by Alexa Black
Kara licked at the wound one last time. Her lips ghosted along the flesh of Kara’s thigh. “So soft,” she purred against Sue’s skin.
She traced her way up to Sue’s vulva. Sue moaned again and spread her legs.
Clawed fingers spread Sue’s inner labia apart. Sue didn’t bother keeping still. Dangerous as Kara was, Sue knew her now. Knew she had nothing to fear.
Kara sniffed at Sue’s wetness, like the other Outcasts had sniffed at Sue before. But they’d been scenting a stranger. They’d been suspicious. This was Kara, taking her in, discovering her with all her senses.
“Please,” Sue whispered.
Kara pressed her mouth against Sue’s skin. She parted her lips, and Sue could feel her inner heat. She bucked her hips, hard, and Kara gripped her hips, holding her in place.
The power in Kara’s grip sent another tingle through Sue’s flesh. If this is what it means to be your pet, I guess I can get used to it.
Then Kara began to lick, laving Sue’s clit with slow, methodical strokes.
Sue wrapped her other hand around Kara’s head, pressing it as hard as she could into her flesh. Kara laughed against her skin and sped up, matching Sue’s frantic movements.
Then she moved off Sue’s clit and slipped her tongue inside.
Sue snarled, half wanting Kara to keep lapping at her clit, half welcoming her Outcast inside her. She gasped and panted as Kara’s tongue moved inside her.
Kara slipped free of her again. She took one of Sue’s inner lips into her mouth, sucking at it, and then taking it between her fangs. They pressed against the flesh, sharp but not piercing. Sue froze, a frisson of fear only heightening her desire.
Kara wouldn’t hurt her, but Kara was a living weapon. Sue panted, wanting.
Kara opened her mouth again. She moved to murmur against Sue’s clit, a humming vibration.
“Please,” Sue said again. She would have said it loudly, but only managed a needy little gasp.
Kara snickered against her flesh and flicked her tongue over Sue’s clit. Sue bucked against her lips matching her rhythm.
Her flesh locked and she pushed out her hips, grinding hard against Kara’s lips and tongue as she let out a long, high cry.
Chapter Seventeen
“I have to see the dead ones.”
Kara turned away from the mirror and stared at Sue, her eyes wide. “The dead ones?”
“Yes.” Sue nodded, trying to look as decisive as the pilot she’d once hoped to become. “The ones your people punish. They’re humans. Like me. I have to know what it’s like for them.”
Kara stepped closer. “Those humans aren’t like you, Sue Jones. They are the worst of your kind. Rapists. Murderers. War criminals.”
Sue shuddered. If she went down there, if she met those other humans, she’d be right next to horrible people. Whether there were Outcasts around to punish them or not.
“Then most humans don’t end up here,” she said, choosing her words carefully.
“No.”
“Then it’s not ‘accept me or else.’”
“What?”
“That’s how the old religion tells it. That you either accept God—the guy you Outcasts call the Enemy—or else you go to hell.” Sue swept a hand out in front of herself. “Which is here.”
Kara laughed and moved to sit on the cot next to Sue. “That’s not exactly it. Though perhaps the Enemy would like it to be.” She sighed. “We have not heard from him in what you humans would consider an age. Maybe several of them. We only know the task we were given, and the ones who come here so that we can perform it.”
Sue’s eyes widened. “He left you alone, then?”
“Once he banished us, yes. And gave us the duty to punish those humans who came to us for absolution.”
“Wait. Who came to you for absolution?”
Kara nodded.
“You mean these…you mean the people in hell want to be there?”
“Want to be in hell?” Kara chuckled again. “Very few want that.” Sue turned to her and held up a finger. “But every soul knows what it has done. And those that have done terrible things cry out for absolution. We give it to them.”
Sue’s brow furrowed. “Their souls cry out? Does that mean they want it, or does that mean they don’t?”
“It means they know what they have done, and they know what they deserve.” Kara reached out to touch Sue’s cheek.
