Part 2 | Chapter 13 - Operation: Oceanic Memory (2)

Part 2 - Orientation Day

Chapter 13 - Operation: Oceanic Memory (2)

Adrian’s sigh over the buzz of his Vespa’s wings is practically dripping with exasperation. “Maybe locking in will warm you up,” he suggests.

“Locking in?”

Everett touches the side of his neck with one finger below his own Vespa, “It stings you, the toxin is some kind of hallucinogen that connects you to Adrian. It's like a temporary bond,” he explains.

My heart practically seizes in fear. Pooka snarls. No!

“No.” I firmly say.

“It doesn't hurt, much,” says Everett, still looking at the glass in his hands instead of me.

“If you touch me I will kill you!” The words are out of my mouth before I can even tell if it was me or Pooka who thought them.

Pooka leaps forward, knocking Everett backwards and snaps his jaws above his head, black mass billowing and crackling with plasma. His paws pound on the window, spreading a massive spiderweb of cracks across its surface from the center of each. Then he bounces and pushes Everett down with his paws, snarling and gnashing his jaws at his face. The glass in Everett’s hand spills, splashing clear liquor across the carpet and rolling to a stop at the base of the bar across the cabin. Everett holds very still, palms open and back pressed flat against the floor beneath the weight of something he can't see. Cold frost begins to form on his chin just below Pooka’s snarling face.

“Status? What happened!?” yelps Adrian in my ear. I cup my hand around the Vespa and toss it in a panic across the room. Its mass is so tiny it drops the ground barely a few feet away, wriggling all six legs to right itself. Everett’s Chromatopelma rears up on the top of his arm chair, exposing its fangs. My breaths come so quick they give me no air and I gasp for the next, Pooka’s panic fills every nerve in my body.

“Do not touch me!” We scream, as I scramble backwards into my corner.

“We're fine Adrian,” snaps Everett and gentler adds, “I'm not gonna touch you!” His voice steady but his chest heaves beneath Pooka betraying his own adrenaline. The sheen of sweat on his face and neck begins to freeze as well now, tiny white crystals crawling upwards from his skin.

No! No! No bonds for the takers! We cannot let them see! Slavers, liars!

“No! No, no, no!” Repeating the word is about the only coherent thing I can manage through Pooka’s feral thoughts and our blinding panic.

“You don't have to lock in. No locking in.” repeats Everett.

“I won't do it!” we demand.

Everett looks through Pooka at me, “I promise you, I won't let them touch you. Please…” he slowly brings two fingers together and gestures upwards, “It's getting in. Let me up. I promise I won't touch you.”

I follow his indication up to the window again and see wisps of the white fog beyond the train beginning to curl in through the cracked glass. Panic finally overwhelms me and I tuck my head into my hands, breathing desperately, my heart thundering faster than I've ever felt it.

Pooka slowly pulls back, snarling still and Everett scrambles free and drives straight into the bag of supplies, pulling out a roll of duct tape. He pulls his shirt over his nose and mouth one handed and begins to tear lengths of duct tape to place over the largest cracks, dissipating the white fog with the cautious wave of his hand. Once he's done, he begins to reinforce with secondary layers leaving me to recover my breath at his feet while Pooka bristles over me, spreading his cold to my skin now.

Once he’s done he tosses the duct tape back in the bag and kneels, still keeping his distance, palms cautiously raised. His eyebrows are tightly drawn together. “Hey, hey now,” he almost coaxes, voice steady and gentle, “No one's gonna touch you. It's alright now. I promise.” I give him nothing in return except suspicion, Pooka continuing to snarl at my side.

With a ragged sigh of his own, he stands and brushes the ice crystals off his chin, watching as they fall on his chest as white snow. He then shakes them free of his hand and plants his hands on his hips to inspect his work on the window.

“Will it hold?” I ask, wetting my lips again.

