The sliding man struggled with a rat on his back, unable to get a grip on his little opponent. It was the same story everywhere: small animals, now dangerous, thought that they had moved up in the world’s scale of dominance.
Taking careful aim, Slate teleported onto the man’s back. It was an uneven perch, and they were careening along the building’s rubble at speed. Slate teleported them both to a nearby rooftop where the sliding continued until the man slammed into a wall.
Slate tumbled off from the man and looked at him. His clothes, once expensive, were in tatters, the grey fabric hanging in strips. Decorating the man’s clothes and his body was a mixture of fur, blood, and foul-smelling bodily fluids, the rat on his back having been killed by their joint collision with the wall. As for the rest of him, his skin looked as though he had contracted a form of leprosy. Despite this, he seemed otherwise uninjured.
Slate saw him begin to move again without groaning or screaming, the normal signs of human injury. Somehow, against all reason, the man was alright courtesy of a Keystone ability.
Hearing other cries, Slate teleported to an adjacent rooftop and then another, zeroing in on the source of the noise.
Agony
Deklan heard a rustling sound nearby. He tried to scan the area but was foiled by the overturned car behind which he’d taken shelter. Because it was a large vehicle, he couldn’t see what was on the other side. He cautiously circled around it, hoping that whatever he found wouldn’t be threatening.
He was surprised by a rough and unfriendly voice that came from behind him. “You’re a long way from home, lad.”
Deklan whirled and saw a tall man, whipcord thin, who looked menacing. With narrowed eyes and angry lips, his face was a study in malice. Dusty and dirty clothing indicated that the man had experienced a morning as hectic as Deklan’s own.
Deklan held up his hands in front of him. “I’m just passing through. I don’t want any trouble.”
“I don’t care what you want. This conversation is about what I want. You understand me, boy?”
Deklan backed away, trying to put space between himself and the stranger, his hands still a barrier between them. “Sure,” he replied.
“Your money and your Uplink. Now.”
“I don’t think that I can give you that.”
He didn’t have time to react. Something that glowed lashed from the man’s hand and into his left thigh, tearing through it and hitting the ground behind him. Screaming in agony at the pain, Deklan collapsed to the ground, his eyes facing the sky.
He could hear footsteps approaching him. Not wanting to be hit again, Deklan rolled onto his stomach and pulled himself along the ground to escape.
A rough hand grabbed his shoulder and flipped him onto his back. Pain exploded in his skull as his head hit the pavement, and his eyes closed of their own accord.
“You’d have done better just to say yes,” said Deklan’s attacker, “but I’m not finished yet.”
Deklan opened his eyes in time to see the second bolt leave the man’s hand and tear into his abdomen. As Deklan gasped at the searing pain, his body jerked involuntarily and was rewarded with fresh waves of agony, his wound grating against the glowing weapon that had been thrust through him. A long minute passed with Deklan staring into his tormentor’s eyes as he tried to bring his frantic breathing under control. He’d never forget those eyes.
“Do you still want to keep that Uplink?” asked the man. Without waiting for an answer, he raised his right hand and unleashed another bolt.
A fresh spear of pain lanced through Deklan’s wrist. It burned with all the intensity of Deklan’s first two wounds.
“Don’t worry. You’ll bleed out soon.” The man’s tone and crooked grin made it clear that he enjoyed the violence.
Both lines of light vanished from the man’s hands and from Deklan’s body. Some of the agony died away, but the greater portion remained. Deklan could move again but felt too weak to fight the heaviness of his eyelids.
Surprises
Slate teleported from rooftop to rooftop. Each stop was measured in seconds, just long enough for Slate to reorient and choose a new target. Someone nearby was in a lot of pain. The screams grew more intense, then faded.
Standing on the corner of a roof that was filled with an astonishing assortment of slaughtered animals, among them a giant rat, Slate saw Chain climbing up the side of a building in his unique fashion. Slate knew what was waiting to be found, a maimed victim on the verge of death. Chain liked others’ suffering and had left many in that state over the last few days.
