Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  Swearing was one of them.

  “Wolf-fucking horseballs,” she muttered, groaning as she found her footing.

  She remembered, though. She knew what they were up against. This thing, this godling monster, it was going to orchestrate a conflict that spread across an entire world. When it had gathered whatever it was it wanted to, the results of tests, studies and whatever else, it would consume this world, her own, and everything else to spawn the next generation of its kind.

  If she had any conception of where to look-

  The answer was given to her. A thirty-nine step plan.

  She felt a chill.

  If I wanted to kill the monsters and save everyone from this madness?

  Three hundred and seventy-four steps.

  She could see each individual step, looking forward to see what it entailed. She could see it evolve as time passed, accounting for her starting it later.

  If I wanted to do both?

  Five hundred and thirty-three steps.

  “Forta,” her uncle spoke. “You’re awake.“

  She spun around.

  He kept his distance. “A madness possessed you. Has it passed?“

  Had it passed?

  Five hundred and fifty-four steps. Why more than before?

  She couldn’t bring herself to respond.

  “You moved like someone else was inside you. Escaped Ruggero and me like we weren’t even there.“

  “I remember,” she said. She remembered so much. She understood it all, and she couldn’t explain it-

  Ninety-two steps.

  She could explain it. Could she explain it and save everyone? Explain it and find the strange god-beast, and save her hometown from this chaos?

  It was possible. It would require two thousand, one hundred and seventy-four different actions. Statements, movements, decisions at precise times.

  But she hesitated to carry it out.

  There was another question she had to ask. Like the fable of Luisa and the black-furred man, she had to ask very carefully.

  Could she do all this, explain to her uncle, find the thing that was at the heart of this chaos, and save her people, and handle the other essential crises she run into on her way?

  No.

  A fog was creeping over her eyes, and the number of steps were growing too numerous at the same time. Two differing things, denying her.

  The chill and the general sense of unease crystallized with the realization that she’d have to choose between stopping this monster and helping the people she’d grown up with.

  “Fortuna, you look as though you’ve seen a ghost,” her uncle said.

  I might have, she thought, without taking her eyes off him.

  She shivered, but she steeled herself, picking the path she wanted to take. It was the haze of fog that scared her most. If she chose to do something else, and she lost sight of the path where she could kill the godling…

  Her uncle stiffened as she approached, but she laid a hand on his arm. She tugged on his sleeve to get him to bend down, then kissed his cheek.

  Saving him?

  The answer appeared in her mind. “Go, uncle. Run as far away as you can. Don’t eat or drink anything for three days. It’s all tainted. Poisoned with the same thing that is making people into monsters.“

  His eyes widened. “You will come with me.“

  She shook her head.

  Then she broke into a run.

  She could outrun him. She knew. He had a bad leg, and it was worse since he’d had to fight off Ruggero.

  Into the hills, up the mountain.

  Her body ached, but it was easy. She knew how to move, how to place her feet so the branches didn’t catch on her or trip her, to avoid the patches of lichen which would break away and make her foot slide on the rock beneath.

  She knew the most efficient way to climb the rock wall.

  She paused to catch her breath, doing her best to ignore the horned man’s corpse at the foot of the wall. He’d tried to escape this way too, but he’d been pulled down or shot when he was partway up.

  Had he been one of them?

  Something went wrong. The monstrous godling had a plan, a vision of the future it wanted, and this isn’t part of that.

  It had crashed to earth, and something had broken free. Here and there, phantom images had appeared, brushing past people, and they changed. Others changed without touching any of the massive, ghostly gray hands that had appeared from thin air. She knew, because of this conviction in her head, that it was the food and water. It was tainting the landscape.

  All coming from higher up the cliffside.

  She found her breath, then scaled her way up.

  The landscape she was as she reached the top wasn’t a familiar one.

  A different sky, showing a different time of day. But the space in between was something else entirely. She had only to look and she knew what it was she looked at. The entity. The evil godling.

  I have to kill it.

  The plan formed in her mind. The haze of fog still hung over her mind’s eye, and it grew worse with every moment.

  Her hand moved to the little knife at her belt. She wore it there for when she helped her mother with the cooking and gardening. Worked metal was expensive, and the knife was a personal treasure. Two inches long, curved. She used it for cutting stems and trimming fat.

  She would use it here. She started walking forward.

  There were people gathered, bystanders. An assorted mix.

  Why are they here?

  No, was there a way to find out, using this sight she had?

  I want to understand why they’re here.

  They’d come from different worlds. There were gates or doorways here and there. When the entity had fallen, it had left gaps.

  They bellowed words in a language she couldn’t make out. Warnings. They were too far away to stop her.

  A woman stepped in her way.

  Strangely dressed, wearing a dress so short it might well be indecent, showing the calves, and a fair amount of the upper chest. Her skin was the strangest black color, her hair bound in thin, glossy braids.

  One of the monsters? No. She knew right away it was a stranger from a distant land. A land much like the one she had glimpsed in her fever dream.

