Page 27 of Godslayer
I turn a corner and there they are. A parade of bots carrying women and girls. I get in line, keeping pace. They don’t notice me—don’t pay any attention to me at all—but I didn’t expect they would. Tyse comes up next to me and together, we follow the bots and unconscious women and girls into the next room.
It’s not as loud in here, so Tyse is saying, “We should go. This is a bad idea. We should just go.”
But I’m shaking my head, stepping aside, out of the line, so I can take in what the actual fuck I’m looking at.
It’s not vats of spark, it’s… I can’t even come up with a word. My eyes travel up the wall of the tower—it must be twenty or thirty levels, at least. And every inch of these walls has a tank attached to it. Tanks, and tanks, and tanks—all the way up to the tippy top of the tower—filled with glowing spark.
“It’s insane,” I catch Tyse muttering. “This is fuckin’ insane. No wonder the air in Delta City is clogged with spark like ash in a forest fire. He’s got oceans of it.”
Which is an exaggeration, but only marginally. Because these tanks of spark have to equal lakes, at least.
“Why does he need so much?” I ask.
“Power,” Tyse whispers. “That’s the only possible answer. It gives him power. And once ya have a bit of it, ya always want more.”
It occurs to me, in this very moment and maybe for the first time ever—which is embarrassing—that I have no fucking idea what spark evendoes.
I mean, I used it to make whimsical drawings in the air.
What a joke.
Because clearly spark is something spectacular if a god needs this much of it.
I look at Tyse, wanting to read his expression, but I find him looking elsewhere. And when my gaze follows his, I find the answer to my question about what Delta is doing to these girls and women who didn’t make it home in time for harvest.
They’re all on beds. Clustered under the tanks that line the walls. They are in various stages of being plugged in and the ones who got here earlier are pale, almost gray. The tubes connecting them to the tanks are empty now, drops of residual spark cling to the interior, evidence that they’ve already been harvested.
Are they dead?
Tyse must be asking himself the same thing because he walks over to a child and places his finger on her neck. His eyes find mine. “She’s alive, but barely.”
I force my mind to think, trying to work all this new information out. He doesn’t kill them. The punishment for missing your harvest is to be drained to the edge of death.
They’ll probably wake up in their own beds, maybe? Their ownstable. The bots having returned them to the farm. And they will carry on with their lives. Vowing to never miss another harvest.
I let out a long breath, finally having seen enough, but unable to take my eyes off the scene playing out all around me.
There are at least a hundred women and girls in here. And from the screens, I would calculate that this is a tiny fraction of the population. Delta has thousands of women in his herd of Spark Maidens. And he even takes it from the children.
Girls. That couple had three girls. He must breed for females.
The Extraction is starting to look like a pretty good time compared to Delta’s dystopian nightmare.
Tyse walks back over to me, offering his hand. “Come on. Let’s go. We’ve seen enough.”
I take his hand and allow him to lead me out of the tank room, back into the roaring vat room, and we head back the way we came.
There’s a faint beeping noise. Coming from outside, I think. And I can just barely make out Delta’s recorded voice—so soothing, such a lie—telling his people that the evening harvest is now over.
When will he do it again? Is there a night harvest? Or will he let them sleep until morning and milk them then?
If I thought I was ever going back to Delta City, I might start planning a conversation with the tyrant. I might pick and choose my words carefully. Hoping to make him feel guilty enough to reconsider what he’s doing here.
But I’m not going back. Even before finding this place, I knew that.
Never. I’mnevergoing back.
Tyse leads me out of the tower. We pass several dozen bots—none of which pay any attention to us. And when we get to the door that leads back out to the train, I see the sign. A sign I didn’t notice on the way in because we were on the other side of this door and didn’t have a reason to look behind us once we passed through it.
