Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Seventeen

Jessyn drew the blade down the berry’s shell. Its blood, pink and fragrant, welled up and out as she pinned it back to expose the sandy interior. It was the twenty-fourth berry she’d skinned that morning. The others lay out in a grid on the countertop, each marked by a slip of Dafyd’s faux-paper. They were waiting to see what kinds of amino acids, when introduced to the rich environment of the pulp, made the farm die faster.

“No, no, no,” Irinna said from near the mouth of the alcove. “Thank you, no. We don’t want anything.”

The feather monkeys had brought a small gray box into their alcove and deposited it on the floor. They screamed and chittered as Irinna tossed it back out of their workspace and into the corridor beyond. One of the alien animals rose up, its arms open like it was going to hug Irinna, but then it turned and loped out after the object and the three others followed it.

“I think you hurt their feelings,” Jessyn said. “What if you just rejected a proposal of marriage?”

“They are cute, but dating outside your species is challenging,” Irinna replied. “How are you doing?”

“I’m fine,” Jessyn said.

It was what she always said.

The truth was, it was hard to get out of her bed. It was hard to eat food. It was hard not to get lost in fantasies where oblivion was the closest thing the universe had to rest.

She envied the others their energy. The Carryx guards wouldn’t answer questions about where the other groups from Anjiin were, and the aliens that didn’t have translators didn’t say anything at all, so Synnia and Else had been going on walks together, mapping out the labyrinth of the complex and looking—unsuccessfully so far—for more humans. Rickar had gone on a couple longer explorations on his own, but he didn’t talk about them much. He also used a pen and paper to draw little games that he and Synnia played, passing time together in their exile. Jessyn would have liked to play a game or take a walk or at least have the energy to consider them.

Every day was hard. Everything was hard.

She had one pill left, and she should have taken it almost two weeks ago. She knew enough about the action of the medication to understand that, with the present levels in her bloodstream, it wouldn’t make much difference. Some stubborn, irrational part of her brainstem insisted that as long as there was one left, as long as she wasn’t out, there was hope. It was the part of her illness that Jellit had called bad magic back when he’d been around to call it anything.

Jessyn shook her head like she could dislodge the thought. Thinking about Jellit was like pressing her thumb against a razor blade. It was easy to do too much, and she never knew how close she was to damage until she was already bleeding.

She plucked up another berry and slit it open to get at what it tried to keep inside for itself, and thought about the phrase physical hypocrisy.

“Ready for the samples?” Irinna asked.

“Almost. Samples ready?”

“Almost.”

“Professionals.”

Irinna chuckled. “If we’re lucky, these little puppies’ll have nice broad toxicity tolerances.”

“We still have to figure out what not-turtles actually eat. The farm’s not much good if we don’t know what to plant in it.”

“Yeah,” Irinna sighed. “It all needs to get done. Easy’s fast, and hard takes all the time. But hey, maybe we can find a way to make some coffee creamer in the meantime. Get Campar to quit—Jessyn? Are you all right?”

“What? Yes. No, I’m fine.” But she wasn’t. She was shaking.

Nutrition. She’d been thinking about food, but food was just a set of chemicals the same as anything else. The thing that could mend her brain was seventeen carbon atoms, a few chlorines and nitrogens, and the holes all filled with hydrogen. It wasn’t exotic. It wasn’t strange. She could have synthesized it herself if they’d had a different lab setup. They were making the berries into biochemical factories that could produce specific outputs. And one of the outputs could cut the rot out of her mind.

Maybe. Maybe not, but maybe. Hope was like a breath of air when she’d already resigned herself to drowning.

Hands trembling, she took another slip of paper and wrote her initials on it, then placed the berry she’d been vivisecting onto it. There were other compounds in the pill—the one precious pill she hadn’t had the heart to swallow. If she introduced the medicine to the berry and it died faster, she wouldn’t know if it was the molecule she cared about or one of the others in the matrix that had been the poison.

If it didn’t, though—if nothing in the pill was immediately toxic to the berries—she wouldn’t have to keep pretending that she wasn’t marching toward her own death. The urge to live bloomed up just below her throat, warm and desperate and bright.

“I have to run back to the rooms for a minute,” she said as she put down the knife.

“Now?”

“Just for a minute. I need to get something.”

Irinna shrugged. “Should I finish those up?”

“No,” Jessyn said. And then, “Actually, yes. Just the control group. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Irinna said. “Go.”

