“I’m telling you, it’s not just an urban legend, Sur Dar Lok was down in sublevel eighteen and heard something being dragged around! He said he looked around the corner of the access tunnel. Saw a two-legged monster pulling a body bag through a hatch into the restricted areas!”
“And I think he was probably sniffing insulation solvent instead of replacing the Axiom-damn pump bearings. I’m having the super run a diagnostic on his O2 sensors just to be on the safe side.”
After a lot of discussion and a night of pleasure sharing with Vael, I felt sufficiently prepared to accept Lael’s offer. The next morning I packed two big bags; my Dive bag was filled with all my daily essentials, clothing, and loose bits of Dive gear, and a second bag was packed with my armor. My partisan was awkwardly sized, so I had to wear it strapped.
I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t feeling a lot of apprehension about leaving Vael’s apartment to head up to X-1 for a few months. Between the class dynamics, the surgery for biotech, and the training itself.
But I knew I needed it, desperately, and I wasn’t likely to get a better offer that didn’t come with significantly bigger downsides, costs, or contracts. Vael either didn’t know or wasn’t sharing what the games would entail, but she did try to give me a few pointers about what to expect with her mother.
“Although she has been on Earth longer than most other Sul’vari, she spends most of her time off-world Diving, and the century she’s spent here is a tiny fraction of her life. You should expect that she’s going to be very forward, maybe even pushy about you adopting our culture during your time there. Don’t feel afraid to push back when you feel it’s warranted. My mother doesn’t respect people who aren’t willing to hold their own ground.”
Lael intimidated me a little, but having thought about it on the taxi ride, I’d realized that it wasn’t her power that I found intimidating, but her knowledge. There were a lot of powerful people, entities, and organizations in the Ark, and I’d spent my entire life either avoiding being stepped on or finding ways to mitigate the impact of being just a cog or a statistic.
I knew what it was like to be a fly on the wall in a city full of predators of all shapes and tactics.
What I struggled to even begin to grasp was what it must be like to be thousands of years old. She must have forgotten enough random tidbits over the years to fill entire server racks. What would it be like, not to have children, which was something that I struggled to parse, but to have hundreds of them.
My hand drifted to my necklace, and I ran my fingertips over the items I’d strung together while I stared out the window of the vehicle. My ride was a plain, ubiquitous auto-cab, just another rolling box on wheels. Advertisements were playing on the media system, but my attention was tuned to the view of X-1.
I arrived at the estate while it was still fairly early in the morning, having made good time despite somewhat heavy inter-level traffic. Grabbing my two bags and my polearm, I stepped up to touch the security system’s interface when the door opened.
She probably can sense me from blocks away; go figure.
Lael was as scantily-clad as she typically was, once again wearing little more than a loincloth, chestwrap, and jewelry. She had a warm smile on her face and welcomed me in immediately.
I dropped my gear at the spot she indicated, and she proceeded to give me a full tour of the estate. It was crazy, and I saw more than I had in my first visit. There were levels below the ground floor, and the entire place was filled with more rooms of various form and function than I could even hope to keep track of at the moment.
There was a full gym, an armory that reminded me of the walls of House of Lorhara, an indoor shooting range, and a small spa facility with a sauna and hot tub. The upper floors were divided: one for guest use, and one for family use. She could have probably housed a couple dozen family members, and everything was furnished, but empty. It was a little uncanny, really. There was Lael’s room, where I’d slept the first time I’d been here, with her things in it just as she’d left them. The door across the hall from Lael’s was closed, and I didn’t have to ask to know whose room it was.
I wasn’t sure if Lael had this place built herself, or if she bought it from someone else. There was a nursery. Half a dozen bedrooms sized for younger kids who didn't exist. Seeing them all standing empty and untouched stuck with me longer than I expected it to. Something to come back to when I had more mental bandwidth to dedicate to unpacking.
There were a couple of people employed by the estate to tend to things, but by and large, the place felt very hollow, despite being clearly lived in and well-loved.
After the tour wrapped up and my stuff was taken away by… somebody, I was left sitting in what I’d describe as a cross between a trophy room and a lounge. Lael said she had to make a call and to expect someone shortly, and had left me to go around as I pleased.
So naturally, I went to the place that was full of severed and mounted monster heads, and what I was pretty sure were artifacts ranging from ‘fairly exotic’ to ‘priceless.’ The lounge had a number of objects floating in the air along recessed wall shelves, each ringed by a blue light. There were more downstairs in one of the rooms off the armory, too. I walked over to take a closer look at them, because I wanted to verify what my senses were telling me.
