After some time, the maid who had brought them here returned. Her footsteps were sharp against the stone floor, cutting through the silence with the no-nonsense rhythm of someone who considered every second not spent working a second wasted.
"Let's go, you two." She ordered curtly, already moving down the corridor, not even bothering to check if they were following.
Phewwwww...
Both women let out quiet sighs of relief, their shoulders dropping almost imperceptibly. They fell into step behind her without a word, exchanging a brief sideways glance that said everything neither of them was willing to say out loud. They were just glad to be moving away from whatever had been waiting for them back in that room if they had stayed there longer.
She brought them to the main kitchen, a wide, steaming space that pressed heat against every inch of exposed skin the moment they crossed the threshold. The air carried the smell of boiled grains and cooking oil, thick enough to feel like something coating the inside of the nose. Without explanation and without pleasantries, the maid pointed toward a long counter lined with loaded food trays and gave them a single flat look. That was all the instruction they were going to receive.
And so the tour began.
Sio and Gracie moved through the mansion alongside a small group of other maids, each carrying trays, distributing food from room to room and corridor to corridor. On the surface it looked like ordinary morning routine service, almost boring. Just maids doing their rounds through a large house, nothing worth remarking on.
But nothing about this place was ordinary. Not even close.
The further they went, the harder it became to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Step by step, room by room, both girls were forced to witness the true reality of what this mansion actually was. And it was so much worse than anything they could have mentally prepared themselves for.
Every corridor peeled back another layer of horror.
In the shadowed corners of narrow hallways, women sat curled against the walls with their knees pulled tight to their chests, rocking in slow, endless motions that looked less like comfort and more like the body's last desperate attempt to hold itself together. Their lips moved in fractured murmurs, broken words and fragments of sentences breathed into the floor or the ceiling or nowhere at all. Their eyes saw whatever it was they were seeing, and it was not the hallway around them... Some flinched violently at the sound of approaching footsteps, a full-body jerk with their arms flying up to shield their heads, as if they were bracing for blows that had simply paused rather than stopped. Their bodies had been conditioned to expect the worst, and no amount of temporary quiet had managed to convince them otherwise.
Others did not flinch at all. They just stared straight ahead, eyes stripped of everything behind them, like someone had reached inside them and turned off their soul light a very long time ago.
In the wider halls and private chambers, women were dragged by the arm through doorways, shoved forward with open palms, barked at in clipped commands as though they were livestock being sorted from one pen to another. Some had been forced to kneel on bare stone floors for so long their legs trembled visibly beneath them, every muscle driven well past the point of protest. Others were chained and simply left that way until their bodies gave out entirely. A few had already collapsed where they stood, crumpled on the floor too spent to get back up, their breathing coming in shallow, unsteady pulls that barely proved they were still alive.
The smell of hell found Sio and Gracie halfway down the third corridor, and it never let go after that. It clung to the air with a suffocating possessiveness, a dense and heavy weight soaked through with sweat, rot, and human waste.
They understood it then, in a way that could not be unfelt.
Despair has a scent. And this was it.
It coated the back of the throat and made every breath feel like something that needed to be washed out afterward. The floors beneath their feet were smeared with grime and old stains, filth that had been ground so deeply into the stone over what must have been years that it had simply become part of the stone itself. And still, women crawled across those same floors on trembling hands and knees, their faces streaked with dirt and dried tears, leaving faint trails through the muck as they went.
Some bore their suffering openly on the outside. Bruises that had gone deep purple and yellow at the edges, cuts left untreated and beginning to crust over, swollen joints bending at angles that spoke of violence repeated so many times it had become nothing more than the rhythm of daily life in this building. But others looked clean. Almost normal, surface-level. It was these ones that unsettled Sio the most, because there was nothing behind their eyes when they accepted their food trays or answered a command. Their voices had no inflection left in them. Their expressions had been smoothed over into something completely blank. Whatever personality and warmth and personhood had once existed inside them had been dismantled carefully, piece by piece, until only the outer shape remained, still walking around, still breathing, still technically there.
This place did not merely hurt people. It hollowed them out down to the core and left the outside standing.
But what turned Sio's stomach the most, what made the bile climb the back of her throat with real intent, was not even the women themselves.
It was the MEN OF THIS HOUSE!!!!
They laughed. They talked. They walked down these same corridors and stepped around collapsed bodies the way someone might step around a puddle on a morning walk, without breaking their stride, without once glancing down. To them the suffering was background noise. The women were for them are just lifeless dolls, that just happened to breathe...... Their laughter bounced off the walls and echoed through the misery surrounding it with a cheerfulness so obscene it corrupted the air wherever it landed.
UUAAAAA! UUULLKKKKK!! AAWWOOOAAHH!!!
