Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

19

While Anlyn guided the Bern ship toward one of the distant structures, Edison repeated his speech one more time, just in case anyone was listening. Anlyn felt soothed by his sonorous voice, even though the words sounded like complete gibberish. Unlike his English, she laughed to herself, which only sounds like half gibberish.

Anlyn had arbitrarily chosen the middle of the three major stations to head toward. Each of them was covered with long docking arms to accept massive ships; as a result, they looked like pincushions with the needles inserted at precise intervals. What really looked odd about the stations, however, was that they all stood perfectly empty.

Anlyn glanced over at Edison as he wrapped up his speech one more time. They waited.

Nothing.

“Do you still think it’s a good idea to explore that station?” Anlyn asked in Drenard.

“Absolutely,” Edison said, replying in kind. He peered through the canopy at the distant structures hanging in the void. “It would’ve been quite the raid if your cousin had left the way open. There’s nothing here to stop us.”

“I’m actually shocked he let us through at all. But you’re right, this has been anti-climactic.” Anlyn paused and pointed to her screen. “Hey, according to these charts, we’re going to pass near a major jump point on the way. There’s at least a dozen of those route lines converging on a few spots, probably where they directed outbound traffic. You think we should stop and look for any trace signatures?”

“I don’t follow,” Edison said.

“Hyperdrive traces,” Anlyn said. She turned to him, reminded once again that her betrothed was a genius, but he hadn’t been exposed to everything. He just seemed so comfortable with space flight—and technology in general—that she found it easy to forget he’d grown up around none of it.

“When you jump through hyperspace,” she explained, “you leave a signature. They fade over time, but if someone jumped out in the last few days, we could possibly get a general idea of where they went.”

“Fascinating,” Edison said. He leaned over the ship’s computer and typed away. His fingers paused for a split second. “I found a help file on it,” he murmured, then went back to typing furiously.

“Great,” Anlyn said. “That means I’m going to be the expert on the subject for another five whole minutes.”

Edison turned his head and flashed his teeth, which made Anlyn laugh. Edison snorted, which really got her going. The two of them chuckled and wheezed far more than the moment merited—perhaps laughing off some of the day’s anxiety. They laughed with tears in their eyes, with a mind to stop laughing and soon. They laughed with the release of trauma, with the energy that probably should’ve found an escape with a good cry. Most of all, though, they laughed to fake it. They laughed for each other.

It took a moment for Anlyn to compose herself, to keep from carrying on like that forever. She took deep breaths, her heart pounding in her back as the sad echoes of their gaiety filtered aft through the empty ship. She wiped her eyes and looked up at Edison, a somber smile on her face.

“Love, what in the galaxy are we doing here?”

“I’m just following you,” Edison said between pants.

“I’m serious. Are we crazy? Are we wasting our time? What were we thinking?”

Edison finally stopped laughing and gazed out at the wasteland of empty starship stations. He took a deep breath, his chest swelling to fill his tunics. “I’d rather be here than around that table, arguing with your people,” he said. “I was always more up for a good raid than a council meeting.” He turned to Anlyn, his face suddenly full of sadness. “Now my brother, he would’ve preferred the other.”

Anlyn felt a chill at the sudden turn in the conversation. She held her breath, torn between her desire to chase the topic and the fear of scaring Edison away—back to his native English. She toyed with the SADAR using the few buttons she had memorized and watched as he began the trace scan on his own screen. Anlyn took advantage of the distraction:

“You hardly ever mention your brother. Why is that?”

Edison fiddled with the dials along the edge of his SADAR. He cleared his throat, and Anlyn braced for a bout of English techno-babble.

“My brother and I didn’t see the universe the same way,” he said.

Edison fell silent; Anlyn turned to face him. She watched him move to his other display and flip through pages of Bern writing. His head went from side to side as he scanned the lines. She held her breath as he read a few pages and made an adjustment to the scan. Finally, the scan having begun, he turned away and looked out his porthole.

“You don’t have to talk about it—” Anlyn said.

“I killed him,” Edison blurted out.

“Love.” Anlyn reached over and ran her fingers through the fur on his arm. Suddenly, she didn’t want him to talk. She didn’t desire to hear, to know. She felt guilty for ever wanting to drag anything out of him before he was ready. “I didn’t mean to bring that up,” she said. “We don’t have to talk about your home—”

“No.” Edison shook his head. “Before that, before the EMP, my brother and I fought in a bunker. Cole and Molly were there and… and I killed a member of the council with my bare hands. Then I left my brother in there. I left him in that bunker to die, knowing what I was about to do.”

Edison turned and faced Anlyn, tears streaming across his fur.

“I hated him,” he said. “I hated my brother, but exterminating my entire people was easy compared to that—” He stopped, too choked up to continue.

Anlyn reached for him; she wrapped both arms around his head and cooed softly. In the back of her neck, her heart stabbed with pain, hurting at having brought the subject up. Or maybe—at hearing him say the same things in her own language that she’d been used to puzzling through in his rigid English.

“I love you,” she said in the common, Drenard form.

“And I you,” Edison replied.

So they held each other, floating beyond the Great Rift on the Bern side of the universe, Edison with his head snuggled against her tunics, Anlyn with her cheek resting on his fur. They stayed like that for several minutes, precisely the length of time it took the Bern computer to crunch the hyperspace signatures.

And thereby destroy the mood.

20

Walter slapped his flightsuit, thumping the Wadi on its head, but the stupid thing just continued to squirm in his pocket. He reached the end of the alley and rounded the corner, having decided to try the building with the thick door first, mostly to stick to the same order as before. Unlike other Palans, he liked order.

As he reached the wooden sidewalk, he merged with a weaving stream of boisterous and drunk nighttime people. He stuck close to the side of the building, wincing at the sound of the traffic blaring in the street.

Just ahead, he spotted a wallet bulging in a back pocket, the badge of a tourist. He scooted forward, drying his hands on his flightsuit, before he remembered what he was supposed to be doing:

He was looking for Molly.

He shook his head, turned, and surveyed the building next to him.

It was lit up inside, but he didn’t see an open or closed sign. He cupped his hands around his face and leaned close, trying to look past the glare of light bouncing back and forth between the glass and his face. The interior seemed shallow, just a bit of standing room and a tall counter that ran the width of the building. Two large Humans worked behind the counter moving boxes and doing boring, officey stuff.

Walter stepped back to look for a sign on the building. The only thing he found was a single line etched into the large pane of glass:

That narrowed it down. Walter knew how Molly felt about politics, no way would she have followed Cat in there. Besides, hadn’t that ticket guy said something about a pub?

He turned and squeezed through the crowd, passing the dark alley to see what the other building was. The first thing he noticed was all the neon lights in the windows, the glowing tubes bent into the shapes of frothy mugs and gigantic bottles. Definitely a pub.

A cluster of figures stumbled out the front door—Humans and otherwise—somehow staying upright by clinging to their fellow drunks. Walter frowned at them. He waited for the group to pass before ducking through the entrance and into a small foyer, where he found a second set of double-doors. These were slathered with posters for upcoming events and hand-scrawled pages put up by people selling things. A half-dozen flash drives dangled from the ends of the latter, no doubt loaded with product pictures and info. Walter considered stealing a few—he knew how to wipe and unlock them for general use—then remembered he had an entire sock drawer full of them on Parsona.

He thumped the Wadi one more time before pushing the doors open and stepping into the pub. The blatting traffic and yelling from outside were immediately replaced with a smoky, clamorous din that somehow managed to be worse. A wall of large shouting aliens—Humans mostly—crowded a bar running the length of one wall. The rest of the place was filled with small tables surrounded by clusters of mismatched chairs, but nobody seemed to be sitting in them. Much of the furniture had been pushed aside to create a clearing where another raucous crowd stood in a vibrating mass. Pushing and yelling, holding their beers aloft and splashing their neighbors, it looked like a bunch of Palan pirates gambling on a game of Rats.

