After the Red Rain (22 page)

H
e promised himself again: He would bend. Not break.

With his days and nights equally blank, with nothing to do or hear or read, he could have lost his mind. It would have been easy. Time passed, marked only by the meals and the dimming of the light through the window. He counted mornings, but lost count. He knew only that he’d been in prison for at least a week.

They couldn’t know about his secret weapon.

Not his abilities. Those had weakened, flagged with his energy as he subsisted on water and what little sunlight he could glean. Just enough to stay alive.

No, his secret weapon was his memories.

He’d spent years traveling. He had seen things unimagined by Max Ludo and his jailers. And now he spent each day-merged-with-night recalling every footstep, every blink.

Beginning with the first.

The roses. He does not know their name yet. He does not know his own name yet. That hovers in the time to come, glistens in his future like dew on rocks. But the roses are there, in the now of memory, the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes, their semidouble petals in crisp yellow, architected
around the stamens and pistils, the sepals folded like bowing servants. How many people witness such beauty in their first eye-opening? He knows beauty in that instant, and he knows luck as well.

He is lucky.

“I’m lucky,” he murmured from his cot.

He stands on legs disused to supporting weight. His own sepals have curled down from his neck and begun to close around him, forming a safe, temperature-regulated cocoon. When they shed, he will keep them with him, safe in the form of a long coat.

The sepals were beginning to regrow. He felt them unfurling from the back of his neck. For now he could conceal them under his clothes, but eventually they would become too large to hide, and his captors…

Memories. He tried to recollect every detail of his trek across the continent, but his remembrances were always interrupted.…

Her touch.

Interrupted by more recent memories…

Her eyes.

Deedra.

Fear and curiosity in her eyes, intermingled, combined. She touches him. In the dead and dark of night, she kisses him.

He walks a blasted wasteland, ten years ago, buildings burned out and collapsed all around him. Someone has spray-painted on a trestle
YOU ARE ENTERING HELL!!!
and Deedra is suddenly there, reaching out for him, and her eyes consume him, and he wants to be consumed, devoured, by her.

YOU ARE ENTERING HELL!!!

A fine silvery fuzz began to appear on his skin. This had happened once before. Five years ago. Up north, where the nights were humid and cool, like now. Each morning, he scraped at the fuzz as best he could,
sloughing it off into the toilet. It would devour him, he knew. If he couldn’t get rid of it, it would eat him alive.

At least something will get to eat in here.

Each morning he scraped it off and returned, exhausted by the effort, to his cot.

“Can you hear me?”

He craned his neck so that he could see the door. A man stood there, half in shadow. “I said, can you hear me?”

“Yes.” Rose’s voice sounded rough and guttural. He hadn’t spoken in several days. The word stabbed his throat.

“Good. I thought maybe you were unconscious. If you keep up this hunger strike, they’ll force-feed you. You should know that.”

“Force-feed?”

“It’s… unpleasant.”

Eating the gross swill they called food was a nauseating enough prospect. Having it shoved down his gullet against his will was enough to make Rose’s insides clamor to escape his body. He propped himself up on an elbow. Cleared his throat.

“I can’t eat. I want to. But I can’t eat what they’re giving me.” A thought occurred to him. “Are you my lawyer?”

The man snorted. “Your lawyer will get here when she gets here. They’re in no hurry to have you prosecuted. Once you get sent to the Citywide facility, you’re out of the Magistrate’s hands. And he likes you where you are. No, I’m here to talk. Can we talk a little?”

Rose considered. He had no other options, after all. He nodded.

The man came out of the shadow. His eyes were mismatched, one blue, one green, and Rose couldn’t help staring. “You can change your eyes!” he exclaimed.

“What?” The man shook his head. “I was born like this.”

“Oh.” Rose deflated. He could, with concentration, alter the pigments in his skin and other exterior surfaces. That was how he’d
created the fake brand that allowed him to remain—for a time—in Ludo Territory. For a brief, shining moment, he’d fantasized that he’d discovered someone like him.

“I’m Superior Inspector Jona Markard. I’m the one who arrested you.”

Ah. Yes.
Rose remembered now.

“You shot at me. With people around.” He mustered enough accusation that SI Markard flinched.

“I was chasing a murderer.”

“I haven’t killed anyone.”

Markard folded his arms over his chest. “Listen, Rose. They sent me in here because they figure you’re pretty close to breaking by now. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m authorized to do it, but I don’t want to. Do you believe me?”

Rose wasn’t sure he did, but there was no harm in saying yes.

“You’re never leaving a cell. As long as you live, for the rest of your life, you’ll be in a cell. Do you understand?”

