Chapter Three #2
“I do not care if I bear another egg, I will not abstain from Vil! Any work done to flush my ducts would be wasted effort!” Noel’s curt shout from down the hall made Doc flinch then relax.
“Thank you for using decent language around Noah!” Doc’s response earned a huff.
A muttered comment from the other room about someone giving Vil warning because Noel was about to have his own hunt, and it wasn’t for razik!
“Razik?” I gave Doc a second glance.
“Uhh…like a porcup—no. Pork. Pig! Those things.” Doc waved his hand dismissively. “Anyway! I think… For me, it—”
Doc’s lips twisted, and he opened a screen midair, waving his hands this way and that as he opened up password protected files and flipped through photos of a young male, younger, softer, and more innocent looking, staring back at them, and it was hard to look and equally hard to look away at the damaged body he’d been reconstructed from.
As if reminded of what had been, Doc rubbed at his arm, squeezing it mindlessly.
I’d never lost an arm before. I’d lost a foot, but that memory still brought me no joy.
He’d lost so much more, and what he got back…
well, it’d always be debatable if it was him.
With as much damage as he took, he had to wonder.
If any of his body was truly his, if his memories were transplanted—if he was just a petri dish of memories and DNA.
I’d never been anything else but myself, so that I couldn’t relate to.
Then again, Sarge likely had the same—or did he? As a body-swapping parasite, he probably had made peace with it in his head.
Noel came in a moment later, Noah in his arms. His face, a usually emotionless canvas, held a note of frustration in it, but the documents Doc had open drew his curiosity. And if anything I knew about Noel, it was that a puzzle trumped any irritation.
“Wait. Go back two pages, second section. A sentence about tissue seeding.” Noel shielded Noah’s eyes by turning his body just enough to keep the little one from seeing any of the more disgusting imagery.
Noel squinted at the document and raised a hand, gesturing for the pages to flip and turn.
It always threw me for a loop how fast Noel could read, eyes almost shivering in his skull.
“I didn’t know they used my bone marrow like that. Interesting.”
Noel frowned as he glanced from Doc, to me and back at the document again. “Riiight…”
“I still feel guilty about all that, Noel.”
“They took so many samples and pieces of me over time that I don’t remember any one single event. It was all one big jumble. Whatever they did to me to heal you was nothing.” He handwaved it off, and I sat up a bit as Noel frowned. “So, he’s rejecting my tissue. Who did they use to make him?”
“I was told Tal and Raziel,” I added helpfully.
“Raziel…” Fel tapped his bottom lip. “I have his sequencing on file. What if we tried to recreate some of his DNA and injected it into Wallace?”
“Wouldn’t work. He’d reject any new tissue. Noel’s is the only stuff he never rejected.” Doc huffed.
Noel nodded sagely. “My antibodies are fairly universal. Or lack thereof.”
“True.” Doc and Fel spread a few of the pages out, but I didn’t miss Doc hiding the images of his broken body where Noah couldn’t see them.
“Well, if all else fails, shove my brain in another body or something if things get bad.” I shrugged. “Maybe the Colthraxians had something right?”
Fel flinched as if I’d struck him, and Doc frowned. Noel, though, froze, tail flicking with an anxious pace.
Fel, as if alerted by the motion, flicked his tail a different way and caught Noel’s gaze. “Well?”
Noel blinked, a moment’s confusion turning into realization. “Right. Tail. Always feels like someone’s reading my mind, here. No. I—Colthraxian tissue. What if we permeated Raziel’s code onto a cultured piece of Colthraxian neurological tissue and—”
“Simultaneously shut down the rejection and speed up the takeover at the same time! Brilliant…” Fel curled his tail and flicked, and Noel’s shivered in response.
A silent convo that had both me and Doc glancing back and forth trying to parse meaning.
Before we could ask, though, Fel scampered off, tail swishing in something I recognized as excitement.
“Wait! You want to put a colthraxian in me? Wouldn’t that like kill me?” I scrambled and drew my feet up, ready to run at the threat.
“Nah. Just a piece of the cleaned tissue will turn your immune system off for long enough to take the material. Think of it like sticking a piece of their fingernail in you,” Doc said.
That was marginally better, but still.
“I promise you it will be fine.” Noel glanced at the paperwork. “Probably.”
“Fine, is the operative term, not the probably.” Doc rolled his eyes and took Noah from Noel with a little coo. “You might have another little cousin to play with here soon. You won’t be the baby anymore.”