Walter stepped closer, trying to peek between the forest of legs, but they were too dense. He went to one of the tables instead and pushed aside the collection of empties and smoldering ashtrays. Using one of the chairs, he stepped to the top of the table and took a quick look at the center of the group, trying to sate his curiosity quickly before one of the barmaids told him to get down.

It was a fight. A big man was beating on a little one, the latter’s face so covered in blue blood he couldn’t even make out its race. He tried to remember how many species bled blue as the little one’s head whipped around from a heavy blow, the crack of bone-on-bone coming just before another roar from the crowd. Long hair flew out in an arc, blonde with streaks of light blue.

Walter recognized the hair, the only thing he’d noticed from the stupid show. The little person was the woman they were after! And she was getting her ass kicked.

Walter looked around for Molly, wondering where she had gotten off to. He jumped down from the table and started for the bar, saw the thick wall of patrons there and stopped. He turned back to the fight, not knowing what to do.

The Wadi clawed him through his secret pocket, tiny claws jabbing into his flesh, the stinging pinpricks spreading as the creature’s toxins coursed through his veins.

Walter thumped the thing on the head and fought to come up with a plan. He cursed Molly for disappearing whenever he seemed to really need her.

The man standing over Molly yelled across the room to the others. “Hey boss? I think she is local. Been voting as if, anyway.”

The man with the beard strolled over and checked a small screen. Molly groaned at him, pleading in her head for them to remove the foul rag. She gagged again and started coughing, her cheeks puffing against the tape and cloth.

“Hmmm. Pretty good cyclid count. Either she was born here, or she’s been on-planet a while.” He looked up at the larger man. “Good work. Take it all and label it Bekkie for now.”

“Thanks, boss.” The brute looked down at Molly and winked, as if this were good news for both of them. “Five liters,” he said to himself. “That’s a buck seventy ounces at eight thousand an ounce.”

“Divided by two!” the other guy yelled.

The man frowned and glowered at the speaker. After a moment, he smiled again. “Still, I can’t even do the math, which means a good night. A very good night.”

He whistled to himself and picked up a needle from the tray before inspecting it. Molly raised her head and yelled into the blood-soaked rag; she banged the back of her skull against the metal table and flexed her biceps as hard as she could against the restraints.

“Ah, there’s our vein,” the guy said. He slapped her arm with a flat palm. Molly looked down at her elbow as he brought the needle close. She tried moving it side to side to avoid the plunge, but the man just tightened his grip, causing the purple web beneath her skin to stand out even more.

He shoved the needle into the biggest of them.

Molly felt a burning sensation up and down her arm. She groaned as blood squirted out the back of the needle and splashed against the man’s apron.

“Damn!” He fumbled with a valve at the end of the needle and got it closed; Molly fought to not pass out. She watched him place several strips of tape across the inserted device before untangling coils of clear tubing and hanging empty bags from the side of the table.

Across the room, the other two men chuckled at something, making the scene too bizarre for Molly to comprehend. The laughter and horror didn’t mix, they just wrapped around each other, swirling like oil and water.

A distant voice called out amid the laughter: “Hey Paulie, anything you spill is coming out of your cut!”

And that really got them going.

21

Anlyn pulled out of Edison’s embrace as the hyperdrive traces flared up on the nav screen. She tapped him on the shoulder and pointed. Edison glanced at her screen and grunted at the results.

“We just missed them!” Anlyn said.

Edison brought up a different display on his own screen and typed something on the keyboard. The info showed on Anlyn’s as well, but she couldn’t read any of the numbers. Still, she didn’t have to know what they said. The intensity of the signatures was more than enough.

“This is impossible,” Anlyn said. “You don’t see traces like this except for right after someone jumps. These are too fresh to be—”

“They’re a week old,” Edison said.

“No, love, these are brand new.” She hit the zoom button, bringing the scope out. The traces were spread throughout the entire system. Hundreds of them. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“The computer says they’re a week old, and it has a destination.”

“A destination? They all go to the same place?”

Edison grunted. “You’re right. This doesn’t make any sense.”

“What? Where do they lead?” She hated not being able to read the screen, relying on just the raw images.

Edison flipped over to the nav chart, pulling it up on both screens. He zoomed in on a single point.

“Here,” he said.

Anlyn couldn’t read the name under the object, but she recognized the symbol from Bern charts. It was a star. A class V star.

“They jumped into a star? So the traces are blowback.” Anlyn shook her head. “That explains the strength and age. Maybe they are a week old. But still, why would they… why jump into a star?”

“I’m not a big fan of the prophecy,” Edison said. “You know that. But I also don’t like coincidences. Do you think—?”

“That the Bern are gone? Mass suicide? No. Only because I’ve learned to not jump to my favorite conclusions.”

“Give me an alternative.”

“Okay…” Anlyn thought for a moment. “They scuttled their ships before moving off, keeping them out of our hands.”

Edison frowned.

“Or they… maybe it was a waste-disposal program.”

“Only if they were disposing themselves of ships. A dozen of these signatures come up as the same class and model as this one.”

“Maybe there’s a rift in the center of that star!”

Edison shook his head. “Wouldn’t work. The mass in the star would just leak out to the other side. No, I think they did it on purpose. Maybe they figured out some way to slingshot past your barrier. They could be attacking Drenard right now.”

“Don’t say that. And we were on Drenard a week ago. I—should we still go explore one of these stations, or should we jump along a few trade routes until we bump into someone? There’s a ton of settled worlds on this map.”

“What about jumping after them?” Edison asked.

“What? Jump into the center of that star? Have you melted your mind?”

“It was just a suggestion,” Edison said. “Then again, think about it, think about where we are. This is the front line of the Bern-Drenard war. We’re standing in the trenches of the most important standoff in your history. Do you really think they just left? Or that they killed themselves? I think it’s more likely they aren’t here because the front has moved elsewhere.”

“I know you hate it when I say this, but I don’t understand. Even without the English.”

Edison blew out his breath, then sucked in another deep one. “At almost the exact instant your Circle voted to change a tactic that has been in place for thousands and thousands of years, the moment they decided to move out of their arm of the Milky Way, the Bern disappear? Like I said, I loathe coincidences more than I hate prophecies.”

“More?” Anlyn asked, doubting him.

“Absolutely. A prophecy might be nothing more than a prediction, or a well-reasoned theory with flowery language. A major coincidence like this? I just don’t buy it.”

“What they did, if these scans are correct, it seems suicidal,” Anlyn said. “Desperate. Like something we should be celebrating instead of getting worried about.” Anlyn looked from the screens to the orbital base they had been approaching. “I say we go check out that station, maybe broadcast our message a few more times.”

Edison lowered his brows, peering at the distant station. Eventually, he nodded. “That seems logical. Still, something tells me we should follow them, but perhaps there is more to that than just jumping to a precise spot. A modification of some sort…”

“Exactly,” Anlyn said, not enjoying his line of reasoning. She turned to one of the stations and increased thrust. Edison adjusted the SADAR for her so she could see any major debris in the way. But no matter how much he played with the gain, the SADAR remained dominated by the hyperdrive traces: bright, big blooms of pixilated energy.

They were like the ghosts of something fierce, haunting the dark closet Anlyn had been taught to fear her entire life. But now, having stepped through that mystical and lore-filled door, she had found the closet to be perfectly empty, a prospect somehow worse.

As they approached one of the traces, she felt her cold side dominating. The absence of the bad men—not knowing where they were right then—was far more powerful than their presence. It was as if they could be around any corner, or off doing worse things than merely lurking in her imagination.

