***
Diem returned to the training ground hours later, exhausted and foul tempered. He not only had work to do, but at some moment, and most likely at the least opportune one, he expected Span to come calling to discuss whatever lies Wind had told him about that evening. Diem exhaled a ragged breath.
The door of the ground's cabin was bright. The sight of it pulled a rough sigh from Diem's chest. It could be Eon, returned from his errand. It could be Span, but Diem doubted the other Rha would have gotten word this quickly and his dragon was nowhere in sight. Or it could be the overseer, who Diem wanted to see least, following the conversation he'd just had concerning his sister.
"Blessings!" Phuck chirped as Diem stepped through the doorway. While it appeared that the overseer was wearing a smile, it was hard to tell for sure, since the middle of his mouth was absorbed in the dark, central smudge of his face. However, in this case, it didn't matter to Diem what the alien looked like.
"What do you want?" Diem asked. Plutians didn't recognize sarcasm and, luckily, they weren't easily offended with blunt either. Phuck's odd expression became odder as it dropped to a possible frown. It was impossible to tell what the face was trying to do. Diem just looked away.
"I came to speak business," Phuck said.
"Then speak it."
"I heard there was an unexpected catch of hens," Phuck said. Someone at The Fly House must've seen the mess on his work clothes and mentioned it to Phuck. Diem was sure it was the Smallers who the overseer used to glean the information and Diem couldn't fault them for being unaware of the hardships they created with their innocence. He expected these leaks, so Diem only rolled his hand like a barrel in front of him, to move along the Plutian's conversation.
"I expected you would report them to me," Phuck said, "instead of me having to find out about them on my own."
"I was a little busy." Diem leaned on the door frame, dwarfing the opening. "Wind came here to speak with me today."
"Oh." The Plutian fidgeted his fingers around him. "Why was she here? She shouldn't be here. House training grounds are supposed to be private."
"She came to talk with me, about you."
"Me?"
Diem studied the Plutian, but the blasted black hole in the middle of the alien's face made trying to read the thing's emotions even more confusing. All Diem knew is that he wanted to do his best to look Phuck right in the eyes, to show him in the only way he knew how, that their differences and their positions of power and their relationship meant nothing to Diem, in comparison to protecting his sister. Diem squared his shoulders.
"Wind told me that you showed an interest in Karma."
"Interest?" Phuck looked away. "I was hoping for a mating, possibly at the House Party, but..."
"A mating?" Diem's boots pounded heavily over the floor toward the Plutian. Phuck jumped backward, a hiss simmering from his lips. Diem stopped short. A Plutian hiss was a warning that the alien was about to spray its venom. Diem stepped further back, hands at his chest in surrender. "Understand my...concern...Phuck. You are talking about my sister."
"I could give you a sister, if you would need to trade."
Diem tried to keep a lid on his rising anger. "I don't want to trade. I want you to leave my sister alone. Plutians are not supposed to mate humans. It's unnatural."
Phuck cocked his head to one side. Without being able to get an accurate read on the dead space of Phuck's expression, Diem made the leap that Phuck was offended. Plutians were proud and Diem was sure he was supposed to feel honored that a Plutian would be interested in mating a lowly human, but it only disgusted him.
Diem knew he had to be careful. Diplomatic. He chained up the thoughts of shoving his thumbs right into the Plutian's sinkhole of a face and ripping the head wide open.
Phuck rubbed two fingers together in thought. "You are correct, I believe, that it would be unnatural, if a Plutian retained his form. However, you should have no worry in the case of your sister. My form is of man, as you can see..." Phuck jacked his thumbs into the waistband of his pants, slipping them to his knees in one motion. Diem's hand shot up to shield his eyes.
"No, no, I don't need to see that," Diem said.
"I assure you, I am accurate in all ways," Phuck said.
"I don't need to see," Diem assured him again. Once Diem trusted that the alien's pants were back in place, he looked at the Plutian's face and caught what appeared to be molars, encased in the shadowed edges of the alien's partially visible lips. It was a most grizzly smile, if that's what it was. Diem coughed instead of gagging.
