Dimarrah Folette is a woman accused of murder and awaiting the executioner when a stranger comes for her. Together they unravel secrets that could ignite a war.
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They took you from me before I could breathe your name. Before I could hold you, or take in the smell of the top of your head.
I survived the stone walls and darkness. The cuff on my leg. The five steps before it pulled tight.
I survived the cold, metal table in the room that smelled of citrus and antiseptic. The white lights that blinded me while they took out the part in me deemed not human.
I thought grief could not come again, but grief is an ocean, and it swallows me whole.
Losing you.
This.
This pain I cannot bear.
CHAPTER 1. STONE WON'T CATCH, DARKNESS WON'T BURN
Dimarrah was kept where no other prisoner was, down in the underbelly of Finton Willis, encased in steel and stone. She listened to footsteps and voices, ears pressed to the grit of the floors and walls. She listened as someone starved of light will; blade to the whetstone, the darkness honed her hearing. She knew who came by the way they walked.
The doctors had come in the beginning with staccato authority, heels resounding like gun shots down the corridor.
The guards came regularly. One was quiet, but the oily kind of quiet that seeps around corners and oozes from shadow. She barely heard his footfalls before he appeared, sliding food on a tray through the slot in her cell.
He thought she didn't know he watched her, but she felt his eyes. His feverish expectation, the simultaneous hope and dread that she might combust right there in the cell. That some spark of her Anomaly would return. She felt his fascination and equal part revulsion. His nerves always simmering.
Bald was the other guard, a live-ink tattoo covering his neck and face. A lizard tattoo. Garish city tech, but realistic enough to make Dimarrah cringe when its tail coiled around the guard's ear. A forked tongue flicked out, and the lizard stared with beady, soulless eyes.
Bald came with Nerves when he wanted an audience, which was most of the time. She heard his approach a mile away, slow and drawn-out, like someone who knows they can get what they want and who likes taking their time getting it. He came when he was bored or angry. Most times he was both. She still had the bruises on her cheek from the other day. Or week. Hard to tell time in the dark.
"Better just to kill 'em." Nerves muttered once. "Rabid dogs got to be put down." That's what she was to them. A ticking time bomb.
Bald had a grin that made her insides curdle, like he was hoping she might burst into flame just so he could unleash his rage on her. But she'd give them no show. Not now. The doctors had broken that part of her. Even now, months later, a cold sweat came over her when she remembered it.
