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Adam resents Henry every moment that he's nearby-- heard and smelt but mostly unseen, sitting beside Adam's bed or reading to him. Adam strains toward him and cringes away, but only inside his mind. His body remains inert, slowly withering, his days given to an inventory of small dull pains and fury. Henry’s presence is the only thing that has weight; everything else is distant, almost a dream. The conversations of the staff and the squeak of wheels as gurneys roll by might as well be in another country. There is no continuity to them; nobody gives him a sense of linearity except for Henry. Everything else is fragmented; conversations that move past him because even the doctors don’t always remember that there is a mind inside this motionless body. His existence is a half-life full of uncompleted stories.
He smells the stagnant water and hears the buzz of quiet panic for days before he someone leaves the television in the room on long enough to hear the news. There are heavy waves and rising tides down south off the coast of Delmarva, making their way up the coast and flooding the sewers.
It is during the floods that there is another, more personal panic. Something about Adam's x-rays, some hard questions asked to Henry and answered in a tone too low to hear, and a series of new blood tests, needles tapped into him, more x-rays. After that, Henry doesn't visit again, though Adam holds out hope for days until the days become weeks become a month.
Adam resents his absence more than his presence, howls silently for him to come back and face the mess he's made, misses the sound of his voice reading scientific articles and even the way his eyes blazed when he leaned over the bed and let Adam see him, the way he scolded and chided and hated.
Two months later, and the smell of mildew has been purged. The flooding no longer has a place in day to day conversation, their novelty worn away. Henry still hasn't returned; Adam can't remember if it's the sixty-second or sixty-third day without a visit and the uncertainty is driving him even madder.
There is a visitor, though. A new, lurking presence, not a doctor or the nurse. Whoever it is, they reek of the streets, of soot and trash, but there's no bodily odor, or even the tang of soap to identify the who and what of his visitor. They-- hulking, formless in a massive hoodie-- circle in his blurred peripheral vision, approaching the bed. They crane over him.
She is -- tanned? No, the unnatural orange-bronze of a spray-on, garish even in shadow and backlit by the hospital fluorescent. Why can't he smell it on her? Unkempt whiteblond hair curls out of the hood; her face is marred with a faux-tribal tattoo, graceless and brick red, obvious and unemployable. Some kind of bizarre jewelry on her nose, not just a ring but some sort of-- cap? in rough crystal.
"There you are," she says, sounding disappointed in him but not surprised. "Why are you just lying there?"
If he could give her a withering look, he would. He can't. He stares, because all he can do is stare.
"If your body's that badly damaged, just give it up and start over."
It isn't a choice, he screams without sound. She glares down.
"You're no use to me like this," she snarls. "I'm not waiting around for you to fix yourself-" and her arm draws back, her fist is the size of Adam's skull dear god, and before he even processes what she's doing she has plunged her hand into his stomach.
There is pain, hideous pain, very briefly. And then there is a lack of pain, the welcome separation from his damaged body. He is still. He should be plunging in a rush toward the river, but for a few long seconds he is actually between death and the river, and for the first time he can almost take stock.
He feels-- small, vulnerable, infinite but contained in himself. The woman's fist encloses him and he has the sudden understanding that if her grip tightens this will be the last time, the last time--
He feels himself plunging toward the river and goes more willingly than he has in two thousand years.
Being able to move is such a relief that he almost forgets; everything disappears in the burst of sensation, the frozen water on his skin and the ability to kick through it make him giddy, and he is laughing before he surfaces, and he swallows foul water and laughs anyway, crawling hands and knees onto the bank of the East River. The light is gray and cold and it's filtered through clouds instead of hospital blinds; it's beautiful.
He vomits the water from his belly, scrapes his hands through his hair and pulls, relishing movement and change and even the broken glass digging into his knee is a different, bright pain so much friendlier than bedsores and degenerating muscles.
The laughter racks his chest, swelling into hysteria, hovering on the edge of sobbing.
"Enough!"
He looks up the bank.
The giant woman in the dirty hoodie is waiting for him. He freezes, but the laughter hisses out anyway. Of course. Of course, this was bound to happen again some day. His condition is only an advantage as long as it isn't planned for. But why isn't she approaching? She's almost vibrating with impatience, it's obvious even ten meters away. What's holding her back?
"You! Zirconium. Get up here."
"Go to hell," he advises her, grinning defiance as his teeth chatter.
