The thunk of the shovel drove the hiss of the gravel under the warm, weary weight of a colder sun. Around her were more than a dozen like her. Their shoulders burned. Their feet were sweaty in their socks, and mud from the farm field had stolen a shoe once or twice. Lord Hearst found increasingly elaborate expressions of dismay.
Crowley’s, in contrast, were much more direct. Shit, fuck, damn. The usual. Her head shrinking was finished even if they had had to cut it short—the pieces of memory were there. If her head ached, it was expected. It was easiest to just start picking them up from what she already knew.
He entered the barn with such an honesty about him. That had been her first real examination of Pigeon. The creature strode stiff-backed, military, a respecter of authority. Despite his crisp vest and nearly untorn pants, he had been compromised. There was blood in the water, but she couldn’t tell what. He, she was told, was someone to respect in this organization. He was a commander, second only to the gray-haired elder he spoke to.
“Sir, I… I saw my wife…” he said quietly. In control, but upset quivered in every non-motion. There was negative space.
The old doctor had to bend to keep their words private, and she watched as he nodded. Whatever they said after was lost.
The crowds around her chattered and so she occupied herself in learning names. A lot of them she would come to never see again. They were hazy in her memory, half-formed, but they tittered among themselves. Many had nerves exposed. This was the first screening for GDI, and no one knew what it would entail.
They stood, stated their desire to join and their reasons. A warm Merican woman with light hair (Had it been Babe?) nearly jumped when the double doors swung. Jeffrey entered and was immediately liked by everyone in the room. As far as her memory went, he was only a vague impression of colors, of King’s Court, of a ready smile and piercings. Another never seen again.
“Hey Doc Thomas, you want some of this?!” he yelled, brandishing a brew. No, Doc Thomas did not want some of it.
Helmet under one arm, Pigeon downed the contents of the Color Court Man’s jug.
Time passed. Every minute carried away another piece of the bird’s lucidity.
“Demons,” the Retrograde whispered, black eyes wild. The others laughed as he lifted his gun toward the ceiling. She did not. In her opinion, only one type of person laughed at a loose barrel. They did redeem themselves slightly by removing his gun.
“They’re everywhere! From the chimney… I will protect you…” He sounded serious about drug-induced delusions. They laughed. She did not. She had grown up in pseudo-military organization. This was not how commanders acted.
Time passed. They walked the paths as Doc Thomas gave their wet noses a lay of the land in Hayven. So far, it had been ancient trees and cabin-dotted fields.
Pigeon splayed his arms and ran alongside them, the happiest creature to ever imagine it was flying or forget its wife.
None of this. Not outside. Zed had no remorse.
She can’t remember what she said when she took him aside, scolded. She couldn’t remember his response. She had not, she supposed, expected him to live long.
Large black eyes appeared in front of her, somehow kept together in a sea of bloodied skin and a tightly held frown.
“Smiles? You see this band here? You knitted this for me.”
Her eyes flickered to the band, unfamiliar chunks of green yarn, then with some surprise to a similar one around her own wrist. Finally, as her gaze raked the area, she spotted another one on the wrist of a zed maybe four yards away. It faced two others, speaking to them, and she told herself she misread. Just a desiccated Retrograde, even if it didn’t seem to breathe…
No help there.
“Professor? Professor! Let’s go see the Professor, Smiles.”
Somehow, she knew this person was honest. She trusted him to lead her until she could make sense of this world.
“Professor Barnes? Yeah, he wears this white mask with a lot of black lines on it. All swirly. Anyone can point him out for you. He talked to me when I…”
…
The Double Tap warmed the grass with honey squares of light. Silently she left the blackness, felt the forest night wreathe her and leave her just before she reached the windows. She observed the crowd behind the glass without any particular inclination to enter.
A pale-faced woman in the habiliments of a doctor waved at a helmeted man. A young boy sat with his head in his knees as the crowd broke around him. One man, one whose entire demeanor bled self-control, accosted a woman by the benches in the corner. His clothing was fine, almost Pure Blood if not for its condition. The hat matched the smile. She focused entirely, though, on the mask hanging at his waist, how he did not seem to know where to place his hands before finally shifting them into a firm position. The white oval smiled blandly at her with blank, blank eyes, black lines swirling up. Something punched through her ribs at the sight of it.
Templeton, then.
Chink. Hiss. Shunk. Hiss. She threw herself into the rhythm of it as the memories came more quickly. In a way she relived them, but it was past and done.
“You’re wasting your resources. I don’t have the energy to mend anyone,” she grated out through her teeth. Pincers of steel chewed the back of her neck, and nauseating rips of pain shook from her spine. Did he never understand? Templeton continued to speak, though, forcing the truth in her face until she had to acknowledge its presence. Globs of dying insects, joined in a fevered pus, drained hot down her shoulders and to the ground.
You lost control again, she thought to herself. Shame. Who lets a bug own them? Shouts ripped across the fields beyond the treeline to answer that question. Apparently, many. The memories of the hunger were not so distant for her grimace to fade, and she remembered keenly her confusion…
This will be hard day for them. He’s already earned my loyalty—what more does he want from--
The source of the shouting came into view far down across the clearing, and a dozen people did the math quietly in their heads.
“Go,” someone said. “We have to go.”
A leather coat was good for wet ground, for the most part. Under a gentle gray light, the sawbones lay sprawled against the Double Tap like a doll thrown against a wall. The sheep flock of clouds marched around with glowing edges, and people chuckled, screamed, shouted, and played. To her the sound faded, became rain. One last glance spoke of no danger, so she dropped her hat over her face and let her ears become her eyes. She folded into the calm quiet of sleep. It wasn’t full—only a fool would fully fall asleep in the open, no matter how many people there were to skew the consequences.
A pace away, footsteps registered and then stopped. She waited, diagnosing the movement. After a moment, the weight of one of the stumps nearby creaked with a man sitting down. She recognized it and slept a little less lightly.
Templeton, then.
There was a slow, grounded cadence to his words. Almost a Yorker accent, but untruncated. “Do you remember why I killed that man? It was not because he had simply stolen from me.” Reh-mem-bah; stow-len. He spoke in the patient tone he sometimes took when unsure how to speak of serious subjects. In the memory he referenced, he stood in front of the Kennel. His words rang across her mind as blood spilled across the gravel. First came a low, menacing mutter, followed by the thespian shout of a man who knew enough of the mind to manipulate it effectively. The murmuring words were more important.
She nodded. She even repeated what he had said, to be sure, and he affirmed it.
“Yes.”
The sawbones closed her eyes. She exhaled until her lungs were empty and tired. The truth of the matter was the only optimism she sought. One day, he would die. He lived now. One day, he might betray her. … she could not think of someone less likely to do so. And that was enough.
For some reason, as she walked away, an image of stars came to her. She had been sure the memory would come to her.
The sawbones opened her eyes and concentrated on the crackling of twigs. The copse didn’t have to be concerned about zed today. It was a deer fleeing from a group of adolescent farmers whose combined beard material could have maybe made a sweater for a mouse. She would have to tell their mothers to teach them better shooting. The grave was fit to starve. With the tension past, however, her mind worked forward again.
Thankfully, shoveling was automatic.
Heat seared across the Double Tap field as people milled and played. Sunday was a celebration to them. People had been torn to shred this week. The Grave Mind breathed in and oozed out. But it was Sunday, for all those who survived the week. Sunday for those who could afford to ignore truth in the death around them. She remembered people smiled.
