the touch of her hand

His hands move like birds.

You sit in a cell and listen.

"I wish...I wish we knew what happened to him. If he's alive."

"Do you?"

His eyes are blue, like his shirt, like the sea. He makes you remember the sea and salt. His voice tastes like salt.

"No, no, I really don't. I don't want to know he's dead. I don't want to think he's dead, that he died alone, sucked dry by some Wraith or wrapped up and gone mad in one of those cocoons, waiting to end like this."

He looks at you and you think he knows what you've forgotten. Your lips taste of salt when you bite hard enough.

"Do you think they activated the self-destruct when the shield failed?"

"Radek and I rigged a dead man's switch. Elizabeth had it."

His hands move, and then still, like dying birds.


You think you must have been in the cocoon a very long time, since before the hungry ones last slept.

They speak of the city of the ancestors. They speak of war with the hungry ones, but not of winning.

A very long time, but nothing has changed.


Later, you watch as the hungry ones take him away.

"Don't," he says when the other man would have offered himself in his place. His mouth slips into a strange, down turned smile. "Don't. I'm sick of the accommodations anyway."

He walks between the drones, untouched.

The other man watches, his hands clenched like stones, his eyes like stones.


Sleep is a dream in the cocoons.

You drift while time unravels every memory and you are slowly unmade, numb and mindless.


He watches the door.

The hungry ones never bring anyone back.

You think he knows this.


Your mouth is full of dead screams.

They are deaf to you.


They come for you next. They come for the dark-eyed man and two others. This is different, you think, but you don't know or don't remember. It will mean nothing, because nothing you learn will ever help you or anyone else.

You walk steadily. At least the hungry ones don't touch you if you do that.


She holds out her hand and he takes it.

You wonder how anyone could, but he is without hesitation. She leads him forward. He is tall and human and when he steps out of the shadows, the man beside you gasps.

A white scar traces over his brow and cheek, curling bone lines carved into his pale skin.

She traces the mark with a talon and it bleeds. His blood is not so bright as her hair, her hair that hangs to the floor in a crimson curtain. He leans into the cut, his eyes closed. Her fingers comb through his dark, dark hair as though he pleases her.

Her hand slips over the side of his face and stops. The spiracles below her eyes flare open. He doesn't scream, doesn't close the eye you can see, but his head tips back and to the side, a surrender display, giving the long curve of his throat to a predator. The scar, you understand, is a mark; she has fed on him before.

She feeds now and you watch as his face hollows, but she lifts her hand away before the thread snaps and he still stands, empty and silent, no more than another shadow. She strokes a crepe paper cheekbone with the same fondness you once showed a pet.

"Which ones?" she asks.

Her voice is dust and ages and darkness, a chorus, a multitude.

The man beside you gags.

His voice is a whisper, empty as his eyes. "None."

She laughs and shakes her head, hair waving like red sea weed. "Forever."

You watch as she touches one of your weeping fellow sacrifices, watch as she takes from him much more than she took from her slave, as she takes all, until he is a silent husk. Without pause, she feeds again, leaving a second victim crumpled.

The slave watches, too. He doesn't protest again, if that was a protest.

You think she will kill him now, when she returns to him, but this time she doesn't feed.

"I know you hunger," she says. He nods and she sets her hand on his chest this time. "Take."

His head falls back and he sways. The smile on his face as the stolen years of another life fill him is ecstatic, erotic, secret.

The man beside you whispers a name, his voice like cracked stones. The slave turns his head. You see recognition in his eyes.

Something moves through those eyes you think would be hazel in the sun. Here there is only darkness. It swallows you all. She brushes his lips with a finger and he kisses it.

"Again?" she says.

"Again."

Beside you, one more protest. "Colonel—"

"Forever," she promises him.

And they unspool the thread of your life, unwind your lost days and nights, until you are nothing when it tears away at the end.

She holds out her hand and he takes it.