Surveying the street that Chain had left, Slate saw a man lying in a spreading pool of his own blood. Teleporting next to him, Slate examined the man’s injuries. He had three huge wounds—one in his left leg, another in his abdomen, and the last through his wrist.
The leg wound was bad enough on its own. The bright red blood geysering upward indicated a severed artery. The abdominal wound was even worse, oozing both black and red onto the ground beneath him. Slate had seen gut wounds like that before. They caused excruciating agony and were death sentences.
With one arm cradling him, Slate teleported the man to another rooftop to reduce their vulnerability and pulled him under cover. Finding a kit of emergency medical supplies in a pocket, Slate knelt next to him, careless of the blood pooling around the victim.
The first thing to do was to stop the hemorrhaging. Seeing some bandages strips that came on a white roll and peeled off like tape, Slate pushed them into the man’s abdominal cavity in the hope of staunching the blood there. The bandages dissolved on contact and slowed the flow. The man moaned but didn’t struggle, his eyes glazed over and unfocused.
Another layer was needed. You were supposed to keep applying the strips until they stopped dissolving. Slate inserted another wad of the bandages, and the blood slowed further. With a third application the coverings turned red but kept their form and sealed over the main source of the flow.
The wound in the man’s thigh, less obstinate than that in his belly, required only two layers of bandages before the bleeding stopped. The final wound was a hole bored straight through the man’s wrist, but though bad it only trickled, which was not a good sign. One strip of the bandages staunched the flow there.
The victim was waxen and unresponsive, but there wasn’t much else that Slate could do. A blood transfusion and stitches were needed, but stitches ran the risk of breaking the seal made by the bandages. The chemical seal was fragile at first and took time to harden into a flexible and durable shell. And a blood transfusion wasn’t an option if you didn’t have blood on hand. Teleporting to a hospital wasn’t possible either because the jerking it involved would in all likelihood reopen the abdominal wound.
It would be at least ten minutes before the man could be moved without destabilizing him. That was ten minutes he probably didn’t have. Slate strongly doubted that the man could be saved.
With lips near the man’s ear, Slate asked, “Can you hear me?” There was no response. All that was left to do was to stand by him and wait for him to die.
The victim’s labored breathing grew weaker and weaker. Cries became small moans; then there was silence. Slate reached down and closed the man’s eyelids.
Recovery
Deklan’s eyes snapped back open. His unbearable pain had diminished like a tide receding at a beach. In a few more moments it was gone completely. Even his throat was no longer raw from screaming. Deklan’s fingers danced over the healed wounds, pressing and prodding the unbroken flesh. A relieved smile ghosted over his face. He’d had no confidence that he could survive.
Looking up and craning his head back, he jolted back when he saw an eyeless face over a long black leather trench coat observing him. Despite the figure’s lack of any distinguishing features, its overall body language still conspired to make the observer look quizzical and confused.
“Who are you?” Deklan asked.
A hidden mouth opened on the blank face, and its response was deep and uninflected. “Slate.” The head pivoted left and right, looking at Deklan from different angles. “If it makes you feel better, most people react the same way to my appearance.”
Reassured by the polite answer, Deklan bowed his head forward and raised himself on one hand. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be rude. You just surprised me. I saw you on the news this morning. You’re becoming quite famous, you know.” He then levered himself into a sitting position and surveyed the scene. They were on a rooftop, and the area around him was a still wet puddle of blood.
He reached down to his abdomen and felt the ragged hole in his clothes. The skin underneath the fabric was unblemished. It looked newly formed, not so much as a single hair appearing under the caked gore. He reached around to his back and detected another hole in his clothes there.
Taking in the red crust on his hands, Deklan said to Slate, “We’re not on the road anymore. Did you move me?”
“Yes, and I bandaged you.”
This man was the first stranger to help him in Boa Vista. Deklan made sure that his voice conveyed real appreciation. “Thanks so much. I’m Deklan, by the way. How far did we go, and how long was I out?” Deklan looked around, trying not to stare at Slate’s face, or lack thereof, yet still fascinated by it.
Slate’s head turned to the left, then back to Deklan. His voice was matter-of-fact. “I teleported us to a nearby roof, and you’ve been out for about half an hour.”
