Chapter 381: Interrogation and Heat

They led the captured hunter to a sealed chamber beneath the Origin Palace, nowhere near their recovery halls and far from any possible path that one of her scripts might try to open. The thing was bound to the edge of a stone with a layered set of restraints of blood, shadow, and living dark from Nyx. Its paleness of armor was split along one side, the ruined leg set only to keep it from dying before it talks.

Lucifer stood before it, while Nyx remained to the side on the coil and readiness of his darkness. Aeloria watched from the rear with Lucian, both in unspoken, silent, readiness. "You will answer," Lucifer stated. "All of them. Every route you used. Every order you carried. Every single target on your list. You waste my time, and I will begin having Nyx rip out the things that make a delay seem worth the life."

Its voice was strained from where the faceplate was cracked, but the meaning was plain enough. "You already know the first targets. The ones set to be freed. You. Any other late density that can still be pulled back into the feed."

Nyx coiled further darkness around the thing’s remaining good wrist until the armor of it screeched in protest. "Details. Not summaries."

The thing’s head tilted to one side for a moment as though it was calculating what silence might earn it. Then the fight in it died out in an ugly short breath. "The orb no longer takes the full original set. The threshold math has been altered following the partial cut. If the core claims one more of the major late-seed sources-live density, and not the drained leftovers it can complete with fewer of the chained feeds. You are their source. The counter-hunt was not only to kill opposition. It was to prove you could be trapped and taken."

Aeloria’s expression was stony. "So not only is the being defending the harvest, it is trying to take the strongest of the remaining variable and process it as fuel."

"Yes," the thing said in return. "If that fails, then kill is acceptable. Dead density doesn’t shorten as much, but it will still lessen the schedule. Alive is better. Alive is cleaner."

Lucifer’s eyes never left the broken mask. "The entry routes."

The thing told them to the end, the two folds remaining of the few places where an approach had been hidden along the outer rim. One temporary under-path near the old river gates. All three would be set to collapse upon passage. That Lucian would have teams set out to seal the existing way when the next attempt was sent forth meant that by next use, the paths would all likely be gone. The thing spoke confirmation of their other suspicion, for the cells had the capture hooks keyed to particular high-output signatures, with Lucifer’s name at the top of the list.

When that last piece had nothing of worth to be drawn back from, Nyx turned to Lucifer. "Do you still need it?"

"No."

The dark closed and the only light the thing held left died soon enough.

Lucian was already moving back towards the door. "I will get the new route data burned into the lattice, and everything that has the hint of a fold must be burned. Aeloria, wait with the recovery halls until we are sure that there is no second mark team already on the move."

Aeloria gave Lucifer a long look before offering a quiet word. "You heard it. You are not only the spear now, but you are the prize. Be sure to have plans made considering that."

They left him in the stillness of the room for only a moment before the burden of the knowledge had taken hold.

Vina found him later in the long private corridor that ran outside of the sealed strategy rooms, where the palace noises fell and the twin moons lit the stone with thin red light. She had obviously waited for the end of the interrogation. No stance of report remained in her. There was no shadow guard, only the woman who had already claimed him once and had not given him leave to see her become someone else’s property without taking the truth to the matter to be put against him by her hands.

"I heard enough through the secondary channel," she said, standing close enough to him that should anything in her body move he would feel the shift through his own. "They want to capture you for the orb. All those that had survived would do so for the chance at life."

"Yes," Lucifer returned to her.

She took him in a step forward and close enough that he felt the heat of her already within the tension of his own. "Then you cannot stand here alone with that knowledge as if it is the war only."

He answered her in the same way, hands going to her back and pulling her towards the private room tucked to the side off the main corridor that the guards had taken great pleasure in hiding behind for centuries of the palace’s existence. Neither wasted time in stripping the clothes from them. There was no testing to see if they remained awake under the touch of his skin, only the fear in his face under what he had already been told and a great many nights of the street and the want to still live when he woke in the morning changed it into the same language.

Vina hooked a leg around his hip and brought him in. When he pushed it was deep and immediate, and the sound she made at his mouth was half relief and half claim. He drove into her with the same force as he had used to the hunters’ bodies, but nothing of them met human flesh. Her back hit the wall every time he drove in. Her nails scored his shoulders. She bit his throat hard enough now to leave a marking on it that still lingered when the next council drew near.

"You not get taken," she got out around the breath as she writhed beneath him in waves. "Do you hear me? You don’t come near the other thing. You come back to this. To me. To us."

"I hear you," Lucifer said, and meant the only words the space gave.

He hooked his hands back under her thighs to take her higher, and the angle changed her voice into shorter, rougher sounds. Vina gasped her release muffled against his shoulder once her body clamped down around him in hard pulses. He met her shortly after, burying himself deep into her with a rough sound that had no polish left in it.

They remained locked against the wall, breathing slow and easy and resting before Vina’s forehead met his. Her fingers remained curled at the back of his neck, not in a way to release him just now. "Ella and Luna are taking the palace side of reports, wards, and the political noises the district makes. I told them I was taking this part of the night."

Lucifer brushed her jaw while still inside her, still close enough to feel every small aftershock. "Then take it. The war will be back at the door before morning."

Vina kissed him again, slower this time but just as certain. "Let it come. You don’t face it as a prize the other can use on their own threshold. Only while I can still take my own hands on you and remind you which side of the wall you stand."

Outside the private room, the palace continued the work of sealing routes and counting debts.

In it, the knowledge from the hunter and Vina’s claim to him had the same burden in truth:

The orb took not only the chained, but wanted him.

And those that had chosen him so far would not leave that wanting unfilled.