Anlyn found herself holding her breath as she flew through the hyperdrive trace, a hollow feeling in her chest matching the ghostlike apparitions hanging in the void. As she pierced the image, she thought about what would drive someone to jump into the center of a star, and the fear she had felt when Edison had hinted at doing just that.

22

At first, the attackers were nothing more than extra blurs below, mere background noise in the bizarre world in which Cole had found himself. It wasn’t until objects on the deck fell still—as dead bodies are wont to do—that Cole realized something was amiss.

Out of a blur, a body appeared on the deck, its limbs at odd angles, a large pool of blood popping into existence with incredible speed.

The fur-clad guards at the base of the platform stomped up the steps, and Cole wondered for a moment if his jailors were about to become his protectors. He looked to Byrne, expecting some words of wisdom or advice.

“Kill the One!” Byrne barked to the men.

Cole rose from his seat and backed away. “Wait!” he said.

Two of the men pulled out long wooden handles and wielded them as if they contained blades. After seeing what had happened to Riggs’s leg, Cole didn’t feel like testing the illusion.

One of the men lunged forward, raising his arms. Cold grabbed his metal chair; he spun and slung it at the man’s face.

It flew right at the man, turning once in the air—and then it split in two, falling to either side and past the guy. Cole glanced at the ten meter drop to the deck—a height like a three-story building—and took another step back. Two of the men circled toward the other side of the mast, trying to get behind him.

Cole turned and moved toward the rear of the pedestal, hoping to put the large, flat tower between him and his attackers. One of the fur-shrouded figures yelled for him to stop—or yelled to the others to stop him. As Cole backed away, the man’s scream plummeted through several octaves and seemed to draw out forever. He also noticed the blurs moving across the deck below had turned into statues, and the men running after him on the pedestal seemed to swim through molasses.

Still—they slowly gained, and Cole could sense they would soon pierce whatever barrier he had stepped through and be upon him with their swords. With no place to run, the decision to jump no longer seemed like a decision at all. Cole moved to the edge of the pedestal and nearly lost his balance as it twitched beneath his feet. He knelt down, grabbed the lip, and lowered himself over the edge to minimize the fall. Holding on by his fingertips, he had a brief pang of doubt before letting go.

He kept his body spread out across the smooth metal surface, hoping the friction from his flightsuit would slow the fall. It worked better than it should have, as he almost seemed to float to the ground, sliding through the air as if it were fluid. When he hit the deck, however, his knees still buckled from the height of the fall. Cole rolled with the impact, pushed up into a crouch, and looked around, wondering where to run to, which small metal building to hide inside of, when the men from above came raining down around him with uncanny slowness.

Cole dashed between two of them before they could get to their feet, and several other fighters across the deck noticed him. One of them pointed, and the rest gave chase. Cole sprinted into one of the alleys created by the squat structures, angling toward the port side of the deck. As he got away from the mast, everyone started to move at the same rate of time again—and most of them in his direction.

Fleeing through the haphazard twists and turns of the tight alleys reminded Cole of his nefarious Portuguese childhood. He felt right at home as he changed directions repeatedly, snaking his way aft.

Skirting the wide clearing from earlier, he tried to get his bearings, to locate the room they’d kept him and Riggs in. Several times, he found himself dodging hellish scenes of gore littered across the deck. Dead bodies—some clad in so much fur they looked like roadkill—lay in hacked up pieces amid large pools of blood. They weren’t the only dead; the other figures that had shown up lay here and there in white combat gear turned grisly shades of pink by the time Cole ran past.

When he came to a wider area with less cover, Cole glanced back to find several pursuers gaining on him. He looked ahead again just in time to dodge around another puddle of death; he ran past the nastiness while searching for an alley to dodge down.

Checking over his shoulder, Cole saw that two pursuers had attempted to cut him off. They slipped in the puddle of gore and fell, covered in blood. Cole darted behind one of the low buildings, then changed direction and ran directly aft, hopefully keeping the building between himself and those chasing after. Once he crossed the open area, he ran around the next shack and hugged the back, pausing to catch his breath. He knew he couldn’t keep up such a pace forever, especially not with his heart and adrenaline going full-bore.

He slowly made his way to the far side of the small shack, sucking in deep gulps of oxygen as he went. When he got to the corner, he peeked around and saw a cluster of men running toward an adjacent structure; they were following along in the last direction they’d seen him running. Cole looked forward, toward the bow of the moving village, and didn’t see any threats heading his way. He did, however, notice something familiar. The tall mast—the size of it from that distance and the buildings blocking the view of its base—it all looked identical to the first time he’d noticed it. He had to be close to the room he and Riggs had been held in.

Cole pressed his ear to the wall next to him. Nothing. But if Riggs was dead from his wounds, that’s exactly what he’d expect. And anyway, with the way people were blurred into motion while he was with Byrne—there was no telling how much time had passed during their conversation. Perhaps they’d already disposed of his body, or taken him someplace else.

He considered all these possibilities as he made his way around the side of the building. Shouts could be heard in the distance, growing closer. Cole stole around to the front of the small structure and pulled open the door he found there.

Bingo.

He immediately recognized the inclined racks with their dangling restraints, even though they seemed to have been rearranged. What’s more, he knew that tangy scent of blood, a hint of which remained in the air. He looked to the floor for signs of it, expecting to find a wide streak heading toward the drain along with dotted trails spurting off in one direction, but they had already cleaned it up. There was no sign of Riggs. Not even a part of him.

Cole turned to leave. Surely they would eventually look for him in the only room he’d been inside of. He wondered which direction he should head: aft into the unknown, or forward and toward the Firehawk. He was about to set foot outside and let fate decide for him, when loud footsteps began approaching from the side of the shack. Cole jumped back into the room and shut the door as quickly and quietly as he could.

The thunder of several running men passed, and a sense of panic crept up in Cole’s chest. What good is running? He thought. Where would I go?

The severity of his situation began to sink in: he was trapped in hyperspace with a collection of ancient Earth bandits, and the things Byrne had told him about the universe—the utter scale of time and space and destruction—it made all his petty concerns of self-preservation seem ridiculously small. Temporary, at best. The sane course of action, he began to suspect, had been to stay put. He should probably just step out with his hands up and turn himself in.

The sound of someone running up to the door ended that internal debate. The natural tendency to run—to protect himself—surged through his body, surfing a second wave of adrenaline. Cole grabbed the door handle and held it tight just as someone outside tried to operate it.

The bar twisted in his hands. He tried to grip it hard enough to make it seem locked, but it moved just enough—with the tension of tendons rather than steel—that he knew the person outside wouldn’t be fooled.

“Hey!”

The shout came through the door muffled but audible. Something thumped against the door, a hand or a lowered shoulder.

Again, with a dull thump.

Cole listened to two more before getting the timing down. He turned the handle the other direction, using the man’s pressure against him, and pulled the door open right before the next blow came.

A fur-clad man stumbled inside, waving his arms for balance. Cole kicked the side of one knee to help the figure go down faster. The man let out an agonized roar and fell, clutching his leg. Cole jumped on him immediately, the metallic taste of awful necessity rising up in his throat as he pictured himself killing this man with his bare hands.

He jumped for the guy’s back, hoping to strangle him from behind, but the man rolled out of the way and Cole ended up clutching his chest instead. He pulled himself on top of the figure; the man writhed in agony and kept trying to grab at the leg Cole had kicked.

Cole threw one of his own legs over the guy, straddling his waist. He kept his knees wide so the man on the bottom couldn’t buck him off, locked his heels under the figure’s legs to keep him from rolling over, and reached for his neck.

Ignoring the weak efforts to fend him off, Cole worked his hands past the fur, groping for raw flesh. The man’s goggles—his face swaddled and obscured—made the job easier. They allowed him to forget what he was trying to do; he could simply pretend there wasn’t a human inside.

