No Dogs in Philly (15)

A Cyberpunk Horror Noir | Chapter 15: The Hunger

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Friar.

He was behind all this.

Saru tripped and stumbled down Pine Street, startling the glib night crowd of snappy suits and posh dresses. It was a nine-block journey from Washington Square to Friar’s lair, nine blocks for Quick-E-Sets and zip sutures to seal her leaking holes, and her healing mods to sew her up from the inside. She could still hear the alien voices calling to her, that urge she’d felt within her—physical, emotional, spiritual, sexual—to give herself up and join into something greater.

Her boot kicked open the wrought-iron gate to Friar’s lawn and she marched right up to the fortress door. She slapped a microgrenade with some sticky propellant to the handle and then thought better of it. With a pinky tap against the contact plates the magnetic lock buzzed and the door swung open. It had been programmed to let her in. Or. Or it had been keyed to Friar’s psychosomatic profile and the ghost in her head made her a match.

She lurched down the hallway, past the study, the living room that looked to be never used, the kitchen with a half-full teacup still on the counter. She found the second fortress door leading to the basement, which also swung open at her touch. Her footsteps echoed, boots clanging on the metal stairs. The lights were off and her waving arms couldn’t find a switch. She missed the last step and tumbled face first onto the metal platform.

“God damn it!” she yelled, words echoing with the clang of her body against the metal. She picked herself up and rubbed her knee. It was an injury just lame enough to hurt and not activate any healing mods, though the ache quickly receded in the wash of analgesics already flooding her system. She stood still and let her eyes adjust to the near-dark of glowing instruments. Guided by this she found some switches, and the frizzling bulbs of an industrial chandelier clicked awake.

The operating table was empty. No bloated, decaying Friar. No chance the pigs could have been here, no enterprising vulture or worried relative. She’d told no one—and who would take a body and leave all the expensive crap? Something was off too; the equipment ever so slightly ajar, adjusted, and—an eye. It stared at her amidst the clutter of superstitions Friar had amassed on his altar. A bloody blue eyeball now lolled in the bowl of withered white bell flowers. Was it Terry’s? Or another, nameless, victim?

With a sinking feeling, Saru walked to the edge of the platform. Her eyes followed the lights down, down, down into the pit, to where the massive door now lay open.

There was an elevator, she saw, a steel platform the size of an industrial dumpster that slid down two metal rails to drop her just in front of the door. It moved comically slow, giving her more time to think than she needed. The bare light bulbs passed one by slowpoke one, the platform above getting smaller and smaller, and she reflected on her own stupidity.

Mercenaries—she could have hired a dozen crackheads with shotguns to run ahead and eat bullets for her. Another light. How many bullets did she have left? Three antitank. Twenty-seven antipersonnel. Four flashers. Some blanks. Another light. Fourteen microgrenades. A kick shiv. Three tranquilizers. A souped-up, tinker-special cattle prod. Another light. Not much of an arsenal against an alien god.

The elevator came to a juddering stop right in front of the door. Truly massive, larger than she’d thought, you could drive a whole subway car through it. Why had Friar needed such a large door anyway? She realized she had to pee and shuffled into a corner behind one of the door’s hinges to relieve herself.

Better.

There was a control panel with seemingly obvious open and close buttons, but also a keypad lock. Was he keeping something in or something out? Or maybe he stashed his gold in there in great heaps and piles—wouldn’t that be a happy ending? A ring of the same bare bulbs that traced the elevator illuminated the area around the door but didn’t do much to punch away the darkness beyond. She could see about eight feet into the threshold—dirt floor and naked rock, and there was the faint outline of a concrete frame amidst the rock. Here goes nothing.

She stepped into the darkness and then took another step. Nothing happened. She took another step and then a skip. “Hey, Friar!” she yelled down the tunnel. Her voice echoed back, except it seemed to be saying, “Idiot.” What had she expected?

