by C. E. Murphy
Rick whispered, "I'm sorry, Cat," but she shrugged and glanced down at him again.
"Wouldn't have given you the watch if I wasn't prepared to deal with what happened when you used it, mate." She'd never tried forging a cure-all from the Waste and didn't know if it was possible. Didn't want to think about the ethical implications if it was, either; there was a whole World out there that deserved it, if she could make one. But she was going to have to figure out something to keep people like Davos—people who'd realized there were two or three humans she was willing to go out on a limb for, and had no qualms about using them against her—from ever doing something like this again.
That was for later, though. For now, she said, "Tell me what you know about Savos's disappearance," and watched Davos's smile widen into something bordering on dangerous. Not just smug, definitely not relieved, but a cold kind of self-satisfaction that said he thought he now had Cat over a barrel, and that he'd be able to use her like this whenever he desired.
She was already looking forward to proving him very, very wrong, but he didn't need to know that, and neither did anybody else.
"She went back through the Waste ten days ago," Davos said.
"Why?"
His eyes narrowed. "Reasons. She's never gone more than a day, when she goes. I've been looking for you for a week."
"It's not easy to keep time lined up when you travel to the Torn, Dav. You know that. She's probably on her way back already."
"Not according to what a little bird told me. Somebody's been watching the Waste real close. Trying to catch travelers. And somebody else has been watching the watchers."
Rick muttered, "Look, if Dr. Manhattan shows up I'm outta here," and Davos reached through the bars, grabbed Rick's shirt, and yanked him forward to bash his face against the bars.
Cat grabbed Davos's wrist and stepped.
* * *
Davos looked different in the Waste: smaller, reedier, as if he drew sustenance from the World and with it, size. He was too dark to go pale, but shock dropped his jaw and, while he was off guard, Cat twisted her grip on his wrist and bent him where she wanted him to go. Rick went with him—Rick, who had been in Davos's grasp when Cat stepped, and for whom Cat could not now spare a glance—Rick went with him, fell, and was released to lie gaping on the indefinable floor of the Waste. Mouth by Davos's ear, Cat said, "In a minute I'm gonna go do your bullshit errand and fetch your sister, but right now you're going to give Rick the antidote, and don't even try to tell me you don't have it on you."
"I don't—"
Cat twisted harder, and while he shrieked, drew a knife from her boot with her free hand. She laid the cold iron blade against his throat, smiled, and murmured, "Don't play with me, Davos. You feel it already, don't you? I can make it burn a long, long time before you even start to die, and that's not even taking into account the wither of the Waste. I could stay here forever, if I had to, but you can't. You need a world, whether it's the World, or the Torn. Don't imagine I don't know that it's your sister who travels back and forth, not you. You lack the stuff to survive here. So you can save Rick now, or be a long time dying."
Davos's snarls turned to gasped whimpers of pain, between which words slid out. "You'll poison the antidote if you don't get that iron off me."
"You have less than a minute to make me believe that." Cat moved the blade away and Davos turned his head, green eyes full of loathing, to glare at her.
"There's a knife in my belt. I need to get it."
"Rick," Cat said, "get the knife from his belt."
Rick stuttered an agreement and crawled to his feet like a man who didn't believe the surface he moved across would hold him. Which was fair enough: the Waste could easily not, although with Cat nearby it was more likely to remain stable than it might have otherwise been. The worst of it, Cat knew, was that there was no visible difference between what they stood on and everything else. It didn't lend a sense of security to motion, although she'd always been confident of her ability to move through and across it.
But she was half of the Torn, and Rick was all of the World. He fumbled the blade from Davos's belt and held it out to Cat like he was afraid it would bite. She felt Davos's muscles tense and moved her iron knife closer to his eye. "I wouldn't."
His lip curled, but he relaxed again. Cat nodded toward Rick. "Cut him."
"What?" Rick's voice skirled and Cat gave him a tight smile.
"If holding the cold iron against him means poisoning the antidote, then his blood is the antidote. Cut him, and drin—"
"I don't wanna turn into a vampire, Cat!"
