XV.
Luther's invitation hovered in the air, a bubble about to burst.
The light guttering from the fire cast long, haggard shadows behind Gordon. Dancing silhouettes stretched across the walls. Though a distance of less than several meters separated them, the empty shrill ringing from outside the cave suggested more.
Faint streams spilled from his nostrils. Looking without sight, his sclera glistened a milky white glass.
Had it not been for his small shudders of life, Alyx might have remained inert forever. Dread smothered the hopeful flicker threatening to spark within her ribcage. They balanced on a precarious edge; one false move would dissipate him, return him to snow and shadows. And yet, instinct compelled her to test his verisimilitude just as she had done in the crevasse. She needed to prove he was not another ghost to be exorcised.
Weightless steps carried her furtively across the gap. The closer she approached, the clearer the blood caked to his skin grew. Part of his earlobe was torn. Black flecks coated jowls and a sharp protrusion of cheekbone. Opposite his cranial scar; wrong side.
The softest whisper might thaw him, but only if she dared. They weren't in the observation room, after all, where coma locked his brain inside fever dreams of the Citadel. If she so desired, she could indulge an entirely selfish compulsion to lure him back to the present moment and watch awareness fill his murky gaze. Show me you're alive in there.
Alyx braced his cheek in her good hand. The smatter there had cooled, leaving behind dried plates that cracked as his jaw shifted, peeling like an old coat of paint. He molted, shedding encrusted skin for fresher flesh.
Unspoken questions brimmed. What hurt you? What are you running from? We've all got things chasing us, Gordon. Not much sense in leaving.
And then she heard it, a murmur emerging into salience.
ttery power is
seven perc
"It's good to see you again, Gordon." Mossman's placid greeting broke the reverie. Hands tucked, she smiled up at him, a touch of melancholy, if not nostalgia, tinged in her voice. "Well, no, not quite. I'd probably see more of you if I stood on the other side."
Judith's glimpse of amicability encouraged Barney to follow. "Yeah, Gord. Really ain't much of a party here without ya." Stooping to grab the fallen crowbar, he brushed the frost clinging to the nicks and offered the battered weapon to its rightful owner. Seconds' worth of pause gave him reason to reconsider. "On second thought, maybe I oughta hang onto it for a little while."
Luther, however, was decidedly less patient. "Come, Freeman." He gestured toward the fire, uncurling one knobby finger at the ebbing core.
The sound of their voices replenished a small measure of vitality in Gordon. He beheld each of his allies with haunted eyes, as though branding their faces to memory. Icy, pale lips moved in an aborted attempt at speech.
Terrible foreboding pricked her skin.
Speak.
Tell him everything.
Now's the time. Confess. Tell him what brought him here. How you uphold your father's lies in silent, self-righteous complicity.
Look at him. He's terrified. Some part of him knows just as well as you do how alien, how wrong, how displaced this is. Chained in service to your worthless, bloodsucking life.
Nausea flickered deep inside her. If the contract her father signed had been a written document, he'd have found it easy to nullify. Paperwork could be hidden, burnt, shredded. Files, deleted. One's word offered little in the way of substance.
Blood, the most ancient means of swearing oath. No covenant more binding existed than blood.
Grave stillness having settled over him, he pulled her in, gripping her nape. They exchanged no words, but the rattle of their synchronous breath spoke volumes. After releasing her, he walked toward the fire and knelt, head bowed, before an implacable ring of Vortigaunts.
A cold gust stirred the flames and sent up a flurry of white cinders. The shower had yet to fully dissolve when Luther snapped his neck.
Screams. Too many voices. Sound and fury trembled the cave to its bones.
Alyx? Mossman gripped her bad arm before diving into a disjointed stream of consciousness. Alyx oh Christ why did they—
"Blind your eyes."
y power is six perce
"Deafen your ears."
Barney hurled the crowbar at Luther, where it bounced off bloodied talons clutching chunks of auburn hair and clattered a thunderous roar. "Fuck you," he screamed, throat cracking on vicious syllables, "fuck you!"
"T'charr."
"Such hateful deceit, wearing Freeman's face."
"You sorry sons of bitches—"
Alyx—
"It will exploit any hole in your heart."
"—fucking butchers—"
"Shut it out."
"—he did nothing to you—"
"Do not permit it passage!"
"—nothing! No, don't give me that bullshit! Just shut your dirty lying mouths—
Alyx! Do something!
"Persist!"
"—and go to hell!"
"Already the human has fallen for its tricks."
"We cannot feed it more blood," Dushan said. "We must end this now."
Called to his bleak craft, Luther pulled. There came a tearing, a meatlike ripping. Mossman clapped a hand over her mouth. The fire flared a little higher, a little hotter.
"You bastards!"
Struggle. Guttural Vortigese battled human expletives.
She winced. The cacophony rendered rationality a difficult task. Caught in a stupor, she watched Barney tear a path through the Vortigaunts, crash into the corpse and shake it, wailing animalistic noises she hadn't thought possible. The dam had finally burst. Contorted by pain, he embraced the HEV and buried himself in the shoulder's gnarled mesh.
