Slow Burn Dark

by A. B. Keuser

  The man was moved to the side, held for further questioning. He wasn’t the reason she’d been called to Creighton.

  The moon held a colony of farmers who sowed, tended and reaped the planet around which they rotated. Places like this—atmosphere thin rocks void-dark the majority of the time—held the most heavily visited temples. People here needed to know the Great Mother was there to protect them.

  And she was a tool of the Great Mother.

  A visible, physical… feared presence in a universe where doubters sometimes needed sharper proof than simple belief.

  And then it was time.

  The woman whose life and words didn’t add up, who’s children existed at a swirling miasma and wore scars and bruises too numerous to be ignored, stood at the front of the congregation. Rigid as a pole, her face was as serene as anyone blissfully ignorant of their fate.

  She knew enough to fear… but not enough for the terror accurate to her situation.

  Even as death hung over her, she didn’t see it.

  Didn’t sense her own evil.

  Perhaps she thought her crimes were lowly enough there was no chance they could have drawn the Great Mother’s wrath.

  Perhaps she thought she would simply receive a slap on the wrist.

  But Kathrynn gave only one punishment.

  It was all the Great Mother asked of her today.

  “Ana,” Mother Mihm said, her words cold. “You’re here today because the Great Mother has concerns for the children in your care.”

  “My kids are fine.”

  A hot lance dragged over Kathrynn’s shoulder.

  “All of us are her concern. She loves and cares for us, and if we are foolish enough to believe we can hide anything from her…” Mother Mihm’s words died as Kathrynn stepped forward.

  She pulled the sickle apart, dividing the blade into two, identical, thinner blades. Sweeping the pair over the woman’s head, handles crossed, she held them like a deadly collar.

  “What…?” The woman was smart to say nothing more, to hold perfectly still.

  With the blades on either side of her neck, Ana couldn’t run.

  She couldn’t move without cutting herself.

  Kathrynn stared into her eyes, watched the woman’s intent.

  Saw her future.

  Saw her present, and the things she didn’t want anyone to know.

  Kathrynn’s gaze shifted to the three figures, hidden behind the others.

  Ana had ordered them to stay at the back, shaken the youngest hard enough the girl had nearly thrown up.

  Dark thoughts coalesced around them in her mind. Unwanted, their presence was a pall. And Ana’s life would pay for every mark on their bodies.

  Her children were small… possibly too young to know what was about to happen. Definitely too young to witness it.

  “Remove them.” She flicked her red gaze toward those who screened them.

  Seen in reality, instead of shadows, the children were not as broken as their mother thought them. A unity the woman didn’t see existed. One that would help them survive.

  The eldest, a boy whose arm hung at an odd angle… whose collar bone had been broken more times than it had been allowed to properly set… shook off the hands that tried to steer him from the room.

  He was sixteen, though he looked no older than twelve. In his eyes, she saw a dark fury. Something that could harm more than just him if left on its own.

  She shook her head as the sisters tried, once again to take him from the chambers. His mother had done heinous things to him. Things the girls had been spared from.

  He deserved to see. Deserved to know, without a doubt, she was gone. That she would never hurt him again.

  “Ana Mikaela Jonas.” Kathrynn noted the lack of reaction to her full name. “The Great Mother, in her wisdom, has brought me to you. You have been given opportunities to atone for your sins—to seek absolution.”

  “I’ve done nothing wrong in the eyes of the law.”

  She tightened the blades against the woman’s skin as that lie bit at her bones.

  Blood trickled down the woman’s throat as her eyes widened--as she searched for some other lie she thought would save her.

  “No Colarium jury would convict me.”

  The truth slithered through the burning of the lies, like ice, sharp and frozen.

  It spiked a murmur through those still gathered.

  “The laws of the Great Mother are higher than the Colarium, Lazarai, or any other conceit of man.”

  The woman’s smile was smug—as if she’d forgotten her precarious position. “The Great Mother isn’t a killer.”

  The force of that lie would have dropped Kathrynn to her knees years ago.

  “She protects those who cannot protect themselves. No one here could stop you, so she sent me.”

  Forcing the woman to meet her eyes, Kathrynn didn’t lower her voice. “And I am a killer.”

  True fear finally shone in Ana’s eyes, and her lips parted. Whether to spout more lies or beg for leniency, no one would know.

  No one needed to hear the words.

  Tightening her grip on her sickles, Kathrynn wrenched her hands apart. The woman’s head separated from her body in a single stroke of the dual blades.

  Kat closed her eyes on the gasp of those still gathered, and opened them, once more, to silence. She didn’t look down at the woman’s severed head. At the body as it hit the floor with a sickening tud.

  Death was her purpose. It came with no pleasure.

  Kathrynn didn’t look at any of them, except for the boy.

  His jaw was tight, his eyes narrowed as he stared at his mother’s body. Whatever he saw, there was no joy in him. The Great Mother’s justice had been served.

  And then, the chemicals that had held her everready… depleted.

  Breathing in slow, deep.

  She’d done this before. She’d do it again.

  Still… the room spun and she couldn't let herself close her eyes.

  The last thing the sisters needed was for her to fall flat on her face in front of an already skittish congregation.

