The Human Experience

Six-Quarter P, day 5, 3412.

The assassinations weren’t what I liked about being the Iron Wolf. They were just part of the job. It was the freedom I loved – the freedom to stop pretending I was human. People no longer saw me as human. They stopped expecting humanity of me. After a while, I suppose I did too.

That was what made me so perfect for the job. It was what told me Orcadis would never let me off my leash, never let me be anything else.

But even dogs have dreams, and after a day of playing the rabid hound, still I’d lay my head down at night and dream of being something more.

The worst part was hearing Varali’s cries. Lykus had never been able to stand them. Loud and obnoxious like her. They ripped through his spine like a blaring dissonant chord.

And that was probably the closest to empathy he’d ever gotten, that scratching feeling down the spine when Varali cried.

She’d cried the night they’d been brought here, waking half the asylum, and again when the mentalists had decided to move her into a cell down the hall from his.

Now she cried as they marched him past her cell for the last time.

“Lykus!” she bawled, her bony fingers grappling for him through the bars. She caught the back of his rags and they ripped as his guards tried to push him onward.

He resisted their pushes, looking over his shoulder at his little sister. Kid was ugly as hell, with those strings of raven hair licked to the sides of her face, a face grimy except where tears cut an ivory path down each cheek. But there was beauty in that dirty, emaciated, swollen-eyed ugliness. It was love.

Or so he’d heard. Love was just another abstract concept like altruism. He would never find out what it meant. People had tried to describe it, but they’d vainly used other ambiguous terms. Feelings. Caring. Lykus felt pain when the guards beat him. He cared to make Varali shut up for the sake of his pounding eardrums.

“Don’t take up singing, Vara,” he said, throwing her an over-the-shoulder smirk. “You sound like a bag of cats.”

But Varali only wailed harder, her face red and ballooned, tears dribbling from her lips. Lykus didn’t know what he’d said wrong. He never did.

“Oh, for Delmira’s love, stop that shrieking already!” one of the guards flanking him yelled, and slammed his metal baton into Varali’s knuckles. She whipped her hand back with a yelp.

Lykus drew Varali’s head toward him and pressed a kiss to her forehead. That usually shut her up. He felt her skinny arms trap him in an embrace, crushing him against the bars.

The wind burst from his lungs as a metal baton cracked against his spine. Rough hands tore him away and he doubled over, lances of pain shooting up his back.

“Please, h-he’s sorry!” Varali cried. “He d-didn’t mean to, he won’t do it again! Lykus, t-tell them y-you’re sorry!”

He wasn’t, and it didn’t matter anyways. The guards took him by the shoulders and steered him farther down the damp stone corridor. Varali’s screams carried in an echoing wave.

Lykus looked into the consecutive cells he passed. Cadmon the Hysterical huddled in the corner of one, his knobbly knees tucked to his chest as he chuckled to himself with the glassy-eyed madness people here eventually succumbed to. Fiendish Ferric congratulated Lykus on a crime so well executed that, if not for the lack of gore, he’d have deemed it worthy of himself.

They reached the corridor’s end. Lykus waited, listening to his even breaths bouncing around the walls while the guards fit a key into a lock. One of them pushed and the stone portal groaned open, scraping against the floor in a nerve-pinching way that reminded Lykus of Varali’s cries.

Everyone in the entrance hall froze as the men marched through with the condemned. Lykus looked at each in turn, but the mental health workers glanced away as if catching the soulless, wolf-like gaze of a mass-murderer would be like catching the disease of his crimes. Lykus shifted that soulless gaze to Delia. She held it, unblinking, and only when his lips pulled up in a mirthless smirk and he winked did she join her colleagues in watching the floor.

It never got old, unnerving Delia.

The clinking and hissing of chains sounded as the front door was unbolted, and then Lykus was pushed out of the asylum. He blinked in the sudden darkness, orienting himself by the gentle whooshing of waves sweeping up the beach to his right and the wind rattling the tall reeds to his left.

He breathed the salty tang on the air, feeling the sea-spray blow his hair down his back. The guards didn’t let his eyes adjust and shoved him onward, and he stumbled on the uneven terrain as they forced him down the rocky outcrop leading to the beach.

Lykus jumped the last few boulders and wet sand squished beneath his toes upon landing. A wave came up to greet him, frothing about his ankles and then pulling back with such force his feet sank deeper into the sand.

“Ah, Amaris’s wrath!” one of the guards said with a laugh. “Only a few paces of beach left. Too bad, eh, wolf-boy? The anticipation’s the best part. The fear.”

Lykus turned a cold stare to the guard, making his smile falter. “You know I don’t understand what that means.”

“You’ll find out soon enough.” He spat at Lykus’s feet. “People like you deserve a worse death. It’s not fair, is it? You killed so many times and we only get the pleasure of killing you once. If the Star-Gods are just, they’ll make high tide slow tonight, make it almost drown you fifty times, every time pulling back to extend your suffering by another miserable breath.”

He forced Lykus to his knees while the other unloaded coils of rope from the burlap sack slung over his shoulder. As they bound him to a jagged tooth of rock rising from the beach, a glint caught Lykus’s eye. He looked down to see two gleaming wet pearls embedded in the wiry bush of his beard. Varali’s tears would accompany him to the end. For some reason that was fitting. He’d die knowing someone loved him. Whatever that meant.

They tied him so tightly he could barely draw breath, and tingles of restricted circulation coursed down both arms. Through curtains of tattered black hair he watched them, trying to understand the harsh lines etched into their faces as they walked the rope around the boulder, yanking and wrapping and finally tying it at the back.

“I don’t particularly enjoy killing,” he informed them. “You, however, seem to be relishing this.”

