How long it takes for her to raise and press her fists against her ears, she has no way of knowing. The wailing is an ocean of tortured screaming now, flowing over and through her, unrelenting and inescapable. Snatches of ancient, malformed words and syllables occasionally surface from out of the aural maelstrom, and her entire body jolts with recognition at each one. This is a song. She feels her jaws and cheeks at the sides of her palms, motionless. Why is she not screaming and singing with them? Why is she not in pain? Why is she aware?
She wills herself upward, in cautious, incremental movements. She must know where she is. Time. There is something called time, and this movement, this breaking from the pack returns it to her fully, as though she is surfacing from another dimension. Faces split in half, jaws hang from dripping heads, eyeless sockets filled with wriggling veins and snapping jaws, heads that are not heads at all but bulbous tumors and contusions and masses of splintered pulp and bone. Squirting tentacles, broken wings and hooves, piston limbs and keyboard smiles. She stares wildly about her, waiting for someone to turn to her, to drag her back down. They stream on, oblivious even as her toes brush the edges of their gaping moist flesh. They stream on, and she hangs above them now, silent, astonished, still.
They are at the jagged edges of a vast cliff that drops off sharply into a smoking abyss. She and others like her, upright and sailing one after the other like a mindless swarm, thin bodies hanging and drifting in an endless ouroboros of ghouls and ghosts. Thousands. Millions. The swarm is not one layer of beings, but many—too many for her to see their end. The cliff is circular, she can see the curve from either side of her, but it is so wide she cannot see across to the other side. Once again, she floods her body with her will, and she drifts across the great river of spectral pain, until she reaches the edge, daring to go no farther. The sky is brighter now, with huge shafts of light occasionally breaking through from above, illuminating the face of the cliffs. Water and what looks like blood and oil streams from thin orifices, plummeting down the glistening sides—remnants of a once-unstoppable river, she recalls. But beyond the cliffs, so far down she can barely believe what she sees—movement in the flashes of increasing light. Small movements, small buildings, small plumes of green fire, small gyres of cogs. No, not small—merely so far below her that what she now realizes is a wondrously complex and sprawling mechanism of industry and machinery appears spread out below her feet like nothing more than a miniature diorama. And crisscrossing all of this are two fat beams of brilliant emerald fire. The singing and wailing has diminished with the darkness, and she hears and feels the vibrations of the power lines running up through her body, the steady cyclopean pounding of the city, of its heart. This is what sings to her now, and she wants to join.
Her fists are still at her ears, and she feels—yes, this is pain. No, wait, this is only discomfort. There was a true, life-rending pain before the blackness, she remembers, a bone-splintering, flesh-pulverizing sundering that cracked her open and extruded her smashed remains into this place, but this is merely prickly bites all along her fingers and against her palms, mundane in comparison to the cacophony of the world around her. She lowers her hands before her and uncurls her stiff fingers. Coiled inside each palm are several strands of pale-green leather, studded with white diamonds. They are small and delicate and even in the low morning light of this still sunless place, she can see how beautiful and perfect they are, how in the muted dawn they shine and gleam like polished teeth in rows of wide smiling mouths.
I am Alexandria Jessamine.
Memories silently explode throughout her, like brilliant fireworks lighting up a barren sky. Vecula. Felix. Diogenes. Becher. And somewhere in the labyrinthine ruins of all of it, her beloved apartment, and her beloved.
The sun is up now, full and hard and hot like it used to be, except she sees it now not just as a sun but a star in a whorl of stars, she sees all the stars before and behind it in this great arm of their galaxy. She senses the cosmic void behind and around it, but it is not a void at all, it is alive with incomprehensible, terrible, joyous purpose; and her newly forged body is a part of this purpose.
