The Man Without Hands

by Eric Malikyte

  “He always glares at me when I’m in the driver seat,” Mike said.

  “Just this once, you can drive,” Luke said.

  “Wow, nerves must have you wound tight,” Mike said.

  “He won’t tell me what it is.” Adrienne was serious. He could see her glaring at him from the rearview mirror.

  “Probably that no-hands fella,” Mike said.

  “Jesus, Mike, will you just fucking drive and keep your damn mouth shut?” Luke said.

  Adrienne smacked his shoulder. “You be nice to Mike.”

  Mike started laughing. Luke wanted to punch him.

  “You think that’s funny?” Luke said.

  “No, not at all,” Mike said. “I was just thinking about whether or not it’s considered assaulting a police officer if your wife beats on you.”

  “You’re an asshole,” Luke said.

  “Hang on, Mrs. Braddy,” Mike said, as he took the car out of the garage.

  The sound of their constant attempts to berate him faded into a dull whisper, just off the edge of understanding. Luke got the distinct feeling that someone was watching him. As they left the parking garage, his eyes scanned the darkness, but found nothing.

  He sighed. Maybe the chief was right; maybe he needed to let it go. He had a pregnant wife to take care of.

  Before long, they were back at the house. Luke changed out of his civilian clothes into his uniform.

  Adrienne gave him a peck on the cheek and he joined Mike in the unmarked car.

  “You okay?” Mike sounded serious now.

  “Not really,” Luke said.

  “Sorry about all that.”

  “You’re not, but fine.”

  “That shit at the morgue must have really messed you up.”

  “You could say that.”

  The nightmares too.

  “You gotta let this go, man.”

  “I am, or at least I’m trying to.” Luke shook his head. “But...the thought of being in the same building as that thing...”

  “Yeah, I get it, believe me.”

  “Let’s just do our shift and try to forget about it.”

  Luke tried, he really tried. And then, two hours into their patrol, they got a call from Dispatch.

  “What’s going on?” Luke asked.

  “We got another call from Ilene, says she needs to see you immediately, and won’t accept another officer on duty.”

  “Must be important,” Mike said, with none of the usual sarcasm.

  “We’re on it, Dispatch.”

  3

  Ilene was a hot mess when they found her down in the morgue. When she saw them, she rushed over and closed the doors behind them.

  “Jesus Christ on wheels, what took you two so long?” she said.

  “What’s the problem, Ilene?” Luke asked, hoping against hope that she wasn’t going to say what he thought she was going to say.

  “What, the bitch clawed her way out of the icebox and escaped the hospital?” Mike said, chuckling like an idiot.

  The life drained out of Ilene’s face.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” Mike’s stupid grin faded quick.

  Ilene nodded.

  Luke placed his hand on a shelf near him that he probably shouldn’t have been touching. He rubbed his eyes.

  “My shift started an hour ago,” Ilene said. “I came down here and her box was open and empty. And...”

  “What?”

  “There’s something else.” Ilene guided them out of the morgue and into the janitor’s closet, where the stench of death almost made Luke vomit in his mouth.

  The woman couldn’t have been much older than his wife. Her eyes were still open, blood trickling from her ears. When Luke looked closely, it looked as if it had dried hours ago.

  “What the hell,” Luke said. “Why didn’t you—”

  “Why didn’t I try to save her, why didn’t I put her on one of those tables in there?” Ilene’s pupils were shaking, her hands too. “She was dead when I got here. I didn’t want to disturb the crime scene, and I wanted an officer who was familiar with this case. People already give me weird looks because I work on corpses all day and night. This is a small town. People talk.”

  Luke shut the door to the closet and nodded. She made a decent point.

  He tried to calm himself. It’s different from the dreams...

  Then, he remembered the feeling he’d had in the car earlier and reached for his phone.

  “Mike, you calm her down, I need to make a phone call.”

  Mike nodded and took Ilene into the other room.

  He knew he should call this in, he knew he should be putting his job first, but the first call he made was to Adrienne.

