Page 38 of Hellbound

Tori shook her fluffy golden head. “What’s an aberration?”

“A mind fuck. That’s all I know.” Like the paintings. Marian eyed the other diver warily. “Yo, Aisling. You going to stay the fuck away or what?”

No response. Aisling kept staring at the orb pulsing its strange yellow light.

“Let’s go,” Marian waved Tori down the path. “We’re close. I can feel it.”

“You’re going to leave her like that?”

Marian threw a scowl over her shoulder.

“What do you want me to do? She’s a poacher.”

“But …”

The traveler’s voice was so pleading, so full of disbelief that Marian’s conscience roared to life with surprising intensity. She let out a loud groan. “Fine, fine.”

Marian took a few steps toward the other diver. “Hey, idiot! Don’t look at that!”

The diver swayed against the barrier, blinking once, then twice. When her eyes next opened, they were milky white.

“Feels … so good,” came her drowsy voice. “Feels like …”

Aisling’s feet left the ground as she began to float toward the sphere. Marian’s eyes widened.

“Oh my god,” Tori gasped, her own eyes taking up half her face. “What’s happening to her?”

Marian didn’t know, but the sight of diver muttering and levitating sent a cold spike of fear through her. The only thing missing was a fucked-up clown holding a red ballon.

Without thinking, she dashed across the ledge toward Aisling.

“Aisling! Snap out of it! Hey! Hey!”

“Feels like …” Aisling slurred as her shins bumped the edge of the barrier. She drifted higher, closer to the orb, circling it slowly like she’d entered its orbit. “Like goin’ home.”

Tori raced up beside Marian and reached across the barrier, but Aisling was too far away now. She spun faster.

Marian’s heart lodged in her throat as dread washed over her as she watched Aisling spin even faster. She had no idea why she no longer felt the sphere’s pull, but she couldn’t look away from the diver spinning round and round.

Then Aisling’s right arm snapped like a twig.

“Oh shit,” Marian muttered.

Tori’s horrified gasp came at the same moment Aisling erupted in a symphony of godawful screams. Her skin peeled away, exposing muscle. One by one, those fibers plucked away, revealing bloody bone. New limbs sprouted from dispersing tissues, then broke down. Something silver ignited in her chest.

Like a magnesium burn, too bright to behold. Her screams grew more ragged, less human and more animal as her body broke down.

Until all at once, Aisling dissolved away, and all that remained were the echoes of her screams. Then silence, and a ring of dust circling the siren sun overhead.

If there’d been anything in Marian’s belly, she’d have thrown it up right there.

“What … what happened?” Tori asked, her voice quaking. “Where did she go?”

Marian swallowed thickly. She had no idea; she’d heard of divers surviving horrors like these. So long as the Remnant didn’t take you, there was hope. What remained of a diver’s mind on revival was another matter entirely.

Marian shoved past Tori and hurried back down the path as she tried to push the image of Aisling’s dissolution from her mind.

“I don’t know. Keep moving.”