three, and push the rapier tip backward as hard and as quick as I possibly could. The noise that resulted—I’m not doing it justice when I say it went SCHHHLIIIIICK, which also doesn’t describe the pain of a full foot of steel being pushed back through your innards and out the small of your back as carefully as I could do it, which wasn’t very. The sword fell to the tiles with a sad rattle, and I took a couple of moments, and by the time I reached down to get it you’d just—healed up. No more pain. No more stab wound.
The hilt was so hot and slippery with blood that it was hard to grasp. Your hands were bare. It took a few goes to get it. The grip was made of polished wood or plex, and your fingers didn’t close the way I expected them to, probably because they were shorter than mine.
We were in a narrow, sweaty corridor, dark, lit only by a thin rail of overhead red lighting. There was an alarm blaring somewhere, and a distant white-noise buzzing sound, like you’d get from a piece of malfunctioning machinery. You were soaked through with blood, and where you weren’t soaked through with blood you were soaked through with sweat. The air was shimmering with the heat. Standing in that hallway was like standing next to a bonfire, one that also made you wet.
Beneath you a bunch of blood was smeared playfully on the floor and lower walls, as though someone had rolled around in it, which I guess you had. But there wasn’t that much of it. It hadn’t been a fight. Whoever stuck you with your own rapier hadn’t let you get a shot off. You weren’t around to be furious, but if you had been, I would’ve told you not to bother; I planned on making them sorrier than they had ever been in all their fucking life.
Pool of blood: check. Air so hot: check. Surrounded by big and illicit bones: check. Looking at your hand to keep this tally—what hand there was, beneath the blood, and your fingers, and your small palms, and their absolute lack of thenar muscle—reality went through me. Kind of like a big iron railing, now that I think about it.
You were gone. You’d left me behind. Inside you.
“Fuck,” I said. It wasn’t my voice. “Fuck. Oh, shit. Oh, fucking hell. Help. Yuck. Aaaargh.”
In the darkness of that hot and bony corridor, something bumbled into view before you—us; me—which at least forestalled my full-on physical and emotional breakdown. It was a nightmarish nonsense of wasp, and bone, and meat, and it was alive, and when it saw me it stopped.
The thing’s bulk was set on a stretched-out, humanlike frame—like a person walking crab-fashion, feet planted flat and hands flat backward on the ground, abdomen thrust ecstatically up in midair. But when I say hands and feet, think of hands and feet fed through a shredder, and then all the exposed bone and flesh banded back together with black-flecked orange shell. This was topped with great shiny plates of thorax, a big diamond-shaped thing, and a tiny-waisted abdomen. At its highest point sat a huge skull of something that might’ve been anything, so long as that thing wasn’t human. Its lines were obscured by great slabs of pulsing, greenish, comb-chambered flesh, and here and there someone had slapped on long wicked hairs as thick as your fingers. Which weren’t that thick. I’m just amending here; your fingers are fine. Great serrated beetle jaws emerged from either side of the skull’s maw, dripping steaming liquid, and it snapped meditatively as it stood—hung, actually: transparent wings buoyed it up, moving so rapidly that what with the steam and the blood and the heat and the dark I hadn’t seen them to start with. And as I watched, little pinpoints spun within the black craters of the skull’s eye sockets, and then great wet black eyeballs emerged from those holes.
This would have been a terrific moment for you to come back. It would have been completely sweet. I don’t care how much of a hot badass I’m meant to be, I was in the wrong body clutching a sword I’d never used, and you didn’t have any muscles, and I absolutely did not feel well. I felt bad. I needed a time-out. But the monster screeched in a weird, double-throated bleating chitter, two sounds simultaneously and both of them shitty, and those eyeballs