Defekt

by Nino Cipri

  The toilet stopped growling at him and slowly sloughed off its camouflage; cautiously rewarding Derek’s vulnerability with its own. Dex and Darkness both took a couple steps back as the toilet slowly faded into sight. Derek could see the burn where Dirk had shot it, charred black with cobalt-blue flesh underneath it. It looked painful.

  “Yeah, he hurt me, too.” Derek rolled up his sleeves, showing off the bandages. The egg chair toilet took a couple steps forward, cautious, ready to flee. “I should have stopped him, but I was . . .”

  It wasn’t pain that made Derek’s throat clench. It was shame, and horror, and the overwhelming awfulness of seeing two defekta blown apart and being too afraid to stop it.

  “Derek.”

  He turned around to see Delilah standing behind him; she must have come out from behind the armoire while he was talking to the toilet. He swiped angrily at his eyes; he didn’t deserve the comfort of crying. He’d gotten some burns on his arm. Two defekta were dead, and the rest of the inventory team had had to put up with Dirk for months. He’d only had a few hours of him.

  “You can talk to them,” she said. “And they understand you?”

  “I think I’m one of them.” Scraping up the last of his rapidly dwindling bravery, he rolled down his turtleneck, feeling the cool, damp air on his defect. “See?” he said, tense, waiting for the other shoe to drop, or for her to shoot him on the spot.

  “Holy shit,” Dex said from behind her. “That’s fucking gross.”

  There was a thump as Darkness punched him in the shoulder.

  “Hey, fuck you! I didn’t mean it in a bad way!”

  Delilah said nothing, just considered him with a look of genuine surprise on her face.

  “I didn’t realize what it was until, you know. Until Dirk tried to kill me.”

  But that wasn’t entirely true; he’d known something was wrong with him. He knew enough to hide it, knew it would get him in trouble and endanger his relationship with LitenVärld; that LitenVärld, despite Derek’s genuine love for it and his faith in its ethos, would not or could not make space for him to exist as his whole self. There was a place for everything here, but—as Darkness had pointed out early in the night—that was only true so long as LitenVärld could control it or sell it. Anything the company couldn’t make use of, they disposed of. That’s what they’d done with the discordant inventory team members. That’s what they’d done with Derek when he stepped out of line and asked for a day off. And naturally, that’s what they’d done with all the defekta.

  Derek felt grief bearing down on him, clenching in his stomach. It hurt; this was the only home he had, and it had rejected him and wanted him dead. Worse, he hadn’t cared that it did this to others until he’d experienced the pain himself.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said, both to the inventory team and the toilet, as well as the rest of the defekta—they’d all crept close, inveterate eavesdroppers that they were. “I can’t stay with the company. I can’t ask you to—”

  “You can ask,” Delilah said. “You should ask.”

  That robbed Derek of his words. He’d reached the end of his courage, and now felt terribly afraid. Not even that they would refuse him; if they said yes, it opened up a whole barrel of complications, and Derek wasn’t sure if he was strong enough to deal with them.

  Still. He forced the words out, because speaking didn’t always require courage; sometimes desperation was enough.

  “How do you feel about quitting?” Derek asked.

  “Fan-fucking-tastic,” said Darkness.

  “Awesome,” Dex agreed.

  “Great,” said Delilah. “But I think we can do a little better than just resigning.”

  * * *

  “Does the company actually value Dirk the way he thinks they do?” Derek asked Delilah. They were sitting together in the customer service desk, lit a little better than the rest of the dim store. She had asked if she could record a few observations about his defect for her notes; she’d never given up on trying to understand the defekta, and her focus now extended to Derek’s defect.

  “I doubt it,” Delilah said, looking critically at the anatomical sketch she’d made in a leatherbound notebook. Derek didn’t quite dare to look at it himself, but couldn’t make himself look totally away, so it lingered in his peripheral vision in graphite, surrounded by Delilah’s dense, cramped handwriting. Tympanal plate??? Auditory vesicles interpreting transmitting lies as pain—

  “He’s discordant too, though he always liked to forget that fact. They put him in charge, and they definitely like him more than us, but that’s one hell of a low bar.”

