I notice Terina has still not shared, keeping herself closed. A stranger among strangers among friends. I feel for her, a fellow exile.
Beds have been made up: a selection of cots and rolls wedged into the main room and downstairs bedroom. It’s all so cozy I actually have to wonder if they plan to try to take us in our sleep. If they are, they’re really good at covering it. I don’t sense violence in these people at all, despite all the fear they’re managing to keep in check. But I still get the sense that they’re hiding something. (And that’s fair—they don’t know us, they have reason to fear us, and we certainly haven’t been totally forthcoming ourselves.) Maybe they know they have no means to harm us, and just hope we’ll move along peacefully if they keep playing nice (not unlike the vibe I got from the Pax while they were feeding us).
Jane and Anna plan to sleep upstairs in the children’s rooms, with dutiful Cal camping out on the landing like a guard (though he says it’s just in case Bly has problems during the night). We thank her again for her generosity, assure her that she’s been more than adequately hospitable (and hopefully reassure her that we won’t be attacking her in her sleep).
She offers us the use of her indoor shower, which feeds water heated from another plant-burning stove. There’s soap that smells like it’s been made out of the oils of nuts and aromatic plant extracts.
The males defer to Terina , the Ghaddar and I take first opportunities.
Terina goes first and takes an unusually long time—I’m almost fearing for her safety enough to forgo privacy—and eventually comes out with her long hair bound up in a borrowed towel, asking for a comb. Her red-stained skin is barely lighter than it was, despite the clay-paste residue being gone—long use must semi-permanently dye the skin.
The Ghaddar is military quick, and takes her weapons into the tight bathing stall with her. I realize as we pass that this is the first time I’ve seen her face, her metal demon mask hanging around her neck as she combs out her own long black hair (she carries her own comb for the task). She’s prettier than I expected she’d be. I can certainly imagine the rumors swirling around her and Colonel Ram could be at least partly true (and I certainly doubt she’d let just anyone be intimate with her—he or she would have to be able to impress her, and the Colonel did earn her loyalty, no easy feat).
When it’s my turn, I find myself hesitating. The stall has a mirror. In it, I see the me I know, scar and all, except for my eyes: metallic green, unreal. The effect makes me dizzy—I can’t look myself in the eye.
But that isn’t my biggest source of distress. That’s what’s coming next: This will be the first time I’ll see myself—what’s under my L-As—since whatever’s been done to me.
The hardest part is unbuckling my belt and setting down the sword, propping it up in a corner. I quickly realize I can’t move very far away from it—more than a meter, and I begin to feel pain, cramps and spasms throughout my body. When I move closer, I get the vague happy feelings again. Thankfully, the stall isn’t much more than a meter and a half square anyway, so it’s just a matter of finding a corner to lean the blade closest to where I am as I move around.
Slowly and carefully undressing, my shaky fingers having trouble unfastening my L-As (or what still sort of look like my L-As—they’re definitely heavier, more armored), I start to get a look at skin that looks very much like mine, only missing my multitude of scars. (So why do I still have the one on my face?)
The most shocking change gets revealed when I get the nerve to peel off my jacket and pants (which I do fast just to get it over with). My muscle tone looks like it’s almost doubled. I’m all hard-sculpted, like my fellows that obsessed over PT every waking moment of their off-shift time, spending their duty credits on extra protein supplements on top of max rations. And my muscles feel like metal under my skin.
I rotate in the mirror, look at myself all over, flex my new muscles. I wonder how strong I am. I feel a thrill, flooding me. Pride. Vanity. I look beautiful, perfect. It’s a body a warrior would want. A weapon, like my sword.
My sword. My sword that controls what I feel, uses it to control me.
I feel sick. I want to smash the mirror. The only reason I don’t is because it would make me a bad guest—I owe Jane and her mother more than a tantrum. I breathe, stuff it down, shut my eyes so I can’t see.
I shower with my habitual speed, then find I don’t need to dry off: My skin seems to suck up the water. (I realize it did the same thing this morning, when the sky soaked me.)
