She screamed until she couldn’t catch her breath, blacked out, woke to new horrors. She’d bit into and through her bottom lip, which hung wordless and kissless in two pieces painting her chin and cheeks.
Still alive.
The stood in a circle around her, jerking their members to attention, ready for ensuing rounds, waiting for orders, waiting for questions and answers they knew she’d never give, as if they could fuck the truth from her, bring her to confessional orgasm, ply the coordinates and movements and statistics from her body with their pricks, slick with her truths, blood spattering the floor in revelations.
Her ears covered with rough hands, armored hands, the fury in his eyes capturing what attention she couldn’t hold dear and safe behind tear-wet eyelids, she couldn’t hear their barks and grunts, couldn’t realize her next coupling until the soldier shot, grinned, crawled out of and off and she saw him then, a former lover, a former underling in her resistance, standing with his hands bound behind him, matching bloods and tears masking his face, sobs because he saw what they’d done to her, what he was about to do to her.
He fell under the rifle stock. Unable to stop his collapse, his hands bound, he slammed onto her front, their collision producing a unison exclamation of pain. Soldiers adjusted his position, tore his pants down and from his legs. His tears dropped to her face, cleansing unremarkable tracks across tacking blood.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
The soldiers laughed at him: flaccid penis and tears and the mutual sobbing he shared with her. She looked up to see the commander drinking from a flask, his foreign orders sending a scurry of soldiers to her lover’s sides and rear, a flurry of hands coaxing and encouraging, violating him as they’d violated her, forcing him to a half-erection with their manipulation of his shaft, his testicles, his prostate. His was a different form of resistance.
All through the rape of him, he remained still above her, his two eyes locked on her one, their inhalations and exhalations matched, the paths between their gazes and breaths a hesitant solace. He grimaced through the pain and when they judged him hard enough, one enterprising soldier guided him into her.
Through blood and the seed of a dozen others, she’d produced enough of her own wetness for him. Only for him.
The position wasn’t impossible, but difficult because of the bindings holding his hands at his back. They were chest-to-chest, and he whispered to her, knowing he was crushing her, knowing his weight took her breath, which he tried to replace with hitching whispers: i love you, i love you, please forgive me, i love you and she ground beneath him, pain spiking from the groove where her clit had been, where her vagina had been grated and gouged, where the blistering brands split across her navel and inner thighs.
He hated himself for building to orgasm. Her eye comforted, knew.
When he shuddered and released, she barely felt his cum splash within her. A last look and she definitely felt his weight release; they pulled him up by his hair and shot him in the back of the head with a shiver gun, the resonated needle of metallish emerging just below his left eye, covering her with chunks of his brain and skull and the cartilage of his nose, a rain of blackened blood.
His dead weight slammed back against her, and in his death his body opened, his penis shrinking with awful speed even as it pumped urine and remnants of his semen into her gaped hole, mixing with her blood and slick, his shit and sweat running against her thighs and buttocks, puddling in that puddle that surrounded her broken body.
The soldiers laughed and cheered as they dragged his corpse from her and began their rage again, being sure to keep her alive, just keep her alive.
Maire screamed out to no god in particular.
Some months, some times.
Jud tapped her fingers on the table.
“He’s the only god here, you know.”
“Well, fuck me in the ass, Frenchie.”
Jean Reynald shrugged his shoulders. “It’s true. You’re a name. A placeholder. You’re the focus of his divinity. Without him—”
“Without him, none of you’d be here today.”
West grumbled. “Stop this shit.”
Sapphire and Jade Jennings West sat on either side of their “father.” Like almost all of the others, they’d been retrieved from the enemy line just before the hells Paul had written. They both made to speak at once, both looked at West, both let mouths close and fingers interlace.
West, the twins. Jud and Reynald. Honeybear and Banana Tits. Arik Mandela, a circle of a dozen others, each noting the echo of staccato fingertaps across the chamber as Jud thought.
“He’s falling apart.”
“He knows we’re here right now.”
“Don’t be too sure of that. He never saw the Delta crossover coming. It was—”
“If he’d looked hard enough, he’d have seen it.”
“Stop.” West rose, paced. A thought and the A/O line appeared at the center of the table. “Only thing that matters is that it happened, we’re trying to fix it, and the focal point of our existences is losing his fucking mind. We can’t get a solid lock on Delta within fifteen points. We can’t—”
“You sure that’s not just the loss of your maths girl?” Reynald considered, turned to Alina. “No offense intended, dear.”
“None taken. I suck at ‘maths.’”
“How many times do we have to do this? Without even knowing how or why? He hasn’t told us nearly enough for us to succeed once he—”
“Once he loses it completely,” Jud sunk farther into her seat, “We’re dead. You know that. Simple as that. Once he forgets us, we’re gone.”
“Then what’s the point of this?” Alina looked up from troubled brows.
“Killing time.” Reynald cleared his throat. “We’re just killing time.”
“Lights.”
West’s whisper echoed out across the liquid expanse, his bootsteps following not far behind. The chamber door snicked shut behind him, adding to the building bounce of sound. He tried to walk quietly, but doubted it really mattered.
He sat down on the pool’s elevated lip, triple-checking his seals before making any contact. His atmosphere chilled; he could see his breath attempting to fog his lookers.
They’d started harvesting as much silver as they could filter from the combat zones. Paul hadn’t been taking many trips out of Judith ME. A lot of people had died to bring him his silver in drips and dots at a time. He thought there was an answer in the machine ocean; West thought it was a pointless indulgence.
Paul’s nose was the only thing breaking the surface of the pool. He didn’t appear to be breathing, but upon closer inspection, West saw the faint ripples of exhalations. More and more often, he’d find the young man here in the silver pool, his patented hawking Hughes Nose the only indication that he was there.
West knew Paul knew he was there. He needed no words; the tug and release was enough.
Paul lifted himself to a sitting position, swung forward to a crouch, the silver sliming from his nude form. When he stood, the fluid pool solidified under his feet, a mirror field. Trailing rivulets of the invasive metal dripped down from Paul’s ears, nose, eyes.
He always scared West after his swims.
“How’s the meeting?” His eyes were silver, were motion, were mud hazel. The last of the silver evaporated (absorbed) from (into) the tangles of his chest hair, pubic hair.
West shrugged, popped his seals and removed his helmet after the silver was gone. “Not a lot of faith.”