Chapter Twelve
Revenant
"Wake up!"
He opened his eyes and uttered a muffled scream of horror, like someone waking up from a nightmare trying to get out of bed, only to discover that he was paralyzed and could not move a finger. Shin only managed to feel the water in his throat and lungs, along with mud and who knows what other filth from the deep.
"She needs you, right now! Get up!"
"I'm coming, I'm coming."
"Please help me!!!"
The desperate feminine and male voices echoed in his mind, like a distant echo from another time and place. He looked around with disoriented eyes, but all he saw was darkness surrounding him. He briefly wondered if he hadn't lost the sight of his only eye this time. Where were those voices coming from?
It was no time to worry about that.
He was underwater, without even oxygen equipment, with his lungs collapsed with water, but he was still alive.
He opened his mouth again as he felt a metallic taste on his tongue that he knew all too well, mixed with the muddy water. But that was not what worried him. He was at the bottom of the lake and a heavy rock had crushed his stomach and part of his solar plexus which were sunk under the mud.
How long have I been unconscious?
The last thing he remembered was the log coming straight at his head. When he was finally able to move his hands he touched his head and felt a strange sound of something crunching and binding inside, at the same time as he felt an itch in his head, and his scalp finished closing the wounds. It was the sound of skull sutures joining back together and skin regenerating.
Had it been the voice that had awakened him? Or was it that the regeneration had already reached a critical enough point for him to finally open his eyes? Shin was not the first time he had heard voices in the depths of his mind. He already heard it a few times before centuries ago, almost always in dangerous situations, although he could never discern where it came from. Whatever the reason for the voice's existence, Shin was grateful to have finally been awakened.
Damn it. I lost my head... again.
He touched his body and relieved he could feel his neck, but the rest of his body still seemed numb. He could feel his legs a little, but no more than that and, even though he wasn't breathing, he was sure he felt the shattered ribs digging into his lungs, or was that his heart? It didn't matter. He didn't care in the least.
Shin pressed his lips together and from his arms came out a weak cloud of black particles that in a matter of seconds covered his arms and hands. He hugged the huge boulder of probably more than 500 kilos and moved it to the side, simply getting rid of it.
Almost instantly Shin twisted into a fetal position, with spasms that increased the turbulence of the water even more, as the sound of several cracking sounds spread through his spine and thorax, putting his bones back in place and the tissues and viscera repaired themselves at an impossible speed, beyond all human understanding. He felt a warmth begin to rise up his back again at waist level.
Just as it happened, when he hit the logs with his fist, again a black cloud of metallic particles came out of every pore of his body and took a few seconds to adjust to the shape of his body. The shoes came undone, unable to resist the pressure of the much larger feet now, covered in the same opaque black metal and showing toes ending in claws. And the shirt was torn to shreds by the particle cloud, as it began to take shape. He still had his backpack and shoulder holster intact, but his weapon was not there. Of his clothes he only kept his pants, which were somewhat destroyed, and his trench coat, which in spite of all the disaster was still intact.
He opened his mouth in a mute scream again while the dark armor continued to grow from the tribal-shaped scar on his back, wrapping around his body, until it went up his neck and advanced rapidly towards his face. It hid his mouth, nose and eyes to finally hide in his hair, which although it was not covered by the cloud of particles, it acquired a metallic texture.
His face had completely disappeared, and only a mask with no facial features was visible. There were only slight depressions where the eyes used to be. His metallic hair floating weightless and the ears, which although still had their shape and were of the same texture of the armor. Shin had a humanoid form but at that point it was hard to tell what it really was.
He floated for a second trying to look at his hands but they were melting into the darkness of the lake. He looked up and propelled as if he had been born in that environment, he began to ascend while a single thought filled his head.
Mai.
His partner. His lover.
Since joining Nevermore, it was not the first time he had been separated from her on a mission. Sometimes they acted separately, or with other members of the investigation division, but never anything like this had happened. This time, things had gone very wrong.
