"Well, well, what have we here?" the doctor said, voice raspy and high-pitched. "Lovely specimen." He clattered closer, reached up a pincer, and stroked Ayumi. "How old are you, child?"
"Thirteen, I think," she said. "Please, sir, they said I can work with the wagons."
The doctor seemed to smile, though it was hard to tell with a scorpion. "Ah, you are afraid. I understand. You should be, you know. This will hurt. Quite a bit, I'm afraid." His smile was almost kindly. "But you are a human, after all. You live to feel pain."
The doctor lifted a scalpel.
And he cut her open like a fish.
Ayumi screamed.
She flailed against her bonds.
She prayed.
Please, ancients, please, ancients, please . . .
The tubes pumped her with fluids. And the doctor cut. Snipped. Pulled out her womb, her ovaries, placed them aside, filled her with liquid.
And she screamed.
And she wept.
"Keep her alive," he said to the nurses. "Seal her up. Stitch her up. More tomorrow."
The nurses pulled out steel thread. "Fear not."
Ayumi screamed as they worked.
She passed out, woke again, stitched together. Bleeding. Dying.
A nightmare. Just a nightmare.
White eyes in the shadows, marbles in cups. Tears, hot and bloody.
He wove me a rug of many colors. Of birds that flew and mountains that soared. I flew on a blue bird through the night, a bird with small white eyes.
In the darkness, she flew on the magical beast again, holding his blue feathers. The bird that had died in her attic. Naked and afraid. He had grown strong, grown his blue feathers, risen again into the sky. They flew toward a distant star. To Sol. And the sunlight seared her.
Dawn came. And the doctor came. And he smiled.
"Good morning, my child! Are you ready? This will hurt, I'm afraid."
And he ripped her stitches open. And he cut. And she lashed at her bonds until the straps dug to the bone, and she screamed until she tore her throat. And he cut, removing pieces, filling her with fluid.
"Fear not," said the nurses, great naked birds, looming above her, bodies pink and wet. "Maybe you will be like us."
Her eyes rolled back, and she flew on her blue bird through the night, a bird like a whale, taking her through darkness, blind but leading her home.
"You bathe in pain," whispered the doctor, taking out organs, planting new organs, working as she trembled and wept. "How beautiful. How beautiful, the human agony."
She slept in pain.
She screamed.
She stood on a rooftop, and all around her the enclave burned, and baby birds lay at her feet, curling up, consumed by fire. The reptiles feasted. Her toes fell off. Her toes became baby birds. The reptiles ate them. They lived inside her. Breeding, cutting, bursting out, and she was a bloated corpse of bustling lizards.
A star in the distance. Shining in the night.
Sol.
A soul.
A dying light.
A tunnel to light.
She fell into shadow.
Her heat stilled.
Laughing, the doctor placed defibrillator paddles on her chest. Electricity coursed through her. She awoke, gasping, heart racing.
The doctor kept cutting.
Ayumi flew.
She was a freezing bird, trampled, broken. Grains of wheat spilled from her split belly.
She was a barren desert.
She was meat on a spine.
She was maybe like them.
She was eyes in a cup.
She was in darkness, rising, screaming, falling again. Flying.
She was a scrap of cloth, embroidered with metal thread, a trapped bird.
Earth. A soul. A world. Ahead—a pale blue dot. And Ayumi flew.
She slept, nailed to the wall, stitched shut with rusty metal. She woke on the table, cut open.
"So beautiful inside." The doctor leaned above her, magnifying lenses on his eyes, cutting, removing, taking out all her pieces, all her secrets. "So wet and red and lovely."
Her heart cracked and fell still. The defibrillator crackled, and she jolted up, screaming. And he worked again.
She was torn apart. She hung on a wall, a frog, splayed open, dissected. She gazed upon the searing lights. Upon a blue world in the darkness. Upon Earth.
I will see it again, Father. I promised. I promised.