The more talkative guard crouched on his haunches to glower into Lykus’s face, plucked a dagger from his boot, and flicked it across Lykus’s cheek. Lykus barely felt the stinging tightness of the open flesh. “We should’ve killed you three turns ago. But no, Del wanted to give you a chance. You were sick, she said. Mentally unstable. It wasn’t your fault. After all she did for you, you spat in her face. Why?”

Lykus stifled a sigh. They always asked why. But their attempts to understand him were about as futile as his to understand them. “My cell-mate was already dead. I just did him the favour of releasing him from his body. Someone had to. You certainly wouldn’t, and he begged for release every day.”

“Every inmate mewls for freedom.”

“Not like him.” Lykus remembered the man talking to himself, withdrawing further into a catatonic trance each day. “You knew he was Infected. Before long the Voices would have claimed him and he’d have been no better than a vegetable.”

The guard stood, the Amaris moon glowing like a halo behind his silhouetted head as if to claim him a saint for ending this inhuman creature’s life.

“That was the excuse you had for all of them, wasn’t it, Wolf? They would die anyways.” A glint ran like lightning down the exposed blade of his knife as he raised it. “And you got to choose when and how. So yes, I’ll enjoy choosing how you die.” His arm lashed out and Lykus saw blood seeping through his ripped tunic before he felt the fiery tightness of the tear across his chest.

“What the hell are you doing?” breathed the other man.

The furious guard’s knife cleaved again, opening the flesh of Lykus’s bicep, his abdomen, gouging into his calf-muscles until white smears blotted his vision. Lykus clenched his teeth so hard his ears rang, struggling to choke down the yells in the back of his throat.

“What I’ve wanted to do since they brought this monster here. I’m avenging Hirenda. Let him feel the pain I do every damned day of my life.”

Ah, so that was it: one of Lykus’s victims had mattered to this guard. Curious thing, love. It bred such violence. Seemed paradoxical, but what did he know?

“Stop, mutilation isn’t part of his sentence!”

“Piss off, I’m not cutting him deep. Just so the salt can settle in.”

The guard finished his artwork, straightening with an upward twist of his mouth that didn’t reach his eyes. The black ooze on his dagger caught the moonlight.

Kicking wet sand into his face, they started back up the boulders to the asylum. Water lapped around Lykus’s legs, which had gone mercifully numb from his crouched position, tempering the burn of salt along the cuts on his thighs. Blood rippled through the dark waters as they rose over the hours, the red undulating waves disturbed only by occasional strings of algae.

Pain left Lykus lightheaded as the waters crashed against his chest, pulling back only to strike again harder. Through the tear in his tunic he saw the pink flesh around the knife’s slash, almost swollen closed.

They didn’t get it. Lykus couldn’t learn from pain. But physical punishment seemed to make those he’d wronged feel better nonetheless.

His pulse didn’t quicken as the water-level reached his shoulders, then his neck. He’d never belonged in this world, anyways. In death he’d be normal. Dead bodies didn’t feel, so who would condemn Lykus the corpse for not feeling?

Amaris laughed at him above, twinkling, her milky reflection zigzagging in the waves. Lykus craned his neck to the top of the hill and saw the lights in the asylum’s windows flicking off.

And he saw something else: the crumpled bodies of the men who were supposed to be guarding him, their black figures sprawled on the hill. Another figure approached, skipping rocks nimbly as it descended to the beach. Without hesitation it jumped into the waves, splashing Lykus’s face.

Mentalist Delia Alister waded her way through the waist-deep waters toward him. She tipped his chin up, wiping his wet locks from his eyes, and gazed upon him with the analytical eyes of a good mentalist.

“I know I’ve disappointed you,” he managed. The sound barely hissed through his salt-shrivelled lips.

“Follow my finger,” she instructed sharply, waving her forefinger in front of his eyes.

He did as he was told. “You always defended me. I want to thank you.”

She wrinkled her nose as if to escape the stench of his bullshit, then lowered her hand. “You’ve never been good at following rules. Neither have I.” And she slid a kitchen knife from the sleeve of her lab-coat. Lykus steeled himself when she advanced with it, but she made for his binds and started hacking away at them.

“Why, Del? You’ll be fired. You’ll be imprisoned.”

“It’s Mentalist Alister. And don’t pretend you care. I’ve invested too much in you to lose you now,” she said. The twine ropes slapped into the waves and she lugged him to unsteady feet. He leaned heavily against her, legs weak.

Delia walked him past the boulders and up a flat section of beach. The sand turned to weeds and eventually grass as they stumbled along. “Where are you taking me?” Lykus finally managed.

“To Vangarde. To the brain specialist I told you about.” She set him down in the hay at the back of a cart drawn by two donkeys, then fixed him with a serious gaze. “That is, if you still want to go.”

“I do.” He pulled his lips up in that fashion that meant happiness.

“Are you sure? There are bad emotions too. Fear. Anger. Grief.”

Well, he had no particular attachment to himself. He wouldn’t miss Lykus Savage and frankly, neither would anybody else. He took Del’s hand, trying to be tender, but he must have failed because she stiffened. “I want to love,” he said.

Her usual stiff smile curled her mouth – cynical, she called it. “What people say about it, you do know it’s horseshit, don’t you? It leads to more pain than anything.”

“That’s what makes it meaningful. It’d be nice to have meaning in my life.”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself. Get comfortable, then – we’ll be travelling through the night.”

“Not without Varali.” Del’s face lit with what he’d learned to recognize as surprise, so he elaborated. “If I was to love anybody, it would be my sister. After the operation I will regret leaving her behind.”

With a last growl Delia whipped around and started back toward the asylum. Lykus felt sure he heard her mutter “ungrateful shit.”

And for once, as he watched the first of the suns cast a pink rim on the horizon, Lykus thought he understood what people meant by hope.