Qarotti, Eron 14, 5531 – Second Shift

Equifār Verdaris’ looming form disappeared around the hallway corner. The sound of her heavy boots echoed in her wake. Tendakeo waited for the crisp click of the stairwell door swinging closed.

When it came, he sagged in relief against the wall opposite his apartment. He barely heard his neighbors’ words of gratitude for dealing with the Knight. They retreated into their units until eventually Tendakeo stood alone, staring into the depthless shadows through the apartment door.

It took a long time before he could force himself to approach the door. His boots had been welded to the floor by some unseen force. His mouth had gone dry. His muscles were half-frozen with terror. He made himself take steady breaths until he regained control.

He had taken only a few faltering steps past the threshold before his stomach made a complicated and distressing maneuver. Groaning in alarm, he made a stumbling dash for the bathroom. Despite the darkness, he avoided running into anything. Luck and muscle memory guided his steps. He dropped heavily to his knees in front of the toilet. His self-control rapidly lost ground against his body’s resolute conviction to turn itself inside out.

After he was done vomiting up the stress that had been churning inside his belly, he flushed and rested against the toilet’s cool steel, catching his breath. He was too busy quieting the trembling waves rolling through him to care about the stinging scent of industrial disinfectants in the water refilling the bowl. He sighed. Blessed Silver, at least the water was still running.

He shuddered in relief. When he’d first seen the Knight, a bolt of mortal dread had shot through him. A towering presence with strict discipline in every line of their body. The gleaming skull helmet they wore. He entertained the thought that some avatar of death had descended from the void to claim him and Veshrin. The world had teetered dangerously, his knees threatening to buckle. Visions of his and Veshrin’s inevitably brutal ends had flashed through his mind. At the time the idea had made him nauseous.Now a small, dark part of him wondered if it wouldn’t be a form of mercy in Veshrin’s case.

Unbidden, images of what had become of Veshrin appeared in vivid detail at the forefront of his mind. Fear, bitter and electric, rolled through him. He gritted his teeth, brushing the visions away. The surgeon’s calm he had earned during his cycles of training settled upon him, quelling the panicking parts of his mind. Veshrin wasn’t dead yet. Death was only certain if Tendakeo lost control. He needed to focus on what he could do to help Veshrin, not ways he could fail.

He was doing well enough, he told himself. He fighting collapse since the moment he had seen Veshrin collapsed in the bathroom. Cleaning Veshrin’s wounds. Carrying him awkwardly into bed. Rushing to get rid of the bloody evidence outside the unit. It had all blurred together, thoughts racing faster and faster. He hadn’t had time to feel, let alone think.

His body returned to his control, albeit reluctantly.

The tremors subsided, and his legs slowly regained their strength. Tendakeo pushed himself to his feet and felt his way to the bathroom’s sink, for once grateful for the manual controls on the faucet. He rinsed his mouth out and patted his beard dry using his shirt. Feeling more human, he felt his way to the door, amazed in retrospect that he’d managed to make it to the toilet without braining himself. He dug around in his right pocket and found the familiar disc of his comm, warm and solid against his cool fingers. Pulling it out, he pressed his thumb to its face. Sapphire light blazed up, rendering the contents of his comm’s home-state in holographic clarity. It easily pierced the darkness beyond the bathroom. He set the lit comm in his palm, using its glow to steady him.

Thusly armed, he made his way to the main door and slid it most of the way shut, leaving a space no wider than one of his fingers. The hallway was currently empty and likely to stay that way unless something new and exciting happened, but that was no reason to be reckless.

He turned towards bedrooms, directly across from the unit’s door. Their bedrooms shared a wall, and the deep, inhuman growl he’d heard through it only hours earlier made Tendakeo shiver as it echoed in his mind. Taking a deep breath, he crept forward, his heart pounding in his chest. He set his hand against the left-hand door. It was warm, just as it had been when he’d woken up and checked it after the growl.

He’d been too afraid to open it then, conjuring all manner of horrors waiting to escape just on the other side. No time for that now. Given what had happened to him, Veshrin should already be dead. By some miracle, he wasn’t, and Tendakeo had to do what he could to keep it that way.

