12. Mourner

Riley woke up panting, the phantom image of Siberian's dead body staring back at her with Jack's sunken eyes.

Smells.

She breathed in and out, taking in the smoke from the fireplace and the musty smell of the couch's fabric, but none of it eased the band of iron gripping her lungs.

Siberian trusted her.

Tastes.

She could taste the salt of her own tears, mixed with the metallic tang of blood.

Siberian loved her.

Sights.

The hunting trophies mounted on the wall. The door to the bedroom. The empty glass of blood — Manton's blood.

Siberian loved Bonesaw.

Sounds.

The occasional crackling of the dying fire. The branches of a tree against the roof. The wind's howl.

Manton loved Bonesaw.

Touch.

The warm leather of the couch. The soft flannel of her borrowed shirt. The icepacks around her severed hand, in the lunchbox.

Manton loved Bonesaw, and she wished she knew him well enough to know for sure whether she had made the right choice.

His death, and Siberian's disappearance, hadn't hurt that much the first time around. Not as much as finding the truth.

This time, there was no truth, only speculations.

Maybe he loved Bonesaw enough to love Riley too. She would never know.

She sat up, cross-legged on the couch where she had slept, having insisted that Benny take the bed since he was too tall to fit comfortably on the two-seater. Murder Rat kept a watchful eye on him in the small bedroom adjacent to the bathroom, which left Riley alone in the living room slash kitchenette.

Her power wasn't back yet, and wouldn't be for another couple of hours, so she grabbed the blood reservoir next to the couch for a refill of her glass.

With Siberian, she'd had the fleeting thought that it wasn't so different from pretending to be Bonesaw after the others came out of cryostasis, but it wasn't quite true. Her actions then had been subdued, limited to obeying orders rather than unleashing her full creativity, but she's still gone along with Jack's ideas until he was taken down. She'd still killed people, and hadn't felt bad about it because it was self-preservation.

The fact that she was conflicted about Manton was a good thing, her therapist would have said. It showed that she was worried about doing the right thing, even though she didn't always know what that was. It showed that she'd changed.

You still killed, a voice that sounded too much like Jack whispered in her mind.

She rose from her seat and checked the bedroom. Benny was asleep, or at least pretending to, and Murder Rat sat on a chair at the foot of the bed, beady eyes strained on him.

The Riley from the pocket dimension had killed Melanie Hampston rather than setting her free once she was done with her, because she'd been scared of what it would mean.

This Riley would do better.

Her gaze lingered on Murder Rat. She'd been scared before, when given files of past victims to help doctors, that she would one day find beauty in Bonesaw's work. A good thing, then, that there was no beauty to be found in Murder Rat. No artistry. No meaning.

She forced herself to smile.

Murder Rat was a shameful abomination, but the shame was a good thing. It meant that she knew better now.

"No…" Benny mumbled. "Please…"

Was he having a nightmare or reacting to her presence?

At least he had stopped stuttering, which was the hallmark of a great friendship, in her experience.

She retreated to the couch, leaving him to his nightmare, whether he was awake or asleep.

She stopped for another refill and sat back down on the couch, staring at the embers.

Was that what people without powers felt? This dull kind of nothingness, with no urge to invent or create, no drive to engage in conflicts?

How boring. What did people do all day?

She couldn't remember what life had been like before she got her power, what had occupied her time. Had she gone to school? Did she have friends? What games did they play? What was her family like?

What did normal people her age do?

School? She supposed it was school that occupied most of their time. What was it like? It was one of those things that everyone knew and assumed you knew, and asking would draw a line dividing oneself from others.

The closest she'd experienced to school had been her classes, but that had been tailored to her power and circumstances, and she'd been the lone student. Ethics, philosophy, psychology, sensitivity training… She was pretty sure these weren't on the curriculum for regular sixteen going on twelve students.

Who would she have been, without powers? If life had gone on without the Nine attacking that city, that home she didn't remember?

She could hardly imagine.

There would be no question of whether she was twelve or sixteen, for one thing.

It would have been boring, she supposed, to be caught up in petty problems, without dreaming of bigger things, but a wistful part of her longed for the smaller stuff she could never have.

She stretched to get up, and was abruptly reminded of her injuries, sitting back down.

Unbuttoning the flannel shirt, she delicately peeled it away from her midsection, running her fingers alongside the pink scars. She would have to open them up again to fix the internal damage.

She adjusted her shirt and rose from her seat, careful not to jostle anything, to get another refill. The blood was running low, but that was okay. Enough remained to carry her through the night. She finished her glass and set it down on the floor before laying back on the sofa.

Sleep didn't find her, which was as well. She didn't need another nightmare about Siberian.

Manton was dead. Siberian was gone. There was nothing to do about it.

Except that she was uniquely equipped and experienced in reviving people.

Wavering loyalties could be dealt with. She had, after all, programmed the clones to be loyal.

It wouldn't be that Manton and that Siberian, but that hadn't mattered before. The passenger would cobble things together into a good enough approximation, with the help of simulated memories.

Riley gripped the covers until her knuckles turned white.

It's what Bonesaw would have done. Had done. It's what Bonesaw had done, and even if it had laid down the foundations to revive the Flock, that didn't make it a good thing.

Siberian was gone, and Riley didn't need someone to love her. She'd managed just fine, after Gold Morning.

She clutched the covers tighter.

What about her?

Had she been cobbled together by the passenger? Was that how she came back?

Was she really herself?

She didn't feel like a stranger in her own mind, the way Ashley or the Flock members sometimes felt.

No, she knew just thinking about it that it didn't make sense.

If she died, it wasn't Riley that the passenger would remember. She'd engaged more with her power as Bonesaw than as Riley, saw more conflict, fed the passenger more data, and those were the only things that mattered in the end.

