Paper Swallows Sample
Trigger Warnings: war, mental health, violent imagery, death/suicide, foul language
Contents
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Chapter 1
Runaway
Micha Vargas launched himself over the last few stairs of the landing, just ducking the bottle thrown at him from above. Uncle Kalan chased not far behind, a leather belt clutched in one work-gnarled hand. Micha burst through the sagging front door of the tenement building and ran into the stormy night. “Get back here, you thieving bastard!”
He kept going, splashing barefoot through puddles in the part of town called the Narrows. Dogs barked in the distance and somewhere an infant cried.
“You’re useless,” Kalan shouted, leaning drunk against the doorframe. “Run away, boy, just like your father.”
Kalan’s words echoed inside Micha long after they died in the air. His heart pounded in his temples. His face was numb where his uncle had hit him, though every jostle brought bright hints of pain to come. I deserve worse, he thought, then, I won’t go back.
His legs carried him through the Narrows. With Kalan as his only living relative, Micha had nowhere to go. He thought of his uncle’s rage and Micha wished the war took Kalan instead of his mother and father.
The city stank of sea water and industrial runoff. Low growls of thunder echoed overhead like the revving of engines. Growing up, Micha had been interested in machines. He loved the way clockwork ticked again if you put the pieces together just right. His earliest memory was excitement at the age of four seeing bright mechs on Parade Day.
Spending the last two years apprenticing in the Reynholm factory under his uncle, however, had sapped his appreciation for cogs and gears. A scrawny boy of 14 years old, mechs were now things Micha scorned and feared. They were a future he’d never have.
Micha knew soldiers in mechanized armor patrolled the streets at night, and if he were caught out past curfew… He thought about the Orphan Trains, which rumors said carried orphaned children and homeless adults the soldiers caught out after curfew away from the city. Their fates were left to the imagination. He shivered.
Anyone looking out their rain-streaked windows saw a feral boy running down the chipped lanes, past parked cars and wooden buggies. His wet clothes, so worn his patches had patches, were held up by suspenders. Dark brown hair clung to his face, masking the bruise under his right eye. The rain washed away evidence of his tears.
Though well after curfew, the city was far from asleep. Micha ran by speakeasies and people smoking cigarettes under awnings to keep out of the rain. Micha’s foot caught in a pothole and he fell with a splash into the disgusting runoff. He lay, facing the angry darkness, lit here and there by lightning, listening to a prostitute’s phlegmy laughter. Hissing, Micha dragged himself up, his trousers peppered with grit. His foot throbbed and he saw he had cracked a toenail.
The choked Narrows opened into the wider streets of the Eastbranch District, a lower-middle class neighborhood trying not to succumb to the rot of the slums. The buildings grew more spaced apart and were in much better repair, but these days, everything in Geoffsport sagged as if tired.
Nothing was untouched by the war.
He limped to the storefront of a dark barbershop. In its window was a poster of a uniformed young man with the words, DO YOUR PART. The enlistee's regulation haircut and healthy, full face were exaggerated opposites to Micha's superimposed reflection. His own looked gaunt, dirty and with too-tan skin he inherited from his father.
He shook his head to clear it and examined his eye. The right one was swollen shut where Kalan had hit him. He found it tender to the touch and let out a shuddering sigh.
Thunder rumbled, the wind blew. Rain ran down the surface of the window and Micha saw blood on his shirt. He adjusted his suspenders and rubbed at the stain. He had to get moving, but he was almost hypnotized staring at his reflection.
That could have been you, a part of his mind mocked him.
"What am I doing?" he asked no one. He walked on, not thinking about where he was going, just knowing he would never go back.
Micha walked hunched in the rain and feeling sorry for himself, making his way uphill to the center of the city, Griffon’s Hill. This war, he thought. This stupid, senseless war. He could remember the parades from his earliest years, he recalled the jubilation of the crowds, the feeling of nationalistic pride of seeing the machinations of the home front. Going on its 18th year, most had grown warweary. Pomp and pride was long ago replaced by somber ceremonies and unspoken regret. Too many young soldiers had been returning home in flag-draped boxes. And those who returned whole were broken on the inside.
Like Kalan. He shook the thought free; he couldn’t bear feeling sorry for his uncle right now. Why should he care if his uncle sometimes cried in his sleep? Micha was tired of getting yelled at, at being swatted when he asked questions. I won’t go back.
As the nature of the war changed, from colonial uprising to near-global conflict, its impact on day-to-day life grew. Factories sprang up overnight, wages rose then stagnated and, for the third year, enforcement of martial law and the curfew. When he was younger, he bought into the glory of battle and the propaganda spewed from the loudspeakers. Now news and announcements made him taste bile. Even the graffiti the Returners left every so often or their flyers nailed to fence posts put him on edge. He just wanted to be left alone, a chance for peace. For just a moment to pick up the pieces, to breathe.
Get over yourself, he thought, the voice in his head sounding a lot like Kalan's.
Micha walked close to the posh storefronts, clinging to the shadows tossed out beyond the street lamps. This district, closer to the city center, with its cafes, flower shops and tailors, was once a happy place for Micha when he had visited with his mother. Now, the very air seemed to repel him. The winds that blew through the streets pushed him back, whispering to him subtle warnings, the collective message being, "Not welcome."
Cold and alone, with litter skittering over the pavement on wet jetties, Micha certainly felt unwelcome.
The Narrows and surrounding poorer neighborhoods were active after dark, ignoring curfew with a sense of desperation. Griffon's Hill, however, was abandoned this time of night. In the center of the district loomed Griffon's Tower, rising twelve stories tall. The city spread from the clocktower like the roots of an oak. Micha was only a few blocks away, mesmerized by the sight of it. Seeing it seemed to slow his thoughts.
Lightning oscillated, illuminating both the tower and the brooding thunderheads. He soaked in the Imperial Standard, so red and black and angry, the medieval griffon symbol bold and unyielding, draped partially down the tower's four faces.
The focal point of the tower was its four clock faces decorated with gold numerals, which were visible most days shining through the city’s smog. Of course gilded lettering wasn't the end of its beauty and magnificence; the structure itself was made of quarried stone, with vaulted windows, faux balconies, cherubs, dragons, and all assortments of other fae carved in effigy. Seeing them again jarred him–he had no time for fairy tales since his mother died. She used to read to him all the time, acting out each role dramatically until he giggled. His mother, the actress, and he, her biggest fan.
Stop it, he scolded himself, pushing down his feelings, trying to box them up, make them go away. Sometimes, it worked.
It was hard to consider that just two years ago, he was living a different life, sleeping in his own bed in a little house with his mother, scratching a living from survivor's benefits and what money she earned acting. The months after he was expelled from boarding school were hard, but at least he had a foundation. He was there for his mother and she was there for him, each taking turns being lonely, hopeless, resilient. Then Kathan Vargas died, and her twin brother took Micha in.
