Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 80
The wild-haired woman stood over him. Thick, black hair the same color and curl as the head of hair Nev now bore. A crossbow dangled from her belt. She held a machete in her left hand. “You aren’t my father,” she said. Her gaze went to the crumpled, bloody body of the old hermit.
She brought up the machete.
“I don’t want to hurt you!” Nev blurted.
“Too late for that.”
She swung, and Nev propelled himself up, rolling hard and sloshing into the water. She came after him. She feinted and stabbed, a quick, trained strike that caught him off guard. She was trained. A former guard? Mercenary?
Nev scrambled up the bank, trying to get his bearings. The body was too new. He was too clumsy.
“I know what you are,” she said, advancing.
“Then you know to leave me be,” he gasped. The new body still felt like a poorly fitted glove, a burlap sack instead of a tailored suit. He needed to delay her until he got his second wind. “Just… step away.”
“You murdered my father.”
“I didn’t. He was already dead. The soldiers killed him.”
“Liar.”
“I’m not your enemy. That’s the—" Nev searched for the word. “Syndicate? They’re the ones who took your children. I’m just moving on. You won’t know me.”
“You’ve denied my father a proper rest.”
“This is a just a body. I promise you. His soul is—"
“You’re a fucking disease. A fucking monster. Get out of him. Get out!”
“I…can’t. Please. I don’t want to hurt you.”
She swung at him. He leapt back, casting about for a weapon. A large stone, maybe. Something to stun her, not kill her. Her blade hissed past him again, tearing his sleeve. Nev turned, and ran.
He kept near to the water, circling up the beach. The moment he got his second wind, he would dive into the water and swim across the lake. She could fight, but could she swim?
“Stop! Stop, gods be satiated!”
Nev gasped and felt a raw surge of heat consume his torso. A good sign. His body filled with a cramping, searing pain, like birth. He had been reborn a thousand times, and here he was again, a soul that could never die, so long as there were more bodies within his reach on a battlefield. His skin began to chafe and flake. He shoved his hand against his torso and felt only smooth skin. It was enough. Second wind. He dove for the lake.
A hand took hold of his collar. Yanked him back. He landed hard on the stones, lost his breath. The woman pinned him to the ground, her mat of hair hanging into his face, obscuring his vision, and shoved the machete against his neck. “Enough,” she said. “Enough. Leave my father.”
“He was the nearest body. There aren’t any more. I have nowhere to go.”
“Then I’ll kill you, and he’s free.”
“He’s already free! If you kill me, you’re killing only his body, but you’re destroying my soul. You can fight, but have you killed?” Her grip eased. A long silence. Nev closed his eyes. “I am just a man, like your father. I’m sorry you lost him. He died defending his grandchild.”
She choked on a sob. “Fuck you.”
“I’m sorry.”
She got off him but kept her hand on the machete. Nev rolled over, trying to catch his breath. Too close. That had been far too close.
“They took my daughter,” she said. “I’m going after them.”
Nev spit into the water. He dipped his hands into the lake and washed out his mouth, scrubbed the vomit from his beard. “No one comes back from the Vault,” Nev said.
“I did.”
He glanced over his shoulder, regarded her anew. A young woman, maybe mid-twenties, though the hard look in her black eyes, the thick hair, made her look older; someone who’d seen far more of life than this mountain settlement offered.
“Oh,” he said. He sloshed cold water over his head, soaking his own filthy hair.
“If you tell anyone that, I’ll kill you.”
“You seemed bent on doing that anyway.” He turned, still on one knee, trying to appear less threatening despite the body’s bulk.
She sheathed her machete and flicked her long coat over it.
“How long ago?” he asked.
“What?”
“Since you left the Vault.”
“A long time,” she said, “but not long enough, it seems.” Her mouth formed a thin, hard line. She had her father’s mouth, too, this body’s mouth, full lips and jutting chin. “It’s easy to see you aren’t him. You don’t have his way of holding that body. Your speech, mannerisms. It’s different. How did so many of you live so long?”
Nev offered her a small shrug.
“I could scream, now,” she said, “and draw them all here after you. They’re angry. Finding you here after what happened, they’ll think you’re with the Syndicate. They’ll murder you where you stand. Or…”
“Or?”
“Or you can come with me. To the Vault.”
“You have no reason to—"
“You’re wearing my father’s face. You owe me this much.”
“I—understand.”
“And when we’re done, I want his body.”
“I’ll need another one.”
“We can find another one. People die all the time.”
“I don’t know what you intend for the two of us to do,” Nev said, “against an entire army. I have an unusual gift. I’m not a magician, or a necromancer, nothing like that. I don’t like to hurt people.”
“What are you called?”
“Nev,” he said.
“Tiana,” she said. “What do you need? To…function?”
“Food,” he said.
“You won’t pass for my father. And you’re filthy. They will know immediately. Stay here. I’m getting llamas, supplies. If you go anywhere, I’ll find you, and I really will kill you, for breaking your word tome. I was trained at the Vault. You understand?”
