The Prey of Gods

by Nicky Drayden

  Ire itches her insides as it churns like colliding winds, an agitation before the storm. She’s going to need a lot to take down Nomvula. The girl’s got more power than she realizes, but with thousands of people here, all in various stages of panic, it’ll only be a matter of time.

  A gunshot rings in the distance, and seconds later a piece of scaffolding falls from the ceiling. The crowd roils up at Sydney’s back, but she’s got no time to rubberneck. She sucks up the oncoming fear that washes over her like a tide. It sputters in her chest, not enough to strike, but enough to seal all the emergency doors with a flick of her wrist. They’re all trapped now, no escape. Sydney’s tapped the little bit of power she’d built up, but she doesn’t need it for the next phase of her plan. Only a lighter and some kindling.

  And the best type of kindling is the kind that screams.

  A sweater here, a long skirt there—she pauses long enough to set them ablaze, then turns a sharp eye back to the bot in pink, a few paces beyond. Shrieks come in all directions and Sydney smiles at the first scream of “Fire!” In minutes she’s regained some power, and as people are trampled, the storm begins to take hold inside her, becoming denser, until the power of a category five hurricane swells within the confines of her chest.

  Soon.

  And you can bet, first thing after she’s destroyed Nomvula, Sydney’s going to take Brie Montblanc as her slave to make her haute couture dresses. Demigoddesses do not buy off the rack.

  Sydney ditches the lighter in favor of drawing a flame from the palm of her hand. A whole gang of brooders become a polyester bonfire. They go up in flames faster than her 450th birthday cake had when she’d actually bothered to put up all the candles. She then forms another flame as she looks for suitable fodder. She spots them, a couple of Riya wannabes in their thigh-high striped socks, silver mesh skirts, and see-through tops. Sydney aims the fireball, but when she goes to release, her hand doesn’t follow. It’s stuck, held there by an invisible force. The same force sinks into her neck like a pronged dog collar.

  “I won’t allow you to hurt anyone else,” comes a voice from behind her.

  Sydney staggers around to face him and is surprised to see it’s the boy from the rugby field—and he’s not looking so well. Sydney smiles. He’s strong, though. This is what she’s been waiting for, a worthy adversary. He’s too bullheaded to be afraid right now, but soon he’ll be trembling at her feet, begging for mercy, and his fear will fill her to the brim. She concentrates, forces her arm down to her side so that he’ll know what he’s up against.

  “Well, looks like someone’s gotten in touch with his inner demigod,” Sydney says with a sneer. “I’m going to enjoy the sound your insides make as they spill onto the ground almost as much as I enjoyed Riya’s singing. And by the way, I never properly thanked you for the concert tickets. Great seats.”

  “I like my guts right where they are, thank you.” Muzi raises his hand. “Show me what you really are,” he commands.

  The grip tightens around Sydney’s neck, and she grasps for fingers that aren’t there. Against her will, Sydney’s wings slice through the back of her pretty gown, ruined, but its beauty pales in comparison to that of the thick, sleek blades her wings have blossomed into, such a deep red, they’re nearly black. It’s been centuries since her wings have been this impressive. Two meters in each direction, she dares anyone not to piss their pants as she flexes them. Talons burst from the flesh of her fingertips, which she’d had the foresight to paint a charming shade of pink, though honestly, she’d picked it for its name: Apocalyptic Cotton Candy. It’d taken two and a half bottles per hand, but, oh, was it worth it.

  On her tiptoes, she gives a flap, and the world falls from beneath her as she rises into the arena’s rafters. “You can’t control me, boy!” she bellows to the vermin below. “I’ve had bunions with more power than you.”

  “You won’t hurt anyone else, ever. Do you hear me?” Muzi calls up to her. His words penetrate to the heart, or the frozen thing she’s called a heart all these centuries. He’s stronger than she’d anticipated. That’ll make disemboweling him all the more delectable. Sydney grits her teeth and dives, straining against the mind-grip choking at her throat as she swoops up two victims with her talons. A quick scissor action severs their spinal columns. She then drops them from the rafters like the rubbish they are.

  Fear crashes into her, shooting up like cannons. Now’s the time.

