CHAPTER 1 - 2.2 - It's Paliputra Out There

The sound of another train approaching from up ahead carries over the badlands ridge. As if it weren’t unlucky enough that there’s only one track across this bridge, its signature haunting horn loudly identifies it as another vigil vehicle. The creek bed isn’t that far down, we’ll have cover if we can just get there.

Yhana and I spend longer than we’d like wearing through what little composure we’ve got left to figure out how to dislocate our handcar from the tracks. We’ve got no good options other than casting; the train will be upon us before long, so I stow my apprehension.

Tweaking local gravity isn’t that difficult of a trick for a gapwalker anyway, but Yhana’s vivicalligraphic force does most of the work, lifting the car off the rails and situating it below the bridge, where we hunker down beneath it as well for good measure.

As the oncoming train passes overhead, now might be a good moment to revisit that, actually. Yhana and I are both a little unusual with our radiance. I’ve got two frequencies, she’s got four. Mine at least has precedent, but her gift is nearly unheard of. If you can call it a gift, anyway. Based on her family history, it comes with a lot of complications. I try not to think about that right now.

Yhana is looking at the rumbling slats overhead, but I’m looking at her. She tries to keep her hair tidy, out of her face, but it falls in wispy, disheveled strands around her tired, pale green eyes. The black markings in her fur that intersect them hide the full extent of her exhaustion, but through their cream outlines the bruise-like tint of bags long since formed is barely visible. She’s at her limit. She didn’t even have to be here.

I let out the breath I’ve been holding, a billowing black cloud on the frosty air. I massage little circles around my own eyes, yellow fingertips against black eyelids. All this for a prospect we don’t even know a thing about, except for the general direction to go. Just follow the river. Just follow the river. Just follow the fucking river. It’s all we’ve been doing, so hopefully we haven’t gone off course yet. It’s not in sight right now, somewhere at the foot of this vast plateau. We’ll come across it again at the top of the falls. This isn’t Toraan, it’s not like the tracks shift and change here.

The tracks overhead go still once more as the train shrinks into the distance in the direction we’ve left behind. On shaky legs, Yhana rises to stand again.

“Alright,” she prompts, “let’s get this thing moving again.”

I nod, and we repeat our arrangement from before, reseating the handcar and getting back to pumping.

Days on Paliputra are dim at best, and the nights are nearly unparalleled in their darkness. Distant stars paint the sky but offer little visibility. Even with the augmentations made to my eyes, a thermal image stretches on into grainy infinity. I close them for a little while instead.

“You should take a break,” I suggest.

“I should take a break,” she agrees breathlessly. She lets go of the handle, taking a seat nearby, though moments later I hear her lie all the way down. “Will you be able to manage that for a bit?”

“Slow progress is still progress,” I assure her. “Besides, if I have to tap out it’s better that you’re well rested.”

She chuckles at that. “I don’t know about well.”

“Do the best you can. Cape?” I offer, shaking another one loose.

“Please,” she accepts, bundling herself in it like a blanket. “If I had to feel like this all the time, I think I’d just die.”

I say nothing, hoping she’ll just fall asleep, but she’s shivering a lot. I can hear her shifting, her teeth chattering, and an occasional doggy kind of groan, you know the one.

“More?” I ask, taking off another cape. The hood of a cloak a couple of layers underneath falls with it, and I shake my maned head, letting my ears twitch upright unencumbered for the first time in far too long.

She wordlessly snatches the cape, giving herself another layer to work with. The cold metal platform, even insulated against, provides little comfort at all, especially since she’s stopped exerting herself. Her palms glow softly, incandescence rippling out from under the layers as she runs them over her arms; it’ll help in the moment but she won’t be able to cast in her sleep.

“You still look cold,” I remark. “Are you going to be alright?”

“You have suggestions?” she asks.

“I’m open to them,” I reply.

“If I had a good one, we’d already be doing it. But I don’t think your lukewarm core temperature has what it takes to fix this,” she states.

“Oh, I wasn’t—“ Not that. She’s been shelter for me many times, but even then I have reservations about trying to return the favor.

“Besides, I’ve seen the way you necroharmonize often enough.”

