Feverborn

by Karen Marie Moning

  When they’d descended from above, their assault was instantaneous, almost as if they’d sifted, expanding their leathery cloaks, smothering me. I hadn’t even managed to lift a finger before my hands were immobilized.

  My spear and guns, useless. I hadn’t been able to get to anything, not even my cellphone. Then again, from what I’d seen, Barrons’s tattoos hadn’t been finished and IYD wouldn’t have done me any good.

  One moment they’d been in the sky, the next my arms were tightly straitjacketed to my sides, my legs bound. Their smelly, leathery cloaks had covered even my head and I wasn’t able to breathe. I thought I was dying. The horrible thing about being suffocated is you don’t know if you’re going to wake up or not.

  I’d decided in my last, fleeting moment of consciousness that the way the Sweeper had decided to “fix” me was apparently to kill me; a sentiment I might not have entirely disagreed with at various points in my life.

  But not now. Jada needed me. Oh, she didn’t know that and probably wouldn’t agree with it, but she did. The Sweeper could try to kill me later. Now was not a good time. I wasn’t staying here to get “fixed.”

  I leapt up.

  Er, rather, my brain gave the command for my body to leap up.

  Nothing happened.

  Manacles rattled. Slightly. My wrists and ankles burned. I groaned. I’d practically broken my neck trying to stand. I was strong. My restraints were stronger.

  I tried to move my head. It didn’t work. There was a wide band across my forehead, strapping it tightly to the surface upon which I was stretched, flat on my back.

  I was horrified to realize I was secured to some kind of cold metal gurney. For a moment I was afraid I’d been given a paralytic drug, but then found that I could move my head a few inches if I put effort into it. The rest of me was so tightly buckled down, I couldn’t move my arms or legs at all.

  There was a sudden rustling in the distance, the sound of my stalkers, their dry chittering. I stank to high heaven, drenched in their disgusting yellow dust.

  I went motionless and closed my eyes again.

  In horror flicks, when the hero gets strapped to this kind of thing, in this kind of place, the villain always waits for them to regain consciousness before the truly gruesome acts of barbarism begin.

  I could play dead a long time.

  As the rustling wraiths drew nearer, I heard a whirring and grinding, the sound of badly greased cogs turning. I kept my eyes closed and concentrated on breathing deep and natural.

  I recognized the sound.

  The thing ambulated ponderously closer, panic and dread accompanying it, filling me with the same immobilizing fear I’d felt the night the walking trash heap passed through the alley behind BB&B. I couldn’t have moved then even if I’d been unrestrained.

  If I had been able to move, I would have smacked myself in the forehead. As I ran like hell.

  The trash heap I’d seen the other day was the mysterious Sweeper!

  It had been right there with me, inside our protective storm, looking for me two days ago, and I’d had no clue it was the thing that had its minions watching me.

  In my defense, they didn’t look anything alike. And who would think something ancient and all-powerful that fixed other things would itself be compiled of refuse?

  Although, I brooded, it sort of made sense. Maybe it was always fixing itself, too, and just grabbed whatever was handy. I remembered the metallic things embellishing the Unseelie princess’s spine, the metal I’d seen flashing on my carrion stalker’s faces, and it made even more sense. Sort of. As much as anything in our Fae-infested world made sense anymore.

  The thing crashed to a rattling halt somewhere to the right of me. I lay rigid with fear, listening, trying not to let panic completely unravel me.

  There were noises then, smaller ones than the Sweeper’s heavy tread. Metal against metal: clinks and clacks of things being turned on and off and moved around.

  Beyond my closed lids the environment grew brighter. Two more clicks and it was abruptly brilliant. Focused, intense lights had been turned on and were shining directly down on me.

  I didn’t like this one bit. I was strapped to a table, with bright lights above, about to be fixed by something that couldn’t even walk straight and was made of trash and guts. Despite the panic immobilizing my limbs and clouding my mind, I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell it thought was wrong with me. How was I broken? I wanted to know, to argue with it. I wisely kept both mouth and eyes shut. Not that I could have opened either anyway. Its mere presence was a paralytic.

