The Last Hour of Gann (168 page)

“Hurt?” Iziz came back to her, his head still cocked, still smiling. “You didn’t look very hurt the last time I saw you. Did Zhuqa get a cut in after all? Did I? Tell me you bled for me, Eshiqi.”

“It was a—”

Iziz turned back in the same easy, friendly manner, drew his sword and hit Dag in the face with the hilt. The sound of bone crunching was somehow louder than Dag’s scream, and the spattering of blood and teeth falling over the ground was even louder than that. “When I talk to you, I’ll look at you,” Iziz said, and looked back at Amber. “How bad were you hurt when Druud tried to kill you? I’m curious. Wait.” He glanced behind him to the raiders standing over Dag, who was still screaming even as he tried to fit his shattered jaw back into place, and said, “Shut that thing up or get rid of it.”

The nearest raider helpfully kicked Dag in the side, then smacked him in the head with the pommel of his knife a few times, and finally grabbed him by the hair and started hauling him
toward the hole in the shrine’s crumbling wall. Nicci moved out of the way.

“Stop it!” Amber shouted. “He’s hurt, for God’s sake! He can’t help it!”

Iziz swung toward her, moved in close, but did not hit her. “Pick someone to take his place,” he said, staring hard into her eyes. “I’ll let him go. I’ll even patch him up first. Druud, fetch me the humans and put them in a line. Pick someone to go over, Eshiqi.”

Amber couldn’t stop herself from looking as
Scott assembled the last of his Manifestors—naked, shivering, mutilated, and still following him—but when they were all there, she clamped her jaws shut tight and stared back into Iziz’s eyes.

He waited, his spines ticking out the seconds. “Not even you?” he asked softly. “It’d be quick, at least. Quicker than all the
eventual
ways I had time to think on while I stirred Zhuqa’s burning bones.”

She closed her mouth.

“Please yourself. Geozh!”

Dag’s mushy pleas and promises to be quiet t
urned into screams, turned into receding shrieks, turned into nothing. Amber didn’t watch. She looked at Iziz looking back at her and said, “What do you want?”

“From you?”

“Yes.”

He seemed to consider the question fairly. It seemed to be the truth when he finally said, “I don’t know yet. But for right now, I want to know how bad you were hurt when Druud tried to kill you.”

For answer, since answers had become inevitable, Amber loosened her girdle and opened her tunic to show him the scar left by the kipwe’s attack. Iziz’s spines flared again as she undressed to this small degree. Faint smudges of yellow lightened his throat as he looked down at her chest, then her belly, and finally at the scar.

“Fuck Gann,” he said mildly. “
Or fuck a kipwe, anyway. They used to have kipwe shows in the camp when I was young. I may have mentioned that once. Druud, get over here.”

Scott
came, his head bent and jaw tightly clenched.

“Did she fight back?” Iziz asked
, prodding at the worst of the scars with his fingertip.

“No,”
Scott said sullenly.

“
Could she? Or was she just lying there in a pool of her own fucking blood?”

“She wasn’t bleeding.”

“She wasn’t bleeding,” Iziz echoed, again in that almost-laughing way. “That bled, Druud. Tell me it didn’t again and I’ll tear your squirming little tongue out and feed it to you. You’ve seen me do it before. Dare me not to now.”

“She was bandaged up when…She was bandaged by then.”

“I see. You really are a shining drop of poison shit, aren’t you?” Iziz asked, almost admiringly. He fingered the edge of the scar for a moment more, plucked at it just once with the rough scale that acted as a fingernail, and then moved his hand unhurriedly lower, wedging it beneath her breeches with a grunt of effort to grip at her sex. He had to hook at her girdle to hold her from her instinctive flinch, but he wasn’t bothered by it. His expression remained serene if distracted as he felt between her legs for her opening and forced a finger inside.