  The phone rang.

  “Well, first thing we need to do is get the evidence techs down here to document the scene...”

  Ring.

  “Will I be a suspect? I mean, who’s going to believe some dead woman just up and walked out?”

  Ring. Ring.

  “Do you have an alibi for before you came into work?”

  Ring.

  “I was in bed with my husband...”

  “Ain’t exactly airtight, but it might do if the security cameras show this woman getting up and walking out.”

  And it went on ringing for so long that he was tempted to run right back to the squad car and go home just to check on her...

  But then someone answered.

  “Honey, listen,” Luke said. “Something’s happened down here at the hospital and I’m gonna need to work late. I need you to lock the doors and windows tonight. I have a bad feeling.”

  “You should.” The voice was hoarse and feminine, and, most importantly, not his wife’s. “You thought you could escape this. But there is no escaping this.”

  The phone clicked. He felt goosebumps spread across the back of his neck. Panic rose and seized at his thundering heart.

  He tried calling back ten, maybe fifteen times in a row. No answer.

  His mind shattered into a thousand fraying thoughts, a thousand possible scenarios. All of them ended in tragedy.

  He didn’t remember leaving the hospital. The last thing he remembered was pulling up next to the house alone in the squad car.

  The street was flashing red and blue from the two patrol cars that had arrived there first. There was broken glass on the grass, and...

  He slammed the door shut, shattering the driver-side window, and ran to Adrienne. She was lying facedown in the red-stained grass.

  The officers tried to pull him off of her, shouting things at him, but he couldn’t hear them. All he could think about was his family.

  He had to save his family.

  His fists rang out. He kicked and he screamed until he was beside his wife again, holding her tight, brushing her hair out of her eyes, calling her name...

  She never answered.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SAGE

  The day the Council of Elders met with Commander Kiel to make their decision had come and gone. Sage had spent first moon anxiously awaiting their decision, and had found it nearly impossible to focus on his forms as Captain Tullis guided them through their lessons.

  Captain Tullis had worn her Masku clothes. The white tunic she’d elected to wear made her bright blue skin seem to glow even brighter than her barrier. Apparently, most of the Captains had taken to wearing clothing they’d liberated from the Masku. Some students had speculated that this was to prepare them for the types of disguises they’d have to wear when they became Valier.

  Before today, he’d always breathed a sigh of relief when he found out that she’d be the one running their drills. She had always been easier to deal with than Kiel, treating him with a level of indifference.

  Not yesterday, though. She’d changed. And she had run her drills at a pace that equaled if not exceeded the intensity of Kiel’s drills.

  Sage had been sweating when Kiel came to get him. It had been difficult to tell what Kiel’s expressi
on bore. Was it disappointment in his stare? Anger? Or, perhaps, solemn acceptance of the Council’s decision?

  Kiel took him to his tower on the west side of the city’s core. With another long night came the darkening of the Olloketh crystals. The city seemed smaller when it was lit by torchlight. As if the shadows were somehow alive, closing in on all of them.

  The Tower of the Guardian stood before a cavern entrance that only Valier and those summoned to dine with Geidra and her Council were allowed to enter. The tower’s interior had been lit up, Valier standing guard on the roof, peering down on him and their master.

  Kiel led Sage up red-carpeted stone steps and offered him a drink. Something the Masku called “wine.”

  “Drink,” he’d said, offering Sage a glass with a long handle. “And take a seat.”

  Sage had done as Kiel asked, sipping on the wine. It was a strange, green liquid, bitter and yet somehow sweet. “So...bad news?”

  Kiel shook his head, but his expression did not change. “The opposite, actually. The Council has passed the motion to allow you to enter the Trials tomorrow. With the condition that you swear allegiance to myself and High Elder Geidra.”

  “Allegiance?” Sage said. The liquid started to make his head and limbs feel heavy. “Isn’t that already a given? You’d be my commanding officer if I passed, right?”

