Lexi realizes she’s been clenching her fist for the past several minutes, digging her nails painfully into the meat of her palms. She forces her knuckles to unlock and gently rubs her trembling hands over the front of her wrap, smoothing them until both the sting and the tremors subside.

“We need help,” she says, finally. “Thankfully, our choices are very few. That will make it easier.”

THE MESSENGER

“ASHANA—”

“My name is Evie,” she corrects Brio, urgently. “You have to call me that while we’re here.”

“What? Why?”

“The Aegins arrested a drunken vagrant bar brawler named Evie. Laython crammed a blood coin down Evie the vagrant’s gullet.”

She watches him slowly process this, no doubt hindered by the other major revelations that have very recently blindsided him.

“We’ve all had our true selves stripped from us here,” he says. “That’s what they do. They don’t care who we really are. What difference does it make what you call yourself?”

“You are proof that isn’t entirely true,” she reminds him. “They may try to take your identity from you here, but they abducted you precisely because of who you are, Brio. Treating us as Savages and appointing callous brutes to whip us into submission is a tactic. That doesn’t mean people smarter and more important than those brutes aren’t paying attention. They care who is here and for what reason. I’m choosing caution for now.”

Brio opens his mouth to reply, but in the end, perhaps due to exhaustion more than anything else, he only nods silently. His eyes are wet and bloodshot. They flicker red in the light of the fire she’s fashioned from his pitiful burned log.

Brio never was much use sleeping rough.

She watches the ragged man she remembers as so crushingly handsome. Once, she lost everything she had because of him. Now she’s chosen to leave everything she knows behind for him. Evie is forced to consider the notion she’s either a hopeless glutton for punishment, or just an incredible devotee of symmetry.

“Do you understand now?” she asks Brio.

“I don’t understand any of this,” he says. “I mean… I understand where we are and what you’re saying, but… how are you here?”

“I’ll explain, but first I need to have a look at this leg.”

She kneels in front of him. The right leg of the filthy hemp pants he wears are already ripped and crusted with dried blood. She tears the rest of the stained material over his knee, exposing a deep gash that must stretch six inches down his calf. The wound is mostly black, and much of it is scabbed over. Evie knows the scabbing is only superficial, nothing but more dried blood. There’s no healing going on underneath.

“Is it numb?” she asks, trying to keep her voice even.