Thresholder, ch 173, The Eight Worlds of Queenie, pt 2

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~~~~

I got spat out with the rifle and worried that it would be taken from me straight away, but I was in a forest with big old trees, not in a back alley. And of course that got me worried that I’d have to hunt for my food again — I’d gotten used to street vendors and delivery drones, hot noodle soup in my hands five seconds after I’d had the thought that I wanted some.

I found a trail readily enough, dirt path type deal, and I picked a direction to start walkin’ in. I was full of mechanical shit by that point, powered legs and arms, a whole semi-exo strapped down my spine, but I had a cloak on that hid all that. It didn’t even occur to me that I’d be a monster to the eyes of people from my old world, especially the spine, which was the root of a person. And then I was walkin’ down that forest path, which might have been home for all I knew, except the trees were too big, and I thought of the men I’d fucked, and the fact that I couldn’t have babies anymore, and I started to worry about what I would do. I had ammo for the rifle, which still couldn’t make its own back then, but not too much of it.

When I came on the glass spires, I knew I wasn’t home, and I breathed a sigh of relief, then tried to decide on what to do about the rifle. I carried it with me, ‘cause either they’d try to take it away and I’d fight them, or they wouldn’t know what it was and I’d be able to keep it just fine. I had a pocket full of tithe cards, which were worthless, but I had more faith in myself by that point.

I loved the glass. Everything was made of it, tall spires and rounded buildings, bubbles of the stuff, warping the interiors, but you could still see people inside, except for frosted rooms I took for bein’ commodes. They were only sort of human, too tall and lanky, too delicate, and there was somethin’ about the eyes, too far apart, or stickin’ out too much. Lookin’ at them now, I forgot how weird they were, I guess. I got used to it within a day, and then it was just normal to me.

They gathered up and decided what to do with me, and I didn’t speak the language, so my threats and questions fell on deaf ears. It ended up bein’ one of the taller ones, whose name was Cantico, and he had a whole spire to himself. I’d learn later he was their version of a scientist, though there was a lot they didn’t know about.

He gave me a room to myself, high up in the spire with a good view, and fed me their strange mushy food, and I decided not to shoot him just then. I’d killed two brutes by that point, and I was thinkin’ there would be a third sooner than later, so I was tryin’ to build up some strength and get the lay of the land.

It took Cantico three days to get a handle on my language, and as soon as he knew, everyone knew. These people had a way of changin’ things, what they called the Loom, and I guess all it took for him was to change what was inside himself to add another language on, once he had the shape of it. He had all kinds of questions about me, about what he called my ‘strands’, which he’d just never seen before. That was the magic they had there, this way of changin’ things by their elemental nature, except the elements weren’t anythin’ sensible like fire or water, they were ‘hope’ or ‘combustion’ or ‘anger’. They could change themselves as much as they wanted, though they didn’t touch their core threads often at all, and they could change other people, except that was so taboo that they nearly killed me the first time I asked about it. Even to look at someone like that was intimate, somethin’ you only did with someone you were entwined with.

I learned their ways. Glass was easy to work with, it had good threads, they said, and that was why they built with it so much. They built with it like other people built with mud, and didn’t think much of blowin’ out a new room. That was the first thing I learnt, glass, but it didn’t help me much, and I was terrible at it.

In that world, everythin’ had threads to it, stuff that made it up, and that was most of what those people did with their day. I ate their mash for three days before I had a meal with someone else, and I learned then that I was supposed to take the raw material of the mash and make somethin’ of it before I ate. All the parts were there, the sour and sweet, the meaty and acidic, but I was meant to use magic to construct it myself. I hated that, and mostly it was because I was bad at it.

It was all mutable, you see, and it was a kind of paradise for it. They had animals they could pull the threads on and repack to make them docile as lambs. And the lambs, those they could make to have plentiful wool of fine quality. They’d change a thing’s nature, then pull on these magic threads that made up its existence to draw the element out and make it more prominent.

I was a week in when I caught Cantico messing with my rifle, and I would have screamed at him, but he had it all apart, threads loose, so I sat there fuming and waited for him to put it back together. Turned out that he’d had his eye on it just about as much as he’d had his eye on me. And however mad I’d been at him, all that washed away when I realized how much better he’d made it. I hadn’t been thinkin’ that was somethin’ that he could do, but of course it was, they could make things better just by tuggin’ on the strings.

