Apostles of Mercy by Lindsay Ellis

Author:Lindsay Ellis [Ellis, Lindsay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags:  
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Trinity shoved Paris onto the floor in front of Nikola right on her hip, right on the bruise they’d given her the night before. Nikola’s head was cocked at a weird angle, his eyes focused on nothing, like he’d been put in a trance. It was so dark in here, and coming from direct sunlight, it was taking some time for Paris’s eyes to adjust. This time, a bigger crowd had shown up to bicker about . . . whatever it was they were bickering about.

Then a shove from behind her from Tsar Bomba, the loudest of the bunch, knocked her onto her face. She curled into a fetal position as Bomba stood over her, addressing their peers in that spitting alien language. It was so strange watching them speak with their mouths closed, all the noise coming from the air holes in their necks. She chanced a look at the crowd that was gathering. Some of them were smaller than the group that was standing over her and bickering loudly, smaller even than she was. These must be juveniles, she thought.

The adults were clad in black skin suits, but the skin suits the juveniles wore were all over the place, the garbs covering them so diverse in color, style, and amount of clothes it made her think of the Lost Boys from Hook. The veins under their alabaster skin were much darker than what she’d seen on the skin of the adults, snaking up their necks and faces like vines crawling up old houses.

One of the other adults grabbed Paris by the shoulder and pulled her back onto her knees, and she tried to flinch away when they jammed something into her ear.

“DEAR GENTLE CREATURE.”

“Nik!” she gasped, and the shoulder-grabber let her go. “Tell them I didn’t . . . I didn’t know about the land mines!”

“I KNOW, DEAR GENTLE CREATURE. YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE WE ARE.”

“Do you know where we are?”

“WE ARE IN THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE. THAT IS ALL I CAN TELL.”

Northern Hemisphere, she thought, her mind racing; Northern Hemisphere. Tropical rainforest. Land mines. That narrowed it down considerably; they must be somewhere in Southeast Asia. “What’s happening? What are they going to do?”

“THEY HAVE REQUESTED THAT I ACT AS TRANSLATOR. THEY WANT YOU TO EXPLAIN YOURSELF.”

“Yes, anything they want! I’ll tell them whatever they want.”

Nikola paused, looking at the group behind her, still bickering. She wondered if she should frame it more as an act of altruism than the fact that she had been more terrified of being discovered with a dead Castle Bravo than a maimed Castle Bravo. The others quieted until only Bomba was speaking to Nikola. Nikola was still in that trancelike state, his focus on no one and nothing.

“THIS ONE BELIEVES YOU DELIBERATELY LURED THEIR FELLOW INTO THE MINEFIELD. THEY WANT TO KNOW HOW YOU STAGED IT.”

Paris looked at the creatures behind her incredulously. “They think I planned this?”

“THEY HYPOTHESIZE I DID.”

“That’s absurd!”

Nikola’s head straightened, and he finally said something. He hardly got a word (or whatever their word equivalent was) out before Bomba cut him off.

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