Chapter 18: Alcatraz

"But your grace, Children of the Immortal are not permitted in the Temple."

"I will gladly supply you with Nobillo guards for this purpose. Security is far too lax for something of this magnitude. Further, I require that one of your scientists regularly checks on him twice a bil at least to ensure his health and the soundness of the equipment and also,"

Lucian glared at him in mute, irate anticipation.

Rivuk ran his white-gloved finger over the surface of the desk and brought it up so he could see the black on the tip. He brushed it off with his other fingers. "Clean this room. It's filthy."

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"Ahh!" Lindsay's back arched with the strike of the whip. She cried out as it struck again and again. There couldn't be any skin left on her back!

"Where are the Bonat camps?" the guard demanded.

"I'll never tell you!" she cried. She didn't know how her tongue found the words. Her mouth tasted like blood; she was so thirsty.

Another crack of the whip. "Where are they?"

She told him exactly what he could do to himself in language he couldn't understand. His palm struck her chin, whipping her head back with a sharp crack.

Lindsay woke up with a jolt, lying on her stomach on the stiff white mattress of a jail bed. She tried to get up and gasped, falling back down to the bed.

"Try not to move." Large, gentle hands laid a cool, wet strip of something across her back.

"Carak..." she mumbled, trying to turn her head to see him.

"Yes, your highness. Stay still now." The cool, wet strips were placed on her neck. "You have a lot of wounds."

"I'm sorry..." She saw Rivuk's cold eyes staring in her memory. Tears pooled on the mat beneath her nose. She deserved this. No physical pain could hurt as much as that look of betrayal.

Carak said nothing, his hands spread over the bandages as he laid them down on her back, on her butt, on her thighs and calves, soothing her as they silenced the burning pain of her skin. She focused on his touch. Eventually, the tears stopped coming and she lay her cheek in the wet puddle.

"Why are you doing this for me?" she asked.

"You are my princess," he said simply, as he put away the bandages. She could see him now. His tall, grey form bending over a small stool of a chair he had made a temporary table. "And it would distress my lord to see you in such a state."

"Is he coming?" She tried to push herself up in her eagerness but fell back to the bed with a cry of pain.

"You'll have to stay still for at least an hour. The dermal regenerating solution will begin to burn soon."

"Is Rivuk coming?"

Carak let out a sigh. "Yes. He intends to."

"He intends to or he is?"

Carak fixed her with a hard look. It was amazing how she understood the expressions in those large, milky-white orbs now. "He intends to."

Lindsay let her gaze drop from his. "Oh. I deserve that."

Carak didn't give her the satisfaction of disagreeing.

The entire back of her body from her neck to her ankles felt warm. Then hot. Sweat began to roll from her hairline. "I'm not your princess anymore. You don't have to come help me. I'm the captured Queen of the Bonat now. AH!" Her skin was on fire! Tears began rolling down her cheeks again.

Carak knelt down, folding his massive body so his eyes were level with hers. "You will always be my princess, and I will always come to your aid. I may not be able to take away your pain, but I will do everything in my power to reduce it."

She reached out a shaking hand to grip his. "Tell me a story," she squeezed three of his large fingers tight. "About the Immortal."

He lay his other hand over hers. "Of course, your highness," he said. She thought she heard a catch in his voice. "Back before the canyons of Kirith were carved..."

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After the public apology was finished and the press placated, Rivuk made his journey to his next destination. He stood perched on the ruin of an old pleasure arcade overlooking the north-end of town that somehow managed to look dark even in the full light of the desert sun.

Nerisa landed beside him and handed him a long brown cloak from the marketplace down the road. "Are you certain you don't want me to go with you?" Nerisa asked. "I can remain outside."

"No," Rivuk answered, slipping on the cloak. "It would be too conspicuous. It'll be suspicious enough for one Nobillo to enter an invocation den, let alone two."

"Just, be careful."

"I will be." He wasn't particularly afraid, though he knew what apoths were capable of. Apotheosis was illegal in Kirith, but that hardly stopped the Korsuch from using the chemical cocktails their scientists had invented that were now made by muses in the backrooms of run-down apartments and warehouses that claimed to be tanning hides and dying fabric to try to explain away the smells and the chemical waste. Cocktails to bring a Korsuch closer to perfection, to godhood as the apoths would say. Combinations for physical strength, for mental acuity, for sexual pleasure, to lose themselves to the world or to heighten their perception of it - there was an Apotheosis for every want and newer, more dangerous ones being developed every iuna.

