He made a face. “Not me. The priests were still trying to teach me not to fight, so I didn’t get let out much. But I saw five others like me in the temples before I escaped. They’re treated as gods there. In the Silver.”
She’d heard of the Changers’ serpent gods and she froze, every instinct suddenly locking into wary place as all his comments about temples and priests suddenly made sense. Her eyes flickered back to his clawed fingers. She’d never seen that on a Changer before, not even once. “Were you…”
“Bred like a horse?” He gave an unhappy smile. “Given all the girls I wanted—just paraded in to get fucked, never to see them again, no baggage? Yeah. Or, at least, that’s what the priests wanted. I didn’t though, and that pissed the pharaoh right the fuck off. Probably why Pastet was told to kill me. I couldn’t get over the way the girls were acting—looked kinda dead, like someone had sucked the spirit right outta them. Looked the way I felt, back when they were whipping me against that stake because I wanted to go back to my mom. Looking back, they were probably girls they were harvesting from the Wastes and weren’t telling anyone, then using them to make more fighters for the war machine and nobody would care. Anyway, whole thing made me sick. I refused. They beat me for that, too. Not in public, though. Private. They kept a contrabrace around my neck, kept me from fighting back.”
He bent a little to peel back his shirt, which showed the golden metal band covering his collarbone and lower neck. It was etched in alien designs that glowed with an inner light and made Skipper’s heart pound. She’d seen collars like that…stamped in Changers’ holy books, adorning depictions of sacred beings from the Silver. She inched away from him, her heartbeat suddenly a thunder in her ears.
He dropped the shirt back to his chest bitterly. “They had five of us. Four of them were model citizens. Fucked everything that moved, did everything they were told, never tried to leave the temples without an entourage. I was the only one they wouldn’t take the brace off. Wouldn’t let me go anywhere near the public. Had Ibis or Jackals watching me at all times. The rest of the breeders at the temple were fat and happy, like trained parrots, doing tricks whenever they were asked for the crowds, getting their rocks off all night long, never once asking where their real families were.” He hesitated. “I never saw any girls of my kind, though. I guess they only kidnapped the boys. Or if they didn’t, not sure what they did with the girls. They weren’t at the temple.” He hesitated, wincing like he expected her to yell at him…or pull her knife again.
“You mean you’re…” She was finding it hard to breathe. “One of those snake things?” She’d seen them on the books, like furry white serpents floating between the clouds.
“Eehhhh,” he looked at her hesitantly. “I mean, we get this thing off my neck, I could probably show you, but it’s not really a snake.”
“Don’t fuck with me,” Skipper snapped, her chest hammering. “Those things don’t need a weapon to make fire. They’re like…elementals or something. Eternal.”
“Aliens, is my guess,” he said. “Something that landed right before the world went to complete shit. I’m guessing the human government’s captured one, did all sorts of genetic experiments on it, used it to make brainless psychopaths to kill people with fire. Probably some rich dudes got their kids altered. But maybe not. I do know that what the priests say is bullshit. We didn’t come out of a fucking volcano.”
Skipper could only stare.
He shrugged uneasily. “But like I said, I wasn’t really given a chance to get close enough to talk to them before the Ibis thugs hauled me back and put me in the basement for a couple centuries.”
Silence hung between them so long that the fire started to pop and go out.
“So.” He gave her a worried look. “You’re the first one I’ve told. You seem to be taking it pretty well.”
“You’re telling me…” Skipper whispered, “…you can fly? Change…” she gestured at his body, “…your shape?”
“They made me stay as close to human as I could when I lived in the temple,” he said. “But if I could get the collar off, probably. It makes things…super difficult. I haven’t ever done it without like six priests watching over my shoulder to make sure I didn’t fly off, so I haven’t had a lot of practice.”
Skipper stared at him, realizing she simply couldn’t find the words to speak. Finally, she said, “So… The soldiers they send out here to hunt scavvers, the ones who don’t look human… It’s ‘cause they’re not?”
“Half-breed aliens, is my guess,” Ptahmohtep said. “Something that could alter reality with their minds. They make them take a human form when they put them with those girls, so I’m guessing they’re compatible somehow.”
Just like Skipper’s grandmother had insisted. Everyone had thought she was crazy.
“And that’s…you. You’re one of those things. An…alien.”
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Ptahmohtep winced. “Well, I think so? They tried to tell me I was forged in a volcano, but that was bullshit. I remember the diesel-smelling sack after they ripped me out of my mother’s nest.”
“Fuck,” Skipper whispered, staring at him. She glanced down at the weapon in her hand. “So this thing…it’s alien too?”
He grimaced. “Well, not exactly. I, uh…” He winced and reached up to scratch the back of his neck. “I was just…uh…making it glow and melting stuff for you so you’d think it was you and take the zipties off.”
“Why didn’t you melt the zipties?” she whispered.
