Page 36 of Odder Still
And every new motion a strict calculation?
MY SLEEP DROPS ME from one tangled mess of black to another. Jumbles of color and incoherent whispers filter in. They settle around my feet, becoming a plain of grass in blues and teals, an orange sky giving way to pink at the edges. As I turn, its colors flutter and drift.
Warm air brushes through my braids. My ignation gashes prickle. I hold up my arm. The colors yank themselves out of my flesh, peeling up like centipedes and leaving the red of an open wound behind. They drop to the grass. Forming together, they build on each other, rising to my height. Arms sprout from a torso, and a slew of braids spill from a head, until I’m staring back at a fractured version of myself made of wiggling stained glass.
“I get odder the more you know of me,” it whispers. Raising one color-cracked hand, it points to its own chest. “I,” it repeats. “I get odder.”
Odder.Emotions coil up inside me: a flickering confusion that masks a realization I refuse to look at. Instead, I want to flee, into the Murk or through the gap in my empty chest. I refuse to be as shattered by this as the other me is.
Its fingers come apart into colored threads of glass and light. I feel myself turn over in my sleep, and our hands, the physical and the dream, neither or both, clasp an arm. My confusion blooms into fear.
The weight of whatever we’ve clasped turns into a full presence. It sucks us into itself, like the parasite had shoved itself into me, only in reverse, and as it does, we’re hit with a suffocating feeling, something dark and weighted. We float within this new being’s existence, taking up parts of its body, seeing through eyes that aren’t eyes at all. A tank surrounds us. Beyond lies a giant room, silver-ornamented windows and graceful chandeliers hanging high above tables of research equipment. A pair of white-coated scientists hover around a woman with her arms and legs bound to a table. She bares crooked teeth and familiar wild eyes. The conspiracy theorist—Jane, or Jean, definitely Jean. One scientist pins her head down while the other plunges a syringe of rainbow-glowing ignation into her neck. Jean screams.
Somewhere beyond the rims of the tank, Ailsa shouts in protest, “What are you doing—that’s a person. Where are the dogs?”
“Don’t worry, dear,” a man’s voice replies. “No one will miss her.”
I jerk upright.
Lavender releases a protesting mew from where she’s snuggled against my knees. Light streams in through the cracks in the stony façade outside the window. The covers tangle in a mess around my ankles, and my sweat sticks my pajamas to my skin. Tavish’s side of the bed is empty and cold. The shower runs, but he must have convinced Sheona to use it, because he sits at his desk, fully dressed in a casual, blue-and-grey overcoat and scarf, scribbling away at a set of papers with a system of indented rulers as a guide and his ignation-fueled reader pressing along behind the words. He seems to be doing less writing, though, and more combatting Blue’s desire to sprawl across his notebook.
I flop back down. Those few drunken hours last night were a much-needed break from reality, but they weren’t enough. I feel worn still, from my sore limbs to my exhausted soul. If I could only postpone life a little longer, use another bottle of whiskey to turn it all off again. But time would still continue its usual trudge. The parasite would dig itself deeper. My pets would curl themselves up on my porch for another week.
I feel the parasite unfurl itself. It slides through my mind, and I want all the more to cast myself straight out of this existence, out of any existence where a foreign sentience is slowly taking control of my body and leaving me to sit, helpless and hurting, in the backseat. The thought propels me out of bed.
The blankets come with me, pulling a very unhappy Lavender along. With a hiss, she scrambles across the floor and dives beneath the lowest shelf of shoes, somehow squishing her extra weight in there like she’s made of liquid. She glares at me.
Tavish’s pen stops. “Ruby? Are you all right? You sounded restless, but I wished not to disrupt your sleep.”
“I’m alive.” I force myself to exhale as I strip my moist top off and lift my braids away from my back. The parasite perched in my neck warms uncomfortably, casting off emotions that make my skull itch and raise the hairs on my arms. It crashes back through my dreams, bundling them into a memory it can shove at me. They make me shiver despite my sweat. “I had nightmares, though.”
Tavish swivels his chair toward me.
I perch myself on the edge of the desk and bounce a paperweight between my hands. The first part of my dream twists around my chest, forming a knot I can’t untie. It feels too personal to explain and too nonsensical to make use of. I skip directly to the lab part, sharing my view from the tank, the way the scientists injected the conspiracy theorist with ignation, and Ailsa’s objections. When Tavish doesn’t respond, I toss the paperweight into the air, catching it with one hand. “Maybe it’s nothing. Just a compilation of all my fears from the day.”
“Probably,” he replies. “But we also ken so little about the way an aurora latches onto an intelligent host. What if it’s sending you a message? Or worse.” Neither of us speak this other option out loud, but its static touch transfers between us: my dream might have been some kind of vision.
“If that lab is real, we have to stop it.” They aren’t quite my own words, shoved desperately out of my mouth through the sheer fire of the parasite’s combined fury and anguish. I try to force away the foreign emotions—this is sad, yes, but it isn’t my home. It isn’t my fight. I’m only here to get this damn parasite out of me. How can I save a corrupt city if I can’t even stop my own body from being corrupted by a nonsensical aurora?
And another, more wrinkled thought follows: why the hell is the parasite so determined?
Then, it clicks, the pieces of the dream coming together. Whatever is happening in that lab, perhaps it’s not just hurting people. Perhaps, somehow, it’s hurting auroras too.
The fury takes hold again, stronger than ever. I choke on it. Somewhere beyond the haze, Tavish speaks.
“You can’t have seen my mother’s primary laboratory, where they keep the auroras. It’s in the business end of our building, and Ailsa never goes there anymore. Besides, every research project is screened through multiple scientists. If they were injecting humans with ignation, I would have heard something.” His voice lowers to a mumble. “A secret laboratory would violate a slew of old assembly regulations, though.”
Blue rubs against my tense fingers, nuzzling her face into my palm. Her gentle purring settles over me like a calming blanket, and again, I don’t know whether the feeling comes from the parasite or me. Does Blue soothe me because I like the cat, or because the parasite also holds some strange affection for her? Or do one of us appreciate her only because the other does, because there are parts of us too entangled for the otherness to feel foreign any longer? I have to bury the thought before it can take hold of me and tear me apart.
Tavish appears lost in his own head, his fingernails pressing mindlessly into his cuticles and his jaw set into his tongue-chewing sign of worried concentration.
I toss the rest of my borrowed pajamas to the side and head for my clothes stacked on the dresser beside the door. A few rips and stains still mar it, but a light floral scent replaces the grime and stench. I don them in a rush.
With my long vest’s flowing material flaring around my knees, and its ruby accents shining against the black lacing of my billowing shirt, I should feel more at ease with myself. But the parasite’s presence still hovers between each thought. It tickles my consciousness when I quiet my mind, as though its own intellect runs at a whisper beneath mine, sharing pieces of my brain to use for its own, indecipherable deliberations.
As though snapping back to himself, Tavish bursts to his feet. “Ah, I forgot to tell you— apparently unethical experimentation is the lesser of our worries. We received this while you slept.” He offers me an envelope, the shimmering silver wax seal already broken.
The note within is written in delicate, sweeping letters on stationary trimmed in iridescent loops and swirls. I read under my breath, just to let Tavish know I’m processing. “The assembly is in the process of working out a contract that will grant Findlay Inc. the sole rights to the foreigner’s aurora. You may deliver him to me by noon. I have already canceled your eleven-thirty meeting with Dr. Druiminn’s lower-district hospital reformation committee so that you might not be preoccupied.”