Unfortunately, Rose did.
The rest of his life
, though, was a vastly shorter amount of time than they could imagine. There’d been a fine coating of more silvery fuzz along his legs when he’d awoken before. And while he couldn’t see his back, he could
feel
it there, growing, sinking its excruciatingly small talons into his skin. Blooming into him. Becoming him. Or he was becoming it.

Either way, it meant the end.

Would he surrender? he wondered. Would he eventually confess to something he hadn’t done? Would he show them what he could do and let them dissect him, all to end the agony?

“You need to come clean,” Markard said. “Tell them what you know. Look, the Magistrate’s not an unreasonable man. He’s very concerned about the plans your territory has. If you give him the information he needs, he—”

“He’ll overlook the murder of his son?” Rose sat up, back to the
wall, and mimicked Markard’s arms-across-the-chest pose. Even dying, he wasn’t stupid enough—or desperate enough—to believe that Max Ludo would forgive Jaron’s death.

Markard’s mouth moved without sound and then he recovered. “You’ll always be on the hook for Jaron. But if you give up your people, tell us what we need to know, the other charges could go away. The spying—”

“I didn’t spy.”

Markard sighed. “I’m trying to help you, Rose,” he said softly, gazing at him with those beautiful, mismatched eyes.

“You’re not doing it very well,” Rose replied. He was exhausted. Without even being aware of it, he drifted off to sleep.

The meals began to blur, and his vision began to blur, so he was no longer certain how much time had passed.

He began to wonder if perhaps he
had
killed Jaron Ludo. He
had
been there, in Jaron’s apartment. He had gone there to recover Deedra’s pendant. Slipped in through a window, as he’d become accustomed to doing. Jaron lived so high up that he never would have imagined someone entering through the window.

The pendant had been on a shelf in the bedroom. Rose had taken it and only then had he noticed the humped figure in the dark. The body. The blood.

He’d fled. Safer. Always the safe route. And yet…

There was a tendril, so like his own. Jaron had been crushed and slashed in a way Rose knew he could crush and slash.

What if there was someone else like him? What if some other Rose had…

There was no other Rose, though. None that he knew of. But who else could…

I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t.

But what if he had? What if he had done it and simply… didn’t know?

He could not recall doing so, but was that definitive? Could he have murdered Jaron and
forgotten
doing so? The human mind, Rose knew, was capable of truly astonishing feats. And his mind was probably not even human.

Maybe I did it. Maybe they’re right about everything. Maybe I’m a spy. Maybe I was built in a lab in some other Territory, created in a test tube and sent out to wreak havoc on my Magistrate’s enemies.

And what of his other memories? The ones of his long trek across the Cities? They’d never existed. He’d conjured them in prison, as a way of pushing back against the solitary confinement. Inventing a history to ruminate on, something to think about beyond the four concrete walls.

What about Deedra, though? She was real, right? She exists, doesn’t she?

Yes. Yes, she did. He had touched her. She had kissed him. Those things were real. He clung to them.

His arms had become spindly and twig-like, with a gray cast to them. When he lifted his shirt, his rib cage stood out against his thin flesh in stark relief, like ripples frozen on the surface of a pond.

The sepals growing from the back of his neck were a day, maybe two, from being unconcealable under his shirt. He contemplated ripping them off himself. Aware of the camera, he decided he would have to do so under the blanket. They would probably think he was having a seizure, so he would have to move quickly.

It turned out to be a moot plan. When he awoke the next morning, ready to do it, he felt the sepals shifting under him. They had curdled and fallen off in his sleep.

Dead.

Staring at the gray-green fold of his own body, now separate from him, he thought,
So am I. Not long now.

T
ired of waiting for him to come to them, they came for him.

It was—as best he could tell—the middle of the night. His cell suddenly exploded with bright artificial light as the door clanged open, shocking him from a stupor.

No shackles this time. That, more than anything else—more than the silvery mildew on his body, the dead sepals, the ribs—convinced him that he was near death.

Once, they’d respected his power. Now he was nothing to fear.

They dragged him down a hallway. It blurred, a gray-white smear lit by the hellish artificial lights overhead. Something deep within him yearned and strained for the lights, mistaking them for true light. But they held nothing for him. No nutrition. No life.

A new room. This one dark, with a chair and a single penetrating light glaring at the seat. They put him in the seat and shackled him to it.

Not, he soon realized, because they thought he was dangerous.

“Your hunger strike is a failed gambit,” Max Ludo said.

Rose raised his head, desperate to peer beyond the brightness stabbing his eyes. When had Max Ludo gotten there? Had he been there all along?

A hand grabbed his hair and jerked his head back. Another grasped his lower jaw, squeezing and prying it down, his mouth agape.

“Our chow not good enough for you?” a voice asked, and the next thing he knew, something slimy and rancid and gritty all at once was shoved between his teeth. It tasted like death and loss and chemicals.

