"I've read once about babies who were born without sensation and they chewed their fingers and toes off because they couldn't feel any pain at all. I can't sleep when I think about it, it's crazy."
Pariston nodded. "Do you see yourself eating your own fingers and toes?"
The large, beautiful copper spoon disappeared inside Samion's mouth. "Yeah, I'll be like a carrot man."
"A carrot man?"
Sam sputtered a laugh, garbled with the food in his throat. He hunched over in a coughing fit. Pariston handed him a glass of water. Once the boy cleared his throat, he discarded the food plate down on the table next to his bed, recalling some old repulsion.
"But really, there were pictures and all," Sam continued, looking pointedly at Pariston, lifting up his hands to his face. "The babies just had stubs. Stubs for fingers. No nails no nothing. Just fleshy stubs."
With his hands so close to his face, Sam seemed to realize that his fingers didn't look much better than those he saw in the pictures. Moreover, they were worse than the last time he looked at them.
The rash had eaten a good portion of his normal, healthy skin, especially between his fingers, bubbling in those dark crannies like mold, some patches of it drying and flaking and peeling. With the chipped, rotting nails he had, perhaps he was wishing he didn't have nails at all.
He picked up the plate of food again.
"The doctor said it can't be treated, my condition, I mean." Sam said, the plate on his lap. "I won't eat my toes or fingers though." The boy resolved to finish his breakfast, refraining from saying more as he worked his way through the bland potato mush still piled in his plate.
The doctor in question was with them in the isolation ward, finally getting a moment to speak with the other ill scientist. Cheadle had performed a couple tests with Sam to ascertain his congenital insensitivity to pain, and it turned out that the kid also suffers from anosmia (which surprised Sam, who and up until that point had comically failed to notice this crucial loss of sensation.) He couldn't smell anything, but he could taste and distinguish hot from cold, sharp from dull, and he was capable of differentiating various textures from each other. It took the boy a couple days to make amends with the loss of his sense of smell, and then he seemed to bounce back fine, although he picked up this habit of twitching his nose, as if there must be some scent in the air he could still catch.
Cheadle was keeping a close eye on the two of them right now, throwing them glances every other minute to see if everything was going well, to see if the boy was still being cooperative. When their eyes met he nodded to assure her. The white protective suit made her even more distant.
It's been a week since Gregory's death, a week since Ging's appearance, and less since Cheadle met the scientists again to share the latest developments with them. It wasn't a pretty or easy gathering, to say the least.
Dotti's magic tree became public knowledge, much to his dismay, despite having previously declared his nonchalance about revealing it. What happened to Gregory and the parasitic fetus inside her was also made known. Many things were divulged, even the strange homogeneity of the child refugees' gender, except two details that for some reason Cheadle had decided to shelf away: the mysterious water well Gregory spoke of, and the alleged lost journal of Clarence Coll. Hima was aware of one, Dotti of both. Neither said anything during the meeting.
Everybody seemed more aware of the others around them, and Cheadle's presence had a somewhat toxic effect on their relationships. Those who appeared initially close were growing distant from one another, and those who had amiable associations hardly talked anymore, as if there was more safety in staying apart, and not just within quarantine rules. Cheadle made them work, allocating them tasks that kept them away from one another, and for the first time it seemed like progress was being made.
In the midst of all that, they had no chance of leaving the settlement to see Ging.
The man did not come again after that night, and the last Pariston saw of him was his back as he slid off the bed, adjusted his clothes back on and walked out of the room, presumably to follow Cheadle. "See ya," were the only words he said before leaving the room, and Pariston had stayed behind, kneeling on the floor just where Ging left him for far longer than he'd admit, thinking with wry humor that Cheadle owed both of them an orgasm.
They did not talk about that night, and neither about what happened between them in the baths, nor about Ging's invitation. They barely even exchanged any mean pleasantries since the latter incident. Worsened, maybe, by the fact that she let him wash her hair then and she scrubbed his back, which perhaps made her feel even more complicit. Cheadle was all business with him now, and Pariston knew that's how she protected herself; her best method of keeping him close but away. He was demoted to an apprentice, and there wasn't a single moment where she let him be free except in sleep.
In the heat of July and the haze of his headaches, Pariston was learning how to administer drugs, how to handle medical tools, how to take and preserve different samples, how to operate respirators, how to care after patients. He helped clean and maintain the isolation ward, the common room, their room, the labs, the repository. Cheadle gave him medical books to read, most on anatomy, but some were on surgeries and surgical methods, and those were the best—and hardest—to read.
He would have made a good surgeon, Pariston believed. No, he would have made an exceptional surgeon, only the field didn't interest him much, back when the subject of what he wanted to study was laid out on the table. And even if it was a choice—his mother eventually conceded with great sorrow—no medical college would have accepted him with the grades he had.
He possessed no special interests at school, certainly nothing to do with biology, and now that he thought about it, Pariston had entered and graduated school with no particular passions and no academic achievements of note. He had an aptitude for math, but he didn't need it for the role of elected class representative.
