Night-Time Wandering

Marlo lay awake. The cubicle he was in was small, with a hammock stretched from corner to corner. There was a desk to his right, a cabinet by his feet, empty shelves by his head and a printer to his left. Papers were spread across the floor, records of finances for an organisation that wasn’t even real. Occasionally the printer would spit out another, which would drift down to join the pile accumulating at the bottom. Nothing was on, the lights were dim, and he couldn’t hear anything, save for the occasional clang of metal from the other side of the floor. But Marlo couldn’t sleep. Not even close.

“Fuck.” He said, out loud to the quiet, and the dark. “She was right. I am thinking about it.”

CLANG! The sound of metal being struck rang out.

What the hell was he doing here? Why was he the one who had been given this memory? What the hell did he do now, for all of eternity? He’d asked these questions before and didn’t have an answer then, just like he didn’t now. As it turned out, neither did anyone else. Just dumb luck. A one in a hundred million chance that his afterlife would be such hell. DVIN were never going to stop chasing him. Ever. And those stories of what had happened to the others were making him even more scared.

CLANG!

Yoki, with pieces, literally punched out of each other. Harlo, shot, and Giuseppe torn apart. Marlo hadn’t known any of them, but if that had happened to random people, what would DVIN do to him? He couldn’t take that kind of thing. He wasn’t built to be some great rebel, liberating people and fighting evil conglomerates. Just being dead was shocking enough. And seemingly, none of these people around were either. None of them seemed to actually know what they were doing at all. They kept mentioning some greater movement, and Wimund, as the leader had even communicated with it, but surely if it existed, they must have had people who were better than them, who were the archetypal heroes. These guys were just an offshoot, the absolute bottom of the B team, a Z team if you would.

CLANG!

Though, would he fit in any better in a team that did act the way he expected them to? They’d be actually out, fighting crimes and stuff. Getting in even more danger, which he’d be dragged into. Besides, these guys had saved him. Maybe he could get a lighter job here, managing their finances or something. That made him think of the call, and he got even angrier.

CLANG!

Leaving someone like that to die, on call, taking a role where you know people will look to you for help, and then ignoring them… it was heartless. When he remembered that, his face got hot with rage, and his gratitude dried up. Even if it was a possible fake, even if they didn’t actually give those services. To just stand there, listening to someone die, someone who knows that there was nothing waiting for them on the other side, and this was their last and only hope, to not even give them the kindness of talking to a fellow human… it was cruelty the likes of which Marlo had never seen. How the hell could they pretend to be better than DVIN and then do that? It was monstrous.

CLANG!

A mix of the rest he’d already got on the jellyfish and his emotions ensured there was no way he could sleep. He sat up and struggled to get out. His eyes widened as he lost his balance, and he fell out, onto the floor, sending documents flying everywhere. The papers softened his fall, but it still hurt, and he got up as quickly as possible. He knew Monticello was sleeping somewhere here and hoped the thud of his body hitting the ground, like a rock chucked into a riverbed, hadn’t woken him up. He got up, and snuck out, as quick and quiet as he could, not stopping until he stood once again beneath the electric hum of the corridor lights.

CLANG! Came the noise, yet again, from a door all the way down on the right. He ignored it and made for the room he remembered the call coming from. He didn’t know what he was going to do. Maybe he’d just sit there all night, just in case someone else called in. he felt like he had to. If another person like that called, and he was asleep… he wouldn’t even entertain the idea. He tried the doorknob. It was locked. He tried again. Still locked. One more twist. Astonishingly, still locked.

He got down on his knees and looked at the doorknob. There was a keyhole, but, obviously, he had no key. He tried sticking a nail in, but an electric shock coursed from the hole, and zapped him, making him yelp and jump back. He looked around quickly, sure someone would hear his expletive, then stopped. What did it matter if someone came? They couldn’t tell him what to do. How was this hurting anyone? Well, it had just hurt him, but besides that. He’d be careful, he’d make sure that if someone did call in, they were really who they said they were. And then… what?

He couldn’t go to them. He would if he could, regardless of the danger of him getting caught but… how could he? Sure there might have been a station attached to this building, however many hundreds of floors above. But he had no idea how to get there. Could he give them directions to fix their own issues, glean something from all the fake documents lying around? Maybe. But what if it was all fake? What if there was nothing at all useful that he could find?

