Corruption

by Adam Vine

  I gave her an energy bar and set about trying to light our little pile of stinking Louse flesh while she sat and ate. She tore the lumpy white bar greedily from the rice paper and shoved it into her mouth, scarfing it down in two bites. She made the second bar disappear even faster.

  By the time she was on her third, I’d hit a spark off the flint blade of my axe, exploding the oily flame bud in a brilliant pyre of red and green fire. I kept the other energy bars hidden in my pocket.

  The initial burst of flames subsided and the fire diminished to a slow, gentle burn. When Zaea was finished eating, she warmed her hands above the flames and said, “They were royalty.”

  It took me a second to realize she was talking about the tombs. “Oh. Yeah. How do you know?”

  “I was a princess,” Zaea said, staring at the faces floating in the infinite march of the mirrors.

  “Wait, did I hear that right?” I said. “Did you just say you’re a princess? As in, the daughter of a royal family?”

  She gave me that disappointed look again, like she was sad I wasn’t using my intelligence. “Yes. That’s what I said.”

  “Of where?”

  “Of Neen, the City Arcanum.”

  I’d never heard of a city in Europe, or anywhere else, called Neen.

  “Have you been here before?” I said.

  Zaea’s expression became forlorn. “I don’t remember. I suppose I must have, since we’re here now. But I can’t recall how I got here. When I fell asleep, I was in my own bed. Of course, I was pretty drunk. But then the next thing I know, you were shaking me awake and talking to me about fires. Did you bring me here, Daniel Harper from California?”

  Her words sent a slow tingle down the back of my neck. She fell asleep in bed when she was piss drunk, like I did. I shook my head. “No. I didn’t. We’re in the same boat.”

  “What?”

  “We’re in the same boat. It means I’m just as confused as you are.”

  “Oh,” Zaea said. “A boat of confusion?”

  “Yes.” I let out a chuckle. Searing pain shot through my shoulder. I gasped and clutched it. The shrapnel piece seemed to be gone, but a huge swathe of my skin was wet and excruciatingly painful to the touch.

  Zaea motioned for me to turn around so she could look. I heard her whistle behind me. “You’re burned. It looks bad, but I can treat it. Doesn’t seem to have gone all the way to the bone. You’re lucky.”

  “Lucky is exactly what I feel right now.” Zaea didn’t pick up on my sarcasm. I knee-walked across the floor to examine my wound in the closest mirror. The looping pingback of reflections from across the hall made it easy for me to get a full view of the damage.

  My left shoulder, lower neck, and the upper triceps of my left arm were an open, oozing mess of dead, cooked flesh and blackened skin. There was a small silver lining to that cloud, though; the flames had sealed shut the deep score created by the shrapnel, between the top of my left scapula and the bottom of my trapezius. At least now the cut wouldn’t get infected. The burn still would if I didn’t clean and bandage it, but I knew enough first aid to know that burns were easier to treat than deep cuts.

  My t-shirt had disintegrated where the Louse’s flame had touched me, an oblong spear rather than the formless firewall I had imagined. That made sense. The flame bud’s hole was small, like the opening at the end of a gun barrel. When the flame bud primed and fired, the hottest part of the fire it shot would be something like a lance that could be aimed directionally, rather than a nebulous cloud.

  “Could be worse. But we’ll need to find bandages,” I said.

  Zaea crept up to my back, looked at my wound again, returned to the fire, and with nurturing dismissal said, “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. We simply need to find an AutoLek. I might need to ask my father to link me a new bank fab. I seem to have left mine at home. Then, we can figure out where the nearest flyder station is, and when the next launch will be that can take us home. We were very drunk, that’s all. We got blackout drunk and took the wrong flyder somewhere, we walked around, we got lost, and now… here we are. This looks like it might be in the QZ,” the unfrozen girl gave me a reassuring smile.

  “QZ?” I said.

  “Quarantine Zone.”

  Jesus. She thinks she’s still on her world, like I did, I thought. But something deep inside me tells me that isn’t how this works. Neither of us are at home any more, Zaea. Both of us are very, very far from home.

