Chapter Eighteen

“Hello, lasses,” the armless ghoul choked out. It laughed at them, a sputtering, horrible noise. “Honestly, I am glad to see you both still with us.”

All that remained of the Tsarevich were a few lumps of indistinct meat skewered on the steel spikes, fuming and smoking as they smoldered away to black carbon.

“I want you to know that I never wanted anyone to suffer.” He staggered closer to the edge of the scaffolding. Another step and he would fall onto the spikes. Sarah was pretty sure that was exactly what he intended to do.

“Mael Mag Och, I presume,” she said.

The ghoul flexed the ragged nubbins of bone he possessed in place of arms. “In the flesh.”

“What’s going on here?” Ayaan shook Sarah’s shoulder but Sarah didn’t know how to answer. “What happened to the Tsarevich? The machinery was supposed to heal him! It was supposed to make him whole again. What went wrong?”

Mael Mag Och shrugged. It made the skin of his chest split and peel. “The machinery worked just fine, lass. I just never meant it to do any such thing.”

“You? You killed him?” Ayaan was nearly shrieking. Sarah wished she would calm down. “How is that possible?”

“It helps to have friends on the inside.”

“Nilla,” Sarah said, getting it.

He tried to smile but the remains of his mouth merely twitched. “His plan required her to condition the energy of the Source. To step it down to a level his bodily tissues could accept. At my command she merely fed him an extra little jolt.”

“But why?” Ayaan demanded. “Why did you do this? Why did you kill him?”

“Sarah knows,” he told her. Sarah bit her lip. She had a feeling she did know, and it terrified her. When Gary had told her about Mael Mag Och she’d thought of him as a laughable sort of vision. Someone stuck in the mindset of the Dark Ages. That was, of course, before he got his hands on the ultimate power of the life force itself.

“So I was saying that I never wanted this to be such a difficult transition. You should ask Gary some time, Sarah. He would tell you, I’m sure, just how much compassion I still had in my heart, back in those all-too-brief days when I still had my own body. How I wanted to make things easy on you. Instead you chose all this blood-curdling violence and pain.”

“We chose nothing,” Ayaan spat. “What are you talking about?” She leapt down from the flatbed and took a few steps toward the scaffolding. The ghouls moved toward her just as quickly. She had watched them tear Enni Langstrom to pieces. She took a step back.

Mael Mag Och acted as if nothing had happened. “I was a nice chap, once. I know that’s changed. It’s a hard lot to be a raw consciousness stripped of form and left spinning in the void. If it made me a bit cranky, well. I do apologize.”

Ayaan grabbed Sarah’s arm tight enough to hurt. “What is it, Sarah? What does he want? What is he going to do?”

She struggled to find the best words. “His god told him to destroy the human race. Like, all of it. I think he’s going to do something to the Source.”

“Very good,” he told her. “The Source is a hole in the side of the world. Imagine a balloon with a tiny little pinprick in it. Imagine the air coming out, just a little at a time. Enough to keep the likes of you upright, that’s all. Now imagine what happens if you let all the air out of the balloon at once.”

Ayaan shook her head in disbelief. “You’d kill everything. Animals, plants, trees, people. Overload them, burn them to ashes. Everything.”

“Hmm. It is a pity about the trees. But I’ve been given a mission. If I’d had a bit of help from the start maybe things wouldn’t have come to so drastic a pass. I asked Gary for his help and the buggering bastard ate my head. I asked the Tsarevich and instead he turned himself into the king of the blighted world. I asked you,” he said, the clouded orbs of his eyes burning as he stared at Ayaan, “and you spat in my face.”

Sarah put her hands over her mouth. She couldn’t believe this.

“Ah, yes, I asked young Sarah as well, though I was a trifle dishonest about things. She was the only one who actually tried to help me. Too bad she was such an ineffectual little child. In the name of the father of tribes himself, lass, did you honestly expect to fight an army with a couple of mummies? I’m fond of the Egyptian folk, I truly am, but they’re crap against modern weaponry. You really missed the point.”

