Chapter 2: Arata - Inhuman Abduction

  Sound came back wrong. First a hiss, my breath far away, then a ceiling drip that took a long time to fall. The terraces. The slab. Golden scales under my hands. They were bruised. A single word pushing up through my ribs. Grow.

  “Status?” a man’s voice asked, rubbing rough against the memory.

  “Stable vitals,” a nurse said. “Unresponsive. Same as an hour ago. Down from 85 kilogrammes to 50.”

  I tried to turn my head. The skull stayed. My brain lagged, and I felt like vomiting.

  “He’s not an assassin,” the man went on. “Not an Islander either. Where did he find him?”

  “North Seawall sweep. They asked for confidentiality.” Baatar, I thought, and I suddenly felt like going to the bathroom.

  A cracked light panel drew a river across the ceiling. My mouth tried a word. “D… d… drag… aha…”

  “Dragon?” the man said, closer now. “Nurse. You told me he remained unresponsive.”

  “He does, Dr Vainio,” she said. “He repeats that word in cycles. No reflex on command. Like his mouth is on a loop.”

  “Dragon,” I said helpfully, and forgot if it left my lips or stayed in the skull.

  Footsteps. A tablet chittered. Paper moved.

  “Unknown male, early twenties,” the doctor read. “Alias ‘Unemployed Man’ from a public stream handle. No City ID, no visa, no contacts. Anomalies?”

  The nurse hesitated. “Hair shows green banding under the dermal lamp. Not dye; fluoresces on a chlorophyll curve. Fingernails too. Labs flagged a pigment in organ panels. We triple-checked reagents.”

  “Chlorophyll,” Dr Vainio said, warming the word. “Composition?”

  “He shouldn’t be alive. But his body’s behaving like it expects to survive.”

  “What about the phone?”

  “In evidence,” she said. Plastic crackled. “Legal pulled the VOD. CAP masked everything past the bazaar. The last live audio is him breathing on the Seawall and saying ‘not normal.’”

  “So, the public saw nothing.”

  “They saw a runaway,” she said. “Then a mask.”

  Good, a mean part of me thought. The rest thought nothing. Silence. Machines blinked.

  “Keep him here,” Vainio said. “No transfer to City General. Hourly checks. Atchison, scrub the staff sheet; everyone signs confidentiality. I’ll brief Black Box.”

  “Sir,” the nurse asked softly, “if he never recovers…”

  “Perhaps you’re right, nurse,” Vainio said, and I hated him for sounding certain. “If he doesn’t, I’ll take him to the morgue. Personally.”

  The door swung open. Baatar filled the room the way a tide fills a harbour: quiet, without sympathy. “Nurse,” he said. “Doctor.”

  “Baatar,” Vainio replied. “He’s stable. We’re monitoring anomalies.”

  “Specify.”

  “Pigmentation. Regenerative markers. Weight variance,” Vainio said. His blink came a fraction late, like a mantis considering a leaf. “Small things. Unrelated to the fall.”

  Baatar looked at me for a length of time that felt like an invoice. “He said ‘dragon’?”

  “In cycles,” the nurse said, before the doctor could sand the truth down.

  Baatar’s head tilted a millimetre, the movement of a man listening to a channel other people don’t get. “We’re setting a perimeter. Nothing leaves this ward. No press. No handlers. No Association scouts. If anyone asks, this is a concussion with complications.”

  “And if he dies?” Vainio asked.

  “We’ll advise,” Baatar said, which is what we’ll decide sounds like in a hospital. He stepped out, and the room felt lighter again.

  “You should rest too,” Vainio told the nurse, gentler now. “Twenty minutes and a tea.”

  She nodded, fussed with my blanket. Up close her lipstick had smudged a touch at the corner. “Can you hear me, mister… Man?” She winced. “We don’t have your name.”

  I tried one on. “A… rat… ah…” My tongue tripped and fell. “Ar… aha…”

  “Don’t strain.” She smoothed the sheet. Her fingers were warm. The light hummed. I let the white go slack and the colours returned on their own. The terraces. The slab. The purple sphere in my right hand. Warm as breath. The eye looking back to me. “Don’t,” I told the memory. Good memories don’t listen.

  Something tickled under the tape on my wrist. I lifted my hand. The cannula sat under standard-issue moral tape. From the tape’s edge, a hair-thin green thread had sprouted, going nowhere, meaning nothing, quietly terrifying. I pressed it down with a nail that wasn’t quite my colour anymore. It stayed the way a bad idea stays. “Nurse,” I croaked, just to prove I could. No one came. Good.

  Pearl walls, and pale wood. A window showing the assassin’s association black market streets. I was in the belly of the beast. Yeah. There was no escaping. An evidence bag on the counter: my phone inside, the assassin’s one was not. There goes my intel.

