_ Hiiro

  I think the torture lasted for hours. In a way, I hoped it had. It didn't seem right that so much suffering could be inflicted in anything less than hours. In a distant, detached sense I almost appreciated how skilled Diablo was. He could take apart a man faster than I could take apart a car, and cars were made to be disassembled.

  I was starting to think that I'd been made to be disassembled too…

  "Now," Diablo said, examining my severed ear still locked in the jaws of his bloody forceps. "If you still want to cooperate, I'll make a new deal with you."

  I nodded. I could only nod, my throat was too raw from screaming wasted words.

  "Tell me-" A riotous alarm blared, cutting him off.

  The sound pierced into my bones. It shook the air and sent a fresh wave of agony over the exposed nerves of my bleeding toes, my shortened fingers, the exposed musculature of my torso. Even without my left ear, the alarm was deafening.

  Mudo reached inside his shirt, I spotted the flash of a concealed pistol in there before he pulled out a small radio and handed it over to Diablo. The alarm lessened into a grating roar, but one you could yell over if needed.

  "Status report." Diablo's roar was whisper quiet in the din. I couldn't hear anything from the radio.

  A deep rumble shook the earth around us. That rumble became an earthquake that threw my captors to the ground and toppled my previously immovable stool. Chained up like a pig at the butcher's, I hit the ground face first without catching myself. Cracking my skull against the ferrocrete hurt but no more than the the mind-shattering agony I was already in.

  The alarm died, the lights too for a split second before a dull red backup powered up. Between the earthquake, the alarm and Diablo's hollered questions, the interrogation cell was drowning in sound. I felt the overpowering noise in my bones, a million times louder than thunder grumbling overhead. It could have went on for seconds or hours. It stopped… eventually.

  "Status report." Diablo repeated, his terse tone so perfectly even you could have built a tower on it.

  This time I heard the radio's answer. Men were screaming in berserk fury and terror as they emptied weapons on full auto. They were fighting and from the sounds of it, they were getting slaughtered.

  Two impossibly loud cracks reverberated up my everything. It felt like the planet was a giant nut and something had just smashed it open. The soul-crushing rumbling resumed. Even louder now, even closer. I saw cracks in the ceiling. Dust trickled down through them into my various open wounds but I couldn't care less.

  It was going to collapse. This whole mountain was coming down right on top of my head and I didn't even have a hope or a prayer of making it out of here. In the red light that filled the room, I saw that my captors had the same thoughts racing across their minds. That was nice at least, that they'd die too. We were all going to die. Our bodies would never even get discovered under all the rubble.

  < M???y??? H????i??i???ro??? s??t???i??l?l?? l???iv??es??, a??n?d??? I?? w??i??l?l??? s??a?v???e?? h???i??m??? >

  The thought tore through my mind like a siren blasting into both ears only not at all. I didn't really hear it, I couldn't hear anything over what sounded like an entire mountain being torn down on top of me. It was in my head.

  I recognized her voice in an instant. It was the same one that had called to me from the stars on another world. It was the one I still woke up hoping to hear whispering beside me. It was the voice that'd lit a fire in me so long ago. I could tell from the way Mudo was looking to Diablo that they'd both heard it too.

  "You boys are fucked now." I whispered, spitting out a mouthful of blood and what felt like a tooth too.

  I don't think they heard me. I couldn't even hear myself. The grinding, world-shattering earthquake went on and on. Until it didn't.

  I could barely hear the sound of my chains clinking while I trembled in the silence that followed. I was still shaking even after the earthquake had stopped but it didn't really seem that way.

  "What the hell was that!?" Diablo demanded of his now-silent radio.

  He wasn't asking me, but I answered anyway. "My girlfriend… sounds pissed."

  Mudo reached inside his shirt once more and two pistols materialized in the flat dim light. Diablo wasn't as smooth on the draw, a shaking revolver made its way into his hand after a few seconds. He listened in to his radio but no one was talking.

  The line had gone completely dead.

  "Get out there, see what's going on." Diablo barked, a spreading crack in his gentlemanly demeanor.

  Mudo tried to open the door. It was stuck fast. He put some muscle into it and that didn't make any difference. They were both as trapped in this cell as I was. I had a small chuckle at the irony of that.

