Coil

by Ren Warom

  “The cavern’s through there,” he yells as he approaches his waiting team.

  Suge punches the air and shouts, “Hell yeah!” as Bone lets out a whoop that betrays more than a hint of exhausted relief.

  Stark’s beaming behind his mask. Then he stops, swings his torch to and fro, and says in a tight voice, “Where the fuck is Tress?”

  Chapter 26

  Shades of light drift across the surface of a tawny iris. Flutter the pupil wide. Shrink it to a pinpoint. A full stop. The end. The eye jumps, showing a sliver of white as Burneo watches himself. Serene. Detached. Aware. He stands waist-deep, hands splayed flat on the surface. Head lowered, his features reflect in the yellowish mirror between thumbs. He pays no mind to the rats gathered on the rim of the outlet pool. They are mute witnesses. Nothing more.

  Echoing from in the distance, amplified by the throats of the tunnels, comes the sound of footfalls in his playground, just as he knew there would be. In precisely the place he expected. This is what he’s been waiting for. Ripples undulate the surface, agitating mirror smoothness to liquid coils as his great bulk wades through and rises up onto the edge, scattering the rats. Bare legs lurch along in that half graceful, half awkward glide as he follows the sounds.

  Closer now, Burneo perceives the distant flicker of lights and picks up the tatters of conversation, broken and faint, fluttering under the splashing of boots in water. But that’s not all there is. He stills for a moment, scenting the air. They have followed the path he scattered for them just as he willed it. But there is danger awaiting them, danger he has led here. And they have brought with them the one to whom he gave his gift, the Bone-Man. Foolishness. That one has danger all around him.

  Burneo shadows them, huge and silent as the lightless void. Watches them from the recesses, from behind the curving edge of outlets, observing the rise and fall of beams as they progress towards the entrance to his cavern. The small one at the back falters and stops. She, too, senses danger. Her head swings to and fro, constantly scanning. His nostrils flare. She’s afraid, he can smell the tang on her breath, but she does not falter. Strong, then. This is good. Better her than the Bone-Man. There are sights left to share that the Bone-Man needs to see. He will fetch her and they will lead him together.

  He stands and waits as she retraces her steps, her image growing ever larger in the shrunken black lens of his eye.

  A full stop.

  Chapter 27

  Stark runs full tilt, back around the corner, hollering for Tress, a raw scrape of panic in his chest. Stands, eyes closed, to listen for a response. The sound of rushing waters in the depths of the outlets grows loud in his ears like the roar of an approaching mob baying and howling, but there’s no distant cry for help. Not even the ragged tail end of a scream. Tress has vanished.

  “I want an inch-by-inch sweep, every fucking corner,” he rasps. “We scour this place, you understand? We find her.”

  And he’s off down the tunnel, the light of his torch frantically sweeping the walls and the floor. He ends up side-by-side with Suge, who, by the brightness of the glow at the back of his pupils, has switched his augments to full power, recording and analysing everything. It hurts to use it at that level, even for a few minutes, and he experiences an overwhelming rush of affection for Suge’s dedication. They survey every inch of ground they’ve covered, throwing light down the outlets as they pass them. Farther back than they expect by a good long way, the light of beams pick up the bulk of Tress’s gun and torch. They’re about twelve feet into one of the outlets, a forlorn heap of discarded metals in a pool of blood. Stark slams his fist into the wall, splitting his knuckle and leaving a smear of blood behind.

  “No!” He shoves his torch into his pocket and grits out, “Give me some fucking light.” Holds out a hand to Bone. “Glove.”

  Bone reaches into his jacket and pulls out a glove for Stark, who fumbles it on, ripping through the palm in his haste.

  “Fuck!” He shoves the remains at Bone and snaps, “Another.” It takes him a further two tries, swearing and graceless, to fit a glove onto his shaking fingers, then he scoops the gun from the floor, cradling it in his hands. “Do you have an evidence bag big enough?” he asks Bone, his voice a rigid dam against a tidal wave of boiling emotions. Bone nods, going through his pockets again, his face pale and set, and Stark says to Suge, “Check the walls, the floor. You’re looking for more blood. If you find it, see where it leads. We’re relying on your eyes, now.”

