'Compulsion' has its Fan Fiction Birthday on 7th June🎂
Happy birthday!
Tell us something about that fic, anything you like, and we'll help blow out the candles and wish it many happy returns!
You can save this ask until the actual date or reply whenever you like.
AHHH hi El lovely, thank you for sending! Apologies for the delay in response.
Yes, it was the anniversary of Compulsion! I'm super proud of that fic, and I always intended to write an epilogue of Ezra and Beatrice enjoying their happy ending. Maybe one day, it will escape my drafts folder.
summary: To seek answers from The Mother, Beatrice must bear witness to the darkest chapter of her history. She won't be doing it alone though.
chapter warnings: horror, alien monsters, reanimated corpses, blood and gore, Trauma, but we're healing from it, panic attacks, physical violence, discharge of a weapon, mobs, PTSD, war imagery
word count: 5.8k and beta’d by my wee love @ezrasbirdie 👑
A/N: Only the epilogue is left!!! I can promise it will be soft and fluffy. These guys have been through enough. 😆
MASTERLIST // AO3
// Previous. //
“Attention. Life Support Systems are at 75%. Please proceed to the shuttle bay and follow evacuation proceedings.”
Once Georgie cut the power grid, the emergency protocol voice over began and started counting down the remaining time. Emergency red lights along the metal buttresses of the structure of the dome lit up, bathing the entire interior in a gloomy red glow that competed for the daylight.
From the shuttle bay, Dock 12E, Ezra had the perfect vantage point of watching the crowds stream in. They were in some semblance of calm, mostly confusion, and shades of worry; some carried their gear, others had nothing but the clothes on their backs. They made their way to their designated emergency evacuation transporters, under the watchful coordination of the military.
Ezra was keeping a well-trained eye on all who passed through while Cee and Georgie prepared for the flight. Their private transport, arranged by a contact through Georgie, was humming quietly as her engines warmed up and her fuel was checked. A case of raw Hephaestus pearls was hidden in a floor panel on the main deck, just behind the pilot’s seat. Having been transported there, moments earlier, from its previous secure location in a locker on the other side of the terminal. No one had spared a glance at the teenage girl coming to collect the locked luggage bag from the locker.
The short-range transport shuttle had a cargo hold of only six tons, unlike the larger ones that dominated the decks on level E. This particular one was nicknamed the Fishknife, she was an X-class passenger “dinghy.” Her hull resembled the flat snout of a fish head, in a pallid gray-green coat of paint over it, nestled primly between two sublight impulse drives under her wings.
Cee checked in on Ezra on the entrance ramp on the rear of the Fishknife.
“Any sign?” she asked him.
Ezra shook his head, miserably. “Damn woman probably decided to do a solo drift,” he said.
“She probably got caught up in the crowds.” Cee was trying to delay his worry and remained hopeful. She regarded the man who had become her guardian—watched how the thin veil of petulant indifference was slowly morphing into utmost concern, and the pale shadow of despair was creasing his brows into a deep furrow.
“If you’re so worried, why not go after her,” Cee suggested, to which Ezra gave her a very undignified snort.
“I cannot in good conscience leave you again,” he retorted.
“We’ll be fine,” entreated Cee, then she was interrupted by the voice over.
“Attention. Life Support Systems are at 70%. Please proceed to the shuttle bay and follow evacuation proceedings.”
“Plenty of time,” Cee quipped. “Do you love her?”
It was Ezra’s turn to regard his ward closely. “Where’s this line of questioning from?”
“Do you?”
“I—” But under the pressure of the inquiring stare of the seventeen-year-old, his shoulders fell. Deflated. It was like aurelac—cut too quickly out of her organic sack, and the acid in its skin melts the gem. It must be handled precisely, and Cee was cutting him to the quick.
Incisive as a fish knife.
He tried again.
“I don’t know.”
That was honest.
“But you care for her deeply?” Cee again.
“Utterly,” he said. “It is hard to describe it, bein’ in her head, her bein’ in mine—”
His tongue felt oddly heavy, for the twang of his accent slipped through, rougher and thicker under the microscope of Cee’s lens. He dropped his hanging consonants and elongated his vowels.
“T’s like knowing someone so fully, so wholly, you don’t see where the lines blur. Seein’ somebody so completely through their own memories, their own habits—how could one not fall in love with every little thing they do? Every little way they think. Even seein’ the darkest parts of someone and havin’ the courage not to look away.”
Coming to, he saw the smile on the kid’s face was far too elusive. Like she knew a secret but wasn’t going to share it.
“I hope you get to experience that one day, Cee,” he added. “I truly do.”
“So go get her,” said the kid. Rather brightly. “We’ll be here.”
Ezra tucked a wild piece of Cee’s blond hair behind her ears. It was growing well past her shoulders now. She’d need a trim, just as he would soon. His beard was getting scratchy, and the usually straight ends of his hair were growing past his ears and starting to curl. It wouldn’t be long before the longer bangs over his forehead would be sweeping in the way of his vision.
“You really are growing up too fast,” he said and pinched her cherubic cheek upon the last bit of baby fat. Amicably, she batted his hand away and rolled her eyes.
“What. Ever.” She loped up the rest of the ramp, rejoining Georgie in the cabin of the ship.
“Engage security protocols until I return,” he shouted up the ramp to her retreating back. At once, he hopped off it and headed to the terminal exit.
Few prevented him. Soldiers were not letting those who had already been cleared to pass back out of the terminal, and Ezra had to talk circles around one of the uniformed soldiers, bearing the designation of infantry in the Intergalactic Army. He feigned an important mission for his daughter, and a precious book left behind in his abode. Ezra persuaded the soldier—it struck a chord of sympathy in her, and so let Ezra pass.
Soon, Ezra was back on those streets, heading north to the central part of campus.
The cognition labs in Baylor’s Science buildings resembled a private spa more than a hospital. Aesthetically calming, they were soundproofed to prevent disruption during Drifts and decorated in neutral colors with retro furniture. The walls resembled bamboo forests; their slats even scented with perfumes that induced states of serenity.
The entire block had its electricity cut off and was running on reserve generators. The place had been looted in the weeks since the strikes started, two weeks ago—it felt like a lifetime ago. The furniture had been tossed, the rooms trashed, but little was taken in the disarray.
Beatrice followed the gray carpeting from the reception center to the private rooms where the Drifts were performed. Each room was outfitted with the highest quality tech, designed by Baylor Corporation engineers. There were two beds to a room, and an observation room with a one-way mirror. Drifts were performed under the watchful eye of support staff and a small unit of neuroscientists and mycologists, trained to keep tabs on brain activity of the Drifters and the Mother throughout.
“Attention. Life Support Systems are at 65%. Forty-five minutes until critical levels. Please proceed to the shuttle bay and follow evacuation proceedings.”
It had taken a while for Beatrice to get the generators up and running. Additionally on her way, a soldier had tried to stop her in the streets—“M’am, evacuation is this way.” She twisted out of his grip. The shouts followed her—“Hey! Stop!”
She booked it the whole rest of the way.
Someone had been siphoning off the fuel for the generators, most likely the workers on the picket lines, and the expensive batteries were running low. She had to jumpstart them with cables, but finally it worked.
She got a few of the lights working, and best of all the machines that would accommodate, a Drift.
The sample from the Mother was producing a steady line of theta waves, once Beatrice plugged it into the bioamplifying machinery. It was tempting—once seeing it all hooked up—to plug herself into it, to solo Drift with this sample before it became severed, and the connection ultimately lost. Forever.
There came the sounds of an intruder.
Long, loping strides could be heard coming down the hallway. Whoever they were, they were not making any effort to be stealthy.
Searching for a hiding place, Beatrice then heard her name, and Ezra barged into the room, sweaty and panting, having sprinted to find her. He slid down the wall, gulping down air, until he was seated on the floor, legs akimbo in front of him.
“What are you doing here?” Beatrice asked, settling between his parted legs.
“Thought you—were—” he gasped and heaved “—solo drifting.” He swallowed heavily, closing his eyes and sending a small prayer heavenward. “Never make me run—like that—again, dear Bea—Beatrice. Kevva above, I hate it.”
She cupped his face in her hands, planting a small kiss to his nose. “Did you run all the way here?”
He harrumphed a small cough. “You are desperate, Beatrice. I have, many a time, been the bedfellow of desperation, and she has her tenterhooks in you and shall not let. Two Drifters,” he said, and held up two of his own fingers. “One Mind. That was their rule—your rule.”
His index finger waved in front of her face, then it dropped to his chest, rubbing, open-palmed over his racing heart; a stern pout pulled down the corners of his mouth. “Girlie, I am no athlete. Do not make the mistake of thinking I ran all this way for diddly-squat.”
“Ez,” she sighed out.
They sat quietly, Beatrice making small thumb circles along his jaw, until his breathing was finally restored to normal.
“I didn’t think you’d come looking for me,” she said.
His grin was so sheepish, and his already reddened cheeks did not let up.
“Okay,” she relented. Because he knew her. He knew—and after all they’d shared of each other. “Okay, we Drift together. Right now.”
Muscle memory kicked in, as they prepared themselves for their final Drift. They knew each step by heart. Soon they would be in a theta pattern and holding.
“Let’s hope this works,” said Beatrice.
It was an old landscape. Ancient even. One that for many centuries hadn’t seen warfare. It was a land occupied by two opposing factions. Historically these factions were united under the umbrella of one civilization, until such time brought strife and animosity and that one sundered and severed into two.
One faction became remarkably wealthy and technologically superior; they sought alliances off-world, set up trade markets, and a strong tourism industry. They built a class of nobles who, over generations, consolidated their wealth and power and rank, as one divined by prophecy.
The second faction, genetically similar, although linguistically unique, maintained their ancient rituals—used the land sustainable, farmed and toiled the earth, and kept their connection to the old ways. They were nomadic peoples, harvesters, shepherds, largely peaceful. Their lands were soon invaded by their neighbors, outsiders steamed in, seduced by the profiteering of the noble class, and seeds of dissent began to grow into something more antagonistic.
Full blown war descended, and intergalactic channels stepped in to prevent genocide, but hands were dirtied none the less.
One such battlefield was in the shadow of colossal ruins, the seven figures of the Divine Gods.
“This is not the Drift,” Ezra said to Beatrice, admiring the strange figures carved from rock that towered above him. They were many stories tall, not as big skyscrapers found in the megacities of the Ephrate, but magnificent in some unfathomable sibylline way. Two-handed, he gingerly touched the long vines of ivy that had overgrown, to reveal the ornate details of the statues.
Fog hid the direction of the sun, and the celestial skies. Distant roars of battles could be heard, the shots of weapons firing, the whistles of mortars flying through the air. A streak of fire lit up across the sky, cutting through the fog before disappearing, and then the ground shook with the impact of the missile miles away.
“We’re in limbo,” said Beatrice. “My limbo. This place is Claxon.”
“Why did she bring us here?” Ezra wondered, falling into step side-by-side with Beatrice as they explored the site.
It was a powerful being indeed, for the Mother to craft such a place from Beatrice’s subconscious.
A large crater came into view at the base of the fourth colossus up ahead. It was not a naturally formed one though. Evidence of the great violence done to the land was everywhere—shorn rocks and grass, uprooted shrubbery, overturned stones. The bottom of the crater was now a puddle of mud and water.
It had formed from a bomb.
The fog moved around them, and more of the battle-scarred scenery came into view. Copses of trees in the distance bookended the No Man’s Land—mechanized artillery droids and foot soldiers advanced to the front as the battle moved over the hill.
On the outer rim of the crater where they stood, Beatrice made out a few darkened shapes upon the ground, wearing Army fatigues. More of these misshapen figures appeared as the fog rolled over them, revealing seven bodies in count, strewn about from the force of the mortar’s explosion, many had missing limbs and were entirely too blood soaked to be recognizable.
She gasped an inaudible sound and backpedaled directly into Ezra.
They were standing in a mass grave.
“This place cannot hurt us, it is but a memory,” he said to her, moving his arms around her center. She flinched and fought out of his grasp, trying to escape, but he restrained her. “They are projections of your unconscious mind.”
“Why?!” Her boots were stuck in the mud, saturated with blood and water. The two of them struggled to regain balance upon the lip of the crater and so fell into her depths. They slid down upon the earth, falling to their knees into the mud.
Beatrice found footing first, until Ezra’s body collided with her, and they both toppled into the sticky mud again.
“No, get me out of here,” she shrieked. “I don’t want to.”
“This is where it started, Beatrice,” Ezra said, not wanting to hurt her while they wrestled. Beatrice did not share that caution. He doubled over at the collision of her elbow into his ribcage, and then the base of her foot slamming into his knee sent him to the ground.
She went running up the slope, skidding and sliding all the while, grasping in vain for purchase upon the shredded wet earth.
“You were created here,” Ezra called after her, kneeling in the small muddy pond. They were equally tainted with the bloodied sludge. “This is the remains of the bomb that knocked you unconscious, that put that hole in your brain. The coma, the seizures. Your powers—it was birthed here. That’s why she brought us here.”
Beatrice scrambled up the slope. Fury and fear had her weeping, tears that washed the mud off her face, even as she dirtied it the more she wiped them away with her hands. Panic had seized her limbs, she could barely move and so crawled, dismissing the way the mud and dirt made heavy her clothing and seeped into the sides of her boots.
She couldn’t escape, nor escape the nightmare of the flood of memories this place inspired. The derelict smell of ash and flesh burning. The putrid stench of war had overstayed its welcome. The haunting rarified architecture of the colossal stone gods standing around and above them acted as apathetic prophets. Judge, jury, and executioners from on high.
Her escape was unsuccessful, and tiredness won out, and so Beatrice sank, exhausted, grieving, choking on her sobs, which wracked her whole body.
“I’m right here.”
Ezra. His voice was nearby, so near, it swept over her like a security blanket. Two sets of arms (his arms!) rolled her over by her hips, tugged her into a seated position, she all but drowned under his embrace.
They breathed together in the dying wind and fog. Pathetic figures in the mud and drudgery, but for the small encouraging words to her, poetry to her senses, they weakened her agency, made her succumb to his will as if he were the spell master, not her.
“I’m right here,” he repeated. The angle of his sharp nose softened as he smushed it into her cheek. “We’ll do it together. You have to remember, Beatrice. You must look it in the eyes.”
A round coin shaped bloom of gold appeared at the base of the crater, growing larger and larger, and then rivers with golden tentacles. It grew up the slopes of the crater and outwards, appearing sturdy enough that both Ezra and Beatrice could grasp onto it as a handrail and crawl their way out of the crater. They greeted the flat earth above, to stand on shaky limbs, hand in hand.
The fungi grew and grew, stretching so long it wound around the corpses—those horribly exhibited corpses, with their mangled limbs, with clothing melted from the heat of the blaze, blood-soaked all seven.
Dead, beyond recognition.
The fallen soldiers of Beatrice’s platoon. Her comrades. Her brothers and sisters in arms.
One by one, with the help of the fungi, they became reanimated. Their shell-shocked eyes blinked into wakefulness, and their mouths began to move.
Beatrice and Ezra gazed terror-stricken all the same to bear witness to the past coming back to life.
“What do you wish to know, little creature,” they said, all as one. The will of the Mycena somniantes spoke through their mouths.
“You changed me,” Beatrice shouted back. “Why?”
“I made you better. I left a small part of me in you, to grow and heal you. As I have been able to heal others.”
“Others, what others?”
“So primitive, your monstrous species. A central nervous system.” The voices took on a mocking tone. The whites of their eyes glowed the silky golden color of the fungi. “So fragile too. Rot is the destiny of your lot, while death and decay are the blood of my life. It is so extraordinary that I get to enjoy the life energy of others. I so liked time in your bodies, knowing your taste. You two were so special to discover. Rare is the connection that you two share.”
“You,” Ezra spoke up, accusatory. “You’re the voice that compelled us.”
“I am. Your species so often misunderstands.”
“You played us like dolls!” Beatrice wailed indignantly. “You can’t do that to people.”
“I merely gave you truth. It was already there, and I gave it the necessary push.”
“Not right all the same,” muttered Ezra, for Beatrice’s ears alone.
“You said others,” said Beatrice, “what others do you mean? Others like me?”
“It is time for you to go. Your time in this place has come to an end. This planet is my home, and you monsters are pests here. Small ones, but pests all the same.”
“Wait! A few questions more—”
But the golden tentacles were already receding, retreating back into the dirt, and the bodies of her comrades were falling back into lifelessness.
“Please! Wait! How do I control it?” Beatrice shouted.
“In time, little creature,” the last of Mother’s voice said. “It’s yours now.”
“No!” Beatrice chased the retreating roots, digging up the earth into which it disappeared. Breaking her fingernails as she did so. “What about you? What do you call yourself? Are there more like you? What about the Drift—is it gone? Don’t leave us!”