Her body felt like she’d taken a euphoric—bright and light and electric in a way she relished and knew better than to trust. She walked along the well-known path between the lab and the rooms as if she was seeing it for the first time. The wide central space with its dozens of alcoves like the one she spent her time in. The strange bodies, monstrous and beautiful and both, that moved through the space with her, as thick as a downtown street during festival. The green-bronze walls and floors, the same as the ships that had killed Anjiin.

She hauled the wide door open when she reached it. The rooms were sun-soaked and empty except for Tonner standing at the kitchen counter with pages of handwritten notes spread out before him. When he glanced up, he looked annoyed.

“You’re supposed to be at the lab.”

“I’m going right back.”

“We have a schedule.”

“I’m not stopping at the bar on my way back,” she snapped, then went to her room before he could reply. The pill bottle was under her bed, the same place she’d hidden away her most precious things when she’d been a child. The one pill in it was a dull, dusty orange with a manufacturer’s mark pressed into it. The pharmacological labs that had made it were under a different sun, if they still existed at all. Even if this worked, she’d be medicating herself with excretions from the sandy pulp of an alien animal.

“Please let this work,” she whispered, though she wasn’t one of the pious. “Please let this work. Please.”

When the universe didn’t answer, she wrapped the bottle in her fist and left. Synnia was singing in her room, a slow, strange song that Jessyn didn’t recognize. If the experiment worked, she should probably plan to make an extra dose for the older woman. For that matter, they should probably just put it in the water supply. She could make vanilla and cinnamon along with the creamer. She could do anything. That wasn’t true. It was the euphoria talking. The hope.

Tonner didn’t look up again or speak as she left. The wide door closed on him. In the passageway, one of the Carryx lumbered past on its massive front arms, its abdomen scuttling along behind it. Its voice was fluting and deep, a study in undertones. It was almost beautiful. She felt a surge of hatred for it. How dare it be beautiful.

She had nearly reached the alcove when the sound of the explosion came. Not the sharp crack of detonation, but a low, rumbling whoosh: the crackling of a sudden, vast fire. All around her, the aliens paused, shifted. Some ran, but not in any particular direction. No alarm sounded, but an acrid smell like burning plastic seeped into the air. A distant chorus of high, angry voices screamed in pain or else victory. She walked forward until she turned the last corner before their lab.

Then she ran.

A thin smoke clung to the ceiling outside their alcove. The flame was either out or invisible, and whatever had happened, it had damaged the lights. They flickered—blindingly bright to utter black like a strobe without the rhythm. And caught in the flashes like still images from a violent book, the feather-haired monkeys were running riot. One with particularly long arms and needle-sharp teeth stood on the countertop, smashing the berries she’d spent the morning prepping into a single, wide pink smear. Another was ripping the pages of notes in its tiny, clever hands. Two others were standing on a bundle of something on the ground, hunched over it with their shoulders tense. Biting it, worrying it like dogs taking apart a stuffed toy. The terrible thing wasn’t the violence. It was the joy.

The bundle moved, and Jessyn recognized Irinna.

She moved without thinking, like the world had suddenly shifted, and she wasn’t running toward the lab, but falling. She heard herself shouting No, no, fuck off! She grabbed one of the attackers off Irinna’s back. It was the weight and texture of a large house cat. It squirmed in her grip, thrashed, clawed, bit. Jessyn clubbed the corner of the countertop with it. Three hard blows before the monkey went limp, then two more afterward.

Something clamped onto her leg, sharp and grinding. One of the other beasts had sunk its teeth into her. The long-armed one that had been ruining the samples rose up on the countertop. It had claws like little daggers. The pain of the bite was fierce, and something unexpected in Jessyn welcomed it.

“Yeah? You gonna kill me?” Jessyn shouted, lunging for it. It danced back. “You gonna kill me, you little fuck? Come here and try.”

Something landed on her back. Teeth sank into her shoulder, and some strange part of her mind became very calm. Yes, it hurt. Yes, she wanted it off. But the pain was just data. Her attacker was just a problem, and you fixed problems the same way. A step at a time.

And more than that. The pain was permission.

She reached down to her leg where the one enemy was still attached, and wrapped her hand around its neck. She could feel the moment it realized it was in trouble and tried to pull away. The other on her shoulder let go, shrieked, and started clawing at her eyes, but she ignored it, bringing her other hand down and cracking the one monkey’s neck. The tension and sudden release felt just like breaking a bone. It spasmed in her hand as it died, and she thought how interesting it was that there was some parallel evolution of spinal cords. Lucky you aren’t being eaten by something with a more distributed nervous system, like octopuses. Starfish.

