Unwelcome light beamed into Cheadle's eyes, even when she stood far away from it. Sunlight swept a path through the hallway, rolling over every shaded corner. How faded this place appeared, like she could grind the very walls to powder by passing her hand over them repeatedly, the aggressive song playing in her earbuds through her MP3 player spurring her further on to imagine this slow collapse.
She hadn't slept well at all last night, forgoing their room and returning down to the lab to continue working, eventually falling asleep with her head on a desk. Right now she was waiting for Pariston to show up, her mind replaying scenes of Sulei stabbing the parasitic creature with her knife, over and over again, intermingled with what she witnessed last night in their room, and so it was that everybody in that room was being stabbed, including herself.
The little lab incident of yesterday had pissed Cheadle more as the night progressed, and as she remained close to said creature in its little container, seemingly unaffected, still unharmed in its shapelessness. There was a calculated carelessness about it, and it was, as Cheadle thought, a performance. A mindful scientist—and Sulei was one, because Cheadle knew the woman's history—would never purposely damage a valuable specimen like that.
From the left end of the hallway Pariston appeared, and she could hear his sunny 'good morning' before he even said it. She turned off the music and stuffed the earphones in her pocket.
"Good morning!"
Yeah. "Pariston,"
Apparently he had the time to comb his hair and dress well. Vested, his button-up shirt cuffed elegantly, his leather shoes gleaming.
"Had a good night, I presume."
He smiled. "I did, which reminds me that you didn't spend the night in our room."
"I was working in the lab."
"Oh, well, I hope you don't mind, but I slept on your bed."
"I don't mind at all." Cheadle said, stepping away from the wall to start walking. "In fact, I think you should sleep on it from now on, Pariston."
His smile grew bigger. "That's really kind of you, but I'm not going to take it. We agreed it's yours, after all."
"Did we?" She murmured, but he didn't seem to hear her. Instead, he asked what she was listening to. "Nothing. Did you get anywhere with that kid yesterday?"
"Oh, Sam. Yeah, he told me his name." Pariston added when she looked at him, strolling beside her with his hands clasped behind his back. "I wouldn't say I gathered any useful information about him, but he was quite forthcoming and willing to converse with me. I think I should establish some trust before diving further."
Cheadle nodded. "Did he say if he knew any of the other kids?"
"No, but I could ask him." Pariston said. "He seemed quite independent of them. Absolutely grew up in mainland. Although I couldn't place his accent; he wasn't speaking very naturally."
That interested her. "What makes you think that he grew up on mainland?"
Pariston shrugged. "I don't know, something about his attitude. How do I put it? He just seemed to me like a kid who's held a smartphone in his life."
"Touched by modernity, you mean?"
"Exactly. You shouldn't underestimate that." He said jovially. "I found him personable and smart in a contemporary kind of way. His age suggests he was born in mainland, anyway, unless he was somehow born in the Dark Continent before the expedition, which is very unlikely. As to the period of time he's spent here, I don't think he himself is even sure."
Cheadle hummed. "So, a couple years?"
"That's what I'm thinking."
"Maybe he's arrived with an independent group. Did he mention any parents?"
"No, he didn't." Pariston said. "Let's say he was esoteric on the subject."
"Esoteric?"
"Yeah, fancies himself a son of nature, which I believe supports my theory that he was neither born in the Dark Continent nor spent a long time in it."
"Sheltered, not sufficiently traumatized?"
Pariston chuckled. "Yeah. He didn't seem to care much about parents or such. Said he was sick before arriving at the settlement and has at some point lost all sensation in his body."
Cheadle nodded. "I want you to keep talking to him, and others as well." She looked at him. "Can I trust you with that?"
"Of course, children take well to me."
"Good."
They walked towards the ground floor, and Cheadle was content to see that people no longer roamed the hallways. They were observing the quarantine, albeit reluctantly. People still went out of their rooms for food and baths, but there was no huddling and no groups to be seen, although she knew the soldiers had their own way of communicating with one another. They were nonchalantly belligerent and gingerly cooperative, and only because the settlement was the safest place for them to be. Cheadle thought they would be more difficult to convince, but it seemed that her arrival here had made the danger they only tangentially experienced real. They congregated like a pack of wolves, but they were, perhaps, the most scared here.
"So," Pariston started. "Where did you say we were going?"
"To professor Steis's 'little farm'."
"Dotti?"
"Him."
"You don't seem very excited."
"I'm not."
Pariston chuckled. "He's really pushy. I'd fear for your life if you didn't accept his invite."
She rolled her eyes. "He's an outcast here. The others don't seem to like him very much or regard him highly."
"Which would make his opinion more valuable?"
"Different, for sure."
The man was different, and that interested Cheadle, for whatever it's worth. He was, for one, significantly older than the rest, which perhaps contributed to his estrangement from his team members. Cheadle was beginning to see the various, interconnected webs that held them together, the people they were close to and the ones they didn't like very much, but Dotti's circle appeared to include only himself, and he had a tendency to disappear and creep away from any gathering (after insisting, yet again, that she visit his working space.)
And here they were, finally, where Dotti Steis had carved a little space for himself, and it was, she had to admit, beautiful. She could imagine, too, why he made it hard to reach and seemed strangely possessive of it.
A wall facing south was knocked down along with a portion of the ceiling, and replaced with a large, sprawling canopy of lush, vivid green that left fluttering shades on the ground. Along the walls were placed pots brimming with exotic flowers, purples and blues and blood red, long-stemmed and budding, waxy and papery, the kinds found nearby and faraway from here. Some, even, she was surprised to see, were indigenous to regions of mainland.
It was a little garden overflowing with what she guessed were years worth of work, and even though it was humble and even primitive in contrast, it reminded her, fondly, of the Association's greenhouse. She couldn't imagine it as the result of solely individual effort, yet it was Dotti alone who greeted them, surprised, stepping out of a side door where the elation on his face changed to something lesser once he saw that there were two of them. He didn't bother to hide his disappointment at seeing Pariston with her, but he nonetheless offered a generous welcoming, gazing rapidly around him as if to humbly point their attention at all that he's made and cultivated.
"You finally came, it's such a surprise, really." Dotti said, taking a step too wide for his short legs, falling eagerly on Cheadle's hand to shake it. "It's a pleasure to have you here, it really is. I've been waiting for you, to tell the truth."
The man shook her hand vigorously. She didn't want to be rude. "I love the gardenias."
Dotti smiled awkwardly, beaming, his eyes wide, shooting a back glance at a lone pot where mainland white gardenias were growing in a beautiful arch. His wild black eyes darted back to her. "Very like you, doctor."