I get dressed as quickly as I can, hands still shaking. Then I go let the males know they can have their turn.
I’m dreaming the same dream again, stuck in the same helplessly fluctuating shape in a transparent box, watching flashes of people standing still.
Redhead cyborg is there, sitting in his chair, but now it looks like the back of his head has grown into the rest of the room. It doesn’t look like cables, exactly. It moves, flows. But that’s not the most interesting parts:
Doc Long is there, except his eyes aren’t fucked up—they match. His face is semi-frozen in a slow motion shout, all twisted rage. It’s aimed at the redhead, close enough to be spitting on him, but the redhead is just looking calmly back at him, like he’s not even there.
I catch their fight in flashes, random stills. Long ranting. Redhead just sitting calmly, letting him.
Then redhead is alone. Just sitting. Alone.
No. Not alone. We’re still there, we five. In our little transparent cells. He acts like he’s ignoring us, but I know he isn’t. I know he can hear me, feel me. But he’s elsewhere.
I realize there’s another clear cell. Bigger. On the far side of the chamber. It looks like there’s a body in it. Human. Male. Pale skin and light hair. Wearing skivvies. Stiff and inert like a corpse or a doll. On display? Or in storage, put away to be ignored like the rest of us?
Has it been there all this time? I didn’t see it before. Or didn’t care about it. Just another piece of forgotten junk. History. A keepsake, like we are. No longer useful, but still somehow treasured.
I call out to it, but it doesn’t answer. It’s dead, shut down. Deactivated. Not needed or wanted.
I never bothered to look at it before. It wasn’t important. An obsolete device, kept out of human sentiment. Like me. Like us. We five. So I look.
Dee. It’s Dee.
Time has passed again. I think I’ve been offline.
Long is back. Now he’s on his knees in front of redhead, looking broken, deeply traumatized, sobbing. When I get a shot of his face turned up where I can see, he’s got the mismatched eyes. In flashes, he looks like he’s pleading, begging, like a man who’s lost everything and just wants to die. And he hasn’t come alone:
Ram is there again, standing off to the side, watching. This time, he’s got that look he gets after a bad, bloody battle. He even looks physically battered.
Bel is there too, loitering in the shadows like he doesn’t want to be here. And Astarte. She comes in, clings to Ram, and he holds her. Both Bel and Astarte are crying, have been crying. Looking at Long. Something horrible has happened. They all look like they’ve been through a battle, like Ram. As the flash-images progress, I watch them heal, repair, while Long just shuts down, sobbing.
Then Ram and Bel and Astarte are gone, no explanation. It’s just redhead and Long.
Redhead gets up, all the living cables sunk into his nervous system moving with him. He stands over Long. Touches him. Touches his face. Long looks up…
The feed starts moving in quick fits and starts, as if the action is finally happening at a rate I can process. Long is convulsing. Redhead’s touch…
I see Long start to change. It looks like his skin is dissolving, or being eaten by something, something black. It covers him, consumes him, converts him, turns him…
Oh no.
Then something starts happening to redhead. Piece by piece, maybe cell by cell, he starts turning into light. He’s turning into brig
ht white light. Coming apart. Just before it finishes, he turns his head to face me, gives me a little sad smile like he’s sorry about something…
Jed. It’s Jed. Younger, but it’s his face.
And then he’s gone.
Everything is gone.
I feel the light taking me apart, tearing me apart. I fight it. I won’t let it. I call out to my friends, the others like me. We Five. We have to fight it. We have to fight it or we’ll be gone and…
I wake up to sunlight and screaming and the clattering of heavy metal.
My new reflexes are impressive: even out of a dead sleep, I manage to catch the big piece of blackened steel coming at my head.
It takes me two slow seconds to recognize it, since it’s not where it’s supposed to be. It’s one of Bly’s shoulder plates.
I’d made my bed on a mat right next to his borrowed bed. Erickson and Elias took narrow and not-too-comfortable-looking cots wedged into the bedroom with me. Both are sitting up, then getting up quick, like something’s on fire in the room. The Ghaddar is in the doorway—she’d slept out in the main room with Murphy, Terina and Rashid.