Gordon. The abject manner in which he moaned his friend's name, a sob tarred in pitch-black despair, sparked the humanity that shock heretofore repressed. A spasmic clench squeezed her throat, then another, and another, until the mechanical contractions brought moisture rimming to her corneas.
ery power is
five perc
Sour odors contaminated the air.
She expected a watery blink to wash this nightmare clean. If she waited another moment or two, she'd find slumbering faces huddled around the fire.
No such thing happened. This was reality. Concrete. Unyielding. The Vortigaunts simply let Barney curse them out until his throat ran dry.
Confusion and stress turned Mossman's hyperventilation into congested coughs. Alyx gripped her clammy hand to steady her while Luther retreated from the body, stained from his brutal work. Neither asked the obvious. His reticence said enough.
Another harrowing scream from Barney disrupted the mourning process. Slathered in blood, the HEV clamped onto his forecep, tightening against his thrashing blows. Get it off me, he shouted while the perpetrators he condemned mere moments ago rushed in to help, get it off—
The Vortigaunts extricated the body, untangling the two, and rolled it onto its side, leaving its potential victim to shake. Barney rebuked further attempts at placation like a panicked animal and scrambled against the cave wall, racked by explosive spasms of diaphragm.
Yet, it seemed, the suit obeyed no whims but its own. Stiffly it extended its right arm and grasped a crag in the floor. Metal and ice conspired to utter an abrasive moan.
Undaunted, Luther snarled die, you persistent scum and planted a foot onto the small of the back, pinning the rest to the ground. A stopgap measure at best, it did little to dissuade the limbs from probing the ankles of its captor. The ring of Vortigaunts congregated around the body once more, this time flux shifting a grim overlapping chorus.
Following the initial stab of horror, Barney's gagging weakened, as did his resolve. The strength in his legs evaporated; buckled calves lowered him to a kneel. Oh, God. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.
"I think," Mossman said, "I've seen this before." They dwelled in stunned silence as the Vortigaunts grappled with the blind creature, constraining its appendages. "In the cave, after I struck the match, it found me. Every moment of pain and terror it had experienced, branded into my mind like a glowing hot coal." Her voice grew weak and brittle. "But if that's true… " One hand rose to her cheek, tremulous fingertips webbed in the pus she couldn't stop weeping. "Then… Wallace… "
Confronted by a starkly inhuman presence, Barney sought anchor in the nearest human. Their petty grudges no longer mattered. In that moment the bad blood dissolved, replaced by a dire yearning for normalcy. He grabbed Alyx and pulled her down.
The world faded in the darkness of rough wool, a skein stretched over a pounding heart. Tattered breaths pulsed erratically against her ear.
"Don't look." Barney's whisper tread the thin edge of terror. He jerked his coat over her as her mother had done in her last living moments, spoke words her father offered before the end took him. "Just a bad dream." Proof to the contrary wafted up in the slapping and scratching of metal on ice. He juddered, pushed her head down. Don't surrender your innocence. Better to feign deprivation of the senses than acknowledge what lurks just beyond their membranes. "Close your eyes. It's just—"
"Relinquish Freeman," Luther hissed, summoning energy, "or suckle our young on the milk of your blood. Pass on!"
er is four percent. Coolant detected in pneu
Barney slumped to the ground, taking with him their flimsy veneer of shelter.
Everyone—Vortigaunts, Luther, Barney, Mossman—sprawled in a scattered ring around the cave, loosely orbiting the bright epicenter. Dim green cords extended from their unconscious bodies. Akin to dew gliding down a spiderweb, clots of light oozed toward the HEV's hollow cavity, pushed along the tendrils by equally slow breath.
Knelt before the pulpit in an indefinable worship, the hazard suit cast her necklace into the fire.
As silver filigree bubbled, the pendant crumbled, exposing the garnet oystered inside. Once flames tasted Xen, they shone supernova. A burst of oversaturated color flooded the cave, bright enough that Alyx shielded herself with a forearm. But just for a flicker. Renewed, the cleansed fire emitted a sterile dazzle.
The suit thrust its empty cavity into the forge it had prepared. The attached cords scorched, slithering back to their point of origin.
With the hazard suit bowed in obeisance, the cords gradually stitched together a primitive tapestry of a spine and its attendant nerve endings. From them emerged the brain stem, a cerebellum, a limbic system and pituitary glands. The growing gray mass first bloomed into the right hemisphere, then the left.
The threads splintered into finer ends which proceeded to spread outward. Neural oscillation. Skeleton. Musculature. Circulation. Thin pockets of subcutaneous fat and cartilage, deft creases knit together by invisible hands. Each layer comprising a human being methodically wove atop the other until the shifting flesh began to resemble him.
As the sole witness to the process, she grew aware of her heart as an errant creature, beating hard enough to burst. The physiological signs were there, yet she hovered in a strange place removed from fear. The neural connections necessary for terror had drowned in cortisol and adrenaline: because of it, a shroud of calm draped over anesthetized flesh, numbing everything, even the cold.
Slowly, the HEV withdrew. What masqueraded as a human being emerged with cinders in its hair.
Taking the leisure of sitting upright, the body bearing Gordon's face pursed his lips and exhaled a long pillar of smoke.
It gave her a grin besmirched with soot.
"You'll have to do better than that."
