Infection

Part 1

Written by Sailor Nova

Poison stains a bright river dark.

At first, there is only a hint of it; a thread of ink winding through the whirlpools, tainting the limpid water with malice. But quickly the single thread becomes two; two become four, four become ten, ten become fifty, and suddenly there is a menacing black cloud creeping downstream. It fills the river inch by inch, like a predator overtaking its prey -- no dam able to contain it, no force of man or nature or miracle able to stop it. The muddy venom eddies around the banks, blackening the soil, wilting the vines. It thickens the water into a viscous soup, drowning the fish and choking the fawn; the parched forest begins to shrivel around it, curling in on itself, cracking, splintering, withering to death.

It is a toxin spreading through your blood.

You can see it swirling through your veins, pulsing just beneath the surface... you scratch at your skin, try to dig it out with your fingernails, but you know that no matter how much you bleed, your veins will never run clean again. It's circulating through your body; it's in every corner of your mind, every moment of your thoughts. You can't sleep, you can't eat, you're sick with the virus, and you sit up late into the night watching beads of sweat fall from your eyelashes as your body spasms in agony and you wince against the pain. Your skin turns white and your eyes turn yellow and your tears turn red; and then one day you notice that sounds are duller and scents are fainter and everything looks darker, and even the coarsest of cloth feels like it's barely there. Around you, the world stumbles and shakes with your illness, rocks like a sailboat on an angry sea. You can feel your foundation cracking, feel your resolve crumbling... and then one night, suddenly and swiftly, your fear overtakes the pain.

The infection threatens to swallow you whole.

Her first night in the hospital, Caden had a dream that Naoya died.

There was a funeral but she couldn't go. She wanted to but she couldn't, they wouldn't let her, and so instead she snuck into the cemetery and hid behind a giant oak, listening to Anastasia's father give a eulogy through the cemetery trees.

It was no longer winter and not yet spring. The season was hovering in stasis between the two, the air heavy and chilled and the ground soft and wet with the melted snow. Caden was wearing a pair of low heels and they sunk into the spongy moss that covered the roots of her tree, staining the bottoms of her pant legs damp. There was a low morning fog over the grass; it was drenched in dew and it soaked the toes of her shoes as well. They were on a planet with hills and fields, and in the distance, past the edge of the forest, a brook rushed loudly down the mountain, pregnant with runoff.

He was being buried, and there was a humble granite headstone lying on the ground beside the grave, waiting to be erected at the head of his final resting place. He was being buried, but there was no coffin, and his body, peaceful in death, lay still in an uncovered stone sarcophagus. His lips were pale and his expression was blank -- somewhere between indescribable regret and indescribable bliss.

It was a small funeral and Caden did not recognize most of the people that were there, standing in a crescent around the grave-site. His parents were not there, although she thought that one of the taller men was maybe one of his brothers. A friend of his from high school was there with his new wife. Off to the side stood a man with long dark hair looking very guilty, and there were a few offworlders in the small crowd, but there weren't any boys there with dark eyes and fingernails like flower petals, at least none that she could see. Perhaps they were there in spirit. Anastasia was there, dressed in full widow's garb, complete with a long black veil and a bright ivory handkerchief that she clutched, unused, in her black gloved hands. Saafir wasn't there -- he had died on the hangar floor. Caden had watched him go, gasping and calling out Naoya's name around the thick black blood that had boiled up out of his mouth; when he closed his eyes for the last time he had flooded the place with it. His body had floated through the city on a river that flowed from his own wounds. That had been a long time ago. But he was probably there in spirit, too.

She stood and watched the service in composed silence for awhile. There was a monk of some sort - she couldn't identify the order - chanting and praying in an unrecognizable dialect over Naoya's corpse. He was the only one not wearing black, the sky blue of his robes a beacon in the bleak grays and greens of the cemetery. She listened to him only detachedly, her mind instead wandering to fond memories of the deceased.

