Gods of Rust and Ruin

by Azalea Ellis

  While they talked, the two who had brought me down from the roof examined my injuries and shot a vial of something into my neck.

  “Go ‘way,” I said, still slurring. But when I tried to lift my good hand to bat at them, I found that my body wouldn’t move. It could have been from injuries, but I was betting they’d just paralyzed me. My face chilled in the breeze, and I realized suddenly that my face was wet for some reason. I wasn’t crying, was I? I was tougher than that, surely. I let out a tiny wet cough, and promised myself I wouldn’t do that again as pain swept through me with the movement of my chest.

  They stepped back, and one lifted his hand and encapsulated me in a bubble that pulsed faintly red, which only added to the crimson tint of my world.

  Oh, that didn’t bode well.

  Nadia returned, scowling at me through the red bubble. “I ought to have you executed,” she said, little dots of spittle spraying from her mouth. “You would be, if this were a standard military operation.”

  I tried to raise a defiant eyebrow, but I couldn’t feel my face to tell if it worked.

  “You may be valuable to us, but don’t think you’re untouchable. It was a mistake to give you such a long leash. You’ve deliberately disobeyed my orders, and proven yourself a danger to our operation.” She dug her nails into her own palms, fingers clenched so tightly they’d turned pale. “Damn Thinkers,” she muttered, turning her head away from me. “I would have you killed right now if your body wasn’t useful to us,” she said, quieter this time. She crouched down outside the bubble and met my gaze. “But I, too, have my orders, and your body is useful. You’ll wish it wasn’t, soon. You’ll think back to today and wish I’d had you killed immediately. Because you will be useful to us. But you’ve proven you can’t be managed with anything but a stranglehold.” She stepped back, and nodded to the pair of differently dressed Players.

  One lifted their arm, and the bubble rose, taking me with it. It buzzed unpleasantly along the skin touching it. As they walked behind Nadia, my head rested awkwardly against the side of the bubble.

  Once again, I had an audience of Players, watching from the windows and a few open doorways. I wish I could say it was surprising, the number of faces which bore a look of satisfaction.

  I caught a glimpse of my own reflection. Ouch. I would have winced if I could. The wetness I felt on my face was blood, as the red liquid dripped from every orifice in my skull. It dripped from my ears and nose, and my eyes were completely crimson around the blue irises, leaking blood instead of tears. I tasted it in my mouth, and every breath rattled with it. My left arm was swiftly turning purple and swollen under its own layer of leaking blood.

  Apparently, I’d gone a bit too far with Chaos. I needed to get it under control. But I didn’t have any more Seeds on me, and I didn’t currently have the luxury of time to meditate. I wished I could pass out to escape the pain, but I wasn’t sure I’d wake up again if I did.

  My bubble followed Commander Petralka down into the bright white bowels of NIX, and I did my best to stay alert and memorize our path and the placement and type of security measures. I would match it up against my mental map later.

  Nadia passed me off to a guard when we got down to what I was pretty sure was the seventeenth basement level. “Here,” she said. The word was ominous, and final, like the dust rising from a demolished skyscraper after it crumbled in on itself.

  One of my captors met my eyes for a moment, and I thought I saw a spark of sympathy. Then they moved me into a small, cold white room and the door slid shut behind me. The bubble popped, and I flopped onto the floor, eyes rolling back momentarily from the pain of being jolted. I struggled to stay conscious, noting vaguely that the air buzzed around me. What looked like thick white steam shot out of tiny holes in the wall near the ceiling. I’d seen that before, I knew, but I couldn’t remember where, for some reason. I felt dizzy.

  I started to separate from the pain, and with the distance came profound relief.

  Then oblivion claimed me, and I knew nothing.

  Chapter 11

  In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

  —Albert Camus

  There was pain, and cold, forcing me to wakefulness. I really wanted to escape from it. I couldn’t, and that made me want to huddle up in the corner and sob. Instead, I opened my bleary eyes. Blood crusted together my eyelashes, and I had to blink a few times to free them. I ended up staring at a nondescript metal door. My ears were buzzing, and despite lying on the floor, I felt dizzy. Abruptly, my stomach rebelled, heaving bile up onto the ground so hard I felt like the convulsion were trying to turn me inside out. It hurt, but the involuntary movement that aggravated my wounds hurt even more.