A ring of elaborate and intricate scrollwork at the bottom of each of the spaces on the shelf glowed with the same blue light, and sure enough, what my aura sense had been telling me appeared to be true. These objects floating in the air weren’t just monster part trophies; they were still alive. Held in some kind of suspension, but not any kind of technology that I recognized at all. Typically, these sorts of things were stored in some kind of liquid and/or stored at cryogenic temperatures, from my limited experience consisting of one bad run-in with Veris biotech and a bunch of fictional films.
Here they were just… floating, still as a statue. Horns and a tongue, several different kinds of eyeballs, a few things that were clearly some kind of internal organ, a tooth, and so on. There were several dozen of them in total, just here, and more in the lower levels. My tail was up near eye level, and was doing the not-sniffing around thing. It approached one of the monster parts, and I heard a humming buzz. I tried to will it back, but it crept closer.
A moment later, a searing jolt of electricity or something shot out of one of the displays it was sniffing, and a sharp crack followed. My tail thudded into the floor, limp and twitching, and I could smell a foul burning odor in the air. I looked down to see a scorch mark on the tip of a mandible, with a visible chunk blasted out of the bone-like material.
I could feel that it hurt, but in a gone-numb sort of way.
“Serves you right, you greedy thing. That’s not ours, and this isn’t a lunch buffet,” I admonished my tail as it twitched back to life. It kept itself back down near the floor behind me after that and acted sullen, or possibly just lethargic.
A few minutes of observing ancient-looking martial weapons later, I heard the telltale sound of Lael’s claws clicking on the stone floors of the estate approaching. She entered with another Sul’vari woman in tow, whom she introduced as her lawyer, Min.
Min was carrying what looked like a cross between a briefcase and a large toolbox, and Lael gestured for me to take a seat on a plush couch. Min took a seat right next to me and placed her leatherbound box-thing on the low table in front of us.
Lael took a seat in an armchair to the side, and crossed one leg over the other, regarding me with a coy grin on her lips. Her toe rings quietly clinked together as she flexed and stretched her dangling foot.
“Min is here to assist us with formalizing our agreement, Kiera. Once this is done, we can visit a friend of mine to get started with some things, as we discussed.”
I cleared my throat. “You mean the uh, biotech?”
Lael nodded.
“I figured that would come later, like, after I’d earned it, or whatever.”
Lael chuckled. “Grafts that will help you grow would work best if granted early, no?”
I couldn’t really think of a good rebuttal, so I glanced over at Min.
She was wearing an expensive-looking dress with a short skirt, one that seemed tailor-fit to a figure that was much more shapely than I was used to seeing on most Sul’vari I’d met. The pale gold color of the dress contrasted nicely with the rich purple color of her skin and her red eyes.
“So paperwork? A contract?” I asked her.
Her eyes turned up at the corners, and she replied, “Of a sort, sure,” in flawless English.
Uh…
I looked over to Lael for an explanation, while Min leaned forward to open her box.
“We will celebrate your bonded status with a traditional practice of marking your body with the bond.”
“You never mentioned anything about any tattoos; I’m not sure I want–”
Min let out a short, giggly laugh. “It is not like a Human tattoo; it is felt, not seen.”
Lael smiled and nodded to Min, and I was left feeling like I was getting into something I wasn’t sure I was okay with.
“Lael, I want to know more before I sign or… get jabbed, or whatever. What exactly do you mean by bond mark?”
Lael clicked her tongue and made a low sound in her throat. “A bond marking is a type of construct laid into the flesh. I will pay the cost to make it, and you will pay a small amount of your own mana to maintain it. It grants benefits to you, and to me, too, to honor our agreement.”
Min was pulling out some arcane-looking devices from her box, including a short metal rod with symbols covering every square centimeter of its surface, some crystals, and a few small glass bottles.
“What benefits? And what do you mean by honoring our agreement? Does it like… enforce the terms?”
I agreed to work for her, but I’m not sure about having some kind of alien collar put on me.
“In your case, Min will be constructing an array that will help you sense and tap mana better than you currently do. And nothing so crude! It will tell me if you are not being honest with me, but only with the work you have agreed to.”
“So it what, changes color if I try to screw you? And it helps me with my abilities?” I asked Lael.
She rocked her head from side to side for a moment, then nodded. “This is close, yes.”