Alex laughs and cries all at once, and the black-chested eagles soaring past serenade her in response. She is dead, and filled with more life than she thought possible. Becher’s newly created river of the dead has become a mere shadow to her now, a flickering presence whose painful dirge registers in her ears as a faint but clear warning to those beyond the district’s transformed borders: do not pass. And a siren song for the being below, an interdimensional welcoming, a sweet lullaby. It is her siren song, too, her welcome back to a place she never belonged and can seemingly never escape.
Alex wills the strands of diamond and flesh around her wrists—they twist and nestle against her slender wrists, and she raises them in the clear air, admiring how they wink and shine, how the thin strands of electricity that arc off her newly silver fingertips reflect in their faceted faces. Beyond the ouroboros, Obsidia gleams with them: she sees the city as it really exists: radiant, triumphant, a stupendous conglomeration of human-made buildings and immense non-human structures that constantly shift and morph as they flicker from the light of this universe to the next and back again. This is the new city, taking shape all across the ravaged and raped continent, still wet and glistening with the cold abyssal and hadal waters of the Southern Ocean. Alex stares at the horizon, mesmerized. How would it be, to spend eternity floating through it, exploring and discovering its every abhorrent and miraculous secret? How would it be, to add to that terror and wonder with lovely little acts of beauty and terror all her own?
But Alex is a daughter of earth, not Obsidia. The city is eternal; the things she loves and longs for are not. Obsidia can wait. Below her feet, wondrous things are happening, as well as so many things she wanted to do before, in her old life, when she never had the power, time, or nerve.
“There you are.” Alex reaches out toward the sky, fingers spread wide. It’s blue, a true bright blue, like meadow flowers in the mountains, the blue of swordfish and jaguar eyes and turquoise-capped teeth of the gill-throated women of the Antarctic territories. The blue of the hearts of cenotes and glaciers. The blue of her vision of the moment she dies…
She stares at her fingers. The dark veins of thaumaturgical fire are mere sparks now, and she feels the full weight of her body, the full weight of gravity. “No,” she whispers. Of course. She didn’t die. Again. She just went through those stupid fucking beams, and ended up here, with all of the truly dead. The magic was never hers—there was no transformation, only vestiges of the power beams coating her corporeal form, keeping her floating and alive. And now it’s bled off with the night, and the cliffs are rising up all around her, faster and higher.
“Oh fuck me no—” And she’s falling, spinning around and around while the black-breasted eagles shriek and dive, and she flips around in the air and sees that sky, sees that bright clear blue she’s never seen before in her life and will never see again, she’s flying away from it, down and into the animate emerald abyss of Becher, screaming, screaming, screaming…
Tuesday, August 26
12:27 pm
Alex wakes up out of death, lets out a single gasp, and freezes. There is so much pain flooding her body that she doesn’t dare move or breathe. Not that she thinks she can. She can only stare up at the iron and glass ceiling, at the jagged hole directly overhead, and the dusty grey of the far-off sky.
I’m still alive.
“Welcome back.”
The pale image of a man crouches over her, his body flickering in and out like a scratchy strip of movie film. He looks familiar, with long black hair and abyssal-dark eyes. Standing behind him, also peering down at her, are several other men and women, all dressed in similar drab suits, holding small black notebooks and clipboards. Every one of them is scribbling furiously away, except for one older man who is taking photos of her with a very large flash camera. “Diogenes, remember? From M37?” His voice
sounds as scratchy and tinny as his visage. “We tracked you all the way to this roof. The fall, that is—we tracked your fall. It was spectacular. When you’re feeling a bit better, several of the Ministry’s personnel would like to speak with you. About the fall, and other certain aspects of your life. I can be there, if you like. Anyway, when you’re ready.” He grows silent.
She has to work at it for a minute to get her tongue and jaw gently into position. It feels like all her teeth are still there, but everything feels so raw and new. How could she have survived that fall? Unless, like her beloved knife, she can never die, only break and mend again and again. “Did I die? Didn’t we all die?”
