by Audrey Grey
My breath escapes in a quiet hiss. I force my watery eyes off Duchess. Do not cry.
Ripper is inches from my face, her own face strangely emotionless and slack. “Hope don’t belong to us leeches. Hope for the Outside. Hope for fools and corpses.”
She’s right, and I hate her for it. I try and swallow as a wave of emotion crams my mouth with bile.
I hate Ripper. I hate this place. And more than anything, I hate myself for being so afraid. “What would you know of the outside? You’ve never seen how blue the sky can get. Tasted freshly picked peaches, still warm from the sun. And the stars, so many it would take you a lifetime to count. They twinkle as if alive, tiny bits of white fire—”
Ripper clamps her hand over my mouth. “You thinks you’s better than me, Digger Girl?”
“Yes.”
This is obviously the last thing in the world I should have said.
She blinks, her eyes wild in a way I can’t predict. Slowly, the animalistic look sinks down inside her. “Shut your mouth, or I carve out your pretty little tongue.”
Ripper jerks me to my feet, sadistically tweaking the rope so that I’m choking and wheezing as she clambers into the hole. I twist my head to try and glance at Duchess one last time, but the rope bites into my neck and I stumble forward, gasping for breath.
Given my current way with words, this might actually keep me alive.
Chapter Two
The stench of human waste hits me like a wall. A cacophony of wails and moans echo off the high ceilings of the pit. Squinting through the darkness, I make out the ten-story walls, tears from the underground streams seeping through the earth and making glistening rivers down the sides. It goes on for miles. Or maybe without sunlight everything seems larger.
Someone shrieks. Farther off, howls reach a fever pitch and then abruptly cut off. Except there are no animals here. No guards, either, or cages to keep us from tearing each other apart. Only a boarded up hole in the ceiling called the drop that connects us to the upper levels of the prison where the regular prisoners reside.
They call us Pit Leeches because we live off the prison above, forced to eat their scraps. Funny how I ended up here for that very same reason: searching for scraps. Not that I’d call the fuzzy, glistening lumps that rain down every seven days food. Half the time the maggots and beetles infesting it are more edible.
The sound of Ripper’s headlight flicking off grabs my attention. Judging by her tense demeanor, we are going to travel straight through the catacombs—a mazelike collection of dark caves hollowed out in the walls.
Small fires burn inside the holes, their weak light scattering hundreds of shadows. Ripper’s head swivels left to right, eyes sharp and hungry as we near the first cells. This is the most dangerous part of the pit.
Fear purls through me. “This is stupid.”
“Shut your mouth, Digger Girl, or we both be a tasty little snack.” Even she isn’t guaranteed safety in the catacombs, a fact she has to be acutely aware of now that Rafe is gone.
It takes all my effort to keep the rope slack enough to breathe. I am also careful to keep my movements slow and smooth. Here, the classification system is simple.
Predator or prey.
And the predators are always watching, always working to determine which category you fall under.
Flickering pools of firelight dot our path as we continue. Inside the bottom cells, bodies with protruding ribcages and jutting spines hunch around simpering fires. They clutch sticks impaled with stringy chunks of gray meat. I try not to think about what they’re eating—who they’re eating—or how that was almost my fate, years ago. Their eyes gleam eerily in the firelight as they trail us.
Despite my revulsion, the sickly-sweet smell of charred flesh makes my mouth ache. I try not to gag on my hunger as we pass a cell crowded with creatures. Gaunt shadows skitter along the walls. There’s a scuffle as two small boys attack a skeletal, wild-eyed man. He shrinks to the ground, moaning. A tidal wave of frantic limbs swallows him.
The crowd spits free a wispy cadaver; the girl is pale and slight, a tattered yellow dress hanging off sharp bones. She snatches the meat the man dropped. Our eyes meet just as the fatty chunk worms down her scrawny throat.
She has to be cunning and resourceful to have made it this far. But her feral expression can’t mask her fear. And if I can see it, so can they.
I give her a week, tops.
