Rain poured down in ropes and threads, hammering over the roof of the car, cascading down the sides, over the windows, to the mud below, around the struggling wheels, turning in the sludge of earth, of thick soil and thicker foliage. Mouth dry and head pounding, Pariston opened his window and stretched his arm out to the rain, catching the warm torrent in the palm of his hand. The soft fabric of his shirt stuck to his arm and back. He unbuttoned his collar.
The world outside was so green and foggy and wet.
A faint rosy hue adorned Cheadle's cheeks, the sweat of her sternum printed on her shirt, lips dry. She ran her tongue over them, again and again. Hair stuck to the sides of her face, she pushed it away.
It's been three days since they left the settlement.
As promised, Pariston had delivered the coveted plants from Dotti's garden to Twen. He exchanged them with the old scientist for a jar of blue jam and an apology—and he tried to make it as sincere as possible, and worked particularly on the cadence of his remorse. Dotti accepted both, yet held onto the right to remain suspicious and unwelcoming, but that was none of Pariston's business.
And as promised, Twen began fixing and preparing the car. He had accepted the plants with a kind of begrudging gratitude and childish petulance. His rushed, hushed 'thanks' was a delight to Pariston's ears.
Somehow, during the past days, as he and Cheadle prepared to leave the settlement, he had managed to sustain a budding, mutually beneficial 'friendship' not only with Twen, but with Dal, too.
It was an exclusive, covert, unofficial boy club, and although Pariston wouldn't go as far as to claim he started it—even though he did—he nonetheless enjoyed the right to call himself a distinguished member, not because he was particularly important but because he was the outsider slowly worming his way in. The two men had obviously been desiring something of this sort, the casual company of other guys—not other soldiers, for Twen, and not other scientists, for Dal. They wanted to hang out and talk shit, and Pariston caught on to that. The two enjoyed it more because they thought Cheadle was unaware of their little nightly meetups, where they gathered on the roof to smoke and chat. To them, Pariston was onto this shared, boyish resistance. And he was, to an extent. He liked it. That wasn't an act. Twen and Dal were still full of secrets, and they still talked, even with each other, behind a hundred veils, and Pariston was perfectly fine with that. Moreover, he loved the guessing game.
Markov was, interestingly, on the fringes of this club. The short, tousled man, with his erratic gaze and nervous smile appeared little interested in spending time with them. He was distant, and not only because Cheadle kept him busy. Pariston had seen him several times with Twen, although Markov seemed to dislike the latter's company in the presence of others, and Pariston could understand that—Whenever alone, Twen had a different flavor; a less aggressive, less combative attitude, a periphery gentleness, even, the kind often performed out of sight. When his crew of pulpy half-wits wasn't around, Twen was less inclined to buff his chest and play predator, less inclined to draw out his claws and bare his fangs. Markov sought that, and when it wasn't available he simply retreated.
The other soldiers didn't like that Twen was close with the scientists, and lately they didn't like that he was 'collaborating' with the new arrivals, especially after the bath incident.
To them, Twen was accepting subjugation. That could very well be it, but Pariston didn't care. Those soldiers couldn't even glance at him or Cheadle anymore without looking away nervously, and that only made them more hostile. But to Pariston, Twen only wanted to survive, and in order to survive one has to align themselves with the powerful, and after the little harassment debacle, it seemed Twen recognized who held more power in the settlement, suddenly embarrassed by the posse to which he previously proudly belonged. It took him some time to accept it, begrudgingly, and now even when he spoke of Cheadle he did so with less outward antagonism and more caution.
Pariston didn't care either way. He felt strangely safe and content, secure where he stood and excited about what's ahead.
Before leaving, under a fledgling metal awning in Twen's junkyard, Pariston stood, enjoying the mild chill of the morning rain. Inside, Twen was affixing a newly-cleaned, high-powered solar panel to the car, fingers blackened with grease, perspiration glistening on his forehead, the large scar on his chin more prominent now that his face was tinted with the pink of concentrated labor. It was hot inside the shed, and thin streams of sweat gathered at the man's elbows in little drops, falling to his jeans. He sighed, wiped his forehead, fought against glancing at the entrance, gave himself to the small parts of his work.
Pariston was openly and unceremoniously disallowed entrance to the shed. It's one thing to have found the roof weed garden and hang out there, another to enter this other private domain. Twen can't lock the stairs to the roof but he can lock this shed, and he made it clear that nobody was welcome here, the one thing that truly belonged to him in any sense of the word, so Pariston had no choice but to stand outside and watch.
Everybody in the settlement knew where they were going. Cheadle had been transparent about it, and Pariston knew that he hadn't really overestimated her ability to maintain peace. Relations had softened and everyone talked with a little more trust and faith. Cheadle said that Ging Freecs could help, and that she needed to scout the geographical range around the settlement to collect vital data that will help in learning more about the virus. Her theory was strange and strangely plausible, but there was yet to be any concrete evidence and for that she reserved the right to elaborate further.
The two of them have been exchanging all sorts of information, except for one single thing that Pariston decided to withhold from her. It felt more exciting to keep it a secret. For now.
When she gathered the scientists once again and showed them the scraps of paper containing that fungus experiment, Dal—whom he expected to say something—said nothing, his face remaining amiably impassive. Only Sulei said she knew about the experiment. It was possible that it wasn't the same experiment of 'last summer' which Dal mentioned so flippantly on the roof, and it was possible that the papers don't really belong to Clarence Coll, and possible, too, that the whole file was simply red herring. Cheadle already considered the latter two but knew nothing about the first possibility, because he hadn't told her about what he'd heard and the dots he subsequently connected.
Pariston wanted her trust because he wanted his nen and equal footing, but he also wanted the trust of Dal. For what, exactly, he still didn't know. Things like these usually revealed themselves later.
It will be fun to see this one thread unravel.
After days' hassle of preparation and planning and discussing arrangements, both of them were now, on their journey towards Ging, feverishly silent. The world outside the car's windows prompted a kind of serene reverence, a kind of quiet contemplation. They still weren't very far from the settlement, still somewhat close to a modicum of civilization, still driving on land previously trekked. There were clear footpaths and roads among trees, subtle signs that spoke of human visitation, but the farther inside the forests they ventured the clearer it became why people feared leaving the settlement, why so many flocked to it while others disappeared inside the entrails of this land.
The forests here devour pride, and devour the solitary, and everywhere he glanced a disease could be lurking, maybe the very disease which invaded the settlement. In his breast pocket, Pariston felt for the three joints Twen had given him. He didn't even have to tilt his head down or pull one out to smell it. He could tell it was powerful. Twen initially wanted to give him only one but Pariston asked for two more, and two more weren't free.
"Want one?" He asked Cheadle, his voice sounding louder at the sudden stop of rainfall.
"I assumed you were keeping them for later."
"We can always pass one between the three of us."
