by TJ Berry
One thing Gary had learned, after years of humans abducting him, was that he could never to allow his captors to get him to a second location. Especially if those captors were known as the most deadly assassins in the known universe.
He wasn’t fast, or particularly strong, but the one advantage he did have was the ability to heal. Walking slowly and compliantly, he dropped his hands out of view of the Sisters and began to fill the air with words.
“You know, I always support your plans. I understand that you have access to information that the rest of us cannot know, and that you make decisions based on that information, but it would be helpful if you could share even the smallest hint of your plans with me so that I could assist you to continue them without interference.” Gary droned on, saying anything that came to mind both to distract the Sisters and to mask the sounds of his thumbs breaking. It hurt like hell. He hoped they didn’t hear the waver in his voice when the bones crunched.
He wriggled the angel-hair rope until it was wedged tightly against his thumb’s lowest knucklebone and yanked with all of his strength, all the while trying to keep his voice steady. He felt a stabbing pain and a pop. The rope slid off his hand. Before it had even come free, the joint was already back in place.
Still talking about cooperation and alliances, Gary moved his hands behind him, hoping the Sisters’ veils would obstruct their peripheral vision. He raised his arms behind the heads of the two Sisters flanking him, then simultaneously grabbed their heads and slammed them together. There was a sound like a ceramic plate hitting a wooden table too hard. Both Sisters hit the ground.
Gary took off at a run in the opposite direction, hoping that the handful of seconds he had as a head start he had would be enough. The Sisters were fast and there was no way to know what type of Bala were under those veils. Any one of them might have been able to stop him in his tracks with a magical phrase or turn him to stone with her hair full of snakes.
He heard the whispering patter of soft feet behind him and realized the octomite was giving chase as well. Even though the Sisters were more dangerous, the eyeless creature frightened him more viscerally.
He pounded through the underbrush, back toward the marsh. Hooves were awkward on slippery tile floors, but, here on packed dirt, he was able to run twice as fast as any human. The scratches from the branches that dragged against his arms healed instantly. It seemed possible that he might actually make it out of the forest unscathed.
Something flew through the air with a high-pitched whistle. Gary instinctively ducked his head, but the projectile embedded itself in the back of his right thigh. He went down, rolling through the foliage and coming to a stop against a tree. The octomite caught up with him and wrapped its long fingers around his legs. Gary kicked out and sent the octomite whimpering back to the Sisters. The bullet in his leg pinged against the root of the tree as it fell out of his flesh.
Gary got up and ran again. Two more bullets hit him in the back. For a moment it was hard to breathe. He coughed up a mouthful of frothy fluid. The bullets pushed out of his back, but more slowly than the leg wound.
He burst out of the forest into the clearing near the marsh. It was too early yet for Kaapo to return and the water stretched to the visible horizon in either direction. There was no going around it unless he wanted to take an hours-long detour. With only the slightest hesitation, Gary waded in.
The Sisters came out of the trees a moment later. They stopped at the edge of the marsh, watching him sink into the muddy ground.
At first, it wasn’t painful as the water lapped at his nerve-free hooves. That changed when the acidic water inched up to his knees, burning away his skin in sheets. A Sister called out to him.
“Gary, this is ridiculous. Come back. We only want to–”
“Kidnap me, like you did the others,” said Gary through gritted teeth. He knew he was being ridiculous but he still couldn’t stop. The Sisters were not going to kill him. If they’d wanted it, he’d be dead already. He could just turn around and go back. But also, he couldn’t. He was back on Copernica Citadel, being marched onto a Reason ship for his first stint in captivity. He was being loaded into a makeshift cell in his own ship, where humans would torture him for horn. He was walking to the Quag on the first day, knowing that every moment from here on out would be agony. If there was one thing he was never going to let happen again it was to be held prisoner against his will. Every step took him further from going down that road again. He knew it made no sense, but he just had to keep walking.
“You’re going to dissolve yourself in that water,” yelled the Sister. “Get back here and I’ll explain. We’re protecting the village from the invaders.”
Gary opened his mouth to answer. The water slapped against his thighs, eating through his trousers and stripping off the top few layers of skin. The words died in his throat.
“Gary, stop,” called the smallest Sister. “We need you.”
They should have thought of that before backing him into a corner. He wasn’t sure how far he could make it into the marsh. Certainly not all the way back to the village. Already, his hooves were wearing away enough that he could feel the acid water eating into the connective tissue and tendons underneath.
The Sisters called out to him a few more times, but he couldn’t hear the words over the whooshing of blood in his ears. He’d been imprisoned, tortured, shot, had broken bones and been frozen nearly to death in the cold vacuum of space, but this was by far the most intense and lasting pain he had ever experienced in his lengthy unicorn life.
As his panic fell away and logic rushed in to fill the space, Gary scanned the skies, looking for an angel or any other Bala who could lift him out of the water. The airways over the marsh were clear. No one ever headed toward the forest and no one was idiotic enough to be out on the marsh. There was no way to call for help.