We are nearing the last cells when I pause, just for an instant. Ripper is moving fast now. Her momentum jerks the rope, and I stumble.
A hundred skeletal faces hone in on me at once. I have screwed up. Have declared myself prey. And all the predators have noticed.
“Walk faster, Digger Girl,” Ripper orders.
I notice the glint of a dull knife inside her palm. The hairs on my neck shoot straight up as my peripheral vision picks up shadows.
The walls seem to jolt up and down as we run. I wonder how long our composure will last. I wonder if Ripper regrets snuffing Rafe.
I wonder if this is how I will die.
The air cools. The catacombs and their sweltering fires are behind us. I shiver, and not just because of the cold.
The shadows have thickened. I can hear them. Shuffling. Growling and biting at each other as they trail behind us. Soon, the only thing I can hear is my breath wheezing rhythmically inside my head.
Bones litter the floor beneath the drop. They have been cracked, gnawed, and gouged clean. A spotlight bursts on. The shadows that have been trailing us cry out and scatter—though not far enough for comfort.
Ripper shields her face with a hand. “I got the Digger Girl.”
Half a minute passes before the metal lid grates open; dirt and rocks sprinkle the ground. I blink as the spotlight catches my face. The light goes away, and there’s the sound of something heavy being lowered. Ripper’s headlamp skips over a bucket, barely large enough for one person.
When the bucket thuds to the floor, Ripper doesn’t seem to know what to do. She twists around to the shadows, which are slowly circling us again to form a tight, inescapable ring.
“The bucket’s too small,” Ripper shouts at the faceless hole. She pulls me close; I am surprised to feel that she is trembling.
“Put the girl in first,” a man calls. “We will send another bucket down for you.”
“The deal was we both go.” I feel the cold edge of Ripper’s blade catch under my Adam’s apple. “We go together or . . . or I spill her blood right here.”
Now I understand Ripper’s payment: a trip upstairs. Once again, alarm bells go off. Very few people could have clearance to make such a deal.
But a powerful Gold would.
There’s a pause. “You have one minute to relinquish the girl. After that minute is up, the deal is off and the bucket goes away.”
Ripper licks her lips and eyes the growing mass around us. A few shadows dart forward, and she slashes the air with her knife, sending them surging back.
The knife bites into my skin, and I think she is going to fulfill her promise from earlier, but then the rope falls from my neck and I’m shoved toward the bucket.
Hard wood scrapes against my bare feet as I clamber inside. The bucket sways as it lifts, the chains jangling. I sink to my knees, my hands knotted knuckle-white around the bucket lip.
Suddenly the bucket rocks hard, as if someone has grabbed onto it and is dangling. It heaves violently to the side. I’m flipping, my arms and legs spinning uselessly, my mouth open in a silent, airless scream.
The ground slaps the scream from my chest. I fight to my knees, Ripper spewing a stream of curses beside me as the prisoners close in.
The spotlight once again peels back the darkness, but this time it has little effect on the frenzied crowd.
The fear makes me want to die now and get it over with. But I can’t die. Max needs me.
A hard shoulder spins me around. Cold dirt presses into my cheek. The top of my head burns—someone is dragging m
e backward by my hair. I think I cry out. My heels dig into the ground, and I twist and buck.
Bony fingers clamp onto my bare foot, and a mouth framed in jagged teeth prepares to take a chunk out of my calf.
A small shadow wriggles almost comically up the creature’s arm and clamps onto his face. Bramble! The creature shrieks in blind fury, whipping his head side to side.
Bramble loses his grip and falls to the ground.
Wiggling from the creature’s grasp, I kick blindly, my heel smashing into its cheek with a sick crack.
Suddenly the pressure from my hair is released. Someone slips an arm under my armpit and leg, and I go weightless before collapsing headfirst into the bucket.
I scramble to my knees and make eye contact with him, the man who helped me. Not a man, an older boy, although it’s impossible to tell exactly how old. Shaggy hair haloes razor-sharp cheekbones and windy white scars. One particularly nasty scar creases his eye socket, where his left eye must have once been. The other eye is wild and intoxicating, a startlingly bruised shade of blue.
