by Jay Barnson
Suddenly, from beneath the makeshift raft, something shuddered.
Nidj didn’t know anything about sharks, having only seen one once as a girl outside the Greek ruins in Ephesus dragging some poor creature through the surf. The next shudder was unmistakable: her bleeding arm had opened the channel in front of the island like a buffet line to whatever scoured the surrounding reef in hope of an easy meal.
Jerking up onto her knees, she could make out the three sets of fins slicing through the swirling current. As the next wave rose before her, nearly flipping the makeshift raft and her along with it, Nidj came face to face with the grey ghost, as if the wave was another trick mirror in the deathly carnival of the ocean.
Although the line of communication to the ship had gone dead, she could still hear the Doctor’s voice inside her ear, as if he was standing on the other side of the raft spurring her on, his trademark scowl darkening beneath his plume of white hair: We are frail things, Mein Liebling.We suffer and exhaust our bodies each day to know what we are made of in this impermanent prison that is our flesh.But you shall be something different, something far greater. Your fears shall not be our fears. You are not the same frightened girl covered in blood on that train, Mein kleine Mädchen. You are the beginnings of stars . . .
Nidj closed her eyes. She trained the three disks in her mechanical hand, turning them like giant coins that would either buy her fortune or her death. The wave rose again. As the grey shadow turned to face her, she told herself it was nothing more than a scarecrow, its grey, leathery face made of nothing but straw.
It was not her death. Not now, not here . . .
The jaws of the beast opened before her and stayed opened as the head ringed in a jet of crimson that burst all over her pale, shocked face. Clink!
The severed head fell down between the two logs, jostling back and forth like a ball for a few seconds before lodging firmly in the tangled nest of vines. Even in death, the face of prehistoric hunter grinned at her. Screaming wildly, she kicked the beast’s face down into the water until her tan leather boots were smeared with its dark offal. She knew what she had to do next.
As the world above and below swam before her eyes, she lowered her body and began to paddle, digging both arms down into the surf, looking back every now and then to see if the other two had taken the bait. A frenzy of splashing answered her as the next wave picked her up in its reckless embrace.
Over the jagged reef it carried her, whether by luck or by fate, she would never know. She didn’t stop paddling until she could see the beach. And even as she ran through the surf, she held the three disks behind her, ready to strike the unseen hunters flitting beneath the translucent surface.
In the wet, warm sand she collapsed. The ocean and sky swirled all around her. Time fell away, dissolving into the ether of her adrenaline giving way to unbearable pain once more. Only then, at the edge of safety, did Nidj let herself go.
The sun woke her first, the crab second; third, the startling realization that she was still alive. Before passing out she must have taken off the mask; her mouth was full of wet sand. Hacking and spitting out gritty clumps of the ocean’s ash, she brushed the blue-shelled crab away with her pneumatic arm, her mind still filled with visions of the grey shark that had engaged her just beyond the island’s reef.
For a second, the organic claw of the creature and the pneumatic-mechanic hand of the half-human girl poised as if in battle. Realizing itself outmatched, the crab skittered away, disappearing back into the surf until it was no more than a few bubbles in the glistening tide pool.
Nidj rolled over onto her back. Every muscle, every tendon felt severed. In the blazing sun, she looked at her human arm. Her pale, olive-hued skin had already turned rose red from the force of the tropical sun. The wound had turned dark brown as if cauterized by fire. The blood had finally stopped running.
But the beginnings of coin-sized boils began to pop up all over the arm. The sun had saved her from bleeding out, but the coming infection would be worse. Like the tide that swept away an army, turning its victory into defeat, it would kill her if she didn’t find some way to treat the wound.
She pushed herself up onto her knees. Choking back a scream, she bent her human arm backwards to detach the five clamps holding the waterlogged windsuit in place. On the fifth clamp she fought the coming faint and won—by a hair.
