alive,” someone said.
Stephania looked up, and the presence of the garbage pickers so close to her took her a little by surprise. Had she blacked out for a moment? They stood around her in a pack, seeming to tower over her even though most would have been smaller than her if she’d been standing. Some were children, some were people twisted by illness or war, missing limbs or bearing scars.
“Help me,” Stephania said.
Maybe they wouldn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts. Most people didn’t do that, in her experience. Even Thanos had abandoned her eventually. But there were other reasons to help someone. Stephania knew that she was beautiful. Maybe they would want to sell her to a slaver for a profit. Maybe she could find one to seduce while she recovered.
The very fact that she was thinking it told Stephania just how desperate she was right then. It was true though. Give her any kind of chance, for any reason, and she would find a way to take control of the situation.
“I get her slippers,” one of the scavengers said.
“You do? Who says you do?”
There were hands on her then, a seeming horde of them. Every touch was agony, so that Stephania screamed and writhed. Worse, every touch seemed to ignore her completely. They tore at the few scraps of possessions she had left, tearing them from her while ignoring her completely.
She tried to fight, although the truth was that she couldn’t have fought off so many even if she’d been well. As it was, they tore every scrap from her, even though she tried to fight back. She grabbed for a sharpened piece of pottery, swinging it at the nearest of them.
They danced back.
“We can’t leave her like that,” one said.
For a brief moment, Stephania dared to feel hope. Maybe her few scraps of silk were the price for saving her.
“Throw her on one of the pyres,” another said. “No one will know.”
“No,” Stephania begged. “No!”
They grabbed her, ignoring the way she tried to fight as they lifted her. They carried her between them, and it was like being held aloft by a rolling wave of people. Stephania barely had the strength now to turn in their hands, but whichever way she turned, there seemed to be people there ready to hold her.
They carried her across the garbage the way servants might have hefted an old piece of furniture waiting to be demolished. There was no care to it, no gentleness, not even a fundamental acknowledgment that Stephania was alive. To them, she seemed to be nothing more than a thing to be disposed of.
She could see the fire pits ahead now, and that only fueled her struggles. They were big enough that each could have swallowed a house, flames coming up in spurts from them, as bodies broke down in their heat. There were corpses piled near them, each stripped of all valuables, while figures in the rags of the scavengers lifted them and threw them to the flames.
Stephania could feel the heat of the pit from here as they carried her toward it. It was like standing in front of a blacksmith’s forge, or having the fire of an alchemist’s burner skimming across every inch of her skin.
She didn’t want to think about how much worse it would be if they threw her in there. When they threw her in there.
It was impossible not to think about it. Stephania had seen people burn before, in the middle of battles, or when she’d had them tortured. She knew the smells of burning hair and skin, and just the memory of those told her what her future would involve.
“Please,” Stephania begged. “You don’t know who I am. You don’t know what I can give you!”
“Doesn’t look like you have much from here,” one of them said.
They lifted her higher above their heads, ready to fling her down into the pit. Stephania screamed even though she knew it wouldn’t do any good. From there, she could see into the deep, white-hot heat of the pit’s heart, where corpses were slowly turning to gray ash and charcoal.
They pulled Stephania back to throw her, and she knew then that she was going to die.
She found herself thinking of Thanos, despite herself. Part of it was hatred, because if it hadn’t been for him, then she wouldn’t have ended up here. That hatred had her thinking of Ceres too, and everything the pair of them had done to her.
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