Charlotte Boyett-Compo- WIND VERSE- Hunger's Harmattan by Unknown Read Free Book Online

down inside you
and takes hold. It hurts like hell, believe me.”
    She thought of General Strom and his
comment that it was not pleasant. “What did you feel when you Transitioned for
the first time?”
    He drew in a long breath and looked away
from her, centering his gaze across the chamber to the far wall. “I don’t like
talking about it.”
    “At least tell me how you reacted to it,
Ailyn. How you…”
    “I had no idea what they were going to do
to me that day,” he said. “They came to my cell, shackled me and took me to one
of their laboratories. They shoved me facedown on a stainless steel table,
lashed my hands and legs to the corners. Since I was naked to begin with—we
weren’t allowed clothing—all I remember was shivering violently because that
damned stainless steel was cold as ice on my bare flesh. When they came in with
this jar, I couldn’t see what was in it. Someone grabbed a handful of my hair
and jerked my head up. Someone else poured a thick fluid down my throat. I
remember gagging, realizing it was blood, and the next thing I knew, they were
slicing my back open. I felt the blood running down my hip and then hell opened
up and swallowed me whole.”
    “There was a revenant worm in the jar.”
    “Aye,” he said, “and the pain was so
intense all I could do was lie there and scream as she ate her way through my
kidney. You can’t imagine the agony, Shanee. No one can.”
    Shanee shuddered at the image.
    “Everyone hurried out of the room. It
seemed to take forever but I know it was only a matter of moments before I
began to change. When the Transition was complete, I broke free of the
restraints as though they’d been made from paper. I rolled off the table and
slammed myself against the wall, snarling and spitting. The only thought that
kept going through my mind was that I was going to stay that way. That I would
be a beast for the rest of my life. All I could do was crouch there and howl
with despair.”
    “You must have felt so alone,” she
whispered.
    “At the height of the agony I heard Tariq
speaking to me but I thought I was going insane. I was hearing voices, I was no
longer human. I just wanted to curl up and die.” His shoulders flexed as though
he were reliving that horrible time. “Eventually I wore myself out and just
collapsed on the floor, foaming at the mouth, whimpering. At some point I slept
and when I awoke, I had reverted back to being human. I heard Tariq speaking to
me and he explained what had happened to me, what would continue to happen to
me every three months for the rest of a very long, unnatural life.”
    “Did his speaking to you help?” she asked.
    “Not at first,” he replied. “At first I was
sickened and enraged that this had been done to me against my will. I never
knew such creatures as Reapers even existed and here was this strange,
disembodied voice telling me that the entire race came about because a goddess
and demon were at war with one another. I just couldn’t get my head around
that, but he didn’t give up. He talked to me until I really started listening.
If it had not been for Tariq, I could not have survived close to twenty years
of being locked in that containment cell every moment of my life without
companionship or anything else for that matter. It has taken me two years in
this paradise to begin to feel human again.”
    “By the gods, Ailyn,” she said, feeling
tears building in her eyes. She had not cried since she was a babe in arms but
his pain touched her as nothing ever had. “How awful for you.”
    “And now you know why some men’s minds were
ripped apart by the experience and they had to be destroyed. A man with the
powers of a Reaper who cannot reason or know right from wrong is not fit to
walk among humanity. He is a living, breathing danger to everyone with whom he
comes into contact. They called them rogues and simply terminated them.”
    “How long did you remain in Transition?”
she asked, aching for