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circumitus) wrote2015-03-31 12:36 am
circumitus) wrote2015-03-31 12:36 am
Entry tags:
you are a vessel, an empty husk not yet made whole
Sprawled out on the floor was Tejinder Wakeman, in a pool of blood spilling rapidly from his arm. His dark complexion was sickly and pale, his spiked black hair shaggy and covering his face. His sunglasses were missing, and his eyes squeezed shut. As the Tamas-thing kicked Tejinder across the floor, it became obvious that something else was missing.
His arm. The entire forearm had been completely severed. The Salamander could see raw muscle and bone jutting out of where his limb should be.
The many metal joints clanked and twisted, making crunching sounds as the Tamas-thing hovered back. His mouth was covered in blood and pieces of sinew were dangling out the corner of his lip. For a moment he flashed his teeth stained with deep red in what looked like a grin.
The lights in the hallway behind flickered. Tamas was no longer there, and all that remained was Tejinder Wakeman.
Curled up, the Archiver convulsed. His eyes rolled to the top of his head, and the Salamander briefly saw that they were the color of dark brown flecked with green.
“Well, that was unexpected... Wait, what’re you doing?” Tremond suddenly demanded of the Salamander as she approached Tejinder’s tremulous body.
Orion was not far behind her, leaning over as she knelt at his side. She didn’t even pay mind when he glanced over at his gun in the corner. “Is he breathing?”
“Yes,” she told her brother. She reached out to Tejinder, feeling his warm, sweaty forehead.
“Are you going to kill him?” Orion asked.
“No,” she replied.
But it’s going to hurt, she neglected to add as the Salamander took the bloody stump where Tejinder’s forearm used to be. Concentrating on heat and energy, and a red light. Just like when Lucas had touched her in Engelus and Tremond not long ago, that heat flowed through her. This time crimson red veins protruded from her skin, pulsating as they extended their light to the palm of her hand.
Her skin burned to the touch, and she was burning Tejinder. Cauterizing his wound.
When the bleeding stopped, Tejinder breathed more evenly, but he was still unconscious.
“Take care of him,” the Salamander said, waving Orion to the Archiver with her arm pulsating with red veins.
Orion obliged, dragging Tejinder out of the doorway and into the room, setting his back up against the wall. He used a knife to rip off the neck around Tejinder’s turtleneck shirt to cover the Archiver’s eyes. The Salamander recognized the knife he had taken from the boy that tried mugging them at the opera.
The aria that had been playing ceased, leaving only silence when the Salamander turned to Tremond. His eyes were wide with shock and awe. “Amazing...! You utilized your Brísingamen on your own free will, without a need for an emotional trip! It’s unexpected but I’ll welcome the change of pace. Losing the Archiver would, I believe, result in far more trouble than it’s worth.” He grinned joyfully at her hands, which were still burning with that crimson pumping through her veins. A thin veil of black and oily liquid seeped from her fingertips.
The Salamander gave a start, holding her hands out.
“Samandrine,” Tremond said, as if hearing her distress. “Consider it another product of your... gift, the Brísingamen.”
“What is this?” she asked, wavering and almost looking to Tremond for help.
Taking her wrist, the former chancellor lifted her hand, allowing the oily substance to drip to the concrete floor. “This... can be extremely toxic. Only when ingested, however. Samandrine can cause anything between temporary paralyses to inability to breathe. It’s not always fatal, though like with any poison it can be if belted out in high quantities.” His lips curled as he pulled a cloth napkin from his vest, and used it to wipe Tejinder’s blood and the samandrine from the Salamander’s fingers, which wiped away like soap washing a layer of mud. Her arm twitched with the hot energy pumping through her red veins. “It’s beautiful, no?”
“Negative. Smells bad.”
“That may be,” Tremond said, releasing the Salamander’s wrist and dropping the napkin to the floor. “But thanks to your Brísingamen, you just saved your friend’s life.”
“The Archiver is not my friend,” she said. “I have no friends.”