And still the doctor cut her, snipping her spine.
And the pain flowed away.
She floated in space. In the darkness among the stars. Heading toward light.
Silence.
All was silent.
No more pain. Only death.
"Ancients," she whispered.
Above her rolled a sea. Deep blue and indigo. Another plane. A realm of light, casting shadow. They swam above her, beings with no forms.
"I must see Earth," she said, flying in the blackness.
Sadness fell upon her like the rain. Colors swirled above, and voices spoke in her mind.
You may rest, child. Let go. Flow into death. There will be no more pain.
She shook her head. "I cannot die. I promised my father. To see Earth. To see home. He wove me a rug." Her tears flowed. "A rug of Earth."
She raised the scrap of the rug, the piece that had survived the fire. On it appeared her bird, flapping its wings.
These are threads of aether, said the voices.
"For I am a daughter of aether," whispered Ayumi. "Let me live."
Life will hurt, child.
"I do not fear the pain."
A rumble beyond, grainy. She is dead. Lived longer than I thought. Toss her out with the others.
The nurses lifted her corpse. No pain. No memory. Falling into darkness.
Ayumi reached out toward the ancients.
"Please."
Life is fragile, child. Do you not fear dying again?
"I will never fear this place." Ayumi smiled through her tears. "For you are here."
Light.
Light glittered across her, silvery and warm.
On an examination table, a warty scorpion pressed a defibrillator's paddles against a mutilated corpse.
Electricity coursed through her, jolting her heart.
Light. Light everywhere like motes of stardust.
On the table, Ayumi's eyes opened.
She gasped for air.
Above her—searing white light.
Around her—organs on trays. Her organs. And yet a heart still beat in her chest. On her hand—a glowing rune.
The doctor hissed and scuttled back, eyes wide, stinger raised.
"Impossible!"
The nurses screamed.
Her bonds tore. Ayumi rose, whole and healed.
She was naked, pale, pure. Reborn. Alive. Alive.
Shakily, she raised her palm. A rune shone there, shaped like a snake biting its tail. A weaver's rune.
The doctor shrieked and lunged toward her.
Ayumi grabbed a scalpel and tossed the blade, hitting his eye.
The doctor fell back, eyeball bursting, screeching, tail flailing.
She walked toward him, eyes dry. The doctor hissed, curling up, eye gone.
"How is this possible?" he screeched.
Ayumi grabbed the defibrillator paddles from the table. The machine he had used on her so often, bringing her back to life again and again.
"You brought me back so many times," she whispered. "But not this time."
She turned on the machine. She cranked the dials up to the max. The defibrillator hummed and hissed and crackled. She placed the paddles against the doctor.
The creature screamed.
Ayumi stood, eyes dry, holding the paddles against him, driving the electricity into the creature. Murdering. Murdering him. His shell cracked open. His insides gushed out, burning. He twitched like a doll on a string, and when she removed the paddles, he fell.
The nurses
looked at her. Half human. Half beasts. Scorpion eyes and scorpion claws. Slowly, they removed their masks.
"Free the others," Ayumi said. "Take them off the walls. Take them off the tables. Take them outside."
She walked out of the hospital, leading the most miserable and courageous humans who had ever lived.
Nurses—deformed and sliced and stitched together.
Patients—sawed open, burned, frozen, cut and reformed.
Experiments—barely alive, swaying, blinking in the sunlight. They were like broken hatchlings, trembling, rising from shells. They stepped, limped, crawled away from the hospital into the gulock. Blinking, they moved past the pile of skinned bodies toward the huts. Never had such pitiful, deformed creatures walked together. Never had braver warriors walked into the fire.
The scorpions saw them. The creatures shrieked and charged at them.
The patients did not flee.
They had endured medical experimentation. The loss of their families. The loss of their humanity. They welcomed death.
The scorpions reached them, ready to kill.
And the patients fought.
