Chapter 8
Stings
When Nes recognized that none of the stray shots had coincidentally hit him in his unprotected head, he felt incredibly lucky and almost wanted to go gambling with his newfound good fortune. He’d have to take Trenna along, obviously – good luck charms are hard to come by.
The smell of the blood dripping from four holes in the dead enemy on top of him was choking him, sticking in his throat and lungs. Nes pushed the corpse off with a sickened grunt. His combat attire had shiny wet goop all over the top half, but since the clothing was a very dark gray with red lining in places, it was harder to notice than if Dastou’s choice of base attire color for his subordinates was white.
Nes sat up with some effort and looked over at Trenna, who was lowering herself down to sit on the floor. She carefully put the weapon she used on the floor and pushed it away with a shaking hand. She busied herself for a few seconds by cleaning her glasses with the inside hem of her topmost t-shirt. Nes was resting on his rear, taking slow, deep breaths to calm his nerves. Every inhalation hurt, the pain spreading from his neck to his entire torso, but at least he could breathe. He also felt like his soul, if there was such a thing, was missing a few pieces despite him having done nothing beyond defend himself and Trenna.
The corporal got to his feet, groaning all the way, grabbed his gun from the floor, and looked at the closest storefront nearby, it’s windows blown away. It was an all-day breakfast location, faded hand-drawn fliers that advertised menu items on the ground among broken glass. He looked at Trenna again, who was still sitting on her knees.
“Hey,” he called to her. When Trenna made eye contact, he pointed at the breakfast place. “We’re going in there. We have to get out of the open.”
Trenna quietly nodded and stood up. Nes waited while she hobbled to him, her eyes angled down to avoid seeing corpses. When she was next to him, he led the way past a storefront door, his boots crunching and crackling on glass. He pointed his gun awkwardly as he glanced inside this dark space, his shoulder in a lot of pain. Nes saw and heard nothing, and turned to tell Trenna she could go in. She was holding a tablecloth that he hadn’t heard her grabbing and almost asked what she was doing, then made the connection that it was for them to sit on.
With a tilt of his head, Nes told her to go inside. She limped in, deftly spread the tablecloth on the floor barely a step inside the shop, and went back down on her knees. As usual, this store was small because customers would eat outside on a table, the inside reserved for ordering and cooking. Trenna readjusted herself and sat with her back to the cashier counter without stepping too far into the dark shop, which gave Nes enough room to sit next to her and keep an eye on the door. This girl really has done a lot of hiding if her instincts for how to act were this honed.
Nes thumbed on the safety on his gun and followed her in. He took his place, not sitting too close to Trenna, and sat with his back to the counter like she did. He reached for one of the extra magazines on his soft-latch magnetic holster and replaced the mostly used one in his rifle, then set the gun next to his leg.
He took a few deep breaths, each as annoying as the last. Almost everything hurt. His legs were okay after the burning sprint from the escalator, but that was thanks to conditioning which didn’t do a thing for his bashed-up, aching shoulder or the numerous sore spots on his upper body from bullet impacts. Nes continued his slow, almost meditative breathing, interspersed with the occasional pained grunt, for another minute before deciding to break the silence.
“Thanks,” Nes said, finding his voice softer than usual. “You saved my ass.”
“I guess, maybe” Trenna cut herself off, doing her best to compose the words before trying to talk again. “That means we’re even. They tried... oh god.” She stopped again, but this time didn’t keep going.
“Tried to kill you along with me and Dastou, yeah,” he finished for her.
It was dark in this shop, yet their closeness to the entryway meant plenty of light was leaking in, enough to see a look of instant dread on Trenna, followed by her head and eyes darting all around trying to find something.
“Don’t worry about any others,” he said while making a placating hand motion. “Dastou would have taken care of them.”
“By himself? With no weapons?”
“Hey, you’re the one who worships him, shouldn’t you be the one with unfailing faith?”
“Um, I guess,” Trenna conceded.
“Don’t worry, he’s fine.”
Nes smiled at her previous response. In spite of so little contact, she may have already started seeing Dastou as more of a person than a god. Good, she’d get along better with him, learn more from him, if she was able to see him more realistically.
