“But also so that you can figure out where he came from and how he came to be this way. For your own experiments. And to learn enough that you don’t need him.”
“To learn enough to help him,” Michael said. “If we do not understand his ethnicity, his genealogy, his development, his cultural norms at the time of trauma and after… standard scientific knowledge fails us because he is, to our knowledge, unique. I have searched every continent. There is nothing like him to study for comparison. He could be dying right now. We cannot know unless we study him.”
Rachana scowled as she pointed the remote at Michael.
“He is dying right now, Michael. You brought them here. Don’t sugarcoat reality.”
The arachnidan man’s face changed, for the first time since Eliza met him, from placid indifference to anger. Ice filled her gut and she stumbled backwards. It was not a face she ever wanted to see again. Rachana was undisturbed.
“Fine. I’ll tell them. You can make moralize our work all you like, Doctor Reyes. Charlie is dying.”
She clicked. The globe spun to focus on Brazil’s Atlantic coast. A red circle appeared.
“This is Alcantara Launch Command. In eight weeks, the Grupo, alongside several partners and with the support of the South American Space Alliance, will launch an experimental deep-solar habitat into orbit. The vessel is meant to send a small crew deep into solar orbit on a 12-month expedition to test human survival techniques. Charlie will takes the crew’s place.”
“Why?”
“He wants to leave,” Michael said.
For the second time in as many minutes, his mask shifted. Eliza wanted his angry mask back. This new sorrow was somehow worse. Was his face only capable of extreme emotions?
“No,” Rachana said. “He wants to die.”
“Why?”
Eliza’s hands were grasped together over her aching chest. This could not be the story. This could not be the reason. She could not be a part of this, not again, not now when life was beginning to make itself attainable.
Rachana hesitated but finally spoke.
“His existence is suffering. You are exhausted. We understand. But you must look past that to see what we have struggled against for decades. You must see our urgency. Eight weeks is the briefest of moments remaining in the work of a century. Imagine your entire life was written and edited not by your functioning mind but by an endless cycle of fictionalized traumas and confused origins.”
She flung an arm over her mouth as several wet coughs rattled free.
“How many times do you think he’s rewritten his own life’s story? How often has he lived through traumas more vivid than what you experienced last night? What did it take to arrive at this science fiction he thinks is his life?”
Eliza’s hand covered her mouth. She reached out to touch the launch center on the hologram but stopped.
“There has to be another way. There has to be.”
“Then you finally understand your role here,” Rachana said. “We’re at the end of what we can achieve without new data. There is so much more we will discuss to make you understand. You have a lot to learn. But he will not be stopped. We physically can’t. We have to learn more about how he became like this if we’re going to help him.”
A rare tear ran down Eliza’s face. It dripped from her chin. The sickly woman’s earnestness disturbed her. This was the truth, however partial. They wanted to help this man. They wanted to help themselves, too. How could she deny it? She had seen him. She had lived through his story as if it had been her life. What else had they seen that reports and holograms could never represent?
It was unbelievable, but wasn’t that her job? She and Rachana were scientists of different sorts. Helena Haim taught her better. When faced with discordant information and an undeniable truth, the choice was not to deny the truth but to connect the dots.
WeHaveTheChanceThisTimeMakeThisOneDifferentThisIsWhereWeBelongBeHere
“How can we help?”
CHAPTER 13 - THE HUNT
The lion licked its parched lips to taste the morning dew. The mangy, rhyming scents of sweat and fear mingled with that dew. A foolish creature had followed it to this odd hill.
The cat eased below the surrounding grasses. Its tongue flickered. More of the same strangeness. At least it was not a tiger. Those striped bastards ruined all things. No, it was a man, another evil thing that stole from the lion.
A brown bear would announce itself. The lion liked bears. They fought well and tasted better. The lion liked moose, too, though they were hardest of all things, except the tiger, to kill. It would settle for a rust-stained roe deer or even a slinking weasel. It would settle for any meal at all.
The black-maned king of beasts paused beside the tall stone wall that topped the hill. It knew what walls were. The scent was nearby. It considered entering the narrow halls but decided to prowl outside. It licked its lips again. The scent was all fearful man and exposed bone. Maybe the man carried a kill. But the lion could not find blood on the wind.
It did not matter. The lion could feed today and again tomorrow. Its hollow stomach, eager for the twenty or thirty pounds of meat it could hold, already ached. Today would be a good day.
Fen watched the lion think through its problem from his perch atop the wall. Even a lion as wise as this one must be, if you counted the scars on its graying muzzle as battles survived if not entirely won, would never think to look up while out here among the grasses where there were no trees. It didn’t matter if the creature had stalked prey in an abandoned city at some point in its long life. Wild things, like people, avoided those burned places where the lightning still came to sing its triumphs. Hemanta’s technique worked well. Most creatures could not change how they viewed their world. It was hardest of all for the queens and kings.
The hunter paused at the ring fort’s gate, considered entering, and then turned to circle the high walls. Fen understood. He thought the place eerie, too. People even older than the Hollow Folk built this fort on the only hill for as far as a hawk’s eyes could see. They abandoned it soon after. His father told him all this one morning many years before when he returned from another expedition. Fen had dreamt of this fort ever since.