Eventually the sounds of the Sisters fell away and there was nothing to hear but the slapping of the water against his legs. In places, the muddy bottom dropped down, and he sank lower for a few steps, burning his torso and even once his arms. When he stepped out of the low spots, they healed, only to repeat the process over and over in an excruciating cycle. It was difficult to kill a unicorn but Gary thought he might have possibly found a way to do it.
Eventually, when he was far out into the marsh, the acid water ate through enough of his leg muscles that his steps began to falter. He stumbled along, trying not to drop his hands into the water. When it became hard to even lift his legs, he knew it would not be long before he fell headlong into the marsh without the ability to lift himself out again.
He stopped walking and stood still, listening to the lapping of the water. He had run out of ideas. It was getting difficult to think at all. He prayed to Unamip that someone would find what remained of his body and give him a proper Bala burial.
Through a haze of pain, it occurred to him that Unamip was probably just a few kilometers away, watching all of this. He wondered how a unicorn he had considered a friend could allow this and all those other atrocities to happen. He doubted that Unamip was really a god at all.
A new flare of pain burned in his midsection. His legs, unable to move, had sunk deep into the mud at the bottom of the marsh. There was no longer enough muscle tissue left on his bones to pull them out. He thought about how stupid it was to come all this way, survive so many hardships, just to dissolve into goo in a marsh. There would be no trace of him for anyone to find.
His legs wobbled. In a moment he would fall and the water would eat away at his brain, erasing any trace of the Gary Cobalt who used to be. He wondered if his consciousness would live on in the water. He swayed, hoping at least that the end would come fast.
Two strong hands reached under his armpits and dragged him up and out of the marsh. He hit the deck of Kaapo’s raft with a thud.
“You are an idiot,” she said, kneeling next to him. He raised his head enough to see that his lower half had been mostly dissolved away. His
legs were skeletal, his pelvis bones poked through a gelatinous shroud of flesh. Up on his stomach, he could see organs pulsating beneath transparent gel. He lay back on the logs.
“You weren’t supposed to be here yet,” he panted.
“I left early,” she said. “Unamip told me to come.”
“Tell him I said thanks,” said Gary, before the world went black.
Gary awoke in a sunlit room to the sound of pounding hooves. For a moment, he thought he was a child back in his treehouse on the Jaggery while his father stomped angrily below, demanding that he come down. Little Gary had learned early on that full unicorns couldn’t climb trees.
He opened his eyes and although the room was made of logs, they were pink and fresh and did not smell like pine. He was in the hospital, not the tree house.
This part of the hospital was the clinical wing, where injured beings came to recover. Bala came in with fingers pinched between logs, broken bones, and food poisonings from trying new berries and foliage. With a room of his own, Gary was probably the most serious case on the ward – unless there was someone else with more than half of their body eaten away.
The hospital was a place he had avoided since arriving on their new planet. The front meeting rooms were full of tearful Bala telling their stories of mistreatment at the hands of the Reason in group therapy sessions. With care and time, many of these Bala would be able to create a new life here. Some of those in recovery had been given small jobs around the building, like the kitchen spirit who was in charge of hulling grain for the patients to eat.
Further back in the building were those whose depth of trauma meant a longer treatment plan. Some sat quietly, not reacting to anything happening in the present. Some screamed and yelled in their locked rooms. Others fought invisible enemies who wore the Reason spheres and tears.
A couple of the patients had recently complained of hearing voices. They’d been experiencing whispers that offered them instructions on how to build bits of technology out of local materials. As intriguing as that was, the medical staff had chalked it up to group delusion and everyone missing their phones.
As fraught as it was in the hospital, the workers attempted to create a joyful atmosphere. The aides and healers made every effort to remember that their work was necessary and valued. Their smiles had a tinge of sadness, but they embraced each other frequently and with genuine comfort in their touch.
Gary sat up in his bed, pulling back the covers to see the damage his walk through the marsh had wrought. His legs were not dressed – infection was not a concern for him – but they had been slathered with some sort of greasy ointment. Probably just to make the doctors feel like they were doing something useful. The muscle was growing back from the top of his legs down. From his calves, he was all bones until his hooves, which were completely gone.
“Feeling better?” asked a pile of blankets on a chair in the corner. Boges poked her head out of the top, russet hair sticking up every which way.
“Alive, at least,” he said. She dropped out of the chair as if to leave.
“You don’t have to go,” he said.
“I have things to do,” she replied, heading through the door where he could not follow.
There was something going on with Boges. A secretiveness that she had never displayed in all her years working with him on the Jaggery. She’d avoided him for weeks as if she was upset with him, then turned up at his bedside like she had in the past. It troubled him.
A persistent itch crept up his thighs where the skin and muscle were new. He reached down to scratch and got a handful of viscous grease that he wiped on the bedding.
A little elf child stepped into the room holding a bowl of something steaming.
“Boges said you were awake. Do you want to eat?” she asked.
