Meanwhile…
Below…
The sea
Not far from the coast of New Thrimp
A world as yet unnamed
-Saskia-
Doomp.
Doomp.
Down in the hold of the ship, Saskia realised, too late, that she should have practiced for what was about to happen.
Doomp.
Doomp.
The guard approached, bending over to pour the liquid in a narrow-necked bottle onto the cloth gags of each prisoner in turn, soaking them. Saskia wished she would put her torch out. Down here in the dank, wet darkness of the hold there was no other light, but there was no ventilation either and the smoke was threatening to make her cough. The little yellow flame crackled and spluttered, illuminating almost nothing but sending huge, crazy shadows writhing across the wooden walls.
The woman was being generous with the anaesthetic, thoroughly re-soaking each of the cloth gags wrapped around the mouths of the unconscious figures on the floor. Saskia was prepared for the drug-soaked gags: as part of her preparation in recent months she had grown a gland in her neck that produced a crude antidote—a mollecule that clung to the receptors in the brain targeted by the Polity’s anaesthetic, insulating them from it. The formula wasn’t perfect, however, and she was still feeling light-headed and tingly from the sleep-inducing vapour emanating from the gag around her mouth. What she had not anticipated was a guard coming round topping up the dose—that was a level of organisation beyond what she had expected from the Polity.
And now the guard was only a few prisoners away from her.
Doomp.
Doomp.
If she reacted, the guard would realise she was conscious and within seconds she’d be either dead or unconscious, and the entire plan would fail. Marco’s sacrifice would be for nothing.
Saskia was the only prisoner awake.
Doomp.
Doomp... Glug.
Experimenting with the sample Ken had managed to obtain for her had allowed her to develop the antidote and the gland that produced it but she had also learned, incidentally, that the Polity’s anaesthetic was highly flammable. Every time the approaching figure bent over to splash more of it over the gag of another prisoner, she carelessly lowered the torch dangerously close to their heads.
What would happen, Saskia wondered, if one of the gags caught alight? There was no water down here. If the fire spread, the hold would soon be full of corpses with scorched half-melted heads. The Polity would eventually rush down and put it out, if only to save their ship… but how many would be dead by then?
Doomp.
Doomp... Glug.
There was no choice now. She would just have to hold still and try to stay conscious. She closed her eyes and forced the muscles in her face to relax completely, making sure not to flinch as the cold liquid splashed across her nose and mouth, seeping into the cloth wrapped tightly around them. Despite her efforts, the sensations triggered a reflex and she felt her closed eyelids flutter. Just a flicker of muscle. The smallest twitch. Not even a full movement—just the ghost of one.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
But the guard froze.
With her eyes shut, Saskia could only hear what was happening; the sudden silence filled the space. Seconds stretched. She hadn’t moved on to the next prisoner. Then, heat. Faint at first, then stronger, the warmth of a flame hovering close. The faint light on the other side of her eyelids began to grow brighter. With a sickening feeling, she realised the guard was studying her.
Her adrenal glands flickered into life in response, trying to flood her bloodstream with adrenaline, but with the conscious bodily control of a Windborn, she calmed them; adrenaline would speed up her heart and her breathing, pumping more of the anaesthetic into her system, not to mention giving her away to the guard whose face must now be only inches from her own. Fighting her body’s natural urges, she forced herself into stillness and calm, sleep-like breathing. She had been working her new gland hard in readiness but still she felt her whole body start to tingle as the drug immediately slithered its stupefying tentacles into her brain.
‘Only one that hasn’t pissed itself,’ she muttered to herself dryly, before moving on.
Doomp.
Doomp... Glug.
The danger past, Saskia had to fight to maintain her hold on her adrenal gland whilst forcing her exhausted antidote gland to continue synthesising. Straining against the urge to sleep, she shallowed her breathing, and waited.
The guard was painfully slow, clearly unenthusiastic about the job she had been given. She wasn’t measuring the doses at all, Saskia noted with anger. She felt certain that without her antidote gland, she would have been dangerously over-medicated. How many of the prisoners would have their gags removed only to be found dead, either overdosed or choked on their own vomit? How many would be brain damaged? Her anger flared; if Igor was dead…
Suddenly, there came a loud crack from above, like a fencepost splitting, and a female scream, abruptly muffled.
Holly.
The guard looked up in alarm. Almost immediately afterwards there came another crack and another muffled scream, this time more anguished than the first.