  “Still,” Derek said. “There won’t be any going back after this.”

  Delilah looked at him over the tops of the UPPFATTA reading glasses she’d perched on her nose. “Do you really think any of us want to go back?”

  Derek opened his mouth, then hesitated.

  “Do you?” Delilah added. “It’s okay if you do want to.”

  “I can’t, though,” Derek said. “I mean, look at me.”

  Derek had finally given up on the turtleneck, torn and splattered with blood, and was pulling on a V-neck that he nervously stole from the FUNDAMENT collection of plain shirts, underpants, and pajamas. His defect was tucked into the hollow of his throat, not as large or terrible as it had felt, but he still couldn’t look long at his reflection in any of the many mirrors throughout the store. He bore scratches on his wrists from the dying table runner, bruises and gashes all over his legs from his first encounter with the egg chair toilet, burns from the INVENTERA. Reagan had told him that he wasn’t a normal employee, but an exceptional one, and that alone placed a different set of expectations on him. If only she could see him now.

  Well. She probably would see him soon. Dex had plans for more videos, since the first one had gone viral. It was only a matter of time before it got back to LitenVärld corporate.

  “It’s okay to wish you could go back, even if you can’t,” Delilah said thoughtfully. “This has all happened really quickly for you. We’ve had months to come up with a million failed escape schemes.”

  “Like what?” Derek asked.

  Delilah put down the field notebook, and Derek could finally look away. Nearby, Darkness and Dex were trying to teach a group of defekta the choreography of a dance that had gone viral on ChitChat. The egg chair toilet was both the most enthusiastic and the objectively worst dancer.

  “Oh, all kinds of stuff. We alerted the media through anonymous tip-offs, but all the true things we told them sounded like pranks, and when we toned it down they told us that there wasn’t enough interest to report or investigate. And it’s really difficult to make a plan that would actually surprise your supervisor when he’s basically the same person as you, can extrapolate all the ideas in our heads. Last time we just ran. Only Dex made it out, and he got dragged back after a week. That’s when the company started locking us in.” She tapped her notebook contemplatively. “You’re the difference this time. And we’ve learned enough from all of our previous failures to know how to seize this chance and do something with it.”

  Derek mulled this over, wondering how many of the plans that they made were similar to the ones he’d tried to enact. “Is it weird to be grateful that you failed all those times? I mean, I’m directly benefiting from it now, and if you hadn’t, I’d still be . . .”

  Trapped, he thought. Treading water.

  He flinched a little from a touch on his shoulder. Delilah had leaned forward and put her warm hand on his arm. “We’re not doing this as a favor to you. This isn’t a rescue mission for the defekta, or a noble sacrifice. We’re all in this stupid boat together.”

  Derek huffed half a laugh. At Delilah’s raised eyebrow, he explained, “Sorry, I was just thinking of a question Reagan asked me when she interviewed—or I guess interrogated—me earlier today.”

  “Oh, the question about the people in the sinking boat? She loves that question. I feel like that�
�s the real LitenVärld ethos, right there. Anytime there’s a problem, throw the least convenient people overboard.”

  Derek felt his urge to defend the company rise, sputter out, and disintegrate. That’s what happened when you were the person elected to drown.

  “Dirk’s getting closer,” he said, pitching his voice loud enough to get Darkness and Dex’s attention. “I think it’s time.”

  “Gotta say, this plan is weird,” Dex said.

  “None of our plans have worked,” Delilah reminded them. “But it’ll be another point of data.”

  Darkness nodded and added, “And it’s got style. We’ll make failing look cool, if nothing else.”

  The egg chair toilet, having followed Dex back to the group like a lost puppy, rippled with enthusiasm as it leaned its cold weight against Derek’s leg. Once Derek had apologized and explained what had happened, the egg chair toilet had transformed into an enthusiastic ally, overjoyed to be part of a group, and possibly a little attention-starved. It reminded him of a puppy—a very large porcelain puppy that weighed a few hundred pounds and could completely camouflage itself.

