I have no answer, because my question is a mirror.
What has she done to me?
Three
Catarine
Oh no.
I’ve gone too far this time.
Way, way too far.
The man stands and twitches his gray suit, resettling it over his broad, all-too-human back, tapered waist, muscular quads and calves. The cowl has fallen back, revealing black hair and pallid skin, and he pads silently across the blood-soaked carpet on gray boots. The black lining his fingernails could just be polish, the spikes on the backs of his ears a quirk of biology.
But the molecule-thin blades nested like a chevron tattoo at his wrists prove he is the deadliest member of the conquering race. A foot soldier, known as a blade, from the conquerors of Arris.
Why, if the Arrisans had superior ranged lasers that devastated hundreds of planets like they’d devastated Humana, were their foot soldiers trained and armed to win a war single-handedly? Old joke. Because every part of Arris is terrifying.
And I have just sexually assaulted him.
I have assaulted him in the ship’s theater where we used to spread blankets and eat popcorn and pretend we were still on Humana, in a big science experiment together, one that would be over soon.
He presses the communication button.
The movie screen activates, and another brutal, pallid Arrisan fills the half dome. He leers over me.
Terror jolts into my bones. I scramble around the back of the captain’s chair.
“Spiderwasp in,” he barks. “We acknowledge your priority call. Intercept in two clegs. Prepare for the majesty of the High Command’s newest flagship, blade. Spiderwasp out.”
The screens go blank, and the orange blood sprays become more visible.
As do the ribbons of flesh beneath my bare feet.
I am crouched in someone’s entrails.
Silence cuts my ears with its sharpness. The stench of burnt oxygen and sour waste pierces my nostrils. The world fractures around me like peering through broken glass. Too sharp, too real.
The foot soldier replaces his hood and turns.
His face is barely profiled in the cloaking shadow of the assassin’s cowl. The suit moves like a normal cloak, but a sheen of black underneath deflects light like spilled oil. He flexes his fingers. The curved blades emerge a fraction from his wrists. He fixes on me.
No.
I scoot around the captain’s chair, trying to make myself small.
Please, no.
Oh, please—
“What did the Eruvisans do to you?”
His voice is toneless and quiet.
Like a serial killer.
I want to look away, but I can’t in case that’s how I miss when I die. “Nothing. Everything. I don’t remember.”
The shadows where his eyes should be widen slightly. He thinks I’m tricking him. Like I would even know how.
I can’t feel my hands anymore, and my ears ring, but somehow, I still sound calm. “They came down the hall from the cafeteria and surrounded me. I begged them to…ah…have sex with me.”
Even at the point of death, this is still shameful and embarrassing. Worse because the fog hasn’t rolled back in. It seems blasted away, gone forever, leaving me with ugly slivers of panic and regret.
“One of them screamed that they didn’t have time, but the other one with filed teeth and a really big, uh, bazooka? Already had his pants-thing open, and he said they had time because they had to collect the cargo. He carried me back to this room, and I had sex with them.”
He doesn’t react. No movement. Just partially extended blades and silence.
“Then you arrived.”
He turns away, the cowl hiding his whole face, and stares over the miasma. “And?”
“You killed them all.”
He toes one of them, then crouches and holds his hands at an odd angle. The suit extends beyond his wrists to cover his fingers. He paws at a victim. Gore travels up his gloved fingers. He stands and strides to another. Searching. “And then?”
“Ah… You were there…”
What does he want me to say?
I remember he was not eager. When I came on to him, he showed me his flaccid cock, not in invitation, but in dismissal. And I hadn’t cared. Other people’s feelings never bother me when I need my fix.
Pins poke my toes. Blood flow. I need to move.
I ease onto my knees.
He glances back at me.
I freeze.
Please don’t kill me.
He slowly stands. Hands at his sides, his suit retracts to reveal his gray fingers again and the blades at his wrists. “You were never in their ship.”
The tone is flat, a statement, but I don’t want to miss a question. I shake my head.
His fingers flex again. The blades extend past his fingertips and retract. “Where did they encounter you?”
“The hall by the escape pods.”
He moves his arm.
Wait. He wants me to show him?
I use the captain’s chair to pull myself to my feet. My muscles have locked up. I totter across the theater and into the hallway on stilts. Sodden fabric sticks to my damp legs. My heart thuds as if a stranger is pounding my chest with his fist.
He moves behind me like a shadow.
This is how the Arrisans murder people.
My neck prickles.
He’s close, his arm lifting, his blade sliding out, and while I’m turned away, it slices—
I whirl.
He’s standing on my other side, several feet back, giving me plenty of space.
My arms tremble.
I saw the reach on his blades. They swept the room. They cut through a wall. There’s no safe distance on this ship.
But his shadowed face orients on me, so I gesture at the obvious. “That’s my escape pod.”
“Where were you before?”
Before the emergency? “In the cafeteria. I was… No, my bedroom.”
He tilts his head as if to ask which is it?
“I was in the cafeteria with everybody when the emergency lights flashed. Then, instead of going to the pods like everyone else, I went back to my bedroom and grabbed my ears.”
His cowl lifts fractionally.
“I have to take my ears whenever I leave the house. There’s a tracker inside, and if that malfunctions, the ears are memorable, so people can say if I’ve gone past.”
One of my parents’ compromises. It’s also good at attracting the kind of man who’ll try anything once. I become other, exotic. And the neural link is the only thing that can convey my real feelings sometimes. While I stand stupidly, the ears flatten and convey my inexpressible regret, shame, and sadness.
That’s how it used to work.
I take off the ears.
They are spattered with blood.
And now I can see with terrible clarity.
Terrible, injuring clarity.
I always wanted to be cured, but not this way.
It’s probably fleeting anyway.
I know where he wants to see next.
My bedroom.
“Show me.”
All right.
I lead him down the hall. The carpet is trampled and blackened. Was it always like this? Surely the invaders didn’t leave the grime in the corners. The black circles on the walls, though, are new. Weapon marks.
There’s a circle next to where the captain’s pod was.
Someone shot at her?