Retroactivity

by Edwards, Micah

  Marc grinned, his crystal tusks glittering. “I am monstrous and inhuman.”

  “Perception matters,” pressed Mat. “I want to be able to show that we are working together, peacefully. I want to record the meetings and broadcast them.”

  “Acceptable,” said the Neverman. “And the second?”

  “Return this body for burial,” Mat said. “Take the message back, but then let us return Marc to his family.”

  The Neverman shifted slightly, but said nothing. His eyes seemed to stare through Mat.

  “You said yourself that this body was not meant to be sustained,” Mat said. “It costs you nothing to let us have it when it wears out, and garners goodwill.”

  The Neverman cocked his head slightly, as if listening to a far-off whisper. Then he smiled, his mouth glittering like a geode.

  “Will you do this?” Mat asked insistently.

  “It’s a funny thing,” said Marc. “I would have. I believed that you meant it. You sounded sincere.”

  “I have been sincere,” said Mat. A deep, ugly feeling began to form in the pit of his stomach. A standard response to being accused of lying? Or his augment warning him that things were going wrong? Not for the first time, Mat cursed his weak augment and the uncertainty it brought.

  “You say that,” said Marc. “And perhaps it is even true. But you have negotiated in bad faith. Knowingly or not! It does not matter. You have already broken our deal.”

  “What have I done?” asked Mat.

  “You! You, collectively you.” Marc waved his hand in irritation. “You. It does not matter now. Lean in close, and I will tell you a secret.”

  The feeling in Mat’s gut flared, filling him with an urgent need to leave the situation immediately. He pushed back his chair to stand, only to turn the motion into a desperate spring as he saw the Neverman across from him start to swell and split. Mat’s chair toppled over backward as he grabbed for the coffee table and turned it up onto its side, sending water glasses flying as he attempted to shelter behind its meager surface. He grabbed Dana’s hand and dragged her down, too.

  Blood ran freely from Marc’s mouth, garbling his words even further than normal. He stood from his chair and held his arms out expansively. “The Emissary is coming.”

  With a sound like a railroad spike being driven through a watermelon, Marc exploded. The crystals filling his body ruptured and shot outward in a glittering cloud, embedding themselves into the table, chairs, walls, ceiling and any other exposed surface. Dana wailed in surprise as a burst caught her in the shoulder, shredding her suit jacket and piercing her skin.

  The room glittered like a cave, but stank like a slaughterhouse. Mat warily looked up from behind the table. The only sign of the Neverman was a ruined chair and a pile of sloppy gore. He had ruptured completely, coating the room in bloody crystals.

  “Are you all right?” asked Mat.

  “Yeah,” said Dana. “Just grazed.”

  She scratched at her shoulder. “It itches, though.”

  “We’ll get it looked at,” said Mat. “Come on, let’s go.”

  He started to gingerly make his way to the door, but stopped when he noticed that Dana was not following. He looked back to see her looking at her phone.

  “Something I need to know?” he asked, just as his phone also buzzed.

  “Mandatory evacuation,” said Dana, looking scared. “All of Miami. This entire city. People are being told not to take any western roads.”

  Mat read the text himself. It was stark and to the point.

  IMMEDIATE MANDATORY EVACUATION FOR THE CITY OF MIAMI AND SURROUNDING AREAS. TRAVEL NORTH, EAST OR SOUTH. EMERGENCY PERSONNEL WILL ASSIST.

  THIS IS NOT A DRILL. EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY.

  The two stared at each other. The Neverman’s final words hung in the air between them. The Emissary.

  XIV

  “And what of our—well, not heroes, exactly. What of our protagonists?”

  “I still don’t understand why we’re back in DC,” Molt complained. She drummed her fingers restlessly on her leg, sending a subtle vibration through the entire room. “And don’t tell me ‘it’s where we need to be.’ The whole point is to go fight Seed, so why are we just wasting time here?”

