night that Hope was killed, West found Paul sitting alone in the construct. This time it wasn’t decorated with his typical college bar layout. It was gray and empty. Mostly empty. West thought most of the gray came from him. He thought in, saw Paul, and thought out. West knew the author needed time alone.
West talked to Jud, and she sent him back to a semblance of home. She’d handle the repairs.
Abbie was in bed already, the lights out. West had been downstairs reading a parenting magazine half-heartedly between paying bills and watching the game. She’d bought the magazine and many more like it and put them in a stack on the coffee table. West was younger, skinnier, his hands still callused. Before the war. Before she’d…
So he read the magazines, not that his wife put any faith in them. She knew they’d work it all out eventually. They wouldn’t learn how to love a child by reading articles on the right diapers to buy and proper vaccination schedules.
West crawled into bed next to her, and her weight shifted as his lowered. A whispered, slept inquisition to which she knew the answer: Adam? She moved into a spoon against him. As he gave her a goodnight kiss on the cheek, he smelled toothpaste and Noxzema and her shampoo, the expensive stuff she felt guilty buying on a farmer’s paycheck, but the stuff that he loved her to have and needed her to have.
It was a quiet night in Nebraska, away from his missing arm, Hope’s dead body, Paul’s emotionless face in that gray, empty room.
He didn’t want to go
back downtown after they’d watched moonrise by the water.
She was always just behind them, always close enough to taste them, once reaching out for Maggie’s halo of curls, her hand stopping just short of target. Not yet. She didn’t yet trust herself enough to not savage their
bodies all around her, an imperfect circle on imperfect sand.
Hunter’s body slumped to the ground, the shattered skull splashing gray and crimson on impact, the shiver gun cratering sand at his side.
It was in the perfect silence that she screamed, her wail growing younger faster as the silver spread through the sky, the stars, all
the energy they’d expended on the development of weaponized silver would be for naught if the test failed. Already, there were reports from the many fronts across shattered space that the lumbers were adapting, evolving, fighting back against the harvest fleets.
Ever cut your grass one day, and the next, you notice a foot-tall dandelion towering above the green, white fluffy seeds spreading in the phantom wind? The lumbers were just as hardy, just as determined to resist harvest.
You don’t know what freedom is until you’ve seen a system-sized school of trees, branches bare and brittle from the nothing of space, defensive spines bigger than continents firing from ridged, cavernous bark, tearing apart slithers with petrified wood.
The keening, the screaming: their calls weren’t answered in that void.
Their song was one of
morning West left the dream of Abigail’s arms and retreated to the horror that was the final book.
Paul was already in Jud’s chamber. When West greeted him, his hand waved him to silence as his head cocked toward the obscured cove of Jud’s sleeper. The lights were at work carving her apart, flaying layer after layer down to her silver core where god lived. West never got used to seeing that. Blood, guts, and a pretty little marble. The lights wrapped her in a new Jud body and sealed her up. She stretched, the incision lines still sealing on her face and chest.
“The answer’s ‘No.’”
“We need to get back out there.” Paul’s voice wasn’t.
“You need some time.”
“I don’t—”
“You need some time.” She wrapped herself into a robe and reclined. “It’s too soon.”
He spun, mouth curling to a snarl. “There’s no fucking time left. We need to get out there, full-force, and—”
“Paul.” She held out her hand. “Take this.”
West knew what it was already: Hope’s marble, now lifeless and useless. Paul snatched it from her grasp and stormed from the room. When the chamber door had cycled shut, Jud patted a place next to her on the dais and motioned for West to join her.
“He’ll be okay.” West didn’t believe it, but he said it because it was the only thing he could think of.
“Yeah.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “I liked Hope.”
“There’s no way…?” He let the question fall.
“Not this time. Maire fucked the code. She’s lost to us.”
He didn’t want to think about the implications of to us.
“Who’ll be our third?”
“Fourth, with the bear.”
“I hate that bear. Who’s fourth?”
“Ever meet Banana Tits?”
This is where I take them when they’ve died:
Jacob was wrong. It’s not easier when nowhere feels like home. It’s easier when no one feels like home.
It was a close cousin to the first book’s Chicago crater, I suppose, a great gouge in the surface of the planet, the cliffs of the edge entirely too sharp on the periphery, the upload generator tilting precariously miles away at the impact’s center. The sky was empty.
I walked past the older graves, their shadows inking the glassed dust with darkness deeper than that feeble sunlight should have birthed. Simple stones, simple names. Each contained multitudes.
I buried her marble next to another.
I wanted to say something when I was done, as if vocalizing the loss would validate her importance to my life, to my sanity. I couldn’t find the right words. The words I did find were inappropriate and filled with a venomous mix of truth and emotion that I could no longer afford.
I remembered that first night: the beach, the shadows, the voice. Another life. The grating of sand across skin. Too many kisses on the cheek. All of that, all of that, now ruined by the corrupt code of a child, a monster.
I stood and walked away from my cemetery, certain that I’d visit it again before long.
There are no mechanics to a shiver gun.
The basic physics are those of particle acceleration and molecular resonance. The gun itself is nothing more than a shaped form of phase-ready metallish, available in any sculpt one could desire. In the history of her, she’d eventually see shivers like six-shooters, the traditional claw form of the inner worlds, the stylized driftwood grip and sliver barrel of the outer worlds, blocky extended cubes and tubular bells, rifles, billion-barreled shatter arrangements mounted on destroyers.
No matter the size or shape or taste, the shiver gun she remembered most was the pistol with which she’d been repeatedly raped after her capture and interrogation following the initial invasion of her homeworld. The Inner forces enjoyed such torture. They viewed her lifekind as barbarians; the condition in which they found her blockaded planet certainly helped that assumption. Continental fires, cannibalized cities, necromancy and sacrifice and an innate resistance to the machines.
She refused to talk. They enjoyed the aftermath.
A swift and brutal beating to tender her up, to get the juices flowing: blood from her broken nose, her split lip, her torn ears, tears, snot and spittle and vomit. A particularly brutal impact to her chest had split the bottom of her left breast open. They’d stopped the bleedout on that one even as they bit off her right nipple and carved and branded their marks on the soft gooseflesh of her belly, her descent to sex, her thighs. A broken finger, an extracted tooth, a clump of raven hair torn from her scalp and waved as a prize above: she still wouldn’t talk.
A thumb in her eye: an audible pop, but they kept her alive. She was beautiful.
The first at her sex was the commanding officer. The only lubrication between her legs was her own blood, the torn labia and excised clitoris providing her a semblance of new virginity, and the splash of seed he left behind, his pathetic penis quickly deflating and retreating below codpiece armor to the congratulations and admiration of his subordinates. The other officers took their turns, filling her, ripping, inverting and bypassing walls of flesh, cervix, uterus, bruising and abrading the softness, the holy tender profaned.