Chapter 4
Niki
Kitchen work was hell. Not the metaphorical kind you complain about over drinks after shift, but actual, literal, sweating-through-my-disguise hell where the heat hit like opening an oven door directly into your face.
Species I couldn't name and wouldn't want to barked orders in languages my translator choked on, spitting out half-translations that made no goddamn sense.
I kept my head down and hauled crates that smelled like rotting fish had fucked a dumpster and died there.
I chopped things that might have been vegetables or might have been organs, honestly didn't want to know, but none of it mattered because I wasn't here to cook.
The observation point Binwee had mapped was a service corridor, narrow and dim, with a ventilation grate overlooking the cell block.
We'd timed our arrival for right after the afternoon fights.
I pressed against the grate while Binwee crouched beside me, small enough to peer through a lower gap, and my heart did that thing it used to do before kicking down doors in the Bronx, that hammer-against-ribs rhythm that meant shit was about to get real.
"There," Binwee whispered. I heard them before I saw them: boots on metal first, then voices rough and crude as the translator turned their words into something like "move it" and "fucking beast." Then came the crowd noise rolling through the corridors like a subway train, all roar and bloodlust and that particular sound of people who'd just watched something die for their entertainment.
Four guards appeared, different species but all armed, dragging someone. When I saw him, when I finally laid eyes on Enslak, all I could think was: Jesus Christ.
The Vaktaire I'd met were big and beautiful in that alien way, but standing at that grate, watching him emerge from the pits, I realized I wasn't prepared at all.
He was massive, seven and a half feet easy, maybe more, built like he could tear through a brick wall and not notice.
Dark cream fur covered most of him except where patches were just gone, replaced by scales that caught the light wrong, or matted fur crusty with old blood, or bare gray skin that didn't belong to any Vaktaire I'd seen.
His hair hung long and streaked white, matted into something like dreadlocks where gore had clumped it together.
The claws curved like fucking scythes, while his teeth, visible through his half-open mouth, belonged on something that hunted in nightmares.
They'd spliced him, cut him open and sewn other things in. I found myself wondering how many species, how many times they'd done this to him.
"Mother of God." The words slipped out before I could stop them.
Binwee glanced at me but didn't say anything as the guards threw him into the cell.
He hit the floor like a side of beef, that wet, heavy sound of dead weight meeting stone, and didn't move for several seconds while blood pooled around him.
His blood or something else's. Impossible to tell.
One guard kicked him hard enough to make me flinch. "Get up, beast. Time to get clean."
Enslak pushed himself up, hands and knees first, then standing.
The movement was wrong. Too mechanical, too trained, like a dog that's been beaten into obedience until it doesn't remember any other way to be.
When he finally stood, I got a clear look at his face and saw the augmentations extended there too: jaw jutting forward, features distorted.
But his eyes, gold set in blue, pure Vaktaire, the only part of him they hadn't managed to corrupt, held something that made my chest hurt.
It was sadness, but not the sharp kind. It was the kind that came from losing everything, from forgetting who you'd been before survival became the only thing left. I'd seen it in people who had been broken for so long they no longer trusted themselves to feel whole.
The cell door opened again and a smaller figure entered wearing service staff clothing: Zarlak.
I leaned closer, memorizing everything. Height five-six, close enough to mine.
Build slight, almost delicate. Movements efficient but careless, someone who'd done this a thousand times and stopped giving a shit around time number three.
He didn't speak to Enslak, didn't acknowledge him as anything but an object.
He just grabbed the hose and turned it on.
The water hit hard enough to stagger him.
Cold water, judging by the steam rising off his overheated body.
Zarlak swept it across him methodically while blood and gore washed away in pink rivers.
When the spray hit a blaster burn on his ribs, Enslak went rigid, his breath catching in that involuntary gasp pain rips out before you can stop it.
As the water hit open lacerations on his shoulders and back, his muscles clenched in waves, his claws scraping stone as he fought to stay still.
The spray found a deep gash still bleeding and Enslak flinched hard enough that his knees buckled.
