Chapter 51 Collecting Souls
Sapphire
I roll on my side, letting my eyes peel open, and come face-to-face with a woman staring back at me through the rusty bars meant for the cage of a gigantic bird.
The sight of her round brown eyes scares the daylight out of me. I fling myself back, cracking the back of my head into another set of bars behind me. Hissing, I rub my scalp and grit my teeth.
Those curious brown eyes blink timidly, like she didn’t mean to frighten me. In fact, my reaction equally scared her. The woman strains to sit herself up, using a scabbed elbow and dirty hand to inch herself up to lean on a set of bars.
“Skievéz.”
I’m sorry.
“Fuck me. Old Alkadonian can only mean one thing,” I groan, adding pressure to the back of my head.
“She’s from Dementia,” a man says from a cage next to the woman studying me with an interested gaze.
“I speak your language too,” the woman tells me with a smile.
I nod, jerking forward as a hand lands on my upper back.
“It’s just me.” Niklaus. Groggy. Annoyed.
I twist around to see him lying in the cage to my right, pinching the bridge of his nose as he keeps his hand on me.
It only takes me one or two seconds to know where we’ve landed.
It’s a hallway made of brimstone and two columns of oddly shaped cages.
Red and yellow bulbs, glitching and pulsating with inconsistent light.
A dreary old tune, like that of a vintage carnival—an organ, trumpet, and other instruments I don’t recognize.
And the scent is exactly as I pictured it.
Candied apples and the scum at the bottom of a well.
I lock eyes with Niklaus as he lowers his hand.
“We are in the fucking Vexamen Prison,” I exhale. The dread and denial arrive and leave like a puff of smoke. The uncontrollable laughter snuffs any other feelings out. I sit up, covering my mouth with the back of my hand, pinching my eyes closed as a fit of giggles ruptures my lungs.
“Yep,” Niklaus adds with zero humor to his tone.
I laugh harder, wheezing with tears in my eyes.
“We must have done something horrible to a saint in a past life,” Niklaus continues.
I can’t stop laughing.
“Is she okay?” the woman asks.
Niklaus ignores her. “It has to be bad for our health to travel this much.”
I’m delirious, shaking my head, and reaching back to pat him on the shoulder. The muscles under my fingers tense and coil tightly together.
“She’s in shock,” the man two cages down says.
You are damn right, I am.
“The sentinels didn’t put them in uniforms.”
“White material? Could they be from—”
“No.”
“But they wouldn’t have just thrown these two in a cage without inspection and—wait, they don’t have collars?” The man stands to get a better look at us.
I rest my head against the bars and close my eyes.
“It was a last-minute imprisonment,” I sigh.
The cage doors open and the ground rumbles with hurried footsteps.
“Follow us!” the woman is already in the hallway, careful not to get in the way of the inmates jogging past us. The man stands behind her, watching us suspiciously.
I look back at Niklaus, and we exit our cages and follow our neighbors down the long hallway. Men and women aren’t dressed how we read in our books. Niklaus notices it too.
The women are barely covered in dark red rags, patches and strings that only cover their private areas. The men only wearing black and red pin striped pants.
“I thought they wore red one pieces like bathing suits, and the men wore black pants?” I whisper to Niklaus.
The man peers back at me with a subtle scowl. “There have never been uniforms like that here.”
At a closer look, the man isn’t really a man at all. He’s a teenager. Younger than me. Short, shiny black hair, and lime green eyes. The woman looks close to his age. Maybe seventeen? Long, chocolate brown hair, tan skin, and gentle sprinkling of freckles on her cheeks and slender shoulders.
“She’s thinking of someplace else,” Niklaus replies.
And we come to a complete stop. My bare feet tap at the murky water spreading past the entrance of the community showers. There are multiple jagged pipes gaping from the ceiling, hosing gray water onto a compact grouping of naked inmates.
Some howl at the cold water pounding down on their backs torn to ribbons of loose flesh and open meat glistening with blood and other fluids. The beastly results of recent whippings. Others shiver and keep their heads down until sentinels nod and release them from their shower time.
“Laughter gone?” Niklaus asks, unamused.
“Laughter gone.”
I don’t look his way as I slip out of my white patient gown, eyes lowered, arms clasped around my chest. As my hands grip my sides, I wince at the rib bones so easily defined to my touch. I can’t believe how much weight I’ve lost. I don’t feel like myself anymore at all.