“We—” Diogenes turns and looks back at his companions for a quick second. “We can’t quite say what happened to you. I mean, the rest of us, everyone else who was in Becher at the time—I wouldn’t quite call it ‘dead’ in the traditional sense. We’ve merely transitioned into something a bit more useful for this part of the process. As you can see, I seem to still be adjusting, I can’t quite get it right…” He looks down at his flickering hands, clearly annoyed.
“Process?”
“Well, now we have to spend the next several centuries making sure Becher District does its job—we have to remain here and keep the engines and spurs working as we move the cargo attached beneath us up the sides of the birthing wall to the surface. This is Epoch II.”
Alex says nothing. The building begins to rock back and forth in hard thrusts, and several panes of glass crash from the skylights down onto the floor. The men and women collectively cringe and duck.
“Don’t worry,” one of the observers pipes up, “this happens all the time now. Every five minutes or so, actually. It’ll get smoother once we work the kinks out. After a while, you won’t even notice it.”
“Every five minutes,” Alex murmurs. “For centuries.”
“Yes,” Diogenes says, his voice lowering. “We still have centuries.”
“We need to move her,” one of the women says, and Diogenes nods. And then they disappear from Alex’s view. She feels a thin sheet snapping over her naked body, then hands lifting her up. A low howl slides out of her mouth as new waves of pain wash over her. “Sorry,” a voice says. The skylights drift from view, replaced by steel girders and a cracked concrete ceiling covered in heavy pulleys and chains. A warehouse.
“Where am I?”
A young man with a very earnest face pops into view. “When you fell, you were pretty close to the edge—you were lucky you didn’t slip down between the walls and the district, there’s a massive gap and God knows where you would have ended up. Anyway, you’re in one of the old warehouse districts that used to line the river. Southwest.” Alex feels her body lower back onto the floor. If only she could roll her eyes. Didn’t they even bother to bring a stretcher? Fucking government workers, everything always on the cheap. Diogenes’ face appears before her again.
“Okay, so, we’re going to let you rest here for a while. There’s a change of clothes over on the table—I’m afraid you lost your clothes in the fire.”
“My belo—my knife.”
“I’m sorry. We found the strap, it’s with the clothes, but—I looked everywhere, Alex. It’s gone.”
Alex squeezes her eyes shut. If she could clench her jaw any tighter, her entire skull would break.
“Anyway. The freight elevator is just a few feet away when you’re ready to leave. We switched the electricity back on, so everything’s running. Here’s my card, and cab fare home—” she feels him slip a tiny envelope into her hand and carefully curl her fingers over it “—and when you’re rested and ready to start work, give me a call.” The men and women begin closing their notebooks and shoving them into satchels and briefcases.
“Work.”
“Yes, Alex.” Diogenes lowers his gaze slightly, looking away. He’s warning her. “Everyone in Becher District works for the Ministry of Obstetrics, now, and so do you.”
“What if I don’t want to work for you.”
One of the men laughs.
“So you’re just going to leave me on the floor, naked and alone.”
“We’re not babysitters, we have real work to do,” one of the younger women snaps.
“Don’t worry.” The photographer leans over her and takes a final shot, the flash blinding her briefly. “You’re never alone in Becher anymore. We’ll make sure no one comes near the building. But if we need more observations in the field or need to go over your healing process in greater detail, we know what to do. Contact you, that is.”
They’re going to kill me, again and again, and again…
“You’ll be fine,” Diogenes says as he gently squeezes her arm. He leans farther in, and she waits as he opens his mouth to speak. He stares into her eyes—what does he want?
I have faith in you. He mouths the words silently, but her body jolts as hard as if he had screamed them. She feels a single finger press firmly against her upper thigh, right where her gently thrumming knife used to be strapped. And then, with the rest of them, he is gone.