Then he took the opportunity to hide his embarrassment by inviting them inside his office, a childish spring in his feet as he ushered them in, eagerly, reverently hunched—for them or the place into which he was letting them, she didn't know.
As they walked through the door, Dotti skipping ahead, Pariston shared a wily smile with her. "Twen for me, Dotti for you," he said, quietly, dreamily. "Are we finally going to find love here, Cheadle?"
"Your giddiness disturbs me."
"Oh, but they're just our type!" He whined further, sampling the next words in his mouth before saying them. "Repressed. Crazed."
Cheadle chuckled despite herself. "What's with you and Twen anyway? Are you even attracted to him or does he just smell like somebody you can manipulate?"
"I wouldn't say 'attracted'," Pariston hummed, giving this way too much thought. "I am simply intrigued by Twen."
Dotti turned to them, and remained silent for dramatic effect as he finally walked them inside yet another spacey room, one filled with nothing but saplings—small, young trees each alone in a pot of dark soil sporting a sign that catalogued its features and 'list of treatments'. Some of their thin trunks were bent in strange directions, others were simply rootstocks with no shoots, malleable, row, all frozen in a state of adolescence.
They did not appear to be struggling for life. They did not appear alive at all.
"You've done all this by yourself?" Cheadle asked, impressed, wandering the narrow pathways between the pots, bending down to read the smudged handwriting covering one sign. 'Ar-Ca-034, industrial well ', it read.
"Most definitely not." Dotti replied, following her with his fervent gaze. "This is, in fact, a project I shared with the dear late Clarence. He built these rooms with me and we worked on the first trees, the ones right there, at the back, as you can see." He said, walking urgently towards those trees as if pointing wasn't enough. He stood beside them, his posture not any better than the misshapen saplings he gazed at adoringly as they doubled over in some kind of pain. "I favored them with a special place. Evidently, they do not favor me back." And he let out that weird giggle of his, a sound that made him simultaneously fascinating and repulsive.
Cheadle looked at the two young trees, and at first gaze it was difficult to tell whether they were real or plastic. Their wood was smooth to the touch, and they sported dark, waxy green leaves, some of which were yellow and spotted. She rubbed one between her fingers. "You were close with professor Clarence?"
"I would like to believe so, yes." Dotti said, caressing a weak branch, lifting it up like one lifts the old skin on their eyelid to see it without wrinkles. It sagged. "Clarence was very dear to me, special, I'd say, and we worked quite well together. Truly an extraordinary man; his loss was devastating. To me, at least." His expression turned to unconcealed contempt. "Most of the others here, they are young and careless, as I have thought, as I have believed from the beginning, really, they have not proven differently. Petty, they don't possess a modicum of scientific spirit. Taking all these strange children in, all of them were on it, I was the only one who objected."
"You did?"
"I mean, not all of them, but most, surely." He said, reigning down on his zealousness. "Sulei was with me, however, she was with me. A good woman, and she is the leader, supposedly, not very good, I'd say, and yet. It is such things I mean when I criticize them." He went on, discomfited by any gaze that lasted a second too long on anything. He looked over Cheadle's head, even when he addressed her directly. "It is why I'm so elated with your presence. Very sincerely."
Her eyes met Pariston's, and if anything he seemed quite elated, too, abandoning her to this man's frantic whimsy, strolling among the trees, hands behind his back, his figure towering over the saplings as he bent down to smell them, even in the absence of any flowers. Did he miss the garden he left behind, she wondered.
"I'd love to know your opinion on the recent events here, professor Dotti." She said, walking alongside the old scientist when he gingerly abandoned his post beside the two special trees, murmuring an urgent plea for her to call him 'please, just Dotti'. To egg him on further, she added: "I too am of the opinion that the refugees should not have been let into the settlement. Neither the soldiers."
The man let out an excited huff of air. "Precisely my point, dear, precisely my point, and I said as much, then. This is a research facility, not a camp for the displaced." He said in frustration, unconsciously following Pariston's trail. "I do not say this out of any heartlessness, believe me; I'm soft, my wife used to say, but there is something to be said about protocol. Clarence would have agreed with me, surely."
Cheadle bent down to read another sign. 'Ar-Ca-012, Lake Harkenburg '.
"And the infection?" She asked. "Do you believe it came with the children?"
"I have no doubt about it." Dotti said confidently. "They arrived here already diseased; something or the other they picked up from outside and carried over. I have smartly maintained distance, as you can see now, I work here all the time alone."
She nodded. "But they came in three waves, as I've been told. Were they all diseased, too?"
Dotti mulled over the question, turning abruptly to free his shirt from a passing branch. "I would say the first wave. They were the largest in terms of numbers, if memory serves me correctly. Very many of them, all about the same size and age, too, I noticed. Like a perfect crop."
"Crop?"
"Yes, yes," he smiled, and the two of them finally arrived where Pariston had stopped, which startled Dotti for a moment, his eyes taking Pariston's tall figure in, as if having forgotten that he was present at all. "Like a beautiful crop of cherries, for miles, every cherry a twin of its sisters."
Pariston stared back at the man, seemingly amused at the scientist's wistful gaze that found itself in Pariston's. Dotti looked away, displeased with whatever he saw reflecting his cherry orchard back at him.
"So I take it you had no personal contact with them of any kind?"
"I did not, true." Dotti said. "I observed them at their arrival, but retreated when my objections fell on deaf ears."
Yet another sign. 'Ar-Ca-09, Lake Urm' .
"Are they all the same tree?"
"Yes."
The tree to which the sign belonged had a strange bluish tinge in the fumbling veins of its trunk. It looked sturdier than most others, but it only sprouted sharp, leafless branches.
"I have been attempting, for years, to throw as many variables as possible into the growth process." Dotti said. "All that you see are plum scions grafted in multiple ways into a variety of flowering, fruit-producing indigenous trees, watered from different sources, but none have worked quite well. All except one."
Dotti's voice fell a notch, for the drama of it, and he clapped his hands suddenly. "I want to show you my baby. My daughter. A chimera." He declared, teetering on the edge of everything he wanted to reveal, lost as to which path to take among his trees. "Everyone has focused on ground vegetables and such, but Clarence and I looked up, towards trees, towards fruit."
Finally out of the maze of pots, he led them with slow, slinking steps to a room with a small, tightly-closed entrance. Dotti fumbled with the lock, and when the door opened with a metallic creak it opened to darkness with no clear dimensions.
"It's well known that all attempts to domesticate the continent's plants on mainland have failed, but not the other way around, although the latter with some difficulty, but I believe I have reached a successful formula."
And then, with a click, he lit up the room.
A vibrant, surreal bacchanalia of colors beamed at them from the midst of the room where a single, strange tree stood. Shooting up from the ground, its full height encumbered by a ceiling too low for it, its sprawling branches veered off into every other direction, crawling the ceiling like intermingled spider-webs, drooping in corners towards the earth, some, even, burying back into it.