Though the Salamander regarded Tejinder with a matter-of-fact nature, there did linger a certain fondness for the man. A fondness that drew her to save his life without Tremond’s say-so. For some reason, she did not wish to see him die. In fact, she found herself grateful that he still lived.
“Surely you wouldn’t have been so swift to step forward if you felt nothing for the man,” Tremond urged.
“Not to sound disrespectful, sir, but you have never understood my feelings.”
Gregory Tremond’s eyes rose. This was clearly not the answer that he was expecting. “Really? Your feelings? And what is it you’re supposedly feeling?”
“Confused.” She looked over to the body bags. The bloodied one remained stationary, unlike David’s bag. Red soaked through the open holes.
“You want to see what’s in there, don’t you?” Tremond beckoned her to the body bags.
The Salamander didn’t respond. She strode to it without prompt, as casual as anyone could to a corpse. She knelt beside the body bag and held out her arm. The pulsating had stopped, as did the rush of heat flowing to the ends of her fingertips.
“What are you feeling now, Salamander?” Tremond’s inquired coolly, like a silken trickle of false security.
“Afraid,” the Salamander whispered.
“Why are you afraid?”
“Because.” She placed her hands over the bag. One held onto the zipper, the other over the side. She leaned over the bag, already smelling the stench of rotting flesh. “We know what is in here.”
“Then what’re you waiting for? Open it.”
So she did.
Red snow falls over the icy streets of Ashwater, Washington. Now it’s full of holes and chasms. Smoke billows from the broken asphalt.
It’s there that Sergeant Stone sees herself, stumbling, limping through the streets. The boy from the Eider crash is safe in medical care. She does not worry for him now, or for anything.
At the end of this road, fumbling through the aftermath of a city on fire, a man waits for Stone at the gates. He consoles her with a promise to forget, as she has forgotten many times before.
Your body is weak now. You’ll die soon.
Her vision is spotted, but Stone makes out the rust-colored hair of her kindred. She hears him pull out a gun.
Goodnight, sleepyhead.
A point-blank bullet cracks her skull open. She collapses and dies again.
The Salamander stood up.
Her own face was looking back up at her from the body bag. It could have very well been her spitting image, if not for the meat well beyond rigor mortis. Threads of brown hair had already fallen out. Worms weaved in and out of her shrunken eyes and mouth, her ears secreting some kind of off-colored fluid. Jagged jaw hung agape, ready to snap off after years in decomposition.
She flashed back to the morgue.
Long after it had shut down, the Renaissance Sanitarium still housed several bodies of the dead. But only the morgue itself. Though the rest of the hospital reeked of must after a few forgotten years, she remembered that crematorium. That smell, and all those bodies...
They were all her. Corpses of the former Salamanders. Each of them given similar records that Tremond had fabricated: A twenty-nine-year-old veteran of eleven years in whatever armed force she was a part of. Always at the rank of sergeant or something similar:
Rey Stone, the American or Canadian marine and a child of drug addicts.
Sheridan of the Defense Forces of Ireland, who hailed from a family of alcoholics and had no desire to drink a drop of hooch herself.
Silva of the Argentine Navy, raised by deadbeats with no drive in life.
Steyn, the daughter of a man who worked in human trafficking, and threatened to send her to a brothel for any insolent behavior until she ran away to the South African Army.
Sarfati, a girl who knew of war at a young age when her family were killed. She then joined the Islamic Republic of Iran Army.
Schuyler, a Dutch woman who watched her mama murder her papa while having a drunken argument, and enlisted for the Korps Mariniers to escape her maniacal mother.
Schmidt came home from school one day to find her parents dead on drug overdoses, which led into her joining the German military.
Then there was Safronov. Rey Safronov, the Salamander. A psycho who became a sniper during the Kristiv Resurgence in Russia...
For many years, she had dreams of Ashwater. Red skies dawned from the Battle-Brave, rent from the city below. These moments were trapped in time, doomed to repeat for many long and agonizing years.
With the image of herself still fresh in mind, the Salamander moved over to the other body bags. She knew what waited inside, but she unzipped them all anyway.
