The Bronze Sword

A/N - This is a collection of all the FULLY written Bronze Sword chapters I have so far. I deleted all the other related blog entries except like two because I didn't want to let go of the 8 kudos they each have. Because I am addicted to validation. They're not gonna be in this one right now because they're not fully tied into the story yet, but they will be soon

This is just like, the neat collection of all the neat, fully written, tied together chapters. 

Also warnings for a lotta talk of death and.. blood and stuff. Does anyone care? Idk. Ok author's note over

Atterrissage brutal de l'ange

Mid-winter

        The door to the bar flies open violently, like the pages of a book in the wind, and the opening encases the opener in a rectangular frame of light from the midday sun outside. He slumps against the doorframe, panting and sweaty, streaked with dirt and blood. He’s of average height, if a little on the shorter side, lean and gracefully toned, and his skin is a warm brown, splashed with ragged-edged patches of pale white, like his body is a map of some fantastical planet. His hair is a deep, dark brown highlighted with a few streaks of white, and it looks like he was just thrown in and out of a tornado headfirst. He’s also almost completely naked, with only a ragged skirt wrapped haphazardly around his narrow hips. He straightens himself up, shakes his head a little bit, and moves forward a tentative few steps before falling completely limp to the ground like a ragdoll.

        Jax was the first one to him, kneeling down on the ground by his unconscious body as Milah jogs awkwardly past to shut the door. He presses two large, clawed fingers gently to his neck. A pulse, steady enough. Not really knowing what else to do, he pushes the hair out of the man’s face and straightens him out a little bit, putting his arms in a less awkward position. He looks at him closer, at his eyelashes, the bags under his eyes. At the little white patch on his left eyebrow, at the sigils on his chest, seemingly branded onto his skin. He’s quite pretty, he thinks, in a boyish sort of way, and he looks peaceful. Idyllic.

        Milah rushes over with a potion in a small brass bowl and Jax is glad for the action. She waves the potion bowl by his nose and he wakes with a start, his eyes shooting wide open like an owl’s. In the split second, Jax notices that his eyes are hazel. He sits up fast and seemingly regrets it, pressing his palm to the side of his face and groaning.

        “Where am I?” he asks, his tone urgent, demanding, but unsteady. He rubs the back of his head with his palm and looks dizzily around.

        “You don’t know where you are?” Milah calls from the bar as she empties the potion back into its container.

        “Is this Bronze Sword?” He leans back on his left hand and twists around to face Milah.

        “The very one. Who’s asking?”

        He groans and pulls himself up off the ground with generous assistance from Jax, following him with wobbly steps as he leads him to a stool at the bar.

        “My name is Emerett,” he says, clearing his throat. “I’ve just come– no, wait, is this The Bronze Sword?”

        Milah raises an eyebrow. “Yes, are you sure you’re okay?”

        “No I mean, is it true that you guys have… are the rumors true? About the shelter?”

        Jax and Milah exchange a look, or a series of looks. His eyes widen, hers widen, she tilts her head, he raises his shoulders, she furrows her brow.

        “What do you know about that?” she demands, breaking the silence.

        “No,” Emerett sighs, pausing to consider something, “I just escaped from the army. They sent me to be killed, I- but I escaped. I escaped and I heard that I could find shelter here. That you guys help… people like me. You know.” He looks down, clearly nervous, or ashamed, or something. Milah chews on her lip for a second and huffs out a breath through her nose.

        “Take him,” she says to Jax, waving her hand towards a dark wooden door at the back of the building.

        “Come on,” he says, offering his hand again, “Let’s go.”

        Emerett waves his hand off and stands up, making sure he’s steady before he walks. Steadiness verified, he follows Jax to the door, surveying his surroundings. It’s a pretty nice place, with wooden furniture and decorations on the walls, rugs and old weapons, skulls and a couple furs. It’s completely empty save for him and the other two, but that’s not crazy for a bar in the daytime. There are no windows and the place is lit haphazardly, with colorful lamps on tables and some glass lanterns on the walls. There is no overhead lighting and the effect is quite moody and dim, which is not at all helped by the burning incense distributed throughout the building. It smells strongly of beer and herbs, but it’s not overwhelming. It’s kind of comforting, he thinks, like being wrapped in a blanket of smoke.

        They reach the back of the building and Jax opens the door with a key in his pocket. Beyond it is a stone staircase, lit with lanterns inlaid in the old stone walls. It smells considerably less nice in the stairwell, less like incense and more like wet dirt. He walks carefully down the stairs, keeping his balance consciously. Pretty soon they reach another doorway, and Jax knocks on it. After a few seconds, a slot in the door slides open, revealing a pair of eyes.

        “Whozzat guy?” asks the eyes behind the door.

        “New refugee,” Jax answers, “just came. Says he’s an escaped soldier.”

        “You believe him?”

        “Might as well.” he replies with a shrug.

        The door opens and the full form of the eyes is revealed. A middle aged man, maybe in his early forties, with a thick, dark beard and a bald head. He wears a black knee-length skirt and a loose white tank top, and he stands almost the height of Jax. On his waist is a tactical looking bag, and reaches into it and pulls out a small black notebook and a stubby wooden pencil.

        “You gotta name?” he inquires, pointing the pencil at Emerett. 

      “It’s Emerett, sir.”

      “You do not have to call me that….” he mumbles, jotting something down in the notebook. “Just call me Orrian.”

      “Yes, sir– Orrian,” he shakes his head, “Sorry.”

      Orrian flips through his notebook intently, searching for something. Emerett stares curiously at his hands, his thick, calloused fingers. They look like the hands of the older soldiers he knew in the army, the ones that had actually been in battle. 

      “We’re out of rooms.. ehh… you’re gonna have to share with somebody.” he mumbles, mostly to himself, but Jax’s ears perk up.

      “He could share with me,” he says way too urgently, and immediately regrets it, “I still have room in.. mine.” He kicks his heel meekly against the ground. It’s true, the second bed in his room is still empty, but Orrian doesn’t know that. He has him categorized under single rooms due to a mix-up in names that happened right when Jax came to the shelter. He never corrected him. He doesn’t like the idea of sharing rooms with somebody he doesn’t trust, but something about Emerett gets under his skin. His eyes keep popping up in his head, green around the edges and golden brown inside, like the sun shining through a glass bottle.

