After the Red Rain

by Lyga, Barry

  He pushed the tray of food into the farthest corner of the cell and curled up on the cot. He closed his eyes.

  They wanted to break him.

  He would bend, instead.

  CHAPTER 30

  On the second day, he had a visitor.

  He paid careful attention to the procedure. First, they ordered him to stand in the center of the room, facing away from the door, his fingers laced together behind his head. He heard the click and rumble of the door unlocking and opening, and then hands harshly shackled his wrists behind his back. A moment later, the door clanged shut.

  “You can turn around,” said a voice.

  He turned slowly. Before him stood a tall man, his shoulders broad. His ropy arms terminated in long fingers that flexed constantly. He wore a purple robe over a charcoal-gray suit with a pale yellow shirt. With cold gray eyes sunk deep in his face, he glared at Rose, alternately pursing and sucking in his lips. He was the man from the vid. Jaron’s father.

  “You’re the dung-drop who killed my boy,” he said, his voice inflectionless.

  “Mr. Ludo, I didn’t—”

  Max Ludo said nothing. With a surprising swiftness, he crossed the few feet between them and belted Rose with the back of one heavy fist. The blow rocked Rose and sent him reeling back until he collided with the sink. His vision blurred for a moment.

  “First of all,” Ludo said, “it’s Magistrate Ludo. Mister is for ditchdiggers and dung-pilers.”

  Was that a trickle of blood running down Rose’s jawline? Or sweat?

  “Second of all, I didn’t tell you to talk. When I want you to talk, I’ll tell you. Got it?”

  Rose nodded. He suddenly suffered a dramatic and unexpected surge of empathy for poor dead Jaron Ludo. And for the first time in his life, he was actively afraid. He’d seen fear before; he’d had it explained to him. But he’d never felt it himself. He’d always been aware of his own skills, his unique talents. Few and rare were the threats he could not evade.

  But right now, he was shackled and pinned down in a concrete box.

  He planted his feet and braced himself against the sink to stay upright.

  “Look at you.” Ludo took Rose’s jaw in his hand and twisted his head this way and that. “So goddamn pretty. What the hell Territory spawned you? You look like a girl, but my cops tell me you have a dick, so you’re a boy.” He clutched Rose’s jaw harder and pulled, dragging Rose away from the sink, then shoved him full in his face, driving him backward. The backs of Rose’s knees collided with the cot, spilling him onto it; he narrowly avoided cracking his head on the wall.

  Ludo towered over him, teetering on the brink of collapse. Rose yearned to lash out, to batter Ludo away from him, to shove back the threat. But he was so weak. And giving away his abilities would only summon the guards. Too many for even him to overcome.

  He was keenly aware of the camera in the corner, bulbously concealed, watching everything.

  “Is that what happened?” Ludo went on, his cheeks and jowls suffused with crimson outrage. Droplets of sweat fell off him and splashed onto Rose’s chest. “Did my boy think you were a girl? Make a move you didn’t appreciate? So what? Big deal. You couldn’t just take it? You couldn’t just live with it?”

  Rose still said nothing. He could shift the shape of his hands if he had to. If Ludo commenced a beating, he could slip the shackles and…

  And what? Kill Ludo? Invite a swarm of guards to descend on him and beat him to death? Or worse, ship him off to a Territory lab somewhere, to dissect him in ways Dr. Dimbali never would?

  “Did you trick him?” Max asked. “How did a pissant like you overpower Jaron?”

  Ludo grabbed the front of Rose’s prison-issue shirt, hoisting him out of the bed. Their faces came even—the stench of bad food washed over Rose, along with stray spittle.

  “Who sent you? I want to know! I want to know now. It was Dalcord, wasn’t it? He’s been spoiling for war for years. Wanting to expand his territory. Capture my food tech. It was him, wasn’t it?” He shook Rose. “Answer me!”