“Hmm? Oh, we’ll be in another dome any moment now. I’m sure it’s fine.”

“Is the Exec coming back?” I ask.

He cocks an eyebrow towards the door. “Mum? Nah, she’s gone.” There’s no surprise or emotion in his voice.

“Where?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“She always like that?”

Everett shrugs. The rush of wind and flashing bands of darkness cuts off any words he might have said as we pass through the dome lock into familiar yellow tinged air - and beyond a landscape of conveyor belts and huge piles of crumbling red earth - more rock than I’ve ever seen in my life. A thin, red dust hangs in the air, billowing off drops in the conveyor system where the earth tumbles from one to another and the fines sail into the still sky.

“Catakalan in sight, lock me in,” says Everett aloud. The Vespa on his ear pulses its thorax and drives its barbed behind deep into his neck below his ear. He hisses with the pain, bending his neck away instinctually as his mouth hardens into a grimace. A white flash of something spiders down his neck and dissipates into his tanned skin.

I cautiously watch my own Vespa walk along the carpet towards me, six legs uncoordinated as it navigates the pile of the fabric that must seem like a landscape of boulders to something so small.

“You don’t have lock in,” says Everett, neatening his shirt again, “But wear the mank-ass Vespa. I can at least speak to you, and if you speak aloud Adrian can keep track of things.”

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Do not worry. If they touch our mind I will sear them down and burn any trace of what they see. They will not touch us. Pooka’s eyes gleam with sparks of fire, no pupil in their red depths.

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The shuttle bus screeches to a halt as the breaks engage, and I stumble unexpectedly bumping into the chest of the rider next to me. He barely glances down, clearing his throat and pushing my shoulder to unconsciously keep me steady. It’s standing room only, packed with bodies all leaning against the walls or braced from the grab handles hanging from the roof.

“Sorry,” I mutter.

“No worries,” the stranger grunts back.

I swing back the other way as the bus accelerates again after turning the tight corner.

Everett watches across the aisle, the thoughts in his cobalt blue eyes masked by tinted safety glasses. A quick stop at Obsidian Security outside the train station, he barely needed to show one of those Aquila business cards and we were ushered out back and provided with a change of clothes and a place to leave out luggage, Regina’s bag now with us. Overalls, banded in high visibility yellow and reflective silver stripes, stained with red dust and washed so many times the fabric has softened and pilled. A hard hat and safety glasses too, and gloves that I copied Everett and clipped to my belt with my ID.

“Stay still, my symbiont is about to climb on you,” whispers Everett’s words in my ear through the buzzing wings of the Vespa as he turns away to look out the window.

His Chromatopelma had been working its way carefully on the bodies through the bus, cautiously stepping from one to another seeking a free ID badge or city-monitor to skim. After finding suitable targets it had returned and glowed over Everett’s credentials before slowly picking its way through the crowd to me. Even with his warning, I can barely feel as its legs grab onto my heavy overalls and it climbs to my waist, settling to work on my ID badge. Checking the direction Everett is looking first, I swap the hands I’m gripping the handles overhead with to lower my currently blank city-monitor down near my waist, hooking two fingers into the belt loop of my overalls. Pooka is tucked into my collar as some kind of Mus.

There are no other symbionts on the bus with us. I know where they all are.

Beyond, in the wasteland of stacked rock waiting to be loaded on ships at the port, the symbionts labor. Huge, pondering Loxodonta shuffle from task to task, pushing sleighs of material with their massive black tusks and batting their leathery ears back and forth under the light of a distant sun. A few humans walk with them, waving arms to each other and coordinating the movement of material from one of the rock piles not being serviced by the conveyor system. Between them, other smaller symbionts support, all large vertebrates suited to manual labor and some even with their host’s riding them.

Beyond the rocks I can see further than I’ve ever seen in my life - there are no towering city buildings here, the distance dissolving into the red and yellow haze of the air. The human places have changed so much since I last walked them…

You have memories of before me?