His two older sisters were of the artistic, literary type, so their mother, bless her little heart, wanted something a little more 'prestigious' for her only son and last child whose fate she could hope to influence. Thusly he was shipped off to an elite business school at the ripe age of eighteen in a neighboring country—so he could be independent but stay close to the family—where after no more than seven months of studies he dropped out to try his hand at a little thing called the Hunter Exam.
Pariston was, from childhood and up until today, totally and wholly preoccupied with people, and no amount of diversity in the spoiled insecure sharks swarming the campus of his university could hold a candle to the personalities he passed during the exam.
Now, all of the world was momentarily condensed to this sick boy on a deathbed.
"When did you say the pain insensitivity started?" Pariston asked conversationally, rebalancing the clipboard that had slipped a little off his lap.
"I didn't say." Sam answered, his plate now emptied. He looked a little better for finishing it.
Pariston tilted his head and smiled. "I get it, you're smart, and I respect that, but we do need this information to help cure you."
Sam rolled his eyes. "What does my pain insensitivity got to do with me turning into a zombie?"
"You're not turning into a zombie," Pariston said. "If anything, you're becoming a swampsquatch."
The boy snorted. "A swamp-what?"
"A swampsquatch."
"What's that?"
Pariston hummed uncaringly, didn't give an answer.
"Are you trying to get me to talk?"
"I am, yeah."
Sam fell back on his pillow, lifting up his arms in frustration. "Look, it happened a long time ago. I ate a weird mushroom or something and apparently it killed my pain nerves or whatever, and now I can't smell shit."
"Were you alone when it happened?"
"Of course I wasn't alone. Come on, Paris, ask me the real questions."
"Don't call me that."
The goofy expression on Sam's face withered, and the chummy feeling that was animating his hands receded with it too. He stared at Pariston with uncertain eyes, still unsure of the line he crossed and a little hesitant to ask. He clearly wasn't comfortable with the cold drop in Pariston's voice or the sudden change in his demeanor. The bit of friendliness he believed they shared drained from the space between them.
"Huh? Why?"
"I would simply prefer that you don't abbreviate my name." Pariston said, his voice devoid of warmth. "Can we agree to that?"
The first boundary. It took the boy a moment to nod. "Okay, sure, whatever."
Pariston smiled. "So, you were saying you weren't alone?"
"No, I wasn't. I was with many other people." Sam answered, newly discomfited by eye contact and preferring to observe the ceiling instead. "It was a group of scientists but not like this one here."
"Your parents were with them?"
Sam nodded. "They paid us a lot of money to come."
"Why?"
"A new lifestyle, off the grid kind of thing. There were ads about it, on the internet. I don't really know, but my parents saw the money offered and agreed."
"What happened after?"
Sam shrugged. "We came here, but not like here here. It was some other region. We built a church there."
"A church?"
"Yeah, they were some kinda religion. Talked about god and stuff, preachers there, I mean. They would talk to us every night, talk to everyone there."
"What did they talk about?"
"I told you, some god they worshipped." Sam said, finally shifting his gaze back to Pariston. "They said he's here in the continent and that we should pray to him so he will save us from illness and death. Some of the preachers could perform miracles, too."
Pariston tilted his head. "What kind of miracles?"
The boy grew a little fidgety, clearly uneasy with the question. "I don't know, like they could…" he trailed off, scratching his knuckles. Could he feel itches, or was it just a tick? "They could summon things, like ghosts. We couldn't see them but we felt them and heard them, we really did. They were real."
Pariston listened intently, watching the boy blinking, trying to recollect his memories or string them into words.
"One of them could take pain away, that's how I became like this." Sam finally said, holding his breath, holding something shameful in his chest, indirectly admitting his previous lie. "There was a ceremony and everything, and he chose me. He said I was born ill and he could take away my pain. There was a circle and me in the middle." He let out a regretful chuckle that he quickly swallowed. There was fear in his eyes. "I thought it would be so cool, if I couldn't feel pain anymore, thought it would make me really strong, but my dad didn't like it. Mom was really into it, she pushed me so hard, she volunteered herself too but they wouldn't take her. Only me. And then," Sam took a breath, trying to calm himself. "The preacher put a hand on my head, like this, and he took all my pain away. Then to prove it he pierced my tongue with a big needle. I couldn't feel anything." Sam stuck out his tongue for a moment, showing him a noticeable but healed puncture in the middle of it. "I thought it was great but I wish I hadn't done it, I wish I wasn't chosen, it was all my fault. Everything changed after that, people got weird and started acting weird."
"And your parents? What did they do?"
"My dad wanted us to leave. Some others like us wanted to run away too and some didn't. They all fought about it but in whispers," Sam said, himself whispering, reliving the events of that night. "Dad took me at night even when I told him I didn't want to. I wanted to stay."
"But he forced you to leave."
"I was so loud they heard us and then chased us, so many people, running after us like crazy," Sam inhaled, his breath shaking. "but others escaped with us and I was like unconscious, like I couldn't see anything and my dad told me to keep running so I did, but when I finally stopped he wasn't there and I was just alone with other kids."
"And you all came here together?"