  Suge walks slowly ahead, his eyes throwing light on the wall to illuminate small spatters of blood that appear black as tar in shadow.

  “Is it Burneo?” Bone asks.

  Stark breathes out through his nose and calms, trying to listen to his gut, the instinct he’s spent his career relying on. “No. This is not his work. It feels like punishment.”

  “Rope,” says Bone.

  “Guarantee it.” Stark fights the sinking of his gut, the grip of his heart, clenching in his chest. This is his worst nightmare. It’s everything he worked to prevent. “I should have taken into account that Rope might be down here as well, especially after finding that fucking lab! Just didn’t think. Too fucking set on Burneo.” He’s so fucking stupid. It was supposed to be him facing any possible danger, not one of them. This should be his blood, not Tress’s. “Let’s get after Suge. We’re not going to let Tress go without a fight.”

  They move off down the outlet, into the dark heart of the sewers, travelling in the grip of darkness, in the chorus of the rushing waters beyond the outlet. They pass knots of pipes, choked ventilation grills, rungs leading to exit ducts; long narrow holes webbed with fine veins of moss, slick and black from the constant drip of moisture as Suge’s eyes continue to illuminate the pathway of blood spatters. Until it stops. For a moment, they’re all caught in a mutual flare of panic––this was their only link to Tress––then Stark snaps out of it and issues a command to backtrack.

  “There’s got to be something.”

  “How could I have lost it?” Suge sweeps around, the glow in the back of his gaze lending him a demented air.

  Stark grabs his arm. “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay, Suge. You just lost focus for a minute. We’re all struggling for focus. Find yours and get back to where you last saw the blood. See it for me,” he demands. “Right now.”

  Suge closes his eyes, wincing only the tiniest fraction as he begins to intone in that singsong manner: “Ten metres back. Last splash of blood. Diffuse. Angled. Means she was moved. He’s done that a few times. She’s likely slipping. Patterns suggests he’s holding one limb, has her body draped like a coat thrown over his shoulder.” His head twitches. “Four metres back. A drip. Small. Like an inverted triangle. Pointed at the bottom. Angled left.”

  His eyes flare open, filled with surprise. He steps back four long strides and stares at the wall. In the light, they see the droplet, a thin, ragged smear, triangular, the point facing down and to the left as he’d described it. Suge flicks his torch on and raises it. Above them, in the centre of the outlet roof, is another of those ducts, this one large and gaping as an outlet tunnel. The rungs to it climb the opposite side of the tunnel.

  Bone crosses to the rungs and scrambles up to the lip of the duct. Calls out, rough relief mixing with the anxiety in his voice, “There’s more inside here, a big smear, he must have hefted her in hard.”

  Suge points his torch into the hole. “How far does it go?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Stark says, making his way to the rungs. “If Tress has been taken that way, that’s the way we go.”

  The exit duct climbs a long way, changing direction to horizontal and veering to left or right with no warning. Though spacious, it leaves them disorientated, fighting off tension headaches like screws wound into their temples. It leads to another tunnel––daylight revealing filthy walls and a rubble-logged stretch of brown ice. They run towards the light, slipping and sliding, to find their way blocked by a heavy steel grille, hi
nged to rise upwards. Working together, Stark’s shoulders and Suge’s height, they force it open by reluctant degrees. Then Suge holds it in place as Stark and Bone trudge out, covered head to toe in black filth. They’re on a concrete platform, ranged along the edge of a canal, surrounded by a thick growth of lank, slimy reeds, like a tatty fringe. Further on, where the water’s clear, ice covers the surface, choked with rubbish. There’s a low bridge to their left, and where the water disappears beneath, it’s swallowed by deep shadow.

  Suge lowers the grille, letting it drop the last few inches to clang in the silence. The sound startles a flock of pigeons roosting beneath the bridge. They swell out in a blurred cloud of blue and grey, the loud shuttering of hundreds of pairs of wings lifting them into cool, slate sky. Stark yanks off his mask and watches them go.

  “Where are we?” Suge asks, coming to stand by his side.