  Voices echoed in the corridor: wheels, soft shoes, a gurney with a bad bearing. Someone said “North Seawall” and “CAP” and “trending,” and “Unemployed Man” pricked the air like a tack. Another voice: “Scrub the comments.” Another: “He didn’t show anything; it’s just audio.” Another: “Audio is enough.” If audio was enough, I’d already ruined being no one. I closed my eyes. Let that wave come up and go out without moving me. Hours passed, I think.

  The door opened. Not Baatar. Two assassins. One, broad shoulders stretching the orange jumpsuit tight, fabric creased where muscle refused to lie flat. Dark hair fell to his shoulders beneath a blue bandana, damp with sweat. His face was hard-set. Stubble, sharp eyes.

  The second, a handsome man with a grey turtleneck, shaggy brown hair and a black blazer.

  “... Wrong ward,” the second man said. His eyes did math on my evidence bag, my bracelet, the green under my nails.

  “Out,” Vainio said from behind them. His voice stayed soft. Soft like a scalpel wrapped in gauze. “If you’re scrounging, try the graveyard.”

  “Just ensuring the victim is comfortable,” the second smiled,

  “Aura read?” he murmured to his inmate partner. “Nature magic, for sure.”

  “Out,” Vainio repeated, and they went, fish following a leaky boat.

  When the door shut, the doctor stood at the window and watched the corridor empty. He looked older when he wasn’t speaking. Maybe everyone does. Now I was alone with the creepy, old doctor.

  “I know you’re perfectly healthy,” he said, still watching the glass. “Men who can’t move don’t flinch when men like that come in.” I didn’t answer. It felt like a trap designed for my better self. He turned at last, gaze clinical and something else. Stillness held too precisely. “For the chart,” he said, tapping the tablet, which showed a chart with ten elements. “Your dragon sphere has awakened your Nature magic. Not Gravity, no density artifacts. Celestial residues: but no thermal, no condensing moisture, no pressure scarring from wind. No Shadow markers. Not Fire, quite the opposite.”

  The doctor stood and left his water.

  “Drink. I’ll come back for you.” I didn’t drink it. Taking favours from a man who lectured me seemed dangerous.

  It was night, I thought, as I saw no markets open, and no assassins loitering around outside. Footsteps paused outside. One set, heavy enough to vote on its own. They spoke as if I didn’t exist. “Transfer at dawn,” Baatar said to someone, not to a nobody like me. “No sedatives without my authorization.” My heart disliked those words in a very specific way.

  When his steps went, I counted to a number that meant cowardice and sat straight up. It was now or never. The IV tugged. I got both feet to the floor and celebrated like an idiot. “Okay,” I told the thread under the tape. “Help me not be a bag.” The deadman buffer would dump my recording if I didn’t cancel by tomorrow. The evidence bag refused to open. I pinched the seal with nails that weren’t mine anymore and failed gently. “Fine,” I told the plastic, because bargaining always works. Something changed in the air, a small pressure shift. The way a storm remembers it has someplace to be. In the darkness of the black market, a light moved where lights don’t. Not a drone cone. Not an assassin. A soft, intelligent arc, like someone drawing with a pen the night respected.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “Not normal,” I said again, softer. Something smiled without a mouth. Not friendly. Not unfriendly. The feeling of being noticed by a physics problem.

  “Dear boy,” a voice said, as the light approached the window. Calm. Dry. Amused, like a librarian delighted by punctuality. “Don’t thrash. You’ll only tangle the tubes.” The light came closer, pressed against the window, and mixed with a purple aura.

  “Doctor Vainio?” I said, stupidly, as the voices did not match.

  “Fortunately for you, no,” the voice said, and the drip decided to resume, just to prove it could.

  “W-who…?” I began.

  “Someone whose job is tedium without Seraphel’s star dragon,” the voice murmured. “Step one.”

  The bed rose an inch without the legs moving. Not floaty magic you’d see in cartoons, just quiet wrongness, as if the floor had changed its mind about down. The IV stand tilted.

  “Step two.” The window locks spun with a click. The pane eased out, the purple aura seeped into the room, shading the wooden panels “Shall we leave before the tide of men washes back?” the voice asked, terribly polite.

  I thought of Transfer at dawn. I thought of Doctor Vainio’s doll-like eyes. I thought of the eye in concrete, patient as weather.

  “A… aha,” I said, because agreement is easier than courage. “Y-yes. Please.”

  “Good boy,” the voice said, condescendingly, a tone I’ve heard from rich old boomers a hundred times, offering me a handful of credits. “Do try not to scream.”

  The bed slid toward the window, weightless. Lines slipped free without bleeding; the cannula tugged and then was simply not in me anymore. The evidence bag with my phone rose from the counter and tucked itself under my arm. Outside, a shape the colour of answers waited. Simply a curve of night that accepted edges without needing them. The air around it bent.

