CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - EYES

How long had it been? An hour, a day, a whole week?

His sense of time had unraveled and scattered in the pitch dark of the dungeon, losing all meaning. In this damp underground pit where day and night bled into each other, the only thing that kept Krazoc tethered to reality was the rhythmic, smothering sound of water droplets seeping from the rough stone walls as they fell into the little puddle on the floor.

Drip. Drip. Drip. It was the only clock time had.

The only thing that broke the bottomless dark they were trapped in was the heavy, wrought-iron door that opened just once a day with a grating screech. When the door cracked open, the feeble torchlight that leaked in wasn't even enough to light the face of the guard in the corridor.

A bucket of moldy, soured mushroom soup hurled in along with the light, and the dull thud of wooden bowls striking the stone floor, completed the ritual. Then the door would close again, the lock would settle into place with a heavy echo, and the world would sink once more into that absolute, blinding darkness.

Krazoc shifted slightly against the ice-cold stone wall at his back. Moving his body was an act whose limits were drawn in pain. The cell was not small—its ceiling rose so high it vanished into shadow—but Krazoc's world was only as large as the length of the thick chains binding his wrists to the massive steel anchors in the wall.

He could stand, sit on the stone floor, and lean his back against the wall; but the thick, rusted links of the chains gave him no leave to move about the room. With every movement the iron rings ground into the wounds on his wrists, and each time he sat his spine struck the cruel curve of the stone. His muscles woke each hour to a different ache, his body rebelling against this helpless captivity.

And yet it was not his body that truly rebelled; it was his mind. He was fighting to stay awake. If he slept, he thought, the child would be left defenseless in the dark.

Because they were not alone in this cell.

Krazoc had known it since the first hour the door had shut. At first he had taken them for mere shadows in the pitch dark, illusions of stone or damp. But his eyes, growing used to the darkness, had already begun to pick out the mute figures huddled in the cell's dingy, deep corners. Within the shadows were small, pale glimmers. Eyes. Dozens of eyes, studying Krazoc and the child from within the darkness, silently, without blinking.

Some part of him could have sworn he felt the emotions behind the eyes before him.

For days Krazoc had watched the movements of these figures. When the door opened and that bucket of soup was thrown in, these grey silhouettes would dart from the shadows, but never make a sound. With muffled rasps they would snatch their share and pull back quickly to their own corners. But the thing that truly caught Krazoc's attention was the invisible boundary these creatures drew. Even as they fell upon the soup, they passed in a wide arc, well outside the reach of Krazoc's chains. They were mortally afraid of his massive body, his shoulders, and the dark, predatory look in his eyes. To them, Krazoc was a new, unknown, and rending threat that had been cast into this cell.

After days of silence, Krazoc had reached a firm conclusion about his cellmates. These were not the eyes of a bloodthirsty predator preparing to strike. These were the eyes of wary, cowed, and gravely wounded predators sizing up a new and enormous stranger thrown into their territory. His own eyes.

Attivs.

"They look human, but there's not a spark of soul in them—not the smallest ember," Elara had said, the dogmatic disgust the Capital had taught her in her voice. "We could also call them biological batteries," Vance had said, as though stating an unalterable law of nature.

These words, all that remained of a handful of his memories, kept Krazoc from letting his guard down. He didn't care what the beings before him were, or what suffering they had endured. If even one of them took a single step toward the child, he wouldn't hesitate to crush those creatures, even at the cost of tearing his own arms from the chains. He drew a deep breath. Right now I have far bigger problems than the Attivs, he thought, in the White Void within him.

Krazoc's gaze settled on Alister, curled up on the stone floor just beyond that unreachable, invisible boundary, where his chains could not reach.

For days the boy had been, in the truest sense, wasting away. The child who had watched the world with delight even on that cramped wagon journey, who couldn't tear his eyes from the forest, was gone; in his place was a shrunken, pallid husk. For days he hadn't touched the bitter soup they were given. Cold sweat beaded down his forehead, and from his cracked lips spilled only broken, moan-like breaths.

Krazoc stretched his massive arms forward. The thick, black iron chains wrapped around his wrists pulled taut to their very limit, and the heavy iron anchors in the stone wall let out a pained groan. To lift Alister from that ice-cold, moldy floor and pull him against his own enormous, warm body—to break the child's fever—he needed only two steps. But the thick chains would not allow it.

He had pushed his own limits during the raid and had not closed his eyes for days. No matter how hard he strained the muscles that desperately needed rest, no matter how the veins in his neck bulged, that merciless iron pinned him to the wall. His hand hung in the air, just a hand's breadth short of where the child lay, clutching at nothing.

Helplessness settled onto Krazoc's shoulders, a thousand times heavier than those thick steel chains.

