26. Sawyer
SAWYER
The air cools as I descend into the mines, wet stone breathing against my face. Every sound feels amplified—my own breath too loud, shoes scraping grit. My ears buzz, straining for anything that doesn’t belong to me. But there’s nothing.
No guns.
No Keepers.
No drones buzzing above my head.
And still… my steps are hesitant.
I’m not impulsive.
This feels impulsive.
What did the horn signal? How long will it hold the Keepers at the compound? How much time is required to get from here to the gap in the fence?
No answers. Just me and a stashed hiking bag strung over my shoulders.
The bottom slaps the backs of my thighs as I creep past three wheelbarrows sitting half-full, stone dust clinging like dried blood.
A shovel lies discarded in the dirt and three pickaxes follow, dropped where hands must have let go all at once.
I pick up my pace and weave through the tunneled path in search of the money tucked within these walls. The candles thin as I go. Their light stretches and weakens until I lift one from its hook and carry it with me.
Wax drips onto my knuckles, hot and slick, as the ground dips and turns to bare rock. Puddles swallow my steps.
The tunnel splits.
I choose left and move faster, already bracing for the possibility of doubling back.
That’s when the first groan crawls out of the dark.
I still. My shoe slaps water before I can stop it. Another groan answers—then another—sound folding over itself, echoing off stone.
I hold the candle up and catch the shape of a camera mounted high on the wall. My heart stutters.
But it’s dark. My hood is pulled low.
“Oh, shut up, Smiley. No one wants to hear it,” someone croaks, The words gargle up their throat. The voice of a heavy smoker—if they allowed that here.
I lean the candle against rock and stalk around the corner to tally the Keepers.
Zero.
My eyes narrow in the dim lighting, lanterns spaced ten feet apart down a long stretch of tunnel. Two rows of bars line either side and extend beyond sight. Somewhere behind the bars, someone groans. Agonized.
“I said shut up.”
There’s a thump. Silence—temporary, just until my ears tune into the soft collective sound of a hundred bodies breathing as one. The faint shift of dirt, splintered coughs.
My body has the explanation before my brain. The urge to run pulses through my legs and buzzes up my spine. But I don’t. I edge along the cells to peek in at the people inside. Most are lying or sitting, many in the fetal position. One starts hacking while another cries.
Men.
All men.
Dozens of them.
Hundreds potentially, if I walked far enough into the black.
The hardened wax on my knuckles cracks as I flex my hand. Many of the prisoners notice me, but only a few get up to go to the bars, snarls on their dirty faces, some disfigured.
I turn around when I feel someone watching me, but of course, there’s no one there. No one except the Dregs. No one except the slaves.
“Sawyer?” A man stumbles up to the bars, dark hair in wild curls to his shoulders. “Is that you?!”
Wilcox.
“Oh, thank God.” His voice shreds on the words as I approach. Mud and tears streak his face as he slams into the bars, fingers white, nails split and filthy. He smells wrong—sweat gone sour, rot clinging to him like a second skin. “Please, you gotta get me out of here.”
Other men wander up as hope sparks. Conversation bounces off the walls in what is too weak to call excitement.
“What the fuck did they do to you?” My voice is high as I take in my business partner. The tattered shirt Wilcox wears swallows him. Large purple bags droop beneath his eyes and do nothing to distract from the hollow of his cheeks. He doesn’t look like he’s eaten or slept since I last saw him.
I look down at his toes when my memory takes me back to his ceremony. His feet are black enough to disappear into the dark.
“It was that bitch,” Wilcox says over a man’s howl.
“She set us up. If we don’t get the hell out of here, they’ll throw you in here too, so come on…
Please.” He tries to rattle bars that won’t budge while a sob shakes his chest. He doesn’t tell me where to get the key to the cell, and I don’t ask. I don’t need to.
The Keepers have it.
And god knows when they’ll be back.
My shoulders coil, and my arms grow tense as bricks at my sides. I look down the tunnel where I came.
Run.
Fucking. Run.
“What do you mean she set us up?” I ask, my voice deceptively calm.
“She told me we’d be welcomed here with open-fucking-arms.” Snot bubbles from Wilcox’s nose. I’m too frozen to feel disgust. “She painted this place to be a goddamn sanctuary. If I had known…” He mewls and pushes his face so hard against the bars, his forehead turns stark white.
“Who set us up? Raven?” I ask, trying to make sense of what he’s saying. He got their contact from his brother. He reached out to the cult, to the Head Keeper. How could she set us up when we’re the ones trying to get in?
