Author's Note: dark_roast created another wonderful illustration for this chapter. You can go directly to the picture here: ic dot pics dot livejournal dotcom / dark_roast / 7627531 / 56495 / 56495_900 dotjpg or go here for the full art post: archiveofourown dotorg / works / 2515286
Now
The soldier is in a rainforest. The first and last thing he remembers is the doctor's voice, filling him up, giving him his orders. His only weapons are his arm and his body, but that's enough. He can edge away in time from the hidden spikes as he wades through mud, move fast enough and hear and sense well enough to navigate a booby-trapped path. At some point the only way towards the target is through a tunnel sealed by barbed wire and full of murky water. He uses the metal hand to rip a hole open and takes a breath deep enough to fill his lungs.
The night outside is warm, but the water is cold, cold, as cold as it gets.
One minute.
He cannot see, but he isn't afraid. He is never afraid.
He knows what he is for.
Two
(stay here just stay here end it now)
minutes.
He emerges to air, rushing tangy and humid into his lungs, a moon like a jaundiced eye, leaves bigger than his head. Then gunfire, pinning him in place. He melts into the shadows. The only sounds are the whistles and cracks of the bullets, the splashes as they hit the water. Even the birds and the insects are quiet. Soon he pinpoints the spot, high up in the canopy, where the gunman must be. Not a sniper. A sniper wouldn't be this wasteful.
He moves in a wide semi-circle until he is behind the shooter's nest and begins to climb.
There are things in the trees, he knows, with scales and fangs and claws, but they can't do anything to him. Sting him or bite him and you'd fall dead from venom.
He lands on the platform high up in the tree branches, the good arm at the ready, but instead of a
(person)
target there is only an StG, rigged to fire on a timer. Spent cartridges spill, still hot, onto the platform. He breaks the mechanism, stops the rifle and unhooks it from its moorings, then takes it with him along with the last cartridge belt. His weak hand is stained with mud, and that makes the gun feel cold and slippery, even though it fits perfectly into the metal hand's hold. He can sense steel spreading from his arm to his bones, snaking through his veins, curling around the glistening darkness of organs.
The mission objective is inside a compound with sentries and guards, wooden spikes jutting towards the sky and the outside. There is a fire, the scent of something sweet, burning. He has been told not to be seen, so instead of cutting a path straight to the target, he sneaks in. He has to be a ghost instead of a weapon. He can be a ghost. He can just disappear.
He waits for a patrol to move past, then crawls across a wooden beam ceiling, drops down, picks a lock.
Inside it's dark and it smells of burnt oil. He smells of nothing but mud and his breath is soundless. He doesn't even have a shadow.
The target is sitting on a chair, back turned towards him.
Very bad.
He unslings the rifle, points the barrel at the target's head. When he squeezes the trigger, there will be only one shot.
Neither of them moves. He cannot hear the target breathe.
When this is done everything will
(stop)
be fixed. Put right.
The doctor whispers under his skin. The soldier can feel all the words, buried in his flesh like rivets. It is good. He belongs somewhere, to someone.
Listen to my voice. There is nothing else. It is necessary that you do this. The future depends on it.
The shot rings out. He is sure everyone in the compound has heard it.
The target's head rolls to the floor with a thump, spilling sawdust as it falls.
He draws nearer. He has to make sure it is finished. He uses the edges of the plates on the metal arm to tear through the target's torso, where the heart should be. He slices through fabric, then rubber. The metal hand is covered in something sticky. In the dark, it's the colour of tar.
'You have completed your assignment,' the doctor says. 'You have done well.'
Now he gets to sleep.
:=:=:=:
He awakes.
The dark goes from ice to warm and liquid.
He thinks that maybe the dark is better when it's cold.
There is a heartbeat, very steady. He knows what's coming next even though he remembers nothing of what came before. When the voice starts—his voice, the doctor's voice—it is soothing. Comforting.
Listen to my voice. There is nothing else. Listen to my voice.
Yes.
The light appears, brightens from deep grey to white. Soon they are done with the leads on his skin and the pictures flashing behind his eyes. His nose and throat are clogged with the ice-smell, but all he cares about is that they have just ripped the voice away from him like a limb, or a piece of dead skin.
He does not have time to feel the lack. The doctor himself is there, standing in front of him.
'Move your arm, soldier,' the doctor orders.
