Chapter XIII: Spilled Blood, Part 2

You think about a lot of things when you know that you’re dying. Wondering if there’s an afterlife, for one thing, wondering if I was about to get to meet Abby again. Or, if the Christians were right, that I’d be going as far from her as I possibly could for what I’d done. Or maybe Halflance was right, and I’d wake up as a newborn rodent of some kind. I regretted not saying anything to Halflance before getting shot. At the rate that the strength was fading from my limbs, I wouldn’t be able to trace out anything in the dirt before falling unconscious, and I’d lost the chance to speak the moment a rifle bullet passed right through my diaphragm.

The two groups of soldiers having their stupid little face-off had erupted into total chaos after I fell, shouting and screaming, trying to direct and redirect the blame. They were far away, distant. My skin was getting even more pale, if such a thing is possible, as the blood poured out onto the earth. I wanted to collapse, to let death take me, but I couldn’t. I held on. 

That must have been what Regan Leyrender felt in her last moments, bleeding out, unable to talk or breathe because I’d opened up her trachea. The difference was that her last moments were spent in the arms of her loving wife, and I was all alone. It was what I deserved, if I was to be honest. The pain started to fade; the final phase, as my nerves shut down from lack of blood flow. 

Except… there was no blood flowing, not anymore. More of a trickle. The pain, burning like a bonfire, slowly receded, shrinking back into my chest like it was nothing. My senses became sharp again, the sounds around me closing in until I could remember where I was. My lungs suddenly burned for air, and I couldn’t help but suck in a cold, sharp breath. At once, my right hand shot to my stomach, where I’d been shot. There was still a hole in my shirt, and the cloth was still soaked with blood, though not as utterly drenched as it had been… but the wound was gone. Smooth skin, not even a scar. Calm came over me, an impossible calm, as I started to feel the wet dirt beneath my hands and the cool breeze flowing through my hair. One thought filled my mind. 

That bitch had shot me!

I slammed my fist against the ground, and rose up onto one knee. Nobody was looking at me quite yet, too busy arguing with each other. The revolver was still at my hip, and with glacial care I took it out of the holster and pulled back the hammer before rising onto both legs. I took aim at a patch of dirt a few feet to my left. Bang. 

The instant I fired, all eyes were on me. All wide, tear-stained, terrified eyes. A couple of people fainted immediately. 

“Drop your fucking weapons!” I screamed, casting my revolver to the ground. 

With a chorus of clacks and rattles, the three dozen or so armed women around me did what I asked, some of them setting their rifles down while others dropping them as I had done. Apparently, surviving a rifle round to the center of mass will give your words some weight. Lady Halflance looked shaken, wordlessly mouthing something to herself. 

“Alright, now that that’s been dealt with…” I drew my sword, pointing it at the woman who had fired the shot that had started the whole thing. “You. Trigger happy asshole. You have two sentences to explain what happened.”

All the blood drained from her face, and her hands were trembling like a leaf in the wind. “I was on patrol with just myself and Volun Usher,” she stammered, “when we started seeing movement, suspicious movement, might have been stonewose. Suddenly one of the Durkahns showed up out of nowhere, and I didn’t have the chance to see who it was, and I just fired because I thought I was about to die!”

I pivoted slightly at the waist, not giving enough of a damn to move my sword arm but still wanting to point at Sir Margaret. “Now, Colonel Sir Margaret Halflance, what is the punishment for shooting another soldier at close range while not even in the middle of combat?”

I had never seen Sir Margaret looking completely and earnestly terrified before, but I guess there’s always a first time for everything. She yelped the moment I looked at her, eyes almost popping out of her skull as she stared at the hole in the fabric of my shirt. “Oh, erm, well, such things are typically somewhat under the discretion of the commanding officer, which is me of course, but the guideline in the doctrine for such things as this would usually be a dishonorable discharge followed by several weeks of treatment in a mental hospital?”

“Well, there we have it, don’t we?” I wheeled around to the Durkahni camp, sheathing my sword. Best not to point weapons at the aggrieved party. “Now then. Let’s be honest. Do you really think, if this was some grand conspiracy, that they’d stop at only shooting one of you, and have their best doctor working on saving that person?”

