“The two of you are my best guys, you know that?”
33, given name Trevor Doubtful, did not say anything. It wasn’t like him to speak, even when spoken to. Doubly so when someone like Montanna was prodding it.
Montanna, the Number who refused to be called by his rank. He never wore the uniform, just a cheap suit and a forced smile. A hatred for him Trevor had.
25 nodded so hard he gasped for air, “Why I’m honored 35, I truly am. You know, you’re my idol in a lot of ways.” Trevor would have rolled his eyes, but what would have been the point. None of them could see his eyes beneath his false ones. His remark was heavy in his hand, even if no one could see it.
They were standing in front of the room that belonged to those they would soon kill. Montanna looked straight at Trevor and gave him “I hate you” eyes. “There should be three targets, not including dear Adam. Which will you tango?”
He was giving him first pick. Now that was an honor. He gripped tighter on his Remark, old blisters flared up anew. “The Remainder girl. Her brother was never punished.”
“He was, karmically. I don’t think his soul is doing him any favors.” Montanna said, his voice contorting into a laugh at the end. A small hand slapped on his much larger back. “But that’s not an issue. You can dance with her, as long as it’s fatal.”
Why would I do anything else? He thought. There was a consistency to Montanna’s words, the man always seemed to be implying things he would never dare speak aloud. It frustrated Trevor but the mask of the Wyrm hid his true feelings.
Now the smiling con man was opening the door. He talked to one on the other side. Montanna’s charm was short, but that wasn’t Trevor’s problem. The sound of the Remainder girl, so high and mighty, was his cue.
He walked away and up the stairs, 25 would soon do the same in the opposite direction. 25 flashed a smoke bomb of some sort and made a v with his black fingers. Yes, do what you have to do.
He went to the room they had rented. It was right above where Adam sat. Using the keycard to get in, he half expected occupants. There were none.
Now it was safe to bring his Remark out, coming up like being pulled from a river. He clawed her through the walls. His Remark’s head a circle with endlessly spiraling teeth, orbiting the center like a float rat orbiting light. Their innards were green and filled with sparks. He created absence.
Putting an ear to the floor, he moved his head slowly till their mumbled ramblings were the loudest. He traced the hole with his finger first, a nervous habit that accomplished nothing outside of ritual and its neccisity.
The circle was pushed, and it made a hole. With confused eyes the two lower Numbers looked up at him, their faces struck with disbelief.
It would be a tight fit, but his Trick made it so he would always fit at the expense of his shape, but he always found a way to put himself back to normal.
A large white and red orb does not register as human. The whole scene was surreal, like a ball being put into a slot for some elaborate game. The ball landed with a thud, cracking the harsh metal floor and putting an end to the playful projections. His arms came out, revealing the ball to be a thing with digits.
With a lazy shrug he rolled onto his left side and took out a chunk of the screaming mans corresponding shoulder. The man has an axe as his remark but he won’t see it be used. Come here, he grabs him. The blows on his back alarm his brain, but his fingers are well practiced and maintain a firm grip, a little off the top. He’s a better barber than a murderer, he thought, it’s good that he had options in case this didn’t work out.
…
Bent over the toilet, she threw up until she couldn’t anymore.
Because, she literally couldn’t.
”I’ve adjusted your gag reflexes.” Adam said, buzzing in her brain. “By adjusting your gut biome first. Which was tricky, but there’s an impressive amount of maturation and changes you can make within seconds just by changing stomach acid levels.”
It felt like she was choking. They had crawled out of the bedroom and ran towards the bathroom. Locking it behind her on instinct. There was someone killing the others. He was a massive man with a mask comically small, his bloated moon like face leaked out around the edges as he tore through 29’s scalp. That was all she saw before she closed the door and felt the bile pushing its way back up.
“Don’t worry, I can sense your panic.” Adam’s Remark, no, Adam himself buzzed cheerfully over to her. “Let me help with that”
A cool blueness surged through her, coating her body with placidity. “Oh. You’re-“ It didn’t feel right ethically, she had agreed to Adam becoming her Remark but she didn’t really know what that entailed, but it was hard to think what with how calm and at ease she suddenly felt. “Is there a way to like… mellow it out a bit?” She laughed, mellow out the mellow. That was funny. Outside 31 was making a sound that was the vocal equivalent of tearing cardboard.
…
“29 is dead” This fact appeared on the Remainder girls veins as she stared at the corpse. She stood up and silently retrieved her remark, before desummoning it. He desummoned his own, wanting this to be a fair duel. The blood from the back had dripped over to his hands. Her remark must have gone straight through. Trevor didn’t understand why or how he was still standing. They were fighting melee style now, a unspoken agreement Trevor didn’t bother to break. He had to favor his right side because his left was seizing up, his greater size and strength proved useful to overcome this, and he considered a reality with only one useable hand with an assuredness.
