Chapter 5 (Anna’s POV)

  I stared blankly at the stone wall opposite my cage, letting my eyes drift over the layers of graffiti etched by hands now long rotted—half-scratched names, crude prayers, tally marks marching nowhere. The wall was a canvas of despair, each mark a testament to the countless souls who had passed through this place, leaving behind their final, desperate messages. Damp mortar bled greenish streaks where mold bloomed, soft threads of fungus waving each time a draft slid through the corridor. Even in fever-haze, I could read the history: hopes carved in fingernails, then overwritten by curses, then by nothing at all. One name had been gouged so deeply the stone had split, the letters now swollen with blackened rot that seeped a viscous, amber-colored slime. I imagined the fingers that had carved it—bloated, blistered, the nails torn loose by the effort.

  A fresh drip of pus slipped from my forearm and pattered onto the slatted floor. The smell hit first—sour meat left in midsummer sun—then the ache followed, dull and throbbing up the bone. My regeneration flickered uselessly beneath the raging infection; each half-healed scab peeled open again, leaking cloudy filth that crusted yellow along my wrists. Flies had found me days ago. They danced lazy arabesques around the wounds, landing to drink. I no longer bothered to shoo them. Their proboscises plunged into the weeping flesh like tiny, glistening needles, their bellies swelling with the milky discharge. One had lodged itself in the corner of my eye, its tiny legs scrabbling for purchase in the crust of mucus and blood that glued my lashes shut. I couldn’t blink. I let it feed.

  I shivered so hard the chains rattled. Fever fire chewed my spine, yet clammy sweat glued my hair to my cheeks. Every breath tasted of rust and mildew, as if the dungeon itself were decomposing and I had to inhale its rot to stay alive. The air was thick with the stench of decay, a putrid mix of old blood, excrement, and the ever-present mold that seemed to grow in every crevice. The smell was overpowering, a constant reminder of the squalor and filth that surrounded me. Somewhere behind me, the guttering torch hissed, its rancid tallow guttering with a wet, phlegmy sound. The smoke coiled like a serpent, slithering into my nostrils, coating my tongue with the taste of burnt hair and rancid fat.

  A rat skittered under the grate, nose twitching. It paused beneath the drip, lapped once, then scurried away with a squeak—disappointed, perhaps, that I hadn’t died yet. A few days ago, I would have hurled a stone at it; now I only watched, vaguely grateful for the gray blur of movement to break the monotony of stillness. The rat’s fur was matted with filth, its tail a gnarled, hairless thing that dragged behind it like a worm. It paused to gnaw at a scrap of cloth tangled in the grate—my own, I realized, a shred of my cargo pants, stiff with dried excrement and streaked with the iridescent sheen of maggots. The sight of it made my stomach churn, but the rat devoured it with relish, its jaws working like a piston.

  Somewhere deeper in the cell block, metal screamed against metal—the Anarchists opening another iron door. The echo bounced until it swelled into a howl that crawled down my spine. A moment later came the scent: smoke and hot grease mingled with something sweeter, sickeningly sweet, like candied pork gone rancid. Dinner was coming.

  They never entered my cage during feeding time. An arm reached through the bars, shoved a dented tin mug across the floor, half full of murky broth. Steam coiled off the surface, carrying a greasy film that caught the torchlight in rainbow slicks. Bits floated—ribbons of gristle, slivers of gray cartilage, a shred of cloth still clinging to a button. I knew exactly where it came from. The Anarchists wasted nothing. They took the bodies of their victims, boiled them down to their essence, and served them up to the living as a grim reminder of their power and cruelty.

  I forced myself to drink. The liquid coated my tongue with waxy fat before sliding down, lukewarm and gelatinous. I gagged anyway. The flavor was copper and ash and bile, a blend that clung to my teeth. I imagined tendons disintegrating in the pot, bones boiled white, marrow scooped like butter into the cauldron. The broth was a grotesque parody of sustenance, a perverse mockery of the nourishment that should have kept me alive. But it was all they gave us, and so I drank, swallowing the remnants of my fellow prisoners, their flesh and blood becoming a part of me.

  When the mug clanged empty against the bars, I slumped back, stomach twisting. Hunger still gnawed, but the broth would cling to my gut like lead for hours before the cramps set in. The Anarchists claimed it kept us “useful”—neither strong enough to rebel nor weak enough to die. We were to be kept alive, but only just, our bodies reduced to mere vessels for their amusement.

