Jaguar

Walking nonchalantly past the unmarked boundary between town and wilderness, I watched as vagabonds like the one at our camp stood in a single-file line before a “doctor.” Like everything else in the town, neither the person nor the profession had a name. The miracle the “doctor” performed - transforming a rail-thin, sickly adolescent into the lean, vivacious person she always should have been - had no name, either.

Coming to the town always infuriated me. Everything in the place was pointlessly extravagant and inefficient, built in ways that wouldn’t work if someone wasn’t bending the rules the universe played by. Every bridge with unnatural curves and spires, every home held in the air from below by hair-thin filaments, every pristine street and glistening surface made my blood feel like it was boiling under my skin. This was the place of a people without need, and they would never see what an affront it was.

I stopped, looking back at the young woman who had just received a miracle. If the story ended here, it would be a happy tale. But what would she face when she returned to her shelter in the woods? How much of her family would never be able to experience such a thing, because they couldn’t make the journey, and because the “normal” alchemists wouldn’t make the journey to them? Would they even be here when she needed another restorative wave of the hand?

“Better to live at the whims of someone’s rage than their charity. Rage takes energy that may run dry, but apathy to another’s existence takes no effort.”

“You’re looking even more bitter than usual today,” My contact said as he approached. Like the others, he had no name; I called him Brown, though only for reference, and only to myself.

“I need information,” I said, trying to sidestep his twisted sense of humor. Today, he wasn’t so easily distracted.

“Would it have anything to do with the two dead men everyone in town is looking for?” Brown asked, his voice snide and amused, “Your tent village by the pond is suspect number one, from what I hear.”

I glowered at him. Like any of the other alchemists, he knew every detail of the town’s ongoing manhunt. This was the opening round of negotiations, and from the looks of it, Brown was feeling that he had the better starting position, which meant that he would not feel he had to give as much as he took.

“The schoolmaster they’re looking for: what was he working on?” I asked.

“Payment first. What do you have to offer?” A discomforting eagerness crept into Brown’s voice.

I hated dealing with Brown, and I wasn’t the only one. Even “normal” alchemists were reluctant to interact with him. Unlike the others, who radiated knowledge so freely that it was a subconscious action, Brown had immense control over what he shared with others. He was a hole in their understanding, someone they tolerated because he could do everything they could, which meant that excluding him just made him harder to predict. He was extremely, arrogantly proud of this devious talent, and unfortunately, his ability to keep secrets meant anything I wanted to do in the town usually required his help, if I hoped to remain undiscovered. Even if I wanted to recruit other alchemists, they’d never be able to keep their knowledge of my darker deeds a secret.

“I haven’t had time to learn anything new,” I said, swallowing my humiliation to put on a pleading tone, “My people are starving.”

“Oh, there has to be something. You’re so talented! Come on. Teach me something new,” Brown teased. So debasing myself wouldn’t work this time; I wished he would be more consistent in that regard.

I sighed and groaned, and Brown gave me a satisfied, wicked smirk. I had nothing to offer except the info I had gleaned from the schoolmaster’s body, and letting Brown have that piece of information would put him in an even better position of leverage.

The memory of the dying man’s last desperate breaths chilled me. I didn’t know if my people would share his fate, and couldn’t know unless this wretch got something he considered valuable.

“The schoolmaster…came to us,” I said, hoping I could keep secrets of my own, “He was dying. He couldn’t breathe.”

“And you couldn’t keep him alive,” Brown said, more a statement than a question. So I was hiding nothing. He already knew, probably had known as soon as he saw me. Strangely, it felt comforting not to have to keep the secret anymore.

“Don’t worry about the doctor,” Brown said, relaxing into a tone that seemed more sincere, “I want you to tell me about what you found when you examined the body.”

“Can’t you…” I gestured to my forehead, then to his. He chuckled.

