by Ren Warom
And Bone knows how those small animals, enraptured by the blinding glare of headlights, feel before the awful weight of tyres at speed grinds them to paste. He still wants to run, but he’s transfixed.
“Come,” says Burneo, and walks away.
This is Bone’s only chance. He could run now. He could escape. But where? Back through the darkness, becoming ever more lost? What kind of option is that? His only choice is to follow, find out what Burneo wants of him. Hope it’s not his life. Or his flesh. Resigned, Bone wades after the man-machine, who flows like water despite his bulk. He leads Bone to a thick steel door in the side of the tunnel he’d never have seen, and Bone guesses, with a sinking stomach, that he may have passed many the same. The door opens onto an immense canal of seething yellow water, the source of the roar that engulfed the sound of Stark’s progress. The light is sudden, too bright, and Bone cries out, raising a hand to protect his eyes. When they adjust, he takes his first proper look at the other living legend of the Spires.
Nude and gigantic, Burneo towers above Bone’s lanky frame, his ivory flesh corroded with thick ropings of scars. Where his genitals should be, there’s a blank wall of flesh framed in steel, spouting tubes filled with a sluggish flow of bodily fluids. Plates of polished and rusted steel coat him like buried scales, like armour, merging seamlessly into the ravage. The shapes Bone saw in the dark are pistons. Slicked with thick brown grease, they hiss and blow flumes of hot steam, spit and shudder, oozing a clear straw-coloured fluid. Where’s the engine that drives this beast? Bone can’t see it. It must be contained within the ruined vault of Burneo’s chest. He raises his eyes to Burneo’s face. Finds one amber eye regarding him with serene detachment. The other eye rolls in the skull, a lustrous ball of mercury, fluid yet contained. Bone swallows, fighting for air, for lucidity.
“Stark …” is all he manages before Burneo raises one enormous hand, fingers clicking with inset metals and sighing with miniature pistons.
“I have words for you.”
“Words?” Bone has no clue how to respond. This is not what he expected. For a start, he’s still alive.
“The words are a message. Messages must be spoken.” Burneo’s head lolls backwards, that single amber eye clouded with dreaming. “Find him and the ropes will guide you. Follow the coils.” Burneo’s immense chest rises and falls, a bellows built from flesh. “He is waiting in the dark and the glass.”
Bone’s breath deserts him. The edges of his vision blur and blacken. Extreme vertigo hits in a wave, his gut rising in instinctive response. The darkness around his vision contracts, pupil-like, thrusting him into darkness more complete than the tunnels he’s just left. In that obscurity he feels naked. Exposed. Impossibly high whining explodes into his skull, heard as if from far away, and he begins to tremble violently. Another sound breaks across the first, like glass shattering in the distance, and the ground rushes up towards him. Panicking, he thrusts his arms out to catch himself, but they slam into thin air, and partial reason, comprehension, slams back into his awareness.
He comes out of it blinking madly, not falling after all. Too shaken to be embarrassed, Bone snaps his arms back to his sides. His head rings with the echo of that endless whining, and there’s a faint, greasy residue in his mind, the glutinous slew of his dream world invading the daytime. He wants to reach in there and scrub it out. Feels tainted, insecure, and rendered too vulnerable. It’s enough that these dreams have stolen his sleep; if they begin to attack during his waking hours, he’ll go mad. He thinks he might puke, but the sensation goes swift as it came, replaced by the jabbering demand for gas-malt.
“What the fuck?” he yells at Burneo, terror making him angry beyond all reason.
Burneo says nothing. Stands there staring into the middle distance, the fractured mask of his face complete only in its emptiness. Bone has no idea what to make of it. He was certain this might be a set-up, a trap of some kind, but there’s no Rope here, no trap, only this poor, insane creature. He begins to wonder if Stark’s right at all. How on earth can this unbalanced Goliath be part of anything as complex as the game Rope’s playing?
“What the hell is going on?”
Burneo raises one hulking arm and points across the waters, criss-crossed by long bridges wrought in blackened metal. On the other side there’s a steel door, adorned with bands of yellow and black. “There is something for you. A gift.”
“For me?” Bone asks, but Burneo only continues pointing. “What about Stark?” Bone murmurs.