Two men stood next to her by the rail. One was all beard, teeth, and good humor. The other was a rail-thin arm-slapper in the three shades of Merica.
“Hey Blondie Two!” the bearded one shouted into the Tap.
“What’s her name?” the thin one asked. “I can never tell her and Antigone apart.”
“I just call them Blondie One and Blondie Two!”
The sawbones tilted to see and barely avoided being knocked over. She saw a tight grin in a blur of movement. The young woman (Not-Antigone) was similar to Crowley in coloring. Light eyes made an otherwise heart-shaped face seem fierce— pupils exaggerated by contrast. Blonde hair snapped up behind her as she wrapped around the iron railing and past them into the field.
As the memory materialized, some things remained blurred. She didn’t remember what the woman had been holding, nor why it had been stolen. It didn’t matter enough for her mind to keep it.
Neither, apparently, did the man chasing her, not enough to gain a face. Some lanky creature dogged Not-Antigone, shouting obscenities. Tex? May have been Tex. It whined and snickered, yelling comments about her lack of morals, lack of intelligence, and lack of attractiveness in spades.
He didn’t make it five steps before she was at CBGB Cabin with her apparent twin. All of DOC mercenary group was there to back her up, also showing their teeth. They seemed willing to help.
This was Not-Antigone, the hired hand. She wondered how people could confuse the two women. The ease of Antigone’s stance did not translate to the other one. Antigone was capable, skilled. Not-Antigone stood differently, despite her attempt at ease.
This one's dangerous. A threat. Past time, she had thought, I found out the poor girl’s name.
Breathing, she concentrated on the burning in her shoulders. She patted the mound flat and moved to the next. At this point, though she kept her silence, there was little difference between the present and the past for her.
“You are Alexa,” Rosemary insisted.
Another scream ripped across the crowded Telling Visions cabin, hitting the wooden rafters with a force. Alexa the soldier bent with hands clutching, hammering a dirty concrete floor. Alexa the Ban-She muttered at them in deadpan, blue eyes searching with calculation. The force of her thrashing was something they should have foreseen. It was psionics, but it was still a surgery. An unmedicated surgery on an unyielding floor would hurt. The woman in pearls at least tried to keep her from hurting herself on the floor.
“You are Alexa!”
Smiles wondered if Rosemary knew how terrified she sounded. There came a point where emotions flowed off of people like waves, palpable. The Pure Blood’s emotions twisted off her bent shoulders and stricken face, mixing in with the young woman’s desperation, and ran over the floor like fog on a lake. The retrograde glanced sideways at Templeton, who right now was only a hat tilted downward. Without seeing his face, she could get no read, though his form hinted at distress.
Her eyes caught briefly on Rasputin’s—once again, no read in a dark shared glance. She wondered if he felt anything, or if he had just mastered suppression. Penelope had said he had once been a different man, now deadened by the world around him. It was something a person like Penelope would say. She unconsciously returned her eyes to Templeton before training to the patient.
“You are Alexa! You can do this!”
“I don’t know who I am!”
The fog of emotion twisted with self-loathing, and several people shifted. Smiles did not. You know who you are. You don’t like it, but you know. Now what are you going to do about it?
“Fight it. You can fight it!” Rosemary was the coacher, the coaxer, in their circle. One who was not sure whether her tears unshed were appropriate to this situation. The woman wanted to show she cared, but she didn’t know how much those tears would help. They might just show helplessness to someone who sorely needed confidence now. They could just as easily be exactly the compassion needed at the moment.
The screams raked the ceiling.
“I’ll tear you apart, I’ll tear you…” Smiles prepared to move as their eyes met. “I’ll eat your heart,” the victim growled. Craning her body against the cold concrete, she shrieked in agony and another voice surfaced.
“Please! Please just kill me… I don’t want to live. I don’t want this anymore. Please!”
It’ll hurt. You’ll be purged. Fixed. She tilted her head. Shivered—from the cold, from the adrenaline. But what are you whole?
The next sound seemed to stretch for days.
“Who is this person coming up now?” Templeton asked. The young woman in question entered under the shade of a tree and regarded the two of them as if wondering if she was walking in on a prank. The sawbones peered at the hired hand, who smiled blandly. There was a friendly way she watched them, as if she expected no attack. Everyone was at such ease. Well, maybe the woman suspected something, but nothing threatening from them.
“Uh. Hi?” she said shortly, grinning.
“Not-Antigone?” Smiles asked.
“That will do.”
Alexa’s smile, if possible, stretched wider and graduated to a full grimace. She now knew the apparent joke. “Haha. But hey, I have to talk to you.” Smiles felt an interest in what this person would say, but color caught her eye.
In the distance, a beautiful woman in a flowing dress picnicked.
You underestimated her, she thought honestly. Look at her hands.
The morgue glimmered in giddy morning sunlight. Birds beat the air with breathy promises above the dirt path. As she plunged into a narrative, Rosemary stood expressionless, pointed, in her gown.
“…everything changes. Everything. Breathing, walking, scents... feeling... It's always a little bit… warmer. Smythe said it's because there is far more blood in the body. You are bigger. Even from the beginning there is a... heaviness, that wasn't there before. It is very quickly clear that you are... sharing space with another being in the most... basic and intimate of ways. And then, as things go on... there is more. You can feel little... flutters. Pushes. Stirring. There is this little being that you spend every waking and sleeping moment with. Thinking about. Singing to. Feeding, breathing with... sustaining. Waiting for. They are your world. And you wait and you wait... And then it's... gone."
"No more... warmth. Nothing moves. Your body is... solely yours. There is nothing to think about or sing to. Your clothing doesn't... fit right anymore because it fits. You will never... meet that person. And no matter what you do or who you touch, you will never...ever be that close to that person ever again. Or anyone else."
Though she did not want this person broken, she tested for her breaking point then. She found it out of her reach, and this was reassuring. Everything died, but she’d prefer Rosemary to live. In the end, the death of the Pure Blood’s infant had strengthened her to endure, maybe endure everything else that would come.
Rosemary’s room was dark, filled with twilight, and Smiles sat in a bed far too comfy next to a woman far too well-dressed. The place was familiar to her. A few feet away was where she left a gift for the woman’s loss, months ago, and a few feet from that was a door she now grimly considered running toward. To lose control, she reminded herself, was to die. Rosemary’s hand on her knee was like a wire under her skin, and she tensed. To jerk away, to retaliate, to--
If she was psionically influenced I would be gone. If the child had any psionics left, I could be there again. Thrown back to where my senses all lied, to where faces watched in the woods and everything held real enough to hurt but fake enough to sicken. To where I could be covered in blood what shouldn’t exist, because the people who drowned lived unaware--
“I know you hate this,” Rosemary said, and blue eyes locked on hers like painted steel. There was good intent there. Caring. Friendship. Even love. And deep sadness. This was a woman who wept for every injury someone else had ever received. This was her overture, her offer of safety.
You don’t want what you’re asking for, she felt to the woman, willing her to hear it even as she tried to find words for it. She had a difficult time thinking when others were touching her. Why would anyone want her to feel? Are you convinced I’m unwell? Rosemary. This is what I am. Those steel eyes held her fast, and she marveled at how the Pure Blood could masquerade as so unthreatening, even now. Do you think I’m broken? Wide eyes… pain. Rosemary’s pain.
We are all.
