by A. L. Knorr
I could have screamed my anger and self-loathing to the skies. As it was, the fires of my anger sputtered out before we merged onto the next street, and I was left feeling a sickening emptiness.
What now?
Dillon had the second pair of rings, and they might be enough to set Kezsarak free. I still didn’t know all the ways that would be bad, but if that demon’s torment of my dreams was any evidence, the world could do without him running free. I shuddered at the thought, remembering the crushing gears and wishing for death.
No, if nothing else, for my own sanity, I needed to keep Kezsarak buried deep in whatever prison he was in.
But how?
I felt a shift in my ride’s stance, and then we were gliding into a parking lot just off a busy street I didn’t recognise. The expanse was nearly empty of cars, a bare, concrete square between a petrol station and a shuttered collections agency. A few streetlamps cast pools of light, but the rider piloted us to a patch of black shadow between them. We came to a stop, the rider throwing out her legs to brace the bike as it gave a final chuff, before she slid out the kickstand.
I’d never ridden a motorcycle before, so the etiquette of a dismounting passenger was lost on me. I peeled my arms from around her, my locked muscles protesting. She swung a leg over and kept a hand on the bike as I managed a clumsy dismount. My whole body throbbed, and the tense ride had done nothing to help.
Standing on the pavement sent knives of pain through my ribcage, stealing my breath. I doubled over, willing air into my tightening lungs.
“You look awful but there’s still fight in you,” the biker said, chuckling as she removed her helmet. “You nearly squeezed the life out of me.”
A flash of dark hair flipped up, and I was staring at those familiar eyes again, set in a striking face I couldn’t readily forget.
“Daria?” I wheezed at the woman from the university lavatory.
“Yes, love,” she said, nodding. “Hello, again. I suppose you’d like an explanation.”
“You think?” I had just enough breath to put force behind the words, but I made the mistake of trying to stand up to deliver them. A second later, I was wincing and gasping, one hand on my knees, the other bracing my side.
“Take it easy,” she said, putting a hand on my back. “Sark laid into you pretty badly. You must have really hacked him off. We need to get you looked at.”
A lorry barrelled by, laying on its horn. We both jumped at the sudden blast. When I looked at Daria, a cry of new shock escaped me.
Her dark eyes gleamed like those of a night-time predator reflecting torchlight. Her lips peeled back to reveal needle-sharp teeth. In a flash, the monster was gone, and she was pretty Daria once more, but I was past believing it was a trick of the light.
“We need to go,” she said, reaching out to help me straighten.
I lurched back and nearly folded in two at the pain arcing up through my body. Both my hands wrapped around my ribs, and I snarled. “Like hell. There is no we!”
Dary’s face bowed with genuine hurt.
“Ibby, please,” Daria pleaded. “You’re hurt.” But she took a step back.
Fear and anger gave me a strength I didn’t think I could muster. With a grunt of effort, I shot my hand out and curled my fingers into a claw. The metal clasps of her biker boots stretched like elastics to the opposite foot and, with a snap, bound themselves together.
“Stay back,” I said, panting as I sank down onto my knees. I wanted to melt into the pavement cracks, but I stoked the last embers of my desperate rage. I had to stay awake, had to stay on guard.
She looked down at her hobbled feet and sighed. “Ibby, this is childish. Why would I rescue you if I wanted to hurt you?”
Dary’s eyes, so vulnerable in her young face, flashed with irritation as she looked up. She stared at me with a long exhale. I glimpsed for just a second the incredible mind working behind those eyes, and saw experience there. Her body and face said young woman, probably my age, but those eyes said she was frighteningly old.
“Who … are you?” I asked, finding it wasn’t just breathing that was difficult. Forming my thoughts into specific words was getting harder too.
The woman crossed her arms and glared at me for a second, and it was hard to keep my eyes from wandering to the collapsed baton on her hip. The aluminium alloy of its telescoping shaft was ready to betray its mistress at any sign from me. I took what comfort I could from that.
