The Human Experience

One P, day 38, 3408.

Sometimes I wonder how people can hate me so much when they love the one who hires me, who reads me my list of victims and lets me know the time, place, and method of my next hit. It isn’t as if people don’t know Orcadis is behind it all. I’m only the sword in his hand. So why is he loved, while I, the instrument of his wrath, am so despised?

People believe what they see, my boy, Orcadis told me today. They see me trying to stop the Voice epidemic. They see you killing. It’s the way of the world, son – every hero needs a martyr.

I think it’s the first and last time anybody will ever call me a martyr.

Two T-Turns Later

Tychon had long dipped below the horizon, entrusting the sky to his brother’s care for the hours before he, too, would be pulled to rest. Pyrrhus bathed in a sea of pink light like a bead of blood on a blushing face. It would have seemed peaceful if not for the flashes tearing the heavens open with the smaller sun’s every flare.

And the alarms wailing, wailing.

Hector straightened on the bench. Around him people scooped up their children, packed their blankets and picnic baskets, and scattered from the park with practised efficiency.

“Attention, attention: Code Black has been effected. For your safety, please proceed indoors. I repeat, proceed indoors and commence lockdown. The disturbance is due in four minutes.”

Sickness rising within him, Hector started out of the park at a smart pace. The alarms pursued him, screeching like a hundred badly-tuned violins from the speakers atop the town’s information poles.

Few still dared to venture farther than the market or their workplaces nowadays. People found shelter quickly enough, slamming doors and bolting latches and sliding chains.

As if the Voices cared about their locks.

Mothers shrieked at dawdling children from their thresholds, and Hector lengthened his stride, his breaths coming quickly.

“Son!” called the baker from his shop window. “Son, in here! Hurry now, they’re coming!”

Hector hesitated, fighting back waves of nausea. His own body’s reaction puzzled him; he’d been fine just a minute ago. His instincts screamed at him to take cover in the baker’s shop, but some inexplicable madness made him say, “I’m only a few minutes from home, sir. I’ll make it.”

“May the Quintet help you if you don’t hurry!” the man said, and slammed the window down.

Only the last stragglers remained now as Hector hurried down the streets. Even the homeless found refuge, banging on doors and being admitted without complaint. Not out of kindness, Hector knew, but because the Helms had appealed to the Star-King, and the Star-King had passed an act forcing families to grant lost souls overnight admission in the case of a Voice Swarm.

After all, an Infected vagabond was everyone’s concern, if he Infected others.

When Hector heard a distant hum carried on the wind, he broke into a run. The sickness heightened, smearing his vision with white. His heart thrashed until his ribs ached. He staggered.

What a time to be sick! But it wasn’t sickness, he realized as he halted round a corner. With shaking fingers he drew his emotion journal from his jacket pocket and cracked it open, leafing quickly through its pages as he tried to put a label to his symptoms.

We’ve never seen a brain like yours before, whispered the first of them.

Hector’s yell cut through the evening. He clutched his head as though that could protect him, journal toppling to the cobbles.

You’re afraid, but not of us, another observed. That is curious indeed.

Fear! That was it!

The Swarm passed over him, thickening the air with whispers that filled his mind, probing, digging, prying.

Feeding. Always feeding.

Hector ran, shaking his head to loosen the intruders’ grip on his mind though he knew it wouldn’t help. “Get out of my mind, get out, get out!”

Who is Varali? One of the parasites asked. We sense tenderness for this being.

Vara! Something clicked into place. That was why he was afraid, why he’d passed up the baker’s offer: Varali was due home today, around this hour. And he was supposed to pick her up.

Picking up the journal and tucking it away, he veered off the cobblestone path leading to their house and cut through a patch of wild brambles, making for the town gates where the caravan would have left her.

Voices whispered after him, their claws trying to sink into his mind. But Hector focused only on his breathing, the sting in his lungs and the iron tang of blood in his parched throat as he ran. He ignored their questions. Engaging with them was a sure way to become their slave. They couldn’t be allowed to draw any inkling of emotion. It was said the Voices fed on love, but they’d been known to latch onto other emotions, too. So Hector gave them nothing. Not hatred, not fear – nothing.

Emotions exist along a continuum; they are not discrete from one another, Orcadis had taught him. Love can lead to fear, to hatred. Grant the Voices access to one end of the scale and they may slide to the other.

But banishing his fear was hardest. Hector told himself the Code Black Accommodation Act would save Varali. Someone must have taken her in, even if the girl didn’t have the wits to seek shelter herself.

Yet still the fear gnawed somewhere deep inside and Hector’s legs pumped harder, propelling him through the deserted streets as twilight painted the sky a deep amethyst.

The village gate loomed into sight. “Vara!” Only his call bounced down the road. And the parasites trailed behind, whispering.

