I was bait.
“Now sit down, both of you. I want you to listen for once in your lives.”
Kandi sat on a stool with her back to the pair of large feet, the tubes feverishly printing knobby ankles on top of them. Cris didn’t move. The miser patiently approached him; the poopies grew more agitated with each step. Her hood nearly touched his face.
“Sit.”
Maybe it was the stench oozing from the hood, the smell of hot acid bringing tears to his eyes. Or maybe it was something else. He backed away and parked on the edge of the stool next to Kandi. Muscles tensed over his shoulders.
“Have you met your brother?” she asked him sweetly.
Across the hall, the boy had finished the snowflake. The miser waved and he smiled, holding up a fresh cutout of seven reindeer linked together. She made a surprised sound, the kind a mother makes when her child makes his first poopy.
“Have you lost count of us?” Cris said. “Or just forgot.”
The poopies barked. The bows waggled on their collars. The miser shushed them soothingly. A long, uncomfortable pause ended with, “Sonny is a good boy.”
“For now.”
“Unlike you, he listens. He’s excited about Christmas. He will appreciate everything I do. Is that hard, to be grateful? To recognize everything I’ve done, all that I’ve sacrificed for you?”
“This isn’t all for me.”
“You’re right.” She waved one of the poopies at the boy.
“Him, either. This is all for you.”
She appeared unfazed, fingers kneading the furry rolls on the dogs’ necks. The dogs were silent. Burning coals glowed inside the hood; fumes wafted out and watered Kandi’s eyes. Cris hadn’t shown gratitude. Perhaps that was how he got the scar. Kandi didn’t want to see another one.
“Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. I’ve spent my entire life working for this, and it’s finally going to happen. You’re not going to ruin it. And neither are you.”
The miser turned the hood toward Kandi.
“Your father is a very smart man. He’s also handsome and fearless, but he has a secret. It’s a very precious thing to know secrets, a currency as old as time. We all have secrets, but the trick is to lock them up and keep them safe. You’ve never heard of me until now, have you? It’s because I protect my secrets on this little island. No one will ever know me.”
“What secret?” Kandi muttered.
“Not yet, dear.” A smile beamed inside the hood. “Your father will serve a purpose, just like you. When you have a rat, you get a cat. If the cat can’t catch it, you get a trap.”
Strange, she was talking about cats when she was holding dogs. But those things in the jungle, the ones that chased them into the trees, were agile and bullish. But they couldn’t catch the rat.
Because the rat has tunnels.
“You were supposed to stay in the resort, but you explored the island. Eventually, the naughty one would find you too tempting. He played his little peekaboo games with your phone, impressed you with his muscles and came to your rescue. And now here we are.”
She checked on the boy across the hall.
“Sonny’s a good boy, sweet and innocent. You’ll eventually ruin him if I let you.” The miser swung toward Cris. “This one’s already spoiled.”
“Ms. Heather—”
“Don’t call me that!”
The cloak billowed out. Kandi’s nostrils burned. She leaned back. Her real name was a fuse that led to something explosive.
“Ms. Heether.”
“Yes, dear?”
“Aren’t you lonely?”
“In the end, we’re all alone.”
She moved to the doorway like a ghost. The cloak briefly exposed bright red toes with candy red toenails. Footprints steamed on the floor.
“This is a historic Christmas, children. One that will never be forgotten. The world may not know me, but that doesn’t mean they won’t adore me. Unlike some, the world will appreciate my efforts. You are lucky enough to witness it, and for that you are welcome. You’ll stay up here where it’s safe and boring. Afterwards, when the fun is over, I’ll find each of you a room, and we’ll talk about what comes next.”
She held her poopies up and spoke in a childlike voice. “Do you think they should get a room? Hmm?”
The weird little poopies climbed into the hood. She made kissy sounds and continued the baby talk.
“My dad will know I’m up here.”
“He’s busy, hon. And you left your phone on your bed. Remember?”
If he didn’t go back to the room, he wouldn’t know she was gone. The miser had been playing with her all this time. Was that Sandy who helped her escape? A dreadful thought occurred to her.
Has Sandy been the miser all this time?
“Merry, merry, everyone.” She tossed an extra gown at Cris, one like the new Sonny was wearing. “You’re not in the jungle anymore.”
The gown puddled in his lap.
“Come, sweet boy!” she called.
He dropped the scissors and wrapped his arms around her. The poopies licked his head and she raved about his masterful cutting skills. He showed her each creation before gathering them in his arms. There were too many to carry, some falling on the floor. She guided him toward the exit.
“Don’t touch anything while I’m gone,” she called. “Earn my trust, children. I mean it.”
The door to the exit soundly locked behind her. Kandi distantly heard her say something to the new Sonny.
“Are you ready for a ride?”
CRIS LOOKED LIKE A hospital patient. The gown was wrinkled and loose. He stared at his naked hand. The glove was gone. Whatever kind of power that thing had, it wasn’t coming back. He was trapped.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I... I didn’t know she was using me—”
“I did.”
