Free City Infernal by Edward Lee Page A

into the street. Her clothes were torn off, and as she was being raped en masse, two more three-fingered hands vised her head and twisted it round and round and round until it came off. Decapitation did not seem to dissuade the woman’s queue of rapists in the least. In guttering glee, then, one of the wardens stuck the severed head atop a street sign for all to see.
    The street sign read: CITY MUTILATION ZONE
    The severed head was Cassie’s.
     
    Silence.
    Darkness, like death.
    Then—voices, sibilant whisperings:
    “See how blue? I told you.”
    “Cool.”
    “You can even ... touch her.”
    Hands felt her body. She was blind. One hand seemed to tremble as it touched her face. Another opened flat between her breasts.
    “I can feel it! I can feel her heart!”
    Fingers seemed to diddle with the locket on her chest. “I can even feel this. I can hold it ...”
    “You were right.”
    Cassie’s eyelids opened. She could not move. She lay like a corpse that somehow continued to see.
    The nightmare of the city and its systematic butchery was gone, replaced by this. It’s still a dream, she thought. It has to be.
    “You were right. She’s an Etheress.”
    “My God ...”
    A pause.
    “Let’s go,” one of the figures said. “I think she’s about to wake—”
     
    —up, her back arched severely as the paralysis of nightmare broke and she lurched upright in bed. Her eyes bulged. Her mouth was propped open and she was screaming but the scream came only as a long barely audible hiss from the back of her parched throat. The faintest light of dawn etched orange around the tasseled front drapes. She felt mutely terrified, the way one might feel upon wakening to realize that an intruder lurked somewhere in the room.
    Her gaze jerked left.
    Was it her imagination or did she glimpse a shape moving quickly away from the doorway?
    She jerked again in bed, snapping on the lamp on the nightstand as if the light would drive away her panic. She waited for her heartbeat to recede but it didn’t. Her nightgown felt like tissue paper stuck to her skin by sweat, and when she looked at her locket, she wasn’t sure but its burnished silver finish seemed blotched by fingerprint smears.
    I am SO screwed up in the head....
    She thought of calling out for her father, but what good would that do? She had but one option and she knew it.
    She swallowed the rest of her fear and left the bedroom, her bare feet quickening down the hall, to the landing, and then up the next stairwell and the stairwell after that.
    This is it, she thought.
    Without pause, she ascended into the oculus room.
    Three figures sat in a row on one of the mattresses: a girl, a guy, and another girl whom she instantly recognized as Via.
    “Hi, Cassie,” Via said. “We knew you’d come up to see us eventually.”

Chapter Four

(I)

    Via smiled cheerily from her seat on the mattress. The other two seemed to have expressions of awe on their faces.
    Cassie just froze.
    “This is Xeke and Hush. This is Cassie. She lives here with her father.”
    Cassie didn’t even move her head to look back at them; only her eyes darted. Via remained dressed in the leather pants, boots, and jacket that she’d been wearing previously. Xeke, the male, was dressed similarly: late -’70s British Punk and appropriate buttons and patches (BRING BACK SID! and Do You Get The KILLING JOKE? and the like). Were it not for her shock, Cassie would’ve been struck by how handsome he was—lean, toned, dark intense eyes on a face like an Italian male model’s. Small pewter bats dangled from his earlobes, and his long jet-black hair had been pulled back into a masculine ponytail. Xeke’s eyes appraised her as though she were iconic, and the same went for the third squatter, the other girl. What did she say her name was? Cassie thought. Hush?
    “Hush can’t talk,” Via said, “but she’s cool.”
    Cassie felt far away as she listened; she felt detached from herself. Her throat clicked as she