_  Hiiro

  I woke up in a grey ferrocrete room with no windows, doors or furnishings of any kind. The fact that I woke up at all was surprising, though I couldn't place why that was or why everything had a curious haze to it. I strained to recall anything beyond the vagaries of who I was, and failed utterly. I couldn't remember how I'd gotten here or what this place was or why it felt like my head was about to burst. All I knew was that I was in pain and I was warm.

  "I would have answers from you." Treu stated, suddenly standing over me.

  Had Treu always been that massive? He seemed to fill the room that'd been completely empty just seconds prior. How did he get in here? There weren't any doors. And for that matter, how could I see him at all? There were no lights yet the sealed ferrocrete chamber I was trapped in was illuminated as if there were. What was going on? Why couldn't I understand what was happening?

  "STOP thinking." Treu hissed the command and I was powerless to resist, my mind blanking instantly. "Your trifling concerns are irrelevant. You need only know that you can give me what I want, or I can take it."

  "What do you want?" I asked. My words had a warbled, echoing quality as if I was yelling into a chasm kilometers underwater.

  "What is that creature, B???im????, to you?"

  Treu cursed her name around bile that poured from his lips. He rocked back a half step, tears of black blood streaming down his face and his complexion gaining a horrific, cadaverous mottled-green hue. The room itself seemed to recoil at the mention of her; the walls groaning under sudden strain, finger-wide cracks appearing in the ceiling and each of the square room's five corners stretched out into the distance.

  Then I blinked, and everything was as it had been before, hazy and unfocused. My memories came flooding back to me in that blink, like a book thrown open to a favored passage. I could remember nothing in detail, except for her.

  The ethereal way she walked without seeming to lift her feet. Her commanding aura that was indescribably reassuring and incalculably intimidating. The subtle mannerisms she was slowly learning from everyone around her and those entirely alien ones she must have brought from wherever it was she came from. Her reservation, wit, caution, curiosity, grace, tolerance, passion, intellect and every other trait I'd gleaned from our days of easy companionship all flooded to the forefront of my mind.

  I remembered Bim, but the question hadn't been so mundane. Treu scattered the observations, ripping every subjective impression from the unaltered facts below. He parsed days of my life into neat bullet-point lists where Bim's spawning humanity had faltered. She never slept or ate, and she only drew breath when speaking. Sometimes, underneath the alluring gold of her knowing eyes, there were flashes of an insatiable hunger ready to feed on the minds and souls of everyone around her. There was pain too, something I'd never seen in her myself but Treu highlighted dozens, scores, hundreds of instances where Bim was undoubtedly suffering in silent isolation.

  Treu's lightspeed review of my memories found my walk in the gardens with Bim and the terrible, ruthless weight of his primary attention settled there— dozens of other mental probes scouring elsewhere in my mind simultaneously. I could feel myself being pulled apart layer by layer as he replayed our first date, over and over again. I was a witness outside of myself, rewatching the same scene play out while Treu manipulated the controls.

  "I keep forgetting that you aren't really human." I heard myself say. "What's it like, being a devil?"

  "What is it like to be a human?" Bim countered, a note of passion creeping into her otherwise stately voice. It was one of the only times I'd ever heard her so moved by a topic I'd raised. "These are both difficult questions, worthy of a lifetime of study."

  Treu spotted a lingering moment of pain buried under Bim's regal disposition. How had I missed that? What was it that had bothered her?

  "Many hands make light work." I said, desperate to keep talking to her, even though I could barely follow along with all her talk of the soul and time and our utterly alien, incompatible existences.

  You damned fool, ask her what's wrong! My desperate cries fell upon the deaf ears of my past self. All the willpower I could muster wasn't enough to alter the memory, let alone the unequivocal past.

  "Would you like to aide my search for the answer?" Bim had asked me. "There's a tangential probability that there will be some overlap to these lines of inquiry."

  "Sure, if I can find the time." I said with a dismissive chuckle.

  Again, Treu saw a deep pain behind her eyes. I'd gladly help her out, she was like my little sister after all. You damned fool, don't you see what she's really asking you? She wants to bridge the gap!

  "Why do you want to know what it's like to be human anyway?" I asked.

  Bim paused for a long moment. A faint landward breeze tugging at her translucent flowing dress and the short cut of her perfect black hair. She had a scent to her, entirely her own and like nothing I had reference for; it was spicy and sweet and so definitively feminine that it could only ever be her's. Bim's golden eyes flicked to my cracked lips (she was about to kiss me, I'd thought) but then they returned my gaze. When our eyes met, it was divine. She saw me at it was magnetic. She was as drawn to me as I to her and I'd never seen that until now.

  "I thought you were cute." She said, then she turned to regard the gardens once more.