On the outside he could have been striking, maybe even handsome. But in here, beauty is the first thing they take from you.
A hard smile splits his face open. “Hold on, Digger Girl.”
“Thank you,” I start to say, but then I pause. He looks so familiar . . .
Now I remember. He was with Ripper the day they captured me and took me to the catacombs. In fact, he helped tie my wrists. He had both eyes then, and he was younger, softer, less savage looking.
He’s just like them! I recoil from the boy as I remember how he ignored my pleas for help.
“You’re . . . You’re just like them,” I say.
The boy scowls.
The bucket jerks upward, and I scowl right back. Yeah, I remember you, Pit Boy.
I exhale with relief as Bramble scrabbles over the side. He ducks under my shirt and curls into a ball, his body cold against my stomach.
At the top, two screws, our nickname for the guards, yank me to my feet. Cold steel shackles clack loosely around my wrists. For the first time in years, I imagine what I must look like.
What I must smell like.
“Walk, Pit Leech,” the first screw orders. The tone of his voice implies that if I give him trouble, he will push me back in and enjoy it immensely. His eyes are watery and glazed, and he reeks of tar, the cheap drug rampant among the Low Colors. It’s rumored the Royalists secretly supply it to keep us weak and sedated.
“What about the girl?” I gesture to Ripper. We both look down at her, a tiny white flicker in a sea of filthy, churning bodies—a lonely, dying star. She is still swinging her knife. Still waiting for the bucket.
The last thing I hear before the lid grinds closed, sealing off the pit, is a high-pitched scream.
One that I imagine Ripper would make.
Grinning, the screw spits onto the ground, brown tar-laced saliva splashing droplets onto my legs. “What girl? All I see are Pit Leeches.”
Chapter Three
This part of the prison is nice. Clean and orderly and quiet. Another world, really. Old halogen lights buzz from the ceilings and walls and chase away the shadows. Electricity isn’t regulation, but nothing here is. We pass a room where well-groomed prisoners in crisp, orange uniforms form a neat line as they await rations.
My brain immediately categorizes them as prey before I remember that we’re not in the pit, where something as small as giving up your back will kill you.
There’s a whining shudder and the lights flicker, die. Immediately, the torches along the walls spark to life. The screws and prisoners hardly react, so the power must fail often.
The prisoners here are Bronzes from the nearest Diamond Cities. To stay above ground, they must be in good standing with their local magistrate, be current on tithes to the Emperor, and prove they are a decent producer in the factories.
Needless to say, the pit is just a bit overcrowded.
The last time I was in these halls, I was scared to death. They were leading me to the drop. I remember the way my hands shook. The way my breath caught in my chest. I didn’t know what to expect; I just knew that I couldn’t make the fear go away.
I was nine.
The bucket was the same one I used going back up. Except when I huddled in it then, so small it nearly swallowed me, it was wet with the warm piss of the girl who went right before. She had screamed the entire way down.
At the bottom, her screams had abruptly cut off.
I resolved not to make a sound.
As soon as the bucket hit the ground I ran, sprinting blindly, my heart exploding inside my chest. Hands reached from the darkness, but I twisted from their grasp. I ran toward the light. Naively I thought it could protect me. That I would be safe there.
My young brain couldn’t yet understand that there are some places where you are never safe.
I spent the first night in the catacombs, learning to be a ghost, to slink in shadow and breathe quietly and use the balls of my feet. I learned that firelight glints off the eyes and mud can be used to mask your skin. I learned that sometimes light is bad, not good. I learned that it takes less than a day to strip away your humanity, to peel it right off like an extra skin.
The feel of daylight on my face calls me from my memories. We are in a sparsely furnished office with a flimsy rolling chair and desk, two holographic bookshelves, and a floor-to-ceiling window looking down on the prison yard. The screw unshackles me and retreats. Just like that, I am alone.
The first thing I do is scour the desk for food, but there is nothing. I pace, searching for anything even slightly edible. I’m prostrate on the floor looking for crumbs when the clouds must part and it happens.
