The Door Inside Him #2
The pleasure belonged to Oliver. Then something inside the pleasure noticed that it belonged to Oliver. Bhodi gathered. His shadow climbed the edge of his boots without moving across the floor. Oliver inhaled sharply. Marin's hand went toward the manual release and stopped before touching it.
"Talk to me."
"It feels good."
Seraphine moved behind the glass and stopped herself. Marin stayed on Oliver. He described the increased specificity first, then let her test the less flattering parts of it. Pain had sharpened. So had fear. The desire to continue remained unmistakably present.
Bhodi pressed closer with the admission. Oliver's own desire moved beside it. He could still separate the first impulse from the second, but the division no longer felt like two voices. More like two hands resting on the same object from different sides.
Marin watched his face. "Do you want to stop?"
The open door remained where it had been. Three steps. One turn. Cold corridor air. He imagined leaving again. Relief. Regret. Irritation. Safety, perhaps, if the word had not already been abused beyond usefulness in Anchor House.
"No."
Marin waited long enough that Oliver understood the question she had not yet spoken.
"Mine," he said.
Her shoulders loosened by less than an inch.
R3 continued. The room became want with an immediacy metaphor could not explain.
Oliver retained the basalt beneath his feet and the glass before him, yet every object acquired a second relationship more immediate than shape.
The open door was escape and choice. The black water was knowledge.
Marin was beloved, desired, feared for, trusted, and infuriatingly capable of asking the correct question when he most wanted a beautiful one.
Seraphine was six absent years refusing to become one emotion. Venn was consequence wearing naval braid. Pell was the ridiculous human fact that one exhausted customs officer on a lever could still alter what a machine built across decades was allowed to do.
The sea above them was movement. Bhodi pressed closer. Want recognized want. Oliver's pulse changed. R3 recorded something. Then stopped. The fourth housing clicked. R4. The black-glass band around the wall fracture darkened. Oliver saw himself beside it. He had not moved.
Another Oliver stood three feet to the left.
A third waited near the open door. For one vertiginous instant he thought the glass had become reflective.
Then the figures continued multiplying while his body remained still.
One Oliver wore no marks at all. Older, perhaps, with hair long enough to brush his collar and fatigue Oliver did not recognize around the eyes.
Another had blood at the corner of his mouth and the delighted expression of a man who had survived something he absolutely intended to describe inaccurately later. A barefoot Oliver stood in Golden Sands pajama bottoms holding a payroll ledger.
One wore black glass beneath his skin. A boy of twelve sat on the Kraken's rail with Matthias Corren's chart beneath one hand. Oliver's stomach tightened. Marin's voice sharpened. "Describe only."
"Several versions of me."
She made him separate appearance from claim. They did not appear physically present. Nothing established them as futures. One resembled a memory strongly enough to hurt.
"The child," Oliver said.
Seraphine closed her eyes behind the glass. Oliver kept looking. The boy drew a line across Corren's chart where no coastline belonged. The older Oliver touched two fingers to the side of his throat in the same place Marin used when checking Oliver's pulse.
The ledger-holding Oliver closed the book.
The black-glass Oliver smiled without humor.
None spoke. Bhodi moved through their outlines without taking a body; darkness simply became stronger wherever the possible Olivers overlapped it.
The figures sharpened when Hunger attended and softened when its attention returned to Oliver himself.
Marin asked whether the figures knew anything Oliver did not. He watched the older one look through the glass at her with familiarity convincing enough to hurt, then glance toward Seraphine. Nothing in either expression exceeded what Oliver already knew.
"I can test it."
He asked the older version what Jasper had done with the western berth after the customs seizure. The figure smiled and supplied nothing. Oliver tried something more private.
"What does Marin want for breakfast tomorrow?"
Its gaze shifted toward her. Still nothing.
"Excellent," Oliver murmured at Marin's raised brow. "They remain theatrically useless."
The bloodied Oliver laughed soundlessly. Oliver did not. The difference became suddenly important. His own mouth had wanted to answer the expression. He felt the impulse. Chose not to. R2 clicked. The possible figures all looked toward him. Oliver went cold.
"Marin."
"I saw the board." Her attention moved from him to R2 and back. "Continuity increased."
Oliver looked at the bloodied version still waiting for his response. "Because I refused to smile?"
