The Sin Eaters

by Aaron Summers

  The alarm flashed a cold red 09:42 into the dark room. The shrill sound should have startled Eliza, had she been sleeping, or even existed. Charlie pawed at the empty air where she had been. The room was gone. He sat alone in his isolation chamber again.

  He had been there all night, in silence, staring into the Stygian darkness that defined this place. He leaned against the blast-proof door as though he guarded it from anything other than himself. The ruined concrete walls were gouged by his claws. The only sound, beyond his body’s endless symphony of organic processes that forced him to continue living, was the whisper of pure sweet oxygen from a single port. The room was entirely empty. He loved it all. Whatever feral specters might haunt him, at least in here he could create some measure of separation. Outside, the demons were inside him. In here, they sat beside him.

  His chest tightened as he remembered fragments of faces. They swirled behind his vision. A girl cried against his shoulder. Her brittle hair stank of ocean salt. He drew a breath and smiled. Lava flowed from the broken place in his healthy leg. It singed his skin as it dripped onto the floor, vanishing just before it touched concrete.

  A fishing net slipped between his fingers amid a field of blooming flowers so pink that they hurt his milky blind eyes. He swallowed the oceanic flavors of life and exhaled the intimacy of his own blood.

  She was standing in front of him. He began to rise but decided to stay seated. The dizziness would find him soon.

  “You are quiet today,” he murmured to the empty room.

  “I am not here.”

  She was speaking that forgotten language again. Why was it her native tongue some days but not others? Eliza would understand. He would try to tell her before he boarded the vessel. She promised to be his sin eater when he was gone, after all. He chose to respond using the language he didn’t know.

  “But you are.”

  They were always here. He smiled as the reflexive thoughts began again. They would always run their orbits. He let himself detach as the theater commenced. It would distract that darker beast inside him for a little while.

  “You are as here as me. It does not matter that you are made from the poison inside me.”

  She faded beneath his candor but brightened when he stopped speaking.

  “This choice you make is small.” She held up her flickering fingers. “Narrow. It is too little for you.”

  She brought her upraised hands together as she crouched. Her hands framed her face. He saw a warm spring meadow behind her. He blinked and the meadow was gone. When he looked again, it had returned. It was the world outside her hands that lied. Her hands held the truth. He drank in the familiarity of her foreign speech. Had he known this, once?

  “We know, but I am too tired for this to continue. There is no other way. The only way out is through but I can find no end to this tunnel.”

  She placed her hand on his scarred knuckles.

  “There is always a way. Where does the tree’s path lead?”

  Even deep inside his thoughts, Charlie startled. He had never told anyone about the path, had hardly let himself consider it. To hear the vision of a woman who looked more familiar, more solid, more real by the second, ask so casually about this deepest string inside his abyssal mind scared him in a way he had not felt in lifetimes.

  He let one hand drape over his upturned knee as he considered the almost faded scar on the inside of his forearm that Einhar gave him so very long ago. He ached to thank the long-dead watchman for the gift of the scar. It helped him find his way better than anything else, even the iron sigil with the same runes that he was leaving behind.

  “The vessel takes me from it.”

  “Do you not want to know where the path ends?” Her childish questioning voice needled him.

  “It does not end! You cannot force this on me. I have lived this endless journey, not you.”

  The specter giggled. Was she younger than she looked? She sounded like a child.

  “How long, Charlie? Before Takka?”

  He closed his eyes at the sound of the other’s name. Tears brimmed beneath heavy lids.

  “Before Jernbjorn? Before you were nothing?”

  She squeezed his hand now. The tender touch transformed into a vice. She would not let go. A stream of tears ran down his face. He tasted his own salt as it dripped over his quivering lips.

  “Before Akuma.” His voice shifted into another unknown language. “Before I was kamuy. Before I floated all the days of my life. Before…”

  He stopped because the words ended themselves. They would not move past his lips. The vice tightened until a mountain crushed his fist. Her tongue glowed like the lava he had seen on the burning mountain and then its sound aged beyond memory.

