“Dark night!” J.B. turned away from her and stared at the blank wall. In all the time that Krysty had known the Armorer, she had rarely seen him so upset.
“She’ll be all right. Worst that can happen is that they catch her and she explains she got lost. And they’ll just bring her back here.”
“You think so, do you, Krysty? Your mutie powers of seeing tell you that, do they?”
“Hey, back off, J.B.,” she said, feeling her own anger rise, covering her anxiety about Ryan.
“Back off!” He threw the hat against the door. “She shouldn’t have been so triple stupe as to go off and do that, and you” he pointed accusingly at Krysty, “should’ve had more sense than to let her go.”
Jak had been standing by the window. “Cool out,” he said. “Shouldn’t have done it. Shouldn’t come to harm. No reason think danger.”
“I just hope you’re right, Jak. Rad blast it, but I hope you’re right.”
A WHITE CARD WAS FITTED into a slot outside each of the cells. Cells . There was no way that Mildred could avoid that word in her mind. There was a long string of coded letters and numbers on each card, presumably giving information about each of the inhabitants.
Mildred reached up her left hand, swallowing hard and taking a long, slow breath, and slid open the first of the rectangular ob slits. She looked in, closed her eyes, then looked again.
The cell was about eight feet square with a toilet facility in one corner, along with a small basin and faucet. There was a fold-down table on the left-hand wall, clipped upright. A white steel bed covered in a white plasticized mattress was against the far wall. There was no window in the cell, just a small vent slit high above the bed.
The overhead light was relentlessly bright, revealing the naked figure that lay on the mattress.
At first sight Mildred thought it was a hermaphrodite, until she saw that it had no sexual organs at all. There was simply smooth skin at the junction of the thighs. No body hair was visible, and none grew on top of the rounded skull. As though it sensed her presence, the thing turned its face toward her. The eyes were covered with a caul of lacelike skin, the nose was missing and the mouth was a lipless circle of dribbling flesh.
The arms were absent, but Mildred could see that there was a line of individual, dwarfish fingers, running from the shoulder, along the side of the body, almost to the hip. They moved in a strange, hypnotic rippling rhythm, like the cilia in the respiratory tract.
Very slowly, Mildred closed the grille and moved to the next door.
The second cell was empty.
The third one wasn’t.
It was a tiny person, no more than one quarter of normal size. As far as Mildred could see, through the slotted grille, it was male, as there was some dark curly hair around the mouth. Like the thing in the first cell, this one also lacked eyes.
At the faint sound of the inspection vent opening, it turned its little face toward the door. The mouth opened, and a long forked tongue slid out, seeming to taste the air.
For a moment it stayed frozen, then it hurled itself at the door with a fearsome ferocity. Mildred recoiled instinctively, though there was no way the creature could reach her through a half inch of tempered steel. From the soft thud, she guessed that the guards were aware of the habits of their prisoner and had padded the inside of the door.
She could hear it leaping up and down, its small hands clawing at the grille, a birdlike chirruping coming from the toothless mouth.
With a shudder of horror, Mildred slid the grille shut and moved to the last cell on that side.
Lying on the mattress was half a woman, naked, fast asleep. But it wasn’t that she’d simply lost her legs. It was as if a giant guillotine had dropped on her with unimaginable force, cutting her diagonally, from just below her left armpit through her groin to the top of her right thigh.