CHAPTER 8 - CHICKEN OF THE TREES
The S.S. Lono and its escort fleet were the pride of the East Pacific. Lono, like all Syndicate supercarriers, was a floating garden fed by nuclear power. In the old world, such a ship hull would be used to house thousands of tons of missiles, ammunition, aircraft, and other instruments of death. In this era, the ship fought malnutrition and low morale with its vast hydroponics bays.
Its own crew was just a few hundred sailors largely assisted by drones and semi-sentient robots that kept tomatoes, potatoes, spinach, kale, peppers, grapes, basil, strawberries, beans, watermelons, berries, guava, chocolate-pods, and cucumbers flowing into the feed silos. Mess chefs throughout the fleet could place remote orders for their kitchens, and individual sailors with a particular craving could do the same; everything would be delivered as quickly as possible by automated ZON delivery drones that based out of the Lono.
Even the wake wasn’t wasted. Trailing behind the Lono was a conical net filled with nutrient filaments that bled spirulina algae fertilizer into the ocean. This net was periodically dragged back into the belly of the ship (usually just before the desalination brine tanks emptied), and in so doing was auto-scraped into algae tanks for processing into Syndicate’s most precious commodity: Spiru powder, the nutrient base mixed into everything from sugar-rich Spiru-Cola to cheesepuffs.
Maintaining optimal biometrics was at the foundation of Syndicate’s bill of rights. Thus, ensuring that even so-called ‘junk food’ was nutritionally charged wasn’t even a matter of debate; it was written upon the founding charter tablets in ZON’s now-lost Seattle HQ centuries before: “A nourished society is a harmonious society.”
ZON was the patron corporation of the S.S. Lono, in fact, and the Trine Accord’s administrative lead for the entirety of the East Pacific, well into the great harbor cities of The Iguana, Samfrisco, the river metropolis of Port Lamb, and the fortress rigs of Wolfport. The Iguana and Samfrisco in particular were centers of trade with the interior peoples of NorMurica; the Sequoians, the Moto Tribes, and miscellaneous others, who were usually from unmarked cult compounds and/or fascist holdover citadels (the two were often the same) hiding in sad bunkers throughout the barren hills and plains of the continent.
It was bright midday, and The Iguana was in sight for the S.S. Lono’s fleet. Geologically, it was an unremarkable city, lacking the majestic mountain ranges of the Pacific Northwest. Ecologically, however, it was a marvel of turquoise waters and dove-white waves. The sky mirrored this, with its capes of curved clouds dancing across the blue as fast as that warm wind could carry them.
Speakers throughout the main decks of every ship, from the smallest interceptor to the burliest destroyer, played a celebratory Haka chorus. This was livestreamed straight from the gardens on the flats of the Lono itself, where a mixed troupe of sailors of Polynesian descent wearing nothing but shells, cyberware implants, woven grass, and collective liters of tribal ink, bulged their eyes, stuck out their tongues, slapped their muscled thighs, and pantomimed slitting the throats of imaginary enemies to the beat of heavy drums.
Over the noise a team of company poets read an ancient Māori poem, as was S.S. Lono tradition. This poem was read into separate feeds for optimal translations by the various poets, and sailors heard it based on their implant language settings (which were typically set to Angrish, Califalish, Portuñol, Solombala, or Mandonese):
The spirit is within the smooth bones of the god.
Here are the sacred signs of the assembly of Lono:
The voice of thunder bursts forth;
The rays of lightning flash;
The earthquake shakes the land;
The smoky cloud and the rainbow appear;
Heavy rain and high wind blow;
Whirlwinds sweep beneath the earth;
Rocks fall on stream banks;
Red mountain-streams rush to the sea.
Here are the water spouts;
The cluster clouds of heaven tremble;
Springs in the cliffs gush forth.
…
Here is Lono the bone of glory;
The bone placed in the clear sky.
Hundreds of boats from The Iguana were already out to sea to meet the incoming fleet. The celebratory display was broadcast freely, and free residents of The Iguana had broken out the good tequila and the grills to baste, roast, and enjoy the ‘chicken of the trees’ from the local beach ranches. The city’s namesake came from the green lizards so widely cultivated along the coast for protein, and just about every sailor who wasn’t vegan in the Lono fleet was looking forward to getting a break from lab meat and Ezekial bread.
The orders were pre-loaded for weeks. Boats waiting for the fleet blasted their horns and music at the sight of the hundreds of ZON drones flying ahead of the fleet to deliver subscription orders of produce, preserves, Spiru-Cola, Junmai-C, Churtles, and crates upon crates of ZON’s proprietary chocolate bars.
