46 More Meat-Sock than Limb
More Meat-Sock than Limb
T he door to the compartment rattled open, banging loudly when it hit the underside of the transport’s roof.
Temmi squinted against the sudden assault of sunlight.
Cowering in the corner, she didn’t feel any particular rush to leave the relative safety of her metal cage.
Not when what awaited her was a very certain, very public death.
Two burly, visored men jumped onto the cargo bed and stalked silently toward her.
“Fuck off!” She kicked out at them, but her prison boots only connected with air.
Strong hands grabbed her upper arms and hauled her to her feet. She let out a whimper at the jackhammer of pain that railed from her dislocated shoulder to her bound fingers. Her legs buckled. A bizarrely distant part of her brain registered that her nose had stopped bleeding.
The guards threw her to boiling-hot black concrete. Her arm hung grotesquely, still bound behind her back. The pain was blinding, narrowing her world to the very present, very urgent now.
A metallic bang came from behind her. The transport’s door being brought down and latching shut. The sound was followed by the thrum of an accelerating engine and the rush of warm air against the back of Temmi’s neck. Her ride was gone.
“Not much to look at, are you?”
Temmi didn’t recognize the voice. Nor did she have the strength to tilt her head up and see who’d spoken. Something firm nudged the underside of her chin. Forced her face up.
The voice belonged to an elderly albino woman seated comfortably in a motorized hover-chair. She held the end of a gold-tipped walking stick, which she’d jammed beneath Temmi’s chin to keep her head from flopping back down.
The emperor’s chief of staff. Temmi didn’t remember her name but recognized her from her first interview on the star cruiser what felt like seven thousand years before.
They were on the rooftop landing pad of a dizzyingly tall building. The city of Elsidor breathed and buzzed in Temmi’s peripherals. Busy airways jammed full of hover-vehicles in every shape and size and color; glossy, spiraling towers, a sun that actually cared to share its warmth.
“I’m here to secure your confession.” The woman’s voice had a thin, wobbly quality. Her walking stick scraped against Temmi’s throat. “The briefer, the better. Really, I don’t need much more than your unrepentant face and a soundbite.”
“Fuck you,” Temmi spat.
The walking stick slid away from her chin.
The woman settled the triangular base on the landing pad, using it to lever herself out of her chair.
An attendant who had been previously invisible to Temmi darted forward to secure and remove the chair.
Another attendant crouched before Temmi’s face and touched something cold and wet against her nose and lips. Cleaned away her blood.
The emperor’s chief of staff circled Temmi. “Let’s try this again, shall we?” The walking stick lifted and came down hard against Temmi’s mangled arm. The old woman had a surprising well of strength.
Temmi screamed.
“Come now, Artemis Ialan. Tell us why you did it.” She snapped her fingers, and a camera drone buzzed close to Temmi’s face. “Your vocabulary does extend beyond the crude and uncreative?”
“Fuck. You.”
The stick came down on Temmi’s arm again. She couldn’t prevent hot tears from streaming down her cheeks.
“Aren’t you angry yet?” Another slap of that heavy stick.
Another impossible wave of pain.
“I have other forms of leverage, you know.” The woman’s voice seemed to tremble in every direction. The red recording light on the camera drone winked at Temmi. “You have family back on your planet. Confess for them.”
Temmi closed her burning eyes. Checkmate, then.
“I hate you.” Her words came out a whisper.
“You want a confession?” She reopened her eyes, staring directly into the red blinking light.
A recording, not a broadcast. It wouldn’t matter what she said; the empire would take only what they wanted and delete the rest. Delete the truth.
Delete her.
“I hate Expan.” She forced herself to sit upright, gritting her teeth against the white-hot pain of her arm that was more meat-sock than limb now.
“I hate the emperor. I hate her daughter and her son. I hate everyone and everything that supports their regime. I am hate and rage, and I killed those women so I could get one step closer to razing the whole fucking empire to the ground. I hope it burns after I die.”
And it was true. In that moment, Temmi would’ve set fire to the universe herself.
The camera’s red light blinked off and the drone hummed away.
“See? That wasn’t hard, now, was it?” The last words Temmi heard before something sharp pricked the back of her neck and her pain was replaced by obliterating nothingness.