Chapter 365: Too Many Victims

Crowds of people litter the streets. Most of them don’t have a speck of dust on them, but all of them have the slight uncertainty of a life freshly upturned. I apologize meekly and tread carefully so as not to step on any tiny toes while I squeeze through the crowd, making my way up and out of the main area and onto the strip leading to the hangar. My awareness ensures I take in the entirety of the scene without the need to turn.

There are so many of them. People of all ages, still wearing the uniforms for whatever jobs or schools they were just attending up until a few minutes ago, now forced to crowd around the buildings meant for new refugees. Except… maybe they are refugees now. Refugees in their own damn city.

I shake my head and discreetly check my Class Card. Call’s message has an attachment on it and nothing else. If I hadn’t seen him send it to me I wouldn’t risk tapping the ominous attachment, but since I did, I press my thumb to it and watch as a new messaging window opens. Inside is a shift schedule for all the speakers under a certain level, including Call and Lament and a whole lot of others.

“Nobody’s assigned to double-check the hangar?” Pearl leans in and frowns. “Hum. Are they just done with it?”

I sure hope they aren’t. Just because I can feel that none of the mechs were touched by the apocalypse, doesn’t mean someone else couldn’t come around and do whatever they did to the first one again. Lizzie must know at least something–she was in the hangar when the mech burst out. Hopefully Call can get some good info out of her.

Pearl crosses her arms as I walk right up to the hangar. “There aren’t any guards, there’s no more security than before, and… they didn’t even bar the door. Why the heck didn’t they at least put up a forcefield to stop any of the hundreds of victims from coming up here?”

“No good reason, that’s for sure,” I mutter under my breath and step in. It’s brain-speak from here on out. “All I can imagine is that they either don’t care, know exactly what actually happened, or don’t think anyone can cause any more damage. None of them explain why they didn’t rope this place off at the very least.”

“That’s what I said,” Pearl agrees. “So what’re we looking for here? The Preservation obviously scrubbed this place clean before Speak left with Lizzie.”

I shrug. “Did they really?”

Pearl shrugs right back. “I don’t know. It’s what I’d do, but obviously I’m not them. And they’re obviously not me, or else they would’ve conquered Earth by now.”

“With a bunch of mechs? Yeah, I’d say so.”

I chuckle and round the corner to the spot where the old man’s eyes fell out. Various stains mar the ground in reminder of how hurt the poor guy actually was, but aside from that, there’s a few wisps of magic lingering in the air too. Little gilded things. Things that I’m pretty sure my actual eyes are seeing, not just my awareness.

“Pearl? You seeing this?” I kneel down next to the stains and cup a hand around one of the wisps. “This stuff doesn’t feel like the healer’s magic.”

She furrows her brow and squints at the remnants. “I think you’re right; they’re actually visible. Which means Speak should’ve seen them on her way out. No… we should’ve seen them on our way out. Someone put them there after we left.”

It definitely looks that way. I carefully move my other hand in and trap a wisp inside to see what happens. The thing brushes against my palm with the weight of a feather drifting in a midsummer breeze, then pushes right through my skin and keeps moving in a choreographed dance with the others. I pull my hands back and focus on them with my awareness. One of them glistens with gold all the way through where the wisp passed through.

“Intangible, but can actually do things. Can’t feel it going up my arm, and can’t feel my body actively trying to break it down,” I muse. “Is it completely benign?”

A soft rattling a few feet over grabs my attention. I lean back to feel in the direction of the noise… and settle on a row of lockers that my awareness can’t penetrate. They don’t feel magic at all, but since I can’t sense through the slats, there’s definitely something magic about them.

Pearl raises an eyebrow. “Secrecy etchings? Why would lockers with simple padlocks need secrecy etchings?”

“They wouldn’t,” I say and rise to my feet. A thought brings a projectile and a shield into my hand as I creep up to the rattling locker. “Keep my brain on a hair trigger, Pearl. Whatever’s in there could be unbelievably dangerous.”

A sharpness overtakes my awareness without a word from Pearl. I nod to myself and wrap my hands around a simple padlock, worn and scratched with years of use, and give it a probing tug. It strains under the weight of a little effort and already threatens to give way. This is the kind of thing I’d expect to see on a gym locker that’s being rented out for an afternoon, not in a secure hangar.

Hell, it’s so strange that I can’t believe it's actually supposed to be here. I lean back and look at all the other locks. Each and every one of them is stuck through with a simple piece of silvery metal that bleeds into the locker itself with a spiderweb of shimmering material. I let go of this lock and try the other.

My muscles strain just from touching the thing. Actually pulling it back feels like trying to rip a redwood out of the ground with my bare hands, and that’s not even mentioning the strange sensation of the metal itself. It's as if the bar itself is scanning me for something. An actual security measure, if I had to guess.

“One locker with a shitty lock, and it’s the only one making noises,” I turn and scan the room one more time, and this time, I notice a little silver bar underneath the old man’s desk. “Looks like someone got this one open and stuffed something inside.”

Pearl grimaces. “Was it Speak?”

