Up close, this wasn’t—this person didn’t look like a Watcher. They didn’t look like an Automa at all. Ayla frowned, something flaring up in the back of her mind, a prickle of horror she did not yet understand. She looked down at the person on the cot. The human. Their face was gaunt, sunken cheeks and eye sockets. They were dressed in plain white clothing, a shirt and pants—all of the sleeping people were, Ayla realized—but the parts she could see, the hands and feet, the wrists, the forearms—were just as skeletal.

“What . . . ?”

There was a contraption at the foot of each bed. A stone vessel with a thin metal pipe no wider than a finger sticking out of it. Ayla followed it with her eyes, from the mouth of the vessel up the edge of the cot, and then she saw the sleeping person’s wrists were tied to the cot, and their ankles, so their limbs were akimbo, and the pipe ran up the edge of the cot to the person’s wrist.

“Crier,” Ayla said. “Crier. What is this?”

Crier was leaning over another cot, eyes huge, one hand pressed to her mouth. She shook her head once, hard.

“Crier,” Ayla said.

“This one’s alive,” said Crier. “I think most of them are. I can hear their heartbeats. Not all of them.”

“Crier, what is this?”

“They’re being drained.” She sounded oddly calm, as if she’d bypassed horror and gone straight to numbness. Her eyes flicked from the cots to the stone vessels to Ayla’s face. “The Watchers are draining their blood. They’re—collecting it.”

Ayla staggered away from the cot. She bent over for a moment, trying not to be sick. Taking deep breaths didn’t help. The air smelled so strongly of blood, thick and oily on her tongue, in her throat, in her lungs. “But they’re alive,” she said. “Can we . . . we have to—get them out of here.”

“We’ll have to wake them up. They might not be able to move, but we have to try. We can’t drag ten unconscious bodies out of here.”

“Twelve,” said Ayla, counting the cots.

“No,” said Crier. “Ten.”

Oh gods. Without another word, they got to work. Ayla leaned over the first cot, this person who was not sleeping, and tried to wake them as gently as she could. Pressing at their shoulder, murmuring, “Hey, hey, wake up, please wake up.” She was horribly aware they could be caught at any moment. If a Watcher walked in here they’d be done for. Please wake up. Please wake up.

Finally, finally, the person’s eyelids fluttered. They made a small pained noise.

“I know,” Ayla murmured. “I know. I’m so sorry. I want to help you. Can you open your eyes?”

Their eyebrows furrowed. They drew in a rattling breath. Across the room, Crier was speaking in a low voice to one of the others. Ayla tried to keep calm. How long had they been in here? How much time had they lost?