49 - Ordeal by Fire
GraftingBuddha
Retired Pooh-Bah
49 - Ordeal by Fire
The building was in a state of open decay and ruin - but that decay was hard to see behind walls which remained at least vaguely intact, and windows which were solidly boarded up. Certainly, this was a marginally nicer part of town, which meant that the police kept squatters away. As they went through the rusty door and underneath the yellowing, stained bricks, Taylor got the feeling of walking inside a giant scab, seeing the open wound which was barely concealed behind layers of compacted cells. The interior was completely ruined, piles of rubble and destroyed furniture littering a bare concrete floor. It was impossible to tell what kind of place this even used to be, it was quite possible it had been a general-purpose dumping ground over the years. Washing machines with electrical innards spilling out in looping coils were stacked uneasily in one corner, pallets which she could sense were infested with woodworms and woodlice crumbled quietly in another. Dust was omnipresent, floating through the air in spore-like motes. And away from them, seemingly endless corridors stretched into the distance, lined with rotten posters and more junk.
The feeling of being in a wound intensified. This felt like an urban wound, a place where the skin of the city had been split and all those undifferentiated cells were brought to the surface. It felt unformed, only half-completed. Who on earth would dump dozens of shredded washing machines here, or all those lampshades which were slowly turning into liquid? Who would go to the effort of placing them here in strangely organised piles, while whole warehouses were up for the taking in other parts of the city which had less of a police presence? If a city was an organism, something that grew and replicated organically, then this felt like a wound. It sprouted all the things a city building should have - corridors, furniture, machinery - in an attempt to heal over the cut. But all it did was make half-formed things in perplexing orders. A word came to mind - teratoma. A tumour containing teeth, hair, random cells which had no business being where they were. This was a teratoma of a building. One day the city might come along and bulldoze it, make way for something marginally more useful, but until then it remained an ugly tumour, a badly healed wound, a black mark on the urban landscape.
They descended into the tumour of a building, finding a set of oddly placed stairs which led down to a rusty metal door. The basement. Arch was shivering in the cold, and the way his body hair all stood up on end in response gave him a slightly cloudy look - his outline a little blurred.
"Thank God you guys are here, honestly, if you had been delayed at all…"
"Why, what's happening?"
"No easy way to put it, Turk's gone nuts. He took this combat stim last night so he could help you, but some cape stopped him. He was too full of energy, so he just wandered around for a while and came back with this worm thing."
"OK, that sounds useful-"
"No, it's terrifying - not just the worm, though. See, Turk was meant to get into combat. He didn't, so the stim is still in his system. He's insane."
Ahab leaned forwards, face grave.
"Was it an injector with a dancing fish logo?"
"What? Yes, uh, I think."
Ahab turned to the others. Taylor was desperately trying to picture what a dancing fish logo might look like.
"We need to go in, Turk is currently wired to the gills and roughly ten seconds away from a possible heart attack."
They rushed in, taking the steps two at a time. Arch trailed behind them, still shivering. Taylor paused as she entered - the sight was… something. Clammy walls dripping with moisture, a shirtless Turk wearing an apron that matched Arch's, and a very, very familiar creature on the ground. It looked at her, and its eyes widened. It recognised her as well. Seeing the creature's expression, Turk whirled around to stare wildly at Taylor. He looked… interesting. Sweat dripped down his face and body, and his single eye bulged with manic energy. He was positively vibrating from too much tension. And the piece-de-resistance to this already alarming sight was a shining knife in his right hand, clutched by white knuckles. A fire extinguisher, new, lay against the wall - well, at least manic Turk still had an eye for workplace safety.
"Oh, hey Taylor. Where have you people been?"
"Long story. Where did you find that thing?"
Turk shrugged.
"Found the pier when you guys were gone - Armsmaster was there, he left shortly after you did, though. Before the hazmat teams came along, I was able to find the body of this giant… thing. And what do you know, this little turd was still alive. Barely moving, but… alive. Already detached from the main body. So, I dragged him to the truck, and now we're interrogating him."
Arch piped up.
"I'm helping!"
Turk grunted.
"He is. The thing speaks to him more than it does to me. No idea why."
Taylor had an idea why. But not just because of Turk's current state of suppressed mania, there was something more than that at play. While Arch and Turk had been struggling to understand this being, Taylor already had a damn good idea what it was, and how it worked. If she was correct, then of course this being felt uncomfortable around Turk - it could probably see every engagement he'd been in, every weapon he'd ever used, every event which had carved him into the man he was today. She'd be terrified of Turk if she knew all that - as it was, she only knew a little, and that was enough to make her very wary of getting on his bad side.
It was odd looking at a being which had tried to kill her, and was now completely helpless. Chorei had been a storm of destruction from beginning to end, only truly vulnerable right at the end. But this thing was… pathetic. Boneless, spineless, toothless, legless. If they left and locked the door, it would likely die within a few days. With Chorei they had needed to call on a terrible force to find victory, here… here they could walk away and win without even trying. What's more, she had a strong sense of being cheated. Armsmaster had killed the giant that had once been a biker, with very little effort if Ahab's account was correct. And now she had a single part of that creature to vent her frustration on. She realised Turk was still talking with the others, trying to explain why the knife would definitely work while the chopsticks hadn't. He hadn't quite noticed that Arch was not bearing a car battery. That combat stim was seriously messing him up.
