The sound cut through the fog like a blade. High. Raw. The kind of scream that tears the throat on its way out.
A woman's voice.
Grigor moved to the edge of the shelf, looking down into the gloom of the level below.
Five men stood in a loose circle on a wide ledge. They wore stitched leather vests, not the ragged clothing of scavengers, but something crafted. Uniform. On their shoulders, a brand–a dog's head with a collar around its neck.
'A faction. An organization.'
In the center of the circle, on the ground—
A woman.
Young. Maybe nineteen. Blonde hair that might have been beautiful once, now caked with mud, blood, and dried fluids Grigor didn't want to identify. She was naked. Her body was a canvas of bruises, old scars, and fresh wounds.
She was on her back, legs kicking, arms pinned by two of the men. A third knelt on her chest, holding her jaw open.
On the stone beside her head was a small, dark lump of meat. Pink and red.
'Her tongue.'
Self-amputated. Bitten off at the root. The stump in her mouth was caked with grey powder—clotting agent. They had stopped the bleeding. Cauterized, probably. She'd tried to bleed out. They hadn't let her.
'Smart. Desperate. She knows the value of a clean death here.'
The smell hit him a second later. Not just blood—though there was plenty of that. Something sharper. Industrial. The chemical bite of branding solution, still smoking where it had seared a mark into her shoulder blade.
'A dog collar. Same as their vests. They're marking inventory.'
"You know the rules," one of the men said. He was grinning. No teeth on the left side of his mouth. "No biting tongue, bitch!"
He laughed. The others laughed with him.
"You see, love," he continued, leaning close to her face, "you aren't responsible with your teeth. You don't deserve them. We also have no use for them."
He reached into the mud and picked up a rock. Flat. Heavy. The size of a man's palm.
The woman's eyes—blue, bloodshot, wild—locked onto the rock. Her pupils contracted to pinpricks. She thrashed. She screamed—a gargling, tongueless howl that sounded like a dying animal.
CRACK.
The rock came down on her face.
CRACK.
Blood sprayed. A tooth skittered across the stone like a dropped die.
CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.
She fought. God, she fought. Her legs kicked, her body bucked, her ruined mouth sprayed red foam as she screamed without words. The two men holding her arms had to brace their weight just to keep her down.
CRACK.
Another tooth.
CRACK.
Another.
Grigor watched.
He cataloged the angle of impact. The force required to break enamel. The systematic nature of the process—they weren't hitting randomly. They were working in a pattern. Upper right molars first. Then lower. Then the canines.
'Professional. This isn't rage. It's procedure.'
The woman's screams became weaker. Gurgling. Drowning in her own blood.
"I even prefer without it," the man with the rock said, wiping a splatter from his cheek. "Love is in the balls!"
The others roared with laughter.
CRACK.
She went limp.
The man checked her pulse. "Still alive. Good. Boss wants her breathing."
They bound her wrists with braided sinew—human, by the texture. One of them gripped her breast with lust, while removing his pants.
A scrawny man kicked his crotch.
"Erebor, not now–"
"–you already had your fun with her," the man said, his voice dripping with something Grigor couldn't place. "Now it's time for the next one..."
The man's voice trailed off. The others laughed.
They lifted her like a sack of grain: two men on the legs, one on the arms. The fourth collected the scattered teeth from the ground, dropping them into a pouch at his belt. It clinked against others. Full. He'd done this before. Many times.
'Trophies? Currency? Both?'
The fifth man—the one with the rock—pulled a vial from his vest and poured something over the woman's ruined mouth. She convulsed, her body arching off the ground, but no sound came out. Just wet gasping.
'Disinfectant. They want her alive. They want her functional. This isn't punishment. It's processing.'
He stretched, cracked his neck, and looked up the cliff face.
Directly at Grigor's position.
Grigor didn't move. Didn't breathe. The fog was thick enough here. He was shadow against shadow.
The man squinted. Shrugged. Turned away.
"Move out. Long walk to the Kennels."
They dragged the woman into the mist. Her blonde hair left a smear on the stone. Her severed tongue remained behind, a small pink island in a sea of grey.
Grigor stayed still for a full minute after they disappeared.
Then he looked at the tongue. At the blood trail. At the place where she had been held down, used, and processed.
The scene was familiar. Not the specifics—he had never cleaned something so profane before—but the architecture of it. The practiced movements. The way the men worked in shifts, two holding while one operated. The casual laughter between strikes.
He had cleaned rooms where this had happened. Apartments. Basements. Once, a church annex in Queens. He had mopped the blood, scrubbed the walls, disposed of the mattress. He had done the math on the spatter patterns. He had never asked questions.
'Not my problem.'
He turned away.
'She's dead weight. She'll slow you down. You have no weapons. No allies. No knowledge of the terrain. Intervention probability of success: zero. Probability of joining her on that walk to the Kennels: absolute.'
The logic was sound. He was naked, weak, unarmed except for chemistry. The men had numbers, weapons, organization. Intervening would accomplish nothing except adding his body to their inventory.
'You cleaned scenes like this on Earth. You never intervened then.'
He began to walk back toward the upper ledge. The bioluminescent glow of the sacks cast his shadow in sick blue patterns against the stone.
'But you were paid to clean. No one is paying you now.'
He stopped.
'Is that the difference? The paycheck? Is that what made it acceptable? Money laundering the conscience?'
The smell lingered. Iron. Ammonia. That faint chemical bite of bleach. It clung to the inside of his nostrils like a memory that refused to leave. He had smelled it a thousand times before. In apartments where the walls needed repainting. In basements where the drains backed up with things that weren't just sewage.
'You knew what happened in those rooms. You always knew. You just didn't look.'
He looked at the brand burned into his memory. The dog's head. The collar.
'The Kennels.'
A business. An operation. An infrastructure of suffering that made human trafficking look like a cottage industry. No different, really, from the crime scenes he had sanitized for years. Except here, the product respawned. The meat grew back. The supply was infinite. The demand was eternal.
And now he was part of the economy. Not as a cleaner. Not as an observer.
As inventory.
He filed it away. The name. The brand. The long walk they mentioned. Data. All of it data.
He moved on.
---
He was thirty meters up the scree slope when he heard the sound behind him.
A whistle. Low. Trilling.
Every muscle in his body locked.
Slowly, he turned.
The quiet boy was standing at the base of the slope. Ten meters away. Watching him with those ancient, empty eyes.
He didn't speak. He didn't move.
He just... watched.
Behind him, in the fog, Grigor could hear footsteps. Heavy. Deliberate.
Soren's voice drifted up from the mist.
"I smell him, Milo. The one who got away."
A pause.
"Let's finish what we started."