  After what felt like an endless amount of time, it rattled and clanked away.

  The chittering of the ghouls faded as they went with it, and I collapsed in my skin with relief as voluntary motion returned.

  A reprieve. No clue why. Didn’t care.

  I slitted my eyes open and closed them quickly again, blinded by the bright, cold lights shining down. I turned my head as far to the right as I could. That was where I’d heard the ominous sounds, and I wanted to know what I was facing. I opened my eyes again.

  After ascertaining no wraiths lurking in the shadows, waiting to sound the alarm the second they saw me stir, I strained my muscles to peer as far right as possible.

  A long metal table.

  A dazzling array of sharp, glittering instruments.

  It was straight out of a horror movie. I had the sudden unsolicited, disturbing memory of sitting in BB&B five nights ago, trying to dig bullets out of myself, thinking about what sick things could be done to me if I was tied up, given my regenerating abilities.

  Breathe, I told myself. Above the table was a large rectangular screen featuring a picture of something gray and black and white and shadowy.

  I narrowed my eyes, focusing on the screen. It took me a few seconds to process what I was seeing, and I only did because my nose itched and I couldn’t get to it so I scrunched it up and sort of tossed my head the small amount I could, and the image on the screen moved.

  It was me. On the inside. Specifically my skull.

  Every detail: sinus cavities, teeth, bones, muscles. There were symbols marked in various spots on the skull. I angled my head hard and noticed that to the right of the large screen were four smaller ones.

  Those took me longer to figure out but I finally realized each was showing different parts of my brain. There were symbols marked on those images, too, concentrated in—if I remembered my biology courses correctly, and unfortunately at the moment I seemed to be recalling them with horrifying clarity—the limbic region of my brain.

  I knew what the limbic region was. We’d studied it in my abnormal psych course. It was a set of brain structures located on both sides of the thalamus, and it supported emotion, behavior, and long-term memory, among other things. The limbic system included the hypothalamus, the amygdala, and the hippocampus. It was highly tied to the brain’s pleasure center and tightly linked to the prefrontal cortex.

  The reason I recalled all this so clearly was because our university had been participating in a study while I was taking my AP course, and the professor had solicited volunteers for it.

  The purpose of the study had been to explore whether a “turned off” limbic system or brain damage in that area was a valid marker of psychopathy. He’d told us there was significant evidence acquired from incarcerated criminals that there was indeed a correlation.

  I remembered looking at my classmates, who’d eagerly thrust their hands in the air, thinking: Who would be stupid enough to volunteer for this? What if they got their brain scanned and learned they were psychopaths? Was that really something you wanted to know? More importantly—was it really something you wanted everyone around you to know?

  I’d shoved my hands deep in my pockets that day and kept them there.

  Now, as I studied the screen of my brain, I pondered the implications. I lacked the training to decide if my limbic region was “turned off” or damaged, but from the look of the
instruments on the table and the symbols on the various parts of my brain—it was about to be.

  The Sweeper thought my brain needed to be fixed. I scowled. There was nothing wrong with my brain. Had I been able, I would have clamped both my hands protectively to my head. Would my skull keep remodeling as it tried to cut me open? Sealing around its instruments? I had no doubt that whatever barbaric surgery it had planned wouldn’t go easy. I wondered if it was the presence of the Book inside me that made the Sweeper consider me both powerful enough and fractured enough to require fixing. The damned Sinsar Dubh just never stopped messing up my life.

  A voice broke the silence from my left—first, scaring the shit out of me, then filling me with far more horror than I’d realized I could even hold.

  “It’s my heart,” Jada whispered. “What’s it planning to fix of yours?”

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  “And I will wait, I will wait for you…”

  I closed my eyes and sagged limply against the table.