She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. "Where do you hope it will lead you, this 'friendship' with Twen?"
Pariston shrugged. "Somewhere interesting."
He doesn't like us very much."
"But he will." He said, watching as her attention shifted from him to something outside. She brought the car to a careful if sudden stop. "What is it?"
But Cheadle was already walking out of the car and into a nearby dark groove where a swarm of yellow flies was hovering. Pariston followed suit, but remained at the door on the other side. She squatted down, pulling her shirt over her mouth and nose, her body obscuring whatever lay at her feet. Her sudden intrusion into this funnel caused the flies to scatter about, spreading a very particular stench.
It was a dead animal.
She jogged back to the car, opened the trunk and hauled up her huge backpack. Gloves, vials, special ziplock bags, syringes, blades.
"Is it safe to deal with a corpse like that?"
"No," she said, pulling down her collar to wear an actual mask. Gloved and masked but still largely exposed, she returned to that dark spot with brisk steps. "Close the window."
"Need any help?"
"No. Get in the car, and don't move."
Pariston rolled the window up, stayed outside.
She must've cut the animal open. A heavy, overbearing, sour odor filled the air. The hoard of yellow flies buzzed frantically, seemingly multiplying in their frenzy, their big abdomens round and spotted, wings gray and large; robbed momentarily of their prey, they drilled the air around the car, more clearly noticeable against the vehicle's black surface, appearing everywhere Pariston looked. They were nasty and aggressive, they hovered dangerously around Cheadle's body, and if not for the spilled blood of an already claimed meal they would have attacked the two of them. He didn't move a finger.
The spotted yellow fly was a somewhat familiar sight. An indigenous, abundant species that could be found everywhere on the continent, and fed on everything from decaying wood and rotting flesh to live, breathing intruders. Seeing them around was a good sign, and their absence—along with the absence of all other animals and critters—around the settlement was remarkable.
One fly beat its wings close to his head, one zipped by his face, many settled on the car, rubbing their smelly limbs together. Every single one of them could bite. The females especially were aggressive and constantly hungry. "Cheadle?"
"A minute."
These insects could be disease carriers. They could be reservoir hosts. Their bites were painful and long-lasting, under the best of circumstances.
"They took over the car." He called out again. One landed on his hand. It crawled between his thumb and forefinger.
"I'm almost done!"
He could feel one in the strands of his hair.
When she finally stood up, a hundred flies revved their wings around her, flying madly about, in a collective craze, the wave that started with the ones around her ebbing all the way to the flies on the car. Together, they sounded like a flaming engine ready to explode.
To avoid aggravating them any further, Cheadle made her way back to the car slowly, her bloody samples in one hand, the other holding a vial containing some captured flies. Now that competition retreated, the flies calmed down, scattering around them, flying back to their meal. Pariston got back inside.
With a long sigh, Cheadle entered the car through the backseat. That's where they kept a package for Ging along with their bags, and a freezer tank he suspected was a nen construct. Something like intestines was in that bag she put there. Her gloves were bloodied. Carefully she took them off along with the mask and put them in a tightly zipped bag.
"What was it?" He asked, watching her pull herself back to the driver seat.
"A vole of some kind. It was mangled so I couldn't tell for sure." She said, turning her arm and pulling up her sleeve to reveal a couple bites around the inside of her elbow.
Pariston cupped her elbow and brought her arm closer to inspect the bites. "You're hurt."
"Yeah, they were more aggressive than I remember." She said, her arm uncomfortably, awkwardly unfurled under Pariston's eyes. "We should get going."
"Wasn't there a balm for it?"
"There is, but I don't have it." Cheadle said, taking back her arm from his grip, restarting the engine. The heat of the bites began spreading. "It's not dangerous, I've been bitten by them before."
"Let's switch places, I'll drive."
She glared at him. "I'm not incapacitated."
"They're going to get worse," Pariston reminded her. "Maybe Ging will have something for them."
Cheadle let out a frustrated sigh. "Let's get there first and then we'll see."
At first, when he told her about the ship in the forest, the one he saw from the roof if he focused hard enough in the right direction, she wasn't entirely convinced. Ging must live close enough to the settlement if he could come and go frequently, she gave him that, and had agreed that a ship permanently dry-docked so deep inside land and this far from the shore could, reasonably, appeal enough for Ging to inhabit, but there were no confirmations he was there and getting lost inside the endless forests of the Dark Continent in futile pursuit of Pariston's hunch was the last thing she wanted, yet she continued driving, suspecting that at some point they might have to give up the car. The deeper inside the forest they ventured the harder it was to drive, and despite exposure to predators and the elements, she believed it was safer, faster, and much less conspicuous to move on foot.
Cheadle hadn't been in the field for a long time, and regardless of all dangers outside the walls of the settlement, and despite her uncertainty about Pariston's directions and the vague map he drew her, she was excited. Observing fauna and flora, gathering samples, compiling as much data as possible, tracing a pathogen's journey through its carriers to its hosts, trying to discern its life cycle, it was rigorous work and essential to her job, and she loved every bit of it. Staying in the settlement was never going to be enough, and relying on the information the residents there gave her won't matter if she ultimately failed to follow the pathogen right where it starts.
It was dawn when they set out, the sky still a deep indigo, blooming amid cold drizzle. Sulei had accompanied them outside to see them off, and so did Hima, Markov, and Twen. Sulei asked why just the two of them, why not take a whole team, and there was a kind of shaky hope in her eyes, her flaxen hair catching faint light, and the expressions on the others' faces suggested an expectation of that sort, but Cheadle said three were enough, and she believed that, all circumstances considered. Bringing other scientists along would only hinder them. No need to expend precious resources. Three Hunters—no, two—were enough for now. Besides, she needed them here. Markov was close to finishing the refugees' profiles and studying the samples, while Hima has succeeded in keeping the parasitic fetus alive and well, and Sulei promised—in her own way and with cryptic words—to seek the lost journal and missing papers of Clarence Coll.
It was growing hotter as the hour approached afternoon, the car sputtering and jittering on marshy terrain, the sky above blocked by towering trees and sprawling branches. Surrounded by glistening green, clothes stuck to their bodies, the deeper they drove the less faith she had in this vehicle's capabilities.
The rain which had stopped for an hour returned once again, first a sprinkle then a downpour, drowning out the already meager sounds of hiding wildlife. Her arm stung and she felt it growing heavy, the skin around the bites swelling and reddening. It itched and pulsed. Another hour and it will become numb. A couple hours later it will fill with puss and blood and she'll have to drain it. That was the good scenario. The bad scenario would be that the spotted yellow fly has become a reservoir host or carrier either of the infectious agent she was hunting or of some other unknown pathogen.