“One of the unfortunate limitations of alchemy, my friend. You didn’t learn it the same way we did. You blunt-forced your way into it from the top down,” Brown said, pausing to stroke his chin, “Ah, I’m going to tell you something. I think it might actually help our…future relations.”

I glared at Brown again, but with less venom in the expression. Whatever purpose he thought might be served by better “future relations” was probably all for his benefit, but the uncomfortable truth - that I didn’t know what he hoped to do with anything I had given him - had never seemed so threatening as it did now. I had known this since we first started doing business, but had accepted it as the cost of survival. Now, though…

“The way we learn, changes us. Sometimes, it makes us more like everyone else,” Brown pointed to himself, then to me, “Others become something new. Something unique. They figure out things no one else can do, overcome…” Brown paused, looking for the right word, “Obstacles…that everyone else says are just too difficult.”

“Is that what I’m helping you do?” I asked, feigning confident indignation, “Remove obstacles?”

“Oh, no,” Brown said, laughing again, “At the moment, we are just friends, having a conversation.”

I let out a slow breath, trying to keep the growl out of my voice.

“Point of all of this is, your mind isn’t like the rest of the fools in this place. The paths through your thoughts are familiar, but unmarked. The further in I go, the less I know of where I am,” Brown said, an unexpected, sincere respect creeping into his voice, “With you, I can’t always tell the difference between memory and imagination, especially on matters of alchemy.”

“But you can read me well enough to know I need something,” I said flatly.

“Basic Rigelian communication,” He spread his open palms wide, as if to say “what can you do.”

As if to say, ‘this is what you and your kind lack, the reason you are distrusted, treated like charity cases, and left to die.’

“Please. Hasn’t this dance gone long enough? We have information for each other. Let’s exchange,” Brown said, his head bowed in fake supplication. I had no other choice.

“The doctor said his matter felt wrong, so I felt it myself. I’m sure you saw that. I’m sure you saw me go into a fit, some alternate dimension, or something.”

“It was confusing to observe secondhand, but…yes. I saw something like that.”

“I heard things. Words, phrases, combinations that made no sense. It felt like I was losing myself.”

“Like you were going somewhere.”

I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to relive the terror in the schoolmaster’s eyes, the emptiness so deep that it looked like the man was going to collapse in on himself. I didn’t want to…but it felt like I was seeing it more vividly now than I had when the schoolmaster had been brought to me.

Why was I connecting my acid trip with the schoolmaster’s death? Why did it feel like I was disappearing down the same hole that the schoolmaster had been drawn into?

Acid trip? What does that mean?

Suddenly, quickly, my vision narrowed. My legs seemed to turn to soft clay, and collapsed beneath me. I passed out before I hit the ground.

******

I could not recall Brown having moved, but he was helping me stand, half-dragging me to a nearby bench. By now, he knew better than to use alchemy to sustain me, but I could feel myself growing less thirsty, and the air around me growing slightly cooler. He was drawing water out of the air and placing it in my body, restoring what I had lost in sweat during my horrifying blackout. I decided I would address his violation of my body later.

“That was quite an experience,” Brown said.

“What’s happening to me?” I asked. It was only now that I realized I was trembling.

“Are you asking what I’m seeing with…” He gestured in a circular motion around himself with his hand. I nodded, breathing deep, trying to calm my shaking.

“It’s like you said: your matter is trying to go somewhere,” Brown said. It was the first time I could remember seeing him perplexed. I couldn’t recall telling him about my matter wanting to ‘travel,’ but it could have happened during my fugue.

“We need to go to the schoolmaster’s lab. Home. Wherever he was. We have to figure out what this is,” I said. I could hear the fatigue and anxiety in my voice.

“I agree,” Brown said, unable to keep the smile completely off his face, “But uh…I’m not gonna carry you anymore, I think. Just in case.”

He didn’t need to elaborate. “Just in case” helping me would put him in danger of an existential malady, cause him to lose his mind. I couldn’t fault him for being cautious.