The scarf was next, which took some more doin’. It could move before this, which was somethin’, handy in all kinds of situations, but after Cantico spent a week on it, it nearly had a mind of its own, and it was more powerful than it had ever been before, more psychic, more durable. You can shoot a hole through it and it’ll spring right back.

Cantico was the first I used the scarf on, back when I didn’t know what I was doin’. I wrapped it ‘round his head and tried to push some of myself into him, mostly to see what would happen, thinkin’ that we could just undo it, but somethin’ snapped instead, and he became like all the others. It took a bit for us to know what had happened, but we talked it out, and figured it out, and he swore me to secrecy.

Now see, if they’d known, they might have done somethin’ to him, and certainly would have done somethin’ to the scarf. He wasn’t even much different, but there was somethin’ that they all feared, and that was dyin’. I guess they were doin’ somethin’ with those emotions, pushin’ ‘em down or somethin’, but they came up to the surface fast when all that stuff had been stripped from him.

He wanted to reweave the whole town, make them all somethin’ different, better, more suited to him. He didn’t want me to use the scarf on them, because he knew if we did that, they’d come out with their own ideas. I went along with it, mostly because I could, but he wanted to reweave me too, so I didn’t have a mind of my own. I nearly shot him when I caught him creepin’ into my room, but we talked it out, and I slept with the rifle in my hands and the scarf wrapped tight around me, ready to wake me at a moment’s notice.

I hated the new Cantico, and hated him more as the days passed. He was focused on himself, and that was fine, that’s how a person should be, but it was what he wanted to do to everyone else that pissed me off. He was goin’ to make them slaves, or worse than slaves, and I saw my father in that, I can tell you that. He made plans, and didn’t share them with me, but I could see the shape of ‘em.

I shot him four days after I’d had the scarf on him, then ran away from town.

I know you’re thinkin’ that this is a sign that all the schemes I’ve got goin’ here won’t work, but I’ve thought of that, and it was different with Cantico. Not him, especially, but them, their whole people and what they could do to each other. How they’d lasted that long not tearin’ each other apart, I have no idea, but they could do it, and there was nothin’ that could make them bind to each other, to have some kind of trade or relation, not when they could just turn each other to slaves so easily.

Well yeah, chubbo, I do think it’s different here, that’s the whole thing I’m sayin’. But we’ll know soon enough.

No, I don’t want to talk about it, I want you to listen, and if you don’t want to listen, then I can shut up.

Alright, see, not so hard, is it?

Anyway, I went around for a while, found a new city of glass, new people in it, and the brute who was runnin’ things there.

He’d learned the Loom better than I had. His mind just worked better at it, I guess. He was obeyin’ their rules, at least around the Loom, not lookin’ into them or touchin’ them. He had support, is what I’m sayin’, or it seemed like it. I didn’t actually go into the town, I stayed back and watched through my scope.

How many brutes do you need to fight before you see the pattern? Before you know there’s a fight on the horizon every single time? I’d had enough of the brutes, so I just shot him from a distance, and that was how we opened things.

And I expected that it wouldn’t work, and that we’d have a whole fight about it, that I would run through the woods to a fallback nest and shoot him again. But he just died right then and there, and the portal popped up not long after that. He had a big sword that I wanted, but it was in his glass tower in the middle of town, and I was up on a bluff pretty far from him.

I never learned much about him. Knowing you, maybe he wasn’t a brute at all, but I’d spent some time watchin’ him, and he seemed like bad news to me. He had those people under his thumb. Could be that if we’d talked, I’d have learned somethin’ about what was goin’ on much sooner than havin’ to learn it from you, but I don’t know. Life is funny, sometimes. He was just hoppin’ between worlds like I was, and then he got a bullet in the head from nowhere. Makes you think.

Yeah, I guess I did put a bullet in your head from nowhere. Shame you had that helmet.

~~~~

Perry would have done the same, of course, and yes, he would expect that the portals wouldn’t set things up so that a bullet through the head was the end of things: they tended toward “fair” fights, repeated, protracted engagements. You had to try, obviously.

It was actually interesting that sniping someone had worked. When Perry went through his mental catalog, he wasn’t sure that he could think of a time when that had happened, even among the stories he’d collected from the other thresholders. He would have wondered whether she was lying, but she showed him the shot she’d taken. The portal had popped up with hardly any hesitation at all, so it was one continuous memory, no chance for a cut in there.

The people were huge, eight feet tall with gray skin, making her look like a child next to them. The Loom power was visual, with solid-color lines coming up from whatever object they were manipulating, and he never saw Queenie do it herself, only watch others, which he found suspicious. She’d said that she was never very good, but he didn’t believe that, and he wondered about the parameters she was operating under, how long it took her to start unraveling and changing something, and what would happen if she was interrupted in the middle of it. Could she kill him if she got too close, even if seemingly unarmed? The only reason he thought that was unlikely is because she would have used it when they’d fought each other.

But he would review the footage later, because for now, she was already onto the next world.