Digging his thumbs into the soft depression below the Adam’s apple, Cole squeezed as hard as he could against the main arteries, pulling both hands toward each other with his thumbs.

He thought clinical thoughts. This was just a task. Something that needed doing.

The man grabbed Cole’s wrists, but he didn’t have the leverage to do anything about the stranglehold. His hands just remained encircled there, gloveless and young-looking.

A weak croak, muffled by the fur, escaped the man’s mouth. Cole turned away from the sight of what he was doing. The man tried to say something; Cole dug his thumbs into the trachea, not wanting to hear. It sounded like the man was going into shock, complaining about how cold he was even with all that fur around him.

Cole concentrated on nothing but the throbbing against his palm as he waited for the life to eke out of the man’s body. He focused on the pulse, distracting himself with something mechanical. As it became difficult to distinguish the man’s raging heartbeat from his own, Cole knew the end was coming. The man’s hands loosened their grip around his wrists and fell away, his elbows striking the metal decking. Both hands remained there for a moment—empty, but still shaped as if to grasp something. Finally, they too sagged to the floor, slowly like something inside still provided resistance.

Cole maintained a tight grip, knowing that he would pretend to go out in the same circumstance, lashing out as soon as his attacker pulled away. He waited until the muscles in his arms burned and his knuckles ached—only then did he take his hands away, his stomach churning with disgust.

A few flakes of snow drifted in through the open door behind him. Cole turned and realized how brazen and exhibitionist the murder had been. Reaching out, he threw the door shut with a metallic bang, dropping the room into complete darkness. He pushed his goggles up to his brow and surveyed his victim in the light filtered through the semi-transparent ceiling. He knew what he needed to do to delay his capture.

He pulled the boots off first, and then the man’s fur jacket. He hesitated a moment before stripping the jerkins from his legs—more out of respect than embarrassment—then proceeded to loosen them up and tug them off as well.

The man’s body offered quite a bit of resistance, the heaviness of death forcing Cole to struggle with the pants. As they came free, he noticed the legs were slathered in a purple mess, like a war-paint of some sort. Setting the clothing aside, he reached for the strips of fur around the man’s face, having saved that for last. He hated to look, but he needed to see what he was doing in order to untangle the covering.

He lifted the man’s head to unravel the continuous strip of fur. After the first wrap came away, he saw that the goggles were on top of the rest, the rubbery strap helping to hold it all in place. He pulled the goggles off and made the mistake of looking at the man’s eyes. They stood open, tear-tracks of pain running back from the corners.

Cole tucked the goggles into one of the jacket pockets and looked away from the accusatory glare. Even with nothing of the man’s face visible but those eyes, he couldn’t take the sight. He worked blindly, staring down the man’s body, gritting his teeth with the nastiness and intimacy of the task. As he untangled the head covering, he tried to lose himself in the bands of purple paint encircling the man’s thighs. He wondered what their significance was. He unraveled more fur, one hand looping behind the man’s neck, and he suddenly became even more fixated on the colorful bands of paint. There was a pink line wrapping around each, right above the man’s knees and barely visible through the purple stain.

Something stabbed Cole in the chest before he was fully aware of it on a conscious level—the primitive part of him outpacing his frontal lobe and reaching the awful truth first.

Flashes of terrible awareness strobed through his brain: an image of the man clutching at his leg; him thinking to look for Cole in that awful room; even what he had been trying to say right before he died. The man wasn’t complaining of the cold, he had been saying a name, over and over.

All these things occurred to Cole at once, jumbled and overlapping. In a split second, he knew. He knew before he looked back to the man’s face just why those frozen, tear-streaked eyes had bored into him so.

Holding the last of the rags, he turned to face the man he had just killed with his bare hands. He turned and begged the universe that he might be wrong. He didn’t want to be right. He could feel the world swallowing him up if he was…

And he was.

23

Walter snuck up behind the circle of men, stooping down to see between their legs. It was like an orchard of poorly dressed stumps shifting to and fro. He squeezed past the outer layer, trying his best to ignore the easy pickings in such a melee—wallets and jewelry ripe and ready for harvest, begging to be plucked.

He shook his head and waited for a shift in the crowd to create an opening, then he surged forward, getting out of the way again before they crashed back into each other. The rowdy men seemed to sway with the sounds of the beating ahead, loosening up as they groaned, their arms flying in the air, then packing back in as they waited for the next blow.

Taking his time, getting a sense of the flow of the action, Walter gradually made his way to the inner edge of the circle, nearly on his knees he was stooping so low. He finally got a good look at the participants, just as the fight seemed to reach its conclusion. The lady Callite from the bubble—the one who had made the flood-awful sounds—was lying on the floor, a bloody mess. A large man stood over her, waving his hands to the crowd.

“No more!” someone yelled.

“C’mon, she’s had enough!” screamed another.

The lady hollered something herself, flecks of blue foam spitting out of her mouth. Walter stared at her—amazed she was still conscious after bleeding so much—and tried to read her lips.

“More,” it looked like she was saying. She waved at the man above her and tried to sit up. “More!” she groaned.

The crowd quieted down, sensing the show was over. The man above her shook his head. “That’s plenty, Cat. You don’t pay me enough for this.”

Her head fell back to the floor as she struggled for something in her pocket. Walter watched intently, wanting to end the spectacle, wanting to help her, but not knowing why.

The man bent down and took something from her: a roll of money. He flicked through it, dropped a few pieces on her stomach, then stepped away. The lady curled her fist around the change and seemed to go limp.

The crowd dispersed—their tribal rumbles transforming into chairs scraping across the ground, hollered drink orders, and the crash of glass on glass in trashcans. Walter hurried over to the lady, compelled by the sight of her blood-covered form. He suddenly thought of his mother, but shook the memory away as he crept to the lady’s side.

Her face was a mess, covered in blood the color of deep water. One of her eyelids cracked open; a bright eye swiveled around to study him—

Walter ran off, dashing to one of the tables. He grabbed a fistful of paper napkins, ignoring the men yelling insults at him, telling him to just leave her alone. He hurried back, falling to his knees and reaching out to dab her wounds.

“Flank off!” she yelled at him, knocking him back with incredible force.

Walter hissed in alarm and felt the Wadi go nuts in the pocket by his stomach. He moved close enough to the woman to talk, but stayed out of arm’s reach.

“I’m Walter,” he said.

The lady looked at him, her brown, scaly face covered with a film of blood, both of her eyes nearly swollen shut. “You’re scrawny,” she said.

Walter looked down at himself. “Leasst I’m in one piecse.”

“If you’s bigger, I’d ask you ta kick me,” the woman said. She gave him one last appraising look, then allowed her battered head to settle back to the floor. She closed her eyes and ran a forked tongue over her busted lip.

“Leave her alone,” a guy behind Walter said. Walter turned around to find a table had been scooted nearby; several men lounged around it, working on fresh, foamy drinks. “She’ll be fine, little man. Best you can do is leave her be. Sammie will clean up the mess.”

Walter ignored the guy and turned back to Cat. “We’ve been looking for you for two weekss,” he told the lady.

“I’d congratulate ya, but I ain’t been hiding.” Her eyes remained closed as she spoke. “Now scram, or go buy me a beating.”

Walter felt for his wad of cash, all the money he’d lifted since they got to Bekkie. He unzipped his loot pocket, inserted his hand—and regretted it immediately. The Wadi inside bit him, sending toxins through his knuckles. He grabbed it around the belly, the sensation of its soft flesh between his fingers reminding him of the one he’d crushed on Drenard. He considered repeating that feat, becoming twice the Drenard he currently was, but remembered what he’d reached in his pocket for. He yanked his hand out and strips of confetti followed—all that was left of the bills he’d stolen from the locals.

