We walked for ten full minutes past endless pits with their strange specimen. We turned right to find another expanse, more of the same: lab coats, desks, pits. I started to become anxious, but then I saw her. She was naked, and I felt nothing at that moment but rage and hatred for Andalaf, something I didn’t always feel; these emotions were usually only associated with memories of Morfran. Sure, Andalaf did awful things, but they did not kill my son. Shun disagreed with me, but I didn’t generally go into that territory with her. She was allowed to blame Andalaf more than Morfran. But then, I agreed with her, though my hate was a bit more pointed toward the creep Shun had knocked out.
Ai ran, her red hair down, flipping this way and that in her terror-stricken face. There was an almost faded note in her ashen-grey skin, and I wondered if that’s what happened when Sallis-Faint were afraid. I was sure the Jonnys took Caelziax away as soon as they found the black summon Sachi.
The pit was filled with grass, flowers, trees, and even a little creek, and apples grew from the trees.
Chasing Ai all around the forest of the pit was a species I’d never heard of or seen, so it could only be one of Nejirita’s creations. It was a cat, a male, no doubt because a penis swung between his legs, but definitely feline in origin. It stood on its hind legs like a human, though, and, really, the whole body was humanoid. The only things that were definitely a cat’s were the paws on his hind legs, the face, the pointed ears, the flicking tail, and the red fur that covered his entire body. The hands were like mine. It was coming after Ai—trying to kill her?
“Arashi,” I whispered. My suit, thankfully, spread across my entire body underneath the maintenance jumper. My rage guided me as my suit prepared for the thirty-foot jump down into the pit. Some were deeper, I know, but thirty feet was quite deep enough to keep Ai—and I suppose even cat-like creatures—from escaping.
Ai dodged another attack from the red man-cat, and I thought that all that time spent in the trash did her a great service. I jumped in, rolling as I landed on the grass below. My suit’s veins glowed yellow, the Sachi active to absorb the shock of the landing. I dismissed any worry I had about running out. There wasn’t much I could do about it. I ran and pulled my knives out of my maintenance jumper.
“Ningyo?!” Ai said as I tackled the red cat to the ground. He threw me off, baring his teeth at me, but his eyes had a strange, very human look to them. Fear?
“No, Ningyo, don’t!” Ai said.
I ignored Ai and circled around the cat.
“I have no wish to hurt you, human,” the red cat said in a low, cordial baritone. “I—”
I jumped at him again, knives out, ready to take a stab at him. He dodged.
“Ningyo, he’s trying to help,” Ai said.
“Looks to me like he’s trying to kill you, Ai.”
The red cat took me down and pinned my arms to the ground. “We are staging a fight,” he growled.
“Please don’t hurt her, Rin,” Ai said.
“They are trying to breed us. To force us to … so I am pretending to be violent so they will separate—”
“What the fuck is that maintenance man doing down there? This pit is fine. You! Down there! What are you doing? Only scheduled maintenance gives any of you fucks clearance, and we haven’t scheduled any!” one of the scientists shouted, peering over the side of the slick, white desk.
I could hear Shun say, “We were told by Ben Nejirita—”
“Told what, you fucking bitch? Told what?!” Nejirita’s voice. “Sally, send in the fucking lizard. No, not the fucking red one, the green one that you have a remote for. Get those two out, and kill that one down there. Stacey? Alert security at once that there are intruders. You two will come with—”
Ben Nejirita fell flat on his back on the grass next to me. It was a thirty-foot drop, and the old man wore no Sachiarmor. If he wasn’t dead, something was surely broken. I looked up to see Shun and Hinote staring down at me. Then, a large, green lizard, nearly as tall as the pit, stepped inside, grabbing Ai and the cat named Rin and setting them safely outside of the pit.
“Ningyo!” Ai yelled as two large male scientists ushered her away. Others tried to approach Hinote and Shun, but they disappeared from my sight. A few of them joined me in the pit moments later with sickening crunches.
The green lizard picked up the crumpled Nejirita with sharp, green claws and put him outside of the pit up near the scientists.
“Shun!” I called up. Both of them were trying to stay with me, and while I appreciated it, the whole reason we were here was being spirited away by scientists. Shun looked at me frantically, walking along the edge, keeping an eye on me while avoiding as many of the scientists as possible. “Go after Ai! NOW! Hinote can help me!”
