Mud (Chromatic Mages #1)

Chapter 19

Rosabel La Rouge

Present Day

It was a moment’s decision, one I don’t think I even made very consciously. But my leg was only throbbing lightly after resting it most of the day, after that long sleep, after eating well and after yet another two visits from the Bluefire guard who did healing spells on me. I was right—he looked okay even though he’d used his magic on me and I was Mud. Perfectly okay.

All I knew was that I had fifteen knives on my person in various sizes hidden away under my clothes, two silver daggers with blades long enough to be considered miniature swords, two guns strapped to my torso—and I was sick. Sick enough to stay in the bathroom and throw my guts out for hours.

Just sick—and so damn tired.

So, I ran.

It wasn’t very smart of me, I’ll admit. The guards that were appointed to my room had gone to eat, and Poppy had gone to shower before she had to see me off, and I snuck outside of my room to find the hallway empty, so I took that as a sign. Nobody was watching. Nobody could see me, and I knew how to sneak out through the back of the mansion. I’d done it a hundred times, and I was going to do it again today.

Because nightfall was just a couple of hours away and I didn’t want to die in a stupid game that Iridians played to get rich and powerful and less bored with their lives. I didn’t want to die at the hands of a power-hungry asshole with no moral compass and no regard for life.

No, I’d rather run and live in hiding like a coward for as long as I could.

I went down the stairs on the other side of the mansion that mostly the help used and then through the laundry room. I sneaked across the open kitchen doors and down the narrow corridor, to the backdoor that opened near the pine forest barely a five minutes’ run away. I’d get to it, and then to the other side in no time. There was no need to pay attention to the pain in my leg or think or plan or try to make sense of the absurdity that had become my life— just run, Rora .

That’s exactly what I did—until I tripped over magic so dense it could have been a concrete block.

I tripped and my face got close and personal with the ground, and that same ward—Greenfire, best of the best—spread over me like a blanket, trapping me under it. I couldn’t move even if I’d had magic in me, let alone as… stripped as I was now.

Still, I tried to push it off me with all my strength. I planted my hands on the soft ground and I tried to sit up, put my back to it, gritted my teeth, yet the magic was way stronger. It bounced back onto me like a rubber band and slammed me against the ground once more, so hard it took my vision away for what felt like seconds to me but must have been longer than that. Because the next time I was aware of myself, hands were on the back of my neck, around my arms, holding me down.

Footsteps coming closer—so distinctive I recognized the tempo of her pace even when she walked on grass.

My limbs were no longer in my control. I was pulled up—and I tried to make it to my feet. I really tried. But the best I managed to do was look back at Madeline’s face as she approached us, her eyes on me, her disgust clearly painted all over her face for all to see.

Iris, the way she hated me right now. The way she despised me with her whole being.

“ Pathetic, ” I thought she muttered under her breath, but I couldn’t be too sure because one of the guards holding me on my knees by the arm slammed the butt of his gun to the side of my head.

The world disappeared completely.

Wheels underneath me. That’s the first thing I noticed.

Cold metal around my wrists, which made my heartbeat soar within the second. My eyes opened and I expected to find myself in a dark basement chained to a chair, with Taland somewhere close by, watching from the shadows.

Instead, I was in the back of an SUV, the fancy ones Madeline usually traveled in, with two guards sitting across from me, and another two in the front. The car was moving, the guards in front of me barely blinking.

Fuck, my head hurt. I had cuffs around my wrists, but the chain was long enough that I could reach the right side of my forehead where I’d hit the ground, and my temple where one of these pricks had hit me with the handle of his gun. I hissed in pain when my fingers touched the wound, and I had a trickle of dried blood going down the side of my brow. It wasn’t bleeding anymore, but it pulsated pain that spread through the rest of my head in waves.

But my leg wasn’t hurting at all, like someone had spelled me again while I was out of it.

“Where are we?” I asked because it was dark outside, and all I saw were trees through the tinted windows. Trees and other cars driving both ways.

“We’ll arrive in the City of Games in three minutes,” said the driver, while the ones sitting in the back with me reached for something in the compartment between their seats. A small bottle of water and something wrapped up in tin foil.

A sandwich.

“If you try to run away, we have orders to stop you by any means necessary,” the guy who unwrapped the sandwich said, before he put it in my hand. His friend put the bottle of water in my other.