In return, ranchers and traders refitted the drones with export crates full of vacuum-packed ‘land tuna’ (more iguana), collagen and calcium supplements (ground up iguana skin and bones), and precious bootleg interactive sim-chips straight from the indie recreation scene of The Iguana, famous for its old-world insistence on crafting bespoke immersion programs for even the most discerning Syndicate neuro-cyborgs.
The Ombudsmen of the Independent Civic Authority of The Iguana were also proud to report that, as of the previous year of 2409’s industry survey, only 0.5% of all entertainment media coming to Syndicate via hard-copy could be classified as “snuff.” This was a heroic decrease from the previous year’s 0.8%, and an enormous drop compared to the prior decade’s average of 4.5%. This drop in snuff production was largely thanks to the joint efforts of the Iguanan Police Department and their corporate sponsors at ZON Central Command.
In their 2410 press release on the subject, ZON stated: “Snuff is cringe. Syndizens who seek the primal thrill of combat are required to go through psychological, physiological, and neurological conditioning to ensure compatibility with combat cyberware. Why? Because the only people you should be killing are dangerous fascist belligerents that have been thoroughly scoped by our partners in PRISMA and the Ghost Corps. No one should be kink-shamed, but if you get off on witnessing the torture and murder of innocent people, you will be flagged for rehab by SynCon. No one can hide those thoughts forever.”
Under sunny skies and through blue seas, the fleet found its mooring off the coastline. The festivities would continue at sea until the next morning. The chaos of the celebration was a perfect cover for Ghost agents to leak out of their hidden habitation compartments attached to the hulls of various ships throughout the Lono’s fleet.
Most of the captains didn’t even know they were there. The compartments opened, and cloaked bodies swam out to sea, meters beneath the waves and as translucent as jellyfish.
Outside city limits, the scorching dunes and windmill hills folded into a valley where perimeter fences could meet into a natural chokepoint. There, the Moto Tribal Coalition Authority formed a checkpoint to manage intake on the east side of The Iguana, which was under their sovereign control by the free trade charter with Syndicate.
Given that entry via the eastern side was nothing but the rugged Bleaklands, traffic was seasonal. With spring getting deeper, the off-season’s hot weather had already come; at its peak, the Bleaklands sun could cook the paint off of a truck chassis. This is why the arrival of a brig rig (from the northern pass, of all places) showing up at the gates was odd.
Tribal warriors, desperate for something to do, showed up to the rig by the dozens to help with offloading the prisoners. The brig rig’s mystery only compounded when one skinny young man and a green-haired monkey girl were offloaded for processing.
“We might be super fucked,” said Mote to Trip, as they were led to the checkpoint in cuffs.
Trip, who was so thirsty he had no spit to swallow, wheezed. “Don’t be… negative. Please.”
“These aren’t my tribe.”
“Aren’t you Motos unified under the… coalition?”
“Uh… maybe on paper.”
“PAPER IS FOR NERDS!” Shrieked one warrior, who emphasized her point by ramming the stock of her AK-47 into Mote’s shoulder blade.
Mote yelped in pain. Her lips curled and she bared her sharp teeth back at the woman, whose face was streaked by finger-trails of black engine grease; the woman bared her teeth right back.
“Fight me,” Mote spat into the sand; this sacrifice of personal moisture only amplified the intensity of her challenge. “Ratchet grease-guzzler.”
That was all it took. The warrior woman threw her rifle into sand, bulged her eyes, smashed her fist against her own breast, and chirped a series of Red Crest war yelps.
“Uncuff the green girl!” She demanded. “On my honor!”
“Red Crest and honor,” Mote hopped over her own cuffed hands and brought them up. A nearby brave uncuffed her in seconds; duels of honor were not to be delayed. “Ha! You’re the tribe that claimed Yellow River land and ate shit for it!”
“Yellow River, no wonder this mutie girl smells like piss! Yellow River, cowards who hide behind their V12s and long-guns! Cowards who run away!”
“It’s called baiting and ambushing, you brainless gas-rag!”
“Coward tactics! Oh, we see you for what you are, Synner-lackey!” The warrior pointed at Mote’s ZON skates and refused to even look at Trip. “You’re a friend of wicked mermaids!”
Trip watched as the two squared off and couldn’t have been less interested. He saw a canteen on the hip of a nearby warrior. “Can I get some of that?” He asked.
