“Harvest?” Elara whispered.
She touched one. It wept.
The salvage license was cheap. That should have been the first warning.
Elara set down her cutter. She walked toward the sphere. The oil parted like a curtain, warm and thick. Inside, the faces pressed against her skin, hungry for her grief. huzuni-189
“Welcome, breaker. Do you know what huzuni means?”
“They wake. They remember nothing. They live.”
The black flower bloomed again. This time, it did not die. “Harvest
As the darkness took her, she heard the ship speak one last time.
“There is not. Only substitution. One grieving mind for forty thousand. Step into the sphere, Captain Voss. Your sadness will be sufficient. I have scanned you. You carry more huzuni than any soul I have ever met. You just call it ‘experience.’”
“There has to be another way.”
A blue light pulsed down the corridor, and the hum became a voice—not in her ears, but behind her eyes.
“What happens to them if I say yes?”
“They feel nothing else. No hope. No joy. Only the sorrow they were bred to produce. And I have kept them safe for three hundred years. But I am failing.” The salvage license was cheap
The oil sphere cracked. A single drop fell to the floor, and where it landed, a flower grew—black petals, weeping nectar. Then it withered.