20. JUDGMENT #2
What if she was too late? She began to run. She had to check every cage before she moved on, had to be certain. She found no sign of him. Unless—
Her heart shuddered and skipped a beat. The lone individual outside a cage had been pulled apart to the point they were barely recognizable as human—yet still alive.
Attached to a myriad of tiny silver nodes, they had been made into a web of their own components.
Their eyes, pulled far outside their skull, beheld Ysira with a horror so profound, she could not look away.
Blue eyes. Not Neri’s.
Ysira had bitten through her lip so hard, she tasted blood. She summoned the will to do what she’d have wanted for herself. She turned her weapon on the thing that had been a person and fired at every exposed organ and artery, until horror faded to a silent, final relief.
The next team of soldiers caught her off guard.
Projectiles struck her twice. Three times.
The pain was nothing compared to the blistering rage inside her.
She slaughtered them one by one. When her stolen weapon stopped working and she lost track of the hammer, she used her bare hands.
After a while, she stopped running. It made no difference. They caught her, and she killed them.
Let them see exactly what kind of monster they created.
When there was one man left alive, she bladed her fingers and jammed them into his abdomen, rupturing flesh and connective tissue.
She grabbed a fistful of his intestines while he screamed, and she wrenched.
His eyes rolled back in his head—he was going to black out from pain and blood loss, but no, he needed to stay awake, he needed to look at her while he died and know there was nothing he could do to—
But he was already gone. Ysira drove her fist into his skull again and again, again, until nothing remained but pulp and shattered bone.
Her ears rang. Her vision blurred. It wasn’t enough.
It would never be enough. She could have destroyed an entire world, made a thousand of those uncounted suns go dark, and still it would not be enough.
She was sick inside her helmet. Ripped it off so she could breathe again. On her knees in that pool of blood and sick, a scream tore its way up through her chest. She screamed until her throat was raw, until she could do nothing but sob.
Find Neri. Find Neri. Find Neri.
She staggered to her feet.
Eventually, she found a pointed-eared woman who was unarmed, cowering under a table. Her black hair hung loose around her face, framing terrified rose-quartz eyes, and she wore a smock like Ertagaz’s.
Ysira centered herself, let that red haze recede. Then she dragged the woman out by the shirt.
“Don’t hurt me!” she shrieked. “I’m a researcher, not a soldier. I’m just a scientist—”
“Get up.” Ysira’s voice came out hoarse. “Tell me where you’re keeping the boy.”
“You have no idea what you’re dealing with—” the woman started to say, but Ysira lifted her by the front of her smock and let her flail.
“You people keep saying that,” Ysira snapped. “I think you have it backward. Where is he?”
“They’ve ordered his transfer planetside, back to the Zal Fel base.” The scientist spoke very quickly. “C5-001 is too volatile. There are ten thousand people on this station and if he blows a hole in it we’re all dead.”
“Take me to him.”
Ysira held the scientist by the collar as she led her through the complex.
Ysira’s fingers encircled her neck; it would take little effort to break it.
The scientist seemed all too aware of this.
Trembling, she brought Ysira to a transparent enclosure sequestered from the rest, where a frail, black-haired boy sat on the floor—awake and apparently unharmed.
Neri stood and limped toward them as they approached.
“Release him,” said Ysira.
The scientist complied. The enclosure’s front wall slid away with a hiss, and Neri rushed into the open.
For a terrifying moment, Ysira worried he’d try to embrace her.
Instead, he looked her up and down with frightened, bright red eyes.
She was covered in blood, some still wet, some forming a stiff crust on her clothing.
“What’s going on?” Neri asked. “Where were you? Are you all right? Why—”
“No time.” Ysira seized the scientist as she tried to slink away. “I’m not done with you yet.”
“Please,” she moaned. “I did what you asked.”
Ysira dug her fingers into the woman’s arm with almost enough force to splinter the delicate bones. “You’re in no position to bargain. Show me the way out.”
The scientist bleated on about something Ysira didn’t understand.
An awful noise sounded overhead, a blaring howl that could only be some kind of warning.
The overhead lights flashed, splashing the walls and floor with red, and Ysira’s patience ran out.
She squeezed until the scientist’s humerus was wet gravel and she screamed.
Ysira felt nothing at all. “Show us the way out, or I break every bone in your body one by one.” She grabbed the scientist by the neck and urged her onward. To Neri she said sharply, “Stay close and follow me.”
