I’m trying, he thought. Fuck, how he’d rather be questioning Hooplah Diaz right now.
“Inhale,” said the voice. “And releeeease.”
That was the last thing Kage heard before he drowned in silver.
*
Daniel’s feet fell into the rhythm of the crowd on the Promenade. He swung to the metronome of the canal’s waves lapping the riverbank.
The sun had set minutes before he reached the bottom of Margaret’s staircase. It was Saturday night. The inhabitants of the Promenade escaped their dusty buildings, their dusty lives, and stepped onto Canal Street. Gutter performers cartwheeled along the walkway, their oscillating neon glow cycling through every color south of ultraviolet. Teenagers, eager to taste the sins of the city, whooped and laughed through the thoroughfare.
Music splayed through the throngs in narrow beams. As he walked, Daniel stepped into and out of the bands of sound.
“Let the night dive into your liver,” screeched a man’s falsetto. Daniel stepped out of the invisible beam of music, and into another. “I ate you yesterday. And you tasted like a mushroom cloud of pain.”
Bubblers behind him. Bubblers in front. Edging him, driving him forward. He shut his eyes. Allowed himself to be carried by the pack. Allowed the electric haze to penetrate him. There was a delicious energy in the Bubble air. The vibration seeped under Daniel’s fingernails. His hands tingled with it. These people … these people who’d taken everything from him. His very body. His very meat.
His feet pulsed with their excitement. The drum of their heartbeats became his heartbeat. As much as he hated them, he was one of them tonight. A Bubbler. Soaking up their joy. Drowning in their hedonism.
His glasses pinged, and he opened his eyes. Bacchus Mall stood before him. Fountains of wine flanked the entrance. He reached out a trembling hand to the liquid, black in the evening light. Alcohol coursed through his fingers. Wine. Cold as Margaret’s heart.
Daniel guzzled it down. He hadn’t had a drink since the last Friday night at the cafeteria in the Orphanage. Weeks, months, ago? He didn’t care. He withdrew his hand. Shut his eyes, and dunked headfirst into the fountain. Let the liquid stuff his mouth.
After a minute of this, after he realized passersby were staring, he stepped back. Allowed the wine to drip away from the waterproof material of his smartshirt.
He checked himself. He didn’t feel anything more than slightly tipsy. But he’d drunk so much? The world glowed with that faint tinge of careless promise.
He stepped through the archway. Toward the throbbing red dots on the map in his vision. Toward Ben and Bob Stanton. Into Bacchus Mall.
“Sir, I’ll have to ask you stop right there.” A hand, thick as as Daggy’s, struck the center of his chest.
Daniel’s eyes traced up the length of the hand, up an arm so meaty, it could double for a leg, up into eyes the size of fists.
“Your clothes aren’t set to phased variance,” said the bouncer.
Daniel shrugged.
“First time here?” The man’s voice was entangled in barbed wire.
Daniel nodded.
The bouncer slapped a device onto Daniel’s chest. “Higher frequencies on the left. Lower frequencies to the right. Ethereals on the top floor. Probably want to avoid those if it’s your first time.”
“Got it,” said Daniel smoothly. He had no idea what the man was talking about.
“Next.” The bouncer shoved him through a shimmering curtain.
Daniel tried to make sense of the sight on the other side. To his right were rows of storefronts, burgeoning with customers whose movements left after-shadows in their wake. Hundreds of youths weaved in and out of the stores like sewing needles. They wove through restaurants and coffee shops. Diners and ice cream booths. Burger joints and milkshake parlors. The scents of a million untasted meals swam through his brain. Tickled him. Taunted him.
To his left was grass. Cricket-field grass. Like the ground he’d seen when he’d first arrived in the Bubble.
His gaze swung back to the stores. A couple, hand-in-hand, strolled out of an Indian restaurant, and headed for the lawn. They each wore devices on their chests like the device the bouncer had given Daniel. They twisted the black dials now. And as they passed over the invisible line that seemed to divide the grass from the stores, they disappeared.
Raw confusion, the familiar sense of losing his mind that he’d felt when Thomsin had disappeared into the taxi, overtook him now. He blinked. Squinted. Removed his glasses. Replaced them. The couple was gone.