  “I haven’t a clue, and I don’t really care, as long as we’re still following Tress,” Stark says. “We need to scout for blood traces.”

  “On it.” Suge moves off down the platform.

  Stark turns to look for Bone. “What the hell are you doing? Fancy going for a fucking swim or something?”

  Bone’s at the edge of the platform, his toes sticking out over the water. He’s staring at the opposite bank, at the crowded maze of high rises blocking the sky above, his jaw sagging. “Stark, how the fuck did we get here?” he asks, his voice high with shock.

  “We walked.”

  Bone swivels round to face him. “No. You don’t understand. Those buildings. I know where we are. This is precinct 17 in Gyre West. This is miles from where we were. There’s no way we ever just walked from the River Head to here. No way at all.”

  Stark blinks, convinced he heard wrong. “Precinct 17? Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s over six hundred miles,” Stark says faintly.

  Bone steps away from the edge, both brows raised high. “No shit.”

  Stark looses a low growl. “What in the fuck is going on?”

  “I do not know,” Bone responds, his voice filled with disquiet.

  “Got blood here,” Suge yells, beckoning them over.

  Stark and Bone run to join Suge at a short flight of half-cracked concrete stairs leading up from the platform. There are fresh streaks of blood, small but distinct on the broken crusts of snow piled on the risers. Those smears look too real, too red, in the bright light of day, and Stark fights to contain a wave of anger and misery, of terrible guilt.

  Bone places a hand on his shoulder. “There wasn’t enough blood around her gear or in the tunnels for her to have bled out. You have time.”

  Stark grabs the hand Bone’s rested on his shoulder in gratitude for a second and they follow Suge as he tracks the trail to a thin spit of derelict land just above the canal, fronting a muddle of what was once workshops for the boat trade. Whilst Suge does a swift search of the area, Stark and Bone stop behind the edge of the first buildings. Bone’s back scrapes the corner as he scoots to the shadows. He sucks in hard and flips to his side, resting on his shoulder.

  Stark raises a brow. “You okay?”

  “I got a tattoo,” he says quietly, as if still getting used to the idea but absolutely loving it, nonetheless. Stark always assumed his clear skin was voluntary, but something about that note of pride, almost shy, in Bone’s voice, makes him rethink.

  “Well, well,” he says. “Welcome to the human race.”

  “I was never outside of it,” Bone replies softly. “Not voluntarily.”

  Stark nods. “I’m beginning to see that, brother.” Sensing this topic is not an easy one for Bone, he catches Suge’s eye and signals him over. “Anything?”

  Suge points. “There’s an open workshop. Snow’s been disturbed in the last hour. Reckon they went through it.”

  “Well, okay. Weapons drawn, ready to fire.” Stark takes out the evidence bag and pulls Tress’s still-bloody gun from it. He hands it to Bone, who takes it between his fingers, screwing up his face. “Quit being squeamish,” Stark snaps.

  Bone shows his teeth. “It’s not the blood, it’s the gun,” he snaps. “I like weapons with edges, not bullets. I have too much experience in dealing with the results of projectiles.”

  “Ah, well, unless you fancy fighting in close quarters with Burneo, you’d best put any reservations aside for the next few hours.”

  Bone winces. “Got it,” he says, but he holds the outsized gun away from his body as they move in a small group towards the building.

  It’s not far, the whole spit of land being only thirty metres wide. The door is, as Suge said, flung open with a heap of snow built up behind it. Stark moves to the fore.

  “Let’s see what’s in here.”

  Behind the door lies an echoing barge workshop. Gaping holes in the roof let in pale beams of light and gusts of freezing air. The drip of melting snow plays a soft rhythm on damp wood. A large, unfinished barge takes up the majority of space, and they split to move around it towards the shuttered sliding doors at the workshop’s end. Bone and Suge take a handle each, and at Stark’s signal, pull them open. As one, the group lurches backwards, coughing. Sweet and cloying and with an undertone so sour, it tightens the throat, the stench rolls around them, tangible, like a shimmer of heat from tarmac.