  The distinctive smell of stomach acid only partially masked the scent of raw, bloody meat, which I knew was coming from my own body.

  My eyes traveled to the side as I instinctively avoided following that train of thought any further, and I saw a plain grey pouch lying on the concrete floor, underneath a metal flap cut into the wall. A nutrition packet.

  Despite my earlier nausea, my body cried out for sustenance with a strength that overwhelmed even my pain. I forced myself to inch across the floor using my good arm and weak nudges from my legs. I tore the cap off the nutrition pouch with my teeth, and squeezed some of the normally disgusting mush into my mouth with the cold-stiffened fingers of my good hand.

  Yes. Yes, this was what I needed. I breathed a sigh of relief and continued to suck. After a few swallows, my agitation calmed, and I slowed to sips so as not to upset my stomach. I didn’t want to be forced to expel the meager rations. And they were already making me feel better.

  I closed my eyes and breathed shallowly, as the deeper breaths made me move more, and caused proportionate pain. As the nutrition mush settled, it seemed to push the pain away. It must have had some sort of pain relieving substance mixed in. I understood vaguely that might not be a good thing, but I couldn’t bring myself to care past the wonderful feeling.

  As my mind stopped cringing away from the sensations haranguing my physical body, I was able to clear up some of the Chaos I’d released in my earlier attack. I could only suppose that the sedative mist they’d knocked me out with had somehow also resulted in calming Chaos, either directly or through the enforced absolute calmness of my body and mind. Because I probably shouldn’t have woken up again, ever, with that amount of power used and the damage to my body.

  I didn’t get very far with wrangling Chaos, because before I knew it I’d eaten the whole nutrition pouch, and then the world slipped away again.

  When I woke up the next time, another food pouch lay on the floor next to me, and the pain had separated into distinct sections. I wasn't sure if this was a good thing or not. My head throbbed like my brain was trying to hammer its way out of my skull. My eyeballs, nose, and pretty much all the soft tissue inside of my head burned like I was grinding salt into an open wound, and my stomach simultaneously ached with hunger and threatened to force bile up my throat. My arm, however, hurt less, which I wished was a good thing. It ached deeply, throbbing with every beat of my heart, like my head, but the pain had decreased. I tried to wiggle my fingers, and found I couldn't.

  Damn it. That was bad, I knew. Not that nerve damage was surprising, at this point. I might be in danger of being poisoned by my own putrefying flesh. The classes I'd taken recently in combat medicine and first aid flashed through my mind. But I had no tools, no supplies. I was trapped in a room by myself. There was nothing I could do for any of my wounds, except meditate and hope my Seeds were strong enough to heal me.

  Somehow, I doubted the Seeds could do a thing for my arm.

  I picked up the food pouch, bit off the cap, and slowly started to suck up the nutrient slush. It started to numb me, the sedative doing its job, so I backed off even though I was absolutely starving. I couldn't afford to keep sleeping.

  "Display time," I muttered aloud, and my VR chip o
bligingly popped out a small Window. I waved the warning away. It was ten in the morning, which meant I'd been in the cell approximately ten hours.

  I wondered what was happening to the rest of the team. Had Adam made it back in time? Had they been captured, like me? It had been part of the plan for me to cause trouble, be captured, and locked up down here, but not like this.

  If what I knew of NIX was true, they would want to use my team in the field, not lock them up. It was a pattern with them . . . and wasn't it crazy that I was hoping to be blackmail material? If Petralka thought she could control my team without locking them up or torturing them, she would. I hoped.

  With that thought, I mentally interacted with my VR chip and tried to send a message to the whole team, asking for a status update. The Window pulsed faintly, but failed to send. I grew dizzy as my brain almost seemed to vibrate. What the heck? Maybe my concentration was too shot to interact with the VR chip properly.

