The air in Darkwater is a cold mouth on my skin. Black trees, slick with damp, claw at a sky the colour of old dishwater. The sludge makes a sound like a wet cough with every step.

  They do not sink. They do not slip. Their feet find solid ground I cannot see. They are chess pieces gliding through a world of chaos.

  For a moment, the fog thins, pulling back like a rotten curtain. There, on the edge of sight, a black spike splits the grey horizon. It is a fortress of smooth, dead-black stone. It has no texture. It drinks the sound from the air. I can feel its silence even from here.

  Their heads do not turn. Their focus remains fixed on the path before us. The fortress does not exist for them.

  Ahead, a cluster of stone sheds and iron pipes emerge from the mist, scabbed with rust. A low drone vibrates up through the soles of my boots. My heart stutters, trying to match its rhythm, but the beat is wrong. Too steady. It is the sound of a machine waiting.

  A gate of weeping iron opens. I am pushed into a yard of mud. My mind is braced for the noise of human misery.

  There is none.

  The only sound is the squelch of my own boots and the low, constant drone of the pipes.

  The yard is a geometry of dread. Long, low buildings. Empty pens. A watchtower with a vacant eye.

  A group of Collectors cross the mud on wooden planks. Their movements are clean. They do not look at me. One carries a wrench. Another inspects a valve.

  I expected a hell full of people. Instead, I find an empty wasteland.

  I am a piece of grit in a machine. And I am the only one.

  The technicians freeze. Their wrenches hang limp in their hands. They turn as one, their silver masks reflecting a single point of new darkness. A man steps from a stone doorway.

  He is not like the others. His armour is polished obsidian, alive with grooved lines that bleed a soft, sick light. His mask is a sculpture of pain, forged from a dark metal and inlaid with silver wire. The wires form images. A needle piercing an eye. A hand being flayed to the bone. A spine bent into an impossible circle.

  But the cloak is worse. It is made of skin. A heavy, patchwork thing. A quilt of stretched human faces, their expressions preserved and frozen. It breathes with a shallow, collective life as he walks across the mud.

  The hairs on my arms lie flat, as if afraid to be noticed. His attention sweeps over my escorts. Fear has them by the throat. I can see it in the rigid line of their backs, the way they hold their breath.

  He stops at the one who led me here. He doesn't speak. He doesn't need to.

  He raises a hand.

  The other Collectors seize their comrade, forcing him to his knees. The mud swallows his shins. He is a pawn being swept from the board.

  His hand enters the Collector's chest. With a sound like roots being ripped from damp earth, he rips out a clot of writhing shadow. He crushes it in his fist, and the life leaves the Collector's body in a shuddering sigh.

  The corpse falls into the mud, its uniform ripped open.

  I see it. The brand. The same brand seared into my own flesh. A cold sweat slicks my skin.

  These aren't monsters. They're like me. Whatever happened to them could happen to me. Could still happen to me.

  One of my escorts grabs my arm. He drags me away, his pace unchanging, each step a perfect, empty copy of the last.

  Our path takes us through a long, low shed. Inside, the air is musty, thick with the smell of old wool and damp leather. Piles of clothes reach the ceiling, the discarded remnants of a hundred lives. Roughspun tunics from farming villages. Finer, wool coats of town merchants. A shoe, the leather cracked and worn thin at the toe.

  On a wooden table, a Collector is methodically sorting through a new pile, picking out anything of value. I spot a wool cloak, the same deep blue as one worn by Grace from the tavern. A silver buckle. A thick leather belt. They toss the rest onto the heap. He doesn't look up.

  My escort doesn't slow. He pulls me along, shoving me inside another low building at the end of the path.

  The door's final, heavy thud seals me in. I am in a long room of shadows and dust. Fifty cots, maybe more, are arranged in lines so straight they hurt to look at. Each has a thin, stained mattress and a threadbare blanket.

  As my vision adjusts, I notice a small, tarnished plaque above my cot, stamped with a number: 47. My eyes take in the room. Every cot has a plaque with a number. And beneath every number, two marks are stamped, one below the other.

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  First, a vertical line: |

  Beneath it, a horizontal line: —

  Every plaque is the same. The number, then the two stark lines beneath it.

  I look back at my own plaque.

  47.

  And beneath it, a stark vertical line: |

  Just the first mark. Halfway.

  In a room full of finished sentences, mine is the only one waiting for its final, damning period.

  I see a folded set of clothes on my cot. It's a uniform. Dark grey, utilitarian, made of a coarse, durable fabric. The fabric is stiff, unworn. It smells of lye.

  I peel off my old life, layer by layer. As I tug off my trousers, a small, folded piece of paper slips from a pocket and lands face-down in the dust. I pick it up. It's a child's drawing, done in clumsy, bright charcoal. A big, round man holding the hand of a small girl with wild, spiralling hair. Derrick and Belladonna. Beneath it, in shaky letters, it says 'My Da'.

  My throat tightens. This small piece of paper holds more warmth and life than this entire compound. It cannot exist here. I search the room, hunting for a hiding place. I find a crack in the mortar of the stone wall, my fingers careful not to crumple the drawing as I push it inside.

  I sit on the edge of the cot, and the cheap mattress sags on the empty side as if someone else is sitting there. A cold draught touches the back of my neck. I hunch my shoulders.

