by Dima Zales
The pain is sharp and stinging, but at least it’s not amplified by the recently departed Sasha-chort the way it was for Felix.
Then again, maybe Felix was in a better position. When they could amplify the pain, they could get away with less damage to the victim’s body.
Before I can think more cheerful thoughts such as that one, Boris hits me in the stomach.
Air rushes out of my lungs as my solar plexus shrieks in pain for the second time today. And it’s again Boris’s fault.
Gasping, I try to go into Headspace but find it almost impossible to concentrate.
Who knew reaching the needed state of focus is so much harder when you’re in debilitating pain?
Boris smacks my other cheek.
I want to scream, but I still don’t have enough air to do so.
There’s a strong taste of copper in my mouth, and tears stream down my cheeks.
“Enough,” Woland says just as I expect to get hit again.
For a few blissful minutes, I’m left alone, so I use the reprieve to regain my breath.
When I refocus on Woland again, he looks at me pityingly. “This doesn’t need to get so unpleasant,” he reminds me. “It’s just a matter of time before you tell us what we need to know. Why don’t you just do it now before the damage is permanent?”
“Please.” I cough. “What is it that you want to know from me? I’ll tell you anything you want.”
He looks confused. Then he asks hopefully, “Where is Rasputin?”
“Who?” I say, figuring if I can’t send them on a wild goose chase, I can at least feign ignorance for a bit.
Woland sighs and gestures at Boris.
Boris punches me in the nose this time.
I see white stars, and the pain almost makes me pass out.
Almost, but unfortunately not quite.
Woland waits until I can talk again, then says, “I have it on good authority that Rasputin is your father, and you know where he is.” All usual politeness gone from his voice, he adds, “Lie to me one more time, and I’ll stop your heart.”
The chorts around us murmur nervously.
Crap.
I didn’t realize he’d count that as a lie. This might be a case of the future liking certain patterns.
I’m only down to a single lie before he gives me the heart attack I experienced in my vision.
Also, who is this authority he keeps talking about?
“I’ll ask again,” Woland says. “Where is he?”
“Idi k chortu,” I say—a Russian curse I chose because it references his kind.
Woland shakes his head in disappointment. “Did you know that sayings like that are why my kind is so powerful?” he says. “It makes it so that some Russians still believe in us to this day.”
Instead of a reply, I give him my best death glare.
“Fine,” he says and looks at Boris. “Use your power on her this time.”
Boris grins wider than before and grabs my neck in a chokehold.
Only instead of squeezing, he does something, and an energy like the one in my vision spreads through my body.
A sharp pain blooms in the upper left side of my abdomen.
What the hell?
What just happened?
“Boris just killed your spleen,” Woland says.
I stare at him uncomprehendingly, my insides painfully churning.
“The spleen is responsible for filtering antibody-coated bacteria,” Woland says, clearly misunderstanding my look. “It also reprocesses old red blood cells and recycles the iron in your hemoglobin.”
The power of thought finally comes back to me. “No.” My voice shakes. “You can’t do that.”
“We can and we did,” Woland says. “There’s someone in this room who can do the same thing to every single one of your organs. As long as you refuse to talk, you’re going to lose them one by one.”
The horror I feel is indescribable.
I just lost my spleen.
Though I’m still fuzzy on its function, I think I’m now going to be more prone to certain infections. Not that the exact effects matter. The very idea of losing an organ like that is beyond creepy.
I think I’d rather they keep beating me—which is probably why they opted for this.
“You ready?” Woland nods at a blond chort who steps forward. “Your tonsils are next.”
Fighting the mother of all panic, I try to focus on Headspace.
I’m in too much pain to concentrate, but I have to. This might be my last chance, as the pain will only get worse from here.
I suck in a breath and focus again.
Then again.
Finally, it works.
Chapter Seventeen
I’ve never welcomed the bodiless existence of Headspace as much as I do now.
Maybe I can now think of something—though my thoughts boil down to one simple mantra.
I don’t want to lose any more organs.
I really don’t.
But I also can’t tell them where Rasputin is.
I’d rather live without a spleen and tonsils.
Ignoring the shapes around me, I float until I calm down to mere panic levels, and then I reach out to Rasputin.
He doesn’t answer, which is probably for the best.
I’m so freaked out right now that I’d be tempted to tell him what’s happening. And then he might want to sacrifice himself for my sake.
I float some more and do my best to calm down further. Then I try reaching out to the bannik again.
It doesn’t work.
Just for completeness, I try to think of Nostradamus’s essence one more time. He seems perceptive, so I add that to my summons. Troubled as well—no doubt thanks to his loss of sight. For good measure, I even add my desperate need to talk to someone into the mix.
To my shock, an entity shows up in Headspace next to me.
A being that radiates power and curiosity.
Spotting me, he reaches toward me.
With great eagerness, I reach back—and fall into the joining.
I’m walking down the street, a tiny palm held firmly in my much bigger hand.
