By the time they yank the sack off my head, my bladder is screaming. Not my fault - we came straight from the pub, after all, and two pints in, I was hardly expecting to be kidnapped.

  Light floods my eyes. I blink, adjusting. Finn and Tom kneel beside me, barefoot, hands bound in front. The concrete floor is cold against my shins, stretching out toward exposed brick walls. A warehouse. Someone’s made an effort to clean it up - the mould scrubbed away, the usual detritus of abandoned places swept aside - but it still smells of damp and dust.

  At the back of the room, a long row of wooden benches creaks under the weight of around twenty people. They sit in eerie stillness, their faces lost to flickering candlelight. Candles, despite the rows of dead ceiling lights looming above us.

  This can’t be Bauman, I think, looking around. He didn’t strike me as the melodramatic type - more of a shove some reworked biomech into someone’s ear and call it a day sort of person. And besides, we’re still in Under. They carried us here, and it only took them twenty minutes.

  ‘Quiet now, brothers and sisters,’ a voice calls from behind us, even though nobody was talking. ‘The time for ceremony approaches.’ I twist. The speaker is a tall, short-haired woman. In the middle of her forehead is a tattoo of a rams head.

  Oh, I think, blinking at it.

  ‘Who are you?’ Tom’s voice is hoarse. A painful purpling bruise is swelling on his cheekbone.

  ‘We are all children of the Shepherd,’ the woman says, and Tom’s confused gaze slides to me and Finn.

  ‘They’re from the Flock,’ I translate, grimacing.

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ Tom says.

  ‘Religious thing. They worship—’

  I go slamming into the floor as the woman plants a kick square on my back. My chin smacks off the concrete so hard I taste blood. ‘Addie!’ Finn shouts through the ringing in my ears.

  I groan, dazed. I’m in a lot of pain. My ribs feel as though they’ve turned into heavy stone in my side, like they no longer fit.

  ‘Quiet,’ the woman snaps.

  ‘Why did you take us?’ Finn says, glaring up at her. ‘We’re nothing to do with you!’

  I struggle back up to my knees, moving like an old woman, and spit out a wad of blood-tinged saliva. The woman’s mouth curls with disgust. ‘Do not make a mess.’

  I stare at her. ‘You kicked me,’ I point out, but she’s lost interest.

  ’Is it time?’ she asks a man standing nearby with his arms folded.

  ‘Almost,’ the man says, smiling. ‘Ten minutes.’

  The woman exhales slowly. ’Then we must prepare the—‘

  ‘I need the toilet,’ I say.

  The silence that follows feels tense. Slowly, the woman turns back to me. The black rams head on her forehead stares down at me like a third eye.

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘You took us from the pub.’

  For a long moment, she just stares at me. If looks could kill, I would be dead; I brace myself for another kick.

  She turns again. ‘Melanie!’

  A shadow unpeels from the wall and comes over. The girl has fabric wrapped around the lower part of her face, but she’s younger than the full head of white hair would suggest. My age, maybe. Just someone who’s spent a lot of time in the Pits.

  ‘Yes, mother?’

  ‘Take her to the toilet.’

  Melanie dips her head, eyes sliding to me. They’re full of contempt. ‘Get up,’ she says, lip curling.

  ‘Addie.’ Finn’s voice. He doesn’t have to say it out loud, I can see it in his face: Don’t do anything reckless.

  ‘I just need to piss,’ I tell him.

  I feel his eyes on me as I stagger after Melanie, cutting across the room to a set of large metal doors. Not only his. All the freaks on the benches too. I can’t do anything with them staring.

  Melanie pushes open the doors and gestures at me to go first. I walk through into a wide, bare corridor. It’s dark - only lit by a dull strip of lighting in the ceiling. Doorless entrances to other rooms stretch ahead on either side, like big black tombstones.

  ‘Move,’ Melanie says from behind me. I don’t like not being able to see her - I turn, and catch the silver in her hand.

  She’s got a gun.

  I stare at it, disbelieving. How the hell has she got a gun? They’re tightly regulated by Top. Even the gangs struggle to get them down here.

  ‘Move,’ Melanie repeats in a low, thin voice. ‘Forward.’

  I swallow, and turn, walking forwards.

  The Flock might be better than Bauman, but not by much. It’s a relatively new group that have gained traction in the last five years or so. Always at street corners on market days, robed and preaching, ‘—prophets, sent to purge the world from sin! If we continue to enact violence on them, thus violence will be enacted down on upon us too—’. They’ve been known to beat people to death for heresy.

