by T. J. Berry
“She’d be over in the flora section. This is fauns, half-breeds, and other bipeds.”
Gary stepped up onto the bench to see the corner of the warehouse nearest the wall. There were the windows Jenny had described, too high to reach, even from a bench. The guards had at least put the flowering plants near the windows, which meant they were trying to keep them alive instead of starving them to death in the dark.
“Get down,” hissed Mizzet. “No one needs a guard over here.”
There was a group of trees in a corner standing on the sandy gray clay that passed for dirt in this part of Jaisalmer. They were clumped together in the center of the cell, their branches commingling for warmth and comfort. He sat down.
“Who is she to you?” asked the cat woman.
“A friend,” he replied.
A guard from the door walked down the row and paused at their cage. Gary ducked his head. The woman tucked her legs up and made herself as small as possible.
“What were you doing up there?” asked the guard.
“A mistake, CO. Won’t make it again,” said Gary without looking up. The guard tapped the bars with his baton and kept walking.
“See that you don’t,” he said.
“You’ve been in before,” said Mizzet.
“Did some time in the Quag,” said Gary.
She let out an awed hum.
“Impressive. Who’d you kill to get stuck there?”
Gary didn’t answer.
“That’s fine. You don’t have to say.” She chuckled. “You’re half human. I can see it in your face. I bet you tore your mother in half when you were born,” she goaded.
“You don’t have to be like them. Just because they have you caged, doesn’t make you an animal,” said Gary.
The guard came back with a younger colleague and stopped at their cell again.
“See, this faun came in on a transport last night. Picked up at Borstal. Some guy rounded him up in openspace. He and a few people were responsible for a whole lotta deaths on one of our ships. I want you to get some practice in with him today.”
The older guard unlocked the door and stepped into the cell. He raised his stun stick and touched it to Gary’s neck for several seconds. Gary hit the floor, his arms numb. Mizzet hissed quietly.
“They’re getting riled up,” said the younger guard, with fear in her voice. “Should we gas them?”
“Calm down, Harper. They’re acting on instinct. Show them you’re the alpha.”
The older guard raised his stick and brought it down on Gary’s side several times, whacking his ribs and shoulder. He lay as quietly as he could.
“See? Totally docile. You do the cat.”
The younger guard approached Mizzet with her stick poised to strike. She faltered when the cat growled low and puffed out her fur.
“Show it who’s in charge, Harper,” said the older guard, breathing hard between blows on Gary’s back. Harper hit Mizzet sideways across the face. She yelped and curled into a ball. Harper paused and the older guard urged her on.
“Good. But you have to solidify your status. Make it bleed on the floor.”
Harper lifted her arm again and came down on Mizzet’s ear. She did it a second time. The woman whined and covered her bloody ear with a paw.
“I did it,” said Harper, looking sick. The older guard stopped mid-strike and examined her work.
“Not bad.” She reached up and wiped a spatter of Mizzet’s blood off Harper’s cheek. “You always get a little bloody. Wash your coveralls in cold water and dish soap to get the stains out. Keep your uniform clean. Not like the rest of these grunts. You want to move up in the Reason, you have to look the part.”
Harsh buzzing lights hanging above the warehouse came on with a loud thunk. Creatures groaned and blinked in the sudden brightness. A set of heavy boots marched down the space between cells. They stopped at Gary’s door. He could see them even with his face to the floor; they were polished and pristine.
“There were express orders from Colonel Wenck not to begin any intake procedures on last night’s drop off before I–”
She stopped and bent down to Gary on the floor. She smoothed his hair away from his face.
“What the bloody hell,” she said, so quietly that only Gary heard. She stood up, the command back in her voice.
“Get him up and into the dissection room. No one touches him until I get there.” She marched out of the warehouse with footfalls that woke everyone who wasn’t already up. The guards pulled Gary to standing. They prodded him out of the cell, even though he went willingly.
He bit his lip to keep from making noise as his ribs crunched and tugged, his bones knitting themselves back together in time for the next beating. He had never decided if a healing ability in prison was Unamip’s blessing or a curse.
“That turkey they fed us last night was garbage. Some kind of lab-cultured crap they keep trying to pass off as meat,” said the older guard.
“I heard it was phoenix meat,” said Harper.
“Explains the heartburn.” The older guard rubbed his chest and belched.
They led Gary past a dozen rows of cells, all filled with Bala and part-Bala in various states of deconstruction. A legless spider, head and thorax only, sat in one of the cells alone. It chittered at him as he passed; a plea for the mercy of death. There were human cells as well, filled with forlorn people who had been caught with their Bala loved ones. He didn’t see any children. He wasn’t sure whether that was something to celebrate or mourn.
The guards paused at one of the cells near the door. Two centaurs were fighting unrelentingly, their human halves grappling while their hooves stomped and skidded. One of them held the front half of a pig under his arm. The guards opened the cell door and attempted to separate the two without getting trampled.
Gary was as close to the dryads as he was ever going to get.
“Kaila,” he called into the tiny forest a couple of cells away.
