Page 56 of Consume
With a push of a button on my protective suit, I was nothing but particles racing back toward Mayvel. Toward home. Toward my friends and family, many of whom I feared the worst for. The memories of the warzone I’d left them in chased me back even faster.
Please be okay.
Soon, I reformed back inside the blood-streaked glass container at the waste treatment plant. The robotic voice welcomed me back, and air hissed to unlatch the door. Steeling myself for what I might see, I removed my helmet, clutched the Saelises’ book closer to my chest, and stepped out.
“Hands on your head,” a male voice shouted from my right.
Multiple weapons pointed at me from the hands of uniformed men.
The rest of the room appeared to have been painted red, but everyone I knew was gone. Gone didn’t mean dead, but my breaths grew ragged all the same.
“Where—?”
The man’s gun clicked. He shoved the metal into my forehead, his eyes as cold and deadly as his weapon. “Don’t make me tell you twice, Absidy Jones.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Ineed proof, Absidy.” The Mayvel police detective tapped his thick finger on the table between us. Like his too-smooth complexion, his button-down shirt appeared as though it had never met a wrinkle. Even as a full-grown man, he looked around twelve, but also like he never missed a single detail. “This is too wild of a story to believe without any proof.”
His bias against me was a tangible thing worthy of stabbing. He didn’t want to believe me even though I’d explained myself for almost two days nonstop and most of my story checked out. He wanted to cook up his own theories about all of the Mind-I malfunctions and the parasite-poisoned water that had resulted in mass murder sprees all around Mayvel and Wix. Apparently that was easier than buying the story of a suspected murderer and bioterrorist who had just saved humanity from total destruction.
You’re welcome, everyone.
I forced my clenched jaw to relax enough to grit out, “You took the proof as evidence, remember?”
They’d taken the book and pulled the alien wires from my pocket before they’d booked me, and everyone in the room had leaped back in horror at the gray, still-writhing mass. I’d almost laughed, but then it struck me that once upon a time I would’ve done the same thing. I used to fear everything I didn’t understand, which was most things. I still didn’t understand, but I’d started to accept that not understanding was just life. Or my life, rather. Now, though, instead of recoiling in fear, I wanted to learn. I wanted to be a better Absidy Jones, but not from inside a cell on a prison planet.
“I do remember. We’ll study it and see.” He said it in a tone that sounded like he was begrudgingly doing me a favor.
While my fingers itched for my ice pick and I thought more stabby thoughts, he stood from his chair.
“I’ll see if your public defender is here yet,” he said on his way out of the closet-sized room.
I sagged back in my chair, the iron chains cuffing my wrists clanking loudly. It was ironic that iron now bound me when I’d declared that it no longer did. I didn’t have any in my mouth. I didn’t need it.
The handcuffs were slightly warped where they touched my skin. Not a design flaw and probably not the result of an underfunded police force. From the sweat seeping from my pores, my extra parasites were feasting on the metal. Since I was likely headed for a one-way trip to the prison planet, I was sweating a ton.