She stared as dirt trickled into the trench she made. What she did not notice was Crowley staring at her, and it helped her realize enough to pull forward to the present. The sooner she remembered, the sooner she’d be herself.
“Smiles?” he graveled. He always did. “Are—”
She liked how the plastic siding of the walls rose up like a canyon. Joined to the green house had been a smeared white apartment, connected only by the second stories. The patchy seam of the two colors formed the top of their secret tunnel. Lofty, claustrophobic, and still well-lit for its depth, the back alley filled with scroungers and misters on a good day. One could find herbs among the thick overgrowth. Or just privacy for a needle.
It was spring. She had been seven, without a mask, small and rotting. When she poked her head into the tunnel, it had been deserted.
A young boy with dandelion hair routed through the pockets of a dead man all the way near fence. The man was dead. His tee shirt had been white. Everything else was obscured by mountain of fence-borne honeysuckle.
Zed did not search corpses. They ate them, so the boy wasn’t a zed.
“What you doing?” she asked, approaching. When he turned, she noted he was a few years older, with eyes the way the sky never was. At least not until winter.
“Lookin’ for stuff.” When he rubbed his cheek, some of it came off. Probably ten years old. Back then, there was still a certain awe associated with people that much older than you. Threat? His knees poked out of his shorts like bones.
She bent down next to the dead person and looked around before drawing a knife. He flinched but then relaxed—not before she saw he was also armed. He had a wrench or something. “Have you ever seen what’s inside a head?” she whispered.
“No,” he said curtly. He had now moved on to the coat pockets, head down, curly blonde hair sweaty over his eyes.
Soon the alley filled with the raw scraping of knife on bone, until she finally jammed the shiv into the eye with all of her (usually dismissible) weight. Almost…
The skull cracked like a dry stick, a surprisingly drum-like sound. They recoiled back as one, then edged in again.
“So… what is inside a head?” he asked. He acted nonchalant, but nerves still ran high. They were not supposed to be here, either of them, they knew. Certainly not doing this. As she opened the area, blood ran down in small creeks. A mush hid inside the shell, not all that different from other organs. Loopy, organic.
“…It ain’t what I thought.” There had been disappointment, then.
They stared at the now thoroughly gored dead man for a moment before curiosity sparked again. “You find anything?”
Proud as a Pure Blood, the boy called Martin Scraps splayed a few cred and herb in his hands. “Yeah.”
“You can have it,” she decided. His reaction to this comment was cut short by the sound of an oncoming group. The low talking and brisk occasional command named them as an organized scouting party, and the voices confirmed them as one of her groups. The two children ceased and listened.
“I won’t tell anyone if you won’t,” he blurted, proving himself a creature of all legs as he burst out of the alleyway and away. Back then, she had marveled at those words, finding them undeniably logical. It had been the first time she had ever heard them, and they made sense. As she squeezed behind the honeysuckle gap in the fence, she decided to look back, and see, if he had gotten away. Later she’d learn nothing short of ritual sacrifice could kill the little tinker.
“—you—”
They made a neat triangle: the medic, the tinker, and the tree-tied criminal. When they were within two feet it lifted its face, the white of one eye completely red from bruising. That was not the issue, though.
The tinker stopped, and the sawbones tilted her head the slightest bit. The tree-tied victim’s smallness was not just starvation. Emaciation could have explained the body, but not the immature bones of her face. Eleven, maybe ten years old. Tall for her age, dirty, Merican. So, so afraid.
Then the important part came. She remembered it as the moment she understood him, and that maybe, he grew to understand her. They looked at each other, the two in masks. Testing each other’s limits, looking for that tight shoulder or avoidant glance that would indicate a boundary had been reached. Looking for any sign of discomfort that could end a partnership and foretell a remorseless knife in the back. His eyes were dead behind that mask, crystalline blue and untouched. Her eyes were dead behind her grinning travesty of a face, mouth an impassive line. She saw the little edges of moonlight circle those eyes, and she knew. There was nothing in him to care.
And only a second of work wasted.
The two raised quiet fingers to their rotted lips, and the tree-tied child seemed to understand it would not be killed here. There were no reassurances, no calming touches, no attempt to remove the wad of cloth from its mouth. The victim submitted itself to an uncertain future in the hands of ghouls instead of a certain one in the brittle teeth of the undead, a pragmatic choice on its part. The syringe in the woman’s hand also did not go unnoticed. It reached out its hand despite itself, imploring, but it did not meet their eyes. Just as well.
Businesslike, the two of them cut it from the tree, unhappy fruit, and bundled the creature in tarp. After seven rolls, the tree-freed victim is not visible through the tattered holes of the fabric.
The journey back to the caravans dug into their stamina more than it should, then. A schedule change meant they had waited three days for this week’s victim-in-a-tarp, and brutal sleep shifts were required of two people in the wilderness. Another day and the time would not have been worth the credits. It was the economy of survival, of avoiding those small-town minds and big-city hands. Back then, they much preferred the hostility and hospitality of those eking it out in the in between.
“—okay?”
She nodded and drove the shovel down and--
She woke up to their tent by the radio tower, and she considered staying in this town. Stepan’s rotting face hit the cold, damp morning air like a butcher’s painting. Gored, raw. His past nightmares were only faint smudges of blood on the blankets now. The sheets covered him as if two slips of cloth could shield him from the world. There was no sun yet, just a gray half-light, and it was kind to his features. You could almost see a beaten up farm boy instead of a breathing corpse.
There were lines of anxiety in the cross of the redhead’s brow and in the hold of his mouth. Day by day he was leaving behind the isolated farm boy who had only shot zeds from safe distances. It was in his stance during the day. He had even talked back to her last night. Soon, he wouldn’t need them.
She could fix it when the time came; she could with little trouble. But the fact was she didn’t need a bodyguard in this town. And if she didn’t need him, it was better he thought the parting was his idea. Smiles had decided, then, to break Stepan. He had healed wrong long ago, and he would have to be broken to heal straight. Whether he did or not would be his choice.
The crinkle of the tent as she stood caused Crowley to jerk like a puppet on half of its strings. He curled somewhere near the flaps. She had watched him as he slept, often. Nightmares always chased him. When he did sleep, it was like now, where the sound of the wind or a bird’s cry could bring him back up to the brink in a second.
Good for survival in the short term, but she always wondered how the weariness didn’t drive him under. How could he focus on repairs?
Maybe not well. Crowley’s sunken eyes screamed death unless he put a bag over his head. The years had been hard on him physically, made him more gristle than anything. Maybe, if she removed her makeup, she’d see the same.
He had also considered staying in Hayven then.
She eased her way out of the tent, the zipping sound freezing Stepan Stepanovich and Jacob Crowley in mid-twitch. They were both awake now and listening hard. As they heard something leaving and not entering, they both relaxed and settled back down. No help for it.
It was that kind of nervous living that kept people alive. The grass was wet and the world in twilight, and she began distributing the bundle of overclothes and armor in her hands to the appropriate places, pulling a boot on there and getting her hat on to keep her mask steady. The field *- was covered in pale shadows and water, and a bird trilled somewhere.
She soaked in the loneliness. It was something to ward off the crowds and brightness and noise of the coming day. Rare. Another zip sounded, and Jacob poked his curly blonde head out of the tent, looking squinty and miserable.
“Are you going to the Tap?” he asked, hoarse. She nodded. He nodded as well, grimaced a few times, and held up his finger to wait. She had wondered if she had ever seen him honest in their entire life.