  Diablo forced my stool upright without emptying either of his hands. He fiddled with his radio for a second, then held it to my head. He aimed his revolver lower, down towards a non-vital organ that most men would consider otherwise.

  "I hate to do this when we were getting along so well before. On principle, I dislike the use of human shields but these are trying times indeed. It's an open line. If that is your 'girlfriend' out there, then tell her who you are and that she holds your life in her hands."

  I don't know what was funnier; the fact that he thought I could actually stop whatever the hell was happening, or that I would even if I could. I had a little chuckle at the idea. Then the hammer cocked back on the pistol pointed at my balls and my martyrdom suddenly became a lot less appealing than my life.

  Before I could speak, two more earth-rending shocks tore through the world. The ceiling cracked into a spiderweb, a fat shower of crushed rock dust pouring down on everything. This was it. The ceiling was about to collapse and a million tonnes of rubble would have the last laugh.

  A new sound raked over the cacophony, a million nails clawing on a planet-sized chalkboard. It was meters of solid metal tearing. The sound alone turned my bones to a fiery jelly. Without the chains trussing me, I'd have melted into a tepid puddle for sure.

  The cell went completely dark. The soul-crushing total darkness you could only find buried in a lightless void. Whatever emergency line had been powering the backup lights and alarm must have been destroyed.

  Everything went quiet, truly utterly calm. I couldn't even hear my captors breathing. Couldn't see the gun pointed at my balls. Couldn't imagine whatever the hell was going on outside.

  But I could feel the entire mountain looming over my head, just waiting for one last kick to send it all crashing down. There was another thing too. I felt a warm glow deep inside the pit of my stomach.

  Six perfectly spaced, perfectly smooth, perfectly triangular triangles of blinding twilight appeared around the door and the man still trying to open it. They were unnatural, too completely utterly mathematical in execution to be the product of a human mind. The sight alone had me thinking I'd never seen a straight line or even spacing until this very moment. I'm sure Mudo thought the same as he gaped down at the massive hole in his torso. Metal tore, stone crumbled and the reinforced-steel door plus its human accessory flew like a thrown brick into the twilight.

  Mudo couldn't even scream as he flew into the night sky… The night sky I could see from the underground depths of whatever prison I'd been taken too… The night sky that should have had hundreds of meters of stone and steel and guards between me and it… The night sky which was perfectly outlining the demonic monstrosity hovering outside my cell with two eyes blazing like miniature suns. Eyes locked on me.

  I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing. I saw slashes and tears all across her skin, black-gold roiling insanity bubbling within. Eyes… Eyes of the lost and damned pleading for release flickering in the negative space behind her like ghostly afterimages. A sickly-sweet reeking scent of cinnamon sewage, sulfuric rotting fish and the ozone tang of lightning-struck iron all mixed into one. The smallest hint of a smile on the face of a stranger I thought I'd known.

  <"My H????i??i???ro???"> Unmoving lips roared the words and thoughts, mental noise smashing into me. It was a mess of half-formed sentiments, turbulent raw emotion and an undeniable certainty of fact. Possessiveness battered my brain into a stupor. All I could do was stare in awe and terror.

  "Bim?" My voice was a faint shadow burning away in the light of twinned suns.

  Where there should be an entire underground compound, there was open sky on the cusp of dawn and a satellite station on the horizon like a setting moon. Further back, I caught a glimpse of the absolute carnage she had wrought to get to me. It was too much. I couldn't bring myself to see what she had done, done for me, so I locked my eyes on her.

  Bim hovered in the air. A vengeful angel with phantom wings of pleading eyes shown in negative by the falling rubble and rising flames behind her. She was repulsive and alluring all at once. The sight of her pushed the pain from my mind, fortifying me as fuel did a fire.

  Diablo made a soundless twitch. The right half of his skull imploded. No sound, no flash, no hint of movement on Bim's part but I knew she'd done it. Diablo crumpled, braindead before he'd hit the ground.

  Bim was already answering my question before it had fully formed in my head. "The fleshling was going to kill Our H????i??i???ro???"

  Again, the words roared from her sealed lips like a thunderclap. Vertigo struck me in a wave at the mention of my name. Nausea followed a second after. What little I had in my stomach, the second after that. I bent double and my chains came away like softened butter.

  Diablo's body spasmed on the ground, half of him anyway. His left side was completely stilled but the right shuddered. A bone-rattling wheeze sagged from the ruin of his face. I tried not to look at him as I plucked the pistol from his writhing, curled fist.

