against the wall, chest heaving, terror written across her face. Young. Probably not much older than twenty. Pretty, in the way stock sometimes is—bred for appearance as well as magical potential.
“Please.” The word breaks as it leaves her. “Please, I just wanted?—”
“I know what you wanted.”
The Matron wants a survivor. Someone to question. I grab the female by the throat and lift her off her feet, just enough to remind her who’s in control, then carry her back toward the pens.
She cries the whole way. I don’t let myself hear it.
Later.
The pens are quiet again. The survivor has been taken for questioning—her screams will echo for hours, then stop when she tells them what they want to know or when she runs out of voice. The bodies of the males have been disposed of. The breach in the wards has been repaired.
Order restored. The machine continues.
I stand in my quarters—a cell, really, larger than most but still a cage—and stare at my hands. The scarification lines have closed, power settling back into dormancy. No visible blood. My body processes what it takes, absorbs it, converts it.
Clean hands. As if the killing never happened.
Three people died tonight because they wanted what she wants. Freedom. Escape. An end to being resources in someone else’s machine. I killed two of them myself—efficiently, brutally, without hesitation.
That’s what I am. What I was made to be.
She gave it a name. Whatever I’ve been building toward—she gave it a name.
The modifications I’ve spent three years carving into my own flesh pulse faintly beneath my skin. New channels. New pathways. A way to break free of the Matron’s control without her knowing.
I’ve been planning this alone. Preparing alone. Assumed I would fight alone, die alone, maybe take the Matron with me if I was lucky.
Now there’s a harvester with sharp eyes and blood-stained hands offering to stand beside me. Offering knowledge I don’t have, access I can’t get, a decade of careful preparation that complements my raw power.
It’s a trap. It has to be.
