The headache I’d felt when I’d opened the portal to screensaver world in the middle of the hospital gave me the worst headache I’d ever weathered. My awareness occupied both my physical body and my ghost body up until the very last moment, as the decoupling completed and left me disconnected from my incorporeal second self.
Decoupling from my dopplegenneth had definitely made things easier for me, though not without cost. What peace of mind I’d gained was quickly replaced by brand new, home-brewed worries.
It seemed reasonable to conclude that the difficulties I’d been having with my newfound mental abilities was because my transformation had yet to give me whatever built-in features wyrms had that made their mind compatible with existing in a superposition of states—something the human mind was never meant to do. It made me all the more fearful that I wouldn’t be myself at the end of the line. The fact that I was having trouble with these abilities was a sign that I was still human. But what about after that, when those troubles were no more? Would wyrm-me no longer care about my family? Would he even have any remnants of who I was within him?—assuming I was even still a he by that point.
I didn’t know, and that scared me, a lot—maybe even more than the idea that I was no longer going to be human.
So, the downside was this existential crisis, but, on the upside, at least I didn’t feel like I was losing my mind anymore. No, I was back in the waiting line for that. It was not a good feeling—and neither was the state of the hospital. I tried to hold onto the trust and hope that my second self would be able to keep things under control. I mean, I’d climbed up the side of the hospital like some kind of superhero; that had to count for something, right?
In the end, it mostly averaged out and left me feeling neutral.
Curiously, de-coupling myself had as much of an effect on Andalon as it had on me. Ever since I decoupled, she’d been going on about how weird she felt, as if she was disconnected from herself. I imagined that had something to do with me having put up mental walls between my perceptions and my dopplegenneth’s. She said I could probably “re-conneck” her with my dopplegenneth if I put my mind to it—i.e., lots of intense focusing—but, at the moment, I was busy with a crisis of my own, so I had her retreat to the not-here-place, with the promise that I’d get to work on “re-connecking” her as soon as I could.
It started with a string of several patients as the early morning gave way to the late morning; most of it was triage. Triage was horrible; it was both the easiest thing and the most difficult thing. All it took was a single wyrmsight-assisted glance, and I could tell what kind of NFP-20 case a patient had, and its etiology and presentation; I could send them on their way lickety-split. Easy as pie. But that was all that I could do. Even just trying to help them wasn’t on the menu. There were simply too many of them, and, even if I could have made a difference, I had a grand total of no hope that it would accomplish anything other than negligibly dampen their pain while they lay in wait for the Green Death to steal away their souls.
But that wasn’t my new crisis. No; the crisis happened while I was walking from the triage area to intake duty as my schedule demanded.
A woman screamed her lungs out, triggering a flare of hysteria all across E Ward’s central hub. It was like my father had told me as a kid: when women scream, a fight is soon to follow.
And that’s exactly what happened here. Footsteps squeaked on the vinyl floor as the combatants struggled. The madwoman’s distress drew bystanders like moths to a flame—me, most of all.
I hurried over as fast as I could, yelling through my mask. “Stop! Stop!” My breath was hot on my lips.
The two male nurses manhandling the woman relented, stepping back and letting go.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” I said.
They did.
Coming to a standstill, I stuck out my arms to either side, motioning at the bystanders like a traffic cop.
“C’mon…” I panted for breath. “Back away. Back.”
My chest heaved and shoulders flexed.
I cleared my throat. “What’s… uh… what’s going on here?”
The nurses answered me, but my attention wasn’t on it.
No.
My attention was focused on the corner of my vision where I’d left a patch of thickened wyrmsight just in case I came across anything odd, or if I needed to use a plexus. Through that spot I saw violet and ultramarine latticework in and over the woman’s body, the sign that she was on her way to becoming a wyrm.
Just like me.
“Beast’s teeth,” I muttered, “why isn’t she in bed?”
“Doctor, she—”
“—Because I don’t have insurance,” she snapped, in between coughs, “that’s why!”
Oh fudge, not this again…
I swear, if my country could ever get its healthcare problems dealt with, I could die a happy man—well, wyrm.
I sighed.
The woman was plainly dressed, like someone you might have found working a cornfield two hundred years ago, in Vineplain, in the south.
Actually, you could still find them there; primitivist Oatsmen colonies lived there to this day, where they kept the rest of the world at arm’s length.
“What’s your name, Ma’am?” I asked.
