Blood beads where buzzing metal pinches my scalp. Dirty blond hair puddles onto the concrete as the Gray finishes scalping me with an electric razor. His compatriots call him Danto. He rolls my head around to make sure he’s got it all before clapping me hard on the top of it. “How ’bout a bath, dominus?” he asks. “Grimmus likes her prisoners to smell nice ’n civil, hear?” He taps the muzzle they strapped to my face after I tried to bite one of them. They moved me with an electric collar around my neck, arms bound still behind my back, a squad of twelve hardcore lurchers dragging me through the halls like a bag of trash.
Another Gray jerks me from my chair by my collar as Danto goes to pull a power hose from the wall. They’re more than a head shorter than I am, but compact and rugged. The lives they live are hard—chasing Outriders in the belt, stalking Syndicate killers through the depths of Luna, hunting Sons of Ares in the mines…
I hate them touching me. All the sights and sounds they make. It’s too much. Too gruff. Too hard. Everything they do hurts. Jerking me around. Slapping me casually. I try my best to keep the tears away, but I don’t know how to compartmentalize it all.
The line of twelve soldiers crowds together, watching me as Danto aims the hose. They’ve got three Obsidian men with them. Most lurcher squads do. The water hits me like a horse kick in the chest. Tearing skin. I spin on the concrete floor, sliding across the room till I’m pinned in the corner. My skull slams against the wall. Stars swarm my sight. I swallow water. Choking, hunching to protect my face because my hands are still pinned behind my back.
When they’ve finished, I’m still gasping and coughing around the muzzle, trying to suck in air. They uncuff me and slip my arms and legs into a black prisoner’s jumpsuit before binding me again. There’s a hood too that they’ll soon jerk over my head to rob me of what little humanity I have left. I’m thrown back into the chair. They click my restraints into the chair’s receptacle so I’m locked down. Everything’s redundant. Every move watched. They guard me like what I was, not what I am. I squint at them, vision bleary and nearsighted. Water drips from my eyelashes. I try to sniff, but my nose is clogged tight with congealed blood from nostril to nasal cavity. They broke it when they put the muzzle on.
We’re in a processing room for the Board of Quality Control, which oversees the administrative functions of the prison beneath the Jackal’s fortress. The building has the concrete box shape of every government facility. Poisonous lighting makes everyone here look like a walking corpse with pores the size of meteor craters. Aside from the Grays, the Obsidian, and a single Yellow doctor, there’s a chair, an examination table, and a hose. But the fluid stains around the floor’s metal drain and the nail scratches on the metal chair are the face and soul of this room. The ending of lives begins here.
Cassius would never come to this hole. Few Golds would ever need or want to unless they made the wrong enemies. It’s the inside of the clock, where the gears whir and grind. How could anyone be brave in a place so inhuman as this?
“Crazy, ain’t it?” Danto asks those behind him. He looks back at me. “All my life, never seen something so slaggin’ odd.”
“Carver musta put a hundred kilos on him,” says another.
“More. Ever see him in his armor? He was a damned monster.”
Danto flicks my muzzle with a tattooed finger. “Bet it hurt bein’ born twice. Gotta respect that. Pain’s the universal language. Ain’t it, Ruster?” When I don’t respond, he leans forward and stomps on my bare foot with his steel-heeled boot. The big toenail splits. Pain and blood rupture from the exposed nail bed. My head lolls sideways as I gasp. “Ain’t it?” he asks again. Tears leak from my eyes, not from the pain, but from the casualness of his cruelty. It makes me feel so small. Why does it take so little for him to hurt me so much? It almost makes me miss the box.
“He’s only a baboon in a suit,” another says. “Leave off him. He don’t know any better.”