Hearst and Crowley now passed a shovel between each other, all of them now six feet into a ditch. A dark-shrouded creature, tall but bent, paid rapt attention.
“You’re really showing him how,” Jacob deadpanned.
This was made difficult. For one thing, the Lascarian didn’t appear to have working hands, only sleeves with small rings attached to the ends. This might have been fixable, but Hearst was teaching the brunt of the lesson. As Crowley noted, Hearst’s shoveling skills needed practice.
They bickered, and she watched. The Lascarian regarded her warily when she glanced at it. Innocent? Threat? No, innocence was not the right word…
In the underbrush that night, she remembered losing almost all of her being. Even now it was probably her spottiest memory, because so much of what she had felt was no longer comprehensible to her.
“Pheebee!” the sawbones screamed. Her voice ripped, and she would have killed someone if it would help anything at all. It felt like the world was tearing apart, with her own yells shivering like ghosts.
She managed to choke the name out one more time, but swollen red pain flared in her throat even then.
Breaths came through that flame now too, too fast, too fast, too... A wild part of her mind marveled how she was alive when she had been hewn in half. Every edge of her screamed from separation. Where was Pheebee? She struggled to make logical lines out of information, but if she could not find Pheebee, and soon, she would be worse than dead. She was dead now. Perished. Every edge of her screamed to find this other half of her person.
The logical part of her mind stated she would not be this upset even if she were dying, but she could not hear it. There were other problems, after all, with indoctrination. The shell between herself and the Grave Mind held painful thin.
“What if we all end up in a black room? Haha, and they covered ev—”
“—ease tell me you’re not leaving. You’re better than—”
“I deserved the skin. It’d been Easting and I was done. Do you understand me! Done! Don’t interrupt! I… I… the skin’s—”
“I should have found it. They’re never coming back now.”
“—an we be together, Ein? Even here? It reminds me of the da—”
“It hurts, it hurts, it fucking hurts, just get it out, I don’t care how, just end it, it hurts, God damnit I cannot be strong for this, Tara, just get it out it hurts!”
“I’m not so bad, you know? If you want to stay, you can. I just thought… sorry. I’ll never make you do this, but… you did say--"
“It was right through here, I promise. There had been something I always wanted to show a Remnant.”
“—can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? Do you think you could—”
“Pass the salt. Nah, I don’t really look at them. Honestly, it helps when I don’t.”
Smiles stoked the fire in her throat with a deep breath. The pain brought her up again enough to concentrate, and for a moment she felt balanced enough to decide what to do with this obsession. Then, the rest hit her. Pheebee. Her shaking legs still found purchase on the trail after hours of this. Lucidity had been rare.
She lifted her eyes with deep, incomprehensible pressure pushing her forward. It became more complicated when she realized what she was seeing. The Double Tap shone like a halo above Pheebee’s head, casting her face in shadow and casting her shadow in a long line across the field. Running. They both were. Sense. Every sense she had screamed they were the same person, and there was intense confusion at occupying a different space. Agony.
The Gravemind murmured.
She felt as though she watched herself and Pheebee embrace from a distance. The pain ceased. Her hair was particularly soft, and her eyes always kept sad, even when she smiled. While them being two people seemed strange, it could be managed as long as they were close. The situation, she told herself, could be managed. This one was safe.
“Is Smiles hugging her?” someone asked.
“Holy shit.”
“I never actually thought I’d see that in this lifetime.”
Suddenly she was in her body again, herself, brutally confused. Something like a concussion pounded in her head, and the Grave Mind tried to speak over it. Pheebee let go gently and she took her hand without hesitation, feeling a life of callouses, scars and rot on the girl’s fingertips. She knew where every one had come from.
What really disconcerted was the emotion of Pheebee, because it was also hers, because nothing could be theirs alone anymore. They did not have the same head, but it was close. She did not, could not, move more than five feet away.
And she felt Pheebee’s gladness, relief, love for her as if they were her own, except that she had never known them. Memories of happiness, sadness, terror, anger, fragmented and found her. They could be her own memories, her own feelings, if not for the small shred of awareness she still held.
That, and the fact that this language was incomprehensible, untenable, and she… It was not numbness, exactly. If anything it was its extreme opposite. Smiles followed Pheebe in a state of wide-eyed, mental paralysis. Pheebee, who now knew her more clearly now than anyone ever could or would again. Pheebee accepted her and responded only with honest affection. There was fear for their state—obviously she was confused as well, but she felt happiness in their bond. Lost, Smiles followed. She was so tired, but at least she was whole again. Feeling what Pheebee felt was better than the pain of not having her, even caught in this flood. It had to be normal.
Something might not be right, but right now she could only wait until the intensity dulled enough for her to think. How did people live with this every day? It was too much to understand, but for the first time she understood, somewhat, the things around her.
“Are you here to ask a question, or are you just existing?” Eligos watched with his too-intense eyes. By the bar, he tried to slip under the skin with a calm smile and a sense of absolute control. Confident. He was not someone who commanded her answer in any way; she did not respond. At some point in his life, this man had wept and screamed alone, same as any other. For the record, though, the answer was neither.
Water soaked through her boots as she pulled short again for a break. The wind was picking up, but the shovel proved a good rest. She clasped it like a priest in prayer, letting every memory wash through. She had never had the luxury of this process being manageable before now, and Templeton probably did not understand the price she owed him for this favor.
The rest of her rushed in, hundreds of fragments, and she accepted it fully. Hours later, when she finally leveled the top of their trench and walked home, the sawbones felt through one last memory.
It had been in one of the foggiest nights she’d ever seen in Hayven—the world became alien and beautiful. Beyond the sound and light, everyone ceased to exist. She and Templeton spoke by the haze of the morgue. Submerged in the sheets of blindness, he found her. He spoke to her when she had been in the most danger of her life. It had been quiet, that time. Thick lines of black stretched upward around them.
(A psionic zed, they told her later, had hit a few people. It drained their will to care about anyone or anything. This was a fine distinction for something like her. Few words could have made her realize, and he knew them all.)
With almost a snap, she saw him as a person again. It seemed she had been at the mercy of her own failing will. A puppet to any chemical, psionics, or parasite that came her way. To the grave.
The hammer left her hand before she had even consciously raised it. Not the most aerodynamic weapon, she noted flatly. Sharp metal clapped against the far edge of the morgue. It thumped to the bushes below. Not her most well-thought-out action, either. She might need the hammer in her hand.
It had occurred to her, faintly, that she was furious—he used cut through her headsicknesses with the feeling. The Sawbones retrieved her hammer tersely. When she looked back at Templeton, though, all pressure waned. She could not understand him.
Templeton doubted himself constantly, and yet he could not stop from being certain that he was right. He spent his life in a struggle to keep people in control of themselves, but he could not accept his own loss of control. His humility was so insincere that it had a ring of sincerity, and he passed the whole thing off as a joke anyway, while playing solemnity. His way of speaking was so tangled that by the end of the sentence she could rarely tell if he was being serious, and this was not even counting sarcasm. He complained about being transparent when he was a knot so contradictory she was sure even he couldn’t tell where his mask started and his self ended. More than likely because he valued the mask more. The cold intensified as she focused on the screams in the mist.
In the end, her concern about him pulled her back. Hm.
