Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
“It’s your blood,” Tyse yells, trying to be heard over the roar of mechanical things on the ground floor.
“What?”
“Sorry. I was just thinking that it’s like your blood. Your life force, ya know? And he’s stealing it. It makes me kinda sick to look at it.”
“Me too.”
“Oh, shit. Look.” We’re still standing on the third or fourth landing above the vats, so we’ve got a good view of the lower level. Tyse is pointing to the far end where bots are carrying women and girls to another part of the tower.
Before I even realize it, my feet are flying down the stairs.
“Clara! Where are ya goin’?”
“I need to see,” I yell back. Going faster now. “I need to see what he’s doing with them.”
His boots pound on the metal stairs above me, but I don’t wait. He might stop me and I’m not leaving here until I know what Delta is doing to those women and girls who didn’t make it home.
Once at the bottom, I dart off to the left. Weaving my way in between working bots, vats of spark, and all kinds of other machinery that I don’t have names for. It’s loud again. Much too loud to have a conversation. But I can faintly hear Tyse calling my name behind me.
I turn a corner and there they are. A parade of bots carrying women and girls. I get in line, keeping pace. They don’t notice me—don’t pay any attention to me at all—but I didn’t expect they would. Tyse comes up next to me and together, we follow the bots and unconscious women and girls into the next room.
It’s not as loud in here, so Tyse is saying, “We should go. This is a bad idea. We should just go.”
But I’m shaking my head, stepping aside, out of the line, so I can take in what the actual fuck I’m looking at.
It’s not vats of spark, it’s… I can’t even come up with a word. My eyes travel up the wall of the tower—it must be twenty or thirty levels, at least. And every inch of these walls has a tank attached to it. Tanks, and tanks, and tanks—all the way up to the tippy top of the tower—filled with glowing spark.
“It’s insane,” I catch Tyse muttering. “This is fuckin’ insane. No wonder the air in Delta City is clogged with spark like ash in a forest fire. He’s got oceans of it.”
Which is an exaggeration, but only marginally. Because these tanks of spark have to equal lakes, at least.
“Why does he need so much?” I ask.
“Power,” Tyse whispers. “That’s the only possible answer. It gives him power. And once ya have a bit of it, ya always want more.”
It occurs to me, in this very moment and maybe for the first time ever—which is embarrassing—that I have no fucking idea what spark even does.
I mean, I used it to make whimsical drawings in the air.
What a joke.
Because clearly spark is something spectacular if a god needs this much of it.
I look at Tyse, wanting to read his expression, but I find him looking elsewhere. And when my gaze follows his, I find the answer to my question about what Delta is doing to these girls and women who didn’t make it home in time for harvest.
They’re all on beds. Clustered under the tanks that line the walls. They are in various stages of being plugged in and the ones who got here earlier are pale, almost gray. The tubes connecting them to the tanks are empty now, drops of residual spark cling to the interior, evidence that they’ve already been harvested.
Are they dead?
Tyse must be asking himself the same thing because he walks over to a child and places his finger on her neck. His eyes find mine. “She’s alive, but barely.”
I force my mind to think, trying to work all this new information out. He doesn’t kill them. The punishment for missing your harvest is to be drained to the edge of death.
They’ll probably wake up in their own beds, maybe? Their own stable. The bots having returned them to the farm. And they will carry on with their lives. Vowing to never miss another harvest.
I let out a long breath, finally having seen enough, but unable to take my eyes off the scene playing out all around me.
There are at least a hundred women and girls in here. And from the screens, I would calculate that this is a tiny fraction of the population. Delta has thousands of women in his herd of Spark Maidens. And he even takes it from the children.
Girls. That couple had three girls. He must breed for females.
The Extraction is starting to look like a pretty good time compared to Delta’s dystopian nightmare.
Tyse walks back over to me, offering his hand. “Come on. Let’s go. We’ve seen enough.”