A Glossary of the world of Aerthe, a character list, and a labelled illustration of a landship, can be found in .
Gio blinked to keep her eyes open. Tired, sore, and every heartbeat made her head want to explode. Seeing her feet helped her weather the pain from her left arm. She couldn’t touch it due to her neck being locked to the wall and her wrists fastened at her back. Couldn’t free her right arm to feel the left. She’d thought she was ready for death but what a joke that was – no one was ever ready.
She owed so many. Dying would accomplish nothing.
This blood-snack room was deep within the bowels of the royal landship. She barely felt the rock as the great vessel’s tracks and wheels traversed terrain. The sound of the engines was distant. The hum of voices was muted yet thousands lived here. Thousands, and during the past hour she’d personally watched that number go down.
Three women had died in this room, as far as she could tell from the bodies rolled aside to nestle into the steel walls. Didn’t matter how pretty or young, or even how smart you were. These Mekkers were having some sort of orgy cross bloody gourmet party.
Illegal? Probably.
Likely to be interrupted? Probably not, from the laughter and the attire of the men. They were rich, high-class assholes. Their clothes were...had been sumptuous. Though the women were mostly naked, the men had also lost clothes. Surprise, surprise.
Discarded garments carpeted the floor and gave the thick blue rug a motley look. Past her toes were hints of torn dresses, edges of fabric, undergarments, pants, a wig, sex toys, dildos, ropes. She refused to raise her head.
After she’d comprehended what blood snacks were, she’d looked down – even when someone came to the wall for a fresh woman.
She was the last. Maybe being smart did matter.
Chained to this wall, the women had been chosen, one by one, until only she remained. Her left arm throbbed and she glimpsed the bluish tinge of her skin. Left alone in her cell after the injection, she’d tied a pressure bandage over the needle mark. It worked for snake bite...
One of the women had died before they took her off the wall. Whatever the drug might be, the dosage wasn’t fine-tuned.
Did they know her crimes? Slitting Drette’s throat hadn’t been her proudest moment but it was her best.
Smart to slow the spread of the drug, to use the leftover wrapping from her meals as a bandage. Everyone else brought to this room had fallen off the proverbial cliff, had been fucked and sucked of blood – the men’s mouths moving greedily over bodies, plastering over the neck port of whatever girl they currently had their dick in. Orgasms were had by all. Yay. The girls might come but they were oblivious.
Her neck chain clinked when she slumped, her back rendered cold by contact with the wall. Cotton and skin against steel and rivets. Her legs ached nearly as much as her bandaged arm.
Another quavering female whimper, then a groan from a man, made her shut her eyes and tense. Ignore them.
Maybe the men were too stupid to see the bandage? Maybe they just wanted her to be last?
Or the bruises put them off. The purple-and-black splotch had crept from her face down to her neck in the hours after the lawgiver smacked her. The steel of her cell door had let her examine the injury. The law here was an ass, but that’d been true of cops on Earth too. Some, anyway.
If they left her much longer, her arm would die from lack of blood. The blueness, the numbness, were bad, bad signs. As if that would matter soon.
The fucking continued.
The slap of skin on skin, the moans, the derisive chuckling as one of the last living girls splayed on the couches spasmed in orgasm. The smell of spilled cum and sexual fluids thickened the air.
She was going to die. Sentenced to death by the courts, she’d thought the lawgivers who’d tortured her for information about Drette and his portal magic would be the ones to do that.
Not so.
Someone whispered “Fuck, fuck, fuck” in the Mekker language.
The panting and subvocal curses, the creak of couch and thump of feet on floor, told her a man had risen. She kept her head down until he arrived, then she gathered her courage and looked up.
Him.
Within the first few minutes she’d seen him tear the clothes off a girl and the plug from her neck port. He’d shoved his lips over her leaking neck and sucked. Pinned, she’d struggled but failed to get away. She’d appeared to faint. Only then did he decide sex was an option and had pulled apart her thighs.
Heavy-set, watery eyes and mouth with redness around them. Ugly, bald, beastlike male.