“Sstupid lizsard!” he yelled, zipping his pocket closed. He sucked on his burning knuckle, which just made his tongue sting. He looked down at the lady, who had one eye as open as it could get.

“Palan, huh?”

Walter nodded. He pulled his finger out of his mouth. “And proud of it,” he boasted.

“Grab us some chairs,” the lady said. She grumbled to herself: “I hardly made enough tonight to feel it.”

Walter had to go almost to the other side of the bar to find two unoccupied seats. He dragged them back, drawing glares from other patrons as they screeched across the floor. He almost expected the woman to be gone by the time he returned, but she was just sitting up.

“You with a sadist club?” she asked Walter, as he helped her into a chair. “Cause I still do those meetings for a fee.”

“I don’t think sso,” Walter answered, picking up the napkins and holding them out to her. He felt happy when she accepted them. There was something about the woman he couldn’t quite place; he’d seen a lot of bizarre alien stuff in his time, but nothing quite like her. “Why do you do this?” he asked.

The Callite leaned back in her chair. She looked him up and down as she wiped two kinds of blood off her hands. Somehow, having sat up, the swelling around her eyes didn’t look quite as bad as it had before.

“You’re too young to get it,” she finally said. “Now, you wanting an autograph, or you got a paying gig?”

“I… we—” Walter looked around, expecting Molly to walk in at any moment; he wondered where in hyperspace she’d gone to. “My friend Molly hass been trying to find you. Ssomething about fussion fu—”

A sticky hand latched onto his mouth faster than a Wadi firing from a hole in a cliff. Walter looked down his nose at it; he peered across the brown arm it was attached to, tracing it up to the very stern and blood-streaked face. There was no doubt about it: the swelling around the lady’s eyes had gone down a lot. He watched them dart from side to side before boring right through his skull.

“Who’re you with?” she asked.

Walter mumbled into her palm.

“Softly, now,” Cat said, pulling her hand away.

“Molly Fyde,” he whispered, looking around.

“That’s crap,” the woman said. “How do you even know that name?”

Walter pointed to his flightsuit, at his name scrawled across his left breast. “I’m crew on the sstarsship Parssona,” he hissed. “I’m the ssupply officser!”

The hand returned, grabbing Walter’s collar and pulling him out of the seat, hauling him close to the lady’s face—which, now that he was up-close, really seemed to be in not that bad of shape, to be honest.

“Where’s the ship?” the lady demanded. “And where’s Molly?”

Walter swallowed. Or tried to.

“I don’t know,” he whispered.

24

Cole cradled Riggs in his arms and sobbed. He held his old friend’s neck, pressed Riggs’s face up against his own, and cried as hard as he ever had. His body shook from the effort. Snot, saliva, and salt mixed on his lips as his moans turned into screams—mad, inhuman sounds that barely registered in his ears as his own voice.

He wanted to pound his friend’s chest. He wanted to rip his own open. He wanted to claw out his heart and pack snow inside. Anything to fill the gaping, burning, crushing void he’d created there.

Deep down, something yelled at him to undo it, to bring his friend back. It wrestled aside the angry beast that had taken him over, giving him instructions on CPR, telling him it wasn’t too late. But before he could think to begin, the door burst open, filling the room with harsh light and forcing him to bring his goggles back down.

Cole turned and saw that his inhuman screams had summoned men dressed up as animals. And something odd seized him. That beast within took over, and Cole fell into a dream-like state untouched by time, a nightmare of slow and fast in which he was but a passenger riding along inside someone else’s skull. He felt a body around him, but it wasn’t his. That body jumped up, taking him along with it, elevating his view. He watched the body’s fists fly at a face.

You aren’t supposed to punch that hard, he felt like telling the body, but the arms kept going straight out, impacting a skull, trying to punch straight through it.

Blood splattered and leaked out from between the strips of fur covering the man’s face; Cole watched the mangled hand hit again, knowing it was broken. Not knowing it was his.

The other man swung his arms as if he held an invisible bat. The person Cole occupied—whose brain he resided in—seemed to jump back reflexively. The torso of the man with the bleeding face flew apart, his insides spilling out like red ropes soaked in oil.

The nightmare slowed down even further as the opened man collapsed, and Cole’s bodily vehicle slipped in the mess. The man with the invisible bat swung again, his black goggles seeming to pop with rage.

Cole felt himself duck inside the skull, willing the man he was occupying to get low. They crashed down as one, and the invisible blade made a noise above. He watched as two arms—arms he should recognize as his own—scrambled ahead, swimming through the blood and mess on the decking, trying to reach the dangerous man with the invisible blade.

The broken hand reached out and clutched the opened man’s torso, grabbing his lifeless furs and pulling forward. Somehow, Cole could feel the vehicle’s legs pushing and slipping in the blood; they propelled the scene ahead, lurching for the man with the goggles whose brow hinted at wild, unseen eyes.

A hand grabbed the swordsman’s thigh. Cole watched, completely detached, as it yanked the man down, the slick blood assisting as it spread out beneath them. The man’s arms wind-milled, swinging for balance. He landed in a heap, then brought the invisible blade up, preparing to swing. Cole watched other hands—hands he barely recognized as his own—grab the man’s arms and wrestle them down. He admired the way the good hand pinned the man’s wrist while the mangled hand went to work on his face. That hand was no good as anything but a club, anyway. He wondered what it would feel like to own a hand destroyed like that. What the sensation might be like to ball crushed bone into something resembling a fist and throw it, as hard as one could, into a solid thing. Over and over.

He wondered how that would feel, because he couldn’t know. He watched the scene for a little while, the horror slowly speeding up to real-time before he grew bored of it. The striking stopped.

Cole couldn’t even tell what the hand had been hitting. Below him lay a red mess, the orb of one eye dangling from a bundle of nerves. It hung out of something misshapen and leaking. And what had been a crushed hand, now looked like ground-up meat. Splinters of white bone stuck out where knuckles once were, all of it dripping with blood.

The person he was riding inside staggered to its feet, legs wobbly and shaking. It moved toward the light, toward the rectangle of air filled with sparkling flakes that rode on the wind. Unable to do anything but watch, Cole rode along as the person left the small room, taking him out as well, out into a world full of silent fighting.

Men were everywhere, men and aliens, fighting in clusters. It all had the sloppiness of a dream as people split in two and some seemed to disappear altogether. Cole watched the legs beneath him march away from it all, moving toward the edge of the deck where more light and sparks of whiteness—miniature angels—danced and beckoned, offering a calm, seductive reprieve.

When several men came running after him, after the body he was in, Cole hardly noticed the legs beneath him begin to kick. To Run. He jounced around inside the skull—confused trapped and alone—riding along and screaming for everything to stop.

The men gave chase, swishing the air with nothingness. Cole could only see them when the head he was huddled inside turned around. Mostly, though, it looked forward, giving him a view of the approaching rail. But he was more concerned about the men, having seen what those blades could do. The body ran—the railing was so near—yet the legs beneath him continued to churn across the frosted deck.

He felt trapped, a little creature in someone’s head. He imagined his tiny arms and legs stretched out, pressing on the walls of the skull, straining to hold himself in place. He wanted to steer away from the rail, away from the edge of the metal deck, but the thing he rode inside sprinted on. He could feel the blades whiz behind him as they threaten to spill him out of the skull and onto the decking.

The body hit the rail at full speed. It bent in half at the waist, tumbling over. The head holding Cole became inverted. He had a brief glimpse of the snowy ground rushing past—far, far below. He grabbed at the controls for the arms, urging them to do his bidding. The nightmare slowed, proceeding at a crawl, each moment drip, drip, dripping.

