Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
It never happened, obviously.
I became Jasina Bell, the down-city whore.
Auntie didn’t like my dress that afternoon. Being eight, I couldn’t afford fabric. So I picked a tattered dress from the trash bins behind a Shipping District whorehouse, ripped the seams, and turned it into something new.
The look on Auntie’s face when I got off the boat at the Maiden District made my insides quiver with fear.
Long story short, I didn’t go to the gala. I was sent away, chased by nasty words and condemnation. I went to the waterfall so I could dream of a day when no one was in charge of me, and no one could judge me, and all I wanted that day was to go home without having to ask for help.
If I had wings, I could fly. If I had gills, I could swim.
But I was helpless and I had nothing but a dress made from second-rate silk picked out of the trash.
I hated that feeling.
The helplessness.
It’s why I stayed in the Rebellion, odd as that is, since it was Auntie who injected this futility into me. I hated the way we were treated down-city. I hated the lack of… well, everything. We had nothing. And the people up-city had it all.
This is what I see when I wake with words on my lips.
Finn Scott. The absolute poster-boy for up-city fucks.
I am face down on a large piece of circular glass. If this feels familiar, it’s because it is. My lot in life. To be strapped to a spark harvester to feed a god or power an augment.
Luckily, there’s no Donal here.
Just Finn. Directly below me, standing on a black-glass stage that pulses with lines of light, holding a fighting stance like he’s been put on ‘pause’, and looking more like one of those workers in the Factory Dimension than the man I met a couple of months ago.
His body looks like it’s been chiseled from stone. Glowing eyes, blond hair now white, and two streams of crackling cyan-blue spark come out of his shoulders and attach to my plate.
Aside from Finn, there are three other men being held hostage on the circular platform below, as well as three other girls strapped to plates of glass above them. The air is wet with the spark that’s being harvested from us. It hisses and crackles around the plates like little bits of static holding the power of lightning.
“Gentlemen!” A voice roars from below the mist. It’s Xi. My first look at the real him. Which is jarring because he looks nothing like the hologram he presented to me in the Factory. His style is lead singer in a spinecore band that plays the down-city docks back home.
A young, muscular man stuck in his clash-boy era, Xi is tall, and lean, and wears no shirt. His eyes glow cyan-blue, his face etched with light. Hair sticks straight up, white and spiky, like it’s been electrocuted. At first, I think his chest is inked up with tattoos, but then, I realize that he’s not covered in skin, but black glass. And those designs aren’t tattoos, they’re switches.
Glowing with blue-gold spark and orange-green swirls, the switches wind around his torso and arms like snakes. Bright against his glassy skin, they flicker on and off, making captivating patterns that I find hard to look away from.
He wears pants that look like they were stitched from the hides of ancient animals and his shirtless upper body jingles and clanks with chains. They are every width—thin and thick—hanging from his neck and dropping from his belt. Gold, and silver, and heavy with charms—they must number in the hundreds.
He makes quite a picture, I’ll give him that.
But now, at least, it makes sense. Because this narcissistic god remade Finn in his own image. He turned Finn into one of them.
“May I present to you,” Xi opens his arms in a wide gesture, motioning to Finn. “The answers to all our prayers. My fellow Medians, please indulge me as I list the full capabilities of my latest—and best to date—success!”
This is when I notice the other gods. Placed around the massive circle like a clock with only nine hours in the day, Xi stands at midnight. “First, and foremost,” he bellows! “The final solution to our greatest problem—the Cognitive Port Interface! This is a direct link to the augment’s brain stem that allows for total mind-body control. Divine spark signatures are converted into neural patterns readable by the augment's cortex. But it gets better—because this model comes with bidirectional syncing, allowing the god to receive real-time feedback from the host augment. Which allows for a more natural response in combat, speaking, and decision making.”
He’s got his claws in Finn’s brain stem. I don’t actually know what that is, but I can take a good guess. Rage fills me. Who gave him the right? Why does this thing assume that humans are his pet projects?