by B.J. Keeton
***
“I can’t stand another one, Harlo. I mean it.”
“Maybe there won’t be another one,” she offered. She didn’t believe it, but she had to offer the poor guy some kind of hope. For the past three hours, as close as she could tell anyway, the guard had regularly come into their cell and accosted Swinton. It handed him the Flameblade and somehow puppeteered him into slicing off one appendage or another.
The second time it had happened, Swinton had just lost a finger. That hadn’t been too bad, seeing as how he had chopped off his own leg an hour before. Since then, though, the guard had forced him to self-amputate his other leg and the arm that Harlo had healed when he had first arrived in the cell. Each time, though, the guard somehow replaced the severed body part and healed it up with the Flameblade’s aura. It was like magic. Harlo knew a lot about healing—she had better, she had worked, lived, and breathed it for the last six years—but she had never seen any kind of nanite treatment that worked as fast or as efficiently as this guard’s sword did.
She felt more than a little bad that she was almost as curious about how it worked as she was disgusted at it happening.
His voice was distant as he said, “There’s always another one, Harlo.”
“That’s the spirit, Swinton. Give on up.”
“Good idea,” he said. “I think I just might.”
“It was sarcasm, Swinton. Cheer up a little.”
“I think,” he coughed as he spoke, “I think I’m doing a better job of cutting myself apart. That guy’s doing a pretty good job of putting me together, though. I just can’t take it again, Harlo. I just can’t.”
Harlo closed her eyes. She knew she couldn’t do anything for him, but she said again, “Maybe there won’t be another one.”
The door hissed open and two of the purple angels came through instead of the typical one. “What, you’re starting in on both of us now?” She wanted to sound tough for Swinton’s sake, but she thought it came across as pathetic. She never had been good at sounding stern.
The guards ignored her comments and moved toward either Swinton or Harlo, picked them up, and walked back out the door. The Charons struggled against their captors, but it was no use. The angels barely even acknowledged they were resisting. Harlo struggled longer than Swinton did, but eventually even she stopped. She let them carry her through the hallways, but she made sure that she took stock of her surroundings as she passed by.
There were decorations here and there in the form of sculptures, but they were abstract, and she knew nothing about art. The walls all looked pretty much the same to her; they would descend a winding staircase that would lead to another curved hallway that led to another winding staircase. There were doors and rooms along some of the corridors, and even though they had latticed doors, too, she couldn’t see inside them. They were moving too quickly through the halls.
Eventually, a winding staircase led to an open chamber on what Harlo assumed was the ground floor, or at least near the base of the tower. The room wasn’t dissimilar from their cell. It had the same kind of tiled floor and ceiling, but it was much larger, had multiple entrances and exits, and in the very center, had two gleaming purple stakes standing upright.
That was where they were headed. The guards walked toward the stakes and dropped Swinton and Harlo. The guards forced them onto their knees. Even though they struggled, the angels tied their hands behind them and around the poles.
Then, the angels left the chamber, and Harlo and Swinton were alone.
Harlo broke the silence first. “See?” she said, “There wasn’t another one. What did I tell you?” Her voice cracked before she finished speaking, which only emphasized the utter lack of confidence she felt at that moment.
Swinton laughed. It was a real laugh, and he kept laughing until Harlo joined in. Neither of them knew what was so funny, but after what they had been through, laughing like that was exactly what they needed.
When it subsided, Swinton said, “Yeah. You were right, doc. There wasn’t another one. I’m sure that whatever this is, it’s going to be a lot more fun.”
“The upside of this is that there were only two stakes. That means that it’s just us. Not Ceril, Saryn, or Chuckie.”
“Lucky them,” Swinton said. “Lucky us.”
“Did you hear that?” Harlo asked.
“What?”
“I don’t know. Like…buzzing and thumping. I don’t know.”
“No, I d—yeah, yeah, I hear that. What is it?” Swinton said. Beside him, three more stakes began to rise from the floor, the tiles that lined the floor topping them. “Uh oh.”
“Yeah. That’s bad.”
The door to the chamber opened and violet sunlight poured into the chamber. Two more of the angels walked toward Swinton and Harlo. These were dressed much more nicely than the guard who had been accosting them for the past few hours, and they carried long staves they must have used for weapons. Behind them, they dragged three bodies.
“I think they found the others,” Harlo said.
“Yeah, I think so.”
The large purple men dragged Ceril, Saryn, and Chuckie’s limp bodies to the new stakes and tied them up just like they had done with Harlo and Swinton. Harlo watched them bind her teammates to stakes. She wanted to do something to help them, help herself, but she had no idea what that could be.
“Swinton?”
“Yeah?” he answered.
“I think we’re screwed.”
“I’ve been saying that for a while, doc.”
She started to reply, but one of the guards struck her in the forehead and slammed her head into the stake. She slumped into unconsciousness.
