Blood Vivicanti (9781941240113) (3 page)

Lowen was making demons –
things somewhere in between Blood Vivicanti and Sleeper Devils –
monsters that were even less human and less Kharetie than
me.

Lowen called them his
“Devicanti.”

Lowen’s first successful
test subject had been Nell. She was the first to survive the
procedure. She was the first Devicanti.

That poor broken girl, she
was everything I could have been, and nothing I became. In
comparison, my life had not turned out as bad as hers, though it
could have.

Even from miles away, as
she was charging ahead of the other Devicanti toward the mansion, I
could sense how Lowen’s blood – Theo’s Blood Vivicanti blood – had
changed her. She was no longer as miserable as she had been. Her
new blood had focused her misery into an instrument of revenge. She
was indeed more powerful. But she was also very, very
angry.

She was the Cinderella
story yanked inside out.

Nell and the Devicanti
moved faster than I first guessed. They were in the mansion before
Red and I left the underground laboratory.

We could not hear them when
we leaped back up to the library. We looked for them but we did not
see them. So we walked stealthily toward the front entryway, where
the front doors were mere splinters.

We were almost outside when
I heard the sickly wheezing of someone behind us.

Slowly, Red and I turned
around.

We came face to face with
Lowen’s grotesque new opus, his Devicanti.

The Devicanti had eyes that
glowed like dirty yellow lanterns. They looked haggard and hungry.
They looked as fierce as wolves. And we soon found that they were
stronger, faster, meaner, and generally more rabid than Sleeper
Devils, although they could never be as strong as Red and
I.

Nell was standing before
them, confronting me, as if I were the yoke of all her
misery.

“
What’s yours is mine,” she
said, her voice like a hissing snake.

I clenched my fists,
preparing to fight.

Before I ever became a
Blood Vivicanti, I had been the shell of a girl, a thing to be
pitied, forgotten trash to be collected by the Junk Lady in
Labyrinth
. But whoever I
had been, that old girl was no longer me.

In the blink of an eye, I
punched through the nearest wall and I yanked out a gas line and a
live electrical wire.

The live wire came into
contact with the gas line.

Magic ensued.

There was a very small
spark.

There was a very large
explosion.

Red and I were blown
backward through the front door, out into what had been Wyn’s very
neat front lawn. It had become by then mostly mulch and
mud.

Red and I slid through it
all, still clinging to the rucksack and the devices, which were
thankfully unharmed.

The fire and the noise had
wounded us, but my ability to heal had come from him, and his
ability to heal worked faster than mine.

He was on his feet in a
flash. He tore off his earmuffs with clear discontent and he glared
down at me with an expression of both astonishment and annoyance.
Apparently he would have preferred not to be blown up.

For a man called Silent,
his body language speaks volumes.

Most of the Devicanti were
vaporized in the explosion. They lacked Blood Vivicanti
resilience.

But I had the distinct
feeling that Nell had survived the all-consuming fire. I could
still smell her. I could still
feel
her.

Yet it was more than that.
In many ways, she and I were exactly the same. We were
survivors.

Red and I zoomed home in
his spaceship to the Locomotive Deadyards.

We entered our Labyrinth
Fort. All around us were train parts, wheels, and cogs.

For a junkyard, we had made
the place pretty clean.

Red is more fastidious than
you might think.

Who knew that OCD could
exist beyond the Milky Way?

He and I unloaded most of
the contents of our rucksack. He set the scavenged parts neatly
together in rows.

My mind had started to
wander.

I was thinking about Theo.
I’d been thinking about him a lot lately. Lowen the Dark Man had
possessed his body, and I was wondering if Theo was lost forever,
or if there was some chance and hope to save him someday, somehow,
anyhow.

My mind imagined the worst.
It always does.

I left Red alone to work on
some new device he was making. I took the rest of the tech in my
rucksack and I went to another car, my own sanctuary.

Once there, I touched the
light switch. Sepia-colored lights flickered on.

I didn’t need the lights. I
was just used to them. I liked having the lights on. It was
comforting. I needed some comfort.

The lights were connected
to a kind of steam engine. Light and steam and the pulsing thrum of
the engine filled the air.

I moved across the room
like an ordinary girl. It was good to feel ordinary every now and
again.

I went from that room
toward a back room, a hidden room. The door to it was made of metal
plates and wires and gears and pipes.

To one side of the door was
a button. I pressed it.

The mechanical parts of the
door curtained back in a graceful ballet of grinding and
twirling.

This room had been a dome
car. It was one of the earlier models, called, “The Silver
Vista-Dome.” Atop the car was a small dome with windows that used
to provide train passengers with a panorama of the passing
countryside.

I was using it to provide
me with a panorama of the Locomotive Deadyards.

Sometimes I could imagine
the day when Lowen the Dark Man discovered where Red and I were
hiding, and then attacked us. Yes, in my mind it was like the
Battle of the Five Armies. Only instead of Goblins and Wargs
against Elves, Dwarves, Eagles, and the Men of Dale, it was Red and
I against Lowen, the Sleeper Devils, and the Devicanti.

