Saturn's Children

The white-hot glare is flickering faster now, as my overloaded eye responds to the slight dimming. I blink, trying to reduce the amount of light entering my pupils, and I’m rewarded by a hazy eyelash-obscured view. I’m lying on a metal rail, one of a group of bars lying parallel to one another. My head casts a long shadow across the nearest one. I must be on the surface, and my head is turned away from the setting sun. The craggy edge of a crater looms to the left of the rails. To the right, there’s a boulder-strewn plain. I tense and strain, testing my bonds. I know what they’ve done to me now, and it’s not fu

It’s getting darker. The heat beating on the back of my head is begi

Alright, smarty-pants, I think irritably, you get me out of this!

Something moves in the knife-edged shadows near the tracks. I roll my eyes in its direction, trying to ignore the whiteout. Who are you? Stone’s witness, here to watch me die?

I have a sudden intuition. Let me handle this, says a certainty bubbling up from the back of my head. I’m not sure whose memory it is, but she feels almost happy. I let go, and everything slides into place.

I concentrate on my chromatophores, tweaking the ones opposite the solar inferno away from their default reflectivity. I can mess with my texture and color, tune my skin from pink goo softness to refraction-grating scales. As a brief experiment I roughen the skin on my wrists and grate at my bonds with denticles of silicon; but there’s not enough freedom of movement to get anywhere — I’ll never cut those ties in time. A shame, but Stone’s vengeful sibs aren’t that stupid. So I work on my skin texture some more. Refraction. What I’m about to try is fiddly work, and if I slip from the mirror finish too soon, I’ll overheat badly, maybe cook myself. Diffract, diffract. Reddening my skin, roughening…

The thing in the shadows moves, a curious rippling darkness against the penumbral background. I flex my back and try to turn my head farther, ignoring the tearing pain in my scalp. “Help,” I yell as loudly as I can in electrospeak. I can feel the heat licking around the edges of my mirror-finished back, warming my face as the diffractive spines sprouting from my chromatophores bend the solar backlight around me. I must look like a black silhouette of a burning woman, surrounded by a ruby red border. I tense, and force my spines to lie flat. Then I tense the other way, sticking them upright. A flashing ruby red border, that’s what I want. The only color in this stark, black-and-white landscape. Pay attention to me!

The track hums beneath my cheek as I flare and fade, flare and fade. The barely visible thing snuffles around the sleeper ties, then turns toward me, and I have a nagging feeling that I’ve seen it before. It? Him. “Help!” I shriek, but all that comes out is a whisper. The track hums again as Ci

The thing in the shadows stands up and waggles its proboscis in my direction. It begins to walk, very deliberately, away from me. I flash my diffraction silhouette desperately, and it pauses for a moment — then rises on a puff of rocket-disturbed dust and zips away toward the onrolling city.

“Don’t leave me here,” I wail, overwhelmed by a sudden bleak stab of horror. (For some reason part of me expected that thing — whoever, whatever, it is — to rescue me. And now that part of me feels betrayed.) I can see what’s going to happen, as if in a theater of gore — the spectacle of my demise. Here I am, tied across three tracks, my head anchored to the northernmost one by my own hair. Here comes Ci

Stop whining and pull yourself together, part of me warns grimly. The sunlight is already dimming: I can see stars smeared across the sky behind the city. You’ve got about three minutes of sunlight left, then twelve minutes until it’s over. Which is more important: your hair or your life?

My hair?

I blink at the sudden realization. If my feet were free I’d kick myself in the ass: I’m a fool! There may not be enough time…

I have a full head of long ruby red hair, one of my least unfashionable qualities. It grows from an array of extrusion follicles in my scalp and falls halfway down my back when I wear it loose. The aristo assassins used my own braids to tie my head across the track — they’ve knotted them in two thick hanks under the rail, and I’m not strong enough to yank my own scalp off. But if I grow it…

Well, yes. I force my scalp into activity, steeling myself against the crawling, chilly itch as I squeeze everything I can into extruding more hair, willing it to grow. I don’t normally let my hair grow from day to day, but in a fashion emergency I can make ten centimeters in an hour — it’s physically draining, and it never looks as good, but it’ll do at a pinch. Now, with panic driving my follicles into a frenzy, my glands pulse as I strain my neck muscles against my bonds. The hair grows white and fine as glass. As I pull on the still-setting fibers, they stretch, thi

For the first couple of minutes I’m not sure it’s going to work (and wouldn’t it be a crying shame to go to my death looking my worst for my enemy’s imago?), but then I discover I can nearly touch my chest with my chin. I stop squeezing my follicles, lean back until my head is touching the rail, then tense my shoulders and do my best to sit up. There’s an awful tearing from my scalp, then sudden freedom. I pull my head away from my magnificent mane, leaving it wrapped around the rail, its roots thi