Mask of Humanity

The echoes of Azure’s cry rang dully off the stone walls. Fuck with us… gonna fucking die!…

He laughed. ‘Is that right?’ He made a frightened face and held his arms out and made a show of looking around. ‘Oh, oh no, they’re gonna get me!’ He paused expectantly. He looked at Azure, who was giving him a tremendous scowl. ‘Where are they?’ he asked, in a puzzled voice. ‘Aren’t they coming? No?’ He peered around again. ‘Nah, doesn’t seem like it. No one here, is there, Honey Boo?’ he called over to the woman.

‘That’s right, Honey Bear. We been watching,’ said Honey Boo. ‘It’s just you three. And that drone. And us.’ She chuckled.

‘I guess they send the drone to the rest of ‘em,’ said the man, his eyes narrowed. ‘That’s alright. We’ll keep on sending the drone. Eh? No need to change anything, anything at all. Let your friends know that everything’s fine, nothing to worry about down here.’ He looked to Azure. ‘How many are they then, these big scary friends of yours?’

Jo saw Azure open her mouth and she grabbed the girl, her fingers digging into Azure’s bicep.

‘Hey!’ yelped Azure.

‘Shut up,’ she said over Local. ‘Let me think.’ She glared at the grinning man. She wasn’t at all sure this was the right way to go about things. Now this pair would know to watch out for anyone coming to check on them, to try and make sure there was no reason for someone to come and check. She’d thought, maybe, that Azure’s boasts might scare the pair off, but that wasn’t happening.

However, she figured that now it had been done she might as well lean into it. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, her father had been fond of saying. To Jo, lamb and sheep were just these fluffy things seen in textbooks, they had died out long ago when humans worked out better ways to make wool and meat. Even so, the meaning of the saying persisted.

‘There’s lots of us, and they’ll be coming to check up on us soon. Way more than you two can handle.’ As she said this, she was thinking: we need to make sure the message gets to the others. That we’re in trouble down here. If Nicolai comes… Azure was right, on that front. If they could get the information about what was happening to him, these two would be dead in quick order; she had no doubt of that. Assuming nothing big was happening up there, assuming he and the others were free to come and intervene. But now they’d told, these two would know to avoid leaving any signs of what was going on.

The woman laughed. ‘I’m sure they will. I’m sure they care greatly about the people they bundled away into this place to harvest crystals for ‘em.’

‘Harvest crystals and fatten your Seeds,’ said the man, staring at Jo with sneaky little eyes. ‘We appreciate that greatly. Take your Seeds out and put them on the ground.’

Jo’s eyes widened. No! None of them quite knew why, but she, like everyone else, knew that her Seed was important. She couldn’t lose it. She had to hold onto it, to finish it! They had to do something…

‘I’m not handing my Seed over!’ came Azure’s voice in her ears. ‘Jo, we have to do something, they’ll kill our Seeds!’

But what can we do? thought Jo. She saw no options.

‘I’m going to swallow mine,’ said Perro, and she looked over at him to see his face worried but determined. ‘I’ll take it out, like he said, and then swallow it before they can react.’

‘Won’t they just cut us open for the Seeds?’ asked Azure. ‘And what if our stomach acid melt the Seeds?’

‘They want us for something,’ said Perro. ‘Remember what they said about keeping the drone going up? They aren’t just going to kill us, take our Seeds, and run. I think they want us to keep the traps going. Harvesting for them.’

Jo frowned at him. ‘Why?’

‘To complete their own Seeds as fast as possible. I heard you don’t get everything, when your Seed eats another. That’s what Maxine on the Radio says, anyway, and she knows more than anyone about this place. They can have us keep harvesting each trap, three of us rather than their two, take the proceeds, and then kill us when their Seeds are almost complete, to get all the way.’

‘What about our Seeds melting?’ asked Azure.

Perro shrugged. ‘I’d rather risk my Seed dying inside of me, than see these two shitheads steal it.’

