The thick gloom provided cover for one party, but not for the others. The ground rolled like water, causing buildings to shudder and groan under the mounting tension.
Cittenvei cast her gaze over the metropolis from her position at her office window. Her hearts thrashed, her blood boiling as it coursed through her. The one boy she had condemned to life imprisonment several years ago was still nowhere to be found. When the clack of an officer's boots filled her ears, she intuitively snapped the stylus that she had anxiously clutched in two.
"My Rynaeltess," he said, making sure to keep his tone even, because his voice certainly wasn't calm. "We've searched all through the Junction. Those strange spheres have vanished, and the Alekzandyrs are nowhere to be found."
"That brat has to be somewhere," she said through clenched teeth. "People don't just up and disappear from prison!"
But Lucein had. With the help of some thing, he'd managed to defy her will for him to rot an eternity in a cell. She was sorely pissed.
"Find him," she growled.
"Miss, we've searched all over the city —"
"Not in that cesspit on the other side of the Junction."
The officer went silent, and right away she could tell no one wanted to go there. It was the same as getting too close to a hornets nest. There were some things simple human nature accounted for, and the officer's hesitation was a manifestation of rational instinct.
Cittevnei didn't care. She snatched him by the scruff of his collar and yanked him down. "You and the boys are going to go and find that bastard. I don't care what it takes, who you have to kill, whose dick you'd have to suck — get me Lucein!" Her grip on his collar became so tight that she cut off the man's air. She thrust him away, and he thudded hard on the floor, sputtering.
No sooner had they left than did frustrated tears trickle down her cheeks, though her face was yet scrunched in a scowl.
First that white-haired prick repeatedly turned her down, and now this. His son, that illegitimate damnable boy, seemed more headstrong and defiant than his father. There was nothing she hated more than being denied and defied, and the instant they found that honey-haired brat, she had a mind to emasculate him.
Then slit his throat on national television.
She was in the middle of projecting her fury when the floor of her office rippled the same way a lake does when stones are cast in it. Those easily dismissed tremors had become full-on quakes. The ground was rolling, and in one of the vehement shocks, she was knocked to the floor. She watched, with intrigue and crippling terror as the glass of the windows groaned and undulated like an erotic bellydancer.
Then the glass shattered, and through the open panes, she saw the skyscrapers whirling just before they tumbled to the ground like drunken gits.
She scrambled to her desk and clutched it, the queasy feeling of shifting gravity wrenched her guts. She watched, crippled by terror, as the skyline moved upwards, and her view became the pavement below.
She closed her eyes.
The building crashed into a heap of debris and the remains of other structures. The sky cracked, the dirt rolled. A fissure tore open with great arcs of volatile plasma racing into the heavens.
Glass crackled underneath her palms. Her knees scraped on the pavement, her slacks torn, as she crawled out from her office. The whole city loomed over her. Structures drunkly leaned against one another in bent arcs, the sidewalks looked more like shed snake skin, and as she looked out in to dismal cityscape, there was a multitude of faces.
At first she thought these were human faces, since they were too far away to really note their features. Then they came near, and her hearts went arrhythmic. She was surrounded by them.
On a large scale, the Kyusoakin believed in civility even despite trying circumstances. But not all Kyusoakin were, by nature, kyusoakin. As much as the human species dissed them as a whole, there were those who amounted to nothing but talking animals.
The Deserters were just that.
They circled around Cittevnei, licking their lips and cackling like a pack of jovial hyenas.
"Another she-uunan," one shojen said to another. "This one looks important, tsche?"
"Not anymore, nai'ii!" said the other. "Looks like bottom-fodder to me." He skitted over and snatched her ankle.
At once Cittevnei gripped a length of lead pipe and snapped to his direction, swinging wildly. The pipe burst into the shojen's shoulder. He yelped and jumped away.
As he did, another one leapt for her. He wrenched the pipe out of her grip, then smashed her upside the head with it. She fell over, limp as a shark out of water.
Exactly what happened next, she'd never know. Nor did she care, being unconscious. In that moment, when they descended upon her, the ground ripped open, and violent, hot-pink and red arcs of lightning shot into the sky.
There were no survivors.
A New Regime.
Regarding Lucein and his people.
The Kingdom of Ecstasy Page 17
