The burning waned, and a dull throbbing took its place. Tears leaked from my eyes, and snot ran from my nose through the substance on my lips and into my mouth. I retched, but my stomach was empty, and I spit the bile and snot and poison out as I coughed.
“You’ve deluded yourself. You think this is as bad as it will get?” Irdelron shook his head in mock sympathy as he leaned over me, the gilded vial of Phaetyn blood dangling from his neck. “I already know you’ll give me the answers I seek,” he whispered, caressing my face. “Everyone does. This? Jotun and I do this for fun. I have an odd . . . obsession with besting mortality. Have you ever noticed how easy it is for one life to end? I own that power. It’s my life’s work.”
He reached for the vial, his eyes losing focus.
I was being foolish. I knew it before I acted, but his fake sympathy was too much. I spat at him, that vile mixture in my mouth. My spittle sprayed his chin, neck, and the top portion of his pristine aketon.
In an instant, the fake kindness was gone, and white-lipped fury took its place. Irdelron slapped me, the force of his hand jerking my head to the side. He spun, his back blocking my view of what he was grabbing. Then he seized my hand and smashed it flat. He held the object high, and I pleaded with him as the stake glinted in the weak light. But he only laughed. He brought the weapon down, splicing it through my left hand.
I screamed in agony as the pain exploded. I writhed, but every movement made the pain worse, and I attempted to hold still. I tried to wiggle my fingers, but even that sent excruciating waves of anguish up my arm. The rest of the world melted away, and my entire universe was the brutal torment crushing the bones and veins in my left hand.
Jotun’s impassive face came into focus when the initial pain diminished, leaving an almost unbearable throb. I glimpsed the door swinging shut out of the corner of my eye, a flash of white aketon showing as it did. Irdelron was gone. I whimpered in relief.
Jotun turned to the wall, to his weapons, and my heart fell.
He came to my side, a thin needle pinched between his thick, now gloved, fingers. He set a clay container down on the edge, by the hand that was nailed to the table, and removed the lid.
I swallowed, clenching my jaw, tightening my core in anticipation of more pain. I closed my eyes, not sure if it was better to remain in ignorance or see the next means of torture.
He pinched the inside of my elbow, and shards of ice crawled up my arm toward my heart. I opened my eyes, and the room fractionated into tiny slivers that shifted and twirled, preventing me from making any sense of the countless pieces in front of me. I had a single moment of relief before the torment began.
The tiny ice pieces surged inside me, ballooning as they morphed into insects and arachnids. They coalesced in purpose and descended, gnawing and clawing at me, shredding my skin and burrowing deep to lay their eggs. They climbed under my ragged tunic and into my hair. I tried to turn my head, but there was no way to prevent them from digging into my ears. I forced air out my nostrils again and again, trying to keep them from my nose, but the number multiplied, and I had to close my eyes as a second wave descended.
The bugs pinched at my lips, and I folded them in between my teeth to prevent the insects from getting into my mouth, but as they filled my nostrils with their clawing, crawling legs, I was forced to open my mouth so I could breathe. The eggs under my skin started hatching, and the new creatures tore their way out. I screamed, chomping the bugs and spitting them out as fast as I could. Their legs stuck to my tongue, and I spit and chomped while trying to suck in enough air to stay alive. But I was slowly losing. A slithering centipede with millions of feet crawled across my cheek toward my mouth. I whimpered in horror, gagging as I tried to chomp the creature so I could breathe. But the pieces of the one became dozens of smaller invertebrate, and their segmented bodies wriggled into my throat and then into my lungs. I screamed, my voice raw from the overuse, and then I retched.
Pain shot up my arm as another creeping beast gnawed through the rest of my hand, the dead fingers discarded to the ground for other crawling things to eat.
They were in my ears, in my brain, eating away at everything that made me, destroying me until there was nothing left.
11
My arm flopped forward, stirring me from the escape of unconsciousness. Someone was here, shifting through the space, back and forth, silently.
I floated in and out of awareness, and each time, the person was in a different place.
Working from left to right. Methodically. Curiosity forced one eye open—the other was too swollen to cooperate.
The person stopped and turned toward me. His height and broad shoulders bespoke his gender as well as his square jaw, which was shaven clean. His downturned lips were visible, but the rest of his features were hidden beneath a dark hood pulled low over his face.
His lips thinned to a meager line, and he draped me with a cloth. Then he turned his back to me and continued wiping and storing the instruments in the room. Jotun’s cleanup crew. I couldn’t have done a single thing to protect myself if I tried.
I slipped away into oblivion.
The putrid stench of feces and sulfur was my first indication I was still alive. But I was warm. I had to be dreaming. Or dead, I thought, remembering the bugs and my torn throat and mind. How could I be alive after that? Were the bugs real? Or did the injections cause me to hallucinate? I shifted and inhaled sharply as I realized I had moved, unrestrained.
Not only was I warm and unrestrained, but nothing hurt. Nothing. Not my face, my skin, or my left hand. I clenched my left hand, it was heavily bandaged, but I could feel my fingers. Someone had tended to me.
I opened my eyes just enough to see I was no longer on the table in the torture room but on a stained mattress on a stone floor, buried in a mound of blankets.
I was alone. At last. The words flashed through my mind before I remembered them as the dying lament of the girl, Madeline. I rested back on the lumpy mattress, staring at the ceiling and wondering how much time had passed since Jotun injected me with . . . Horrible shakes raked my body at the memory of the bugs under my skin. They continued for an indiscriminate amount of time in the destitute darkness of my new home.
I was alone.
Mum was gone, and the bit of fight left in me before Jotun strapped me to the table was non-existent now. I could hardly recall I’d had the notion, and I couldn’t remember what it felt like. That piece of myself the girl told me to keep, the place that separated survivors from victims. I didn’t know how to find it or if I had one to begin with.
A tear leaked from the corner of one eye and ran into my hairline and around my skull onto the mattress.
Another followed.
And more, until I was sobbing, face pressed into the filthy mattress to conceal my breaking point as best I could from the other prisoners.
My mother was gone, and I might have killed her.
My mother was gone.