Platitudes in F Maximum #2
“Before she was made Surgeon General.” Mallory gazes at the vivisection tables.
“She’d open up her specimens on these—enemies and employees, dead and alive and in between.
This was about the time BGS stopped exterminating the contaminated, and started to collect them.
Combatants who were changed by ecdytoxin.
Inspired by it. Casualties and prisoners. ”
“Not prisoners,” Aster says. “Patients.”
“Patients. Of course. Poster children for a new age.” He laughs.
“Bertram was greedy. He wouldn’t let anything go to waste.
Not even his victims. It was in good taste, wasn’t it?
BGS offering a healing hand to their own casualties.
Reaping what they’d sown, sifting through all that chaff for a bit of wheat. ”
As they traverse the wrecked factory, Mallory points out the teratopod tanks, the shattered remains of a distillation apparatus, the line where they assembled the canisters.
“You remember those days,” he says. “You remember what it was like up top. In the early weeks of the Revival, when the Palas was giving us everything they had. Every day another battle. Every day another species added to the Manual. I barely saw my brother. I avoided him, and when I did run into him, I’d roll down my sleeve, I wouldn’t let him touch me.
I don’t think he knew. For weeks, he didn’t know.
He was busy with his own work. When he wasn’t fumigating, he was rebuilding.
He was decontaminating the galleries, throwing art into the fire, or sending it down to us in R&D.
“However fast things moved up there, they were faster down here. The teratopods grew and ate and grew. We’d get a crate of paintings and broken vases and dining silver looted from upstairs, and we’d throw it all into the tanks.
Those things were connoisseurs. They loved Dagdrun wine.
And cocaine, and novels, and jewelry. Love letters could make such an exquisite toxin.
A good vant Wron could make a fume that turned buildings into a billion tiny pebbles.
Those old statues of Bacher’s dragonfly could make anything molt into glass.
And Merrett—well, you never knew what a Merrett would do. ”
He pauses at a vine-netted mound at the center of the factory floor.
Braced in rusted steel ribs, the tank is the size of a small house.
Like the rest of the place, it is deformed with the hallmark growths of Revivalist weaponry, but remains mostly intact.
He climbs to the top and gazes down the shaft at its center.
“One of the teratopods,” he says, “outgrew the others.
Reames told me it was supposed to be that way.
It outgrew the others, and ate them. Then, it ate one of us.
It got too big for the tank, so Reames had it dragged out here—over there, right where all those cables are dangling.
We strung it up, pushed the hooks through the spiracles. And we continued harvesting.
“The other kids … all of us were stung, at least once. We took it on the fingers, or the palms. Most of us just burst open, sometimes quickly, sometimes not. We’d start to grow things.
Make things from ourselves. One started to dance and couldn’t stop.
The one that Reames always called the Doll died in her sleep, and when Whyck opened her up she was stuffed with this …
cotton-like substance. Every organ, completely replaced.
We pulled out her guts and used them to absorb ecdytoxic spills. ”
“Oh, Mal,” Aster breathes. He doesn’t look at her, only the dark beyond the tank.
“Reames just brought in more,” he says. “There were always more of us, from Strangleroot, or Orphanwell. Some just looking for glory, throwing their lot in with BGS. Some were contaminated, and had nowhere else to go. Oh, look. Witchfruit.” Aster follows his finger and spies a bulbous flower under a conveyor belt.
It trembles in the darkness, skin expanding and contracting like breath.
Another happy Manual entry, though she can’t remember which number.
“It makes a great perfume,” Aster says. “Subtle, sharp. Good for blades.”
“For me, or for you?”
“You think I’m nimble enough for heroics? I’d cough out a lung. I’m a composer, not a performer.” She bends to pluck the flower. “So … when were you stung?”
“I don’t know, actually. It wasn’t just once—there were dozens of little accidents.
Tears in my iron-vine sleeve. Or I’d come out of the tank just knowing.
And then there were the—well, the things Reames tried out on us.
Shots and blood draws and these little …
experiments. In the end, I never knew if it was the teratopod who changed me, or him.
He was relentlessly curious. And we couldn’t stop him—we didn’t want to.
We’d line up to let him try things out on us.
We were in awe of him, all of us. Me, Whyck, the other kids, we were all terrified and entranced.
Even the Marshal—or, I guess he was still just a captain back then—the rare times he’d come down to the factory, treated him with caution.
“Reames was a marvelous teacher. Showed me what a true ecdytoxic molt looked like, how it’s the speed of the process that defines its violence.
Only timing determines if something blooms and decays like a perfume, or if it tears a whole city apart.
Timing is what separates an action from an accident.
” He frowns and descends the tank. “As the Poet-King says: ‘Time will blind the all-seeing and kill the deathless. Time will stopper the source of the Catoptric.’”
Aster wheezes out a laugh. “Mal. Poet-King is satire. That line was a joke.”
“You think I care?”
He drops down beside her, and she places the deflated witchfruit in his breast pocket. When he raises a hand to touch it, she holds his bare wrist, running her fingers over his scars. A thread pokes out from under his sleeve, and she pulls it loose.
“Reames was fascinated with them,” he says.
“They reacted to ecdytoxin. Sometimes violently. They hate it, and they’re hungry for it.
” He lets Aster turn his palm in her hand.
“I could never tell if they were a part of me, or if they were something else, and I was only their host. They were always eager to break the surface of my skin. In those days, with all that ecdytoxin around, you could pull them from me by the handful. Reames kept them in jars on his shelf, but he never got around to finding a use for them.”
Aster lets the tiny thing wrap around her finger. It is a blue one, bright as Ostlerfell dye, toothless and full of wonder. When she lifts it close to her face, it writhes at the touch of ecdytoxin still on her breath. “I could find a use,” she whispers.
“Go on, then. I’m your muse.” His smile is joyless, determined. “Name the limb, vralen, and I’ll cut it open for you.”