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Slumber.
Sweet, mellow slumber. Like a coat of honey, engulfing every thought and making it distant, soft, unreachable.
That had been Ghoul’s reality for as long as he could remember.
Pictures of his life outside sleep floated like ghosts on the mushy, confused surface of his consciousness. He had been medicated before; this was not it. Being medicated did not take away the knowledge you had about the world. It took away your feelings about it, sometimes. But now Ghoul felt like just a container for those foreign pictures, memories he knew belonged to the person that was supposed to be him, but looked like a movie. A weird, eerie one, but a movie nonetheless. Fiction, made of characters.
He could observe himself as one of these characters. He could see this black-haired kid making a decision that, rationally speaking, should never fall on such an inexperienced life. All around he could see other kids, living with scraps, hiding in every hole of Battery City like rats. Again, he found he did not have any knowledge or feeling attached to these pictures: they were just there. It was just a movie. Movies can’t touch you.
Among these rat-kids, familiar faces. He recognized that he might’ve shared some form of bond with them in the same way he recognized himself among all the characters: not with affection, nor hatred. Just a neutral understanding. These familiar faces melted in a more grown-up version of themselves, and he saw his own face shift into an exhausted, experienced version of that black-haired kid. All around was not Battery City now, but a new, scarier place. A nest in the desert, with shadows that he understood should be dangerous. Not to him, of course, but to the characters in the movie.
And the characters did fight those shadows. They were hunger, warmth, cold and most of all frustration. He could recognize that on the faces of all those characters, as they existed in their defeated silence, and especially on the one that belonged to someone he somehow recognized as important. Someone with bright, red hair, and an overwhelming urge to make noise. Any kind of noise.
That sight startled him. He remembered feeling curious about his reaction to it. Yet, it was still not an involvement. He was analyzing his own thoughts as a scientist would analyze some samples in a lab.
Then something changed.
Voicing over the movie scenes rolling in his memory, an outsider voice. He could not see who it might belong to, but he easily grasped that it was not part of the scene. It was a real, human voice. It was asking a question.
Who is he?
Ghoul did not know how to answer. He was just a character in a movie, after all.
Who is he, Frank?
The voice resumed. It was a man, the oldest voice he’d heard in a while. The oldest voice since his father…
Twitching eyelids. Beginning to get responsive. Good. Proceed.
The voice paused, then Frank felt something cold and stinging begin to work its way from his arm inwards, quickly spreading to his chest. He thought about fireworks made of ice.
Tell me about him, Frank.
Suddenly, Frank did not feel the need to keep any secrets from the voice outside his head. He heard his own voice, now. It was not a character in his memories anymore.
“Poison,” he heard himself saying.
“Good boy,” the man said. He was kind. Frank felt some weight land gently on his forehead. “Now, who is this Poison?”
Bright red hair and broken, vengeful eyes flashed on the back of Frank’s eyelids. Who is Poison? He did not need to keep secrets from the voice outside his head, no. Still, he had no words fit for an answer.
“Subject distressed by input,” a new, further voice said. A female one. Meaner, or worse: completely blank.
The man, whose hand Frank could still feel on his forehead, began to caress his face. Now Frank remembered his father in this motion, the worried care he would show each single time he wound up at the hospital as a kid.
“No need to rush yourself,” he said. “Let’s begin with a simpler question, perhaps. Who is Poison for you?”
Frank…no, Ghoul. Ghoul felt a wave of sharp, acid pain invade his stomach and lungs. It had been sparked by a picture: the red-haired person dropping dead in front of him, a beam of golden light crossing his chest where his heart used to beat. Over and over. Someone, something, tall and white and pristine, working with a knife on his back, enjoying every single slit through the flesh as a hunter would enjoy skinning fresh game. Not a single drop of blood falling on the pale hand, nor the white-clad wrist, moving with surgical precision…
Suddenly, Frank knew he had to keep secrets. He knew he had to, so it hurt when his voice broke out of his own throat anyway, to say: “Hope.”
“Hope?” the man outside rejoiced. “Wonderful. Would you tell me more about hope, Frank?”