******

The schoolmaster’s home was the easiest to get to, and was only guarded by a single man. Still, even one guard would be enough to keep us away, I thought. If they were close enough, they’d detect our unique matter signatures and catch us in the act…but Brown had other abilities I was not aware of.

Before we approached his unguarded back door, he blew a heavy breath through his nostrils. A cool breeze rushed past, creating little eddies of air. Even I, with my limited sense for alchemical alteration, could feel what he had just done. A chaotic, disorienting not-sound had gathered around the house. The guard, just on the periphery of Brown’s ‘confusion field,’ instinctively moved forward a few steps.

“He’ll pick up on the sudden absence of identifying material if I just turn on my ‘vault of secrets’ mode while we’re in there,” Brown said quietly, “This should give us about 30 minutes before the flyers show up.”

Somehow, I knew how long a minute was, despite having never heard the word before. When I questioned the knowledge, I found that I couldn’t remember having heard Brown say the word to begin with.

Flyers. Only now did the word, and the terror associated with it, register with me.

******

It didn’t take long to find evidence that the schoolmaster had been up to something weird. Sheets of fabric, torn into undefinable shapes, bore unintelligible symbols. It was like art, except I had never seen art arranged this way. The symbols formed straight lines, even where they were stacked one on top of the other.

EXOTEMPORAL

I traced my finger over the string of symbols.

“Have you-” I began.

“No,” Brown interrupted. He was clearly shaken and afraid, for reasons I could not guess.

Several pieces of the fabric were frayed, strings still hanging loosely. Eventually, I realized that two of the pieces went together, forming a longer line of symbols. It must have been ripped apart. Once I knew to look for pieces that went together, I began to construct much larger lines of-

“It’s not witchcraft! It’s science!”

The hand gripping my arm squeezed it so hard that I was sure it would break. That didn’t hurt so bad as watching all my work burn.

The sensation didn't come through as pain this time. This feeling was like the memory of looking in a dirty mirror.

“What’s it now?” Brown asked. His voice felt too far away; I wasn’t sure I could yell loud enough for him to hear.

All of it. Every experiment, every data point, everything I could never cram into my head again. 

I cried as I watched my family’s salvation turn to ashes. The black, stinking smoke would claim them now. I could never remove the poison from their lungs.

“You’re lucky you don’t burn in there too, girl,” A gruff voice growled in my ear. 

I wished he would. My life was over anyways.

The intrusive thoughts were more confusing than painful. I still remembered who I was, still felt how wrong this experience was. A change deeper than that of alchemy was stirring in me, showing me a piece of a life that wasn't my own, making me understand things that should have been beyond me. 

She was there. And everywhere. Everywhere was everywhere. There was a word for this: worlds inside worlds inside worlds, everything spilling again and again, waterfalls tumbling into each other forever, falling and rising…

Infinite.

“I had to come to this world. Your world. Yours is the other piece that makes it all complete. You have all the words for the things I cannot explain, and I have the invisible things that you know by name.”

The art was not art at all, but knowledge made material. It all descended on me like a flood: thousands upon thousands of symbols. Letters. Words.

And those words, in her book - a book, a thing full of passages, made of sentences, made of words, made of those symbols bound together into orderly lines - took those things we could not speak, and made them into speech itself.

I held the fabric in my hands. The girl from my…memories…spoke the words aloud to me. They were instructions for crossing into another…

Space?

No, that wasn’t it. Too small.

Universe.

I suddenly felt that I was being forced into a place too small for me, growing smaller, smaller, forever smaller…

When I snapped back to myself, I realized, angrily, that all of this about another universe was not a sudden revelation. This was the work of years. I knew it, sure as I knew myself.

******

The guard squirmed and thrashed, his screams muffled as I clamped his mouth shut and dragged him through the front door. I didn’t care who saw me now.

He cried out as I threw him to the ground and kicked him. He scrambled backwards, eyes wide in catatonic terror. He raised a hand towards me, and I smashed it with my mace glove. He howled in pain, a gruesome, gut-wrenching sound that would have been heard for half a kilometer.