  "You don't know-" I started, mewling the words around the bile coating my mouth.

  "Yes, We do."

  "Why didn't you just kill him?" I asked, unable to bear the wretched sight of him spasming on the floor.

  "We detected your hesitance. Your desire to minimize the bloodshed."

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  Was that what I wanted? I didn't want to be a murderer but hearing the animal noises Diablo was making seemed worse. He deserve death for what he'd done, to me and everyone before me, but what she'd done was so much worse. No one deserved that fate. I braved a glance at him and was reminded of Celio dying on the docks. Treu's words ghosted up from my memory.

  "Can you… fix him?" I asked.

  "For My H????i??i???ro???, anything."

  Bim barely spared a thought for it, her main focus somewhere a trillion kilometers away. She flicked a hand and Diablo's skull grew outwards in even jerking pulses. I could have been watching a time lapse of a man's head inflating if it hadn't been for the sounds he made as his bones scraped together while growing flesh slithered into place.

  For a single blink-and-you-miss-it moment, Diablo was healed. I didn't blink. I saw it and I watched that healing continue when it should have finished. Rampant, freakish, mutant growth started exploding out of his head.

  Diablo's skull kept growing bone into horn-like spikes and armored plate deposits at random. It reminded me of degenerative radiation poisoning and how the body slowly forgot what a human was supposed to look like. I watched in horror as the flesh change took hold of every bone in his body and began warping it into… something. Something monstrous.

  It wasn't just his skeleton either. Brains, muscle and little fleshy nubs that might have been tongues radiated outwards from their cranial starting point. His left eye snaked out of his face on an extruding tendril of grey matter. His jaw fell off, reveling scything bone mandibles and the meat of what had been his airway and esophagus. Everywhere I looked the change had taken hold of him.

  "Bim! Stop this." I wanted to roar the words, to assert some sanity over the madness unfolding a meter away from me, but the words came out in a desperate plea.

  She didn't respond. Didn't tilt her head like she always did when something confused her. Didn't pull her focus back to me from wherever it was. And she didn't stop whatever she'd done to Diablo.

  I saw a meaty piece fling itself free of the undulating flesh. It splattered on the ground and spread veiny webbed claws into the ferrocrete. It was like the roots of a tree. That flesh started growing. It was spreading like a fungus of living cancer.

  A seed landed in the pail Diablo had been using for my severed digits and in an instant the raw material was consumed. Then they too started transforming into something monstrously alien. My torn ear grew bulbous, severed lengths of fingers became spidery limbs and my flayed patches of skin hardened into insectoid chitin.

  Something in my mind snapped once I saw the living cancer forming triangles that formed helices that formed hexagrams that formed shapes I didn't even know the names of. I stole a single terrifying glance at something humans weren't meant to see. I wept at the sight. I screamed a bare-throated wordless roar.

  Flames lashed out from my gaping maw but it wasn't enough. I snatched up Diablo's pistol from the writhing mass and blasted into the cursed ruin of man. Each frenzied pull of the trigger incinerated swaths of the living cancer yet still I raged in berserk insanity.

  A condensed inferno of golden-white light poured from me, striking the living cancer and latching on like jellied napalm. With the living cancer to fuel the fire, the flames bellowed an oily black-green smoky tar that reminded me of every person I'd ever killed in cold blood. It was sickening. Maddening.

  And it was only a fraction of the roiling orderly insanity I saw churning through the gnashing lacerations in Bim's skin.

  My knees slammed into the uneven, charred floor once my fire was spent. Portions of the interrogation cell had been chewed up, consumed, devoured by the living cancer now rendered into a brittle ash by cleansing flames.

  Bim hadn't moved this entire time. Just looking without really seeing. Like she is and was and will be in a million places at once and none of them are here and now. She was right there! So close I could reach out and grab her, but somehow she'd never been further from me.

  "Bim…" I struggled to get the words out around the tightness on my throat. "What happened to you?"

  "We… No, she… She has to save him." Bim spoke the words in a broken chorus of whispering voices. Hundreds of dissonant hissing throats all funneling the words through a single set of unmoving lips.

  Something was wrong with her. She had broken somehow. This wasn't the same as after the rollover but it was similar. Bim needed my help. I had no idea how to fix her. No idea if she could be fixed.