She raised a hand to silence him, and stepped forward with narrowed eyes. Her gait was sure, her steps unhurried. Her gaze was hard as steel, and twice as cold. She crouched down next to the worm-thing which had assisted in wounding her and her friends - almost killing all of them. Gone was the awkward, anxious Taylor of last night's discussion, gone were the petty anxieties and irritations which plagued her morning. All that remained was a creature of determination and cold, unfeeling resolve. The worm gulped, its Adam's apple bobbing sickeningly in a too-small throat.
"You recognise me."
It nodded frantically, licking its lips with a too-red tongue.
"You see the past."
It nodded again, eyes bulging warily, hands wringing incessantly, gums sliding against each other with a nauseating rustle.
"Then look into mine."
It did. It saw a being much like itself - a worm, albeit born of a different force, one that grafted instead of unified. It saw a cold-faced girl with control over the swarm bringing that worm to its knees, forcing it to drag itself to its own obliteration. It saw a cold face staring as elevator doors slid shut and all became one. It saw another worm, no, a pair of worms in a double helix spinning in the heavens. It saw power forced into the hands of a girl, and it saw how that power had changed. It slammed its head against the ground, grovelling as hard as it could.
"Please, please don't kill me! Please, I have no future, no present, I am friendless and alone, I… I don't want to die! I don't want to go! I don't want-"
Taylor growled animalistically, and slapped it with her bare hand. It felt like she'd struck a hot kettle, and she hissed in pain. She knew what it was doing, knew it was drawing on Chorei's last words as best it could, knew it was trying to shake her. But this thing only saw the past, couldn't see the future one little bit. And that meant it couldn't guess how Taylor would react, and its shrivelled eyes stared out with shock and fear, mouth falling silent. Taylor remained in control. Turk whistled, impressed. Taylor, for her part, was cold. She tried to suppress the shame at being so frightening to this creature, and more than that, tried to suppress the faint feeling of pride which rose up at having achieved what Turk, a man with far more experience than her, had been struggling to accomplish.
"Then tell us about the dealer. Find his past, and tell us everything."
The creature's yellow eyes widened.
"Please, don't make me do that, I don't… I don't want to."
"I want to. And you'll do as I say."
The creature wailed then, entered into a genuine tantrum. Coming from an infant it would be annoying, coming from a pale slimy thing that had the voice of a grown man was downright disturbing. It sobbed and screamed, pounding its fists on the floor, shaking its head frantically.
"Don't want to!"
Turk nodded solemnly.
"I'll get a car battery, we'll attach it to its nipples."
Taylor looked at him disbelievingly, and the cyclops blinked right back with a total lack of shame on its face. She stood, going to the table and grabbing a pair of hard rubber clothes.
"No. No car batteries. Look, you…"
She returned to the worm, wincing as she grabbed the things head, forcing it to look at her. The creature was… weak. Incredibly weak. No muscles to speak of, no ability to actually resist her. This was quite possibly the first time she'd held something human-like and had felt in total control, totally able to inflict harm and totally immune to receiving it. She retched internally as she realised that this is likely what her bullies felt most of the time. The creature blinked at her, eyes shrivelled and yellow, the pupil completely burst and leaking black fluid into the surrounding jelly.
"You'll tell us what we want to know. Look at the others - look into their past. And tell me if any of them will accept 'no' for an answer."
The creature looked about. The scarred woman had done worse things to better people, had nothing left to lose, wouldn't hesitate to visit new and unique pain on it. The one it had so brutally pulverised the night before would be worse, it could feel the rage boiling off her, the way it pervaded every aspect of her past. It knew that she suppressed that rage, but all she really did was compress it. An inferno was turned into a tiny warming sun, a sun that occasionally flared and burst forth with impossible strength. The cyclops it already knew to be heartless. Even the other one, the nervous one, the other one wearing an apron… there was something about him. Something about his past, a flavour of total hopelessness and dejection. An image came to it suddenly - a naked man standing on a lonely beach at the edge of a grey island, a beach of grey stones under a grey sky facing a grey sea that boiled and frothed. It saw the man howling into the wild, screaming mindlessly and senselessly, without shame or reserve. He saw the flecks of spit on his mouth, the savage quality of his eyes. And then he saw the man dress and walk away, the howl still echoing in the wasteland, loud as a thunderclap. The howl continued even as the man departed. And the creature knew that it could expect no mercy from that quarter either. It was familiar with how despair could summon up the most perfect cruelty.
It nodded to the girl, and looked back, tried to find the dealer, tried to recall the mind which had shaped it and the hands which had dragged it forth and made past present and future all the same. It remembered the hands of the man who had delivered it from the burning sack of flesh that it called mother and father both. It looked back, and began to jabber.