  The bolt scrapes open, and a Collector enters. He carries a wooden bowl, steam rising from a grey, formless gruel. He moves with the same efficiency as the others, his path a straight line toward my cot. He is five paces away when his body hitches.

  A dry, rattling cough erupts from behind his mask, a sound like gravel being shaken in a tin can. The cough becomes a spasm, his whole frame shuddering. The bowl slips from his grasp, the gruel splattering across the dusty floor. His hands fly to his mask, fingers fumbling at the clasps.

  It falls.

  The face beneath is a ruin. Skin like cracked earth. A nose sunk into two black holes. Eyes like oil slicks, pulsing. He opens his mouth to gasp, and I see not a tongue, but a black, quivering membrane, and teeth like a row of tiny daggers. Bone pushes through the skin of his cheek, white and sharp.

  He grabs the mask. He forces it back on. The metal grinds on bone.

  He stands. He is still again.

  He turns. He leaves.

  I am left staring at the spreading grey stain on the floor. I sit. I breathe.

  My mind tries to unsee the ruin. It cannot. I'm left wondering if the long day, the fear, the isolation, has made me see things that aren't there.

  The sound of the bolt is a violation. Not one, but a dozen of them file in. They line the central aisle of the barracks, their silver faces turned toward me. Silent. Waiting.

  One steps forward. It carries a silver mask. It holds it out.

  My hands, slick with a sweat, close around it. The metal is a shock of cold.

  I lift it to my face. A click.

  As it settles over my face, the world I know dies. The air loses its stench, but it also loses its texture, its memory of rain and soil. The colours of the room, the rust on the cots, the dark stains on the floor, all bleed into a uniform, soulless grey. The sound of my own terror, the frantic beat of my heart, becomes a distant, muffled pulse, as if it belongs to someone else. I am no longer in the room. I am watching it from somewhere far away.

  The Collector lingers for a moment, its masked face inches from mine. It leans so close I can feel a faint vibration as it speaks. "Do not take it off."

  With that, it leaves.

  I drift to the doorway and look out at the compound. The world through the mask is a flat, grey picture. And in this picture, a pattern emerges.

  My eyes trace the lines of movement. One hauls a crate. Another turns a valve. A third stacks bricks. Each movement is clean, repeated, without a wasted motion.

  No one speaks. No one rests.

  They are all moving, working, living here. But they are all masked.

  Where are the others? The ones taken from Greyhollow, from Blackthorn, from all the other villages over forty years?

  The answer is right in front of me, in every silent, working figure.

  They are not gone.

  They are here. Working.

  The Collectors are the villagers.

  My knees buckle. I fall against the doorframe, a strangled sob caught in my throat. This is a cemetery where the dead are forced to dig their own graves, and then the graves of their families. And they have just handed me a shovel.

  The phantom grip of the shovel is so real in my hands that I don't feel the living grip of a hand clamping onto my arm.

  He leans in, our silver masks nearly touching.

  "New," he says. The word is flat.

  My voice is a dry rasp. "Tell me. How long have you been here?"

  "My selection was… forty-eight seasons ago." His head tilts, a bird-like, unnatural movement. "I remember the terror. It fades. A mercy."

  "Mercy?" I choke out the word. "Look what they did to you."

  "They made me useful. The body I had before was weak. It felt pain. It felt love. Useless things."

  My heart, Derrick's heart, aches at the word. "You don't remember your family? Your home?"

  He turns his blank mask toward the grey sky, as if searching for something. "Sometimes," he says, the sound fragile, as if it might break apart before reaching me, "I see a face. Her eyes… they were blue. Not just blue. Blue like the heart of a glacier. So bright they hurt to look at. But that memory means nothing now. It is irrelevant."

  I stare at him, at this hollowed-out man, and the truth settles on me. They don't just take them. They send them back. They turn sons into the monsters that drag their own fathers from their beds. They turn husbands into the silent figures who watch their wives weep in the town square. This is a system designed to make us the instrument of our own bloodline's destruction.

  "What is the point?" I ask. "Why this? Why are we made into this?"

  The silver mask seems to consider the question. "We serve a greater purpose. The details are unnecessary for you. You will understand in time."

  He turns to leave, but then he hesitates. His whole body goes rigid, and a tremor runs through him. He leans in close one last time. "Don't fight it. There's no one left to fight for. They're all in here with us." He taps his silver mask.

  Then he walks away. My eyes catch on the back of his collar. Stamped into the stiff, dark fabric is a small, faded number: 11.

  In the silence he leaves behind, a slow, steady ticking begins, a sound from deep within the walls. My eyes search for its source, but find nothing. It is a small, sharp violence, the sound of a life ending, one second at a time.

  Each masked figure is a story that has been erased, a final chapter that was ripped out. And tomorrow, they will write my ending.

  I lie back on the cot and stare at the ceiling. My breathing becomes the loudest sound in the barracks. Death tomorrow would be a mercy. But they don't offer mercy here. They offer a second, worse life as a hollowed-out thing.

  Alistair's last promise. Derrick's stubborn heart. They'll scoop it all out. Leave nothing. Just a shell. A useful thing that doesn't remember her name.

  Gods, not her name. Let me keep her name.

  I close my eyes. I wait for the morning.