Well, not my hand. This is Nostradamus’s memory, so the bigger hand is his.
This is a memory from a time before he lost his sight—and he’s enjoying looking at the greenery all around. He especially enjoys watching his beloved son.
“Can we go to the bakery and get a pastry?” the boy says in French—which I understand, as I’m inside Nostradamus’s head.
Nostradamus grins. “What do you foresee I’d say in reply? Do you think I’ll agree or not?”
The love he feels for his son is overwhelming.
It almost makes me scared to have my own kids one day—loving someone this much just seems against the rules.
“Does everything need to be a lesson?” the kid sing-songs. “It’s Sunday. I just want—”
Another memory begins, and this time, Nostradamus is standing in total darkness that is his new existence.
He’s not brooding about losing his eyes, however. It’s the loss of his family—which had been murdered by Tartarus—that weighs on him.
Cold rain pelts his head as he reaches out and feels for the small gravestone.
When he finds it, he reads the inscription in braille.
It’s his son’s grave.
An empty grave.
The actual corpses are on another world—a world Tartarus decimated.
“I’ll make that monster pay for what he did to you,” Nostradamus promises grimly. “He won’t get away with it, I swear. I’ll—”
As happens every time the memory part of the joining is over, I find myself in complete emptiness with a synapse-hologram of Nostradamus floating in front of me.
He’s attached to the uncanny shape-entity that is his Headspace representation, and his glasses are missing—which gives me a look at the scarred mess that used to be his eyes.
“Sasha,” he says calm
ly. “This is a pleasant surprise.”
“How do you know it’s me?” I ask, still staring at his injuries.
“When in this place, I can see just fine,” he says. “Or more accurately, it’s not eyes that one needs to see in this place—nor is it ears you hear with.”
“Right.” I float down a foot. “As much as I’d love to discuss metaphysics, right now I urgently need your help. I can’t risk one of us running out of seer mojo before I tell you what’s going on.”
“Of course.” His accent sounds thicker as he floats down to my level. “Talk.”
Rattling out information as swiftly as I can, I explain what happened, finishing with, “I was hoping you and Lilith could help like you did earlier today. I know it’s a lot to ask, but—”
“I’m in, but I can’t speak for Lilith,” he says. “I’m assuming she’ll want to help her daughter, though.”
“Great. When do you think you can be here?”
His forehead creases in concern.
“We’re on another world,” he says. “It may take a while to get to you.”
“Crap.” I float down about five feet. “I’m not sure I have enough organs to wait a while.”
“You’ll have to think of a way to stall them,” he says. “Now, let’s terminate this conversation so both of us retain as much of our seer powers as we can. I have a feeling we’ll need them.”
“You’re right,” I say and float toward my Headspace representation.
“Be brave,” Nostradamus says as he does the same.
We both touch ourselves—in a non-dirty way, of course—and the joining terminates.
I’m back in my chair with hope in my heart.
Hope that evaporates as a chort walks closer to me and touches the back of my hand.
“Last chance for your tonsils,” Woland says.
Cringing, I shake my head.
The energy enters my body again, and my throat spasms as though I’ve gotten the worst case of strep in the history of medicine.
I gag, and tears stream down my face.
It’s hard to believe I just lost my tonsils. Again, I have only a vague idea of their purpose, but I believe I will now have an increased chance of throat infections.
“Ready to cooperate?” Woland looks at me and nods at a short chort to his left. “Your gallbladder is next.”
“Screw you,” I try to say, but thanks to my swollen throat, it comes out more like a hiss.
The round-faced chort walks up to me and touches my wrist.
This time, the pain is in my upper right abdomen.
Brutal, pulsing pain.
Realizing that I’m screaming my lungs out, I do my best to calm down, but it’s hard, knowing that I won’t store bile in my gallbladder anymore.
Speaking of bile, there’s plenty in my throat.
Woland catches my gaze. “Please talk. We’re running out of non-vital organs.”
I swallow a fresh surge of bile. “He’s my father,” I manage to croak out. “I can’t give him up.”
“A father you never knew existed,” Woland points out.
Battling a wave of nausea, I shake my head.
“Fine.” Woland nods at a thin chort on his left. “Which kidney do you want to keep for now—left or right?”
I grit my teeth and do my best not to show my horror.
“Left one it is,” Woland says and nods to his minion.
The guy walks over and does his thing.
This pain is the worst one yet. I shake as if in the grip of a seizure and pray for unconsciousness—but it doesn’t come. Instead, there’s just never-ending agony. Radiating from my stomach, it pulses through every nerve ending in my body until I feel like I will throw up.
I don’t—barely—but I’m so drained by the effort I’m barely able to keep my head up by the time the worst of the shaking stops.
“Are you done with this resistance nonsense?” Woland asks.
Battling through the agony, I stiffen my neck and pointedly press my lips together.
Sighing, Woland gestures to the spikey-haired chort who killed my adoptive mom in my vision.
The bastard steps forward.
