Chapter 5

Mara

Could he at least pretend to be sorry?

To be fair, he'd drawn exactly the conclusion I wanted. Anybody who saw that many thread vipers disappearing under my skin would assume I'd bargained for an aberrant's power and had precious little time left to enjoy it. I barely understood my primary identity myself. I certainly wasn't about to explain it in a hallway full of cameras.

Caesar practically beamed. “Annie. Annie, look!”

The woman examining Two-Fifty-Six rolled her eyes and got on the comm. “Dr. Shaw? It's over. We've got subject 256 in sector 2-26. Ms. Arkwright's here, too. We're going to need you down here.”

She cut the connection. “Captain. The commander will be back soon.”

Even a Vanguard soldier who couldn't stand me knew what I meant to River. The least her boss could do was rearrange his face. Caesar waved her off, finished his laugh, and finally crouched beside me. I'd leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes. With so much of the dead man's blood all over me, good luck telling how badly I was hurt. Who'd credit an old-stock girl with bringing down a Devourer, even one with a low-threat symbiont? He'd been on his last legs when I found him. Luck would explain the rest.

A hand waved in front of my face. “Still with us, sis?”

I opened my eyes. “Don't call me that.”

I was too tired to soften it. For a beat he just looked at me.

“Okay, okay. Touchy. Here I was trying to be nice.”

Annie's eyes went to the ceiling. I could practically hear her begging him to make an effort. I thought she had it backward. Caesar let you see exactly how much he hated you, but what he actually did was always just this side of the line. In the original story nobody had suspected him. Even River hadn't seen him coming.

I stood up on my own. Nothing hurt anymore.

“Are you badly injured?” Annie asked after a moment. “Do you need a hand?”

“I'll be fine. I'm going to the exam room.”

That was where Ellis worked. Whatever the vipers called a repair, what they'd actually done was turn themselves into tissue and take the place of whatever was missing. Take them away and the wounds would still be there. The man in front of me was proof enough of that.

The sight of him from this angle turned my stomach. I looked away and held very still until the urge to vomit passed. This was my first time seeing what a blade in my hand could do to someone. If I wanted to live here, I'd have to be able to face the sight again. At least now I had something to keep me alive besides other people's willingness to look after me.

June Shaw

By the time I got there with my team, Mara was gone. Two-Fifty-Six's lower legs lay on the far side of the emergency door, severed at the knees. The cut in his neck was what had killed him. Odd, considering the regenerative ability of the organism he'd been carrying. That wound shouldn't have looked like that.

I took a closer look. There was residue on the severed limbs behind the glass. Apart from that, he was clean.

“Where's the thing that was inside him?” I asked Caesar.

“Oh, that.” He leaned back against the wall. “Moved into Mara.”

“What?”

My people stopped picking up specimen fragments and turned to look at him. Annie had said Mara was here. I looked up and down the corridor again. “Are you telling me she's a Devourer?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Where is she?”

“Went to see that prick in the exam room.”

“So she's hurt, too?” I pointed a finger straight at his nose. “You let her walk over there by herself? Have you lost your mind? You know how unstable a new Devourer can be. And of all the people this could've happened to—”

The faces around me had gone white.

“When's the commander coming back?” somebody asked.

“Today.”

Mara

I made it most of the way to the exam room without meeting a soul. The red alert was still in effect. Everybody was probably downstairs under the lobby. Fine by me. There was no easy way to explain the state of my clothes.

My communicator rang. Video call from River. I looked down at myself and hit decline.

In the middle of something. I'll get back to you.

I turned the communicator over in my hand. It looked a lot like a phone. You just couldn't go online with it. Haven, the great ark on land, was the only place in Cities of Ash with the kind of network coverage that let you browse like people had before the Fall. Elsewhere you could make calls within the four-shelter network. The little outlying refuges didn't even have that.

That was how I'd guessed River was making another deal with Central. The big shelters were rivals. None of the other three was about to let a competing commander stroll in, and he couldn't have called from one of the little ones. That left Haven.

He didn't text back. I quickened my step.

The exam room was outside the affected sectors. I cleared the scan, the door slid open, and there was Ellis, catching a nap while the rest of the building went to hell.

“What is it this time? Just so we're clear, I've got one use left this week and—”

He opened his eyes properly.

There wasn't a clean spot on me. Hair, clothes, skin, all of it stiff with half-dried blood.

“It's not mine,” I said automatically.

“Wait.” His voice shook. I hadn't even taken a step toward him. “Would you consider washing up first? Perhaps a change of clothes?”

Was this man for real? I'd seen him button himself up to the chin and scrub his hands raw after taking off his gloves. How he'd managed to keep that habit going through the apocalypse was a mystery for the ages.

I called the thread vipers away from my wounds. The pain came straight back. I winced, raised one wet hand and let him get a good look.

“But now I am bleeding.”

For two whole seconds he stood there fighting what appeared to be the great moral battle of his life. Then he came over, peeled off one glove and took my hand between finger and thumb as if he were picking something out of a drain.

“How did you do this?”

“Does it matter?”

He gave that exactly as much answer as it deserved. After a moment with his fingers on mine, he said, “You've got serious internal injuries.”

That first impact with the wall. It had been a lot to ask of a body that bruised just from being outside. “Can you put me back together?”

“I can try. Is your will up to date?”

I gave him a lovely smile.

Neither of us spoke after that. He went to work. As the wounds closed, the color went out of his face. I doubted he'd ever had to put this much of me back together before. The Mara he knew had rarely even left her room for fear of hurting herself.

It took several long minutes. I'd been ready to have the vipers hold some of the damage together between treatments if he couldn't manage it all in one go. As it turned out, he got nearly everything.

“Thank you.”

Ellis got up, walked to the sink with an absolutely blank expression and washed his hands with meticulous care. He dried them. He put on his gloves.

Then he hit the floor.

Oh.

Overuse, if I remembered my game mechanics. He'd come around with rest. Some stamina on him. Still, it was my fault, and I did consider helping him onto the couch in the back room. Then I looked at my clothes. If he woke up to find out I'd carried him in these, he might never recover.

I found him a blanket. It seemed the kinder thing.

Back in my room I got a call from the research wing.

“Ms. Arkwright? June Shaw. How are you feeling?” She dispensed with the pleasantries pretty quickly. “Caesar told me what happened. We need to examine you. There's also quite a bit you should know about Devourers. I'll come get you in a little while and take you into the research wing.”

I thought it over. “Sure. I can do that.”

I stripped off my clothes and got in the shower. Once the water was running I finally had a moment to think through the changes on my display.

First and easily most important, the Summoner. Half the point of Cities of Ash was the aberrants. I'd seen more Ascendant powers in the beta than I could name, and not one of them worked on those creatures. A live specimen was worth money. So was information about one. Central held the strongest hand in the world and was still sending people out to buy both. I didn't want to find out what they'd pay for somebody who could make an aberrant do what she told it.

The public release back home had added Devourers. From everything I'd heard, these were ordinary people who couldn't awaken a power of their own. They made a deal with an aberrant and died young. Every last one. If people wanted to put me in that category, I could live with it. It explained what they'd seen, and it spared me a whole lot of other questions.

Then there was my second identity. Player. Spectator. An ability that switched on when the conditions of a scene were right. A player could be controlling one character and still watch the action from the outside. If I shared a scene with people who'd had dialogue in the game, did that mean I could hear their lines wherever they stood? It would explain the two conversations I'd overheard.

It also accounted for the window onto the game forum in my old world.

I'd saved one visit. I brought up my display, selected it, and for the second time since waking up here, I opened the players' forum.