  “Do you want one of us to come with you? “ Delilah asked.

  Derek shook his head. He’d told them he didn’t want to risk one of them going in and getting lost, falling through a maskhål without any way of finding their way back. But also—and he hadn’t told them this—he felt like Dirk was his responsibility; as the person who’d had the least exposure to him, as the person who’d refused to see how awful he was until it was too late. He couldn’t look at Darkness’s bruised face or the dark circles under Delilah’s eyes or the way Dex always hunched in on himself when talking about the things he liked—he couldn’t know where those things came from and ask any of them to do this in his place.

  And Derek wasn’t alone anyway. The defekta would have his back. There were always monsters in the hearts of mazes—there was definitely a picture book in the KinderVärld children’s line with that title—but this maze was on Derek’s side.

  “I can do this,” he said.

  “We’ll be watching on CCTV and listening over comms,” Delilah reminded him. “And we can always go back to Plan B if this doesn’t work.”

  Plan B was to murder Dirk. Derek had barely managed to convince everyone not to make it Plan A.

  All Derek had to do now was to walk the labyrinth, slow enough for Dirk to follow him into a different world, and then lose him there.

  Derek had spent this whole shift running away from things—now he would run toward something. That was some kind of progress.

  “This will work,” he said to the group, trying to scrape together some confidence. It had to work. He hated Dirk, despite not being built to hate. But his ears started ringing and his body broke out into a cold, prickly sweat when he imagined Plan B.

  Delilah patted him on the back, and Dex offered him a fist bump, giving a pained sigh when Derek fumbled it in a moment of extreme squareness.

  Darkness just slid into Derek’s space before he could try to think of something to say to them. They pressed their warm body against him and touched their uninjured cheek to his. “I’d kiss you for luck if my face didn’t hurt so fucking bad,” they whispered.

  Derek made a noise he had never made before. Darkness laughed, winked at him when they parted, and Derek flushed.

  “Gross,” Dex muttered.

  Derek practically flung himself into the maze after that, with Darkness’s laughter fading in his ears. He made his way to Dirk’s footsteps, which were pounding against the cement in a rage that grew louder and louder the closer Derek got to him. Derek could make out muttered curses, just on the edge of hearing, promises of what he was going to do to the defekta, what he would get LitenVärld to do to Derek, to his whole traitorous team.

  Around him, the defekta were still moving. Walls parted, curtains tugged themselves out of his way, shelves skipped aside, and couches shuffled over to let him past. He found himself opening a shower door and walking into it, then crawling through the resultant passageway as it heaved arrhythmic breaths around him. A napkin set whose cotton weave had solidified into leathery wings with tasteful geometric borders led him through the narrow passageways as they opened and closed around him.

  He knew the exact moment when Dirk saw him. Derek had paused to catch his breath and his bearings, in what had at one point been Kitchens, but now had a little bit of every part of the store; a breakfast table had shimmied over to a secretary desk, while a set of bocce balls from Backyard and Recreation and some decorative floral wreaths rolled around his legs.

  Dirk’s steps slowed and then paused as some predatory instinct made him look Derek’s way, separated only by a few rooms, and visible through a set of glass French doors.

  Their eyes met, and Derek held his gaze. Dirk really did look like a monster haunting a maze. Blood had dried in streams down his face, while bruising had spread over his nose and up into his eyes and cheeks. Blood-flecked spittle had collected in the corners of his mouth. This was Dirk, the truth of him, beneath the confidence and self-assurance, beneath the easy authority and casual bullying. Derek was ashamed that he hadn’t seen it before; even more ashamed that there were so few differences between them.

  He darted away. Dirk thundered after him in pursuit.

