39 Quartus 6490, 12.47 Colonial Time
Molecay


She was young. About the same age as Athena, maybe less, maybe no older than Zac. Once she had been so pretty that she'd undoubtedly have caught the attention of his wayward little brother. Once she might have laughed and flirted, confident in her ability to use her looks and her slender young body to drive the Zacs of this world wild, probably watching their frantic attempts to show off and attract her attention, watching with demurely cast down, wicked eyes, enjoying the first tentative exercise of power. It wasn't just teenage boys who had hormones.

Here, her face was too pale for beauty, every last hint of colour drained from it; even her lips were colourless. The flesh was falling away from the bones beneath, cheekbones sharp as dies with the cheek below sunk so deep that Apollo could see the shape of teeth beneath. The naked body stretched out in the pod was still slender, too slender, with the belly concave beneath prominent ribs. Her body was as colourless as her face, the nipples on the small breasts barely flushed with tawny-pink. Apollo watched, but if the ribcage moved, it was so slight as to be imperceptible. Without medical scanners, he couldn't be sure that she was breathing.

Apollo leaned down, splaying his hand against the pod's transparent cover, letting it take his weight. He tried to take in every detail, staring down at her.

She stared back. Her eyes were open, unblinking. They were a pale blue, not the bright blue of Zac or Athena, but blue for all that; icy and chill and staring up at him as if it were all his fault that she was lying there, starved and dead or dying, and abused in a way no sane man could even begin to fathom.

The top of her head was missing.

No accident, that. It had been removed surgically to expose the brain, the edges of the skin clean and scalpel-cut, the brain tissue wired directly into the pod. Apollo couldn't even guess at the equipment she was linked to, none of it familiar enough to even help him begin to speculate about what its function was. The same little lights that had danced inside the IL Cylon were sparkling inside her head, red and blue and green.

He leaned down further and watched the fireflies dance.