Pain had a flavor.
For most people, it tasted like iron. Blood in the mouth. A bitten lip. A punch to the nose.
For Anna, pain tasted like bleach.
It was a sharp, chemical sting that burned the lungs before it even touched the skin. It was the smell of something being stripped clean, of biological matter being reduced to base sludge. It was the smell of the White Vents.
She didn't know where she was, but she knew the texture of the ground. Basalt. Slick with sulfur condensation. Sharp enough to shred denim, brutal enough to grind skin into paste.
She was being dragged.
Her wrists were bound with wire—not rope. Rope had give. Wire bit. It dug into the lattice of healed scars on her radial artery, finding the grooves where she had tried to open herself up a dozen times before.
She couldn't scream.
She tried. The impulse was there, a frantic signal from a brain that still remembered what it was like to have a voice. 'Stop. Please. I'll do anything.'
The signal hit the back of her throat and died.
There was no tongue to shape the air. Just a cauterized stump, dusted with grey clotting powder that tasted like ash and disappointment.
They had taken her teeth, too. Not all at once. One by one, with a rock, while two of them held her down and the third—the one with the laughing eyes—did the work. He hadn't been angry. He hadn't been cruel. He had been efficient.
"Can't bite the merchandise if you don't have fangs, sweetheart," he'd said.
She felt her crotch burn with intense pain. It was swollen, red and bleeding.
Click. Crack. Spit.
Now, her mouth felt like a cavern. Too big. Too empty. Every time she breathed, the sulfurous air hit the raw nerves of her gums.
'Don't pass out,' she told herself. 'If you pass out, you miss the window.'
The window was small.
She knew the rhythm of the Trackers. They were arrogant. They thought the wire was enough. They thought the clotting powder and the beatings had broken her. They didn't know about the Override.
Anna blinked. The lids felt like sandpaper. The world was a blur of gray stone and white steam.
They were walking along a "Drag-Road"—a groove worn into the rock by centuries of bodies being hauled downward. To her left, the shelf dropped off into nothingness. A sheer cliff that plunged into the dark.
'The drop.'
Her heart didn't speed up. It slowed down. Not calm. Focus. Like staring at a phone screen when the hate comments started rolling in. Block. Delete. Scroll.
She looked at the distance. Three meters.
She looked at the Tracker holding her lead. Big. Lazy. He held the wire slack, ignoring the dog he was walking.
She looked at the drop.
'Option A: Jump. Result: Game Over. Respawn Time: ~45 mins. Spawn Point: Random.'
It was a gamble. But a gamble was better than the destination.
'Delete Account,' she thought. 'Create New Profile.'
---
Malibu, 2016.
The bass of the track was thumping in her chest. Some remix of a Imagine-Pandas song she pretended to like because everyone else liked it.
She was holding a glass of champagne in one hand and her phone in the other.
11:42 PM.
The notification banner was a dopamine drip. @josh_ua liked your photo. @sarah_bebe commented: "Body goals! s2" @brand_deal_official sent you a DM.
She smiled. It was the "Plandid" smile—mouth slightly open, eyes crinkled, looking away from the camera as if she'd been caught in a moment of pure, unadulterated joy.
Inside, she was screaming.
Her feet hurt in these heels. The corset top was digging into her ribs. She was hungry—she hadn't eaten a carb in three weeks to prep for this party. And she was bored. God, she was so bored.
"Here," a guy said. She didn't know his name. He was wearing a shirt that cost more than her first car and had a jawline that looked purchased. "Take this. It takes the edge off."
He pressed a blue pill into her palm.
Anna didn't ask what it was. Asking wasn't cool. Asking implied you weren't part of the lifestyle.
She popped it into her mouth and washed it down with the champagne.
Pop. Fizz. Swallow.
Ten minutes later, the boredom vanished.
It was replaced by a warm, heavy blanket. The music slowed down. The lights smeared into streaks of neon. She felt herself sinking into the white leather couch, heavy, so heavy.
She looked at her phone.
The screen was blurry. She tried to type a caption for her story. 'Best. Night. Ever.'
Her thumbs wouldn't move.
'Wait,' she thought. 'I accept the terms and conditions?'
She hallucinated.
The darkness wasn't scary. It was just... quiet.
Her last thought wasn't about her family. It wasn't about God.
It was about the filter. 'Did I use Golden-Glow or Deep-Blue? Golden-Glow makes me look too tan.'
Then the battery died.
---
Anna lunged.