Kalan Strix was nothing like his sister.
Stop brooding, stay alert, he told himself. The streets were silent but for the storm. So far, Micha knew he had been lucky. He had made it several miles through the city without passing any of the soldiers patrolling in their mechs or on-foot with their dogs.
Micha neared the clocktower, and could see the barricade restricting access. Once, when he was a boy, Micha had been allowed inside. He remembered looking up at his mother then back again at the whirring gears, his laughter drowned out by the machinery. That was back when it was still open to the public.
When mom was still alive, he thought. New tears filled his eyes and he clawed at them. Stop it.
The clocktower chimed once, breaking his thoughts. It rang into the night, then again, brass competition to the thundering heavens. On the third bell, the tower exploded.
Chapter 2
Captive
Only fog existed for a time, then darkness. From time to time, a scene would take shape in the void. He saw himself digging out from under rubble thrown by the exploding clocktower, then disconnected nothingness, then sirens and orders being shouted by soldiers. What might have been the sun was in fact a building on fire, dancing under the high intensity spray of the firetruck. But the sounds blurred together in a high pitched ringing that vibrated through his being. Men with grave faces looked him over, tried to talk to him, shined bright lights into his eyes, but he had no idea what they were saying. “Go away,” he might have said, before struggling against clouds. Sleep, darkness, abyss–those sweet melodies sang and Micha had no resistance to their calls.
****
The fog rolled and the light focused until it became the hazy outline of a bare bulb through a gauzy fabric. Micha tried to move his arm, but he couldn’t. His head rolled, his eyes swam, reluctant to focus. It was quiet wherever he was, but a blur of low sounds eventually drifted into clarity. A gentle hum of a machine, the faint beeping of another, a hint of radio music. He tried his right hand, and it moved. When he opened his eyes again, Micha saw a bag of liquid hanging suspended from a wire, tubes snaking this way and that. Exploring, his right hand felt his bare chest covered by a thin cover, and thick bandages wrapped around his head.
Panic took him all at once and adrenaline shot through him. He sat up on the bed, fighting against stiff, bruised muscles. The bed had a small curtain around it, filtering the light, dampening the sounds outside the hall. There was the sound of footsteps passing by. A dozen questions pestered him, and he shook his head, sending pain like splintering glass through his mind. Looking down, Micha saw his left arm secured to the bed by a leather strap. A set of tubes ran into a needle that entered the vein at the crook of his elbow. There was a latch and an eyebolt in the strap. The padlock attached to it was so obviously incorrect it cleared some of the cobweb from Micha’s mind. Someone was in a hurry when they fastened him to the bed, and they didn’t line up the lock’s bolt and eyelet before snapping it closed. He pulled out the IV, wincing, removed the useless padlock, then undid the strap.
He found he was naked under the covers, and adolescent embarrassment mixed with his fear and anxiety. Footsteps, the same squeaky boots, were coming back around. Chancing it, Micha parted the curtain on his bed. Beside his was another curtained bed with a dimly visible shadow breathing shallowly. The room was not large, and while it looked recently renovated, the architecture was old, the walls plasterless stones freshly whitewashed.
The footsteps were getting closer to the open doorway. Across from the room was a closed door and beyond, Micha could see nothing else. The outline of a young soldier with a rifle slung over his shoulder became visible as he made rounds down the hallway. The soldier wore the lightly tanned battle fatigues of Cordovan Infantry, sidearm holstered at his hip surrounded by the bulging kit stuffed inside his utility belt.
Wincing, he rolled back onto the bed and worked his legs over the edge. Where the hell am I? he thought. It had been a few minutes, Micha’s movements slowed by the dizziness in his head and the aches throughout his body. The soldier’s boots passed by once more and Micha heard the sound of some sort of commotion down the hall, a door opening, and a shout, “Private McKenzie, in here, please,” the voice called and the soldier raced by once more.
Realizing it as the only chance he might get, Micha stood on shaky legs. Breathing heavily, he parted the curtain, and, naked, he walked to the doorway. To his left the soldier was running into another room, a nurse ushering him in front of her and closing the door. More clattering, yelling.
Micha gulped and ran to his right, his bare feet slapping the polished green linoleum. A dozen feet, and Micha pushed past the swinging double-doors, finding himself in a crossroads of halls. The room was about a hundred feet square, its walls were salmon pink. A polished but clearly antiquated secretary’s station stood at the room’s center, and sitting behind the desk was a man wearing white orderly scrubs. He was bald and though sitting seemed as large as a bull. A jagged scar ran down one side of his scalp to trace his clean-shaven jaw. MR. GREGORY was stenciled in the lapel he wore at his breast.
For a split moment, Micha took in the scenery and the large man. Mr. Gregory, for his credit, only took a moment to start rising his bulk from the chair, “Stop where you are!” he commanded. Like a mouse fleeing a cat, Micha took a dozen paces diagonally to another double-door. He sprinted to it while the big man rounded the desk, fumbling with something.
Micha elbowed the doors open and stopped short. The floor ended in a balcony, almost like the box office seats at Setzer Theater where mother performed. Breathing hard and clutching the rails, knowing the orderly was right behind him, Micha stared down at the scene below him.
The lighting was brighter here adding to the theater-like impression, but that’s where it ended. Below the room was bare and sterile, smelling of copper and fresh disinfectant. The room opened into some sort of stage complete with spotlights hanging from the ceiling, illuminating not a play but what could only have been an operation in progress. The doctor, bloody scalpel held daintily in his green, elbow-length rubber gloves, froze above his patient. A girl lay on the table, a machine forcing oxygen into her small body.
Micha wasn't sure what he was seeing. Could that be? The girl, whose features he couldn't make out from this far, had her eyes closed. At first, Micha thought the girl might have been wearing some sort of stocking cap, made of a light gray wool. The repulsion escaped him like a round fired from a rifle. "No, no, no," he repeated, shaking his head to clear the image from it. The girl wasn't wearing a stocking cap. On a table nearby, sitting in a little bloody pan, Micha saw the top of the girl's skull, surgically removed. It wasn't a cap. The gray, round mass, which the doctor had just been prodding with a scalpel, was the girl's brain. "No, no, no–"
Mr. Gregory moved on him as quickly as a dancer. Micha didn't even try to resist the bull-sized man and he only gasped a little when he felt the wasp sting of a syringe pierce his neck. "No, no, no–"
"Mr. Gregory, please," the doctor said.
"Apologies, Dr. Einsinger. I'll be taking this slippery one to his room now."
Whatever the orderly had injected him with was working. The protests pouring out his mouth clotted like a bloody scrape and all at once he felt heavy. He almost thanked Mr. Gregory for catching him when he fell. It seemed only proper. At some point, other orderlies jostled to get inside the medical theater. They lifted the boy onto a gurney. The fear didn't go away, but rather he did, in and out like someone fooling with the knob of a radio.