Nevertheless, it was somewhat reassuring to see animals and insects through the road; birds hopping away from rain, taking shelter in their nests among branches and leaves; hives, burrows, trunk cavities. Still, she couldn't stop the car and lure one of these creatures every time she saw one. The only reason she had stopped for that vole was the fact that it was dead in a region bereft of its natural predators. It wasn't prey but roadkill, falling on the ground unclaimed by any alleged hunter. In times like these specifically, Cheadle wished for a large team, people who could spread out in a specified geographical region and capture animals for study, a well-equipped group to hasten the work and lessen the load, but the absence of this was her mistake and for that she preferred not to dwell on it.
"Are you sure you don't want me to drive?" Pariston asked, eyeing the swollen crook of her elbow.
"Neither of us will drive in a minute," she said. "We're going to leave the car."
"Where?"
"Here," Cheadle pointed to a small natural clearing ahead that appeared to have been previously inhabited by some primates. Behind that clearing was an impasse, a jagged hill of fallen trees and mud and dead leaves. No car could drive up that. She looked at him. "Let's hope you're not wrong about our destination."
Pariston smiled awkwardly. "I might totally be wrong."
"Ah, joy." She brought the car to a stop under a bent tree.
The forest was quieter in this corner, or perhaps it was the car's engine that had nestled in her ears like that, and with its sudden absence the world expanded sideways and closed vertically on them. The sky was nothing but an extension of the earth under their feet, and like that time when she drove through Langres to Pariston's villa, Cheadle sensed that same omnipresence, had that same feeling of being watched and observed, except this time it wasn't the result of dread and pressing anxiety, not entirely, but something more palpable and tactile, as if suddenly she was aware how deep inside the forest she was and how far away, on either side, other humans were, and she could touch this very thought. She only had Pariston for company.
When she glanced at him, he was having the exact same feeling, but she didn't know that.
"I'll carry your bag for you." Pariston offered once they opened the trunk and backseat doors. He took out his bag first. "What's in this package, by the way?" He asked, hauling out the big wrapped box meant for Ging.
"A whiff of civilization."
Her right arm by now completely limp and useless, numb and aching at the same time, Cheadle strapped the freezer tank to her waist and shoulders, contently complying with his offer to carry basically everything else.
With everything out of the car, the two left it under the tree and began their long, slippery climb up the hill. It was like a quagmire had risen and coalesced and formed a large protrusion in the earth, and one wrong footstep meant sinking down in the mud. Nothing they passed didn't stick to them, and the higher they walked the trickier the terrain. Along the way she picked up a tall, fallen twig and inspected with it all the peculiar, grassy small holes they passed. They were depressions in the earth of varying circumferences and depths, most were shallow and filled with natural debris, spaced about randomly with no clear pattern. She wondered what they would look like from above, if she glanced down at them. Her eyes sought the massive canopy of branches over their heads, the little gray patches of sky peeking through, the rain droplets bouncing off leaves. A bird shrieked. She felt tiny.
Behind her Pariston was walking slowly, mapping his way through the mud and among the scattered holes, his arms disappearing under all the stuff he was carrying, damp hair stuck to his forehead. He felt her gaze and looked up. "How's your arm?"
"I don't know," Cheadle said, digging her twig in the soil of an elevated ledge. "The physical response so far is normal, par for the course."
"Do you think it might be worse than that?"
"It could be infected, yeah," she replied. "But it's too soon to know for sure, if it were the case." Then she snorted, and found herself stopping to wait for him. "Are you worried I'll pass it on to you?"
Pariston caught up to her, and stepped closer to readjust the slipped strap of her bag over her shoulder. "I'm worried you'll get sick and die."
"Is that so?"
"I think about it every day, since we arrived here."
She rolled her eyes. "Joyfully, no doubt."
"Not at all," Pariston chuckled. "Your death will reduce my chances of survival by more than half. I can't really risk losing you. You're a virus Hunter, so I do ultimately benefit from being with you in this situation."
If something occurred, if Cheadle was to die by any means, Pariston won't only have less of a chance to survive a possible infection, but will also never retrieve his nen from her, which no doubt haunted him more. It would be gone forever, dissipating with her own body, her own nen, and perhaps this was her primary wall of defense against him. His aura was her hostage, and she knew he would do anything—was already doing everything—to get it back.
The nen-sapping, inscribed metal of which the ankle monitor was made was still a somewhat novel technology by the time she decided to deploy it. Even years after their discovery, nobody really knew for sure the mechanism by which they worked, or their potential drawbacks for the people involved. Not enough research was done to study the material and anything beyond its immediate effects; you were hard-pressed to find a Hunter or any nen user willing to subject themselves to voluntary nen loss, but it was nevertheless very appealing, and tempting, as a punishment. A soft, scrupulous kind of violence she approved of using and ended up inflicting on both of them.
"Besides, didn't Gregory say the virus is everywhere?" Pariston continued, smiling at her. "Believe it or not, I find that reassuring for some reason. It's all equal chance, and luck." He fell silent for a moment, his eyes scouting the road ahead. They were close to the top of the hill. "We're not any safer in the settlement than here, or elsewhere."
"A virus is never everywhere, because it can't survive anywhere." Cheadle countered. "It's true that any number of these creatures could be suspect," she pointed up at two flitting redstarlings hiding among branches, at a camouflaged reptile that flashed a bright yellow before disappearing again, at a hive of ant-eating wasps circling a peeling tree bark. "There are reservoir hosts and carriers and transmission routes and all these form a complex cycle; it could feel like a virus is omnipresent, but it's not the case. Wildlife absence around the settlement is strange, and it might be connected to the virus or a number of causes, and I need them for any further research, but regardless, I don't think the words of a dying person should be taken at face value."
"Do you regret it, killing her?"
Cheadle stopped. Her first instinct was to argue about his choice of words. No, she didn't kill Gregory but simply eased her death, helped her pass away, medically assisted in her suicide. It didn't matter. She could say she didn't think about it, but she did, and when Pariston asks whether she regrets it he doesn't mean the regret of an immoral action but the regret of willing relinquishment of a vital study subject, for, debatably, moral reasons.
Does she regret not wringing a dying person suffering under a horrible affliction of every last bit of information?
"No."
It might turn out to be a bad decision, and it wasn't easy to make, but she had felt responsible, specifically, for Gregory's condition. Every choice she'd made in the past decade seemed to coalesce in this one person, all the mistakes and missteps and strategy flaws, from sending a bunch of civilian convicts to the most dangerous place on the planet to coming here, alone with no assisting team and no proper equipment, with Pariston Hill, in a selfish move of what increasingly seemed to her like an unconscious but somehow premeditated act of self-annihilation.
Pariston didn't know that, but freeing an international criminal condemned to house imprisonment and bringing him along on an unauthorized trip to the Dark Continent wasn't the only law she broke. In a way, she sensed, strongly, after what she's done, that being here was safer than on mainland, and that, regardless of what happened to them here in the continent, neither she nor Pariston would be able to go back. Perhaps Ever.
