Chapter 4: Auction and First Leads

Argoth had directed them to a slave auction in a hamlet a few miles west, held that afternoon. Before they left his shop, So-Ye finished strapping on her sidearm and utility belt—the only items she was permitted to wear besides her collar.

Ryker couldn’t help himself. “You sure look good in those guns.”

His new slave shot him a look that could have killed a tiger. “Shut the fuck up ... Master.”

Argoth smirked from behind his workbench. Ryker raised an eyebrow and said, “She sure has spunk, doesn’t she?”

So-Ye climbed naked into the ATV’s passenger seat and buckled up, then stuck her tongue out at Ryker as he took the driver’s position. The meld thrummed between them—he felt her irritation mixed with reluctant affection, the push-pull of a woman still adjusting to what she’d become.

He started the engine and they rolled west.

The hamlet sprawled across a sun-bleached ridge, low stone buildings huddled together, streets crowded with collared women and traders hawking wares. So-Ye’s eyes flicked from shadow to shadow, movement to movement, her body leaning subtly toward Ryker, reflexively attuned through the bond.

The ATV hummed beneath them as they threaded through narrow lanes. Collars glittered in the sunlight—some plain brass, some shimmering in colors like oil on water. She caught the smallest gestures: a girl’s nervous glance toward a trader, the way a horse shifted under a mounted slaver’s weight, a hand twitching near a blade.

The streets grew more congested the closer they got to the auction grounds. Ryker parked the ATV near a stone cistern and they continued on foot. So-Ye walked beside him, bare feet learning to avoid the sharpest stones, her naked body drawing occasional glances but no real attention. Here, a collared woman without clothes was as unremarkable as the sky.

Ryker scanned the crowd, silent and calculating. His hand rested near his pulse pistol. So-Ye felt her chest tighten through the meld, her attention rooting where it needed to be—on potential threats, on Ryker’s subtle shifts in posture, on the flow of the crowd.

“Stay close,” he murmured.

“Always,” she replied, and meant it more than she wanted to.

The auction square opened before them, a wide plaza ringed with wooden cages. Voices shouted over the din—bids called, coins clattering, women’s terrified murmurs, the shuffle of bare feet on stone. The air smelled of sweat and fear and roasting meat from a vendor’s cart.

Ryker’s attention locked onto a particular slaver near the center cages—a thick-shouldered man with a scarred jaw, dragging something small behind him on a chain.

At first glance, it looked like a child. Azure blue skin, perhaps four or five years old, with long straight white hair that caught the sunlight like frost.

Then she stumbled, and Ryker’s perspective shifted.

Not a child.

The tiny figure had the proportions of a fully-formed woman—pert breasts, curved hips, a delicate waist—all compressed into a three-foot frame. She tried to pull away from the slaver’s grip, and he caught her by the forearm, spinning her roughly.

Her eyes—huge and luminous, amethyst-colored—locked onto Ryker’s across the crowded square.

And then, impossibly, he heard her voice inside his mind.

Help me. I know things about Maria.

Ryker’s hand dropped to his weapon.

The slaver jerked the chain, and the tiny woman cried out. He swung her like a rag doll, hurling her bodily into one of the cages. She hit the bars with a sickening thud and crumpled.

“Hey!” Ryker’s voice cut through the noise. “Leave the girl alone!”

The slaver turned, sneering, one hand dropping to the knife at his belt. “Fuck off, stranger. That’s prime merchandise—worth three hundred gold at auction.”