She was surprised by how far ahead the boy had seen, in such a situation. Perro was more than he seemed on the surface. ‘You’re right,’ she said, and began to speak more, only to be interrupted.

‘What are you lot discussing?’ barked the man, angry. ‘Enough with you standing there staring at each other. Take the Seeds out, and drop them on the ground, now!’ He raised the SMG, sighting down it.

‘We swallow all together,’ said Jo. ‘On three.’

‘Okay,’ she said to the man, and began undoing the wrap around her bicep, where her Seed was squirming beneath. ‘We’ll do it.’

‘One,’ she said the others, as Perro did the same. Azure started messing with her clothes, to look the same as them, though her Seed was in her mouth.

‘Two,’ said Jo as she and Perro took their Seeds out.

‘Three,’ she moved her Seed right to her mouth, plopped it in.

‘Hey! What the fuck are you doing!’ yelled the woman, raising the pistol.

Jo swallowed, and heard the other two doing the same.

The man was gaping at them. ‘Did you just swallow your Seeds?’

‘That’s right,’ said Azure, smirking.

‘Shut up,’ Jo hissed at her, worried about the response the girls mocking words might draw.

‘You little bitch,’ snarled the man.

‘We ought to cut them open,’ hissed the woman, and Jo saw the eyes of the pair meeting, looking to one another. Their throats moved slightly. They were debating what to do.

Jo was ready to move. If they looked like they’d shoot, she might as well try something. But from their faces she saw something different.

‘Fuck it,’ muttered the man, irritated. ‘Whatever. We only wanted you to run those traps for us, I don’t know why you swallowed your Seeds. Dumbshits. Probably get fucked up in your stomach.’ He laughed, and the woman laughed too.

Jo was quite worried on that front, and from the faces of the others, knew they were, too.

She could feel her Seed. She’d felt it sliding down her throat. Now it was in her stomach. She was still able to connect to it, and she was observing its reactions and emotions closely. She was expecting to feel a sudden spike of pain and terror from it, as the acid in her stomach started eating into it.

But instead she felt a vague curiosity from it. Closing her eyes, she focused, and managed to connect to it.

She found herself in a red-coloured world of strange liquid and disconcerting shapes, crawling on a red wall. Around the side of her stomach. The Seed was entirely unharmed by the stomach acid. It was fine. She was safe.

The urge to let out a sigh of relief was tremendous, and she held it in only at the last moment. Opening her eyes she saw a smile forming on Perro’s face, and knew he was about to let out a similar sigh. She shifted and her foot stepped onto his.

‘Ow,’ he muttered as she pulled away.

‘Don’t let them know our Seeds our fine,’ she told the other two, and she was proud of them when they didn’t nod, when they adopted upset, miserable expressions—as though their Seeds had just been lost. She formed her face into a similar expression, and shook her head, letting out a grim sigh.

‘You know we could just cut you all open?’ said the woman, her eyes needling into Jo and the others.

Jo shrugged. ‘You could. But you’d not find anything. Our Seeds are dead.’

The woman scoffed. ‘Whatever. We’ll see.’ There was an ominous air of promise in those words, one that pricked at Jo.

There was no use pretending otherwise. These two intended to kill them, sooner or later. All she could was hope that it would be later.

‘So what now?’ asked Azure, raising her arms.

‘Now you three get to work.’ The man grinned. ‘We had a look at those traps you made. Very smart. But I see you’re carrying crystals. Taking them to the drone, right?’

‘That’s right,’ said Jo, wary.

‘Then let’s go. Have to keep up appearances, don’t we?’ He smirked.

The five of them moved through the tunnel and out toward the pit. As they approached, the woman moved ahead of them, turning to face them and walking backwards. She stashed the pistol, hiding it beneath her rags.

‘Don’t get any stupid ideas,’ she warned, her hand hovering over the bulge of the pistol as she stepped out from under the shadows and into the sunlight shining down from the hole. ‘I can have this out in a second and a bunch of holes in all you. The undead might kick up a fuss but they won’t do anything more than take our weapons. You three are dead either way.’

