Steel Sky by Andrew C. Murphy Read Free Book Online Page B

touch his knees. He gives up, letting himself fall back, jerking the rope tighter. He swings and rotates slowly.
    “Can’t even do one sit-up,” Dancer says, rolling her eyes toward the palaestran. “I think somebody needs a more rigorous exercise schedule, don’t you, Lem?” That’s right , Second Son think s, that was the man’s name .
    “Should we let him down now?” Lem asks.
    “Absolutely not!” Dancer declares. “I want to bring a little color to those cheeks!” She slaps Second Son hard on the buttocks.
    Second Son watches his younger face grow purple. Seeing it, he can again feel the pain as the rope bites into his ankles. He had hobbled on swollen feet for a decameron.
    “Let’s just leave him here for a few days,” Dancer says, circling him.
    “ I recognize that I am lost and I require guidance . . . ”
    “What’s that?” Dancer’s grin grows wider still. “Lem, can you believe it? He’s praying ! Speak up, Hump! We can’t hear you!”
    Second Son screws his eyes shut and continues mouthing the prayer silently.
    “Stupid! Koba was a man like any other!” Dancer seems genuinely offended. “He pulled his tights on one leg at a time. He breathed and ate and shat like any other man. And he died like any other man. Great-great-great-great-grandfather killed him!”
    “That’s not true!” Second Son shrieks. “He chose to become one with the Stone! Orcus the First had nothing to do with it!”
    “Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not.” Dancer affects nonchalance. “The point is, it makes our family look more powerful to have that rumor circulating.”
    She makes a face as if something unpleasant has just occurred to her. “Incidentally, Hump, dangling upside-down by your feet doesn’t have quite the same effect.”
    “Let me down!” he cries. “Let me down!”
    “Lem! Look, he’s wet himself!”
    Second Son doesn’t remember this part. He leans closer to the screen. He can see a dark stain growing on his tights, but he decides it’s just perspiration.
    “It’s a good thing you have an older brother,” Dancer says, “otherwise Father would never have any opportunity for grandchildren.”
    Dancer walks jubilantly out of the room. Her lover lumbers after her. Second Son stares at himself, hanging helplessly, fingers almost touching the floor, tears rolling up his face. Dancer turns her head, smiling, for one last look before she slips away. Second Son freezes the image, feeling the rage burn in his chest.
    He had hung there for almost a chronon before his brother Stone finally came along and found him. Stone cut him down and massaged the feeling back into his feet without a word of criticism, without even a look of disappointment. Of all the family, Stone was the only one who never seemed to think of Second Son as a failure. Stone only tried to help him when he could, to defend him whatever the cost to himself. Stone could bear any burden without complaint. Perhaps that was why they had given him that nickname, the highest compliment possible in the Hypogeum.
    Second Son loved his brother unconditionally. When Second Son was a little boy, Stone took him for rides on his shoulders. Second Son loved the rides so much and took them so often that someone commented that Second Son looked like a hump on Stone’s back. That was the origin of Second Son’s hated nickname.
    Second Son preferred to remember Stone the way he was when they were young, before he got sick. He had changed so much in his last days. He withered like a plant in the dark, his once-bright eyes sunk deep in their sockets. His clothes hung around him and his hair turned white, though he was only nineteen.
    But the transformation in his personality was what frightened Second Son the most. The once stoic and cheerful elder brother complained perpetually, sometimes about things that no one else could even see. He snapped at people for no reason at all. As the tumor grew in his brain, he lost the ability to distinguish