  The woman said something in a strange language.

  Fortuna strode forwards anyways. Her special knowledge let her push her way past almost effortlessly, choosing the right spot, the right amount of strength. The godling was in a chasm, a crater caused by the impact. It stretched out in every direction, a pool of flesh, and it reached into several worlds at once.

  It was disorienting to look at.

  Step twenty-nine, making her way down into the crater.

  She stepped onto loose grit, and her weight did the rest. She coasted down, much like the boys riding down the mud-slick path they’d made in the hill, down into the pond, except she remained on two feet. It was a task only the oldest and most athletic boys could manage.

  It was more dangerous here than it was on the hill. There were rocks that jutted out, and outcroppings of deeper roots and plant life that had rained down into the crater in the aftermath of the impact. It was more dangerous, but not harder. This, like scaling the cliff face, was easy.

  Everything was easy now. It was disorienting.

  The woman with black skin followed, moving slower. She used her hands and feet to control her descent, sliding from rock to rock, stopping before sliding down further. The black-skinned woman was a quarter of the way down before Fortuna was at the bottom.

  It didn’t matter. Fortuna advanced into the living forest alone. Everything here was alive, hands moving, webs of skin stretching and folding. There was a cacophony of noises that made her think of a chorus of heartbeats, a choir of soft breaths and whispers. Gentle human noises that were all the more eerie because she could see right through the deception. She was well aware that what she saw here was the godling putting together a mask so it
could lie to people, setting them against each other.

  She advanced into the heart of the gray forest. She was terrified, but the feeling was disconnected from her actions. She only had to recognize the next step in the series. She was aware of the steps that followed…

  Until she came face to face with the godling. Her knife was in hand, and she could see a figure before her. A human shape, in the midst of pulling itself together from the examples and experiments that surrounded them.

  She set foot on one of those experiments, a raised hand, and used it until she was eye to eye with the being, a matter of feet away.

  It swelled, lurching forth, creating few inches more of waist, another inch of one arm, two inches of another arm. Beyond the ending points, the arms and legs simply extended into nothingness. Parts of a tapestry she couldn’t make out. It moved again, and closed the distance between them.

  The being raised its head. She could see its eyes open in recognition.

  It’s teaching itself how to act like we act. Even this.

  She raised her arm, knife held with the point down.

  And the gray fog descended on her mind, blinding her. A barrier, a blind spot, a future she could no longer see. Had it set the limitation more firmly in place?

  The godling smiled. It knew, because the power she was using was the same power it had used to glimpse the future, to find that particular future where it had the world divided, drowned in conflict.

  As far as the godling was concerned, she was blind, as helpless as anyone else.

  A voice, from behind her.

  The black-skinned woman, shouting something in a foreign language.

  I want to understand her.

  One step.

  She had only to think, ‘Stab it.‘

  Fortuna realized she still held the knife aloft.

  But where had she wanted to stab it?

  Indecision gripped her. For an hour now, she’d been absolutely certain of what she was doing, and now she faced the absolute opposite situation.

  Her hand shook. She nearly dropped the little trimming knife.

  She nearly fell as the hand beneath her moved. Her power failed her here, too. Because the hand was an extension of the being before her.

  It was going to kill her, and then it was going to reclaim the ability to see the future. It would use that power to control the world, then to destroy it.

  And she couldn’t bring herself to move an inch.

  I want to tell her…

  The words were alien to her as she spoke them. “I- I can’t.”

  A hand wrapped around her shoulders. She felt a body press against her back, supporting her.

  “I- I have seen visions. Things I was not meant to see, things this… godling wanted to keep to itself. I… have to stop it.”

  But even as the words left her mouth, she couldn’t bring herself to move.

  The woman leaned forward over Fortuna’s shoulder, her face in Fortuna’s peripheral vision. She said something.

  “I believe you.”

  The woman spoke in her ear once more, her voice insistent. She translated, asking for a way to understand the answers.

  “It’s dangerous?”

  Fortuna nodded.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I- I would stake everything on it. Everything ever.”

  Though she didn’t even know the words she was speaking, there was a conviction in her tone that seemed to reach the woman.

  “Where were you going to stab it?”

  Where? The image had fled her mind, erased from her memory.

  “Where?”

  The being moved again, and they stepped back, nearly falling. Fortuna managed to keep them both steady. Easier if she looked at it as ‘I don’t want to fall’ instead of ‘don’t let this thing make us fall.’ So long as she divorced her thoughts from the being, she still had this strange certainty.

  It lurched, creating more of itself. Legs, a sexless groin, more of the arms. Hair flowed free, overlong.

  It bent over, head hanging, arms suspended to either side.

  She saw the nape of the neck as hair slowly slid free, silky and straight.

  Still unable to bring herself to move, she found her left arm extending, palm down, until the longest finger pointed at the spot in question.