But I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t want to eat—I wanted to get the hell out of this car before we made it to the City of Games!

Panic instantly settled in.

I should have been more careful, damn it! I should have made sure there were no wards around the mansion. Never mind that there had never been any wards inside the estate that had stopped me from moving about freely—I should have been more careful.

Fuck, fuck, fuck! Look at me now, I’m losing it.

I was finally, really losing it.

Except now wasn’t the time to lose it, was it?

I was tempted to laugh because I couldn’t even afford to freak out or be pissed off at all. I couldn’t afford to let myself feel what I needed to feel, not right now.

So, closing my eyes, I picked up the memories and the thoughts in my head and forced them into order.

I’d tried to run away. They’d caught me. They’d brought me to the City of Games. They were going to force me into the Iris Roe, and if I tried to run again, they were going to shoot me to death. That’s what by any means necessary meant.

Unless I shot them first.

My knives, my guns, my leather jacket and leather pants were on me still. I could shoot these guards before they got me through the gates. I still had a chance.

“Do you mind?” I said, raising my hands to tell them to take those cuffs off me.

“We have orders to keep them on you until you enter the game,” said the guy who’d given me the bottle of water.

It took all I had not to start cursing out loud.

“I can’t eat with cuffed hands,” I said instead, as calmly as I could manage.

The guards looked at me—that’s all they did. With their hands over their knees and their shoulders straight, ready to launch at me at any second if they needed to, they just looked at me with a dead expression on their faces.

The cuffs weren’t going anywhere.

I brought the sandwich to my mouth and bit into it, defeated. Not hungry in the least, but I was going to need the energy. It was delicious, though, which told me Poppy had had something to do with telling the cook how to prepare it. Lots of turkey and lots of cheese, and the cold water did wonders to clear my head .

The reminder sent shivers down my back—I hadn’t gotten the chance to even see Poppy at all. When I decided to run, I didn’t think I’d get caught, and I didn’t think about what would happen if I did get away. I’d just ran, and now I was never going to see Poppy again.

Maybe that was for the best. I sucked at goodbyes. I would rather just…disappear.

Easy enough to do in the City of Games.

The City was located west of Baltimore, over two hours away from the IDD Headquarters. Iridians loved their games, loved to showcase their magic, loved to test their skills, and that’s why the covens had created the City of Games— a safe space to do magic and entertain with no boundaries.

So now the world had a live magical show to visit any time they pleased, and the covens made a lot of money off those visits, and the Iridian folk had a way to be who they are openly while earning fame and money and power off it.

There were a lot of playgrounds in the City of Games. Think of it as this big permanent circus, with games that went on regularly, including those that were played every month or year or four years, like the Iris Roe. It had two large theaters that played magical shows for the audiences, a zoo with magical animals—one of two in the entire world—different parks with different themes, from Disney princesses to lands of mythical creatures. Large hotels, restaurants, bars, an aqua-park and a miniature volcano, too, as well as a very famous wedding venue that people said was booked some three years in advance.

Yes, the City of Games was a big deal to a lot of people, and it got regular visits from Iridians and humans from all over the world. I’d only been here twice for two events with Madeline when I was a girl, but the place had always given me a bad vibe, so I’d never come back. Poppy had—plenty of times. She’d begged me to join her—just three months ago last time—promising me the best buttered popcorn I’d ever had and chocolate chip muffins to die for.

I’d said no because I’d had to work—for real, so I’d been relieved to not have to lie.

Now, I was being forced into the City at my weakest.

The bigger games had special playgrounds within the City, and the biggest one of all was that of the Iris Roe, a game that gathered thousands and thousands of visitors. You couldn’t stream the game anywhere, and nobody really saw all of it, not even the audience, just like Billy Dayne said. They could only see the game through the screens mounted on the seating area—and maybe that’s why it was the most popular game the Iridians had ever created. The mystery of it had a special appeal that tugged at people’s hearts. Only the players—those who survived, anyway—really knew what it was like in there, nobody else.

Or maybe it was because the players were free to do whatever they wanted and needed to do to get to the end, even hurt and kill others. They had free rein to use their magic, any old or forbidden spell they could get their hands on, and never have to answer for it in their lives. Those who went in there were all in. The chances that they’d die in the game were higher than the chances that they’d come out alive—so maybe that’s why the game was so popular?