Chapter 3
Subject
Alone in the flat, Micha tried not to listen to his neighbors argue. He sat in the dim candle light, bouncing his head off the broken coldbox and feeling his hunger squirm in his stomach like a parasite chewing its way out. It was after curfew and Uncle Kalan still had not returned with dinner. Each time Micha hit the box, the combination lock rattled. The neighbor woman was crying now. The walls were so thin he could probably see his neighbor's shadow-puppet selves with a bright enough flashlight. Reminded of puppet shows with his mother, he stomped the thought before it fully bloomed in his mind.
His stomach growled.
Where are you? he wondered. He had last seen his uncle hours ago when Kalan left promising to return with dinner. It was getting late, and Micha was too hungry to sleep. Stored inside the coldbox were provisions his uncle saved for "hard times." He kept it locked against intruders, and Micha.
"Don't listen to what they tell you, boy," Kalan often said, never explaining who they were. "Hard times are coming and it might come to us needing that food." Micha was certain in this case, us didn't exactly include him.
Micha felt like an afterthought on the best of days, and on the worst, Kalan hit him.
He put it out of mind when he heard the front door. Facing the entry, Micha wondered how drunk Kalan would be. Kalan missed several times with the keys, then on the third try unlocked the deadbolt. The door clattered open, and Kalan stood unsteady at the threshold. He limped in, favoring his bad leg as he always did in nasty weather. He was soaked from the storm and a potpourri of vomit, sweat and stale hooch exuded from his pores.
"You'd better get away from that coldbox, boy," Kalan slurred, resting a steadying hand against the wall as he made his way inside.
Micha rose to his feet and walked out of the kitchenette. There must have been a look on Micha's face because Kalan was quick to snap, "What?"
"Nothing."
"Don't nothing me, boy. Spill it or I'll pull it out of you."
"I was just wondering, did you bring dinner?" he asked, knowing Kalan had not. Two day old stubble stood out on his uncle's face, a dingy mixture of salt and pepper. His greasy, thinning hair was pushed back by deep furrows ending in a widow’s peak. The only thing Micha could see in Kalan's possession was a bottle hidden in a paper bag. Even with prohibition, Kalan could always score a drink.
Kalan shook off his shabby denim coat, hung it on the hanger with difficulty. "Dinner? You should have asked me before I left, boy."
Micha withheld his protest that he had asked. It wasn't worth the argument. It wouldn’t be the first or last time he went hungry.
"Get to bed. We have a job before our shift."
"Yes, sir," Micha said.
"You copping attitude, boy?" Kalan said, anger flaring as he unfastened his belt.
"No, sir."
"Better not be," he said, collapsing into his chair, the only real piece of furniture in their flat. It faced the window overlooking the street and the tenement buildings across the street. Months ago, they had owned a radio, but Kalan pawned it. He kicked his feet up and undid his laces, pulling his boots off and throwing them near the door.
Micha crossed the room and made for his own bed, nothing more than a haphazard pile of scrap cloth and a bit of cotton batting. He closed his eyes, thankful the couple next door had quit arguing. Sleep seemed far off, kept away by the hollow gurgling in his belly. Micha had never known anyone to work as hard as Kalan, but living with him was a nightmare. Like almost every night in the two years since his mother died, Micha pitied himself. Everything was just so… unfair.
Kalan grumbled, then got up and went to the kitchen, smacking his lips. He was already several pulls into the bottle he had stuffed in a paper bag. So he gets to eat when he's hungry? Micha thought, then huffed and rolled over, facing the peeling plaster wall.
His ears perked up when he caught his uncle muttering the combination to the lock as he dialed it. The lock clicked, the coldbox opened with a rattle and Kalan began to rummage around inside. He got a snack of cheese and dry bread before returning to his chair and collapsing. Like many times before, so many times, Kalan forgot Micha existed. Micha, however, just kept repeating the combination to himself, writing it with an index finger on his upper thigh.
For untold minutes, Micha lay in the darkness, his mind racing with angry, hurt thoughts long after his uncle began snoring. Almost against his will, Micha crawled from bed and tip-toed across the uneven wooden floor, guided by the candle's soft flicker. He stepped over the creakiest floorboards. The hunger in the pit of his stomach was dulled by anticipation and the threat of discovery. It made him nauseous. Thankful for the storm outside, he almost wished his neighbors hadn’t quit their argument so early tonight.
At the coldbox, he looked over his shoulder and listened. Kalan's breathing was deep and regular, unchanged. Micha fumbled with the lock, feeling its heft, and entered the combination: 6, 30, 13. The lock popped and he lifted the lid, fumbled and nearly dropped the lock, and in doing so, let go of the lid. It swung out of his reach, into the pots and pans hanging from nails on the kitchen wall. One fell off its hook and clattered to the floor, banging off the icebox en route and spinning to a noisy stop.
“Rebel bastards!” Kalan exclaimed, tearing himself from his chair. "What are you doing?" he shouted.
Micha's breath hitched in his throat and he could not move.
"You were getting into my food, weren't you?" Kalan shouted. Micha didn’t speak. He could only stare at the cast iron pan, betrayed.
Kalan was on him in a moment and before his mouth could work itself into a lame excuse, his world exploded. He fell in a heap, his back sliding down the coldbox. Kalan stood over him, shouting. "You're just like your father, always taking what you weren't given." Kalan leaned in, grabbed Micha by his shaggy hair and pulled him to his feet.
"I was hungry," Micha muttered. It was barely a breath.
"Hungry?" Kalan snapped. "I'll teach you to steal from me!"
Micha felt tears working their way up and he hated them. I won't cry, he told himself. I won't give him the satisfaction.
"Look at me when I'm talking, you greedy little pig," Kalan screamed, striking Micha with an open palm. Micha's ear went deaf. Pain shot across his head, but he stood. "I should have left you for the damn streets. You want to catch a ride on the Orphan Train, do you?" Kalan hit Micha again, this time with a backhand that stung the entire side of his face. “You’re just like your father.”
Micha's rage spilled over, and at the last moment, he raised his arm to deflect his uncle's next blow, connecting hard. "Don't talk about my father," Micha shouted as loud as the thunder outside. "He was a better man than you'll ever be!"
Smack! Micha heard the blow before he registered what happened. In one moment, he was facing his uncle; the next, he was eye level with the dust bunnies under the oven. He thought it curious he couldn't see out of his right eye, that it wouldn't even open as he looked up. Kalan had his belt, and was growling, too angry to speak as he raised his hand to lash out.
Micha feared for his life.
He kicked out, catching Kalan in his bad knee, the old injury that sent him home from the front lines years ago. Kalan buckled, missed catching himself on the counter, and smashed his face against the stove. Micha jumped to his feet and ran out the door and down three rickety flights of stairs with Kalan scrambling after him, howling.