"I don't know how to say this," Diem said. "But my sister is not interested in you. It is not meant to be an insult, but human women are supposed to be with human men."
"But she is only a girl," Phuck said. "If she's known nothing else, then she would know no difference in me."
"She'd know," Diem said tightly. "You need a girl that would mate you properly, Phuck. Someone experienced. How about Wind? She wants to be Linked."
"Wind mates everything," Phuck said. "I once came upon her accidentally in the shorb brush. I thought she was hunting hampigs, but she was not. She was mating. With something that doesn't even take breath."
Diem winced. He didn't want to know, but Phuck caught the wince and seemed to interpret it as curiosity, because he went on.
"It was a polished piece from a gorne stump," Phuck confided. He rubbed the tip of his chin. "She has an incredible talent for carving. The stump was so smooth that it wouldn't rip out her guts. Not an easy feat, considering that gorne stumps have all those thorny knobs and..."
"That's fine. I don't need to hear," Diem said. "I don't want to hear."
"Alright." If he'd been human, Phuck would've shrugged, but since he wasn't, he made a glugging sound in his throat and changed the subject. "I would like to know more about the catch you opened today. How many hens survived?"
Grateful to move on, Diem cleared his throat. "Six, so far. I've put them with my sheathen, Forge."
"I don't care for that." Phuck shook his head, the black spot in the middle blurring. "You are the only one that can get near the hens with that dragon."
"Exactly," Diem said. "It keeps us all honest."
"I am no other way," the Plutian said.
"Sure, you're as honest as they come," Diem said with a sly smile. He knew Plutians didn't understand sarcasm, just like they didn't understand archaic slang. Phuck proved it once again by returning a humble nod in response to Diem's compliment.
"Thank you," Phuck said. "So you will consider moving the hens to another dragon's hoarde?"
"Nope." Diem shook his head. The only dragons available were each of the other Rha's dragons, that were used to guard their individual Houses as well as the harvests of dragons that the humans cycled back to the Plutians. If Phuck was dealing with one of the other Rhas, which was likely, moving the hoarde would mean giving away leverage. "Why do you want access to the dragons, other than to take them without paying me first?"
Phuck fell silent, possibly sucking in his bottom lip. It was impossible to tell from the face, but it was obvious to Diem that the alien was searching wildly for a suitable lie.
"If anything were to happen to you, the hens couldn't be recovered."
"Nothing will happen to me, unless you make it happen," Diem countered, although Span crossed his mind. He kept his mouth shut. He certainly didn't need to gift wrap a solid alibi for his death.
"But if something did happen..."
"My dragon guards those hens." Diem's hands curled into fists. "I train the hens and give them to you in return for extra portions for the Fly House. That is our deal. If something happens to me, then Forge will continue to raise the dragons."
"But the hens are not chained!"
"Exactly," Diem said. "If something happens to me, then there are going to be loose dragons flying around and one of the other overseers is bound to notice that. That's what makes our arrangement perfect, exactly how it is. It keeps
me healthy."
"The gorne satisfies every need of the human body, to maintain its health," Phuck corrected. "Hoarding dragons keeps you alive."
"Semantics," Diem said. Phuck visibly bit the outer edge of his own lip. Diem was sure the Plutian just realized he'd told Diem the truth, and that was the last thing he had ever meant to do.
CHAPTER SEVEN
7 Days Post Second Waking
Maeve was totally comfortable not speaking with Steven. If Steven Burtman was the last man standing on Earth, he was going to stay that way until he keeled over. She wasn't about to do one damn thing with him that might risk creating mutant offspring that were one-half utterly dazzling, awe-inspiring, superheroes and one-half utter fuckwads. She learned to listen for him and head in the other direction.