  “Fighting Seed isn’t the point at all, Maria,” said Lacuna. She sat in front of a mirror propped against the wall, rubbing a cream into her skin. Glancing up, she caught Molt’s eyes in the reflection. “Fighting Seed is the means. The point is to be asked to fight Seed. And if we’re hanging out in Florida, we’re a lot more likely to be asked things like ‘What were you doing here when Seed suddenly got riled up?’”

  Lacuna paused to examine her blotchy skin, searching for patches she had missed with the cream. “As it is, I’m only mostly sure that we didn’t leave enough clues behind for people to connect the robbery to us.”

  Molt smiled. “We got to rob a bank! That was awesome.”

  “Says you,” grumbled Taunt. She sulked in a corner, purple crystals still glittering over half of her body. Halflife leaned over her, hands hovering just above the surface of her skin. Beneath her palms, the crystals slowly shifted and melted away, leaving irritated welts in their place. Taunt grimaced and shifted uncomfortably. “Low haul, and definitely not worth it. Getting these crystals removed is taking forever.”

  “I could do it faster,” said Halflife melodically, “as long as you don’t mind fallout. How do you feel about radon? Little gamma radiation sound good to you?”

  Taunt bared her teeth and rattled her hair. Halflife smacked her spikes down. “Don’t get testy with me, or I’ll leave the rest of these crystals here.”

  “I just don’t know why I had to be last,” groused Taunt.

  “You weren’t last. You were third. I did Lacuna before you because she was having a worse reaction to the crystals. And I did myself first because I felt like it.”

  “And I, of course, needed no help to return to my natural state of perfection,” said Replix, holding his arms wide to display his unblemished skin.

  “Same,” rumbled Molt, grinning. “We’re like peas in a pod.”

  “I had wondered if those would stick around through the chrysalis process,” said Halflife distractedly, her attention focused on Taunt.

  “Gone in the morning,” said Molt, extending one huge hand for inspection. “Same as every day. Same as before, only a little bit bigger and a little bit better.”

  “Did they crumble?” Halflife asked.

  “Didn’t look. I just left the skin there. If not, someone’s gonna find a pile of Nevercrystals in the woods.”

  “They’re only quartz.”

  “Hey, maybe you’d fix me faster if you’d quit running your mouth,” Taunt said peevishly. Suddenly, a crystal on her shoulder lost its purple hue.

  Taunt spun away, clutching at her shoulder. “Ow, hey! What the hell?”

  “Oh, sorry,” said Halflife, smiling pleasantly. “I accidentally turned that one into salt instead of back into skin. I must have been distracted by the insult to my ability.”

  Across the room, Replix laughed. Taunt glared at him briefly, then turned her attention back to Halflife.

  “This isn’t funny. Fix it!” she demanded. “It burns!”

  “Say please,” Halflife told her.

  Taunt narrowed her eyes. Her skin darkened. “You couldn’t fix it if you wanted to,” she hissed, her hair rising up into quills.

  Halflife stood, the smile dropping from her face. “This is how you want to play it? I’ll turn your blood to mercury.”

  “Don’t,” said Retroactivity, walking into the room. Everyone froze, waiting.

  His eyes flicked to each member of his team in turn, settling on Taunt. “You want to get put back to normal? Go sit down, please.”

  “It’s taking forever. And it hurts,” complained Taunt, but she settled back down in front of Halflife. At a glance from Retroactivity, Halflife also resumed her seat.

  “I offered to fix
her up the fast way,” said Replix.

  “Don’t touch me, you freak!” hissed Taunt.

  Replix smiled. “And you see the thanks I get?”

  “So how much longer do we have to sit around here?” asked Molt.

  “I don’t want to spoil the surprise,” said Retroactivity, “but things are getting interesting in Miami.”

  “Interesting?” asked Lacuna.

  “I think it’s safe to say that, at the very least, negotiations are over. They’ll try a few futile things. Then it’ll be our time to shine.”

  “I’m not going,” Jerry Kinkaid insisted. “I’m not well, and I’m not leaving.”

  The nurse looked exasperated. “Jerry, it’s mandatory. Come on. Everyone else is going. Don’t make this a big deal.”

  “No!” said Jerry, his voice rising. “I’m an American citizen! You can’t herd me around like cattle!”

