54

 

WITH OUR ENHANCED sense of direction, Sissy and I are able to find the entranceway to the obelisk in no time. We tear up a spiral staircase that coils along the inside wall of the tower. A darkened vertical shaft runs up the center of the obelisk like a black spine. I know what it is. It’s the column through which enclaves are transported.

What would have taken us a good ten minutes to climb if we were hindered by the cumbersome coordination and pathetic endurance of a heper is over in less than two. At the top is the door to the Ruler’s Suite. It’s locked. Judging by the fresh scratch marks and the dents pinged into the door, many have already tried to get in, futilely.

Sissy takes a running start, slamming into the door hard. It rattles, but the hinges remain secure. The door is self-locking and triple-barreled. We could be smashing our bodies against the door for the next hour with nothing to show for it.

I pull the shotgun over my head. “Stand back,” I warn. I point the barrel at the doorknob.

The flash of light turns my vision into a white sheen. The sting like a thousand razor blades exploding in my eyeballs. I collapse to my knees, try to blink away the pain. Sissy, bumbling forward, arms outstretched, pushes past me. I hear the sound of the door being ripped apart. Forcing my eyes open, I stagger in after her.

Inside the Ruler’s Suite, I stumble into a metal contraption. It’s the restraint apparatus upon which the Ruler had tied himself two days ago. Eyes still clenched shut, I touch along its width and height. It’s empty. Only the remote control used to open and close the glass partition dangles from the frame.

It takes almost a minute before I regain my vision. There’s no one else here. The suite feels so different from before. Instead of a claustrophobic confinement, it’s airy and spacious, the sensation akin to floating in the sky. The windows, shuttered against daylight the last time, are open now and span the entire circumference of the suite. They offer a panoramic view that lets me see a hundred miles in every direction from an unblocked, elevated vantage point.

I gaze outside. Rushing toward us, from the direction of the metropolis, is a one-mile-tall, five-mile-wide wall of dust. It’s the horde of naked millions of citizens coming in at breakneck velocity. At their speed, they’ll be here in less than five minutes.

Around us, glowing like lanterns, are the five tanks. They’re still filled with the green liquid. When I first saw the tanks two days ago, they were dark and opaque, illuminating little of what lay within. Now they are bright and clear and I see everything in them.

Drool drips down my fangs, splatters against my chest. I try to swallow before more saliva spills out, but there’s too much, too fast.

Sissy hasn’t seen the tanks yet. She’s preoccupied, bent over an opened enclave on the floor. Sniffing, licking the interior. I trot over to her. A heper was devoured in here, every ounce of flesh ingested, the glass licked clean twenty times over. I smell the chief advisor, what little odor of him is left, anyway. In the corner of the enclave is his tablet. I pick it up. The screen, layered with sticky saliva, tells it all. He was trying to make his getaway. He had pre-programmed this enclave to head to the underground train station. And that’s not the only thing he’s activated—he also remotely started the train engines.

“Over there,” Sissy says, head lifting. Her voice flat and hoarse, emotion ripped out. She walks to a tank on the far side of the suite, her paws silent on the marble floor. The heper inside the tank is drifting submerged in the fluid. Eyes closed, arms drifting upward as if surrendering, its hair waving back and forth languorously. The heper boy. David. The only sign that it’s still alive is the oxygen mask placed over its mouth. It looks so different from how I remember it. Sapped now, its youthful aura gone, replaced by a sadness and agony that permeate off it.

I hear a click of metal. Sissy has pulled the dart gun off her back, jacked back the trigger. She points the gun at me, her eyes fixed warily on the drool splattering down my bare chest.

“We re-turn now,” she says. “You first.”

“No, wait.” The words sloshing in my mouth, drowning in my saliva.

Her head snaps. “No. Now.” Her words coming out lispy, mired in wet bands of saliva in her mouth. “I dart you. Then I’ll turn the gun around, dart myself.”

The floor starts to tremble, the walls shake. I gaze outside quickly. They’re almost upon us, the millions from the metropolis.

“Wait,” I say, lifting my arms. “Just wait.”

The dart gun trembles. Because she’s feeling it, too. The conflict. The equivocation.

“I’m going to shoot you now,” she says. “Don’t move.”

“Wait.”

She stares into my eyes, past the drab, unreadable expression of my face. And in my eyes she sees something I’m trying to hide, and it is the very thing she’s trying to deny.

We don’t want to be re-turned. We don’t want to be squeezed into the confines of heper nature again.

Hands trembling, the smallest flash of fear breaking through the plane of her face, she raises the dart gun, points it at my neck. “Never forget who you are,” she says, and starts pulling the trigger.

A flash of movement. From behind her. A mere blur, a flash of white, whorls of flaming red.

Ashley June, a bullet of ferocity and velocity, smacks into Sissy’s side. Sissy goes flying, the dart gun skittering across the floor. Ashley June pounces, her body looping right across the suite, landing on the dart gun. She spins around, the gun pointing at Sissy.