“Walk in front of me,” Niklaus orders.
“So you can gawk at my backside? No, thank you.”
Niklaus keeps his head angled away from me but stays at my side.
“So I don’t have to worry about anyone grabbing you while my back is turned,” he responds with tired aggravation.
I take another look around, weighing my options. So many male prisoners staring at me already. Well, not just me. The teenage woman is the target of a lot of attention, but as she enters the showers, she stays locked arms with the young man with bright green eyes.
“Okay.”
Reluctantly, I accept his hand, and we step into the angry downpour of water that reeks of rusty pipes and a well full of mold.
I wince and bear down as the pins and needles stab my skin.
The water is colder than I expected. But I stay in place in front of Niklaus, keeping my head down as my wet hair forms a wet curtain around my face.
…eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.
“Veitzentuiex! Dé venouis zéxeknéxies!” A man with long, fuzzy white hair grabs my elbow. He tugs at me once, wearing a big, crooked grin. “Veitzentuiex, inexec!”
The malnutrition in my body is like a drug that won’t leave my system.
I let go of Niklaus’s hand and try to use his weight against him.
A maneuver that would normally be effortless, feels like I’m trying to move a mountain.
The man laughs angrily, snatching my throat with his other hand to force me into submission.
“Let her go!” the young woman yells in Old Alkadonian.
But Niklaus steps to my side, seizing the inmate’s wrist, and prying him off my throat.
Though he doesn’t stop with that downward movement.
With a fast twist, I hear the bone in his forearm snap.
Then another. The first proximal metacarpal is separated from his radius bone.
The inmate is powerless to fight off Niklaus’s dominating hold on him.
And Niklaus’s shadow stretches over the wet stone floor and the whimpering man like a reaping from scripture.
The inmate begs in Old Alkadonian, but Niklaus doesn’t respond. His head tilts and his eyes go cold, as if measuring how much more this body can take before breaking entirely.
“All right, that’s enough,” the young man tells Niklaus. “It’s not worth it. Let’s go.”
“No?” Niklaus glances down at me, mocking the young man with a raised eyebrow. “Breaking the bones in his hand for attempting to sexually assault this woman isn’t worth it?”
I massage the bruising skin around my throat as I watch another small bone crack. The inmate screams, crumpling under Niklaus’s iron grip.
“I think I’d like to break the rest of his hand. Then his forearm. Then his elbow. Then snap each of the tendons that string everything together.” Niklaus cracks his neck. “Would that make your throat feel better, darling wife?”
I scan the crowd. The whispers. The men seemingly getting ready for a fight as they move their way to the front of the circle forming.
I shake the water from my eyes and place my hand on his chest. “Let’s get out of here.”
Niklaus hesitates, eyes dropping to my hand, then giving me a sidelong glance.
“Come on,” I coax him.
The young man and woman watch us cautiously, clearly fearing the retribution of other prisoners who are gathering closer.
Niklaus unlocks his hold, blinking down at my assailant flailing on the floor as he clutches his arm to his chest.
I turn away from his naked body, feeling disgusted and so fucking sick of being thrown into the most barbaric, inhumane situations that made up the past where our parents are from.
How could this world be so evil? How is it so different than the cushioned life Niklaus and I have lived?
I mean…I’m in a goddamned co-ed community shower, being cleaned with rusty drain water and assaulted by middle-aged men with boils and sores on their backside.
The sentinel nods for our next wave of inmates to move forward, changing into clean uniforms. And now that our asylum garbs are disposed of, there will be no other details to stand out with. We are now Vexamen prisoners who committed no crime to end up here.
I slip on the cloth and straps that are made up of scarlet rags—small patches of flax linens, coarsely woven together to give me that scratchy, uneven texture against my skin.
First is the brassier, stringy and so small and thin, I can clearly see my hard nipples pressing against the material.
The bottoms are a shred of red braided string for my backside, and a tight cloth covering my front.
Niklaus buttons his black-and-red pinstriped pants next to me.
“They’re going to make us wear the collars,” Niklaus warns me.
“Huh?”
I look up just as a sentinel stomps toward us, an inflamed acne-covered face pinching in a grimace at our appearance. He holds out two iron collars and grumbles something in Old Alkadonian.