“I’m not a student, as I led you to believe. I was at the university on the lookout for signs of an organisation I’ve worked with in the past.”
First Dillon, now her; didn’t anybody at university just go to school?
I shook my head and settled into a cross-legged slump on the pavement. I needed to sit down before I fell over. My head felt heavy, but at least breathing seemed easier.
“What organisation?”
“They call themselves the Group of Winterthür.”
I stared, unsure if it was just my injuries or my ignorance that left me clueless.
“They’re the group that betrayed Lowe all those years ago and the one Sark is currently working for,” Dary explained. “They have agents in academia so I was waiting for something to shake loose.”
“You … you worked … for them?”
“With. Not for,” Daria clarified. “I’m a freelancer, but things didn’t go well last time, and I was looking to even the score. Sark is just one in a long line of miserable gits employed by them.”
She called Dillon a miserable git. How hilarious and endearing. I giggled, not really knowing why I found it so funny. Something clicked in my side when I laughed.
Dary’s expression became one of grim concern. “I’m on your side, Ibby.”
She gestured towards her feet. “Ibby, I’m begging you, please. For your own sake, undo this and let me help you. Much longer, and I’m not sure if I can get you to help on time.”
For a second, I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, and that seemed funny too. Then the metal of her altered boots sang out to me, and I released the mental grip I’d forgotten I was maintaining. I felt like letting go of a lot of things right about then, not the least of which was my bladder.
“I really have to wee.” I giggled again, then: “Ow.”
With a sigh, Daria helped me slowly to my feet and braced me with an arm.
“Where is Lowe?” she asked as my head lolled back.
I stared up into the dark sky with the corona of the streetlight at the upper edge of my vision, a reverse sunrise.
“I’m cold,” I muttered and gave a half-hearted shiver.
Dary’s fingers squeezed my arm, and her breath felt warm on the side of my face. “Ibby, for the sake of your life, how do you get to Lowe?”
Lowe? Lowe was gone. Gone like I was going. It wouldn’t matter if I told her.
“British Museum Station,” I slurred, my tongue a stranger in my mouth. “Covent to ghost station.”
The dark sky swelled, pressing on me as it thickened and roiled. For a second, I saw flashes of light, like lightning bugs, and I recognised the red-orange flashes as cinders. From a flurry of those, burning eyes materialised in the drooping sky. I tried to scream, but darkness swallowed me.
18
My existence had shrunk to two distinct points.
First was a single finger that extended out from the machine, which I could twitch and crook uselessly. It was a futile movement, but trapped as I was, I kept curling and uncurling, terrified that small movement would be gone too, and I would be entombed in the gears completely and eternally. That single finger was my only defiance.
Second, and even less pleasant, was the incredible burden of breathing. My chest clenched between the twisting teeth of spoked wheels. Every instant was a compressed eternity, where I was certain I couldn’t force my tortured organs to draw in one more breath, and then somehow, painfully sucked in enough oxygen to stay alive. Never enough to stave off the panicked pre
ssure of needing another breath, but just enough so I couldn’t enjoy the oblivious darkness beyond the machine.
Thoughts, even terror and despair, wouldn’t form into anything coherent as I tried to drag in another breath.
UNDERSTAND.
The voice was there, gloatingly patient, reverberating up through the gears so I could feel the spiteful satisfaction vibrating in my distended bones and crushed flesh.
KNOW.
If they were commands or declarations, or both, I didn’t know, but either way, they hinted at a subtle shift in the voice. The rage was absent, and between breaths, I realised the machine was cold now, its furious heat quenched. My finger curled in and brushed the metal, cool to the touch.
YESSS.
The bitterness was still there, a vast ocean of malice filled with millennia of resentment, but the storm had passed for now. The voice rested, settling to the bottom of its hateful depths, content to watch me. The horror of this terrible nonexistence ate at my mind, gnawing with dreadful teeth. The voice wanted me to stay there, perhaps for a million eternities, to soak in its venomous sea as it watched me trapped in that cramped state of bare existence.
