Content warnings: Self-harm, suicidality, suicide attempts, eating disorders
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Gallows bird — Or, like a carrion crow, you keep flirting with death, coming back to the idea of self-destruction.
You expand the reality of yourself in this moment of fervour, in this infinite timebreadth a hair’s width apart from where the shrapnel from the bomb is there and into the next second where it is not — not in your skin nor in the air nor the dead dry ground, pockmarked with dust and dead-dry footprints from passing beasts. The air is a searing prairie sky blue, and the metal atop your skin is sixty-two degrees Celsius and has stopped feeling hot. There is only a sensation of difference against the negative two chill from the rest of the air around you — it is the middle of the day and the wind is clear and the ground is forty-nine degrees Celsius, but the air holds no moisture, none at all, and so is frigid. You never did enjoy Opa for lighting, but for a condensation of a piece of the world — your world, your ideals — it is useful: Isc to fix, Opa to realize, and Eha to complete the scene.
The scene overall is unnecessary, but you are showing off, proving what you are capable of. A desperate plea in your gut: Notice me. Notice my suffering. Nobody should be doing this much for this assignment. You cannot allow yourself to slack, and so you overextend yourself. This scene, in the end, is what you worked the past three nights for: Stop a bomb without using any sequences you have been taught before. Make an entirely new construction.
“Complete,” you say to your professor. Your throat is soft, vocal cords unstretched — these are the first words you have spoken in two days. Your professor is pale and blinking in the sunlight across from you.
A moment slides by like warm water in a bath.
And then you subtract range from the scene, and the classroom reasserts itself in a blink that bleeds sunlight like an afterimage. Gone are the golden leaves, the zenith sun, the hard dry earth and the tongues of fire licking out from the cracks like sparks from a shattered metal plate. Gone are the dead branches, the flammable mottle of golden-waving grassland stretching out into the distance. Reasserted: planks of wood, curtains, the stage upon which you stand, chairs with red velvet like a one-third slice of a colosseum dressed in fabric and plush cushions instead of dry endless land filled with students you had set behind you with a twist of Isc that you weren’t supposed to know. You blink in the dark.
You are watched, you know, as your vision adjusts, and your existence is deliberated. You feel the pressure of it when your professor nods, can hear the thunder covering her words and intentionally do not process whatever phrasing she uses as she praises or criticizes your technique. It is not one taught in the college, dipping a sliver of reality over another, pocketing the remainder when done. That’s the point — poring over in-house textbooks for direction and your monthly imported shipment of fantasy novels for inspiration. Your professor gestures, white-and-black coat thick over her paper-dark skin like brittle oak leaves dusting winter snow, and with an effort of will like a dagger twisting inside you unfold the dimension once more — you limit the range to only a few meters before it expands and that sparks a hot coiling inside your right deltoid, seventy-eight point five Celsius from the Opa-Eha sequences, then it cools as that heat is transferred to the work, and you are again standing in a blinding pool of sunlight that doesn’t bleed over even the slightest into the edge where reality reverts to being a classroom. The cracks in the ground beneath your feet crumble, slightly, and the dust that goes into the dark shattering there turns to a pale yellow-orange fire that flashes up like striking rattlesnakes. You keep the world open longer, waiting for direction, exhaustion snaking up your bones as the sequence saps from your energy reserves, not tied to the stars because you aren’t supposed to know that yet, were asked not to use them because there are first-cycle students in this class. It sounds enough like But think of the children. You tip your head back, something like a nosebleed throbbing at your sinuses, taking a distant moment to watch the dead leaves melt down from their branches, solidify in the air as needle-drops, melt back again into puddles of molten gold as the world heat alters. Noon passes and then comes again as the Sun runs its tiny circular rotation in the sky, tidally-locked planet recreation you have made. And then you tip your head forward — the gesturing professor is impatient, upset, and your moment is over. Re-collapse your world in a sensation like silken chains binding your wrists.
Your head hurts. The lights are too bright, your clothing too rough against your skin. The air is moist, cold, feels like sandpaper. Your mouth is dry.
It’s not worth acting on the pain.
There are stares, you are sure of it, but you cannot see them through the blinding dark. Haven’t yet had the spare time and effort to love yourself that it would take to make a sequence allowing for seeing in the dark, and you are not like the rest of your team, not yet allowed to receive modifications for rapid adjustment of your pupils and the rod cells of your eyes.
A glimmering of regret, quickly squashed. Your coat hangs black and heavy on your shoulders, oils cold inside, the only part of you unadjusted to the sun you had made.
You pass. You are told to prepare an Isc rune base for an in-class battery-making activity. You are told to return to your seat.
You are certain that the class passes. You simply are not there for the rest of it. You sit in the front row, ears open for questions, answering correctly but absently. The best teaching methods developed by over forty contributing and feeder worlds slide off of you like water over oil. On your desk are a spool of wire and a pair of needle-nosed pliers; instead of following along with your professor’s instructions, you bend into shape another set of rune bases that will become your coat. Not Gravis coat, exactly, but something else. Something more. The bomb is reset. You lean back, squeeze your eyes shut for a moment as another student takes the stage.
You are in the left-main plaza. The sun is pale overhead; the shadows are dead on the ground. Bare wind burns your skin. Your stomach has the twisting feeling of having eaten, but you cannot taste nor can you remember anything you would have had. The air is clear blue, thunderheads low on the external horizon past the citadel and library that will not pass over until dark. Students soar overhead and you scratch at the sequences in your arms not covered by bandages. What class do you have next? Your legs know, and the rest of your body follows behind. Perhaps you will work that into your coat someday, making actions of the body automatic. Outsourcing movement so you can be even less present from the world. Maybe someone will finally notice how much you are hurting, if you do.
Maybe your coping mechanisms are unhealthy.
It doesn’t matter.
The sun is high.
Direct sunlight shines through the windowpanes. They’re all idiots. You are raising your hand. Your other hand fiddles with an Isc-Opa sequence that will stop your heart, should you activate it. You think you can feel the whistling of book-stale air through the Eha pits in your skin from the thermal exam. “Sixty-eight,” someone blurts before you are called on. That is not correct. The answer is there in your mind like you are reading ahead in the professor’s lecture. Praise warms the individual who spoke, followed by a cooling correction. The thunderheads at the citadel windows are churned up by the stained glass into rainbow soup. Your eyes are blessedly covered by strategic positioning by a pillar in the room and your coat is a heavy sun-dampener on your shoulders. “But what of when a universe has two suns?” that individual asks after the professor is finished. A stupid question. The words of an imbecile. Your skin writhes; you hold your breath like stupidity is airborne — don’t want to catch it, don’t want to be in the same existence as them.
Making room for them in your mind means making room for idiocy, and you can’t afford that. You are trapped here in this first-cycle course and thrown into the second-cycle courses you don’t belong in, either, but the latter have catapulted your knowledge far ahead of what you are only scratching the surface of here. What are you even doing here? It’s dizzying.
“Nine, then,” murmurs the presence to your left. “Adjust the Eha modifier by nine millimeters and add a conjunction accounting for temporal drift. Calculate it back through space and time.” His voice is thin, like he has not spoken in days. His coat is Gravis, his wings unkempt and albatross-long, russet black and white, folded and held at a stiff angle, keeping the tips off the ground. The professor moves on, heading the class through Socratic questioning to come not only to conclusions, but to the idea itself that one can fix an energy source to power a sequence. The idea is supposed to be novel, and is supposed to be a wild and lengthy construction on the mind. The upper-level classes don’t bother with this, just call it what it is: a battery.
Something snags, then, processing what you heard. You murmur to M. Red, “But that would require a tremendous quantity of energy. And time. Do you expect to scan for viable power sources every time you run a sequence?” As though you don’t.