I give the faintest dip of my head, bearing no more fight in me.
The walk behind our two neighbors is a blur. My feet ache and sting at the sharp, jagged ground. My stomach grumbles from a piercing hunger that won’t go away. And I feel sick all the time.
“Do you know how we got here?” Niklaus asks as we wait in a long line of prisoners for our first meal.
The commissary is loud and echoey, bustling with metal plates dropping, cups clapping against tabletops, and inmates shouting over each other.
“No.” I drop my head back and roll it side to side to stretch my sore neck. “Kind of. I had a dream I saw Krimson.”
Niklaus lifts his gaze hopefully. “Was it real?”
“I don’t know. I think. Maybe. It felt real.”
“What happened?”
“He was trying to find me. And—” The rest of the dream pummels into my thoughts with a force so powerful, I lose my breath. “Uncle Niles. I saw him. He was in some kind of imprisonment. Shit, I think he was…”
“What?!” Niklaus turns me to face him, so we’re not overheard.
“Do you remember that chapter on the different forms of captivity in Vexamen? During the era of the Mazonist Brothers?”
“Yes.”
“What was that one where those captured were forced into physical labor until they were assigned a place in society, like the Vexamen Breed or imminent servitude toward the Meat Carnivals?”
Niklaus focuses his blue eyes over my head as he zones out to think. And that gaze shudders, then darkens as a dreadful realization falls over him.
“What? You remember the name?” I ask.
“The Blackspire Ward of The North.”
My insides twist into a tight knot.
I let my chin drop in firm agreement. “That’s where I saw him. It looked exactly like the photographs.”
The line moves along, our metal trays are filled with a green chunky soup, and metal cups scooped from a porcelain tub of cold water. We follow our neighbors to an empty table. I do my best to avoid eye contact with anyone but can feel their eyes drilling holes down my body.
“Husband and wife, hmm?” the young woman asks. “At least you weren’t separated during imprisonment.”
I briefly cut a glance to the couple observing us.
But I’m too overwhelmed by the food in front of me.
Too confused, sickened, hungry, anxious, and conflicted over why I’m starving yet filled with a stomach full of tangled knots.
The thought of not eating is nauseating.
The thought of eating is nauseating. It all just makes my stomach hurt.
I swallow a small spoonful, unbothered that the soup tastes like grass and sour cream with the gritty texture of undercooked rice and oatmeal.
“How long have you two been married?” the woman tries again.
“Not long,” Niklaus and I answer at the same time.
I try another spoonful. Nerves impale me from the inside out. What the fuck did that asylum do to me?
“It is a good thing you two are together. Single maidens and gentlemen don’t do well. Assaults happen often.”
“Hmm.” Niklaus taps his spoon to the tray. “Would either of you happen to know of a group of inmates here? Commander Kaspias would have taken a special interest in them.”
The young couple furrow their brows at him. “Who?”
“Kaspias? He’s a high-ranking commander. Would have a close relationship with the Mazonist Brothers.”
They look confused. “Are you talking about Dr. Ivast?”
Niklaus searches my face, then blinks back to our neighbors. “Crow Ivast?”
I raise my eyebrows at Niklaus’s question. Not possible. Crow Ivast was Albatross’s grandfather. The savant who once worked for the Mazonist Brothers but was stolen to work for Demechnef.
They nod.
“Do you know of any prisoners named Dessin, Skylenna, Niles, Warrose, Ruth, or Marilynn?” I ask urgently.
“No, I’m sorry. Do you have family or friends here too?” The young woman pats her neighbor on the shoulder. “We’ve been here a long time. We know almost everyone’s names. Haven’t heard of those.”
I shrink in my seat and stare at Niklaus with parted lips but no words to spare.
“I thought…”
“I’ve always traveled to places where there are loved ones. But—”
The young man nudges the woman’s arm. “I told you. They have to be from that asylum in Dementia. That white gown? That’s why they aren’t too frightened by the prison. Most are. And they were either traded or abducted, right?”
“You’ve solved the mystery,” Niklaus mocks, but I hold my hand up to him.
“I didn’t get your names,” I say cautiously.
The woman smiles warmly, crinkling the freckles on her nose. “My name is Sophia. And this is my friend, Jack.”