Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

The sensation brought back a clear childhood memory of Bekkie, an emotion, really. As a kid, she’d only known a handful of people, all of them Humans, their faces blurred by time. She could remember a trip into town with her father once, how she’d expected to see so many new races, and how disappointed she’d been to see so few.

She wondered if that’s where her fascination with aliens came from. The flight out to Palan had been so exciting—that long queue of diversity strung out just for her like a parade of exoticness. But did that make her a xenocist in a way? Pining for some exhibitionistic display of otherworldliness? Celebrating a thing just because it was different?

In the shops she passed, she did see a few Pherons and Callites working, usually with a smock on and some cleaning or serving prop in their hands. Both of their home planets were just a jump away from Lok, providing a nice source of cheap labor. The more Molly looked for them, the more she saw—but she really had to seek them out. They blended too well with their environment, partly because of their camouflaging uniforms, and partly because they seemed so less kinetic, less boisterous, than their Terran counterparts. They seemed perfectly content—or trained, perhaps—to fade into the layered background to which they’d been relegated.

A loud crunching sound interrupted her scanning of the crowd; Molly looked down to find the Wadi eating the lip of the water bottle, the vessel sucked completely dry.

“No.” She pulled the plastic out of the Wadi’s mouth and moved the animal to her shoulders; she waved down an older couple passing by.

“Do you know where the sheriff’s office is?” she asked them.

“Almost there,” the gentleman said, eyeing the Wadi with some curiosity. “Everything okay?”

“Do what?” Molly asked. The man’s genuine concern had thrown her off guard. “Oh, yeah, I’m fine. Thanks, though.”

“Just keep going and it’ll be on your right,” his wife said.

“Thanks. Both of you.”

The pleasant exchange felt odd after a few days of bad run-ins, mostly with shopkeepers. It reminded her that not everyone in the galaxy was evil scum out to kill her, take her blood, or destroy the universe. She wiggled her shoulders, trying to work some of the tension out of her body. She knew it wasn’t good to let other people’s rudeness dictate how she felt. She kept that in mind as she weaved through the crowd for another block. Finally, she spotted a building ahead with bars across the windows and recognized the painted silver star hanging over the door. Molly kicked her flightboots against the jamb, dislodging the chunks of caked dirt deep in the treads. She pushed her way inside.

The door hinged back with a creak, and bells jangled overhead. The office inside looked like a huge shoebox hewn out of rough lumber. Two shafts of dust highlighted the place, the particulate matter so dense in the morning sunlight that Molly considered ducking under them. In the back sat a table, pressed up against two of the shut cells. A prisoner in each cell sat close to the bars, their hands poking through and holding fans of cards. A young man sat at the table outside the cells. He wore a vest over a buttoned-up shirt, and a gun hung from his belt. Molly nodded to the three figures as she closed the door, setting off another racket from the bells.

Someone cleared their throat to Molly’s side. She turned and squinted through one of the shafts of dust to find a man appraising her over a folded newspaper. He sat behind a desk, leaning way back in his chair, his old herder boots propped up on a smattering of loose papers. When he pushed his hat back with a solitary finger, Molly felt like looking around for the holo cameras. The entire scene was so cliché, it had moved from comical, directly to spooky.

“No pets,” the man said. He shaped his hand like a gun and aimed it at the Wadi.

“She’s trained,” Molly said. “She won’t be a problem.”

“Better not.” His thumb decocked, and his finger came up a few inches with the imaginary recoil. He blew across the tip, smiled, and then holstered it away. “What can I do for you?”

Molly approached the desk, fighting the urge to swim through the shaft of lit dust with her hands. She glanced at the group of men playing cards, their faces slowly turning to follow her movement across the room. She noticed the walls were papered with election posters, rather than wanted posters. The only giveaway was the smiles; otherwise, even the actors would probably have been the same.

“I, um, have a problem with some men, Sheriff…” she bent forward and tried to read the name on his star.

“Browne,” he said for her, looking down at the star as if he needed to be reminded. “And I ain’t much help on marital disputes. Unless you need a lesson on starting a few.”

One of the card players chuckled at this, and the Sheriff shot him a look, as if prisoners could have fun, but not at his expense.

“No, it’s nothing like that. I just pulled in today, and some people claiming to be friends with my father—”

“Scottie?” Sheriff Browne interrupted. “You come in on Parsona? ”

Molly swallowed. “That’s right. And I—”

“Can’t help you,” the Sheriff said. His newspaper flapped back up in front of his face, and his hat sank down a few inches.

“Can’t, or—”

“No pets, ma’am. I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”

“But I—”

“No pets! ”

The Wadi’s head recoiled from the outburst. Molly reached up and rubbed its back, trying to soothe it. “Could you at least tell me where I might find someone?” she asked. “I’m looking for…”

“Ain’t no tourguide, neither.”

“…a woman, a Callite that goes by the name of Cat.”

The newspaper came down, just low enough to expose Browne’s eyes.

“ Cripple Cat?” he asked.

Molly looked to the card players. The other lawman gave her a huge smile. She turned back at Sheriff Browne. “Uh, I guess. I just know her as Cat. Or Catherine. Do you know where I can find her?”

The Sheriff pulled his feet off the desk and shot forward as his boots fell heavily. Molly took a quick step back.

“You’re lucky to know her as Cat. Most people don’t.” Browne shuffled some papers around on his desk and came up with a few stubs. He handed them out to Molly. “Twenty each.”

“What are they?”

“Tickets to see Cat.”

One of the card players chuckled again and got another visual blasting from the sheriff. Molly reached into her pocket for some change from the cantina and held it out. Sheriff Browne looked at the two coins.

“Just one ticket?”

“Just one,” Molly said.

Her heartbeat quickened as she took the stub.

She was getting close, she could feel it.

Cole startled awake as if from a bad dream. His arms and legs jerked reflexively but wouldn’t move; they were pinned in place. He blinked, gradually bringing the world into focus, fearing more of the bright light. What he found proved worse.

He was strapped to an inclined platform, his legs tied down a meter apart, the thick ropes looped around his ankles and through holes in the solid steel. He glanced up at his hands, which were similarly bound high over his head. He tried jerking down on them and felt his bruised ribs sing out in pain, jolts of electricity lancing from his chest to every new bruise across his body.

“Good luck with that,” someone said.

Cole turned to his side. He had to lean his head forward to look around his own arm, then saw Riggs tied up a few meters away, strapped to an identical structure: an angled sheet of steel halfway between flat and vertical. He also noticed several empty racks scattered about the small room, all roughly arranged around a gated drain in the center of the floor.