Page 93 of Odder Still
Heart open, voice tender,
it’s to you, I surrender.
“YOU CAN’T HAVE HIM.” The demand comes from all parts of me, human and aurora equally, resounding inside and out. Though I am only a single me, I feel half of myself form into a separate physical presence: a person made from shards of glass, a hundred rainbows sparkling in its center.
‘I won’t let him die.’This time, the voice in my mind isn’t built on memories but formed of darkness and warmth and velvet.
No,a gruffer, more human voice replies,neither will I.
With the aurora part of my mind, I reach for the threads crashing into Tavish. I grit my teeth and do my best to yank them out of him. It feels like guiding metal ropes with a pair of magnets, but the effects appear in the natural world almost instantly, silver liquid dripping in rivulets as the mutation strands revert their course. The gashes seal inside him, and the last of the ignation seeps from his wound.
He drags in a gasp, his eyelashes fluttering.
“Tavish?” I fight the urge to shake him or else to grip him tighter. “Tav!” What if I wasn’t fast enough, what if the bestial presence brought by the threads harmed something internal—inside his body or inside his mind? I brush his blood-soaked curls out of his face, leaving a new red smear in their wake, and pray to any and every god in the entire sun-forsaken North that he’ll be whole, be all right, be unharmed by the chaos that nearly took him over. “Please, please, Tav.”
Tavish makes a sound, low and whimpered. “I am here.”
I sob in relief and hold him. The ignation mutants pace, and the radio plays static; endless, haunting static. The white noise surrounds us, bearing down, almost suffocating. It’s broken by a sound that shouldn’t be—by the crack of the ignation cask.
Raghnaid stands before it, one hand plunged into the liquid at its base. She sways as the shimmering liquid seeps into her. Beneath her skin the glaring white and void-black of her aurora fights its last, but she controls it now the way mine had controlled me—the way I had controlled my human.
Fatigue turns my anger into a self-destructive dread. My strength feels flimsy, like the force of ten mugs of coffee after a week without sleep. More energy can only sustain my body as long as my mind can keep up. Mine is bruised, cracked, torn out, and sewn hastily back together.
But what I am—hungover or functional, bark or bite—it doesn’t matter compared to this. This must be stopped. For Tavish, who won his war a hundred times over already. For Maraheem, which a perfectly human Raghnaid already managed to grind beneath her heel. For the aurora inside her. And for me.
Perhaps, for me most of all. Because I care.
I lay Tavish gently onto the floor. His mouth opens, but I press a finger to his lips. Letting go of him feels like twisting back my ribs to yank out my heart and set it in the path of a rampage. But the worst thing I could do for us right now is to hold to him too tightly.
Silent as a ghost, I slip behind the ignation-feasting Raghnaid, so near she should feel my presence, but it seems I’m still made of mist and the in-between things, perhaps now more than ever. I curl my fingers into the iridescent gashes in her neck and use the aurora part of my mind to yank. Raghnaid howls.
Her aurora writhes, trying to coil itself around me—into me, past me, through me—but even with my aid, it only manages to tremble free of Raghnaid’s hold for heartbeats at a time, ripping chaotically in and out of place.
The same way I grabbed at her, Raghnaid grabs back. Her reverberating threads hit mine like a white-hot inferno. When our consciousnesses meet, hers blazes so fast and hard it feels like an explosion has gone off inside me. I curl into myself, forcing my lungs to open and close, but it’s not enough. She flings me away with unnatural force. Her anger spills outward, thrusting them on the mutants around us. They turn toward me with snarls and howls, teeth bared.
Something crashes against the lab.
The building teeters, one side rising as the other lowers. With a terrible grinding, it skids over the edge of the roof it’s perched upon. It catches. The cracked corner bows around its gilded wallpaper. As it comes loose, the trickling leak turns into a violent stream. The lab falls. It drops like a brick into the submersible channel, sinking steadily toward the main gate.
Seawater rushes through the room, carrying the eruptstone-tipped knife past my arm and plunging it toward the yellow ignit. My breath hitches, and panic rushes from me, resonating into the nearest ignation mutant—a small cat. It leaps in front of the weapon before it can collide with the ignit and detonate us all into nothingness. We both flinch as the blade sinks into its side, but it barely seems to notice, the wound turning a bright emerald against blue-grey tabby stripes.
I realize what I’ve done with a pang to the chest.
The lab jolts me out of my mourning when it hits the top of the gate, slotting into the submersible’s water-removal chamber. Supplies bob in the rising flood as it pushes us toward the ceiling. Tavish treads water, one hand on the wall. I snatch his cane and attempt to swim to him.
A blast of radio static tears through the room so loud it seems to burn out the inside of my eardrums for a moment before it fades to a hum.
“People of the lower”—Ivor Reid’s gruff voice crackles in and out, disrupted by shouts and explosions—“we can still win this. I beg every one of you who fought back when you were stepped on and survived through the pain when you couldn’t: Don’t give up. Make us a new Maraheem.”
The air lock opens beneath the lab’s glass floor. We drop into the main gate, skidding against one of the empty submersible platforms and hitting the ground with a deafening crash. The bowed wall tears away. Water shoots up my nose as it pushes us all out of the lab and across the floor of the main gate, through the open entrances to the upper’s central square.
Still clinging to Tavish’s cane, I roll across the square, wet and ragged, and come to a painful stop.
A barricade of tables and chairs and a lopsided cart has been erected in front of the central fountain. Most of its living occupants—and all the soldiers assaulting them—turn from fighters into inebriated fools as the giant ignit rolls to a stop near Tavish’s feet, leaving Tavish and the pulsing yellow the only things between the overwhelmed rebels and Raghnaid. Even the upper-city civilians watching from balconies and street edges seem to relax, goofy grins appearing on the nearest. The few sober people in the room transition from surprise to fear. From the edge of the barricade, Ivor fumbles with a pistol.
Raghnaid is already on her feet. Her wet hair clings to her face, and her aurora-wrought skin glitters. Ignation mutants gather at her back—wolves, walruses, and bear. What was once Jean crouches on her right, and the knife-plunged Not-Blue hisses near her feet. Beyond the massive glass windows behind her, a crown forms of orca, dolphins, sharks, and fish. Raghnaid’s desire vibrates within them all.
I grip Tavish’s cane tighter. If I could get to her, I could end this. But it has to be now. I’m out of energy, and the rest of Maraheem is out of time.