The Hollow People left it standing despite their taste for ruining their own histories. Three broken stone rings crowned the hill, one inside the other, forming a kind of labyrinth that only its occupants would understand when raiders came to steal their cattle. Black ash stained the ancient walls.
Fen decided he could tolerate a building such as this, a place still open to the unending sky, where people lived among the world instead of outside it. The fort stood for centuries while lives began and ended.
The lion huffed. Fen startled but held steady. An old hunter’s trick, meant to emulate the antelope’s signal to run. The hunter’s nostrils flared and slimed as it searched the air for him. He knew he stank. For three long days, he marched the plains in search of a worthy prize. He took another day to wind his trail back to the ring fort and waited an entire freezing night for the lion to follow his bait.
His hands tightened around the short spear. It was his only weapon, as he considered such things. His own limbs were more useful by far. The razor-edged armor growing from the scarred places on his body was better still.
The rules of the hunt required him to take a weapon. He chose his long-gone mother’s spear. She had smiled when she handed it to him the morning before she left on her perpetual hunt.
“Your father brought me this from some city. I do not know the name.”
Hemanta dropped the spear into her young son’s hands as she emerged from their tent. It was still their humble home then, not made rich by Jonah’s influence and Fen’s successes in the sparring ring. It was still the tent where he was born, and born again. He fumbled the heavy gift.
The shaft was nearly as long as his arm, a perfect length for carrying, throwing, and thrusting. Its material was black, mottled, unfamiliar, and the same as the sharp head
that flared wide at as the base before quickly narrowing to a point.
He ran his thumb along the edge. A thin red line appeared before he registered mild pain. He started to wipe it on their tent’s exterior but sucked the blood away instead.
“What will you use to hunt? Winter comes soon.”
Hemanta gestured to her legs. She hunted in the Thundercloud way more and more often. He hated it. The hides were more valuable when they weren’t punctured but the dehydrated meat of a terrified animal tasted almost as bad as eating nothing at all. Almost.
He started to ask her why but saw her vacant stare at the horizon. She was no longer here with him. She had not been, not truly, since the day she gave him to Jonah. She longed to run.
“When will you return?”
Her mask broke. The taller woman crouched beside her son.
“Do you know how to use this? It is a helpful tool.”
“What is it made from?”
“Your father named it steel. He said other names too. They meant nothing to me. It is like iron but different. It will not rust as fast. Do you know how to use this?”
He looked into his mother’s eyes and saw a thing he had never seen before. He knew her fury, her love, her hunger, even her fear, as rare as that was. He did not know her sadness until now.
“I know enough from you. The weight will help. Thank you. When will you return?”
She blinked and rose, looking back to the horizon.
“When my hunt is finished. Tell Jonah.”
She walked from the tent’s entrance to the edge of the grasses.
“When will you return?”
He tried to set his face to match hers. All people wore masks. They helped the person be who they needed to be. Why had no one told him how much strength they sometimes took to wear? He wanted to dash his to pieces and make his mother stay. Something was wrong inside her mind. Leyevi Hemanta Artemia left their home a long time ago. This woman in front of him was all that remained.
“I love my son,” she said without looking away from the horizon. “I will return when my hunt is finished.”
Fen rubbed his wrists against each other, shedding bone dust into the gentle wind. His mother was long gone. The lion would be, too, if it suspected this was a waste of time. He could count its ribs from three hundred lengths. It was too hungry to waste time, too hungry to forfeit a meal. He smelled his own bone on the wind and knew the lion already had.
The spear and his stitched goat hair breeches were the only things he brought out to the true Steppe. The coarse breeches scratched his own coarse hide. He looked up at the blazing morning sun. It beat down on them both, foreshadowing the oven that this day would become. A shimmering haze already rose from the stone walls.
He pressed his hand against the dark rock. It stung through his hardened skin. He licked his lips, tasted the morning damp as it cooked away, and peered over the wall. The lion was gone.
Fen crouched lower, filling his nose as the lion had, and felt. Sometimes, if the place around him was as still as the lake at Baikal in deep winter, and if he drew in breath through only his nose until the crisscrossed scars on his torso threatened to burst their patchwork bindings and the gruesome white star on his right flank groaned, he could smell as the field beasts did.
This lion’s carnivorous breath overwhelmed him. He sputtered but stopped the cough before it betrayed his location. The lion starved. He could taste its acrid breath rush past its infectious teeth. What it lacked in muscle, though, it would compensate for with experience, desperation, and rage. The old tooth bit deepest.
To kill a healthy young male was one victory. A man could take a Mongolian bow, three birch arrows, and two ash spears to the Steppe and return, more times than not, clad in the maned hide of a rutting young prince who strayed too close to a fresh blood bait.
To kill a starving monarch… he almost broke his silence to laugh. A gift from the grasslands, if only he could find the lion. Its universal stench became a disguise as every breeze now stank of it.