  Treu watched our impromptu date six times before he'd seen enough. The rest of his probes had scoured my memories of her and found nothing else worthy of deeper inquiry. He had lain me bare, and found the first date of an inexperienced man past his prime. Treu had come looking for some great conspiracy to rend the cosmos asunder, and revealed a tangled mess of confused emotions.

  "Where's the rest?" Treu asked incredulously. "Surely there's more. There HAS to be more!"

  "Bim is the most amazing woman I've ever met." I answered, finally regaining control of my facilities. "That's what she is to me."

  Treu regarded me slack-jawed. The momentary expression seemed incompatible with the giant's harsh features, as if relaxing even that much was anathema to his very being.

  "IT, isn't human. Let alone female." Treu sneered.

  "That doesn't matter to me!" I roared, the room around us re-solidifying under my force of will. Heat was building inside of me, conviction matched the rising surge. "I… I think she's my answer."

  "Infatuation is a chemical imbalance in the flawed brain of an undisciplined mind." Treu started, his features rigid with hatred. Something seemed to come over him, not a gentleness but something tranquil I'd never seen from the giant of a man before. "You may love a monster—it may even love you in return—but that does not change its nature."

  "What the hell's that supposed to mean?!" I demanded, hurling my will against the giant's.

  At the force of my question, I saw something. Just as Treu had opened my life's story, I too saw a single page of his saga, experiencing its narrow scope and absorbing everything, everywhere all at once. It was near impossible to make sense of, decades slamming into my mind simultaneously while I grasped at the coarsest details.

  Treu was hunting for long years. It was the last time he'd been truly challenged. I saw cities burn, moons cracked asunder, great swaths of humanity obliterated. I felt his respect for the devil, the way he acknowledged another being as, not an equal per say but close enough. It was something like him. A worthy foe… a Nemesis! A Monster.

  That hunt had sustained Treu for decades, the lingering promise of the kill, the anticipation of it. The endless training, the appetizing skirmishes, the allies expended on this glorious crusade, everything built to a legendary climax. Only, when Treu lands his killing blow, there's no rush of victory, no great sense of accomplishment. There was nothing but a gaping hole, where purpose had once been.

  "Enough!" Treu roared, shutting me out of his mind. "I have the answers I need from you, Pyrokine." Treu smiled wickedly, the entirety of his features warping into a thin veneer of twisted humanity that could barely contain the monster within. "You shan't recall this interrogation. It is purged from your mind. Await your sacrifice, Pawn. Now, awaken!"

  The ferrocrete room crumpled around us, great chunks of rubble falling away into an infinite blackness. Everything, everywhere, there was only darkness and cold. Treu was unmoving, that perverse mockery of delight plastered onto his face the epicenter of the universe's destruction.

  The floor gave way under my feet. I scrabbled at the collapsing stonework for purchase, but it was all coming apart. Every jagged piece I grabbed was as malleable as a leather armrest. Everything was falling no matter what I desperately clutched at. I sank my fingers into the yielding stone and some part of my mind was back in the staff car as it rolled. In all this infinite blackness there was sky, then gravel, then sky.

  Then water.

  I drew in a massive sputtering breath, choking down a lungful of fluid for the effort. I was drowning! I tried to roll over and cough it up but I was strapped down to something soft. My eyes couldn't make sense of all this blinding light.

  The seatbelt! I reached for it, but my arms were pinned down, my legs too. I was drowning and these straps were too blame. Killing heat welled up inside of me to burn my way clear.

  There wasn't enough, nowhere near enough! It was like my tanks were running on empty and I'd already used up my reserve. Even my adrenaline was fading out now, consumed to fuel the fires around me. It wasn't enough! I was going to drown and I couldn't save myself.

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  Another bucket of water was dumped on me, then I was thrown free.

  I flopped to the floor and retched my lungs clean. I was freezing, my skin so tightened by gooseflesh that if felt like I'd been shriveled up and shrunken. I was going to die, if the water didn't get me then the cold would. I needed a fire. I needed heat!

  A third bucket of water splashed onto my back, as I finally took a breath and blinked something recognizable into my brain. The grey ferrocrete room without doors was gone, I was facedown in one of the palace's bathhouses surrounded by black-armored mercs brandishing tin buckets, fire extinguishers and, in more than a few cases, firearms pointed at me.

  A hand grabbed my gunshot shoulder and rolled me faceup. Purple eyes, too big and so alien. A slap found my face while a thumb dug into my wound, rattling my brain into something resembling alertness.

  "Hero! You need to stop burning things or you're going to die. You're killing yourself! If you can't get a grip, they're going to put you down."

  I started closing my eyes. I was too cold to understand what was being said. Another desperate slap rocked my jaw.

  "You piece of shit! You can't die until I get some answers from you!"

  "…C-C-Cold…" I muttered between shivering teeth.

  "Yeah, yeah, I can see that. It'll have to do, throw him in!"

