Chapter 24
Home Field looked abandoned, but only in the way a corpse looks dormant while rot works beneath the skin.
The building hummed with hidden life. There were people inside—hundreds, maybe thousands. Even through the restraints, she could feel the pressure of their thoughts.
Home Field’s upper floors were encased in glass, reflecting the pale moons.
The lower half had discolored by neglect.
People wore scarves over their necks and faces—as if dust or disease lingered everywhere.
A chain-link fence rose around the complex.
It rose ten feet high, crowned with coils of dark metal.
Even if she escaped the building, she would never outrun this place.
Not with her wounds and not with her luck.
Still, she would try. For Cary.
They passed security checkpoints. One was outside the fence, another inside. Gloved hands searched every inch of her, rough and impersonal, while Nikos barked at the guard.
“Alright, we’re clean. Tell Number Three the Simas girl is here, plus one extra. We’re taking them down below.”
Down below. So, Ryker wasn’t waiting at the door.
Good—or worse.
Were they taking her to Ryker soon or shelving her until he decided she mattered? Either way, if she wanted any chance of survival, she needed to gather information: find out who truly ran this place, where the weak points were, and what Ryker wanted with her and Taryn. Escape would come after.
Deeper into the structure, it was cold and white under too-bright lights. Basir and Nikos had called it a processing center and, at other times, a holding facility, but inside these walls, it seemed to operate as both a prison and a laboratory.
Everyone had a task, a place to be. Still, they stared. She saw the wariness in the guards’ eyes. They studied her wrists longer than Taryn’s, careful not to meet her stare. She wasn’t like the others.
A jab of metal struck her back. Nikos’s voice was low, meant only for her. “Come on. You’re mine to handle until I hand you over. Don’t think of making this harder.”
His fingers clamped around the back of her neck, steering her ahead.
Audrey walked without speaking. She forced her face into stone. More people stared at her. She ignored them. Being afraid was a privilege she didn’t have—not here, not now.
“Well, well, well,” Nikos drawled in amusement. “Quiet at last. Good. Means you’re scared. You should be, you stupid bitch. I might even get some time alone with you before he burns this pretty body to ashes. I can’t wait to shut that smart little mouth.”
His hands sank further into her neck.
Audrey ground her teeth, fury simmering warm below her skin. If she ever found another moment as she had with Nassir, she would paint the floor with Nikos’s blood.
Where was Emerson? If he were alive, she would have walked him exactly where he wanted to go. Let him come. Even if she never forgave him, he could help her get off this shithole.
They turned into a maze of identical hallways with white walls, sealed doors, and fluorescent light. A place designed so no one inside could ever learn its shape.
Down a flight of stairs to a lower floor, they were shoved into a bare room with two beds, one bathroom, and no windows. A single overhead light burned constantly. The walls pressed in like a contracting throat.
She curled her hands into fists, fighting the shaking.
Don’t let them see. Not now.
They did not come for Audrey that day. Or the day after. That frightened her more than an interrogation would have. It meant someone had given orders. It meant she was being saved for a reason.
Instead, men in black leather banged on the door. They marched inside and dragged Taryn away by her arms. She always came back hours later in pieces. Burns. Cuts. Clothing torn into bloody lace. Burn-marked as if someone had purposefully held her skin to the flame.
By the third morning, a rhythm took shape. Harsh lights snapped on, food trays slid in with plain water and stale bread, and silence devoured the hours. Guards arrived for Taryn after they ate, and hours later, they brought her back for bed.
Audrey started watching for patterns—which guard paused as she passed? Which footsteps brought food to her cell, not violence? When did the building seem to fall asleep around her? If this place ran on routine, routine could fail for her, too.
Audrey heard the guards in black leather whispering to each other. “Don’t mark the Simas. He wants her intact,” one said.
She pretended not to hear.
The door opened an hour later, but it wasn’t the usual guards this time. A woman in a gray detainee uniform walked in before anyone outside could stop her. Her eyes shot between Audrey and Taryn like she was weighing livestock. “Simas,” she said.
Audrey ignored her.
“They say Number One asked for you.” The woman looked down her nose at Audrey. “That makes you either very important...or very dead.”
