Epilogue

  Nayeli strained against the cuffs on her wrists, thick metal and piercing strakes pinning her hands to smooth, hard foam. She couldn’t move her head in the twisted nest of wires and manifolds clasped around it. Her body formed to the gurney. The floor lights flicked on as she pulled on the restraints again and again. Her ritual. Her husband hung across from her, similarly bound. The polished black walls reflected the steady white lights.

  This place was so unnatural. So artificial. It disgusted her. The monsters that came to this place and ruined it disgusted her. Pale, nasty creatures, too powerful for anyone in the villages to stop. Her stomach twisted. More than a century locked in this place, but the horror was fresh.

  A low drone hummed through their chamber. Nayeli’s husband sagged in his prison across from her, supported by the wires and tubes protruding from his bare chest and arms. Nayeli refused to look at her own. A grating voice, a unison pair of voices, slid into her head. The silhouette of two floating chairs were outlined by the floor lights. All Nayeli could see of the ones in those chairs were the tips of pale, gnarled knuckles, twisted with age and scorn.

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  “What have you told them, Mother?”

  The smithies had softer sounding hammers, warmer sounding whetstones. That double voice was hell. Unsteady. Unpredictable.

  Nayeli spat. She refused to speak this nasty language, foreign to her land. She didn’t respond.

  “So be it.”

  The Union’s voice came again, whirring electricity and ringing metal. Men rushed into the room and took Nayeli’s husband from his restraints. They hadn’t been moved in decades. Wires hissed and snaked in the air discharging some acrid cloud. Her heart dropped knowing it flowed in her. Her husband sagged in the men’s grip and didn’t resist. Nayeli screamed with the hope the true children of the land had gotten her message. It had been so draining to send even that.

  “Wipe her again,” the Union spoke to one of the operators in the room. “Leave only the Mother. We can’t have a mass panic.”

  Nayeli felt something stab into her head. She screamed.

  “Ha chii! Ha chii, ha chii! Ji gug!”

  Her husband didn’t lift his head. She tried calling again to the sons of the land.

  “TS? JONG!”

  Then, there were the floor lights.

  How wonderful was that technology in her land. She felt one of her children nod off to sleep and whispered her loving graces.

  “Buenas noches, mi hijo.”