He'd wanted to eradicate the invocation dens of the North Side, but Elihim had stopped him, calling them a necessary evil. Just like the Nobillo unknowingly relied on Jericho, so too did the Korsuch rely on Apotheosis in their competitive, cutthroat world that demanded nothing less than perfection and the constant production of new, groundbreaking technologies. A fair estimate of half the tutors at the Korsuch schools of higher learning were occasional users and a fourth were addicts, having achieved their positions through sleepless skells kept awake and focused by the Asclepius Apotheosis and then, finding the next level required even more to simply maintain the same position, they fell into full addiction with many eventually dying in these very North side invocation dens. The sciences fared even worse, and, in athletics, the cocktail commonly known as Rac was used so commonly in Korsuch sports it was expected. But, then, that was part of the point of the games, altering athletes to show how science could grant them superior abilities.

He flew down to the place the young doctor, Augusta, had shown him. The door swung loosely on a broken hinge. He pushed it open. The room was dim. A number of Korsuch sat on the sand-covered floor with their backs against the walls, furiously gesturing and typing on holotabs, mumbling narrations to themselves of insights that would soon be forgotten when the chemicals wore off. When they were no longer Flying Olympus, but Soul Devouring after Falling to the Fly - phrases that made no sense to him but that apoths liked to use, though he doubted they had any idea where they came from either.

One man lay in his path, his wrinkled eyes staring wide from his stiff face, mouth frozen open. His arm was up with his fingers almost pinched together as if he'd been holding something when he died. Probably a holotab. Whatever research he'd been working on had been stolen from his cold, dead hand.

"Just kick him aside," a sallow-faced blond man who had probably once been handsome and still might be thought so to those who didn't mind sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, said. Rivuk guessed he was one of the ferrymen for this particular establishment.

Rivuk chose to step around the body. He walked through another room, probably once a kitchen judging by the pipes that stuck out of the wall, and up the stairs. The room he was looking for was at the end of the hall.

He opened the door.

Augusta stood from the stained mattress of the room's single bed. Besides a grimy chair and end table, it was the only furniture in the room. He opened his cloak, revealing his uniform.

"I was beginning to think you wouldn't come," she said.

"Were you able to acquire the video?" he asked.

She held up a tiny holoball and pulled up the video from it so it played in mid-air in front of him. It was Lindsay! His anger burned as he saw his band on her wrist, but still, his heart ached for her. He watched the whole scene slowly play out. She clearly had no idea what she was doing or seeing and it was even clearer to him, as she shuffled about, that she had no intention of breaking anything except to free the Bonat man in front of her.

That and she was terrible at espionage. Just disgraceful. It was good he'd chosen her to be the face of the revolution, rather than work behind the scenes, because they would've been exposed in bils, if not hours. Thank the Immortal he hadn't told her the whole plan. Really? A chair? It was a good thing she'd been stopped or she probably would've killed the man she was supposedly trying to save. And what would she have done even if he had survived and she'd given away her location with the sound of shattering glass? Dragged him out of there and through the whole city? Though, more likely, the chair would've just bounced off and hit her in the face. She really didn't think things through, did she?

In many ways it was one of the things he loved most about her.

The video cut off as the light retracted back into the ball. "What will you give me for it?" Augusta asked.

"What do you want?" Perhaps it sounded like a weak negotiating position, but that was how he needed her to see him, as someone she could take advantage of.

She tapped the ball against her lips as she took a few strolling steps across the room. "Well, I know your blood is out of the question."

He nodded in affirmation.

"I had thought about trying out a few things on that sex tape with you, but that skinny shaft of yours wouldn't do it for me. Ril's cut for my pleasure, and he'd only get jealous anyway."

"And it would be illegal," Rivuk said.

