We were led through stacks of boxes, wrapped and ready for transport, and into a section of factory cordoned off from the rest. And there it was, the Fruit. It roared high in my vision, looming like a gargantuan chestnut over the concrete floor, the assembled men, and a table laid out with tools. I thought I saw purple velvet, the clones of my father’s sledge repeated, over and over again. I blinked, and my vision sliced apart, reformed, and focused. Tools, yes. Everything from axes to saws to a drill.
“Right. Well, idiot, you’ve definitely brought somebody.” Carmine’s sneering voice, grossly distorted, rumbled into my ears like bitumen being laid on a new road, and with the association came the smell of it, the burning, waxen tar. “Problem is, Manny, he’s not the right motherfucking guy! Where’s Vincent, you fuckup?!”
“Guy says he’s got the same set of preconditions. Vincent cut and ran.” From the way he used the word, it was clear he was repeating Vassily verbatim.
There was murmuring that might have been talking, but my inner eye was fixated on the Fruit. It pulsed in my vision, a blue dark enough that it seemed to suck in the light around it. I recognized a faint smell, even through the heightened state, that I could not help but breathe in. It was like the most fragrant peach I had ever smelled. In the back of my throat, it transmuted: the sweetness became aromatic and dizzying. Phi. It smelled like Phi.
“Scopolamine.” One word leapt out from the babble. “Okay, get him on it.”
A knife was thrust into my hand, and I was led forward. The driver, a swirling swarthy mass, his teeth made of light, turned me to face the Fruit squarely. “You heard him. Start chopping, and don’t stop ’til you reach the middle.”
As I advanced towards it, I had a vague memory of someone saying this thing had wiped out several guys. That it had sprayed them, something like that. But I couldn’t stop going forward or stop my arm from lifting and the knife coming down. The blade made its first blow, sinking into the rind like butter, and the smell of Phi became overwhelming. My handler retreated hurriedly and left me alone in my labor as my arm rose and fell, rose and fell, like the piston in a machine.
Excitement turned the voices around me to a spiraling shrill that blended into the rest of the muted talk around the perimeter of the light.
“Fuck off, all of you!” Carmine barked. “I got this!”
His voice wasn’t blurry. My head was clearing. With every passing moment, the drug was fading, and fast. My stabs slowed momentarily but then resumed as I struggled to keep the cover and not reveal the loosening lock on my mind. A door slammed behind me, and Carmine returned. In the sudden silence, Vassily’s wheezing was all too audible.
At one point the knife began to thud and stick. I pulled it free, sunk it in again, and was struck square in the face by a jet of pure blue liquid that burst free under pressure from the pith. The stuff didn’t burn me, and neither did it hit the floor; instead, it evaporated into fragrant steam before ever touching the ground.
The world swooped in a florid arc and then drew in to a point, sharp and clear. My body was mine once again. I chopped at the pith, and this time, the liquid slopped down the sides of the shell.
“Jesus and Mary...”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Carmine cross himself and kiss his ring, muttering in Latin. I changed the knife for my hands, pulling out chunks of soft sky-colored pith from inside the shell. I couldn’t stop. I could have, if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t want to stop. Elbow-deep in the mystery, I couldn’t stop. What was inside? The woman in my dream, the one who had called me “father”? Nothing? Everything?
I broke through a thin inner skin and forced my arm in past it. It was hot inside the rind, as hot as a freshly cracked chest. I felt through a labyrinth of spongy, pulse-infused tissue up to my shoulder. It put me on my tiptoes, and I pressed my ear in against it as I groped around, searching for anything I could grasp and pull free. The shell reverberated with a low thrum up close, an impossibly huge heartbeat that surged as something unseen lunged forward and gripped my forearm.
I roared in mingled shock and pain, hauling back. Whatever had me held on as I pulled it through the final nacreous layers of the rind. Phi spilled everywhere as a woman - at least six feet tall and as athletic as a gymnast - slid out of the tunnel of the womb and fell on top of my chest in a spill of wet white hair. It was like living paint, a shade so pure it bent and flexed against light to hold its wholeness of color.
“Jesus Fucking... Shit!” Carmine screamed into the echoing hall of the warehouse, flinching away. “What the shit are you doing!?”