I chewed on that for a second. Every answer she gave me was reasonable. That itself was almost the problem. Nothing she said was actually wrong, yet some old, stubborn part of me was still standing in the doorway of this deal, arms crossed, and refusing to fully enter.
I didn’t have a better option. I didn’t even have a counter-offer. I just had a bad feeling I couldn’t turn into an actual argument.
I let out a sigh. “Okay,” I said, and hated myself a little for how easily it came out. “Fine. I’m here to study, and I gave you my word that I’d take it seriously.”
Lael beamed with a toothy grin, and Min reached over and handed a transparent crystal to Lael.
I could feel what she was doing with it almost as clearly as I could see it when she held the crystal in her hand and charged it with her mana. When she was done, it was glowing with the same color as her eyes. Min took the crystal back and attached it to one end of her ornate rod.
“I will need to concentrate while I work, so please don’t interrupt until I’m done,” Min told me, then asked for my right hand.
She took my hand and studied my arm briefly, then picked up her rod. I saw that the end without the crystal attached to it came to a fine tip, but it didn’t look sharp. Over the next several minutes, I sat and watched her work, and it was a surprisingly pleasant experience.
She alternated between pressing the tip against my skin somewhat firmly in specific points along my palm, the back of my hand, and right forearm, and doing light brush strokes in intricate patterns. It didn’t leave a mark besides some brief redness where it was pressed more firmly. The drawing she did might have tickled if she didn’t have a steady and deliberate hand.
While I couldn’t see what she was doing, I could absolutely feel it. Lines were being laid down on top of my circuit, and they connected to my circuit and the locus in my hand where she worked. Lael’s mana felt tingly and electric to me, and the minute sparking sensations gave me goosebumps. As Min worked, what started off as an intricate, winding, and unbroken single line built up from the tips of my fingers to my elbow, and from there, additional layers were laid down on top of the first.
She worked quickly, and it took maybe half an hour in total. The whole experience reminded me of some kind of shady pseudo-medicine you heard about, where cracking joints and sticking needles in people cured their woes.
Right up until the point where Min finished her work. Then something switched on. My perception shifted, immediately, and totally, like someone had thrown a breaker somewhere behind my eyes.
What I had felt before was nebulous sensations of mana and its flow, blurry and indistinct, a cloud of aura emanating around and through a person. I could feel what Min was doing, and the glow-taste of the mana she was sticking into my arm, but now I could see the construct she’d made as clear as day on my skin. Or rather, in my skin and flesh.
Lael noticed my reaction, and it got a laugh out of her.
“It is good, is it not? Min is an artist with these things. Very skilled,” Lael said to me, while looking at her curvy lawyer. I got the impression there might be a thing between the two, but I couldn’t tell if it was romantic or just familiarity. It was hard to tell with Sul’vari.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“I feel like she just gave me glasses when I didn’t even know I needed them,” I admitted.
The two chatted for a few minutes while she packed her things back up, then left. Lael stood up and retrieved something from a nearby table, then brought it over to me.
It was a solid metal golden bangle, much like the kinds that she seemed to always be wearing. A simple interrupted loop with ball ends, but one that was surprisingly light for what I’d expected. She asked for my right hand, and put it around my wrist.
“The bond is only visible to Users; this is a physical representation of your station with the house. Keep this on always unless there is a need to remove it.”
There was a fine, flowing script etched into the surface of the bracelet, but it was Dar’vari, and I wasn’t remotely versed in the written language.
“If it’s just a name badge, why keep it on all the time?”
Her eyes met mine, and she held the gaze, much more serious now than the mirth from a moment before. “My house has enemies, as all houses do. This is both a protection and a warning. It will open some doors, and close others, but it marks you as someone who is not a pet or toy. Do you understand?”
It’s a Sul’vari color block, got it.
I nodded to her. “I do; we have a similar thing back home.”
“Good. Shall we go visit my friend and discuss your grafts?”
I swallowed, then nodded once more.
She just smiled and took my hand into hers.
***
I was expecting to have gone to some kind of boutique clinic, or surgery parlour. What I got instead was seemingly the residence of someone who lived the equivalent of a few blocks away. Another Sul’vari–I got the impression that Lael mostly interacted with her own species–who shared a personal taste greeting with Lael upon arrival.
She was a doctor of sorts who specialized in the extraction, manipulation, and implantation of xeno tissues. After a brief consultation and examination of my tail, Lael had picked out a handful of things, and I was given the choice of a few things to pick from with the remaining capacity I had available.