A set of branches unfurled from the tangle of foliage and a bark-covered face looked out at him. Her green eyes narrowed, then widened in surprise. She stepped out of the circle on bark-covered human legs. Jenny had always wistfully said they “went on for days,” and the metaphor seemed apt. Kaila clasped her hands and the long, leafy branches sprouting from her head rustled down her back with excitement.
“Gary Cobalt?” She extended her arms through the bars, but she could not reach him. “Is my Jenny still alive?”
“Yes. She’s trying to get to you.”
“Tell her not to come here.” Kaila’s green eyes flashed in terror. Her voice carried and the guards looked up from their centaur brawl.
“She’s already on her way. Be ready,” said Gary. A bolt of pain coursed through his side as a guard stunned him again. He hit the floor so hard the metal grating cut into his knees.
“Get away from the bars,” said Harper. The older guard joined her.
“See? You’re getting it,” he said.
They pulled Gary up and brought him to a room that would have given the mightiest warrior pause. Examination tables of various sizes were lined up in rows. Each one had straps to tie down a creature, no matter how large or small. A bright movable light hung over each one. Around the perimeter of the room, tidy shelves and racks held tools both edged and blunt. It looked like an armory, or a museum exhibit dedicated to pain. Sharp-toothed saws for carving off limbs hung next to delicate surgical instruments. This was where the Bala were portioned off for parts.
The two tables nearest the door were occupied. On the first, a juvenile redworm lay sedated across two tables, its immense body hooked to a series of tubes that drained its acidic blood. The orange-red liquid bubbled in the collection container. The human technicians were covered from head to toe in protective gear. One of them looked up as he passed. Half her face had been seared by acid, but no one had offered to heal it. She glared at him with her remaining eye.
The next table held a dwarf, strapped d
own tightly. His tiny body took up barely a quarter of the massive table. Two technicians stood over his throat, flayed open, examining the vocal cords.
“See here? If we excise these two vocal folds, they can be mounted in the engine room directly.”
“How do we keep the tissue from decaying?”
“Biotech is working on a solution of fairy plasma that slows decay.”
As they passed the table, Gary noticed the dwarf’s eyes were open. He blinked rapidly, and the heart monitor beeped an alarm.
“Push another round of succinylcholine.” A tech tapped the controls and the dwarf’s eyes stopped fluttering and stared blankly at Gary.
The guards walked Gary to the far end of the room, where the tables were sized for humanoid beings. They tilted one vertical, fixed restraints around his legs and arms, and left him there.
The officer with shiny boots strode in a few minutes later, barking orders without breaking stride.
“Get out,” she said. The redworm technicians put down their instruments, but the other two stayed near the sedated dwarf.
“We’re in the middle of something,” said one of the surgeons.
The officer pulled out her service weapon and shot the dwarf in the head. The heart monitor went flat.
“You’re done. Go,” she said, heading for the back of the room. The surgeons groaned and tossed their instruments onto a tray.
“Singh, you are the fucking worst,” said one, taking off his lab coat.
Gary was surprised to see that he recognized this officer and her tightly wound headscarf. This was the woman the Sixian parrot had shown him in the Bitter Blossom; the one who he had impaled with his horn. Her face was set hard like other Reasoners, not as kind as it had been in his vision.
She stopped in front of Gary.
“This won’t work on you, will it?” she asked, holstering her weapon.
“No.”
She stepped up to him.
“Who are you?”
“Gary Cobalt of the–”
“Not that. Why are you in my head?” she asked, searching his face for answers.
“You’ve had a vision of the two of us.”
“Every night, you are in my nightmares,” she said, poking her finger into his chest. “Who sent you to haunt my dreams?”
Indeed, she had dark patches under her tired eyes. She walked over to the wall and pulled down a bone saw.
“I’m supposed to supervise the collection of your useful body parts. They say it isn’t possible to kill a unicorn. But they don’t say anything about a half-unicorn.”
“The colonel wouldn’t allow you to kill me,” said Gary. “I’m far too valuable alive.”
He had seen his own kin chained for years in the holds of Reason ships, locked into collection systems that continually scraped a thin layer of horn as it grew. These unicorns were shadows of their former selves. Most of them were atrophied and broken, unable to form coherent thoughts. They made unintelligible sounds and ran themselves in circles when set free. If these were the only unicorns that Reasoners encountered, he could see why humans would consider them animals.
“Who are you?” she asked again, brandishing the saw close to his face.
“We are connected somehow. It’s not my doing,” he replied.
She furrowed her brow at his lack of fear and dropped the saw onto a tray with a clatter.
“You are exhausting,” she said, rubbing her eyes.
“I’ve heard that before,” said Gary. She nearly laughed, then her mask came down again. There was a flicker of hope, if he could just keep her talking. “I don’t even know you. Tell me who you are and perhaps we can figure this out,” he said.
“I’m Subedar Lakshmi Singh, regimental administrative officer for Colonel Wenck. Why are you in my head?” She asked the question more plaintively than the first time, and Gary realized she genuinely wanted to know why he was tormenting her.
“I assure you, I am not. I have seen the same vision you describe. Yesterday morning, when I stared into the Sixian parrot. You were in my vision of death.”
“Yesterday?” she asked. “But I’ve been dreaming of you for months. Is this some kind of Bala magic?”
