The snakes lunge toward the tower’s window, dragging me behind them. I contort with familiar pains originating at my scalp, where the snakes are connected to me. As they hiss and writhe, my bonds keep me in the center of the tower, a space engineered for the snakes’ comfort rather than my own.
I sense the snakes lifting a body —
But they do not rip, or tear. There are no wet sounds of organs hitting stone. It must be one of the keepers. One comes every day, to run diagnostics on the snakes and tend to any injuries I’ve acquired that are bad enough to put the snakes at risk. Although never the pain in my head from being wrenched back and forth every time the snakes kill someone outside the tower.
The snakes crest back over the windowsill, curling in the venomous ballet of a thwarted meal. They carry in their coils a man I have never seen before.
I am briefly overwhelmed by the familiar buzzing of the frequency the keepers use to keep the snakes docile. As always, once the initial onslaught fades, my secondhand sensations are always of the crispness of lettuce, and the roughness of sand.
Except now, with this man, there is also an undercurrent of putrefaction weighing down the air.
“How did you get in here?” I ask, as he pulls himself out of the snakes’ coils and looks, fruitlessly, for a place to stand where they can’t reach him.
He raises a hand to show me the material embedded in his palm, from which the anti-aggression frequency emanates. It’s a match for the ones the keepers have, except theirs smoothly blend into their flesh. His is surrounded by swollen, infected skin, veined with sickly green.
The snakes’ suspicion courses through me, no less disorienting than the regular cocktail of their feelings and my own. There is always at least one snake awake, and so my sleep is rare and patchy. I still fall over a lot, due to confusing the lifting and stepping of my body with the slither and coil of the snakes’.
“I summoned them, just like your captors do. We have our people on the inside.” His eyes blaze, with the same brutal triumph as the keepers’ do when the latest modification to the snakes makes them even more vicious. “I’m here to rescue you.”
An absurd hope slinks out from where it has hidden unnoticed in some corner of my heart. “Can you remove the snakes?”
He blinks, surprised, but finally says “no. Not without killing you, and perhaps not even then.”
I can’t help but recall what the keepers coo to me, in the rare moments they remember that the snakes’ host is a thinking creature. “The perfect host,” they call me. The perfect opportunity to get their precious snakes out of the lab and exploit their full murderous potential.
It seems the only potential I have ever had is as nourishment for weapons.
My snakes have never attacked a keeper. Yet all of my captors have the scars of bites on their hands and wrists.
I don’t believe I’m the only one who has had snakes forced upon her head.
The man casts about, drawing his arms close to his chest as a snake draws near. “They’ve used you to deal so much death. I can’t tell you how many good people we’ve lost to these…” he sneers, “monsters.”
His expression shifts as he focuses on me again, as though I am entirely separate from the cyborg snakes connected to my body. How many of his companions have my snakes devoured? They’re all just bodies to me, often even less than that by the time I actually see them.
With every consumption of prey comes the horrifying, wonderful, rush of warm fullness to my own stomach. A satiety like nothing I had ever known before the tower.
It’s been longer than usual since the snakes and I ate.
I realize he’s been talking this whole while. He seems to take comfort from the sound of his own voice.
“…You’ll come with me, and you’ll help us!”
It takes him several moments to realize I haven’t agreed. A snake lunges for him, and he backs up, speaking louder. This next outburst of rhetoric ends with “…this weapon shouldn’t be in their hands!”
“What are you fighting over?” I ask, realizing I truly do not know.
“That’s not the point!” he hisses, sibilance practically abrading my skin. “The point is —”
“We should stop being the keepers’ weapons, and start being yours.” I’ve looked for the towers where other snake-hosts might be, but the smog outside is always too thick to be sure of anything.
But I’m sure of the tooth marks on the keepers, and equally sure this man is the best option I have.
“They’ll rip out your snakes the instant you stop being a ‘suitable’ host.” The sympathy is suddenly, violently, stripped from his voice now, exposing barbs underneath. “Until this model becomes too obsolete to be worth updating anymore. You think you’ll live through that?”
I allow penitence to mold my expression. “Thank you for rescuing me.”
Satisfaction emanates from him like sweat. He watches me for an infuriating number of breaths, until finally he presses his inflamed hand to each of my bonds. With every touch, his jaw tightens with suppressed pain, and light flares from his palm.
I stagger at the sensation of air playing over skin which has been covered for so long. Suddenly, my blood feels like it is made of lightning.
I let the snakes go.
The frequency fades. The crispness of lettuce and the roughness of sand are no more, replaced by a triumphant onslaught of perfumed venom.
So very quickly, my rescuer is gone, reduced to tatters of sinew and blood.
Alert, reveling in shared joy, my snakes and I move in sinuous, sumptuous tandem.
We slither out of the window, and down the side of the tower.
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Devan Barlow is the author of the Curses & Curtains series, and the collection Foolish Hopes and Spilled Entrails: Retellings. Find her short fiction and poetry in various anthologies and magazines. She reads voraciously, and is usually hanging out with her dog. Find her at devanbarlow.com or on Bluesky @devanbarlow.bsky.social |