Chapter 19: She is Mine
Dorian woke to heat, rope, and Liana’s spine pressed hard against his own.
For a moment he did not move. Pain travelled through him in slow, deliberate waves. His head throbbed. His mouth tasted of old smoke, blood and ash. Thick rope bound his wrists behind him and pinned his ankles tight enough that he could already feel numbness threatening in his feet.
Ash still clung to him in dry, grey patches. It had settled into his hair, the seams of his shirt and corset, and the folds of Liana’s clothes, turning sweat into a thin, filthy paste. His coat was gone.
Sunlight broke through the jungle canopy in ugly white shafts. The air was wet and hot enough to choke on. Around them, the camp moved with the steady confidence of people who did not fear captives.
Smoke drifted between low huts of hide and woven reed. Meat roasted somewhere nearby, rich and greasy in a way Dorian did not care to examine too closely. Heavy pots hung above the fires. Children ran barefoot through the packed dirt, shrieking at one another, their ribs sharp under sun-browned skin. Men sat in the shade with blades in their hands, sharpening them with patient strokes. Women stirred the pots or cut strips of flesh on broad wooden boards stained dark from long use.
One boy dragged something pale and curved through the dust. Bone, probably. Human, possibly.
No one looked at them. Which was worse.
“Liana,” Dorian breathed.
She jerked awake behind him so sharply he felt the shock pass through her whole body. Her breath caught. Fear reached her at once, clean and bright.
“Dorian?” she whispered.
Her voice nearly broke on his name. Dorian disliked that immediately. It meant she had stopped pretending she was in control.
He studied the camp again, forcing calm into his voice. “What are we looking at?”
Liana answered low and tight. “One of the horned tribes. Border raiders. They take prisoners. Sell them when it suits them. Eat them when it does not.”
She went rigid as she said it.
A little to their left, under a sagging canopy by one of the sheds, lay the capsule for Lucky, intact and untouched. Its indicator light still glowed steady.
Relief hit Dorian. Good.
His coat lay beside the capsule. His brass cuff rested on top of it, covered in dirt. Liana’s bow and arrows had been gathered too, all of them smeared with something grey and sticky. Their daggers were gone. That, naturally, spoiled the effect.
Dorian tested the rope at his wrists, gently first, then with more care, rolling one shoulder, shifting his weight, feeling for weakness. Nothing. The knots were rough but clever. They had been tied by people who knew exactly what they were doing. Behind him, Liana shifted, testing her own restraints with the same lack of success.
“Can you understand them?” he asked quietly. “The tribe.”
“No,” Liana said. “They are not Loteri.”
She paused. “They are strangers here.”
Dorian might have replied, but the camp changed. No shout. No alarm. Only a subtle collapse of movement, as if the whole clearing had drawn one breath and decided to hold it.
Every person dropped to their knees.
It happened all at once. Children stopped where they stood. Women bowed their heads. Men lowered their blades and bent forward as if their spines belonged to someone else.
A tall man moved between the fires. Taller than any of the tribe. Even at a distance, he looked wrong. He wore the tribe’s ritual dress: hides, beads, bone, and a horned headdress broad enough to make him seem inhuman. But his posture ruined it. He stood too straight, moved too cleanly, and carried none of the loose, half-feral weight of the camp. His hands remained clasped behind his back as he crossed the clearing, the gesture neat enough to belong in a council chamber.
Not one of them, Dorian thought.
The man gave a short order in the tribal dialect. Four warriors rose at once and came for the prisoners. Rough hands seized Dorian and Liana, hauled them upright, and dragged them across the camp. Liana stumbled once. A hand closed on her upper arm hard enough to bruise. Dorian kept his face still and his eyes open.
He counted steps. Doorways. Distance between fires. Number of armed men in reach. Possible exits. Weak walls. Blind corners. Nothing useful.
No opening. No weapon.
They were shoved through the hide flap of the tall man’s hut and forced down onto a low wooden bench. The warriors withdrew at once. The flap dropped shut behind them. The noise of the camp dulled, though it did not disappear.
Inside, the hut smelled of leather, incense, old resin, and beneath that, something that did not belong in any jungle. Disinfectant. Machine grease.
The tall man stood before them in silence for a few moments, as though deciding which version of himself he meant to use. Then he raised both hands and removed the headdress. The horned weight came away with a dull thud as he set it aside. He rolled one shoulder, then the other, and exhaled sharply through his teeth.
“Horrible thing,” he muttered. “How do they bear the weight of these wretched things for hours?”
That was the first crack. The complaint meant nothing. The accent did.
Dorian lifted his head by a fraction. He recognised that sound. Flattened vowels. Hard, clipped consonants. Every word shaped like a small act of contempt. He had heard it before from a Walker who had survived decades in captivity and escaped.
The man flexed one hand as if easing the strain from it. Six fingers opened and closed in the dim light. There it was.
Dorian went very still.
Veyra 16. Of course.
The man noticed where Dorian was looking and smiled without warmth.
“Sharp,” he said in common tongue. “Good. That saves us time.”
Liana had gone silent beside him. Dorian could feel her tension even without turning his head.