He hated and pitied him. In another time and place, Micha might have been able to respect Kalan, to love him even. Uncle Kalan adored his twin sister, Kathan, Micha's mother. When she died, it shattered something fragile deep inside his uncle, Micha was sure of it.
No one was untouched by the war.
****
“I take it your uncle hits you often?” the man in spectacles asked him from across the desk.
All at once, the argument with Kalan vanished, and though Micha had no recollection, he felt like he had been speaking for a very long time. He was in an office, stuffed with bookshelves full of texts and other odds and ends.
Micha stared at the man, confused, not sure of what to say. His throat was dry.
"Please go on," the man encouraged. "Did your uncle hit you often?"
"I'm not sure," Micha stammered, understanding at once he was not comfortable telling this man anything.
"Ahh," the man continued after a moment. He sat down the pen he was using to write and removed his glasses and polished them. "I think I understand what's happening here. Sometimes the drugs have that effect, what one might call a 'coming to' sensation, might you say?" Replacing his glasses on his thin, ageless face, he said, "Moodiness, fatigue, confusion and short-term amnesia is common after a dose as large as the one Mr. Gregory gave you yesterday afternoon. My, you were a determined bugger to try to wriggle free, weren't you?" The man spoke casually, cheerfully, openly, but the tilt of his grin reminded Micha of a shark.
Yesterday? Micha thought. Then it wasn't a dream, it really happened. He tried to replay the events of the last few days, but his thoughts were syrupy. The fight with Kalan, running away, Griffin's Tower exploding. Soldiers, the girl with the open skull, all real.
"Am I in a hospital?" Micha asked.
"Why, yes, in a manner of sorts. As I've explained, you are at Rosemouth Asylum, or rather, in the building that once housed the asylum. I’m afraid you died in the terrorist attack on the clocktower.”
Micha blanched. “Died?”
“Obviously a joke, don’t be so alarmed.” The man had pale skin, a clean shaven face and wore a white jacket over a pressed gray shirt. His hair was white or very light blonde, Micha wasn’t sure, making it hard to tell how old the guy was. He spoke with an accent Micha only knew as “out of town,” but might’ve been Needleheim in origin. He was clearly educated. “That’s what the papers will say and your next of kin, Kalan Strix, will be told–you died in the explosion. Of course, it was staged, but let’s let everyone blame the Returners.” The man chuckled.
Micha didn’t find any of this funny. It felt like a goose just walked over his grave. His head was spinning.
“I am Dr. Roderic Einsinger, former head researcher of the Vertance Alliance’s department of biologic studies, and now currently assigned to research under the Cordovan Empire’s flag. Do you recall anything I told you about the project of which you are now a subject?”
The doctor politely waited for Micha to shake his head before continuing. Micha’s heart pounded, and he felt the room tilting and wobbling. The doctor’s tones were cold, matter of fact, but delivered in such a way Micha was left feeling like this Einsinger guy was doing him a favor. “You were found guilty by military tribunal of breaking curfew and as punishment, you have been placed in my care as one of my phase three test subjects. You see, the Alliance saw my methods as ‘unethical’ and ‘cruel’ and stymied my research every step of the way.
“That’s why I left their fallen cause and joined the true might of the Empire,” the doctor said, then rose slowly. He turned his back to Micha and the boy watched him switch on a record player. Slow band music, something he recognized from his mother’s collection, played softly. “Once Mayor DeArmand listened to my proposal, the Cordovan government and the Sigma Corporation practically slid me a blank check, giving me carte blanche to achieve my goal: ending sigma sickness.”
Micha could do nothing but listen to the man and try to make sense of what he was saying. What did sigma have to do with anything, with him? “Sigma sickness?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it, Mr. Vargas, the orphan, and besides, it’s never mentioned in the press,” the doctor laughed. “Yes, sigma, the fuel source beating coal out of the market, the same energy that is powering the device playing music this very second.” The doctor turned to face him again. “It’s quite safe for us in this environment: the fuel is being burned far away, the electricity transferred through grounded cables under the city’s very streets. But for our soldiers, and the soldiers of our enemies, they are not quite so safe.”
The doctor polished his glasses again. “Mechanized armors are causing a percentage of its pilots to lose touch with reality, to enter into blind rages, to shoot comrades and civilians alike, and it’s getting harder and harder for the government to keep it out of the papers while terrorists like the Returners are dying by the dozens to discover this secret for their own cause. And my little orphan Micha, it’s my job to find out why and how to stop it, and for that task, you are going to be my lab rat.”
Chapter 4
Bubbles
Weightlessness. Countless bubbles tickled him. Thick glass domed his view outside. Men in lab coats taking notes on clipboards, orderlies helping other children from gurneys into similar vertical tanks.
“They’re all orphans, here,” Dr. Einsinger had told him. “For phase three at least.”
Orphans, he thought, like me.
Oxygen snaked into his lungs with mechanical hissing, fed from the mask wrapped around his face like some octopus. Diodes and wires pocked his naked skin, umbilical cords of vital information feeding the hungry scientists. Reams of paper printed from machines all around the lab. Greenlit monitors displayed rudimentary graphs the boy could only guess at. It was unlike anything Micha had seen before.
Immediately after being told he would be experimented on, he was whisked away. Micha didn’t have a chance to shoulder the knowledge before being led to a large room, jabbed with another needle and placed into the empty chamber. “This is a cocktail of lysergic acid diethylamide to loosen your serotonin receptors,” the doctor said as Mr. Gregory filled the syringe, “and a mild paralytic, to keep you docile for what we need you to do.” Micha’s mind screamed at him to struggle, to fight back, but he was powerless with fear.
Terror gripped him when the container sealed shut and greenish liquid began pumping into the chamber with him in it by the gallons. As his body was locked between flight or fight mode, whatever Mr. Gregory poisoned him with started to work, and his body slumped with a splash to the floor.
“This is mineral water infused with raw sigma,” the doctor spoke outside the chamber. His voice was muffled, distorted by echoes that seemed to come from Micha’s mind itself. “In mere minutes, the chamber will be filled and you will be suspended inside of it, at which time, currents of electricity will be passed through your body.” The light reflected off the doctor’s glasses and the waves of the liquid made his hair seem like it was made of writhing snakes. “Today’s test will simulate the exposure a mech pilot receives in sigma radiation over an estimated one thousand hours of operation, expedited to just a few hours here. Remarkable, really.”
He blacked out for a moment, weightless and careless. Then the shocks started.
For over an hour, at intervals Micha couldn’t begin to guess, powerful charges of electricity passed through his body, causing spasms in his arms, legs, torso, chest. The cocktail did nothing to dull his pain. “An unfortunate necessity,” the doctor said after the first interval. His mind was a spiral of distorted images, dreamscapes, geometric patterns and blendings of sounds, colors, raw emotions and agony. He wanted to scream when the voltage passed through him, churning the water with the currents, but he physically could not.
