Chapter Eight, in which we learn the author has gone completely off his
rocker.
http://www.bloodgod.com/smgray/index.html for this and SM: Gray.  (The
server is down at the moment, but hopefully I'll fix that by tomorrow.)

All comments, as usual, are much appreciated.  I want to hear from you!

Django Wexler (khaine)
khaine@mindless.com

"If disaster strikes, it's God's wrath--quote the Old Testament.  If
nothing happens, it's God's mercy--quote the New Testament."
	-The Onion

Chapter Eight
     Hotaru


     "She's cute.  I say we keep her."

     I levered open eyes gummed shut by tears and sleep, and saw nothing
but a brilliant blur.  Unclasping my hands from around my knees was an
effort, and rubbing my eyes didn't accomplish much.  I blinked, and
waited for things to clear.

     "Dee, we're late as it is."

     "Although..."  The third voice sounded musing.  "God might want to
see her."

     "Or She might not.  You want to end up as the next sacrifice?"

     "Yup!"  The first voice again, feminine, high, and cheerful.

     "Speaking for those of us in the land of sanity, I say we leave
her."

     "At least let me fuck her before we leave."

     "By Her fucking Knife, Tetsuya, is that all you think about?"

     "Can I watch?"  The girl again.  She sounded kind of disturbed.

     "Give me a break.  It's been a long week."

     "And you can't wait another day?"

     "How about we keep her, and you can fuck me?"

     "Shut up, Dee."

     My vision had cleared enough by this point so I could see I was
still where I'd been lying the night before, on the floor of what had
been my bedroom in Setsuna's house.  I could hear the voices through the
doorway into the next room.  I'd apparently spent the night curled up in
the corner, and my legs popped when I stretched them out with a faint
sigh.

     "She *did* say she wanted us to be on the lookout for strangers."

     "Yeah!  We can bring her along and let God decide what to do with
her."

     "Look, how about this.  I'll try and wake her up.  If she can walk,
we take her with us.  If not, we leave her.  I'm sure as hell not
carrying some girl all the way back to camp."

     I got to my feet, shakily and with some assistance from the wall.
Last night was still crystallizing in my memory, but it felt as though I
cried so long and hard there was nothing left inside.  I felt numb,
empty, and vaguely curious as to what the three strangers had planned.
It wasn't, I thought, as though I had anything else to do.     

     The girl poked her head through the doorway and looked surprised
that I was standing.  She was younger than me, perhaps thirteen or
fourteen, with straight red hair cut above her shoulders and a T-shirt
that hung on her thin frame like a tent.  Her face was grubby, but
smiling.

     "Good morning!"  She leaned back out the door for a moment.  "Guys,
she's awake!"

     I waited for her attention to return to me, then nodded.  "Good
morning."

     "I'm Darasora.  Everyone calls me Dee.  Who are you?"

     "Hotaru."  My head had stopped spinning to the point where I could
let go of the wall.  "I'm Hotaru Tomoe."

     "That's a nice name.  You can come back to camp with us!  I'll let
you meet all my friends."

     "I..."  I didn't quite know how to answer that one.  I was curious
about these people, but some sense of caution had started to return.
Dee looked friendly enough, but the other two...  "We'll see."

     "I'm afraid you misunderstood."  The third speaker, the one they'd
called Tetsuya, stepped past the little girl.  He was tall and gaunt,
with pale interested eyes that focused on me right away.  It wasn't
quite a leer, but his gaze made me shiver.  He was also, I noticed when
he moved his hand, wearing an automatic pistol at his side.  "That
wasn't a request."

 

     The third man, I learned as we were walking, was named Korin.  He
was short, squat, and sour-faced, dressed in several layers of tattered
jeans and armed with a nasty-looking assault rifle that he kept slung
over his back.  Korin hadn't said more than ten words since we'd left
Setsuna's house, and Tetsuya, who walked at the rear, seemed more
interested in staring at me then engaging in conversation.  Most of the
chatter, therefore, came from the girl who'd called herself Dee.  I
learned, in no particular order, that she was thirteen, her parents were
dead and her brother had been 'taken', whatever that meant, and that she
lived with Tetsuya, Korin, a few dozen others, and 'God.'