He checked the map overlaid on his glasses. Ben and Bob Stanton were, according to the display, standing about a hundred yards to his left. On the lawn, where nobody at all seemed to be standing.
Daniel examined the device plastered on his chest. “2300,” glowed in faint LED numbers across the front of the device. The couple seemed to have adjusted theirs by twisting a dial that encircled the display screen. He twisted his now, in a clockwise direction.
The numbers cycled upwards on both the device, and on his glasses. The number was displayed on the bottom-left corner of his vision. 2500. 3000. 3500. Something shimmered on the grass. He continued winding the dial, gradually now. 3700. 3900.
A haunting note warbled into existence. The morphing numbers reached 4000, and the music clarified. The note trembled in the air, squeezed into short bursts of sound that bathed the folds of Daniel’s ears. It tapped his eyeballs with its insistent beat.
At 4100, the grass dissolved into a gray haze. The ghostly outlines of people hovered over the lawn. As he adjusted the dial higher, the vague lines of their bodies coalesced, forming distinct individuals.
“… chocolate makes me horny,” said a man’s voice.
Daniel focused his eyes. Notched the frequency of the device a few decades higher. It was the couple. Standing about a yard in front of him, sharing an ice cream.
The girl laughed. “We’re in the right place then.” Her smartblouse was an alarming shade of flesh. Daniel blinked again. That was her nipple. The smartblouse was translucent. He looked away.
Drums. A voice, drenched in melancholy, sang out in balladic rhythm.
We had you cleaned
We had you eat
We had you bathe
We had your feet
It took Daniel a moment to place the song. The operating theatre where they’d taken his amygdala. The same words. But the difference in the beat was sufficient for a difference in meaning.
He sought out the source of the voice. There. In the distance, past swarms of laughter and half-naked onlookers, was a stage.
He stepped through the crowd, the ground spongy under his feet. Two young men stood on the platform. One blew into what looked like a long pipe. Daniel focused on the instrument. “Didgeridoo,” said his glasses. The other man sang into a microphone that hovered about his lips.
We ate your lungs
We heart your beat
We love your toes
We love your meat
Like all the audience, the band was shirtless. But … but something puffy, something pink, inflated on their chests. He squinted, but couldn’t make out what the appendage could be.
Daniel stepped forward. Pressed between two couples.
“I’m ready. Want to switch to 5200?” said a girl. “After this song,” said another.
Daniel ignored them. Ignored the touch of their breasts against his arm as he brushed past. Because planted upon each of the chests of the two men on the stage, in the glaring concert lights, was … a lung, pink and alive. And as one of them blew into his didgeridoo, and as the other emptied his voice, rich as a printed steak, the lungs deflated.
That was them. Ben and Bob Stanton.
And Daniel knew. He just knew. Those were his lungs.
*
Cold.
Kage felt it as a tingle in his anterior ventricle. It was cooler than usual for this time of year on planet Regulus. Barely nine hundred degrees Celsius. Divin
g in the liquid silver was hazardous. A few hundred feet down, pockets of ocean solidified into chunks of solid metal. They rose as they coalesced, melting back into a liquid before they reached the surface.
Kage was hunting in one of his favorite spots – a silicon reef about three miles from shore. Pickings had been good this season. He and his pod of squid had eaten well. Henkalaus, a young male who’d joined the pod earlier this year, was looking especially fat. When he’d first joined the group, you could wrap a talon round his forward tentacles, with room to spare. Now his limbs were the size of cucumbers. Kage wouldn’t be surprised if Henkalaus ousted Darius for Lead. But not quite yet. It was only Spring, thank Whales. Summer was when the females went into heat.
The pod propelled forward through the hoary depths. Darted around hunks of barely frozen silver. They swirled the scents of Regulus through their posterior ventricles. Kage sniffed a distant shoal of Vibrating Molasses. The bitter aftertaste of a Beluvian Ray.
There. Kage detected it first. Henkalaus, who was pirouetting around a piece of silicone that had broken away from the reef, hadn’t smelt it yet. And Darius didn’t seem to have detected the scent either.
