Coil

by Ren Warom

  Tress touches the tacked seam on her face, covers the ragged wound from her throat to her chest with a shaking hand. “He did. He had me,” she says, and her eyes brim with remembered terror, unshed tears. Stark’s hands tighten on her shoulders. He can’t help it, despite her wince of pain.

  “Why didn’t you call for us?”

  Fierce rage––so very Tress, he wants to laugh, to give way to tears––flashes behind the pinched look of pain. “He attacked before I knew he was there, the fucking coward, I didn’t even see him at first …” She falters to a stop and her anger disintegrates to childlike sobs, taking over her whole body.

  Stark holds her shoulders, utterly helpless. He’s completely distraught, her tears more than he can bear. He allowed this to happen. “It’s okay,” he says, knowing it’s not, but needing to reassure her, to reassure himself.

  She looks up at him, her pupils dilated to pits. “No,” she says. “It’s not okay. He’s not human.”

  “Not …?” Stark shakes her a little again, gently this time. “What do you mean?”

  Tress struggles for calm, but when she speaks the words tumble over each other and her breath hitches and snags, the muscles of her face slack with remembered shock. “Rope’s a monster. Sharp bones. Wet flesh, writhing like snakes. So strong. He was twisting around me, choking me. Cutting me everywhere. I couldn’t defend myself.”

  Stark shares a glance with Nia. “Lever again,” he says.

  Nia comes over to place a gentle arm about Tress’s shoulders, her lips pressed to a thin line of outrage. She nods. “I think it has to have been. It sounds similar to what Bone described. She must be strong, if she can break through a ceiling like that anyway. Could Lever be Rope?”

  “My gut says no. I think she’s the thing that got loose in the lab. If she’s transmog on the scale we think, she could look like anything. Could have hidden anywhere and not be known. I reckon this scheme’s been years in the making. Reckon they were waiting for Leif’s death. Not much that man wouldn’t do to keep the truth from sullying his good name. Listen to me,” he says to Tress. “Whatever you saw Lever do, it’s just gen. She’s a genuine modified monster, but that’s it. Was she trying to take you away?”

  Tears slide down her face. “No, I don’t think so,” she whispers. “She cut me all to hell with blades growing out of her fucking body, and she wasn’t going to stop. If Burneo hadn’t come for me, I’d be dead.”

  Stark takes a few deep, unsteady breaths, racked with fury and guilt. “Rope was onto us, onto Burneo,” he says to Tress. “Maybe he thought we needed punishing for not playing by his rules. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have dragged you into this. I should’ve gone alone. It should’ve been me.”

  “Don’t be fucking stupid,” she snaps, wiping her tears on a ragged sleeve. “There’s no way in hell you could’ve kept me out of it. And if you’d been hurt instead of me, I’d have come after you. You need to quit the self pity and you need to listen.” She sways, and he tightens his grip again, holding her steady. “Time’s running out. Burneo’s on the wrong side of crazy, and he doesn’t talk much, but since yesterday evening, he’s been driving me fucking spare going on constantly about some man in dark and glass. And he knew you were coming, he’s been waiting for you.”

  Stark’s shocked out of his misery. “Bone was taken yesterday evening,” he says. He looks up at Burneo, still gone from the room, his body left behind like some vast, ancient artefact. “Burneo,” he says, then louder, when there’s no response, “Aron.”

  Burneo’s lids slowly rise. One eye is a ball of liquid mercury, blind and alien. The other, recognisably Aron’s, is luminescent as amber, but empty, as if he’s a puppet of flesh driven by arcane energies far from the human. Gradually, awareness rises in the depths of that amber pool, drawn from a place too far away for sanity. What comes is more frightening than nothing at all, a barely hinged glint of humanity that sears through Stark like a blinding white light, bleaching his innards.

  “Reinhart.”

  There’s the impression of a question being asked, an inflection akin to bewilderment. The sound of it echoes around, multiplying within the expanse of the canal walls and mingling with the sound of water until it swallows the name back to silence. Stark’s jaws grind together. Hearing that name from his old friend reduces him to points of acute agony, because it isn’t true anymore, not for either of them, and there’s no way to make it right. They’ve both come too far, lost too much.