  ‘In there,’ Melanie says.

  We’ve reached the end of the corridor. The remaining doorway is on the left, and even from outside I can smell the stink. ‘You have two minutes,’ she tells me.

  ‘Isn’t there a light?’

  ‘No.’ She keeps her gun trained on me. ‘Hurry up.’

  I peer through. I can barely make out the gleam of porcelain: a small toilet and a sink, both of which smell like putrid water. There’s no door, either. I turn back to Melanie. ‘Can you untie my hands at least?’

  ’Two minutes.’

  I sigh and fumble open the ties of my trousers, careful not to reveal the pouch under my shirt.

  Lucky for me, Melanie turns her head away, although she keeps the gun pointing in my direction.

  There’s nothing for it. I use the toilet. In any other situation I would have felt kinda grotty to do it, but I really do need to piss. As I do, I slip my bound hands into my waist pouch, staring at Melanie’s scowling profile, her eyes trained on the wall. Holding my breath, my fingers creep first to the little lump of the wrapped-up biomech, and then to the smoke bomb. I pull them out, carefully. Can’t move too fast. Somehow I manage to funnel the biomech into my bra. The smoke bomb is trickier, a bulky metal sphere just smaller than my fist. Somehow I manage to get it into the pocket of my trouser, then awkwardly straighten up and attempt to pull the flush.

  Melanie’s head whips back to me as a loud, clanging gurgle comes from the pipes. A half-hearted gush of water follows.

  ‘All done,’ I say brightly.

  Melanie eyes briefly flitter down my body, distrusting. ‘Go,’ she decides.

  We walk back down the corridor. My heart’s pounding. It’ll be awkward to activate the smoke bomb - I need to shake it, hard, and then hurl it at the floor. But it’ll give us some cover to run. Considering the number of people in the main room, they might not risk shooting if they can’t see. I reckon the door on the other side of the room might lead to an exit, considering this corridor seems to lead inside the building—

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  ‘Walk faster,’ Melanie snaps, and gives me a solid push forward.

  I trip, not expecting it, and catch myself on a doorway. My lips clamp together to stop the groan of pain. I can’t even clutch at my ribs - all I can do is hunch over and try to breathe. Something’s wrong. With that last push, something’s been knocked out of place, something vital. Sweat prickles to life on my back, my forehead, as I try to breathe without crying.

  ‘Get away from there,’ Melanie says, but her voice sounds funny. Scared.

  I open my eyes to glare at her, but she’s not looking at me. She’s staring, wide-eyed, past my shoulder, into the dark room visible through the doorway. I turn to look too, just for a few seconds. Then Melanie grabs hold of my collar and yanks me forward.

  I go, unprotesting. Goosebumps prickle slowly to life and I begin to sweat.

  Melanie pushes open the doors to the main room, and hauls me through.

  I take it in with new eyes. The candles, the face coverings, the wooden benches no longer seem farcical and stupid. Now I notice the nervous, excited faces, the gazes that keep flicking between us and the double doors. The slight brown stain in the middle of the floor, when the rest of the room is freshly mopped.

  ‘Was that…’ I say, my voice hoarse and rusted.

  Melanie doesn’t reply. But her lips twitch. She wants to smile.

  Yes, I think, dazed, as she shoves me back towards Finn and Tom. Yes it was.

  Finn grabs me, glaring at Melanie. ‘What is it?’ he asks me. ‘What did she do?’

  I open my mouth and then close it again. The words keep getting stuck. Snatches of conversation. Finn’s shifting. My own jerked breathing. In the gaps between all of it, I can hear silence.

  ‘Addie,’ Finn says, hand on my arm.

  I lick my dry lips, and drag my gaze up to meet his. His eyes grow wide at whatever he finds on my face.

  ‘’They’ve got a Katerakt,’ I say.

  We’ve caught Katerakts before. There are so many of them amassed at intervals around the wall every night, staring gormlessly at the stone. It’s easy enough to trap one and bring it in. If some of them seem more energetic - if they try to climb - then occasionally Top will bring in the military. They usually pour hot tar down, or throw rocks. There’s no point wasting bullets if they’re just standing there. You can kill a Katerakt with a gun, but only if you hit the heart, which is harder than it sounds; that’s a small target, and when faced with a living, breathing human, the Katerakts suddenly turn quick and silent and deadly. And if you shoot them anywhere else, it’s like the don’t even feel it.