The great blunt mass of Burneo’s head falls backwards, damp black hair trailing in tangles down to sculpted buttocks, and he responds in a voice that shakes Bone to his marrow, “I will see Reinhart. He is in my playground.”
“What? Reinhart? Are you going to bring Stark here?”
“He answers a greater call.” Burneo fixes Bone with that single amber eye, as piercing as it is laced with distance and dreams. “As do you.”
“Why can’t you talk sense?” Bone spits, threadbare.
He has a growing feeling that all this madness is just mad, no meaning to be found in any of it. A cruel joke some maniac, perhaps this one right in front of him, has chosen to play. Striving for calm, he grinds the palms of his hands into tired eyes, wringing away frustration and the sensation of Burneo’s unsettling gaze. Looks up to find Burneo’s no longer there, his huge body moving away at shocking speed down the side ramp.
Bone slams his fist against the wall and yells, “Bring Stark! Don’t hurt him.”
Burneo pauses, vapourous piston steam rendering him an apparition. He laughs, the sound too human, before diving down into the roiling waters and disappearing beneath the surface. Bone fights back the urge to continue screaming.
“Fucking hell.”
With no more time to waste, Bone races across to the door Burneo indicated. Straining its massive weight open, he slips into the brightly lit viaduct beyond. Spider-long limbs propel him down the passage. Smoke trashed lungs gasp deep, rasping gusts of oxygen. His mangled liver sends jolts all the way down to his toes. He grits his teeth, his face a mask as savage as Ballerina Girl’s death rictus, and scrabbles for the comm. Clumsy fingers struggle away at buttons, reaching after some response––anything. At the first inkling, he’ll use it to call Stark, lost in the dark water and the rats, and warn him that Burneo is coming.
Chapter 17
Proximity to his old friend creates anticipation painful as the cut of glass to flesh in Stark’s belly. Somewhere in these dark, endless coils, Burneo—once Aron—has made his home. How far Aron has fallen that he would consider this place his home? The sewer townships under parts of Mace and Helix, with their modern conveniences, are parlous traps of privation compared to the living found above, but this hellhole’s worse by far. Worse than the Rat Gulley. No better than a lightless dungeon, discombobulating to the eyes, the senses.
Ghost walls leap out in the corner of his vision. Viaducts that, at first glance, seem blocked, drop away to form endless, echoing portals when seen at periphery. On second glance, the portals are gone, but Stark’s convinced they’re there, that he has spectators he can’t see. It’s honing his nerves to a fine point, sharp enough to cut his confidence. Above his head, the tunnels creak and groan, their spines seeming to protest the weight of the city above, the unerring burden of the past. These tunnels carry the burden of Stark’s past—the mountainous man-machine Burneo, a walking testament to extremes of modification, if the sightings can be believed.
He remembers Aron as a giant, even then, and heavily modified, the kind of black-market, backstreet chop-jobs they’d all been forced to in their poverty; his own shoulder implants are a testament to that, bulky and somewhat ill-fitting; their scrollwork bold, rather than fine. He’s never changed them because he wants to remember what it was to have nothing. But it wasn’t how Aron looked that marked him as distinct and unusual, it was how he was, detached by some fundamental difference to those around him.
Stark is ce
rtain that difference was behind his choice to run with the gangs, that it influenced his unfathomable decision to take his sister further from help. Very likely, it’s also the driving factor behind his cooperation with Rope and the activities he’s engaged in down here in the sewer. The brutalisation of willing fools. He’s afraid he’ll have to kill his old friend to make him stop, and despite what he said to Bone in the Boreholes, Stark has little desire to end Aron.
He wants to catch him, though, and make him answer for the damage he’s done to those pilgrims of modification. For the troubles he’s supported in the Spires and the Zone. For collaborating with a killer whose actions horrify Stark, who imagined he’d seen everything humans could do to one another. But above all that, personal and unprofessional as it is, he wants to ask him why. Why Teya? There were hundreds of Wharf kids he could’ve taken with him to the gangs, plenty more capable and less precious to them both than her. So why did it have to be her? Why did they have to lose her? It wasn’t worth her life. None of it was worth that.
Up ahead, a watery slew of light appears, highlighting the bend of the tunnel.
