Ally. Asset. Tactical advantage.
None of them fit.
What fits is her hand on my face. Her lips against mine. The way she said my name like it meant more than designation.
I crack my knuckles—the sound loud in the silent night—and start the long walk back to my quarters.
The stakes have shifted. The plan. The shape of what we’re building.
And somewhere beneath the calculation and the assessment, a new feeling demands attention.
Something I’ll have to learn how to carry.
THIRTEEN
IMARA
The quarterly offering begins at dawn.
I stand among the other harvesters on the pit’s eastern rim, my ritual drum heavy against my hip. The Sacrificial Pit stretches before us—a natural sinkhole where crimson springs converge into a churning pool of blood-tainted water, nearly a hundred feet across, its depths layered with centuries of bones calcified into formations that resemble coral made of fingers and ribs. No one has ever found the bottom.
The pit glows from within. All those accumulated deaths releasing their stored energy, casting the gathered clan members in shifting red light. The screaming here is loudest—echoes of every life ended in these waters layered into a constant background wail that most of us have learned to ignore.
I’ve never learned to ignore it.
Dozens of depleted stock line the pit’s edge, bound and blindfolded. The quarterly purge—every three months, the clan disposes of those whose bloodlines have been deemed exhausted, whose bodies can no longer produce the quality of blood the rituals demand. Some have been here for decades. Some are barely out of childhood.
This is my forty-second offering ritual. I’ve attended every one since my promotion to harvester, standing in my designated spot, beating my drum in the prescribed rhythm, watching bodies fall into the churning waters below.
Forty-two times. I’ve never stopped one.
Today is different.
Today, Kharvek stands among the Harvest Guard on the pit’s western rim.
His scars catch the pit’s glow, that faint red pulse visible even at this distance. I can see the tension in his shoulders, the stillness he adopts when assessing a battlefield. His gaze sweeps the crowd, the guards, the bound stock.
When his mismatched stare finds mine, understanding passes between us. Not a signal—we haven’t planned one yet. We weren’t supposed to move for weeks. The ward corruption isn’t ready. The escape routes haven’t been finalized.
We’re not ready.
I pull my attention back to the ritual. The Blood Matron hasn’t arrived yet—she’ll make her entrance when the ceremony reaches its climax, appearing from the Sanctum’s depths to preside over the final sacrifices. Until then, Sister Vela conducts the preliminary rites, her voice rising and falling in the old chants that make the blood-wards pulse brighter.
The stock shuffle forward in their chains. First group of ten, moving toward the pit’s edge.
That’s when I see her.
Third row back. Small, dark-haired, trembling despite the warmth that rises from the pit. Her blindfold has slipped slightly, revealing one terrified eye—the same shade I see in my own reflection.
Dena.
The nine-year-old from the Red Children’s training pens. The one with my bloodline running through her veins, theone the Matron noticed three months ago for her “promising potential.”
She must have failed a test. Must have disappointed someone. Must have acted—or failed to act—that got her reclassified from “promising” to “depleted.”
She’s nine years old.
My hands tighten on the ritual drum until my knuckles ache. I count the guards around the pit—twelve, plus Kharvek. I count the ritualists maintaining the blood-wards—eight. I count the other harvesters, the Attendants, the observers who’ve come to watch the quarterly purge as entertainment.
