by Scott Hale
“I’ll take what I can get,” she mumbled to herself as she proceeded forward, lifting a patient’s gown from a chair with the tip of her ax.
If Aeson’s map was correct, and if it hadn’t fallen through to the floors below, the laboratory was on the fourth. She climbed over a toppled vending machine, knocking aside the perforated aluminum cans that surrounded it, and pushed through a door into an unlit stairwell. She scrambled over trash, boxes, and medical equipment, using the blood-covered wall for support as she went.
She found the door to the fourth floor held open by a gnawed leg bone. Somewhere higher on the stairwell, she heard running, heavy footfalls going up and down the fifth and sixth levels. Quietly, she moved the leg bone aside, went through the door, and then placed it back where it belonged, so that the creature above, whatever it was, wouldn’t know she’d been there.
A single halogen light burned brightly at the end of the hall, buzzing like a wasp nest. It looked new, and even though Vrana understood little of electricity, she was sure that there was no reason for any to be coursing through the hospital’s copper veins. Rooms lined the hallway, and photographs of happy children, animals, and picturesque landscapes lined the walls. A portrait in an ornate, golden frame caught Vrana’s attention. It was of an older woman, with bright blue eyes and gray-streaked hair. A stethoscope hung from her neck, and she wore a white coat. An inscription below it read “Ødegaard” but the rest that followed was too faded to make out.
Vrana followed her memory of the blueprints as she went around wide corners and even wider doorways. She walked down the middle of the floor, keeping equal distance between the right and left side, for each open room held a potential threat. A strong wind stole into an office ahead and tossed a few papers into the hall, where they landed in a puddle of black liquid oozing from the ceiling.
Vrana passed a sign that read “Genetic Counseling” and stopped. She blinked, her heart pounding ahead of her thoughts. Her knuckles turned white as she gripped the handle of the ax. Something was standing in the room behind her. She swallowed hard and turned around.
It had seen her, Vrana was certain of this, and that meant she had to face it. She could hear it breathing—a raspy kind of breathing, one reserved for the sick and dying. From the corner of her eye, she could still see it, pale and scrawny, with flesh too loose for its jutting bones; human perhaps, she thought, though she couldn’t be sure.
She stepped in front of the doorway where it stood, ax held high. On the other side, her victim was thoroughly unmoved. It was human, or at least it appeared to be: The curvature of its body and face suggested it was female, but it was hairless, without clothes, and otherwise ambiguous in regards to sex. When Vrana stepped closer, its downturned eyes focused harder on the broken tiles at its feet. It had no fingernails, navel, or crimson Corruption along its arm. And when it opened its mouth, Vrana saw that it had very few teeth and no tongue.
Despite its deformity, it said, “I will not stop you.”
Vrana’s eyes widened. She stumbled, refusing to accept what she had just heard.
Again, it addressed Vrana, its voice soft and slightly feminine. “I will not hurt you, I do not think.”
A cold shiver scaled Vrana’s spine and froze into a tightness around her neck. “How are you… how are you doing…”
It continued to stare at the tiles. “Without a tongue, one can speak freely, I imagine.” It rubbed its arm, sending flakes of dust into the air. “Why have you come here?”
“I need something. I need something from the lab,” Vrana admitted, worried about the repercussions of being dishonest with the creature.
It nodded, raised its thin arm to its stomach, and pulled back the skin there, which was not skin at all but a spongy material. Inside, its organs glinted artificially as though they were plastic, and there was no blood. It reached up into its ribcage, removed a plastic keycard, and held it out for Vrana.
“This will let you into the laboratory,” it said as Vrana took the card cautiously. “I’ve had it for so long that I’ve forgotten why it was so important in the first place. You are strange, for a human.”
Vrana gritted her teeth. “I’m not human.”
“Oh, nor am I,” it said as Vrana backed out of the room. “The others will let you through, but after that I cannot promise safe passage.”
“Others?” She stopped and looked around to find the fourth floor still empty. “How many are you?”