She tilted her head back and laughed. He couldn't help but be captivated by the way her red hair cascaded down her back and bounced as her plump, ice-blue lips curved up in a smile and her breasts bounced just ever so slightly. This was Lindsay's influence, both in that this would be exactly the type of woman she liked and in the fact that his attraction to her made him more attracted to these weird features. He'd been taught Korsuch physiology in school, but he'd never even thought about sucking on a nipple until he'd sucked Lindsay's. Now he couldn't help picturing it, his mouth on Augusta's breast. No, it was Lindsay's mouth, the lips were plump and soft, and the color of the breast had changed from pale pink to whitish blue. It was Donil again. No, he was back to normal and here in a room with a woman he didn't really find attractive at all, but his wilding did.

Augusta smiled wickedly. "You're going to see a lot of illegal things today," she said. "No, I've been working on a problem in the Temple I just can't solve and the deadline's coming up in a few bils. I've heard about your powers and I want you to use them to keep me alive."

"What do you mean?"

"Can you do it?" she asked.

"Yes, but I would like to know why I would need to."

"Because if you don't, there'll be no one to get you what else it is that you want." She smiled and pressed a button on her heavily-indented kiton-leather glove. "Cyril, bring me three Scleps and give me a Cock Shot."

A Cock Shot, now he understood what she meant. Yasolina had just done an expose on the rising death toll around the new drug, formally called Thysa, last iuna. On its own it could kill, but with three shots of another drug on top of it... It was an intentional fatal overdose. And for what? She likely wouldn't rise any higher from it, it was just an assignment.

Whoever Cyril was, he didn't even try to talk her out of it.

A minute later, the blond man from downstairs entered the room.

"Hey Ril, you don't mind if he watches, do you?" Augusta asked.

Cyril glanced at Rivuk dismissively and shrugged.

Augusta took off her top, leaving just her purple, lacey bra. She turned around and raised her mass of red hair off her neck, showing off the long, narrow, black Apotheosis port. It looked like something a computer might be hooked into, which was exactly the point. "You ever seen a download before?" she asked the prince, knowing full well he hadn't.

Cyril unzipped the back of Augusta's black skirt and let it fall to the floor to reveal panties that matched her bra. His hands traced the curve of her butt to her hips and her pulled her body against his, grinding his hips against hers as he kissed the back of her neck. She let out a giggle as he kissed up to her jaw. "Get on with it, Ril. My break's only so long."

He stepped back and took out a transparent bag with three sclep flash-nano packs in it. Flash-nano bots, the delivery method of choice for inoculations because they burned out quickly and were flushed from the body after a few bil, had experienced a boom in sales recently thanks to the ever-increasing trade in establishments like these. He inserted each drive, one after another, as she let out little moans of pleasure.

Rivuk could feel them entering her body, could feel her adrenaline rising as her blood vessels dilated. Hormones were being released in alarming levels. Everything was moving so fast, it felt like her body was diving, picking up speed, heading straight for the ground with no sign of slowing.

Cyril turned her around and pulled off her bra letting those beautiful breasts fall out in the most careless fashion. Dusky rose nipples exposed to the warm sun seeping in through the sheer curtain. Cyril pushed her down onto the bed and pulled off her panties as she moaned, head lolling back and forth, mind lost in a chemical fog.

Her eyes caught the prince's and she gave a loose smile. "You're welcome to join in," she said.

He raised a hand to demure. He could feel the part of his mind that was Lindsay's going mad with desire, even the parts that were his own wanting to feel human-like skin against his. But it was only to remind him of hers. He didn't want this woman, he wanted his wife, even now, in his disgust and anger, it was her body he wanted. To revenge himself on her with this stranger only made him feel dirty at the thought.

Cyril took off his pants, his cock hanging out, looking very little like the ones Rivuk hadd seen in Lindsay's memories of human genitals. It was oblong and surgically split down the middle, creating a shallow groove between two engorged, long, red bulbs. He took out another drive and inserted it into a port at the base of his penis. Thysa. The enzyme in it was activated by heat and gorged itself on seminal fluid produced inside the Korsuch penis, producing a waste chemical that was toxic to life but produced wild highs and heightened the effects of any drugs in the system.

"Give it to me, Ril," Augusta cried.

