Ravenous (Taint of the Gods #1)

39. RHYDIAN

39

RHYDIAN

R unners continued corralling the soldiers who’d surrendered into the steel pens in the centre of the compound. The sound of tech crashing to the ground told me that Amida and the other flyers had finally taken out the last of the Sky Drones. We were lucky they hadn’t seen fit to have Sky Hawks guard this place or we would have lost more than three in the raid.

It had taken less than five minutes to take this place. Now the soldiers were all captured, the fence was down, their tech dead and their communication relay duped. The capital wouldn’t know about what happened here for at least a day, and by the time they got here it would be cinders. All traces of us would be burned into the soil with Kindling fire. Within the next hour, all the collars tied to this place would be removed. I’d call that a successful raid.

“What are you grinning about?” Eleen asked, cutting into my thoughts. My eyes flicked down to the collar on her own throat and that happiness evaporated.

I changed the subject with a question of my own. “Have they been located yet?”

“No,” she replied. “But you say they’re here, so we’ll find them.” Eleen stared out across the dirt courtyard where the first group of Devos were led out of the Re-education Building. That was what they had named their barbaric indoctrination program. Where they taught Devos they were mistakes. That their lives had only been spared because rather than kill them, The Core saw fit to provide them with a purpose. From what we understood, part of that was convincing them they couldn’t even keep their own names.

The Runners were moving them to the mess where blankets and food were being commandeered for them. I was about to join them when I heard her voice.

“Rhydian!”

I searched the courtyard for her face but realised that was pointless since she would be wearing another.

When I called out to her there was no answer. There had been no messages from her group either.

“Where’s the medical facility?” I asked Eleen, but as the words left my lips, I sensed Wade. He emerged from around one of the buildings, the face he wore distraught. When he saw me it was her name he signed.

I ran.

Wade led me through the open doors of a white building, through an equally white corridor and into a room where the keypad had been smashed to keep the doors open. The stench of blood was so prominent I expected to find another bloodbath beyond.

Instead, curled up behind a desk I saw a young woman, hands clawing at the white hair on her head, mumbling incoherently.

Knowing who was behind that unfamiliar face, I crouched down and softly said her name. There was no response.

I repeated it. Finally, the young woman looked up, and her grey eyes stared back at me, red-rimmed and desperate. Her breathing suddenly picked up, quick short breaths, her gaze darting across my face in a frantic manner. ”Rhydian,” the stranger pleaded with Rieka’s voice.

She was beginning to hyperventilate. “I can’t…I can’t’ shut them out. You need to…to…to…I can’t do it. Help me.” She reached for me, grabbing my clothes, my arms, my hands. She wrapped her arms around my neck, her words becoming hysterical as her hold on me became desperate. As though she just could not hold on tight enough. “Please. I can’t push them out, you have to do something.”

“Knock me out, please!” her inner voice cried in anguish.

I raised my hand to her back as she continued her frantic pleas and made physical contact with the skin of her neck. The effect was immediate. Her blood pressure dropped and she fell against my chest unconscious.

I lifted Rieka into my arms and turned to face the room and the cause of her frantic state.

What I saw made my blood boil.

“Where are the medics?”

I hated forcing my taint on others, but this Medic Ceroy had given me no other option. From the corner of the interrogation room—because of course these bastards needed one—Filora used her taint to keep the Organic in her chair. She was the strongest Pneumatic amongst the Runners, stronger even than Wade and given the state we had found those Devos in, I was not taking any chances.

Sal had already removed the medic’s ability to see so even if on the slightest chance the woman escaped, not even The Core would be able to identify us from her memories.

Ceroy scowled at the sound of my boots when I entered the room. The shackles on her wrist gave off a low humming sound, one of a dozen we’d been forced to use on the Devos too dangerous to walk freely. If she cooperated like they were, once they re-acclimated in a safe place, the shackles would be removed. But as of yet, she hadn’t.

She just regurgitated the Propaganda Slogans. “The Core know all. The Core see all. Their punishment is swift.”

