Page 155 of Decimation

“What the fuck is this?” The words tear from my throat. I am proud of how steady my voice sounds, even as my heart hammers against my ribs.

Ezekiel’s smile widens. He moves closer, his robes whispering against the stone, and I can smell him now; sandalwood and something darker, something that reminds me of old churches and older blood.

“You know what this is,” he says, his voice almost gentle. “You’ve been prepared for this day. Isaac prepared you.”

Isaac.

The name hits me like a fist to the stomach. His death felt like a liberation, like a chain finally breaking, but his lessons remain. They are carved into my bones, written in the scars that map my skin. And now, looking up at Ezekiel’s smiling face I realize that this, whatever this is, was always part of the plan.

“No,” I breathe. “No, I won’t…”

“You will.” Ezekiel’s voice hardens, the gentleness falling away like a mask. “You’ve been chosen, Leandra. You and these five women beside you. Tonight, you will become something greater than yourself. Tonight, you will ascend.”

He gestures, and the women move closer. They surround the stone slab, their veiled faces tilting down toward me, and I can see their eyes now; dark and glittering, pupils blown wide with something that might be devotion or more than likely are the results of drugs.

One of them reaches for me. I see the glint of metal in her hand, a needle, long and thin, filled with a liquid that glows faintly blue in the darkness.

“Don’t…” I start, but the word dies in my throat as the needle slides into my neck.

The pain is sharp and immediate, a bright point of fire that radiates outward through my veins. I gasp, my back arching off the stone, and then…then the world begins to change.

It starts as a warmth spreading through my chest, a heat that has nothing to do with the cold of the chamber. It moves through me like honey, slow and thick, loosening my muscles, softening the edges of my fear.

I feel my jaw go slack, feel my eyelids growing heavy. Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice is screaming that this is wrong, that I need to fight, that I need to…

But the voice is so far away now.

So small.

So unimportant.

The women begin to undress me. Their hands are cool against my heated skin, their fingers deft and practiced as they work at the ties of my shift. The fabric falls away in pieces, and I feel the cold air kiss my breasts, my stomach, the tender flesh of my inner thighs.

I should be ashamed.

I should be afraid.

But the drug has wrapped me in a cocoon of detachment, and I watch their hands move over my body as if from a great distance, as if the body they are touching belongs to someone else entirely.

And then the colours come.

My synaesthesia has always been a part of me, as natural to me as breathing. But this, this is different. This is overwhelming.

The chamber explodes into a riot of colour.

The women glow like stained glass windows come to life. One burns with a deep, pulsing violet. Devotion, I realize, or something close to it. Another shimmers with pale green, the colour of envy, of wanting. A third blazes with orange, bright and hungry, the colour of lust barely contained.

And Ezekiel, Ezekiel is darkness. Not black, not the absence of colour, but something deeper. Something that swallows light whole and gives nothing back. He stands at the edge of my vision, and around him the colours of the other women bend and warp, drawn toward him like planets orbiting a dying star.

I try to speak, but my tongue is thick and useless in my mouth. The sounds that escape me are not words but moans, low and animal, and I feel my hips shift against the stone, my body responding to the drug in ways my mind cannot control.

“That’s it,” Ezekiel murmurs, his voice sliding through the darkness like oil on water. “Let it take you. Let it open you.”

The women begin to touch me.

Their hands are everywhere at once; on my breasts, my stomach, my thighs. Fingers trace the scars that map my skin, following the silver lines like roads on a map. A mouth closes over my nipple, and I cry out, the sensation shooting through me like lightning. Another mouth presses against my inner thigh, teeth grazing the sensitive flesh, and my hips buck involuntarily.

I am drowning in sensation. Lost in it. The drug has stripped away every barrier, every defence. Leaving me raw, exposed, and achingly sensitive.