  Then I was is warm water up to my neck. Everything was rubbery and languid. I had the notion that I was a thick cube of meat being stewed. Eventually, I stopped shivering. I took a deep breath that sent jagged needles of pain across my chest. I could breathe. I wasn't freezing. Everything hurt but I was warming up. I opened my eyes millimeter by painful millimeter, properly taking in my surroundings.

  Aside from a few bandages charred black, the gold cross around my neck and the ballistic weave melted across my torso, I was completely naked in a massive tub of steaming water. Princess and a dozen other mercs from the outfit were all staring at me like I'd grown thirteen heads or something. Some of them were sporting burns or wearing clothes pocked with scorch marks. I covered up my groin with hands blackened by horrific frostbite— my toes, lips and nose, I noted, were similarly colored.

  "What's going on?" I asked, barely managing to get the words through my unmoving lips.

  "Cat's out of the bag, Firebug." Princess answered. "Everyone saw what you did, we even got it on camera."

  "What did I do?" I asked, looking at the faces around me for hints. Some were awe-struck, others murderous, and a few more still were brimming with curiosity. Leeroy pushed his way to the front of the crowd, a heavy pistol in one hand and a fire extinguisher in the other.

  "We were hoping you'd be able to tell us that." He said. "Short version, you saved the Client and the others in your car. It's how you did that which has us concerned."

  "How did-" I started but Leeroy silenced me with a wave.

  "The debriefing can wait until you're off of death's door— and until you have some pants on. The rest of you, we've got a whole mess of work to be done and casualties to take care of. Show's over for now, so clear out."

  They left me to stew for a good few hours. Despite Gerald's insistence that they were a lost cause, my fingers and toes regained enough sensation to all but guarantee I'd keep them— most of them at any rate. How debilitating the resultant nerve damage was remained to be seen.

  The merc left me to it and sent for Zoe-Esther once it was clear that whatever my recovery entailed, it was beyond anything so mundane as science. To her credit, she didn't so much as blink while helping me dress myself. I was too damned weak to do it myself; I couldn't even stand without her bearing most of my weight. I caught her stealing nervous glances at my blackened, swollen fingers as I got my shoulder over her.

  "Never seen frostbite before?" I asked, trying to make a joke out of it but I didn't have the strength to pull it off.

  Zoe took her eyes off my afflicted hand and looked at my face, namely at my similarly afflicted nose and lips. She looked away pretty quick and just shook her head.

  "It's not contagious. I'll explain it later. For now just get me to the ops center."

  It was slow going, every step sent fresh agonies up my rubbery legs and despite my pride, Zoe had to carry me up the stairs to the third floor. Heads turned as what must have been the eleventh hour of this particular conference thundered to a deafening halt.

  I was the last of the command team to arrive, excluding a conspicuously absent Bim. Even Treu was in attendance, lurking in the corner like a stuffed byakkai, ready to pounce at the first sign of worthy prey. Leeroy and Princess were leaning over the room's small side table, looking like my arrival had caught them in the second before fists started flying. A medicated Alice was sitting near enough to contribute to a conversation, but far enough that she and her broken leg wouldn't get drawn in on one side or the other. Celio's man (the one who'd survived the rollover with us) was there too, pacing the room while his hand nervously hovered by the golden pistol at his hip.

  "Don't wait on my account." I said, trying to diffuse the room and failing miserably. Zoe kicked a chair into place and set me down. She remained nearby, like a protective nursemaid and I could hear her breathing heavy from the efforts. "Well, get on with it."

  "Shut up and watch this." Leeroy commanded.

  What followed was every second of recorded evidence that I was something abhuman. The initial shots were from my time on the Stalking Shadow, including several conversations I'd thought private. Then came footage captured from the Black Cat as it flew in to rescue Celio from his own stupidity.

  The opening scene was an aerial of our ambushers bearing down on the staff car after I'd rolled it. My faint heart was pounding as I watched, some part of me morbidly curious to see what came next, another fully dreading discovery of what happened after I'd blacked out. The killing heat that normally would have been whelming inside of me like a building storm, was suspiciously absent. Finally, the shuttle drew near enough to see the individual players— though through some chance angles there was nothing of Treu or Bim recorded.

  Recorded voices were screaming for missiles to finish their lock before the truck closed the distance, but it was too late, the truck was practically on top of us. We were on our own. The Client would die just minutes away from rescue. Then there was the explosion, like a teardrop of liquid fire splashing off the truck and everything around it. The flames didn't stop there.

  A relentless chain reaction ignited, the fires spreading as if everything it touched was a barrel of pressurized fuel just waiting to cook off. By the time the shuttle had landed some fifty meters away from us, massive swathes of the city's outer slums were burning and still the hellish flames spread with supernatural swiftness. The view shifted, suit cams from the powertechs who'd dismounted. Everywhere, everything, there was only a sea of fire. Except for me.