In the nothingness between shocks, Micha lived his life a thousand times. He waved as a child to his father leaving for war; he screamed at his mother when he realized all Dad’s letters were fakes she’d written, the newspaper with VARGAS, DEVIN – M.I.A. written on it balled in his tiny fist; finding pride at the Academy of Geoffsport, then it being snatched away in an instant; discovering his mother hanging from the rafters, the record skipping and repeating the same musical phrase that sometimes snuck up on him when he wasn’t careful; moving into the flat with Kalan, his uncle kicking cans and trash out of the way to make room for him; working, working, working, mindless, repetitive factory work, minting replaceable parts so the cogs of war could roll ever on; then the fight, running away, the explosion.
Agony shot through him again, bringing him to focus on the wavy face of Dr. Einsinger again. His eyes were hidden behind the glare from his glasses, and the corner of his lip was turned up in a shark’s grin again. “Increase the current by one and three-quarters amps,” he said.
This time, after the shock, Micha knew only swirling darkness tinted by a sickly green haze.
****
A swallow landed on the windowsill Micha was staring at for who knew how long. He was dressed in a thin gown, a line of drool hanging from his mouth and forming a puddle in his lap. The swallow reminded him of something buried so deep in his psyche that even remembering it caused him pain and brought him to his senses.
He shook his head and the swallow flapped away twittering leaving him alone in the whitewashed room. He sat on a bed, his neck craned to one side, looking out the barred, open window. The sky was evening-pink, and far off he could see the city skyline. The clocktower’s absence was like the missing tooth in an otherwise beautiful smile.
Micha stood up and stumbled. Whatever they’d drugged him with was wearing off, but slowly, and it turned the boy’s every thought into molasses. He was so tired. What am I going to do? he thought, knowing panicking would get him nowhere.
But as the seconds turned to minutes turned to hours, and no one came to rescue the scared boy, panic was exactly what he did, banging on the walls and the locked cell door until his fists were sore, but no one answered. Outside his door, he occasionally saw soldiers and orderlies walk by under the gap between the door and floor. As the silence grew on him, the other sounds of Rosemouth became more evident. Far away, he heard echoing sobs void of all hope and the chanting of the broken-minded.
“They’re all orphans, here,” the doctor said, causing Micha to jump and spin around, only there was no one there.
Sigma sickness, Micha thought. He wracked his brain trying to remember hearing about it, but it was no use, he was just a kid who had to grow up too fast. He didn’t feel sick, but wondering about it brought nausea and he wasn’t sure if the drugs they’d pumped in with were the cause of his dizziness.
At some point before twilight ended, a hatch on his door opened and someone dumped a tray and tin mug onto the floor of the cell. Micha sniffed the air from his bed, too hungry to be paranoid about the thin meaty stew. In the deep mug, he tasted tea and it brought a smile to his face and a memory of his mother. This one didn’t hurt so bad, so he left it alone, and scooped up the remaining broth with a hunk of bread.
Belly satisfied, Micha climbed back on the thin bunk and tried to sleep but flashbacks like lightning strikes of regret kept him awake for a long while yet.
Chapter 5
Curiosity
The next morning, Micha awoke to the latch in his cell door being opened and another tray slid across the floor. “Eat up. Dr. Einsinger will be seeing you shortly,” a voice called from the other side of the door.
Micha rose, used the toilet and ate his breakfast. The asylum was quiet this morning, except for the background noises of pipes groaning, electricity humming (“It’s quite safe for us in this environment,” Dr. Einsinger had said), a buzzer sounding somewhere distant. The moans of the inmates seemed to be over for a time, and Micha was okay with that. The tray was slopped with a biscuit and some thin gravy. He ate it barehanded, uncaring of the mess he would lick off his fingers momentarily. He drank from the mug and was excited. “Orange juice?” he exclaimed, his voice echoing damply off his walls. He drank the contents of the mug in one gulp and wiped his mouth.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had orange juice, and he didn’t even care that there were bits of pulp. He had always asked his mother to strain his and she always obliged, teasing it was the best part for a growing boy. He laughed a little, put the mug down and slid everything over to the same corner with last night’s supper tray.
For an hour or more, Micha paced around the room, stopping each circuit at the window to look outside. The courtyard was manicured, but no patients–Subjects, Micha corrected himself–roamed the lawn. The building seemed to be U-shaped with a symmetrical wing opposite Micha’s. Tall wrought-iron fencing surrounded the expansive perimeter. Beyond the fence, Micha saw forests. Once he saw the clouds of coal smoke from a locomotive running on tracks hidden by the trees.
“My left arm to be on that train,” he said. “Even if it happened to be the Orphan Train.” It was as hopeless a situation as one got, he supposed, just as loud knocking came from his door.
“Face the wall,” a stern voice said. Micha recognized it as Mr. Gregory.
Micha didn’t see any other option but to comply, so he did. In moments, the door unlocked and he felt the large man loom behind him. “Spread your arms and legs, I’m going to check you for any contraband.” Micha did so and he was roughly patted down.
The man was bigger than Micha remembered from their first encounter. Micha gulped. “This is how it’s going to work while you’re under Dr. Einsinger’s study. Five days a week, you will meet with Dr. Einsinger for morning debriefing, followed by your trial for the day, then back to your cell. You’ll be fed twice a day, breakfast and dinner. The experiment otherwise requires you to be confined to your cell. Do you understand?”
Micha thought he did, but everything was happening so fast. He nodded.
“Good. I am authorized to detain you if you become aggressive or if you refuse any of my instructions, is that clear?”
Again Micha nodded.
“Good. Follow me.”
He followed the orderly through a series of halls to the semi-familiar door of Dr. Einsinger’s office. Inside, he was asked by the doctor to sit, so he did so.
“How do you fare today, Micha?” Dr. Einsinger sat in front of stacks of paper just far enough away that he couldn’t make out the script.
Micha swallowed. “I want to leave,” he said, voice cracking.
The doctor frowned and scribbled something. “What are you writing?” Micha asked.
“I am taking notes on our conversation.”
“Why?” he asked, a little too quickly.
“Protocol. Does this upset you, Micha?”
Micha steadied himself. Sigma sickness, Micha recalled. He’s studying whatever that is, and he already said it comes with irritability.
Micha shook his head. “No, I was just curious.” He swallowed. “My father was a mech pilot. I read all the magazines I could about mechs and engines growing up. None of them talked about sigma sickness.”
The doctor nodded, allowing Micha to continue.
“I just don’t get it,” he said. “How come the study? The newsreels I saw at the nickel theater never showed pilots as anything but the strongest heroes.”
“Let’s take a walk, shall we? I think I’ll be able to explain. I am always keen to indulge a curious mind.”
“O-okay.”
The doctor walked around the desk to the door.