  “He didn’t take Tress through there,” says Bone, staring into the darkness, pressing Tress’s gun back into Stark’s hand and reaching into his pocket for gloves. “Those doors haven’t been opened for a while.”

  Stark nods. “We’ll check outside again. You deal with … that.”

  Chapter 28

  As Suge and Stark head back outside, Bone snaps on his gloves, walking into the room beyond the sliding doors. He flicks the switch, shading his eyes as four spotlights spring to life. Not a gift from Burneo, this time, then. This is Rope. Why would Rope lead them to his own work? Is it a warning? Is this what he’ll do to Tress, if they don’t stop chasing him? Knowing Stark, that will do nothing to deter him, it will only cement his desire to bring an end to this killer. It’ll make it personal. The room Rope’s used for this diorama is an old equipment shed, narrow and long since empty of its contents. Taking up the slender space is that all-too-familiar webbing of taut ropes, and suspended in their centre, framed by walls slicked in red paint, awaits a tableau of exquisite grotesquery.

  Two women face one another. They’re both small and brunette and greenish-black with decay. Swollen and oddly blurred, their skin slips downwards in folds like ill-fitting clothes. Molten whites droop from under half-closed lids, their faces distorted, as if a series of strokes had rendered their muscles useless before they died. Twin streaks of thick, clotted fluid stream from their noses, down necks, and onto breasts sagging and misshapen from putrefaction. But Bone’s eyes are drawn, as though magnetised, to what lies between them, a part of the sculpture that separates it from all others. Their arms are raised, as if to clasp hands, but instead Rope has scrambled them together from elbow to fingertip, creating a single frozen limb between the two bodies. The end result is both harmonious and terrible.

  Tendons weave around interlocked bones, and the small shapes of finger bones lace delicate patterns at the humerus through the intersections between radius and ulna. Muscles and thick arterial veins droop like forlorn decorations, stippled with black stalactites of dried, coagulated blood. There’s no skin encompassing this ruined mass of forearms and hands, it’s been left exposed, as if to allow an audience to witness the perfection achieved in the fusion. Drawn close, too close, to that sticky paradox of parts, Bone feels a liquid shifting within his head. The ground spins away from his feet and a wave of vertiginous sickness sweeps up his throat.

  He moans. “Oh, fuck, no. Go away.”

  Darkness seeps into his mind on icy waters, and the hallucinogenic whirl of red circles on white rises behind his eyes. Inexpressible agony clamps his ribs, and then his limbs. Bone grits his teeth so hard, small flecks o
f enamel break off, rolling gritty and harsh against gum and cheek. His mind threatening to slip away, he hangs on by will alone, reminding himself over and over that he has a job to do; he can’t fall apart here. At first, the words are empty repetitions, collections of letters that mean less than nothing, but gradually, inch by inch, they gain strength, conviction, cohesion and, as sudden as they arrived, the red circles vanish, leaving Bone hanging on to his ribcage and breathing hard against the abrupt cessation of pain. Footsteps echo into the silence. They move behind him and stop.

  “What the fuck?” Stark wheezes out, as if air has deserted him.

  Bone sucks in too much air, almost in compensation for Stark’s lack. It makes him lightheaded. Fills his mouth, nose, and throat with the thick stench of the women’s putrefaction, strong enough to root him back to reality.

  Shaking, though he tries not to show it, he says, “Transmog.”

  And saying it catapults his thoughts to Lever, to her jaw-dropping, mind-bending display. It was meant for his eyes, but maybe he was mistaken in thinking it was a message for him. Perhaps instead it was a message to him, about what they’ve seen today. It’s all connected to the lab. To transmog. To the brutal enforcement of change upon the helpless. Perhaps Lever was once in cells like those. Perhaps she knows who Rope is. She could be in danger. In need of his help. But he hasn’t a clue how to help her, how to stop this. He swallows against a vast knot in his throat. It’s becoming too much to cope with. There’s nothing special about him, despite the reputation he’s achieved. All he knows, his entire knowledge of mods, of Zone practitioners, is the result of years of hard work. That’s the sum of his skill: dedication.

  Stark’s voice rumbles into his ear, making him jump. “So he’s not a subject, then, our killer, nor a lab assistant.”