I stared at her in numb disbelief, mouth thick with the taste of blood. "Zarya?"
"Yes." She carefully scooped me up into a bridal carry, standing as if I didn’t weigh anything at all. “Don’t worry, Bat’ko—you’re going to be okay.”
Chapter 38
“He’s got a punctured lung.” Angkor’s voice came from somewhere beyond my tunnel vision, oddly distant. “You should let me-”
“It’s fine. I’ve got him,” Zarya replied curtly. “Go tend your wounded—come and see me once you’re free.”
“Okay. Okay I’ll… I’ll be there soon, alright?”
I hung in the Gift Horse’s arms as she carried me into a tent. The floor was covered in foam mats with reflective silver backs and army-style sleeping bags. Zarya lay me down and propped me up on the injured side. It hurt like a bitch, but the weird folded position made it easier to breathe.
Gasping, I watched her go to a large ALICE-style Army rucksack and rifle through it, searching frantically for something.
"Wh-whh?" Dizzily, I tried to move by myself and failed. Everything was heavy and fuzzy at the edges.
Zarya didn't reply, fussing with cotton and a small glass bottle. The sharp green smell of peppermint cut the sweet fragrance of Phi as she soaked the plugs and jammed them into her nose. She sniffed a few times, shaking her head.
"Peppermint oil. I’m sorry, Father," she replied thickly in Ukrainian, facing me. "You're still a virgin... the smell of your blood would knock me out if I didn't get this first."
Words failed me as we gazed at one another. She’d grown. In blue fatigue pants and a thin-strap tank top, she was a ribbon of lean muscle, almost seven feet tall. The weak, sick, fragile creature I’d Pacted on the floor of the Manelli’s processing plant had died, and this Zarya had replaced her.
"You're alive." My voice was a wet rasp.
"Yes." She breathed the word like an incantation, and unseen power ruffled over my skin. "You fulfilled the Pact. I told you we’d see each other again."
I’d killed her, eaten her, and watched her vanish, but she was here. I reached out in shock, fingers trailing over her shoulder. As I did, Zarya cupped my face in gloved hands, smiling. Her eyes—now so much like Kutkha's—were wet with unshed tears. I stared up at her, wonder mingling with fear as that awful, hot night in August came rushing back in a torrent of imagery and sound.
My eyes brimmed with sudden tears. “Vassily didn’t make it.”
“I know.” Zarya let go of my face, and grabbed the other thing she’d pulled from the bag: a dagger in a functional leather sheath. Vision swimming, I watched her pull the blade, and stared at the weapon in sudden hunger.
“They turned him into a monster.” A wracking shudder passed through my limbs. “Z-Zarya, please-”
“This isn’t for you.” The Mare shook her head and set the edges between her lips. She pursed them as she drew the blade forward. The soft flesh parted like a peach, silver blood streaming from the cuts. I drew a deep, painful breath at the smell. High, floral, humming like a live wire, it cleared the air like a shockwave. Light seemed brighter, breathing became easier. She knelt down over me, and brought my head up so that I could meet her mouth with mine.
“It will be okay.” Zarya’s bloody kiss rolled through me like thunder, sheet lightning lancing down into my mouth to stab up behind my eyes, blasting through my gut, energizing every nerve. I could feel my heart squeeze, my cells regenerate, divide, and then die off according to some ineffable design.
My cock hardened and I stiffened with it, shaking uncontrollably through an ecstatic, painless release. The pain ebbed away, and in its wake was nothing but Light! and a deep, savage hunger. I surged up against Zarya, driven by instinct so powerful that I ceased feeling the rest of my body entirely. It was all mouth and greedy, swallowing throat. Everything vibrated, steadily building in both volume and power, consolidating into the sound of GOD’s heart beating through time and space. It always said the same thing.
...LoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYou...
As the Phi put me under, I saw Kutkha in a nest spun of MahTree branches, his head tucked under his wing, and I felt – and somehow, observed – the way that this Tree’s roots had meshed through my body. Seams of light were braided along my spinal cord and the big nerves of my torso and legs like veins of gold in quartz.