  Stark shakes his head. “No. I’m not Reinhart. And you’re not Aron.”

  Burneo blinks in slow motion. “No,” he replies, and the sorrow in it reflects the sorrow grown like a wall of granite in Stark’s chest. “I am not Aron.” The life in his gaze flickers out. “You’re late to my playground. The game is near to ending. He is lost in the dark and the glass.”

  Stark sighs, and there’s a world of weariness and pain in it, some twenty years’ worth. “Just help us,” he pleads, hoping to get through, somehow, hoping they’re not already too late for Bone. “Don’t let me be too late this time. I can’t do it again.”

  A glimmer of something like the old Aron flits swift as a fish across that amber surface. Burneo speaks, and the words are not meant for Stark, but for Reinhart, Stark knows it as soon as he hears them. “There was time to take her down until you came.”

  A red tide of rage and fear crashes through Stark’s chest. He sees Teya’s face, that mess of blood and bone. Watches again as Aron runs away, driven by his bullets. He doesn’t know how many times he hit his old friend before Aron finally turned to run, how many clips spent, only that there was a single bullet left for Teya. Aron had begged him to listen, to understand what he was trying to do, but Stark could only see her face, could only hear his pain. He doesn’t know how often he’s wished there were two bullets left. He knows it’s too often, and that it never stops hurting. And he wishes every day he’d been able to stop, to listen, because he’ll never know if Aron could have saved her. He’ll never know if that bullet was mercy or murder.

  Stark tries to talk, but there are no words left. Nothing he can say will make it right. Nothing he can ever do. Burneo stands still as an oak, his presence solid as the metals wound throughout his body. He tilts that great, broken head to gaze at Stark, nothing of Aron flickering within, as though a flame has been snuffed. Savage shadows roil there instead, such plaintive ghosts Stark can hardly stand to witness them.

  “He is lost in the dark and the glass,” Burneo says, and there’s unimaginable agony in it. Words like blades are tearing his mind to shreds, forcing their way out of him, whether he wants to speak them or not.

  Desolation, pure and absolute, is all Stark can feel. It’s not losing the chance to ask forgiveness, he doesn’t deserve that. It’s the finality of the loss of Aron within this brutalised mess of modifications. Looking at them, at each irreversible strike against Aron’s humanity, Stark sees them for what they are. Self-inflicted punishments. They are for Teya. Like him, Burneo has never recovered from the loss of her. He probably blames himself. But it wasn’t his doing. It was Stark’s. All of it. Stricken, he looks away from Burneo’s gaze and meets Tress’s eyes, forced to bite back tears at the empathy in them. He doesn’t merit her empathy, but he welcomes the fierce glare of reprimand that follows.

  “I don’t know what the hell is between you two, but you better get a grip,” she whispers furiously. “Rope’s winding down to some big fucking finale, and if Bone’s his centrepiece, we need to find him now.”

  “I know,” he tells her wearily. “But I don’t know how to reach him, Tress.”

  “These visions are hurting him,” she says softly. “But he can be reached, he is in there. Talk to him.”

  Stark sketches a terse nod. If Tress says he’s in there, then he’s in there. “Burneo. The man in the dark and the glass, do you know where he is?”

  Burneo blinks. “Lost,” he says.

  “We need to find him, do you know how?”
/>
  Burneo inclines his great head. “Follow the ropes.”

  Stark ignores the huffs of annoyance from Nia and Suge. They see a madman talking in riddles and nonsense, he sees a man in dreadful pain, and he realises that, whatever happens after they find Bone, he’ll have to let Burneo go. It’s more than a matter of a debt owed. Burneo’s broken, and pulling him up into the world to subject him to the insanity of a media circus and a public trial would be an injustice. More than that, it would be cruel. He still believes Burneo’s victims require justice, but he no longer sees the end result in monochrome. There are different types of punishment, and some can go on for far too long. He reaches out, placing a hand on Burneo’s massive, ruined shoulder.

  “Take me to him,” he says.

  Chapter 44

  Darkness, pain, cold. The shatter of glass.