  There was a ring, perfectly spherical centered around my past self, where the fires refused to flow. It was like a polar vortex in the middle of Hell, and there I was standing in the middle of it with great sheafs of ice growing off my flesh.

  "Holy shit." I breathed, but the recordings weren't finished yet.

  Huge rifles snapped to bear on me. Some of the powertechs were calling out to me, trying to snap me out of whatever this was. There was no conversing with me, nothing they said could reach into that frozen place my mind had gone too.

  It was at this point, my ungodly flames required a new source of fuel. I watched myself wither, it was like a terrible movie without an effects budget. In the time it took me to release a shuddering breath, I had grown shriveled and blackened as the ice reaped its due.

  The cameras of every powertech in the rescue team all looked at me down the length of their weapons. They were going to kill me, I realized. I couldn't tell if it was intended as a mercy or simply to stop me— to stop the icy creature and his raging hellfire.

  I was so fixated on my own approaching death, that I failed to see Bim walking through the desolate tundra radiating from me to place a hand on my chest. I toppled a second later, the rigor of my frozen limbs making quite the spectacle of my collapse.

  The footage that concluded the horror film I'd unwittingly stared in was a mess of smash cuts. In the process of transporting me from the desolation I'd created back to the palace, I'd burned nearly everyone who'd attempted to touch me and several unlucky mercs who'd been too close to them. The footage had run its entirety now. I was left staring at my weakened self, mirrored in the lifeless black screen afterwards.

  "It's amazing!" Princess said, breaking the silence. "I know none of you can see what I can but… Stars! This is magic! I can't even begin to describe it to you. It's like eight new rainbows of color in infrared alone! It's… It's-"

  Leeroy slapped her full in the face, the sound splitting the room like a thunderclap.

  "It's dangerous." Leeroy growled. "He's dangerous."

  "Roy, Hero's the answer to everything I saw!" Princess said, her undimmed enthusiasm bordering on hysteria. "This is so much bigger than anything we've ever dealt with. You see Hero as a weapon but he's the next step in human evolution. Don't you get it? Talfryn was right!"

  "Who's Talfryn?" I asked.

  "He's dead, that's all you need to know." Leeroy said without turning from his albino opposite. "And you need to wake up! We're mercs. We're on a job, not a crusade. If you can't keep your head on mission, I'll bench you for someone who can."

  "Roy, none of this matters!" Princess protested.

  Leeroy slapped her again, throwing her to floor with the blow's savagery.

  "Our Client nearly died! Celio is the only reason we're here. He is the ONLY THING that matters on this hell-hole of a planet." Leeroy collected himself with a growled breath. "Leave. You're off contract without pay until you can get your priorities straight."

  Princess wiped at her bloodied lips, smearing the crimson across her ghostly face, and left without a word of protest.

  "Now, you." Leeroy said, giving me his full attention for the first time since I'd entered. "Explain. Everything."

  "I can't." I said. I tried to shrug but the motion came across as a palsied twitch instead.

  "Botshit."

  "No really, I can't. You already know everything I do. Your little home video summed it all up. I'm a freak. I make fires. I burn everyone and everything I come into contact with! So if you're going to kill me get on with it!!! My life's enough of a scat-storm without you playing up this witch hunt."

  "He won't kill you." Treu stated, causing everyone in the room but me to jump.

  "I won't, will I?" Leeroy said, drawing a pistol.

  "No, you won't." Treu repeated, speaking pedantically. "He saved your precious client. He is truly the 'Hero' of the hour. And you, Leeroy von Stalking Shadow, are a murderer of honor and principle."

  "Are you volunteering to take his place then?" Leeroy asked between gritted teeth.

  "Better still, I'm in a unique position of enlightenment amongst your outfit." Treu stated mockingly. "When the time comes, I will deal with the monsters in your midst, personally."

  "Why?" Alice whispered, the single word slurred from pain, fatigue and medicinals.

  "I'm not buying it either." Leeroy added. "You haven't lifted so much as a pinkie for anything else, and now you want to triple your workload. What? Out of the goodness of your heart?"

  "Don't be absurd." Treu sneered. "I have a vested interest in preserving this dimension's super-luminal integrity. All I ask, is for a carte-blanche when the time comes."

  "And when might that be? A week from now? A month?"

  "At the risk of sounding cliche, you'll know it when you see it."

  For a long minute, Leeroy must have considered how likely it was he could actually kill the giant of a man. Evidently, the odds weren't to his liking. With a noise somewhere between a sigh and a growl, Leeroy holstered his pistol.

  "You'll do whatever the hell you want anyway. Fine. But until 'that time comes' you need to start pulling your weight. Those are my terms."

  Treu lips twitched.

  "We have a deal, Mercenary."