“Aveena, honey. Please.” Salia said gently before turning back to the prisoner, opening her mouth to reveal forked tongue and pointed teeth. “You have no idea how happy I am that you’re going to do it this way,” she gestured to Kantor, who grabbed something from the counter.
“W-what the fuck are you?” the prisoner pleaded, “I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about!”
“If you won’t admit who you are, then it’s going to be difficult for us to continue,” Salia said, “do you have any good GD?” she asked.
“G-gene doping?” his eyes wide with panic, “I d-don’t have any-any gene doping.”
“And why is that?” Salia asked, “I mean, you must be into the scene if you were coming to my club.”
“I d-d-don’t have anything ag-g-gainst g-gene doping,” he said, obviously lying.
“Good!” Salia said, taking a syringe from Kantor and stabbing it into his leg, injecting it into the prisoner, “because I just gave you some.”
Panic turned to horror as he struggled to get free, rocking the chair back and forth, almost falling. Salia grabbed him by the shoulders, long fingers digging into his back, bringing her genetically modified face right up to his.
“You’re going to look just like me soon,” she said, “once I give you some more injections,” she signaled to Kantor, who held a handful of syringes up, a grin on his face.
“Fuck you!” the prisoner shrieked, gritting his teeth before hissing, “oh my G- oh God, what the fuck did you do to me? P-please, no…I’ll…”
“I thought you might come around to seeing things my way,” Salia said, “now I have some guests here who might want to know a few things.”
The prisoner looked to me and Laura, trembling.
“Who-who the fuck are you?” he asked, voice full of venom. “You don’t look like these tranny mutants.”
“We’re more human than human,” Laura said.
The captive looked at her confused, unable to understand German without his tech.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“Please,” he pleaded to me, “don’t let it put any more of that shit into me.”
“You know,” Salia said, grabbing another syringe and popping the cap off the needle, “You should feel honored I’m giving you this for free. It’s a quite a rare and expensive concoction of mine,” she stuck the needle in his leg again, pushing the plunger down as the prisoner bellowed in fury.
“Wh-what-what are you d-doing to m-me?”
“The problem is that this concoction requires a few other injections to go with it, if you want it to work right,” Salia continued, feigning worry, “this does more than rearrange bone structure. It actually manipulates HOX genes to make you grow new bones. It’s a process that takes a long time to complete, and works best if you’re still going through puberty,” she explained calmly as the prisoner struggled, “You ever see those old videos of mutant animals with extra limbs? Cows with extra legs hanging off their sides? Well, this is going to be a long and very painful transformation for you.”
The prisoner sat wide-eyed, shaking, sweat pouring down his face.
Salia turned around, a big, snarling smile on her face, and unwrapped the shawl from her body, letting it drop to the floor. The prisoner shrieked in horror at her naked body.
Protruding from Salia’s scapula grew flesh colored wings, each about a foot and a half long. The bones slanted up away from her back to each side before arcing down from an elbow joint, ending in lumpy stumps. They looked like misshapen arms coming from just below the shoulders on her back. Thick skin flaps hung down from the inside of the arms, innervated with bioluminescent vessels alive with brilliant greens, blues, and reds. She flexed the wings, only able to manage a few degrees of flexibility in the stunted bones.
“This took me a long time,” she explained in a calm voice as the prisoner struggled so hard he toppled to the floor, shouting. Salia continued, “Your scapula form sockets as new bone is deposited. An extra pair of humerus, radius, and ulna. Different regimens required for different stages of growth. Lots of mouse experiments when I was a teenager to perfect it.”
“Oh God, oh God…please…k-kill me,” he panted, looking to Laura and me for some kind of deliverance, “please…don’t l-let it d-do this to me.”
“That’s going to depend,” I said, walking up to him, barely able to take my eyes off the growths protruding from Salia’s back, “there are some things we want to know.”
“Please,” he pleaded, “I’ll-I’ll tell you anything, just please don’t…don’t let it do this to me.”