“I mean, you’re good at shrinking stuff with it,” I point out.

“Mm, still pass,” she reasserts.

“Strict predator, got it,” I say, and I don’t push it further. Maybe I’m even a little relieved, I don’t know how I’d have handled myself if the moment actually arrived.

I’m better now. So I tell myself. It’s the only way I can reconcile nearly eating Nym, not so long ago. He even seemed eager, in my memory.

We ride to little more than the sound of the handcar’s rhythmic creak and her own intermittent shuddering for maybe a minute, when she picks up where I was content to leave off. “I mean, it’s not just that.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” What am I saying, obviously she wants to talk about it.

“You know how you are with big spaces?”

My pointed ears flatten. “What do you mean? I don’t think I have a thing about big spaces, do I?” I do have a thing, I’ve said so before, but not to her. I just didn’t think it was so easy to clock.

“You always stick close to cover where you can find it,” she points out. “You walk like you’re afraid of the sky.”

“I mean, the sky’s had a lot of bad shit in it as of late, you know.” She knows that almost as well as I do, but her home wasn’t destroyed by the planet’s source of light and heat literally dripping down to touch the face of the world the way mine was. “What about you, if I can ask?” I ask anyway. “I seem to remember you sneaking around vents without issue.”

“It’s different with someone to talk to.”

“I guess pockets are out of the question?”

“You’re very persistent,” she deflects.

“Sorry!” I laugh as I say it; it doesn’t feel like the right thing to punctuate an apology with and it’s forced anyway, but there it is. “You’re just shaking a lot.”

“I’ll deal, don’t worry,” she insists. “It’s nothing compared to seawater on a good day, it’ll leave you feeling numb for days.”

“That’ll be the arsenic,” I point out. It’s a big enough problem that back on the islands, the dialysis parlors were always packed.

“Also it’s just fucking cold.”

“It certainly is.” 

She does manage to find some rest after that. Not proper sleep by any stretch, but even getting to lie down for a while should help her in the long run.  Most of the ride through the night is uneventful, thankfully, even allowing me to stop and rest a couple of times to manually coax the ache out of my compromised muscles. But never for too long. I think we’re being followed. Not by the vigil or even overnight passenger trains just sharing the track, but occasionally I hear something else, something small. Another handcar or something small and unassuming like that. I don’t catch sight of it. It’s perfectly possible they’re just going the same way as us anyway. 

Other than that, I encounter nothing else, strangely, though I can distantly hear trains on other tracks, bound for places far to the south. Occasionally, we pass remote homesteads, modest structures or even more repurposed train cars like the inn. One built close to the tracks almost blinds me as its motion activated light illuminates our handcar. For a few seconds, I go still, transfixed, momentum keeping us drifting onward until our presence could not possibly warrant little more than a dismissive shrug from whomever might have been home.

I wonder how one gets by out here. The community I lived in was fairly isolated as well, but we at least had community. But it’s not there anymore. I think of my family. I never did make contact with them since becoming tangled up in all this. The administrators likely paid close attention to any messages I had tried to send through the chatterworks in the capital. Everything on a need-to-know basis, carefully curated, labyrinthine bureaucratic machinery operating behind a simple concrete facade. Thinking about it this much, I understand why one would take their chances out here after all, keeping a paranoid eye on the rails.

But never as paranoid as I am right now, I’m sure. I keep casting a glance backward trying to catch sight of that other presence coming our way, but after getting a faceful of floodlight I’m night-blind. I didn’t pick up on anyone else in infrared anyway, so they can’t be close. Or they’re hiding.

The first hues of sunrise only begin to show themselves when I find the river again. It’s good to have even a little bit of light to work with now, or I might have missed the fork in the track. One way leads across, the other leads parallel.

Yhana stirs as I hop off, knees nearly buckling as I land, laying drowsy eyes on me as I heft the weight of the switch. “Everything alright?” she checks.

“Yeah, I think this is the right way,” I confirm. “They said to follow, not cross. Assuming they were as clear as they needed to be, we’ll go this way.” I gesture upriver, but that’s an awful lot to assume. The guide in my head had an odd parlance, to be sure, but it didn’t seem to harm their particularity. I tell myself this, anyway.