Ghoul did not want to talk more about hope. He did not like the direction his mind was headed in, so different from that soft, golden coat of honey before. This new condition did not feel like his conscience was being drowned in sweet relief: this felt like it was being dissected open in formaldehyde for anyone else to pry. He started noticing his own palpitations increase, and he felt drops of sweat running down the skin of his back. Still, against his best attempt, he talked.
“Destroys and creates,” he said. He still did not fully understand the meaning of his own words. Just, his body told him that they’d better stay inside. They did not. “He’s…her…”
A small void imploded in Ghoul’s mind, making him wince and halting his speech.
“Mr. Korse,” the female voice said, a distant hint of worry breaking her neutrality. “I think it’s best if we let him-“
“No,” the man said. “He can take it. Increase dosage by two percent.”
As the freezing sensation crawled further into every vein of Ghoul’s body, he could feel the warmth of the man’s hand keep petting him in comfort. He found he was suddenly repelled by the act: its kindness clearly did not move from anything but opportunism. It had nothing of the selflessness of his father.
“Now, Frank. You will be good for me, and you will tell me how this Poison operates. You will tell me about this…Hope you mentioned.”
“Korse,” the woman urged. “At this level of stimulation and at this heart rate, not even the white room-“
Ghoul could feel his own heart trying to escape from his chest, beating on his ribcage as a feral beast. He suddenly began to feel fear, and with it, all the flood of his past emotions rolled in. Whatever kept him sedated seemed to just cave in to his frantic blood rush. Hope: that was the reason. What a bullshit word. How could there be hope if hope himself was dead, sprawled on the desert rocks with a mutilated back?
“Increase by four percent,” the man said, emotionless. There was not even an effort to sound cordial anymore. The freezing liquid had reached every vein, and its unbearable, sharp pain now surmounted any anesthetic that traveled in Ghoul’s body.
“Iero Frank,” he explained with chilling calm. “You are being interrogated on account of your crimes against Battery City. The Council has agreed to guarantee you amnesty and a full pardon in exchange for your cooperation in eradicating the terrorist threat posed by Party Poison and his associates, the Fabulous Killjoys. You will be reunited with your mother, and you will both be granted a new identity in the Capital as soon as the trials are over. Do you understand?”
“I do,” Ghoul said before he could understand he was speaking.
“Do you accept these conditions?”
“I do,” Frank said. Again, it was as if these words were being spoken by some remotely controlled speakers in his throat, with no approval from his mind.
“Release,” the man said, content.
Frank felt the cold sensation retreat as if it were a living thing, a tangle of well-domesticated ice snakes. Still, he knew he now belonged to the man pinning him to the bed with fake, artificial kindness. His body did not respond to his own commands; his eyelids kept shading his sight, heavy and unmovable. A mess of memories and now free to flood emotions clouded his consciousness, and he had no real idea of what his current situation might be. All he knew was what he felt: Weak. Defeated. And most of all, hopeless.
Then, the man asked something: “How did he survive, Frank?”
At the hearing of this, something new occurred in Ghoul’s body. It was not the rational elaboration of what the man had just said to spark it: no, Ghoul knew he could’ve been lying. He should know. He saw Poison get drilled in front of his own eyes; he felt it happening. He felt the crawling omen that, for some reason, took hold of him anytime someone died. He had not had the time to make peace with Poison’s death during his sedated state, so he should be doing that now that his emotions and thoughts started rolling back in. Still, something in his body kept him from accepting to grieve. It was as if a new, radiant energy flooded every single fiber of his being. Yeah, Ghoul noticed that it felt like…life? That was really the only word he could find to explain it. It felt like the exact opposite of what he felt during his previous premonitions.
It was just a feeling, maybe. It was just the spark of hope.
But it was just enough.
Ghoul’s eyelids finally slid up, a blur of a human silhouette shading the neon white light just above his face. He hated this sight. It made him feel like a sick child all over again. He moved one hand to stroke his eyes but found it tied, which immediately formed a pit of both panic and rage in his stomach.
“Interesting,” the male voice said, amazed. It belonged to the still blurry face above his head. “This one, too.”
A new silhouette approached as Ghoul’s vision gradually adjusted to the painfully bright light. The woman said: “He should be deep down in the white room, Korse. If not dead, for that matter.” She sounded terrified. Then she cleared her throat and resumed her blank tone as she informed: “She’ll want to investigate this as Anomaly no. 2, of course.”
