Chapter 117: Death And More Death

"The one who killed billions."

"You didn't kill anyone," Mara said.

Rook's laughter faded.

"You did not kill a single person. Whatever came out of that stone did this. That sickness attached itself to you, used your body and spread without your knowledge. You were unconscious for most of it. You were a prisoner."

Rook studied her face. A tired smile slowly pulled at one side of his mouth.

"But I did hurt someone."

"The doctor?"

"I put my blood inside him."

"He deserved it."

The answer came without hesitation.

Rook's smile disappeared.

"Many people deserve death, Mara. That doesn't give me the right to choose which ones receive it."

"You didn't know what would happen."

"I knew my blood wasn't normal. I knew they were afraid of it." His fingers closed around his forearm, directly over the place where he remembered driving the needle into the doctor. "I wanted him to suffer. I wanted him to feel what they had done to me."

"One man," Mara said. "One man who tortured you for years. You cannot be held responsible for every life taken afterward. That isn't fair."

Rook opened his mouth, but no answer came.

"Nothing is ever fair," the old man said.

It was the first time he had spoken since Rook began recounting the laboratory.

He left the cabinet and approached the treatment table, leaning upon his cane as he examined the darkness covering Rook's arms. There was no mockery in his voice and no attempt to soften what he intended to say.

"The Brand has judged you the primary cause of those deaths," he continued. "The infection may have destroyed their bodies, but it reached them through you. To whatever force applies these markings, that distinction appears to matter more than intention."

Mara turned toward him. "He was used."

"Yes."

"He didn't release it knowingly."

"I heard him."

"Then why are you blaming him?"

"I am not blaming him. I am explaining the Brand."

The old man stopped in front of Rook.

"A weapon cannot act without a hand. A sickness can, but it still requires a place from which to spread. You became that place. Willingly or otherwise, the deaths began with your blood. One shouldn't blame the knife for the murder."

"That makes no sense," Mara said.

"It does not need to satisfy you. The Brand does not conduct trials, accept testimony or consider whether punishment will improve the condemned. It records consequence. He acted, the infection spread and people died. That appears to have been sufficient."

"You're not helping."

"That was not my intention."

Mara stared at him.

The old man ignored her and continued studying Rook's arms. His eyes moved slowly along the Brand, following its blackened lines from the wrists to where they disappeared beneath the sleeves.

"There is another matter," he said. "A reason you still cannot Cull."

Rook looked up. "What do you mean?"

"You remember the laboratory. You remember what happened before you entered the Underworld, yet your Death Imprint has not manifested."

"That's what I said."

"Yes, and I believe I know why."

The old man placed his cane against the table and sat upon the chair Mara had abandoned. He leaned forward, resting both hands over its handle.

"The machine kept you alive."

Rook's expression tightened. "That was what it was built to do."

"How?"

"They connected it to almost everything they could put inside me. It drew blood, replaced fluids, fed nutrients into my body and forced air into my lungs when I couldn't breathe."

"And when your life signs disappeared?"

Rook did not answer immediately.

"You mean when I died?"

"Yes. When you died."

"It brought me back."

"Every time?"

Rook stared at the floor.

"Every time."

The old man considered that. "How many times?"

"I don't know."

"Estimate."

"I can't."

"You spent years inside the machine. Surely you tried to count."

"I did." Rook rubbed his thumb against the edge of the table. "I stopped after the first hundred."

Mara's stomach tightened.

"The first hundred?"

"They weren't always full deaths. Sometimes my heart stopped. Sometimes I stopped breathing. Sometimes everything went dark and I woke up hours later."

"That is death, Rook."

"Apparently it wasn't permanent enough."

"How long did that continue?"

"I told you. I don't remember."

"Days?"

"No."

"Months?"

"Longer."

Mara looked at the marks upon his arms. Three hundred years in the Underworld had not prepared her for the thought of the life that had preceded them. He had awakened inside the machine, died within it and awakened again so often that the events had ceased being separate.

