Page 84 of Odder Still
My parasite tucks itself into my subconscious, coiling so small that the exhaustion I hadn’t even realized it’s been pressing to the side for me slinks back in waves. I don’t push through the fatigue—I can’t, its bulk too endless and annihilating for one person to conquer—but I fit it into my fury. Tired and disheartened, I can still choose not to give up on us. I can choose one last hope.
“If you pull it out, it won’t latch for you!” I shout. “The auroras are intelligent creatures, like humans and selkies, and you’ve trapped them and cut them apart for your own gain. Even if you remove it, it won’t bow to you.Wewon’t bow.”
In the silence, I can almost hear Raghnaid’s stare. “Then I’ll tear you both apart and find a use for your scraps.”
My parasite whimpers, and I can do nothing but hold to it.
The scientists scurry around the table with their machines. Lachlan dances through the fray, setting up tubes and bags. When he tightens a band around my arm and pokes an eruptstone-tipped needle into the crook of it, my parasite tries to close around the insertion, but the eruptstone seems to fight it right back. The liquid that runs into the nearest bag shines so brightly with those rainbow-radiating, too-white shimmers that I can barely see the red beneath. Raghnaid watches from a distance, but I feel her presence more strongly than the frantic beat of my own heart or the cold metal against my stiff back.
Our panic grows as our blood keeps draining. The machines run through a series of beeps and shifts, one scientist moving and calibrating them at consistent intervals. Time seems too slow and yet too fast, moments or minutes or hours between each bag of blood. A scientist stops to distill one into three shining vials while the rest of their team shut down the machines. The world turns a little hazy at the edges, and a slight rush resounds in the distance, like death is coming for me in the form of a waterfall.
My parasite’s emotions slowly detach from mine as it writhes with a mixture of guilt and growing determination.
‘Was prudent enough not to leave you,’it says, repeating Raghnaid’s earlier words with a mournful twist, before adding a line from Malloch,‘Going to let you live.’
You’re what?I fight to find meaning it the mismatched phrases.
Instead of replying, it stirs. Inch by inch, it pulls itself up, a strand of it slipping free of my arm. Leaving me. Letting me go so my blood will turn red again and they won’t have reason to dissect me. It’s a ridiculous proposal: I could give Raghnaid and Lachlan my parasite on a silver platter, and I doubt they’d send me anywhere besides a watery grave at this point. But the fact that my parasite offers it at all makes me almost laugh and almost cry.
As it pulls itself farther away from me, though, the freed tendril of its body changes. The rainbow of colors deep within its black form flickers out as the velvety surface turns brittle and ashen. It cries, its pain so violent it tears into me.
With every ounce of strength I have, every small piece of control I share over it, I pull it back into me. It shivers, curling through me like a hug. Slowly, the greyed-out slice of its body returns to normal.
You’ll die.
‘Not letting us all die out,’it protests.‘I could save you.’
Don’t.Despite my parasite’s determination, its leaving will change little. But paired with that knowledge is a fiercer, truer reason I object—one I’m almost afraid to admit because it’s too terrible and too beautiful. Instead, I repeat,Don’t you dare.
Like a part of my subconscious, my parasite senses the things I can’t yet say. It warms, all affection and wonder.
Above us, the scientists examine their backlit pictures: our body—ourbodies—cut into slices and viewed straight through, as though my skin and organs have gone translucent around my bones. My parasite’s black gashes curl across my ribs, filling the center of my chest. They work their way down through my stomach and into my gut. From the back of my neck, they weave through my brain, tendrils coiling into one of my eyes.
My chest tightens, but my parasite nudges it open again, flooding me with a rush of calming understanding. It fiddles through my memories, finally selecting Tavish’s words, though it has to mangle them to get its point across:‘Have a bit of… life together.’
I ignore the way it winds within me, clutching my organs, so close to full control, and focus instead on that final word.Together. We are doing this together. And that… that is amazing.
These last few days, I’ve dreaded Tavish’s departure, mourned the betrayals in my past, grieved for the mother torn too soon from my young life, and all the while, my parasite has stayed with me, has moved me from one moment to the next when I couldn’t move myself. Without it, perhaps my life would never have been at risk, would have been easier, simpler, just me and my front porch and a bottle of wine. Just me slowly sinking into myself. Just me dying alone, with no fight left.
The scientists point out parts of the diagram. Places to cut. My parasite bares its teeth at them, sending me another rush of affection.‘Together.’
If one of us dies, we die together. And we die fighting, for us and for the auroras and, a little bit, for a damned drink. My only regret is that I won’t be able to apologize to Tavish. That, and the auroras might all perish and the ignits fail and the mutation infection develop further with people like the Findlays exacerbating everything as they try to take advantage of it.
I curl my fists as the scientists prepare their blades. One of them leans over the table, replacing my full bag of blood with an empty one. It seems to fill slower. Perhaps a symptom of blood loss. Perhaps a sign that it’s time to act.
Because there’s something we’ve skipped over, a piece of knowledge that’s been sitting at the back of my mind since they first bound us to this table. Something I fought so hard against but might be the only solution after all. The little bit of pure me left in my body still recoils from the knowing that there would be no going back from this. If we do it, there will be no scenario where my parasite dies and I do not. No scenario where I breathe, alone, in my own head, ever again. No scenario where the emotions I feel are really mine, where I can trust who I am to be fully and utterly me.
I want more time to think about it, to figure out how I, me, myself, truly feels. Time, the one thing we don’t have.
But before I can pull on my parasite in one final attempt—in the hopes that if we’re stronger together now, that being even more together will make us stronger still—a fresh set of footsteps echoes down the stairs, interspersed by a softer rumble. All eyes turn to the entrance, and the lab goes still, until only my heartbeat remains. My heartbeat, entwined with the rapping of a cane.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
With Teeth and Bureaucracy Bared
But I am more than that sea, more than this situation,
more than the place between grief and desolation.