I shrug and wrap my fingers around the padlock. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

A single, hard tug rips the lock part of the lock clean off. The bar clangs against the locker a few times in a wild spin before slipping free to let the locker swing open. I take a step back as my awareness slips in to fill the once imperceptible space and the body inside of it. Neck cut, blood staining a plain white tank top and sweat pants decorated with some cartoon character or another, and eyes begging for help.

“Jesus,” I mutter to myself and lean down to get a better look. “This is goddamn brutal. When did it happen? Before the mech went haywire?”

Pearl leans forward and taps her fingers against a wall. It sends a very strange shock down the front of my face, like a snap of static combined with a very large drop of sweat that trails all the way down to my right hand. I instinctively reach it forward and press two fingers to the body’s neck, even though it’s obviously–

Thump-thump.

Our eyes go wide in a moment of stunned silence. There’s no life in this body; the wound isn’t gushing, its chest isn’t rising, and there’s no recognition behind those eyes. But it has a heartbeat. And something made that rattling sound.

“Shit, what the hell, what do we do?” I hiss aloud.

Pearl exhales, eyes still wide. “Why do you think I’d know? The last time I helped heal a dead human you happened.”

“I know, I know, just panicking a little. Let’s see what I can do…”

I summon a purification coin and place it on the corpse–body, I mean–as a precaution. Flaring it right now would probably stop whatever’s keeping the poor bastard alive, so that’s not a possibility yet. On the other hand, it’ll definitely kill them. So if things get worse, I still have options. I pull out my Class Card and scroll through to see if I have the potions in the right place this time, and sure enough, I have an entire massive waterbottle full of the stuff.

…And an entire reservoir full of the stuff Slice is made of. I’d almost forgotten about that. And there’s a flask in one of the slots that I can’t really remember what’s inside. I summon both the potion bottle and the flask, set the potion on the floor, and uncap the flask to check what’s inside.

A small, emaciated paindne erupts out of it. “Savior? Do you have… um… where are we? Is that a corpse?”

“Slosh?”

The liquid construct turns to me and bows. “At your service, my savior. Do you need this body disposed of? I can easily do that for you.”

“No, no, no… disposal,” I set my jaw and turn to make sure nobody’s watching. “How much did I tell you about the Preservation?"

Slosh tilts its head to the side. “Aside from what you’ve told everyone else, relatively little. I do know that they are our enemy, though. Should I go on a killing spree, Savior?”

I sigh and reach up to twist an earring. “No. But you just volunteered to make my life a lot easier. Next time we see Call, can you split your body in two and send a piece of yourself with him?”

“Easily, my savior,” Slosh immediately responds. “If you don’t want me to dispose of the body, would you like me to reanimate it? The neurons are rapidly degrading, but I think I should be able to keep that degradation at bay until the potion works its magic.”

Pearl shoots me a sideways glance. I can feel her reluctance in it, and I’m exactly as reluctant as she is. We don’t know how dangerous this body is; giving it access to Slosh’s powers could be a very dangerous mistake. But if its neurons are degrading, then the potion might not be enough…

I stare deep into the terrified, empty eyes. Something about the way they’re frozen bothers the hell out of me. My brain tries to latch onto a very important truth about the corpse that just keeps slipping away out of reach.

“Savior, time is running short,” Slosh warns. “If this body’s brain goes fully dark, there is nothing I can do for it.”

This body. It. How goddamn dehumanizing. I crouch down at the thing’s side and unscrew my watter bottle’s lid, then pour a generous helping of potion down its throat. Some of it bubbles up through the neck wound, but most of it slides straight down into the stomach. That should be enough.

I tap the body’s forehead with two fingers. “Save it if you can.”

Slosh nods and slithers down my arm. A small river of construct liquid follows it down to pool on the body’s forehead, then flows straight into the body’s nose. The same feeling that something’s off ticks at the back of my mind like a particularly annoying grandfather clock on the cusp of ringing out way too loud for the second time that day. I… don’t know why that’s so specific, but the number two stands out so much more than any other.

“Oh, see, here’s a problem,” Slosh reappears in the middle of the stream and hands me a small sphere of rock. “This was lodged in his brain. It’s probably what killed him, since there’s so little blood on his shirt. Back to it!”

The construct disappears, leaving me holding a piece of rock the size of a pill. My awareness latches onto it before I have a second to wonder what it actually is. My eyes dart to the body–to his body–now that the piece of stone isn’t making him completely anonymous anymore.

I still have no idea who he is, but my best guess would be that he’s in his early teens. Maybe younger, maybe older; I can’t really tell with kids, but the grim truth is that I’m staring at the body of a dead kid with unbelievably pale skin, bright red hair, green eyes, and so many freckles that it looks like someone spilled paprika on his face.

“Shelby, there’s a… card in his back pocket…” Pearl says slowly, her voice uncertain. “I think it has his name on it.”

I grind my teeth and carefully reach under the poor kid to find his card. It sticks out of his back pocket in a way that would be unbelievably painful to sit on. As I pull it out, most of it doesn’t come with; it’s snapped perfectly in half, obscuring the latter half of the poor kid’s name. But I can make out a first name clear as day right next to a giddy picture that matches the body.

‘Taylor’.