For a moment, as with every curtain reveal, there was silence. Everyone stood still as the ripples of the stealth technique faded away. Zoe felt a heaviness settle into her bones as her Skein plummeted. Using the everywhere lens had drained almost as much as the fight with the ambassador.
In the back of her mind, she thought the item was more of a curse than something intended for actual use. But then, that was the deal with the system as far as she understood it. Anything that worked, was more of an emergent effect than anything directly useful.
But these thoughts were fleeting as Cassy’s corpse, animated by the godforsaken parasite within, standing behind Anton like Lady Macbeth, slowly turned to face Zoe.
She — it — winked one decrepit eye.
And chaos erupted.
Zoe’s chain whistled through the air toward the monstrosity. She felt a clenching of fear around her chest. A tightening in her breath. She forced herself to step forward and engage. This wasn’t the plane. She was stronger now. She could do this. She had operated on herself, and once she had the spiritual technique, the [Mind’s Eye Incision] she knew she could save Cassy.
“Cassy!” Zoe called. "I can free you from the creature!”
But the creature slipped away from her chain. Zoe stepped forward again, but hesitant, she felt responsible — she shouldn’t; it wasn’t her fault, she’d known nothing about the system and it wasn’t her fault that Cassy got brained by a mirror-coated skeleton, but still — still — the guilt persisted.
Anton had no such hesitation.
He spun in place and kicked out. His foot planted on Cassy’s chest and sent her flying across the room. Blackened blood and filth burst from her mouth as she crashed into the wall. She slumped onto the ground, but Anton had already charged toward her.
“Whisper in my mind!” he hissed with an outrage Zoe didn’t realize he was capable of. What happened to the stone-faced criminal?
The creature wearing Cassy didn’t have time to get up before Anton’s knee crashed into her jaw. She slammed back and crumpled against the wall further as he struck at her with precise and brutal fists.
Zoe felt her bile rising. Jack looked equally sick as he stood, unsure of what to do. This wasn’t his fight, but as Zoe looked on, she wasn’t sure this was a fight at all. Anton’s blows rained down with a savagery she found frightening.
Cassy’s corpse shivered. The jaw leaked a burbling sound.
Sick.
Hideous.
Unmistakeable.
The creature was laughing.
“Yes! Hit me. Hit me! Solve all your problems!”
Anon’s fist crashed into its temple, and the bone cracked. He grabbed her skull, thumbs digging into her eyes, and lifted. With a creak of vertebrae, her head came free. The rotten tissue was no longer strong enough to hold it all together.
How had Zoe thought she could save that? She was a surgeon, not a necromancer….
Anton’s eyes swarmed around the head like vengeful angels and Anton screamed, red in the face, as the light left the creature’s dead eyes.
“How dare you sneak past me!”
Cassy’s broken jaw hung slack and mangled. Her skin was pale grey, her tongue bloated purple, and her blood oozed thick as cold molasses. But she was not dead — no — the creature wearing her was not done.
With a shiver, Zoe remembered the plane. That frantic fight in the dark.
Suddenly, she wasn’t sure if she had killed any of the creatures on the plane. Sure, she received a cold rush of death energy, but was that from killing the parasite, or killing the host?
It had been flying through the safe zone that had saved them, but there was no safe zone now.
She stepped closer, the room silent except for Anton’s ragged breathing, and Zoe’s chain slithered up to grip his shoulder.
“Anton…” he had nothing else to say and so she repeated his name. “Anton, calm down, please.”
He glared at her, before swallowing, and held up the creature’s head.
“How long do you think she’s been poisoning my mind?” he said. Tears down his face. What was happening to him? “You don’t understand, you’re a doctor.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve always been smart, but me? I just got my brain, and now I can’t even trust it.”
Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!
Zoe’s chain slipped his shoulders.
“I get it. I do,” and her gaze traveled downward. “Is it dead?”
He hefted up the head like it was a melon.
“No, but it will be soon.”
Cassy’s eyes rolled around as the creature looked at them. The headless body twitched and lopped like a fish at the bottom of a boat. The mouth moved.
It whispered.
“I will be dead soon. Yes… maybe… but first… Joel!”
The last word left the broken mouth with all the grace of a wet fart, but it was loud enough to ring through the room.
The doorway burst open, and Joel scampered across the ceiling like a manic cockroach. Zoe’s soul shuddered at the sight. His bloodied nails dug into the plaster and his head scanned them, crooked and creaking as the vertebrates bent in ways they were not supposed to. He saw Cassy, and he shrieked and moaned like the wind through an abandoned subway tunnel.
A dozen creatures hung from his back. Their skin was raw and translucent, they chittered like monkeys and flexed long scorpion-like tails. With a screech, they leaped toward the stunned humans below. Zoe’s chain lashed out at the one fluting towards her face. It was more solid than it should have been, as though she struck a lump of lead. It crashed into the wall and bounced up off the ground with no injury.