Lera found the staff files an hour after the raid in one of the offices. According to Ceroy’s file, she had been a medic for Kensilla for fourteen years. She was sixteen when they found her, and as much as some of the others held out hope, she was a hopeless case. Nothing we could have said or done would make this woman tell us anything about the people she was brainwashed into thinking had saved her life and given it purpose.

I opened my senses and located Ceroy’s heart. Her pulse was fast, which was to be expected. I waited three beats for our hearts to sync.

Filora, my mother’s best friend for more than twenty years, was aware of my taint, and so she remained in the room. It was our system, one she and my mother had set up to ensure my family’s Hemopathic status remained hidden. Even from my friends. She was the muscle, and my being ‘human’ allowed me the facade of something familiar to these radicals.

I told Filora to release the medic. The moment the sensation dissipated Ceroy tried to strike, only for her to freeze in that position, arm outstretched reaching for me. There were no eyes in the room, so no one was aware that it was my taint in control of the situation.

I ducked under her arm as I circled her chair. I could sense her and the half-dozen others down the hall, waiting for the results of the interrogation they believed Filora was aiding me in conducting.

They could hear nothing behind that door thanks to Filora.

Ceroy returned to her seat at my behest. Even without eyes, the furrowed brow was prominent. I made her lower her hands into her lap, palms flat on her knees.

Her heartbeat quickened when she realised she was no longer in control of her own body.

“What’s happening to me? Who’s there?”

“You should know that I do this with a heavy heart, and I hope that in time, though I don’t expect it to be anytime soon, you will come to understand that what I do now to you, I do to save many lives, including your own.” I removed the pin from my hair. As I do I find that place in her mind, the place that makes it so she won’t remember this, and I pressed. The anxious expression on her face disappeared. She was blank. A puppet for my thoughts.

She overturned her hands according to my wishes and I circled the table. The Alchemist steel pin pierces the skin of her finger, a crimson drop emerging on the surface. There is no reaction from her in this state. Just the blood on the tip, whispering to me everything I needed to know about this woman.

I took a deep breath and slid the blade across my tongue.

Image after image flashed before my eyes. Her life before them, her life with them. The way they tortured her into submission and how she developed a reliance on them. I saw her encounters with military generals, an encounter with a woman who she witnessed force herself on young Devos, the same woman returning with scars across her face and being forced to mend those scars into some kind of token battle wound. I was getting lost. I tried to focus more. On the compound. On the facility itself.

New threads appeared and I let my subconscious get pulled along them. They started out slow. Her arrival at the compound, her patients, first soldiers then Devos. There was another thread there. I pulled. And I kept pulling.

Buildings, and cages. Blood and tonics. And the purpose of the patients in that room. And the other rooms. And—

I removed myself from her memories.

Through gritted teeth, I thanked her and then sent her into unconsciousness.

Outside the room, all eyes looked to me. I tried to remain calm. I knew they wanted answers, but if I had not processed what I saw yet what good did they think that information was to them.

“I need to check on my wife,” was the only thing I could say.

Rieka lay curled up exactly where I’d left her two hours ago. Lying in an empty bed. Only now she was awake and staring at the miserable soul in the bed next to her.

When I’d been forced to bring her along it had been with the knowledge that she could handle herself, but this—

Tortured and mutilated Devos.

We’d found tortured ones before, Devos who refused to submit, kept in windowless cells, forced to eat, sleep, and shit in the same two-meter squared cells. We’d never expected to find our kind being used as lab rats. However, it should not have surprised me since the nation in question considered us nothing more than prey animals they hunted for sport. I’d warned Rieka to expect some gruesome sights but even I hadn’t expected this.

There came a crash at the far end of the room, causing Rieka to startle. I crossed the distance where Wade was attempting to lull Sal’s fury with loving words.

“They are monsters!” she shouted, a sound I’d heard less than three times in my twenty-four years of life.

She turned when she heard me approach. “Rhydian, did Ceroy tell you anything?”

Wade saw the expression on my face, and knew what I was going to say, his eyes closing in defeat. “It was as we’d feared.”

Worse.

There were dozens of camps like this across the Republic. I kept that thought to myself.