When she did, the face was far less decayed than her other corpse, but still withered away with golden peach-colored skin. Her eyes had turned to mush. Some of her teeth had been knocked out. It remained in a present state of disintegration, with a fly making its journey to and from her left nostril. The Salamander turned, finally, to the last body bag, and revealed it to herself as well.
This one, strangely enough, was not much different from the rest, except for a significant detail. Her hair wasn’t short and brown or black or dark red, but replaced by long, gold-colored tresses. The decay had not yet affected her. Though dead, the golden-haired vessel somehow appeared as though she were only sleeping.
The Salamander stumbled back, staring at the three corpses. The stench of her own rotten, bloody body filled her senses, while the golden one did not seem afflicted by the hindrance of time.
“We could never cremate the bodies,” Tremond explained. “I tried, but they would never burn — just like the legendary Salamander. Must be where they got that. Anyway, our only option was to let them decay over time. Given your physiology and our Father’s immortal genes, however, even your corpses were used for research. There are others, too. I’m sure you recognize the few here already! That is Sheridan, Schuyler, Steyn... I’m afraid there is not much left of Stone’s, but if you would like to see the rest someday, I could—”
“No!”
The Salamander’s gaze did not tear from the dead faces of her past selves.
The writhing David Wednesday did catch her peripheral vision.
Tremond’s hand landed on the Salamander’s shoulder, though it hardly offered solace to her soul. “You never were supposed to wake up. That’s why you were left to rot at the Renaissance Sanitarium. No matter how many times we tried to dispose of you, your... Something about your Brísingamen kept you going. And since we couldn’t kill you, the only option was to transfer you to another vessel, rewrite your memories to think you’re a human soldier, programming one tragic story in after another. It became fun after awhile, I must admit...”
You are a vessel, an empty husk not yet made whole.
“You are born to die, and afterwards you are made to live again. That is how you live your life.” Though his words were hostile, his tone was not. Neither was that gentle squeeze of her shoulder. “It was only natural that you would go mad from it. Dying over and over for so long... Lucas Coffey tried to undo the damage that had been done after his ex-wife died, but he failed. You yourself happen to be nothing more than a scorch mark left on the world. These cities are proof of that.”
“Ashwater...?”
“That’s right.”
Glancing over her shoulder, she regarded the torn up edifices outside the window with strange regret. “I destroyed Ashwater.”
“Yes and no. You had no way of knowing back then, but when you made contact with the incubator for the Battle-Brave, there was an unprecedented resonance between it and your Brísingamen. My fault, really. I should have noticed the similarities between an incubator and a vessel. A vessel is just a temporary incubator that can contain the Battle-Brave’s energy for only a short time. You were a proto-incubator, if you will.” Tremond shrugged, as if the death of millions meant nothing more to him than an anthill.
“Was Engelus my fault, too?”
“Much as I would love to blame you, no. The Battle-Brave’s incubator was already making its way into the city under the name of Delta Selwyn.”
The Salamander lifted her head to meet Tremond’s eyes, taken aback as the image of the drug-addled woman she had initially thought to be Baby Girl being the Battle-Brave. “She was a human.”
“No, Delta Selwyn woke up in the city around the same time as you. The only difference is that she was already programmed to be a self-destructive addict. After tipping Camilla Banks to her as a potential client, the drugs she gave to that little incubator eventually killed her. Banks had no idea what she’d just done, as expected...”
It didn’t matter. Her and Tejinder’s attempts to stop the Battle-Brave at the Reactor of Nuclear Applications meant nothing. The Battle-Brave’s incubator had been on the verge of destruction several hours after her death.
“What are the Battle-Braves?” the Salamander asked.
Tremond’s shoulders fell. “History oftentimes repeats itself. You know this better than anyone.” He gestured to the three corpses out of the four body bags. “When there is panic, it’s only natural for people to take up arms. They create bigger weapons when their enemies start to rise against them. In this case, the weapons are less about size and more about powerhouses. Your bodies, both incubators and vessels alike, are capable of storing a massive amount of energy within yourselves.
