by Adam Thielen
“You make it sound so romantic.”
“The stronger vampires enjoy it the most,” he claimed. “Give it a try.”
“I don’t want to.”
“This ain’t no damn after school special, drink it!” he said in a strange voice.
“After school, what?” Cho puzzled, then closed her eyes. “Don’t fucking meme me right now.”
“Seriously,” he said. “Be somebody.” He held the bag to her face with a thick plastic tube extended, like a vampiric Capri Sun.
“Fine,” she said, then warily placed her lips around the tip. The tube turned red and Tsenka squinted, bracing herself. Sure enough, it tasted just like blood, but as it rested on her tongue it began to take on a strange quality.
A feeling of euphoria surged through her body. It tingled with delight, causing her to shudder. She sucked at the straw and the bag collapsed into a flat rectangle.
“It’s amazing, Matthias,” she said, rolling onto her back. “I can feel it inside me. I feel so much better now.”
“Another bag?” he offered.
“Yes!” she answered, grabbing the pouch and pulling it to her mouth. She sucked it down in mere seconds, then closed her eyes and smiled.
Matthias caught himself smiling back, her exuberance pulling him along for the ride. But Tsenka’s smile faded and her hands lowered to her stomach.
“Something’s wrong,” she said. “Ungh,” she moaned.
“What’s wrong?” asked Matthias. “Here, roll over and try to throw it up.” His hand touched her arm and she batted it away with a whimper.
“Skin is burning,” she grunted, rolling to her side into a fetal position. And indeed her skin seemed to take on a tint of pink. As she rolled, Cho’s back left behind a light red imprint on the gray sheets.
“I know,” she murmured. “I know. I know.” The pink on her skin turned darker, glistening from the dim light of a nearby lamp.
Matthias’s face turned to stunned horror. “Your skin, Jesus Christ. It’s bleeding… everywhere!” He ran to Tsenka’s bag and grabbed a bottle of her rejection suppressants and dumped the pills onto the table. He crushed them with his palm and scooped up the resulting powder.
“I’m there,” continued Tsenka. “I’m there, where he left me. I’m burning.” Her eyes glazed over and her body began to shiver.
Matthias turned Tsenka’s face to the ceiling and funneled the powder into her mouth. He clapped his hand over her lips, hoping the drugs would absorb quickly. He pulled his com out and called the cybernetics specialist. As it rang, he found himself struggling to come up with a way to explain the situation.
“Tsenka Cho’s skin is diffusing blood and she’s in pain!” he shouted as soon as the call connected.
“What?” said the voice on the other line. It belonged to the cybernetics specialist and engineer named Amir Horowitz. “Matthias? What else—forget it, take her to the emergency room at Saint Luke’s aug center. I will meet you there. Do not waste time!” he said, disconnecting.
Matthias scooped her up, her naked skin now quite slick with blood. She didn’t protest this time but simply asked where they were going. He sat her in the car and leaned the seat back. Matthias pressed the emergency button on the car, allowing it to break traffic laws when its pathing algorithms determined that doing so would result in a net reduction in travel time.
Tsenka seemed to wake from her nightmare and began running her fingertips over her skin. “What the hell happened to me?” she asked.
“Shit, are you alright now?” asked Matthias.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I feel weird. Numb. Is this my blood?”
“Yes. I gave you two blood packs and then you started to seize or something.”
“I remember drinking. Then pain. Now I’m here. Why are we going so slow?”
“I should have never agreed,” he said.
Tsenka grunted, shifting in the small bucket seat. “I’m fine. Not sure about your car, though.”
They arrived several minutes before the doctor and opted not to clean off her skin, in case it would help with some sort of prognosis. When the doctor arrived and entered their diagnostics room, he flinched.
“You really meant she was bleeding through her skin,” he said.
“I’m fine,” said Tsenka, appearing actually better than she had been since the turning process began, minus the coat of blood.
“Clearly,” said the doc.