“Thank you,” he replied, reaching for it. She saw his slimy hands.
“I was told to tell you not to touch that,” she said.
“I’m a terrible patient,” he said. She smiled at him.
“Me too.”
“Oh, I thought you were the doctor.”
She giggled.
“No, I’m Clemenwine,” she said.
“Thank you for the soup, Doctor Clemenwine,” said Gary.
She laughed again and the clouds parted outside of his window, pinkening the room with the rosy sunshine. All those years under human rule, he’d missed living daily life among the Bala.
There were unicorns nearby. Gary could smell their sweat and hear hooves pounding on the walls. These were the ones who had been strapped into Reason ships for horn harvesting, sometimes for decades.
Many of these unicorns he had known in his childhood. He had seen them strong and fit. Now their flanks were rubbed bare and hairless by tight harnesses. Manes were pulled out so that they did not get tangled and matted. Skins were marked with burns, ears clipped, and horn dug so deep that though the crater in the skull grew back, the brain matter that re-formed was bare of memories and higher functions.
They thrashed in their rooms, sometimes forming words and names out of muscle memory, not truly knowing what they were saying. Hearing them made Gary feel like a tightly-coiled spring. He’d been in their position, left in chains and filth as humans dug knives into his head to scrape out the valuable bits of him. One small slip of the knife and he would have been in their rooms, flinging himself against the walls and dripping spittle onto the floor. Being near them felt too close, as if that past could still creep up and catch him.
It was at these times that his mind went to dark places. He wondered if perhaps he had gotten it entirely wrong – maybe humans were the rightful heirs to the universe, a conquering race strong and invasive enough to take over several planets in just one hundred years. Maybe Gary was wrong about kindness being the most important thing. From there it was a small leap to giving up entirely.
Outside, dutiful Bala were following his orders to rebuild their world, figuring out how to construct new lives out of the ruins of their old ones. It seemed pointless, all this wrangling of divergent goals, all this work for a race that the Pymmie hadn’t bothered to protect. Humans were on the way. This time, he was sure the Pymmie weren’t going to step in.
The thought of fighting a hundred years of war all over again exhausted him. If humans were going to spread like a virus unchecked, he couldn’t stop them. He certainly hadn’t the last time.
This was why Gary never came into this building. It always led to dark thoughts – a deep well from which there was no escape. He’d managed to stave it off through busywork in the village, but laying here with nothing to distract him, the heaviness settled over him like a shroud. He was too exhausted to even eat the soup that Clemenwine had brought. It sat on the bedside table, growing cold.
He didn’t make a conscious decision to drop into the null but his mind went there anyway. He saw all of the Bala around him, most gathered in the town, doing their evening tasks. They were bright lights in a soupy sea of color from the living things on the surface. It was hard to pick out individual people based on color and feel alone, but a few were obvious. There was Horm the centaur, pulsing in muted dark red on the outskirts of town. He saw his father, shining like a beacon at the top of the unicorns’ mountain.
He pushed his awareness further out. There were the stoneships, playing a game of tag around the third moon in the system. Something caught his mind’s eye beyond the third moon. A gathering of four bright lights gathered in the darkness, hopping in random patterns throughout the null.
Those were necromancers and they were on the Reason ship, which was far closer than he expected it to be. It would arrive in hours, not weeks. How had they come this close so quickly?
He zoomed in as close as he could, trying to glean the identities of the four necromancers. This ship had only three the last time he checked. The addition of a fourth had somehow coincided with their jump in speed. There were the two he’d seen earlier – mediocre and unremarkable. He saw Bào’s energy,
solid and strong, but not reaching out far past himself. He was experienced enough to know how to use his abilities efficiently.
That fourth one was not someone he’d encountered before. Their energy spun around them in wide rings, smashing into everything around it and grappling with. This necromancer’s energy fought with everything around it, untrained and unharmonious. Battling constantly, but never gaining ground. He suddenly knew who it was.
It was Jenny Perata.
What had weeks ago been a slight glow was now a roiling mass of power. She’d learned to gather massive quantities of nullspace energy but she wasn’t directing it with any sort of precision. This was the danger of necromancers discovering their true natures late in life. They found themselves with tremendous power and no skills to use it.
There was a small part of him that was relieved to see her alive, even though the destruction she was causing was catastrophic. It looked like she was attempting to disable the ship entirely. She was going to tear it apart.
A voice near the foot of his bad startled Gary out of the null.
A cave troll stood at the foot of his bed. He wore the rough apron woven out of dried grass that signified a hospital worker. It was stained with fluids in the colors of several Bala bloods. Gary shivered.
“I said, show me,” barked the troll.
“Sorry. I didn’t hear you,” said Gary.
“You were in the null and I want to know what you see,” said the troll. “Are they suffering? Are they dying?”
“Who?”
“The humans.” The troll let the words drip with hatred.
“I don’t know,” said Gary. As much as it would satisfy the troll to know the humans were killing each other over basic needs, it wouldn’t help anything.
