The Human Experience

Five-Quarter P, day 33, 3415.

Sometimes I wonder how Del can so easily look past the fact that Lykus is a murderer. What does that say about her? That she’s forgiving and nonjudgmental, or that her past sins have put her on his level?

It seemed impossible to lift Hector’s spirits. Del didn’t even want to try. There was no point – his day was about to get a hell of a lot shittier. By sundown he’d be Infected and betrayed by the only person he had left in his miserable life. She wouldn’t give him empty words.

Instead she poured more wine into his goblet. That would make it easier for him to suffer this fate at her hands. It’d also make it easier for the Voices to penetrate the resistances of his mind.

Icy needles grazed her spine. She couldn’t believe she’d thought of that. Had she so easily fallen into the role of traitorous bitch?

Hector leaned back against the enormous fir under which they sat, gazing with jaded eyes at the mountain’s summit, where he’d woken up this morning at their inn wondering why he was again forced to be Hector.

She’d suggested this outing as an escape. He’d been eager for solitude, but Belred and Solmay played their parts well by objecting for a good hour that they couldn’t be left alone. Conceding easily, especially after Hector’s little escapade in Van-Ferrall, would have been suspicious, after all. So Belred had clamped tracking devices around their wrists and told them not to go past the Inaulti Valley. Solmay had suggested this secluded little island in the forest, which she’d allegedly seen from the cable car on the way up. That way Hector couldn’t suspect Del of intentionally trapping him in a Swarm. Let him blame the guards. Let him think it was their idea. She’d blame herself enough for the both of them.

“There’s a plan behind this,” Hector muttered.

Delia’s stomach somersaulted. “W-What?”

He turned his head to her. “Last time Orcadis left me as Hector, he wanted me to make peace with my parents. Wouldn’t say it – because he knew I’d never do it that way – but that was his purpose. What do you suppose he wants now?”

“You overestimate him,” she said, trying to relax her shoulders. “He doesn’t even care about his own son. Why would he care about your parents? The old Prier probably sat on the remote or something. He’s so busy not thinking bad thoughts that he’s forgotten how to think altogether.”

Hector offered a weak smile and brought the goblet to his lips, but his thought-energy remained sceptical. It still suffocated her when he was Hector. Lately his waves centered less on Varali and more on a general disinterest in life, which she found more alarming than the outward grief. She wondered if he was strong enough to take the next blow – the Infection.

Del gulped back her share of the wine, forcing it down her knotted throat. She was disgusting. Couldn’t Hector smell the betrayal streaming off of her like filth? Days of justifying it to herself hadn’t made her feel less slimy at the thought of doing this. But if she didn’t, Hector would get caught stalking the Exodus like so many trained spies before him. Orcadis would never give him the remote. He’d probably drive Hector mad playing ventriloquist with his emotions.

But she still wanted to drop the entire operation, grab Hector’s hand, and run.

She nestled her head against his shoulder in silent apology. Hector didn’t push her away. Why was she always expecting him to? Lykus had said he wanted to be more affectionate with her. He’d said he was scared to do it.

“Who are you, Del?”

She tensed against him. “Huh?”

“I don’t know anything about you. For example, why were you exiled from Van-Rath? I told you the first day we met that I was exiled for throwing my sister from a window.”

Del hesitated. She knew Hector deserved the truth, but talking about herself always left a sour taste in her mouth and a pervading feeling of weakness. Even with Orcadis, she’d had difficulty opening up. She’d just seemed too messed up, her sins unforgivable. The Greathelm with his compassionate chocolate eyes and warm smile was too pure to hear any of it, she’d thought. Telling him would be like muddying an immaculate white garment. It was too beautiful for a dirty child to put on.

Orcadis would wait in silence with her, patient, not expecting anything. After much internal toil the girl Neria would throw out one or two of her darkest crimes. He’d never justified the things she’d done. He’d loved her despite them. Saying nothing, he’d take her in his warm, strong arms and rock her, wringing bitter tears from her heart with one of those Akkútian melodies sung in his baritone...

Oh, Gods. Gods! What sort of idiot would fall for such–?

