Chapter 116: World Ender

Rook remained seated upon the edge of the treatment table, studying his arms.

The old man had moved the curved knife out of his reach. He stood beside the cabinet now, making no attempt to examine him again. Beyond the doorway, the feline lay across part of the hall with its head upon its forelegs.

Mara waited until Rook's breathing had settled.

"What do you remember?"

His fingers stopped moving over the Brand.

"Enough."

"The laboratory?"

He looked toward her, then away again.

Mara pulled a chair closer but did not sit. She just waited for him to speak for a bit.

"You don't have to tell me everything," she said. "But was the young man I saw you?"

Rook pressed both palms against the table. For a moment, she thought he intended to stand and leave. Instead, his shoulders lowered beneath a long, exhausted breath.

"I remember my fiancée."

Mara went still.

"There was a ring. I remember making it, worrying that it wasn't good enough. I remember how much that mattered to me." His thumb passed across the bare fingers of his other hand. "Then there was the stone."

"What stone?"

"Something that fell from the sky. From space. I touched it. It was what I decided to use as the stone for the ring. A beautiful black stone… full of life. Full of death."

He stared past her toward the open doorway, his eyes narrowing as he followed something neither she nor the old man could see.

"I got sick afterward. Weak. Always tired, no matter how long I slept. Food stopped helping. I could eat until I felt ill and still lose weight." He touched his ribs through his shirt. "I remember looking at myself and wondering how there could be so little left."

Mara sat slowly.

"The government came looking for me," he continued. "They knew where it had fallen. Knew I'd been near it. They said they needed to examine me, make sure I hadn't been exposed to anything dangerous. A health checkup."

His mouth shifted into a faint, ugly smile.

"I went with them."

"And they kept you?"

"They kept me."

The answer came quietly enough that Mara leaned forward to hear what followed.

"At first, I thought there'd been a mistake. Then I thought someone would come looking. After that, I spent a long time trying to get out." His gaze dropped to the pieces of ropes beneath his boots. "None of those things worked."

The old man watched without speaking.

"But the sickness changed," Rook said. "I stopped getting worse. Started putting weight back on. Things that should have hurt me barely did. Wounds closed. I got stronger. Healthier than I'd ever been."

He flexed one hand, watching the tendons move. "Strong enough to frighten them. Strong enough that they stopped coming into the room without guards."

"Did you hurt someone?"

Rook looked directly at her.

"I never killed anyone."

Mara glanced at his arms before she could stop herself.

"Then why do you have a Brand?"

A laugh escaped him. He lowered his head, rubbing both hands over his face, but another followed before he could finish.

"You wouldn't believe me."

"I'm listening."

"You keep saying that as though it makes this easier."

"It doesn't have to be easy. Take your time." Rook let his hands fall.

For several seconds, he said nothing. Mara could hear the faint movement of the feline's tail against the floor outside.

"Whatever was inside that stone was alive," he said eventually. "Something organic. A virus, maybe. A parasite. I never found out which. They discussed it around me sometimes, but they weren't particularly concerned with keeping me informed."

"The white room," Mara said. "The one I saw in the Fourth Rank's memories. That was where they put you?"

"Yes."

He closed his eyes.

His body recoiled before he opened them again, one shoulder jerking backward as though someone had reached for him.

"That was me. I remember the room. The table. The machine." He swallowed. "I remember it far too fucking well."

Mara kept her hands in her lap.

"How long?"

"Years."

The word changed the room around her.

She had watched several minutes of that laboratory. Fragments of conversations, a blood draw, a patient transferred into a machine. She had thought the bruises upon his arms were evidence of days or weeks.

Rook had lived there for years.

"They found out how much medication it took to keep me quiet," he said. "Then they made sure I always had enough in me. Sometimes I could hear them, but I couldn't move. Sometimes I woke up long enough to understand what they were about to do."

His fingers curled against the edge of the table.

"The thing inside me made me resistant to disease. Whatever they tested, whatever they exposed me to, my body recovered. They wanted that. Said it could change medicine. Save people who couldn't be saved."

A thin laugh interrupted him.

"They told me it was for the greater good. That my sacrifice would help other people live better lives."

He looked at Mara.

"They wanted to save the whole world. They just didn't want to save me."

"What were they doing with your blood?"

"Taking it."

Rook's eyes shifted toward the tools beside the cabinet.

"More than they should have. More than a body could lose and keep living. They replaced it with some kind of fluid. I don't know what it was. I remember it going into me. I remember how cold it felt."

Mara thought of the dark tubes surrounding the machine.

