Monster Planet(40)

'We tie hands, then tie to ceiling. You cannot sit down without tearing arms from sockets. Body won't let you do that, even when unconscious. You have not sit down three days. Your arms are dying, no blood. All blood goes to feet, which swell, then crack. Used at Guantanamo Bay, and at Kabul. In Belfast and Mosul and Jerusalem. Roman Catholic church invent it for Inquisition, because no blood shed. But KGB make it perfect.'

Ayaan tried to lick her lips but her mouth stuck together as if it were full of glue. Concentrating, squinting her eyes she managed to get a drop of spit onto her soft palate. Our kicks are never so simple, Cicatrix had told her. 'Torture,' she creaked. 'Do you,' she said, and waited until she had more saliva to loosen her tongue, 'come when you see me like this? Does it make you come?'

The Tsarevich smiled at her. The kind of smile a grandmother would keep on living for. 'Is not for me, is for you. Such talent you have. Such talent I never waste. I have use for you, even now. Is sad, must hurt so much, is very sad, but also, is necessary. Must break down ignorance and fear. You see?'

You mean,she thought, lacking the energy to keep talking, you mean you have to wear down my psychological barriers. Ayaan knew exactly what they were doing to her. Even in her reduced state she could still think, if slowly. They were torturing her in preparation for brainwashing. No matter how much resistance she put up, they would just push her farther. No matter how long it took, they could wait for her to come around.

'Fuck, get mop! She wets self,' the rough voice said.

The Tsarevich frowned. 'Kidneys shut down after three days. Is permanent, if you don't sit down.' He took a handkerchief out of the sleeve of his armor and mopped at the front of her pants.

'What,' Ayaan stammered, 'what do you really look like?'

His eyes sparkled. 'You find out, and soon,' he told her. 'Very soon now. You come stand at my side.' He put a hand over his mouth, catching himself in a faux pas. 'I mean to say, sit, at my side, yes?'

The smile lit up his face and the cloud moved away from the sun.

Stay alive,she thought. Stay alive for Sarah. She needs you.

'You will to be mine,' he told her, patting her feet.

She knew better than to antagonize him. It would only get her another day on the strap. Still. She was still Ayaan, at least for the time being. 'That's what the Least said,' she told the Tsarevich. 'And look at him now.'





Monster Planet





Chapter Two


Hell Gate, the neck of water between Manhattan and the northern extent of Long Island, stretched out before them as placid as a sheet of glass. 'This was impassible before,' Osman said. His haunted eyes told her this journey was dredging up old memories he'd long since sealed away in the back dark corners of his mind. She felt a bizarre communion with the old man, a place where their two very different lives had finally touched. She wondered if that was what growing up felt like.

'There were bodies. Thousands of them.' He moved to the bow and stared ahead through Ayaan's old field glasses. The diesels chugged along just fine without him at the wheel. 'And the birds. The pigeons, the seagulls'they were a carpet of white feathers.' He lowed the binoculars and looked back at her where she sat atop the wheelhouse. 'A city's worth of bodies. A raft of them.'

They were gone, the bodies he described. Gone for years probably. They had taken the long way round to Governors Island, a paranoid excursion that took most of a day as they headed back out to sea and then rounded the extensive coastline of Long Island, then coming down through the Sound and the East River. Osman had been convinced the bodies would still be in the way but Sarah was terrified that the Tsarevich might be watching them, that he had some way of knowing where they went and that he could follow them to their destination. Only by wasting a day's good sailing could she relax and feel she had shaken off that hypothetical pursuit.

The city passed her by on the right like a series of eroded cliffs. Dramatic, startling sometimes in their size, the buildings didn't connect with anything she'd ever seen before. The tree branches emerging from the windows, the fallen piles of concrete and steel looked like natural features. Even the occasional spill of glass where an entire skyscraper's facade had collapsed down into the street might have been an outcropping of some glittering crystalline mineral. As they passed what her chart told her was called Roosevelt Island Osman rushed back to his controls to steer them around a twist of metal that slumped across the river like an elephant's trunk drawing up water. It took her a while to realize it must be what was left of a bridge. Rust and metal fatigue had claimed most of it, leaving broken legs sticking up into a blue sky, rising hundreds of feet up into the air.