"The hands are none, the voice is all - tongues of fire in the dark, endless tongues, wriggling like worms, branching from a single tree. There is rope, there is sand, there is a flaming pillar in the sky. There is a laughing man - please, don't make me see any more!"
Taylor snarled, and held its head in place even harder, refusing to give it a single inch. In a moment of spite, she grabbed on ear and twisted it - hard. The creature yowled and continued, the feeling of heat building. She felt the flesh between her fingers begin to give way like hot taffy.
"Wandering the desert, escaping, finding shelter in the decay across the ocean. Mother and father mean nothing, they did not create him, they only bore his flesh into the world. I see a boy in the desert, I see a boy entering a tomb, I see a boy breaking ancient statues and burning ancient books, he does it to spite and to grieve. He laughs, he reaches into the sand and blood and he makes himself. Please…"
The last word was whimpered. There was something about the creature - something steaming off its back. Taylor kept holding on. The heat of its flesh was nothing compared to the heat it had tried to kill her with barely a few hours before. She needed this, she had a being beyond her comprehension trapped between her hands and she was not going to let go, not until she had squeezed out every scrap of information she could.
"He… he makes himself a new home. He walks the decay and finds people who listen. He leaves fire behind him. He leaves such fire - fire in the fields, fire in the streets, fire in the churches. He comes… he comes to the sea again, tired of land. He makes us one, he makes us all one. He rides the sky… his tongue is fire. He has learned… he has learned… learned at the hands of a man from his home, who walked a road of glass and learned the ways of division… he learned to divide so he may better make whole… he learned such things… he learned…"
The creature lunged backwards, strength alien to its skinny frame allowing it to rip free of Taylor's hands. It looked at her, eyes glowing with inner fire… no, not just its eyes, its whole body was glowing with an inner furnace that roiled and churned in unsettling waves, fire that coiled and laughed, and she had a flashback to the previous night. She screamed to the others to 'get down!' and flung herself away. Fire exploded from the body, sparking and coiling, writhing around it with endless complexity. The creature screamed in pain and ecstasy, mind consumed in a matter of moments. Only the body remained, animated by fire that had a mind of its own, fire that destroyed everything that divided and left behind only total unity. It howled out, jaw disintegrating even as it spoke, tongue igniting as it did so.
"The ordeal comes!"
A rush of heat blasted outwards, sending the moisture on the walls into a choking gout of putrid steam. Taylor could feel her flesh drying, her hair coming close to burning… she looked around frantically, and saw the fire extinguisher. She didn't even think - she just grabbed it and slammed it at the creature's head. In the intense heat close to the body, the metal began to melt and split, releasing a gout of high-pressure foam that did almost nothing to extinguish the fire. But the impact, that had stunned it, momentarily making the flames abate. Realising what she had to do, Taylor kept slamming the fire extinguisher down on the creature, over and over, until the brittle charred skull gave way and revealed nothing inside, nothing but a boiling orb of yellow flame. The flame swivelled, twisting unnaturally, yet retaining its coherency as an orb. An orb with a dark, dark centre. A pupil.
It looked at her.
Taylor screamed in pain, slamming her eyes shut, continuing to hammer away. She hammered and hammered, until the metal gave way and she was impaling a charred body over and over again, only dust issuing forth. Images were flashing through her mind, most nothing but noise, but some were vaguely comprehensible. Fire predominated, but not just fire - there was a feeling of release to that flame, a feeling of… a word came to mind, a word she had never heard before, but which the flame had found to be a convenient expression. Phlogiston. A once-theorised quality of matter, a substance which dwelt in all things and was released during combustion. She knew in that moment that the phlogiston was real, that all matter had a sharp glowing core to it which would be released if the matter was only… convinced.
She saw through eyes that were not her own, eyes that were shrivelled and yellow and marked with tiny fingerprints. She saw a man in his office, papers scattered all over, equations written on every available surface. Taylor didn't understand any of it, but the man did. He had studied too much, looked too deep. He had studied matter too long, and had found the first source, the first point from which all other points diverged, a hideous tree stemming from a single root. For years he'd thought entropy was the final state of matter, a final point which all things strived towards in their own way. He understood better now, understood that entropy was a foul imposition on a pure state, that all matter yearned to return to the first moment of creation, a moment which existed before time and thus occupied both a single instant and untold infinities, a single point of space and a boundless universe. He felt the nostalgia of the atoms. And as he learned this, his mind clicked. Cells began to dream of the first source, neurons couldn't help but think of it - they had finally learned of their origin, and longed to return. And in a secluded office in Switzerland, an inferno was released from the body of a nameless professor.
