Page 7 of Enslak

For the first time since waking up on the Trogvyk ship, I had a purpose again.

Maybe getting shot in Hell's Kitchen had been the beginning of something after all, not the end.

Chapter 2

Enslak

The guards dragged me through the tunnel.

My feet, were they still feet, scraped against stone. Everything hurt. Everything always hurt, but this was different. Fresh. The kind of pain that came from torn things, broken things, things that would heal wrong if they healed at all.

Blood dripped from somewhere. Mine, probably.

Mine? The creature's? Both, probably. The smell was thick in my nose, copper and rot and something else, something chemical that the beast had bled when I finally tore its throat out.

Or had I crushed its skull?

The memories were already slipping away like water through claws.

Claws.

I had claws now. When had that happened?

The guards threw me forward and I hit the cell floor hard enough to drive the air from my lungs. The door clanged shut behind me, metal on metal, final.

Always final.

I lay there for a moment, or maybe longer since time was strange, trying to remember how to breathe. My chest expanded. Contracted. Expanded again.

Good. Still working.

The creature hadn't crushed my ribs after all, though it had tried. I remembered that part vividly, the weight of it, the decay-smell of its breath, the wet sound it made when it died.

Had I won?

Must have. I was here. It wasn't.

Did it matter?

The cell door opened again and I didn't bother looking up. I knew what came next. Always the same. The Negita's footsteps, light, quick, irritated, crossed the stone floor toward me.

"Up," Zarlak said. His voice was high and nasal, the translator making it sound even more grating. "Filthy beast. Up."

I pushed myself to my hands and knees. The movement sent fresh waves of pain through my body. Something in my shoulder wasn't right, dislocated maybe, or broken.

Hard to tell anymore.

Pain was just there, background noise, like the drip of water somewhere in the walls or the distant sounds of the city above.

Then water hit me like claws raking across my flesh.

Cold. So cold it burned. The hose's pressure was brutal, stripping away the blood and gore and bits of the creature stuck to my skin, to my scales, to the patches of fur that grew in places fur shouldn't grow. I closed my eyes against the spray, but it didn't help. Water found its way into my nose, my mouth, my ears.

"Turn around," Zarlak snapped.

I turned.

Slowly. My body didn't want to obey, but it did anyway, muscle memory, or maybe just memory, the kind that lived in the body instead of the mind.