Ezra fell to his knees beside her, gathering up her arms and holding her in an embrace.
“It’s done, Beatrice, it’s done. She’s gone.”
“No, no, no. You can’t do that,” she gasped. “You can’t do that to people. I’m not done with you.”
She screamed. A raw hurt sound that could make one’s ears bleed. Throat gone raw, she collapsed finally into Ezra’s broad chest.
He tenderly stroked the back of her head, cradling her until her own sobs receded.
They were alone with the dead, and the Stone Gods.
A faint whistling was growing louder, approaching from the horizon. Beatrice knew what that sound meant, and she shut her eyes against the vision of a mortar shell heading for their direction and she and Ezra were plunged into nothingness.
They woke simultaneously, at the precise ignition of the alarm, signaling the end of the Drift.
Ezra, to the stinging reality of his missing limb, which in dreams so often reappeared to him as an old friend, and then left just as quickly and fell into a spell of disappointment upon waking; Beatrice to the conclusion that she was more vexed than before, the lack of answers and the hole in her heart proceeded to make her burst into unbidden tears upon the bed.
Another voice, more pressing, spoke over them, reminding them of the urgency of their predicament.
“Attention. Life support systems are at 35%. Warning: critical levels imminent. Please proceed to the shuttle bay and follow evacuation proceedings.”
Time had passed quickly. What had felt like moments in limbo translated to over an hour in the real world.
“Come, Beatrice, we must depart,” Ezra said, scrambling to get to her side quickly.
“I don’t understand,” warbled Beatrice, her chin wobbling. “There’s so much I don’t—” A heavy whimper, “I don’t know.” It was Ezra who detached her from the wirings, she was too numb to do it herself.
“Where’s that soldier with her stiff upper lip?” asked Ezra, gently. “That fighter with her sharp tongue.”
“She’s gone,” Beatrice sniffed. “She’s been gone for a long time.”
“Nah.” Ezra shook his head back and forth, comically. “She’s still in there.”
“She’s not—”
Ezra interrupted her tongue lashing. “We are shadows of my former selves, you and I,” he said. “That does not mean it is all over and we give up.”
His gaze landed, longing, to the emptiness on his right side, to where the stump ended and the sleeve of his fleece had been tied off and so hung, awkwardly at his side. Beatrice’s gaze hung there too; more bubbles of sobs released tears that rolled down her cheeks.
“I think that’s why we get along so well,” he added, thoughtfully. It produced a small chuckle in Beatrice, so small Ezra thought he was hearing things.
“Oh, shut up,” she ribbed, knowing how scathing their clashes often were.
“Folks used to cower in my presence. I had a former partner who was twice my size and double my strength, and he bent to my persuasion. It was a heady thing, but now I cannot even frighten a teenage girl.”
Another small laugh from Beatrice, and he drew closer to her, parting her legs dangling off the bed to stand between them and place his forehead upon her own.
“I don’t possess all the answers. Maybe the Mother doesn’t possess them either. It is no wise thing to place all your faith into one peddler. We shall figure it out, dear one,” he said. He gave a fortifying squeeze of her firm thigh. “For now, I must insist on our hasty departure from this place.”
Beatrice collected herself, lamented the state of her puffy tear-stained face, the bags under her eyes. None of which bothered Ezra, who kissed each of her closed eyelids, until they were dry.
They both found the tray holding the sample to discover it had been liquified—the fruiting bud gifted by the Mother to Beatrice was reduced to a puddle of slime.
There’d be no more ways to communicate with her. They were on their own.
Out in the hallway, the walls began to shake. A great trembling made the floorboards ripple as a wave, and so compelled them to sprint down the stairs, taking them two at a time, with Ezra griping all the while about his hatred for an overabundance of exercise. They reached the exit and didn’t look back, until they were a safe distance away. They were stunned to find that the entire Science building was in the arms of the Mother’s gigantic tentacles. Her monstrous alien arms were embracing the brick building—one of the oldest on the campus—and reduced it to rubble in a matter of heart-stopping seconds.
The rest were soon falling under her sway, as she targeted block after block for demolition. The once-mighty testament of Baylor Corporations’ technological superiority crumbled to dust before their very eyes.
Those already evacuating in an orderly fashion, quickly panicked, seeing the pace of the destruction of the campus. Queues devolved into stampedes in the lines at the shuttle bay.
Many of the shuttles had already departed, vanishing into the upper atmosphere, their seats fully occupied, but those that remained grounded were reduced to pandemonium. Army personnel, stationed to provide peacekeeping, were soon swarmed by the crowds streaming for an exit, and so quickly the orderliness that had defined the previous hour, vanished.
As they fought their way through the crowds at the terminal, a wayward arm reached out and grabbed Beatrice, pulling her out of step with Ezra. She turned with her arm raised in a fist, ready to break the jaw of this stranger, pausing only when she came face to face with the wide, scared eyes of Shelby.
“Bea! I was so worried.”
Ezra’s fingers were threading through Beatrice’s own, tugging her along. “Give no time of day to this betrayer,” he muttered.
“I guess you’re with him now,” said Shelby, seeing Ezra’s interlocked fingers and protective stance at Beatrice’s side.
“Wait.” Beatrice reached across the distance and placed her free hand on her friend’s shoulder. “You see now what she’s capable of? Do you understand now, Shelb? Baylor is done for.”
“And what am I gonna do?” lamented the Drifter. “I’ve been doing this for twenty years, I can’t work anywhere else. Is this really the end of Baylor?”
“They don’t care about you,” replied Beatrice haughtily. “They’ve never cared for you, even when you did their bidding. We’re expendable to them, all of us. The rest is for you to figure out.”
The jostling of the crowd almost separated them; the panic was palpable. They had but moments to spare.
“I don’t blame you for what you did,” said Beatrice, reattaching her hand to Shelby. “I forgive you.” But she jerked a small motion of her chin in Ezra’s direction. “He won’t, but I do,” she added, for even she felt the heat of his glare towards Shelby. “You cross me again, Shelby, you turn us over to Baylor or the authorities, you come anywhere near us with threats, and you won’t live to regret it. He’ll make sure of that.”
Shelby made a taut nod in understanding, her round chin crumbling with unspoken apologies all the while.
Beatrice dropped her hand, but not before Shelby hastily shoved something into it.
“This was confiscated off your things when they found you,” she said, eyes full of hurt. “You should have it back.”
Beatrice opened her palm to find the small switchblade—her knife. There was her clan’s crest welded into it—the two stags in battle, their antlers entwined around a fleur-de-lis—and the small inscription of her initials, which she had added in herself some years ago. She had thought the precious family heirloom was lost forever.
“Kiss the little ones from me,” Beatrice told Shelby, in gratitude and in sadness.
That was the last time she ever saw Shelby.
Dock 12E came into view ahead. The small shuttle was waiting for her passengers. The ramp descended in its airlock, and Cee descended, holding a charged thrower at her hip, ready to shoot off those who were not welcome aboard their transport.
Small though she looked, against the backdrop of the swarms of people, she cut an intimidating figure, holding off panicked workers, shouting at them to find another way off-planet. It was with relief when she greeted Ezra and Beatrice, as they came racing through the terminal, Ezra in his off-balance jog, and Beatrice’s smoother strides beside him.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” Cee shouted above the din of cacophonous shouting from those trying to evacuate, and the whistles and yells from the crowd control.
They flew up the ramp to enter the ship, but not before part of the mob broke off and tried to force their way up after them.
A shot rang out.
Muffled screams.
Beatrice’s eyes swam, searching for injury upon Ezra first, then herself, and found none.
It was Cee, with the hunting thrower. She had shot blindly over the descending throng to warn them off. It had worked, they retreated.
The heavy doors of the shuttle shut, cutting off the view of the besieging swarm.
“You guys okay?” Cee asked, still holding the rifle aloft. It was basically useless now, needing a charge loaded into her throttle before another shot could be taken, but the message of her menace was clear.
“We’re fine, let’s get out of here,” yelled Ezra, high on adrenaline.
At a gesture to Georgie, the throttles of the engines started up and they disengaged from the dock and the geodesic dome and wheeled along the tarmac to a designated lift off spot.
Beatrice barely heard Cee fussing over her and Ezra, pinning them with questions about what had happened and why they had taken so long, and instead took stock of the interior of the spacecraft.
It was rather small, only a singular room about the size of Beatrice’s bedroom back in the Residence Hall—a pilot’s and co-pilot’s chair at the bow, a large viewport and the control panels underneath, then there were two extra seats fused to the starboard wall, complete with seatbelts, and two rear windows on either side of the paneled door.
A stepladder was fused upon the portside wall, leading to what Beatrice assumed was storage and another level beneath this main one.
“Take your seats please,” said Georgie urgently but ever cheerful from the pilot’s chair.
Ezra took the chair beside them, giving the whiz kid an avuncular gentle punch to the shoulder. Beatrice and Cee took the two passenger seats and strapped themselves in.
Once given the signal from ground support, the shuttle began to take off, and the craft gained altitude, leaving behind Hephaestus’ surface, and the geodesic dome of Baylor’s corporate campus.
Beatrice watched out the windows in the rear as the Fishknife took off. Through the sheen of the glass dome, Beatrice could see the rubble that remained inside it and the last of the evacuation ships departing.
All around the outside of the massive dome, rivers of gold were visible on the surface, long meandering paths of the mycelium—those arteries that made up the Drift. The Mycena. The Mother. They were forming rapidly, swelling at an unsettling pace, branching, like the branches of trees, up the sides of the dome.
From the safety of their high elevation, they watched the mighty mycelium consume the massive glass dome. Swallowing it down into her shadowy depths into nothingness.
Rot is the destiny of your lot.
Mother’s final revenge.
The Fishknife floated serenely upwards, the sky darkening as their ascent hit the upper limits of the planet’s atmosphere. That distant red dwarf that served as this galaxy’s sun was but a small bright orange orb in the distance, and Cabieri, the lone moon to Hephaestus, began to take shape out the front window. They coasted by it, close enough Beatrice imagined extending her arm and sweeping her fingers across its scarred surface, pockmarked by meteor craters.
Ezra moved first, unbuckling from the seat, and unlatched a panel underneath the front seats. He lifted a boxy suitcase out of the ship’s floor and opened it.
A bundle of pearls spilled within it.
Beatrice had never seen so many of those precious gems in one place. Their milky spheres possessed a subtle glow of their own, as if lit from within. Some were shaded in a hue of lavender, others in a dusky pink. Most were that pearlescent white of fame.
They were the most beautiful things Beatrice had ever seen.
It could be a million credits, maybe more. The last of the pearls ever mined on Hephaestus.
“Where to?” Ezra brightly asked the bunch, laughing, he ran his hand through the piles of pearls, stroking them like a pet. “Anywhere, none shall be overlooked. We can reinvent ourselves with this amount of wealth. Be anyone, anywhere. Cee, you pick! Where to?”
“Me?” Cee asked, dumbfounded.
“Little birdie, there must be some planet you’ve always wanted to visit,” said Ezra, picking out one of the larger pinkish pearls and chucking it across the space to his ward.
Cee caught the pearl handedly and admired it. “Well, yeah, I guess. It’s kinda silly,” she dithered, turning a rosy hue.
The others jumped in, encouraging her to share.
“Okay, okay.” She gave in, though squirmed in her seat. “Lau. I’ve always wanted to go to Lau.”
“The vacation planet?” Ezra, once seeing to it that the pearls were safely zipped back in their luggage, he spun in the copilot’s chair to scrutinize the teenager. “Famous for its palm trees and endless private islands.”
“My dad said I was born there,” explained Cee, rolling the pearl between her palms. “I always thought I was born where I grew up for a while, on Cav—um, Cav…” she stumbled over the foreign name of the planet.
“Cavaria,” Beatrice gently corrected her.
“Right, Cavaria.”
“Lau, huh?” Ezra mulled it over. He began a search for the coordinates on the control panel anyway. “Sounds perfectly idyllic. Georgie, you in?”
“Sounds wicked,” they chuckled. “I could use a vacation.”
“We all could,” Ezra heartily agreed.
The impulse engines of the Fishknife meant they would only travel at sublight speeds to their destination. Not as fast as the large passenger shuttles, and certainly not the crafts built for long-haul expeditions, but it was far more discreet.
Beatrice was so exhausted she hadn’t even realized she was still holding her fist closed around the small handle of the switchblade. It was cutting into her sweating palm. She opened her creaking joints to admire the small item, and now the only personal effect that had seen her through this strange journey.
Weeks of stress and anxiety began to slough off her, a shedding of a skin as the ship turned away from the moon and headed out among the stars. Cee must have overheard Beatrice’s fanciful sigh of relief, for the kid’s hand gently touched down upon her slackened arm, nonverbally checking in with her.
There was so much uncertainty, roiling and turbulent, within her. There was loss and grief, and anger and disillusionment.
But as Beatrice sought those sturdy, earnest, keen, brown ones that pinned on her from across the cabin—he had once more spun in the co-pilot's chair to see how the other passengers were faring—she realized there was something else there too.
A seed.
In the main viewport, the background of stars took on a strange, angular dimension that enveloped the cabin in a soft, shimmering glow as the craft picked up to her top speed.
It had the effect of bathing Ezra under the light of a full moon, and his markedly handsome face grew tenfold as he beamed, not a smile, but a smirk. A self-aware smirk full of bright-eyed mischief, and a private joke just for her. One that contained multitudes of possibilities.
Yes, a seed had been planted in her—who knows when—and it had sprouted, produced offshoots, and ancillary branches.
tagged by @sp00kymulderr and @princessanglophile ❤️❤️
gosh my next chapter of Compulsion is so close to being finished and it all seems so full of spoilers, so here's something innocuous...sorta...
“Girlie, I am no athlete. Do not make the mistake of thinking I ran all this way for diddly-squat.”
“Ez,” she sighed out.
They sat quietly, Beatrice making small thumb circles along his jaw, until his breathing was finally restored to normal.
“I didn’t think you’d come looking for me,” she said.
tagging anyone and everyone who spots this!! Share ya WIPS!
summary: Waking in the Medical Wing back in Central Campus, Beatrice is given a chance to prove her loyalty to Baylor Corporation.
chapter warnings: horror, canon typical violence, mind control, Ezra being unhinged, lots of blood, needles, medical devices, strong language, allusions to sexual acts, making out
word count: 8.7k. Beta'd by the lovely @ezrasbirdie 👑
MASTERLIST // AO3
// Previous. //
The graveyards on Claxon were covered in flowers. The scarred landscape, the very one wrecked by war, soon filled with willowherb; where the trees were felled by the constant bombings, ragwort grew instead, and where drudgery was dug in with the trenches poppies and dandelions were found blooming. The wasteland, those irreplaceable areas pockmarked with savagery, were renewed, healed over by flowers that hadn’t been sighted in centuries.
What was most beautiful about Claxon in the post-post blitz, was when her grass was growing and her seeds were blowing in the wind, and when the smell of pollen and rosebay covered the smell of death.
It was a shame Beatrice would never see the planet again in her life, but she dreamed of those war-torn pastures, covered with the scenery of violets and marguerites sprouting from the ground.
Everything is a cycle.
“...punishment for an unsanctioned Drift is a fine upwards of five thousand credits. The Drifter is facing additional charges, such as breaking and entering a closed mine, harmful provocation and injury to a Baylor Corporation employee…”
A sigh, and then Beatrice heard. “I can keep going? I know you’re awake.”
Beatrice opened her eyes.
The mousy brown ponytail that could only belong to Shelby was seated across from her in a blue plastic chair, reading aloud from a tablet.
“Wanna tell me what the hell you were thinking?” Shelby accused the now fully awake Beatrice. “Let me continue. Intent to steal pearls, a missing drill truck, along with other damage to Baylor property pushes the Drifter’s sentencing up to criminal charges. Subject to fifteen to twenty years in a penal colony,” she read.
“Shelb—” Beatrice hacked a violent cough. Her throat was dying, caked and rusted with disuse. Her head throbbed with a nasty hangover.
Shelby bobbed into view, holding out a cup of water and assisted Beatrice in drinking rapidly from it.
“You’re coming off the sedatives, that’s why it feels like you’ve been hit by a truck,” said Shelby, the maternal sternness in her voice glaringly present.
It was late. Or perhaps really early. The lights were turned down low and the curtains were shut and the sun had long since abandoned the surface.
Beatrice recognized the off-white coloring of the walls and the cheap sheets of bedding that served as a private room in the Medical Wing on Baylor Corporation’s campus. She was hooked up to a plethora of machines, liquids and antibiotics were being pumped through her system. A device was attached to her head that was tracking her brain waves.
She’d only been to Medical while under supervision of the lab techs for her weekly check ups between Drifts.
“What’s happened? How did I get here?” She asked Shelby, who had gone back to reading the tablet with an entirely disconcerting expression. “And when did you get here?”
