Jaguar

Three Earth years prior...

“Can’t breathe. Air...hurts.”

For the short time I saw him alive, he had been as pale as a bone. He gasped and groaned as he coughed up sputum, like he had been inhaling poison.

Over the course of an hour, the man painfully slipped over the edge and into death’s unyielding grip. Precious minutes had escaped me while I manipulated the air into random forms to find the one he could use, but I couldn’t catch every molecule of Rigelian air that his body couldn’t use. I hadn’t been strong enough.

All Rigelians can manipulate matter - general alchemy, the people in the town call it - but it had to be learned from someone else. Knowledge radiated like rays of sunlight for us, and what we had was shared. Well, this was the case for most of us.

Those like me, who cannot feel those rays of knowledge, who lack the mental ears to hear what’s being said?

******

“He’s...different,” I said as I placed my hands on the corpse’s chest.

“What do you mean?” A young girl asked.

“Draw it!” Her brother replied.

So many of us starved or fell ill to our planet's raw air, that the children were not disturbed by the sight of another dead body. In a few years, they wouldn't even be curious at the sight of one, assuming they were still alive.

I took my hands off the man and began to move the dirt beside me. I poked a single divot into the soft soil, then scribbled a jagged fuzz around the divot, edges of the ring touching the center.

“Oh! That’s one of the small pieces of us, right?” The girl asked. I wish I could remember her name.

“Yes, the smallest,” I said, looking into her bright, excited eyes. The reminder of death's long grasp apparently did not suppress the curiosity of children.

“I remember you showing that to daddy. I still don’t think he understands,” She said, voice full of innocent amusement.

“It’s a hard thing to understand, little wing,” I had said.

I made a smaller divot in the dirt near the first one, then drew a wider ring of fuzz around the second, keeping the jagged halo separated from the center.

“Most of his pieces are like ours,” I said, pointing to my first drawing, then panning my finger to the second one, “But some of them are...”

“Bigger? Faster?” Her brother asked, seeming excited to finally, maybe understand some of what his sister picked up more consistently. She bent down and stared at the drawings, hand on her chin. I felt irritated with myself; she was looking for more meaning in the drawings than I could give them.

“I don’t know. Different. Not...heavier. More like...it’s a different invisible color, than the invisible color of our pieces,” I said, even more frustrated now for my ignorance.

“They have colors?” The boy asked, comical confusion shown in his raised eyebrows. I decided I had reached the limits of my ability to explain.

“Let’s...let him rest. Wait for the doctor. I need to go make some more Lump, anyways,” I said.

******

Alchemists - most Rigelians - only ate as a leisure activity, having learned as babies to form and absorb the nutrients their bodies needed. It was one of the many things they took for granted.

Lump was exactly what it sounded like. I had learned from several doctors what most of the raw materials were that our bodies needed to keep us alive, and after I forced them to leave samples of those things, I did not sleep until I figured out how to make them myself. The others brought me plants and fruits that grew by the river, and I pulled the raw materials from them with the messy, clumsy alchemy I had clawed out for myself. When all the materials had been put together, they formed a thick, dry, formless dough.

It was rough, strenuous work that looked nothing like typical alchemy, but I had grown strong from it. The heavy little pieces were bonded tight to other pieces that I could not use, but I ripped them away nonetheless, setting the useful stuff down into growing piles in front of me, and dropping the debris into a bucket. The bucket filled faster than the piles.

The doctors’ knowledge was incomplete. The instinct to create and consume what they needed in order to survive was automatic, and so it was rarely thought of. They didn’t know that some bodies reacted badly to nutrients other bodies considered normal, or that one raw material needed another in order for both to be absorbed by the body. I had lost so many of my people to bodily failures I could not predict, and keeping my people from starving had been a deadly game of trial and error.

I tried not to despair as I continued the tedious work. I was tired enough already, and we were having to venture farther and farther to find plants with nutrients we could use...which meant we were getting hungrier. A few had tried to help me with making more Lump, but no one was able to learn enough alchemy to help me “peel” more than a dozen of the eight-petaled green blossoms before they could no longer continue. I needed more time to teach them...time I did not have, because I had to spend ever more time making food.

The tent door rustled as it peeked open, breaking my concentration.

“Doc’s here,” Pillar said. The big man didn’t linger; he headed the way he had been walking.

I sighed. It was time to do my other job.

******

Coldwood was difficult to affect with alchemy. Made from trees that took hundreds of thousands of years to grow, the little pieces it was made of resisted any kind of movement or reaction. If one spent enough time to make a box out of it, any alchemist placed inside would find it difficult to escape.