“No,” he says. He rolls a shoulder stiffly. This brings a wing down, touches the primaries to the floor, and you are certain you could use Opa to make a barrier. A force field, almost, or an intangible barrier that would make— you are reminded of ghosts, how they cannot be touched, how they are ethereal—
Is it possible— no, how can you make it so that when something approaches, it is turned into Opa but keeps its form, just squished? A collapsing barrier. Returning the form when the harm is no longer close? You are aware that you are looking for problems in need of fixing. Inspiration.
M. Red had said more, after that. You had missed it — but it makes no sense anyway, like being in those second-cycle courses that were supposed to bring you up to speed but made you feel like you were only falling further behind. Building the parapets of a castle before laying the foundations, but what foundations you gleaned from them surpassed and destroyed what foundations they tried to build in the fundamentals courses of Cycle 1. He is staring at you.
“Absolutely right!” cheers the professor. The student in the front shuffles, a wingless, coatless, mirageless flickerless embarrassment as proud as a toddler making spittle. First-cycle classes are bland to you now, devoid of inspiration or desire. It’s stifling, makes you cling tightly and overexpress your own sequences that make heatwaves, make mirages, that alter gravity. The professor leans before the student who spoke. They are a lively thing, brilliant red and yellow striped hair, energy and personality enough to herd the clowder of cats that any first-level cohort is. You aren’t sure whether their hair is dye, Opa, or genetics. “In fact, that’s exactly what it is called,” they continue. “A battery.”
Your muscles hurt, your skin is taut, your heart thumps heavily in your chest; you are finally feeling the aftereffects of the work you did this morning in your second-cycle course. Half of the energy you drew for it, after all, came from your future — a technique you were told shouldn’t even be possible. But you do it — and, moreover, understand it — as naturally as breathing.
Your advisor hasn’t been able to replicate your sequences. You need to understand the fundamental workings of a sequence in order to run it, they had taught you on your first day. And that, as far as you were aware, was true.
If you made a force field of Opa transmutation-into-light-and-condense-with-Isc, how would that work for walking? If it encompassed the entire body, that would include the feet. And what of clothing? How would it differentiate, this barrier, between harmful and positive?Even the air you passed would become condensed before you — would you push it away? Put it behind you when you were done? You’d need to make sure the condensing didn’t overall reduce matter in the universe — the black-hole clause your second-cycle classes taught so fervently.
How would you breathe? And what of temperature, and what of light? If it generalized to anything harmful, that would include UV-A and UV-B. You’d need a supplement — are there even vitamin D supplements available on Rela? Your fingers dance on a handful of loose wire before you, snares of metal filament catching on your fingerprints, ripping new lines into your skin. You don’t hear M. Red’s next statement, but the question asked is understood by some part of yourself, unbidden, and you begin to answer it with the words you had already concocted in a different part of yourself. “I—”
“No,” he says. Did he interrupt you? The class is forgotten at this point, his voice quiet, but responses in your mind bubble at full volume. M. Red looks thoughtful but tired. Why is he even in this lecture, again? He said he had a free period. What is he doing right now? Why is he with you? You change your focus, attention to him. He is working on his coat, just as you had been doing to your own coat last class, but his sequences are far more intricate, densely compacted into an overlapping mess. The wire he is using is engraved with tiny sequences of its own — how had you not thought of that? But also, how on earth could that work? The imperfections in the wire, the imperfections in the runes bent into shape from the wire, would surely cancel out the benefits. Unless the runes in the wire somehow granted additional layering so— maybe they were sometimes modifiers and sometimes— nope. That’s where your brain peters out, can’t go any further. It’s a barren expanse — or, no, it’s like chopping into a log with an axe and finding heartwood. You’ve come as far as you can. And yet he understands whatever it is that you cannot. You thought you were so clever, making a tiny universe and carrying it in your pocket, that Isc-Eha-Opa unholy tricuspid thing done first for an assignment then furthered due to a sudden influx of passion, and yet here is someone working a technique far more complex and for what? To have greater density on his Gravis coat, something he has plenty of already? It’s insanity, makes you almost angry — and he’s not even showing it off. M. Red is an abomination, a golden child to you. You do the late nights, the overwork, the biomodification regimens all so you can stay afloat. He doesn’t need to work this hard. You know his assessment scores, vaguely: top marks and beyond in everything he applies himself to. Above and beyond, always — and for what?
When had he last slept? Eaten beyond carefully controlled Isc nutrient infusions? Moved his body beyond the necessary for going to classes? Gravis majors, you knew from the upper-level classes you didn’t belong in, often suppressed muscle and fat mass changes, made themselves as lean and scrawny yet stable as possible to support slight advantage in Gravis technique. Anything for an edge. But…
Corcus had once described to you the glorious mess of sequences he had fashioned to work the link between himself and Rook, and to work the aspects he needed for the internship he had. It was after he had, despite all protections and precautions, had his body attacked while piloting alongside Rook. A rare occurrence, for nothing to be piloting his body while he was away, but necessary, for some reason you didn’t understand. He came back to his body too fast, bypassing the safety catches he usually went through like a wool carder for identities. Rook and Corcus went together into Corcus’s body, and Rook’s body, unpiloted, dropped into the River Lethe. Thank goodness for a lack of mind. You nursed Rook back to health with Corcus choking on air and burning with fever on the next cot over, pulled home from Hades by emergency transdimensional Isc sequences set up by M. Red that you scarcely understood. Was that really the last time in your memory you had actually felt like yourself?
Is it?
“I have medical later today,” M. Red says softly. He does not mean clinic hours. “Your appointment time is the same — I’ll just be before you, so if you notice me leaving the building, that’s why.”
“Okay.”
The class is over. You are sitting in an empty lecture hall, save for M. Red weaving bracketed wires through the trilayer of his coat. A feeling like azure-indigo overtakes you, and for an infinite moment you understand instantly, wholly, entriely what he is doing and why. By making the sequence catch between layers, one sequence can chain to other, separate sequences without losing integrity or muddling the other sequences with the extrapolations found on other layers. One rune base, several sets of modifiers, many extrapolations from one — a single base working multiple separate and unconnected sequences. How had nobody thought of this before? Perhaps because too many runes are locked into the skin in the second year — everything taught builds up to it. Skin carries risk of too-much-injury if the runes are stacked, risk of migration if too thinly applied. Why teach that which will be immediately discarded?
How had M. Red gained the inspiration for fabric?
M. Red makes another bend in his wires. Quietly, by his side, you copy him, working on your own separate sequences. An assignment for your next class, you remember faintly. You’ve been messing with it all day, an Isc-Opa scramble. There is a hummingbird in your chest. M. Red’s transition to modifiers is foreign to you, and you don’t even think, just copy it into your own sequences, barely understanding it. It should be enough, that barely-there understanding, to run it, though. Make the final bend…
Between the potassium injection of Isc. The electrical conductivity suppression of Eha you figured out last week. Eha isn’t all heat, M. Red once told you late at night, seeing your light still on, too, and you keep finding new ways to understand those words. Slip the sequence just under the wiring of the rune-base, and—
It fits perfectly.
It’s beautiful.
It’s not yours.
Nobody can know.
The lecture hall is dark now, quiet save for the soft snips of wirecutters and creaking of tweezers. Outside, through open windows: the rain-swish of swaying trees and, distantly, ocean waves. You press your hands flat, compact the 3D wire bundle into its final shape, complex and densely woven. Take a moment, steel yourself for failure, and examine it, your mind’s creation plus another’s. Let yourself grow numb and list your inclusion criteria for the next class.
Second-cycle, learning modifiers on top of modifiers — you are still afloat, though barely.
Your heart is a thunderdrum in your chest, nausea roiling, space behind your eyes pulsating in your skull — calm yourself, examine your new wirework sequence through the stiffness and hurt. Does it fit all the requirements of the assignment? Maybe. You don’t know. You don’t remember; you know you can, but there’s that despair like sticky goo in your gut and it doesn’t even matter; you are hazy, air in your lungs unreal. Do you even need to breathe, to sleep? Perhaps those actions are just falsehoods tying you more closely to the world. Maybe you don’t need anything at all — a monster, that’s what you are. You’re not like other people. Your skin doesn’t exist.
