Merren Vask counted people better than he counted bullets.
Bullets came loose in pockets, disappeared into floor grates, got traded for stimms, vanished down the wrong throat of the wrong gun when some hook-handed idiot heard a noise and decided the entire district required correction. Bullets lied by nature. Men lied by profession. Fuel drums sweated, filters clogged, knives broke, cages warped, locks jammed, and every crate stolen from the upper transit lanes arrived with a different number of sins nailed to its side.
People were easier.
People screamed when moved. People bled when damaged. People slept badly, fouled corners, clutched children, whispered prayers, begged for water, traded names, forgot names, and became much easier to count once chain-tags had been hammered shut around their wrists. A person with a tag was stock. Stock had category, condition, yield, and route. The trick was not to think too long about the noises they made before the ink dried.
Merren sat behind a slab of bolted plasteel that served as his desk and wrote with a stylus stolen from an Administratum corpse. Above him, three lumen strips buzzed inside wire cages, throwing sick yellow light over the ledger slates arranged in careful rows. The hook-chain yard spread below his office platform in ordered ugliness: cage lines along the left wall, fuel drums under tarp to the right, water filters stacked near the drainage gate, ammunition crates beneath two stubber nests, and the red-brown coats of Hook-and-Chain men moving between it all with chain hooks, shotguns, knives, and the bored cruelty of men who had mistaken habit for strength.
War growled beyond the yard's outer walls. It had been doing that for hours. Sometimes the fighting pushed close enough to shake rust from the roof beams. Sometimes sirens dragged themselves through the smoke outside and died in the broken vox-web. Sometimes the floor gave one of those deep, sick tremors that reminded everyone the hive was not stone, not really, but old machinery stacked so high and neglected so long that even its bones had forgotten what they were built to carry.
Inside the yard, business continued.
Merren dipped the stylus into the slate's input groove and corrected Cage Three's tally from nineteen to eighteen. The old man with the lung rattle had died between counts, which was irritating because he had been a pipefitter and pipefitters sold well to anyone trying to make stolen infrastructure behave. Merren marked him as loss, then added a note to strip the corpse before dumping it. Boots, belt, two metal teeth if someone had the patience. Maybe not the teeth. Labor costs mattered.
A woman in Cage Four stared up at him through the bars.
Merren knew her number without checking. Four-Seven. Adult female. Approximate age thirty to forty. Former ration clerk or hab-quartermaster, based on the way the others listened when she spoke and the way she had reorganized the cage's water allotment before anyone asked her to. Good hands. Good memory. Too much spine. Worth more alive than broken, though Rusk Venn's boys kept forgetting the distinction when bored.
He tapped the stylus twice against the slate and called down without lifting his voice. "If Four-Seven is speaking again, gag her after next water."
One of the guards below, a broad man named Hest with a rusted hook looped through his belt, looked up from picking at his teeth with a knife. "She ain't speaking."
Merren looked through the smoke-stained glass slit of his office. The woman had not moved. Around her, the other captives sat too still among the stink of sweat, old urine, cheap antiseptic, and fear. A child leaned against her knee, shivering under a strip of sackcloth. Two men with factory burns across their arms kept their heads down. A young boy stared at the cage lock with the fixed intensity of someone imagining miracles.
"They're always speaking," Merren said, returning to his ledger. "Most of them are simply too stupid to use their mouths."
Hest laughed because he thought that was expected.
Merren hated expected laughter. It wasted air and invited familiarity. He marked Cage Four stable, then moved to the stockpile register. Forty-six portable filters, eight cracked but serviceable. Nineteen fuel drums, three leaking, one possibly contaminated with sump-water. Ammunition uncertain because the western nest kept drawing from the reserve without notation. Medicae crates two and a half, because one of Rusk Venn's lieutenants had opened a sealed kit to patch a cousin's leg and left the wrapper hanging like an animal had chewed it.
The stylus paused.
Western nest.
Merren leaned toward the speaking tube bolted beside his desk and pressed the brass switch with one knuckle. "West nest, tally your belt count."
Static answered him.
He waited. Static continued to breathe through the tube, thin and dry and old. Merren pressed the switch harder, as if bad discipline could be crushed back into shape by force. "West nest, answer."
Nothing.
Merren's mouth tightened. "Hest."
The guard below looked up again, knife still between his teeth. "What?"
"Check west nest."