  No, no, no, I screamed inside my head. Not this. Anything but this.

  Then I surged violently from head to toe, trying to explode from my bonds. I flailed, shuddered, and flopped. Minutely.

  I got nowhere.

  “No,” I finally managed to whisper. And again more strongly, “No.” Not Dani. Never Dani. No one was “fixing” anything about her, and certainly not her bodacious heart.

  “So,” she prodded in a whisper. “What’s it fixing on you?”

  “You’re strapped to a table, about to be fixed, and you’re curious?”

  “If I hadn’t told you first, wouldn’t you be curious about what it thought my problem was?” she whispered back.

  “How do you know its purpose is to fix things?”

  “Pretty obvious from the images, Mac,” she said dryly.

  “How did you know I was here?” I hadn’t known she was. I hadn’t bothered looking to my left. There hadn’t been any sounds over there. Perhaps our would-be surgeon had already set up her instruments before I’d regained consciousness.

  “Superhearing. You’ve been sighing. Occasionally, a snort. Can you reach your cellphone?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Me either.”

  How had she gotten here? Had the wraiths broken out a window in BB&B, swooped in and plucked her unconscious body from the bed? Had they always possessed the power to defeat Barrons’s wards and just been pretending? And why? As far as I knew, my ghouls hadn’t been stalking her. Had the Sweeper simply tucked her into its cart like a grocery store customer indulging in a buy-one-get-one-free deal because she’d been handy and according to its nebulous and highly suspect criteria was “broken,” too?

  “How did it get you?” I asked woodenly.

  “I looked out the window and saw you walking down the alley.”

  “I thought you were unconscious.” Damn it, she should have been unconscious! Then she wouldn’t be here.

  “I was waiting for everyone to finally leave. Ryodan finished my tattoo today. I had someplace to go. But I looked out the window and saw you following what looked like a walking trash heap.”

  “Following it?” I’d never even seen it. Apparently the noisy, rattling heap could cast a glamour.

  “It was about twenty feet ahead of you. Then I heard Barrons’s voice coming from it and knew something was wrong. The minute I stepped outside, the ZEWS were on me. I didn’t even have time to access the slipstream.”

  They’d straitjacketed her, too, I realized. Smothered her and knocked her out, and like me, she’d awakened restrained from head to toe.

  “Slipstream?”

  “Used to call it freeze-frame.”

  “Got any superhero ideas?” I said. I wasn’t hopeful. Restrained, even her extraordinary gifts were useless.

  “Everything I learned Silverside requires use of my hands. Can you move at all?”

  “Only my head and only a little.”

  “Ditto,” she said.

  I searched for something reassuring to say but could find nothing. Barrons would have no reason to look for us beyond the eight-block circumference of the storm, and I doubted we were in that part of the Dark Zone that was inside it. I’d underestimated my ghoulish stalkers. I wasn’t making that mistake again. I had to assume anything that put so much premeditation into its “work” would put an equal amount of thought into choosing a place where it would not be interrupted.

  We couldn’t count on Barrons for a rescue. And certainly not Ryodan.

  It was just the two of us.

  “I’ve been in worse situations,” Jada whispered.

  I winced and closed my eyes. I really hadn’t wanted to hear that. “Jada—”

  “If you’re going to tell me you’re sorry again, stow it. It was my feet that took me where I went. That night and tonight. We make our own choices.”

  “And there’s your responsibility dysmorphia showing again,” I said coolly.

  “Responsibility dysmorphia is you being so arrogant you think your actions are the only ones that count. You chased me. I ran. That’s two people doing two things. We can split it fifty/fifty if you want. I planned on going Fae-side anyway. I was hungry for adventure. I never thought ahead. I lived in the moment. You weren’t responsible for that.”

  I remembered her laughing as she’d leapt into the mirror, deep from the belly, no fear. “I should have come after you.”

