Page 14 of Spelunking Through Hell

In the infirmary of Naga’s estate, being skinned alive, again, by people who are very, very good at their jobs

Eventually, of course,the screaming stopped. There’s only so much pain the mind can process before it starts shutting things down, and while the liquid I hung suspended in was designed to keep me from slipping into shock and dying from the sheer intensity of it all, it was impossible for them to deaden my nerves enough to keep the removal of my skin from being the worst thing I had ever experienced. It didn’t matter how many times they put me through it, either. Every single time was the worst time. Cut shallow, cut deep, that didn’t matter once the knives were tracing along my body, as intimate as a lover’s hands, touching me in ways I had never allowed anyone to touch me, not since Thomas disappeared. And he hadnevertouched me like this, not even when he’d needed to patch me up.

They flensed me one inch at a time, and I was awake and aware for the entire process, unable to lose consciousness thanks to the drugs in the nutrient bath around me, unable to even find that much peace. Bit by bit, they cut me away, leaving my face, as always, for last, so that my eyes could stay shut until they ran their knives along the inside of my cheeks to sever skin from muscle and peeled it away, taking my eyelids in the process.

They appeared above me, three smaller members of Naga’s species looking dispassionately down at me, all covered in blood to their elbows. One of them was holding a pale, boneless thing I knew I wouldrecognize if I looked for too long, and so I didn’t look. My exposed nerves were on fire.

Another of the medics produced a small ivory jar, and only the fact that I had screamed myself raw stopped me from demanding it right now. She opened the jar and sprinkled its contents, a pale ocher powder, into the liquid around me, and finally, mercifully, I lost consciousness. The pain went with it and was the greatest kindness I had ever experienced.

It always was. Every single time.

I woke up naked, dry, and stretched out on that same metal table I had been placed on when Naga first brought me here. Nothing hurt. I lifted my right arm and held it up so I could see, and was greeted by the sight of smooth, unmarked skin. No tattoos, no scars, not even a single freckle. I’d asked Naga once, why they couldn’t give me painkillers; why they had to knock me out when they finished skinning me, and not before. He’d replied that it had something to do with the skin itself. If they wanted the procedure to function correctly, my nerve endings had to be active during the removal, and reasonably quiescent while my skin was regrown.

It didn’t exactly make sense to me, but it had been working thus far, and it was keeping me moving, which was the important part. Maybe it would have been better if I could have understood what was being done to me. Probably not. I’d still have to go through the process, which cut away all the damage I’d done to myself since the last time I’d been skinned, doing it in a way that went all the way down to my bones—hence why I kept getting de-aged every time I went through it. It cut away distance and time in one fell swoop, leaving me purified.

Best of all, once it was over, nothing hurt. No old aches, no unexplained sore spots. I got a clean slate every single time. And maybe that made up for the fact that it was literally torture and was slowly driving me out of my mind. I didn’t really know, and I absolutely didn’t have another option.

I sat up on the table, swinging my legs around so my feet were pointed at the floor, and stood. Naga and his people trusted me; all the surgical equipment was still here, and if I’d finally snapped, I could easily have outfitted myself for a fight. Instead, I ignored the trays of shining knives and scalpels, shivering a little as I remembered what those same instruments had felt like slicing through my skin, andcrossed the room to where a robe was hanging on the hook next to the door, waiting for me.

Naga was always thoughtful like that. It had taken a few years for him to figure out where the soft, squishy aspects of my mammalian biology came into play, and then he had started arranging things for my comfort as much as possible. Robes in any room where I might be expected to be naked, for whatever reason. Fruit in the kitchen, along with pre-killed meat of indeterminate origin that I could cook, rather than needing to slaughter my own lunches. Pillows for me to sit on. Little things, designed to make me feel like I was a valued member of his household, and not just the equivalent of a tailypo moving in and making myself at home.

(And if some of those “little things” were horribly reminiscent of the ways Thomas had adapted his home to the tailypo before I moved in, the sort of kindnesses you showed a pet, not a guest, there were worse fates in this world than being someone’s beloved pet. At least Naga took care of me. It was nice to have someone who was willing to do that, even if the methods they chose weren’t precisely the kind a human would have used.)

The robe, which was made of some relatively smooth flannel, was nevertheless soft enough to be momentarily distracting when I put it on. I paused, taking a deep breath as I processed the sensation and pushed it to the back of my mind. This was a natural side effect of what I’d just done to myself. My new skin was an adult’s skin in terms of toughness and appearance, but it was also brand new, and everything it experienced was a surprise.