“I think we’ll walk alone, thank you, Mr. Gregory,” Dr. Einsinger said when the orderly started to follow. For a time the only sounds were the bare slaps of Micha’s feet and the clapping of polished shoes.
Micha was sure the halls were color-coded. Each had a single line of paint running through the linoleum. The doctor led Micha down hallways of pink, green, teal and yellow hues, down stairs, and all the way to the main entrance where military police were stationed. Idle conversation stopped and the soldiers stood at attention. Dr. Einsinger waved them on, showed his badge at the security gate and was buzzed in. Once they had passed, Micha overheard their conversation resume.
“It had to be those commie Returners,” an older soldier explained to a younger one.
“It’s a shame, really,” a younger one said.
“Hell no, not a shame,” the original speaker said, growing louder, more passionate. “It’s a call to arms, and if I wasn’t stuck here guarding kooks, I’d be out there right now hunting the scumbags down.”
Double-doors broke up the rest of the conversation.
“But I thought it wasn’t the Returners,” Micha said.
The doctor looked at him, shark’s grin evident and tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially.
Micha said nothing, keeping pace with the doctor’s long strides.
“What I planned on showing you isn’t far now,” the doctor said. “As I said, you are a subject in the third phase of these experiments, and lucky you. You only survived yesterday because of the sacrifice of those who came before you.”
Micha’s pace faltered but he fought to keep calm.
“The first two phases were carried out on adults. Those affected by the sickness were, afterall, adult male mech pilots. It was a limited success. Over the trials, I have discovered the cause for why the treatments were unsuccessful. The pituitary gland. After puberty, it shrivels like a raisin. In the autopsies I’ve performed on those who succumbed to the sickness, who eventually became catatonic and died, the pituitary has in almost every case swollen and burst.
“Phase three brought more successes, and the perfection of the sigma radiation chamber. Orphans and the homeless bleed society dry, but here the weak are consumed by the strong. We are making society stronger, together. You see, after countless tweaking of formulae, after countless trials, we’ve found something that… helps, at a cost.”
Dr. Einsinger stopped speaking for a moment, trying to find his words. Micha started to wonder why the doctor would deign to tell him all this, any of it at all, then it occurred to him: Micha would not be leaving Rosemouth alive.
“Do you know what sigma is, Micha?” the doctor asked.
“Sigma is fuel,” Micha said. He remembered something he read once. “I guess it’s made from rare earth minerals or something.”
“Very well done, Micha, but to truly understand, you have to go deeper. This mineral is called magicite and it is indeed rare. Cultures a thousand years ago made jewelry from magicite and used it for their pagan rituals. They claimed it had connections to the spirits. The Drova was the only culture still surviving when Cordova settled this continent ages ago. This was long before colonizing the other parts of the world that brought everything to glorious, progressive war.
“There are lessons in the past, my boy,” the doctor said, holding open a door and passing into a hallway that was painted with a black line, “and worlds other than ours.” Cells lined the walls. The doctor walked to the middle of the hall and stopped a half dozen feet away.
The doctor unlocked the cell door. “Please, after you.”
Micha stepped forward. Dr. Einsinger nodded once, the light catching on his glasses, and Micha opened the door. The clattering latch echoed.
The well-greased door opened with a woosh, and Micha felt his body being pulled inside. He resisted, holding onto the doorway. Squinting against the sudden gust that was pulling him, he faced what was in the dim room.
A man with wild hair and beard was chained by his ankles in the middle of a cell similar to Micha’s. All over the room, glowing blue sigils flashed like blue lightning bugs, each in the shape of a jagged circle. The man hovered against the chain, body limp in the air, his mouth moving as if in prayer. The force Micha confused for wind came from the man, but he was stock-still in the eye of the storm.
Micha watched, stunned by the sight. Minutes passed and the energy kept pulling at him at the same storm-like force, never wavering. Then, like a lightswitch being flipped, the man dropped, landed upright, and turned to a blank spot on the nearly-covered wall. With a shout that sounded feral, the man gestured at the wall and another blue circle glowed into existence.
“It goes like this,” the doctor said, startling Micha, “twenty-four hours a day. He doesn’t speak to anyone, he has to be force fed to be kept alive. He doesn’t sleep. We can only get to him when he’s about to carve another sigil into the wall. Come.”
Micha stepped away, breaking his eyes from the man who began to rise again, hovering tethered by the chain five feet in the air. “Who is he?” Micha asked after the door closed with a bang.
“Is it curiosity or compassion that begs that question from your lips, Micha? Suffice it to say, this man was a soldier, a mech pilot, the only member of phase one to have survived. He is kept alive because of the treatment I have developed and because of our constant monitoring of him.”
Micha stood, soaking in all the information. None of it made sense, not about the sigma sickness, not about his being captured by this lunatic and brought to be experimented on. But he was sure if he kept his eyes and ears open, he would find something to latch onto to make sense of this place. He’d find an opening to escape.
Escape, Uncle Kalan’s voice mocked in his mind, don’t you even dream it, a wimp like you.
“This man arrived to me a raving lunatic, weeks away from slipping into a coma from which he’d never awaken. There will be more cases like his in the future, and the point of this experiment, little orphan Micha, is to cure it,” the doctor said. But something about the way he said it made Micha think he was lying; that there might be something else to it. The doctor removed a timepiece from his lab coat, “Hopefully, with some of your curiosity sated, we can continue. After you.”
Micha took one last look at the closed cell door. He kept seeing the strange circles like afterimages every time he blinked on the way back to the doctor’s office.
Chapter 6
Routine
Over the next weeks, Micha Vargas’s life became routine. Time became frayed and the borders of his very self blurred. He began to find himself twitching at imaginary sounds and crying uncontrollably by himself at night. Twice in a row he woke up to find he had wet the bed. The bedding was changed by the time he returned, just like the old food trays were removed and his cell cleaned.
After breakfast, Micha would meet with the doctor for debriefing. Dr. Einsinger would begin by asking, “How do you fare, today, Micha?” Micha would answer, sometimes politely if he had the energy, sometimes rudely; but always the doctor took notes. What followed would be an exercise of logic or a series of questions Micha felt he’d answered a thousand times by now. Any deviations from the expected answers were noted. “This is to measure your progress or decline over time,” he explained one day when Micha refused to answer. “Not answering would be indicative that the treatment is not working.”
Following the exercises, the doctor would remove a cylindrical tube and he would play it over a phonograph. The vignettes of his life he had seen on the first day were played back for him in audio form. He heard voices from his past, among the staticy haze of ethereal sounds. Micha would be asked to go into detail about the experiences he had while in the submersion chamber.
“You can record what’s happening inside my mind?” he had asked the doctor.
“In a rudimentary fashion, yes. This way, when you become unresponsive from sigma sickness, I will still be able to successfully run tests on you.”
“Then it doesn’t matter what I answer here.”