As he climbed up, he rummaged through the pockets of his trench coat and found the translation receivers, but discovered they were damaged. The spare was in the car.
It didn't matter. He could feel her. He knew she was still alive and for the moment that was all he cared about.
Thirty meters. Forty. Seventy. How deep is this part? he wondered, as his body finally emerged from the icy waters.
Likely, it had been nearly a hundred meters deep. The mask uncovered his face, and he spat copious amounts of black sludge from his mouth that had been stagnating in his esophagus and lungs, and took a big gulp of air, feeling his lungs swell again. And his heart that, until then had been beating at a slow pace, began to accelerate and the blood started to pump at a normal rate through his body. He looked around him and cursed aloud.
How far away am I? He had been dragged too far from the river of barely sixty meters where everything had happened.
Although he could vaguely be guided by the surrounding lights in the near-darkness, he spun around on his own, trying to get his bearings and more or less estimated that he was in the middle of what was once the lower Kolsay lake. That was almost five hundred meters in both directions to reach the coast, but far away from where he had fallen.
“Fuck!!" He cursed again and began to stroke eastward, hurrying as fast as he could. He had not yet gone more than fifty meters when a light at his back appeared and Shin turned quickly, remembering the report of the strange lights.
But there was no red light. Instead there instead was the white fog light of a drone with a smiling sticker on the side. "Piper?"
Of all the drones loaded in the car, Piper was Shin's favorite. He found it endearing and almost with an intelligence and personality of its own, so he had marked it with a sticker on the side and could almost say he treated it like a pet rather than just part of the working instruments.
"Why aren't you with your partner in the car?"
Had something happened at the cabin? Whatever it was, must have been bad enough for a drone to break protocol and wander of its own volition, away from the place it had been put to guard.
"Light the way for me," Shin ordered and continued his journey, but the drone instead of lighting it turned to the southwest side.
"Come on! I need light on this side!" Shin yelled.
But it didn't matter how much he tried to give it orders. The floating ball refused to obey and blinked several times, looking in the same direction. Then it turned to Shin and started emitting the lights again. Shin then understood, it was Morse code. At times like that, Shin really hated that his body rejected the Neurowire system, but at least even if it was in an old fashioned way, he could still communicate.
"-- .- .. / .. -. / --- - .... . .-. / ... .... --- .-. . / ... --- ..- - .... .-- . ... - / -.. .- -. --. . .-."
"Mai on the other bank, southwest, danger," he muttered.
"-- --- -. ... - . .-. / ..-. .. --. .... -"
"...monster...fighting?!"
".... ..- .-. .-. -.-- / .. -.. .. --- -"
"Shit! Come on, come on!"
Shin squeezed and, without bothering to translate the rude ball, started swimming now in the opposite direction, following the drone's light.
He didn't know how Mai could have made it to the other side if the log dam had been destroyed. He hoped that the monster Piper was referring to, had nothing to do with what he had seen under his microscope earlier. The calcareous structures around the meteorite microfragments and the mutations in the environment had already given him a bad feeling. Who knew what kind of organism had been incubating in the subterranean bowels of the lake for hundreds of thousands of years. He had questions but he would find the answers later.
Absorbed by his thoughts, he didn't notice and not even five minutes had passed when he finally arrived at the shore, a little tired and agitated, but he had no time to rest. He took off his trench coat and the tatters of his shirt, which was a nuisance, then hid his trench coat in the trunk of a tree. He kept his tactical shoulder holster and the backpack on and ran after the drone.
Shin frowned as in the middle of his mad dash he began to make out a pinkish glow in the distance, and that was the exact spot where he was going. He just hoped that whatever was happening there, Mai wasn't in the middle of it.
Why am I going slow? he asked himself.
To anyone who had seen him, he would have thought he was a demon running in the dark. But, for some reason, Shin was not at all satisfied with his pace of travel. Something was missing, though he couldn't tell exactly what it was.