“There are many faiths that differentiate Heaven and Hell, as though they’re two separate forces from the world we live in. Do you know what I think?” Tremond placed his hand under her chin. “Hell is repetition.”
Her eyes shifted towards the corpses again, and then back to Tremond.
“The truth is, this is already Hell,” she said aloud.
“Yes. For many, death is the end. But you do not have that luxury.” Tremond let go of her, stroking her cheek once. “Wouldn’t it be nice to break the cycle? Give it an ending?”
The Salamander wanted to answer. None, however, would have sufficed. That horrible sadness returned. She felt trapped in her repeated deaths.
She opened her mouth to speak, about to utter a single word...
Then, a shot blew through the open window.
The Salamander went still. A hole exploded through Gregory Tremond’s ribs. Only a brief glimpse caught Tremond’s wide-eyed face as he crumbled over the floor, on his side.
“Shmir!” Orion cursed. The Salamander had almost forgotten he was there. He must have been tending to Tejinder’s wounds while trying to take this all in.
Following the sound where the shot rang from, the Salamander moved to the opening. Her hand pressed to the windowpane, she peered out in a stupor.
Across the way, roosted over the slanted top floors within the neighboring building, Faye Elms kneeled with a rifle in her hand. She hovered by the window for cover, before vanishing in order to reload.
Another shot did not come to claim the Salamander yet. Not while Faye had to reload her rifle. The rounds it used were by no means easy to handle, and without the proper training and precision, the kickback could snap a person in two when firing one. Even for a brief second, the Salamander recognized the rifle — the same kind that hunters could use to take down large game animals. Particularly elephants.
Poor Faye. No matter how skilled she was, she must have felt a terrible backlash after firing it. She would break her collarbone if she wasn’t being careful.
The Salamander still had time. But she was tired. She was so tired of running now.
As she turned around, she saw Orion Gideon, and was at a loss of words.
Tejinder Wakeman was somewhat awake now, his hand clutching what was left of his right forearm. He stirred, though blindfolded by the cloth Orion had torn up for him.
David Wednesday wasn’t moving anymore. If he was still breathing, she couldn’t tell.
Gregory Tremond’s body was left twitching from the explosive rounds that had blasted clean through him.
Behind her, Faye Elms readied another shot.
The Salamander looked down. Her hands were covered in blood.
Whose blood?
His arm. The entire forearm had been completely severed. The Salamander could see raw muscle and bone jutting out of where his limb should be.
The many metal joints clanked and twisted, making crunching sounds as the Tamas-thing hovered back. His mouth was covered in blood and pieces of sinew were dangling out the corner of his lip. For a moment he flashed his teeth stained with deep red in what looked like a grin.
The lights in the hallway behind flickered. Tamas was no longer there, and all that remained was Tejinder Wakeman.
Curled up, the Archiver convulsed. His eyes rolled to the top of his head, and the Salamander briefly saw that they were the color of dark brown flecked with green.
“Well, that was unexpected... Wait, what’re you doing?” Tremond suddenly demanded of the Salamander as she approached Tejinder’s tremulous body.
Orion was not far behind her, leaning over as she knelt at his side. She didn’t even pay mind when he glanced over at his gun in the corner. “Is he breathing?”
“Yes,” she told her brother. She reached out to Tejinder, feeling his warm, sweaty forehead.
“Are you going to kill him?” Orion asked.
“No,” she replied.
But it’s going to hurt, she neglected to add as the Salamander took the bloody stump where Tejinder’s forearm used to be. Concentrating on heat and energy, and a red light. Just like when Lucas had touched her in Engelus and Tremond not long ago, that heat flowed through her. This time crimson red veins protruded from her skin, pulsating as they extended their light to the palm of her hand.
Her skin burned to the touch, and she was burning Tejinder. Cauterizing his wound.
When the bleeding stopped, Tejinder breathed more evenly, but he was still unconscious.
“Take care of him,” the Salamander said, waving Orion to the Archiver with her arm pulsating with red veins.
