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Even the man who would rewrite the future of Terra in his image was not immune to unexpected twists in the narrative.
Awareness came to Jeramie in a montage of blurred images and muffled sounds. His senses felt distant, as if his consciousness had come apart from his body. The air smelled like soot and ozone; it was unpleasant to breathe and his lungs seized and burned with the attempt. It was hot, and yet his shirt felt cool and damp against his chest. There was pain, ostensibly his, although it felt like it could just as easily have belonged to someone else.
There was a hand on his shoulder. A voice, panicked - Gira? - calling his name. And then there was darkness.
***
Hymeno Ran was, as a rule, too proud to admit when she was in over her head. But in the privacy of her own thoughts, she was beginning to suspect that she was in over her head.
They’d brought Jeramie here immediately after the battle. His injuries were extensive; he needed the type of care that could only be found in Ishabana. He was intermittently conscious, albeit lethargic and confused, but she wasn’t too worried about the altered mental status. It was almost certainly due to shock and blood loss, and would certainly resolve as his condition improved.
If it improved.
After prying Gira away from the stretcher and ushering him out of the infirmary, Hymeno got her first good look at the condition of her patient. It was the blood that got her attention first, the color stark against the usually pristine white of his clothing. It was red, of course, but something about the color was bothering her. Medical training aside, she had an eye for color, and this red was just slightly more of a plum than a crimson. As her staff carefully shifted Jeramie’s body onto the table, she observed places where he didn’t seem to be bleeding at all, but a clear fluid with the faintest blue tint was leaking out of him from somewhere and seeping into the fabric of his shirt.
A nurse started cutting him out of his shirt, peeling back the damp fabric so Hymeno could visualize and treat the wound. Something in her gut twisted as the extent of his chimerism was revealed and she was reminded, graphically, of Jeramie’s true nature.
She had seen the right hand before, of course; he made a point of displaying it, and his right arm seemed to be the place where his Bugnarok features were most prominent. But the purple color and chitinous plating extended across his chest and back as well, the exoskeleton gradually thinning until it blended in with the more human-looking skin of his left side. Even in the places where he appeared more human, her trained eye noticed differences. The odd shape of his clavicle, the unusually sharp angle of his pectoral ridge. His right side had taken the brunt of the impact, leaving his…skin? Shell? Armor? cracked open across his chest and shoulder, exposing muscle tissue and unfamiliar viscera. Shards of the violet carapace flaked off and fell to the floor as his shirt was removed. Someone in the room gasped and Hymeno whipped her head around to face the sound.
“He is just like any other patient,” she admonished. “If you can’t be professional about it, then you can leave.”
Her team was silent. One nurse offered her a slight, apologetic bow and hurried out of the room. Hymeno felt a moment of conflict about whether to praise her honesty or chastise her disloyalty, but quickly tabled that decision for later as she turned her attention back to the problem at hand.
A different nurse, this one mercifully a little more steadfast, was now hesitating with a needle in hand. “I can’t get a line to start fluids,” she explained. “His veins are, well…odd.”
“Hold off for now,” Hymeno directed. “We’ll need to image his internal injuries anyway, and that will give us an idea of where to find an access site. I’m not sure if he can accept a transfusion of human blood without complications anyway.”
The problems kept mounting from there. The biggest obstacle, Hymeno thought, was having no baseline for comparison. It was difficult to tell which structures were holding their natural shape and which were deformed by injury. If he had a dislocation or if the joint was supposed to be hypermobile. She was fairly sure he had collapsed a lung, but the organ in question looked less like a human lung and more like vertically stacked layers of what she could only assume was respiratory tissue, so she couldn’t be entirely sure. He was perfusing well enough, regardless, so she gave up on it for the moment.
Her team got their scans, the lab got their test results, and all of the new information raised more questions than it answered. Nothing about his body behaved the way it was supposed to, or the way she would have expected. Human standards simply did not apply. She knew nothing of Bugnarok anatomy, save for random observations she had made about their bodies while fighting them. Their weaknesses, mostly. Ways to kill them more efficiently, not do the opposite. But she suspected even having more information about the Bugnarok might not have helped her here, because Jeramie was both, and neither.
She patched him up as best she could, hoping her efforts were correct enough to make a difference, gave her staff strict orders to monitor and update her with any changes, and left the room to clear her head.
The second she stepped outside, Gira almost bowled her over.
