The one with the mustache, called Neal, ran a hand under Lori’s disarranged skirt, giggling as she wriggled at the touch, “Warm and wet, Alain. And yellow as a possum’s guts.”
Krysty had tried. “You do that one more time, you sack of cancerous pus, and I’ll snake on you to the fucking baron.”
“He don’t care,” said Alain, nibbing a hand thoughtfully over his rough chin. “Long as we don’t do no mortal hurt. He don’t give a fuck.”
“Why not do yellow first? Then fuck red in the mouth; and see how she likes it.”
“I’d bite it off, if it’s big enough to get my teeth in.”
Both guards laughed. “First off, Alain here’d push the muzzle of his old blaster half a foot up your fucking nose, bitch. You even set your fucking teeth in me, and they’ll be wiping your fucking brains off the ceiling.”
It crossed Krysty’s mind to let them. Lie there and blank her mind clear of what was happening to her. She could do it. She’d done it before, back in Mocsin with the sec boss there. Kurt Strasser. Before she’d met Ryan Cawdor.
But there was Lori.
The girl, despite her bizarre upbringing, had an oddly unflawed innocence. If Krysty lay there and allowed these two brutish pigs to do what they wanted, she knew they wouldn’t stop at a simple fucking. That would just set them on other ways of humiliating and hurting them both.
“Gaia, help me,” she whispered, closing her eyes, trying to relax and draw on the immense power of the Earth Mother. Part of Krysty’s mind told her this would be futile. But she recalled what Ryan had said about leaving a place a tad cleaner than when you came to it. That she would do.
The cords that bound her ankles and wrists were made of waxed whipcord, tied so tightly that there was blood seeping from under the nails of her fingers and toes, burst from the swollen flesh. The pain had been easy to control, but she worried that she might not be able to function well in a fight.
“Help me, help me, help me,” she repeated, drawing on the strength in the way that her dead mother had taught her, way back in Harmony.
“Be real good fucking this. Better’n that ‘fayette slut with boils on her tits,” sniggered Neal.
“Yeah.”
“Me first.”
“Sure. Like my bun well buttered,” cackled the younger man.
Drool hung from the corner of Alain’s narrow mouth. He put his head back and laughed again, and Krysty saw the way the cords of his neck stood out like strips of thin iron.
The girl took a deep breath, her mind wandering back unbidden to a fine summer’s day in Harmony. She would have been around sixteen years old then and filled with devilment. Carl Lanning, a fresh-cheeked boy who would pluck her cherry, was the son of the blacksmith, Herb. The lad had teased Krysty about her powers, challenging her to show him. The forge had been deserted; the fires had slumbered with a dull red glow, and the hammers were ranged on the walls. She’d picked up a freshly hammered iron shoe, the holes rough-edged and silver. “Go, Krysty,” Carl had encouraged her, watching. He’d fallen silent, unbelieving as she’d gripped the horseshoe, putting a surge of incredible strength into her hands and wrists. She twisted it as though it was saltwater taffy, then, dropped it to the floor of the forge where it rang like a bell.
Peter Maritza and Uncle Tyas McNann had learned of her trick, taken her into the smoke-scented parlor and sat her beneath the framed picture of a racehorse called Skyrocket. They had taken her to task for abusing her unique gift, warning her she must use it sparingly and wisely. “Only when you must girl,” Peter had said.
Now, watching the two men prepare for their corrupt sexual pleasures with the helpless Lori, Krysty’s lips moved.
“Now I must, Uncle.”
Both men had their backs to her, fumbling with their trousers, their blasters laid on the stone by their feet.
“Gaia, help me,” whispered Krysty, feeling her energy increasing until it seemed as though her body might burst with it.