Page 51 of Fifth
Their hunger stained the air, greedy voices mingling with the metallic clatter of credits.
The headman shifted Emmy with two fingers at her shoulder to show the angle of her face, as well as her partially exposed body in the short, transparent shift they’d given her. She flinched, then checked herself and stood steady. When she looked for Hannah again, the headman caught her chin and kept her eyes on the light. Locus heard his own teeth grind.
“She’s afraid,” someone said from a screen, his tone soft as though he had just learned the word and wanted to savor it. “I like that.”
Hannah moved fast enough to startle him. She stepped into the light so hard the nearest guard lifted his baton automatically. Locus took the strike to his shoulder before it fell. He didn’t move when it bounced. The guard rocked back, eyes toowide.
The headman didn’t turn, but the fingers on Emmy’s chin tightened. Hannah trembled. The nearness of her body, pressed full into his side, was a fire he couldn’t ignore. Her trembling breasts brushed against his ribs, her hip shifted against his loincloth, and every instinct in him howled to turn and take her mouth then and there. Fury for her sister burned in her eyes, but heat for him pulsed beneath her skin, and he experienced every note ofit.
“Look at me,” Hannah called to the dais. The yard snickered. The sound cut her but didn’t stop her. “Emmy. Here.”
Emmy wrenched her face free. It cost skin. She didn’t cry out. She found Hannah and held her with a look that said everything the yard wouldn’t let her say aloud. The headmantried to force her back to the lens. She made him work for it. The bidders’ murmurs changed. Not less hungry. Just more engaged.
Voss didn’t look away from Hannah when he spoke. “Add ten.”
The numbers leaped. Amasked bidder answered. Voss went over him. Another screen flickered and died as if a connection had been cut. Voss didn’t glance aside. His mouth moved on a number that made the clerk take a breath like she had been dragged underwater. The headman’s lips parted. He laughed to cover it and fanned himself as if heat had finally foundhim.
“Sold,” he said too quickly, voice breaking on the word. He caught it and smoothed it. “Sold to Voss.”
Hannah’s body went tight and strange, like a wire strung wrong. Locus lifted his hand to the small of her back, thumb pressing into the hollow there, claiming her spine. “You will stand,” he murmured. “You will breathe.”
The headman gestured to a man in a black vest who stepped forward with a compact cutting tool that looked like a flattened spool of coin. He tapped a series on the rim, and a thin electric arc snapped to life, humming with power. The sound in the yard dropped to a hush that was part reverence and part greed. The man in the vest reached toward Emmy with the tool. She jerked back. The chain stopped her. The arc touched the cuff at her wrist and the metal turned gray, thin as ash. It fell away without sound.
Hannah’s breath broke. “No.”
Locus’s hand tightened. He didn’t look away from the platform. “You will be calm.”
The man touched the arc of the cutting tool to the chain at Emmy’s other wrist. That cuff fell too. Voss didn’t reach for herarms. He didn’t touch her at all. He lifted his hand in a small motion that said move. The man in the vest set the tool beneath Emmy’s elbow. The heat shimmered against her skin as the arc flared brighter, filling the air with a wavering haze. It was no alien transport—just a crude, searing trick of current and light—but it made her form waver like a reflection disturbed by a stone.
Hannah stepped forward without choosing to. Locus moved with her and stopped her at the line of shadow, his body an immovable fact. Her back pressed against his chest, the curve of her hips fitting too well into his body, and he nearly growled at the ache of wanting her even as he kept her steady.
Voss looked down the steps at Locus like he was measuring distance. His mouth didn’t change shape. He spoke as if reciting a rule. “By the terms of sale, interference is a forfeit.”
Locus didn’t answer him. He spoke to Emmy, voice pitched to ride the hush. “Look at your sister.”
Emmy’s head snapped down. She found Hannah again, and this time she didn’t fight the hand on her arm or the cutting tool at her side. She lifted her chin like Hannah did and she held the look until the last clear line of her face dissolved. The air closed on the space she had occupied. Somehow, someway, she wasgone.
Hannah’s knees bent as if the ground had shifted under her. Locus took her weight against his thigh and set her upright with a pressure that wouldn’t show. She shook once from shoulders to wrists and locked it down, leaning just slightly into him as though her body knew where safety lived.
Inside, rage ripped through him like fire. Emmy was gone, sold to a man who treated her life as numbers on a screen. Locus’s mind burned with the faces of every bidder, every watcher who had laughed or sneered. He catalogued them asenemies to be ended. Avow carved itself into his chest. He would tear down this yard stone by stone, slaughter the ones who profited, and salt the ground with their blood. No drone would remain in their sky when he was finished.
But Hannah pressed back into him, her spine against his chest, her trembling holding him to the moment. Her warmth grounded him, secured him to something more vital than vengeance. Protect her first. Destroy them after. Her scent filled his lungs, her heartbeat fluttering against his arm, and his fury bent itself into focus. She was the reason he would survive this trial, the reason he would make sure every man herepaid.
The yard answered with a ragged cheer, thin and uncertain, more cough than celebration. The headman spread his arms for the drones. “A pleasure doing business,” he said, and meantit.
Voss descended the steps without looking back. He didn’t take a drink when a man offered one. He touched his ear and spoke a command to someone who wasn’t there. His transport would wait somewhere outside the camera angles, quiet and clean. The yard parted for him again and closed after him like water.
The headman sauntered over, his grin sharp in the floodlights. He crouched just enough so Hannah could hear him clearly. “There, there,” he crooned. “Don’t be sad. If you’re lucky, you’ll see your sister soon enough. Once the alien is dead, chances are Voss will bid for you too. Ijust don’t expect him to pay much for damaged goods. So make sure you give them a good show in the preserve. Or else.”
Locus’s arm slid tight around her waist, pulling her back into him until her spine pressed flush against the hard lines of his body. Fury burned in his chest, but so did something hotter,more dangerous. Desire. He bent his head, his lips a breath from her hair. “You are not damaged. You are mine to protect.”
The words vibrated against her skin, avow that hung in the air as the crowd’s noise ebbed. It left a taut silence, the kind that made the next command inevitable.
The headman snapped his fingers. “At nightfall, they go to the preserve! Survive until daybreak and get to the far side of the gate and you live.” His gaze turned feral. “Just in case there’s any question, you won’t survive.”
Chapter 16
HANNAH STAREDat the sky, watching light fade intodusk.
