Total pages in book: 210
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
He will want more, Finn. More, and more, and more. And you must feed him.
These were his last words to me in a letter.
What a fucking shit show.
I mean—I scoff—is this going to be recorded in our history? Finn Scott, age twenty-eight, received a written record of Aldo’s Scott’s final words and they were, You must feed him.
Feed him… women.
The god—our god—eats them? Rapes them? I don’t know. No one bothered to tell me that. Probably because nobody else knows either. Not a single person who was not a sacrificial Spark Maiden has ever been inside that fucking tower.
I press my fingertips to my temples and rub little circles because I have a pounding headache that comes with a sinking feeling that this headache will follow me, will be here, haunting me, until the day I die.
The day someone kills me, more likely.
Because that’s how my father died. He was killed.
Murdered.
No one on the Council even bothered to come up with an alternative story. Not even one for the masses, though that will happen. Murder is not a thing here. People do die by the hands of others, but it’s a misunderstanding or an accident.
At least, that’s how we record them—this is what I was told today while sitting next to my father’s body in the morgue.
At no point in this day was my father in the health center.
He was dead when I arrived. And whoever the murderer was, they did more than just kill him. They slashed his face. They cut off his hands. There was a white sheet covering him so I didn’t have to see the details, but there was so much blood, I didn’t need to see the details.
That moment is burned into my mind. I will never stop imagining his desecrated body under that bloody sheet.
It was me and the members of the Council in that morgue. And that’s where they handed me the letter he left and proceeded to slowly, and patiently, explain what was happening, what would happen next, and what part I would play in it. Not to mention the consequences if I didn’t fall in line.
The god is dying.
The spark is dying.
We cannot let this happen because if the god dies, we go with him, and if we go, the human race is lost forever. Therefore, we must do everything we can to prolong the god’s life by feeding him more Spark Maidens. Even if that means we feed him every Little Sister in this year’s Extraction.
Which was a very convenient way to leave out the fact that Clara—the love of my life and future wife—would enter that tower long before any of those Little Sisters do.
This conversation with the Council took place less than thirty minutes after I last saw Clara when we left my quarters. Less than thirty minutes earlier I was in bed with Clara, filled with a sense of satisfaction. Dreaming about our very-near future where we would be married. There would be children. We would have a home together, and raise this family, and live out calm, easy, respectable lives.
And then I learned the truth.
That none of that will ever happen.
There was never even a remote chance that it would ever happen because our god’s death has been a long time coming.
Everyone on the Council knew that the god was dying. And if we don’t prolong his death by propping him up with more, and more, and more Spark Maidens, the entire city—the last city on the planet after the Great Sweep took everything out more than a thousand years ago—will disappear and all of humanity will go with it.
My entire life is a lie, not because everyone on the Council knew about the dying god, including my father, but because my family was given the position of Extraction Master for one reason and one reason only—because my great-great-great-great-grandfather was willing to lie to the people of Tau City and assure them that everything is going to plan.
Lie to them. Tell them it’s fine.
And every Extraction Master who came after also agreed.
Including my father.
And now… me.
I am looking out the window of my new office watching as Clara loses her grip on reality and slaps one of the Matrons across the face. Even from fifteen floors up and across the canal, I can see the spark come out of her.
There is a struggle. It lasts longer than it probably should seeing that it’s six Matrons, Jeyk, and Mitchell against one lone Spark Maiden, but Clara puts up a good fight.
Eventually, though, someone jabs her with a drug—which is a pretty dear thing and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen people given drugs in Tau City. It wouldn’t be my first assumption if I wasn’t able to see the cyan-blue liquid inside the syringe, but I can. It’s not just glowing blue, it’s pulsing. Like all the tumultuous emotions in the vicinity are giving it life.