Slavemakers

by Joseph Wallace

  “But all insights, all data, are useful,” she said. “Now it’s my job to find out how.”

  * * *

  NOT JUST YOUR job.

  Kait stood in her cabin, feeling the ship scudding along on the long, unthreatening swells, a stiff wind blowing them back toward the coast. Soon enough, the thieves on board would be back in contact with the hive mind.

  Her conversation with Shapiro had made her realize at last that she’d delayed her actions, her intentions, long enough. It was time.

  Time to learn what Trey had learned. To see what he saw.

  To understand the hive mind from within, and maybe be able to find a practical application in what Shapiro had just learned. To uncover a tool, a weapon, from what for now was merely knowledge.

  Leaning against the wood frame of her bunk, she reached into her jacket pocket. By now, the feel of the little bottle buried there was as familiar to her as a set of keys might have been to someone in the Last World. Only this time, instead of just holding it in her hand, she withdrew it and looked at it.

  From behind the tinted glass, the thief she’d captured on the beach stared up at her. It was very thin, with ragged wings and dull eyes. Kait hadn’t fed it, and by now it was near the end of its long, slow starvation.

  But its abdomen was still grossly swollen, and that was all that would matter. It would die soon, this gravid thief, but first it would fulfill its last mission.

  Kait twisted the cap on the little bottle and pulled it off. Inside, the wasp’s useless wings whirred. Its mandibles twitched. It knew she was there, knew what that meant.

  Kait drew in a deep breath. She was so frightened, but she knew she wouldn’t stop here. Not now.

  With a sudden jerk of her hand, she dumped the thief out of the bottle and onto her bed. It fell on its back, far too weak to fly, and as it struggled to right itself, she reached down and grasped it behind its head with her thumb and forefinger.

  Then, not allowing herself any second thoughts, she sat down on her bunk, leaned against the wooden wall—feeling the vibration of the ship’s beating heart—and, with her left hand, pulled up her shirt, exposing her belly.

  The thief looked down at her bare skin, then up into her face. Its abdomen pulsed.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE THIEF STOPPED struggling. Kait thought that it guessed. It knew.

  Severed from the hive mind, it had only one remaining mission.

  She looked into those unreadable, multifaceted eyes. All these years inside our heads, she thought. What have you learned about us?

  There was only one way for her to find out.

  Kait took in a breath. She’d thought about this moment for years, wondering how she’d feel when she finally reached it. She’d be crying, she’d guessed. Crying from fear, or maybe from relief.

  But it was through dry eyes that she spent a few moments looking at her own flesh, as if she had never seen it before. The slight curve of her stomach. The flat planes angling down toward her pelvis. The three small birthmarks arrayed to the right of her belly button like the stars in Orion’s belt. The fine hairs that, as she watched, prickled with goose bumps.

  Kait’s shoulders were gripped by a deep, convulsive shudder that made her bones hurt. Then, swinging her left arm, she placed the thief on the curve of her exposed flesh, on top of the birthmarks.

  It stood there, staring up at her. She could feel its legs against her sensitive skin, six discrete pinpricks.

  For a second, maybe two, it did not move. Then its bulging abdomen arched. Its white stinger slid out from the end.

  The stinger that was also its ovipositor.

  * * *

  WITH A MOTION so fast that it was a blur, it punched a hole in Kait’s flesh.

  This was the moment she had always feared. How would she be able to tell whether she was being killed or . . . impregnated?

  And now, as agony swept through her, as if she were aflame, as if she were igniting and burning up from the inside out, she didn’t know. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the pain, the fire, spreading upward and outward. When it reached her chest, it would consume her heart. When it reached her brain, her mind, it would reduce it to nothing but black ash.

  Somehow, she didn’t smash the wasp that was torturing her. Somehow, she didn’t scream or fall to the floor. Instead, she jammed her fist into her mouth, biting down so hard that she could taste her own salty blood. It was crucial that no one hear her.

  The thief raised its abdomen. The stinger slid upward, out of her, leaving behind just the tiniest bubble of blood at the surface of her bone-pale belly.

  But the pain did not stop, nor even lessen. Kait did not know how much longer she could survive it. Perhaps it was already too late. Maybe she was already dead.

  Even in the fire of her agony, she thought about her parents. Her birth parents. Which of them had died first? Had her mother seen her father die? Had they seen the wasps that killed them? Had they watched the stingers enter their own flesh?

  Kait closed her eyes. If there was anything else to see, it could happen without her bearing witness.

  She didn’t have to watch, but she couldn’t stop herself from feeling the ovipositor reenter her. For a moment she felt only the sensation of the dagger inside, a jagged tearing of her flesh. A sharper, more tangible pain amid the flames that had now spread throughout her body.

  But then her nerve endings, somehow still functioning, registered . . . something new: a cool liquid being injected into her. No, not cool, cold. Freezing.

  The thief emptied itself and filled her. There was a pause, a moment of stasis, and then Kait felt the needle pull upward once more and withdraw. Leaving only ice behind.