The door closed behind her. Heavy. Quick. Silent. Not a slam but a sigh as it sucked shut. The lights went out. She took a few steps into the quivering darkness then switched on her implanted night vision. She was in a tunnel, the same width and height as the door, and dank and wet and clammy. There were footprints in the dirt. Her scanners told her they belonged to size-nine male loafers. Calculating the dust accumulation they were recent. No drops of blood. No shambling pattern of a ruined body.

She kept walking. It seemed like she walked for a very long time, but maybe it was just her creeping sobriety. Crap. There were just a few swills—now her flask was empty and the backup flask was low. She had some diluted uppers in her pocket ring, but would that be enough to keep her courage up?

Walking and walking and walking and—what was that?

An ominous bulk squatted in the dark. Something mechanical. Something arachnid. The Betty hopped into her grip.

Her scanner spotted a pattern amidst the metal. A barcode. The Net connection was nonexistent down here but her cached encyclopedia drive produced a result: The Hathaway DreamHouser 840X: The only limit is your imagination. It was a construction machine. A personal fabrication dozer. A programmable implant-controlled model. A tool of the rich to customize their mansions. Friar must have used it to build his lair. The tunnel was just a garage. A place to store the damn thing.

But no. Why so deep? This model was the size of a semitruck. He could have dug a hole in the wall and covered it with a tarp. If anything, storing it down here was extremely inconvenient. Building metal platforms and an elevator. Installing bank-vault doors and support pylons.

Friar had been trying to get somewhere. Go somewhere.

Saru ducked under the fab dozer’s crane and edged her way around its mechanical arms. The metal pinged and hummed against her accidental collisions. The sound rang down the tunnel. The rock on the other side of the dozer was different; rougher. Mixed with…concrete. It was decayed and crumbling. Rusting rebar twisted out like squashed mosquito legs. She didn’t even need her implants to tell her this was ancient. The dozer had fused a metal airlock into the concrete wall, what seemed to be its final act. An oily musk drifted through the open doors.

Saru scrambled through the airlock and into another tunnel, wider, running perpendicular, formed of concrete. Her clunky footsteps kicked up fits of dust and she coughed and the cough ricocheted to the left and right. She balanced at the edge of a platform collapsing into a channel. Amidst the mucky rubble, three metal tracks ran along the channel floor. Cracked tiles. Crooked steel beams. Trickles of percolating sewage and rain. Stalactites oozing from the sagging ceiling. Freckles of orange moss eating the paint spelled out psychedelic letters that her scanner interpolated as “Broad Street Line.”

Friar had connected his tunnel to the abandoned subway system.

She had to give it to him—the man was smart. He needed elzi for his experiments. But dragging them off the street through his front door wouldn’t work. Sooner or later someone would notice if he pulled up with a truck and unloaded a body. Maybe he could have gotten away with stealing corpses or trafficking normal dopes, but elzi were a completely different animal. They were deadly and unpredictable. Immune to reason and most methods of suppression. So he had to go where they were. He must have planned the whole thing out. He was loaded from working for the Gaespora. He bought the fab dozer. Found the old plans for the subway. Hell, maybe he bought the house to be close. And then, in no time at all, he could carve out everything he needed—a laboratory and a pipeline of test subjects. There were hordes of elzi in the subway system. An endless supply.

No violence. Nothing messy. He could just lure them out with a hot dog on a stick and shut the door behind him. And the bodies could disappear just as neatly. Elzi ate dead elzi, after all.

How long had he been doing this? How many elzi had he dissected? He must have learned all kinds of secrets about the margins, about the gods. Is that what he had been trying to do all along? Become a god? Had he kept his plans from the Gaespora? Or had they suspected, observed, encouraged his experiments? Had they used him just like they used her? To do the dirty work they were afraid to?

