Soo-hyun swallowed a hollow pain in the back of their throat. “Okay, I’ll do it,” they said in a breathy whisper, worried that if they spoke normally their voice would break.
“I knew you would,” Kali said. “Welcome.” She sat on the leather chair, opened a cupboard beneath the counter, and retrieved a pair of black latex gloves, a tiny plastic cup, and an eyedropper stained black with use. She carefully unscrewed the lid on the ink pot, and using the eyedropper, decanted a couple of drops into the plastic cup. “You’re going to need to strip.”
“Strip?” Soo-hyun said.
“Sorry, I should have warned you not to wear coveralls.” Kali connected the tattoo gun to a small box that sat inside the cupboard, cables joining it to a power point and a flat round pedal on the floor. She looked up, and Soo-hyun still hadn’t undressed. Kali sighed. “I don’t expect you to do anything that I wouldn’t,” she said.
Kali stood and, without hesitation, lifted her dress over her head, before dropping it in the corner of the room. She was naked but for a pair of gray briefs, her skin white enough for Soo-hyun to see the red, blue, and purple of her veins meandering beneath the surface.
Soo-hyun stared, eyes shocked wide.
Kali made no effort to cover her breasts, or conceal the different tattoos that marked her flesh like ancient hieroglyphs or the forgotten sigils of some dead god. She sat back down, and continued working at the tattoo machine. “I’m not even looking, Soo-hyun; take your time.”
Soo-hyun exhaled. Without thinking, before they could change their mind, they pulled down the zip on the front of their coveralls, listening to the plastic sound of the teeth being pulled apart. They took their arms from the sleeves and pushed the rough canvas fabric down past their hips, letting it pool on the floor at their feet. They kept on their underpants and a T-shirt, embarrassed by the stains that marred the armpits.
Kali glanced up, and patted the leather bed. “Take a seat.”
Soo-hyun did as they were told, stretching out across the plastic wrap that clung to their skin, scritching as they peeled their limbs away, repositioning their legs until they could sit comfortably. With their right leg bent at the knee, and their inner thigh pointed up toward the ceiling, Soo-hyun tried not to focus on the stretch marks and blemishes, the fine dark hair they had never bothered to shave.
“There’s something else I need to talk to you about,” Kali said, her attention fixed on the needles blurring at the tip of the gun as she hit the pedal and the gun buzzed. “Your police dogs—can they be piloted?”
“Piloted?”
“They patrol our community, and they help to keep us safe from outsiders, but I need more from them. They’re marked like police units, they could go out into the city and work with impunity. We just need to be able to control them.”
“The first generation of dog drones were strictly user-operated. It was only after a couple of years of in-the-field training that the machine learning algorithms could grasp the necessary duties and responsibilities,” Soo-hyun said, nerves speeding the words from their mouth.
“So that’s a yes?”
“I don’t know exactly how I’d do it, but it must be possible.”
“How long would it take?”
“I have no idea,” Soo-hyun said. “A few days? A week?”
“Alright. I’ll get you whatever you need to make it work.” Kali dipped the needles into the ink and hit the pedal, coating them in black. “I would tell you this isn’t going to hurt, but I hate lying.”
Soo-hyun lay back, focused their attention on the bank of lights overhead, fluorescents cycling at fifty hertz, their flicker barely perceptible. Something cold touched their leg and Soo-hyun’s body lurched. They looked down to find Kali wiping a spot on their inner leg, disinfectant cool against their skin.
“Just calm down,” Kali said. “Breathe slowly. In for four seconds, out for four seconds, nice and steady.”
Soo-hyun inhaled, and closed their eyes. They squeezed them shut tight when the gun buzzed again, steady this time, sound like a huge mechanical wasp hovering over their skin. The wasp touched down, and a pain like burning spread across the soft skin of their thigh.
When her people gathered in throngs, Kali spoke slowly, with authority gathered from every higher power she cared to mention. Given enough time she mentioned them all.
Her detractors claimed her pilgrimage was made of lies rather than steps, but the woman born to the name Madelyn Danekas truly traveled across the Indian subcontinent. See the QR codes of her boarding passes, verify each pixel of the photos she uploaded to the cloud. They are all still here.
She was there. That much cannot be denied.
She traveled through India reading books on Hubbard, Asahara, Jones, Osho. She learned ways to lead. She learned the lies people wanted most desperately to believe. She learned the careful manipulations needed to keep herself separate from her followers, above them.
Madelyn Danekas traveled to India with a suitcase full of books, but Kali Magdalene returned. A self-made woman, the product of immaculate conception.
Madelyn Danekas’s mother was alive and well, in Burbank, California. Her bones had not been reduced to ash, the ash made into ink. She was always among the first to like Kali’s posts and videos, and she remained a recurring monthly donor to her daughter’s organization, no matter how often Kali claimed she was dead.
CHAPTER FIVE
The fry pan slammed down on the steel stovetop. JD twitched awake at the noise, eyes wide to the alien surrounds, brain struggling to catch up to his sensorium. He rolled over and felt the threading of a throw pillow rub against the side of his head. He sat upright on his mom’s couch, face to face with his reflection desaturated in the black glass of the