“Alright,” Hector sighed, breaking her reminiscence, “we’ll start with something smaller. Who broke your heart?”

Her stomach flipped. “That’s not something smaller.”

“Aha, so you admit someone broke your heart!”

“Yes, Hector, I was left pregnant and crying at the altar and vowed never to love again.” She snorted. “Oh, and I also had terminal cancer. Violins played all night.” Hector’s shoulder moved beneath her cheek as he breathed a deep sigh. That’s right, I’ve resorted to sarcasm. Time for a different line of conversation.

He lifted her chin, making her raise heavy eyes to his face. “Why did you refuse to marry me?”

Delia chewed her lip. Everyone she’d known had disappeared from her life when she’d been thrown out of her village. Where did a person with no connections and no friends go? To the Helms, of course. Severing all ties with the outside world was an admission requirement, to ensure the poor lost soul learned to depend only on the Helms. Neria had been no different. Orcadis became her only contact, her lifeline. Leaving him destroyed her because she’d depended on him like a drug.

And...wasn’t marriage all about dependence, too?

“Staking everything on one person makes life very unstable,” she said. “I don’t want to be roped to anyone. It’s okay to want you, but I don’t ever, ever, want to need you.”

Hurt pooled in the deep green eyes. “But I’ve needed you all this time.”

“No, you haven’t,” Del said, her voice cracking. She swallowed to continue. “For all my help, I’ve only made things worse. I should have left you as you were.”

Hector brushed her hair from her forehead with a wistful smile. “That’s not what I mean. I never needed you as my mentalist. I needed you as my ally, my friend.”

Guilt crashed over her. A tingle started in her nose and she felt the tears coming like a persistent sneeze, but Hector didn’t let her lower her face.

“I know I’m not the ideal husband. I know I don’t have much to offer. My love is selfish, yes, but yours is broken, too. Can’t we learn how to love together? Can’t we mend ourselves together? Neither of us can do it alone.”

“But we have to. You can’t trust me; I always run. And I can’t trust someone who wouldn’t give a damn about me if it wasn’t for a chip in his brain. That...that’s not even you. The real you doesn’t...doesn’t...” Give a shit? “Love me.” She expelled the last words like some garbage that had to be taken to the curb before the neighbours smelled it.

Light trickled out of Hector’s eyes and she realized with a pang she’d called him ‘not real.’ Smooth. She remembered why she never expressed herself. It always sounded this bad.

“Lykus would love you if he could,” he tried. “As for me, I can, and I do. This thing in my brain didn’t change me, Del; it gave me my whole self.” He looked down, fingering the rim of his goblet. “I just can’t handle being whole, I guess.”

Those wretched tears tried their luck again, but Del fiercely held them back. Then, before she could stop herself, she turned Hector’s face to her and kissed him.

At first he just stood there, shocked, it seemed, his lips slightly parted, but then he pulled her close and deepened the kiss.

That was when she lost it.

A sob burst from her lips. She ripped away from him, breathing heavily. “I’m s-sorry.” She scrambled to her feet and her goblet tipped over, soaking the earth with red like spilt blood.

Hector stood, too, taking her elbow when she turned away to wipe her nose with her sleeve. Tears leaked helplessly down her cheeks now, faster than she could wipe them. The garbage was out. The neighbours were smelling it. “Feminine issues pending, I suppose. Hormones, all that lovely stuff, you know?”

“No, don’t joke.” He cupped her face in his hands, gazing into her eyes. “What is it?”

She tried not to break down, not to snatch him in a hug and tell him what a lying piece of shit she was. “I just need to go to the bathroom and clean up. There’s a rest area close by on the mainland.”

“Alright, let me pack up and we’ll go.”

“N-No, really, this is...embarrassing.” She squirmed her face free of his hands. “I don’t want to dampen your mood more. This trip was supposed to make you feel better.”

“Come on, Del–”

“Please, don’t insist.” She pushed the canoe down the shore and halfway into the water, then placed one foot on the edge to keep it from floating away. “I’ll be back soon and we’ll unpack the picnic basket. Unless you want to go back to the inn, that is. It’s blood soup on the menu today.”

