Coil

by Ren Warom

  A new voice interrupts, clipped and icy, filled with authority. “He’ll be caught and held accountable. However, this is potentially disastrous for us all. It has to be buried. Do you understand, Leif?”

  “I understand, Connaught, all too well,” replies Leif, and the edge to it slices at his ears, hurting them.

  Hands take hold of his chin, gently this time. He’s trying for words, but they’re trapped behind dry lips, a deadened tongue. The hands cup his head, so careful, too tender to bear. Then a trickle of water pours between his lips. Glorious. Unspeakable heaven. His stomach cramps, hurling the water back up and choking him.

  Behind the water, the words he’s been trying to say rise fast and bitter as vomit.

  “The wrong skin. He was wearing the wrong skin.”

  The present crashes in, bright and shattering. He hangs there, disassociated from himself. His thoughts are chaos, haemorrhaging under the weight of escaped memory. He can’t feel his body. Only his mind fills him like broken glass, all sharp edges and pain, and the red circles rise behind his eyes like seeping blood. From within them come snatches of disjointed memories, brutal as shark bites, memories of then and now merging into one vast lump. Indistinguishable. Dark. Cold. Pain. Ropes tight as a fist. The soft scuffle of rats. The red circles wheel faster and faster. They throw another memory from the chaos hard as an uppercut, whole and absolutely clear …

  Walking in the snow, in the muted light of street lamps, hands deep in his pockets. A door slams in the distance, the sound of muffled laughter ripples across the air. Leaves like fire fall slowly within the snow, a stop-motion counterpoint, their soft touch a caress upon his head. Then glass shatters, resounds in his ears loud as a car crash, and a bolt of pure white agony shoots through his skull. The world tips towards him, and before his staring eyes, red circles form, seeping through crisp, new snow: red in the white, fading as he loses consciousness …

  He’s choking on tears, they spatter to the floor like bile and the itch at his forehead becomes untenable, an aggravating crawl, as if his skin is stuffed with spiders. It’s driving him insane. If he can’t itch it, it will drive him insane. He has to itch it. Has to stop the spiders. He pulls at his hands, but they’re trapped, tied fast behind his back, and he panics, wrenching at them. Ropes tear into his skin, deep wounds he can barely feel, and blood pours hot as boiled water over the backs of his hands, pooling in his palms. In response, a scalding flash fire leaps from his spine to his arms. As it reaches his hands, the bones of his palms and his fingers explode apart, flesh stretching and twisting about them as they shift within the grip of ropes. Metallic stomach acid spurts into the roof of his mouth as the pressure on his wrists goes slack, bonds falling away to dangle against the small of his spine. His arms flop to his sides, joints burning, muscles cramping, pins and needles rippling from his shoulders to whatever it is at the ends of his wrists.

  He wants to leave them dangling there, but the urge to look is compulsive. Slowly, he raises them to eye level, too far gone to notice how much it hurts, and yells at the sight of them, a flat sound of denial. Those aren’t hands. They aren’t hands at all. They’re shapeless, blood-drenched tubes of flesh, like amputations, smooth and featureless and too liquid. Worse than no hands at all. Before his horrified gaze, they begin to reform, skin rippling as bones shuffle back into place, and he’s fighting for breath, his vision fading in and out. The crawl of spiders at his forehead translates into intolerable pressure and the skin of his forehead splits, just like Lever’s did on Rope’s body. Begins to slide apart. He screams, a hoarse note climbing ever upwards, and slams those alien hands to his face, holding it together against the slick well of blood, the pressure of heavy flesh courting gravity. Phalanges pop upwards in quick succession, an alien, gorge-rising sensation against his temples, and his fingers snap to shape, pressing into his skull.

  “Stop it,” he screams at the red mask of a face that’s both Rope and somehow Lever, and also something worse. “Please, stop it!”

  “Why would I?” Rope asks, matter of fact. “It’s mine. I want it back.”

  Expressionless, passionless, Rope lunges for his wrists and starts to prise his hands from his face. He shouts at Rope, an incoherent denial, and wrenches away, slapping loose flaps of skin back onto his skull as they peel towards his chin. Rope roars with rage. Under the thick wrap of tendon-streaked red, Rope’s bones begin to move, the muscles unravelling, blood stretching between like thick, red membranes, and though he fights it, Bone’s powerless to prevent the response of his own flesh, more appalling than the deconstruction of his hands. Joints rupture and separate, his bones beginning a slow migration to new positions, his muscles sliding beneath loose skin. An unwinding that feels like seasickness, riding in the heavy liquid of his own body, the undulation of his innards. It throws his senses into a frenzy of discordant kinaesthesia. His head spins and reels. Harsh ringing resounds in his ears and has the opposite effect it should, bringing all sound to perfect clarity.