He does not need to be told which arm the doctor is talking about. He raises the good arm, the strong arm, turns it back and forth, closes and opens the hand, wriggles the fingers. The metal is smooth and, other than the elbow joint, seamless. Under the waking room's lights, still slick with ice-fluid, it glistens like a diamond. 'Full control, yes, that is very good.' The doctor sounds happy.
He wants to make the doctor happy. It is not good when the doctor is unhappy.
The doctor tells him what he is meant to do. 'Are you ready to receive your mission briefing?'
They put pictures in his head, give him his weapons. The pictures are ugly, because what he has to do is ugly, but he will do it because the doctor asked him to. Because this is the war, and he is the soldier, and he was made to do what has to be done. The doctor is always watching, even when his eyes are not in the room, and he can see everything inside the soldier's head, even the littlest thoughts that scurry about like ants. He knows when the soldier is Wrong, even when the soldier doesn't, and he has machines and other things he can use to fix him, correct him, get him sorted out.
The soldier has
(bad)
(very Bad)
(don't even think)
not power too, no. Not power. But he is—maybe—necessary. There are things only he is fit to do. That is why the doctor asks him. The soldier cannot live without the doctor, but the doctor needs him too, just a little.
The idea is… pleasing, he thinks. His eyes dart from the white coats to the doctor and back again. The thought is written on the screens, pouring into the wires attached to his head. The doctor can see it, but does not punish him for it, so it must not be Bad.
The soldier folds the thought up, as tight as it can get, and tucks it away as snug as a bullet inside a gun.
:=:=:=:
The mission is in a harbour city. The air is warm—too warm—and full of sea moisture, but his arm works and his weapons work, and so he cannot mind it. The ocean
(island)
is crawling with ships, big and small, and the target is in a building that rises into the darkening sky like a needle. He has cased the area since the drop, knows there are bodyguards posted outside the room but not inside. Inside is safe because it is fifteen storeys high, but that is not true. Nowhere is safe from the soldier.
The city is thick with people, and street traffic, and noise, so he keeps to the alleyways and the roofs, under cover of shadows and the trees lining the avenues. He knows he can't be seen. He isn't real.
When he gets close to the hotel, he moves from the rooftops to the underground. He has the building's schematics in his head, a fleshless white skeleton in a blue field. He knows where the basements are, the soft entrances, the elevator shafts. He lifts the electrical panel in one of the service elevators and disables it. It is only temporary, he knows—once people find the fault they will eventually take a look at the wiring, repair it. But that's what he needs it to be, temporary; just a mishap that won't raise any suspicions.
That's what he is, too. Temporary. When it's all over he will never have been here.
He climbs up the shaft, to the very top. When he's almost there, he hears the elevator start up again, fourteen floors below. He isn't worried. He's fast.
He doesn't look down. He never looks down.
When he climbs out the elevator is still a whole floor below him. He makes his way to the roof, eyes focused on the water tanks and the
(maze)
tangle of vents and not on the city spread out below, then climbs down the outside, inch by inch, unseen. The wind howls and tosses his hair about and the ground is very far below him, but he knows he won't fall. He won't die. He can't.
He reaches the target's window. The curtains are drawn and he crouches on the ledge, balanced on one foot.
The hotel's facade is white with wealth, but from this high up he can see the shanties huddling on lower rooftops, the rain barrels and cracked concrete and walls of rust-stained corrugated metal. It makes him dizzy. Headlights and strings of street lamps swirl far below. He feels something strange in his midsection, and wants it to go away.
He focuses on the window again, where he has no reflection. He's listening for noises from inside the room, but still he notices the thickness of the silk curtains, the string of pearls abandoned on a dresser.
The soldier knows this is what he was made to do. He wasn't born like people are and didn't live like people do. Instead, like the doctor explained—patiently, because the soldier isn't smart enough to understand—he serves a Purpose. He can't grasp it fully, not even if it were laid out in front of him like a disassembled rifle, but when he sees these things, pearls, shanties, he understand that perhaps what he does will help fix that.
Maybe it can be Good even if he's Bad.
The window is easy to force open. He slips in, his footsteps soundless. This is a bedroom, empty. He walks to the adjoining room, where instead of the target there is the woman mentioned in the briefing, busy at a writing table, leaning over a spread of paper sheets. She doesn't
(don't hurt her)
(don't)
feel him approach until he's right behind her. She turns around. Her eyes widen. Instinctively, she grabs a letter opener and slashes at him full force, but it's too late, it has always been too late. Her yell for help never makes it out of her throat. The soldier clamps his hand over her mouth, yanks her up, and sinks one of his knives into her kidney, all the way to the hilt.
