Page 84 of Elanie & the Empath
While I cowered, he rose.
“You see it now, don’t you?” He stared down his nose at me. “You see the truth. I am doing nothing to you that organics haven’t been doing to us for centuries. You are the bionics now.”
As I watched my fellow prisoners rise slowly from the floor, their heads still bowed as they returned to their toiling, all of them fed and clothed and housed but none of them free, I knew that he was right.
Even so, this place? This underground? It wasn’t the answer. And it wouldnotbe my home.
Elanie was alone in our hut, probably wondering why I’d left her, wondering what she’d done wrong. Wondering if I’d ever cared about her at all. If I’d ever loved her. Despite the anger raising the temperature of my skin until it sizzled, I had to keep my head. I had to find a way out of here and back to her. That was all that mattered.
“Well.” I kicked at my bars, theclangricochetting down the long, dark hallway. “If I’m a bionic now, when will you let me out? I can’t be your good little worker if I’m stuck in this cell, now can I?”
“You’ll be released tomorrow. Lars will train you in your duties.” Kicking my bars back, the much louderclangmaking one of the prisoners jump, Gol warned, “And do yourself a favor, Portisan. Don’t try to escape.”
All the non-bionics within earshot gasped at the word, stale shame wafting from them as they muttered things like “no, Lord Gol” and “we would never.”
I made a massive fart noise. “Did you train them to do that? It’s ridiculous. You’re ridiculous!” I shouted, aiming the word at a nearby Delphinian I was pretty sure was Captain Crapface.
At bionic speed, Gol’s hand shot through the bars of the cell. He grasped my throat and yanked, slamming my head into the bars so hard stars exploded in front of my eyes.
“When I deign to pay a visit to this sickening, repulsive underworld,” he said with a preternatural calm, considering he was a thumb-twitch away from crushing my trachea, “you will bow, you will grovel, and you will obey. If you don’t, there will be consequences. Our pigs are always hungry, and that is not a good death.”
He released me, and I slumped to the ground, sucking in air.
“Elanie will do well in Thura. In no time at all, she won’t even remember your name.” He waved his arm over the still bowed heads around us. “Just as everyone else here has been forgotten, you will be forgotten. You know, I think it will be good to have a doctor down here.” His smile would have been at home on a snake. “You organics are so frail and fragile.”
Lars unlockedmy cell with his upper hands the following morning, holding a plasma prod in one lower hand and slapping it against the palm of the other. “You gonna be any trouble?” he asked, his bushy brows raised. “This thing packs enough juice to knock you out for a week.”
Recoiling from the bright red beam arcing between the prod’s prongs, I raised my hands. “I’m good. No trouble at all.”
“That’s what I thought.” Lars grunted, slapping his hand with the prod one more time. “Well, come on then. You’ll start on the water pumps. It’s a good job, all things considered. It’s not as nice as the grow rooms, but at least there’s no shit to shovel.”
“Sounds like a dream,” I mumbled as Gol’s warning about the pigs chilled my blood.
Stepping out of my cell, I followed Lars down the tunnel. With each step, the Gorbie’s frizzy hair brushed against the glowlights overhead, making them swing and cast strange shadows along the walls. We passed other cells, most of them empty, but some filled with beings in their beds, turned on their sides. We passed rooms filled with loomsand non-bionics stitching clothes together. A kitchen where a Ulaperian in a white chef’s hat and tinted goggles barked out orders. A laundry room with a wall of industrial washers and dryers and an old man perched on a stool in front of them, reading a frayedPsychology of the Known Universemagazine that looked even more ancient than he did.
When the man looked up, he squinted bloodshot blue eyes at me, then gave a dismissive head shake before going back to his magazine.
“What’s his deal?” I asked as his disgruntled annoyance reached me all the way out in the hall.
“Oh, that’s just Old Max,” Lars replied. “He’s been here longer than any of us. From Mercury, I think.” He made apshsound. “Mercurians, am I right? Just ignore him. The rest of us do.” Lars spun a finger around his temple. “His head’s gone sideways. Speaks in riddles. Doesn’t make any kind of sense.”
As we made our way deeper into the underground, taking so many turns I had no idea how I’d find my way back to my cell without help, a sound started to echo off the walls. A low thrumming hum. A power source maybe? But we’d passed the generator station several turns ago.
“What’s that noise?” I asked, ducking under a massive pipe that traveled across the ceiling.
“What noise?” Lars made another turn.
“That humming.” It was definitely getting louder. I stopped, pointing down the tunnel to our left. “There. Don’t you hear it?”
One of Lars’s upper hands scratched his head. “Nah, I don’t hear anything. There’s nothing down that tunnel but some old maintenance closet anyway. Come on, you need to relieve the last shift. We’re already late.”
Narrowing my focus, I tried to commit the remainder ofthe trek to the water pumps to memory. There was something in that maintenance closet. Something generating power. And I was going to find my way back to it and figure out what it was.
Lars had been right aboutone thing: pumping water was better than shoveling shit. But barely.
I was not in peak physical shape by any stretch, and after spending mindless, grueling hours pushing and pulling the pump handle, I nearly wept when he came back for me.
My replacement, a four-foot-tall female Gorbie, smacked Lars’s butt with one of her lower hands before settling next to the pump and getting to work.
