Take pause, my good knight, in your quest for right! For the rating module has been placed — at the bottom, you see — and all is well in this night! I must bid you a good read and a good fright, for today is Halloween and I am fear’s delight!
“Neurons remember the shape they are in to make a thought,” Rook recites through his dream. Softly, out loud, in a woman’s voice. “Neuronal drift helps tell time, but to fix memories we halt neuronal drift for all affected neurons of Isc, pinning axons and somas to fixed points within the brain. We allow for unfixed neuronal structures to pass by our fixed neuronal structures like a river around a sea of stones.”
Just as limestone quarries grind themselves into decrepitude with the changing groundstone, so too do his joints creak and crack against the morning night. The wire bends under his direction, an and Isc modifier snapping into shape. The sheets warm his legs; where his skin is exposed, freezing night air prevails. Feathers warm his shoulders, but in odd patches: some are bloodfeathers, and there they are hard, brittle. All contrast, all distinction. Focus. Trace the wirework with fingertips, kickstarting the flow back to what he had written stream-of-consciousness.
Rook filters through his vision, dragging the dregs of dreams in his wake. Curiosity, and between eyeblinks falls the weight of Rook’s visual tether, his borrowed occipital lobe — the mirror — into living, and into the next moment Corcus sees for two: map isc unit15 where individual:r=verf as 1:1 where 1=signal (def:nt.1 defas:ankl2,sampleif absen) when mem-15 loc=true and—1
and…
A broken moment like glass cracking, threads snapping within a millisecond through the entirety of the pane — memory, faintly, willingly, of Jasper snapping, crumpling to the ground in the third square, then let go. A habit now made old — torment thyself. A pain made weary, a once-hot lance cooled until it only prodded — firepoker no more.
Relax into a different posture of stiffness. Oiliness of his skin damp on the blankets and soaking the wood of the wall. Allow a brief moment of action: shut and rub aching eyes. Three in the morning — feel out briefly, and the sequences winding through Rook laser-mirror a correction of five-fifteen. Ignore it. Better to hurt and be wrong, right now. When he is hurt, others benefit.
He blinks. Not just to wet his eyes, but because he is weary, because there is a wet-wood heavy exhaustion set deep in his bones, muscles gooey gelatin beneath wired leather-skin, because by blinking he is touching divinity fleetingly, chasingly, corpse-piloted until another wisp-fine thread of rest is all his body can scream for. The motto of hiking made applicable everywhere: Keep walking, because once you stop you won’t be able to get back up.
Blink, eyelids sluggish, tugging low — blow them wide, hold open, tachycardia at the idea of sleep because that for him now holds only uneasy dreams, half-space between reality and mind where one lies paralyzed in that space where nightmares walk. Too many details, too much fuel — he is a forest in dire need of cleansing fire. Choke back a sob that isn’t sorrow and, for a moment, there is that pressure inside, a sliding grasp like an avalanche of breaking promises, of undoing new to return to old routine and harm-to-others-and-self, old safety behaviours: he reaches out and touches the mind-locks that let him transfer memories, transfer thought processes, and for a moment all defenses fall away like gates turned into mist, walls of heaven crashing down so one can fall straight off a cloud and down to torment, and he is grasping that memory-slack and Rook is not awake. Nobody would know - or they would and it would not matter. He wouldn’t know, and it would be so easy and reduce all this pain and—
M. Red shifts beside him and everything softens, fades. New arrangements click back into gear. Nothing happened, and it is an organic loss of memory — he is genuinely and truly not sure what transpired in the last few moments of his mind. A warmth like cotton.
Corcus puts a hand over M. Red’s wing-shoulder, the exact amount of pressure uncertain through M. Red’s grasp of Gravis but the pressure soothing nevertheless. M. Red does not wake — needs the rest — and Corcus’s hand is calm, fingertips spined like cat’s tongue bristles, metacarpal-pads remembering how to groom feathers, tugging at loose ones and doing so. Soothing, an oilpaint-thick cobalt blue sensation that remains in his hand, because his forearm is ember-orange with anxiety paling to white-amber-gold with his torso, a molten inferno immobile. A heaviness pervades, half-melted lead in Corcus’s lungs, and his hand is pulled away by his forearm and he makes the effort now to get up, to breathe under his own power, to pull his mind into working order. Don’t turn on a light, not knowing how close the ceiling is. Can’t pull the database entry without waking Rook — that presence is rock, now, dreaming again. But he? Restless. Numb, calm. Despair on the horizon, if he does not make use of this numen-hour.
Unhook legs from the bedsheets, swing himself upright, twist tailfeathers at an uncomfortable angle in the comforter behind him and plant feet on the ground. The skin that had been warmed by M. Red’s perpetually feverish body now tells him he is cold there, despite being two degrees hotter than the rest of him. He untangles his feathers, levers himself up, takes a step forward with ankle-tendons tight and short, unlong in the absence of morning, and Corcus puts his arms above his head, stretches, susurrus of shoulder-feathers against his ears deafening in the still air.
Is he dizzy, or is he unused to the dark? Or maybe he was poisoned again — mental check: his skin hurts as much as always, a vague achey pulse in the back of his mind like a pulled muscle, only relevant and overbearing when he takes notice. Stiffen, stop, bristle and feel the heat trap inside the scalloping coverts and down creeping under his arms. Shake it out, heavy, exhausted because he —
And he remembers: You will always overworry about something. The subject isn’t the problem, the anxiety is. Give the anxiety something productive to feed on — shove an apple in its mouth or it’ll choose your hands instead. The same logic as before but palatable to the moment, says a memory accessible even with Rook asleep. So he rises from the bed, despite everything telling him not to — telling him to keep examining his hurts and wants and wallow — quiet and languid to the other side of the room, through the Opa barrier that used to be a dividing wall. And sits at the desk, mind buzzing — lack of input, lack of adrenaline, lack of urgency. Thoughts suppressed. He stares.
The theorem looms on the desk, written out on paper and targeted on nothing since ubermorgen to ensure it works, woven with wire since yesterday because it does.
Bits of cut-off discarded metal make the desk sharp, pockmark the soft wood, embedded from leaning atop the scrap to peer at some small piece of a sequence. Clippers, unused, lie wide-mouthed in the corner. Flashes of orange pinprick his vision. A buzzing in the brain, a gnawing anxiety — I am forgetting something. Something important. What is it? — and, with effort, he ignores it, unfinished rune and whatever thought it was generating, placing wirework as part of the landscape, another mess of clutter on the desk—
And the world is peaceful again. Mild struggle inside, wrestling with his calmer self, needing to name the unnamed worry — then an abrupt stillness. Don’t examine it too closely. He’s won. Nothing to do.
He’s been using more of his pre-Rook strategies as of late.
Stretch again, stiff neck and back rocks before the forge, on some expression from Rook’s dreams — follow through with it, the whole series of forms old-memorized with intention: the old chair exercises from physical therapy so he could use his new body properly. Hollow memory there — push it aside, taste nightshade and wine. It wouldn’t do, though, to fill that gap-toothed space, to file that edge into Rook. It is important that it be kept, that he may remember what it feels like when something goes missing and is found again. An experience to live around — like an unruly spider, web full of mosquitoes and flies, thriving ominously above one’s bedframe.
Fluttering anxiety; a glance narrowly curbed to stop before the desk.
Turn off the mind through movement. Fold forwards; over the knees go his torso and head, send the hands around the calves and grasp the ankles at the backs; forward up-and-over go the wings in a parody of child's pose: long and soft and oily, unkempt and broad at the secondaries and not at all like the clean hard length of M. Red’s. Stretch the patagium like a rubber band wrapped around an expanding protractor, wings huge and splayed at his sides in an inverted straddle. Hold there just up until the muscles start relying on joints and ah, a satisfying twang of muscle and bone from leaving the position through a stiffness, a hot joint unrolling, unwinding, ungraceful, and he leans back in the chair, limbs flopping, one arm hitting the chair hard enough to bruise, head thudding heavy onto the headrest bolted there. Eyes lid, briefly, and feel the blackout sway.
Purple blots well in the redblack seiche.
Relax. Let time fall away.
Black. Almost into boredom.
Shove the boredom away. Refocus.
…
An intolerable itch. Let one arm swing loose from the pose long enough to scratch the pit of the wing, fingers digging deep into the feathers of the underside of that stretched-long wing, and among the latest pinfeathers scratch and pull away one thick waxy sheath. But relief is not his — scratching only relieves for a moment, then spawns a thousand stronger, almost painful itches all across the body. The hand moves to scratch more pinheads free. The sensation is maddening, feathers inside alerted, seeking release.
The sound of sheaths clattering to the ground is like rain. New feathers unfurl, damp and new, in the dark.
The hand keeps moving. He wishes it wouldn’t. They’ll all be so maddeningly colourful. His first post-surgical, post-moult reflection a gorgeous sunrise. Secretly, covertly: love the colour. His geneticist did a brilliant job — the hues, the brilliance, the sheen, the contrast: rainbow, wine-red soaking to flowerfield yellow as the fields of home, thick and heavy to greening blue and purple like an aurora on his primaries, bleeding over to join the contrasting navy blue-purple-red oilslick black on the backs of his wings.
The colours are horrible. Hideous — because they attract attention, because they’re a sign of foppishness, because he was allowed the option of choosing them. And because—
And—
A gap in his mind — he is better at recognizing them, has paid closer attention since the ceremony like how one notices subtle nauseas so acutely after a period of sickness — followed closely by delicate pale seafoam between his fingers, froth-bubbles popping on contact with his skin-oils, grime seeping into his nailbeds. The signal to forget — not the instruction, but the fleeting reminiscence that folds over what won’t have been and — and—
His posture is slipping. How long has he been holding this pose? His arms are in the wrong place. Rearrange, and reset the footing. Then feel a soft nudge against his toe, senses alert from the quiet numb dark: bend down and touch the hard, flexible shaft of a shed primary on the floor. Too dark to see colour, even for his mirror-shine eyes, but he can almost smell, long since faded but the memory is strong, the tar-dye smothering the inside like woodburn. Twitch, twist, contract and see flashing glimpses within the furled bloodfeather: lapis-azure, amethyst, deep emerald, strikes of citrine, all with onyx bleeding through on the outer edges — mountains struck gold and strong by the glory of a sunset. Replaced, willingly and intentionally, on the primary shed and unswept on the floor and in the unshed feathers remaining, with a thick gelled black.
The sensation lingers on his foot for moments after he moves it, and he decides abruptly: it’s been long enough. Tug down from the cliff-face of reverie, reel back, bolt-awake and disoriented in everything but space. Only forgetful in mind. Electric, quiet lightning, heart a bloody cogwork, he checks himself over, his other hand scratching at the long sheath of the bloodpin, stiff and subtly warm, covering the closest of his left wing’s primaries, mirroring its twin on the right. His body is cold, energy depleted. Moulting, comes the fuzzy thought.
Check-up complete. He uncurls, sits tall. His back aches fiercely like one large cramp; mornings, he wakes blessedly unaware and numb to the eternal grey-blue pain held there until he remembers that they exist. And now comes the headache from sending himself so far from body: thudding, black and tan and desperate, thoughts pushed to the front of his mind and clawed through like riverrocks underfoot the rage of glacial whitewater.
