by Rabia Gale
She had wanted Isabella to know her limits.
And when she had come upon the girl weeping, stretched naked on the hot stones near the Divide, its lurid light painting bruises upon her slick body, slime snails leaving painful trails across her skin, the Matria had said:
Now you know how far you can go. Now you are ready for the Secret of Eternal Sleep.
Isabella had learned how to endure.
Now she would learn how to die.
Isabella knew with every fiber of her being that Karzov could—would—break her. As fellow krin slayers, she had seen his work. Seen him interrogate a quivering mass of flesh, toothless, blinded, flayed. Seen him experiment with the krin-possessed, pouring acid into ears and pulling out fingernails.
She’d been sick with loathing, but she’d been young and fearful back then. She’d thrown up after that one mission and fled to Oakhaven.
She had never worked with him since.
She’d known that someday she would have to kill him.
When she was better, faster, stronger.
But he’d gotten ahead of her. Absorbed in her duties, she had not paid enough attention to him. Had not known he’d negotiated with krin. Had not known he dabbled in magic and kidnapped kayan children.
If only…
Isabella’s shoulders heaved and chains clinked together. Regret seeped out from behind her walls, tinged the air salty. The krin, scenting weakness, inched closer.
Isabella collected herself. When the krin reached out for her, they met the steel wall once again. Hard, shiny, smooth, with no cracks or faults in it.
No windows, no doors. Impassable
Karzov wasn’t going to have the fun of breaking her. Isabella would make sure of that.
She gathered her kyra into a knot, concentrating her will within it. Her desire for her own end turned it hard and tangled and black. Slowly, she withdrew sustenance from the rest of her body. Her toes went numb and so did her fingers.
The krin within whimpered.
That’s right. I take you with me when I go.
No… Its voice was a tiny sigh. Then, as if making a heroic effort: Use me… I will help you…
Help? Isabella almost snorted. The cavern felt very far away; she no longer felt the bite of the punishment chains. The fire in her muscles died to a dull ache which diminished even more.
I wish to live. Don’t you?
Not as a puppet.
You will not be. We will be… partners.
Images flashed, unbidden, through Isabella’s darkening mind.
Her father, his large frame wasted under his loose unkempt clothing. His face the color of curdled milk, his blue eyes filled with a feverish, alien spark. His skeletal fingers reached for her, his voice—his, and yet not his—pleading with her, “Not a parasite. A partnership. Please understand, Isabella. I want to—”
Yes, Hugh Solange had wanted to live. And his daughter had desperately wanted him to be right. And so she had taken up the daggers and left him be.
Until the bodies, torn apart, shredded, half-eaten, began appearing. The fusion of krin and man had given rise to a monstrous appetite.
Isabella had dealt with him herself, Eya and Voya turning against their former master, daughter turning against father. He had been strong at the end, hideously strong. She remembered his hands around her neck, squeezing the life out of her.
Then the blood. She remembered the blood.
Bright red. Spurting. Splashing. All over her.
No. I won’t end that way. I won’t give anyone else the duty of putting me down. Not even after what she’d told Rafe back at the submersible’s cave. It was too great a burden to put on another.
It won’t end that way, muttered the krin inside her. Not this time.
That’s what they always say.
But it’s different, it insisted. You’re different. I’m different!
Isabella paused. I, the krin had said. I, as if it had an identity, a self-awareness that went beyond appetite, beyond hunger.
Like those krin in the village she had let live.
Please, it said. If you die, they might get me.
They?
The others. It was sincere, she could tell. Its fear thrummed through her own organs. They will devour me. I will be consumed by their hunger.
For a moment, she was tempted. Greatly tempted. So tempted that she understood how it must’ve been for her father, as the disease ravaged his insides.
A chance to live.
That desire had made a monster out of him.
The krin felt its hope slipping away. It cried out, You need to live, too. See what Karzov’s plans are. Hear what they know!
And it channeled krin speech into her.