Nes tried for a couple of seconds to try and get lost in thought, remove himself from what just happened temporarily, but something kept him here in the present. He glanced around to find what distracted him, and found himself staring at his uniform’s top layer shirt, which was covered in other people’s blood, which was getting to him again. Without moving too much, he grabbed a cloth napkin with a cloudy sky pattern from near his feet. He shook the dusty fabric and held it. From the mini med kit in his upper-arm strap-pocket, Nes removed a single aerosol tube as long as his index finger, and aimed the small nozzle at his chest. He carefully sprayed something that foamed into a thin, dark blue coating on his shirt.
“What are you doing?” Trenna asked.
“Cleaning up a little,” answered Nes as he put the little tube away. He let the frothing action finish, then used the napkin to wipe away the activated foam. “It’s a strong disinfectant and cleaning solution meant for injuries. It’ll do the job on my uniform, too, and get rid of most of that damn smell.”
“I see. And I understand. That... was making me sick, too.”
“Sorry,” Nes said as he finished wiping at his clothes. The cloth was now a mix of dark blue chemical and dark red blood on white and blue fabric. After the cleaning, some of the dark gray of a lot of his shirt was tinted violet, which was still far better than what it looked like before.
“Trenna,” Nes started after throwing the fabric out through the glassless door, “what did they mean by ‘acolyte bitch?’”
“Oh. Right. I think it’s because I still made efforts of worship toward the Sainthood.”
“So others you live... lived with, didn’t?”
“No, not at all,” she said, a note of disappointment in her voice. “Because we were ignored by the system, and the Saints control that, everyone else began to hate them even if they didn’t before.”
“Hmmm. They hated Saints because of the Cypher, huh?”
“Right, but I hadn’t talked with anyone about it, not for a while. It would just lead to arguments, and I’m not good at arguing, so it would end with me standing there getting told how much I was wrong. I think the more passionate ones decided it wasn’t worth it because I was going to stay as wrong as I was. Others didn’t care that much; we were surviving, that was what mattered, not my beliefs. Or, that’s what I thought until you woke me up today.”
Nes wasn’t sure if Trenna wanted to keep talking, but he did. However, any topic was better than what was outside this little sanctuary of a breakfast diner, and he veered slightly.
“You should know that none of the Saints has ever had any idea what the Social Cypher really is or how it works. People think the opposite because it’s easier to accept control than the lack of information that ends up as the truth.”
Nes turned his head to his companion and saw that she was staring at the floor, nonplussed by his remark, her eyes revealing that she was trying to fit pieces together.
“So, Mr. Dastou, or the Prior Fifteen, never had anything to do with it?” she asked.
Prior Fifteen? That must refer to the other fifteen generations of Saints, Nes thought, Dastou being last of the sixteenth. Religious terminology was never a subject he cared enough about to know anything more than common phrases.
>
“Not at all,” answered Nes while stretching his back. “We, as in Dastou and his huge entourage, are as confused about that stuff as anyone. That’s a huge part of the Academy and DSF, to track and study mass-hypnotism, find out what it is. I remember being really freaked out, too, after I was first told that no one has answers to how our entire world works. It can be overwhelming, realizing that it’s not only you in the dark, it’s everyone. When we get back, I promise we’ll explain what we know and what don’t know better, tell you more. Okay?”
“Yes. I’d like that very much,” Trenna said, the corners of her lips lifting into a small smile.
Huh, that was the most modest reaction he’d ever seen of someone being told that the Cypher was not controlled by Saints when they previously believed otherwise. Typically, worshipers believed that the Saints had a grand plan in place, and that it had been corrupted by the void, the blackness that swallowed Dastou’s people’s vision, making them unable to see stars. There were some pretty incredible stories and fables related to all that. It wasn’t a huge surprise that after meeting Dastou Trenna’s beliefs became more malleable; he tends to have that effect on his believers.
Trenna was quiet again, breathing slowly, and Nes looked away and sat still, letting his head loll back to touch the counter and his eyes close while facing the ceiling. He gave himself a few seconds of Open Iris, ignoring the dangers of overuse, and let his brain drift away to his past. He thought about Trenna’s beliefs, and about his own long-held affinity for the Saints. His attraction to them was more about the mystique, not worshiping them for their supposed power. Nes did once assume they had a hand in the Cypher, some minor effect. It had been a while since he realized that his assumption was there because he was told as such throughout his life. He let that go because the people who told him, his parents and grandparents, weren’t very neutral. They had lost loved ones to the machinations of the system and wanted a more direct target. All those stories of Saints controlling the Cypher always attracted two kinds of people in equal number: those like Trenna who wanted something greater than themselves to put faith into, and those like his older relatives who wanted to fill the hole in their understanding of the world with hatred.
