It lay dormant most of the time now—the entity within V's arm.
It did not have a name despite the occasional address of 'Bones' from the bluebird that sometimes nosed at it. It did not have a shape despite the occasional imaginings of a vast but headless winged beast made of deep red flames that passed through V's mind.
V only ever thought of it with such abstracts. He called it by no name. As he, within his thoughts, sometimes called himself by no name. 'V' was as a placeholder no different from 'I', 'me', or 'myself'. It was by chance that the letter had come to mean much more than originally intended. On occasions when he lingered on his past, he sometimes forgot only to cling with renewed possessiveness to the identity that now rode upon that letter.
This it perceived, as he perceived.
When V brought it under his will in battle, it knew his mind well. With no immediate threats and his guard ever dropping, less so. Still, nothing that he perceived was ever truly out of its reach.
It saw his frequent dreams. Jarring, violent regurgitations of memory in hues of ash and blood. And other nightmares still, of crumbling. Of death. The drum of his heart filled his world in the moment of waking. V was accustomed to this. He made no outward mention. Nor did he let fear linger in his blood. Instead, in much the same way he reached to assure himself that his weapon was close at hand, he reached inside himself to know the power at his disposal; its own among them.
In V's less fraught sleep, it saw dreams that were not V's own. They faded beyond his mind's reach within moments of his awakening, impersonal to him and thus impermanent. But it could not un-perceive these dreams so easily, no more than it could unknow their sources. V was a crowded man. Full of residues leftover from the consumption of other entities. These scraps were far beneath his conscious notice, but his dreaming mind knew their presence.
So it saw when he dreamed of a young boy crushed and crying beneath the burden of eternity. And when he dreamed of silent flowers shaped like ill omens. Once, he dreamed of a man he did not know, voiceless yet implacable, whose eyes reflected a crimson shape.
The entity had lingered on this dream.
It saw V's waking hours too. Knew which poems he often returned to in the book he kept, and which unwritten lines he could summon from memory. Knew that sometimes his mind was full of music (which always brought it uncomfortably to attention). It also knew he felt at ease in his company. And that he was frequently off-put by that ease. And that at this very moment he was absorbing precious little of the plans his companions were discussing.
The fine details of the future didn't interest him. In his mind, he would act when it was time to act, and in the meantime, it was simpler to wait and not worry too much. This, it knew, was his way of not thinking about reaching their destination. Out that way lie his every ambition, yet he considered his success with thoughts so contrary that it could not make sense of them.
It gave a contemptuous lurch in the arm that united them.
V ignored it.
"The temperature's been dropping all day," said the boy who was theirs. "You think we should find someplace to stop?"
"It can only go down so much right? It's May." The girl who was not theirs paused. "…But we're also further north than before. And this truck isn't gonna do shit to keep him warm if it comes to that. Fuck; tell me how to get back to the main road."
It saw the gray horizon that V watched while the two went back and forth on where to go, and heard them decide on someplace to the west. The one who was not theirs pulled off to one side of the road and insisted that V eat before they move on. An animal was captured, but the endeavor made it no further.
"ALERT: SUBSURFACE TREMORS DETECTED."
Battle tension had already flared it to keen awareness before the ground erupted. A metal snake with a drill for a head upended their transport. A dozen of the simpler insect-like machines clawed their way up from the gap in the earth, each with their own oddly placed drill appendages. V spun his cane with lazy arrogance. He knew these enemies, so it too knew these enemies. They were not its match.
Flame, it threatened.
"Don't do anything extravagant," warned the girl.
V did not like this rule. Options flicked through his mind, but few of them were not 'extravagant'. All the might at his disposal, and in the name of restraint whose purpose it barely understood, he reached for the lowliest thing he had—a gun.
An urgent but unintelligible voice yelled from the nearby cliffs. "БЕРЕГИСЬ!"
The girl snatched both V and the boy under her arms, dived across the road, and rolled them all into a ditch. The air thrummed once, briefly, in a way that V only felt through its physical extension on his body. There was no explosion. Only the clattering of machines on stone, and the grinding of their metal parts.
V watched a small rain of humans fall from a nearby overhang. With great coordination, they surrounded the immobile machines, and impersonally began dismantling them while they still lived.
"E-bombs?" their boy asked.
It did not know the meaning of this word. Only that it filled V with a tight unease that had nothing to do with his own body. A weapon, it gathered, but one that could only harm his companions. He was not human the way they were human.
"Dangerous," said the girl. "But real damn efficient if you need parts."
A large, well-bundled man that V immediately labeled 'leader' approached them. His expression was hidden behind bulky, reflective green lenses, and his voice was gruff, but not aggressive. "Из какого сектора вы пришли?"
The girl who was not theirs answered quickly, "Сектор G Восток."
V watched them conduct their cryptic conversation with an expression of boredom, and the entity likewise gave the prattle no regard. Instead, it focused on the light-footedness of V's stance and the tautness in his shoulders. He was prepared to cut the entire group down if needed. It lent its own dangerous heat toward the cause as a smaller human wagged her gun toward V.
