Yes: my father was a bad man. Is a bad man. A drunkard, a wastrel, an addict, a violent abuser of my mother and myself-a figure of terror before he became one of contempt. And yet-
And yet there had been two things left in his life that he’d called his own: his tiny trade in etherium scraps, and his son the rhabdomant, who had kept him in business. And I had ripped them both forever beyond his grasp.
As he had taught me, all those years ago: whatever can be taken, will be taken.
I took from a man who’d had nothing else.
While I was contemplating this unflattering concept, I was also bringing forth all those residual shreds of etherium that had lingered under my skin all these years. Tiny spheres crawled across my skin like silvery mites, gathering themselves in the palm of my left hand, until finally they all joined into a single smooth ball, a half inch in diameter and weighing less than an ounce.
It would have to be enough.
A particularly bright fist-size sangrite protrusion from the nearby wall seemed a likely spot to test my idea. A brief inspection revealed several faults and fissures, one of which extended all the way to its surface near to its joining with the rest of the wall. I formed the etherium into a tiny needle, which I used to scratch open a vein in the back of my hand. Clenching my fist produced a satisfactory droplet of blood, small enough that I did not need to worry about it dripping on the floor and blowing one of my feet off. I stuck the end of the needle into the blood droplet, and with my mind thinned the needle while gradually hollowing an internal channel up its length. This produced a slight vacuum, enough to draw a little of my blood up within it, converting my needle to an etherium pipette.
I sealed the end of my pipette, and very carefully wiped the exterior. Inserting it as far as was practicable into the surface fissure of the protrusion, I caused the etherium to open and retract very briskly, so that I could step away before that portion of my blood inside the protrusion could react with the sangrite and detonate. Which it did.
With a stunningly intense crack! the sangrite protuberance exploded from the wall as though shot from a ballista. It hit the far wall, and the impact produced a shattering blast of raw power that lifted me from my feet and slammed me into the wall-fortunately without drawing blood.
Detonation on impact. Interesting. But inconvenient.
“YOW!” Doc exclaimed in my ear, louder even than the explosion. “Warn me when you’re gonna do something like that!”
“Doc,” I said, checking my bones as best I could for fractures, “I’m gonna do something like that.”
“Oh, very funny.”
“It’s not a joke.” I climbed back to my feet and stepped carefully over some fragments to locate a few tiny chips. I wet my finger and touched the smallest of the chips-a sliver less than half an inch long, and so thin that it looked clear. Folding my pipette into tweezers, I took the splinter and jammed it into the lateral side of my left butt cheek.
For what seemed like a terribly long time but was probably no more than a second or two, nothing happened-but then I felt a definite surge of energy from the splinter, for a bare instant before my ass caught fire.
Nothing actually exploded, which was a relief, but a patch of flesh almost an inch in diameter spit fire and poured black smoke and felt, for about five seconds, as if it was burning all the way into to my hip joint.
“Ow wow wow WOW!” Doc wailed. “You had to do it on the left side, didn’t you?”
“It’s good manners to share. What’s the count?”
“Are you kidding? After you set our butt on fire?”
Meat-scented smoke trailed up from a charred divot about the size of the end of my thumb. He wasn’t kidding: it hurt. It felt like someone was excavating my butt cheek with a red-hot spoon. And that was the good news. “Where were you when you lost track?”
“The late seven hundreds.”
“Not the answer I was hoping for.” Three minutes. I’d been right all along-not enough time. Not as much as I needed. No more tests. No more theories. This would either work, or it would kill me. Us.
I hate improvising. Hate it. Improvisation is for people too lazy or stupid to plan.
A group of stupid, lazy people that now included me.
I dropped to my knees at the edge of the scattered chips and splinters of sangrite. The cleavage appeared to be largely orthorhombic, which was fortunate-most fragments tended to be long and thin, like a crystal stylus. The problem was that the tiniest flakes seemed to be fading away-shrinking like sublimating dry ice. Which explained why I had found no existing fragments on my initial search. The damned stuff evaporates.
Why is it that nothing ever turns out to be easy?
I gathered as many of the medium-to-large crystals as I could fit into both hands and began to stick them into the only place where, first, I wouldn’t lose them, and second, I wouldn’t run the risk of having my colon explode; that is, I stuck them into the long tangles of my hair. Time pressure made my hands tremble, ever so slightly. I carefully kept the crystals away from my scalp, especially those with sharp edges, as having my head blast open would be only slightly less traumatic than full rectal detonation, and that only because I would be too dead to suffer.
And that was the easy part.
I found one crystal that had shrunk to two and a half inches long and about a tenth of an inch in diameter. I held it in the palm of my right hand, along with my tiny bead of etherium.
“What’s that for?”
“Shh. We’re not going to get a second try at this.”
I stared at the etherium bead. It rolled across my palm to the crystal of sangrite, then flowed over and around it, encasing the sangrite in metal. I then refined one end of the etherium to shape it into the sharpest, stiffest point that raw etherium could hold. That accomplished, I used the fingertips of my left hand to locate an intercostal space to the right of my sternum just above my heart, then brought my sangrite-filled needle there and put its point to my skin, the needle angling to aim behind my sternum.
“Um, Tezz? You mind telling me what you’re doing?”
“In a moment.”
“Seriously. What are you doing?”
“This.” With a sharp movement of my right thumb, I stabbed myself in the chest, driving the whole needle in as far as I could push.
“Ow! Damn it!”
“My thoughts exactly,” I gasped. The pain crushed my breath away-like being stabbed with a rusty gate latch. Must have inadvertently nicked a rib. “But… so far so good…”
“You say that like it’s going to get worse.”
“We met only days ago, yet it seems you’ve known me all your life.” I closed my eyes and wasted some few seconds settling my mind and summoning my concentration; a mistake in this part of the operation might kill us both.
Even if I did it right, it might kill us both.
I hate improvising.
I found the needle with my mind, and I induced tiny projections of etherium to stick out from its front end, then slowly creep along it to the rear, while at the same time causing smooth etherium to flow forward from the rear to become new projections-like a conveyor belt in reverse, or the linked-chain treads of a heavily armored vehicle. In sum, the effect was not unlike the scales of a snake. The threads gave the needle purchase on my surrounding tissue, so that it could pull itself slowly-agonizingly slowly-toward my aortal arch.
“Oh, crap,” Doc moaned. “Oh, you bastard. You do this to me on purpose-I apologized for your balls, didn’t I?”
“This is not…” Speech was difficult through the clench of my jaw. The needle felt bigger than my thumb and as though it was using fishhooks to claw its way through my chest. “… punishment. If even a tiny gap opens in the casing… and blood touches the sangrite…”
“I get it. Ka-boom. Splat. How in the hells did you talk me into this?”
“By not… telling you about it…”