“I’ll take charge of it,” the man said immediately.
“Mr. Korse, you already-“
“I trust you to handle the recording of today’s events as S-level classified,” he interrupted. He did not move his face from staring down at Ghoul’s. “Now leave. And switch the Eye off.”
Ghoul’s now clear sight grasped the hesitation on the woman’s face. She did as she was told, nonetheless, which meant the man was now the only other person in the room. His loom felt heavier and heavier, and Ghoul suddenly hated him. He hated how naked it made him feel, how much his condition resembled that of a lab rat. Ghoul always hated the concept of lab rats. He wanted all rats to be free and happy to roam wherever the fuck they want.
Suddenly, just as the woman closed the door behind her, some of the lights in the room switched off, leaving the space behind the man dimly lit. His aquiline features and chilling eyes spoke to Ghoul, somehow. He inspected what he could see of his skin, almost as pale as anything else in the room. He inspected his clothing, perfectly white and elegant and…
“Fuck you,” Ghoul heard himself barking. He heard it before he could truly comprehend what his mind had just realized. He spoke it before he could process the overwhelming, acid rage taking hold of his body as it snapped forward. The motion was so strong that Ghoul could feel the skin ripping from where something sturdy was pinning his wrists to the bed. His furrowed brow clashed with the man, still looming. He did not move and did not wince in the least. If anything, Ghoul could feel his cold eyes getting crueler.
“Impressive,” the man murmured. Ghoul noticed he had not blinked in ages. “This is the most impressive thing I-“
Now the man did wince, because Ghoul swung his head as strongly as he could to headbutt him. “Fuck,” Ghoul said, and it came from a low, guttural place at the mouth of his stomach. He spat in the man’s face, but the absence of any reaction didn’t calm his anger in the least. “You,” he yelled, his voice broken.
The man did something new and unexpected: he smiled. He moved both hands on either side of Ghoul’s face and stroked with his thumbs to dry it from the hot tears streaming down his bloodshot eyes. Ghoul snapped his head to bite his right hand, and the man did not move it back, even when it started bleeding.
“You are one fascinating thing,” the man said, finally stepping back. He took his hand back from the jaws with no effort whatsoever, and Ghoul felt pain in his teeth from the sheer force of that motion. The man was completely impassive to the bleeding bite mark on his thumb. “Silly me,” he cackled amusedly, “thinking that I submitted to the most boring day job.”
“Fuck you,” Ghoul growled again. He suddenly had no other words in his vocabulary.
The man took some more steps back, almost merging with the darkness surrounding the room outside the circle of white light above Ghoul’s bed. “I was sincere, by the way. He is alive. But I think you know that, in one of your arcane ways.”
Ghoul hated himself for it, but he could not stop the wave of hope from showing up on his face. Surrounded by the mask of wrath he still did not relinquish, his eyes shone just a little brighter.
“And I hope you know he will be back for you,” the man said, now facing the open door.
Ghoul could not see it, but the man smiled big, now. “Oh, he will be back,” he said.
***
Red stormed into the radio room with Riot barely able to keep up her pace. Everyone was waiting for them, and Dr. D. was already ready to plug in whatever data source they’d bring back. Red removed her contact lens, which folded in a microchip.
“We went close,” Riot panted. “Really fucking close.”
“Any luck?!” Kobra rushed to check that Riot was okay. She seemed unscathed.
Red stopped talking. She was streaming her memories on screen through the chip that Dr. D. had just plugged in.
“I think we know where they’re keeping him,” Riot added. “And it’s not jail nor a hospital.”
On the screen, through the sharp eyes of an android girl, everyone could now see a building that they had seen many times in their nightmares. The BL/ind Tower.
Dr. D. whistled. “Straight in the viper’s nest. Poor cat.”
“We’ll need…fuck.” Jet was unsure- and this came very rarely- how to even approach a plan of action. “We’ll need a miracle.”
“We are a miracle,” Poison said. “And he is one as well.” He had barely talked at all since he came back from the Letterbox. He had kept to himself, praying, or meditating, or whatever he did when he went into his head for hours.