“I understand.”
Tiana gripped the hilt of her machete, as if for emphasis. She left him on the beach, and Nev heaved a great gasping breath, filling his newly healed lungs. He folded his hands over the smooth skin of his stomach and closed his eyes, thinking briefly of Carlov. An older man, old enough to have a grandchild, but his hands were strong, his thighs meaty and stout. It had been a long time since he’d gotten this involved in the affairs of the bodies he wore like a second skin, a hermit crab pulling on a shiny new shell, and he did not like it.
Tiana would likely betray him in the night, as so many others had. But an attempt on the Vault, and the syndicate that currently controlled it, would be an insane undertaking with a dozen soldiers, let alone just the two of them, body mercenary and former Vault child though they were.
When she returned, he had managed to sit up and move onto a nearby stone. He drank from the lake as if trying to drown himself in it.
Tiana handed over a cake of hard cheese and slab of cave-aged ham, and he devoured it like a starving man, which he was. His body—yes, his—began to feel more familiar.
“Clothes,” she said as he dug in, and set a fresh pair of trousers, shift, small clothes, and coat next to him. “You stink. You should wash.”
She went back to her llamas, tethered in the scrub along the shore. Nev undressed, washed the shit and piss and lingering vomit from his new skin. Shivering, he pulled on the clean clothes and walked up the beach to stand with her.
“Come,” she said. “They have a head start.”
Nev had nothing left in the cave behind him. He did not like to carry personal items from one body to the next. It was too easy for those items to be tracked along with him. Tiana forged ahead of him. Perhaps she was overconfident, having an unarmed man at her back. Perhaps she was overconfident because he bore the face of her father, even if the way he inhabited it was not familiar to her.
They went around the lake, following a path that Tiana said the syndicate had taken. “How many children did they take?” Nev asked.
“Nearly three dozen,” Tiana said.
“That will slow them.”
“That’s my hope. If we can catch them before they get to the Vault, it will be easier.”
The afternoon crept on to evening, and though Nev checked often, no one followed them. “Have they left it to you?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Me and my…” she grimaced. “Father.”
“Because you’ve been there.”
“Yes. Both of us.”
“What’s your plan?”
“I’ll know when we catch them,” she said.
Another hour of walking, as the sun disappeared behind the mountains. Then, “It’s been four generations since the last war,” Tiana said. “What have… people like you done all that time? How have you…survived?”
“We don’t draw attention,” he said.
“Surely they’ve forgotten you all by now. You can live as you are?”
“They will always remember us,” Nev said. “Always. You did.”
“You were a myth. The Corpse Soldiers.”
He grimaced. “In my day we were just mercenaries. Body mercenaries.”
“Stories change.”
“As do countries, people, yes,” he said.
Tiana pulled out her machete. He cringed, hanging back with the second llama, unsure of what she would do next.
“How long have you hidden yourself here?” Tiana asked.
“Not long,” he said.
“You take advantage of small villages like this, don’t you?”
“How have I taken advantage?”
“Stealing our bodies.”
“I spend most of my seasons in just one body. They last, usually. I don’t kill people when I don’t have to. I stay out of other people’s business.”
“By stealing their faces.”
Nev let that lie. Tiana broke the silence a few moments later, and asked, “Did you spend time in the Vault? They say it was made for people like you, originally.”
Nev patted the llama’s flank. The llama hummed. “It was called something else, when they brought me there.”
Tiana stopped walking. Turned. “Tell me.”
Nev grimaced. “You don’t want some old story.”
“I do. What was it like, however long ago it was, for you?”
“The Vault…” The name itself evoked a certain smell, like day-old fish and wet stone. “We were chosen,” he said, “singular. That’s what they told us. They scoured villages like yours for us, for those who could do what we could.”
“And now you’re all dead.”
“Or scattered,” he said.
“A few live,” she said. “That’s something.”
“Is it? Maybe it’s best they murdered us all. But… I don’t like dying.”
“You don’t like dying? Don’t you die all the time?”
“Consider that this may be the reason.”
Tiana kept them walking well past dark, head bowed as she tracked the Syndicate officials and the children. Nev could have followed them blindfolded, but he let her forge ahead, no doubt thinking she was showing off her skills from her time in the Vault. He wondered how the experience had changed, over the generations, from being a place one put those who could harness other bodies as he did, to being another organization training ordinary children for gross tasks.
“We should have caught them by now,” she said, as the God’s Wheel entered the sky.
“You should eat,” Nev said. “Sleep. They will have stopped, too.”
“They can’t be more than a few hours—"
“We don’t know that.”
Tiana reached for the machete again, and Nev put a hand on her elbow, gently but firmly. “Let’s not,” he said. “I give you my word I’ll see this through. I will accompany you to the Vault.”
“And I should trust that?”
“What else do you have?”
“The machete.”