"I suppose it was too much to ask you would be grateful. Have you already forgotten being stuck in that bed?" she growls. "I need to talk to you. Get up here."
"Maybe I want a swim."
"Don't go in there." The massive woman flinches; a small movement on a large body averaging out to merely visible.
It's the water. She's terrified of the water.
"Look. I needed you mobile and talking. I did what I had to. Don't be stupid about this," she says, the most hamfisted attempt to cajole he's ever heard. Still, apart from murdering him-- which she did with admirable efficiency-- and knowing his secret, she hasn't proved herself a threat yet. Of course, knowing his secret constitutes a threat in and of itself, but he's got to work with the situation he's been given.
He clambers to his feet, and she leans back a bit, lip curling. "Have I offended your modesty?" he sneers, a high-pitched giggle breaking off in shivers.
"You've gone completely native, haven't you?" she sounds disgusted. "Get some clothes on before somebody notices you."
"I don't have any to hand," he points out, shuddering.
"Are you defective or something?" The woman drags her hand down her face-- blood red, her entire hand, he realizes. Ambitious tattoo work. He realizes just how ambitious as she pulls off her hoodie, holding it out to him. Her entire forearm is red; her arms have stripes of the color, but it's barely a design at all. A birthmark, instead? But not in that color. Her shirt is tight, sleeveless, but she doesn't seem to notice the cold, even as a bitter November wind whips up and sends her hair streaming.
She shakes the hoodie at him, and he chooses curiosity and warmth over paranoia, staggering up the bank to take it and wrap it around him. It hangs like a tent, down past his thighs and wide enough for three of him. Not a trace of lingering body-heat, but it cuts the wind and that in itself makes him feel warmer; huddling next to the retaining wall he can entertain the slight hope that he will sometime, in the future, be warm.
His ... assailant? Rescuer? Watches him shiver with distaste.
"It's like you can't help it."
"That's precisely what 'involuntary reflex' implies."
She curls her lip. He still can't see how the bizarre crystal talisman is attached to her face. It might well be some sort of poorly conceived implant, like that lamentable fad for horns that went around a decade or so ago, or the ever-popular implantation of pearls in awkward places.
"Whatever. Do you have communication equipment somewhere?"
"Not readily available."
"Fantastic. When was the last time you were in contact with Homeworld?"
He gives her a politely blank look. She stares.
"Nobody's contacted you?"
Plenty of people have contacted him in his life, but all of them from just the one world. Most of them a great deal saner than his new acquaintance. He says nothing, correctly guessing that she'll happily supply her own conclusions.
"I can't believe it!" The woman groans in heartfelt exasperation, beseeching the sky with her hands tensed into blunt claws. "I knew the Zirconium project was a waste of everyone's time, but of all the times for Yellow Diamond to listen to me, she picked this one? I can't believe nobody followed up. I thought you were a pet project. I thought she'd have made an attempt to save you before this planet cracks in half. Do you even have any communications equipment-?"
She gets her answer from the look on his face, and slams a fist into the retaining wall behind her.
Adam makes a small, strangled noise.
"Stop staring at me," she snaps. Unfair; he isn't staring at her, he's staring at the deep hole she left in the concrete without appearing to notice. The bones in her hand should be in splinters, but there's not a scrape on them.
"Now that we've established that I don't have the resources we need," he says carefully. "What now?"
"I've got a base. Come on."
She grabs him by the wrist; her hand envelopes his, and she drags him along as if he ways nothing. He can't dig his bare feet in; he'll skin them raw. He grabs her wrist with his free hand, trying futilely to pry her off.
Or-- less futilely. She twitches as his fingers close around her wrist, despite his comparative lack of strength, despite the fact that his fingertips cannot meet because her arm is as thick as his thigh and despite his complete failure to find a pulse point. He knows that she barely felt it and she still drops his arm and gives him a shove.
"Fine with me if you can't keep up," she snaps, and storms ahead of him.
Curiosity is his primary driver now, and he follows her up into the street, his makeshift robe flapping around his legs.
She stops next to a high security gate wrapped in decrepit, dangerous-looking barb wire and gives him a long look.
"No chance of you getting over that on your own, is there."
"Do you fly, too?"
She makes an irritated noise and throws him over her shoulder, and there are a few painful impacts as she takes a short running start and then hops the fence like a fare-jumper over a turnstile. The barbed wire creaks under her hand; she doesn't appear to notice.