“You can live without the thyroid gland,” Woland says pedantically. “But you’d have to take hormone replacement pills for the rest of your life.”
I try to spit at him, but my throat is too swollen and mouth too dry.
“So be it,” Woland says.
The spikey-haired asshole walks up to me and touches my hand.
An energy spike later, the agony in my throat seems to spread farther down my neck.
I break out in a cold sweat. I feel on the verge of losing my mind—or breaking down and telling them what they want to know.
But no.
I can’t.
“What else is unessential?” Woland looks at the lanky chort who stabbed Dad with a shashka in my vision.
“Well, women can live just fine without ovaries.” He nods at the round-faced chort who was also at Dad’s hotel.
A chill spreads through my whole body. Just minutes ago, in Nostradamus’s memories, I wondered if I’d want to have a child, but that was just a spur-of-the-moment thought. In reality, I very much want to have the option to have kids, and to have that taken away is—
“I think it’s also possible to survive without the pancreas,” the round-faced guy says, nodding at a skeletal-looking chort in the crowd.
“She’d need insulin very soon, and we don’t have any,” Woland says, studying me. “No, I think the ovaries are a great target. There are two of them, so Sasha can have two chances before irreversible consequences.”
“Please!” I choke out. “Don’t.”
“Then tell me what I want to know,” he says soothingly. “This stops whenever you want it to stop.”
I tug at my bindings, but to no avail.
“Make it the right one,” Woland tells the round-faced chort.
The guy walks up to me and touches my cheek. “Just tell him what he wants to know,” he whispers. “You will anyway.”
When I don’t reply, he shrugs and sends his vile energy into my body.
It feels as though all the cramps I’ve ever had in my life condense into a single moment, and the cold sweat trickling down my back turns into a river. At the same time, I feel like I’ve been thrown in a sauna, where someone has turned up the heat to human-barbecue levels.
My stomach heaves, and my vision darkens, but somehow, I remain conscious—and agonizingly aware of the pain.
Forget fertility. I’m ready to tell them anything just to stop this.
A desperate idea pops into my swimming head, and I struggle to go into Headspace to see how it would pan out. But no matter how hard I try, the cramps from hell make it impossible.
I try again.
Nope.
Headspace and pain are refusing to play well together.
Fine then. Maybe I risk my idea without checking it via a vision?
“You have two seconds before you go sterile,” Woland says from somewhere.
No.
Not that.
“Stop,” I moan. “I’ll tell you where he is.”
The sweaty palm of the round-faced chort is removed from my hand.
“Please go ahead,” Woland says soothingly. “Just remember, lie to me again and you die.”
That’s right.
This will be the second time—and I know he’s not bluffing.
“New Zealand,” I squeeze out as I did in my vision. “He’s staying at the Four Seasons Motel in Queenstown.”
The rest of our interactions proceed as in my vision. He checks to make sure a place called Four Seasons exists in that part of the world; then he takes a bunch of chorts and leaves.
Dragging in air through my painfully swollen throat, I sag in the chair.
My big gamble is that Nostradamus and Lilith come before I get caught in this lie.
My crappy choices were to risk my life or lose my
other ovary and who knows what else.
“Do you want to play some chess?” Boris asks another chort and takes out a tiny box from his pocket.
“We have to watch her,” the chort replies.
“Not necessarily,” Boris says, then smiles nastily at me and cracks his knuckles.
“Wait,” I croak as he makes a fist, but he ignores me and smashes it into the right side of my already-swollen face.
Something—probably my cheekbone—cracks, and my consciousness drops away.
I come to my senses in a symphony of pain.
My whole body is in agony, and my face feels like it’s been through a meat grinder.
There is a bright side, though.
Thanks to the pain, I know where I am—so I don’t show anyone that I’m back to the land of the conscious.
I just breathe shallowly and hope the agony subsides.
Only it doesn’t.
In fact, it’s so bad I’m unable to reach Headspace no matter how many times I try.
After I stew in misery for what feels like hours, I hear the door opening.
Hoping with everything I’ve got that it’s Lilith and Nostradamus, I crack my lids a sliver. The irony of this doesn’t escape me. If someone had told me this morning I’d be this eager to see Lilith, of all people, I’d laugh in their face.
When I see who came in, all hope deserts me.
I gravely miscalculated.
It’s not Lilith and Nostradamus.
It’s Woland—and he looks furious, just like he did in my vision.
And like in that vision, he’s about to kill me.
He’ll stop my heart, and that’ll be that.
As if in rebellion over what’s about to happen, my heart hammers wildly against my ribcage.
“I told you what would happen if you lied to me again.” Just like in my vision, Woland grabs my aching chin and forces me to look into his eyes.
This is it.
“Wait,” I say frantically. “I can explain.”
“No.” Woland’s face is like stone. “You’ve wasted enough of my time.”
Chapter Eighteen
Before Woland can send his heart-killing energy into me, the warehouse ceiling explodes.