With scalpels. With rocks. With tooth and nail—those who still had teeth and nails.
"For Earth!" they cried, those who could still speak.
And on the rocky ground of a foreign world, light-years from Earth, they died.
The scorpion claws cut them. The stingers stung them. The venom coursed through their veins. They died far from home, twisted, deformed, but not alone. They died with brothers and sisters. They did not die in labs, experiments on tables and walls.
They died as heroes.
"Kill them all!" shrieked the scorpions. "Kill every last pest in this camp!"
The arachnids swarmed. They burst into huts and tore the prisoners apart. They laughed, ripping through corpses, not bothering to skin them.
The prisoners cried out. They died. Thousands died.
But thousands fought.
Even those who had not endured the Red Hospital were barely human. Starving. Skeletal. Reduced to an animal state. Yet as they rose one last time, as they fought with stones and sticks, they were the finest of humanity.
Ayumi walked at their lead. She raised her hand, and the rune glowed. A weaver's rune. A gift from the higher plane. The scorpions saw and hissed, blinded, and scurried back.
As death sprawled around her, Ayumi reached the gates of the gulock. Towering gates. Iron and black and sharp. Human skins hung from them, faces still attached. She looked up at those lurid curtains, and tears filled her eyes.
Her own skin hung there.
She had been skinned whole. Face and hair. Flapping above the gate.
But I'm healed. The ancients healed me. I will not die today. She raised her eyes, and between the clouds, a patch of night sky shone. I will see Earth.
The gates were locked and electricity buzzed across the fence. Prisoners tried to climb, to flee, only for the electricity to course through them. They died on the fence, limbs slung between the crackling bars. The last hospital survivors gathered around Ayumi.
"We will climb the fence," they said.
"The electric shock will kill you," Ayumi said.
They nodded. "It will. We will burn on the rods. But you will climb over our bodies. You will be free, Ayumi-san. You will be free. We will all be free."
She knew they were dying already. She knew they could not survive the damage the doctor had already done.
They climbed the fence.
They screamed as the electricity filled them.
Nurses and patients, human again. As they died, they were human again.
As behind her the scorpions were butchering the thousands, Ayumi climbed over the bodies of her friends. She climbed to the top of the crackling, buzzing fence, and she remembered climbing the walls of the enclave, gazing from their top upon the city of Palaevia. From up here, Ayumi gazed upon a different land. Upon a dark, cold wilderness, a hinterland of boulders and distant white trees. A planet whose name she did not know. A planet so far from home.
But her rune shone on her hand. She was not alone.
The top of the fence was tall. She knew the fall would likely kill her.
But she was not alone.
She would see Earth again.
Ayumi jumped off the top of the fence.
She jumped into darkness. To freedom.
She landed in a pile of ashes. Ashes of burnt humans. Their deaths had saved her today.
Ayumi ran into the darkness, naked and beaten and covered in blood, scars in her heart, scars in her mind. A glow on her hand. A gift that shone. Behind her rose the screams of the dying, of those she could not save, and Ayumi knew that she would forever hear those screams. She ran into shadows, and she flew on her bird, traveling in the night to a distant star.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Rowan sat in the shadowy hold, working on the script to Dinosaur Island II, when the alarms blared and doomsday arrived.
She bolted up, scattering pages of her script.
The klaxons wailed across the ISS Byzantium. Red lights strobed. A robotic voice cried out: "Enemy incoming! Enemy incoming!"
Rowan leaped to her feet. Even though she stood inside the Byzantium, a great warship, she clutched her pistol as if scorpions were already on board. When she looked out the porthole, she could see the rest of the Inheritor fleet orbiting Helios. They were changing position, placing the local star to their sterns, assuming battle formation.
It's here, Rowan thought, heart thudding. Doomsday. The great battle which will win or lose the war. My sister is here.
