red: 0.74 millimeters of coastal loss since 10 a.m., 22.6 million square miles of land remaining.
“Knew it was broken,” mumbler says.
“Your banner broken?” clipped-tones asks.
“Yeah, this morning when I left, said we had 24.2 million square miles. Knew something had changed. What about dead zones?”
“Don’t know…don’t fuss over any of it. Nothing but a bother. Can’t fix Earth. Wish I could turn mine off.”
“Wish I had yours. Can’t sleep without the latest. Look, no Earth Strikes for 24 hours! Thought for sure the night shift would have gotten one.”
“Why do you think we’re working this one over. Word came from upstairs. Can’t let another 24 hours pass without a report. Have to deliver one tonight.”
silence falls. the feel of the mumbler eyeing me trips across the back of my neck. feel a nervous tingle in my eyebrow. my knee jerks up. surprised my feet aren’t tied.
“Won’t work, sweetheart,” clipped-tones says. twirling a small square mirror in his hands.
a burning ache starts biting at the bottoms of my feet. fingers twitching now. thin, sticky fabric stretched across my thighs catch on my peeling fingertips. clipped-tones notices.
“Had to dress you. Your clothes were in bloody shreds. What did this to you?”
i tune out. let the words fall around me undeciphered. wonder: can water slide over these thin, sticky tights. if i escape, could i wear this to get back Under?
when i don’t speak, clipped-tones slides the mirror between my face and his. i draw away from the face in the mirror.
“No sense hiding from it. Hurt’s been done.” so says the mumbler.
i steel myself and turn back to the mirror. the face i see is not my face. purple-black bruises flowering around the eyes—no big surprise. headache splitting my skull can’t be from a bug bite. slowly turn my head. ragged smear of tiny punctures—neatly gridded—crawls up my left cheek. a thin bloody shadow blankets the wounds. other side of my face, no better. a wide gash—dry, but glistening—cuts across my right cheek. puffed and pimply skin bloating around my mouth. salty water rises, clawing its way to my eyes. i will it back down—ain’t the place to shed a tear, even if it’s for my own flesh.
“So, coordinates. Where did it happen? People need to know.”
shake my head. from what i hear, a bio-anger is nothing like they make it seem on the Net. just because an Earth Strike breaks a few bones doesn’t mean Earth is angry. once you been Under, you stop thinking Earth even notices you. we can’t make Earth angry. we’re about as important as globs of spit.
“What’s this then?” clipped-tones asks. I hear the mumbler clicking away on his hand-unit just behind my head. taking notes? sending messages? preparing a profile to send to the NewsNet? the mirror shifts from my face to flash on my neck and shoulders. first real mirror I’ve seen in a long time. clipped-tones tilts it, showing me a deep groove splitting the flesh above my breasts. thick and hard in some spots, too dry to be new. don’t need a mirror to see it cut across my chest, arc over my shoulders, rip across my upper back.
wet my lips. try to push out “Und-” but my mouth is useless. lift my hand. try pointing down. ragged fingernails scratch at the sticky fabric on my legs.
“What’s she trying to say?” mumbler asks from behind me.
clipped-tone man shrugs.
bang my feet on the floor. UNDER, yelling in my head. thought everyone on the Surface knew about us. Under. I’m damn near a lifer down there. been wearing the tank so long, the edges of the headgear grew into my flesh, got a little more comfortable—you could say. never mattered to me. better fit means less accidents. less accidents means more runs. more runs means more money i can send up to this damn air-breathing place. don’t expect no enviro-cop to ever understand that. us who live Under were born with hard choices to make, that’s all. some people end eighteen years of hard labor tied to a chair with a busted up face, others get to slide by them waving a mirror around. just the way it goes on the Surface.
new sound behind my ear. shrill, metallic. sounds like the arms or legs of a machine clicking into sharp- angled positions. something cold and rigid presses on either side my neck: the metal was clicking for me.
“You sure you have nothing to tell us?” man with the mirror asks. nervous edges flutter in his voice. sounds scared of what’s about to happen. “Look,” he says, drops his voice down to a whisper, slides closer. “We don’t have to link you up. You just cooperate, and we won’t have to extract the information. It’s easier if you talk. Can’t run your story without full details.”
something heavy and round pushes against the base of my skull. panic wells up in my chest. gulp wildly. try to suck up enough air to force sound out of my mouth. Can’t speak! Can’t speak! Can’t speak! strain so hard my body jerks against the restraints. veins and vocal cords bulge in my throat. feet pound the floor.
“I know, I know,” clipped-tones says spreading his hands out. “Just stop. I know you can’t speak. We just… We’re going to have to…”
“Enough with the warnings. Just get on with it already,” mumbler says. “You know the drill. Let’s move.”
“She can’t speak,” man with the mirror says. looks over my head at his partner.
“Don’t matter,” says the mumbler. “They want the story by 8, it’s going to run at 10. They’re already advertising.”
a few drops of water fall out of my eyes. “extract information.” they’ll dig through my memories like starving squatters clawing through a garbage dump. grab my emotions, download them, dress them up, and beam a tearjerker to the NewsNet. who cares if there really was a bio-anger. there will be one now.
flash of light—blinding—rips across my vision. inhale deeply. “Pain,” i think. “That was pain.”
something is wrong.
no more pain. splitting headache, gone. heat rests weighty between my legs. arms and hands don’t feel like mine—they feel thick and heavy. the room, the clipped-tone man, and the NewsNet banner all melt away. i am sitting in nothingness. nothing around me but a table laden with piles of ghostly flesh. not meat, not food—human bodies. curves of elbow and knee jut out from a sea of skin. here and there an ear, a chin, a pair of lips poke up from the jumble. my mouth moves easily. i lick my lips. no pain in my jaw.
i am aroused.
when my mouth moves, a voice trickles out. the voice is disembodied and tangled—and it is not mine. it is the same voice that has been muttering behind me since i woke up tied to this chair. the mumbler’s voice pours from me, stream of broken diction rambling about women and the marks of saliva he’s left behind on their skin. this is the mumbler’s voice; this must also be his tongue. his tongue resting in my mouth. his tongue moistening at the thought of ghostly flesh made real.
odd memories begin to rain through my body. i am seeing and remembering parts of the female body that i’ve never touched. salivating for the crease of a breast resting on a fleshy torso, longing to push apart meaty female thighs. i fall back into my body for a split second. the room is just as i left it—stark, bright, unadorned. i am still tethered to a chair, and the mumbler is still yowling like an animal. clipped-tone man is behind me now, speaking to the mumbler in a voice that pulses with both worry and soothing. then i understand:
that cold metal circle. the pressure at the base of my skull. the wrong source—it’s tapping into the wrong source.
hunger whips through me like an electric shock, bringing me back to the mumbler’s table. i am the mumbler. predatory. needy. hoarder of fleshy victories. this is my table now, i own these body parts. i need what he needs: bodies, flesh; have no use for feelings. crave the tabled flesh. lift my bound hands, reach for it. hunger erases my boundaries. the room, my bruised body, it all slides away. the mumbler’s memories gush into me, become mine.
something funky and toxic pulses deep in the viscera of my body. a multitude of tiny dried pellets, brittle- shelled capsules lodged deep in my bowels. that’s what’s left of these women after i have lain with them; fed of them, then condemned them to this ghostly pile, this monument of memory.
i sift through limbs, searching for flesh that hasn’t soured or been sucked dry. searching for a ghost that will yield her heart. not the heart that beats blood, the heart between her legs; the heart that speaks to her in feverish rushing whispers. the heart she works hard to ignore.