It hadn’t been hard to figure out where the wounds—some of which were clearly claw-marks—had come from, or how Veshrin’s hands had ended up half-melted. Tendakeo had seen many such burns as a student. He had known the true nature of ‘the Dragon’s Lair,’ but he’d told himself that Veshrin would be fine because the ‘dragons’ they bled were always kept sedated.

There shouldn’t have been any danger. It had found Veshrin anyway.

Tendakeo was the reason Veshrin had been exiled in the first place. It didn’t matter to Tendakeo that Veshrin claimed he’d known the risks. The risks existed because Tendakeo felt compelled to save the entire tarnished fucking system.

Well, now it’s his turn. A deep frown twisted Tendakeo’s mouth as he swallowed more of the acidic fear seeking an escape. His hand shook badly enough that his comm’s holo-field was shedding tiny sprites in every direction, pinprick motes of light that faded soon after escaping the range of the projector. He pushed the door aside enough to get a fingerhold, forcibly sliding it into its alcove within the walls.

A wave of golden light spilled through the opening, completely overpowering the comm’s relatively feeble illumination. It momentarily blinded Tendakeo and forced him to turn away, swearing in Wāimojo.

Rubbing his streaming eyes, he turned back to the door, his free hand raised defensively against the light. For nearly half a minute he stood there, transfixed, as the light revealed a steady cycle of ebbs and flows, fading to near invisibility before flaring bright enough to rival daylight. For the first time, intrigue began to pierce the fear clouding his mind. He watched the light dance as he summoned the will to finish opening the door and reveal what lay beyond.

He turned off the comm’s holo-field and returned it to his pocket. Closing his eyes, Tendakeo set both hands against the door and pulled. The heavy metal panel slid along its track, protesting with rumbling, grinding noises as it went.

He counted to five.

The truth isn’t going anywhere. Whatever has happened to him won’t unhappen just because I refused to look at it.

So, at last, he looked.

When Tendakeo had laid him in bed, Veshrin had been wearing a thin undershirt, a pair of undershorts. Tendakeo had bandaged all the wounds he could. Now, Veshrin lay completely exposed. Clothing and anything else on his body had apparently melted away. He lay on his side, knees drawn up and his long arms wrapped around his legs, having taken on the posture of a fetus in utero.

The part of Tendakeo that saw what had become of his friend began screaming in horror. It was only through monumental effort that he kept his outward composure. The doctor that had been carved into him by the cold, firm hands he’d trained under asserted itself, almost defensively. It forced him to see Veshrin as he would see any patient with unusual symptoms, as a living puzzle to be solved, a challenge to be overcome.

Seeing him, it was difficult to imagine Veshrin as he had been only a solar earlier. He lay in the ruins of what had been a bed, ravaged by some strange xeno-biological process. In some places, his skin had been covered in fur, or something that looked like fur. It pulsed slowly with eerie, gilded light. It rippled in languid waves, moving to a breeze Tendakeo knew could not exist.

The air rolling out of the room was hot and humid. It smelled both strongly floral and of rotting fruit. The combination caused Tendakeo’s barely settled stomach to consider revolt once more. Clouds of dust disturbed by opening the door drifted through the air, flowing past Tendakeo’s face as they escaped into the cold unit.

Veshrin faced the wall shared by Tendakeo’s bedroom, lying in a depression filled with the same fur-like patches. They were shorter and less active than the ones on Veshrin. Was he breathing? Tendakeo couldn’t tell from his position by the door. Tendakeo’s own breath caught as he peered closer at Veshrin’s back.

Root-like tendrils had emerged from his spine, crawling across the bed in branching, blindly searching patterns. Where they touched the sheets and surface of the mattress, the fabric had rotted away, revealing browning and blackened spots. Before his eyes, a wave of light appeared at the tips of the tendrils and flowed back towards Veshrin, into him. A bioluminescent network of lines was revealed as the light raced it beneath his skin. Mildly, he observed that they faithfully followed the human nervous system. Was it…feeding Veshrin, rather than feeding on him? Keeping him alive?

He became aware of a light source near where his left hand rested against the doorframe. A proliferation of translucent vines with pale leaves had erupted from gaps between the wall-panels. They swelled with their own light. Scattered among them were tiny flowers with pulsing blue petals. He stared. Plants, growing out of the walls? On Lustrathīr, of all places?