Her hand spasms open. The letter opener lands on the heavy carpet. It's the first sound since he's stepped into the room.
She is not the target.
A small red stain spreads on the back of her silk robe.
Her eyes are so wide.
(stopstopstop)
He releases her face. Her mouth opens into an O of surprise. The second sound is a gasp as he pulls out the knife. Her brows furrow, as though she can't quite believe what is happening to her. Fluid gushes down from her wound to the floor. She is warm and solid in his arms and even though the room now smells of blood and urine the pale light trickling in makes everything clean.
Like a blanket of snow.
(stop)
He was told not to be seen. To get rid of her if she was in the way. So this must be done now. Things will happen otherwise, terrible things. But the doctor didn't tell him not to be quick, so he sinks the knife again, this time in her chest, up and under the ribcage, into her heart.
She doesn't fight it, not anymore. She must understand, then, that this is to put things right. That he has to cut out the Wrongness like the doctor cut it out of him. Her eyes turn glassy as red spurts down the front of her robe, rains down in a flood. Heart blood is red, but in this light it's almost purple. She looks past the soldier, grows slack in his arms. Her mouth opens, soundless, her slipper slides off her foot and plops onto the blood-soaked carpet. He can see a thread of saliva on her lips.
He lays her down on the floor. Her body jerks once, twice, then stills. Her eyes are still open, already drying. The pool of blood spreads under her like wings.
Dying is hard, maybe. It isn't hard to be dead.
The soldier steps back. He was careful not to step on the blood, but it has spattered on him nonetheless. It cools on his skin. The smell of it fills his nose. He swallows, once, twice, and doesn't understand why.
He reaches down to close her eyes with his weak hand.
The target is in the adjoining bathroom. The soldier can hear humming, the occasional splash of water.
He steps up to the bathroom, listens for a moment until he knows what will be waiting for him on the other side. The door is unlocked. When he goes in, the target is still in the tub, the air rainforest-steamy. The target's mouth opens, but before anything can come out, before he can move at all, the soldier is already upon him.
The soldier is always so fast.
He pulls the target underwater and holds him there. The target is strong with terror, splashing water everywhere, hitting the sides of the tub, but the soldier is stronger. His metal hand is fastened around the target's throat, cutting off air and blood, his flesh arm pins the target's legs against the rim of the tub.
A glass.
Stairs.
Pick on someone y—
Water rushes into the target's lungs. His struggle grows weaker and more desperate, and through the strong hand the soldier can feel the weight of him, the strain of muscle and sinew, the noises muffled by water. The water turns a faint pink. The target's tongue lolls from his open mouth, his eyes bulge, his skin turns ashen. Soon there's a squeak of skin on wet tile, a few final convulsions. The body turns limp. Soap suds float above the face, so the only visible thing is the tongue, looking like a purplish slug, and a halo of dark hair.
The soldier releases him, leans back.
There is water everywhere, even on the soldier's face, dripping down. The target's (the corpse's) foot sticks out of the tub, the heel reddened. There won't be a bruise.
The soldier slides the body fully underwater, turns it on its side. He has to tuck the body's knees against its chest so it will fit.
The soldier gets to his feet again. Now he must
(wipe it)
(don't please)
disappear.
He looks at the body again. Under the electric light, blanketed by water, it almost looks like it's asleep.
More things whenever he blinks: an alleyway, a rifle, cold. He does not want the pictures, even if he does not mind rifles, or cold. They bring back that tightening fist in his stomach, like all his gears are stiffening with rust. He can feel them about to spill out of his mouth.
He turns his back on the body, rubs the cold skin on his face. The water is dirty, the tiles slippery. He can smell the start of unpleasantness in the air; soon there will be the sticky sweetness of rot, the stink of fluid oozing from the body's nose and mouth.
The doctor will take care of the soldier. The doctor will take the pictures away. Fix him, put everything right, like the soldier has put things right tonight. Everything right. He bites his tongue, manages to hold his insides in. Everything will be right.
He does not remember, but he has done this many
(no)
times. It is what he is for, like one of his knives.
Like a trap.
He steps back into the room, where the other body is and where the air smells of ammonia and cooling blood.
Outside, fireworks have started up. They sound like artillery fire and tinge the body, whose flesh has begun to turn livid, blue, green, red.
The newspaper lying on a table says 1964.
The doctor tells him he has done well, even though he swatted away one of the white coats when they were putting him on the chair, even though he cannot tell the doctor why.
Now he gets to sleep.
Now he gets to forget.
TBC...