Episode 9 - A Dark, Deep Place. And the Hollow Beyond.

  Chapter 88 - Operation: Cards on the Table

  The sound of rain on the roof of the trailer is a constant tattoo.

  It’s not the torrential rainfall we sometimes get out here, which I’m told is unique to the transition from spring into summer. Carol explained it to me with diagrams and maps. The land warms faster than the ocean as the weather turns hot, drawing in the moisture off the ocean.

  No, it is not that sort of rain. Rather, it is a gentle patter that provides a subtle white noise. It disappears into the back of your mind, like a quiet murmur. I've grown to love the sounds of rain and its variety, at any other time I might find it calming. Instead, I listen to the rain as I stare at the floor across the cabin from my curtained bed. Assembled there is a nest of sheets, and a duffel bag that seems like it will be later serving as a pillow. Pell stares back at me, all eight legs spread protectively across the bed. Her pedipalps bob, hairy tarsi rubbing together in a manner I have always considered equivalent to her laughing at me.

  For a giant spider, I think she’s fairly judgmental.

  I stumble as the trailer rolls over something outside, Pooka walking on his own through the dark as the rain drizzles around him. His grumbles are forgotten for an uneasy guard. The holobionts seem rare in the wide open spaces between ruins; there are no scraps of humanity to attract them. But we have run into them occasionally. In the dry of the day we could just warn the crew away from them and chart a different course, but in rain like this they might be active.

  “You gonna eat?”

  I turn and look at Rhett over my shoulder. He’s hunched over the unfolded table, crammed against the wall of the trailer with a tablet in front of him and the maps of our route up. Between his hands, our respirators, as he changes out the filters. His curls curtain his face, glowing with the faint blue of the illuminated maps. He’s kept himself busy over the first day between our conversations, taking care of many of the small domestic tasks of keeping the trailer moving that I never have to do as Pooka and I roam - watching the maps, organizing food, keeping our meagre belongings arranged and clear of the small living space between us. It’s an odd change, but not unexpected when I think about it. He was always working, even at Aquila, it’s just his jobs there were different.

  “Uh… I’m not hungry.”

  He looks up, tucking a curl behind an ear. “You should eat.”

  I glance again at the beds, lifting one arm to grab a beam across the roof to balance with.

  Rhett’s eyes lift, and he follows my gaze. Then he straightens and returns his attention to his hands. He clears his throat and pushes the unwrapped meal cake he was picking at across the table. “Sit. Eat. We can brief on the plan for tomorrow.”

  I sigh and sit across from him. Tentatively, I draw the meal cake towards myself. They are bland, starchy things - both incredibly dry and oily at the same time. They’re little more than a packed protein and fat blend fortified with nutrients and minerals. More human fuel source than food. I draw a pocketknife from the slim pocket on my hip and rub the blade on the material of my leggings to clean it.

  “We’ll be coming to the tablelands from the top, here,” says Rhett, ignoring my disinterest and pushing the tablet between us for me to look. “The elevated land is split by rivers that diverge in a delta towards the sea, so we’ll have to descend to where the Navigators marked. We'll stay up here for the night and wait for the rain to pass. I don’t want to be descending when we might get trapped in a bend in the dark.”

  “Pooka can handle anything out there,” I mutter.

  “While also pulling our trailer? I am unarmed. Pell is so useless out here I might as well not have her. We’re incapable of helping. So, no, I don’t think so.”

  I glare at him while I pick apart the meal cake with my knife. “You’re not the boss of me out here.”

  He leans on his wrist, watching me with one eye between his curls. “Really?”

  I sigh. “Sorry.”

  “The Captain commanded me to keep you alive. I’d rather not risk her orders by having the two of you almost kill yourselves fighting senselessly. We’ll keep a low profile and get in and out. No different from any other job. Look,” he redirects, turning back to the map. “Here is what I’m thinking. Pooka will need to follow this ridge in the night…”

  I pop a mouthful of cake into my mouth as I watch his hands, half paying attention. His fingers are curled except for his index finger and thumb as he lazily scrolls and zooms to illustrate the route. The back of his hand is angled, pale scars dotting his knuckles. They are not like my scars; blotchy, ugly things. They are all thin, maybe from splitting his knuckles open in the past.

  “Why was this platform never sealed in a dome?” I ask as Rhett draws lines on the contour map, ignoring whatever he was explaining.

  “Well, that’s obvious,” grunts Rhett.

  “The tablelands?”

  “Yeah, I assume the terrain is too rough here to have ever been populated. I don’t know what technology pre-scarcity humans had, but apparently it was not enough to overcome or make it worth it when they had other more civilized locations.”

  “Have we ever built a new platform?” I wonder, chewing on another mouthful of bland food. It’s almost not even worth eating.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  He rocks back and actually pauses as he gives the matter some thought. “Hmm. I don’t know.”

  “How much have you worked out?” I ask.

  He chews on that question, eyes narrowing. “About what?”

  We were talking so easily earlier, but now we are back to circling. I don’t know what to give up, and I don’t know what he’s already perceived.

  He’s not an idiot. And he's just as cagey about revealing his hand as I am. I knew he was always tense at Aquila, but it’s truly become clear to me how high his walls were there. He’d wrapped himself in every piece of armor he could find, arming himself to never be exposed. I don’t know how far we can test pushing each other’s boundaries, but each step we take makes it easier to try the next.

