Escapology (43 page)

He picks up the strand of connection he broke, and links it to his drive. It’s vile to touch even when no longer active, sending ice through every vein, every neurone. Li was all kinds of wrong, and her thoughts, her impulses infect this mass of suckered flesh all through, their corruption a stench he can’t ignore. Bracing himself, he reawakens it, puking again as the filth of it flows through him.

Awake, aware,
alive
once more, and barely under his control, the Kraken explodes from Shock’s eyes in soaring leaps of gold, sending Yang and the men around him running. Hungry, eager to destroy, it tries to break loose, go where it wants, to anything smaller, anything weaker, Puss and Shark included. Shock hauls it back, his mind creaking under the strain as he corrals to his control, driving it upward toward the Queens. As it rises, its tentacles fill the sky: huge fleshy gold appendages covered in suckers the size of craters. It’s a city hub of coiled and urgent flesh on the hunt.

Eager to hurt whatever it can, denied easy pickings, the Kraken launches at Josef’s Queen, the first, the strongest, flowing through the air to latch onto her body, tangle around her huge limbs. Her silence is terrifying, denotes a fierce will, a determination outstripping even the very size of her. She tries to hold on to the Heights, but the Kraken is too strong, and she topples. Anticipating impact, Shock can only stare, stunned, as she and the Kraken hit the ground together, two gargantua locked into warfare that affects only themselves, each other. It doesn’t seem possible.

The Kraken tears at her with relish, pulling one of her legs clean off. Then another. As they break loose, their golden threads untangle, dispersing into the air like mist. Snapping its beak forward, it gouges out one of her eyes, tears off a feeler. She’s keening now. Her voice shaking the air as her body could not shake the ground. Shock’s unable to think, to see. Everything is her pain, her agony, her outrage. It reaches out, distracts the other Queens from trying to crack his drive.

They rush to her side, grabbing the Kraken’s tentacles with their incisors. Obscuring even that great tentacled bulk with their vast bodies, they rip chunks from its thrashing limbs, its golden head. Shock’s never felt pain like it. Attaching it to him, he’s linked it to his neural system, and the agony prostrates him. He thinks he might have pissed himself.

And the Queens are winning, the Kraken dying, dissipating into mist. In a few seconds it’ll be gone for good, and if Shock doesn’t break the connection, let it go, it’ll take him with it. By the time he remembers, he’s too weak, can already feel himself fading away. Puss tries to help but she’s too weak herself, too hurt by the Queens.

Shock. I have them.

Volk’s voice barely registers. Shock’s staring at the remnants of the Kraken, watching as his last moments fade into fragments of mist and dissipate. Too broken to fight. Too lost to care. It’s Shark that saves him, saves Puss, powering in from nowhere to savage the fine thread between Shock and the Kraken, rending it apart as the final pieces of that creature dissolve. With nothing to distract them, and aware of Volk’s meddling now, the Queens turn on Shock as one, ploughing their minds into his.

Helpless in the wake of their attack on the Kraken, the harm it caused him, Shock has no means to resist. No will to hold against theirs. They hit like a hurricane, tearing his mind apart, tearing Shark’s connection from him as if it were nothing. As if it were meaningless. Shark’s swimming toward him, desperately trying to reach him when the connection goes. It stutters mid-air, flailing, and mandibles close around it, shattering it to motes of gold. Crying out, Shock reaches for Shark, for everything that’s gone with it, atomized into thin air. The grief is immeasurable. All-consuming.

He holds on to Puss for dear life, knowing she’s next and then he’ll be nothing, an empty slave, the Queens’ plaything, but it never happens. They’re gone. Their weight out of his mind, leaving it too light, light enough to float away, their bodies no longer devouring the skyline, leaving nothing but vast ’scrapers to dominate in their stead, crowding out his vision.

Shock hears the Queens screaming fury. Is it them? He can’t tell if the sound is real or imagined as, through Emblem, he watches Core sputter and go dark. Cease to exist. There’s still Slip, everywhere, as far as his eye can see, further, and the life outside of Slip, but at the centre… only darkness. It has swallowed them whole. Swallowed him.

Laying his head on the ground, Shock’s too grief-stricken to cry. The darkness within is all but absolute; the part that was once Shark now lies dead. Empty. He’s a fractal, core reflecting core reflecting emptiness into infinity. How will he bear it? He can’t. If Puss weren’t here, her tentacles laid across his back, her head rested on his, he’d die right now. Just let go. It would be so simple.

Shock!

Volk.
He can hardly speak, even via IM.

Are you okay?

Stupid question.

Shark
, he says, then his throat strangles. Paralyzes. He can’t say it. Can’t speak any more. What use are words? What use is he?

I’m so sorry
, she says. She means it. It doesn’t help.
Hold on, we’ll be there in a minute. We’re coming. Just hold on.

Nothing she says registers. Shock wants to lie on the ground forever. Be absorbed into it. Disappear. Atomize like Shark and join it wherever it’s gone. But the gold gleam of Puss’s head, so close to his, illuminates his lids; turns them into cathedral windows, flooding light and colour into echoing emptiness.

He stares at the red tracing of capillaries, all of them connected, and realizes he’s not the only one who’s lost someone. He’s not the only one hurting. Puss is broken too. Hurt by Li, by the Queens, by Shark’s loss. Hurt by his removal in grief. More vulnerable than ever, even though she’s partially back in Slip. Pushing himself up, Shock gets to his feet. His body is battered, his mind worse, but he can move. He can find them a place to go. He’s good at hiding. Or at least, he used to be.

Come on
, he says, and waits for her to slide up his leg to her favourite spot on his torso. It doesn’t feel like she’s clinging to him any more. It feels like they’re clinging to one another.

