The smell of burning human hair clung to the air. Acrid smoke laced with something chemical, almost plasticky, like a doll left too close to a heater. It didn't smell like woodsmoke or coal. It smelled like something that should be scrubbed with industrial-grade ammonia.
Grigor Ash smelled it before he felt the heat.
He was strapped to a metal grate in the cargo hold of the Reaver transport. The grate was cold, ambient temperature hovering around forty degrees Fahrenheit. But the air above him shimmered, rippling with a heat haze that distorted the face of the man leaning over him.
Lieutenant Craw was smiling. Not the manic grin Grigor had expected. This smile was focused. Surgical. The expression of a man solving a problem he enjoyed.
Craw was shivering. A fine, constant tremor ran through his frame despite the heat pouring from his palms. His shoulders hunched inward. His teeth hadn't stopped chattering since he'd entered the hold.
"You've got busy eyes, Cleaner." Craw's voice was high-pitched, almost wheedling. His left hand hovered four inches above Grigor's sternum. The air between palm and flesh rippled. "Calculating. Meat shouldn't calculate. Bad for the flavor. Anxiety releases cortisol. Cortisol makes the meat sour."
Grigor didn't answer. He cataloged.
'Pulse 110 and rising.' 'Inventory zero.' 'Caloric reserves critical. Approximately 62 kilograms remaining body weight.' 'Radiated heat from palm approximately one-forty Fahrenheit. Uncomfortable. Not yet damaging.'
His restraints were standard: leather straps cinched around the wrists, iron shackles bolted to the grate at the ankles. The grate itself was welded to the deck. No leverage. No give. His ribs pressed against his skin like the bars of a cage. Ten days of starvation had made him see-through.
'Odds of survival statistically irrelevant.'
Craw's hand drifted lower, tracing the line of Grigor's ribs without touching them. The heat intensified. Skin flushed red. Capillaries dilating in panic response.
"Most people scream by now," Craw observed. Disappointed. "Fresh meat always screams. They beg. They promise things they don't have." He leaned closer. "You've been here, what, an hour? I've had them weeping in half that. Why aren't you begging?"
"Because you're not listening." Grigor's voice was a ruin. Cracked lips, dry throat, the rasp of a man who had been screaming at nothing for ten days. "And because you're not going to kill me. Not yet."
Craw's eyebrows rose. "Oh? Why is that?"
"Your scout needs protein. If you burn the meat, you destroy the nutritional value." Flat. Clinical. The voice of a man reciting a material safety data sheet. "But that's not why you're doing this." He met Craw's eyes. "You're warming yourself up. I can feel how cold you are."
Something flickered in Craw's expression. His shivering intensified for a moment before he clamped down on it.
"Smart." The word was a hiss. "Too smart. That's the problem with you, Cleaner. You think you're outside of this. You think because you understand the mechanics of what's happening, you're not a participant."
Craw's fingertips began to glow. Not with flame. This was concentrated thermal kinesthesia. His fingerprints turned the color of cooling iron. Dull cherry red.
"Let's see if we can turn that brain off."
He reached down and pressed his glowing thumb to Grigor's left collarbone.
Craw's shoulders relaxed as his palm met flesh. For a moment, his eyes fluttered. The perpetual shiver in his frame went still. He exhaled, long and slow, like a man stepping into a warm bath.
He was finally warm.
---
The sensation wasn't pain. Pain was a signal sent by nerves to the brain. This was a shout. An overload of every receptor in the vicinity. The intimate violence of a brand.
Grigor didn't scream. He gasped. Sharp intake of breath. Taste of scorched copper coating his teeth.
"Better." Craw dragged his thumb down, leaving a black, cauterized line across the pectoral muscle. "See? Steps. Process. You like process, don't you?"
Grigor's mind skittered away from the damage. It retreated into the safe, sterile room in his head where he kept the periodic table and the MSDS sheets for hazardous materials.
'Thermal damage to epidermis and dermis. Second-degree burn threshold exceeded. Subcutaneous fat rendering. Smell of lipids breaking down.'
