Lifeless

by Adrianne Strickland

  So that was what she’d given me. I glanced at the syringe. She hadn’t used all of it, and the tray held two other syringes. I wondered what was in those, and if I would have the chance to stab them into Ryse.

  She followed my gaze. “Just in case,” she said.

  I’d been trying to say something earlier. “Swanson … where’s Swanson?” I tried to roll my head to look at the windows, but had to be satisfied with rolling my eyes.

  “Ah yes, the father you call by his last name only, a last name you don’t even share. I’m sure he would love to be here—I would love for him to be here—but he’s only been arrested and suspended for now, not sentenced to be executed.” She shrugged. “Can’t say the same for Andre.”

  I stared at her, panting. “Why … do you hate me?” I hated her, of course, but my reasons were pretty obvious.

  She bent down, putting herself on my level. “I don’t hate you, Tavin. Not at all. In fact, I feel a kindred spirit inside of you.”

  I tried to shake my head, which meant it just twitched. “Not me. The Word.”

  “Yes, and the Word is inside of you.” She leaned closer. “And I love it. It speaks to me. It’s a part of you, but I want it for myself.”

  “So you want … to break me down … make it all yours.” My tongue was clumsy in my mouth, but I met her eyes and actually held them, something I was usually too repulsed to do. I tried to see something in her that I recognized. If Tavin and not just the Word of Death could speak to her, maybe she wouldn’t do this to me. “Why … are you like this?”

  “I think all Godspeakers are like this to some extent. We’re each just drawn to different Words, called by them. And death, pain, is what calls to me.”

  I tossed my head as much as I could. “I already knew … you were sadistic. But why?”

  “You think you can psychoanalyze me in the minute or two you have before our guests arrive, hmm?” She flipped her short black hair over her shoulder with a slight smile. “Perhaps you want to understand why I’m doing this to you?” She waited until I nodded weakly, and then leaned back. “Nice try. But not knowing is another form of torment, I feel. Helplessness and fear in the face of the unknown puts you on a mortal plane with the rest of us, doesn’t it, even though you have a bit of a God inside of you?”

  So she wanted to torment the Gods, or as near to it as she could, by torturing one of their Words. And not just any Word, but the one most often used to torture humankind.

  Too bad I was the innocent bystander, because I almost couldn’t blame her. Not that I could tell her that. She either wouldn’t believe me or else she’d just want to encourage that side of me. And “almost” wasn’t quite enough in a lot of situations, I’d discovered—I could definitely blame her. Because even if she hated the Gods, she also had some crazy God-complex going on herself.

  “You must’ve had … a tough childhood,” I said. I hoped the sarcasm was coming through well enough.

  Ryse’s eyes narrowed and she straightened all the way. “Shall we begin, then?”

  She turned away from my gurney, heading for the door out of the Death Factory. I remembered what was about to happen. The room tipped disconcertingly around me, but I still tried to lift my head to talk to her.

  “No,” I said, speaking as fast as I could with my drug-heavy tongue. “Gods, no. Please … Ryse. Dr. Winters, whatever. I’m begging you. I’ll do whatever you want. You won’t even have to make me. I’ll do whatever you ask … just not this.”

  She shot me a considering look over her shoulder. But then her chilly smile returned. “What if this is what I want?”

  “Then I’ll fight you with every last breath in my body.” The words sounded more desperate than threatening.

  Her smile stayed. “It’s more fun for both of us that way, I think. And besides, you also carry the breath of one of the Gods, and it doesn’t want to fight me.”

  “No!” I cried as she moved again for the door. I tried to struggle, but all it amounted to was me shifting weakly on the bed in my restraints.

  The door to the Death Factory slid open after she swiped her card. “Bring them in here,” she said.

  Security guards wheeled three chairs into the room, not just one. Strapped to the wheelchairs were Jacques, Chantelle, and Drey, followed by Pie—who was dragged bodily inside by the neck, on her purple leash, when she planted her paws and tried not to enter the lab.