      “I thought you had a single?” Orrian interrupts his train of thought, quite rudely.

      “No I, um, don’t”

      “Well fuck me,” he flips through his notebook again, looking for Jax’s name, “it sure says you do in here.”

      Jax looks around guiltily, failing to respond. He makes eye contact with Emerett for half a second and immediately looks away, feeling probably more nervous than he should. He feels his eyes on the side of his face, burning a hole directly through to his brain. Maybe he’s a psychic, he thinks, some kind of wizard maybe. He imagines him doing gesture spells, his fingers agile and precise, and then he really hopes he isn’t a psychic.

      Orrian corrects his notebook, scratching out his name and rewriting it in the double rooms section, with “Emerett” written next to it.

—

      Later, Jax sees Emerett in the corner of the bar, holding a glass of beer and looking around owlishly. He’s right by a lantern and the flame paints his face in streaks of golden light, jutting up across his cheeks and into his eyes, lighting them up bright like an angel. He’s screened from him by a layer of smoke flowing thick and smooth like water.

      Emerett sees Jax behind the bar, pouring a glass of beer and sliding it out to a customer, or another shelter dweller? He doesn’t know them all yet. From the smoky corner of the room, he watches his clawed fingers wrap around beer bottles and glasses and money and washcloths and whatever else. His hair is long, dark, and wavy, falling loose around his face and over his broad shoulders. He holds the bottles like swords. He’s screened from him by a layer of smoke and people flickering by like flames.

Calibration, initiation…

Jax shows Emerett the room. Dark, dull, lit by a few wall mounted torches. A wardrobe, a cabinet. Two beds separated by a long table with two drawers. One bed is covered in furs with the sheets thrown wildly and the other is completely neat. One side of the table supports a silver flask, a knife, a black ashtray, a small book, and a pile of jewelry. The other is completely empty. He guesses the empty side is his.

Jax tells him which bed is his (he had guessed correctly) and that he should go ask Orrian for clothes, they keep some for newcomers to take if they don’t have their own, which they usually don’t.

He complies, walking out of the room and down the stone-lined hall. Orrian, sitting in a chair by the door to the stairs. He asks him about the clothes, and he leads him to a closet room at the end of the hall and tells him to take what he wants. He gives him no specific number but he assumes he doesn’t want him to take much. Two shirts, two pairs of pants, a jacket, and a pair of black knee-high combat boots, like the kind they wore in the army. Thank you, no problem, and he’s back to the room, sorting the clothes in the wardrobe.

—

That night, Emerett goes to bed alone for the first time in his life. No army bunkmates, Jax nowhere to be seen. He had eaten with him but he’d gone from the bar (which apparently served food at meal times) to the shelter with the rest of the roomers and Jax had gone elsewhere, out into the cold night. The room was quiet, dark, lonely. He never thought he would miss his bunkmates, or anything about the army for that matter, but he doesn’t like the silence. He’s scared he might dream.

—

      He does, he dreams of sheep, but he doesn’t remember when he wakes up. No horn to wake up to either, they’re underground so no sun, Jax is still asleep so no chatter or clatter or shuffling boots. He only wakes up because his eyes know when to open. He had gotten into the habit of waking up before the horn anyway, about 30 seconds, right down to it.

      He sits up in bed and looks around the pitch black room, calibrating his eyes to the dark. He doesn’t really know what to do. No drills to go to, no training or conditioning, he doesn’t even know if the bar serves breakfast. He doesn’t want to wake Jax by lighting the torches, and he doesn’t know where the matches are anyway, so he just sits there for a bit, adjusting to the thought of his new life. No drills, no training, no conditioning, maybe no breakfast, right. Weird roommate. He’s an animal hybrid, he knew a couple in the army, with claws and tails and furry ears. But the ones he knew were a little more… refined. They looked more like real hybrids, Jax looks like a child’s attempt at drawing a hybrid. A large man, tall and muscular, with the ears of a wolf pasted on top of his long, messy hair and a whole entire tail behind him, bits and pieces haphazardly thrown together like a science experiment. Claws and padded fingers, thick, dark body hair. He looks over to his bed and wonders. It’s entirely possible to make something like him, but he’d never seen it before. He’d never seen most things before. He’d never seen piercings like his before, symmetrical on the mouth, two silver balls on either sides of the top lip, two beside either corner, and one in the very middle of his bottom lip, a ball on the lip and a black, teardrop charm below it. Three silver cuffs on either side of his wolfish ears, but those could just be regular jewelry. The army pierced their right ears for number tags, but never anything else. They removed his tag when they sent him to the executioner, but they kept the ring in, small and silver. He had forgot it was there.

      After a few minutes, he figures he should probably do something, so he gets out of bed and puts on some of the clothes he acquired yesterday; a long black tank top and a pair of moss green pants, loose but cinched at the ankle, with cargo pockets, the most familiar thing he could find. The men in the army didn’t normally wear shoes, but everybody he’s seen so far has worn them, so he laced up the boots before he left.

      Shutting the door slowly behind him, careful not to make any noise, he walks out into the hall and drags his fingers across the stone wall. It’s rough and cold, and he likes how it makes his fingers rise and drop and drop and rise.

“Breakfast’s out in the bar,” he hears from in front of him. Orrian, in his chair like last time, writing something in his notebook.

“Oh,” he rasps, startled and sleepy-voiced, “Thank you.”

Orrian doesn’t respond, he just raises his hand and unlocks the door. Emerett pushes it open and walks up the dank staircase, hearing the lock slide back again not a second after he’s closed the door. This staircase is too steep, he thinks as he climbs, and it smells like rain. He reaches the top and hesitates a minute. He’s nervous like he always was before tests in the army, or in the cafeteria when they got a new batch of soldiers, or right before they brought him out to the middle of the courtyard. He pushes the door open and steps into the bar.

