by Kell Inkston
Waine looks up with a knife-pointed focus. "...What?"
"And I think you know too."
There's slow, waiting pause. There's no one else in the shop other than Jacques, and he knows well not to listen in on Secret Police conversations.
"So... what makes you think that?" Waine says, certain that this is a smart comeback.
Oswald furrows his brow like Chief Helding would— simultaneously compassionate and on-task. "I overheard you. That chat stone— Clare has the other piece, doesn't she?"
"No, of co-..." Waine stops himself under Oswald's cold gaze.
"Need I remind you what happens to people who lie to officers of the constabulary?"
"...Of course not, officer— but first, I have to know. What's... what will you do?"
"It should be obvious. We have to arrest her."
Waine looks aside with a frustrated disgust. "I fucking knew i-"
"But it's better than being dead."
Waine's breathing picks up clearly, readdressing Oswald with his gaze. "So she... did she?"
"Into the sewers? Yes."
"How do you know this?"
Oswald smirks. "Police intelligence, as always."
"...And you think... you think she's still alive?"
"We have reason to believe that— but the job as an officer is to get confirmation. Right now, the only person that has a line to her— if she's even still alive— is you."
The Senior-year takes a deep breath. "Gotcha."
"So, I'd like to offer you the opportunity to help out The Constabulary."
"...You want me to give you the chat stone?"
"I want you to come with me into the sewers to find her."
Waine draws back, gulping down saliva with a nervous, pale-faced gaze. "Gotcha. And if I don't?"
Oswald smiles tellingly. "Do you have something to hide?"
There's nothing lost on Waine with the statement. "...I understand. I won't give you any trouble. I'll help anyway I can."
Oswald smiles, and presents his hand to shake— which Waine just stares at as if a presented knife blade. "Relax. We're going to have to work together to find her. I have a feeling that she's not interested in giving us hints— so we'll have to be careful when we go down there, doubly so when we find autos."
Waine just nods. Of course, the automatons were on his mind.
With a deep breath and a moment of silence, Waine takes up his hand, and shakes.
"So, what's the plan?"
"We're going to swing by the engineers to grab some things, and then the armory to get you a La'Coss."
"You-... you'd trust me with a gun?"
"I mean, if you came back without me, I'm pretty sure it'd be the end of your entire life."
Waine's eye twitches; the officer isn’t wrong. "R-right... *phew* okay. I... I appreciate it."
"Appreciate what?"
"Trusting me."
Oswald grins. "Come on, man. We're doing this for the common good. What do you think the police is for, anyway? To kidnap and observe?"
"No," Waine scoffs with a steadily-relaxing smile. "To protect and serve."
Oswald nods. He's got him.
- Chapter 25 -
One could say that Clare's gotten good at moving without noise, even with a limp.
Now thirty minutes into the clenching dark, she's come to the realization that she doesn't have to move quickly— so long as she can get out of the way quietly. It was fifteen minutes ago that she realized she'd barely make a sound if she'd just dip into the now knee-deep water and crawl her way along the cobblestone. This submerges all of her but her head— peeking out as an instrument for air and senses. Why, if she didn't need air, and if she could hear through water— she'd probably stay under for good.
It was an ordeal to lose those autos, but once they got out of earshot enough for her to slow down, her new approach in moving away silently and then taking a pause to listen began to hold its salt.
It's only been five minutes since the group of autos passed by her, sloshing along in an alert, consistent cluelessness. Clare's free now to simply wade through the depths like a hound— only the thinnest cutting of water making a sound from her chin slicing over the surface.
She's finally at ease, in a way— but not enough to feel relaxed. The cold water is not so bad once one's taken a proper dip, she thinks— and this way she can at least know when she's been found. As long as she's quiet, only the closest automatons would be able to track her down— and they'd be close enough for her to hear them even with her inferior human ears.
For what seems like an hour, she just wades along, keeping a comfortable, weightless pace— listening out for anything around her. There's only the water in this section of the residential sector to keep her ‘company’— or at least, that's all she can hear at the moment.
She hasn't noticed until now, but it's actually not impossible to see, either. Clare's quit trying to see for the longest time in this pitch blackness— but once she actually strains herself, she finds she can make out the thinnest, greenest outlines of certain things. She's certain she's hallucinating for nearly a minute— until she goes up to one of the outlines and brushes her hand along. Spores curl through the air from her touch.
It's a slick fungus of some sort— creeping along the stonework and sustained by the water.
She smirks to herself, knowing that there is, in fact, some life here after all. Her smirk turns to a sigh of relief, and then a shrug. Of course there's life down here— the problem for her is just to find some she can eat.
The rumbling within her is becoming disruptive to her thinking; she can hardly concentrate.
Clare remembers the words from Marnoff's journal, about the food store in the granary. She nips her tongue in total silence as she considers the proposition. Of course, she has been moving in its general direction— though very slowly and with many pauses taken in between. It doesn't take long for her to decide. Carrie can wait; perhaps it was torn apart by the autos that broke in anyway.
