The uniforms belonged to Lyle, so they all had to take them off, down to their under-clothes. The others folded them, like they’d been taught, while the dep thralls stared at them with blank eyes. As they pulled away Red came to sit by him, and flung her bare arm around his shoulders. Dally couldn’t look her in the eye, but eventually leant into her. Together they crowded around the vent with the others, watching the house get small and disappear behind them.

“I only ever lived there,” she whispered, in the dark.

Dally tried not to cringe. He was a son of a bitch. Did they all know it was him? With his dumb plan?

“I’ll look out for you. I’ll—“

“It’s okay.” Red shook him a little, in a way that was probably meant to be reassuring. “I wanted to go, you know that? When they took the others I thought, you know, that should be me. I can fight.”

Her voice had a nervous edge to it, but she was leaning forward in her seat on the floor. Spines bristling on the back of her neck under the skin. She'd said stuff like this before, a couple of times, but Dally hadn’t thought she was serious. Now she bared her sharp teeth in the dark.

“This is what we’re made for, right?”

Dally made himself nod, trying not to stare at her. “Sure,” he said, numb, “yeah.”

The hauler dropped them all in the muddy courtyard of a staging base. Dally had never been anywhere military before, but this wasn’t so different from the thrall-houses where he grew up. There was the same blank, steel and brick warehouses, the same token chain-link fence. That wasn’t for keeping thralls in, he knew. It was for the people living in the tenements right outside, to make them feel better. And it seemed to work; human kids were running alongside the fence, laughing and throwing fistfuls of muddy snow at each other. They didn’t even look up as the thralls were unloaded.

Dally’s group had been pulled in along with what must have been the last group of requisition takings. Something like five hundred of them stood in a line across the muddy field in front of the base, waiting to be inspected and catalogued. Most of the thralls already there had registry tattoos on their biceps or shoulders: Odesia Trade Company’s writhing squid, or dull, blocky logos from one of the mining outfits. Anvil must have given up their thralls long ago, since almost no one had that.

In this crowd Dally and the others stood out for how human they looked. The mine thralls had the kinds of faces that would have made Lyle squirm.

“You doing okay?” Dally asked one, a male just in front of them.

The miner had wide, gold eyes like a hawk, surrounded by jagged bone ridges. His neck and shoulders were too thick to pass for human even at a distance, and studded with broken-off spines. Even in home form he was about eight feet tall.

“Could be worse,” he said, bland. “Could be digging holes.”

Dally snorted in agreement.“Do you know where we’re going?”

“Nah. Not even the humans know. I heard Salidna, then I heard Provok.”

They were towns on two totally different war fronts - South and East.

“You know the Brairs,” the miner went on, “they take those piles of rubble and we just take em back, like playing catch. Guess it’s our turn again.”

“Good,” said Red, too loudly.

Together those lined up shuffled in place, arms crossed against the cold. Their breath steamed in the dusk. Red had been curious in the car, staring all excited at the road as they sped along. Now she’d gone quiet.

“What if they want it out?” she asked, suddenly, without looking up.

It took Dally a second to realise she meant her eye. He stiffened, crossing his arms over the lump of scar on his chest. “They won’t,” he said. “No. I mean, It’s useful, right? Three is better, if you can see out of all of them.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” She didn’t sound like she believed him.

He bumped against her shoulder as they walked, all the way to the front of the line. An officer waved to a building on the other side of the yard, and Red started towards it. When Dally went to follow her, the man planted a hand on his chest.

“No,” the officer said, slowly and clearly. “Over there.”

Red stumbled to a halt, staring back over her shoulder. For a second they just looked at each other.

“Over there,” the officer said, again.

“Where’s she going—?”

A swift backhand caught Dally full across the face. It was faster than he could flinch back, and left his cheek stinging in the cold. Dally touched the rising welt, startled.

“Go on now,” the man said, with a warning stare. “Next!”

Red had started walking, slowly, and after a few seconds Dally did too. He watched until she disappeared into a low, windowless brick building on the other side of the yard. As soon as she was gone he ran a hand back over his hair, trying to swallow his panic.

The flow of the line took him to a chipboard stall where a bored young private had him turn around, all while asking questions. What could he do? Had he ever used a weapon? What was the lump on his chest?

“I had a uh, saber. And that‘s where they cut off the extra arm.” Dally wasn’t really listening — he was too busy trying to look over the partitions, to see the others. Nesette might have been in the next booth; Dally thought he could hear their crackling teenage voice.

Finally the officer waved him off. “Down to your right, follow the line, wait in the white circle.”

That was a line chalked on the damp concrete, and at the end were a few thralls were already standing in a nervous cluster.

On his way there Dally passed the station where Nesette was being booked in. He slowed, trying to wait, but the closer he got the more obvious it was that this was not going smoothly. Nesette was crossing their arms over and over across their bare freckled chest, glancing around like there might be a way out.

“Says here you’re female,” the officer was saying. “Did you tell them that? Hey—“ another officer was walking past with an armful of files. The first one stopped him, pointing at Nessie. “That’s a male, right?”

The new officer squinted. “Is it?”

This was not good. Nessie was not male or female, and no amount of questions was going to change that. But humans didn’t have a word for esicts in their files - they just got listed as either ‘defective male’ or ‘defective female’. And maybe Nessie had passed for female as a kid, when the records were done. Before they hit puberty. Not anymore, though, with that long crest of spines, and sharp jaw.