“How?” His voice sounded thin and raw. His answer was more of the morgue-like silence that had filled the room since he’d opened it. It felt like the whole world was holding its breath, waiting to see what he would do. He couldn’t cower by the door forever. The impulse that had plagued him throughout his life had grown intolerable. He needed to know.

He found himself entering the room, head on a swivel, taking in details with wide, disbelieving eyes. Not content to devour the bedding he lay on, some of the roots growing out of Veshrin had reached the edge of the bed and spilled over, cascading towards the floor in cords thicker than one of Tendakeo’s fingers. They formed countless crisscrossing intersections as they raced for the walls. Rather, what lay behind them. They had climbed the wall-panels, anchoring themselves somehow as they went, until they disappeared into the dark spaces left between the misaligned wall-panels. Higher up, as if they had dislodged them with pure mechanical force, the vines and their blossoms burst forth from between panels Tendakeo remembered being intact as recently as three solars earlier.

At their highest intensity, it was hard to look at the vines directly, so he cast his eyes down, in time to note the flow of energy through the adventurous roots.

The light that flowed from the wall roots was much brighter than that of the roots on the bed, which all but confirmed the logic Tendakeo had been building. The roots had found and tapped into the electrical and heating systems, causing the power outage. That caused an uncomfortable realization. However far they reached, they were draining enough power to black out half the level. That was far beyond mere life-support. What was the final intent?

Tendakeo looked towards the bed and suffered a shock as the darkened spots he’d noted just moments earlier had disappeared beneath the visibly expanding mat of fur-like growth. Heedless of where he stepped, he rushed to Veshrin’s side, only pausing when one foot-fall caused a wave of golden luminance to race through the root-like structures. It felt unmistakably like an alert signal. A shock ran through him when he finally looked past the xeno-biological miracle coming out of the walls and fully focused on Veshrin.

Veshrin was on the other side of the bed, meaning his back was to Tendakeo. Tendakeo looked at his spine, expecting to see signs of trauma and disease where the roots had punched through Veshrin’s skin. Instead, they emerged as extensions of his natural body, transitioning from his naturally rich, earthy brown to a semi-translucent sandy color, and finally to the translucent state that filled the room. Then he looked up, towards the back of Veshrin’s head.

He blinked, once, twice, then four times in rapid succession. The memory of Veshrin’s hair only the night before appeared in vivid, undeniable detail. Veshrin had never worn his hair loose, choosing to keep it tightly braided. Now spilled forth freely. Its color had darkened from the pale, straw-yellow Tendakeo had always known. Veshrin’s hair lay about him in looping curls spreading out from his scalp like a soft cloud of spun gold.

“That’s not possible.”

The ‘fur’ growing on and around Veshrin rippled with the sound of Tendakeo’s voice, and Veshrin’s limbs twitched for the first time since Tendakeo had entered the room. Then, all at once, his hair moved. A languid ripple that passed from his scalp out towards the tips, accompanied by the now-familiar pulse of light. With an audible creak, Veshrin’s head turned towards Tendakeo, but was stopped by his neck’s natural anatomical limit. He held that position, face tilted toward the ceiling, eyes closed, not a breath passing his lips. The effect was that of a blind person’s courteous gesture towards the customs of the sighted. Go on, I’m listening, it said.

Suddenly, Tendakeo didn’t want to be in the room, didn’t want to be anywhere near…whatever he should be calling Veshrin. Was it still Veshrin? It looked like him—more or less—but what was behind that placid face? He leaned down towards Veshrin, as if he could see the truth of things if only he were a few cems closer. Raising his head had caused the hair to fall away from Veshrin’s brow, revealing a bump that had begun to rise in the center of his forehead. A similar spot of raised flesh, darker than the rest, had grown at his right temple, and with a bit of effort Tendakeo could see the shape of its twin emerging from the left.

“Can you…understand me?”

Veshrin’s lips parted slightly, but what floated out of his mouth wasn’t anything that Tendakeo could qualify as speech. Something very much like birdsong, interspersed with harsh burrs that vibrated uncomfortably in his ears. The air in the room echoed for only a moment before the sound was absorbed. When the light’s cycle reached its lowest point Tendakeo noticed blue light shimmering within the raised spot in the middle of Veshrin’s forehead. It flickered, and then light exploded from Veshrin’s form, leaving blue and gold afterimages on Tendakeo’s retinas. The buzzing sensation in his ears was repeated across his entire body, only exponentially stronger and accompanied by a flush of intense heat. Startled, Tendakeo reared back, blinking rapidly.