Then they began to lower his body into the ground. She couldn't see the mechanism that was dropping the sarcophagus down, but she could hear it -- old fashioned winches and motors, cords and straps straining under the weight of the huge stone. The sound of it winding hissed past her like a hornet through the damp late-winter air, and the once-beautiful man began to slowly disappear into the earth.

It hit Caden like a punch in the stomach. They were burying him, and he wasn't coming back ever again. He was still so young, but he had laid down his sword for the last time. He had finally given into his fate and let himself be crushed by the weight of the world on his back. Wisdom had bled out in rivers from his stigmata, peace had flowed from his eyes in streams, and his soul had finally flown to god. He had finally welcomed death, and now she was here, watching him vanish. Around her, the entire universe mourned his loss.

Final everythings had already passed -- final hellos, final goodbyes, final thank you's. She had already spoken her last words to him and caught her final glimpse of his bright eyes. And now here she was, looking at him, watching him, for the last time. The final finality. The end of him, of everything. She would never see him again. She would never see him again. Everything about him that she'd had such a tight grasp on for so long was slipping through her fingers. She wasn't ready for him to go away like this. She wasn't ready for him to end so suddenly. Hadn't he just begun?

They were burying him. They were burying him, they had dug a hole in the ground so deep that you could see the core of the planet glowing angry and red at the bottom; they were going to put him in it, and then pile him with dirt until he drowned. His lungs would fill with it, it would be underneath his fingernails and in his hair and between his eyelashes and pushing into his mouth through his delicately parted lips. The earth would rape him of all his elegance, mar him and disfigure him and rot away everything beautiful about him, and he would be gone. They were burying him! Her knees gave out and she fell against the tree, the rain-softened bark falling away under her hands. Oh god, she cried out, he's dying, you're killing him.

When she woke up, Caden stared at the ceiling, unmoving. It took her a moment to find her way from the haze of sleep and realize that it was just a dream -- that no one had died, no one had been buried, no one had floated into the afterlife on a river of their own blood. Naoya's heart was still beating, it was still pumping heated red nectar through his veins; he was still breathing, somewhere, through his delicately parted lips. Her heart was inexplicably heavy.

It took her a moment to calm down, push the nightmare as far as she could from conscious thought, and remember where she was and where she had been. Her memory began to filter back. She was in the hospital, and her arm was gone. Naoya had shot her three times, twice in the left arm and once in the chest. The live-fire bullets he used had shattered her bones and missed her heart by only a hair's width. She would be dead right now, if it hadn't. For some reason, she didn't want to think about the possibility that he had purposely missed. Either way, she was alive; but her limb was beyond saving, in bits and pieces between the hangar and the operating table.

She had thought the sight of her new mechanical arm would shock, anger, and sadden her, but when she glanced down at it for the first time she felt none of these things. Surely the drugs flooding her system had dulled her senses -- but even then, somewhere in her subconscious, she had already accepted it. Not much in her life would change with its inclusion, after all. After a few weeks of healing it would be just as capable, if not more so, than her old arm. Because of all the extra durasteel in her body she was now a good ten pounds heavier, but she could deal with that. And really, she did everything important with her right hand anyway. It wasn't a big deal, she told herself. People got them all the time, after accidents. But this one represented so much more, didn't it?

She moved her fingers, clenching and unclenching her fist. The new muscles and tendons expanded and contracted with the small sounds of their miniature hydraulic systems. It stung her surviving skin with shocks of cold as her damaged nerves struggled to relay impulses. Her arm was gone, but she was alive, and lucky for it. What if she had died out there? Alone, bleeding to death beside a Nagai terrorist, gunned down by a man who really, in the end, just wanted to make her life better. If she had died, she would have had a very large funeral, much larger than the one in her dream or any funeral Naoya would ever be afforded in reality. That thought made her throat tighten.

