Chapter 23 #2
The simple tenderness stunned her. Audrey tried to say thank you, but only broken air came out. Taryn nodded as if she understood anyway. Audrey didn’t know what to do with the kindness from someone who owed her nothing. It felt more dangerous than cruel.
They rode in that metal box all day, jostled like bodies in a mass grave, thirst gnawing at their tongues until they barely felt like their own. Then, they stopped.
Audrey glanced through the dirty glass window. Nepra had grown darker and colder the closer they got to Home Field—an iron lung of a planet. The trunk bed’s door squeaked open.
Nikos’s smile was gone.
His eyes were coals.
“I hope Basir’s doing well,” Audrey taunted, baring her teeth.
Nikos lugged her from the truck by her shirt as if she weighed nothing. “Don’t say another word. Your life is about to become extremely uncomfortable. And this was supposed to be the easy part.”
“Aww, Nikos.” Audrey batted her lashes mockingly. “I’m a terrible captive.”
He gave her his fist instead of a reply.
Enjoyable was not the word for the days that came after.
She and Taryn received one meal a day—barely food, it was just scraps of simple dried meat and stale bread with so many seeds inside that Audrey almost gagged on one. Water came in the tiniest of droplets.
Worse, their wrists were zip-tied to bedposts at night whenever they stopped at a safe house.
The cuffs dulled what she could do.
The zip ties meant they didn’t trust dulling alone.
Sometimes they drove until they reached a breaking point, with Nikos pushing them harder every day to reach Home Field.
Basir—horrifyingly still alive—woke with fresh enthusiasm for watching them bathe, leering and rifling their naked bodies with hands and eyes.
Audrey caught the bitter edge of something behind his gawking—a need to confirm he still had power, maybe, after nearly dying.
Nikos had mentioned one night that Basir's wife ran off with an Aggregate security enforcer years ago. Ever since, he’d proven himself with cruelty, insisting he was harder and more loyal than anyone else.
Now, his eyes crawled with both hunger and old, pervasive resentment, as if punishing them made him less the victim of his own history.
Audrey had never felt so humiliated—not even in prison. At least there, cruelty followed rules.
Here, cruelty was in the air.
She listened to Taryn’s muffled screams at night, her voice breaking against the thin walls, and prayed—actually prayed—that Emerson was somewhere out there, closing in as Audrey led him toward Ryker.
By the bruises on Taryn’s face the next morning, they were already torturing her for information. They hadn’t even waited for Home Field.
Every time Audrey looked at her after that, Taryn looked smaller and harder at once.
The closer they got to the main base, the more Audrey’s hope lived on a thread, and she was almost out of thread.
Every part of Nepra looked the same: dust, metal wind, a sky that never brightened.
After four days in the truck, they set out on foot, walking until Audrey’s injured thigh burned, her hunger changed into nausea, her thoughts fraying. Her mouth was gagged, which was Nikos’s personal gift for “talking too much.”
She shuffled beside Taryn like a prisoner on a pilgrimage to the gallows. Once, when Taryn’s foot caught on a stone, Audrey lightly held her elbow just enough to keep the woman upright. Neither of them acknowledged it.
Cold gripped them like fingers. This side of the planet never saw full light. Everything lived in twilight—half-born, half-dying.
After several hours, numbness spread along her arm where the restraints dug into her bone. Her anger rose with every step, climbing like heat under her skin.
If she could only summon that fire again—
If she could only reach the thing that had answered her in the smoke—
But nothing answered her. Only the empty throb of exhaustion.
And yet, that wasn’t entirely true all the time. Something reacted now and then—small surges slipping through the cuffs when fear spiked. It wasn’t her real power, though, just leakage.
One afternoon, they stopped. Nikos ripped the gag out and tipped a swallow of water against her tongue—more insult than mercy.
She snarled.
“That’s it? Untie my hands or carry me.”
She saw the slap coming and sidestepped.
Her boot slammed into his foot. Her knee drove into his groin. Nikos folded with a strangled curse.
Audrey laughed—bright, unhinged.
Then his backhand cracked across her face, whipping her head sideways.
“You’re a colossal pain in my ass,” he hissed. “I doubt that’s the first time you’ve heard that.”
He struck her again. And again. And again.
“But go on. Keep talking,” he said. Ryker will have even less patience for your bullshit than I do, and I’m dying to watch you piss him off.
Audrey smiled at the thought before she could stop herself. Blood spilled down her chin. “Oh, I plan to get under his skin. Deep.”
The reminder that she could still hear him even through the restraints made his eye twitch. He glanced at the cuffs and growled.
“Handing you over can’t come soon enough,” he muttered, tying her gag back.
Hours later, the world darkened ahead, like a continuous wall of shadow, as though the land itself had stopped and something else had begun.
Lights shone along the dirt path as they crossed into the darker side of Nepra.
They exposed nothing comforting—just sand-like dirt, shrubs, chain-link fences, and emptiness.
It was even colder than before.
Over the hill, Audrey saw it. Concrete walls resembling an exiled city.
A massive structure sprawled in the dark, like a skyscraper laid on its side.
It was a place built to swallow people—a machine.
The word slid through her head, both mechanical and monstrous.
She imagined it was part prison, part machine, built to process and break people down piece by piece.
Merely looking at it, Audrey thought the walls might grind her up and spit out whatever was left.
Audrey guessed the Aggregate would have a hard time attacking a place like this.
She felt sick, despite her outward bravery.
Was this Home Field?
An hour later, she had her answer.
And death seemed much closer.