Most of my enemies lie in the ground. The rest I put here. Boneriders fill some of these cells. The Jackal’s own. I only wish we’d been able to throw Lilath in this pit instead of giving her the easy way out by shooting down her destroyer till it crashed into Luna’s surface. In coming down here to free one of them, I wonder if I am becoming the traitor that the newsreels say I am.
We pause outside a cell door. “Is everyone going to behave themselves?”
“Are you, bossman?” Clown asks. “You almost cut off his head last time.”
“Almost,” I say. The sight of the Gold in the dark hall on that Luna night, his bare face covered in Howler blood, has not left me. Sometimes I wake from sleep thinking he’s outside my door, waiting to come in. Waiting to kill my family. “Sevro…are you going to be civil?”
He shrugs.
“Good enough.”
I disengage the lock. The door whines and the blue light encircling the handle goes dark. Steeling myself, I crank the handle and haul back the door, stepping out of the way of my men with their raised rifles. We’re hit with the smell of algae and feces. The cell is a dank concrete box. Empty but for a toilet, a plastic sleeping pallet, and a shirtless, gaunt man. He faces away from us, asleep. His spine like a fossil in dust through sun-starved skin. Greasy white hair spills off the side of the pallet. He turns to look at us with black eyes sunk deep in a tattooed face. I take an involuntary step back, seeing my time with the Jackal in the man’s body.
“What the hell? That’s an Obsidian,” Sevro says.
“Winkle, the package is missing,” I say. “Are you certain he is in cell O-2983?”
“Positive. I’m looking at the roster now. He’s stated as present in his cell. No medical intake info or labor duty. This is bad, bad, bad, bad.”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Then who the hell is this?” Sevro asks. The prisoner stands very slowly. He’s no giant like Sefi. He stands barely six and a half feet and is as thin as Alexandar. He’s past fifty, with a deeply receding hairline, a filthy beard, and more tattoo ink than I’ve ever seen on a man.
He watches us with intelligent, curious eyes. Not holding himself like a warrior, but as if he were a sinister mathematician studying string theory on a holoboard. A set of tattoo spirit eyes stare at me when he blinks. The only men who wear that ink are shaman of the Ice. And most of them are women.
Sevro steps toward the Obsidian, gun raised. “Who the hell are you? Answer, shithead.”
The Obsidian smiles with his eyes, looks at the gun, then to Sevro’s mask, back to the gun, then gestures to his mouth with a single finger. He opens it wide. Sevro shines a light inside. “Gross.” He steps back. “Someone cut off his tongue.” And that’s not all they took. What I first took for a receding hairline I see now is a half-completed scalping. It makes the front of his head look indented, like the bottom of an egg.
“His hands…” Thraxa says.
“Let’s see your hands,” I say.
He cooperates without protest. Embedded in the back of the knotted hands are the crescents of the Obsidian caste. Black. Not the bleached white of a prisoner. “You’re not a prisoner.” He finds my eyes, even through my opaque helmet, wags one finger and then sketches a shield over his heart. “Guard?” He points a finger at me. Yes.
“You get lost?” Sevro asks.
The Obsidian thinks, then makes a fist and pounds it into the small of his back, like he’s being stabbed. I watch him with greater interest. Why was a guard stabbed in the back?
“The prisoner 1126. Did he do this to you?” Thraxa asks. The man wags a finger no. “Do you know where he is?” No.
“Winkle, can you track 1126’s implant or collar?” I ask, turning back to my task.
“No. It’s not on the system.”
“What do you mean it’s not on the system? He can’t have left the damn station. He’s a prisoner of the state. He’s on code black, no transfer. No one in history has escaped from Deepgrave.”
“Your dad did,” Clown says to Sevro.
“That wasn’t exactly an escape,” Sevro mutters under his breath. “I swear to the Vale, if that slimy shit has been out in the worlds all this time…”
“Do we really need him in particular?” Clown asks. “We got our pick of sociopaths.”
“Boss…” Thraxa says.
“We’ll have to take a look around,” I say. “We need to find him.”
“There’s two hundred guards here,” Sevro says. “Can’t sneak around not knowing where we’re going. If the alarm goes, shit will get mortal, fast.”