Dissolution

Chapter 9 - Blind

            

I woke.

Hard ground bit into my cheek and hip. The cold had seeped into my bones. Where was I? I blinked. It hurt, like rasping sandpaper against my eyeballs. I saw a blur of color, and then the world around me slowly resolved itself into reds and oranges, yellows, and a blue so pale it was almost white. Dawn. I must have been out for hours. I tried to track exactly where the sun was, but the image kept slipping from me, as if my eyes had greasy fingers. My left hand went automatically to my UConn to adjust my implants. I poked at the blank screen for a good minute, uncomprehending. And then I remembered it was off. And why.

Panic swirled through me. I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to see the blurred world around me, but the thoughts kept coming. I'd jumped into the river. I was alive. I was alive.

I coughed and tasted an ashy bitterness at the back of my throat. I blinked again. This time, it hurt less. I squinted and saw shapes. I looked down at my traitor of a body and it swam up in my vision, slowly, like something monstrous: blackened skin and a deep red so unholy it was like fire. I flinched. I felt like I should be screaming from the pain, from the chemical burn of it. I should be dead. But what I remembered as an all-consuming inferno had died down to what felt like a deep sunburn. I shivered, feeling newly bloody and alive. Swollen. Pink and ripe to the touch.

And my eyes. They were coming back. Slowly. Surely. I could see there were ridges to my skin. Edges. Raised, like cooled, crusty magma, like the aftermath of a volcanic eruption. My hands moved themselves, trembling along those edges. I'd never been able to resist picking my scabs. I'd never scarred. I brushed my fingers against the jagged bits of skin, braced myself for pain, and lifted . . .

It was like peeling wax. I was a doll. I was something not human. Sheets of blackened skin lifted away, and I saw raw pink, swollen skin underneath. New. Like a newborn. I was mesmerized by myself, by this act of peeling, lifting, flaying.

Arms, legs, back, chest, feet, hair—all gone. I laid strips of myself neatly down by my side, anything to delay taking away my face. I almost crawled back to the river to see, just for a moment, to remember who I was. Then I laughed at the absurdity. After all, it was the river that had stolen my face, that had birthed me anew as this alien thing.

The laugh cracked my cheeks open. I peeled the shell of my face back and saw the remnants of me spilling away. Pain rushed eagerly in to take its place, hot and hungry. It ate me as I wept, burning hotter where my tears ran. I tried to breathe. In and out. I counted. Sometimes, when an Experimental panicked, a Tester would sit and count with them to calm them down. It didn't always work. But it was all I had now.

One. Me. Two. My parents. Three. Jake and his family. Four. The suits. Five. My friends. I wondered if any of them would recognize me now.

By the time I had cried myself out, the pain had faded to a watchful burn. I uncurled and tried to stand. Around me, the detritus of my old body lay scattered like the remnants of a murder. I picked up my skin with swollen fingers and draped it in the crook of my arm. I turned. And I recognized my salvation, the great shadow I'd hidden behind last night that had shielded me from the road. It was an abandoned PERCO shipping container, gaping empty to the world. The bottom of it was littered with trash. I stared at it for a moment before comprehending. PERCO. Shipment. I was in corpless territory.

I coaxed my trembling body to move. Muscle by muscle, I stumbled across the path I'd dragged myself across and headed back to the river. I stopped well short of the edge, took a breath, and then heaved the evidence in. All of it. My discarded skin, my hair. I watched it hit the water with a dull splash and then disintegrate, scattering downriver. If I was lucky, they'd think that was all that was left.

I turned away and tried to assess my options. They were limited. I couldn't go home. I couldn't even get into my home, without my UConn. I couldn't go anywhere. ANRON had revoked my license.

Revoked.

There was an ugly finality to that word.

My fingers shook, clumsy and painful. They reached up automatically to stroke the collar twisted around my neck. It took me a moment to remember and then I pulled away, horrified. The collar that I'd treasured for so long lay scarred and dead around my neck. What had I done? Could I even be sold without a functioning collar? When I'd been running, the most important thing had been to disable it so they couldn't track me. But now . . .

Now I was one broken metal ring away from a corpless. And I was in their territory. The river had washed me almost to the outskirts of Unilox. I had never been so close to the Wall. It towered high above me in the distance, a solid reminder of the wasteland outside. And in front of it, the living blocks DRAYTH had built long ago loomed like stooped men. Some were ruined. I could see even from here where ivy had twisted away the windows, where a gnarled tree had burst through a roof. I backed away, breathing hard.

No. ANRON had revoked my license, and I had broken my collar. But that couldn't mean I was corpless. I was still ANRON Property. I just had to find out exactly what that meant.

With one last, frightened glance at the slums of the corpless, I started to make my way back to the city that had abandoned me.