The garish neon tubes around it appeared to exert no effect on the majesty of its colors, like the very light emanated from within it, like it existed separate from all that was around it.
Cheadle and Pariston stood before it, open-mouthed, struck by the idiosyncrasy and ebullience, by the luscious deviancy of it.
Beautiful like the first wickedness that ends innocence, it seemed to draw everything in the room towards it, a gravitational pull that lugged the soil towards the center, creating a wide, deep gutter around the base of its trunk.
"Tell me, tell me how extraordinary it is, my daughter." Dotti pleaded, and it was impossible to fault the venerating madness in his eyes. "Tell me how you've never seen anything like it." He frothed, turning to them, his back hunched, his face contorted into something malicious in its mindlessness.
"Is it plum?" Cheadle asked.
"Can we make jam out of it?" Pariston followed.
Dotti stared at them, dumbfounded. He stuttered out something that neither heard, then he shook his head, as if to wake up from this euphoria. "It's… it's plum, yes. One fifth plum, to be precise. As for jam, um…" the scientist trailed off, studying Pariston once again as if he's only just appeared. "The fruits are edible, so I suppose jam could, indeed, be made. Howev—"
"Wonderful!" Pariston interrupted, irreverent of Dotti's indignation, just about to spill forth from his open mouth.
Cheadle put a quick, gently admonishing hand on Pariston's arm. "He doesn't mean to offend," she said with a smile, attempting to mitigate the situation. "he loves to spoil himself gastronomically, so you can imagine being here has been difficult, for him."
The attempt failed.
"What do you do, sir?" Dotti approached Pariston, hands behind his back, a praying mantis approaching a prey it was yet to know was far too dangerous for it. "You are not a scientist, as is very clear. You are a nurse. Stick to that."
Pariston smiled down at the man, nonplussed by the demeaning tone. "Of course. And as a nurse does, I will nurse you when you become sick."
The hand on his arm turned into a grip.
"The tree is extraordinary, Dotti." Cheadle said, and either the genuine compliment or the utterance of his first name made him turn to her. She let go of Pariston's arm and offered the old scientist a kind smile. "Tell me more about her, please."
Her sincerity appeared to help loosen the ire that knotted the man's whole body. Pariston stood and observed her take the man with a hand on his back, a proffer, a reminder of colleagueship, drawing him away from the source of his chagrin.
How admirable, he thought, the way she ate herself up and down to stop a frail twig from breaking off.
"She can live in complete darkness." Dotti spoke once again, regaining some of his previous confidence, but—and it seemed so to Pariston—he now liked Cheadle a little less. "Moreover, amazingly, I might add, she fructifies in darkness as well, never-endingly, almost. If I cut a branch, another two grow. If I rip all flowers off her, pollinated or otherwise, more sprout in their stead the next day. She flowers year-round, and bears fruit constantly."
"How do you water her?" She asked, turning a low-hanging plum in her fingers. The fruit glistened appetizingly.
"I don't water her anymore." Dotti answered, visibly bothered at Cheadle touching his fruits. "I weaned her."
"Weaned her off water?"
"Yes, and now I feed her."
She turned to him. "Feed her what?"
"Her dying brethren." He answered, his gaze drifting over the revered tree. "All the others before her, the ones who take and take resources but refuse to grow, they're now part of her, helping her surpass them."
"What about pollination?"
"Manually, like all other plants here." Dotti said. "She has no natural pollinators."
Pariston imagined the scientist painstakingly pollinating every flower, over and over again, every day; a lone insect in the dark, buzzing in the void around its object of worship, endlessly devoted until the insect itself becomes food for its indifferent god.
"Do the others know of this tree's existence, professor?" Cheadle asked, wary, small under branches that seemed about to clamp down on her.
"No, but there is no reason to care anymore." Dotti said, taking hold of Cheadle's hand. "Now that you're here, doctor, you can support me. You'll stand with me, surely." He forced his eyes to look into hers, the small eyes that flittered everywhere. "She's immortal. She will never die. If we can create more, as I imagine, think of all the problems that we can solve, the big world issues; hunger, food scarcity, dying wildlife, loss of ecosystems, even human cell research. We can end death itself, doctor."
Cheadle only stared at him, her hand limp in his, the length of her arm the only thing separating her from his cavernous mania. "I would like to come here again, professor."
"Of course, of course, yes. Come whenever you want."
"I would also like to take a few samples, if you don't mind."
To that he was less enthusiastic. His eyes flitted frantically between Cheadle and the tree, like it was an ultimatum and he had to choose one of them to please, a single right answer and he was going to get it wrong.
"I… I suppose there's no harm." Dotti finally said after a long pause. "But I'd like to be the one to collect them, if you'll allow me, of course."
"Sure, thank you."
The man let go of her hand slowly, and like a caterpillar too stuffed to move, he went about gathering samples from his beloved—fruit and flowers and leaves, bark and sap. Soil, too, Cheadle reminded him.
"I also want to ask you, about a recently deceased scientist." She said.
"Gregory, I'm sure?" Dotti said, bending down to bag her a handful of soil. "I've heard. What a loss. It really is. Very young. It was the right thing, to help her die. What pain she endured."
"Did you happen to visit her?"
"Only in the early days. She was not very welcoming of visitors, I'll say. Even after such deterioration, she continued to be very strong-willed. Admirable, for certain, but it was clear she was in much agony."
"Did you work together?"
"We did." Dotti said, raising his arm to pluck a plum, two. Pariston wanted more. Cheadle urged him to pluck more. "She was very intelligent, I recall, but I sensed strange things about her. Very secretive, and had relations, outside the settlement."
"Relations?" Cheadle asked. "How do you mean?"
"I believe she had a lover. Perhaps a raider, or some such." He said. "She did go out much more than any other person here, so it seemed like that to me, at least."
Cheadle nodded. "I've been told she was already sick before the arrival of refugees. Do you recall any such thing?"
"Ah, yes, I think I do." Dotti said. "She was of a very evasive nature. It wasn't difficult to see that she was hiding things, for sure." The irony of just describing himself wasn't lost on the man as he giggled sheepishly. "Takes one to know one, of course."
"Gregory talked about a 'well' in her room. A water well, I presume." Cheadle continued. "She said she drank from it and that's how she became ill."
Dotti let out a strange, breathless little laugh. "A water well in her room? That would be a strange thing, wouldn't it?"
"You've successfully cultivated a tree in darkness, professor." Cheadle reminded him amicably.
"I don't know, doctor, there's the industrial well outside, for sure, but it seems it's not what you're searching for. I can help you to the water treatment facility." And with that he handed her what he's gathered, all mindfully placed in a small basket.