Lines wrinkled his forehead. He didn’t know the tower was a trap, but he knew Kandi was bait. That was why he’d been avoiding her. It wasn’t until those things came for her in the jungle that he appeared.
Things that were meant to find him.
That was why he avoided the paths. But he’d saved her and wanted to take her back to the resort, to get her off the island. She convinced him to find Sonny when the miser left the tower. The miser was only pretending. His senses of knowing where people were on the island—her dad, the miser—had been tricked. And he was here.
They both were.
The box with the feet was still whirring. Kandi didn’t turn around; she wasn’t sure if she could stand. She’d seen boxes like that before. They were used to print human organs.
What a mess, she thought.
Her legs were numb, her stomach cold. Even so, she should have been more frightened. She was trapped in this room, and her dad didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know where he was, either, or what he was doing. Maybe if she was alone, she’d be terrified.
Cris was sort of a hero.
Just being in the room with him made her feel safe. He’d escaped the miser once before, had managed to steal that glove and live on his own. He could do it again. She knew it was delusional, but the thought kept her from freaking out.
As long as he doesn’t break.
He wasn’t talking, just staring at his hands as if they’d become useless. She felt responsible, but he wasn’t blaming her. Eventually, the miser would have caught him. They sat quietly as the box with the feet whirred behind her.
He got up, staring into the room where the new Sonny had been sitting. Paper clippings littered the table. The scissors were on the floor. He leaned in the doorway, head bowed and heavy. Then muttered just loud enough to hear above the printer, “I was born here.”
She wasn’t sure she heard him right, or what that meant. He patted his chest.
“I just woke up on that table,” he said, “just like all the others.”
He didn’t elaborate, lost in memories. She didn’t know what that meant and wanted to give him s
pace to sort it out. He was shaking his head, smiling at his own thoughts.
“Cris?” she finally said. “I don’t understand.”
He pointed across the lab without looking. Kandi had been too transfixed to notice her surroundings. Lost in her own thoughts, she’d failed to recognize the equipment and benches and materials.
And the box.
It was just like the one with the feet. It was the size of a shower. Cables hung freely from the top and dangled like noodles. There were vials of gray liquid on the bench next to it, the stuff her dad used to research, the basic building blocks for printing organs.
Synthetic stem cells.
Before differentiation, they were metallic gray in color and had a distinctive smell, a sort of warm clayey odor. The same smell she’d noticed when they climbed the steps. The same smell that would sometimes cling to her dad when he came home from work. But once the synthetic cells differentiated into blood, flesh or muscle, they were no longer gray. They turned red or pink or whatever color they were imitating.
Unless they dissociated from the host.
The time Cris had snuck her into the tunnels, he had cut his thumb. When he grabbed her arm, he left bloodstains on her arm—bloodstains that turned gray.
The same gray as those vials.
“You can’t be...”
“When that box behind you is finished,” he said. “a naked elf will walk out. He’ll have a long red beard. He’ll know how to sing and he’ll do what she wants. That’s who we are.”
Kandi was thankful to be sitting. Her legs were icy.
“The helpers are blank. She tells them what to do and they sing their songs. But Sonny and me and all the others... she gives us memories. We wake up her son and we live on an island and we were never sick before this and we love Christmas. That’s what this is all about, Kandi. I’d already been replaced before you got here. And now the other Sonny has too.”
“You’re not your memories.” She shook her head. “That’s not who you are.”
That was something her dad used to say when she was troubled, an old meditation rule about thoughts—what she believed was not who she was.
And neither were memories.
“Tell the miser that,” Cris said. “We’re her son, each one of us. Every day is Christmas and we play family until we get sick. Then she makes another one and starts all over.”
“Why are you still alive?”
“I escaped.” He shrugged. “There were others before me that did, too. They were the ones that stole her technology to carve the tunnels and leave the notes. They left the glove behind that opens doors and controls the eyes. She catches us and it happens again. Sonny would’ve done the same eventually.”
“That’s why he’s trapped in the room.”
“There are a lot of reasons for that.”
He reached over his shoulder where the scar was on his back. Sonny was kept in a room to keep him from escaping. The miser was trying anything to keep him alive. And maybe that was why Sonny was so immature. He was a child trapped in a teenager’s body.
She was also protecting him from herself.
Kandi wobbled slightly when she stood. She took his hand. Scars were raised on the knuckles. Fresh wounds had scabbed over. He was flesh and blood, as real as a person could be. Could he be wrong about this, made to believe something so bizarre to mistake his own realness?
“I don’t believe it,” she whispered.
Kandi didn’t want this to be true. Did this make him less of a person if it was? Was she strange for being attracted to something that was printed in a box, something that appealed to her primitive instincts? Is he still real?
“She’s not a bad person,” Cris said. “She’s just doing bad things. She wants everything to go back to the way it was before everything changed. Before her son got sick. She makes herself forget all of it so she can make it new again because the past is too painful. She can’t handle losing her son or the accident that turned her into what she is now. Because that’s not her.”
“The heat miser,” she said. “That’s not her.”
He nodded absently. She leaned on him.