“Who is the leader of the Knight’s?” I asked as Aveena and Kantor picked Salia’s shawl back up, helping her wrap it around the wings.
“I don’t- I don’t know,” he said, “I’ve only ever met up with like t-two other members. We do everything online…c-completely anonymous.”
“What are the Knights planning?” I asked, “Why did they send the Shift makers down to Mexico? How did they know about our meeting?”
“I-I wish I could tell you,” he said, eyes moist with tears, “I’m the wrong guy to ask. I don’t know anything. I don’t-”
Salia grabbed him, lifting him from the floor, sitting him back up. Kneeling down, she brought her face right up to his. Kantor gave her another syringe and she pulled the cap off.
“No! No, please, don’t!” he whined, “I’d fucking tell you if I could, I swear, but I don’t fucking know! Oh my God, please just stop!”
“He’s a well of information,” Laura said.
“Why don’t you just tell us what you do know,” I said.
He swallowed, trying to get a grip on himself.
“I-I talked with this guy,” he explained, “I tr-traced the communication fro-from further east. From the CSA. The Christian States of America. He-he’s the one who told me about this w-warehouse. S-said it was a meeting place. You know, for trannies.”
“Careful,” Salia said.
“I, uh, I haven’t even been involved with-with-with the on-on-on-on-on-Anonymous Knights for that l-long. I-I-I-I-I-I just f-followed everything they were d-doing in the n-n-n-news. I went to a ch-church and we t-t-talked about them like hu-heroes. I…I liked what they were about, you know? I w-wanted to get involved. He said…he said if I wanted in that I n-n-needed to blow this p-place up. To blow it up while…while the tra-tran…while the p-people were-were in one of their m-meetings. I-I-I just came here to scout it out, you know, w-when I was-when I was uh-t-t-t-t-ttacked. I was attacked and now I’m here.”
“Who was this guy?” I asked, “Where in the CSA did he come from? What else did he tell you?”
“Oh Jesus, please forgive me,” the prisoner said, eyes closed, “please forgive me Lord. Don’t let them corrupt my soul.”
“Answer the question,” Laura said.
The prisoner hesitated, only grasping her tone without tech to translate, face cringing, body trembling. Finally he said, “I-I dunno who he was. Just some scrambled v-voice t-talking to me. The-the trace. It came from-from somewhere…from southern G-Georgia. All he told me is-is-is that he w-worked close with some…with a high-ranking member. A high-ranking m-member of the Knights. He-he-he said he wouldn’t tell me anything else until I p-proved myself.”
Scrambled voice? The same one that helped us?
I could see Laura must be wondering the same thing.
“He was lying to you,” I said.
“No. He wouldn’t,” the prisoner said, desperation in his voice, “not the Knights. They wouldn’t. They work for God.”
“They don’t believe in the same God you do,” I said, stepping even closer, “they were using your blind loyalty to commit an act of terror. That’s what extremists do. They use simple minded pawns like you to progress their agenda. You were their useful idiot.”
“Fuck you!” the prisoner cried. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I’ve told you everything I know! Kill me! Kill me and
let God be the judge!”
Salia took another step forward, holding the syringe, but I held out my hand.
“He’s telling the truth,” I said, “they’d only let a pawn know just enough to make him think they care about him.”
The man started mumbling a prayer of some kind, voice shaky, keeping his eyes closed. He wasn’t going to say anything else.
“Now what do we do?” Kantor asked.
Laura walked up to the man, holding up a sterile scalpel. A look of fear came over Salia’s face as Laura put it to his neck.
“I haav bien to death,” Laura spoke slowly in thickly accented English. She then leaned closer and whispered, “yuer Gawd does no exeest awn zee eentornet and he dose nawt exeest een death.”