BEAUTIFUL.
A kind of awful contentment which had no place with that word suffused the machine as a low atonal hum. It came from a being, who understood time as an abstraction I couldn’t hope to digest. My suffering would be absolute, inescapable and endless in a way that beggared my mind. My twitching finger and gasping breath were the only landmarks in a wasteland I would circle, over and over and over again. I had nothing else. I was nothing else.
FOREVER.
I woke up screaming and shivering.
Lurching upwards, hands tried to push me back down … into the machine. I wailed and fought them hard, clawed, squirmed, kicked and bit.
“Ibby, please,” a man’s voice came with the sound of breaking glass.
“Damn it, Lowe, just hold her!” A woman this time.
My mind lashed about at the same time as my body, reaching reflexively for metallics at hand. Finding delicate tines of metal as fine and strong as spider silk, I raked them around me with slashing fingers.
“Daria, look out!”
The tines struck something solid, and a woman’s scream of pain drowned out my own. The hands released me, and I lurched to my feet. The world reeled wildly, and I swung out like I could grab a hold of it and force it to stop. As I swung, the metal tines twisted, and another scream rang high and loud.
“Ibby, that is enough!” the man bellowed.
Pain blasted sharply across my cheek.
My head whipped to the side, my neck cracked. One hand flew to the sting at my face. My cheek smarted, but the burning sensation, juxtaposed with the chilly touch of the hand, cleared the fog of madness and fear.
I wasn’t in the machine. Theirs wasn’t ‘the voice.’
The world resolved into the commons of Museum Station. I was standing in front of the obelisk, trembling and sweating. Lowe glared, looking angry and ashamed. Behind him, Daria lay on the floor, clutching an arm where half a dozen syringes were buried.
“What’s going on?” Slowly it was dawning. It was me who’d sent the needles flying into Daria. The fine spider’s silk of metals.
Lowe relaxed a little, but his eyes shone with a fierce animation. “You were hurt.” He swept a hand towards Daria. “She brought you here to recover.”
I looked from Lowe to Dary, who glared up at me from her bleeding arm.
“You’re bloody welcome!” Gingerly Daria touched a needle and gave a hiss of pain.
“I … I’m sorry,” I croaked. “I thought you were …”
“You should lie down.” Lowe nodded at the cot on the floor. Next to it was a pile of clothes, scattered medical supplies and a few broken bottles. I felt very cold and tired, but I didn’t want to lie down, fearing a return to the hellish machine. I wrapped my arms around myself … and discovered I was nearly naked.
Soft linen swaddled me from the lowest rib to above my breasts. Other than the bandage and my underwear, I didn’t have a stitch of clothing on. Cheeks burning, I dropped into the cot. Snatching up the rumpled sheet, I pulled it up to my chin.
Daria sat on the ground, still testing the crumpled syringes, finding them bent and unwilling to slide free easily. Lowe stood over her. His posture was that of a man dealing with something dangerous.
“Do you need anything?” he asked, though I noticed he was not doing anything which might bring him closer to her.
Daria left off tugging at the syringes and looked up at him, her expression saturated with that same spooky light from earlier. “I’ll be fine, Lowe. Just smarts. Fetch me the kit?”
Lowe nodded and turned towards me. “Ibby, would you please pick up that knapsack under your cot?”
I found a very old but well-cared for bag of leather with a bronze-latched top and canvas straps. It hung open, medical paraphernalia a visible jumble inside.
I stood, still holding the sheet around me with one arm and an elbow, and shuffled forwards with the bag.
Lowe met me halfway and took the bag. I waddled back, careful of the broken glass that littered the floor. Spying a rumpled pile of clothes, I recognised them as my thrift store purchases. Even Dillon’s jacket lay at the bottom of the pile. Snatching these up, I began to dress while stealing glances towards Lowe and Daria. Lowe had handed off the bag and resumed his stiff posture, while Dary, after fishing out some tweezers and gauze, began the extraction.