Sue flinched. “They want you to torture them?”
“They tell us. They submit.” Kara’s fingers hovered inches from Sue’s skin, but she made no attempt to touch Sue again.
They know what they deserve.
The boy. His jacket. His blood spattered face, his brown skin. His dark hair.
“I’ve done things too,” Sue whispered.
Kara’s hand settled against her chin, a gentle touch. “No one is innocent.”
Sue blinked. “What?”
“None of us is pure. None of us is perfect. We all carry memories. We all carry hurts.”
Tears welled up behind Sue’s eyes. “I couldn’t save him.”
Kara looked at her. Her eyes flickered with some emotion Sue couldn’t read. “I’m certain you tried,” she said at last.
“That’s just it!” Sue cried. Her tears became hot pricks of anger, and she let them fall. “It’s not just that I didn’t save him. It’s that I didn’t even try.”
“I’m sure that you attempted it. I know you.”
“No.” Sue grabbed at Kara’s arm and wrenched it away, surprising herself with her own strength. From the way Kara’s lips pursed, she’d surprised Kara too. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I didn’t try.”
Kara didn’t say anything. Sue gulped in air and spoke again, tears blurring her vision. “There are a lot of riots in the colonies. The cities aren’t even cities. Not really. Just a bunch of buildings people live in. Try to work in. Some are factories. Some program the robots that make things in the factories. Doesn’t really matter. There’s not much to do anywhere, except push people around and get in trouble. And protest the city councils. Kick that one out, bring that one in. Do the whole thing again six months later.”
She laughed. “People are afraid of the cops. When they put down riots. Which is only sometimes. Everything’s crazy. I wanted to be a starfighter pilot, because they…they’re what people who protect people should be. They see the whole galaxy, go out among the stars. They know better than just to push around some crowd that pushes back and kills them too.”
“Go on.”
Sue shrugged. “Then there’s me. I drive a spacebus. Take people from one end of—well, I would have said hell, but there’s a whole other definition of that around here—to the other.”
Kara lowered her head. “Hell is a place of punishment, Sue. There are many of those, spread out among the galaxies and hidden between worlds.”
“Yeah, I’m sure there are,” Sue quipped. Her heart pulsed heavy in her chest.
“You’re not getting out of this that easily.” Kara’s lips curled into a wry smile. “Finish your story.”
“There was a riot,” Sue began, swallowing hard. “Two groups, back and forth, yelling about some man or other on some city council. I didn’t hate him. This kid didn’t either. But the people who did found him. Saw his pins flashing political slogans.”
“So they attacked him,” Kara finished for her.
“Yeah.”
“And you couldn’t stop them.”
“I didn’t even try. I wanted to. I wanted…I wanted to be like one of the pilots. Not just a bus driver. Someone trained. Someone powerful. Someone who puts her life on the line to save people.” She licked her lips.
“And you didn’t intervene.”
“I knew what I wanted to say. What I wanted to do. What I was gonna do. I was going to rush in and tell them to stop it, tell them no. Tell them in two months it would be the other way around, one of them down on the ground, begging and pleading and blood
coming from his nose and mouth—”
“Shh,” Kara soothed her and leaned in closer.
“But the words got stuck. Caught in my throat. I said something. Just some noise that didn’t mean anything.”
“You tried.”
“They heard me and turned around. I just ran.” She glared down at her leg. “My leg felt like a stone. I couldn’t get away fast enough. Someone grabbed my jacket. I felt hands—” She shuddered and stopped.
“But you got away.” Kara slid her hand to Sue’s shoulder.
Sue glared back at her. “I ran and ran. I got away. But here’s the question: Did I deserve to?”
“No one is innocent,” Kara repeated. “Think of Dehek and the scars on his back.”
“Dehek didn’t deserve that!”
“He would kill you if he had the chance, Sue. Now you defend him?”
Sue blinked. “What are you getting at? Are you saying Dehek deserved to be born without his wings?”