Sam nodded. "Some man led us here. We couldn't see his face cause it was very dark and raining so much, but he told us to follow him and we did."
"Are any of these kids here in the ward?"
Sam nodded again, and he seemed afraid of them, even though they were all half-conscious and younger than him, with beds far away. He was afraid of having been chased to this very spot. His eyes shifted away, and some of the fear morphed into perplexed sadness, into an emotion much older than the kid it saddled.
"They said our lives were not good, I mean the lives we were living before, and that we weren't good for living them."
Pariston studied the boy's face, lost between a prideful frown and the edge of tears.
"Was the life you were living before good, Sam?"
Sam offered a helpless shrug, his voice would fail him if he spoke. His bright eyes were glistening with repressed misery. "I don't know…" he muttered, pulling absentmindedly at an already dislodged nail. The pain of it was lost to him when he ripped it off.
"Were your parents good people?"
The boy shook his head, but it was neither confirmation nor denial. He shook it because he didn't know that, either. He didn't know if they were good people or if his life before coming to the continent was any good, he didn't know how to measure its goodness, or what to base it on. He just shook his head and cried.
Cheadle shot him a questioning look, hearing the boy's barely suppressed sobs from her side of the room. Pariston raised his hand reassuringly. This still wasn't out of control.
This wasn't the first child he made cry.
"It's okay, Sam." He said, patting the boy's shaking hands with his own gloved, oversized one. The white material of it crinkled awkwardly, not made for physical intimacy of any kind. When the kid made to wipe his tears with the back of his hands, Pariston stopped him. "Don't touch your eyes."
"Can I at least lick the snot off my mouth?" Sam inquired resentfully, but with a little, weak laugh.
Pariston didn't actually know. His eyes turned to Cheadle but she was already approaching them, something like a napkin dangling between her fingers.
She stood at the other side of the bed and handed Sam the napkin. "Use this. It's clean."
After a lot of sniffing and coughing and mad inhaling, Sam looked visibly exhausted and weak. His head sunk in the pillow, his face sallow, and when Cheadle checked his temperature she found it higher than it was earlier in the morning.
"At least I can feel the pain in my heart," he joked, but it was half-hearted. He was too tired to be self-deprecating. It seemed that something new had settled in his little heaving chest, a new-found seriousness. "Is it really untreatable, this pain thing?" He addressed Cheadle with the question as she pulled a chair to sit next to him.
"I'm afraid so," she answered him, taking the hand he injured a moment ago in hers. "But we can manage it."
The three fell into a soft quiet as Cheadle wiped the blood on Sam's finger and cleaned it. Something about the gentleness and consistency of her hand movement lulled the boy into drowsiness, and he just lay there, watching her disinfect his self-inflicted injury with fluttering eyelids.
"Are you going to do to me what you did to that lady behind the curtains," he asked. "If I become too sick?"
Cheadle looked at the boy for a long moment. "I will do my best so that you don't reach that point."
"But what if I do?"
Gently she wrapped his finger with gauze. "If you become too sick, you will decide what you want to do, like she did."
It was a heavy burden to place on a child, the choice to end their own life, but it seemed to satisfy Sam. "I just don't want to be alone like she was."
She smiled at him and kept her hand over his. "You won't. We will be here, either way."
For a while, Pariston and Cheadle just sat around the boy's bed until he fell asleep, his aching chest rising and falling in soft, wheezing breaths. Sunlight seeped through the high windows, warm and golden and checkering the floor with bright rectangles.
The small church of the isolation ward condensed to this corner, a little less desolate in the morning light.
III
The sugar here came in big, light brown, boulder-shaped solid blocks that could very well be used as a weapon to knock someone unconscious.
Pariston had visited the kitchen cellar two days ago in search of sugar, specifically, and been directed towards these gruff beauties. He weighed one in his hand, heavy and light at once, rubbed his fingers against the sticky, granular, jagged surface of the sugar rock, then licked the tips of his fingers, and decided then and there to make jam.
He wasn't the only one excited for the idea. Those plums were highly edible, and as if in sheer spite at having been barred from them for so long, everybody here went against Dotti's wishes and declared their desire to try them. When no harm proved real by this, the old man simply conceded with broken pride, wanting to disappear back into his work to preserve the last of his dignity, but Cheadle wouldn't let him. He had other jobs to do now.
With that, Pariston started with the help of a rotary of cooks who took over the kitchen duty daily. They needed cauldrons, a lot of sugar and fruit, and some time.
And now, he had the first patch in front of him and the chance to taste it.
The deep, viscous blue of the jam made it appear like toothpaste. It glistened beautifully inside the jar, its peculiar, rich color giving it the allure of a magic potion brewed under a starry sky.
"Are you going to try it?" Cheadle asked him, standing beside the kitchen counter where they had laid out all the jars. Hima and Markov were with them in the kitchens, as fascinated by this new produce as two children seeing dessert for the first time. Their eyes wandered over the jars, the enchantment on their faces revealing years of bad diet, of poverty of the soul.
Pariston hummed. "I'm thinking we should eat it with something, but I have doubts about the potato bread."