Luckily the younger members of his family more or less didn’t give a shit about Saints, and Nes had put himself in an agnostic state about them. That lackadaisical attitude didn’t come randomly. The younger Jaydefs rebelled heartily against the system, their own dislike of it strong for the same reasons as their predecessors, though with an “I know better than you” tinge that made them avoid the less productive anti-Saintist overtones.
On trips to hang out in Davranis North, when ten or so Jaydefs would go explore the city that was essentially one massive coverage hole in the system, the whole Vacation Gang heard constant stories of Saints dropping by. The gray-eyed people would pop in, stay for a little while, give out gifts of valuable uncut gems, or in other ways support places like the Art Quarter, a three-block area where those with a creative side sold their wares or had exhibitions. One of Nes’ sisters was a popular fashion designer, and she displayed her wares at the Art Quarter twice a year with family along. During those visits, he sought those more positive Sainthood stories out, devoured them, wanted to know more, shape his own beliefs. He ended up with enough information that he thought of them as normal long before meeting Dastou, when he was way too young to be hanging out with the drug-loving groupies and overbearing devotees he was getting the stories from. Inwardly, he half-laughed and half-grimaced when he remembered the haughtier poets being the worst to talk to about Saints. Just say the rumor, he’d think, don’t turn it into a goddamn song.
Nes understood why Saints were disliked thanks to the older, better disseminated stories about them. When he knew better, more, he couldn’t make himself hate them. His skeptical state went far enough that he had decided to find a way to live in the coverage ghettos of Davranis North to get away from the system, not caring that the Saints were regular visitors, and in fact hoping to meet one and ask for real information.
Nes down-shifted after those precious couple of seconds of slow-motion peace when he heard Trenna wince. He opened his eyes and noticed her adjusted posture, which must have been what caused her pain. He dug into the extra pocket strapped on his upper arm again, trying not to move the shoulder too much. He removed a tiny plastic container with two vacuum-sealed pills, flipped a tab to open the package, and put a pill in his mouth before extending the half-empty tray to Trenna. She stared at it.
“It’s medicine,” Nes said, chewing the pill, knowing that he was making a sickened facial expression and not really caring. The girl took the tray, removed the second pill, and looked coldly at it. “Chew it,” he instructed. “It’ll taste absolutely terrible, but when it’s out of the seal it spreads through your blood faster. Those painkillers Saan would have given you are mild – you’ll need the extra kick.”
He already felt his headache being reduced in thumping power, though that may have been due to an expectation of relief to come. He was more composed every moment as the pain went away and the smell of blood on his uniform slowly faded, replaced with a medicinal chemical odor that was far more pleasant. He’d seen lots of blood before today during medical courses or training injuries, sure, yet for some reason when it was spilled with intent to kill, by his own hands no less, it grossed him out completely.
“Weren’t you shot?” asked Trenna. “I can see the hole in your shirt. Will half of this medicine be enough for you?”
“Actually, I took a few in the back, too. I have armor on, it’s thin and under my jacket so you can’t see it. That’s kind of the point, really. Anyway, no regular bullet is going to get through DSF armor unless it strikes in the exact spot a previous hit landed.” The last few words sounded like he was reciting, which he sort of was.
“You’re okay?” she asked again.
“Sure, I’m alright. Worn out more than anything.”
That was an exaggeration bordering on an outright lie. He’d never felt worse in his life, but Trenna needed to be assured of her safety and his ability to provide it if there was to be more combat. The thought of which, by the way, made his face and chest uncomfortably warm.
“Are you members of the DSF always this prepared?” she said about while putting the pill in her mouth. When she bit down, she got a nauseated look on her face and a revolted cry escaped her. Nes laughed aloud.
“We try to be, yeah,” Nes said after stopping his chuckle. “But we have the advantage of knowing tons more ways to be prepared in the first place. Saints have a lot stuff they figured out over their history, and most of them kept good records. That pill you took was something that was discovered about a hundred years ago, the formula written down for later use. Dastou hasn’t added much to the records, but he knows how to use what’s there and how to dumb it down for the rest of us to learn about.”
Nes sat up straighter, the toll of his aches dulling with time and medication.