He tapped his breastbone, and she heard the golden collar thump. “Puts a real damper on what I can do. Limits it a lot. Those fucker priests have got five different levels, depending on how much they wanna punish you. The other guys all had level one and could basically do anything they wanted short of fly away. I’ve worn level five since I killed a priest I caught masturbating over me in my sleep. He’d tied me up, told me the pharaoh had told him to come fuck me to ‘make my balls drop’. I ripped his dick off and dropped it on the pharaoh’s board game while she was playing a visiting nomarch that afternoon. It was big news, back in the day. Pharaoh pretended to be horrified. They demanded some sacrifices. Threw a couple priests in a pit of magma from a helicopter, if I remember. Then, while the witch hunt was going on for the public, they got eight Jackals to drag me under the temple and fitted me with a level five. Oh, and they held me down while every single one of them got their rocks off in my ass. Kept me chained there a few days, bent over for anyone to take. Pretty much the whole temple had me that week. Pharaoh’s orders.”
Skipper, unlike most crag-nannies or even scavvers, had never been raped. Not that sick or desperate men hadn’t tried—she’d just been too quick to stab them and managed to slip away. The idea that this man, this living god, had been used in such a way, was incomprehensible to her.
“Anyway, it was a couple centuries ago,” he said, gesturing dismissively. “Just wish I could get this pain in the ass collar off. That would basically fix everything.”
“Can I see it?” Skipper asked.
“There’s a special key,” Ptahmohtep said, not showing her. “The pharaoh holds onto it. Hides it as a necklace. Just shaped like a square peg, but there’s something else going on with it. Maybe magnetic or sonic, I don’t know. You wouldn’t be able to pick the lock, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Can I see anyway?” Skipper asked. She…itched…to once more see proof she was dealing with not a Changer, but a god.
He gave her an unhappy look, then reluctantly pulled at his shirt hem. “All right, but just…” He hesitated. “I wasn’t very good at hiding what I was. I tried, but there was always stuff that I…couldn’t get right.”
She nodded and, when he started to awkwardly pull up his hem with just one hand, struggling with his dislocated shoulder, she stepped forward to help.
Immediately, she saw what he’d meant and her breath caught. The lumps in his backbone that she had taken to mean he was thinner than ideal were actually some sort of spines, bony deformations under the skin, and his breast bone jutted outward in a harsh V, like a bird’s, and every rib stood out like a hard, bony protrusion connecting to his spiny back. And a line down his back glistened with four-inch, pearlescent hair, like a body-length mohawk.
“Oh my god,” she whispered, afraid to move lest she touch him. “You’re really the blood of the Serpent.”
“I prefer the term Skymancer.” At her frown, he said, “It’s an older term. Before the priests. I think some guys saw the ships coming and going, back when they were still in service. It was in a couple history books I read in the temple library, after they let me out again.”
“What ships? Ocean ships?” Her grandmother had whispered of the ocean. A lake so big that one couldn’t see the other side.
“Spaceships.” At her blank look, he pointed up. “They come and go from the stars.”
Skipper’s eyes went wide and she glanced up at the starry expanse, despite herself. “You can do that?” she whispered.
“I don’t know what I can do,” he said, searching her eyes and for a moment sounding almost…vulnerable. “I was hoping you could help me figure it out?”
Swallowing, she tore her eyes from his alien chest and looked again at the glowing collar. She squinted at the flowing, feathery marks. “You can read this?”
He snorted. “It’s a passage from scripture, a cautionary tale about gods rising from volcanoes and keeping them satiated with sacrifices of human flesh lest they bury humanity in seas of ash.”
It looked too pretty to say something so horrific. “What language?” she asked. Even though she couldn’t read, she didn’t recognize it as one of the ones on scavver ledgers or on posters in the Changer camps.
“Something old. The priests say it was spontaneously vomited up by Yellowstone during the End Times, but I saw some of those marks carved into the trees in the woods up North. I think it’s the alien language.” He hesitated, glowing yellow eyes flickering back to her. “Well, my language, if you wanna get technical.”
Skipper stared at the glowing blue marks. “Can I touch it?”
“Won’t hurt you, if that’s what you mean.”
Gingerly, Skipper reached out and touched the metal—and immediately gasped and yanked her hand back when it felt like the touch sucked every ounce of warmth out of her body and through her fingertip in less than an instant. “Holy shit!” she cried, shaking out her fingers and stumbling away from him. “Holy shit holy shit.” Her whole arm was numb. She grabbed her elbow, whole body trembling.
“I’ve gotten used to it,” he said wryly. “It’s like our kryptonite.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Skipper whispered.
“Eh, something from before the Fall.” He sighed and looked down at himself as she continued to look him over. She could see the place for a key right in the center of the chest, like the ornate lock on an old treasure box. The entire contraption looked…ancient…but with an immutable permanence that made her spine tingle with unease. Just being around the collar left her uncomfortable.
Ptahmohtep let out an unhappy breath as he looked. “Anyway, sorry I lied. I was just…really desperate to get out of those zip ties, and I was pretty sure you’d just brain me if I told you the truth before I showed you I wasn’t…” he hesitated, “…well, dangerous.”
But he was dangerous, that was becoming crystal clear. “You said you’re the one who melted the stone, not the gun, right?”
He gave her a wary look and a nod.
That was why it hadn’t worked for her on her trek back to the Changer camp. She felt like such a fool.