Then they're in an alley he vaguely recognizes, under a faded sign declaring the building next to them a fallout shelter, and he sees that the steel door to said shelter is hanging limply on its hinges. Inside, there are lights on-- as he steps gingerly in, he sees that they've been wired crudely into a main. The only furnishing is a round dais made of white stone, about three meters across and calf-high.
"Did you break into the history museum?" he asks, surprised.
"For all the good it did me," the woman grunts, stepping in after him. "The thing's not working."
Adam has seen those before. They were old before he was born, the strange white altars, and nobody knew what they were for. Modern history calls them pre-Babylonian when it acknowledges them at all.
"Is it supposed to do something?"
Another withering look. Well, then. He's pleased to disappoint. He ignores her glare and makes a circuit of the fallout shelter; their assets are limited. A stack of discarded loading pallets, piled in the corner: too splintered and rotted to make even a decent weapon. A pile of copper remnants, which he guesses were rather forcefully salvaged. That's all that there is.
He sits gingerly on the pallets, and checks the pockets of the hoodie. He's expecting nothing and gets something, so when the woman turns away from her rewiring to look at him she finds him staring intently at the granola bar he's unearthed, squashed and abused but still wrapped.
He hasn't had solid food in months, and reincarnation is an exhausting process.
"It's some kind of energy supplement," the woman says dubiously. "They gave it to me at that center for humans without a base."
"May I have it?"
"Why?"
"Because I'm hungry."
"... well, I don't need it for anything."
He has the wrapper open before she's finished speaking, and she watches him devour it with a look like horror.
"Do you have a problem?" he snaps.
She sighs and leans back against the wall, sliding down it into a loose sitting position.
"You do understand, right, that you're not one of them?"
He's too tired for more riddles. "One of whom?"
"One of them. The squishy carbon sponges filled with oxygen and fluid that overrun this planet. Humans. You know you aren't one of them. Don't you?"
His world tips slightly off center, and he staggers on his feet and then sits down. The woman lets her head thump back against the wall; apparently this is comforting enough that she continues, skull against concrete one-two-three times before her shoulders go limp with resignation. Concrete dust spills over her shoulders like dandruff.
"You honestly don't know anything. I can't believe it!"
"What are you talking about?" Adam rasps out, and she turns an exhausted look on him.
"You know what? Fine. Fine, I'm not doing anything else until this planet hits its deadline. Listen up, I'm not going to explain this twice."
The story she tells him is patently absurd; History Channel idiocy about vastly advanced aliens made of light and crystal. Very new age. Less new age was their plan to harvest the Earth, to use it as a sort of spawning ground. A traitor emerged in the ranks; One faction turned on another, and with the help of early humanity, overthrew their rivals. Conveniently, this was before humans had gotten around to writing things down; it had all resolved itself by the time human civilization was getting around to the wheel.
"You were from before the war, though. It was Rose's idea to develop you, what a shock-- she always had a weird interest in the organics, and she interested some of the others somehow. I thought it was sick, putting gems through an organic maturation process, but she was so interested in the 'experience'. I knew she was up to something, but did anyone listen? Of course not." The supposed alien rolls her eyes. "And look at you now. I don't know how you do it, having your gem stuck inside all that meat. Is that why you can't make clothes? Can you even manifest a weapon? Ugh, you're almost as bad as what she ended up doing to herself." She pauses. "No you aren't. Rose is worse. She has a way of taking things too far."
"I don't believe this," Adam mutters to himself. "I don't."
"Oh, come on. I've held your gem in my hand, I know you're a Zirconium. You're not the only one on this trash-heap island, either. I've sensed at least one other."
"You're wrong. I bleed; I freeze; I starve. Trust me, I've died most of the ways that a human can. If it were a choice I'd have stopped doing it long ago."
"Wait, you bleed? Not just a manifestation of damage but you've got blood?" She recoils. "That's why you warp back to water when your form is damaged. You've actually made some kind of organic cocoon--uch, you're like a Desert Glass but less useful. How can you stand it? Aren't you smothering in there?"
"Stop talking about me as if I'm not real!"
"You're real. It's that gross shell you've made out of organic molecules that isn't."
"I'm human."
"No!"
"Yes!"
"Are you going to keep doing this until the planet explodes?"
"I am human-- what?"