She glanced over her shoulder in time to see Hector’s nose scrunch. “Alright, you go ahead.”

Del swung her other leg inside, sat, grabbed the oars, and tried to smile as Hector pushed the canoe off from the shore.

“Delia!” he called after her. She twisted on the bench. Hector stood ankle-deep in water, his raven hair rippling down his shoulders, his lopsided smile lacking pretence. “You really did make me feel better.”

The wind knocked from her lungs. Sweet mother of suns, tear my heart out, why don’t you?

She navigated away from the island that would serve as Hector’s prison in another half hour or so, ramming her body weight behind her oars until her biceps burned. Her pulse hammered in her temples by the time the canoe scraped onto the pebbled shore at the other side of the river.

After dragging the canoe into the thistle sprouting between rocks, Del cast a glance at the islet where Hector was now a speck against the one fir tree at its center.

She swept into the trees, her strides long. When she’d threaded deeply enough into the wood that she could no longer hear the rush of the river, Del broke into a run. She didn’t stop until only a line of trees separated her from the clearing that housed the Inaulti Valley’s rock formations.

What a mess she’d made of this! Her watch said she was ahead of schedule, but she hadn’t been able to bear the guilt of being with Hector another minute. Del rested her forehead against a tree trunk, squeezing her eyes shut with a groan. Had she really cried?

A whinny caught her ear and her head shot up. She peeked around the trunk. Three horses grazed in the valley, each tethered to a rock spear emerging from the forest floor. Her eyes darted across the clearing in search of their owners. Surely enough, there the three of them sat, hunched over a campfire rotating spits of meat over the flames.

But if these were the Infected people of the Exodus, they were early by Orcadis’s calculations. In fact, these clowns weren’t due here for at least another week. Had their plan been shot down before it had taken flight? If the Infected left before Hector could join them, this was all for nothing. She was betraying the man for nothing!

Through her panic she didn’t realize another rider was approaching until he burst from the treeline at the opposite side of the clearing and dismounted by the others.

“You won’t believe what I saw by the river,” he began, locking Del’s heart in a vice. “There’s a man stranded on that tiny island. His canoe’s on the other side of the river like somebody left him there or something.”

The woman by the fire looked up. “Serious?” She tore into the charred animal on her spit and worked around her mouthful to say, “Alarm’s due any minute now.”

“Poor bloke’s gonna get Infected.”

“Eh, who says he isn’t already?”

“Might swim for it,” another suggested.

Del froze. He wouldn’t, would he? Well, say he did, he still wouldn’t make it across the river before the Swarm hit –

“I hope he knows about the water snakes,” one of them said. “Else he’s a dead man.”

And it was all over in one fell swoop. Terror crashed over her in a cold wave, raising the hair on the back of her neck. Oh, shit.

For a moment she stood torn, Hector’s uncertain fate calling her to the shore and her survival instincts urging her to the cable cars. If she turned back for Hector now, they’d both be caught in the Swarm.

But if she didn’t...

Oh, who was she kidding? Hector wasn’t the kind of person who’d sit passively by as his enemies enclosed him. Of course he’d swim.

Cursing herself, Del wheeled and started back the way she’d come. She jumped over shrubs and protruding roots, slapping foliage out of her way, twigs lashing at her cheeks and hair. Her breath clawed tight in her chest, but her numbed legs pushed on, driving her through the forest as Tychon sank below the horizon and the trees burst into flames against Pyrrhus’s ruby light. With the ancient sun’s flashes, shadows swayed beneath tree trunks like they were candles guttering in the wind.

She stumbled over a rock as the alarms sang out. A recording carried through the forest, and though the warning was in Inaulti, Del didn’t need to understand it for fear to shoot down her spine like the caress of cold steel.

With the alarm carrying across the land in echoing waves, Del clawed out of the trees and emerged onto the thistle-strewn shore where she’d left the canoe. Instantly she looked to the lone islet in the river.

Hector wasn’t there.

A dark head bobbed above the waters halfway between island and mainland.

She ran to the canoe, pushing it back into the water with arms weak as jelly. No sooner had she swung over the side than the first whisper cleaved into her mind.