  “Um… Zaea? What exactly is an AutoLek? And a bank fab? And a flyder? I’ve never heard those words before,” I said.

  Zaea raised an eyebrow at me. “An AutoLek is a doctor’s kiosk, a place for treating wounds and diseases, up to and including tier one and two cancers and basic biotechnical surgery. You can find them on any street corner in the civilized world.” Her eyes darted up and out as she corrected herself. “Well, maybe not any street corner. They’re harder to find near my work. I went to Ganheim Academy for school. We used to have one in every building. Now I have to walk over a kilometer any time I wanted to change my eye color.”

  “Wait, wait. What the hell are you talking about?” I said.

  The unfrozen girl stared at me, the light of the low, oily flames dancing in the blue lakes of her eyes. “What? I don’t understand,” Zaea said.

  I washed my face through my hands, exhaling a frustrated sigh. “Never mind. I don’t think we’re going to find any of that here. AutoLeks, flyders, or whatever. You’re the first living person I’ve seen since I’ve been here. Well, that’s not entirely true. I heard one woman yell something while that Louse… thing was carrying me – it’s a long story. She was human, but you’re the only other one.”

  “Louse thing?” Zaea laughed. “Now who’s not making any sense?”

  I frowned. “Yeah, you’re right. That probably sounds pretty insane. You just woke up here. You haven’t even been outside yet.”

  Zaea shook her head. “You’re a bit strange, you know that, Daniel from California? I must say, I don’t know who you are or how we met, but I’ve woken up next to far worse after a wild night.” She extended her hand. “And I apologize for my terrible bedside manner. I’m pleased to meet you.”

  Jesus. She really thinks we slept together, that this is all just the aftermath of some drunken hookup she doesn’t remember. Won’t be long before she sheds that delusion...

  I shook Zaea’s outstretched hand. It felt cold and small, but familiar, too, like a touch I’d been missing all my life but didn’t know I had been missing until now. “The pleasure’s all mine, Frost Princess. And, I’m glad you’re feeling better. To be honest, I didn’t think you were going to make it for a minute there.”

  “Are you not always honest, Daniel from California?” Zaea said with a smirk.

  “Um, it’s just Dan. And, I’m not sure. I try to be honest. But I’d be lying right now if I told you I knew where we are or what the fuck is going on.”

  Zaea shook her head no. “No one is completely honest all the time. The difference between a liar and an honest person is, the liar doesn’t know it. That’s what my father says. Our people consider him a good king. And he is so funny. He tells the dirtiest jokes… things that should not be appropriate to say in front of your daughter.” She laughed at the memory. “You’ll see when you meet him. He will like you.” Zaea pursed her lips suddenly, catching the comment on the tip of her tongue. She blushed and smiled. “Oops. I’m sorry. I probably sound crazy, talking about you meeting my family after one night.”

  “It’s okay. He sounds like a great man,” I said.

  “He has his flaws. But, don’t we all. Anyways, come on. Let’s get up and get that wound treated. I’m feeling much better, and I need to stretch my legs.” Zaea rose, shivered, and stretched. The fire was dying, and I didn’t see any reason why we shouldn’t, though I dreaded to see her sweet naivety shattered when she saw what awaited us outside the tombs. Just in case we wouldn’t return, I grabbed the remaining half of the f
lame bud and the broken axe head. I let Zaea keep the Snowman’s fur coat.

  The lights died as soon as we passed Grandma. A loud thunk echoed through the endless hallways, and the unbroken beam of the single lamp flowed back out of its mirrored infinity, leaving us in pitch-black darkness. Zaea gasped behind me. “Dan?”

  “I’m here,” I said. I couldn’t even see my own hand in front of my face. “The light should be motion activated, but it’s not coming on. Looks like the power went out. We’ll be okay. Here. Give me your hand.” I reached and groped for her hand in the darkness, my fingers brushing something soft and warm.

  “Hey! That is not my hand!”

  “Sorry,” I said. Her fingers found mine. “Hold onto me, okay?”

