I wanted to fight, she admitted. Wanted to break him.
But none of that mattered right now. The anger was just another symptom of her disorder, like the nightmares. She needed to focus on the cause. The vector…
She returned her attention to the sample in her Petri dish. She couldn’t shake the sense that the black gruel was staring right back at her. That was ridiculous, of course. It was only a food additive, like countless others that had passed through her lab for testing and approval. She always approved them. The plant’s manager had made that requirement perfectly clear when she took the job. Quantity over quality! Potton Vitapax supplied the city’s Delta-class labourers with cheap synth-proteins, keeping millions just above the starvation line. That precarious swathe of humanity wasn’t picky about its food, only its absence.
‘We keep ’em topped up so they don’t start chowin’ down on each other.’ Her new boss had winked conspiratorially. ‘Or on us!’
Chel suspected even that crude mission statement wasn’t strictly true. It was rumoured that Potton’s base stock, the euphemistically named ‘Vita Ephemera’, wasn’t entirely synthetic in nature. The grey sludge was delivered via an underground pipeline and funnelled into the plant’s vast network of vats, where it was refined, flavoured, coloured then finally packaged for distribution. There were countless varieties under the company’s brand, but the essence was always the same. Chel sometimes wondered what a molecular analysis of that raw gloop would reveal, but that led to questions about what lay at the other end of the pipeline, which conjured possibilities she didn’t want to dwell upon.
Dismissing the unwanted train of thought, Chel returned her attention to the sample on her desk. VLG-01. The compound’s code name was bland, yet it had piqued her curiosity immediately. The ‘01’ designated it as the first formula from a new supplier, which was unprecedented in her experience. Potton’s additives were always sourced from the same handful of companies, with most products numbering in the high thousands. Who was this ‘VLG’?
The toxicology analysis had come back negative, unusually so in fact. No traces of carcinogens or impurities at all, unlike many of the borderline poisons she’d rubber-stamped for her paymasters. Suspecting an error, she had repeated the tests several times, always with the same results. The compound was clean. And yet she’d held off approving it. Results be damned, she didn’t trust that tarry slime. She’d felt a visceral aversion the moment she saw it, which had intensified with every test it evaded.
‘What are you hiding?’ she murmured. For better or worse, she’d uncovered part of the answer already, though it raised more questions than it settled. The compound had psychoactive properties, though nothing had shown up in the chem-tests. It had taken a more direct approach to unravel that particular secret…
Four nights ago she had administered three undiluted drops with a pipette, directly to her tongue, forgoing the customary infusion wafers or solutions employed by the company’s indentured tasters. It was a flagrant violation of protocol, never mind good sense. Indeed she couldn’t say why she’d done it. Part of it was her antipathy towards the sample – an unwillingness to let the damn thing beat her – but that wasn’t the whole of it. At some level it hadn’t been a decision at all.
I had to try it.
Chel shuddered, remembering the rancid sweetness that had infused her mouth, like the pulp of a rotten fruit. And beneath that, something other – a quality that had no parallel with any natural flavour, yet one she’d recognised in a heartbeat, like a buried memory that was eager to be exhumed.
We… know… you…
She frowned, unable to tell whether the slurred thought had been her own or a reverberation from something outside, slipping through her mind like an intruder. As she floundered, the liquid in the dish moved. Ripples spiralled from its centre, shaping the ooze into concentric ridges that persisted as the liquid flowed through them. Chel held her breath as a complex geometry of spines and petals coagulated before her eyes. It looked like a glistening black orchid.
Or a mandala, she realised, picturing the graffiti she’d seen earlier. This was another manifestation of that arcane form, but rendered in living fluid it captured the reality in a way paint never could.
The reality?
Chel leaned closer, fascinated. The liquid couldn’t actually be moving, though it had moved her to perceive the effect. This had to be another hallucination, but that didn’t make it meaningless. No, there was a message here. She felt sure of it.
As… within…
Once again she was struck by a sense of disconnection, as if the thought weren’t hers.
‘So without,’ she whispered, intuitively completing the verse.
With creeping slowness the mandala flexed within the dish, extending itself into a quivering corona of thorns. Reaching for her… Chel’s hand answered of its own accord, snatching up the container and bringing it to her mouth without recourse to thought. The flavour was exactly as she remembered it.
Distilled darkness.
Potton Vitapax was a sprawling complex of blocky buildings encrusted with pipes and cooling towers. A chain-link fence encircled it, topped with coils of razor wire. The Needleman walked its length patiently, looking for a way inside. It could smell its prey within, ripe for revelation.
Will you, won’t you prick out the lights and bleed the night anew? The ancient rhyme spun through the hunter’s mind as it searched. Whenever the holy fugue awoke it those words were waiting, vibrant with power. Will you, won’t you seek out the sighted and slash their little lies away?
Finally an opportunity presented itself. A burnt-out truck hunkered alongside a stretch of fence, its pallet piled high with ruptured barrels. In a healthy metropolis such a carcass wouldn’t be left to rot on the streets, but Carceri’s industrial quarter