Saskia could tell from the footsteps and the glugging of the bottle that the guard had suddenly increased her speed, as though she was suddenly keen to be finished and get back upstairs. Doesn’t want to miss the show, Saskia thought. By the fifth crack, the guard was done and the doomp, doomp of her boots was receding up the staircase to the great hatch leading to the deck.
Saskia remembered being dragged through that hatch and down those stairs, feigning unconsciousness despite the scrapes and thuds from careless handling by careless guards. They would pay for that. Very soon, they would pay.
When the hatch had creaked opened and banged closed again, signalling the guard’s exit, she eagerly tensed the new muscles that retracted the sheaths of flesh on the outsides of her wrists, allowing the sharpened boneblades concealed within to emerge.
This part, she had prepared for. She began to move.
With practiced familiarity, she worked her arms back and forth, back and forth, the sharp, hard shards of bone protruding from the sides of her wrists sawing at the ropes, which were cold, thick, wet, and tight. The motion would have chafed ordinary skin to bleeding. She silently gave thanks for the scaly calluses left by hour after hour spent training for tonight, cutting herself free from ropes just like these.
As soon as the ropes fell away she ripped the gag from her face and stood. The guard had been right—the hold stank of human waste, the inevitable result of overdosing people with tranquilisers and leaving them in an unventilated space. Rage rose again inside her and this time she did not hold back her adrenaline. Her heart quickened and her body processed the anaesthetic still in her bloodstream faster. Slowly, her focus returned.
Above, she could hear another woman’s voice, powerful, deep, and seductive, though she couldn’t make out the words. Hurry up, she told herself.
Quickly finding Igor, she was relieved to see the steady rise and fall of his chest. She pulled the sodden cloth from his face and threw it angrily to the corner of the room, then raised her hand to the gland in her neck and excreted some antidote, not into her own bloodstream this time but outwards, onto her fingers. She rubbed it into his gums, pulling back his lips with her other hand, then sliced through his bonds with her boneblades and moved onto the next prisoner, leaving him to recover.
The rest of them were unknown to her, an assortment of human miscellany hauled from the Polity’s prison cells. She treated them with as much gentleness as she could, removing gags and tossing them into a far corner to keep the noxious fumes as far away as possible, and quickly but carefully sawing through their ropes. The gags she removed easily but the boneblades quickly blunted—grimacing, she forced open the fleshpocket in the fat around her middle, in which she had concealed a small whetstone. Re-sharpening the boneblades after each prisoner was time-consuming, and although she’d grown them without nerves, sliding the rough stone along the edge of her own exposed bone sent a jagged shudder down her neck and across her back every time she used it. Nonetheless, she worked on. Soon they were all unbound and breathing drug-air, befouled only by the vapours of their own effluent.
She returned to Igor to find him unmoving, but awake. In the shadowy gloom of the disparate rays filtering down through the cracks in the decking above, she could barely make out the whites of his eyes. Then he grinned, and a crescent of gleaming teeth bloomed in the darkness.
‘I’ve pissed m’self,’ he growled.
‘Shhh,’ she whispered. ‘Quiet voice. Everyone else has too. Some worse.’ She felt a smile tug at her cheeks; it was good to hear a familiar voice after so many hours down here alone among the unconscious.
‘Got a stinking headache too,’ he added.
‘How much longer do you need before you can get up?’
‘Not long.’
She placed a hand on his shoulder and sat down beside him to wait, listening to the sound of his breathing gradually growing stronger as the anaesthetic wore off. She heard one or two others beginning to shift in the gloom.
‘I’m very, very pissed off,’ he said conversationally. ‘I’m gonna cause a lot of damage.’
That was good. Pissed off was exactly what the plan needed him to be. Not just him—they needed the entire crowd of prisoners pissed off—but he was the spark that would light the inferno. The more pissed off he was, the better. ‘Good!’ she whispered. And sshhh!’
‘Right.’ He rose unsteadily into a crouch. ‘No point laying about.’
‘Hang on,’ she hissed. ‘They’re all still waking up. Rest a bit more. Get your strength back.’
‘Bollocks. Come on,’ he muttered, rising to his feet, a lean, angular silhouette against the dim light. She felt the familiar urge to comply and follow.
‘Igor!’ she whispered.
‘Mm?’
‘You just used your Urge on me!’
He shrugged. ‘Yeah.’
‘Why?! We’re on the same team!’
From above came riotous cheering and laughter, smothering the sounds of their conversation.
He smirked. ‘Just making sure it still works.’
The smile tugged at her cheeks again.
Igor was in charge.
Everything was going to be fine.
‘I think it’s gonna have a lot of work to do soon,’ he added. ‘Anyway. First things first. Where’s Billy?’