  Sydney homes in on Nomvula, pulling against the boy’s mind tether like a bulldog on the end of a flimsy leash. And then all at once she’s free of Muzi’s meddling. She swarms, cutting Nomvula off midstride.

  “Dear, Nomvula, come give your big sister a hug,” Sydney says with a sly grin.

  “I want nothing to do with you,” says Nomvula.

  “Nomvula, don’t!” comes Muzi’s voice, the crowd parting out of his way. “She’s dangerous.”

  Nomvula turns to face Muzi. “Stay away. She’ll hurt you.”

  “I can handle her,” Muzi replies, eyes red like someone had beaten them to a pulp. They aim right in Sydney’s direction. “Sleep,” he commands, voice dropped an octave. His brow bends nearly into a ninety-degree angle. “Sleep, now.”

  Drowsiness rains down on Sydney. So this is what it’s come to? The boy hasn’t even known his true self for a full week, and yet he has the strength to defeat her? It’s all she can do to will her eyes open. Muzi’s shaking, bleeding from his ears now, but he’s got her tied up, paralyzed. She can’t breathe. The weight on her neck and chest is too great. Darkness envelops her, and then somewhere deep in her mind, among five hundred years of life experience, a single memory slips back through the connection Muzi’s got on her, like backwash into a soda bottle. Muzi groans as it connects . . . that nice memory of when she’d slaughtered the inhabitants of a small village: men, women, and children. His grip on her weakens ever so slightly.

  Sydney digs up a few memories of her own and lobs them over their mind connection like grenades, each grislier and more inhumane than the last. She laughs on the inside until his hold on her loosens enough for her to laugh on the outside as well.

  When she regains complete control, Muzi’s a shuddering mess on the ground in an impressive pool of his own vomit, doing his best to sever their connection, but now she wants them linked—she’s got him by the balls now. She forces it all inside his wretched mind, every innocent she’d killed, every person she’d maimed, every life she’d extinguished without the slightest bit of remorse.

  Nomvula approaches the near corpse of Muzi like a cowering dog, then bends over it, eyes shedding tears. The alphie joins her.

  “You could save him, sister,” Sydney says in a singsong voice. “But then you’d have no power to fight me!”

  “I’m not going to fight you,” Nomvula mews, laying her hands against Muzi’s forehead, eyes closed as if she’s about to draw.

  Sydney raises an arm and thrusts Nomvula away. The girl tumbles to the ground and is slow to gather herself up. Once she does, she only cringes.

  “What? I go through all this trouble, and now you won’t even put up a fight?” Sydney spits.

  “I’m nothing like you. You’re not my sister.”

  “Tsk, tsk. I know thirty-seven thousand lost souls that might say otherwise. Now show these people your pretty wings. Show them how you destroyed that township.”

  “I’m not that girl anymore. I don’t have to let my ire control me.”

  “Fine.” Sydney glowers, taking a step toward Nomvula. “Have it your way.” She raises her hand, ready to give the deathblow, but the alphie in the pink coat puts its body between them. With a flick of her wrist, Sydney brushes it off to the side, but it swarms back in a split second. Only now there are two of them.

  Sydney laughs. As if scrap metal could get in the way of world domination! She sends them both flying through the air, way across the arena floor where they land with a double clang. Sydney dusts her hands off, but before she can take anoth
er step, ten alphies form a wall around Nomvula’s scrunched-up body. Sydney steps back, takes a good look at her surroundings. There’s a whole army of them headed this way, alphies of all sizes and shapes. The one in the pink coat leads them again, dinged up but no worse for wear.

  Sydney draws hard and deep, then sends a hundred of them careening into a wall with such a force, they’re battered to unrecognizable bits. And yet they still grow in number. She shuffles backward, trying to buy herself time, conjuring a magnificent force, enough to crush a thousand of them with the flinch of her mind. An impressive feat . . . and yet they keep coming, filing in from the doors flanking the side of the stage, all those alphies that had been checked before the concert. Thousands and thousands of them, they form a cocoon around Nomvula’s body.

  But no, this isn’t the end. Not by a long shot.

