The first thing she knew was the gag. It was a dry, stiff thing, a leather strap that dug into the corners of her mouth and tasted of old tannin. A sound tried to form in her throat but the leather choked it dead. There was only the damp heat of her own breath, thrown back into her face.

  She was slung over his shoulder like a fresh kill. The man, Loric, walked with a untroubled rhythm that rocked her body, a sickening sway that churned the fever in her gut. Her wrists were on fire, the rope biting down to the bone. Her hands, numb and useless behind her, clenched at nothing.

  The world was a smear of cold, hard things. Polished stone and sharp-edged crystal swam past her eyes. The air was filled with an expensive perfume that felt alien in her lungs. Banners, blood-red and gold, slid by overhead.

  She tried to fix her gaze on something, anything, but the corridors melted into one another, a long, seamless nightmare of wealth. The only constants were the man’s unhurried stride and the gag in her mouth.

  Servants slipped past like wraiths, their heads bowed, their eyes on the floor. They were part of the stone, part of the silence.

  His voice was a low rumble against her ear, too close, too calm. “Awake?” he murmured. He shifted her on his shoulder, a reminder of the cage her body had become. “Save it. You’ll need what’s left.”.

  She fought to lift her head, to see where he was taking her, but her body was a leaden weight, a traitor. She slumped forward, a choked gasp escaping against the leather. The fever was a drum now, beating a frantic rhythm from the swelling in her arm.

  He stopped before a set of doors, black wood bound in metal that seemed to drink the light. He laid a hand on them, and they swung open, spilling a pale, dead light into the hall.

  To her surprise, she hadn’t been brought to a dungeon. Rather it was to a living room of breathtaking scale, a display of a fortune so vast it had become its own form of art. Light from the towering windows spilled across floors of cream-colored marble, illuminating furniture that was both exquisitely beautiful and arranged with an eye for grand, effortless comfort. Near the fireplace, two figures were posed in high-backed chairs, radiating the placid, assured elegance of those for whom the world held no surprises.

  They looked up, their twin expressions of placid boredom disturbed for the first time that evening, as Loric appeared in the doorway. His mother, a woman of flawless, ageless beauty, was the first to speak.

  “We were beginning to wonder what diversions you’d found for yourself,” she said, her voice a cool, melodious instrument. “To ask to remain on the Satellite…” She let the name of that dreary place hang in the air like a foul odor. Her eyes, sharp and quick, flicked to the unlovely burden on his shoulder. “But I see now. You’ve brought back a little souvenir for your troubles.” A smile, thin and brittle as spun glass, touched her lips.

  In their world, after all, the Satellrites were a sad, untidy fact of life, and if a young man of a certain station chose to pluck one from the squalor for his own amusement, it was a matter of little consequence. It was the mingling that was so terribly vulgar, the risk of bringing the dirt from the gutter into the drawing room.

  With a patrician’s careless grace, Loric moved to the center of the room and let the girl slide from his shoulder. She met the polished marble floor with a thud, a crumpled heap of fever and soiled silk. A muffled sound of protest escaped the gag as she stirred against the cold stone.

  “She’s rather a pretty thing, don’t you think?” Loric remarked, dusting his hands with an air of finality, as if he had just concluded some tiresome piece of business.

  His father leaned forward slightly. “There is a certain… quality,” he conceded.

  The admission earned him a swift, venomous glance from his wife.

  From the floor, Magnolia made a desperate, squirming motion, a frantic, undignified struggle against the ropes that bound her.

  Loric crouched beside her, a faint, almost tender smile on his lips. “Don’t worry,” he murmured, his voice a low, chilling whisper. “We’ll have you feeling much better soon.”

  At the sound of his voice, she went utterly still, her eyes, wide and glassy with fever, fixed on him in a moment of pure, distilled terror.

  Then, as if the whole affair had become a bore, Loric scooped her from the floor and settled her back on his shoulder. He turned to his parents, his face once more the picture of handsome, dutiful youth. “I really must be on my way,” he said brightly. “It wouldn’t do to keep my guest waiting.”

  He strode from the room without a backward glance, his footsteps echoing on the marble until the great doors closed behind him, restoring the room to its sepulchral silence.

  His mother sat rigid, her gaze fixed on the doors. “Do you see?” she said at last, her voice tight with a fury that trembled just beneath the surface of her composure. “It’s this… this lechery. It’s becoming a habit. A vulgar, common habit.”

  Her husband sighed, a long, slow exhalation of breath. “He’s young, my dear. A little wild. He’ll grow tired of his games.”

  “No,” she snapped, her voice cracking like a whip. “I will not have him dragging his sordid little conquests through this house as if…” She stopped, her throat tight, unable to voice the true shape of her fear.

  Her husband said nothing, only stared into the fire, its flames casting flickering gold across his face as they danced on, indifferent to the world around them.

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  Loric’s own room was a world away from the grand, cold theatre of the rest of the house. Here, the air was hushed and close, scented with cedar and the faint, clean smell of old leather.

  Loric laid her down upon the vast, white expanse of his bed with a strange, almost reverent care. He stepped back, his shadow falling long and dark across the silk sheets, and simply looked at her, a connoisseur before a new and startling acquisition.

  “Incredible,” he murmured, the word a soft exhalation in the quiet room. His eyes, accustomed to the predictable, pedigreed beauty of his own world, traced the feverish flush on her cheeks, the damp, silver strands of her hair that clung to her skin like threads of moonlight. “How does a place like the Satellite produce something like you?”

  He leaned closer then, and she flinched, a small, animal movement of pure instinct. His hand, gentle and yet implacable, tilted her face toward the light. “Your eyes,” he breathed, and in his voice was a note of genuine, unfeigned astonishment, a sound more dangerous than any threat. “They’re as pale as frost on a windowpane. Almost white. Did you know what a rare and lovely sight that is?”