"I'm sorry, but there's really nothing else," Markov said. "Let's just try it as it is?"
They opened the jar with spoons ready, their hands hovering, wanton and greedy, over the new food. All four scooped a spoonful of blue, and inspected the mounds under their eyes. The scent of it was overwhelming, like a perfume bottle shattered on the ground. Pariston lifted his spoon in a toast.
"Here's to mortal joys."
"To mortal joys!" The others repeated, taking the spoons in their mouths.
The four of them stood in a circle, sharing in this sensation, lying together under this wave that washed over all of them, surrendering, warm and cooped up, silent but for the little festival inside their mouths, something like sleep shrouding them as everything became a serene blur.
Overtaken, Hima leaned against the wall and let out a long sigh. "Dotti that son of a bitch. I can't believe he's been hiding this shit from us."
Markov, on the other hand, stood motionless, the spoon hanging contemplatively from his hand, tears in his eyes.
"It's not that bad." Pariston joked, and it seemed to wake the other man from his own quiet, private ecstasy.
"Not at all!" Markov's eyes widened and he waved his hands. "It's… it's…" he was lost for a moment, then he just laughed, deeply and with his whole body, sniffing back the tears. "It's the closest I've felt to home in a very long time." His grey eyes shifted to the floor in self-consciousness when nobody said anything. "That's a little stupid to say."
"It's not, it's a huge compliment." Pariston assured him. "I'm glad you like it."
"It's weird, it's making me feel ignorant." Markov went on. "How we just don't know anything, not even here, about each other."
Hima looked away, her face a little less elated, her shoulders sinking down. Without their white coats on, with only their old clothes and without the façade of control, they appeared like two abandoned children. And perhaps that's what they always were.
Cheadle, during all this, had remained silent, expressing no opinion, her face downcast. Pariston elbowed her shoulder gently, tilting his head down, trying to read her expression. She looked up at him, then at the others. Pushing her glasses back, she smiled at Markov's concerned face. "It tastes great."
"Okay, maybe the weed business is illegal and bad optics, so forget about it," Hima started excitedly, pushing herself off the wall to pick up one of the closed jars and shake it in front of their eyes. "But this isn't, right? C'mon."
Markov looked uncomfortable with this shameless, sudden display of entrepreneurial ambition, taking a step away from his colleague as if to distance himself ethically from her. She didn't need him to voice his disapproval to know it. She squinted at him. "You never sold anything in your life?"
"No," Markov said. "Although I did make bracelets in school that my friends sold."
Hima groaned, pointing the spoon still in her hand accusingly. "How did you even end up here?"
He smiled awkwardly, shrinking away from her, his face falling into something boyish and endearing as he tried to fend her playful belligerence off him.
How did Markov end up here, Pariston wondered. It's not that the man was just outwardly peaceful or harmless, but that he had the kind of personality usually screwed over in life—simultaneously flighty and trusting, he was the type to linger, obscure and submissive, in prison, and he not only survived that, but survived it long enough and well enough to be brought here, to the most dangerous place on the planet, chosen by Cheadle specifically.
Out of respect for them or mistrust of him, she had not divulged these people's pasts to Pariston, neither did she confront them by it, and they were warming up to her, at least these two who stood with them now, the two she drew closest, one of them trying to convince her of their business idea, the other suppressing laughs.
They liked her, he could tell. They wanted her to like them, too.
And that was the thing about Cheadle. The way she could instill lifelong trust and loyalty in people, even if they weren't fond of her personally, and whenever she earned that she earned it the hard way. The rewards of earning her trust and loyalty, too, were endless, but they weren't easy to have.
Ging had that about him, as well, in his own way and through his own methods, except he didn't seek to earn it, like she did, didn't care either way, and was far less dependent on it.
As for himself, Pariston couldn't pride himself on this particular quality. Nobody trusted him long enough to live, and even his own family and classmates and teachers, back in the day, treated him with a specific kind of propitiating caution that bespoke fear and consternation. People liked Pariston and stuck by him for different reasons, none of which had to do with his willingness to catch them if—and when—they came crashing down. He was a generous showman and entertainer, and that was enough to draw people close.
He smiled and accepted the two scientists' thanks, and then watched them leave with a plan to distribute the jam; left alone, at the end, with Cheadle in the kitchen. He bumped her again with his arm.
"Did you like what I made?" He asked. "You didn't look at me when you said it's great."
She looked at him, her expression neutral. "It was great."
"I want to give Twen some of this, personally." Pariston said, turning to the rows of blue jars on the counter. "And I'd like to do it by myself."
"Why, for the car?"
Pariston smiled. "Do you want me to ask him for the car?"
"You're going to ask him either way."
Deciding not to open the subject of the invitation with her, neither to poke the matter of her willingness to let him out of her sight, he instead searched the kitchen for a clean napkin in which to wrap his little gift. "I think we should keep one for Ging, too. I'd love for him to try it."
Cheadle smirked. "You've been so generous, lately."
"I'm always generous, when I have the means." He said, finding a fittingly red piece of cloth for his jar. "You know that."