"He's not a vampire," Cat said. "He's closer to a tree. Cut him. I don't have enough hands to do it myself, Rick."
Davos swore, extending his hand. "I'll do it. Give me the kni—"
Rick stuck the blade into Davos's palm, screamed, and fainted.
For a couple of seconds both the Torn-born stared at his pale, unconscious form. Then Cat, unforgivably, began to giggle. Davos struggled with his own expression, caught between multiple pain points and his helplessly giggling captor, and finally gave a snort that sounded like an agonizing attempt at snuffing out laughter. Rick's eyes rolled open and he lay there looking emotionally wounded at their laughter, which only made Cat laugh harder.
Davos ruined it all, of course. He surged forward, trying to break out of Cat's grip. He nearly broke his own shoulder instead, and screamed quite convincingly. Cat ended up with her knee planted in the middle of his back, and his wrist twisted much higher than it should go. "How much of the antidote does he need? And remember, if you lie to me…" She left the threat dangling, in hopes that his imagination would be scarier than hers.
Really, though, 'left to die in, and of, the Waste, with bonus iron poisoning' was scary enough. Davos snarled, but answered, and Cat said, "You're going to have to make a cup of your hands," to Rick, who looked queasy again.
"I can't drink a cup of his blood, Cat."
"Unless you're carrying a syringe, you're going to have to."
"Even if I could, that's not how antivenoms work!"
"Rick," Cat said, as steadily as she could, "you've been poisoned by a venom from an aelfhaim on the far side of a shapeless Waste, where you are currently stuck with someone who was born of both worlds and can not only traverse, but forge that Waste, and you're worried about how antivenoms work in the World?"
His gaze lit, desperation replaced by hope. "Can't you shape a syringe? Honestly, I don't think I can drink his blood."
"If your other option is dying, I bet you'll find you can. And no. I can't shape a syringe." Actually, she could, but she had no idea what else it might draw from Davos, besides his blood. Artifacts were not often only the simple things they appeared to be on their surface.
More to the point, perhaps, it would mean letting go of Davos, and she didn't imagine that would end well. "Unless you can hold him down like this."
Rick said, "What?" faintly.
"If you can hold Davos down, I can shape a syringe. I need both hands to do it."
There was a reason, she decided, that Rick liked the kind of courier gig that involved taking lots of cash money to fly around the world and clean up expensive messes, rather than taking breakneck rides across the city through unforgiving traffic. He was, at heart, a gentle soul. Gentler than Cat had imagined, even. Kallie would have stuffed Davos full of knives and drunk from him like a fountain, but Rick was honestly just a good-hearted, kind...himbo. Stabbing people, it appeared, was not something himbos did.
He did rise, though, and come to stand shakily at Cat's side. "Knee here," she said, pushing hers into Davos's spine, much to his displeasure. "Hand here. Keep the pressure on it and he shouldn't move. If he does," she said, switching places with the human man, "stick him with this." She handed over the cold iron knife, and Rick looked like he might throw up. Cat squatted beside Davos, waggling her fingers to draw his attention. "You and I both know you can probably throw him off. Let me strongly recomme
nd not pursuing that course of action."
Davos growled, but nodded. Cat moved back a few steps and began to draw the stuff of the Waste together, considering what Artifact might come of her efforts.
It could not, by its nature, be a simple syringe. Its purpose was to draw the antidote from Davos's veins; to draw, in essence, the magic from his blood.
An Artifact that could steal magic from the Torn-born was the kind of weapon she never wanted her father to think of.
It required limits. The vial itself could provide those limits, and if not diluted by the blood, the antidote itself would in all likelihood require a lesser quantity than what Davos had specified.
If not, she could always use it again. And again, and again, until Rick was out of danger, and Davos was drained dry, if necessary.
Every once in a while, Leandra Woodrow feared she might be her father's daughter after all.