  I opened my mouth and croaked, “Send Window to all team members.” There. It couldn’t fail to understand voice commands.

  Except it did.

  UNABLE TO CONTACT SUBORDINATE VIRTUAL REALITY CHIPS.

  The Window popped up over the message I’d been trying to send, and the hair on the back of my neck rose as the dizziness increased. My stomach decided it really would like to throw up the nutrition mush I’d slurped up the last of without realizing, but I fought the urge.

  I panicked for a bit, I’ll admit it. Then I turned my mind to analyzing my suddenly disastrous current circumstances. I ran through the functions my VR chip was supposed to have, and determined that it was functioning properly, except for anything that required outside input. Which meant that it wasn’t broken, and despite my worried thoughts, whatever was in the nutrient pack probably hadn’t interfered with the chip. That was both good and bad. Good because I could still eat them, and bad, because whatever was blocking my chip was beyond my immediate control.

  The buzzing dizziness was coming from outside my head, as opposed to a side effect of a concussion or the like, I was pretty sure. I wouldn’t take a stacked bet against NIX implementing some sort of signal scrambler, perhaps based on the vibrations around Torliam’s room. Damn. I almost wondered if it could get any worse, but stopped that thought in its tracks. It didn’t do to tempt the gods of irony.

  I was getting tired, and that was making it hard to think. I shook my head and set aside that problem for a few minutes while I meditated to suppress Chaos again. I needed any edge I could get, and letting my body deteriorate from the inside any faster than absolutely necessary was unacceptable.

  By the time I finished, my eyelids felt like they were trying to bench-press a hundred pounds every time I blinked. Damn it, I was tired.

  I examined the room. My cell was similar to the one Torliam lived in. White, made of a stone or concrete-like substance, with small holes around the ceiling that had sprayed gas down on me. The solid metal door fit snugly into the wall on either side. The major difference between my room and his was that I wasn’t stuck on a metal slab or attached to any machines. The room was completely bare, and my cell had a metal flap in the wall, through which someone had no doubt dropped the nutrition pack.

  I scooted closer to it, and tried to pry up the metal flap. It opened easily, but I couldn’t get my arm into it any farther than the wrist, because opening the flap’s hinge caused another flap to tilt up behind it. Instead, I tried sensing past the flap using my Perception. The square metal opening slanted slightly upward just behind the flap, and then turned sharply up, then turned again to point straight parallel to the ground, opening up into the outside hallway. It created a skewed S-shape. No way a human arm would bend properly to fit through that, even if the flap opening didn’t guard itself.

  I wasn’t disappointed by this realization too long, because I passed out again, leaning against the wall with my good shoulder.

  This time, I woke up when the silvery food pouch landed in my lap. I pressed my ear up against the metal opening and heard footsteps. “Hello?”

  The owner of the footsteps, two people, I thought, didn’t respond. But they stopped for a moment before continuing on. I immediately dove into my senses, pushing outward through the small duct and following the duo out into the hallway.

  They exchanged meaningful glances with each other, and when they were a bit farther away, one murmured to the other, “Increase the dosage of food sedative for Redding, and the strength of the inhalable for the operation. She’s displayed an unusually fast adaptation to the narcotics. Waking now is . . .” He looked as if he was doing calculations, but continued after a few moments, “almost twenty percent faster than expectation.”

  His partner glanced back at my door. “Well, at least she’ll be dependent on them soon. Anything to decrease the likelihood of escape from that one is a good thing, in my book.”

  “Yes, but the sedatives are damaging in high doses. Her condition will deteriorate more quickly than normal.”

  His partner shrugged as they continued to walk away. “She’s going to be ‘gelded’ soon anyway. Should I increase the dose in the next nutrition pouch, in prep for the surgeon? We won’t have to worry so much once the VR chip is replaced with the penal conditioner model and she’s locked down to a table.”

  “No . . . we want her on an empty stomach for the surgery. Just make sure the calculations for the inhalable sedative are properly adjusted.”

