But this Ord grabbed an ankle and yanked her off her feet.
Then he jumped up and set his foot against her neck, letting her curse and lash at him, then in her rage biting through her own tongue and spitting it at him.
The air gave a supersonic crack as the tongue passed.
New hands were unmanacled. But instead of throwing him off, she grabbed Ord and pulled him close, an irresistible strength leaving him lying on top of her, chest to chest, his left ear pressed against her tongue-less mouth.
This wasn’t Ravleen. This was a monster, nothing but a scorching rage and a shred of embittered, poisoned intellect that gave the rage its direction.
“More talents,” she begged with other mouths. “Let me kill him, please. Please.”
“No,” said a Nuyen’s calculating voice. “No.”
Xo was kneeling on the sweet grass, and with a genuine pain, he told Ord, “You know, you really can’t win this thing.”
Part of Ord wanted to believe him. Defeat meant peace and a kind of freedom, all of his massive responsibilities taken from him.
“You’re simply too weak,” Xo informed him.
Ord said nothing.
The Nuyen’s talents were at work. Oily and cold, they slipped inside him and spoke with a pure confidence, telling his soul, “If you surrender, at this moment, nobody needs to die. Including you.”
“Shut up!” Ravleen screamed. She laid beneath Ord as if he was her lover, and her face colored and twisted, the eyes throwing fire at Xo. “Just please give me another fucking hand, and shut up!”
For an instant, her grip was stronger.
Slightly.
Then weakened again; Ord barely noticed.
Unnoticed, the bear-dogs had made a circle around them. Then one of the beasts became Avram, and he grabbed Xo and pulled him away. Another was Buteo, and she calmly and expertly took hold of the Sanchex monster, peeling back hands until Ord could find his way to his feet again. Then the other bear-dogs—much modified in the last moments— put their cavernous mouths around various body parts, and waited. And the humans watched Ord, waiting for whatever he said or did next.
The artificial moon filled the sky, and the mountain turned to magma again.
Then came a rumbling thunder, vast and vaguely musical, and Ord smiled as if embarrassed. He hid his genitals with his hands, and quietly, in a near-whisper, told Xo, “You were right. I wasn’t strong enough to win.”
No one spoke.
“But I am now,” he admitted.
The Nuyen’s face lost its color, its life. “You can’t be. The defense grid is on full alert. Talent requires mass, and nothing has moved into the system since—”
He hesitated, and winced.
Quietly, to himself, he said, “Shit.”
Ravleen chewed off her lower lip, then spat it at her captors.
Wide-eyed, Xo gazed up at the sky. “You’ve always been here,” he muttered. “That refugee boy was the last of you, not the first.”
Ord nodded, distracted now.
The moon’s framework was dissolving, its mysterious guts obeying gravity, pouring out of it like a great, invisible river.
Xo tried to pull his arms free, and the bear-dogs snipped them off at the shoulders and left them flexing and twitching in a neat pile, the hands instinctively clinging to one another.
Then Ord opened a ten-kilometer mouth, finally slaking his fantastic thirst.
8
It was meant to be a weapon, a tool that could destroy talents en masse.
Nothing like it has ever been produced—certainly not in our galaxy— and we should point out, the device was designed and built by every surviving Family, plus civilian agencies. Costs were shared, and responsibilities were shared, and there were inevitable failures in security. Its final assembly took a thousand years in deep interstellar space—a requirement born of microgravity constraints—and our best guess is that the Chamberlain took control of the project then. He gutted our work, then successfully hid his own body parts inside the device. Then he let us make fools of ourselves, delivering him to the unsuspecting Earth… with as much pageantry as security allowed… each one of us boasting, “This is for you. We have done this wonderful thing for you…!”
For Xo, there was no compelling sense of failure. No self-pity tugged at him, and in a strange fashion, there wasn’t so much as a breath of remorse. The truth was clear-cut: No combination of skill and luck could have beaten the Chamberlain. This situation was born hopeless, and he was blameless. Free of his obligations, Xo could halfway relax. Inside himself, in secret, he nearly smiled. Then he made an effort to adapt to his new circumstances—as a prisoner, as a hostage—watching events but knowing that he had no role but to witness these momentous, inevitable deeds.
With an soft, almost pissy voice, Ord announced, “Now, finally, I’m going to visit my sister.”
The words saturated every channel, public and Family, then trailed off into a screaming white hiss that frustrated every other attempt to speak.
The Papago woman said, “Finally! It’s about time!”
Ord clothed himself in gray trousers and a bulky gray shirt, but he left his body young and his chin injured by Ravleen, still dripping its illusionary blood.
Avram was still holding Xo. He had a relentless grip and a nervous, loud voice. “What do you want from me?” he inquired.
“Stay with Buteo,” Ord replied. “While I’m gone, help her hold the Sanchex.”
Ravleen was too dangerous to be left with just one of them. Xo would agree, if anyone bothered to ask him.
“What about this one?” Avram asked, giving Xo a hard shake. “What do you want done with him?”
Ord’s eyes were distant. Unreadable.
Eventually he said, “The Nuyen will stay with me.”
Xo found himself freed, sporting two functioning arms again.
“I want you to watch,” Ord promised. “Everything. Then you’ll tell your big brothers and sisters that I meant it. I came to talk to Alice. And everything else that’s happened was their fault. No one else’s.”
The last few steps were exactly that. Steps.
The two of them had already passed through plastic rock and collapsing defenses, an army left scattered above them. Temporarily blind; utterly lost. Xo found himself inside an infinite hallway lined with an infinite number of identical doors, armored and mined. It was a powerful escher. He took two steps, then looked over his shoulder. Ord was standing before one door. His face seemed empty, his bare feet frozen to the slick white floor. Reaching for the coded pad, he slowly changed his hand to match the jailer’s.
Then, he hesitated.
“Is she there?” Xo asked.
“Yes.”
Ord spoke in a whisper, fearful and abrupt.
Xo heard himself ask, “Are you scared?”
“For every imaginable reason,” the Chamberlain confessed.
“Don’t be,” Xo advised. He laughed for a moment, then explained, “Alice has been locked up for so long, and treated so badly by so many people… honestly, I doubt if she’ll remember much more than her name.”
The Chamberlain nodded, then touched the pad, and pushed.
Alice was in the middle of her tiny cell, walking away from them: Step, and step, and then at the tiny white toilet, the smooth turn. For a slippery instant, she seemed oblivious to her guests. Soft blue eyes stared through them, and she took another step, then paused gradually, ignoring her brother but staring hard at the Nuyen.