Yhana’s up and at it in moments, and together we work to conquer what we dearly hope is the last stretch. Before long, we almost get what we want. We can see the lights of a town in the distance now, set up in the higher elevations around a bluff that breaks the monotony of the terrain. In total darkness I might have mistaken it for stars.

But I’m burying the lead a little bit. Well in advance of our destination, there is an incline, the tracks leading right into an illuminated hillside tunnel, a vigil checkpoint, still far away enough that hopefully they haven’t spotted us yet. 

“We’ll have to take this on foot,” I groan. “What do we do with the handcar? I’ve never rifted anything this big.”

“The river’s not too far that way,” Yhana suggests. “If you can float it again, we can just sink it to hide our trail and walk from there.”

Seems a shame, since it’s gotten us so far. But if we have to come back for it and go the other way, it’s not like the current could carry something this heavy very far. It’s an even greater shame we don’t have a partly living one like the one I set up next to back at the inn; we maybe could have shrunk that, but no aura means no self-regulating shape.

We get it over with, it takes us about 20 minutes backtracking well out of sight, lightening our burden, and floating it all the way to the water to let it sink. This had better be where we’re going, I don’t think I have the juice to do this in reverse even with direct sunlight beginning to refill my aura at a more optimal rate.

Frankly, I barely have the juice in a physical sense to get up this hill, feeling my body have to push itself just to complete the walk to its base, but pistons make do where tendons protest, though they shudder and warp inside of bones gone spongy and weak. Yhana’s got her own solution, vivicalligraphic energy subtly wreathing her like golden cinders as she promotes healing in her aching joints even on the move. She’ll be famished before this is over, but I’m feeling it too. Food isn’t a strict requirement like it was in life, but old habits die hard, especially on a psychosomatic level.

But, knowing well there’s no other option, we push through, cresting over the top and trudging onward. The river looks pink in the early light. It diverts again further to the west, but is fed by a tributary reaching from the bluffs.

“Oh, hold up,” Yhana says, stopping where the ground begins to level out. “I think this is Muan.”

“Muan?” I ask, trying to match her speed.

“They’ve got hot springs,” she explains, well enough stating her intentions in the same sentence. “I see pamphlets about them all the time.”

“Well obviously we’re going,” I agree. “It’ll be no good meeting our contact like this. If I can actually rest, maybe I can delay taking coagulant a little longer, and see if I can get ahold of them in my head for directions.”

“Are you sure?” she asks. “No offense, but you’re not looking well.”

“I’ve been worse.” It’s true and she knows it.

“Then hurry up, if I collapse out here I’m not getting back up,” she urges. The prospect alone reignites her vigor, and she sets a pace to lead the rest of the way into town.

I’m so eager to get there, I almost ignore the nerves that prompt another look over my shoulder, but listening to them one last time, I catch sight of that motion activated light switching on once more, far behind us.

When we arrive, It’s that weird part of the day, too late for dawn, but not quite mid-morning. The sun dominates the low horizon like a roiling red hill, its proximity to the world more than making up for all it lacks in mass. Most people are up and at it by now, having left the baths behind to go spend their day in whatever combination of labor and leisure awaits them. It works out great for Yhana and me, who need not deal with the crowds at peak hours.

We delay our bath in favor of food, first; more of that dark, spongy rye bread, which effortlessly holds the runny matter of softboiled eggs in its pores. We gnaw ravenously at a hard sliver of yak cheese each, meant to last a while, but people aren’t meant to exhaust themselves as we have. Chasing it down with steaming mugs of mineraly, bitter tea cut with a dollop of butter, we settle up and prepare to settle down, just for a bit.

I’m carrying our only battery, still quite full, so I take care of the fee at the front desk even as Yhana proceeds right ahead to scope out a good spot. The clerk doesn’t seem to care, at least. This is an easygoing place the likes of which I hadn’t found until now over my stay in Dominion territory.

“Could I get some bathing dust too?” I ask, pointing at the rolled paper tubes lining the shelves behind her. She obliges, deducting the appropriate charge and handing it over. The scent of aromatic wood and oils come through the wax paper caps at either end, soothing already. With all I need in hand, I hurry off to catch up with Yhana.