"I appreciate that," she said, taking it from him, holding in front of her like she was ready to set out for a picnic. "I want to ask you one more thing, if you don't mind. Did professor Clarence keep records? Maintained a diary of some sort? A journal, perhaps?"
"Most definitely. Clarence was an avid recorder. Wrote down everything." Dotti answered. "Although I do not know where his papers could be. The repository, most likely. Have they not given you the key yet? I can take you there if you wish, of course."
"Thank you, but Hima Siwayama had promised to help me in that regard." Cheadle said with a polite smile. "I'm supposed to visit the archive today, actually."
Dotti nodded absentmindedly. "I see, I see."
"Well, thank you for everything." Cheadle said. "We'll meet again here for sure. Stay safe."
"You too, doctor." Dotti's eyes passed Pariston contemptuously, and he seemed to have no interest in walking them out, as he simply shifted his attention back to the tree, attending to where he saw it ruffled by their intrusion.
Out of that coffin, back to the rows of tree pots and then at last to the garden, Pariston walked with a smile, waiting for Cheadle to start what he knew she was going to say. In the garden, beside the arch of gardenias, he plucked one, a creamy white velvet that smelled like a distant summer night.
Away from Dotti and his peculiar gardens, Cheadle halted and turned around to face him.
"Don't ever do that again. Ever."
"Do what?" He feigned obliviousness.
She fixed him with a hard stare. "Provoke people, demean their work, act disrespectful on purpose because you're a little bored."
"But you agree he was disrespectful and demeaning as well, invoking nursing to offend me and put me in my place."
"He was," she agreed. "But you started it, and you irked him further with your morbid reply. A simple sorry would have sufficed."
"Why put the blame solely on me when, like me, you wished to knock him down a peg or two?" Pariston asked, twirling the flower between his fingers. "Like me, you thought he was silly, even when what he created was great. You encouraged me. Asking him if they were plums after that show he put on? Genius. I simply loved it."
Cheadle's frown deepened, her glare unrelenting. "You love to antagonize people, that's what you love, Pariston."
"You wanted more of those plums, too." He bent down, offering her a coy, inviting smile. "You're tired of the people, you're tired of the food. You are bored, too." His fingers went up to her face, brushing away a long hair stuck behind her glasses. She stepped away from him. "I was helping you, and you never appreciate my help."
"You're not helping me. You're making my job worse, Pariston."
"Remind me what you were saying yesterday, Cheadle, about appeasing egos?" He hummed in faux contemplation. "Right. You said you'd rather have your face eaten."
When she had no reply to that, his smile grew bigger, and he took a step closer to put the white gardenia in her hair, tucked it right above her right ear. She looked splendid.
"Very like you, doctor."
III
Pariston was in no hurry to follow her, but she wasn't going to let him be alone.
In her head Cheadle saw their room, Ging on her bed, Pariston kneeling on the floor, and the more her neck and ear tingled from where his fingers brushed them the harder it was to cut that reel and shove it back, but the memory refused to stow away, comfortable to burgeon exactly where she pushed it—in the dark, periphery corners of her mind.
There, it propagated itself into things entirely the making of her own imagination.
Pariston relished in her silence, she thought, as he let her lead him towards the labs. The gardenia was no longer in her hair; she had tossed it in the basket where it nestled between the blue, glistening plums, its own muted ceremony among the festival of purple, pink, and orange tree blossoms. Even away from her nose, the scent of it lingered.
Hima was waiting for them. A 'casual botanist', she had called herself, and was more interested in the science of archiving and cataloguing than anything to do with plants, and had at one point assigned herself to the repository where everything pertaining to the settlement was kept. She had stayed with Cheadle all of last night, after Sulei and the other scientist left, showing her around the labs, studying the samples with her, freeing new space in which to keep the new records and profiles, joking about the blob they extracted out of her colleague and around which they roamed all night, theorizing.
So far, she seemed the most trustworthy person here, stable in a way that was lost to the others. Markov, as well, only he was less forthcoming and much less personable, meek in a way that irked Cheadle. She wanted to surround herself with them, to draw them to her, to establish mutual trust. They didn't hold any great affection towards Sulei, she gathered, but they deferred to her regardless. Despite the current situation, the head biologist had a way of making them feel safe and protected.
They did not have to progress, they only had to stay alive—that was Sulei's way—but that balance had become much more tenuous lately. It's in this gap that Cheadle could operate.
"What will we do with the plums?" Pariston asked when they entered one of the labs.
"Keep them sterilized, for now." She answered, putting the basket on the closest flat surface. She shot him a glance. "I know you want to try them, but it's still unclear whether they're safe to consume or not."
Pariston hummed. "He said they're edible."
"He's not exactly a reliable source of information, is he?"
"Where does he go with all the produce?" Pariston wondered aloud, picking one of the plums out of the basket. "Does he eat them? Does he gobble the plums in the darkness like an animal?" He scrutinized the fruit, holding it up to his face. Against his lips, under his nose, he smelled it, eyes aflutter.
"Don't bite it, please."
Pariston returned the plum to the basket, his cheeks reddened. "I'm tempted."
"Thanks to you, we might not be able to have more." Cheadle said, separating the contents of the basket and readying them for the fridge.
He rested his elbow on the table and leaned on it, watching her. "You're a Hunter, Cheadle. You don't need the permission of some old crock to pluck fruit."
"Just because one is a Hunter doesn't mean they own the world and everything in it."
"But it sure felt like it."
She won't ask if he misses it. She won't ask what it meant to him, what the loss of it meant to him. She didn't care. That was a conscious position. Fuck him, and fuck the world he thinks he once owned.
"What's that?" Pariston asked, already walking towards the object of inquiry.
Cheadle followed him with her gaze, carrying the samples to the fridge. "An overgrown sentient tumor. We extracted it from Gregory's stomach cavity last night."
The malleable, swarthy creature was placed at the far end of the lab, in a large glass container, where it blobbed on the floor of it, unmoving but for its dark, beady eyes. It watched Pariston approach it, its eyes fixed on this new presence. It seemed to be breathing, its small body pulsing faintly.
Pariston bent forward, his face a foot away from the container. "What is it?"
"My theory? A trophically transmitted parasite." She answered.
"Trophically?"
"Through indigestion," Cheadle explained. "Whatever she drank, or ate, had lodged itself in her stomach and grew there, sustaining itself on the fat in her body, on muscles, on skin and bone tissue, as well. There was nothing much left of her body; she ought to have died of innumerable health complications long ago."
Pariston hummed. "Most parasites keep their hosts alive, don't they?"
"And some use them to breed, and kill them even when it isn't beneficial."
