Read An End for Free Online

disseminating it throughout the atmosphere, where it rained down, tiny flecks of silver, a confetti of glitter that dusted the faces of the assembled masses and spawned, spawned on and in their flesh, screaming flesh as the roar from above, the many engines of an Extinction Fleet descending from above, a tumult that was indescribably beautiful and horrifying and—
    Zero closed his eyes, snapped his head back and forth, those alien hands now grasping both sides of his face, those alien eyes now drilling into his mind with pure white fire.
    [she sent you to kill us, you know. or maybe the beauty of it is that none of you knew. you thought it was a jihad. you thought it was civil war.]
    Zero opened his eyes and looked desperately up at the stranger, whose face was white and held a sheen of sickness and exhaustion. The stranger shook his head, cleared his throat, and the suffocating mental embrace was released.
    “It wasn’t a civil war, Zero.” He assembled his sentence very carefully, spoke the words with a childish fascination at the sound, the taste, the touch of the new language. “It was a genocide.”
     
     
    “I’m so sorry.” Zero felt all of his energy, all of his vitality pour from his body at the man’s touch. The Stranger’s touch, for that is what that silken mental embrace felt like. He was a stranger, but so remarkably familiar... “I never knew—”
    The Stranger smiled the sad smile of ancient resignation. “Of course you never knew, Zero.” He leaned in close to the incapacitated Zero, gently, tenderly kissed his forehead, tousled his hair. The gesture was so kind, so loving. Who was this man?
    With a wave of his hand, the beams of light holding Zero suspended in the air slowly faded, lowered him to floor level, where he stood, weakly rubbing his hands over the cold gooseflesh of his forearms. The Stranger’s head tilted in concern and then understanding, and he removed his black overcoat and wrapped it around Zero’s shoulders.
    “Come on, son. There’s much to talk about, and so little time.”
     
     
    [it would seem that we were a little too efficient.]
    Fleur glared at Mother, whose eyes betrayed the obvious relish with which she was stringing them along. The little girl sat in her tiny chair, her hand placed lovingly on top of Hank’s new emulated hands, uneasily clasped on the table before him, on which was printed a circular pattern of dancing barnyard animals, all linked hand-to-hand, or hoof-to-feather, rather. Mother patted Hank and gravely rested her chin on her fist, shrugging with feigned indecision.
    [too efficient. that’s the only way to explain it.]
    “Just tell us what you want to say. Stop these games.”
    Satisfied that she had stirred enough emotion in Fleur for now, Mother smiled widely, crossed her arms on her pre-pre-pre-pubescent chest.
    [you ran when you found out what you were doing to those worlds, little flower. you hid on a prison galleon bound for the outer and hoped that we’d never be able to find you. if it weren’t for whistler and seven and eight and nine, you’d have escaped with the rest of the vermin.]
    Whistler and Nine sat side-by-side, each flickering in perfect projected unease. Neither could look up and face the gaze of Fleur.
    “They brought me back unharmed.” Fleur instinctively flexed her “new” left hand, constructed from an emulated parts clone, raped from another Fleur to fit the only Fleur that truly mattered. “So you must have found another planet. Another rogue world.”
    [something like that.]
    “Just fucking tell me!”
    A motion too fluid and too fast for Fleur to comprehend and they were alone in the room, Whistler and Nine and Hank vanished, the only hint of their existence the tiny silver spherical emulation projectors that dropped into the children’s chairs in which they had been sitting. The balls rolled around the concave (convex?) depressions meant for human posterior regions, then fell through as the chairs, the