  “I wasn’t sent by anyone.” Rose measured his voice carefully, avoiding stresses and deep inflections. He didn’t want to present even the slightest threat to Max Ludo. “I’ve been roaming for—”

  Max Ludo howled, a single note of incoherent rage. He spun around, shoving Rose, who stumbled, fell, and sprawled on the floor. Rose’s vision swam for a moment, and when he recovered, Max Ludo stood over him, fists planted on his hips.

  “You know things, pissant. And you’ll tell me. You’ll tell me everything. About my boy. About the tech you used to mimic our brand.” He crouched down with great effort and poked Rose in the gut. “I’ll know it all, you hear me? I want to know where those vine things came from. It’s not tooth-weed or any other kind of weed. What has Dalcord been up to? What are his scientists making? What’s going on over there?”

  There was nothing to say. Rose could keep telling the truth, but to Max Ludo, the truth was a lie. And there was no lie Rose could conjure that would satisfy a man who was so patently insatiable.

  It was not Rose’s first encounter with the irrationality of humanity. Nor was it his inaugural introduction to outright evil. Over the years he’d come across any number of rapacious, greedy, destructive people. Those he could not assuage with words, he’d always been able to escape before violence became inevitable. As with Jaron Ludo, running away was always the most expedient course. Better than hurting someone.

  But now there were no words to mollify Max Ludo. And no way to escape.

  Huffing and panting, Ludo jabbed an irate and accusatory finger at Rose.

  “You’ll tell me. You’ll tell me all of it. Trust me on that. I control this Territory and everyone in it. That means you, little spy, little murderer. If I have to reach inside you and pull out the secrets with my own hands, I will.”

  “When do I get my day in court?”

  “We’ll get around to that. You’ll have a lawyer. That’s the law, even though it’s stupid. But I get to appoint your lawyer. Isn’t that a kick? Isn’t that great? I get to pick your lawyer. Trust me, little girl-boy—you’re not getting the finest legal mind the Territory has to offer.”

  He kicked Rose in the side just above the hip, right where it hurt the most. With a shout of “Guard!” he was out the door, still wheezing as he went.

  Rose must have passed out, because when he opened his eyes, he was on the cot and his hands were no longer bound.

  They’re going to kill me. They’re going to torture me for information, and I don’t have any. Or they’ll learn that I’m not human. Either way, they’re going to take me apart, piece by piece.

  He thought about his experiment. The secret one, the one only Dr. Dimbali knew about. He intended to carry that secret with him beyond death, but would they eventually make him tell? What would they do if they saw what he’d done out at the place Deedra called the Broken Bubble? Would they even understand it?

  He imagined not. And the thought of how they might react, their violent, fiery instincts…

  So much work. So much time. And they’ll destroy it all in moments.

  He probed his jaw, his side. The injuries were tender and painful, but not debilitating.

  If they’re going to kill me, I won’t make it easy for them.

  CHAPTER 31

  He promised himself again: He would bend. Not break.

  With his days and nights equally blank, with nothing to do or hear or read, he could have lost his mind. It would have been easy. Time passed, marked only by the meals and the dimming of the light through the window. He counted mornings, but lost count. He knew only that he’d been in prison for at least a week.

  They couldn’t know about his secret weapon.

  Not his abilities. Those had weakened, flagged with his energy as he subsisted on water and what little sunlight he could glean. Just enough to stay alive.

  No, his secret weapon was his memories.

  He’d spen
t years traveling. He had seen things unimagined by Max Ludo and his jailers. And now he spent each day-merged-with-night recalling every footstep, every blink.

  Beginning with the first.

  The roses. He does not know their name yet. He does not know his own name yet. That hovers in the time to come, glistens in his future like dew on rocks. But the roses are there, in the now of memory, the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes, their semidouble petals in crisp yellow, architected around the stamens and pistils, the sepals folded like bowing servants. How many people witness such beauty in their first eye-opening? He knows beauty in that instant, and he knows luck as well.

  He is lucky.

  “I’m lucky,” he murmured from his cot.