“No, Sue. I am not.”
“Dehek wasn’t born evil. No one is.”
“Some are, perhaps. I do not know. But you’re right. The Enemy is wrong to curse us all from the beginning.” She traced a hand over Sue’s chest. “As you are wrong to curse yourself.”
Sue hung her head. “All I needed to do was say something. And I couldn’t even try.”
“You were at risk. You might have incited them against you.”
“So?”
“There is a difference between heroism and foolishness, Sue.” Kara’s hand moved on Sue’s shoulder, in a soothing rhythm.
Sue wanted to give in to it, but she couldn’t. “You’re a warrior. How can you say that?”
“My people were trained for war. Long before we rebelled.”
“Yeah. And you fought the war. Even though you knew that you might lose it.”
“That is true. But violence is not something to risk lightly. And”—Kara pointed with her other hand, at the pale scar on Sue’s leg—“you’re fragile. Even for a human.”
Sue clenched a fist. Tears pricked at her eyes again. “I don’t even know if he lived or died! I just know that he went still.”
Kara answered with a mournful note, like part of a chant or a song. A wisp of vision came with it, a black cold cot in an empty room. A woman’s shape, hunched over, her horned head held in clawed hands. A mist of shadow danced grief around her.
And beneath the shadow, her back was scored with blazing scars the darkness could only dim so much.
The vision was bad enough, but the humming note was worse, a current of mourning that Sue couldn’t will away.
Is that how it was? After your war? Or are you just showing me you’ve been hurt too?
“You do not need absolution,” Kara said at last. “Not for that. You’re no warmonger, Sue Jones.” She leaned closer, her face inches from Sue’s, as if she wanted to kiss her.
Sue shook her head. “Maybe I don’t. But if there are humans down there, I have to see them. They’re like me. I have to know what’s happening to them.”
“Those humans are the worst of your kind.” Kara gripped at her shoulder, too hard. Her eyes smoldered with anger.
But Sue knew, somehow, that Kara’s anger wasn’t aimed at her. “That doesn’t matter.”
“Very well,” Kara sighed. “I will take you down there, if you’re so certain that is what you need.”
Chapter Eighteen
Kara didn’t use Sue’s shuttle.
Sue wasn’t sure why she’d hoped Kara would. But she’d imagined it, the old weather-beaten hull of an old friend she barely fit in, cozy in the way only an old jalopy could be. And here on a faraway planet—if this was a planet, and not something weirder like a whole other dimension—it would’ve been a little piece of home. Sue sighed. Even the weird old rusty smells would comfort her right now.
And she could use some comfort. She only wanted to do this because not doing it felt wrong.
Kara’s craft was too pretty. Not pristine, not like the homes and shops up above in the Rings. Sue had seen the scratches and pits in the hull when she’d climbed in, evidence of what sandstorms and lightning and flame could do, even to craft built by fallen angels.
And there were other ships here too, swooping in and out of the paths of the storms and the striking lightning. Sue couldn’t see much through the storm, but what she could see looked as battered as Kara’s craft.
But like everything else here, the ships were elegant. Finely crafted. A sleek, compact triangle that could weave between the paths of the buffeting winds. And practical as they were, the Outcasts couldn’t resist embellishing them, it seemed. Designs curled around the hulls, mimicking twisting knots. Like whoever had built them took a little too much inspiration from the Rings that they called home.
The Outcasts liked their handiwork, it seemed. Just like their songs and their bowls of food. Sue knew the Outcasts had been warriors, but what about artisans? Maybe, when they’d taken up their arms, heaven had lost a few craftsmen.
Their craft dove toward the ground, pushing against the winds. Sue watched readouts flash across the window, on the sides and the top and the bottom. She still couldn’t read the Outcasts’ glyphs, but watching Kara’s screen made her hands itch to touch the controls, to fly something. Her shuttle. Her spacebus back home. The starfighter she would never pilot. She flexed her hands and balled them into fists to ward off the impulse.