Dr. Charcharias, who had been staring at me and muttering under her breath, suddenly remembered that she was caring for someone who couldn’t recover from bullet wounds, muttered something along the lines of “What the hell are you,” and went back to that. 

“It’s incompetence. One person’s endless incompetence,” I said. “Could you at least wait until it becomes a pattern to go for retribution?”

The Durkahns turned in on themselves, arguing in low tones in their own language. There was about a minute of tension before Sarnai started speaking. 

“There will have to be change, you know. To prevent an accident like this from happening again.”

“Obviously,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at the Blueroses. “But I’m not the expert here. Mostly I’m glad that you aren’t trying to kill each other.”

Lady Halflance dashed out into No Woman’s Land and grabbed me by the wrist. “Amina, is she going to make it?”

“If we can maintain pressure on the wound for the next few minutes, I think so. She’ll need surgery, though.”

“Excellent,” Halflance said with a scowl. “Come with me.”

“What? This is more important than—” Charcharias glanced over at me, and I could see her face turn a slightly paler shade of sky-blue. “Oh. Of course. I’ll be right on it.”

Sarnai and Sir Margaret remained behind to smooth things over between the two groups of soldiers, while Halflance and Dr. Charcharias pulled me into a secluded corner. Halflance looked pissed, lips pressed together and brow furrowed, while Dr. Charcharias had a wide-eyed expression like she’d seen a ghost. 

“What the hell did you just do?” said Lady Halflance.

“I was just trying to prevent any more violence,” I said, meekly trying to avoid the obvious question. It had hardly been two minutes, and I already wanted to let the memory of what had just happened fade away into nothing. 

“Emma, a thirty caliber rifle round passed directly through your center of mass and impacted the wall over my head,” said Dr. Charcharias. “It likely would have severed the largest arteries in the human body, perforated several essential organs, and caused massive blood loss leading to rapid exsanguination. You should already be dead, or so close that it doesn’t matter.”

Wordlessly, I lifted my shirt up to where I remembered the nexus of pain being. The skin was still damp, droplets of blood scattered across the surface, though not as soaked as it should have been. Charcharias covered her mouth, then uncovered it, then covered it again.

“Not even a scar…” muttered Halflance, in a tone that suggested profanity.

“Do you mind if I examine the site of the wound,” said Charcharias.

“Of course not.”

Charcharias reached out as if she were trying to pet a porcupine, carefully prodding my stomach area with her index and middle finger. Her face was locked in total focus. 

“Fuck… The abdominal wall is intact. No evidence of subcutaneous bleeding, scar tissue, anything like that. You’re breathing fine and not in any pain, I assume?” Charcharias glanced up at my face, and I nodded. “You were shot in the center of mass two minutes ago, and there is absolutely no evidence of injury as of now.”

“Did you feel any pain, at all?” asked Halflance.

“Yeah. A lot of it. I was sure I was going to die for a bit, I couldn’t breathe, blood was pouring out of me… but then it just… stopped hurting,” I said. “It healed.”

“Alright, we need to go to my lab, right now,” said Charcharias. “We need to figure out what’s happening here.”

It was just then that Miss Rook showed up, jogging into us from the direction of the center of the treaty grounds. “What the hell happened?” she said. She had reverted to her Creandasian accent. 

“Follow me,” said Dr. Charcharias, “and we’ll explain.”

Dr. Charcharias’s lab was actually attached to Halflance’s building, which made sense. Technically speaking, she was on the expedition as Halflance’s personal physician. The good doctor, myself, Halflance, and Rook, all crowded into her office and closed the door behind us.

Her office looked much the same as the one she had back on the Halflance estate, except smaller and less dense with medical stuff. Still, there were multiple shelves of medicine and tools, two entire tables and enough chairs for all of us to sit down, though nobody did. There was also, still taking up almost the entirety of one of the tables, the mostly-completed body of Charcharias’s vitometer, a bizarre electronic device designed to sense the élan vital, some sort of electromagnetic field that Selene medicine thought was responsible for life. I thought it was bullshit.

“What happened, Miss Rook,” said Dr. Charcharias, emphasizing the “Miss,” “is that Emma just survived being shot at close range with a rifle directly in the center of her lower torso.”

Rook gave Charcharias a pointed look. “This is a deeply inappropriate time for humor.”