Hest rolled his eyes, but he went. He took the metal stairs two at a time, boots clanging against the platform frame, then crossed the yard beneath hanging chains and patched tarps. Merren watched him pass Cage Four. The woman inside did not look at Hest. She looked at the floor instead, one hand resting against the child's back.
That was wrong.
Captives watched guards. It was instinct. They watched hands, boots, keys, weapons, faces, anger, thirst, boredom. They watched because not watching got teeth knocked out, fingers broken, water withheld, children taken to other cages. A captive who did not watch a guard either had accepted death or knew something the guard did not.
Merren set down the stylus.
Hest climbed the ladder to the western nest. His head and shoulders passed through the smoke haze near the upper platform, then vanished behind the sandbagged gun shield. A moment later, the heavy stubber's muzzle shifted downward half a degree. Merren waited for the shout, the curse, the complaint, anything.
The speaking tube clicked once.
Then twice.
Then went dead.
Merren rose slowly.
Below, the yard kept moving. Two guards argued over a ration tin near the fuel tarp. A third dragged a chained man by the collar toward the inspection post. Someone laughed near the drainage gate. The lumen strips buzzed. Water dripped from a roof seam into a bucket already full enough to overflow black down the sides. Cage Four remained too quiet.
Merren opened the drawer beneath his desk, took out a compact laspistol, and checked the charge indicator. Half-full. Enough for correction. Not enough for war.
He thumbed the yard alarm.
Nothing happened.
His finger pressed again. The switch sank under his touch with a soft mechanical click that should have woken every bell in the yard and lit the gang's red lamps across three corridors. Instead, somewhere beneath the platform, a tiny component gave a sad little pop, and a thread of smoke curled from the alarm box.
Merren stared at it.
Then the eastern lumen row died.
It did not explode. It did not flicker dramatically. It simply went out, one section after another, folding the far side of the yard into layered shadow. Men cursed. One of the cage children started to cry and was hushed so quickly the sound barely had time to exist.
Merren picked up the speaking tube again. "Gate team, report."
Static.
"North post."
Static.
He switched to the sector line, the one that ran back through two stolen relays toward Rusk Venn's filtration chapel. "Venn. Answer."
Something breathed through the tube.
Not a man. Not machinery either. A soft shift of air near the receiver, close enough that Merren could hear the faint scrape of leather against metal. His skin tightened along the back of his neck.
Then a woman's voice said, very quietly, "No."
Merren dropped the tube.
The yard changed all at once, not because anything obvious happened, but because Merren finally understood the quiet had been assembled around him piece by piece. The missing west nest. The dead alarm. The failed vox. The darkened lumen row. The captives who had stopped looking afraid in the correct direction. The guards still thought they were working inside a yard with walls, guns, locks, chains, numbers, and a man at the ledger. Merren saw the negative space between those things and felt his stomach turn cold.
Someone was already inside.
He stepped out of the office and onto the upper platform, laspistol raised. "Lock down the cages," he shouted, pitching his voice over the machinery hum. "All hands to stations. West nest is compromised."
Men reacted messily. That was the problem with men chosen for cruelty instead of discipline. Hest's cousin Varn looked toward the western platform and lifted his shotgun without knowing where to point it. Two others ran for the cage line and fumbled with key-rings that were no longer on their belts. A guard near the drainage gate tried to light a flare, only to find the striker missing from the cap. Someone shouted Rusk Venn's name. Someone else shouted about ghosts. A chained captive laughed once before a woman hissed him silent.
Merren saw a shape move above the yard.
Not a full person. Not yet. A boot passed over a crossbeam near the dead lumen row, black against deeper black, and vanished behind a curtain of hanging cable. A guard below it turned at the wrong moment. A hand closed over his mouth from behind. A dark blade touched under his jaw, angled not to spray blood across the cage in front of him, and his body sank out of sight with controlled reluctance, as if the shadows had taught him obedience.
Merren fired.
The lasbolt struck the cable curtain and burned a glowing hole through rubber and old dust. The guard he had aimed near did not scream. The shadow did not fall. Men below saw the shot and began firing because men with guns preferred noise to uncertainty.
Shotgun blasts hammered the darkness. Autopistol rounds chewed the upper beams. A stubber tried to cough from the eastern nest and jammed on the second burst, its feed belt hanging in a clean severed line over the loader's hands. Smoke thickened under the roof, stirred by panicked motion and the sour breath of cheap propellant.