She ran across the Byzantium's hold, boots thumping and echoing inside the cavernous tanker. The Jerusalem, the flagship of the fleet, was filled with bunks and rooms and corridors. The Byzantium was the same model tanker, refitted for war with the same shields and cannons. But on the inside, the Byzantium was a vast empty chasm, used in her older days to ship gasses and liquids across space.
Today, the Byzantium was masquerading. On the outside, she looked like exactly like the Jerusalem, even painted with her colors and name. But the true flagship was now hidden behind Helios, the hot and verdant moon below. And the Byzantium, this ship is disguise, was a trap prepared to spring.
A company of soldiers filled the freighter, two hundred men and women, brave Inheritors ready to kill and, if they must, die for their cause. Some were only teenagers, no older than her seventeen years. Others were elders with white hair. They were haggard warriors, their uniforms old and ratty, their hair shaggy, and they bore an assortment of weapons—rifles, pistols, even swords and clubs. The Heirs of Earth were not a true army, just a group of refugees and rebels. But in these warriors' eyes, Rowan saw more courage than she had ever felt.
As she ran by them, they saluted her.
"Godspeed, Rowan!" one man cried.
"Earth's light shines upon you, Rowan!" said another Inheritor, an old man with brown skin and two white braids.
"Kick some ass, kid!" said another, a young man with laughing eyes.
Rowan reached the door to the bridge, then turned to face the others. These men and women, two hundred in all, would help her spring the trap. If Rowan failed, if she could not capture Jade, it would be this company tasked with capturing her—or killing her. Her eyes strayed down to their weapons.
I must not fail.
She looked back up, facing them.
"Earth calls us home, friends," she said. "For Earth!"
"For Earth!" they cried, voices thundering.
Rowan ran onto the bridge. Emet was at the helm, turning the Byzantium away from the sun. Rowan took position at the gunnery station. She couldn't see the enemy fleet yet, but the monitors showed a swarm of green dots approaching—fast.
There were thousands.
Thousands of strikers.
"Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster," Rowan muttered, feeling faint.
Her head spun. Her hands shook. She could barely hold the
triggers to the cannons. She panted and she worried she would have another panic attack, like the one she had suffered in the engine room.
Emet looked at her. He nodded and gave her a small smile.
"Ready, Corporal Emery?"
There was warmth in his eyes. There was comfort.
She looked at him. A tall lion of a man. He wore his old blue coat and black cowboy hat. His shoulders were wide, and his rifle hung across his strong back. He seemed like a force of the universe, impossible to topple.
You are like a daughter, Emet had told her in the engine room, embracing her. And this was what she needed now. Not just the strong, confident leader. But also the father. Also love.
"Ready," Rowan said, her fear fading.
The Inheritor fleet faced the darkness. Frigates hovered in the center, the core of the fleet. Corvettes surrounded them, a shield of fury. Starfighters formed the third layer, a heliosphere of speed and vengeance. Their supply barges and refugee carriers retreated to hide behind the nearby gas giant, a handful of starfighters accompanying them.
To their right, the Menorian fleet arranged itself for battle. The geode-ships, each the size of a frigate, formed a wall in space, their crystals shining. Rowan had grown up devouring books by Marco Emery and Einav Ben-Ari, great heroes of the old wars, and she knew they had fought alongside these tentacled aliens. Rowan was proud to fight with them too.
I will make you proud, my ancestors, she thought. I promise. I will win back Earth, the planet you fought for. Your sacrifice will never be forgotten.
Movement caught her eye. Rowan turned to the left and gasped.
"Ships from our port side! The enemy misled us, they—" She frowned, then her eyes widened. "Concord ships! A Concord fleet, come to help!"
She watched in awe. Hundreds of warships came to join them. Their hulls were cylindrical, winged, and filled with water, and fish swam within them, lavender and blue. Rowan recognized them. Here flew the Gouramis, wise and brave aliens from an ocean world. These beings too had fought with her ancestors, had come to honor their ancient alliance with Earth.
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