For both of them now, a return would mean facing criminal prosecution. And really, in such a case she would have no defense. Humanitarian reasons? Then why only herself and the man she locked up? Why go save people nobody cared about, people she had specifically chosen because nobody cared about them? The mission here was a front for more lucrative business, for safer investments, to maintain land claim, to preserve funding and support. The world at large had forgotten about the scientists here and didn't care, and three weeks ago Cheadle, too, didn't care, but now she did. Terribly so.
"I don't regret it." She said, but it was a whisper.
III
Finally, out of the thick green canopy and out in the open where rain had stopped falling, they reached the peak, and stood with heaving chests, overlooking the sprawling forest of gigantic red, flowering, poisonous dogwood that unraveled under the parting clouds overhead. The sun was melting down, a hazy golden eye staring right at them, casting droplets of pale oranges and pinks at the land below. It was breathtaking.
"Do you see it?" Pariston asked, lifting up his arm to point at a peak in the distance.
It was far away, its rustic, metallic color mingling with the red of the trees and camouflaged by them, and if one squinted hard enough to make out the form it encompassed, something akin to a merchant vessel took shape—a large ship, upturned, leaning forward, jutting up the sky at a nearly 50-degree angle, so conspicuous it was easy to miss.
From this distance, and perhaps at the distance from which Pariston had first noticed it, it did seem like just part of the natural landscape. He looked at Cheadle and smiled widely. "Who would've thought Ging would become a pirate."
She rolled her eyes, even though, admittedly, the idea was pretty cool. "It's a cruise ship. Docked inside land no less and not properly at that. We don't even know if he's there."
"We have to dream big, Cheadle."
"Fuck off," she groaned. "You can't even afford to say that."
"I'm an optimistic person," Pariston said, nonplussed, taking the lead this time around, his golden hair a warm orange under the sunset. "And you're just excited."
She didn't reply to that. Another hour or a half and they'll be there, by this ship. With careful steps she followed Pariston down the hill. Only the forest of brilliant red stood ahead.
Home to a species of symbiotic root ants, this relatively small Dark Continent dogwood forest was pristine and well-maintained thanks to these small creatures. Those trees were much more fragile than what initially appears, and could only survive among their kind, weak at supping and storing resources, easily overtaken and preyed upon by animals and other plants; the root ants helped by destroying any encroachers, especially other plants, having developed a collective immunity to the otherwise poisonous fruits, thereby ensuring the forest as their turf.
Everything around them was begging to be touched; the small, fuzzy leaves, the blood-red bark, the ant colonies swarming under their feet, but this ecosystem was widespread on the continent and one of the firsts to be studied. Cheadle had taken saplings back with her to the mainland, but as with everything else they shipped along, the trees traveled all the way only to die. Now, she found a small joy in seeing them again.
Step after step, the leaning ship was coming into full view.
It was a relatively small luxury ocean liner, steel hull peeling and rusting, the foremost of its three black funnels broken, grimy, foggy portholes lining sturdy steel plates, and everything past the watch bridge was buried underground, where it seemed the ship was either being slowly devoured by the earth or squeezed out from its depths; the vines and ivies which sprouted from the soil to crawl and creep over the ship's hull were in flowering season, little pinwheels of yellow and purple blooming over the metal ruins.
Weakly, stubbornly, the ocean liner held onto its name with faded letters. The Sea Cherry .
The ship was of old design, the origin and private owner of which Pariston recognized almost instantly.
"So that's where Orta Ritwik ended up." He said, excited, turning to her with a huge smile, caught something tangible of a world that's passed him only on TV.
Cheadle's eyes passed over the old letters, recalling the meager, sketchy details of a disastrous 'nowhere voyage' that had left mainland about two years after the pioneering Black Whale trip, taken, puportedly, by a handful of world elites aboard the private cruiser of Orta Ritwik, an Iwanese billionaire and the owner of multiple companies specializing in the manufacture of the latest emerging security technologies, and hundreds of stocks and assets in various industries.
Last anyone knew of that man's latest venture was that the ship had simply disappeared, along with all its passengers, somewhere in the ocean between Aiza and the Dark Continent. Scouting aircrafts couldn't find the smallest traces of the ocean liner, and even satellite cameras caught nothing. The Sea Cherry had vanished completely.
Pariston's eyes were filled with a menacing kind of glee, eating up the ship as it leaned over them, delighted at a hundred different things that rushed at him all at once, but mostly at the sight of a relic which once belonged to an old business rival. He had probably seen and heard the news about this mysterious disappearance on TV while the prisoner of his home.
Orta Ritwik had lobbied hard to attend Pariston's trial. He was denied.
"Do you know that Ritwik couldn't play poker at all," he said, stopping for Cheadle to catch up. "so he used to sit at the table and have his teenage son feed him moves and tactics through a hidden earpiece."
"Did you ever play with him?"
Pariston hummed. "Of course, I fed his gambling addiction for years." He let out a wistful sigh. "He owed me millions, but alas."
That was true. A whole legal team, of which she was a member, had to handle Pariston's finances and business legacy in the months leading up to his trial. He himself owed people exorbitant amounts of money, having nonchalantly left behind a mind-bogglingly impressive trail of unresolved civil cases, unaddressed lawsuits, and a whole class of frustrated, angry lawyers. Many of his confiscated properties, owned temporarily by the Association, were sold to pay off his numerous debts and keep away the business rivals who yawed around the Association to feed off the juicy crumbs of Pariston Hill's empire.
"I used to have brunch with his wife all the time, too." He said with a coy smile, the sincere ruefulness of his tone implying they were some good old friends of his that he's simply lost contact with and not the vicious monsters they were.
"What did you do with his wife?" Before the question was even done slipping out of her mouth, Cheadle wanted to swallow it back, regretting the very thought. It was the wrong question to ask. Why did she even care what Pariston did with Ritwik's equally wealthy, equally unscrupulous wife? It was Cheadle herself, after all, who had to deal with the insane meltdown of his business relations. She knew more about that than she ever imagined she would.
Pariston laughed. "It was an innocent friendship, I swear." A gleam nestled in his eyes. "Do you think their ghosts haunt the ship?"
"I hope they haunt you, you absolute ghoul."
The colorful paper trails he left behind spoke of an adrenaline junkie saved only marginally by pre-existing wealth but mostly by a bottomless well of cunning and charisma.
Pariston was rich, richer than most Hunters, certainly richer than her and Ging. He was rich in a way normal people couldn't even begin to fathom, but nothing in all the history she dug up told of basic greed. He didn't care. He poured money into everything he liked, madly infatuated and self-destructively reckless, bought things and sold them at a nearly equal rate, had no specific interest in any enterprise and dipped his toes into almost all fields, from fashion design and real estate to international pharmaceutical trade and sketchy tourism companies. Fraud, art forgery, money laundering, pyramid schemes. Obscure boutiques, picaresque seaside hotels, island resorts—it was thrilling and maddening to hold onto the tail of this wild animal and let it drag you through a universe of absurdity and senselessness.