"Что, ты не говоришь?"
"Я могу говорить просто отлично," their boy snapped, and positioned himself directly in front of V. "Его языковой процессор поврежден. Отвали!"
The girl who was not theirs choked on a burst of laughter that roused V's curiosity, but quickly regathered herself and barked: "Вести себя!"
"И вам того же," said the leader, vaguely in their direction. "Опусти пистолет, идиот."
The weapon lowered. V loosened.
A short while later, the vehicle was righted, and they were on the move once more. With several additional humans and a small collection of machine parts in tow. According to their word, the cold snap was going to worsen. There were usually one or two in this area at this time of year when strong winds from the Kingdom of Night blew in. The place V's companions had intended to go was dangerous—one of several maws to a den of machines that moved below ground through most of the area. In exchange for being guided to a place both safe and out of the elements, the humans had requested only the small favor of transport with their spoils.
"Anything beats driving into a machine nest," said the girl. "But we're headed to the place we specifically got off the main road to avoid, which means you two need to keep it together. 49, don't do anything flashy and V… you can just stick to what 49 said."
"Which was?" V prompted.
"That your language processor is busted." They rocked into a turn, and she smirked. "He also told that girl to fuck off."
V coughed out a laugh, and the entity's still-sharp senses dimmed. Outside, rain began to fall, and the applauding din of hail soon followed.
The place they arrived was not much different from the ruins where the entity had become a part of V. Not so many buildings climbing the sky, but still dense with structures, and a number of humans darted around with their heads down against the worsening weather. Their escort identified their primary place of rest in a red-hued, run-down church.
The inside was faded yet still brutally busy with patterns and reliefs. V reached inside himself, in that self-assuring action he usually only took after his bad dreams, and in the brief meeting of his will against its own, it understood why. The relentless designs reminded him of some plane he had once walked that either preceded or followed the source of his nightmares.
It knew that muted uneasiness scraped him like a dull but heavy blade. That he masked this as he sought out the smallest, driest, least ornate corner he could put his back to. It knew his irritation when they were bothered almost immediately by an interloper.
The girl once again handled the talking. There was faint admiration in V for how casually she separated from them, leading the other speaker out of the small space as though it were only natural. And fainter still, the recognition that she must have frequently lured her targets where she wanted them like that—V himself among them.
The entity grasped that she was no longer an enemy to V but lacked the mind to fathom when or how he'd grown to have such even-tempered thoughts toward her. V's conquest against the watchers involved as much exultation as ruthlessness, but this girl who was not theirs had provoked savagery in him that it had not perceived since.
"Are you hungry?" whispered their boy.
"I'm fine." This was a lie. "What are they saying?"
"Hmm… Sounds like a lot of androids are traveling around these days." He craned his head toward the conversation just beyond the far wall. "He says nothing really changed out here despite the treaty. A few months of quiet, then new machines as hostile as the old ones. This group…This place is all these guys have known for decades or centuries. They want to keep living here, so they're continuing to fight. Now… Ah, now they're just talking about safe roads and getting gasoline."
If V felt something toward any of this, the entity did not know. The words garnered no reaction, and that composure made his thoughts opaque. As the girl returned, it pressed him more that he shivered where the cold trickled from the stone into his back.
Without a word, his companions sat to either side of him, and exasperation flashed through him as heat began seeping into his sides. A dozen protests raced to be the first, but he sighed and focused on trying to sleep instead.
In the truck, he sometimes woke up slumped against the one who was theirs. The boy said nothing of this, and neither did V. It was known between them that V did not care to be close and could be prickly about being touched. Yet there was a liberation that came with knowing it could not be helped. A means to yield that did not call for him to surrender anything.
This it perceived, as he perceived, and it might have given another contemptuous shudder at the depths of V's self-deceit had it not turned its focus inward.
The passively begrudged sharing of heat stirred in it something that did not come from V.
It felt. It remembered. But the shape of the memory was as formless as it was aching and it circled itself impatiently, seeking some concise image or impulse within itself that could describe its agitation.
Humans. Seed. Seal. Song. Memory. Memory. Memory. Memory.
Annoyance clouded its perception. It had no mind. It could not think without borrowing from V, and V could not sleep with it churning so. Yet his will was gentler than usual as he impressed quiet upon it. Softened despite the hunger in his gut and the hard, uncomfortable stone beneath him. He settled someplace on its amorphous essence with a strange familiarity.
Like the ghost of a sword-calloused palm touching memories of red scales.
Its anxiety faded. It curled around this imagery, content to return with it to dormancy while V's companions steamed strangely at his sides and drove the chill from his body. Soon, V slept. A rare untroubled sleep brought on by an even rarer certainty that, at least for a while, he was protected. Whispers of warmth that had little to do with temperature rippled along the surface of his mind.
Disjointedly, it wove a thought through those ripples. Small, but complete. Maybe it would only be as a quickly forgotten dream that he heard it at all.
I, too… am warmed.