“[Moons, preserve me!] What was that,” he cried, chest heaving with effort. Seconds passed. The room had been reduced to ghosts layered on top of one another, murky. Only closing his eyes provided some relief. Eventually, the afterimages faded, allowing him to open his eyes again.

Veshrin had laid his head down and turned away once more, apparently having dismissed Tendakeo. He felt as if he had failed some vital test, but had no idea what it could mean. He tried to get Veshrin to move or respond for the next few minutes, doing everything short of physically touching him or disturbing the growths around him, only to be met with nearly inanimate stillness. Eventually, Tendakeo had to admit defeat.

“What now,” he asked the room. Not that he’d expected a conversation, but after that first dramatic outburst, Tendakeo had expected, well, something. What had he done wrong?

Awash in frustration, a maddening curiosity, and fear born of dozens of half-formed questions, he remembered the stack of sample kits he kept in his room’s storage. He sighed. Of course.

Minutes later he had returned with two sample kits tucked under his left arm, wearing gloves, and holding a laser-scalpel in his right hand. The vines seemed a good place to start.

They proved surprisingly resilient to the laser scalpel’s blade, sending out rapid-fire bursts of signal-lights, but eventually the plant-like flesh parted. Half a leaf and and the stem it had been growing from went into one bio-plastic collection vial, a blossom into another, and part of the roots that had grown across the floor filled the kit’s third and final vial. Sap, nearly transparent, syrupy, and filled with glittering flecks, oozed forth from the cuts, but hardened to a gel-like state in seconds. He turned to Veshrin, anxious but resolute.

The laser-scalpel wouldn’t cut into Veshrin’s tissues. The skin would grow warm, but the heat and energy in the blade was absorbed easily, with no visible effect. The magnetic field of the blade began to warp after a few minutes of test cuts in various locations, as if being pulled apart. Soon after that, the device went dead in Tendakeo’s hands, the power-cells depleted despite him having charged it recently.

Confused but determined, he got to his feet and made his way to the kitchen, grumbling to himself. He was halfway across the living room returning with the sharpest knife they owned when it hit him what had happened. The idea drew him up short.

Veshrin, the organism, they had adapted. In the time it had taken to gather the samples from the wall vines, the whole network had…evolved reactively, changing to become resistant and apparently even immune to the scalpel’s hard-light blade. As for the warping, Veshrin, or the thing growing inside him, had disrupted the magnetic generation tech in the device. He couldn’t pretend that there was any other explanation for the device’s malfunctions.

When he entered Veshrin’s room, Tendakeo only gave himself a moment to consider what he was about to do. The knife gleamed in the rising bioluminescence, its smooth, ceramic blade appearing to drink in the light and take on its gilded quality.

There wasn’t any other way. If he wanted to try to help Veshrin, if he wanted to understand, then Tendakeo needed samples of his tissues. He quickly knelt next to Veshrin, careful his knee didn’t rest on a root, and began cutting a thin strip of skin from his previously injured forearm. The skin was unblemished, as if the claw slashes from the previous night had been a hallucination Tendakeo had suffered. The knife parted Veshrin’s flesh with far less ease than Tendakeo expected, but after a minute and a half of work all three vials from the second kit had been filled with bloody samples from all different locations.

Curious how Veshrin would respond to the damage, Tendakeo stood back and waited, watching him intently. He didn’t have to wait long. The cuts on Veshrin’s forearm, right leg, and neck began emitting thin whisps of steam, and then new tissue began growing in.

“Real-time regeneration,” Tendakeo said, his voice barely above a whisper. The energy the network was draining made sense if it were trying to fuel a system like that, but it was shockingly fast compared to any biological system he had heard of, Terran or xeno.

His comm vibrated in his pocket, accompanied by a loud two-second burst of a song melody. He was nearly startled enough to drop the samples.

He checked the time. Shit. He was late for his shift.

It was probably someone from Central Medical demanding to know where he was. He looked down at the samples clutched tightly in his left hand. They looked surprisingly mundane, given they represented the potential destruction of his world.

“Just hold on, Ves. I’m going to learn what I can.”