She reached up for the one on her shoulder, but it bounded away. The two remaining attackers scuttled out of the alcove and bounced excitedly in the cathedral. Their gums were black. They screamed. On the floor by Jessyn’s feet, Irinna coughed and tried to sit up.

“Bomb,” the other woman said. “That thing they brought before. It was a bomb. I didn’t throw it out. I was… the samples…”

“Don’t talk. Don’t try to talk. It’s going to be all right. You’re going to be fine.”

She didn’t look fine. Blisters were rising on the pale skin of her face. The ends of her white-blond hair were now black and twisted where they’d burned. A small but spreading pool of blood smeared the floor under them, and at first Jessyn thought it was coming from Irinna.

“Hey! Hey! Call the guards!” Jessyn shouted. “We’re hurt! We’ve been attacked.”

In the cathedral, the alien menagerie went back about its business. One of the Rak-hund slid by, its legs undulating as it hurried past. The long-armed monkey chittered, made eye contact with Jessyn, and shat on the ground before the two surviving attackers turned away, vanishing into the crowd.

“Please, someone. We’re hurt. We’re both hurt.” Then, a moment later, “What the fuck is wrong with you assholes?”

“Emergency medical… not so great here,” Irinna managed, then her breath caught in pain.

“Yeah,” Jessyn said past the panic in her throat. “You’d think with all the shit they built, these fucking roaches could manage an ambulance.”

Irinna smiled, but her gaze shifted, losing focus.

“No no no,” Jessyn said. “Stay here. Stay with me.”

“Go back. Get the others.”

“If I leave you, and they come back, they’ll kill you.”

“The work, though. If no one’s here—”

“The work’s gone.”

The alcove’s light flickered again, this time with a deep red and a sound like water on a hot skillet. When it went out, it didn’t come back.

“We have to go back to the room. We have to go together.”

“I just…” Irinna began, and didn’t finish.

Jessyn’s back and side were cold. The adrenaline had faded enough to let the pain in her shoulder and leg burn through. The walk back to the rooms seemed terribly long, even without a burden. And Irinna would die if she left her. Jessyn might not understand anything else in this hellscape, but she was sure about that.

She shifted her weight, moved to Irinna’s side. There was a way to do this. She’d learned it in some rescue aid camp when she’d been a child. She remembered trying it on Jellit and being so proud that she could pick him up. How had it worked?

With only the light spilling into the alcove from the outside, she drew Irinna up to sitting, then leaning her against the counter, to a somnolent stand. This was right. Old memory came through, and Jessyn bent, drew the semiconscious woman across her own torn and bleeding shoulder. Holding Irinna’s leg with one hand and her arm with the other, Jessyn lifted.

I can’t do this, she thought, her thighs and back burning with the strain. But she took a step forward anyway. And then another. Her breath seemed unnatural—too close and also somehow not associated with her. Like listening to someone else laboring beside her. She spat, took another step, then another, and she was walking. Around them, the surreal traffic of alien bodies flowed like images from nightmare. Nothing offered her aid, but nothing stopped her either. They were all in the same corridor. They were all in different worlds.

By the halfway point, she was muttering I can’t go on with each step, and then taking another after it. I can’t go on. I can’t go on. I can’t go on. When she reached the wide door, she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten there or how long she’d been standing, looking at it bemused. She couldn’t open it, and she couldn’t figure out how to knock. The best she could manage was to go up to it and bang her forehead against it again and again and again until it opened and Else looked out at her with wide, startled eyes and her mouth agape.

“Hey,” Jessyn said, and sank to the ground. Irinna rolled gently off her shoulders, their clothes making a wet ripping as they parted. The dried blood had glued them together.

In what seemed like a blink, everyone was there. Campar lifted both women, one in each arm like they were light as a feather, and carried them to the couch. Synnia showed up with a cloth and a bowl of warm water, wiping away the worst of the gore and finding the gouges in her flesh when she flinched. Tonner ran out to see the lab. Jessyn thought she’d told them about the attack, about the bomb and the feather-haired murderers, but she wasn’t sure. She tried again now, but Else put a hand on her shoulder and pressed her back into the bed. Oh, somehow she was in her bed.

“Did Irinna…” Jessyn said.

Else’s mouth tightened, and for a moment she looked angry. Only no, it wasn’t anger. Or sorrow. Horror. Else was horrified.

Jessyn tried again. “Is she…”

“I’m sorry,” Else said. “I’m so sorry.”