“How is he?” he asked, his tone a little too desperate to befit a so-called tyrant.
Despite the bond they had started to forge through fighting side by side, there were still times Hymeno did not quite know what to make of Gira. But his heart was strong and his feelings were earnest, and something about the openness in his expression spurred her to offer the same.
“He’s stable,” she began. “At least, he is as far as I can tell. Nothing about his body makes sense, so it’s hard to say how much of what’s happening to him is normal and how much isn’t. He’s on the lowest possible dose of pain medicine because anything higher slows his heart to a crawl, but he’s also metabolizing it twice as fast as a human would. Some of his organs are in the wrong place, some are apparently missing, and he has some I’ve never seen before. He has both an internal skeleton and an exoskeleton, and both are broken. And his lungs are a mess but I’m honestly not sure how much that matters because I’m fairly sure he’s breathing through his skin.”
Gira listened attentively. Most of the medical details were beyond his knowledge, but he held his own well enough to understand what was important.
“We don’t know enough about him, do we,” he concluded.
“No,” Hymeno agreed. “We don’t.”
“I want to understand him better.” Gira chuckled quietly, shaking his head. “If he heard me say that, he’d just tell me I need to get better at reading between the lines.”
“His secrecy could easily get him killed. It could have killed him today.”
Gira regarded her with that thoughtful, careful look that always reminded her he was much more a force to be reckoned with than his recklessness and lack of decorum would suggest.
“I know it’s been hard for you to trust Jeramie,” he said. “But I also know you did your best for him today. I want to thank you for that.”
Hymeno raised her chin and straightened her back. “My pride as the Queen of Ishabana would allow for nothing less. No matter what my feelings about him are, I wouldn’t let them damage my country’s reputation.”
Somehow that answer just caused Gira’s expression to brighten further.
“Let me know when he wakes up,” he said. “I’ll see if I can convince him to be a little more forthcoming.”
At that moment, a nurse ran up to both of them, breathless and panicky. “Your Highness, he’s gone. He somehow got his hands on that gun of his, and just-”
She mimed the Venomix Shooter’s familiar puff of smoke. Gira’s smile fled and he ran out of the room, apparently intending to give chase. Hymeno pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger and let out a little sigh.
“I’m spending the rest of the day in the spa,” she declared. “Let everyone know I’m not to be interrupted unless we’re under attack.”
***
Jeramie woke to the scent of flowers and antiseptic, and a light so bright that it made his eyes burn. He closed them again, quickly, and attempted to turn away from the light, to no avail. His body was sluggish, too slow to respond to his commands, and every effort at movement made him ache. Even with his primary eyes closed, the smaller vestigial eyes, lidless, continued to sting. His memory of what had happened remained patchy, but he had a fairly decent idea of where he was, and it wasn’t where he wanted to be. The room was too open, too bright; such a place wouldn’t allow him to rest comfortably and recover. And he didn’t care for the idea of being gaped at as a curiosity by the Ishabanan medics, either.
He opened his eyes again, endured the pain long enough to let them adjust so he could get a better sense of his surroundings. It was easy enough to confirm his suspicions, and almost as easy to spot where they’d left his weapons.
Getting them, though, that would be the tricky part.
Standing was almost certainly out of the question. Even if he thought he could manage it, someone would stop him, and probably sedate him for his trouble. Snatching the Venomix Shooter with a web and then using it to make his escape was certainly a better bet. His arm protested as he reached out, throbbing under fresh white bandages. Nothing happened. Jeramie panicked for a moment. That meant at least one spinneret was damaged. If they both were, he’d be stuck here. The second attempt hurt, but at least it was successful. The familiar weight of his mother’s gun landing in his palm was a comfort. Somebody noticed the activity and shouted in his direction, the sound fading into nothingness as he pulled the trigger and made himself disappear.
***
The bad news was, Jeramie could have gone anywhere. The good news was, in his condition, he couldn’t possibly have gotten far. Ultimately, Gira found him faster than even he had expected, deep in a forest not far from the palace grounds. All it took was seeking out the darkest places, and looking up.