"You're not the only experiment jammed into the mantle of this world, you know. And what's going to come after you is much, much bigger. This dirtball is going to crack like a faulty geode. Ugh, and I'm going to be on it. Stuck on an island. Just me and a defective Zirconium."
"Adam!" he snaps. "I have a name."
"It's a stupid name!"
"Better than Jasper!"
"Get fractured, you hydrocarbon monstrosity."
"I didn't ask you to murder me."
"What, you liked lying around inside a simulated sack of adipose because you can't even reform without help?"
"If the alternative is your scintillating company--"
"You can leave, you know!"
"I can't, in fact, climb over barbed wire!"
She comes to her feet in one powerful motion and advances on in him. He's actually somewhat surprised that she doesn't strike him: instead, she picks him up bodily, stalks outside, drops him over the fence.
Somehow he had assumed that despite her protestations he was actually some sort of prisoner,but here he is on one side of the bars while Jasper vanishes back into her concrete shelter and slams the door hard enough that it sticks.
He feels as if the door has shut on his last chance at understanding himself.
Nonsense. He's not some sort of alien simulacrum. The world is not about to end.
The woman is unhinged. Unnaturally strong, but unhinged, that's all.
That's all.
He sleepwalks through the routine of finding his feet again; retrieves one of his caches of money and clean clothes, opens one of the boltholes he rents under a name other than Lewis Farber, cleans himself, feeds himself, chooses from the selection of clean identities he had ready for a situation exactly like this one. Henry Morgan may pride himself on his skills of deduction, but he and his friends at the police department haven't yet fingered any of his alternate identities, and he allows him to be slightly smug about that.
He considers murdering Henry, just once, a friendly reminder that the game is on once more, but he finds he's not sure he can stand to be in the same room as the good Doctor Morgan quite yet.
He's had a cold ache in his gut since someone put a fist through it, and his nightmares are haunted with serpents cracking out of the earth and his flesh turning to stone. Henry looms over him, examining him with a jeweler's loupe or reaching into his stomach. He's long past the idea of dreams having any real significance; he chases the nightmares off with caffeine and long nights.
He has to clean up after himself. He infiltrates the hospital he was confined in, destroys the documentation of his stay, and destroys the x-rays that so alarm the doctors. He barely glances at them; some sort of development error in them that has caused a bright opaque blob in his guts, roughly square, but an error is all it is.
It's curiosity, only curiosity, that gets him back into Lewis Farber's unthreatening clothing and pastes Farber's helpful, unthreatening smile across his face-- it's an idle whim, nothing more, that takes him into the city's homeless shelters looking for anyone who knows a very large woman with particularly distinctive tattoos.
"Yeah, I remember her," says a volunteer. "Is she okay? When we pulled her out she was a wreck. She was screaming and then she went quiet. That was back during the flooding, we don't know how she wound up in the water. I don't think she was a jumper, but we still worried when she disappeared again--"
Adam assures her that Jasper is doing very well, and moves on.
"Held down a bed for three days. They couldn't move her. Complete space-case," a teenager tells him, in exchange for five dollars and a hot cup of coffee. "I think she's one of those Beach City alien conspiracy junkies. She was sort of catatonic until the flooding stopped. Got the end of the world crazies."
"Thank you," he says, and slips the girl an extra bill. She slips it inside her frayed coat, cups her reddened hands tighter around the coffee, and watches him suspiciously until he's turned the corner.
Everyone who's met the woman remembers her; she never ate, that any of them saw. Cold to the touch. She punched her way out of an ambulance, once, leaving the paramedics largely unharmed and the ambulance itself nearly totalled.
All right. She's unhinged and very, very strong. It doesn't prove anything.
Adam drifts through the city, making plans to leave and postponing them until some undefined later, because he still feels as if there's something he has to do. If he traced his wanderings, he knows they would slowly complete a circle around a particular street in Brooklyn, one he does not approach and cannot quite leave behind.
The next time he sees Jasper, she's sitting on a bench by the river, watching the water as if it's going to do something to her the second her back is turned.
He walks past her to the coffee kiosk that had been his original destination, but when he turns away he finds himself with two cups of tea instead of one. Well. He's not going to carry two cups of tea through Manhattan; he settles himself on the small patch of bench that Jasper hasn't laid claim to, and proffers one of the cups.
"What's that?"
"Tea." He sips his own. "Considered soothing by a large percentage of earthlings."
