Screja unwrapped his bandages slowly, her fingers careful and practiced.
What is this feeling. Was I always this sensitive.
Atiya's body twitched. The sensation was natural enough on its own, he recognized it, but it was amplified to a degree that had no business being natural.
She mixed an aphrodisiac into the medicine.
The conclusion arrived cleanly and immediately. His body was already ahead of his reasoning, a heat spreading outward from his core that had nothing to do with fever and everything to do with the woman currently leaning over him.
The carnal desire hit with a weight that made thinking feel like wading through something thick.
He kept still.
"I am sad, you know," Screja said, her voice soft and unhurried. "My friend died. There are no men left in this village I have not already tasted."
She looked at him directly. "So. Esteemed guest, will you console me tonight."
She unrobed herself without particular ceremony.
Atiya looked.
Yep. This is turning into one of those novels.
The problem was layered and he ran through it quickly because his body was not going to give him unlimited time to think.
The wound he was carrying was minor in reality, the shot had missed everything critical, but he had deliberately widened it himself to manufacture a reason for the village's top healer to tend to him personally and get close to the people making decisions.
That plan had worked.
However the woman had made a plan of her own in return.
He had also spent time carefully constructing the impression of being a perverted man. He had no innocent face to hide behind now.
And if he lost control of his yai concealment mid act, he was finished.
It will be fucking hard to focus on yai concealment when I am getting my balls blown.
He stared at the ceiling for one moment and weighed his options.
Her hand slid closer and Atiya's gaze dropped from the ceiling to Screja involuntarily.
She was bare and entirely unapologetic about it, smirking as her hand found him and grabbed hold.
Atiya flinched.
"I mixed some anesthetic into your medicine," she said pleasantly. "You cannot move for a while, you know."
'This is rape.'
He could move. He chose not to, for the reasons he had already laid out clearly in his head.
Exposing his yai concealment was not an option. So he laid there and made the calculation and accepted the result of it.
Screja tilted her head, reading something in his eyes that amused her. She leaned close to his face, fingers trailing over the unwound bandages, brushing skin in a way that sent sensation cascading through the aphrodisiac already saturating his system.
His gaze moved over her despite himself.
She was not young, not by the standards of the 169 belts where scientific breakthrough and yai had long since made mortality optional for those with access to either.
She had to be over a thousand years old by any reasonable estimate. It was there if you looked for it, not in her appearance but in something behind her eyes, a depth that accumulated over centuries whether one wanted it to or not.
None of that made her any less alluring. If anything it made it worse.
He enjoyed the service as much as he condemned the situation. Both things were true simultaneously and neither cancelled the other out.
It was possibly the first time he had ever been raped. That sat somewhere in the back of his mind with a particular irony attached to it, that it was happening not because he lacked the strength to stop it but because stopping it would cost him something he was not willing to spend. He was ascension two.
He had skills that could end her where she stood. She did not know that. Nobody in this village knew that.
The night stretched long.
He woke the next morning with Screja's arms around him, her breathing slow and even against his back.
'I need to get out of this village.'
He lay still and ran through what he had gathered so far. The village guards, ascension one initial stages at the ceiling.
Kellen had been a support type. The general population was not a military threat to him at his level.
Fredo was the variable.
He was the only one Atiya could identify as a genuine potential threat.
Unless there was someone else he had not yet seen.
In the end I will have to kill all of them.'
He looked at the ceiling and turned the thought over without particular emotion. It was the optimal solution. Clean, complete, removing every witness and every variable in a single process.
He had done comparable things before on a smaller scale.
The arms around him were warm.
He noted that too, filed it away, and kept thinking.
****
"Does it happen often."
Zelaine asked it toward the ceiling, her back to Mavine, the blanket pulled up to her chin against the cold seeping through the walls.
"Happen what?"
"The piglet incident."
A pause.
"For several months now," Mavine said, her voice carrying the soft blurred edges of someone half asleep, "a strange white light occasionally shines in the night. And then the day after, things like that happen."
Zelaine went still beneath the blanket.
*Several months. And they saw the white light too.*
She pulled the blanket higher and let a moment pass before steering away from it.
"Nevermind that. I want to ask you something else. How does it feel to be a yai user."
It was not an unexpected question given the circumstances. Zelaine had manipulated the family's memory carefully, threading in the impression that their daughter had always been a yai user. None of the real family members were. Naturally they would carry a quiet curiosity about it.
The silence that followed was a different kind than the ones before it.
"What did you see inside the well?"
Mavine's voice came out small. And beneath the smallness was something heavier. Something that had been waiting.
"I saw you jump in there."
*She saw that.*
Zelaine stared at the dark above her and said nothing for a moment.
"Just water everywhere."
Zelaine yawned, lazy and deliberate, pulling the blanket tighter. She said nothing about the crystal.
Mavine's hands tightened on the edge of her blanket. When she spoke again her voice had changed, the sleepy blurring gone out of it entirely.