Isabella flinched at the roar in her skull. A confusion of voices, a gnawing of hunger, an inflammation of the passions. She was tossed around in a sea of krin thoughts, krin appetites, krin memories.
They stirred and roiled, like a cauldron of bubbling stew. Fragments came to her:
Karzov smiling… stazi cowering… a feast! a feast of fear!… “Join me”… the tender morsels of a lover’s grief… “Soon you will have all the ka you wish”… the melting flesh and glistening fat of forbidden lusts… “Enough for all at the source, under the disc”
The source. Under the disc.
Isabella’s eyes shot open. Electricity crackled off her.
She knew what Karzov wanted. She knew his plans.
His audacity took her breath away.
He would take the whole world in the palm of his hand and mold it into his plaything.
She was back in her own aching body, every nerve alive and thrumming, every muscle strained.
Every shape and shadow, every bump and dip and crack and crevice stood out to her, outlined.
The krin cried out, multitude as one, Watch out! She knows!
Her krin replied, Is it to be?
Pressure built up around her. Her heart hammered. Her pulse raced.
She said, Yes.
And let the krin out.
Dark energy swept through her body.
It rushed through her veins, glided across her muscles, and sheathed her nerves. Shadow stuff filled crevices and nooks of her mind. She blinked once, and the world was different.
No longer boringly three-dimensional. No longer flat and mundane.
No, this was the world of folded space and twisted time, of overlapping and sliding past and connecting at corners.
She couldn’t take it all in. Wouldn’t make the attempt. Isabella knew that to do so would shatter her mind, still clinging to will and self-control. She wasn’t in charge, not anymore, but she wasn’t a helpless prisoner either. She was, like the krin had promised, a partner.
A krin with integrity? I won’t forget, she told it.
I knew this kind of partnership in ages past. And now, thanks to you, I know it again.
The caverns of Karzov’s hideout lay compact and folded around her, like the tightly-furled petals of a rosebud still wrapped in green. There were so many layers here, it would take her a year and a day to peel and study and navigate them.
She saw how the other krin moved through them. Seen in their world, they weren’t as blobby and formless as she’d thought. In these many dimensions, they had shape and sensors, appendages and antennae. More defined than she had thought, she caught sight of oily black carapaces and scaled limbs and webbed membranous wings and other body parts she could put no name or description to.
They moved with a purposeful fluidity. Here, they hissed, you are in our world. Foolish mortal. Foolish outcast.
Their multidimensional appendages lashed at her. The whips passed through her body and stung her soul. The shock made her gasp; she had never thought cold like this could exist, like the death of worlds.
Her krin moved, with blocking tendrils of its own. Isabella felt her body blur, her limbs almost passing through the punishment chains. For a moment she was free, misting out from the shackles,
the next moment, they clamped cruelly down onto her wrists and ankles again.
It resists murmured her krin, while the others laughed, in a terrible cacophony of atonal notes. The noise shot pain in sparks across Isabella’s nerves, leaving them scraped and raw.
This was the krin’s world and she was at a disadvantage.
Get me out of the chains she told the one inside her. I’ll take care of the rest.
Burningly cold tendrils grabbed her limbs. But, I can—
Just do it! Wail-and-tear-woven draperies lay over her, pressing her down with their weight. Hot-cold lances of pleasure-pain held her pinned.
Her krin struggled to free her from the chains, but its desperate flutterings were weakened. She had starved it and—
Something comes!
They all felt it. It was lightning in the dark, a sea breaking loose.
Ka lit up the krin’s world, in jagged cracks of color, burning after-images into her eyes.
Isabella!
The familiar voice broke through worlds, across space, burned away shadows.
Rafe? She lifted her head, awed, as the wave of ka, crackling with all colors, surged for them.
Linked with the krin, she could actually see, for the first time, what Rafe knew.