  “Mind your toes,” the voice said, and the room’s lights flickered. For a heartbeat I saw a slender figure standing precisely where the shadow was. Grey, in a neat, purple turtleneck, giant black eyes like polished stones. Then the figure wasn’t there, because neither was the room. The bed and I crossed the absence between hospital and hull in one gentle, indecently quiet slide. The anxiety gave me a nosebleed, which covered by hospital gown. The window swung itself shut, and when I looked back, my bed was already made. Those rock-hard pillows now looked fluffy.

  Somewhere down the corridor, a nurse said, “Did you hear that?” and another said, “It’s probably Vegetable Blue, off his medication again.”

  A low, civilized hum replaced the drip. Dim lights found me. One minute I was there, the next I was not. I now understood those alien abduction stories. They weren’t drunk, their brains blanked events.

  The interior was white and seamless, the floor curving into the walls without joints or seams. Rows of black pylons lined the chamber in precise intervals, each one angled toward a circular opening at the far end.

  The ship didn’t vibrate. There was no engine noise. The silence pressed on my ears until I noticed my breathing had gone shallow. My stomach tightened, the same way it does just before a drop. Outside the opening there were no stars. Just dark, uninterrupted space, close enough that it felt wrong to be exposed to it.

  I flexed my fingers into the solid surface I was laying on, and felt the nanites respond, tightening slightly, like they were compensating for something I couldn’t see. My mouth was dry. I swallowed and tasted metal. I had never been inside anything like this before. Nothing here was meant for people.

  “Welcome aboard,” the voice said from just behind my shoulder. A grey hand adjusted a switch I didn’t have words for; and a purple, hazy light focused on the centre of my chest. “Do keep breathing. In through the nose.”

  “Wh… who…”

  “All in good time,” he said. “You are very untidy, Mr Unemployed. I recommend a shower and several new decisions.”

  My mouth thought of something brave to say and filed it under later. I turned my head and looked out the window. Far below, The Island kept humming its old, small song. The Seawall kept punching the ocean. Baatar was out of sight, and finally out of mind. The last thing I saw before the world narrowed was my faint reflection in a panel. My eyes too wide, nails a little too green, and the hint of a smile on a mouth I hadn’t yet met.

  The craft turned without moving. Dark folded gently over light.

  “Okay… aha…” I told the air. It didn’t care. My nails were still wrong, green under the light. My shoulder sat calm and guilty, healed without permission. My throat tasted of IV metal and something sweeter that didn’t belong to hospitals or human bodies.

  A seam drew itself in the wall and became a door. Grey skin with the softness stone has before sunrise, features tidy, a violet turtleneck. They looked straight out of the late-night documentaries I watched at home. Sei-jin. Spaceman. A grey alien.

  I froze when our eyes met. The head was too large, skin smooth and pale, eyes black and wide without any visible white. They didn’t blink. They didn’t shift. They stayed on me, steady and complete, like I was already being tracked.

  My breath caught. I realised I’d gone still, every muscle locked, waiting for something to happen. My heart was pounding hard enough that it felt exposed, like he could hear it. The air felt thin. I swallowed and my throat burned.

  They didn’t react to my panic. They just looked at me, calm, unmoving, close enough that I couldn’t pretend this was a screen or a projection. This was a body. This was an alien.

  “Dear boy,” he said, mild as static. “Enjoying the view? Yes, I remember my first flight, millennia ago.”

  “W-who… where…”

  He touched two fingers to nothing. Down remembered itself. I settled onto the table with a small, guilty thud. Dust that had been uncertain drifted gratefully to the floor.

  “Oruun,” he said. “You’re aboard my ship. I borrowed you from Black Box before they filed you under problem.” He held an evidence bag. My phone inside, seal unbroken. “Your deadman buffer is deactivated. I assumed you wouldn’t want your mother and sister executed. Now, please refrain from arming another one in my living room.”

  “I didn’t… I mean… aha…”

  “Mmn.” He set the bag on a ledge that grew to meet his hand. “We’ll call it an accident of enthusiasm.” A slim wand, bone-white and embarrassed to exist, appeared in his palm. He touched it to the inside of my wrist.

  Color bloomed outward, rings I had no names for. Green burned brightest, edged by a colder blue.

  “Nature,” Oruun said, satisfied. “The dragon was Celestial, but the sphere was only the key. It wakes what’s already there.”

  “That’s… magic?” I asked, because it was the dumbest word I had left.

  “We use categories,” he said. “Pay attention.” He listed them the way doctors list side effects: “Gravity, Water, Wind, Nature, Celestial, Flame, Terra, Electric. Radiant and Shadow as overlays.”

  “Understood, sir,” I said, eager to be obedient and alive.