She watched him try how the jar looked with the cloth he found, testing different shapes in which to tie it, styling it carefully and patiently. The bright, blood red of the cloth made a striking color scheme with the dusky, luminescent blue of the jam. In a way, wrapping it made it seem even more like poison. Perhaps those were Pariston's aesthetic intentions.
"What will you be doing?" He asked her, already readying himself to leave.
"I have a couple people I need to see, too." Cheadle said. "Come back to the third lab, when you're done."
Pariston nodded. "If you see professor Dotti, don't give him a jar." He said. "I will do it later, myself. As an honest apology."
"Fine, suit yourself."
Since what felt like a lifetime, the two parted ways.
Without him by her side, trailing behind her or strolling in front of her, Cheadle walked differently. There was a weight to him, to his presence, a weight to every minute she spent stuck with him. Maybe it was a bad decision to let him go see Twen by himself, but for a moment she didn't care. She wanted to be rid of him, to be by herself, to spend as much time as she could without anyone around her.
The jam was magnificent, and nothing like she'd ever tasted before, including other jams, but that's precisely what put her off. Blue, and a blue like that, was rare to find in nature, rarer still in food, and Dotti's pretty plums were of such a shade that—and even after testing and eating them—still seemed unreal to her. Markov was onto something when he likened the taste to home; there was something primordial about the fruits, about the tree. A chimera that was futuristic yet ancient, a primeval organism pulled together with—by—new materials, and Cheadle could not escape the sense that she had seen it before.
In her aimless wandering she chose the hallways that seemed least frequented. The kitchens were on the third floor and she wished they were higher so that she wouldn't reach the ground floor so quickly. With slow steps Cheadle descended the stairs, dreading an unwanted encounter with someone or the other. How could such a large place feel so crammed?
Erja Pyrr, the other infected scientist who was still alive and with whom she talked this morning, was surprisingly high-spirited and optimistic. The necrotic rash he suffered was highly localized, unlike the others, and it had consumed most of his left calf and all of his left eyeball so that the latter appeared as if his eye socket was stuffed with dead algae, fuzzy white with a protruding iris that seemed about to slough off the eyeball. It was blind, and he was unable to close his eyelids or blink. It bestowed him with a strange, roguish visage that was hampered by the other eye—a rapidly-blinking, merciful blue that sought her eagerly and didn't waver, even when the man discussed with her his own ideas of debridement and amputation.
Cheadle told him that she, too, had considered debridement as a surgical option to remove the dead and dying tissue, but that she realized its futility once she discovered that the necrosis was not starting within the integumentary system but much deeper. Moreover, the infection was destroying intercellular bridges and forming what she called 'cell ghettos', groups of cells pulled apart and insulated within clusters, making it difficult for them to communicate and therefore relay the presence of foreign material.
The cells which existed to protect and defend his body were functioning to make him into something else, too, and this thing, whatever it was, preferred fragile, sloughed, rotting skin tissue. She didn't confirm a link between the parasitic fetus and the virus, however, because she still couldn't draw a convincing causal relation between the two. One case was an anomaly, after all, and Erja Pyrr had nothing growing in any of his cavities, ascertained after a thorough nen examination. None of the other patients had, either, all of them little boys, two whose condition has significantly, and perhaps irreversibly, worsened.
Despite this, the ill scientist remained in good spirits, and urged her to relay to him all new developments and discoveries. She promised to do that, a half-promise, it was, and it made her feel bad, and she was glad that she could be alone and feel bad about everything she wanted to feel bad about without Pariston towering over her to read it on her face.
And yet, when she found a quiet corner on a small staircase to do just that—at the exact floor where she had talked with Ging a week ago; the second time she reached this floor in a thickheaded haze—her mind seemed to suddenly and utterly forget it all.
Instead, Cheadle had an epiphany.
III
The higher Pariston walked the narrower the stairs became.
Two feet did not fit on a single ledge, not even all of one. He climbed up on tiptoes, his right shoulder pressed against the wall, his right side open to a deep abyss with no balusters which could intercept a potential fall. He felt like he was walking on air, held by nothing, protected by nothing. He just ascended, closer to the light, closer to the sun that he knew had to be immersing everything on the roof.
Pariston had been observing Twen whenever possible, trying to draw a mental schedule of the man's routine. He hung out with the ex-soldier goons and they seemed to be his primary, and only, social group, but he was most often apart from them, and eventually he learned that Twen spent most of his time in either of two places and was rarely seen anywhere else, even during food distributing hours.
One was a junkyard seaward within the settlement borders where he built little stuff and tinkered with various equipment. The other was this.
Dotti Steis wasn't the only one with a secret garden.
He stood in the doorway, taking in the scene stretched in front of him. The afternoon sun shone white over everything, and it took a moment for Pariston's eyes to adjust. A field of spikey, dark, lush green peppered with yellow and purple blossoms spread before him, with tight pathways between each cluster of plants, themselves overgrown with other, lesser, species, and a man crouched in the center of it all, watering something, his thin blond hair so light and faded it appeared like the fur of a polar bear, hollow and transparent.