“Don’t know any better?” Danto asks. “Bullshit. He liked the fit of master’s clothes. Liked lording over us.” Danto crouches so he’s looking into my eyes. I try to look away, frightened he’ll hurt me again, but he seizes my head and pulls open my eyelids with his thumbs so we’re eye to eye. “Two of my sisters died in that Rain of yours, Ruster. Lost a lot of friends, ya hear?” He hits the side of my head with something metal. I see spots. Feel more blood leak from me. Behind him, their centurion checks his datapad. “You’d want the same for my kids, wouldn’t you?” Danto searches my eyes for an answer. I have none he’d accept.
Like the rest, Danto’s a veteran legionnaire, rough as a rusted sewer grate. Tech festoons his black combat gear, where scuffed purple dragons coil in faint filigree. Optic implants in the eyes for thermal vision and the reading of battlemaps. Under his skin he’ll have more embedded tech to help him hunt Golds and Obsidians. The tattoo of an XIII clutched by a moving sea dragon stains all their necks, little heaps of ash at the base of the numeral. These are members of Legio XIII Dracones, the favored Praetorian legion of the Ash Lord and now his daughter, Aja. Civilians would just call them dragoons. Mustang hated the fanatics. It’s a whole independent army of thirty thousand chosen by Aja to be the hand of the Sovereign away from Luna.
They hate me.
They hate lowColors with a marrow-deep racism even Golds can’t match.
“Go for the ears, Danto, if you wanna make him yelp,” one of the Grays suggests. The woman stands at the door, nutcracker jaw bobbing up and down as she gnaws on a gumbubble. Her ashen hair is shaved into a short Mohawk. Voice drawling in some Earthborn dialect. She leans against the metal beside a yawning male Gray with a delicate nose more like a Pink’s than a soldier’s. “You hit them with a cupped hand, you can pop the eardrum with the pressure.”
“Thanks, Holi.”
“Here to help.”
Danto cups his hand. “Like this?” He hits my head.
“Little more curve to it.”
The centurion snaps his fingers. “Danto. Grimmus wants him in one piece. Back up and let the doc take a look.” I breathe a sigh of relief at the reprieve.
The fat Yellow doctor ambles forward to inspect me with beady ocher eyes. The pale lights above make the bald patch on his head shine like a pale, waxed apple. He runs his bioscope over my chest, watching the visual through little digital implants in his eyes. “Well, Doc?” the centurion asks.
“Remarkable,” the Yellow whispers after a moment. “Bone density and organs are quite healthy despite the low-caloric diet. Muscles have atrophied, as we’ve observed in laboratory settings, but not as poorly as natural Aureate tissue.”
“You’re saying he’s better than Gold?” the centurion asks.
“I did not say that,” the doctor snaps.
“Relax. There’s no cameras, Doc. This is a processing room. What’s the verdict?”
“It can travel.”
“It?” I manage in a low, unearthly growl from behind my muzzle.
The doctor recoils, surprised I can speak.
“And long-term sedation? Got three weeks to Luna at this orbit.”
“That will be fine.” The doctor gives me a frightened look. “But I would up the dose by ten milligrams per day, Captain, just to be safe. It has an abnormally strong circulatory system.”
“Right.” The captain nods to the female Gray. “You’re up, Holi. Put him to bed. Then let’s get the cart and roll out. You’re square, Doc. Head back to your safe little espresso-and-silk world now. We’ll take care of—”
Pop. The front half of the centurion’s forehead comes off. Something metal hits the wall. I stare at the centurion, mind not processing why his face is gone. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Like knuckle joints. Red mist geysers into the air from the heads of the nearest dragoons. Spraying my face. I duck my head away. Behind them, the nutcracker-jawed woman walks casually through their ranks, shooting them point-blank in the backs of their heads. The rest pull their rifles up, scrambling, unable to even utter curses before a second Gray double-taps five of them from his place at the door with an old-fashioned gunpowder slug shooter. Silencer on the barrel so it’s cool and quiet. Obsidians are the first to hit the floor, leaking red.
“Clear,” the woman says.
“Plus two,” the man replies. He shoots the Yellow doctor as he crawls to the door trying to escape, then puts a boot on Danto’s chest. The Gray stares up at him, bleeding from under the jaw.