“The thing is,” started Matthias, turning to the doctor, “she’s at the end of a nocturnal transformation.”
Amir jerked his head at Matthias, then back to Tsenka. He leaned in and looked at her remaining natural eye. He stepped back and stared deep into Matthias’s orbital sockets. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” he yelled.
“It’s complicated,” said Matthias.
“It’s what I—” said Tsenka, trying to get a word in.
“No, it’s not bloody complicated!” Amir interrupted. “Nocturnals and modifications do not mix. Is this why she has this skin?” he asked. “Was that all part of the plan?”
“Uh, what?” said Matthias. “Never mind that, can you help her?”
“At this point, I don’t know,” replied the doc. “You’ve doomed her to a life of pain and constant vigilance, if she lives.”
“I feel pretty good, actually,” said Tsenka, pulling her shoulders back to stretch.
“I told her the risks,” said Matthias. “There’s no going back. Now please...”
Amir shook his head and pulled a torso-molded machine down, extending its ceiling-mount arms, and pressed it against Tsenka’s chest. He selected a few options on the touch screen embedded on his side of the device, then turned to Matthias.
“Show me the bite,” he ordered.
Matthias peeled off the rubber patch, revealing a lighter-colored circular mark where a thinner layer of synthetic skin now resided. “Had to use a tool,” he mumbled.
“At least her nanos are working, or at least they were,” assessed Amir. “What was she doing before this episode?”
“I was drinking blood, tasty human blood,” Cho said, grinning suggestively at the doctor. His eyebrows raised for a moment, then he looked down at the analysis and implant reporting system as numbers and warning messages began to flood the screen. Amir’s fingers expertly pecked at key words and began to filter them out. He began to nod as he read.
“Okay,” he said with a sigh. “The good news is that whatever happened, Tsenka’s vitals are stable. Her electrolytes are fine. Her blood pressure is within acceptable levels. There doesn’t appear to be internal bleeding, though that sort of thing can be hard for this machine to detect.”
“Okay,” said Matthias, bracing himself for the bad.
“The bad news is that the episode is directly related to the blood she drank,” said Amir. “It kicked her immune system into high gear and started attacking her skin. But that’s not why she bled,” he revealed. “Her blood pressure became dangerously high, so the suit opened its pores to relieve pressure. It’s not supposed to do that except as a last resort.”
Tsenka was quiet. Somehow, none of this fazed her, but Matthias was not so calm. “She’s going to need blood,” he said. “Even if not blood, whatever keeps her alive is going to fuel her vampiric traits.”
“Right,” said Amir. “Which is why this isn’t done. Who the hell even authorized this?”
“I’d rather not say,” said Matthias.
“Well, I am going to be looking into it and lodging a complaint with your council,” said Amir.
“Great, now would you like to help her?” asked Matthias.
“She’ll be fine,” said Amir.
“See?” chimed in Tsenka.
“I’m increasing the tolerances of the skin,” explained the doctor. “And I will inject a new set of nanos that can help process blood that comes in so her system doesn’t overload. Since her condition is a bit different now, I can increase the immunosuppressant
s to counter the rejection to some degree. The current nanos have been reprogrammed to deliver more of her current script when they sense a rise in blood pressure.”
“And she’ll be okay?”
“I believe so,” Amir replied. “But this is just the beginning. There’s no telling what sort of issues you’ve set her up for down the road.” He turned to Tsenka. “You have to limit your blood intake. Too much and basically blood vessels will start to tear, and the membranes in some of your more sensitive cyber may break as well. You’ll be choosing hunger and weakness, or pain and possible death.”
Cho nodded. “Thanks, doc. Don’t be mad at Matthias, he didn’t have a choice.”
“You tell yourself that if you like, but that’s not how it works,” he argued. “Did you think this would extend your life? Because it is just as likely to do the opposite.”
“Not exactly,” she said.