He closes his eyes and cries. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I only ever talked to her through email. I don’t know who the bitch is.”
“Why do you think she set us up?” I ask, though deep down I know. I can feel it in the turning of my gut, in the blood draining from my face.
He cries but doesn’t answer. I’m wasting too much time.
When I turn and take a step away, Wilcox makes a primal, agonized sound that only causes me to walk faster.
I need to get the fuck out of here.
Now.
Yesterday.
Last week.
“They wanted you,” he yells. I pause but don’t turn around. “She said they needed you to fix a problem. She swore this place was just like the island, and fuck man, I wanted to go home.”
I close my eyes as a wave of nausea comes over me, nausea that only comes when you realize something you should’ve known all along.
Aurelius’s words telling me he heard I was the best. I should’ve known then. I should’ve seen it immediately.
Wilcox didn’t find this place.
He was shown it.
Purposefully, directly, manipulatively.
By them. To get me.
“Is there even a stash of money here?” I half turn..
Wilcox cringes, but I see as another man points down the tunnel, into the darkness past the cells.
Four seconds.
That’s how many I waste.
“You better get me the fuck out of here, Hansley,” Wilcox growls as I march past the cells. “Sawyer! Sawyer!”
I ignore him, walking, then running toward the abyss until a soft glow slices the walls. I nearly walk into the heavy curtain covering the candles, but when I pull it back and step through, I forget everything that came before it.
Money. So much money. More than I’ve ever seen in my life in one place that wasn’t my bank account.
Thousands and thousands of one hundred dollar bills are stacked until the piles reach the ceiling.
My foot knocks over a candle as I step toward the mound, and I gasp while hunching forward to catch the flame, far more protective than the maniacs guarding it with open flame.
My head hangs with a sigh as smoke rises to my nose, the flame snuffed by the dirt.
I pull the hiking bag off my shoulder and fill it while men shout after me. Some people cheer for the misfortune of their captors while others scream in jealous rage.
Once the bag is full, I sling it over my shoulder and take off past the cells. Wilcox screams behind me, promising me death if I leave him here.
Water sloshes up my legs as I sprint through a puddle, and when I trip on a rock, I hit the ground hard, my elbow cracking against stone. I hiss and stumble to my feet.
I run until I burst through the exit, and only then do I slow to take in my surroundings. The exit Zephyr showed me has a heavy amount of traps between me and it, so I’m careful as I start that way.
Careful.
Yet fast.
But not fast enough.
My strides hitch as I pass a tree with fat branches hanging low, a slice in the bark that reminds me of the tree where I met Luna. I’m at least a mile from the actual spot, but my eyes play tricks anyway. They push me inside my head, inside my memories.
The cell Thorne built while I stood over her unconscious body. A cell not so different from the one that holds my future self if I get caught.
The way she trembled in my arms when I ‘saved’ her.
The moment I knew she was too stubborn to survive this place.
The suggestion I gave to Aurelius, to let the girl choose between Seraph and Dreg.
“Fuck.” I slow to a stop, my hand bracing against the rough bark of a tree while I catch my breath. My eyes close while I try to breathe, but my own moronic fucking voice fills my head.
They won’t kill her. They were never going to kill her. They don’t waste failed initiates—they farm them.
But…
Dirty bodies. Rotten stench. Hungry gazes.
They fill my mind until it’s all that I see. Prisoners who’ve been starved of food, of dignity, of stimulation—prisoners who came here, to a ‘sexually free’ cult, to live out dark fantasies I know far too well.
No, she won’t die. Not right away.
But she’ll be raped. Repeatedly. And starved. And beaten. Whether the cult does it or their prisoners do, it’s her reality.
I see it. I see her so fucking clearly that the last words she spoke to me whisper hauntingly.
I hope someday you’ll become the man you want to be… I know you’re capable of doing the right thing.
“Goddamn it!” I slam my fist against the tree. Blood prickles through the cracks of wax on my knuckles, bits of bark peppering the mess.
I look back and visualize the path to Luna.
No.
This is bigger than her. It’s bigger than us.
It’s already too late.
The bag feels heavier as I continue forward. My shoes sink into damp earth with every step.
Luna’s fate is not my fault. I tried to prepare her.
I trudge five more steps.
It’s too late to go back.
Five more.
All I’m doing is wasting time.
Yanking the straps down my arms, I let the bag hit the ground. I tuck it away inside a fallen tree trunk and mark the spot in my mind.
Then turn and sprint down the hill, every trap in the path to the ceremony stage memorized.