  “I would have darted into the nearest mirror in the hall. You know what those were? They showed pretty, happy places, sunny islands with white castles on sand. It took me a while to figure out what was on the other side wasn’t what they showed. Barrons was right. You following me would have killed me.”

  “You know about that?”

  “Lor told me. And once I’d gone through that first Silver, you had no chance of finding me. There are billions of portals in that hall, Mac. That’s not a needle in a haystack—that’s a billion needles in a gazillion haystacks.”

  “But you lost so many years,” I whispered.

  “There you go again. I didn’t lose them. I lived them. I wouldn’t undo a bit of it. It made me who I am. I like who I am.”

  That hadn’t been how it looked at the abbey, and I told her that.

  “It’s hard to be alone,” she said. “You do what makes survival possible. Otherwise you don’t make it.”

  Like talking to the equivalent of a ball for five years? I didn’t say. However crazy it was, it had gotten her through. Who was I to judge?

  And now here she was, strapped to a table, and the part of her the Sweeper wanted to work on was her heart—that amazing, luminous, live-out-loud in every possible color part of her that, given enough time, could heal and become luminous again.

  But not once the Sweeper had worked on it.

  I didn’t think for a moment it intended to make her more caring and emotional. I was pretty sure if either of us walked out of here after having been “fixed,” we wouldn’t be remotely the same, probably some Borg-like creature, a distant, collective automaton. I shuddered at the thought of losing my individuality, especially since I’d been altered to live a very long time, with my personality blotted out by the stamp of something that fancied itself an improver. How dare anything tamper with our innate structure? Who the hell was it to decide what was right and wrong with us?

  And Dani—so unique, complex, and brilliant—what might it turn her into?

  I closed my eyes. Tears seeped out the corners. “Can you forgive me?”

  “I keep telling you, you didn’t do anything to forgive.” Then after a long pause she said, “Can you forgive me, Mac?” And I knew she meant Alina.

  “I keep telling you—” I said.

  We both sort of laughed then, and I cried harder, silently. We’d had to be tied up in the same room together to finally say what we’d needed to say.

  The Sweeper was right. My brain was flawed. It couldn’t be relied upon. My heart would always overrule it. Like it had when I’d been determi
ned to bring Barrons back from the dead. Like it quite possibly had in bringing Alina back. There was no way Dani was getting worked on. I would never let it happen. No matter the cost. Right or wrong, wise or foolish, liberating or damning, I wouldn’t allow the Sweeper to harm her.

  “I don’t like how quiet you are, Mac,” she whispered. “What are you thinking in that messed up head of yours? It’s your brain, isn’t it?”

  I must have made a sound of irritation because she sort of snickered.

  “I knew it,” she said. “It’s planning to fix your brain!”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “It is, too. Admit it,” she said. “We’ve been analyzed by a pile of junk that looks like it’s going to fall apart if it takes one wrong step, and found lacking. My heart. Your head.”

  I snorted. It was kind of funny in a really weird and not at all funny way.

  “You’ll notice it thinks my brain is perfect,” she said smugly.

  “Yeah, well, it thinks my heart is better than yours.”

  “It is.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Well, my brain’s definitely better than yours,” she said lightly, and I was struck by the realization that cold, distant Jada was teasing.

  “You do realize we’re in mortal danger right now,” I reminded.

  “You know what Shazam did for me that was one of the best things of all? He kept it light no matter how dark it got.”

  Again I winced. I didn’t know how to talk to her about her stuffed-animal delusion. I said nothing.

  “So, what’s going on in that badly highlighted head of yours? Have you tried olive oil, by the way? You aren’t over there thinking about trying to do something with the Sinsar Dubh, are you?”

  I wasn’t about to defend or argue. It wasn’t open to debate. Not with her. She was the reason I was going to do it. “Of course I tried olive oil. The paint penetrated the hair shaft,” I said irritably. “It’ll come out eventually.”

  “You think you can use its power without it destroying you?”

  “What do you think?” I evaded.