It’s full of people, shelter dwellers and otherwise, grouped together in tables and floating around the bar. The air was filled with fragrant smoke like last night and people slid through it like fish through water, carrying mugs of beer and water and bowls of thick stew very similar to the kind they ate in the army, grains and vegetables and what seems to be fish. Dazed, he walks up to the bar on the balls of his feet, weaving swiftly through the people like a shadow. Behind it is the woman he met yesterday. She has colorful flowers tucked in her thick curly hair and she’s rushing from one side of the bar to the other, trading bowls and mugs and ladles and bottles between her hands and passing them to various people and locations, ladle under the bar (presumably to a pot of stew) to bowl, bowl to person, bottle to mug, mug to person, bowl from person, bowl under the bar. It’s like a dance, graceful and swift, with learned steps and deep troughs of memory to follow. It takes her a while to notice him, sitting sheepishly on a stool with his hands in his lap.

“Breakfast?” She says, startling him out of his daze. 

“Yes, please.”

The dance resumes, ladle to pot to bowl to Emerett. He thanks her, but she’s already on the other side of the bar. He gets up and looks through the smoke for a table. There are no empty ones left, so he tries to find one of the people he met yesterday at dinner. The first one he finds is another animal hybrid, a tiger, named Heliote. She’s sitting at a small three-seater table on her own, with an empty bowl, a half-empty mug of beer, and a cigarette in a wooden holder. He walks over to her table, shuffling his feet a little bit.

“Can I sit here?”

She nods at one of the empty chairs. “We met at dinner, right? Emerett?”

“Yes.”

“I’m from the army too,” she says, breathing out a puff of smoke, “I didn’t get a chance to say it last night. Same batch as Jax.”

Right, she’s the same kind of hybrid as him, he thinks. Mosaic-ish. Tiger parts pasted onto her like costume pieces, stripes on her face and arms like face paint. He could’ve guessed they were grown from the same lab design, but the army is new information.

“Jax was in the army?” Emerett asks, furrowing his eyebrows.

“He didn’t tell you?” She furrows her eyebrows right back. They’re thick and black, in contrast to her fiery orange hair.

“No.”

“He doesn’t really like talking about it, I guess,” she says, running her hand through her choppy, chin-length hair, “but he told us you were in the army last night, so he can’t get mad at me for telling you he was.”

He did tell them that, and it ticked him off a little bit. He doesn’t want Jax going around telling everybody everything he knows about him, even if the only thing he knows about him is that he was in the army. Bad form. But he was drunk, relatively.

“How are you adjusting?” She takes a drag from her cigarette and puffs it back out to mingle with the smoky air. “To life outside, that is.”

He looks down at his untouched bowl of stew and takes a bite, because he’s hungry or because he wants to buy himself some time to think about his answer he doesn’t know. It’s warm and tastes exactly like the stuff from the army, but with fish in it instead of pork or chicken. 

       “Okay, I guess.” he responds after swallowing, “This place is pretty similar to the army anyway. I didn’t really know what to expect.”

      “Yeah, that’s what I thought when I first got here. I thought it would be, I don’t know… dingier. But it’s nice. It’s home.”

      He takes another bite of the stew and fails to think of a response. They sit in silence for a minute as he eats, rushed like he always has, not really internalizing the fact that he doesn’t have anything to rush to after breakfast. Heliote’s eyes are an ambery yellow and they shift across the room like lighthouse beams as she alternates her lips between her beer mug and her cigarette. 

      A click at the side of the room and there’s Jax through the door, wearing a pair of loose black pants, a long jacket tied around his waist, and no shirt, only a stack of silver chains on his chest and rings like earrings through his nipples. More irregular piercings. His wavy hair is loose around his shoulders and it shifts across his chest as he walks to the bar, slow and weary-stepped. He retrieves his breakfast and a mug of water and scans the crowd. His eyes are quick and sharp, and the same amber-yellow color as Heliote’s. He finds them fast and walks over to their table, hooking his foot on the leg of the last available chair and pulling it out haphazardly.

      “Morning,” he says as he sits, his voice thick and rough with sleep, the sound of it burgundy red. Emerett hums in response, finishing the last of his stew and sitting awkwardly straight-backed in his chair. He feels his yellow eyes on the side of his head and he looks to the other side, absentmindedly observing a woman at a table to his right.

      “How’d you sleep?” Heliote asks, question with a deceptive second head of sarcasm.

      Jax chuckles through his nose, a couple of sharp puffs of air. “Fine. How’d you sleep?” Emerett hears his voice a half-notch louder and looks over, eyes widened. Jax is looking at him, pointing at his face with his spoon.

      “Oh,” he says, surprised, and not really prepared to contribute to conversation. He was stowed away on some rusty train of thought. “Good, I guess.”

      “Weird being alone at night, huh? Or, mostly alone.”

      “Yeah.” He thinks of his army bunkmates. On not a small amount of nights he would hear some kind of vocalization from one of the other beds. Nightmares… sex, maybe. It was hard to tell most of the time, unless one of the other beds was empty. “Quiet.”

      “Quiet…” Jax whispers in return, elongating the vowels, adding a breathy “ah” sound after the t at the end. This was the end of the conversation.

—

      Emerett had a hard time occupying himself in his new home. He gave himself a modest tour of the place, which only took a few minutes since it’s only the tavern (that is the word for it, he was informed) and the shelter hallway, which is extremely uninteresting. Stone walls, stone floor, wooden doors. He doesn’t open any of the doors, assuming that, with the exception of the closet at the end, they all lead to rooms like Jax and his. He was right, except some rooms have more or less beds and there are a few other storage closets. Inconsequential.

      He’s too scared to go outside, being an army escapee and therefore a felon. He’s far far from the army base and he doesn’t think anybody would care enough to search for him anyway, but he doesn’t want to risk it. He was running from the law for long enough after escaping the base, two weeks of sneaking through the country, hopping trains and running along the edges of woods and sleeping in alleyways, nearly naked in the winter cold. He got rumors, directions, cold night companionship from other stowaways, but nothing else, having to beg for food with the dogs at the back door of restaurants. He lost a lot of weight and a lot of moxie those two weeks. Thinking of this, he finds himself laying on the –his– bed in the –his– room. Like waking up from a dream, goosebumped. 

