“Remove that one’s gag, gentlemen, please. I wanna hear what he has to say, and it looks like he has a lot. Thank you,” Andy Andalaf said, waving a hand to us all as if to welcome us. “I’d like to personally thank you all. It really saved us a lot of time, effort, and money. You gave us what we needed, and we didn’t have to lift a goddamn finger.”

“Yeah, we know about your little fuckin’ plan—” Hinote started but was interrupted by a swift punch in the gut from John Jonny, who smiled as Hinote grunted. Josh Baker exploded into laughter, tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Oh? You know all of it, then? How about the Dead God, no eye?”

“The fuck did—”

“I called you no eye, you big fuck. Now listen to what I have to say, or your cock and balls will join your eye and your ear before you leave this goddamn room,” Andalaf said, his voice raised, his hands turning purple with how hard they gripped the sides of the white desk. Hinote glared at the man but shut up. “Good!” Andalaf smiled, a thing that twisted inward at the corners. “Good. I don’t enjoy losing my temper. I just … sometimes, I have to help people … settle down. Now, where was I? Oh, yes. The Meeks! Our entire workforce! They think they’re safe with us now. And just when things were beginning to get a little shaky, what with all the Sachi poisoning, you gave them someone else to hate!”

Hinote spit at the president, earning him another smiling punch from the sociopath John Jonny. Josh Baker barked laughter and cried.

“We won’t need the people of the Meeks much longer, though,” said Andy Andalaf as he clicked a button revealing a screen. On the screen was a video feed of Ai looking into the tank where the giant Dead God was kept, and she was glowing and singing. There I was, slowly stripping all of my gear off and walking toward the glass. “Girl can’t even help herself. Look at her! However, we want to ensure it’s not a wasted attempt. It’ll kill her to open the world of the Dead God, but if she doesn’t have enough Sachi, well … it’d be a great waste. And a shame. It might not stay open very long.” He turned away from the screen, a mock frown on his face. “Either way, we’ve got her DNA, so—”

“What do you mean? What’s Ai got to do with it?” I asked, panic eating its way up my stomach. I remembered what I felt when she started to … well, to do whatever it was that she did.

“A world … dripping with Sachi. The world of the Dead God,” Nejirita said. “The Sallis-Faint are the only ones who can open it. It was the speculation of one Dr. Itzak Olimav that the Sallis-Faint came from there. Though it was only his speculation, I’m afraid. He ran many tests on his dear wife and landed on some very interesting facts, one of them being the way to open the Dead God’s world and what is there. But he never did find out for sure if that’s where the Sallis-Faint migrated from.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Y’all are fuckin’ crazy,” Hinote said.

John Jonny prepared to get another sociopathic hit by hurting Hinote.

“John, I think that’s enough,” Andy Andalaf said. The Jonny backed off, not angry, not happy, just … a fucking sociopath, a puppet.

Puppet.

I shook my head.

“Hinote,” Shun said, her head bowed, her voice small. “Remember Ai’s father? What he said? And I remember the ads looking for the Sallis-Faint.”

“Andalaf has been trying to gather Sallis-Faint for years,” I said. “I always thought it was the healing Sachi, but this makes more sense. The greed stinks of Andalaf Inc. A planet dripping in Sachi. Nothing like the promise of more to get Andalaf’s dick hard.”

John Jonny looked at Andalaf, who smiled and shook his head once.

“You wound me, ex-Chudo. Second only to Morfran, too,” Andy Andalaf said, his smile curdling on his face, those twists coming up at the corners. Ben Nejirita cackled a moment. Andy Andalaf raised his eyebrows at the man who warded off his attention with a hand. Andalaf looked back at me. “Such talent, all gone to waste. The both of you. But I wonder, were you there? I mean, really there because if you were only second to him, you’d think you could have stopped him from—”

“I was there when he … did it, at the Sachi drill tower at Mount Clafendlin,” I said. “He was … too strong.”

“A true tragedy,” he said, shaking his head sympathetically. He lowered his voice. “And now you keep company with terrorists who have killed so many—”

“You killed ’em! For some made-up shit about Dead Gods!” Hinote said.

Andalaf laughed. “Take them to max security. We can execute them in the morning on the endorphinscreens and make it pop up live on all of ’em. I thank you all again. This should be sufficient motivation for the people of the Meeks to get on our biggest dig yet. We need as much Sachi as we can get to give the girl when she starts singing to the ugly thing in the tank.”

My Sachi had long since worn off. My spinal was out, and I sagged in the grip of the Chudo soldier who held me. The Chudo soldiers took us away, down the way we came, then onto the elevator. We passed the Dead God’s tank again, and I saw our weapons lying in a pile on the floor. They escorted us onto the large glass elevator, where they took Ai and Rin down earlier. I was certain we went down past the first floor, below ground. The elevator doors opened. I could only see the first few cells because of the glow from the elevator. They were numbered doors, curved like a submarine’s sides, and the metal looked like the type that would be used on a submarine to keep water out, though I knew this design served to keep people in.

I tried to catch Shun’s eyes, but she would not look at me. Hinote looked defeated. I tried to think of something, anything to say to them, but nothing came. I struggled to keep my head up. The curved metal door of the cell slid into the wall, a door marked with the number seven. The Chudo threw me down onto a cold metal floor. I couldn’t see what was around me because the hallway was dark, and the cell itself was a perfect black that consumed me, swallowing my consciousness and knocking me out. As the door shut, I drifted into the kind of sleep where one feels as though gravity is pushing down on them into the ground, forcing them to stay there.

I slept, for the first time in days, I slept.