“No,” I said. “No, she’s being literal. I have a hole in my clothes to show for it.”

Rook took note of said hole. “Rifle wounds to the stomach are some of the worst injuries I’ve ever seen, trust me. A woman dies slowly, and screaming. And, of course, there is no wound there.”

I shrugged. “It… went away. Like it healed. That’s the best I can say.”

Rook looked over to Lady Halflance, her face a steel mask of dispassion. 

Halflance nodded. “I saw it happen right in front of me, though in little detail.”

Rook nodded. “Well, if you claim that young Emma here has suddenly developed some kind of miraculous power of healing, then there is only one way to test that out. Emma, give me your arm.”

I very pointedly did not do that. “What are you about to do?”

Rook took two steps over and grabbed me above the elbow, pushing my sleeve up with the same hand. Resisting her grip was like trying to force the moving handrails on an escalator to stop moving. With her other hand, she drew a combat knife out of goodness-knows where. 

“No no no please stop aaaah!”

With a single swift motion, Rook drew the blade across the muscle and fat of my upper arm, leaving behind a long but shallow cut, thin and red. It hurt, pain like the worst kind of paper cut shooting up my shoulder. Before I could even react more than an incoherent yelp of pain… the pain was gone. Before my eyes, the wound faded, narrowing, and sealing shut like a zipper from both ends. There was no scar left behind, and the injury hadn’t even had time to bleed, no more than two seconds, before it was gone. 

The room fell silent. Rook let go of me and sheathed the knife. The moment she did, I reached up with my other arm, feeling around where the cut had been. It felt completely normal, no soreness or anything.

“Well then. That settles that, doesn’t it?” said Rook.

“God-Vessel,” Charcharias muttered, with the tone of a profanity.

More silence. I couldn’t understand it. My head was full of static, still trying to believe that what I had just seen was true. A physical injury, an open wound, sealing shut in a matter of moments and not even leaving a scar behind. I had seen a few impossible things in my time on Selene, giant robot spiders and steam-powered cyborgs and so on, but this was… it was happening to me, to my body. But then again, it wasn’t really my body, was it? For the first time since my first day on Selene, I felt an eerie disconnect between myself and the flesh I was inhabiting. 

“Have you been able to do this before, Emma?”

“No! Absolutely not! This is… completely impossible on Earth, and I’ve been injured before and it didn’t just… heal like that!” 

Lady Halflance nodded. “I just needed to make sure.”

“The fuck do you mean ‘make sure’?!” I screamed. “Like I would just not tell you that I can fucking regenerate?! If I could do this before, I wouldn’t have been scared that I was going to die during the,” my voice suddenly dropped to a half-whisper, “Leyrender duel.”

Dr. Charcharias wheeled around, running to her cabinets and grabbing handfuls of various tools and drugs, placing them on the counter one at a time. “Alright, if you don’t already know what’s going on here,” she said, “then I’m going to have to figure it out myself. Emma, you don’t mind if I perform a few basic tests, would you?”

“Of course, Amina,” I said. “As long as there aren’t any knives involved.”

Charcharias pivoted over to her vitometer, slamming shut the large side panel that allowed her to fiddle with the internals, and flicking the switch to turn it on. Almost at once, a huge puff of black smoke burst through the shell of the machine along with a shower of sparks. “Goddamnit to hell!” Charcharias muttered through gritted teeth, shutting the vitometer off before it could set anything on fire. 

“I assume it was not meant to do that,” said Lady Halflance, folding her arms. 

“I had it calibrated, and I’ve spent weeks going over every single circuit for weaknesses!” Dr. Charcharias hissed. “All conventional logic says it should work. I guess we’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way,” she continued, going back to the cabinets. 

I tried to pull back into myself, retreating into the corner of Dr. Charcharias’s office. The eyes of the other women in the room were spotlights, too bright and harsh, and there were no closets around to run into, curl up, and shut the door behind me. Which was a shame, because that would be the only way to feel safe, less like some inhuman thing, give myself the time to process what the hell I was.

“When was the last time you were seriously injured?” asked Miss Rook.

“Oh, that must have been…” I tried remembering anything. All those fights, against the blankwolves and the chargerthing and Nemesis’s Mechanodrones. “The duel. Regan Leyrender got a good hit in, bashed me in the head.”

