Indigo met my gaze and said, simply, “I was the general in charge of capturing Kystrom.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY FOUR:

Perversion of Potential

The pounding in my ears rose to a roar. Indigo and Tamara left the room together, then parted outside the door. Tamara left her flashlight lying at my feet, but took her pack away with her. Indigo dialed down his light once he was outside, to just the palest wisp of blue. Five minutes ago I might have followed after them, called their names, chased them down and tried to bring them back. Now I sat on the floor of a closet in the Nameless, Tamara’s flashlight illuminating one empty corner, and drowned in the white noise.

I felt an urge to pray, but I had no words to say. I rubbed my thumb over the scars travelling down from pinky to forearm on my right hand. The last time I’d felt this numbed and alone, I’d been in Benny’s ship flying away from Kystrom for the very last time. If I’d had a knife, or even Benny’s little scalpel, I would’ve added two more scars to the collection, an offering to the God of Blood, if I even lived long enough to scarify.

There was still the wound on my leg. It had stopped bleeding somehow, but when I’d looked at it earlier, the wound had been deep enough to scar. I could get my nails in, open it up. Not traditional, but what was tradition about scarring yourself for a Republican soldier and the Minister who had killed your family? It would be a long, deep scar—

My fingertip brushed the edges of the wound. It hurt, a bright sharp warning pain, my body telling me in no uncertain words to STOP MESSING WITH THAT, IDIOT. But I touched it again, tracing my finger along the length of the wound despite the pain, because I could not quite believe what I was feeling.

The gash had been sizable. I could still feel blood drying on my pants from when it had been bleeding. And then I’d walked on that leg, run on that leg, and that alone should’ve kept the cut open. But I wasn’t bleeding anymore. In fact, the wound had somehow closed up. Not healed—it felt too raw, too sharp to be healed—but somehow, it had closed up.

I grabbed for Tamara’s flashlight and missed it the first two times. The beam of light wavered when I picked it up, shaking in my shaking hand. I trained that unsteady light on my leg and found no gaping wound, no scab, but a red line where the wound was. Like it had been stitched up, but there were no stitches on the outside.

No stitches on the outside, but I had nanomachines inside me, with tiny little legs that could function almost like sutures.

Nausea rose in my throat. A horrible perversion of something designed to protect and repair, Indigo had said.

Something designed to repair.