Before they could speak, Sparks said, “We’ve been sent down to check on the prisoners.”
“Why?” one of the soldiers replied in a gruff voice as he stepped toward them.
“Since the power cut, Mother wants us to check everywhere.”
“But other than the lights, there’s nothing reliant on power down here.”
“Do you want to tell her that?”
The shadowed face of the foot soldier stared at Sparks for a moment before he stood aside and unlocked the heavy door for them.
Sparks walked through and Seb followed on her heels with his head raised. Even if he didn’t feel confident, he needed to project it.
The stench damn near knocked Seb over. Worse than the streets in the slums, worse even than the sewers they’d gone through to get into the elevated city, it reeked of both human waste and a rich funk of rotting flesh.
Seb gagged several times and his mouth dried from the heat in the room. A sharp look from Sparks and he finally managed to pull himself together.
The same lights that ran along the corridor’s ceilings ran along the dungeon’s ceiling. Although they had far fewer in the dungeon. As a result, many parts of the cave were sunk in deep shadow. Unfortunately, some of the dungeon remained all too visible.
In the centre of the room—lit up as if beneath an interrogator’s spotlight—a wooden structure the size of a bed had a small female strapped to it. About the same size and shape of a human child, she had scaly green skin. On closer inspection, Seb recognised the device as a rack. The small child looked like she should have been smaller. Her tiny form stretched beyond a point it should be able to. Dead from the process, her mouth hung open and her lifeless eyes stared at nothing.
In front of the rack sat a large wooden chair. The slumped form of an older female sat strapped to it. She had the same scaly green skin of the stretched girl. Seb would have also taken her to be dead were it not for the gentle rocking motion as she sobbed in near silence.
Sick to his stomach, Seb walked over to her and undid the straps on the female’s arms and feet. So what if the soldiers looked in? They couldn’t leave her like that.
Once he’d freed her—the female smelling as bad as the dungeon itself—she simply remained in the chair. A fogged glaze sat in her eyes as if she’d lost her mind. Seb stared at her face for a few more seconds and saw the familial resemblance. She was the mother of the dead girl for sure. “Damn,” he whispered, his hushed tones rippling away from him.
Seb didn’t have time to do more than he’d done, so he spun around and took the room in. Although dark in there, his eyes adjusted to the poor light and he saw various torture devices dotted around him. Rather than getting used to the funk of the place, it seemed to get worse as he looked at the tools designed to cause pain. Each one had been stained with the blood of many victims. Rusty, dirty, and sharp, they’d all been created with agony in mind. They’d kill beings through either spearing them, stretching them, or hanging them. Half of them still had the broken forms of dead victims on them, and whilst some of the remains looked fresh, some were rotted beyond recognition.
Short and sharp breaths ran through Seb and the room seemed to get hotter. When he looked into the corner, he saw something boiling there. It added to both the heat and the stench in the room, but he didn’t want to investigate it.
Along one wall ran a line of cage doors. Bodies shuffled inside, and when one of the creatures within stepped forward, Seb gasped. Sparks looked up from her mini-computer and he nodded in the direction of the cages. “The child soldiers. Sparks, look.”
Sparks looked across the dungeon at the cages full of young males. Still unable to see her face, Seb read her mood from her utter stillness. What could she say to that? If they released the boys before they found Gurt and SA, the commotion it would undoubtedly cause could mean they’d never get their friends back.
A long finger protruded from Sparks’ robe and she pointed away to another corner of the dungeon. “Over there. Gurt and SA are over there.”
With the map in her hands, Sparks led the way again. Seb followed, watching the caged boys for a little longer before he focused ahead. When he caught up with Sparks, he found her in an empty cage. She stared down at her screen. “The map says they should be here. They should be locked in this cage.”
Seb looked back out into the central area of the dungeon and his heart sank. “Uh, Sparks,” he said as he pointed into the darkness.
Sparks came to Seb’s side and heaved a weary sigh. “Oh no.”
