____________________________gothic: chapter five - by adire___

A lifetime of standing on street corners.

The wireheads would find her, eventually. They always did, their pockets clattering with enough credits to buy her, but not the more appealing fantasy simulations.

They could always afford her.

She felt out of place in the City, garbed in pink and purple liquid latex and glitter amidst this blackness, even her ebon-dyed hair bright against the gloom--and yet she was just as much a child of the City as its machines. Programmed to perform her specific functions.

A digital whore.

She had thought the two boys were only more customers as they stepped from the shadows, until she realized that the shorter, brighter one was half-carrying the other's emaciated corpse.

No, not a corpse. But the strange one needed help.

Throttle had carried Raze from the rooftop, dragging his surprisingly light frame through the maze of smoking metal carcasses amidst the occasional acrid starburst of combustible material. The pale boy had collapsed only moments after his spectacular performance, wicked talons crawling their way back up his black-sheathed fingers to vanish like snakes finding their holes....and he was left, cold and clammy and barely breathing. Childlike, almost. Vulnerable. Not the divine, terrifying god-creature that he had been mere moments before.

The red-haired boy had found this hooker, this liquid-latex whore, on the street below, calmly smoking a clove amidst the rubble of debris that had hailed from above only moments before. She took one look at them, and only nodded, gesturing for them to follow.

He didn't know why he had trusted her--or why he had trusted Raze, for that matter, but he had. He always knew--with Raze, with the hooker, with anyone worth trusting.

Her name was Aurelie, or that was what she said. She had an apartment, small and cracked and lit by the muted red glow of neon tubes. She had a bed, too, the neatest, cleanest thing in the two-room apartment, with its white sheet and equally white boy stretched across it.

Throttle paced helplessly, wondering why he didn't just leave him. Why he couldn't just leave him.

Aurelie sat by the bedside, staring in fascinated wonder. Her fingers traced reverently over Raze's boy-smooth face, his arms, his chest, touching the metallic patches on the boy-machine hybrid's skin in near-disbelief, perhaps even awe.

After what Throttle had seen, he could understand that awe.

Raze showed no signs of waking. But for his shallow breaths and the spasmodic flutterings of his lashes, he might well have been dead. A corpse, ripe for plucking by the nanosprites.

Somehow the thought of watching that aesthetic body staggering mindlessly along the cracked gloom of a City street like thousands of others before it disgusted Throttle.

Drip, drip.

Water trickled from a grungy, threadbare towel into a bowl as Aurelie sponged Raze's sweat-soaked chest.

In silence they waited, watchful tension shimmering indigo in neon lights.

"Sir, we've lost him again."

Anger scorched sulphurous in grey air, quiet as a surgeon's scalpel. "How many retrieval units were sent?"

Icicles could have formed on the tip of the messenger's nose, so chilled was he. Shivering. "A full detachment of fifteen, " he said, and the office was humbled.

"How?" The scalpel sliced the air, and the messenger felt it at his throat.

"He...he....Sir, Doctor Henssen said...."

Gentle, coaxing, deadly as a serpent's soft hiss. "Doctor Henssen said.....what?"

He quivered. There was no sympathy. Not from the faceless authority.

"Doctor Henssen said...said....that there have been some...unexpected developments....."

Fingers steepled. Patrician brows lowered.

"I see...."

"We've lost him, Sir. He disappeared from surveillance sight at approximately 0300."

"Goddammit!!" Katsai bellowed, bull-red, as he slammed his fist into the windowsill, and the plassteel shook. "What the hell do I pay you people for?!"

"Not to baby-sit, " the man at his side reminded him tartly, and Katsai growled, his massive bulk tensing.

"Baby-sit? That boy is your goddamned life, man!"

"I know, Sir, " he said contritely, placatingly, but there was not a hint of chagrin in his voice. "We're on it now. He'll make it here safely."

"He'd better. We're not giving him to it before we're good and ready."

