Chapter 26
Audrey had no idea how long she’d waited—minutes, hours, maybe both. They still had her locked in a metal holding stall inside a processing shed that opened onto Home Field’s central courtyard, but from the bars she could see everything.
Taryn’s mutilated corpse passed hand-to-hand through the crowd, borne above them like an offering. Each glimpse made her physically ill, but also more furious.
Even through the restraints, the crowd’s thoughts battered her mind. They were feverish with wild devotion—and also tempered with fear.
A few of the Voíríans watching her looked unsettled, their thoughts flitting with the same strange word before they smothered it.
Triad.
Then, as if a great invisible hand pushed down upon the multitude, silence rippled across the gathering.
A chilling calm rolled through them.
She thought of Cary. The last buoy that tied her to the universe.
Deep in her mind, Audrey felt a growl waking and rising.
The monster inside her—her pnévma, if that was truly what it was—shuddered awake.
She didn't know what a pnévma was meant to be. It sounded like some combination of power and presence. She suspected it was more than merely a weapon. It was a force belonging to her, yet also separate. She clenched her fists until her nails split skin. The stirring didn’t stop, yet it gave her strength, something she desperately needed right now.
Was this what they all feared? Not just power, but whatever carried it?
Her hands gripped the icy metal of the cage. The stalls flanked the shed like pens, as if Home Field had been designed to sort livestock and rebels with the same architecture. Her breath clouded the air.
Movement flashed at the periphery of her vision.
The woman from Taryn’s memories—short dark hair, a green vine tattoo winding around her neck—wove through the crowd toward the raised concrete platform at the center of the courtyard.
Number Three.
Audrey would never forget her face. Tall, graceful, olive-skinned like Audrey, almond-eyed and unreadable, she moved with the terrible ease of someone who knew the entire courtyard would bend around her. Power rolled off her hard enough for Audrey to feel it from the cage.
Apprehension rolled through the men on the platform.
Fists lifted together as Number Three passed. The crowd parted for her without being told. Their hush felt devotional in a way Audrey found worse than chanting.
A half-smile curled her lips as Number Three approached Nikos, thanking him without speaking. Gratitude, like a predator praising the hunter who’d cornered the prey for her. She grasped his shoulder and moved forward, examining Taryn’s desecrated body on its stake with an unreadable calm.
The platform stilled. Even the bonfires seemed to bow their flames.
Number Three clicked her receiver. “Number One has a message for you all,” she announced—this time in Aggregate Standard. A deliberate choice. A universal summoning.
The crowd bent forward as one.
A hologram blazed to life over the platform.
Audrey sucked in a deep breath, suddenly unable to breathe. Her body knew before her mind caught up.
That’s him.
The pnévma inside her turned.
The projection towered over the courtyard through fractured blue light, almost solid.
Wind moved through his hair, catching on the same carelessly disheveled look she remembered from the night of the murders.
It seemed as if he had stepped out of memory and into the freezing air before her.
He acted with predatory ease. Each shift of his body was controlled yet never looked forced.
Cheers rang around the courtyard as people shouted his name, clapped, and stamped their feet in wild unison. Some faces shone in rapture, others showed apprehension—together, their voices thundered through the yard.
Then he smiled.
It hit Audrey like a blow.
Not because it was kind—there was nothing kind in it—but because it was beautiful in the most infuriating possible way. Her body reacted before her disgust could catch up. What the fuck was wrong with her?
He looked almost unchanged from the first time she saw him in her backyard—only meaner, more finished.
Time affected everyone, yet had passed by him.
He wore plain black clothes, but even as a projection, he outshone the others.
He was not as large as some towering Voíríans, but he was built with a harsher accuracy that made size irrelevant.
None of that should have mattered. Only his power mattered.
Even at a distance and through projection, his power pressed on her lungs. His presence dominated the courtyard. The hologram almost seemed like a lie.
The most revolting part was that something inside Audrey recognized him. It was a shared intensity she could not name, as if her own power were answering his.
She rubbed hard at her sternum, trying to scrub the feeling out.
Then his smile fell, and he spoke.
Audrey had heard him speak before, but only where it was at least bearable—inside her head.