“Well, I don’t want to argue about it further. Good luck, and let the implant software send reports when it wants to so I can review them.”
“Thank you, Amir,” said Matthias, bowing slightly.
The doctor pushed the scanner back up to the ceiling and covered Cho with a hospital gown. “Go home and get some rest,” he directed, and they obeyed.
* * *
“Are you going to get in trouble because of me?” asked Tsenka. She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Matthias unbuckled his belt and kicked off his shoes.
“No, I’m going to get in trouble because of me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t believe that’s true,” he shot back. “But you shouldn’t be. Fuck their regulations.”
“I don’t want to make your life harder,” she said. “I’m just so self-centered now.”
“You planned all this.”
“Yes,” she admitted after a pause. “I don’t know exactly when, and it was more of a contingency really.”
“What did he mean about your skin?” asked Matthias, sitting on the edge of the bed opposite Cho. He twisted his back and neck to look at her.
“You sure you want to know now?”
“Yes,” he said. “I have this uneasy feeling maybe you can settle.”
Tsenka closed her eyes and concentrated. Even in the dim light, he could see her skin shift darker with artificial pigmentation. A thin black plate slid out from a slit hidden on the left side of Tsenka’s brow, covering her natural eye.
Matthias’s uneasiness turned into a wave of nausea. “Gods, I should have known,” he uttered before standing and walking out of the room. Tsenka’s eye shield retracted and her skin lightened. She closed her eyes and exhaled.
With nowhere else to go, Matthias eventually returned to the room. “As much as I think lies lead to ruin, you’ve got to at least mask this from the council. The vampire pact with the NR is interpreted as preventing advancements like this.”
“I know,” she admitted. “Maybe Kate can edit the medical records.”
“No,” said Matthias. “You’d think that’s a good idea, but if someone, anyone, notices then the sniffing will never end until everything is out in the open. Just be ready to convince them that your intent wasn’t to break the law but just get as many features as you could. They may buy that.”
“I will make sure they know it was all my idea,” she said. “And that I hid it from you before you turned me. I don’t need it forever,” she said. “Just long enough.”
Matthias lay flat on the bed next to Tsenka. “You want your revenge.”
“More than anything,” she said.
“Do you even know who you are going after?”
“Kate messaged me, said she has a likely match. She wants to talk about it in person, though.”
“You aren’t ready,” said Matthias. And before she could protest, “But you will be. If you really want your revenge, then you can’t just go out there and expect the dominoes to fall in a neat little line. You need a plan. You need a backup plan. You need contacts, tools, weapons. You need training.”
“I’ve been training, though,” said Cho.
Matthias barked a single short laugh. “No,” he said. “You want to make use of your new powers, you will need new training. We did what we could for your weak human flesh. In two nights, we start over.”
Tsenka had no response. She didn’t know what he had in store, and at that time did not want to know. She closed her eyes and let the darkness take her.
* * *
Matthias meant what he said. He let Tsenka rest for another night and meet with Kate to discuss her prey. Then he took her shopping and they loaded the cart with fitness supplements and protein powders. The car took them to a blood bank, where he traded in his empty blood packs for new ones.
Then they went to a small corrugated storage building, abandoned for decades, just a kilometer from Matthias’s house. It was there that he explained aspects of vampire physiology that most nightstalkers neglected. Namely, the ability to quickly build strength and speed, and quickly lose it through atrophy as well.
“To build strength you will need a ridiculous amount of this junk at first,” he said, gesturing at the bags of powder with abs decorating them. “You will need energy, and you will need to drink blood. You will be in pain. You will bleed. You will hate me. You will not leave until you can beat me.”
Tsenka Cho accepted his challenge. But while she followed his advice, her strength did not increase as quickly as his did. Night after night, he beat her down until he himself could not stomach it. But then a change began to occur. Her speed began to increase beyond that of Matthias. Her strikes couldn’t throw him back like his could to her, but she started finding it easier to get out of the way and land on him.