  The nurse gestured around the ward. “No one else here has a problem with moving away from danger. See?”

  He was correct. All around the room, patients were packing up their possessions and moving toward the hallway, supervised by an extremely bored-looking guard. Jerry, however, was unconvinced.

  “So if everybody else jumped off of a bridge, I should do that, too? I won’t. I’m hurt. Anyway, I can’t even carry things. I have those crystals growing in my hand. What kind of doctor makes a sick man work?” He waved his bandaged hand back and forth. “I ought to report you to the medical board, Doctor—” he paused to read the nurse’s nametag—“Abrams.”

  Nurse Abrams sighed. “Everyone here has those crystals, Jerry. Every one of you had a run-in with the Nevermen. That’s why you’re here, so we can figure out how to get them out. The doctors are going, too, so if you want to be treated, you need to come along.”

  “I want to be treated here,” said Jerry mulishly. “I’m not leaving.”

  “Jerry.” The nurse took a deep breath. He was experiencing a rising desire to throttle the old man, but settled for putting a hand gently on his shoulder. “You are leaving. That’s how mandatory works. Please stop being difficult.”

  Jerry shook off Abrams’s hand. “Don’t touch me!”

  He shook his bandaged hand in the nurse’s face, one finger outstretched accusingly. “I’m staying here. And I don’t care what you or anyone else has to—”

  Suddenly, shockingly, Jerry’s hand exploded. Abrams staggered back, his face peppered by shrapnel. Purple crystals glistened in his skin, standing out colorfully among the flecks of blood.

  Jerry stared at his arm, which now ended in a stump halfway along his forearm. For a brief moment the whiteness of bone was visible, and then a torrent of blood poured forth, gushing onto the floor. Jerry shakily raised his stump in front of his disbelieving eyes, the blood fountaining upward with every heartbeat. Jerry shrieked shrilly, falling backwards onto the bed.

  Abrams’s nurse training kicked in and, ignoring his own pain, he grabbed frantically for bandages and a length of rubber tubing to apply a hasty tourniquet. Jerry slumped unconscious in his arms as he was knotting off the tube. Abrams pulled one arm free to reach for the call button, but even as he pressed it, more shrieks and wet splattering noises began to sound all around the ward.

  “What the hell is going on?” shouted the guard, drawing his gun. He had been caught in various blasts and crystals glimmered among rips in his clothing. All around him, people screamed and fled, or slumped dying to the floor. The floor was awash in blood, the walls painted with it.

  “It’s the crystals!” Abrams shouted back. “They’re detonating!”

  A panicked look came over the guard’s face. “Is this gonna happen to me?”

  His gaze fell on the body of a man who’d been injured by the Neverman at the airport, and who had had crystals embedded up the length of one leg. His torso now lay on the floor, one leg entirely missing, the other a shredded mass of flesh that looked like something that might have washed up on a beach. Purple crystals studded the floor and beds around him, texturing the lake of blood.

  The guard dropped his gun and started prying frantically at the tiny crystal fragments embedded into his arm. “Jesus, man, get them out of me! Get a scalpel or something!”

  Abrams raised a hand to his own face. Although it was probably his imagination, he swore he could feel the crystals burrowing, digging inside with a malign intelligence.

  “I…I have some calls to make,” he said unsteadily. Dropping Jerry’s body to the bed, he rose and made his way carefully across the blood-soaked floor toward the hallway. Screams for help rose all around him, but he barely heard them. There was nothing he could do for them. There was nothing anyone could do.

  The hallway was a scene of mass chaos. Whatever had caused the crystals to explode was not limited to the room, and fleeing had not saved the patients. It had only helped the carnage to spread. The acoustic tiles dripped with blood, and the entire hallway was painted in shades of red. The bespattered lights helped enhance the impression that the entire building was drowning in blood.

  One hand on the wall to steady himself, Nurse Abrams made his way slowly along, his mind focused only on getting to his locker to retrieve his phone. He had to let his family know where he was, to know not to look for him. He ignored demands for assistance and pleas for information, and shrugged off grabbing hands.