The terraced slope outside is a lovely place, maintained with woody plants that provide a suggestion of privacy with their white coniferous foliage, though the variety of elevations here foil their best efforts. Stone walkways connect the concourse and its main attractions, rough underfoot so as to naturally guard against slipping. The light blanket of snow that covers the rest of Muan can hardly establish itself here, a mildly sulfuric layer of steam forming a visible barrier against it in the cold air.

Yhana has already found a spot and undressed, her legs in the water with her back to me. For one reason or another I’ve been bare to her a fair few times, mainly because clothes seldom make it into the equation when she exerts necroharmony, but to see her the same is new to me. I don’t bring it up as I pass the tube to her. I’m too tired to give it more significance than that.

“Oh, perfect,” she exclaims. Slitting one of the caps with a clawtip, she pours out a handful before passing the tube back off to me and beginning to work the dust into her fur.

I’m a little nervous about joining her as it’ll mean removing all the layers I’ve been hiding beneath so well until now. Fully exposed, there’s enough wrong with me on my surface that I’d be unmistakable for someone else. But there’s hardly anyone else here. They’re all up on a higher elevation anyway, placing us in a blind spot where they can hardly pay us any mind as it is. Too tired to even shrug about it, I begin to strip, leaving the capes and cloaks and all my own clothes in a single pile.

My coil of tails unfurls in a long overdue stretch, hips creaking and popping in response. It’s a satisfying feeling, but I nearly stagger as a result. Less of that, until I’m submerged. But first, I dust myself as well, letting it set a moment before filling a nearby bucket with spring water and dousing myself away from the pool, leaving behind the grit and grime bonded to the powder.

I dip a toe to test the water, finding it a little hotter than I’d like, but I’ll acclimate. It takes me an embarrassingly long time to ultimately lower myself, but Yhana has the good grace to keep her eyes restfully shut and not remark on it.

I join her in that, resting my head at the pool’s edge. It’s deeper than I expected, but it’s already doing me good, relaxing joints that I was nearly certain had forgotten how to. I’m only being a little dramatic as I say that. I try not to fixate on the speed of my… well, decay isn’t the right word, it’s a sanitary process. But the established boundaries that used to exist between flesh and metal have blurred quite a bit in the past several days even with the coagulant I’ve been so good about taking. Barring this morning, of course. So much of me is just sludge now. I think it’s trying to regrow my missing lung, but the malformed sac in my chest pops and rattles with an edema-like condition brought on by my own semisolid self. My ambitions of predation seem ridiculous, when I actually take stock. Parts of me are probably permeable, a false solid, simple for anyone with enough determination to force through. Viscera mimicked by something with the consistency of tar, skin waiting for something to test its surface.

I’m probably dying, if I’m being honest with myself. All the way, this time. I’m even making it worse just to run away from a cozy place to do it. But at this point, I’m fueled by indignation. The people who professed to have my best interests at heart even as they restricted my movement through the city, my ability to even check on my family, and the things I could know, those are the same people who caused this to begin with. I agree, there are worse hands that the unique machine pumping ink through vaguely-remembered veins could fall into. But I’ll guard it by following a plan made by people who actually give a damn about me.

Samsara, may she know peace. Nym, whose companionship I’ve come to especially miss. And our nameless benefactor, supposedly waiting for us in this very town. If we followed their directions right, anyway.

I must have closed my eyes at some point without realizing it. I find it takes just a bit of force of will to open an eyelid so heavy it makes a sound as I check who has entered our pool. An anteater woman lowers herself in, flanked by a pair of companions standing nearby. A human, his numerous aberrated augmentations bared to the world, and an enormous mountain hound morph, his represented animal local to this hemisphere, but his stature to another. Neither of them get in. I’m uneasy about that for some reason, but I don’t show it, closing my eye again.

The anteater clears her throat. My other eye opens, this one a permanently luminous amber set into an ectoplasm-black sclera. The unease in me only grows as we regard one another. She’s inspecting me, not in any promiscuous sense, rather she seems to be sizing me up. As for her, she’s got at least a size class or two over me, with an unathletic but solid physique.