Pooka cleans his nose on my shoulder with his small cupped paws, tiny eyes glowing like flame. I have walked many times, lived many lives. Each time I come back, I only find more to hate.

If you hate it so much, why stay? Why not flow and kill and bite like you claim? Why wait for me? Why need my permission?

Because what purpose would it serve except to sate my own thirsts? The ground would barely begin to moisten with their blood before you are severed as my root, and I will return to the dark and hollow. Achieving futile nothing but reassurance we still live. I know you thirst too. We must bide our time, grow in the dark and spread our roots deep.

I turn in my hand the pen the man I had bumped into had in his pocket. It has a company logo on its white body. I slip it into the pocket on the chest of my overalls. Beyond, one of the Loxodonta the bus passes snorts up a cloud of red dust as it takes thundering steps in the opposite direction.

“Heads up, this is our stop,” says Adrian. Everett stiffens in a way that tells me he got the same message. We disembark to turnstiles leading to a small fenced community of demountable buildings - lockers, changing rooms, bedrooms, offices. A great mess hall between it all, so no one has to go too far for their breaks. A labor camp among the hills of mined ore. As I step out, the gentle wind blows red dust into my face, and I catch a salty smell like pickle brine in the air.

Everett disembarks behind me, coughing and looking disgusted at the dust. As we stand in line for the turnstiles, he nudges me with one elbow and holds his hand open.

“What?” I hiss.

“Give it to me.”

“Give what?”

He raises an eyebrow, rolling his jaw with a patience that seems very close to being at its end. I slap the pen from my pocket into his open fingers and cross my arms.

“You ever think this sort of thing isn’t hurting the person you hope it is?”

“I’m not stupid,” I reply testily.

“Then why do it?”

I don’t know him near well enough to give him that sort of explanation. What does he know of any of it? Son of the co-owner, he’s almost a free-man, let alone loaded with enough assets to afford private cabins on mummy’s dime. I’d nick his pen if I could. If I didn’t get the sense he’d break my wrist if he caught me.

When we swipe through the turnstiles, neither of our badges raises any alarm.

“Right, looks like the toilet blocks are over there. You search the women’s, I’ll take the men’s,” he says in my ear through the Vespa, lips unmoving.

I enter the toilet block as requested, glancing at a camera turned towards the sinks, and shut the door to the first stall. Pooka swells into the shape of an Aquila again and perches himself at the top of the stall. The tank of the first toilet is clear, so I slip into the second. At the sound of footsteps my heart jumps and I slowly lower the lid and sit on the seat, holding my breath as I wait. When I hear the sinks turn off and the intruder exit, I slowly pivot and wedge open the tank on the second. Also clear. At the end of it, all twelve stalls are empty.

“Where’s Everett?” I whisper quietly, hoping I’m loud enough for Adrian to hear.

There’s a long pause, then a single word “Mess,” his voice is distracted like he’s only half listening to us.

“Did he get it?” I ask, “I’m all empty.”

Everett’s voice returns this time in the Vespa’s hum, “No. Get out here, meet me in the mess.”

I sit on the toilet seat for a moment longer, calming my racing nerves. Then flush it behind me and wash my hands pointlessly at the sink. I’m surprised when the water washes cloudy pink from the red dust that’s already settled on my skin.

When I look up, it’s not the face I remember seeing last time I looked in a mirror. Strands of my grey streaked hair hang limply under my hard hat, my face is already covered with a fine red dust everywhere except for where I was wearing the safety glasses. Bags hang under my eyes, a product of my fitful rest pre-manifestation and my almost complete lack of sleep in the holding cell that was my last night at Murasaki.

Pooka perches on the stall wall above me, his head hunched between his wings and eyes glowing. His talons click against the plastic walls as he shifts position to look at me back through the mirror.

The blood shot streaks in our eyes make us look half feral creature, half tormented ghost.