On the thirteenth night of abuse, she found a stack of cardboard boxes set up in the middle of the concrete-floored warehouse.
“What is this?” she asked.
Matthias attached his com to a tripod and pointed it at the boxes, using them as a makeshift screen. “You are getting faster,” he said. “It’s your strength, and I admire it, but you have to try harder.”
Tsenka had learned not to argue. She was already a magnitude more deadly than she had been a week earlier, but she cocked her head in curiosity. Matthias projected a scene onto the boxes that looked somewhat familiar.
“At the time of this recording, streams were broadcast at one hundred and twenty frames per second,” he explained. “But the drone that recorded this did it at two hundred and forty.”
Cho realized she was watching the original source video of Matthias Trent’s battle against Scarlet Makida on the deck of the Haven airship. Her jaw dropped, but she patiently waited to see where this was going.
“Makida was also fast,” he said. “I don’t know if she really tried, or if she was just so ancient that it came naturally to her. Here is where we do our best work, right before I try to aim a shot into the eye slit of her helmet.”
The video played forward at fifteen frames a second slow motion. Cho watched while Makida’s arms and legs became a blur, striking Matthias several times with a jab, a straight, and a forward kick. Matthias rewound back to the jab and slowed it down even further.
“Count the frames from extension and back,” he said. Then, “Jab, thirty-one frames. Straight, forty-three frames. Somewhat sloppy kick, seventy-eight frames.”
Tsenka did some napkin math. “Almost eight jabs in a single second,” she awed.
“A lot goes into a strike,” said Matthias. “I doubt she could maintain the necessary balance to keep that up when her fist would meet resistance, but it still gives you a good idea of where the bar is.”
“Can we watch all of it?” asked Tsenka, suddenly transformed back into an impressionable youth.
“No,” said Matthias. “Instead, let’s take a look at some footage from our sparring last night.”
“Oh no,” she said, as Matthias switched videos and fast-forwarded to where Tsenka had gotten the better of their exchanges.
> “Count it out,” he said, playing it at thirty frames per second. “You this time.”
Tsenka obeyed. Her right optics could easily keep track of frames at that speed. “Left hook, seventy-six frames. Knee, ninety-six frames. Kick, hundred and two frames. Jab, forty-seven frames. Jab, forty-eight frames. Shit.”
“Now you see,” he said. “Makida had the benefit of age, but you have the benefit of fighting knowledge and some augmentations. This should be your goal.”
“I don’t know how I’ll get any faster,” she said.
“I want you to study some videos,” said Matthias. “A strike is a full body action, always. I think with some better technique and extra hours on the bags, you’ll get there. I’ll get it set up.”
Tsenka studied the techniques, used her perfect storage to memorize them, then practiced using Matthias’s com to measure her speed. Over and over she threw the same strike until she broke her old speed. Then she used perfect recall to replicate it over and over, her muscles learning it. Cho would turn off the recall function and then try again to move faster on her own. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it did not, but she progressed, slowly but surely.
A week passed and their number one focus was nights at the warehouse, but outside of those hours, Tsenka and Matthias started watching shows together, eating out together, and as they lay together in the mornings, Tsenka began holding his hand as she fell asleep.
However, her progress in speed-striking had plateaued well short of that which Makida had exhibited. She considered the possibility that she was stronger than Makida to make up for it, just not as strong as Matthias. This was a hope more than a theory.
Drinking blood never gave her the same rush as it did the first time, and it never hurt her the same either, and as she thought back to the cyber specialist’s words, it occurred to her that the new nanos he installed might be blocking the effect of the blood on her system, holding her back. She scheduled a second visit with Doctor Amir Horowitz for the following morning, well after the sun would be up.
That morning, she released Matthias’s hand and threw on a long coat and leggings, both coated with UV protectants. Tsenka’s eye shield descended and her skin darkened. She wore gloves and the coat’s hood for additional protection but stopped short of putting a mask over her face.