Silhouetted in the dark, Seb looked at the limp and hanging forms. One large brute of a creature, the other, a slim and slender female. He shook his head as the strength in his legs ebbed away. With a hand on the wall, the surface hot and damp to the touch as if the stone sweated, Seb said, “I can’t believe we didn’t get to them in time.”
Chapter 50
“We have to cut them down,” Seb said as he walked toward the forms. His voice warbled when he spoke again. “I can’t believe we didn’t get here in time.”
The two limp bodies each had a hood over their face. They’d clearly been put on before they’d hanged them because the rope bunched the fabric around their necks.
Seb removed one of SA’s knives from her harness. He got to Gurt first. It would be easier to see him dead than it would SA. His hands shook as he sliced into the Mandulu’s hood.
The second the brown sack fell open, Seb let out a relieved sigh. “It’s not him, Sparks.” A look at the bloated face, the weight of the creature’s body pulling against the tight noose around its neck, and he laughed as he stared into the brute’s bulging eyes. “He’s too pretty to be Gurt.”
“Even when I’m missing, you’re rude about me.”
Seb spun around to see the large form of Gurt emerge from the shadows. The blue bioluminescent glow of SA’s eyes stepped out of the darkness with him and Seb’s heart skipped.
Before he’d thought about it, Seb rushed over and held both of SA’s hands as he stared into her brilliant glare. He wanted to hug her, but he refrained. “Oh my. Are you okay?”
Instead of her often blank expression, the slightest hint of a smile played on SA’s lips before she nodded.
“I’m fine, by the way,” Gurt said.
The brief flash of happiness returned to impassivity on SA’s serene face, and she dragged a man forward from the dark.
With long dirty hair and a scraggly beard, he walked with a limp. Seb stared at the mess of a man. “George Camoron?” After a few seconds, he looked at both Gurt and SA. “Why’s he still gagged? And why are his hands still tied together?”
SA shoved the man forward and Seb removed his gag, screwing his nose up at his dirty stench.
“My god, why have you taken so long to get to me? Do you know how long I’ve been down here? Do you know who I am?”
Before he could say anything else, Seb pulled the gag back across the man’s mouth. Because he still had his hands tied behind his back, the plummy excuse of a being couldn’t do anything about it. Seb nodded at both Gurt and SA. “Okay, I understand now.”
Despite silencing the man, Seb dragged him forward into the little light they had down in the dungeon. Almost unrecognisable from his picture, his hair had grown long, his skin had turned a few shades darker because of dirt and sweat, and he’d lost a lot of weight. Dressed in what looked to be the suit he’d probably arrived in several years ago, the black fabric that remained of it hung from him in scraps. His crusty trousers seemed to be stained with his own waste and blood.
Just to touch the man made Seb want to wash, but they had to get him out of there. As he turned Camoron around, dread sank through Seb’s form. The back of his clothes had been ripped to shreds. The white fabric of his shirt had been stained with old yellow blood, and angry white scars were raked down his back as if he’d been mauled. “My god,” Seb said, “what have they done to you?”
The lights in the dungeon suddenly grew so bright Seb coul
dn’t see. Regardless of his temporary blindness, he heard the voice of the soldier with crystal clarity. “Nothing compared to what we’re going to do to you.”
Chapter 51
It took a few seconds for Seb to recover his vision from the glare, but when he did, he saw the two soldiers they’d persuaded to let them into the dungeon and a whole host more behind them. The narrow doorway only allowed a few through at a time. The hallway on the other side appeared to be crammed with red cloaks too. An image of the hangar they’d been in earlier and the sheer number of soldiers in there ran through his mind. It wouldn’t be easy to get free.
Seb pulled George Camoron behind him, and although he should have focused on their enemy, he couldn’t help looking around the dungeon now the lights had been turned up. The child on the rack looked more horrendous, her shoulders and hips fully dislocated. The kid’s mother remained slumped in her seat, as inconsolable as before.