"Don't be cute," she snarls, and takes it. She leans her face close-- smelling it, perhaps, although how he's not sure. "It's hot water full of alkaloids and some kind of xanthine. Don't humans have enough of that lying around?"
"You might like it," he says innocently. "It's extremely bitter."
She sneers: she gets the joke. "If I ingested it I'd have to excrete it somehow, and I don't plan to sink that low anytime soon."
"It's a source of warmth?" he tries.
"I don't feel the cold."
"Convenient." He takes another sip of tea.
"The fact that you do is a little over the top, don't you think? You're taking this biology thing way too far."
"That's not a choice I made."
"Have you tried making a different one?"
"Not recently."
He watches her eyes flick back to the river.
"Why are you afraid of the water?"
She shows her teeth in a snarl, but says nothing. They sit together in silence until Adam's tea is gone and Jasper's is cold.
She tips it out on the ground, dispersing the puddles it makes with one booted foot. She shoots a last glare at the river, then at him. "I had a rough year."
"If you were human," he says, quietly, thinking of how she makes free of his body but flinched at the slightest hint of confinement, of how betrayed she was by her own fear, of the story of her lying catatonic in the shelter. "And I were still a practicing therapist, I'd say you were just out of a very unhealthy relationship."
"Don't be more disgusting than you already are." Jasper crushes her paper cup in a sudden, convulsive movement, and what's left when she opens her hand is so dense that it falls like a stone. "Fusion isn't a relationship . It's a tactic. Only perverts treat it like some kind of lifestyle, and I didn't choose that, understand me? It wasn't my choice to stay." She's shouting, and Adam remembers his skin splitting open under the impact of her fist and he stays very calm and very still.
"Understood," he says, through gritted teeth. She storms away-- decisively inland-- and he sits very still until she's out of eyeshot and tells himself that that's what attempting to help people gets you. He knows better than that.
Two weeks later, he's walking aimlessly in Central Park when he's seized by the shoulder and dragged behind a hedge and into the lee of Jasper.
"What do you want?" he snaps, struggling. Jasper lets go of him without fanfare and he nearly falls off his feet as the resistance vanishes.
"I found her. I thought you'd want to know."
"Found-- who? What?"
"One of the other Zirconia. Look." She points. "She's the one on the left."
Adam feels his stomach clench as he recognizes the two men she's pointing out. He ought to have been expecting it-- he'd nearly walked straight into them and not been aware of it. Inexcusably stupid.
He ducks back behind Jasper, trying to calm his suddenly racing heart.
"What the hell's wrong with you?"
"He's the reason I was in the hospital."
"Who-?"
"The other-- the man on the left. His name is Henry. The man he's walking with is his son."
"Oh, you're doing this again," Jasper rumbles, shooting him a longsuffering look. "You're a gem. So is she. You don't need to use their weird surplus categories; knock it off."
Normally he would take this in his stride, but he's been knocked off this stride and can't take anything well just now. He's fighting a wave of adrenaline; he wants to strangle Henry, crush his windpipe and feel him go limp. He wants to shake him by the shoulders and tell him how proud he is of that masterstroke of cruelty. He wants to see fear in Henry's eyes. He wants to see him smile.
He will not put up with her dismissal on top of that, not now.
"My identity," he grinds out, through the pounding in his ears, "Is not surplus. Madam."
"It's ridiculous."
"Not to me."
"Why are you so pale? Why are you getting damp?"
"Shut up!" It's too loud. Oh, no. He flattens himself against the hedge, looks out through a break in the branches, but the Morgans still have their backs to him, gaining distance as they stroll through the park. He goes to his knees, places his trembling hands on his thighs.
"You don't need to do that," Jasper says. It makes her uncomfortable to see this, to see him sweating and succumbing to body chemistry, and he feels a burst of gratification. He hopes she chokes on her discomfort. "Stop doing that!"
"I can't." His anger at her makes a neat distraction from his own self-loathing, his disappointment in himself for being fallible and scared of someone as toothless as Henry Morgan. "This is what I am. I don't care if it upsets you"
"You're a gem! You're embarrassing yourself!"
"You hate knowing that someone like you could be vulnerable, don't you?"
"I am not vulnerable!"
"Then let's go for a swim," he snarls, and then wishes he could take it back because Jasper has him by the collar of his shirt and he has been trying to forget that she knows how to kill him very permanently but he shouldn't have let himself forget it because she is much, much stronger than he is.