Both girls swallowed hard, pushing the nausea back down through sheer willpower. Sio kept her head low. Gracie kept her face stripped of everything readable. They moved mechanically through each stop: extend the tray, collect the empty bowl, move on. They did everything in their power not to look too long at any one thing, not to let any more of it sink in than had already gotten through the walls they were trying desperately to hold up.
Just keep moving. Just keep moving.
After finishing the food distribution, they were led to a part of the mansion that was away from all the violence and closer to the meeting courtyard.
It was the area where all the pregnant women were kept.
Both Sio and Gracie stopped walking at exactly the same moment. Neither of them made a sound. They stood in the hallway and simply took in the sight in front of them: women in every stage of pregnancy, seated on low cots or lying still on thin mattresses in different rooms, their hands folded over swollen bellies. Their faces were pale, worn down with constant suffering they have endured over the years, their body was really tired from giving birth to babies that they don't even know who their father was.
TSK.
So many of them. Reduced to this. Kept alive just long enough to serve a purpose and not a single breath longer.
GRRRRRR....
Fury ignited in Sio's chest but she forced it down, kept her hands steady at her sides, kept her face as neutral as she could hold it. They began moving again, working through the room one by one, distributing meals to the pregnant ladies. The other maids finished their rounds gradually and were dismissed, the group thinning out as time passed by, until only the two of them were left in the hallway.
Then they were directed toward one of the room at the far end of the corridor.
CREAAKKKKK....
The door groaned as they pushed it open, the sound dragging through the small space like it resented being disturbed. It was a modest room: just a bed, a narrow table, and a single window letting in a thin strip of pale light that stretched across the floor that barely reached the opposite wall. They walked to the bed at the far end and stood there in quiet silence, while the maid who had led them this far glanced at both of them briefly.
"Five minutes," she said.
Then she turned away and busied herself tidying the corners of the room, keeping her back to them, offering whatever thin measure of privacy she was able to give.
Sio and Gracie set the food tray down gently on the small table beside the bed. The woman lying in it had been sleeping, or at least something close to it. Her breathing shifted as they drew near, growing lighter and more aware, and by the time they reached her side her eyes were already beginning to open. They lifted slowly, weighted with rest, blinking against the pale light until her focus settled on both of them. A faint smile crossed her face.
"Hmm. You two came."
"Ow, ow!" She tried to push herself upright and immediately winced, her arms shaking with the effort, her face tightening around the eyes.
"Miss, easy!" Gracie moved forward without hesitation, slipping her hands behind the woman's back, guiding her carefully upright and settling her against the headboard with steady care.
"Haha, sorry about that." The woman exhaled with a short laugh as beads of sweat traced their way down her forehead. "After getting pregnant it is way harder to move don't let people tell you that it gets better as you get used to it."
Gracie spotted a small cloth on the bedside table and reached for it, dabbing the sweat from the woman's forehead in gentle strokes. "Is it really that hard?"
"Yes of course it is hard but at the end it will be worth it," the woman said, her smile carrying a sweetness.
She let Gracie finish, then glanced quickly toward the maid still occupied in the corner. In one smooth, nearly invisible motion, her hand slipped into the inner fold of her dress. She produced a small piece of paper and held it out toward Sio with her palm turned down, the paper barely visible between her fingers.
"Keep this safe," she said, her voice dropping to just above a murmur. "I am sorry for calling you into this hell, but there are eyes everywhere in this place. Small bits of information are easy enough to pass by mouth. Something this long, written down like this, carries real risk though. Everyone who comes in and out gets searched. Right now, the whole house is distracted with the Princess visit. No one is going to look too hard at a couple of maids today."
She gave a small, sincere dip of her head.
Sio took the paper with steady hands, then angling her palm just enough to catch the pale strip of light from the window as she scanned its contents without making it obvious she was reading.
The handwriting was small and cramped, packed into every available space on the page as though whoever had written it had been terrified of wasting even a millimeter of room:
SECTOR 07B — SECTOR 12X — SECTOR 19-DELTA — SECTOR 37A — SECTOR 44-OMEGA — SECTOR 51-SUBLEVEL — SECTOR 88-BLACK — SECTOR 99-VOID — AUTH ZONE I — AUTH ZONE XII — AUTH ZONE OMEGA — HIGH AUTH ZONE-7 — MAX AUTH ZONE-RED — ZERO AUTH ZONE — SUBLEVEL -3 — SUBLEVEL -7A — LOWER SUBLEVEL IX — DEEP SUBLEVEL OMEGA — UNDERLEVEL 12 — UNDERLEVEL BLACK — BUNKER LEVEL 05 — VAULT 13 — VAULT OMEGA — IRON VAULT-7 — BLACK VAULT XII — CORE VAULT ALPHA — NODE 17-A — GRID SECTOR K-9 — BLACKSITE 04—
And it kept going. Line after line after line filling every corner of the page.