     I tried to question her on a couple of these points, but she
essentially ignored my inquiries and continued her non-stop stream of
chatter.  Korin led the way down the hill, picking his way carefully
through streets crowded by fallen masonry and destroyed vehicles.  The
city seemed almost deserted in the light of day, and we met only a few
others.  A group of young men, staggering and stumbling and laughing far
too loud.  An old man, sitting on top of a nearly-intact automobile with
a shotgun, who watched us carefully until we were out of sight.  A gang
of children gathered around something in the road -- they fled at our
approach, revealing the naked body of a woman lying face-down in the
gravel.

     All of this barely registered with me.  It didn't feel *real*;
unable to accept the evidence, I'd reverted to an Unforgiven-like
detachment.  This was just another little world, another place where we
would accomplish our task and move on.  There was nothing familiar here.
So I let my gaze pass lightly over the bodies and the bands of
scavengers, and tried to concentrate on my mission.

     That was the problem, though.  What, exactly, was my mission?  Why
was I even here?  My home was -- I choked back a brief sob -- gone.  The
city had been reduced to barbarism.  I could call Jahara, since he'd
attached one of his invisible markers to me, and just *leave*, write the
world off and never come back.  I could even put up with his
self-satisfied smirk, or at least the knowledge that while Jahara's face
was as expressionless as always, he *ought* to have a self-satisfied
smirk.

     I gave the problem some thought while my companion/captors argued
about the best route to take, and Dee dashed off the path to retrieve a
toy robot, half-melted to slag, from some forgotten store.  By the time
we were moving again, I'd come to a decision.

     I wasn't going to swear my life to revenge, tempting though that
seemed.  And I wasn't going to spend the rest of my days here in this
slum.  What I was going to do was find out what had happened to everyone
-- to Setsuna, to Haruka and Michiru, to Rei and Usagi and the rest --
and having either located them or confirmed that they were dead, we
would all leave Earth together.  Jahara would probably object, but I
suspected not too strongly.  After all, *Aegis* was large enough for
tens of thousands of people.  Why should six or seven more matter?

     I felt pleased with myself, distantly, for coming up with a plan.
My consciousness felt like a tight-rope walker, balancing precarious
rationality over a sea of black despair.  Focusing on the logical
progression of things was the only way to survive.  So the first step
was to go back to this camp with these three, who seemed reasonably
civilized people, and find someone willing to talk about what had
happened.  I wasn't afraid, particularly, since I was reasonably sure I
could escape if I had to.  And finding the Sailor Senshi couldn't be
that hard.  I couldn't imagine Haruka or Makoto just lying low, escaping
notice; wherever they were, the Senshi would stir up trouble.

     "Hotaru!"

     Dee's excited voice brought me back to the present, and I found
myself standing next to a six-story apartment building, the scars of
explosives marring its sides underneath crumbling window frames.  It
stood alone in a block of destruction, the buildings on either side
having succumbed to some unnamed catastrophe.  The apartment block
looked to only have one entrance, and all the ground floor windows had
been boarded up.  The main door was guarded by a pair of bored-looking
women in their thirties sitting next to a light machinegun.  They looked
up at our approach, and Dee ran over to them excitedly.

     "Emi!  Mori!  Look what we found!"

     Once we were closer, Tetsuya raised a hand in a more restrained
greeting.  "Hey.  Brought back a prisoner.  She said She wanted to see
any strangers."

     The taller of the two women looked me over with a critical eye.  I
suppressed an irrational urge to pose.

     "Okay."  She rapped a pattern on the door behind her, which swung
open with a creak.  "Go on up."

     "Anything happen while we were away?"  Korin asked as he nodded to
the guards, in passing.  

     "Not much.  Snakes have been causing trouble again for some, but
they ain't bothered us yet."

     "She'll give them a good kicking if they try."  The other woman,
silent until now, favored us with a sudden grin, then spat on the
ground.  "Fuckin' snakes.  The Imps should slaughter the lot of them."

     "Not bloody likely."  The three of them laughed, and Tetsuya
prodded me in the back.

     "Come on, girl.  You got an appointment to keep."

     

     These people -- I still didn't know what they called themselves, a
clan or a tribe or whatever -- had pretty much gutted the interior of
the building.  There was no power, of course, and most of the occupants
congregated in what had probably been the lobby, around a bonfire fed on
the remains of furniture and plastic sheeting.  Tetsuya led me up the
stairs, while Korin drifted off into the crowd.  Dee stayed by my side,
for which I was grateful.