  Everyone who had ever mattered to me.

  nineteen

  Pie, Drey, Chantelle, Jacques—all of them were now in the Death Factory, ready and waiting … for me.

  I’d told Ryse about Chantelle and Jacques, I realized, when I was trying to remind Drey of the people who were important to us. Drey had been right to keep everything hidden and act as though no one really mattered to him. Because once people knew, they did this to you.

  It wasn’t only the Gods who were cruel.

  Chantelle was sobbing as a security guard wheeled her to a stop near my gurney and set the brake. Her hair was a wreck and remnants of eye makeup streaked black down her cheeks. Her slightly creased face looked older.

  “Tavin!” she cried when she saw me. “Honey, what’s going on? I’m so scared!” She saw the cuffs on my arms and shook her head in confusion, sobbing even harder. “What’s happening?”

  The security guards left in a hurry. No doubt they would wait right outside, but no one wanted to be in here other than Ryse. The one holding Pie secured the end of her leash to a metal handrail along the edge of a counter near Drey and left. The door slid closed behind him. Ryse walked up to it, her black Necron boots clicking over the white tiles, and punched a code into the door’s keypad. The bolt clunked home, locking us all in.

  “No one to interfere, I’m afraid,” she said.

  Jacques’s chiseled face was steely and grave. He probably guessed some of what was going to happen, since he’d knowingly helped Khaya and me escape on his trash barge. Chantelle hadn’t even known what she was doing when she sheltered us under the bridge, in the break room she and the other ladies used. It was all my fault she was here.

  Drey’s eyes were dry. He was calm. He looked at me from his wheelchair and said, “I love you, Tavin. Know that. Whatever happens, I love you.”

  Tears of helplessness ran down my cheeks. I couldn’t look at them anymore.

  “Ryse, I can’t do this,” I said, my voice cracking apart. “I’ll be broken inside. I won’t be able to be the Word of Death after this.”

  “I think you need a little breaking to be the Word of Death,” she said calmly, walking back over to me. “Others agree. So you’re going to break for me today. And once everything from your past life is gone, you’ll be able to focus on the future. Besides, all three of these individuals have been charged with treason and sentenced to immediate execution. The law must be upheld.”

  At the mention of execution, Chantelle started wailing.

  “I will have no future!” I shouted over her. “If you make me kill them, I swear to the Gods, I will kill myself! There will be no Word of Death!”

  Then I realized that I could do that before I killed anyone else—if the Word could work on me. It was probably a long shot, but I folded my fingers up to the edge of my wrist, just where the cuff began, and threw everything I had at it.

  “Cut, sever, gash, gape … ” It wasn’t working, so I went deeper, practically screaming at my internal organs. “Falter, fail, hemorrhage, explode, eviscerate … die, die, die!”

  The Words dissolved into my own gasping. I might have just been speaking normally for all the effect I had. When I turned the Word against myself, it just slipped away, like a knife turned away by armor.

  Chantelle was moaning. Drey was shaking his head and shouting for me to stop. Jacques looked scared for once, and Pie was whining and backing against her leash so hard the skin of her neck was bunc
hed up around her head.

  Both of Ryse’s eyebrows had shot up, but her expression smoothed when I stopped speaking. “We’ll just have to take precautions against any self-destructive tendencies, won’t we? I think restraints will be necessary at all times.” She stepped toward me. “Unless, of course, I’m godspeaking.”

  “I won’t cooperate,” I said. “I’ll do everything I can to be the worst Word of Death. They’ll take me away from you, make me pass the Word to an automaton that you won’t be able to torture … ”

  This was the first thing I’d said that truly seemed to make her pause.

  But then she only said, “I won’t give you the chance to be anything but the best Word of Death, after this.” She looked at the others and tapped her lips with a black-gloved hand. “Perhaps we should ease into this. Start with the one who matters least to you and then work our way up from there. What do you think? Jacques first, then Pie, Chantelle, and Drey? Or would it be Jacques, Chantelle, Pie, and then Drey?” She sounded genuinely intrigued by the question. She glanced at Jacques and Chantelle. “It must sting to realize you matter less than a dog.”

