Every night Dinah finds people committing crimes and hurts them until they stop, and they go to jail and do awful things to each other, and then they get out and–having few other options–mostly go back to committing crimes. She knows this, but it’s not as if she can pretend that exploitation and rape and murder aren’t happening. So she has to fight. It makes her want to scream.
Humanity: a race digging itself deeper and deeper, looking for gold in a coal mine. How deep do you have to be, she wonders, before even the canary turns black?
Surfacewards he has one name, of course, but below Orin has more beautiful titles: Deep-Diver, Lord of the Water Planet, Sword of Atlantis. The Speaker. The Fisher. King.
The first is truest. No other has the strength to follow the ocean floor to the deep trenches. The Earth suffers, but only down here does it groan of its ache.
He removes the gauntlet, presses his missing left hand into the ooze. I too am wounded, he says, with the great voice of his mind. I understand.
Not even the whales hear him crying; the rumble of ships is too loud.
“That is a huge cocksucker,” says Henchman 48 in awe.
Henchman 97 lifts the long gatling from its crate. “Comes with a harness, too. You actually hold it under your arm–”
“All my dad ever got,” says 48, “was an Uzi.”
“The rat-with-wings got a bulletproof cape, didn’t he? So we got depleted uranium. He cut those up with the little boomerangs, we got EMP guns, he went poly-camo.” 97 snaps on the eyepiece. “And now we got infrared…”
“Yeah, well, you know who wins an arms race.” 48 strokes the steel of his own gatling. “The arms.”