She stepped over Walter and went to the rail, looking down across the seats and the handful of people milling about. She took in the stage, lit only by the house lights, and knew she’d been there before. And more recently than her early childhood. Much more recently.

Dakura. Her mother’s simulated afterlife!

Her mom had whisked her there virtually in an attempt to keep her quiet. It had only been for a moment; her mother’s next tactic had been to strap her into a dentist’s chair, a memory Molly didn’t feel like revisiting. She concentrated on the stage, instead. It was definitely the same place. And it had to be the same theater her father had brought her to as a kid, right before they fled to Earth. She must’ve been six, or very nearly. She looked up at the dimly lit dome above her head, the tall walls to either side dotted with private viewing booths. She remembered sitting in one of those, leaning across the rails—

“Ew!” Walter yelled. Molly turned, and in the dim light she could see him patting his flightsuit, his hands coming away as if something were on them. “Thiss floor iss ssticky!” he hissed.

“Serves you right, you Drenard.”

Walter scrambled to his feet. He looked down at the faint stains on his clothes. “I am a Drenard!” he said proudly.

Molly laughed, reminded once again that some of her habitual cursing no longer made any sense—or at the very least had become ineffectual. She led Walter along the rail to the seats at the center of the balcony, thinking about how she couldn’t tell people to “go to hyperspace” the way she once had. Not since she was yearning to get there herself.

“Where iss everybody?” Walter asked, looking down at the sparse gathering below.

“I hate to break it to you buddy, but I don’t think Cat’s performance is gonna be that nebular.”

She glanced at her watch, which was still on universal time. She did the math for Bekkie, taking into account its fourteen-hour days, and confirmed that it was almost eight. And yet, she and Walter were the only people on the balcony, and just a handful seemed to be gathering below.

Walter settled back and spread both of his arms across the generous armrests. Molly looked at all the empty seats around them and wondered why she felt obligated to sit directly next to him. The Wadi must’ve had a similar thought; it moved from her shoulder to the back of the adjacent seat and flicked its tongue out at a stain. Molly squirmed in her chair and wondered what those jerks on her ship were doing at that very moment.

After a few minutes of agonizing over Parsona and watching the Wadi explore its environment, a chorus of boos signified the start of the show. Molly leaned forward to glare down through the railing at the rude behavior. As the lights began to dim, she saw several people hurriedly purchasing fruits and vegetables from a vendor. A handful of spectators stood in the aisles, carrying on and making a ruckus.

The only other quietly seated people in the audience besides her and Walter were an older couple in one of the box balconies. Molly strained to get a view of them, but the house lights dimmed, and soon, the entire space was pitch-black.

An electric speaker popped, and then blared with a shriek of feedback. Finally, a voice—deep and loud—boomed through the mostly-empty building: “Ladies! Gentlemen! Lokians! Welcome to another Tuesday performance from Cripple Cat! We regret to inform you, she has made a change in her routine during her recent tour of Lok. The management would like to stress the need to throw early and aim true.”

The speakers clicked and popped again as a button was released somewhere. There was another shrill of feedback as it was pressed once more: “Enjoy the performance!”

As the announcer fell quiet, a new and worse sound took his place: a metallic crash followed by a terrifying wail of vibrating steel. It threw Molly’s spine sideways, then the sound rang out again. And again. Each bang was like an off-key tuning fork sending out sonic tendrils to molest her ears. Through the noise, Molly could just barely hear the screams and boos calling out from below. The poor Wadi jumped from its perch, did a few circles in her lap, then started digging its way under her shirt.

Bang! Screeee! Over and over.

Molly stuck her fingers in her ears, but the horrid sound wormed its way through and just rattled around, trapped inside her skull. The assault on her one sense was so terrifying, it seemed to bleed over to others. She could taste metal. Pops of light burst in her stunned vision, although it was still pitch-black all around her. Even her nose hallucinated somehow, as an electrical burn tickled her nostrils.

