She looked at him.

“Is it okay if I go . . . do that?”

She considered, then nodded, looking toward the monster lying in a pool of its own black bile at the center of the chamber. Kaveh hesitated, still suspecting this might be a trap, before deciding fuck it, he was going to die, anyway, if he didn’t pee.

He stepped outside into the harsh morning sunlight, his muscles electric with a night of fear, still not quite believing this was real, not sure if unzipping his fly was a good idea. What if he got zapped with his dick out? Maybe that was exactly what they were waiting for, those sick alien fucks.

It wasn’t even a good pee. It was the kind where when at long last the moment comes you’ve been holding it for so long that the muscles are like, Nope, sorry, buddy! The storm surge is coming, we gotta keep these levees in place! When he finally forced it out, it was more painful than a relief. It was only when he had finished that it occurred to him that now was probably a good time to run for his goddamn life.

He turned, half expecting there to be no cave entrance at all, but there it was, roughly human height. He could even see the unnatural smooth floor. Yes, now was definitely a good time to run for his goddamn life. But it wasn’t going to happen. In Kaveh Mazandarani’s inner struggle between self-preservation and curiosity, a struggle that occurred more often for him than it did for most people, curiosity was fated to win every time.

14

14

A headache was forming that felt like a toothy parasite was gnawing at her left temple from the inside as Cora stared at the monster in the center of the chamber. Ampersand had “drained” the “poison,” but the creature still looked like it had been sculpted out of black ink, an apparent permanent side effect. The technique Ampersand had used to weld him to the floor had been crude by his standards, like straps melded one with the glass-like rock beneath him like a straitjacket made of black steel. The longer Enola stayed there, all but welded to the floor of the cave, the more the effluvium around him congealed, and it was becoming harder to clean by the second.

Ampersand had not given her any indication when, or if, Enola might regain consciousness, which was another thing keeping her paralyzed where she stood. What if he woke up? What if he started trying to talk to her again with that horrible voice? Ampersand had indicated that whatever cocktail had turned his body that color had also changed his personality, but she hadn’t really seen anything resembling a personality; he felt like an animal, corrupted software, a glitching machine. She struggled not to think of Enola as an “it.”