A stitch in Hector’s side squeezed the breath from his lungs and forced him to a halt. He twisted in circles, calling Varali’s name until his voice cracked and blood pounded hot in his temples.

Something stirred under the veil of an old willow. Wind sighed through its drooping canopy like the teeth of a comb through hair, swinging the stringy branches apart to reveal a form huddled against the trunk.

See? We lead you to her. We mean you no harm.

Hector’s throat closed; in his desperation he hadn’t realized he’d let the Voices guide his search. Brushing aside the leafy curtain he reached her in two strides, then stooped and grabbed her shoulders.

Varali’s head snapped up from her knees. She smiled vacantly at the sight of him.

“Are you hurt? Did you have an attack? Have you taken your medication? Where are your escorts?” he demanded all at once, brushing her raggedy bangs back over her forehead to examine her.

His concern seemed only to amuse her. She bit her lip to keep from giggling. “You’re acting silly, Lykus, I’m fine.”

Then something shifted behind Varali’s permanently sunken eyes. “Hush now, I’m talking to my brother,” she murmured. “He doesn’t like your kind, just like Uncle Orry. But I’m sure he’ll like you when I tell him what good friends we’ve become.”

Hector’s world shattered. Varali was Infected.

He plucked her up by the elbow and ran her all the way home.

Varali stood awaiting her guardians’ verdict. Del paced before her, her face marble. “Explain,” she said, softly but sternly.

Varali swallowed. “I...I told you I didn’t want to be escorted like a baby.”

“So you gave your escorts the slip, is that it?”

“I snuck away once the caravan reached the gates,” she said, and had the decency to look abashed. “But I forgot they had my medication and I sort of...had an episode in the bushes where I was hiding. When I woke up everyone was gone and the alarms were going.”

Hector breathed deeply to calm himself. “Why?”

“No other girl of fourteen turns gets treated like me. I’m tired of feeling crippled. I wanted to show you I can be independent.”

“You showed us you can be stupid!” Hector yelled.

Varali’s amber eyes pooled with tears in their buried depths. “I’m not stupid,” she whispered feebly.

“This is exactly why we hired escorts for you. You can’t be treated like a fourteen-turn-old and you know it. If you weren’t being stupid, Varali, I’ll be damned!”

Stupid: the one insult that could get to Varali. He’d flung the word at her on purpose, but felt no satisfaction when Varali flinched and shouted, “Don’t call me stupid! Why do you have to be so parent-y all the time now? You’re no fun anymore, Lykus! I want the old Lykus back!”

Hector’s rage spiralled out of control. Next thing he knew he was on his feet, his chair landing on its back. “Lykus called you stupid all the time, or did you forget?”

“He didn’t do it to hurt me. You do! I didn’t mind the things he did because I understood he didn’t know better, and he understood the same about me. You treat me like a prisoner! Like they did at the asylum. And you say it’s because you care.” Tears trickled down the sides of her nose. “If loving me means yelling and keeping me in a cage, then I don’t want your love anymore!”

A cool hand caught his wrist. Hector pulled free of Del, sick, his heart exhausting him like he’d run ten miles. Anger, fear and concern collided within him and he didn’t know where to put them. People swallowed those feelings all the time, but for Hector it was too much.

“Well, too damn late! You think I wanted this? You think I wanted to feel like I’m going to pass out every time you have an attack? This stupid operation bound my life to yours, Vara; you die, I die too!”

He toppled the woven straw end table, sending a pitcher of water down with it. Varali gasped as shards skated across the hardwood, water running round her sandals.

“That’s enough,” Del said, stepping between them. “What’s done is done. Vara’s Infected, so let’s just figure out what to do about it. Hector, take deep breaths and count down from one hundred by threes.”

Count? Hector didn’t want to count. He didn’t want to take calming breaths and think rationally. He wanted to rant and rage and stomp and yell. He wanted to vomit the lava that burned in his chest.

“I like my Voice,” Varali said defiantly. “I don’t want to get rid of it. The Iron Helms are wrong – Voices aren’t evil. They’re lost, and they only want to go home.”

“You will not go where it tells you!” Hector bellowed. “I’ll chain you up in the basement before seeing you lope off into the unknown because the Voices say so!”

Delia gave him that look that warned him to get his tranquilizers before he reached the height of his anger fit.

“If I stay here I’ll Infect you.”

“Not necessarily,” Del argued. “Jesreal once told me you can’t ‘catch’ the Voices from Infected people like a virus. The only reason people think they’re contagious is because they stick together in Swarms, so they tend to linger around the Infected. All we have to do is keep you inside and make sure other Voices don’t sniff out their friend living in your brain.”

Varali’s eyes widened. “I don’t want to stay inside. I’m finally catching up in school. Mistress Divan says next T-turn I’ll be in the same class with kids my age.”