Hello.

Del’s whole body reacted in a spasm of fear that almost toppled the canoe over. She clutched its sides as it careened on the waves she’d created.

You fear us more than others do. It makes you especially resistant – and vulnerable.

Stars, why was she reacting like this? The butts of the oars slid in her sweaty palms and she gritted her teeth to keep from losing her nerve. In her head she kept repeating, Shut up, you don’t exist, this isn’t real.

One of the Voices detached from the indistinguishable whispers floating through the air and answered. Don’t exist? Because we are in your mind? Then your thoughts, your senses, your emotions cannot exist either. You cannot exist.

Don’t interact with them. That was the secret. Del’s elbows quivered as she pulled her oars back again for the final few strokes. Hector was yelling at her from the water, but she could only hear the whining drone in her ears. And the Voices. Always the Voices.

Why are you so defiant? Haven’t you always wanted a friend?

Delia grabbed Hector’s shirtfront as the canoe skimmed past him, tried to heave him up. Her hyperventilating had left her feeble, and white extended inward from the periphery of her vision until everything was a vague, ghostly outline.

She blinked to bring the world back into focus. A ripple writhed beneath the water’s surface near Hector’s back. Del released his shirtfront and took an oar, reaching around him to beat at the water in a panic. Hector clambered up and rolled over the canoe’s side. He plopped onto his back, features skewed with fury, clutching his head as he bellowed, “Shut up, I’ll fucking kill you, you shits, you murdering shits!”

Voices squirmed their way past the barriers Del had erected against them. She threw up fresh ones, calling back her Helm training, trying not to choke on her terror.

All the while Hector raged. “Don’t mention her! Don’t you dare mention her, you motherfuckers!”

He, it seemed, was interacting with them. She wanted to yell at him not to, wanted to pick up the oars and row to shore, but fighting the Voices didn’t leave enough brainpower for anything else.

Then one of them spoke with Orcadis’s voice. Neria.

She screamed. It was so spontaneous even Hector stopped his tantrum.

I know I’ve hurt you. It doesn’t have to be like that anymore.

“No! Don’t!” she cried, throwing her hands up as if that would help. It was over. She was losing. She could feel the reins slipping by the second.

You’re scared. The Voices remind you of your past illness. You fear they’ll make you do bad things again. Just let me in and it’ll stop. We’ll be together. I won’t let anyone force you to do what you don’t want to.

Something like a red-hot spike drove into her ankle. She choked out a scream before the pain intensified, spreading like fire up her leg and stealing the breath from her lips. Dazed, Del saw Hector leap onto her in a flash of motion. Another hot burst of agony as he ripped a long, squirming thing from her leg. He tore it in half with his bare hands, its toxic blood oozing down his forearms.

Come to me, Neria, the Orcadis-Voice coaxed. I’ll make it go away, just like last time.

Del stared at Hector. He was gripping her shoulders now, shaking her, but she couldn’t feel anything. Surroundings melted into pops of colour like fireworks. Even the Voices faded to the background as ice coursed up her leg, numbing everything in its journey through her torso, into her brain.

It was good enough. She allowed a delirious smile, her head lolling back of its own accord. Hector roared at her to focus, but he sounded miles away. Del found herself blinking up at the bruised sunset sky and knew she’d been placed down.

Peaceful oblivion took over. The body convulsing beneath her seemed nothing but a tumour chaining her to this earth. It was fine this way. There was no fear this way. There were no Voices.

Del felt herself pressed against Hector’s chest, his sodden shirt clinging to her cheek. She felt his screams for help vibrating against him as her ravaged nerves clamped and shook her muscles. Hector finally lay her down in the underbrush (were they on the mainland?), gesturing wildly to the hazy figures that had melted out of the trees.

One thing. Just one thing before she could let herself go.

“Hector.” Her rasping voice chiseled deep into her eardrums. He turned at once, eyes brimming with fear. “I w-was exiled b-because...I’m a-a m-m...” She coughed, blood spraying down her chin, but she had to say it. She had to say it before she died. “Murderer.”