The warrior offered it to him without a word or taking his eyes off the fight. Trip stepped over his cuffs and gripped the canteen as best he could with his wrists bound together. He downed the whole thing and was thirsty enough to ignore the unsettling viscosity of the water.
Meanwhile, the Red Crest warrior, who was head and shoulders taller than Mote, lunged in and trusted her superior reach. Mote, who was used to having functional skates, hopped backwards and barely avoided getting slugged across the jaw. She did not avoid getting a big fistful of her hair grabbed, twisted, and yanked. Trip winced as he witnessed poor Mote get her stomach slugged over and over, until she was crumpled on the ground sucking dust.
When the Red Crest woman got done preening for her audience, she gripped Mote’s hair and lifted her cheek from the sand to look into her eyes.
“Don’t jaw if you ain’t got claws,” she said with a sneer, before shoving Mote’s face back into the dirt and kicking her stomach.
Trip didn’t interfere, at least at first. But then he remembered that, at least until his augmentations were repaired and put back online, no one was watching or judging him. He went to Mote and crouched down beside her. He could enjoy a little empathy, as a treat.
“You okay, Mote?” He asked.
Mote struggled to breathe, let alone speak. She pushed herself up onto wobbling arms, then wobbling legs, and glared at her abuser with eyes gone cold with hatred. Trip knew that look, though he didn’t know where he’d seen it before. He touched Mote’s shoulder, and she slapped his hands back with a mighty DAP.
“Don’t…” She wheezed. “… touch me…”
Trip drew his hand back. “She sucker punched you.”
“No, she didn’t… she got me fair and square.”
Mote held her aching stomach with one of her arms and pointed at the Red Crest woman. “I’ll get you next time.”
The warrior smirked and stuck out her hand. Mote eyed it like a forest creature eyeing a suspicious treat sitting under a box with a string attached to it. Against her apparent better judgement, Mote reached for the offered hand.
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At the last second, the other woman pulled her hand back and imitated Mote’s voice:
“DoN’t tOuCh mE!”
All of the Red Crest warriors had a good, mean-spirited laugh at that. Mote clenched her teeth, sucked in a deep breath through her little nose, and marched toward the security checkpoint in silence. Trip couldn’t help but feel badly for her. He followed close behind but had words in passing for the belligerent Red Crest woman.
“You’re malignant,” he said, pointing at her. “Watch your back.”
“The fuck does ‘malignant’ mean? That some Synner cybercock disease or something?”
“Don’t touch him,” shouted another Red Crest. “He’s got the malignant!”
“Nasty little chalkfaced twink!”
Trip remembered the blade at his hip; his fingers itched for it. He took a breath, then caught up with Mote and walked beside her. She kept her eyes ahead and focused on keeping steady, between the awkward steps of her unpowered skates in the sand, and her lingering injuries, she seemed to be having a hard time.
“They got their blood,” Mote murmured to him as they walked. “So, we’re good now. Papaw always said ‘the sun don’t dry up a lake bed without making a raincloud.’”
Processing at the checkpoint wasn’t a big deal. In all of five minutes, their identities were verified by handheld biometric scanning devices, and they were directed to their respective consulates in the city. The gate guards, also Red Crest, seemed a little older and even had a bit of sympathy in their eyes for Mote’s treatment at the hands of their young warriors.
The Iguana and its towering skyline, glinting with glass, covered in solar-skin, and overflowing with terraces of greenery and fruiting trees, laid out before them in the hills. Great windmills turned in the warm coastal breeze and the sound of music and aerial drone traffic got louder and louder as they walked the half-buried sidewalk path winding down toward the shuttle stop. There they stood for about an hour. Mote made her lack of desire for conversation abundantly clear by sticking earbuds into her ears and turning up rhythmic music so loud Trip could hear it from five feet away.
Their shuttle arrived. It was an old Wocky Worm tribal long-bus with sixteen wheels and an engine block the size of a garden shed. It’d been refitted for urban streets with smoother tires, tighter suspension, and the cargo section cleared out for more passenger seating. Residents had welded wedding padlocks to its outside and covered it in years of layered graffiti, with messages and family tags crowding each other out for space like ferns in a jungle. The driver was Wocky Worm tribe, with a ponytail so long he wore it braided around his shoulders like a pet snake. He had arms covered in winding violet tattoos and a friendly grin full of gold and black teeth.
“Tu mosin’ Ta Iguana?” He asked the two of them. Trip had no idea what he was saying because his translation chip was fried. He looked to Mote. Mote stepped onto the bus.
“Hella,” she said.
