Jaguar

They had a way all along.

As I stared at the fabric pages, it was all revealed to me. There were more voices now, and when I closed my eyes, I could see them.

"I can feel it!" I cried out, joy in my voice. 

No, it wasn't my voice. It was a woman, taking hold of a…

What did they call it?

An…atom. A hydrogen atom. She had moved it for the first time. It had become hers.

The schoolmaster had known how to teach alchemy all along. What I was seeing wasn't something he was making up as he went. This was a practiced curriculum, and his students were picking it up with ease.

Curriculum. There were so many new words. How did I know all of these words?

"You need to stop this, Jague," Melia said, not bothering to let me know she was coming into the tent. I wouldn't have looked up from the pages anyhow.

"Jaguar. Call me Jaguar. Jague is a weird name," I said.

"What is Jaguar, what does that mean?" She asked, concern in her tone. That's right, jaguars only existed on Earth, not Rigel.

Earth. Rigel. New names. Places.

Melia grabbed the top of the page I was reading and tried to pull it from my hands. She had caught me off-guard, but I still managed to grip the end of it with my fingertips. It ripped with a heavy tearing sound, leaving us with roughly half the page each. I flopped backward, then gasped in horror.

"You broke it!" I yelled, shooting up from the ground. The sound of thunder rumbled in my ears. I contracted the air inside the tent as I erupted in fear and rage. The humid air grew frigid and heavy as it rushed towards us from all sides. Droplets of ice precipitated and showered onto us, stinging my face as they made impact. 

She looked irritated as she dropped her half of the page and I began to stoop and pick it up, but she caught my head with both hands and yanked me back to standing.

"Control yourself!" She shouted. Her grip was strong; it felt like my skull would collapse if she so much as twitched. She took a long breath through her nose and glared at me.

"How long has it been since you slept?" She asked calmly, still holding my head in her vice grip.

"I don't know. I don't…I can't remember," I said, my gaze lowering to the ripped page on the floor. She shook my head once, and my eyes jerked back up to meet hers.

"How long, Jague?" She asked again, with more volume, but the same tone.

"I don't know, when did I get back from the schoolmaster's place? 4…5 days ago?"

"And you've been in here that whole time."

The realization of all the things I hadn't done struck me like a mace glove. When she released me, the guilt felt like a weight in my gut, and I nearly fell to the floor. I hadn't made Lump. I hadn't talked to the camp at all, hadn't checked to make sure I wasn't followed. I had failed them all utterly.

"The food," I started.

"It's fine. We'll last long enough for you to get a little sleep," She cut me off, pointing to the cot behind me.

"They…they knew how, Melia."

"More from your hallucinations?"

I heard her words. I understood them, even heard the anger in them, but now that I had started, I couldn't stop.

"They could have taught us all along, but they kept it to themselves," I was raising my voice. Melia jabbed her finger at the cot.

"Bed, Jague," She said.

"Do you hear me? They've been letting us starve, letting us die of exposure while they-"

"Bed, Jague!"

"They left us to die, Melia!"

She grabbed my left arm and spun me towards the cot. I tried to snap free of her grasp, but suddenly felt how tired and weak I was. When my wriggling made me fall to the ground, she held her right arm out, catching me by the armpit. She effortlessly dragged me behind her, backing towards the cot and hoisting me onto it.

"It…they…I'm…" My thoughts stopped making sense. Rage, fear and fatigue crashed together, and any words I might have said or pondered were gone. I tried to sit up, aware that I needed to be awake but unsure why. Melia gave me a gentle shove back down, and I didn't try again.

"Sleep," She said quietly.

I couldn't sleep. Couldn't, can't, had to…

Had to…

******

"Food is full of complex proteins, vitamins and minerals…"

The woman's voice was growing clearer. 

"We would need to control billions of atoms to make them."

I sprang from the bed, nearly toppling as I got to my feet. My body ached in protest, and I groaned with every step, but I kept shambling out of the tent, rubbing one eye and yawning heavily.

"Can't sleep. Can't sleep. Can't…" I started to yawn again, and nearly toppled over, but violently shook my head to keep myself awake. 

"Wake up. Wake up!" I shouted to myself. That was good. Loud sound makes adrenaline.

Adrenaline means awake. There we go, wake up, wake up. Better. Better!

I made my way to the big tent. My hands shook so badly that I struggled to unwrap the tie strand that held the flap closed, but eventually worked it loose. Inside, the raw ingredients were stacked up to my chest. The camp had been busy while I had lost my wits. The surge of emotion I felt at the sight of a feast they couldn't eat was complex. I had failed them so badly. The whole world had failed us to an even more unforgivable degree. But this…this would work.