The nude woman, dripping blue, levered herself up on deceptively strong arms over my face. I couldn’t breathe. She was the most graceful and powerful and fragile thing I’d ever laid eyes on, and she was powerfully, painfully familiar.
“Thank GOD,” she whispered in Ukrainian. “You made it.”
I knew her like my own face, and without thinking, I reached up to touch her cheek. My eyes blurred. Her name was on the tip of my tongue. “Z–Zar–ya?”
She was crying, laughing, and reached up to clap her hands over my cheeks, nodding when I said her name. Zarya. I had never seen her in my life. I scrabbled back from her, heaving for breath, too scared of her otherworldliness to do anything but react. I ran into Carmine’s shins. Carmine was staring, and without looking down at me, he offered me a hand up. That wasn’t how this was supposed to go, but in the face of Zarya’s ability to exist? It made as much sense as anything else.
“Bat'ko, there’s going to be a DOG here any minute.” She spoke in accented English, educated, neither American or European. My accent. “Please, we have to go!”
“Dog? What dog?” Carmine blurted.
He took a step towards us, and Zarya shied back, as if warding him away. Without a second thought, I put myself in front of her and shoved him back. “Back it up, pizdha.”
The bigger man’s lips curled, and he snarled wordlessly as he took a step forward. “Back it... hey! You aren’t calling the shots here, you little f-”
Before I could stop myself, I swung at Carmine’s face. He wasn’t expecting it, and my fist took him square in the jaw. He raised his ring hand, but before he got the word of power off, I kicked him in the jaw and he bit his own tongue with a bubbling squawk.
“No. You fucking shut your whore mouth,” I said. “She’s not ‘yours.’ Her name is Zarya.”
“She knows!” Carmine spat, blood pouring down his chin, and pointed at her. I didn’t dare turn to see what Zarya was doing. “She knows Everything!”
“Blyat!” Zarya said from behind me. “I can’t use any of these guns! They’re all... oh, GOD dammit...”
“So ask her from over there.” I reached over to the tool bench and picked up another, larger knife. I was pretty sure I could land it in Carmine’s face before he could get his hands up to work magic.
Carmine looked past me, shivering. His reddish eyes were full of the kind of desperation I’d ever only seen in junkies. “Fine, okay. Fine. Listen to me, lady. You listen. I need to know the answer to something.”
“You g-g-got about a minute before we’re all dead.” She was chattering with cold or fear.
“I fuckin’ died on that mountain.” Carmine picked himself up and lurched a step forward. I tensed, but he stopped and turned away to pace sidelong to us both. “I know I did. I remember dying. Lady, you gotta tell me. What the fuck did I see? What the fuck was looking at me?”
“Ah.” Zarya nearly made a sound but, instead, turned away to skim her hands over the array of tools on the table. “No, we don’t have time. And you don’t want to know.”
“I have to know!” He had gone red in the face and whirled back to face us. “It’s driven me nuts! Every night! Every dream! I see it staring at me. What the fuck is it!?”
“I...” She froze, trembling. “It’s... it’s the I. The I of GOD.”
“God?” Carmine’s expression fell. “And the voice?”
She made
a small, needy sound, like a sound of hunger. “That’s GOD, too. Look, we need to get—”
“It’s freaking me the fuck out, is what it’s doing!” Carmine was expressive in his agitation, waving his hands. “How do I stop it? Jana told me you could stop it.”
“You… you can’t.” I felt her swallow.
“The only way you can stop GOD looking at you is by removing yourself from your enslavement to it,” added a third voice from across the room. “Listen to the lady, Carmine Mercurio, and while you’re at it, back it up.”
Carmine whipped around on his feet, looking straight at what I also saw and couldn’t believe I was seeing. The small, doughy face of Lev.
Lev held a slender silver pistol outstretched in one hand. He was flanked by three of Carmine’s own enforcers. They had the stupefied, fixed expression of men under thrall. There was no visible turbulence around Lev: no light, no shadow, no flame. Lev’s gaze was keen, and the skin was drawn tight across his jaw with effort. I felt the energy around him, the magic.