The woman moved only when the yard had wasted enough ammunition to hide her first real sound.
A smoke capsule rolled down from the upper platform and bounced once near the center winch. It hissed open in a low, spreading cloud that swallowed boots, knees, crates, and fear. Men shouted through it. The captives pressed back from the bars, not toward them. Merren noticed that and hated them for understanding before he did.
The southern wall blew inward.
Not the whole wall. A section no wider than a cargo hatch folded open with surgical violence, shaped by a flat breaching charge placed exactly where the old rivet line had weakened. The blast punched smoke across the yard and knocked three guards off their feet without touching the cage row behind them. Merren felt the pressure slap his chest through the platform rail. His ears rang. Dust fell from the roof in filthy sheets.
Through the smoke, a woman walked into view.
She wore a reinforced underhive jacket with black plating worked into the lines, practical boots, and a tired posture that did not match the speed with which the room kept dying around her. A long rifle rode her back, heavy and predatory. A large revolver rested in one hand, held low, not pointed at anything yet because the things it would be pointed at had apparently not earned the motion. Her hair was short, darkened by grime and damp, and the left side of her jacket did not quite match the right, as if the garment had been repaired by something that understood function better than fashion.
Merren saw her face for less than a second.
She looked bored.
No, not bored. That was wrong. Boredom was absence. Her attention was everywhere. It moved across men, cages, exits, guns, crates, shadows, leaking fuel, wounded captives, open locks, blind corners, and the broken alarm box with a speed that made Merren feel suddenly, humiliatingly included in a calculation he had not known was being performed.
Varn raised his shotgun at her.
The revolver came up.
One shot. Varn's hand opened around ruined fingers, and the shotgun dropped before his scream finished arriving. The woman's second shot took the knee of the man behind him. Her third broke the lamp hook above the northern gate, dropping a heavy chain and its hanging cage-lamp onto two guards trying to form a line.
The heavy stubber in the eastern nest cleared its jam.
The woman vanished sideways.
She did not dive. She did not scramble. She moved as if the geometry of the yard had offered a suggestion and her body had accepted before thought slowed it down. The stubber tore through smoke where she had been, ripping apart a stack of ration crates and sending dry meal-dust into the air like dirty snow. Merren glimpsed her boot strike the side of a support column, her body twist through a narrow gap between two hanging chains, and then the long rifle came off her back.
The sound it made was not a gunshot so much as a verdict.
The eastern nest disappeared behind a burst of meat, sandbag cloth, and shattered metal. The stubber's barrel spun once as it fell from the platform, struck the floor muzzle-first, and lay smoking beside the cage line. Captives flinched away from it. The woman did not look at the bodies, but the rifle's recoil moved through her harder than she wanted it to. Merren saw the correction: a half-breath of pain swallowed before it became weakness, a brief tightening in the shoulder and ribs before the weapon returned to obedience.
Then she had already slung the rifle and was moving again.
They had not found her.
She had finished being quiet.
Merren backed toward his office door. His fingers tightened around the laspistol until the grip dug pain into his palm. Below him, the yard became compartments. Smoke divided men into small groups, and the woman harvested those groups with a patience that made panic useless. She shot hands before triggers, knees before charges, throats only when men reached the cages, heads when someone tried to run for the fuel. She crossed from cover to cover using angles Merren's own guards had ignored for months because they had believed walls belonged to them.
A guard grabbed a child through the bars of Cage Two and dragged him forward as a shield.
The woman stopped moving.
So did the yard.
For one breath, Merren thought he had her. The guard thought it too; his face split around a grin as he pressed a knife under the child's jaw and shouted something about backing away. The words arrived mangled through Merren's ringing ears, but the shape was familiar. Bargain. Threat. Control.
The woman's revolver did not move.
Her knife did.
Merren did not see the throw clearly. He saw her wrist shift, saw the guard's grin vanish, saw the blade appear in the meat of his forearm at an angle that opened his grip without touching the child. The boy dropped. The woman shot the guard through the mouth before he could scream over him.
The child crawled backward into the cage.
The woman turned her head slightly, eyes cutting toward Four-Seven. "Keep them low," she said, her voice calm enough to be obscene.
Four-Seven nodded once.
Merren understood then that the captives had not been waiting because they were obedient.
They had been waiting because she had told them to.
He ran for the cage-control lever.