The syringe came into being between her hands as she stretched and worked the stuff of the Waste. Glassy, but not; metallic, but not. Sharp, either way, and slenderly hollow in the way of the things of the World. Element by element, it became what she required, until a thing that had never existed before in all of time now did, because it was her will that it should exist, and nothing more. If it had anything in common with fairy tales, it was a thing like the sleeping spindle, but the commonalities were slim. Syringe in hand, she knelt and pushed the needle into the meaty part of Davos's shoulder. No one would draw blood that way, but it wasn't really blood she was looking for.
And the stuff that coalesced inside the syringe was not, and could never be mistaken for, blood. It spun around itself with a milky translucence with one turn of the light, and a foggy etherealness with the next. Davos whimpered, a sound more of fear than pain, and Cat, watching the power flex in the vial, couldn't blame him. She would be terrified if someone drew that substance from her own body.
When it had filled, she took it from Davos's arm and pushed Rick's sleeve up, prepared to plunge it into his. He flinched back, making Davos yelp, and said, "Aren't you gonna, I don't know, sterilize that first?"
"It's magic, Rick. It can't infect you." She popped it in his arm before he could object again, then, as he went alternately white and red, said, "I wonder if that should have gone into your vein, actually. Oh well. Guess we'll find out."
Rick stared at her in visible dismay, but she only leaned down to Davos and murmured, "I'm gonna take another vial full as back up, in case he needs further treatment. And in the meantime, you'd better remember I'm literally carrying a fistful of your essence. Imagine what I could do with that." She jerked her chin up, indicating Rick could move now. "After all, you're going to be very well behaved now, aren't you, Dav."
"You cold-blooded witch," Davos said as Rick let him up.
"Oh no." Cat felt the coldness of her brief smile. "I'm not a witch, Davos. I'm much, much more powerful than that. Too bad you didn't realize that before now. How you feeling, Rick?"
"Woozy?"
"We'll assume that's normal." Cat frowned thoughtfully between the two men, and finally muttered, "Dammit. The fastest thing to do would be bring you with me to the Torn."
Hope shot through Davos's expression, and pure horrified terror shot through Rick's. "No fucking way," he declared. "If I get to go and Kallie doesn’t, she'll straight-up murder me."
"You know, for a guy who just got himself captured, you're suddenly evidencing a remarkable amount of self-preservation," Cat said. "Trust me. I'm not taking you anywhere that Kallie wants to see.” Cat sighed and turned to Davos. “I wish you’d just asked for help. It would have made this all a lot easier. Do you have something of Savos's?"
Davos gave her a bleary, angry look, then took a small metal box from one pocket and handed it over. Cat examined the material—silver, not steel—and opened it to find a single leaf lying inside it. Her eyebrows went up and Davos's went down in challenge when she glanced his way, but she shrugged. "Okay. Both of you hold on to me, and don't do anything stupid," she said, again to Davos, "because you'll end up stuck in the Waste forever if you do."
Rick, who was not cut out for this sort of thing, clung to her arm like an ingenue, and Davos put a big hand sullenly around her other arm. Cat lifted the leaf, breathed in its scent, then crushed it in her palm, and stepped.
* * *
In the best case scenario, Cat would have been right. Savos would have been on her way home, or time would have simply passed differently, as it usually did, in the Torn, and she would have been enjoying a long lazy afternoon in a butterfly-filled meadow.
To no one's surprise, it was not the best case scenario.
Passengers in tow, Cat stepped into a space so dark that for an instant she couldn't even breathe through it. The very next second it filled with light so intense she cowered, and Rick yelped in confused fear. Davos, though, roared as if in pain, and when Cat gave an eye-watering blink in his direction, she saw steam—smoke—rising from his skin.
Rick, decent human being that he was, yanked his own shirt off and threw it over Davos before Cat could put two thoughts together, then emphatically pulled Cat's leather coat off her shoulders so he could use it, too. Cat lifted a hand against the blinding light, trying to find its source, but it was as if someone had shoved the entire sun into a cavern: the light came from everywhere, scalding and dangerously brilliant.
Scalding, but only scalding Davos. Her own skin didn't react the way the big man's did, and even Rick, fragile though humans were in the Torn, didn't seem to be burning.