“He’s strange, isn’t he?” she asked. “I always figured the Saints were holy creations, so far removed from the rest of us that we’d never understand them.”
“Hah!” replied Nes before realizing that her statement wouldn’t be funny to anyone outside an entourage. “No, they’re pretty normal. Highly capable and quirky more than god-like, though I’ve only known one personally – the rest I know from stories. I’ve considered Dastou a friend for a while now, and he’s just him to me. More pal than Saint. He told me how he was found and anointed this morning, a story so boring I wanted to hit him.”
“I see...” said Trenna, who became very quiet.
She was understandably thrown off by everything the happened today already, and having the person she worships brought down a peg twice in two minutes maybe wasn’t the best thing for her.
Nes fingered the hole in his shirt below his heart and felt the damage to the filament armor. He could kiss whoever invented the stuff right now. “At lea
st nothing went through,” he mused, his stinging bruises jogging a memory, “though it reminds me of the first time I was actually shot, when Dastou put one in me during my freshman year.”
“Wait… what?” Trenna asked, wide-eyed.
“Yup, he does that to all the new people at Ornadais Academy sooner or later.” Nes spoke casually, as if he was sharing a story about a long day at work. The tale was a few years behind him and everyone at the school had a similar one, and he was used to his being dismissed as one of the less exciting ones. “The medicine we just took,” he continued, “it’s practically miraculous, and sometimes we don’t have the, well, faith to use what he gives us without worry when we first start out. It’s a little hard to believe all of the over-the-top things we’re being taught or that his or another Saint’s discoveries will work so perfectly. Some of the training also changes your brain, how it works. Newcomers are sometimes too skeptical about it.”
Trenna was engrossed, and Nes couldn’t help but get into telling his usually yawn-inducing story. He moved his hands around freely, careful not to bother his shoulder or back.
“Faculty members are also sworn to secrecy. They don’t want people without the practiced mental fortitude to take an advanced lesson that’ll leave them in a coma, or to steal strong medicines because they injured themselves and want to get better faster. The result of that secrecy is some new recruits, especially the more dick-ish ones, thinking it’s all nonsense. To help us believe he shoots us once, unexpectedly, in our first year. No one avoids it, no one can, really – hiding from a Saint is impossible when you sooner or later have to be in the open going from one class to another.”
“How badly do you get hurt?” Trenna asked in wonder.
“Very. Dastou knows how to kill or injure with ridiculous accuracy. He shoots you that one time and you’ll die without his level of treatment. We call it the ‘Fresh-Face Pledge.’ If you take the pledge in the courtyard, as a lot of us do while going from building to building in the complex, it practically turns into a party before medical trainees stabilize you and take you for treatment. When I was shot near the water fountain I almost fell in. I didn’t exactly appreciate all the cheers and laughter while I bled like an undercooked steak.”
“Treatment or not, that sounds like it takes a while to heal?”
“It’s based on the injury. Almost no one is completely out of commission for more than a couple of weeks, and after that light duty for at most a month. That’s better than being dead like we’d be if we didn’t have the advanced medicine, machines, and personnel to get us better. One really obnoxious rookie got her spine severed, paralyzed her from the waist down. It was amazing – she was walking again in two months, jogging in three. Dastou took the lead for two of the kid’s three surgeries himself to give a few ‘maybe now you’ll be more respectful’ looks at her before and after the operations. No surprise that recovery came along with a new attitude about training when she came back to class.”
Trenna smiled and laughed lightly, and Nes was glad for the change in her demeanor. After another nice, calm minute of silence, he figured they should get going. He felt much better and so would she, and this wasn’t over. This ambush featured nowhere near the number of people Trenna said lived down here. He eyes his throat mic’s transceiver, saw that it was still on, and turned the volume for his earpiece back up.
“Weirdo, you can come out now,” Nes said that with no special intonation, like he was talking to someone right next to him. “If you’re happily exploring, tell us where to meet you.”
No answer. He tried calling two more times, and again received no responses. Dastou was sometimes aloof, sure, but not so much so that he snubbed his agents after combat; something was wrong. He switched channels on the transceiver by turning a small dial on the side, and heard no sound from the Caravan’s stand-alone channel. Was the device broken, damaged in the battle? Maybe. Nes stood up, walked out of the diner, and shouted, hoping the Saint was in earshot.
“Dastou! Get out here!”