Again he had helped her. Even looking at him was calming. She rather dryly reminded herself not to make this continued habit of headsickness. Templeton needed vacation time, every now and then, and if he let her pay him she would probably count for half his business.
These strange complications called people…
Crowley’s, in contrast, were much more direct. Shit, fuck, damn. The usual. Her head shrinking was finished even if they had had to cut it short—the pieces of memory were there. If her head ached, it was expected. It was easiest to just start picking them up from what she already knew.
He entered the barn with such an honesty about him. That had been her first real examination of Pigeon. The creature strode stiff-backed, military, a respecter of authority. Despite his crisp vest and nearly untorn pants, he had been compromised. There was blood in the water, but she couldn’t tell what. He, she was told, was someone to respect in this organization. He was a commander, second only to the gray-haired elder he spoke to.
“Sir, I… I saw my wife…” he said quietly. In control, but upset quivered in every non-motion. There was negative space.
The old doctor had to bend to keep their words private, and she watched as he nodded. Whatever they said after was lost.
The crowds around her chattered and so she occupied herself in learning names. A lot of them she would come to never see again. They were hazy in her memory, half-formed, but they tittered among themselves. Many had nerves exposed. This was the first screening for GDI, and no one knew what it would entail.
They stood, stated their desire to join and their reasons. A warm Merican woman with light hair (Had it been Babe?) nearly jumped when the double doors swung. Jeffrey entered and was immediately liked by everyone in the room. As far as her memory went, he was only a vague impression of colors, of King’s Court, of a ready smile and piercings. Another never seen again.
“Hey Doc Thomas, you want some of this?!” he yelled, brandishing a brew. No, Doc Thomas did not want some of it.
Helmet under one arm, Pigeon downed the contents of the Color Court Man’s jug.
Time passed. Every minute carried away another piece of the bird’s lucidity.
“Demons,” the Retrograde whispered, black eyes wild. The others laughed as he lifted his gun toward the ceiling. She did not. In her opinion, only one type of person laughed at a loose barrel. They did redeem themselves slightly by removing his gun.
“They’re everywhere! From the chimney… I will protect you…” He sounded serious about drug-induced delusions. They laughed. She did not. She had grown up in pseudo-military organization. This was not how commanders acted.
Time passed. They walked the paths as Doc Thomas gave their wet noses a lay of the land in Hayven. So far, it had been ancient trees and cabin-dotted fields.
Pigeon splayed his arms and ran alongside them, the happiest creature to ever imagine it was flying or forget its wife.
None of this. Not outside. Zed had no remorse.
She can’t remember what she said when she took him aside, scolded. She couldn’t remember his response. She had not, she supposed, expected him to live long.
Large black eyes appeared in front of her, somehow kept together in a sea of bloodied skin and a tightly held frown.
“Smiles? You see this band here? You knitted this for me.”
Her eyes flickered to the band, unfamiliar chunks of green yarn, then with some surprise to a similar one around her own wrist. Finally, as her gaze raked the area, she spotted another one on the wrist of a zed maybe four yards away. It faced two others, speaking to them, and she told herself she misread. Just a desiccated Retrograde, even if it didn’t seem to breathe…
No help there.
“Professor? Professor! Let’s go see the Professor, Smiles.”
Somehow, she knew this person was honest. She trusted him to lead her until she could make sense of this world.
“Professor Barnes? Yeah, he wears this white mask with a lot of black lines on it. All swirly. Anyone can point him out for you. He talked to me when I…”
…
The Double Tap warmed the grass with honey squares of light. Silently she left the blackness, felt the forest night wreathe her and leave her just before she reached the windows. She observed the crowd behind the glass without any particular inclination to enter.
A pale-faced woman in the habiliments of a doctor waved at a helmeted man. A young boy sat with his head in his knees as the crowd broke around him. One man, one whose entire demeanor bled self-control, accosted a woman by the benches in the corner. His clothing was fine, almost Pure Blood if not for its condition. The hat matched the smile. She focused entirely, though, on the mask hanging at his waist, how he did not seem to know where to place his hands before finally shifting them into a firm position. The white oval smiled blandly at her with blank, blank eyes, black lines swirling up. Something punched through her ribs at the sight of it.
Templeton, then.
Chink. Hiss. Shunk. Hiss. She threw herself into the rhythm of it as the memories came more quickly. In a way she relived them, but it was past and done.
“You’re wasting your resources. I don’t have the energy to mend anyone,” she grated out through her teeth. Pincers of steel chewed the back of her neck, and nauseating rips of pain shook from her spine. Did he never understand? Templeton continued to speak, though, forcing the truth in her face until she had to acknowledge its presence. Globs of dying insects, joined in a fevered pus, drained hot down her shoulders and to the ground.
You lost control again, she thought to herself. Shame. Who lets a bug own them? Shouts ripped across the fields beyond the treeline to answer that question. Apparently, many. The memories of the hunger were not so distant for her grimace to fade, and she remembered keenly her confusion…
This will be hard day for them. He’s already earned my loyalty—what more does he want from--
The source of the shouting came into view far down across the clearing, and a dozen people did the math quietly in their heads.
“Go,” someone said. “We have to go.”
A leather coat was good for wet ground, for the most part. Under a gentle gray light, the sawbones lay sprawled against the Double Tap like a doll thrown against a wall. The sheep flock of clouds marched around with glowing edges, and people chuckled, screamed, shouted, and played. To her the sound faded, became rain. One last glance spoke of no danger, so she dropped her hat over her face and let her ears become her eyes. She folded into the calm quiet of sleep. It wasn’t full—only a fool would fully fall asleep in the open, no matter how many people there were to skew the consequences.
A pace away, footsteps registered and then stopped. She waited, diagnosing the movement. After a moment, the weight of one of the stumps nearby creaked with a man sitting down. She recognized it and slept a little less lightly.
Templeton, then.
There was a slow, grounded cadence to his words. Almost a Yorker accent, but untruncated. “Do you remember why I killed that man? It was not because he had simply stolen from me.” Reh-mem-bah; stow-len. He spoke in the patient tone he sometimes took when unsure how to speak of serious subjects. In the memory he referenced, he stood in front of the Kennel. His words rang across her mind as blood spilled across the gravel. First came a low, menacing mutter, followed by the thespian shout of a man who knew enough of the mind to manipulate it effectively. The murmuring words were more important.
She nodded. She even repeated what he had said, to be sure, and he affirmed it.
“Yes.”
The sawbones closed her eyes. She exhaled until her lungs were empty and tired. The truth of the matter was the only optimism she sought. One day, he would die. He lived now. One day, he might betray her. … she could not think of someone less likely to do so. And that was enough.
For some reason, as she walked away, an image of stars came to her. She had been sure the memory would come to her.
The sawbones opened her eyes and concentrated on the crackling of twigs. The copse didn’t have to be concerned about zed today. It was a deer fleeing from a group of adolescent farmers whose combined beard material could have maybe made a sweater for a mouse. She would have to tell their mothers to teach them better shooting. The grave was fit to starve. With the tension past, however, her mind worked forward again.
Thankfully, shoveling was automatic.
Heat seared across the Double Tap field as people milled and played. Sunday was a celebration to them. People had been torn to shred this week. The Grave Mind breathed in and oozed out. But it was Sunday, for all those who survived the week. Sunday for those who could afford to ignore truth in the death around them. She remembered people smiled.
Two men stood next to her by the rail. One was all beard, teeth, and good humor. The other was a rail-thin arm-slapper in the three shades of Merica.
