“Aren’t you curious to see what goes on in there?” I ask. “There has to be a way that I can record it for you.”
“Why would I want to get involved in that? It’s none of my business!”
“If there’s one thing I know about men like Excelsior, it’s that they like to talk. He’s going to say a lot more interesting things to me than I’m going to say to him at my trial—things that will make people mad, Dobrey. If you could somehow leak my trial, I doubt you’ll have to show up for work on Fitzmartin or kill anyone else you don’t want to ever again.”
He looks around, making sure that we’re not being overheard. “There could be a way. A small, oral camera could work,” he murmurs timidly. “We use them to study the digestive tracks of the priestesses. They swallow them. But I could maybe put one on you somewhere. Make it look like a button or something. They may not check you once they prepare you here.”
I know I can’t push him. He’s skittish. If I push too hard, he’ll fold. “It’s your call,” I whisper. “I just don’t want to see things get worse for you when it’d be so easy to change them. And I’m dead anyway, so I have nothing to lose.”
Another attendant enters the room and makes Dobrey jump. “You haven’t given her the RU7 yet?” he scolds; his blue eyes are so light as to be almost milky. “Gimme the gun and go check on the other one.”
“I have this one, Mieko,” Dobrey whines.
“Do it now!” Mieko retorts. “I’m tired of your insubordination! You’re going on my report. I’ll personally see you demoted to full-time extermination! Do you hear me? Now go!”
Dobrey hurries out of the room, and Mieko wastes no time pushing RU7 into my arm.
“Who’s in the other room?” I ask while the drug burns a raw path through my vein.
But Mieko is all business. He sets the gun aside and leaves me tied to the bed.
A galaxy of stars floods my vision as I look around me. Colors and shapes shift and drift in and out of focus. My head lolls on my chest as someone takes off my restraints, lifts me up, and strips off my clothing. I have a hazy notion that I’m being bathed and attired in something tight and torture inducing, like the dresses I’ve seen Nezra and some of the other priestesses wear. My hair is roughly done up in intricate braids. Finally the metal collar is tested again and matching metal arm restraints are added to my ensemble at my wrists.
Dobrey leans over me and says something. It sounds the same as if he were speaking to me underwater. He presses something into the stiff fabric of my dress. It pokes my skin, a pinprick. Then, he’s gone. I stare at the lights on the ceiling again.
Bland-faced men lift me from my bed and place me into a black coffin-shaped transport pod hovering nearby. The lid closes. My blurry eyes look up through the pod’s window at the white lights on the ceiling. The pod moves slowly down a hall.
Dizzy, I strain to focus. Every person who passes stares down at me through the glass, and I come to think of myself as being a part of some black parade. The hoverpod pauses. A soldier opens the lid of the pod. He runs his hands over me as he gazes at my breasts, which push up from the cinched-too-tight corset. I want to push him away when he touches them, but nothing about me works right. I try to concentrate on his face, but I don’t recognize it so I quickly lose interest in him. He closes the lid to the pod and waves his hand and I move on.
The hoverpod enters a round-shaped room. Above me, there are tiers of seated Brothers, all shrouded in darkness as they gaze down upon me in my black bullet-shaped coffin. The hoverpod stops. The lid opens. I shift from the interior of the pod as the liner lifts me out by an extension arm and deposits me on a black tufted chaise lounge in the center of their horseless carousel.
Above my head hovers the turning hologram of the brilliant blue star, the symbol of the Alameeda Brotherhood. Beside me on a black table rest the two crowns that I had Kyon design for me. They’re his and hers. I smile at them. They’re so lovely. He did well.
“Kricket,” a voice resonates in the room. It sounds like Kyon’s. I’m disappointed when I lift my chin to see it’s not him. It’s Excelsior. He has an easy stride as he walks toward me; he owns the room, and he knows it. When he nears me, he goes down on a half-bended knee, so he can look me in the eyes. His are a colder blue than his son’s—a soulless blue.
He’s dressed in a dark military uniform with a holographic Star of Destiny on each of his pointed lapels. “Do you know where you are?” he asks me.
