Ashborn Chapter 25
Dareya is brought before the Riders not as a witness—but as a warning.
The female guards, wearing rubber suits to protect them from the water, stripped me, turning on the shower in the cold, concrete room. They scrubbed me with the usual industrial-strength antiseptic smelling soap using the stiff brushes on my goose-pimpled flesh, not caring if they opened any half-healed wounds. Any blood was washed away by the freezing water from overhead. My skin was covered with scars from where the beatings had split my flesh. And where it had not been split, it was a rainbow of colors from the bruises in various stages of healing. One of the guards yanked my head back and scrubbed the soap into my hair and onto my face. My eyes stung from the assault on my senses and the bit of soap that got into them, my hands uselessly shackled to either side of the shower stall. Finally rinsed off, they perfunctorily toweled me off, combed my hair just enough to detangle it, and slipped me into a clean pair of underwear and undershirt. And a clean black jumpsuit with D-3 emblazoned on the back. Brig level delta three.
The male guards returned. After locking my shackles around my waist, wrists, and ankles, they led me through the hall.