~~~~

I guess you’re wondering how I can change my face? About the acid in my veins? Well, I got those at the same time, or at least the same world.

The rifle and the scarf got taken from me, and I would say I was getting used to that, but it was really only the second time it had happened. I couldn’t tuck things away in the aether then, and even if I could have, maybe these people could have undone that somehow, I don’t know. My things were poked and prodded, then put away into storage, and I didn’t end up gettin’ them back until right at the very end. Has that ever happened to you?

See, I’m thinkin’ that maybe you just had an easier time of it than I did.

Yeah, I saw you get your arm shot up, I’m just razzin’ you, chubbo.

Anyway, the Facility was huge, and I never got out of it, and never found out what was beyond those doors, just saw more and more of it as time went on. There was an endless parade of scientists, army men, managers, janitors, all kinds of people there, seeming to come from nowhere and go nowhere. I had thought, at the start, that I would just escape, go out into the world, but I never knew whether there was a world out there. It went on and on, and if you thought you’d gotten to the end, a place with pipes and tanks and storage, there was just more after that. There were barracks and bedrooms for all these people, embedded into the Facility itself, and sure, I could have bought that they were stayin’ there for a bit, that would have made sense, but they never talked about the outside, never said where they were goin’ when their tour was done, only talked about transfers.

So far as I know, that whole world was a single Facility, but that wouldn’t have made much sense, because where did it all come from, right?

Well of course I asked, when they weren’t busy with their tests and tortures, when they hadn’t stuck me in a box I couldn’t get out of. Here, look, they just seemed confused by what I was sayin’ to them.

Anyway, the Facility was all tests and machines and more tests. They knew right off the bat that I’d come from another world, and didn’t seem to care too much, it was just data for them, and data was what they lived and breathed. They had computers, like the tech-priests, and they spent a lot of time on them, click-clack typin’ away.

I got measured every which way. They had tape measures that they wrapped around me, and a tub they would dunk me in that got them some data, and they’d take rulers to me, and take photographs for the computers. They measured out my water and my food, and put me in a mask on occasion so they could measure my breath. Occasionally they’d get a special guy to come in, maybe a doctor or maybe not, and he’d look in my mouth and prod at my stomach and open my legs and stick a finger in my butt. And after that, he’d take off the gloves he wore and type somethin’ up in the computer, more data.

I fought back against them, and learned why that was a bad idea. The only thing worse than the doctor was havin’ the doctor doin’ all the same stuff while held down by three or four other people who didn’t seem to mind whether I got scuffed up.

So it was a nightmare world, and I thought to myself, well, the brute will show up eventually, and I’ll kill him, and then I just need to make for the portal.

Time passed, and they got their data, and I was put in experiments, and they got more data.

I escaped more than once, and a few times, killed some of my captors. I got a higher rating in their system, until there were two armed guards in the room with me whenever there was an experiment. I had my wrists and legs cuffed a lot. It was hard to get a downgrade, even if you were compliant, and there were times I regretted what I’d done, most of that was just me wantin’ better opportunities for escape.

The experiments were all over the place. Sometimes they’d give me a paper cup of somethin’ to drink, and I’d throw it in their face and get punished, or drink it and feel sick to my stomach, or giddy, or have a rash. They brought me into this huge room once, which could have fit the whole castle I grew up in or nearabouts, and I was cuffed to a pillar in the middle for two hours while I heard this loud clicking sound. They made me run, and jump, and one of the experiments almost killed me, because the implants I had started pushin’ out of me. I lost them all that way, over a painful week.

Still, not everythin’ was like that. I got the acid blood when a giant snake bit me. I could shift after a cold night with a laser lamp pointed at me. No rhyme or reason to it, at least as far as I knew, and the tests kept on comin’, with more tests whenever an experiment seemed to work. They draw the acid blood from me, to test it, shot me to see whether I could using the shift to heal back up, which I could.

