The Black Garden: Chapter 21

The Blind Mice had left the big grey sedan almost hanging off the edge of the road, one tire sunk down into the mud. Surprisingly, there was no enemy activity around the vehicle – and with a jolt, I realized that the whole confrontation in the forest had probably taken less than thirty minutes from start to finish. By the time we’d made sure the scene was clear, I was becoming increasingly aware of the load of metal in my ass and left leg. I still had enough gas in the tank to keep the pain and inflammation bearable, but the shrapnel needed to come out sooner than later.

“Our MCP isn’t drivable, so we’ll hand this over to Digger for remote piloting and see if we can use it for something later,” Lilia said. “I’ll rip the GPS and auto-drive data and see what we can get from the car’s movements. You said it was owned by an asset?”

“Yeah. Recent convert, name of Mert Wigge. I figured the chance of him ratting on me was about seventy percent, and he didn’t let me down. It’s my own fault: I didn’t have long to culture him, so I wrung him pretty hard.” The sting of betrayal was minor, all things considered, but it still stung. The handler-asset relationship could be fraught, perverse, and dubiously ethical, but it was still a kind of relationship—and in the case of this guy, a decidedly intimate one. I limped over to the filthy car and waited for Lilia to work her magic.

Visually, Lilia’s particular form of ReMa was even less flashy than mine. She barely broke stride, while ahead of her, the car’s lights pulsed and the alarm briefly honked before all the windows un-tinted and the doors unlocked. Lilia went to the driver’s side, leaning a knee on the seat as she reached inside. Ratty and Gaius wordlessly took post, watching her back as she worked on accessing the car’s computer.

“Whew. Smells like a sewer in here,” Lilia remarked.

A sewer? A nasty feeling of foreboding gripped my stomach as I looked through the rear window, and saw Mert’s unfashionable trenchcoat flung over the backseat. No blood on it… but no other sign of the man himself. I went around to the trunk, grimacing as something twinged in my leg, and steeled myself before I lifted the lid to look inside.

He had only been gone a couple hours, not quite enough time for rigor to set in. Mert’s empty dark eyes and slack, vividly bruised cheeks were flecked with blood. There was no single obvious cause of death, but his hair was a matted, gory mess. He lay in the fetal position in a pool of congealing blood, hands cuffed behind him. And his clothes... he'd shaved and dressed nicely, something suitable for a date. A black button down and chinos, nice shoes, a silver chain around his neck. He had even put on cologne. The rich masculine perfume clashed with the reek of sweat, old blood, and voided bowels.

Dizziness washed over me. My hand flew to my mouth as gorge rose in my throat. I took one step back, then another, until I felt muddy grass sink under the heel of my boot. There, I dropped down into a squat and ran my fingers up through my hair, gripping at the roots until they burned.

“Z? You okay?” Gaius called out.

My mouth worked, but no sound came out. I just… had to get my breathing under control. I took several deep, steadying breaths, listening to the crunch of gravel under Gaius’s soles as he ranged out to a place where he could still watch Lilia’s six, while also glancing into the trunk.

“Aww fuck,” he said.

“They… they didn’t zero him, at least.” My voice came out tight and dry. I had to push from the ground with my hands to get to my feet. Once I did, I limped back over to take a second, more clinical look. Carefully, I moved Mert’s head to the side so I could see what was going on. When I saw the bloody pulp that was left of his exposed brain and spine—the drilled and pulverized tissues where his neural networking and data storage implants had been violently excised—the quivering rage in my belly turned to a cold, sharp thing.

“They just… tore into him like fucking animals. It had to have happened just before he left to see me.” I ground out the words aloud, looking up at the trees overhead. “Tsariel! Why didn't you tell me he was in trouble?! I could have fucking done something!”

In the place he was taken, the enemy had the advantage. Had you attempted to destroy them in their place of strength, the odds of your perishing were unacceptable,” the angel replied after a few tense seconds. “We were there for him in his moment of passing. He understands. And you are already forgiven.

“Hey, Z-“ Gaius started to try and talk to me, even as I stalked around the car and punched the frame between the rear window and rear windshield. Two, three, four blows, rocking the car until I left an imprint of my fist in the metal. Lilia, alarmed, leaned back out to look at me.

I snarled wordlessly, and struck again. “Fuck!"

Gaius didn’t try to say anything further, but he made a gesture to Ratty and trudged over to me. A dinner-plate sized hand fell on my shoulder, gripping through my tattered z-suit. It was warm and familiar, grounding me as I shuddered with fatigue and rage.