  Bone wrenches awake, exhausted. Every inch of his body hurts, and the bombardment of dreams has become too much like memory to dismiss. He’s tried to rationalise the deluge, but there’s no doubting their vivid quality, the physical weight of them. They’re bodily recollections of something buried, kept away from him. From the pattern of recovery, the effect on his mind, they have to be coming from behind a failing memory patch.

  Emptiness. Cold. Darkness. Screaming. Explosion of sound. Roaring. The pounding of feet.

  Bone claws to consciousness. Why would he have a patch? The first thought is Leif. Leif did something to him. Shoved something he didn’t like behind a wall, so he’d never have to deal with it again. Is this where Bone’s will has gone? Or is it something worse? It feels like something worse. Memories so horrifying, he’d do almost anything to escape from them, but he’s trapped here, he’s got nowhere to go but inwards.

  Lights. Blinding. Searing his eyes. Jabbers of words, jumbles of colours, hands on his body …

  He snaps out again, battling hysteria. The patch isn’t merely failing, it’s fracturing, disintegrating. He’s going to drown in these memories, if he can’t figure out what they are, why they’re hidden. He has to try because if he dies here, he wants to die with his mind still his own. He looks desperately into the darkness, feeling the cold and the constriction of ropes binding him. This is so similar to the memories leaking from the patch. The events are connected. It must be Rope. Rope is the connection. But how? He tries to remember what happened before waking in the darkness, but it’s blurred behind the oily remnant of some sort of drug. He needs to start further back, with the last things he recalls before the swallow of darkness. What were they? A faint image slips across the edge of his mind. He grabs for it and holds on until it sharpens to focus.

  “Snow.”

  Insane, hypnotic patterns of tumbling white. They mesh together, forming a door in his memory, the entrance to Willough Block. 328 Willough Block, the Rise, Kirk Falls. The address rolls heavy across his mind, dragging other scraps of memory behind like boulders. Willough Block wasn’t locked. But her door was. He’d forced it open, fingers burning as it pulled against them. He remembers softness under his shoes. Her apartment was carpeted. So expensive. She had so much. And computers, too. He sees a revolving spiral, concealing a map, a stream of mail hidden in a tear. He’d taken out his cell to call Stark, the slender shape of it cool in his palm. But something stopped him. Prickles. Prickles on the back of his neck. Once. Then again.

  “The drug. It has to be.” He strains harder, fighting through the murk brought on by the drug. But all he can recall is a peculiar sideways view of the room and warm rain falling on his face. “Rain?”

  His breath hisses out because it couldn’t have been rain. Not inside. He closes his eyes, pushing at the memory, testing the reality of it, but it’s undeniable. There was definitely rain. Warm rain falling on his face, and even on the carpet, blurring in fading sight. Bone’s eyes snap open into the darkness, recognising the colour even through the blur.

  “Blood.”

  Drops of blood like rainfall on the carpet and on his face, but there was no sky, only ceiling. And he’s seen blood like that before. Thick, fat drops slapping to the ground, a blood music that fell to the soundtrack of his screaming.

  “Lever,” he whispers. “She was there.” Understanding creeps in on the back of remembrance. “A trap. Lever and Rope, working together.” Rage and misery flare like fire within. “Lever was sent to catch me. Why?”

  Bone scans the pitch-black surrounds, willing his eyes to pierce the shadows. He knows she must be close because she was there with him. She did this to him. Brought him down here into the familiar darkness, the agony of ropes and the cold. He wants answers, and Lever has them, just as he thought she did.

  He yells into the dark, the ropes cutting into the flesh of his chest, “Where are you?”

  And a voice responds from everywhere and nowhere at once. Low. Scathing. A whispered accusation. “Do you remember what you have done yet, Bone-Man?”

  Almost unwilling to believe it, despite all he’s remembered, Bone breathes out her name, “Lever?”

  A soft laugh ripples through the darkness, and something moves towards him. It’s the eyes he sees first, an intense green––bright pools of colour floating in whites pure as new snow. Her pupils are wide and black, an abyss to consume him. They cut straight through him. Lever. Irrefutably her. She steps forwards in measured strides, the delineation of exposed musculature glistening even in darkness. Naked and skinless and perfect, she moves closer to him, scouring him with that verdant gaze.

