Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast by Benjanun Sriduangkaew (e books free to read txt) 📗

also regulate eir body temperature—normally in uncomfortable ranges, but Anoushka has chosen to keep it at thirty-five to thirty-seven degrees Celsius. Eir arms are absent—she has let Doctor Saamiye see to em but not to reconstruct the limbs, leaving em with only one good leg. What remains is nearly a dismembered torso. The way Xuejiao liked to be during coitus.

“I despise you,” ey hisses. Those ornamental roses in eir irises are folded, tight unyielding buds. Red pinpricks.

“I’ve come to give you a choice.”

A laugh. “Poison or bullet, isn’t that right? I fantasized about this sometimes; I was almost impatient. It never did come—well, now it has. At last the suspense is over.”

“No.” She drops into a chair that has bloomed out of the floor, as blue as the grass. “I’m offering you the choice of execution or continuing to be Xuejiao and remaining at my side.”

Erisant parts eir mouth. A trickle of maintenance drones slips between eir lips, serpentine, filling eir throat with clear, warm water. “Are you having a stroke, Admiral? Or is the idea to keep me as a bound pet to humiliate me for the rest of my days?”

“You’re capable. You’re intelligent. Xuejiao was an asset and performed her duties superbly, apart from the treachery.” Anoushka rests her hands in her lap. Her breath curls in white wisps, despite the illusion that they are surrounded by summer. “I’ll need to keep you in my sight and limit your movement. To most you’ll be understood to have returned with the Alabaster Admiral in victory. A small price to pay, wouldn’t you agree.”

“Why,” ey says, “would you do this?”

Because you kept the pearl Numadesi gave you, she might say. It rests in Anoushka’s jacket even now, crimson and pristine. “Does my reasoning matter? It gives you another chance to try to kill me. We shall test each other’s boast—yours that you’d do all this again, mine that I would woo and wed you once more. We will retrace our steps and remake our maps, and you may whet your knives and hone yourself for another effort.”

For a long time Erisant says nothing. The drones swim back out of eir mouth, shaking themselves off, and meld back into the restraints. The image of Mahakala shines on, a single day that hangs like a perfect jewel in the dark. “What is my time limit?” Eir voice is soft.

“There’s none. Territory takes a long time to chart. Your life and mine are as complex as any.”

Ey meets her eyes. She will never quite forget that look: its serrated edges, its finality. Eir smile like thorns. “I’m making a choice. Kill me. Make it with your bare hands—I’m owed that. You destroyed me and all I held dear. My world, my people, my husband. I tried to do the same to you. There’s no coming back from that and there’s no falling back into the shape that is Xuejiao. The fairytale’s finished.”

Anoushka imagines—will always imagine—another life where she’s able to persuade Erisant, where they continue, build upon what is true after what is false has been sloughed away. But that is delusion: she is too soft, often too naïve. “Very well. What would you like done with your body?”

“I will be dead and won’t care.” Eir smile widens. “You’ll remember me; I will be a wound within you forever. Your flesh will be my cenotaph.”

She stands and takes off her gloves; she makes it slow. The false grass wavers in an unseen wind but she is steady. Her hands are firm and true.

She lowers herself until she is face to face with the person she once believed was her wife. Erisant strains against eir fetters and pushes until eir mouth meets hers with bruising strength. Ey bites hard, teeth like needlepoints, and draws blood. The taste of rust congeals in Anoushka’s mouth, commingling with eir breath.

Anoushka cups eir chin, then curves her hand around that avian throat. Eir pulse leaps against her and then it is time. She tenses her grip. She clenches. In no time at all there is that familiar noise, the crunch of bone, the snap of life letting go.

Ey lolls in the restraints, eir head limp.

She brings the pearl from her jacket and tucks it into Erisant’s collar, where it will roll past clavicle to rest against a still-warm breast; where it will, eventually, grow as cold as the rest of the cell.

For the night, Numadesi has perfumed and painted herself in silver and gold, sunrays that radiate across her chest, stars that wheel slowly across her thighs and hips: she is bare otherwise, save for a gold circlet around her throat and a rose-gold chain that she has looped around her shoulders. She considered wearing the pearls in her hair, then thought better of it.

When she enters the bath, her lord is already there, waist-deep in water and obscured by steam. The pool’s rim is copper, half of it craggy in the way of stone lapped and sculpted by the sea’s attentions.

Anoushka raises her head, her eyes half-lidded. “Come join me, my wife.”

She does, displaying herself as she glides: she makes every step count, the sway of the hips, the shifting of the breasts and the glint of precious metals. She watches Anoushka watch her, the slow-burning hunger that has its own heft, like a gauntleted hand on a naked belly. Numadesi kneels by the pool’s edge, combing her fingers through the admiral’s hair, brushing stray droplets off Anoushka’s full, long eyelashes. “You are splendor made flesh,” she murmurs, putting her lips to the whorled shell of an ear. “The incandescence of you—to touch you is to be seared and cleansed, to be forged anew.”

The slightest fragment of a smile. “But you’re already perfect. My treasure. My jewel.”

Her lord brings down the bath’s heat and draws her by the chain into the fast-cooling water, touching her, cupping her—first tender, then urgent. She is propped against the pool’s edge, laid out as a feast: sampled piece by piece, morsels