Krin shrieked as the leading edges reached them, dissolving their substance. The kyra bond strengthened, shone silver and gold, threaded with jewel tones. There was Rafe, and she saw that he rode, not the waves, but an entire menagerie of ka-made beasts.
Ruby unicorns trailed orange smoke and lowered chiseled golden horns. Dragons and eagles flew on wings of sapphire crystal and amethyst mist. Large cats bounded, emerald blazing in their eyes and foaming in their mouths.
So this is ka!
Isabella, get out of here!
She snapped to herself—this was the ka of acid and poison, eating and tearing, delighting in savage destruction. The punishment chains gave way, shattering to pieces just as she misted out of them and into krin-space.
Which way?
A multitude of paths lay ahead of her.
This. The krin took the reins of her body and she half-ran, half-sank into a cavern wall.
Not a moment too soon.
Rafe’s makeshift army swept by her back in a rush of heat. Walls crumbled and ceilings collapsed as she fled through the origami of Karzov’s headquarters. Dimly, she saw other figures milling about, heard their screams from a distance. Her route took her right through a man. One step and she was in small barracks-like room. An ashen face, protruding blue eyes, stubbled chain. His open mouth was a crater, his pores dirt-filled pits in an oil-slicked landscape. She passed through him like a ghost and stepped into yet another room.
This was equipped like a laboratory. Isabella traversed it in mid-heave, glassware frozen in its trajectory through the air, wires straining from the walls, bronze tubes rigid across the room, dust suspended, a blue liquid caught in time as its leading edge dripped over the counter.
Isabella snatched up her daggers from a box with a black light over it as she stalked by. She shook the trailing wires off them.
Behind her beakers shattered, cables thunked, liquid splashed, stools crashed.
The petals of this place crumbled as she sought to walk them, breaking apart under her feet.
The tainted ka reaches even to the places of the krin, her traveling companion told her, subdued. This place will not last.
Tremors ran up and down her legs. She felt Rafe nearby, but he was occupied, his entire being bent towards containing the wild ka he had unleashed. She reached out to him, felt his acknowledgment. He was busy and he trusted her to take care of herself.
Just like she’d trust him with the ka.
She stepped again and found herself in a meeting chamber full of people.
Her attention zeroed in on Karzov.
No time to think. Just act. His back was turned, Eya and Voya thirsted for justice and vengeance.
She lunged for him.
Sticky shadow stuff caught her arms and legs, twined her throwing arm to her side. Ka so dark and viscous she hadn’t seen it at all. She peered through the folded worlds to see its source.
Two children, rail-thin, old-eyed, made knots in old rags. One of them, the boy, said in a high, thin voice, “I sense her.” The girl echoed, in a lower whisper. “I sense her.”
The kayan twins.
Karzov turned, his blue eyes pinning the spot were Isabella was. His mouth smiled, but the flames of insanity burned in his gaze. “Well done, my dear. You really are good.”
The hatred and rage that went over Isabella shook her with its intensity. It boiled in her blood and left her light-headed with loathing. Almost she sprang forward into the room proper, almost she engaged him in the battle she longed for.
Almost.
It is a fight you’ll lose said the calm part of her, in the voice of the Matria. It is impossible for you yet.
She swallowed her anger. It burned like bile all the way down, filling her belly with fire. She yanked her arms free of the shadow trap, kicked the clinging strands away.
“Running away, Isabella?” Karzov’s stare was fixed on her position.
He welcomed the fight. His eyes were lit up with challenge. Never mind that the ceiling had come down in many places around her, nor the stazi officers begging for direction.
The creepy twins stood there, dull little lumps, and waited.
Another time, Karzov. Depend on it. In the meantime, enjoy the wreck of your headquarters.
Her smile tasted like lemon as she withdrew deeper into the trembling shadowy world of the krin.
Where to? her krin asked, weak and fearful. It was ready to leap away, jump to the Barrens, an abandoned mine, a boiled-away lake, the burning sea, the Scorching Divide, just to get away.