You are staring at the wirework. The rubric floats before your eyes, a construction without any sequences to power it. Blank face. Decide without actual contemplation, without actual assessment, after thinking through the first few checkboxes: This will suffice.
The world is terrifyingly grey and nothing matters.
And then you are before M. Red, handing it to him, that rune-base for an Isc-Opa sequence. Shame, horrible shame from you. He will see it, see that you are nothing but a fraud.
A blank stare from him. He hands it back. And then you are in your next class, the same work being handed to your professor, the same cup of your hands, the same bent angle of your elbows. It is taken from you.
“Unacceptable modifiers here,” says the professor. The voices in your head that would say She’s always a critic or Everyone else agrees that she’s too tough and But you did your best — the things you say to reassure anyone else — are not there. Anyone else deserves rest, praise for attempts, did their absolute best. You, though — you know that you could have done better. Always.
“However,” she says, and you supplement her says with begrudgingly, because you cannot tolerate people being nice to you, “this is the best of the lot. And you have improved tremendously in this class. I no longer think you are in danger of failing.”
Someone else’s thoughts might be incredulous, despairing and confused at once: But I was never in danger of failing, or but we aren’t even graded here — what do you know of my home world’s grading system? or What would someone think if they heard you threatening me like this? — but you are not someone else. You are you, and so you take that clutching cliff-face despair into your heart like a thorn. It’s what you do, deadening yourself, and the self-hatred here cools you enough, fuels you enough, drives you enough — you are calm, cool, collected, and resolve bowingly to work your next sequences harder, better, more cleverly and insurmountably. Accounting for all possibilities. You see it like a tiny universe — like the demonstration of a new sequence you had never made before in your first-of-the-day class a lifetime and five hours ago. Five hours? Has it been that long already? You are so cold.
A tiny part of you whispers, In danger of failing? Assuming it’s not the class — failing at what?
The words that follow float before your eyes, your professor leaning forward and speaking low. A confession, a genuine hurt and warmth wrapped into one. “Listen carefully. This class was to teach you that the more specifiers you have within a sequence, the less flexible the application of that sequence.
“I heard about the world-creation sliver you submitted for Applied Conjunctions Three this morning. That and what you just gave me — I see that you freshly made it, the wire is still springy and it is impressive that you made it in such a short amount of time; I will not demerit you for that; it is rather impressive — they paint the impression that you are not listening in my class. You must learn — because you are extraordinarily talented, Jasper, and I believe that if you heed this you will be able to do anything you set your mind to — that the more convoluted and targeted and precise a sequence, the less applicable it is.
“I know the Cycle One classes you are in right now teach to make runeworks as specific as possible. I am instructing you to make your sequences broader. This class is to teach you, though you won’t see this listed on the syllabus, how to make sequences that change the way you as an organism live and function. In your first cycle, we don’t want you hurting yourself, and we want you to think creatively over smashing obstacles with brute strength. In Alternative Sources next season, it’ll also be because if you ever run a sequence off of your own body — like what you just gave me — it is indeed important to conserve energy. I think you have already learned that lesson to sufficiency.
“Listen. When a sequence is so narrow that once it is made it cannot be altered besides time and place, it functions completely separately from your life. It’s only a tool, not an extension of yourself. I am teaching you how to make extensions of yourself.
“I have a special assignment for you,” she continues, and you remember blindly that she is your mentor, your advisor, her name is Hera, that she was assigned that role to you by your preference of choosing her because she can say things like this to you and you will remember, at least subconsciously — remember this, and then forget immediately in the wash of astringent words, “because I know you are always working on something, and something tells me that you will make something new tonight. For whatever you make next, I want you to make it the loosest, most open sequence you can.
“Your rubric is this: I want it to change you as a person, and I want you to be able to wear it for a lifetime.”
Warmth curling in your chest like flowers blooming and branching and bursting from your aortic arch. Put a memo into yourself to do that, to make something like that tonight. You already have ideas, have been having them all day, and just needed a push to make it happen. And then, once you have sufficiently processed, you push yourself towards forgetfulness — because stress induces that in the likes of you — and then—
Cold. You don’t know the word except for the psychological state, the false existence. Your thermal signatures recognition exam made sure of that. Less of an exam and more of a skill acquisition — it was only a test in that you were asked, after the agony was more in memory than in body, to say what the temperature of various controlled objects was, that the proctors could ensure the memophenidates had worked correctly. A short medical screening immediately after that to ensure there were no adverse reactions. An exam in posterity, not actuality.
Your eyes are dry. You have been forgetting to blink again. Shut them, rub them viciously with your knuckles, see whorls and brownish patterns as the viscous fluid inside hyperpressurizes. Open them. See your professor’s face, pale and earnest and curious and weary with worry. Don’t know what to say. Bow.
Check your watch. It’s been seven hours, not five, since your class this morning. Have you eaten? You are still at the front of the line, before the professor. Students inch forward, a line pressuring behind you, Eha heat-ripples and Opa mirages and Gravis distortions and Isc matter-jumping messing with your vision in a delightful way that warms your tepid heart.
Numb in your throat. Return to your seat with your almost-sufficient sequence, moving with legs told to be brisk and the rest of you walking against the weight of a planetoid. What even happened in the last five minutes, the past ten? You only know that you didn’t fail.
“Do you have clinic hours today?” asks a second-cycle mage to your left. Opa sequences you could do in your sleep ripple under their skin, bright with firefly-sparks where another sequence instructs metal in their skin to illuminate itself at the point of activation.
How could they be thinking of clinic hours right now? You need to focus — the line is over, students back to their seats. So fast. Yours took the longest to review — shame, there. Then alarm: the professor is nearing the podium. You spark the sequences lying atop your skin — your cognitive-focused sequences are in braids about your ankles; you were never one for tradition. But the question wriggles, and you answer with half a brain, like dolphins do, “Yes.”
“Same here! What do you have scheduled?”
Irritation is a soothing balm to your nervous system. Then you remember that clinic isn’t supposed to be on your schedule yet. “Preliminary exam for myself, then the burn ward.” The irritation is there, too, that you can’t talk about your actual schedule, and you externalize the hurt: “It’s the only placement they let me have.”
“Makes sense,” says the Opa mage, and you are tempted to call them an imbecile too, group them in with the first-cycles — and actually do, for a thunderclap of a moment — but then their arm sparks too, alongside their temple-sequences, and the air around them grows hazy. Ripples in the air, tiny but visible to you just barely, stopping short just above their skin, slowing and then condensing — are they recording sound? Insanity. You wish you could — you’d gotten used to recorded lectures, had to adjust when you arrived. You couldn’t even bring your insulin pump. Had to get that implanted as a rune sequence right off the bat — nobody else had a surgical appointment within their first few days. Bitterness fuels the thoughts: you had missed out on the socializing, the bonding, the icebreakers and the rule-setting. You didn’t even get time to set up your dorm room. Just straight into classes for you. No wonder you are so alone. Always playing catch-up. But right now, the second-cycle students feel more like your cohort than your own.
Watch the ripples-like-soundwaves for a moment longer, eyes caught like fish to hooks. An odd way to make a recording device, really. Like it’s being misapplied. Tug, snap yourself out of the thought with a twist of your shoulders that breaks something red and wet, deep inside.