His eyes shot open as she sliced the scalpel across his throat, a stream of blood gushing from the wound. Salia leapt back as Kantor let out a cry, Aveena covering her mouth and screaming. Laura stepped backwards slowly until she was standing next to me, her clothes dotted with the prisoner’s blood. He choked and gasped, struggling, rocking back and forth. A cascade of blood as it poured down his bare chest over the floor around him. A chill went through me, seeing once again how easy it was for Laura to kill someone.
“Oh, my God!” Aveena repeated over and over, “oh, my God!”
“Jesus Christ…” Kantor whispered as the prisoner choked out his last desperate attempts to breathe before going still.
I approached the corpse, rummaged through his pockets, removing a cryptocurrency drive, some tweezers, a couple trillion-dollar bills of old U.S. currency, a smashed candy bar, and an old USB drive. Everyone watched, quiet. I put the two drives in my pocket, walked over to Salia and set the tweezers and candy bar on a lab bench.
Still looking at my hand on the bench I said, “So, we can count on your cooperation in distributing the chromosomes?”
“Y-yeah,” Salia said, her voice two parts trepidation and one part admiration, “Sure, yeah.”
“W-what…” was all Aveena managed.
“You…you killed him!” Kantor stammered, voice shrill with fear.
“Nothing gets past you,” Laura said, setting the bloody scalpel down on the counter before walking to the sink to rinse her hands off.
“The injections,” he said, eyes wide, “they were…just saline solution…”
“He was going to try and kill all of you,” Laura said, shutting the sink off and starting toward me, “probably would have tried even harder after this. We did you a favor.”
“We’ll get in contact with you about the chromosome treatments,” I said as I made for the door back into the club.
Salia stared after us as we walked through the door. I could see, even in her strangely black eyes, that we had been everything she had expected. Brutal and efficient. It scared her to have actually been witness to it, but we were exactly what she had hoped.
She may have made herself look demonic, but we’ll be the ones that turn her into a monster.
Aveena looked shocked and confused, unable to process what she had just seen. But the way Kantor looked at us, it was hard not to feel as monstrous as what I viewed Sachi in Mexico.
Maybe Sachi was right all along, Evita said, the little piece of wood still in my pocket, maybe there’s no way to avoid becoming monsters when you’re going up against monsters.
Chapter 9
“What the hell is going on?” Akira’s voice came over my earpiece as Laura and I made our way through the dancing crowd.
“They had the room setup to stop signals from getting through,” I said.
“You were offline for almost half an hour,” Akira said, the worry in her voice palpable, “are both of you alright?”
“We’re fine,” Laura said, “I think we put the fear of God into them.”
“What happened?” Akira asked.
“It’s a bit of a long story,” I said, “but for now, I’ll just say that we have their cooperation.”
Akira was silent for some time as Laura and I exited the barn. We shut the door behind us, cutting off the music to only a dull thumping. Walking back across the rough terrain, Laura started laughing.
“Are you alright?” Akira asked.
“This fucking place,” Laura said, “I would never have imagined seeing something like this.”
“I’ve been telling myself that for many years now,” I said.
Yet there was a part of me that was more easily able to accept the growing absurdity of present-day reality. Over so many lifetimes I had seen how societies could change. The creation of language and then writing. The way cultures evolved to such extremes that their conviction to their own apparent self-evidence became their downfall. I’d seen people dedicate their lives to all matter of beliefs, only to have them fade into history, forgotten.
And yet, humanity can still surprise me.
When we got back to the meeting spot, Darren was already there, though his arrival appeared recent. He was a few feet away, taking a leak onto a bush.
“You came back,” Laura said with mock praise.
Darren tried looking back over his shoulder, swearing when urine splashed onto his hand. He finished up and came around the truck, limping from the healing bullet wound in his thigh, wiping his hands on his pants. His bionic left hand was colored like flesh but still misshapen enough to be discernable as artificial from a distance.
“Quit pissing on your hand,” Laura said, “that thing cost you an arm and a leg.”
Darren grunted.
“Everything go well?” I asked.
“Everything ya’ll asked for n’ more,” he said, a look of satisfaction on his face.
