This is an excerpt from my novel Rag & Muffin. It is currently on an editor’s desk, but since I am getting ignored rather than rejections, I may move to self-publication in the near future. Anyway, this has to include a language warning since it’s more explicit than what I normally post on the blog.
In the dark, on her grass mat, Miss Alice sat in the Padmasana—Lotus Posture—one of the basic positions of Yoga. She had heard that if she practiced Yoga, she could make her Sammohana stronger.
She wanted to make it stronger.
It was the only thing she had.
She tried to focus on her breathing, but it was hard: She kept thinking about the men, about the chair, about the buzzing whine of the drill and the horrible pain it made when it went into her head. The back of her neck hurt. Her brain throbbed with a monotonous ache that made it difficult to think, and she still felt vestiges of the sickness and chills she got the last time they dug into her skull.
She didn’t understand why they were doing this to her. She didn’t even hate them. But she felt stark terror every time the door opened because it meant more agony, more screaming, more sickness. It meant their greasy hands and bad smells. It meant being hit and slapped and tied down. It meant searing pain.
She heard steps outside. She heard a hand rattling the knob. She heard the knob turn with a groan and a click.
The metal door opened with the ear-splitting creak of rusty hinges. Once again, she used her only weapon.
As he came through the door, she looked into his eyes. With a stab of pain, she felt her ravaged Heaven Seed gland squeeze down, and a pleasant ripple ran across her body. She began to speak, to order him to release her—but he simply walked over and slapped her on the mouth.
“Don’t you ever try that on me, you little cunt. And stop wasting your juice.”
It was the man they called Harman. The really bad one, meaner than the others.
Sammohana never worked on him.
Miss Alice lay on her mat with a hand to her face, crying. She tasted blood.
Velasquez, the big man with the ugly smile, walked in and slugged Harman in the jaw, knocking him to the wall.
“Hey, boss, what the—?”
“I told you not to touch the goods, Harman,” Velasquez said, “and I meant it. Fucking drug doll cost a lot of money.”
“She tried to put the whammy on me!”
“I don’t care if she rips your fucking face off. Don’t touch her. Now bag the bitch.”
“But you just said—”
Velasquez hit him again.
Harman cussed under his breath for a minute as he rubbed his jaw. “Mohit!” he yelled. “Where is that drunk? Mohit!”
Mohit, a marjara Sudra with a morose face and graying fur, stumbled through the door as he wiped his bleary eyes with the back of a hairy wrist. Even from across the room, he stank of cheap Bangla.
“Help me out here,” Harman grunted.
Mohit flexed his big fingers, heaved a sigh, and, with shoulders hunched, clumped toward Miss Alice. She tried to crawl away, but there was nowhere to go. Even though she squirmed and kicked, he picked her up with his thick hands.
His embrace was tender, almost fatherly, which somehow made it worse.
“I’d like to put the little bitch’s eyes out,” Velasquez rumbled, “but then she’d stop making the glow.”
Harman walked toward her with a leer on his face and a burlap bag in his hands.
Just before he put the bag over her head, Miss Alice saw a stranger walk through the door—a small Elysian man in khaki trousers and a fraying Oxford shirt. He had a receding chin, and his trembling hands flicked back and forth as if seeking something. They reminded her of a chicken pecking the dirt.
The bag went over her face and smelled like moldy potatoes. It scratched her cheeks and nose. Against the back of her legs, she felt the prickly edges of the scabbing vinyl on the cushions of the extraction chair, the terrible machine in the center of her room. Mohit held her down, but Harman’s rough hands strapped her in—she knew they were his hands because they pulled the straps as tight as they could so they cut her skin.
“There she is, Felix,” she heard Velasquez say, “a real premium drug doll. Strong shit she makes, fuck you up like nothing else. She’ll send you straight to the Pleiades.”
Then came a squeaky voice, apparently Felix’s. “I’m lookin’ to go higher than that, Velasquez.”
“Sure you are,” Velasquez answered with a grunt.
“What’s with the bag on her head? I wanted to see—”
“She’s got powerful Sammohana, kid. One glance from her, and you’d be on the floor, crying for your mama. You wanna look in a hybrid’s face, go to a fucking temple instead.”
Felix’s voice became hushed. “I dropped the glow just once,” he said, “but it was old stuff. They say it’s better fresh—is that true?”
“I don’t touch it,” answered Velasquez, “but this is fresh as it gets. We’ll pull it for you right now, and you can drop it while it’s still warm.”
“I can’t describe it,” Felix whispered, voice trembling. “It’s like everything since has been a dream. I’ve just been thinking about when I could do that again, see that again, even though it hurts like … they say that’s what it’s like if a rogue runemachine pulls you in, the feel you get when you hit the Seed. That true?”
Velasquez grunted again. “How the fuck should I know? All I know is, Miss Alice is the real shit. She’ll blast you to heaven and Jahannam and everything in between.”
Felix whispered, “What you see makes it worth it. I’d endure anything to see that again.”
Velasquez made a low growl in his throat. “Right now, we’re gonna give you enough to trip all night. This doll’s not been juiced for a few days, so she’s got a lot stored up.”
