A shadow moved to my right. A male shape emerged from behind two crates. A shaft of light cut through the open doors and caught his face.
I nearly collapsed in relief, but the damned arm against my windpipe tightened. “Not so fast.”
“Six,” Zed hissed. “It’s her—this is Bravo.”
The arm suddenly disappeared and I stumbled. Zed’s arms crushed me to him. I didn’t fall apart. No sobs broke free from my chest. But I grabbed onto him so hard that he finally whispered in an amused tone, “You’re hurting me.”
I pulled back a few inches to see that his eyes were shiny with tears. “Pussy,” I said.
He chuckled and pulled me in for another hug. “I’m so glad you’re alive.” He pushed me back again to look at my face. “Mica?”
I bit my lip. It was too soon to tell him about the bleeding, but technically the young was okay as could be, given the situation. “He’s okay. We’ve been taken in by a woman who oversees the child laborers.” My stomach twisted with excitement and fear. Excitement because I never would have imagined Zed would come so fast, but fear because his arrival meant things had just gotten way more dangerous for everyone. “I told her you’d come.” I grabbed his shoulders and squeezed. “I knew you’d come for us.”
The corner of his mouth lifted in a wobbly sideways grin. “I’m sorry it took so long. I was worried you’d already broken out.”
An annoyed-sounding throat cleared behind us. “If the touching reunion is over, we’ve got work to do.”
I turned to look at the woman who’d had me in a headlock. From the physical assault and the bitchiness, I figured she’d be six feet tall and ugly. Turns out I was half right. She was barely taller than me—probably five-eight, but she looked like someone had beaten her with the ugly stick. Pale scalp peeked out between the dark stubble on her head. Her right eye was swollen almost totally shut. The other one had fared only slightly better, in that it was swollen but a bloodshot pupil was clearly visible. Her lip was split and her jaw was covered in purple bruises. The wounds distorted her face too much to tell what she’d looked like before she lost the fight.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked.
She snorted. “I’m Carmina.”
Zed stiffened next to me, and I looked up at him to see what was wrong. He gave the female a look I couldn’t read. She just cocked her head at him, as if in challenge. Finally, she looked at me. “And you’re Bravo.”
I nodded toward her swollen face. “Who beat your ass?”
“Someone a lot tougher than you, little girl.”
“All right,” Zed said. “I swear, if you both had dicks you’d be measuring them.”
I didn’t like this Carmina. I knew this was not a rational reaction to have about someone who had come to help save my ass, so I decided to push down my hostility. “Sorry, it’s been a shitty week,” I said.
Her lips quirked into a smile, as if I’d surprised her. And just like that, the tension dissipated. “How many guards?” She nodded toward the door.
“Three. Humans. All have rifles.”
She nodded. “We’ll wait until the unloading gets under way and blend into the crowd.”
Sixteen
Meridian Six
An hour later, we entered Matri’s domain. Sneaking off the train was easier than I’d expected, but the human guards who made up the Troika’s day shift were lazy fools. They leaned against the train depot like slugs, smoking cigarettes and gossiping like old ladies. Bravo had led us and the children into the warehouse to deliver the boxes of uniforms before leading us right out the back door.
We’d met Matri on the path to the barracks. She’d given each of us a once-over with her miss-nothing gaze and nodded. “All right,” she said. “All right.”
Then she’d lowered her head to listen to one of the children. She’d listened to the girl as if the young was an oracle delivering our fates when in fact she’d only been asking Matri when they’d have their next meal. “Soon, sugar. Soon.” Then she’d run her hand over the child’s greasy hair and smiled like they were in a park on a picnic instead of walking through a death camp.
Sure, Icarus had told me that Krovgorod was a labor camp. He’d explained how the mining operation worked and how the rest of the prisoners each had shifts in different sections of the camp, but being there put the entire operation in a different light. For one thing, the people were walking corpses. So thin. And their skin was either gray from the constant plume of ashes from the main warehouse’s furnaces or pitch black from the coalmines.
The barracks she led us to wasn’t much larger than the train car we’d so recently abandoned. The wooden structure was filled with rows of rough-hewn bunk beds. The air stank of body odor and urine. There was no light. No hope. It was little better than a tomb. Stepping inside, I looked at Zed, who’d gone pale. He shot a look at Bravo, who tried to smile, but it came out wobbly, as if she was ashamed for us to see how they’d been living.
But instead of pity, I felt anger. Icarus had warned me the conditions would be bad—subhuman. But nothing prepared me to see thirty-odd children living like livestock in a wooden pen. Their dirty faces had long forgotten how to smile and as they watched us enter, their faces were blank, as if they’d also forgotten how to hope.
“I’ve sent a couple of the children to round up the camp leaders.”
I walked to a long wooden table near the front of the room. My fingers itched for a gun. The minute I’d walked into that room I’d lost the illusion of being a tourist in the camp. The instant Zed and I had revealed ourselves, we’d committed to being prisoners too. I just hoped it was a temporary situation rather than a permanent one.