“Is it possible you have some… Bala ancestry?” he asked as delicately as he could.
She flinched and shook her head.
“I’m not one of you.”
Across the room, the redworm on the table twitched. Singh watched it while she peppered Gary with questions. “Who is Penny? In the dream, we needed to kill her.”
“I don’t know anyone named Penny.”
“And I said that we needed to kill all humans. Why?”
“I don’t agree with that sentiment at all,” he said.
“Me neither. Obviously.”
“I have a question for you, Subedar Singh,” he said, using her formal title. “You have seen this dream every night for months. Would you say that you’ve had this vision at least one hundred times?”
“Yes.”
“I ask you. In your vision, did we appear to be adversaries?”
She folded her arms across her uniform jacket and looked at him skeptically. She was decorated with pins for several battles. There was a blue enameled wave for the Battle of Botono Bay, where the Reason had routed the last of the free unicorns from their hiding place under the sea. Another was a snowflake that indicated the Ketewan Uprising, in which the Reason had quelled a rebellion of humans trying to stop the war. And at the top was the pin that he had seen on Jenny’s uniform, back when she still wore it – the stylized stone turret that symbolized Copernica Citadel.
“You were at Copernica.”
“That’s correct.” She looked uncomfortable.
“Then you must know Jenny Perata.”
“I’ve heard the name. She wasn’t on my ship, but she saved a lot of people on the Pandey.”
“You’re holding her wife in there.” He flicked his head toward the warehouse.
“We have a lot of people’s wives in there.”
“Not a lot of people are the hero of Copernica Citadel.”
“Are you asking me to liberate a resource just because it’s married to a former Reason officer?” she asked.
“No, I’m asking you to liberate both of us.”
Subedar Singh laughed out loud.
“You are bold, my nocturnal visitor.”
The redworm by the door moved again and Singh took a moment to walk over and check its vitals. On the way back, she picked up the scalpel that the techs had used on the dwarf. She stopped in front of Gary and picked up a collection vial from the tray of equipment. She dragged the dirty scalpel down his forearm and caught the run of silvery blood that ran out.
“Pretty,” she said, holding the vial up to the light. “I just want to try something.”
She brought the vial over to the dead dwarf and poured his blood into the wound in his head.
“I wouldn’t–”
“Shhhh,” she said. The dwarf convulsed on the table, then pulled against his restraints. He babbled in a language that was neither human nor Bala, whispering through his open throat. Singh watched with an unsettled look on her face. She stomped back to Gary.
“Why didn’t it heal him?” she demanded.
“It did. My blood can heal the tissues, but not replace the knowledge or memories they contained. You would do well to shoot him again and put him out of his misery.” It was a thing that Gary had never imagined himself saying, but he had learned that sometimes the cruelest path was also the kindest.
Singh unholstered her weapon. It was a typical Reason projectile firearm, which meant that this woman worked only on-planet. She drew it, but hesitated.
“You can’t bring him back?”
“Not like he was.”
She fired a single shot and the dwarf went still again. Singh returned, looking thoughtful.
“What a waste,” she said.
“Perhaps if you didn’t dissect us, it woul
d be less wasteful.”
“I’m not here to debate Reason ethics,” she retorted.
“What are you here for?” he asked. “Because I am positive that Colonel Wenck does not want me taken apart. I’m sure there’s an FTL ship somewhere in orbit with a cage waiting for me.”
She pursed her lips.
“When I saw who you were, I thought I could get some answers.”
“Those dreams will continue for as long as I live,” he said. “I will continue killing you every night in your sleep unless we determine the cause.”
She furrowed her brow.
“That’s not the dream I’m having. In my dream, I’m killing you.”
“With my horn?”
“Yes. In my dream you’re begging me to kill you and I don’t want to. You’re… a friend. And I feel so terrible, but I have to do it, so I do, but after I’m just gutted and then I wake up an absolute wreck. Like I’ve murdered my…” She trailed off with a shrug.
Gary was more confused than ever about the vision, but at least this conversation was keeping her from sawing pieces off him. This was the most thoughtful discussion he’d had with a Reason officer in nigh on thirty years.
“We’re seeing two versions of the same event,” he said. “Which may mean that how it occurs is still uncertain.”
“You sound like a Sister,” she said.
Gary leaned forward in his restraints.
“A Sister would know what the vision means,” he said.
“I can’t get an audience. I tried,” said Singh. “Pulled every string in the Reason, but they won’t talk to me. Especially after that business with the rebels.”
Gary let out a single laugh. He felt like a chess piece on the board, slotted into place exactly where he needed to be in order to set up a particular scenario. He felt light and calm. As Jenny would have said, it was all going to be fine.
“Actually, I have a meeting with the Sisters this morning,” he said. “If you get me and Kaila out of here, I’ll bring you along.”
Singh considered in silence. He hoped that she realized how rare an opportunity this was. Meetings with the Sisters were not granted frequently, and certainly not to regimental administrative officers who sat at a desk doing paperwork all day. With him at her side, the Sisters would be willing to listen to her questions. And there was no better group suited to explaining a mysterious vision than the Sisters.