The thought of his death made her gut constrict instinctively. He couldn't die, could he? He seemed so grand and godly in her mind - immortal and omnipotent, invincible and unconquerable - that it seemed impossible for him to be able to die. His fingers touched everything in this world, and his tendrils wound through even the deepest parts of her heart: he was everywhere and everything at once. He was so much and so many, he couldn't possibly be mortal -- it was unlikely he was even real. She hoped against all hope that in the end, it was all a figment of her imagination -- dream or nightmare or feverish hallucination. But she knew, even beneath her hopes, that in reality, he was just a human. A beautiful mortal that had been born, was alive in this world, and would eventually die. He had been created, formed, and molded, just like she had been, with the same organs and bones and cells. At some point in time, just like she had been, a man had fathered him, and a woman had given birth to him. He had parents, somewhere. She didn't know who they were or what kind of parents they had been, but they existed. They had lived lives. And they had been born too, each from a mother and a father that was born as well.

He was the type of person who didn't seem like he had come from anywhere, and Caden had to force herself to imagine it, but he too was a baby once, even paler and more fragile than he was now. He had, like her, learned to walk, and taken first shaky steps into the world. He had been a young boy, and done all the things that young boys do. He had attended elementary school with other five year olds on whatever planet he had come from, and sat in a classroom full of peers whose names he probably did not remember but faces he probably did. He had worn small children's clothes and children's shoes, tiny socks that fit in the palm of your hand and miniaturized hats and mittens in the wintertime. He had drawn in the dirt with sticks. He had skipped rocks across ponds. He had played with toy ships and drank juice from plastic cups decorated in cartoons.

He had grown, and done adult things, too -- a myriad of little, pointless human things like marking doctor's appointments on a calendar and waiting for busy elevators. Lining up his pill bottles on a shelf, turning them so that all the labels faced outward. Putting his chrono on in the morning and taking it off at night, laying it on his bedtable beside a glass of stale water.

He'd been many places and done many things -- just as many normal as unusual. He'd had many relationships and known many people; some had loved him, some had hated him. Some had hated him very much. Some had loved him very much. Knowing him, he'd probably had many lovers -- he may have even been in love with some of them. Saafir was his lover, or at least had been at one point.

Anastasia had been his lover, too.

Caden felt her cheeks flush with a bright, fiery anger. Her throat closed up, her heartbeat hastened to a frenetic pace, and suddenly, with that single thought, the fragments of her last few days, scattered by the fog of sleep, came together. She gasped as everything came rushing back to her, the terrible pain that she had hoped was just a nightmare, washing away the haze of her dream. For what was definitely not the first time and definitely not the last, Caden remembered with a throbbing ache in her heart everything he had done and everything he had said -- how much trust she had put in him, how much trust Adara had put in him, and how cruelly he had let them both down.

Her mind spun with the implications.

The last fragments of her introspective moment faded away; the warm afterglow of sleep dissipated, the memory of her dream sunk into her subconscious, and an all-too-familiar rage replaced it. He wasn't an innocent child or a merciful deity. He wasn't her friend and he wasn't her brother. He wasn't anyone she could trust anymore. He never had been. In the back of her mind, Caden wondered how long it would take to come to terms with that. How long it would take for her mind to finally accept that he was no longer a friend. Even here and now, incapacitated with wounds from his own hands, it was hard to believe that the past twenty-four hours had actually happened. But they had, and as much as she didn't want to believe it, her world had changed because of it. She had changed. Everything had changed.

The more she thought about him, the more fiercely the anger burned in her reddened cheeks. But her fury was a perpetual motion machine, one end of the equation feeding the other, and the harder she tried to push him from her thoughts, the more impossible she found it to not think about him -- his name, his face, his voice, his touch, everything about him and everything about what he had done. As unwelcome tears prickled in the corners of her eyes, a complex web of hatred, love, regret, pride, pain, and guilt bloomed within her chest. Her hands balled into fists again, gripping the sheets in her whitened knuckles. How many years would it take for a day to pass free from thoughts of him? How many years would it be until this fire died down?

How long would it take for her to be able to trust again? Would she ever?

Caden took a deep, shaky breath. She was in the hospital for four nights after that, and they passed filled with dreams of death.

Back to Stories | Next Chapter