Another piece of Bly’s armor flies off the bed and tries to bean me. I realize I’m smelling something sharp and musky and human, like when one our scouts or perimeter snipers came off a long posting, sealed in an H-A can for too many days without a shower, but it’s combined with undertones of rotten flesh—infection, burns. The first image that flashes through my mind is that Bly has gone wrong and burst open…
I jump up. Bly is thrashing on the bed, sitting up. His armor is coming off in sections, come loose from him. Even his helmet flops around on his head. He’s panicking, like he can’t breathe or is on fire. He definitely can’t see—his mask is twisted too far sideways. He tries to pull off the helmet.
“It’s okay! It’s okay!” I’m telling him as I let him feel my hands, then get my fingers up under the jaw of his mask. Pry. Try to find release catches…
The mask pops off, and then the helmet flies off as he throws it away from him. He takes a long, gasping breath like a man who’d been buried alive, still flailing, wild-eyed, dazed—I grab his hands, hold on. His skin is slick, and he’s strong, but so am I.
“It’s okay! Bly, it’s me! Straker!”
I realize he’s pretty much naked, what’s left of his armor just laying on him or half-off him. His pale skin looks intact—unmarked—over dense hard muscle. And that’s odd, because the Bly I knew before he became Chang’s Shadow Knight was bone-lean, battle-scarred and covered with Zodangan tattoos. His once long blonde hair has been chopped short, as has his beard. His blue green eyes stare at me, like he’s not sure what he’s seeing, like he’s not sure if he’s woken up from his nightmare or not. In his irises, I see the telltale metallic highlights of a hybrid, nano-implanted.
He twists his hands out of my grip, feels his face, looks down at his body.
I get up off of him, my open hands trying to reassure him that he’s okay. The others have filled the little room, as if backing me up against some threat.
Bly untangles himself from the scrap-heap piled on top of and all around him, gets his feet on the floor, stands up. The rest of his armor falls away.
He’s… Well, perfect. I have to avert my eyes like a shy little girl. Terina yelps behind me, and she actually hides around the side of the doorway.
Bly seems oblivious to his nudity, or more accurately is absorbed in it, staring down at himself in disbelief, even as our hosts come running to see. I hear Jane gasp.
“I thought you said…” Cal begins, then realizes our unanimous shock.
“Get Long,” Erickson insists. “Please. Now.”
Long is nowhere to be found, which somehow doesn’t surprise most of us. What Cal returns with is a package, a neat bundle of fabric, with a hand-written note that just says “For Bly”. It’s a set of simple clothes: a thick hand-woven tunic, pants and soft boots in different shades of browns and tans.
We manage to get Bly into the shower (he’s covered with a rancid slime). He’s still in a daze, overcome. And then he almost collapses when the water hits him. He screams like we’ve either scalded or frozen him, then starts laughing, giddy. He keeps looking at his own hands, letting the water run over them. I realize: he probably hasn’t felt much of anything since Chang sealed him in that suit. That was over a year ago.
Like me, he doesn’t need to be dried off. His skin absorbs the water left on it. And his hair and beard have grown inches just in the last hour.
“OWW!!” Bly snaps, clutching at his right shoulder. I didn’t see it, but the Ghaddar apparently stabbed him with one of her knives. I see a flash of blood between his fingers.
“You bitch!!!” he spits, pushing us away, glaring at her as she falls back into a defensive stance out in the hallway, knives still ready.
“Look,” she says icily, nodding to his wound. He moves his hand. It’s already closed. Bly watches it fade away in seconds, chuckling like a madman. Even the blood that was on his skin vanishes, as if re-absorbed into his pores.
“You still have your nanites,” I state the obvious.
He digests that, staring at where the wound was, then at his hand (there’s no blood on his hand either). I can’t tell from his expression if this is good news, bad news, or maybe both.