Then: a hand gripping. Gripping the rail. Both hands now, clutching the metal bar, stopping his plummet. One of them was whole, the other a disgusting mess. Above, several men gathered, their pants and gasps puffing out like smoke. They looked down over the rail, black goggles wrapped with fur. Cole watched from his prison as they scrambled for the arms, trying to pull the body back into the nightmare.

The view turned, forcing Cole to look back down at the ground, at the inhospitable wasteland of snow racing by. When the view returned to the rail, the hands were leaving the arms, one man pushing the others away.

Cole recognized him, recognized the blonde hair and small goggles.

Joshua.

Joshua smiled, almost as if he could see Cole through the goggles, could see inside the body’s skull where he was cowering, confused and afraid.

Joshua held something over the rail: a wooden stick, hanging from another wooden stick.

Cole froze. He leaned closer to the inside of the body’s eyes; he pressed his palms against the pupils and peered out, staring at the familiar device.

Joshua swung the invisible thread right at him—right at the skull he’d receded into. Cole screamed at the hands to let go, at the arms to come up and block the blow.

The good arm still had enough fear in it to obey, but the mangled one did not. One hand let go, coming up in front of the skull to protect him; the ruined hand somehow kept its grip. Cole braced himself as the body he was in rotated on the single grasp of that bloody, pulped hand. He watched as the invisible thread flew past, seeming to miss everything.

But then, he started falling away. He fell into the sinking embrace of open air even though one arm remained fastened to the rail—remained there, frozen in the shape of a claw.

Cole stared at it from within the head, watched it slide away from the body along a neat line of red separation.

My body, Cole thought.

This is me.

That arm, still grasping the railing, he finally understood it to be a part of him. He came to the realization moments after it was no longer true.

His good arm waved in the wisps of snow, but he focused on the other one. He watched the dismembered limb as he fell away from it, watched it remain up high, dripping blood through the whizzing white. The arm became smaller, a tiny piece of meat stuck to the side of the ship, as he fell away, down to the snowy drifts below.

Air roared past his ears. Accelerating. Stomach rising with the speed. He landed with a pained crunch, a thump of lifeless heft. His body smashed through the hard, frozen exterior of the snow and drove down, deep down into the soft wetness.

The cold seeped into his bones immediately. Cole lifted his head. He pushed up with one arm to get his face out of the moisture, away from the tight hole he’d created. He wiggled back and forth, yelling at the pain and horror of it all, the frustration of not being able to move, of being wrapped in the freezing embrace.

His right arm came free. He looked down at it, saw how the limb ended in the middle of his bicep. Blood arced out in spurts, melting red canyons into the wall of white before him.

Cole fought to free his other hand from the clutches of the packed snow. He yelled and yanked it free, grabbed a handful of snow and pushed it against the wound. The raw, exposed nerves burned with pain beyond compare. He could hear himself screaming, could feel the white world around him growing dark. He struggled against the dying sensation, kicked at the brutality of it all, shook with rage at the approaching blackness squeezing in around him…

Cole collapsed forward. His eyes rolled up behind his lids, and his face fell into the cold and wet.

25

A cylindrical column of blood marched out of Molly’s arm and snaked through the twisted tube attached to the needle. Molly felt faint from watching it leave her body; she could feel her pulse shoving against her temples. She shook her head and pushed at the rag with her tongue, trying to find room to breathe. Beside her, the large man prepared a row of empty bags, hanging them one at a time from the side of her table.

One of the other men in the room told another joke, and everyone laughed. The man over Molly slapped her table with his hand, then wiped his eyes. The sight of his yellowish teeth, his mouth pulled back in a smile, his apron covered in blood—the banality of it all made her realize: the end of her would come right there on that table. No remorse. No heroics. Nothing special. She just stepped into a dark alley, and was gone. Soon to be a few bags of votes vibrating with punch lines.

She laid her head back and concentrated on her heartbeat, on slowing down the thumps against her temples, if for no other reason than to be resistant. She breathed slowly through her nose and focused on the gradual rise and fall of her chest against the tight restraints—

Another quip from someone and the room rocked with more laughter.

Another bag was hung.

“Aren’t you hurt?” Walter asked Cat as he followed her outside.

“I wish,” she said, speaking over her shoulder as Walter scrambled to catch up. “It’s a cinch to pick a fight in a new town, but then folks catch on. Soon as they reckon you’re looking for it, they ain’t so game. Eventually you gotta start paying ’em, or hanging out with sickos. Before long, you move on. You move on long enough, and you’re going in circles, know what I mean?” She stopped at the alley and peered down it, squinting at the darkness like it had done something wrong.

“This the last place you saw her?”

“At the far end,” Walter said, pointing down the crack between the two buildings. “Sshe ran around the corner like sshe wass chassing you.”

Cat looked down the street at the front of the elections office, then back down the alley. “You don’t reckon she went back to the ship, do you?”

Walter shook his head. “No way. There’ss bad people on the sship and we’ve been trying to find you for agess.” Walter felt for the Wadi, made sure it was still there. “I heard sscreaming when I came around the corner. Thought it came from one of the doorss. I banged on both, and a guy told me to get losst.”

“From that building?” Cat asked.

“No, from the bar. Nobody ansswered from there.” He nodded at the other place.

“Let’s go ask,” Cat said, marching toward the entrance of the place. “I know one of the guys that works here. Throws a helluva right cross.”

“Paulie! Somebody here to see you.”

Molly watched the man leaning over her look up to the far end of the room.

“Tell ’em I’m busy,” the guy said.

“It’s that Callite chick from the bar. She looks pretty rough, man.”

“Aw, hell.” The guy left the second bag to fill and took off his apron; he casually tossed it across Molly’s chest as if she were a part of the furniture. “I got no time for her bullshit tonight,” he grumbled.

Molly tried to ignore the commotion and concentrate on her pulse—on the long, steady breaths she pulled in through her nose. She turned her head to the side and relaxed her muscles, no longer fighting against the restraints. The other guy, the one who had held her legs, was filling close to his tenth bag. The person giving the blood had stopped thrashing a while ago, their moans slowly drifting off as if to sleep.

Molly’s procedure was definitely going slower. She tried to make each breath, each slow filling and exhalation as gradual as possible. She pretended the tangy metallic taste in her mouth was her own precious blood reentering her body, filling her back up. The illusion was enough to keep her from gagging, allowing her to slow her metabolism down to a crawl.

She was going to go out on her own terms, she decided. Not thrashing and speeding the inevitable up, but going with a calm and peaceful mind.

It’ll be a bonus if it irks these bastards, she thought to herself.

Walter picked up one of the election brochures and studied it while he and Cat waited. “Wasste of time,” he hissed to himself. He knew Molly better than anyone. Anyone still alive, anyway. Why would she come to a place like this? She hated voting.

The Wadi twisted and struggled inside his flightsuit, which made him suddenly annoyed at Molly for running off and leaving him with the stupid animal. You weren’t supposed to catch the creatures; you were supposed to kill them. Any real Drenard knows that. Besides, the thing had been eating so much food over the past weeks, it was beginning to cut into the money he’d bartered for back in Darrin. Hell, it had already eaten the money he’d made that day—and literally!

Walter put the brochure down and popped the thing on the head once more. The stupid thing had become like another crewmember, someone else Molly spent more time with than him. He thought about bopping it again when a large man in a jumpsuit came out of the back, wiping his hands on his butt. He smiled at Cat.

“Hey, Cripple. Looks like you’ve been having a good time tonight.”

“Yeah. Not bad, Paulie. Look, I was wondering—”

“Listen, we’re not really open right now, and I’m pretty busy in the back, so why don’t I come over and find you later? I’d be up for cracking some ribs if you’re buying.”

Walter watched a smile creep across Cat’s mouth—a mouth that didn’t seem near as busted up as it had earlier.

“Actually, I’m trying to help my friend here find someone. A young girl. You seen anyone stop in?”