The Rhizomes, I realized, not without a little wonder – and fear. What did this mean for me? For Kutkha? For the Tree?
Consciousness returned gently and slowly, like the rising sun. I was warm, soaked with sweat, and covered by an open sleeping bag. The bag was damp and dirty from the filth that had been ejected from my skin, a slurry of dirt, infection, and toxins pushed out by the flux of Zarya’s blood. My shoulder was healed, the flesh that Glory had taken filled back in with new, silvery-pink tissue. The throbbing, infected wound no longer hurt. As I moved and stretched, there were small aches and pains. The muscle memory of the injuries lingered, the ache of freshly healed nerves adjusting to normalcy. I looked at the inside of my arm: the Glagolitic symbols I’d used to code Lee’s coordinates had scarred over. They were faint, but legible.
"Zarya?" I called out to her in the thick silence. She wasn't in the tent, and it was zipped up—both layers. Puzzled, I started to get up and put my hand down on a pile of neatly folded clothes. They were approximately my size: a coverall and a t-shirt, underwear, and to my relieved surprise, a pair of thin leather gloves.
Once I was dressed, I pushed my way out of the tent into a camp that occupied a huge dilapidated building, a grand hall that was partly open to the night sky. Close to half the ceiling was missing, but the rain and wind that lashed New York never reached the camp. It hit a translucent energy barrier, an orange-tinted field that sparked and shivered under the icy assault of the storm. And just as well: the sky was a weird, sick grey-green, moaning and rumbling with spiraling clouds.
The only people outside were guards watching the entry and exit points. The futuristic workstations were now only manned by one person, a stocky, sandy-blond man in a black t-shirt and urban camouflage pants. He had his feet up on the black gun crates that served as his desk. He was ugly as sin from the neck up, fleshy and flat-featured, but he had the plush, muscular build of a Marine and the same kind of jarhead haircut. He was chewing gum and typing one-handed on a small, flat keyboard that didn't seem to have any keys: just patches of rainbow-hued light that lit up every time his fingers pattered over it.
"You looking for His Royal Whoreness?" The guy called out to me as I slowly wove my way toward him.
“Uh.” I hung back at a respectable distance. He looked HuMan—but after what I'd seen, who knew? “Do you mean-?”
“Angkor?” He pronounced his name like ‘Ang-gore’, with the kind of hard accent that made me think of Chicago or Milwaukee. “Yeah. That’s who I’m talking about. Last time I saw him, he and Zarya were off in the bushes together. But that was a couple hours ago.”
Together? My gut clenched. “I see. And who are you, exactly?”
“Lieutenant COMMO Douglas Digger at your service, Sir.” He saluted with one finger to his brow, not looking away from the flashing screen. An action movie... no. A video game, because he was clearly interacting with it. But one so realistic that it was almost indistinguishable from a movie.
I stared at him dully. “Of the...?”
“ANSWER Cellular Scout Corps. COMMO division.”
It was difficult not to stare at his screen in astonishment. “And they do...?”
“Technically, I’m the COMM’s Officer attached to the Flying Fucks, which is the bulk of the Cellular Scout squadron you see before you,” He pulled out a napkin and spat his gum into it, then reached for a bottle of crystal cola. “Realistically, I’m Angkor’s substitute mom and a spittoon all rolled up in one.”
I regarded this man—he really looked like a ‘Doug’, not a ‘Mr. Digger’—with a deepening sense of madness. I wasn’t quite convinced I was awake. �
��Right. You… have a history together?”
“I’ve been Angkor’s COMMO for so long that I’m basically an armchair serial killer,” Doug said. “The kind of shit I have to listen to over that fucking radio... Like, for his birthday once, I played him ‘Happy Birthday to You’ with a track made up of all the grunting, screaming Gift Horse murdergasms he’s had over the years.”
“Clearly I know less about him than I thought I did,” I said.
“You’re not the first person to say that.”
Not Zarya, apparently. “Do you know where he is now?”
“Probably sucking something’s dick. Go check down under the chapel,” Doug replied. “First building from the rear exit, down the stairs. Watch out for the Tulaq.”
Too-lack? “The what?”