Hope rising like flood water, Stark turns to say to Bone, “I think we’re onto something. Do you see that light?”
There’s no reply.
“Bone?”
Stark waits a moment before he allows panic to make him shout, “Hey!”
Nothing.
He splashes back through the tunnel, passing some of those freakish goddamn viaducts, but Bone’s nowhere to be found. Stark slams a fist into the water, frustration riding him too hard for self-control. Bone probably got his fool self lost somewhere back there after the stupid torch failed. Hell alone knows how far back he lost his way; they’ve been down here a good two hours.
“Fuck!”
What should he do? Bone’s an adult, and he has a comm. Stark gave clear instructions on how to use it. If Bone finds trouble, he’s fully capable of using the damn thing to call for help. Once activated, the comm’s signal will pinpoint Bone’s position and lead Stark directly to him, wherever he might be. Will he think to, though? The panic he heard in the Mort’s voice when the torch went out, that was no simple fear of the dark. That was trauma of some kind. If Bone’s alone, he’s probably not thinking coherently enough to activate the comm.
Going back for one last look at that elusive light, Stark finds it gone. Winked out of existence in the few minutes since his realisation and partial backtrack. He curses out loud, scaring rats into the water around him, their wet bodies pressing against his thighs. He knocks them away with balled fists.
“Oh, fuck it,” he says through his teeth. “Mort-sitting it is, then.”
Before he turns to leave, though, he looks once more down the stretch of tunnel. If that light was real, if it wasn’t his mind at play, where might it have come from? And, more to the point, just where the hell did it go?
Chapter 18
At the end of the viaduct, there’s another door. Bone’s still on the comm. The screen’s lit, but he can’t make it work. Every last muscle aches, his lungs are in tatters, and he’d skin a limb for a gas-malt to make his liver quit bitching. Slamming full force into the new door, he opens it to a reluctant shriek of rusted hinges and stumbles forwards into yet more darkness.
“Shit!”
On the last ragged edges of patience, Bone steps in and feels his way along the wall to the right, stumbling over unseen objects. He moves his hands over the wall until he snags on the edge of a square of steel. Shoving the comm into a pocket, he feels for the switch, using both thumbs to drive it upwards. The lights snap on. He turns to face the room and falls to his knees, retching, not feeling the unforgiving impact of stone. He’s not eaten in hours and nothing but elastic spools of spit come up. They cling, astringent, to his bottom lip, trailing in slimy ropes to the floor as he retches until his ribs ache, his stomach spews bitter acids.
He’s afraid to look again, but he wipes the spit away and raises his eyes in a painstaking arc. It’s another victim of Rope, standing at the centre of the room. It must be Rope’s work because ropes hold it static, despite the almost casual positioning. He realises, now, it was ropes catching his feet in the darkness, pulled so taut they’re like steel cables. The switch he pressed doesn’t work the usual spotlights, but the lighting down here may be too fixed to modify, and it’s bright enough to suffice. The sweeping coverage of red is also missing. Instead, a blackening circle of drying blood surrounds the corpse, perhaps a substitute made in haste, or an ironic nod to the usual framing. But this sculpture is not like the others. Instead of clean flesh, denuded of all identifying marks or mods, it’s been altered, modified almost beyond recognition. He saw the face first, the sight that threw him to the ground, threw his stomach into his throat. The flesh has been removed, exposing the skull beneath, and a series of pistons forced through the cheeks into the jaw. The jaw itself frozen into a scream rictus so wide it’s dislocated.
A plating of rusted steels obscures the majority of the bone, framing startling blue eyes, glazed with terror even in death and slowly forming a white film frosted as Bone’s breath in the cold of the room. Above those staring eyes, from the brow, a double row of ragged horns trail over the skull and continue down the full length of the back. But that’s not the worst of it. The whole body, including every last limb and digit, has been skinned, the muscle woven with a disarray of steel implants. There are black slicks of blood, as if the work were frantic, hurried. Drying gobbets of poorly incised fat and strips of peeled skin spatter the floor. Muscle flaps hang like rags, remnants of the person this machine, this thing, might once have been.