Before all that, before the trial and everything leading up to it, Cheadle knew he had a separate life composed of civilian pleasures, but was hardly aware just how far and wide Pariston's non-Hunter world extended. He had an entirely different existence, and interestingly but not surprisingly, a whole slew of scorned, vindictive, disillusioned, equally irrational lovers who had managed—in guile and luck and in some miraculous force of cosmic protection—to enter Pariston's world this intimately and stay alive to talk about it.
A con artist and a madman, he was fascinating, inimitable, and sinking so thoroughly, for months and months, in the idiosyncrasies of his universe was dangerous and toxically titillating.
In comparison to that, this ship looming over them felt completely, utterly insignificant, except that truly, and as Pariston said, Ging was, indeed, up there.
He stood on the ship's bow, looking down at them.
"Yo!"
"A lovely home you have there!" Pariston called.
"I know."
"Where's the red carpet?"
With a loud, booming clangor, Ging unfurled a ladder that swung down perpendicular to the ship and slammed the ground underneath, kicking up dirt. A bunch of birds shrieked and then fell silent.
"Climb up, suckers."
Pariston stopped to let her go first, offering her a little courteous bow and a restrained smile. There was a kind of curiosity and giddiness in being here; it was so different from the long, never ending hallways and closed walls of the settlement.
Up on the lopsided deck, Pariston, feet firmly on the wood, put down their bags. "Cheadle is hurt."
She glared at him. "It's nothing, just a yellow fly bite."
"Where?" Ging asked, searching her with his eyes to find the damage. Cheadle shook her right shoulder, the only part of her bitten arm that she was able to move. Ging took a step closer to her and grabbed her arm to pull up her sleeve, making a face at the reddened, swollen flesh, at the white residue in the crook of her elbow. She still felt his hand even after he let go. "Yeah, I have something for it. Come on. Watch your steps."
He walked ahead, down, in sprints and slides, towards the once-glorious, grand, branching staircase with a mechanical moving lid that connected the deck to the uppermost floor below and which was now open, the low-hanging sun setting the golden staircase balusters aglitter, pushing against the ends of dark shadows concealing what appeared like a carpeted bar and lounge, managing to light up a large, dusty space empty of couches, chairs and tables that seemed to extend all the way down to the stem of the ship, bigger at this unnatural angle.
Pariston stood beside her on the woozy deck, atop the staircase, looking down at the abandoned lounge. "I hope you've prepared nice rooms for us."
"Heh,"
"Are we going to be sleeping in balcony cabins?" Pariston insisted, following Ging down the golden stairs. "Bunk beds?"
"Hammocks." Cheadle said.
"Suites." Ging said, hearing their prancing on this jagged road of a staircase. It was a little strange, to have company here, to hear sounds made not by animals or plants but by other people, and as always with cases like these, a little part of him regretted their presence.
Ging rarely wandered this area, mostly confining himself to the second deck where he had worked the hardest to revive this ship. It was large, and if he wanted any kind of order he needed to limit his moving range. Besides, he didn't actually spend much time here, or maybe he spent too much time that even the briefest of outings felt like a long journey.
"You've re-architectured the whole ship, didn't you?" Cheadle asked from somewhere behind him, her voice echoing through the empty lounge, and when he turned to them he saw her hand trailing the right-sided, curved wooden bar, all shelves behind it pristine but empty, back to its initial state after he fixed them, before stocking and refurbishment.
"Not everything," Ging admitted, stopping once he realized they were interested in the space around them, splitting left and right to look around, their boots leaving dirt marks on the fuzzy green carpet. His toes sunk into the loose tendrils of it.
"Did you empty it?" Pariston asked, still toting bags over his shoulders.
"Only the furniture."
"And the glassware, the booze?"
Ging smirked. "They took most of it with them."
"You mean the surviving passengers?" Cheadle asked.
"Possibly, or raiders." Ging said. "I found it like this."
Pariston hummed, looking up at the round windows that let in a faint orange light, at the big, tilting chandelier. "I hope they didn't take everything."
"There's still enough alcohol on this ship to inebriate a herd of Iwanese elephants." Ging said.
Pariston's face lit up. "Didn't see any of them, perchance?"
"Could have," he replied to the laden question, knowing whom the other man was referring to. "There's more people here than you'd think."
"Did you have contact with any of them?" Cheadle asked, already accusatory.
He turned to her. "What kind of contact?"
"The physical kind."
"Physical how?"
She pinned him with a look. "The kind that could transmit deadly disease, Ging."
"I've interacted with dozens of people, I don't know. That's why you're here."
Cheadle stopped. "So you might be infected?"
"Do you think I could be?"
"Do you think you could be?"
Ging grimaced. "I know you're gonna try to examine me whether I want to or not."
"Correct."
"You'll find out then."
She groaned. "Why do you have to make things harder than they have to be?"
"You're the one who always makes things harder than they have to be." Ging countered, turning away from her. She was going to say something but she swallowed it, lapsing into begrudging silence the rest of the way. Pariston was way behind them, quietly enjoying their bickering as he toured leisurely around the lounge.
Did she want him to lie sick on the ground, begging her to help him? There was a certain methodology he acknowledged about her work, and knew that to her he was infected until scientifically proven not, which was reasonable enough. Ging did need a medical checkup one way or the other; he didn't actually know if he was infected or not, and he wouldn't have asked them to come here if the answer was positive; he would've rode it out like he did most other infections he acquired through the years, but he also suspected this one was something else entirely, if the things he saw were anything to go by. He had survived infectious illnesses before, diseases that killed hundreds of others, some wide-spread, some highly localized where he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but back then his body was more resilient, his ability to beat back sickness stronger, and despite all efforts and pretenses, it wasn't like that anymore.
Did Cheadle sense that? Each time he glanced at her she looked away.
"So, what's on the itinerary today?" Pariston asked once they crossed to the other end of the main lounge, this time descending another set of branching staircases that led down to the second deck, where with a couple flicks the whole deck lit up.
"Food and rest." Ging said, standing under the golden chandeliers that hung low, heavy and elaborate, lining the ceiling of a sizable, straightened, red and gold carpeted floor of the second deck's common hall. Doors lined the walls around them, and the other two took a minute to adjust to the change in walking angle. Suddenly with normal ground under them, they just stopped.
"How long have you been working on this?" Pariston asked, peeking inside an open door. The room was a modest cabin, filled with junk.
Ging shrugged, continuing ahead to the rooms he had for them. "Three, four years. I don't remember."
"By yourself?"