Maeve had taken over the dusty suite that had her name posted on the door like a rock star's dressing room. Her parent's suite was at the opposite end of the hall. She'd swung open the door and looked in on the palatial digs. It seemed fitting that they would've been in a room so far from hers, that it would've been nicer than all the others. She closed the door.
Her own suite was really just a hotel room, without running water and a toilet that had a slide-mechanism instead of a flush, so waste just dropped into an abyss. She kept it shut. The bathroom door had a thick seal around the edge. It had to be there for a reason.
There was a bed in the center of the room, a dresser with a mirror, an empty armoire in the corner, a useless TV suspended on the wall, overhead lights and lamps on the bedside tables that were all illuminated by a hand crank, just like the one in Supply.
Maeve went about making her suite a home with the things she found while exploring the Archive. She dragged back books from the library, which wasn't as huge as the brochures claimed; she rolled back a heap of clothing, from the Archive's wardrobe 'pantry', on an office chair. She hadn't discovered the room with the lock boxes yet, but she was sure she would. She wanted her old, buckled boots back and her jewelry. She was sure that one glance at her septum ring, with the diamond hanging like a door knocker above her cupid's bow, would be the magic bullet to make Steven lose his mind.
Even with that prospect, Maeve avoided the chamber room and Steven, both of which were looming and freakish parts of the Archive. She locked her suite door when she was inside or when she ventured out and she toted a heavy metal flashlight she'd found. She had to twist the end like a pepper mill to light the thing, but it was handy for bashing chamber bugs, or Steven, if either need arose.
So far, she'd only run into Steven twice. Once, when she had surfaced for food and he was already rooting in the pantry, and once when a hallway had led her unexpectedly into the chamber room. Although the chambers kept any scent of the dead contained, the idea of it plugged Maeve's nostrils whenever she walked in the room. Steven had found the cranks for the lights, so she saw him across the open space, hovering over one of the caskets. It gave her the willies to see him there, doing what he'd probably done to her.
She stayed back from him, but called across the room, "You shouldn't stare at people while they're...asleep."
Startled by her voice, his chair shrieked as he jumped to his feet.
"I'm trying to figure out how to save them," he said. "I don't know why you and I were able to wake up, but I think it has a lot to do with the chamber bugs. They're in a bunch of these chambers. That's what kills them. But some of the chambers don't have any bugs. At least, not yet."
That made her feel like a douche. He was trying to save some people. All Maeve was doing was rifling the cache of supplies and making a nest for herself in one of the rooms. She made her way over to him, standing in the glow of the chamber he was parked beside.
"This might sound really shitty," she said, "but maybe they shouldn't wake up."
He stared at her then and by the misty light of the chamber window, she could see the dark circles around his eyes, as if his eyes were tree stumps and independent rings were forming around them for each night he didn't sleep. He had the start of jowls. His hair was greasy. But the sadness that registered in his eyes from what she said left her throat feeling a little sticky and clogged with words of explanation.
"What do you mean?" he asked. She cleared her throat.
"Well, for starters, the food supply sucks," she said. "You saw it. We can go for a while if it's just the two of us, but if we end up with even twenty people, all the food is going to be gone in a couple weeks. I don't know how long we'll be able to go before we have to pry the outer doors open and take our chances."
"You're being dramatic. There's enough food for us to get by."
"Not when you figure it in proportion to all the caskets in here."
"Chambers," he said. "And these are human beings. I'm not going to just let them die, if I can help it."
"That's the point, Steven. You can't help it. If you open up the boxes, they croak. If you leave them shut, the bugs get in and kill them. But if you figure out some way of waking up all these people," she whisked a hand around the room, meant to cover the entire warehouse of chambers, "we're all going to starve."
He slopped down onto his chair as if she'd shot him.
"They deserve to live too," he said, staring at the chamber in front of him. Maeve peeked into the window of the box. She grunted, the sympathy dissolving away.
"You mean the pretty ones deserve it, Steve-O?"
"I just like to watch over them."
"I know," Maeve shivered. She'd been one of the girls he'd watched, after all. "You really are some kind of a perv, aren't you."