“We are one hundred now.”
Black liquid began to leak from the hole in its stomach, dripping down its legs and forming an oily puddle across the tile. For the first time, it looked up at Vrana and then all at once fell apart into a cloud of dust.
CHAPTER VI
Keycard in hand, Vrana passed through the series of steel doors that would lead her to the laboratory. The first was severely dented and covered in blood, but the three that followed it were pristine, as though whatever had tried to breach the entryway had died before reaching them. Each door closed behind the other, sealing off the area until the next was opened. Glass tubes, like arteries, lined the entryway as well; and with every step she took, the liquids inside the tubes bubbled and popped, creating a golden light for Vrana to find her way.
The laboratory itself was untouched, awash in the same golden light that drenched the entryway. It smelled metallic, like blood, and of antiseptics. It was smaller than she imagined; it contained five computers, two large freezers, and various microscopes and mixing devices. Reports unreadable to Vrana were kept in large binders, some of which had had their pages torn out. Large ventilators looked down from the ceiling, the shafts behind them appearing to have been welded shut. She riffled through the room for Aeson’s cylinder, digging in the semi-translucent bins stacked in the corner and the cabinet with the electronic locks that had failed.
For a moment, out of impatience and dread, Vrana considered leaving, but this was her third trial, her final trial, and nothing short death could justify forsaking the long held ritual.
And as is often the case in times of frustration, the answer was in front of her, disguised by its obviousness: an outline, rectangular and raised, painted over, perhaps to appear as a part of the wall. She pressed the keycard against the wall and then watched as the wall shuddered and slid back.
On the other side, a second laboratory waited, swathed in violet light and plastic sheets. More workstations lined the walls, their computers covered in bags like cadavers. At the center of the room, several large glass pods protruded out of the ground, acting as hosts to the swirling black liquids inside. From their glistening base, heavy tangles of cords and wires fed into the floor; going to her knees, Vrana saw through the grating the machine to which they were connected: an orb, larger than herself, which coughed out an orange mist at three-second intervals.
Using the little light she had, Vrana came to her feet and moved from chart to chart, diagram to diagram, in search of anything that would help her locate the cylinder. For her, most of the scientific jargon was indecipherable, but among the blocks of text between every readout and poster, one word was repeated—“homunculus.” Vrana found an illustration swinging from a tack, and when she unrolled it, she saw a mirrored image of the creature from before. Beneath the illustration, she noticed a notebook, its pages heavy with faded ink from a perfectionist’s scrawl. Though she didn’t understand the language it was written in, the sketching of the homunculi inside was enough to convince Vrana that it was important, and that she should take it, so Aeson could uncover its meaning.
She turned around and passed beside the pods, minding the blade of her ax so as to not rupture them. She bent over and looked into the black liquid that churned beyond the glass. Everything in this room could be harvested, Vrana thought. It didn’t make sense that she should be one of the few to enter the hospital and then return with only a simple cylinder. If she told the elders of what she’d seen, of what she’d found, would they send others? Why hadn’t they alrea
dy? She stood up and, like the keycard reader, noticed the cylinder in question, across the room on a desk, in plain sight. Maybe I shouldn’t tell them what I’ve found, she thought, maybe that’s part of the trial.
“Anyways,” Vrana said, releasing the breath she’d been holding, the thoughts she’d been considering, “time to go.”
She scooped up the cylinder, and after recognizing the various warning symbols that lined it, she gently lowered it into her satchel beside the journal, the necklace, and the Skeleton’s key. She exited the laboratory, ensuring all the doors were shut behind her, leaving everything as it was, except for what she had taken, unwilling to give the homunculi a reason to attack. She hurried across the fourth floor, not toward the stairwell but toward the room she’d seen earlier from the outside, with the rope made of bed sheets dangling from its window. She ignored the feces smeared across the floor, went to the window, dropped the cylinder into a patch of grass, and started her descent.
