“What is it?” Cole heard Joshua say, his own face averted and his eyes closed.

“Our esteemed guest is on deck, sir,” he heard a voice say.

“Excellent. Tell him we’ll be there in a minute.”

“He wants you right away, sir.”

“And I want you to stall. Take him to the mast if he’s impatient, that way we’ll be there before he knows it.”

“Yes, sir.” The door banged shut; Cole opened his eyes and waited for them to adjust to the relative darkness. Joshua stood in front of him, his goggles now down around his neck, his hand reaching into his fur coat. “What’s your name?” he asked Cole.

“Mortimor,” Cole said, looking down at the patch on his suit.

“No, it’s not.” Joshua pulled something out of the folds of fur—two cylinders of wood, bright and polished. “I recognize the getup. I know you’re not him.”

“You’ve got me confused for someone else,” Cole said. “Where I come from, it’s a common na—”

“Do you know what this is?” Joshua asked. He held the two cylinders up for Cole to see, gripping them in a single fist, side-by-side.

Cole shook his head.

“Ever heard of the Luddites?”

“I know what a luddite is,” Cole said. He snuck a quick glance at Riggs, who seemed livid and confused by the discussion—his forehead was full of wrinkles, but his jaw kept clenching and unclenching.

“The Luddites,” Joshua said. He held one of the glossy cylinders away from his body. The other one dropped toward the ground and then stopped, hovering in mid-air less than a meter below its twin.

“The terrorists?”

All three of the men laughed. “No, not terrorists, my friend. Freedom fighters. We were once devoted to liberating mankind from the tech-nology that blinded them to a good life.”

“You preferred to die toothless and young, is that it?”

Cole regretted saying it as soon as it came out. He tensed for a blow, but none came. Eying Joshua warily, he saw a thin smile creep across the man’s face.

“There were some . . . flaws in our worldview, sure, but we have a much higher purpose now. We now know and understand mankind’s failings, and we’re working to fix them. However,” he twisted his outstretched hand slightly and the levitating stick swung in the air, “we still loathe technology. Deep down—the original members who are still with us—we prefer the simple things in life.”

Carefully, Joshua reached below the hovering wooden handle and grasped it with his other hand. He then brought both of the cylinders parallel to the ground while keeping them apart.

“Simple is always better, don’t you think?”

Cole raised his eyebrows.

“The wire between these two pieces of wood is constructed almost entirely out of carbon. Lovely, beautiful carbon. The matrix of life.”

He moved the handles closer, but Cole still couldn’t see a thing.

“The strand is just a few atoms wide, and yet, it is nearly unbreakable, held together by the natural forces of electromagnetism. Gorgeously simple, really.” Joshua’s eyes changed focus, away from the nothingness and fixed on Cole. “Do you know what that makes this lovely wire?”

“Easy to lose?” Cole joked.

Joshua tilted his head to the side and smiled. “It makes this the sharpest thing in the universe.” He turned to the goons beside Riggs and nodded. The man with his wrappings down off his mouth smiled, his shaded eyes darting toward Cole before he knelt down and yanked Riggs’s pantleg out of his boot. He unzipped the expander on the side of the flightsuit’s leggings, then slid the black fabric up past Riggs’s knee. He pulled hard, bunching the material in a band so tight around his thigh, that Riggs grimaced in pain.

Cole stared at Riggs’s exposed, pale leg and noticed for the first time a trough in the rack right behind the thigh, running from side to side. The goon performed the same ritual on the other pantleg, unzipping the boot expander and yanking the material up high.

“What do you want to know?” Cole asked.

Joshua flashed the briefest of smiles, there only for an instant. He frowned and shook his head. “For starters, I want you to stop asking me questions. I want the both of you to concentrate instead on spilling your guts.”

The goons laughed at this. Joshua nodded to one of them and jerked his head toward Cole; the man came over and stood by his side. Cole expected him to jam his fingers in his ribs or armpit, just as he had with Riggs, but the man clamped his hand over his mouth, instead.