He spread her legs and Rivuk could see she was fully modified. Her clitoris had been moved to the rim of her vagina for more direct stimulation, and the soft, pillowy labia had been fully removed with any hair, leaving a smooth plain above her slightly wider vagina to her urethra. Ril moved gingerly into position. She gasped as her clitoris slipped into the groove. He pushed inside a bit and Rivuk saw her vagina parting for him, the supple flesh yielding and returning as he pulled back and pushed in deeper. He could feel the pleasure shooting through her legs, her heart racing, breath coming fast. Ril made a few more tentative pushes in and out and then he pushed himself inside, hard.

Augusta gasped. Ril's cock was vibrating so fast, Rivuk could hardly see her clit buried in it. In truth, he'd never seen Korsuch copulation, he'd barely understood the function of their parts. He knew it was similar to humans, but now, having been with a human and seen through her eyes the process, the influence of the original Korsuch DNA was much more apparent. As was the pleasure aspect. Augusta's eyes were rolled back and her mouth frozen in a silent scream of ecstasy, lost in an orgasm that would only end when Ril came.

Her breasts shook and bounced on her chest, cradled in the nest of her red hair. So tempting. He wanted to touch them, to squeeze them in his hands and feel their softness under his fingers. He wanted to feel the nipples against his palms and hear her moan as he rubbed them. To feel those large breasts under his lips for real and not just through Lindsay's memories of Donil's. To give in to his pain and frustration by using this woman's body instead of his wife's. But no, he wanted that exquisite pain. He wanted to keep it all to himself; to greedily horde it, not taint it with some woman in an invocation den. Why should she know any share of him when he already knew all of her? She, who was, at this moment, becoming aware of her hubris.

Her heart was racing too fast; the beat had become one long thrum. He could sense in her mind the fear within her racing thoughts, DNA combining and recombining, samples and graphs and spreadsheets of data flying by and under it all the terror of the ground approaching too fast. She knew this was too much, she'd taken too much, and in moments it was going to be even more. She was a doctor, she knew what was about to happen, but it was too late to stop it.

Ril came.

Rivuk felt the chemicals wash though her body like a cool wave, as the wave touched her heart, it stopped. The dull thrum ceased in his ears. He began pumping it, keeping it going as all her organs began shutting down, one by one, when the wave passed through. He was compressing her lungs to breathe, sending pulses through her darkened brain, keeping her organs alive. She was free to die once her purpose was fulfilled, but at the moment, he still needed her.

He looked over to Ril who was pulling on his tight pants with their loosely woven strap sides without even the vaguest concern to the woman he'd just cum into lying dead in the bed in front of him.

"Why didn't you stop her?" Rivuk asked. "You knew it was a lethal dose."

"If she wants to play Icarus, what is it to me?" Cyril sneered with a disinterested callousness that made Rivuk want to reveal himself to the man and drag him in for trial. "Sell to the living, sell off the dead, either way, I get my coin. Tell me when you're done with her so I can order a collection. And don't damage the skin too badly with that acid, you never know who's going to buy." He turned and walked away, leaving Rivuk alone, pumping her heart and compressing her lungs.

He didn't pay attention to how long he'd been at it, at least ten minutes, when suddenly she shot straight up in the bed. She gasped. Air rushed into her lungs, filling them. The dull thrum began again. Everything was racing within her. She grabbed her holotab and began typing furiously, throwing up images into the air. He recognized one of the beasts from the northern mountains with its tusks, fangs, and sharp, split hooves. Another was a three-dimensional illustration of an animal that was smaller, but with normal predator-like legs and paws, a large, sharp-fanged jaw, and tiny ears and eyes. It looked like something from Okeshi's ancient past.

"If I take this and pull from here..." Augusta mumbled as DNA strands rotated in front of the pictures. She pulled pieces of them out and matched them to others. Rivuk could still see her thoughts racing by so fast he couldn't truly understand them as she sat on the bed, still fully naked except for her gloves, typing them out. "There we go... Annnndddd HA!" she cried. "I got it!" She raised her arms victoriously. Her breasts bounced. "Now I just need to resequence the RNA of the virus..." Back to typing furiously, more images, now of different things. As far as she seemed to be concerned, he wasn't even there.

"I'll contact you with what I need," Rivuk finally said.

She barely nodded, continuing to type. Flying Olympus.