There was a loud exhaling sound, followed by a gurgle as the remaining seawater fell from the pressurized tubes. The pack detached from her back. For the first time since standing in the cabin of the Bird without the mask or suit on, she felt incredibly light, like a real bird must feel unencumbered by the weight of larger animals.
Rising cautiously to her feet, she took in her new surroundings. The beach yawned out before her, one long skirt of white sand on either side. Beyond it, a dense tangle of bright green accented by strange, bell-shaped blue and red flowers. Find some sort of antiseptic for the wound.
She knew this from listening to the Doctor’s adventures he would tell nightly by firelight, great hour-long yarns spun from his travels through the African subcontinent. He was a land expeditionary before an aeronautical one. He and a team of three others had ventured deep into the wilderness to prove that a rare contingent of the saber-toothed tiger had not gone the way of the mastodon, but was alive and thriving in a secret hunting ground somewhere in the Congo. Only the Doctor had made it out alive, the deep red scars across his chest the only proof to the world of the lost species’ existence.
Without the aloe extracts taken from the stalks of a dozen plants, the Doctor would have soon been counted among the dead. It was this belief in a similar plant existing in the tropical climate that made Nidj press on into the jungle, unaware that she, too, might be stumbling upon some dark example of Darwin’s genetic drift, that somewhere lurking in the tangle of vines hissing with the chorus of unseen creatures, another saber-toothed beast awaited her.
Holding fast to the razor-sharp halos with her mechanical hand, Nidj sliced a path in front her. Something quick and marsupial screeched above her head, its red nocturnal eyes glittering down at her before screeching again and disappearing back into the canopy.
If ever, Mein Liebling, you are wounded in the wilderness, she heard the old man whisper in her ear, the smell of hot coals in the fireplace and spiked cider rising in her nose, seek out anything that looks like a cactus. Sometimes the sharpest, most vicious of things have the power to heal us. This is the great crux of life, as clear and enigmatic as the rose. And is not a rose a beautiful, healing thing?
If only they were discussing aesthetics, reading Tennyson or Ruskin by firelight, safe within the confines of the musty old house surrounded by the portraits of his ancestors, their black and white faces smiling slighlty as if approving in the madness of their successor’s great mission.
Seek out the cactus . . .
She sliced through the wet web in front of her. But there’s nothing here! She wanted to scream to the sea of eyes up in the canopy. Nothing that resembles a cactus in the slightest! This is the jungle, you old fool, not the desert!
But just as she began to give in to despair, she spied barbed petals rising out of the shadows off to her left. She cut furiously through the wall of vines, gritting her teeth again as the wound in her arm began to reopen and weep with blood. And then, there it was, just a few inches from her hand.
She sliced one of the plant’s arms and it toppled to the ground. Kneeling over the plant like some lost idol, she felt a shiver of hope pass over her as she watched the milky fluid start to run from its severed, green artery. Carefully cutting away all the barbs with the help of her halo, she flicked her mechanical wrist and returned the disk to rest. Then, she squeezed the flow of milk over her wound. The one arm of the plant bore little of the soothing juices, but after slicing two more branches, clearing away the barbs and repeating the ritual again, her arm was soon bathed in a milky coolness, as if thrust into some ancient lake.
I
t still burned, but it burned like the dying coals of a fire burn, not raging with the fury of the inferno. She would have to keep the wound exposed to let the air speed the sealing process. And she would still need water and sustenance to help her body fight the coming infection, but at least she had stayed the progress of the disease beginning inside her.
Sccccccreeeeeeeeeech. A few dark shadows—monkeys, she decided, from their small hunched bodies and long tails—fought themselves in a stalemate battle in the canopy above her. She hunched down against the wet floor of the jungle and scanned the wilderness. There was an outcrop of rocks she remembered from the makeshift raft, at the moment the wave lifted her up above the skyline. It rose above the jungles, buried deep somewhere in the heart of the island. If she could find the highest point, she could figure out the island’s secret anatomy, where the arteries of its wild heart might flow with fresh water.