“Not a soul. Been real quiet tonight. Big rally over on the square and all. Tell you what, I’ll keep an eye out and find you at the bar if I hear anything, okay?” He smiled at Cat, but his eyes darted over to Walter.

“Yeah,” Cat said. “Sounds good. Come by later.”

Paulie gave a half-wave and backed through the door, pushing it open with his elbows. Cat turned to Walter. She squatted down to be on his level while the men behind the counter continued with their work of moving heavy boxes, ticking items on clipboards, and eyeing the duo warily.

“Maybe we should head back to that ship of yours,” Cat said to Walter.

He shook his head and sniffed the air.

“No? Whatcha thinking?”

“He’ss lying,” Walter hissed quietly.

Cat jerked her thumb at the door behind the counter. “Paulie?”

Walter nodded. “It issn’t a guesss,” he said.

Cat touched her nose. “The Palan thing?”

He nodded again. “It reekss in here,” he said.

“Hey, Paulie, what did she want?”

The far worker’s voice throbbed in Molly’s ears, mere background noise to her calm meditations. It was like falling asleep in the cockpit and feeling the thrum of the engines coursing up through the hull. More than that, actually. More like being in the vacuum of space and sensing vibrations through her fingertips. Her fingertips were tingling.

Molly couldn’t tell how much of her detached feeling was from blood-loss, how much from fear, and how much from the meditation. Her world had become a feeble set of inputs—dull and jumbled in her fuzzy thinking. She heard the other guy say something and a third voice tell them to get back to work. All of it took place far away, seemingly heard by someone else’s ears.

The large man appeared beside her once again. He dragged his apron off her chest and draping it around his neck. He fumbled with the sash, wrapping it around his back as he glanced down at the second bag.

“What the flank?” he asked. With both hands, he traced the tube from the bag to her arm, obviously searching for kinks.

Molly smiled ever so slightly.

The man must’ve noticed the twitch at the corner of her lips. He reached down and grabbed her neck, bent over and brought his face close to hers. He started to say something through a toothy sneer, but there was a crash at the other end of the room.

The man looked up.

“What the flank?” he asked again, louder, this time.

Or maybe Molly just heard it more clearly as the carefully wrought fog began dissipating from her senses. She felt it in her temples again: her pulse. Betraying her.

“Jesus,” Cat said, looking out across the room of bodies. They were spread across a grid of tables, the forms as still as the two men she’d dropped behind the counter. She saw the bags hanging from one of the gurneys, saw the insulated cooler below a table stamped “Votes,” and a sickening puzzle fell together. She felt like she’d wandered into the back of a morgue to find them churning out links of sausage.

A short, bald guy with a beard came running over, yelling something. Cat drove her fist into his trachea to shut him up. She felt a lot of meat give way under the blow, felt her knuckles impact the ridge of spine beyond that softness—and figured she’d gone a little hard on him.

The man collapsed in a quiet mound. He just folded up on himself and remained as he landed, strangely still. He weren’t the sort of guy she usually tangled with. Part of her felt horrible for him. The other part wondered what it had felt like to get hit like that. Had it hurt? Or been done and over too quick?

Looking up, she saw two men more her likable size: brutes with lots of muscle and mean faces. Her favorite combo.

“Paulie? What the flank is going on here?” She turned around and made sure the door to the front was closed, saw the Palan kid rushing over to check the bald guy. “You goddamn draining people?” She walked across the room. The two guys formed up in the aisle, both wearing aprons splattered with brown smears of dried blood. Except for Paulie’s. His looked awful fresh.

“Oh, hell, Cat, we’re just making a living.” He reached over and held the other guy back. “We can get you in on this if you want. Guarantee it pays more that the performin’ arts. You could make enough to get yourself a real ass-whoopin’.”

Cat scanned the room. There were at least a dozen bodies in there, most of them too pale to be alive. “Where’s the girl?” she asked.

“Don’t know nothing about any girl. Look, you’ve had a rough night. Why don’t I give you enough coin for a few fights and you let us see to our friend over there.”

“Why don’t we just flank her up?” the other guy asked.

“Yeah,” Cat said. “Why don’t you boys just flank me up?”

Paulie laughed. “For free? C’mon, Cat, I like you and all, but you don’t know what you’re messing with here.”

“Yeah,” the other guy said. “This ain’t some small racket. You’re gonna get a world of hurt.”

Cat smiled. “Promise?”

Paulie waved his partner down. “Seriously, Cat, you should take your little friend and get out of here. Pretend you never came. Besides, we ain’t seen no girl tonight.”

“He’ss lying,” Walter said, arriving by her side.

Cat placed a hand on the boy’s chest and pushed him back. “Trust me,” she said. “I know.”

She turned and faced the men and smoothly changed her stance, bringing her fists up and taking her hips off square. Small things, but enough to change the game and quick. It was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Paulie’s friend came fast. Fast and dumb. She’d never seen him around any of the pubs, so he obviously didn’t know what he was dealing with. Cat watched his feet as he ran, figured out where he’d be planting his foot just before he got to her and made sure her own foot was driving to where his knee would be.

It sounded like a thick branch snapping in two. The knee bent back the wrong way, and she barely moved in time to keep from getting wrapped up in his flying bulk. He landed with a thud and went to screaming holy hell, writhing on the ground, fumbling for his foot, but it was trapped beneath him, out of reach.

Cat watched the Palan kid go from silver to white, his eyes bulging at the sight of the man.

“Can you shut him?” Cat asked.

The boy nodded and ran back to the screaming figure, pulling something out of one of the pockets on his flightsuit. Cat turned back to face Paulie.

“Now you see why I never bring him out,” he told her, smiling nervously and gesturing to the gurgling man behind her.

Cat took a few steps forward.

“Damn, Cat, fine. The girl is right there. Barely gotten started on her. Take her and go.”

Cat shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so, Paulie ol’ buddy. I ain’t had such a great night. Or not bad enough, anyway.” She called back over her shoulder: “Hey little man, see to your friend over there.”

The boy padded by, wiping something off on a bloody rag. He hopped up and down, looking on top of the tables for his friend.

Cat pointed, showing him which one, and then stepped closer to Paulie.

Close enough that he could hit her.

Molly didn’t understand what was going on. She saw one of the guys go down, tripped up by a Callite. One of the other victims? Had someone gotten loose? She shook her head, tried once more to spit the rag out, and then felt her pulse quicken, pumping out more blood.

She tried to find a balance between staying calm and getting free; her struggles would hasten the end, but her stillness would ensure it. Her moment of panicked indecision was interrupted by Walter, who appeared out of nowhere.

Molly moaned at the sight of him; she could feel tears streaking down the sides of her face. He ripped the tape free and pulled the foul rag out of her mouth, holding it with his fingertips like it was something dead. Molly turned her head to the other side and spat, scraping her tongue against her teeth. She saw the other victim, the Callite, get hit in the face and go down.

“Hurry,” she told Walter, who fumbled with the straps across her.

Walter peered over her at the fight in progress. He bit his lip in concentration and reached for one of the straps.

“Arms first,” she said, as he went straight for her thighs.

He flicked the leather strap open and her arms came free. She worked on the one across her chest, then sat up to do her legs—and nearly blacked out.

She lay back down, remembering the needle. A dark cord of crimson trailed off her left arm, spiraling down to one of the bags hanging from the table. Molly gnashed her teeth together and fumbled with the little valve on the end of the needle. The device tugged against her flesh as she twisted the small, plastic handle; she could feel the metal needle move around inside her arm as she fumbled with it.