Orion obliged, dragging Tejinder out of the doorway and into the room, setting his back up against the wall. He used a knife to rip off the neck around Tejinder’s turtleneck shirt to cover the Archiver’s eyes. The Salamander recognized the knife he had taken from the boy that tried mugging them at the opera.
The aria that had been playing ceased, leaving only silence when the Salamander turned to Tremond. His eyes were wide with shock and awe. “Amazing...! You utilized your Brísingamen on your own free will, without a need for an emotional trip! It’s unexpected but I’ll welcome the change of pace. Losing the Archiver would, I believe, result in far more trouble than it’s worth.” He grinned joyfully at her hands, which were still burning with that crimson pumping through her veins. A thin veil of black and oily liquid seeped from her fingertips.
The Salamander gave a start, holding her hands out.
“Samandrine,” Tremond said, as if hearing her distress. “Consider it another product of your... gift, the Brísingamen.”
“What is this?” she asked, wavering and almost looking to Tremond for help.
Taking her wrist, the former chancellor lifted her hand, allowing the oily substance to drip to the concrete floor. “This... can be extremely toxic. Only when ingested, however. Samandrine can cause anything between temporary paralyses to inability to breathe. It’s not always fatal, though like with any poison it can be if belted out in high quantities.” His lips curled as he pulled a cloth napkin from his vest, and used it to wipe Tejinder’s blood and the samandrine from the Salamander’s fingers, which wiped away like soap washing a layer of mud. Her arm twitched with the hot energy pumping through her red veins. “It’s beautiful, no?”
“Negative. Smells bad.”
“That may be,” Tremond said, releasing the Salamander’s wrist and dropping the napkin to the floor. “But thanks to your Brísingamen, you just saved your friend’s life.”
“The Archiver is not my friend,” she said. “I have no friends.”
Though the Salamander regarded Tejinder with a matter-of-fact nature, there did linger a certain fondness for the man. A fondness that drew her to save his life without Tremond’s say-so. For some reason, she did not wish to see him die. In fact, she found herself grateful that he still lived.
“Surely you wouldn’t have been so swift to step forward if you felt nothing for the man,” Tremond urged.
“Not to sound disrespectful, sir, but you have never understood my feelings.”
Gregory Tremond’s eyes rose. This was clearly not the answer that he was expecting. “Really? Your feelings? And what is it you’re supposedly feeling?”
“Confused.” She looked over to the body bags. The bloodied one remained stationary, unlike David’s bag. Red soaked through the open holes.
“You want to see what’s in there, don’t you?” Tremond beckoned her to the body bags.
The Salamander didn’t respond. She strode to it without prompt, as casual as anyone could to a corpse. She knelt beside the body bag and held out her arm. The pulsating had stopped, as did the rush of heat flowing to the ends of her fingertips.
“What are you feeling now, Salamander?” Tremond’s inquired coolly, like a silken trickle of false security.
“Afraid,” the Salamander whispered.
“Why are you afraid?”
“Because.” She placed her hands over the bag. One held onto the zipper, the other over the side. She leaned over the bag, already smelling the stench of rotting flesh. “We know what is in here.”
“Then what’re you waiting for? Open it.”
So she did.
Red snow falls over the icy streets of Ashwater, Washington. Now it’s full of holes and chasms. Smoke billows from the broken asphalt.
It’s there that Sergeant Stone sees herself, stumbling, limping through the streets. The boy from the Eider crash is safe in medical care. She does not worry for him now, or for anything.
At the end of this road, fumbling through the aftermath of a city on fire, a man waits for Stone at the gates. He consoles her with a promise to forget, as she has forgotten many times before.
Your body is weak now. You’ll die soon.
Her vision is spotted, but Stone makes out the rust-colored hair of her kindred. She hears him pull out a gun.
Goodnight, sleepyhead.
A point-blank bullet cracks her skull open. She collapses and dies again.
The Salamander stood up.
Her own face was looking back up at her from the body bag. It could have very well been her spitting image, if not for the meat well beyond rigor mortis. Threads of brown hair had already fallen out. Worms weaved in and out of her shrunken eyes and mouth, her ears secreting some kind of off-colored fluid. Jagged jaw hung agape, ready to snap off after years in decomposition.
