Gods of Rust and Ruin

by Azalea Ellis

  He shook his head silently, continuing to strain until tiny beads of sweat broke out atop his still-pale skin and his breath grew fast. Finally, he took his hands off me, and stepped back. “I can’t,” he said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I can’t fix it. My Skill just glances off. I can tell you’re hurt, but I can’t get ahold of the injury to pull it into myself.” He shook his head desperately, as if denying the truth of his own words.

  “Oh,” I said, my voice almost swallowed by the wind. “Well, now I’m really worried.”

  The next couple days were stressful, to say the least. Sam volunteered his services to other Players who got injured in one way or another, which seemed to both reassure him that he could still heal, and to make him more anxious and motivated to keep doing it.

  I figured it must have been difficult not to be able to heal Chanelle or me. I asked him to keep my condition a secret from the rest of the team, at least until I could come up with a solution of some sort, and he acquiesced, but made me promise I would let him help if he could be useful.

  The Player members of our team, even Zed, started attending classes. Zed had a lighter load of “Player” classes than the rest of us, and spent the rest of his school day with the kiddos, working on his own normal education.

  I spent most of the next few days acclimating to classes and trying to perform well enough to earn some Seeds, while any free time was spent meditating and worrying about the Seed of Chaos’ effects. I spread my awareness around the base when I had the chance, but I had yet to be able to reach far enough to observe the alien, though I was aware of its location below me at all times, as if it was a beacon.

  The scientists came up with a way to remove Zed’s Seed, and I carefully controlled my worry around Bunny, but convinced Blaine to come observe the first removal session and make sure everything was okay.

  When I arrived in the observation room, Blaine was already sitting in front of the observation window, half paying attention to the scientists below. I used my link to turn on the speakers in the room, playing some loud classical music. NIX was no doubt already frustrated by my insistence on privacy for my private conversations.

  Birch pressed his ears back at the noise, his tail flicking back and forth in irritation.

  Blaine didn't look up from his tablet as I took a seat beside him, but I was used to that. After a few moments, he spoke casually, as if we'd been talking for hours. "I have made some progress on the diagnosis, but none on a cure. I am not sure there is a cure, to be candid. This may be like amnesia, or memory loss. Something we can only hope that the body fixes on its own."

  I knew he was talking about Chanelle. "What have you learned about what's wrong with her?"

  “The files which Bunny,” he said the name with badly hidden irritation, “got for me about what happened to her were . . . redacted. Heavily. Apparently, my clearance level is not high enough to be privy to whatever experiments they were doing. I am going to be speaking directly to the scientists in that research department in the attempt to get more information. For the time being, most of what I know, I have discovered through my own research. Meningolycanosis affects the brain. However, I am not certain that is the entirety of what was done to her. The symptoms suggest that she was infected with something slightly different to the samples I was given to work on, or that in a human host, it interacts complexly with the body. Perhaps even both. Whatever she had seems to have affected her like an advanced, mutated cousin to the rabies virus.”

  "What does that mean? Are you saying the serum you made to cure her didn't work?"

  Birch pressed himself against the cool floor, a small whine escaping him in response to the tone of my voice.

  “No, it worked. For the most part. But the damage was already done. In the samples I studied along with your blood, the Seed organisms seemed unable to recognize the meningolycanosis, and it did not attack them and thus draw attention to itself. However, samples I got from Chanelle show an almost nonexistent number of Seed organisms. Much less than I originally estimated, based on China. It seems that somehow, they were all destroyed. It was as if they were a bacteria subject to high doses of antibiotics. Perhaps the meningolycanosis began to attack them, I do not know. Worrying as that may be, it is secondary to the extensive brain damage. Strangely, it has left her gross motor skills intact, and she seems to be able to understand basic instructions well enough to feed herself and carry out other rudimentary functions. It is also quite a conundrum why Sam is unable to heal her. So far, this is the only ailment I have encountered that seems to elude him, except for perhaps amputated limbs and the like.”