Another set of eyes. A hermit seated on top of a pillar. The smell was horrific, his sores had only escalated in foulness the longer he remained, and now the pillar was practically streaked with an endless issue of pus and corruption. He was staring into the sun, eyes shrivelled and yellow. He was understanding the first source just as the professor had, but he thought of it in different terms. 'Nostalgia of the atoms' meant nothing to him, but he knew of the Monad, he knew of the branching tree of creation and the foul impositions of the Demiurge. New words came to him, new ideas to describe the same entity he had loved all his life. He learned the new names of God, and learned also that all he had achieved amounted to not a scrap of true Gnosis, not until this moment. He learned, and his mind achieved enlightenment. He reached to his skull and peeled away, layers and layers falling away until nothing remained. He shed every shell he had once treasured, and counted himself lucky. Intelligence and memory was blazed away, all that remained was a perfect orb, a perfect eye, a bottomless pupil. He was an idiot - a divine idiot, his idiocy making him a god in his own right, unified with the Monad. With divine mercy, he reached down and carved the thousand names of God into his pillar, the pus and putrefaction seeming like nothing more than golden steps on the road to heaven. And when people came to his pillar they would find a headless charred body, and names which shrivelled the eyes and scoured the soul. Revelations encoded onto light and sound, equations branded into the quivering wavelength.
A final set of eyes, shrivelled, yellow, pupil long-since destroyed. A face like a hungry coyote, all lean and starved, gaze too intense to ever really be comfortable meeting. A blank room, with blank furniture - outlines without colour. A door opens opposite, and a woman steps through. A woman with dark, curly hair, a wide mouth, and cold, cold eyes. The voice attached to the eyes speaks, brimming with mockery.
"Not yet."
And then she was gone, and there was nothing but mocking laughter, and a vast shape coiling in the dark.
She felt hands wrap around her, screamed, tried to break free. The fire extinguisher clattered from her hands and rolled over the ground. She instinctively opened her eyes, scanning for her only weapon. She saw the arms wrapped around her, realising that they were strikingly familiar. She saw the charred body, now completely inert, mostly destroyed by her continued assault. Her struggles slowed, and her breathing stabilised. Her eyes remained wild, though, glancing around the room, frenziedly looking for any possible threat.
She saw herself, then, through her insects. She saw a room of stunned people, nursing some minor wounds, trying to move out of a basement now flooded with steam and smoke. She saw a man behind her, wearing an apron, holding her arms tight at her sides. And she saw the girl the man was holding. Wiry, tough, with recently dishevelled black curly hair. She saw livid red marks around her fingers where she had come close to the flame, saw rubber gloves melted by the heat, saw ash and soot streaking her every article of clothing, caking her face. She saw her eyes - bloodshot, wild, staring. She saw what had happened to her left eye.
She stopped struggling, and Turk dragged her out into the cold air. The others were here, gasping gratefully, blessing unawares the clean, crisp air of the outdoors for not being the choking smog of the underground. Taylor sagged to the ground, panting hard. Ahab glanced over, noticing the state she was in, and stumbled over to pat her on the shoulder.
"I… I guess we got the information we needed, huh?"
Sanagi choked out a bitter laugh, and looked at Taylor with a strange respect.
"Nice work in there, Hebert."
She couldn't tell if she was being sarcastic or not. On the one hand, she'd almost gotten them all killed - again - but on the other hand, they had actual information. They'd seen the enemy. And the enemy had seen her. She clutched her eye, groaning in pain. Turk leant down next to her, face grave. The adrenaline, the fear… they'd cleaned him out. The manic energy in his eyes was gone, the last dregs of the stim washed away. Now he was just an injured man in an apron who really shouldn't have been allowed to do half the things he'd done over the last few hours. He gently prised her hand away, looking at her eye with a professional's gaze - steady and cool. Ahab peeked over his shoulder, and whistled.
"Well that's something."
Taylor couldn't bring herself to care. She'd always been more fond of her hair, anyway. Turk handed her an eyepatch, one of his spares. She snapped it on without a second of hesitation, happy to let herself become half-blinded, her bugs could fill in the rest if necessary. The others were looking at her with trepidation, and for some reason this struck her as the most irritating thing they'd ever done. She'd seen the enemy, seen through their eyes, and they were acting like a bunch of slack-jawed rubberneckers because her left eye was somewhat messed up. She snarled, anger breaking through the pain.
"We have a plan. We find this person. The thing was referencing Brother Ibrahim, so we look for any Bedouin in the city. We find the right Bedouin, we find the cult leader, we kill him. Am I understood?"
Their reactions were varied. Turk looked at her with an almost sorrowful, almost regretful expression. No point feeling remorse, she thought, there was work to be done. They were the only people placed to take care of this mess, and regret over how far they'd come would only slow them down. Sanagi looked at her with… admiration. Genuine admiration. Taylor felt a glint of satisfaction at that. Ahab was similar to Turk, albeit with more self-hatred mixed in. Taylor had always admired Ahab a little. Admired how outgoing she was, how open, how skilled. But in the last few days her opinion had marginally shifted. She'd seen how desperate Ahab really was, how miserable. She still admired her skill, but nowadays there was a faint air of pity. And that pity made Ahab's regret slide off her. Arch… well, she barely knew Arch. But Arch was looking at her understandingly, as if he got it. He understood being burned, the lingering pain of it, the festering terror.
And he understood the urge to burn back.