“Hey Blondie Two!” the bearded one shouted into the Tap.
“What’s her name?” the thin one asked. “I can never tell her and Antigone apart.”
“I just call them Blondie One and Blondie Two!”
The sawbones tilted to see and barely avoided being knocked over. She saw a tight grin in a blur of movement. The young woman (Not-Antigone) was similar to Crowley in coloring. Light eyes made an otherwise heart-shaped face seem fierce— pupils exaggerated by contrast. Blonde hair snapped up behind her as she wrapped around the iron railing and past them into the field.
As the memory materialized, some things remained blurred. She didn’t remember what the woman had been holding, nor why it had been stolen. It didn’t matter enough for her mind to keep it.
Neither, apparently, did the man chasing her, not enough to gain a face. Some lanky creature dogged Not-Antigone, shouting obscenities. Tex? May have been Tex. It whined and snickered, yelling comments about her lack of morals, lack of intelligence, and lack of attractiveness in spades.
He didn’t make it five steps before she was at CBGB Cabin with her apparent twin. All of DOC mercenary group was there to back her up, also showing their teeth. They seemed willing to help.
This was Not-Antigone, the hired hand. She wondered how people could confuse the two women. The ease of Antigone’s stance did not translate to the other one. Antigone was capable, skilled. Not-Antigone stood differently, despite her attempt at ease.
This one's dangerous. A threat. Past time, she had thought, I found out the poor girl’s name.
Breathing, she concentrated on the burning in her shoulders. She patted the mound flat and moved to the next. At this point, though she kept her silence, there was little difference between the present and the past for her.
“You are Alexa,” Rosemary insisted.
Another scream ripped across the crowded Telling Visions cabin, hitting the wooden rafters with a force. Alexa the soldier bent with hands clutching, hammering a dirty concrete floor. Alexa the Ban-She muttered at them in deadpan, blue eyes searching with calculation. The force of her thrashing was something they should have foreseen. It was psionics, but it was still a surgery. An unmedicated surgery on an unyielding floor would hurt. The woman in pearls at least tried to keep her from hurting herself on the floor.
“You are Alexa!”
Smiles wondered if Rosemary knew how terrified she sounded. There came a point where emotions flowed off of people like waves, palpable. The Pure Blood’s emotions twisted off her bent shoulders and stricken face, mixing in with the young woman’s desperation, and ran over the floor like fog on a lake. The retrograde glanced sideways at Templeton, who right now was only a hat tilted downward. Without seeing his face, she could get no read, though his form hinted at distress.
Her eyes caught briefly on Rasputin’s—once again, no read in a dark shared glance. She wondered if he felt anything, or if he had just mastered suppression. Penelope had said he had once been a different man, now deadened by the world around him. It was something a person like Penelope would say. She unconsciously returned her eyes to Templeton before training to the patient.
“You are Alexa! You can do this!”
“I don’t know who I am!”
The fog of emotion twisted with self-loathing, and several people shifted. Smiles did not. You know who you are. You don’t like it, but you know. Now what are you going to do about it?
“Fight it. You can fight it!” Rosemary was the coacher, the coaxer, in their circle. One who was not sure whether her tears unshed were appropriate to this situation. The woman wanted to show she cared, but she didn’t know how much those tears would help. They might just show helplessness to someone who sorely needed confidence now. They could just as easily be exactly the compassion needed at the moment.
The screams raked the ceiling.
“I’ll tear you apart, I’ll tear you…” Smiles prepared to move as their eyes met. “I’ll eat your heart,” the victim growled. Craning her body against the cold concrete, she shrieked in agony and another voice surfaced.
“Please! Please just kill me… I don’t want to live. I don’t want this anymore. Please!”
It’ll hurt. You’ll be purged. Fixed. She tilted her head. Shivered—from the cold, from the adrenaline. But what are you whole?
The next sound seemed to stretch for days.
“Who is this person coming up now?” Templeton asked. The young woman in question entered under the shade of a tree and regarded the two of them as if wondering if she was walking in on a prank. The sawbones peered at the hired hand, who smiled blandly. There was a friendly way she watched them, as if she expected no attack. Everyone was at such ease. Well, maybe the woman suspected something, but nothing threatening from them.
“Uh. Hi?” she said shortly, grinning.
“Not-Antigone?” Smiles asked.
“That will do.”
Alexa’s smile, if possible, stretched wider and graduated to a full grimace. She now knew the apparent joke. “Haha. But hey, I have to talk to you.” Smiles felt an interest in what this person would say, but color caught her eye.
In the distance, a beautiful woman in a flowing dress picnicked.
You underestimated her, she thought honestly. Look at her hands.
The morgue glimmered in giddy morning sunlight. Birds beat the air with breathy promises above the dirt path. As she plunged into a narrative, Rosemary stood expressionless, pointed, in her gown.
“…everything changes. Everything. Breathing, walking, scents... feeling... It's always a little bit… warmer. Smythe said it's because there is far more blood in the body. You are bigger. Even from the beginning there is a... heaviness, that wasn't there before. It is very quickly clear that you are... sharing space with another being in the most... basic and intimate of ways. And then, as things go on... there is more. You can feel little... flutters. Pushes. Stirring. There is this little being that you spend every waking and sleeping moment with. Thinking about. Singing to. Feeding, breathing with... sustaining. Waiting for. They are your world. And you wait and you wait... And then it's... gone."
"No more... warmth. Nothing moves. Your body is... solely yours. There is nothing to think about or sing to. Your clothing doesn't... fit right anymore because it fits. You will never... meet that person. And no matter what you do or who you touch, you will never...ever be that close to that person ever again. Or anyone else."
Though she did not want this person broken, she tested for her breaking point then. She found it out of her reach, and this was reassuring. Everything died, but she’d prefer Rosemary to live. In the end, the death of the Pure Blood’s infant had strengthened her to endure, maybe endure everything else that would come.
Rosemary’s room was dark, filled with twilight, and Smiles sat in a bed far too comfy next to a woman far too well-dressed. The place was familiar to her. A few feet away was where she left a gift for the woman’s loss, months ago, and a few feet from that was a door she now grimly considered running toward. To lose control, she reminded herself, was to die. Rosemary’s hand on her knee was like a wire under her skin, and she tensed. To jerk away, to retaliate, to--
If she was psionically influenced I would be gone. If the child had any psionics left, I could be there again. Thrown back to where my senses all lied, to where faces watched in the woods and everything held real enough to hurt but fake enough to sicken. To where I could be covered in blood what shouldn’t exist, because the people who drowned lived unaware--
“I know you hate this,” Rosemary said, and blue eyes locked on hers like painted steel. There was good intent there. Caring. Friendship. Even love. And deep sadness. This was a woman who wept for every injury someone else had ever received. This was her overture, her offer of safety.
You don’t want what you’re asking for, she felt to the woman, willing her to hear it even as she tried to find words for it. She had a difficult time thinking when others were touching her. Why would anyone want her to feel? Are you convinced I’m unwell? Rosemary. This is what I am. Those steel eyes held her fast, and she marveled at how the Pure Blood could masquerade as so unthreatening, even now. Do you think I’m broken? Wide eyes… pain. Rosemary’s pain.
We are all.
She stared as dirt trickled into the trench she made. What she did not notice was Crowley staring at her, and it helped her realize enough to pull forward to the present. The sooner she remembered, the sooner she’d be herself.