  I knew that wasn’t quite true. “Blaine,” I said, turning to the man whose kind features sometimes hid behind his glasses and his focus on whatever fascinating thing he was working on at the moment. “Do you remember examining samples from me, after we got back from our last stay on Estreyer?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you notice anything unusual about them?”

  “More unusual than the two different types of Seed material mixing around within you? More unusual than the subtle ways it has been augmenting your body?”

  “I’m talking about the fact that the new Seed is trying to eat me alive,” I said.

  Blaine hesitated, frowned, and shook his head. “I did not have much time to do extended observation of those samples, as you know. And I did not bring any of them here. When you say, ‘eat you alive,’ what exactly do you mean?”

  “That’s what Sam said it seemed to be doing. And he can’t heal me, either.”

  Zed finally entered the room below, and I turned my attention from Blaine to wave at my brother.

  Zed waved back, but I could tell the joking smile on his face wasn’t quite natural. A scientist motioned him onto an obviously high-tech examination table, which cocooned him in glass and began to display diagnostic diagrams and numbers all over the surface. The display was gibberish to me, but the scientists down below gathered around avidly, tapping away on the arched smartglass of the examination table and their own tablets.

  Blaine watched them, explaining what they were doing and the readings the table was giving.

  After a while, Zed got off the table and drank something green, gagging a few times and screwing up his face into an exaggerated grimace with each swallow.

  When I used the mic in the observation room to grill them about it, the scientists assured Blaine and I the liquid was almost perfectly harmless, as long as they completed the rest of the procedure, and didn’t stress Zed’s liver and kidneys by having him drink it too often. Blaine seemed to believe them, and I was mollified.

  Zed said something that made some of the scientists laugh, but I noticed that he didn’t look up at me too often, and was holding himself too still. He was uncomfortable.

  They pierced his arm and hooked him up to a machine that began to pull his blood out through a tube, presumably filtering it somewhere within before returning it to his body. After a while, he relaxed and sent me a thumbs up.

  When I was assured enough he wasn’t being harmed, I settled back again. “Maybe Sam can’t heal certain things from Estreyer,” I said to Blaine. “Or maybe there is some other sort of restriction on his ability that we just haven’t come across until now.”

  “Perhaps.” Blaine looked up from the simulations he’d begun running on his smartglass tablet, the worry on his face an obvious contrast to the unaffected tone of his voice and his academic language. “I do not know what to do, or how to help either of you,” he said. “My specialty is science and engineering, not medicine. And I will assume that you do not want to bring the medics of NIX into this.” He paused, and added in a low voice, strangely intense, “I would advise against it.”

  “Of course. I don’t trust them. At all. But . . . maybe the solution is simple. If the meningolycanosis killed off Chanelle’s Seeds . . . maybe she just needs more? You’ve stopped the meningolycanosis, so it can’t keep destroying them, and
the Seeds do a pretty good job of healing. Maybe even for things like the brain. NIX might have some research on that, if you could access it. I don’t know if we’d be able to focus them into healing specifically, if we’re planting them in her body for her, but it’d probably do something, don’t you think? I’ve been using them myself, and Sam said it is working, but just not fast enough. If we could get a significant amount, maybe it could boost my regenerative growth level above the corrosive level of the Seed. Both would keep growing stronger, but as long as my Resilience and Life stayed higher than Chaos’ strength, I’d be okay.”

  Blaine’s face brightened and his eyes unfocused from my face. “Perhaps, perhaps. Like compound interest. I would rather not duplicate the circumstances of Chanelle’s situation in another living creature for testing, but…” He sobered. “But I do not have access to Seed material, despite the fact that I work here now. Access to Seeds is very restricted, and I have actually already been denied my first request. I had a small sample back at my home laboratory, but that would not be enough to make a difference, and even that is out of our reach at the moment.”

