20. JUDGMENT
JUDGMENT
YSIRA
When Ysira’s vision faded in from a red blur, she was sitting in a pile of soiled laundry. No, sitting was the wrong word.
Something—several things—had ruptured. Bones snapped back into place. She coughed up a mouthful of blood. Her passenger writhed and worked, unmistakably incensed with her.
It took another several minutes to regain her full range of motion.
She collected the helmet from where it had landed beside her and climbed unsteadily to her knees, then her feet.
She’d fallen into an enormous metal bin beneath a gaping black chute.
At first, the greater area called to mind the docks below Zivora—vast and brown and creaking, smelling of age and industry—but the walls vibrated with an off-kilter thrum, blasting heated air from invisible vents, almost as though they breathed.
As though she’d been swallowed whole, soon to be digested, by some monstrous beast.
A horrified exclamation escaped her as a bundle of filthy clothing dropped from above.
Peeling a pair of someone’s drawers off her head, she scrambled out of the way and leapt to the grated floor.
Her fresh, silken clothing was torn and stained.
She’d lost her pants, which was just as well, because it seemed she’d soiled herself in the fall.
Grumbling under her breath, she dug through the bin for something intact to wear. She did not relish the notion of roaming these corridors unarmed and unclothed.
By the sheer volume of laundry, this vessel had to be home to hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
But it proved a struggle to find anything in her size.
Ysira was tall, and generous in the hips and chest but not unusually so.
Every blasted item of clothing in this bin seemed made for the likes of Ertagaz—short, narrow, and delicate.
When she finally found pants that fit over her thighs, they barely covered her knees.
Tharanoth and the other gods aside, was everyone on the station like Ertagaz? Perhaps long-lived, as he’d implied, but so very breakable? A slow, vicious smile tugged at the corners of Ysira’s mouth.
She put her helmet back on and searched the area, an unsettling blend of the otherworldly and the ordinary.
For every detail that reminded her of home—tools, clothing, machinery—she encountered several for which she had no name.
She trusted nothing and touched as little as possible, choosing the most familiar, least organic-looking thing available for a weapon: a short, sturdy hammer.
She jogged along the grated floor, tossing it hand to hand, once again marveling at how light and swift she felt.
At the end of the grated walkway, she located a set of doors and, between them, a smooth panel covered in shapes and numbers. Though she recognized the numbering system, she could not discern its purpose. When she tapped a number at random, the panel shifted to show a pictogram of an eye.
She was still trying to make sense of it when the doors scrolled apart.
The woman inside wore a high-collared grey uniform. She looked similar to Ertagaz: a smaller, weaker version of the Zivoran gods. Emerald eyes went wide when she saw Ysira. She stumbled back. Ysira stepped into the tiny, windowless room, and the doors slid shut behind her.
The woman lifted her wrist to her lips, speaking rapidly into a device. “It got out.” She backed into a corner, as far from Ysira as the cramped space would allow. “Repeat, it got out—”
Ysira snatched the device away and pinned the woman to the wall—gently. She couldn’t kill this one just yet.
“Show me how to get to level seventy-four.”
“You c-can’t,” the woman stammered. “Your biometrics aren’t in the system.” Her gaze darted sideways to the panel of numbers.
Ysira pointed at the eye. “What does that mean?”
“I am a servant of the Firstborn Empire. You’ll have to kill me first.” Ysira twisted the woman’s arm behind her back until the shoulder dislocated. She screamed yet still refused to answer. But Ysira had enough information—and the woman’s terror—on which to make an educated guess.
“Hold still.”
Ysira held her by the neck with one hand, steadying her face as she pried open her eyelids.
The woman choked and struggled uselessly with her good arm, left eye wide with horror as Ysira scooped out the right.
The optic nerve tore, insubstantial as a spiderweb.
She put the eyeball in her breast pocket.
Then she slammed the woman against the wall like she’d done to Ertagaz.
Ysira returned to the panel and pressed the number 7, then 4. She held up the eyeball when prompted. The room—the elevator, though this was far different from the docks in Zivora—shot up.
The doors opened on a dark corridor, similar to the one near where Ysira had awoken. She stepped out, clutching the hammer, her every nerve alight and trembling.