She didn't like that answer, but she knew it was right. Her passenger wasn't involved in her return to the past.

*

There was a visceral satisfaction in taking ownership of her flesh.

Her power had been back by the time she woke up, and with it came the itch to use it.

Patching up her injuries took less than fifteen minutes, the bulk of the time spent on reattaching her severed hand. It wasn't her best job, but it didn't matter. It would heal just fine in a matter of days.

Once everything was in working order, she began preparing her disguise. From a culture of stem cells extracted from her bone marrow, she crafted a flesh mask to wear over her face, to change her features and avoid facial recognition.

A timer went off, and she rinsed her hair in the sink, washing off the foam that had reshaped its proteins. After drying it, fingers singled out one lock, extending it to its full length, then let the curls spring back to their natural shape. A delightful mess of wild curls that couldn't be further removed from Bonesaw's impeccable ringlets.

Her natural hair.

She moved on to the legs and arms, elongating them to bring her body back to its familiar shape and proportions. To feel at home in it, instead of relying on her power to compensate for the difference. It wasn't much; she'd been short and petite and a late bloomer even without erasing a year and a half from her body.

Those surgeries had never been reversed. Higher-ups didn't trust her not to sneak something in, even with supervision. Her body hadn't aged a day since she took a literal bonesaw to herself, but that was months in the future, from this standpoint.

This time, she would let herself grow up. She'd been twelve long enough.

There was still a lot of work to come. Most of the changes were purely cosmetic, because time was of the essence and there were limited tools and materials to work with.

There were raw materials available, but she didn't want to use anything Bonesaw had harvested.

She would need to grow tissue to replace the filler, but it would all look fine under layers of clothing for now. The rest would require fine-tuning once she wasn't in a rush, and there was still the bulk of Bonesaw's weapons to remove.

Benny entered the bathroom and screamed.

"Shorry, I should have chlosed the thoor," said Riley, the handle of a scalpel in her mouth while she adjusted the rib-spreader. "I thought oo were shtill ashleep."

She raised her eyes in case he was gonna puke all over her work, but he fell to the ground instead.

Murder Rat stared at him for a moment before poking him with her heel. He didn't move.

She looked at Riley, who shrugged.

Riley finished extracting the capsule of plagues from deep within her ribcage, then dropped it in a bowl of biocide. She had time to close the incision before Benny came to.

He didn't get up, instead curling up in fetal position while whimpering.

She ignored him for now, cleaning up her work station.

"There, all done, bathroom's yours. Sorry for the wait."

She carefully stepped around him on her way to the kitchen.

There, she laid out a bowl of Frooty Toots and a water bottle for Benny's breakfast, then began gathering her stuff.

By the time she was all packed up (with a few useful things scavenged from around the cabin), Murder Rat carried Benny and forcibly sat him down at the table. He began mechanically eating his cereal, and she realized that she was staring when he noticed her and let the food drop from his mouth.

"Oh god, did you put something in there?"

"No," she answered.

She hadn't.

It was aerosolized.

*

After moving an unconscious Benny to the couch and fixing the phone so he could call for help once he woke up, Riley turned her attention to Murder Rat.

Back then, it had been something of a breakthrough. Her first real success at mashing up two capes.

Now, as she forced herself to ignore the input of her power and look beyond the stapled flesh, the only thing she could think about was being under Khepri's power.

She reached for the remote and hesitated.

The hesitation was silly, really. Murder Rat was programmed with a compulsion that kept her from attacking her maker no matter what.

Riley held onto that memory of freedom being stolen away as she revoked her conscious control over Murder Rat.

"I'm sorry I did this to you," she said, and she meant it.

There wasn't much of a reaction. Beady eyes turned to stare at her, and drool continued to drip from the restructured mouth. Murder Rat blinked, and Riley searched for what to say next.

What would she want in that situation?

A new body with all kinds of cool new features, duh.

The answer was so obvious she could hardly imagine anyone choosing differently. Which was kind of the problem, really. It was hard to put herself in someone else's place, and she only had her own experience to draw comparisons from. That was why she had classes on the subject.

Ask. Explain. Explain enough that there are no surprises, and leave decisions in their hands. Respect their decisions. No surprises. Nothing that isn't approved first.

Even when freed from her control, Murder Rat couldn't meaningfully consent, which meant that Riley would have to proceed while knowingly breaking the rules, but she could still explain.

"I don't know what happened. Woke up here and now, and it's not my here and now, and it's definitely not a here and now that I ever wanted to see again. Where I'm from, I haven't been Bonesaw in a long time. I killed the rest of the Nine so I could get away. I'll fix you. Give you separate bodies. Give you your lives back."

This lapsed into the familiar territory and well-rehearsed words of Project Lazarus.

"The new body wouldn't be exactly like before, but I can make a pretty good approximation. The end result is usually about 75 percent, inside and out, but that's for people brought back from the dead, with no brain or DNA available, and some of the data's usually corrupted from storage. I'd give you at least 90, maybe even 95 percent. Better than now, and with room for improvement. It would take a while to get the right equipment and get things going, but I can put you in a coma until then, so you won't feel a thing. Full disclosure, I'll put all the essential bits in a life-support pod in the meantime."

The problem was that every time she'd brought people back, she had relied on other people's powers or tech. She wouldn't have Jamie to provide the raw material, Amy to smooth things over, or fancy tech from Toybox for the incubation chamber.

Hell, she could make incubation chambers with Mannequin's tech in a pinch, but the only piece she had with her was her backpack, and it was way too small.

Unless… Yes, she could do this. If she went back to the Nine's previous hideout, to salvage Mannequin's tech.