The lever was old, stupid, and dangerous, which was why he had kept it. In theory it released the overhead chain rack and locked every cage door from the outside. In practice it could crush half the yard if pulled while the wrong guide hooks were loaded, but fear made people respectful of bad engineering. Merren stumbled through his office, slammed his shoulder into the inner rail, and grabbed the lever with both hands.
The woman looked up.
Not surprised.
Annoyed.
Merren pulled.
Something under the platform snapped in the wrong direction.
The chain rack above him did not descend onto the cages. It came sideways. Someone had cut the retaining lock, reversed the tension, and left the whole suspended assembly waiting for his hand. Merren had time to see the first length of chain whip through the smoke like an iron serpent. Then the office platform screamed. The desk tore free of two bolts. The wall struck him, or he struck it, or the entire yard decided to become impact.
The world blinked.
Sound returned first.
Not all sound. Not honest sound. A high whine lived in Merren's left ear, and beneath it came the wet pulse of his own breathing. His mouth tasted like blood and rust. Something heavy pinned his legs. Something sharper pressed beneath his ribs when he tried to move. He opened his eyes and saw the underside of his ledger desk tilted above him, its plasteel edge wedged against a collapsed chain frame. Slates had spilled across the floor around his head, cracked screens still glowing with prisoner counts, ration weights, water tallies, fuel loss, debt marks, sale routes, names reduced to numbers.
Smoke dragged itself through the ruins of the office.
Beyond the broken platform, the yard had become a low, blurred shape of aftermath. Men groaned. Someone prayed. Someone else begged. Cage doors stood open in a row, each one swinging slightly in the disturbed air. Captives moved under direction, not stampede, guided by Four-Seven and two others who had found courage faster than Merren found breath. The woman stood near the breach with one hand pressed briefly against her side, not long enough to be weakness, but long enough for him to see the cost.
She lifted two fingers to the black bead at her ear.
"Numen," she said. "Yard secured."
The name meant nothing to Merren. It should have stayed nothing. But the way she said it made the air around the word feel occupied, as if the conversation had opened a door to someone not present and the room had made space without being asked.
A man's voice answered through the bead, faint with distance and filtered by machinery. "Captives?"
"More than projected," the woman said, turning as Four-Seven brought a limping man toward the breach. "Forty-eight breathing. Twelve wounded. Six children. Several with useful trades if they are telling the truth."
"Useful trades?" the man asked.
"Water worker, hab electrician, loader crew, medicae assistant," she said, watching one of the wounded nearly fall before catching him by the collar and setting him upright with brisk irritation. "One woman has been running ration discipline from inside the cages."
The man on the comm was quiet for half a second. "That's not just captives."
"No," the woman replied. "That is manpower with trauma."
A second voice entered the channel, dry and precise enough to cut glass. "Primary facility is not an intake shelter."
"I know," the man said. "Find somewhere that is."
"Searching," the second voice replied. Its tone made the word sound like a rebuke aimed at the entire underhive for existing in poor condition. "Candidate located. Abandoned water-purification annex, three levels west by maintenance descent and drainage spur. Structurally damaged. Defensible. Unsanitary. Salvageable."
The woman looked across the yard toward the stacked filters and fuel drums. "Can it hold them?"
"Temporarily," the second voice said. "Longer if supplied. Longer still if someone prevents the roof from finishing its current argument with gravity."
"Can we make it hold?" the man asked.
"With materials currently present in the yard, yes," the second voice replied. "With comfort, dignity, and competent plumbing, eventually. I emphasize eventually."
"Mark it," the man said. "Evelyn, can they move?"
The woman—Evelyn—watched the freed captives gather into frightened clusters near the breach. Her gaze moved over injured legs, shaking hands, children, old burns, infection swelling under dirty bandages, and the kind of exhaustion that made standing look like a punishment. "Some can. Not all. Not safely through a warzone."
"I know," the man said, and the heaviness under his voice made Merren suddenly furious because it sounded like concern and concern had no place in inventory. "Argent?"
"No," the dry voice said.
"I have not asked yet."
"You are about to ask for Grudge."
Evelyn's mouth curved very slightly.
Merren could not feel his legs.
"Evacuation escort," the man said.
"He is not cleared for redeployment," Argent replied.
"Not redeployment."
"That distinction is manipulative."
"Is it wrong?"
The pause stretched long enough for a wounded captive to sob once and be hushed by Four-Seven's hand on his shoulder.