There, it had been a whisper.
Here, it was a command.
The sound of his tenor outside her mind was lower than she expected. Smoother and controlled in a way that rendered every word chosen. In her head, Ryker had continually felt intimate in the ugliest way. Out here, with the whole courtyard forced to hear him, he became something larger.
She felt the reaction murmur through the people around her before she even understood her own.
Backs straightened abruptly, eyes dropped in instinctive submission, and even the guards seemed to tense and shift their stance.
It was as though the sound alone could reach through walls and exact punishment for any sign of weakness.
Audrey bit her lip, straining to comprehend his words.
She could not understand most of what he was saying, and that enraged her.
But the cadence still got under her skin.
Survival. Resistance. And the Aggregate—the ruling government, the power that claimed every inch of the country as its dominion—was obsessive in its quest for control and obedience.
She caught just enough to know he was promising them something bigger than vengeance.
“The Aggregate believes they own the future,” Ryker said.
His smile turned sinister. “They’re wrong.”
Ryker’s gaze swept the crowd. “They believe power belongs to whoever can seize it...but they’re wrong about that, too.”
He let the words register before adding, “Power belongs to whoever can control it.”
Another pause.
“That is the difference between rulers and corpses.”
Ryker’s voice moved through her like poison with a pulse. She hated that it affected her at all. Hated him more for making it impossible not to feel.
“The Aggregate calls us traitors. History will call us necessary.”
When he finished with his fist lifted, the crowd answered together.
“CARRY ALL BEFORE ONE! CARRY ALL BEFORE ONE!”
The chant shook the courtyard walls.
Audrey willed her body to react, to move, to break free of whatever spell had fallen over the crowd. But she stood statue-like, trembling, hands still gripping the bars of the holding stall.
Movement snapped her attention sideways.
Number Three’s head shot left. Her hand lifted, pointing through the crowd. Audrey followed her stare just as a man broke from the audience and charged toward the platform.
Number Three smiled.
Another man rushed from behind the platform at the same time.
Number Three raised both hands—one toward each man—and her eyes radiated with vicious delight.
Blue fire erupted.
Both men went up in flames in perfect unison.
“There are traitors among us,” she shouted in Standard, severing cleanly through the panic. “And we do not tolerate traitors.”
The crowd went rigid with fear, a collective holding of breath.
Then Number Three’s black eyes found Audrey—and held. Audrey’s heart jumped. The remaining prisoners ignited in brilliant blue fire, including Taryn’s desecrated body. Flames roared upward, erasing what little dignity the dead had left.
The stench of burning flesh flooded the processing shed and rolled out across the courtyard. Audrey shoved her hands further into her jacket pockets to steady them, though it was useless. She was already exposed out here.
No wonder Sophia had kept her away from this world. It was ritual tempered with terror.
Number Three stepped down from the platform, flames projecting monstrous shadows at her heels as though the fire itself bowed and followed. The crowd clamored again—roars, screams, cheers all folding into one another.
Audrey watched until the bodies, including Taryn’s, collapsed into ashes and smoke.
The crowd thinned, and the bonfires burned lower; they left Audrey in the same holding stall inside the processing shed. Strange cawing sounds drifted across the compound—something between a cricket’s rasp and a bird’s death-rattle—breaking through the humming of nearby minds.
The accommodations were worse than anything she’d endured so far: a dirt floor, cold as bone, interrupted by a patch of withered grass. She sat against the bars, shivering.
After about an hour, even the humming waned. Either the world quieted, or she simply went numb to it.
They were still toying with her by dragging out the hours.
Good. Let them try.
She must have drifted, because something shook her shoulder. Her eyes opened to a trace of blue light. A hovering flame cast a shaking gleam across the enclosure, shadows forming sinister silhouettes.
And then—her face appeared.
Number Three. The executioner. A gun leveled at Audrey’s forehead, close enough for her skin to feel its cold promise.
“Stand,” the woman said in Standard.
It took all of Audrey’s strength not to tremble as she rose. Her surroundings gleamed at the edges. Cary’s smile flashed through her mind. Her father. Taryn. The fire.
Is this the end?
The unknown made her muscles tense, and she flexed her hands.