  Ice that spread outward from its reservoir beneath her skin. That extinguished the flames as it raced down her legs and up through her trunk and into her heart, which pumped it upward into her brain.

  And, in an eyeblink, the pain was gone.

  Kait sat up straighter in her chair. Opened her eyes to see the thief topple sideways and fall to the floor. It lay on its back, legs twitching, ovipositor still extended. In just a few seconds, as Kait watched, its movements grew more feeble, and finally it folded its legs and stiffened in death, like any other wasp, any other insect.

  Kait looked away from the dead wasp, looked inside herself instead. The ice had spread through her body, to the end of every vein, every capillary. She could feel her cold heart thudding against the cage of her ribs, battering to escape. She could feel the individual strands of her hair against the skin on the back of her neck. She could feel the hole in her belly, the excavation the thief had made, the tiny passageway that the larva would soon widen into its airhole.

  The pain was gone, but what had taken its place? Deep inside her was a single pinprick. Not of light, of darkness. Deeper darkness.

  The egg. Already changing, already transforming.

  Even as she focused on it, Kait felt something else sweep upward all the way to her brain, her mind. She’d been expecting this, knowing it was coming, but even so, it nearly overwhelmed her.

  The amnesic chemicals the thieves pumped into new hosts. The drugs that protected their young by making you forget what had just happened to you.

  Sitting on her bunk, leaning against the ship’s quivering wall, Kait found herself wondering why she was there. She knew who she was, remembered that just a few weeks ago she’d boarded a sailing ship and headed away from Refugia.

  But everything after that was a blank. She looked down at her fists, clenched in her lap, and could not remember why she’d bitten one, why it was bleeding.

  And then she forgot to think about it at all.

  * * *

  ONLY . . . SHE WASN’T going to allow this to happen.

  With a sudden, violent lurch, Kait slammed her fist against the wooden frame of the porthole
. Then she was on her feet, standing in the middle of her cabin, staring around her, remembering.

  With the pain’s help, her memories returned. Amorphous, transient at first, but there. Present.

  Somewhere deep in her mind, an image appeared. Or perhaps she created it. Her hands grabbing hold of something that was fleeing from her, and pulling it back in.

  Holding on like her life depended on it, because it did.

  Now she remembered catching the thief near the beach back home. Putting it in a bottle to keep till later. Placing the bottle in her pocket, where it had spent much of the Trey Gilliard’s journey.

  And then retrieving it from her pocket. Here, just now. Spilling the dying thief out of its prison and placing it on her belly.

  Watching—seeing—it penetrate her flesh with its dagger to deposit the egg. Feeling it repeat the motion the second time to ease her pain.

  And to make her forget.

  The forgetting. Even as she focused on what had happened, on her memories of the past hour, she felt them slipping from her grasp. Again she pulled, fighting against what felt like a tidal flow, the tide flooding away from her.

  How did you fight a tide? It was so much easier to allow yourself to be carried away by it.

  She was sweating, cold moisture against her skin. The tide started to carry her memory away, and again she pulled it back.

  This was the battle she was going to have to face, again and again, countless times, as long as the larva was inside her. She’d known it was coming, known that this was the first—and ever after, greatest—risk she was going to have to face when she’d made the choice to—

  To try to follow Trey. To see what he had seen.

  Already she knew what had happened to him, all of it. The assault. The penetration. The pain, the agony, the icy balm.

  Yet Trey himself had forgotten. Even he, as strong as anyone Kait had met in the Last World, had fallen victim to the forgetting. It had taken Sheila to figure out what was going on, to see the swelling and the airhole, and—almost too late—to cut the larva out of him.

  The forgetting. A brilliant strategy, elegant in the way only nature could be. Necessary because primates were the thieves’ preferred hosts, a rich meal and—more importantly—one that was likely to stay alive long enough for the adult thief to hatch out.

  This was a crucial point. As the young thief grew inside them, host mammals always exhibited behavior that put their lives at risk: obliviousness to threats, a dormant period followed by unusual aggressiveness. So lay your egg in a rat or other small mammal in the wild, and both it and your larva were likely to get killed.

  A primate made for a far better choice. Not that monkeys and apes were entirely exempt from danger. Leopards, an occasional eagle, a large snake, all might take one. And in the last decades before the Fall, a primate could also be a target for a bullet fired by a human hunting for bushmeat.

  But leopards were rare, monkey-eating eagles and snakes rarer. And humans were comparatively recent arrivals in the thieves’ historic home territory, providing both a new threat to the species and a new opportunity.

  Yet even with all their advantages, primates didn’t make perfect hosts. The problem was that they were too smart. An infected monkey’s natural instinct, immediately after noticing the telltale swelling and circular airhole, would be to worry at it, dig at the hole, and eventually remove or destroy the larva.

  By the time the larva grew so big it was impossible to miss, it would release a flood of toxins that would kill any host that tried to remove it. From what scientists in the Last World had observed in the wild, monkeys had learned to recognize this, to understand when it was too late to save an infected individual.

  So the rest of the troop would turn their backs and abandon the host to its fate.

  Yes, a brilliant evolutionary strategy.