Blink slowly, more of a closing of the eyes and opening of them again. Body unawares again, a numbness and a floating in space above his skin. Send the pain elsewhere for now. He’ll need it later, though, and roughly, with imprecision and dredge-slow thoughts he works his fingers and thoughts in tandem, spider-spinnerets weaving, instructs the newest of Rook’s sequences, even in sleep, to steal the memory down the coil-wires inaccessible and then to send it back to him after a certain number of perfect repetitions in the blind, dumb memory of the brain-that-isn’t. An imperfect system designed like how his mother — rare memory here, odd hours provoke those — would sometimes write herself messages and send them to one of a string of PO boxes so she’d receive something nice in a month. A system designed off of that, instead of any kind of efficiency.
Exhaustion like flies swarming over cooling skin. Touching himself promotes that effect — specifically the echo of himself, the mirror with extensions that lives within Rook. The false-brain. To do twice as much work thinking, moving, breathing when densely connected to it for any longer than half a second. Why had that taken him so long?
He looks behind him, through the Opa barrier, in reflex.
He had taken it for granted, yesterday, of that ease in mindshift. “I upgraded my language sequence!” he calls over the gale. Without conviction, without focus. More colours in his feathers, further along in the moult; it's one day later, sleepless and having stayed up the night before his departure to make sure the vision sequence on his desk would work. Winds threaten to rip his voice from the air and there’s a click in his mind of a second chemical battery bursting to accommodate the language sequence’s expenditure. The sky is black, oily, like an alcohol fire ready to bloom and burn, and the horizon boils like wolf-fur beset by maggots. “The density of the original sequence was too much. I borrowed instead of making anew, because of the—” the exhaustion gets to him, briefly, and he locks his knees, watches the floor, sways but does not fall, catches back to his words, risk of rambling but the facade must be kept “—the… The— I borrowed their work because if I didn’t I wouldn’t be ready for this internship.”
The group stares at him with reckless fear and that old enemy Distance. He doesn’t care if they are interested; they need to know. It’s unfair. They deserve better. Then there’s a flickering pulse inside and he’s biting down on a wire, clipped metal end scraping a notch inside his beak, and a huge firm hand grabs and presses down on his back. Rain wets his eyes and he fever-shivers.
Something twists behind his right orbital bone. He shouts, “I have a friend. Her name is Dane. She’s working on— on making…” He sways and spreads his wings out in a jolt to keep balance, and the woman in the suit-attire recoils, blanching, pallid skin briefly matching the middle stripe on the blue-white-red flag on her lapel. His skin is soaked in sweat; his feathers are matted, insulating properties gone in the downpour. His sweat reeks of iron.
Keep upright, despite not knowing which way is down.
“I’m not the mage you requested. I know her — she’s my friend,” he continues after the absence. Hopes they don’t realize. Knows they do. Pretends it’s fine, they won’t remember. “She’s — you know her too, but let me say this. She’s working on making sequences that can filter whole oceans and atmospheres. And her sister — I think she was your second choice? I saw the sheet, but she’s undergoing surgery back home right now — she’s working on world replacement — they told me the theory so I could work it for your world. I told them I would, but I’m not doing that. I can’t — it’s… I have—”
Thunderclap. Headache jabbing his temples. Excuse himself with a hand while he looks for the thought that just drifted — missing gap, wait for Rook to sweep the thought back, doesn’t happen. Gaping, drifting — he hasn’t— what’s it called? Hasn’t lost his train of thought in a long time. “It bursts my logic sequences.” Not true. Any mage would be able to tell that, but for them it’s close enough. “Dane—”
Too loud. The wind whistles, roars, he can’t hear himself. Right, Jasper— Jasper had made an air-shield sequence with Opa recently, a trial for one of her skin expansions. Starpower-fuelled. But this one isn’t — it comes with its own battery. Curse, fish inside his pockets, and bring it out — a small wooden block thing engraved deeply with charlines. Drop it on the ground.
It’s like an intestinal bleed, or being gored by a bull. Something inside him is cold, then hot, then gritty and dusty. Feverchill. But the wind vanishes — still so loud, and he stumbles, briefly, not leaning into the wind anymore to keep himself upright.
Refocus. This isn’t about the airshield — just be grateful that it worked, most of Jasper’s stuff having not worked in the past. Try again. Clear the throat. Organize the thoughts — slow, agonizing. Try anyway. Ready.
“This internship isn’t mine; it’s hers.” The VIP looks concerned. Her mouth opens. His ears are ringing. “I’m sorry. They tell us not to say we are sorry. I’m sorry. I—
I was sent instead. Dane and Zaza…” Breathe. “…She can repair the oceans and seas, cleanse your clouds and airs, rebuild your mountains. If I did what they taught me, I could too.” A headache is blooming in the left side of his skull, blotting inkspots into his right eye. He has about ten minutes left until his brain needs a break, probably. “It could be through physical reconstruction, or through just reseeding a world and spinning it into a black hole of my own making, then transporting you and the birds and the fleas and all of your creations there while worldswapping the old with the fresh.”
The VIP says carefully, “Mais qu'est-ce qui se passe, bordel?” and it’s with the tone imported doctors use in the Academy’s Whiteward. The tone that says, You are crazy and I am scared of you. He laughs, then the thought of him laughing when they feel that way about him has him doubling over, coughing and hacking and giggling and occasionally still ha! — it’s, it’s—
A desperate plea makes it through, sent nowhere: Rook. M. Red. Finish it soon. I can’t do this without you.
That thought is enough to make him straighten, reorganize, reset. He takes a deep breath and with the memory of maple trees and a fizzing spark the Opa airshield reasserts. “Ma’am,” he starts, and curses himself for saying that word because all of his professors hate it, says it makes them feel othered “—Sorry. M.,” he starts again, and that’s better, “if the Academy sent the mages you requested, you’d end up with a perfect new world. You’ve made mistakes here. The sisters you wanted refused your request—” reading this from memory, now, eidetic qualities etched into him with his own sequences old and familiar and warm, not used in the same way as he’d done before he had Rook and now he feels four years younger for it “—because, they told me, you’d just Mistake all over again, and all you’d see them as is as a perfect fix. They want to reserve their work for clients with hazardous planets, societies expanding to the stars, nations in need of repair after unavoidable natural disasters, not induced — the sisters—” he can’t stop himself, an elated anger taking hold and he’s reaching for Rook for support and for— but no “—they were angry with your request, M.! They—” choke, try desperately to remember what’s already forgotten “—they hate their home. They watched corruption and politicking destroy the nation they came from, and they know if word gets out that they, the sisters, are an option, corruption won’t even pretend to care about the world that’s being destroyed because they can be called in to reset it, forests regenerated, moss-strewn clifffaces regrown, gold-laced alpine meadows undetonated, fens and bogs redampened and canebrakes replenished — all permanent consequences unpermanenced.” Gasping for air, ears ringing. His VIP’s eyes are in his direction, but lost, confused. The words are reaching her, yes, and their meaning — but here’s the heaviest wave of despair, and know, horribly: telling her this won’t change anything. She might have bad dreams from this, but even those will be outcompeted by everything else in her life.
No consequences. Like when he had just left Recovery — no. Best not to dwell on old failures.
Flicker-pinescent: gravity sequences, automatic to his sense of himself, engages deeper; he’s drifted inch high aerial from where he’d been rolling on the balls of his feet, and he reengages heaviness in at least his skin with an absent gesture long turned into thought long turned into reflex, because skin is the least comfortable organ to have unbuoyed from planet-mass. Antigravity makes him puffy. The group is staring at him like he’s not going to rescue them from another bad situation of their own making. Is he? “I…”
What has he been saying? Twist another wire with a crook of his head, stepping densely on the source so it draws into a spiral. Put it down, and his mouth croaks without needing to clack his beak because he has two sets of vocal cords and the second work like lips, “Black hole sequence engaged.” His eyes look right, meeting M. Red’s, and the wood panelling is warm. His mouth continues, “Are the white holes in place? I don’t know how to make a spear. Do you k—” and he loses connection. His form wobbles before the people he is supposed to save. Save. What a word. His pulse beats an obnoxious drum at his jugular notch. The world blurs again, all grey rain and brown clouds and roaring horizon.
What is he missing? Wind whips the space before his face as he conducts a search of his body.
Barrelling at him is a curved metal slab with hydraulic tube-hinges on one end and glossy paint covering the broader convex side. He barely perceives it in his peripheral vision — in reflex, he flexes a wing and it freezes in place millimeters from the mishmash of colours among the black, and with a shudder and a rolling millisecond later with the space in time like created when one perceives lightning, the screaming sideways raindrops for two meters around his body all boil and turn to steam, resulting in a brief reprieve from the rain. The metal drops to the ground with a dead thump.
He stares at the wood-block airshield. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Embarrassment floods his cheeks. Jasper’s Opa barrier — she said it was supposed to hold, but here it was deteriorating. Letting objects through — he was just glad it still kept the wind out, at least. Opa isn’t his strong suit — he could work with Isc to keep flying objects from colliding with him, but that took incredible amounts of energy and was not sustainable.
He racks his mind. Vaguely, wearily reaches out: wet moss soaked by cherry petals bruised by cold rain. Empty shelves. No Rook. He rocks forward and — gravity? No, that is his knee; lean into and a wall of force hits him and he’s dimly aware of his senses redoubled, beak and warm claws and dry feathers, feeling and watching and feeling again as multiple joints strike the concrete and his skull bounces against the rooftop. Grime flies from the impact, body heavier than it is meant to be, and he is experiencing it a third time, cracking and crunching and a thuk! of bone on stone—
It’s wet and cold and dark, and he’s shedding feathers and itchy and breaking at the seams — Please help me and there’s that feeling of presence again and Rook’s clever and he tastes, faintly, because taste is faster in thought than even words, As fast as we can. Hang in there.
He lies there with galeforce winds suctioning and smacking him down to the rooftop. One of his VIP’s advisors creeps close, shouting something — he watches unwillingly through unmoveable eyes, some Isc sequence jammed. Can’t let them reach me. Nothing bad would happen, but his dignity would be crushed. He levers a hand under himself, scraping raw the side in the effort. Dead weight of his body, default Gravis too heavy and light at the same time. Unused to working his own body — push in a one-armed pushup, use his wing-wrists for stability. Then — freezing cold and then blazing hot at 31 degrees Celsius, too searing for his hypothermic skin, and he is up, miraculously. Wobbling, wavering, and thank goodness the recovery sequences are inside the wing now instead of over it: he takes the idea of a stick, makes a jerking motion with his leg to stabilize his knee to straighten it. It splints.
One leg behind him, the other in front. Make a shelf of stable air with Isc, not Opa — raindrops freeze into spheres in the un-air; lean on it gently. Not too much, because the tug of sleep is wearying and stronger than his desire to live.
That’s what he was missing. Click back into place. One person from the group watching with more knowledge than the rest. VIP looking at a glowing electronic device in their hand, whispering at it. Don’t get too close to that — his sequences would fry it — and take the consent document from his pocket, sodden. What’s the formality again. With a flickering, eggshells-request-pleading thought to Rook that isn’t heard, he simply makes it unsodden with one of the recovery sequences in his left wing’s secondaries, embedded from proven usefulness and rewritten with tweaks for this particular internship stint. He holds out the document, rainproofed with attention on the raindrops above it, and simply says, “Here. I forgot the words.” The language-work burns cold on his forearm — the one with the burn holes, the occasional temperature numbness and perennial debilitating pain. And dimly remember: in advance of cold weather and temperature shifts, he had Jasmine flood his bloodstream and fat reserves with as much long-acting painkiller she knew he could take. Sequences don’t work to block the nerve signals of pain — too complicated, even for him, and it would take at least several months of study and personal work to undo his reliance on pharmaceuticals.