      He’s never had a room before, he thinks. He went straight from the growth lab to the barracks. He gets up from the bed and inspects the place. The walls and floor are stone like the hallway, and everything else is made of the same kind of wood. It’s exceedingly plain and a little bit depressing. He finds his hands on the cabinet doors, opening them and inspecting the contents. Not much of interest; some books, some potions, a couple skins of wine. A couple knives, one large and machete-esque, with sigils engraved on the base of the blade. He catches a glint of bright silver out of the corner of his eye and it leads him to a black wooden box on the bottom shelf, with intricately carved silver caps on the corners. He crouches down and inspects it. Dull on the sides, the paint worn off. He presses his fingers to the most worn areas and opens the lid. 

      Inside is paper, a stack of it, worn and stained. He looks quick over his shoulder and unfolds the topmost sheet. A wanted poster, with Jax’s face in the middle. He looks younger, and his hair is considerably shorter, cut almost exactly like Emerett’s. The cut they have in the army, early stage soldiers, or late stage trainees. A few months before they’re ready for battle. His eyes are dull and his mouth is set. So they do search for army escapees. This unsettles him. A wanted poster? Are there posters of him out there? He unfolds the next paper, burrowing himself deeper.

      A newspaper, this one. The text is considerably faded, but he can make out the headline. Extremely volatile soldiers escaped from army base, several army officials dead in horrific massacre.

      The box is closed again. The papers are folded and back in their nest. Emerett is sitting back on his bed. Extremely volatile soldiers escaped from army base. Was that Jax? Extremely volatile? Massacre? Murderer? His thoughts race panting by like wild horses running from a fire in the fields. There are other reasons one might keep a newspaper. Maybe that was a friend’s escape, or maybe he just collects news from the army base. Maybe he knew one of the dead guards. Maybe he is an extremely volatile escaped soldier. It doesn’t matter anyway, he thinks, it doesn’t matter. If he had finished army training he would’ve killed countless enemy soldiers on the field, what’s the difference? He lays back on the bed. What’s the difference? He doesn’t know. Jax doesn’t seem dangerous. He closes his eyes. What’s the difference? What’s the difference?

      Deep in the back of his head there is a pulsing, bloody mass that reaches its void-dark tendrils out to the front of his head, like ravines in his mind, like ghostly shadows, to answer: They do not matter. The guards matter, the country matters, we matter, nothing else matters. The shadow tendrils flash in front of his head, playing a puppet show he’s seen countless times before; a faceless head being blown apart, a nameless leg-stump squirting out blood, a heartless chest being stabbed and slashed sword and metal and blood on the dusty ground. The voice he heard his entire maturation, countless unconscious nights unremembered in the lab, listening to the voice while his body floats in the milky growth liquid and his mind develops in his head. They do not matter. The country matters, we matter, nothing else matters. They do not matter. They have no names, they have no hearts, they do not matter. Run, slash, stab, shoot. The country matters, we matter, nothing else matters. The country matters we matter nothing else matters. Thecountrymatterswematternothingelsematters.

—

He eats dinner again that night with Jax and Heliote. He avoids his eyes, he doesn’t talk much.

—

Nighttime, in the room, Jax takes the silver chains off his neck one by one.

“How you like it here?” he asks, dropping the chains haphazardly on the bedside table. The end of one catches on the corner of the ashtray.

“Alright,” Emerett picks absentmindedly at his fingernail beds as he answers, halfhearted in all respects, “I guess.”

“You got any questions? Or, you know…” The end of his sentence trails off with no apparent destination.

Emerett’s brows dig themselves further into the middle of his forehead. How did you escape the army? Have you ever killed a man? Who are you?

“What do you do all the time here?”

Jax raises his eyebrows and thinks for a second. “Drink,” –pause– “read, hunt. A lot of people work. Sometimes we go out to tell people about the shelter, poor people and… stuff. You can come if you want.”

Emerett considers this. He can’t stay curled up in the shelter forever.

“Sure.”

Glowing Iron

      Emerett is standing by the bar with his feet parallel on the wooden floor, fastening the clasp of a black cloak around his neck. It’s evening, and he, Jax, and a sandy-haired woman named Ishia are preparing for what she calls a street run. This is what Jax told him about last night.

      “Watch out for cops, big guys with black helmets.” Jax warns him, handing him a long, thick strip of white fabric, “Wrap that around the bottom of your face in case you have wanted posters.” He waves his hand around his mouth to illustrate placement.

      He complies, coiling it around his mouth, loose enough to breathe, and tying the fabric at the nape of his neck. He feels like some kind of surgery patient. Sometimes, in the army, he would see men come back from the doctor’s ward with bandages like this on their faces, the forehead or the chin or the whole thing. No men in his base had ever been in battle, training base, so he never knew why they would be injured.

      He’s wearing the most inconspicuous outfit he owns, the black tank top and the green army pants with matching jacket. Jax supplied him with a dagger just in case, small and silver and nestled in a black leather sheath on a black leather belt. He fidgets with it as Ishia explains the plan for the night, sliding the dagger in and out of the sheath absentmindedly with the tips of his fingers. She’ll split off and cover the northern side of town, while he and Jax get the south. Jax has a backpack full of blankets and various canned foods to give to people so they can at least help them if they refuse, which they probably will. People usually assume they’re traffickers, cops, pimps. Nobody blames them for the assumption.

      Jax isn’t paying attention to Ishia. He’s done this countless times before. He knows the town, he knows the plan, he knows most of the people on the streets, lived out with them for a while. After he left the army, before Xyrin and all. Some of them are stubborn bastards, and most of the ones he knew are dead anyway. He sits on the edge of a table and looks over at Emerett. He’s standing a few feet to his left, eyes wide open and posed intently at Ishia. His posture is straight, army man, and his brown hair is crumpled up at the base where he tied the mask. He studies the skin of his neck. It’s a golden brown, for the most part, with white patches strewn haphazardly across it like splashes of paint. Weird, he thinks. He watches his wide eyes flicker to the right for a second and catch on his, and his head stutters back to face Ishia. Pay attention, sure.

—

      They come back to the bar cold and successful, with one taker. A teenage boy, seemingly an orphan, with mousy brown hair and deep bags under his eyes, dull grey like the snow-slush piled up on the walls of the alleyway where they found him. They bring him into the tavern and Jax walks him down the stairs to get assigned a room via Orrian and his everpresent notebook. Emerett removes his mask and cloak.

