Kendi flopped and writhed on the ground. Blackness surrounded him, thick and impenetrable. His talons curled with cold. He could feel the heat being leached from him like water being sucked from a glass. How many voices were in the blackness? He couldn’t tell. Twice he had tried to leave the Dream, but the pain was too great for the necessary concentration.
“Why are you doing this?” he choked.
Concepts flooded Kendi’s mind. ~anger HUNGER reach expand ANGER lonely~
Kendi tried to rise, but the energy simply wasn’t there. “You’re lonely?”
— lonely HUNGER ANGER lonely~
“Come join the rest of us,” Kendi replied. The response seemed to puzzle the darkness. Kendi rallied. “I meant we’re all lonely.”
— MOTHER~
The single concept knocked Kendi flat in its despair. A small part of Kendi’s mind wondered what a trained psychologist would think of it. He shivered in the biting, horrible cold.
“I miss my mother,” Kendi called out. His voice sounded thin and weak. “And I miss Ara. So does Ben. I-we- know what it’s like.”
The darkness hovered about him as if considering the idea. The icy heaviness lifted just slightly, as if it were pulling back from the Dream. A flicker of hope flared. Perhaps ~HUNGRY~
There was no sympathy or empathy in the voice. Kendi, lying crushed beneath its icy weight, gave himself up to the ancestors and took his final breath.
“We surrender!” Vidya shouted, and threw her pistol toward the ruined door. It clattered on the tiles. Katsu did the same. Vidya shot a glance at Sejal, who had only been slightly stunned and was already recovering.
The result of Vidya’s words was predictable. The table was shoved out of the way and a dozen more guard boiled into the room, crowding the room with warm bodies and flushed faces that sweated with fear and stress. Vidya and Katsu were swiftly handcuffed and the cattle prod was torn from her belt. The polymer bands bit deeply into Vidya’s wrists, but she didn’t cry out. Prasad, still dazed, was yanked to his feet and cuffed as well. Vidya watched placidly as three guard converged on Sejal, who bore a small burn on one shoulder. His strange pale eyes bore into them. At once, every guard in the room went rigid.
“Quickly!” Vidya said. “The last two!”
Four guard moved to the final pair of beds. Other guards released Vidya’s, Katsu’s, and Prasad’s handcuffs. Vidya rubbed her wrists with relief. One more child went into the cryo-unit. The pair working on the final child had disconnected him and were sliding him toward the final cryo-unit when utter despair crashed over Vidya in a sickening tidal wave. Her legs went rubbery and she slid to the floor. Every other person in the room, including Sejal, Prasad, and Katsu, did the same, but Vidya barely noticed. Nothing she did was worth anything. She was alone in the universe. Prasad had abandoned her, stealing away her daughter and leaving her to raise a son who had turned into a prostitute. The neighborhood she had worked body and soul to build and protect had failed, and the people who lived there surely snickered at her and called her names behind her back.
One of the guard started to weep hoarse, dry sobs. So did several of the others. The first one, a handsome, dark-haired man who looked barely eighteen, picked up his pistol, put it in his mouth, and fired. His head vanished in a snapping cloud of electric blood. Vidya couldn’t work up the energy to care. Part of her was aware of the fact that the final child was still active in the Dream, that it was feeding on the minds on Rust. She still didn’t care.
Another guard, this one not sobbing, got up and wandered aimlessly about the room. He was a short, slender man with brown hair and a flat nose. His face was devoid of any emotion, of any sense that other people had feelings. After a moment, he slid a knife from his belt, crouched over one of his sobbing compatriots, and deliberately drew the blade across the other man’s throat. Crimson liquid spouted into the air. The man’s sobs dissolved into gurgling noises. The flat-nosed guard stared at the glittering blade with a flicker of interest before moving purposefully toward Katsu. She looked up at him with dull eyes. Blood dripped from the knife. And still Vidya couldn’t bring herself to care. She had only known Katsu for a few weeks. It wasn’t as if Katsu were much of a daughter to her.
And then the bleak miasma lifted for a moment, as if something had hesitated or drawn back from her mind. For some reason, the image of a falcon holding back darkness popped into her head. A spurt of adrenaline shot through Vidya’s arteries and cut through the fog pressing down on her mind.
Vidya got to her feet. The despairing apathy had lifted enough to let her act, but she still felt as if a weight were pressing her down. She pulled herself upright using a cryo-unit for support. The flat-nosed guard reached down and grabbed the front of Katsu’s shirt. Katsu made a small sound as he raised the knife. Vidya’s fumbling fingers found one of the many pistols dropped by the guard. Katsu’s shirt tore as Vidya raised her heavy hand and fired.
She missed. Energy cracked through the air and made an uneven black spot on the wall. The flat-nosed guard dropped Katsu and twisted around to face Vidya. He lunged across the room. Vidya fired again, and he dropped in his tracks to lay twitching on the floor.
Vidya turned to face the final child lying on his bed next to the open cryo-unit. The smile still lay on his distorted lips. All at once the sense of uncaring smashed back into her. Vidya wondered how she could ever have seen the twisted monstrosity as a person, as a human being worth saving. It was the cause of all the problems around her, and its self-satisfied smirk only made her angrier. It was a thing, an experiment gone wrong. Vidya raised the pistol and squeezed the trigger.
Then she jerked her hand. The shot went wide. A light fixture exploded, sending down a shower of white sparks. No. This thing would not make her a murderer, no matter how angry or uncaring she became.
Vidya bolted forward and grabbed the child by shoulder and hip. She shoved him, rolling him roughly into the cryo-unit. The slid slammed shut and the viewplate fogged over.
Instantly, the weight lifted. The despair and anger she felt melted away into something she could handle. She pushed herself erect against a bed still warm from the child that had occupied it. Around her, the guard stirred. Two were dead, and the room smelled of coppery blood and pungent bowel. Prasad came slowly to his feet and Katsu stood up as well. Sejal sat down on one of the beds. A guard blinked.
“What the hell?” he asked.
And then a shuddering boom shook the lab.
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE DREAM
We came to you in a dream, But you were not there.
Kendi huddled on the flat gray ground. One of his wings was broken, and he was so cold he had stopped shivering. He lay there bleakly, waiting to die. The Dream was absolutely quiet. Not a sound disturbed the air.
And then, like the first hesitant birds calling after the storm has a passed, a whisper drifted by. It was followed by another, and another. They slowly swelled into a full chorus, but it somehow different from the one Kendi had been hearing for so many years.
Dull pain throbbed in Kendi’s wing and he couldn’t find the energy to raise his head. The darkness was gone, but he could still feel the life seeping slowly from him. It wouldn’t take him long to die now, and he just wished it would happen quickly. He closed his eyes.
Another strange whisper. Kendi felt something nudge him. He ignored it. Another nudge. Grudgingly Kendi opened his eyes. Astonishment widened them. People had encircled him. Men and women, all naked, their brown skins drawn smoothly over taut muscle. They had brown eyes and brown or black hair that flared outward in ropy