“Maryon,” She wiped the tears from her eyes. “Maryon Palmwitch.”
Maryon was tall and lanky. She had a long face, with tawny hair that came down the sides of her head straighter than a shower curtain. Her complexion was off, though—doubtless a symptom of her Type Two NFP-20 case. Her bloodshot eyes blinked and twitched, unable to calm down. She kept one of her arms clutched at her chest, her hand scrunched up into a fist.
One of the world’s crueler injustices was the way that good deeds—like a serpent’s tooth—all too often came back to bite you.
In this case, my good deed was persuading WeElMed’s management to start providing priority treatment for uninsured children—but only children. And all it took to make it happen was a wee bit of blackmail.
What a world.
I had to fight the urge to extend my hand to Mrs. Palmwitch; old habits die hard.
“Maryon,” I said, lowering my arm to my side, “I’m Dr. Howle. You can come with me.”
One of the nurses did not like this. “Doctor, her SPN is—”
“—Do I have to remind you that I’m co-head of this Ward’s Crisis Management Team?” I tilted my head down and glared at him.
Neither of them said anything.
What was the point of having power if I wasn’t going to use it? Yes, Ani had gotten in trouble trying to do the same thing on her own, but here, there was a crucial difference: Maryon was Type Two. Director Hobwell wanted us to identify and sequester Type Two cases as quickly as possible.
“If you want to stop me,” I said, “find someone of the appropriate rank.”
If the nurses bothered to file a complaint—and they didn’t strike me as the kinds of pedants who would—by the time it worked its way through the grapevine, Maryon Palmwitch would already be registered as a Type Two case, and no one would dare cross me for intervening to sequester her, even if it had meant overstepping my bounds by disregarding the order of service demanded by the Service Priority Numbers.
I knew this because Hobwell had told me so.
Meanwhile, Maryon was staring at me like I was some kind of wizard.
I wished I was worthy of her awe.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me…” I turned to face Maryon. “Follow me.” I led her to the empty examination room that I’d already been heading toward. I closed the door behind us as soon as we stepped in, and then gestured at the examination table—currently in chair mode. “Please, take a seat.”
She did.
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I noticed she was wheezing. I couldn’t tell if that was because of her Type Two NFP-20 infection, or if it was a lingering aftereffect of screaming her heart out while trying to wrestle free of the two burly nurses.
Out of nowhere, my head ached—a slight throb, a wave of dizziness—but I shook it off with a shake of my head.
I reached for my stethoscope, but Maryon lifted her hand, as if to stop me. “There’s no point.”
“But—”
Her face trembled. “—I’m already dead. When I came here yesterday, I had little doubt I was living on borrowed time.” She stared at her hands. “I just wouldn’t have thought that debt would be collected while I was still walking and talking.”
“Have you told anyone about these symptoms?”
She shook her head. “I just woke up, Dr. Howle. Besides, I’m already dead and doomed.” She shook her head again. “No, I…” she sighed, “I hardly matter any more.” She looked me in the eyes. “Only one thing matters now.”
“And what’s that?”
“It’s like I told those orderlies,” she inhaled sharply, shuddering, “I want to see my son.”
“Your son?”
She nodded. “We’ve been waiting here since yesterday morning. I don’t have any insurance, not since my husband left me. But, last night, a miracle happened.” She smiled through her tears. “They accepted Kreston for treatment! It was like the Angel Himself had come to us in our time of need.” Blood trickled as her smile opened a crack in her skin, on her upper lip, showing dark red wyrmflesh beneath.
Kreston…?
Oh no. Oh no no no no no…
Suddenly, my throat felt like it was three sizes too small.
“Wh—… Maryon, why were you screaming your head off out there?”
Her limbs trembled. “As soon as I woke up, I checked with the receptionist to see if anyone knew where he was, but the receptionist didn’t have any answers for me—something about the software network having not yet registered the change in treatment policy—so I marched right into the Ward and demanded to see him right away.”
“Maryon, you can’t just go barging into the treatment area, you should know that.”
She nodded and wept. “He’s the other half of my heart. He’s all I’ve got left, and I’m all he’s got left.”
My heart sank.
The tragedy on my plate had doubled—as had my headache.
Wait a minute…
Andalon, I asked, is my mind going to fracture again, or something?
I swear, I could almost hear voices.
Andalon floated through the wall. “Uh… I dunno.”
Drat.