      “You actually got someone today!” Milah says, her tone hard to read. She comes out from behind the bar and hands them both a mug of hot cider, placing a third on a table and sitting on one of the stools, leaning back on her elbows propped up on the bar. She’s wearing a pair of purple pants that flare out under the knee and a short, sky blue dress with bell sleeves. Her dark, coily hair is loose and just barely reaches her collarbones. Emerett notices a sheen on her face, like fine, multichrome glitter all over her skin. A layer of liquid rainbow. Part of her skin? She’s here, so she was probably genetically engineered, and the labs can make anyone look like anything. Maybe she was an entertainer, or something.

      “Cold out there,” Ishia responds, “I wish we could’ve got more.”

      “You know how it is.”

      Silence, like a fish caught in a frozen stream. 

      Emerett collects his thoughts. The run was interesting, although he didn’t really do much. He was mostly just shadowing Jax as he talked to people, giving them food and blankets, joking around with them. I’ll be back next week, he said to the people that refused, I’ll be back next week.

      There were no cops, or they didn’t see any. Emerett was relieved at this, based on the things he’s heard about them from Jax and the others. A violent lot, not entirely fond of the poor. They don’t like lab-grown people being out and about, or “labs,” as seems to be the colloquial term. Labs are grown for one specific job, if they’re not at that specific job, surely they’re a criminal, an escapee. There’s no way to tell if someone is a lab just by looking at them, but the general consensus among law enforcement and the higher classes is if you look poor, you’re probably a lab. Of course, the police force is also lab grown, but they’re superior about it, egotistical from lifelong special treatment and government issued conditioning that tells them to be. They’re paid well, and supplied with their own houses in their own neighborhoods outside of town. Law enforcers are the only members of the upper classes that come from the genetic industry, excepting children grown for parents who can’t produce their own. Maybe some elite entertainers, sex workers and similar, but the bourgeois ones are almost always commissioned and therefore reside on a rich person’s property, so they’re a grey area in the class discussion.

      “He’s settled,” Jax’s voice juts through the quiet, above the ambient noise of crackling fire and breathing. He walks over to the bar slow and sits on the stool beside Milah, leaning his head back and puffing out a sigh. Ishia hands him the mug of cider and he drinks nearly half of it in one go.

      “So,” he says, putting the mug on the bar and facing Emerett, “you have been initiated. You think you’ll wanna come next time?”

      Emerett considers this. He’s still not at all comfortable with these people or with the world in general. He’s been thrust into the outside world on fate’s impulse after spending his entire conscious life in an army base training for one thing and now that one thing is gone and he’s spinning out in the middle of space with no purpose. He doesn’t know how to conduct himself without a mission, and he supposes helping people is as good as any. He nods.

—

      Back in the room, in the middle of the night, in the awkward silence between two singular ones. Emerett is sitting in his bed running his fingers through his hair. It’s dirty and sticking out in directions he doesn’t really want it to, but there aren’t any showers in the shelter like there were at the base and he doesn’t have a comb, so he just smooths it down with the palms of his hands. A comb drops into his lap, seemingly from thin air. He looks up and Jax is standing by his bed looking quite demure.

      “You can keep that,” he says, uncharacteristically sheepish, “if you want.”

      Extremely volatile, he thinks? “Oh, thanks.” He picks it up and inspects it. It’s simple and black, carved out of wood, with a handle shaped like a bird’s wing. He runs it through the front of his hair.

      “You saw my papers? In the box?”

      Emerett’s jaw clenches itself, knuckles turning white on the comb.

Several dead in horrific massacre

Jax sits down on the edge of his bed, running his fingers through his long black hair. “I checked the box and the papers were- they were in the wrong order. The newspaper over the wanted poster. It’s fine, I don’t really care.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I told you, it’s fine. Did you look through the whole thing?”

“No,” he responds, guiltily, guilty, “just the first two.”

“Okay.” He rubs the side of his face with his palm, dragging the ball of his hand across his jawline, the palm across the coarse black layer of short facial hair on his cheek. Emerett notices a scar cutting through the hair on the right side of his face, right next to his mouth. Long and pink and indented, reaching from his chin to the middle of his cheek, pulling his skin inwards at its puckered edges like a claw pressed up against his face. Is it from the escape? Massacre.

“Do you want to- do you want to know? The story?”

Emerett nods and Jax sighs in return, scooting back on his bed and crossing his legs like a child.

“I was in the army, or I trained for it at least. Like you, I’m assuming. You never went into battle?”

He shakes his head.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Your hair gives it away.. The length, you know. So, I was part of an experimental batch of hybrids, animal people or whatever. They designed us to see if animal DNA would help soldiers in battle, heightened senses and strength and claws and all.” He flexed his clawed fingers, illustrating the idea. “We did great, too. Not as good as some of the later.. formulations, but great. They made wolves like me, some big cat types like Heliote, and bears. That was all, I think. 

        “Anyway, we reached about the same stage in training you did. We went through all the conditioning, all the training, all the- all the punishment. We were aggressive, kind of… highly reactive, but that’s what they made us for. We were brute fighters. We were animals, instinct-ruled and tight-wired, going through all that shit they put the training soldiers through, you know.

        “So, we were a few months out from being able to go into battle, and one of us just snaps. His name was Julien, a lion, my– a close friend of mine.” He falls silent for a second, looking down at the ground. “He did something, something wrong, and they took him out to that platform in the courtyard where they whip… transgressors? Whatever you call it. People that do things wrong. Whipping, god.” Another silence. 

        “They took him to the middle of the courtyard and I was there. I watched them bring him out and make him kneel and everything, and I saw his eyes. When they were calling out his name and whatever rule he broke, I forget now, his eyes were closed and then they open and they were different, wider or… sharper or something. Tiny pupils, maybe. His eyes were wrong and he stood up all fast and it was like a tornado, he had the whipper down on the ground and he was bashing his head– his head on the pavement and snarling like an animal and–” His voice catches in his throat. Emerett notices his eyes are closed, and his cheek shifts, the setting of his jaw. It makes the scar twitch. He wants to say something but he doesn’t know what.

        “The guards got him in what, maybe thirty seconds? They shot him and blew his head open all over the courtyard and then they were both dead. Fucking god. The next day they rounded us all up and handcuffed us and sent us to the executioner. The hallway was so bright, I felt like we were walking straight into hell.

