Bound to The Enemy of My Mate
The wrongness Elira had felt at the entrance now intensified into a cold dread.
They found the first corpse tossed into a side crevice like refuse. Then another, half-submerged in a stagnant, chemical-tainted pool. The callousness was a cold knot in Elira’s stomach.
Then, her boot knocked against something that was not rock. She glanced down, expecting another bone. But a faint glint of metal caught the torchlight. She knelt, ignoring the damp seeping through her trousers.
It was a skeleton, curled in a final, agonized repose. But the fingers of one hand were not relaxed in death; they were clenched into a tight, skeletal fist, as if holding onto a last, desperate secret.