The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) (29 page)

He released his grip and bent his left arm back and forth to test it out. Good as new.

The sidewalk was filled with gawkers, most dressed in business suits, some in more casual and exceedingly colorful clothing, but none stopped, not before to investigate his fall, not now to scrutinize his unlikely rise. The pedestrians stared, in horror or wonder or annoyance or awe, but flowed around him without cease, like water around a stone in a stream.

He didn’t see them. He just stared up at the hole in the side of the building from which he’d fallen. He was still furious, still torn between what he should do and what he must do. What was that again? Everything was fuzzy, but he was sure that whatever it was he must do was back up there on the fourteenth floor.

Something disgustingly warm and clammy licked his cheek. He flinched back from the whisper touch and his senses lurched to preternatural focus. He saw that he had avoided being snared directly by a translucent tentacle, the tip of which was flat and leaflike. He somehow knew that if the tip touched his head it would rob him of his will.

His rage exploded anew.
She
was dead, he suddenly remembered. He watched her die up there on the fourteenth floor. And now someone was attempting to force upon him the equivalent of rape. The blue light rising off of him flared momentarily to brilliance as he reached out and took hold of the tentacle, wrapping a bit of its length around his wrist to draw it taut and to prevent the leaflike tip from touching him. He took a deep breath and yanked hard. He fell slightly forward, as one does when transitioning from standing to swimming in chest-deep water, and the city sped by him all blurs of gray and streaks of vomit.

The motion stopped abruptly, though his head was a few seconds behind. He looked around, somewhat dazed, and found himself in a parking structure, one that must have been condemned since it was open to the sky all the way down to the bottom. Concrete chunks of varying size blanketed the ground, making it uneven and treacherous, like rows and rows of unending, broken teeth. Lengths of rebar jutted from the lips of each level, arranged like stunted cilia along a gullet to promote digestion. He could see people walking by outside, but had the sense that they didn’t see this place as it really was. The city wouldn’t allow this kind of waste: real-estate, parking in particular, was at a premium. It must have had to do with everything else that was going on. He looked up and saw the chalk-white man standing at the edge of the third floor. More of the transparent tentacles writhed from the back of his neck, rising and spreading out interminably into the city.

The white man didn’t notice him at first. When he did, he fixed his eyes upon him, cocked his head in confusion, but said nothing. Instead, he sent out several more tentacles.

The angry man had had enough. He stood motionless until the optimum moment, grabbing the lead tentacle in his right hand and wrapping it, and those that followed, around his forearm as he had the very first of them. Two he caught in the sweep of his left foot, pinning them and their seeking leaflike heads to the jagged concrete rubble littering the ground. He reached out with his left hand to shore up his grip on the tentacles and yanked once again, just as hard as before, but this time, the chalky white man was jerked from his perch and came helplessly, like a fish on a line.

The white man, who up close was revealed to be unnaturally thin, landed upon the jags of concrete in a way that looked far more painful that was evidenced by his reaction. But he wasn’t given a chance to rise.

The angry man rushed forward, and drove his right foot into the white man’s chest. The hard sole of his shoe sank deep and made the white man wheeze. The angry man dropped down, pinning the white man’s right arm beneath his knee, and proceeded to pound his powdery white face to a bloody pulp. The only white that remained there when the angry man was finished were the tips of a few teeth and patches of exposed skull.

And still the angry man wasn’t finished. He pushed the bloody mess over onto its ruined face, pressing it into the concrete with his foot. Still the translucent tentacles squirmed and writhed, but now they were aimless with no intelligence to guide them. In his right hand, the angry man gathered the tentacles at the back of the white man’s neck, and began to pull at their source, like a particularly tenacious weed. Once again, the blue light tendrils rose up. The angry man pulled and pulled until he’d dislodged the translucent thing, tearing it from a red womb with a wet ripping sound and a terrific spray of thick blood. With the thing doubling as his spine gone from him, the white man’s body was left bent and flaccid, a shapeless heap of thick, pasty skin.

The angry man stood, held the still-wriggling organism, which could only be compared to a squid—one with impossibly long and impossibly numerous tentacles—and squeezed until he rent its body with his fingers. With a combination of triumph and revulsion he cast it away from him, aware now of another pair of eyes—powerful eyes, heavy eyes,
fiery
eyes—upon him.

