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Cthoni ripped the wrist section off an old nitrile glove, used the resulting loop of light blue rubber to tie up her bangs. She looked kinda like a troll doll, Jabber would’ve told her if he was conscious enough to do so.
Far enough from both consciousness and unconsciousness for comfort, his body draped limply on the cot Cthoni had dropped him onto to free her hands for pulling out a first aid kit from her pocket. After taking another look at the wound through his chest, she discarded the packet of bandages and gauze in their repurposed cigarette carton to search for more significant tools.
Jabber wheezed, hazed out pupils stared up blankly taking in nothing, the sea of worms writhing across the popcorn ceiling, then nothing again. The shrill shrieking noise of a bumped microphone droned in his ears whitening out even the face of the person bending over him.
They held up a large plastic jug and made a pouring motion. What a great jug! It looked like it could hold a lotta stuff. He decided he approved of the container before realizing it had felt familiar for a reason. It was one of his containers. Siiiick.
Taking his dazed smile as an affirmative, Cthoni completed the action she’d mimed.
Descriptors for the resulting sounds and smell could also be used in the description of cooking meat. Jabber turned his head to the side and emptied the contents of his stomach compartment. Cthoni supposed that was one less potential complication and merely dropped a cloth over the mess to deal with later. Then she doused both of her hands in the sizzling liquid, and stuck one of them wrist deep in his chest.
Just like overseeing raider missions, the following process was a bit of a juggling act, mainly of limbs. Cthoni had a lot to keep track of. One hand groped around inside her coworker’s chest, finding its way beneath flesh and bone in search of the problem, the other hand held his writhing torso down. A foot also held his dominant hand down, half her weight over the backs of his knuckles so Mankira couldn’t jerk toward her throat. Actually, the majority of her attention was spent adapting to the herculean effort Jabber was putting into fighting her off. The instinctive baring of his teeth only paused, his sweaty chest heaving up and down, when she asked him which of the dubiously labelled vials of liquid from the kit would hurt more if she dumped it in him.
“Tha’s for a blood party, big hug. And the. Snake one. Snakey snake,” his brow furrowed as if catching himself, “No snake, bad snakey. An’ sticky. No good. Blue, that one’s like falling. Fast. But you want the jelly jig-jiggly. Red right. Might not work though, probably hurts if you get my drift. Or’s it purple.”
Not the coagulant or the anti-venom then. She probably wouldn’t get more hints. Cthoni plucked a small white bottle out of the kit, unscrewed the lid with her teeth. Sweat beaded her brow, still she moved fast, fighting her focus to spit out a question about what exactly happened. Her fingers bumped into something foreign between his ribs. Mankira, already activated, pulsed in a warning, toxic, magenta, the bladed extensions of Jabber’s fingers digging in and through the cot fabric. Without the utmost caution on her part, they could be digging into her stomach next.
If Jabber was talking about how the mission that day had gone, Cthoni couldn’t tell. Actually, it sounded sort of like he was facing troubles of the romantic variety, though that couldn’t be right. “Or ice cream. You chose the movie last time,” he accused.
Tightening her hold on his sternum and hand, Cthoni let out a breath. Then went for the kill. Ripping out the rusted length of what looked to have once been a rebar stake, she dumped the rest of the bubbling acid into his chest cavity. His back arched off the cot as Jabber screamed. Cthoni pinched pink tissues together, applied the liquid in the white bottle, and just in time too as Mankira fully activated and his unpinned hand carved through the airspace where her neck would’ve been had she not ducked. Adjusting her weight distribution, Cthoni changed stances. Despite the adrenaline pumping through the room and Jabber’s thrashing, her flat eyes betrayed no bloodlust, and her hand did not waver.
Just as quickly as it’d started, the scuffle was over. Jabber laid on the cot. Manhole laid on Jabber, and Cthoni sat on top of it, their combined weight more than his chemical-addled body could throw off in the moment. The balls of her feet rested on the backs of his hands, and Mankira had shrunk back down to her standard form, denied of the chance to feed.
She closed the site with a staple gun. The resulting line of crooked silver junctions looked right at home amid the scarred topography of his torso.
Mankira rested her head against a pillar as she squinted out into the distance. It was a great big pillar, wider around than the span of her arms, carved with dozens of long furrows which extended upwards parallel all the way to the ceiling. This time the pillars were many, spaced apart evenly, a few meters between as they ringed the perimeter. It was one of the more spacious configurations, which she supposed was worth some amount of arbitrary points.
“Good evening,” she greeted. The strange construction in which she found herself did not respond. It was merely the echo of her own words bouncing against the blue-tinged stone of the floors which returned to her ears. The world around them was not quite silent, gentle waves lapping at the building’s front steps, the muted colours of a far off bustle, the sweet scent of incoming rain. There was not stillness, but the quiet acknowledgement of two existences sharing, for a brief lull in time, the same space.
