XIV.
Vagari awoke a handful of times on their journey through the reaches of the bog, and every time in a delirium, a half-wokeness that blended reality with the world of dream. Most of the time he awoke to BP, sometimes Carla, sometimes Malcom, all struggling as they pulled him through the peat, mud, and bloodied corridor. Stars above blared, turning from distant lights to burning red alarms, crying out “ERROR – ERROR – SYSTEM MALFUNCTION. CONTAINMENT BREACH DETECTED.” Towards the end there were others, nameless faces, and indiscernible voices. Some he thought he recognized, but most, if not all, were like the droning moans of ghosts – haunting specters come to remind him of his crimes against them. “Why, Val? Why?” the voices called to him, sobbing, pleading for answers he couldn’t muster the courage to give them. “Was it worth it? Was it worth everything? Everyone? Was it worth it?!” No, he thought, it was not.
Vagari didn’t know how long he had been out for, but when he awoke fully at last, he did so to the warmth of the sun upon his face. “Ah – there we go. Coming to,” announced a strangely familiar voice from behind. “Awake at last. There for a bit I was doubtful you’d recover, but you have a remarkable ability to heal.” Vagari let out a groan followed by a sharp hiss as he struggled to turn away from the window and put a face to the voice. “Don’t worry, I’ve no doubt that the pain will pass,” the voice said kindly while placing a firm hand upon his shoulder in assist. “The demon’s poisons, while paralyzing, also appears to hyper-stimulate the pain receptors. My guess is it feeds off pain and anguish – or rather fed. Honestly, most people would have died from the shock of it, I think. But not you. Not only did you survive, but killed the creature even. Impressive.”
The face to the voice was a kindly one. He was a mutant with at least some luck to his configuration – appearing mostly human at first glance. Half his face showed an East-Asian heritage with sharp almond eyes and high cheekbones, while the other half boasted his mutations, thinly veiled behind a collapsed fold of his hood. Vagari could see a twist of darkened flesh that curiously pulsed with a faint glow. “By pure luck, I assure you,” Vagari insisted with a groan as he looked the man up and down, that sense of familiarity at his voice nagging viciously in the back of his mind. “Who are you?” he asked, curtly at first, but then once more in a thankful tone, saying “Who do I owe the honor of being my savior today?”
The man gave him a curious half-smile and tilted his head in slightly. “A one Doctor Jan Xu,” he announced. “Though the by… BP 2-8-57, rather, is owed the honor. She pulled you nearly all the way out of the bog all by herself. It was entirely by coincidence that we spotted you from the main road, to be honest. Me and mine just happened to be in the area. You’re incredibly fortunate.”
Dr. Xu, how many could there be, Vagari wondered with an inquisitive look at his savior. “Must be fate,” Vagari mused weakly, eying the man over, that spark of familiarity flaming up into recognition. He knew this man, and not from BP’s telling of him. He knew him, his voice. But from where? “Thee Dr. Xu, I presume?”
“The one and only, probably,” Xu said with a laugh, clasping his hands together with a wag of his index fingers. “BP 2-8-57 told me she spoke of me. Good things, I hope! Hope…” Xu sighed with a warm smile as he reached out and clapped a hand on Vagari’s knee. Giving it a shake, he carried on to say, “I hadn’t hoped I’d get to see her again, not with that creature stalking the city. After what happened there, after what happened to me… Well, return was impossible. I barely made it out with my life. It’s my biggest regret that we couldn’t make it out together.”
“Right, that’s a story I’d like to hear,” replied Vagari solemnly, eying the man sidelong. He adjusted himself to face him, throwing his legs over the side of the bed. “She told me the good, the good Dr. Xu who taught her how to talk and read, who listened when nobody else would. That’s what I heard. What I saw however… that creature, and whatever the hell else you people had going on there.” Vagari let out a nasal sigh, shaking his head before saying, “Let he without sin… Forgive me. You saved my life.”
“By all means lay the judgement down!” Xu exclaimed with a laugh before letting the laugh fade and the crooked half-smile fall from his face. “GOD knows I deserve it. I know what I did and the pain and suffering that came from it. I paid a price, in a way, after my escape,” Xu said, tapping at the shadowed side of his face suggestively. “Though that is quite the story, and one for another time, perhaps. What we did there will haunt me for the rest of my life. But you know something about that, don’t you? Let he without sin…” Xu knitted his fingers together again. Something seemed to writhe under his sleeves. “Now I’ve treated hundreds if not thousands of aberrants from coast to frontier, and never have I seen one quite so well-crafted as you. So neat, so uniform. Not a single mistake made.”
“It’s all a mistake!” Vagari snapped in a spike of anger that he quickly stifled. “But yes, I know something about that.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do,” Xu said darkly before reverting to the warm half-smile. “Tell you what, we can swap stories sometime. Misery loves company, after all. But now, I’ve told you who I am. Care to return the favor? Not required for treatment, but it’s good to have more than ‘Wanderer’ written on the paperwork. Who are you, Vagari? And what madness possessed you to try and cut through the old city? It was considered perilous long before we decided to play GOD.”
