Hammers on Bone (Persons Non Grata, #1)

by Cassandra Khaw

The building in the distance, with its boneyard of chimneys, its cellblock windows, is like the corpse of a god that’s been left to rot, picked-over ribs swarming with overall-wearing insects.

I’m too old to be intimidated, but not old enough to be inoculated against a sense of righteous offense. The thing in his neck is a blasphemy, a mutagenic outrage of flesh, an insult to man and beast and all of us that came crawling out of the ocean before.

The noise becomes a whisper, a hiss, a celebration, a roar, a black surf breaking on the glaciers of an old, decaying world. It sutures itself into syllables, strings of sounds that could almost be called words if you’re feeling generous.

She looks up as he wrenches her forward. Up into eyes—there are so many of them, like constellations, like unclean galaxies—and more eyes, a nightmare of sclera and blue.

“You want something, bruv? You ask. You ask me like I’m a person. When I say no, you fuck off. What you do to someone’s head and what you do to their meat, it isn’t much different, you hear? You don’t take what you’re not given. Get me?”

You know how they say you never forget how to ride a bike? Magic’s like that. Deeper, even. The knowledge of it inks itself on the inside of your bones, as does the practice, the methodology of execution. You can’t unlearn it any more than you can unlearn the symbiosis of ventricle and aorta. I stroke the razor across my arm. Three deep welts: one for every god devoured, every world forgotten.

Anything, rattled the man that once lived in this skull, rags and bones and memory, but somehow still stubborn as capitalism.

Her existence is a protest, a rebellion, a clarion demand to bend the world into a better place. People like her either ride the space elevator to the constellations or get cut down in dark alleyways.

I’d gotten into the detective business to escape the deepwater blues, from the songs that squirm in your veins like worms. Sure, I’d go for an easy job, sometimes, ice a monster that had gotten too big for his bed. But this?

This close, all I want to do is rip tear bite cut expose the artery, flay the vein eat chew eat tear devour muscle, gobble up viscera, consume until there is nothing left, until meat subsumes the weight of millennia, the bone-beat longing for vengeance, the memory of— My nails dig into his skin, and then I breathe out. I’ve spent so long holding on to this form, so many years stubbornly human.

Night comes. Real night. Not just the chronological byproduct of Earth pirouetting around the sun, but a blackness that shoves the lizard brain nose first into the dirt and hisses for caution.

Images metastasize, oiling together like a watercolor painting gone to rot, as I crawl up, up— teeth and tongues and eyes, a thousand eyes, replicating without pattern, pustules of optic nerve dribbling into new maws, new sclera; invasive, furious, predatory, seeking to take take take take feast feast EAT—

Human anatomy surrenders to the pragmatism of combat. Muscles unbraid, sinews lengthen, even as veins become garrote and bones blade. In minutes, we’re viscera commanded by will, flayed tissue, tendon, and teeth.

I don’t remember who said it, but there’s an author out there who once wrote that we don’t need to kill our children’s monsters. Instead, what we need to do is show them that they can be killed.

None of what she’s saying connects. They’re facts, pieces of the truth. Without order or context, they might as well be a mad saint’s gibbering, or the vestiges of a dead man’s compassion.