Lena's POV
The boots hit the stairs at 4 a.m.
Lena heard them before she was fully awake, heavy, too many, moving with the kind of purpose that meant someone had already decided how this night was going to end. She sat up in the dark. Pressed her back against the cold wall. Listened.
Three sets of feet. Maybe four.
Her heart was going fast, but her head was faster. She looked across the tiny apartment. Her father was already at the door.
He was already at the door.
He was standing there in his wrinkled shirt, hands at his sides, not moving to block it or bolt it or do any of the things a father was supposed to do. He was just standing there. Waiting.
Lena's stomach dropped straight through the floor.
"Dad."
He didn't turn around.
The knock came anyway. Three hard hits, the kind that weren't asking.
"Renn Voss." The voice on the other side was flat and bored. "Open up."
Her father's hand went to the lock.
"Dad." Lena was on her feet now. "Don't."
He opened the door.
Three men stepped inside like they owned the place, which Lena understood in one terrible second; they basically did. Big. Uniformed in dark grey with a small red mark on the shoulder. A Collector's mark. She'd seen it on posters. On warnings. On the faces of women who came back from the lower districts with empty eyes and no explanation.
Her eyes went to the kitchen table.
Gambling chips. Scattered everywhere. A drink was knocked over and never cleaned up. Papers she hadn't looked at because she'd been too tired and too busy holding this family together with both hands and no help from the man who was supposed to be doing it.
Her father finally looked at her.
His face broke her heart and made her furious at the same time. He looked sorry. He looked like a man who had already done the thing and was only now feeling bad about it. That was the worst part, not the strangers in her home, not the chips on the table. The fact that he had already decided. Already signed. Already chosen the debt over his daughter, and the sorry look on his face was his way of saying he knew it.
"It's only temporary," he said. His voice cracked on the last word.
"Temporary," one of the men repeated, and the other two laughed.
Lena ran.
She got four steps exactly four before a hand caught her arm and swung her around. She fought. She bit down on a wrist hard enough to feel bone, she kicked, she scratched, and she was good at it, better than they expected from a girl her size, but there were three of them and one of her, and she hadn't slept, and she was scared, and eventually that math always wins.
The bag went over her head.
Dark. Rough fabric. Smelled like oil and cigarettes and something chemical underneath.
She heard her father say, very quietly: "Take care of her."
She heard the man say, "Sure."
She heard both of them, knowing the man was lying.
They put her in a van. Pushed her down onto a metal floor and told her to be still. She was still. Not because she was told to, but because she was thinking.
She counted the turns. Left, left, right, long straight, hard right, downhill. She counted seconds between turns. She felt the texture change under the tires: smooth road, then rough, then what felt like a ramp. Going down. Underground, maybe.
She listened to the men talk. Their voices gave her names not their own, but the name they worked for. Carver. They said it the way people said it in the Ashlands when they thought kids weren't listening. Low and certain, like a fact of nature. Carver's quota. Carver's new facility. Carver's happy with the numbers this month.
She was a number. She was part of a quota.
Lena breathed through the bag and did not cry and did not scream and did not waste a single second on the sick grief trying to claw up her throat. She could fall apart later. Right now, she needed information, and she was collecting it the only way she could: in the dark, by feel, with nothing but her own mind.
The van stopped.
Doors opened. Hands grabbed her arms and pulled her upright, and walked her ten steps, a turn, twelve more steps, a door that beeped when it opened, and then the bag came off.
Lena blinked.
The light was bright and white and everywhere. She was standing in a massive underground room ceiling so high it was almost a warehouse, walls smooth and reinforced, lights running in strips along every surface. It was clean, which was somehow worse than she expected. Organized. There were numbered doors along both walls. There were guards at every corner.
And there were women.
She counted without meaning to: ten along the near wall, more behind a partition, at least a dozen in the far section. Some sitting. Some sleeping. Some were standing with their arms wrapped around themselves, looking at the floor. None of them was looking at her. They'd stopped looking at new arrivals. That told her everything about how long some of them had been here.
Thirty. At least thirty women.
A number was written on Lena's wrist in thick black marker before she could react. Forty-four.
She stared at it. Forty-four. So there had been at least forty-three before her.
A woman in a grey uniform, older, small, with flat eyes that had long since stopped feeling anything, handed her a thin blanket and pointed to an empty spot along the wall. "Sleep if you can," she said. "Processing is in the morning."
"Processing for what?" Lena asked.
The woman looked at her the way people look at someone who has just said something too young and too innocent to survive this place.
She walked away without answering.
Lena stood in the middle of the room with a thin blanket and a number on her wrist and thirty women who had stopped hoping around her.
She looked at the ceiling. She looked at the doors. She looked at the guards' patterns, their blind spots, the way the one on the left shifted his weight every four minutes like his knee was bothering him.
She sat down. She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders.
She started counting again.
She didn't know it yet, but somewhere above her, a man in black was already watching Carver's facility on a screen. His jaw was tight. His eyes were cold.
He had his own reasons for being here.
And they had nothing to do with her.
Not yet.