"It's pretty gross. Is it a fetus?"
She didn't like the look he sent her, the devious way the corners of his mouth pulled up or how he leaned far too close to the creature as if to let it whisper something in his ear.
"It does look like one," Cheadle said. "We might have caused it something of a premature birth, but it's also possible that it had been simply waiting for another host; we still don't know if it can survive meaningfully independent of one."
"Do you think it's connected to the virus?"
"We don't know yet. It's not a symptom that's appeared on others, but it could be a late-stage development of the infection. It could also be something entirely independent of it, something only Gregory had, maybe even what initially caused her illness."
Cheadle was in the process of constructing an approximate timeline, one that connected Gregory, allegedly the index patient, to the rest of the infected. It was difficult, thankless work, but she was getting there. Moreover, she needed the children's side of the story here, and so she needed Pariston.
"Have you ever looked at a blood sample under a microscope?" She asked him, diverting his attention away from the little creature.
He turned his face to her. "In school."
"Come." She took a serum tube and skin tissue out of the fridge and closed it, then pulled a second chair to a table, where she had studied Gregory's blood samples last night.
Pariston took his time walking to her, a little woeful at parting ways with the living tumor. He sat in the chair she pulled for him while she took the other. A drop of blood on a slide, she invited him to take a look.
He smiled. "Haven't seen blood this close since I was fourteen." But then his smile waned, and he seemed to notice what she wanted him to. "A high white blood cell count." He said with a kind of curious bemusement. "Means infection, right?"
"Yes," Cheadle said. "But they're eosinophils, which specifically indicates a reaction against a parasitic infection, hence, my theory. We're usually able to see infected cells or related pathogens in a blood sample, but there's nothing." She removed the slide and put another, balancing a hand on his back as she did so. She pressed him down a little, like a flotsam under a wave. "The case with her skin tissue is different, however."
Pariston looked into the microscope once again, and this time to a very different sight.
Elongated and fissured, Gregory's cells appeared like splinters, frayed and pulled apart, torn and shredded over a cutting board. Along the open, wide grooves of them swam other skin cells, looking slightly different, healthier, burying through the few intact cells and surrounding them, engaged in what appeared like slow feasting. No pathogen appeared in sight, only damage.
"I thought I would find what would prove necrosis, because the appearance of her skin suggested it, but I didn't." She said. "The samples collected from the other ill scientist show much lower levels of white blood cells but similar skin tissue results."
"They're eating her." He murmured, zooming in to observe this microcosmic show of hunger.
"Replacing her, more precisely," Cheadle said. "Most of her cells had become, essentially, impersonators that resemble the original but carry little of her genetic material. The pathogen is mimicking cells after infecting them, which is highly unusual. A virus cannot live without a host to carry on its functions for it, but this one appears to not only use skin cells to propagate itself, but it's also copying the cells genetic makeup and moving around performing their functions with very slight variations, transforming the host gradually into an altogether different ecosystem."
Pariston lifted up his head. "A doppelganger."
"Basically," she said. "And by the time the body's immune system catches up to this strange shift, it's too late. It might be a new strain of virulent mycosis, seeing as it's absent in her blood." Her eyes sought something else, away from him, to the little creature she extracted. "At the end, Gregory's body was really no longer hers, genetically, at least. I wonder if she knew that."
Pariston imagined that loss of control, the knowledge that his body wasn't his own, that it was something else, something new coming out of him and expelling him simultaneously. To be replaced on the molecular level. He had an urge to look at the sample again, but he couldn't, for a new face popped into the room.
"Doctor Cheadle?"
Must be the archivist.
"Hima," Cheadle smiled at the woman. "We were just storing some samples."
The young scientist waved her thin wrist. "No problem, want me to wait for you in the repository?"
"Sure, thank you."
And then the little head of black hair disappeared behind the door. Pariston got up from his chair and helped Cheadle put back everything in place. Leaving the lab, he threw a glance at his little friend at the back, where it wasn't clear if its eyes were perceiving him or not, only that it was breathing.
Hima Siwayama was waiting for them in the repository, and she acknowledged him with a respectful, curt nod and addressed him with his name, her boney fingers weltering against a shelf a little too high for her where she was attempting to pull a file out. He slid it out for her.
"Thanks," she said, taking the file from his hand with a casual smile, and then sidestepping him to address Cheadle. "So, here's professor Clarence's file."
"I wanted to ask you," Cheadle took the file. "Was Dotti Steis involved with professor Clarence's funeral?"
Hima tapped her humming mouth with a finger. "Not really? I mean, he was there, and he cried a lot, but he didn't do anything. None of the technical stuff involved with taking care of a dead body."
"Were you?"
"No," Hima chuckled, her dark eyes crinkling in the archive's dim lights. "The man died so suddenly and we barely spoke that by the time I cared enough he was long in the ground."
Cheadle opened the file. "Who took care of his body then?"
"Sulei," Hima said, rolling her eyes as if there was obviously no other answer. "She really held into everything, after the professor's death. There wasn't a ceremony or anything, I mean, can you really even afford one in this place, but she made sure everything was taken care of. They were pretty close."
Cheadle didn't hide her dismay at this. She had extended a peace offering to the head scientist by including her in the choice to end Gregory's life, had shown the woman compassion when she didn't have to, but it seemed that this wasn't enough to bridge the gap between them. Sulei was a hard rock, and everything seemed to lead back to her one way or the other.
"Dotti claimed he was close with the professor, too." She said, leafing through the file with a soft frown. "Was everyone?"
Hima shrugged, leaning against a lacquered table. "The man was popular."
"Did you like him?"
"I don't like condescending paternalism, so no."
The young scientist gazed at Pariston with a soft, cheeky smile coupled with a resigned shrug, as if that dislike was just out of her hands. Her face was a strawberry with no inch of skin wasted, a light brown taut over the defined bones of her cheeks and chin, and eyes that were innocent and cunning in equal measure, the eyes of smart kids who knew they were smart but didn't care to do much with it. He wouldn't be surprised to learn if she had spent her adolescence involved in delinquency that gradually evolved into more serious crimes. How she got to study botany or even enter college at all was without a doubt a story he'd love to hear.
"Dotti claimed the professor kept records, a journal or some such," Cheadle said. "Were they collected and preserved after his death?"
Hima pushed herself away from the table and strolled towards the rows of metallic shelves that lined the walls and center of the room. "I think there are some papers, although I don't know about a diary. Nothing of that sort was brought here." With a swift hand she pulled out an old folder, opened it, sifted through it quickly, then promptly returned it. "To be honest, doctor, if a journal existed it wouldn't be strange if that old creep kept it with him. He was a little obsessed."