“If you pick up to try and help, you’ll be breaking the law.” Those words echoed in his head. Marlo stopped. Giving himself up, just to help someone who might not be real. He could see it now, the voice on the other side of the phone going dead, the door being broken down. God knew what would come in, what kind of horridly augmented soldiers, armoured to the teeth, literally. Marlo’s head swam with images of red visors, metallic teeth, gun barrel arms, sharp blades, and pulsing pistons, all designed to capture him. But worse still, what if they didn’t know he was here? What if they sent another of those terrifying ravens?

Marlo remembered how petrified he had felt when that thing had arrived. It had burst into existence from nowhere and shredded through that carriage like it wasn’t even there. Those dozens of chilling eyes, the rank oil smell radiating off it, the ear-splitting screeches. The deep, terrible knowledge in his gut that he couldn’t possibly fight or escape something like that. Fight or flight both failed, so he had simply frozen. Were it not for the others, he would have been turned to paste by that beak. That was the first time he had truly felt like his life had been in danger, not just in Limbo, but in his entire existence. The train had been pure instinct, adrenaline pushing him out of the driver’s seat and throwing the brake lever out the window. The Raven had been very different. He was utterly powerless. The mere thought of seeing that again…

CLANG! He jerked out of it. He couldn’t open the door. There was no way. Impossible. Even if he could, no one was calling, so there was no need. With only a mild tremble, he got up. he tried a few more doors, out of interest, but they were all locked too. Thankfully, no other doorknobs shocked him. He was just about to turn back to try to work that infernal hammock again when he came to a stop in front of the door the metal clanging from. He remembered Nessa’s tears, flowing down the cheeks of a face that was remaining stony just to benefit others. She had just lost half her friends, people she had seen join after her presumably. Perhaps she had recruited them, like how she had technically recruited him. He sighed, shook his head, and tried the door. This one swung inwards.

The second it opened; he was hit with a blast of heat. He staggered, shocked. The air felt thick, heavy, and dry, and the entire room had an orange tint. As his eyes adjusted to this, aching in the baking air, he saw that this was not one room, but three, the inner walls knocked down to make one complex. The heat, and the yellow-tinted air, was the result of the gigantic forge about ten or so metres across from him. It was squat and round, like an enormous teapot. Behind the thick, reinforced glass set into the closed metal door, flames crackled, licking at the walls like they were trying to escape.

To his left, there was a collection of desks, placed together, covered in electronics. Soldering and welding tools lay side by side, next to a pile of motherboards that lay unattended. A saw set into the table sat next to a series of lathes and sanders and a pressing machine, along with a few barrels, filled with varied oils and water. On the right side, amongst the wreckage of the wall that used to separate the two rooms, there were cabinets, the fronts of their shelves gutted to reveal rows and rows of test tubes. They were all filled with chemicals of varied types, all kinds of colours glinting in the darkness. There were cooling coils running up and down the walls, counteracting the terrible heat of the room. Next to them was a similarly butchered wardrobe, filled with clothing of varied states of completion. There were suits, hoodies, jeans, medieval tunics, robes that looked almost clerical, and all kinds of other articles of clothing Marlo didn’t recognise. Many had a web of wiring running along their inside, which glowed faintly, even through the infernal mire.

Then Marlo saw what was behind the wardrobe. Next to it, shoved in the corner as if it was unimportant, and thus should take up as little space as possible was a bed, small and unmade. The sheets were spread across the floor, and the pillow was thrown against the wall. It looked filthy like it hadn’t been used in a long time. In front of that, a small, square table with some personal effects and scraps. They looked mostly like junk, cogs, and rags, and the majority was taken up by blueprints, crinkled, and faded from the height. Above it, hanging from racks nailed into the walls were cybernetics without a body to be included in. Metal arms, legs, or more subtle things, braces to be placed along a spine, reinforcements for ribs, things that looked like they could unfold into wings, blades, or guns, and many more he couldn’t possibly guess the purpose of. The entire place had been turned into a workshop, where comfort was an afterthought, and everything was dedicated to producing more augmentations, the space optimised for creation and customisation. And right there in the centre, hammering away at a red-hot piece of iron on a large, flat anvil, was Nessa, face set with deep concentration, hammer rising and falling in a steady rhythm.