I didn’t begin to understand some of the terminology the doctor was using, and she did a fairly good job of being patient with me and explaining things. It seemed that there was a “responsible way” of utilizing biotech, which involved limiting the amount of alien tissue you were sticking into someone based on their current ability to withstand it.
Cybernetics had similar concepts and phenomena, and I drew parallels to what I was familiar with. In addition to being increasingly taxing and demanding on the body it was installed into, cyberware also had a strong correlation with certain kinds of mental illnesses. The people who went totally overboard sticking in as much chrome as they could tended to develop delusions of grandeur and various forms of dissociation.
From the sounds of things, biotech was harder on the body than it was on the mind, so to speak.
Lael’s selection of grafts was all very grounded and common-sense things for a prospective Diver to have, and she explained to me that most of them were things that Sul’vari were given as children and lived their entire lives with, which was rather eye-opening for me. Most cybernetics were age-restricted to 18 or older with any above-board clinic, and it was as much of a practical limitation as it was a liability issue. Bodies that might not be done developing didn’t tend to play nicely with largely immutable implants.
The list of things selected for me wasn’t things that I took any issue with having. There was an immunological enhancement that largely prevented most infections caused by alien life, which also slashed transmissibility down should you become infected anyway. Not having to risk dying of mutated alien ebola virus sounded like a good thing to me.
There was a gland that modified the body to become much more resistant to brain and spinal cord trauma, and it was typically paired with another gland that moderated your response to bodily trauma and shock.
There were two items that had to be grown in your body, rather than being stuck in fully-formed and operational. One was an organ system that boosted clotting and healing from injuries. The other was more dramatic, and the big thing that I had questions about.
It was explained in very simplistic terms to me as a symbiotic organism that would grow and largely replace most of my digestive tract. It was part of a layered defense against microorganisms, but more importantly, it was an organism that was both far more capable and efficient at digesting food than either of our two species was. I’d get a much better nutritional yield for eating the same food, and I’d be able to extract more value out of things that were only semi-digestible.
The digestive symbiote would cause some intestinal distress while it was growing, which would involve spending time near toilets, a restricted diet for a few days, and painkillers.
I wasn’t looking forward to that at all.
I had to stop and think about what it was that I wanted when I had the opportunity to choose something for myself.
I had the ability to heal myself with my User abilities, which would be getting a passive boost from some of the biotech additions. I still didn’t have any really good solutions for ranged attacks, but I’d been steadily warming up to the idea of fighting in close, so that wasn’t as much of a sore spot as it had been previously. There were some various monster chunks that could potentially give me more reach, but… there was a major downside.
It sounds stupid, maybe, but I didn’t want to have some kind of thing that looked like the ass-end of a porcupine growing from my arm.
For the first time in my life, I actually liked the way I looked, and I wasn’t keen on the idea of messing that up.
The other thing that jumped to mind was my frustrating lack of size and strength. While having to either use my tail or find something to step on to reach upper shelves was annoying, part of me got a distinct kind of tingle having to look up at Vael when we stood close to one another.
So I inquired about means of boosting my strength.
It turns out that there was a wide range of solutions to this problem, and Lael provided me with her advice on the matter, which helped narrow things down significantly.
There were things that were similar to muscle grafts, which offered immediate and significant increases in strength, with some downsides. Other options included engineered changes to individual body systems, like a graft that allowed the body to slowly replace the connective tissues and fibers.
In the end, I went with Lael’s suggestion, which looked like a lumpy blob of purple meat the size of a steamed dumpling. It came from a species of six-armed ape creatures and had been cloned and cultivated for centuries into what it was today. It wasn’t an organ for remodeling muscle structure; it was a developmental signalling organ, the alien version of a pituitary gland. The biotech version was carefully managed to give specific results, so you’d get highly optimized and managed signalling for muscular and skeletal growth and repair, and not six arms.
Hopefully. I don’t think I’d look good as some kind of human-spider mutant Kiera. The tail was more than enough as it was.
With everything selected, it was time for implantation. Having gone through this once before, I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t fighting my flight instincts as hard as I could. I was sweating, twitchy, and my stomach was clenched up into a ball of knots.
I was asked to strip down to my underwear and lie on my side on a clean table not too dissimilar from an exam table you’d find at a clinic. The doctor brought in a tray with bits of monster just… sitting on it. There was a faint shimmer in the air around the borders of the tray, which was the only indication that something else was keeping things safe and sanitary.