  Abruptly, he stopped, staring out a window. Outside should have been a parking lot, some streets, a few neighboring buildings. A decent if wholly unremarkable view. But what he saw instead rooted him in place, robbing him of all conscious control. He slumped back against the wall and slid slowly to the ground, still staring outside.

  At the edge of the parking lot, rising a dozen feet above the tops of the small trees there, sat a monstrous thing. Abrams’s mind insisted it was a blob of jelly, and would not address the scale, the movement, the amorphic features. Shapes moved inside of it, humanoid, struggling like ants trapped in honey. The thing slid forward, whiplike cilia questing around it as it moved. In its wake, it left a glistening trail of crystals along the asphalt.

  It was featureless, as blank as a mountainside. Yet somehow, Abrams felt it look at him, felt it see him across the parking lot and through the window. He tried to tell himself that was only a fantasy, but with terrifying speed it reared up and began to flow across the parking lot toward the hospital, towering ever larger as it came.

  Abrams, still unable to make his legs move, watched in terror as its bulk filled the view, blocking out everything else with its translucent mass. A body banged heavily against the window, a woman trapped inside of the creature. Crystals protruded from every part of her body, growing even as Abrams watched. Her staring eyes found Abrams’s, pleading for help. Just one more call for assistance he couldn’t answer. He looked away.

  Below him, Abrams heard the front doors of the hospital shatter. The purplish mass slid slowly out of view as the blob forced its body into the hospital, and Abrams was desperately, selfishly glad that he was a floor up and still had time to escape. Staggering slowly to his feet, he looked around at the shouting madness all around him, people running frantically in every direction. He picked up a chair, preparing to smash a window and jump out.

  Before he could, the crystals in his face detonated. Abrams screamed once, gargling on a mouthful of blood, before his faceless body toppled over backwards, adding its contribution to the crimson river flowing through the hospital. Crystalline shards studded the walls around him, slowly growing to form a latticework.

  Mat stabbed a finger at his phone’s screen, ending the call. He sighed angrily and ran a hand through his hair.

  “Well, so much for that. Maybe they can convince her, but I doubt it.”

  “Amygdala won’t come?” asked Dana, who had heard only Mat’s half of the conversation. It was still enough to be clear on the answer, but she didn’t know what else to say.

  “No. Says she won’t walk into an ‘emotional abattoir.’ I don’t know. I suppo
se I can’t blame her. A city in fear can’t be a fun place to be an empath.”

  “Not much of a fun place to be anyone,” said Dana. She scratched her shoulder. “So what do we do? Anything we can do here?”

  “We should follow the evacuation orders,” said Mat. His stomach roiled briefly, and he frowned. “Hm. We should stay here.”

  “Sorry, what?” asked Dana. “Which one?”

  “Neither,” said Mat, whose stomach was still faintly knotted. “Both are bad. Hold on, sorry. I want to check the options. Give me a minute.”

  Mat stepped into the center of the new suite they were in, standing as far from everything as possible. He closed his eyes and allowed his body relax into a neutral stance. Taking deep, measured breaths, he tuned out the outside world and let his thoughts slowly empty.

  “We should evacuate,” said Mat slowly, almost intoning the words.

  “So—” began Dana, but without opening his eyes, Mat held up one finger in her direction.

  “We should stay here.”

  Dana frowned, confused, but Mat’s eyes were still closed, so she held her questions.

  “We should wait for reinforcements. We should go to the source. We should hide somewhere else. We should form a defensive squad. We should split up.” A wrinkle formed briefly on Mat’s brow, and his tongue flickered out to wet his lips before continuing. “Dana should evacuate. I should evacuate. I should go assist.”

  Mat fell quiet, and remained totally still for several seconds before opening his eyes. Dana regarded him curiously.

  “So that’s your augment, huh?”

  Mat shrugged awkwardly. “Yeah. It’s not fantastic, but it’s better than nothing. And that’s the best way I’ve found to get a good answer out of it: run through a list of choices and feel for the subtle differences.”

  “So what’s the answer?”

  “We split up,” said Mat. “I go find the Emissary, and you get out of here.”