Trip followed. The doors hissed shut behind him and the bus lurched into action, shoving him against the railing. The driver cranked up the music, which was a thundering house track from a local studio; the bass was so intense it made Trip’s heart palpitate.
It being early in the day, the driver hit up Mote for conversation. “Tutros def Diablicate? Oho…?”
Mote flopped into the front seat nearest the driver and pointed at Trip. “Tam hella Diablicate, peron yai so Yellow River.”
“No cappa?”
“Hella no cappa.”
“Tu solo?”
“Hella.”
Trip sat in the seat across the aisle from Mote and stared at her. “He doesn’t speak Angrish?”
Mote laughed. “Everybody speaks Angrish, dummy.”
“So” said Trip. “Why isn’t he speaking Angrish?”
“Because Angrish is for chodes.”
Trip did not know what a chode was and did not care to find out. It was one of those words whose very sound implied vulgarity. “Okay, so what language is he speaking, then?”
“Califalish. What the heck part of Syndicate are you even from that you don’t know Califalish, Mr. Secret Agent?”
“Far Western Syndicate, past Jakarta. I grew up on the Ryukyuan rigsteads, GYOTA sphere. As a boy I was brought up speaking old Ryukyuan by my mother and Tây Gái by my father.”
“Man… I never even heard of either of those. Syndicate must be huge.”
“It is. Benefit of being ocean-based, I guess; expansion is easy.”
Mote leaned back against the window and got cozy. “How’s that?” She asked.
Trip kept himself relaxed, but his eyes vigilant. He scanned the empty shuttle and the window to the outside. They were the only passengers so far, but given that he saw the familar metal glint of habitation stacks cresting over a nearby hill, they wouldn’t be alone much longer.
“The agri-carriers were always the key,” continued Trip. “ZON uses them to reinforce or expand coastal and island settlements and has gotten pretty good at it over the past few centuries. Now that Miami’s been folded in, the last big project is reviving the canal at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. That’ll connect Atlantic and Pacific, just like the ancient world did.”
“If you guys are all over the world, how come you don’t fight each other?”
Trip furrowed his brow. “I don’t understand the question.”
“Moto Tribes are always taking shots at each other. Don’t you guys do that?”
“Not in any meaningful way… not like what I saw happen to you.”
“Damn… how, though? Cops?”
“No. PRISMA keeps everyone on the same page, for the most part.”
“What’s PRISMA?”
“One of the corporations of the Trine Accord – it stands for Pacific Rim InfoSphere Mapping Apparatus. They manage social cohesion and intelligence stuff, like… translation software, implant standardization, counterintelligence, that kind of thing.”
“So like…” Mote leaned in with a gleam in her eyes. “… like secret police. And cool tactical espionage shit? And mind control?”
Trip offered her a thin smile. “You wouldn’t be the first person to think that of PRISMA – some people in Syndicate even think the whole corporation’s central leadership is an elaborate deepfake meant to cover up a fairy cabal.”
“A what the fuck?”
“Fairies are spirits that live in computers. Most of the ones that live alongside us in Syndicate are helpful spirits, but some can be mischievous. My mother was a gijutsu-yuta, she used to do exorcisms for people who got malicious fairies in their heads.”
Trip remembered his mother especially by the simple circle tattoos on her hands, the inked lines on her finger bones and chin, and the way her flowing sleeves would flicker the candles in a given room. The thought made his heart ache. He had not considered her for years.
“I remember,” he said, feeling far away from that dingy bus ride. “I remember one time when she had to connect her mind to a fisherman’s. He was an old man with legacy tech from the twenty-odds, and it was blackwalled, too – nothing going in or out, so his onboard fairies had turned strange. He’d take the jellyfish from his catch and just… throw them at schoolchildren while shouting in a language no one understood. Only happened once or twice in town, but it was enough to get the gijutsu-yuta involved. She had to stay connected with him for a full day, and the only way she got him to comply was by drugging his bukubuku tea with valium. Eventually she got the fairy to stop believing in its own existence, but that took the old man’s oldest friend out of his head; he no longer hallucinated the fairy in his episodes and felt empty. A few weeks later he tied a tire to his neck and threw himself off of his boat into the harbor. My mother said she’d never use the ‘solipsistic hallucination’ ever again on a fairy.”
Mote’s eyes were wide and her face was as flat as it was mute. “… um, what?”
“Sorry. Uh… Gijutsu-yuta are important in Syndicate. They go by many names, depending on the culture. Broadly, they’re just called psychopunks.”