  He stands on legs disused to supporting weight. His own sepals have curled down from his neck and begun to close around him, forming a safe, temperature-regulated cocoon. When they shed, he will keep them with him, safe in the form of a long coat.

  The sepals were beginning to regrow. He felt them unfurling from the back of his neck. For now he could conceal them under his clothes, but eventually they would become too large to hide, and his captors…

  Memories. He tried to recollect every detail of his trek across the continent, but his remembrances were always interrupted.…

  Her touch.

  Interrupted by more recent memories…

  Her eyes.

  Deedra.

  Fear and curiosity in her eyes, intermingled, combined. She touches him. In the dead and dark of night, she kisses him.

  He walks a blasted wasteland, ten years ago, buildings burned out and collapsed all around him. Someone has spray-painted on a trestle YOU ARE ENTERING HELL!!! and Deedra is suddenly there, reaching out for him, and her eyes consume him, and he wants to be consumed, devoured, by her.

  YOU ARE ENTERING HELL!!!

  A fine silvery fuzz began to appear on his skin. This had happened once before. Five years ago. Up north, where the nights were humid and cool, like now. Each morning, he scraped at the fuzz as best he could, sloughing it off into the toilet. It would devour him, he knew. If he couldn’t get rid of it, it would eat him alive.

  At least something will get to eat in here.

  Each morning he scraped it off and returned, exhausted by the effort, to his cot.

  “Can you hear me?”

  He craned his neck so that he could see the door. A man stood there, half in shadow. “I said, can you hear me?”

  “Yes.” Rose’s voice sounded rough and guttural. He hadn’t spoken in several days. The word stabbed his throat.

  “Good. I thought maybe you were unconscious. If you keep up this hunger strike, they’ll force-feed you. You should know that.”

  “Force-feed?”

  “It’s… unpleasant.”

  Eating the gross swill they called food was a nauseating enough prospect. Having it shoved down his gullet against his will was enough to make Rose’s insides clamor to escape his body. He propped himself up on an elbow. Cleared his throat.

  “I can’t eat. I want to. But I can’t eat what they’re giving me.” A thought occurred to him. “Are you my lawyer?”

  The man snorted. “Your lawyer will get here when she gets here. They’re in no hurry to have you prosecuted. Once you get sent to the Citywide facility, you’re out of the Magistrate’s hands. And he likes you where you are. No, I’m here to talk. Can we talk a little?”

  Rose considered. He had no other options, after all. He nodded.

  The man came out of the shadow. His eyes were mismatched, one blue, one green, and Rose couldn’t help staring. “You can change your eyes!” he exclaimed.

  “What?” The man shook his head. “I was born like this.”

  “Oh.” Rose deflated. He could, with concentration, alter the pigments in his skin and other exterior surfaces. That was how he’d created the fake brand that allowed him to remain—for a time—in Ludo Territory. For a brief, shining moment, he’d fantasized that he’d discovered someone like him.

  “I’m Superior Inspector Jona Markard. I’m the one who arrested you.”

  Ah. Yes. Rose remembered now.

  “You shot at me. With people around.” He mustered enough accusation that SI Markard flinched.

  “I was chasing a murderer.”

  “I haven’t killed anyone.”

  Markard folded his arms over his chest. “Listen, Rose. They sent me in here because they figure you’re pretty close to breaking by now. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m authorized to do it, but I don’t want to. Do you believe me?”

  Rose wasn’t sure he did, but there was no harm in saying yes.

  “You’re never leaving a cell. As long as you live, for the rest of your life, you’ll be in a cell. Do you understand?”

  Unfortunately, Rose did. The rest of his life, though, was a vastly shorter amount of time than they could imagine. There’d been a fine coating of more silvery fuzz along his legs when he’d awoken before. And while he couldn’t see his back, he could feel it there, growing, sinking its excruciatingly small talons into his skin. Blooming into him. Becoming him. Or he was becoming it.

  Either way, it meant the end.

  Would he surrender? he wondered. Would he eventually confess to something he hadn’t done? Would he show them what he could do and let them dissect him, all to end the agony?