I gestured to Melia to get off the round-edged box. She shrugged, sliding off the hinge side. The man inside the box had his eyes painted shut with the sap from the tree. I could feel a tingle in my stomach as he exerted a chaotic, weak force around himself in his panic. When I snapped my fingers, the tingle morphed into mild pain, but when I began to walk around the box, the feeling returned to what it had been. The man faced ahead, hyperventilating but silent.

“You with me?” I asked. I hadn’t meant to growl, but the sound would probably help. The man whimpered and either nodded or spasmed his head.

“We won’t hurt you, if you help us,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. As much as I hated our greedy kin for leaving us to die, we needed them.

“W-w-wha-what do you want from me?” The doctor stammered.

“You help people understand health problems. A rare, valuable skill,” I didn’t say it as a question, “Tomorrow, you’ll go right back to that. We’ll send you on your way with something to wash off the sap, and payment for your services.”

That part was kind of a lie. I couldn’t give him anything valuable that he couldn’t bring into existence himself. I’d figure something out.

“And...um...what do...what do I do?” The doctor said, seeming mollified by my calmer tone. I paused; when you wanted to force someone to do something for you, it was best if your mark didn’t know if you were making a threat or a request.

“We need you to examine someone,” I said.

“But I...you, I can’t see-” He stammered quietly.

“You know what I mean by examine,” I said with emphasis, “You don’t need your eyes for that. My people will guide you to...him.”

It was best if he didn’t yet know he would be examining a corpse.

“And that’s...just examine?” The doctor asked, his tone carefully venturing out of fear and into confusion.

“Hmm?” I asked.

“No...changes? Just discern his matter?”

“Do not change anything,” I said firmly, “Just need the information. And I’ll need you to say it aloud.”

He tried to look for me, his body slumping into an odd stance that I interpreted as more confusion.

“But...you can’t...?” The doctor began.

“No. I can’t,” I confirmed.

“I don’t think I’ll know how to describe it.”

“You’ll have to try.”

Before he could say anything else, I nodded to Pillar and Gerald, the latter being one of Pillar’s exercise partners, and they scooped the doctor out of the box, setting him down and walking him forward in a single motion. The man dragged his feet, trying to bring them forward to match the big men’s pace. I gave the two a look that said to take it easy on the guy, and they slowed to let the doctor walk, but didn't loosen their grip on him.

******

The doctor was still trembling and shuddering when Pillar and Gerald nudged him to the ground in front of the corpse. He patted at the ground quickly in a sweeping motion, finding the body after a few seconds, then recoiling away from it almost immediately.

“He’s dead!” The doctor protested loudly, his voice rising a full octave.

“Yes, he is,” I said calmly, putting a firm hand on the man’s back and pressuring him forward, “And we need to know what killed him.”

“You didn’t...” The doctor began to ask the obvious question, but I let the silence keep him from finishing it.

He gingerly placed his hands on the man’s chest, and stopped shaking almost immediately. He opened his mouth to speak.

“Um...” The doctor said, working his mouth but not managing any words.

“Yes?” I said, not so much a question as a prod.

“How...where did you find this man?” The doctor asked, almost too quietly to hear.

“Just tell me what you’re finding,” I said.

He took a moment, clenching his jaw and drawing a sharp breath. He wasn't stalling; he was drawing a blank. I had a hunch that whatever he was trying to describe was even more enigmatic than alchemy.

"It's...wrong," He said, pausing again, "The head, it's...his thoughts? Instincts? They're...hurting him. Hurt him. Killed him."

"They made his body try to make something that harmed him," I said, making the guess sound like a confident suggestion.

"Maybe? Uh...probably? Look I told you I don't have words to-"

"I know," I interrupted, breathing deep to calm myself, "I know. So, his matter is the same as ours?"

"It is, but..." The doctor's voice was now empty of fear, "It...I don't know. It wants to go...somewhere it can't go? Does that make any sense?"

I sighed. This wasn't going to work. Something was indescribably wrong with this body, but that was the only thing this doctor could tell me.

"Wait," The doctor froze, and his breath hitched, "Wait wait wait...I know who this is."

Melia gave me a fearful grimace as she quietly donned her mace glove. I glared and waved her off; this was bad, but we needed to know how bad.

"No...no this can't...you..." The doctor stammered.

"Who is it?" I asked, forcing my voice as low as it could go.

"It's...he's...the schoolmaster. He's been missing for days."