Twen stood up to his full height—and he was a very tall, very thin man—to observe the new comer. When he saw it was Pariston, he looked surprised. Perhaps he was expecting someone else, but he snickered.
"So you found me."
"You're not very hard to find, I'm afraid." Pariston said, leaving the doorway to enter this base of operations, not awaiting an invitation or permission.
Despite the sun beating down on them, the greenery here cooled the air quite nicely, and a lovely breeze swayed the plants around him so that they chafed and rustled. They had a strong, intoxicating odor.
"A lovely garden you have here."
The man scoffed. "If you want weed just say."
"Weed? Not at all. I came to give you something," Pariston approached the man leisurely, watching that metallic blue gaze seizing him from head to toe, and what Pariston had read back in the car as pure hostility was now tempered by something else; a little hesitation, more caution, and perhaps, a grain of respect. He was clearly one to learn a lesson quickly. Pariston offered the wrapped jar. "It's food."
Twen glanced at the offering then back to him. His hands remained at his sides. "That jam, ain't it?"
"Oh, so you've heard about it."
"I've heard about a lot of things."
"Well, I made it myself." Pariston said with a smile.
"And you just wanna give it to me?"
Pariston hummed, stepping closer. "Is that weird?"
Twen studied him warily, a soft frown adorning his face, and from this short distance Pariston could see old pockmarks and pecks covering the man's ashy face; big, asymmetrical lips; a long nose and a prominent chin scar. He wore an old, dirty white tank top, revealing lean, strong arms and a dark farmer's tan. He was barefoot, too, with a pair of faded, tattered jeans rolled up over naturally hairless calves. His toes were dirty, and ugly.
The long, reciprocated scrutiny apparently made him uncomfortable, and he half-turned, wiping his soiled hands with his tank top. "Did your little boss send you?"
"No, I wanted to see you by myself. She doesn't know I'm here." Pariston lied, once again drawing attention to the jar in his hands. "I'd love for you to take it. I wrapped it just for you."
Twen snorted, but took the jar regardless. He unwrapped it and was struck for a moment by the starry blue within. "This looks like fucking poison. What, revenge for what happened to you at the baths?"
"Oh no, I don't care about that at all." Pariston said, bypassing Twen to wander around this roof garden, plants brushing against his ankles. "Although it was very rude, what you've done."
"I didn't do anything."
Pariston found an old wicker chair and dragged it close to the edge of the roof. He allowed himself to sit on it. "But isn't passivity, in itself, a form of action?" He said, turning his face from the fields below them to the man approaching the edge to stand beside him. "You were a spectator. That's a choice."
Those blue eyes were as faded as the man they belonged to. A cruel, demeaning smirk darkened them. "Why care when you have a woman to defend you?"
Pariston laughed, enjoying the cold gust of wind that whipped his hair back, the bright sun on his face. "I see you haven't forgotten to pick up the shred of ego wrenched from you that day."
Twen didn't like that, and he didn't know what to say to it. He was so close to Pariston's chair that he could just tip it over gently, effortlessly, sending Pariston headfirst over the roof and into the ground below. But he wasn't going to do it.
Silence hung over them, sweet and warm, and Pariston took the time to stake out the horizon with his gaze. From this height, the land stretched all the way to the sky, green and dark and incomprehensible, but somewhere in the distance to the west he noted a slightly dissonant material, a peculiarity jammed up among ancient, mammoth trees that appeared like them but not of them, poking the sky with its broken hull.
He wouldn't have seen it if he wasn't already looking for it.
"It's nen. I know what it is. I know what she used." Twen said, a confident naivety pervading his hoarse voice.
Pariston smiled at him. "Smart boy."
"Don't fucking speak with me like this." Twen spat out, the plants around him giving his eyes a faint green shade. "You're the lowly assistant cleaning bathrooms. You think I don't fucking know who you really are, Pariston Hill?"
"You do?"
"Twen?"
Both of them turned towards the doorway where a tall, dark man stood, wearing casual attire more well-kept than what the others cared to wear. He had a hand over his eyes to block the sun, and he seemed hesitant to enter.
"I fixed your stupid shaving machine but couldn't find you, so I gave it to your wife this morning." Twen said out loud, encumbered by this sudden appearance.
The man at the doorway laughed. "Thank you, but I'm here for the usual. I can come by later, if it's inconvenient now." He seemed to be checking Pariston and how dangerously close he was to the edge of the roof. "Aren't you afraid there, Pariston?"
Pariston already had the pleasure of meeting Dal Ormana, at the last gathering, realizing that he had of course seen the man before but didn't recall the name he gave, which was absolutely a shame. If anybody in this settlement was a viable bachelor this man would have been him, with the unkempt beard and all. If he asked Pariston with that even, deep voice of his to pull his chair back Pariston would do it instantly.
"Don't worry about me Dal, it's lovely here." Pariston called back. "Please, come join us. Twen was telling me about the curing process."
"Oh yeah?" Dal walked closer, coming into full view. "Didn't take you for a smoker."
