“Welcome to the pit,” Ok’di said.

I looked around, noticing the shock in Baila’s eyes. At least this is new to her, too, I thought. The room was a perfect circle carved into the earth, with four identical doorways spaced evenly around the room. The only thing that gave any sense of direction was the stairway that we had come down.

Before I could fully contain my awe, Ok’di looked around, studied the markings on the walls and the doors, then started walking purposefully toward one of the doors. Baila followed him. The giant was only feet from the wooden door when Baila called to me. I ran to catch up to them as he pulled the door open.

Even with everything I had seen in the past months, I was not ready for what was behind the door. I expected a warehouse, a hidden training facility like Stravus had in Boh’gren. What I saw instead was terrifying.

The room was blinding white, filled with medical equipment. A tall man with a surgical gown was bent over a table, blood covering his hands and his front. I gasped as he plunged his bare fingers deep into the small frame before him. The boy that was laid across the operating table jerked and moaned.

“Hey! What the hell is he doing to that kid?” I asked. The surgeon looked up, surprised to see the audience he had amassed. The boy’s blood dripped from the man’s fingertips. My fists clenched and I stepped forward, but Ok’di put an arm out in front of me and shook his head.

“He’s helping the boy. Look.”

I looked. The child had wounds all over him, except where the man was working. I let my fists loosen and the man went back to work, poking and prodding the boy’s bloody frame, forcing the injuries to close and repair themselves.

After a few moments, the man stepped away. He looked pale, tired. “Apologies. I would have stopped to say hello, but the boy had Torak venom that was putting up a good fight to reach his heart.”

He wiped his bloody hand off on his stomach, then held it out to me. I stared at his still-bloody hand and grimaced. He shrugged. “Sylas. Everyone calls me Surgeon. Nice to meet you.” He wiped his hands against his jacket again, only smearing the gore that covered him almost completely.

“Hi. I’m Divan.” I looked him over, looked at the room again, then finally at the boy on the table. “Is he… Will he be okay?”

“Oh, yes. Torak venom is deadly, but slow. I was able to get it out of him before it became too serious.” He looked at the boy and pulled his surgical mask down off of his mouth. “I will have to regain my strength before I can take care of some of his other injuries, but he will be back on his feet and in the fields by tomorrow morning.”

I looked at him, amazed. “How is that possible?”

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

He let out a sad laugh. “Possible? Divan, anything is possible when you have no other choice.”

The surgeon took us to another room, and got us up to speed about the state of the outlands. “The king had already been paying for the Empire’s protection for a few spins, raising quotas on all of the farms by almost double. Those that couldn’t meet the quotas were not permitted to go home.” He washed his hands in a basin in the corner of the room, then poured the dirty water down the drain, to be purified and run back to his faucet. “Damaron had even permitted the Terrans to send down skyfallen troops to watch the fields, to ensure that they received their payment. The Terrans were the ones that released the Toraks on our planet.”

The razor-fanged creatures had been heard of in the cities, but I had never seen one, nor the destruction that they caused. “That boy in there…” I gestured to the doorway, behind which a child with no more than a dozen spins was lying unmoving. “What happened to him?”

“The Toraks. They are relentless creatures. Trained to walk the edge of the fields and to hunt and kill anything that crosses its path. One of the soldiers in the fields pushed our friend into the torak’s path. The creature was on him before his mother could pull him off the path.”

Ok’di spat on the ground. “Terrans find joy in watching our children die, creating new ways to kill us. I will feel no joy when they see their children fall under my hammer.” I shuddered and tried to wash the image from my memories. The others stood stone-faced, each confined to their own mental prison, reflecting on the inevitability of the violence that was to come.

“Well, I really should be getting this one out of surgery and into our triage wing. I’m sure we will need the space again soon.” Sylas walked away from us, breaking the spell that the moment had us under.

We followed him out of the back room and back into the makeshift operating room where he messed with a few levers on the bed, laying the boy out flat and then rolling him toward the wall. He moved his fingers and the metal parted and created an opening large enough for even Ok’di to walk through.

The room we entered was much larger, and it replaced the quiet calm of the surgery room with chaotic urgency. There were a half dozen men running between rows and rows of beds, their feet slapping against the hard ground. The sound bounced off of the walls and rang off the hollow metal cots that lined the massive room.

Each of the runners looked drained of energy, their bodies sunken in and frail. None of them stopped to acknowledge us. They just continued up and down the rows, stopping occasionally to check on their patients. I noticed that, when one of the men stopped, they would put a thumb to the forehead of the patient they checked on. Each time after they left, the patient looked as if they were experiencing extreme pleasure.

“What are they doing?” I asked quietly to Baila. She just shrugged, and we both looked at our companions. Ok’di did not change his expression, but the surgeon got smiled and gave a knowing wink.

“Transference,” he said quietly. “That is the way that we help. The way that we heal. We give our own life force to those that need it.” He gestured at the nearest medic, who had just pushed her thumb into the forehead of a wiry looking man that had windburned cheeks and speckled eyes. She groaned lightly, sounding pained as the man’s breathing evened out and a few of the sand specks that had burned into his eyes faded away.

“We can not fight the enemy because of the oaths that we took. We can still give ourselves to something greater, though. That is what we have chosen to do.” The surgeon looked across the large, crowded clinic and smiled. “I would rather give my last ounce of myself up helping our people than to live a long life in service of Terrans.”

I stared at the room, and a sudden wave of emotion washed over me. So much hurt. So much death. I didn’t want to kill anyone else. “Can you teach me how?”