Pennies dropped like a copper cascade at the back of Cat's mind, filling in blanks about Davos that she hadn't consciously thought about. A woman shrieked, sounding as though she suffered the same kind of pain Davos did, and Cat lifted her voice to bellow, "You'll kill your golden goose if you don't turn that off!"
It burned on for what felt like forever: nine seconds, maybe ten. Then suddenly, as abruptly as it had flared, the light faded, although not entirely. Davos stopped howling, though, and the woman's cries turned into a few gasping sobs, then went quiet. Cat yelled, "Name your claim!" to the echoing walls, and after a long time, a throbbing voice came back: They are born of my earth.
Rick, behind Cat, said, "What the fuck, is that an earthquake?" and a thin shred of humor shot through Cat.
"No. It's a voice. There's an elemental here. They were born of something else as well!" she shouted at the walls. "You have no claim on them!"
I claim all that lies within me. A thrill went through the resonant voice. You are within me.
"What," Rick said shrilly, "is an elemental?"
"Yeah?" Cat yelled. "Is that sunlight within you too?"
It bathes me, the voice said in a remarkably superior tone. It is mine to redirect.
"So anything that touches you is yours, huh? You subsume it? You control and command it? It becomes part of what you are?"
The walls rumbled again, and Cat displayed a harsh smile. "I have a gift for you, then." She edged her foot forward, not quite stepping, but nudging her way toward the Waste. Another few centimeters, and a breach opened, the Waste itself spilling around the toe of her boot.
The voice went cautious, not quite fearful. What is this?
"It's something for you to add to your collection."
No! The protest came barely a breath later, as the Waste began to encroach farther on the cavern floor. It is nothing! I cannot be one with it! It will destroy me!
"I mean, that's a possibility, sure. But I thought you wanted everything you could touch."
I only want that which is real! The sunlight and the water and the glittering pieces of stone! What you call to you now will eat away at me until I am gone, and then go beyond, until all of the Torn is undone!
"I suppose you'd better let Savos go, then," Cat said coolly. "I know she's good at finding those glittering stones for you, but are they worth dying badly over? Are they worth the whole of the Torn?"
A figure rose from the cavern floor,
approximating a human form, if such a thing was cast in rough stone and clothed in living earth. It rose tall and tall and taller again, until Cat and the others were dwarfed, and its voice, which had come from everywhere, was now directed through a mouth large enough to be a cave. Rick whispered, "Holy fuck," and the elemental said, "You would not."
"Commit genocide? Probably not. I'd probably pull the Waste back once it finished with you. Assuming I could." Cat nudged her foot forward again, opening the breach a little wider. It hurt. The elemental wasn't wrong. Waste and Torn weren't meant to interact, not like this. When she went from one to the other, she stepped. She didn't linger at the border. Lingering made her heart beat too fast, made sweat drip down her spine, made her breath come in aching pulls that felt as though they would never be enough. The Waste, used like this, did want to destroy what it touched, in so much as it had feelings or will or desires.
The Waste, Cat remembered, was always growing. Maybe this was how. Maybe idiot Artificers opened encroaching bits to teach somebody a lesson, and in the end, the Torn paid for it.
Because it did seem like the Torn paid, and not the World. The World seemed to keep expanding, while the Torn grew ever-smaller.
Or maybe that was just an adult's perspective displacing a child's. The Torn had seemed impossibly large, when she was young, but she'd seen far more of the World in her years there than she'd ever seen of the place she'd been born.
Earth roiled under the elemental's surface, exploding in bursts that rained soil around them in clods. Not too closely, though: it didn't want to accidentally touch the creeping Waste. It became more human in guise, or at least, more aelfen, and more feminine, as if copying Cat's own shape in hopes of assuaging her. Sullenly, it said, "I cannot find them the way she can."
"No," Cat said wearily. "I suppose not." Humans didn't generally go digging through their own bodies in search of specific bones or organs. An elemental couldn't search out the shining rocks that most appealed to it, either, not from within its own living parts.