"That thing they put you inside…"

"Was built for me."

He leaned forward, elbows upon his thighs, and pressed one hand against the back of his neck.

"If my heart stopped, it brought me back. If I couldn't breathe, it breathed for me. They could take almost everything and still keep enough of me working to do it again."

His face tightened. He drew a breath through his teeth and waited until he could continue.

"They kept finding new places for the needles. Even with the healing, they needed another vein. Then another. I remember them arguing about where to put the next one while I was still lying there."

Mara's stomach turned.

"They drew blood. The machine kept me alive. They drew more. It kept me alive again." He shook his head slowly. "I don't know how many times I died in that room. I don't know whether any of them counted."

Neither Mara nor the old man spoke.

Rook stared at his hands for a long time.

Then he laughed.

This time, it lasted long enough that Mara almost reached for him. He shook his head before she could move.

"The Fourth Rank."

"What about it?"

"I think I finally understand why it knew me."

He raised his face. His eyes were wet, though the sound coming from him still resembled laughter.

"That motherfucker. The doctor you saw. And the others. All those people whose eyes you looked through."

"The people from the laboratory?"

"Their memories ended up inside it. That's why it recognized me. It ate them, and everything they remembered."

Mara recalled the ledger: flooded passages, ruined Bastions, deaths recorded long after the laboratory.

"But how did they all become part of the same Abomination?"

"I don't know the whole path." Rook rubbed at his forehead. "Maybe they arrived together. Maybe something found them before a Reaper did. They were already connected before they came here. You saw that yourself."

It was an explanation, but not one he could prove. Mara could hear him assembling it as he spoke, fitting the recovered memories against what she had told him.

"Why wouldn't they have become Reapers?"

His laughter stopped.

"Because they didn't kill me."

Mara looked at the table beneath him.

"After everything they did?"

"They kept me alive. That was the whole fucking point."

She struggled to reconcile that with the Brand covering his arms.

"But you were trapped there. Sedated. You couldn't leave. How could you have killed anyone?"

"I didn't."

"Rook…"

"I didn't kill anyone." He lifted his arms slightly, exposing the dark markings. "And apparently that doesn't matter."

Mara waited.

"The thing that infected me didn't want its first host dead," he said. "That's what I understood later. It made me stronger because it needed me alive. Healthy enough to keep carrying it."

"Carrying it where?"

"Anywhere it could spread."

Mara's attention moved to his hands.

The syringe.

Rook saw the recognition upon her face.

"My blood entered that doctor's arm. You watched it happen."

"Yes."

"I remember doing it."

His right hand closed around something that was no longer there. His thumb moved as though pressing down upon a plunger.

"I wanted him to feel it. Just once. I wanted one of them to know what it was like to have someone put a needle into you without asking."

Mara remembered the words that had survived the fragment.

See how it feels.

"He went home," she said. "He hid the injury. Then he got sick."

Rook nodded.

"Grey skin. Hair falling out. Something moving beneath it."

"Yes."

"I saw that sickness too."

"When?"

"Near the end."

He shifted upon the table, drawing one foot backward beneath him. The movement seemed unconscious, an attempt to put more distance between himself and the memory.

"I rarely woke up once they started leaving me in the machine. But I remember waking then. They were afraid."

His voice had lost almost all its strength.

"Not worried about the readings. Not irritated because I'd moved or because a test had failed. Terrified. Every time they looked at me."

Mara glanced toward the old man.

He remained beside the cabinet, listening.

"One of them tried to kill me," Rook said. "Right there. He kept saying it was my fault. That I'd done this. Someone stopped him, and they started shouting at each other."

Rook pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

"I remember wishing they'd let him."

Mara did not interrupt.

When he lowered his hands, he looked older than he had before the treatment. His face had healed completely, but the exhaustion remained.

"Another one came close enough that I could hear him through the machine. I remember his mouth moving. I remember trying to understand why he was looking at me like that."

"What did he say?"

Rook drew a breath.

It caught halfway in.

"He said I'd released a plague."

Mara's fingers tightened against each other.

Rook began laughing again. He bent forward beneath it, shoulders shaking, and for a moment the words would not come.

"He said it had spread beyond anything they could contain. That it had affected the entire fucking planet."

The laughter continued until he ran out of breath.

Then he looked down at the Brand.

Mara had seen those markings countless times. She had wondered how many murders they represented…

Rook ran his thumb across the darkness covering his wrist.

"Me," he said.

His mouth trembled around the last remnants of the laugh.

"The one who killed billions."