“She’s right. Go get her. You’re better at that shit,” Hinote called. Shun gave me one more look, then nodded her head and ran out of my sight. The large lizard turned to me and reached its claws, but Hinote used the lightning Sachi, a direct hit. It was a robot, from what I could gather, and Sachitronics were sensitive to powerful charges from lightning Sachi. It froze for a moment. I didn’t hesitate, running up the frozen, reaching arms. I was sure the lightning my suit was protecting me from was making the Sachi drain faster, but I had no other choice. The beast reactivated, raising its arms, and I used the momentum to jump, my suit adjusting for the movement.
I hit the ground running, and Hinote followed, clearing the area in front of us with lightning while using his gun to shoot behind.
“They went this way!” he cried as we headed toward an open doorway like the enormous one where we came in. The doorway led down a long hallway, lit with bright Sachilight, though not as bright as in the main lab. The walls were the slick plastic white of the desks, and the floor was grey. I ran fast ahead, leaving Hinote behind. Two things very important to me were up ahead. I couldn’t afford to wait.
There were cages upon cages, and I could see the bars vibrating with lightning Sachi. Scientists were trying, and failing, to get Ai and Rin—both still naked—into these cages. They fought in a triangle. Ai was probably having the most trouble but was still somewhat holding her own. Any trouble Ai ran into was short-lived because Shun or Rin offered her support, and they were fucking the scientists up.
I slammed into them, throwing three into the lightning Sachi cage bars. They went down easily enough, but there were five more to replace them. None of them, thankfully, were Chudo trained. I dodged a fist on my right, ripped into the man with an upward pull of my knife in the right hand, then brained the next guy after rolling under his kicking leg. Hinote finally caught up.
“DOWN!” Hinote shouted. Rin, Shun, Ai, about three of the scientists, and myself all obliged, but the rest were filled with bullets from Hinote’s endorphingun. The corridor was a bloodbath, and white lab coats were stained. There was a low buzzing coming from the blood touching the lightning bars.
“I’d suggest the three of you leave now. But first, please point us to the nearest elevator,” I said.
They pointed down the hall, two men and a woman, gaping at us and their dead coworkers. Rin walked up to one and pulled a badge from their coat. Good thinking. I did the same.
“Best if you go the other way, now. Thank you,” I said, leaving the three. There was something … different now that we were with Ai, something strange. I wanted to keep them alive because I sensed that they meant no harm, that they were … good, much like she was, unlike the gang that attacked me in the Meeks or those men at Keith Smith’s mansion. It was like Ai radiated a knowing out to the rest of us. I wondered briefly what would have happened if Ai had been with us at the drill towers we’d bombed—would she have stopped the killing of the Under-City people and of the beasts that lived inside, slaves to Andalaf, or was that all a necessary evil?
“You—you turn right. At the end of this hall,” a female scientist said. “Don’t take the elevators at the end of the hall. You’ll pass a room with a big tank in it; just keep going past the tank, and you’ll get to our elevators. Should be quicker than leaving through the elevators everyone else uses.” It all spilled out of her, and I wondered if she was feeling the effects of Ai’s presence as well.
I remembered being drawn to Ai, wanting to keep her safe; it felt ... important. It was stronger then, almost like a dose of Sachi, but cleaner. Why was it more potent? I looked over at the Sallis-Faint woman, and as if she knew what I was thinking, she turned her ruby-red eyes to meet mine. My vision was almost hazy, and Ai seemed like the only clear thing.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I turned back to the scientist. “Thank you. Sorry about your friends,” I said as I walked to Ai. She smiled at me, and I suddenly became very aware of her nudity.
“Do you mind wearing clothes from one of these?” I asked.
“I suppose if you can kill them, I can wear their clothes,” Ai said.
I looked at Rin. “What about you?” I said.
“He comes with us,” Ai said.
“I was just wondering if he wanted to cover himself. You two are friends?”
“Rin is the last of his species, as far as he knows. So we bonded somewhat over that, as I am also mostly alone. But he’s helped me, pretending to be violent when they tried to breed us, and now he’s helped us escape the guards.” Ai looked down at the death, her mouth leaning into a frown on one side of her face.
Rin put on the pants of one of the bigger scientists. Bloodstained, of course, but they seemed to fit. Ai followed, putting on the full outfit of a woman who lay near me. We walked down the hall in the direction the three scientists pointed. When we came to the end, the hallway veered right, but there were elevators there. “Do we trust them and go right?”
“I think either way, we fucked as soon as we get to the ground floor. I hope you got more o’ that fight in you, Rin,” Hinote said.
“I am perfectly fine with dying here,” Rin said in his deep baritone, his tail curling curiously behind him as he spoke. “What I am not alright with is being in an Andalaf cage again.”