I gritted my teeth through the ear-splitting sound, then hit him across the mouth with my mace glove. His sounds became whimpers as he clawed at the floor, trembling and staring into my eyes.

“How long?” I asked, calmly, coldly.

“Th-th-th-they’ll know! They’ll be coming!” The guard stammered. I grabbed him by the neck with my gloved hand and squeezed.

“All the more reason for me not to be gentle,” I growled, pulling him a hair’s length from my face, “How long!?”

The man tried to recoil, as if my rage were an unexpected wave hitting him in the face. He opened his mouth, unable to speak, unable to beg me to explain what I wanted from him.

“How long has he been working on this? How many of you were busy talking to other…” I bit my lip as I tried to remember the word, “Other universes, while we starved?”

It finally occurred to me that, with the way Rigelian knowledge flowed amongst the whole population, everyone in the town would have known what was being done here.

Everyone, I thought, as I turned to face Brown, still clutching the guard’s neck.

“How long?” I said, voice going cold again.

“Long enough to be old news,” Brown said, his face morphing to something unreadable. He had been just as terrified as the guard was now, but the feeling had apparently dissipated.

“Don’t be angry with him. He didn’t know what this discovery was,” Brown added. I dropped the guard, who gasped and scrambled backwards, trying and failing to get up and run.

“He knew what it wasn’t,” I growled, taking a step towards Brown, my disgust with the man suddenly renewed. Brown laughed wickedly, and I paused.

“I’m not some kid you’re gonna get the drop on,” He said, those words being something I knew weren’t from this world. I felt an icy blade of wind graze my ungloved hand. The skin across my knuckles grew red and dry, then cracked until they bled from tiny cuts. I seethed in impotent fury, which seemed to make Brown more amused.

“Don’t get me wrong. I have plenty of sympathy for you deaf ones,” He said, the word ‘deaf’ being another I had never heard before, “But culture isn’t made of matter. Can’t manipulate that. I can’t change what our people are, what this world is, any more than you can.”

There was a demeaning statement there, a suggestion of powerlessness that was supposed to push me to breaking. He was trying to tell me that I was small, that if someone with so much power as he had - power to break my body, to wither me away - if he couldn’t bend the world to his will, what hope did I have?

But that implication wasn’t what I heard. The emphasis, for me, was put onto a different word.

“I can’t change this world.”

As I had just seen, though, this world was not the only one.

******

I rampaged through the house, gathering every piece of word-filled fabric I could find without reading them. They wouldn’t all be useful, I knew, but I didn’t have time to pick through them for what I needed.

“You should get out of here. The other guards will be landing by the front door in about 30 seconds, and my ‘go away’ field won’t do much to them,” Brown said.

Flyers. I had been suppressing the thought, but now that I could no longer hold it back, my body insisted they were already tearing me apart. It felt like burning alive. 

There was no time to discuss how we both knew what a ‘second’ was, the shared understanding of a place where time itself was a number, a thing that had to be acknowledged, and not a subconscious pattern that lived in everyone’s collective awareness.

“I take it you know them too,” I said bitterly, stuffing the sheets of fabric into a large bag.

“Same way I know everyone else,” Brown spread his arms wide. If he was trying to irritate me, he was succeeding. This, more than anything else, was why I hated him: he seemed to take all the most damaging opportunities to remind me that he didn’t share my struggles. Brown had the ability to detect who was coming, hide what he had seen and done, and fight anyone who stood against him. The flyers posed no threat to him.

He wouldn’t help me run, wouldn’t so much as open a door.

“Let me know what you find out from those,” Brown pointed to the bag slung over my shoulder. I briefly registered that he couldn’t read them - or perhaps was pretending he couldn’t read them - and told myself I’d figure out what to do with that information later. I gritted my teeth and nodded angrily, but he just smirked as I rushed out the back door.