There were other people, other test subjects. Occasionally they put us together, though not often. Sometimes it was as part of an experiment, other times we were just bein’ held in the same cell together for whatever reason. Some of them seemed like they’d been there forever, and a few claimed they’d been workers before somethin’ happened to them. Two said they were from other worlds, and I guess I believed them.

The abilities they gave me bumped my rating up even more. They were worried I would mimic their shape, spit acid blood on them, that sort of thing. The experiments continued, they measured me, poked their fingers in my butt, just like before, and a part of me wondered if this was just goin’ to be my life, or if I’d die to one of the experiments, or if some day they’d just give me so many powers they couldn’t put me down again.

I had the Loom though, and that was eventually what got me out. See, I could reshape the bars, take the strength from them, but I was bad at it, and not gettin’ better. Every time it felt like I was gettin’ somewhere, they’d move me to be closer to some station or another, so the new rounds of tests could go on. But after the acid, there were only so many cells they had, and so I had more time with the bars, to prepare what I could.

I broke out one fine mornin’, which probably wasn’t mornin’ at all, and this time was different than before, because I could take on a person’s face and I had a plan. I killed one of the low level workers, stuffed his body down a shredder, put his clothes on, and mopped the floors. They had ways of lookin’ for me, like I guess you do to, but I knew the place backward and forward. I’d been keepin’ my eyes open, watchin’ them on their computers, seein’ what it was they did all day, and I knew it all, more or less.

I picked my way through the Facility, tryin’ my best to fit in. I slipped through, got on a computer, used some logins I’d picked up from watchin’ the keyboards. I’d always had good eyes.

There were a few vaults scattered around the place, and I made for them. Took me some effort to slip through, almost got caught a few times, and I guess eventually they decided I must have died somewhere along the way, or that I wasn’t doin’ much harm. I was lookin’ for the rifle, and the scarf, and maybe some normal clothes. A rifle would have been shit in the Facility, it was all narrow corridors and small rooms. But the rifle was mine, and I wanted it back, and I didn’t know what I was goin’ to do after that.

Once I had it, I hid it away and kept on bein’ a janitor, workin’ sometimes, seein’ more of the Facility. I’d been broken, I guess, and it took some time to pull myself back together. They’d treated me like an animal, less than human, and I wanted to kill them all, but it seemed like there were just too many. I did kill some, but there were always more, always someone to take their place. So one day, I decided I just wanted out.

I used the computers more. I’d been waitin’ on another brute, I guess, but I realized that maybe he was just doin’ the same thing that I’d been doin’, that there was a chance he wasn’t strong enough to escape them and get out on his own. I thought to myself that maybe he was locked in a cell somewhere.

They had a list of everyone in the whole Facility, a list so long if you tried to see it all the computer would whine like a dog. You had to look at it in bits and pieces, enter dates and numbers, all that data they had from us, those numbers. I didn’t know what I was lookin’ for, all the brutes had been different, but I started with everyone who had a rating higher than mine. There weren’t many, only twenty, and when I narrowed it down, there was only one who’d shown up in the last year.

I read all about him, but most of it was numbers. He didn’t talk. He had powers, three of them, nothin’ that they could take away, and that's why he ranked so high. He’d broken out five times, and they locked him up for it, only bringin’ him out when they had lots of men in armor to deal with him. He grew back stronger from anythin’ that didn’t kill him, and they’d tried a lot to kill him. He could flood a room with sand, and he’d done that more than once, which wasn’t just dangerous for them, but took forever to clean up.

His last power was his strongest though, a way he had of usin’ people. Only one at a time, but if he laid eyes on me, he’d have me kill myself. Thankfully he had a helmet they kept on him all the time, one they’d bolted to his skull, but I was worried goin’ in, I’ll say that, chubbo.

And I didn’t even know this was really the guy!

I did somethin’ a bit clever and keyed in an order. Those men, they loved followin’ what a computer told them, loved to get the data the computer said to. My whole time there, at least a year, all that was because a computer said to, all the meals, all the tests. So it was a final order, sort of, my chance to get out, to shoot this chubbo in the head and then slip on out.

I picked the biggest room they had, one I’d been in before, the one the size of a castle. They put him in there, then I killed them and slipped inside. He was huge, chained up to the center of the room, just sittin’ there like that was his everyday. And it was, I knew that, ‘cause it had been mine too.

I shot him, then shot him again, and he tried to flood me out, sand comin’ out of him. I shot him a third time, and he was howlin’, but I could tell it wasn’t enough. The bullets, I’d read up on him, that was never goin’ to be what did him in, so I went with my second plan and slit my wrists wide open.

