Quinn poured over the latest results that were printed out and scattered over the floor. Her long hair masked her expression but our connection told me she was deep in thought, searching for patterns in the noise of data.
Organ’s experiments were running concurrently around the globe, each team led by someone like Quinn. Over time, she had carved out her place as a savant in this new field of Shaping. She could read the data and tune out the less desirable variables, she could understand the mechanisms working at a molecular level within the bodies of test subjects. Most importantly, she could make the cold, rational decisions that no one else could quite muster the courage to take responsibility for. Naturally, she became a leader in the organization.
When I had first met her, she was a child. Straight-backed, primly dressed, but still a child, with a serious expression that rarely changed to anything else.
That moment was clearer than anything. My second birth.
Before that? I was military. Despite the best efforts to instill a sense of brotherhood and pride, I was really only loyal because… I didn’t recall why. The pumping blood in my ears seemed to drown it out. It was the times that I got close to remembering that it felt like claws were digging into my heart and I wanted to blow them out with a shotgun. So I didn’t recall. I choose not to.
Right. The first time I met her.
I had been recruited by a man who only went by the moniker, the Hermit. I took him to be some wealthy bureaucrat at the end of his lifetime. The kind that tends to task themselves with far-fetched goals in some effort to make a legacy. Stooped and aged, always wearing leather gloves and clothes that covered all of his skin, except his face. He never asked about my past.
He knew about it, of course, and that made me think about killing him every time I walked behind him, staring at his exposed neck. He had offered me a vast wealth, but what truly interested me was his long-winded and vague rants about rebirth.
That man led me into the room where she sat, staring up intently at a large, elaborate model of the celestial bodies that hung from the ceiling. She didn’t acknowledge our entrance. She sat on a mess of loose paper, scribbling indiscernible notes with unrelenting speed, her mouth muttering something under her breath.
Such a strong display of purpose was immediately enticing to me.
I stared at the pen in her hand. Oh to be a well-used tool. To be part of something valuable without needing to keep thinking. It seemed like such a lovely idea instead of the creeping guilt and the temptation of oblivion.
The man walked past her to a typewriter that sat on an ornate side table. He typed out a short line that I could read from where I stood near the doorway.
“QUINN. I HAVE A CANDIDATE HERE FOR YOU.”
Quinn ignored him, eyes roaming the planets above. She brushed a strand of hair that drifted in front of her eyes. My hands began to tremor. I squeezed them together behind my back. Not now.
My heart was being eaten, but there was nothing I could do. Like a panicked animal, it tried to break free of the bones and viscera that held it inside my chest, seeking some escape. I knew there was none. So I pushed the guilt out of my head, flinging the memories as far as I could into the dark recesses of my mind, where I would no longer remember them. But the guilt had simply descended into my heart instead, where it could eat at me from my subconscious, a reminder that even if I didn’t remember, the sin remained. I would never escape the old me. The person I most wanted to kill.
Quinn stood and walked over to the typewriter to read it. Then she looked at me for the first time. The moment our eyes met, it was like a snare had been pulled taut. I was pinned to the spot and I felt her poke and prod at me with her mind. The man had warned me of this ahead of time, but I hadn’t taken it seriously. I didn’t mind the feeling though, the alien sensation of my body being sifted through like a chest of toys was a wonderful distraction.
I only dreaded that she might ask who I was. I couldn’t answer that. The guilt would leap out of my mouth and do something ugly.
Quinn pointed up to the diorama. “Rip that one down. I made your legs-”
I had already jumped. My body was light and strong. I seized the sphere she had asked, snapping it free from the hanging wires. When I landed, Quinn was looking at the red model planet I held.
An emotion that was not my own rippled across my body and my fingernails grew into curved blades.
“Shave it down by twenty percent,” she said.
I obeyed, understanding her intent through my body. My hands were her tools. When I finished, she merely pointed and I understood. I jumped, first to seize the wire and rip it free, then again to reach the scaffolding at the ceiling. I clung there, muscles straining as I stretched out to sink the wire into a new location. Then I attached the red planet and slowly let it drop to the wire’s length.
She nodded approvingly and her satisfaction ran through my veins. It felt good.
The tremors in my hands were gone. The guilt was there, but it was distant, eating something that I no longer recognized. I’d found my escape. A new form, under a new name.
—
“Damascus.”
I snapped out of my idle recollections in an instant. Quinn was moving. I fell in step behind her.
She hadn’t needed to say my name, I would have sensed her intent like any of my own senses. It was as natural as feeling pain. Even more so when the metal armour covered my face and I could see nothing, yet feel everything.
Right now, the armour flowed around the rest of my body, keeping my head clear so I could breathe. At any time I could command it to take form and become solid. Quinn’s specialty in Shaping things into stasis was useful. It meant I could go hours without taking a breath. The darkness of the fluid armour was a cocoon that I craved. It was in those moments where I was truly a part of Quinn, one of her limbs to do with what she saw fit.