The building was in a state of open decay and ruin - but that decay was hard to see behind walls which remained at least vaguely intact, and windows which were solidly boarded up. Certainly, this was a marginally nicer part of town, which meant that the police kept squatters away. As they went through the rusty door and underneath the yellowing, stained bricks, Taylor got the feeling of walking inside a giant scab, seeing the open wound which was barely concealed behind layers of compacted cells. The interior was completely ruined, piles of rubble and destroyed furniture littering a bare concrete floor. It was impossible to tell what kind of place this even used to be, it was quite possible it had been a general-purpose dumping ground over the years. Washing machines with electrical innards spilling out in looping coils were stacked uneasily in one corner, pallets which she could sense were infested with woodworms and woodlice crumbled quietly in another. Dust was omnipresent, floating through the air in spore-like motes. And away from them, seemingly endless corridors stretched into the distance, lined with rotten posters and more junk.
The feeling of being in a wound intensified. This felt like an urban wound, a place where the skin of the city had been split and all those undifferentiated cells were brought to the surface. It felt unformed, only half-completed. Who on earth would dump dozens of shredded washing machines here, or all those lampshades which were slowly turning into liquid? Who would go to the effort of placing them here in strangely organised piles, while whole warehouses were up for the taking in other parts of the city which had less of a police presence? If a city was an organism, something that grew and replicated organically, then this felt like a wound. It sprouted all the things a city building should have - corridors, furniture, machinery - in an attempt to heal over the cut. But all it did was make half-formed things in perplexing orders. A word came to mind - teratoma. A tumour containing teeth, hair, random cells which had no business being where they were. This was a teratoma of a building. One day the city might come along and bulldoze it, make way for something marginally more useful, but until then it remained an ugly tumour, a badly healed wound, a black mark on the urban landscape.
They descended into the tumour of a building, finding a set of oddly placed stairs which led down to a rusty metal door. The basement. Arch was shivering in the cold, and the way his body hair all stood up on end in response gave him a slightly cloudy look - his outline a little blurred.
"Thank God you guys are here, honestly, if you had been delayed at all…"
"Why, what's happening?"
"No easy way to put it, Turk's gone nuts. He took this combat stim last night so he could help you, but some cape stopped him. He was too full of energy, so he just wandered around for a while and came back with this worm thing."
"OK, that sounds useful-"
"No, it's terrifying - not just the worm, though. See, Turk was meant to get into combat. He didn't, so the stim is still in his system. He's insane."
Ahab leaned forwards, face grave.
"Was it an injector with a dancing fish logo?"
"What? Yes, uh, I think."
Ahab turned to the others. Taylor was desperately trying to picture what a dancing fish logo might look like.
"We need to go in, Turk is currently wired to the gills and roughly ten seconds away from a possible heart attack."
They rushed in, taking the steps two at a time. Arch trailed behind them, still shivering. Taylor paused as she entered - the sight was… something. Clammy walls dripping with moisture, a shirtless Turk wearing an apron that matched Arch's, and a very, very familiar creature on the ground. It looked at her, and its eyes widened. It recognised her as well. Seeing the creature's expression, Turk whirled around to stare wildly at Taylor. He looked… interesting. Sweat dripped down his face and body, and his single eye bulged with manic energy. He was positively vibrating from too much tension. And the piece-de-resistance to this already alarming sight was a shining knife in his right hand, clutched by white knuckles. A fire extinguisher, new, lay against the wall - well, at least manic Turk still had an eye for workplace safety.
"Oh, hey Taylor. Where have you people been?"
"Long story. Where did you find that thing?"
Turk shrugged.
"Found the pier when you guys were gone - Armsmaster was there, he left shortly after you did, though. Before the hazmat teams came along, I was able to find the body of this giant… thing. And what do you know, this little turd was still alive. Barely moving, but… alive. Already detached from the main body. So, I dragged him to the truck, and now we're interrogating him."
Arch piped up.
"I'm helping!"
Turk grunted.
"He is. The thing speaks to him more than it does to me. No idea why."
Taylor had an idea why. But not just because of Turk's current state of suppressed mania, there was something more than that at play. While Arch and Turk had been struggling to understand this being, Taylor already had a damn good idea what it was, and how it worked. If she was correct, then of course this being felt uncomfortable around Turk - it could probably see every engagement he'd been in, every weapon he'd ever used, every event which had carved him into the man he was today. She'd be terrified of Turk if she knew all that - as it was, she only knew a little, and that was enough to make her very wary of getting on his bad side.
It was odd looking at a being which had tried to kill her, and was now completely helpless. Chorei had been a storm of destruction from beginning to end, only truly vulnerable right at the end. But this thing was… pathetic. Boneless, spineless, toothless, legless. If they left and locked the door, it would likely die within a few days. With Chorei they had needed to call on a terrible force to find victory, here… here they could walk away and win without even trying. What's more, she had a strong sense of being cheated. Armsmaster had killed the giant that had once been a biker, with very little effort if Ahab's account was correct. And now she had a single part of that creature to vent her frustration on. She realised Turk was still talking with the others, trying to explain why the knife would definitely work while the chopsticks hadn't. He hadn't quite noticed that Arch was not bearing a car battery. That combat stim was seriously messing him up.