“Oh. This is a good one,” Shelby said. “Subjects were rescued using flame cutters on the double blast-proof doors and exhibited violent tendencies when discovered; one almost killed a member of the medical staff as he was put into quarantine, and his titanium appendage was deemed dangerous and thus confiscated. It is believed by the doctors at Baylor Corporation they are still under the influence of the compulsion and should be given sedatives until such side effects wear off. May take many hours to a few days for them to wake.”
“How long was I out?” Beatrice croaked, sick to her stomach. The nausea was more likely a side effect of the sedatives and the antibiotics, but she couldn’t help but think something more sinister was at play here.
“Do you know, in all my years as a Drifter I have never once seen a compulsion event. Not once,” said Shelby, emphatically. “And yet the second you bring this Miner into the Drift—what did you think was going to happen? It went to shit. You must have done something wrong.”
“We didn’t do anything wrong. We completed that Drift perfectly,” Beatrice snapped, growing angry at the lack of answers she was getting from her friend. “How long? Tell me how long I’ve been out.” Tears began to eke from the corner of her eyes, and she wiped them hastily away with the sleeve of the hospital green robe.
“You’ve been out for two days,” Shelby answered. “I got a call as soon as they found you. You were covered in some weird spores. The CEO called me. The C-E-fucking-O. Do you know how worried I was?”
Two days?
Then where was Ezra? And Cee? And Georgie? And what happened?
What the fuck happened?
Flashes of memories passed through her mind, rosary beads on a string, one clicking against the other. The tunnels. The obstruction from the Mother. Ezra in his ombre suit. The panic attack in the underground stream and Ezra in his suit, talking her down. That’s a good girl. Ezra, naked. Ezra, over her. Kissing her. Ezra and his lips brushing her skin; his teeth putting marks into her belly. The voice that had controlled her—compelled her. Ezra fucking her. Fucking herself on Ezra’s cock.
Was it real? Or some sick, perverted dream?
She parted the hospital robe enough to examine her abdomen.
A purple bruise was on her navel just beneath her belly button. On that round bit of stomach, the place she always failed to flatten. She pressed her fingers into it and the pain bloomed with a sweet ache.
A love bite left by Ezra.
Real.
All real.
“If you tell them that this man manipulated you,” Shelby was saying, “that he made threats on your life, company lawyers will convince the judges to reduce your sentence. All you have to do—”
Beatrice interrupted. “Where is he?”
“All you have to do is tell them you were manipulated, and that you were offered grand promises that he could never fulfill. Just tell them it was a lapse of judgment—”
“Lapse of judgment?”
“Beatrice, you were Baylor’s best Drifter! They need you back! They’ll be on your side. Tell them you didn’t go along with his plans.”
“No, it’s not true!”
Shelby looked more than disappointed. She folded her arms over her chest, cross-examining Beatrice. “What about the missing truck?”
“Shelb—I don’t know anything.”
“That’s two for the Drift, which means a third person to drill for pearls and escape. Who were you working with?”
A small pool of dread bored a hole in Beatrice’s gut. “We had no accomplice,” she lied. “It was just the two of us.”
“It was his kid, wasn’t it?”
“Just us two.”
“That kid you were worried about when he was in limbo. Where is this kid?”
“There was no one else,” Beatrice said firmly.
Shelby peeked a glance out at the partially closed door to the hallway. The hospital wing was all quiet at this hour.
“They will send you to prison unless you can cut a deal,” said Shelby, sitting down heavily beside her on the bed and pinning her friend with a grave expression. “You can come back to work; we can perform more Drifts. Together. C-suite hired workers who are going to cross the picket lines, this strike is over.”
Beatrice started vehemently shaking her head. She had to find Ezra. She had to know he was okay. That he’d make it.
“Are you listening, Beatrice? The armed forces from Central are here to restart the negotiations and smooth the tensions between the police and the protestors. The miners have no leverage once they see that others are taking their jobs. They’ll go back to digging it will be just like before. Baylor Corporation is being generous!”
Beatrice laughed. A shockingly bitter sound that rattled both women. “Generous? Listen to yourself. What did they offer you?”
Shelby, smartly, did not reply.
Silence reigned between the two Drifters. Beatrice glanced at the screens recording her brain waves. Active and jumpy beta waves. They swam across the screen with some speed. Beta category was problem-solving.
Beatrice returned her attention to Shelby across the way. “Because they must have offered you something. Let me guess—a clean slate of your debts?” she probed.
For debts Shelby had. Her mother’s back surgery last year was mostly covered by Baylor Corporation’s health insurance but there were lingering costs; her teenage daughter needed braces and went to an expensive school, she had an infant son too, and someone would have to pay for the daycare when her husband only worked part-time.
What was loyalty if it could be bought and paid for?
“What about that backdoor you sent me? What happened to helping me sell Baylor’s secrets?” she asked, hurt by Shelby’s betrayal. Beatrice wished she could say she was more shocked by this turn of circumstances.
Everyone had a price. Baylor Corporation had just found the amount and supplied the right amount of pressure on it too. They probably approached Shelby with a room full of lawyers, intending to back her into their corner. Remind her exactly who was writing her cheques.
“It’s no use,” Shelby capitulated. “I was wrong to give you that.”
“It’s the only leverage I have.”
“Unless you come back!"
“There is no going back.”
“What do you mean?”
“The earthquakes.”
Shelby shrugged it off. “Unstable gasses beneath the surface.”
“Wrong. It’s the Mother—she’s waking up. If she’s not already fully awake by now. That means no Drifts, and no Drifts mean no digs.”
Shelby laughed until her pale round face went pinkish in the low light. “I want to believe you, I really do.”
“Where’s Ezra?” Beatrice started unhooking herself from the machines. First with the ones planted upon her head.
“Stop that! Where are you going?”
The machines started to beep erratically. Beatrice ripped the needle dispensing her electrolytes and antibiotics out of her arm. Before both her feet were on the ground, two large orderlies dressed in their medical white uniforms barged into the room.
“Beatrice! Stop! Stay calm. They’re here to help,” warned Shelby, backing away once seeing Beatrice was fighting them off as they tried to restrain her back onto the bed. “You’ll hurt yourself. Stop resisting!”
The calls went unheeded. Beatrice fought them anyway, physically kicking and lashing out.
A strange sensation overtook her. She became aware of her heightened perception, and was no longer in the room, at least not physically, it was like her body was stepping outside itself, watching her struggle on the bed as they tried to strap her to the hospital bed. She was no longer in possession of her own mind, she could feel the others, the ones she was fighting—the contours of their thoughts, the dimensions of their emotions.
Their minds, malleable as sand, and in her control.
Sleep. She willed it.
The two members of the nursing staff attempting to pin her arms at her sides, they stopped. Mannequins with their strings cut, they flopped; one bounced off the bed, before hitting the floor beside the other with a sickening crunch. Two inert bodies lay unmoving upon the ground.
Shelby flattened herself against the far wall, breathing heavily, watching Beatrice with a penetrative stare. “What the fuck?” She breathed. “What did you—”
“They’re asleep,” Beatrice huffed. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, its blankets tousled in the scuffle.
A droplet fell from her nose and onto her lips. Another followed and marked a perfect circle on the tiled linoleum floor. A red stain of blood.
“H-h-how did you…?” Shelby shrunk when Beatrice, a dangerous glint in her steel blue-and-yellow eyes and blood streaking a path of purple-red down to her chin, stalked towards her.
“Tell me where Ezra is before I walk into your head and make you tell me.”
It was a perfect replica of the room Beatrice had woken in—the medical devices, the closed curtains blocking out the dark night and, eventually, the arrival of dawn.
The only difference was that Ezra, in the same hospital green robe, lay in peace upon the bed. He was curled in on himself, sleeping soundly. His right arm was exposed, the stump an aberration to the rest of his body.
What had he called her all that time ago? An incongruous thing.
The metal arm that had so much defined him was gone, and as such, he appeared wholly unguarded and vulnerable as he slept. His dark-haired head was upon the pillow, with his face turned away from the door as Beatrice crept, tiptoeing, into the room.
“Ezra,” she whispered. No movement.
Only the lights from the hallway spilled into the room. They would be undisturbed; Beatrice made sure of that. She wiped the last remnants of blood off her face with the sleeve of the robe.
“Ezra.” Still nothing.
A round metal restraint glinted from his wrist. He was handcuffed to the side rail of the bed.
She placed one knee on the bed and gently shook his shoulder. When she got no response, she arranged her limbs to lay behind him, tucking her knees up the same way. They were almost touching, only an inch or so remained between them.
She hovered her hand over his shoulder. For the faintest of seconds, she longed to bury her nose in the soft strands of his hair at the nape of his neck, imagining she’d find the smell of a pine forest there and raindrops on leaves.
But no—only the faintly astringent scent of hospital grade soap met her nose. The same that emanated from her body, the smell so peculiar to her own understanding of herself, and of Ezra. She knew they’d both been thoroughly sanitized.
“Are you in there?” she whispered, abandoning the desire to actually touch him and instead tucked her arms in close to her body, keeping her hands, placidly, to herself. “Ezra, wake up,” she said, a touch louder.
She matched her breathing to his, putting all her focus towards expanding her mind, trying to replicate the sensation she felt when she dropped those orderlies into a sleep, when she made Petey lose in that arm wrestling match many moons ago, and finally when she walked into Ezra’s dream.
It never came to fruition. Only the even-tempered sounds of their breathing could be heard, and the low beeping of the machines observing his body metrics.
“Ezra, please,” she whined.
His body stirred, very slowly at first, and gradually more and more. His shoulders shook and he made a slow groaning sigh.
“Beatrice,” she heard him say. “That you?”
Her arm wound over his hip, splaying her hand over his belly. “It’s me,” she whispered, her lips upon the shell of his ear.
“I feel as if I indulged in one too many drinks,” he said, voice grating and sandpapery.
“Sedatives.”
He rolled, spinning face first, then those wide beautiful shoulders turned over, and the bed shook as his left arm met the resistance of the handcuffs.
“What in Kevva’s name?” Ezra spewed, growing more awake by the second. “Bastards cuffed me.”
“Took your arm too,” Beatrice mentioned.
“Where are we?”
“Medical wing. Central campus.”
“How?”
“Emergency crews found us—they had to open the doors with flame cutters. Apparently, you almost killed one of them.”
“I don’t remember that.” He twisted his upper body as much as he could to remain close to her. “Beatrice,” he murmured, his lips lightly brushing the tip of her nose as he spoke. “Our little bird—” a sharp, cutting inhale of worry “—do you think they have her in a cage?”
“I don’t know,” Beatrice replied, moving the back of her hand comfortingly over his abdomen. “They’re charging us with an unsanctioned Drift and the intent to steal.”
His lips parted in a confused sigh.
“It means, Ezra,” Beatrice went on, “they haven’t found any stolen pearls. There’s no proof. Only a missing truck.”
“Then Cee and Georgie escaped?” The hopefulness in his tone made a balloon grow in Beatrice’s chest.
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “It’s possible.”
“Meanwhile, we will be sent to a prison colony.” He despaired with a dry, strained laugh. “The cruelest of all ironies—they will send me to The Green for my punishment.”
Familiar with the true depth of his fears, Beatrice reached for his face, smoothing her hands over his roughened hairy cheeks and jaw. His beard had grown thicker and more unkempt in the two days since she’d last touched him.
“I cannot go back there. I simply cannot,” he said quietly.
“Oh hush.” She soothed away his worries, made soft caresses that followed the crescent of his mustache with her thumbs, down to his chin. “I won’t let that happen. I won’t,” she intoned, sealing it with a kiss to the roughened jawline.
“Are we still under its spell?” Ezra posed. “It feels like a strange dream.”
“It passed,” said Beatrice quietly, “but it was real.”
That was the first time his eyes opened all the way. Even under the shadow of his long eyelashes, they could be read as full of turmoil all the same. He shifted wanting to be nearer to her, but held back by the handcuff on his wrist, and so was unable to embrace her.
“You don’t find it in yourself to hate me then?”
“Does this look like I hate you?” She swung her leg over his hips, drawing them ever more embraced. Nose-to-nose, her hands cradled his head, carding delicately, and absentmindedly through his curls. “This is all my fault. I should have been more careful.”
“For what offense, dear Beatrice? It was no more your fault than mine. That voice we heard. It was almost like,” he left it hanging off, thoughtfully. “It was her’s, wasn’t it?”
It didn’t need to be said.
“I keep thinking of it. Dream that I’m still there, with you. How we—” He drew in another sharp inhale, this one to cut off a low debauched groan. It slipped out anyway. His cock under her thigh twitched and his nose nuzzled affectionately along the top of her head, drinking in the smell of her hair. “Is it strange that I still desire you?”
“No more strange than anything I’ve seen lately,” Beatrice rejoined.
Ezra’s mischievous side shone through. “A hearty riposte, dear one. You’ll find that these fetters are the last thing keeping me from having you again right now.”
His lips sought hers, their mouths opening, prying whispered groans and small utterances of need with the barest of kisses.
“But, ah—” and his lips fell away. “How did you find me?”
Beatrice felt her face and neck rise a few degrees in temperature. “I, uh, threatened Shelby. I put two orderlies to sleep,” she said.
“To sleep?” Ezra’s eyes widened with his question.
“Shelby told me where you were. Of course, you’ve never met her,” said Beatrice, upon noting Ezra’s clear confusion. “She’s a Drifter. A friend…or so I thought.”
“But this sleep…?”
“I used my—” It felt strange. Giving it a name. “Let’s just say I willed it.”
“These orderlies, they didn’t happen to have the key to this contraption, did they?”
Beatrice deflated. “No.”
“There must be more guards around. They’ll realize soon you’re missing from your room. Did you dispatch this Shelby to the land of dreams as well?”
“She’s restrained to my bed,” said Beatrice, and added glumly, “I didn’t like doing that.”
“Well, needs must.” Ezra, so nonchalant.
“We have to get out of here.”
“And run around Hephaestus in naught but these gowns?” Ezra was smirking at her. “Some grand escape.”
“We’re not far from the Residence Hall, we can hide out in there, plan a way to contact Cee,” said Beatrice, forming out their plan as she said it. “Shelby said the armed forces from Central are here to start up negotiations. C-suite is forcibly returning everyone to work. More Drifters will be returning. The place will be empty.”
“Beatrice, indulge me but a moment. I believe I know how we can get me out of these shackles.”
“How’s that?”
“It would require you to use your Drifter magic to get the key.”
“Ez,” Beatrice warned, “I can’t control objects.”
Nevertheless, he was not swayed. He became animated by his idea. “But you can control the mind of the person with the key. Is that not correct?”
“I don’t have—” She groaned, cutting herself off and burying her face, wrapping herself around him. “I can’t,” she said, soft, and small, and scared into his warm neck.
“Beatrice, you can,” said Ezra. His chest rumbled with a small chuckle. “You walked into a dream and woke me out of limbo. You put two orderlies to sleep through your own ability to influence their minds. I’m sure you’ve done more before we met without realizing it. Beatrice, you are more than capable. Now, how did you do it?”
“I was.” She detached her face from his neck. “I was desperate.”
“So emotion drives it. That’s good. What else?”
“Before, when I walked into your dream the second time, I’d been exercising, which clears my head.”
“Hm, clarity of purpose and singular determination. Brilliant.”
“Ez,” Beatrice breathed, losing hope, “this is crazy.”
“There is no room for doubts now.” He kissed her.
Driven by Ezra’s resolve, Beatrice sat up, arranging herself to face the doorway, ready to defend herself against any obstacle that came through it. She closed her eyes, narrowing her focus.
Key. Guard. Key. Guard.
“That’s the spirit, girlie.” Ezra encouraged from behind her.
“It’s not working,” she cried out, frustrated. “This is beyond stupid.”
“Good, get angry, Beatrice!”
“I’m not angry.”
“You are. All that you’ve done here has been for nothing, Beatrice. The strike will be over. Cee is gone. The pearls are gone. You and I were nothing but pawns to a higher power. For nothing,” he reproached bitterly. “Hell, I’m angry. Baylor Corporation wants you to lose.”
Her jaw clenched. Key. Guard. Key. Guard.
“Why did they send that Drifter to talk to you?” Ezra suddenly supposed. “I bet she buttered you up with a deal to lessen your sentence,” he added. “They’ve got us pounding our feet for scraps. They closed their boots over our necks and squeezed. What did she offer you? A chance to return to Drifting, with all the pretty perks and your salary intact. Maybe a raise? Yes, I see how it is—you were going to hang me out to dry, Beatrice.”
“I wasn’t,” she volleyed, yet her fists balled at her sides. “Now stop fucking talking.”
“Tsk-tsk, language, honeybun,” he drawled, clicking his tongue with such condescension it drew only more ire from Beatrice, who was attempting to ignore him. “Did you come in here to have your way with me one more time and then watch me get dragged back to The Green? You little minx.”