“Tulaq. Big teeth. Flappy wings.” Doug made a Tinkerbell wing motion with his hands. “If she gives you any shit, just tell her that Zarya and Digger say you’re cool.”
Tulaq. Right. I nodded stiffly. “One last question. Where are we?”
Doug arched his eyebrows, which made him look even more like a pug. “North Brother Island. The old sanitarium. Jeez, they didn’t tell you anything, did they?”
“No, they didn’t. Thank you.” I nodded curtly and withdrew, shivering inside of the coverall. The craving for a drink was echoing in my head again... something strong and sour, like the way I felt about anything involving Angkor and Zarya, together.
Chapter 39
The chapel Doug described appeared at first glance to be solid after almost a hundred years of neglect. I slunk out under the eerie umbrella that covered the old sanitarium, the building where Typhoid Mary had spent her final days. I gazed off into the horizon, and saw the city bathed in thick smog... or smoke. From here, the devastation that had to be taking place could not be seen. It felt remote. Surreal, even.
The bare, dusty chapel had an air of sanctity that was unmistakable—a cool, sweet-smelling hush that fell over my shoulders like a mantle as I pressed in and went down a flight of stairs. Instinct led me unerringly to an arched underground room that was half excavated earth, half stone.
I opened the old door into a wall of humid heat: damp, hot air heavy with the smell of moss and lush greenery. Vines and roots clung to the broken remains of the chapel’s basement. Radiant light broke through the ceiling in places, including the makeshift dais where a strange machine thrummed and pulsed with light—and life. It reminded me somewhat of an amphora, but it was much larger, and had a wet, silvery surface that rippled with motion just under the surface. Angkor sat in front of it on his bed, a thin air mattress, sharpening a small armory’s worth of rainbow-hued knives with a whetstone. His head jerked up at the sound of the door.
“Alexi.” He set the knife down and stood in alarm. He was still wearing the bodysuit I’d seen on him during our horse ride out of the sewers. “You’re alive.”
The sight of him made me feel oddly tired. Angkor was still beautiful enough to make my pulse pound. Full-lipped, sloe-eyed, his dark hair tousled from his helmet, my body responded to the sight of him with bittersweet hunger. I didn’t know how I felt about that. “Angkor.”
He approached me at a quick walk, searching my face as he closed in. I was about to say something – try to get angry at him, maybe – when he lay his long hands against the front of my shoulders and, after a moment’s hesitation, pulled me into a stiff-armed embrace.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t make it,” he said. “Truly. Please believe me when I say that I couldn’t find a way to let you know what had happened.”
I breathed in the familiar sweet-spicy smell of his neck, and haltingly returned the embrace. “It’s… it’s not ‘okay’. But I’ll hear you out, ‘Zealot’.”
He stood back from me, hands still resting on my arms. “Who’d you pick that up from?”
“Kristen Cross’s report to Norgay, whoever he is,” I replied. “That was the first time I heard it. I figured out who it was when Lee Harrison died in my arms.”
His mouth framed a silent ‘O’ for a moment, and the light in his eyes faltered as he scowled and looked down.
“Zealot of what?” I shrugged him off, not entirely gently. “There’s already two parties of fanatics in this game. I don’t know if I’m comfortable knowing there’s a third.”
He laughed, a little hollowly. “Zealots are a unit in a video game called StarCraft. It, uh, hasn’t been invented here yet. Seven years from now.”
I stared at him, puzzled.
“StarCraft is kind of a big deal in South Korea.” He smiled sheepishly, and shrugged. “Like, it’s a televised professional sport for people who can’t play sports. It’s a wargame with three factions. I was a Protoss player, and Zealots are one of the main Protoss units, so…”
I held up a hand. “What do you mean, seven years from now?”
“I don’t know if you remember me telling you about Cells.” Angkor sobered, and the subtle physical connection between us faded as he crossed his arms and rested his weight back on his heels. “Cells are planets, the ‘cells’ within GOD’s mass. I told you I was a traveler between worlds. Well, that’s true. Not all Cells are synchronous. Some are in the future or the past, relative to this world. The shortest explanation I have for that is that the closer a Cell is to the Skin of GOD, the more ‘in the future’ it is and the faster time passes. So to quote Arnie, I’m from the future. Make sense?”
