He stepped out of the car.
Permanent damage. Removing the majority of her lower intestine.
He didn’t step into the house they’d borrowed. He headed straight for the house next door, the one they’d broken into when they were looking for house keys.
Interrupted blood flow, infection, possible signs of necrosis. She’l require a colostomy bag even in the best case scenario. In the worst case scenario, well, there’s any number of ways this could end badly for the patient.
End badly, Krouse thought. She’ll die.
Heading inside through the side door, he locked it behind him and made his way to the living room. The canisters were sitting under the couch, along with the papers. He flipped through them.
Canister A: F-1-6-1-1, ‘Deus’, 85% mixture.
Added: C-0-0-7-2, ‘Balance’, 15% mixture.
To be consumed by Client 1
Canister B: R-0-9-3-6, ‘Jaunt’, 70% mixture.
Added: C-0-0-7-2, ‘Balance’, 30% mixture.
To be consumed by Client 2
Canister C: C-2-0-6-2, ‘Prince’, 55% mixture.
Added: O-0-1-2-1, ‘Aegis’, 30% mixture.
Added: C-0-0-7-2, ‘Balance’, 15% mixture.
To be consumed by Client 3
Canister D: M-0-0-4-2, ‘Vestige’, 75% mixture.
Added: C-0-0-7-2, ‘Balance’, 25% mixture
To be consumed by Client 4
Canister E: X-0-7-9-6, ‘Division’, 80% mixture.
Added: C-0-0-7-2, ‘Balance’, 20% mixture
To be consumed by Client 5
Canister F: E-0-7-1-2, ‘Robin’, 60% mixture.
Added: C-0-0-7-2, ‘Balance’, 40% mixture
To be consumed by Client 6
“Can’t even say what they do, huh?” he asked. ”Because you want to leave maximum room for us to screw up, is that right?”
He could hear a car on the road, the crunch of heavy snow beneath tires. A car door slammed. He flipped back several pages to reread the directions. Nothing more complicated than drinking the stuff.
But which one? He stared at the list, muttered, “Jaunt.”
A small laugh escaped his lips. Didn’t a jaunt mean a short trip?
“Well, that’s as fitting a choice as any,” he said. He could hear the others making their way inside.
He screwed off the top of the canister and withdrew the vial inside. ”A toast! If I’m screwed no matter which path I take, then at least I’ll go forward with courage! Fuck you, Simurgh!”
Marissa and Oliver appeared at the entrance to the living room just in time to see him tossing the contents of the vial back. They rushed forward to stop him and only succeeded in catching him as he fell.
Pain.
It was like cold electricity, moving through his body at a speed of an inch a second.
He saw fragmented images, faded, blurry. A crystal formation, growing in fast motion. Two crystals, each somehow alive. They moved by creating more of themselves, letting the crystal behind them die. He sensed that years were passing, but they moved together, insistent.
The second they made contact, the entire world was turned to crystal in a heartbeat.
Another heartbeat later, the world shattered.
Another image. Creatures that folded and unfolded through space, existing in multiple worlds simultaneously, too many to count, spreading out from the remains of a world.
A third scene. Falling towards a barren planet, seeing the descent with countless eyes that weren’t quite eyes. And a fragment of an idea… that the world had the same general shape as Earth. Landmasses in the right place, if not quite the right shape. No water… but still Earth.
“Krouse,” Marissa whispered.
“All good,” he smiled. He struggled to his feet, then nearly lost his balance. He had to put one hand on Marissa’s shoulder to keep from falling to the ground. ”It’s all good.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m brave and stupid and because she’s the only one who ever gave me the benefit of a doubt,” he said. He tried to walk and fell. Marissa caught him.
“You can’t,” she said.
“Can too. ’Cause I’m pretty sure it worked. Not sure how. But it worked.”