A shiver passes through him. The consent document is signed. At last. Now he knows what to do, and he follows it: brief Isc flash of fruitskin orange, the smell of citrus to activate the modifiers relevant to his conceptualization of space to combine-maximize and a modification-expansion to include everything of the rooftop including the rooftop itself and subtracting everything in his sequences that defines Corcus, and with a crack-snap and faint residual electrical hum when the air has cleared, half of his assignment has successfully been Isc-transferred to their destination safe, tropical, and stormless.
VIP and assistants secured, he calls to Rook-who-isn’t-there. His eyes itch madly — tug away the hand that creeps. Half of his assignment done. The concrete roofless edge he stands on groans. Rain whips his face, and his knee has stopped being numb, pain sneaking past the drugs assaulting his liver.
The hurricane on the horizon is a white noise that blots out all else, even breathing. What was he here to do, again?
Turn back around. Cup head in hand. He sighs — not for the purpose of sighing, but because he hasn’t breathed for a time. It doesn’t bother him that he forgets to breathe — it has been happening more often as of late. That doesn’t bother him either. This sort of thing is bound to happen. Nobody has done this before, to his knowledge, but that’s how it feels. He just needs to take some time to automate the process.
Focus. The ping comes from himself, this time. The sensation of falling petals stuck beneath his feathers, a sense of stickiness — then stir-crazy itchiness, an insane desire to be rid of his skin.
He forces his hands to his sides, sheathes his fingers in calm fists. A different memory must have wound down, must have been interpreted in a new light, must have worked its way out of the storage system in Rook by accident — a fault in the new wirings he had installed in the veining of Rook’s secondaries. He still needs to patch the errors. On instinct, he clasps his hands together just before some impulse jerks his arm, destination set for his feathers and fingers aimed to rip and tear. Unsettling. Disorienting, disembodying. He stares at himself, an outsider in a puppet. Hello, Rook, he calls carefully. A sense of sleepy eyes opening — human, his own, watched by Rook at some point. Take this for me? he asks, because he’s been doing better about asking, lately, and when he receives confirmation he sends the string of wrapping around the memory, too easy to lead himself down and fall under, and it is gone.
The sensation of seafoam bubbling under his fingers.
Rook rustles, clacks his beak like a human smacking their lips. The room is still, the dorm quiet with the sounds of early-rising students waking and trying not to disturb anyone else. Doors creaking, hallways half-echoing with murmured words in sleep-thick voices. He hears it all. And there again is that odd longing.
Several thick gulps and a sharp ring of keratin against metal, vibration dampened with a reflexive touch. Corcus stares down at the water bowl, rim held by an outstretched taloned foot. Careful, comes the sign from Rook. A sense of prodding curiosity, and — Don’t get lost.
You, Corcus says back. M. Red shifts, rolls onto his other side, the creak of sequences bending under skin a gooseflesh sound-memory that Rook and Corcus tennis until it ends up between them, shared. Go back to sleep, Corcus begs quietly, and Rook acquiesces, borrows something from Corcus’s memory-banks, is gone.
Corcus breathes, the sound quiet without another watching. The air is cold in his lungs, thick like he is drowning in dark water. It is five-thirty in the morning, by his updated estimate. The sun isn’t up yet, blessedly, the sky not pinking, but the edges of the horizons are thinking about it. Greying before the explosion of sunlight over the rim of the sea. He rubs his forearm gently, the rubbery smoothness of hairless skin.
Right, the theorem.
He sits back up. Stares at the table. Then focuses, banishes the memory-locks forbidding working memory to long-term when engaging in this article, pushes through the haze of befuddlement like swimming through black silken oil into the clear water below and looks.
The near-complete remains of a theorem lies before him. It’s in better state than he remembered it to be. It just needs the new activation sequence.
That he’d been fiddling with earlier. He sighs again, this time for the sake of sighing. Numb arms, dull lips, absent eyes.
His body slots the sequence into the corner, pauses. It doesn’t look right. Blink, within his body again. Retract the activation sequence.
A thin spiral wrapped in jutting bits like sunlight through leaves: when mem-15 loc=true and—
Translated: when he is thinking of a specific memory — this one being tightness in his chest, black lightning, sensation of squeezing the eyes shut — is the case, and… something. It needs something more, lest he think of that memory on its own and have the sequence fire. This process is normally as easy as breathing — why is it so hard now? Is he losing his touch? Black, empty sensation there, an unbecoming-of-self — older self, gone-self more him than any feeble imitation he is now. He…
Leaves in a stream. Trickle of water, babbling brook, refracted liquid-pebbles, rich green smell of stringy algae. His thoughts drizzle, an onslaught of birch and maple autumn-castoff, overcrowding and clogging the stream. River dam, beg the leaves to push down, stream turns into a river, holdingwater overflowing, trees soaked and dying, river breaking-banks—
Breathe. Dissatisfaction at feeling his pulse in his skull and not his heart. Focus, gently, on the blueness of his fingertips, and produce an awareness of the heating sequences written into his ribs. His body warms immediately — irritation at self-care, power-down of that through awareness of the base of his spine, right at the roots of his tailfeathers by his lower oil-gland. A shivery discomfort and a lack of memory for where the oil-gland came from — a surgery, but which one? There wasn’t an oil gland, and then there was. He’s scheduled for another adjustment, a check-up under sequenced unconsciousness if he can tolerate it or drugged anaesthesia if he cannot, later this week.
A memory of nausea, a taste of menthol. Shudder.
Focus.
He flops on the air like a wet kite in the outflow of the hurricane’s inner windspiral, spearing from hot thermals into near-freezing deluges and back again. Drugdaze heavy and gasping, air sucked from his chest and airbones, wing-sequences erect and jabbing into the shoulderblades of his arms. A shadow passes in the grey haze and he stabs a connection to Rook, and something huge screams towards him like a fighter jet in the storm and a sequence coldbrands his inner thigh and—
Silence. Clear and bright sun, and a quick hum of anti-UV sequences shielding exposed skin and, vitally, tattoos. Corcus takes a gasping breath, finally clear, and relaxes minutely, gliding in the undisturbed air. Beautiful. More Western textbook houses below, and a devastating wake of unrecognizable unhouses past that. Tiny figures moving below — despite the recency of his new eyes, he still tries in new but vain reflex to trigger the sequence to see through them too and receives a jolt of disorientation and rebound when the capsule in his eyebrow doesn’t reunite with the rest of the sequence still on the desk, unimplanted. Connect soon, Rook, he begs to nowhere and nobody. Gutting regret for postponing surgery until after this internship, for serving himself first and not wanting the surgical sites to get infected or stitches to be torn. He knew better — should have…
Should. Should have sacrificed his body, his mind. Should have put the Academy’s wishes first, academic prowess first, body and mind second to everything: should have come in still reeling from surgery and anaesthesia, should have come in with swagger, confidence, and seeing everything from all corners, intracranial hemorrhage from that squanched from some new sequence he would have made so he could keep going long after he should have dropped. Should—
Nothing he can do about it now. The dread looms grey in his chest and he hangs in the air, storm-eye static and crooked, and—
And then he smashes through the other side of the eyewall, crack of a glass chemical battery muffled under the thunder of a thousand other actions of destruction, and he is fast approaching a ridge and sound roars back in: snaps of towering oaks made into lightning-sticks, the overwhelming explosive power of stones clacking into metal snapping, windowpane-glass splintering against roof-tiles like twin bullets meeting—
Power, says Rook from beyond where the globe curves. Permanent connection established. Uncondensed, but workable — permanent solution to transdimensional cutoff acquired,” and Corcus says automatically, Yes, indeed and does not say, It worked! What was the solution? Was it light-faster-than-light, or was it the checkerboard black and white holes idea? How did you break through the dimensions — finally! Was the bubble theory of multiversal communication true, or is this through an invented Way — is it the last-case solution, or middle, or first? Please tell me Yaw was wrong. I’m so glad that you are back because he is quite busy, but Rook sends a rippling wave of warmth that cuts through the biting wind, and Corcus blinks and briefly catches a glimpse of the huge spread of wires on the dormroom floor, a tangled mess looping sunspike Isc with whorls of Opa — M. Red has been taking classes, and is putting the knowledge to use on their mutual least understood rune. And it works.
Corcus mentally thumbs the bead in his eyebrow — considers sparking the vision sequence on the desk at home, too fragile to move and would-ruin-the-point if he brought it along. M. Red doesn’t know about it. Then, decided: too soon to spark it. When he does, it’ll come in sputters — still not complete, but it should hold for a time. Needs to.
He at least wants to try.
He’s been holding back as of late. From Rook, from M. Red. He needs to fix that before it becomes a problem, and at the thought feels from Rook a warmth that heats his bones — No worries. It’s like unpinching a nerve and pins and needles finally leaving, strength returning, or like two days after chemical anaesthesia, when one’s faculties are returning — it’s all so easy now. His exhaustion doesn’t matter — he has his other half back.
Pitch right, says Rook, and it’s only until Rook takes control over Corcus’s lagging limbs and steers him from a bullrushing rooftop, juxtaposed and whole against the detritus in the rainband, that Corcus realizes how glad he is that Rook is here at his least apt.
The raindrops are still falling. The second assignment of his single-purpose internship, type-B placement-for-a-day: stop a hurricane. Energy transference and grounding — genuinely easy, dead-simple. Something a child could do. But on this scale, with compromised mind, drugged to the gills yet still in pain, without preparation, without sleep, without food, without anything but himself, desperately-trying other half occasionally heard, two of five chemical batteries still charged—
No. Now, he has Rook.
He takes out a waterproof tar pen. Scratches thick black lines over M. Red’s blocky blue Eha tattoo over Corcus’s inner right bicep: hefty, dense, touch to Rook for the memory of the precise concept it documents for non-human, non-animal, non-plant, non-massive-body — rain — to be in his mind, a preemptive sequence somewhere on the fabric tape around his thighs illustrating, written just after the arrangement and confirmation meeting with his coordinator — heart pounding, sweat sour, eyes stinging, throwing himself and rebuffed from Rook every two minutes, forgetting and a sun-breadth later finally accepting-coping — that he could work the weather as they wanted.
The raindrops are falling.
Soar sharply up through the stormwall. Corcus’s blood is designed for density, lungs and airbones remade and unscatred to handle upper atmosphere, and an Isc sequence that isn’t his forms an almost-visible face-shield deflecting shards of stone, glass, metal, trees and houseparts — higher, higher. Spark of blue in his armpit. Corcus holds his hands out. Messy. Hates physically linked sequences. Too many things can go wrong.
Arms 90 degrees from his body. Stormclouds growing thin. Accelerate. Adjust the angle of his wings — curve, stiff-holding. Accidental activations, deformations of the physical shell are too easy to break, adjustments necessary. Physical actions become nearly unworkable when holding something, pressed against a wall, running. Jasper and Jasmine both have the habit — theirs are almost uniformly unconscious, or physically activated by stance. It had been M. Red’s suggestion to try it out again, just this once. The first time he’ll have done this since his vow to avoid it after his first cycle graduation, alongside the vow to stay with M. Red as far as the road would allow.