“Soon. Soon. Soon. Soon,” I repeated.

“Jague?” Melia said quietly. I hadn’t heard her enter, but I vaguely remembered how loud I had been on my way into the big tent. It seemed obvious that I’d wake her up or get her attention, after I’d thought about it for a moment.

I took a redfruit in my hand and focused on it, imagined its insides. It was full of nutrients…yeah, that was what the woman in my other voice called them…nutrients that we needed, but there was something else in there that poisoned everyone who ate it raw.

“What is it?” Melia asked. It was a redfruit. She knew it was a redfruit; why was she asking such an odd question?

No. Not what she meant. Need to stop, just for a moment. Explain.

“We’ve been doing this all wrong,” I said.

“What’s…what have we been doing wrong?” She asked. Her face looked pale, and the rings around her eyes were dark as deep bruises. I briefly wondered if she had been awake as long as I had.

“The…uh…” I struggled for the words as my attention returned to the redfruit, “We…I…we’ve wasted so much. We’ve been pulling out what we need, leaving the rest.”

“Yeah?” Melia was confused, and probably concerned about me handling food in this state.

“Don’t need to…” I trailed off as I found what I was looking for in the redfruit, “There you are!”

The thing inside the fruit - several of them, too many to count - was alive. It was small. Well, it was bigger than the atoms and molecules, much bigger, but I would have needed a microscope to see it.

Microscope? What did that mean?

Not important.

I touched it with my mind, observed it with the multisense. 

That was my word, multisense. I’d work on it later. 

The thing, the tiny things, I saw them, understood them. Simple creatures. They just wanted to feed, multiply, feed, multiply. They’d do both inside us, rapidly. We were a whole world to them, a world that would not fight them. Our bodies would give them everything they wanted without knowing they were robbing us blind.

“Sorry little guys. We need this,” I said.

They resisted for only a moment as the fruit they called home began to chill. Their cell walls weren't made for defense, but to maintain their structure. That structure quickly gave way to the piercing ice crystals that burst from the water within them as I pulled the heat energy from the redfruit into the molecules of my hand. 

The heat rose into my hand like tiny, white-hot needles. No danger of falling asleep when I was feeling this, I joked to myself. It wasn’t funny enough to be a distraction from the pain.

After about 10 seconds, I relaxed, setting the fruit down and taking a deep breath. Resting was a mistake; my eyelids grew heavy, and I nearly fell over as I plunged into sleep for an instant. I jolted awake when Melia caught me, only a moment before my head would have crashed into the crate of gathered redfruit.

She tried to say something to me, but I jumped up before she could speak.

“Where’s the…” I trailed off as I searched for the sterilized redfruit I had just been holding, then nearly fell over as I shouted in delight, “Here!”

I observed it again, searching it for any…pathogens? Yeah, that was the word. There were…some. So few, though, that they wouldn’t cause harm. Would actually help. Would…the words from the woman in my head stopped making sense; I was too tired to parse them.

“It’s good. I mean…it’s good,” I said, tapping my closed fist to my forehead, as if the right words would fall out of my mouth if they found the hole at the bottom of my brain, “The fruit! It’s good to eat. You can eat it.”

She took it from my hand slowly, eyeing it with apprehension. It hurt that she didn’t believe me, but she was right to be skeptical. Guilt surged up in me again; I’d left her to take care of everything when I had gone on my five day rage simmer, and she had taken that burden. The fact that we were still here, that this camp wasn’t full of corpses, meant that she had held things together. No one else could have gotten everyone through.

So she was tired, and hungry. And her good judgment, superior as it was to mine, was starting to yield to her appetite. She only let the temptation linger a moment before she looked away from it and back to me.

“Those things kill when they’re eaten raw. Everything we gather kills,” Melia said wearily. I’d never seen her so drained before. She clearly wanted the food - badly - but she was strong enough not to do something stupid. This was why she would have been a far better leader than I was; I had nowhere near that amount of discipline.

“Here, I’ll show you,” I said, excitedly pulling the fruit from her hand faster than I had intended, “Sorry.”

I took a bite of it. She started to move towards me, perhaps to force me to spit it out, but halted when she saw the pleasure on my face. 

I had never felt a sensation so good; it was…I don’t know how to describe what it was. All of our food had been bland, oddly-textured bits of nothing, but this was like concentrated joy and energy poured directly into my body. Everything I had ever worried about in my entire life abruptly disappeared for a moment, leaving only pure, thrilling sensations in their place.