He felt a pressure behind him. A matching pressure to his right. He turned to look, to see what was happening, and only saw the flatscreen television and a heavy speaker poised on the edge of the bookshelf. There was a chord, as if a string stretched between them, vibrating, and the television was suddenly sitting on the bookshelf, the speaker in the midst of the entertainment center. The television fell with a crash, and the remains of the screen danced across the floor. Marissa shrieked.
“See?” he smiled.
“Krouse-”
He was aware of the pressure, aware of the reaching. He tried to push it to move, like he’d move his hand, and it did. He couldn’t exactly feel the shape, but had a sense of the heft of the thing he was pressing against. He pressed the other presence against the coffee table, but didn’t feel the same chord.
Could expand and contract it, he noted, as if he were opening or closing his hand. He tried expanding one. No, that made it worse. Expanding the one around the coffee table, grabbing, what, air?
The chord.
The desk from the front hall crashed to the ground and tipped over just beside them. The coffee table settled in the front hall. Again, Marissa made a noise of alarm, a yelp. ”Krouse! Stop!”
“It’s all good,” he repeated himself. ”Because I’m going to help her. Fuck the Simurgh. Fuck destiny.”
He stopped when he saw Cody in the hallway.
“They’ll accept this too,” Cody said, “Our friends, your friends really, they’ll let it slide, won’t they? I get threatened, treated like shit, and you? Well, you get the breaks.”
“Pretty much,” Krouse said. ”But if it helps, you’re doing it for you. I’m doing it for her. For Noelle. Because I love that girl, and she puts up with me, and I’ll probably never find another person like that again. Not in our world and not in this one.”
“You’re not capable of love,” Cody said.
“We’ll agree to disagree.” Krouse pushed the presence against Cody, surrounded himself. No, not quite. I’m smaller. Need to suck in some air…
They swapped places in a flash. Cody staggered.
Krouse nearly fell, too. He caught the rails of the stairwell to balance, grit his teeth in the anticipation of pain.
No pain. He clenched his bad hand, the one that had been impaled.
It was healed.
“All good,” he said, knowing he was saying the same thing over and over, rambling. ”Guess I’ll need one for her.”
He grabbed the heaviest book from the coffee table, then reached for a canister…
He could feel it, but couldn’t get a lock. He turned around, looked.
There.
The book was replaced by the canister the second he made eye contact. He nearly dropped it.
Krouse smiled. ”Not too difficult. Not hard.”
He whirled around, nearly lost his balance. ”Well, I’ll meet you guys at the hospital.”
“Krouse!” Marissa shouted. She stepped forward, reaching for him. He pushed his power into her and Oliver, switched them so that Oliver was within a few feet of him.
Oliver backed away, scared. Krouse had expected as much.
“Hypocrite!” Cody shouted.
“I know this is shitty,” Krouse admitted. ”And my excuses, my reasons for doing it, maybe they don’t make up for what I’m doing. But I’m okay with you guys hating me if it means helping Noelle.”
He headed outside, stepping through the side door, glanced around.
The garage of the house he’d just left was still open from where they’d investigated. It had a car sitting inside. He smirked.
He had to wait until he had both Marissa’s car and the one in the garage in sight before he could lock on to both. He pushed his p
resence into each, didn’t find it particularly difficult to get a hold…
They switched. Marissa’s car made a crashing sound as it settled in the garage.
He got in his car, then pulled it into the driveway, just in front of the garage. Cody was just stepping out of the side door. Krouse saluted him.
Then he swapped himself and his car with the one that was now on the street.
They didn’t have keys to that car that was now blocking the driveway. It would buy him time.
He shifted gears and drove.
■
“Hey, No’.” He said. He sat down beside Noelle’s bed.
She opened her eyes, smiled just a little.
He smiled back. ”You’re finally awake.”
“Morphine helped. Hurt too much to even open my eyes, before.”
“Sorry.”
“Hey, Krouse… things are pretty fucked, aren’t they?”