The rain is falling.
It’s the first time he’ll have sparked a sequence from kinetic action in almost four years. He crooks the most distal joints of his ring and index fingers. Breathes in. Cloudbreak.
Eyes linked. Support sequence ported through, says Rook, and the last streaks of cloud tear from his face and—
Rook, he says between one wingbeat and the next, is the sequence on the desk ready?
Maybe. Saffron-flavour: memories, faintly, flickering: failed sequences, visiting mages in the Academy hospital. Antiseptic white doors he couldn’t go through, warnings of rune deactivation. And then Recovery: Professor Yaw’s red-illuminated hand halfway to the elbow, sunken deep inside a student’s chest for a cardiac massage. Then a retraction and pulse of apology — cold rain, heat. This little time apart, and already they are unused to having the both of them. Corcus feels the same.
I need to know how big the storm is. Rook knows this, but perhaps M. Red is listening. The sequence M. Red hasn’t looked over — did Corcus write it properly? He is proving himself, yes, but to whom? What if— but it is too late for second guesses, doubts. The storm is always moving. I never took the Distance exam; it wasn’t available in my first cycle in the first place. Corcus knows this; he’s mostly narrating for his own benefit. I know the desk-sequence, the vision-sequence is not done, but the basics are there. Do you think it’d be able to run on he turns, checks, crick in his spine however many batteries I have remaining? I need more eyes than I have — if I can see the storm, I can smother it. It would work, right?
Unease. It is a good experiment for its functionality. And then: thick, heady power through the connection, bead in Corcus’s eyebrow briefly searing hot and then acclimating to the temperature between-worlds, then the one he is in, and the sequence is connected through Rook, then through Corcus. Running like a relay system. If something goes wrong—
Holding steady. This should work. And then comes the second wingbeat, and Corcus is soaring higher, higher, clouds parting to—
The sun. Brilliant, shining so bright, hurricane making the sky even brighter like the inception of snow blindness. Alien colours — too bright, too many lights, but that is not what matters — look down, and the hurricane is striped and striated like the interior of Corcus’s bicep under Opa bleachlight.
Upwards. Nobody can see him this high up — glimpse within the eye: battening storm hatches, refixing defenses; liferafts and poles, huddling in attics and basements, on rooftops watching through glass lenses the approach of the eyewall heralding reentry into the storm. And outside that—
Blood, injury, a man’s head cleaved in: see that one through especially sharp eyes — probably a child. Broken legs, someone being torn from their balcony by a treebranch that gored them, a person strung by their guts from the broken beam of a felled transmission tower, intestines spooling out like line with a fishing bobber, trailing ends looped and tangled around and remaining guts held violently and gelly-like, wobbling inside like a soft gelatin dessert or too-wet spaghetti noodles or silken tofu ground into ribbons—
He blinks, suddenly nauseous. Careful, comes Rook, and places in him a tiny mental barricade for next time: no violence. Easy to break through, but will let him find that as a checkpoint instead of waltzing straight in. Thanks.
Air thin. Sputtering vision enabled again, switching to the next chemical battery — one broke in the hurricane. Thank goodness it wasn’t the one feeding his gravity sequences.
A huge circular stadium, open at the top. There are so many people below. Thousands. He spies medical beds.
Still flying higher. Pounding blood hot in the base of his wings, cold at the Eha-anchors that steal body heat to refill chemical batteries. He never was one for starpower — it felt too much like cheating.
High enough, says Rook, and Corcus is part of telling the judge-embassy-ambassador at M. Red’s side on the Rela side of their connection, “Ready.”
Turn around. Feel the thread between where he is and eyes, eyes everywhere, eyes inside and on rooftops, eyes in trees and eyes grasping bridges, eyes staring and bobbing almost drowned but not quite, almost dead but not there yet, optic nerve still intact and firing — stormwall coming, he fixes all those locations in mind around the circumference as best he can of the hurricane, switches control over his body so Rook can pilot while he stabilizes those locations, fixes them and tiny Opa lights ping on to establish reference-markers so the rest of him can work; he self-refers to his vision sequences to stabilize their locations relative to his, fixes the markers in mind and—
Claps his hands together.
The hurricane’s death is announced with a thunderclap of silence. Miles all around, that white roar is banished — like a deafening roar, the all-at-once lack. An intolerable sensation.
A wave of perfectly lukewarm mugginess descends in the lack of heat or wind.
Rook is distant, a pale flavour, an erratic pulse. Corcus’s fingers twitch, go still. Some muscular assistance he has barely noticed vanishes and his form becomes weighty, dragging in the air, and he rights himself.
The clouds stop and crystallize and fall, perfectly clear. The wind below, a low dull roar, lies slaughtered where it once howled. The now-desecrated spirals of air show briefly to the borrowed eyes on the ground — the drowned pair are gone, but the intestine-torn ones are still open and running — as mist, thick and pearly white ribbons fully visible and awing.
Vanishing as that, too, falls.
Corcus’s body is overflowing with energy. Something reports from inside: Opa storage reached peak density, and he assesses: chemical batteries broken and unusable, Eha bursts not relieving the buildup, existing sequences not made for handling this large an energy load, made specifically to never unleash so much at once, and unable to dump. He’s made a terrible mistake. He—
Houseparts, treebranches, roadsigns drop from the sky in a litter of missiles. Some of his eyes vanish in smears of red. Others look up: rainbows thicket the clear sky, raindrops smearing like ice spires and plummeting straight down in the windless air. Through those—
—isrupted, comes Rook, and he’s plugging new wires into different ports — ports? That wasn’t part of the plan—
Corcus is plummeting upside-down, wings trailing, other limbs flopping with an absolute lack of muscle, ability, or grace. Because—
Blackberry flavour, nightshade-dizziness. Too much.
His sequences crack and sputter at his sides — frantic, direct, triage now! between heartbeats direct the energy to the collection batteries in his old primaries and split, burst the ends and shafts there instantly with a supermassive heat surge and instantly experience the effects with an obscene rustling and clicking of secondary feather veins smacking against themselves and not taking air. Blast it again, again, and try a fourth time but the sequence has melted and the repetition of the trigger in his mind isn’t Isc-fixed—
Another mistake. Like not doing his vision-sequence-surgery ahead of this internship. Like thinking he could — he’s plummeting too fast, too fast, can’t roll out of it, can’t control his body, between his legs wet and can’t smell it among the dead but screaming air he falls through — shudder, jolt, blackout vision one, two…
…fifteen, it’s back, cloudy and unfocused but back. He’s below where the outflow cloud was — tilt head, he can see the details of the ground. Corcus tries to bring both arms to level height and can’t. Tries to smile but the right side of his face is numb. Okay. Okay. He can deal with that. Triage — energy needs to leave. He can weaken it with supermassive heat surges, given the new feathers and looseness of the old. In his peripheral vision — switch intentionally and see from another’s eyes: clear skies, a plane flying low in olive and brown with a red plus on the tail and a tiny tear-drop shaped speck descending like a bullet, sky backing him oddly transparent without movement smearing air and water across the horizon. It is a flash of shock and fear from Rook, briefly: The objective is already complete. Ground the energy and we are done; you can come home.
Sharp instructions now, textbook pages thick on the tongue: Don’t die. Reorient.
He can’t hear Rook, nor comprehend him. He is staring at the glory of the sun inside himself. He needs— He needs—
Rook. He needs—
Divert power. Heat like a furnace.
Not enough through the Way-window to send the energy inside Corcus; Rook can’t ground for him. But his fingers are holding the tar pen. Corcus carefully relaxes the few muscles still in voluntary use, and Rook in Corcus’s body takes a thick, oily, carefully winding strike across his arm.
A tiny fluttering sensation, and the air breathes.
The hurricane’s implements of agony, the rain still falling as ice, coalesce, fragment, and dissolve into mist-light. Spheres of water suspended in the air splatter his face: gently, his body dives in the way a temple raven does, not like how he prefers. He could take over. He does not. Peace — unknot the chest, unfrozen — feel like a fool: should have worked the recovery sequences earlier — do so now, unwillingly, undeserving of such kindness to himself when there’s still work to be done. Horrifyingly, feel not much difference but then everything as torn neural tissues rebind, as feathers are smoothed and his-Rook’s body lifts in the changing aircurrents, and there is still rain and so with displayed caution and guardedness Corcus passes even that distraction of that freezing water splattering his face into Rook. Rook accepts.
A knot is unwinding in Corcus’s chest. How— so tired. It hits him heavily, so easily.
The problem is not gone. His sequences glimmer with light; his body is overheating, logic sequences written too long ago dumping only just not enough to cook him into his bones, his skin, excess draining wherever it can. Divert some to the Isc air sequences, advises Rook, but it’s not enough. He blinks, feeds a tiny thread of power back into the massive Way-halved sequence-trigger stitched inside, sees himself not diving anymore, now circling far above, rainbow patches showing through the black, impenetrable sequences visible: searing orange-hot on his secondaries, a circle of steam marking his path through the freezing rain.
Recovery bought him time to reorient himself, repair unfixed neural tissue but his body is aching again, bones cooking, marrow melting — sickening, jolting sensation inside him and for a moment, even his nose vanishes, becomes liquid and then light and then a melting buzz before reforming from body-preservation sequences — too much. He had been keeping it under control, but healing himself took — a sequence slips, energy-filled, fires randomly, unevenly — blink. There is a circle drawn on his arm, now, some command to himself finished. Wingbeat. Someone on the ground is holding two halves of a dead dog, organs spilled onto the ground like soft red balloons. Sharp crack where his arm-shoulderblade meets the wing-shoulderblade; move through the grinding bone as it reforms. The senseless rain blurs in expanding steam, and his bones are beginning to soften — Rook holds back the pain for him, but he can smell the sweetness of meat. He is holding 5.2 x 1019 joules, most in his batteries and too much in his wing and body-sequences, the rest overflowing into those hair-wires interlaced inside his brain tissue — too much and he’ll face the consequences later, exhaustion and the suffocation of sleep-need almost drowning him, now compounded. A tiny amount auto-spends itself to an old fibrosis-thickened implant: a barely-remembered unignorable system-failure dead-man’s-switch, and he’s flying with incandescent beads of air-turned-plasma in a halo crowning his skull. One of his oldest sequences, made solely for showing energy expenditure, implanted but never used — plasma goes too wrong too quickly. But here it was.
His mind is dying. His temples have icepicks jammed through them; his spine is a cracked iron rod, his thoughts are numb: endlessly repeat the flavour of the energy, stare straight at it inside him with the overwhelming nature as looking at the Sun two miles away from touching its liquid surface. Sunspots batter his vision — go inside himself, focus on holding the tremendous power of the hurricane-unmade, putting the unwatched energy in cognitive load because the mind can hold the sky. The sheer magnitude needs to go somewhere. It would scorch the planet if he released it recklessly. His body passively changes water to steam, contrailing the sky, but even that makes no dent in the power.
The feeling of seafoam between the fingers. Something has disappeared.
Feel through Rook, eyes blurring to see and feel the frozen rain on his baking skin. His hands are lead. There is a circle drawn on his arm. Sketch with surgeon-still hands two extra modifiers, tiny lines, arms shaking in staccato. Struggle to still without disturbing Rook’s inhabitance. He hasn’t breathed in three minutes — he hadn’t realized, but it is too late to take a breath. He fills the circle—
FOOM.