The subway platform rumbled. A rain of soft debris pelted her bare head. A croak of metal. And then silence. But not quite silence. She could hear it now. The song that was the birth and death of the universe. Atoms crackling like gristle on a stove. Currents of pale nothing. Joy and dread and the convoluted geometries of flesh: uausuausuausuau…

A glimmer of something to the left. A flickering blue amidst the green of her night vision. It was like she remembered it more than she saw it. Like it was inside of her. Or imagined. A fang. An eye. A tail. And then nothing.

Whatever. A sign was as good as a hunch or a coin flip. She slid down the ramp of rubble and followed the subway tracks to the left. The Betty twitched in her palm, expecting a confrontation with some enemy, but her motion detectors found nothing. Well. Not quite nothing. The bent beams and cracked concrete walls teemed in her periphery. Countless micromotions that registered as ripples of static in the green-gray haze of—

“WaystarOpticsTM: Upgrade to PremiumPlus for superior night optics, enhanced motion detection range, and infrared heat scanners. Enter coupon code HELPNOW for fifteen percent off.” An advertisement flared across her night vision, bright and startling; its melodic jingle rumbled like a gong in her skull. Anywhere she looked the ad was there, blinking and flashing, blocking everything.

Shit. She forgot to pay the subscription fee. She blinked back into her normal sight and met darkness. Not a wink of light from an old emergency call box or a discarded implant. Just clammy air and a stench of decay so fierce she could taste it like a jelly coating her tongue.

She rummaged in the pockets of her peacoat and found a fold-out reconnaissance drone. It wasn’t exactly a mining bot but it had a flashlight. She flicked it into the air and it fluttered into a muffled hold above her, moving like a balloon tied to an invisible string. By its thin beam she examined the rippling walls. They were oddly bulbous, swelling and sinking into hills and valleys like big greasy bubble wrap.

 Something moved across them. Many, many somethings. Insects. Ants. Maggots. Flies. Grubs. Vermin. Mice and rats and pigeons. Possums and the occasional startled raccoon. They squirmed across the walls and floors and ceilings in a stew of decomposition. Their tails wriggled and their wings flapped without purpose. Their glassy eyes accused. Their flaccid limbs wagged in a pantomime of life. And then—a face. Human. Glassy white bulged eyes, rolling under the carpet of deadness. The nose rotted away. The mouth chomping mechanically, chewing, grinding, the fleshy paste slurping down a ragged throat into the bulbous protrusion. It was a stomach, a belly, stretched to the size of a trash bag, the skin stretched to parting, translucent, fusing to another hump, another belly, connected to another face, a honeycomb of human bodies fused to the walls, feasting on a slurry of garbage.

Disgust forced her backwards; something caught her heel and she bashed it with the prod. A spark and a dull thud. A retching splush. The hump was another body, a stomach bulged like a beach ball, popping against the force of her strike, the half-digested contents spilling free. The face of the body whimpered, the head trying to bite and lick her boot with toothless gums, stuck by a neck fused to the ground. The arms and legs had distended, softened, bent into snaking fleshy tubules, that merged with the other warped limbs of the other monstrous bodies to form a network running up and down the tunnel.

“Shit…” Saru said it like a prayer against the dark. A talisman of normalcy.

She followed the fleshy tubules deeper into the subway. More of them now. A thicker slime undulating across the walls and ceiling. More skulls, more distended, impossible, gigantic stomachs, teeth chomping, tongues lapping, puny arms and legs melting into stringy connective tissues. The metal and the rust and the water and the fungus and rock penetrated by digestive filaments. All of it dissolving. Disintegrating.

Crack. Sizzle. Pop. She could hear with a sense beyond sound the crunch of atoms. The oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide of the very air being ripped apart. The aerosolized driblets of water and the algae and bacteria within slurped up. Bones bending and buckling, gnawed, splintering, snapping.

Fear trilled down her spine, clamping the muscles in her throat, raising the goosebumps on her neck, squeezing her lungs and guts. It was the spastic knee-jerk of prey. Save yourself. Save this body. This “precious” mind. Protect it. Even for a few more hours. Or days. Hell, a year and seven months. Just run. Just go. Away from here. Out of this dark tunnel. The fear was comforting. A blanket of humanity. She laughed, and the laugh too was devoured.