  He hears bones crack and move, Rope’s and his own, the sibilant rush of sliding muscle, of shifting skin, a melody of change, jarring and hollow in the ear. Then Rope attacks, a blur of sharp edges, visceral speed and strength. Slicing through the bonds at his chest, his shoulders and slamming deep into skin, to muscle, and beyond. He howls at the pain and his body replies with a clumsy shield––ribs flared out from his chest, forcing those blades to slow. Striving to push them way. The harsh scrape of sharp edges on rib shafts reverberates through him. He gags at the sensation. Gags again as his body throws out a veil of muscle to cover Rope’s rebuilt head, but he’s too slow and Rope too expert. Rope ducks the veil and slams those blades between his ribs again with horrendous force, scissoring them apart. With a snapping sound remarkably similar to twigs underfoot, his ribs fracture, and Rope’s blades scythe past. Blood spurts into his eyes. He tries to make blades to cut at his lower bonds so he can escape, but Rope’s everywhere, a frenzy of fierce rage and unbelievable power and he’s forced to curl over, instead, to protect vital organs.

  Those blades of bone fall again and again, cutting through skin and muscle, slicing into femur and rib and scapula, breaching his weak defences to pierce his lung, his liver. So many cuts, the pain bleeds together and becomes a wall of all-encompassing agony, every breath like a burst of flame. Bleeding out, he faces Rope head on, to let him see he’s not beaten, not even in death, and a percussive burst of pure sound splits the air, half deafening them, making them scream into each other’s faces. The back blast of heat from an explosion slams through in its wake. Serrated metal fragments, white-hot, fly against the ropes and strike burning impacts on muscle and flesh before clattering to the floor. The scattergun sound of feet on concrete pounds into the darkness, and from the shadows, two huge arms— steel-wrapped muscle hissing loud as a tangle of angry snakes—scoop Rope into their grasp. Rope fights back with wicked precision, but the arms of metal and flesh are immovable, the mass wielding them absorbing blows as if they’re mere inconvenience.

  He hears voices yelling, the sound of more feet muffled by the ringing in his ears. Lights flare all around, invading his eyes with the brute force of blades in flesh. He screams again. Rope joins him, a sound seemingly of one voice as they snap their eyes shut. His lids illuminate like stained glass, delineating veins, the deep purple of blood, the orange of flesh. There are sounds of horror, a volley of shouted words, a woman screaming. Across the top, shots fire again and again, their impacts a succession of dull, meaty thuds. Frantic hands stutter across his chest, pushing at his ribs, trying to force them back behind muscle, behind skin and a familiar voice begs him, “Come back, Bone, please come back. Don’t die. Don’t you dare fucking die, you bastard.”

  He opens his eyes and it’s Nia. It’s Nia. She’s here. And he wants to stop, to make himself normal again so she won’t be frightened, so he won’t disgust her, but he doesn’t know how. In the momentary stillness of his body, he feels the nanites surge in his skul
l, sinking back down his spine to repopulate the rivers of ink flowing beneath his skin, and some unseen force takes hold of his flesh and bones, re-moulding him without mercy. Despite the fresh waves of pain, he almost sobs with relief, but Nia’s hands halt their frenzied attempt to put him back together. She pushes away and stares, disbelieving, as his body remakes itself. Horror contorts her features, followed by revulsion.

  “Transmog,” she says, barely able to get the word out. She looks up at his face. “Did Rope do this to you?”

  Unable to speak, he shakes his head, and her face crumples, eloquent with distress. She steps even further away and he feels it as a physical sensation of loss. He wants to take this back. Take everything back. It’s too much, like the vast jumble of new memories inside of him, an uncontainable amount, most of them incoherent, incomprehensible. The entire, garbled life of a stranger crammed into his skull, overlapping his own and threatening to devour him. There’s nothing sane in those memories, nothing whole, and he knows he has to fight, but he’s so tired and so very lost. Waves of dizziness pass down from the top of his skull, their passage a vibration that shakes him to the core, and there’s a strange weight in his chest. Experience tells him what it is: blood beginning to leak into his chest cavity, perhaps his stomach, too.