He stares at the wiring. Mind a series of jammed inkpots, quill unwriting. He should wait until morning, but this needs to happen now. But: discomfort. He can’t read what he’s written — can’t go through it again, knows all of it better than he knows his heart-valves. And, more importantly, terror at the thousand possibilities, an insurmountable wall. There is only now, where the sequence is not done, and later, where it is perfect and complete. No bridge.
He stares at the algorithm-in-artform before him. Sweating, heart pounding, head throbbing, fingers clutching at nothing. Oh, god.
Awareness of the thermal sequences in his sides — crank it cold. Near-freeze the blood and shock, thermal shock, hypovolemic shock and gasp, choke. Shudder, blink and end up bleary, sightless, purgatory staring at the ceiling because did I go too far this time? What will he think when he wakes up to my corpse?
Corcus doesn’t die, though, and thank goodness for that because that would have been embarrassing. The shock numbing his fingertips and lips and nose reasons him, culls him from his current spiral and onto at least a flat trajectory, if not an upward slope. Breathe. Remember the reasons you are here. Remember the coping strategies learned somewhere he can’t remember that isn’t in Rook. Breathe.
Plot it out. A reminder from his professors. And so he shuts his eyes, calls on a memory, asks Rook with the briefest tug and received permission, and with the Isc-memory of falling and the taste of salt he is sat in a bamboo forest where the sun is warm, the air is damp, and blade-shaped leaves rustled in the wind above. His body in the chair, limp and breathing manually, and his mind in that place beyond memory which he only recalls now from the reconstruction. Now—
Call upon the world-memory that allows him to do this unimpeded. How are you not homesick? someone asked once — it’s because he has this, and because it’s been long enough that he’s forgotten anything but this of home. Is that normal? It’s only been so many years—
Falling, salt, biting-tongue the trigger—
The tentative thwopping of helicopters is the first notable sound to break the silence. He sits up gingerly, but then lies back down, at least for the moment. The ground is soft and the grass tickles his ears.
The cockpits are full of lights. He can’t hear, but he can see their mouths moving. Soon the helicopters are followed by water ambulances puttering through the onion-layers of failed stormwalls. Rook sits snugly on M. Red’s gloved fist, taking a break at last, whole body aching, and his advisor, finally having something to do, tells him the next meeting point through Rook.
Get up. There’s a density to his movements that he couldn’t feel before, a deadening of lactic acid buildup from what he is used to. He stretches gently. His tendons aren’t right nor his muscles. Stiff, and some parts unable to initiate the stretch at all. No energy, not even the killing kind.
Stretches incomplete. There’s a hunger in his stomach that he rarely gets to the point of feeling, where it feels like his insides are scrunching into a black hole. He twists himself out of the curled-over shrimp position it feels better in, bearing through the pain and telling himself it’s not real. Shake off the dirt, Isc-clean what he can see and doesn’t shake off. Wiggle the tailfeathers, grit teeth, twist over and yank out the loosest feather, exposing the long, hard shaft of pinfeather beneath, and exhaustion pools in and he bears the seconds that feel like hours, concrete in the mouth and legs and wings of twisting the other way around and he swears he can feel a flea wriggling on his skin under his tailbase but he ignores it and rips out the matching feather opposite, stained with ink on the inside and iridescent black on the backside, unnecessary to dye both sides. Drop the feathers, reconsider, take them in hand and—
Chemical batteries almost empty. He shouldn’t disintegrate them.
Plant them in the dirt like windvanes. Over a foot long, each of them. Recognizably his. And-
The supervisor’s getting impatient, Rook advises, flicker of an old cross-faced man in one of the advising rooms wood-panelled and warmly-lit by real gas lanterns, and Corcus Gravis-leaps, makes two powerful wingbeats down despite the strain in his hollow chest and launches into the clear blue sky.
He goes where he is told to go, and soon he is soaring like a vulture over crowds that look more like chopped multicoloured yarn strewn inches thick over a brown carpet, no ground to be seen among the thronging bodies. Corcus circles low, taking the moment to close his eyes and block out the rest, and briefly it feels like home — the wet air, the smell of broken wood — until wastewater and latrines and broken oil barrels and iron mix into the changing wind.
Thermals are starting back up again, gingerly — he dips into the updraft, wings stiff, grateful for the slight warmth and ease buffering his descent — Rook doesn’t like it, predisposed by birthright to only use thermals for going higher. He descends, impatience having him buffet the crowds with his downdraft until one patch of the shocked and fearful makes room for him to land, some unlucky displaced pilgrim of hurricanes encouraging people to get back, make room. The stadium the crowd is in is seeing volunteers do similar things for wheeled ambulances, tiny people walking before the bulky wheeled boxes to part the sea of people and let them through. Rook clacks his beak, and there’s a sliding sensation while Corcus lands heavily, knees buckling and exchanging infinitesimally small amounts of energy from his single remaining near-exploded near-empty chemical battery to regain weight in his body so he can stand — mud squelches between his toes, Rook blinks, and Corcus’s advisor on Rela and halfway across the world bends and murmurs into Rook’s ear too loudly to know how Rook works that these people have never seen anything like him before, so be careful, find the imposter and get out, and Rook dives into a memory and Corcus is assaulted by colours and light, warm and stately, nothing like this wrecked fen turned farmland turned stadium-turned-gathering-place of the muddy, the wet, and the cold.
The human who had cleared enough space for him to land is speaking to him. Remember over the words: New world, old history, not enough to pay— Rook helps: Worlds that can’t pay full-price receive a mage of the Academy’s choosing, to help expand the breadth of a student’s capabilities — and Rook says, they are fantastical. The question you missed asks— his voice changes, strikingly rich, deep, with a musical lilt: ”Are you an angel?”
Cardiac arrest is— Their face blurs before his eyes. What is an angel? he asks Rook, but a moment’s fevered glimpse through Rook’s eyes and ears shows arguing with the ambassador, M. Red shouting — he’s never heard him shout and it scares him — and red-faced, pale-knuckled, ”We need to get him out now! He’s done — I know him; he’s my partner! He’d rather—”. “What?” Corcus says instead, to buy himself time. Gravis-alter his bones so he’s not falling down so much — no, wait, fix himself in place, antimomentum. Delirious lights whirl inside his eyes — switch to a different set, blot out the rest, problem’s still there, worse. It’s been only seconds, heartbeats, and more words assault his virgin ears — a whirring sensation against his skull, not real except as phantom pain as his language sequence keys itself to a new source with a fierce biting cold on the vambrace. See with his own eyes: the person is young with lovely dark skin, acne-ridden but otherwise undamaged. No muck, no scrapes. Just tired. An almost mirror image of M. Red, but lacking the old stress-fractures across his skin.
Corcus says something. Black out. Rook: “You are to blame for this disaster,” he had said. Heartbeat, heartbreak: what a horrible thing to say. Why did he say that? He doesn’t believe it — where did those words come from? ”Help me,” he croaks, but his feathers are smoothed and another wire clicks into place. His tongue is clumsy under his teeth, lips sluggish to move. It’s the right side of his brain that’s broken this time — remember rearranging his neuroanatomy for the first time, brain surgery done on himself through Rook with Isc-Opa fingers, himself primary and Jasmine attending — violin echoing eerie in the surgical theatre, playing during the operation to ensure he retained that, the smell of Jasmine’s imported hibiclens she said was necessary because she couldn’t be sure of her antiseptic sequences yet — remember from the smell and grain-texture of textbook pages turned oily-brown with fingerprints and know: something’s gone wrong with his occipital and temporal lobes. Or the structures going there. Help. But he can’t see. Try to get sight through Rook — rebuffed.
Something is terribly wrong.
“What are you,” the face he’s looking through states. Scrunching of the nose and eyebrows. Not a question. His next set of primaries are almost ready: the pair over are coming loose from their sheaths, ends sticking out like those of a nightjar. Sunset orange peeks through where he is unfurling. Too noticeable. Unprofessional.
He nudges a wire slightly to the left with his beak. “Corcus,” comes M. Red’s voice from above, and metal chairlegs screech against concrete flooring — his supervisor jumping to stand. “You see?” says someone tasting of tea, and a hand grabs at him — he sees through their eyes and dodges, black bird nimble black bird quick. He presses his feathers in meekly, doggedly returns to the work despite shooing hands because even M. Red makes errors — this is his specialty: the theory of infinity and black holes is like chessboard squares, not trees. Balance negative infinity with positive infinity with lightlines to spear the fabric and you cut down instead of across flat infinity. Twist a wire. “Corcus!” His face is wet, feathers soaked from Rook’s anti-overheat sequences burning, hot red iron smell—
It’s too much. The sounds, the exhaustion, the stimulant use a numb tidal wave in his bloodstream. The exhaustion so deep he could cry, tears welling just under his jawline when he yawns. He knows that if he starts, he won’t be able to stop.
His face is bright red, his feathers sticky and damp, some broken and charred at the edges. Rainbow ones miraculously unharmed — the dye does weaken his feathers, and the new feathers are stronger than the old. Someone is walking close behind him, their hand reaches out, fingers spreading for his tailfeathers dragging in the muck—
I want to sleep. To cry. To dream. Is this what it will be when he graduates? This, but endless?
When has he ever met a graduated Mage, outside of the ones working at the Academy?
God, this will suck to see on his performance review. Mage collapsed, needed rescue. The crowd is drawing in. ”Who do you think you—” That queasiness cues his body, is enough to staunch the bleed of his mind — summon, heroic effort, the idea and fact of standing up, unseeing but sparking the sequences in his wings to finally figure out what’s wrong with him. So far, so good. His eyes are blind — see through the eyes of others, watch his body falter, stumble—
The tidal wave swallows.
In the dream, temple ravens circle the towers. The sky is so blue it borders on purple. Where the snow begins and before the bamboo ends runs a thick river, and across that river zig-zag pillars and bridges, unneeding of complex construction because the maintenance is constant: a good way to keep busy, especially for children — wooden dice and sword-stick games between tasks given by the apprentices, and apprentices busied with their own tasks. A twenty-minute flight upward, Corcus knows, would bring him into the snow. In the high edges of the snow begins a blissful noonday mist that rolls down into the valley, pooling to cloak the landscape below. His heart remembers the existence of a crater-lake under the fog, one fed by glacial melt and so clear that in the summer the surface is entirely transparent — a trick played on wing-apprentices of the temple is to tell them that the crater had been drained and they needed to lug rocks up from the bottom. The log is warm, and Corcus realizes he is sitting with his thighs instead of his glutes, making room for his tail even in this dream. He doesn’t usually have that, mental map of his body always out of date. The wings came almost instantly, at least. Shuffle them, wiggle his tail, make sure they are real.
They are.
It’s been a long time since he’s been at home with his body within his dreams.
He closes his eyes. Breathes deep the wild alpine air.
He needs more eyes. That is what lies on his desk, in waking — he recalls that much, pushing the borders of dream, feels briefly at his steepled body. He needs a way to activate it, a way that will be useful and second-nature to him eventually, but which he can adapt quickly to. He needs a week. He only has until tomorrow.
A hand-sign would be useful, but would disrupt the effectiveness if his hands were bound, in use, or removed. Similarly, he wants to be able to use the sequence regardless of his physical position. That removes most effective cases of physical anchoring for the sequence-start. He has yet to make any physically-associated sequences since the Opa-light sequences everyone makes in their first cycle, and is grateful that he has never taken them in as implants. He isn’t keen to repeat the experience. That is case one.