You tell me.

It took all four years to prepare the playground for the Iris Roe. Dozens of teams worked on it—and the first were the scouts who spent all those years chasing rainbows all around the world and harnessing their colors, to find the best, most durable ones, to create The Rainbow. It was the strangest group of colors you’ve ever seen—and half the prize of the Iris Roe. Half the reason why people were willing to lose their lives for it.

The rainbow had five colors—the colors of each school of magic, but they weren’t just one color. Each held together every other color that fell under the umbrella of the main one—there were mints and limes under Greenfire, aquamarines and cobalt blues under Bluefire, pinks and oranges, too many shades of gray to count—except Whitefire, forever pure, not tainted by any hue.

People still argue that black and white are not, in fact, real colors. White contains all colors, while black is simply the absence of light, and therefore, the absence of color.

Except they are—at least in magic. They have power to alter reality nonetheless, to do just as much as red and blue and green and every color of the rainbow. That is why Iridians have considered them colors in their own right since the beginning of time.

A mountain marked the heart of the Iris Roe playground, like a volcano that spit rainbow colors instead of lava. That rainbow was to be absorbed, basically, by the player who got there first. Once that happened, that power was filtered and uploaded into the winner, so that he may carry all of it in his blood, then pass it on to his children.

To take magic from anything—Iridians or magical objects—was exhausting, and draining a carefully cultivated rainbow like this one took extra energy. Most importantly, it took magic, but it could be done. It had been done by the winners of this game in the past, and I still had trouble believing it. To harness the color of rainbows, to learn how to put it together in one place, to pick the strongest colors and discard the rest, to allow Iridians to actually absorb a manmade rainbow like that ?

I don’t know—it felt unnatural. Not the way things should be. Wrong.

But what the hell did I really know about the world? I was stuck in survival mode for so long that I still hadn’t stopped to breathe and try to accept that I wasn’t even an Iridian anymore. That my whole life had changed, yet again—this time to something I could never recover from.

So many people.

The City of Games was secluded from the rest of the cities and towns near it. River Ibri separated it from the east, while a large forest created a clear border west and north. To the south was the highway on the other side of a big, empty field. There was only one entrance for visitors—the main one, where the doors itself were magical and they would not let anyone through without a ticket. There was no way to trick that magical system—it was created with magic of every color because the one thing Iridians wouldn’t stand for was to be robbed of their money.

The other three entrances were separated—both for players of the bigger games, and for the City’s permanent and temporary employees. I had no idea which gates we were driving through but it didn’t really matter. I was already inside, and the streets were packed, and I knew deep in my bones that I was not going to make it out of here again.

We only stopped by the entrance for thirty seconds while the driver gave a piece of paper to a City guard armed to his teeth with a machine gun, knives, and a wand strapped to his chest. I was half tempted to scream and ask for help, but then I remembered whose car I was in.

I remembered what I was.

I clamped my mouth shut and didn’t make a sound.

Inside, before ten minutes were over, the SUV slowed down, then stopped completely, and found me still trying to get my shit together, to not panic, to breathe.

The guards pulled me out by the arm, handcuffs still secured around my wrists. But when the magic of the City filled my nostrils and ears and eyes, I forgot all about them.

The couple of times I’d been here, it had been daytime. Even though I’d never really felt at ease within these walls, I’d still been impressed by the tents and wooden stands and hotels and the larger buildings around me. But at night, apparently, it had a completely different feel. Magic, colorful and vibrant, hung around every structure, around each performer. Even the cotton candy stand let out a soft Bluefire hue as it spun the sugar around and wrapped itself into a dog figure on a stick. The children laughed and clapped their hands as the man smiled brightly—such a small trick with such a big impact on these little kids. It would forever create the idea of what magic should be in their minds. They’d never realize how false it was even when they grew up. Because the City of Games was just that— games aimed to entertain.

Magic was only power, and power always wanted more power. More, more, more. An Iridian could never be powerful enough. They were always in search of ways to become more powerful. Wealthier. More influential in the world.

“ Move, ” the guard to my right told me, shoving me to the other side, toward the back of a wooden house from the rooftop of which rose big bubbles glowing in all colors, before they popped in the air a few seconds later like miniature fireworks.

The actual fireworks, though, had begun right where we were headed.