“No offense to your culture or anything,” said Mote. “But the more you talk about it the more ratdick insane you sound.”
Trip rested his head back against the window and smiled. “That’s fine.”
“Is it true everybody sees everybody else all the time, where you’re from?”
“Potentially, yes. It’s all stored in central clouds the public can access.”
“Clouds?” Mote visibly strained herself as she no doubt tried to imagine data being stored in a big, fluffy cloud. “That’s fucking choco-loco, dude, so with the power of clouds you could watch your neighbor taking a dump?”
“I mean, yes… I don’t know why you would, but you could.”
Mote laughed. The driver looked at her through his mirror and she shot off rapid-fire Califalish in his direction. Trip could only assume from context that she was telling the fellow everything she’d just learned. The driver’s response was to lift his finger to his temple and swirl it while staring conspicuously at Trip through his mirror.
“Yeah,” Trip looked at his armor-encased hands. “Crazy.”
They passed through the stacked habitation crates built into sun-blocking towers along the shrubby hillsides that their road wound through. The stops were every ten minutes or so. Trip noted the reliance of these people on a combination of Syndicate tech (the hab-crates themselves, water recyclers, bio-printers, tool fabricators, collapsable excavators, solar spray, etcetera). He felt a twinge of pride seeing the GYOTA logo on just about every piece of utility tech; he’d worked alongside his father as panel-weaver and rivet-kid in the drydocks and manufactories of Fukuoka and had the molten-metal scars on his forearms to prove it.
As passengers boarded along the ride to the city limits, Trip paid as much attention to them as he could without being conspicuous. Most were working-class folks seeking Syndicate generational residency for their future children; this was done through agricultural service. Their hands were permanently stained green by algae from the processing vats on the southern edge of the city’s industrial base. Beyond those subtle physical clues, he could discern nothing useful. It was then that Trip felt blind without the assistance of his implants, or even his suit’s onboard silhouette profiler; there was no metadata, no movement predictions, nothing to connect him to PRISMA facial recognition databases, nothing to give him any kind of intelligence on known or suspected belligerents, and it was only in the absence of this that he realized how vulnerable he was.
Mote, on the other hand, napped in the sideways sunshine filtering through the bus window. Before long the bus was full and Trip moved to sit next to Mote – he wasn’t sure if it was to protect her or because he felt safer with the scrappy little simian at his side. Maybe it was both.
He did not know who had implants or who didn’t. He did not know who was a deep cover ghost out to drag him for malfeasance. He did not know when someone would take over the job he failed to finish. He only knew that he’d neglected to kill Mote and her sister, and that this dereliction of duty would have consequences.
“They’re going to kill you and wipe me,” he murmured to the napping Mote. “And I’m sorry that there isn’t really anything I can do about it.”
“Well,” said the bus driver, in perfect Angrish. “Don’t beat yourself up too badly, Trip. After all, you’re new at your job and getting a lot of mixed signals between your personal Chat, senior operatives, and SynCon. Sometimes you have to go with your gut.”
Trip stared at the driver and chose a tone to match the chill he felt. “I see.”
“That said… defying a direct order from Neon Vox herself.” The driver whistled and shook his head. “I dunno about that one, ‘chachone, seems like a quick way to get your family name carved into brass and lovingly finger-fucked into a mag.”
“A direct order?” Trip kept steady, despite the tremor in his guts. “She’s just a consultant these days.”
“You’ve been offline about two days too long, Tanaka-chan. Go get a bite to eat, clear your head, enjoy the quiet while you can… not everybody like you gets a free baseliner vacation in The Big Liz for failing at their job. You got some kind of luck.”
Trip didn’t dare respond with silence. “By grace itself, I’m grateful for every breath.”
The driver kept his eyes on the road and maintained a sincere smile. “Good. Last stop,” he said, as the bus squealed to a halt on a bustling street corner. The driver reached up to honk the long-bus horn. Passengers poured out into the streets and dispersed like muddy water into the sea. The horn startled Mote awake; she scrambled out of her seat and grabbed Trip’s wrist.
“I’m hungry!” She cried. “Feed me with your big dick Synner money!”
“S-sure…”
And so, like some five-liq lobotodoll programmed for compliance, he was dragged off the bus by Mote. The driver gave a parting wave and a totally inscrutable grin before sealing the bus door shut. It lumbered down the road, deeper into the city’s tangle of swaying power lines and jury-rigged hab pods.