She said it gently, with understanding rather than malice, which made it all the more embarrassing, since they both knew it was true. Even in the dark of the room, the chambers illuminated the tint of humiliation in his cheeks. Maeve left through the door where she'd entered by mistake and detoured through Supply to gather some extra food to hide away in her suite.
***
"Go away," Maeve croaked. She was lying face down in the utter blackness of her suite and it took her a minute to realize it wasn't her landlord banging, demanding rent. Everything rushed back and she would've given anything to be back in her cramped flat, with Mr. Cregmen yelling through the door instead. She stumbled to the door and opened it, the dim hall lights drizzling into her room.
Between eye slits, Maeve saw three figures. Three. What the hell? She shielded her eyes a little with a hand to her forehead and squinted even more. Were they Zombies? An icy rod of adrenaline slid down her back and woke her up, though her pupils were slower to warm up in the light.
"What's going on?" Maeve asked.
"They woke up!" Steven boomed.
"Got it," Maeve wedged her eyes open a little more. Two girls—not the ones Steven had been watching, but two far prettier—stood in the hall, behind Steven. One brunette, one blond, they both looked a little spaced out and confused. Still trying to get a grip on what the hell was happening, Maeve thought. Good luck. She'd been awake for seven days and still couldn't wrap her head around it. Maeve gave them a little wave. "Welcome to the afterglow."
"I'm Amber Harding," the brunette said.
"Amy Harding," the blond added.
"Twins!" Steven's smile burst like overripe fruit. Maeve rolled her eyes at the rise in his voice and tried not to think about anything else on him that might be rising. She leaned around him to speak to the girls.
"When did you wake up?" Maeve asked.
"About seven hours ago," Steven answered. "They just came walking out of the shadows."
"He screamed. Loud," Amber said. "I'm surprised you didn't hear it."
"This isn't like the brochures. How come no one's around?" Amy's wide eyes searched up and down the hallway as she rubbed her arms. "There was supposed to be a whole staff here to help us. Where is everyone?"
Maeve rubbed her eyes. "We don't know."
"Like I was saying," Steven said with a gentle lilt to his tone, "I was the first to wake up and everything was dark. I
believe something went wrong."
"You think?" Maeve grimaced. Amy stopped rubbing her arms and squeezed them, as if it would stop her from crying. Her twin moved closer and Maeve was struck with how frightened they were. She realized she had been too busy to be as scared as maybe she should be. She smiled at the girls. "We don't know anything yet. People have just started waking up and all we know right now is that the outer doors are closed."
Steven pursed his lips together. "We know that there was supposed to be thousands of chambers and there are only about five hundred. We know that the Archive welched on its end of the deal. We know only a few of us have woken up, even if we have no idea why. We know the outer doors aren't just shut, they're sealed," Steven said. "Everyone on the surface may be dead. We might be all that's left of humanity, ladies. It might just be the four of us from here on out."
He giggled. Jezus. Could he be any creepier.
"But we don't know that, do we?" Amber asked.
"No, we don't," Maeve said. "People have just started waking up. Something's triggering it and there's probably going to be a lot more."
"I hope so," Amy said. "It can't just be us and..." She finished the sentence with a hasty glance at Steven.
"Hell no it can't," Amber added. She turned to Maeve. "Mind if we hang out with you for a while?"
Maeve pushed her door open with her fingertips. The two young women walked over the threshold, but Maeve swung her arm down, hanging onto the doorframe to block Steven's entry.
"Sorry," Maeve said. "Girls only, Steven. I don't entertain men while I'm in my jammies."
He grunted, but took a step backward into the hallway.
"That's reasonable," he said, wiping the tip of his nose with short, insulted strokes. "Just let me know when you are decent then."
"Will do," Maeve said with a grin. She closed the door on him, knowing she'd never been decent and he wasn't giving her any incentive to start now.
The Fly House (The UtopYA Collection) Page 8