A large temple raven — a misnomer, not quite a raven and also not exactly a crow — swoops from nowhere and lands heavily on his upturned knee. Corcus had braced for impact and is successful in staying upright.
It tilts its head. Croaks at him. Not Rook, but the same species. One that doesn’t exist in the other feeder worlds the Academy accepts from. A geneticist’s experiment run amok and a pest control success story on all worlds but this one, where it had enmeshed in culture and religion too quickly for its removal. He flicks his fingers at it; wingspread, sunshadow, wingbeat, rush of air, careening skywards. Glossy black-blue-green against the lapis sky.
Blooming mountain hyacinth cloys his lungs.
Second case. He doesn’t want another sequence with multiple memories held and cross-checked against each other for activation — those are difficult to activate in the heat of the moment, at least until they become solid and second-nature to him to activate, undoing and redoing from being what they once were to simply a byproduct of sensations and perceptions on the way of signalling whatever sequence he needed, and then simplification from that into being arbitrary and random things he feels once in a while as he simply uses whatever sequence he needs. As easy as moving a limb. But he needs this sequence to work even when he is still getting used to its functions. He leans back in the chair, disrupting the dream-haze memory-veil over his perception borrowed so kindly and modified from Rook’s dreams. That is case two.
And so case three: not physical, not conceptual, but existence-based. He pulls his thoughts together: if he were always seeing from the eyes of others, it would be a constant noise. He’d have to learn to tune it out or form a system to dial it down. But cognitive-based meant it would need only conceptual pressure from him on how much it functioned or what its range was, once he adapted. And it meant near-instant allowance for if he wanted to only focus on a few individuals from a crowd — he’d need to dampen them and have a way to instruct the sequence to work with him on that dampening, if he used the second case. With this, it would simply be. And, truthfully, if he were working it based on cognitive pressure, he’d gain a new sense: that of people being nearby. It should work like that accidentally, have that delightful secondary effect that Professor Hera is always talking about.
So: unconscious activation, semiconscious control. Living in the first and third person at once so long as someone else was around. Like Rook but more, though just with the eyes.
The wind changes. The mountain hyacinths are gone. Quietly, stretch deep.
It feels good. It feels good without him having to numb the parts that hurt along the way.
Know he shouldn’t, but savour it. Savour being briefly back in a body that doesn’t hate him.
Refocus. Decision made. Now he just needs to write it.
More eyes. It would be useful. That’s why Corcus wanted it. All he’d need was to adapt — he’d prefer a week to lie in bed and recalibrate, but his internship starts tomorrow. No — he’ll make it work. He could always take refuge in Rook if he needed.
All he could hope was that he’d be fresh and ready come time for internship season.
No way around it. He sighed, and it was the first kind of sigh again. He shut his eyes. Loosened grip on the scene and set Rook back within his own dreams — of the sea, he perceived distantly, before cutting that off — and tasted charcoal and grittiness on his teeth. Back. Back to—
The dullness of his body. The heaviness of his chest. The acrid taste of bile, the pulsing pain of his eyes. He could summon the memory of a cold cloth over them, if he wished. But even that would take energy — and there is a bitterness, there, that it wouldn’t be real. Only as present and helpful as he willed it to be. In that case, he might as well just push through the pain.
His back hurts. His eyes ache. His bones throb. He takes a deep breath, then levers himself despite the cramping in his abdomen upright in his chair and allows himself to crack open his eyes. Behind him, M. Red stirs — Corcus freezes, heart heavy, until his lover rolls over towards the wall with a sigh. Unpeel himself from stillness. Look at everything but the theorem before him.
Six in the morning. Long, slow blink. Sunrise will be in thirty. Tiny chemical bottles sit on the windowsill, visible in the dark through his memory of the room overlaid on his vision — another new sequence he is trying out. There is the temptation to take his early, trip the Isc-Opa condensing it all into the later cascade, drop it straight into his lungs and whip his bloodstream into a curdled frenzy. And through a second as long as a minute, he deliberates, stretching time until the wave crests and breaks, that suicidal urge — breaks free, still staring at the vials. With effort, like magnets together turned apart, he doesn’t.
It is a close thing. It always is, this early.
Discomfort. Childishness, and — push through it — disgust at himself, faintly, then a tamping-down on that — we’re better now — and back to work. After a moment’s reaching in his mind and forgetting and consulting Rook’s database without waking him for the newest and still-maybe-not-permanent addition to his over-skin wrist sequences, he summons the smell of wildflowers and pinches his index and thumb together — Isc-Opa-edged fingers, and he picks up the wirework. map isc unit15 where individual:r=verf as 1:1 where 1=signal (def:nt.1 defas:ankl2,sampleif absen) when mem-15 loc=true and—
—and where (def:e as neu-fix=9:9 limit range=.003; r:”Rook” where e=9918) e!=1. “bolus” 10(unit=c) and spark where amet-rub-sapp dist.2(unit=d) — End.2
It was so much easier than he thought it would be. Than it had been earlier. He sits up, head aching, back complaining, wings loose in their sockets from hunching over like a shrimp. Oily sensation of completeness, because the sequence and theorem were complete and together. Just needed to implant it — no checking-over necessary by professors when he was in his second cycle.
And no checking in with M. Red, this one time — evil sense of self-loathing there that he isn’t checking, because it’s useful to his accomplishments — try harder. He can’t always rely—
End that thoughtstream there. Mindblank — dizzy, uncertain. Feel his bare chest, stroke with light tickling fingertips over the ridges of wires under his skin — what had he been doing again? Ignore it, no seafoam-sense, with difficulty.
The moon is beautiful. Its shape feels almost normal to him now.
His muscles are tense. Stretch, primaries brushing the walls of the room. Coverts itchy, primaries strangely loose, secondaries feeling oddly separated. His mind is fuzzy, but he isn’t in the mood to snap himself out of it — almost half-asleep. He wonders, idly, if he is due to moult soon.
Soon. He stares at the wall, listless. What had he been doing, again?
“What are you up to at six-fifteen? We don’t have classes today.”
That pandan voice. An association his Isc-warped brain formed early and retained long after other associations usually left, followed by a relaxation and involuntary banishment of thought.
“I have medical today,” Corcus’s mouth says. Do I? Hello, Rook. Gladness inside that they have gotten over their fight. And then he, he adds, “Another batch of wing-surgeries. I’ve been sponsored to watch, since it’s in my field of interest.” Grey haze, blooming pink petals falling, Professor Yaw, a weight tugging at his primaries, rowing: beating his wings hard with his feet tied to the top of a small pillar, exercising so hard his body spasms all over even in his toes, feeling half like electricity and half like he might pee. Then, fallingbloom later, soaring over the Academy, free, twinges in his tendons light, muscles dense and pleasantly straining, parting the air like water, new sequences braided for density and Gravis-altered for lightness woven through his flight feathers for accessibility.
Ashtaste, memory gone. Rook’s eyes blink open, and through them Corcus watches M. Red stand, stretch. Corcus needs to have them do a meal together again soon.
M. Red is bending to touch his toes, overlong wings carefully half-extended, then rotates up and is done. M. Red is much quicker than he to start the day — though he’ll finish his exercises on the landing pad outside later, where he wouldn’t knock things over.
“That’s far into the day though,” M. Red said. Warmth at his side, and a curious falling sensation. Yellow-green-gold — no adjustment occurred; he was actually falling.
“Corcus.”
“Tomorrow I have internship,” he says normally, and then, “but I’m terrified. I don’t know why. Tomorrow I have internship. I don’t know anything about the work, the site. I can’t do anything to fix it. I don’t want to die. I don’t think I will, but I don’t want to,” his mouth is saying. Indigo-blue confusion, horror: where is this coming from? He was doing so well not thinking about it this morning until now.
Is he lying? Assess: correct, this must be a lie. Complaining won’t change anything, and he is undeserving of reassurance, should only receive reassurance if he has been doing his job well. He has not been doing his job well. He should be denied complaining and reassurance until that is fixed. Satisfaction at this thought-chain: all is well in the world. He is to blame and all is right.
Null sensation from Rook. Irritation? Worry? He’s not worthy of worry. All unhappy far-off things.
Part of him hides away in Rook, no barriers. The air is quiet. Stop talking, says some other part of himself, tries to bite down on his lip, shut his mouth manually but the rest of him is pouring his ugly self out, seeing how much of its weight the world can bear before something breaks: “I’m not built for this. I’m not even the person they wanted — I can’t do what they need. I haven’t even been to a single briefing meeting and I need to be there by tomorrow.” Testing the limits of their relationship like he always does, being too much, pushing against that invisible membrane that, if it breaks, will mean he’s alone again. Trying, almost, to break it — at least it’ll be over with. It’s inevitable; he always ruins things — why does he do this to himself? “I still don’t know what it is that I need to do. It’s the twins’ and I can’t do what they do — I can’t represent the Academy like this. I’m not ready. I can’t do this.” He doesn't mention the new sequence on his desk, the experiment to see if he can even make a sequence properly without help. Ignore the true-thought that no mage these days makes a sequence without supervision, references, double-checking with their team. That this is what teams are for. But he needs to be independent — though: acknowledge the ugly, horrible thought that he can’t function alone ever because Rook is one of the two things keeping him himself. He can’t even exist without help.
M. Red is staring, watching. The air is so heavy, and Corcus almost succeeds at closing his lips and jaw, stilling his tongue but then the worst part comes out, the most awful part, a looming void gaping under his heart in his chest — if he exhales too hard, his heart will come unstrung and fall out, and he’s not sure if he’ll be able to grab it before it’s gone. His vision blurs. “Rook isn’t signed up to come with. I don’t know if I can persist without him. I love you, and I swear it’s not about you, it’s just that I—”
There is a deep heat enveloping him, fragile and gentle, downy soft. “You have me,” says M. Red. It isn’t an interruption. The featherlight touch of M. Red’s mandible on Corcus’s shoulder lifts and M. Red is staring at Corcus with an endlessly empathetic expression. “And you’re so strong. I know you don’t accept it, but one day I hope you will. You’re capable of this.” And his arms encircle Corcus a little more, wrapping loosely at his sides and tightly over the feathers on his back, gentle over the heat sequences where they make his bones sensitive.
Something wet is smearing down Corcus’s face. How was it that only a minute ago that he was in total despair? It’s as far away as the mountains. M. Red’s face is burnt into his eyes, even nestled back into his wing-crook — Corcus is drifting again, loathes for once that he is, that he is so unmoored from even love that he cherishes and seeks. M. Red’s face — Corcus had trained himself to make a face like that in the mirror as a child, memorized the feeling and way his facial muscles shaped so he could make it for others, was bullied because it was weird and creepy. But M. Red does it naturally.
Rook stirs in his mind. It’s been a long time since he’s touched those memories. I’ve never seen that before, says Rook, and do you want them?
The details are gone. It’s just the list of existence that remains — even with M. Red asking, he wouldn’t be able to recall anything beyond the knowledge that it happened. It’s how he made do without Rook — discontent there, in himself, that so much was lost in an effort to preserve himself. And that he is so fragmented from the multitude of who he used to be.
It’s all right. The platitude, though, doesn’t work as it should.
“Corcus.”
He looks.