"I'm not!" Pariston chuckled, glancing at an irked Twen. "But I think I might be interested in trying."
Dal found another chair and picked it up, choosing to put it down a little back, admitting with an unashamed smile that heights intimidated him.
He was an undeniably, objectively handsome man, his black skin glistening under the sunlight, his eyes dark and attentive. Pariston had never seen anyone before whose eye color so seamlessly matched their skin so that they appeared like an extension of it. He seemed much more stable and put-together than everyone else; had an easy-going personality, a brotherly, patient levity about him, and for a man who was robbed of his fatherhood the moment it happened, he didn't look it. Pariston wondered what a man like this found in someone like Nina; they were so unlike each other, and it followed, curiously, that he never saw them together.
"Got us a new blend, Twen?" Dal asked, leaning forward with elbows on his knees.
"I said you get me the shit and I make it, Ormana." Twen said, squatting down halfway between the two of them. "And you didn't get me the shit, did you."
Dal laughed, opening his arms as if to show Twen that he had nothing on him this time, either. "Ever since we were told about his secret tree, Dotti's been testy with me, and now I have to think twice before visiting his garden." He shook his head, woeful but not grudging. "I've been building a rapport with the man, respecting his boundaries, not prying, and then bam! Now I have to convince him I'm one of the good ones again."
"Blame that doctor," Twen said, a resentful little boy, busying his fingers with the fraying threads of his jeans. "She snitched on him."
"Snitching is too strong of a word, if you ask me. I think what doctor Cheadle did was the right thing, ultimately." Dal confessed, his mouth pursed in thought. "Dotti is a stubborn silly mule, but he has no choice but to come around. I'll give him a week or two to adjust." Then he turned his pretty dark eyes to Pariston. "What do you think of it all, Pariston?"
Pariston hummed. "He was hiding a valuable and potentially revolutionary resource. I'm sure once he tries the jam we made from his plums he'll be a little less upset."
"Oh, I've heard about the work you've been doing in the kitchen!" Dal exclaimed. "When can we try it?"
"Right now, sir," Pariston smiled, gesturing with an open palm to the jar Twen had carelessly left on the ground over its red wrapping. "I've brought Twen a sample from our first patch. Let's just say he and I started out on the wrong foot, and I wanted to amend that, but you can take this jar if you want, I'll get him another one."
Dal scooted off his chair to bend down and pick it up. "I'll wait for my own jar, thank you, but don't mind if I try it now, eh, Twen?"
"Whatever."
"A yes it is, then." Dal opened the jar and drew it closer to his nose, taking a hearty whiff. "Heavenly, and the color, too," he tilted his head, inspecting the insides of the container. "Reminds me of some of that old fungi I've tried to culture last summer."
He dipped his finger gingerly in the jar, and brought it to his lips.
Pariston felt a tingle climb up his spine and spread over his shoulders, his eyes fixated on the speck of glistening blue left, unfelt, on the man's mouth.
Dal leaned back in his chair, eyes closed, breathing deeply, awash in warm contentment, his tongue moving inside his mouth to gather every last bit of taste. "Damn Pariston, Dotti better fall at your feet when he tries this." He closed the jar and put it back where it was. "I'm really tempted to steal it, but I'm a patient man, so I'll just go to the kitchen and take one."
"Be my guest!" Pariston said, loving the way his name sounded in the other man's mouth. "I'll make more soon, so help yourself to as much as you want. Make sure to take one for Nina, too."
That last sentence didn't have the desired effect on Dal, who only nodded and smiled enthusiastically, getting off the chair with a long sigh, ready to leave. "I've gotta go now."
Twen stood up, too, and pulled what appeared to be two joints from his pocket. "I can only give you these for now, better ones I promised to others so you'll have to make do."
Dal took them with resigned acceptance. "Beggars can't be choosers." He said, tucking them in the pocket of his dress shirt. "Guess I'll have to wait until I find my way back into Dotti's good graces."
"I can get you what you want from his garden." Pariston interjected, standing up as well. "As doctor Cheadle's assistance I still go there regularly. He can't turn me away from his door." He told them with a confident smile. "Just tell me what you need and I'll do my best to bring it for you."
The two of them regarded him incredulously for a moment, then shot each other brief glances.
Dal was already half-way down the stairs when he listed the last ingredient they wanted. Pariston nodded at him and waved goodbye, then turned back to Twen. The tall man stood at the edge of the roof, among his plants, his wiry figure lonesome against the setting sun, so large and so close behind him, dyeing his stringy hair a fiery orange.
When he spoke, his voice was despondent and weary. "Would your boss approve of this?"
Pariston walked slowly towards him, reveling in the tender, warm light that washed over everything, in the orange hues that made Twen's face a little less hard and cold, a little more approachable. He came to a stop right in front of the other man, shorter than him, in his shade. "What she doesn't know won't hurt her."
Twen let out a mirthless chuckle. "But really, what do you want?"
"I wanted to ask you about the state of the vehicles," he said. "We might have to leave the settlement soon, the doctor and I. We will need one."
"I can prepare one of the cars for you, but you'll have to get me the plants first."