  “I am waiting. Lead the way,” Zaea said.

  I reached out with my free hand until I felt the cold, mirrored glass of the left wall, and started walking. It took much longer to navigate the spider web of halls in total darkness, but eventually, we made it back to the entrance to the crypts, and the promising light of that shining, gilded archway.

  “See?” I said, letting go of Zaea’s hand to wag a finger at her. “I have an impeccable sense of direction.”

  Zaea blew a raspberry through her lips.

  We ascended back into the station’s high, domed hall, the smells of ancient death and cold dust seizing in my nostrils. The lights here were still on.

  Zaea scrunched her face and covered her nose. Her eyes became discs as she saw the piles of corpses covering the floor and benches. A two-tone whimper escaped her lips.

  “Oh, no.”

  I gave her hand a gentle squeeze to let her know I was still there. “Yeah. That was my reaction too,” I said.

  I suspected Zaea had been brought here by the same strange, unknowable happenstance that had brought me. I didn’t think these were her people. But if I was wrong, I didn’t want to say something that would add to the trauma.

  Zaea walked among them, fingers slatted over trembling lips, breathing short, pale clouds of breath. Tears brimmed at the edges of her eyes.

  When she’d taken a full survey of the room, she turned to me, blinked back her tears, fixed her stricken posture, and demanded, “We didn’t get drunk and sleep together, did we. We’ve never even met before now, have we.” Neither were questions.

  I shook my head slowly. “No.”

  “Daniel, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly.

  “What happened to them?”

  I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe they froze. But that doesn’t make sense. The heat is still on down in the crypts, twenty feet from here. Or it was, until a few minutes ago. If they were freezing, why didn’t they just… you know?”

  “They didn’t freeze,” Zaea said. “We used to operate on cadavers that were preserved this way in medical school. These people were poisoned.”

  “Poisoned?” I took a second look at the corpses lying or sitting side-by-side in close circles, some leaning on each other, some fallen. I’d assumed that they’d done that to keep warm, but Zaea was right. There wasn’t any indication the cold had been what killed them. There were, however, plenty of tiny, pill-sized glass cylinders littering the floor that looked like the bottles my anxiety medication used to come in back in the first months after the accident when I still took it – those were plastic, but the basic design was similar.

  Of course. This would be the perfect location for an end-of-the-world suicide ring to get together and kick the bucket. Where better to find lethally poisonous preservatives than in a royal crypt?

  “They killed themselves,” I said.

  Zaea shook her head. “Not all of them.” She pointed to the few who had fallen outside the main groups, huddled in corners or curled up behind trash bins. “The others killed themselves. These ones didn’t want to. But they weren’t given a choice.”

  I suddenly wanted very badly to leave that sepulcher of sallow, sunken faces, parched leathery skin, and unblinking eyes. I saw a vision of despair in my mind’s eye so empty and terrifying it shook me more deeply than I’d been shaken walking through the fields of frozen corpses on the surface.

  “I need to get out of here,” I said. “Come on. The exit’s right there,” I said, and began walking toward the stairs leading back down the platform.

  Zaea put a hand on my non-injured shoulder to stop me. “No. That’s the train station. Look. The sign says Metro. Can’t you read Ithic?” she said, pointing to the strange, swirling script scrawled above the gate.

  I shook my head no. Confusion washed over Zaea’s face, then fear. “Dan… where exactly is California?”

  “California is in the United States. On Planet Earth.”

  “And in which sector of the Paradigm is this Planet Earth?”

  That was all that needed saying for both of us to truly see each other, and our surroundings for the first time.

  “Zaea, where the fuck are we?” I said.

  Zaea looked back at the sign above the subway gate, then at me, then the sign again, her lips parting like she was staring at a pattern her eyes couldn’t follow. “I don’t know, Dan. I don’t know. I was wrong. That language isn’t Ithic. It looks similar, but the accents are wrong. And some of the characters are different. It’s like we walked into some kind of…”

  “Parallel universe,” I finished for her. “Or a wormhole. Magic wardrobe. A door to another dimension. Or… something.”