  “What about . . .”

  The buzzing grew too strong, and my concentration too weak, for me to hear any more. I wasn’t in top shape, to say the least. But I had enough to know I needed to make a move, and fast. I had no desire to meet this ‘surgeon’ and have him update my brain hardware.

  I glanced down at the silver pouch in my lap and reluctantly away. I couldn’t sleep. Judging by their conversation, by the time I would normally get the next nutrition pouch, it’d be time for surgery. Which meant I had a few hours, at most. They would knock me out with the aerosol sedative before trying to enter the room or mess with me in any way. I couldn’t take advantage of them opening the door and allowing me to attack and free myself.

  I needed to be gone before they arrived. How?

  I had planned to be down here, and planned to have to escape. But I’d also planned more time to prepare, and hadn’t expected NIX to do quite such a good job of detaining me. As counterintuitive as it might seem to be locked up in order to pull off a jailbreak, and the fact that I had vowed I’d avoid being put in this cell at all costs, it had made sense.

  Torliam’s room was physically and electronically reinforced to the max, as was the whole level he resided on. The security wasn’t unbreachable, but any way we would have broken in by force would have alerted NIX to our plans too early. To break in and then break out again would have taken too much time. It was faster to get NIX to take me down to Torliam themselves, so I could work from within the prison level.

  We’d had a plan. It depended on use of our VR chips. Once I was down here, with everything else already prepared, I’d contact one of the team and give them directions through the vents to my cell. They’d bring me one of several stashes of supplies hidden among the vents system to enable me to more easily break out, before I was incapacitated any further, like Torliam.

  Then, Adam would use the connection in our VR chips to lead me through forcing the door to Torliam’s room open from the outside, which was the only way it opened at all.

  So, without the VR chip, I didn’t have a way to escape from my cell, or to open Torliam’s. I’d tried to make sure redundancies were worked into the planning, but we were still working on it, and I hadn’t anticipated this.

  I let the tension flow out of my shoulders and brought the food pouch to my mouth with my good arm. I bit off the cap and took a single swallow. I didn’t want the sedative to knock me out, but I needed the energy, and a bit of pain relief. Plus, I was just starving. Literally. I examine my arm critically as I lowered the pouch to my lap.
My body was wasting away, almost literally in front of my eyes.

  No doubt my Seeds were desperate for fuel, and had turned the only place they could. The almost non-existent fat deposits had been burned away first, and then they’d turned to my muscle. The bones of my wrist stood out sharply against thin, pale skin, and even small movements exhausted me.

  I needed to get out of my cell, and into Torliam’s. Working with what I had, how could I make that happen? I put my aching brain to the test, leaning my head against the coolness of the metal flap. It was so cold in my cell, but my head was hot, and the metal soothed some of that.

  There was an extremely high chance the team hadn’t been able to continue preparing after I was locked up, so I could only count on the things we’d already done. Adam had been in the middle of the critical mission. If he’d finished it, we might be able to pull this off. If he’d gone straight back to the team barracks, I was screwed.

  It took me over an hour of thinking, with occasional slurps of my nutrition pouch for pain relief, to come up with a plan. It was reckless, and it was dangerous. And as far as I could tell, it was my only option.

  A focused examination of my cell from where I sat revealed a few cameras, and no blind spots, per se. But if I tucked myself into the wall, they would only be able to see my back. I took another swallow of my nutrient pouch and turned toward the metal flap, blocking the view of it from the cameras.

  It was a struggle to get the claws of my right hand to come out, like it hadn’t been since I first gained the Skill. But after almost a minute, I had claws again. My body suit was in the way, so I disconnected it at my waist.

  I brought my hand to my stomach, under my belly button, and sliced into the skin. It bled sluggishly, but I ignored that and slipped a clawed finger under the skin. I could feel it tugging and separating from the layer of connective tissue and muscle below with teensy little snaps. I shuddered, and felt light headed for a second, but continued wiggling my finger below the skin of my stomach till I felt the pouch there and pulled it out.