Before you, below. There is no projector, but it feels like there should be — this professor is clearly from a place where they were used. The rectangle on the wall burns with ingrown lights that assert into forms and words within a thoughtspan. Your eyes ache, a tension headache building early. Your mouth tastes like blood. Consider again the Isc-Opa-Gravis possibility of a forcefield, the one you had imagined in the class before this. Run it down again — and in a moment that splits you down inside, imagine and then realize through a what-if that no, Opa would not be sttriictly required, if you were to make that. Not even Gravis would be needed, really, you realize softly, if the forcefield were a wall instead of a stabilizer of something’s place in the world. Now, consider the modified form: a rune sequence with primarily Isc that makes any acceleration slow the nearer it becomes by halving distance travelled over and over in exponential amounts the closer it becomes, keeping Opa only for the black hole clause in case something goes wrong.
It’s like breathing air after becoming used to perfluorocarbons — refreshing, revitalizing, freeing. Like adrenaline but enjoyable, not a morning necessity. Remember Zeno’s paradoxes, the halving of distance into infinity. And of things you wanted near you? You would ask Rook or Corcus how they use memories to lock sequences. Unless you wanted it near you, this sequence would put any object going towards you into a lifelong labyrinthine rendezvous with yourself.
And with that third time thinking down this route of possibility you know that tonight, tomorrow, and for the next month, you will be making this sequence a reality. And, if you like it enough, which this time you finally have the gut feeling that you will, this sequence will become a permanent resident in your body.
Logistics. Something finally stuns you, feels wrong, a weight in your chest. Think quickly — for funding, you decide, you will sell the area-creation sequence you just completed. Sharp pain to your joy-heart, there, but it is necessary, the panic of a great loss a spur to kick you into making the new. Maybe Professor Yaw will buy it — the lack of ambulance or mobile trauma bay had jarred you on your first day, and you haven’t gotten over it. And—
And then your thoughts quiet, decisions over.
There are projections on the board you that you do not recognize. You have no idea what time it is. You probably missed nearly a full quarter of the class, you wager, thinking this down. Your rune sequences pulse with your heartbeat, remembering how yesterday you had resolved, hopelessly, to do better than yesterday and yesterday’s yesterday and so on. The professor opens her mouth, not-a-slide flickering to the next predetermined image. “Today’s topic is—”
You don’t deserve to be here. You don’t deserve to be alive. Right here, right now, open the Isc-Opa sequence you’ve been fiddling with all day. Change the target faintly, lightly, just on the tip of your tongue, and stop your own heart.
Clinic hours pass easily. Warm wood, frankincense. Swabs, coughs, impaled arms. It’s quiet today — you’d never say that out loud, but you risk thinking it today. It’ll be exam season soon, though, and that will trigger an influx of students. Suicides, self-injuries, exam-induced gore and viscera spilling into the hallways. You grab a bite at the plaza cafe, down the mountain and halfway towards the cliffside, near the student market and town at the base of the campus, forgetting your vow to yourself to starve and dehydrate and sleep-deprive yourself, because maybe if you hurt yourself enough someone would finally notice and care about how much you are suffering. Did you ever die, in your previous class, or did you just obliterate your memories and recover instantly? There is a sequence on your forearm that you don’t recognize, fresh pen ink intricate, weaving between the thermal exam holes pitting the flesh there. A sharp chemical blue. The pastry is good. The student working the counter remembered you, had set it aside in anticipation in case they ran out before you arrived. Blueberry fritter? they asked. Yes, you replied. Unvoiced: You never order anything else. You had made polite conversation, wondering as always where they get the wheat flour. Outside, pastry finished, you chide yourself on having such a predictable routine. Vow to change it. Know that you won’t.
Walk the plaza outside, the woods, mind absent and body detached, until the shadows tell you that too much time has passed to put it off any longer.
Return to the clinic. The sky is orange and black and blue, conundrum streaked with yellow. This time you enter through the back entrance, head straight for the surgical wing because you’ve memorized the room they set aside for you. Pass through the double doors and sweep from gentle hues, warm wood, live plants into a sterile hospital wing almost up to par with what you remember from home.
Grimace at that you have to be here. Don’t like being treated as special. Know that technically you are — you are re-convinced of it every time you meet your advisor — but the moment you leave, that fragile belief is gone once again. You see others working so much harder than you, being so much more present than you ever are, succeeding and earning higher grades and holding a job when you can’t manage even your sleep schedule. Picture M. Red as you think this. You hadn’t seen him exit the clinic.
Find the room. Smells like antiseptic, weeping through the door. The door is shut, a simple, neat Opa sequence by the handle turning the copper an intangible red as your hand passes through it. Ineffective for emergencies, because the door could just be broken down, but effective for deterring automatic movements to enter the room.
Murmuring from behind the door, audible without your ear pressed to the wall but more audible with. M. Red, Jasmine, someone else. Lean against the wall opposite the door, tilt your head back, feel the rush of black wash over you and relax into it — succumb to the tinnitus, the white noise, the chills sweeping your body in waves. Exhale into vertigo and forget to inhale until the door opens.
Jasmine is staring at you. Behind her, M. Red is a constellation of Opa sparks tracing like fireflies over his sequences; he sits up from the surgical table, stretches and unfolds his wings from the gaps made for them and for a moment he is on display and he dwarfs the room, black and white and huge like the night sky with a cloudstripe through them. Then he folds himself down, pristine and stiff from whatever his procedure was — likely nutrition, your dazed mind remembers, and you see for a moment how sickly thin he is, nauseatingly and horrifyingly skeletal under his clothing, a living puppet, and then some Opa illusion fizzles up and cloaks that and he sits sideways across the chair to do up his coat. Jasmine’s eyes are keen on you, calculating, but you have no room in your mind for her: M. Red tugs his coat-flaps over his huge albatross wings without expression, buckles them together once the back-flaps fall down. He shifts, stretches, waits and his coat ripples with a thick clank-clank-clank, far too heavy and dull, like it holds multitudes inside. He swings his legs down onto the ground. A loose downy feather drifts across the floor like snow in the wind, white with black tips.
“I’ll be ready for you in a minute,” says Jasmine. Her face is a strained, bloodless blur, and then she is gone. Her shoes click down the hall.
M. Red finishes with his coat, plugging the needles dangling from wires extruding from the leg-covers into his calves with thick, dull snaps, then stands “Your turn,” he says, and gives you a half-excruciated smile — you don’t think it’s related to you being you. and then you’re alone.
Enter. Shut the door. The room is oversized without people in it, big enough for most winged mages to stretch at least one wing out. The lighting is off, the infrastructure likely not detecting enough heat from you to register an occupant. It’s quiet, save for your heartbeat.
Stand there and observe the same scene as always.
Pale wood tiles. The clutter of imported machines for when the problem isn’t known. Tacked-up paper and ink sequences decorating the walls in a strangely beautiful chorus like fortune slips, ready to be pressed to a patient’s skin and activated in an eyeblink.The table has an open hole in the middle where your spine will be accessible, has two padded rods for bordering and supporting a patient’s thorico-lumbar spine where second-cycle students who were assigned to have wings — or who came in with their bodies already as such — can lie in semi-comfort. This is what M. Red had to detangle himself from. There is no true comfort, you’ve been told by M. Red and Corcus and countless others. You had briefly experienced it yourself, but you squandered that chance.
Feel nothing but a dull numbness at the fact. Remember, dimly, asking the one and only time: Corcus, take it. Take my knowledge of precisely what happened.
”Leaving the stories?”
”Leaving the stories.”
And it working. And with that: nothing at all in your mind. Static and styrofoam.
The light is bright, but the surgical light is still off. Sit on the edge of the bed. Hesitate before lying down — the moment you do, you will not be able to get up again until the procedure is done. You are still able to leave, still have free will and autonomy, until you can’t anymore. You do this every time. And so you sit there, waiting until your doctor comes back.
And then the door opens, just as you start to drift off despite the lights. “I’m back,” she says without cheer and without regret. An informing statement, not a greeting. A long pale coat, a braided lilac sash, dark skin almost purple under the lights, orange-black eyes mild and intelligent. Her nametag reads Jasmine — Second Cycle.