The doctor, for her part, was very professional in examining me. I felt a surge of self-consciousness as she was pressing her fingertips into my chest and abdomen. I had a whole lot of boob and a softness on my lower belly that sometimes showed when I had tight clothing on.
She seemed to pick up on my nervous fidgeting, because she smiled at me and told me that I was extremely healthy, as might be expected with my aspect, and that she’d be done with the procedure in just a few minutes.
I was craning my neck a little to watch what she was doing on my belly, partly because I was morbidly curious about the prospect of getting chunks of dead aliens stuffed in my gut, and partly because I wanted to see how a professional mana-medicine practitioner did their craft.
It was about the single most uncanny thing I think I’ve ever seen. She traced the tip of a claw down the upper side of my abdomen, and my skin just parted like she was opening a resealable plastic bag. Then she picked up the first graft–with her bare hands–and proceeded to just stick it in the hole in my side.
It didn’t bleed. It didn’t hurt, and I wasn’t numbed, either. I could feel the sides of the organ slipping past the slit she’d opened in me, and then–
I squeezed my jaw shut as a wave of sudden nausea surged in my throat. The sensation of her sticking her hand into my abdomen and sliding the organ into place just about caused me to vomit on the spot.
I think I would have taken it better if it had been agonizingly painful, but instead she was working like it was just another Tuesday for her.
I suppose it is, at that.
Most of the pieces went in my abdomen, with the exception of two, and she pinched the hole in my side together and the skin just resealed itself like nothing had happened. I could feel her working some form of a construct on me when she did it, and she executed a second one, which made my belly tingly, and that was that. She washed her hands in the sink and dried them off, then helped me to sit upright.
“I think that was maybe the strangest thing that I’ve ever had happen to me,” I told her.
“Hold your judgment until the procedure is complete!” she replied in a positive and perky voice.
Then she handed me a paper cup filled with water. I glanced at the cup, then back at her.
“The last two are taken orally,” she informed me.
I glanced down at the tray. Sitting on top was what I was damn near positive was a four-centimeter-diameter spherical egg, and the other item was a lump of what looked like twisted black roots that had been dipped in lubricant.
I managed to get both down without barfing everywhere, and that was an achievement I was fairly proud of.
“Eat a big, mana-dense meal, drink lots of clear fluids, and prepare to rest. You’ll feel a strong fatigue set in within the next two hours or so. You might feel tempted to use your healing to alleviate symptoms; you can, if you’d like, but you will likely worsen your symptoms in exchange for a lesser duration. Message if you have any complications, and be on the lookout for the following things…”
***
When I woke back up, it was dark outside, and checking my slate, it was the very early hours of the morning the next day. I’d been out for more than twelve hours straight, but despite being passed out for that long, I was still extremely groggy and very tired. Exhausted down to the bone, like I’d been running around the entire day rather than sleeping.
My head was fuzzy, and things had a bit of a dreamlike quality as I carefully slid out of Lael’s huge bed–she’d seemed mildly offended when I’d asked for a guest bedroom, so I’d conceded to staying in her room for now.
Lael was sleeping on her back, limbs akimbo, with one arm flopped over her head and her eyes flitting around under her eyelids. She was nude, of course, which I wasn’t going to dwell on at the moment. I made my way into a restroom down the hall and used the facilities with only the night lighting on. The estate was dark and quiet, and I wanted to get back to sleep soon.
The ravenous hunger in my belly was telling me I needed to make a pit stop for a midnight snack before returning to the warm embrace of delightfully soft bedding.
I padded barefoot down the staircase to the first floor, where the kitchen was, but the layout of the estate got jumbled in my head at some point, and I found myself back in the trophy room-slash-lounge. My feet had moved with a greater degree of certainty than my mind had.
My mouth was watering and my stomach growling as I wandered over to the shelves from earlier, now shining in the darkness with pale blue light. My tail was writhing around behind me as I crept closer, until I was right in front of the displays.
What looked like a white, pearlescent chunk of stone with thorny tendrils branching off of it hung frozen in the air and wreathed by the pretty blue glow. I went to reach out for it with my tail, then remembered the shock from earlier.
Of course, it’s warded, or something.
Instead, I reached forward with my hand slowly, waiting for the hum to sound, but nothing happened. A ring of blue light passed over my hand, and I gingerly pulled my snack back out of the field. As soon as it crossed the light barrier, it seemed to come to life, and the thorny branches turned into soft, mushy tentacles that wrapped around my fingers. The thing was the size of my fist, and started beating eerily similar to a heart in my hand as I brought it to my mouth.