Cheadle hummed. "I did consider it, but, benefit of the doubt and all that."
Hima laughed, pulling out another folder. "I'd think you're too good for this place, but, y'know," She gestured with a helpless wave of arms. "Sulei might be a huge bitch, but she wasn't wrong, last night." She said that without any animosity, even with some sympathy, squinting at the open folder in her hands.
Cheadle didn't even look up from the folder. "Are you asserting loyalties, Hima?"
"I'm just trying to stay alive, doctor."
"As do I." Cheadle looked up from the file, smiling. "Can I keep this?"
Hima shrugged. "Sure, have at it." She walked back towards them, a different folder in her hand. "I only found this, but you're free to look around yourself."
Pariston didn't know what Sulei had said last night, and it didn't seem like either woman was going to divulge any further, so he looked away, far to the back of the room where two computers were shoved close to the wall. Curious, he walked towards them.
"What do you use the computers for?" He asked, running his finger over old camera equipment that lay strewn over the computer tables.
Hima turned to address him. "Imaging, sending reports, spider solitaire."
He laughed. "You only have two in the settlement?"
"Yep."
Was it what they used to send Cheadle the initial report? If so, it meant that Ging had entered this very room and used one of the computers to sneak his message inside the digital report, and this possibility wasn't lost on Cheadle, either, as she looked up from what occupied her hands to observe the old machines behind him. Then her eyes, like his, were searching for places from which Ging could have entered other than the main door. There were none.
"Are you the only one who comes here, Hima?" Cheadle asked.
"All scientists can, they do have to ask me for the key beforehand, though."
"And then return it?"
"Yeah, the arrival of soldiers here complicated our living situation. We're just more careful with them around, regarding equipment and documents and such."
Cheadle rested her files over the table. "Nina spoke of a team of amateur scientists who spent a period of time here. Did you meet them personally?"
"Oh yeah, they were a treat." Hima chuckled. "Talked a bunch of new-age nonsense and then left, never to be seen or heard from again. Do you think they're dead? I think they're dead."
"Did they have children with them?"
Hima shook her head. "No, they were all really young, a bunch of twenty-somethings, kinda cultish?" She twisted her mouth in amused disgust. "I wouldn't be surprised if they were antinatalists or some shit. Are you thinking the kids here might be connected to them?"
"Nina suggested the kids might be connected to groups like them. She had strange opinions, about the matter."
Hima snickered. "Let me guess, experiment subjects."
"Yeah."
"She's a misanthrope."
"Always?"
Hima shrugged. "Who knows, we never really clicked. Her husband, though." And she winked shamelessly at both of them.
Cheadle suppressed a chuckle. "Did you 'click' with him, Hima?"
"I wish!" Hima chuckled. "He's like the only fuckable man in the settlement. If I knew we could marry here I would've snatched him right up front. Even his name is sexy." She gazed up dreamily. "Dal Ormana . Don't you just wanna lick it?"
They all laughed. If Pariston had seen Nina's husband in the hallways or some room, he didn't know it. The man was yet to show up for the mandatory medical checkup. Now he was curious, but then Hima's expression morphed into something more somber and distant.
"It gets pretty lonely here," she said, hands between her thighs. "You'd think with soldiers and shit, the pool of people to like would grow larger, but they're all awful."
"You're not close with anyone here?" Cheadle asked with sympathy.
"Does occasional shallow human interaction with the guy who basically moonlights as your weed dealer count?"
Cheadle had no reply to that.
"I mean, Twen is fine, but I'm pretty sure he lost his virginity to a literal hole in the wall, so I'm not touching that."
Oh. Twen. Pariston smiled. "He sells you weed?"
"Nothing like what you find on mainland," Hima answered. "It's an indigenous genus, similar to mainland cannabis but way more potent and dangerous. One of the soldiers died chewing it. That bastard used some of our research on it and then went on to farm that shit on the rooftop." She exclaimed, nonchalant about her jealousy and morbid admiration. "He doesn't 'sell' it, per se, but he distributes it in exchange for various things."
Pariston felt a surge of pride, singular and unexpected, as if Twen was his student, as if he had personal stakes in Twen being more than meets the eye.
"I say we quit this vegetable cultivation nonsense and start producing these new varieties of cannabis on a mass scale." Hima said, excitement animating her face. "I mean it. I can use the money, and you can use this new industry to fund whatever crazy shit you Hunters do."
Cheadle sighed. Beside a woman two decades younger than her who knew nothing of the bureaucratic hell of getting anything of this sort off the ground, she seemed a little lost for words. Pariston smiled at Hima but knew that her dream was impossible. For her, anyway. There will never be funding for such a project, not legally, and never on an industrial scale. If there had been adequate funding, the Association would not have chosen a bunch of civilian scientists to carry research on the continent. Instead, Hunters would have been sent, but Hunters are expensive, and their death costly. The standards were quite different for criminals with college degrees. Manufacturing and selling drugs—and a kind still illegal in many nations— would be incredibly bad PR for the Association, pure and simple.
Cheadle would rather gouge her eyes out before living through and handling any more losses.
"Okay, whatever," Hima rolled her eyes at their silence. "Obviously you're not interested in my idea. Maybe the Hunter Association is just too big to be my business partner."
"It is, but you don't have to worry about that." Cheadle said. "We were talking about the child refugees," she let out a long breath. "What do you think of them?"
Hima leaned forward in her chair, her hands dangling over her knees. For once, she looked serious. "For one, I think it's really fucking strange that they're all boys."
A subtle smirk found its way to Cheadle's face, like she had finally heard what she wanted to hear, like she had hit a target. When Hima didn't get a reply, she added, hesitant: "They're all boys, right?"
"In the sense that they all have penises, yes."
Hima squinted. "That's weird, isn't it?"
"I think it's weird, too." Cheadle said. "Weirder still that you're the first person here to say it."
"Really?"
"Yes."
Hima leaned back, eyes wide, gazing up to the ceiling. She jerked her head forward in a sudden motion. "That does kinda put Nina's stupid theory in perspective, doesn't it?"
Cheadle chuckled. "A little, yes. I still don't find it very compelling, however. You can peruse the test results for their samples; if you look at them, you'll see that there's nothing strange. No anomalies in the blood, nothing to indicate damage or systemic harm to their bodies by external means. They're quite healthy, even."
"If you noticed this, doctor, why didn't you tell anybody?" Hima asked, looking oddly purposeful. "It's fine if you don't trust people here; I have little trust, too, and I've been with these people for eight years." She continued. "But exactly because of that, I really don't think you'll win favor here by playing mind games with people."
Cheadle smiled. "Why haven't you mentioned it, considering you saw it as well, and long before I did, too?"