“Teleported?” Hearing that someone could teleport was one thing, seeing it on the news another, but finding out that he had been teleported was hard to process. “I hadn’t realized that you could teleport other people too,” he said. “That’s quite an ability.” Deklan reached down to touch his stomach again. Not even a trace of a scar remained. He kept feeling for one, remembering the overwhelming pain.
He then looked at his forearm. The scabs from where Mittens had clawed him remained. His fingertips were also bloody where he’d scraped them while looking for Susan. Uncanny, especially since his left wrist was uninjured from Chain’s attack. He didn’t understand his Keystone ability, but it was nice to know that it was still working. “Half an hour?” he asked Slate. “By any chance did a man with wings show up?”
Slate merely shrugged. “I’m not sure. I was busy with bandaging your wounds.”
Something about Slate’s voice registered vaguely in the back of Deklan’s mind, but he dismissed the thought and hid his disappointment. “That’s okay. He was just going to give me a ride to catch up to my parents and get to the Elevator.”
“The Elevator?” Slate’s voice was nuanced, implying questions that extended beyond the two words.
Deklan owed him an answer for all of his help, so he explained his thoughts on The Sweep. “I don’t think things are going to get better down here. I had assumed that the animals were going to be a threat, but it seems that man is still the most dangerous predator on the planet.”
Slate nodded in agreement with his points. “So why the Elevator?”
“I’m trying to get up to the Terra Rings. I convinced someone else that it was the smartest thing to do. She’s dead now, and my parents are alone.” Deklan felt the weight of his mistakes bear down on him. After the attacks by Chain and the shadow, he wondered whether the Rings were going to be any safer or whether he was on a fool’s errand.
“Stop that!” Slate sounded disgusted.
“What?” he asked.
When Slate’s head turned toward him, Deklan was forced to match gazes with an eyeless stare. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You tried; you failed; you continue. Feeling sorry won’t bring your friend back. In fact, it doesn’t do anything useful. Just be happy that somehow you came back to life.” The words were like those of a drill sergeant relaying orders to a solider.
Slate then pointed to the sites of Deklan’s various injuries. “I’ve seen many people as injured as you were, most of them in the past few days. None of them survived, yet you don’t even look surprised.”
“Yeah,” replied Deklan lamely. “I guess not.”
“Then why do you still have those cuts on your forearm?” The question was softer than Slate’s previous comments.
Deklan wondered the same thing. “Fickle gifts?” he said. He reached out to give Slate a handshake. “Thank you for watching over me. I have no way to repay you. Is there any favor I can do for you in return?”
Slate shook his head. “Just remember the offer.”
The man was preparing to leave, but Deklan had another question. “Why aren’t you trying to get off planet?”
“I’m trying to help people here,” Slate responded. “Besides, you said it yourself: man is still the most dangerous predator.”
“True enough, but the animals here aren’t making life any safer.”
Slate’s voice was low and held a touch of irritation, conveying impatience to move on. “No, but I don’t stay in one place long enough for that to be a problem.”
Deklan had another important question, which he asked without much hope of an affirmative reply. “Will you help me get to the Elevator?”
Deklan could almost see the gears turning in Slate’s head. “Okay, but we may need to take a detour to rescue someone else.”
“How often does that happen?”
Slate’s blank face was impossible to read. “Too often.”
It didn’t sound to Deklan as though he was going to have company for long. “Where did you find me?” he asked.
Slate pointed to the square below them.
Seeing the pool of blood that marked where he had lain, Deklan mused quietly to himself, “How is it that I am still alive?”
“Good question,” said Slate.
The two figures stood in silence for a moment before Slate asked, “Are you ready to go?”
Deklan held up a hand again. “Almost,” he answered, “but I have just one more question.”
“Yes?” said Slate, drawing out the monosyllable.
“Do you have an Uplink I can borrow so that I can tell people I’m alive?”
“Uplinks can be tracked, not a good idea for a vigilante.”
Deklan sighed, the answer not being what he’d wanted to hear. “I guess it was too much to hope for. Let’s go.”