"No," Argent said at last, sounding offended by accuracy. "It is not wrong."
"Release him," the man said. "Escort only. Captives first. If he starts eating the furniture, tell him I said later."
Evelyn looked toward the breach, then down at the scattered slates near Merren's head. For one impossible second, he thought she had seen him. Her eyes passed over the broken desk, the chain frame, the blood, the ledgers, the cage-master trapped beneath the arithmetic of his own yard. Then she looked away and began issuing quiet instructions to the freed captives.
Merren tried to laugh.
It came out as blood.
Release him, the man had said.
Him.
The word crawled around Merren's skull while the smoke thickened and pain pulled him downward. Evelyn's boots moved away. Four-Seven's voice rose, not loud, but steady, telling people to stay together, to keep the children between adults, to tear cloth for pressure wraps, to leave the dead and carry the living. Somewhere nearby, pale light folded around a stack of water filters and removed them from the world.
Merren blinked again.
The beast came through the breach after the shooting stopped.
At first Merren thought the wall had moved. The dark at the broken opening swelled inward, too large for a man, too low for a machine, dragging the smell of sterile fluid, old blood, wet armor, and living fury behind it. Black plates slid through smoke in overlapping ridges. Tendrils flexed against the floor. Claws found purchase in broken concrete with delicate care that made their size worse, not better. Six eyes burned through the haze at different heights, each one awake with the same offended intelligence.
The captives screamed.
Evelyn did not.
She stood beside the breach with the heavy rifle slung across her back and the revolver held low. One hand lifted, palm out, not toward the beast, but toward the people. "He is not here for you," she said, and her voice cut through the first wave of panic like a knife through cloth.
The beast huffed.
The sound rolled across the yard, hot and dismissive. He stepped over a fallen child without touching him, placed one massive forelimb between the captives and the open drainage route beyond the breach, then turned his head toward a wounded gangman crawling for a dropped shotgun. The man froze. The beast showed him every tooth in his mouth.
The man chose stillness.
Smart man.
Argent's voice clicked faintly from Evelyn's bead. "Grudge is to escort, not redeploy."
Grudge growled at the air.
Evelyn glanced toward him. "You heard him."
Grudge growled again, lower this time, with enough contempt to make the nearest captives flinch.
Evelyn's expression did not change. "Yes, I know. Very tragic. No one respects your professional ambitions."
The beast's eyes narrowed.
"Captives first," Evelyn said, pointing two fingers toward the gathered survivors. "Resources second. Revenge after not dying."
Grudge turned his head toward the yard's remaining stockpiles.
Evelyn's mouth twitched. "Do not pretend you did not understand the order."
He understood. Merren could see that, somehow. The beast moved through the yard like hatred under discipline. He nudged two wounded captives upright with the side of his head, then lowered his body with visible disgust while Four-Seven and another woman tied a man with a shattered leg across the armored ridges behind his shoulders. When a child started sobbing too hard to walk, Grudge leaned close, sniffed once, and huffed in the child's face. The child stopped crying out of pure confusion.
The beast seemed satisfied.
Then he began looting.
Not randomly. That made Merren's chest hurt worse than the broken ribs. The beast was not tearing apart the yard for rage or hunger. He was sorting. Fuel drums were dragged into a line with tendrils and tagged by a pale device along his harness. Water filters vanished in folded flashes of light. Ammo crates disappeared after a brief pause, as if judged and accepted. Medicae supplies went first when Evelyn pointed. Tools followed. Chain racks were ripped free, inspected, then rejected unless they had usable metal weight. Corpses were ignored except when equipment had to be peeled from them with a precision that looked obscene on something so large.
Evelyn moved beside him, more selective still. She marked what mattered, rejected what would slow them, and stripped the yard of value without sentiment. A crate of cheap blades stayed. A box of clean bandage rolls vanished. Fuel went. Fetish trophies stayed. A stack of route slates disappeared into her pack. Rusk Venn's local strongbox opened under her knife and yielded ledgers, coin, a compact vox-cipher, and three ivory tags she studied for long enough that her face became unpleasantly still.
Four-Seven led the captives toward the breach. The woman walked with a limp Merren had not noticed before. She kept one hand on a boy's shoulder and the other wrapped around a pipe she had taken from somewhere, as if freedom required something heavy enough to swing. When she reached Evelyn, she stopped.
"Where are you taking us?" Four-Seven asked, her voice rough from thirst and disuse.
