AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What’s on your hand?” he asked, twisting the man’s arm to look at his knuckles. They looked banged up.
“He hurt his hand in the mines,” answered a woman who looked about the right age to be his wife. She had venom in her voice and glared at the man like she wished she could shoot lasers at him. “He’s not strong enough to lift the marble, and his lungs hurt from the dust, but he still has to go in there every day to make you rich.”
The man rolled his eyes as he answered in a bored voice, “Kemp doesn’t share his money with me, lady. I’m just doing my job.”
“Your job is to harass old men?”
“If they are rebels, yes. No one is immune.”
The older man’s face whitened visibly. “I’m not a rebel!” he said.
“That remains to be seen,” the military man answered. He pulled on the old guy’s arm and led him down the street.
His wife yelled “No!”
She looked around for help, and her eyes settled on Nova.
“Help him,” she begged.
Nova hesitated. She needed to stay off their radar as much as possible. But the woman was nearly in tears, and Nova didn’t like the way that guy was treating someone frail and so much weaker than him.
She didn’t know what the old woman expected her to do. With a deep breath and a hope that she wouldn’t come to regret it, she stepped in front of the military man.
“Let him go,” she said.
The guy barely glanced at her as he pushed her out of the way and kept marching forward, dragging the old man behind him.
“I’m Altair’s wife,” she said, finally deciding that might have been why the woman had asked for her help. “I order you to release him.”
The man stopped to look her up and down. “I take my orders from Devon,” he said, like that made them enemies. Then he called out to one of his colleagues standing a few meters away.
“Grab her too,” he said. “She’s a rebel’s accomplice.”
And there was the regret!
The second man grabbed her arm and pushed her forward. They pulled her along to a cart where several more people sat looking down at their feet. It was the terror in their eyes that had Nova suddenly wishing she’d never met Elizabeth.
* * *
They were paraded around town on that cart. Nova had the feeling the Military men were purposely taking the long way around to wherever they were going to scare the villagers as they passed. The building they were taken to hadn’t been on her orientation tour of the city, but the metal bars over the windows were a clear sign that they were being taken to a prison. Whether high-tech or primitive, all prisons had the same air about them.
Her eyes automatically took inventory of all possible exits. She observed every lock from the corner of her eyes. Her biggest obstacle would be the brawny men who stood outside the front door as they were herded inside the building.
They marched them down a flight of stairs to a dark corridor smelling of mildew. Along the corridor were prison cells. Some were empty, but some emitted a strong smell of human excrements which made Nova’s stomach turn.
“What are you doing here?” She recognized the voice. She turned around to find Brent walking up beside her. “They don’t normally take women.”
She hadn’t seen him in the cart, but there were at least twenty people, and she hadn’t gotten a good look at everyone.
He kept his voice and demeanor impersonal, giving her the impression he didn’t want the others to know that they knew each other.
She played along.
“I tried to defend someone they were taking,” she said. “Though I suspect my biggest mistake was telling them that I’m married to Altair.”
He nodded like he’d already suspected as much. “Yeah, you might not want to go around bragging about that.”
He nodded his head at a man with a bruised up face approaching to eavesdrop on their conversation. “No one likes him.”