“Are you refusing to answer? That could be indicative of sickness. You’ve been helpful thus far, Micha.”
With no other choice, Micha told the doctor about events in his life flashing before his eyes, over and over, like a skipping record. “You have unresolved trauma, Micha,” the doctor said, neutrally. “Much unresolved trauma. The loss of both of your parents, being expelled from boarding school, your abusive relationship with your uncle. All of that is trauma, and you’re stuck reliving all of it until you choose to put some of it down.”
Micha looked away from the doctor, tears in his eyes.
“It’s time,” Mr. Gregory said, knocking on the door.
“So it is,” Dr. Einsinger said.
Following debriefing, Micha fell into the routine of being escorted down several halls until he reached the pink one. Here, he would enter a busy space as large as a gymnasium lined with twelve chambers. Upon arriving, he would be injected with the same cocktail of paralytic LSD, and once the orderlies fastened all the diodes and wires to his body, he would step cold and nearly naked into the claustrophobic chamber and the sigma water would begin to try to drown him.
He would wholly hallucinate scenes from his past, powerless to change them. Another shock would grip him, scramble his brain and seemingly change the radio station to another memory.
On the fourth day, he refused to answer when Dr. Einsinger asked, “How was it you got expelled?” Micha had been telling the doctor that he always wanted to be a mech pilot like his father, but his only opportunity vanished when he was expelled from the Academy of Geoffsport.
Micha shook his head. Images kept trying to come to mind. “It doesn’t matter.” He looked away. He was tired, scared and knew he would be tortured in moments. It was hard for him to stay calm.
The Academy was his one way to get out of the Narrows, to get away from Geoffsport entirely. Military officers were made at boarding schools like his all across the Empire of Cordova. If his father did it wrong, he was going to go in and do it right, damn it. Only it didn’t end with him piloting a mech into the sunset like his prepubescent mind had imagined.
“I have ways of making you tell me–part of the reason I’m here is because I developed a truth serum and gave it to the Cordovans–but I will respect your privacy today. Though I will mark the refusal.”
But under the drugs, he later became obsessed with the question. After the third interval of electricity, Micha opened his eyes, only instead of the green-tinted and distorted images, he found himself sitting in a classroom, listening to the students talk to one another while he himself was silent, waiting for the instructor to enter and begin the day's lesson. Examinations were only a few weeks away, and the students were abuzz. Theirs was the first class with the opportunity to enter into a special mech piloting pre-program designed for gifted children. It was everything Micha wanted since his father left.
"Hey, Micha," a student named Thomias called.
He glanced over only to be hit in the face with a sopping wet spitball just under his left eye. The room went momentarily silent then exploded with laughter and jeers.
"Do it again," one student shouted.
"Eww, gross," a girl said.
"What a wuss, he won't do anything," said another boy.
Micha wiped it away, flinging it to the floor with a splat. Thomias tore another strip out of his notebook and crammed it into his mouth, exaggerating each movement. He chewed it with an expression that dared Micha to do something about it.
"Don't do it again," Micha warned, his face red with a mix of embarrassment and anger. He gripped the desk with white knuckles.
The bully chewed like a man with tobacco in his mouth, winked at one of his friends and launched the wad through his piped tongue. Micha ducked, but not quickly enough, and the spit soaked paper spattered this time on his forehead and bounced off.
"Don't take that from him," his only friend, Sylas, said from the desk behind him.
Before he knew what was happening, Micha launched himself from his chair, knocking books and scattering papers across the floor, plowing through the other desks to get at Thomias. The other boy was slow to move, caught up in his mocking laughter. The look of surprise when Micha punched him in the face was satisfying. Micha wailed on Thomias, who covered his face. Shouts erupted and droned for long moments until all at once the room became silent.
"Micha Vargas!" the instructor shouted from the doorway. "Go to the dean's office, immediately! The rest of you, a-ten-hut!"
Everyone in the room stood at attention. Micha hung his head and left the classroom, not daring to look anyone in the face. He moved down the halls, passing portraits of the great Cordovan generals hanging from neat, gilded frames who seemed to judge him from their stoic poses. He was ashamed he acted so rashly, that he could be goaded so easily by Thomias.
At Dean Horowitz's office, he found himself alone in the quaint waiting room. The secretary was out, perhaps for lunch at the mess hall or on some errand, and Micha wasn't about to knock on his closed door to tattle on himself. He decided to wait until the secretary walked in, the dean came for him or the next bell rang.
After a few minutes, he heard movement from the dean’s closed office, along with a grunt he couldn’t place. Instinct told him to leave, but the risk of further punishment stayed him. He was a great student, always reaching high marks and pushing himself to be one of the best in his class. Scrawny for his age, his academic success made him unpopular with some students. He wasn’t the best or smartest, not by a long shot but he was far above average. He had the singular goal of becoming a mech pilot like his father, and only now, bobbing in a chamber worlds away did he realize his motives: he hoped someday to find and rescue his father from the POW camp he’s surely been in this whole time.
Another grunt, this time female, then an audible smack! And the woman’s voice calling, “Stop, that hurts.” There was something about the woman’s voice he recognized, but it was muffled by the door and he didn’t want to recognize it, because really, there was no way he could ever not recognize that voice.
“You know you like it, slut,” Dean Horowitz growled, then the sound of another smack followed by furniture crashing off the desk.
Micha decided he really shouldn’t be there, damn the consequences, and was about to leave when he heard more noise coming from the room. “I can’t do this anymore,” the woman shouted. He stood just as the door slammed open, and his gaze met the teary eyes of the half-undressed woman whose voice had sung so sweetly to him as a child. He was staring at his mother, her pretty dress rumpled and unbuttoned at the neck.
“Mom?” he said.
“Get out of here,” Dean Horowitz screamed from his office. He ran to the door, holding his pants by the waist, his face maroon, the veins in his balding pate throbbing.
Kathan Vargas walked to the boy, sobbing and red-faced, her lip bloody at the corner. “Let’s go home. Come with mommy,” she said, sniffling, pulling at him to come with her.
Dean Horowitz looked down at Micha and shook his head. “Get out of here, you bitch, and take your brat with you,” he said, then slammed the office door, hard.
Micha followed his mother out to the beautifully maintained grounds outside the school. He looked back at the ivy growing up the walls in confusion. Everything was happening so fast, and before he could think clearly, they were near Griffon's Hill, heading east down the crowded streets, to his childhood home.
"Mom, wait. What–" he tried to say.
She stopped, turned around and crouched in front of him. She straightened his jacket and said, "No. Do not ask me what happened. Do not."
"I love you," he said, finally breaking into tears.
She pulled him close, joined him in crying. Pedestrians walked around them, ignoring the scene, and for minutes she held her boy and he held her, both lost and afraid in this war-torn world.
He was so preoccupied re-living the moment with his mother that he did not see the little girl with a bandaged head watching him from an alley. Watching, unmoving, silent.