  I yelled wordlessly, as loud as I could, since I could do nothing else. Ryse only winced at my volume and picked up the controller hooked to the gurney. She used it to sit me up higher on the bed—so she could get at my back. I tried to press myself flat into the mattress, but once I was in a sitting position, her death-proofed hands shoved my head forward with hardly a protest from my muscles. My hospital gown was already open in back, so she didn’t even need to move the fabric aside before her voice was inside of me.

  Death, she crooned. Death, my friend. Relax. Maybe she was saying it aloud too, but I heard her in my mind, my body.

  And then I didn’t protest at all. My arms relaxed entirely.

  I was Death. We were Death.

  Ryse unbuckled my straps and unclipped the IV tube from the junction near the crook of my elbow, leaving only a handy injection port dangling from the needle still in my arm—in case she wanted to give me something else, no doubt. As she did, she moved slowly around the bed, keeping in constant control with her voice and in constant eye-contact with the Words on my skin. At her direction, I even helped her with the straps on my ankles and then slid off the gurney. My legs were wobbly, but I could stand. The blood-spattered hospital gown slid off to pool at my feet. It was a small consolation that I was wearing blue hospital shorts underneath.

  She put a hand on my bare shoulder to help direct me, and I noticed that she’d taken off her Necron glove. She was toying with death again, like one would do with flame. Not that I could do anything about it, even though part of me wanted to. I tried—oh, that part of me tried, screaming in a soundless, solitary confinement in my own brain—but my body didn’t listen.

  She walked me over to Jacques first. This will be simple. We’re easing into this, remember? I am not without mercy.

  I leaned forward, placing my arm, the uninjured one, on his shoulder. I stared him right in the face. His eyes were wide at first, but then they relaxed. He even nodded at me.

  “Rupture,” Ryse said behind me—through me—to a few of the arteries in Jacques’s brain, right behind his left eye. The pressure must have been a little excessive, because his eye flooded red. He jerked once and then sagged against the straps of the wheelchair, unblinking.

  I distantly expected Chantelle to scream, but her eyes were squeezed shut and she was murmuring under her breath. Maybe praying to the Gods.

  Pie was the one who screamed, or near enough, yipping and howling at an ear-piercing pitch. She whipped back and forth, thrashing against her leash like I’d been thrashing on the gurney.

  I felt Ryse’s grimace through her words: Pie dies next, then.

  I straightened from Jacques, turning away from Chantelle, and moved in the direction of Drey … and my puppy. She was tugging so hard on the collar that some of her shrieking noises were coming out in rasps.

  Let’s make this silent. I can’t stand any more noise.

  I bent forward, leaning toward her on the ground where she struggled. I could see the whites of her frantic eyes. My good arm reached for her.

  “Asphyxiate … ” Ryse began.

  Just before my fingers grazed Pie’s fur, Drey and his entire wheelchair came crashing down. He must have thrown all his weight toward me, tipping the chair. He crushed my arm to the ground underneath him, dragging me to my knees … and away from Ryse.

  “Gods damn you,” she snapped, turning her attention to Drey for a brief second.

  Which was long enough for me to turn on her. I ripped my arm out from underneath Drey, ignoring the wrenching pain, and threw myself at Ryse. Both of us went careening into a counter. Neither of my arms was working right, fumbling uselessly at her Necron sleeves, unable to find her ungloved hand or her neck. And so I pressed my cheek against hers as she tried to push me off.

  “Break for me.” I was nearly kissing her as I breathed the Words. “Slowly.”

  Her head snapped back at the sound of the first crunch in her arm. And then she screamed.

  Before I shoved myself away from her, I found her bare hand and squeezed it. “Silently.”

  Her scream choked off into a hissing gurgle. She slid to the floor, her mouth working and her face twisted with pain, but she couldn’t make a noise.

  My legs buckled and I had to crawl the rest of the way to Drey. Pie was fine, whimpering, huddled in the corner between the wall and the counter, watching me warily.