“That’s not all,” Riot added, her voice somber and tense. “We scanned comms all the way to the Tower looking for Ghoul or Frank or Killjoy, whatever. The streets are all full of bullshit. Even the sewer rats believe in the hostage sham.” On screen, a pastiche of fragments of what Red picked up: news segments, social media posts, private conversations. Pictures of Ghoul as an innocent Battery City kid and security footage of them with big bright red Xs on their faces. “But the cake is in the big building,” Riot added. As Red’s vision tried scanning inside the BL tower, the screen went static. “We could not get inside, of course. We’d be dust by now. But we left with a little gift.”
Red’s recorded vision rewinded backward and focused, with a huge zoom, on some people leaving the white skyscraper from one of the back entrances. A barely comprehensible audio recording now played: “Did you read----news----he’s----floor---scary----she’s not happy with----say------to the white room”.
“The white room,” Jet repeated, tapping his leg up and down. “We have something to work with.”
“That’s the best we could do,” said Red, her eyes coming back to normal as she unplugged from the screen. “We have a building and a room. Not bad, huh?”
“No,” said Dr. D, gravely. “This white room’s no room at all. It’s the place your mind goes when they mask you. Fill you with their perfectly curated chemical cocktails.”
“Shit, shit,” said Jet. “How do you know that?! Are you sure?”
“I survived many a horror, my young friend.” Dr. D laughed, bittersweet. “We need the cat back before he becomes what the news wants him to be”.
“Is it reversible?” said Kobra, fearing the answer. He didn't want to think about it. His mind went to all the beams he shot in the forehead of people who were maybe just in a white room somewhere inside themselves. He shivered.
“As long as you don’t lose yourself for good,” Dr. D. explained. “But that can last different for every single one of us.”
“He’ll be okay,” said Poison. “We have what, a hundred floors to go?”
“Make it double,” explains Riot. “That place’s as deep underground as it is high.”
“How do you know he’ll be okay?” Kobra looked at his brother with anxiety all over his face. He was usually the one to know things, but that day he was confused, uneasy, as if facts and beliefs were all mixed up and he had no way to tell one from the other. He guessed he would have to get used to this feeling, now that he somehow accepted that the weird stuff all around him wasn’t just lucky coincidences.
“He’s exactly where She wants him to be.” Poison fiddled with something he had taken from the letterbox that morning. “Mind you, She’s really jealous of her saints.”
“She won’t let his martyrdom fall to the wrong side,” Cola added.
“I don’t care what fucked up faith you’re into,” Kobra protested, “But don’t talk about martyrdom and my friend in the same sentence ever again.”
“I agree,” said Jet, reaching a hand on Kobra’s shoulder. “Whatever is the reason for why we are the way we are, let’s keep things pragmatic. We know two things for sure: one, we need Ghoul back before they fry his brain for good. That’s as soon as possible. Two, he is somewhere in that building. Red,” now Jet summoned back all his confidence in directing plans. “We’ll need you on intel. Give us anything you find on the building, who’s guarding it, what’s the topology and especially its history. Who’s been there before that maybe we can make sing.”
“Already on it,” Red’s pupils went blank again, and her eyes shone with a neon hue. She was still, and Riot knew she was actually elsewhere.
“Kobra and Poison, the three of us will be discussing an infiltration plan. Riot, get us some fake IDs asap. Preferably with some clearance in BL tower. Anything works.”
“Not our first rodeo,” reflected Poison, thinking back to when, some years before, this protocol was employed to break out of jail another Iero.
“Well, but now our faces are broadcast all over the city 24/7,” protested Kobra. “Stealth won’t work. Not if it’s us.”
“It has to be us,” Poison said, firmly. “And I agree. Stealth is lame and I’d rather go in with a bang. That’s a part of the plan you’ll have to trust me with.”
Everyone turned to him in suspicion and confusion. He answered with a smile. “You’ll see.”
Jet said: “We have ways to change the perception of us to the untrained eye. Those inside BL tower will be trained, of course. We need to get there, and then…yeah, I guess a bang is the only way in.”
“I hate this,” mouthed Kobra, as he took his laser gun from the holster to check its functioning against an empty can at the other side of the room. “I fucking hate this so fucking much.”