  “Well,” I said, watching Zed down below as the cleaned blood filtered back into his body, “I will just have to find a way.”

  A couple days later, the team was entered into our first mock battle. The battles were announced every two or three days during breakfast, and after the announcement, teams had barely enough time to prepare and move to the arena before the battle started.

  I’d been shoveling food into my mouth, because if I didn’t eat enough, I knew I’d be starving well before the second meal period of the day. Adam had calculated with his signature snark that I ate my own weight in food about once every week. I maintained that I was just going through a growth spurt, but in truth I worried that my body was trying to compensate somehow for the energy it expended fighting Chaos.

  “Eve, you eat so much,” Jacky said, smirking as she took a bite of the turkey leg held in her fist. “How often do you poop?”

  Zed, Kris, and Gregor almost spit out their food with sudden laughter, while Sam stared at her in horror. The others were too busy talking at the other end of the table to pay attention.

  Zed gave Jacky’s turkey leg a high-five with his own, which somehow devolved into “sword” fighting, and meat flying everywhere.

  Birch perked up and took a flying leap for one of the pieces, flapping his wings futilely as he snatched it from the air.

  Kris looked at me under her lashes, as if worried that I’d seen her laugh and would be offended.

  Gregor cleared his throat, smoothed his face, and pretended he’d never laughed in the first place.

  I grinned, and Kris smiled tentatively back, then returned to making a snowman out of mashed potatoes and vegetables, while I resisted the urge to reach over and ruffle Gregor’s hair. I knew he hated that, but sometimes he was so cute!

  Then, the large screens cut into the walls lit up with the battle announcements.

  Like creepy puppets under the same master’s fingers, almost every head in the room turned to look at the screens at the same time. The faces of my nine team members lined up beneath mine on one of the screens, number score and a ranking next to each of us. NIX tracked all its Players, both within its walls and out in the real world, giving them points for their actions. Like Commander Petralka had said, I had one of the highest scores ever for a Player entering NIX.

  That was nothing compared to the scores of the highest ranked Players, who'd been a part of NIX for far longer.

  "They're ranked twelve places above us," Sam murmured. "And it's a full squad! How are we supposed to fight a full squad?"

  Now that I technically had ten people on the team, we were considered a squad. Which was a nasty bit of payback on Petralka’s part. When she had agreed to my demands that Blaine, his family, Chanelle, Zed, and Bunny be under my protection, she’d done so by putting them on my team. Even though none of them were fighters, and half of them weren’t even Players, my command level was still bumped up to squad leader. I turned my attention to the other side of the wall, where a screen showed the faces of our opponents, Squad Ridley, along with their ranking. Shit. Vaughn Ridley led a squad here? "The ranking isn't always indicative of real strength," I said weakly. It was no comfort. Vaughn had shown me how vicious he was in the Characteristic Trial, and I knew there was no way he’d lead a team any less driven or dangerous. Just alone, he had almost as many Skills as my entire team.

  Adam shared a glance with Sam, and turned to me incredulously. "Eve." He drew a breath. "Over half of our squad members aren't fighters. Don't tell me you expect them," he gestured to the non-Players at the table, “to fight them.” He pointed across the cafeteria, where our opponents were stamping their feet and shouting.

  Zed scowled, clenching his fork so hard his knuckles turned white. “We can still help, Eve. Just because we don’t have Skills and aren’t superhumanly powerful doesn’t mean we’re useless. The battles use technology, too. I can use an air-burst gun just as well as you, or fly one of the airpods, or even act as a decoy for one of you to come in and surprise attack them.”

  I bit the inside of my lip as I watched Squad Ridley jog off through one of the side doors of the cafeteria, moving in formation. “Let’s go. We don’t have much time,” I said.

  We moved out, our ragtag bunch not moving in anything close to formation. We had children on the squad, and a girl in an unresponsive stupor, so any attempts to look cool and competent were doomed from the start.