He caught himself on the wall, trembling, but he didn't cry out, didn't protest. He just stood there and took it like an animal being hosed down after slaughter, broken and resigned.
"Disgusting," Zarlak muttered, the translator rendering it perfectly clear. "Filthy beast. Should just put you down."
He turned off the hose, grabbed a bucket from the corner (I could smell it even through the grate, something rancid and spoiled) and dumped it on the floor: slop, kitchen waste, scraps you wouldn't feed to anything living.
"Eat," Zarlak said, and the cell door clanged shut.
Enslak stood there dripping, staring at the mess on the floor.
Then he lowered himself down and ate, scooping the slop to his mouth with his hands like an animal because that's what they'd made him.
I had to look away, had to close my eyes and breathe through my nose and remind myself why I was here.
But the image was already burned in. It would be there forever.
"You've seen enough?" Binwee asked quietly. I nodded, didn't trust my voice.
"Then we follow Zarlak. The rest proceeds as planned."
I pulled back from the grate, my legs shaky.
The cop part of my brain was already working, cataloging Zarlak's gait, his route, guard rotations, timing.
But underneath that, something else burned: rage, cold and pure, at what I'd just witnessed.
At what they'd done to him. At the casual fucking cruelty of it all.
I'd worked homicides in New York, seen terrible things, cases that kept me up at night.
But this was different. This was systematic. Torture refined into routine.
We moved through the service corridors, keeping our distance as Zarlak left the facility. He didn't hurry, didn't look around, completely confident. Why wouldn't he be? He was nobody. Just a caretaker. Another cog. But he was wrong about that.
No one paid any attention to us as we moved along. Why would they? To others we were only workers. Less than nothing.
The city streets teemed with evening falling, if you could call it that with two suns setting at different times, and beings everywhere conducted business ranging from legitimate to definitely fucking not.
My auditory implants filtered through the noise and locked onto Zarlak's distinctive guttural laugh three blocks away.
His thermal signature blazed bright orange against the cooler crowd as my ocular implants tracked his movement through the marketplace, automatically highlighting weapons: a vendor with a plasma rifle stashed under his stall, guards at the entrance gripping stun batons, a rooftop sniper I nearly missed until thermal caught the heat signature off his weapon barrel.
Exit routes, choke points, civilian density, everything overlaid across my vision in real-time.
If I'd had this tech in New York, I'd have been fucking Superman.
Zarlak strolled through it all like he owned the place. Stopped at a stall for meat-on-a-stick, exchanged crude jokes with another Negita, completely at ease. Never looked behind him once. Sloppy. The kind of carelessness that would get you mugged or worse in most of New York.
The deeper we went, the worse it got.
Down an alley, someone smaller was cornered. A straight-up mugging in broad daylight, or whatever passed for daylight here. The victim's screams cut short by breaking bone. Nobody intervened. Nobody even slowed down. Just predator and prey.
Two blocks later, a body hung from a makeshift gallows between buildings. Days old, left to rot as a message. The stench of decay mixed with open sewage running through the streets.
Slave markets operated openly. Beings chained in pens, eyes hollow. No humans, thank God, but other species inspected like livestock, branded, the traders moving with the casual confidence of men who knew no law would touch them.
Weapons everywhere. Death so common it barely registered.
You could feel the fear in how beings moved, quick and efficient, eyes down, maintaining careful distance from anyone dangerous. Conversations died when armed groups passed. This was a world built on terror.
Zarlak led me to the outskirts where buildings grew smaller and more run-down, streets narrower and darker, the kind of place where people didn't want to be seen.
My hand drifted to the weapon hidden under my clothing.
His home was exactly what I expected: a shack barely worthy of the name, cobbled together from scrap metal and salvage, leaning to one side like a strong wind might topple it.
The smell hit from twenty feet away, rot and waste, a rat hole.
Fitting. He went inside and didn't lock the door.
Why would he? Who'd want to break into this place?
Me. That's who.
I found a position across the street, tucked between buildings. Binwee appeared minutes later, silent as a ghost.
"That the place?"
"Yeah."