It shouldn’t have made her shiver all over. The way he spoke those words so close to her neck.
She twisted to glare at him. “Oh fuck you, Ezra.”
“Yeah, fuck me. That’s exactly what you want,” he said savagely. “One last fuck, because you can’t get your pussy wet without charging headfirst into a fight.”
“Shut. Up.” She turned back to the task at hand, turning her attention inward.
Key. Key. Where is the key?
She squeezed her eyes tighter, forcing Ezra out. Her mind began to wander, projecting itself outward, roving. An expansion took place, a part of her separating from her corporeal body, reaching out.
Grasping to conquer a weak mind.
It fell upon one. Deftly, she drew it out. As one draws poison from a wound, slowly and with care.
Bring me the key, she willed it.
Then, like paint tossed carelessly over the canvas of her study, disrupting her concentration, she heard him.
Ezra.
His heckling burst through the fog.
“You were going to fuck me while you fucked me.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” She whirled, frustrated tears starting to burn as acid in her eyes. “I’m trying to get us out of here!”
Whatever she was to say next, she didn’t. The door burst open, and a Baylor uniformed Security Guard entered the room. His arm was raised, and Beatrice stepped between him and the bed where Ezra sat, expecting violence.
Only the guard said nothing and did no more. In fact, his eyes were unfocused and bore a strange glassy quality. He was staring without looking. It wasn’t a weapon in his outstretched hand, it was a small stainless-steel key.
It worked.
Beatrice gingerly took the key out of the guard’s hand. The spell broke. The veil lifted. For with a wheezy exhale, the man snapped into alertness.
The guard stared, baffled, at his surroundings, and at Beatrice and Ezra. “What the—? How’d I get here?”
Sleep.
It rang out from Beatrice, a disembodied voice from her own mind that swept over the guard as a tidal wave. For in the next second, before the alarm could be raised, he wilted. His knees gave out under him, and just like she had witnessed in the two orderlies, he fell to the ground. Fast asleep.
Beatrice felt the wetness on her face and knew what it was before checking. In a daze, she unlocked Ezra out of the handcuffs. She could feel his eyes on her, and she ignored him. Burning with all shades between fury and relief, her hands trembled as she fitted the small key into the handcuffs; a turn, and they unlocked.
Once freed, his wide hand immediately cupped the side of her face, forcing her chin to turn to look at him.
“Beatrice,” he said. And it was without an ounce of his nasty taunting, or even strained resignation. It was colored with such devotion; Beatrice’s knees tremored. “My Beatrice.”
His thumb swept across her cheek, and he leaned in, pushing his mouth against her own inert lips. Her defenses fell further when his tongue surged into her mouth, prying her lips apart, and curling to taste her. The taste of copper sat heavily on her lips—blood having fallen from her nose down to her chin at her mental exertions, and Ezra stained his own lips, moaning erotically into an even deeper kiss.
His hand fell from her face to the plump curve of her ass, and he pulled her bodily towards him, gripping with such intensity, a lesser woman might have backed away from him.
Not Beatrice. She clutched at him, her fingers tightening around the cloth of the hospital robe. She hated how much she needed him. How he could worm his way under her skin.
But Kevva, she wanted him. All of him.
It was like that time after the earthquake. All desperation. All barriers drawn away. It was ungentle, their passion.
“Beatrice,” he murmured again when they broke for air, gasping into each other’s mouth.
The lower half of his face was covered in her blood—it stained his dark mustache, the corners of his mouth and the hairs on his chin. That wasn’t all. Ravenously, he leaned forth once more and licked her. From her chin to the top of her lip. He closed his mouth, swallowing down her blood, and he hummed, a sound that was both pleasing and revolting in equal parts to Beatrice.
“Forgive me, I only said those things to whip you into a frenzy,” he said.
“It worked,” she said, devoid of all excitement. “I didn’t think it would.”
“I did not mean any of those awful words.” He pleaded with his eyes, and then pressed his forehead into her own, desiring to be granted amnesty through the osmosis of their skin touching. His hand slipped between the cheeks of her buttock, seeking her heated center through the scratchy cloth of the robe.
“I know,” she answered, still reeling from the fact that her endeavors were successful. “It’s okay, Ezra, s’okay. I know now. I know.” She drew back enough to grant him the significance of her next words. “Don’t ever manipulate me like that again.”
“A first and only time.”
He swore on it, kissing her bloodied lips once more. A promise sealed in red.
Beatrice broke it off from descending any further into untimely lust. His wandering hand pulled back, squeezed her hip. “Do you really think I can’t get my pussy wet without a fight?” she asked with a frown.
“Oh, do not hold such a trifling non-truth against me,” said Ezra. “I was improvising.”
“Improvising?” She scoffed, but fiddled with the invitingly low and open collar of his patient’s robe all the same, showing off the few freckles that dotted his chest. “You call that improvising.”
Ezra was about to reply—a verbose defense of his methods—but saw the way Beatrice’s smirk was drawn more with coyness than outrage, so breathed a small sigh of relief, and dropped it.
“Typical,” said a third voice, and the appearance of a shadow in the doorway made them jump. This time it was Ezra who moved first, protecting Beatrice’s body with his own in a potential standoff over the body of the sleeping guard.
Only there was no need.
Beatrice recognized the slight figure of the newcomer in an oversized navy hooded sweatshirt, a pair of the dirtiest jeans, and steel-toe boots a size too big for her, but mostly for the pout of supreme disgust on her face.
“You two look like shit,” said Cee, although there was the barest hint of relief in her blue eyes.
“What in Kevva’s name are you doing here?” Ezra thundered, sizing up his ward. “Dammit Cee! I have you express orders to leave this place. You and Georige should have taken that transport as we’d arranged. You’d be lightyears away from here by now!”
Cee remained stoic during Ezra’s berating, but then he softened, and rushed forth and with a small “c’mere,” he drew the girl into his one-armed hug.
“You don’t know how relieved I am,” he said to her, his eyes growing watery with unshed tears.
“Sentimental?” Cee quipped, smiling through her own attempts to cover up her blubbering, and returned his embrace.
“Don’t you know it,” he grumbled.
“I was supposed to break you out, but I guess you took care of that for me.”
“What happened? Where have you been hiding?” Beatrice cut in urgently when Ezra released her from his hug.
“Georgie’s place. We’ve been lying low. Though it’s been quiet around here since the military showed up. Curfew is still in effect, we only have an hour or so before they come for you.” She nudged the body of the guard upon the floor with the tip of her boot. “What happened to him? Is he…sleeping?”
“Long story,” Beatrice supplied.
“And why are you both covered in blood?”
“Longer story,” said Ezra. “I promise I shall regale you with the gory details should you inquire, but now is not the time. Please tell me you retrieved those pearls.”
The kid nodded enthusiastically, her eyes sparkling brightly in the low light. “We did.”
Ezra choked up, bringing his shaking hand up to his chest to temper his racing heart. “And they’re safe?”
“We stashed them where no one would find them. There were rumors,” said Cee. “About crews finding two Drifters in the mines. They said it was a compulsion event.” Her eyes ping-ponged between Ezra and Beatrice. “Is it true?”
Ezra curled his lips inward. Dithering.
“Yes, it’s true,” Beatrice answered on his behalf. Better not to keep lying to the girl.
“Whoa,” Cee muttered under her breath. “You could have killed each other.”
Beatrice saw the bob of Ezra’s throat as he swallowed, staring grimly at the floor. When his eyes did lift upon her, and what passed was silent acknowledgement, she shuddered. Remembrances of their compulsion—that strange violence that befell them—lingered in her body, in the genetic memories of her cells.
“They searched our home, Ez,” Cee went on, ignorant of the true depth of her words. “I think they were looking for more information on you. Georgie hacked into the security system and found out they were holding you here, under quarantine.”
The hospital had been running on a skeleton crew since the start of the protests, and mostly empty, but company lawyers were on site and being escorted by soldiers, so it was too dangerous to rescue them during the day. So Cee and Georgie decided to wait for the cover of darkness.
“Georgie intercepted a secure transmission that they were going to move you to a new location off-planet at 0800 this morning until they could get you before a tribunal,” said Cee. “Baylor is seeking maximum penalties. Penal colonies. Could even be The Green.”
The girl gulped, taking seriously the threat of the return to the place both she and Ezra feared the most.
“Hey, no one’s going back to The Green,” said Beatrice, placing a reassuring hand on Cee’s shoulder. “Thank you for coming to get us.”
It turned out, Cee had brought a change of clothes for them. She doled out the clothing from a backpack. Jeans, shirts, fleece jackets for the cold nights, spare underwear, even socks for their shoes—Beatrice was surprised at the forethought into her rescue operation.
Cee went to keep watch on the corridors while Ezra and Beatrice dressed in their civvies and cleaned up.
Beatrice stripped out of the robe. Cee had included a sports bra for Beatrice among their clothes. Ezra's hand fell to her naked breast, the right one, upon the spot where another bruise—his love bite—was evidenced into her skin. He cupped her breast, thumbed the purple and black skin, just beside her nipple.
“She’s right you know, we could have killed each other,” he said, despondently. His hand traveled down to her navel, gently swept his pinky finger over the bruise there in an abject apology.
“That’s not our story,” said Beatrice.
The main part of Cee’s plan was to set off the fire alarm in the entire building. They would be able to escape in the chaos.
“That’s my birdie,” Ezra noted, a hint of pride in his coffee-brown eyes.
So while the alarm blared and the lights flickered, Ezra, Cee, and Beatrice, followed the signs posted for the quickest evacuation route. The mayhem was distraction enough. No one cared enough to follow the three of them as they ran across the courtyard, evading the line of soldiers running into the building.
They had another hour before curfew was lifted, so they had to take the back alley routes to Georgie’s place, ducking into narrow side streets to the north part of the campus. They jogged until the sounds of the fire alarm from the Medical building were no more than far-off background noise.
“Just around here,” Cee pointed, and ran ahead, upon turning the corner they heard her make a surprised oof.
She had run straight into the backside of a very confused Baylor Corporation uniformed guard.
Ezra went running up. “Unhand her!” he bellowed, seeing the two guards manhandle her down the street.
Beatrice slowed down her run, recognizing the two stocky figures in their helmets, outfitted with batons and rubber-bullet shooting rifles. One of them bore a bruise on his jaw, the other had suffered a black eye recently. She couldn’t believe her luck.
“Oi, Ricky,” said the taller of the two guards. “It’s them.”
Ezra snarled threateningly. “Let her go.”
Beatrice couldn’t remember the name of the other guard, but she definitely recalled the moment her fist connected with his jaw when she knocked him out all of a few days ago. The way his head had jerked into a peculiar angle, and he had fallen unconscious at her feet, while Ezra had dispatched this one, Ricky, with the rifle.
“Looks like our pal here doesn’t have his metal arm this time,” sneered Ricky. Cee struggled valiantly but was overtaken when the other one beat his baton into her abdomen, making her double over with a cough.
With a growl, Ezra marched forth, but was delayed by Beatrice, holding him by the back of his fleece. Without his metal arm, he was at a disadvantage, and she wasn’t about to let him go running into an uneven fight.
“We’re unarmed,” Beatrice said to the two buffoonish guards, while restraining Ezra. “Let the kid go. You want revenge for beating your asses and leaving you handcuffed together, then take your revenge on us, not the kid.”
“Beatrice,” Ezra sing-songed her name, dragging it out into three distinct syllables. He was glaring violence at the two other men, “that Drifter magic sure would come in handy right about now.”
“Not gonna scare us this time,” said Not-Ricky. He was dragging Cee backwards, his arm around her jugular.
“We were just enjoying a lovely stroll in the moonlight,” said Ricky, taunting them by swatting the baton upon his open palm, ready to strike another blow upon Cee should either of them make a wrong move. “Ain’t that right old man?”
“Don’t you hurt her,” spat Ezra.
“We’ve been waiting to catch you two again,” said Ricky. “Walt and I got reamed by our captain for what you did to us. Docked us a night’s worth of pay.”
“We been hoping you two would slip up again,” added the one named Walt. “Come crawling out after curfew.”
Beatrice felt a small tremble by her feet. A sensation of something moving beneath it.
“See sweetheart,” said Walt to Cee, who was silent, but sending pleading faces to both Beatrice and Ezra in turn as Walt’s arm tightened around her throat. “We intercepted these two rebels breaking curfew a few nights ago. Oh did they not tell you?”
“Breaking curfew a second time, that’s not good. Not good at all,” chided Ricky. The pound of his baton into the flesh of palm was like the ticking of a time bomb.
Fwump-fwump-fwump.
“That’s a night in the clink,” he threatened.
Fwump-fwump-fwump, went the baton into his palm.
Something glittered out of the corner of Beatrice’s eye, down beside the toe of her boot.
Gold threads were growing on the surface of the asphalt, moving with such rapidity they were soon overtaking each other. It was near silent, a mere abstract noise of trickling water.
The vines slid, barely noticeable in the poorly lit street, where the only illumination were the streetlights the next block over. The mycelial threads were already passing Ezra, gaining ground and began to fan out, widening with ancillary branches in a half-moon circle.
A rumbling started up, stronger than before, and it cut off the guard’s deriding speech.
“Kevva-damned quakes,” said Ricky, glancing worriedly around as the shaking escalated.
A bulb exploded in the streetlight closest to them, sending all five of them ducking at the spray of glass that littered the ground.
Walt’s arm must have loosened around Cee. It was enough for her to jab the point of her elbow into his ribcage. Hard. Walt doubled over in pain, and Cee took his moment of weakness to escape.
“Don’t let them get away,” one of them cursed, as he tried, but failed, to grab Cee, who was able to run the last few paces to Ezra’s side.
“Look!” Cee pointed.
The mycelium had started to crawl its way up Ricky’s legs. It was spreading on him, winding and winding around him, its weblike thread moved quickly. The same was happening to Walt, he was caught in a mesh of fungus that had formed a trap around his ankles, and it was augmenting up his legs to his waist.
“What are you doing, Beatrice?” Ezra said to her out of the corner of his mouth as they all slowly backed away from the scene, one foot at a time.
“This isn’t me,” she retorted.
Awestruck, they watched the fungus slowly devour the guards—because that’s what it was doing—devouring. It covered them in its veiny roots. It grew from their legs, and up their torsos, making them fall over, writhing, their uniforms becoming obscured, their weapons now useless, clattered upon the ground. Bulbous brown and gold-spotted heads sprouted over their rib cages, tubes of silver with gills the exact hue of a golden sunset on Hephaestus upon their necks.
It didn’t stop—growing over their mouths in a thick canopy, and soon the screams of the guards were silenced. Their writhing stopped too, and what had been two people had transformed into monstrous, misshapen lumps wrapped in cocoons made of rotting fungus.
The air was spoiled with the heavy smell of rotting flesh, and the pungent sourness of earth.
Ezra misstepped and stumbled, off-kilter without the counterbalance of his right arm. He fell to one knee.
The ground was moving. The fungus upon her surface advanced to where they were gathered. It formed a circle around them—they waited with strained breath for it to grip them, wrap its unnatural tentacles around their ankles and consume their bodies as it had done to Ricky and Walt.
“Let’s go,” shrieked Cee, hooking her arms under Ezra’s to pull him away.
“Wait,” hissed Beatrice.
The fungus and its creepy tendrils were paused at Beatrice’s shoes, and the base of Ezra’s knee. Slowly, a bulbous round head appeared, peeking outwards in their direction, and a single mushroom sprouted. A fruiting bud, bearing the shape and contour of a human eye.
Its golden sheen twinkled at them. Almost like it was winking.
The Mother was always protective—Beatrice knew she wouldn’t hurt them. Not without provocation.
So, answering the Mother’s beckon, Beatrice bent down and plucked the bud with its stem. It hummed, singing a mysterious tune in her hand, and its inner glow bore a faint thrum of life in her hand. She knew what was contained in this gift from the Mother.
Once the sample was plucked, the rest of the threads continued to circle around them. As they watched, the slithering branches left them untouched. Unharmed.
The shaking subsided, and the ground returned once more to stillness. The hazardous roiling movement paused as the organism within the substrate dove deeper underground, returning once more to the shadows.
None were brave enough to speak in the aftermath of the horror they had witnessed.
Ezra’s hand found Beatrice’s hip, and he fumbled for the waistline of her jeans and formed a fist around it. Using her body as a counterweight, and while Beatrice dug her heels into the ground, he pulled himself upwards to standing, although an unsteady one, gazing mystified at the nightmare a few yards away.
“I think we can all firmly agree that Mother is awake,” he said.
“She recognized you,” said Cee, equally dazed, gazing at the now inanimate mycelium on the street. “That’s why she didn’t hurt us.”
“Are you all right, birdie?”
“Yeah, fine,” she brushed off Ezra’s paternal instincts. “What did she give you, Beatrice?”