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  I lay on my side, cheek against the cold slats, and listened. Water dripped somewhere behind the wall at a maddening rhythm—three quick drops, pause, two slow ones, pause, a single drip that always splashed louder than the rest. From another cell came a low moan: a prisoner singing nonsense to soothe himself, words slurred by missing teeth. Farther on, chains clanked, a wet cough hacked, a body thudded as someone failed to stand. The dungeon breathed with us, exhaling decay.

  Torches hissed in their brackets, burning rancid tallow that sent sooty spirals up the stone. Each flame cast shadows that writhed like specters. One shape looked almost human—until it bent the wrong way and melted into a smear. I tracked that specter across the wall, half-convinced it was the part of my soul that had slipped free to watch me rot. The shadows danced macabrely, a twisted ballet of light and darkness, each movement a grim reminder of the horror that surrounded me.

  Heat flared behind my eyes; the fever spike arrived. Vision blurred, colors bled. The graffiti shifted—names crawling in and out of focus as though the wall itself pulsed. I blinked, but the letters kept moving, rearranging into phrases my father once scrawled in his notebooks. “Entropy devours the careless.” I laughed, a ragged hiss that scraped my throat raw. My captors weren’t careless; they were meticulous in ruin. They took their time, savoring each moment of our suffering, ensuring that every last drop of pain was wrung from our bodies before they finally let us die.

  The laugh drained what little strength I had left. My body shook violently, sores tearing open anew. A wave of fetid air rose from my own skin—sweat, pus, old blood, the moldering cloth of my dress fusing to flesh. It smelled like a charnel heap after rain, a putrid mix of decay and desolation. I pressed my forehead to the grate and inhaled the iron tang of the bars, trying to drown the stench with something simpler, cleaner, but metal only reminded me of chains.

  For a heartbeat, the fever dropped me through memory. I was in my childhood home—the one with pale curtains and a kitchen smelling of bread. Morning light spilled across polished wood. Father smiled at me over a mug of coffee, steam curling around his face in gentle halos. Outside, the world was green and alive. The vision was a stark contrast to the squalor of my current existence, a cruel reminder of the life that had been stolen from me.

  The vision shattered. A hoarse scream ripped from somewhere down the corridor, echoed by cruel laughter. A splash, then silence. Rats scurried past my head, frantic to reach the fresh spillage before it cooled. The sound of their scurrying was a grim reminder of the cycle of life and death that played out in this place, a never-ending dance of decay and desperation.

  I turned my face away from the raucous feeding sounds and stared again at the graffiti. One line I hadn’t noticed before had been gouged deep enough to expose pale mortar: WE WERE HERE. The words wavered as tears filled my eyes—first I’d shed in days. Salt burned the split skin of my cheeks. I tasted grief and rot and that vile broth all at once. The words were a stark reminder of the countless souls who had passed through this place, leaving behind their final, desperate messages. We had been here, and soon we would be gone, our lives reduced to nothing more than a few scratched words on a stone wall.

  “We were,” I whispered, voice trembling, “and soon we won’t be.”

  The torch sputtered, sending a gout of smoke across the ceiling. Sparks rained down in tiny orange comets, landing on my bare arm. I barely felt them. My body had become distant, like an abandoned house rife with mold—something to observe, not inhabit. The sparks were a grim reminder of the fire that still burned within me, a stubborn flame that refused to be extinguished, even as my body crumbled around it.

  A distant clank warned of the next patrol. I closed my eyes, bracing for the squeal of the food cart, the rattling keys, the stench of boiled flesh. Instead, I heard only my pulse thudding in my ears, loud and irregular. Each beat felt as though it might be the last. The sound was a grim reminder of the fragile thread that still held me to life, a tenuous connection that could be severed at any moment.

  Part of me hoped it was. Another part, small but stubborn, whispered of doors opening both ways and Joshua stepping through. I hated that whisper—it kept me breathing. It was a cruel reminder of the hope that still lingered within me, a desperate longing for salvation that refused to be extinguished, even in the face of such overwhelming despair.

  The cell hummed with damp and hunger and the quiet industry of decay. I counted the drips again: three, pause, two, pause, one. My thoughts drifted with them, heavy as congealed fat, until darkness folded in and the fever dream reclaimed me—graffiti swirling into murals of broken faces, rats chanting in voices I almost recognized, torches flaring into suns that seared the world clean.

  But when I woke again, the stone wall would still be there, and I would still be bleeding, and the broth would still wait, cooling into a skin that no one but the condemned would ever swallow. The cycle would continue, a never-ending dance of despair and decay, until finally, mercifully, it ended. And I would be gone, another name scratched onto the wall, another soul lost to the endless night.