  “You need to come clean,” Markard said. “Tell them what you know. Look, the Magistrate’s not an unreasonable man. He’s very concerned about the plans your territory has. If you give him the information he needs, he—”

  “He’ll overlook the murder of his son?” Rose sat up, back to the wall, and mimicked Markard’s arms-across-the-chest pose. Even dying, he wasn’t stupid enough—or desperate enough—to believe that Max Ludo would forgive Jaron’s death.

  Markard’s mouth moved without sound and then he recovered. “You’ll always be on the hook for Jaron. But if you give up your people, tell us what we need to know, the other charges could go away. The spying—”

  “I didn’t spy.”

  Markard sighed. “I’m trying to help you, Rose,” he said softly, gazing at him with those beautiful, mismatched eyes.

  “You’re not doing it very well,” Rose replied. He was exhausted. Without even being aware of it, he drifted off to sleep.

  The meals began to blur, and his vision began to blur, so he was no longer certain how much time had passed.

  He began to wonder if perhaps he had killed Jaron Ludo. He had been there, in Jaron’s apartment. He had gone there to recover Deedra’s pendant. Slipped in through a window, as he’d become accustomed to doing. Jaron lived so high up that he never would have imagined someone entering through the window.

  The pendant had been on a shelf in the bedroom. Rose had taken it and only then had he noticed the humped figure in the dark. The body. The blood.

  He’d fled. Safer. Always the safe route. And yet…

  There was a tendril, so like his own. Jaron had been crushed and slashed in a way Rose knew he could crush and slash.

  What if there was someone else like him? What if some other Rose had…

  There was no other Rose, though. None that he knew of. But who else could…

  I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t.

  But what if he had? What if he had done it and simply… didn’t know?

  He could not recall doing so, but was that definitive? Could he have murdered Jaron and forgotten doing so? The human mind, Rose knew, was capable of truly astonishing feats. And his mind was probably not even human.

  Maybe I did it. Maybe they’re right about everything. Maybe I’m a spy. Maybe I was built in a lab in some other Territory, created in a test tube and sent out to wreak havoc on my Magistrate’s enemies.

  And what of his other memories? The ones of his long trek across the Cities? They’d never existed. He’d conjured them in prison, as a way of pushing back against the solitary confinement. Inventing a history to ruminate on, somet
hing to think about beyond the four concrete walls.

  What about Deedra, though? She was real, right? She exists, doesn’t she?

  Yes. Yes, she did. He had touched her. She had kissed him. Those things were real. He clung to them.

  His arms had become spindly and twig-like, with a gray cast to them. When he lifted his shirt, his rib cage stood out against his thin flesh in stark relief, like ripples frozen on the surface of a pond.

  The sepals growing from the back of his neck were a day, maybe two, from being unconcealable under his shirt. He contemplated ripping them off himself. Aware of the camera, he decided he would have to do so under the blanket. They would probably think he was having a seizure, so he would have to move quickly.

  It turned out to be a moot plan. When he awoke the next morning, ready to do it, he felt the sepals shifting under him. They had curdled and fallen off in his sleep.

  Dead.

  Staring at the gray-green fold of his own body, now separate from him, he thought, So am I. Not long now.

  CHAPTER 32

  Tired of waiting for him to come to them, they came for him.

  It was—as best he could tell—the middle of the night. His cell suddenly exploded with bright artificial light as the door clanged open, shocking him from a stupor.

  No shackles this time. That, more than anything else—more than the silvery mildew on his body, the dead sepals, the ribs—convinced him that he was near death.

  Once, they’d respected his power. Now he was nothing to fear.

  They dragged him down a hallway. It blurred, a gray-white smear lit by the hellish artificial lights overhead. Something deep within him yearned and strained for the lights, mistaking them for true light. But they held nothing for him. No nutrition. No life.

  A new room. This one dark, with a chair and a single penetrating light glaring at the seat. They put him in the seat and shackled him to it.