The old man did not look surprised. He appeared more troubled by the confirmation than by the number.

"What else do you remember?" he asked. "Not the procedures. What happened around you as the sickness spread?"

Rook closed his eyes.

"At first, there were always people in the laboratory. Doctors, guards, assistants. I heard them even when I couldn't see them." His brow drew together. "Then there were fewer."

"How quickly?"

"I don't know. Time didn't work properly in that machine. I could wake after an hour or after a week and it felt the same."

"But their numbers decreased."

"Yes."

"What happened next?"

Rook's hands tightened against the stone.

"Someone came back."

"One of the doctors?"

"I think so. He was sick."

The memory took time to emerge. Mara watched Rook's eyes move beneath his closed lids as though he were following the man through the laboratory again.

"He covered his mouth with cloth. His skin looked wrong beneath it. Grey around the eyes. He kept dropping things because his hands wouldn't stop shaking."

"What was he doing?" the old man asked.

"Searching the cabinets. He took several containers and put them into a bag."

"Samples?"

"Maybe. Medicine. Blood. I couldn't see from where I was."

Rook paused.

"He looked at me before he left. I was awake enough to speak. I asked him to release me."

"What did he say?" Mara asked.

"That I deserved to remain there forever."

Rook's mouth twitched, but there was no humor behind it.

"He laughed when he said it. Then he ran."

The small Beacon fragment burned steadily beyond the open door. Its light travelled across the floor, stopping near Rook's feet.

"Someone else came after him," Rook continued.

"Another doctor?" Mara asked.

"No."

His eyes opened.

"I don't know what it was."

The old man waited.

"It might have been human once. Parts of it still were." Rook looked past them toward the feline lying within the hall. Its golden eyes watched him from between its forelegs.

A shudder moved through his body.

"It looked like an Abomination."

Mara felt the hairs lift along her arms. "That isn't possible. Abominations don't exist among the living."

"I know."

"What did it look like?"

"Black skin. Smooth in some places, split and rotting in others. It walked like it had forgotten which parts of its body were supposed to move together." Rook searched for the closest comparison. "A newly corrupted First Rank, perhaps. Maybe a Second before its structure had settled."

The feline's tail moved once across the hallway.

"It was hungry," Rook said. "That was the only thing about it that seemed certain."

"How do you know?"

"It was eating someone."

Mara said nothing.

"I remember the arm. Only the arm. It held it between both hands and tore pieces away with its teeth." Rook looked down at his own fingers. "Then it noticed the machine."

"It approached you?"

"Yes."

"Did it attack?"

"No."

Rook's breath left him in a quiet laugh.

"I wish it had."

The words silenced Mara.

"It came close enough that I could smell the blood on it. Put its face against the glass and looked at me. Then it started sniffing."

"At you?" the old man asked.

"At the machine. At the tubes. At me. I don't know." Rook's hand moved unconsciously toward his chest. "It stayed there for a while. I thought it was trying to find a way inside."

"But it left."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I don't know. Maybe it recognized the infection. Maybe it didn't consider me food. Maybe there wasn't enough of me left to interest it."

Mara looked toward the feline again. The Seventh Rank watched them with an intelligence the creature in Rook's memory might not have possessed.

"After it left," Rook said, "I lost consciousness."

"You died," the old man corrected.

Rook gave him a tired look. "I woke again."

"That does not contradict me."

"The laboratory was empty. No doctors. No guards. Nothing except the machines that were still working." His voice grew quieter. "I called out until my throat stopped making noise. Nobody came."

The faint hum of the surviving Beacon filled the silence.

"I blacked out again. Woke again. The lights were weaker. Then it happened again. And again." Rook pressed both hands against the sides of the table. "Every time I opened my eyes, something had changed. Dust on the glass. More lights gone. A sound in the corridor that never reached the room."