  Derek aimed himself toward one of the thinnest places, a spot that was already stretched nearly to the breaking point beneath the weight of LitenVärld’s uncanny geometries. Its wailing became a whistling shriek as it split open, and Derek broke into a sprint. A bright blue shelving unit pried apart its shelves just enough for Derek to wriggle through. Beyond it, the maskhål stretched across a passageway, the same red as the emergency lights, throbbing as if to a heartbeat. Derek waited until he could hear Dirk only a dozen feet behind him, and then darted through.

  This was the part that most worried Derek; that in the other world, the defekta wouldn’t listen to him, or be able to understand him, or that they wouldn’t be alive at all. Delilah had told him that the closest universes would almost undoubtedly be the most similar to theirs. The further out one ventured out, the stranger and more divergent the universes became.

  The shifting labyrinth had extended past the borders of his own world. The defekta here were still moving, still remaking the maze as he ran through it.

  “Thank you,” he said as he passed them, because they owed him nothing but were saving his life anyway.

  As he ran, Derek tried to balance his own pursuit with Dirk’s, chasing after the sound of the maskhåls as they split open doorways into other doorways into doorways; he couldn’t let himself get too far ahead, nor let Dirk get too close.

  He was concentrating on that balance so much that he didn’t hear the other footsteps in the maze, not until he collided with them.

  “Sorry!” he said instinctively.

  “Sorry!” the other voice said, in the exact same intonation, at the exact same time.

  Seeing the other members of the inventory team for the first time had been like looking into a series of warped mirrors. This was like looking into a perfectly, painfully accurate one. Dex and Delilah and Darkness might share his genetic material, but they were thoroughly their own people.

  This was Derek, down to his bones, down to the scuffs on his work boots and pinched line between his eyebrows.

  “You’re . . .” the other one said, pointing at him. He had the same look of shock that Derek could feel spreading on his own features. “I guess I should stop being surprised at this point.”

  “Maybe,” Derek confirmed. He pointed behind him. “You came in here to lose Dirk?”

  “Uh-huh,” the other Derek said, jerking his head backward in confirmation. “Think we should—”

  “Together?” Derek said. “Oh, absolutely.”

  They both took off, twin footfalls thudding down the hallways as they shifted around them.

  “What if they see each other?” other Derek asked, out of breath. “The Dirks,
I mean?”

  Derek looked at him. “What if they see each other?”

  He and the other Derek ran in silence for a moment, thoughts racing.

  “I am so tired of being chased.”

  “Same. They might distract each other.”

  “At least enough for us to sneak away and leave them here.”

  “I can’t think of a worse punishment for Dirk than having to deal with himself.”

  “Exactly.”

  It didn’t take long for the two Dirks’ footsteps to collide, much the way that Derek’s and the other Derek’s had. Their crash was much louder and harder, both of them cursing aloud. Derek and alt-Derek slowed down, then paused to listen.

  “What—?” Dirk screamed. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  Neither of them answered, but they weren’t stupid, and it didn’t take long before one of them guessed what had happened.

  “He led you through a wormhole,” one of them said. “I can’t believe you fell for that.”

  “Hey, how do you know you didn’t go through a wormhole? Fucking prick. No wonder everyone hates you.”

  “Hey, fuck you, buddy. Attitudes like that are why you haven’t gotten ahead.”

  “Fuck me? Fuck you!”

  Derek had thought Dirk had been joking when he’d said that seeing his doppelgängers had made him feel violent rage. Maybe he’d meant Derek to think it was a joke, but the situation wasn’t funny now. He and the other Derek both winced as they felt a fist connect with someone’s body. He jerked his head in the opposite direction. “Should we get out of here?”

  The other Derek nodded, and they quietly made their way further into the endless labyrinth, the sound of the two Dirks scrapping and screaming slowly fading away.

  * * *

  For a while they walked aimlessly in silence. The defekta seemed to have finally tired themselves out, and the labyrinth stopped shifting and moving around them.

  “I think I need a break,” Derek said.

  “Same,” the other Derek said, and they smiled exhaustedly at each other.