“Yeah,” he said. He smiled a little. ”So you caught some of what we were talking about?”
She nodded slowly. She closed her eyes with such languidness he thought she was falling asleep, but it was only a slow-motion blink.
“Yeah, things are supremely fucked,” he said.
She nodded a little. ”I’m due for another surgery. They gave me one short one, and now they’re replacing my blood, see?”
“I see,” he said, eyeing the blood bags.
“…I kind of wish we’d done more boyfriend and girlfriend stuff,” she said. ”Sorry.”
“Don’t need to apologize. You did what you had to.”
“I could die,” she said. Her voice was feeble, quiet. ”They’re cutting too much out, and they can’t wait any longer, but my condition’s bad, so I could die on the table.”
“You’re not going to die.”
“And even if I live, I’m gonna be ugly. Nice big plastic plug in my belly, with a bag of shit attached. Which is really ironic, you don’t even know…” she trailed off.
“I sort of figured it out,” he said.
She nodded. ”Big scars, bag of shit. Is why I wish we’d done more, before. Won’t be any good to look at, after.”
“I don’t care about scars. But it doesn’t matter anyways. You’re not going to die, and you won’t have scars. Or a colostomy bag.”
She turned his way.
He asked, “You catch any of what we were talking about? Back at the house?”
“Only some. Um. I can’t distinguish the reality from the delirium dreams.”
“I suspect the delirium dreams made a little more sense, if that helps,” he said.
He set the canister down on the short table beside the bed.
“What’s that?” Her eyes widened. ”That wasn’t a dream, then. Krouse, no.”
“Yes. You’re going to take this, and it’ll help. You’ll live, and you won’t need surgery. Then I’ll get you out of here, and we’ll go home. Somehow.”
“I don’t- no, Krouse. People were saying… They were scared. This… this isn’t some minor thing.”
“No. It’s big. It’s huge.”
“There were only six,” she said. ”And there’s seven of us.”
“You deserve special treatment, after what you’ve been through. And I want to make sure you get better.”
“No. It’s… it wouldn’t be fair to the others.”
“Screw the others. Cody, at least, can go fuck himself,” Krouse said.
“No, Krouse. I… there’s too many things, too many warnings, and stuff you guys were saying about poison-”
He could hear footsteps in the hall.
“What if you take half, then?” he asked. ”Only half. It’ll be fair to the others.”
He drew the vial, then found a paper cup by the sink. He poured half into the cup.
“See?” He handed her the glass vial
“Krouse-”
Someone’s going to come in any second now.
“It’ll work,” he said.
“And if it doesn’t? Or if that horrible stuff you guys were talking about comes true? The… what did you call it? The cause and effect?”
“If it happens,” Krouse said, “Blame me.”
“I don’t-”
“Please,” he said, the word barely above a whisper. He hadn’t realized he was saying it out loud before the word had left his mouth.
She gave him a small nod, and he helped her to drink.
I’ll take the blame. I’m okay with being the bad guy, he thought. Just so long as you get to live.
17.07
Noelle screamed, her back arching.
“Well,” Krouse said, as he reached for the tubing that led from the bag of blood to her arm. He pulled it out, then removed the tape that had held it in place. “That’s bound to get someone’s attention.”
The heart monitor was erratically shifting from a series of fast beeps to flatlines. His own heart skipped a few beats until he realized that it wasn’t flatlining for good. A steady blare marked an alarm going off.
He stood and blocked the door of the room with the chair he’d been sitting on. Noelle screamed again, a howl, almost ragged.
Had he screamed that much? Or taken that long? He felt a twinge of anxiety.
Someone shoved against the door of the room, but the chair held fast.
Krouse wasn’t too worried. He had his power, so if it came down to it, it was merely a question of-
A landscape stretched around him. It was a smaller planet than Earth, he sensed, to the point that the curvature of the planet was noticeable as he looked over towards the horizons. He realized he was looking at multiple horizons simultaneously. They weren’t his senses.
