****

The cafeterias here were just as empty as the ones underneath, but they managed to scavenge a few canisters filled with fruit and others with something called “Valhalla Sausages.” Letho had never had this particular Fulcrum delicacy before, but the Tarsi seemed quite excited about them. Apparently they were big fans of highly processed synthetic meat particles molded into finger-length sausages floating in a sea of brine and preservatives. Letho tossed a can to Maka, who grinned like a child. Bayorn stopped in his tracks, turned to face Letho, and gave a grunt, a little smile on his face as well. Letho tossed his other can of Valhalla Sausages to Bayorn, a little forlorn as he watched the Tarsi pluck it from the air. Calories had become a precious commodity.

“Hey guys, save one for me, all right?” he called to Bayorn and Maka. They didn’t answer, making no promises.

A rustling and clanging from a nearby kitchen area drew Letho’s attention. Checking it out, he found Deacon lying on the floor, half buried in pots and pans.

“Hey man, you all right?” Letho asked.

“Yeah,” Deacon said as he struggled to his feet. He favored Letho with a drunken smile and staggered a little. Sweat glistened on his forehead, and his skin had taken on a sickly pallor.

Thresha!

Thresha and that hungry atrocity that lived in her belly. The tentacles, the barbs like organic hypodermic needles.

“Let me look at you,” Letho said. He grabbed Deacon by the shoulders, careful of how much force he applied, but even so he was taken aback by how little resistance Deacon offered. Letho grasped Deacon’s chin and turned his head up and to the side, examining his friend’s neck.

“What the hell are you doing?” Deacon said, slapping at Letho’s arms. He might as well have been slapping at the gravity that held the Fulcrum station in orbit.

“Just, uh, checking something.”

“Go check it on someone else, buddy. Deacon Shipke don’t fly that way.”

“Whatever. What happened?” Letho asked.

“I don’t know. I was looking for some plates and stuff that we can take with us—you know, knives and forks, that kind of stuff. I guess I just blacked out for a second. I must be running on fumes.” Deacon shrugged.

“Here, take these,” Letho said, offering Deacon a can of the Valhalla Sausages from a cargo pocket on his coveralls. “Don’t tell the Tarsi I gave these to you. Eat them now. We need you to get us to Eursus in one piece.”

“Oh, Letho, a can of Valhalla Sausages. You really know the way to a guy’s heart.”

“Yeah. Don’t ever say I never gave you anything. Have you seen Thresha?”

“Not in the last ten minutes or so.”

Concern filled Letho. It wasn’t safe for Thresha to be unguarded.

Is that what you call it, Letho? Guarding her?

Hoping to find Thresha quickly, Letho slipped away from the group. It wasn’t difficult, as everyone else was absorbed with the task of scavenging. Letho imagined that the Tarsi probably enjoyed it—he remembered the repurposed items and cobbled-together instruments he had seen in the underneath. Fintran’s coffin, a beautiful vessel fit for a king, had been made from actual garbage.

As Letho stole away, his footfalls were hidden by the clatter of Tarsi digging through drawers and cabinets, tossing items into large piles on the floor. Once he was alone, his anxiety began to rise. Perhaps Thresha was trying to escape, trying to get word back to Alastor? He wondered what he would do if he caught her in the act of betrayal. Would he kill her? More importantly, could he?

Yes. You could. It would be easy.

It took only a minute or two to find her; and when he did, he didn’t like what he saw. At all.

Thresha was crouched in the center of a shadowy storage room. She was holding some small thing, a thing that his brain attempted to identify, but couldn’t. All the Eursan words at Letho’s disposal failed to describe his dawning horror and anger. It threatened to manifest in a flare of energy that would split him into atoms. He shouted out in Tarsi, choosing a word that implied carnal knowledge of another being, and Thresha’s shoulders flinched, but she remained rooted where she was. Letho, finally coming down from the shock of what he saw, began to piece together the reality before him.

It was a cat—or a ramshackle collection of skin and ribs that had once been a cat. Someone’s pet, perhaps. More likely it was a generation or two removed from domestication. It did not struggle, even as the abominable tubes that snaked out from Thresha’s gaping throat continued to drain the emaciated body.

“What the hell are you doing?” Letho asked.

But he knew exactly what she was doing. It was what Alastor had done to Letho’s former supervisor, Baran Gall, on the steps of the civil services building of this very Fulcrum station. He had seen it before, but it was so fundamentally obscene to him, so antithetical to his understanding of life and how organisms should function, that he found it just as revolting now as he had the first time he witnessed it.

Thresha tossed the lifeless carcass aside just as one would discard an empty ration packet. Letho watched in mingled awe and disgust as Thresha’s feeding tubes slid back into her mouth, entwining and compacting themselves into a reasonable facsimile of a human tongue. The dry sounds her jaw made as it snapped back into its normal position made Letho’s stomach sour.

Thresha regarded him with a lusty gaze, and his hand went to the pistol at his waist. Then she snapped back, her eyes filling with the antipathy that Letho had begun to regard as her default facial expression.

“I was hungry,” Thresha said.

She eyed Letho’s left hand, which still rested on the butt of his semi-auto. Letho didn’t like her posture, and decided to keep his hand there. Neither of them moved, sizing each other up with the cool eyes of gunslingers. They stayed like that for a moment, and then finally Thresha wiped her face, and her body relaxed a little. Letho dropped his hand to his side. The silence was an unbearable weight upon both of them.

“Well, say something,” Thresha said.

“You want me to say something? After what I just saw you do?”

“I told you: I was hungry. I have to eat too, you know. Would you rather me attack your buddy Deacon? Or one of the slave bears?”

“Can’t you just eat normal food?”

“It doesn’t work that way, ass. The Mendraga condition changes your entire body. I don’t eat, piss, shit, or sleep. I don’t even think I have a stomach anymore.”

“That’s disgusting,” Letho said.

“Yeah, well, thanks for being so sympathetic. I’m not exactly ecstatic about it, you know. If I had known what was going to happen, I probably wouldn’t have accepted Alastor’s little gift. He’s…” She paused. “… rather persuasive. What he promised versus what it’s actually like…”

She fell quiet, her hand absently going to her belly.

A tumor. Or a fetus.

“Aw, man, don’t get upset. I’m sorry. I’m just trying to figure this whole thing out.”

“Well, when you get it all figured out, let me know what the plan is, okay? I’m dying to know what your strategy is.”

“You don’t have to be such a jerk all the time, you know,” Letho said. “I’m doing the best I can.”

“Great! That’s just great. I hope your best is good enough, because if I know Alastor as well as I think I do, things are going to be really bad on Eursus. I hope you’re prepared for that.”

Letho didn’t reply. He stared at the floor, searching for some sort of response, but found none.

“I didn’t ask for this, you know,” he said at last. “At least you had a choice.”

“Yeah, kidnapped by Mendraga and having to choose between being food or becoming one of them. Those were good options for me, huh, Letho?”

“I would have chosen death. I would rather die than become a Mendraga.”