“Bly… It’s…” I try to be comforting, but he ignores me, pushing through us like he’s in a hurry to be somewhere. (Thankfully, he also ignores the Ghaddar.) He grabs his new clothes, pulls them on as he heads down to the kitchen.
With everyone watching and like no one is here, he snatches up a pitcher of water and guzzles it, then takes a large bite out of a piece of fruit, then tears into a loaf of bread. He sounds like he’s having an orgasm with every mouthful. He goes from edible to edible, sampling everything as our hosts look on, just this side of terror.
“Bly…?” I try to get his attention. He spins on me, grins like a fool, grabs my face in both hands, and kisses me hard on the mouth like he’s trying to devour me. He tastes like food. Thankfully, he breaks off quickly, but still holds onto me, leaning in to smell me, my hair, my neck. I’m surprised that I let it go on, wait him out. (I can’t say I don’t like it, but I know I can’t trust my emotions, and there are lots of uncomfortable eyes on us.)
Finally, he lets me go, looking sheepish, almost embarrassed.
“Forgive, dear Lieutenant,” he apologizes with a bow, but then he takes my hand and kisses it gently, just once. Then he turns to our host, who’s been keeping her distance. “And to you, great lady. I’ve certainly been a poor guest, conscious and otherwise. But it’s been long since I felt anything on my skin, tasted anything, smelled… even saw the world except through my crimson lenses. I’d forgotten…”
He gets lost again, staring out through the window, at the buildings, the green, the sky. Grinning. Laughing to himself. Then he spins like a drunk and makes a dash for the front door, runs outside, out into the path, into the sunlight. He spins around and then faces the morning, stretching out his arms to greet it, grinning blissfully. His eyes, I realize, are wet.
“I didn’t think I’d ever feel again,” I hear him mutter to no one. “Anything. Ever.”
“You think it was Long?” Erickson quietly asks me (though it sounds like he’s already decided), as we give Bly space to have his moment.
“It would make sense,” I agree. “But why? Out of the goodness of his heart? He doesn’t even know us.”
“But he seemed to know what our swords were.”
I realize we’re not alone. There are dozens of pairs of eyes on us, watching from the surrounding buildings, curious, probably still terrified of the strangers in their midst.
Bly’s beard has stopped growing after several centimeters, and his hair has reached shoulder-length. He also has hair on his forearms, his chest. He falls to his knees in the moist dirt, claws into it with his fingers like he’s never felt anything like it before, brings a fistful up to his
face and smells it.
“We need to get to the Barrow,” Elias prods us, either oblivious or not caring.
We give Bly a few more minutes to soak up the sun and the fresh air, while the others go pack what little we brought with us (Rashid has the only significant load, which he still won’t share). We quickly snack on some of the foods Jane and Cal have set out for us, then I go and gently tell Bly we need to get moving.
“Of course,” he lets me know he still understands duty. “Of course. I’m sorry. We need to be going.”
I feel like an ass. Then worse, because my sword is again pumping pleasure into me, another reward for heading in the right direction.
Bly straps on his sword and knife, after tying his armor up in a bundle with some borrowed cord. His sleeveless robe—badly burned and falling apart—wraps around that, looking like a sack full of holes. He slings the burden over his back—he knows we can’t leave technology like that here, no matter how inert it may be, and not just because our hosts have forbidden it in their borders. I offer to help him carry it, but he declines with a slight smile.
Jane and Cal take us out of the colony and down a path that runs north of the one we took getting here, headed west. As we pass through the colony, hundreds turn out to watch us leave, keeping their distance. I certainly can’t blame them for continuing to be fearful. They should be. We’re likely the very opposite of hero, savior, champion.
The path gets us pretty directly back to the shore of the Lake. From the positions of the visible Rim and the sun, I’d guess we’re on the most western tip of the Peninsula, probably only a kilometer or so northwest of where Jed dropped us—the sand and terrain look familiar. In the distance, south across the water, I can still see the crests of the mountains from where we came, tall enough to be seen over the horizon but half-masked in haze. There’s no sign of the Charon anywhere on the Lake.
The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades Page 35