Somewhere safe, Isabella said, feeling remembered warmth on her face, smelling yeasty bread and vegetable soup.
There was only one place that had ever felt like home. Isabella thought of it, fiercely, intensely, pouring all her memories into the krin.
She felt its relief, felt it reach out to pull and pinch the space around them.
They jumped.
Chapter Fifteen
Isabella
ISABELLA CAME TO FULL consciousness to find a krin—metaphorically—in her face.
She projected the total force of her disapproval at it. The krin scuttled back. I’ve been waiting for you to wake up. The undertone was that of a puppy: See how good I’ve been?
Isabella made a noncommittal noise. She was not in the habit of conversing with parasitical beings who dwelt inside of her, any more than she would talk to a bug crawling over her foot.
She sensed the krin’s hurt. It was an all too human emotion, albeit one that Isabella was used to seeing secondhand.
She wasn’t ready to upgrade the krin’s status to symbiont yet. Even though it had kept its promise and done its job.
She opened her eyes to a familiar view—a mural of fanciful star-women trailing hair of flame, comets with burnished horses galloping within, worlds in a myriad shapes and bronze gears and arms connecting the lot.
Isabella stretched under a soft, faded patchwork quilt, luxurious as a cat. The soles of her feet thunked against the low footboard. She propped them on the wood and stretched again, to her full length. She no longer fit the bed, but that didn’t keep this room from feeling like home.
A row of windows set in the tops of two converging walls let in a warm, lemony light. It pooled on the golden oak floorboards and ran lightly over the child-sized dresser and table. It gilded a particular enormous stuffed cat, its velvety nap much worn, which itself flopped on a chair too small for her now.
One side of the room had been enclosed by planks to form a closet. Isabella pushed off the covers and sat up. Her bare feet found satiny wood; she rubbed her toes against it in sheer delight. She fetched a dressing gown of pink satin from the closet and flung it over her shoulders. She glanced at her reflec
tion in a small, square mirror—her braided hair didn’t look too mussed.
Besides, she smelled breakfast.
Her kyra showed her three humans and assorted animals in the house and its surroundings. The animals and two of the people she expected. The third, though…
Frowning, Isabella padded into the kitchen and stood at the threshold, staring at Rafe Grenfeld sitting across the table.
Eating her grandmother’s porridge, no less.
“Good morning,” he said with his mouth full. He waved a spoon at her from behind fortifications of coffee pot, mug, a stack of pancakes covered in berries and dripping syrup, and a loaf of freshly-baked bread.
The whole place smelled of yeast and coffee, caramel and cinnamon. Isabella’s mouth watered, but she still had the self-discipline to keep her stomach from growling.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded of the unwelcome guest.
“Now don’t be rude, Isabella dear.” Her grandmother bustled away from the enormous iron range that ran along the short wall of the kitchen. She plunked down an earthenware bowl of her special porridge on the table, right across from the pesky fellow. “Good morning, love. Did you sleep well?” She kissed Isabella on the cheek. Her iron-grey curls tickled and her scent—of flour and honey and wildflowers—wrapped Isabella in an embrace almost as solid as her arms around the girl.
“Well enough, Grandma.” Isabella returned the kiss. It was impossible to remain haughty in this kitchen. Rafe looked on interestedly. He looked far too pleased with himself—and, of course, her proximity opened up his kyra-sight greatly.
“I made your favorite porridge.” Grandma smiled her gap-toothed smile. It made her homely face more beautiful than that of any celebrated Oakhaven beauty.
Isabella weakened further. “With dried currants?” she asked, half-hoping and half-fearing.
“And sap sugar and fresh blueberries,” Grandma confirmed.
“Oh.” Isabella sank down onto a stool and dug her spoon into the gooey mixture. She could almost live on the scent of it alone, though her stomach whimpered at her not to attempt it.
“You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here,” she informed Rafe before she even took a bite, thereby proving her mastery of mind over base appetites.