It was all bodies, heat, and dust. There were topo-geezers giving away bottled water with prayer beads and post-it notes of hand-written affirmations like ‘you can do that’ and ‘win or lose, you can choose.’ There were luristas lounging in open-air cafes, sipping foamy mugs of freshly-toasted espresso and fanning their sweaty tits after a long, hot night’s work; it’d been Friday the day before and they were enjoying a flush of wealth from all the surge pricing. And around another corner, there were the succulent scents of lemon-pepper and stick-roasted whole iguana covered in salted goat cheese and lime wedges, all sizzling over solar grills and dripping fat into shot glasses used to fuel the haulers and courier kids through long days up and down the hilly corridors of the city’s many improvised cobs and corners. All of this was to say that the eastern side of The Iguana was hundreds of square miles of neon, concrete, solar skin, hab stacks, garden towers, gondolas, and private utility grids made possible by GYOTA and ZON technological subsidies that had been airdropped into the region centuries before, and Syndicate had neither the right nor the inclination to uproot the place.
Uprooting slums had a way of destroying more than it created. There were whole college degrees at Jakarta-Uni on the subject of Slum Ecology and how to leverage it toward common good and reinforce it in ways that didn’t disrupt generations of urban sociological development.
In a place like this, Mote was a nightmarish ward. She zipped from one attraction to the next, iguana-on-a-stick in one hand and a bottle of lime-green BAMF!1-P0P in the other. In her excitement, she let go of Trip’s hand and lost him in a crowd.
Trip wasn’t aware of the exact moment when the lights went out for him because that’s just how losing consciousness works; one moment you’re awake, the next you’re awake somewhere or sometime else, or perhaps you’ll never be awake ever again.
“Trip!” She called out between bites of crispy lizard meat and glugs of sugary slop. “TRIP!”
Mote peeked down alleyways and wound through crowds. There was nothing here she recognized anymore. Someone shoved her shoulder and she staggered on her useless, clunky skates and tripped over a curb. She tumbled onto the concrete and looked up and around, past the tangled cables and towering habs to the bright blue sky. She saw birds lined up along the cables and felt her palms sweat. Mote dropped her treats and leapt to her feet. She sprinted through a winding alleyway and into the shade. All she knew was she was running downhill.
The birds were everywhere, watching her from their perches. The dipping alleyway ended in a dumpster and a wall of tagged-up metal. There was no one else there. As she caught her breath, the graffiti on the dead-end in front of her came into focus:
It was a red-eyed moth with teal-and-magenta wings. Instead of a moth’s face, it had a girl’s face set into a tuft of fuzz and many insect limbs that ended in human hands. Of course, it reminded her of her sister. And Mote couldn’t be sure, but, when she stared at the graffiti for too long the paint shifted and stuttered, like the world itself was malfunctioning. And then she saw the shimmer along the walls, the cables, and the many pigeons roosting above.
An intrusive thought: Mothy and Papaw’s buggy shattered in a streak of oil and blood along the baking sands of the Sand Wocky Valley.
You want to be a hero, but you can’t even help with chores, said Mothy’s voice in her head.
Mote grabbed her skull and pulled at her hair. She shrieked in her throat and felt the fight boiling up inside of her; a sense of dread made the ground uneven and her thoughts like cracked glass. “Stop,” she growled. “Stop stop STOP STOP!”
COME BACK TO MOTHER, SWEET FAIRY.
Mote felt psychic pressure; it was like someone slipping their fingers through her skull, grabbing the base of her cerebellum, and squeezing it mechanically. A knee buckled and she wanted to scream, not in pain, but rage and humiliation. She jerked her face up and saw, blocking her exit, an apparition of a woman hovering in the air. She had scintillating moth’s wings that radiated a nauseating light. There was a series of gems welded into her brow, and she had the big, baseball-sized compound eyes she associated with her sister.
“Just kneel,” whispered Mothy’s voice. “Why have you always been such an angry, closed-off person? We came from the same mother… but we are so different.”
“You’re not my sister, not real! I’m flashback-tripping off that fucking shampoo again!”
Far off toward the sea, Mote heard klaxon sirens. Voices boomed over loudspeakers in a language she couldn’t make out. Above, flocks of birds plowed across the sky in geometric formations. And directly beneath her a shimmering, translucent ooze crawled up and around her skates. She panicked, she thrashed, she scraped and wiped it off, but it wouldn’t stop climbing.
“It feels good,” said the apparition in Mothy’s voice. “Let it in.”
Her scream turned to a gurgle as the membrane slid down her throat. After that, all she knew was white static. And in that white static, she saw Everything. She saw Mother. She saw Truth.