Propped with rebar against the cracked wall of the dilapidated wave pool is a woman. A gown clings to her shape, translucent and gauzy. Her arms stretch wide, secured one in each direction with narrow rope, but her bare feet dangle, left loose. She hangs from her wrists, lifeless, a vague Y-shape against the jagged X of the makeshift St. Andrew’s cross.
Sickly yellow-green light from a plant-based bio lantern spills around the corner, illuminating the abandoned amusement park. It’s a startling fluorescent rush that tears apart the eerie blue-greys of the shadowed tableau and repaints them in stark neon relief. A man follows in the lantern’s wake, his clumsy human footsteps loud on the frosted grass.
He pauses, processing the scene, and his scent sharpens with confusion, then ripens into horror. He rushes to her and wraps an arm around the woman’s ribs in an awkward attempt to create slack in the ligatures. As though to lessen her discomfort. As though she is a person and not a corpse, a body frozen inexplicably and hanging from a cross.
Some people never learn the difference.
When I step from the roof he nearly jumps out of his skin. “Go,” I tell him, and he does, skittering away, lantern forgotten in his blundering fear.
It’s two quick swipes of my claws and a bob of the light to have the woman settled on the unmanicured grasses, the area tamped down by boot prints. Long shadows thrown by the light of the bio lantern distort the length of her body as I kneel beside her.
Her eyes are open, irises swallowed by pupils, eyelashes crystalline. They frame her eyes in splintery, glittering spikes. I push her fully to her back with a bit of pressure, and frozen fabric crunches and cracks as it’s crushed by her body. Sloppy, oversized Xes in a pathologist’s classic Y-shape glare through the sheerness of her dress.
This wasn’t an autopsy — it was a smash-and-grab.
I make quick work of picking apart the stitches with a claw; then, finding the flesh too gelid to pull apart, I tuck my fingertips inside the gash and, with a great burst of strength, tear open her chest in a horrible shuddery cracking sound.
My work makes for a strong stomach, but I swallow despite myself.
Behind broken ribs, nestled in the cavity that should’ve contained an organ, lies a ruby the size of my fist, a full-size replica of an anatomical heart. I wrap my hand around the rock and give it a tug, extracting a false heart from the dead woman’s chest. It’s not dissimilar to removing a living heart.
The ruby isn’t an Echo — those appear as a sheen over the organ like a translucent hologram. It’s a rock. An unbeating, very precious, but entirely useless rock. Why?
Turning the ruby over in my hand, I run my thumbs along the surface, perfunctorily searching for a Hemoglobal serial number. I won’t find one. This isn’t an Echo. Not even some unfathomable next-gen version of one. Echo tech has one purpose: the ultimate and unyielding control of any creature unfortunate enough to bear it. There’s not a slave alive without one.
My heart squeezes with a ghostly ache, the reminder that I once carried my own Echo. I rub at the scar on my chest.
There. It’s a notch I worry at with the pad of my finger until it depresses. With a click, the false heart cracks and falls open into two pieces like a hollow plascrete egg. When I find the missive inside, my grim smile is a baring of sharp teeth.
It’s a message to Salomé. And I know where to find her.