Hima had no immediate answer to that. She just sat and stared, loose hairs tickling her forehead. She offered a weak shrug, a preamble to some explanation, but nothing came out of her mouth. She seemed confused about wording the logic behind withholding what she had noticed.
"You're suspicious and cautious, and those are good instincts. You're curious, too." Cheadle told her, amiable and inviting. "I'd like for you to continue helping me in the lab. Come tonight, I'll be there."
Pariston smiled reassuringly at the young scientist when she looked up at him. Something like purpose moved the gleam in her eyes.
"I'll be there."
III
Public baths. Cheadle wanted to hurl.
She stood a little away south of the planting fields, towel and clean clothes draped over her arm, fingers entwined in front of her, watching with resigned, composed mortification a group of half-naked ex-soldiers stroll jovially in packs out of the baths and into her line of vision, the warm colors of the setting sun sweeping over their exposed skin.
Wet-haired, boot laces untied, towels and shirts slung casually over shoulders, some of them slowed down to regard her with roguish, coy stares, one of them even whistled. They laughed and twittered among themselves, drawing near her.
Hima had said it best an hour ago when warning them of taking late baths. Don't do them, the young scientist had said. Cheadle didn't take the warning seriously, but perhaps she should have.
"Want me to scrub your back, doctor?" One of them called, making a silly circular motion with the upturned palm of his hand. "Or do you like it in the checkup room?"
Cheadle offered no response, but didn't break eye contact either. As they became closer, a couple feet away from her, she could see that Twen was among them. He didn't join in the chatter but didn't care to stop it when it became more graphic, hiding a vindictive smirk behind his hand as he lit a cigarette.
Pariston, who had been more finicky about what clothes to pick and thus was left by her in the room, appeared beside her, sunny and smiling. "Oh look, we have company." He said, surveying the scene around them. "Good evening, gentlemen. Lovely evening we have today, no?"
Cheadle hated that he did that. There was no reason other than his insufferable desire to draw attention to himself. She hated it because it was enough to stop the men from going on their way. Instead, they stopped and stared, wolfish and cruel.
Several of them cackled. "The doctor's little bitch is here."
They whistled at him, too.
She made to walk past them, but the one who called for her blocked her way. His broad, naked chest occupied her vision. Ugly as sin , Hima had called them.
Cheadle looked up.
"Don't ignore me." He hissed, pouting his lips, seemingly trying to be both seductive and menacing. Cheadle blinked.
"Arwin, was it?" She asked, already bored with him. "I'd love it if you got out of my way."
He smirked. "And if I don't?"
She tried to bypass him, but he blocked her again. She wasn't going to use force. She didn't want any display of power.
"You're a Hunter. Not gonna fight?" He taunted her, bucking his hips back and forth, laughed and tilted his head. Then he pouted in mock sadness when she once again attempted to move past him, burying his hands between his thighs, and then whispered, "Is it your dangly bits that make you such a sour shrew?"
"Aren't you a little too old to be calling genitals that?"
Pariston couldn't have chosen a worse point to interject. Cheadle felt greater ire at him than the man in front of her.
"It's a little embarrassing, if you ask me." Pariston added.
The men stopped jeering for a moment to regard him derisively.
To them he was a minion. He was less than, and the fact that he didn't show a sliver of fear or anger irritated them even more. She could feel a sense of collective wounded pride slowly overtake them. It made people violent.
"The fuck you just said?"
"I said it's embarrassing." He repeated, slowly as if he's talking to a child. "All your buddies think that, too."
Cheadle's jaw tightened and her chest clenched. She didn't want a confrontation, not over this and certainly not with the settlement's most volatile inhabitants, but the atmosphere foretold of a possible brawl. The ex-soldiers didn't like back talking, and they seemed suddenly aware that they were facing Hunters yet were too proud to bow out.
The two of them could take these men out. Easily. Cleanly, even. No nen and no hatsu. But it wasn't the right thing to do.
Pariston thought differently.
"If you're gonna speculate over people's genitals, you might as well bet your life over it." Pariston said. "If you're so curious, you'd bet your very soul over it. That would make it so much more fun, don't you think?" His smile was heartless. "That's how Hunters do it."
He wanted to escalate things and he didn't care where it took them. Pariston never saw consequences, but Cheadle knew he saw the punch flying his way.
She grabbed the balled fist before it collided with his face.
Pariston hadn't moved an inch, the fist and her fingers wrapped tightly around it right under his nose. His eyes crinkled with a smile as the man's arm hung aimlessly in the air, the force behind his punch flowing back to his shoulder, causing him to wince in pain. He swallowed, and then withdrew his jittering hand in fear and held it to his chest.
"It's best not to move in large groups, for your own safety." Cheadle said, her hand back at her side. "Excuse us, please."
Mouths slightly open, they made way for them, mindlessly, almost, the cloying weight of Cheadle's nen hanging over their chests. Pariston met Twen's furtive gaze among their pale faces, then he smiled and nodded courteously as he brushed past them. "Gentlemen."
The threatening energy roiling over them kept every soldier in place, even once the two of them walked past. Pariston could feel it just like them, her nen like poisonous slime, and within it, his own, a void, and an excitement that raked him from head to toes.
If there was an animal nearby, it would have fled.
"Everyone in this place is so horny." Pariston marveled out loud once they entered the baths, looking around him at the rows of showerheads and old benches. It was cold in here, colder than outside, stuffy and wet.
Cheadle stood in the middle of the open bath, her back to him. "This is the second time in a single day that you do something stupid for the sake of it and which could potentially jeopardize my work."
He placed his clean clothes at the driest surface he found. "You're the one who used your nen."
She turned to him, furious, arms open. "Because they would have attacked us otherwise."
Pariston looked at her, nonplussed. "I defended you, you defended me. I don't see the problem; they were pretty rude to us both."
Fuming, Cheadle threw her towel and clothes over a wall that separated the bath into two areas with a corridor between them, but which was—in a strange and bold architectural choice—erected opposite the showerheads so that it neither shielded anyone from eyes nor really segregated genders. There was only one place to undress, and there stood Cheadle, fumbling with the buttons of her shirt.
"I didn't 'defend' you, and you sure as hell didn't defend me. We didn't need to be defended." She said with gritted teeth. "I stopped a pathetic fight that would have broken out for no good reason, a fight you riled up." With an angry finger pointed at him, she continued, "We don't want to antagonize people. We're not going to attack them no matter what. I could have better handled the situation without your unnecessary input."
"Why didn't you just let him punch me then?"
Cheadle glared at him, shirt half-open, hesitant between jumping at his throat or staying put. "Maybe I should have. Maybe I would have loved to see you with a broken jaw, Pariston." She spat his name out like venom, then turned around to start taking off her clothes but decided otherwise, turning back to him with a half-hearted laugh. "Don't even fucking deny it. You wanted me to use my nen."