  The silence that had permeated the hall, slowly filled with whispered prayers that made her stomach churn.

  She stared ahead, eyes unseeing as Mother Mihm brought the congregation back to order. As she blessed them and sent them home. As the hush of feet signalled her fellowship’s departure.

  The boy was among the last to leave, steered away by a sister in deep blue-hemmed robes.

  Kathrynn remained where she was throughout, blood dripping an uneven patter, staining the hem of her robe, darkening the color already there.

  When the sisters were finally alone in the temple again, she allowed herself to relax her stance, to breathe normally.

  Mother Mihm led her to the cleansing room.

  “The Great Mother provides in unforeseen ways.” Mother Mihm watched warily as Kathrynn cleaned her blades in one of the deep basins. “I’m sorry it came to that.”

  “Evil cannot be allowed to thrive.”

  She’d learned early on that speaking as little as possible about her executions… especially directly following them, was for the best.

  No one needed to know the full reasons those like Ana lost their heads.

  She wasn’t even certain what went on when the lies built up, when her blood turned hot and her mind narrowed to pinpoint focus.

  She knew the basic science, of course.

  Knew that the only reason she’d been able to complete the act was the adrenaline buildup that needed release… that for whatever reason flowed through her blade when in contact with evil in the blood.

  She shook away the thoughts and found Mother Mihm still watching her in the mirror. “Will you stay for the evening services?”

  Kathrynn shook her head. “I’d better not. Your attendance will be high—they’ll want to be there, just in case I’m keeping tally of those who stay away as those with potential secrets—and there’s no
need for me to make those you need to see daily any more uncomfortable than I already have.”

  She’d scheduled her departure early, for the same reason.

  Mihm watched her, holding a towel out when she’d finished with the first blade. “It must be a lonely life.”

  Kathrynn didn’t answer as she dried the blades, snapped them together and replaced them in their sheath.

  When she turned back, Mihm was closer than she’d expected.

  The woman hugged her before she had the opportunity to react, and she forced herself to relax into the other woman’s embrace.

  She was too used to people flinching away from her to accept the contact outright, but she needed it.

  She hadn’t realized how much until she allowed herself to return the embrace.

  “The Great Mother gave you this burden because she knew you could handle it. That doesn’t mean you need to pull away from those of us who wouldn’t be able to.” The sad command in Mihm’s voice spoke to her long experience as head of a temple.

  “Few are as understanding.” She said as the woman released her. “Thank you,”

  “You’re welcome here anytime you wish.” Smiling, Mihm swept her hand toward the sisters gathering space where the sounds of food being prepared echoed. “After you change, you will join us for the midday meal. I won’t take no for an answer on that.”

  She could not remember ever being ordered to do anything by a member of the order since she’d turned red.

  “I’m not sure—”

  “My daughter speaks of you often when we are able to connect.”

  Now that she looked, there was something familiar in the curve of her jaw, the length of her lashes. But Kathrynn didn’t know….

  “Pasmin loves you,” Mihm’s smile was indulgent. “And my daughter could never love a monster.”

  Kathrynn felt the blood drain from her face and turned away to pull the robe over her head. “I’m so sorry, she never mentioned that you were one of our order.”

  “She doesn’t like to bring it up, thinks people will assume I had something to do with her placement.”

  Pulling her jacket on, slipping the sheath supports over her shoulders, she flipped back her hood and adjusted her shoulders. “I imagine, if they knew, they’d still think I had more to do with it.”

  “Possibly.” Steering her into the kitchen, Mother Mihm sat her down at the table and —again—ordered her to do nothing.

  None of the other sisters shied from her. Whatever Mihm taught her disciples here, it was not what she’d experienced from others.

  It did the opposite of reassure her.

  Ten, uncomfortable minutes into the meal, Kathrynn finally asked, “None of you are afraid of me?”

  All of them paused, looking at her with faintly humored smile.

  “Why should we be?” one of the sisters asked, clear blue eyes guileless. “So long as we never fail the Great Mother and her purpose for us, you pose us no threat.”

  A sister in purple whose name started with a B—Kathrnynn had never spent enough time with the members of an outpost to need to know their names—handed her a bowl of flat bread. “I was terrified of you when I was on Ludo, but Mother Mihm explained it all to us. I only wish I would have known what I do now from the outset.”

  Less unsettled, but no less confused, Kathrynn looked through the hexagonal skylight cut overhead, to the swirling landscape of the planet above.

  She saw a future, both terrible and strange. A future that could pull them away from the destructive path Archimedes had set them on the day he’d attempted to kill her brother.

  But the full puzzle wasn’t available to her yet… it would require a deft hand, and interference in Flynn’s plans….

  Two righteous paths did not always run parallel.

  Before she knew it, the meal was over and her wrist was buzzing with the reminder that her ship would soon depart. She took the time to help the sisters clean up anyway, learning more of the things Mother Mihm had said to keep the fear at bay.

  But she couldn’t linger forever.

  “Thank you for the meal. I’m sorry my visit was not under better circumstances.”