Alex lies on the concrete floor, drifting in and out of sleep. Every five minutes, like clockwork, a little earthquake shakes the building, but after the first twenty or thirty, she drifts right through them. Outside the warehouse, she hears the faint ebb and flow of heavy traffic, as if everything was normal in Becher, as if nothing strange had ever happened here, beyond the normal parameters of strangeness. Pigeons coo from the edges of the skylight, then crack their wings and disappear as hawks dive-bomb them. The shadows shrink, move, lengthen. At some point, Alex makes the decision to sit up. By the time she’s in an upright position, back against the wall and legs sprawled out before her, it’s night out, but not as she’s ever seen it before. A deep unnatural green glow spills down from the skylight. The high walls, she realizes, are blocking out the ambient light of Obsidia. She’ll never again see full night, or full day. It’s just Becher down here, just the emerald and aubergine glow of those two massive beams of thaumaturgical power that cross the city from the middle of the spurs, that now creep up the walls, dragging them all behind.
When the weak light of morning appears through the filthy glass panes, Alex finally forces herself to her feet. Her movements are stiff and jerky, and it feels like someone beat the holy fuck out of her. She ignores the tears streaming down her cheeks as she takes her first steps, one hand flat against the rough wall, her silver nails leaving long streaks in the rotting concrete. Another day and night might help, but she’s hungry and filthy, and along with the money and business card, Diogenes slipped the key to her apartment into the envelope. It’s obviously a copy, which means that the Ministry must have the keys to everything in Becher now, but she doesn’t care. It spurs her into action, into slipping the terrible Ministry-issued dress over her head and strapping the worn reminder of her greatest loss in life against her left thigh, into pulling the massive gates to the freight elevator shut even though it hurts so much she starts to laugh, and even though it takes her almost an hour to figure out how to shift the heavy levers that send it down and level enough with the ground floor so she can actually step out without needing a ladder. The main floor is nothing more than another industrial cathedral of colossal pillars of brick and stone, with a modest row of offices lining one side, and a series of loading docks and doors facing opposite. She searches through several of the offices before finding a working phone and crumbling stationery with the name and address of the warehouse.
After she convinces the operator to connect her to a local taxi service, Alex washes up in the dusty locker room. The lights are fat bars of ordinary florescence, and they flicker and buzz like tired yellow jackets when she turns them on. She stands before the cracked sink, water dripping down her face and the face in the mottled mirror. It is the face of a woman who has not lived fifty years, or forty, or even thirty. A new network of jagged black scars and contusions cover her dark skin and all the older shimmering lines; but they’ll disappea
r eventually, and the woman who remains behind will be a woman who has been rebuilt a good quarter-century younger, with brighter teeth, with a touch of mercury flashing at the brown center of her eyes.
“I remember you,” Alex says to the face still hiding behind the bruised and swollen trauma. “Hello again.” Her fingertips brush the smooth hollow at the throat of her neck. Of course the faked thauma-port is gone. It wasn’t a part of her, it was a part of Obsidia, medical and alien trickery rejected in her reshaping. It feels good to see the beating of her heart within that smooth, unobstructed valley of flesh. As her fingers rest in the hollow, Alex notes flashes of white circling her still-mending wrists, little sparks of prismatic light just under the skin. Diamonds, beautiful and unbreakable.
Things are going to be different this time.
Alex makes her way to the main entrance, pushes the large metal door open, and steps outside to a wide cobblestone street lined with identical brick warehouse fronts. The air is dry and there’s no horrifying smell to it, which is odd, and the street is quiet, almost sepulcher in feel. The river, she realizes. That constant wet, putrid smell, it’s gone. The glare from above is terrible, as always, but already she notes that the great shadow of the new high wall is making a rapid approach from the east—in less than ten minutes, she’ll stand in complete shade. Days will be much shorter here, for centuries. And the nights will be longer, but never quite dark enough for those black-clad witches and mages that dart and flow in their mysterious ways through her neighborhood streets. That will change things, make everything a little more interesting and dangerous.
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