Chapter 6: Self-Defense

He’d tried his thigh, his sleeve, the inside of the coat where nobody would see it. The red was still on his palm, brown at the edges now, dry.

Two things came off it, and neither one was worth anything to him. The man bled like a man, and he was bleeding badly. And anything Ash said out loud went down the corridor and into the man’s ear, so he stood in the middle of the floor with all of it in his hand and did nothing with it.

He could have gone after him. He knew which end of the corridor the man had taken, and he had two legs and a knife, and he didn’t go.

The monitoring room door had never latched. He turned around and pushed it open.

The floor was full.

Hospital staff, all of them, in what they’d come in to work wearing. Scrubs. A maintenance jacket. A woman with her badge still clipped to her collar. No two of them down the same way.

He put two fingers under the first jaw he came to. Warm. He went down the row. Warm, every one of them, and slow, and what beat under his fingers was the pulse of somebody asleep.

Not dead. Not awake.

Either the man had done it on his way down to the basement. Or the man he’d met upstairs was wearing somebody else’s name tonight — the card, the coat, the title, all of it — and had stood in front of him talking about a first meeting that had never been a first meeting.

He couldn’t ask about it. Everything he said went into the man’s ear. He found the room’s second door, left it shut, and let both answers stay where they were.

Something buzzed against his hip.

He got it out of the coat pocket. A phone — no case, one scratch across the screen, UNKNOWN NUMBER up in white. He held it a second and wondered whether it had been left for him on purpose, then answered it and said nothing.

“Mr. Whitlock?” A woman, pressed flat and close to the phone. Behind her was the sound of a room with people in it: cloth, somebody breathing wrong, a hand over somebody’s mouth. “Mr. Whitlock, is that you? We’re still in the building. Something came through here. We’re on two — we’re in the exam room, the door’s shut and it’s holding, but please—“

The voice fell off into nothing, and what was left was breathing, several people’s worth, all of it tight.

“Okay,” he said, barely above his breath. “Stay put. Don’t open that door for anything.”

“He’s coming,” the woman said. Not to him anymore. The phone went muffled against something, a shoulder or a palm. “He heard us. He’s coming.” And behind her the room came up again, small crying, people telling each other out loud that it was going to be all right.

He took the phone away from his ear and looked at it, still warm, then ended the call.

The coat had two outside pockets and one inside. He went through them the way you go through somebody else’s things when you’ve been told not to lose them. Cigarettes in the left. The phone had been in the left. On the outside of the man’s left thigh was a sheath, and the knife had come out of it into the left hand with no reach in it that Ash could find, inside a second. Left-handed, then. He didn’t know what he was going to do with that. He kept it anyway.

The flat thing was about the size of a pencil case, and it was one: gray, two hinges, a small screen set into the lid, one corner worn smooth where a thumb rode it. He opened it.

Nothing inside but two rows of slots, like an ice tray. Eight of them, each one cut to hold something round.

Stamped small on the bottom: CORE ANALYZER.

Up on the wall, one of the monitors was still running. One camera, that was all, black and white, and it was pointed at the third-floor elevator lobby. The man was in the frame.

He came in from the right at a walk that was already a run. Then he did three things, and Ash had to play each of them back to see them. He broke a bottle on the tile and the spill spread out wide and lay still and shining. He went up the pipes beside the elevator hand over hand and lay down along them under the ceiling. Then he put his elbow through the corridor light.

The picture stayed up and the picture went black.

No eyes. The alcohol had taken the smell. What was left to hunt with was sound, and the sound of a man overhead, and the elevator.

Ash got the method. All of it, in order, on one screen. What he didn’t get was the other thing. He’d been left on this floor — the one room up here with a door on it, the floor where the people were still alive. He couldn’t ask about that either.

Behind him, out in the corridor, something moved that wasn’t a person.

He went to the doorway. The thing on the floor had both hands under it now and had come up onto its knuckles. The pipe through it had a shallow bow in it that hadn’t been there ten minutes ago, and the blood was running down the steel in a sheet instead of a line. It was working itself off the pipe the way you pull a stake out of wet ground, and it was going to get there.

He took out the phone and dialed, and watched the thing while the line rang.

One ring.

“What.”

“If a person kills one of these things,” he said, “is that self-defense?”