It took a little effort, but I was able to stuff the entire thing into my mouth without biting down on it. Some distant part of my mind wondered how I was supposed to swallow something this size. The thing didn’t seem to mind. If anything, it wanted to be eaten as badly as I wanted to eat it. It squirmed and squeezed into a more tube-like shape, and little tendrils wrapped around my teeth so it could guide itself down.
It was salty, had a strong flavor that reminded me of vat meat, and was slightly sweet.
I was still hungry, so I stepped to the side and reached for the next item on the menu.
That’s when a blade of teal light came into my field of view and tapped against my neck.
I froze in place.
“Step away from the shelf, Kiera.” Lael’s voice, calm and level.
I did as she told me, then blinked several times.
“Lael?” I asked her, then looked around.
“Mhm.”
The fuzzy sleepiness I’d been feeling was yanked back from me like someone had thrown a pouch of slushy on my face. I clapped my hand over my mouth, and felt suddenly ill, because I could feel wriggling in my chest where whatever the hell that was was swimming around inside me.
“What– I thought I was dreaming, I, I–”
I felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my stomach, and let out a croak while doubling over. My circuit came to life seemingly without my prompting, and rapidly started to heat until it felt like a barely-controlled blaze inside of me.
One, two, then numerous more stabbing sensations filled my stomach, and they felt like they were stabbing out in different directions. My knees thudded into the area carpet, which barely provided padding over the stone tile floor.
“It hurts!” I cried out, then gagged into my hand. I could taste blood.
Lael’s voice was softer when she replied. “Mm, I imagine so. Be strong, Kiera, and fight against it.”
I felt hot mana race up my spine, and at the same time, more twisting sensations, but of a different, slightly less unpleasant sort. These didn’t feel like I was trying to digest broken glass; instead, they felt like they were casually shoving my innards around. The things from my back met the things from my stomach, and they decided it was time for a turf war.
Things inside of me were being pierced, battered, or torn apart as the street battle moved down into my abdomen.
I was sobbing, coughing, and gagging on my own blood and bile, curled into a ball while my tail thrashed around behind me. I heard something get knocked over, followed by a smash. I only got brief flashes of clear vision between tears blurring everything, but Lael was standing about a meter away and was holding a blade of light with the tip lowered at me. The way the teal color of her mana lit her face from below would have terrified me in any other circumstance.
The battle went back and forth, but it became clear pretty quickly that the invader I’d gulped down was losing the war. The fighting died down, and with it, some of the misery, but I was still in an unimaginable amount of pain from feeling like I’d fallen gut-first into a macerator. As the fighting originating from my back died down, it instead shifted to rooting around in my abdomen and spreading feelers around in my chest.
I wanted to throw up, but I was terrified that I was going to puke out my heart or some other vital organ if I did. Meanwhile, my circuit was blazing like an inferno in my limbs and core, and I could feel my mana surging out from my circuit into the rest of my body. The pain shifted from cutting and stabbing sensations to a dull, aching throb, and it spread out from my torso and into my limbs. The sensations of squirming movement under my skin and in my flesh and blood followed along behind the ache.
I felt pressure starting to build in my upper arms and thighs, and the aching throb became so intense that I had to fight just to breathe.
Lael seemed to have either sensed something or made a decision, because the teal glow blinked out of existence, and I felt her scoop me up in her arms.
I don’t know how it was possible, but the pain just continued to escalate, worse and worse. I would have traded it for when I snapped my arm like a twig in my first Dive in an instant.
I thought that I was going to pass out, either from forgetting to breathe or the agony radiating out of my bones.
The ache was continuing to spread outward into my extremities, but it wasn't just pain anymore–it felt like something was swelling up from the inside of the bone itself, pressing outward against it from the marrow out, like my skeleton had been packed with expanding foam. The pressure in my left arm hit its peak, and I felt it go, not a snap, but a wet, crunching rupture, like something inside the bone had finally split its casing open. I heard it as much as I felt it: a deep, meaty crack-squelch, wrong in a way a broken bone had no business being. My right, then left thighs followed, the same wrongness blooming outward from the core of each one.
For one brief instant, I could have sworn that I felt something moving inside the shattered wreckage of my arm and threading through the shards of bone. My circuit shook like a rung bell, and then I actually did pass out.