A fate Kiva shared, now that she was no longer the prison healer.
She should have been terrified, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.
For some reason, she didn’t think the angeldust was to blame.
“Next,” came a bored-sounding male voice, causing Kiva to look up from the dead grass to see that they’d reached the mouth of the building, where a pair of guards were ushering prisoners toward a set of ladders poking out from a rectangular hole in the earth.
“I know you’re messed up right now,” Cresta said urgently as the inmates in front of them disappeared into the shaft. “But whatever you do, don’t let go of the ladders.” At the blank look on Kiva’s face, she hurried to add, “Think of something important to you. The boy — the one with the stutter. You love him. Hold on for him.”
Tipp.
A foggy memory of the freckle-faced, gap-toothed boy blazed across Kiva’s mind, causing the pain in her heart to throb anew.
“Next,” repeated the guard, waving toward Kiva and Cresta.
“One rung at a time,” Cresta said. “Do it for the boy. I’ll be right beside you.”
Kiva nodded dully, her head feeling too heavy for her shoulders, but at the same time, impossibly light. She tripped over her own feet as Cresta prodded her forward, the guards watching with amusement. They knew who she was, how far she’d fallen. They were enjoying this.
Fire rose within her, but it didn’t last, the angeldust sweeping it away by the time her hands reached for the metal rungs.
There were two ladders bolted side by side, and as Kiva began to descend the first, Cresta kept her promise and remained with her, all the way down to the first platform, then on to the next set of ladders. Down they stepped, rung after rung, platform after platform, with Cresta murmuring quiet encouragement. Kiva watched her hands as if they belonged to someone else, feeling nothing, only vaguely aware that she was moving downward, that her muscles were burning, that the air was becoming stale and chilled.
Tipp. She would hold on for Tipp.
Even if, after what he’d discovered, after what she’d done, he surely hated her now.
An agonized sound left Kiva, and Cresta looked over in alarm. But then they stepped off the final ladder, causing relief to flood the other girl’s expression.
Safe. They were safe.
But they also weren’t.
Because before Kiva could catch her breath, she was being pushed down a luminium-lit tunnel after a line of prisoners, all shuffling along like ants. A distant feeling of panic hit her, the claustrophobia familiar but muted by the angeldust.
The last time she’d been here, she hadn’t been with other prisoners. But she hadn’t been alone, either.
Blue-gold eyes. A hovering, magical flame. A perfect snowblossom.
This time the drugs didn’t force the image away — Kiva did.
She couldn’t think of what had happened then.
She couldn’t think of him.
A sloshing sound caught her attention and drew her gaze downward, the earth turning to mud, then shallow water, becoming knee-deep the further they walked. When the prisoners were ordered to halt by one of the supervising guards, Kiva found that a pickaxe had been shoved into her hands somewhere along the journey. She tested the weight, waving it before her like a sword.
Caldon had shown her how to do that, training her with a wooden practice blade.
Kiva closed her eyes and forced that memory away, too, allowing the angeldust to subdue her reignited pain. She dropped her arms, trying to remember where she was, why she was there, what she had to do.
Tunneling.
She was a tunneler now, tasked with digging for water and creating passageways for it to flow into the aquifer.
It was the worst of Zalindov’s work allocations. The hardest, both physically and mentally. The quickest death.
“Think of the boy,” Cresta commanded from Kiva’s side. “Don’t stop thinking about him.”
The sheer authority in her voice had Kiva obeying, and when the guards ordered them to begin digging into the hard limestone walls, Tipp’s face remained front and center in her thoughts.
Kiva swung the iron axe into the unyielding rock, over and over again. The movement jarred her arms, the sound set her teeth on edge. She welcomed the burn that grew with every thrust, her vision turning hazy as dust clouded around her, her hearing overwhelmed by the clash of hundreds of axes meeting solid stone. She was vaguely aware of Cresta working at her side, reminding her about Tipp, telling her to keep digging. She couldn’t stop — if she stopped, the guards would come. They were patrolling freely, whips and batons at the ready. Don’t give them an excuse, Cresta told her. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.
There was blood on Kiva’s axe, dripping down the wooden handle, from split blisters and cracked calluses. She felt the pain, but it was muted, just like everything else around her.
Until it wasn’t.
Because as seconds turned to minutes, and minutes turned to hours, the angeldust’s effects began to fade.
It started with a low, persistent headache at the base of her skull. Next came the taste of copper on her tongue, followed by a tremor in her fingers, making it difficult to keep hold of her blood-slicked axe. When the guards finally announced the end of the workday, Kiva was chilled despite the arduous labor, and finally cognizant enough to realize that what she’d survived was nothing compared to what was ahead.
“I feel awful,” Kiva moaned as they waited their turn to climb back up to the surface.
“I’ll bet,” Cresta murmured. “Is there anything in that infirmary of yours that might help?”
“It’s not my infirmary anymore,” Kiva replied, swaying from exhaustion. Her freedom from Zalindov had granted her access to regular food and exercise, and that, combined with the numbing effects of the angeldust, had given her enough strength to endure the day’s hard labor. But she was feeling it now, every part of her hurting. Her thoughts, however, were clearer than they’d been for weeks, so she battled to keep her focus, rattling off a list of plants all known to ease withdrawal symptoms.
“The only way out is through,” Cresta said sagely, brushing her twisted red locks away from her damp face. “I’ll see what I can scrape together.”
Kiva mumbled a reply, unsure what words left her mouth as her chills grew and her body began to tremble. She couldn’t remember climbing out of the tunnels, nor could she remember Cresta supporting her all the way to the dormitory building and dumping her unceremoniously on a pallet, dust and mud coating her skin, her tunic still stained with her own vomit. She had no idea how much time passed as she lay there, shaking and sweating, her muscles aching, her bloodied palms now throbbing mercilessly.
“Give me your hands.”
Cresta was back. Kiva didn’t know how long she’d been gone, or how long since she’d returned. Her snake tattoo was almost indistinguishable beneath a layer of grime.
Wet slid across Kiva’s palms, eliciting a sharp sting. She tried to tug them back, but Cresta held firm.
“You need to keep these clean, or they’ll get infected.”
Kiva stilled, the words echoing across her memory. She’d heard them before. She’d said them before.
You need to keep these clean, or they’ll get infected.