Even with the world being smaller, he shouldn’t have been able to see the horizon. Not unless these senses he was using were more refined, or the atmosphere was thinner. Somehow things were degraded, blurred around the edges, but it didn’t impact his ability to see, only to draw together a complete mental picture. A film reel with the damaged frames removed, only it wasn’t a sequential reel. There was depth, in more ways than one.
He could focus on the ground, note how craggy it was. Where the larger expanses of landmass had pressed together, it had cracked and separated in dramatic ways. The compressed soil of gravel and rocky material formed zig-zagging cliffs and deep chasms.
He could focus on the grove of crystalline figures. They were more like stalagmites than people, glassy, and the planet rotated thrice in the time it took them to move a discernable distance. Still, they were communicating, vibrating with subsonic hums that played off of the others, complicated ideas.
He tried to discern the hum, but ran into the degradation, the distortion of the frames that had been spliced together, for lack of a better term. He was jarred into the next available scene. Two crystalline figures, moving steadily towards one another.
He could tell how they were different from the others. They were bigger, and they traversed ground that didn’t bear the clusters of ‘dead’ crystal that the others left in their wake like a slug’s moist slime. They weren’t restricted to the equator where things were hottest.
They closed the distance between them, made contact-
I’ve seen this before. From another angle. It’s a replay.
No time had passed, but he was dazed, caught off guard as the chair’s legs skidded on the tile. It fell to the ground and the door swung wide open. A man in uniform charged into the room. The butt of a rifle caught Krouse in the stomach, and he collapsed.
“What the hell are you doing!?” the uniform screamed at him.
Krouse coughed and groaned as his stomach rebelled against the violence. His eyes and his power roving across his surroundings. Something he could swap for the uniformed officer or for the gun. With his eyes, he eyeballed mass, eyeballed size and likely volume, tried to match it to what he was feeling from the gun or the officer.
The officer kicked him.
Swap the lamp for the gun? No, the lamp was too lightweig
ht.
He resolved to switch himself and the officer, grabbing air to compensate for the volume. The difference was larger than it was with him and Cody, it required extra seconds.
He grunted as the officer kicked him again.
He had a grip. He winced as a kick caught him in the side of the head, closed his eyes-
Again, he was somewhere else. He saw energy condensing, two figures intertwining, and the summary birth of countless entities, as if from the birth of a star, only they were alive.
No, he thought. Need to focus. This is because of Noelle. I’m getting caught up in whatever’s affecting her. A sympathetic reaction.
He forced himself to look away, tried to focus on his power, instead.
Nothing. His body wasn’t there.
He struggled further, tried to banish the visions, to focus on the empty void rather than the countless creatures that were radiating out from the detonation.
The vision chose its own time to end. That was the downside. The upside was that he wasn’t quite so disoriented when he came crashing back down to reality.
His power still had a grip on the man in uniform. Krouse forced a swap.
It didn’t change the situation much. He was still lying on the ground, the uniform still standing, but Krouse was now behind his opponent.
The confusion the teleportation had generated bought him a second. He got on his hands and knees and then threw himself at the man’s legs, driving his side and his shoulder into the back of the knees.
The officer fell, and Krouse hurried to his feet.
The gun was a problem, and he hadn’t seen anything he could swap for it. Everything in the hospital was either too lightweight, too miniscule, or both.
Noelle screamed.
This is taking longer than mine did.
Krouse rolled over to grab for the gun. He only succeeded in getting a grip on it, but he couldn’t wrest it from the uniformed man’s arms.
The alarm continued to blare, the heart monitor seizing up as it ranged from high intensity to ominous low beeps, and Krouse was losing his wrestling match over the gun. He knew if he lost it, he’d probably get shot. The use of his power had been the only way to avoid being beaten into unconsciousness, but he suspected it also raised the stakes. Given a chance, the officer would kill him in self defense.
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