And then, the dense silence within the darkness broke.

Krazoc saw one of the shadows detach from its place, peeling slowly away from the pitch dark. A figure, its frail, ash-colored skin barely visible in the darkness, glided forward with movements almost as silent and graceful as smoke. With slow, wary steps, this Attiv crossed the invisible boundary they hadn't breached in all these days, moving straight toward Alister where he lay on the floor.

The exhaustion and helplessness in Krazoc's eyes evaporated in an instant, replaced by a pure, primal, and lethal threat. He drew his massive arms back and wrenched his thick chains toward the wall with all his strength.

Clang!

The dull, deafening sound of cold iron echoing off the cave walls made every Attiv inside flinch. Krazoc's chest, braced to roar, was like a predator's final warning. The other eyes in the room shuddered all at once in terror and shrank back into their corners, into the darkest crevices of the wall, and behind one another.

All but one.

The frail Attiv approaching Alister paused but did not step back. It slowly raised its scrawny neck and fixed its gaze directly on Krazoc's pitch-black eyes. Its eyes were large, pale, and carried a strangely familiar expression. It was afraid—its grey skin trembled—but within those eyes was something that all of Krazoc knew. It was as if it were trying to come to an understanding with Krazoc, without words, through that mute gaze alone.

Krazoc was not convinced. He yanked his chain once more. This time far harder, far more warningly. The sound of the iron erupted inside like a clap of thunder, and a fine layer of dust sifted down from the stone wall. The body language that said Back off swallowed every bit of oxygen in the room.

But this time, Krazoc's lethal warning did not produce the effect he expected.

A faint, rustling stir rose from the darkness. First one figure, then another, then several more. The other eleven Attivs—who for days had hidden in corners and crevices, afraid even of Krazoc's breath—took a step forward out of the safe shadows they sheltered in. Silently. Without threat. They had no weapons, no claws. It was only a single, shared step taken to stand behind the one of their kind who had stepped forward in that moment—"Eyes."

At least, that was what Krazoc thought.

Krazoc's eyes slid from one corner to another. His astonishment vied with his fury. These creatures were no longer cowering heaps of flesh standing one by one. They were standing together.

Eyes didn't so much as tremble. Its gaze went on defying Krazoc's vast, dark fury. Then, drawing its eyes away from Krazoc, it came with exceedingly delicate, gliding steps and sank down at the child's side.

Krazoc held his breath, gripping the chains taut. He was clenching his teeth so hard that the muscles of his jaw twitched. At the slightest wrong move—the instant those scrawny fingers came to an angle that would harm the child—he was ready to lunge forward and tear the creature apart, even at the cost of ripping his own arms loose like steel anchors from the ocean floor.

Alister lay on his back, breathing in broken gasps amid the delirium the fever brought. Eyes slowly bent its long, scrawny neck. It brought its ear close to Alister's feverish face. In that moment, Krazoc could have sworn this monster was trying to listen to the child's breathing, to understand how much he was suffering.

Eyes slowly raised its thin, cold fingers. Krazoc's muscles drew taut as a bowstring; he gripped the chains until his palms bled.

But those long, grey fingers did not go to the child's throat. With an exceedingly gentle, almost timid touch, the creature slowly smoothed back the hair plastered to Alister's sweat-damp forehead. The natural coolness of its fingertips touched the child's burning skin like a balm. Eyes slowly laid the back of its hand against Alister's fevered cheek. With that touch, his broken breathing found a deep and peaceful rhythm.

After the touch, Eyes lifted its head again. It looked at Krazoc one last time. There was no challenge in that gaze any longer. It withdrew with the same silent, graceful steps it had come with and melted back into its own dark corner among the other Attivs. As it retreated, the other eleven figures dissolved into the shadows with the same silence and vanished.

A moment later Alister stirred faintly. The flush had left his face. His eyes slowly opened, and he turned his tired, shrunken body toward where Krazoc was. The child's gaze searched the darkness for the giant's familiar, massive silhouette. Their eyes met. Once Alister was sure that Krazoc was still there, still waiting for him at the end of those chains, he closed his eyes again with that broken little smile and this time withdrew into the depths of a peaceful sleep.

Krazoc felt the hands gripping the chains slowly loosen. The cold iron fell back to the stone floor with a faint clink.

His eyes moved back and forth between the grey figure in the corner and Alister, who had stopped writhing in fever and now slept calmly. In the White Void of his mind, the Capital's arrogant voices, Elara's taught disgust, and Vance's merciless definitions shattered and echoed.

Soulless fuel... Biological batteries...

As Krazoc leaned his back against the cold wall once more, he did not take his eyes from that dark corner. If even a monster could harbor within itself the compassion to ease a child's pain, then it was all too clear who the real monsters in this world were.