“The only reason you aren’t prospectively going to bear an egg is that Gorm has been otherwise occupied.” Noel sneered.
“I’ve not even thought about Gorm that way since—you know.” Doc waved a hand and strode out of the room, still fawning over Noah while indirectly taunting Noel about his untimely ovulation.
Unfortunately, I did know. Gorm and I had played around with one another before. It was sort of a rite of passage… Kinda. Gorm had a way of worming his way into your bed and making it seem like your idea the entire time. “Well, at least he’s stopped pestering you for—”
“No, he offered to put me in his schedule the other day. I passed politely. He has plenty of others looking for that.” Doc tossed a little device to Noel, cold fog rolling off it.
Noel cracked the device open, the shape of it rather like a staple gun from Mater Terra. He pressed a button on the side and inspected it. “Gas chamber is at 73 percent.”
Doc nodded. “I used it twice this morning already, working. So much better than needles.”
I thought so, too.
Fel returned, a sterilized glass petri dish of a sort in hand. In it was a single, desiccated square of something that resembled a perfectly cut scab. “Since you have said you were my friend, I wish to offer you a piece of myself, Wallace!”
I was so very thankful they were shitty at reading facial expressions and that I also had no tail to show the revulsion that went through me at the gift.
“Place it subcutaneously behind his ear. It’s heavily vascularized, and if there’s any scarring or reaction, we can mitigate it faster.” Noel ignored me, and Doc handed Fel a metal box that he wasted no time in opening and inspecting.
“I don’t know if this is—” Fel pulled a panel open on the wall, making a flat surface to spread the contents over.
Cylindrical pen-like objects scattered about with gleaming blades so transparent I could barely see them.
A form of carbon-based glass on the planet rather like diamonds but with a different molecular structure.
I’d become familiar with them in my short time there.
“One moment.” Noel approached my chair and stared at me, his dark eyes a sea of mystery.
“It is our intention to cut a small slit in the thinner skin behind your ear. Underneath your dermis, we will implant a piece of Colthraxian tissue and wait until your skin heals over—likely a few minutes. Then we’ll prick your skin every minute or two to see when you stop healing, and that will be when we inject my isolate. Do you consent?”
Thirty seconds ago, I’d been determined to run and fearful of what was to come, but with Noel’s clear definition of what was to happen and asking me if I consented? I did consent. I nodded. “Go ahead. Let’s do it.”
Noel nodded once, and a sharp sting made me flinch as Fel wasted no time in opening up my skin. I grunted as he inserted a tool beneath my skin, the click of metal near me making my skin crawl. My anxiety wasn’t as bad as Vil’s or Noel’s when it came to labs, but I still had that trauma.
By the time I had fully registered what it was Fel had done, he had pulled away and rested a gentle hand on my shoulder with a squeeze. The touch, while perfunctory, had a certain comfort to it that I’d never gotten in a facility.
As I lifted my hand to rub at my neck, Noel brought a needle over to prick my finger, watching curiously as it healed over in an instant. I glanced at the blood as Noel wiped it away, leaving behind a pinkening streak. “That’s different.”
Noel nodded. “It comes in around the fifty percent mark, gets more magenta.”
“Silicates in the blood, right?” I stared at it as Noel pricked another spot on my hand.
He nodded.
“Interesting fact: our blood is actually silvery white, but the crystalline structure of the silicates in it reflects magenta and gold.” Fel leaned over and inspected Noel’s work before handing him the injection device from before.
“Ready for stage two?” Noel engaged the handle and pressed it to the tender part of my neck as I swallowed.
“As I’ll ever be.” I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and flinched at a click and hiss so loud it cracked off the walls like a gunshot.
I got maybe two breaths out of me before my chest constricted, and I choked out a breath.
“Sedate?” Fel’s voice sounded out from somewhere.
“Good plan,” Doc said in agreement.
“Agreed,” I said, managing to choke out the words as my skin nearly vibrated, something squirming beneath it as a profound and urgent need to scratch overcame me.
Noel clicked the device in his hand again, a hiss and pop of another vial loading into a chamber, preparing me for more to come. I flinched, leaned my head back, and flinched far before the crack. Sound dulled over the odd whine in my ringing ears.
And ringing.
And by the time I realized it, the pain had gone, sensation faded, and my eyelids were far too heavy to lift.