  Luckily, Bunny knew exactly where our side’s battle prep room was, and he led us there, explaining the rules between puffs of air as we jogged. “If we win,” he said, “we’ll each get twelve Seeds for defeating a squad ranked twelve higher than us, plus the normal five Seeds for winning. If we lose, but impress the Moderators, we still might get a few Seeds on an individual basis.” He stopped talking to breath for a few moments. “The prep room will have weapons or supplies that we can take, but I don’t expect there to be anything really good, since they stock it depending on overall team rank.”

  “What?” I gritted out. “So, for our first battle, we take six non-combatants into a fight against a full squad, twelve levels higher than us, and they’re going to nerf our supplies to match our average rank? Which includes the ranks of our non-Players?”

  Bunny let out a little coughing laugh, his gasps for breath reminding me of my own first quests to exercise. Despite the situation, I felt a bit of vindictive satisfaction, since he’d been the one to give me those quests. “Don’t be so surprised, Eve. Commander Petralka needs to save some face, and regain a bit of authority. Plus, she’s probably,” he coughed again, “angry at you. For all that . . .” He coughed again, and apparently gave up on finishing his sentence.

  Adam shared a look with me, his mouth tightened into a grimace. “This does feels very . . . personal.”

  Our prep room had a few grated shelves of weapons and supplies, a lot of empty space filled only with an old model airpod large enough to squeeze twenty or thirty people in a pinch, and a small screen on the wall with the battle’s objective.

  Bunny went straight to the screen and began to read, while the rest of us moved toward the supply racks. There were ten thin bodysuits that went over the top of our standard issue bodysuits, which were meant to evaluate when a Player had taken too much damage, and was considered “dead.” One for each of us, and sized perfectly for our bodies. The bodysuit would also alert medics to come save someone, if they needed it. If they weren’t critically injured, it worked the same way as the electrical immobilizers NIX had used on me when they injected me with my first Seed, and stopped you from moving.

  The weapons were mostly nerfed, meant to interact with the monitoring suit to simulate damage and shut down mobility rather than actually harm. Killing the other Players in the mock battles was heavily frowned upon, and apparently resulted in a loss of all Seeds that would have been earned during the battle, but it d
id happen, since some Skills were more destructive than others. I bet it also happened when someone held enough of a grudge against someone else that they were willing to give up on the Seeds for the chance to kill them.

  “The objective is to protect a group of civilians that have hidden about a third of the way into the arena, and evacuate them safely,” Bunny yelled. “It’s simulating some high priority targets mixed in with the civilian group. Scientists and politicians. It doesn’t say what the other team’s objective is, but based on ours, it’s almost certainly to wipe out the civilian population, and probably to “dispatch” our team as well.”

  “How much time left?” I shouted.

  “Nine minutes.”

  I grabbed one of the airburst-round guns, and hooked it onto the utility belt at my waist, along with plenty of extra ammo.

  Beside me, Zed did the same with competent efficiency and a tight expression.

  I didn’t try to stop him, though seeing him suiting up for battle made my stomach clench.

  “No!” Blaine’s voice rang out, sharp enough to draw my attention.

  Gregor scowled up at him, holding tightly with both hands to a gun of his own. “I’m not going in there without a weapon. I don’t trust you or any of these other idiots to be able to protect me!”

  Kris shifted from foot to foot, looking between her brother and her uncle. “I want one, too. We don’t have to be a burden to everyone else. If we’re attacked, at least we’ll be able to defend ourselves.” She turned to me, a pleading look on her face.

  Gregor stomped toward me, still holding the gun. “I can have this, right?”

  I looked up at Blaine, who was staring at me wordlessly, his expression mixed between pain, anger, and resignation. “It’s best if they can help defend themselves,” I said to him before turning back to them. “I’m not going to send you into battle, but if one of them comes after you, don’t go down without a fight.”

  Blaine didn’t say anything, just turned away and latched a large shield onto his arm, which clamped on and then contracted down to the size of a bulky armguard.