“I’m so sorry,” Kandi said.
He took her hand. They walked to the end of the hall where the window looked across the island. The warehouse was glittering with a fresh round of Christmas cheer. They were safe in the lab, but the miser had said something that lingered heavy and hot. And her dad was going to be part of it.
A Christmas we’ll never forget.
CLAUS
31
Claus ducked beneath scaffolding.
Overhead, a conveyor belt transferred gloppy material into a large box. Occasionally, it would pop like a nutcracker and a glob of material would drip down.
A gray, metallic puddle formed in the snow.
He dipped his finger in it. The material had a grainy-slimy feel. And it was warm.
A cloud of gnats descended on the puddle. Moments later, the clicking of tiny legs scurried overhead; a column of spidery things crawled along the conveyor. They found the leak and began patching it. This was a strange land.
But Claus had quickly grown accustomed to it.
The gnats were not gnats but microscopic spies. The gray goo that burped from the mountain was the foundation of stuff—microscopic building blocks that could become anything. The human race was using them as synthetic stem cells, but the elven had been using them to make all forms of matter for centuries. These were elven secrets, but secrets no more.
Had she been watching us all this time?
A line of helpers skated past him. Hands laced on their bellies, they leaned back and glided on large feet. These helpers, however, were not the red-bearded helpers he had seen when he first arrived in the warehouse. These helpers had long gray beards that nearly touched the ground, with puffs of white hair growing from their ears. They were followed by a leaner set of helpers with pointy ears and shorter feet and clean-shaven faces. Their cheeks were cherub and glowing as they sang.
Things have changed.
This stuff from the mountain made these little fellows. She was using the gritty gray slime to make them. Humanity had been manufacturing functioning organs for years but had not crossed the critical line of building a person.
She’s creating life.
The spiders had patched the leak and were returning to the mountain. A cluster of black-bearded helpers slid beneath the conveyor with one of their brethren on their shoulders. It was a redbeard. By the looks of his pale cheeks, he had succumbed to the wilt, as Claus had come to think of it.
They just ran out of energy.
He had seen them throw redbeards inside the mountain for the past week. A door would open and belch sulfur before slamming shut. This one, though, was laid against the giant gift.
They placed him next to another redbeard.
In the weeks since he’d come to the warehouse, the mountain never stopped feeding the giant gift box. The walls were thick and heavy; they were metal-cold and rang when he kicked them. Like a bottomless pit, they never buckled and never filled.
A white cloud hissed from the mountain.
Claus was prepared to fetch the wilted redbeard before it was thrown inside. Instead, Naren crawled out. On hands and knees, he emerged from the open doorway and stood up. Steam rose from his sleeves and snowflakes stuck to his hair.
He’d been in and out of the warehouse for weeks, observing the redbeards, sometimes without sleeping. It was about that time the new helpers began popping out—the skinny ones and short ones, the clean-shaven and old, the blackbeards and graybeards, the pointy, the narrow, the gangly and hooked. He was somehow responsible for these variations.
Now he went to the fallen redbeards.
A variety of helpers watched him pull instruments from a bag—shiny discs and elastic tubes and boxes that lit up. He placed them on one of the redbeards’ foreheads and studied his watch. After a time, he moved it to his neck.
Cla
us approached cautiously.
Naren had done well to avoid Claus, seeing him from a distance and moving away. He was focused and undisturbed; he didn’t need a jolly fat man from childhood stories getting in the way.
Perhaps he didn’t notice Claus this time as he looked over his shoulder. The redbeard’s cheeks were already rosy.
Naren retrieved a syringe from his bag and injected something into an IV bag. He studied his watch. A few minutes later, the redbeard’s eyes fluttered open. He looked left and right then hopped onto wide, hairy feet. The helpers slapped their bellies and cheered. Together, they sped around the mountain like elders welcoming a newborn into the colony.
Naren started on the next one.
“I know why you’re doing this,” Claus said.
Naren didn’t look up, only repeated the same sequence with the discs and the straps and looking at the watch. Because Santa Claus didn’t exist. If he did, he couldn’t do what he was doing because nothing would make sense. And he needed the world to make sense.
He needed to focus.
“You’ve made sacrifices,” Claus said, “the world doesn’t know about.”
Claus knew about selfless service. He knew about living in obscurity, the joy of living a life that included the good and bad. No credit or blame. The life Claus had chosen was not always glamorous or appreciated. In fact, it rarely was.
Naren knew that life, too.
“I just want you to think about,” Claus said, “what you’re doing.”
The spies mingled with drifting snowflakes. The miser would hear what he was saying. Claus had an idea of what she wanted from him, but he wasn’t certain what she wanted from Naren. Or what he was doing.
We need to stop her was what he was trying to tell him without her hearing.
“There you are!”
Right on cue, the miser came around the mountain with a horde of helpers in her wake and the hateful little mutts under one arm. Her poopies wore bows like gift wrapping and growled whenever she stepped within ten feet of someone other than a helper. She was usually alone. This time she brought a guest.
A boy.
Rise of the Miser: Claus, #5 Page 21