  So I ask the question in my mind. “About cryptids? About how this works?”

  “Did my dad say something?”

  “No.”

  “Did Captain Rattakul?”

  “I’m asking. No one put me up to this.”

  This is not wise.

  Nothing I ever do is. I’m sick of it. I’m not second guessing myself. I’m making my own decisions.

  “I think you should try to blood bond,” I declare.

  Rhett blinks at me, his mouth slowly opening as he blankly processes my words in growing shock. “I… what?”

  My thoughts spill, the floodgates opening now I’ve crossed this line. “Blood bonding is something conduits do, according to Rattakul, which stabilizes and strengthens their powers.”

  “I didn’t manifest a cryptid.”

  “No. And you’re not a conduit. But you’re also not like everyone else-”

  “How do you know I’m not a conduit?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Look, back in Catakalan, when you breathed in the Erratic - you didn’t go insane, right? It made you sick, but you didn’t completely lose yourself in the communion.”

  He shudders suddenly at the memory, and a wave of realization washes over me as I watch him. It’s not just the symbionts that make non-conduits insane when their bonds open… It was the hollow.

  I have felt the hollow before. The day I manifested, and I touched the manifestation platform, the hollow cried to me for the first time, and up and out of its depths Pooka came to me. I remember the vastness now, but it was so brief. I never felt at risk that I would be lost in it. When Pooka was the only one using his powers, it passed through him leaving me untouched. He is a being of that place; he does not feel its pull like we do - or if he does, it’s just his natural place to be and he is unaffected.

  But the more and more I have channeled his powers through myself, becoming a conduit, the more the hollow has begun to touch me. To call back when it is summoned as symbionts work their magic. It threatens to wash me away, to dissolve me into its depths. My conduit nature must give me some resistance to it, or maybe an immunity built through exposure. I constantly feel the bond and sense the symbionts; I might have some sort of tolerance built that would overwhelm someone who didn’t.

  But, if I finally succumbed, would I too be an empty and wild thing like those crazed men were in a different kind of white fog at that Catakalan warehouse? Would I be a feral beast capable of Pooka’s devastating control of matter and energy? Is that why the blood bond is so important for conduits? That Rattakul insisted upon this and Moreau has turned a surprisingly lenient eye to let me travel to do this.

  Everyone else… they are blind and deaf and dumb to symbionts, except their own. And they do not have a bond strong enough to hear or channel their symbionts' magic like I can Pooka’s. They are protected from the hollow as part of the design. It is a feature of the modified protocols for non-conduits - it keeps them safe from the hollow.

  Did conduits once know this? Were there conduits who helped create these protocols at the time of the betrayal in Pooka’s memories? His previous host certainly did not participate in such experimentation.

  “You were connected with Adrian, just like you are Pell. You looked through a thousand eyes and listened with a thousand ears. Your body was suddenly many, way more than it has ever been. And there was a dark place, open all around you, that came right to your edges and threatened to sweep you away unless you stayed and were human despite it. Right? I’m right, aren’t I?”

  His retreat as I talk is palpable, drawing away from his work with the respirators and the glowing tablet between us. He can’t escape me. I have to press this. He’s felt the hollow now. It might get worse, as it has been for me. Or it might be an opportunity for Pell and him? They obviously care for each other. What if I could do for him what I did for Adrian and give him a better connection to her?

  I make bad decisions. I make them all the fucking time. But this feels like the right one to make. The world runs on secrets. Rattakul and Moreau keeping theirs no different from Adrian and Regina and every other company out there. I’m sick of it. I’m trying to remove my own masks, so I will tear down the rest around me too. I want to try something new.

  Whatever conduits in the past did, whatever their reasons… it led to things the way they are today. Maybe whatever happened was so bad it would have made no difference, but maybe there was some other way - some other outcome than this dead world we live in and the corporations that hold humanities survival together and expect us to be grateful for it. So fuck them. I’m going to do things my own way. It feels fucked that Regina was the first person to ever tell me to focus on my targets, but she was right. I need to abandon survival if I'm ever going to learn to hunt with clarity.

  “It’s called the hollow. That feeling that comes for you and threatens to steal your mind away. Conduits apparently blood bond to stop it. But it has another benefit. The more blood given to the hollow the deeper the bond. I’ve given blood more than once, that’s partly why I am the way I am, I think. You’ve said it yourself that all the misformed bonds you would smuggle are about blood. Even Patrick, with no symbiont - because his blood is his twin's blood! It’s always about blood. And I don’t know what would happen if a normal person did it, but you’re not like them. You have something conduit in you even if it’s not what I am… you survived the hollow, you can hear Pell. You should do it too!”

  In my flurry of thought, I’ve bent over the table at him, hands clasped on either side while my voice and confidence climbs in volume. I take a breath when I stop, watching him as he frowns and pulls back against the wall, but his eyes are darting as he thinks.

  I wish I knew the calculations he was doing. I barely know the man I catch glimpses of underneath. Does he see a way to step out of his parent’s shadows? Does he have a genuine curiosity to better understand Pell? Does he covet my powers and see a chance for strengthening his own? Does he plan his own objectives altogether? I glance at his bed on the floor, taken without even speaking to me about it, and Pell stands at the edge of the sheets, still and brittle and delicate as ever.