Not a sound from him. Not a sound from anyone, unless the low mutters and speculative grunts from the watching raiders counted. Iziz worked a second finger in and rubbed them slowly back and forth, watching her watch the sky. At last, he wrenched the fishhook out of her girdle and cupped the back of her head instead, more or less making her face him.

“I’m going to fuck you,” he told her grimly. “I don’t think I’ll enjoy it much, but I’m going to do it. After that…well, I promised my men a fresh poke if we ever found you. So. Here’s what’s going to happen, Eshiqi, if you want to start making your plan. You’re going to catch every cock in my camp all the way down to little Thirqa unless you pick someone to take your place.”

Amber pressed her lips together and glared at him.

His spines flicked. “You don’t mean that.”

That felt horribly like the truth, but she shook her head and glared at him anyway.

“Point your finger for me, Eshiqi,” Iziz said, working his own a little deeper into her. “I promise not to kill them if you give them to me freely.”

She shivered, but kept silent.

Iziz waited, running his gaze over Eric and Nicci, and then the rest of his huddled human slaves, keeping his hand at work the whole time. When his eyes finally came back to her, he pulled his hand out of her breeches and wiped it on Scott’s chest. “Not a damn one of them would do the same for you,” he told her seriously. “You know that, don’t you?”

She said nothing.

“When I told Druud to pick one of his for mine to play with, he did it. He would have sold them if I’d offered him coin. He promised me you before I even knew he knew you.” He smiled with his head cocked and the yellow throbbing on his neck. “I’ll make it easy for you, just tonight. I’ll let you choose Druud.”

Scott
made a cawing sound, but she didn’t look at him.

“It’s not the fresh poke I promised, but then again, it’s nothing new to Druud either,” Iziz said. “P
oint him out to me and I’ll even let you sit with your man tonight where you don’t have to watch. No?” The tilt came out of Iziz’s neck. He leaned very close, his breath hot and bitter on her lips. “Say it, then. Tell me no. Say it like the fierce little thing Zhuqa always said you were.”

Amber did not answer. Her jaws ached from keeping them clenched. Her palms hurt where her fingernails dug at them in fists. Her heart hurt, but it kept beating.

Iziz turned his head slightly while keeping his eyes on Amber. “Nicci!” he called.

“You stay the fuck away from her!” Amber shouted, and she must have lunged too because there were hands all over her all at once, yanking her back and holding her tight.
“Leave her alone! I’ll kill you, motherfucker! I’ll kill—”

Iziz
slapped her. He didn’t let her see it coming like Zhuqa would have done. She scarcely saw him move at all. There was a black blur and a white light and then she was sagging back in a raider’s grip, staring dazedly at the sky while her face swelled with heat.

“You had the first choice,” Iziz spat. “You threw it away to score points of
f me. How many points was it worth, eh? Nicci!”

Nicci came. No one brought her. She just came. Her
neck was bent, like a lizardlady’s, to an subservient angle. “Can I pick someone else?” she asked.

Iziz, one hand on the buckle of his belt, paused. His
spines flicked, then flared curiously. “Who?”

Nicci looked at Amber.

But of course that didn’t happen. Of course it didn’t. They were sisters. They were all each other had. Amber had taken care of Nicci all her life. She’d tucked her in at night, got her up in the morning, walked her to school, done everything their mother was too strung out to care about. Amber was the one hiding with her in the bathroom when Bo Peep brought her bad dates home. Amber was the one stealing fruit cups and milk cartons off the lunch line so Nicci would have something to eat that night. Amber had fought off big kids and alley dogs and their mom’s drunken punches and every other goddamn thing the world had thrown at them and they loved each other, they were sisters, and this was not happening!

“Take her,” said Nicci.
“She’s the one who deserves it. Not me. So you take her. You make her
feel
it.”

“You don’t mean tha
t,” Amber heard herself say. Heard someone say, at any rate. It sounded more like their mother, when she was stoned and half-asleep.

“She looks like she means it,” Iziz remarked.
“But I’m not bargaining with you, Nicci. Not tonight. On your belly.”