  “How long ago did you wake up?” Zaea said.

  I shrugged, sucking air through my teeth to show my uncertainty. “I’m not exactly sure. It feels like days, but it can’t have been more than a few hours ago. I wasn’t as lucky as you. I woke up outside, in the snow. Still can’t believe I didn’t die.”

  Zaea’s brow furrowed in consternation. “What snow?”

  “I think we should go outside. It’s easier if I show you. If that’s not the main exit, where is it?”

  Zaea gestured toward a sealed, ornate double door on the far side of the hall, opposite the stairs. “There.”

  We struggled for at least half an hour to get those doors open. The snowpack was thick on the other side, and the gaps between and underneath the doors had frozen solid. It took both of us slamming into it with our shoulders on a count of three just to get one side ajar, letting a slip of muddy, gray light fall in through the cracks. It was morning outside.

  Two more well-timed shoulder thrusts and the door opened wide enough for Zaea to squeeze through. I waited in silence for a moment before calling out, “Zaea?”

  “Sorry,” her voice came muffled from the other side.

  “Can you help me open this a little more? It’s not big enough for me to get through.”

  “We’re on the Surface?” she muttered to herself, then louder, said, “All right. There’s a lot of snow. I’ve never seen this much snow before.”

  “You pull. I’ll push. Ready?” I said, and we did, until I was finally able to shimmy through.

  The pallid gray of the outside blinded me at first. I shielded my eyes with my hand and waited for my vision to adjust.

  We stood on the remains of a stone promenade covered by a long overhang lined with statues. It was dawn. The promenade was a narrow bottleneck opening about a hundred feet long, where the shattered remains of revolving glass doors framed a serrated portrait of the ruined world beyond, a broken city rising piecemeal from the tundra as far as the eye could see.

  Zaea shrugged the Snowman’s furs off her shoulders and offered them to me. I shook my head. “No. You hang onto it. You can give it back to me later, when I’m the one almost dying. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Zaea said.

  We started walking toward the shattered revolving doors. I paused to look at the graffiti someone had scrawled on the grimy, crumbling walls. I was seized by the strangest sensation. The longer I stared, the clearer the symbols became. Suddenly, that mutant, alien form of Cyrillic transformed into words with meaning a
nd value, and in that instant I could read the characters as clearly as I could read English.

  “A mouse alone is prey, but a family of mice overruns,” the graffiti said. Beneath it, the artist had signed the name, Vermin.

  That’s what the woman yelled who rescued me from the Louse. This must be the Vermin’s territory.

  Zaea put a hand on my shoulder. “Dan? Can you read what that says?”

  A frigid gust of wind blasted in. I wrapped myself in my own arms and said, “I can. The strangest thing just happened. I didn’t understand jack shit when we were inside the building. But when I saw these words in daylight just now, I could.” I chuckled nervously. “Maybe it’s written in magic paint.”

  Zaea folded her arms too, shivering and glaring at me skeptically the way Carly used to when she thought I was lying. “And what does it say?”

  “It says: A mouse alone is prey, but a family of them overruns. Vermin.”

  Zaea nodded. “I feel very disoriented, Dan. We need to get out of here, and find someone who can help us figure out exactly where we are.”

  “You know what? That’s a great idea.”

  I was first to climb through the shattered glass of the revolving doors, helping Zaea with one eye while I kept the other on our surroundings.

  The crypts were located at the end of some kind of plaza lined with other grand buildings, all facing a huge, rectangular mirror pond. The ground was buried under six feet of clean, white snow. I couldn’t see any footprints, but I thought the Lice might have been waiting to ambush us once we were out in the open.

  It wasn’t the Lice we had to worry about. As soon as Zaea had both feet in the snow, someone hissed, and six pale shapes rose from the snow, surrounding us with weapons drawn. They carried short, cruelly bladed spears, short swords, knives, and axes, and wore white fur jackets with hoods drawn. But they moved differently than the Snowmen had, intelligently, with swift grace and silent purpose. All of them were masked, wearing the faces of owls, mice, rabbits, mongooses, foxes...