Free The Trap by Andrew Fukuda

they’d earlier toured the catacombs. Your appearance stirred quite a ruckus—the hunter boy, the dome girl, found! In fact, in a scant forty-eight hours, the Ruler has plans to devour
you. Both of you. For his birthday.”
    He pauses, takes in the look on our faces. Something humors him; he takes a long, languorous scratch of his wrist. “But you needn’t worry. Before that can happen, tomorrow, in fact,
I plan on relaying to him the sad, unfortunate news of your premature deaths. That you got into a kerfuffle with some boys down in the catacombs. Over what I don’t know—perhaps over
Sissy, say. Things got out of hand, and you ended up drowning in the cesspool, then flushed through to the sewage incinerator. Both of you.”
    “The Ruler won’t believe you,” Sissy says.
    “Of course he will. He will fly into an apoplectic rage, of course, will sprint down into the catacombs. And of course, he won’t find you. Nor will he—or anyone—later
smell you up on the Palace grounds. Not so long as you remain in this hermetically sealed secret room.”
    He dabs the corner of his mouth with his pinkie. “We have just a few kinks to work out before our story becomes airtight. So we’ll need to send you both back to spend one more night
in the catacombs—just in case the Ruler decides to spring a surprise visit tonight to gawk at his catch of the century. But come tomorrow, after we’ve crossed our
t’
s and
dotted our
i’
s, we’ll have you back in this room. And then we’ll inform the Ruler of your untimely demise.”
    He studies us for a moment; something about our silence irritates him. He picks up the blade, looks at me. “I think it’s best if you consider something.”
    “What?”
    “You and this girl,” he says. “You’re the Origin.”
    “Understood, but—”
    “You’re no longer
Gene
and
Sis
. That’s no longer your designation or your name or your identity. You’re the Origin. You’re the cure for the
duskers. Best to now think of yourself that way.” He lifts the blade to his nose, sniffs. “We can inject you with sedatives. Render you into comatose blood-producing vegetables. And
there you will lie, asleep, for years, no, for decades. Your eyelids will never open again while you slowly turn into withered plants, hair white, nails long—”
    “But you won’t,” I say. “Otherwise you’d have done it, already. You need our blood pure. Not polluted by whatever chemicals you’d have to inject into
us.” It’s all conjecture, but I seem to have nailed it.
    His lips twitch ever so slightly.
    “You need us awake, healthy, and robust for years. Not chemically jacked vegetables lying on cots, bodies atrophying away. You need—”
    “Shut up,” he says quietly. “Just shut up.”
    The air in the room stills.
    “We Originators haven’t survived in their midst,” he says softly, “without becoming ruthless. Business done with the minimum of fuss. Risks avoided, deadweight
sacrificed. So remember this word:
ruthless
. If you resist, we shall be ruthless. Ruthless in exacting your full, if not glad, cooperation.”
    When Sissy speaks, her voice is as calm and unflinching as the chief advisor’s. “And you’ll never have our cooperation. Not while you continue to send countless human boys and
girls to their deaths. You claim it’s for the greater good, but whose greater good?” She shakes her head. “So go ahead, shoot us up, inject us. That’s the only way
you’ll get our blood. Go ahead and taint your precious Origin blood.”
    The chief advisor regards her coolly through half-lidded eyes. He picks up the tablet, taps the screen.
    The group of men shift as one, moving several meters from a rectangular outline grooved into the floor. Two of the men slip into the aisles, grab weapons. Tranquilizer dart guns.
    The floor starts to hum.
    “We’ve been waiting, have had oodles of time to think and plan for every possible contingency that might arise.” His cadence is