It was that way they stood staring out at the pitch of night, their isle the lone existence in the middle of an eternal ocean which stretched dark beyond the horizon.
She’d seen it before in many forms, a ring of stones around a grassy clearing, a weatherworn hatch into a well-stocked bunker, once, as the lumpy shadow of a pillow fort, but most often, it was in this way Manhole appeared. Walking the open corridor which ringed the building before heading toward the center, Mankira’s eyes shifted around in search of differences, new features, rare inclusions. Perhaps describing the structure as an old temple was wrong spiritually, but it was adjacent architecturally. Resembling a miniature Parthenon on the outside, the building’s core consisted of an inner amphitheatre scooped into the ground. Descending the steps, Mankira crossed her arms against a chill which emanated out of the cool stone all around regardless of the season. Dragging along the tiled mosaic of the floor as she stepped lower and lower, the silver rings decorating the ends of her locs clinked. In the center of the bottom of the theatre, clear water shimmered in a circular pool. Standing at the edge looking in, her shadow did not cast upon the water, and thus, did not scatter the little fish that swam within. Of the same sort, a handful of golden minnows flickered just beneath the surface, speckling crystalline blue with flakes of interred sunlight. Seeing them, Mankira flopped onto her back there at the edge of the pool and let out a long sigh.
Splaying out about her head, her hair marked serpentine tracks through the nautical mosaic of the floor, dividing patterns made of small squares the colours of robin’s egg and sea glass and abalone shell with bold dark florals. The floor was still cold, the chill seeping through her flesh and into the bone within, but that was something which couldn’t be helped.
On some visits, she absentmindedly tried to catch the fish, one clawed hand hovering over the surface of the water, her keen eyes tracking the shapes beneath, but they’d save that game for another time, maybe the next morning. Laying on the ground, Mankira raised one hand up toward the unseen sky, splayed their fingers, and thought about the jinki with eyes which burned copper chloride blue, how they could get her to show them her released form. And thought about Cthoni, how easy their puzzle had been for her this time. And thought about the wind howling above, shrieking as it laced through the spaces between marble pillars. And thought
It wasn’t a very good hiding place.
In the days which followed, Mankira explored the entirety of the structure, first in a natural looping spiral, then in strips, then in randomized 5 by 5 meter squares. Not looking for anything in particular and simultaneously looking at everything. Marble, marble, limestone, marble, the building material throughout was uniform. As were the columns, facades, and pediments which seemed so content in their symmetry that every rare irregularity she did find seemed itself a celebratory event. So Mankira crawled through and around and over that monolith of blue marble and occasionally did a little freestyle dance upon discovering a small patch of lichen here or a mislaid square of mosaic there.
Without a notepad, she could carve into the stone of the ground or a pillar itself, though the marks would not stay. A half minute before the damage began disappearing from the oldest lines first was usually enough to work out a thought or line of an equation.
After a couple of circles, Mankira stopped her exploration loop in front of the pond and considered what she had loaded in her claws at the moment.
Overall, the structure’s construction, after the initial surprise factor, was rather dull.
But sometimes she could poke at something, get a shower of sparks from an errant gas pipe, an anachronistic electrical wire. A miniature volatility in the darkness.
One of these days she’d stick her claws in and widen the crack. See if she could make it so big she could put her eye up to the resulting hole and peer inside.
But on this particular morning, the pool at the centre of the amphitheater looked particularly appealing with its golden fish, nice and plump, swimming slowly in the water. Her irises sharpened along the blade of her nails as in her stomach a familiar gnawing began. The fish split in half and darted out of the way of her lazy claw flicks. Mankira hunted them down with marked precision, reducing them to deanimated puddles in no time flat.
Then she sat down and calculated how long it took for the fish to reform. One run wouldn’t be enough of course. They’d have to repeat the experiment several times to collect a sufficient sample size for the data set.
Even for ground standards, the shape hanging upside down from the ceiling light when Cthoni entered the room was too large to be a cockroach. Logically, there was only one person it could’ve been, but the fact it was a person at all already meant the situation could not be described as normal.
Normal was a bit of a miracle around the raider base, and Cthoni couldn’t remember the last time she’d prayed.
Jabber was sticking his fingers between the strips of the metal cage around the ceiling light, zapping his fingertips against the old bulb. Each time he tapped the light it flickered a little more than usual.
Cthoni stared at him. It wasn’t that he was exactly confined to his room by force, but ever since the last mission had ended catastrophically (the boss’ objectives had not been met largely due to the fact one member of the raid team had not fulfilled their role), and Zodyl had given him a “choice” between discipline or isolation, Jabber had been on rather good behavior. Meaning he was likely only mildly altered, and thus their current positions made less sense than they would’ve on a normal day.
For the raider on the ceiling, it was simple enough. He didn’t enjoy this kind of pain, but he didn’t want to be disciplined any more by the boss. So he had stayed put. And after weeks of no missions, no intel gathering, no mussing up cleaner jobs, he was getting bored.
