It is a holiday in US, so we are taking it easy and the installment is on the short side. Happy Memorial Day.
Something wet my hand. My eyes snapped open. Sometime between the waves of shivers and searing pain, my will had given out and I’d fallen asleep.
Bear lay next to me, licking the dry stalker blood off my hand. Her eyes were bright, and when she saw me stir, she sat up and panted.
My back ached, but the suffocating fatigue was gone. I felt strong again.
I flexed. No glitter. In her or in me. We had beaten the flowers.
For a few moments I just sat there, happy to be alive.
Bear danced from paw to paw, looking at my face as if expecting something.
“Are you thirsty?” I took off my helmet and poured some water into it from the canteen. She lapped it up.
The gashes on her shoulder and back had closed. I parted her fur to check. There was a narrow, pink scar, but even that was fading.
What was it Elena said about the stalkers? They soak up bullets like they’re nothing and keep coming.
I still had one stalker heart left. I focused on it, pushing as deep as my talent would let me go. The heart unfurled before me, not just glowing, but splitting into layers of different properties, each with its own color, as it had done when I panicked trying to diagnose Bear. It felt like the most natural thing now, as if my talent always worked this way.
I studied the layers. The toxicity was first, an electric blue. I used to see it as a simple glow. Occasionally I got swirls of color varying in saturation and vibrancy, which my brain somehow interpreted into data, but what I saw now was nothing like it.
My father used to collect topographic maps, detailed reliefs of mountain terrain in different parts of the world, with contour lines and color-coded heights: lighter color for the greater elevation, medium for the mid-lying areas, darker for the valleys. This was exactly like that, except I knew that the valleys were a healthy baseline, and the peaks indicated how much toxins affected a particular body system. Nervous and integumentary systems were barely influenced, the digestive and respiratory were moderately impacted, but the poison wreaked havoc on the endocrine, exocrine, muscular, and circulatory systems.
And I somehow knew that the integumentary system was comprised of skin, hair, nails, sweat, and oil glands. Yesterday I had no idea what that word stood for.
There was no point in puzzling over that. The more pressing issue was that the stalker hearts should’ve killed us. They didn’t. Why?
I focused on the next layer, the one glowing with pale pink under the blue. There was that unsettling feeling of falling through the glass floor again. Another relief, in red this time. It took me a moment to figure it out.
Regeneration.
I hadn’t seen it before, maybe because I was too focused on countering the poison. The stalkers were damn near indestructible. We’ve been targeting the glands in their neck, but given time, they would regenerate those. You had to deal enough damage to cause actual clinical death, otherwise no matter how badly they were wounded, they would bounce back. Good to know.
But the regeneration on its own couldn’t counter that shocking toxicity. More, that was not the way biology functioned. Eating cobra meat didn’t magically give you the ability to produce snake venom. Eating the stalker hearts should’ve just poisoned us, but instead both I and Bear healed our wounds and purged the poison.
On the other hand, regular biology couldn’t account for the emergence of the Talents, compound fractures healing in 7 hours, or a glowing gem passing through solid bone. We were in Arthur C. Clarke territory. Any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic, and this was magic.
I sorted through my environment until I found some pollen traces and split that into layers as well. The toxicity was off the charts. I tried to look at the two of them together, the heart and the pollen, by superimposing one on to the other, but the picture was too complex. After a few seconds, both sets of layers collapsed, and I saw white again. This time I was blind for at least a minute. I had to be careful not to push myself too far.
The best I could figure out was that mixing the pollen and the stalker blood somehow negated their mutual harm while boosting the regenerative properties of the stalker’s heart.
It was a miracle that we survived. A roll of cosmic dice.
Once my vision returned, I flexed again. A quick scan of Bear and my body showed if not outright immunity, then a high resistance to both poisons. We could likely stroll through the flowers now, not that I would risk it unless we absolutely had to, and eating the stalker meat should be safe. At least in theory.
The memory of the horrible battery acid taste sliding down my throat made me shudder.
I checked my shoulder. The bite had knitted closed. The gashes on my legs from the claws had healed too. I had escaped death. Again. I couldn’t tell if it was the magical gem or my newly acquired regeneration. Possibly both.
Bear licked the hat clean and looked at me.
“More?”
I poured a bit more water out. She lapped it up.
My mouth was dry, too. I tipped the canteen and finished what was left. We would need to find a water source soon. Also, I was hungry. So very hungry. I’d taken my watch off because it broke, so I had no idea how much time had passed. I should’ve checked the bodies for a watch, but I didn’t think of it at the time.
It felt like I hadn’t eaten in days. The stalker heart weighed about 2 pounds, and I had eaten a whole one just like it. I should’ve been full, but instead I was starving. Water, food, exit. I needed to find all three.
There was something on the opposite wall. Some sort of shapes…
I picked up the hard hat and flicked the light on.
Cave drawings, depicted in rust red and blue. A procession of some kind of beings, resembling raccoons or foxes, maybe? They were leading weird looking donkeys.
Danger.
A vision unfolded in my mind. A caravan of fluffy creatures departing, some being wrapped in rags begging on the street, and a feeling of alarm. Not deadly danger exactly but ruin. Financial ruin.
The vision faded.
“What do you think this is all about, Bear?”
The shepherd wagged her tail.
“Yes, I don’t know either.”
The woman who called me her daughter, the four-armed killers, and now the foxes, all distinct and morphologically different. Three separate species. Representatives of three civilizations? Or was it one complex society?
What the hell was on the other side of the breaches?
I had no answers and more pressing things to worry about. We had one canteen of water left, so we needed to get a move on. If we found a water source, I would need to wash up. My coveralls were drenched in stalker blood. My hair was bloody too and it stuck to my face and neck. I hooked the empty canteen back to the loop on my coveralls, put the hard hat back on my head, and nodded to my dog.
“Once more into the breach. Living the dream.”
Bear wagged her tail, and we started across the stone bridge.
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