The Surrogate’s Blade
He leads us through a final arch, onto a gallery that runs along the inside of an enormous vertical shaft, and he stops, and he lets us look, because he is proud, because to him nothing here needs hiding.
The shaft goes down farther than the eye follows and up farther than the light reaches, and its walls are not walls. They are racks.
Tier upon tier upon tier of them, curving away around the shaft and down into the blue glow, and in each rack, lit softly from within, stands a tank, and in each tank floats a person. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands.
Suspended in pale fluid, eyes closed, perfectly still, perfectly tended, each one wearing the same banked silver under the skin that I wear
Bab Populer