  As long as, in those early days when the larva was most vulnerable, before it possessed enough toxins to kill its host . . . the host forgot what had been done to it.

  * * *

  ONCE AGAIN, KAIT reined in her memories, pulled them back to her.

  How many days was this battle going to continue? What chance did she have to succeed, to keep her awareness of what had happened to her—what she had caused to happen—against the rising tide of the drugs working their way deep into her brain?

  Could she be stronger than Trey had been?

  * * *

  SHE WAS WAITING for something. She didn’t know what. She only knew that until it happened, she wouldn’t—couldn’t—leave her cabin.

  Going through what was already becoming her mantra—I remember I remember I remember—she waited as ten minutes passed. Fifteen.

  Muffled, distant, the sounds of laughter from on deck reached her, more as vibration than sound. As remote from her as if everyone else still occupied the earth, but she was on some far-off planet. Waiting.

  I remember.

  And then it happened. She could feel it. A new violation, but something else, too.

  An awakening. A . . . remaking. Kait herself being remade. Her flesh and her brain, her mind, being forged into something new.

  Kait put her hand on her bare belly, and felt—at the same instant from within and without—the newly hatched larva move within her.

  At the same time, her mind was remade as well. For the first time, she caught a glimpse of what Trey had seen. The things he had never told her.

  Kait looked, and saw, and began to understand.

  And despaired.

  * * *

  AISHA ROSE WENT very still. For a moment her vision blurred.

  Or, rather, her outside vision faded. What she saw inside came clear.

  So much time, years, had passed since the last time this happened, that at first she wasn’t sure what she was seeing.

  But then she focused, went back within, and understood. It was someone new. A new light that wasn’t part of the spreading stain.

  It was already dangerously close, and Aisha Rose still had too far to go. The distance, her weakness, and the creatures that now owned the real earth had left her short of where she needed to be.

  Far from home. No: truly without a home for the first time.

  But with a renewed goal, a mission she knew she could not abandon, as the new light called out to her.

  There was just one problem.

  EIGHTEEN

  SHE COULDN’T BE sure, but Aisha Rose thought she might be dying.

  Mama had told her that on the dreamed earth, people used that word all the time. “People would say it,” she said, “even if they didn’t mean it. Didn’t come close to meaning it. ‘I’m dying here,’ they’d say, and no one would give it even a second thought.”

  Aisha Rose, days out of Nairobi, heading east across the savanna, realized that was another difference between the dreamed earth and the one she lived on and would die on. Back then, before the dream ended, you could say almost anything and mean something else, and everyone would understand anyway.

  You could say you were starving, or chilled to the bone, or terrified, or dying, and mean that you hadn’t eaten in a few hours, or you needed to put on a sweater, or that you were nervous about something, or that you were merely very bored. And no one would take you seriously. They’d know you were exaggerating, and that you likely had never been any of those things, not really. Nor had they.

  But back then, it was to your advantage to say things you didn’t really mean. On a huge and crowded earth, filled with floods of people like the ones in the pictures she and Mama looked at, you’d be invisible if you weren’t noisy. No one would listen. You’d be drowned out.

  But life was different now. If words themselves mattered at all—and Aisha Rose had begun to wonder if they did, even as she continued her nightly recitations—then they only mattered if they meant something. They only m
attered if they were true.

  * * *

  THE TRUTH: AISHA Rose was chilled to the bone.

  Huddled beneath a thorn tree that she was too weak to climb, she watched the sun descend toward the western horizon. Even the last trailing outskirts of Nairobi had dwindled and finally disappeared. Now all that was left was endless bush stretching in both directions. She was already starting to shiver.

  These were the patterns of her days on the savanna. Midday here in the bush was so hot that the sweat slid off her body in sheets—except when she couldn’t find enough to drink. Then her sweat would dry up, her tongue would swell in her mouth, the sun would twist her thoughts into disorganized fragments, and she would find herself losing minutes, even hours, as she staggered forward, one step at a time. Or, finally, retreated to the shade to rest and wait.

  At first, when the heat began to ebb, when the sun began to lose its blistering strength, relief would almost overwhelm her. But it wouldn’t last long, because she knew what the night would bring. In just a few hours, as soon as the chill began to seep—and then flood—into her, she would crawl under a blanket of leaves, a leafy fallen branch, or some vines.

  It didn’t help much, but it was better than nothing. Sometimes she had nothing.

  Inevitably, the shivers would begin. Her teeth would click together, her skin erupt in a mass of goose bumps, and she’d shake so hard she thought that her translucent skin might split to reveal the bones planted so shallowly beneath.

  Her whole body possessed by the cold, except for her left hand, the one she’d cut, which throbbed with heat. The palm was swollen and an angry red, and her forearm was beginning to get puffy, too. Within a few more days, she wouldn’t be able to use the hand for anything.

  Finally, dawn would arrive, the day would begin to warm, and she’d get back to her feet. Start her hejira east once again, every goal stripped away but that one.

  But she was beginning to hear voices—not Mama’s voice; Mama was silent—telling her she wouldn’t make it. She would die days, miles, before she reached her destination.