Walter got her feet free as she finally closed the valve. She pulled the hose away from the device and felt nauseas as it started dripping her blood from the bag to the floor. She looked away and toward the fracas—saw her kidnapper on top of the blood-splattered woman. Molly wanted to help, but she wasn’t sure if she was even strong enough to stand. She swung her legs over the side and felt Walter’s hands on her arm. He had some of the tape from her mouth and a clean rag. He held them out as if to make a bandage across the needle.

“Wait,” she told him. She pulled the needle out with a grimace, then Walter pressed the cloth against the rising bubble of bright blood welling up from her arm. Molly looked over her shoulder, keeping an eye on the two fighters while Walter wrapped tape around the cloth. He, too, was keeping an eye on the one-sided action.

“That’ss wasssername,” he told Molly.

“Who?” Molly glanced back at the woman, who was being pummeled into the ground. “You mean Cat?” she asked.

Walter nodded.

Molly jumped down from the table and her brain toyed with passing out; her knees jittered, and Walter steadied her. She glanced at the bags of blood, trying to figure out how much was in them and remember how much she’d started with. There were a dozen or so hanging from the table with only two full, so she had to be okay. Just deciding so gave her enough psychological strength to remain upright. She turned and sized up her predicament as the man in the apron continued to pound her mother’s friend. Wet, slapping sounds accompanied each blow. The noise had the same effect as the taste of that foul rag—it nearly made Molly gag.

“See if you can open the back door,” she told Walter. He hurried off while Molly tried to figure out how she was going to get Cat out of there—if she was even alive. The man’s body obscured most of the Callite, but what she saw looked horrible. A small pool of the alien’s blue blood spread out from underneath her, and dotted trails of the stuff streaked away in wide arcs that matched the man’s blows. Molly checked the tables for a scalpel, or anything sharp, but there were only the extraction needles, some tubing, and a bunch of bags.

She grabbed a full bag of her own blood and one of the needles, formulating a plan as she crept up behind the large man. Her heart, so recently calmed to slow its draining, raced as she snuck closer. She cringed as another blow landed. She watched the man’s hand—clad in dripping blue—come back up, then plummet with another fleshy crack. Molly expected him to turn around and see her, to stop her. She fought the urge to run, which she knew would just make her pass out. She carefully re-opened the valve on the needle. When she got close enough, she didn’t hesitate. Forming a fist around the valve end, she swung her hand around the man’s shoulder and buried the needle in his neck.

The large man spun around, eyes wide, his bloody hands fumbling above his collar where jets of crimson stole away his pulse. Molly bit into the bag, tearing it open with her teeth. The man growled at her and reached out—

Molly crammed the spilling bag of fluids into his face, aiming for his eyes, shoving it hard before letting go. He pawed at himself, screaming, blood flying through blood, his head still level with her waist. Molly grabbed the back of his head, wrapped her fingers in his hair, and pulled down as she threw her knee up. She tried to drive her leg all the way to her palms.

There was a dull crunch. The man’s arms fell to his side and his body went still. Molly’s knee lanced out in pain. She wobbled from the exertion—fell down to her hands and knees and fought hard to not black out.

Nearby, Cat’s head rolled around, blood and gore making her look like something out of an alien horror vid. She gave Molly a nasty smile. Her teeth—the ones not missing—were covered in her own blue blood; her lips were torn in two, bifurcated like her tongue.

Cat tried to say something, and flecks of azure mist popped up into the air. Molly scurried to her side, trying to figure out which wound to tend to first and how she was going to get them out of that damned place before more people showed up. She glanced to the back of the room where Walter stood holding the door to the alley open. He waved one arm for her to hurry up.

Cat spoke again. Molly tried to tell the woman to save her energy, but the Callite’s hand came up and clutched her shirt, pulling her down with ferocious strength.

Molly turned to her; she saw a maniacal grin spread across the woman’s pulped face, saw eyes vibrant with life meet her own.

Cat whispered something. Molly leaned in closer, turned her head, concentrated on committing to memory the woman’s words, in case they were her last.

“I felt that,” the woman whispered. She let go of Molly’s shirt and smiled even broader. “I felt that good.”

26

In his snowy grave, Cole had a dream.

A final dream, perhaps.

A sequence of dreams.

He floated in space as stars rushed by, white streaks against the black. He saw his face reflected in a helmet. Molly’s helmet? He saw his own visage fishbowled in another’s visor, his lips black.

The persistent burn. His flesh on fire, a popping fire as the numbness receded, the cold draining away and exposing the agony beneath. Cole could feel his individual nerves stretched out across the cosmos, shuddering with dying sensations, electrocuting him with pain.

Dying. Lips black, reflected in a visor. Swollen or fishbowled or both.

He hung in the vacuum, surrounded by white.

Plucked. God’s fingers holding him. Lifting him.

Dangling and dying amid the fuzzy white all around him and the shady blackness of his dreams within.

Flickers of non-dream. The real invading his final sleep. Strings of meat, of tendon and vessels hanging from his arm. Hanging like wire. Wire and blood everywhere.

A twitch. A thrumming pain. A dream of aching, of burning and freezing, of thawing and cooking, of hell and heaven.

A universe of pain, full of aching.

An aching.

A never waking.

Cole’s life didn’t flash by—it loomed and froze. A single image. A boy, dark-skinned and poor. White teeth, but no smile. Lisboa. Portugal. Bairro de lata. Slum. Home.

He saw fury creased across a young forehead, too young to crease like that. Black furrows full of the blackest rage. Fists clenched, arms thrown wide for balance. A boy at his feet, bent in half. The image was frozen, but the boy’s leg was blurred. The boy’s leg kicked, action without motion. A frozen blur, vivid and remembered. The last kick that did it, pushing a nose back into a brain. Silencing it.

Cole didn’t need to see it. Didn’t need to see the before—the years of life abused and wasted. Didn’t need to see the after—the hours of being beat on. So much pain on either side of that frozen slice of rage. Towering stacks of pain squeezing a sliver of time, that frozen horror of violence. Of killing.

Cole didn’t need to see it. He had another life worth flashing by. A life of redemption. Of learning to love. But he didn’t get that one. Just got the brutality and error—looming and frozen.

Something else. New. Guilt and pleasure intertwined and swirling through Cole’s mind, becoming one.

Arms waving, reaching, swimming out of the fog. Out of unconsciousness. The world, a world solidifying, congealing into the half-real, half-imagined.

A woman kissing him, her hands on his body, on his chest.

Lips touching, over and over.

Cole looked up—saw it wasn’t Molly.

Red hair. Bright. The color and flicker of fire, of precious warmth. It danced and waved all around him—it draped across his bare chest. He was naked, the girl hovering.

It felt like—

It felt like forever.

Like wholeness and emptiness, like something spilling out and refilling, like infinite desire and eternal sating, the two racing and endless, like lines stretched out through the unknown, meeting at forever.

Pleasure.

Lust laced with fear and shame.

It wasn’t Molly.

He tried to fight back, to push her off, but every movement—deflected. Every effort—turned against him. The fiery woman. Resistance became passion.

The gradual giving in. His body worn down. Exhausted. Dead. She was kissing him—he kissed back. Hands wrapped in the wild hair, pulling her down.

Skin sparked with electricity everywhere it touched, where it touched other skin. Something jolted him alive.

Alive.

Cole looked at his hands. Fiery hair slid between his fingers. Ten fingers. But he didn’t have two hands. Not anymore. A dream. It was a dream—the last firings of frozen neurons as he perished in a bank of snow.

He pushed the girl away—or tried to.

She was strong. And the more he fought, the more beautiful she became, smothering him with a longing.

Cole groaned. He wondered if this would be the last he ever felt. A parting gift for a life too soon ended.

He longed for Molly.

The lips, full and fiery, shut out his moaning, clamped down on his mouth. Biting. He felt his body betray him, betray his promises and do another’s bidding. Cole cried, tears streaming down his face. Tears that felt incredibly—powerfully—real.