“Holy shit,” I whispered when the guard continued to drag me behind the building, and I began to notice the colors in the distance. The fucking rainbow glowing brightly in the night like miniature colorful suns had come together in one place.

By Iris, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my whole life, and the fireworks that were going off over it paled in comparison.

“Keep moving,” the guard said, as if he couldn’t see that I couldn’t stop him from dragging me whichever way he wanted with my handcuffs on and my throbbing head. At least the pain in my leg had faded away almost completely. Someone had definitely spelled me again while I was unconscious.

Two of the other guards were ahead of us, while the last was behind, just to make sure that I had no way of escaping them if I tried.

I wouldn’t, though. There were four of them, each twice my size, and armed. My hands were cuffed, but that’s not the reason why I knew I’d lose. It was the magic that ran in their veins. Magic, which, even if it were the weakest, it was still more than what I had.

Yet at the sight of that man-made rainbow, not being able to run away didn’t seem like such a big deal just now. Because what if I could actually get close to those colors, to that life —so beautiful and vibrant and full? What if I could soak up all those colors, all that energy, and indeed return my magic to its original state the way Madeline hoped I could?

Fuck, now that I was looking at it, it didn’t seem so impossible. Now that I could actually see the Rainbow with my own eyes, it was almost like I could touch it. Like I could find it. Like I would spend a lifetime chasing it if I had to.

The guards dragged me closer to the playground.

They said elves and orcs dug over ten thousand acres for three years without stop to create it. The base arena where the game took place was an ellipse, so big they had space to create just about anything they wanted for each coven. The seating tiers began about a hundred feet overhead, and they fit close to ninety thousand people comfortably. It was a city of its own, this playground.

Rats, I’d thought the first time I saw a picture of the Iris Roe in Madeline’s newspapers. People were poured like rats into this maze-like setting nobody could really see clearly, while others sat above them and watched and laughed at their misfortune, made wagers and bets on their lives.

Just like rats in a lab—and now I was about to be one of them.

Then the Rainbow began to slip down into the ground.

The people cheered. So many of them were already in their seats that the ground shook and groaned from their cheering. We were far away, and the tiers rose another thirty feet above ground level all around the edges of the playground, so I could only make out the Rainbow through the tall gates in between the seats that served to let in the players.

It was now almost completely inside the mountain, and to let those colors out again, a player had to get there with five keys, according to Billy Dayne. Five keys, only five. It wasn’t impossible, was it?

I thought for sure the guards were going to drag me to those gates, to the people waiting in line to get in—but no. They took me toward the other side, deeper into the crowd of people all rushing toward the Iris Roe, while the fireworks exploding over the audience began to slow down and fade, too.

“Are we going to the Redfire gate?” I asked because now that I couldn’t see the playground at all because of the high wall that surrounded it, the nerves were getting the best of me. My entire body was shaking with fear. With sheer panic.

“No,” the guard dragging me by the arm said.

“So, where are we going?” And did I want to try my luck at escaping?

They could kill me if I did. I wouldn’t mind it—I was already a dead woman walking.

But…what if I wasn’t? I hadn’t believed Madeline when she said it, but now that I’d seen those colors on that Rainbow, everything seemed so possible. So thrilling. It gave me twice as much hope as those weapons on my vanity table had in the morning.

The guard didn’t answer me. He just dragged me all around the outer walls of the Iris Roe, past the Greenfire gates where there had to have been at least a hundred players waiting in line, and deeper still to an area with no light and no people walking by. No stands selling food or drinks, no tents with performers in them, no games, no nothing—just darkness and trees on our left, and a large wall on our right.

My ears were already used to the screaming crowds sitting on the other side of that wall. The colors of that rainbow were still imprinted on the back of my lids so that I saw them every time I closed my eyes.

My father used to tell me that anything was possible with magic, but I’d stopped believing that a short time after he and Mom passed away. Because it wasn’t true. Not everything was possible with magic. Bringing them back wasn’t. Making my grandmother love me wasn’t. Being happy wasn’t.

But maybe undoing what was done to me in those woods was. Maybe those colors were a promise that I could actually get my magic back, after all—and who was I to deny myself life ?

My decision was made for me soon enough, though. Because they were not going to get me in through one of the five gates of the playground.

They were going to get me in through the backdoor.

