and back, while Raven stayed in the rear. The grave-rot stench of the undead was gut — wrenching.
“So where are we?” Black asked.
“Just walk, bitch, ” Raven said. Her voice was smooth and cold. “ No talking. And don’t screw with me: y ou don’t need to be in one piece for what Rake has planned for you.”
Danica’s legs ached, but she’d done her best to rec over her strength while she’d rested. The stairway shaft was barely lit with dim red bulbs set in iron wall- brackets. She looked up and saw no end to the stairs, just more grilled landings and darkness. They’d climbed maybe five floors already.
Screw it.
She waited until the Scarecrow in front of her reached the next landing. Danica threw her body back against the Scarecrow behind her while she held onto the railing. The undead’s spindly legs slipped just enough for her to shove it backwards, and i t lost its footing and crashed into Raven. T hey both fell down the steps and on to the landing be low.
She sense d her spirit. H e was free from Raven’s grip, and he rushed to her like they’d been separated for years. Her skin flush ed hot from his presence.
The Scarecrow in front of her turned. It couldn’t maneuver in those tight quarters, so Danica duck ed down and grab bed the sid e of the four-foot long 20mm cannon. The trigger sounded, and if not for her spirit shielding her the roar of the weapon would have blown her eardrums apart. The air glowed hot white. Shells pounded into the wall and the other Scarecrow. Danica tried to aim for Raven, but the Scarecrow that she struggled with reached up and grabbed her by the neck. D ead fingers that smelled of burned meat closed around her throat.
Her spirit hardened into an ic y blade, and s he arched backwards and drove it into the Scarecrow’s oversized face. Teeth and bone shattered. Its grip held for a moment, then faltered.
Danica charged past the brute and up the stairs three at a time. Part of her wanted to go back and finish off Raven, but she heard movement down below. Revengers, more Scarecrows. She ran.
The stairs just kept going. A brighter light appeared far overhead as a door opened somewhere near the top of the stairwell. Black’s heart leapt into her throa t. Voices came from above.
She looked around. T here was a small door on t he landing she’d stopped on. She pushed it open, moved through and closed it behind her as quietly as she could.
She stepped through d ark clouds of cold steam. The smell of chemicals was strong. Danica crept forward along a stark metal corridor. D eep blue lights cast a path of bruise shadows. She struggled to peer through the frost — black haze.
Dripping shards of ice clung to the steel. The air hum med with machinery. Danica tasted aged metal and salt. She heard voices in the distance, cold and alien. Thick pl umes of smoke billow ed out of the walls. She saw faces in the fumes, leering and distorted.
Her spirit pulsed against her skin. H e sense d something ahead, something she couldn’t make sense of.
S he inched forward. Her breaths clouded in the air. Cold steam curled around her feet as she stepped through broken pale light that pushed up through the grill beneath her. She couldn’t see anything below except shadows and smoke.
Danica kept looking b ack. She expect ed the hatch door to fly open at any second, but it didn’t.
Her feet found a hole. A narrow ladder led down. The passage continued on, but she made the descent almost without thinking. Her spirit clung protectively to her skin. The ladder was cold, and it was covered in something that felt like ice but was actually some congealed slime that clung to her gloves.
She descended into a claustrophobic room filled with tilted shadows. Massive devices like boiler tanks pushed in at her from all sides. The air was oppressively hot, but dark ice had somehow formed on the walls.
What the hell are you up to, Rake?
She found a large cylindrical tank filled with churning green and black fluid. A second tank waited nearby, and a third, all tightly arrange d. Dark soil covered the floor like someone had spilled dirt. Danica leaned down, and found bones in the soil.
Shapes writhed in the liquid. Humans stripped of their flesh, now turned to black husks of charred and wriggling meat. They hung upside-down in the murky fluid, tethered to metal hooks and glass tubing and surrounded with cables and wires that moved like undersea life. Dark juices were pumped out of t he tanks and into a humming and virulent machine the size of a refrigerator. The machine’s iron face bore a clear glass plate, a viewport to the guts of the device where a dozen or so separate containers had been filled with different colored fluids.
The bodies sagged as if being deflated. They looked less like human corpses and more like leather sacks with each passing second. The black muscles sucked inwards, pulled tight, contorted like burning plastic. The faces crinkled in a nd the eyes bulged and sagged down.
“What the hell?”
Her spirit screamed. Something in that fluid, in those bodies, made it recoil. She tried to restrain him, and suddenly found she couldn’t.
Because he wasn’t there.
A Scarecrow stepped out from around one of the machines and aimed its weapon at her. A pair of war wights followed. T heir peeled skulls and razor talons shone in the dull light.
A Fade was with them, but it wasn’t Raven. It was Gath. The wiry Islander cell mate who’d kept her and Co le safe for the promise of sexual f avor s was there, dressed in a Revenger’s dark armor. He smiled warmly. Danica felt waves of power emanate from him, that null field that kept her spirit from doing anything.
“You bastard,” she said. “Of course. No wonder you were able to keep me and Cole safe and well fed. I should’ve seen right through it.”
“I still want that threesome,” Gath smiled.
Danica backed away.
She heard footsteps on the walkway overhead. She knew she could have dodge d into the maze of machinery and floating bodies, but she didn’t know if there was another way out, and with two F ades nearby the only weapon she had was useless.
Not yet, then.
She held up her shackled hands, and was taken.
The upper decks of the Ironnaught were in chaos. Revengers moved about frantically. Danica got the impression the ship was in highly dangerous territory and might have even been under attack, except that she couldn’t hear any s ounds of battle.
The halls were made from black iron. Wide corridors led to cross-halls and large chambers. Every door stood open, allowing Danica to peer into t he officer ’s rooms and map chambers, and she saw the navigation console and the master gunnery. Scarecrows stood at almost every intersection. S he felt the distinct presence of war wraiths and murder spirits as they float ed through the ventilation ducts.
She was taken to the bridge, a stoic and humorless room cut in odd elliptical angles. There were no chairs, just standing stations at the control panels along the back wall. There was a massive viewport made from reinforced blood glass, and skylight s above and below. The ship floated high above a pale wasteland dominated by glacial floes and dark hills, jagged ruins and drifts of snow. D erelict clo uds seemed frozen in the dusk sky.
Rake was on the bridge, along with Geist, Burke and Raven, all dressed in Revenger black, with iron epaulets and blood-colored badges of rank on their chests. The Fade woman was bruised and had a nasty cut down one side of her face, presumably from whe n she and the Scarecrow had fallen down the stairs. She walked right up to Danica, and Black braced herself to receive a blow.
“No,” Rake said. Raven fumed. Her dark eyes narrowed with hate, and she clenched her fists several times before she finally stepped back.
“Good girl,” Danica said. “Can you roll over, too?”
Raven stepped back up and punched Black in the stomach. The blow was hard and fast, and Raven’s hand felt like it was nothing but bone. Pain flared through Danica’s abdomen, and she doubled over, the breath forced from her lungs. She coughed a few times before she was able to stand straight again.
Rak e walked over and slapped Raven hard in the face. Blood ran down her mouth.
“I said ‘Stop’, you undisciplined whore,” he said quietly. “Back away.”
Raven did as she was told. She looked at Danica and smile d.
“You never learn, do you?” Rake said to Danica.