  Kiel sighed. “Look, I know how you feel, Sage.”

  “And how do I feel?” Sage was growing uncomfortable with where the conversation was heading.

  “You feel unfairly persecuted for your father’s crimes,” Kiel had said. “I’ve tried...to separate my feelings from my duties, but I confess that it isn’t easy. I’ve tried to give you the same training as your peers, hoping that you’d grow into a man that was nothing like your father.”

  “I see...”

  Oh, he tried all right, Sage thought. At least until it didn’t benefit him and his brood.

  “And you’ve truly shown promise these past few months,” Kiel said. “The Council’s only concern is that you’re only doing this for the Trials, and that you’ll regress into past behaviors once they’re over.”

  Behaviors like seeing Takarus, or Wren, or making my opinions known.

  “So, this pledge will prove my loyalty?” Sage asked.

  Kiel nodded. “They’re waiting now. If you’re ready.”

  Sage was tempted to chuck the glass at the wall and let the Council know just what he thought of them... But then he thought of Wren, of the embrace they’d shared. About making things better for the healers...

  “I’ll do it,” Sage had said.

  Kiel had led him into another section of the city he’d never seen before. With the Olloketh crystals gone dark, the cavern containing those great towers had been lit by torches which stretched along the metal walking path to High Elder Geidra’s home. The torches made the towers glow with a warmth absent from the rest of the city.

  As he had stared on their towers and their statues, growing higher and higher against the ever-rising ceiling of the cavern, he couldn’t stop thinking about how the rest of the city lived. Ordinary Sulekiel who didn’t pass the Trials were forced to live on rations, and those rations dwindled to scraps for people like Wren and Belyl.

  High Elder Geidra’s tower was the largest of those towers. Like the other towers, hers was walled off with stone and metal gates. Kiel led Sage through, and they entered the tower through her golden vaulted doors.

  Inside, his way was lit by torches suspended by sconcesin the walls. Her statues were made of shimmering gold, her chandeliers of Olloketh crystals and precious metals, and her chambers filled with items that the rest of his people could never hope to obtain. Extravagant furniture, made from the hard work of farmers who toiled with the few crops that grew underground. Trinkets and historical artifacts displayed on stone tables. Statues that held up great metal shelves filled with tomes—some of which he recognized to be of forbidden Sulen Tukar and Ara’ka techniques.

  She’s a goddamned hypocrite, Sage thought. And so would he be, if he did as they demanded.

  Kiel had led him up Geidra’s spiral staircase, up twenty floors, and past who knew how many other spoils of her long rule as High Elder. In the past, he’d heard, the position of High Elder was supposed to be one lived in constant meditation, a warrior who would sacrifice their long life to the service and betterment of their people without the need for possessions.

  But from what Sage saw, Geidra seemed more like one of the legendary Masku kings from the history tomes, kings who had ruled their people before their gods had ripped their crowns from their heads and forced them to regard the deities as their new rulers.

  Having reached the topmost floor, Kiel led him down a long corridor.

  One of the doors to his right was open.

  A seven-foot monstrosity of a man with black skin and silver eyebrows regarded him, as did a frail-looking boy with long, violet hair, and a girl with pale, silver skin and onyx hair.

  The small boy giggled as he passed, sipping on a glass filled with that familiar green liquid.

  Once they reached the end of the corridor, silver doors swung open to a long chamber filled with more luxuries, and there, at the end of the room, lit by candle and torch, sipping glasses of Masku wine and looking on Sage as though he were a disease, were the Council of Elders.

  High Elder Geidra wore her dress robes, as did the others. Extravagant things made of the softest linens that their people could make, most of them were the color of blood, with gold and silver lacing. They were all here. Elders Delecys, Makai, and Kanazh all stared at him, smug looks on their weathered faces.

  “Well, speak of the daemon,” Elder Makai said, chuckling. He was rumored to be only six hundred processions old, which would make him the youngest of the Elders, a pale, silver-skinned man with onyx hair with a single streak of gold running through it. “He has arrived.”