I look around. “I’m in a snake pit.” A titter of male laughter rises from the theater-in-the-round.
“You’re in the Universe Chamber in the House of Alameeda.” He snaps his fingers. A hovering pod comes within reach of his fingertips. Lifting a cauterizing implement from it, it’s clear by his easy glance that he’s well acquainted with all of the hideous tools on it.
“It still looks like a snake pit.”
Excelsior lifts a small device and presses a button on it. The metal cuffs on my wrists lift from my sides and slap against the metal T-shaped poles on either side of the chaise lounge by my ears. I try to yank them down, but it’s too powerful.
He shows the long-handled, silver device to me before he presses the glowing trident to the pale skin of my right forearm. The smell of my skin burning is almost as painful as the claws of fire that run down my flesh. The pain is accompanied by a canyon-sized rush of terror that fills my chest. When he lifts it from me, I have a glowing, red wolf scratch.
“That should wake you up a bit,” he whispers near my ear. I bite my lip because it’s beginning to tremble and it’s really important that I not show him the depth of my fear. “You’re going to have to tell me when you’ve had enough. I have a tendency to go too far sometimes.”
I don’t shy from him; instead I force myself to laugh as I pant. “Does that usually scare all the little girls you torture?” Inside though, I know I’m not going to be able to keep this act up for very long. He has a dead heart. It barely beats. I recognize the look in his eyes; he can spin heartache into any color he chooses.
Above us, no one makes a sound. He replaces the silver cauterizer on the tray and picks up a razor blade. Its surgical sharpness gleams in the small spotlight we’re under. He plays with it as he attaches it to a short-handled grip. Taking his time is meant to increase my panic.
“Do you know why you’re here?” he asks me.
“I’m here to kill you.”
Hisses of “Treason” come from several places and heights on the tiers.
“Why would you want to kill me, Kricket? I’m your creator. Your Maker.”
“There are so many reasons to kill you, Excelsior. The fact that you think you’re my creator is just one of them.”
“I’m also the one who saved you from him,” Excelsior says. He presses another button on his device. A hole opens up in the floor near us and a tank rises up from it. Inside, Manus, the Rafe regent, sways in the water of the medical stasis tank. His skin is blue-veined and translucent. Paper-thin pieces of it hang from him and float in the water. Gone is the dark, rich color of his hair. It’s now bone-white and has shed in large patches. Curled in a fetal position, his gnarled hands warp, as if his bones have become waterlogged and bent. Whatever his medical tank is supposed to be doing for him, it stopped doing it a long time ago. He belongs in some horror-filled sideshow act, a dreadful curiosity to strike fear into chill seekers.
Excelsior prowls toward Manus. “I sent the Strikers to liberate you from his plan to mate with you. My creation!” He says the words as if he’s disgusted by the very thought. He lifts the device in his hand again, and it gives off a stark, piercing noise that cracks the tank. Water squirts from between the cracks until it shatters the glass and spills Manus out onto the ebony floor. The stench that rises into the air makes me throw up in my mouth. The water quickly drains away into the hole in the floor, but it still reeks of decomposition and death.
Attendants are called in; they pick up pieces of Manus as his fle
sh falls off his bones. The mess of him is quickly discarded into a hatch in the floor and the water vacuumed up by sucker-bots. Attendants bring in water. Tall glasses are poured for each Brother in the theater seats above us. All the while Excelsior watches me with his killer-come-to-call stare.
When the attendants leave the room, he asks, “Do you know why you’re really here, Kricket?”
He wants to tell me, so I let him. “Why am I really here, Excelsior?”
“It was the only way I could get all the Brothers in one room together. They came to see you. I knew that they would. They were hoping you’d kill me so they could be rid of me.”
Choking noises sound from above us. One Brother stands up, holding his throat, and coughs up blood as he topples over the railing and falls into the snake pit with us. More gurgling and vomiting sounds cause chaos in the room. Brothers begin to succumb as blood pours out of their orifices. I look back at Excelsior, who is watching me with keen interest.
“You poisoned them!”
