CHAPTER FIFTEEN - The Sorting Room

"Welcome, Verona," Bonka bellowed wistfully, stepping quickly from behind her and onto a newly-formed iron platform that extended in all directions around them, "To the SRFCI, where we unearth seeds born of their fruit, and the hulls are burned away."

The room, Verona noted, her mind still burning with awe, could determine neither seeds nor fruit. In fact, her eyes, which had finally adjusted to the new light, could detect nothing organic at all. What she saw instead was a wide panopticon of large vats holding what appeared to be thousands upon thousands of metal orbs, each a slightly different shade of a dark light she could not discern. The stones rolled and spun like gumballs in vending machines, transparent pipes extending down from each of them and into a star of unseen metal that met around a cavernous hole in the center of all of them. The orbs dropped, one by one from each machine, down their columns and into the black below.

Verona stared at it breathlessly.

"In each of those stones, Verona," Bonka whispered to her sumptuously, "in each crystal of anima, is more pleasure, more purpose, and more knowledge than you could ever fathom." He stared into the machine's abyss with the girl for a brief moment, while he allowed her to digest his words. "A hologram, of course, but eons more than you could ever desire; for an entity as fractionated as you."

The young girl opened her mouth, but remained silent.

Bonka redirected his gaze to where her smooth jawline connected to her throat. Swerving his head to its side, he spoke again, louder than before, "But I suppose you don't want one. You said, back on the ship, that you wished to start over, am I wrong? That you wish to be solemn, to be meek? That you want to want for nothing?"

After a moment of chattering silence, the clap and press and hum of the machines working gently just beyond them, Verona finally spoke below bright, burning eyes:

"I know this place," she muttered, "it's the Sorting Room of the First Chamber of Indulgence."

Bonka smiled at her.

"The tapping, the static shock between each stone. Every tick, click, and spasm, I remember it like yester-"

She stopped herself. Her eyes fluttered, but could not close.

"What I told you back on the boat, Bonka, I insist that you forget I said a word of it." Her chest heaved and her knees locked, her words firing like cannonballs betwixt her rows of perfect teeth, "For you to have brought me here, it is already more than I've ever dreamed. I know, and I've known since I was quite small, what is compressed within those seeds, as you've described them. I know what's in the spark at the bottom of each stack of stones, as they fall into towers below, before they are returned to the machines above."

She stepped forward slowly. "I know that this is the precipice of law and intention, encrypted as it might be. And forbidden, even to be close to its ceaseless excavation, by someone as simple as me. For you to permit me access to even touch each stone, each a piece of a question to an answer buried between them, a ripened pomegranate ready to burst and spill -

"I am having one. For freedom from torment of desires fulfilled without satisfaction. I would be a fool to choose peace and quiet as my penance, when the ichor of pleasure is at my fingertips; let me fester and dissolve in the zenith of indulgence, where worry and loneliness is lost in the dissolution of ego as it burns hotter than one million suns; a crater filled, a splinter withdrawn, milk and honey into the starving belly of a withered infant."

Bonka strode briskly towards the girl and placed his cane on her shoulder, turning her gracefully around to face him.

"Consider not your presumptions, but do not fear the unknown." From the top of his cane he removed the large knob that had remained under his gloved palms the entire time Verona had been under his care. It was only now that she could see it properly, and she could see that it was the very same stone as were bountiful within the large, warm machines ahead.

He reached down slowly, and offered it to her.

"I want to pick one," she insisted, "Or I might go mad that the cornucopia is not what was promised."

Bonka stared at her, expressing subtle astonishment for a fraction of a moment. His glove squeaked as he tightened his grip around the crystal, and he leaned back away from the girl.

"So be it, child. Pick for yourself the fruit you desire."

The words had only just passed his lips before the teen scrambled up the narrow ladder nearest to her, her boots clinking gently up the rungs as if they'd barely made contact at all.

Atop a platform that hovered over one of the vats, she gazed into the precipice below, regarding the star of transparent pipes that passed down a crystal one by one into the gaping maw between them. They danced like shooting stars of gamma and beta and ultraviolet as they tumbled, silent thunder rolling through the warm and humid air that pressed sweat through her young skin.

She trifled through each of them with all of her senses, her vain mind aglow with the bounty of opportunities, her greedy fingers already twitching with anticipation.

"That one," she pointed to a stone that had begun its descent. Burning hot hues seared holes of starfire into the back of her skull as she watched it.

Oh god, the pleasure! The unparalleled debauchery of mindless indulgence, and infinite satisfaction, all pressed into one small shape that she could hold with her hands and press into her skin through her ribs and into her very heart. It flickered like a planet amongst a sea of stars in the void of far beyond, and her entire body was illuminated with lightless flame as she leapt from atop the machine and into the pipes beneath her.

"At last, at last!" She screamed, hitting the machinery below, her cries a symphony over the cracks of her bones and the splitting of her skin. She clambered and crawled, her disjointed body already sliding down with gravity towards the mouth at the ends of the pipes. Her eyes followed the hot stone, her eyes locked as she spun and squandered, her nails scraping the invisible grit and her nails catching the unseen bolts and ridges.

She extended her bloodied hands forward to follow the stone as it neared its exit, that she might catch it just before it and she would enter the abyss -

As sweat-lined locks of chocolate-brown hair and the girl's pale, perspiring face breached the event horizon of the pulling void, the stone dropped into her grasping palms.

Her skirt and legs fell in after, and her silence bode no sign of outcome. The air was still as her shoes, thrown aside in her impact, slid in after her.

"WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO MY SON?" the furious man bellowed, his voice cracking anxiously.

The other man, his chest and neck buried in the shadow of the enormous man's fist and forearm, glanced nervously up at his captor:

"Do you want the easy answer?" He paused, inhaling weakly, "Or the factual one?"

"Just…" the larger man's shoulders collapsed, his figure clumping to a near embrace of the man in his clutches, "Just tell me what you - what they've - all those lot of you, the white bastards in white coats, and those bird headed…"

His interrupted himself with a sharp hiccup, his finger's grip loosening around the scientist' s collar.

"Is my boy coming home?"

"No," The scientist responded quietly, and without any semblance of emotion.

"He's not here anymore."

Was Verona's desire satiated? Was the cornucopia all she hoped it would be? What's become of poor Charlie, absent from this chapter and still waiting, mortified, upon the iron docks?

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