  I stumbled on rubbery legs towards her. The air surrounding her was bitingly cold, completely still yet I'd have sworn there was a freezing gale pushing against me. It felt as cold as I'd been when I first heard her sibilant hushes whispered between the fury of nature and the beauty of the cosmos. I remembered how I'd heard her calling me across the stars and the haunting familiarity I'd known as soon as I laid eyes on her.

  Above all else, I felt the burning desire I'd never known until I woke up beside her.

  "B??i?m???," Her name leapt from me as my soul soared at the utterance. "Come back to me. I need you!"

  "She has to save him!" A hundred voices cried out in an maddened chorus using Bim's mouth.

  "You did! You did save me." I was choking on the words. I couldn't swallow this growing lump in my throat no matter how many times I tried. "I'm right here, so please, please come back to me."

  I could have been begging to a statue. The twinned suns of her eyes didn't move, not a flicker of indecision. What little humanity Bim had picked up wasn't just diluted in all her star-god power trip, it was completely gone. This… thing wasn't her.

  She was the only one I'd ever wanted, everything I'd never realized, and now she was gone. If the gods or God or whatever, if any of them were real, they had a pretty fucked up sense of humor.

  Bim's body was right there in front of me and there wasn't a spark of life anywhere to be found. If I ignored the millions of wriggling writhing things slithering under her skin, she could have been stone-cold dead. She could have been a corpse but somehow this was so much worse.

  I reached for my inner fire. It came with hesitation now, flagging and near-spent and somehow, it seemed almost sympathetic. I could feel it howling inside of my bones, the mournful haunting cry of a lone wolf calling for a pack that had been slaughtered. It was a chilling note, as real to me now as the life-sapping arctic winds had been in years long past.

  Bim's body was a mockery of ice. I had a fire in my soul and a blizzard in my memories. Something was going to break and if it had to be me, I think I'd be fine with that.

  So long as Bim came back. Arctic nightmares tore through my mind, but one struck a cord. The first time I'd ever heard her voice calling out to me on the brink of death and despair.

  "What's-" I started, fighting down a fist-sized lump in my throat. "What is it you desire?"

  She blinked. For the first time, she blinked! When she opened her eyes the twinned burning suns were gone, replaced by her usual golden-amber eyes and all her insatiable curiosity.

  Bim was in there! Imprisoned in her alien body, pleading and detached from the human world. I saw it in her eyes, she was clinging to the question with all that she was!

  I was her lifeline and I could feel her slipping away from me. Like hell was I going to let that happen! I'd save her— even if it killed me.

  My voice was a rasp of emotion but I kept digging for every memory, every feeling, every single ounce of warmth I felt for her and I forced it all into a single word no mortal mind was meant to know. I bled my heart and bared my soul and put every fiber of my being into calling her back from that abyss.

  "B???im????'k???el??a??i??dhz?????a!" I howled the alien word, drowning in its power as it coiled from my tongue and ignited my bones. An utterly alien concept hammered against my mind threatening to devour me. I held fast to the burning desire to save her and pressed through. "What is it you desire?"

  Tears like liquid gold fell from her eyes as her lips trembled.

  "You," She whispered. "Always and Eternally. For the rest of your life and all those that come after this. You, my H????i??i???ro???, are the only thing I could never be without."

  Bim fell from the air into my waiting arms. She was freezing to the touch— shivering, trembling as she threw her body against mine.

  I don't know what happened next.

  I was growing. Time slowed to a crawl. My perspective had completely changed the moment we touched. There were no words for it. No way for a human mind to fully comprehend the utterly alien rationale. I think… I think I was seeing through Bim's eyes just then, except it was nothing like sight.

  There were sparks. Millions of tiny sparks all clustered together, raging against the encroaching darkness that surrounded them. I could feel my mind going further, racing wider for boundaries that no longer existed.

  I think I saw the entire planet and the minuscule habitats dotting the solar system too. I might have been looking at a billion insignificant specks spanning trillions of utterly empty kilometers. For all those teeming multitudes, for all that desolate nothingness, two individuals blazed like mirrored stars in the darkness. Bim, a supernova that never should have been. And me? I was her perfect compliment in miniature. The one thing in all the desolate nothingness of the uncaring cosmos that she couldn't survive without. I was her's. That was the irrefutable truth. This plane was chaos and uncertainty and death, but I was the one real object grounding everything else.