"Unknown."
Naturally. Bhodi pressed closer with something Oliver could only interpret as interest, not satisfaction at obedience. Interest in distinction. The smile available. The smile refused. The person deciding between them. He wanted to call that meaningful. He did not. The figures began moving again.
The ordinary Oliver with the ledger turned a page. The child folded Corren's chart. The black-glass version stepped closer to the fracture and let the dark reflection climb over one hand. None moved like people living independent lives. They behaved like propositions.
Ways Oliver might continue being presented to himself. He disliked the wording as soon as he thought it. Presentation was still interpretation.
"R4 feels less like route through space," he said.
Marin looked toward the corresponding board. "Then what?"
"Route through identity, perhaps."
"Perhaps."
"Thank you for the enthusiasm."
"Keep going."
Oliver looked at the open door. Then at the figures. The door still meant three steps. The figures did not block it. That seemed important enough to keep noticing. Bhodi gathered along his spine. The sensation from R3 returned, sharper.
Pain threaded through old injuries. His right palm remembered being cut. His ribs remembered impact. Scar tissue beneath his shirt became briefly more real than the skin around it. Pleasure followed each remembered hurt. Oliver's knees softened. Marin's hand reached the release.
He lifted one finger. Wait. She stopped.
The gesture cost more than it should have.
Bhodi moved closer, not through the room but through the way Oliver experienced himself inside it.
The next breath entered his lungs with someone else's attention braided through the satisfaction of having lungs at all.
Oliver closed his eyes. The possible selves remained visible anyway. That frightened him enough to make him laugh.
"Of course."
"Oliver."
"I'm here."
"Do you want extraction?"
He checked. Pain. Pleasure. Curiosity. Fear. The open door. Marin. Bhodi. All of them crowded the answer.
"Not yet."
Marin made him give her the reason. Oliver opened his eyes and looked toward the open door. "This is the first part I cannot explain from the machinery alone."
"That is not automatically a reason to continue."
He nodded. The objection landed before he could decorate it. "And I want to."
Marin let that answer remain separate from necessity until Oliver admitted the second category was still unclear.
"Then do not borrow necessity."
He smiled faintly. "Cruel woman."
"Still true?"
"Yes."
She did not praise him. Bhodi pressed closer. Oliver felt the desire to go farther rise hard enough that his pulse accelerated. Some of that desire was his, some belonged to Hunger, and the overlap was part of the danger.
"One step," he said.
Marin's eyes narrowed. "Define it."
"I do not move toward the fracture, manipulate R4, or use exclusion. I let the contact increase once and you keep asking questions."
She made him carry the rest. If he stopped answering like himself, she pulled him out. If he asked to stop, they stopped. Then she asked what happened if she told him to stop. Oliver's humor faded. "I listen." Marin waited. She was not asking for obedience, and both of them knew it.
"If you ask me to stop," he said, "I tell you whether I will."
"Acceptable."
He looked down.
"Closer."
No siren resonance entered the word. Bhodi did not need it.
Darkness rose through Oliver's shadow. The possible selves sharpened.
Pain struck first. His knees hit basalt.
Every healed break in his body remembered itself at once.
Rib. Hand. Shoulder. The old wound at his side.
A scar near his temple that had stopped aching years ago and now returned as heat.
Marin moved. Oliver raised his hand again.
Wait. He could still do that. That fact became precious.
Then pleasure arrived hard enough to hollow his breath.
Cold water after heat. A perfect tack in bad wind.
The weight of Marin's hand at the back of his neck when he had chosen to kneel for her and remained capable of standing.
A door yielding. A ledger balancing after three hours of finding someone else's arithmetic crime. Jasper's plum cake, bad enough to become beloved through repetition. Bhodi experienced Oliver experiencing them. The recursion threatened to become more compelling than any individual sensation.
Oliver grabbed the first thing he could name that Hunger would not automatically make profound.
"Anise."
Marin stared.
"I dislike anise."
Understanding reached her immediately. She asked for another. Oliver gave her people who sharpened knives from the wrong angle. R2 jumped. A third answer followed before she finished asking for it.
"Anyone who says an impossible map is probably wrong as though that reduces its appeal."
Marin's mouth moved. The possible Olivers slowed without becoming still.