She raised a hand to silence him, and stepped forward with narrowed eyes. Her gait was sure, her steps unhurried. Her gaze was hard as steel, and twice as cold. She crouched down next to the worm-thing which had assisted in wounding her and her friends - almost killing all of them. Gone was the awkward, anxious Taylor of last night's discussion, gone were the petty anxieties and irritations which plagued her morning. All that remained was a creature of determination and cold, unfeeling resolve. The worm gulped, its Adam's apple bobbing sickeningly in a too-small throat.
"You recognise me."
It nodded frantically, licking its lips with a too-red tongue.
"You see the past."
It nodded again, eyes bulging warily, hands wringing incessantly, gums sliding against each other with a nauseating rustle.
"Then look into mine."
It did. It saw a being much like itself - a worm, albeit born of a different force, one that grafted instead of unified. It saw a cold-faced girl with control over the swarm bringing that worm to its knees, forcing it to drag itself to its own obliteration. It saw a cold face staring as elevator doors slid shut and all became one. It saw another worm, no, a pair of worms in a double helix spinning in the heavens. It saw power forced into the hands of a girl, and it saw how that power had changed. It slammed its head against the ground, grovelling as hard as it could.
"Please, please don't kill me! Please, I have no future, no present, I am friendless and alone, I… I don't want to die! I don't want to go! I don't want-"
Taylor growled animalistically, and slapped it with her bare hand. It felt like she'd struck a hot kettle, and she hissed in pain. She knew what it was doing, knew it was drawing on Chorei's last words as best it could, knew it was trying to shake her. But this thing only saw the past, couldn't see the future one little bit. And that meant it couldn't guess how Taylor would react, and its shrivelled eyes stared out with shock and fear, mouth falling silent. Taylor remained in control. Turk whistled, impressed. Taylor, for her part, was cold. She tried to suppress the shame at being so frightening to this creature, and more than that, tried to suppress the faint feeling of pride which rose up at having achieved what Turk, a man with far more experience than her, had been struggling to accomplish.
"Then tell us about the dealer. Find his past, and tell us everything."
The creature's yellow eyes widened.
"Please, don't make me do that, I don't… I don't want to."
"I want to. And you'll do as I say."
The creature wailed then, entered into a genuine tantrum. Coming from an infant it would be annoying, coming from a pale slimy thing that had the voice of a grown man was downright disturbing. It sobbed and screamed, pounding its fists on the floor, shaking its head frantically.
"Don't want to!"
Turk nodded solemnly.
"I'll get a car battery, we'll attach it to its nipples."
Taylor looked at him disbelievingly, and the cyclops blinked right back with a total lack of shame on its face. She stood, going to the table and grabbing a pair of hard rubber clothes.
"No. No car batteries. Look, you…"
She returned to the worm, wincing as she grabbed the things head, forcing it to look at her. The creature was… weak. Incredibly weak. No muscles to speak of, no ability to actually resist her. This was quite possibly the first time she'd held something human-like and had felt in total control, totally able to inflict harm and totally immune to receiving it. She retched internally as she realised that this is likely what her bullies felt most of the time. The creature blinked at her, eyes shrivelled and yellow, the pupil completely burst and leaking black fluid into the surrounding jelly.
"You'll tell us what we want to know. Look at the others - look into their past. And tell me if any of them will accept 'no' for an answer."
The creature looked about. The scarred woman had done worse things to better people, had nothing left to lose, wouldn't hesitate to visit new and unique pain on it. The one it had so brutally pulverised the night before would be worse, it could feel the rage boiling off her, the way it pervaded every aspect of her past. It knew that she suppressed that rage, but all she really did was compress it. An inferno was turned into a tiny warming sun, a sun that occasionally flared and burst forth with impossible strength. The cyclops it already knew to be heartless. Even the other one, the nervous one, the other one wearing an apron… there was something about him. Something about his past, a flavour of total hopelessness and dejection. An image came to it suddenly - a naked man standing on a lonely beach at the edge of a grey island, a beach of grey stones under a grey sky facing a grey sea that boiled and frothed. It saw the man howling into the wild, screaming mindlessly and senselessly, without shame or reserve. He saw the flecks of spit on his mouth, the savage quality of his eyes. And then he saw the man dress and walk away, the howl still echoing in the wasteland, loud as a thunderclap. The howl continued even as the man departed. And the creature knew that it could expect no mercy from that quarter either. It was familiar with how despair could summon up the most perfect cruelty.
It nodded to the girl, and looked back, tried to find the dealer, tried to recall the mind which had shaped it and the hands which had dragged it forth and made past present and future all the same. It remembered the hands of the man who had delivered it from the burning sack of flesh that it called mother and father both. It looked back, and began to jabber.