The Morgans are gone. The park is quiet, darkness falling fast the way it does in winter, and his breath is steaming in the air. Jasper's breath is invisible, perhaps even unnecessary, and Adam doesn't know quite when he started admitting to himself that some of her madness has method, but he's almost convinced now that she is what she says. He already believed utterly in her willingness to end him.
She drops him.
His knees give out.
"Suit yourself. Wallow in your biology, I don't care. I'm going to track the other Zirconium."
The park lights come on as he sits in an ungainly sprawl, the ground wet and cold and soaking the seat of his trousers. It takes a while for his ears to stop ringing.
When his legs will hold him, he follows the path the Morgans followed; it leads him past the zoo, disgorges him near 59th. Almost involuntarily, he looks east. They might be home by now if traffic is good. Father and son, comfortable at home, perhaps having dinner together in some traditional and insufferably heartwarming way. The picture of paternal devotion, even though the average bystander would no doubt think that Abraham was the father and Henry the son. It throbs in his temples, his sullen anger that Henry has… something. Some measure of normality left. Surely the world will beat it out of him sooner or later, as it had beaten it out of Adam, but until then Henry's good nature and his hypocrisy and his vengefulness chafe under Adam's skin.
It draws him on like a vacuum in his chest, walking 59th like a ghost until he has to turn or step into traffic. Before him, the long ramp onto the Queensboro Bridge lifts itself away from the island, towards Brooklyn. Finding his way onto the pedestrian walkway would be too much like a decision-- he lets the sidewalk spin him away, zagging under the bridge, close but not too close. If traffic is unusually bad the Morgans might still be waiting above him.
Jasper is in the shadow of the bridge; nothing but pale hair, gleaming nose and hulking silhouette in the streetlights. She's leaning against a brick storefront, and Adam dismisses the phrase 'holding up the wall' as potentially too literal.
"Lose them?"
"They got in a vehicle. Went over that." She stabs a thick finger up toward the bridge.
"There's a walkway over the bridge, if you wanted to follow them."
"I know." Jasper grunts. "I know these bridges. I did recon on the tunnels. None of them are going to do me any good."
"Your phobia's limits are fascinating. I've seen you get closer to the water than the Queensboro Bridge would ever take you."
"It's not a phobia and it's not some kind of arbitrary glitch." She stands. "C'mere. I'll show you."
She doesn't grab his wrist; she moderates her long stride to let him keep up, leading him under the bridge, past a few sleeping bundles, homeless men and women who have chosen the cold over the shelters.
As they pass an abandoned playground the scent of burning cannabis cuts the cold air; a small huddle of young souls too well fed to be homeless have taken shelter by the fence of the playground and are passing around a little point of red light. Their faces are dull in the gloom and their eyes fixed on nothing. Postgraduates from the university, if he had to guess just based on the particular note of their despair.
They take him in dispassionately, see an unremarkable man in a wool coat and flat cap, and their gazes... bounce off of Jasper. He does understand. She's too threatening to comprehend all at once.
Jasper leads him to the river walk and stops, hunching over to lean her elbows on the low metal fence between the embankment and the path. For a long moment, she scans the river; Adam watches her face instead of what she's observing. He watches the play of wariness, then a slow dawning hope-- then the disappointment, the tension, as her eyes fix on one point.
"There." She extends an accusing finger toward the water, and he sights along her arm.
At first he doesn't see what she's pointing at; it's all swirling dark water, reflecting the lights of the bridge, and he has to sweep the surface more slowly before he registers the shape. It's a protrusion from the water, roughly the size of a person; could be a large piece of debris but is standing too still relative to the current. Almost a human shape, not quite; as human as a virgin seen in treebark or a saint on toast.
It's watching them.
"It's not her. I'd know." Jasper's voice is so quiet that he thinks for a second it must be a third party speaking. "Just a water projection. But that doesn't mean she can't reach me. She's leaving me alone as long as I don't try to get off the island."
"Who-"
He stops himself. Alien Jasper may be, but her features are easy to read.
"She's your... rough year."
Jasper's grunt is affirmative.
"She frightens you."
"The surface of this garbage planet is seventy-five percent water. She should frighten you, too."
The apparition melts into the water, and wells up like a fountain off to their left, about thirty meters away, close enough to see staring eyes in a melting face.