In the evenings, he would sit on his bunk as the sky changed colors, thoughts interrupted by the visions and terrors he’d witnessed while in the tank as the drugs began to fade. He’d eat the same meal, drink the same tea and lay on his bunk and think. There was nothing to distract him from himself, nothing to take away from the raw emotions and regret. He wondered if he was starting to go mad.
But like a train on tracks, his days were already planned by others, and he had no choice but to follow along even when it hurt. Wake up, debriefing, drugged and dunked in the radiation chamber trial for hours then it would be over and he’d be in his cell, waiting for food.
Awaken.
Debrief.
Trial.
Sleep.
Awaken.
Debrief.
Trial.
Sleep.
Awaken.
Debrief.
Trial.
Sleep.
Routine.
Chapter 7
Dreams
For over a month, the same routine. Micha’s psyche felt shredded. Waking and sleeping were one and the same, interrupted by only a few hours of cognizant pacing in his cell. When he closed his eyes, he dreamed whether it was day or night.
For his part, Micha never considered himself much of a dreamer. His mother would always talk about her vivid, lucid dreams and Micha would listen wide eyed until uncle Kalan jeered at her. “Dreams aren’t real,” he’d say.
“Oh yeah,” his mother challenged once, “then why dream at all?”
Kalan grunted. “Who knows? It’s a waste of time.” He picked out a beer from the coldbox.
“I say dreams give us hope, and teach us lessons. They can predict the future sometimes.”
“Really?” Micha asked.
“Yes really–”
“No, not really,” Kalan interrupted. “Don’t feed him that horse–”
“Not in the house!” Kathan chided him, but they were both smiling now. “Don’t you dare finish that sentence.” To Micha she said, “Besides, you’ve seen it. I’ll dream about Devin sometimes and a letter will arrive in the post. Your uncle Kalan just doesn’t see magic anymore.”
“Yeah, I don’t, because it’s not there.”
“Your uncle had the most vivid imagination growing up,” Micha’s mother told him. Kalan scoffed and she continued, “We pretended all the time, playing in the streams or in the fields on grandpa’s farm in Grayfields.”
“What happened?” Micha asked.
“Soldiers don’t have time for fairy tales in the trenches. When I dream, all I see are my friends dying,” Kalan said, then purposefully walked from the room. Kathan kissed Micha’s boy-soft hair and he smelled the sun on her skin.
Micha wasn’t sure which were flashbacks, dreams, memories or hallucinations. Melancholy took hold of him even though he fought like hell to show the doctor otherwise.
Without warning, he would leave the here and now and be instantly transported to another time. At once, he’d be in school, among peers. Or he would be back in the flat he shared with his uncle, getting ready for work while Kalan gave him a talking-down. But now, he was in the operating room again, running in an endless hallway away from Mr. Gregory, who walked casually, inching closer to him with the gleaming needle poised. Echoes bounced off the hall like waves of distorted voices, entire neural maps bugging out in his mind.
The dream froze. The distortion stopped. The nightmare paused. Like when a newsreel goes bad at the nickelodeon, he thought. Like a flash of lightning he was out of the hall and standing next to the doctor frozen over the girl whose brain was exposed. He backed into a medical cart, sending the tray off and scattering the instruments on the floor. From under the gurney he saw the whimpering form of a girl crying on the floor.
He did a double-take. The girl was in two places at one, both on the gurney with her skullcap removed and under it, crying. She wore a medical gown like his that raised just below her knees as she sat with her head buried in her hands. Micha saw she had scars all over her arms, but they weren’t ugly things, the signs of trauma. Some of them looked like constellations etched in scar tissue, others like figures.
Her skin was lighter than Micha’s and her barely visible reddish-blond eye-brows furrowed in pain. The scars on her scalp were another story. She had no hair on the top of her head and no signs of any stubble; there was a clear tracer around her cranium where staples were used to fashion her skin together. Other scars ran here and there, cuts and dissection marks older than the ones she received on the table Micha saw on that fateful day–was now watching happen again around him.
The girl’s sobbing was the only noise.
“Are you okay?” Micha asked. His voice drained away like yelling in a vacuum.
The girl looked up, her bloodshot eyes wide. She shook her head and looked away again.
Before he knew what he was doing, the boy reached for her and they hugged. He shushed her like his mother did when he was a kid and rocked her gently back and forth under the hot OR lights and suddenly he jerked awake in his cell.
The next morning during debriefing the doctor asked, “ How do you fare today, Micha?”
“Where do our dreams come from?” Micha asked.
“Ever the curious one, aren’t you Micha?” The doctor sat straighter in his chair. “What do you think dreams are?”
“My mother says they’re the source of our hopes,” Micha said. “Sometimes they can predict the future. Sometimes they’re events that have happened. Sometimes, just nonsense.”
“Indeed, that is one theory. Some would subscribe that dreams are nothing more than the short circuiting of our brains losing consciousness during rest.”
“My mother dreamed all the time,” Micha said. “I don’t dream so much. Or at least I didn’t.”
“Everyone dreams, Micha,” the doctor said. “Most dreams are just forgotten upon waking. But you asked where dreams come from. Some say they are figments of the imagination. There’s little argument there, being as we cannot experience anyone’s dreams but our own. The machines we’re using to record our experiments are getting closer. However, dreams are more than just a replaying of the day’s events.
“Dreams can inspire us, nightmares can trap us. But I posit that they aren’t just figments of our imagination. Every culture has a different take on dreams. Myths were born of dreams. Industrial progress as we know it was inspired by a string of serendipity leading to a more productive society. The Drova believe there is a world alongside ours, a spirit world, called the Dreaming, where we visit at night when we dream. The Gerdanians are today following scripture that talks openly about the Well of All Knowledge. Marriages in Palduvia were once sanctified under a dream guide. World-wide, centuries past, in Tristas Sol, Vertince, even in Needleheim, mythology and spirits worlds show up in the stories.”
“Griffon’s Tower was covered in gargoyles. I was noticing them, seeing all the fae creatures from stories my mother told me as a boy.”
“Indeed. Even secular Cordova has use for the fae and fairy tales. Science focuses on the physically calculable, the repeatable. Religion uses mythos and fables to explain matters which are not currently measurable. About the Dreaming, I know there is a middleground. I’ve seen it,” he said, his voice low, the eyes behind his glasses glossy. “Imagine it, the font of all human knowledge, the access to limitless energy, so close to us we wouldn’t even need to leave the room.”
“But there’s energy at the flick of a button now. That’s practically magic.”
The doctor smiled. For once, it lacked the predator’s edge to it. The doctor’s eyes scanned a bookshelf. “It is, but it’s more practical magic,” he said. “Myths talk about literal magic. Once we developed to a certain point, we stopped asking about souls. We stopped caring about dreams.”
Thank you for reading this sample. Please feel free to contact me or return to the top.