"The hands are none, the voice is all - tongues of fire in the dark, endless tongues, wriggling like worms, branching from a single tree. There is rope, there is sand, there is a flaming pillar in the sky. There is a laughing man - please, don't make me see any more!"
Taylor snarled, and held its head in place even harder, refusing to give it a single inch. In a moment of spite, she grabbed on ear and twisted it - hard. The creature yowled and continued, the feeling of heat building. She felt the flesh between her fingers begin to give way like hot taffy.
"Wandering the desert, escaping, finding shelter in the decay across the ocean. Mother and father mean nothing, they did not create him, they only bore his flesh into the world. I see a boy in the desert, I see a boy entering a tomb, I see a boy breaking ancient statues and burning ancient books, he does it to spite and to grieve. He laughs, he reaches into the sand and blood and he makes himself. Please…"
The last word was whimpered. There was something about the creature - something steaming off its back. Taylor kept holding on. The heat of its flesh was nothing compared to the heat it had tried to kill her with barely a few hours before. She needed this, she had a being beyond her comprehension trapped between her hands and she was not going to let go, not until she had squeezed out every scrap of information she could.
"He… he makes himself a new home. He walks the decay and finds people who listen. He leaves fire behind him. He leaves such fire - fire in the fields, fire in the streets, fire in the churches. He comes… he comes to the sea again, tired of land. He makes us one, he makes us all one. He rides the sky… his tongue is fire. He has learned… he has learned… learned at the hands of a man from his home, who walked a road of glass and learned the ways of division… he learned to divide so he may better make whole… he learned such things… he learned…"
The creature lunged backwards, strength alien to its skinny frame allowing it to rip free of Taylor's hands. It looked at her, eyes glowing with inner fire… no, not just its eyes, its whole body was glowing with an inner furnace that roiled and churned in unsettling waves, fire that coiled and laughed, and she had a flashback to the previous night. She screamed to the others to 'get down!' and flung herself away. Fire exploded from the body, sparking and coiling, writhing around it with endless complexity. The creature screamed in pain and ecstasy, mind consumed in a matter of moments. Only the body remained, animated by fire that had a mind of its own, fire that destroyed everything that divided and left behind only total unity. It howled out, jaw disintegrating even as it spoke, tongue igniting as it did so.
"The ordeal comes!"
A rush of heat blasted outwards, sending the moisture on the walls into a choking gout of putrid steam. Taylor could feel her flesh drying, her hair coming close to burning… she looked around frantically, and saw the fire extinguisher. She didn't even think - she just grabbed it and slammed it at the creature's head. In the intense heat close to the body, the metal began to melt and split, releasing a gout of high-pressure foam that did almost nothing to extinguish the fire. But the impact, that had stunned it, momentarily making the flames abate. Realising what she had to do, Taylor kept slamming the fire extinguisher down on the creature, over and over, until the brittle charred skull gave way and revealed nothing inside, nothing but a boiling orb of yellow flame. The flame swivelled, twisting unnaturally, yet retaining its coherency as an orb. An orb with a dark, dark centre. A pupil.
It looked at her.
Taylor screamed in pain, slamming her eyes shut, continuing to hammer away. She hammered and hammered, until the metal gave way and she was impaling a charred body over and over again, only dust issuing forth. Images were flashing through her mind, most nothing but noise, but some were vaguely comprehensible. Fire predominated, but not just fire - there was a feeling of release to that flame, a feeling of… a word came to mind, a word she had never heard before, but which the flame had found to be a convenient expression. Phlogiston. A once-theorised quality of matter, a substance which dwelt in all things and was released during combustion. She knew in that moment that the phlogiston was real, that all matter had a sharp glowing core to it which would be released if the matter was only… convinced.
She saw through eyes that were not her own, eyes that were shrivelled and yellow and marked with tiny fingerprints. She saw a man in his office, papers scattered all over, equations written on every available surface. Taylor didn't understand any of it, but the man did. He had studied too much, looked too deep. He had studied matter too long, and had found the first source, the first point from which all other points diverged, a hideous tree stemming from a single root. For years he'd thought entropy was the final state of matter, a final point which all things strived towards in their own way. He understood better now, understood that entropy was a foul imposition on a pure state, that all matter yearned to return to the first moment of creation, a moment which existed before time and thus occupied both a single instant and untold infinities, a single point of space and a boundless universe. He felt the nostalgia of the atoms. And as he learned this, his mind clicked. Cells began to dream of the first source, neurons couldn't help but think of it - they had finally learned of their origin, and longed to return. And in a secluded office in Switzerland, an inferno was released from the body of a nameless professor.