He contorted his arm so it was wrapped tightly behind him, it was just dead weight. She screamed, they always screamed, there was something about him that was distinctively terrifying. Maybe it was his mask, tiny but with painted bulging eyes taking up all available space.
In combination with his infinite flexibility, he could see, in a detached sort of way, how terrifying that could be.
…
”They’re still fighting out there.”
“I can hear them.” She whispered, sufficiently mellow but not too mellowed. She was huddled in a basin in the bathroom, staring at her hands. There was something different about them, but it was hard to tell what due to all the blood. “What do we do?” They had checked the window and found it opened to concrete. “We’re fucked. We’re so…”. She calmed herself with deep breaths. Adam wasn’t the only one who could lower her anxiety. Her heart was still beating like the fear of death.
Okay, he was admittedly better.
”Hey Adam, I know what I said before, but could you increase the mellow a bit?” Something big slammed into the adjoining wall. “Thanks.”
“I’m currently busy optimizing you, through my options are regrettably limited.”
”What?” She didn’t like the sound of that, but a full body shivered pulsed through her all the same. Maybe she did.
”I’m making it easier for me to trigger your reflexes, to have control of your appendages in real time and hand eye coordination thats as proficient as possible. I can guide your movement .”
It sounded like he was describing a automobile. With just a little bit of touching up, this Devon can get so many miles. She giggled. Okay yeah she was a little mellow still.
”Stick your hand out quickly”
There was a crash outside and she tried to ignore it. The door was dead bolted and maybe they didn’t even know she was here.
She slid her hand down on the blue tinged marble and spread the fingers out. Adam in his Remark body floated up and she grabbed him in the other hand. “So what’s up?” She wasn’t fully free of nerves, but they were far away and irrelevant.
“This is called a stress test, I apologize in advance for any injuries.”
”What are you WOAH” Without warning the hand gripping Adam sprung into life and danced with glee around her fingers. It was a game she had seen sailors and fishermen playing, showing off their speed and finesse through the medium of a knife, seeing how long they could go without stabbing themselves.
This was that on five times speed. She felt the breeze of Adam as he moved from empty space to empty space, leaving marks in the floor but her fingers miraculously scar free. She had no control over the movements, it was all Adam, puppeteering her body as she moved his Remark form. All she had to do was keep her other hand still. It was almost relaxing.
Then she twitched and he hit flesh.
…
Oh, she did something to his leg. Her remark imitated his own and he didn’t like that very much. It spurred around with speed he could only admire. Would have sliced through bone if he didn’t rip it out himself. The wounded leg bent wrong and caused him to kneel but that was okay. “Fucking die. Fucking die.” She yelled, and there was a stirring vulnerability in her words.
He had an opening. Her manic rage was tiring, as much to her as it was him, and she couldn’t keep it up forever. When the Remainder girl took a breath he gripped her with his good arm, raising her as he raised himself. He wedged his bad leg on the corner of the room to get to his full height. It cracked again, but that was fixable.
“I knew your brother” He said, his voice a low hum you would only notice in the absence of noise. As the look of horror dawned on her, he very carefully raised his mask with his bad hand, so that she could understand why his voice seemed so familiar.
The Remainder sister was- something happened to her that he could not understand. It would not have interfered with his plans, if the unknowable attack wasn’t directly, deliberately, targeting her eyes. Her last vision was not his face. Enraged and embarassed, he killed her quickly by squeezing her throat until it burst.
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Montanna smirked and walked in like he had rented the room. Whatever his Remark was had already been dismissed, he never got a good look at it.
”We agreed she was mine.”
“And you didn’t leave any for the rest of us. What was I supposed to do?” He kicked the corpse of the boy over. He tsked tsked at the handiwork, as if he could have done better.
“Why not the reserve member?” He pointed to the closed door, near the ajar bathroom.
“25 is in there, ya dunce. He’s probably relaxing, enjoying her bed while her corpse starts to rot.” He knocked on it lazily, not even bothering to bring back his Remark. The smoke from within floating out in a never ending stream. Montanna looked down, finally noticing. “Or, Adam offed him, and one of us will have the pleasure of taking him in.”
He took point, so that the bathroom was in his peripheral vision. The possibility of someone being in there was considered, but tossed for being ridiculous. Unless they were hiding, and therefore no threat, they would have struck by now.
Montanna must have taken some other preemptive measures he didn’t notice, because the next thing he knew the door was kicked in and Montanna was in there. Trevor simply stared at the empty space where Montanna once was. His leaders hand came into view, and ushered him inside.
