Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,101

a sedative—a powerful brandy of some kind, awful and putrid. It’d made her brain muddy and slow, but it didn’t kill the pain that would come later. Not really.

They’d cut off all her hair and shaved her pate with a razor. She remembered blinking blood out of her eyes. Then they’d dropped her down on the table, tied her down, and the one-eyed scriver had wiped her skull with alcohol—how it burned, how it burned—and then…

“Desperate times,” the one-eyed scriver had sighed, picking up a knife, “do call for desperate measures. But don’t we have the right to be unorthodox, my dear?” He’d smiled at her, a simpering expression. “Don’t we?”

And then he’d cut her head open.

Sancia had no words for the sensation. No words for the feeling of having your scalp slashed open and peeled back like the skin of an orange. No words for feeling him measure the bend of your skull, and listening to him tap-tap the plate into shape. No words for suddenly feeling those screws, those horrid screws biting into you, the gritty, grinding feeling as they bored into your skull, and then, and then…

Things had gone black.

She’d died. She’d been sure of it, at the time. There’d been just nothing. But then she’d felt someone…

Someone lying on top of her. Felt their warmth. Felt them bleeding.

It’d taken her a long time to realize she was feeling herself.

She’d been feeling her own body, lying on a dark stone floor. Only she’d been feeling herself from the perspective of the floor. She’d become the floor, just by touching it.

In the dark, alone, young Sancia had awoken and done her best to re-collect her sanity. Her skull had screamed and shrieked with pain—one whole side was swollen and sticky and bristly with stitches—but she’d realized then, alone, blind, that she was perhaps becoming something else, like a moth struggling to fight its way out of its pupa.

There had been chains around her wrists. A lock. And because of what she’d become, she’d felt she was the chains, she was the lock—and so she’d known how to pick it, of course, using a shred of wood she’d pulled off the wall.

They hadn’t intended this, surely. They hadn’t planned for her to become this thing. If they had, they would have tied her up better. And they wouldn’t have sent the one-eyed scriver alone to check on her in the night.

The creak of the door, the spear of light stabbing into the shadows.

“Are you awake, poppet?” he’d called sweetly. “I doubt it…”

He’d probably thought she’d be dead. He certainly hadn’t expected her to be hiding in the corner, lock and chain in hand.

She’d waited until he’d stepped inside. Then she’d sprung.

Oh…Oh, to hear the sound of the thick, heavy lock striking his skull. Oh, to hear him crumple to the ground, gagging, shocked. Then she was on him, wrapping the chain around his throat and pulling it taut, tighter, and tighter, and tighter.

Wild, agonized, and covered in blood, she’d slipped out and roved through the darkened house, feeling the boards beneath her, the walls on either side of her, feeling all these things, feeling everyone in the house all at once…

The house had become her weapon. And she’d used it against them.

She’d locked their bedroom doors, one by one. Locked everything as they slept, except one way out. And then she’d gone downstairs to where they’d kept the alcohol, and the kerosene, and all those reeking fluids, and found a match…

A struck match sounds like a kiss in the dark, sometimes. She remembered thinking that, watching the flame crack to life and then flutter down to the pools of alcohol running across the floor.

No one had made it out. And as she’d sat and watched, she’d realized—master or slave, all screams sounded alike.

* * *

Silence filled the library. Nobody moved.

“How did you come to Tevanne?” asked Gregor.

“Snuck aboard a ship,” Sancia said softly. “Easy to stow away when you have the floorboards and the walls to tell you who’s coming and going. When I got off, I stole the name ‘Grado’ from a winery sign I saw, since everyone just expected me to have a last name. Hardest thing was figuring out the limits of what I could do. Touching everything, being everything…it nearly killed me.”

“What’s the nature of your augmentation?” asked Orso.

She tried to describe it—knowing what objects were feeling, what they’d felt, the sheer avalanche of sensation that she constantly fought to keep at