Brick woke to a world of endless blue skies, standing in grass so uniformly green that it couldn't be on Pandora, couldn't even be real. Only dreams and paintings looked like this. Creatures cavorted in the meadow nearby, some familiar, some fantastic. A white, four-legged animal with a long neck, a spiny thing, a bear. They went about their own business, seemingly unaware of him. In the distance, a flock of starlings exploded into the air. The formation turned loops that made Brick dizzy to watch.
He looked away. When he saw the other thing, the thing in the water, he wanted to look back at those unsettling birds, but he was mesmerized.
A quivering biomass marred the landscape, as large as it was unspeakably awful. Its pink surface, ropey with veins, bruised toward purple and yellow in places. It was deformed by tumors just underneath the slick exterior, making it lumpy. The whole thing throbbed. At the same time, Brick knew that it was dead meat, the way you can know things in dreams without any proof. Human figures crawled all over it, swarming like ants, and their mouths worked on the organ, gnashing and gnawing. Brick recoiled.
"Stop," he heard himself say, although he was terrified that those figures would turn their attention on him. "Please, stop eating it."
His voice came out in a rasp, but some of the figures heard and stopped to look at him. Their eyes were the worst, because they were utterly human. They could have been the eyes of anyone Brick had ever met. Their bloody lips parted as they grinned, baring their pink-stained teeth and squinting their awful eyes.
"Come and eat. There's plenty for all. You just have to reach out and take it," they said together. Their voices could only be described as gentle.
"I don't wan' it." Brick said, weeping like a child. But suddenly he did want it, wanted to sink his teeth into the throbbing pink mass more than anything in the world. An unearthly whispering filled his ears with promises. It will taste like apple pie, the voices said. Like an expensive cigar, like pork, like sweaty flesh. It will fill you in ways that food never can, and you'll never be hungry again. You'll never be sad or scared or guilty. That was the promise that the whispering voices made, buzzing in his brain. "I can't!"
"There goes Brick! Tall as a house and twice as thick! It's your God-given right, Brick. Take your pleasures where you can, because this is your kingdom, the kingdom of man...you better take your pleasures now, because you're going to the other place soon enough!" The figures laughed with their mouths full of meat. Globs fell out, and even those tempted him, and he cried harder, but his feet moved without consent. He waded into the water.
When he touched the pulsating biomass, he found it warm under his fingertips, and vibrating with life, sure, but somehow not alive. Because the living feed off the dead, and build homes on the graves. This was another thing that Brick knew without knowing. But, didn't he? Didn't he scrape out a life on Pandora, where the strongest built their homes over the bones of the dead? I'm alive, Brick told himself. I deserve this because I'm still alive, and I'm hungry. He leaned forward and bit a piece out of the shivering thing, severing a chunk cleanly.
It turned to smoke in his mouth. Someone gasped, and he turned to see Amanda standing in the water behind him. He had last seen her when she was fifteen and he was twenty-five, but now she looked to be about ten years old. Her dark hair fell in loose waves across her eyes, and her fingers fluttered at her throat. She stared at Brick as though he were a monster. He tried to tell her it was alright, because he was alive, alive and hungry, but that didn't make sense to him anymore. The words flapped away like starlings as they left his mouth.
A thousand voices screamed behind him. He looked back to the biomass, but found it gone, replaced by a rakk hive. The enormous beast heaved on its side, stumpy legs kicking futility. It had been split open by the escaping rakks, and struggled in its dying throes. Its exposed innards glistened.
"Not dead, not the dead," the rakks seemed to cry as they spiraled upwards. Their bat-like wings made a whiskery sound. "The living build their homes over the bodies of the weak. But you are alive, and strong. Brick the brawler, Brick the strong, your momma says you came out wrong!"
Brick sunk to his knees and let the water come up to his chest, even though it had turned red from the rakk hive's blood. He lifted his hands to cover his ears, and saw that they were red too, the blood standing out brilliantly in the lines of his palms. His fingers trembled.
"Shut up!" he cried. Even though he clamped his bloody hands over his ears, he could hear them. The sound only grew muffled, became a maddening murmur that buzzed in his ears. Something brushed against his foot, something so cold that it seemed to freeze his skin. Brick shivered and-