Vagari couldn’t rightly put his finger on it, but he felt he couldn’t trust the man – not with the truth. As grateful as he was to be alive, there was just something about him and his just-in-time arrival he found suspicious, dangerous even. It was too fateful, too miraculous. The chance they had been just passing by right then and there were slim to none. So he’d lie by omission. “I’m just that – a wanderer,” Vagari claimed with a hapless shrug. “I’m a tradesman, scavenging the wastes. I sell my wares in the Megacity – the Lower Outer-City mostly. I live here, however… if here is Eastend as I suspect.”
“It is,” Xu confirmed with a nod. “We found you by the north road, half way into bandit territory, and brought you here for treatment. BP 2-8-57 told us of your trials, how your caravan got attacked, and you were shot and left for dead. Your luck seemingly has no bounds.”
“Yes, I had been returning home to enjoy my earnings when bandits attacked,” Vagari claimed, wondering what else BP had told him. “The city seemed, at the time, like a safer bet than walking the Eastern Wastes along the serpent road.”
Now Xu was the one eying him suspiciously. But, after a moment of silence, he’d laugh and shake his head. “Wow, what a choice to make! And considering that traveling the wastes alone is pretty much a death sentence, you made the right one,” Xu exclaimed. “Fate leads us down the strangest of paths, doesn’t it? You must be the luckiest scav in the world. Explains the bars we found on you – pardon the snooping. Uh – would you like me to alert the local guild of your arrival? They’ll be as entertained by your story as I’ve been, I’m sure.”
“No, no that’s fine,” Vagari replied with a wave of his hand. “I wasn’t scheduled, so I doubt they’ve closed my accounts yet.”
“Well, let me know if there’s anything I can do for you,” the doctor told him while taking to his feet. “Otherwise, I suggest plenty of rest and fluids, all that doctor’s orders stuff, and you’ll be right as rain in no time. Oh – and no more shortcuts! Luck runs out, Vagari, especially when pressed.” Xu smiled down on him. He was tall, probably a head taller than most. Realization twisted in Vagari’s guts like eels. He knew who he was, where he had heard his voice before. “I’ll let our mutual friend know you’re awake.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Vagari watched in a mix of confusion and disbelief as the man left the room behind with a curt wave over his shoulder. He didn’t want to believe it, the strange twist of fate, but he was sure of it – Xu and the hunting tall man were one in the same. But did he know who he was? That they were after the same query? Vagari doubted he did. If he did, why leave him alive and tend to his wounds? Especially after the trail of death he had left in his wake prior. But if it was just blind chance then why did it feel as if fate were playing tricks on him? Vagari staggered to his feet and then lurched towards the window. Were the demon’s toxins still clouding his mind, he wondered? Was he drawing connections were there were none? Vagari hissed and pressed his forehead against the window. Soprano was out there, somewhere waiting for him, hiding. Whatever the case may be, she was his first priority, her and the book. What about BP, he wondered? Was she as surprised as he was? Was she surprised at all? Some small paranoid part of Vagari suggested that maybe she already knew who waited at the far end of the bog, that maybe she had led him there, right into the tall man’s hands.
Xu didn’t know who he was or what he was after, otherwise he would have left him for dead or killed him outright, Vagari decided. But too was he sure that their encounter was anything near a coincidence. No, maybe what he had told him about being unable to return to Site-B was true; he just wasn’t completely cut off from it. Those little lights dotting the walls of that fell chamber below the hospital came to mind – cameras still active, still watching. Xu had seen him, seen what he could do, and that he and BP managed to walk away from what he wouldn’t dare approach. He had seen and came looking – that was the truth of it. Vagari let out a hopeful sigh. Perhaps that meant he still had time, that Soprano still had time.
Just then the door to the room swung open. True to his word, Dr. Xu had told BP of his revival. She waddled in hastily, eyes red with tears as she made a bee line straight for his leg, throwing her arms around it. “You’re okay!” BP exclaimed, rubbing her toothy muzzle up and down like an over joyous hound. “I was so worried!”
“Yes, I’m fine,” Vagari uttered, placing a hand on her head. “You took good care of me. Thank you.”
“It wasn’t me… All I did was drag you,” she said sadly. “It was all I could do.”
“I heard you fighting the demon,” stated Vagari encouragingly. “You did more than drag me, you saved my life.”
“I… I couldn’t just stand back and do nothing!” BP cried, pushing herself away. “You’re my friend and it wanted to hurt you.”
Friend? Was he her friend? Was she his? Vagari eyed her suspiciously for a moment in silence. If she were in league with Xu, what was their endgame? Why help him at all? No, he decided, she was probably as much a victim of circumstance as he was. Vagari sat back down upon the bed and pressed his face into the palms of his hands. Maybe he was just being paranoid. “So that was Dr. Xu, huh?” Vagari asked, sliding his hands down his face. “Curious fellow.”
“Curious…” BP echoed, looking down at her feet.
“You’re not happy to see him?” Vagari pressed. “What’s wrong?”