'It's just chemistry. It's just energy transfer.'
He focused on the ceiling of the cargo hold. Rivets. Rust patterns. A stain that looked like oil but was probably old blood.
"Still thinking." Craw shook his head. "I can see it. You're hiding in there. Counting. Judging."
The lieutenant's face hovered directly above Grigor's. His eyes were dilated with the specific arousal of power.
"Let's take the lights out."
He raised his right hand. The index finger glowed white-hot. Not cherry red. White. The temperature of a soldering iron.
He moved it toward Grigor's left eye.
Grigor's body thrashed. The lizard brain jerked against the restraints. The leather bit into his wrists. The grate held.
"Open wide," Craw whispered.
He didn't stab. He pressed.
---
The sound was the worst part.
Not a scream. A pop. Wet. Intimate. Like stepping on a slug.
Then the hiss. Moisture that had no business leaving the body escaping as vapor.
Grigor felt the pressure release. Something that should have stayed inside was now outside, running down his cheek in a warm, gelatinous rivulet that smelled of sulfur and something else. Something private. The kind of smell you weren't supposed to know about yourself.
His body arched against the restraints. Not a choice. Just meat reacting to stimulus.
The world went white. Then red. Then black on the left side.
Grigor heard a scream from very far away. It sounded like a woman. No, like a child. No.
It was him.
Inside his skull, where the eye used to be, there was now a socket filling with heat. Craw's finger was still in there, searing the tissues that had held the optic nerve. The nerve endings screamed data: 'hot hot hot wrong wrong stop stop stop—'
The Cleaner filed the data. Categorized it. Moved on.
'Vitreous humor boiling point two-twelve Fahrenheit.' 'Intraocular pressure exceeding structural limits.' 'Retinal detachment complete.' 'Optic nerve cauterization in progress.'
The smell hit him fully now. Not meat. Eggs. Boiled, rotten eggs.
'Sulfur,' the Cleaner noted. 'The eye contains high concentrations of sulfur-rich proteins. The disulfide bonds in the collagen are breaking.'
"Enough."
The voice came from the shadows. Cool. Bored.
Craw froze. His finger was still inside. He withdrew it slowly. A sickening squelch of suction.
Grigor convulsed. His remaining eye watered uncontrollably, blurring the figure standing by the cargo bay doors.
Desmond Price leaned against the bulkhead, arms crossed. His amber-gold eyes were unreadable.
"That's enough, Craw. We need him functional enough to cut."
Craw wiped his finger on his pants. "He was boring me. Too quiet."
"He's not quiet now."
---
Grigor was hyperventilating. Short, shallow gasps that didn't seem connected to the body they came from.
His right leg spasmed. His jaw clenched so hard something cracked in the back of his mouth. A tooth, maybe. Or a piece of his sanity.
The cargo hold was too bright. Too loud. The voices sounded like they were coming through water.
'This isn't real,' something in him decided. 'I'm not here. I'm in the sterile room. I'm organizing files. I'm safe.'
The phantom weight in his palm returned. Cool silver. A memory of ownership. Of self. The statue. His statue. The last thing that had ever been truly his.
The mind was breaking. And somewhere in the fracture lines, something new was growing.
He looked up at Desmond with his one good eye. The pain was still there, a blinding supernova in the left side of his skull. But the fear was gone. Fear required a future to protect.
He had no future.
He was meat.
"Vitreous humor," Grigor croaked.
Desmond paused. "What?"
"The smell." Black and clear fluid leaked from the empty socket. "It smells like sulfur because of the disulfide bonds in the collagen."
Silence stretched in the cargo hold.
Twitch, sitting in the corner clutching his stump, looked up. Suture, arranging her knives on a crate, paused.
They all stared at the man who had just had his eye boiled out of his skull.
Desmond regarded Grigor for a long moment. Then, slowly, something shifted in his expression. Not a smile. Recognition.
"You survived the al-Rashid." The words were soft. Measured. "Ten days in the Hatcheries alone. And now this." He tilted his head. "Interesting. Most souls break by day three."