“Don’t hurt her!
” Amber lunged again, but she was held fast. “Please! You can take me, just please let her go!”

Iziz finally looked at her, but he never had a chance to answer.

“Go?” said Nicci. “Go where? Look where we are! You…You
made
me come here!” Nicci shook her head in an incredulous, angry series of jerks. “How could you do that? How could you do that? You were supposed to take care of me!” she screamed suddenly, throwing open her arms. “Me! And you picked him! So fuck you, Amber! You hear me? Fuck you! I hope you choke on their fucking cum and die!”

“You don’t mean that!”

“Let’s find out.” Iziz offered the fish hook.

Nicci looked at it, then snatched it from his hand and stepped up, holding it in her shaking fist.

The hands pinning Amber to this moment tightened, but she wasn’t struggling. She couldn’t move, couldn’t even feel the air in her lungs. This wasn’t happening. It just…just wasn’t.

“I ha
te you,” said Nicci. “I want you to see this. I want you to know that this happened because of you.”

She
swung. But not at Amber, motionless, stunned.

The curved edge of the fish hook sank as easily into Nicci’s throat as it had into the soft inner meat of Zhuqa’s body.
She screamed again and ripped, grunting with the effort to make the hook move. A hot, heavy gush struck Amber in the eyes. She slapped at them, screaming and tasting her sister’s blood—swallowing it—and still somehow heard Iziz’s quiet, “Ah,” just exactly the way he’d said it over Zhuqa’s corpse.

The fury of Nicci’s features slackened, twisting into something merely bewildered in the moment before she staggered. Amber lunged to catch her, punching at the lizardman who tried to restrain her, but Nicci’s weight was too much to hold and her hands were slippery. They went down together in a hot, wet heap with Amber on top, trying desperately to push the blood back in through the open gash in her baby sister’s neck. It didn’t last long; she could have counted the seconds by the slowing spews of fresh gore if she could have counted anything at all, but there weren’t many. Nicci clutched once at her arm and once at her hair. Her lips moved, but there was no sound, no way to say for sure just what she would have said. It looked like ‘help’. Or ‘hate’. Then she was dead—warm clay in the shape of Nichole Sarah Bierce—and nothing was left to move her blood except gravity.

“That was even better than I hoped for,” said Iziz, but so far away and through so many muffling layers of cotton that she could barely understand him. “Stand her up.”

S
omeone must have tried because it seemed to Amber that she fell upwards for a moment, then downwards, then both at once and then she was gone too.

* * *

The lights came on, vast bright lights with no particular source, whiting out the world to a clean, featureless blank in which Amber stood alone. After a while, it occurred to her that she was standing in a line, and sure enough, there was a string of people in front of and behind her. They were all in white, like the lights, like the walls and floor and ceiling. She was in the Manifestors’ skyport, she realized, and there it was, the
Pioneer
, not in space at all but sitting right there on the tarmac, waiting to board.

She looked to her left and there was Nicci, hugging her duffel bag and crying because she didn’t want to go. She looked down and by God, she was fat again, her belly straining at the stiff fabric of her brand new colonist’s shirt.

None of it had happened yet. She could stop now, walk away. There’d be fines to pay, but she could figure something out. Get another job. Lose the weight (again). Hell, she could leave the city and watch on the tiny television above the bar where she worked just down the road from the trailer where she and Nicci lived as the whole world wondered what had happened to the
Pioneer
, and on the other side of the universe, Meoraq would go to Xi’Matezh without her.

Scott
was waiting to scan her thumb, only she didn’t know he was Scott yet. She didn’t ever have to know. She could still walk away.

And Meoraq would walk home from Xi’Matezh alone.

“Let him.”

She turned to her right and there was her mother, somewhere between Bo Peep and Mary Bierce, wearing a white t-shirt and no makeup, smoking a cigarette. She smiled with half her mouth, not mean but just tired, the look of a woman who knows. “You can’t save everyone, little girl.”