She curled her mouth in derision.
He was drugged, if not by the same arousal-inducing concoction given to the women.
“Fuck,” he muttered, staggering, grinning. Or was it her vision that was off kilter? She’d have slid down the wall to the floor if they’d let her. Everything had a wobble to it.
“Hi,” she whispered. Replying might delay him.
“You’re still here? Wet yet?” His grin widened to one that’d not shame a crocodile.
Every time they came to fetch another woman, they’d tried her, Gio – placed their hand between her legs, squashing the light cotton and lace of her dress into her pussy. Every time, they’d grunted and moved on.
They wanted wet females and seriously that was a problem when she was scared to death of what they meant to do to her...and her arm was about to fall off.
With a smack that made her flinch, he put his hand on her then wriggled a finger partway inside.
“Dry still? No fun.” He peered at the bandage and tapped it, made her squeak and flinch again, because that really had hurt. The nerves still functioned. “I’m guessing this is the culprit? Clever, clever bitch. Want to keep your arm or want to have fun?”
She stared back, overwhelmed.
“I can leave it like this. Either way I’m sucking you, fucking you. Last choice.” His grin morphed into a sloppy leer. “Humans are so fucking tasty.”
She’d rather be lucid for her last moments...wouldn’t she? Letting them control her was repulsive. As if they weren’t doing that anyway. She hated giving in. The drug would flood her system if he undid the bandage.
He shrugged. With wavering hand, he reached for the lock on her neck chain. “Never had one with a fucking blue arm.”
She didn’t want to know this and feel it, did she? Why make herself feel the pain, the humiliation? Tears welled. Give in. There was no gain in suffering. She parted her lips to speak, and her knees picked that second to shake. She wedged her back into the wall in an attempt stop herself falling.
“Wait. Wait.” She swallowed. This was it. There was no hope; no one on the Aerthe cared enough to help her. No one. Give in.
“What’d you say?”
Her ears rang in a thin, high tone – a sign she remembered from times when she’d fainted – at school, on a jog at the park.
Fuck. “I –”
Another man rose behind her molester. A cloak with a hood partially concealed his face.
How quietly he’d arrived. Shadows shifted. Something was raised, dark in his hand.
The blow or shot, took out a fair portion of the bald one’s head.
Silently, apart from the ringing, and a soft pop, blood spattered her.
She couldn’t deny the thrill as he crumpled to the floor – the exultation. Die, asshole.
“Evening,” the remaining man murmured. “Nice party.” His lips were thick with promise of evil. They arched lopsidedly, as if this grim reaper attempted a morbid sneer.
Her heart clenched painfully. Was she next?
But the assassin turned away. He’d surpassed the bald one’s height by a foot, and wore scars on a face that was not normal. She watched as he stalked the room, finding new prey, assessing who was where.
He raised his hand again and this time she saw the lines of a gun.
The lights were low and they were all intoxicated by blood and sex and liquor of some variety – their undoing. The poor fucking souls. They didn’t see him coming, until they were a millisecond from dead.
One squawked and scooted along the couch on his back. One gasped. The rest died without knowing. A shot to the back of the head, same as baldie. Pop. Pop, pop.
With each kill, a flicker of blue erupted from his weapon. She smiled and kept herself upright by making judicious use of wall. Bye-bye. If she died from gangrene, it was worth it, just to see vengeance dealt. Her vengeance, god knew what his reasons were...
Then. Oh, fuck then...
He aimed at the first girl and she held her breath, muttering a tear-filled prayer, but he felt the girl’s neck then shot her anyway, and moved onward to the next. They lay so very still.
Pop, pop, pop.
She sobbed, caught that sob, stifled it. Forget me, forget me. I’m not here.
She’d get loose somehow, then run, escape, crawl into some hole. All so impossible but panic let her hopes run wild. She tugged at the bindings keeping her wrists at her back.
Only he didn’t forget her, he turned and walked to her, stopped in front of her. The weapon was at his thigh, dangling there as if it were of no consequence.