The stage lights gradually brightened as the horrendous noise con-tinued; they revealing a lone figure on the stage: a nude Callite, her back turned. At first, Molly couldn’t tell what she was doing. Then she noticed several objects rising and falling in front of the woman. She glanced at Walter and could see his outline huddled and cringing from the awful noise.

They needed to get out of there before they went permanently deaf.

Just as Molly considered an escape from the barrage of awful sounds, the first volley of fruit arced from the crowd and into the puddle of light on stage. Molly watched, horrified, as the raw and rotten foodstuffs splattered across the alien’s bare back. Something like cabbage exploded against her head, and the crowd could be heard whooping over the furious noise. The female Callite, seemingly naked, kept throwing the objects up in the air. Her back, brown and webbed with the lines of interlocking plates, shed the incoming missiles, her muscles rippling like turbulent, muddy water.

Molly pushed on her ears and watched intently. The Wadi finally managed to dig its way under her shirt; it crawled around to the small of her back where it huddled and shivered.

The woman began to turn. Another light came on, illuminating something floating down from above. Molly glanced up and saw a clear bubble descending—and the audience must have noted it as well. The hail of rotten edibles became thick and frantic, most of them missing. The spectators began using both hands, as more objects zoomed through the air at once than there had been people below.

Some of the produce found their target, and as Cat spun around, Molly saw she wasn’t completely nude. She wore a very short apron—almost like a welder’s smock—that just covered her body from her breasts to the top of her thighs. She completed her turn, facing the audience and the hail of edibles, and Molly finally recognized the source of the clamor: two hammers, like small sledges, were being wielded in each hand. The woman swung them in tight circles, knocking the falling objects repeatedly into the air. The things she hit looked like woks, but with the handles removed. She struck them on their flat bottoms with such precision that they rose straight up, never spinning over. She just kept juggling them with noisy violence.

Molly matched each of the objects with their unique brand of auditory pain. All three had their own signature, like merciless handwritten scrawls etched with fingernails on a blackboard. A piece of fruit glanced off one of the woks, sending it wobbling. Molly heard excited whistling from the crowd as Cat fought to stabilize the blaring cone of steel. Meanwhile, the lip of the descending bubble was close to protecting her, so the aim from the unseen firing squad shifted to her bare legs, both of them already flecked with the salad of disgruntled viewers.

Molly felt hope swell in her chest for the tormented performer, glad that Cat had added the shell as some sort of feeble defense. The lip of the inverted bowl finally met the stage, locking inside a round collar and sealing it tight. Residual noise continued to ring in Molly’s ears, but she could tell the source of the painful vibrations had gone away, as she could no longer feel the fabric of her shirt buzzing against her chest. She pulled her fingers out of her ears and worked her jaw, feeling something pop inside her skull.

The Wadi wiggled out of its makeshift cave and crawled up inside her shirt, peering out the collar. Molly leaned forward to take in the scene below as fruit from the audience continued to impact the barrier, sliding down and leaving colorful tracks behind.

Inside the bubble, Cat juggled the woks, each one rising up toward the ceiling of her shield before sinking back down. Without the agonizing noise, Molly could begin to appreciate the physical ordeal taking place. Each hammer looked to weigh a few kilos, and the woks had to be sturdy to take such a beating and put off so much sound.

Cat’s arms, popping with sinewy muscles, were beautiful in motion. They vibrated with each impact, relaxed, then tensed, then vibrated again. The definition in them stood out through her dark, scaly skin, the movement of them reminding Molly that Callites appeared to be made up of hard plates, but they were just as soft and pliable as she, the webbing no different than how her own skin looked on close inspection.

She shifted her gaze to Cat’s legs, where the alien’s larger muscle groups fought to keep her body stable, her torso rotating gracefully through the cycles of the juggling, hips and shoulders weaving in time to a tune Molly could no longer hear. The entire display was a sort of grace moving to the beat of torture, a sensuous expression of pain. Molly studied Cat’s body and her motions intently, finally noticing the two bands encircling the woman’s thighs, the only things she wore besides the smock-like apron.

