Sneak Peek: 6-5 - Meeting Darius

A voice rang out:

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.”

The voice was both familiar and surpassingly odd: that of a man I once knew, yet somehow doubled and very slightly out of sync, with a harsh, digital undertone. As the man’s voice finished, “sunless sea” there echoed, beneath, the second voice: “see?”

            With a faint whirl, out of the darkness at the far end of the room appeared a man in a bulky wheelchair. As he approached, tubes and wires plugged into the back of the seat slithered behind him, leading back towards the heavy machinery.

            “Welcome,” said Darius, as he pulled in behind the desk. A single spotlight dimmed into life above, casting a pale cone of illumination over the man. “To my pleasure dome.”

            “—doom,” whispered the second voice.

            “Forward,” whispered Dmytro, with a soft pat to my skirted bum.

            Cursing the need for his support, and for the shoes the crippled my step, the gag that silence me and the cuffs that left me helpless—cursing the entire getup that ensured I appeared before this guy as vulnerable, a submissive feminine supplicant—with drool dripping down my chin and onto my chest—I minced forward. I’d planned on this meeting going differently, that was for fucking sure.

            “Sit,” Dmytro instructed.

            I posed awkwardly at the edge of the seat, arms trapped behind my back, tits forward, long legs together and tilted to one side.

            “Welcome,” the man in the chair said.

            He sat forward in his chair, fingers steepled, elbows on the armrest. A heavy hood, nondescript and grey, covered his face. His hands were thin and bony, the nails long and yellow. There was an overall impression of frailty, of bones and skin wrapped in clothing. This close, the rhythmic wheezing sound became more distinct, and I realised he was hooked up to some kind of respirator to assist his breathing.

            “Hello, Miss Bellamy,” he said, and again the mechanical undertone, a second voice very slightly out of sync: “—me.” Then his head—twitched—once, twice—and he leaned closer. From within the shadow of his hood, bright eyes gleamed—one of them with a light all its own. “Or should I say, David Saunders?”

            I felt rather than saw Dmytro at my side stiffen with surprise.

            Another twitch of the head. His raised his hands to his hood. The face he revealed was emaciated, cheeks sunken and lips thin and dry. Yet it was a face I recognized, that of Darius Graves. But where he’d once been tough and wiry, like animal sinew dried under a scorching sun, now he appeared sallow and sick. His hair with thin, the skin waxy. And seeing him, I gasped and jerked back, biting down hard into the gag.

            His left eye flashed with curiosity and amusement, but the other was flat and dead—a mechanical implant, dull grey metal imprinted with a cluster of tiny crystalline flecks that sparkled like sapphires in the dim light. A copper-coloured nugget erupted from his temple, and a thick strip of metal, pitted and wired, extended from it along his scalp to the back of his head. The entire rear of his skull swelled with metal and plastic, into which plugged wires and thick tubes. These either ran into the back of the wheels chair or fell to the floor and wound into the darkness behind him.

            “It seems we’ve both been through some changes,” Darius said dryly, and the left corner of his lip twitched in a sardonic grin—the right side of his mouth twitched feebly as he spoke, as though partly paralysed.

            Fear ran down my spine, and I grunted around the gag.

            “Wouldn’t you agree—Luke?”