M. Red is looking at him, has gripped his shoulders where new feathers prick from his skin in a steady creep, thin olive fingers like cherry wood among the undyed blue and yellow. Eyes wide, searching, face heartened but serious, taller than he but lighter, tailless and pristine, wings angled in the conjoined room so the ends sit on the bed. A warmth leaches from M. Red, touching even the keyed Eha sequences in Corcus’s bones that turn body heat into chemical battery refill—
“You can do this,” he says kindly. Full of conviction, and the anxiety in Corcus’s skin is soothed, briefly, in its endless entangling and writhing. Briefly, he believes that he can, because M. Red has that kind of power. “You’ve studied hard and prepared yourself. I’ll be on the other side to catch you if anything goes wrong, and Rook will finish the reconnection project. Even if you only sync up when you come back over, it won’t be like the beach.”
M. Red is right — he can do this. It’s a solid heat in his bones, warm and gentle unlike the notching-increments of Eha. Corcus’s shoulders are light, back straight and unstiff, realize: M. Red hasn’t spoken for this long in ages. He must have slept well. Lean in to rest head on head. M. Red opens his mouth, but then — something dulls in M. Red’s eyes and he is slipping sideways, and it’s Corcus’s turn to grab him within that honey-slow, heat-soaked moment not yet burned cold by fear, reposition with M. Red in a swift turn-foot contrastep motion, left leg between the knees from behind and right arm across his beloved’s paper-thin chest.
Brace successfully. Smell of chloramine.
Burnished-wood under the fingertips from Rook followed by a stiff-silk diving exploration: a memory source Rook isn’t consciously aware of yet and needs to acquaint himself with. Corcus walks M. Red to the bed, Gravis sequences kicking in from M. Red’s coat-shielded body as Corcus throws him bodily onto the mattress, wings dragging thin lines of dust through air, ankle-ticklish feathers straggling in the wind like leaf litter over the hardwood, Corcus is strong, aware of his own vitality, perpetually forgets that his strength training and muscle-building flights actually do something.
The sun is coming up. He heeds to go soon. But M. Red, with effort, eyes open and clouding over and then unclouding and then shut, stiff and then unstiff, says quietly from the bed, “Please don’t die,” and it is the sound that remains in the still room for a long, long time.
A metallic-tasting gas fills his lungs, deflates, inflates. Vertigo and cold in his extremities, his wingtips and hands and feet like blood loss. Pins and needles and an almost-comfortable numbness to his lips and deeper in the rest of his body — dreamily, fleeting-fast, recall with the smell of feather dander: drugs with a half-life of seconds. Unable to reach the brain because they simply don’t last.
Chemical paralysis, though, keeps his limbs heavy. Only the prickling of his eyelids and thin murmuring beside him, too quiet to discern but syllables familiar, in the only language he knows, aids him in shoring.
Blink. And burn, horrible burning, sequences in his wings alighting in whisperfire. Memory stored there, not his mind, comes clear, crisp, clean as glass-ice. The lights are blinding: squeeze the eyes shut with no strength, but to no avail — in comes still an avalanche of sensations: crumpling into the mud, broken rebar sinking into his skin between the wires like needles through knitting wool. Dirty metal scraping sawtooth marks through runes etched on the fragile fins of his spine. Squirm and feel guts writhe around the intrusions: tinnitus and blanket blizzard-whiteout. A tall set of eyes slouches forward, hands huge in borrowed vision, approaches through the white froth of rising murmurs and shouts — a language he cannot understand. Spark the language sequence and—
His body jolts down another notch in the rebar, something having dislocated from the pressure: it looks like a seizure, that movement, and then he’s lifeless as a doll.
He’s looking down at himself, a rough foot prodding, eyes meeting other borrowed eyes that are wild, frantic, moving and mouth open, jagged omnivore teeth animal-white, words, shouting, rising foot knee obscuring sharp jolt outcry, stomp-crack heel-stomp and something unsockets deep inside his wing. Raised fists too scared to punch him. Run away.
Is he still out? He’s moving.
I’ll give him another dose. I think he might be from the church-raven world. They—
Rebar inside, the squeezing of lungwall rubbing against opposite lungwall and too deflated to scream. Flickervision — see through everyone, then attention on just one: another crowd-member terror-greased and grimy, nose shining in their vision under the stadium floodlights, crowd parting like a brown sea, mangled bird-animal huge and broken on the ground, no start or end to the feathers or skin. The borrowed eyes break the circle of feet like an arrow through a noose and his vision-sequence flickers, seeing himself from all angles and then one again. Try to twitch and fail. Hands reach over him obscuring and a long rod-shaped metal amalgam is drawn from their picket and a hole appears in his torso followed by an explosion of pain washing into the frozen sea of other hurts like a calving glacier; the metal tool recoils and their hands jerk with it.
He’s in his eighth year? Snip. Looks like ninth.
Longer than medical school.
Medical school is too short.
Fewer people, suddenly — the pain had blacked out his vision, mind overburdened with sensation to discern new sights. People aren’t looking at him anymore — running, fleeing. Something is wrong with his body — he twists and it doesn't move in the ways he wants it to. He can still wiggle his toes. He is distantly aware as a kind boot rolls him over, sweat and mud soaking his skin and making him so slippery it takes them a few tries, and someone elsewhere in the stadium falls to their knees, sobbing from fear, and someone else is firing another metal thing, cracks echoing in the stadium like broken bones, and someone else is shoving others aside, running away, crying a two-syllable word and other eyes are vomiting, panicking, crushing each other and trampling—
The kind eyes bend down, unpacking a small white box with a red plus on it, jabbering something quick and incomprehensible. Take stock of him and freeze—
And, mechanically, they keep going. Take a pair of scissors and — snip, snip, away goes the thick blue-black Isc sash wrapped around his abdomen, cloth parting to iron. The hands pause again. There are twin holes, one entrance wound and one exit wound, in his gut. Then the hands clench and something hard folds inside of him, and his muscles tensed, and that thing snaps like a plant pulled up too hard, roots breaking inside the soil, and he is laid to rest within his own body. Rook?
Pain.
Shears, please. Watch the feathers. IO drill. IO. Yes. Whiteward. IO.
Tibia. Yes. Yes. I know. I— yes. The ends are dense. Drilling.
Sharp keening cry like a dying animal. Pressure, then release.
No more sight, only feeling. Hours, or perhaps picoseconds, pass. The hands have stopped mending him, are petting his feathers, clumsy like a child. Searching for something? Fingers trace along his sequences — blink — are stitching the holes — those will go septic soon, remove the waste, isc=remup15s— but no — the pinprick and inside-tugging violation of un-numbed stitching persists; he isn’t used to the sensation when it isn’t him doing it. Oddly uncomfortable. Blood pools out, sluggish and sticky. His lips are cold. The person stitching him ties a small knot. Strokes the wing closest to them, the pit where it connects almost seamless now with the grafted muscle and bone. Kneels over, sharp jolt, plucks a feather. A souvenir?
Blood pools. The stitches aren’t finished. They reach for his other wing.
He wonders, faintly, when the memory will end, or if he is dead and stuck in the replay of his own death. Is it possible for sequences of the mind to outlive the body?
Good perfusion. Watch the wing — that’s an active sequence. No. No, don’t touch it.
—ctive when he came in. Transport said it was—
Their hand touches the second feather. Emboldened, this time they wrap around a black-painted primary. His chest rises, bones groan, his throat opens to tell them, I have sequences in those.
The vision sequence flickers. That feather has something on the backside, where he can’t normally see himself, where he does not dye his feathers.
A foreign sequence is micropainted there in searing blue pigment.
The feather comes loose and something snaps.
A great Gravis-bubble shoves outwards, impaling him an inch deeper on the spike-branches in the mud. A thunderclap and remnant sensation of Rook’s beak bending a final wire into place and there is an overwhelming feeling like that of knowing one must vomit when sick that his feet should be clawed. Then the pressure of Gravis-steadied hands grasping his body, an explosion of light, sound, decompression sickness and a forgotten sequence auto-activating, last chemical battery snapping to devour the deadly air bubbling in his blood—
Stillness.
Wheel him in. Okay. On three. One, two, three —
Thump.
Stillness.
His sequences click, a completion indicator he hoped he would never have to hear. He lets the memory go. Corcus opens his eyes. Limelight, too painful to bear. His muscles twitch and even that is blinding red to his mind. Imagine a field of black, a calm lake, dark purple sky, lapping waves outlined by stars—
Another muscle twitch, this time in his wing, and he almost jolts from his position, only doesn’t because it’s too embarrassing if he falls, has dealt with — feverheat: lifting a newly winged mage, final surgery done, from the crevice between the bed and wall, wing-arms still fleshy and pink, rasping bloodfeathers forktine-fence noise against the cobblemetal wall, Corcus’s lower back straining and popping.
Something wet and warm is seeping down his face. Try to be still.
The hospital shorts sandpaper his skin, some unconscious repressed movement scraping him, and a light breeze — antiseptic fan, infection control measure — ruffles the feathers on his chest. He wiggles his toes. No socks. Dare to crack his eyelids again, squint at the ceiling, painful but adjust, glassbreak in his corneas, flicker of sequences, see past the lights—
The ceiling is white. Eggshell, pearly smooth. Shorts and nothing else for a patient uniform, the architecture plaster and antiseptic white. Whiteward.
Stay still, very still. How badly did he mess up? Dazed — then wing-sequences open again: sensation of feathers pressed to his face, the disorientation of having eyes open and the scenery not moving when one turns their head, and his talons clutching a wooden dowel rod covered by — Rook? But that didn’t come from Rook, was from himself recording an encounter from Rook. His sequences are still catching up to consciousness, doing checks he had written into them without the expectation of ever experiencing them since being in the wrong body with Rook on the beach. Where…
Look right. Find that he can’t. Focus, retain his own body, and try again — turn his head? No — some pressure on either side of his skull and neck prevents that. Flick his eyes to the right. Adjust the focus until he’s looking past the IV stand and all its spidery tubing. Ignore the slow pulsing warmth in his chest where the tubes— ignore what the tubes are doing there.
Succeed. Avert, focus.
Rook sits on a small perch, jesses tightly tied to a thick metal ring. A leather hood that Rook hasn’t needed in years sits snugly over his head, cupped portions covering the eyes, knotted firmly at the back of the skull and under the feathers to expose Rook’s ID plate.
Grief, then, clawing like a tendril-ball of grey roots in his lower stomach. Then guilt, then shame worming its way through. Sickening, churning nausea, thick and take a deep breath, expand the diaphragm because if he focuses on it too hard, he will surely vomit. I’m so sorry. Without Corcus, Rook…
The curtain rasps open and two plain-skinned, blue-donned individuals step into his room, barely visible from the edge of his vision looking down. His eyes hurt.
“My name is Ash. This is Kumar,” the shorter of them says. Their voice is oddly muffled, like they are underwater, and their lips move out of sync with their voice. The correct shapes, but too slowly for the sound. Familiar — he’s still catching up from anaesthesia. “We are—” fading “—edical students doing residency in the Relan Academy Whiteward Program for Non-Mages. Can you verify your full name and—” a stumble “ —student ID, and season you joined the Academy?”