  “How long, Shariyu? Do you remember the grandfather and the bird? You told me of Ziz. I did not steal this from your fertile mind.”

  “I remember Sky.” He gasped, saying the word like a name, and canted his head at the sound his own voice made. “The children and the fire.”

  “And your father, the captain.”

  “He was not my father!”

  Charlie spat each word and finally the borrowed language out of his mouth. A haze obscured her face. Her grip tightened until he could no longer feel the hand at all. It was well. He could grow another.

  He held up his other palm as offering but could no longer see her. She shimmered just behind the flickering silver leaves that sprawled above him. He felt the concrete floor below him but when he looked down he saw, as he knew he would, the unended and unstarted gnarled tree trunk.

  That path would be there, as it always had been, birthed from the crumbling mountains that were the tree’s tall roots. Plain white space filled the sky around him. A pinprick of perfect black waited at the roots like a dragon feasting on the beginning of everything.

  “I will climb no more,” he told the leaves.

  Each was larger than him, some two or three times wider than the span of his reach and veined like the sprawling lines of these new cities that covered the earth. He reached up to push a leaf away but found it cupped in his palm. He wrapped a paw around it to tear it free but stopped. There would only be more. He withdrew his hand.

  “How long, Fetu?”

  The towering spire that was the tree the size of the world rumbled. He dug his claws into its bark as the leaves above clanged together with a raucous metallic fury. They were shifting gold and molten bronze when the earthquake slowed. He stepped down onto the path that wrapped around the trunk. It was hardly as wide as his shoulders and had never been there before. Something was different now. He had forced a change, a concession, no matter how small. That did not matter. It was too late. It was time to leave.

  “Too long, but I do not know that name.”

  This new, old language tasted better than all the others, like cool spring water in the desert.

  “It is your name.”

  He looked up to see her dirty bare feet dangling over the side. He would reach her in a single spiral around the trunk. She kicked her legs while she waited.

  “Names mean little and less. They are like breezes in the hot summer or fishes in the sea. One may come and go as fast as another. How much of my pain is buried with that name? It is my torment you delight in.”

  “No, boy.”

  She was ahead of him on the path and was a little girl. Wind burnt and tan with a mess of frizzled black hair that stank of the ocean, she could barely stand still while she spoke. She wore a simple tunic for the high summer’s work. Her tiny hands were already knotted from weaving nets and leathered from salting meats. But she was young and beautiful and his sister. Charlie stumbled forward.

  “I know you.”

  She smiled and raced up the path. He chased after but she flickered and was gone.

  “You were always so fast. Ariad, come back! I cannot catch you.”

  He stumbled beneath the yoke on his shoulders. When he turned to look over the path, he saw only the grassy p
lains, the thriving forest, and the dark mountain off to the west. It hissed and smoked but never burned. Maybe the elders were wrong. Who ever saw a mountain spit fire? His parents would tell him of this.

  The towering ocean waited to the east. It would fall onto the island soon, one day, eventually. Bouncing locks of hair cut through the grasses ahead of him. He dropped the yoke to chase her but fell back onto the path.

  “Fetu is your name.” The last word stretched on forever. “The best name because it is your first name. Do you not yet remember?”

  “I… no.” He rubbed the middle of his shin. “I lost it.”

  “The leg, yes, and the name, yes. Both can grow back with time as all things can. You wish to leave. Go then.”

  Charlie’s mind slipped onto the other path, the one that lived farther down where every thought circled around and he found only smooth walls where there should be doors, or at least cracks. Some monster had scored the walls with its fangs and claws. A circle of perfect blackness waited in the path’s center for him to stop walking so that it could consume him.

  He forced his thoughts back to the ledge. They were sitting on a platform grown from the mighty trunk. Hundreds of platforms spiraled around the eternal tree. Pachamama would like it here. She deserved to see this. Many people did. Then they could understand.

