and putrid fruit. I choked on the first sip, nearly spit it out, but managed to keep my lips pressed together. It went down like you'd expect that combination to, burning all the way, and the explosion it caused in my stomach forced all the air out of my lungs. My vision went white, and I felt electricity spark from my fingers and toes.
The second sip went down more easily. By the third, I could feel my arms again, and after that, I held the cup myself. Drinking the potion greedily as if it were nectar squeezed from a half-dozen exotic fruit.
At least, that's what I told myself. It still tasted like rotten apples coated in axle grease and bile, but I knew it wasn't going to kill me. On the contrary, it was cleaning me out. Of a lot of things. The magickal purge. One potion washes away all manner of sin and poisons.
'God, that's toxic,' I managed when my throat worked well enough for words.
'Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger,' she said.
'Fuck Nietzsche. He never had to drink that stuff.'
She patted me on the chest and then left her hand there. 'And look. Your mood has improved too.'
I nodded at the battered cup. 'Where did you get that? From the engine room? They didn't have something cleaner?'
'The cocktail would have melted anything else,' she said.
I ran my tongue over my teeth. 'I think it stripped off a layer of enamel.' My stomach still boiled, but the prickling fire in my joints was gone, and the noise in my head had fallen to a dull roar. The normal sort of roar. The music, while still a pervasive pressure, wasn't as bowel-rattling as it had been a few minutes earlier.
She was right: I was stronger.
A man in black leather and a mask that blocked all his peripheral vision bumped into Marielle and she pressed more firmly against me. Her fingers started tapping on my chest. 'You need to move around,' she said, her mouth close to my ear. Her breath was hot on my neck, and I felt a welcome flush of blood move through my skin. 'Get your blood circulating. Make sure all the toxins are burned out.'
'What do you suggest?'
She nodded toward the crush of bodies on the dance floor, and her hair brushed the side of my face.
'Strictly for medical reasons?' I asked.
'Of course.' She nipped my earlobe.
I looked toward the bar. Beneath the metal fish on the wall, a pair of young women dressed as goth Lolitas were busy texting on their mobile phones. Probably to each other. There was no sign of the centurion. Nor was there any sensation from the reinvigorated Chorus that Antoine was still in the crowd somewhere. If he ever had been.
'Come on.' She dragged me into the mass of dancers, and I gave up looking for something that wasn't there. Her hand was hot and real, and the rest faded away. It was all a dream, and what I held was what mattered. It might be enough, I told myself.
The last time we had danced in public had been the New Year's party/millennium celebration at a place simply known by a Greek symbol. I had no idea if Omega was still there, though I doubted it; the party that night had had a vibrant fatalism about it, as if either we or the place itself wouldn't survive past dawn.
There had been Watchers there-Bento, the last one from our little coterie who was still speaking with me, and a number of others-and the mood, while celebratory, had been slightly tense. Ever since the game of Hunt the Werewolf had gone badly in Bechenaux, Antoine and I had been circling each other, waiting for an opportunity. In the months and years since that night, I had come to realize that it wasn't that Marielle had been blind to our antagonism, she had simply expected us to behave better. The question never satisfactorily answered was who had been the most naive that night: Antoine and I, or her.
In that moment, during those few hours before New Year's Day, I hadn't cared. The world shrank to her and me; everything else was hidden behind a barrier of rhythm and light. She and I moved against one another, breathing in time. Her hands against my chest. My mouth on hers. My hands in her hair. Our breath, moving back and forth. Her voice, Whispering in my head in a way that made the Chorus jealous.
We had been this intimate prior, but not like this in public. Not in front of Witnesses. Let the Record show that the Daughter of the Hierarch chose to end the last century in the arms of the Outcast-
The Record also contained the death of the adversary at the hand and sword of her champion, a man who later became Protector-Witness-one of the chosen soldiers of the society. Such was the cost of sinning against the fraternity, of a brother transgressing against brother, and while Marielle would argue that she was not a possession-not something that could be bought or traded or kept-the simple fact was: I fucked Antoine's girlfriend-more than once-and then celebrated such intimate knowledge with her in public.
Sins of the flesh. Though, while I harbored a few regrets from the last decade of learning magick, Marielle was not one of them. She was a ruinous complication; the sort of entanglement which everyone involved knew was going to end badly, but which no one shied away from. We were hedonistic children of an age which had no use for the morality of our forefathers. We believed we were stronger than the desires rooted in the flesh, that we were more emotionally evolved. We were domesticated creatures, no longer obsessed with the basal elements in the hierarchy of needs. We could-and did-concern ourselves with the eternal riddles of philosophy and consciousness. We knew the flesh was mutable, fallible, and would ultimately betray us without reservation. Why would we not enjoy the sensory opportunities it afforded us while it was healthy and strong? Why not?
The ecstatic ceremonies of ancient cults involved rituals of the body. Whether it was physical contact with another or the ingestion of pharmaceuticals or narcotics or the deprivation of sensation, the secret rites took advantage of the body's limitations. Overload the body, a machine that operates via a systematic structure of patterned responses, and it doesn't stop functioning, it stops following those preset patterns. It loses control, and turns to the mind for help. Freedom is the drunkard's waltz, the doper's irrepressible stream of consciousness, and the hedonist's climactic shiver. In these moments, the body is gone, and the mind is free to venture beyond the shell of meat that holds it.
I know what it is like to occupy the life of another, to experience their sense of taste, touch, and smell. To see and feel what they do. To know their fear and desire. While the Chorus is the fractured history of a dozen or more lives, it is not the chaos of schizophrenia. I never switch places with them; my identity is always the strongest, for it is in contrast to them that I am defined.
I am not the man I was ten years ago, but then who of us is?
And yet, validating that nexus of our cosmology, I gravitated toward Marielle once more, drawn to her in this enclosed space. She was a spark without shadows, and her pure light pulsed with the rhythm of the world around us. A moth flings itself at a light, Icarus flung himself at the sun, and I clutched Marielle tight, more desirous of that heat and light than any prior seeker of illumination. The crowd moved with us, a whirlpool cycle that ebbed and strained against the walls of the boat. Sensing the change in the crowd, the DJ flipped on a record with a lock groove, an endless loop disguised as a piece of vinyl, and no one cared. We were a primordial sea of flesh, electrified cells circling a central star.
This is how life began, a hundred million years ago. Tiny lights swirling tighter and tighter until all the gross materials caught in the whirlpool of energy fused into the primal gases and fluids of existence. The soup kept spinning, following the rhythmic cycle of God's heartbeat, and each rotation compressed everything a little more.
With each cycle-life, death, life again-we got a little closer, and eventually I kissed her. Her lips were hot and real, and they, too, might have been enough.
In an alcove that barely qualified to be called such, on a shelf that wasn't much more than a steel bump on the bulkhead, wreathed in shadows of our making, Marielle braced herself with one foot on the floor. Our pants were already undone; mine bunched around my ankles like a pair of short-chain manacles. With one hand supporting her raised leg, I fumbled with the edge of her panties.
The beat shook the boat, a subsonic rumble that shivered the rivets. My fillings vibrated, making my mouth tingle with electricity, and her tongue carried the same current. She opened her mouth wide against my lips as I pushed her back against the wall, and her lips curled into a smile as I slid into her. Arms wrapped around me as if I were saving her from drowning, Marielle held on tight as our rhythm became a counterpoint to the pulse beating through the bulkhead.
The song became stronger, the beat more insistent and violent as if the river was being bombarded. A knot of white-hot heat flooded my groin, a pressure that wouldn't release, no matter how hard I thrust. No matter how