She turned as he entered, and her face broke into a wide grin “Hi!”

“Hello.” Marlo said, hesitantly, still looking around. “Just dropping by. Sorry, I would have knocked but I assumed you couldn’t hear me over the…” he gestured around him “raging inferno.”

“It is quite ravaging on the eardrums.” Nessa agreed “I am certain a lesser person would go deaf. For that reason, you should likely not spend too long in here.”

“Oh. I mean I’ll go if you want-”

“Do not do that! Whatever gave you that idea?”

Marlo sighed “Couldn’t imagine. So why are you still working so late? At least, I assume it’s late. This city seems to always be dark.”

“It always is. But yes it is quite late. So late it has in fact, become early.” Nessa said, returning to hammering, adjusting the large rectangle of metal with tongs, and beating it into a more cylinder-like shape.

“Can’t sleep?” Marlo looked around for a chair, gave up, and sat on the floor. The carpet had been stripped long ago, and the boards underneath were unpleasantly warm, but at least the air was a modicum less sweltering.

“Oh, I do not sleep. That is where the bad times are.” Her smile was unwavering, but something about her eyes made Marlo quite uncomfortable. Her hammering kept up the slow, steady ringing, loud clangs beating out every few seconds.

“Bad times?”

“I believe you call them nightmares.” Nessa reached down and grabbed the cylinder firmly in a pair of tongs. She lifted it up, walked over to the forge door, and stopped. “I do not remember much of my life. But each time I dream, I see naught but flames, tearing at me, trying to break me down.”

She ripped open the door handle, and astonishingly, it got even hotter. Marlo threw up his arms at the sudden haze of sparks and cinders that blasted forth and could see Ness between them, a darker shape framed against the fire.

“Sometimes, I feel like it is about to swallow me up, and there is naught I can do but starve it of fuel, refrain from sleep until I feel ready to return and battle it again.”

She stabbed the metal into the fire “I can control flames here. I can keep them trapped in my forge, use them to shape my creations. Flames out here, I may stop at any time. I suspect the flames I dealt with when I was alive were a lot harder to control. Clearly, I lacked the ability. Not anymore. I am very proficient.”

She turned the metal over a few times and hauled it back out. She slammed the door closed, cranked the handle closed, and took it back to the anvil while behind her the flames clawed at the door, like beasts trying to reach her. She placed it back down and started hammering it again.

“Are you… holding up alright?” Marlo asked, pulling out his shirt and blowing down it to try and circulate some cooler air. It wasn’t really working, and almost squelched when he let go and it returned to his skin.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean… I don’t mean to be insensitive, and if you don’t want to talk about it that’s fine, but… you just lost a lot of people. You didn’t seem to be holding up well earlier.”

“Indeed. I was. But, lo and behold,” she gestured to the racks of weapons adorning the walls “they are immortalised in my work. Yoki’s blades, painstakingly remade. Giuseppe’s cannon, identical down to the last bolt. And Harlo’s mask, his likeliness forever immortalised in metal. They are merely decorative of course. Even a being as great as I could not make them all as functional as they once were in such short a time span. But they are with me now, guides that will aid me in my forge. And one day, I will create versions that do them properly. I had to make honorary pieces that were both accurate and quick so that I could trap some of their essence before it was gone for good.”

Marlo remembered the fact that anyone who died down here was obliterated. Maybe this was Nessa’s way of coping with her loss.

“I see. That’s… quite beautiful in a way-”

“Should you die, what piece would you like?”

“Huh?”

“I make it a point to ask everyone this. And for yourself, why your likelihood of death is quite higher, higher than any of theirs was. So it seems purely practical to ask you what you wish for, while I still can.”

“Uh…” Marlo wiped his forehead and found it drenched. “It’s a lot to spring on someone, especially in this heat. You’ve got to give me some time.”

“I shall, though too much would be-”

“Yeah, yeah.” Marlo sighed and shook himself. He had to change the subject. He came in here to avoid thinking like that. “Uh… tell me about them. The others that I missed.”