Rose hissed and shook his head, but he was held fast. The hands jammed his teeth shut. Pinched his nostrils closed.

“Eat it, you bastard!” Ludo cried. “It took years to come up with just the right combination of spliced genes to make something like that. Eat it!”

Rose couldn’t breathe… which normally wasn’t a problem. He’d learned early on that when he couldn’t breathe, his body had ways of absorbing the air around him. But the air here was stale, and he was too weak. They wouldn’t let him breathe until he swallowed. He struggled against it, his body clamoring to swallow, his mind crying out against it.

He started choking and gagging and seizing, his body a jerking, uncontrollable thing that moved of its own volition.

The hands came away from his head, and he vomited the sludge they’d forced into him. It spattered the floor in front of him and ran down his chin in rivulets.

Even with his eyes closed, the bright light stabbed him. Gasping, he said, “I can’t. You have to understand. It isn’t natural.” He had to make them understand. If they wanted him alive at all, they had to understand. He didn’t know what words to use. He barely understood himself; how could he expect them to?

“Not
natural
?” someone spluttered. “That’s cloned from original stem cells, spliced with the DNA of the extinct turkey. It’s the most natural thing in the world!”

“Wait.” Ludo’s voice. “If he wants natural, maybe we should give him natural.”

There was near-silence, filled with a low murmuring among voices out in the darkness that lurked beyond the harsh lighting. And then chuckling, which grew into laughter, and he was hauled to his feet and dragged again, into a corridor, past several doors. They flung open a door before he could read the word stenciled on it. They dragged him in.

His vision blurred, then sharpened for an instant. Cold tile under his feet, cracked with age. Ahead of him, an ancient-looking metal box, weeping trails of rust. A guard went to the side of it and cranked open a small hatch.

“Most natural thing in the world,” Max Ludo chortled, “is being in the womb, eh? Am I right?”

A chorus of obsequious yeses.

“This is as close as it gets,” Ludo went on. “Old-style sensory-deprivation tank. Almost forgot we had this damn thing down here.” He poked his nose toward the open hatch, then recoiled, exclaiming. “Whew! Okay, so maybe not
all
your senses will be deprived. Four out of five isn’t bad, though. Right?” Before Rose could respond, Max gestured. “Dump him in.”

The smell hit him before they got him through the hatch, a rancid miasma, thick and noxious. He could taste as well as smell it. He struggled, but was too weak—they shoved him through the hatch, and he fell into a too-thick pool of water. The smell was all around him.

“You’ll float in there for a good long while,” Max promised him, his face filling the hatch. “No sound. No light. We’ll see how long you last before you beg us to pull you out. How long before you’re willing to spill all your secrets in return for something,
anything
but your own thoughts and that smell.”

“I don’t have anything to tell—”

Max slammed the hatch shut, leaving Rose in darkness and in silence.

He inhaled the stench.

Eyes wide, he could see nothing. Ears on alert, he heard nothing, the tank designed in such a way that its walls and water absorbed even the sound of his own breathing.

He reached out a hand, stretching his fingers to their fullest extent, brushing against the side of the tank. At least he had smell and touch going for him. There was something out there in the great blackness, he reminded himself. He was not floating in a void; he was floating in a metal tank filled with old, stale water in the middle of a building in the middle of a Territory, in the middle of a City, on the face of the planet.

He reminded himself of this over and over.

Metal under his fingertips. Then a patch of something fuzzy. Mold, he thought.

Hello there, living thing
, he thought.

He smiled.

And closed his eyes.

Nothing changed.

Later—how long, he could not tell—they hauled him, reeking and soaking wet, out of the sensory-deprivation tank. The first sound to his ears was the tired, fading laughs of the men around him.

And Rose felt disoriented. Vulnerable. The light was too bright, the room too loud. Huddled on the floor, he could not find his bearings, could hardly move on his own.

But…

“Go hose him off and throw him back in his cell,” Ludo said.

Hands under his arms lifted him.

But as he adjusted to the light and the sound, Rose realized something.

He felt better than he had in
days
.

They threw him into a tiny stall clad in cracked tiles.

Why did he feel better? Something they’d done. The moss in the tank. Paramecia in the stagnant water.

And now… now water! Cleaner this time, and more water than he’d encountered since his imprisonment began. He lay on the floor and spread his arms and legs wide, letting the water touch every inch of him. Cleansing him, yes, but more important than that…

Hydrating him.

Fortifying him.

It was over soon enough, over sooner than he would have hoped. But as they hauled him back to his cell and hurled him in—“Take some time to think, pissant. You’ll talk soon enough.”—Rose realized two things in the damp, cooling clarity of his postshower euphoria.

First, that he would die in prison.

Second, that this meant he had to escape.