Sunlight.
I stumble to the window. As much as I want to drink it all in, my eyes cannot take the bright light and I squeeze them shut. I dig my cheek into the warm glass, fingers splayed on either side of my head.
Bramble lets out a curious chirp. He’s never seen the outside. I feel him lift my shirt, give a soft coo at what he must be seeing, and then his weight leaves me. “Look, Bramble. There’s nothing else like it.”
I brave a stare. The light leaves fuzzy yellow rings around my vision. Past the yard are thick green spruce trees. Beyond that, the sea, a shimmering blue-green ribbon smudged with darkness.
“Cypher.” My breath clouds the glass. I trace a hand over the dark ridge as I picture the old Diamond City, a skyline brimming with metal and glass factories that glitter in the sun. From the bay, when the sun first peaks the waves and catches in the meshwork of buildings, the entire city seems to catch fire.
After the Everlasting War, Cypher was one of only a handful of surviving glass and metal cities. Diamond cities, they call them, because the Gold owned factories we are forced to slave away in shine like jewels in the sunlight.
Looking at Cypher now, I wonder if the three-story home I grew up in is still there, just as Max and I left it. I choke back tears at the thought of my brother. What must he have thought when I didn’t come back? That I abandoned him? How long did he wait for me under that bridge clutching his ancient, bedraggled cat, Cleo, his blue eyes blinking away tears?
“I’ll be back,” I think I called.
I can still hear Cleo’s squalls as Max clung to him like a life preserver, lower lip quivering. I know it took all his courage not to chase after me.
I see now that I must have known, somehow. I must have known it would be the last time I saw my brother. I must have. Because it took every single ounce of energy I had to force myself to leave him.
The door clicks shut, startling me. At once my body prepares itself to fight. I whip around. My first instinct is to find a weapon. The only thing available is a gold quill pen, and I jerk it up like a dagger.
The woman is tall and angular, wearing black riding boots and a chartreuse-green duster coat. A gray top hat slants across her shoulder length, whitish-silver powdered wig.
She is h
andsome, in a masculine sort of way. Full forehead. Strong patrician nose. Dark ashy eyebrows that arch sharply over eyes hidden behind smoky, metal-rimmed glasses. White silk gloves slink up her sleeves.
She has Royalist written all over her.
My eyes fixate on the head of the Emperor’s golden phoenix peeking from her collar. The brand on her neck tells me she’s a Gold. Sweat breaks out over my palms as I search for the Sigil that will tell me which Gold House she hails from, but she wears nothing that hints at her lineage.
“All hail the Emperor!” she snaps, slapping a bony hand over her heart. It’s been years since I’ve heard those words. I’m supposed to respond in kind, a public declaration of my allegiance to the Emperor, but the idea revolts me.
“Food.” I fall to my knees, still, inexorably, holding my useless weapon. My voice is a pathetic croak. “Whatever you have. Please.”
Disgust twists the woman’s face. “For Emperor’s sake, stand up, Bronze.”
I manage to obey. Two men in identical black velvet tailcoats flank the woman. Centurions. When they spot the pen in my hand, they both reach for the pearl-handled revolvers neatly tucked into their waistbands.
Their brands, a smooth raised Bronze phoenix, emboss the flesh above their stiff, white collars.
As the woman shifts, the rest of her brand comes into view, and my eyes land on the red scorpion gripped inside the phoenix’s claws. Only a member of the Emperor’s War Cabinet would wear that brand—the symbol for death to all Fienians—or be allowed the color red.
The color was outlawed years ago, after the death of the Emperor’s first wife and newborn daughter at the hands of Fienians. Red stands for rebellion, for uprising.
To some, red stands for freedom.
Biting my cheek, I refocus on the woman. She holds up a hand, and the Centurions relax. But their fingers twitch around their pistols. Conscripted at the age of six from Bronze families, the Microplants embedded inside their skulls and years’ worth of training mean the two Centurions are blindly loyal to the Emperor—an assertion they will gladly prove if I give them cause.