They all ogled the mushroom in Beatrice’s hand, the golden bulbous bud, the small tendrils of its roots.
“I think she wants us to Drift with her,” said Beatrice. “One final time.”
Meanwhile, Ezra’s fist was still tightly attached to Beatrice’s waistband. Her physical tether to reality. The warmth of his knuckles leeched onto her waist, and he tugged on it to jolt her out of thoughts. “You are quite sure that this wasn’t more of your—”
“It wasn’t me.” She pocketed the sample in her fleece, zipping it shut for safekeeping.
“More of her what?” Cee asked, far too astute for her age.
The adults prevaricated for too long, giving each other side-long glances and there was some awkward shuffling on Beatrice’s part.
“More of what?” Cee snapped, impatient with them.
“Drifter magic, it’s real,” said Ezra.
“What!”
“Can we get out of here?” Beatrice was eying the streets, a certain chill on her neck keeping her vigilant, but Cee beseeched her.
“You’re a telepath?”
“I can’t move objects.”
“She cannot move objects,” Ezra parroted. “But she can be persuasive. She can walk into dreams.”
“I can walk into dreams,” echoed Beatrice flatly.
“Okay,” said Cee, “what does that even mean?”
“It means it was Beatrice who woke me out of limbo,” Ezra answered for Beatrice, who was recalcitrant to the examination into this power, of which she had spontaneous ability to control.
Beatrice had too many questions herself, but the only source for them would be the unfathomable mind of The Mother. The mushroom bud in her pocket was weighing her down. She marched forth until Ezra’s hand slipped from their hold on the side of her jeans. They started hoofing it up the street, going the rest of the way to Georgie’s.
All the while, there were more questions from Cee, all of which Beatrice answered without too many unnecessary details. (Yes, she was still finessing the process, and she couldn’t prevent the nosebleeds, and no, she didn’t remember the contents of Ezra’s dream.) That was one was answered with an extra glare in Ezra’s direction, who was roguishly grinning at her. Charming in his usually mischievous way.
The sky was already lightening with the oncoming morning. Beatrice could see it begin reflecting off the glass walls of the geodesic dome as Cee knocked at the red rusted door to Georgie’s lodgings.
Dawn of yet another morning on Hephaestus.
Beatrice and Ezra were fugitives.
They took their time refreshing their supplies and wolfing down a meager breakfast.
Georgie’s abode was decorated the same as the one Ezra shared with Cee. The off-putting gray, unremarkable furniture of Baylor’s homogenized modular homes, the sleek counters of the chrome kitchen, and the bedroom and its ensuite were placed in the rear of the modular home.
The only difference was that Georgie’s living arrangements were covered in tech equipment. There were about three servers in the space, lots of wiring, what looked like charging ports, independent consoles and screens, about four of them, each running some kind of complicated system diagnostics.
One, notably, was paused on a game Beatrice recognized. Temple Doom was flashing across the screen. Baylor Corporation’s whiz kid was a gamer in their spare time.
As they waited out the return of daylight hours, and the end of curfew, other details from that day in the mines were quickly accounted for.
Ezra and Beatrice learned that once Cee and Georgie began digging, a few earthquakes disrupted some of their work. No major damage to them, but many tunnels were cut off. Cee figured Ezra got stuck, which is why he never showed up. They cleared out the pearls, enough for each of them to earn hundreds of thousands of credits, but when they started back up to the surface, the place was crawling with emergency crews.
“Bet it was Toby,” suggested Ezra while chewing on a Bits Bar. “That damn security guard probably cut himself loose and called for backup.”
“It’s a relief he did,” Beatrice said. There was no coffee to go along with the breakfast, and it was making her grouchy. “They would have found us days later, instead of hours.”
Cee continued to entertain them with the details of her side of the heist.
She and Georgie stole the truck, managed to escape, and drove it to the shuttle bay. They stashed the pearls and their environmental suits in a secure locker at the terminal and used the dispersed crowds from the funeral to blend in and return to campus, and stayed in for the rest of the night. By the next morning the military showed up, and negotiations were happening between miners and Baylor company representatives.
There were rumors spreading aplenty about what had happened down in the mines. Compulsion event. A Drift gone wrong. A deadly man with a metal arm. Drifter mind control magic.
A debate ensued on how to proceed next.
Ezra was eager to leave Hephaestus.
“Post-haste,” he enunciated. “We have our pearls. We have each other. I say, we exit.”
“They’ll be watching the terminals. They expect us to leave,” countered Beatrice, perched on the kitchen counter, kicking the heel of her boot into the lower cabinetry as she mulled over different scenarios.
“What if we overload them?” That was Georgie, from the computer terminal at the table.
Three pairs of eyes pinned on her.
“I’ve been trying to hack into the Baylor’s servers that control the mainframe, I’m almost through. We could override their systems, shut down different parts of the grid that control their security feeds,” she suggested. “Cause more trouble for them?”
“Or turn the whole thing off,” Cee said, growing animated. “What if we went bigger? And still saved everyone—all the workers. The support staff. We can’t abandon them.”
“If we shut down the entire grid, that would…” Georgie’s eyes went wide. She started typing furiously at the console.
“Someone explain what just happened,” piped up Beatrice.
“The grid controls the climate environment of the whole biome. If we cut off the oxygen flow, it’d be a dome wide evacuation event,” Cee said helpfully, leaning over Georgie’s shoulder, watching them work.
It would overload security. A campus wide evacuation meant they could slip through undetected. There’d be too much chaos in the terminals, nobody would notice that the fugitives were among those evacuating, if they hid well enough.
“How long?” asked Beatrice.
“Gimme a second,” Georgie said. Their fingers flew across the keyboard.
“It would take hours to evacuate everyone. The biome won’t deplete right away, it would merely stop scrubbing carbon dioxide and pumping in new oxygen. We’d have a few hours of air before it becomes too dangerous to breathe,” said Ezra.
“Good.” Beatrice hopped off the counter. “That’s plenty of time to steal Drifting supplies.”
Ezra reached forth and touched her elbow, concerned. “You really mean to do this?”
“She gave me a sample. I need to speak to her.”
“And what if she doesn’t give you the answers you seek?” Ezra frowned, shook his head. The white streak on his hair traced side to side. “Beatrice, it is too risky. Once Georgie shuts down the grid, there will be mass panic.”
“We don’t have time for disagreements, Ezra,” she said, noting that Cee was trying to look like she wasn’t eavesdropping on the conversation, but failing. She caught the kid’s every curious eye watching them, before Cee hastily glanced away. “Take the kids and the pearls and go on the first transport out. I’ll follow soon enough. I need that tech.”
“Your comments are respectfully noted, and I, definitively, disagree.”
When he could see he could not dissuade her, he tried another approach. “Beatrice, it is not in my habit to beg. It is simply against my nature.” Five fingers curled around her wrist, almost threateningly, if it weren't for the delicate sweeping of his thumb, dancing back and forth on her inner part of her wrist, to her palm.
Beatrice was reminded that it was the same comforting gesture he did in the tunnels when she had her panic attack. One she could find herself getting used to.
“I won’t miss a transport. You said so yourself, we have a few hours of leniency before it becomes inhabitable,” she said gently.
“There is one more thing.” He bit down on his bottom lip, searched her countenance, though he was far from asking for her permission. “I took the liberty of entrusting Georgie with Baylor’s corporate secrets. They have agreed to leak the contents of it all once we reach a safe distance from Hephaestus. All but ensuring a clean escape. Should any of us be captured, they have a failsafe mechanism that will automatically send it to every Intergalactic broadcast.”
She wished to say more to him. The right words failed her.
It was Ezra, that connoisseur of words, who did it for her. He backed them into a private corner of the room, away from the prying eyes of the teenagers.
“Do not mistake this for a goodbye kiss,” he said.
It sure felt like one. They way he held her around her waist, the soft press of his lips against hers. With his broad shoulders caging her against the shadowy corner, it was almost blocking out all the other responsibilities. The entire rest of the galaxy. She ached all over.
When she took leave of Georgie’s abode, taking pains to not be recognized or bothered by the SWAT patrols, as she retraced her steps down those familiar streets to the Medical Wing with the Mother’s sample firmly in her jacket pocket, her lips were tingling; his kiss lingered as an afterthought.
Or a pleasant dream. The kind one has no desire to ever wake.
I've literally been tagged a bazillion times and I had nothing to show for it. So thank you for your patience if you did tag me @ezrasbirdie @starlightmornings @wildemaven @thelightsandtheroses
It was a perfect replica of the room Beatrice had woken in. The machines, the closed curtains blocking out the dark night and eventually, the arrival of dawn. Even the quiet hush of the computer reading the computer feedout of his brain waves provided a peaceful soundtrack.
The only difference was that Ezra, in the same hospital green gown, lay in peace upon the bed. He was curled in on himself, sleeping soundly. His right arm was exposed, the stump an aberration against the rest of his body. His dark-haired head was upon the pillow, his face turned away from the door that Beatrice crept through, tip-toeing into the room.
Shelby had gone on to distract the guard, but time was precious.
“Ezra,” she whispered. No movement.
Only the lights from the hallway spilled into the room. She crept toward him.
too lazy to tag, so I'm tagging any and all of you who happen to see this cross your dash! Share your WIPS!
summary: The heist is on! Ezra and Beatrice head into the underground mines to perform their final Drift to locate a rare cluster of pearls, but they face dangerous consequences as something else takes control.
chapter warnings: here we go people, we got explicit sexual content and dub/con elements from sex pollen galore in this chapter (p in v sex, rough sex, sex pollen, f receiving oral sex, object insertion, fingering, spitting, dirty talk, injuries from rough sex, lots of fluids/cum, smallest hint of subby Ezra), references to needles, strong language, canon typical violence, earthquakes, references to the death of a background character, nudity, panic attacks. Let me know if I missed any.
word count: 11.9kit's a doozy. Beta'd by the amazing @ezrasbirdie 👑
MASTERLIST // AO3
//Previous.//
The prevailing theory of a compulsion event was that an improper Drift rewired the brain, thus triggering a ‘reset.’
Little was understood about it, only that the victims displayed animalistic behaviors, veering on the feral. Victims spoke of a loss of agency, of a voice that ‘compelled’ them into ferocious violence—performed excessive feats of sexual intercourse, masturbation, even violence. Studies were considered too unethical to carry out—one couldn’t force a test subject to undergo a compulsion event in order to further study it, thus research was only limited to the few episodes recorded in history.
Neural imagery showed increased activity in the limbic centers of the brain—the amygdala, the fear and the pleasure center. Dopamine levels were elevated to unnerving degrees. Other auxiliary parts were lit up—heightened sensations, tactile and olfactory responses were at an all-time high. The repetition of the acts couldn’t be accounted for, other than the brain was merely reduced to a basic primordial state of being and wouldn’t satisfy itself until the ‘compulsion’ ran its course.
Many theories didn’t fit the evidence, and so a mystery remained, the truth eluded doctors and Drifters. Episodes became rarer, and the last compulsion even from a Drift hadn’t been recorded in generations. Research fell into myth, fact turned to fiction, and with the enigma of just what a compulsion event was became no more than a ghost story.
But as in all scientific revolutions, when the model was in crisis, a paradigm shift was imminent.
There’d been two more aftershocks in the night, disturbing the sleep of the small company. Nothing near catastrophic as the first, but the house was well shaken by the tremors, as were her occupants, who rushed out of their beds in the middle of the night to congregate in the living room.
Twice.
By morning, the next thing Beatrice knew she was opening her eyes to the soft sounds of Cee knocking upon the door telling her it was time to wake up.
She groaned because she had a headache already. It did not lessen with a cup of coffee, nor when she chugged eight ounces of water. Not even the artificial sugars of the Bits Bar settled the slight band of tension sitting in the corners of her forehead.
Outdoors, crowds were already forming, heading down the streets towards the center of the campus in Adonis Square. The workers had gathered for the funeral. They wore black bands on their right arms, their faces marred with grief.
For a while, Ezra, Cee, and Beatrice, all their baggage and equipment in hand, joined their somber ranks. Where the crowds went east, the trio made their way south, towards the shuttle bays and transporters to the mines.
That was where the wiry figure of Georgie met them, distinguishable by their red-orange curls and freckled face. “All right, Ezra?” They greeted him. “Good to see you out of limbo.”
“Georgie, you are looking particularly radiant this morning,” he replied.
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” they shot back.
“You owe me fifty by the way,” Cee told them, giving her friend a hug in greeting.
“Really?!” But Georgie’s jesting dropped when they received a glare back from Ezra and Beatrice. “Wow, tough crowd. Lighten up, will ya.”
They led the way, filling the trio in on the security details. “All the cops are in the square for the funeral,” said Georgie. “Not even a watchdog out here at the shuttle bay. We might expect some guard at the entrance to the mine itself, but so far they’ve been called to the Square.”
First, the team had to dress in their environment suits. There was a trailer that housed a dressing area, with suits, helmets, oxy-tanks, and other tools for the mining work.
Beatrice took cues from the others on how to dress; she’d never been outside the dome nor into the mines. Cee took pity on her, after she had dressed in her own dark blue environmental suit, she held a white helmet under her elbow, while giving Beatrice the details on the parts of her suit.
“Intake tube and an out-tube here and here,” said Cee, pointing out each nodule on the suit. “You’ll share oxygen with Ezra—we always travel by pairs in the mines. That’s twelve hours per tank, split in half. Six hours before a change over. Radio dial is this top one, you’ll have a headset in the helmet.”
It was a lightweight but durable material, outfitted with its own set of steel-toed boots that would protect her feet in the mines. There was a snug addition that slipped over the neck and shoulders and would connect the helmet, which also came with a headlamp. With waste processing and nutrition delivery, the environment suit, once sealed, was fully self-supporting.
In the airlock, Ezra connected the long tubing between their suits, which was hooked up to the oxy-tank he had upon his back. While Beatrice and Georgie wore suits of the Baylor Black, the insignia of the company, its twin rings on the right shoulder, and Cee was in blue, Ezra’s suit was an ochre-color, a patchworked older model worn by off-planet harvesters.
“These earthquakes do not bode well for us,” he said in a clipped, husked tone while he checked the filters on her suit. “Something is going on beneath her surface, just where we are headed. So no distractions today, aye Drifter. Nary a one.”
“What does that even mean?” she asked, perplexed. “‘Nary’? What century are we in?”
“Patience and fortitude are the words of the day.” He lowered his voice even further, enough that it crept a shimmering tingle along the base of her neck, and he bent his head in further draw in the private conversation of their own. “That little stunt you pulled last night—to repeat your wording—means nothing.”
He was focused on fastening the final of the clippings on her suit. His fingers were too big for the nimbleness the task required, and the small clasps kept missing their enclosures.
Dig the knife—
“Oh ‘stunt’?” She teased him back. Features schooled into a perfectly angelic expression.
—then twist it.
“Not thinking about me naked?”
With a frustrated growl, he fisted the neckline of her suit and drew her closer to him by inches. His nostril flared and he bit down on his bottom lip, curling it inward to stop the barrage of words no doubt already tumbling around the inside of his head.
“Foxy woman,” he said finally, after a few tense breaths passed between them. He smirked, though it clearly took all his willpower to make it convincing, and it bore more resemblance to a taut grimace. “Come Beatrice, we would part as friends, especially after all the intimacies in Drifting we shared.”
“Whatever you say, partner.” She made a small two-fingered salute.
Satisfied, he released her, and let her finish the last of her fastenings herself.
“Regular breaths, Beatrice, don’t be hyperventilating on me. It will only send you into a fainting spell,” he admonished when he lifted the helmet over her head and clipped it in. She could hear the whoosh of the oxygen entering.
She was in her own fishbowl now.
The first few steps outside the airlock were anticlimactic. Everything was filtered through her headset and helmet, and her own breathing dominated the soundscape.
The topography was flat where they were for a few miles, making it a straight shot to the mines, identifiable by the red-clay jagged escarpment upon the horizon.
To the north were the mountains that called Hephaestus home, their peaks full of snow, and even through the audio of her own rhythmic breathing there was a light wind blowing across the plain as they walked towards the shuttle, which was a few train cars upon a monorail.
Not a soul met them there.
Beatrice watched the geodesic dome of Baylor Corporation’s campus grow outside the window as their shuttle went speedily along the monorail. The towering walls swelled until soon enough the curved edge of it that served as its roof came into view. It was a strange sensation, being on the outside looking back at it. She remembered her first sight of it upon her landing on Hephaestus, how it had stolen her breath then too. To her eyes now, it appeared more fragile—not a masterpiece of human engineering, but an example of human hubris instead. It appeared a monstrous alien upon such a picturesque backdrop of the landscape.
A self-contained golf ball.
It was all of a fifteen-minute ride. Soon, they were approaching the opening of the mines.
Here, Hephaestus had been terraformed beyond recognition.
