Chapter 77 Kali
KALI
Needles pricked my arms from the bruising grip of the two soldiers hauling me down the street, toward a crossroad brimming with military trucks and handcuffed people.
Even my broken pinkie had grown numb, the accidental bumps against my captors failing to call out a hint of pain. My whole body sizzled from various aches and cramps and throbbing and gashes and bruises.
But I contained the cries seeking to spill out of me. A rule had ingrained itself deep inside me: never give the enemy what they wanted, whether that’d be a sound of pain, information, or anything else that could be used against you.
Only after Sadira and I’d gotten separated in the heat of a battle, I’d been too exhausted to defend myself against a group of Ardaton’s soldiers. Although my adrenaline levels had been going through the roof, the four men had wrangled me into submission in less than three minutes.
“I swear I will shove my boots up your asses,” I muttered.
My feet dragged against the asphalt as I hung suspended between two brutes. I didn’t have the energy to match my pace with theirs, especially when they seemed to purposefully move quicker than I could.
One tired-to-her-soul and smarting fighter couldn’t do much against multiple rested and well-organized fellows.
“Shut up and walk, bitch,” the short and bulky soldier hovering at my back spat out. “You don’t—”
“Remember your orders.” Marching in front of us, the sharp-featured man with a red circular patch on his uniform—a squadron leader—glanced over his shoulder at us. “No speaking with our prisoner.”
That weariness stopped me from rolling my eyes. It wasn’t like I could talk my way out of this. My tongue tended to bring me trouble, not something that’d make my dreams come true.
But my body… That was a different case.
So I relaxed, becoming deadweight in their grasp.
The soldiers grunted, scrambling to catch me before I sagged onto the road. Their disgusting hands slipped all over me, from my hips to my waist and then back to my arms, but in the end, they hoisted me back up.
But not without curses and grunts as they strained to hold me. A laugh bubbled up inside me from such a simple tactic having almost taken down two trained men.
The squadron leader paused in the middle of the street. Daylight bounced off the severeness of his look. “Halt our work again, and I will personally introduce you to Lenus.” At my frown, he added, “He’s a fan of studying the layout of nerves in a human body.”
I blew upward in hopes of removing the sweaty and bloody hair obstructing my vision. “I doubt he can come up with worse things than I’ve already endured.”
The leader’s pale lips retracted, exposing straight teeth sitting in two perfect rows.
His smile raised my hackles. If it was possible, I would’ve curved my back like Shadow did whenever we’d accidentally slam our bedroom’s door.
“We’ll see,” he said. A hunch he knew something I didn’t drenched me in cold. “We’re almost at the designated location.” With a short nod to his subordinates, they half-carried, half-towed me to the intersection buzzing with action.
Lines of people stood before the open backs of black matte trucks without any windows. Ardaton’s military was packing everyone inside like animals—
No. Not everyone.
Either green or no bands at all adorned countless wrists, and the lack of black bands made me strain as I tried to spot a single non-fertile person.
“Move.” The soldier at my back gave me a shove.
The slap of his palms against my shoulder blades caused me to stumble. For the first time since they’d captured me, I was glad someone was holding me up. I would’ve face-planted into the asphalt otherwise.
My body was beginning to protest staying awake.
Ignoring the bone-grinding grip the two grunts had on me, I murmured, “I’ll see how you move yourself when I rip your entrails out through your asshole and make you eat them.”
“What nonsense are you spewing, huh?” The same idiot pushed me again, but then stepped aside—the squadron leader had fixed him with a glower.
Yet the knock had been enough for me to lurch sideways. The soldiers caught me, righting me once more, silently urging me to resume walking to their destination.
As we continued our trek, we passed an alleyway, and my insides twisted into a knot.
Yesterday’s dinner crawled back to my throat as I spotted heaps of the fallen, all nestled in the narrow passageway.
Black wristbands looped around corpses’ forearms like chains, trapping the souls instead of setting them free.
Ardaton was as much of a monster-infested city as Ilasall had been.
My stomach curdled, yet we marched on, right into the center of the intersection, just a few blocks away from the Spire. The ruins of the once tallest glass building in Ilasall loomed on the horizon.
“You said you have survived the worst things imaginable.” The commander of our group gestured to his right, to a silver bus tilted on its side. “I don’t think you know what that means.”
