Monster Planet(80)

'Look at you, lad, you've been made more than you were. You've been made noble, no, you're royalty now, one of three creatures in this world with any power or strength left. You're the very prince of death, aren't you?'

In Russian, the word was tsarevich.

'He teaches me then, how to control and instruct dead man. He shows me powers that are mine, and powers that are his. And why we have power at all. To wipe out all humans, he says. He begins to tell me who authorizes such a plan, and why it must be so. And then he goes.'

The benefactor disappeared in mid-sentence, in mid-instruction. The Tsarevich was supposed to go forth and kill every living human he could find, he knew that much. The benefactor had never explained what this was supposed to achieve. Without warning, without completing his instruction, the tattooed man had just vanished.

'Only later, only much later do I learn. Was eaten, yes, eaten by one like me. One like Nilla, you, too. One that was him called Gary.'

Ayaan uncrossed her legs. She folded her arms across her chest.

'Yes, yes,' the boy said, waving at her. 'Now you know so much. Why I do not hate you, for one. Why I wanted our friend ghost.' He pointed at the brain in its jar. Ayaan didn't look. 'That is him, and I seek him for twelve years to find out rest of command. Go forth and kill so that... so that what? Now he changes tune, of course. Now he tells me sacred mission is called off. I don't know what to do.' The boy smiled. 'Is little joke, of course. I know exactly what to do. I must heal myself. I must make myself whole again.'

Ayaan frowned. She looked over and saw Nilla, whose face was a mask of perfect attention.

'You must to see this now, is not pretty, and I am sorry. But you must. I continued to grow, you see, even after car hits me. My little body keeps to growing, but lying in bed, could not grow right. I was in bed seven years before Epidemic came and started the healing process on me. Seven years I grow wrong.'

The imaginary boy vanished without so much as a flicker of light. The throne, which had once been a car on the MAD-O-RAMA dark ride, turned around on a circle of revolving floor. Cicatrix was revealed inside, her limbs tangled with those of the Tsarevich, the real Tsarevich. Cicatrix wore nothing but a slip. The Tsarevich was sucking on a cut in her thigh, sucking out her blood.

It wasn't vampirism that made Ayaan and Nilla both shift in their seats, however. It was the boy. He had a skull shaped like an eggplant, much broader at its crown than at his chin. A single patch of hair stood off-center atop his head. His face was distorted, pulled out into a long parody of a human visage. One eye was permanently closed by a fold of flesh, the other protruded from his head so much it looked like it might fall out. His mouth contained three or four teeth growing at random angles'when he drew back from Cicatrix's thigh a mixture of blood and saliva drooled from his lower lip, which didn't close properly.

They couldn't see too much of his body, which was hidden behind Cicatrix's curvaceous form. Ayaan could tell, however, that his arms were of different lengths and only one ended in a hand'the other was a squid-like mass of fused digits growing at abnormal angles. His chest had been caved in on one side and his pelvis seemed to attach to the wrong bones.

'He cannot take solid food,' Cicatrix said, breaking the silence that had filled the room like something solid, like all the air in the room had been replaced with solid glass. 'His body no longer functions so. Only blood can he eat. My blood. I eat all sugar and candy I like, and he takes away from me, so I stay slender. Is good arrangement.'

She chuckled and the monster on the throne smiled. His tongue wagged inside of his mouth and words formed. 'I go now to Source. All pieces are in place. Soon, this body is no more. Soon I am real boy again!'

Ayaan's hands were grabbing at the air before she realized what she was doing. She was pulling energy toward herself, gathering power for a massive death bolt that would destroy the two of them and probably turn the throne into dust as well. She could do it, there was absolutely nothing stopping her.

It had not been her own decision, however, to gather that energy. Maybe, she told herself, her subconscious was so disgusted by the sight of the Tsarevich that she just wanted to destroy him, to put him out of everyone's misery.

Or maybe Semyon Iurevich had put that thought in her head.

Does it matter?she heard, the words blasting through her cranium like a chill wind off a freight train's passage.This was the deal. From the beginning, this is the way we played the course. You put on a wonderful show, lass. You made so nice even I started to believe it. I honestly started to believe that you had come around to his side.