Her clay soils had been transformed into a massive cavern that was big enough to house a jet plane to pass through comfortably. There were lighting and support structures on her inner walls, and locomotive tracks that led in and out—no doubt for moving earth and stone. The floor was rife with the evidence of many footprints and the wheels of drilling lorries that had passed through.
There were a few buildings to the right of the opening for processing and storage areas that were shuttered up, and notably, a guardhouse.
“Head’s up, we got company,” said Cee. A Baylor Security guard was trotting out of the guardhouse to intercept them. He made an indication with his fingers on what channel to switch their communicators. Everyone tuned their radio dials, alert.
“Hold up there,” said the watchman, speaking through the headset in his own helmet. He had a baton and a stun gun attached to his environment suit made of Baylor Black and a security badge gleamed on his breast. “Where are you folks headed?”
“Checking the pumps—we had water in the tunnels last month. Making sure they’re still running,” said Ezra cordially. An ingratiating smile came all too easily to his sharp features.
“I’m under strict orders not to let anyone underground.”
“This is from up top, my man,” said Ezra, keeping his tone unobtrusive. “C-suite wants those tunnels free and clear of water.” The watchman held firm; Ezra took a few graceful steps in his direction. “Look, friend, I don’t make the rules. Right now, those tunnels are filling with water from this season’s acid rains. Probably chewing through the metal supports and eating the wiring and drilling parts.”
“I’m sorry, I cannot.”
“Sir.” Cee, gently from beside Beatrice. “It could spell a tunnel collapse. We need to—”
The guard held up his arms, staying her advancement. “Miss, do not come any closer. Stay back. No one is going into the tunnels.”
Beatrice tugged Cee by her belt, restraining her from approaching the guardsman any closer.
“I’m not about to write up a report on how those channels became inoperable when we all have to go back to work,” said Ezra. “Let us check the pumps and we’ll be out of your way.”
“S-sir, I cannot let anyone proceed. Go back to the Biome.”
Ezra’s right hand came down heavily upon the man’s shoulder, the guard visibly flinched. Beatrice stepped between the men and where Cee and Georgie stood, prepared to block him from harming the two teenagers.
“Is it just you today, Toby?” asked Ezra, reading the nametag on the guard’s suit. He was still grinning like a madman.
Not grinning. Baring his teeth.
“Get your hand off me.” Toby tried to shrug off Ezra, but the metal fingers, under the thick gloves, had latched tightly onto him. “Ow—you’re squeezing.”
Toby lurched, grasping for the stun gun on his belt, but Ezra was quicker, pulling out the tubing that ran between the guard’s oxygen tank and his helmet, effectively depriving him of oxygen.
“Ezra!” Beatrice didn’t even realize his name had fallen from her lips in a shrill hiss.
The guard started to choke, deprived of his life-support system as the oxygen in his helmet waned quickly. He fell to his knees, with Ezra’s towering figure above him.
“Just you Toby? I need to know if there are others,” said Ezra. “Nod your head to answer. Anyone else on site today?”
Toby, through all his choking gasps for breath, was able to nod, frantically, in assent.
“I don’t want to find another guard patrolling out here, so if you are lying to me, I shall be very upset. Do you understand that, Toby?” The sound of bone cracking under his bionic fingers could be heard. Toby screamed, soundlessly, and his frenzied nodding continued all the more. He was starting to turn red with his exertions and the dwindling air.
“Ezra, enough,” Cee, from behind Beatrice, whimpered.
“Look away, birdie,” reprimanded Ezra.
“That’s enough, he’s telling the truth,” butt-in Beatrice.
“Look away! I do not wish you to witness this.” The bionic fingers tore through Toby’s ligaments like it was paper-mache. Blood seeped from where his fingers were attached to the guard’s shoulder, staining the man’s suit.
“You’re killing him. Reconnect his oxygen,” pleaded Beatrice.
He wasn't listening. It was horrible, watching Toby writhe, and Ezra’s seething rage coming to the forefront, drunk on the power, the violence inherent in his bionic grip.
“Stop!” Cee shouted with a shrill cry, and with a strained growl, Ezra released the guardsman.
Beatrice rushed to plug the oxygen tubing back into the watchman’s suit. Toby gulped down the fresh air, falling helmet first into the dirt, clutching at his injured, bloodied shoulder and shivering.
“Let’s just tie him up and leave him in the guardhouse. There’s no one else here, Ezra,” Beatrice pleaded. “We don’t have to hurt anyone.”
Ezra, temporarily lost in his own world, whirled around, and upon seeing the visibly shaken teenagers standing a few meters away, and then the cowering pathetic crying guardsman who was calling for a medic, cooled.
“Fine,” he spluttered, breathing heavily. “We’ll tie him up.”
And thus, they locked Toby up in the guardhouse, still attached to his oxygen tube, and his bloody shoulder wrapped in gauze. Beatrice used zip ties around his ankles and wrists, and laced him to a chair, then returned to the others preparing for the hike into the mines.
At the opening of the main tunnel, the four gazed with both terror and respect at the wide hole leading down into the earth. They couldn’t see where it ended, only that it was a slow descent underground, and curved away before continuing into blackness.
It was a strange goodbye to the other team. Ezra bumped his helmet against Cee’s in an affectionate knock, reminding her to keep her guard up in case more security showed up. Cee balked at the prospect of putting her thrower skills to use and seemed more comfortable with having to tie them up in the guardhouse, along with Toby.
“If it should so happen that we are separated. Do not come looking for us—are we clear? I will find you, little bird,” said Ezra. “It goes to all hell you get to that transport, and you get out. Are we clear?”
“Clear,” Cee replied.
She gave but a small inclination of her helmet in Beatrice’s direction with a knowing glance, then she and Georgie waved off the Drift team, while they headed to where the line of abandoned lorries stood to secure one for their use. The hulking drilling machinery had lain dormant for many days.
It wasn’t far into the main tunnel to the elevator, there was still daylight and sky visible, when they boarded the open-air lift. The metal platform creaked with their weight. A few taps on the small dashboard and the rickety platform began to descend, lit only by the bulbs of the inner chamber. Beatrice witnessed the ground rise up to swallow the sky, and soon there was nothing to see but the four inner walls of the mine, overrun with cables.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Beatrice berated him. “You could have seriously hurt him!”
“I wasn’t going to kill him,” said Ezra, stonily.
“In front of Cee like that! And Georgie! What is wrong with you?”
“I told her to look away, did I not?”
They passed level after level of tunnels, buttressed by steel, granite, and—everywhere—the golden threads of visible mycelium upon the walls. The fungi thrived in the deep underground, anoxic soils of Hephaestus. Beatrice’s ears popped with the pressure changes; if she and Ezra were not breathing oxygen through a tank, she was sure the very air would carry with it a noxious smell—the musty stink of dirt, excess diesel fumes, the thick canvas of metal, and other toxic gasses.
“You know well the temptation of violence just as much as me, Beatrice. I do not have to explain my necessary actions to you. Would you rather he be left off and warn others of our presence here?” It echoed in her headset, and she winced at the ferocity of his voice. “We are this close. I am not having our plans altered. Cee knows me, and she’s seen me do worse, so do not mistake her age for lack of experience.”
“Being a soldier is about discipline of force, not whatever you do—whenever you feel like it.”
But he remained, resolutely, turned away from her, staring off at the lines of wires that traveled the length of the elevator shaft as they descended.
“How far down are we?” she asked, changing the subject and bristling at the cutting edge to his mood.
“1100 meters.”
A passing dizziness overtook her, and she squeezed her eyes shut against it, trying not to think about the vast amount of space between them and the surface—the mountains worth of solid rock, the unyielding pressure of gravity pressing down on her body, but a pinprick compared to the solidity of the weight and darkness around her. Anxiety bubbled in her gut, and she swallowed it down with a dose of her mantras.
“What are those?” Ezra’s question crackled in her ear, thick with static. At this point, they had already lost contact with the surface on their radios. “You repeat those phrases a lot.”
“Meditation ritual. Learned it while in recovery.”
“And they help?”
“Yes. The translation is ‘I am anchored like the roots of the trees.’”
Ezra hummed. A polite disagreement. “Not one for platitudes myself, but to each their own.”
It was a few moments more before the lift came to a halt. Beatrice peered into the tunnel ahead, lit only by the headlamps on her helmet. Ezra stepped off the platform lift first, and helped Beatrice descend the first few steps. It was so black, she was sure if the headlamps were off, she wouldn’t be able to see her own hand if she held it an inch before her eyes.
There were few steps in one direction and then—
The tunnel flooded with light with their motion. Yellow bulbs burst on, one after another, revealing the dank circular path of the tunnel. It went dead-ahead in a line so straight they must use computers. It was no more remarkable than the ones she had seen above—they all looked the same to her eyes.
“This is the Chasm,” said Ezra, leading the way. With the piping running between their suits, Beatrice couldn’t stray far behind, so kept pace with him.
“The Chasm is one of the oldest mining tunnels. Pearls were mined here from the beginning, it began to dry up about half a century ago, but we find a few will crop up on this level once in a blue moon. She was flooded before I started working here—unusually heavy acid rains last season. Pumps work overnight to keep the groundwater at bay.”
On and on he continued as they hiked, detailing the history and temperament of this particular tunnel.
There was very little altitude change that was hardly noticeable at first, but after a while, Beatrice felt the pressure on her joints shift. They were upon a steadily descending downward slope, the grade of which was barely perceptible, but after a while became apparent.
Up ahead, their headlamps picked up an obstruction on the path. Shimmery veins of varying thickness, from spindly and narrow, to ones as thick as a tree trunk, blocked their path.
“This is new,” said a perturbed Ezra. “Must be from the earthquakes.”
They couldn’t see through to the other side. The fungi web was too dense, her branches too thick, and their golden sheen were so enmeshed it was like the workings of a spider’s web. The mycelial threads were soft to the touch, and had a little give when Beatrice reached a gloved hand to touch one.
The Mother had broken out of the earth.
“We’ll have to go around,” said Ezra. “We can go down a level and meet the airlocked chamber through another way.”
Forced to turn around and head back to the elevator shaft, their moods were further soured. They hoped that other levels wouldn’t have as big obstructions and the paths would be navigated with more ease.
Back at the lift, they descended to another level, 1900 meters below the surface. This elevator shaft ended at this level, and where this tunnel appeared much the same way, it was hotter. The deeper they went underground, the warmer it got. Beatrice hopped off the platform lift first, and she was met with a loud splash.
“There’s water,” she exclaimed.
“Very astute, Drifter yes,” replied Ezra, splashing down to land beside her. He had to turn his whole upper body to peer at her through his helmet, then he headed first down the tunnel, with bulbs upon the ceiling that lit up by motion detectors.
The murky brown waters in the tunnel rippled and sloshed as he went.
“I didn’t sign up to go swimming,” said Beatrice. Fear tightened around her throat.
“We are well below the water table, a few streams here and there won’t harm you,” Ezra called back, going steadily ahead. The tether between them began to grow taut, and he tugged on it to coax her along. “It’s just a little kiddie pool.”
“No! Swimming!” Beatrice yelped. The water seeped coldly through her environmental suit.
Sweat cast a sheen upon her forehead, and she could feel it beading upon her temple. Her headache roared anew, and more sweat trickled down her neck, making her jerk at the sensation of the fat droplets leaving marks on her sensitive skin, already prickling with her growing anxiety. The inside of her helm began to fog up with her panting breaths.
The suit and the helmet balanced on her shoulders felt heavier than ever. They’d already wasted enough time with the backtracking and the rerouting to the deeper level. Perhaps Cee and Georige were meeting resistance above? Surely another security guard must have appeared already. They may have already been found out—police were minutes from being called to their location, the tunnels would soon swarm with their foes. That or, another earthquake would rip a seam right between Beatrice’s dragging her down into some depthless cavern deep in an underground sea…
She was being shaken.
“Drifter! Beatrice! Look at me, Beatrice. Right here.” It was Ezra. He was trying to bring her back. “You need to focus—what’s the damn wording? You are the anchor as the roots of the trees. You are the anchor—”
“I am anchored like the roots of the trees,” Beatrice said quickly under her breath. Repeating the mantra in its original language over and over to seal it in.
Ezra’s face swam into focus. No lines of derision, only the pure openness of calm. “Just a little claustrophobia, it happens to all newbies on their first descent. Look at my eyes, Beatrice.”
She did. Brown and safe.
“Very good, there you are,” said his voice. A softer husk that spoke directly in her ear. She watched his lips move as he spoke. “It’s just a little water, but this tunnel rises up and joins with the one above, and the chamber is but a brief jaunt. You’re doing great, Beatrice.”
“No…” she said weakly, “no swimming.”
“It is but a little groundwater runoff, we have to move, or the acid will eat at our equipment.” He held up her wrist, bringing it up to her eye level. Deftly, he removed one glove, and dug his fingers under the layers of on her wrist and touched her overheated skin, rubbing lightly upon the inside of her wrist, up to her palm and back.
“I know those memories,” he said. “I’ve seen them. I’ve felt them. You fear the water, Beatrice, I know.”
A sound between a scoff and a laugh burst forth from her surprised lips. Relief and horror.
“Your memories from before your injury are murky, like an abstract painting,” he said to her. “Some of them make no sense at all. Except for the water, you always fear the water. How about a few more steps until we hit dry land and then we’ll take a hydration break. Walk with me.”
It was slow going at first through the knee-deep water. Their boots got stuck in the muddy banks and they had to work harder to make it through the stream, with Ezra guiding the whole time. His fingers around her wrist, until as he had said, the water height tapered off and soon the stream was no more than a few puddles underfoot. Her suit was wet from the knees down, clinging to her wobbly legs.
“That’s a good girl,” said Ezra. So light, it was like a delicate stroke of a feather at her inner ear, and Beatrice choked, warming all over and had to bend at the hip to hide the rising blush on her cheeks. There was no pretending in the way she was catching her breath.
They took turns hooking in the liquid hydration packs to the back of their environmental suits. There was a small straw close to Beatrice’s chin and she just had to pull it forward with her lips and start sucking on it for the drink to come through. The first tang of the electrolyte-infused water was a balm to her achingly dry throat.
“First time in the tunnels, I had such bad dizziness, they had to send me back up to the top,” continued Ezra with a touch of laughter. “Spent my first day of mining in the medical bay talking to a headshrinker. How Cee never let me live that one down. I’ve been stabbed, I’ve been shot at; had my fair share of looking down the barrel of a thrower and outmatched in fisticuffs. But a little jaunt beneath the surface—that’s what ties me up into knots? It took a few tries, but the claustrophobia passed.”
“I remember,” Beatrice croaked, talking despite her dry throat.
She studied the man’s face. The wide nose. The pink lips, now pale. The bone white scar on his cheek, and even the flecks of silver in his beard seemed more pronounced. At times he both looked younger and older at the same time. She’d seen him, through his own memories, as a little boy, then a young man with a growing vocabulary and a taste for vengeance; she witnessed through his heart aches and his triumphs, and the wounds that with time became scars, and the dark soul-crushing hollowness at the center of his chest that appeared the first time he descended into the mines.
Bound by the Drift, they knew more about each other than possible.
“Look at the pair of us,” said Ezra, sucking merrily through his own straw inside the lining of the helmet. “A Drifter in the mines and a miner in the Drift! They’ll tell stories about us one day.”
“How much further?” she asked after a few more of the gratifying gulps of the savory drink.
“Another half a kilometer by my guess, it should bring us around to the other side of the obstruction we met and present a clear path to the inner chamber. We can take our helmets off in there, and no sooner.” He scrutinized her through their glass helms. “How are you doing?”
“Better. You?”
“Me?” He gave a loud belly laugh. “Girlie, I’m dandy!”
He could have been holding on by a thread, but she wouldn’t know the difference with his sunny tone.
A beat of silence while they both drank from the straws in their helmets.
“Thank you,” said Beatrice. The first light of real empathy in her tone. “For all—” She gestured vaguely behind them, where they could hear water dripping further away in the tunnels. “For all that.”
“No need to thank me. You just keep thinking about the roots of trees and being an anchor and mantras and all that. Let’s go, it passes the time to chat while we walk.”
A mycorrhizal pearl is created when the Mycena organism is under extreme duress.
A certain percentage of stressors must be prevalent for a pearl to be formed—hydration levels, salinity, enzyme activity, atomic structure, and other rudimentary pressures inherent in the environment. A certain sediment, say for example, the innocuous sodium chloride, which when found in soils up to a certain percentage puts such pressure on the growing strands of fungi that it secretes nodes made of a sticky gelatinous substance that will grow and grow. Years of this substance creating striated layers would condense in on itself, with such meticulous design it formed a near perfect sphere.
A pearl.
Clusters of pearls could be read as a kind of autobiography of the organism—drought conditions, high salinity, temperature variations—all accounted for by the shape and make of the pearls. An intricate story of an alien life—of a life of trauma—told over centuries.
