Ex Lacrima Remnant

Track #10 – By my Side

Red. Everything was red. Blots. Patches of colors that once were human beings. Sprayed on the ground. Covered in red. Red on the walls. Red on the floor. Red on the ceiling. And that muzak. That horribly cheerful muzak echoing through the mall. Bright notes, happy tunes, entrails. Yes, those had to be entrails. Her fingers could feel the wetness, the slushy texture. Entrails. In her hands. Among the red, the red that caked her face, her eyes too. Eyes that could not see anymore. Eyes that could only recognize faint shapes. All those shapes… unmoving. Red. Just red. Red, entrails and muzak. Nothing else. No sound. No yell. No bellow. No cry. The retching, the urge to throw up. She couldn’t keep it in. She couldn’t stop it. Red. Entrails. Muzak. Vomit. Her nose assaulted by the stench, the stench of rot and decay surrounding her. And the perfume of a rose. Powerful. Fragrant. Almost dwarfing the smell of blood. She couldn’t see where. She couldn’t see who. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t. She. She was. She was trying. She was trying to understand. Her memories faint. Washed out. Who did that? Why was she there?

Why

so many

corpses?

Was

it

her fault?

Blood. Blood. Blood. Her blood. A hole in her chest. Blood dripping out, slowly, trickling like a dry river.

(Why)

was she

dying?

Was

it

her fault?

The sirens eating the muzak, voices, screams. The sound had returned. The rose. The steps. The blot. The shape. The shape. The shape. The shape. That eye. That eye.

That.

Eye.

That.

Eye.

Thateye.

Thateyethateyethateyethateyethat

AAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Kryzalid woke up. Sweat. Sweat all over her forehead. Sweat all over her skin. Her breathing wildly out of sync. Her eyes wide open, looking at a collection of blots that had to be the ceiling. Her arms, her legs, sprayed on a cramped sofa. Her braids spread on her chest, on her white t-shirt, almost reaching for her black shorts. She took a deep breath, wiped her tears. That dream. Again. Hitting like a truck, every other night. Never letting her go. She felt wetness on her cheeks. She was still crying. Still. Crying. Like a toddler. That wasn’t her. That wasn’t her current her. But Mimi, Mimi was still coping. Still trying to, at least. Curled in a pocket of her mind. The woman that could have been, had that incident not happened. Kryzalid stretched a little, lazily sat on the sofa, glanced around the dimly lit room. The holographic alarm clock was ticking, projecting its fourteen-sectors quadrant on the opposite wall. Fat chance she could read that without connecting to it, but she could hazard a guess that it was still early. The clock changed color every three and a half hours, going from red, to orange, to green, to blue and back to red. The fact that it was in the orange phase – that much she could appreciate – meant that it had to be somewhere between half past three and seven in the morning. A large split, but not large enough to make her question her earliness. Best case scenario, she slept eight hours straight. Worst case scenario, only about four. She glanced around the room one more time, trying to guess what the patches, blots and spots were. A two-people flat couldn’t be easily arranged for four, especially if three of them were women. So, she had taken the decision of sleeping on the sofa and leave her bed to the two gals that they rescued, while Dobrio was using his cot-slash-recharge-station alone. The LEDs and indicators of his charging mat were most likely the blinking lights she was looking at right now. She slumped on the sofa one more time, staring at the ceiling. Her shoulder was still hurting, despite Dobrio’s second emergency operation and all the lymph she had drunk before going to sleep. Sure, it was healing faster now – probably would have completely healed in five or six hours – but the process wasn’t painless at all. Prim got her good, with that spear of hers. That delicate, shrinking violet of a rhizome was now a war machine. Kryzalid didn’t know whether to feel proud or sad about it. She liked Prim’s innocence. For a while, she even fantasized about dating her. Yet, all she could do was watch her from afar. And, after she lost her sight, not even that. Blind. Renegade. Fugitive. Terrorist. Lymph junkie. Mass murderer. Any chance she had at making that old fantasy of her reality was now completely gone, no matter how her body reacted at the idea of Prim’s nude body. The idea. Because that was all she could have: a faint reconstruction, a fictional picture put together from memories she couldn’t let go of. Mimi’s memories, before she turned into Kryzalid. Mimi had so many more chances than her, but never used them. Until it was too late, and the chances were lost. Without even having spoken with Prim once, after that first encounter in the greenhouse.

“Lagash fuckin’ dammit.”

