Sons and Brothers #2
“She’s tired of your stories. Tired of the same tragedies and legends, Larbella and the Poet-King, over and over.” When Guy doesn’t reply, Dawn lowers his bowl. “So are you. I can tell.”
“How?”
“The things you sing,” he says. “In your sleep.”
They finish the meal in silence. Dawn stands, takes their bowls, and the beetles chirp the hour.
The night rapidly cools. When the barracks lights moan and shut off, scattering a swarm of spurned moths, Guy stands at the door with a candle.
He gazes into the misty night, then paces the catwalk for a few minutes, until the wind blows out his flame.
Exasperated, he undresses and crawls into bed.
Without Tyro, their slitted nook is uncomfortably roomy, and even the hellrat broth can’t keep out the chill of Martyr’s Moon.
Guy curls at the edge of the foam mattress, blanket bunched at his chin.
He closes his eyes for a few minutes, assuring himself that his sister will be fine, until he feels the mattress shift.
“You’re shivering,” comes Dawn’s whisper. An arm snakes around him, a solid chest presses against his back, and for the first time since they were children, catching naps on the narrow overhangs of their errand routes, they lie perfectly fitted together.
Dawn’s breath is warm in his ear. For a moment Guy fears he’ll feel his lips, the stirring of an erection, the nudge to do what bunkmates are commonly presumed to.
A needling dread tightens his throat. He has always considered the possibility—no, the inevitability—that one day Dawn would extract this price for all his years of kindness, of patience and loyalty.
It is such a small price, Guy tells himself, merely a transmutation of a love they already share—yet when a hand moves up his chest, his heart jumps to his throat.
“Relax,” Dawn whispers.
Then he stills, seemingly content just to lie beside him, an island of heat in the moldy chill. Slowly, Guy unclenches. In the bodiless vertigo of near sleep, he lets himself bask in Dawn’s warmth.
“I’m sorry,” Guy whispers.
“For what?”
“If I keep you up. With the … singing.”
“No. It’s nice. Like nothing I’ve heard before.” He shifts his cheek against the back of Guy’s head, and a breath touches his scar. “It’s your sting.”
“It’s what? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe.”
“It is.” Dawn’s sleepy certainty is unnerving. “I’ve been … too.”
“Oh, God. When?” Guy struggles to turn. “On Conundrum? After? You never reported it.”
“I’m not sure what I would report. It was nothing. It was just an exposure. Not even a sting.”
“Are you all right?”
“Fine. I’m just … having strange dreams again.”
“About the canyon?”
“About the coffin. The one where I’m thrown into the river.
But it’s … different.” He rolls onto his back.
“I’m still sinking, and the water is coming in.
The lid is still nailed shut. But this time, there’s a crack.
There’s a way out.” He lifts his arm, pressing it against the low ceiling.
The honors inked into his wrist glint in the silver threads of river-light, one ring for each bullet.
“All I have to do is reach. Reach up to the lid and make a fist and—”
Something bangs against wood. Guy starts, and his gaze flickers to the door, where another urgent knock rattles the hinges. He rolls out of the sleeping nook and stumbles to open it.
“Little shit—” he growls through his relief. “Where’ve—”
When he pulls the door open, it’s not his sister on the other side.
“Emergency,” Three says cheerfully.
His stomach drops. “It’s not Ty, is it?”
“Ty? Course not. She’s fine. Napping soundly under the punishment ward.” Her grin widens. “No, we’ve got a job, Moulène. Call came down the lines from the overcity, straight for us. You’ll never guess who it’s from.”
The infestation is visible all the way from the end of Finch Street, where the orderly bricks of businesses make way for the leaning towers of Splinter Row.
A poison glow mushrooms over the sloped roofs.
The sidewalk is dotted with onlookers, night doctors with their bags of contraband, courtesans and their dates, pajamaed children dropping down from balconies.
A Palas lorry idles at an intersection, coughing greenish clouds of metabolites as its passengers reconnoiter.
They do not approach the toxic effusion, but stand with guns ready.
They too have heard reports of a new bug and its strange venom.
Of course, like levelheaded soldiers, they don’t believe the wilder stories, but their doubt doesn’t make them any less uneasy.
It came on suddenly, one rifleman reports, overtaking Sreckt Brothers Pest Control and Hex Removal with the speed of a fire.