As tree rings are read, so too are the pearls.
“History told through biology,” Ezra concluded as they walked. “Look at that, we’re already here. See how the time flies when I do all the talking?”
The airlocked refuge chamber was one of few designated rest spaces for the workers, housing a rest space, toilets, spare workman’s tools, non-perishable foods, liquid hydration packs, and best of all, a well-stocked array of oxy-tanks. A generator continually cycled oxygen, scrubbed carbon dioxide, and there was a machine for dehumidification and cooling as well. Pumps worked overtime to keep groundwater out of the sealed room.
They had to pass through two sets of heavy blast and fire-proof doors to enter.
In the transition room, Ezra and Beatrice removed their helmets. It was getting warm inside her fishbowl, and the cool air of the artificial atmosphere cheered Beatrice. She stripped out of the environmental suit; both were thoroughly sweating from their hike in the tunnels.
They locked themselves in the chamber. The heavy steel doors closed with a series of clicks.
Once in the main room, Beatrice, dressed down in her leggings and tank, twisted her long brown hair into a neater bun and took stock of all the items they brought for their Drift. A handheld computer from Georgie to track the coordinates of their Drift, a bioamplifier to convert their readings, and the electrodes.
The walls were a mix of poured concrete, to stave off tunnel collapse, and the rigid rock walls of the naturally occurring granite. Webbings of gold could be seen growing along the granite, where fungi had nested, and would provide the samples necessary for their Drift.
Ezra, in a black waffle thermal shirt and joggers, arranged the few chairs and cushions in the room, where many miners had taken their mandatory breaks, to set up a spot for them to sleep.
The only way to communicate with the other half of their team was the old-fashioned way. The Mycena scrambled the radio signals, so Baylor placed telecommunications wires throughout the entire mine. Once the Drift yielded a GPS coordinate for the pearls, an encrypted message would be sent along those wires, no radio signals or otherwise. Georgie and Cee should have, by now, started up those drilling lorries and started their descent underground along the circuitous access tunnels dug specifically for the big trucks, where it was slower going than the direct path of the elevator.
“Shirt,” stated Beatrice, holding up the portable defibrillators. Ezra, with a smirk, lifted it to reveal his chest, as she placed the strap around his torso.
“Not too tight,” he reminded her with a sigh as she secured the buckles at his ribcage and turned on the device.
Once she was done setting him up, Beatrice lifted the end of her tank top, revealing her abdomen. “It’s your lucky day, scoundrel,” she said. “You can do me.”
Ezra dropped his own shirt and took the second strap from her. “Small favors, Drifter.”
She let him wind his arms around her. They held eye contact while he fitted the device in the center of her chest, beneath the built-in bra of her shirt. He made a quick assessment that it was all in place before he began to buckle the straps—not too tight, nor too loose.
She said nothing even as she caught him briefly raking his eyes over the swells of her breasts under the tank top.
“It has occurred to me that Cee’s arrangement last night was not without warrant,” he said as his fingers, titanium and flesh, worked to cinch the strap. “There is an extra seat on board our transport. We can accommodate a way for you to leave this planet.”
“Changed your mind?” Beatrice asked with a skeptical cock of her head.
With the way his brown eyes beheld her, so soft and with a weighted sincerity to them there can be no mincing of his words. “I have been reminded that it was you who retrieved me from limbo—you didn’t give up on me.”
He tested that the strap wasn’t too tight by slipping two fingers underneath to measure its give. Her stomach muscles tensed at the sensation of his knuckles skimming the skin over her ribcage, mere inches from her breasts, before they were gone, and he was turning on the device in the center of her chest.
“It is with that sentiment that I am offering you this one chance to renegotiate,” he said, while they waited for it to light up. “You’ve supplied your assurances to our cause, and towards our personal safety, my own and Cee’s, and I, thus, am feeling generous.”
Beatrice could make him no promises, but also did not wish to offend the sensibility that inspired this gesture of goodwill.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, and dropped the hem of her own shirt now that the heart rate monitor was in place on her chest.
For a calling—or rather a current—ran through her. The very same velocity and voltage as that which spread through the substrate and in the mycelial underbelly of the planet. Her connection to the Mycena somniantes, the Mother—she must know its endgame. There were too many unanswered questions, ones that required her to remain on this planet.
For now.
“I appreciate the sentiment though,” she added.
No sooner were the words out of her mouth when a harrowing tremor shook the chamber. The ground and the walls of granite and concrete trembled with growing agitation and moved of its own accord. The chamber, and its occupants shook, and the lights flickered.
The terror of yet another earthquake, this one larger than the previous ones, shook the foundations of their civility and prudence, for Ezra and Beatrice clutched at each other as frightened children.
Dust and dirt drifted down from the ceilings, upheld by her concrete pillars but they groaned with a sickening roar.
It all halted. They gazed at their surroundings, both muttering thanks to Kevva under their breath. The reinforced structure held, and those blast-proof doors did too.
“They’re getting more frequent,” Ezra observed, staring upwards at the ceiling of the bunker above them.
“I hope Cee and Georgie are okay,” said Beatrice quietly.
“They are resourceful kids. Those trucks are outfitted with drills that will go through any obstruction.”
Beatrice’s arms were around Ezra’s torso, and warming, she quickly backtracked out of his embrace, though his hand lingered on her lower back.
“Cee is of the mind that these tremors are the Mother itself. Her theory is that it is waking up. Does make one wonder,” said Ezra, pensively.
They went back to business of setting up for the Drift.
“If we take this assumption of Cee’s to its logical conclusion, we must assume The Mother must want something from us,” proposed Ezra, untangling the electrode wiring while Beatrice set up the samples.
“Even so, perhaps she doesn’t realize the damage she’s causing,” debated Beatrice. “We mustn’t assume the Mother’s intentions are sinister in nature.”
“Mustn’t we?”
“It’s a biological organism—she deserves the right to not be exploited into extinction.” Indignation colored Beatrice’s words. “She has the right to live as she does, without interference in her need for food, territory, and to spawn future generations.”
“Ah yes, the fundamental rights to eat, move, and fuck,” Ezra said provocatively. “How could I forget?” he added in the heavy pause that followed, pregnant with meaning.
“She’s never known another of its kind. All she talks to are…us. Drifters. If you could call it ‘talking.’ We might as well be quaint pets given the size of our brains and the longevity of our life spans. She outlives us, outmatches us. She’s never had a true connection with a species of equivalent intelligence.”
“Are you pitying her?” Ezra rebuffed.
“I do pity her, yes,” asserted Beatrice. “She’s all alone.”
“If these earthquakes are her, then we’ve underestimated her.”
Theta waves were already appearing as output on the screens from the Mycena somniantes, and soon, the two of them would be locked into the Drift, traveling along those same waves.
Beatrice sat facing Ezra on the cushions he laid out on the bunker’s floor. She held up a liquid IV bag with two separate drip lines. It was the sleep drug, to be slowly released into their blood system during the length of the Drift.
“Come here, I have to hook you into this. I’ve measured out enough for a seventy-five-minute Drift,” she explained. “Should be long enough for us to find pearls.”
They were sitting cross-legged, facing each other, and Ezra was turning paler by the second.
“I’ve never stayed that long in the Drift with you,” he said, while she thumbed across his forearms, searching for the best vein. “What shall we unlock this time?”
She found a plump vein for entry, and carefully injected the needle under the skin; the drug would shortly take effect.
“No secrets in the Drift,” the perspicacious scoundrel said.
“No secrets,” she echoed.
It was her turn, and Ezra did so gently, taking care to repeat the setup as she had done for him. Then, two electrodes on the temples, and two at the base of the skull for each. They assisted the other, acting as the other’s mirror; every gesture was weighted with purpose and deliberation. All too aware that there would be no going back after this.
“Ready?” She asked.
The drug was already bearing down upon their systems, the slow magnetic pull of a drip, drip, drop into sleep, and they lay down, facing each other, upon the cushions on the bunker’s floor.
“Why did we look to the heavens thinking we’d find our gods there,” said Ezra, drowsily. “We should have been looking at our feet.”
There was nothing but the beat of the passing theta waves from the Mycena, and the whir of the filters and dehumidifiers for company. It barely even perturbed Beatrice that she was many meters under the surface of Hephaestus, she could have anywhere. Somewhere above them, were the throngs of the workers, mourning a man who made his living digging these very tunnels.
Ezra drifted off first. His breathing elongated—that was how she knew.
Gold winked at her from the walls of the chamber, mimicking the twinkling of stars in the sky overhead. Her body went heavy, and she was floating on an underground river, being carried off into a dream.
It starts with longing.
They all do.
An indescribable ache. Perhaps it’s been there all your life. You don’t remember a time in which it wasn’t there—this searching.
Present tense—because it is always there, never ceasing. A state of be-ing.
You never needed a language for it. Sometimes it would cry out, with a word, a song, or a poem; a story on a screen or a page that swept you away, that spoke to a moment. A truth you’ve never lived but was there all the same. Indelible, down to your very bones.
There was no conceiving of a life without it.
Stuff your mouth full of dirt to fill it in. Fill the hollowness inside you. Taste the rich hummus blend of magnesium, sulfur, salt and dust. The earth is in your mouth now. Underland. Underfoot. Under your nails too, until you have your fill and your heart is now buried too far down for anyone to reach….
Until someone comes along and starts to dig it out of you. A miner, crawling in the tunnels of your veins, the caverns of your ribcage, comes across the greatest treasure of them all, forged in the very pressures of your skin, lit by the temperatures of your flesh.
Not hollow after all.
It wasn’t the alarm that woke Beatrice. It wasn’t either that her headache was finally clear.
It was him. She longed for him.
She didn’t have to open her eyes to feel him, occupying space in her head, where the outline of his shape was a ghostly presence. It was warm, as one felt the beams of the sun without having to look up.
There was a dryness in the back of her throat. Seventy-five minutes and no breaks would leave one gasping for a drink. She must want for something to quench her thirst. But water would be superfluous to the ache that was exposing itself more and more to the surface of her consciousness.
Something has been dug up. She felt it was missing. A glass case empty somewhere in the vicinity of her chest where once something—a thing with dimension, with mass and volume, and solidity once occupied.
Present in its absence.
She was no longer in control.
Her hand (and here is the weirder part) was rubbing herself through her crotch. Half-awake and there was already heat blooming between her thighs. She removed her hand, felt the glide of her fingers upon her stomach, bare skin, the scrape of her leggings on her knuckles, the snap of the elastic band of her underpants.
“Ezra,” she called. (Why did her voice sound so broken?)
Her thighs clenched together at the sweetness of his name rolling off her tongue. Her fingers, wet.
“Ez.”
She had to blink multiple times for the room to come into focus. There. His head, his shoulders, turned away from her. The curvature of his back created a crescent folding in upon himself, knees tucked away from her. An off-color wet noise reached her ears, a roughened, wheezing pant.
She peeled the electrodes off her skin—two on the temples, two on the base of the skull. The plastic tube running out of her arm was empty, the drug all used up and she yanked it out of her. There was a distinct ringing of the alarm coming from the other side, but she was too busy observing Ezra’s back. The knobs of his spine were visible through the meagerness of his black shirt, the tense shuddering of his shoulders, and his left arm, moving mechanically. Rhythmically.
“Ez.”
A snarl came out. “Don’t.”
A ragged, aching lip-curling hurt.
The dryness in her throat overwhelmed her. It became difficult to close her lips over the sound of his name.
(Water?)
It passed, fleetingly, through her mind, and she groaned. Her hand was already inching back towards her crotch. That heat was growing there, and she passed her palm over herself, trying to appease it. She cupped her sex. The leggings were damp.
Ezra was groaning, a swiftness to his arm movement increased. The back of his head was already damp with sweat, and for the briefest of seconds, Beatrice recognized it. She’d been here before. She’d seen him like this. The grunting, groaning noise he was trying to stifle—
He was getting close. She knew because she felt it. The more he worked his arm, down his pants, his fist circled around his cock, jerking, jerking—
The source of that wet, skin-slapping noise—
The more it rose in her.
“I—I can f-feel you,” she gasped, rubbing, compulsively, over her leggings. The fabric clung to her inner thighs in a snug outline of the shape of her mound. All she had to do was press her fingers and the fabric slipped through her puffy folds and touched upon her clit, swollen and soaked with her arousal, creating extra friction.
Ezra must feel her pleasure too. He was no longer trying to hide his noises. He sprawled on his back, with his face stuffed into his right elbow. The edges were red with his exertion, the tips of his ears, the hinge of his jaw. He was cutting his teeth on the fabric of his shirt, marking it with a distinct blotch of wetness from his mouth.
They couldn’t help it. Couldn’t stop.
It spoke to them all the same, and their bodies moved—it wanted to take. It wanted.
It wanted.
It had rarely known another, touched another.
It came to a head-spinning crescendo. Beatrice felt the climax bloom through her, and more wetness spilling underneath her fingers. There was a choked groan from Ezra at the same moment. She saw him bite what was left of his own stump, just above where the mechanized arm connected. Enough that he must have drawn blood, and his left arm, buried down the front of his pants, stilled, leaving behind a dark spot on the crotch. His belly fluttered, pale, nearly hairless, save a small trail of dark hair that started beneath his belly button.
“I lied, Ezra.” It came tumbling out. She couldn’t fight it. “I lied.”
“Fuck, Beatrice. Don’t talk,” he sputtered, rolling away from her, and attempting to crawl away.
“I wanted you to look at me last night.” She clamped her hands over her own mouth. Something else was controlling her words. Tears leaked out of the sides of her eyes and though she fought against it, her own desires came tumbling out. “I wanted you!”
It rang out around them. Ezra’s crawling slowed; he was having trouble breathing. She could see that every intake of air was painful to him. He slapped his own cheeks, fighting off that same thing, that same compulsion, with low growls.
He reached the alarm—it was still blaring its awful bells—he closed his mechanized fingers over it, and it shattered to a thousand pieces. Silenced for all time.
The silence of the chamber was overwhelming. Just their manic breathing.
“I liked it,” Beatrice spilled. “You wanting me.”
“I would have given it to you.” His head finally snapped in her direction. Tears also ran from his eyes, red-lined and wild. “I almost did—No.” He shook his head, slapped again at his cheeks with a ragged cry. “Yes, I would have had my way with you in my bed.”
“Yes,” she screamed. It felt good not to fight it. “I’d given—whatever. Let you have me the way I saw you have me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it—the way you had me in your dream. Fucked me.”
Ezra groaned. He was hard again. Beatrice could see it through his pants. Her own pleasure coursed through her. So daringly alive, it shocked her.
“Touch me, please. I n-need.” She was reaching for him, on all fours, unthinkingly.
He was on top of her in an instant, and they fought, weeping as they kissed. Their tongues slipped in and out of their mouths, wide open. They went rolling, limbs snaking together, bodies crushing. Beatrice felt the metal fingers upon her clothing, the stretch of the fabric at her hips, and a loud ripping sound met her ears. It echoed in the airtight chamber around them, sweltering despite the workings of the air conditioner and the humidifier.
He had torn her leggings, ripped open her underpants. The fabric rustled as sails, rendered useless, in the breeze and flapped open around her legs. He settled over her, with bits of her clothing stuck in his fist.
“Guide it in,” he directed her. She tugged at his pants until they cleared his buttocks, and she could grasp his naked cock.
They let out twin cries of euphoria, their lips colliding and parting in frantic kisses. He was huge in her palm. Girthy, so her fingers could barely touch each other, and long, weeping with precum, and already slick with his previous orgasm.
His arms bookended her head, his broad shoulders nearly blocking out the view of the concrete pillars and the sandy granite ceilings, and the sight of the streams of gold mycelial threads that were growing, growing. Splotches that resembled cauliflower had sprouted upon the walls and were throbbing in tune to their heartbeats.
The first kiss of the underside of his cock through her folds left them panting into each other’s mouths. The devices on their chest clashed as Beatrice arched into him. Neither noticed, too enraptured with the feeling of skin-on-skin, of Ezra’s thick cock parting the slick lips of her pussy, until its head is notched at her entrance and, clamping his eyes shut, he snapped his hips into her. Filling her in one abrupt motion.
Beatrice clutched at him while he drove his cock in and out of her. She canted and lifted her body, meeting his erratic thrusts with her own tempestuous desire.
“Fuckfuckfuckfuck,” Ezra kept saying and Beatrice whined and whined, calling out for more.
He clamped his hand—the flesh one—over her mouth, blocking out her noises. “Sh, shush. Hear that,” he grunted, his breath coming out in abbreviated puffs. “Hear how you want me, darlin’. Hear how well you already take me.”
She could hear the slick noises of their fucking. Her eyes fluttered shut, drowning under the sensation, the sounds of her pussy swallowing his cock, the touch of his ruddy, sweaty, cum-stained palm over her mouth, and his body, hovering over her.