I suspected something was probably going on with my dopplegenneth, but—whatever it was—it would have to wait. Right now, Mrs. Palmwitch needed my help, and I needed to figure out what I was going to do. I was going to have her sequestered; there was no way to avoid that. However, whether or not I told her Kreston was dead was entirely up to me.
Andalon, you might want to go to the not-here-place. I looked at Kreston’s mother. This is going to make you sad.
Andalon looked at me forlornly, but then nodded and vanished.
“Could you tell me about your son, Maryon? I might have seen him.”
Technically, that wasn’t a lie. Me being me, I was floundering in indecision. That being the case, I’d defaulted to what I usually did when overwhelmed by indecision: stall for time, and hope for a miracle.
My question made Maryon smile, but I could tell it was just a strip of emotional adhesive to tape over her pain.
“He’s… he’s a little on the thin side,” she said. “A bit shy. Introverted, except when it comes to his obsessions,” she chuckled softly. “He’s autistic, you know. He… he struggles with things. School. Friends.” Her expression hardened. “My son-of-a-bitch husband left me because of it. ‘Three broken children in a row,’ that’s what he said to me.” Maryon turned stony with rage. “He and my pastor-father think my womb is cursed.”
Mrs. Palmwitch nodded. “They said it’s because I don’t have enough faith. I haven’t humbled myself enough before the Triun! Two dead sons, and then Kreston, and they say it’s my fault?!”
Angel no. A shiver ran down my spine. Please, Moonlight, no…
Mrs. Palmwitch cried. Her voice scratched and skipped like a broken record. “My first was eyeless and stillborn. My second died one night in his crib. Kreston isn’t a punishment. He can’t be. How can a child be a punishment? Only a monster would think that.” She sniffled. “I’ll fucking tear the throat out of anyone who… who…” She shook her head again and again as her face melted into tears.
At that point, I simply gave up.
If psychiatry had taught me anything, it was that the struggle to straddle the vast distance separating empathy from mere cognizance was one of the defining conflicts that underpinned what it meant to be human—or, I should say, what it meant to be a person. A person could have an abstract, purely intellectual understanding of why someone else felt the way that they did without sharing that feeling, themselves. The great tragedy of history lay in how readily people allowed an absence of common feeling to blind them to one other’s needs—or even to their own needs. Discord grew from that absence, and in that blindness, it flourished. Unfortunately, that absence was all-too-common.
But not here.
I didn’t just recognize Maryon’s pain. I felt it, too. Heck, I’d never stopped feeling it.
In the abstract, Rale’s death was not my fault. It was an accident—and, even if it hadn’t been—it occurred completely outside the sphere I was purview to influence. I couldn’t have gone in and told the surgeons, “Stop, he’s going to die,” because I hadn’t known it had been fated to happen. By both logic and the law, I was not to blame.
But my heart told me a different story. It was the same story that was written in my gut; the same story that ached in my bones and burned through my nerves and weighed down my soul.
It. Was. My. Fault.
That was the story. Just four words long—and it broke me.
I pushed him into getting the surgery. If I hadn’t, he wouldn’t have died on the operating table, because he wouldn’t have been there in the first place. And no amount of therapy would be able to convince me otherwise. Awareness didn’t stop the pain. Nothing could.
That’s why I had to help others. That was why I had to be useful.
I needed to make amends.
I needed to convince myself that my existence wasn’t a net negative.
I’d taken an oath to do no harm. I couldn’t allow myself to break that oath, because then I would be just as bad as the cruel, unfair world that took my mother from me, and my sister, and my son. That’s why, whenever doubt struck me, I remembered my pain. That pain spurred me on. It gave me the strength to fight on. My own experience of pain was enough to convince me that no one else ought to ever suffer in that way ever again, not if I could do something about it.
I wasn’t sure if God was real, but that promise was. Without that, without knowing I was making a difference, I would have really, truly failed.
And that’s how I knew what I needed to do here. Yes, I’d just met Maryon Palmwitch, but I was certain I felt what she felt. And if our positions were reversed, I wouldn’t want to be kept in the dark.
Do unto others…
So I told her.
I told Maryon her son was dead.
I told her she was suffering from a Type Two case of NFP-20.
I told that meant she was on her way to turning into a serpentine dragony sort of creature called a wyrm, and that the wyrms had the power to move objects by sheer force of will, and that they housed the souls of the dead—because that was their purpose, for the afterlife was within them.
And I told her that Kreston was one of those souls.