She flashed back to the morgue.
Long after it had shut down, the Renaissance Sanitarium still housed several bodies of the dead. But only the morgue itself. Though the rest of the hospital reeked of must after a few forgotten years, she remembered that crematorium. That smell, and all those bodies...
They were all her. Corpses of the former Salamanders. Each of them given similar records that Tremond had fabricated: A twenty-nine-year-old veteran of eleven years in whatever armed force she was a part of. Always at the rank of sergeant or something similar:
Rey Stone, the American or Canadian marine and a child of drug addicts.
Sheridan of the Defense Forces of Ireland, who hailed from a family of alcoholics and had no desire to drink a drop of hooch herself.
Silva of the Argentine Navy, raised by deadbeats with no drive in life.
Steyn, the daughter of a man who worked in human trafficking, and threatened to send her to a brothel for any insolent behavior until she ran away to the South African Army.
Sarfati, a girl who knew of war at a young age when her family were killed. She then joined the Islamic Republic of Iran Army.
Schuyler, a Dutch woman who watched her mama murder her papa while having a drunken argument, and enlisted for the Korps Mariniers to escape her maniacal mother.
Schmidt came home from school one day to find her parents dead on drug overdoses, which led into her joining the German military.
Then there was Safronov. Rey Safronov, the Salamander. A psycho who became a sniper during the Kristiv Resurgence in Russia...
For many years, she had dreams of Ashwater. Red skies dawned from the Battle-Brave, rent from the city below. These moments were trapped in time, doomed to repeat for many long and agonizing years.
With the image of herself still fresh in mind, the Salamander moved over to the other body bags. She knew what waited inside, but she unzipped them all anyway.
When she did, the face was far less decayed than her other corpse, but still withered away with golden peach-colored skin. Her eyes had turned to mush. Some of her teeth had been knocked out. It remained in a present state of disintegration, with a fly making its journey to and from her left nostril. The Salamander turned, finally, to the last body bag, and revealed it to herself as well.
This one, strangely enough, was not much different from the rest, except for a significant detail. Her hair wasn’t short and brown or black or dark red, but replaced by long, gold-colored tresses. The decay had not yet affected her. Though dead, the golden-haired vessel somehow appeared as though she were only sleeping.
The Salamander stumbled back, staring at the three corpses. The stench of her own rotten, bloody body filled her senses, while the golden one did not seem afflicted by the hindrance of time.
“We could never cremate the bodies,” Tremond explained. “I tried, but they would never burn — just like the legendary Salamander. Must be where they got that. Anyway, our only option was to let them decay over time. Given your physiology and our Father’s immortal genes, however, even your corpses were used for research. There are others, too. I’m sure you recognize the few here already! That is Sheridan, Schuyler, Steyn... I’m afraid there is not much left of Stone’s, but if you would like to see the rest someday, I could—”
“No!”
The Salamander’s gaze did not tear from the dead faces of her past selves.
The writhing David Wednesday did catch her peripheral vision.
Tremond’s hand landed on the Salamander’s shoulder, though it hardly offered solace to her soul. “You never were supposed to wake up. That’s why you were left to rot at the Renaissance Sanitarium. No matter how many times we tried to dispose of you, your... Something about your Brísingamen kept you going. And since we couldn’t kill you, the only option was to transfer you to another vessel, rewrite your memories to think you’re a human soldier, programming one tragic story in after another. It became fun after awhile, I must admit...”
You are a vessel, an empty husk not yet made whole.
“You are born to die, and afterwards you are made to live again. That is how you live your life.” Though his words were hostile, his tone was not. Neither was that gentle squeeze of her shoulder. “It was only natural that you would go mad from it. Dying over and over for so long... Lucas Coffey tried to undo the damage that had been done after his ex-wife died, but he failed. You yourself happen to be nothing more than a scorch mark left on the world. These cities are proof of that.”
“Ashwater...?”
“That’s right.”
Glancing over her shoulder, she regarded the torn up edifices outside the window with strange regret. “I destroyed Ashwater.”