He pulled Cole’s chin to the side, forcing him to watch as Joshua knelt down in front of Riggs with the two handles held far apart. Cole saw his friend’s boots twitch, straining against the ropes. Riggs tried to yell something, but the other goon clamped his hand around his mouth, forcing the two former friends to look at each other. Riggs’s eyes were wide, his nostrils flaring with desperate, shallow breaths.

Taking extreme care, Joshua slowly inserted one of the handles in the rack’s trough and fed it behind Riggs’s legs until it slid out the far side. He again grasped both handles and held them far apart, his muscles straining as if pulling the invisible thread taut. He looked back at Cole and smiled, then turned to Riggs’s legs.

Cole could feel his own eyes bulging as he shouted into the furry mitt covering his mouth. His cheeks filled with the muffled roar of his own voice as Joshua brought the handles toward his chest. Cole knew Joshua would turn to him, would give him one last chance to speak before he did anything bad. Or maybe it would all be a cruel joke. A hazing ritual. A prank meant to bond them together.

But Cole was wrong.

There was almost no effort in what Joshua did. He brought the two handles together in front of Riggs’s thighs, switched them to the opposite hands, and then pulled them away from one another. Cole couldn’t even tell if the motion made a sound over his own muffled pleas.

Riggs’s face remained frozen for a moment, then his face twisted up in confused concentration, almost as if he were fighting to place a smell. Cole tried to breathe through his nose as Joshua stood back and began rolling one of the handles in the air, sucking the other one up to it.

The real horror didn’t begin until the goon by Riggs let go of his mouth and reached for the purple bag. Riggs struggled against his restraints, grunting. One of his thighs came away from the rack.

His boot didn’t.

Cole gaped in sick disbelief at the lower half of his friend’s two legs, both of which were still strapped to the rack. There seemed to be a long delay before the thighs began jetting blood, splattering the boots and running down the steel toward the drain. The thighs kicked even more as Riggs writhed in horror. Cole’s head filled with a dull roar—his own moans reverberating through his skull, back into the steel rack, then echoing in his ears. It gave his rage a metallic tinge, like fear and hate wrapped in foil.

He could barely hear Riggs scream as the goon began slapping purple goo on the ends of his stumps. Thick pulses of blood sprayed through the man’s fingers before he could get it stopped. It came in rapid, forceful spurts, a visual measure of Riggs’s racing heart.

After what felt like minutes of struggle and abject terror, Riggs’s head finally fell forward, his jaw slumping to his chest. Blood continued to leak out of his legs; the man tending to them paused for a moment, licking some of the purple goo off the back of his hand.

The man holding Cole’s face let go and stepped away. Cole tried to suck in a lungful of air, but before he could, he heard his own disbelieving wail leak out, the last of his held breath forced into a whimper vying to become a scream:

“What the flank? What the flank!”

Part XII – Lessons Learned

“The surface confounds with its visibility.

Truth always lurks beneath.”

~The Bern Seer~

11

Molly stepped out of the sheriff’s office and back onto the crowded sidewalk. She looked down at the ticket stub she’d just purchased. There was no name on it, just a date, time, and place: that very night at eight o’clock, the opera house. Lok’s extremely short days meant she didn’t have long to wait, but it also meant skipping a shift of sleep. She tried to calculate how long she’ll have been up by the next nightfall—when the Wadi’s claws dug sharply into her shoulder, breaking her concentration.

She turned to chastise the animal, then saw it had cowered down low to peer over her shoulder at something. Following its eyes, she looked across the street and spied Walter walking amongst the crowd.

Molly let a buggy go by, its un-muffled engine blatting loudly as it revved up to cajole the buggy ahead of it. She ran across the street behind it, hot exhaust blasting her bare knees. Weaving through the foot traffic, she took long strides to try and catch up to Walter. The boy was walking unusually fast and quite close to the two Humans just ahead of him.