        “There were a lot of factors that went into what happened next. We were an experimental batch, remember, and they didn’t really know everything about us yet. That is to say, they didn’t know how strong we were, and how hard we were to condition. They rely a lot on the conditioning there, they’re all so sure that we’re too beaten down to try anything with them, that’s why they didn’t put restraints on the people being whipped or anything.”

        They did, or they did when Emerett was there. He didn’t know there was a time when they didn’t.

“But they were wrong. We were thick-skinned. I also think some of the guards called in sick that day, or something. Anyway, one of us near the front of the line, I think it was a guy, broke through his handcuffs and killed one of the guards. They had guns, of course, and they shot him, but by the time they got him down, twenty more of us were out of our handcuffs and moving. It was like some kind of mass hysteria, or like a really small war. It was kill or be killed, and the guards were outnumbered and overpowered. The rest is history. Or it was news, at least. ‘Several army officials dead in horrific massacre,’ you saw the paper.

“Some stuff happened after I was out, it was a few weird ass years before I heard of this place,” he sweeps his hand in an arc in front of him, gesturing to the general area, “but eventually I made my way here and… here we are.”

Emerett stares at him for a few seconds and it becomes clear that he’s not going to say anything else. He breathes slow, trying to process this new information through his lungs. Jax looks at him expectantly. He has no idea what to say.

“How long ago was this?” ends up coming out of his mouth.

“Oh damn, I don’t know. The escape was probably like five years ago, and I got here…” he thinks for a second, furrowing his brows and quirking the corner of his mouth upwards, “maybe two years after that?”

“Geez,” Emerett half whispers, sitting back in the middle of his bed (he had made his way to the edge, unaware) and leaning his head back on the wall. He really doesn’t know what to say. Kill or be killed, he said. He’s clearly alive, so he assumes that means he killed, but if an army guard had caught up to him when he was escaping, he probably would’ve done the same thing. He was trained to defend his life, at all costs. Chills run through the back of his neck like the cold edge of a knife.

“It’s late, I’m gonna go to sleep,” he hears from Jax’s side of the room, considerably quieter than earlier, his voice choked.

He nods, and keeps his eyes open after the torches go out, staring at the ceiling in the pitch dark.

Interlude: The snow is melting into the creek

          The snow is melting into the creek. It turns into liquid and runs off of the eaves of the houses, down the walls and into the soil, burrowing down to the seeds nestled in the earth.

          Breakfast, lunch and dinner and sleep and breakfast again. Emerett sleeps on his side now and he puts his shoes on when the sun is high.

         They talk at night, usually, voices rough in the cold dark. Jax tells stories from years before in the shelter, of Milah and Ishia and Heliote and others, water in the stream. Orrian and his wife Thatma, apparently the owners of the place. Of street runs, of fights with cops, of swashbuckling heroicism. He paints the truth in brighter colors, but Emerett doesn’t question him. He never tells anything before the shelter, leaving a three year gash in the narrative. But Emerett doesn’t question him.

        Two rays of light converging on the cliff.

Jax takes Emerett hunting, out in the bright woods that borders the town. He lays his bow in Emerett’s hands and his slender fingers wrap around the body of it as natural as a wolf’s teeth wrap around the leg of a deer. He was designed to be an archer, or a swordsman, maybe. The arrow goes through the rabbit the same either way, and the space between his skin and his muscle feels like a liquid black hole spread across his entire body. Jax takes the rabbit from him, his warm finger pads dragging barely along the back of Emerett’s cold hands, and his veins explode inside of his skin, filling the void with bright red heat.

The ice claws that jut out over the edges of the creek are melting. The water is flowing, flowing, flowing. It flows out of the woods into a river into the vibrant ocean crashing into itself over and over again.

Are you healing?

Two months later, early spring

        Jax pushes the door to the small, dim room shut behind him as Emerett sits down on the edge of the bed. They’ve just come back from a search, for people in the streets that might need shelter. None today. Emerett lifts his bruised arms up to unwrap the fabric mask from his face and a dull pain bites at his biceps.

        "Shit." he hisses through his teeth, closing his eyes and shaking the hood of his cloak off. Jax walks over from his own bed, shoes half unlaced, and brings his hands up to Emerett's shoulders to remove his cloak. He’s become sort of motherly towards him after so many dangerous street runs together.

  "They got you good, huh?" He starts unwrapping his mask and removing the beaten silver armor from his arms, surveying his injuries. He catches his reflection in the metal, distorted, covered in blood and dirt. The scar on his chin looks almost obnoxious, cutting directly through his facial hair, demanding to be seen. He looks at Emerett's face instead, pushing the sweat-matted hair off his forehead.

  "Like always." Emerett sighs. He closes his eyes and breathes in through his nose as if he's trying to reinflate his body. Pain sears through his abdomen like the bang of a gong, loud and clear. He cringes and looks down at himself after Jax removes his chestplate, staring almost blankly at a sizable wound on his stomach revealed by a tear in his shirt. It's a big cut and pretty deep, deep enough to warrant a healing potion if not a visit to the mage, but he doesn't really register it in his mind. He feels it and he sees it, but the synapses don't connect in his mind to tell him that the body that it belongs to is his. It's like he's watching himself from outside his self, watching his doppelganger perform woundedness on a shaky little vignetted stage. He feels a hand gently tapping his cheek and his soul shoots violently through the portal of consciousness back into his wet, fleshy little brain.

       "You alright?" He watches Jax ask. It takes a second for him to register that the question is in fact targeted at him.

       "Yeah, yeah I'm fine."

       "I have enough potion to deal with that," he lifts a bottle half full of clear liquid and shakes it slightly, "but I'm gonna need you to take off your shirt. Don't feel weird about it or else I'll start feeling weird about it."

       He complies wordlessly, going through the motions. As he watches Jax apply the potion to a torn old rag, he thinks about why. He's being healed because he's wounded, he's wounded because he was attacked, he was attacked because he is not a normal human. Or, he guesses, because he looks too poor to be a normal human. Normal, bred and born humans are usually bred and born in big houses inland. The poor ones are the grown ones, the created ones, the genetic rejects and refugees and realized visions and sketches of scientists in secluded labs secretly funded by the government, and they’re not supposed to be roaming around outside whatever job they were designed for. Attacked by a policeman, he remembers. He was wearing a big black helmet and big black boots.