She caught the first two men by surprise. They wore uniforms like the one behind her, whose remains still dripped down the walls. One let out a strangled yell. The other lunged. She shoved him. He hit the wall with a crunch and slid bonelessly to the floor.
His fellow stumbled. Before he could reach for a weapon, Ysira swung the hammer at him. It caved in his chest. Stuck there as he gurgled and died. She wrenched the hammer free. Half a ribcage came with it, shredded meat and fabric hanging off the bone.
“Drop it!” screamed a third man, though his face had gone stark white. “On your knees!”
A team of six flooded into the corridor after him, all small and slender with ridged faces and pointed ears.
They pointed short, cylindrical devices at her.
Clearly some sort of weapon. The way they sighted her evoked archers choosing a target.
But where was the projectile? How would it reach her? The man’s confidence gave her pause.
She ran at him anyway. There was a noise like the thrum of a low-pitched instrument.
Something hot and bright struck her in the stomach.
He hadn’t touched her, hadn’t even moved.
But she’d endured far worse than this. She shrugged off four more projectiles—several missed, as if they’d been too slow to sight her—and closed the distance.
Ysira had learned to fight in ankle-deep sand and heavy armor, under a vicious sun, against opponents two at a time and twice her size.
In Zivora, that made her an above-average threat.
Here . . . she moved between opponents moment to moment, breath to breath.
She ducked and wove and spun, throwing them in front of each other’s weapons, shattering bones, not pausing until she reached the other end of the hall.
They hadn’t touched her. They never stood a chance.
Ysira broke the neck of the last man standing—one swift jerk that left his head hanging by scraps of sinew. As her passenger healed the cuts on her hands from his fragmented spine, she picked up his weapon. She quickly deduced how it worked, copying the motions she’d watched the others take.
A second team advanced around the corner. She turned the weapon on them. It proved intuitive. Projectiles of bright yellow light scorched limbs, melted innards. They died screaming, and all Ysira could think was Good.
At the end of the hall, she limped into a vast open area, dragging her left leg as a ragged hole in her thigh knitted shut.
The lights were so bright, she had to squint and shield her eyes.
The area reeked of death—not natural decay but the way a corpse smelled after Ogden had stripped it and scrubbed it with lye.
The stench of something sterile masking irreversible rot.
It stopped her in her tracks. And then . . . She remembered.
Tharanoth hadn’t dwelled on this memory; she hadn’t stayed on this station long before they moved her back to the canyon, but perhaps he’d knocked it loose when he was digging around in her head. Perhaps it was simply the shock of standing there again, eleven years later.
Every citizen of Zivora had asked themselves these questions: Where do the Harvested go? What happens to them? Ysira had long had her suspicions, and she’d already been forced to relive her own fate. But never in a thousand years could she have put words to this—at last, the answer.
It would have broken her to try.
A maze of box-shaped cells, glass walls streaked with dirt and grease.
People riddled with tumors, gasping for air, clutching frozen, blackened appendages.
A man with eight limbs, splayed on the ground like a spider.
A woman slowly roasting beneath a poisonous orange light, the air around her rippling with heat.
Someone who appeared to be growing an exoskeleton, sobbing against the wall of their cage.
A pile of corpses—or was one still breathing?
—melded together and mutilated beyond recognition.
In the cage beside the corpses, a little girl put her hand against the glass.
She was no more than six years old, with a shaved head and a large birthmark on her cheek.
Her empty eye sockets were ragged and bloody, but she appeared to sense Ysira’s presence.
She opened her mouth as if to speak—or to scream—but only a stump remained of her tongue.
Ysira shot the cage. The brilliant gold projectile dissipated into the glass, harmless.
She tried the hammer next, then her fists, beating against the barrier until her muscles trembled and she realized it was futile.
She couldn’t free them. These prisoners had to be held by the highest security measures, because they were her people.
The Harvested. So much stronger than the monsters who kept them there, and rendered helpless all the same.
The girl turned her back on Ysira and sat. Shoulders slumped. Defeated.
Don’t stay, don’t look, you can’t help, find Neri. Ysira dragged herself away, repeating the words in a vain attempt to drown out everything else. Find Neri. Find Neri. Find Neri.