"How brave you are. Those who wield yai are stripped of fear. Hatefully brilliant. Still, they are subdued in the brandishingly bright light."
Zelaine's eyes narrowed at the ceiling.
*That phrasing.*
She opened her mouth to say something and the light came through the walls.
It bled in through every crack simultaneously, surged through the windows in a single white wave, and the room ceased to have corners or shadows or depth. Just light, total and clinical, bleaching the air itself.
"What!"
Zelaine threw her arm across her eyes and jolted upright, barriers snapping into place around her on pure instinct.
"Stay close to me, Mavine."
Silence.
"Mavine."
Nothing.
"Hey. Mavine!"
Her hands swept across the bed, across cold sheets and empty space, finding nothing. She scrambled across the mattress, arms cutting through the white air in wide searching arcs.
*If only my other senses were higher.* She was a genius with a circuit and completely useless right now, as blind as anyone else in this.
Then the light dropped.
All at once, like a switch. The room snapped back into itself, shadows returning to their corners, the furniture solid and ordinary and exactly where it had been. Zelaine stood in the center of it all in nothing but her underwear, breathing hard.
The bed was empty. Mavine was gone.
Clank. Clank.
The door handle rattled violently.
"Mavi—"
The door burst open.
Mark and Ellamele stood in the frame. Their faces were slack, emptied out, eyes rolled back until only white showed.
Each of them held a kitchen knife, the blades catching what little light remained in the room.
Mark moved first, lunging with a twitchy unnatural speed that did not belong to him, driving the knife toward her chest. He hit the barrier instead and the impact folded him, his head connecting with the floorboards with a sound that made her wince.
Zelaine was already across the room. Two precise chops, clean and heavy, to the backs of their necks.
"Fuck! Get back to your senses!" she hissed, catching Ellamele before she could drop wrong. "Get back to your senses!"
As they slumped to the floor, she instantly materialized her black Yai cubes, stretching them into thin, indestructible strands to bind both of them to the bed.
"Mavine!" she called out again, her voice echoing through the farmhouse. No answer.
Then, a violent crash shattered the silence. The window exploded inward, shards of glass spraying across the room like diamond dust.
Zelaine immediately shifted her attention to the breach, her black Yai cubes swirling around her in a defensive swarm. Through the jagged frame, a nightmare forced its way into the room.
It was a crow, but a grotesque perversion of one. It was as large as a small elephant, its massive bulk barely fitting through the wall.
The creature possessed three muscular, taloned legs, and its body was a map of gore—deep, jagged wounds wept black ichor, and in several places, the intestines were actually sticking out, swaying like pale worms.
To make it even more nonsensical, a vestigial third wing sprouted crookedly from its back.
'Is it a Yai beast but it sure does not feel like it.?'
Zelaine's mind raced. She was certain this was no Yai beast. It lacked the distinct energy signature, that all Yai creatures emitted. This thing felt hollow, like a walking corpse held together by spite.
"Caw! CAW!"
The crow shrieked—a sound like metal grinding against bone—and launched itself straight at her.
Zelaine stood her ground, trusting in the ten-year masterpiece of her rolling barrier. But as the creature's beak made contact, there was no bounce, no deflection.
With a sound like tearing silk, the crow's beak passed straight through her Yai defense as if it weren't even there.
The barrier had been bypassed.
Zelaine's heart skipped a beat. For the first time in years, she felt the cold air of the room directly on her skin while her defense was still active.
'It bypassed it.'
Zelaine sidestepped, the massive beak whistling past her ear close enough to feel the displaced air against her cheek. Her black cubes were already moving, shooting forward like railgun slugs before she had fully completed the dodge.
They pierced the crow's rotting chest clean through.
The creature hit the floor with a wet heavy sound, split perfectly down the middle, black ichor spreading across the floorboards in a wide dark pool. Zelaine did not stop there. She fired a flurry of additional shots into the remains, obliterating them section by section until there was nothing left that could reasonably knit itself back together.
"Fuck, what is this. Some goddamn invasion?"
She crossed to the broken window and looked out.
The farm was wrong. Not dangerous in any way she had a clean word for, but wrong in the way a reflection is wrong when it moves a half second behind you. The air itself seemed to flicker at the edges, reality stuttering like a signal cutting in and out.
She summoned the crystal without thinking, feeling it vibrate against her palm the moment it materialized.
She did not bother with the stairs.
She stepped up onto the window frame and dropped, her feet hitting the dirt below with a heavy thud that traveled up through her knees. She straightened and looked across the farm.
The animal pens were bleeding white light into the dark, pulsing with it, steady and rhythmic like something breathing. It cut through the night in sharp lines, too bright and too clean to be anything natural.
'Where has that girl gone.'
She moved toward the light, crystal vibrating steadily in her closed fist.
'And what is happening inside this farm.'