There were two bodies in there. One he recognized, one he didn’t.
…
“I’m really sorry. I should have stopped before then.”
“It’s fine it’s fine.” Floundering among empty rolls of towels, she finally found a new roll deep in the back, and tied most of the roll around her bleeding hand. “I’ve had worse.”
”The good news is we’re remarkably synched already. There are limits, of course, but moving forward it will be easier to prevent any unnecessary injuries. Your healing factor has also been greatly strengthened.
He talked like a politician. Or atleast how her father had described them.
The voices departed suddenly. They had been yelling before, two masculine voices she didn’t recognize, but they had gotten smaller, walking further into the hotel room.
“It sounds like they’re in the bedroom.”
“Do we make a run for it?” She said.
”Go over to the keyhole, lets check first.”
…
“Why does he look like that?” The body was ancient. Not just old, but like it had never been alive to begin with. A collapsed bloated corpse, half on the floor. It’s black hair covered the floor like the strands of a discarded mop.
“Maybe some quirk of his Trick.” Montanna lifted a hand, checking for a pulse. The arm dissolved into fine particles when lifted. “Not a good one.”
Keeping his distance, Trevor pointed at the body of their comrade. “Stab him please.”
Montanna did so without question. There was a stuttered groan that came from the body that could have been a death rattle or a surprised exclamation by a very alive person trying to play dead. It made no difference now. “Okay, I did it. Can you tell me why?”
“He could have switched bodies.”
“Thats not a Trick I know.” Montanna said, smirking.
“Neither do I.” He took off his mask and opened a cracked window. The smoke was thick but its potency had long diluted. He breathed out deeply and stared down at the red streets, people reduced to dots. “What do we do now?”
Montanna did not answer, he was staring at something behind Trevor.
From the half open bedroom door he saw her. She was emaciated and missing a shoe, with paper wrapped lazily around a hand that clutched her stomach. In her other hand she held a piece of brown glass, stained with fresh blood. Despite this Trevor didn’t view her as a threat. It was her blood most likely. For a minute she made a long slow journey across the living room, tiptoeing around bodies and tripping over empty bottles.
They didn’t stop her until she reached for the door.
Trevor slid into the space between her and the exit, becoming a barrier that she would have to go through. He did not at this moment consider the consequences of this, nor could he have ever imagined them.
“Well, well, and then there was one! The loneliest number… assuming you’re alone.” Montanna said.
Trevor felt alone, for the girls eyes were on him, and they did not at all equal the sluggish exhaustion of her movement. Montanna’s attempt to be witty meant nothing, he was farther away than The Grand, in that unknowable distance, the only thing close were those eyes. They were clear and focused, with a level of understanding that violated him wholly. Montanna could not see this, so he approached her lazily, his Remark not even out.
”Alright then, I’ll try.” She said. Her voice was surprisingly pleasant.
She turned with great speed and swiped at Montanna’s closest leg, a direct hit. He fell down with a yelp, then the blade in her hand was dropped. She mouthed a word that might have been yes, and then the blade, no, a Remark, floated up slowly all by itself. Trevor did not move to attack because he knew it was already over, her eyes told him in a way his brain couldn’t argue with.
.
.
.
“WHAT THE FUCK”
”we need to leave”
“YOU STABBED ME IN THE FUCKING LEG YOU BITCH!”
Impulses that weren’t her own carried her out the door and down the stairs. The man with the slick suit and fake smile was screaming and hopping up and down. Nothing a vertical descent couldn’t fix. His screams became muffled and, consequently, hilarious.
She took the steps two at a time and found the action remarkably easy. The stairs melted into carpet and her momentum made her roll forward before resuming at a full sprint. Her heart was beating like a hole puncher and her vision was fading around the edges and she didn’t care cause she was alive and she had killed two people and she didn’t feel bad at all.
”The door in front of you is opening.”
Adam jerked her to the left like a bad comedy act, avoiding a collision with a very confused looking man dressed in an undershirt and slacks. This was more an apartment than a hotel room, multiple rooms in slick colors spilled out from the open door. Behind him another man gazed out from a balcony, looking up at where the sky would be.
”There room looks much nicer than ours.”
“Thats really besides the POINT!” She yelled, as a strange something that Devon couldn’t make out flew through the air and engulfed the man in slacks. She was out of there and rounding a corner before anything else occurred. The sound of cursing behind her, in the same nasally voice of the man with the slick suit. Clearly poor slacks guy wasn’t his target.
The hotel doors rippled past in a blur. She didn’t remember the way here taking so long. Still running far longer and faster than she ever could have before, she glanced down at the strangely dirty piece of glass in her hand. “What are you again?”
