Queen Of The Great Underworld

47

I couldn’t bring myself to speak. He’d known I’d held something back, and I’d been waiting for him to ask. Of course. But what could I say to him? I couldn’t tell him the truth; that was too dangerous. And I couldn’t lie, because he’d know.

“Very well.” He pulled open the door and frightening familiarity stole me.

I knew this place. I’d cleaned this interrogation room four times, scrubbing blood and urine off the floor until my hands grew raw. I knew each stone on the floor, wall, and ceiling. I knew the crystals lighting the grim space. I knew the echoes of terrible things that had happened here.

On the far side of the room, a strange chair loomed. Leather straps hung from it like stranglemoss—harmless by itself, but deadly to creatures caught in its embrace.

Aaru stood next to me, surveying the room in absolute silence. He didn’t move, like LaLa’s prey hoping she wouldn’t notice it if it stayed completely still. Only his gaze darted around, eyes wide with alarm.

The back of my hand brushed his. A bad idea, I realized too late.

“Take him.”

At Yarrow’s command, the other two guards dragged Aaru toward the chair. He struggled, but he was whip-thin and hungry. The larger men easily overpowered him and shoved him into the chair.

“No!” The word was out before I could stop it.

“I warned you about making friends,” Yarrow said. “But now I wonder if I should have warned him about you.”

Quickly, the guards bound Aaru’s limbs to the chair. One leather strap around each wrist. One around each ankle. Two more went around his forehead and his chest.

Aaru didn’t have shoes, and even from here I could see dark scars crisscrossing his feet and forearms and the bottoms of his calves. His torn clothes weren’t quite long enough.

“You seem attached to this one.” Yarrow dragged his knuckles against mine, a mockery of the way I’d reached for Aaru’s hand. My stomach turned over. “That’s good for me.”

I couldn’t read Aaru’s expression anymore. His throat remained silent against his voice; so was his face against his feelings.

“Why don’t you sit?” Yarrow didn’t make it sound like an invitation as he motioned me toward a small table and chairs near the wall.

My hands shook too badly for me to move my chair out. Yarrow laughed and did it for me, a knowing smirk on his face. Then, he pulled off his jacket, as though settling in, and draped it over the back of the other chair. I didn’t like this helpful, casual Yarrow. I didn’t trust him.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he said. “You’re going to think about why you kept a secret from me, and what that secret is actually worth. While you consider, we’re both going to test that Idrisi boy. What does it take to make him sing?”

The thought of Aaru singing would have made me laugh if I didn’t know Yarrow meant something else. “Why?” I whispered.

“Do you really need me to tell you?” Yarrow looked disappointed. “I thought you were cleverer than that.”

“I’m being punished.”

He nodded.

“Because I kept secrets from you.”

Again, he nodded.

I looked up at Aaru, now fully strapped to the chair. After the isolation incident, when Yarrow had been scolded for nearly killing me, his leaders must have f*******n him from physically hurting me again. That left one option: hurt me by hurting others.

And they’d chosen Aaru. The two guards with him stepped aside as three new figures came into the room: one was Rosa, the Anabeln doctor who’d given me the coconut water treatment, and the other two were warrior trainees, each carrying a large iron basin. They positioned them in front of Aaru, scraping the stone floor.

Inside each basin rested a noorestone the size of a fist.

If Aaru was worried, he didn’t show it.

“I’m sure you’ve heard,” Yarrow said, “that we are moving toward new uses for noorestones.”

A terrible sinking feeling overwhelmed me.

Across the room, Rosa muttered to her assistants, too low for me to hear. One of them dripped a dark concoction onto each of the noorestones, making the room stink of sulfur and . . . something else. Something familiar, but too distant to identify.

“It’s taken some effort to find the best type of noorestones for this treatment,” Yarrow went on. “We lost over twenty prisoners during the testing phase, but eventually we found that small, old crystals are the most effective.”

Anxiety wrenched inside my chest.

“Noorestones aren’t normally hot to the touch,” Yarrow said, as if I needed reminding. “But these—well, I wouldn’t risk it.”

As the trainees slid one of the basins under Aaru’s left foot, my silent neighbor gasped and jerked his leg, but it was too tightly bound.

“What’s happening?”

“A heat transfer.” Yarrow c****d his head. “Have you ever had a fever, Fancy?”

I could only nod. Once, I’d been truly ill. I didn’t remember much from the days I’d lain in bed, just sweat and chills and Doctor Chilikoba ordering me to drink more and more water when I only wanted to sleep. The days felt long and the nights felt longer. Strange how fever could manipulate time.

“Think of this the same way,” Yarrow said. “Heat from the noorestone is moving through his skin and spreading throughout his body. It won’t cause burn marks, but if we leave him like this long enough, his blood could boil. Isn’t that fascinating?”

Aaru bore it with grim determination, but already sweat trickled down his temple, cutting a path through the dirt. Then, without ceremony, Rosa signaled the assistants again, who moved the second basin under his right foot. Suddenly, his hands clenched and he strained against the bindings.