"Mmm, yes…" I slurred as I savored the fruit. It was somehow invigorating and relaxing at the same time, and I wanted nothing more than to devour the rest of it, then feast on the ones the camp had…

“Ah. Yes. Gotta…” I paused, confused as to what I wanted to say. I abandoned the attempt. No more words. Action.

I went bigger. Holding my hands over the entire crate of redfruit, I grasped the water within each one and pulled, draining the heat from the fruits and shattering the microbes within.

Microbes. New word.

It was done, I said to myself, nearly laughing with glee. I tossed a still-frigid redfruit to Melia without looking at where I was throwing. She moved deftly to catch my bad throw, while I gnawed my way through the rest of the fruit in my hand.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her brief contemplation. These things were always poison, but she was starving, and soon the hunger won out.

I saw the same delirious satisfaction in her eyes when she took the first bite…then devoured the rest of the fruit in a half-minute frenzy.

“Oh god, that’s…” She started to reach for another, but held short.

"They’re all…?" She asked, pointing to the crate of fruit.

"Yes," I said excitedly.

"We gotta…" She waved her hand in a circle.

"Yes!" I shouted.

******

Everyone in the camp ate until they were ready to vomit. No one in the camp had ever been able to eat too much; there had never been enough food to make that possible, so we were unfamiliar with the sweet ache of fullness, which slowly gave way to a powerful urge to sleep. The camp practically drifted off all at once.

Melia and I kept watch while they slept. My logical brain knew I was tired, but I was still thrilled at having solved one of our oldest struggles, and there was a backlog of things I hadn't thought or talked about since my raid on the schoolmaster's house. After my earlier nap and the redfruit feast, I wasn’t yet past the edge of exhaustion.

"Go. Sleep," I told Melia. She shook her head.

"Don't trust you to stay awake on your own right now," She said.

“Fair, but…ouch.”

As the fog of hunger disappeared, every earlier thought began to filter back in more clearly. Most of it wasn’t pleasant.

Was it really this easy to feed people without alchemy? Just a little rudimentary energy transfer made the food safe and healthy? Was it really too much to expect the cloud-cuckoolanders down the hill to think of something so simple, to spend such a small amount of their effort to help us not die?

But then…I didn’t know. It was all so confusing.

Also, there was the matter of apparently having visions of the life and experiences of a woman from…another world?

Another universe, I corrected myself. The word made me shudder when I thought about it, and I wasn’t sure if it excited or terrified me.

If I could have dismissed these visions as hallucinations brought on by madness and fatigue, that would have been preferable. Instead, the woman on the other side of this conversation had saved my people by giving me a glimpse into her mind, and by doing so, had become a presence I felt I’d never be rid of.

I should have been grateful. I should have been encouraged. Our struggle for food had just become much less difficult, which would mean fewer raids on the town, and in turn, fewer people dying on those raids. Food was also a luxury item to the alchemists, so now we had a thing we could trade. This changed everything.

“Can you…uh, clean the other raw food? Like you did for the redfruit?” Melia asked.

Her suggestion gripped me with sudden thrill. What did the greengrain, yellowgrain, redleaf, brownbean, darkflower and treedrop taste like when they were clean? What could we make when we combined them? What other wonders waited for us out in the world?

“I’m sure as hell gonna try,” I said. There was an odd inflection in my voice; I couldn’t recall having ever spoken that way. Melia must have heard it too, because she tilted her head sideways, amused confusion apparent in her expression.

“What’s ‘hell’?” She asked.

“Dunno,” I said, lolling my heavy head back. The excitement of the past hour was invigorating, but now that it was wearing off, the fatigue was setting in. Still, this fatigue felt good, like the kind that comes after hard exercise.

“Another word from your visions?”

“Think so.”

She sighed, but with a thin, contented smile. It was good to see a small bit of relief on her face, after all that this situation and my breakdown had subjected her to. It felt good to have given her something that made up for that distress, and in such an unexpected way.

“This is big,” She said, mirroring my thoughts, “The alchemists can’t ignore us now.”

“Eh…they can. Some of them still will. But they’ll have to work to ignore us, now that we have something they want,” I said, suddenly struck with a sense of dread. They’d respond to this in some way; I couldn’t envision a scenario where they just stood by as we became equals.

“You think they’ll do that? Be that petty?” Melia asked.

“Hard to say. Some of them, probably. But…apathy doesn’t take work. They don’t think of anyone but themselves, for the most part,” I said, recalling the schoolmaster’s collection of writings from another reality.