Still kneeling, Bone gapes at the sheer magnitude of invasion, the catastrophic loss of skin. The skin. The fucking skin. His face goes numb, then cold, his gut rising as it did with Burneo, in reaction to the same phantom sensation of falling. Petrified that his dreams will attack again, Bone clutches at his skull, fingers digging hard in a futile attempt to contain them but ripples of pain flare behind his eyes instead, intensifying in waves to become a screwdriver of hurt boring right into the centre of his head, causing something in there, something physical, to stretch taut and snap.
The pain becomes so raw, so profound, it’s as if rough hands have torn one of the pistons out of that poor sculpture and slammed it straight through Bone’s skull. He falls forwards, one hand braced on the floor, the other dug into his belly as he heaves and heaves again, thrown back into helpless nausea, only there’s nothing left to throw up except stomach lining and blood. He coughs and a few drops burst from his throat to speckle the concrete. Their bright ruby ovals against pale grey grow huge in his vision. Become red circles. Red in the white.
At the sight of them, the high whining he heard before, not a sound from his dreams, but somehow worse, explodes like steam escaping a valve and fills his whole skull. Only it’s not whining anymore, it’s screaming, reedy and hoarse, as if from a throat torn to shreds and Bone hangs there, paralysed by the sound. Someone’s in his head. Someone’s in there, screaming at the red circles of blood. And it’s not him.
A blind urge to escape, to stop the screaming, rips through him. He lurches to his feet. Desperate and disorientated, he goes in the wrong direction. Slams straight into the body at the floor’s centre, tangling in the ropes, his shoulder wedged against that dislocated mouth, his face inches from the wicked row of horns. He remains there a split second, blinking in shock, and then he’s yelling, pushing away, fighting to untangle himself. His hands are covered in dark, clotting blood, they slip and slide, and his legs won’t cooperate, but by dint of sheer panic, he manages to somehow extricate himself and races to the wall, breathing hard.
Weakness shoots through his limbs like sickness. He’s fighting back tears, overwhelmed with horror. He needs to find some way to step back from this, gain distance. Reflexive, like a fight response to panic, his inner Mort takes control, covers panic with the need to answer questions, to know. Ignoring the pounding in
his head, the oily churning of his gut, he pulls gloves from his pocket, forces them onto shaking, gore smeared hands. He’s already contaminated the site, the corpse, but the routine and the normality of gloves sharpen his concentration, his resolve. He has work to do here, a gift to unwrap, and time waits for no man to recover from being dumb enough to run when his body’s on the verge of perpetual collapse, even if his mind’s decided to join the party. He’ll deal with this later, when he has the fucking time.
Bone returns to the corpse, relaxing as he steps into the familiar territory of examination, though the body is anything but familiar. Apart from Burneo, whose mods comprise appalling, incomprehensible damage, Bone’s never witnessed modification this extreme. Such a vast amount, and so brutally done, should have killed this man straight away, and yet Bone’s knowledge of the human body tells him this man lived, at least for a while, and he becomes so angry, he almost loses every last vestige of control. He’s forced to stand a moment, sucking in hard breaths through clenched teeth.
When he calms, he looks for the tag, finding it on a strip of flesh below the back of the knee. It’s been reattached like a clothes tag––that innocuous––one end tacked to the muscle with black mortuary catgut, the rest dangling down in a long curlicue like a pig’s tail. Above it, the whole infrastructure of thigh is exposed and punctured through horizontally, with lengths of metal attached to piston-like apparatus rooted in the knee. Gently, he stretches out the thin piece of skin, somewhat dried and shrunken. Tattooed there, in fading black, the tag: THE GIFT.
There is a gift for you.
Burneo, not Rope. A gift from Burneo. Why? What can it mean? And why for him?
Bone drops the skin, close to tears, close to screaming again. The world has become muffled. He can’t begin to understand the low cramp of excitement beneath the waves of sickness contorting his belly, nor the giggles, less nervous than anticipatory, escaping his mouth. To reassure himself, he takes out the comm, covering it in thick, sticky blood from his gloves. If he could work the damned thing, he could have Stark triangulate his position, bring him here fast, bring Buzz Boys just the same. But it’s useless; he can’t remember anything Stark told him. Bone throws it to the floor, furious. It bounces, unharmed, and he raises a foot to smash it, but some impulse staggers across his brain and makes him hesitate.