The man stood for the first time in many hours. He was a startling figure against the azure backdrop of the cloudless sky. Heavy muscle hung from a short and once lanky frame, a gift of years spent sparring with Jonah and the once endless, now thinning string of challengers. The way he stood betrayed the few secrets he might have kept. His legs bowed, slight but noteworthy, from half a childhood spent crippled and another half in constant, reckless motion. Copper skin drank up the sun. Wild ashen hair gave the man a mane that would humble a young lion.
But what startled all who met him were the bones, the hardened armor plates of scab and blade that erupted from his skin at all the places one fighter might use to strike another. Sharp splinters of the mottled grey-white protrusions ran down his forearms to his elbows. More grew from his knuckles and knees. Twin peaks grew taller each year from their bedrock around his right elbow. They would lock together if he straightened his arm. Another year or three and he might lose use of the limb.
Those ugly mountains that rose several inches from his native bone boasted craggier edges than any other growth. They had already tried to claim his life, leaving a fist-sized ragged white scar in his ribs where he let himself forget, just for a moment while claiming victory over Jonah, how sharp those mountains could be.
So far, none emerged without provocation. He knew each cut by the name of the person who gave it to him. Most were named Jonah. The osseous growths left his more muscular features be unless he let himself be cut. Then they grew, never consistently, never uniformly, always in place of whatever human flesh once lived there. Those spars not rooted near true bone shed with time. Together, they made him a harsh pangolin among his smooth-skinned people.
He struggled to hold still during these long hunts. The flesh around his exposed bone itched with a steady fire. The skin and bone could never agree to live together, as though his body tried to reclaim its rebellious materials. They would probably consume him, if he understood anything Jonah taught him about evolyutsiya, about his cancer.
Such changes were good, his coach said. They prepared him better for the world. Not all peoples grew like this. Some waited generations, centuries, forever for a change. He savored the jaw-clenching irritation. It felt like penance for the wounds he inflicted on Old Dread Balerion and so many, many foolish opponents. Pain was the privilege of life.
A tail flickered in the grasses beyond his range. Good. The cats held still when stalking prey and teased when seeking battle. It challenged him as it vanished again. He trusted his eyes to track the shifting sea. The lion’s meaty breath filled his nose. Close, just there, just a length away, somewhere.
He thought lion must feel the same frustration that some tasty morsel of humankind, or something like it, waited just there, just a length away, somewhere.
The lion appeared beneath him. It sniffed the wall, turned back to the grasses, and returned to sniff the wall again. It had decided. So had he. He let the beast turn back a final time, gripped the spear until the knuckles of his hands popped, and sprang from the wall.
He drove the spear into the lion’s shoulder but connected with stone instead. He slammed and bounced away, rolling onto his feet and away from the impact.
The startled lion whipped its head around like a confused child. Its silent search rumbled into a focused growl as it locked eyes with its newest rival. The spear still stood in the muscle between its shoulders. Had he made a mistake when he chose the spear, this lion, this day?
The lion stepped forward. Fen’s legs coiled and launched without his command. He let them throw him at the beast. It recoiled, crouching on its hind legs, and he wondered if it would yield. The beast launched instead. Paws larger than his entire head slammed into his chest. The ground rose up to meet and then hurt him. It stole precious air from his lungs.
A mountain landed on his chest. He tried to roll but could not escape his new prison. Its breath, yes that was the lion’s awful starving breath and not the rot
ted sweet guts of a sun-bleached goat, poured into his lungs until he could sense nothing else. He choked on the breath of the animal that would eat him.
He could also sense everything else. The lion’s pulsing veins throbbed with its hungry blood. The blood itself teemed with an abundant life he had never noticed. The individual hairs of its ragged black mane stood as honor guard against the hostile world in defense of a neck still stronger than the mightiest human limb. No, he thought between thoughts, some grew stronger in these new days. He would be stronger.
The teeth looked oddly perfect for such a seasoned beast. It fed well for many years. He saw the end of his world waiting in its mouth. He wanted to reach into the air between them to touch the crystalline details hanging there. How had he never seen the bits of life that made up the air they breathed together?
Tawny. That was the color of its fur. Gooseflesh rolled in waves up his spine to his quaking arms. Ants crawled into the nest of his bushy hair. His shattered ribs began their familiar reknitting into an alien armor. His gut tightened, clenched, and threatened to force his bowels into violent release. He tightened to stop himself from pissing, exhaled, and let the single moment pass.
Fen slammed his fists into the lion’s ribs. His itching spurs separated flesh from bone as he struck again and again, two, three, four hammer blows until the lion leapt away. Its hot blood flowed into the pink places where his bones emerged from his skin. He licked the blood from his knuckles and decided he wanted more.
The beast circled. Shreds of fur and flesh hung from its heaving chest. It crouched and lunged low for his ankles. Fen sprang left, launched again, and hooked his barbed wrists down the lion’s flank as he flew over.
The Steppe king roared. Fen’s body froze despite his mind’s commands. The roar thundered in his ears until he thought he would never hear again and then it faltered with the lion’s pain.
He tried to reply but his own tattered voice squawked. Old Jonah would laugh at this when he shared the story later. Even now, he could muster nothing more than a boy’s voice. Would he ever grow into a man?
The Sin Eaters Page 15