a reprieve from the madness which has gripped him.
“Saya,” he murmurs, running his long, sharp fingers around Silver’s neck. I can see her pulse throbbing beneath her skin, the blades at the tips of those fingers ever so close to cutting into her reservoir of life and making it spill into senseless death.
I do not know where his mind is. He does not seem to be here, with us. I think he is stuck in the madness of loss, if he is playing the incident over again, as my mind tends to do in moments of quiet. The shattering of a ship. The loss of a loved one, gone forever, split into shards which are still turning in the depths of space, every one a remnant of her memory.
“Scizzor.” I say his name, hoping to bring him back to me, to this moment, and to realizing that he holds a human in his arms. “She’s human. She’s sacred.”
“She’s not sacred,” he says. “She is garbage.”
“Weeee!”
I never thought I would be happy to see that pink multi-eyed escape artist come bouncing through a wall, but today I am. Ham’s sudden appearance distracts Scizzor long enough for me to rush him, slam him backwards away from Silver, and have him drop her.
“HAM! I know you can get her out of here. GET HER OUT OF HERE!”
Ham extends an arm he didn’t have a moment before and sucks Silver through the wall in a way which should not be physically possible, but apparently is.
Silver
“How the hell did you do that?”
Ham’s eyes blink. All of them. At once. Fucking creepy. But I’m too grateful to care how gross this little creature is.
“I’m not really a prisoner. I let them keep me prisoner because it gives them a sense of satisfaction, but truthfully, I could have been gone years ago. I stay here because I get to help from time to time. Like now.”
“You just saved me from having my throat cut, but for how long?”
“For long enough,” he says calmly.
Honor, Shame, and Death
Warden
“We are going to talk about this. All of us. We are not going to run around the ship trying to murder our prisoners.”
It is not often I have to lay down the law this way, but it is not often that we discover Saya’s killer in our midst.
The entire brood is assembled. Hermes, Tusk, Scizzor, and the others who have heard snippets of argument from each side and fully formed their opinions before a word has been said. They remain silent, for Scizzor will not allow anybody else to have so much as a word regardless. I can smell the fury in the air.
“We have captured our sister’s killer,” Scizzor says. “And now you forbid me to exact justice? She deserves to die.”
“We have not captured anyone. A human was remanded into our custody. We have a duty of care toward her, no matter what her crime.”
Scizzor growls, a deep, feral sound which rouses everybody in the room. He is trying to whip us all into a frenzy of revenge, emitting pheromones which make us all more dangerous. I realize that I have underestimated him. He is smart, and he is absolutely aware of what he is doing right now. Those war pheromones are being emitted in a thick cloud, exuded through our skins and breathed into each other’s lungs, generating aggression.
“Saya would not want you to become a human killer,” I tell him. “She would not want you to lose the last remnants of what makes you a scythkin.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means her loss has broken you, Scizzor. It has broken us all. If we kill this human, hold her responsible for our loss, Saya does not return. All that happens is the universe loses a precious, rare human.”
“I don’t care how precious or rare she is. It was her,” Scizzor growls. “She’s not just one of the people who targeted scythkin ships. She’s the one who targeted Saya’s ship. She needs to die.”
“No.”
“No? We have the person responsible for killing our sister in our custody, and you don’t want revenge?”
“She suffered loss too…”
“So she gets to take our sister’s life and you don’t care because you’re both so drunk on the sex you have been having that you’ve stopped punishing her completely. That human is here, drinking our water, eating our food, and being pleasured in our first hatched’s bed. She dies today.”
“You do not get to make that decision, Scizzor.” I am trying to stay calm, though