Chapter One: Creatures of Scorn — Part 2

A Daughter’s Wrath

The knife spread skin, tendons, vein, and muscle, exposing internal organs to open air. Jake, having held the boy by his hair, now threw him face first to ground, ignoring the screams of pain, savoring the vision of blood. Soon the child would be too far in shock to scream, but if Jake had any concern for the boy’s survival, he didn’t express it. Rather, he stared momentarily at the viscous pool of red glistening in the artificial light set high by the side of the pitch and gravel road. Jake loved the rush of adrenaline as he moved in on his mark, now bathed in dying crimson, the air saturated with the sound and scent of his victim’s anguish. The evening was chill enough that the kidney came steaming from the cavity. Jake dropped the specialized chunk of flesh into a true zero storage case, freezing it instantly for transport. The child had been a random draw, a chance to make some quick cash, a fulfillment of a needful craving all at once. Now that the money had been made, Jake found himself quickly disenchanted with the scene. The child, after all, had gone silent. His next mark would not be so easy to take down; he had in fact been trailing her between side jobs for close to two weeks. His client had singled out his next strike, and though he had found her, he now had to choose the right time to move in for the swipe.

Jake stopped to wipe his hands on the boy’s shirt before walking to a drinking fountain. There, he rinsed his hands in iodine and alcohol, rinsed the blood from his face, and then turned away from the playground, heading toward the street. The boy had been playing alone at night, saving Jake the trouble of dispatching parents or friends. He opened a passage into the Snap, a dark place where space was crunched momentarily so individuals with the proper technology could travel between worlds. Known informally as benders, not all interplanetary travelers shared Jake’s lust for blood. Once safely in the dark embrace of the Snap, Jake considered his luck at having a chance to strike two targets in one day. Though he considered himself a predator, most viewed Jake as a parasite. Jake started his career as a tissue seller first as a side job and a hobby some thirty years before. When it brought him triple his legal income, he murdered his conscience and went freelance, slipping forever into the vicious underworld of illicit bender activity.

Jake specialized in small prey with young tissues, saving the surgeons the trouble of restoring longevity to the organs in question. His targets were rarely out of their teens, making his next mark out of character. Added to this was her current planet of residence, a world known for its passionless police enforced culture, a place he would normally not risk collection from. Sholm, a planet not too far distant from the one he’d just left, harbored many people with ruthless reputations. Being a man from a modern technological background, Jake had access to technology not generally heard of on Earth, and to a metaphysical art whose function was grounded in analog quantum computational processes. Jake chose the worst aspects of both metaphysical and concrete knowledge and technology, but in truth trusted neither disciplines. His stones, each rounded spheres with particular graphics etched deep into their surfaces, would be thrown as guidance before every kill. They would spin and swirl in the snap at different speeds and angles, drifting about, stone by stone, until their message could be relayed. His stones always told him something terrible would happen, and he would pay dearly for his decisions — always warned him that his own actions would cause him incredible suffering, while showing him enough hints of how to avoid them that, so long as he stayed extremely crafty, he could narrowly escape.

Jake learned to distrust the stones more so than any other technology he used. It felt to him like the stones would rather he just die. No matter how many times he was warned, he always managed to pull off the next job — always managed to escape from one more risky situation. This time, in the Snap, he cast the stones, watching them drift out in front of him one by one, like beads off of a broken string. The same warning felt somehow disparate to past readings, more severe and perhaps more unavoidable than others before it. He saw few if any of the hints of hope. Such warnings had been cast countless times before. He had always worked hard to change the outcome of the warning. Normally, he would always take precautions based on his readings, and those precautions would see him safely through the task. This time there would be little if any guidance — the stones were eerily obscure. Like all processes of technology and life, the stones it seemed, were failing him. He collected them one by one, considering his next target carefully.

With the homicide of his conscience, Jake had also killed any attachment to his own negative karma. He enjoyed his job considerably, caring nothing for the future his actions were inevitably weaving around him. To him, organ collection was a passion that few if any could fully comprehend. He especially liked collecting eyes, the thrill of blinding people filled him with an unnatural rush, an almost sexual lust. When hunting eyes, children made the best targets, and preying on them gave him an intense urge, arising from deep within the darkest corners of his mind, spreading to every aspect of his psyche. To steal away their innocent sight made him salivate, and after such jobs one would find him, if one were able to look, buying sex from the men and women who sold it on worlds where he would not be recognized for his horrible crimes. His favorite targets were children without homes, born to families of unattached tribes of humekind, who lived without a nation to protect them. Such people traveled from planet to planet, in search of day work, or as simple merchants or entertainers, selling their wares everyplace in the galaxy. Of course, street children without parents were the easiest targets. They were trapped on one planet, good for quick money, and when the client wasn’t particular about the appearance of the organ, as when one was building a biodroid from scraps and pieces, multiple targets could be hit over the course of a few brief hours.

The only outlet Jake found more pleasurable were jobs in which he was given a specific target. Though he found hunting targeted children less challenging than going after street children, the lust resultant of a successful harvest still sent him to any number of prostitutes whom he frequented when money allowed. Picked out of a genetic database that spanned over thirty worlds, target children were expensive, custom targets who matched people with money and power, but little patience. Jake constantly broke into and stole updated information from the database, keeping constant records so he could find just the right donor for his needs. Target children brought him good money; good enough that the risk of being captured while stealing databases from medical centers was something often ignored. Jake thought highly of himself in regards to his abilities when it came to stealing. A master of the Snap and of his own destiny, Jake used his modified bender suit to elude the police of several worlds with a wit expressing a level of genius the police had yet to out-calculate. Jake was one of the three most wanted criminals on the galactic community, and the most sought after by bounty hunters and law enforcement alike.