“Yes and no. You had no way of knowing back then, but when you made contact with the incubator for the Battle-Brave, there was an unprecedented resonance between it and your Brísingamen. My fault, really. I should have noticed the similarities between an incubator and a vessel. A vessel is just a temporary incubator that can contain the Battle-Brave’s energy for only a short time. You were a proto-incubator, if you will.” Tremond shrugged, as if the death of millions meant nothing more to him than an anthill.
“Was Engelus my fault, too?”
“Much as I would love to blame you, no. The Battle-Brave’s incubator was already making its way into the city under the name of Delta Selwyn.”
The Salamander lifted her head to meet Tremond’s eyes, taken aback as the image of the drug-addled woman she had initially thought to be Baby Girl being the Battle-Brave. “She was a human.”
“No, Delta Selwyn woke up in the city around the same time as you. The only difference is that she was already programmed to be a self-destructive addict. After tipping Camilla Banks to her as a potential client, the drugs she gave to that little incubator eventually killed her. Banks had no idea what she’d just done, as expected...”
It didn’t matter. Her and Tejinder’s attempts to stop the Battle-Brave at the Reactor of Nuclear Applications meant nothing. The Battle-Brave’s incubator had been on the verge of destruction several hours after her death.
“What are the Battle-Braves?” the Salamander asked.
Tremond’s shoulders fell. “History oftentimes repeats itself. You know this better than anyone.” He gestured to the three corpses out of the four body bags. “When there is panic, it’s only natural for people to take up arms. They create bigger weapons when their enemies start to rise against them. In this case, the weapons are less about size and more about powerhouses. Your bodies, both incubators and vessels alike, are capable of storing a massive amount of energy within yourselves.
“There are many faiths that differentiate Heaven and Hell, as though they’re two separate forces from the world we live in. Do you know what I think?” Tremond placed his hand under her chin. “Hell is repetition.”
Her eyes shifted towards the corpses again, and then back to Tremond.
“The truth is, this is already Hell,” she said aloud.
“Yes. For many, death is the end. But you do not have that luxury.” Tremond let go of her, stroking her cheek once. “Wouldn’t it be nice to break the cycle? Give it an ending?”
The Salamander wanted to answer. None, however, would have sufficed. That horrible sadness returned. She felt trapped in her repeated deaths.
She opened her mouth to speak, about to utter a single word...
Then, a shot blew through the open window.
The Salamander went still. A hole exploded through Gregory Tremond’s ribs. Only a brief glimpse caught Tremond’s wide-eyed face as he crumbled over the floor, on his side.
“Shmir!” Orion cursed. The Salamander had almost forgotten he was there. He must have been tending to Tejinder’s wounds while trying to take this all in.
Following the sound where the shot rang from, the Salamander moved to the opening. Her hand pressed to the windowpane, she peered out in a stupor.
Across the way, roosted over the slanted top floors within the neighboring building, Faye Elms kneeled with a rifle in her hand. She hovered by the window for cover, before vanishing in order to reload.
Another shot did not come to claim the Salamander yet. Not while Faye had to reload her rifle. The rounds it used were by no means easy to handle, and without the proper training and precision, the kickback could snap a person in two when firing one. Even for a brief second, the Salamander recognized the rifle — the same kind that hunters could use to take down large game animals. Particularly elephants.
Poor Faye. No matter how skilled she was, she must have felt a terrible backlash after firing it. She would break her collarbone if she wasn’t being careful.
The Salamander still had time. But she was tired. She was so tired of running now.
As she turned around, she saw Orion Gideon, and was at a loss of words.
Tejinder Wakeman was somewhat awake now, his hand clutching what was left of his right forearm. He stirred, though blindfolded by the cloth Orion had torn up for him.
David Wednesday wasn’t moving anymore. If he was still breathing, she couldn’t tell.
Gregory Tremond’s body was left twitching from the explosive rounds that had blasted clean through him.
Behind her, Faye Elms readied another shot.
The Salamander looked down. Her hands were covered in blood.
Whose blood?