"That's enough, let's go," Jasper says, a barked order that does nothing to conceal her alarm. Her hair is almost bristling.
Adam makes a vague sound of affirmation and follows a step behind her, resisting the urge to look over his shoulder for as long as he can. When he does look back, the water is flat and empty again, and he doesn't feel any better for seeing it.
He has to trot; she's not slowing down for his benefit this time, and she doesn't stop until there's a good half mile between them and the waterfront.
"You're going back to your base?"
"Yeah. Where else?"
"I have an apartment." He tips his head in the right direction. "Slightly better furnished."
"I don't need to cover everything in heaps of plant fiber and animal skin for my comfort."
"I have ESPN."
"What's that?"
"Entertainment. The closest equivalent to bloodsports that remains acceptable on this patch of the planet."
"You've got my attention." She crosses her arms, waiting for him to lead the way. When he starts off, though, she doesn't immediately follow. "You're letting me into your base. Why."
"The man we saw in the park, the... other Zirconium."
"Yeah?"
"He was a rough year himself."
She huffs softly, a sound of revulsion. "Is this some kind of empathy?"
"No. There's a human idiom, have you heard it? 'Misery loves company.'"
It takes her by surprise, and then she laughs-- a grating, abrupt sound.
"That's the best thing this planet has ever come up with." She smiles-- more a sneer, showing her teeth, but she's regained something that was absent when they stood and looked out into the East River.
He is... pleased. That she's coming. He doesn't trust her, isn't quite sure that he likes her, but he feels less alone than he has for centuries in her presence. Now he has to decide whether she continues to seek him out because she's noticed the same sensation, or if there's something she feels she can still gain from him. The possibility doesn't alarm him. After all, it's what he would do, in her position.
If he had been living in a bunker for months on end and was invited into a residence with working plumbing, one of the first five things he would do is shower. Call it the second-through-fourth priority, depending on circumstance and understanding that locating all the exits would always be the first.
Jasper locates the exits, but doesn't request a shower. She takes an offered towel and simply scrapes herself free of concrete dust and the detritus of the streets. It sweeps off her like-- he thinks marble and then wonders idly if she would find the comparison offensive. It really does take a desperate act of will to convince oneself that she's anything approaching human, and he's impressed on humanity's behalf for managing it day in and day out.
Adam wanders into the kitchen for a whiskey, only to be startled by a bright flash from the living room; when he hurries back in he finds Jasper dressed in dark jeans and a red t-shirt, neither of which he recognizes. They certainly aren't his; he could fit into them twice.
"You've changed your clothing."
Jasper sprawls on a loveseat that would normally accommodate three; she looks like she's on a throne. She seems comfortable under artificial light, even perhaps dangerously close to approving of the synthetic upholstery she's denting. She smirks, the red stripes across her face deforming slightly as her eyes and mouth crease.
"It's a projection. Better than strapping animal hair all over me," she adds. Then she shoots a haughty look at the coat closet. Perhaps she thinks his peacoat will take offense. Perhaps that's a thing that happens where she comes from.
"Of course." It really isn't worth it to argue, so he goes back to finding something to drink. No; a change of clothes first, into soft pants and a dressing gown, then the drink. He's ready for a snide comment-- looking forward to it, in fact, and he smiles when she says-
"Oh look, you're jamming toxins into your face. For fun."
"Ten-year-old single malt toxins," he agrees, and sinks into an empty chair with a contented smile. He curls his bare toes in the carpet, relishing the faint ache of a day spent on them instead of behind a desk. Or in a hospital bed; he can almost approach that thought head on, after the strange catharsis of seeing Henry in the park.
"All that trouble to evolve fragile balls of fat that can almost think like a crystal matrix, and all humans want to do is keep them from working."
"Indeed," he says. "Cheers."
She rolls her eyes when he drinks, but continued exposure to his organic habits seems to be desensitizing her to them. She hardly looks repulsed at all.
"Really? That's it? You're not going to try to justify this urge to malfunction?"
"The reasons for wanting to impede brain function from time to time are self evident. I'd say I was sorry you couldn't partake, but it only leaves more whiskey for me, so I'm not."
"Hmph." She watches him drink. "That shouldn't even affect you. You can make proteins out of dirty water; you could pull that gunk apart into something harmless"
"And yet it does affect me, without even trying. Obviously I simulate my adipose very well."