“You’ve been planning this all along,” Sarah said, dumbfounded. “You wanted me to kill the Tsarevich. You wanted Ayaan to kill the Tsarevich. So you could take his place. You let him capture you and put you in that jar. You told him exactly what he wanted to hear: that he could come here and heal himself. Because this is where you needed to be. How long have you been planning this?”

“I’ve been planning for this since your Gary knocked me down. You have no notion, lass, of how many snares I’ve laid and schemes I’ve hatched to get us here.”

“And my gift, my special vision?” Sarah demanded. “That was all part of your plan?”

“No, no, lass, that was Nilla’s idea, you’ve her to thank. She said the human race deserved one last chance to prove itself. I disagreed, of course, but I have trouble saying no to that one. So I chose you and said if you could stop me, you and you alone, then it would be clear that Teuagh had forgiven the whole sorry mess of us. So just as I had helped your father I helped you. And just like the geezer, you were a complete and utter failure. He couldn’t kill Gary though he was given years to pull it off. You couldn’t do anything right. If I ever wanted for proof that humanity is too far gone for saving, well, you’ve provided it in full, bairn.”

Sarah’s cheeks burned with her blood. She had failed everyone. She had failed so many time over. And now... and now... the enormity of what was about to happen was impossible. She started to faint. She could feel herself spontaneously losing consciousness in the face of such a horrible ending to her life, to her rescue attempt.

“And you, Ayaan. I actually held out some hope for you,” he said. His voice was tinny and small in Sarah’s ears. She was losing it. “We’re the monsters,” he said to Ayaan. She could barely make out the words. “Can we please start acting like it?”

Sarah’s eyes fluttered closed and when they opened she was looking at a rocky landscape that belonged to another planet entirely. Maybe Mars. Or Pluto. She saw the valley stripped of its carpet of bones, she saw the mountains around her and the blue sky and the white puffy clouds. Yet the mountains were naked, totally devoid of trees, of underbrush, even of the patchy lichens that mottled the highest peaks. There were no birds in the air. No fish in the sea. No bacteria. Not even a virus. The air itself had become poison to her—with no plants there could be no oxygen. She started to choke, to asphyxiate, and then she opened her eyes again.

Nothing had changed. She had just become so painfully aware of what was about to transpire that she had seen it. Call it pre-traumatic stress disorder. She had literally seen the lifeless world. And it was going to be all her fault.

“Good night, ladies,” Mael Mag Och said. Then he threw himself down on the steel spikes. One passed right through his thigh and came out the other side with a noise like cloth ripping. The other passed through his throat. His body convulsed in what had to be terrible pain but he made no sound. Beneath him the vacuum tubes lit up with their happy orange glow. The machinery began to hum.

Sarah turned to Ayaan. What could they do? There was nothing they could do. The scaffolding was out of machine gun range. If they tried to rush the scaffolding on foot the remaining handless ghouls would slaughter them before they could cover half the distance. Even if they could get to the body on the spikes what would they do then? Tear him down with their bare hands? It was over. In a moment the life force would be released, dispersed, whatever. It would be gone. That life force was the only thing that kept the human body together, kept all the pieces working with each other. When it was gone Sarah’s cells would turn against themselves, cannibalizing each other for what little golden energy remained stored inside them. In a matter of minutes they would fade out of existence altogether, depleted of the raw mainstay of life. Ayaan would merely collapse. She would fall forward on her face and be truly, finally dead. Sarah would have just enough time to watch that before the cells that made up her eyes devoured each other and she went blind. Before the cells of her brain ate their own memories and thoughts and feelings.

Ayaan leaned forward and kissed Sarah on the cheek. “I’ve missed you,” she said. She had a trembling smile on her lips.

“I’ve missed you too,” Sarah said. She wasn’t crying. She thought she should be crying but the tears wouldn’t come. Maybe she was just too scared.

Ayaan reached into a pocket of her jacket and took something out. Something small and silvery. It looked half melted. “Here,” she said, and put it in Sarah’s outstretched hand. Sarah closed her fingers around its sharp edges, its smooth curves. "I was supposed to give you this."

Why, hello, someone said inside of Sarah's head. Someone pleasant and female. I’ve been waiting for you.