“I’m sorry, man.” Gaius cleared his visor so I could see his face inside his helmet. “It always hurts to lose one.”

“I hooked him with his biochemistry and mindfucked him into helping me. The poor son of a bitch was just lonely.” I resisted the urge to rub my eyes. I’d been running on adrenaline and pure glucose for nearly four hours, not including the ten-hour shift at the hospital. Even enhanced strength and stamina only went so far. “Idiot was too cum-drunk and smug to look out for himself.”

The could-haves and should-haves were running through my head in a blur, along with Hura’s accusations from before. I looked back at the body, and felt the exhaustion sink in a little more. “I need to ask a favor. While Lilia finishes up, I’ll take him into the forest. Do an exam, give him a funeral. It won’t take long, but it’ll wipe me. Can you carry me back to the MCP?”

“Sure. No signs of hostiles and no motion at the encampment yet, so we have a few minutes. Ratty can pack the TACP for a bit. I’ll let the others know.” Gaius gave another squeeze. I reached up to briefly grip his hand, then steeled myself and trudged back over to the trunk. Mert had died because of me; as far as I was concerned, that made his last rites my responsibility.

***

I ended up taking him near to the mushroom patch where I’d destroyed two of his murderers. They still lay there among the pieces of the drones and patchily glowing fungus, still blooming in places where it hadn’t been trampled. I made a quick assessment of his injuries, and concluded that he had died relatively quickly. His wetwear was practically an antique, the cybernetics not wholly integrated with his nervous system. It had been meshed into his spinal cord and brainstem, and someone had slashed him open and pulled the whole thing out like a car radio, wires and all. There were minimal signs of torture, and I doubted that his attackers had even questioned him. They had taken him, ripped out his hardware, and disposed of him. Like a used commodity.

Mert carried the ring he had once worn around his finger: a steel and titanium band engraved with a Grecian-style wave pattern. On the inside of the band, ‘M & B’. There was a story there, one I’d never learn. Maybe he and his wife had separated on peaceful, but anxious terms, feeling each other out from a distance to see if they could trust again. Maybe she’d cheated on him. Maybe he had been an abusive alcoholic, and she’d fled from him as a survivor of yet another scumbag husband. I would never know.

Once I confirmed there was nothing else to provide information, I lay Mert’s cooling body out on the soil, and called to the mycelium again. They responded without question, worming through the earth to curl around the tips of my fingers.

“The Buddha said to the venerable Śāriputra: In the western direction, beyond ten trillion Buddha-lands, there exists a world called ‘Ultimate Bliss’. In that land, there is a Buddha named Amitābha, Infinite Light, who is now teaching the Dharma.” The Amitābha Sutra, read to me and by so many times as a child in hospital, came easily to my lips as I coaxed the rainforest to accept a gift in return for the effort it had made for me. “Śāriputra, why is this land called the Land of Ultimate Bliss? Because the beings in that land experience no suffering, only happiness…”

Delicate white fungi reached from the soil, spreading over Mert in a sparkling threaded carpet. Further down in the gully, the same thing was happening to the flesh and blood I had spilled earlier in the night. I continued the Sutra in a cracking, reedy voice that wavered on the still air of the darkened forest: there was only me, the gurgle of the river, and the ancient words of a very optimistic Buddha, words I didn’t entirely believe, but that brought the living and dead into communion. I needed it for myself. And if the Pure Lands were real, I owed it to Mert to at least tell him the way.

“Sariputra, if there are people who have already made the vow, who now make the vow, or who are about to make the vow, ‘I desire to be born in Amitabha’s Country’, these people whether born in the past, now being born, or to be born in the future, all will irreversibly attain to supreme, perfect enlightenment…”

The corpse seemed to sigh with relief as it sunk more deeply into the soil.

I closed my eyes for a while, and when I opened them, there was nothing left of Mert but a glowing white cloak of fungal rhizomes. By the end of the night, everything—flesh, bones, teeth—would be taken back into the earth.

I knew I was okay when the final lines of the sutra fell from my lips, and I was able to feel compassion for Mert, for the suffering of the Blind Mice, for myself, and for the people of New Warder. Even for Rion Vornn, who had instigated this gathering mud-slide of pain and death. And for what? We had been patiently probing the abscess over New Warder, scraping away layers to reveal the extent of the infection. I had a feeling we would soon find out how deep it actually went.

My last job was to go down into the entrapped mushroom gully, and retrieve some pieces of armor and one of the more intact drones for analysis back at base. If Hura was right and the enemy was now on alert because of me, it was the least I could do for all of us.