The prisons with the boy soldiers in them were huge. A few hundred adolescents were packed into each one, maybe more. Thousands of boys in total, they all stared from the cages at the commotion outside.
The soldier that had spoken seemed confident the five wouldn’t get out. Instead of fighting them straight away, he walked over to a girl who’d been tied to the wall. No more than seven years old, the small creature had the familiar pasty tinge common with Solsans’ residents. The lack of sunlight turned everyone pale. She had long red hair, two horns poking through it, and a large protruding bottom jaw full of jagged teeth.
Delirious with the suffering she’d endured, she seemed oblivious to the soldier, who walked over to her and pointed at where her right arm should be, now just a bloody, cauterised stump. The soldier smiled. “This is what we do to thieves. She stole a cabbage from the ground.”
Although her blue eyes rolled in her head, the girl managed to rouse herself, looked at the soldier, and spoke with slurred words. “It had been thrown away. It was rotten.”
The soldier spun on her and screamed in her face, “You stole it!”
The boys in the cages recoiled at his loud accusation amplified by the acoustics of the cave. Conditioned to fear their masters, the violent outburst clearly triggered something in them.
The soldier then lifted her other hand. The tips of her fingers had been shaved away and they glistened with blood. “We’re taking the other arm now.” He laughed. “An inch at a time.”
The girl’s head dropped and she slumped against the restraints holding her up. She didn’t look like she’d make it to the end of her other arm.
Seb might not have been able to see the soldier’s face, but he could hear the smile in his words. “If this is what we do to common thieves, imagine what we’ll do to you lot.”
The edges of Seb’s vision blurred. When his world slipped into slow motion, he discarded his crimson robe. He then undid the harnesses with both Gurt’s blasters and SA’s knives on them and tossed them to the pair. He shoved George Camoron even farther away. The fool stumbled and fell over.
Before the soldier could draw his blaster, Gurt slipped one of his own free and pulled off two shots, dropping the soldier and his mate.
More of them rushed forward as a red tide. The bottleneck slowed them down and gave SA the chance to cross the dingy room toward the boiling pot in the corner.
With everything slowed down, Seb saw the body—or at least what remained of the body—sat in the pot. Green skin that looked duller than it should be, the process of boiling it clearly leeched the colour from the now pale flesh. The black metal cauldron sat on a bed of hot coals.
One swift kick and SA launched the pot and many of the coals at the door. The scalding water smothered the first few soldiers, who screamed at the contact, and several of the coals burned into their cloaks.
With the plastic smell of burning robes in the air, Seb looked at the remains of the green creature as it lay flopped on the ground, almost unrecognisable as anything once living.
The soldiers at the door screamed louder as they continued to burn. Gurt looked at both Seb and Sparks and then said, “What are you two wearing?”
Seb looked down at the tan-coloured monstrosity.
“There’s so many pouches,” Gurt said, “it looks like it would take you twenty minutes to find your keys.”
“They all wear this kind of crap out there,” Seb said. “It helped us move through the city without standing out.”
Gurt raised an eyebrow at Seb. “I’ll be honest, I’m a little bit embarrassed to be seen with you looking like that, but we can’t do anything about it now, can we? I suppose we’d best get out of this crappy dungeon and away from here.”
As Gurt spoke, more and more soldiers flooded into the basement. The large Mandulu ground his jaw so his horns pushed up his face and he ripped off several more blasts. He then led the way from the dungeon and the others followed.
Chapter 52
Gurt strode towards the guards with a blaster in each hand, his guns bucking every time he shot one. SA followed after him, her polished blades blinking beneath the glare of the now brightly lit room.
After a deep breath, Seb moved off too. They’d been on the go since they’d landed on Solsans and he felt exhausted. His entire body ached and his sore limbs threatened to stop working, but he gritted his teeth and pushed forward.
The narrow stairway only allowed Gurt and SA to fight side by side. Useless as he stood behind them, Seb ran over to one of the cages with the boys in it instead.
