The Bleed: Book 2: RAPTURE David Moody (the red fox clan txt) 📖

“My what?”

“Ancient ad for frozen waffles, apparently. I never ate one, saw it in a magazine once.”

“Why would anyone want to eat a frozen thing?”

“Well, it’s not, I mean, you gotta put it in a…you know what? Doesn’t matter. We’re veering off-topic here. Your eyes give you a very cat-like look, like maybe you’re part of the Thundercats gang, know them?”

“Maddie, most of what you say sounds like a foreign language. What are Thundercats?”

“You know, Thunder, Thunder Thundercats hooooo!” Maddie sang.

“Quite honestly, I haven’t the faintest notion what you mean.”

“Probably should have realized that; doesn’t sound like your world was much past the Medieval stage. You were pretty lucky, not having televisions.”

Thistle decided not to further engage with what sounded decidedly alien. “My eyes are this color because I am a half-god,” she pronounced.

“Hmmm,” was all Maddie replied.

“Hmmm? You have nothing more to say on the subject? No animosity?”

“Animosity? Like some strange sort of god-ism? I said hmm because you are the second person just today that has told me they are a half-god. I have gone my entire goddamned life without ever hearing of such a thing, and now I’m being inundated. I think I’d rather be hit in the face with multiple pies, it’s less…bracing.” Maddie had to search for a fitting word.

“Jenny is a half-god?”

“So she says.”

“You do not believe her?”

“Where and when I come from, God, or gods, in general, have mostly been discredited as merely stories. Nothing more than fairy tales, really.”

“Do you perhaps think that maybe that is the reason for the state of your world?”

“I, umm, never thought about it much, or at all, really. It was all I could do to survive.”

“If she could operate the god-machine, then it makes sense she was a halfsie. I can’t believe I just uttered that foul word.”

“Halfsie?”

“It is derogatory, where I come from.”

“It’s my understanding you can call yourself whatever you want to; it’s only when an outsider does it that it becomes an issue. Marines could call each other ‘crayon eaters’ all day long, but woe be to those silly bastards on the outside that called them the very same thing. Right, sorry,” Maddie said as she looked at Thistle. “You have no idea what I just said.”

Thistle nodded.

“I don’t get it, Thistle. I’m not a half-god, more like Irish and maybe a little English, but no otherworldly elements that I know of, and I can kind of make the god-machine, or god-tech as we called it, work. “

“This Jenny, did she always know she was a halfsie?”

“No, it sounded like she’d just found out and was pretty confused about it and maybe even doubting if it were true, though, I guess you could say she’d been pretty much proofing the pudding. I have got to work on my use of language with you.”

“We have pudding on my world. Is it possible that, perhaps, you could just be finding this out yourself? I mean about you, personally? Who you are?”

“My parents were Bethany and Patrick McMahon. The only thing the gods blessed me with was a certain talent with a wrench and this magnificent head of hair.” Maddie pointed to her red tresses.

“Okay Maddie, who may or may not be a halfsie, I need you to bring me to this clockwork room, I need to find my brother; we stepped through the portal together, we were holding hands, he has to be here.”

Maddie had no idea how the portal worked. It made sense, though, if they went together, they should have stayed together, but who could tell? There were no manuals with the god-tech, and Maddie sourly figured that even if they did have one, it would be written in the gods’ version of Chinese. The mechanism was softly glowing, as if it were in the process of cooling down after having worked particularly hard. All it needed was the pops and pings of a machine and it would nearly be normal, in Maddie’s eyes, anyway. From where they stood upon the small raised platform, they could see the entire room. They were alone.

“How did you come to be in the hallway?” Maddie asked, wondering if Thistle had been tossed out errantly, and that perhaps her brother was in some other nearby place.

“I don’t remember much. It was bright; I had an arm up against my eyes to shield the worst of it, I stumbled a few steps, and that’s when you found me.”

“You held his hand the entire time?”

“It felt that way; I never sensed we’d lost our grip.”

“Let’s see if we can find him, and if that’s the case, there are a few people I’d like to get a hold of myself.” She was, of course, thinking of Sam, Derrick, Tyler, and to a much lesser degree, Sandra, the people she had been with on the moon. “Any idea of what to do?”

Thistle shook her head.

“Do you remember what you did last time?”

“We were looking for an escape from the monsters that chased us. You went through a portal twice now. What did you do?”

“That’s a good question. The second time Jenny was at the controls, the first time, no one was.”

“You sure about that?” Thistle had a small smile splayed across her face.

20

THE MOON

“I am not a god, not a half one, not a demi one, not any kind of one!” Maddie was angry.

“You make it sound like it’s a bad thing,” Thistle replied.

“I don’t know what kind of thing it is, other than I want no part of it. Now can we just try and find the people we’re looking for and drop the rest of this?”

“Lead on, your grace.”

“I will knock you into whatever you call the third day of your week.” A soft glow began to shimmer as Maddie neared the machine, a hum joined it as Thistle approached.

“I don’t know what to do,” Thistle said as she gazed upon the wondrous creation.

“Just think of your brother, the