Their craft settled into a hover, just above the ground. “Look,” Kara said and pointed.
Long rows of humans shuffled over the sands, their steps heavy. Lightning crackled near them. Flame rose from their feet as they passed. It caught on their garments and set the fabric ablaze. Sue cringed. But the humans didn’t react to the fire rising around them at all. They walked through it and past it like they didn’t know that it was there.
They acted entirely too normal to be on fire.
But they also looked drained. Colorless. Washed out somehow, all but the fire around them. White-skinned people looked an ashen beige, and brown and black people’s skin looked wrong too, drained to dull, grayish shades. And their billowing clothes flickered, vanishing as if behind the clouds, and appearing again.
It was hard to see anything past the line of humans, but Sue could see some of the other Outcasts’ ships. Some hovered above the humans, while others landed in the sands. And something else, rising in the distance. A tower, an obelisk, something. Glyphs glowed on it, a bright eldritch purple.
Don’t go there! something inside Sue said. But the humans continued their march toward it, heedless of her little craft and surely unaware of her fear. Were they even aware that Sue and Kara were there?
They had to be. If they’d done unforgivable things and were being punished for it, they couldn’t just be…empty. That would defeat the whole purpose.
“Look,” Kara said again. She flicked her fingers over the controls, magnifying the view out the window until the humans’ faces filled the display.
Their colorless clothes and skin were eerie enough, especially against the fire. But their eyes were even worse. Kara made sure Sue could see them. The dead humans’ eyes had no pupils. And the irises had no color of their own either, dull and empty hazel swirling from blue to dirty brown and back again.
Do they even remember who they are? Or is all that’s left what they did?
Sue cried out, a wordless noise she’d never made before. Would never have imagined herself making, not even during the riots back home. An empty, eerie sound, like the kind she imagined these dead would make if they weren’t so calm.
Kara, merciful for the moment, ran her hands over the controls. The magnification faded, and with it those empty eyes.
But the sights weren’t over. One by one, the humans stopped walking and stood in the pyres they’d made for themselves. They lifted both hands over their heads and clasped them together.
Sue looked at them, a chill seizing her. “What does that mean? What are they doin
g with their hands?”
“You wanted to see them,” Kara said. “Now you have. If you wish, we can still turn back.”
Sue swallowed hard. “No. I have to know.”
“Then watch.”
Sue let herself blink and then forced her eyes open. She’d asked for this. She’d chosen this.
Outcasts emerged from one of the ships that had landed. They didn’t step onto the sands, but hovered, mantles of shadow spread out behind them.
They dove down toward the humans and landed near the ones who’d clasped their hands over their heads. The humans bowed their heads.
Absolution, Kara had said. These humans wanted it. Or agreed to it, at least. Did you go to hell because you thought you deserved it, or because someone else decided you did?
Like the Outcast in Sue’s dream, some carried scourges. Others held other weapons, blades and knives and curling things Sue couldn’t recognize. Mercifully, they weren’t on fire. But they caught the light and held it.
When they struck out at the humans, the flames around the humans flickered and the clothes the humans wore vanished, as though the cloth and the fire alike had only been illusions.
Which they probably are. These people are dead, after all. Sue winced, staring at the too-exposed back of a pale-skinned man.
A blade tore into his back, wielded by a male Outcast who hovered just behind him. The human shuddered, a violent tremor wracking his body. He opened his mouth and let out a cry, a cry like the one that the sight had torn from Sue earlier.
Sue gasped and covered her eyes. The blade left no mark on the man’s flesh, no bloodied slash leaking crimson. Instead, it ripped through his body itself. Where it had passed, Sue could see red.
Not the red of the man’s blood, but the red of the sands beyond him.
He raised his head and cried out, his mouth open wide. The Outcast struck out at him again, the slashes erasing another part of him. The fire vanished too, and Sue winced. The “lake of fire” in the old religious stories was nothing. Not compared to this.
“They’re destroying them,” Sue whispered.