  The initial wonder in his expression twisted, curdling into something covetous and dark. His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “So lovely. I want to dig them out with my own hands,” he murmured, his thumb pressing just below her eye, as if measuring the space. “I want to feel them in my palm.” He leaned closer still, his breath ghosting over her lips. “And then, I think I’d like to place one on my tongue, just to see if I can taste the color of a winter sky.”

  Her lips trembled, but she offered no reply. He seemed to savor it, the corner of his mouth tipping into a slow, private smile.

  “I expected… I don’t know. The usual dullness. The usual grime. Something to be pitied and forgotten.” His fingers grazed the line of her jaw. “But you…” He let the word hang in the air. “You are something else entirely.”

  He straightened then, a slow, reluctant retreat from the spell she cast. His gaze remained on her, on the pale, luminous eyes that stared past him, refusing him entry. He smiled again, a small, satisfied expression that spoke of a man who had just discovered a secret, a treasure that the rest of the sad, tired world would never be privileged enough to understand.

  The dark in that room had weight. It pressed on the high windows and seeped through the cracks around the door. Magnolia lay on the bed, a tied-up piece of meat on a fancy platter, and felt the dark watching her. The ropes were the worst part. Or maybe the gag was the worst part. Or maybe the worst part was the man sleeping beside her. It was hard to decide.

  He’d smiled at her before he’d finally drifted off, a wide, boyish grin that didn’t belong on his face. “We’ll have so much fun tomorrow, especially with the rest of my family heading out for vacation.” he’d whispered, and the word fun had crawled down her spine like a fat, cold spider.

  Fun.

  She tried to sleep. Sleep was a joke. How could you sleep when every nerve in your body was screaming? The bindings cut off any hope of comfort, the knots at her wrists burning dully with every heartbeat. If she breathed too deeply, the gag pressed tighter against her tongue. She tried to think about something else, anything else, but her mind kept coming back to one thing: morning.

  Morning was coming.

  The clock on the wall kept ticking. Tick-tock. Morning's coming. Tick-tock. He's gonna wake up. The wind rattled the window, and somewhere out there was a world she wasn't part of anymore. That world was gone. There was only this room, these ropes, and the monster sleeping beside her.

  Don’t think about his hands, she told herself, but it was no good. She thought about his hands, long and pale and strong. She thought about the look in his eyes when he’d said the word fun.

  She could feel his heartbeat, a slow, steady thump-thump against her side. It was the sound of a drum, she thought. A drum calling something up from the dark. Calling for the morning to hurry up and get here.

  And all she could do was lie there and listen to it, bracing for the sunrise.

  At some hour, when worry and fever had ground her down to something thin and ragged, Magnolia finally drifted into a fitful sleep.

  The world she woke to was bright and impossible: a garden drowning in black wisteria, the blossoms hanging in heavy curtains from branches she couldn't see, swaying in a wind she couldn't feel. They were the color of bruises, of dried blood. The air shimmered with a strange perfume, and in the midst of the cascading darkness sat a man on a throne carved from blackened bone.

  Wisteria vines had crept over the throne like possessive fingers, winding through eye sockets and rib cages, threading between vertebrae. Purple-black blossoms spilled down the armrests, pooled at the base, as if the garden itself was trying to claim him. Or worship him.

  He was beautiful in a way that was almost cruel: sharp-eyed, sharp-jawed, his brown eyes glowing with something wicked and amused. His hair was long and black, falling in loose waves over one shoulder. He lounged back lazily, half-naked, a scarlet cape slung carelessly across his shoulders. The throne suited him. He looked like someone who had never been denied a thing in his life.

  He grinned at her, a slow, bemused thing. “Yo,” he said, as if they were old friends bumping into each other on a street corner.

  Magnolia stared, at the man, at her own hands, free, unbound. She glanced back at him warily. “Who are you?” she demanded, her voice clear for the first time in what felt like days.

  He sighed, his eyes rolling skyward as if this were all terribly tedious. “You can call me King,” he said at last, flashing that sharp smirk. “Maybe I’m the one who was supposed to save your kind—the Satellrites—from their oh-so-miserable fate.” The words dripped with disdain, a bitter edge cutting through his laziness. “Not that it matters now. But that’s a story for another day. No sense wasting my breath if you’re just gonna die right away. Making lengthy introductions can be quite tiring.”

  His gaze flicked over her, appraising, mocking. “So. You’ve ended up as someone’s toy.” He made a noise of mild disgust, shaking his head. “How pitiful.”

  Magnolia’s cheeks burned, but she refused to look away. She glanced at the garden, the skulls…

  This man, she decided, was not any sort of savior. “

  What should I do, then?” she asked, squaring her shoulders. “Is… Is this the great catastrophe? The one that creep in the Satellite said would fall on me, after he injected me with that … thing?”

  The King raised an eyebrow, incredulous, a low chuckle rattling in his chest. “Catastrophe?” he echoed. “You call this a catastrophe? I’ve lived through a hundred things worse than this. I’ve seen true ruin, little Satellrite. This is barely a bump in the road.”

  He leaned forward on his throne, eyes gleaming, lips curled in a predatory smile. “The solution is simple. If you want to live, kill the boy. Kill Loric.”

  She stared at him, stunned. Before she could speak, the dream world began to dissolve, the flowerbed fading, the throne and the King and the skulls sinking away into a pale blur.

  Magnolia jolted awake in the dark, Loric’s breath warm against her cheek, the ropes burning into her wrists, her heart pounding with a terror she couldn’t name.