The questions began the moment I was alert; the moment I was cognizant enough to know that our so-called “dungeon” was in fact a powerless walk-in freezer in a St. Louis hotel.
“What the hell did they do,” asked Mortigen, wrinkling his nose. “Drop you in a vat of dinosaur piss?”
“You kept saying ‘Hespa, Hespa’—in your delirium, I mean,” said Black Duncan. He offered me a cup of tepid water. “But who is it? Is she one of the progenitrices, a guard, their leader, what?”
I blinked as they swam into focus: remembering the pit and the fencing topped with razor wire; remembering Hespa in her elevated lifeguard’s chair, like a queen. “They—they put me in a pool,” I said, “you know, one of those rectangular ones, with the 12 foot deep end—only this one was empty. And then they, they—”
“They pu
