Page 38 of Odder Still
Lachlan stares at me.
I try to offer a smile, but it comes out as a grimace. “Sorry, that wasn’t for you. The damn aurora is playing with my brain.”
“How fantastic.” Lachlan straps on his lens concoction. He grabs my arm and shoves the eyepiece up to the parasite. I try not to ghost away from him as he flips in and out of various lens. “This is monumental. Just incredible. First of its kind.”
“Indeed.” Itwouldtake a specially fucked up creature to want to latch to me. But why choose me—why chose a human at all, when every single other of its kind all host in sedentary invertebrates and plants? Mobility, opposable thumbs, the ability to kill? None of those were things the other auroras sought after. I shudder. Perhaps my aurora is different. Twisted. A proper parasite.
This time, the parasite’s flare is weak enough to tickle. ‘I get odder the more you know of me.’
So you keep saying.
“If I could take a sample?” Lachlan licks his lips, making their chapped surfaces glisten. “I have a place, just around the corner—it has everything we’d need.”
Papers clutched tight to her chest, Ailsa finally speaks. “Mother will find out.”
“Don’t worry, dear, I will deal with her.” Lachlan dropped to a musical mutter, stretching a hand toward her.
Don’t worry, dear. It echoes through my head, matching with the same words in the same voice, turned a little hazy in the light of day.Don’t worry, dear, no one will miss her. The parasite springs to life, pulling back up my dream and slamming it into full focus once more. Panic flares through us, bitter and sharp. We have to be free of here. We have to find that lab, that tank. We have to—
None of that. I have to do none of that. I shudder, drawing in air like the fresh oxygen might poison the parasite and clear the fear from inside my lungs. With a precise wiggle, I slip out of Lachlan’s grip.
He seems only to notice after the fact, staring at his empty hands before dropping them with a smile. “Off to it, then, shall we?”
Ailsa gives me the tiniest shake of her head. As though I needed another reason to stay out of a laboratory conducting unethical experiments under the supervision of a man who never bothered to ask my name.
I lean against the arm of Tavish’s couch, as far from Lachlan as I can reasonably get. “We’ll do what we can here, for now.”
Tavish’s fingers bump against my leg. They stay there.
“I see.” Lachlan’s expression droops, making his skin seem to slide a little on his gaunt face.
He looks irrationally moist. I swear his eyes bulge. He turns to a completely different desk from the one where he first retrieved his lens device and deposits it in the top drawer.
While he’s distracted, Ailsa slips by me. She presses a torn piece of paper into my hand, never once glancing back as she winds her way through the room and ducks past Sheona, out the door. Malloch trails behind her like the world’s least enthusiastic guard dog. I unfold the note to find a short scribble:My library, fifteen minutes. You and Tavish. Please.
It’s thepleasethat gets me. A little splatter of red covers thee, blood born from the same kind of anxious picking that mars Tavish’s cuticles. Whatever Lachlan is doing in that lab, it scares her.
I can’t let it scare me, too. I can’t let my own emotions drift too close to the parasite’s. I fight down the wave of anxiety and tug my shirt back up, flipping the collar to cover as much of the parasite as possible.
Lachlan turns toward me once more. His previous disappointment transforms into sweaty ecstasy, his smile a little toothier than before. “So, you said it’s trying to latch? How does that feel? Let’s start there.”
If this is the start, I want to ask where he intends to end. Whether I’m alive in it. Whether I’m me. “Terrible, but not physically. Whatever it’s doing, it seems to be taking me over without destroying too much.”
“Terrible,” Lachlan says, and I can’t tell if it’s a reply or just him repeating my own answer. He drums his fingers along the top of the desk, his movements like crabs compared to Ailsa’s spidery motions. “But are you stronger from it?”
I don’t know which of us slams into the memory of the ignit we crushed in front of Raghnaid, but it turns my stomach like a monsoon. Between that and the extra speed and intensity during the fights when it has dug into me, stronger seems accurate. I nod. “How does that happen?”
“We don’t know!” Lachlan’s gaze still sticks on me, interjected only by the occasional set of rapid, wet blinks. “But we’ve never seen any noticeable energy loss from those in the Trench, even when creating ignits. In fact, quite the contrary—the aurora seems to provide the host with additional energy. The hosts grow larger and stronger than their aurora-free counterparts and become increasingly more difficult to kill without cutting out the aurora entirely, which is, itself, not an easy task even with the proper tools.”
“Brilliant,” I grumble.
The parasite ruffles through Lachlan’s speech, poking at a few earlier phrases with an intensity that makes my head itch. ‘Even when creating ignits, additional energy, even when creating ignits,additional energy.’
I almost refuse to ask out of spite, but the weight of its emotions rise, bumping against mine until our curiosity gets the better of me.Mycuriosity. Or its curiosity, bled over me until I’ve drowned. I don’t know which anymore. “If the auroras and hosts don’t require any extra energy to form ignits, and ignits also produce energy themselves, where does all that come from? Do they just create it?”
“That’s the dominant theory. But not the only one!” Lachlan snaps into motion, displacing half a pile of books onto the one across from it and rustling through the folders underneath. “There was a manuscript here somewhere—ahh! It’s from a finfolk, and you know you have to take everything they say with an ocean of salt, of course—even less advanced than the humans, they are. But this person writes like they know what they’re talking about. By the Trench, they could almost be a selkie.” Lachlan pauses to take a breath.
I manage to get in a question before he starts off again. “Who are the finfolk, exactly?”