“Smiles?” he graveled. He always did. “Are—”
She liked how the plastic siding of the walls rose up like a canyon. Joined to the green house had been a smeared white apartment, connected only by the second stories. The patchy seam of the two colors formed the top of their secret tunnel. Lofty, claustrophobic, and still well-lit for its depth, the back alley filled with scroungers and misters on a good day. One could find herbs among the thick overgrowth. Or just privacy for a needle.
It was spring. She had been seven, without a mask, small and rotting. When she poked her head into the tunnel, it had been deserted.
A young boy with dandelion hair routed through the pockets of a dead man all the way near fence. The man was dead. His tee shirt had been white. Everything else was obscured by mountain of fence-borne honeysuckle.
Zed did not search corpses. They ate them, so the boy wasn’t a zed.
“What you doing?” she asked, approaching. When he turned, she noted he was a few years older, with eyes the way the sky never was. At least not until winter.
“Lookin’ for stuff.” When he rubbed his cheek, some of it came off. Probably ten years old. Back then, there was still a certain awe associated with people that much older than you. Threat? His knees poked out of his shorts like bones.
She bent down next to the dead person and looked around before drawing a knife. He flinched but then relaxed—not before she saw he was also armed. He had a wrench or something. “Have you ever seen what’s inside a head?” she whispered.
“No,” he said curtly. He had now moved on to the coat pockets, head down, curly blonde hair sweaty over his eyes.
Soon the alley filled with the raw scraping of knife on bone, until she finally jammed the shiv into the eye with all of her (usually dismissible) weight. Almost…
The skull cracked like a dry stick, a surprisingly drum-like sound. They recoiled back as one, then edged in again.
“So… what is inside a head?” he asked. He acted nonchalant, but nerves still ran high. They were not supposed to be here, either of them, they knew. Certainly not doing this. As she opened the area, blood ran down in small creeks. A mush hid inside the shell, not all that different from other organs. Loopy, organic.
“…It ain’t what I thought.” There had been disappointment, then.
They stared at the now thoroughly gored dead man for a moment before curiosity sparked again. “You find anything?”
Proud as a Pure Blood, the boy called Martin Scraps splayed a few cred and herb in his hands. “Yeah.”
“You can have it,” she decided. His reaction to this comment was cut short by the sound of an oncoming group. The low talking and brisk occasional command named them as an organized scouting party, and the voices confirmed them as one of her groups. The two children ceased and listened.
“I won’t tell anyone if you won’t,” he blurted, proving himself a creature of all legs as he burst out of the alleyway and away. Back then, she had marveled at those words, finding them undeniably logical. It had been the first time she had ever heard them, and they made sense. As she squeezed behind the honeysuckle gap in the fence, she decided to look back, and see, if he had gotten away. Later she’d learn nothing short of ritual sacrifice could kill the little tinker.
“—you—”
They made a neat triangle: the medic, the tinker, and the tree-tied criminal. When they were within two feet it lifted its face, the white of one eye completely red from bruising. That was not the issue, though.
The tinker stopped, and the sawbones tilted her head the slightest bit. The tree-tied victim’s smallness was not just starvation. Emaciation could have explained the body, but not the immature bones of her face. Eleven, maybe ten years old. Tall for her age, dirty, Merican. So, so afraid.
Then the important part came. She remembered it as the moment she understood him, and that maybe, he grew to understand her. They looked at each other, the two in masks. Testing each other’s limits, looking for that tight shoulder or avoidant glance that would indicate a boundary had been reached. Looking for any sign of discomfort that could end a partnership and foretell a remorseless knife in the back. His eyes were dead behind that mask, crystalline blue and untouched. Her eyes were dead behind her grinning travesty of a face, mouth an impassive line. She saw the little edges of moonlight circle those eyes, and she knew. There was nothing in him to care.
And only a second of work wasted.
The two raised quiet fingers to their rotted lips, and the tree-tied child seemed to understand it would not be killed here. There were no reassurances, no calming touches, no attempt to remove the wad of cloth from its mouth. The victim submitted itself to an uncertain future in the hands of ghouls instead of a certain one in the brittle teeth of the undead, a pragmatic choice on its part. The syringe in the woman’s hand also did not go unnoticed. It reached out its hand despite itself, imploring, but it did not meet their eyes. Just as well.
Businesslike, the two of them cut it from the tree, unhappy fruit, and bundled the creature in tarp. After seven rolls, the tree-freed victim is not visible through the tattered holes of the fabric.
The journey back to the caravans dug into their stamina more than it should, then. A schedule change meant they had waited three days for this week’s victim-in-a-tarp, and brutal sleep shifts were required of two people in the wilderness. Another day and the time would not have been worth the credits. It was the economy of survival, of avoiding those small-town minds and big-city hands. Back then, they much preferred the hostility and hospitality of those eking it out in the in between.
“—okay?”
She nodded and drove the shovel down and--
She woke up to their tent by the radio tower, and she considered staying in this town. Stepan’s rotting face hit the cold, damp morning air like a butcher’s painting. Gored, raw. His past nightmares were only faint smudges of blood on the blankets now. The sheets covered him as if two slips of cloth could shield him from the world. There was no sun yet, just a gray half-light, and it was kind to his features. You could almost see a beaten up farm boy instead of a breathing corpse.
There were lines of anxiety in the cross of the redhead’s brow and in the hold of his mouth. Day by day he was leaving behind the isolated farm boy who had only shot zeds from safe distances. It was in his stance during the day. He had even talked back to her last night. Soon, he wouldn’t need them.
She could fix it when the time came; she could with little trouble. But the fact was she didn’t need a bodyguard in this town. And if she didn’t need him, it was better he thought the parting was his idea. Smiles had decided, then, to break Stepan. He had healed wrong long ago, and he would have to be broken to heal straight. Whether he did or not would be his choice.
The crinkle of the tent as she stood caused Crowley to jerk like a puppet on half of its strings. He curled somewhere near the flaps. She had watched him as he slept, often. Nightmares always chased him. When he did sleep, it was like now, where the sound of the wind or a bird’s cry could bring him back up to the brink in a second.
Good for survival in the short term, but she always wondered how the weariness didn’t drive him under. How could he focus on repairs?
Maybe not well. Crowley’s sunken eyes screamed death unless he put a bag over his head. The years had been hard on him physically, made him more gristle than anything. Maybe, if she removed her makeup, she’d see the same.
He had also considered staying in Hayven then.
She eased her way out of the tent, the zipping sound freezing Stepan Stepanovich and Jacob Crowley in mid-twitch. They were both awake now and listening hard. As they heard something leaving and not entering, they both relaxed and settled back down. No help for it.
It was that kind of nervous living that kept people alive. The grass was wet and the world in twilight, and she began distributing the bundle of overclothes and armor in her hands to the appropriate places, pulling a boot on there and getting her hat on to keep her mask steady. The field *- was covered in pale shadows and water, and a bird trilled somewhere.
She soaked in the loneliness. It was something to ward off the crowds and brightness and noise of the coming day. Rare. Another zip sounded, and Jacob poked his curly blonde head out of the tent, looking squinty and miserable.
“Are you going to the Tap?” he asked, hoarse. She nodded. He nodded as well, grimaced a few times, and held up his finger to wait. She had wondered if she had ever seen him honest in their entire life.
