Monster Planet(11)

'What was that, girl?' Jack asked her. He looked more surprised than sorrowful, even though in life he and Ayaan had possessed a powerful mutual respect.

'Ayaan, she's' she's dead.' It felt almost good to say it aloud. It made it more real but it also made it easier to cope with, somehow. 'She was killed by the Tsarevich's troops yesterday.'

'She bloody well was not,' Jack swore. 'They took her alive, right before they grabbed up Ptolemy's folk.'

Sarah could only gape at him.

'I thought you knew,' he said.

The mummy massaged his stone scarab like a pet.





Monster Planet





Chapter Six


They put her in a cage, a box almost perfectly sized to fit a human being. It was all quite efficient. The cage was a meter and a half wide, a meter tall, and two meters long. It gave her enough room to shift around in but not enough to sit up. They put a thin blanket under her and loaded her into a truck full of identical cages. The cages fit together perfectly, modular containers for human beings. They closed the door of the truck and left the prisoners in darkness. A very little light came in under the bottom of the truck's door. In that little illumination Ayaan could tilt her head around carefully and see her neighbors on three sides. They kept their faces pressed into their blankets, their arms wrapped around their heads. The one on her left, a boy of maybe seventeen, was bleeding pretty badly from a gash in his chest. His ragged breathing echoed inside the steel cell of the truck like wind coming through a narrow cave.

When the truck moved the cages rattled against each other, clanged against the walls of the cab, vibrated crazily. Ayaan grasped the bars of her cage to keep herself from sliding around. The injured boy lacked the strength to do the same and he moaned pitiably every time the truck cab swayed or jounced or turned and he slid up hard against the limits of his cage, bruising his already injured flesh.

The enclosed air quickly took on the stench of unwashed bodies and shit'there were no sanitary facilities available in the cages. Ayaan needed to urinate a little herself but she swore she would wait and deny the Tsarevich that small indignity against her person.

She lacked the ability to tell time in the enclosed hell. Alone with her thoughts she could only measure the duration of her captivity in how much her anger had cooled and how badly she was failing her obligations. Of those there were many to think on. She had her unit to think of'the entire encampment, frankly, depended on her leadership. They would not have survived so long without her. She owed them her strength. She had a larger obligation to fight the khasiis , the liches'that was a duty she had accepted the day she shotGary but forgot to make sure he was actually dead. The consequences of that careless moment had been paid for by others beside herself. She owed their ghosts a lifetime of service.

Now she had new ghosts, too. Mariam and Leyla were dead, half a dozen more of her soldiers were slaughtered by the fast ghouls in the desert. She owed them vengeance, assuming she ever got the opportunity.

Perhaps more painfully she was letting Sarah down. Dekalb, Sarah's father, had saved Ayaan's life many times. He had gone so far to refuse to let her martyr herself when it would have achieved nothing. In his final moments he had begged her to look after his daughter. Ayaan always had' until she let herself be captured by a strange new kind of ghoul.

As much as she tried to torture herself with thoughts of Sarah alone and defenseless out in the desert boredom eventually trumped guilt. Thirst and hunger helped as well. The pressure on her bladder built and refused to go away and the darkness settled on her like a heavy weight on her stomach. She was used to being able to see things. She needed to see things so that she could shoot them. With no gun and no light she was out of her element.

She had completely stopped trying to measure time when the boy started to rattle deep in his throat. She'd heard the sound before and she didn't like what it boded. 'Hey'are you alright?' Ayaan asked him. 'Hey. Hey!'

He turned with a horrible slowness. Not an unwillingness to talk to her'he appeared quite grateful for the human contact. No, he was moving so slowly because human time was behind him. He moved at the rate of the eternity he was about to join. He looked at her and uttered something in a language she didn't know. His eyes were wild, uncontrolled, and sweat sheened his face.

'I don't understand,' Ayaan said. She tried the languages she had'Somali, Arabic, English, her smatterings of Italian and Russian. None of them got an intelligible response.