Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

She shifted her gaze to Cat’s legs, where the alien’s larger muscle groups fought to keep her body stable, her torso rotating gracefully through the cycles of the juggling, hips and shoulders weaving in time to a tune Molly could no longer hear. The entire display was a sort of grace moving to the beat of torture, a sensuous expression of pain. Molly studied Cat’s body and her motions intently, finally noticing the two bands encircling the woman’s thighs, the only things she wore besides the smock-like apron.

Movement in the crowd broke Molly’s concentration. She watched as the bored spectators threw the rest of their ammunition toward the dome. The missiles impacted and exploded as the unhappy silhouettes filed toward the exits.

For them, the night’s entertainment was over.

For Molly, it had just begun.

A hum-filled silence ensued. There wasn’t a peep outside Molly’s head, just a dull, residual roar from the earlier explosions of sound. She watched, mesmerized, as Cat slammed the objects up into the air. It took her a moment, lost as she was in the lovely display of dexterity, to realize something truly awful. Something horrifying:

It wasn’t quiet in that bubble.

The shield, Molly finally understood, wasn’t meant to protect Cat from the hurled objects—it existed for the audience’s benefit. It protected Molly and the rest of the spectators from the gods-awful noise.

Inside that shell—alone and unguarded—Cat endured a torment far worse and of greater frequency than the petty strikes hurled from the crowd.

Molly leaned over the railing, her empathy drawing her down inside that dome. She tried to imagine the horror of standing there, of enduring not just the noise, but the confined echoes of that shield. She felt the sickening inability to escape or win reprieve, the anguish of willingly secluding oneself in tight proximity to such violence.

The thought made her want to yell out for it to stop; she wanted to float to the stage and pound on the glass and put an end to it all; she wanted to throw something, anything at whoever was doing this. But the silence, the barrier between her and that agony, even the sheer beauty of Cat’s precise movements, it all completely paralyzed her.

So she continued to watch, transfixed, at the sublime mastery of kinesthetics on display. And without even realizing it, she began to cry. The tears silently streamed down her face as she clutched the railing with white knuckles and watched an event more meaningful and more beautiful and more terrible than her imagination could properly bear.

Close by, the old Wadi responded to the tears and sadness. She kept her head tucked beneath the jutting outcrop of her pair-bond’s chin, and she bobbed her head with grief, swaying with the somber scents she could see and smell like columns of smoke. Falling into a deep trance, she forgot even her great and persistent hunger. She forgot her need to feed her brood. She just lost herself in her pair-bond’s emotions—clear and as moving as canyon music. And those emotions stirred something deep inside. Deep, where her pair-bond had triggered other changes by removing her from her lair. Changes she had once fled to the canyon of solitude to never feel again.

As the chemicals and smells of sadness swirled all around her, the Wadi remembered back to long ago. She remembered the arduous, dry, and hot run to the eggless canyon, that place where she could avoid what the male Wadis had done to her. She had made her home in those canyons where offspring were never produced and where the blue hunters rarely came. It had been so long ago, but she was willing to stay there even longer. She had planned on staying forever, hoping to avoid these changes for the rest of her days.

But now they were taking place, and emotions coursed down her scent tongue, traveling like liquid rays of the twin lights to fill her head and heart. They swelled and consumed her near to bursting—even as her body continued to dwindle. Continued to dwindle as whatever she ate and drank was robbed from her, pulled through some sucking void she couldn’t understand, racing off to feed eggs laid in the eggless canyon, which was so impossibly far away that she could no longer taste it. Impossibly far away, but somehow connected to her, nutrients flowing through a corridor that shouldn’t be there.

“What the flank are you doing?” yelled Cole. “What the flank!”

Joshua smiled and calmly returned the wooden sticks to their furry folds. He then brushed his hands along his thighs, smoothing the pelt covering them. “ More questions?” he said. “Should I divide your friend into smaller pieces?”

Cole shook his head and panted for air. He watched the two goons bend down and grab Riggs’s boots, pulling his calves forward so they could smear the cut edges with the purple goop. Blood leaked out the top of them. As they held them away from the rack, Cole could see the concentric circles of Riggs’s insides, the white of bone surrounded by bright layers of red meat.

“Are you ready to answer my questions?”

Cole nodded.

“What’s your name?” Joshua asked.

“Cole,” he whispered. His mouth responded directly to the question, bypassing his brain, his heroics, his fear.

“Where are you from, Cole?”

“Earth. Portugal. What are you going to do with us?”

“If you ask me another question, I’m going to pull out my favorite toy again, do you understand?”

Cole looked away from Riggs, whose head had begun lolling from side to side, dull moans leaking out that seemed to come straight from Riggs’s gut, not his vocal cords. The sound—primal and eerie—snapped Cole out of his zombie-like state. He nodded at Joshua.

“How do you know Mortimor?”

“I don’t, I swear. I know his daughter.”

Joshua nodded as if that made sense. “Have you been to Lok?”

“Never.”

“Do you know what fusion fuel is?”

Cole dipped his head. “Yeah, of course. I went to the Academy, I—”

“No. Not what it’s used for. What it is . What it’s made of.”

The question startled Cole. He thought of Dani back on Drenard, the conversation they’d had on that prison rooftop. Dani had told him that this was the most important question. He lowered his brows and shook his head.

“Were you about to say something?” Joshua asked.

“No, just… it’s an odd question.”

Joshua stepped close, frowning at Cole, his gaze boring straight through his skull. “I’m only going to ask the following once,” he said, “so be honest with me. Are you a Drenard?”

Cole stopped breathing. He glanced at Riggs, who seemed awake, but in shock. His friend’s head rolled around, the whites of his eyes showing.

“Yes,” he said, not looking back at Joshua. “I’m a Drenard.”

“Well, well!” Joshua slapped his thighs. “This is just unbelievable. Jons, finish putting that boy’s legs back on. Kelly, untie Cole. You and I are taking the Chosen One to meet his maker.”

Cole had no idea what any of that meant, but at least half of it sounded very bad for him. He kept his eyes on Riggs as one of the goons stood up, wiped his hands on his fur, and came over to untie him.

Joshua smiled at Cole and moved his goggles from his neck to his forehead. “If it makes you feel any better,” he said, “we were always going to take the legs off both you lads. Had nothing to do with the questions.”

Cole grimaced as the goon pulled him down from the rack. The brute loosened his hands and yanked his arms around his back before re-tying his wrists. Cole kept looking to Riggs, waiting for his eyes to focus, to see if he was going to survive. The guy at his feet had the ends of his legs forced together, the purple paste squeezing out between the severed edges. The man met Cole’s stare for an instant before turning away; Cole closed his eyes right as the door squeaked open, blasting the room with harsh light. The last thing he saw before squeezing his eyes shut was one of Riggs’s thighs twitching involuntarily, a trickle of blood oozing past the purple paste where the two parts of him were pressed together.