“Leave her, Alexi.” Lev’s voice carried through the warehouse. The four men stepped around Vassily. He was crumpled beside a stack of crates, his legs folded awkwardly under his weight. He was pale, a blue-white color that sent a chill through my chest. “Step aside, before I kill you both.”
I looked back at him. “Lev! The hell’s the matter with you?”
“Me? Why, nothing at all.” The small man’s smile was a tight-lipped mask. “I feel bad for you, Alexi. You’ve always been too earnest. Too hard-working. No one appreciates you in the Organizatsiya... but I have a lot to thank you for. Unlocking Jana’s oratory, for one, and leaving it with all of its useful information intact, for another. I paid a visit, I broke her codes. Modified courtroom shorthand. I know everything she knew, about the Fruit, about this... retarded child consciousness that governs our reality. I had no idea she knew so much.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I couldn’t quite mask the fear in my voice. Zarya broke away from my back, and my gut flashed uncomfortably.
“I always figured magic was just a useful skill, you know. Like being good at math or speed-reading. But it’s so much more. I’ve really just begun to grasp the magnitude of what we are dealing with.” Lev blinked rapidly. “Take the Gift Horse. Do you know what she is?”
“Please, Lev. Vassily—”
“I don’t care about Vassily.” Lev’s eyes darkened. Foam was gathering at the corners of his mouth. “She is magic. Literally. Raw power. If I eat her, I’ll be more powerful than both of you put together. Sergei can’t strip me of my position. That scumbag, Nicolai, will be mine. I won’t be playing second fiddle to anyone ever again. EVER.”
“You and what fucking army?” Carmine said.
I wanted to kick him again.
“Anyone I please. I could rule the world with my kind of magic.” Lev’s gaze flicked to a point past his shoulder and stayed there. “If only I had a little more of it.”
It was Carmine who pushed forward, hands raised. “You want magic? You want the girl? You can have her, motherfucker, over my dead body.”
Lev’s reply was to open fire. Carmine threw up a word of power and a gesture with a harsh shout, and then a scream of pain came out as the bullets punched his magical shield with just enough delay that they didn’t burst out of his body. He fell to the ground with an agonized shriek, rolling on the floor. The pain wasn’t normal. I saw the wounds smoking, and his breath came shallower and more quickly as he looked back to Lev.
“You got that gun from Jana’s, didn’t you?” I began to back away. The knife might as well have been a toy. “Lev, you’ll destroy her. She has to be handled by a virgin.”
“No. The Gift Horse has to be birthed and fed by a virgin. It doesn’t need to live for that long afterward.” Lev’s voice was still eerily calm. He was struggling to keep focused on me as Carmine screamed, eyes flicking down and then back again. “I mean... it’s a fruit, isn’t it? You eat it.”
At first, I thought I was still hallucinating when the tip of Lev’s gun began to ooze. The barrel was slowly leaking a familiar greasy oil that dripped from the muzzle and ran down along it, trembling before it broke off and hit the floor. It beaded like black mercury, wobbling—and then the drops began to move towards one another.
"Lev, your gun..." I took a big step back.
Zarya cried out. A knife flew past my face, flung with force from behind me. Lev’s expression contorted: he fired and took the blade just under his collarbone at the same time. His finger convulsed with a wet click. I had seen that before.
“Run!” I backpedaled. A blast of violet-black emulsion spewed from the gun in a torrent: Lev turned ash-white and staggered, throwing the gun away with a yell. The weapon struck the coagulating mass of liquid, hissed on contact, and was absorbed into its mass.
The three Manelli soldiers broke their spell and started shouting, running into each other in their confusion. I started for Vassily as the fluid arched up into a gelatinous mass. It formed a roughly canine shape, but it had too many limbs and far too many teeth.
“DOG,” Zarya gasped behind me. “DOG!”
Carmine sobbed in pain as he dragged himself up and staggered back, eyes darting between me and the DOG. “No, no way, fuck this. Fuck this fucking shit right back to hell.”
Mouths unzippered across the entire length of the DOG’s body as a terrier-like head formed at one end. It split and divided into sinewy tendrils that whipped and shot through the screaming, fleeing men. Its body split apart with a soggy sound into more mouths, which grinned and gnashed and squeaked as they dragged one, then another of the soldiers into its maws. One flew over my head as I dove for Vassily, grabbed him under the elbow, and hauled him up. A spined tentacle lunged for us: I slashed it with the knife, and it recoiled. Vassily was fighting to stay with me, but he was sagging in my grip.