The instruction to lie down has been given so many times before that she simply pauses and waits until you swing your legs over, lie down and align your spine with the hole, fold your arms loosely over your stomach to keep them from hanging off the table. You twitch the muscles of your back with effort, and yes, Isc is active from the table, sparked by your body heat — something warm has seeped into your muscles, numbing you, and Isc has formed anchors in your muscles that keep you still despite the tug of your everything else.
What time is it? A black wave washes over you, prickly hot. For a moment, if you were not locked into position — your doctor bends one stiff arm from your torso and places it onto a side-table, exposing your inner bicep — you would certainly fall, not knowing which way was down.
Jasmine checks the implants in your upper inner arm, right below your bicep. A pinch — taste bitter saffron, vibrant neon green. “Insulin pump replacement working as expected,” she narrates aloud. You briefly remember that she is the fourth member of your team — you forget this, often. Consider her, instead, as just your doctor. Her voice is soft. “Memophenidate lacing at correct dosage.” Nobody answers your questions when you ask why you have memophenidates toggling off and on all day, suffocating your system, but it was part of the package required for your early second year advancement. The lights are too bright — your head is splitting, slowly.
Did your brain ever stop hurting, today, or did you just forget?
She rotates a small wheel and the table tilts over. Tilt-table test, you remember reading a lifetime ago in a textbook made more of plastic than of paper, at a table made more of plastic than of wood pulp, in a room with tiles of linoleum and LEDs carelessly strobing overhead at a rate you couldn’t yet see. And then you know that this is not a tilt table test. Wrong angle. The headache is worse — your eyeballs are rupturing from your skull. There is something inside of you, fighting to get out, an overwhelming pressure. Linoleum. It’s been too long since you last thought about your life before Rela. Sometimes it feels like everyone but you was wiped, made to forget. “Freezing at Gravis false test, but no abnormal biomarkers. Rolling.” And the table flips in one smooth unjarring motion, exposing your back and open shoulderblades. You stare at the soft ceramic floor, eyes hazy, blissfully out of the light for a brief instant. You’ve been pretending to be okay all day, working off an invisible but limitless pool of energy inside of you that wears away at your future with every pull. You’re unwinding, derealizing.
But you don’t have to pretend to be okay here, not in an operating room — let yourself show even your impolite side, all the discomfort and sensation you normally suppress.
Here, you just have to pretend to be competent enough at staying alive.
Fingers cool and gloved in a thin layer of sterile air made solid slide over the ridges of your spine, counting vertebrae. Nausea, actual nausea, pools heavy like mercury in your stomach; a felt-tip pen traces shivery marks over your skin. You fight to hold it in, miss what your doctor says she is doing. Or maybe that’s intentional — sound is blurry right now, thick like cotton. You can’t hear what is being said any more than you can stuff salt through your eardrums — that makes sense, right? Sharp black lines shoot across your vision as the felt-tip continues its work — you are being turned inside-out. The door opens. In wheels a small metal cart. Atop it, red and glistening, are a wet set of biofabricated bones. Dizzy, you gather, and another drug enters the cocktail spewing through your bloodstream.
You try to relax, as you often need to when you donate blood, but you cannot relax because you are not tensed. There is nothing for you to do but wait and manage your anxiety. Forceps click and soft fabric noises by your exposed neck, hairs standing on end in gooseflesh. You try to drift, and you remember that is what you try to do every time. Every third day of the season.
Detach from time. Succeed.
There is the moment when your doctor picks up the bones, triangular things pulsating with blood supply. Tiny Isc-patterned sequences etched into their surfaces, too small for you to see the details. They hover a centimeter away from the doctor’s hands, held sterile where the Opa layer begins.
The muscle around your shoulderblades, painstakingly built back up over the course of the season after your accident, is oddly cold inside. Something metal clicks inside the table and there is a monstrous insertion, skin stretching and bone slick and sliding inside the slit.
A shuddering thock, a disciplined socketing that leaves you choking on air. Do not recover, face-down, nose bluing and blurry in your cross-vision. You do not have enough oxygen — your headache is all-consuming, you are in caffeine withdrawal during a migraine — slip into a cool numb dark space away from your body. If you just put in some effort, you can die whenever you want, just leave your body, but it wasn't supposed to feel like this. Vertigo — drift, then freefall completely from your body with a loosening of lungs — exhale, not as an action but as a relaxing.
A vomitous jolt around your heart. A suffusion of cold fluid inside the arteries there, too fast and too wrong, brings you back from the brink. You gasp back into living, underinflated meat of your lungs greedy for the first time in minutes and you are not allowed to die, have never been allowed to die. There is shouting.
And then it is over.
You are upright, Isc off, drugs draining from your muscles in a metabolization that feels like fire.
The surgical lamp is off but the room is still bright, smells like antiseptic. Your back feels like it was cut open and sewn shut — it was. You’ll see it in the mirror later — it is warm, swollen around your shoulders. The fluid underneath your skin jiggles with movement, a heavy mirror of the tissue on the opposite side of your chest.
Breathe, sickened. In the room bordering yours, bordered by glass, a tech with feathers and scales and a crest and wings like a prairie falcon works the monitors, pretending not to see you. You understand their discomfort — you’ve been in their place enough times, so you don’t make it awkward for them by trying to initiate conversation. You are stiff and aching, but there is no other way of existing and so you treat it all the same, powering through until you aren’t even limping because what’s the point of of giving in to the hurt if you aren’t going to get help.
Leave the way you came.
It’s black out. Midnight. Exhausting — your senses are dulled, hypersensitive but unable to have any sharpness. Your back hurts. Your shoulderblades jiggle, hot and swollen. Your head hurts to the point that it’s an empty sack atop your neck, floaty and unreal. You are a puppeteer piloting this body, right now, and you take careful solace in that, because that’s the only thing keeping you moving right now. Again comes that thought, quiet and fragile: could you make it so you could always do this? Auto-pilot your body, offload responsibilities of movement into something else?
It’s the second time you have thought this today. And so, to follow your rule with yourself that keeps you up at night, you mentally schedule a time to talk to Corcus. He would know how to get started on that. And when you do, you can also ask about the sequences tying to memories, so you can begin on that Zeno Isc sequence project.
You pilot your body through drifts of pink cherry petals, take the shortcut by habit between the minor cliff edge that separates the theatre and the student shops below, go roundabout to the canebreak. Find the one particularly thick cane on the edge marked with a tiny red lantern where a mage generations ago scratched a sloppy — but extremely effective — Opa sequence, slicking the air. Slide through the canes and low offshooting leaves without scratches, reads a language you sometimes forget you even speak, rare now even in your dreams. Bump the sequence with your middle knuckle and travel the canebrake, indeed, slippery and unmarked by your journey. Somewhere inside you, the voice of Corcus, perhaps bidden by your earlier thought of him, murmurs, But what is the point of the journey if you come through unchanged? And you have no reply.
Make it back to the dorms, the impossible buildings holding rooms covered in sigils and paint and more sigils under that, of sometimes upside-down and sometimes catastrophically insane and occasionally contained-explosive disasters. Go up the stairwell, fatigue combining with self-loathing and compelling you to take the stairs, to forego the sequences written into the sides of the building that take one to various floors and rooms in semi-chaotic mismanner. You’ve heard rumors that at least one has been defaced — or was originally written? to attempt to identify underwear and transport everything but that to the sixth floor, and to disintegrate the garment as turnover fuel for the next jump. You aren’t afraid of that, but you don’t use the sequences anyway. Best to remain distant from student culture. Maybe just for now, maybe forever. And so you ascend the stairwell, and as it goes every night the sequences on the walls light the gloom in a rainbow of colours and in the shapes of globes, hearts, plants, genitalia, messages comforting and inane in a cacophony of languages.