“Nothing that’ll let them track us?” I asked, opening the passenger door to the truck.
“I checked all’a drives like Akira said to,” he said, getting into the driver’s side, “showed ‘em as clean.”
“If you consider files about child sex slaves clean,” Laura said, getting in after me as I slid into the middle of the truck.
Darren’s satisfaction quickly faded. He had gone further south into the no-mans-land part of New Mexico, visiting another trafficking house. His first attempt at trying to redeem himself. His self-stated purpose for helping us out.
“I swear I’ll make up fer what I done,” he had said after the surgery to graft the prosthetic onto his arm, “you won’t hafta-”
“And all the other children you sold as sex slaves?” Akira had broke in from the doorway. She held Yukiko’s hand, using her free one to scratch at the white bandages wrapped around her shaved head. “Are you going to find all of those children and give them back?”
“I…maybe not all of ‘em,” he said solemnly, hazy eyes on Akira, her other hand clutching Yukiko’s, “but we gotta start somewhere.”
“How do you plan to do that?” I asked, scratching at the bandage around my own head, covering my right eye. It had only been two days since the surgery to put the new bionic in.
“Ya’ll got them files from that house I worked at,” he said, “I can get morra them.”
“They’ll let you just walk back into one of the houses?” I asked.
He struggled under the sedatives and painkillers to lift his arm, RFID chip bulging subtly under the skin. “Might still have clearance.”
“They won’t know what happened?” I asked.
“Communication ‘tween folks workin’ at those places weren’t too good. Could mean they ain’t heard bout what transpired where I was at,” he said, “or a’least they won’t know I was involved.”
“Sounds to me like a way to make an escape,” Laura said.
“It ain’t like that,” he said. “Ya’ll…saved me.”
“I wouldn’t take it too personally,” Laura said, “you were a fungible hostage. If your friends had given up as readily and easily as you, it might be them jerking off with a robot hand.”
“What happens if they do know?” I asked.
“I reckon they’ll kill me,” he said,
looking down at his bandaged arm, “God only knows. It’s…it’s a risk I’m willin’ ta take.”
“How fucking noble of you,” Akira said, scowling at him, “you’re going to make up for the kids you doped to keep them from hitting puberty? Or the ones you hooked on Shift so they wouldn’t run away? Or the videos you people took of child abuse to put online?”
“I din’t do nunna that stuff,” Darren pleaded, tears welling in his eyes, “I swear on mah life I din’t. That’s how they always was when I first-”
“You let it happen,” Akira hissed, taking her hand from the bandage and walking away before he could finish.
“I-I swear,” he said, looking to me, “p-please. Lemme help.”
I looked at Laura. She shrugged without taking her drowsy gaze off the foot of his bed. Both of us walked away, following Akira toward the exit. Doctor Taylor stood in the hallway outside the room, keeping watch as Akira led Yukiko down the hall. She looked somewhat surprised when she spotted me and Laura.
“She gonna be alright?” Doctor Taylor asked.
“Eventually,” I said, “it’ll take time.”
The hospital was still full of the children we saved, now down to twenty-nine. One girl succumbed to Shift withdrawal and a boy to syphilis. Doctor Taylor told us that some of the children were as old as eighteen, kept looking no older than ten by gene doping.
As Laura and I stepped out into the sun I scratched at the bandage covering my eye again. The night before, a split-brain episode came while I lay in the recovery room, right eye covered. I’d only realized my left hemisphere wasn’t able to see anything when the left arm started trying to take off the medical equipment, ripping an IV needle from my arm, causing it to bleed profusely. The entire time, I was convinced I could see, but nothing going on registered in my vision, even though I’d had the subjective experience of being able to see. Visual anosagnosia. The hospital staff was less confused than I would have expected.
Once we got outside the hospital, Akira did something I hadn’t seen her do in a long time: she let Laura take Yukiko’s hand and took out an unopened package of cigarettes, tore the plastic off and put one in her mouth.
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