Swarm

Inside the ring, the sound is deafening.

– THREE –

I stand with my back against the Cage's simulated stone wall. The rock should feel cool under my palms. But which Serpe would take the time to touch a rock and know the difference? The Cage is about appearances—our weakness, their strength. That's been clear from the beginning.

The roar swells. Without power to my ear embeds, I can't pick out the dying combatant's shrill scream, but the thunderous reverberation goes on for so long it can be nothing else.

– TWO –

The word surfaces inside my consciousness, leaving the oily taste of Serpe in my mouth and on my palms.

Dissociation never looked so good.

But my mind didn't break that way when the snake-eyed recruiters appeared in my office and told my boss someone had tested for the Cage. A year after the Serpe first appeared in Beijing and brought chaos to that city, I saw it happen when they took a woman on the skating rink at Nathan Phillips Square. She started to scream at the sight of them. When they put their scaled hands on her shoulders and tattooed the third eye on her forehead, her other eyes made a clear break with reality. They recoiled and fled, as sickened by human mental imperfection as we are by their slit mouths full of knife-blade teeth, those flickering black tongues.

But when the Serpe took my shoulders in their three-fingered hands and burned sight into my skin and the mind behind it, I did not begin to speak in tongues. Or scream without stopping.

In that instance, I felt purpose.

– ONE –

They'll be waiting out there. Mom. Dad. Little Sam. And Carl. The grief for the fallen doesn't resonate on camera without human eyes wild with pain, reflecting it. The honoured family box will be covered with fresh blue linen, bright as the sky. I place my mother beside the slab that will receive what is left of my broken, bleeding body. My father will be at her side, Sam scrunched between them, confusion brimming his big, dark eyes.

Carl they will place at the bier's opposite edge. The camera angles are best there. He will look into the middle distance of pain, his face in profile against the gleaming stone backdrop of the Serpe Cage, and 100,000 swooning girls will pull his profile.

The sweethearts of the dead do not stay lonely very long.

I let the perfectly stylized tableaux my death will bring unfurl in my mind — the world after I die. I stare down the dark passage, my grief for their grief rebounding inside me with the unfairness, the injustice.

Then I pop the image like a bubble and close the mental door.

There are no memes for what comes next.

Something tugs beyond the edges of what my third eye sees. The rock splits behind me into one long fissure, forming a slit as wide as I am tall.

Outside, the ledge awaits me.

I step onto it, carefully placing my booted feet. The rock wall seamlessly closes. Then the whole wall . . . shifts . . . and recedes into the distance as the Serpe bend the space, folding it back into the vista made famous by so many deaths.

But it's me on the ledge, a two-foot wide sliver of safety at the top of a column of stone, 2,000 feet in the air.

Below and around me is the Cage.

Carl once described it as a grotesque Angel Food cake pan. He wasn't wrong. From the ledge, the stone pinnacle I perch upon descends to the lower sculpted bowl of rock. The Cage's walls, smooth and utterly without holds, flow up from the floor, so sheer I think of solidified water, and crest a few measly feet above me.