        "This might hurt a little," Jax warns him, pressing the potion-soaked rag to his wound and holding it there, "but after a minute it'll be good as new." He looks up and examines the brands on his chest. "What do these sigils mean?"

        "They're from the army."

        "You don't want to tell me?" he asks, tilting his head.

        Emerett doesn't respond. He doesn't want to tell him, that's true, but he also doesn't want to tell him that he doesn't want to tell him. If he doesn't admit that he's being secretive, he feels less secretive. Secretive little secretive secrets all chasing their own secretive little tails like secretive little puppies in his apparently loosely connected synapses.

        "You don't want to tell me what they mean but you don't want to get them removed." Jax muses, "Any good mage down here would do it for free. Takes a swipe of the hand."

          "Do you need to know everything about me?" Emerett says, feeling sort of agitated. Probably because the potion actually does hurt a little and he really expected to be able to will the pain into nonexistence. Jax doesn’t respond.

          Emerett lets out a breath his lungs were holding in place without his permission and watches as Jax removes the rag from his stomach and his wound seals itself back up, from one end all the way to the other, leaving just a thin little pink line, like the ribbon in a little girl's hair, or the closed mouth of a baby sheep. Completely harmless.

       "They mean 'merciless perfection'" he reveals, "The sigils."

      "Oh.. not that bad. I've seen worse, especially from the army. I knew a guy that swore up and down that they'd branded him with a sigil that meant 'good boy' on the ass. I don't know why anybody'd make that up so I was always half inclined to believe him." He pauses for a second. "They do all kinds of shit to people there."

  Emerett looks to the side of the room and suddenly wishes there was a window. A big window with green pastures and rolling hills outside, and sheep galloping all over it. Sheep galloping, sheep galloping, one step two step one step, hup! Left, right, left, right. He clenches his eyes shut and feels the bed dip gently down with the weight of a 6 foot tall genetically engineered half-wolf soldier on his right side. He sighs and lets himself fall back, flopping down on the bed.

        "They've been there my whole life, removing them would feel like removing a part of myself." He says to Jax's back. "But sometimes I wonder what I'd be like without them."

        "I don't know," Jax says without turning around, "I like you how you are."

        "I wonder if they really do anything." He sends the words out into the air like smoke, he knows the answer.

       "Well, I don't know about the merciless part."

       He knows the answer. He knows the answer. He feels the answer inside his ribs every time he hunts, when the string of the bow leaves his curved fingertips, and every time he runs his hands over his chest in the pitch black night trying to feel his own heartbeat through the bone. But he’s not perfect. He looks over at Jax, but he's staring at the other side of the room. Maybe he sees the beautiful window too, he thinks. Lines of sheep.

       "I wonder if you really can make sigils for anything. Like if there's one that means 'huge dick' or something," he jokes, trying to cut a hole in the thick air to breathe through.

       "Yeah I've got that one as a birthmark actually," –Jax lays back on the bed beside him– "When I was born all the doctors crowded around to look at it. They said 'It's a miracle!' and then they all took pictures and started singing hymns."

        Emerett laughs, but a bitter taste settles in his mouth. He knew there had been no doctors present at Jax's birth. He wasn't born, he was grown in a tank in a lab in a remote area. They both were. But they didn't have to talk about it. If nobody talks about it, it isn't real. If nobody talks about it, they were both regular people with moms and dads and sparkling, regular childhoods where all their weapons were made of foam. So nobody talks about it and Emerett laughs for longer than he probably should.

       "Is that so?" He teases, shaking the chills out of his spine.

       "I swear on my mother!"

Morning Rain

The sun shows itself slowly from the underbelly of the earth, stretching its yellow arms out wide across the horizon, reaching through the tall grass of the prairies and the trees in the forest and skipping across the creek like a stone. It doesn’t reach Emerett, burrowed underground in the shelter like a meerkat, but he gets up in time with it by the terribly strong hand of habit. He has never known a morning that didn’t start with the sun.

He gets out of bed, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his palm. Motions motions motions. He puts his shirt on, a tight black t-shirt cropped somewhere across the midsection, bought at a store in town after one of his other shirts was torn in an unfortunate encounter with the branch of a tree. He’s getting used to being able to wear whatever he wants, and he has developed something of a fashion sense under Jax’s careful guidance. He’s wearing flowy white pants that cinch in at the bottom, puffing out a little at his shin and then jutting in straight against his ankle at the elastic cuff, almost like a mushroom cloud.

He grabs a cigarette from the box on the center of the bedside table and lights it as he walks out of the room, sticking the lighter in his pocket and the cigarette in his lips. The floor is cold against the balls of his feet as he walks down the hallway, greeting Orrian and climbing the stairs into the tavern. He retrieves his breakfast, oatmeal, and sits in an empty booth at the edge of the room. Sometimes he sits with somebody else, Ishia or Heliote, but today he feels like being alone, or at least waiting for somebody to come to him if they will. Jax will, once he gets up.

Golden light from the wall lantern slices across his face as he smokes, eats, thinks. He thinks of his classes at the army base. Or rather, his class. They spent most of the day training and conditioning, with meals and a couple hours of free time, but a few times a week they had a history class. He remembers the room, white tiled walls and white tiled floor and white tiled ceiling, C-shaped tiers of wooden benches. The front wall was a projection screen that they used for movie nights once a month, and the teacher would pace around in front of it, in the blank stage formed by the curve of benches. He was a tall man, slender and pale as a ghost, and he taught them about what he called “the world before.” According to him, and therefore the larger army complex, the current world stands on the ashes of a former society, a hubristic society collapsed under its own weight…

       They developed the original methods for genetic engineering, but they didn’t know the power they held, using it only for medical purposes and to occasionally create children for infertile parents. They attempted to create a utopia, without knowing that happiness can…?

        CCCan only be created on sacrificeee.

        Yes, good. They were, admittedly, much more technologically advanced than us, but they lacked our wisdom. They built their entire society on one finite resource and made no effort to conserve it, and their unchecked naivety led to their demise demise demise dem–

        “Morning,” he hears from the other side of the table, and Jax is there sitting down on the bench across from him, yawning. Emerett hums in response, taking a drag off his cigarette. They sit for a minute, Emerett looking out into the center of the room and watching the people eat and talk and talk and eat.