Sio looked up from the paper, her brow pulling together. "These...?"
"If you want real dirt on him, the kind that actually holds weight, those are the places to look," the woman said, her voice carrying a quiet steadiness. "I know there are a lot of them. But we wrote down everything we have heard over the years. Every accident. Every careless word dropped in a hallway. Every whisper traded between men who were certain no one was close enough to catch it." A small, determined smile settled on her mouth. "We listened. We remembered. We wrote it all down."
Sio folded the paper carefully along its existing creases and tucked it deep inside the inner lining of her clothing, pressing it flat against her side until she could not feel its edge anymore.
"Thank you, Miss," Sio said quietly. Beside her, Gracie bent into a respectful bow, her eyes dropping to the floor. "For everything."
"Don't thank us." The woman shook her head with a gentleness that left no room for argument. "We are just trying to get out of the hell we ended up in. Nothing more than that."
A short silence settled between them. Then Sio asked, keeping her voice as soft as she could and stripping any judgment out of it before it could take shape: "But... why did you come here in the first place?"
The woman did not answer straight away. She turned her head toward the narrow window and looked at the thin strip of grey clouds sitting beyond the glass. Her hand found her belly on its own, settling there without her seeming to decide it, her palm moving in small, unhurried circles.
When she finally spoke, her voice was full of sadness.
"This city has gotten bigger. Better too, in a lot of ways. You can see the Queen's work all over it if you know where to look. But it is an island. And when an island gets too full..." She paused just long enough to let that image sit. "The walls close in. There are not enough chances to go around. Not enough food, not enough money, not enough safety... More mouths to feed, more sickness spreading through the streets, more crimes happening in the dark." She let out a quiet, weary exhale. "A lot of us were just pushed around our whole lives without any choices of our own. Some had no option left but to beg. And some..." Her voice went softer. "Some had been broken so many times before ending up here that the cruelty felt familiar. Familiar enough to survive, at least."
She let her gaze linger on the window a moment longer before continuing.
"Personally, I had too many mouths depending on me back home. So coming here was my choice, not the best decision of my life but it helped me feed my family"
She glanced down at her belly. A soft, tired laugh slipped out.
Gracie had been quietly holding a question back for a while. She let it out carefully, weighing each word before it left her.
"Is there no end for all of you? What happens after the baby comes?" She hesitated, then pushed the rest out. "And... why are there no girls here? What happens if someone has a girl?"
"There is no end," she said simply. "I have been here a long time. That is why it is called hell. Either you keep going, keep having babies, keep being useful in whatever way they decide you are, or you break down and let this place finish you."
Her voice carried no tremor in it. No anger fighting its way to the surface. Just the flat, unvarnished weight of someone who had already turned this over in her mind so many times that it no longer had the power to unravel her.
"A very few manage to run," she added after a moment. "But even the ones who escape cannot stay in this city anymore. There is nowhere left here for them to go. He will find them for sure."
She paused at the second question. Her eyes drifted back to the window, back to that thin grey strip of sky.
"As for baby girls..."
She did not finish. She simply held that small, sad smile in place of words and let the silence carry the rest of it, because some answers are too ugly to be spoken out loud.
Agh.
Both Sio and Gracie closed their eyes at the same moment. Their fists curled slowly at their sides, knuckles going pale at the press of their own fingers. The implication sat in the room with them like something with physical presence. It needed no words to land with full force. It was perfectly, horribly clear.
As they stood there in the heavy quiet of that small room, trying to keep themselves together without letting it show on the outside...
CREAKKK! THUMMM!
Suddenly, the door flew open with enough force to slam against the wall and rattle the entire frame in its stone setting. A group of young men poured through the doorway, loud in their carelessness, already laughing about something shared between themselves on the way in.
At the front walked a man in a clean white shirt, his posture carrying the ease of a man who had never once been told no and had no particular reason to start expecting it now.
His eyes found Sio almost immediately. His face split into a wide, delighted grin that he wore with the pride, who considered it one of his better features.
"Hahaha! Hey there, temporary maid!" He pointed at her with a laugh. "I have been looking all over for you, and here you are feeding pregnant women! Hehe!"
The men behind him laughed right on cue, already fanning out across the small room, spreading themselves through every corner.
Shittttt...
The maid who had been quietly tidying the corners stepped forward in a hurry, her voice pulled tight with urgency. "Young Masters, these are not regular maids. You cannot just—"
SLAPPPPP!!!!!
The crack of it split through the room like a gunshot. The maid's head snapped hard to the side and she hit the floor before anyone had time to move, her one hand flying up far too late to stop any of it.
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END OF CHAPTER --- 89 PART 1