The aide only nodded, and Katsai sighed, returning his gaze to his interminable staring out the lead-glazed window. Dammit, boy....do you even know what you've become? Do I?

His eyes found the Level, smooth and round and silver-white, and he stared.

Taunting and silent, the Beast stared back, laughing at him in soundless trills of power.

A corpse shambled beneath the window, on its way to join the army of its brethren, and Raze dreamed.

Sleeping Dragons coiled beneath the City, coiled around him, and he floated within a blue-green bubble of a memory that would not let him go, would not let him see it. Spiders carried the bubble on their backs, a bulbous egg-sac, and chittered as they took him to be born.

The face waited for him, wreathed in metal-black coils: the bodies of the dragons, sleek and cool. It watched him, the face of his mother. She was dead, but she waited for him in the City. As the City. With the City.

It creaked and groaned beneath him, and he felt the Dragons stir within the foundations. They would rise soon. They had risen already, and crawled across his skin, spinning webs like the monstrous spiders that had prisoned him in this warm sea-colored sac that tasted of salt and honey and blood.

He was born in this dark place beneath the watchful eyes of his mother, in a splash of seawater and a tangle of wires. He could not escape the wires, did not want to, huddled pale among them, translucent skin laced with black and streaked with sweet, thick blood.

His eyes burned, burned with bright lights, and he was lying on the Doctor's table.

He did not scream this time. He knew pain now, knew its definition, its measure, but not yet its limits. The wires were in him, the wires were him, and he grew with them, devoured, devoured the cold white table, the Doctor, his laboratory, the District, the City. He was the City, and he saw with its eyes.

It was restless.

He felt the coils of the Dragons around his neck, and pulled them tighter. Breath escaped him in the silent voices of wind chimes, and he died.

I will die someday. The thought returned to him as clearly as it had originally dawned, and summoned the bright solar flash of the other's presence at his side. The other would die some day as well, and die as he did, in the way of the ever-living.

I will not die.

He spoke the words again, and lived, sightless and all-seeing, bodiless and all-consuming. He was all and nothing, dominated and dominant and interlaced with sunlight. Impossible, that sunlight and moonlight, light and darkness should exist in such harmony, but they burned and cooled each other, and existed.

Is this all that there is? he questioned.

No. Not yet. A different voice, different from the Dragons, the spiders, the Doctor, the City, the other, different than any he had ever heard.

I do not understand, he lamented, his heart broken into shards of ice; he watched dispassionately as the wind swept the pieces away into a black sand desert.

Child. Brother. Creation. Father. You will understand. He would have wept, had he known how. I need you.

Who are you?

You.

Impossible, his logical mind wanted to cry, but he was not allowed, for something intruded, something unwelcome and wet. Drip, drip, drip, mother-warm, womb-warm, womb-wet. Rough and raspy and the memory of a cat's-tongue swiping touched him again, and then he was awake, and staring.

Eyes gazed back at him, a million stars and eyes of pitted plaster, and they stared relentlessly at the single unfamiliar pearl of moisture that glistened on his cheek, nestled in a cradle of wires.

He turned his head, saw the face of an unfamiliar Madonna, virginal in her sin, her blue, blue eyes wide with fear and worship of him beneath her black, black hair, almost as black as the worried eyes that gazed down at him, reflecting the blood on his hands. Yellow, oily blood, greasy ichor, the life's fluid of his adopted brethren. For an instant, he felt like a murderer. He had killed that which threatened, that which had always threatened just out of the corner of his eye for his entire life, and suddenly understood his loss.

Beneath him, the City groaned and wept for its slaughtered children.

Staring down at Raze, lost in the incomprehensible depths of acidic gold eyes that seemed to swallow the world, Throttle saw his understanding and strangely, inexplicably, wept.

Another current joined the stream. Another imperative toggled another circuit, and the serpent at the base of the world shifted.

Aurelie felt herself wanting, felt herself dying.

Chapter Four

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