leg bent at the knee, and their inner thigh pointed up toward the ceiling, Soo-hyun tried not to focus on the stretch marks and blemishes, the fine dark hair they had never bothered to shave.
“There’s something else I need to talk to you about,” Kali said, her attention fixed on the needles blurring at the tip of the gun as she hit the pedal and the gun buzzed. “Your police dogs—can they be piloted?”
“Piloted?”
“They patrol our community, and they help to keep us safe from outsiders, but I need more from them. They’re marked like police units, they could go out into the city and work with impunity. We just need to be able to control them.”
“The first generation of dog drones were strictly user-operated. It was only after a couple of years of in-the-field training that the machine learning algorithms could grasp the necessary duties and responsibilities,” Soo-hyun said, nerves speeding the words from their mouth.
“So that’s a yes?”
“I don’t know exactly how I’d do it, but it must be possible.”
“How long would it take?”
“I have no idea,” Soo-hyun said. “A few days? A week?”
“Alright. I’ll get you whatever you need to make it work.” Kali dipped the needles into the ink and hit the pedal, coating them in black. “I would tell you this isn’t going to hurt, but I hate lying.”
Soo-hyun lay back, focused their attention on the bank of lights overhead, fluorescents cycling at fifty hertz, their flicker barely perceptible. Something cold touched their leg and Soo-hyun’s body lurched. They looked down to find Kali wiping a spot on their inner leg, disinfectant cool against their skin.
“Just calm down,” Kali said. “Breathe slowly. In for four seconds, out for four seconds, nice and steady.”
Soo-hyun inhaled, and closed their eyes. They squeezed them shut tight when the gun buzzed again, steady this time, sound like a huge mechanical wasp hovering over their skin. The wasp touched down, and a pain like burning spread across the soft skin of their thigh.
* * *
When her people gathered in throngs, Kali spoke slowly, with authority gathered from every higher power she cared to mention. Given enough time she mentioned them all.
Her detractors claimed her pilgrimage was made of lies rather than steps, but the woman born to the name Madelyn Danekas truly traveled across the Indian subcontinent. See the QR codes of her boarding passes, verify each pixel of the photos she uploaded to the cloud. They are all still here.
She was there. That much cannot be denied.
She traveled through India reading books on Hubbard, Asahara, Jones, Osho. She learned ways to lead. She learned the lies people wanted most desperately to believe. She learned the careful manipulations needed to keep herself separate from her followers, above them.
Madelyn Danekas traveled to India with a suitcase full of books, but Kali Magdalene returned. A self-made woman, the product of immaculate conception.
Madelyn Danekas’s mother was alive and well, in Burbank, California. Her bones had not been reduced to ash, the ash made into ink. She was always among the first to like Kali’s posts and videos, and she remained a recurring monthly donor to her daughter’s organization, no matter how often Kali claimed she was dead.
CHAPTER FIVE
The fry pan slammed down on the steel stovetop. JD twitched awake at the noise, eyes wide to the alien surrounds, brain struggling to catch up to his sensorium. He rolled over and felt the threading of a throw pillow rub against the side of his head. He sat upright on his mom’s couch, face to face with his reflection desaturated in the black glass of the TV hanging on the opposite wall—two days’ growth casting a dark shadow across his cheeks, faded old T-shirt loose around his neck. He pulled his jeans on as he stood. A sharp sizzle from the kitchen called to him like a siren song. He shuffled through, yawning.
It was a tiny kitchen by Hollywood suburban standards, but large for a single-bedroom apartment. A toaster and microwave were shoved into one corner, collecting dust behind a battered rice cooker. The cupboards were finished in a grainy white laminate, stained with old finger smudges that wouldn’t come off, no matter how many times Gaynor scrubbed at them. Gaynor stood at the stove in an old satin robe, staring intently at the bacon curling in the pan.
“Morning, Mom,” JD said.
She grunted in response, not bothering to look at him.
“What?” he asked. His brain chugged slowly toward a guess, dangerously undercaffeinated. “I didn’t steal