  “Enough of this. I have waited for too long and walked this path no matter the pain. You have seen it all. No, not you,” he brushed a hand against her face, “but, yes. You. There is such a thing as too long. Even the stars burn out. I learned this while you were away.”

  She shrugged.

  “No there isn’t, and no they won’t. Unless we let them. Do you not yet see where we are headed? You must continue.”

  Roaring redness filled the dark chamber. It glowed off the walls. He pressed his palms to his face and felt the dripping sweat. It matted his shaggy hair. He blinked, swallowing hard, and tried to separate his thoughts from themselves before the evil organ in his neck triggered. He pressed a finger to it and felt it throb. Of course. He growled. How else? There was no difference between it and him.

  His eyes were burning. This was new, at least as much as he could ever remember. He touched the tender skin and felt deep channels filled with molten metal. The patterns formed a starburst around his eyes. No, not metal. Scar tissue. He had been weeping acidic tears. That had to be new. It was time to leave this place before the changes grew him into something that would never want to leave, would never let itself be threatened again. It was time to go.

  CHAPTER 27 - TZACOL

  The vessel gleamed in the open field. Eliza decided “shuttle” wasn’t good enough to describe this silver-skinned monolith but knew too much about its design to let herself call it a rocket. The true habitat was buried deep within the vessel’s navigational structure. Charlie would live in a space hardly larger than the home she grew up in. It would be all the space he ever had again. That, and all the space between the stars.

  Almost 100 meters long itself, the deep-solar habitat named AEB Tzacol looked enough like a NASA shuttle, except for the missing orange fuel tank and white booster rockets, that she could almost let herself believe it really was a shuttle carrying astronauts to orbit for research and not an experimental vessel hijacked from a second-tier space organization sending her friend to die in space. Almost.

  The command center door hissed open. She smelled Rachana before she saw her. The chemicals, the radiation, the raw ketones on the woman’s breath… she would die soon and was here for her pound of flesh.

  “Listen, Rachana, I’m not in the mood to…”

  The director held up a quivering hand. Her skin had faded in the past few weeks to match her lab coat.

  “No need. I did not come here to chastise you for wasting these last precious weeks.”

  “Uh huh. That’s why you threw that little dig…”

  “Because your work,” the director cleared her throat with a wet cough, “was not a waste. We’ve made a breakthrough, based in part on the information he chose to share with you. We have new leads. Now leave me be.”

  She puttered past Eliza to settle in at a control terminal. Eliza turned back to the room and screamed. Tim was out of his chair and on his feet to stand between her and whatever she had seen. She slapped him away.

  “Michael, Christ, I’m sorry. I thought I’d be used to… thought this would get more normal. We were making progress.”

  The ghoul waved her off.

  “I suspected this might occur during your extended absences. Your developed tolerance for me has waned. It is of no concern. I am glad we are all here to carry this burden together.”

  “When did you get here? You weren’t at the compound when we got back from the Galapagos. Charlie’s been looking for you. He was in the isolation chamber for days. Said he only wanted you.”

  Her hand slipped into her jeans pocket. The vegvisir waited there. She ran a thumb around its rough iron rim. Its pleasant, unyielding mass comforted her. She hadn’t asked Charlie for it. He left it with her without explanation. It obviously belonged to Michael now, but she didn’t want to give it up.

  Michael turned away to consider the bay of windows that stared across the plateau to the waiting vessel. The sheer distance helped protect them from the powerful magnetic field the Tzacol would use to lift itself into orbit. In theory, the raw force needed to lift such a massive vehicle would be contained by polarized fields all around the launch pad.

  InTheoryInTheoryInTheoryMagnetCannonThisMakesPerfectSenseRight

  Brilliant sun washed in. It illuminated his haunting features until he was almost, almost less creepy. He looked like a human again. But they were all humans, Eliza reminded herself. That was what she remembered with Charlie on top of the volcano. She couldn’t think of him as Shariyu. That man wouldn’t want her to. He was a person, regardless of the details, and he made this awful choice because he had convinced himself he was alone.