“Every time you sunk your fingers into this pretty pussy, I could feel it,” he rasped. “Like your own fingers were—around—my—cock.” He punctuated each one with a snap of his hips.
She licked the palm over her mouth, and Ezra moaned. She tasted the salt of his sweat and the sweetness of his cum. She wrestled her chin out from underneath, enough to whisper back, “I know. I know.”
He banged that fist upon the dirt by her head, punching the earth, as he sloppily married his lips to her mouth. The brush of his beard was both harshly scraping and wonderfully indulgent.
“I could feel you,” he said, barely taking his mouth off her.
“I could feel it too.” Her own inner thighs and her abdomen were starting to ache with the exertion of splitting herself open. “Like it was you.”
The bionic arm, planted by her head, was holding him up, but he was losing focus, losing energy. She heard its whirring inner mechanism as he was making a fist through the flattened earth by her head, the sandpapery soil, flattened by time and pressure, by footsteps and machines carving into it.
Ezra slumped into her, his hips losing rhythm, and his whole body fell over her, pressing deeper into her, and her into the dirt as he came, finishing with a long, low growl. It wasn’t painful having his whole weight on her, as his thrusts became smaller and shallower, but she felt something small and square digging into her chest.
“I can’t stop,” he bleated, his forehead resting on her own, sharing their sweat, still fucking her through it. “It compels me. It compels me.”
“Keep going,” she whispered, rolling her hips upwards along his. He was deep inside her, the blunt head of his hard cock pressed up inside her, every ridge and vein fitting snugly in her fluttering walls. She could barely squeeze, he was so big, and she came eagerly, triumphantly, with hearty cries and not a touch on her clit, just the wholeness of him.
When she felt her body start to relax, she carded her fingers through that dark mess of hair, sweeping the messy tendrils off his face. His lips fell over her’s once again, and he moved his tongue into her mouth. He tasted good.
A thin tendril of saliva connected their lips when they came up for air.
“Keep going,” she encouraged him.
Ezra lifted his neck just enough to drink in her expression. His dark eyes swam over her face.
“I’ll hurt you.” Even as he said it, he kept fucking her, slow and filthy, enough for her walls to contract and expand with each thrust of his cock.
“You can’t,” she said.
He pulled out of her, each gasping at the loss.
Hands grabbed at each other, ripping shirts, unbuckling straps. They made quick work of the rest of their clothes, and finally (Beatrice breathed a sigh of relief) those Kevva-awful straps and the defibrillators.
Beatrice rolled onto her knees, arching her back to present the glistening folds of her pussy. She hung her head between her folded arms, and her hair, loosened out of its bun, created a curtain around her face, sweeping to the ground. She waited with bated breath for Ezra to fill her again.
Metal touched down on her lower back and she flinched even as his fingers spread out, absorbing the warmth of her skin and holding her in place.
“Stay like this, girlie,” Ezra was saying under his breath. She felt the blunt head of his cock along her folds as he guided it to her aching center.
All the air rushed out of her lungs as he fit himself inside her, her walls stretching and straining against his girth. She bumped her forehead upon her forearms, wincing and remaining unmoving so that she could get used to his size. Ezra felt even bigger from this angle.
“You can take me,” he said. “You can take me.”
He drew it out and plunged back in with a deliberate hard snap of his hips that sent her whole body forward with a lurch and a deep-seated groan to fall, unbidden, from her parted lips.
The compulsion wouldn’t let them go slow. It was too desperate.
He fucked her across the floor. Drilling into her. Tracks of dirt made inroads on the skin of their knees, the edges of Beatrice’s elbows.
If it wasn’t this, they would be killing each other. In a way, a part of them had been killed off. They’d been reset. No longer humans, not even capable of higher thoughts, just an inexpressible need.
A primordial longing.
They were melding with their roots, the soil, the dirt—becoming one with it. Their hips rutted as they sank, decaying, flourishing. A living, breathing, fucking creature.
An undoing. Made of flesh and dirt, limb and root.
Beatrice focused up at the ceiling. (How had she gotten here? How long had it been?) The unremarkable sandy shades of gray and beige were all around her, earth and artifice, cement and granite.
Something strong was holding her legs open, her weakened, trembling legs. The muscles had long gone sore. Not something, someone.
His arms are around her, holding her upright in his lap, their thighs spread in overlapping V’s, banded together. Bonded together. There are scrapes on her creaky knees, and she can feel—hear—the hard drilling of his cock through her soaked center.
He was muttering her name by her ear, his breath making the tendrils of her hair move.
“Bea–B-Bea.” It quaked and cracked. “BeatriceBeatriceBeatrice.”
“Ez,” she replied, her hands white-knuckled on his thighs, along the outside of her’s. “I need you. Don’t you dare s-stop.”
There are scratches down the length of her torso, where Ezra’s fingernails scraped down her sides in their tantrum of passion. Bruises were already appearing on her kneecaps, her buttocks. On the back of her right thigh were five indents, where titanium alloy fingers had made a home. He was keeping her in place, and his other hand, the flesh-and-bone one, was cupped at her sex, the fingers widened to feel the puffy lips of her pussy swallowing his cock.
His palm began rubbing against her clit, creating a certain type of friction that had her crying out, shaking to chase it.
His voice was lost, overtaken by a throaty moan and teeth clamped over her shoulder. It hurt less than the friction of his cock through her already sore cunt.
She clenched around him as she came, gushing white hot liquid, as he painted her walls in the same moment. She was only wet because of him. Fucking his cum back into her even as it dripped out of her, and he emptied more inside her.
Beatrice collapsed. Too tired to move she spilled into the pillow of his lap, and the strong, sturdy foundation of his chest upon her sweaty back. He banded his right arm around her stomach, heaving heavily with her deep breaths, and his cock began to soften inside her.
“I am going to start cumming dry, darlin’,” he noted, melancholic, in her ear. Brushing the sweaty tangles of her hair off her neck, so he could place his lips there instead.
She started to laugh. Small breathy giggles that moved her abdomen.
They tilted, listing so far in one direction they became off balance. Their legs finally gave out, and both were out before they hit the ground.
Beatrice awoke to the feeling of a curious probing through her folds and the careful spreading of her lips. The metal fingers felt weird on her skin—gentle, like he was extra cautious around her soft parts.
“I have ravaged your cunt,” he said to her, whispering it against the skin of her navel. She hiccoughed a laugh, humming, at the sensation.
“Abused your sweet little hole,” he said, and his vocal cords were so shredded and raw, it was as if he’d been screaming.
“Don’t care. Use me, Ezra. I want—I want your fingers,” she gasped, dropping her chin to gaze at him, on all fours above her. With a feral grin from Ezra, one long middle finger breached her. “Not that. The other ones.” She jerked her head to his right side.
He paused. Knowing how painful it was to fight the inner voices driving their need—yet Ezra did it all the same, face twisting with pain and pleasure, stupor and surprise all at once. Then, he was nodding, acquiescing, pulling out. Ezra bent his head between her opened legs and spat.
She felt the drop of a fat piece of saliva fall upon her mound, slide along her clit and down her slit. He filled her with the metal middle finger of his right hand.
Beatrice grimaced around the sensation. Not quite cold to be completely alien, not quite warm to be human. Somewhere in that gray middle. And not entirely unpleasant. He plunged it inside her, then joined it with his index, crooking them slightly to seek that pleasure spot inside her.
The brush of the artificial fingertips upon her sensitive spot deep inside her, had her arching and widening her already aching legs. Her abdomen fluttered, her breasts heaved; Ezra watched, licking his own lips with his unsatiated thirst.
It was filthy. Where their combined juices leaked out of her, his metal fingers plunged them back into her.
The same ones that had spelled danger, that had bent metal, shredded bone and plastic alike, tore through ligaments with east—the same ones curved inside her with all finesse.
“Oh Kevva,” Beatrice groaned, his fingers working inside her.
“Just Ezra will do,” he said, cheekily, and pressed an open-mouth kiss on her hip. He spat again onto her pussy, and she clenched around his fingers as they became wetter and wetter.
“Shut up, you b-bastard,” she wheezed, and brought her hands up to cup her own breasts. “You’ve been wanting to fuck me since you laid eyes on me.”
She played with her breasts, pinched, and rolled her nipples between her fingers, bunched them in her hands and taunted Ezra by reaching her tongue far enough out she could lick one of her own pert nipples.
“Filthy woman,” he hummed. “I’ve been dreaming of it.”
He crooked his fingers again, making a come-hither gesture, knowing exactly how much pressure to apply. In some twisted sense of revenge, he closed his mouth over the fleshy part of her belly, just beneath her belly button, and bit down.
She didn’t scream, but she nearly did, jerking and shaking. “Say it,” she gasped. “Say it.”
“Yes,” he said, almost immediately. “Yes, I did want to fuck you. Wanted to put your thighs over my shoulders and take you.”
It didn’t hurt to speak so truthfully. Afterall, there could be no lies between them.
“Your mouth, Ezra,” she sobbed, kneading her own breasts, and begging him. “I need your mouth.”
He did so, arranging his broad shoulders between her thighs, his left hand gently caressing the now reddened part of her navel he had bitten. Ezra kissed her mound, he kissed her clit, massaged his tongue over it like a slow-moving pendulum that had her wailing. His nose, that beautiful big nose, pressed into her mound, inhaling her pubis.
“Kevva, I think I’ve perished,” he drawled, before diving back in, sucking avidly at her clit. He said more, too fast for Beatrice to parse out any single word or sentence. Praises she heard, melodies and hums of satisfaction, he was practically crooning into her pussy, talking even as his tongue licked her thoroughly.
She felt for the crown of his head, swept her fingers over his scalp, and tugged sharply at the fine ends of his hair. “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” she chided roughly.
He liked it. Her telling him what to do. Liked, even more, the little flash of pain her nails marked on him. If his weeping cock and the long throaty groan he released was anything to go by.
“So close,” she wailed, as he licked circles around her clit, his jaw working, working, and his fingers plunged deeply into her. “So fuck-ing close. Oh! Right there, Ezra, right there.” She babbled, on and on, chasing the feeling of fullness around those fingers, the glide of his tongue, and the small scratch of his facial hair on her sensitive parts.
She came with a loud whine. All her muscles seizing and flexing as if she could lift three times her weight.
The roiling waves of pleasure that swept through her, swept through Ezra too, and he came, his cock untouched. His cum splashed onto the ground.
When it subsided, and she could blink back the hazy purple cloud that settled at the top of her vision, it was Ezra hovering over her form. Fingers touched at her cheeks, pressing enough to force her jaw to remain open. His shadowy form, clouded with lust, shared her juices—from his mouth to hers—into the open well of her mouth, open as if she were the den of secrets and he was seeking escapism.
She swallowed.
Beatrice could feel her faculties returning, her sense of control; whatever it was controlling them, took a back seat, but there was a second sensation.
The tether to Ezra—his mind overlaid over her own, their thoughts enmeshed, as it was in the Drift.
An achy twinge in her lower back made itself known when she dropped her legs down to the ground and stretched them out one by one. Ezra kissed along her stomach—small butterfly kisses of his lips—while he caressed her sore thighs, bringing his hands underneath her and squeezing at her buttocks.
In reply, she patted along the back of his head, as if she were praising a horse for his winning sprint. His hair was matted with sweat, and his shoulders and body, though dewy, weren’t as feverish as before. She glanced down between their bodies, to where his spent cock was subtly brushing the tops of her legs, leaving shiny marks of wetness as he crawled up her body. A press of his mouth on her belly, another on her ribcage, along the scrapes he had made, then a quick gyration of his cock upon her outer thigh, he was half-hard; a kiss between her breasts, then he sunk his teeth into her right one, close to her nipple, a lesser bite than the one he left on her belly, but he was spoiling her all the same; his cock grazed close to her mound, seeking the heat already emanating between her thighs; another brush of his scratchy chin at the underside of her breasts before he gave her an affectionate nip.
She wound her trigger finger through the abnormal streak above his right brow, curling it twice around the digit before it loosened, and she did it again, watching this simple movement of this shock of gray hair twining between her fingers. Her other palm brushed along the strong plane of his arm, feeling his tricep flex.
He lifted his face off her torso to meet her eyes. “The doors are locked. No one can get through,” he told her.
Her own wetness had soaked his chin, and she swiped her thumb across his lower lip to catch some of her slick and put it in her own mouth, sucking lightly.
“We’re quite alone in here,” he added, skimming the tip of his nose along the line of her jaw. Beatrice’s nostrils filled with the scent of her their sex mingling around their bodies, coating the stale artificial air with a dash of sweetness and musk.
“That’s good,” she said, sweeping back his soft, soft hair. “Wouldn’t want the kids to find us like this.”
Ezra wrinkled his nose at her, displeased with the notion. He placed a quick kiss on the hollow of her throat. “You saw it though, before this all started.”
She already knew what he meant. “I did.”
They discovered pearls. They had emerged through the cloud of their calculations as they traveled in it, just before the whole thing ended and they woke out of their Drift, fighting the compulsion. It was an entire cache of them—valued at a million credits, if Beatrice had to wager a guess—sitting in a tunnel a few hundred meters or so above their location.
Beatrice skimmed her knuckles along his flanks, making Ezra hum a laugh into his next chaste kiss at her throat.
“They should have seen it too by now,” he said, pressing his cock into Beatrice’s lower belly. “Maybe they’re already there.”
“Mhm.” She knew he was going to say that.
The GPS location would have been automatically sent through the telecommunications wires. Cee and Georgie would be able to pick up its signal on the other end. Perhaps they were already digging through the substrate to retrieve the treasure.
But Beatrice didn’t really care anymore, and notably, neither did Ezra.
Her knuckles went adoringly over his flanks again, and he flinched, stifling a chuckle.
“I can feel you,” he said, nuzzling around her neck, his breath puffed hotly along her collar. “How is that happening?”
“Can feel you too,” she murmured. Each small press of his cock grinding against her inner thigh found a mirroring sensation in her own cunt, their bodies aligned as deeply as their minds.
“I mean,” he tapped a finger against his temple. In here.
I know. She didn’t say it aloud, but he heard her anyway, and nuzzled deeper into her, inhaling her richly.
“It’s coming back,” he huffed, weakly, cupping one of her breasts, and thumbing over her nipple that she shivered. “You’re rubbing upon me like a cat in heat, darlin’ Drifter.”
They both were. His cock was slip-sliding along her navel, leaving shiny trails along the skin. She was faintly rocking her hips upwards to meet nothing but air, and clench, miserably, around nothing.
“C’mere,” she breathed.
She pulled him closer, urging him to plant his whole weight upon her. Her fingers swam through sweat and dirt along his back. There were streaks of it on her too, soil and sweat, clumps of it in her hair, bloody scrapes on her body, and cheeks stained with dried tears. She kissed him like she could pour all of her unspoken apologies, all of that untouched desire she kept at bay, just out of reach, she plied it through her lips upon his, sharing it with the tangle of their tongues.
He hitched one of her legs upwards, and she hissed at the protest of pain until Ezra dropped it back down.
“I need to—” he barked, already lost in the haze, rutting pathetically against her belly. “I need to. Let me be inside—let me be—Beatrice, darlin’, it compels me. It compels.”
“Please,” she gasped, pulled under by the same spell. “Please.”
She instructed him to lie down beside her, pulling the cushions—thrown out of the way in their fit of passion—to support their heads. Not taking their hands off each other, as they were too enthralled with the sensation of their skin-on-skin, he rolled off her and she turned to one shoulder, lifting her leg sideways to give him access from behind. He sat up on an elbow, to guide himself inside her again, slipping his cock through her cheeks. They’d made a mess down there; it was all leaking out of her. He found the correct angle for his cock and slid inside her, she tensed, hissing. Puffy and sensitive, nonetheless, she could take him, for once he was all the way snug inside her, it didn’t hurt, it just felt right and good and wonderful.
Ezra lay back down beside her, wrapping his arm around her torso and taking one of her plump breasts in hand. Beatrice could feel the curve of his nose slotted against the back of her shoulder, taking in reedy, wispy inhales.
“There, there,” she sighed out, soothing her hand down his hip, their bodies slotted neatly together. “Doesn’t that feel good?”
His lips were moving fast, he was talking again—slurred lines of poetry, praises, and prayers—interrupted with tiny grunts and groans. All she had to do was wiggle her hips a little from this position to feel the fat head of his cock grinding deeply in her core, and she closed her eyes, relaxed, the compulsion placated.
Neither saw the cauliflower blooms on the granite walls that opened. They had grown larger as the two bodies on the ground had rolled and roiled, fucked and moved, trembled and pined, beneath it. With a soft sound of a sigh, it released into the air a shower of spores that fell over the squirming sweat-soaked human bodies, coating them in a fine layer that caught the light. Gold and silver. Honey and milk.
Soon, Ezra’s jumbled monologues came to a stilting halt, and the gyration of their hips, and both their breathing, slowed.