The first syringe slowly slid free as Daria controlled her body and breathing with obvious effort. By the time several centimetres of needle had emerged, I was both impressed with her and mortified with myself. The events of my awakening were still fuzzy, but I remembered the dream. Every detail made me feel queasy and quivery. I knew why I was in such a state when I woke up, but it didn’t make it any easier to see the results.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” I called as I stood to pull on my jeans.
“It doesn’t need anything from us,” Lowe answered and flapped a hand. “Just sit down and stay calm please.”
My hackles rose at the dismissal, followed by a cold splash of contrition.
You lost the other set of rings. Some Inconquo.
I sank back down onto the cot and stared at the floor. Lowe’s spirit had been waiting for me for a century, and I failed my first ‘mission’ spectacularly. I’d nearly died, had to be rescued, then nearly killed Daria too. I looked at the rings on my fingers and thought about stripping them off and leaving. Maybe I wasn’t a true Inconquo after all. Lowe was mistaken.
Dary muttered something to Lowe. I looked up to see them staring at me. Daria’s expression was concerned while Lowe’s was stern as steel. Brows furrowed like grey thunderclouds, his mouth a grim line. I wasn’t ready for the surge of shame and sorrow that welled up at the sight. Lips trembling, I wrapped my arms around myself.
“I’m sorry,” I sobbed, the words sounding leaden. “I’m so sorry, Professor.”
I wanted to hide my face, but I didn’t, determined to bear his judgement, his scorn. I deserved it.
Lowe’s scowl crumbled. “It’s going to be fine.” He shook his head slowly, bemused. “It isn’t human, after all. Not anymore.”
I blinked in confusion, my mouth hanging open. What was he talking about?
“Thank you, dear.” Dary hissed as another syringe came free, and she applied some gauze. “You’ve managed to insult me and confuse Ibby, all in one fell swoop. Bravo!”
I pressed my hands to my temples and squeezed. My addled brains must have missed something vital.
“She’s upset.” Lowe turned back to Dary, exasperated. “She doesn’t need to think she’s hurt an actual person.”
Daria looked up from her ministrations with a withering glare. “How sweet of you, James,” she replied coldly. “If you prick me, do I not bleed?”
Lowe gave a dismissive shrug as a third syringe came free. “So do scorpio
ns and spiders,” he replied. “No one gets upset when ‘they’ get squashed.”
Dary ceased pulling on a syringe and stabbed the tweezers towards him, eyes flashing that feral light. “Now listen here you pompous, self-righteous, arrogant —”
“What the hell is going on‽” The question burst out of me like an explosion. My hands gripped the frame of the cot hard enough that my knuckles to stained the skin. “You’re telling me she isn’t a she, and she’s not debating the issue? You’re fighting like an old married couple.” My voice trembled. “And why does no one seem to care I failed so badly at getting the rings?”
Lowe and Daria shared a knowing look. Dary went back to removing the needles while Lowe came to kneel in front of me. He held out a hand, and I took it. The familiar chill of his touch was a comfort I desperately needed.
“That you are alive and that we still have the other rings is victory enough for today. Given what you were up against, things could have gone very badly.”
I started to argue, but a gentle squeeze of my hand and a brisk shake of his head quieted me.
“No, Ibby, you need to hear me. This fight has been going on for ages. Literally. We need to take the long view. This is a battle that can’t be won in one night or even a year. I was able to scrape a few successes in three decades of effort, and no one was shooting at me.”
He wiped a few tears from my cheek and raised my chin when it began to sink.
“Don’t be ashamed. That you are alive is proof of strength that few possess.”
I met the eyes of the ghost and saw the sincerity, and more importantly, the trust in his eyes. He still believed in me.
“All right.” My breath shook. I used my free hand to palm further tears away. “I’ll trust your experience on this one.”
“Wise decision.” Lowe smiled, and with a final squeeze, he let go of my hand but did not rise. “If anything, I should be the one apologising. I abandoned you when you needed me in Brexlon Hall. I’m sorry, Ibby.”
