Change of Darkness (The Change Series Book 3) by Jacinta Jade (best new books to read txt) 📕

be provided with water. Your only hope to get out is for someone else to be thrown in with you.’

Siray almost frowned. Someone had to take the female’s place?

‘If someone else ends up in the pit, then you have a chance to prove to us just how strong you can be.’

Siray felt her limbs go cold as she realised what the guard meant. The female would stay in that pit until she died. Or until someone else disobeyed and joined her. And killed her. Or the other way around.

The guard was smirking at the understanding dawning on the captives’ faces. ‘Now that you all understand the rules, it’s time to begin your real training.’

The guard spun on his heel and marched to the row first in line on Siray’s right—unit one.

‘Single file in your rows, through that passage.’ The guard indicated the intended door with a chopping motion. ‘Move!’

The captive at the front of the first row jerked into sudden movement at the shouted order, walking quickly but uncertainly towards the door which had just been opened by another guard.

Siray watched as the rest of the male captive’s row, then the following rows, began to peel off to fall into step. As the file grew longer, more guards emerged from their stations to monitor the progression.

As her own unit stepped away from the main formation to join the file, Baindan in the lead, Siray tried to close her ears to the weeping she could still hear coming from the pit and focus on what might be ahead. She had to be ready.

From her place in line, she watched as she and the others in her group drew closer to the passage entrance, her body growing more tense with every step.

Yet after she had passed through, she simply found herself in a stone tunnel, and all she could see was the line of captives continuing to move on before her. Siray’s sense of foreboding didn’t leave her, but it also didn’t grow. The tunnel was long. Long enough, in fact, to hold the whole file of captives at once. Where were they being taken?

Siray was more than halfway down the tunnel when the door to the entrance she had passed through slammed shut behind them. Like many of the others, she jumped and her head whipped around to view the source of the noise, but the guards in the laughed and continued to prod the trailing captives to keep moving down the passage.

Her anxiety increasing again, Siray glanced back down the tunnel ahead. And saw new light burst into the passage as another door in front of the proceeding file was opened.

‘Move it! Move it!’

Two guards positioned to either side of this new doorway gestured for the captives to move faster, shouting to emphasise their commands.

Siray obediently quickened her pace, almost jogging to keep up with Baindan’s long steps in her effort not to be left behind and create a gap that might draw attention.

As she approached the door, the light grew even brighter, and Siray raised a hand to her shield her eyes, squinting as she passed from the dim tunnel and out into the brilliantly lit space beyond.

***

‘This is the arena.’ The voice of their new instructor, Master Herrin, was gruff and deep, and both his voice and his shaven head gave him the appearance of unforgiving might.

After the large group of captives had passed through the door and out of the tunnel, the guards had hurried them across a wide expanse of sand before making them line up again in their rows.

Then the guards had fallen back to the perimeter of the expansive area, leaving the captives standing in the middle.

Where they had waited.

And waited.

Until one male captive had sat down.

But now the squarely built Herrin was speaking again. ‘You will either fall here, or go on to be part of a new power that will reshape this world.’

Siray listened, stiff and still, as she stood in line, watching from the corner of her eye as the scarred male strolled past the captives in the long line in front of hers.

Herrin’s casual movements were at odds with a face devoid of emotion, and his cutting eyes told her every one of his casual glances had a purpose. That cruelty was a part of him was plain, but through his eyes, Siray thought she could glimpse a mind just as sharp as the edges of the daggers that rode his hip.

‘Today, you will receive new training.’

The casual strides continued, and Siray kept staring straight ahead, avoiding any connection with Herrin’s grey-blue eyes as his scarred chin swung in her direction. In a way, it was hard not to look at him, like going against some natural instinct. The equivalent of turning your back on a hungry cripwof.

‘And tomorrow, you will battle each other. So do not waste this opportunity to learn a new skill, or tactic.’ A cold, calculating smile. ‘It might just be the last chance you have.’

Quiet footsteps sounded again on the sand of the arena, and Herrin’s form left the outer corner of Siray’s vision as he circled around the far end of the captives’ formation. The same survival instincts within her protested, but this time it was far worse, and the skin on the back of her neck prickled as she tried to sense where those footsteps had gone. Even standing in the middle of the group, captives both in front and behind, didn’t mean Herrin might not even now be approaching her unprotected back …

After all, they had already seen the results of Herrin’s displeasure. Off to Siray’s right was the crumpled body of the male captive who had decided to sit down without permission.

Definitely unconscious. Possibly dead. Which left just sixty-one of them confirmed alive, with that male down and a female in the pit.

Siray was quickly learning the underlying rules here, which, not surprisingly, were not so different from what the guards kept telling them all, over and over.

Obey, learn