A multitude of curses reached him, a backdrop to this evil.
“Jesus.”
“Fuck.
“Oh my god. Oh my god, no. No!”
“What can we do?!”
Nothing.
This might have been one of those clever flick-the-page drawings with stick figures. It wasn’t.
It was the silence of these soon-to-be dead that bothered him most. The silence wormed in. Cyn’s mouth was open and yet she said nothing, her eyes clearly following the line of the falling. He moved behind her, placed his hands on her shoulders.
“Why,” she finally asked of Willow, shaking her head as she said it.
“I don’t know. All I can say is that something is happening above, where we cannot see. Something bad.”
As if it could be worse than millions of humans being eaten by aliens.
“There must be a reason,” Cyn insisted. “Are they being pushed or are they accidentally led on some path that goes to the edge. Is the Lure doing this?”
Willow wrung the round railing with both her fists. “That is what I want to find out.”
How could they?
“I have never said this before,” Rutger began, quietly. He wasn’t quite sure why he wanted to say this. “I kept it locked away from myself even. It’s a part of my life I decided to give up, but I was raised by several foster families, and each of them had a different religion they believed in absolutely.”
Cyn looked up at him, sliding up her hands to cover his where they lay on her shoulders.
“This,” he continued, “I’m sure would be regarded as Hell on Earth by all of them. Even the ones who did notbelievein a Hell.”
A great silence lowered as all of them absorbed this tragedy they could not stop, even as it continued with more dying each second.
Someone wept loudly, gasp-crying as if they could not breathe.
“This is why I propose to go upward to below the Top, short of there by a few stories,” Willow said firmly.
What?
“We found a drone inside a compartment in Big Daddy, and Locke has devised a way for us to launch it and see what it sees and to record. We’re going to find out what is really happening at the Top.”
That was a stunning statement. For five years they’d been ignorant of what the Ghoul Lords were doing to the people they’d trapped. Only Cyn had brought back news, and much of that had been lost due to her amnesia.
“I… remember terrible things up there.” Cyn shivered, and he felt it where she touched his body, and her hands tightened on his. “There were piles of bodies, stripped bones, blood…” Again she shook. “I’m with you, all the way.”
“Okay.” Willow turned to assess her then said quietly, “Would you be okay with doing this in twenty-four hours? I have been holding onto this information for days already.”
And she flicked her gaze to him for a moment—as if he could stop Cyn. Well, he might be able to, by tying her down.
“She can judge.”
“I am okay with that, yes. I have a slight limp, but I’m close to back to normal, whatever my normal is.”
At that he couldn’t help looking at the back of her wrist where it curved over where she held his hand. Those red scales reminded him of many things, and some of them he was sure were impossible. Normal was no longer the norm.
A quote came to him, his mind urged him to say it.