“Yes?” I ask. Yhana shifts a bit too, she’s as alert as she can be right now.

“Isn’t anyone looking for you?” she asks. Her narrowed eyes search mine for a spark of recognition I’m already internally lambasting myself for having given in an instant. It’s hard to tell on that long snout of hers, but she smiles. “That’s alright.” She clicks her fingers, and her companions advance.

If Yhana might have also entertained the idea that these three could have been emissaries from our contact, it fades the instant they imply hostility. She reacts before I do, but the sparking crimson light that spreads between her fingertips fizzles like a failing lightbulb. One of them is already tuned to countercast. Gapwalking is out too, I find, as my failure to rift out leaves me wide open. The anteater lunges and grabs me around my head, the claw of her thumb pressed into my throat before I can even finish wondering who these people are.

As the hound begins to pull Yhana from the water, with a flick of her head she commands the surface to follow her, a whipping spire of high-pressure fluid striking her assailant in the eye. He reels back, dropping her, and she lands on the human below with enough force to knock him prone. She’s got no qualms about killing him before he can even draw the breath to beg, but his companions don’t give her the chance.

The anteater copies Yhana, a tendril of water coiling her ankles and dragging her back into the pool. In the anteater’s grip, we are forced under the surface. The already steaming water begins to bubble; she’s trying to boil us. Breath isn’t as urgent a need for me as it will be for Yhana, but the temperature blinds me in either spectrum. I try to dig my hindclaws into the rolls of my captor’s abdomen, but my missed dose is already taking a toll on my strength. I’m stricken with jelly legs bordering on literal, quivering just to summon the strength it takes to crane my neck above the water even for a moment.

It’s the same moment that someone from a much higher terrace jumps. We all stop fighting just then, as whoever it was smashes gracelessly into the ground, their form splattering mostly out of view behind a wall of shrubs.

“What the?…” the human breathes, halfway through sitting up. He’s answered by the sound of popping joints and a rhythmless, wet, sucking sound on the other side of the leaves.

The anteater has neglected to resume drowning me, narrow eyes going wide with sudden, horrified realization. “Scatter!” she commands, letting go of Yhana and I.

I move for Yhana as the anteater hurries away, to pull her sputtering above the surface, just as a pair of large figures come crashing down, displacing us to the edge. The hound splashes in, as a new eyeless batlike form perches over him, slicing into him with their long claws, a spade-tipped tail twitching in agitation at his futile attempt to fight them off.

An awful lot is happening awfully fast, but as Yhana and I haul ourselves out of the reddening water, I start to put it together. These three, two now, must have been following us through the night. The one who jumped is a vex, their body set into explosive metamorphosis by sudden physical trauma. I almost make the assumption that they’ve come to our aid, but I don’t know that for sure. 

Yhana and I hurry for the walkway, clothing be damned, but the human hasn’t given up. He tackles me, and we go tumbling, rolling over each other once before stopping near the edge. One hand on one of my wrists, bones creaking under his iron grip, the other trained on Yhana. It launches from his wrist, detaching, fingers wrapping around her throat.

I return the gesture; I know strangling him probably won’t do a thing, that clammy quality of undeath is unmistakable, but his neck will make for a good handle to throw him over the edge.

He’s only not casting because he’s tuned on me, necroharmony cancelling out my own. A shame, or the ectoplasmic slag of his spinal cord would be leaking through my fingers right now. Unfortunately for me, this is a contest of brute strength, and as I am, he wins. 

Rather, he would have. The vex intervenes for me. They pluck him easily from atop me, and he goes screaming down the side of the bluff to shatter somewhere below, his detached hand going slack in confirmation of his demise. It slides off Yhana’s neck, and she pulls a long, hoarse gasp. The hand rattles onto the rough stone at her knees in imitation of its owner.

Long, pointed ears train on us for a clear sonic picture as the vex faces us. The sharp teeth of their lipless maw perpetually display themselves in an inscrutable grin, inspiring nothing more than terror on an animal instinct I have to actively force back down. I nearly fail to, when they knuckle-walk closer like an ape, placing us both so very vulnerably within arm’s reach. But they do not reach for us. Instead, to my great relief, they speak.

“The third got away. We must leave quickly.”