The doctor rubbed at his sealed eyes, trying to scratch an itch beneath the sap. He groaned and began to sob.

"Did you do this?" The doctor was pivoting from fear to anger, and his words were coming out tight and strained, "Why would you do this? Are you going to kill me too!?"

He was breathing deeply, but wasn't hyperventilating now. All of our good options were now gone. The doctor wasn't a fighter, my scouts had assured me, but he was still an alchemist, capable of rearranging our insides. And now, he believed we had murdered the schoolmaster, and that he might be next.

Worse: we had kidnapped a doctor when the town had been on a manhunt for the schoolmaster. Now there were two missing persons...and they were both here.

I sighed as I slid my fingers into the mace glove. None of my people looked surprised; they had come to the same conclusion about what had to happen now.

I closed my fist and swung it like a hammer at the doctor's nose. He was knocked flat against the dirt beneath him, one violent breath escaping him before he fell silent. After the blow, he didn't get back up.

******

"It's good that it hurts," I said aloud. There was no one else in my tent; I didn't want anyone else with me at the moment.

The doctor's face had cratered when my fist made contact. I knew from experience that shoving the nasal bones into the brain would kill. On the occasions that called for it, I always swung with all my strength. I never wanted my victims to suffer. The result was always a bloody mess that had no resemblance to the face it had been.

I closed my eyes and shook my head violently, trying to shake the mental image of the dead doctor. This was a mistake. The images of the six others I had killed this way flashed through my mind, and I fell to my knees, trembling.

"It's good...that it hurts," I said, my voice shaking. Killing was supposed to feel horrible. This is how I knew I wasn't a monster.

No. I was a monster. But if I could help it, none of my people would ever approach my body count. It was my duty to bear this for them.

"Jague?" Melia said as she scratched on the entrance of my tent. I jumped, startled, then took a moment to collect myself before replying.

"Yep, yep, coming," I said. When I opened the tent flap, she took a step back.

"Are you alright?" She asked, loving concern on her face. For as vicious as she could be, there was a tender side to her. She was always one or the other, and felt no shame for either.

"Yeah...yeah," I sniffled, wiping my eyes and nose. She tilted her head, disbelief in her expression.

"You did what you needed to do," She said quietly, trying to keep anyone else from hearing my distress. That was the wrong thing. They needed to know that I felt the same things they did; I couldn't afford to make them think I was infallible.

"I'm not sure what I did yet," I said, taking a deep breath, "Did you need something?"

I heard an angry shout coming from the direction of the gathering tent, then several more. Her expression became an apology, and I nodded to let her know I'd try to stop another panic riot. I wasn't in any condition for it, but that was my duty, too.

******

"That's easy for you to say! You and Pillar are walking mountains. What are the rest of us going to do?" A too-thin, middle-aged man yelled up at Gerald and Pillar as they stood on the short stump at the center of the room.

"Please don't say-" I began to mumble to myself.

"If you all ate your Lump like we do, you'd be strong, too!" Pillar shouted back.

And there it was: Pillar had once again forgotten that most of the others' stomachs rejected at least some of the Lump, that there was so much variation in what each individual stomach could stand that no one food completely sufficed for everyone. Most of the other people in the tent were either rail-thin or had painfully distended bellies. I was beginning to think that the nutrients that weren't working for Pillar were the ones that kept his brain alive.

The 20 or so people around Pillar and Gerald exploded into angry clamoring, most of them yelling some variation of the need to run.

"Shouldn't have let the kids see the body," I said shamefully. Melia was considerate enough to only smirk triumphantly at me.

"Where do you all think we're going to go?" Gerald yelled over the crowd, "Do you have some place we don't know about?"

"We can't run anymore. We've gone too far now," Pillar yelled.

"You've gone too far!" A woman screamed back, "None of us asked you to kill that guy!"

Gerald reared back, tensing his arms and closing his fists.

"All of you are right," I raised my voice above the crowd, and everyone went silent. I walked up to Pillar and Gerald, burying my irritation at their inept conflict resolution and nodding to both. They stepped down from the stump and walked to the back of the room; everyone moved aside as the two muscleheads glared angrily at anyone near them.

"Everyone is right," I said, sitting on the stump, "There's plenty of bad for everyone."

I waited silently, and everyone took a seat on the ground. The "town hall" was officially in session.

"I'm sorry I had to kill him. I didn't want to do it, but he had the feel of us, and the town was looking for the schoolmaster-" I said.

"We didn't kill him!" A high-pitched man shouted.