“I am!” BP claimed, looking up wide-eyed as if saying anything else was sacrilege. “I am! I mean…”
“You feel something is off as well?” stated Vagari calmly, meeting her gaze. She nodded quietly.
BP shuffled her feet and looked back over her shoulder to the door, to Xu somewhere beyond. With a hard swallow she turned to Vagari and then said, “I was so happy, the happiest I’ve ever been when I saw him. He was alive, and he came back! But I can’t shake this feeling that he’s… dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Vagari asked. Maybe he wasn’t being paranoid after all.
“He feels… wrong,” BP explained, “when I use my power. Like, there’s him and then there’s something else, a shadow. It’s hard to explain, but I just can’t shake the feeling.”
“Me either,” Vagari offered, knitting his fingers together, “his sudden appearance is just too fantastical to believe. The algae bog stretches out for miles and miles in every direction. There’s just no way he just happened to spot you from the road. He knew where you were somehow.” Vagari didn’t like the picture their speculation was painting. Someone had sent that demon there to capture them, and it was looking like Xu was that someone. But why? Why capture them at all? What use to him were they alive? If this Xu really was the phantom tall man, did he know who he was after all? Maybe he was hoping to use him to find Soprano? Then why the ruse? He hadn’t shied away from torture before. Vagari grit his teeth and stood up.
Vagari made his way back to the window. “Tell me, BP, was he alone or does he have people with him?”
“He has people with him,” BP answered, following him to the window. “They feel wrong too, but different… They feel like her. But they look almost like machines, like robots – covered in white and gold metal. They don’t talk or do anything but what he tells them to do. They scare me.”
“Me too,” Vagari replied honestly, recognizing the description. He felt the spot where the light weapon had punched a hole in his abdomen. That cleared all doubt in his mind: this Xu and the tall man were one in the same. Their rescuers were the same vicious band that had slaughtered every soul in the caravan in search of Soprano and the book. But why help them? The question burned as hot as coal in his mind. “I’ve run into them before,” Vagari told her. “They’re the ones who attacked me, I’m sure of it.”
BP shuffled on her feet, looking as if she were struggling to find the words to say. “Why would he want to hurt your friend?” she asked softly, her voice hardly a whisper. “That’s not the Dr. Xu I know…”
“It may be that it isn’t,” Vagari offered kindly. “Maybe this isn’t your Xu at all, just something that looks like him. There’s plenty of creatures that wear the skin of others to get what they want.” Vagari couldn’t say whether it was the same Xu or not, but he was sure it was the robed figure he had seen before. “I’m only half sure I’m even awake right now,” he’d admit, rubbing his temples. “That demon really did a number on me.”
“What… What now then?” BP asked, looking up at him searchingly. She was as lost as he was, probably more. “What can we do? They’re guarding the door.”
“Well, then we don’t use the door,” Vagari said, testing the dust-caked window. It stuck at first, but with a little brute force it opened up with a creak. Instantly the world beyond poured in: the piping sounds of seagulls and the salty scent of the sea. They were definitely in Eastend, Vagari was relieved to find, and most likely in one of the tall apartment buildings just outside the market circle. Good, he thought, they weren’t too far from home.
Vagari clambered up onto the windowsill, groaning as pain shot up his side. Afterwards he would creep out onto a thin bordering ledge that had once been a balcony long since gone to rust. There was hardly enough room for him, back against the wall, but he wasn’t worried about the height. “Alright, come on,” he’d say, motioning for BP to follow. For a moment she just stared up at the windowsill in reluctant horror before swallowing hard, steeling herself. She pulled the bedside chair over and made her way up on it. Gingerly she tiptoed out onto the ruined balcony besides him, whimpering every step of the way. “Don’t look down, don’t look down…” BP chanted to herself as she crawled to his side. She shook almost violently as she clutched onto his leg to stand up. Staring up wide-eyed, she then said, “W-what now?”
“Hold on tight,” Vagari answered. “This might be rough…”
“What? Wait! WAIT!” BP exclaimed as Vagari took a step forward into thin air, dragging her with him.
They had only dropped about a few feet before Vagari’s wings unfurled to catch them, but BP squealed every inch of the way. Vagari’s wings buzzed to life, slowing their descent to a comfortable crawl as they floated down to the dusty roadways below. His landing was leagues better than his last, landing with a soft thud instead of a crash. No sooner had they landed, BP stumbled back and away, gasping for breath. “CRAP – crap – crap, crap, crap,” She cursed as she stamped around touching every surface she could as if to reassure herself that she was back on solid ground. “Uhmuhgahd… NO – let’s never do that again! Never!”
“Fair enough,” Vagari granted as he leaned up against the brick wall of the alleyway they now found themselves in. He leaned sidelong against the wall as his wings reverted back to their rolled cylinder state on the hump of his back. His head swam and the world rocked with it. Trying to steady himself, he stared down the road ahead. With every blink it transformed, changing from dusty brick corridor to familiar printed walls of a laboratory, lit red by blaring lights. It seemed the demon’s toxins yet remained in his system. “Vagari,” BP began, “are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes,” he answered, unsure of the truthfulness. “Follow me.”