"...telling you, the eastern shaft is a waste of time. Nobody’s come through there in months."
"Orders are orders. You want to explain to the captain why we skipped the patrol?"
"I want to explain to the captain why we’re freezing our assess off checking empty tunnels while the day shift gets to stay warm."
They passed within ten feet of where Nacho and Sera were pressed against the wall, their lanterns casting just enough light to create deep shadows that swallowed the two intruders completely. The guards never paused, never looked in their direction, just continued their circuit as if this were any other routine patrol on any other boring night.
Nacho counted to sixty after their footsteps faded, then to sixty again just to be safe.
"Shift change," Sera breathed. "Corvus said there’s a fifteen-minute window. We need to move."
They followed the open tunnel, moving fast now that stealth had become less important than speed. The magical hum grew stronger as they went deeper, accompanied by other sounds: the clank of chains, the murmur of voices, the occasional sharp crack of what might have been a whip striking flesh.
The tunnel ended at a heavy wooden door reinforced with iron bands. Light leaked around its edges, and through the gap at the bottom, Nacho could see the flicker of torchlight and the movement of shadows.
He pressed his ear to the wood, letting his enhanced hearing sort through the chaos of sounds on the other side. Guards. At least six of them. And behind them, fainter but unmistakable, the sound of someone crying.
His tentacles stirred again, and this time he didn’t try to suppress them.
"Ready?" Sera asked.
He looked at her, saw the determination in her eyes, the fear she was refusing to let control her, the hope she was too stubborn to abandon.
"Ready."
She kicked the door open.
The room beyond was larger than the tunnel had suggested, a natural cavern that had been expanded and reinforced to serve as some kind of holding area. Iron cages lined the walls, most of them empty but a few containing huddled figures that shrank back from the sudden intrusion. In the center of the space, six guards were gathered around a table, playing cards by the light of a dozen lanterns.
They barely had time to look up before Nacho’s tentacles were among them.
The fight was over in seconds. Combat Precognition showed him every attack before it came, every defensive movement before it was attempted, every opening that could be exploited. His tentacles moved like extensions of his own body, striking and coiling and crushing with a speed that left the guards no chance to organize resistance.
Three went down in the first wave, wrapped in coils of darkness that squeezed until consciousness fled. Two more fell trying to draw weapons, their arms pinned to their sides by tentacles that seemed to come from nowhere. The last one managed to get his sword clear of its sheath before Sera was on him, her blade flashing in the torchlight as she disarmed him with a single economical motion.
[6 targets subdued. No fatalities.]
Nacho surveyed the room, his senses still on high alert. The prisoners in the cages were staring at them with expressions that ranged from terror to desperate hope. All women. All Sirens. Some of them bore the marks of recent abuse, bruises and cuts and the hollow eyes of people who had stopped expecting rescue.
But none of them was Vael.
"Where is she?" Sera grabbed the last guard by his collar, hauling him up until his feet dangled off the ground. Her voice had gone flat and dangerous, stripped of everything but lethal intent. "The Siren officer. Dark hair. Scar on her left cheek. Where is she?"
The guard’s eyes darted between Sera and Nacho, clearly trying to decide which of them was more likely to kill him.
"I don’t, I mean, there are so many, I can’t keep track of—"
"Wrong answer."
She slammed him against the wall hard enough to crack the stone, and his bravado crumbled like wet paper.
"The special wing! Eastern section! They keep the valuable ones there, the ones they haven’t broken yet!" He was babbling now, the words tumbling over each other in his desperation to be useful. "Third door on the left, past the processing area. But you’ll never get past the wardens, they’re—"
Sera dropped him and was already moving before he finished the sentence. Nacho followed, pausing only long enough to check that the subdued guards were secure and the prisoners in the cages were unharmed.
"Help is coming," he told them. "Stay quiet. Stay hidden. This will be over soon."
Then he was running after Sera, deeper into the fortress, toward whatever horrors waited in the special wing.
The processing area lived up to its name.
Nacho had seen some ugly things in his time as a debt collector. Had witnessed what people were willing to do to other people when money was on the line and consequences seemed distant. But this was something else entirely.
The room was clinical. Sterile. White walls stained with things that weren’t quite white anymore. Tables with restraints. Tools arranged in neat rows on metal trays. And in the center of it all, a chair that looked like it had been designed by someone who’d heard descriptions of dentistry and torture and decided to combine the worst elements of both.
Sera barely glanced at it. Her focus was on the door at the far end of the room, the one that led to the eastern section and the special wing beyond.
"Stay close," she said. "And if anything comes out of that door that isn’t Vael, kill it."
The door opened onto a corridor that was different from everything they’d seen so far. Here, the rough stone walls had been smoothed and painted, the floor covered with what might have been carpet before years of foot traffic wore it down to bare threads. Doors lined both sides of the hall, each one marked with a number but no other identification.
Third door on the left.