"Somewhere that is not here," Evelyn replied, checking the revolver's cylinder without looking away from the line of captives.
"That is not an answer."
"No," Evelyn said. "It is the first answer. Better ones require the roof not falling on you while I explain."
Four-Seven looked at Grudge.
Grudge looked back.
The woman swallowed but did not step away. "And that?"
"Escort," Evelyn said.
"That is a monster."
"Yes," Evelyn replied, sliding the revolver back into place. "Try not to make him feel underappreciated."
Four-Seven stared at her.
Evelyn tilted her head. "He carried something important home today and has been medically forbidden from biting people. His mood is fragile."
Grudge made a low sound that suggested several objections to the summary.
Four-Seven looked at the captives behind her, at the open cages, at the emptied stockpiles, at the beast standing between them and the war outside. Her expression hardened around fear until it became function. "People who can walk, carry those who cannot," she called back to the others. "Children in the middle. No one runs unless I say run. If you fall, make noise."
Grudge huffed again.
Four-Seven pointed at him without quite looking directly into all six eyes. "And if he stops, you stop."
The beast considered her.
Then he turned toward the breach.
Merren watched the yard empty.
That was worse than watching it burn. Fire would have been honest loss. Fire would have left wreckage with a reason. This was erasure with judgment. The cages opened. The captives moved. The stockpiles vanished. The weapons were taken or ruined. The fuel disappeared. The filters disappeared. The ledgers disappeared from every crate and office except the cracked slates around Merren's head, their dying screens still glowing useless numbers into the smoke.
Grudge moved at the rear of the line after the first few metres, not herding the captives like stock, Merren realized with a sick, unwilling clarity, but placing himself between them and everything that might come after. His bulk filled the breach until the people had passed through. When one wounded man stumbled, Grudge caught the back of his coat between two tendrils and set him upright with all the tenderness of a crane correcting cargo. The man nearly fainted. The beast ignored that as irrelevant.
Evelyn did not leave with them.
She stood in the broken yard until the last captive passed through the breach, then handed Four-Seven a compact black device. "Follow the route lights. Do not touch anything that hums. If the beast stops, you stop. If he growls at a corridor, choose another corridor. If anyone asks who you belong to, the answer is no one."
Four-Seven closed her fingers around the device. "Who are you?"
Evelyn looked toward the deeper underhive route marked on one of Hook-and-Chain's slates. Smoke moved around her, catching in the black plating of her jacket and the dried blood on her gloves. "Busy."
Then she turned away from the evacuation line and walked back into the yard.
Merren shut his eyes.
He counted because counting was what he had left. One breath. Two. Three. Four dead guards in his visible line. Five cage doors open. Six children gone through the breach. Seven fuel drums missing from the tarp. Eight fingers he could still feel. Nine route tags lost. Ten thousand guild-scrip in stock erased in less than an hour. He counted until the numbers stopped making sense and became shapes moving behind pain.
The yard quieted.
Grudge's growl faded into the drainage dark. The captives' footsteps receded. The recall-light stopped folding things away. Somewhere far off, gunfire resumed, distant and ordinary, as if the underhive had not noticed one of its little kingdoms being removed from the map.
Merren opened his eyes.
Evelyn was gone.
Relief came so hard it made him dizzy. He tried to breathe around the pressure in his chest and failed halfway through. He would live if someone found him soon. He could bargain if Rusk Venn sent men to inspect the loss. He knew routes. Buyers. Caches. Names. He could explain that the yard had been hit by something impossible, that no one could have held it, that the woman had come from the smoke and taken everything, that the beast—
Boots stopped beside his head.
Merren's breath died.
Evelyn crouched near the broken desk with the slow patience of someone who had never been fooled by debris. Up close, she smelled of smoke, machine oil, blood, and the sharp sterile trace of something that did not belong in the underhive. Her face was tired. That made the slight curve of her mouth worse.
"You counted everything," Evelyn said softly. Her gloved fingers lifted one cracked slate from beside his cheek and turned it so he could see the dead rows of figures. "Water. Ammunition. Fuel. Chains. Bodies."
Merren tried to speak. Blood filled the attempt.
She leaned close enough that he could see the dark flecks of ash caught in her hair and the red line where a shot had grazed the side of her neck. Her voice lowered until it felt almost kind.
"You should have counted exits."
The revolver rose.
The ledger went dark.