Curling an arm beneath her, around the sharp flinch of broken ribs, he limps off down a street that looks more like an ocean. Floating at last, but all wrong, like seaweed on the tide, directionless and heartbroken. He thinks of Sendai. Hallucinogenic oblivion. Birds singing in the trees. What was that dream he had of them falling silent one by one and dropping to the earth? That Shock, that dream of Sendai, has fallen silent at last. Dropped to the earth.

Feeling helpless, utterly hopeless, Shock looks down at Puss. She needs somewhere to go, and there’s nowhere for him to take her. There hasn’t been anywhere for the longest time, only the idea of somewhere. Ideas are ephemeral. Easily lost. And his was lost to him long before he realized it. All he’s left with is this feeling, a hollowing combination of humiliation and profound shame over time lost, life wasted and potential squandered. But, as always, there’s no way to articulate any of this to anyone. Not even to her. So he keeps on walking.

Puss tightens her tentacles on his chest, enough to grind his broken ribs together.

Wait
, she says.

What for?
he asks, still moving.

Our friends are coming for us. Not just Volk and Petrie. Amiga will come too.

The urgency in her voice, the plea, stops him in his tracks.

You want to wait?

I don’t think alone will work. You tried it for a long time, and it wasn’t good. I’d like to try something different.

This was not what he expected to hear. Everything’s changed so much. Before today he was Shock alone, hanging on by virtue of chemicals and delusions. Then he was Shock, Puss and Shark. Now just Shock and Puss, someone who is and is not him, with different ideas, different needs. Needs it would seem he has to give the same consideration he gives his own, regardless of the fact that he doesn’t know how to cope with her difference. The thought is terrifying as much as it is liberating.

I’m scared.

I’m not.

Then can we be you today?
Shock’s trying to be flippant but it comes out more seriously than he’d intended, unnerving him.

Puss slides a little further up his chest to look him directly in the eyes.

We’re me every day from now on,
she says.
We’re you and me. We’re us.

You’re not me.
He wants to take it back as soon as it pops out, but it’s true.

Because I’m female, right?
her tone is acidic, and filled with hurt.
Did you ever stop to consider that I’m not male? That
you
might therefore be alien to
me
?

Guilt keeps on coming today, and never feels any less awful. The thought hadn’t even occurred to try to see himself from her viewpoint. And it’s no excuse for him to say he only knew she had one this morning. Here he is, apparently wanting to protect her, and he hasn’t even paid her the common courtesy of trying to know her beyond the abstract concept of
Puss
, and all because she comes with a different personal pronoun. Talk about being an arsehole. He just won the prize.

Am I never going to stop feeling like an absolute shit around you?

Not if you continue to be one.

Sorry
. The word is inadequate, but he says it nonetheless.

Don’t apologize to me again, we’ve been there and it changed nothing.
Tell
me.

It’s a demand, not a request and, in the wake of guilt, takes him off-guard. He’s answering before he realizes the words are out, when it’s too late to take them back.

How can you be female? It’s like a betrayal. I feel like people will think I could have made a different choice, when I
couldn’t
have.

To his endless surprise, she doesn’t hate him. Instead he gets that tiny squeeze of reassurance.

I know, and you have to trust me when I say my choice does nothing to trivialize yours. I was created from you when you were barely formed. Parts of us overlap, and parts developed separately, yours IRL, mine in Slip. We
are
different. Now I have a question for you. Fairly important.

What?

You asked if we could be me today. You didn’t want to mean it but you did, because you’re scared of change. What scares you more, Shock? The difference between us, or going back to how you were?

Well that’s easy. Or rather, it’s not. It’s just that he’s been reduced to only one possible answer.

I can’t go back.

Then you need to stop holding me out. We can’t do this without each other. You aren’t strong enough, and neither am I. Not even Shark was that strong.

I know.

So stop it, stop holding yourself back from me. I promise the only difference will be that this gets easier to cope with.

Shock’s still not sure about that, but there was a question he had whilst walking away from the gold gathering in Josef’s eyes. How much of himself does he control? It would seem he has his answer: everything. Puss can’t force him to accept her, to begin to take the final emotional steps toward full integration. It’s up to him. He has absolute autonomy to heal or to hurt them both. His is the key turned in the lock.

And so he unlocks it.

* * *

So what happens in the end?

An ex-Haunt and his Puss sit on a seat by a fountain waiting for their friends, holding on tight to one another. The sea is everywhere, within and without, endless and wide open. And on the avenue crowds of shell-shocked people sit side by side on blood-soaked ground, staring upward.

Watching their avis dance.

Ren Warom lives in the West Midlands with her three children, innumerable cats, a very friendly corn snake, and far, far too many books. She haunts Twitter as
@RenWarom
, and can be found on her YouTube channel, talking about mental health issues and, of course, books.

My thanks go out to my agent, Jennifer Udden, without whom none of this would be possible. I’m also endlessly grateful to the team at Titan Books for championing my work, especially my patient and exacting editor, Cath Trechman.

I want to send out a huge ‘you rock’ to Colin Barnes, who beta read the heck out of this and gave great feedback as usual. And to Stephen Godden, sadly no longer with us. The best friend, finest writer, and most incisive beta reader a lady could wish for. Miss you, buddy. I’d also like to thank the rest of what was once the Writerlot crew for keeping me writing when I was about to give up, I count Writerlot’s four years as some of the most fun writing I’ve ever had. Finally I need to thank my children, whose mother invariably has her nose in a book, whether she’s reading or writing it. I’m sorry, kids, and we’re totally going to leave the house this weekend, I promise. I just have to finish this one last paragraph…