Jav awoke with a start. He sat bolt upright and was panting uncontrollably. The sheets were pooled in his lap, wet with sweat.

Mao roused beside him. “What’s the matter?” she said, concerned.

Jav struggled to catch his breath, to master himself. He gripped his head in both hands, then was suddenly conscious of his hands, as if they were soiled with something. He examined his fingers front, back, and sideways, then started at Mao’s presence beside him.

“
You’re alive
,” he cried, pausing only briefly before taking her up in his arms and hugging her fiercely.

“Shhh. It’s okay,” she cooed. “Of course I’m alive. Everything is all right.” She hugged him back and gently shushed him until he calmed down.

“Oh, Mao,” Jav said. “It was awful. I don’t think I’ve ever had a nightmare like that.
Jesus Christ
. Not one that I remember, anyway.”

“What did you say?”

“What? I said ‘not one that I could remember.’”

“No, before that. It was like a name or a place.”

Jav shook his head, his mouth moving but no sound coming out. Finally, he said, “Sorry. I don’t know what I said. It was those damned Relic Cords. I don’t know what it is about them that’s so. . . so
wrong
. They make me sick.”

“I’ve seen how you act around Icsain. He
is
a little creepy. An answer for everything and no emotions except for that subtle and maddening superiority complex of his.”

Jav clutched the sheets in his lap. “Yeah,” he breathed out huskily. “But it’s the Relic Cords inside him that really bother me.”

“Well,” she said rolling over on top of him, “Let’s see if I can’t make you forget all about that right now.”

“I’m pretty sure you—” but his words were cut off, stifled by her lips pressing against his.

Jav told no one else about his dream of the Relic Cords. Nor did he tell anyone besides Mao when it started to recur with some regularity thereafter. It was always the same, beginning, middle, and end. It persisted intermittently for weeks, but now more than disturbing, it was merely tiresome. He chided his own subconscious for not offering up anything more. If there was something to be learned from the events he had now witnessed over and over again, he didn’t know what it could be, except perhaps his already well-established aversion to the Relic Cords. Finally, he broke down and approached Tia Winn to see if she might be of help.

He caught her in the war room after the briefing while they were all on their way out. “Tia, can I ask you a favor?” he said.

She stopped, breathed out sharply, turned towards him as she folded her arms, and fixed him with a firm stare. “Yes?”

As Kalkin walked by he pinched her.

“Ow!”

“Be nice,” Kalkin said, exiting.

She rolled her eyes, but the set of her face relaxed, and her tone grew friendlier. “What do you need?”

“Um, okay,” he said looking up at her. “I’ve been having these dreams. . .”

Her face darkened again. Her brow creased, and her nose crinkled. “Are you accusing me?”

“No. Oh,
no
, of course not. Why? You haven’t been doing anything. . .”

“
No
,” she cried indignantly.

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry. Look, I’ve been having this recurring dream, and I was wondering if you might be able to do something to stop it. I don’t know. Kill it. Bury it. Something.”

Once again her face softened, really softened this time. She took a deep breath and her demeanor changed. Her eyes were apologetic. “What kind of dream?”

Jav shrugged. “An ugly one. Likely a true one. A memory, I think, but one I’d rather not have to relive on a regular basis.”

“I see,” she said, nodding.

Jav thought he saw something in her eyes, something he’d never seen there before. It was either guilt or compassion, but even if it was the former, he didn’t think that she was actually to blame for what he’d been experiencing.

“Can you describe it for me?” she said.

He did and in the process he thought he made her sick with the violence of it. By the time he was finished, tears had wet her cheeks. He’d never realized how sensitive she could be.

She sniffed, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and nodded to acknowledge her ability to help. “I’ll monitor you tonight—and longer if necessary—but I’ll see to it that you never have that dream again.”

“Thank you.”

The Palace launched from Planet 1404, from the fused, composite total of all that was left of Icsain’s system. The general mood had lightened markedly. The Empire was back in motion and currently had a rich source of sustenance in spite of the baneful sun that had forced them to stop.