Nessa finished hammering, and with the shape now decidedly more cylindrical, took it over to a barrel, and stabbed it in. thick grey smoke bubbled over the edge, and spread across the floor, rolling over itself in a thick cloud of miasma that had Marlo hastily get up to avoid having half his body submerged in the stuff.

“Giuseppe was a seaman from Venice in the fifteenth century. I believe he died in border skirmishes with papal states. He had a lot of heated debates with Boss over religion because of that, but he was a lovely person. Always cheerful, full of life. He had one joke…” She span the metal around in the barrel thinking. “Oh yes! A bear walks into a bar and says “I’ll have a whiskey and… coke.” The bartender asks: “why the big pause?”” She drew it out, and plunged it triumphantly into the next barrel, and yelled, with gleaming eyes “He mauls him!”

The fumes were making Marlo feel ill. “Ha.” He said weakly. Nessa paused.

“Wait. No. That was my version of the joke. I cannot remember his. Either way, he was funny. I will miss his jokes. Harlo was a citizen of the country that you called Russia, from the eighteenth century. He was kept captive by the tsar for his diminutive stature and committed suicide in the midst of one of his dwarf weddings to try and degrade the occasion. From what I can tell from accounts of others, his effect on the wedding was minimal.”

“Wow that’s… that’s sad.”

“I suppose. But after a while, you become desensitised to such things. Suicides usually occur to those unhappy with their lives, and this is a new life, so I merely see it as a forced change of setting. Even for those unhappy with their body or their mind, coming here leaves them both behind. We are nothing more than souls here. I have seen the worst deaths imaginable in my thirteen hundred years here, and most people who suffered them seem to get over it.”

Marlo highly doubted that. It wouldn’t surprise him if why Nessa was this way was at least partly her demise. But this was surprising levels of reality awareness from her, and he didn’t want to ruin it and send her into another spiral. “If you say so.”

“He was a very wise man. He taught me many things, despite our great size difference. He always knew how to use the enemy’s perceptions of him, and the rest of us, against them. I will miss our talks.” She smiled sadly. “He was a man with a very unique mindset, and I will do my best to emulate it in the future. And as for Yoki…”

She paused, staring down into the barrel. Marlo could imagine the distorted reflection staring back at her, shimmering waves slashing apart her face. “Yoki was the protector of her village, a small northern Ainu settlement from the thirteenth century. She talked often about how helpless she had felt, part of a small gang of lone girls, armed with nothing but the knowledge of their home, holding out against invaders with traps and illusions, warping their minds with fog and sparks, attacking swiftly and silently, bleeding supply lines and assassinating captain in the night, fighting with shuriken, black eggs, caltrops, nooses, naginatas, and bows. She even had me remake her mask, which she sketched beautifully.”

She pointed to the wall, and as she dunked the cylinder into a new barrel once again, Marlo followed her motion. There, hung up in the top right corner of the wall was a wooden mask. It was light in colour, with black circles on the cheeks. False tusks protruded from either side of the mouth hole, pointing the opposite way to the long-tapered chin. The eyeholes were small and seemed to look down on him in distaste. Built into the forehead was a wide-brimmed hat, made of straw placed around a wooden lattice that looked like horns, probably meant to deflect snow and rain. It was unnerving, so Marlo was sure it must have been very effective if seen at night through fog. He shuddered.

“Of course, eventually her gang was caught. I believe, they were all thrown off of the mountain peaks they defended so vehemently. Yoki was tossed last, so survived the fall by hitting the broken bodies of her sisters. Terribly injured, she dragged herself all night to warn her village, to find it already ransacked. She said the shock killed her on the spot!”

She shook her head and smiled “It is okay though. It is our personal project to go out whenever we can and try and find someone who was from that village. We have finally found a few leads, so I am certain that on our next excursion we can-”

“Nessa.” Marlo said, gently. She stopped.

“Oh. You are right. There will be no more excursions.” Standing by that barrel, facing away from him, she suddenly looked much smaller.

“This kind of thing takes a while to hit you fully.” Marlo says “It comes in waves, and sometimes you get a period in between when you feel fine. Believe me, I’m dealing with similar feelings right now.”