As for food, she was still a decent hunter. Most individuals shipwrecked on an island didn’t arrive in purgatory with a weapon like hers. Her odds of survival, while still slim, increased with the help of the plant’s aloe. The rest of the story was up to her.
She followed the slope of the land, slicing and cutting a path that through virgin jungle resistant to her blade. Sweat poured down her face, stinging her eyes and disappearing between her shoulder blades to pool in the small of her back. Her lungs felt clogged, and the sensation was as difficult to overcome as maneuvering out in the high altitude of the deck of the Bird. But she pressed on, hoping the oxygen coming in through her nose would be enough to sustain her.
The jungle started to give way to rocks, each one dark and slick, some covered with an almost neon green algae. I must be getting closer to the summit . . . It wasn’t until she had scrambled halfway up the nearly vertical rock face that she heard the shouting.
It had come from the other side of the cliff, not from the path behind her. There it was again. The deserted island isn’t deserted after all . . . But who would venture into this deadly purgatory, unless . . . unless they’re looking for me!
Maybe it was a search party, she thought wistfully, her heart leaping up into her throat. Maybe the explosion of the midge had drawn the attention of someone other than the skyrate horde pursuing them since crossing into the Indian Ocean. It was a flimsy hope that rattled in her heart, jostling like the severed head of the shark that leered back up at her, taunting her small victory.
As she reached the last crop of rocks, nearly slipping and tumbling back down the precipice if not for the help of the makeshift ice pick, somehow she knew that she could not be that lucky.
She had reached the tallest point on the island. There, the strange red- and blue-bell flowers seemed to thrive, as if she had stumbled upon a well-tended greenhouse back in London or outside the water gardens in Giverny, France. Below her, the cliff fell away as precipitously as on the side she had just clambered up. A small inlet spread beneath her, a tidal oasis closed on all sides save for one which opened out into the turquoise arms of the sea.
At the foot of the cliff, along the white sand, stood four figures. There were three dressed in the identical leather and metal uniform of the skyrate, their improvised armor of spiked greaves and barbed chest plates unmistakable even at such a distance. And then the fourth figure—hair like a small white cloud, hunched over on his knees while the others hovered above, raising and pointing blades that glinted in the sun.
Nidj felt her heart almost give out. The Doctor! Now real fear—the thing she had steeled herself against ever since the accident on the train in Russia—began to spread like a poison through her body as her eyes took in the form of a white ship, cracked like an egg in the center of the tidal oasis. Half of the ship’s wings were crushed, upended like fins into the sky.
The Bird is no more . . .Nidj fell back against a wet boulder and lowered her head. How? It was the one word that pulsed with laconic fury through her brain. How can I save him? And what if I do? How would we ever escape again?
They were stuck not in purgatory—it was pure hell, ringed with underwater ghosts, kept watch by three devils who sought no greater delight than to torture them until they spilled every single truth of the science that was their reckless sin.
In the Great Room, the Doctor had read her the story cover to cover one night, what he must have thought was the perfect tale for a young girl who was now no longer a girl, but part machine, part monster to some, an example of the Promethean progress of science against God’s divine hand. The Modern Prometheus . . . he had called out Shelley’s tale with unrestrained gusto, the fire flickering in his eyes like the very fire stolen by the Greek Titan himself.
You are the beginning of stars, he had told her that night. He had saved her life, stopped the infection from destroying her body, saved the body, but not the arm which he would modify beyond God’s divine intentions. Her debt was yet unpaid to him. She had to save him to fulfill the debt, and fulfill his own debt to himself in the process, his arrogant reaching above all other men. She owed him the fire one last time.
There was no clear path down the other side of the mountain. They would know of her coming long before they saw her. It doesn’t matter, she told herself. It would end in blood either way. Her only chance was that she could ready the three disks a split second before they saw her burst through the tree line.
