'Somewhere beneath the auction district, three hours before dawn.'
The crying was the first thing you heard.
Not one voice. Many.
From different rooms, different distances, different registers of despair—men behind iron doors, their muffled sobs leaking through stone walls that hadn't been built to muffle anything because nobody who built them had cared.
The crying had been going on long enough that it had become ambient.
Background noise.
The furniture of sound in a place where sound was only ever a reaction to something worse.
Whip cracks punctuated it in irregular rhythm.
CRACK.
"'Twenty-three, Mistress—!'"
CRACK.
"'Twenty—twenty-four—'"
A man's voice, broken at the edges, trying to hold the count together through the pain. The sound of his effort—the specific way a person forces words out when their back is being flayed—carried a particular texture that had no equivalent in any other context.