“Next turn you may be a puppet wandering blindly across the planet to please your brain parasite,” Hector spat.

Varali opened her mouth, but then her eyes misted and she gazed into the distance. “I’m angry because they want to keep me inside. No, they’re afraid I’ll join the Exodus.” She paused a while, listening. “Obviously they know what’ll happen if they stop me from going with you.”

A blade twisted in Hector’s gut. He kicked the fallen end table, sending up droplets of water. Lightning images flashed before his eyes: Varali sinking deeper into the catacombs of her mind, unable to distinguish her will from her Voice’s, setting off to the east with the rest of the Exodus never to be seen or heard from again.

There was no stopping it. Her body could be chained, but not her mind. She would become an empty shell in a vegetative trance, her mind sucked dry until her Voice moved to its next food source.

Her mind was condemned either way. Hector would be damned if he gave the Voices the rest of her, too.

“I’m not letting you go,” he whispered through the sting in his eyes. He felt breathless and weak, an invisible clamp squeezing his skull. The words that came out of his mouth weren’t right, weren’t what he wanted to say, but he couldn’t gather his thoughts while his emotions yanked them every which way like some mad puppeteer. He was left foggy, drained. “I can’t let this parasite use you as a tool to accomplish whatever it wants. You’ll stay here.”

Varali’s jaw tightened. “You killed your cell-mate to save him the torture of being denied the Call. Now you’re going to let me become a drooling, brainless zombie just to keep me with you?”

“You don’t know where the Voices will take you.”

“Lykus would let me go!”

“Lykus gave you that scar on your face! He couldn’t love you like I do!”

Her hand flew to the raised white welt gouged from the corner of her lip to her chin. Guilt punched Hector in the stomach.

He never needed his journal to identify guilt. That one he’d learned quickly, and spent two T-turns perfecting.

“You never asked me how my initiation went,” Varali whispered. “Don’t you want to know, Hector? Don’t you want to know what the elders of Van-Ferrall named me?”

Hector. She never called him Hector.

Varali peered up at him from beneath those scraggly bangs that hung almost to her nose. “Savage. I asked them to. I yelled and made animal noises and swore at them until they did.”

“Tychon’s light, Vara,” Del breathed. “Your surname says something about you in Van-Ferrall before you even open your mouth. Lykus was shunned for the one the elders chose him. Why condemn yourself to his fate?”

“He’s my only family. I wanted to be related to him for real.” She tousled her short, uneven locks, cropped close to her head in the back and left longer in front so strands hung about her ears. “Then I cut my hair off in front of them, so they’d know I didn’t want to be Ferralli without my brother.”

Hotness rushed to Hector’s eyes, and with it the guilt tightened its hold. What had he been thinking, letting her travel with only a few escorts into Van-Ferrall to be tagged by some ancients who thought they knew you from your records, history and some tea leaves?

There was nothing savage about Varali. But that was her brand now – the Wolf’s savage sister. He remembered when he’d been cast out of their village at ten, his hair hacked off and his fledgling status withdrawn so the elders could name him Savage, though surnames were usually chosen at fourteen.

You won’t change, they’d told him. The world needs to know what you are right now. It needs to know to stay away.

“Love isn’t supposed to be selfish, Hector!” Varali half-sobbed, then pivoted on her heel and ran from the room.

Wanting to throw up from the tidal-wave of emotions, Hector looked to Del. Discomfort wafted from her like fumes. His anger she could take in stride, but Varali’s tumultuous feelings she always preferred to stay out of. It was plain she hadn’t learned to love Varali the way Hector had hoped. The woman didn’t have a shred of maternal instinct. Of course she made efforts for his sake, but her talents lay outside the field of acting.

“Your love is her prison,” Del said in her analytical way, relaxing now that Varali was gone. “One day her identity and her Voice’s will merge. You can’t stop it by locking her in this house. When the time comes and she asks to leave, Hector, you have to let her go.”

He snarled at her, the beast in his chest rousing again, but Delia wasn’t daunted by such displays. “I’ll go with her, then,” he said.

“You know Uninfected people can’t join the Exodus. She’ll refuse to go with you.”

“I’ll get Infected, then!”

She gave him an unimpressed look. “What good will that do? Let’s make her last T-turn as comfortable as possible and hope that, wherever her Voice leads her, she’ll be happy.”

Hector gave a roar that seemed to shake the walls. He seized fistfuls of his hair, ripping strands from the plait down his back until he found himself staring at quivering fists of long onyx rope. “Fuck your mentalist speech! Vara may only be your patient, but she’s my goddamned sister!”

Del sighed. “She’s right: your love is selfish.”

“This is bullshit – nobody told me there were right ways and wrong ways to love!”

He crumpled to his knees, water seeping into the knees of his trousers, and wept.

Del went to fetch the tranquilizers.