Wide eyes stared from the dark. Too scared to speak, the pale creatures pulled away from the door. They huddled together in the shadows at the back. A large padlock clamped their gate shut. So large, Seb had to grab it with both hands and pull. It did little to remove it from the cell door.
When Seb looked behind, all of his team had vanished, but he could hear them fighting on the stairs.
Seb noticed a rack of metal spikes to his right. He grabbed one—the shaft tacky with old blood—and pulled. At first, the spear didn’t budge. With his right foot pressed against the rack to stop it moving, he clamped his jaw and pulled again.
Several yanks later it came free with a loud tearing sound. The pole—although hollow—seemed strong enough. Seb turned the weapon around so the pointy end poked up at the dungeon’s ceiling. He gripped it with both hands, focused on his target, and drove the butt of the weapon against the large padlock. He scored a direct hit, but the pole simply bounced off it. A combination lock, the soldiers who’d know the code now lay dead on the ground by the exit to the dungeon.
“Come on, Seb,” Sparks called from somewhere up the stairs. “We can’t hang around any longer. We need to get out of here.”
Exhausted and running out of ideas, Seb screamed through his clenched jaw as he drove another heavy blow against the huge lock. A spark of metal on metal, but the lock remained clamped shut.
The same alarm Seb had heard when he’d been in the hangar with Sparks rang out. A female voice called through the cavernous palace. The echoes of chaos rushed down into the dungeon and he could just about make out her words. “All units head to the dungeon right now. Escaped prisoners. Neutralise by using all force necessary. All units …”
“Seb,” Sparks called again and she appeared in the dungeon doorway, “we need to get the hell out of here. This is our window.”
A look into the cell and the boys continued to stare at Seb. Their saviour, he now had a choice to make. Him or them.
A lump rose in his throat and regret twisted his spirit.
One last look at the boys and Seb ran off after Sparks.
Chapter 53
The narrow stairs that led up and out from the dungeon only allowed room for Gurt and SA to fight their way through. Nearly at the top now, Seb, Sparks, and the rich idiot followed slowly behind. They moved one step at a time as the dark stairwell lit up with sounds of blaster fire, expletives, and the squelch of knives cutting flesh.
The corridor at the top of the stairs seemed clea
r for now. Well, other than the pile of dead foot soldiers. Guilt, fatigue, and his generally poor fitness all dragged Seb down, but he couldn’t stop now. The alarm continued to shriek through the hallways of the palace, and the annoying woman repeated the same order to get to the dungeon.
“Which way?” Gurt called at Sparks, his blasters raised and ready to use.
Sparks stared at her mini-computer before she pointed down the corridor. “That way.”
When the stampede of soldiers’ footsteps came from the direction she pointed in, Sparks quickly pointed the other way. “That way.”
Faster than the lot of them, Sparks took off at a sprint. SA followed on her heels while Seb ran in the middle, dragging the stupid toff with him. Gurt took up the rear.
The sound of Gurt’s blasters went off, and when Seb turned around, he saw the bolts fired from them light up the dark corridor. They took out four Crimson soldiers. Gurt released several more shots as more of the soldiers came into view.
Seb had seen Sparks run and knew she could move faster, but she’d slowed her pace so they could stay together. The backlight on her computer’s screen lit up from the map on the display.
Every few seconds, Gurt released another volley of blaster fire. George Camoron flinched with every shot. As much as Seb didn’t want to give the privileged idiot the benefit of the doubt, he looked like he’d been through hell. Were Seb in his position, then his nerves would undoubtedly be shot to pieces too.
“Get in,” Sparks called back.
Seb dragged the rich idiot into the dark shadow of a wall. As they stood there, George Camoron breathed as if on the edge of a panic attack, and Seb came close to knocking him out to keep him quiet.
Before he could react, a group of soldiers tore past them. They’d come from the direction the gang were heading in, and in their haste to get to what Seb assumed to be the dungeon, they didn’t notice the five figures in the cover of the shadows. The group set off again before the ones behind caught up.
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