Page 90 of Odder Still
Be merely the one who walks beside me
as we create a new path, both of us builders.
Be, most of all: just be.
MY PARASITE AND I grasp at the energy buzzing from the nearby yellow ignit, refilling what we lost like pouring shot glasses into an empty lake. But it has to be enough. At least enough to get to Tavish, to protect him somehow.
We ignore every alarm our body blares and slowly, painfully, slide one arm under us. Our head swims and tosses, turning dark then light. With shaking arms, we use the table to pull ourself up.
Lilias knocks aside a fallen tarp screen and strolls into the lab. The yellow ignit pokes out of her satchel, her left hand still bandaged around her missing fingers. Even from this distance, I pick out the tiny yellow earpiece shining in her ear, the same ones her team wore in Glenrigg. Her team, stranded somewhere above us, and somewhere below as well, abandoned by her.
The cruelty of it all infuriates me. “Your allies are dying in the main square without that ignit.”
Her shoulders bounce. “I never had enough earpieces for all of them.” She bears the guilt of that like it’s nothing, her chin tipped up and her shoulders relaxed. Her gaze sweeps over the laboratory wreckage, taking in the ignation mutants stepping aimlessly through spilled supplies and the water dripping from the corner of the far wall. Her brow lifts at the limp body of Raghnaid. “And here I was looking forward to killing her myself.” She turns her attention my way. If the Findlay’s voice cuts, hers stabs, volatile barbs spat like darts. “You’ll have to do instead…”
“You can’t cut the aurora out of me anymore. It’ll die without a host.”
“How convenient for you.” She drops the satchel with the ignit for Tavish to fawn over and strides toward me. “Tooconvenient. I think I’ll just have to test it.”
I see her coming, but I can’t stop our collision any more than I can stop the tide as it rushes in from the sea. She balls her unbandaged hand into a fist. The impulse to block and duck clashes between my parasite and me, and instead of doing either, we take her punch straight across the jaw. Our head snaps to the side. The pain rocks us. Lilias slams a knee into our side, and we stumble.
Trembling, we try to regain our footing. We have to hit back. But all we have right now is bark, no bite, and so little even of that.
Lilias laughs. “You could have pulled that aurora from its tree long before you ever shook my hand—you could have used it to fight me, to take power, to do anything.”
As she speaks, we tighten our fingers and launch them at her throat in a cheap shot made for pain. She slips to one side so quickly it seems like she phases through another dimension, or perhaps that’s just our vision spinning, waning, weaving in and out of itself.
Lilias sweeps in, her whole hand on our collar and the other grabbing our hair with its remaining thumb and finger stubs. “But you ken the difference between you and me? I will burn down everyone who stands between myself and justice. And maybe that damns me, but at least I win.”
She brings up her knee again, slamming it into our gut as she yanks our body down to meet it. We stagger back. She kicks us in the stomach, sending us toppling into the lab table. We grab its edge, gasping, but the air feels stale, like nothingness tinged in blood. No amount is enough.
“I will bring justice, no matter what price it comes at.” Lilias’s words take on a growl. She grabs us again. “No trials, no loopholes, no mercy.”
We feel the flecks of spit she scatters across our face—she, this woman who has come to end her war at any cost. A deep, oxygen-deprived part of me wants to cackle at her, to tell her that every war is just a battle in something even larger than itself. Instead, we bare our teeth. “That sounds an awful lot like Raghnaid.” Now it’s our face that’s too close to hers, snarling at her, even if we have no energy to back our threat. “I thought you were killing the villains, not becoming them.”
She scoffs. “At least I’ll let an assembly have Maraheem when I’m done with it—a real one, not the puppet show the corps put on. But only after I’ve cleaned out this house, this city of every last one of these hollow, pompous nobs, clean it out so my son can live in it, safe and happy and wanting for nothing.”
“My aurora and I aren’t them. You’re fight isn’t with us.” We know it won’t change her mind even before we say it.
Her grip tightens around the back of our neck, her thumb pressing into our pulse, and her pinkie caressing the soft back of our skull with the stumps of her missing fingers tucked between, as though she might kiss us or kill us. “You, I’m going to kill just because you’ve been such a damn pain in the arse. I’d like that aurora first, but I can compromise.”
Her favorite little knife flicks out from the cuff of her sleeve. We grab at her arm, but she only redirects her stab. The blade buries into our side, its edge grating against a rib.
The pain hits us, sharp and white-hot. We swarm it, strands of us—of my parasite—slipping around the wound as the weapon is withdrawn, knitting the flesh back together, just as those same strands knit deeper into the rest of our—my—being. The agony turns to a tingle, and everything else goes with it: distant, diluted, numb. We swim in our own head, watching the ground pulse, Lilias’s hand pinning us against the dull pressure of the table.
River-born.
Murk blood.
I hear them both as her blade sinks in again.
The next breath we draw is agony. It’s fire and metal, and something in our lungs, wet, red, rusting there. We try to mend it like we did the last, pressing one piece of ourself through the space after another. With every single suture, ten other strands tear into deeper spaces, into something that could be a life, a soul, a future. It eats us—it eats me. It eats me up.
Attempting to latch.
I can’t quite wrap my mind around it, around me and I and myself. But I see glimpses of my old life—of quiet days and quieter nights, sitting on my porch with a case of wine, surrounded by my pets, the world sparkling and blissful. Of no-man’s land. Of everything I want to return to.
Everything I thought I wanted.