She didn’t have control on her words. They just poured out, automatically, whether she wanted it or not. Her left hand went for her neck, for her four connectors. No cameras to use them with, not in the flat. That sucked. She only had a glance at Lacrima and Robin from the sensors spread around the car. Lacrima was… intriguing, for the lack of a better term. Her lymph’s taste was delicious – drinking it had been a one-of-a-kind marvel for both Kryzalid and Dobrio, to the point that they were almost sad she didn’t have more wounds to lick. That had to be gross to witness, especially for Robin, but it was hard to keep their addiction demons at bay. Speaking of Robin, that woman was a complete mystery to her. She hadn’t seen her without her gas mask yet, only managed to recognize that green was indeed her leading color. Lacrima and Robin. The goal and the surprise free add-on. Go for one, get two instead – much like a limited discount offer at a random mini-market. Kryzalid rolled on the sofa, trying her best to avoid burdening her injured shoulder. Those thoughts distracted her enough to make her breathing slow down, her heartbeat return to normal, her eyes dry out. As the clock ticked, her plans for the day started to take shape, to wash out her nightmare. The taste of iron. The stench of decapitated corpses. The perfume of that rose. All of them accompanied her through her rebirth, after Dobrio found her barely hanging on, inside a body bag thrown from a bridge. How did she end up in a body bag, in the first place? She couldn’t remember. The last image, the last picture impressed on her faulty retinas was a shopping mall painted with blood and human remains. And something sweet flowing down her throat. Something she later recognized as lymph. The beginning of her addiction. All went back to that place, to that time, to that event she could neither remember nor focus on. Only scattered pictures and the sweetness of that lymph, never forgotten.

“Thanks for waking me up, Chris.”

Dobrio’s voice reached her from the corner of the room, tired, raspy. Kryzalid hoped that wasn’t the case, but, in her heart, knew that her scream couldn’t go unnoticed.

“Not that I wanted to.”

“I know. Usual nightmare, I bet?”

“That’s not even a bet, come on.”

“Always the same?”

“Yeah. Except, every time there are more corpses, the stench is stronger… and I remember something more. It’s… ugh, I just feel like puking.”

“Got it. Wanna talk a bit?”

Kryzalid yawned. The lack of light. The orange sector. Most likely, it was around four in the morning, as she feared. Too dark to be seven. Which meant that she was at least three hours of rest short.

“I’d rather try to sleep again.”

“As if that ever worked.”

“Come on, there’s always a first time.”

“Right, but what are the odds?”

He had a good point. In the time they lived together, she had never managed to fall back into the realm of dreams, once her memories woke her up. So, chit-chat it was. She turned towards Dobrio’s cot (or, at least, the place the voice came from), replied with a quiet whisper, to avoid waking up Robin and Lacrima too.

“Okay, you win. What do you wanna talk about?”

Dobrio replied in kind, lowering his voice further.

“Your nightmare?”

Kryzalid’s mouth emitted a buzz of sorts, something similar to the sound used in a PV prize show to mark wrong answers. That meant, without a doubt, ‘no dice’. So, Dobrio took note and thought immediately of another topic, one that wouldn’t end up on her black list.

“Got it. Then, what about the two sleeping beauties in the other room?”

“Oh, right. Our lucky catch of the day.”

Kryzalid fought against gravity to sit on the sofa, crossing her legs, resting her cheek on her left hand. Now that she thought about it, it was the right moment to ask her partner in crime about their appearance, demeanor, everything she couldn’t appreciate on her own. That perspective made her grin, a grin that could only mean mischief.

“What do they look like? All the details, please. I wanna know everything.”

“Everything everything?”

“Yuuuup!”

“Which one first?”

“Our new house plant.”

Kryzalid saw the lights from the charging station change their position, turn on and off at different intervals, all while a large gray blot emerged from it. Dobrio must have been sitting too, still connected to the humming machinery. His body was eighty, maybe ninety percent biological – the batteries only fueled some of his secondary implants. Still, having everything in working order was his best chance at being ready for when the Corps barged in. Aiming systems, additional calculation units, scanners, radars. All of them consumed an inordinate amount of energy to be operated, all of them were vital in case of unwanted visits. So, even if he didn’t technically need them, the advantage of keeping them well charged compensated the waste of electricity. Kryzalid stood silent, watching the twisted, colorless shape that she assumed to be his charging cable, before focusing on that red, shining blot that had to be his eye. She waited for him to answer her query, without hurry, until Dobrio cleared his throat (did he even have one?) and started talking again.