         “You feeling alright?”

         His face snaps forward and Jax looks into his eyes, looking for an answer in them, but all he gets is the green water of the creek with the brown mud underneath and the golden sunlight shining through the tree leaves down to the surface, ripples on the bank.

“Yeah, why?”

“Nothing,” he says, taking a bite of his oatmeal. “You’re just kinda quiet.”

“I’m.. thinking.” Thinking thinking. He is, thinking. He’s thinking so much he doesn’t think about anything, staring straight at some undefined point above the crest of Jax’s head.

A few more minutes of silence, mildly tense but not uncomfortable, like a bird sitting on the edge of a branch, and Jax speaks. “I had a thought last night.”

“Shoot.”

He leans forward, elbows on the table, spreading his clawed fingers out in front of himself conspiratorially. “Every spring, in the city, one of those mega-rich people with the crazy mansions throws a huge party, for some birthday or something. The whole shebang; live music, light show, goddamn circus performers.”

“And what?”

“I thought we could sneak in, get people to the shelter.”

Emerett’s eyebrows shoot up into his forehead. To do something like that would be to put themselves and possibly the shelter in total danger. Who knows what would happen if they were found out?

“That is insane.”

“Well, think about it,” Jax says. “A whole bunch of lab-grown performers in a room full of rich and powerful freaks. Imagine how you would feel if you were one of them.”

He imagines this. The elite class doesn’t hardly see them as people, no, they don’t see them as people at all. He’d be just a chunk of meat to them, and all those secluded rooms in those mansions…

“Hell, they’ll probably have prostitutes there,” Jax continues, talking with his hands. “Think of all the people we could help! It’d be so easy to sneak them out, if we just found a way to get in.”

He’s right, such a large collection of vulnerable people, to not even try to help them? “Well, how would we get in? No invitation, no connections…” He raises a finger for each point, aimlessly waving his hand when the list trails off.

“Our only option is some sorta disguise, I guess.” Jax looks over to the side and fixes his eyes on a flickering lamp on a table. People are starting to filter out of the room, leaving behind a sort of vibrational resonance, a buzz in the air of human noise recently departed. Human?

“Disguise ourselves as what? Caterers? Prostitutes?” He spits that last part out, half-joking, but really, where are they supposed to get a catering uniform?

Jax turns his head to the front and tilts his ears to the back, the black fur blending into his hair. “You have another one of those?” he asks, gesturing to the cigarette between his lips.

“No,” he answers, kind of guiltily. “The box is in the room.” 

Jax sighs and clicks his tongue a couple times. Sheepishly, Emerett takes the half-smoked cigarette from his lips and holds it out in front of him, pinched carefully in his thumb and forefinger. The end of it burns bright orange to yellow like a blooming marigold in the sun, singed at the petal-tips and crushed down against white marble. Jax takes it between two fingers and takes a drag staring straight ahead, somewhere between Emerett’s eyes. He can see him looking down at the wooden table. He wants him to look up, blowing the smoke straight over to his face. Success, he squints up at him, tilting his head. Jax smiles and laughs through his nose, a sharp stuttering jet of air, and he offers the cigarette back across the table.

Emerett bites at the inside skin of his lip and smiles, just hardly, like the soft hairs of a feather bending against the wind. “Just keep it.”

He does, smoking the rest of it in silence as Emerett finishes his breakfast, tapping the ash into his empty glass. He stretches his brain trying to think of a plan that doesn’t involve hurting anybody. There’s no way for them to get an invitation, they can’t tell anyone they know someone inside without risking being found out, they can’t get any sort of worker’s uniform without stealing it from actual workers and they can’t do that without hurting them. They can’t pretend to be performers unless Emerett is secretly trained in dance, which, based on his stiff hips, he’s pretty sure he is not. They could show up half-naked through the back door in the early stream of candy-flesh and lay draped around the edges of the room, avoiding the predatorial eyes of the party goers. There they could be as close as possible to the people who need their help, and they wouldn’t have to talk to anybody if they do their job right. But his skin shrinks in on itself. The bangles on his ankles, the hands on his back. He looks down at the floor and pulls his shoulders in, trying to think about anything else but the smoke. He spits in his glass and grinds the burning end of the cigarette down into it, mostly gone anyway.

He looks over at Emerett. He’s sitting near impossibly still, with his eyes closed and his head leaned back. His arms are crossed over his chest and he can see them rise and fall gently with his breathing, slow and even. He focuses on this movement, trying to time his own breathing to it. In, out, calm, calm. He feels his feet against the ground and he can think clearly, he can breathe clearly. His eyes bore into the center of Emerett’s forehead, trying to get into his brain. They fail after valiant but useless effort and he resigns himself to watching the twitching skin of his eyelids until his brain is still and serene like a lifeless pond on a still, hot summer day. Too still.

“Coming up with a plan?”

Emerett’s eyes shoot open quick and he tilts his head just slightly. He wasn’t but he probably should’ve been. He wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, letting images pass through his head quick and hazy like running horses. Metal, blood, white tile, smoke, spit, black fur, warm morning, marigold, silver ring, wooden comb.

“Trying.”

Jax’s tail folds up into his lap and he looks down at the table, studying the ring-shaped stains on the wood. Dusty ghosts of drinks past, infectious circles all running over each other like ringworm in the flesh. “I can’t think of anything.”

“I think the best option is to disguise ourselves as prostitutes,” Emerett says, shrugging his shoulders and feeling kind of ridiculous. “Just to get in. We won’t have to actually, you know...”

Jax bows his head and sighs, tapping his glass against the table and watching the dead cigarette butt shake around in his own spit.

“We could come in that way and then disguise ourselves as regular party goers, if we can figure out a way to get extra clothes or something in,” Emerett continues, seemingly unfazed by Jax’s dejected manner. “Hopefully everybody will be too drunk to notice anything.”

“Probably.” Jax looks around the room, wishing he was asleep again.

“Are you alright?”

He looks forward and Emerett looks genuinely concerned, in a way he’s never seen from him before. His mouth is slightly open, he notices, and he can see his teeth just barely through his lips.

“Oh, yeah,” he responds, waving his hand and shaking his head clear. “I’m fine.”