”I am a Remark named Adam Kadmon, you signed a pact with me and I am now controlling your hands, feet, nervous system, impulses, breathing, sinuses, heart and there is a machine of some sort in front of us.”
It was big, on wheels, and clearly on fire. A bearded guy leaned against a wall next to it, roasting a piece of meat in the machine’s flame. With a yelp she jumped against the paisley printed wall pushed herself off it, and cleared the machine and a good five feet beyond it, landing safely but not gracefully. With a whistle, the guy gave her a thumbs up. In a daze, she did the same.
Taking a runners position, she was once again off.
“We’re going to have to slow down soon.”
“Why?” She said, startlingly angry. It was unbelievable to be able to run this fast, to do sick jumps and kill a man in seconds. It was an answer to itself, she never wanted to do anything ever again that wasn’t running.
She came to another set of stairs and braced to jump the whole flight.
“No. Wait.”
Her momentum ceased like she had slammed into a brick wall. With a grunt she fell backwards, hitting her spine at a strange and violent angle. She heard a crack, and then what sounded like the crack and reverse. Her teeth were bleeding… but that seemed to be the extent of the damage.
”You fractured your spine but don’t worry, I corrected it.”
“What…” She looked behind her, finding the action didn’t come packaged with the tightness and pain it usually did. There was no one there. She didn’t hear any nasally voices calling for her head.
“I improved on it actually. Multiple vertebrae were unaligned and it was limiting the range of motion in your neck.
“How… how can.” She slapped herself. It wasn’t Adam’s doing, it was very much her choice. “Nevermind, lets get out of here.”
“Why did you slap yourself.”
“What?” She was taking the steps one at a time, suddenly walking was like moving through sludge. “Did you not read my mind?”
“I did but I don’t understand it. Apologies”
She sighed, searching around a now more cluttered brain for a response. “It’s a thing my dad taught me, and what his dad taught him, and so on.” Above them the ceiling shook and hanging lanterns threatened to drop. “It’s what you do when you start, um” She tried to find the words for it, which was difficult because the whole point was not to question these things. “Well my dad said we didn’t originally come from here.”
”I think I knew that.”
“Okay. Anyway, the place we originally came from.” She made the shape of a circle with her hands, just like how her dad would. “Was spherical, and rested atop a vast sea.” Adam floated besides her, the tip of his body bobbing up and down in an imitation of nodding. “We left in a ship that was the same shape, and dived deep deep deep beneath the waves!” She was mimicking the way her father told it and getting more excited as she did so. “And then Remarks came out because people fought a lot. The Grand Council created them. And there was this guy called the Man with the Permanent Sneer. Maybe a guy, dad thought he was a metaphor for a movement at the time and not an actual person.” She rounded the corner of the stairs with ablomb, clicking her heels together just because she could. She had lucked out and found a stairwell. “He or they didn’t like the way society was being run. He or they complained, and in response the Grand Council” She struggled to say this last part, know how strange it sounded, “Opened up the ship and drowned the world.
“It sounds like you’re missing parts of the story.”
“How would you know?” She snapped. A space in her brain that felt Adam shaped winced. ”My dad did his own research about this, he told me. It’s far closer to the truth than what Lemure says.”
”What does Lemure say about the past.”
“That we should return to it, primarily.” She snorted and rounded another flight, there was plenty of ambient noise, including the sound of words being seemingly shouted at random, but none of it seemed pertinent.
“I don’t get that.” She continued. “The past seems like crawl cow shit. People killing others to avoid being killed themselves, merit being decided on how easy it is to gut your brother like a fish. I have a job and if I keep my head down, I don’t have to worry about getting murdered. So I’m happy.” I mean she wasn’t happy, but her options were limited and some days when she watched the mirth machine she could fool herself into a sort of simulacra of happiness. “And the past just seems like, basically the same but with more risk of murders.”
”It was more pleasant than that, but still a clear precursor to this age. I believe the past Lemure wants is different from the one I know.”
She came to a door they hadn’t entered from, and eagerly pushed it. “Yeah well tell that to-“
They were in the lobby. And in that lobby was a Number she recognized.
It was Hailien Dreadlock. Extraordinarily bad luck. She was famed for her ruthlessness, having become a member by assassinating Morgan Lemure 40 when she was just in the Reserves. Devon had never seen her in person, people had undersold her size.
A good 7 feet tall adorned in Morgan’s colors, wielding a Remark as long as her height. It was true what they said about her jaw. Devon knew she wore a metal prosthetic, but she thought people were exaggerating when they described it. It was truly intimidating. Raw and twisted, like it had just been taken out of the forge. The top half was sawed down to resemble massive teeth, making her face look like that of an Aberration.
She was intimidating, terrifying, and reputably deadly.
And she was looking straight at her.