“It’s like that one guy, Pylori Man,” he blinked.
Cthoni blinked back.
“Cthoni! My man! Come to break me out?” Jabber grinned excitedly, fiddled with the bulb one last time, then dropped off the ceiling to land in front of her. The cloth tail of his uniform flapping against the ground slowed gradually at her lack of response, deanimated. “Still 50 to life?”
“Jabber, it’s been two days.” Cthoni sat down on the edge of his cot. A momentary perching. If the bed was a couple centimeters taller she would’ve been essentially leaning against a counter.
Following her lead, he plopped next to her criss-cross applesauce, curious.
“Boss wants you caught up to speed on recent events.” Cthoni stared at him as she spoke. He stared back, picking up each piece of information she put down and rotating it every which way before tossing it aside for the next one. There was something else. Something else. “During the festival, a giver underwent a transformation beyond physical.”
Jabber’s leg jigged up and down. Cthoni never stayed within clawing distance longer than necessary. Something, something, what was it. Had something gone off with a hitch? A death, an unintended repercussion, nurse Jabber back in high demand? More likely it was the boss, something the boss wanted could be anything. That was the fun of it. Spit it out, he was ready. C’mon. Maybe if the airspace was filled with white damp she’d sing.
“The other group that took part in the battle was the cleaners.” She was studying him. Or maybe that was just her resting eavesdropping face. Whatever. It wasn’t like it mattered since the fire had been doused. “The boss says this is the opportunity…”
The cleaners, the cleaners. There were still the other strong looking ones, he supposed.
Man… if he hadn’t wanted to dance why had he gotten their hopes up.
“Jabber, do you understand?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he chirped. “So, when?”
“Crack of dawn, tomorrow morning in the courtyard. Boss said don’t make him regret this.” Cthoni reached her hand through a miniature portal and drew out two items, placed them in his hand. The first was his choker, and the second, confusing. “It’s a dirt cup. From a festival stall.”
And it did look exactly like that. A small glass pot that once held perhaps yogurt was now filled with dark brown sludge as it rested in the palm of his hand. Loose bits of errant dirt overflowed from the top, spilled out as stray granules. Then Cthoni handed him a spoon.
He jammed the spoon into the cup without questioning it. He just had to be good until tomorrow. Then discipline would be over. At least dirt was edible. This wasn’t too bad, a little nostalgic. Beneath the crust, the substance must’ve been less dirt more mud because the spoon carved through it with ease, only to jam into something firm but with give. With growing bewilderment, he dug from out of the mud a long and squishy orange gummy.
“There’s worms in it!” Jabber blinked. “The boss—”
“Already got his.” The ghost of a smile touched her mouth, a little joke made to only herself. “You’ll have to see tomorrow.”
It wasn’t strange that she was leaving. She didn’t have to stay to keep an eye on his progress. Jabber paused with the first spoonful halfway to his mouth.
“Cthoni,” he called after her.
She turned back over her shoulder.
“I switched the tops of the vials in the med kit!” Jabber grinned.
Mankira decided it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to take a brief nap.
Several days later after his in-house suspension had ended and Jabber was arm-deep in the hollow of a rotting couch carcass digging for the little pink mushrooms which had sprung up between its waterlogged beams was when the call came through.
Jabber rolled his eyes at the signal. Mankira picked it up for him, holding the unlatched choker up to her ear with thumb and pointer like a particularly fat earthworm. The voice on the other end of the line burned, a line of cool fire down from the hollow of her throat. For how brightly it shimmered ablaze, the entire landfill around them could’ve been saturated in anhydrous ethanol.
“I’m gonna make some mad music with these babies, just you wait and see.” Jabber twirled one of the mushrooms between his fingers, acting for all the world like he couldn’t hear what was being said right next to him. And actually the fluorescent fungi were more interesting than the staticky voice of a cleaner coming through the choker. And actually he had gathered enough now to begin considering just how he would process them to retain their luminous potency—
Mankira sparked on his fingers, an incessant buzz that made him pick at the skin between his digits.
Until Jabber sighed that it was better than nothing. “But we gotta pregame a little.” Even as he said it, he twisted the stack of rings on his middle finger back and forth, feeling the metal rub familiar against his skin.
Mankira stood on the bottom of the final step, her toes almost touching the tide which lapped endlessly. Perhaps in a millennia, in two, they would begin eroding away at the pale marble. But she would not stay to watch.
Rather than guesstimate time on a geological scale, she could say with confidence, if it kept inviting her in, one day in the not so distant future, she’d offer the tendency toward disorder a helping hand. Stone would slough off in great big chunks, the foundational pillars would split from their limestone base, the resulting rubble would become something new entirely. And it would not be a gentle process.
Mankira didn’t look back over her shoulder as she stepped out of Manhole’s domain and directly into the sea of dark maroon which had so closely resembled water under the night-time shroud. What had appeared bottomless after moonfall only reached up to her shins, so she picked a direction and began to walk.