"Do you see anyone else here?" Pariston came to a stop beside him in front of a red wooden door. Ging opened it. "Yours."
The two of them entered the suite, and he stood back, letting Pariston walk farther in where he finally let go of all the bags he was carrying, heaving a long sigh as he straightened up and looked around, measuring the room with his eyes, strolling over to the big, sprawling jacuzzi balcony that would have overlooked the open sea in better circumstances, but which now hung over a batch of red dogwood trees. Pariston moved around, appraising the suite with an incredulous look.
"You didn't change anything?" He asked, bending over the silk bed sheets, inspecting the texture between his fingers.
"Nope, still the same furniture and bedding, just cleaned and dusted."
Pariston shook his head in disappointment, allowing himself to gingerly sit on the bed. "What a cheap man."
"Who, the billionaire?"
"You take them under your wing, you raise them, you shower them with all the luxury the world has to offer, and then they grow up to have shit taste." Pariston sighed, hands on knees, rueful. "Look at this color," he pointed to the sheets. "I'm embarrassed for him."
Ging didn't know what was wrong with the color. It looked fine to him.
When he started working on reconstructing and restoring the ship, the cabins and rooms didn't interest him much, mostly because they were left by their occupants, besides almost turning upside down, pretty much intact. Anything that slid or fell off to break did; TVs, mirrors, statues—he'd worked on those, too, fixing what he could, shuffled their placements but didn't make any grand changes. The bigger rooms, the common halls and lounges, the inner swimming pool area, the theater, the dance hall, those were what he had his eyes on. Converted to workshops and archives, they were more useful to him. He only up-righted the floors of cabins and suites and kitchens to preserve the structural integrity with the rest of the decks. And because he was bored and desperately needed a side project to occupy him and his every waking moment.
He glanced behind his back at the door. Cheadle was out of sight.
"How's the settlement?"
Pariston got off the bed to continue inspecting the suite, heard Ging's question but waited a moment to answer as he entered the bathroom. "It's great, I love it." His voice echoed out, perky and playful. He grabbed a couple things, put them down. "I hope you didn't have to wait long for us to come."
"Nah, I'm fine." Ging wasn't expecting them to come this early, anyway.
"There's no toilet paper in here." Pariston said, peeking his head out of the bathroom.
"There're towels."
Pariston slunk back into the bathroom. "It's pretty spacious. Is there running water?"
"Not consistently."
Pariston stepped out of the bathroom again, whole this time. "Pardon?"
"Depends on whether the fresh water generator wants to work or if I feel like fixing it." Ging said, shrugging. "The ship still has a supply of clean water, but the distiller breaks constantly, and so does the heater; the ship is far away from seawater, and to fill the tanks I have to manually pump water from the nearest river, so," he gave Pariston a look. "Washing in said nearest river is less trouble."
"But there's water now, I hope?" Pariston asked, pushing his sticky hair back. His shirt was stuck to his chest and back, the veins on his arms standing out from dehydration, his long fingers bonier than Ging remembered them, his legs skinnier. He still looked the same, in the fading light clawing inside the room, encumbered by couches and tables and a water bearer statue that looked different in shadows.
"Yeah, there is."
In the darkness of the settlement room, Pariston was all skin, less of him than there was before.
"I'm going in then," Pariston smiled, started unbuttoning his shirt, sat down to take off his shoes, unzip his pants. "You can join."
They never showered together. Or did they? Ging couldn't remember. They never had that kind of thing. He didn't feel like it.
There was a medicine cabinet in the suite, tucked behind a curtain. He took a small bottle and a roll of gauze out of it.
"I'll go find Cheadle."
He caught a glimpse of Pariston's naked butt before the man disappeared inside the bathroom, leaving the door open. "Right, she brought a package for you. It's on the floor. The blue one." Water started. "I brought you a little thing as well, but that's for later."
Ging looked at the package, sealed tightly among the bags and heavy kit, taciturn between them. He left the room.
The hallway outside was long and empty, silent but for the distant, muffled sound of falling water, like it was dripping right under his feet. Cheadle wasn't around, but her bags were, dropped at the doorway of an opened room.
He stepped in, soundlessly, the room draped in fading blue, the white, round carpet darker in the dissipating light. She was on the balcony, her back to him behind a glass door she had enough mind to close.
The floor creaked under him, and his foot caught on a shirt chucked carelessly on the floor. He picked it up, put it on the nearest chair, knew she could sense his presence before he tapped on the glass. She only offered him a half-turn, then went back to viewing the expanse of forest engulfing the balcony.
"How did you know this was your room?" He asked, sliding the door open, walking to stand beside her over the railing.
Cheadle shrugged. "I didn't. It just smelled lived."
"Quite a view, huh?"
"It is," she said. "I prefer it to the ocean, at least."
Then they fell into silence, neither relenting to talk first. He snuck glances at her, at the slight downturn of her lips, the forefinger tapping gently, rhythmically, on the railing, the withdrawn look in her eyes. Clad in a sleeveless undershirt, he could see the freckles condensed over her bare shoulders and sparse farther down so that he could count the ones around her wrists. The bite marks on the crook of her left elbow were whitening and oozing.
"Here, for your arm." He took the small bottle of salve out of his pocket, made to alleviate pain and swelling, and gave it to her. "It'll sting."
Cheadle took the bottle from his hand, still forlorn and reticent. With a peck of her nen, she opened the little sacks of putrid blood that had bubbled on her skin. Ging handed her a piece of the gauze to wipe them off. "How did it happen?"
"Cutting open a mangled animal's carcass."
Sufficiently drained, she dipped her fingers in the salve and tapped it over the little punctures.
"What's upsetting you?" He asked, watching her wrap the wound with the rest of the gauze.
Her throat exhausted a half-hearted chuckle before it was even out. "Don't ask me that. Where's Pariston?"
"Taking a shower."
She sighed. "I should take one too,"
"You can sleep first," Ging said. "You look like shit."
"Thanks, but no."
Ging turned around, resting his elbows on the railing, his back to the sudden gust of hot wind that blew their way. "How's everything in the settlement? Did you find something?"
"A flesh-eating pathogen, a deformed stomach fetus, a seemingly magical tree, and a bunch of papers I can't make sense of," she said, sighing to the trees around them. "It's a lot of work, and everywhere I look is a mystery I can't solve. People there don't like me very much."
"Why would they?"
Cheadle snorted. "Yeah, I know."
"I was surprised, that you came here on your own," Ging admitted, his gaze turning from the darkening room in front of him to the last bits of light reflected in her hair. "I imagined you'd be bringing a team for a situation like this."
She frowned. "And I imagined you'd still have at least some of your own team members with you."
"I'm by myself now." Ging said, didn't address her attempt at deflection. The room behind the glass turned completely dark, only a column of orange light from the hallway seeped through the door crack.
Cheadle looked at him, the mean contortion of her face gone, leaving only a soft frown. "What happened to them?"