Dizzy. Brown-black spots clot your vision. Patterns manifest and twist in your peripheral vision.
Make it to your floor. Make it to your hallway. Make it to your room. Spartan. Walls bare. Sleeping mat rumpled. Kick off your shoes.
Collapse.
Lie there. Lie awake, images of potential sequences spinning, powered into visibility through a half-dreaming state. Have seconds passed? Minutes. Maybe hours. You look pathetic. There’s nobody here to look pathetic for. Get up.
You sit up. Back against the wall, hollow cavities of the wing-sockets that weren’t rubbing oily smears into the wood. Preen glands. You never got them removed. The new bone of today was too important to reschedule.
The concrete is cold through the mat, as it is every night. Your headache is better, but being half-asleep brings awareness of how much your body hurts. Your joints arthritic, your shoulders strained, your back ripped and stapled back together, warm and itchy from biodegradable tattoo ink — you remember the buzzing, now, the pain like ceaseless cat scratches — presumably keeping infection at bay. No aftercare instructions for you, only return to clinic in three days. As always.
Remember with abnormal crystalline clarity M. Red’s coat sequences earlier. Play with them in your head, turn them glowing in the air above you, leg sequences heating to expand your image processing — you had figured that one out early all on your own. Showed it off. Maybe that tiny spark of potential is what landed you here — regret, dark and heavy and twisted, self-loathing. Imagine being in the same dorm, less knowledge, less responsibility, not forcing yourself to lie on your side or stomach to keep the surgical incisions from weeping onto your mat. Imagine not needing to care so much, not needing to study so hard every day but also never hard enough. Imagine.
Clear it.
…Did you sleep? You are lying down, at least. Contemplate getting up. Is it time for your classes? No — your alarm hasn’t gone off. Why is it so dark?
Ah.
It’s two in the morning. Your internal clock still hasn’t reset from your home country, your home world, your home universe, but today it is approximately on time with Rela’s time cycle, will be approximately on schedule for the rest of the night.
Did you ever turn in that sequence from this morning? Shock like cold water submersion. Then remember that you did, but recall the sequence anyway in excruciating detail — even all the modifiers. Recall so clearly that you can see it glowing above you like the Opa graffiti in the stairwell. Reach out, try to touch it. Find the Opa sequence under your mat, reach out with senses still new to you, fumble your other hand off the mat to touch the floor so you can actually feel it, and then yes, it’s tangible.
Drift, tracing the lines and modifiers. One of the spools looks like glasses.
Unbidden: a memory of tables laid out, grey and plastic on a linoleum floor and signs saying not to drink the reagent bottles and a green eyewash station. Brief culture shock directed at your own memory at not having enough space for a winged mage and at the pipes connecting the faucets with the wall. When was the last time you saw plastic? Shake that thought away — this feels important.
Ilona Pitkanen. Your teacher — someone who earned a degree in what she taught, who learned every day how best to teach. Not just a highly educated mentor.
Your teacher’s voice. High school. The whine of LEDs; the smell of plastic; the perpetual buzz of caffeine. Energy, she said, is the excitation of atoms. You can think of it like vibration. Heat, for example: a microwave appliance uses tiny waves — //micro-waves — to penetrate and vibrate molecules.//
You haven't been taught the standard ways of sequencemaking. You know this. You tend to brute-force whatever you can however you can, like a trapeze artist with too much muscle using strength instead of technique to get into whatever position is needed. But this has an advantage, others say they notice about you: you question the unsaid rules. You disagree, because on your side, it just feels like people are ignoring the obvious options in every situation.
This thought is mist in the back of your mind, Eha a gentle glimmer in your mind's eye, sequences shining and shifting, dreamlike code as an art for above, and slowly, carefully, you take out the pen you always have on you, the one any respectable Relan mage keeps several of on their person at all times, and without looking but carefully, with smooth strokes that do not lift the nub from your skin, you sketch the idea you have in your head onto the flat, soft, shaved-hairless skin of your stomach.
If Eha makes heat, and if heat is just vibration, then you should be able to make something vibrate with Eha. Without making heat. Like Isc, if Isc were movement instead of position. Like Isc, if Isc were only seen as a way to lock objects in place instead of altering the position of atoms and subatomic structures. And, briefly, assess that this makes sense — Isc for position, Opa for transmutation of particle and wave, Gravis for gravity. Eha always stood out to you, an odd one out, too specific in its use. The others, following that chain of logic, feel wrong still — recall like a fantasy story: subatomic magnetism, forces keeping atoms together, keeping electrons in orbit — fireworks of a headache, blasts of colour before your eyes, and it makes total sense. Even though you barely remember, because it has been too long since you refreshed your knowledge of basic physics and your textbook orders keep being denied. Bitterly, resolvedly: you will smuggle some in during the next student exchange. You suspect you need to. And then your hand is still, hovering over your stomach, its mission complete.
Sense the sequence in your mind, anchoring to your skin. New sequences are still hard for you to find the activation sense for, sometimes, and drunk on sleep deprivation this makes sense to you. M. Red, Corcus, even Jasmine all say that sequences come naturally to them now, that they simply activate them and they are there. You need to find them in your mind first, even on the best of days. Your mind isn’t quite moulded to how a Relan’s needs to be yet. But.
The sequence hangs in your mind. Feel a weariness wash over you, an almost-insurmountable tug downwards that signals that your body is ready for sleep. The end-stage of the wave, low and shallow, prickles you with hot tiny needles.
Ignore it. Your blanket isn’t even on you yet.
Sit up. Or, rather, instruct your limbs to lever yourself upwards and experience your body doing as you told it to do, even as the rest of you desires everything but. Flail in your mind, looking for the sequence from earlier, the one that stopped your heart.
It isn’t here anymore.
Know, dully, what happened. Smell the chemical blue inked on your arm, still there, still real.
Calm, collected, focused, only one part of you awake, the rest of you asleep. No consequences to any of your actions tonight, whatever they may be. You are a ghost, drifting. You might as well be dreaming.
Tug sharply on the sequence on your stomach. Remember the distance from your room to the roof. Figure, momentarily, that you should try to do something smaller, first, then unfigure that. Remember that it isn’t Isc; that there is matter between you and your destination.
Pilot your body to the window. Fumble it open, use your forearm like a crowbar to wedge it wide. Something in your wrist sends a signal to another part of you, but you don’t feel it. The wind is cold, painful like you’ve been removed of your skin. Hurtle yourself forward, toes over the edge of the seventh floor. The college is not visible. Too many trees, and then lose your balance and feel your heart stop, then start again as you remember it doesn’t matter.
I don’t care.
and for a moment there is agony on your face, your body, as air rips away at your skin. Tug on the sequence written on your stomach and shudder—
Lurch upwards by your bones, because warm calcium is the mineral you latched onto for target. Catapult yourself through the air with all the gravity still there, wholly unlike you experience with attempts at Gravis where it is simply calculated freefall — this is a launching. Parabolic arc — you are not gifted at math. Your heart is shuddering again. Calm yourself. None of this matters. A shattering like glass, a twanging of wire — shade yourself, hide under the carpet, let reality sweep you out of sight, but that innate feeling isn’t enough because it’s verbalized, now, and so you summon inside yourself like a thunderroll words you’ve used before, a mantra of sorts: Whatever happens tonight, happens.
And then you are calm again. Sleepy, wide awake, buzzing, vibrating in only one direction, hurtle over treetops towards the slant of the dorm rooftop. Adjust your aim vaguely, dreamily, finding the sequence modifiers left in your mind like physical constructs and divert your veering towards the railless winged student landing. The roar of wind in your ears, slingshotting yourself halfway across campus and back again, decide whimsically through teary vision at the approaching edge: what if I broke my leg on that? Wouldn’t that hurt. And, well, you’re already here, and none of this matters. Imagine it so vividly it might as well have already happened, and if it might as well have already happened then you just need to follow through with it. Everything is predetermined, now: breaking your legs, recovering from that — imagine the pain you’ll feel, hobbling into the infirmary, then limping into class the next day with splints, the day after that and the day after. Sick satisfaction from the future pain, the pity, the recognition: is Jasper okay? Maybe you’ll finally be hurt enough for someone to care.