“This can change everything!” 

The woman from my visions was saying what I was thinking, but her words were full of desperation, not relief. She was begging someone to listen, but she wasn’t getting the reaction she needed. The consequences of that failure felt dire and imminent.

I grimaced from the jolt of fear that suddenly gripped me. Melia must have noticed.

“The hallucinations starting to hurt?” Melia asked.

“Ah…no. Well…not pain, exactly,” I sputtered, not sure how to put into words the way it felt to be overrun by the experience of a person I wasn’t even sure was real.

And then, there was pain. Something cracked across my jaw…

…or was it her jaw?

“Witch!” A male voice screamed.

“Demon bride!” Another shouted.

******

The impact, real or…otherwise, had spun me to the ground. Everything had gone dark, and I struggled to focus, to see who or what had struck me.

“Mel-” I croaked out. Something hard and unyielding hit me in the gut.

As I curled in, I saw my father’s cane. My brother was shouting, condemning my use of “sorcery” as my mother grabbed him by the shoulder, trying to pull him back…

I felt the familiar corrosion of alchemy reaching inside me, degrading, tearing, destroying…

“Stop! It’s not magic, it’s science, I’m-”

“Shut up, witch!”

I writhed and groaned on the ground as the acidic feeling in my chest took on a sense of boiling. It felt like a thousand hot blades trying to force their way out of my abdomen. I gritted my teeth, trying not to scream.

If I said anything else, they’d beat me harder, become even more angry.

I needed Melia. I begged for her help, but couldn’t tell if my words were coming out in the right reality.

I saw my mother, the only one who cared to save me, to shield me, fall to the ground as my eldest brother shoved her aside.

My ears began to ring, drowning out all other noise.

I cried. I begged, sobbing in words I could only half form.

And then, everything turned into blinding light and scorching fire.

The heat was unbearable. 

This was it; they were burning me alive.

******

I didn’t know where I was, but somehow, I knew I was everywhere. The vaporizing heat in my chest grabbed me and pulled.

Everything happened all at once. The terrified beginning, the desperate extension of a flailing, grasping hand as I tumbled through the not-space, and the final impact were all over in an eternal instant. It was all of time, everything that had happened and would ever happen, compacted so tightly that I could not process them as causal events.

I knew exactly where to look for her. It was the first time I had seen her in perfect clarity. She was a dark-haired girl in a hijab, curled up and crying out as everyone around her screamed in wide-eyed terror. Something looked wrong, beyond the indescribable, excruciating death being dealt to four men who deserved worse…and two young women who couldn’t help being caught in…

She began to travel toward me.

I knew what was happening.

I turned to look behind. In the place I had been scooped from, two flyers were standing in the big tent. Invisible in normal light, but visible to me as a cloud of matter and violence, they stood akimbo, looking down on Melia and my body as we writhed under the alchemical assault. The woman from my visions and I both knew what we were seeing. The people on the ground - our bodies, Melia and I - were having their insides shaken on a molecular level, until those foundational pieces gave up all traces of structure. The literal energy that made us was being ripped from us.

“Mirror. Parallel. Earth. Rigel. Element, chemistry, transmutation, matter-energy conversion, enthalpy of reaction…” I spilled out, speaking words I had never heard, knowing things I had never learned, and finding I could not contain the revelation.

“Oh no…” I muttered, suddenly breathless. There was a horrible realization as I became myself again.

The man, the schoolmaster…when he crossed over, he had switched places with someone. Whoever had been in the body, the soul of the man he stole had been ripped away from Earth and transplanted to Rigel. The process had killed him.

It would kill her.

I could see her come to the same realization. She looked my direction in the nonspace, across the spacetimes we were passing on our way to each other’s realities. When her eyes met mine, they were full of catatonic terror.

Please. Save me, she begged.

I couldn’t. I didn’t know how I got here, I didn’t know how to stop, I didn’t…I couldn’t…

Exotemporal.

That word was like a floodlight on the knowledge I desperately needed.

She searched my mind. The whole of who I was was only so much matter, having been ripped apart and scattered when it entered this place.

We said it together.

“This place is spaces, and times. All of them.”

I imagined myself reaching out, touching the structure in the spacetime beneath me, skimming it with my fingertips, tumbling end over end as the place I was supposed to land, flew by me. I felt a sensation like the snapping of a taut chain, setting me loose to rocket across the spacetime beneath me.

And then my body and mind, perhaps realizing they had entered a place they weren’t supposed to be, crashed into solid ground. 

Everything went black.