  Sydney flexes her wings, using the last bit of ire within her to soar straight up into the rafters, and with talons sharp as diamond-tipped blades, she claws a hole through the arena’s domed ceiling.

  She escapes into the blackness of the Port Elizabeth night, and damn it, wouldn’t you know it, she’s chipped her nail polish.

  Now she’s really mad.

  Part V

  Chapter 38

  Muzi

  It’s like the fiery depths of hell have been compacted into a neat, golf-ball-sized tumor, then shoved into the back of Muzi’s brain. It’s so heavy, so all-encompassing that Muzi barely remembers where he is, who he is. Terror is so crisp, so precise that he forgets to breathe until his lungs yell bloody murder. He can’t close his eyes or he’ll see their faces, the thousands of lives extinguished by that woman’s hand. No, not a woman. A monster. He stares ahead at nothing, unseeing, until his eyes burn with the dryness of an endless desert.

  Then he blinks.

  And in that instant, they all stare back at him, pleading for their lives—bruises blooming like death-ridden flower patches, flesh split clean open with the precision of a sushi chef. Smelling of piss and sick and shit. They die a hundred agonizing deaths, their screams threatening to shatter his teeth, his bones. Muzi lifts his lids. They’re gone now, but he knows they’re waiting.

  “Muzi?” Nomvula says.

  He jumps at her touch. Muzi tries to focus on her, but it’s hard.

  “Are you okay?” she asks. Her small, brown hand rests on his chest. There are alpha bots surrounding her, lots of them. Maybe hundreds. “Blink if you can hear me,” she says this time. A cruel joke if he’s ever heard one.

  Muzi wiggles feeling back into his fingers, then slowly brings his hands to his face. With his thumbs and forefingers, he keeps his lids pried open, but that makes it worse. Nomvula plants her clammy hand on his forehead. It sears his skin, then flashes ice cold. The nightmares fade into the shadows of his mind, allowing him to entertain a few thoughts of his own.

  “How did you do that?” he asks.

  “Shhh. We need to leave now. Before Sydney comes back.”

  “What is she?”

  “Too many questions. Clever4–1 knows a safe place for us. We can talk there.” Nomvula gestures at the alphie next to her, the one wearing a bright pink coat.

  “Clever?” Muzi looks at it closer. It’s dinged up pretty good, but Muzi recognizes the cluster of brood band decals: The Adamants, Whisky Sour, Frankie and the Fingers. “Is that my bot?”

  Nomvula exchanges a glance with the robot whose mono-eye flushes a pale green Muzi’s never seen before. She laughs. “Your bot? You belong to it as much as it belongs to you. It says that it trusts you. I will try to trust you, too.”

  The bot nuzzles Muzi’s armpit and helps him to his feet, its dome head a convenient place to rest his weary, pain-racked body while he gathers his strength. It chirps at him all the while, encouragingly.

  “It thinks you are very brave for fighting Sydney, for saving my life. I can see why it loves you so much. You’ve always treated it as a friend rather than a machine.”

  Muzi shakes his head, trying to make sense of Nomvula’s words. Her accent is thick, syllables long and rounded. Maybe she’s choosing the wrong words. “It is a machine.”

  “Yes, and so much more. I can tell you more. But first we must leave this place. Are you okay to walk?”

  Muzi tests his legs out, then nods. A pestilent fog still rims his thoughts, so they make their way slowly, but with an anxiousness in their step. Nomvula tells Muzi of his alphie’s secret life, an odd tale too fantastic not to believe. In a weird way, he can relate—the secrecy, the lies, the double life that makes it nearly impossible to show your true self to anyone.

  Nomvula keeps glancing back over her shoulder at the hole Sydney left in the ceiling. Muzi is still not sure this hasn’t been one giant hallucination from snorting too much godsend. He wishes Elkin would have never given him the stuff. He wishes things could go back to normal.

  Bladdy hell. Elkin.

  Muzi screams his name. The crowd is thinning now, just panicked people searching for loved ones. Muzi pulls away from Nomvula and her bot posse. “Elkin! Where are you?” he calls out. He wades through toppled seating and steps over trampled bodies like he’s doing foot drills. He panics, mind fluttering a thousand different ways as he tries to remember the last place he’d seen Elkin.