“When znou axicote is found to be the cause of their deaths, everyone will assume it was you who murdered them. I was impressed when I heard you’d poisoned the Rafe defense minister with it. It showed real brilliance and an unflinching desire to survive. You’re the kind of genetic anomaly I strive to achieve in all my work.”
“You say ‘nature,’ I say ‘nurture.’ I wasn’t bred to do it. I was raised to do it,” I reply, denying him any credit for the way I am.
“If only my son had turned out to be more like you. He’s been an insufferable failure,” Excelsior growls as he pushes another button on his device. In the floor, another hole opens up. Out of it rises a T-shaped metal whipping post. Kyon is manacled to it by his wrists. His unconscious body hangs listlessly, held erect by the magnetized irons on his wrists that stick to the top portion of the pole. He looks barely alive. Bare-chested, he’s riddled with cuts and stab wounds. Blood has turned his bruised flesh red.
Inside, my heart feels like it is dying. I search for any sign from Kyon to indicate that he might still be alive. I need him to be alive. My throat aches with anger and unshed tears.
“He must love you, Kricket.”
Pain rips through my chest. “Why do you say that?” My voice comes out raspy.
“When he found out that I had you, he offered himself to me in exchange for you. He said you’d go back to Earth and never bother me again. He said I could have your crowns, the ones you planned to use to steal my rightful throne from me.”
“I will steal it from you!” I say with feigned righteous indignation. “I was meant to be the empress—to wear the crown of the high kings from which I descended. You will bow to me!” Inwardly I cringe. That sounded so fake! Did I overdo the delusional priestess role?
Excelsior’s vicious eyes narrow at me and I think he sees right through me. “I’m the one who is descended from the high kings! You will all be made to bend to me!” He walks to the beautiful crowns, which lie gleaming on a bed of soft black velvet, and picks up the smaller circlet of heavy gold. It’s not delicate, but solid and substantial, a crown that an ancient king would wear—one that a conquering hero would create. He tosses it aside. It clangs on the ebony floor, making my heart beat achingly in my chest.
He’s not going to fall for it! I despair. I want to cry.
He lifts the other crown in his hand, testing the weight of it. It’s the same style as the first one, only this one is bigger. “You’ll never be able to kill me, Kricket. I’ve lived for thousands of floans. I have brought down whole nations of people. You’re just a rabid dog to me—an experiment gone wrong. It will be nothing for me to end you.”
I laugh. “I’ve already killed you, Excelsior. You just don’t know it yet. You’ll never wear that crown!” I fake a smile.
His hand curls tighter around the golden trophy. He raises the shiny circlet to his head. “You mean this crown?” he asks.
My smug smile fades.
Excelsior rests the golden crown on his head, pushing it down for a better fit. The spring-loaded trigger that Kyon designed trips. Four sharp prongs jut out from inside the crown, impaling Excelsior’s skull. His shrill screams race through me, adding to my fear and fascination. Blood oozes from the sides of his temples just as turbine boring worms pour from the hollowed out wells in the golden chaplet. They burrow into his brain, their twisting, wiggling bodies squirming to cut through his bone. Higher-pitched, agonizing caterwauls wrench from his lips as he falls to his knees beside me, knocking his hovering cart of torture implements on the floor and scattering them. The scene is unbearably gruesome. I shy away as the worms devour his eyes.
His screaming stops and the only sound left in the room is my hacking breaths. My whole body is shaking. I open my eyes and try to stand, but my arms are still shackled and stuck to the poles beside my seat. I look around for the remote that Excelsior used earlier. I spot it on the ground beside his head. The worms are squiggling in and out of his cranium, their shiny, rippling white flesh turning rosy from the blood they’ve consumed. I try not to look at them as I rise up as far as I can and point my toe, sliding the remote closer to me with my foot. I use my pointed high heel to press several buttons. Kyon’s manacles release, and he drops to the ground with a loud thud. I cringe, knowing that probably hurt him more. I point my toe at another button on the remote. My hand slips down from a pole. I tap the same button again and my other hand slips down as well.