“Is this it?” she called. “This all you got?”

The only answer was the melody of grunts and the grating of teeth. Sucking and slurping. Wet sopping mucous. Slithering tongues. The retching of acids. The squirm of satisfied viscera. The ripping of skin.

Crunch. Slurp. Munch. Suck.

Snap. Chew. Slather. Lick.

Uausuausuausuausuausuau…

Thick and gooey the noises fell over her. A billion little voices. A trillion hungry jaws. The light from her drone sagged and drizzled like syrup, as if it too were being eaten.

She pressed on.

A draft of air. Spears of welcoming brightness. The tunnel widened into another station, what must have once been a central hub but now was a wilting cave. The ancient platforms had rotted into to mounds of slime. The alien intestinal tubes wove around the columns and elevator shafts like creeping vines. High, high above, twinkling stars of daylight sent down their pale rays to be eaten. They were sewer grates or manholes, probably in the Assistance Zone or the Fish.

Saru imagined the people overhead, lost in the Net, absorbed in their feeds, consumed by their own masturbatory self-stimulation. Oh what fabulous ignorance. How much better not to know the horrible truth, to instead play out the imaginary conflicts of narcissistic fantasy. A thin crust of asphalt was all that kept them apart, the happy, deluded lunatics, and the enlightened demon creeping through the sewers.

Splash!

Something fell from the speckled heights and landed in the pool of half-digested slop. With a slithering dread Saru approached. It was a body. A human. Male. Older. Unpowered ocular implants staring into nothing. The pool rippled. Little, half-seen things wriggled in the ooze. They crawled under the man’s eyelids and into his ears. Down his throat and into his nostrils. Then the water swirled into a whirlpool and drained away, taking the body with it.

More motion. Soft whimpers. Dragging footsteps. They came from another tunnel—too many tunnels! They were elzi, but not like any she had seen before. Not scrawny and decayed. These were fat with blubber, their forms comically distended, like the belly-things in the wall. Their mouths were welted rings, no teeth or tongue, and oozing black drool. Strange, protuberant implants sprouted from the folds of their bloated skin. She drew a bead on the nearest, but it paid her no heed. It knelt by the drained pool and vomited, a continuous porridge of blackness, more mechanical than organic. Its skin deflated and sagged. The elzi shrank as it purged itself of liquids. More splashes. More waddling elzi kneeling to puke out their scavenged feasts. More dead things tumbling from the mesh of pipes above.

The cavern shook, spattering her with hot slime. A dragged-metal shriek like a derailing train drowned out even the slobbering walls and sloshing vomits. All the hackles on her skin rose. Something was coming. Something worse than this. The sound, the song, the mutilated voices calling, screaming, uausuausuausuau…

She picked a direction and ran.

And tripped. Pools of the dissolving stew pockmarked the uneven ground, interspersed with the veinous tubules. She scrambled up and promptly fell again, slipping up to her knees into the digestive fluid. Chunks of meat bobbed against her. Bones hollow-knocking together. She clawed her way out and ripped off her peacoat, which crawled with the things too small and dark to be seen in the shadows. They bit her legs, and she activated the stun-field mesh woven through her clothes, and they fell away as she ran. Her sight bobbed. The drone couldn’t keep up. She flashed the contact plates in her palm for a spark of light, searching for some exit, some way out, the panic choking in her throat. Her breath in her ears, her heart a flutter, her muscles weightless with adrenaline—somewhere there had to be some way out. The chamber shook again.

Her fists clenched the rusted iron bars of a sluice gate. She wrenched them with all her strength, the micromuscle enhancers at full power, and the bars gave. She tossed them aside and then tried to squeeze through the jagged gap. The sharp, bent ends opened her skin.