"Some died, but most of them just disappeared," he said, remembering the last time he went out to search for them alone and came back alone. "They have the same problem in the settlement, right?"
Cheadle nodded. "The majority of their team was lost to unexplained disappearances. People just vanished; they'd leave the settlement never to return, leaving no traces behind." She looked away from him, back to the trees and dimming sky. "They wanted me to search for them. I said it's not worth it."
And she wasn't wrong at that, Ging thought. He knew the settlement had no people and no resources to spare, and dealing with a viral outbreak on top of that. He himself had tried, for years, consistently, and nothing ever came up—not a piece of cloth, of hair, no footsteps or abandoned encampments. It was like none of his teammates had ever stepped foot on the continent. Only him trekking the wilderness, barely material.
"What's that you said about a fetus?" He asked, because it sounded familiar.
"Are we gonna talk about Gregory first?" Cheadle fixed her eyes on him, like she was trying to incriminate him of something he was yet to say. "Because I found that fetus inside her."
Ging stared back at her, almost certain what she was implying. "I have nothing to do with that thing, if that's what you're wondering."
"They said she had a lover, outside the settlement."
Ging squared his shoulders defensively. "It wasn't me."
"Do you know who it was, then?"
"No," he said. "and I don't think there was one."
She sighed glumly in the face of his resolute answer. He wasn't lying, not entirely. He did know Gregory for a prolonged period of time, sometimes intimately, and they had a mutually beneficial, openly opportunistic relationship; he guided her through the forests in her research stints and she supplied him with the latest discoveries in her field at the settlement. And they had fucked, several times, before her illness, or so he believed until a couple months earlier.
Ging had suspected her intentions from the beginning, and came to quickly confirm her dishonesty. She was smart but erratic, temperamental, selfish, uncooperative and easily distracted, which didn't make her a very good scientist, but would have made her a good Hunter. When he said as much, the resentment in her eyes told him all he needed to know.
She was ashamed of their meetings, and her sense of belonging to the settlement was shaken every time she asked for his help. Gregory had several connections in the settlement that seemed to matter a great deal to her but which she couldn't maintain, a thing—he now thought—they unconsciously bonded over. He had led her in circles for months, gauging her out, realizing that at one point she was coming to him not because she was searching for something, but escaping from something, and then, gradually, her sudden appearances became few and far between, and after a while he stopped seeing her altogether.
Until the strange night of floods and crying children and crazy people in the woods that brought him back to the settlement for the first time in years, Gregory had disappeared out of his life.
He looked at Cheadle's despondent face. He should have contacted her earlier.
"Did you have any physical contact with Gregory?" She asked.
There was no point in lying about this. The case transcended the personal. "I did, yeah."
At least he didn't have to state outright it was sexual. Cheadle already knew.
"And when you visited her in the ward, did you stay protected?"
"Yeah."
"Did you know she was sick during your hookups?"
"I guessed she was. She didn't say anything about it." Ging answered, the image of a healthy Gregory muddier in his mind than her last months of deterioration and wasting, lesser with each subsequent visit.
"Did you know this fetus existed inside her?"
"Not until you mentioned it," Ging said, honestly. "I think I know what it is. I've seen a couple cases like it before, with animals."
This seemed to interest her. "What animals?"
"Redback elks, as far as I know." Ging said. "I believe they might be on the verge of extinction."
Where once they were abundant in the region, redback elks began diminishing in numbers with each passing season. Fierce but sketchy, massive but astonishingly nimble, the redback elk wasn't the animal that fascinated him the most in the Dark Continent, but certainly one of the most beautiful. Ging saw less and less of them each year until he could count the remaining ones on the fingers of his hands.
Only one remained, at least around here; a female elk that came and went alone, more a phantasm than a real creature, an approximation of a once flourishing species, like a ghost, and Ging couldn't catch her. He couldn't even find her. This specific elk was his secret, and knowing Cheadle will ask him to track them for research purposes, he found himself holding even tighter onto it.
Ging sensed that if he set out to find this specific animal, she will disappear forever. He had decided a while back to simply let her come to him whenever she pleases.
"Is Pariston still showering?" Cheadle suddenly asked, turning towards the room.
Ging wondered what kind of dynamic those two had going on this time. He had noted from the moment they stepped on the upper deck and close enough to him that they smelled more alike than the last time he saw them. It wasn't just the soap they were probably forced to share with the rest of the settlement's inhabitants, but a certain proximity, an enforced closeness, he imagined, where neither really left the other's side for too long.
Obviously Cheadle wasn't comfortable letting him out of sight, and Pariston was remarkably adaptable, if it meant his survival. Besides, he had little choice in the matter, even when it seemed he did—Cheadle had a certain kind of control over him in a way that most people will never know or understand. The shackles tight around both their ankles weren't lost on Ging, and under the ring of inscribed metal he could glimpse burns that circled their skin, shaped like the little prison where both languished.
He wasn't there for the trial but he was there for most things that preceded it, and specifically when the nen-sapping metal was suggested as a long-term punishment. He said it was a bad idea, then, and still believed that. Little studied and fundamentally vile, Pariston was a perfect primary test subject, except to turn him into one Cheadle had to become one herself, first.
Ging didn't know what might happen when Pariston got back his nen—and he was going to get it back—but it's been a curiosity of his for a long time. What damage will they both incur? Will the retrieved nen even be the same? Will Cheadle's nen alter in any significant way? Was it already altered?
What kind of void filled Pariston's being, without his nen?
When they left the room to see what he's up to, they found him on the bed. Hair still wet, back rising and falling softly, a pillow between his thighs, sprawled naked on his stomach, Pariston was in a deep, tropical sleep.
"You've been working him a lot, I bet." Ging said, standing with her at the suite's door, watching Pariston's body mired in shadows. What a view.
Cheadle scoffed quietly, and he noticed her making a concerted effort not to glance Pariston's way. "He 's been working me." She stepped closer and stared him right in the eyes. "His presence is psychological torture, Ging."
He couldn't help finding that amusing. "Why?"
"Because . Everything." She hissed, flailing her arms. "I can't stop thinking one day I'll wake up from my sleep to find him hovering over me with a knife to my throat."
Ging gazed at Pariston then back at her. "You think he wants revenge?"
"Of course he wants revenge," she said, frowning. "As soon as I give him back his nen he'll stop playing nice, and when that happens I'll have to deal with it alone because fuck knows where you might be by then."
"You don't have to give him back his nen." He said, and observed the subtle changes in her expression, the way her gaze flitted for a second, her lips closed. She had already considered that.
It took Cheadle a moment to say anything.
"I gave him my word."
Ging shrugged. "Then you'll have to deal with the consequences."
"I know." She whispered, her gaze downcast.