Another set of eyes. A hermit seated on top of a pillar. The smell was horrific, his sores had only escalated in foulness the longer he remained, and now the pillar was practically streaked with an endless issue of pus and corruption. He was staring into the sun, eyes shrivelled and yellow. He was understanding the first source just as the professor had, but he thought of it in different terms. 'Nostalgia of the atoms' meant nothing to him, but he knew of the Monad, he knew of the branching tree of creation and the foul impositions of the Demiurge. New words came to him, new ideas to describe the same entity he had loved all his life. He learned the new names of God, and learned also that all he had achieved amounted to not a scrap of true Gnosis, not until this moment. He learned, and his mind achieved enlightenment. He reached to his skull and peeled away, layers and layers falling away until nothing remained. He shed every shell he had once treasured, and counted himself lucky. Intelligence and memory was blazed away, all that remained was a perfect orb, a perfect eye, a bottomless pupil. He was an idiot - a divine idiot, his idiocy making him a god in his own right, unified with the Monad. With divine mercy, he reached down and carved the thousand names of God into his pillar, the pus and putrefaction seeming like nothing more than golden steps on the road to heaven. And when people came to his pillar they would find a headless charred body, and names which shrivelled the eyes and scoured the soul. Revelations encoded onto light and sound, equations branded into the quivering wavelength.
A final set of eyes, shrivelled, yellow, pupil long-since destroyed. A face like a hungry coyote, all lean and starved, gaze too intense to ever really be comfortable meeting. A blank room, with blank furniture - outlines without colour. A door opens opposite, and a woman steps through. A woman with dark, curly hair, a wide mouth, and cold, cold eyes. The voice attached to the eyes speaks, brimming with mockery.
"Not yet."
And then she was gone, and there was nothing but mocking laughter, and a vast shape coiling in the dark.
She felt hands wrap around her, screamed, tried to break free. The fire extinguisher clattered from her hands and rolled over the ground. She instinctively opened her eyes, scanning for her only weapon. She saw the arms wrapped around her, realising that they were strikingly familiar. She saw the charred body, now completely inert, mostly destroyed by her continued assault. Her struggles slowed, and her breathing stabilised. Her eyes remained wild, though, glancing around the room, frenziedly looking for any possible threat.
She saw herself, then, through her insects. She saw a room of stunned people, nursing some minor wounds, trying to move out of a basement now flooded with steam and smoke. She saw a man behind her, wearing an apron, holding her arms tight at her sides. And she saw the girl the man was holding. Wiry, tough, with recently dishevelled black curly hair. She saw livid red marks around her fingers where she had come close to the flame, saw rubber gloves melted by the heat, saw ash and soot streaking her every article of clothing, caking her face. She saw her eyes - bloodshot, wild, staring. She saw what had happened to her left eye.
She stopped struggling, and Turk dragged her out into the cold air. The others were here, gasping gratefully, blessing unawares the clean, crisp air of the outdoors for not being the choking smog of the underground. Taylor sagged to the ground, panting hard. Ahab glanced over, noticing the state she was in, and stumbled over to pat her on the shoulder.
"I… I guess we got the information we needed, huh?"
Sanagi choked out a bitter laugh, and looked at Taylor with a strange respect.
"Nice work in there, Hebert."
She couldn't tell if she was being sarcastic or not. On the one hand, she'd almost gotten them all killed - again - but on the other hand, they had actual information. They'd seen the enemy. And the enemy had seen her. She clutched her eye, groaning in pain. Turk leant down next to her, face grave. The adrenaline, the fear… they'd cleaned him out. The manic energy in his eyes was gone, the last dregs of the stim washed away. Now he was just an injured man in an apron who really shouldn't have been allowed to do half the things he'd done over the last few hours. He gently prised her hand away, looking at her eye with a professional's gaze - steady and cool. Ahab peeked over his shoulder, and whistled.
"Well that's something."
Taylor couldn't bring herself to care. She'd always been more fond of her hair, anyway. Turk handed her an eyepatch, one of his spares. She snapped it on without a second of hesitation, happy to let herself become half-blinded, her bugs could fill in the rest if necessary. The others were looking at her with trepidation, and for some reason this struck her as the most irritating thing they'd ever done. She'd seen the enemy, seen through their eyes, and they were acting like a bunch of slack-jawed rubberneckers because her left eye was somewhat messed up. She snarled, anger breaking through the pain.
"We have a plan. We find this person. The thing was referencing Brother Ibrahim, so we look for any Bedouin in the city. We find the right Bedouin, we find the cult leader, we kill him. Am I understood?"
Their reactions were varied. Turk looked at her with an almost sorrowful, almost regretful expression. No point feeling remorse, she thought, there was work to be done. They were the only people placed to take care of this mess, and regret over how far they'd come would only slow them down. Sanagi looked at her with… admiration. Genuine admiration. Taylor felt a glint of satisfaction at that. Ahab was similar to Turk, albeit with more self-hatred mixed in. Taylor had always admired Ahab a little. Admired how outgoing she was, how open, how skilled. But in the last few days her opinion had marginally shifted. She'd seen how desperate Ahab really was, how miserable. She still admired her skill, but nowadays there was a faint air of pity. And that pity made Ahab's regret slide off her. Arch… well, she barely knew Arch. But Arch was looking at her understandingly, as if he got it. He understood being burned, the lingering pain of it, the festering terror.
And he understood the urge to burn back.
AN: And that's all for today, see you all tomorrow. No spoilers, but let's just say that this arc won't entirely be spent in Brockton Bay.
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