A coated-in-scarlet head emerged around the front of the vehicle, and just like that, instantly, the universe around me evaporated. The pangs of pain slithering in my muscles dissolved like a first snow, my focus narrowing in on the man leaping over the bus.
“No,” I breathed as Zion ran right at me—
The squadron leader gave a sign, and six soldiers abandoned their posts near the closest military trucks, rushing straight at the unhinged man who’d become my home over the last seven months.
As they clashed, so did I. Thrashing in the restraints the brutes holding me had formed out of their limbs, I screamed, the force shredding my vocal cords.
But the cage locking me in place held, not a tremor rocking through it as I failed to free myself.
Zion lashed out with everything he had at the six soldiers, but I didn’t need to ask to know he was running on fumes. Add in his fractured wrist…
The men exchanged punches and blows, but not one of them picked up a firearm or a knife.
Were their orders not to—
The soldier with a soaked-in-red uniform, the hue matching Ardaton’s emblem, whipped out his handgun. Right as Zion turned, the butt of the weapon connected with his temple.
The world stopped spinning as he struck the ground, unconscious.
I grew motionless. As frozen as Zion. Icicles pierced my joints, preventing me from sprinting to his body, from trying to wake him up, from checking if his pulse was steady.
If not for the two soldiers squishing my upper arms, I would’ve collapsed onto the road. All thoughts had abandoned me besides the turmoil of emotions boiling in the marrow of my bones.
So I opened my mouth and let it all out.
The rage.
The torment.
The powerlessness.
My throat vibrated from the trial I was subjecting it to, but I pushed on, and on, and on, until my scream turned hoarse and I lost my voice.
“You think this was bad?” The commander pressed two of his smeared-in-dirt fingers to my jaw, swiveling my head to the other side of the crossroad. “How about seeing your leader surrender?”
I choked mid-pant. On the sidewalk, behind one of the steel-colored cars assigned to green-banded, Ezra stood beside Gedeon, the former’s arm thrown over the latter’s shoulders.
Gedeon’s attention bounded between me, stuck in the hands of the enemy, and Zion’s immobile form. Possible courses of action, evaluation of outcomes, and available choices, they all flashed in Gedeon’s expression, one after another.
Ezra gave a curt nod to the squadron leader, and before I could decipher their exchange, he gripped my uniform shirt, tearing it down the middle, exposing my bra.
The chill invading the atmosphere launched its assault on me, causing goosebumps to erupt all over my skin. The commander ripped the fabric down my right shoulder, all the way to my elbow, his touch so repulsive I shuddered.
But it was enough to jolt me. I twisted and wriggled, elbowing and kicking the soldiers holding me captive—
Stars exploded in my vision. A few seconds ticked by before darkness retreated, giving way to light, and a sting blossomed on my cheek, joining the taste of iron flooding my mouth.
The higher-up soldier had punched me.
Heat crawled into my ripped capillaries while I tried to make sense of what had occurred.
Gedeon stepped forward, only to be stopped by Ezra’s hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t,” I croaked out, pleading with Gedeon to stay away.
The war was far from over. Zion and I had made our peace with laying our lives, but not with Gedeon’s. He had to go on. He had to fight. He had to find a way out of this mess.
It was now or never.
And yet, he took another step toward me.
“Please, don’t,” I whispered through a sheen of mist clouding my eyes.
Right as I swallowed the thickness in my voice, a prick, and then a stream of burning liquid drew my attention to the needle buried in my upper arm.
The commander withdrew the syringe, capping it again and stuffing it in his pocket. “Watch your pathetic leader kneel.” Grabbing my jaw, he roughly turned me away from him.
His fingers dug into my flesh, destroying the sensitive tissue, while Gedeon…
Dropped to his knees beside Ezra.
“You’ll finally get what you deserve,” the man purred into my ear, his vow so edgy it razed my eardrums. “Have fun serving.”
His promise floated in my mind, wild and free, like my muscles. They’d ceased cooperating with my brain, like my legs, and the ground rushed to greet me.
As I crumpled onto the asphalt, the defeat written across Gedeon’s features morphed into waves.
One by one, the shadows crawling in my peripherals stole my sight, and the world vanished.