Blood. Sweet and certain.
Kage inflated his ventricles. Allowed the aroma to tickle his olfactory fibers. This would be his kill. A way to rise higher in Darius’s estimation.
Kage stretched his tentacles wide, tasting the ocean of liquid silver in every direction. Trying to find …
There. Not three hundred feet away. Somewhere above him. Near the surface.
He propelled to his right, round a Bloodworm nest, under a bushel of Mastiff Eels (their bellies more engorged than Henkalaus’s tentacles), and through a shocked school of Xyluthian Rays.
The ocular filaments lining Kage’s back tentacles noticed a blur of motion as Henkalaus barreled through the eels. Darius wasn’t far behind. But this was Kage’s kill.
The scent was undeniable.
Blood.
Not just any blood. Could it be? It … yes, he was sure now that he was closer. A Seclapod. Whales, what a find. It was above him. Seclapods surfaced when injured.
Kage’s tentacles quivered with the thought of it. He’d find the wound. Burrow a talon through the usually impenetrable flesh. Whales, how he missed the taste. When was the last time he’d eaten Seclapod? He’d been but a squidling back then. Darius had allowed him a morsel. Maybe it was because Kage had been so young, or the way Darius had waved his tentacles in a fatherly arc across Kage’s ventricles, but the Seclapod had tasted better than anything he’d tasted since.
He glanced back at Darius now. At the old squid’s faded-pink dorsal fin. His forward tentacle had been lopped off just below the third node last year, when the pod had a run-in with a Juger Shark. The pod, Kage included, had survived because of Darius’s sacrifice. Darius may have been old, but the Lead was still a formidable hunter. Larger than Henkalaus. Larger than any of them. Darius wouldn’t relinquish his position as Lead without a fight. Henkalaus would have his tentacles full come summer.
Focus, thought Kage. Rise.
He expelled a jet of silver from his beak. Another.
Two hundred feet from the surface.
A hundred and fifty feet.
Henkalaus and the rest of the pod were invisible through the eddies of metal below him. But Kage was sure they were propelling themselves to catch up to him with all the power their tentacles could muster. He felt the agitation in the silver. The exhilaration of the hunt built as he rose. With all his strength, he thrust upwards. This was his kill.
One hundred feet.
The heady spoor of the Seclapod was thick now. Brass fronds of blood speckled the ocean, coagulating into denser clouds higher up. Kage tore through it, drunk on the kill. Soon.
Fifty feet from the surface.
Daylight exploded through a blanket of brilliant fractals. Everything above him was light. Impossible to look at directly. Everything but a lumbrous shadow. The Seclapod.
It grew as he rose. Until its silhouette blotted out the sky. And the blood.
Whales, the blood.
It took everything in Kage not to bask in it. Not to drink it in. Not to roll over in an intoxicated bliss.
But he didn’t. He cleared his mind. Snapped his beak. The kill. This was his kill.
Twenty feet.
He could see the Seclapod’s injury now. A jet of brass sprayed from the giant creature’s side. Kage’s dorsal organ pounded with the exertion of the chase. With the last of his strength, he propelled himself into the heart of the brass current.
The blood was so thick he couldn’t see through more than a foot of silver in front of him. But he forced himself further still, toward the great flank of the Seclapod.
He was nearing the surface, and the crushing ocean depths, the miles of silver bearing upon his glutinous frame, had ceased. Whether it was the giddy stench of blood, or the absence of pressure, Kage was suffused with a light agility. His tentacles were a whir of precision. Talons glistened along his extremities. His beak clacked and snapped to an ancient beat. The beat of the kill.
In an awesome collision that almost knocked him unconscious, Kage’s forward tentacles smashed into the raspy hide of the Seclapod. He steeled himself, using his suckers to latch onto the Seclapod’s skin. With all the force left in his trembling body, he plunged a tentacle into the gaping wound of the colossal creature.
Meat.
Oh Whales. Meat.
He clawed at it. Scooped it out in great brassy mounds. Shoved it into his beak as quickly as he could dig it out. And as he swallowed, the syrupy taste filled him.
The Seclapod screamed.