Freezing cold wind — the apex of the parabola. You aren’t there. Aren’t in a classroom, don’t have your legs broken. You just went through it all — it might as well have been real. And now it’s not worth it because nobody cared. Too much effort.
Accelerating. The vibration-stop burning the back half, the ricochet, the opposite-direction pull fires into your ribs where you told the sequence on your stomach-skin to throw away the heat, the excess. Nausea, genuine nausea for the second time today, an odd twisting inside as you are cooked alive, blood pressure faltering. And then remember again: None of this matters. It’s freeing. Sail over the cathedral spire and miss the needlepoint. By an inch, sticking out your leg to collide with it too late. Tuck it back in, glee and sorrow intermingling into a euphoria.
Destination approaching. A leg isn’t enough. Your grin is wide, teeth blanched dry by the wind, hurts on your face: What if I died? Snapped my neck? Broke my back in several places, cracked my skull and spilled my brains out like runny egg? What if I pulsed pink and white and the pulse slowed and stopped? Would they find runes written in my grey matter? Would any of this even matter? Delight, double over and for a fleeting moment your body says you’ve been in that position before, hurtling through the air with muscles and limbs — no, it’s gone, Corcus’s technique having erased all but the ragged edges. That was just a sliver of recall like gum around an empty socket to remind you that you lost — and now that you’re confused by that, the laughter bubbling over only hurts. Straighten. Quarter of the way left. A dim moment of despair: it’s taking too long. Worry you won’t have the courage to pull this off, will find some reason to stop yourself. Steel your resolve, catch hold of the sequences in your mind—
Blinding lights as you pass through the last copse of trees into the central square — huge red lanterns drifting, and the headache that started from your occipital lobe pulses outwards, breaches your orbital cavities and explodes. Agony. Take refuge in your advisor speaking to you today, the flush of failure suffusing you — imagine being clobbered over the head there, right in front of her. Maybe traumatic brain injury would relieve some pressure, academic and mirror the pain inside so people could see it. Maybe if they cared enough you would finally be allowed to die. Fantasize: You’d stop having to work for your position, finally cemented in your rank as the second best mage in a generation. Never have to worry about keeping up because you’d be dead.
Never have to scramble at your assignments again, praying you’ll make it. Never have to worry again about the nightmare where you are pulled aside and told that no, now you are only the third-best mage in a generation. You falter, then, are told fourth, fifth, sixth, and so on.
You’re only the second. It doesn’t feel like it. There is no one you can talk to.
You are screaming, lurched forward at a vibrating speed. Banners, strings of flags, buildings rip past in snapshot blurs. The back-half of the vibration is withheld still and another burn of the excess stored energy vibrates inside of you and your chest stiffens with the heat. Accelerating headfirst towards the landing pad, blurry rounded white oak planks scrawled in charcoal, lights drifting like motes of dust in cheery yellow and reds. Skin negative two degrees Celsius with windchill and mist; stiffly, uncompromisingly relax. Shivering, freezing, a burning heat like feverchill inside you, some sequence of yours decelerating your perception of time on reflex you designed, pulling energy from the speed of your blood through your vessels and agony.
Heart jumping in your chest, lungs caught deflated and nose closed off from the wind, nictitating membranes firmly shut — those were never removed. Safe inside your body’s strong-armed efforts to protect you, but your body can’t do anything to avert this now. Ten. Five. Take a forced frozen breath with an expansion of your ribcage, and—
Choking, flailing, red-hot screaming inside, headache blooming like thorny red roses bleeding. Oh, god, you don’t want to die. This was a mistake. Scrabble at yourself, fumble numb fingers to your shirt to wipe the sequence from your skin — mad animal need to live. You can’t do this — please, please no. Flick pupils up to the landing pad, process barely anything at all — too close. You can feel your neck snapping, dying. No. Please.
Too late. Something searing on your wrist; a final burst of acceleration — at least it’ll be quick. Eyes squeeze shut. I’m sorry.
…
Wince. Flinch. Confusion. Wait, ready, for far too long.
Squint. And with the opening of your eyes, a single flash of pure dazzling cyan light that freezes you in place.
“You look like a stunned fox,” The words are oddly stilted — this is what your brain grabs onto? You stare — at first it’s wings, Isc, Gravis coat, more feathers, safe. Incredulous, scorning: safe? Really? But it’s true. Regretfully, horribly, sorrowfully, undoubtedly: it’s true. It’s M. Red. What else could he be?
The smell of petrichor hits you readily, sends you dizzy and your body is manipulated in the air until you are hanging flat on your back, arms loose and flopping below your torso and then caught in a different gravity before your shoulders can unsocket. M. Red stands over you.
There’s that wave of exhaustion again, this time pinched with the salt of weariness and failure at doing the one thing you’re good at. A two point eight degree wet washcloth wipes over your stomach. There’s a discomforting ping in your brain as the activation sequence is erased. A sharp ethyl alcohol cuts out the pleasantness of the petrichor.
“I won’t ask what you were doing,” he says to the air. “Nor will I say I understand, because I don’t think it would help you to worry about that right now.”
A series of soft clicks, jangles, snaps of metal on metal muffled through the fabric of his too-imbued coat; he is kneeling. Delicate fingers work the sequences wrapped around your ankles.
His hands are soft — too soft. Your fingertips are calloused to tabletop-hardness with how you work with wire every day. He must have a trick to it that you never noticed, and there’s that weariness again.
“These are draining your blood. The movement from your limbs, the pulse from your heart. Only a percentage of it, but it puts strain on your body. Why?”
When you don’t reply immediately, or maybe at something he sees on your face, there is a cold pinch in your upper spine and a loose liquid relaxation that suffuses your limbs. You have a moment to think Jasmine’s cocktail before that thought is gone, too. You are adrift.
M. Red sighs. It’s quiet, but audible to you. He probably doesn’t know you heard it. “Corcus is asleep. Rook is awake, but you know how it is when only one of them is there. I can get your advisor if you need—”
“No, that’s fine,” you say. Your lips are warm, tingly. The only part of you with temperature. “I don’t need anyone right now.” He frowns.
Time slips by. M. Red reads through your sequences, adjusts them for you, commenting on how most, if not all, of the work you’ve done is something that will kill you, eventually. You don’t see why it matters. You hang there in the air, weightless, occasionally being turned over so he can read a new part of you. The moon slips by in the sky. The stars are wide and open like a thousand eyes. It is all so very quiet.
“Clever,” he says suddenly. Has it been minutes, or hours? “You are the second to realize that Eha isn’t heat at all. How did you learn?”
The drug is liquid behind your eyes. You’ve given up on your inner ear. The dark is clear and pristine: the forest a thousand details. Bats snap overhead, drawn by the bugs that are drawn by the light. “My high school chemistry teacher,” you murmur. It takes immense effort to raise your voice beyond a breathy murmur, and even then M. Red’s sequences below his ears — you know what they are, can read them from here — brighten, faintly, to amplify what you said.
“I see.” He does not see. He hovers beside you — you still tranquil, wrapped in a Gravis embrace. He leans back against nothing, stretching the upper tendons of his wings in an unconscious movement. You watch thoughts shift on his face. He is perfect that way, so able to exist in the world. You and he are walking upstream waist-deep, the rapids tugging at your ankles and thighs, the rocks slippery and algae-covered, every step a near-miss, nearly pulling you under, but he never seems to feel the strain. Always forging onward like the current isn’t real.
Like the world moulds to his will, not the other way around. Effortless, untouchable. Maybe he is a god.