He had suspended his web from a thick and well-shaded tree branch, woven it smaller and denser than his usual hammocks, almost like an incomplete cocoon. Some of the strands, Gira noted as he climbed toward it, weren’t pure white but faintly stained a pale lavender. He had called out to Jeramie before he started climbing, so as not to startle the hybrid with his presence. He couldn’t have known, of course, that Jeramie had already been well aware of his arrival, having sensed the vibrations in his web when Gira was still a quarter-mile away. He did not reply, but he did respond, turning a pair of glittering dark eyes toward Gira when he called his name. He watched quietly as the other man ascended the tree with an ease that suggested a fair amount of practice and did nothing to encourage the encroachment, but nothing to dissuade it either.
Gira finally climbed up onto Jeramie’s branch and sat back against the tree’s trunk. Peering down into the web, he was finally able to get a good look at Jeramie. He was significantly cleaner than he had been after the battle, and some of the color was starting to come back into his face. He looked comfortable enough, although Gira couldn’t fathom how, laying with his slender limbs neatly folded and his right arm tucked carefully against his side. He had shed the Ishabanan hospital gown and was fully dressed in an all-white outfit both looser and more simply designed than what he usually wore. Gira wondered where he had gotten it. On closer examination, Jeramie’s eyes seemed slightly unfocused, the red markings that rimmed them deeper and darker than usual. He spoke, finally, a subtle rasp in his voice.
“Well, now. I wasn’t expecting company.”
“You should come back to Flopital,” Gira urged with typical directness. “You’re in no shape to be out here on your own.”
“I beg to differ,” Jeramie countered. “There’s no substitute for the healing properties of fresh air and solitude.”
The last word came with a genteel but deliberate sharpness. Gira let out a frustrated sigh.
“Fine, point taken. I’ll leave you here if that’s what you really want, but at least help me understand why.”
“I’m sure you already know my answer. It’s simple enough, if you–”
“Read between the lines, I know, I know. Although I’m still not convinced that method works as well as you say.”
“The most important things deserve to be considered with care. The best way to ensure they receive the thought they deserve is to leave them unsaid.” With that, Jeramie settled a little deeper into his web and closed his eyes.
Gira didn’t leave, stubbornly refusing to take the offered hint. “You know, Jeramie. If you’re going to build the kind of world you want, make peace between the humans and the Bugnarok, sooner or later that means our people are going to have to learn how to take care of each other. Hymeno is ready to learn. So am I.”
He leaned forward then, reaching into the web to gently smooth Jeramie’s uncharacteristically disheveled hair away from his forehead. Jeramie’s breath hitched in a way that made his wounded side ache, and the trichobothria at his hairline tingled at the touch. He reopened his eyes and focused on Gira's face. For some reason, he wanted to fix the sight in his memory. Maybe it was the pain, or the exhaustion, or the lingering remnants of Hymeno’s medication clouding his mind, but he found himself at a loss for words.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
That satisfied Gira enough to make him willing to leave the tree and let Jeramie sleep. When he returned to check in on him some hours later, the web was gone and Jeramie had vanished. Unfazed, Gira started looking for him again. It took longer to find him this time, but he managed it.
Jeramie moved his web several more times in the days that followed, and Gira felt heartened by the certainty that he was recovering. The more of his strength he regained, the harder he was to find.
***
When Desnarak’s army next attacked, Jeramie was there, and allowed no one an opportunity to question his readiness to return to the fight. He fought with grace and ferocity, and it was plausibly deniable that he was still favoring his right arm. It was also plausibly deniable that he made more of an effort to support Hymeno in the battle than any of the others. He certainly didn’t say anything to her about his brief but eventful convalescence in Flopital.
Gira read between the lines and smiled.
At the end of the day, after the Bugnarok had been routed, Hymeno retired to her chambers and did not find them as she had left them. Her initial outrage at the breach of security faded to curiosity as she examined the evidence of the intrusion. Left on a table in the lounge were a small vase of wildflowers, and a book.
She picked the book up, turned it over in her hands, and leafed through the pages. It was, apparently, a Bugnarok medical text. The book was printed in a language unfamiliar to her, but beneath each line was a handwritten translation, neatly and elegantly penned. Several pages had been marked with thin strips of white paper, and she perused each of them in turn. Among them were an anatomical diagram of the Bugnarok respiratory system, a chapter on treating injuries to the carapace, and a brief notation about the arachnoid subspecies. She laughed under her breath, shaking her head in disbelief. Of all the backward, needlessly elaborate ways to send a message, but she was coming to expect nothing less from the self-proclaimed King of the In-Between.
And yet, somehow, the idea of Terra at peace suddenly felt a little easier to believe.