Veyra 16 was not a Coalition world under the Great Council’s authority. Never had been. Too advanced to ignore, too vicious to welcome. Their machines were elegant. Their laws were filth. A child born there with only five fingers was judged defective, impure, and sent into labour service before it was old enough to understand what had been taken from it. Dorian had read enough reports to know that Veyrans considered brutality a sign of structure and structure a kind of moral virtue.
The man sat down opposite them with the ease of someone receiving guests. He was lean and older than Dorian had first thought. Not old enough to soften. His clothes beneath the ritual skins were well cut, though travel-worn, and one cuff had been mended with thread too fine for anything made in this place. A narrow metal device sat at his wrist, half hidden. Local costume over foreign precision. The disguise worked at a distance. Up close, it merely made him look more obscene.
The Veyran studied Dorian first. Then Liana.
“Well,” he said softly. “A Walker.”
His gaze shifted to her, not with interest, but inventory.
“And this one,” he said, “belongs to you?”
Liana recoiled before she could stop herself.
Dorian moved first.
“She is mine,” he said.
Liana’s shoulder tightened against his.
The Veyran’s mouth twitched. “Is she.”
“We are together,” Dorian went on, sounding tired rather than affectionate. “She is angry because the forest went badly and I was, apparently, not good enough at saving her precious arse.”
Liana made a small strangled sound that could have passed for outrage.
Dorian kept his voice flat. “She bites when frightened.”
“Does she now?” the Veyran murmured.
His eyes moved over Liana in a way that made the air fouler. Not desire. Appraisal. Whether she would carry well. Whether she would last.
Liana’s fingers curled inward until the knuckles whitened. She did not speak. The man watched them both for a long moment, weighing, sorting, deciding what fiction might still prove useful.
Then he gave the smallest nod.
“You know what you are,” he said to Dorian, “to men who understand value?”
Dorian said nothing.
“A beginning,” the Veyran said.
His eyes flicked back to Liana.
“And better still,” he added, “you brought your own breeding stock with you. Convenient. Better blood, cleaner timing, less waste. No need to rely on tribal wombs and chance.”
Liana’s breath hitched once. Dorian heard it. He did not look at her. Something in her had changed. Not panic. Not noise. Something colder, harder, set into place. Good.
Dorian kept his face expressionless. “How efficient.”
The Veyran gave a brief laugh, almost sincere. “Oh, you have no idea.”
He rose. “Come.”
They were not asked whether they wished to. Four tribal men entered, hauled them up again, and marched them to a structure at the rear of the camp, half hidden behind hanging reeds and broad jungle leaves. From the outside it looked like another hut, but the door gave it away.
Proper. Heavy. Solid. Built to keep something in.
Inside, it was something else entirely. Cold. Bright. Clean.
White light burned overhead from fitted panels too advanced for anything this camp should have possessed. Metal tables stood in ordered rows. Glass-fronted cabinets lined one wall. Trays of instruments lay set out with obscene neatness. The air hummed with concealed current. Under the sharp bite of antiseptic sat older smells: blood scrubbed away, sweat, metal heated and cooled too many times.
A laboratory dressed in tribal skin.
Dorian’s stomach turned over once, quietly, and settled.
The door opened again, and a tribal boy came in carrying Dorian’s things. He bowed deeply to the Veyran first, then arranged the items on one of the tables with unsettling care.
Dorian watched his every movement.
His brass cuff and coat had been cleaned. That detail insulted him more than the rest. The small capsule for Lucky was still intact.
The man noticed where he was looking.
“We can discuss your fascinating possessions later,” he said with a grin. “We have time.”
Dorian said nothing.
He was stripped first.
Hands pulled at buckles and fabric with brisk efficiency. Shirt. Corset. Trousers. Boots. He did not struggle. There was no point gifting them theatre.
The cuffs were fixed to short metal chains built straight into the wall. Their locks were hidden inside the iron, neat and clever. Once the metal closed around his wrists and ankles, one of the guards used a narrow, unfamiliar key to seal them. That left Dorian some freedom of movement. Little, but enough. He could shift his weight, stand, or lower himself into the shallow niche cut into the wall behind him. Enough for rest. Not enough for escape.
He tested the restraints immediately.
Liana was stripped as well, then fitted with a collar instead of cuffs. The metal band closed around her throat with a hard pull and a solid buckle. The same strange key was used to lock it. A short chain ran from it to a ring in the floor. Long enough to let her reach Dorian. Not long enough to run away.
She stayed upright, spine straight, furious and pale.
The Veyran made a small gesture, and the guards withdrew at once.
He looked from Dorian to Liana with clinical interest, then set a small glass flask on the floor between them.
“Make proper use of him,” he said. “Not just the flask. I expect results where they matter.”
His gaze dropped to her belly. She stared at him.
“If the flask is empty and you have made no use of it when I return,” he continued, “I may decide your value was overstated. The tribe will not object to fresh meat.”
That was all. Only procedure.
His smile made it worse because it was not theatrical. It was merely real.
Then he turned, walked out, and locked the door behind him.