When the metal doors opened again, Ysira’s armored captors found her alive and unchanged, crouched in a pile of mutated corpses.
They spoke an unfamiliar language, voices echoing strangely beneath their helmets. They stopped several feet from Ysira, appearing to argue as she stared at them. She was so exhausted by then, half-starved and sick to her stomach, that she didn’t have the wherewithal to act when one of them pulled out a short utility knife.
The other shouted something—a warning? It went unheeded. The armored person grabbed Ysira by the wrist, yanked her forward, and sliced off her little finger.
As she screamed, they continued to argue. They hauled her up and marched her back through the metal doors, through a maze of dusty halls, and Ysira found herself begging for her life.Whatlifeeven meant to her now, she didn’t know, but she had finally summoned the presence of mind to realize she did not want to die.
Her captors did not understand a word she said—or maybe they just didn’t care. They arrived at the edge of a chasm, where the labyrinth dropped off into the dark. A horrible stench drifted up from below.
“Please,” Ysira gasped. “Please don’t do this.”
For one wild moment, she thought they might spare her. But instead, the one who’d cut off her finger took out his utility knife. Quick and efficient, he drove the tip beneath Ysira’s consecration scar and dug out a tiny piece of metal.
He slit her throat from ear to ear, and everything went black.
“An error, then,” came Tharanoth’s soft voice. “My servants meant to infect you with a Category One demon and add you to the . . . security system for our base at Zal Fel. It seems, by mistake, they gave you something else. They removed your tracking device and left you for dead, hoping their stupidity would go unnoticed.”
Ysira could not see him—could not see anything—but she felt his presence like a spider crawling down her spine.
“You hoped you might be special,” he said. “Chosen, even. This must be difficult for you.” There was that curiosity again as he watched his specimen squirm.
“You were an error,” he repeated, “born of careless incompetence and fear of punishment. They were not nearly afraid enough.” He hummed again. “I’ll have them identified soon enough. I’ll infect them with Category Ones, let them live long enough to endure the transformation, then serve them to their division leaders for dinner. Perhaps I’ll let you watch. Would you like that?”
Her revulsion made him chuckle. “Our titles have become a matter of pageantry—each domain a manner of suffering fromwhich we deliver you, given the proper reverence. But it was your own ancestors who chose them. They called me the Lord of Hunger because they knew how I punished defiance. They knew their greatest possible value lay in the meat on their bones and its capacity to feed me.”
He still wasn’t finished with her. He watched her crawl out of the mass grave, along the deepriver, back to Zivora. He watched her recover at a pace that was no less than miraculous and return to the Citadel heavy with child. He watched her give birth. He watched her weep as she clutched her newborn son to her breast, overwhelmed by the nightmare that was his existence, the consuming love she felt for him, and the shock of being alive.
Ysira saw her eighteen-year-old self, on the verge of following Ogden out the door. She paused over Neri’s cradle to stroke his soft black hair one last time. She said goodbye. It was the most private of memories, and sharing it with Tharanoth made her want to vomit. But she was no longer made of flesh—only an untethered consciousness drifting in the void. A prisoner inside her own mind.
“So, the boy was conceived before you were infected,” the Lord of Hunger observed. “And carried to term under the influence of rare demonic power. Fascinating.”
Again, he did not seem troubled, merely curious. As though this were but an unexpected outcome of an experiment.He released his grip on her mind, and it was like a fist unclenched from around her very soul.
When Ysira awoke, she was alone once more. Bright lights flared around her. She tried to shield her eyes and found her limbs chained to the hard surface on which she lay. Horror clawed at her insides. The memories, once buried, refused to fade. She remembered it all, and it was too much to bear.
Every emotion she’d buried over the course of the last week . . . the last decade . . . she was suddenly no match for them. Her breath came fast and shallow. She was too small, a mote of dust floating high above the world, alone. With a wrenching scream, she thrashed in her restraints. She couldn’t breathe she couldn’t breathe she couldn’tfuckingbreathe?—
She twisted onto her side, cramming her face against the stiff white fabric just to have something solid to lean on, and this time, her scream became a sob. Once she’d started, she could not stop.
19
CHOSEN
YSIRA
Ysira’s eyelids peeled apart, leaking in blurry white light. She could not move. A thin tube protruded from her arm. Tharanoth’s presence no longer chafed inside her skull, but she was still chained to that bed.
Detachedly, she wondered whether she ought to panic. Her passenger moved in an endless loop around her brainstem, distant and focused on some task, as it tended to be when she was badly injured. Ysira knew, on some level, that she must be in terrible danger. But the thought didn’t bother her. Warmth enveloped her from head to toe, as though she were submerged in a hot spring. No pain at all. She was perfectly at peace.
“You’re awake. Good.”
It took all Ysira’s energy just to turn her head enough to look at the man standing over her, dressed in a grey-green smock.
Her first thought was of the forged goods and coins she sometimes smuggled for merchant clients. This person resembled a cheap imitation of Tharanoth, built by a lesser craftsman. He had the same pointed ears and ridged skull butappeared much smaller, thin and unimposing, with short white hair and silver skin. His sapphire irises glimmered in ordinary white sclerae.
Though his accent was odd, he spoke Standard. There was something very funny about that. Ysira laughed.
He indulged her with a smile. He motioned at the tube in her arm and remarked, “It’s been a challenge to keep you sedated for any useful length of time. You must forgive me if I interrupt our conversation to titrate your infusion.”