Things were looking up, or so Kalkin thought, so he was confused when he awoke to Tia Winn’s sobbing. She clutched the covers close to her chin—an image that brought to Kalkin’s mind a child’s defense against the dark—and sniffed back tears that kept coming and coming.

“Tia,” he breathed. “What’s the matter? Why are you crying?”

She shook her head, perhaps intended to say something, but her lower lip quivered and any composure she’d been able to establish fell away with a fresh onslaught of tears.

Kalkin sat up in bed, scooted himself over, took her up in his arms, and set her head and shoulders in his lap. He hushed her gently as he cleared stray strands of her hair from where they clung to her wet cheeks and smoothed away the remaining moisture there with his thumbs.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

She looked up at him, seeing his face upside down in the dark, and tried to smile. This resulted in new wave of sputtering tears, but she was slowly gaining control of herself.

“Tell me,” Kalkin urged.

She took two hitched breaths and then started to speak. “A week and a half ago,” she heaved out, “I agreed to help your friend. Mostly because he’s your friend. And maybe partly because it was the right thing to do.”

“Jav.” He grinned at this in spite of himself. His feelings for her were never so strong as they were right now. She was trying so hard and he thought that he might love her for it. His feelings for her ran very, very deep, but he had been reluctant to admit that depth to himself. Her saying this now, though, melted any resistance in him that might have lingered.

“He said he was having a bad dream over and over again. He asked me stop it.”

Kalkin listened, nodded.

“So I took a look.” There was a long pause before she continued. “He described it and it wasn’t new to me. It wasn’t a dream at all, but a memory, one that I witnessed. It’s taken several attempts, and it isn’t altogether gone, but he won’t be experiencing that particular memory in his dreams ever again. But, Lor, I don’t think
I
can ever get it out of my head,
either
. I was there. I saw it happen the first time. I was disgusted and repulsed then and am even more so now after. . . after seeing it from his eyes. After essentially doing it with my own hands.” She shook her head. “It was Farsal. Farsal tried to make contact with him using the Relic Cords and Jav beat him to death with his bare hands, ripped the Relic Cords right out of him, all without the aid of an Artifact.”

Kalkin narrowed his eyes, but said nothing.

Tia could read his face just the same. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He doesn’t remember anything else. The memory was triggered by the Relic Cords, and probably wasn’t helped at all by Icsain’s lack of social graces. His amnesia is still basically intact.

“You know, I’ve always hated Jav a little for killing Farsal, mostly, I think, because I happened to see it and because, in the end, Farsal was disposable to the Emperor. It’s maybe a little worse now, I still get little glimpses of blood and brain on my hands. It makes me physically sick and I can’t erase the images from my mind as much as I try.”

Kalkin cradled her head in his arms and squeezed reassuringly.

“But you know what else?”

“What?”

“I think I can forgive him a little, too. Jav, I mean. A lot of what’s in his head is still blocked, it’s an intricate tangle that I don’t even want to think about, but I did get a sense of what he was going through then. Of what drove him to the violence he brought to Farsal. He’d been in love. Who can’t appreciate that? And she’d been killed in front of him. There are times when his sadness and desperation competes in my mind with the revulsion of what he did to Farsal and actually wins out.” She tried to smile again and was more successful this time. She reached her arms up and around Kalkin and brought him down closer to her.

“Don’t ever leave me,” she said. “Please.”

The pleading quality in her voice was too much for Kalkin. He pressed his cheek against hers and managed to say in a broken whisper, “Never.”

Jav’s custom gravity block was crowded as usual. Primarily for Mao’s benefit, they had taken to rotating sparring partners to give her the widest experience possible. Stafros Lowe’s powerful, unrooted kicks, Dolma Set’s movement, which was both evasive and anticipatory, and Jav’s strikes and general adaptive genius all worked to make Mao into
the
top contender for
any
competition. The date for the Artifact Competition was still tentative, but with what the Empire had recouped from the last system and with an aggressive campaign already underway to install jump relays along the progress of the Vine during transit, everything was on schedule. Jump capability would reach Planet 1404 before too long and would catch up to the Palace in time for the event.