Kharvek
FIVE
The bells shatter the silence.
Not the regular bells that mark the hours—these are different. Harsh. Urgent. The kind that mean blood is about to spill.
I’m moving before I consciously decide to, instinct taking over. The corridor fills with running Attendants, all heading the same direction. Toward the lower levels. Toward the pens.
The Matron’s voice cuts through the chaos, amplified by blood-wards until it seems to come from the walls themselves.
“Escape attempt in the Breeding Pens. All Harvest Guard to containment positions. Kharvek—attend immediately.”
My name, spoken like a command. Because that’s what it is. That’s all it’s ever been.
I push through the crowd of Attendants—they scatter from my path, pressing themselves against the walls to avoid contact. Even now, even with an emergency demanding their attention, the fear is automatic. Primal.
Not her. She didn’t fear me. Not really.
I push the thought aside. Later. I can think about Imara later. Right now, there’s stock running loose, and if I don’t handle it quickly, the Matron will start asking questions about why her weapon hesitated.
The Breeding Pens are three levels down, a warren of underground chambers designed for maximum control with minimum effort.
I take the stairs at a dead run, my enhanced muscles burning through the distance.
The blood-wards grow stronger as I descend—denser, more watchful.
The Matron protects her breeding stock with particular care.
The alarm bells continue their screaming. I crack my knuckles as I run.
Violence. Finally, violence. That I understand.
The pen entrance is chaos. Harvest Guard in formation, ritualists frantically reinforcing the blood-wards, Attendants trying to maintain order while clearly terrified of being caught in whatever’s about to happen.
Through the press of bodies, I see the breach—a gap in the containment ward where someone has managed to force through.
Three escapees, I’m told. Two males, one female. Already past the primary checkpoints and heading for the surface.
I push past the guards and follow.
Their trail is easy to track. Fear leaves a distinctive scent—sharp, acrid, impossible to miss. They’re not trying to be subtle anymore, just running as fast as they can. Desperation driving them toward a freedom they’ll never reach.
I catch the first one at the second junction. A male, young, still strong despite years in the pens. He sees me coming and tries to fight.
Mistake.
I open my channels. Let the power flow through the scarification patterns on my hands. My palms split along familiar lines, weeping power, and when I grab his arm, his blood answers my call.
He screams.
They all scream, at the end.
The drain takes seconds. His blood floods through my channels, fuel for the power I carry, life-force converted to magic with brutal efficiency. His body collapses when I release it—empty, hollow, nothing left but a husk of skin and bone.
Two more.
The second escapee is faster. Smarter. He’s made it almost to the surface levels before I catch up, and when he hears me coming, he doesn’t try to fight. He throws himself at a window—narrow, barely wide enough for a human body—and I think he might actually make it through.
My hands close around his ankles and pull.
This one, I tear apart. Physically. The Matron wanted a message, and messages require spectacle. His screams echo through the corridors as I separate him from himself, piece by piece, painting the walls with what used to be a man who dared to want freedom.
One more.
The female is the hardest to catch. She knows the tunnels—must have been mapping them in her head for months, maybe years—and she uses that knowledge well. Twice she doubles back on me. Three times she nearly loses me in the warren of service passages beneath the main structure.
But I’m faster. Stronger. Made for exactly this purpose.
I corner her in a dead-end maintenance alcove. She’s pressed against the wall, chest heaving, terror written across her face. Young. Probably not much older than twenty. Pretty, in the way stock sometimes is—bred for appearance as well as magical potential.
“Please.” The word breaks as it leaves her. “Please, I just wanted—”
“I know what you wanted.”
The Matron wants a survivor. Someone to question. I grab the female by the throat and lift her off her feet, just enough to remind her who’s in control, then carry her back toward the pens.
She cries the whole way. I don’t let myself hear it.
Later.
The pens are quiet again. The survivor has been taken for questioning—her screams will echo for hours, then stop when she tells them what they want to know or when she runs out of voice. The bodies of the males have been disposed of. The breach in the wards has been repaired.
Order restored. The machine continues.
I stand in my quarters—a cell, really, larger than most but still a cage—and stare at my hands. The scarification lines have closed, power settling back into dormancy. No visible blood. My body processes what it takes, absorbs it, converts it.
Clean hands. As if the killing never happened.
Three people died tonight because they wanted what she wants. Freedom. Escape. An end to being resources in someone else’s machine. I killed two of them myself—efficiently, brutally, without hesitation.
That’s what I am. What I was made to be.
She gave it a name. Whatever I’ve been building toward—she gave it a name.
The modifications I’ve spent three years carving into my own flesh pulse faintly beneath my skin. New channels. New pathways. A way to break free of the Matron’s control without her knowing.
I’ve been planning this alone. Preparing alone. Assumed I would fight alone, die alone, maybe take the Matron with me if I was lucky.
Now there’s a harvester with sharp eyes and blood-stained hands offering to stand beside me. Offering knowledge I don’t have, access I can’t get, a decade of careful preparation that complements my raw power.
It’s a trap. It has to be.
Except traps don’t look at you the way she did. Traps don’t understand your modifications better than the ritualists who were supposed to design them. Traps don’t tell you their schedules and their hiding places and offer you their throats while demanding to be used.
I press my hands against the cold stone wall of my quarters. Somewhere above me, the survivor is screaming her secrets to people who will use them to prevent anyone else from trying what she tried.
Somewhere else, Imara is waiting. Patient. Willing to gamble her life on a monster’s choice.
Third bell. Storage alcove behind the Harvesting Halls. Alone.
I could kill her. Eliminate the risk. Go back to my modifications, my slow preparation, my solitary war against the clan that made me.
Or I could take what she’s offering. Let her into my plans. Trust—no, not trust. Use. Let her use me while I use her, two weapons pointed at the same target.