“You should know,” he said softly, “That I have spent more years than you or your father have lived, combined, fighting in some war or another. Let’s agree on that.”
She would not look at him. “Help me make camp,” she said, and jerked her elbow away.
In the morning, he woke before the suns, and let Tiana sleep a bit longer. When he pressed her awake, he noticed her skin was hot and feverish.
“Are you ill?” he asked as she rose.
“I’m fine,” she said.
She was not fine.
As the day wore on, her fever got worse. She stumbled along the track and got confused at a crossroads in the mountain path. A light drizzle fell, making Nev and the llamas miserable, but she did not seem to notice it, nor the mud rucked up around her ankles.
“You’re ill,” Nev said, when they stopped to rest at midday. “A fever like that can kill.”
Tiana did not reply, only stared out past him. He waved his hand in front of her face and found her unresponsive.
Nev sighed and made camp. She had brought a little tent, which he set up to keep her out of the rain. He guided her there and wrapped her in both the bedrolls. She had begun to shiver and hallucinate, gabbling about little black dogs and begging him to make her chicken broth.
“Papa,” she moaned. “Papa, I’m dying.”
“You aren’t dying,” Nev said softly. She sobbed.
Nev held her for a time, until the fever took her down again. He nursed her all night, getting her to drink hot tea spiked with a few foraged herbs that he knew would help reduce the fever. Whatever her body was fighting was tough enough that it might kill her before killing the sickness.
He calculated how long they may be from the next settlement. It might be better to go back to where they had come from, seeking help from a local witch.
But that night, Tiana’s fever broke, and her fitful sleep became a deep, restful slumber.
Nev took up his paring knife and consulted his reflection in a dark puddle nearby. He trimmed up the beard, so it lay smoothly against his face, and cut hunks of the thick hair away from his face and from where it lay on his neck. When he was done, the visage that gazed back at him made him feel more himself, as if he had taken charge of the skin he inhabited. The body had lost some weight in the process of healing itself; there was a moment when inhabiting a new body when it became truly his. As he washed his face again, wiping away the stray hairs, he felt much more grounded.
When he came back to camp, Tiana was sitting up, still looking weak and a bit frail after her illness.
“How long?” she asked.
“A few days,” he said.
“You didn’t leave.”
“I gave you my word.”
She assessed him. “You look less and less like him,” she said.
“I hope that easier,” he said.
She grimaced. “We have to get them before they get to the vault,” she said, and got shakily to her feet.
“You should eat,” he said.
“They changed a lot of the security at the Vault since I was there,” she said. “It will be impossible to get in.”
“You need another day.”
“I can’t—"
“I am just getting used to this body,” he said. “Don’t make me inhabit yours.”
She stiffened. Gave a little nod.
Nev spent the morning fishing and foraging and fed them both a fresh meal of stuffed trout and fried fiddleheads. Tiana slept deeply one more night, and the next day they started out just after midday, following the tracks of the caravan.
Tiana was right, of course. The delay meant they were less likely to catch the soldiers before they arrived at the Vault. Still, they carried on. When she was stronger, they traveled longer days, trying to make up the lost time. Tiana’s mood darkened the longer the journey went.
They came to a little settlement about a week’s ride out from the village. Nev knew they were close because he could smell smoke. What remained of the settlement was mostly in smoking ruin. The cellars had been raided; the tatty fields razed. A few survivors told them the syndicate soldiers had demanded both their food stores and their children.
“Did they say why?” Nev asked. “Why so many children?”
“How long ago?” Tiana asked.
The old woman they questioned raised her hand in a sign against evil. “They passed two days ago. They said the children were a tithe. That they were due.”
Nev glanced at Tiana, but she was already turning back to the road.
“Thank you,” Nev said. “How many soldiers? Were they Vault-trained, do you know?”
“Maybe a dozen,” she said. “Not so many, we thought, but they are well armed. They have weapons…” She made the sign against evil again. “They freeze you cold in your tracks.”
“They… stun you? Harm you?”
“Stun, yes,” she said. “You have a child out there?”
“I do,” Nev said, because his resemblance to Tiana would be clear to anyone.
“If you can…if you can free others… I’m old, and they killed so many of our fighters. If I was still young—"
Nev rested a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll do what we can, but we are just two people.”
Tears welled in the old woman’s eyes. “I understand.”
Nev pulled his llama after Tiana. He had a hollow pit in his gut, not hunger, but grief. He stayed out of the affairs of others because he hated that feeling. Hated to care about anything at all buy his next meal, his next body, because caring hurt too much, and there was always more to care about, more trauma, more injustice. It never ended.
Days later, their own supplies running low, Nev and Tiana came to the top of a rise overlooking another little valley. From here, they could see the towering spirals of the four pillars that supplied air to the Vault, rising up over the bustling stronghold that supported it. And there, looking like a nest of black ants, much farther down the winding path that led to the Vault, was the caravan.
“Quickly,” Tiana said, launching herself down the rocky path.