“Yes.” A woman. There was nothing in the word at all; it landed once and was done. “Where did you get this phone?”

She didn’t say it any louder the second time. She didn’t have to.

And in his left ear, out of the dark at the other end of the building, the man said, “Yes.”

Ash didn’t answer her. He ended the call and put the phone in the coat.

He came off the door frame and put his weight down on the thing’s back.

It was up on its hands and knees and still rising, the pipe still through it, no hand free to do anything about him. He put the knife in between the shoulder blade and the spine and leaned his whole weight onto it, and it went in to the handle. Blood came back up the blade and over his fist and up across his jaw, and the bandage over his left eye went warm and wet.

Nobody up here was awake to see it. He was nineteen years old and his hands already knew where the knife went.

He worked the blade along the belly, slow, feeling under the hide for something the flesh hadn’t made, and found it set in under the skin about a hand’s width up from the hip. He put the knife aside and used two fingers and pulled it out.

Round, and about the size of a grape, and hard. Pale blue going amber at the center, like something that had been in the ground. A goat’s skull was cut into the surface of it, small and neat, and a light moved in there, turning over on itself.

He wiped it on his sleeve and opened the case and pushed it down into one of the eight slots.

The case did the rest. It hummed, ran a scan across the slot, and a circle spun on the little screen and then a page came up, and a voice came out of the speaker and read the page to him, flat, unhurried, one line at a time.

NAME: MORPH CORE — GOAT’S HORN
SOURCE: GOAT-HEADED HOST
CLASS: COMMON
RATING: BLUE, TIER ONE (PALE)
FUNCTION: STRENGTH AND AGILITY, ENHANCED
LIMIT: 10 MINUTES, CUMULATIVE USE
SUMMARY: NO PAIN, NO GAIN!
RESONANCE: UNKNOWN

“Morph core,” he said, out loud, to the room. He turned the two words over. He didn’t know what they meant.

The ten minutes he understood. So did the rest of it. The thing sat in the animal like a battery in a flashlight, and the running was what the animal did with it. Take it out and the animal was a body on a floor.

The breathing in his ear changed. Deeper, and with something working under it, and then a sound that took him a second to place, because it came out pressed between his teeth.

“You okay?” he said into the mic.

Two taps came back, small, right up against it. He’d heard the same two taps on a wall earlier, going away down the corridor, when he hadn’t known what they were. He knew now.

He looked at the case. He picked the core back out of the slot.

Round, and the size of it sat in the palm of his hand, and he’d known that the second the page came up, before he’d let himself know it. The man had said it out loud in a corridor: there are people walking around with pieces missing who can use one. The market’s there.

He put his thumb under the edge of the bandage and pulled. Most of it came away clean. The part that had dried into the socket came away with it, and the socket opened up, and the cold in it had nothing to do with the building.

He lined the core up and pushed.

It went in and it didn’t stop at the surface. Something inside it started to move — a light down the middle of it, the color of a vein, fine threads of it turning and going where they wanted, and they wanted his face. He felt them land. Then they were in with everything inside his head at once, the wet of the socket, the nerves sitting behind the bone, the whole cold hollow of it, and they took hold the way a root takes hold, and there was no space between him and it anymore.

The pain came a half second behind all of that. Fine, everywhere, and fine meant deep.

He got two fingers in around the edge of the core and pulled. It held. He pulled harder, and it pulled the socket with it, and the socket was attached to his face, and the more he went at it the tighter it wound in, until his eyes were streaming and it was past getting out.

“Fuck,” he said, out loud, and the word went into the man’s ear.

The channel had been quiet since the grunt. It wasn’t quiet now.

“What’s wrong.” Not a question, the way he said it. Then: “Talk to me.”

It wasn’t one thing. It was a whole body thing, arriving all at once and then getting worse — a cancer with a clock on it, cells that weren’t his multiplying fast enough to feel, shoving at bone and through muscle and up the inside of his skull.

He got his hand flat on the floor and got the knife and didn’t answer.

He got up along the wall. He put his shoulder into it and moved, and the corridor ran out of light about twenty feet ahead of him, and he went into that.

He went down on his knees twice and got up twice. The third time he stayed down longer, and the knife was in his fist and he couldn’t have said what he was holding it against, and he pushed off the wall and kept moving.

Small curved horns were coming up through his hair, black and wet and curling, and they didn’t stop.