Grigor didn't answer. He was listening to something else.
In the silence of his own head. In the empty space where his eye used to be.
A voice stirred.
It wasn't the screaming chorus of the dead that usually haunted him. It wasn't the memory of his mother.
This was weight. This was pressure. This pushed against the back of his teeth like a second tongue trying to speak.
Clean it.
The words were not sound. They were compulsion.
The filth is not in the pain. The filth is in the hunger. Look at them. Look at the stain on their souls.
Grigor looked.
With his remaining right eye, he saw Desmond Price. But he didn't just see the man. Reality flickered. For a moment, overlaid on the skin like a double exposure, he saw a shadow. A greasy, dark residue clinging to Desmond's aura. It looked like pride. The soot of a thousand burned bridges.
The vision stuttered. Flesh. Shadow. Flesh. Shadow.
He looked at Craw. Craw was covered in it. Sticky, tar-like filth. The residue of cruelty enjoyed for its own sake. It dripped from him in slow, invisible ribbons.
Reality snapped back. Just men. Just meat.
'Dirty,' the Cleaner thought. 'They are so dirty.'
---
"Suture." Desmond's voice cut through the silence. "Craw's had his fun. Make him useful."
The medic stepped forward. She was small, unremarkable except for the collection of filleting knives rolled out on the crate beside her. She wore a butcher's apron over black-steel armor.
She picked up a boning knife.
"Hush now. Hush." Her voice was nursery-soft. She clicked her tongue against her teeth. Tsk, tsk, tsk. The sound a grandmother might make at a child who scraped a knee. "I know he was rough. Craw's always rough. But mummy's going to make it better, yes she is."
She tested the blade against her thumb. Blood beaded. She smiled.
"This won't take long, sweet thing."
She reached for his left hand. The one still strapped to the grate.
"We need the forearm first," she explained to Twitch. "High muscle density. Good protein ratio. You'll be feeling better in no time, dear."
Grigor watched her. He watched the knife.
He should have been screaming. He should have been fighting.
But the Voice was louder now. It was a roar in his blood.
Let them eat. Let them take the flesh. It is only casing. The kernel remains.
They think they are the consumers. They are the vessels.
Fill them.
"Do it," Grigor said.
Suture paused. The knife hovered over his wrist. "Excuse me?"
Grigor smiled. It was a broken, bloody expression. His one eye was wide, unblinking, fixated on some point beyond the ceiling.
"Do it." His voice was a whisper. "I need to see what's left."
Suture looked at Desmond. Desmond nodded.
The knife came down.
---
It was sharp. The edge kissed his wrist with almost surgical precision.
He felt the separation.
The blade bit through skin, then fat, then the stringy resistance of tendon. A wet snick as the edge found the gap between radius and ulna. Suture's arm flexed. A grinding crunch as she levered through cartilage. Grigor heard it more than felt it. The sound of his own disassembly.
'Left hand disconnecting.'
The blade sawed twice. Something popped. Ligaments releasing.
'Ulna and radius severed.'
Blood welled up thick and dark, pooling in the hollow of his wrist-stump before overflowing in warm, lazy streams.
'Blood pressure dropping.'
The hand came free with a final, meaty thuk. Suture held it up, inspecting the cut. Nodded. Artistic.
Craw stepped in with a heated palm. The smell of cooking meat filled the cargo hold again. This time, it wasn't sulfur. It was pork. Sweet, roast pork.
Grigor laughed. A bubbling, wet sound.
"You're eating the evidence," he gasped, as darkness crept into his peripheral vision.
"He's in shock," Suture said, tossing the severed hand to Craw.
"No." Desmond's voice was soft. Thoughtful. "He knows exactly what he is now."
Grigor's head lolled back. The cargo hold spun.
'Ash to ash,' he thought. 'Dust to dust.'
'And meat to the grinder.'
But as consciousness faded, the Voice whispered one last thing. A promise that felt like a hook buried in his sternum.
Soon, little Vicar. Soon you will not just clean the stain.
You will BE the bleach.