"How long?" Mara whispered.

"Only God knows."

The answer contained no anger. That made it worse.

"The machine kept bringing me back," Rook said. "Even after everyone was gone. It kept doing what they had built it to do. Eventually, I stopped expecting the door to open."

He looked toward the pale light beyond the room.

"Then one time I didn't wake there."

"The Underworld," Mara said.

Rook nodded.

"That's the last thing I remember."

The old man remained quiet for a long while. He lowered his head, both hands still resting upon his cane, and traced one thumb over a crack in the wood.

At last, he sat back.

"This is going to be troublesome."

Mara turned sharply. "What does that mean?"

"It means his inability to Cull has been misunderstood."

Rook's attention shifted toward him. "You said I couldn't manifest a Death Imprint because I didn't remember my death."

"That conclusion was reasonable while most of your memories remained sealed. It is no longer correct."

"So what is the reason?"

The old man looked at him.

"You do remember your death."

"No, I don't. I was unconscious when it happened."

"Were you?"

"Yes."

"You have described dying several times during this conversation."

Rook's eyes narrowed. "I described losing consciousness."

"No. You described your heart stopping, your lungs failing and a machine restoring functions your body could no longer sustain. You did not fall asleep inside that device. You died."

"And it brought me back."

"Yes."

"That means none of those deaths were the one that sent me here."

"You are still thinking of death as something that only counts when it becomes permanent."

The old man rose from the chair and stepped closer. He lifted one hand but stopped before touching Rook's forehead.

"The Death Imprint is not concerned with permanence. Reapers die in this world and eventually return. Every one of those deaths leaves a recognizable pattern. A memory of how the soul separated from its remembered body."

His hand descended toward Rook's chest.

"The machine forced you across that boundary and dragged you back. Again and again."

Rook looked at the Brand upon his arms.

"That doesn't explain why I have no ability."

"It explains it perfectly."

The old man pointed toward him with one bent finger.

"You do not possess a missing Death Imprint. You possess too many."

Mara stared at him. "Too many?"

"Each death placed another pattern over the last. Loss of blood. Organ failure. Poisoning from whatever substances they introduced. Starvation. Suffocation. The sickness itself. The machine restored him before any single pattern could settle completely, then his body died differently the next time."

The old man moved one hand over the other, layering his fingers until they obscured each other.

"One death wrote over another. Then another followed. Hundreds of beginnings, each trying to define the same ending."

Rook watched the old man's hands.

"My Death Imprint cannot manifest because it doesn't know which death belongs to me."

"Not quite. They all belong to you. That is the problem."

The old man lowered his hands.

"Every Reaper's ability is shaped by death. The final terror, the final wound, the final refusal to disappear. Yours cannot find a final anything. Your soul remembers dying, remembers returning and then remembers dying again."

Mara thought of the machine closing around the young man she had seen within the Fourth Rank's memory. It had not been preserving one continuous life.

It had been interrupting death over and over.

"So how does he fix it?" she asked.

"He must choose."

Rook frowned. "Choose what?"

"His death."

The old man began counting upon his fingers.

"Was it the infection from the stone? Was it the first time the doctors drained more blood than your body could endure? Was it the machine forcing you back after your body had already stopped? Was it the years of repeated death inside that chamber? Or was your true death all of those things together?"

Rook stared at him.

"You must decide which one defines you," the old man continued. "Not which occurred last. Not which inflicted the greatest pain. Which death was yours."

"And once I choose?"

"If your soul accepts the choice, the other patterns may align beneath it. Then your Death Imprint should finally be able to manifest."

"Should?"

"I have never encountered this condition before."

Rook looked down at his hands again.

For the first time since awakening, something other than anger or despair crossed his face. It was not hope. Hope would have been too generous a word for it.

It was the recognition of a problem that might possess an answer.

"How do I choose?" he asked.

The old man's expression remained solemn.

"I don't know."