“What the…”

My voice trailed off when a door suddenly opened on the dark wall without warning, and only a dim source of red light lit up the darkness of the night. Two men were on either side of it, and they were waiting for us to approach.

The guards who’d been leading us stopped. They both took out theirs guns from under their suit jackets, then turned around and stepped to the sides to let us through.

“Make it quick,” the one in the right said to the one dragging me forward, but he got no response.

The men waiting for us by that door looked terrified as they held their red flashlights in their hands.

“Payment first,” said the one wearing a red and black bandana on his head.

The guard who’d been behind me stepped to my other side and handed him an envelope without words. A really thick envelope without a single drop of ink on it. The bandana guy held the flashlight between his teeth and eagerly grabbed the envelope, while the guard offered an identical one to his friend, too.

I couldn’t decide which was funnier—the fact that I was being smuggled into the Iris Roe by my grandmother’s guards or the fact that I was hoping to actually see the end of it alive.

“This her?” said the other guy, who didn’t bother to count the money like bandana guy, but simply put it away underneath his denim jacket. He nodded his head at me, then flashed his red light on my face.

I closed my eyes but kept my calm.

“Move,” was my guard’s answer, and he gave me a good shove on the shoulder. The light was suddenly away from my face, and one of the smugglers was pulling up my hands while the other shone both flashlights at them.

Then bandana guy produced some sort of a metal cylinder in his hand, touched one end of it to my right wrist, and pressed a tiny button on the side with his thumb.

Sharp needles slipped into my skin, sending pain up my arm so fast so suddenly, I had to grit my teeth not to scream in surprise.

“It’s just a little pain,” the smuggler said, grinning wide, and the red light coming from those flashlights made him look like a fucking monster.

I looked down at my wrist, but I couldn’t see anything on my skin, though it felt like it was burning where that cylinder had touched me. The next second, my guard pulled me by the arm and turned me to the side without warning.

Fuck, it was getting harder to keep myself calm by the second. This guy . This fucking guy had pulled and dragged and shoved me so many times I would be dreaming about pulling his fingernails off one by one.

Maybe that’s why I memorized his face while he unlocked the cuffs from around my wrists. Maybe that’s why, when he took them off and met my eyes, I smiled.

“I can’t wait till I get to drag you and shove you around like this, too,” I said, my voice small, barely a whisper. And I couldn’t even tell you what inspired me to speak, just that I really, really was tired of being treated like a damn puppet.

The guard said nothing. He didn’t smile, didn’t frown, gave no expression at all, but he held my eyes, almost like he was challenging me.

Then…

“She’s Mud ?!”

Both smugglers were shining their flashlights somewhere over my head. I looked up to see that a circle had appeared about ten inches over me. A circle the color brown, the worst color to have ever existed. A muddy brown, the brown that Play-Doh made when we used to mix in all the pretty colors together when I was a kid.

Mud.

Bile rose up my throat.

“That’s none of your concern,” my guard told Bandana guy, but I couldn’t look away from the circle over my head at all. My mark.

It was supposed to show the audience which coven I belonged to. It was supposed to be my only ID while inside the game.

Mud.

“Muds aren’t allowed in the game,” said Bandana’s friend, and he seemed really pissed about it, too.

A charge of electricity went through my wrist where they’d marked me with that cylinder. It didn’t exactly hurt, but it wasn’t pleasant, either.

The next second, the circle of brown over my head vanished into the darkness.

“She’s just a very weak Redfire. You can’t see the color clearly because of your flashlights,” my guard tried, and I’d have patted him on the back for thinking on his feet.

However, it wasn’t going to work. The color was very clear.

“So, then why does she need to get in through the back?” Bandana wondered .

“You got the money. She goes in, just like we agreed,” the other guard said—and he didn’t sound half as friendly as the one who’d dragged me around.

“Are you insane?!” the smuggler hissed. “Do you have any idea what would happen if Muds thought that they could just waltz into these?—”

That’s as far as he went. The guard grabbed him by the shirt and put his gun right under the smuggler’s chin, went all close and personal until the tips of their noses fucking touched. Bandana guy stepped back and raised up his flashlight in surrender. They most definitely didn’t want a fight.

My guard stifled his smile—or maybe it was just a trick of the shadows.

“You got your money. She goes in, now —or else,” said the other who had the smuggler by the shirt.

“Fine,” the man spit. “Let go of me, for fuck’s sake—let go!”