  I’ve never seen one up close before. Once a Katerakt is dead, the body decays quickly, and within half an hour you’re left with nothing but a pile of ash. When I was a kid, me and a few others at the Dorm went to the wall at night - it’s practically a ritual in Under, when you’re thirteen - and waited for one to slink up, attracted by our scent. We lasted ten minutes, throwing rocks at it. Then one of the other boys wet himself.

  The one the Flock has got is trapped inside two metal cages. I looked at it for barely three seconds, but I still caught the cold black gleam of its eyes, the spindly, stretched limbs.

  It wanted to kill me.

  ‘What?’ Tom says after a long pause.

  ‘They’ve got a Katerakt,’ I repeat. I can’t believe it myself, I’m still reeling. ’How the fuck did they get one?’

  ’That’s impossible,’ Tom tells me.

  ‘It’s over there.’ I jerk my head towards the door. ‘It’s in a fucking cage. I walked past it!’

  Tom shakes his head. His lip’s bleeding, a flash of bright red, but that might be because he’s been chewing at it. ‘You must have been mistaken. It’s dark, maybe you saw—’

  ‘You,’ Finn says suddenly, in a tone of voice I rarely hear from him.

  I turn around. There’s a new figure, standing next to Melanie. He’s halfway through pulling his face covering down. Inch by inch, his face comes together: crooked nose, downturned eyes. An unflattering jumble of rat-like features.

  My eyes go wide.

  ‘Hello Finn,’ Jan says quietly. ‘I’m sorry you had to be here too.’

  I gape at him.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Finn says, confused. ‘You- are you one of them? You’re in the Flock?’

  Jan dips his head, abashed. ‘I am,’ he says in a proud, tremulous voice. ‘I have been taken in as one of His sheep. I have found redemption through His merciful words.’

  Finn looks doubtful. ‘You really believe that?’

  ‘Jan?’ I finally pull myself together to say.

  Some of the blushing shyness slides away, replaced with an irritated frown. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Addie,’ he tells me shortly. ‘You shouldn’t have done any of it.’

  I can barely believe it. ‘This is because of you?’

  Jan’s mouth tightens. ‘You’re a thief, Addie. And you’re a bully. You’ve always been a bully. Walking all over people. You’re not a good person, you- you’re a sinner. If anyone should be sacrificed, it’s—‘

  ‘Sacrificed?’ Tom interrupts, taking a step forward.

  ‘I- I couldn’t stand by and do nothing,’ Jan continues like he didn’t hear me, words tripping into each other. ‘I saw it in the numbers, you remember, I knew He was trying to tell me something, and then I realised that I do have a role to play, that I had been chosen—’

  ‘To sacrifice people?’ I say, incredulous.

  Jan’s brows draw together. ‘It’s for the prophet.’

  ‘You’re out of your mind,’ I say, incredulous. ‘This - the Flock - it’s a cult. That thing in there isn’t a prophet, it’s a monster, it’s going to—‘

  I don’t expect the slap across the face - and certainly not from him. We both stare at each other, my cheek bursting into stinging heat. I’m not sure who’s more shocked.

  Then he takes a step back and it breaks. I lunge towards him with my bound fists, only to draw up short at the flash of silver in my peripheral. Melanie’s pointing her gun at me again. ‘Don’t let her get to you,’ she tells Jan, sneering. ‘She’s just a dirty sinner.’

  ‘You’re holding a gun!’ I snarl, and Finn puts a quelling hand on my shoulder, tugs me back.

  But now another thing is falling into place. ‘You’re Mennie,’ I realise, looking between them. ‘You’re the girlfriend with the bad lungs.’ That’s why her hair is fully white.

  ‘Melanie,’ Jan snaps. ‘Her name’s Melanie.’

  ‘You wanted a purifier, didn’t you? You do realise Finn can’t make you one if he’s dead!’

  ‘You were lying,’ Jan says decisively. ‘He can’t make one, and even if he could, he wouldn’t. Not for me.’

  Finn’s grip on my shoulder is slowly tightening. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I’m not really sure what you’re talking about, but I think we should stop shouting. Let’s just talk - talk rationally, okay?’

  The woman with the rams head shoots that down with a single sentence. Her voice echoes in the room, low and husky. ‘The prophet comes!’