His eyes traced the gilded edges of the carpet, illuminated by the hallway light. "I thought this could be an opportunity for you two to get closer." Ging himself didn't know how serious he was about this. The thought was a little funny.
"Stop with these mini social experiments of yours, please," Cheadle swallowed a sound between a laugh and a groan. "No amount of hardships in the world will make me bond with Pariston."
"Why didn't you kill him then?"
"Because it would've made me as bad as him." Cheadle said. "It would've meant I'm just like him."
To her this was the truth, or at least the truth she wanted to believe, and Ging believed her belief in it. A long time from now, he will ask her the same question again, and she will give him a different, perhaps more honest answer. But for now, he didn't argue.
"He said you brought a package for me."
"Yeah," Cheadle said, pointing with a feeble finger to the blue box on the floor. "I take it you haven't opened it yet."
Ging walked to the package and picked it up, then both of them walked quietly away from the room and towards Cheadle's, where he flicked a couple ceiling fixtures to light up the dark suite. He put the box on the ground and sat down with it between his legs.
"Gon sent you something." Cheadle said, sitting down as well, the box between them. He noticed her gaze flickering between the package and his left leg, and now Ging not only dreaded what Gon might have sent but also that she has already noticed what's wrong with him.
As he started opening the box, she didn't say anything about it.
Ging saw what seemed like a lot of clothes. He looked up at her incredulously. "These are from Gon?"
She pushed back her glasses, less to adjust them and more because she was suddenly self-conscious. "No. These are from me."
Ging smirked. "Underwear?"
"Among other things," she said, defensively. "I'm frankly surprised you're not running around in a loincloth."
"My balls would slip right out of it; it would be really uncomfortable."
"And potentially scarring to every unfortunate animal in the vicinity."
Ging chuckled. "Yeah."
She smiled. "I thought 'what would I need if I were alone for years on what amounts to an isolated island?' and I figured it would be clean underwear," she said. "But again, there was a very strong chance that you're perfectly happy running naked in the mountains."
"I did do that."
She tilted her head, unsurprised.
Ging continued to unpack the box, pulling out a toothbrush, an electric razor, a big hairbrush. He grabbed the latter, wooden and heavy with sharp, thick teeth, and then he felt a rush of awkwardness and shyness at knowing it was a really good type for his hair. Cheadle seemed to feel it, too.
"Is this too much?" She asked, chuckling, reaching for some of the items he pulled out then deciding to leave them. "It is too much, isn't it? I mean, I thought you'd need them. You do need them, if I'm completely honest, but you don't have to use them, but it would be great if you did."
He put the brush down beside him. "I won't use them if you make it weird."
"Make it weird?" Cheadle winced back. "You 're weird. This whole situation is weird. I'm not making anything weird; if anything, I'm bringing a modicum of normalcy to your world."
"Cheadle, you're making it weird."
She groaned and stood up. "You know what, I don't care." She walked briskly to the doorway where she left her bag and started pulling clothes out of it. "I'm gonna take a shower, and by the time I'm done you better not be here, because maybe I too would love to sleep naked on a king-sized bed, so, you know, just not to make anything 'weird'."
Ging followed her with his eyes as she strutted about the room like a concussed ant, flitting from corner to corner in search of towels and a place to put her clothes and her bag and the fluffy cushion she'd picked up for no reason and then forgot why and where to return it.
"Cheadle."
"What?"
"Thank you," he said, smiling. "I appreciate it."
She stopped at the bathroom door, her arms saddled with clothes she probably didn't even need and one towel too many. She nodded, a little less incensed. "I'm examining you tonight, so prepare yourself, and a clean room," she said. "And you better be honest about what happened to your leg, too."
The sound of the bathroom door shutting behind her echoed through the room. The mention of his leg made it hurt, as if it consciously responded to the acknowledgment of its injury. Where was Cheadle even going to start with that? Ging himself hasn't looked at it in a while.
Even after she went in, it took him a while to leave the room, still sitting in front of the box, strewn around him all the things she brought him—smelling of her, of her apartment—and at the bottom of the box was a single thing that didn't look like the others, and he was unsure whether to open it now or not, whether to open it at all.
From the appearance of it, it seemed Gon sent him an album, or a scrapbook, wrapped in a peculiar way and with a kind of paper that told him Cheadle had probably received it unwrapped, opened it and then wrapped it in a way as to make it appear pristine and untouched. She did a pretty good job, and that was precisely what gave her little curiosity away. Either that or his son had gotten absurdly good at gift wrapping.
Ging didn't open it, he only returned everything to the box and hauled it up over his shoulder. "Meet me down at the third deck when you're done."
A muffled 'okay' came from under water.
Barely here for an hour and Ging was already feeling this place louder than it's ever been.
III
Pariston woke up in complete darkness to a bone-crunching, tears-inducing headache. The incessant pulsing of it drove him out of slumber and with his eyes open to black, it took him a second to realize he wasn't sleeping anymore. He stayed on the bed, regulating his breathing, his limbs heavy, sticky, separate from him, dragging his body down, his head a boulder he couldn't lift off the pillow.
They had closed the door on him, for one reason or another. The room was vast and featureless, and he felt that the bed itself was untethered, floating somewhere above ground, and if he were to swing his feet off it they would hang in the air. How long had he been sleeping? He only remembered almost falling asleep in the shower.
For the first time in over a month he woke up to a room empty of Cheadle, and apparently his head wasn't thankful at all for that.
He propped himself up, taking with him the edge of the sheet that stuck to his chest, then he sat up upright, the grating heaviness in his body slowly shifting to a feathery, tingling translucence.
The habit of reaching for a phone upon waking up had been sucked out of him years ago so that when his arm unconsciously reached for the nightstand his whole body jolted. Slowly, a little removed, he dragged his hand back to his side. Maybe it had to do with the hotelesque experience of being in a room aboard a cruise ship.
Pariston parted his lips, opened his mouth wide, yawned himself into being. If he manages to forget about it, and if he's lucky, the headache will go away on its own in an hour or two.
In the darkness, he searched for a light to turn on or a door to open. Finally his fingers landed on a light switch that turned on the soft orange lamp of a huge walk-in closet; it beckoned him like a secret passage, and Pariston was only too disappointed to see it bereft of any clothes. There weren't even any hangers and no indications that there was ever anything in it.
He stood on his toes to reach the high upper shelves and passed his hands over them. Also nothing. Pariston moved down, tapping the upright wood boards, touching the other ends with the tips of his middle fingers, scraping his nails in the spaces between the shelves and the timber behind them.
Then, just when he was about to let it go, a board came off.
A dark, inky stairway appeared before him, leading down.
Pariston smiled. Of course Ging wouldn't have fixed and redesigned the ship without adding some hidden pathways. Deciding to leave this little discovery for another time, he returned the board to its place and walked out in search for his bag.
He might as well fill this empty closet with his own stuff.
III