There is a gurgling shout from just beyond his room. Fast voices. He can’t find the will in himself to feel anxious about it. He’s been through this before. He lived. “Corcus-Rook de Moreau-Martinez,” comes the information absently. The action is so simple it’s almost a dream, a wild emotion to feel in the stark low-thrall anxiety thick in all places medical. Automatic feathersoft tug within his eyebrow pellet: nothing. A faint flicker of memory-thought, prepared and packaged for only this moment, hits him and his mouth appends it within his next words: “Please release my bird from the binds; they’re hurting him. 2120087. He can’t function without his other half. My Season was called Fumblespring; it might be on record as Third Un-winter, but I’m not sure. M. Red is coming soon.” Choke on the last part. Gasp the shallowest, slowest air, morphine-slow, and with the last of his thoughts breathe: “Did you turn off the vision sequence in my dorm?”
The doctor that had spoken to him turns to the other one and says something with sharp vowels and low consonants. The other makes a rustling movement at his side, and Corcus understands: he is no longer part of the conversation. It’s familiar, at least — he is a doll to them that happens to talk and feel pain. The more compliant and unresisting he is, the faster and more painless everything will be. But he has his anxieties. Commit a dissatisfying action, briefly: stretch in his mind, find the pellet in his eyebrow linked to the sequence that should be in his dorm, manually follow the golden wire of signal-sync there—
An empty black void. That’s a relief. Corcus relaxes back into the bed, breathing slow and even, wiggles his wings to rest more comfortably on the lower tier of the bed.
“Don’t move those yet,” says the Whiteward doctor, and Corcus obeys instantly, rigidifying and then going limp. His heart monitor bleeps at him — familiar. Warm pulse of not-quite-dizziness, work to relax again, feel five different ports, one in his bones, pulse — ah, the IV bags are almost empty. 34.8C where the fluids enter his skin — the information glimmers fresh, usually background nose. His inner arms had almost healed this time. The non-speaking doctor had once again moved when he wasn’t looking, stepping around the broad feathers dominating the better part of the room, and manually readjusts his wing into the uncomfortable open angle that it was in before, an odd echo of Corcus’s physical therapy after the major surgeries to receive wings in the first place. Sometimes he doesn’t recognize himself. The mirrors in the bathrooms of Corcus and M. Red’s conjoined room are both covered.
“Your Whiteward treatment is complete, but we would like to keep you for observation,” says the first stiltedly. He doesn’t recognize them. They’re gazing off into the distance, reading from an unseen paper. Is it a new cycle of doctors already? He doesn’t recognize these ones. A gap where a memory from Rook would be — pull its echo from his transfer sequences, feeling for the sawtooth edges of memory gentled to nubs by time and repetition, stretch—
A heavy, twanging spang in his occipital knob, right at the transmitting-receiving nodule of sequence connecting to Rook. He doesn’t know the date, nor the time. A dizzying wave, slickened nectar-bitter in his mouth, of disorientation. In another room, there’s the sound of feathers slicing imperfectly through air, and large fans in the ceiling open and whir. Then the sound stops. He reaches for Rook for the date once more—
Nothing. The worm of anxiety, tiny, doubles in size in his guts. The room is quiet. The first doctor opens her mouth — dread—
The slapping of an attempt to knock, then scrape-slide of curtains. “Corcus,” breaks in a pandan-lemongrass voice, and heat floods his body, his nerves jellied into relaxation. The nonspeaking doctor jumps, moves before Corcus, and Corcus sees that that doctor is holding a gas mask with small spines where Corcus’s facial feathers would interfere with the seal. “You can’t be here,” says his second doctor, and Corcus is inclined to agree. How are you even—
“This one cannot function without his Isc object,” says M. Red, and it’s an unsticking of those all-important words that Corcus hadn’t even been able to conceptualize. Thank you.
He steps forward. His wingtips drag on the floor. His robes are dark, Gravis coat brilliant crimson under the white lights. His hair is in disarray, framing thin cheeks. Corcus’s blood feels off — can he even stand right now? If he were out of Whiteward, he could work the recovery sequences in his wings, but he’d need new chemical batteries first. Either one — he flexes a foot and is met with a wall of pain, whiting out his vision and bringing a wave of tinnitus. And no Rook to compensate.
It hurts.
“Let him into my care,” M. Red is saying. His doctors only stare. “Or undo the bindings on the bird and treat them as a unit. They cannot be separated.”
The curtain slides open again to reveal another new face — long dark dreads and honey-brown skin. Runeless, like his other doctors, and oddly plain to look at because of it. The room is quite crowded now. His leg aches bone-deep — what did he do to it?
“Hello, visitor,” she says. Half as tall as anyone in the room, and she carries herself with a deft sureness that makes him think dancer and then she’d be an easy wing surgery.
She looks tired. “Patients are free to leave with a chaperone or groupmember,” comes the clear recital. She is staring at a poster halfway down the wall behind M. Red. “Jen, Ash, let him go. Thank you for taking records—” she turns to face Corcus in an unnerving display of unprofessionalism that, Corcus reminds himself, is the norm in the College “—though why weren’t you wearing your ID? We had to match you to your chart by your face. Nobody knows you’re here, except anyone—” she glances at M. Red “—looking at Waygate entry-exit logs.”
It’s in Rook, he tries to say, but his throat has closed up. Something is trying to speak through him. Rook?
Was his tracker replaced? It wasn’t exactly his fault. Is that why his leg hurts? Brief flash of panic, dread, picture open red flesh, this time parting carefully between silvery wires where there hadn’t been any before. Shunting the pain into Rook, seeking oblivion. He—
“I read through your sequence,” says M. Red abruptly, not looking at the head physician. Corcus can barely see him, can’t look through Rook, but what he can see looks horrible on his face. “The one on the desk.” No. Please. His skin, feeble, is icy cold — frantically try to burn his insides, obliterate his nails, immolate his bones, anything — nothing gets through. Rook’s active sequences must have shut off during a synchronizing event — he must have tried to get into Whiteward when Corcus was pulled back through the Way, placed in Corcus’s room. They must have linked their IDs.
Invasive.
There’s a bounty for Rook’s species in other worlds.
His chest hurts.
M. Red is too good at telling when Corcus has withdrawn, and even better at telling when he’s returned. Corcus can’t escape, these days, and sometimes it warms his heart to a furnace, but now it’s a nail drawn through a still-living butterfly. He can’t move, can’t shut off his ears, sequences that could make this easier to bear shut down or numb to his intent for change. Sensations, suddenly real and visceral as his sequences fail to spark: snowflakes in his hair, alpine air in his lungs, ears needing to pop—
“Darling,” says M. Red. He’s by Corcus’s head, awkward angle, reaching over Corcus and unscrewing the headboard. A skullsplitting pressure Corcus had attributed to headache eases; padded boards reduce into his line of vision. Stiffly, carefully, he turns his head while M. Red goes down to his hands and unties padded fabric from each of his wrists that he hadn’t even noticed, then the same for his legs. Was he…
If he was, it doesn’t matter now. Still, it is unsettling. “Can I move yet?” he asks.
M. Red is checking in with the most recent person in Corcus’s room. Corcus’s doctors have disappeared. The language is one Corcus didn’t recognize, and Corcus doesn’t see the language sequence bracer on M. Red’s forearm — is it hidden under his shirt? That doesn’t make sense; it is keyed to need that particular spot on the body. And no — the bracer wouldn’t work here anyway. Does M. Red somehow know more than one language? Almost impossible, after too long on Rela, to retain the gift of multilingualism, he knows. The why always escaped him — feeble reach for Rook, the reflex slow and uncertain from lack of success. Failure again, almost expected this time. Quiet panic — if he is kept here, it will damage his mental link with Rook. They were doing so well. He—
“Great,” M. Red says. He hands a pen and woodboard-backed paper with a shiny metal clip to the head physician, a sea of checkboxes checked and lines signed. Even from here, Corcus can smell the bleach of imported parchment. M. Red turns to Corcus, arms and hands doing something complicated and unseemly at his side. “We’re leaving. The chest tubes are done — those were going all the way to your liver. An unconventional route because you have so many wirings — I’ve seen the scans.” A strange smile that Corcus can’t parse. Blank thought. “You and I are the two sequence-densest students at this time. Congratulations.”
Blank thought. His leg hurts.
Low buzzing drone.
“Done. Can you sit up?” Corcus hadn’t even noticed M. Red move, nor when he’d taken out the tubes and IVs — nor when M. Red had untied Rook from the post, nor when he’d put Rook’s rigid body into the carrying bag. Nor when he’d strapped on Rook’s carrying bag. Frail and thin thought-thread expecting nothing, trying to access Rook’s memories to verify, tiny swell of hope imagining-tasting a change from not being on the post anymore—
Nothing. And horrible sickening awareness of the deterioration of his reflexive reaching for Rook. Corcus levers himself onto the edge of the bed, an odd mirror with how he’d sat on the treestump only yesterday morning, in Rook’s borrowed dream. Unhooks one wing from where it is stuck under the edge of the bed — the damaged one, he can feel, and gingerly, stiffly he folds it, feeling the miniscule weight change of the bandaging. Bright yellow and purple patches catch the light in his movements, briefly make the curtain shine with colour. He’s almost done with his moult already — so quickly. Too quickly — Rook’s never goes this quickly. It’s not that he’s been here overlong, no — it’s…
Right. Weight placed jitteringly, cautiously, on one leg, he leans forward into M. Red, who supports him unfalteringly, lightboned, and stands with him — M. Red’s sequences still work in Whiteward, and Corcus is too exposed to M. Red’s miracles to wonder why. Thick dizziness coats his tongue with saliva strong as sap. And he remembers faintly, without the help of Rook, that moults have always been like this. A discomforting rapid-shed event once a year that finishes within two weeks, premaking the full pinfeathers and losing the old all at once as the new unfurl — an enormous energy cost, hugely taxing from how large Relan wings are. No wonder his stomach feels like a tiny shrivelled ball — doesn’t he usually take a few weeks off around this time of year? He remembers putting it in his calendar — access Rook? Nothing — why didn’t he do it this time? Internships aren’t usually this time, either; this one was off-schedule, wasn’t even his — why was he on the schedule? Why? — and they’re moving and it takes everything in him to not throw up, move his limbs one at a time. Pad out the door with M. Red, organs jostling and injured wing cinched to his side and throbbing.
Turn a corner. Red squares, white letters. Exclamation marks abound and the smell of antiseptic from a dispenser bolted to the plaster: a set of wide double dividing doors, blessedly cool and gentle wood hues a balm for his white-scorched eyes. Hang head heavy, leaden, almost stumble M. Red and the doors creak open from M. Red’s wing-shoulder outstretched—
He wants to lie down. Become assaulted by a sudden shift to citrus smells and warm wood flooring and plants and brass-plated—
Signal check complete. Calibrating, and Corcus has enough in him to request, “Carry me,” and then his knees buckle for the second time in twenty-four hours and—
The transdimensional access to Rook works. Barring Whiteward or physical manipulation, he’ll never be restricted from Rook ever again. He’s safe now.
Greyout. Like bricks he crumples and finally—
Jasmine’s voice, then Jasper’s, almost in unison: “Oh, thank—”
I got this. Memory of warmth like a cloaking blanket. Sleep.
Let go.
At some point I read The Guardians of Ga’Hoole. The movie (one of the few movies I have ever watched in my life) was good too. I adored the scene in the books where Soren first flies into fire, and similarly loved the scene in the movie where he learns to fly in a storm. It never quite left my brain.