  The woman behind her took hold of the fist that held the knife. She stepped forward, driving the knife down, as if she were an extension of Fortuna.

  Plunging into the spot where the spine met the skull.

  They fell from the hand, dangled for a moment by their grip on the knife. It cut free, and they dropped to the ground.

  Fortuna let one leg fold, pushing at the ground with the other. She rolled, breaking the fall. The woman fell a little harder.

  The entity moved, and everything around them stirred. A thousand hands, a thousand arms, not all attached to the hands, legs, feet, ears, eyes, faces without features, expanses of skin, they twitched and writhed.

  The noise around them faded, the heartbeats going still, the breathing quieting. The movements all around them stopped.

  There was only the thing, hanging in mid-air, struggling to form itself and failing. It breathed in rapid huffs, in obvious pain.

  It wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t alive. A connection had been severed in a moment where the godling was most vulnerable.

  The woman spoke.

  “Again? The heart?”

  But Fortuna was sure this was it. They’d carried out the last step.

  “Can you explain this? Do you know something?”

  Fortuna nodded.

  “Please,” the woman said. Though she begged, “My life just turned upside down. I’ve been lost here for three days.”

  Fortuna looked back the way she’d come.

  Home was gone. Tainted. She could find her uncle, but…

  “I need food,” Fortuna said. “I have no home to go to, so I need shelter.”

  “I-”

  “I will take you back to your home.”

  The woman nodded. “Yes, of course. And you’ll explain?”

  “Yes. But there’s one more thing. I need help.”

  “Help?”

  “There is one more of these things somewhere out there.”

  Yet she could reach out with her power to try to look for it, and all she could see was the fog.

  ■

  Fortuna did up the clasps on the dress shoes she wore as the woman entered her apartment.

  The woman gave the girl a once-over. “You know how to do up a tie? Wait. Dumb question.”

  “A little dumb,” Fortuna replied.

  “You’re getting a sense of humor. I’ve done like you asked. I bought the land with the doorway, using the money you got. Are you sure you want to keep it a secret? People could study that thing.”

  Fortuna shook her head. This was a harder question to answer, but she could construct a kind of mental picture, then test her questions. What would happen? What were the most likely scenarios?

  Panic. Fear.

  Could they figure anything of value out by studying the half-alive thing? She couldn’t be sure.

  But the emotional effect would be all the more pronounced.

  “Well, the area is secured, people have found their way home, or at least, to other worlds they can call home. There was only one doorway people might find easily, and I blocked it off.”

  “Thank you,” Fortuna said.

  “What’s the next step?”

  A heavy question.

  How do we stop them?

  The fog blocked out her view of any answer.

  Can we stop something as powerful as the beings in my fever dream? How can we stop the Warrior?

  Still too close to home.

  The indecision gripped her again. When she wasn’t acting in the scope of her power, it was all the more difficult to act.

  Fortuna frowned. She couldn’t be paralyzed like this. “How- how would we stop any powerful monster?�
�

  “Weapons? An army?” the woman suggested.

  One hundred and forty-three thousand, two hundred and twenty steps.

  It was doable.

  “We need some lab equipment,” Fortuna said.

  Then she turned her attention to the next step, and it dawned on her just how they would be amassing this army. She thought of the monsters that had torn her parents apart, the infection that had ravaged her community and home. Stray bits of the godling had done that to them. It had killed people, turned others into monsters, drove yet others mad.

  But it had given abilities to her. It would give abilities to others.

  ■

  The man, Lamar, reached like a child clutching for candy. The Doctor pulled her hand away. “There’s no guarantee this will work.”

  Fortuna remained silent. Her halting way of speaking, asking her power for the words or the translation, still made for a barrier in communication. It unsettled people, apparently.

  “If what that girl was showing off wasn’t some fantastic magic trick, if this does what you’re saying it will, I’m willing to take the chance.”

  Fortuna exchanged a glance with the ‘Doctor’. She could see the stress in the Doctor’s expression. The woman had taken on a moniker, to give just a little protection to her real identity. Easier to have an adult handling the negotiating and person-to-person interaction. Fortuna was young, and people wouldn’t be so inclined to drink a strange substance offered by a child.

  She offered the Doctor a little nod, a go-ahead.

  “Go ahead, then,” the Doctor said. She handed over the vial.

  Lamar drank.

  The changes ripped through him. Lines marked the areas where bones were closest to skin, and then split into craggy outcroppings, thick with scales the length and width of human hands. Lamar screamed, and the sound soon became guttural.

  More scales sprouted, until the man looked more like a bush than a person. The scaly growth continued at one knee, spiraling around the knee over and over again, growing ever-lumpier.

  The leg fell off. Blood began to pour forth.

  Fortuna started to step forward to help, but her power told her it was too late.

  Couldn’t see the outcomes, couldn’t counteract the outcomes.

  Lamar was left panting for breath. the wound at his ruined arms and legs closed up. Holes had opened up throughout his midsection, exposing scale-covered internal organs.