Preceded by only a sweet smell and a jittery feeling in the night custodian’s gut, the building flooded suddenly with an unidentifiable toxin.
It spread from the ground floor within minutes, snaking up the stairs, percolating through walls and devouring the crossbeams. Tiles melted in the heatless smoke, dripping together like acrylics.
Crossbeams stretched and splintered, the corridors bloated, ejecting bricks from crystalline mortar.
Half the workforce evacuated, and the other half was called in to find the source of the infestation.
By the time Three’s team arrives, nearly everyone in the company is on the street, barring the brothers themselves.
The building burns in a heatless incandescence, fumes billowing from the windows in canopies of rippling toxin.
Personnel flit about, some masked, others barefaced or with collars held over their noses.
A woman in iron vine hugs herself, and a janitor comforts a weeping exterminator nearby.
Discarded mask at her side, she holds her face, shaking.
Something dark and slick blooms from between her fingers.
“Shit,” Guy mutters. Already he can tell this will be a calamitous one. He perks his ear for the usual music, a warped soliloquy, the drumming of a hundred legs. He hears nothing over the buzz of panic on the street, over the angry shouts Sreckt employees have started to direct at them.
“Tighten your respirators, boys,” Three says darkly. “This shit is airborne.”
Guy adjusts his cannulas and floods his tank-sac with BSPAF, but before he takes his first step up the portico, a long black car pulls up beside him.
The vehicle eases to a halt, burnt sugar spilling from its exhaust pipe.
The door swings open and a boot descends, followed by Bertram.
He dons a mask and helmet, wearing a plated suit sleek as his three-piece.
“Look at this.” The hiss of his respirator can’t hide the amusement in his voice. “What a light show.”
“All respect, Eir Bertram,” Three says, gesturing at him with her nozzle. “What the hell is this?”
“Just a proof of concept,” he answers.
“You gonna grab a tank and join us?”
“Oh, no. I’ve come equipped for negotiation.” He signals to his driver and the car pulls away. “The brothers are still holed up in there?”
“As far as we can tell,” Three answers.
“Of course. They always do stay at the office so late.” He tightens his tubules. “Well, off you go. I’ll be up after you.”
Guy glances to Dawn, who glances to Three, who shakes her head and lumbers toward Sreckt headquarters.
After clearing a dozen contriver-worm nests, Guy should be comfortable with the ritual.
But when he steps into Sreckt, he hesitates.
The gaseous toxin is so strange, so strong, he can feel it through his respirator.
A cluster of aimless tones fills his stung ear.
An orchestra tuning, or the ceiling fans.
“Something’s weird,” he mutters.
“You think?” Three answers, pointing her nozzle to the bloated dome of the reception hall.
Toxin coats every surface with a sapphire sheen; paint peels from the archways in crystalline needles.
Precipitated clusters of poison float through the air, and Guy can’t help but feel as if he has been trapped between the facets of some monstrous jewel.
“Toxic phase transition,” he says, hair standing on end.
“Like I said, Moulène,” Three replies. “Airborne.”
They scour the first floor, preceded by a cloud of BSPAF.
Guy tries to follow his ear, led onward by a low, constant drone.
He sweeps through ruined lavatories, offices, a room that may have once been a lounge but is now a cluster of fruiting bodies, bloated leather couches wheezing out crystal dust. They find no teratopods, nor Whittleston termites, nor captured strays.
The only creature they discover is an abandoned hireling in the stairwell.
The man lies on the landing, bare face tilted toward the descending steps.
He wears no iron vine, only a collared uniform, frayed by the acrid air.
Too weak or noxious to flee, he emits small groans through bloated lips.
Guy nearly drops his nozzle, nearly jumps up the stairs to help, but freezes when the man’s eyes meet his own.
With a gurgling moan, the Srecktman twists.
He pulls himself toward the stairs, swinging one arm forward, then the other, then a short, broken third.
His bloated body comes into view at the lip of the landing, neck swelling under his collar, cotton splitting to release petals of proliferating skin.
Cartilage crawls skyward like shoots, unfolding with paralyzing beauty.
Guy can’t lift his nozzle; he can’t think of what substances, if any, this encounter calls for. He can’t think of anything but the vague shape of Bebber lying on his back, his spongy, changed flesh running like paint.
Dawn steps forward, clicking his cannulas into place.
“No,” Guy whispers under his mask. “No—”