  Terrifying didn't even begin to grasp the scope of my sudden shift in perspective, but Bim was there with me. She was my anchor on this ungodly scale no mortal mind was ever meant to reach; just as I was her's on the earthly plane below. There was no future and no past here. There was only the present, the ephemeral all-consuming Now. Everything we had endured until now brought us to this moment of unfiltered comprehension.

  Even if it was only for this fleeting, singular moment, we were one.

  Fear be damned or maybe because of it, she was eager and so was I. On the cosmic scale we danced in communion of mind and soul while our lips joined in the minuscule flesh enraptured below. I held her with arms that could obliterate cities-

  Until my fingers grazed the soul-numbing contraption embedded in her back.

  Solidity deserted her. Our minds and souls recoiled from the cosmos. She was less than a ghost as she pulled on my arms, dragging me back to my miserably human scale. The uncaring cosmos and the insignificant souls lighting it were gone.

  "We… I, have to save you." Bim whispered in disbelief, each syllable a battle. "It's not safe here."

  Bim broke from our embrace, turning back towards the way she'd came. She flicked a single finger and a rubble-dusted tapestry snaked its way through the air to us. Bim stepped aboard and offered me a hand.

  I took it without hesitation and suddenly, we were flying.

  It was all so surreal. My head was still spinning, trying and failing to make sense of the incomprehensibly inhuman experience I'd just had. In the grand scale of things, I was so small. I was practically nothing. The scope of it was so entirely beyond me but I knew one thing with absolute certainty. Bim, a goddess in all but name, chose me above all else every time.

  We flew out from the depths of the earth. Past the thousands of insignificant men she'd slaughtered to rescue me. Past ground zero where I spotted the wrecks of tanks, cannons and fast-attack cars all poking up through the rubble. Past the fortress that had been laid to ruin in my name. She'd done this for me.

  We lifted higher, pulling away from the cliffside a vengeful titan had clawed down into. We were soaring over the city I'd spent the past few weeks living in, now thrown into utter chaos. It looked like a giant had swatted over a tower of building blocks, scattering them into Crucibab. I spotted columns of soldiers arrayed against crowds on the edge of the disaster zone. A wing of flyers were racing across our path and Bim dropped our flight well beneath theirs.

  We were practically scraping the rooftops, serpentining between boulders five times bigger than any house. The streets below were dark, save for where fires had started burning out of control or rescue workers had erected floodlights. I saw a cone of light panning over a familiar street of identical townhouses that had never known electricity.

  A colossal pillar of stone had toppled end-over-end as it smashed its way through the neighborhood. I saw twelve houses obliterated, two spared, then another thirty demolished. The pattern varied over and over yet it seemed never ending.

  I knew what I'd see before we reached it. I wanted to tell Bim to take us higher, to veer off course, but I couldn't find my voice. Even if I did, it was taking every scrap of willpower she had to keep us pointed arrow-straight for Celio's estate. I couldn't turn a blind eye to the cataclysmic devastation wrought in my name. My eyes were searching for my safehouse— for Sophia's home.

  To my dismay, I found it.

  Right where I thought it would be, at the edge of destruction, I saw the unfamiliar ruin of a once familiar house. The formal rescue efforts and their heavy machinery were far off. Instead I saw a crowd of neighbors, faces I knew even if I couldn't put names to them, working by the light of a nearby house in full blaze.

  They were trying to get the bodies out before the fire spread. Three men were tearing through the brickwork of Sophia's house looking for her and I before the flames took what was left of her home. They clawed at the scattered bricks and splintered timbers like men possessed but they were nowhere near fast enough.

  The men broke off their search. The fire spread too fast. I tried to take a breath but all I could taste was ash and the scent of death in the air. We were flying past and I couldn't tell if they'd found her or if she was still buried under the wreckage. Maybe she hadn't been home. Maybe she'd gone shopping during the night.

  Then I saw a splash of color in the firelight.

  One of the men had a scrap of cloth wrapped around his arm and even with the growing distance, I could tell it was a hideous mix of yellow and blue. I could have sworn it was half-soaked in ruby red, but I was hoping that was just a trick of the light.

  I hoped it was… but I knew it wasn't.