The Scumbags Guide to Enslaving Demon's

There wasn’t a soul in the eastern hospital until they locked the doors.

Austin Veyron brought the volunteer team through the front lobby with Elena on his left, Seven bringing up their rear, and Rin skittering across the ceiling near where dark pooled around the beams. Sarielle and Maelis covered their backs with six of the prisoners who had elected to leave the Freehold when given the chance because they knew the hospital’s lower levels.

Every emergency light glowed red.

On the reception counter sat a black ledger, open beneath a NO WALK-INS AFTER MIDNIGHT sign.

Elena gasped out of breath.

"I worked here." Elena said. "We used that desk to check people in."

The ledger page flipped on its own accord.

DEBTOR PRESENT.

Chains burst from the floor.

Seven caught the first two on his armored chest and ripped them free. Rin landed next to the desk claws slashing smoke-formed hands. Austin Veyron raised Territorial Defiance against the chain headed straight for Elena’s throat.

"It’s not hers."

The chain hesitated.

Then the lobby filled with the form of the debt- wraith’s doctor mask. It wore an outdated white coat, but where its face should have been was nothing more than a black page devoid of features.

Employment acknowledged. Training received. Wages advanced. Protection extended. Balance due.

Elena leveled her rifle. "I worked for every hour that I was there."

"Work is debt you tell yourself has better language."

Austin Veyron felt the hunger inside of him answer with a sickening flare of agreement. He could burn this thing. Kill it and feed on its chain. Tear into the ledger pages until the building collapsed around them.

But Maelis had been clear about one thing. Knowing what the original claim was would be the key.

"We need the basement," Austin Veyron said.

The wraith smiled with Elena’s mouth twisting to match it. "Then descend."

The elevator doors slid open.

There was nothing inside but darkness and the sound of something that didn’t have a heartbeat but acted like it did.

"No." Elena said. "The stairs."

They took the stairwell instead. Every landing featured another name carved into the wall. Some had been striked through. Others circled in black ink. On the second floor, a debt-wraith walked out of an operating room doorway with a patient tag still hooked to its wrist.

The volunteers opened fire.

Bullets were useless against smoke, but the roots Seven pulled from the Freehold buried themselves deep into the chain wrapped around the wraith’s body. It screamed when Sarielle yanked the exposed link free.

Austin Veyron caught it off the ground and shook his head against the order.

The wraith unraveled itself like a dark string puppet.

A scrap of paper fluttered to the floor.

CLAIM TRANSFER: VHARA → MUNICIPAL HEALTH AUTHORITY → FREEHOLD COLLATERAL.

Elena read the bottom line.

"It’s trying to make the Freehold take responsibility for me."

"No." Austin Veyron said. "It’s trying to make us believe responsibility is ownership."

They made it to the basement just as the lights began to flicker out. Behind a steel door sat the records vault. Elena pulled an old skeleton key from the hook of the hospital ring she wore on her belt and pushed it into the vault door’s keyhole. She twisted it once, then heard it freeze.

The wraith interrupted them through the building’s intercom.

"Sign the discharge." It said. "Leave the debtor. Take everyone else."

Kaela’s voice buzzed through Austin Veyron’s radio from somewhere inside the Freehold. "They’re attacking Grand Meridian now. They’re trying to break through the root boundary."

Austin Veyron’s first instinct was to recall the team. Second was to rush straight into that vault on his own. Both thoughts stemmed from the part of him that demanded to control any situation he was thrown into.

He met Elena’s eyes instead.

"What do you need?"

Her eyes widened but she nodded firmly. "Two minutes. Inside. Then we can decide how to finish this together."

Austin nodded once.

Seven pressed both hands to the vault door and punched through the wall behind it.

Rows upon rows of dusty paper stretched off into shadows. At the back of the room, a single chain hung from a hole in the ceiling and fed into a book that was twice the size of a coffin. The original hospital ledger glowed on its open page.

Elena walked towards it.

Her name was written on the ledger in black ink, then every shift she’d worked. Every life she had touched and every emergency she had stayed after her shift to help with.

