“I didn’t mean for this…”
“I didn’t mean,” she mocked, making her lips quiver like mine. Her eyes flashed as my hand touched her spiked boots. “You carried unauthorized, alien hardware onto a governmental shuttle, despite attending multiple security briefings instructing you against such indiscretion. You are either sinister, careless, or a gibbering idiot. Embrace the consequences of your actions, young lady. In the end, you may not have your freedom, but perhaps you’ll find your dignity. A true woman needs little else.”
Then the light swallowed the Gold right back up.
I raced for the shrinking door, but it just disappeared into the wall. I beat at it with my fists and screamed till knuckle bone peeked out my skin.
I knew it would never open again.
I wept and curled around my hands and licked my aching knuckles like a sad dog. I hated that woman. I hated her so much, but deep down I knew I’d do anything for her to fill the room again. To see another person once more…
When my bladder grew tight, I just pissed where I lay. I no longer even tilted my head to look as the food slot opened. What was the point? Everyone knows there’s nothing worse than a Julii scorned.
I decayed. I am decaying.
How long since I’ve eaten?
Are there really butterflies in the room?
I remember the mad look in Dagan’s eyes when Pa found him three days lost in the deepmines. He swore he saw demons. He was never the same again. His kind heart replaced by a sour doppelgänger’s.
Am I going mad like he did? I must be.
Demons visit me as my body wastes away, specters made from the light of the place. The scarred woman of the Red Hand who shot my brother’s head off. The liar, Ephraim, who saw I was broken, and put me back together only so he could use me. His Obsidian henchwoman who shot Kavax. That Brown bitch with the needle. The lean, sweaty boy-men who cut my family and clan to pieces with curved iron, and gnawed the innocence out of a hundred Gamma girls.
They mock me in the chaos of light.
But they also bring their victims. Those I love, my brothers, my family, little blind Liam, Kavax who took us from the mud and brought us to Luna, who alone could make Liam’s face shine when his mother lay in the dirt.
What did I ever do to protect them? What did I ever do to save them?
All I did was run or hide.
As the light spasms above me and my body grows light with exhaustion, I sense a calm clarity that turns my life into a tapestry. A story told by someone else.
Here’s little Lyria. She watched herself be freed. She watched herself put in a camp. Others watched her complain. She watched her family die. She watched big bad Hyperion chew her up and spit her out. She watched as she decayed in her cell.
Is that all I am? A watcher? A victim?
Disgust seeps up through the cracks in the bottom of my heart.
How many times did I blame the Reaper? How many times did I roll my eyes when Red legionnaires would visit our camp and spin those yarns of Darrow and the Vanguard. Darrow and the undead Goblin. Darrow, the Julii, and Valkyrie at Ilium. Darrow and the Jackal and the Two Hundred Seventy Days our messiah spent in the monster’s table.
“The Second Birth, they call it, lass,” the young Red legionnaire said, swiveling on the water drum when he saw I wasn’t swallowing the hook like my brothers. His hand touched his chest as he looked around, his voice barely a whisper. “From Mars to Mercury, all know that’s when he became the Reaper. When the man became something more. I’ve seen him in the flesh. At Echo City. He’s got something in him, I’ll tell you that. Something like thunder in a bottle.” He waved his hands at the potential recruits, his voice rising. “And that’s in all of us. Each clanfolk with Red in their eyes. Lambda to Gamma. We may not be big. No. We may not be rich. But we got what he got. Wrath. Seven hundred years of it thundering in our veins.”
Forty-five lined up to give their lives to the Free Legions that day, including two of my brothers. They were just a lot of fools worshipping some jumped-up Helldiver with a Gold wife and a Gold spawn. He wasn’t one of us any longer. I blamed him for taking my brothers, for leaving us mired in the camp, for all that’d gone wrong. But one person couldn’t do all that. He freed us, and then we stayed in the camp and waited for him to do all the rest.
Waiting. Waiting.
Waiting while the tales that made us big began to make us feel small, because we didn’t make the choice like those brave boys and girls did.
We didn’t choose to fight.
Well, fuck me if I’m gonna wait any longer. Survival is my fight.
When the synth food shoots through the tube some hours later, I make a choice. My body is weak, my pants crusted with my own filth as I crawl. But I make it there and I choke down the tasteless fiber cubes and protein and wash them down with water from the tube. When food comes again, I jam it down. Soon the hallucinations disappear. The
dread loneliness grows smaller, dwarfed by the anger at my own eagerness to surrender.