Tears began to stream down her heartbroken face. “Can you mend them?” I asked her. After wiping a sleeve across her face Sal replied, voice on the verge of wrath. “I’ve healed what I could already. The newest ones.” She indicated to the two empty beds behind her where Eleen sat, the fury of a sea god etched into the lines of her face.

“But the others—Rhydian they’re missing entire pieces of their brains and their organs. Whole limbs have been removed. It would take me days to tend to each one, but I’ll do it Rhydian. If you ask me too.”

Days.

We didn’t have days. Even if we postponed burning this place to the ground, the Army was sure to pass through here within the week, and it would take Sal so much longer to mend this many patients by herself.

“We move them,” I said. It was the only choice. “Put them on the trucks. Sal, go with them to the border. I’ll give you the time you need to mend them. And as soon as we get back, I’ll send Lily to you. We’re not leaving anyone behind.”

“Kill me.”

Eleen shot up from the bed at those words.

Rieka was finally standing, the beauty of her hair somehow blanched of all colour here. “Kill me,” she repeated. ”That’s what they were screaming. Please kill me.” A look then crossed her face, as if she had decided something. Leaning down, she pulled her dagger from her boot and strode over to the nearest bed.

“Rieka no.” I rushed to meet her, stretching across the bed to grasp her wrist.

Her gaze remained on the unconscious devo in the bed as she spoke through gritted teeth. “They have been violated and abused, Rhydian. They don’t want to live anymore.”

“And that gives you the right to kill them?”

Anger flashed across her features. I felt the tension in her muscles dissipate. I took that as a sign and released her. She lowered the blade and immediately strode to another bed. Her tone was brittle as glass. “She has had the same part of her brain removed fifty-seven times, each time they grow it back slowly, and without pain killers because they believe the chemical her brain produces gives her the ability to control the ocean tide.” Eleen took a step from her bed towards us, towards a version of what could have been her so many times.

Rieka strode to another bed. “She has had her entire chest cavity removed eighty-three times because they required the pyrophoric sacks in her lungs to be intact.”

She moved to a young man with his left leg missing. “They take his leg bones because he’s like Amida. Their bones are hollow. They grind them into power and turn it into pills that they give their soldiers to make them lighter and faster in combat.”

Slowly she turned to the flayed aquaticus in the bed beside his. “They skin his kind for their scales. This is his one-hundredth pelt. His eyes, he’s lost count since they are faster to mend. They use those in their military cocktails to aid their sailors at sea.”

My jaw clenched. I needed to hear it for myself.

“Everyone out but Rieka.”

All three obeyed, though with a good degree of hesitation. Because of Rieka, I was not behaving like myself. When the door closed behind them, I opened my senses and when I found the young Aquaticus, I felt his heart sync to my own.

Rieka’s eyes widened when she realised what I was doing but it was too late. I let him in and nearly collapsed from the agony. I gripped the bed to steady myself as the man became conscious, the pain now shared between us.

“Please,” he cried, tears falling from eyeless tear ducts. He searched the bed for my hand and I gave it to him.

“What is your name?”

Through quivering lips, he replied, “Arem.”

“Arem, my wife here tells me you wish to depart this sphere for the next?”

The Aquaticus hissed through his pain. “My Rila is already with Veliah. I’ve left her walking the Long River too long.”

I squeezed his hand, the pain in my leg so agonising that the edges of my vision began to blur. “And if I could help you reach her?”

“I would seek an audience with Veliah herself to carve your name in the wall of the Faithful.” He whimpered before continuing. “Mercy is not a sin.”

I clasped the young man’s hand between both of my own. I wouldn’t let him die alone. “You will go back to sleep now Arem, and before you know it your Rila will be beside you.” A soft teary smile pushed through the pained grimace where it remained as I cut myself off from the young man. I swallowed the cry of relief I wanted to scream. There would be time for that later.

I followed the flow of blood with my senses, the way the heart pulled on it like a magnet. And I stopped it. His body didn’t convulse, it didn’t shake. His hand simply went limp in mine. The moment I sensed his last heartbeat, the machine went silent.