Dally’s heart had started hammering again, and he’d slowed to a crawl. Who the hell knew what would happen, if they wrote ‘defective’ on that sheet?

“This again?” he muttered, just loud enough for them to hear. Then he strolled on by.

“Hey, you.”

Dally stopped, feeling their eyes on the back of his neck. When he turned around they were both staring.

“You say something?” one asked.

“I just, uh,” he held up his hands, apologetic. “Sorry, boss. He’s male, the Department just never fixed the registry.”

“Not defective female.”

“Oh, hah, no. I wish, boss.”

He knew it was working when the two men shot each other a knowing look.

“Useless Dep shitheads,” one of them said.

Dally almost sighed. He gave them a close-lipped smile, instead, and made an agreeing sound in his throat. It meant something like: ‘yeah, but I’m not allowed say that’. The officers actually laughed, then, and waved him along.

A few seconds later Nessie caught up to him - he was walking slow enough he still hadn’t even reached the white circle. Dally drifted closer until they were bumping shoulders.

Nessie leaned in to whisper. “I’m male now.”

“You’re okay,” Dally murmured back. “Trust me, you don’t want to be registered female anyway.”

He sounded distracted, even to himself. He still couldn’t see Red. Across the field of frosted mud, the door to the other building stayed closed.

Kit was already in the circle. As they got closer she silently put an arm around Nessie, dragging them in for a hug.

“Have you seen Red?” Dally asked.

Kit shook her head. She was staring at the others around them, scanning the unfamiliar faces. Dally saw that Nessie was, too. They kept meeting the eyes of people around them, and quickly looking away. It took a second to figure out why: If they spent their whole lives in Lyle’s house, maybe they didn’t know what most thralls actually looked like?

The others in the circle were more miners, bristling with spines, some scarred in rune patterns. Plenty had short tails in home form, curled in to not hit anyone else in the crowd. They clustered together, making small signs and barely talking. In the back a small group were actually playing serbat, mumbling their rhymes barely loud enough to hear.

They only went silent when a private marched up to them, and started herding everyone out of the circle. More and more groups, joining together. At first he thought it would just be into one of the buildings, but the private led them down a hauler track in between. The miners shuffled along wheel ruts stamped in the mud. There was a faint buzz in the air, which got louder and clearer, turning into the bone-rattling hum of rail-cars.

The machines were stretched out on tracks behind the warehouses. Each one was an iron-gray carapace about a half-mile long. Rubbery book-lungs on the sides flared and closed, breathing out hot steam. Under the carriages muscular pistons shuddered, each straining against one braked wheel, and at the front they tasted the dirt ahead with hundreds of transparent feelers.

Something tainted the air like blood and rotting fish. In the shadow underneath each car was a thick tube, probing down into the muck. The tube pulsed, sluggishly, swelling with orange liquid as the machine swallowed. Dally always heard railcars were like mosquitos; They sucked up their food from a long vein underground.

He couldn’t help slowing down, seeing them. The miners did too, probably knowing what it would be like inside. These things always turned into a crush of sweating bodies, like being swallowed, and Red was still behind him, somewhere --

Abruptly Dally turned around, started pushing back through the crowd.

“Dally,” Nessie hissed.

“I’ll be back—“

“No.“ Their hand caught his arm, slipped off as he yanked away. The officers loading the car glanced up at him.

Dally aimed for the nearest one, and ran hard into a wall of muscle instead. The miner from before had stepped in front of him.

“Wrong way,” the male said, with the same grim cheerfulness as before.

“My friend’s back there.”

“I know, I know.” He was shoving him backwards, towards the car. “Calm down, keep walking.”

Dally snarled, spines bristling on the back of his neck. He pushed back harder than before, and felt the miner stagger. At the edge of the crowd, an officer started towards them.

Then Red stepped out of a building, about ten feet away.

She was part of a small group who all looked around with wide eyes, confused. A trickle of blood ran down from her elbow from a small cut. When she saw Dally made a quiet noise, and sped up to join him.

They didn’t exactly hug - Dally had finally felt the human attention, like a cold bucket of water dumped over him. The two of them just bumped together and drifted back into the crowd, letting it carry them towards the cars.

“Thanks,” he muttered, guilty, as they passed the miner.

“Yep.”

Inside was how he thought; the car was already too full to sit down properly. They slumped over each other, stumbling on ribs in the floor. When the door valves shrank closed the only light was stained pink, filtering in through bloody membranes in the ceiling.

“What happened?” Dally muttered, finally putting an arm around Red’s shoulders. She was stiff, but not shaking. Like she was ready to attack something.

She swallowed. “There was a mage in there. He, I don’t know, he did this?” She mimed carefully peeling her third eyelid open with her fingers. “And he took some blood out of my arm, and pulled some hairs out.”

Dally didn’t know what the hell that meant, any more than she did. “You’re okay though?” he asked, feeling stupid.

“I’m okay. Like you said, right?”

The railcar started in a wet hiss of hydraulics, a squeal as the brakes let up. Around them the others groaned, struggling to find a comfortable way to sit or stand on the bare floor. Somewhere on Dally’s left a storm of cursing started. A dim figure was clambering over bodies, tripping, looking gangly even as a silhouette.

Nesette fell down next to them, wedged in the tiny gap between Red and the miner. Their voice was a panicked rasp.

“Dally, did you see Kit get on? Where’s Kit?”