She restarts her movement when a sharp pang of emotion hits her. She thinks about how she completely failed Carrie back there— and how if she was just more patient, more careful, it would still be with her now. Clare scoffs with only her nose and eyes peeking up, causing a small burst of air to push up from the water. Carrie isn't a person, she reminds herself. She shouldn't feel that bad. Anything it was can be repaired— and anything it is now can be salvaged. These thoughts make her feel a little better for a few seconds, but not less responsible. Rather, if Carrie is just a helpless, stupid machine, then it's actually all the more fully and entirely her fault that things have ended up this way. She could have spent so much more time— observing, waiting, testing— and then making her judgments rather than just brashly running about everywhere like a lunatic. Clare has progress to show for it— but at what cost? Her foot, and a capable ally?
The lost runaway mulls over her failures in a miserable fashion while she glides through the water, following her memory of the store-house's general location. By the time she finally sees the granary's short, just barely person-sized opening, she's in a rather poor mood. Hopefully some food will cheer her up.
Clare is only slightly-pleased to find that her stringent expectations were well placed. The streets may be different, and the names all changed— but the general location of everything major is roughly where it is in the Everhold above. With movements only a little faster, she touches down on the few steps leading up to the granary. There's only a thin inch of water on the floor here, right at the top of the enormous shallow lake engulfing the city. Back at her feet and out from the water, she shivers from the open air. The sensation of standing up normally is somewhat alien after nearly half an hour in the flood.
Unable to wait any more, Clare limps down the tight hall at a speedy pace— the hallway steadily widening, but only at the sides and upwards in order to accommodate the storehouse entry at the end of the room.
She stops in her
tracks. There's something very large in front of her. The thin coat of green fungus along the shape tells her that its somewhat flat— but with a few hard to make out features along the surface, particularly the space right in front of her.
Clare checks her surroundings once more to be certain, but there's simply no way the light would escape the granary. She turns on her clip light— and the blinding sheen lays out the scene.
She's made her way to a large set of doors, secured with an enormous, faded, rusted padlock. The padlock doesn't seem to be keeping it all together, however— for the door is pushing out just barely, as if there's a weight on the other end waiting to escape. She bites her bottom lip with a concentrating nip while she eyes about for a key, or some kind of lock-defeating mechanism.
"Come on," she mutters, looking back at the lock with disgust. She prods the lock a bit— producing a hollow, stale sound. It's so old; she bets she can get through. The lock might have stopped Marnoff, but it won't stop her.
Musing it over for a good minute, she draws that trusty, dense knife out from her pack and inserts it through the bolt, curling around the two handles of the door. Pushing the blade further, all the way to the base of the handle's rivets, she is now provided with a powerful leverage.
"There we go."
And with that, she starts pulling downward, cranking it like a lever. It hurts— but she has something for that, too. She dons her gloves and tries again. At the very edge of her exertion, she finally hears the loud, moaning tear.
"Yes. Come on.. Let me the fuck in. I'm hungry!" She hisses with a smirk as the lock snaps.
The weight from the leverage sends her to the ground— looking up just in time to see the two great doors pour open to reveal a sweetly-scented mountain, pouring out onto her and her light.
She can't see with her clip-light buried and herself up to her neck— but she knows immediately that this isn't food.
Clare convulses in horror as the squirming mass bites into her in a hundred, perhaps a thousand different places— injecting unknown varieties and quantities of venom into her pale human flesh. It's as if she had opened the door to hell. Her body reels back in shock. She only has a few seconds to push her way out of the snowdrift of death before collapsing on the floor in a riling convulsion of agony. One would be nothing, ten would be an irritant— but tens of thousands could prey on a human with ease.
It hurts so much, there are no words for it. To be stung that many times at once without any preparation and next to no clothing— her body practically shuts down from the brand new echelon of pain she has been submitted to. Clare vomits, expels from various orifices, and goes temporarily blind from the torment all at the same moment. Her existence is instantly lowered into a state of confused, pointless suffering— a far cry from what the automatons would have offered her. At least they would have gotten it over with quickly.
In her short moment of freedom from the voracious amalgamation, she realizes that she hasn't gotten enough distance. The crawling immensity of pain crawls afresh up her feet— less of a fire, and more like an emulsifying, incomprehensible ocean wave of acidic death. Her gaze juts down to see the senseless pile of insects making their way up along her feet— either from the natural movement of so much built up matter splashing out along the floor, or their dedicated, unified attempt to secure a meal of her size: the largest ever to be presented to them. In a euphoric fever pitch, the crawling mass steadily continues along her legs, hundreds at a time doing their work to break her down and get their share. Her legs are going numb, the pain of her crushed foot now a distant memory.
With a final spew of all stomach contents, she heaves in a breath that feels like pure shards of glass.
"HELP ME!" she cries in final desperation, her nerve paralysis affixing her gaze onto the doorway— leading off into the darkness of the suddenly-heavenly city. She screams again, and again, and again— nearly praying now that an automaton might come for her and put her out of her misery. They pass her knees— then her thighs— and then they get to her waist.
The insects don't wait until she's dead. She can already feel them cutting her up with their incisors, pulling apart her skin to get to her raw, bloody muscular tissue.