I wasn’t sure that would be enough either, but it was what I had.

The acid melted through his skin, and through the cuffs that were holding him, and through the helmet that was keepin’ his eyes off me.

I don’t need to show the whole thing, we raced and chased each other, and I sprayed enough acid that I got woozy and ready to die. I shot him where the acid had eaten up his thick skin, and he coughed up some piece of himself. I sprayed him some more, until I couldn’t even stand all over his face and head, and that ate at the helmet.

He took control of me, and I lifted my rifle up to turn on myself. I’d thought about it, if the fight didn’t work out, endin’ it that way if it felt like I’d have to be in that rotten Facility anymore.

And then he died. Slumped over before he could make me pull the trigger.

I sat there and I laughed and laughed as I watched the rest of his face and head melt away.

I passed out, and came to with the workers tryin’ to wrap me up in a jacket. I was strong enough to kill them where they stood, and a good enough shot to kill the others that had come to look at the portal — my portal. I took my rifle, my scarf, and didn’t look back for a single minute.

~~~~

She delivered it nonchalantly, but it was the most terrifying world that Perry had ever seen. She hadn’t held back from showing how dehumanized she was, not even a little bit, her naked body made into a thing of meat in the way she was held in place and repeatedly examined. She had some flourish to the vision, showing day after day, all the same.

It was enough to make Perry reconsider the whole idea of thresholding. Some worlds were wastelands, some worlds you were an ant compared to the higher powers, but it seemed that in some worlds you just sat in torture-prison for a full year.

“She was in there for three years,” said Marchand.

“Was she?” asked Perry.

“The computers she used showed dates,” said Marchand. “Of course, it’s possible that their system of timekeeping is different from our own, but for various reasons I suspect that it’s the same.”

“Such as?” asked Perry.

Marchand pulled up multiple screenshots — or whatever you’d call them — showing the various computer screens at the angles they had available. Perry immediately saw that the dates matched the format he would have suspected, and that the first digit didn’t go higher than thirty-one, nor the second digit higher than twelve.

<I’m sorry that happened to you,> Perry said to Queenie.

<What, that I won a fight?> she asked.

<That you were tied up, tortured, experimented on, treated like you were nothing,> said Perry.

<Nah,> said Queenie. <Wasn’t anything.>

<Looked like something,> said Perry. <If you want to talk about it —>

<Nah, chubbo, don’t need you to swoop in and make it better,> said Queenie. <You’re a talker, you like to talk, think it can fix things?> She laughed. <Can’t fix that world with talkin’.>

<No,> said Perry. <Flamethrower might do it.>

Queenie laughed, and a bit of Perry’s gut-sick feeling faded. She was fine, or masking her feelings enough to appear fine. He couldn’t imagine going through all that and coming out sane, and maybe she hadn’t come out sane.

<Well, the rest will have to wait,> said Queenie.

<What do you mean?> asked Perry.

<It’s sun up, and you need to go get those boys, and I have my own business,> said Queenie.

<The deal was that you’d tell me everything,> said Perry.

<Sure, chubbo, but later, when there’s time,> she replied.

<You’re hiding powers from me, aren’t you?> asked Perry.

<Nah, chubbo,> she laughed. <It’s just that you have that nifty power, and I was relivin’ the old days, and it just took longer than I’d thought it would.>

<Fine,> said Perry. <Tonight?>

<Sure, tonight, chubbo,> said Queenie. <You know, we’re almost friends now, don’t you think?>

<Almost,> replied Perry. <I’d be your friend for real if you stop what you’re doing. We can meet up somewhere, talk it out, get the portal open without any risk to either of us —>

<Nah,> said Queenie. <I don’t trust you a wink. But I’m happy to be an almost friend, until I have to kill you. Sounds nice. I’ll be in touch.>

Perry sighed. That seemed to be the end of things.

He reviewed some of what he’d been shown, the ways she moved, the powers she’d displayed, and what she’d said of them. Marchand had a few things to add, mostly comparing them to what they’d seen of Queenie in the Dusklands. She’d gotten faster and stronger than she had been. She was going to be tough to kill, though she wasn’t immune to bullets, and that was something.

When Perry ensconced himself in the shelf space again, the two women were still sleeping. He woke Anaksi first.

“I know where the Eshkee men are,” he said to her.

He would just have to hope that it wasn’t a trap.