‘We get it,’ muttered Azure, glaring at her.

The five of them made their way to the less-travelled section of the pit where Jo and the others were keeping the drone.

‘Stay over there,’ the man said. He had a cloak of rotten cloth draped over his shoulders, under which he’d hidden his SMG, and from the occasional moments it parted Jo saw that he held it still in his hands. He and the woman went over to the drone, while she and the others stayed a few metres away, and there they deliberated, poking and prodding it, looking it over.

‘Hand over the Link controls, full admin,’ the woman yelled at Jo.

Jo had expected this, and had been considering what to do. She had full control over the drone, shared between her and Nicolai. She needed to try and ensure that when the drone continued on its scheduled movements to deposit their latest take of Oma crystals, it went carrying some kind of message, or signal, that there was a problem. As they’d been approaching the drone, she’d connected to it, and had made a few settings changes which there was no reason to make. Things like renaming the drones designation code to something else, and changing the battery percentage at which it would notify the user of low battery.

It wouldn’t affect the drones operation, but it was a change that she hoped Nicolai would notice, and she had a feeling that he would. He was obsessive, he checked everything.

The bigger issue was that these two might recognise what she’d done. It would depend on their implants and their skill with software. Jo didn’t think either of them looked like hackers or data sorts, but if they were… they might see the signs of her recent changes. She hadn’t had time to thoroughly scrub it all over.

She passed the controls over to the man and the woman and watched, tense, as they focused. Examining the drone inside and out.

In due time they moved away. ‘Put your crystals into it, then,’ said the woman, gesturing.

Jo and the others trudged over and did so, and the pair sent the drone away. It had the route plotted out in its software, and required only the press of a virtual button to go off on that route.

After that, things went in a predictable direction. They returned to the site of the traps, where Jo, Perro and Azure were made to continue operating them.

The pair must have decided that Jo was the more dangerous of the three of them, as the man stuck nearby to Jo, lounging against the side of the tunnel and watching her. Meanwhile, the woman kept moving between Perro and Azure, coming back occasionally to check on Jo and the man.

Jo would trek back and forth, depositing the bones from the last group of undead around a corner, out of sight of the trap. Then the next group of undead would come around, and she’d put the ropes on them and pull the trap.

Then she’d harvest the Soul wisps with the Soul Trap.

One time, as she did so, the woman showed up again.

The woman had something with her, something Jo had seen a couple of times now.

It was, she’d realised, another Soul Trap. Though it didn’t look like theirs. Where the Soul Trap she held was clearly an item roughly fashioned for a new purpose, a helmet with lines on it, the one the woman held was different.

It was some kind of swirly seashell that had been worked and engraved. It had a handle for holding, and was covered in runes, and had the odd bit of gold of silver, especially around the mouth of the shell’s opening. It was about half the size of one of the helmet Soul Traps.

The woman had her Seed in her hand, touching on the shell, and Jo had determined it to be some kind of Imbued item. The woman was able to hold it out, and it would draw any Soul wisps floating in the area toward it, taking it within. On top of that, it was able to draw the Soul wisps out of their Soul Traps.

Jo placidly held her Soul Trap up, presenting it.

The woman held out the shell, an expression of concentration on her face. The blue wisps of soul began to float out from the front of Jo’s Soul Trap, pulled over the space between and into the mouth of the Imbued Soul Trap.

Jo had seen this a few times, now. By this method, their captors were moving between them and collecting their take of Soul wisps.

Jo was told to move to one side of the tunnel as the pair converged, both of them taking out their Seeds and putting them into the Imbued Soul Trap, consuming the take. At the same time, they were crumbling up Oma crystals into the shell. It was exactly the process she and the others had been doing.

She heard the sounds of undead behind her, and the pair looked up.

‘Back to work,’ barked the man.

Jo sighed, and got back to work.

He’ll come. She felt sure of it. They hadn’t noticed the changes she’d made on the drone. He would come. She and the others just had to last until them.