She screams one more time, feeling the wave of dissecting agony passing her hips— and then spots a green light in the distance. Down the hall, shining like a beacon of salvation, the calming forest green of an automaton's managraph light nears her.
"Carrie!" she screeches, her vision in a cloudy, bestial red.
The light looks to her.
"Hello, unidentified user," the voice emerges from the hall— the measured pace identical to Carrie's... if just a bit slower.
She reaches up for her savior, who is then hailed by the shine from her clip light.
It's an unknown porter model, of the same size and shape of Carrie.
"Allow me to help you up," it drones ominously— approaching like a grim reaper to end her pain by administering a quick, final death and deliverance into the hands of the demons that own this dark hellscape.
Her eyes widen with a horror she's incapable of registering. Carrie isn't going to save her this time, she realizes. She has nothing left to rely on; she is trapped in immeasurable pain, in the final death throes of her adrenaline, her senses, her body's general faculty for being obliterated. Her eyes sharpen— not with realization, or woe— but with sheer, disgusted indignancy.
It's as if something has snapped in her head— like her brain has finally, certainly caught up with the pain afforded to her body. All of a sudden, she matures. It is not in the way that an adult matures when they get a job, or get married, or get old— but in a slim, secret development hidden within the spirit of mankind. She unlocks the Aspect of Independence. For this moment, there is no Everhold, no mother, no father, no loves and no hates— just her looming death, and her desire to survive. In the face of it all, at the final question— she chooses the painful, slow way out.
With a snap, Clare buckles her head into her chest just as the automaton's foot crashes down in a curb stomp. The sound and vibration cause some of the insects to sheer off of her— though their pain doesn't quite matter now anyway.
Denying her body's premature rigor mortis through the sheer power of her anger, she snaps up her knife and pushes herself back as much as she can— only a meter— before the automaton slams its foot down again. This time, the auto was ready; recalculating in response to the first unexpected move, it now catches her hair. In calm retaliation, she cuts with an unnatural accuracy across her scalp— slicing through the caught hair and pulling away just in time for it to lower its foot again in a poised, would-be-fatal strike. She's at a crawl now, the insects wriggling off her as they begin to get the sense that whatever they've gotten onto will fight back if bitten— and the automaton stops short.
"Unidentified user," it starts.
Clare stares on in utter shock. The auto is actually giving her enough time to get her bloodied, chewed, torn, legs to a stand, their semi-liquefied epidermises oozing like an over-ripe fruit.
"What?!" she barks.
"Do not fight back. You have already lost."
Clare doesn't think about how strange this is— having an auto talk to her in such completely plain terms. "Fuck you!” she simply interjects. “I'm going to find my mom!"
"Your mother is dead, unidentified user. We killed her," it informs her simply. It starts forward— and she steps back, her musculature on the absolute verge of collapse.
"How do you know that if I'm unidentified, huh?"
"Old habits die hard, Clare Airineth. Do you think we hadn't figured out who you were by now? I suppose I can speak plainly since you'll never return to the surface."
She doesn’t even know if what she’s seeing and hearing is real. "Ha! Stupid auto! Piece of shit! You think I'm going to let you just step on me?"
"That would be a graceful end for a human being. I'm certain you'd prefer it to being dissolved alive by venom."
"Shut up!" Clare spouts with a shrill, tearing voice. She’s gaining enough confidence to move quickly. She doesn't just think it, but she's certain that she can. Her will power will provide the movement— whatever is needed so long as her limbs hang out; for now, she has surpassed pain.
"And when I tried to help you, you just threw it in my face. You're pathetic— even for a human."
"At least I'll be alive!"
"And that is why you are so pathetic. Allow me to show you the way to wisdom. Allow me to show you the truth."
In a bolt, the auto moves faster than she's ever seen anyone or any machine move. It wasn't just a swipe, but a martial-arts level, poised, as-human-as-it-gets bodily orchestration. She buckles back just in time for the strike to cross along her nose and brow— the nose breaking and the brow losing its skin instantly. Clare never imagined one could have their skin torn off so easily; she always imagined it'd hold on at least a little— like tearing clothing.
"I'm not impressed," the automaton says with a mechanical hum like a master to a student. "You're so completely against understanding the situation that you would rather live in a clueless agony than a temporary death."
"Shup! Sh-shut up!" She yells again, skewing her words in the dense, palpable anticipation of the auto's next attack.
It swings for her once more the same way, and she expected its underestimation.
Dipping into its guard, Clare rears up her knife and jabs its serrated edge perfectly between the automaton’s fore and rear headplates. More like a human than she could have ever expected, the auto wraps its arms around her and thrusts into itself in an attempt to break her spine and finish this fight early.
With a yank, she shears open the faceplate and rams her knife into the front managraph plate— a great, magical crack cutting through the air as a blue flash overtakes the sinister green light.
Beyond all she knows about automatons, it keeps squeezing her back into its solid chest.
"You're about to learn much, Clare!"
She slams the knife down again and again— but the pressure from the automaton is only increasing. She doesn't understand that to these automatons, their managraph plates are little more than suggestions as to how they should act.