More creatures leaped toward her allies.
Anton dodged. A silvery plume opened up around him, as though he stood in the center of an unfolding blossom, and he moved with mathematical grace through the raining creatures. His fists darted out and struck them. He kicked. He gouged. He was a whirling dervish of a madman.
Jack’s flaming petals filled the room. They struck furniture. Walls. And a blaze grew. Smoke filled the room.
“We have to get out of here!” Zoe shouted as she punched a creature leaping at her from the ground.
“No…” croaked Joel as he dropped to the ground and cradled Cassy’s head. “Nobody gets out.”
And as he spoke, a familiar flame rushed out of him. It consumed the air, the building, and its occupants. The greedy flame devoured her flesh, her skein, her soul. It burned through her at the speed of thought — no time to reach for her techniques and titles — not time to do anything but scream as the thing that was not Joel activated [Fool’s Rush In].
####
The thing that was not Cassy walked through the streets of the town. She eyed the people as they stepped casually around the rippling space she projected. It couldn’t be measured, not in terms of space, but it was like an allowance, a pause in conversion, not something real, but an absence, and it felt right, to be walking through this fragment of civilization as a living void.
It shouldn't be possible. It wasn’t allowed, and this made her giggle. A place such as this should have a safe zone. It should have measures for protecting itself, but it didn’t.
Whoever had paired with the polyp hadn’t done it right. She didn’t question how she knew — she just knew — in the same way she knew that whatever her impulses told her to do, she should do. Thought was the bane of the intelligent creatures — the living creatures — as one of the others, as a stranger to systems, it was her luck to live a life free of any thought — which did not mean she couldn’t plan, no, not at all, it simply meant she didn’t have to worry.
The thing that was not Joel still crawled on all fours. Their younglings piled on his back in a state of stupefied sleep. They were vicious and forever hungry, but right now they were napping. Something like love rolled over inside something like a heart.
The cold snow froze and blackened Joel’s skin on his shins and hands. His tongue lolled from his mouth as he nodded. He was stronger now that she had fed him the remains of the sniper, but he was still close to mindless.
“What do you think, Joel?” she said to the boyfriend, companion, pet, and surrogate, behind her. “They’re close to the courthouse. You want to follow them in, I think that Insight one is close to cracking. What is his name? Anyon? Yes, he will crack soon, and I can’t wait to see what hatches from that egg.”
But Joel’s body had stopped, and he sat up on his haunches like a patient dog awaiting his master.
She knelt.
A smile on her lips larger than any ever worn by Cassy, but then, that was fine — she was not Cassy, after all.
“What is it?” she asked in her syrupy voice. “Do you think we keep following our friends and wait for them to find us again? Or do you have another plan?”
Joel coughed and opened his mouth. The words almost crawled their way out. He wasn’t quite gone — the flesh that was — and the parasite wasn’t quite all the way there. A limbo creature shackled to both ways, living in exquisite pain, a sacred lamb following its master to slaughter.
The tongue pulsed with the heartbeat of a trapped and tortured man, but the words leaking were all void.
“Flames. Burn. everything.”
The thing that was Cassy sharpened its gaze. It understood the words, and as it looked up at the people standing on the lip of the courthouse, it studied the situation. It didn’t have to think — was not burdened by that curse — but it could, just as all higher life forms can lower themselves to the state of their baser companions in the animal world.
“So… We don’t make it out alive?”
The thing that was Joel shook his head.
“They kill me?”
Not-Joel nodded and hung his head with an exaggerated hangdog sadness before they both chuckled. How delectable to use the system’s treats against itself.
“Then they break the stealth,” Not-Cassy sighed. “It was too good to last forever. This system demands constant growth from its inmates, and I suppose we must do the same to prey upon them.”
Not-Joel nodded, his feet tapping on the ground like any other good boy.
“So…” Not-Cassy tapped her chin. “I have a thought, no don’t look at me like that, this is more of a whisper. Yes. I think I hear the whisper of friends. Do you hear it?”
The thing that was Joel cocked its ears, and a slow smile spread across his face.
There… on the wind… the whispers… pleading and laughing and begging and singing… those who rejected the system and found themselves trapped in the town. They didn’t call through the air, but through the void, and their voices stank of earth, of tombs of rubble and burned rock. Not-Cassy understood their story with one snakelike lick of the air. Their bodies became inactive when the town’s safe zone spawned around them. Though they rejected the system, they could not become proper hosts until the safe zone dissipated, but when it did, their bodies were already interred. Now, they lay there waiting, a whole cellar full of friends.
Not-Cassy clapped her hands together, and, safe within their bubble of stealth, Not-Joel joined her in dancing.
“The plan!” she sang. “The plan continues!"