“I missed you,” says Roche when the hand crawls into his lap. “Yes, I did. You don’t have to touch that nasty skin anymore, no you don’t.”
And then Sarya is hauled out of the firelight like garbage.
“Mer—” she gasps through a collar that is choking off more vital oxygen and blood with every jolt. “Observer—”
She doesn’t know who she’s talking to. Is she begging for her life? Trying to explain herself? To reassure herself? Is she calling for help to a mind who cannot save her? There must be a thousand pairs of eyes on her right now, and yet Observer does nothing as this massive predator lumbers through the darkness with his prey. Here at the edge of the clearing, where the matted grass gives way to trees, it is cold. Out here, it is dark. It’s not Human-ship dark, but it’s close. A few fires behind her and a few hundred false stars in the sky do absolutely nothing to light the forest; whatever few photons they can spare don’t survive more than a meter into it. She stares between barely lit trees, realizing: this is where she ends, in the cold darkness.
Mer holds her up, dangling from her hair and collar, facing the dark forest. “What do you see?” he rumbles.
Sarya struggles, one hand on the collar of her utility suit and the other flopping uselessly, her boots still kicking half a meter off the ground. “Mer, please—” she chokes.
“What do you see?” Mer roars.
Sarya pulls herself up, desperate. “I—I don’t—”
“You’re damn right you don’t,” says Mer. “You don’t see anything. You don’t know what the hell is out there.” He turns now, Sarya’s feet whipping outward with the centrifugal force. “Now what do you see?” he says.
“Fires,” gasps Sarya, instantly, searching for what Mer wants to hear. “People.” Goddess, Mer, what is it? Dancing? Observer? Roche and Sandy, food, what?
“This is our galaxy, Human,” says Mer. “A few fires in a universe so huge, so cold, so dark that nobody knows what’s in it. So much darkness it would rip your mind in half to think about it, and nobody knows anything about it. So what do we do? We band together, a million species with our backs to our fires and our talons to the darkness. We keep our weapons for the night—not each other. And every single one of us understood that—except your Gor-damned species. What the hell kind of morals do you people have? You had a fire. Your people got to grow up in a nice little safe place, with food and light and heat and everything you needed—just like the rest of us. And then when the rest of us said hi, what did the Humans think?” She feels herself drawn inward, away from the fires and toward Mer’s glistening teeth. His hot breath blows the matted hair off her forehead. “You thought, maybe we can take their fires too.”
Sarya chokes on the collar around her neck, on the bile in her throat, on the fumes curling through Mer’s teeth. This is not the time or place to debate, says her mind. This is the time to survive, to think about drawing the next breath, to consider strategies that allow a breath after that and the possibility of more breaths in the future. “Mer—” she squeaks. “You’re…killing me.”
“Yes, but it’s what I choose to do,” rumbles Mer. He draws her closer, until her entire front is actually pressed against his hot fur. She feels his teeth open and close against her utility suit when he speaks. “Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”
Because she has rights, screams her mind. Because she is a living thing and life is sacred. Because Mer is her friend—whatever that’s worth. These and a dozen other reasons flash through her mind, but each one seems like it could instantly trigger a homicidal beast many times her mass and strength. All she has to do is say the wrong thing and she’s dead—for good, this time.
And then she is thrown to the ground, hard enough to rattle her teeth. Her arms and legs are stretched out and pinned to the wet grass by four of Mer’s limbs; she can feel their talons sinking into the soil around her wrists and ankles. “There was a reason,” says Mer from above her, and when he speaks she can feel his hot saliva sprinkle her face. “There was a big reason, called the Network. It said every Citizen had rights. It enforced those rights. But guess what?” And now Sarya hears a horrible wetness, the intensely biological sound of a gigantic mouth opening wider. Something wet and hot caresses the side of her face, then pulls back into the darkness. She shivers, the night air cold on the side of her licked face. “Network’s not here,” whispers Mer.
Sarya turns away, her cheek on the wet mess of grass and goddess knows what else. She holds her eyes closed, waiting. She’s faced death before; she’s been dead before, more or less. But this—this is different, and far worse. This is an ignoble end in the darkness, a last wet scream and gurgle—
And then she becomes aware that the air flowing over her has turned cold. It doesn’t smell like predator breath; it smells like fire and trees and maybe a whiff of the biological necessities of a million partying Observers. She moves an arm, then the other, then opens her eyes and sits up slowly. Fifty meters away, in the direction from which she was just dragged, kicking, a furry mass sits staring into a fire.
And right in front of her, next to the depression where her head lay a second ago, sits Sandy.
“You were watching that?” Sarya demands.
Sandy blinks something, then turns away and scampers toward her fire.
“She was preventing that,” says a voice behind her. It hiccups. “You should be more grateful.”
Sarya turns to see a lone Observer weaving in the near-darkness at the edge of the forest. “What about You?” she demands of it, massaging her limp hand with her other. “He was going to kill me, and You didn’t do a thing.”
“Not true!” says the Observer. It hiccups and raises its cup. “I observed.”
Under a sky of false stars, on the gigantic face of a cube the size of a world, Sarya fumes.
She sits by one of the fires, in one of the islands of light scattered through the cold unknown, on one of the few remaining patches of grass that have not been trampled into moist awfulness. The air is thick with the odor of a million biological bodies doing what biological bodies do—only worse. Observer has been eating and drinking for hours now, and He is apparently the kind of intelligence who doesn’t mind sleeping in His own filth.
She clenches her jaw and strokes the bare skin of her half-dead hand. She can open it with the tendons she left herself, but she can’t clench it without help. She is at the farthest fire from Roche, who took back his hand when she needed it most. Farthest from Mer, the predator who almost killed her. From Sandy, who—well, maybe Sandy gets a pass. Actually, no: there’s no telling what a tier three is doing. Probably playing some long game that Sarya will never understand. The point is, Sarya would have called them her friends, once. She would have even admitted that she was wrong to abandon them. But that was before they stripped her body for parts and almost killed her. That kind of thing tends to change relationships.