The Harvester's Toll

The Request burned into my mind at midday. I was calibrating my kit, the familiar scent of antiseptic and ozone filling my small workshop. Then, the cold, sharp data point: Tithe #2881. The target ID made my blood run cold. 734-H. A Harvester. I knew the designation. Thorne. He'd been in the service for twelve years. A veteran.

A cold dread settled in my stomach. There was no protocol for this. No "do not harvest" list. We were tools, and the Orb had decided one of its tools was now raw material. The Request was absolute. His limbs. His face. It wasn't just a harvest; it was an erasure.

He knew we were coming. Of course, he knew. He probably felt the Request lock onto him the same moment I received my orders. When my team arrived at his safehouse, a reinforced bunker in the Rockies, it was already rigged. The first two members of my team were incapacitated by a non-lethal sonic trap. Thorne was smart, efficient. He was trying to disable, not kill. A professional courtesy, perhaps. Or maybe he just wanted a head start.

We cornered him in a narrow service tunnel. He fought, not with desperation, but with a grim, chilling competence. He moved like we did, anticipated our tactics. It took a high-dosage paralytic dart to the neck to finally bring him down. He collapsed, his eyes wide, not with fear, but with a look of profound, ultimate understanding. He knew the job. He knew what came next.

The work had to be done on-site. The Tithe was too extensive for transport in a living subject. I laid him out on a sterile sheet on the cold concrete floor. He was conscious, paralyzed, his eyes following my every move. I did not meet his gaze.

I started with the left arm, at the shoulder. The laser scalpel made a clean, cauterized line through the deltoid. The bone saw was louder. It's a wet, grating sound that you can feel in your own bones. One limb down, bagged and tagged. Then the right arm. Then the legs, at the hip joint. I had to disarticulate the femurs from the pelvis. It was brutal, physical work. All the while, his chest rose and fell in shallow, paralyzed breaths.

The face was last. This was not a clean extraction. It was butchery disguised as surgery. I made the first incision at the hairline, peeling the scalp back. Then around the jawline. You have to sever every connecting muscle, every nerve. The scalpel has to be impossibly sharp. The face came off in a single, wet sheet of skin and muscle. What was left behind was not a man. It was a skull draped in bleeding meat, with two terrified, aware eyes staring out.

I administered the termination dose. It was the only mercy I could give.

The journey to Orb-9 was silent. The desert had turned the sand to glass in the first days of the Screams, and the black sphere sat in the center of a glittering, obsidian plain. The air hummed with its psychic energy. It was dripping a thousand different fluids, but as I drew closer, I saw a new horror. A patch of its surface, thirty feet up, was twitching. A disembodied hand, absorbed hours before, was clenching and unclenching in a mindless spasm.

I tossed the limbs first, one by one. The black surface absorbed them, and the Orb shuddered. A low, guttural noise echoed in my mind, like a distorted human groan. Then, new appendages, mockeries of arms and legs, began to extrude from the Orb's surface, spasming wildly, dripping synovial fluid onto the glass desert floor.

Finally, the face. I threw it. As it vanished, a section of the Orb smoothed over. A grotesque, oversized parody of a human face began to form. It had no eyes, no features, but a mouth-like slit opened, and from it came a new leak: a thick, grey slurry that smelled of brain matter and static. And a sound. Not a scream, but a psychic whisper, repeating the last thought of Elias Thorne, over and over.