She nearly caught up to him when a ruckus occurred. Some kid came out of an alley right in front of the couple. The boy collided with them, sending the woman to the dirt, and then ran off without even apologizing. Molly rushed forward to help her and her husband, to see if they were okay. Shockingly, Walter did the same. He steadied the man by the hips to make sure the gentleman didn’t go down as well.

“Are you alright?” Molly asked the lady as she helped her up.

“Little snot came out of nowhere!” she said, brushing the dirt off her knees.

“Now Sandra, it was just an accident.” The gentleman patted Walter on the back. “Alright lad, I’m fine. Thank you very much.” He smiled at Molly and tipped his wide-brimmed hat. “Thanks for your assistance, young lady.”

“Molly!” Walter said. He glanced up and down the street as the couple merged with the crowd and disappeared. “What’re you doing here?”

“I’m looking for the person who’s gonna help get us out of here. What’re you doing?”

“Nothing,” Walter said. He thumbed through folds of paper in his hand. “What wass her name again?”

“Cat. I’ve told you that a hundred times.” She pulled him out of the middle of the sidewalk so the crowd wouldn’t have to part to get around them.

“I think I found her,” Walter said.

Before Molly could respond, a young boy forded the river of foot traffic and tugged on Walter’s elbow. Walter turned and pushed him away, hissing softly.

“Did you just give that kid something?” Molly asked.

“What?”

“Was that the kid from the alley?”

“Huh? No!” Walter turned and resumed thumbing through some-thing in his hands. All Molly could see was the top of his stubbled, metallic head, which seemed to be glowing a little. He turned around and pressed a wad into Molly’s hands. She looked at them: a thin stack of tickets, all to that night’s show at the opera house.

She shook them at him. “Where did you get these, Walter?”

“People gave them to me.”

“Gave them?” She reached out and grabbed a fistful of his flightsuit, pulling him close. “Where did you get them? Did you steal them?”

“No! They’re free!” he squealed.

Molly glared at Walter and had a visual of spanking him, right there in public, age be damned. “C’mon,” she said, pulling him back across the street. She veered toward one of the many outdoor cafes lining a busy side-alley.

Walter pried her fist off his cuff and grabbed her hand. As they crossed the street, he practically skipped along beside her, trying in vain to interlock his fingers with hers.

ѻѻѻѻ

A few minutes later, Walter sat across a small café table from Molly, sulking. He took his finger out of his mouth and asked, “Why can’t we go back to the sship?” He pouted and resumed sucking on his digit.

Molly took a sip of her water, which she had made Walter vote for, then leaned back in her seat. “I already told you, some bad people are setting up camp in there, and the sheriff won’t have anything to do with them. Besides, I don’t wanna miss our chance at finally tracking this Cat character down.”

“So let’ss go get ssome gunss,” Walter said. Molly glanced away from him and over his shoulder. Two Callites were walking down the alley, both wearing coveralls splattered with the same purple paint Scottie and his friends had sported. She watched them curiously over the lip of her glass.

“I ssaid, let’ss get ssome gunss,” Walter hissed.

“Get them where? Guns are illegal here.” Molly reached into her glass and pulled out a cube of ice. She squeezed it between the pads of her fingers to numb the persistent soreness there. “That’s why you don’t see people on Lok shooting at each other.”

Walter looked down at his computer for a moment, then back up at Molly. “How do you protect yoursself from whoever’ss in charge?”

“Look around you, pal—this isn’t Palan. A bunch of pirates aren’t gonna take over and let the last people out of prison before putting some different ones in. It doesn’t work like that here.” She raised her voice as she talked, speaking over a protest marching down Main street. Someone on a bullhorn was promising to handle the Drenard invasion differently, and also to get rid of the ships overhead, if only the electorate would throw the current bums out and install him in their place.

“But if the ssheriff won’t help, and he’ss the one with the gunss, how do we get the sship back?”

“I don’t know. Hopefully they’ll be gone by the time we return. I think they were looking for someone else, anyway. Maybe they’ll give up. Anyway, we’re just gonna hang out here until the show. We need to find out about the fusion fuel. That’s the most important thing right now.”