  “Muzi, please. We must hurry,” comes Nomvula’s voice, concerned and impatient. She’s not going to wait around forever, no matter how highly his alphie speaks of him. But there’s no way Muzi can go without Elkin. Has to find him alive and well, and tomorrow they’ll bunk class, order a meganacho from that Tex-Mex place near the beach, then blaze up down by the seawall, watching the waves crash, laughing about how wicked sick the concert was, and how bladdy ridiculous their hallucinations had been—flying demons in sequined dresses and secret robot armies!

  A piece of cement crashes against the floor and explodes like a brick of powder right next to Muzi. He coughs, cringes, and as the haze parts, he looks up to see the ceiling giving way around the gaping hole.

  “Elkin!” he screams, but it’s immediately lost in a thorny tangle of names of others looking for their loved ones. He’s all but given up when he spots Elkin’s coat on the ground. He’s close enough to see Elkin’s face, skin a ghastly blue, jaw dislocated, hanging so wide and so wrong. Muzi’s chest fills with a piercing numbness, and he stumbles backward. But he pushes through fear, through sickness, to be at Elkin’s side. He can’t be left alone like this, with no one to mourn him. Muzi cries. God, he cries so hard, he thinks he’s about to shake himself into a thousand pitiful pieces.

  Nomvula bends down next to them and presses her hand against Elkin’s chest. She concentrates hard, like she did with Muzi’s mind, but this time she’s wincing in pain. She buckles forward, catches herself.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispers to Elkin. The bots form a circle around them, their mono-eyes black at the top and fading into a somber deep orange.

  Muzi leans closer to Elkin’s body, but the bots get closer, too. A couple of them nudge Muzi out of the way. Muzi beats them off with his fist.

  “You stay away from him, you hear me?”

  “Let them help,” Nomvula says.

  “They hate him! They’re going to rip him apart!” Muzi shrieks. A smaller group of alphies form a wall between him and Elkin. Muzi’s about to scale it when Nomvula grabs a fistful of his shirt.

  “They have forgiven him. I grieve with you so they grieve with you. They’ve put the past behind. Now, hurry. We must go.”

  Muzi falls into step, keeping as close to Elkin as he can, who’s being carried by eight alphies who move in unison like a bunch of mechanical pallbearers. They’re so gentle, Elkin’s body barely moves from their perfectly choreographed steps. Vid bots hover over him, solemn, wide lenses looking like they’re about to drop tears at any moment.

  Nomvula takes one of Muzi’s hands and his alphie takes the other. They’re nearly to the exit doors when they hear shouts directed at them.

  “Stop!�
�� says a strained voice. Muzi turns to see that Felicity Lyons chick trotting their way in ridiculous heels. She pushes her way through the bot entourage and then grabs a high-end, late-model bot with decals of South Africa’s coat of arms affixed to each side. “This is my bot,” she says accusingly. Her eyes then glance at Elkin’s body. She shivers.

  Muzi grabs her wrist. “It’s not your bot,” he growls. Felicity is about to argue the point, but Muzi slits his eyes. “It belongs to itself now. It’s not going anywhere with you unless it wants to.”

  The bot makes a whimpering sound, a clear declination of Felicity’s offer. Muzi takes one of its arms and pulls it close.

  “That bot is government-issued property. You’re in violation of parliamentary law.”

  “Government can suck it.” Muzi spits out the words.

  The hard angles on Felicity’s face smooth over, making her look more pathetic than ticked off. “Please. I need to get a message to the people. They need to know what’s going on. People are terrified. They need guidance. They need to hear my voice.”

  There’s something odd about her that Muzi can’t place, but he sort of sees her point. People are panicking. Port Elizabeth needs to work together through their terror, because Muzi gets the distinct feeling that the mayhem has only just started. He’s not going to make these bots work against their will, though. There’s been enough of that. So he turns, addresses the bots. “This woman needs help. There’s a lot of awful stuff going on that needs to be made sense of. I know we’ve all lost today, but if any of you feel the urge to help, to capture this changed world with your eye, please step forward.”