The boy didn’t move. Those vivid eyes held so much fear as they took in the wounded, sobbing scientist, the gore on Ysira’s clothes, and their alien surroundings.
She made her voice gentler, though no less urgent.
“Neri. These people—I don’t know what they’ve told you, but they mean to hurt you.
They have hurt all of us for hundreds of years.
Their weapons can’t kill me, but they can kill you. And they will.”
“Should I—should I use the demon?” he asked.
“No,” Ysira snapped, harsh enough to wound, but she needed him to listen. “Not unless we have no other choice.” If the scientist was worried about Neri blowing a hole in the station, so was Ysira. She couldn’t afford such an unpredictable variable.
Not yet.
“You let me handle this,” Ysira said. “But we need to go.”
From there they ran, as quickly as Neri’s foot and the scientist’s limited body would allow.
She showed them to a high-ceilinged chamber with six massive gates, each as tall and broad as the front doors of the White Cathedral.
Ysira stomped on the scientist’s ankle so she couldn’t flee, ordered Neri to hide around the corner, and dashed ahead to dispatch scattered resistance.
When the last of them lay dying, a dent in his chest shaped like Ysira’s fist . . . she looked up at Neri. His face was rigid, expression far away.
She hated that he’d had to witness this. He would never be the same again. Ged’s fault, she told herself. Tharanoth’s fault. Another, louder voice echoed over and over in the back of her head: My fault.
She tuned it out. She dragged the scientist across the blood-slick floor, forcing her to hobble on one foot, until they reached the first gate. There, the scientist used another panel to scan her eye. The gate rose without a sound to reveal a strange vessel.
Neri croaked, “Is that a boat?”
It resembled one, if only in the way a cactus resembled a yucca plant. Sleek, pale, and oblong, it had fins like a deepriver fish and no visible deck.
“That will take us back?” Ysira asked the scientist.
“You won’t be able to control the navigator,” she said instead of answering.
Ysira hadn’t the faintest idea what she was talking about. “Then you’re coming along.”
“It’s forbidden to me!” the scientist screamed at her. “I can’t.”
“You’re going to try.” Ysira jabbed her in the small of her back, urging her forward, ignoring the dread that gnawed at her insides.
The craft’s interior was compact, no bigger than Ysira’s bedroom in Ogden’s clinic.
A padded chair sat embedded in the back wall.
At the front—the part resembling a fish’s nose—lay a translucent, crescent-shaped table arrayed with shifting symbols, and beneath it, a closed compartment approximately the length of a human torso. Protruding from its end . . .
A human brain.
In Ogden’s service, Ysira had seen her share of them.
She had removed a few from skulls herself, dissected them and learned their basic anatomy.
This one still pulsed, not dead at all, nerves linked to a glowing bulb atop the crescent, spindly metal rods protruding from the grey matter like a spider’s legs.
“It’s still alive. No. Oh, no—” Neri broke off with a shuddering breath.
Don’t look, Ysira’s subconscious screamed at her. Just use the ship, don’t think about it, don’t look—
“What is it?” Neri demanded of the scientist, with unusual force. He pressed a hand to his head as though plagued by a terrible sound.
“The navigator.” The scientist spoke wearily. “A telepathic consciousness, merged with the ship. It’s necessary to travel through the Source.”
Ysira ripped open the compartment. A man lay there—no, a boy; he couldn’t be much older than Neri—limbs amputated, brain exposed, connected to a latticework of tubes and wires.
His flesh melded with the ship itself. He appeared to be asleep, eyes closed, but Neri clutched his head and mumbled, “No no no . . .”
Nausea churned in Ysira’s gut with unprecedented violence. “You—” Her throat burned. “You Harvest us. For this.”
The scientist reached over and shut the compartment. “Faster-than-light travel is the most valuable resource in the universe.” The look on her face conveyed a simple plea: What else would you have us do? As if this were inevitable, and worse—mundane.
“Tell it to take us home.” Ysira choked down bile. “Back to the Scar.” The scientist stared blankly at her.
“The canyon,” Ysira snapped. “The enormous red mark in the middle of the desert. You can’t miss it.”
The scientist hesitated. But she pressed her palm against a screen beside the brain—the navigator—and entered a series of commands. “Approximate coordinates are set.” She pointed at a red panel in the center of the crescent. “Press here and you’ll eject. Now please let
me go.”
“Not just yet,” said Ysira.