“Chest,” he wheezed. “Chest.”
Carmine wasn’t sticking it out: he was running away from us, towards the entryway. He and Lev were closest to the DOG, which bounded after them, shrieking with laughter. They had nearly reached the door, and Lev had flung it open when a many-jointed extrusion flew from the demon’s back like a harpoon. Carmine grabbed Lev’s jacket and pulled him around, using him as a human shield, and Lev’s piercing scream rang through the factory as it hooked him and dragged him back towards the gnashing mouths.
Zarya shook me out of it. She had knives in each hand. “Come on!”
“I’ve killed one of these before,” I said. “Take Vassily and run. Something’s wrong with him.”
Her reply was to worm her way under Vassily’s other arm, hissing through her teeth. On contact with his weight, her skin began to bubble like paint, bubbling and peeling with dark blue and silver blisters. “I don’t have long. We’re going.”
Lev screamed a second time, a sound that blurred to garbling and wet mastication. The DOG was still chewing as it turned. It didn’t whirl in place so much as reform to face us and began to lope and ooze across the ground. Lev’s severed arm fell from between its teeth. I pushed Zarya and Vassily off towards the back of the factory and faced it down with the knife in my hand and my jaws clamped shut. Kutkha, if you can do anything for me right now, make sure my aim’s good.
“HAHAHAHAhahahahHAhAHAAA!” The DOG was far, far larger than the last one and getting larger. Every dead thing in the room was being sucked into its body and incorporated. It was shrieking a hundred things at once as it slunk forward, crunching as bones splintered and the shards reset into its carapace. “WE LOVE YOU X YOU love ALEXI X YOU!”
I cocked my wrist and hurled the knife at the thing as it bore down. I felt gravity hitch, and the knife flew straight and true. It sunk to the hilt in the DOG’s flesh, and it screamed: a hideous, many-throated, wailing shriek of rage. The demon fell back, tendrils whipping wildly as its substance sloughed from around the blade and evaporated in a foul-smelling cloud.
Now I could
run. I caught up to Zarya and Vassily at the back of the factory, barreling under the man’s other arm and catching her wrist, and the three of us ran while the DOG screamed on and on behind.
“How the hell do I know you?” I huffed the question out as we pelted across the floor, through a doorway and into the darkness of the factory proper.
“It’s a long story, and we don’t have much time.” She ground the words out through gritted teeth. I could see Vassily’s limp hand burning the skin of her back and arms. “I don’t know you-you. But I knew other-you.”
Other-me. Because that made sense. The DOG was shrieking, scraping itself along the floor to try to dislodge the blade still buried in its body. Between us, Vassily cried out weakly.
“His wound is infected.” Zarya broke our stride to speak. She was bathed in sweat. “The DOG... everything near it putrefies.”
“There’s no time.”
The DOG screamed pandemonium as it crossed at a limping run towards us. We hit a huge side-rolling door that was partly open. We squeezed through: I put my shoulders to it and tried to roll it across. Zarya staggered to my side, gripped it with her sinewy hands, and with strength far beyond her size, practically threw it shut.
Vassily was staring at Zarya in naked, semiconscious shock, his eyes dark and glassy. She was humanoid, but she was not human, not by the slender length of her throat, her long hands, or her eyes. They were the color of the Earth seen from space, too blue to be real. Zarya, on seeing Vassily’s response to her, lowered her face as if sighting down along a horn. Her return look was one of reproach.
“Angel?” he croaked.
“Gift Horse,” she replied. “Not the same thing.”
He had no time to reply before the DOG hit the door with a heavy slapping sound, followed by the hiss and acrid odor of dissolving metal, and the three of us had to start running again.
“You are not... the first of you.” She panted breathily as we headed away from the smoke and screams. “There’s others. Other Ruachim. My Alexi... he died.”
“Your Alexi?” I snapped back. We pressed through another metal door, slamming it closed behind us. It led into a room with coats and goggles hung on hooks and beyond that, a wide door hung with heavy plastic strips. No sound came from beyond. “The fuck is that supposed to mean?”
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