“I got the sense that they were telling the truth if that’s anything to go on,” Shun said.
“I had the same feeling,” I said, looking back at her. She avoided my eyes but nodded. I was standing next to Ai, and I think I had been since we reunited. I wasn’t sure how to mend that particular situation, but there was no time right then, and I knew that Shun would let it alone, so I did as well.
“Let us take their direction then,” Ai said, taking the lead. I followed close behind with the others through many more of the enormous doorways. At the end of this hall was a closed door. I tried the keycard, and it opened upward with a metal sliding sound, whirring machinery working inside of the wall.
The small hall we walked into on the other side was dark, lit with pale blue Sachilights all around the white walls. The floor was black carpet. Six feet away, the ceiling shot up even higher than the room with the pits, and the chamber was nearly a quarter mile wide, and I couldn’t tell how long. In the middle of the dark chamber was a softly glowing glass encasement, and inside, seeming to float, was the giant body of a man. I saw the body, but it was too big, and the feet faced away from us and were too far away to see. I only call it a man because of its strong facial features and the fact that it had no hair. Its skin was the color of Ai’s ashen-grey. Its eyes, of which I could see only one on the right side of its head, stared blankly at the ceiling, ruby red. I didn’t think it was alive.
In my awe and horror, I lost track of Ai, who was now twenty feet away from me, fast approaching the giant’s glass encasement—his … tank?
I ran over to her, ignoring the looming giant that was growing larger with each step. I couldn’t tell if the others were with me or not; there was a … silence that seemed to have come over the room, or perhaps it was already like that, and I was only just noticing.
The tank was labeled with a metal plaque that read: DEAD GOD. Ai stood directly underneath the sign, looking up at the top of the giant’s hairless head.
“Ai?” I said, feeling stranger by the moment. “I think … I think we should leave. I don’t feel right.”
“This is …” Ai said, her voice otherworldly and hushed with the tone of the room, “what’s been calling me. It’s so loud now. It’s grown ever louder the closer I’ve come. It … it wants me, and all of the Sachi … to open. I could open it now. We could escape there. Be free of all this.”
Ai did not look at me as she said it, and I got the feeling she was talking to herself and … the giant. She started to glow a bright white, green, and red. The colors swirled, but they all shined in unison, a harmonious conversation with one another. Ai’s voice was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard as she sang in a language I’d never heard. The tears pouring down my cheeks came of their own volition, and I was enraptured in fornication with the beloved. The Dead God didn’t move, but he did begin a similar glow to that of Ai’s. They were more like the edges of a horizon on a hot day; the way they seemed to smoke and getting closer only made them go away. My feet moved, walking to the two, the two that were speaking to each other, singing their blissful agony. The awe carried me, and I wanted nothing more than to merge with them both. I dropped my Sachiknives and pulled out my spinal. I don’t recall having given the command for my suit to retract, but it did all the same. I could almost hear voices behind me yelling, but they were muted notes to the ferocious symphony of this god. This was all I’d ever dreamed of, all I’d ever wanted. We could escape there, Ai had said.
I touched the tank with my bare hands, my gloves discarded on the floor behind, along with my other worldly weights. The touch was like that of an electric shock. I collapsed to the floor, twitching, the ringing in my ears shutting out Ai’s voice as she stopped her singing and yelled for me. The red covered my vision, and I could hear the blood pumping faster, ever faster, through my neck into my brain and back again. I thought I would die. Ai was above me, and I saw a faint green glow through the red screen. Sachi gem, a healing Sachi gem.
The ringing slowly faded, and my vision went back to normal. I looked up at Ai, and the swirling colors were gone. I turned my head to the Dead God, and it was the same. Colors were gone, and there was no more silence, no more bliss. I looked down and saw that I was naked.
“Nin, they are here. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Ai said. “I … it just felt like I had to, and I couldn’t stop.”
I turned my head to find the others and saw that Sachiarmored men with big swords strapped to their backs or waists held them. Chudo, at least five of them, who knows how many more were behind the door out there, but there were also infantrymen. Ben Nejirita stood in the midst of our captured friends and the Chudo.
“Ningyo,” Nejirita said. “I’m a bit fucking upset that I didn’t just recognize you at first, but I suppose some things get by you when you’re in possession of a specimen such as that.” He pointed at Ai. “You. My own little puppet. Oh, the places they go when you lose interest in them.”
“She’s not—”
“Shut the fuck up, puppet,” Nejirita said. “I fucking made you. Martin, Ashaio, take them.”
Two of the Chudos that I did not recognize came toward us. I put myself in front of Ai. Nejirita laughed.