"No, we didn't," I said, loudly but calmly, "But they were going to think we did, no matter what."

Everyone grew quiet as that realization took root in their minds.

"But even if we leave, they'll find us," I said. My voice grew softer as I went on, and I had to make it stay loud.

"They feel us in ways we can't turn off. We could go halfway across the planet, and they'd just follow our trail. They'll find us. They'll find the bodies," I said.

"You're all missing the most important part," Melia said. Everyone turned to look at her; she had never spoken up during a town hall.

"We took the doctor to treat the schoolmaster. Part of that was figuring out if what the schoolmaster had would spread to the rest of us," She said.

A cold dread gripped me as I thought of the schoolmaster choking, suffocating and turning pale. I had killed the person who was supposed to tell us if that would happen to us too.

This time, the silence felt like a crushing weight. Even Pillar and Gerald wore grim faces.

******

The burial detail had dug the grave for the schoolmaster, but I called a halt so that I could study the body one more time before I went.

"This isn't smart," Melia said. In the long line of things vying for my attention, her protests were at the rear. I felt a vague regret for that.

"All out of smart, I'm afraid," I said, barely conscious of my own words. I needed to stop, to talk to her. She was going to say something I needed to hear; she always did.

"I'm serious. You're going to die if you do this," She said, crossing her arms. I pulled my hands off the body, then sat back up to look at her.

"Those aren't warriors down there. That's part of why we chose this place, remember? Plenty of normal people to swipe from?" I replied.

"They don't have to be warriors to tear us-"

"And aren't you the one that said this was our most serious problem?"

"Don't do that," She said, drawing herself to her full two meter height, "That's not why you're going down there."

I glared at her angrily. This was an argument we'd had before: every raid we ever conducted on the town, every recon that left broken windows and kicked-down doors, every kidnapping, every murder...the thing that let me eventually sleep at night, she argued, was that I hated them, and I'd always find a reason to kick them in the shins and spit in their faces, something to keep me convinced they deserved whatever we gave them in return for the nothing they gave us.

"If you were really worried about that body having some kind of disease, you wouldn't be hunched over it right now," Melia said.

In truth, I hadn't considered how bad an idea this was if this guy was sick. She was right. She was always right.

"You should be leading these people, not me," I said, putting my hands on the body again and concentrating.

A living body always had a contained, collective movement amongst its smallest pieces, though no two pieces of one's body ever made the same movements. Dead bodies made these unique movements too, but slower and weaker. The schoolmaster's body had lost nearly all of the movement of life. I squeezed my eyelids shut, digging, searching, listening. I needed to feel what the doctor had felt.

Which was...what? It wanted to "go somewhere it couldn't go?" How was I supposed to feel that? Where, how, what did that feel like?

Forget that, I told myself, I would look for what seemed different to me.

It all seemed different to me. For all that this world was full of people who could do anything, I was pretty sure they had no idea what they were playing with.

Something poked me. It was only a little painful, like a needle tapping my belly. It was probably hunger, so I ignored it.

Then a feeling like my head was collapsing in on itself wracked me. I keeled over, crying out. It was freezing and vacuous, like my mind was being blown out an airlock.

...airlock? What was...those two words made no sense together...

It struck me again. Harder, colder, numbing my mind...couldn't think...

"Jague?"

I was moving. Being moved. Something...no, someone was...

"Jague!"

I knew the voice. She was important, someone I trusted. When she spoke, I listened...

Like a reflex, I focused in on myself, fell into ritual.

"This bit, here, is you," My own voice echoed from the past, familiar from endless repetition. Why had I repeated it?

Because everything was big, innumerable, bled together when you started looking at its smallest pieces.

"Look in, not out." My voice said.

"Meditate," Another voice said, giving a name to what I was doing.

I knew her. I had never met her.

At the sound of the stranger's voice, the world contracted. Melia was above me, calling my name.

"Unghhh," I said, reaching to wipe drool from my mouth.

"Are you OK? What happened?" Melia said, propping my head out of the dirt.

"I...don't know..." I said groggily, "But...I have to go find out what the schoolmaster was working on."

Melia scowled at me, but her body was still tense and protective, as if to shield me from some attack from above. I extended my hand, and she clasped it to pull me up.

It was clear she still questioned my intentions, but now that I'd had one of my "alchemy seizures," as she called them, she had relented a bit.

"What did you see?" She asked quietly.

"You were right," I said.

"I know," She said, not prideful, just matter-of-fact, "But...what about?"

"Whatever the schoolmaster did, is going to destroy us."