Waves of agony rippled through the giant, jostling its insides against Kage’s talons. It was the song to his kill. An audience to his performance.
Kage thrust a second, and then a third, tentacle through the wound. The Seclapod wailed, and Kage ate.
Something knocked against his mind. A memory. Of a body. A body with just two legs, which walked on land. This wasn’t right. He … was something else.
The meat bittered in his beak. His tentacles grew stiff, then lax. His ventricles couldn’t … he couldn’t … breathe.
Silver turned to gray, the gray of his eyelids. Eyes. Kage had eyes. A mouth where his beak had been. Legs. Feet.
But he hardly felt them. The meat was in his mouth. And he couldn’t breathe. He was choking.
“Don’t panic,” cooed a voice from everywhere.
Water. In his ears. In his nostrils.
He sat up. Collided with a spongy surface.
Kage yanked the feeding tube from his mouth. Spat out the paste. He punched the lid of the chamber, and spluttered. Screamed. Gasped. Until the lid of the chamber slid open, and he felt a rush of cool air. Candlelight on his cheeks.
Una’s narrow face stared down at him. Her hair was wet. Even through the spasm in his chest, he couldn’t help but trace the outlines of her breasts under her blouse.
“You got there first,” she said, and grinned.
He slurped in the miraculous air. Coughed up the last of the tank’s fluid. “Got where?” he rasped.
“To the kill.”
His mind was a tornado of thoughts. He’d swum. Hunted. The kill. “Where were you?”
“I was Darius. Right behind you. What a thrill. And great food.”
Kage peeked down into the tank. Globules of the feeding tube’s contents floated in the water.
“You didn’t like it?” she asked.
“Uh …”
Una wrung out her hair. Waited for him to continue. He wanted to touch them – those long, wavy bands.
“Let’s just say this isn’t my favorite expansion of glasses tech,” said Kage.
Clouds returned to Una’s face.
“But it was fun,” he said quickly.
“You want dessert?” she asked.
“Do we have to …” he looked back down at the tank.
She laughed. �
�No, I was thinking we go for a walk through the rest of the mall. There’s a phased ice cream bar that opened last week. Shoulders, fuck him, won’t stop talking about it.”
All the water had drained from the tank. Its sides lowered, leaving Kage sitting in a shivering puddle.
“Ice cream,” he said through chattering teeth. “Sounds great.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll be dry in no time.”
And he was. The smartclothes made sure of that. His pants and shirt were crisp against his skin by the time they stepped out of the horrors of The Regulus. Into the chaos that was Bacchus Mall.
*
The didgeridoo overtook Daniel by careful degrees.
The instrument’s quicksilver fingers tickled the fine hairs at the base of his hairline. Traced swirls down his shoulders. Across his nipples. Licked the insides of his thighs.
We had you cleaned
We had you eat
Despite himself, Daniel closed his eyes. Allowed Ben Stanton’s voice to permeate his chest. Caress the ridges of his ears.
We love your toes
Daniel’s face had been numb since the surgery. Since Hal had replaced it with the older, pockmarked skin. But he felt something now. The nerves in his cheeks tingled. The music gurgled through his eyebrows.
We love your meat
The audience thickened around him. Naked arms slid against his own. Breasts, silky, firm, caressed his back. He felt nipples – two mounds of supple pressure against his shoulder blades.
We ate your lungs
When Daniel opened his eyes, a popup box in satin glowed in his vision. “Service provider, The Stantons, has requested phase synchronization. Allow?”
Beyond the floating text, Ben and Bob Stanton stood on the stage. Ben’s mouth was enormous around the microphone. Bob’s encircled the end of the didgeridoo. Lungs, Daniel’s lungs, inflated and deflated on the brothers’ bare chests.
As he watched, their shapes shivered. The outlines of them, of the instruments, of the fans swaying around them, liquefied.
We heart your beat
The music warbled on the verge of inaudibility. The sound of the didgeridoo, wobbly at the best of times, sounded as though it was underwater. The breasts pressed against his back, the arms touching his, grew softer. They sloshed against him. Into him. Permeated his flesh. The nipples at his back breached his skin.
Defragmenting Daniel: The Complete Trilogy Box Set Page 24