  “It would seem that Commander Kiel has offered the young man wine as well,” Delecys said, raising his own glass. He wore red and grey robes; his face was black and his hair silver, like that mountain of a man in the other chamber. “He seems agitated, confused. Does he not?”

  “Yes. Fear not, young man,” Elder Kanazh said. Her skin was citrine, her hair violet. “We are friends.”

  “Yes,” Elder Geidra’s eyes narrowed at him from across the room. “We are. Aren’t we, son of Kyrties?”

  Sage glanced at Kiel, who nodded and said, “Go on.”

  His heart had pounded through his chest as he’d approached the center of the chamber. Even after everything he had been through—facing Dirkus, balancing for uncountable hours above the ever-burning fires, feeling the pit’s heat fill his limbs, Takarus’s silence, not being able to see the rest of his friends, and the humiliation he’d endured as Kiel had made an example of him before the rest of his students—kneeling before the Council had been the toughest damn thing he’d ever been forced to do.

  But kneel he had, and it seemed to please the Council to no end.

  “Would you look at that,” Delecys said, taking a large mouthful of his wine. “It seems wild beasts can be tamed.”

  High Elder Geidra seemed less impressed, walking forward and placing a piece of parchment on the floor before Sage.

  “Sign this,” Geidra said, tossing a pen to him like a guard tossing scraps to a prisoner. “This is your acknowledgment that you pledge your loyalty to us. That from this day forward, regardless if you pass the Trials, you will obey our laws without question. You will cease seeing the undesirables in the Urdys Quarter and fraternizing with Commander Kiel’s son. And any sign of defiance or discussion of taboos will result in your immediate incarceration and forfeiture of rank and possessions.”

  “What?” Sage stared at the piece of parchment, a thing which had been made by the same hands that had grown and harvested the crops for the raw material, the people whose backs the Council of Elders had built their now-crumbling empire on. “I can’t see my frien
ds anymore?”

  “You want to become a Valier, don’t you?” Geidra said, grinning. “If you do not sign this parchment, then I will make certain that you never become one. You will be barred from the Trials, and you’ll live out the remainder of your days as a lowly farmer.”

  Sage had picked up the pen. He remembered thinking it had been impossibly heavy for something so small.

  “Well?” Makai said, his lips twisting into a mocking grin. “Go on. Your future awaits, boy.”

  “Everything you want can be yours,” Geidra said.

  Only upon your graves, Sage thought.

  But in the end, he had signed the parchment, and as Commander Kiel had told him that this was the beginning of a new chapter in his life, that he should be proud of what had been accomplished that day, Sage couldn’t help but think about how miserable his existence would be, spent alone in an army filled with people who whispered his name in disgust and looked on him with eyes filled with contempt and anger.

  He tried telling himself that of course he’d have to conform to their rules at first, but that, eventually, he’d be able to make a real difference as he gained rank as a Valier...

  But deep down, he knew the truth. They’d broken him. And even if he would be allowed to pass the Trials, eventually, they would get their way, and he would be forced to fall in line like a good soldier as his species went quietly out to embrace its myths, and, one day, perhaps, extinction at the hands of its worst enemy.

  Itself.

  2

  Now he stood before the Hall of Trials with his peers, their sweat mixing with the natural moisture and sediment in the air, creating a smell that reeked of desperation and fear. They were waiting for Captain Dirkus to open the doors and allow them into the first chamber, where they would all face the first of the Trials.

  This felt wrong.

  He couldn’t figure out why. This was what he wanted, right? It had been his dream as long as he could remember to succeed in the Trials, to prove himself to his people and become a Valier.

  Why then did he feel so…hollow?

  Whispers echoed around him; glares came from his peers. Reysha’s familiar violet hair and piercing golden eyes cut through the crowd. Eventually, she found her way to his side. Her long violet hair was tied back, and she wore leather bracers and a black and violet tunic that probably matched her family’s colors.