The fifth army would be the
Kharetie. They would surprise the whole world in time.

I had removed all the
passenger chairs in the Vista-Dome, and in the middle of my
sanctuary I had set up my workstation, a long steel
table.

I took off my rucksack and
emptied out the remaining contents on the tabletop.

There were old brass tubes,
old copper plates, silver cogs, and more. Included was the tech
that I’d snatched from Wyn’s holo-imaging device.

I put on headgear that Red
had made for me. A gift, you could call it. It was a leather
headband with several lenses from various pairs of eyeglasses. Each
lens swiveled up and down. Each was outfitted with a unique
electrical current that helped me perceive various spectrums of
light. I could see gamma rays and x-rays.

Yes, I was the new
Supergirl.

I swiveled down one lens
while I rummaged through the scraps on my worktable.

I found what I was looking
for – a cogwheel as teensy as a microchip.

I lowered another lens that
allowed me to veritably view the molecular chain that was binding
the cogwheel together.

It was the last part I
needed in a great plan that I had been working on tirelessly. It
was a magnificent machine.

It was my first
child.

I took the cogwheel from
the room and strolled leisurely through several more rooms
converted from old railway cars. Our Labyrinth Fort wove me all
throughout the Locomotive Deadyards.

Finally I came to an
opening near the entrance.

I stood beside what a human
might have easily mistaken for a metal wall.

On this wall were pipes and
wires and plates of copper and pewter and brass and bronze, and
also more cogwheels of varying sizes.

But this was no
wall.

I opened a panel and set
the tiny cog in a very specific place, right in the middle of a
series of other cogwheels. They all fitted together, like the
workings of a very complex, yet very beautiful jigsaw
puzzle.

That tiny cogwheel was the
final piece to a much larger assemblage.

Beside this assemblage was
a grasshopper escapement that had come from a grandfather
clock.

Surrounding me was the
scent of old metal. I could smell copper. And it smelled like
blood.

Blood smelled
good.

Imagine going on a diet
from chocolate for over a month’s time, or pizza or Kentucky
bourbon or whatever might be your delicious poison of
choice.

Now, imagine getting a
whiff of that.

True: The thought of
drinking blood again – blood like Nell’s black blood – made me sick
to my stomach.

But the
memory
of drinking blood, the delight
I took in its taste, the euphoria that came from devouring Blood
Memories, and the increased knowledge and ability in them, was so
pleasurable that their slightest recollection practically bowled me
over.

My whole body was aching
not only for the good coppery taste of blood, but also for the
knowledge encapsulated within the treasure chest of someone else’s
Blood Memories.

“
Lord, I want a pint,” I
huffed to myself in the emptiness of the Locomotive
Deadyards.

I placed my hand on the
grasshopper escapement beside the network of cogwheels.

I released the
weight.

It swung back and forth,
ticking and tocking like a great grandfather clock as old as Father
Time.

I drew the lens back away
from my eyes, watching my creation work.

Then I stepped back to get
a better view of my machine.

I had been assembling it
for some time. I had to dive deep into the trove of my photographic
memories. I had to juxtapose old ideas to create new ones. I used
almost all the Blood Memory knowledge I had of architecture,
engineering, trigonometry, calculus, logic, and
Whac-A-Mole.

The farther away I backed,
the tinier the cogwheel became, and the tinier it became, the more
it seemed to meld into an even larger and more complex assemblage
of cogwheels.

The ticking and tocking
filled the whole room. It was like time counting down to something
terrible and great.

Still, I backed
away.

The large, complex
assemblage melded into an even greater and more intricate network
of gears, some gears large, some small, some gears internal, some
beveled, some gears helical, some spiral, some hypoid or crown or
worm. There were racks and pinions, suns and planets. There were
cage gears and magnetic gears. There was epicyclic gearing and
harmonic drives. Each worked perfectly together in a delicately
choreographed dance of inter-twining metal and teeth.

A human would most likely
look at all this and only see old copper and brass tubes and more
wiring. A human would naturally mistake my boy as a mere machine
that could not move. A human would probably not have seen that this
was actually the forearm of a massive mechanical man, my
boy.

Backing up, I could see
most of him.

I had made every inch. I
had tightened every screw with my fingers. I had carried every
metal plate as if it were weightless.

His ticking and tocking
that echoed throughout the room was the sound of his
heart.

He seemed to have popped
from my head like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. He was alive
and there would be no shutting him off.

I christened my boy
“Steam.”

Growing up, my parents did
not understand me very well. They had had a child who was entirely
unlike them. But they had made me via the uncontrollable randomness
of childbirth – like most humans.

But I was human no more.
And I wanted to be a better parent. I was seeking to control every
step of my boy’s conception and birth. So I made Steam in my own
image and likeness.