But the descent was much shorter than she expected. By the second floor, when her hands were sufficiently greased with whatever suffering stained the sheets, the rope uncurled. Vrana screamed, and before she could grab onto anything else, she hit the ground hard, her head smacking against the earth. Consciousness and blood spilled out of her scalp, and when consciousness returned, it brought back all the pain she could’ve done without.
“God damn it,” she said, sitting up and kicking the knot of sheets. She rubbed her head, collected the cylinder from the grass, and hobbled toward the front of the hospital.
As she rounded the corner, it was not a homunculus that greeted her but three humans; two male, one female, in a motley of tired clothes and beaten armor.
“Took quite a fall,” said the man in a dented iron helmet, his rapier dangling at his side.
Vrana said nothing as she studied the Corrupted. The man in the iron helmet was the largest and probably the strongest; though when he spoke, he held his side as if injured. The woman was the tallest of the group, her thick, matted braids held in place by small, chipped bones; in each hand she held a dagger, gripping them as though they were an extension of herself. The last man was sinewy, sunburned, starving; he clung to his battered bow the same way a child would a blanket and kept looking over his shoulder at the nearly empty quiver there.
“You have something of ours, Night Terror. A necklace,” the archer said. “Thought we’d leave you to the shadows, to this place, and collect when they’d finished with you.” He stared at the cylinder in Vrana’s hands. “We’ll take that, too.”
Vrana ignored them. She set the cylinder down and stepped forward, holding her ax outward. The woman with the daggers tensed as the Raven approached. The man in the iron helmet drew his rapier. The archer nocked an arrow and looked nervously at his companions. Vrana felt lightheaded, from the fall and the sheer number of enemies before her. I can’t do this, she thought, focusing on the bow, which would be enough to end her before she even started. Can I do this? She remembered Bjørn and his insistence that she bring a bow and hated that, for the first time in a long time, he’d been right.
“One on one, Gregory?” the bandit woman said, looking at the man with the rapier.
All three laughed, shaking their heads.
In a flash, the archer’s arrow whizzed past Vrana’s mask, just above her shoulders. She sprinted toward the three of them, for they left her no other option. The archer fumbled to load another arrow, so his companions picked up his slack. Gregory rushed Vrana, swinging his rapier like a bastard sword. She sidestepped his attack, hopping back as the woman closed in from the side, swiping with her daggers as though they were claws. The archer broke away from the group and then, with steadied hands, launched a volley of arrows at the skirmishers. Vrana, Gregory, and the woman ducked and dodged the missiles as they rained down haphazardly around them.
“You fucking idiot!” the woman shouted to the archer.
“I’m sorry, Nel, I’m sorry.”
“Put that thing away, and go do something else. We’ll take care of the bird.” She stood upright and nodded at Gregory, and together, they ran at Vrana.
The archer was a novice, a distraction, so she took her eyes off him and met the others screaming. She swung her ax, catching the rapier and ripping it from Gregory’s hands. As he struggled to reclaim it, Nel stepped in front of him and slashed in a frenzy. Vrana gasped, dipped, and dodged, and tripped the woman when she’d extended herself too far. Nel slid across the grass, staining her hands. When she looked up, Vrana kicked her in the face, knocking a tooth down her throat.
Gregory was panting loudly now, so Vrana heard him when he tried to stab her in the back. She whipped around and punched him in the side, her fist crashing into a wet patch of tender flesh. Gregory wailed in agony and retreated back toward the hospital steps, dropping his rapier along the way.
As Vrana decided who to kill first, someone else made the decision for her. A dull thud and then choking. Vrana looked over her shoulder and saw the archer gripping the arrow shaft protruding from his neck. Something moved through the trees a few meters away, but before Vrana could get a good look at it, Nel was on top of her, spitting hot blood into the holes of her mask. Vrana yelped and then kicked her away, but not before Nel drove part of a dagger into Vrana’s thigh.