  His vision doubles and blurs. Unable to fight any longer, he slumps in the ropes, falling to hang below his legs. Nia yells for Stark, her hands finally touching his wounded body again, grabbing at him as he swings there like a pendulum, heavy to and fro, his blood drawing abstract patterns on the concrete. Alarm fills the room, but he hears it only as faint buzzing, far off and untouchable. He swings towards what’s left of Rope’s denuded face. The last thing he sees is his own reflection in the dead gleam of a verdant pool. Bone Adams reflected into Bone Adams––and he doesn’t know which one is real.

  Chapter 45

  Nia’s fingers hover, trembling, over the zipper of the body bag. It looks the same as any other, but it’s not. She can’t bring herself to face the contents of this bag. She promised Stark she’d be okay, swore upon her life to Spaz. She shouldn’t have done that. Fact is, she just didn’t want anyone else doing this. It’s her job, her burden, because stepping back from Bone’s body as it rebuilt itself was unforgivable. She saw it in Bone’s face, how much it hurt. The harm she’d done him. Angry she might be; betrayed, confused, and most assuredly still sick to her core at the thought of what he did as a young man, but deserting him when he needed her most was unforgivable. It goes against everything she is. Everything she’s always been.

  The feel of his flesh though, under her palms. She shudders. Oh dear fucking hell, it was beyond awful. First to see him so broken, drenched in blood and just ragged, as if his flesh were a suit half torn off his skeleton. Then, as she’d tried to hold him together, his body began to shift under her hands. Things moving, things snapping, this terrible, liquid sliding. Those sensations hit her right below the diaphragm, visceral and raw. She’d wanted to run, then, run without ever looking back. Merely stepping back from him to distance herself had been restraint at that point. But it was still wrong. Nia hangs her head and clutches the edge of the table, just breathing, breathing through the memory. Blue light flickers overhead, lending the mortuary a watery sheen. It makes her skin look anaemic, dead as the contents of this bag. Nia lifts her gaze to it. So innocuous. A shapeless, black mass, more bag than anything else, but there’s definitely a body in there, and she can’t avoid it forever. She promised, she swore, and she needs to do this. For Bone.

  Grasping the zipper, she draws it slowly down, keeping well back from the stench that’s released. It’s been only twelve hours since the sewer, but that’s long enough for things to have become very interesting in there. Carefully, she folds back the edges, allowing them to drape down over the side of the table, and takes her first close look at the thing that tried to kill Bone. It’s as bad as she feared. Her gorge rises and she has to turn away, gulping air, coughing in the still cool of the mortuary. Thing is the only word that fits what’s left of Rope. There’s little recognisable humanity in this warped, wet mess of muscle, tendon, and bones. Not to mention the sheer amount of damage from bullets. Vast holes torn into bunched muscle, and jagged shards of bone stuck out like spikes, drooling coagulating marrow.

  Stark and Suge shot Rope over and over, unsure where a viable kill shot might be found in the woven horror this homicidal maniac remade himself into. It’s unspeakably vile. Repugnant. Why would anyone have gen like this? It’s not transformative, just hideous. Taking a deep breath, she begins before she can think better of it.

  “On. Record. This examination is for Establishment record and identification only. Decedent is male (no visible penile remnants, but visible fragments of pelvis are flat, tests will confirm), age uncertain, height uncertain, weight at time of death unknown. Very few identifying features due to lack of integumentary system. This was not the cause of death. Rigor mortis is fixed. Multiple bullet wounds, too numerous to catalogue, massive trauma to all tissue masses.”

  Nia blows out and fetches her scalpel, hands hovering again, unsure where to begin. This mess is so ridiculously unfamiliar, considering it was apparently a human body.

  “Body is in a state of flux caused by transmog gen modification. Significant skeletal disruption has occurred, with unusual reformations of radius, ulner, and humerus … these bones appear to have fused, sharpening to blades. We had to wrap them to prevent them slicing through the bag. Muscular redistribution is equally extreme. Muscles of the arms and upper torso have moved to provide driving power for the bone blades. This is a fixed form. The decedent’s passing has not affected it.”