“Her name’s Lacrima. White skin. Straight white hair, slightly longer than yours when untied. Has one red iris. Her other eye is a red rose. Left arm replaced with a vine construct that can change shape and even create a pseudo-hand. Bark only on her spine, as far as I could see. Maybe under the sides of her breasts too, but I haven’t seen her fully naked. One meter sixty-three tall. Eight centimeters more with her platform shoes on. She was wearing black clothes decorated with feathers. Aside from the usual bits, she has an anomalous lymph accumulation point right under her left eye socket, from which it flows like tears, when her body produces too much of it. B-cup breast size, if you wanted to know that too.”

“Yeah, small tiddies like all rhizomes. Bless that idiot Zonta and his fetishes.”

“I thought that was your type too.”

“...I’ll pretend I haven’t heard that.”

“Right. So, Robin. She was wearing a tactical hood, something that on the surface looks like a religious garment – but it’s bulletproof and too thick to just be one. She wore a gas mask too for the whole trip – she took it off only when we reached our flat. One meter sixty-nine tall, almost seventy. Skin paler than Lacrima’s. Green irises. Green hair with a tuft that covers her right eye. Has a green gem encased in the middle of her forehead. Looks like she’s in her early twenties. Definitely not a rhizome.”

Kryzalid took mental notes of Dobrio’s words, started to assemble Robin’s picture in her brain, using the data he provided to her. Her mind was pretty good at putting together images of people, based on descriptions, a skill she had trained for several years to compensate her lack of sight.

“Any quirks of note?”

“Yes. Robin’s ears are wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“Their shape is somewhat normal, but they look like they were… cut. And not in a pleasant way.”

“Huh, the more you know.”

Kryzalid leaned on the sofa, massaged her chin. Dobrio’s summary made her brain gears clang and turn, sorting the information she just received. It wasn’t the full picture, but it was enough – especially combined with what she learned in her short time together with the two newcomers. For example, she got a good hunch on why Lacrima’s BM nickname was ‘Hummingbirch’, with a cartoon bird profile picture. During their car ride, she compared their taxi to an ostrich, described her fall from the building as – her words – ‘the only way a chicken could fly’ – and associated Kryzalid’s far-from-stellar eyesight to ‘that of a cute little kiwi’. And, when Kryzalid finally had a chance at sucking her lymph in a (con)sensual way, she kept comparing her to ‘a thirsty woodpecker’. That shtick got annoying in no time, to the point that Kryzalid considered knocking her out to drink her lymph in peace, but the benefit of dealing with that annoyance were far more than the cons. If anything, Dobrio and she had the first real sip at natural lymph since months. No way they’d say no to that bonanza because their new plant was a bird-focused-crackhead.

With her addiction under control and her sleep nowhere to be found, Kryzalid decided to keep the ball rolling and keep talking with her half-mechanized fellow junkie.

“Say, when do you think the Corps will zero on us?”

“We have a one week head start at most, more realistically two to three days – less if somebody snitches on us. The jammer worked without a hitch and we avoided most of the camera hotspots, but they’re going to find some residual traces and connect the dots, especially if they get access to the satellites.”

“Mobilizing the Panopticon for us? Wow, that’s a honor.”

“You’re a wanted terrorist with a body count in the five dozens. They won’t even need to put pressure on the parliament to get that approved. Not four days before the Turn of the Millennium.”

“So, even deep in Aralu’s underground we ain’t safe. That sucks.”

“We’re safer than outside, at least. Even if they know we are down here, there’s no way for them to check all abandoned buildings without spending a lot of time, resources and manpower. Otherwise, they would have already caught us, right?”

“You have a point.”

Kryzalid yawned again, lay on the sofa, still looking in the direction of Dobrio.

“I’ll miss our PV system. This was the first shelter I could really call home.”

“We lived a wonderful year here. No regrets.”

“Yeah… no regrets. And… Dobrio?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you for… being by my side. Without you, I would have…”

“Hush. You helped me more than enough. Spare the kind words for another time.”

She could hear him laying down again too, his body joints squeaking and twisting under his weight.

“If anything, you should prepare your lecture for tomorrow.”

“Lecture?”

“Do you think it’s easy to convince a civilian not to rat out a mass murderer to the Corps?”

“…you know why I did it.”

“Yes, I do. But they don’t.”

Another yawn. Kryzalid couldn’t keep her eyes open. Tiredness had taken hold of her body and wasn’t going to let her win.

“Ugh. I’ll think about it. G’night.”

“Good night, Mimi.”

As he looked at Kryzalid’s eyes closing, at her breath gently turning into a regular, sleeping rhythm, Dobrio realized that he lost his bet. There was a first time, after all. If his mouth would have allowed him to smile, he would have. But, since that wasn’t the case, he simply lay down too, activating his charging setup one more time. He would have needed all the energy he could muster to stand the combined chore of dealing with three flatmates.