“Cunt,” Nel said, looking at Gregory, who was lying across the hospital steps, dabbing at his side with trembling fingers. “You don’t even know what you have.”
The necklace? Vrana wondered what Nel was talking about and then decided she didn’t care enough to find out. She ran forward, and as the woman crossed her arms and sliced outward, Vrana slid beneath the attack and rammed the ax head into her gut. While she was stunned, Vrana came to her feet, grabbed both of Nel’s arms, and pulled; with a sharp snap, they broke. As she screamed and flailed in agony, Vrana bashed her head against Nel’s, goring her eye with the beak of her mask.
Nel pulled away and collapsed into the grass, weeping bloody tears from the hole in her face. Vrana kicked the woman’s weapons away. Determined to deal with Gregory, she picked up the ax and turned toward the hospital. But Gregory was gone; a severed arm where his body had been. Vrana approached the stairs slowly and saw running up the front steps a long trail of blood that disappeared into the darkness of the hospital.
“Oh my…” Vrana stopped. The darkness was not darkness at all but bodies, hundreds of them, packed together, staring with glinting eyes and gnashing their teeth at her, the intruder, the thief, the murderer. She moved back from the hospital and found the cylinder; with it secured in her pouch, she walked into the forest, shaken and empty, like a stranger who’d seen something she knew she shouldn’t have. She held her ax tightly as she walked between the trees and, cringing, waited for the homunculi to swarm her and give her the deathblow.
But it never came.
When she was certain that she was not being followed, Vrana collapsed beneath a large tree and gorged herself on provisions. When a fourth of what she had in meat and bread remained, she stopped and started on the water. The extra day in the ravine, the one she could not account for, had taken its toll, and it seemed it was finally catching up with her.
She found some bark to rest against and took off her mask to clean the woman’s eye from its beak. Four Corrupted. She had killed four Corrupted—five if the young boy had perished at the hands of the townsfolk. Each death had been easier than the last, and each seemed no different than slaughtering an animal out of a need for defense or sustenance. For a culture that was built upon the history of its enemy, so much so that it nearly lacked an identity of its own, Vrana found it surprising how little sympathy, let alone respect, her people—including herself—possessed for the Corrupted. There was little doubt in her mind that the thieves, her attackers, had earned their fate, just as the villains of history had deserved theirs, but could the same be said for the whole of humanity?
It was on the seventh day of Vrana’s return that she realized something
was amiss. The surroundings were similar—there would be no delays into the Black Hour this time—yet something was missing, something which Vrana could not place. A snapping of branches stole her attention from the thought to the shape lurking behind a crop of trees, watching her as she watched it. The shape stepped into the light, revealing a man of average build with what appeared to be a large, discolored bat’s skull over his head. Bow in hand, the man nodded at Vrana, then vanished into the forest.
She stood in place for a moment, eyebrows furrowed, and considered the man. She had little doubt that he was not of her tribe given the mask and lack of Corruption. Vrana searched her memories of Caldera for his image, wondering if the elders had ordered him to follow her to ensure the trial’s completion.
“I’m not that important,” she said to herself, turning her gaze from the forest to the sky, where snow-covered spires rose out of the sharp slopes of the mountain in the distance. “Hold on,” she said, spinning around. “Oh shit.”
Vrana tore through the forest, stopping only to kill and take what didn’t need to be cooked. Two days. She had two days before she would reach Caldera, and yet Kistvaen stood before her. Something’s wrong, she told herself as the forest gave way to a swamp, I shouldn’t be able to see it from here. It’s not possible to see it from here. Don’t use it as a marker. You won’t find your way home that way.
The moonlit waters of the swamp received Vrana without complaint as she trudged forward. She made no attempt to mask her presence to the things that called the swamp home, for care would cost her time she didn’t have to spare. Brightly colored wisps darted about her head as she went, their spherical bodies blooming and wilting like flower petals. They whispered to her in a language she couldn’t comprehend, though she knew well enough what they wanted by the way they salivated when they spoke.