“No she didn’t,” said Dr. Charcharias. “I examined you as soon as the duel was over, you were completely unharmed.”

My jaw fell open. I still remembered taking that hit to the head, as clear as day, just like every other aspect of that duel. But between then and when Dr. Charcharias had taken a look, it was gone. “The fight against the Mechanodrones, then, the ones that showed up at Halflance manor. One of them threw me into a wall.”

Dr. Charcharias shook her head. “You were fine after that one, as well. I was there, remember?”

Lady Halflance’s eyes went wide. “The battle in Nemesis’s lair, you fell down a forty-foot crevasse. Came back a couple of minutes later completely fine.”

“But I would have remembered the injuries healing…” I said, not believing her, “…if I hadn’t passed out on impact.”

“You’ve been able to heal since before this morning, then,” said Lady Halflance.

I pressed my lips together, raking through my memories. “Which means… the last time I took an actual injury was… back on Earth. Got hit by a stray baseball trying to cross the field, the bruise stayed for two days.”

“So you have been able to heal like this ever since you arrived here,” said Lady Halflance. “And none of your memories of this other world include your body having this ability.”

I shrugged. “Well, yeah. But then again, my entire body was different back then. You know, male.”

I got a blank stare from Rook and Charcharias, reminding me that I had never actually explained what men were to either of them. “We have a different type of people on Earth. Bigger and hairier, no breasts usually, stronger on average, deeper voices. I was one of them.”

Charcharias raised an eyebrow at me, or she would have if she had any eyebrows. “That is certainly an interesting detail. Odd, but interesting.”

“And you’re still certain that these are real memories?” said Rook. “Trust me, I’ve seen the things a… disoriented mind can get up to.”

I grimaced. “Yes. I’m very sure they’re real. Are you sure your memories are real? There are things that happened on Earth that I’d never forget.”

“Emma?” said Dr. Charcharias. “Would you mind if I took a blood sample?”

I turned away from Rook and Halflance for the moment to see Dr. Charcharias holding a large glass syringe in her hand, one of the old-timey ones with the two metal loops on the handle. I guess that was state of the art on Selene.

“Depends, is the needle clean?”

Charcharias shrugged. “As clean as I can get it with the limited supplies out here.”

“Fuck it,” I sighed. “I doubt I can get infected anyway, with how little bullet wounds bother me.”

I had had my blood drawn a couple of times before, when I was sick and stuff, and the procedure was much the same. I averted my eyes as she did the drawing, which took half a minute at least, and was disappointed to find that the rapid healing did very little for the pain. When I looked back, Charcharias was holding a syringe full of blood, and there was once again no sign that there had been a needle inside me.

“Well, that was definitely the most fascinating blood drawing I’ve ever done,” said Dr. Charcharias, showing a bit of her fangs. 

“I can imagine,” said Lady Halflance. “Emma tends to have that effect.”

“Fascinating how?” asked Rook.

“Well, I’ve learned a lot. The smell of the blood is… unusual. Smells like inclement weather. There was no extra resistance to the needle passing through the skin, so you’re normal in that respect. A wound channel that narrow, it had healed shut before I was even finished which made the end part of that… weird.” She strolled over to the other side of the office, squirting the blood into a small glass vial. “The odd part was that there was resistance to drawing the blood, like there was suction force trying to pull it back into the vein if I wasn’t actively exerting myself.”

I nodded. “Yeah, makes sense. I saw some of the blood getting pulled back into the bullet wound as it healed.”

Rook’s eyes narrowed. “A useful ability to have, trust me. Bleeding is a real killer, more than the wound in many cases.”

Lady Halflance nodded. “So what we know so far is that Emma has the ability to miraculously heal from any wound instantaneously.”

“Not instant,” I said. “The bullet wound took a good while before the pain started going.

“Almost instantaneously,” Halflance amended. “You’ve had this ability for at least two months, perhaps longer depending on how well we can trust your memories of Earth. This ability is completely unheard of in modern science, completely inexplicable, and is possessed by the person who is the least well-equipped to use it. Doctor Charcharias, I will leave you to your examination. I have to ensure that nobody else gets shot.”

