Page 360 of Light Leech

I was on a long and skinny boat floating on an indoor lake with an island in the center.

The crowd, all Violet elites who had filled the palace for the party, roared for entertainment. I didn’t care what it would be. Nothing mattered if everything I had done for her was a part of some plot. Someone tapped me, then smacked my bare back when I didn’t respond. I couldn’t register what they were saying. My agonizing thoughts were too loud. Finding her in the crowd was no salve, but salt on an already throbbing wound.

I couldn’t find her, but I imagined her frowning at me as if she had a sick stomach. Was it out of guilt? Was she lingering in the illusion of what we had? Was it ever real for her? Was I a fool to hold on for so long?

I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t.

It had to be a part of some plan. A few moments of doubt had constrained me, but I was still coming out of that limbo between consciousness and delirium. Maybe I had heard it wrong. It had to be.

It had to be.

You would never hurt me, would you. Naoma?

Please.

Oh, how it hurt.

I wanted to smile in case she was watching me, doing anything I could to show her that I understood the part I was meant to play.

I couldn’t. If there was any truth to her betrayal, I don’t know if I could ever smile again. Sure, that was the mindset of an angsty teenager, but that was what I was in the body of a man in his late twenties. Those pivotal years of my life were wasted trying to fight a government that would never budge to satisfy its people.

I was being childish. None of this was ever about me. If I lost her, so be it.

I couldn’t lie to myself. My selfish ego wanted her more than the fall of Gongtide at that moment.

I tried my neurospace, hoping I could ask her anything.

Connecting.

It was stuck in one of those perpetual booting modes that usually entailed device death. I had seen it many times when I was first learning to be an Imp and our enemies would hit our neurospaces with a light-based EMP. It would kill the device for most hosts, requiring a replacement with the associated surgery, but Deleon knew the dangers we would face. With the help of his underlings, whose prowess was later trumped by Ralia’s expertise, he developed a firewall to prevent such disasters. Unfortunately, the EMPs still penetrated the initial layer, but the firewall protected the core itself. If the attack was anything like those I had faced in the past, I had anywhere from five minutes to an hour until it rebooted and rebuilt the walls torn down by the otherwise crippling attack.

Five minutes to an hour of agony, in addition to whatever this form of sick entertainment was.

“Hihow!”

Someone slapped my face, pulling me out of my stupor with one foot still in it.

“What is going on?” I asked.

He was a skinnier, dark-skinned man with large cybernetic arms to compensate for his otherwise gangly build. He shoved me onto one of the boat’s benches, next to a woman with an optic band who forced an oar into my hands.

“What–”

A gong cut me off. The man who had acted like a captain of our boat sat in front of me and turned his attention to the source of the sound with the rest of us.

A chrome-faced Eunuch had struck the gong but now stood with his hands clasped behind his back. The gong stood on a pedestal next to Zhou’s violet dais. He sat atop the light-laced throne with two seats a step below him on each side. To the left sat another talk-show host–not Lyler–whose lack of humor was compensated by his undocumented “philanthropic“ ventures that kept him among the elite despite his condescension to anyone who wasn’t a Violet citizen. I couldn’t recall his name, never wanting to memorize it, but his face was connected to every Violet–sustained “charity” that never fixed the problems it pledged to resolve. Next to him sat Selara Goman, a child actor-turned-musician, who was owned by Reef’s rival company Dorse. A few years ago her drastic change in appearance that most attributed to facial reconstruction or mere age led many to believe that she was a clone, replaced after her past accusations against some of the Violet elites who were likely in the seats near her.

On the far right sat Brian Bryan, a former neuronet pastor who forsook his faith to find the cure to aging without the use of cybernetic implants. Though he had no visible implants, many argued that most of his subdermal makeup was nothing but cybernetic. His biological age was somewhere in the fifties, though he looked about twenty years younger with an off-putting complexion. He had defeated aging in some way, but he looked like one of the artificial humans used in advertising to avoid paying actors. His affect was as bland as his pale skin tone and his personality was nonexistent.

Among these controversial elites sat Naoma on the inner right. A Eunoch stood behind her, though I couldn’t tell if it was to protect her or keep her under watch.

Our eyes locked. Her face was expressionless.

Please. Anything.

Nothing.

Zhou clapped once and the few still chatting after the gong went silent. His voice amplified around the gigantic chamber of a room. I wondered if I could find a way to tap into the speakers like he has once my neurospace rebooted. What could I say that mattered? These were all Violet elites who had tossed their sacrifices into a red lake for want, near naked entertainment?