Hearst and Crowley now passed a shovel between each other, all of them now six feet into a ditch. A dark-shrouded creature, tall but bent, paid rapt attention.
“You’re really showing him how,” Jacob deadpanned.
This was made difficult. For one thing, the Lascarian didn’t appear to have working hands, only sleeves with small rings attached to the ends. This might have been fixable, but Hearst was teaching the brunt of the lesson. As Crowley noted, Hearst’s shoveling skills needed practice.
They bickered, and she watched. The Lascarian regarded her warily when she glanced at it. Innocent? Threat? No, innocence was not the right word…
In the underbrush that night, she remembered losing almost all of her being. Even now it was probably her spottiest memory, because so much of what she had felt was no longer comprehensible to her.
“Pheebee!” the sawbones screamed. Her voice ripped, and she would have killed someone if it would help anything at all. It felt like the world was tearing apart, with her own yells shivering like ghosts.
She managed to choke the name out one more time, but swollen red pain flared in her throat even then.
Breaths came through that flame now too, too fast, too fast, too... A wild part of her mind marveled how she was alive when she had been hewn in half. Every edge of her screamed from separation. Where was Pheebee? She struggled to make logical lines out of information, but if she could not find Pheebee, and soon, she would be worse than dead. She was dead now. Perished. Every edge of her screamed to find this other half of her person.
The logical part of her mind stated she would not be this upset even if she were dying, but she could not hear it. There were other problems, after all, with indoctrination. The shell between herself and the Grave Mind held painful thin.
“What if we all end up in a black room? Haha, and they covered ev—”
“—ease tell me you’re not leaving. You’re better than—”
“I deserved the skin. It’d been Easting and I was done. Do you understand me! Done! Don’t interrupt! I… I… the skin’s—”
“I should have found it. They’re never coming back now.”
“—an we be together, Ein? Even here? It reminds me of the da—”
“It hurts, it hurts, it fucking hurts, just get it out, I don’t care how, just end it, it hurts, God damnit I cannot be strong for this, Tara, just get it out it hurts!”
“I’m not so bad, you know? If you want to stay, you can. I just thought… sorry. I’ll never make you do this, but… you did say--"
“It was right through here, I promise. There had been something I always wanted to show a Remnant.”
“—can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? Do you think you could—”
“Pass the salt. Nah, I don’t really look at them. Honestly, it helps when I don’t.”
Smiles stoked the fire in her throat with a deep breath. The pain brought her up again enough to concentrate, and for a moment she felt balanced enough to decide what to do with this obsession. Then, the rest hit her. Pheebee. Her shaking legs still found purchase on the trail after hours of this. Lucidity had been rare.
She lifted her eyes with deep, incomprehensible pressure pushing her forward. It became more complicated when she realized what she was seeing. The Double Tap shone like a halo above Pheebee’s head, casting her face in shadow and casting her shadow in a long line across the field. Running. They both were. Sense. Every sense she had screamed they were the same person, and there was intense confusion at occupying a different space. Agony.
The Gravemind murmured.
She felt as though she watched herself and Pheebee embrace from a distance. The pain ceased. Her hair was particularly soft, and her eyes always kept sad, even when she smiled. While them being two people seemed strange, it could be managed as long as they were close. The situation, she told herself, could be managed. This one was safe.
“Is Smiles hugging her?” someone asked.
“Holy shit.”
“I never actually thought I’d see that in this lifetime.”
Suddenly she was in her body again, herself, brutally confused. Something like a concussion pounded in her head, and the Grave Mind tried to speak over it. Pheebee let go gently and she took her hand without hesitation, feeling a life of callouses, scars and rot on the girl’s fingertips. She knew where every one had come from.
What really disconcerted was the emotion of Pheebee, because it was also hers, because nothing could be theirs alone anymore. They did not have the same head, but it was close. She did not, could not, move more than five feet away.
And she felt Pheebee’s gladness, relief, love for her as if they were her own, except that she had never known them. Memories of happiness, sadness, terror, anger, fragmented and found her. They could be her own memories, her own feelings, if not for the small shred of awareness she still held.
That, and the fact that this language was incomprehensible, untenable, and she… It was not numbness, exactly. If anything it was its extreme opposite. Smiles followed Pheebe in a state of wide-eyed, mental paralysis. Pheebee, who now knew her more clearly now than anyone ever could or would again. Pheebee accepted her and responded only with honest affection. There was fear for their state—obviously she was confused as well, but she felt happiness in their bond. Lost, Smiles followed. She was so tired, but at least she was whole again. Feeling what Pheebee felt was better than the pain of not having her, even caught in this flood. It had to be normal.
Something might not be right, but right now she could only wait until the intensity dulled enough for her to think. How did people live with this every day? It was too much to understand, but for the first time she understood, somewhat, the things around her.
“Are you here to ask a question, or are you just existing?” Eligos watched with his too-intense eyes. By the bar, he tried to slip under the skin with a calm smile and a sense of absolute control. Confident. He was not someone who commanded her answer in any way; she did not respond. At some point in his life, this man had wept and screamed alone, same as any other. For the record, though, the answer was neither.
Water soaked through her boots as she pulled short again for a break. The wind was picking up, but the shovel proved a good rest. She clasped it like a priest in prayer, letting every memory wash through. She had never had the luxury of this process being manageable before now, and Templeton probably did not understand the price she owed him for this favor.
The rest of her rushed in, hundreds of fragments, and she accepted it fully. Hours later, when she finally leveled the top of their trench and walked home, the sawbones felt through one last memory.
It had been in one of the foggiest nights she’d ever seen in Hayven—the world became alien and beautiful. Beyond the sound and light, everyone ceased to exist. She and Templeton spoke by the haze of the morgue. Submerged in the sheets of blindness, he found her. He spoke to her when she had been in the most danger of her life. It had been quiet, that time. Thick lines of black stretched upward around them.
(A psionic zed, they told her later, had hit a few people. It drained their will to care about anyone or anything. This was a fine distinction for something like her. Few words could have made her realize, and he knew them all.)
With almost a snap, she saw him as a person again. It seemed she had been at the mercy of her own failing will. A puppet to any chemical, psionics, or parasite that came her way. To the grave.
The hammer left her hand before she had even consciously raised it. Not the most aerodynamic weapon, she noted flatly. Sharp metal clapped against the far edge of the morgue. It thumped to the bushes below. Not her most well-thought-out action, either. She might need the hammer in her hand.
It had occurred to her, faintly, that she was furious—he used cut through her headsicknesses with the feeling. The Sawbones retrieved her hammer tersely. When she looked back at Templeton, though, all pressure waned. She could not understand him.
Templeton doubted himself constantly, and yet he could not stop from being certain that he was right. He spent his life in a struggle to keep people in control of themselves, but he could not accept his own loss of control. His humility was so insincere that it had a ring of sincerity, and he passed the whole thing off as a joke anyway, while playing solemnity. His way of speaking was so tangled that by the end of the sentence she could rarely tell if he was being serious, and this was not even counting sarcasm. He complained about being transparent when he was a knot so contradictory she was sure even he couldn’t tell where his mask started and his self ended. More than likely because he valued the mask more. The cold intensified as she focused on the screams in the mist.
In the end, her concern about him pulled her back. Hm.
Again he had helped her. Even looking at him was calming. She rather dryly reminded herself not to make this continued habit of headsickness. Templeton needed vacation time, every now and then, and if he let her pay him she would probably count for half his business.
These strange complications called people…