Agitation shivered across our connection. That was unusual. Quinn’s focus was rarely disturbed. The meddling Wolf, Nick, had done so in the past. I still didn’t understand why. But I tried to avoid thinking about such bothersome things. Quinn would do what she wanted to. She was the driving force, the one who would leap where others took hesitant steps.
The doors opened and Quinn strode out into the library.
It was a grand space that was centered around a wide and long staircase, with corridors of bookshelves stretching to each side at regular intervals.
On an unspoken feeling, I let the metal flow over my face and take shape, although I left one eye exposed for the time being.
There were two men standing in the library, waiting for us. One was clearly Shaped, as he had four arms, each with a different look to them. The arm attached to his back was massive and it warped his perception to look at.
The Shaped man scowled as his companion smiled.
The smiling one was less obviously threatening, yet my instincts screamed that he was the more dangerous of the two. One of his eyes had strange scars around it that looked like roots and the skin was reddened like he’d been rubbing it.
The Shaped one held a briefcase with Organ code marking the side. I felt Quinn’s emotions spark as she recognized the code.
“You retrieved it,” Quinn said in her usual impassive tone. “Excellent.”
The one holding the briefcase deepened his frown. “It’s only a failsafe, right? You won’t use it before we know.”
Quinn didn’t answer.
The smiling one spoke, “I told you. Organ’s leaders are split. This will be the breaking point. Organ will fold in on itself, and at such a critical time too.”
Quinn spoke, “If you knew, then why did you bring it to me? Are you picking a side?”
His smile widened. “No. Be honest, it doesn’t matter who acquires the weapon. The other side would be too proud to bow down. War is inevitable. I just like this location more.”
“Because it’s closer to Nick?”
He laughed. “Am I that easy to read? Come on, you agreed with me, he’s our best bet right now. Don’t get salty just because I brought the fight to your front doorstep.”
Something dangerous flashed in the man’s eyes. “You gotta have stakes, right? That’s the only way we transform. That was your method when you gave all of us captives Dice and dropped us into a deadly game of survival. Well, you’re a part of the experiment now. Let’s see what results we get, hm? Let’s see who emerges changed and who doesn’t come out at all.”
The Shaped one placed the briefcase on the floor and walked backwards, shaking his head.
“Nick will come with H.E.S.P. and who knows what else,” the smiling man said, retreating with a flourishing bow. “The Hermit will come with his side of Organ. It’ll be a three-way tug of war. Regardless of who wins, we still want the same thing. It’s stirring, but it hasn’t yet woken. We need Nell to ring the final bell.”
The two exited and we were left alone.
Quinn twitched a finger and I retrieved the briefcase. She was struggling with something, flexing her jaw and chewing the inside of her cheek.
When I handed the case to her, she examined the contents without opening it, then she nodded and turned to walk briskly back inside.
I followed her into one of Organ’s deepest vaults. Quinn stopped in front of a particular wall of reinforced glass. On the other side sat a satellite. Imperceptibly it shifted, metal plates settling down into place like a hermit crab retreating into its shell, hiding what lay beneath.
Quinn stared at it intently, her emotions flickering through me like flashes of lightning in a brooding storm cloud.
Finally, she moved on, into a nearby room with little in it besides a chair and a custom-made typewriter, with wires trailing away from it into the walls.
Something was already written on the page.
“I’VE NEVER TRULY UNDERSTOOD YOU, QUINN. I RAISED YOU, SHOWED YOU MY DREAM, GAVE YOU EVERYTHING YOU DESIRED. YET NOW, AT THE CUSP OF EVERYTHING YOU AND I WORKED FOR, YOU WAVER? LET GO, QUINN. ALLOW OUR DREAM TO COME TRUE.”
Quinn ground her cheek between her teeth and I tasted her blood through our connection, even if she didn’t notice. Morals did not concern me, but for Quinn it was different. She could do wrong, she could do right. A responsibility, as her tool, I had removed myself from. But I would not fail her even here.
I moved the fluid away from my mouth. “Quinn,” I rasped, barely a whisper. It had been the first time I’d spoken in years.
She stirred.
“You do not waver. You do not falter. You’ve already made your decision. I know it.”
Quinn’s emotions surged and I fed them with my own. I would affirm every part of her, no matter what.
“Your dream wasn’t your own,” Quinn declared loudly to the typewriter. “It was given to you by that thing. But that wasn’t the case for me. My dream is my own. I will not relinquish it for anything. Not even you.”
The typewriter clacked slowly, a weight behind every letter pressed.
“WAR, THEN. THERE CANNOT BE TWO ORGANS. NEITHER OF US WOULD ALLOW IT. ONE WILL RISE ABOVE THE CORPSE OF THE OTHER TO SEE THE NEW AGE.”
“I’ll be waiting for you,” Quinn said, a tinge of sadness in her heart.
There was no right or wrong choice here, only her choice. One that I would follow with every cell of my being. I willed the metal to move, flowing up my arm and hardening into a lethal point. It would bring me great pleasure to be the tool that made her will a reality.