Pariston smiled. "Of course, I was going to offer the same deal."
It was him, now, who could push Twen off the roof. He could put a gentle hand to the man's chest, step closer, and that would be it. Twen would try and hold onto his arm, grabble for the straw outstretched to him, but it would be futile.
In the future, when the warmth of summer is replaced by the unforgiving winter of this land, Pariston—and he was yet to know it—will do just that.
But for now, he sat back on the chair and enjoyed the view, gazing out, untroubled, at the house hidden far among the trees.
III
Cheadle ran.
She zipped past hallways and back to the upper floors, skipping a couple people on her way, dashing towards her room having decided to forgo her intended visit to the isolation ward.
All boys… twin of its sisters… Dotti's tree… The fetus… water well…
Her thoughts preceded her, racing her legs, faster than her, faster than she could gather them in a single, coherent sentence or a logical explanation. All she knew was that she needed to peruse a very specific paper that she had not looked at closely before, a paper that was within professor Clarence's files, one of the papers she took from the repository.
The room was so far away, so far away, she didn't want to lose her directions but she couldn't see clearly, already looking at the file she left on the dresser before she even laid eyes on it.
"Doctor, are you okay?"
Nina's face appeared at the periphery of her vision, surprised or concerned or curious and none of it mattered, Cheadle didn't stop. "I'm fine!"
Finally in the dingy hallway where their room was, Cheadle yet again made to open the wrong door, groaned loudly at this consistent gap in her brain circuit, then turned around to open the door to their room.
There they were, the files. Exactly where she had left them this morning, still exactly with everything that frustrated her about them. Incompletion, amateurishness, bizarre lapses of thought and logic, disembodied conclusions to ideas not even written, and parts that were clearly missing. They were gibberish, to her, but one specific portion that she had glanced over quickly back at the repository flashed brightly in her mind.
A small, patchy, almost inconsequential mention of a fungi culturing experiment.
There were no specific details, no dates, no cataloguing of methods for carrying out the experiment nor the conditions under which it was carried, neither was there any mention of the goal of this experiment. But there was something.
Among the disjointed sentences and prosaic wanderings, there was a name. c. shiols.
She had overlooked this initially because she didn't think it mattered, because it seemed like a draft, because it wasn't what she wanted to read, but it seemed to her now like the biggest clue in the world.
Shiols were an indigenous, parasitic species of fungi that colonized estuaries and usually depleted the very water resource that supported their expansion, sprouting deep, sturdy, highly complex net roots which split and branch indefinitely under water, feeding on marine animals and organisms, from the smallest plankton to the largest fish, catching anything and everything that was unlucky enough to fall in their clutches. The biggest ship wouldn't be able to pass that organic dam.
They rely on water streams to carry their spores for reproduction and were, most interestingly, unable to reproduce asexually by themselves or sexually with members of their own species, instead forming a stunningly versatile but obligatory symbiosis with individuals of various other species, both male and female, to reproduce for them. Those males had many 'types' but none were sequential or simultaneous hermaphrodites, as first theorized, nor were they forming dioecious colonies that separated the gonochoric males from the females. The shiols were completely, wholly unisexual.
They were also enchantingly, brilliantly blue.
There were connections she sensed were peculiar and important, links that led to various mysteries, details she was yet to study thoroughly and put in order, and what worried her was that the settlement neither contained nor presented a viable habitat for the fungi. Cheadle had looked into the water resources in the settlement and found nothing of note, only the usual harmless bacteria. She had gone with Dotti to the underground water treatment facility, took samples from every faucet and puddle around her, and still she found nothing extraordinary.
As to the contents of Clarence's strange little experiment with them, she had very little to go on because these papers provided her with nothing and contained more questions than answers. She needed to find the rest of this, to find the journal, to put her hands on the scraps of notes that strangely did not find their way to the repository. She needed to speak more with the others about what the late professor was up to during the last months of his life. More and more, he seemed to her like an elusive, shifty figure, milling about the edges of everything she touched here, close with everybody but not close enough, shaped anew over and over again on the lips of those who talked of him.
What Cheadle needed most now, however, were live members of the fungi species, and as far as she could tell, there were none in the settlement, nothing in the samples library or the labs, and no clues to any experiment leftovers in these papers she clutched in her hands.
What she needed now was a guide she could trust. A tracker with excellent senses who knew the land and could take her where she wanted to go.
She needed Ging.
Maybe it was time to accept that stupid invitation.
III
A bit of paratext:
1) Sam reading about and being lowkey traumatized by the babies suffering from congenital insensitivity to pain who eat their skin and flesh is straight out of my experience stumbling on said article when I was around 9 years old or so. Naturally I have filled this fic with the oldest, most primal of my fears.
2) I struggled the most with coming up with a name for Twen. I saw him vividly in my mind but just couldn't land on a name I felt fit him. Then one day, there's me reading an article about Mark Twain, and I thought: "Holy shit, Twain! Twain's a good name for that dingus." Then not a minute later it dawned on me. He didn't sound like a Twain, he sounded like a Twen.
The rest is, obviously, history.