Halflance left with a hurried stride, her long coat fluttering imperiously behind her as she went. “I should be doing the same,” said Rook. “The main body of the troops may be under Sir Margaret’s command, but I must attend to Halflance’s personal guard.” Rook gave me a curt nod, then followed Halflance out. 

Charcharias’s tests weren’t anything you wouldn’t expect from a typical checkup, for the most part, with maybe a bit more attention than usual paid to the spot in my upper stomach where the bullet hole was supposed to be. Nothing more invasive than the initial blood sample. Charcharias made me promise to come back in a day or two for more tests, to determine the somethingorother of my flipflops or whatever it was that she said.

By the time I was done with all that, I was officially exhausted. Lack of sleep combined with spending most of the day running around the camp looking for clues about the shell object, and followed up with a nice chaser of blood loss meant that there was only one place I could go: my personal hut, out near the edge of the treaty grounds. To my surprise, Anna and Unity were there, waiting for me. 

The moment the door had rocked closed behind me, both of them were on their feet. “Are you alright, Miss Emma?” said Anna, taking me by the hand.

“We heard you were-were hurt,” said Unity, taking my other hand. “That you’d gotten right messed up in a fight or something.”

Anna quickly shot Unity a cross look. “Yes, what she said. But more politely.”

I was not in the mood to get doted over by my servants. Okay, maybe I was, because I’d had a really bad day, but I really was not on board with the concept of having servants to begin with, which left me very conflicted. “Yeah, there was a bit of a tussle. But I’m fine now. Just tired.”

“We heard shots-shots,” said Unity. “Two of them at least. What happened?”

I sighed. “There was an incident, a serious miscommunication between the Bluerose and Durkahn soldiers. Some people got hurt, but I think I and the others were able to prevent any more violence.”

“Well, that’s good at least. What of the rumors, then, that you were shot?”

I hadn’t expected the rumors to be that complete. “It’s a complicated story. A very complicated story, and I’m sure if you ask Lady Halflance she could give you a more unbiased version of it than I could. Right now, I really need a nap.”

“Of course, Miss Emma,” said Anna.

“Well, let’s go find out-out what happened,” said Unity. “I’ve got to hear this from the source!”

Anna and Unity, apparently inspired, cleared out of the room and gave me some well-earned peace. I sat down on the edge of the bed and took off my scabbard, holster, belt, and all my clothes above the waist. I wasn’t going to be able to wear that shirt again, not with the ragged bullet hole in it. Before I could fully fall asleep, however, something nagged at me.

The sword was on the floor, and with some finessing I pressed it between my knees with the tip pointing directly upwards. It was sharp, and even gently resting my palm on the point of the blade hurt a little bit. I took in a deep breath, closing my eyes and remembering what I had already survived. Logically that should have been enough, but I needed one final test to confirm that this was indeed really happening to me. 

With a final exhale, I tensed my arm and jammed my hand downward as hard as I could, sending the first inch of the blade right through my palm. It hurt like hell, but not as much as the bullet. I pressed harder, until my eyes were full of tears and I could no longer move the hand above the wrist, as the sword cut through tendons and muscles. A thin trickle of blood ran down the blade, but nowhere near as much as should have from a wound of that size. The rest of the blood… It was like footage of how fluids move on a space station, the liquid holding to the edge of the wound under surface tension, not spilling but unable to slip back in while the wound was plugged by the blade.

Getting my hand off of the sword was harder than getting it on, and I had to use my other hand to pull it off. This was going to be an issue if I ever got crucified, not that crucifixion exists on Selene from what I can gather. I didn’t avert my eyes, I didn’t so much as blink while the hole in my hand, a slot wide enough for me to see through, sealed shut, the blood pouring back into it like video run in reverse. I counted, it took four seconds, or maybe three if I was counting fast. There was no sleeping for me after that.

SaffronDragon

I'm really having to resist the urge to ask people if they liked my foreshadowing here. But yes, all of the people who realized that Emma had some unusual abilities... how does it feel to be better at reading books than I am? If you want to see what Emma can do with the knowledge that she can survive bullet wounds, you can click the link below to go to my Patreon. For only $3 a month, you can get early access to all of my chapters as soon as they've been edited, including four chapters of this book. There are also higher tiers with more benefits including two Selene prequel short stories, and access to exclusive patron polls. Otherwise, I'll see you all in two weeks for Chapter XIV: The Musician!