Rising to my feet, I bypass Excelsior’s corpse and run to Kyon. His skin is cold. I look behind me seeing torture devices strung out on the floor. Finding the razor blade, I clutch it and crawl back to Kyon’s side. His blond hair is pulled back in a ponytail at the crown of his head. I gather what I can and lop off huge chunks of it. It regrows, the shorn-off pieces shriveling and melting away as I cut. I wait for a second to see if he’ll regain consciousness. He doesn’t. I put my ear against his chest. I can hear shallow beats. That’s all I need to get me moving again.
I stand and run to the hovering coffin in the corner that brought me into the room. I touch it, and it moves with me like a baby duckling following its mother. I guide it to Kyon and push it to the ground. I don’t know how to operate the extension arm, so instead, I push and shove Kyon with all of my might, rolling him over and over until I force him into the transporter. Sweating and panting, I place my hand on top of the coffin, closing the lid.
I guide the black transporter to the door, which I open. My plan is to bully and intimidate my way out of here. With that in mind, I square my shoulders and almost run straight into Dobrey. He puts his finger to his lips, reaching out and plucking something off the bodice of my dress. He shows me the little disk before dropping it on the ground and crushing it with his heel.
“You did it!” he breathes, as if in awe of me.
“What did I do?” I ask.
“You brought down the Brotherhood! Everyone in Alameeda saw it. The entire world will see it by nightfall!”
“You recorded it!” I exclaim.
He nods vehemently. “I fed it live stream to the hologram network. They aired it in real time. There is a crowd forming outside as we speak! They’re attacking the Strikers, demanding the release of their empress!”
“We have to get out of here. My consort is wounded. I have to get him help! Will you help me?” I ask. My knees are shaking so hard that I don’t think I’ll be able to keep standing if I don’t move.
“I have a trift. I can sneak you out of here.”
“I’ll pay you back. I swear it.”
He sheds his black lab coat and hands it to me. “Put this on.” His scrawny hands touch the lid of Kyon’s transporter. “It’s this way,” he says. “The Strikers and everyone else are watching the crowds at the front of the building. We’ll head to the hangar.”
“Do you have a code to get this collar off me?’ I ask as we traverse an empty corridor.
He shakes his head no. I try not to worry about it. Instead, I help guide the tran
sporter, running ahead to open up doors. There are a few guards posted at the entrance to the hangar. Dobrey hides me around the corner in an empty exam room while he rushes over to the guards. “There are people breaking into corridor three two five! They have sanctumizers!” He points away from me, before wringing his hands. The guards all run in the direction he indicated.
I don’t wait for him to get me. I push Kyon’s hoverpod out into the corridor again and we hurry into the hangar. He takes me to almost the last spot in the garage. We stop at a ship that looks like a huge milk carton. “What is this?” I ask.
“It’s my trift!” he growls, while opening the hatch and loading Kyon into it. “What does it look like?”
“I’ve just never seen one that looks like this.”
“Like what?” he asks, sounding offended.
“Like this amazing,” I reply.
He closes the hatch. “She’s superfast. I just had the engine modified. Guess what I used for my starter code?” he asks rhetorically because he tells me, “It’s Dobrey’s Domain. That’s catchy, right?”
“Cryptic,” I reply.
“She’s my—”
Dobrey’s head explodes. I make a noise that’s close to a scream. Dobrey’s headless body crumbles to the ground. The guards Dobrey distracted earlier run toward me with their guns raised. Reacting out of terror, I hunch over and dive into the open doorway of the ugly trift.
I locate the door button and press it. The door closes. I scan the control panel. It looks almost nothing like any of Kyon’s trifts. This one is a simple manual transmission. I enter Dobrey’s starter code and the trift lifts off the ground, hovering. Directing the craft straight up, I angle it so that the guards can’t shoot me as I wheel it in the direction of the distant mountains.
Knowing which way to go is not a problem. All I have to do is find the center of Urbenoster and I’ll find Kyon’s house. I slip into traffic, hiding among the pack. As I pass among the buildings, I see Newsreel playing on the sides of them all. My face is everywhere, along with Excelsior’s. They play over and over the turbine worms chewing through his skull. I begin to shake again. My skin grows clammy.
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