"What are the risks?"
"Well," Cid said with a crooked smile, "I'm not sure, because we haven't tried this on human beings yet. But in a trial of esper injection in rats, out of a hundred rats only two died. Those were the two who were injected with Catoblepas, so we won't be using that one. The others all survived, albeit without magic, but that was as expected. The archaeological record indicates that magic has a spoken component, and of course rats can't talk."
"I see."
"But there is some risk, of course. Should you want to think about it—"
"No," Kefka said slowly. He drummed his fingers on the desk. Local boy makes good, he thought. Palazzo kid first magic-user in a thousand years. "No. I'll do it."
"Are you sure? You should take your time thinking about such a major—"
"No," Kefka said. "I know what I want to do."
Of course, they couldn't perform the surgery right away. First he had to endure a two-day liquid diet, followed by a dose of noxious medicine intended to "prepare you physiologically for the injection." Then a day-long fast.
During all that time, Kefka was excused from his duties in the Twelfth Battalion, which left him at loose ends. He wandered first the areas of the Magitek Research Facility that were open to him, then the grounds of the army base, and finally back out into Vector.
Long walks proved difficult by the second day of the liquid diet, when his stomach rumbled, which was why he pushed on to do them anyway. He'd never gotten anywhere by giving up when things got difficult.
His walks took him down to the slums, up through the Dalemarket and Butcher's Row, through the stink of the slaughterhouses and the smoke-belching factory district and then—for contrast—through the sweeping avenues lined with flowershops and bakeries, where tailor's shingles swung in the breeze and people young and old sat out on wrought-iron furniture sipping coffee.
He felt distanced from them: not envious, not disdainful, just distanced. As if there was a pane of glass between him and the young couples flirting, the old men playing chess, the dogs tethered to outdoor seating and lolling happily in the sun. Once he might have sat down and tried to flirt a little himself, or wished he had the nerve to do so, but now he felt . . . nothing.
He was going to be different from them in a few days, after all. Really, genuinely different. And that was going to be wonderful. He didn't have to worry about being just one more face in the crowd.
On the beginning of the fourth day, Kefka reported to the Magitek facility, suffered the indignity of a cotton shift, and swung himself up onto the gurney. Not so much different than when he'd had his tonsils removed as a child, except that this gurney had leather straps at the sides and the foot of the bed.
He pointed this out to Cid, who nodded. "We've never done this to a human before, remember," he said. "You might have a seizure and do damage to yourself."
Or I might manifest the esper in a way you don't like, and attack you, Kefka thought. What he said was, "Well, I'm here, you might as well tie me down."
Cid raised an eyebrow, but took his proffered wrists and bound them to the edges of the bed, firm but not uncomfortably tight. And then his ankles, and then another band across his waist. "We're not using a general anesthetic because of possible interaction side-effects," he said briskly, "but if you feel any discomfort, I can give you something for the pain via IV."
"Which esper did you choose?"
Cid had his back to Kefka, rearranging things on a metal tray; Kefka heard each clink and clunk and slither of metal-on-metal distinctly. "Cait Sith," he said, and when he turned there was a hypodermic needle in his hands. "Now relax. This will pinch a bit."
It took three injections before Kefka felt anything besides the brief pinch of the needle, and even then all he felt was a curious feeling of chill in his veins, as though he had been injected with icewater. Three more and Cid said, "We're done." The whole of the procedure took no more than fifteen minutes.
"That's it?" Kefka asked, and was surprised to hear thickness in his voice, his tongue refusing to obey him.
"That's it. Rest there a while. I'll be monitoring your vitals for a bit longer."
"All right—" Kefka began, and then the icewater sensation in his veins turned suddenly to fire.
He arched and grimaced, but before he could even cry out the fire was gone, and in its place, hollowness, as if his blood had been burned out of him and left his veins empty. And in the hollowness, the voice of his own thoughts echoing down a long dark hallway.
He must have hated you very much, said the voice, to use me.
Kefka refused on principle to ask the clichéd question 'who are you?', so he locked his jaw and clenched his eyes against the darkness.
Or perhaps he didn't know what I was? No, that seems most likely. Who that knew us by our names, our natures, our personalities would bind us so? You are all ignorant. The voice sounded cheerful. No, gleeful. Why?
"I know that you're an esper," he whispered. "I know that with you I can become more powerful than any man living . . . ."
Is it the power you seek, truly? The voice drew closer, a soft shimmer near him, like the brush of fur. No, I don't think so, Kefka Palazzo.
"How do you—"
You think they can pour my essence into you without my knowing you, human creature? I see you from within. I know you. I will become you. I will wear you like a skin. You think you have won but you sought to cage the Stray Cat, and I will own you.
"I won't let you."
Oh, but you will. I know your secret, Palazzo-boy. I know what you truly want. It isn't power, is it?
"Shut up!"
You want to be unique. You want to be unusual. You want everyone to know who you are, and when you pass by on the street, you want them to whisper your name with awe and reverence. You want to be someone.
Kefka said nothing, because it was true, and the worst of it was that he could feel that Cait Sith knew it was true.
You're right that I'm your slave. I have to ride inside your body. I have to be reduced to nothing but—but disembodied power, at your bidding. But when you pour the otherworld into yourself, you must displace something of yourself. And—
And it was as though Kefka could feel something burning him from within and without, burning, tearing, breaking—
—and in the center of it, the loose-hipped swaying gait of an alleycat, an alleycat suddenly on hind legs and with intelligence in its eyes: intelligence as focused as a human's and yet cold, unforgiving, an alien mind within his own. Cait Sith. His esper.
And in the name of Kirin and Siren, said the cat, who you rode to their deaths and then discarded, in the name of Ramuh the Sage who you drove to exile, in the name of all my kin in your facility—Ifrit and Shiva and Maduin the Wise and Unicorn who never did anyone a day of harm, and more than I can count beyond that—that you torture to this day, in their name I will grant your wish, Kefka Palazzo, but I will grant it as you never desired. I will be you and change you, and the Stray Cat will scratch beneath your skin, and the faerie madness will take you, Kefka Palazzo, because you invited the enemy in and I am within you now, and when you pass by on the street they will whisper your name, they will whisper . . . .
And Kefka opened his mouth to scream, but the blackness swallowed him up, poured down his throat, stifled him so that all there was was a thin wheeze from his lungs like a laugh.
The white, white, white and echoing emptiness of the laboratory penetrated first through the fog; it was as though his whole head had been wrapped in gauze, muffling not only sight but sound and smell. Slowly the gauze unwrapped and he could hear someone saying, "Administer phenytoin serum, we need to stop the seizure." And then he drew a deep ragged breath, a long gasp that rasped air into his starving lungs, and felt hands holding him down.
Then Doctor Cid's voice, saying, "He's coming out of it. Kefka? Colonel Palazzo?"
Just a few hours ago he'd been Major Palazzo. Kefka smiled, and felt that his mouth was sore. From what?
Screaming, said a voice in his head. An echo, a faint fragment, but he could see behind his eyes the black-and-white cat, the tricky tracery of paws, the bright unforgiving yellow of his eyes.
"I'm all right," he said, though his voice was hoarse.
"You had a seizure. We didn't expect that. Your vitals seem to be stable now, but." He straightened to his full short height. "How are you?"
"I'm all right," he said. "I'm as well as can be expected, I suppose." And then he laughed.
But the laugh didn't come out quite right. It started high, eerily high, and descended through a serried range of donkey's brays that made Doctor Cid and his nurses step back.
Kefka kept from clapping a hand over his traitor mouth, but it was a close thing.
Welcome to the life you've invited, Cait Sith said.