“More than anything else I’ve had to deal with in the last twelve hours.” I shrank into myself, grasping my own arm and squatting to rest on the floor. It wasn’t just Angkor that made me tired: it was everything. It was the echoing rapport of the MahTree’s screams, and the warring need to tell Angkor what had happened with Joshua Keen, and the Tigers, and… everything. “Look. I was pissed off at you for leaving without saying anything. I think I’m still pissed off, but not as much as I was. Not after talking to Lee Harrison.”
“What happened to her?” Angkor squatted down, too. Like me, he could do it flat-footed. That lifted my mood, momentarily.
“She died,” I said. “The Vigiles killed her while we were escaping their holding facility. Before you ask, I never met Kristen. Ayashe called me in to look at the crime scene after she was murdered by her own people.”
“Shit. It was them.” Angkor winced, looking down pensively at the ground. “Dammit. That means I screwed up even worse than I thought I had.”
“Why? How?”
He gestured toward the city. “The MahTree. I was here because of her, all this time. She sent out a distress call and broadcast her position just before we arrived. I guess she’d been too weak to do it before then. Now she’s Ruined. They’re sending the military out to shoot her and bomb her, and you know what that does to Morphorde. She’s going to get bigger, and she’s going to burrow into this world like a metastatic cancer and we… I failed her. And you. Everyone.”
“It’s not over yet.” I reached back to rub my neck. There were no scars, not even scabs, but somehow I knew that what I’d seen in my Phi-fueled dream was real. The Tree had given me something that was now part of my body, and it was something that could be used to help her. “And there’s people who need us. The Vigiles set up Jenner and all the other Tigers at the fight they’re having tonight.”
“Tonight or last night?”
I paused for a moment. “What day is it? How long was I out?”
Angkor gave me a look that was almost sympathy. “It’s the first of November.”
“Shit.” I breathed slowly and stared at the wall. “Then it’s already over, and the Vigiles have them. We have to go and help her.”
Angkor cocked his head to the side, biting his lip. “That depends-”
“There’s no fucking ‘it depends’. She saved your ass from the TVS. She housed you and fed you when you had nothing.”
“It depends if we can even reach them.” Angkor’s head jerked up, eyes dark with warning. “You haven’t seen what the Tree is doing to t
he city.”
Even as he said that, a deep moan rumbled through the foundations of the building, and the amphora-shaped whatever-it-was flared, crackling with orange light. A familiar burned-crayon-wax smell cut through the room, sharp and chemical. Angkor didn’t seem to notice: He reached down to a pouch on his belt, fumbling for his cigarettes.
“We’re meeting with the commander of my division in about fifteen minutes,” he said, reluctantly. “If he gives the all-clear, we’ll look into it. If not-”
“There’s no ‘if’,” I replied. “I don’t care if you and your ANSWER division approve or not. I don’t care if this ‘Norgay’ is the damn President. If you won’t go, I will.”
“ANSWER isn’t part of the U.S. military,” he replied, lighting up. His hands were shaking. “We’re not even from this world. We’re an interstitial paramilitary. Anti-Morphorde, pro-GOD. I’m not from this planet. Hell, I’m not even from this fucking time period. I was still a kid during 1991 on my home Cell.”
“I don’t care.” I stood, too agitated to remain close to the ground. “They’re my people – our people. We’re going for them.”
“I’ll be holding off on a decision until I speak to the Director.” Angkor shook his head, blowing a plume of smoke toward the floor. “No offense, Alexi… I like you, and I respect you, but I don’t know if I trust you.”
That hit me like a dull blow to the gut. “What? Why? What have I done that’s untrustworthy?”
“An informant told me you were having your wrist twisted by the Vigiles.” Angkor’s face was hard, jaws tense. “I personally saw you break into the Church of the Voice carrying a Vigiles weapon, covered in human blood. Later, you were cooperating with Elij... Glory. I figured-”
“His name’s Elijah?” The name made something ripple up along my spine, a weird tingling rush that prickled all the hair on my neck.
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