Blueness rippled across her vision. An unearthly calm settled over her; an electric shiver trickled down her spine. No. This wasn’t right. She couldn’t get away. She wouldn’t die like a mouse in a trap.

It was coming now. She could see its formless form in the shadows from the spears of light. Vaporous darkness pouring in from the tunnels. Yet solid and real. She glimpsed a metal body, hundreds of legs clicking across the floor and walls and ceiling, coiling like a centipede. Its bulk loomed in the darkness, just beyond the reality of her senses.

She took a step towards it.

The creature lurked at the edge of the pale, sick light from her drone. Even seeing it, Saru couldn’t fully know what it was. The information carried from the photons and all the experience of her brain had no understanding. But every trigger of revulsion and despair fired across her nerves, needles in her bones and shivering skin. She saw bodies. Dozens of human torsos fused into a seething lump. Their arms swayed in an invisible current. Their dead eyes wept tears of ichor down upon her. Their rotted mouths whispered in dead-leaf voices, “…come…come…come…come…”

Closer, closer, closer—their arms reaching out in joyous welcome. Saru could feel their pull like a metal shaving against a magnet. It was just like with the Jojran imposter, an existential, psychic, biological lure. But with this there was no deceit, no trickery, no flowery words, no reason to compel her—just raw, brute power. She had to fight her own limbs from reaching out, her heart from bursting in longing, her groin from aching for an infinite love. Oh, how she needed this. Oh, to be borne lovingly into that ecstatic mob.

When the mass of groping hands was inches from her face, Saru deployed the prod. It had a back-alley overload feature, dodgy, dumb, and dangerous as hell, turning the two feet of steel into a Tesla coil for an emergency just like this. Not that she ever figured this was how it would go down. She jammed it right through the eye socket of the skull moaning in front of her and leapt back as arcs of lighting jiggled out. The mass of bodies screamed, a vibration so fierce it popped blood vessels in her eyes and possibly her brain. Not wanting to see what happened next, she ran.

A lucky toss with a microgrenade blasted open the sluice gate and she dove through the cloud of fire, shielding her face with her arm. She landed in a stream of fluid, running blind, the drone gone. The whole tunnel shook and the creature bashed against the gate. When she’d gained some distance she looked back and felt more than saw the mass of bodies pressed into the gap. They wriggled after her, elongating, detaching from the mass, trailing into strings as they pulled themselves forward with their arms.

Saru toyed with tossing a few more grenades, but she didn’t want to bring the tunnel down on top of her, so she kept running. The tunnel bent and tilted, down, down—and then she was falling as it dropped off. She tumbled down a concrete ramp coated in slick grime, splashing along with some hot rushing liquid. And then with a bump she came to a stop on the cutting metal bars of a grate. The liquid poured over her. Saru lay there enjoying life for a moment, noticing how special it was to experience sensation, even horrible sensation, and then picked herself up.

A strange, dim, ambient light penetrated the darkness. She could make out the gray lumps of some kind of structure. It must have been part of the old sewer system—did the Hungry God eat shit too? Of course it did; it wasn’t proud. A meal was a meal, and food was energy, and energy was power, and all this time the shit and garbage had been leaking down here, the waste of a wasteful species a feast for its predator.

She wandered—for what seemed like too long—through the networks of tubes and digesting pools. And other things too. Things that pumped and shivered. That squirmed and jiggled with life. That defied her imagination or understanding. She scanned the things, briefly, looking for some kind of exit, afraid to look too long. Her implants warned her the air was thin here, though it felt dense.

The song was louder than ever. Loud enough it seemed she could make out individual voices, recognizable voices, familiar voices, hundreds, thousands, high and low, all singing together in a vicious harmony. It was the song in the screams of newborns and the gasps of the newly dead, in car honks and ballads, the song of an eye grating against its socket and a worm digging its way through human flesh: uausuausuausuausuausuausuausuau…

With a crawling, slithering-vinyl sensation in her palms, with a sick, slimy dread, she followed the song to an arch in the wall formed of tubes and muscles. As she approached, they unclamped and reddish golden light poured forth. The light felt strange and awful, like she was suffocating in a coffin, though it let her see. It was nothing like the light of her sun, or even her universe. It gave off no warmth or comfort. She was naked within it, exposed, like the light was undressing her, studying her, absorbing her.