Audrey held her stare. “Which do you recommend?”
The woman’s lip curled. “Depends whose side you’re on.”
This woman looked like she was on the last leg of her sanity, but Audrey had to focus on what she might know.
Then, the woman hocked on the floor between them.
“If you’re here for the Separatists, you’ll live,” she whispered. “If you’re here for the Aggregate...” Her eyes slid toward the hall. “He’ll open your mind just like the rest of us.”
Guards stormed in and dragged the unknown female detainee back out.
Patience was a skill Audrey had learned in prison—but this? This was the kind of waiting that hollowed a soul.
Medics fixed up her wounded thigh and kept Taryn alive—enough for the next round. The bathroom had a shower. Audrey washed Taryn’s wounds and her own clothes, scrubbing until her skin split. At first, Taryn flinched from Audrey’s touch. But by the third day, she gave in to it without meaning to.
During the fourth night, Taryn woke, thrashing so hard the bedframe struck the wall. Audrey crossed the room before she was fully awake herself, catching Taryn’s wrists before she clawed her own face bloody.
Taryn stared at her for a long second, then sagged.
Audrey eased her back down, wiped the dampness from her temples with the edge of the sheet.
When Audrey tried to talk to Taryn about what was happening to her, she clammed up.
She wasn’t interested in reliving the experience, even just to explain.
But once, while Audrey pressed a wet cloth to a burn along her waist, Taryn whispered, “They’re not asking about routes anymore. ”
Audrey stilled. “Then what are they asking?”
Taryn bit her chapped lip. “More about what happens inside the Fields, especially the tests they conduct in Field One.”
Audrey wanted to ask about the tests, but she didn’t want to make Taryn suffer any more. “Why did you join?” Audrey asked, without looking up from the torn skin at Taryn’s shoulder.
Taryn gave a breath that almost sounded like a laugh. “I thought rules meant safety.”
Audrey’s hands halted.
“I was wrong,” Taryn said.
Voices came through the walls. Even muted by the restraints, they pressed at Audrey’s skull until claustrophobia constricted her chest.
If Emerson were alive, Audrey knew he would probably come for Ryker—not her.
But either way, she wouldn’t wait for rescue.
That was just another trap. Audrey’s stubbornness burrowed inside her.
Emerson was a means to Cary. Cary was the only one who might understand what she was becoming—whatever that was.
Several more days elapsed, and Audrey decided they were trying to turn waiting into its own kind of execution.
Every time Taryn was dragged back, Audrey hated Ryker more—not abstractly, but personally.
The wounds mattered less than the patience behind them.
This was cruelty arranged with purpose, meant to teach the body and the mind the same lesson.
At night, while tending Taryn, Audrey heard him.
Ryker.
His voice permeated Taryn’s memories and Audrey’s sleep—not always clear enough to understand, but close enough to feel.
He sounded patient and controlled, never hurried.
It was the kind of voice that made terror worse because it never needed to rise.
Indeed, Ryker never sounded angry in the memories—he sounded certain—and when his face surfaced, he remained eerily calm.
From what Audrey could tell, he simply looked at prisoners until they told the truth.
Whenever his name surfaced in the fragments leaking from Taryn’s mind, the people around him changed.
Voices dropped. Eyes shifted.
Even the guards seemed careful about where they stood.
Sometimes dreams were only dreams. But sometimes, if a person was close enough, their mind merged into hers.
And these felt real.
She saw a younger-looking Cary with him. Ryker spoke softly to her outside a Field. Then, she saw them sharing a meal.
Her sister had been here.
Alive.
Known.
Cary was not some artificial hope Audrey had invented to keep herself moving.
She’d stood in this place. Breathed this air.
Survived this machine somehow. If Cary had been here, her mother truly had brought her back to Nepra after the fire.
She was the only thing on the other side of this place that still felt real enough to survive for.
And her sister was somewhere inside this world, real enough to find.
It wouldn’t be easy. Mihail hadn’t seen Cary in years, and Emerson was loath to talk. Cary was smart, strategic, and clearly hard to find. If anyone could track her twin, it would be Audrey, though. She knew her sister as well as she knew herself.