Miss Alice heard Harman slide the extraction needle into the hollow drill and click it into place behind her head. The drill began to whine.
She sobbed.
“Shut up, bitch,” said Harman. He pulled a strap across her forehead and yanked it tight until her neck creaked.
#
Felix was trembling in anticipation, but he jerked back in surprise when he heard the sound of weeping from beneath the burlap bag.
It was easy to think of hybrids as something other than human: They looked like living porcelain dolls, people worshipped them as idols, and they bled the best trip on earth. Of course, he had always known, at least vaguely, what they did to hybrids to get Heaven Seed—but he’d never actually seen it before. He’d never had it fresh before, the way you were supposed to take it.
He had vaguely imagined something forbidden, something exciting and salacious, in the extraction process. He wasn’t sure anymore what he had pictured, but he was sure it wasn’t this.
He hadn’t imagined a cell in a basement reeking of urine. He hadn’t imagined a little girl bawling in a chair while a man with hard, beady eyes licked his thin lips and prepared to dig the fattest needle Felix had ever seen into the back of her head.
Felix swallowed hard.
To his own surprise, he didn’t want Heaven Seed anymore.
“Wait,” he whispered. His voice was hoarse.
Velasquez glanced at him. “Something wrong?”
“I’m not sure about this—”
“No refunds, kid.”
“I know. I just … I’m just not sure about this.”
His breathing grew shallow. He brought the tips of his fingers up against his palms and found them clammy. He felt light, as if he could float away. The room’s stench faded from his nostrils.
At that moment, Felix could have simply tipped his hat, turned around, and walked out with his pockets several hundred denarii lighter. To assuage his frustrated desire for a high, he could have purchased a bottle of cheap liquor at the nearest store, returned to his cockroach-infested motel, drunk himself half dead, and left on a runeship the next day, poorer but wiser, having never got the thing that brought him to this gods-forsaken city in the first place.
That would have been the simplest thing.
But then Harman, the man with the hard eyes and the constantly flicking tongue, leaned on the extraction apparatus, turned off the drill, and uttered a long, low chuckle.
It was a laugh empty of mirth but full of malice, as if he crouched over some prey he expected to toy with at the first opportunity, as if he’d do something more horrible than use the drill as soon as Felix left the room. Sitting rigid in the gray-green chair with the straps digging so deeply into her wrists that her hands were puffing and turning purple, Miss Alice shuddered in a fresh fit of sobs.
That’s when Felix snapped.
He knew he wouldn’t return home on a runeship tomorrow—or the day after, or ever.
An image of his mother flickered across his mind, but then thoughts ceased as he moved mechanically toward his fate.
He wasn’t exactly being brave. He just did what felt right.
“I’ll save you, miss!” he shouted. He shoved Velasquez out of the way and ran toward the extraction chair.
Velasquez was a big man, the sort of thick, broad-shouldered man even a well-tailored suit couldn’t fit. Whenever he moved, his jacket stretched precariously across his broad back and huge biceps. Even so, Felix caught him off balance, and he stumbled into a wall.
Felix reached the chair in a single bound. He extended long, nervous fingers toward the strap on Miss Alice’s right wrist.
Alas, he should have aimed a blow for Harman instead. If he had, perhaps he could have caught the man by surprise just as he did Velasquez.
But he didn’t aim for Harman, so Harman casually reached out and, with fingers scurrying like those of a pianist, touched five marma points on Felix’s chest. Each touch burned like fire, and when the combination was complete, the breath was gone from Felix’s lungs. He staggered back and clutched his heart.
“Kid,” he heard Velasquez say behind him, “you just made one big fucking mistake.”
Felix gasped. He thought Velasquez had punched him in a kidney, but the initial hard pain of the blow stayed steady and wouldn’t let up.
Something warm and wet ran down his legs. He wondered at first if he’d pissed himself, but then he reached a hand around to his back and felt Velasquez’s meaty fist clasping the hilt of a knife.
Felix’s legs gave out as his blood drained. He collapsed forward onto Miss Alice’s knees. Then he sank to his own.
He looked up at her, but her face was covered.
“Take this off,” Miss Alice whispered.
Nobody moved.
“Take this off!” she screamed. “Take the bag off! He needs me!”
Her voice, though high and quavering, held a curious note of command.
Mohit, the drunk marjara, shrugged his heavy shoulders. Slowly and laboriously, he reached out, grabbed the burlap bag by one corner, and whipped it from her face. Her disheveled hair, full of static, encircled her head like a halo.
She looked down into Felix’s eyes. Although dirt had smudged her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, and though her lower lip was swelling, she was still heartbreakingly pretty. Her eyes were round and liquid, her irises violet like a clear sky at sunset.
When her gaze met his, a gentle, golden light suffused everything.
“So beautiful,” he whispered. He wondered for a moment how any man could want Heaven Seed when he could look into a hybrid’s eyes instead.
He vaguely sensed himself falling backwards as the light, along with everything else, faded to black. Before his thoughts ceased like a candle snuffing out, he pondered what his last act might mean for his next incarnation.
Perhaps, thought Felix, I am a bodhisattva in hell.