  She begins a deeper examination with the head, protected under a helmet of what seems to be re-moulded scapulas and more of that strong, fibrous muscle. Her heart begins to beat too heavily, and she tries to breathe her disgust and horror away again. That tissue and bone can be made to do this … it’s unnatural.

  “Head intact,” she says weakly. “No cranial damage. Decedent appears to have constructed a secondary cranium from the matter of both scapulas. There are a few scores from the passage of bullets across the surface.”

  Nia moves down to what must be torso and slices through shredded muscle, trying to find the organs, finally discovering them hidden in the middle of a dense wall of muscles and reformed ribs. Perhaps half the rib cage bent to form a protective cage. She steps back, blinking rapidly, and clears her throat.

  “Internal organs undamaged, but excessive pale hue indicates total loss of blood flow. Decedent bled out rapidly through catastrophic arterial rupturing. Suggests death by hypovolemic shock.” Her grip tightens on the scalpel because Bone came close to dying like that, too, thanks to this creature––possibly his own creation. What horrific irony.

  “I’ll take some tissue slices and samples for testing. Initial blood test results taken en route from the scene by the team who transported the remains are back, as is basic toxicology and full DNA. I’ll review now and recommence after. Recording off.”

  She steps back from Rope again. “I’ll only be happy when they put you in the fucking furnace,” she mutters as she strips off her gloves, knowing she’ll never be able to strip this from her mind.

  Nia moves to the screen at the end of the table and begins to read the results streamed from the hospital lab, trying not to look at Rope’s remains, but somehow unwilling to turn her back on him, though he’s stiff with rigor mortis. She taps into the records dept of the Notary, thankful that this system is the Establishment’s. She’s family, and therefore permitted top-level access. That means, from here, she can crack into files the Notary, and probably even Spaz, would prefer she didn’t. Tough shit for them. She’s determined to find out who Rope is. It’s the least she can do. She’ll deal with Bone’s past and how she feels about it later, when he recovers. If he does. Worried Spaz may have anticipated her curiosity, Nia takes a moment to program an almost invisible jack, to hide her inte
ntions and allow her search to go on unhindered.

  Spaz has probably forgotten she used to stream-jack for fun when she was just a pre-teen. Nothing too serious, she didn’t want anyone to think she could be useful. She wanted a different life, a normal life. Stupid, really, because her life is far from normal. Whilst waiting for the search to complete, she accesses Bone’s sus unit feed. There’s video streaming alongside the readout from his monitors, but she doesn’t look. He’s naked, therefore vulnerable, and it feels invasive. She smiles at the readout, though. His body is healing well, and there are delta patterns interrupting the alpha. He’s dreaming. If he’s dreaming, then he’s in there somewhere. That’s all she wants, for him to come back as whole as possible, even if it means he has to face trial. The screen pings. She looks across from Bone’s feed to the results of her search, and stands there, staring, her mouth working stupidly. She scratches her ear too hard without thinking, grazing the skin, and leans in for a closer look.

  “That’s not right,” she mutters.

  Meticulously, she rechecks the results used for the search and frowns so hard, little bolts of pain shoot through her temples. She turns back to Bone’s feed, tapping to bring up his medical notes, and compares those to the results from the search on Rope’s blood. Her jaw drops. There’s little doubt in what she’s seeing, but she can’t quite make sense of it. It’s not possible. How is that possible? It takes a moment for the shock to hit. When it does, she presses a hand to her belly, feeling decidedly ill. There’s no way of getting around this. No explanation other than the obvious.

  “He’s not Bone,” she mutters to herself, and laughs, disbelieving.

  Dizzily, she triple checks the information, but it’s still the same. A secured file pulled up by her jack, rather than her access, one she should definitely not be looking at, the results matching the birth of one Bone Adams, son of Amiela and Leif Adams. His blood type and DNA both a positive match for Rope. Bone’s results don’t match. He’s B negative, when Bone Adams is recorded as being A positive. But it’s the DNA that makes it irrefutable. Her Bone is not a match to the Bone Adams on record. He’s not even close. Not even a distant relative. She looks at the mess laid out on the table beyond the screen, but it still won’t quite register. That is Bone Adams? How? And who is her Bone? Or rather, who was he? She steadies herself, but her legs don’t seem to want to stop shaking. She looks at the sus feed again. Finally watches the streaming video, because she needs to see him, to know that he’s there.