The days continued to run together, and she saw others, too—officers, workers, officials—some dragged in bleeding, some shaking, some trying to bargain.
By the time Ryker finished with them, she no longer knew whether she was hearing confessions or sentences.
That was the part that disturbed her most. Some of the people dragged through these rooms were clearly brutal.
Some were bureaucrats who had hidden behind paperwork when children went into the Fields and didn’t come back.
Some might have signed orders that built places like this one, but what Ryker did to them was abhorrent.
One day, they brought in a man instead of Taryn. He looked as if he’d been up all night and was in bad shape.
He wore Aggregate security black, though most of it had been burned away. His eyes were open too wide. His mouth kept trying to form the same word, failing. When Audrey knelt next to him, he clutched her sleeve hard enough to tear it.
“Don’t let them test you,” he coughed out. “Not everyone can do what he needs.”
He muttered other things, too, things she didn’t understand.
“He doesn’t want all of them dead. He needs certain ones alive. The rare ones. The anchors,” he said, grabbing at his hair, his eyes wide with fear. “I told him about memories I didn’t know I remembered.”
She could only nod.
Then he started confessing to things Audrey had a hard time following—lists, disappearances, children processed through intake like inventory.
But the shape of it emerged anyway. Ryker was a monster, yes, but some of the men he broke belonged to something uglier than she’d imagined.
Someone, somewhere, had been deciding who was worth keeping, testing, and using.
Shortly after confessing to a litany of crimes, he died.
The next woman lasted long enough to share what she had done before Ryker opened her mind. She signed children into Field intake under false categories, rerouted names, and looked away when the weak ones vanished.
By the time she died, Audrey still wanted Ryker dead. She just no longer believed every person he broke had been innocent.
Audrey sat back on her heels, blood drying below her nails. Taryn had returned, and they both stared at the bodies as the guards took them away.
“That officer deserved to die, but he was right. Ryker is trying to build something with other Voíríans, and not everyone fits into his plan,” Taryn whispered after the door shut, leaving them alone.
“What exactly is his plan?” Audrey held her breath, waiting for the answer.
Taryn shrugged. “They said he needs stronger minds. Better ones. Linked ones.”
Audrey didn’t know exactly what he meant by linked ones, but the words conjured people connected by something deeper than blood—a network of minds able to do things an individual never could.
“Did they mention gold triads?” Audrey asked.
Taryn looked at her lap but didn’t respond right away. “Gold triads aren’t sent to the Fields. They’re fought over.”
“By who?”
“Everyone,” Taryn murmured darkly. “And if you said the Magister told you this is the year, then they’ll start taking the strongest first. So, if they move you downstairs for testing, don’t show them everything you can do.”
Then she crawled into bed, leaving Audrey to stew alone.
Home Field wasn’t just a base, and whatever waited for her in the sterile white questioning rooms she saw in the memories was not interrogation. It was an intake, part of a larger machine built to sort the useful from the disposable.
And she was still alive inside it.
If Cary had survived this place, she had done so by being moved, hidden, or claimed by someone. Audrey would learn how this machine handled the women it valued.
After, she would get to her sister first.
Before Audrey went to sleep, another series of orderlies marched through the hallways, and their conversation filtered in.
“We take the detainees to and from this room for questioning,” one explained, then added, “Number Three wants us to prep the Simas female for morning intake and evaluation with Number One.”
“And Number Two? Has anyone heard anything?”
Another orderly muttered through the door, “Field One still hasn’t transferred him. Bastard won’t give them any names.”
Audrey’s mouth went dry hearing them talk about Mihail—and about taking her to Number One. She pulled the scratchy sheets tighter around her body.
If she wanted any hope of escaping, protecting Taryn, and finding Cary before it was too late, Audrey would have to face Ryker. Real fear sank its claws into her. She had no choice but to ignore it, cling to her anger, and remind herself that she hadn’t been broken yet.
She would survive the intake, learn what Ryker truly wanted, and hide whatever part of herself he had not earned the right to see.
Ryker wasn’t just the monster at the center of the maze. He was the obstacle between Audrey and every answer she still needed.