She didn't pull away from the Tracker. She threw her weight toward the cliff.
The wire went taut. The Tracker, caught off guard, stumbled.
"Hey!" he shouted.
For a second, she was flying.
The ground disappeared. The gray stone vanished. For one glorious, suspended heartbeat, she was weightless. She was unowned. She was free.
'Reset,' she screamed silently.
Then the wire snapped tight.
It didn't break.
The Tracker had wrapped it around his wrist. He grunted, leaned back, and anchored himself against a boulder.
Anna slammed into the cliff face, five feet down.
CRACK.
Her shoulder dislocated. The joint screamed. Her vision smeared into static. She dangled there, spinning slowly over the abyss, suspended by the wire digging into her wrists.
She looked down. The darkness was right there. Waiting.
She looked up.
The Tracker peered over the edge. He wasn't angry. He looked... disappointed.
"Runner," he called out to his partner.
"Damn it," a second voice replied. "Reel her up. Careful with the skin. Master wants her pretty."
They hauled her up like a bucket of water from a well.
When she cleared the edge, they didn't beat her. They didn't scream.
The Tracker simply grabbed her face, his fingers digging into her cheeks, and forced her mouth open explicitly. He checked the clotting powder. He checked the gums. Then he ran a hand down her throat, checking her pulse, her temperature.
He squeezed her bicep. Checked the firmness of her thigh. Lifted her chin to inspect the jawline.
He looked at her like she was a yield calculation.
'Value is High. Condition is damaged, but repairable.'
"Tie the legs this time," he said softly. "And gag her. Protect the mouth, we need it usable."
Anna closed her eyes.
'Failed to Delete Account.'
---
The smell hit her first.
Chlorine. Bleach. Ammonia.
It cut through the sulfur like a blade. It smelled like a hospital, but wrong. It smelled like a hospital where the goal wasn't to heal, but to preserve.
They dragged her to the gates.
The Kennels wasn't a building. It was a fortress of cages.
Rows and rows of iron bars, stacked three high. Inside them were... things.
People. Once.
Some were missing limbs. Some were missing eyes. All of them were naked, huddled in the corners, staring out with dead, empty eyes.
They were clean. That was the most terrifying part.
Their skin was pale, scrubbed raw. Their hair was shaved or tied back. They didn't have the muck and grime of the Dregs. They looked sanitized.
'Product.'
The Trackers dragged Anna past the cages. The inmates didn't scream. They didn't beg for help. They just watched. Silent. Resigned.
They dragged her to the Wash Pit.
A large, circular basin carved into the stone. It was filled with a milky, steaming liquid.
'Hell Bleach.'
The Trackers dragged her forward. She stumbled, her feet slipping on the wet stone. She was already shivering, her skin exposed to the caustic air for too long.
The Handler walked a circle around her.
She poked Anna's hip. "Pelvic density acceptable. Genitalia show signs of repeated abuse, but they're intact." She squeezed Anna's breast. "Tissue firmness within margin. No dermal scarring, but it has some hematomas." She grabbed Anna's face, tilting it left and right. "Mandible compromised. We'll have to fit her with porcelain for the showroom."
She looked Anna in the eyes.
Anna tried to glare. Tried to summon the fury that had kept her running for seven years.
But all she felt was the cold.
"Wash her," the Handler said. "Then brand her. Use the collar mark. She's flight risk."
The Trackers grabbed her arms.
They threw her into the pit.
The bleach burned. It wasn't warm water. It was liquid fire. It invaded. It found the mileage in her skin. It scoured the dirt from her pores, but it felt like it was dissolving her soul.
She tried to scream.
Her mouth opened.
"'...ahhh... gahhhhh...'"
A dry, rasping croak.
The Trackers laughed.
They held her head under. Scrubbing. Cleaning. Erasing.
When they pulled her out, she was shivering violently. Her skin was pink and raw. She smelled like chemical purity.
They dragged her to a cell in Block C.
They threw her in.
Clang.
The door locked.
Anna crawled to the corner. She pulled her knees to her chest. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to cover her nakedness, trying to hold the pieces of herself together.
She looked at the wall.
There was scratch mark in the stone. A tally.
Someone had been here before. Someone had counted the days.
Anna reached out and traced the lines.
She traced the tally marks again.
They weren't days.
She looked at her wrist, where the wire had cut to the bone. She looked at the door, solid iron and forever closed.
For the first time in seven years, she was back.
She wasn't keeping score.
She was the scoreboard.