  “It is no matter. Charlie and I… we reached a certain accord before I left. The mission of the Grupo de Pachakuti must continue. The world is changing. I assume, from your presence here and what I have learned from the expedition reports, that you now understand this.”

  GiveHimTheWayfinderItsForMichaelHesKnownCharlieLongerAlmostTheWholeCentury

  “Charlie, he, uh, he left this with me.” She held out the sigil. “He didn’t leave any instructions but he wanted you to have it, I think. He kept asking for you.”

  She realized she was biting her lip hard enough to make it bleed. When she steadied herself and looked up from her palm, she saw Michael’s eyes filled with tears that would not fall. How could a thing like that weep? No, he was a person. She had to remember. They were feeling the same thing, weren’t they?

  If Charlie’s story was true, and he somehow kept the vegvisir through a millennium that stretched from the Arctic Circle to the jungles of the Andes, then he had given it up for only one reason. He didn’t need to find his way anymore because this new path had only one ending.

  Michael reached for the sigil and for a painful, eternal breath, she thought he would take it. Instead, he ran his fingers over its rough surface. She fought the urge to cringe as she felt the sigil pass on the force of his hand. He deserved more than this. How would people like her react if the world was becoming more like him? Michael withdrew his hand.

  “If he left it with you then you are intended to have it. Thank you for sharing it with me. I would like very much to see it again, from time to time.”

  She started to slip it back into its home in her pocket but stopped. She gripped it tighter, testing the ancient iron and smiling when it refused to yield. It could help her find her way, too. Tim would be happy she found her zero-zero-zero.

  She looked around the room. This was what he asked for. She gripped the sigil until her hand ached and she was certain her fingers would break. He asked her, and she promised, to be his sin eater for the sins he had not yet committed. For the sin he woul
d commit when the vessel launched and he left all these people who tried in their own ways to care for him, to help him, alone with each other to wonder if they could have done more. To deal with a world that he could have helped them prepare for.

  The distant platform rumbled. She slipped into her seat beside Tim. Neither had control panels in front of them. They were only here as his private audience. The ship began to shake. Wasn’t there supposed to be a squawking countdown as some analyst chirped T-minus into a radio? There was supposed to be a cloud of smoke to engulf the greatest technology humanity ever invented, its literal moonshot for the worlds beyond when this one was used up, when the Tzacol began its gravity-shattering climb into orbit.

  The ship lifted. The control room windows dimmed to shade the miniature blue sun that glowed from the vessel’s thrusters. She knew the electromagnetic cannon buried in the plateau would do much of the work as the vessel broke orbit. A photonic thruster built into the magnetic cannon’s barrel provided an additional boost while making the spectacle of light that the solar shades were meant to protect against. The Tzacol’s thrusters steadied the vessel as it rode its magnetic column upward.

  It still looked wrong. Structures like this didn’t just climb into the sky.

  ThereShouldBeMoreActivityWhyArentMorePeopleTalkingHushWeKnowWhy

  She smiled again as the voice in her thoughts quieted itself. The wayfinder felt good in her hand. Yes, she knew why. The ship was mostly automated. Charlie wasn’t doing anything to make the launch happen. The kinds of fuels that exploded just weren’t needed anymore. Even out among the planets, he would navigate with a xenon-fueled ion drive. Maybe the AEB wasn’t a second-rate space organization after all. Nothing could blow up, not really, not like the Challenger explosion or the Columbia disaster of the Hindenburg or… No, everything would be fine.

  Bullshit

  Eliza nodded in agreement with herself. That habit had to stop. Even if she could accept the nagging internal voice’s constant pestering and occasional helpfulness, she couldn’t be seen talking with it. It. That was a bad name for the anxious squawking demon born of her own thoughts. It needed a name. Names mattered, after all. She looked out the window. Charlie would get the joke.