“He might not have a physical body anymore,” I said, “but, his existence continues.”
I managed to say it all in one big breath. The words spilled out of me, the way a truth spills out of a person when they finally set it free. It was a minor miracle I made it through to the end without stumbling over my lagging, undead tongue and outing myself as a transformee.
As always—up in the corner—the security cameras were watching
Maryon hadn’t said a word throughout my explanation. She only opened her mouth when I’d finally finished.
She did not take it very well.
“You’re—” She stood up in a panic, pointing her finger at me as if to smite me where I stood. “You’re crazy! You’re just as crazy as my husband!”
She looked askance at the door behind her, slowly stepping away from me.
No doubt, she was planning her escape.
Slowly, I stood up from my stool, making sure to keep my hands held out in a non-threatening gesture. And it was at precisely that moment that a throb of pain shot through my skull like a sledgehammer blow—and from the inside. My vision swam and blurred. And things quickly became very, very loud.
The severed connection between me and my dopplegenneth blasted wide open. Andalon popped into being right in front of me, half-thrilled, half-terrified. “I’m reconnecktned!” she screamed, hopping up and down. “I’m reconnecktned!”
Then she vanished.
Later, I would later learn she’d been “disconnected” from the copies accompanying my dopplegenneths because I hadn’t given my second self the mental permission-slip they apparently needed to draw from the fulness of Andalon’s powers that dwelled within my wyrmifying neurophysiology. Had I done so, the manifestations of Andalon that appeared to my mental doubles would have been able directly intervene in matters pertaining to my ghosts, just like I was.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
At the moment, as Maryon Palmwitch trembled, I groaned in pain as I was struck by the worst hangover I’d ever weathered. It lasted for an instant of forever, and—
—Suddenly, I went from having one body to six, and I instantly knew everything they knew, and—
—Their fear zoomed through my body, throwing me to the floor in a fit of panic. I screamed in terror.
Mrs. Palmwitch screamed, too. She threw open the door and ran out—
—Oh fudge…—
—Everything on that side of the room melted into a mess of static that alternated between a view of what was physically there and what I and the other dopplegenneths had conjured in screensaver world: the ruined sweep of charred plains, damaged hills, and smoke-choked sky, and Joe-Bob’s mutated, demonic form—an avatar of avarice—racing across the land.
Dragons and werewolves and gryphons and bird-men flew and raced and ran from Joe-Bob’s all-devouring. The demon stormed ahead like a centipede with human legs, and Maryon stood in the middle, completely oblivious.
I screamed.
A yellow kitsune ran at the head of the crowd.
Kreston!
Andalon rode on his back, gripping his fur.
Kreston’s eyes went wide as he saw his mother run out the door and turn down the hall.
“M-Mom!?”
He froze. All nine of his tails went limp. His paws skidded across the grassy vinyl.
Outside, the nurses chased after Maryon. Unfortunately, she didn’t maneuver very well. She must have still been getting used to the movement lag.
Andalon! Blast him, now!
We locked eyes. Light flared in Andalon’s eyes and hair. Her nightgown fluttered as she rose up from Kreston’s back and turned around. In unison, like with Frank, we raised our hands, calling on the purifying light. The radiance exploded out from Andalon’s outstretched hand. The luminous torrent bound Joe-Bob’s monstrous form in its raging, writhing stream. It bound him and squeezed him tight. His body—semi-transparent; solid, yet fluid—oozed out from between the gaps.
He lost control.
His many mouths screamed.
He careened forward, sliding toward me like a derailed train.
Andalon and I closed our hands into fists, and the magic bindings squeezed along with them, crushing the demon.
There was a glorious flash—and then the demon was gone.
The light went out of Andalon’s body as she lost consciousness and fell. She vanished before she touched the ground. My field of visions flickered as reality and imagination dueled for dominance. The ghosts skidded to a stop.
And Kreston watched, in tears, as his mother was silenced by the tip of a noxtifell needle, even as she continued to scream his name.
He tried to reach out to her. He pulled off the mask, turning human once more. He ran up to her, waving his arms.
“Mom! Mom!” he yelled his heart out. “It’s me! I’m right here!” He padded his palms against his chest. “It’s Kreston!”
But she could not see him. She could not hear him. And he understood this—and it broke him.
His form flickered and then vanished. And before I could even weep, a wave of hunger knocked the wind out of me and pushed me down onto all fours, right as the rest of the wonders disappeared—dopplegenneths and all.