  “Lever,” she repeats. Her voice is flat, musical, hard with amusement, and as husky as he recalls. “Is that what you think?”

  The eyes change, then. They’re still Lever’s eyes, but he no longer sees Lever in them. They’ve become devoid of life as the black hollow of her pupils, avid and leached of emotion, pure intent without the handicap of conscience. There’s too much intelligence in them, all of it cold and rational. Nothing of madness in them. Nothing to explain the total lack of humanity. Bone’s skewered, stripped bare and vulnerable. He’d rear back from that gaze if he were able. Run till his legs gave beneath him if he could. But ropes hold him here––Rope has him here, and Rope must be Lever, nothing left to deny it.

  “I think you’re …” he begins. Then those memories resume behind his eyes in starts and flashes, each a jolt pure as lightning, and he finds himself murmuring, “I’ve been here before.”

  Lever bares her teeth in what looks like the hungry expression made before consumption of prey, and drifts closer to him, a mere hand’s breadth from his face. “You have. As have I. I played this game to bring you back, so you’d know what you’ve done. We’ll untangle the web they built in you, together, and make you remember. I was forced to wait so long for this, but here I am. Here we are.” That smile comes again. Calculating. Animal cunning. “It was so simple, in the end. I used her. Took her skin and wore her like a suit to get close to you, to see if you’d know me. But all you saw was her, and I knew I had you.”

  “What?” He can’t pull his mind wide enough to grasp what she’s saying. “Her skin? Whose skin?”

  “Lever. My little helper.” The smile remains as if fixed with glue. A rictus. “When we were fucking, you and I, I told you my name. Did you hear me?”

  “Your name?”

  Pain slams into his skull. A fierce itch builds in his forehead as images peel out of his memories: Lever’s bright gold skirt, her fingertips reflecting shards of neon, the splash of peacock-blue hair. He watches like a voyeur as they race through the night, Lever’s hand tugging him along. He feels it then, re-living it. Mouths devour as the elevator softly chimes floor after floor. They tear clothes like skin. Limbs mesh, entangle, and drop them to the round rug in amongst shapes like leaves. And they fuck as if nothing else matters but the grind of flesh on flesh. Her gold tips rake channels down his chest, drag and burn. Pure white-hot pain. Unbearable. Unbelievably good. An orgasm begins to rise inexorably through his body. She whispers a word into the hollow of his ear. And time stops,
a splash of freezing water to the face. He’s thrown back to reality, to the cold green eyes before him, but sees nothing to explain this.

  “Your name?” he asks.

  A burgeoning sense of unreality cocoons him. That name can’t be hers. Impossible. Lies, then, all lies. This is Lever and she’s lying to him, fucking with his mind sure as she fucked his body. He’s certain of it, as certain as he is that what he fucked was definitely a woman. It must have been. Has to have been.

  The thing called Lever inclines her head. “Did you not recognise my name?” she asks him with dangerous softness.

  “Bone Adams is my name.”

  “No.” The reply is pitiless. “It’s not. You stole a life, and the time has come to return it.”

  With that claim, that accusation, he feels the patch rupture––it’s raw, like fingers tearing at a wound, and cavernous roaring erupts inside his head as torrents of black memory flood from behind the patch. And from the flood comes something attached to the name, latching into recollection like a hook into the soft matter of his brain and he sees …

  Lights. Blinding. Searing his eyes. Panicked voices throw words, questions, between them like blows. There are hands on his face; rough hands prying apart his eyelids; the action causes an abrupt cessation of noise. A single voice speaks. One he knew then and knows now: Leif Adams.

  “It’s not Bone,” Leif says, his voice coloured with puzzling disappointment.

  Bodies jostle too close. Another voice speaks, “Oh, hell. What do we do?”

  “He’s in bad shape, he needs immediate attention.”

  “What about Bone?”

  The response is spat out, as though each word is a bitter mouthful. “I suppose we have to assume he’s made use of this as a disguise.”

  There’s an uneasy pause. “I’m sorry, Leif. Bone’s gone too far. He has to be held accountable, you have to see that.”