Chapter Six

They put her in a cage, a box almost perfectly sized to fit a human being. It was all quite efficient. The cage was a meter and a half wide, a meter tall, and two meters long. It gave her enough room to shift around in but not enough to sit up. They put a thin blanket under her and loaded her into a truck full of identical cages. The cages fit together perfectly, modular containers for human beings. They closed the door of the truck and left the prisoners in darkness. A very little light came in under the bottom of the truck’s door. In that little illumination Ayaan could tilt her head around carefully and see her neighbors on three sides. They kept their faces pressed into their blankets, their arms wrapped around their heads. The one on her left, a boy of maybe seventeen, was bleeding pretty badly from a gash in his chest. His ragged breathing echoed inside the steel cell of the truck like wind coming through a narrow cave.

When the truck moved the cages rattled against each other, clanged against the walls of the cab, vibrated crazily. Ayaan grasped the bars of her cage to keep herself from sliding around. The injured boy lacked the strength to do the same and he moaned pitiably every time the truck cab swayed or jounced or turned and he slid up hard against the limits of his cage, bruising his already injured flesh.

The enclosed air quickly took on the stench of unwashed bodies and shit—there were no sanitary facilities available in the cages. Ayaan needed to urinate a little herself but she swore she would wait and deny the Tsarevich that small indignity against her person.

She lacked the ability to tell time in the enclosed hell. Alone with her thoughts she could only measure the duration of her captivity in how much her anger had cooled and how badly she was failing her obligations. Of those there were many to think on. She had her unit to think of—the entire encampment, frankly, depended on her leadership. They would not have survived so long without her. She owed them her strength. She had a larger obligation to fight the khasiis, the liches—that was a duty she had accepted the day she shot Gary but forgot to make sure he was actually dead. The consequences of that careless moment had been paid for by others beside herself. She owed their ghosts a lifetime of service.

Now she had new ghosts, too. Mariam and Leyla were dead, half a dozen more of her soldiers were slaughtered by the fast ghouls in the desert. She owed them vengeance, assuming she ever got the opportunity.

Perhaps more painfully she was letting Sarah down. Dekalb, Sarah’s father, had saved Ayaan’s life many times. He had gone so far to refuse to let her martyr herself when it would have achieved nothing. In his final moments he had begged her to look after his daughter. Ayaan always had… until she let herself be captured by a strange new kind of ghoul.

As much as she tried to torture herself with thoughts of Sarah alone and defenseless out in the desert boredom eventually trumped guilt. Thirst and hunger helped as well. The pressure on her bladder built and refused to go away and the darkness settled on her like a heavy weight on her stomach. She was used to being able to see things. She needed to see things so that she could shoot them. With no gun and no light she was out of her element.

She had completely stopped trying to measure time when the boy started to rattle deep in his throat. She’d heard the sound before and she didn’t like what it boded. “Hey—are you alright?” Ayaan asked him. “Hey. Hey!”

He turned with a horrible slowness. Not an unwillingness to talk to her—he appeared quite grateful for the human contact. No, he was moving so slowly because human time was behind him. He moved at the rate of the eternity he was about to join. He looked at her and uttered something in a language she didn’t know. His eyes were wild, uncontrolled, and sweat sheened his face.

“I don’t understand,” Ayaan said. She tried the languages she had—Somali, Arabic, English, her smatterings of Italian and Russian. None of them got an intelligible response.

“He says he’s hungry,” a woman’s voice said, speaking Arabic. It came from the cage atop hers. She couldn’t see who it belonged to—the woman up there was hidden by her own blanket. “It’s Turkish,” the woman said, answer Ayaan’s next question. “Turkish, we’re from Turkiye. Where did they… get you?”

“Egypt,” Ayaan answered. “He sounds like he might—“

The woman clearly didn’t want to hear it. “Egypt, they drag us that far? I don’t know where they’ll go next with us. They take us out into the light once a day, give us a mouthful of rice to eat. I don’t know who they are, though a body hears tales, of course.”

“Listen,” Ayaan said, “this child—he’s not going to make it.” His rattling had grown into a sustained droning croak. He was dying, there was no better way to say it. “We have to let them know, they have to take him out of here.”

“They won’t,” an old man coughed from somewhere near. Ayaan got a sense of the bodies around her as if they were hovering in empty space with no bars between them, bodies lined up perfectly in meter-and-a-half wide rows, stacked a meter above and below, extending into infinity. She fought the sudden vertigo.

The boy spasmed, his forearms clanging against the bars of his cage. His legs jerked and the smell of fresh excrement blossomed in the darkness.

“They have to, when he says he’s hungry—that’s one of the signs, maybe you’ve never seen it before, but—“

“Everyone’s seen it.” The old man again. “We’ve all seen it too many times. They like it, this bunch. They like for us all to be dead, it’s holy to them. They rejoice when one dies. Now you be quiet. When you talk, it makes the time drag.”

“But he’s going to change! He’s going to change and we’ll be trapped in here with him!” Ayaan was panicking. She fought to control herself. This was not how a soldier acted. Slowly, with a real effort of will, she turned her face to the side, to look at the boy.

A ghoul stared back.

Ayaan grunted and shoved herself backward, away from him. The dead boy reached for her, his fingers jammed between the bars, his nails pale in the bruised flesh. His face swam towards her in the darkness, his teeth chewing at the metal, his eyes perfectly dead. It was the first time in years she’d actually looked into the face of a ghoul. She had forgotten how they changed, how the animation left the features. The skin went slack. Like a mask it hung on the skull—there was no mistaking an animate corpse for a living human being.

The face slammed against the bars hard enough to crack bone. Ayaan let out another grunt. The fingers kept striving, pushing through the bars. A broken hand burst through, reached for her—couldn’t quite get her. She crammed herself into a corner of her cage, as tight as she could. The hand moved around inside her cage like it had no bones, like a tentacle reaching for her soft flesh.

Fear touched her, if the boy couldn’t. She was far enough back from the bars to be safe—the dead weren’t particularly strong, though they could push their bodies far harder than the living could bear. The boy couldn’t get through the bars. She was safe, as long as she could hold herself up against the far side of her cage. As long as her arms didn’t get tired. As long as she didn’t collapse. If those fingers ever touched her, she knew, the nails would sink into her flesh. The teeth would get her, somehow, through the cage. If he so much as scratched her, broke her skin, infection was almost inevitable. Infection and death. She was safe, until she wasn’t anymore.

She managed, somehow, to hold on until the truck stopped and burning light washed over them and they were pulled out of their cages. Their captors took the dead boy away and slammed his empty cage back into the grid of bodies. Finally Ayaan could relax, let herself fall against the hard bars. Her arms ached and complained. Her body felt wasted, wrung out. Her mind raced faster than ever.

By the time they reached their destination Ayaan had at least one thing figured out. There was no way to meet her obligation to Sarah if she was dead. If she died in captivity the Tsarevich would use her, would make her one of his soldiers. If she wanted to help Sarah she was going to have to stay alive. No matter what it took.