She stepped through the arch onto a bridge and stopped as she tried to comprehend what lay beyond. The bridge was one of countless connective tissues leading to…something. It was an organ. A heart. A brain. A stomach. An eye. An egg. It was a structure, too, with doors at the ends of the bridges, and things that could only be machines. It was as big as a cathedral—no, bigger, a stadium at least. The cavern holding it was so big it tricked her perspective. The thing grew from a chasm in the earth, as deep and wide as a canyon, and—

The chasm writhed with bodies.

Thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, millions? Dead—or alive? They moved, or seemed to, like maggots in a great fleshy soup. From another hole—a lower hole, a hole with no bridge—came another one of the centipede creatures. It slithered out of the hole and down the side of the chasm, no end to its body. The first half of it detached from the chasm wall and swung gracefully out over the abyss below. It reared and Saru saw clenched in its mandibles a line of human forms—oh god, children too! A wave rose up, the arms of the bodies within it reaching out to embrace the bodies trapped in the centipede. They were cradled and carried down with care and disappeared into the sea of flesh. Then the centipede slithered back up the wall and back into its hole and was gone.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Saru whirled and the Betty leapt to her hand. Friar leaned against the arch she had just come from, arms crossed, smiling at her.

“So glad you could—”

Saru fired three times. The first bullet struck Friar dead in the forehead and spattered out with the back of his skull. The other two bullets she pumped into his chest for good measure. He lay still, a satisfying pose of shock replacing his smile.

A wet sloshing came from the pit. A tendril of bodies rose up and dropped a shivering blob of flesh onto the bridge. It wobbled into the shape of a man with a potbelly and a bald pate. Clothes formed from the same material, shoes sprouting out from the feet, trousers and the jacket growing like the skin, just like his hair and eyebrows. It took about a minute for Friar to form again, a perfect replica, and when he was done he stretched like he’d just gotten out of bed.

“—join me. I understand, you need to express your feelings.” He raised his arms and exposed his chest. “I’m sorry this has been such a trying experience for you.”

“I wonder,” Saru said. “How many times do I have to kill you for you to stay dead?” She nodded down at the pit. “That many?”

“And even then I would live forever in the UausuaU,” Friar said. “Safe, happy, and eternal.”

“What about that thing?” Saru aimed at the colossal organ. With a mental command she loaded her last explosive bullet into the chamber. “What happens when I shoot that thing there with a cruise missile?”

“Nothing happens,” Friar said. “But I think you already know that.”

She had to try. A delicious roar from the Betty’s barrel. A brilliant orange explosion erupting from the impact site. She’d hoped for a reaction similar to jamming the prod into the centipede’s eye. But there was nothing like that. The smoke cleared and the organ was undamaged. It didn’t so much as blacken or bleed. The bodies in the pit didn’t scream. No creatures burst from the hives in the stone and hacked her apart with their claws. Friar didn’t even wince.

“Take all the time you need,” he said.

Out of ideas, Saru plucked the white bell flower from her hair and dropped it into the pit. It fluttered out of sight. Nothing happened.

“Well, I think I’ll be going then,” Saru said. “Nice to see you again.” You sick bastard.

Before she could even take a step, the muscles of the arch flexed and the exit sucked closed.

“Actually, there was something I wanted to show you,” Friar said, as if it were the most casual idea in the world. A new toaster. A photo of his niece. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

“I do mind, I really, really do.” Saru studied the arch, wondering what it would take to force open, how many seconds she had before Friar ripped out her eyes and ate her heart. What other way could she get out of here?

“I’ll make it worth your time,” Friar said. “Money, that’s what you love, is it not?”