Nessa didn’t say anything. Marlo sighed “I mean… your excursions don’t have to stop. What if you find someone she wanted to speak to? Then you could talk to her about them, know more-”

“It was for her. She wanted to apologise. I do not know if an apology in her stead would truly count. I will need to ruminate on this.”

“Yeah. Even if sleeping is too much for you, just putting your tools down might help?” Marlo took a step forwards, then stopped. “I’m sorry. I don’t know you enough to be offering advice like this. It’s not helpful when you’re dealing with this kind of thing, to-”

“I used to think… no, I still do think that I have a small heart.” Ness drew the piece of metal out of the last barrel. “Not physically, physically it will likely be twice the size of yours. But I could only ever fit a few people in it. Try as I might, once I had a certain amount, I could not force anymore in. What is worse, if I lose one who has been granted access inside, it feels like they take a portion with them. There have been times where I have feared one day I will lose everyone and be left with no heart at all.” She set the saw set in the table going, and it whirred, almost silently. Everything else in this workshop had been familiar to Marlo, but this was glowing blue and as quiet as the humming lights up above. “But then, occasionally, I meet someone unique. Someone who I can call a friend. They can slip into my heart no problem. And as they do, the strangest thing happens. It increases in size. Not by a lot, and not very frequently at all. Most people are frankly abominable, and I quite enjoy watching them die. But folks like Monticello, like Boss, like my friends who I lost today, like you, even.” She looked at him as she sliced the metal into pieces with the saw and smiled “You make me happy. You make me want to keep going.”

She turned off the saw and stacked all the pieces, as Marlo stood, stunned. She grabbed one, and held it against a sander, setting it to spin. The sparks flew but stopped just before hitting her, outlining her in a fiery corona. “I promise that this creation here will be worthy of the wills my friends have left in me. They will protect you, and the cybernetic I have in mind will make your stay here a lot safer. I will do every in my power to ensure you enjoy your time with us. Because you are my friend, and I must treasure those.”

Despite everything, despite the atrocious day he had, despite his terrifyingly uncertain future, despite the upheaval of everything he’d ever known, despite the knowledge that things would never, and could never, be the same again, Marlo was oddly touched. “Wow. Thank you Nessa.”

She smiled, spinning the metal in her hand. “Anything for my friends.”

Marlo didn’t care that it was boiling in this room anymore. He stretched and looked around “Alright. How do I help?”

Nessa stopped. She stared at him. “Do not do that.”

“No?”

“No. You would be atrocious.”

If Marlo’s cheeks could get redder, they would. “Would I?”

“Absolute dogshit. Utterly devastate my plans. You would also likely injure yourself, and I would be blamed.”

“Nothing even small that I could-”

“Even the most minute involvement, would destroy this, and mean that you went out tomorrow undefended. Besides,” She reached under the table with the saw, and pulled out a piece of metal with five prongs, asymmetrical, and attached to a series of metal sections which bent and flexed, allowing for curving, undulating movement, like a silver serpent. A metallic arm, not made to replace a missing limb, but an entirely new body part. “It is a surprise.”

“So you want me gone?”

“If you can bear dragging yourself away from me.” From anyone else that would be a sardonic joke, but it was a genuine point of concern for Nessa. Marlo laughed to himself and dabbed at his forehead with his shirt “I think I can manage that. I’ll see you in the morning. Try and get some rest, of some sort.”

“No.” Nessa said simply, moving on to sand another piece.

Marlo stepped outside, shaking his head, and shut the door behind him. This corridor now felt glorious, air-conditioned, and refreshing. He grabbed a cup from the water machine by the door, and as he drank draught after draught, looked in the room where he’d received the dire news of his bounty from Wimund earlier. It was mostly dark, but he could see the slumbering shape of Wimund, hunched over a desk in the far corner, papers spread across it, and pen still in hand. He smiled, and after a few more swigs, walked back to his sleeping cubicle. By the time he had managed to sneak back inside and struggle into his hammock, the clanging had started up again. This time, however, he found it rhythmic, almost soothing, and as his eyes closed, he drifted off to sleep, thinking about Nessa, and smiling.