  “The children will be safe and taken care of now. They will have choices they wouldn’t have had before. Marina, the littlest, has proclaimed she will join us, take the robes. But there is time enough for her to discover the Great Mother’s path… whatever it may be.” She looked toward the door. “You could stay.”

  The selfish tug rarely surfaced anymore. But she remembered how to quash it. “Sadly, the Great Mother has other plans for me.”

  With a nod of understanding, Mother Mihm took her hands, “Our doors are always open to you.”

  “I’ll be back,” she hugged her again. “Soon.”

  She snapped the breathing mask over her mouth and nose and gave the woman a brief smile before departing.

  When the airlock doors to the temple sealed behind her, she flipped her hood up. The too-thin atmosphere washed all color from the surface, her clothing muted to a dark gray, no one would have any reason to suspect what she was.

  It wasn’t a long walk to the small shipyards, and she saw no one on the streets…. But a phantom gaze brushed over her senses, and she turned to look at the last house before the entrance.

  Marina watched her from an oval window. Her small eyes studied… and then she smiled. Her little hand rising to wave.

  Kathrynn returned the gesture and whispered a blessing for the child.

  Great Mother protect and keep her.

  The ship that would take her to Beta Five, where the Great Mother had a new task for her would not travel in the blink of an eye like folders could.

  She’d have to pick one up sooner or later, but for now, it was a long trip. Enough time to work on the first portion of her new plan.

  Tucked away in her cabin, she secured the private terminal and typed through the orders, creating a flow that would take those who needed Mother Mihm’s insight to Creighton. One that would send those she had already convinced out into the systems to help others.

  She had to set fire to the future and watch it burn… wait for it to consume her too.

  Seventeen - Flynn

  Bosco was punctual, Flynn would give him that.

  He was waiting where Flynn had told him to when he’d arrived—Flynn knew he hadn’t walked, but the man stood beside the ventilation structure alone. Just him and the shadows.

  That was fine. Flynn had stolen his brother’s buggy again and was finally getting the hang of driving the thing—enough to fake it at least.

  His brother, however, wasn’t impressed. When he rolled to a stop in the paid-for parking space, Putty was there with a glare and some choice words.

  Flynn ignored them.

  “You remember Bosco, don’t you?”

  “What are you going to do with him?” Putty wiped his face with the sleeve of his garish flannel.

  “You don’t want to know.” Flynn said it for Bosco’s benefit, but Putty’s reaction—one of concern sent Bosco’s way—certainly helped.

  Flynn didn’t hide his smile. “Want to watch?”

  Shaking his head, Putty tossed his gear into the buggy. “There’s a machine down in Captain Saguas’ main shaft. I’ll have more fun hitting it with a wrench than I’d have here.”

  “Dang. I’d hoped to borrow that wrench.”

  Putty let out a long sigh and then looked from him to Bosco. “Despite what my brother says, I’m fairly certain he doesn’t plan to cause you physical harm…. Maybe.”

  Smiling, Flynn moved to turn Bosco toward the med cube, but his brother called out one more warning before he left. “Mom might not be around to stop you anymore, but the rules still apply. Stop touching my stuff.”

  “Funny, you never follow that one. Why should I?”

  Flynn cast Bosco, what he hoped was, a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, I won’t do anything illegal.”

  Wordlessly, Bosco followed hi
m, twitchy, like a cat unsure of the creatures that might hide in the shadows on all sides.

  Though Flynn would guess the man had never stepped foot inside a shaft, the bite mark on the dead man’s arm left too many questions to ignore.

  Questions he was going to get the answers to.

  “So… what now?” Bosco asked, looking at him. “Take me to the desert and leave me to die?”

  Flynn was pretty sure it was a joke. “You’d find your way back.”

  “And you wouldn’t have brought me here.”

  “No, I wouldn’t…. Bit anyone lately?”

  Bosco drew back, glaring at him. “I might have.”

  “Was it a random biting? Or did you try to take a chunk out of someone you knew?” Flynn ushered him into the morgue, sure the man was distracted enough he hadn’t realized where they were.

  “Listen, I don’t know what’s happened the last few weeks, but I don’t get in fights. Not unless I have to. What happened with that RTF asshole was me protecting myself.”

  Chad had prepared the room as Flynn had asked.

  “And what about this guy?” Flynn pulled the sheet off the corpse packet and let Bosco have a full look.

  The man stared at the body, eyes moving too fast as he took it all in.

  “No.” He shook his head, indignantly. “No. I did not do that.”

  Bosco would have been half way out the door if Flynn hadn’t had a good hold on him.

  “Okay, you didn’t kill him, but you did bite him. Now, back to our original question. Do you know him.”

  “I mean, I don’t know him know him.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Anders.”

  “And what was he doing here?”

  “It’s his… I mean, he owns Anderson Lodge. We call him Anders, but his name is Phil Anderson. He’s not a miner, but the land rights stayed in the family.”

  “Then why doesn’t anyone here know who he is?”

  “Nobody?” He straightened, looked the man over again. His face twisted and he dropped down, glaring at what remained of the man’s face. “I knew there was something wrong. Whoever this is, it’s not Anders.”

  “First it is, then it isn’t? Make up your mind.”