     The people were a pretty varied lot.  Many dressed in the same kind
of clothing as my three captors, layer upon layer of ripped jeans and
old jackets, but a few wore carefully patched traditional dress or the
remains of business suits.  Weapons were much in evidence: almost
everyone had a sidearm, or at least a knife, and a bunch of rifles were
stacked carelessly against one wall.  There was food near the fire, some
sort of meat and stacks of leafy green vegetables I didn't recognize.
The smell reminded me how long it had been since I'd had a proper meal,
and my stomach growled a little.  Following my gaze, Tetsuya chuckled.

     "After God's done with you, we'll see about getting you fed."  He
smile turned nastier.  "Assuming you still need it, that is."

     I was revising downward my estimate that escape from this place
would be easy.  Sailor Saturn's power meant I could certainly take a few
of them apart at close quarters -- not that I wanted to, I added hastily
-- but facing down masses of modern weapons was probably suicide even
for a Senshi.  

     I wondered at my detachment as we climbed the fourth flight of
stairs.  I *still* wasn't scared.  In tense situations, sometimes Saturn
makes her way to the fore; this was probably one of those times.  In the
three years since I'd left Earth I'd made a sort of peace with my
alter-ego, but things still weren't perfect.

     Sixth floor.  Tetsuya stopped before a heavy iron door.

     "You go in alone."  He looked a little nervous.  "I'll be waiting
here.  There's only one exit, so don't think of trying to run."

     I nodded, and he gestured to the door.  "Go on, then."

     Dee, who had been uncharacteristically quiet until now, piped up.
"Good luck, Hotaru!  She'll be nice to you, you'll see!"

     

     Half the top floor was given over to a single room, the thin
inter-apartment walls knocked out, the floor covered in carpets.  Such
luxuries as the scavengers below had been able to scrounge lined the
walls -- mirrors, furniture, vases in no order whatsoever, cheap plastic
alongside pricey leather.  None of it looked used.  The back of the
place was lined with windows, facing west, so they caught the light of
the now-setting sun.  I hadn't realized how long we'd walked for.

     There was a chair at the far end of the room, facing the big
picture windows.  Someone was sitting in it, but who or what I couldn't
tell from where I was standing.  I walked slowly down the length of the
room, getting more nervous by the second, until whatever-it-was spoke.

     "Stop."  Her voice was a croak, but with strange resonance.  It
carried effortlessly around the room.  I obeyed without hesitating, and
waited for her to continue.

     "They brought you to me, without knowledge of what they were doing.
Truly My will works in mysterious ways."  She let a hand drop listlessly
to the side of her chair, where it folded two fingers around the stem of
a wineglass and lifted it to the hidden face.  "In the end, of course,
it all proceeds according to My design."

     I kept quiet.  I didn't feel there was much to say, under the
circumstances.

     "But now you're here.  Finally.  I knew this day would come, of
course, when one of you would come here to kneel."  Her voice dropped to
a near-whisper, and I edged closer to hear.  "They all refused Me.  Such
a generous offer I made them, and they turned Me down.  Even *she*
refused Me.  She said I was mad, that I was sick.  *Me*.  Sick."

     There was another longish pause.

     "I never thought it would be you, though.  I thought I'd seen the
last of you.  We all did.  I thought it was for the best -- you would
have fought like the others, died like the others.  I hadn't come fully
into my power then, of course.  But now that you've come, everything
will begin."

     She set the glass down again, carefully, and there was a scrape of
wood on wood as she stood up and stepped around the chair.  The woman I
could now see was tall and thin, with hair short-cropped and dressed in
flowing robes studded with bare patches.  There was a hint of grace in
her movements, but a much stronger feeling of strangeness; her limbs
twitched, oddly, as though not fully under her control.

     Most important, though, was the face.  I stared.

     "H..."  I swallowed.  "Haruka?"

     "Welcome home, Hotaru."  Her eyes were a brilliant swirl of color,
shifting from solid red to green to patterns to the purest white.  "I
can forgive you this time, since you have not been instructed in the
methods of address.  But you can refer to Me as My Lord, or Almighty.
Taking My name in vain is not looked upon lightly."

     Her smile was horrible.


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