Her eyes narrow. "I'm going to try some."
"You'll want the bottle marked 'Jack Daniels.'" No sense wasting his good liquor on someone who thinks tastebuds are beneath her. He squirms deeper into his chair and leans his head back comfortably.
He hears Jasper trudge in-- she has a soft step for someone close to eight feet tall, but there's no stealth to the satisfied sound she makes as she drops back into the loveseat hard enough to make it creak in warning. He cracks an eye and notes without surprise that she's claimed the entire bottle of Jack.
"The remote is beside you. Channel sixty," he says, and then yawns. After a pause to read the remote, Jasper locates the power button, muttering something about archaic tactile inputs as she figures out the channel switching. There's a boxing match on; that should please her. He takes the last slow sip of his whiskey, tipping his glass all the way back to let the last drops spread bitter and hot over his tongue.
"I'm going to bed."
"Oh, by all means. Don't let me disrupt your precious biological rhythms."
"Good night to you, too."
The whiskey helps the dreams, although the river looms in his brain. Nothing concrete haunts him when he wakes in the middle of the night to the sounds of of commercial jingle from the living room; he rolls over and sleep finds him again quickly.
In the morning, the television is still on, but the front door is unlocked and Jasper is gone. There's not a drop of liquor left in the apartment, either-- anything with alcohol on the label has been drained. She even found the ten-year Tyrconnel he'd hidden in the linen closet and emptied it, too. He smiles fondly. Of course she did, the spiteful witch. Great walking imposition.
He thinks she must have returned to her base, to whatever she was trying to do with the white dais, but there's a chance she'll be by the river as well, and he may wander that way after he's run a few morning errands. All he knows is that she won't have stayed nearby.
Consequently it comes as a bit of a surprise when he steps out the front door of the apartment complex and trips over her. No: not trips over. Even sitting, her shoulders are almost to his waist and it's almost physically impossible to trip over her. He trips into her instead, and staggers back.
She gives him an unimpressed look over her shoulder. The rising sun makes her hair a halo, almost too bright to look at, and sparkles through the gem in the center of her face.
"Good morning," he says.
"Fifty percent accurate, at least." She visibly considers how much she's going to put herself out to make his life easier, and then grudgingly shifts about six inches so that he can get out of the front door. He squeezes and climbs over her, and sits down on the stoop beside her.
"Did the alcohol take?"
An irritated, negative sound.
"Ah, well. You did your best," he says, and means it to sound exactly as catty as it does.
"I always do."
"Excretion go off without a hitch?"
"You're vile."
"So we've established." He lounges against her firm shoulder; it's a mild imposition, but he'll work his way up to her level given practice.
"Hgn." It sounds suspiciously amused. She gives him a look but doesn't shake him off or have some sort of mysophobic reaction to being touched by so much organic mass.
"Plans for the day?"
"In process." She smiles unpleasantly. "Nobody's coming for me, you know."
"You've given up hope of contact? I thought you were still trying to reach them."
"If they were going to open communication, they'd have done it by now. There are still ways to get messages to this world. But they didn't, did they? Not to you, not to me, not to any of the other Zirconia. This planet's a write-off; the last experiment's the only one that matters." She nods, looks up unblinking at the sun, and her gem splinters the light across her face. "They must have known that if Lazuli defected to this world for good she'd be uncontainable. She's not worth the effort, so the rest of us are expendable."
"It's logical."
"Yes it is."
"You're welcome to monopolize my cable until the end comes."
"Hah!" She slaps her thighs. "I'm not sitting around and waiting."
"Even though it would be logical?" he asks, all innocence.
"If they think I'm expendable that's their mistake. I'm going to correct it for them." She bares her teeth at the sky. "Today I'm going to figure out how to get off this island. Then I'm going to go find the thing that's incubating inside Earth and shut it down. You going to come?"
Adam had detailed so many plans to himself, trapped inside his own body. Furious and paralyzed he planned revenge, grand manipulations, mental games that would have bound his fellow immortal to him in madness and blood.
Those plans seem very hollow, now that he knows that the world itself is due to end, that the Norse pagans were right and there really is some Thing gnawing on the roots of the world. In that context, it all seems ... a bit petty.
He's never killed a monstrous crystalline abomination before, and he'd be a fool to turn down a really new experience.
"Well," he says. "I wasn't doing anything today."