Which just made what had to happen next all the more unpleasant. I sighed and pushed the door open.

The hallway was empty. It always was. No one was ever there when I woke up; they hadn’t been since the first time, when I’d opened my eyes to find Naga looming over me, stroking my hair and hissing soft words under his breath, like some sort of impossible serpentine fairy godmother. (The storybook kind, not the kind we set traps for.) I’d blinked up at him, still half-drunk on endorphins, the ghosts of pain still echoing in my nervous system.

“I’m sorry,” he’d said to me. “I wish there were some other way. But this will help.”

And it had helped, then and every other time. It had kept me going long past the point where I should have been broken by the things I’d been through, the things I’d experienced, and if it hurt, maybe that was a good thing, too, because it kept me from getting careless. Apainless rejuvenation would just have encouraged me to take more risks than I had to, to do things like that stunt with the crawdad on a more regular basis. This way...

We only did it when I’d been injured enough to make it necessary. Sometimes I could run through more than thirty crossing charms before it was necessary to skin me. And sure, it was necessary often enough that it had probably happened a hundred times by now, if not more, but it could have been so much worse.

Holding my robe shut, I walked down the hall toward the door at the end. I could hear buzzing and rattling from behind it. The tattoo parlor wasn’t always active before I went in for a session, but it was always active after, and I assumed it was because Naga called the artists and asked them to be ready for me. There were four of them present when I stepped into the room: two members of Naga’s species, one vaguely feline humanoid with close-cropped fur and a small, jutting muzzle, and a Johrlac.

I offered all four a polite nod as I closed the door and shrugged out of my robe, hanging it on the hook next to the door, placement identical to the one in the surgical suite. I’d tried asking them, a few times, whether I was their only client. Surely this whole system couldn’t exist solely to benefit me. It had all come together too quickly for that. None of them had ever answered.

The lamia artists changed every decade or so as they grew too large to use the equipment and were replaced by their own apprentices. The feline was new, having shown up within the last seven years, replacing a very sweet sylph who had been willing to sneak me sips of water between sessions. I’d liked him. It would have been nice to try and chat with him again, now that he no longer worked for Naga and might be willing to talk to me with more candor. Not that I thought Naga was lying to me. It was just... hard.

I’ve never had the easiest time making friends. I was the school weirdo in Buckley, the librarian’s daughter who always had blood in her hair and mud on her clothes, who cared more about bullets and books than boys. Then I married the town foreigner, a recluse who hadn’t left his house in years, and became part of the landscape.

Marrying a man who literally couldn’t go outside hadn’t done much for my social life. Oh, we’d been happy, but I hadn’t exactly built myself what you’d call a wide social network. My whole family was dead, apart from Thomas; and somehow, only Mary had decided to stick around after her body went into the ground. And then there’d been the babies, and I’d loved the babies, but they weren’t exactlyconversationalists. Outside of Laura’s occasional visits and my own work at the library, I’d been almost as isolated as Thomas was.

And I’d never minded. I want to be absolutely clear about that. I was never a social butterfly, and so it doesn’t bother me as much as it probably should. My choices and my nature made me a relatively isolated person, and I do okay with that. The friendships I do have are scattered across half a dozen dimensions—Bon, back on Earth, Naga, here in his own estate, Helen in Ithaca—and none of them travel with me as easily as I wish they could.

Still, it would have been nice to have someone to talk to while all this was going on. Someone apart from Lybie, who watched my approach with cool blue eyes, as serene as any Johrlac born of Johrlar.

Not many of them choose to leave their home dimension and still carry that name. For Johrlac, the risk of drifting too far from the communal dreams of their hive mind is too great, and mostly we see their exiles, the ones who carry the name “cuckoo” and aren’t allowed to return home, no matter what.

The chair had been adjusted to fit my measurements so precisely that it barely felt like I was sitting down—more like I was floating. As always, we’d do my front first, and then, after kitty-cat wiped away the bruises and swelling, we’d flip me over and do my back.

“May I enter?” asked Lybie, voice level and measured, as Johrlac almost always were. They don’t do big emotions when they’re around other people. They don’t think we deserve them.

“You may,” I said, only somewhat grudgingly.

She leaned forward to rest her fingertips on my temples. Any skin contact would work—proximity to the brain doesn’t matter—but since I had thus far refused to allow any tattoos above the neck, my head was a safe place for her to anchor herself. The soft hum of active telepathy became an overlay on my thoughts, all the more noticeable because it was foreign. Foreign things shouldn’t be inside my head.

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