Below that, she had signed away her name.

COLLATERAL FOR FUTURE CARE.

Maelis swore under her breath.

Austin reached for the ledger page. Elena snagged his wrist.

"No." Elena said. "Not yet. Look down here."

Another name had been written beneath Elena’s.

SEVEN.

The machine tilted its blank eye- slit towards the light.

For the first time since Austin had met him, Seven didn’t have an answer at the ready.

The hospital’s intercom buzzed.

"Two debtors." The voice said. "One ledger. Choose which debt you will erase first."

The lights shut off completely.

Debt- wraiths rushed into the room through the door they had just broken with a tide of paper and surgical masks. Seven stepped between them and the ledger shredding the first several with his hands. Austin Veyron’s roots burst from seams in the floor around them. This time he didn’t use them cage the volunteers to their posts. Instead they bought time. A way back to the stairs.

"Hold back the line." Austin Veyron said.

None of them waited to receive an order. The volunteers took their spots like pieces on a board. Sarielle slit open a wraith’s internal chain with a stolen blade. Rin disappeared into the smoke only to return holding a snapped ledger link in her teeth. Maelis hurled ember fire that burned through ink while leaving the pages beneath untouched.

Elena didn’t bother moving.

"What do you think it wants?" Austin asked.

"A false choice." Elena replied. "It wants us to believe one person’s freedom is bought with another’s."

Seven swiveled his blank face towards her. "If you’re going to play bureaucracy, pick me. I was designed to be disposable."

Elena shook her head. "You’re not disposable Seven. You are Seven."

His entire body went still.

That line meant something. Austin felt it thrum through the ledger as though it was ice cracking under pressure.

The wraith screamed through every speaker system the hospital had lined with metal.

"Designation is not identity."

"Exactly."

Elena wrenched the page free.

The ledger resisted her grasp. Black ink spilled over her arms tattooing her skin with numbers.

Instinct told Austin Veyron to open DEVOUR. Before he could fire the order, Elena pressed a hand against his chest.

"Don’t take it." Elena said. "Read it."

Together they read the ledger aloud. Sentence by exhausting sentence. Every line-item that turned nurses into debtors. Every paragraph that made protection require purchase.

At the bottom, Maelis found it. The original sovereign sigil stamped over and over atop city insignias and hospital markings still usable enough to not stick during adhesion.

Vharra’s chain had never created Elena’s ledger.

It fed on an antiquated system originally designed by humans to buy and sell their own lives.

Austin Veyron slammed his hand over the seal.

"You are not her debt."

The seal split. A clean crack spiderwebbed out from Austin’s fingerprint.

The first line of text on the ledger burned away.

Except Seven’s name remained inked into the paper bolder than it had been before.

Below them, the entire hospital shifted with something large moving beneath the basement level.

"We should have known," Elena whispered.

The intercom crackled one last demand.

"Then go below and ask the first maker who owns him."

The floor opened up along a seam Austin hadn’t noticed beneath the paper shelves.

Cold air rushed up around them bringing machine oil and the smell of old ash with it. A flight of stairs sat there with no blueprints having mentioned them.

"There are too many people in there." Kaela’s voice buzzed over the radio. "Austin Veyron, the Freehold perimeter is holding, but they keep getting pulled back to the hospital. Something down there is calling them."

Austin looked down at the pile of wounded volunteers behind him. "If you wanna go home then go now. You don’t win anything by dying in some basement."

Two of the former prisoners stayed behind with the medics. The rest of the volunteers held their ground. Sarielle moved next to Seven. Elena pocketed the shredded ledger page.

"We aren’t going down there to ask who owns him." Elena said. "We’re going down there to learn how to stop letting anyone own anything."

Austin looked down at Seven. Seven’s blank eye- slit had split into a single vertical beam of white light.

"Do you want to come with us?"

Seven took three seconds longer than any tactical decision should have required to respond.

"Yes," Seven said.

Together, they climbed down into darkness.

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