Late-night thoughts. Delusional thoughts. Memories, faintly, of the taste of gelatin pill capsules and bitter white powder inside. That time a capsule opened inside the orange bottle. Everything covered in a fine sheen of medicine that caught in your lungs when you made the mistake of breathing with it still on your tongue.
An abrupt change in his posture. “Are you all right?”
No. And you don’t want to say it out loud. It’s too much effort. And it’s too much of confirmation, you doing all of the work for your own recovery. He can’t be a god if he has to ask this of you. He just lost his one worshipper.
He seems to hear this. Deflates, exhaustion permeating his bones. It’s all an act. You know he can stimulate his adrenal glands and, if those are exhausted, pull from the reserves he collects off himself, carries in those tiny glass bottles hanging at his hip. Go all night long, and then the next day, and then the next. Repair his own brain, clean it as dreams do through his repair sequences. You’ve heard his and Jasmine’s and Corcus’s and Rook’s meetings on this, have attended a few yourself and otherwise listened through the wall. Jasmine usually doesn’t join, these days, had fallen behind in understanding months ago. Corcus sometimes sends Rook on his own, other times comes with only himself. Has been taking double the amount of classes lately, some at night. And you don’t understand half the things they say until months down the line when some fundamental theory is presented in class and you remember what they discussed and something clicks and you think, Oh! and it all makes sense, but far too late. Even if you are the best in the room in those moments, it’s only because of your exposure to higher ways of learning by others. This makes you among the worst among them all.Even your achievements are really the achievements of others. You will never be enough.
M. Red’s eyes are closed. Fingers weaving complex shapes by his hip. You shut your eyes, tidal wave pulling you under, and then you surface again moments later, Rook on your chest. His weight is more with the guilt that comes from seeing him, half-imagined, crushed and bloodied in a box, thrown into the sea. The sky is purple-indigo.
“I have a meeting to get to,” M. Red says by way of apology. At five in the morning? “With the dean,” he says by way of explanation, though that doesn’t explain anything. You are aware of there being a dean in the same way as you are aware of there being an administrative building, as you are aware of there being rules about dress code. You follow it all accidentally, and none of it ever affects you enough for you to need to be aware of it. Suddenly, guiltily, it feels like you should be. Rook squats on your chest, tilts his head to look you in the eye. His anklet items drift, a tiny glass bottle with fluid inside and so many wraps of braided metal and a single, well-chosen patterned Isc-blue ribbon.
“Will you be all right?” M. Red asks. His posture says I'm sorry. “Are you going to kill yourself when I leave?” It’s a genuine question. And this means he knew what you had been trying to do — knew all along. That tidal wave of exhaustion is no longer here — you surface from it, buoyed by profuse embarrassment.
Embarrassment? About wanting to kill yourself?
Shake your head. No, you won’t try to die again yet — not so soon. You’ll forget your terror and regret come morning, you know, but for right now it’s over.
He twists, there’s a flash of black light, and he’s gone. Collapse gently onto the floor — like how your infinite—distance sequence will work. That floats before your eyes, a quick tic of vision and indeed, you can’t die yet. You still need to lose yourself in work for that.
You are so tired. But you have an infinite well of energy inside of you, and you will ride it until you die.
Ease yourself up. Everything hurts. Your bones ache, shaken and vibrated, jolted from their cushions in your muscles. Velocity, that’s what it is. A vibration in only one direction is velocity. Is that what Eha can be used to do? It’s not even a question — it’s what you did. It sounds impossible. Like saying plants are a function of gravity. It’s not even in the same genus of information, that’s how impossible it is. But you did it.
Rook sits placidly on your lap where he crawled from your chest. “Shoo,” you say, not unkindly, and he hops to the ground, croaking lowly, then, with two sets of vocal cords unused to human noises because he isn’t human: “I will accompany you to your dorm.”
Your bones ache. Your head pounds. Your muscles rebel against motion. But you manage to roll out from the Gravis landing pad’s shock absorption zone. To stand.
Pick Rook up on a sideways fist like how Corcus showed everyone last week. And head down the stairwell, painted over in a hundred tiny sigils and sequences and graffiti and artwork of wings and feather patterns and tips on where on campus one can find free food and restrooms with good splash protection. And down you go seven storeys until you are back on your floor, in the hallway leading to your room.
Awareness as you pass by M. Red’s room, Corcus’s one over from that but the wall dissolved into a thin Opa sheen, only visible enough to block sunlight from entering Corcus’s side during the night where he needs, you know, absolute dark and silence to fully rest.
M. Red’s light is on. Rook stares at you, waiting, and you sigh, continue to your room. Being managed is something you are unfortunately used to. It comforts you a little, in its own way, that you know you need to be treated like a child, can’t be trusted to act on your own will because you will maim or kill yourself if you do. It’s sickening, a perverse pleasure in finally being taken care of. You hate yourself for it. Open your door for the second time tonight.
Your shoes are there by the wall where you left them. Your food stash a jumbled pile in a box in the corner, your clothing a mismatched mess spilling out from another box on the opposite side. A brief series of shelving, barely used, warily altered once a month. A thriving fern on the windowsill that waves in the breeze coming in from the forest that smells of pine. A red and gold rug on your floor that you bought because it was cheap and someone said your room needed colour — it just looks out of place. It was wrong to call your room spartan — rather, it is barren. Cluttered, sure, but not lived-in. Not settled-in. You’ve been here for two years. When are you going to realize that you are here to stay?
Move to set Rook down on the writing desk you have in the corner, but he flutters up to sit on your shelving, which wobbles under even his weight. He was aware of this, must have some memory of Corcus in him to tell him that, and does not startle at the sway. You stare at him. He stares back. It’s the surgical ward all over again, an authority waiting for you to do what you both know needs to be done.
You sigh, petulant toddler that you are. Strip yourself of shirt, pants. Undershirt, underwear. Pump two cold squirts of clear alcohol gel into your hands and rub it briskly into the sequences stitched under your skin at your calves, biceps, and sides. The sun is coming up too quickly — the sky is grey with a side of pink, soon to be rose and then gold. But—
Ah, there it is. Exhaustion cuts you down to your knees, and you faceplant as a sack of bones and meat and stress and exhaustion and denial of your problems onto your mat. Shut your eyes even though your brain is too tethered to sleep.
A series of short flutters. Clicking claws. Firmly, your sheet is tugged over you, up to your neck. You curl on your side. Tighter, then looser as your sequences pinch under the skin of your hip. Rook settles a foot away from your face, blurry despite the morning light, and watches. The sequence that makes your imagination into Opa projections curls from under the mat — with a monstrous effort, you tug one hand out and curl your fingers just under the activation sigil. Rook should get to see your dreams. At least that much can be given to those better than you. Draw strength, switch the power source to your own body heat—
A sharp nip at your fingertip. Reflexively, though sluggishly and with delay, withdraw. Open your mouth, but you are too tired to argue.
Know faintly that you have class in an hour, and that the adrenaline in a jar on your shelf will wake you when it is time. Gain some tiny shred of satisfaction from that. Slacken.
Fall asleep at the break of dawn.
-
- _
Though My House is Dusty, the Very Act Of Wandering Revives It
though that was not my intention —
the way I walk up the stairs, dodging the middle step that creaks
and the way I pull out that chair to access the fridge, and the way
the cat sat on that shelf from ikea we never quite put together —It's been too long since I've been here, and I was so afraid to visit
because I was afraid I would forget the way the birds sing
or how to fill these halls with the rhythm of my feet —
but even visiting like this recalls the past, and I find myself once again
singing to the wind and drumming the beat that fills these walls
because the soul cannot forget, not once it's filled this house once —so all I need to do now is remember that change is good
and stagnation is what made me leave in the first place.And so do what we do when we grace these halls once more:
recall some old habits and make some new
and remember to sing come the morning.