Nothing again. It was time to worry. Nes grabbed his rifle, clipped it to his back again, and started walking toward the pedestrian bridge. Trenna got up from where she sat and joined him. A few steps out, a gurgling voice nearby, wet and stomach-turning, stopped them both from going further.
“We... have... we have...” said a man’s voice, barely audible.
Nes looked around and saw the last person taken down, the one killed by Trenna’s wild fire – or the one he thought was killed – moving his head and talking to no one. The girl, all of a sudden full of energy, passed Nes, limping fast to get to this person. The man was not very old, maybe thirty to thirty-five, a handful of gray hairs spread about his unkempt mane.
“Hundre!” exclaimed Trenna when she got close. “Hundre, you’re alive!”
Trenna bent down toward the man she shot earlier, touching his chest and head while ignoring all the blood. He never looked at her, only at the domed ceiling.
“Trenna...?” the man asked.
“Yes, it’s me,” she replied in a hurried voice. “I’m so sorry, I had to... I had to...”
She had tears in her eyes, and Nes walked slowly in their direction, not willing to be a part of this.
“I know,” Hundre said. “I remember it now. I...” He stopped and breathed, a quiet, miserable sound.
“Uh, maybe,” Trenna said, who swallowed before saying more. “Maybe we can help you. We have medicine and...”
“What little I have won’t help,” quietly interrupted Nes while standing near them. He spoke softly, but it would not make what he said better. “He’s beyond anything I’ve seen someone recover from. He’s not going to survive.”
Trenna wept openly now, and touched her forehead to Hundre’s. Any of her tears that fell on the man’s face smeared some of the droplets of blood that had been sprayed there.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry...” she said again and again.
“No, stop,” Hundre said, quietly and half-choked. “I understand. I’m free again. I have to tell you...”
He coughed and blood spurted from his mouth, some of it landing on Trenna. She didn’t seem to care.
“I have to tell you,” Hundre continued. “That... Milser met a man. He convinced us. I don’t know how, I don’t remember that part, maybe he tricked us.”
Nes was suddenly deeply interested in what this man was saying and changed his mind about respectfully backing away from the horrible scene.
Hundre kept talking. “We attacked you, left you there.”
With those words, Hundre’s voice broke and he cried as fiercely as a dying man could. He cared for Trenna, that was certain, and to what extent Nes couldn’t tell, but the two were close. When the man got himself under control after a few seconds, he said more.
“The man... he made Milser our leader, more than he already acted like. We were sent after you, given weapons, told to kill the Saint.” Hundre coughed, waited, and kept going. “We failed, had a backup plan. That’s what this was, our backup plan. Part of it was taking him... away if he was alive.”
“What?” Nes asked, perked up by the man’s revelation. “What do you mean take him?”
Hundre, for the first time since speaking and having his name revealed by Trenna, looked somewhere besides the weak light source above him. He shifted his eyes, focused on Nes.
“Cosamian Dastou. We took him. We were supposed to.”
“Who made this happen? Who’s this person your Milser met?”
“The Citizen. He took our…” A tough swallow interrupted the words, and he continued. “Made us tools... He wanted the anomalous one, the atypical one. It’s what he called the Saint.” He coughed again, and Trenna and Nes were spellbound into silence until he went on. Hundre made eye-contact with Trenna. “We took him. I’m sorry, Trenna.”
Hundre sobbed again, and closed his eyes. Trenna hugged him as best she could, and cried into his shoulder. He said something else to her, in the smalle
st of whispers. Nes triggered Open Iris and still caught only heard bits.
“…Running… Won’t have to forgive… New Daughter… The good one… Love…”
It was a lot to have said for a man fading away as he was, and Hundre must have walked a wire with his will to live to get it out. Nes, privately ashamed to have listened in to what little he could, let go of his hyper-activity and backed away a couple of paces back. On the last words, the he stopped breathing, deflated, and Trenna bawled soundlessly as she held him for a very long moment. Finally, she looked up at Nes, tears streaming down her cheeks.
He must have appeared odd to her, because he certainly felt that way. A combination of empathic sadness, confusion, anger, worry, and fear rattled around in him, nothing able to take full control. Nes decided to concentrate on two things to keep his head straight. First, according to the man Trenna called Hundre, Dastou was taken from here by force. Second, Nes was going to fuck up anything and anyone that stood in the way of finding both his friend and whoever orchestrated this day full of death.
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