Another wave rose from the pit, an eerie swirling curve of human ooze looming above her. Individual body parts wriggled out, faces with gold teeth, fingers with gold rings, implants with gold wiring. Squiggles of gold slithered up from the sea, and a clinking rain of gold fell around them, forming drifts and piles.

“Take as much as you like.” Friar’s smile nearly twisted off his face.

Saru held out a palm and it filled with golden trinkets. A golden iris from an ocular implant winked at her, still wet with blood. Saru tossed the trinkets back into the pit.

“Perhaps you prefer carnal pleasure,” Friar said. Was he enjoying this? Taunting your enemy—that was a human thing for sure. Or did the aliens get off on that too?

Bodies dropped from the wave, slick, slimy, broken dolls. They twitched and plumped, reforming, hugging and grappling with one another, trading parts and flesh, hollow cheeks filling in, tattered skin sealing, reforming, bronzing, until a gang of muscular hunks flexed and posed. They were flawless, smirking, beautiful. Horrible.

“No thanks,” Saru spat. “This doesn’t really set the mood.”

“Power,” Friar said. “That’s your true desire.”

The beautiful men screamed and fell to the ground, shrinking into thin, skeletal stick figures. They crawled on their hands and knees towards her, bowing and praying, calling her name in dead voices, Saru, Saru, Saru the Great! Saru the Mighty! Saru the Savior! Saru, we worship you! They grabbed at her boots to kiss them with their cracked lips and she kicked them away. Their skin burst and their fluids sloshed together, forming into a hard black substance that molded into statues of her, hair flowing in the wind, tall, gallant, heroic, godly.

Friar studied the statues like they were on a date at the art museum. “An excellent, if somewhat embellished, likeness.”

“Never thought you were the sort to waste your breath playing games,” Saru said.

Friar clucked. “This is no game. Anything you want you will have. Money. Fame. Power. Immortality. A new life. The same life, but better. All the traumas of your childhood removed. All the hate and violence turned to peace, love, and joy.”

“I want to leave. Immediately.”

“No.” Friar shook his head. “You suffer from the same disease as I did. It’s the disease that drew us to our careers. What kept us crawling the midnight alleys of filth and degeneracy. What brought me here and you too.”

“Insanity.”

“Curiosity. You want to know. I can feel it in you, even if you deny it. You want to know what’s in there.” He pointed at the thing above the pit. “That’s what you want. More than anything.”

“Wrong again. You were doing better with the gold.”

“Go then,” Friar said.

The sphincter of the arch slid open. Saru looked between it and Friar.

“It’s no trick,” Friar said. “You’re free to leave.”

Saru took a step towards the door. A rustle in her brain gave her pause. The white bell flower was back in her hair. She recalled Hemu’s wet-sock punch, his words: what moves a god? ElilE. He’d said something too. The Blue God waits. Waiting for what? To see if humans would fight.

It was wrong. There was no safety through that door. Maybe Friar really would let her go, for now. For an hour. Or a day. A year even. A lifetime. But she would still be hunted. There was nowhere to hide from a thing like this. A fake ID and a haircut wouldn’t cut it. There was more at play here than saving her skin in the moment. Movement, ritual, symbolism, game boards she couldn’t see because she was just another piece being plucked and pushed around.

Friar watched her. She wondered how much he could see in her face, how much she gave away. He gave away nothing. What was he, even? Friar for sure. And not at all. Could this thing he was part of literally read her mind? No. The white bell flower was there, protecting her. And she had the eyes too. Her eyes—were they seeing more than she saw? Was the dog now looking through them, watching the scene unfold, and judging? A howl sparked in her chest, a maelstrom waiting to claw its way out, an electric blue sense of being alien to her own self.

“Okay,” she said, biting her teeth, fighting every instinct across every muscle in her body urging her towards the door, to the illusion of escape. It was a trick, a trap for sure, even if she couldn’t see the spike waiting to impale her, she knew the signs. “Show me what you got.”