The guard stepped back but didn’t put his gun away.

He turned to me and simply said, “Go.”

Another shove on my shoulder, good and hard so that I almost fell on my face as I entered the door. Bandana and his friend were cursing under their breath still.

“She don’t got any wards or charms on her, does she? She don’t got any weapons?”

Only enough for an IDD team to handle a good number of criminals.

I said nothing, just walked ahead into the darkness.

“Clear as a tear,” the guard said— my guard. The guy who liked to push me around.

I’d have killed him just for sport under different circumstances. As it was, I was entering the darkness without any clue where the hell I was going, until Bandana said, “Left. Just-just turn left and follow the tunnel. Use your hands. It’ll lead you to the second level. When you’re out, blend in with the other players and keep your head down.”

He sounded panicked as all hell. I nodded, though I doubted he saw me because their flashlights were directed at the guards.

The guards still waiting with their guns by the backdoor.

“Go ahead. Close it. We’ll be here,” one of them said—not sure which one.

The smugglers didn’t hesitate. They pulled the door closed eagerly and turned their flashlights off.

Complete darkness all around me. Not a sliver of light anywhere that I could see.

Shivers washed down my back. Fuck, I could hardly breathe.

“ Go! ”

Raising my hands to the wall on my right, I started moving ahead, all the while reminding myself that no monster hid in this trap they’d put me in, and nobody was breathing down my neck.

Once I focused, I realized that there was a bit of light at the end of this dark tunnel. Footsteps behind me—the smugglers following me in silence. Keep moving, just keep moving, I said to myself with every step I took.

The sound of cheering became louder as that light at the end became clearer. The way the low ceiling rumbled and groaned like it was complaining let me know that I was somewhere under the seating tiers. Each time the audience jumped and cheered, I felt the vibration all the way to my bones.

And then the tunnel ended.

Outside, these wide concrete stairs in between the seats led the players from the gates of their coven and all the way down to the playground, so the audience could see them, cheer for them, and they could smile and wave back, and feel mighty and powerful before the game began. Just like my smugglers said, the tunnel let me out on the second level, barely twenty feet away from the bottom of the playground.

Players all around me—could have been a hundred of them. I tried to act as casual as possible when I slipped out the small opening on the wall under the seats, but those closest to me still noticed. They still looked at me, confused, surprised, not sure what to even make of me.

But I wore red leathers, just like them, and they couldn’t see the color of my magic, so nobody tried to stop me. Nobody said a word.

I moved faster, continuing to descend the wide stairs so that the players who’d seen me coming out would lose sight of me. They probably didn’t care, but I went all the way down to the first level before I allowed myself to slow down and look around, take in my surroundings and see who I was up against.

I saw.

My lungs squeezed when I realized that the playground, the actual game, was so much bigger than I had imagined. A real maze made out of thick stone walls and hedges and trees and buildings, a separate city below almost a hundred thousand spectators screaming their guts out and jumping with their fists in the air.

A miracle I kept on walking and didn’t fall on my face. There was no ceiling over me, no walls around me yet, and I was having trouble breathing. The players who were around me, all wearing red, all waving and cheering and smiling at the audience, were mostly men, but there were plenty of women, too. We were so far away from the gates of the other covens around the playground that we couldn’t make out their players at all, but even if only fifty of them came through each gate, that meant there would be over two hundred Iridians to beat in this game.

Over two hundred Iridians to compete against for the colors of that Rainbow.

Once again, my hope crashed and burned right in front of my feet.

A horn-like sound took over the night, making me jump, and the audience and the players around me screamed louder. We were close, so close, and even though I slowed my step, the crowd pushed me forward until I had no choice but to jump on the muddy soil of the playground together with everyone else.

The horn went off again, and I could have sworn someone spoke somewhere in the distance. The voice was coming from all sides at once. Speakers.

I heard nothing but the loud beating of my heart, though. Saw nothing but the players who were rushing to get into that maze. They disappeared between the many openings on the walls made of grey stone blocks. They disappeared eagerly, running, cheering still, because none of them wanted to think about death right now. They were as full of hope as I was full of terror.

But even so, I followed them when the last of the players disappeared between those walls.

I followed them because I had no other choice.

My weapons were on me. My heart raced and my hands shook, but my mind was calm, my thoughts crystal clear.

The Iris Roe had already begun.