He smiled. "And it was quite wonderful. I doubt they'll bother you ever again."
Her fingers were already finished undoing the buttons of her shirt. "Go to the farthest showerhead on the other side." She instructed him, hesitant initially to undress in his presence, and hated the way that even in anger her mind kept flashing back to images of last night, of what she saw in the room, more so that it emboldened her to simply disregard whether she was naked in front of him or not. Even more, he was still fully clothed, looking.
Hurriedly she stepped out of her clothes, threw them haphazardly over the wall, put her glasses in the driest spot around her, and walked to the showerhead. She turned the little rusty knob, then stood to the side when a drizzle of freezing cold water poured down, clattering on the floor and around her feet. She retreated against the wall and away from the water, refused to meet his gaze or look, even as he began undressing, refused to acknowledge him, reaching for a yellow bar of soap balancing on a tight ledge beside her. When her water finally fell hot, he turned on his.
In spite of the thick walls around them, Cheadle felt as if she was in the cold open. Ropes of hot water falling over her face, she closed her eyes and wondered again about Gregory. Could it truly be something in the water? The people here drank and cooked and showered and watered the crops all with the same sweetened sea water. She was yet to gather local water samples, and she was interested in the various water sources Dotti used for his trees. For those, she will have to go out of the settlement. She also, still, needed to see Gregory's room, and Clarence's, whose papers—unsatisfyingly meager and clipped—she was yet to read closely.
Why did she decide to come alone without a prepared team and with only a criminal who's not even trained in anything close to a medical field? Cheadle could already see the fallout of this mistake, and it was a grand fucking mistake. She knew that.
He said she was bored, and she hated the truth in it, because it implied much more than itself.
"What do you want?" She opened her eyes to look at Pariston who was much closer than she told him to be.
"Use my soap. Wash your hair with it, at least." And he extended to her a purple soap bar. "The ones here smell awful."
Cheadle didn't take it, unable to stop herself from observing his body, standing before her, fully exposed, the real thing he seemed to be offering.
He was close enough that it made him clearer without her glasses, and now that he was without his fancy layers of protection she could more clearly see the muscle loss, but it was easy to notice, too, that he had continued to exercise and kept himself diligently well-fed, was still as tall and stately as day one. His once gleaming tan had regressed into a warm whiteness that she suspected was always his natural skin tone.
For someone who was once a Hunter, Pariston's skin was markedly, suspiciously devoid of scars. There was not a blemished spot on his body, not a cut or a dent or the darkened remnants of an itch scratched a little too roughly.
Still he was, and as she always begrudgingly thought, arrestingly beautiful. The disarming kind, the kind that made people turn and look, the kind that had made her, so long ago, turn and look.
"Are you going to take it?" He asked, simpering, taking a step closer.
She did. He clutched her hand.
"What are you doing, Pariston?"
He pulled her flush against him, one hand grabbing hers up, the other coiling around her back. The soap bar fell between their feet.
Cheadle sucked in a breath, stared up at him, felt her breasts against his chest, his penis pressing her stomach, his fingers maundering over her spine. Pariston stared down at her with dark eyes, his hand drifting up to her neck, her soaked hair, the back of her head.
"Everyone here's in such a fever," he purled. "Do you feel it, this energy, the energy of hungry prisoners."
His low voice mingled with the rush of falling water, his hands hot, the skin under them pulsing. He engulfed her.
"Every single one tethered to a string," he muttered, his lips pink, wet. "Are you the only one in control here?"
Her head hurt. Heavy, she felt it weighing her. This close he was a blur, seemed bigger, more a mass of color than a body. Was she in control?
"Cheadle…" he murmured it, her name lulling over his tongue. "Do you want to fuck me, Cheadle?" His hand crawled back down, fingers tangled with her hair. He smiled at her, caressing the curve of her back. "I've always felt that you wished me at the end of a strap-on. To fuck me without letting me touch you. To be honest, I've sometimes wished it too. Imagined your hands around my neck, choking me, releasing me," he whispered. "but you've always been too much of a priggish prude for any of that."
She breathed, swallowed, only felt that of her body which met his.
"I like the chase and you've never been much of a catch—you give too much, always present when needed. I've always thought you were a little too complacent." He glided his hand off hers, rolled it up over her spine to her head. "Ging's always been more entertaining. I used to want him, fiercely. But I guess we've always had that in common, didn't we?" Pariston tilled her hair with his fingers, pressing them over her skull. "Stupid us, we had eyes on such a pernicious man. Are you in control, Cheadle?" He was drawing her closer to the wall. "I saw how you were on the stairs yesterday, when we were alone, how you let me touch you, how your heart pulsed under my hand. I saw how you looked at Ging and I last night. You could kill me now, if you wanted. Push me away, but you don't."
Against her better judgement. As a willing accomplice to a deep, buried part of herself.
"If I'm not very much of a catch, why do you care what or how I feel?" She asked, her back touching the cold wall behind her, goosebumps spreading over her arms as his body blocked the water from reaching her, as she felt him growing hard against her. "Why do you hold me like this, Pariston?"
"Because you've changed, and because you don't love like I do." He said. "You're a good person. You build and I destroy, but which one of us will put their hands on Ging first, I wonder."
"You're pathetic," Cheadle said, felt the insult at herself, too, at being in this position, at liking it. "Ging is not a possession or an object to claim."
"But you wish if he were. You've wished to break him too, didn't you?" Pariston said, pensive, rueful. "To dissect him in hopes that he becomes a little bit more comprehensible, to be closer to him."
"A monster believes everyone around him is a monster as well," she countered, now seeing him clear with Gyo in her eyes, finally moving, lifting her arm to press the tip of her finger over a little beauty mark she found on his shoulder, then looked up from the little brown spot back to the deep brown of his eyes. "but you're only a psychopath. You are nothing. People are not like you."
"You'd know that." He replied, his mouth stretched softly in something cruel, in something tender. "It's a tragedy that your brains have been wasted on conformity and order." He pressed himself tighter against her, pulling down a handful of her hair tightly, exposing her neck to him. "I would have loved to make a mess with you, years ago," he leaned down over her neck, brushing it with his lips. "but it's not too late for that, is it?"
The mess of him that she wanted, the mess of them—the mess of coming here alone with him.
He kissed her neck, her cheek leaned against his cold, wet hair, its soft strands sticking to her skin.
"Maybe it's not." Cheadle murmured.
Pariston drew his head up with a subtle shift in his countenance. "Ging invited us to his place. An open invitation, of sorts." He shrugged boyishly. "He said we'll find it, if we know what we're looking for."
III