“What, are you gonna slap them with your tits? You’re weaponless, shithead. Oh! Martin! Here,” Nejirita said, tossing a syringe to the brown-haired Chudo on the left. “Give the Sallis-Faint this, and the Audur named Rin after you’re done. Put them both in max security.”
“Au … dur?”
“The fucking cat, Martin!”
Martin nodded his head. I tried to jump forward; I had to try. I said I’d protect Ai, but she pulled me back to her. She looked at me with those ruby reds, shook her head, and gave me a piece of that knowing smile while a tear rolled down her cheek. Then she pulled my face to hers, and she kissed me hard. She bit my lower lip, licked my tongue with hers, and clutched the back of my neck with her bare hand. I put my hand in her red hair and crushed her to me, my wetness pressing against hers. The moment seemed to last a long while before the Chudo soldiers ripped us apart. I stared into her eyes as I was pulled away, and then Martin jabbed the long needle into her neck, and she went slack. Her eyes were the last thing to drop, and I looked away. I heard a familiar sound then: Shun’s quiet sobs and small gasps that signaled I had broken her heart once again.
“Mr. Andalaf would like to speak with these three, Joe,” Nejirita said to the Chudo that held a fidgeting Hinote captive. They’d tied a piece of cloth around Hinote’s mouth. “I’ll follow you up. Come on.”
I struggled to watch as Ai was taken to the elevators we had almost made it to, where we would have escaped if I hadn’t been so foolish, so … hypnotized by that fucking giant thing. The Dead God. Was it a Sallis-Faint? Same eyes, same skin, and the way Ai reacted to it …
The seven elevators were giant platforms that stretched far away from us, and I assumed the Dead God had to be transported on these.
Ai and Rin, the cat-man, were escorted into the large glass elevators, and out of my sight. The Chudo took Shun, Hinote, and myself to the elevators we passed earlier in the hall. Shun was still crying. Hinote was still trying to thrash about, but the Chudo was too strong for him. His yellow Sachi eye had long ago stopped twitching about and laid still, facing down, giving his face a crooked look.
I was still naked, completely vulnerable, and unarmed, thanks to my own stupidity. The elevator led straight up to a waiting room with two sets of red, carpeted stairs, one set on either side. They curved upward and ended at black doors. We walked up the set of steps to the right and entered a room with black marble floors and windows floor to ceiling. I could see all of Man’naka’s Upper-City from here. It was night, and I could see the moon. It felt like forever since I’d seen the moon. At the far end of the low-lit room was a half-square wraparound desk made of the white slick stuff that was in the labs. Behind it, I was sure there were many screens and keyboards, computers connecting Andy to his city, to his world.
Andy Andalaf sat behind the desk, arms behind his head, in a red suit. His belly was a thing of luxury. His smile seemed earned, bold, and definitely boastful. He raised thick, hawklike eyebrows, then set them down on his smiling eyes, his face squashing into something between joy and hatred.
“Ningyo! Come in! How much trouble you have caused us here at our … modest corporation,” Andalaf said, his eyebrows raising on every word that he gave emphasis to. I thought that if he’d just mouthed words and raised his eyebrows, we could’ve probably got the idea just as easily. “I’m afraid the Sun-Seekers—cute name, by the way—weren’t able to bring the sun to the poor people of the Twelve Meeks. Though, I do believe you managed to bring many of them to their deaths?”
Hinote raged at his bonds and the Chudo holding him in place. John Jonny, the Jonny that was in charge of them all, stood leaning against the desk on the outside of it. Fucking cyborg. He wore his black suit, customary to the Jonnys, and he had long hair that reached to the center of his back. His nose was pointed and hawklike, and for a moment, I thought of breeding Andy Andalaf and John Jonny to make a perfect hawk person. Then, to the left of the desk, leaning against one of two pillars in the room, was Josh Baker, a stout, fat man with a neck that was all beard and not really any neck at all. He had brown hair and a smiling face that leaked tears, though he wasn’t laughing, wasn’t crying. He was wearing a green suit with khaki pants; many rings decorated his plump fingers, and I thought they might fall off from a loss of circulation any minute. His face was purple-red like a plumb. Josh Baker was in charge of the Andalaf Military, including Chudo, and where they were deployed.
“I think they killed more of their own than any of ours, Andy! Ha!” Josh Baker said, barking laughter coming out as the liquid seeped out of the corners of his eyes.
John Jonny smiled. It did not touch his eyes.
“Well, let’s get to it, then,” said Andy Andalaf, smiling and touching everyone in the room with his raised eyebrows.