Chapter 4

Pain went through me so hard I thought every bone in my body had cracked.

D?

The Fall had driven plants almost to extinction and wiped out whole species of animals. Aberrants had moved into the gaps and formed a whole ecology of their own. I knew what the low end of that scale looked like. D was where you'd put a harmless beetle or a little animal you could shoo off your porch. Who the hell had put a shape-shifting boa constrictor in the same bracket?

My teeth still rattled from the impact as I tried to place the creature. This encounter hadn't been in the game. Either I'd come in before the opening scene or I was already in the revised storyline.

The voices came back, so many of them, shockingly clear this time.

Kill. Kill. Kill. You have to kill—

I grabbed a handful of the thing around my waist and sawed at it with the scalpel. The blade went halfway through. What fell off scattered like shavings, then came apart on the floor. Each shaving was a filament almost too fine to see, and they were still writhing like worms cut in half.

Two-Fifty-Six reeled the rest back. The voices went with it. I turned and ran.

Had they meant him? Had they meant me? All those voices on top of each other, and I couldn't even tell which of us they were talking to.

I could still see the bright little D above him. I thought of the moving filaments on the floor. The aberrant in Two-Fifty-Six isn't just one—

One animal. There wasn't just one animal in him.

Wolves hunted in packs. So did hyenas. All sorts of creatures worked together to get at things too big for one of them to take down. Something with an A for intelligence could surely figure that out. There must have been immense numbers of them to make something that size, and they could change the shape they made.

But June hadn't known. The researchers hadn't even been able to establish what the thing could do. Why had the vipers kept that from them?

My own text still hung there. Absorb one aberrant to activate. There was a way out of the life this game had planned for me, if only I knew what absorb meant. Kill one? Hurt one badly enough? I'd probably killed dozens with that one cut. Did I have to separate them from the host first? Kill him?

Whatever he looked like, he'd been a person. I'd come from a world with laws about taking a knife to another human being, and a few days here hadn't undone twenty years of living by them. Though judging by the speed with which he was coming up behind me, it wasn't his imminent death I ought to be worrying about.

He crawled along the ceiling, shedding little patches of white over every camera he passed. His idea, or theirs? Either way the Vanguard wouldn't be able to track him. I must have looked like easy prey. My legs had apparently never seen a day's exercise and the impact with the wall had left a taste of blood at the back of my throat. I didn't want to know what was hurt. I just ran, and I wasn't going to outrun him for long.

But I'd spent days learning this floor. As I stumbled across the boundary into the next sector I hit the emergency button beside the door. The system recognized me.

The bulletproof glass dropped like a guillotine. Two-Fifty-Six hadn't quite pulled his legs through. The panel sheared them off, tendrils and all.

His scream rang down the hall. Blood ran in sheets down the glass. He dropped from the ceiling. For a second even I stood there staring. Good thing I'd learned where that button was. I hadn't counted on what the door could do.

White threads swarmed over the stumps. Flesh pushed out between them. In seconds he had the beginnings of two new legs.

So that was what they'd meant by regeneration.

I lunged for his heart with the scalpel. My pulse hammered in my ears. Funny how quickly twenty years of civilized behavior went out the window when the man you were trying to kill started growing his legs back.

A tentacle caught me before the knife landed, then unraveled and streamed back to him. Maybe he needed the bodies for his legs. He got up on the unfinished things, reached out with his own hand and closed it around my throat.

I couldn't get air. My face burned. I drove my foot into his unprotected crotch as hard as I could.

Whatever had happened to his mind, the nerves down there still worked. He faltered. I buried the scalpel in his carotid and pulled the blade toward me as hard as I could. I didn't want to leave a neat puncture that could close behind the blade. I felt it cut through flesh and gristle all the way into my fingertips.

Blood sprayed the walls. It hit my face. His hand opened and I landed on my ass.

He leaned against the wall, clutching his throat. A wet rasp came out of him. Every thread in reach rushed to mend the cut. Even the cameras cleared. Pink fronds waved from the torn edges of his neck.

I had blood in one eye. Everything on that side was red. I sat there getting my breath back, calmer than I'd ever been in my life.

You can't help him. Come over here. I shaped the words with my mouth. I didn't make a sound.

Look up. The cameras can see you. The exits are sealed. How long do you think you have before the Vanguard gets here?

Two-Fifty-Six stared. The fronds at his throat went still.

His body is done. Say you close the wound. Say you eat what's left and take him over. How are you getting out of this building? Come to me. I know you're all here. If you die here, your whole species dies with you.

There it was, the one explanation I'd come up with that made any sense. Three days in a lab and the researchers had only just realized they had a colony on their hands. The vipers had deliberately kept it from them. Why bother? They'd already been caught. But if this man carried every last one of them, that gave them an excellent reason to hide what they were and a better one to drag a dying host through a lab full of armed guards.

Whatever bargain made a Devourer, I suspected the final payment was your body. Maybe even your soul. Caesar hadn't exactly taken me through the fine print. What I did know was that intelligent creatures were capable of caring what happened to their own. They'd reached out to me. And just now, with that tentacle already around me, they'd let go.

Little white heads poked out of the gash. As they pushed through, the wound opened wider.

“You're… crazy,” Two-Fifty-Six got out.

Bodily damage · 99.9%

Bodily damage · 100%

He stopped breathing. The thread vipers poured out of him like a tide going out. When they were gone there were holes all over him. The legs they'd given him were gone, too.

Devourer killed.

Thread vipers killed × 14,982.

You are eligible to absorb the aberrant species Thread Viper. Absorb and activate primary identity?

Fourteen thousand? The kills from our fight must only have registered once the host died. I held out my hand. Given leave, the threads scrambled over one another to reach me and slipped in under my skin.

Primary identity activated.

Summoner · Level 1. Designation may change upon advancement.

Level 1 ability · Tame and command aberrants by critically injuring them or obtaining their willing submission. Outside assistance prohibited.

Field guide entry 001 · Thread Viper. Individual filaments combine to form a serpent.

Overall rank · C (threat and intelligence combined).

Ability · Can assume the form of any substance or living thing.

The Player line flickered.

Access to the higher world (forum) is available. Open now?

I hadn't the energy to take in another thing. I thought no. Two small messages appeared, Acknowledged and Access saved, then went away.

Inside me the thread vipers struck up a chant. Thousands of voices in perfect time.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Our sovereign! Our sovereign! Lead us to glory and the dawn! Lead us to glory and the dawn! Lead us to glory and the dawn!

My head was about to split. “Shut up.”

Blessed silence.

Only then did the pain catch up with me, and the fear with it. My right hand shook so badly around the knife that I had to pin it down with my left. I looked at what was left of the man against the wall. Don't hold it against me. I wanted to live, too.

When my hands steadied I put the scalpel away and took stock. Something inside me was bleeding. The scrapes on my skin wouldn't stop oozing, either. I felt the vipers moving under the surface, fitting themselves over the damaged places, closing the cuts and plugging whatever I'd torn inside.

Boots approached. A woman in combat gear came around the corner. Her eyes went wide. She stopped dead.

“Captain! Get over here!”

The last of the vipers were still piling in under my skin. Little knots of new flesh squirmed over the wounds. Caesar rounded the corner in time to get a good look at all of it. His eyebrows went up. His surprise lasted less than a second before he broke into a grin of pure, delighted malice.

“Ha! You're screwed now, sis. You're a Devourer!”