  I’ve never heard a more chilling three words. The prophet comes, and with it, the metal doors swing open. I catch the tail end of three cloaked figures disappearing through, and the dread in my stomach ossifies into a cold, hard lump.

  ‘What prophet?’ Tom breaks in, voice high, but Melanie is tugging Jan away, whispering to him.

  My chest rises and falls, fast. I’m panicking. I whirl on Finn and Tom, get in close. ‘I have a smoke bomb in my pocket,’ I tell them, barely a breath. ‘I’m gonna use it when they bring the Katerakt out - they won’t shoot if they can’t see. Run towards that door—‘ I nod towards the opposite side of the room from the corridors with the bathroom—’and we’ll try to get out together.‘

  ‘Are you serious?’ Tom says, blood drawing from his face. ‘Are you seriously telling me they have one?’

  ‘Yes,’ I hiss at him, losing patience - there’s no time. ‘Do you think I’d make it up?’ I turn to Finn. ‘Do you have any weapons on you?’

  He bites his lip. ‘My penknife. But it’s strapped to my calf.’

  ‘Don’t try to get it out now. They’re all staring at us. We’ll use it when we get outside to cut the rope.’ I lean in further, using our bodies to block the view, and wriggle my bound hands into pocket. I’ll need to shake the sphere, hard enough for the compartment inside to break and the chemicals to mix, and then smash it on the floor. There’ll only be one chance—

  A deafening slam of noise explodes. Finn shoves me back with a punch to the shoulder and I look around, confused. For a moment, stupidly, I think the noise might have been the Katerakt, but the doors are still and empty. They haven’t come back out yet. I clutch my shoulder, wincing, and turn back to see Finn staring at me in horror.

  ‘A-Addie,’ he says, eyes wide.

  I follow his gaze. There is a growing dark stain on my shirt. Wet hotness creeps down my arm, my side. And then it hurts. It really, really hurts. A strange taste bubbles in my throat, like thick saliva, and I try to cough.

  Tom moves just in time. He lunges forward, loops his arms around Finn’s neck and chest, pulls their bodies close together as Finn struggles forward towards Jan, snarling. ‘Don’t do it,’ Tom’s saying, ‘don’t do it, he’s got a gun, Finn—‘

  Jan looks down at the gun in his hands like he’s not quite sure how it got there. A thin line of smoke twists from the barrel.

  ‘You shot me?’ I croak. My shoulder is suddenly alive, too many nerve cells. It’s burning. Like a whistling kettle, pouring and pouring. My bare feet are sticky with my own blood, and when I stagger back, trying to catch my balance, I almost slip.

  The woman with the ram’s head strides over to Jan and yanks the gun from his hands. ‘That was unnecessary,’ she says, furious. ‘And disrespectful to the prophet.’

  Jan blinks, coming back to himself, and stares down at his feet. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbles. ‘I just… I…’

  ‘We’re very sorry, mother,’ Melanie says and grabs Jan’s hand, pulling him away, back towards the benches.

  Through the roaring of blood in my ears, I realise I can hear something. The noisy clatter of wheels grows louder. We can all hear it; the attention in the room goes needle sharp. Every face turns towards the doors as they swing back open and, slowly, a huge hulking shape emerges.

  The metal of the cage gleams as three men push it into the room using a crate trolley. They take it into the middle, then step back, heads lowered, retreating to the walls.

  Silence follows.

  It’s not regular silence. I’m panting like a dog. Finn’s saying something, his palms digging into my shoulder with agonising force, but I can barely hear him. The silence of the Katerakt is too thick, something with weight, something that leaks into the room like olive oil, builds until we’re drowning in it.

  The Katerakt creeps forward, curling its claws around the bars, pressing its face as close as it can. One of the tall ones. Even hunched, it looms at two and a half metres, its spindly, blackened limbs trembling with the effort of movement. Blood glistens in a slick trail from the doors to the cage. It’s wounded. That must be how they got it in there. But even then, I can’t imagine how.

  I meet its gaze. It’s smiling.

  Not a human smile. Nothing in its black, predatory stare belongs to anything that thinks or reasons. Looking into it is like staring into a bottomless pit. Like looking into death.

  The pain in my shoulder dulls under the jagged surge of adrenaline that bursts through me, but I don’t move. Can’t move. A deep, marrow-freezing cold spreads through me. Blood loss or sheer fear, I don’t know which.

  They eat people, these things.

  I swallow, my throat dry. My voice comes out hoarse. ‘What have you done?’ I say to nobody in particular.