Movement in the crowd broke Molly’s concentration. She watched as the bored spectators threw the rest of their ammunition toward the dome. The missiles impacted and exploded as the unhappy silhouettes filed toward the exits.

For them, the night’s entertainment was over.

For Molly, it had just begun.

A hum-filled silence ensued. There wasn’t a peep outside Molly’s head, just a dull, residual roar from the earlier explosions of sound. She watched, mesmerized, as Cat slammed the objects up into the air. It took her a moment, lost as she was in the lovely display of dexterity, to realize something truly awful. Something horrifying:

It wasn’t quiet in that bubble.

The shield, Molly finally understood, wasn’t meant to protect Cat from the hurled objects—it existed for the audience’s benefit. It protected Molly and the rest of the spectators from the gods-awful noise.

Inside that shell—alone and unguarded—Cat endured a torment far worse and of greater frequency than the petty strikes hurled from the crowd.

Molly leaned over the railing, her empathy drawing her down inside that dome. She tried to imagine the horror of standing there, of enduring not just the noise, but the confined echoes of that shield. She felt the sickening inability to escape or win reprieve, the anguish of willingly secluding oneself in tight proximity to such violence.

The thought made her want to yell out for it to stop; she wanted to float to the stage and pound on the glass and put an end to it all; she wanted to throw something, anything at whoever was doing this. But the silence, the barrier between her and that agony, even the sheer beauty of Cat’s precise movements, it all completely paralyzed her.

So she continued to watch, transfixed, at the sublime mastery of kinesthetics on display. And without even realizing it, she began to cry. The tears silently streamed down her face as she clutched the railing with white knuckles and watched an event more meaningful and more beautiful and more terrible than her imagination could properly bear.

ѻѻѻѻ

Close by, the old Wadi responded to the tears and sadness. She kept her head tucked beneath the jutting outcrop of her pair-bond’s chin, and she bobbed her head with grief, swaying with the somber scents she could see and smell like columns of smoke. Falling into a deep trance, she forgot even her great and persistent hunger. She forgot her need to feed her brood. She just lost herself in her pair-bond’s emotions—clear and as moving as canyon music. And those emotions stirred something deep inside. Deep, where her pair-bond had triggered other changes by removing her from her lair. Changes she had once fled to the canyon of solitude to never feel again.

As the chemicals and smells of sadness swirled all around her, the Wadi remembered back to long ago. She remembered the arduous, dry, and hot run to the eggless canyon, that place where she could avoid what the male Wadis had done to her. She had made her home in those canyons where offspring were never produced and where the blue hunters rarely came. It had been so long ago, but she was willing to stay there even longer. She had planned on staying forever, hoping to avoid these changes for the rest of her days.

But now they were taking place, and emotions coursed down her scent tongue, traveling like liquid rays of the twin lights to fill her head and heart. They swelled and consumed her near to bursting—even as her body continued to dwindle. Continued to dwindle as whatever she ate and drank was robbed from her, pulled through some sucking void she couldn’t understand, racing off to feed eggs laid in the eggless canyon, which was so impossibly far away that she could no longer taste it. Impossibly far away, but somehow connected to her, nutrients flowing through a corridor that shouldn’t be there.

14

“What the flank are you doing?” yelled Cole. “What the flank!”

Joshua smiled and calmly returned the wooden sticks to their furry folds. He then brushed his hands along his thighs, smoothing the pelt covering them. “More questions?” he said. “Should I divide your friend into smaller pieces?”

Cole shook his head and panted for air. He watched the two goons bend down and grab Riggs’s boots, pulling his calves forward so they could smear the cut edges with the purple goop. Blood leaked out the top of them. As they held them away from the rack, Cole could see the concentric circles of Riggs’s insides, the white of bone surrounded by bright layers of red meat.

“Are you ready to answer my questions?”

Cole nodded.

“What’s your name?” Joshua asked.

“Cole,” he whispered. His mouth responded directly to the question, bypassing his brain, his heroics, his fear.

“Where are you from, Cole?”