1018 LC, Adur

The heavy latch of the lock unbolted with a clack, breaking the silence that had fallen in the deep tunnels of the Cardea’s secret wing.

They kept their greatest prizes here, hidden from low-ranking members that had yet to earn the Cardea’s trust. Their newest was a female soldier found wandering outside a Solarian outpost on the Atarrabi border.

From his place in the doorway, Isco could only see her back. She curled into a corner, ghastly pale, half-stripped and still bleeding against the dark stone floor. Her hands were wrapped around her body, tucked where Isco couldn’t see.

He shut the door behind him.

Despite the Cardea’s best efforts, she hadn’t said a word. Had barely made a sound. They’d tried different drugs to keep her both malleable but conscious, needed to know what she was in order to properly test her, but she’d yet to reveal any abilities beyond an unnervingly high tolerance to pain.

Isco knelt before her and pushed the tangled mass of hair from her face. The skin on her forehead was clammy and feverish, but her eyes were open, alert. He had never seen someone with coloring like hers, but it was her eyes that gave him pause. They were the color of ash in snow, or a bright, clean metal.

“You should tell them what they want to know,” he said.

Though weak, her lips quirked into a smirk and her eyes narrowed dangerously.

Isco sighed. He had assumed silence would be her answer.

“They’ll ease up if you say something.” Isco settled on the ground next to her. “It doesn’t have to be true,” he added, “just interesting enough to distract them.”

Her smirk fell, and her brow furrowed. They sat together in silence for another moment, and then she shifted. She attempted to sit up, but she kept her hands tucked and therefore struggled with the movement. Halfway up, she slipped, and her left hand went out instinctually to stop her fall.

Isco felt his heart drop into his stomach when she tipped and he reached out, catching her before her weight landed on her mangled hand. He helped her just enough to right herself, then grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand towards him.

“Dead gods,” he whispered under his breath.

The fingernails of her left hand had been yanked from their beds. Her pinky and ring finger were broken, and the others jutted at odd angles.

Isco grabbed her right wrist, turning her hand over. It was in far worse condition. The bones of several of her fingers weren’t just broken, they were shattered, and the bone of her ring finger jutted from the skin.

There was so much damage Isco didn’t know where to start, didn’t know if there was any way to fix what had been done with what he had. His hand shook with hers in it, the other rummaging through his bag.

The woman pulled her right hand from him and held it against her bare, bloodstained skin. She held out her left to him instead.

“But the other one needs immediate care,” he attempted to argue.

She just pushed her left towards him again.

Isco took it, the realization dawning on him. “You’re left handed?”

She bit her lip, but made no other motion.

“Alright,” Isco said. “We’ll start here.”

While he attempted to focus on what was before him, tried to fix without causing more pain, her attention drifted. Her eyes moved to the opposite wall, then back to her hand.

She shifted, then it happened again, but the second time, her gaze stuck.

Isco looked up, tried to follow her line of sight, but it was the same damp wall it had always been, darkened in spots where the humidity coalesced. But she was focused on something far beyond it.

That was when she broke her silence, her voice dry with disuse.

“He’s here,” she said.

When her eyes shifted back to him, they weren’t human anymore. They had eclipsed, black as nothing.

The sound that followed was nothing like anything Isco had heard before. It was a high-pitched screech and a predator’s roar together. Like the scream of air when lightning rent it, but it was as if existence itself was tearing, the scream quaking with anger. It rolled above and then through the compound, primal and unstoppable.

Isco pressed his hands over his ears when it came close, but just before reaching them it stopped.

It was followed by an eerie silence. Isco removed his hands from his ears, waiting.

Then, something like thunder. The earthen roof above the compound shook, rocks cracking and breaking loose from the tunnels as the buildings above them collapsed.

Isco turned back to the woman. “We have to go,” he said.

She shook her head.

Isco knelt near her, attempted to wrap his arm around her waist and lift her. She gasped from the pain, and the shrill keening tore into Isco’s ears in response. He had to release her to try and cover his ears once more to block it out.

The sound stopped, only to be replaced by the screams of the Cardea. Isco stumbled to the door of the cell and opened it, only to be shoved back. The members of the Cardea were racing through the twisting corridors, knocking each other back and over as they were routed into a chaotic retreat.

A flash of light blinded Isco and he stepped back along the hall. When he blinked away the spots in his eyes, a body fell at his feet, the neck gaping where the throat had been hacked through.

Isco skittered back out of the blood pool, preparing to face the attackers that would issue his death.

Instead, a single soldier rounded the corner.

Where the prisoner’s eyes had turned black, the man’s were molten gold, shifting and curling and undone. His white uniform held the mark of the Shadowed Sun, denoting him as one of the Legatus’s elite.

Isco backed away, but he knew there was no point in running. The soldier’s cuffs were thick with blood, proof that it was his hands that had ripped through the Cardea’s hidden compound.

His grip tightened on twinned blades, the handles white beneath the smears of blood, and he charged.

Isco was slammed into the wall, the air leaving his lungs in a gasp.

“Stop.”

The prisoner’s voice echoed in the hall, and the man’s blade buried itself in the rock next to Isco’s ear. He could feel the stickiness of the blood that coated the metal against his skin.

The soldier turned to the voice.

“Kanna.”

The Cardea’s captive had managed to stand at the open door of the cell, but she leaned her shoulder heavily on the jamb of the door. Evidence of her torture was streaked on her shaking body. Beaten and bloodied, barely clinging to whatever strength that remained in her, the single command carried enough authority to halt an army.

Or the equivalent of one.

Isco was abandoned. The soldier rushed to the prisoner as her knees loosened, overwhelmed by the strain of weeks of torture and pain, and she fell against him.

“Haru,” she whispered as the soldier eased her to the ground.

Once she was safely settled, he shrugged out of his once white jacket and draped it to cover her.

“I knew you’d come,” she said.

Far gentler than blood-stained hands should be, he placed a hand to her cheek. His fingers wrapped around her neck and he tilted her head back, dropping his forehead to hers.

“I was too late,” he said.

She shook her head, a smile ghosting across her lips. “You weren’t.”

Haru shut his eyes. “Why would you do this?”

“We found them, didn’t we?”

The soldier’s eyes opened. They had settled to a crisp blue and slid over Isco like a winter chill. He unfurled from his crouch.

“No,” Kanna said, shaking her head.

Haru turned back to her, met her level gaze.

“Leave him,” she said.

They stayed that way, locked in a silent debate, until Haru relented with a nod.

Haru moved to Isco, stopping just before him. He reached forward and Isco winced. The soldier gripped the hilt of his knife and yanked it from the wall where it had been buried.

He sheathed the blade and returned to Kanna, carefully lifting her in his arms. She leaned into him, mangled hands cradled against her chest, her eyes shut.

Isco understood then why the Palamidia dressed their soldiers in white.

It was the perfect canvas for blood.