  Drey was not fine. On his side still in the wheelchair, his face was turning from red to blue. I’d touched him when he’d fallen on me. When Ryse had said “asphyxiate” to Pie.

  “Gods, no! Drey!” I ripped at the buckles holding him down, eventually spilling him out of the wheelchair. I rolled him on his back on the tiles. His hands were already at his throat, shaking, clawing. His eyes were wide with panic.

  My own eyes shot around at the lab, as if there was something that could help me in here. But there was no cure for the Word of Death. There was nothing I could do to stop this.

  His hands suddenly seized my face, dragging my eyes level with his. He gave my head a jerk, and then hit himself in the chest.

  There was one thing I could do to stop this. Drey knew it, and he wanted it.

  “Drey, no,” I gasped.

  He thumped his chest harder, his eyes flying wider. His face was turning a darker purple.

  He couldn’t get much clearer than that.

  I cupped his head, bringing my forehead against his. “I love you too,” I said, my tears dripping on his cheeks. “It’ll be all right. You can stop now.”

  He stopped. His arms fell to his side.

  My mind was still. No justifications, no mantra, could ever save me now.

  The room was oddly quiet too. There was pounding on the door from outside, but it was muffled. The guards hadn’t decided to blast it open yet, I guessed. Inside, Pie was only trying to hide, Chantelle’s eyes were still closed with tears glossing her cheeks, Jacques was silent in death, and Ryse …

  Ryse was crunching more than anything else, which was a sound no human being should have made. She was on the floor, her back arched in agony, but she wasn’t screaming. What skin I could see was swelling, blossoming with bruises. Her face was almost unrecognizable.

  I wanted to watch it through to the end. I wanted to make it worse. Slower, even more painful. I wanted to tear her apart, piece by piece.

  But Drey was still looking at me. Part of me wanted to slide his eyelids closed, but then another part of me knew that I would torture Ryse for as long as possible if I thought Drey could no longer see me.

  So I dragged myself away from Drey’s side, and he seemed to watch me as I went. I hauled myself across the tiles over to Ryse, pulled myself into a kneeling position next to her, and put two fingers against her te
mple. Her eyes were swollen shut, so she couldn’t look at me.

  “I am not without mercy,” I grated in her ear, leaning over her. “Now, go away—forever. Disappear.”

  She dissolved, rather, turning into a weird sticky pile of mush on the floor. Some of her ran into the drain indented in the tiles. Her Necron suit stayed, still whole but deflated.

  I just sat there for a few seconds, hunched on the floor, staring … and I knew: this was hell. The Word of Death had brought me here. It had been Herio, at first, and then it had been me.

  The pounding at the door had stopped, but I knew they’d be here soon. They would knock me out, and then this hell would continue—at least long enough for them to pass the Word on to an automaton, if they finally decided the risk was worth it. And then everyone else would be at risk. Unless I actually decided to do something about it—something I should have done from the beginning.

  I closed Drey’s eyes in preparation for what I was going to do next. Ignoring Chantelle and Pie, for the most part, I did a cursory check of the lab, looking for a scalpel or a razor or something sharp. But the cupboards and doors were locked. I was too weak to hurt myself without any tools, so I stumbled back over to the gurney, near where the three syringes were still on the tray.

  Might as well try, I thought. If they got to me in time, then I’d only be doing them a favor and knocking myself out for them. But if I died, so much the better. I lined the syringes up and pulled the plastic caps off the end of the needles with my teeth. I’d have to do it fast, get through them all before they took effect.

  With the first syringe in hand, I noticed how little liquid was in each one, even in the two that Ryse hadn’t tapped into yet, and remembered that air in your bloodstream could supposedly kill you. So then I went through them all, pulling the plungers all the way back so that each barrel was filled with air, not just drugs. The syringes were small, but I hoped it would be enough.

  I sat on the edge of the gurney and positioned my arm with the IV needle in it over my lap. I didn’t wait. I jabbed the first syringe into the injection port, depressing it as quickly as possible. The air and liquid hurt, straining my vein, but the pain was microscopic compared to how much everything else hurt.