As she slipped down the wet slope, clawing and fighting everything in her path, in her mind she pictured the three scarecrows back on the estate—how it had taken her hours just to learn to sever all three at the same time. But those weren’t fixed targets waiting for her below, on the beach. They were flesh and blood. They were moving objects that called for an improvised science, or, in other words, art. And she would have to draw them—draw them all—far enough away from the Doctor so that he would not be at risk by the whirling blades.
In the end, it wouldn’t be science that saved him, but pure human improvisation, the variable eye and the I in any experiment that can mean everything. It was the reaching past all fatalism, past the laws themselves. It was the bright hope of the I in the suffocating darkness of les ténèbres.
The muffled voices grew louder as she fought her way through the jungle. Through the daggers of thatched light, she could make out two of the skyrates turning and heading towards her, while the third stayed behind, guarding the Doctor with his long scimitar of moveable jagged teeth, a skyrate’s weapon within a weapon. The third one would have to be forced to move. If she could take out at least one of the other two, then the significance of her threat to them might inspire the one guarding the Doctor to action. It was her only hope.
“It’s just a little . . . little . . .” she could hear the closest one taunting in Russian, his voice a static hum coming from the amplifier installed in his skyrate mask. But he never got the chance to say “girl,” for just then Nidj’s first halo burst sideways through one of the slivers of openings in the vines. The skyrate had the sense to raise his scimitar at the last second. The blade broke in half in his hand, the collision redirecting the halo, sending it spinning off to the right . . . and swiftly cutting across the second skyrate.
The first stared in shock at the shard of a blade in his hands, then back down at the body of his companion lying on his back in the sand. His last words faded to a choked whisper. It was exactly the reaction Nidj had hoped for: immediately the third skyrate protecting the Doctor came sprinting towards them. She would have only a second—maybe two—to unleash the second and third halos from the holster. She was already within a few feet of the other skyrate now. He was quickly coming out of shock, reaching, readying his next attack. But he is too close . . . too close . . .
The skyrate pulled a smaller blade from his hip. The young girl and the six-foot pirate, smelling of sweat and leather and alcohol, locked in arms, the force of Nidj’s halo striking the dagger but not enough to sever it, sending her reeling backwards. From behind the black goggles of his mask, Nidj saw the skyrate’s eyes twinkle with bloo
dlust. She caught her backward momentum and knelt to the ground, steadying herself.
She had never trained in combat with real-live human attackers. The Doctor had never expected the skyrates to be able to actually keep their ships afloat even with the theft of his science, and so had never taken her training any further.
She was out of her league. The man in front of her and the other one now only a few feet away were both trained killers. She was just a girl with a unique arm and a reckless immunity to most fear. As the next swing of the blade came down like a pendulum on top of her head, she raised her unbreakable cast of an arm at the last second.
The blade shivered off. This time, to her surprise, the skyrate fell backwards. My arm isn’t just a weapon. It’s a shield! All she had to do was raise it in front of her, deflect her killer’s strikes until she could find the right window to let loose the disks.
In between the two skyrate’s bodies, now a few feet in front of her, she saw the Doctor slowly slip the dagger from its hiding. In their recklessness, the skyrates had not thought to search the old man’s boots.
The two killers closed their ranks tighter in front her, and the image of the Doctor disappeared. But the hope of him still alive, the secret weapon held tight in his hands, gave Nidj all the prodding she needed to engage her attackers.
It happened almost in slow motion: the blade singing past her cheek; her quarter turn around the skyrate’s heaving body; the mechanical hand slipping under her human one; the first razor halo within a thousandth of an inch of severing her own arm; the release of the disk just as the skyrate turned around for a second attack, thinking her neck in a perfect line of sight to be severed.
But the skyrate had lunged a foot too far—the disk sliced past his left flank, then whirled down under his leg, slicing as the he toppled to the ground screaming in agony. Nidj reeled forward, almost into the arms of the other killer. At the last moment, she leapt between his legs—the third disk went sailing too high overhead, almost cutting the Doctor in half before returning with a Clink!to Nidj’s hand as she rolled back onto her feet again.