  “The costs of Growth,” he went on, still lecturing, “include weight shifts, hydration swings, accelerated patch-healing, occasional misgrowth. Sprouting, if you prefer fairy-tale terms. Avoid high heat until you learn counters. Flame burns plants. Terra crushes them. Wind steals breath. Gravity… does what it pleases.”

  I pulled my arm back. “N-no more scans. I don’t even know you… no offense, aha...”

  “You will.” He slid the wand away. “Or you’ll die, and our relationship will be brief.”

  Something about him fit the room too neatly, like a scalpel lying perfectly in its tray. I looked down; the blanket covering me had opinions about inertia. The ceiling refused to decide on edges.

  “Why me?” I asked. “Why steal me from Baatar?”

  “Rescue,” he corrected. “Stealing implies intent to keep.” A faint hum. “Baatar had a dawn transfer scheduled. He’s efficient. He’d have entered, and you’d end up as paperwork on someone’s desk. Assuming Doctor Vainio didn’t take you first.”

  I thought of his visor, the weight his boots gave the ground. “They… know I said… that word.”

  “I know. I’ve seen how you’ve handled yourself,” Oruun’s mouth shaped almost a smile. “You let it slip. But I believe in you, you won’t make such a mistake again.”

  “What did… what happened to me?”

  “An artifact embedded,” he said. “From a Celestial dragon. Baby dragons are born with a dragon sphere in their throats to absorb their mother’s magic.” He tilted his head thirty precise degrees, then let it reset. “After taking its mother’s Nature magic, the dragon was imbued with Celestial magic by a Nuxxani who wanted to destroy Earth.” He said it as if it made sense, uncaring that it made none.

  “I didn’t ask for any of this. It… it doesn’t make any sense…”

  “But it has already happened, so why complain?” He gestured; my phone drifted into my lap, gravity doing him favours. The way the air obeyed him made my stomach upset.

  He saw me notice. “Demonstrations, not threats,” he said, and suddenly I was mid-step without standing. The room had turned itself ninety degrees. My arm swung and found no world to belong to. He held me there, not pinned, just reminded how small my physics were. “I’m not here to hurt you, Mr Unemployed.” He released the vectors. I dropped an inch and hated the sound I made. “I’m here because I want to terminate a contract.”

  “You could just let me go,” I said. “Drop me at a bus stop. I won’t tell anyone about this, I promise.”

  “You’re the most wanted man on Earth, Arata Tanaka,” he said, using a name I hadn’t given. “You aren’t safe at a bus stop, or even in the depths of a nuclear bunker.”

  My chest folded in on itself. “Don’t speak to me like that. Please. I can’t take any more of… this.”

  “As you like.” The politeness felt borrowed from someone honest. “You will help me find the dragon. The star dragon lives, barely. Then, perhaps, you’ll be strong enough to-”

  “No…! I’m scared, please, Oruun,” I admitted, because there was nothing else left to hand him.

  “Good,” he said. “Fear means you’re still educable.” He palmed the floor; a hidden panel dilated into a window, showing the entire planet beneath. The Island lay as a dot in the middle of the ocean, rings of service light, the Seawall punching the dark sea, fog hanging over the trees.

  “I can’t do tests,” I said, heel finding the table.

  “Not a test,” Oruun replied. “A baseline. Survive sixty minutes. Don’t engage if you can avoid it. Don’t record anything, or they’ll find your location, from the shade of a single leaf if need be.”

  “You’re dropping me.”

  “Not quite.” Pressure gathered around my ribs, firm and invisible. “I’m placing you carefully.”

  “Where?”

  “Whispering Pines,” he said. “Between patrol lines and the Island Apes. I’ll collect you if you live. If you don’t, I’ll collect the artifact for myself.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I’m not a comedian. In through the nose.”

  Oruun finished explaining. He didn’t look at me when he did. That somehow made it worse.

  For a second, no one moved. My heart was going too fast, and I could feel it caught in my throat. My hands kept opening and closing, useless, like they were trying to remember a job they used to have. I should have said something earlier. Something smart. I hadn’t. Now there was no space left.

  “Wait,” I said. My voice cracked on the word.

  Oruun turned, slow. His eyes settled on me, calm, unreadable.

  “If I… if I survive,” I said. My fingers curled into my sleeve, gripping fabric like it could keep me here. “Please… help me survive. I can’t go back there.”

  The silence stretched. I almost laughed, sharp and stupid, because my life had become a joke.

  Oruun studied me for a long second. For a moment, I thought I’d pushed too far. Then he inclined his head, just slightly. “If you survive,” he said, “I’ll help you. That’ll be our contract.”

  The table rose, becoming a door. The viewport widened until it was a mouth that trusted me to feed it. Wind drafted along my skin. Below, fog repainted the forest in its own light. It became too real.

  “Wait, wait,” I said, scurrying to my feet. “Why do this to me… really!? I don’t know where I’m going, I can’t fight, I can’t do anything… please!”

  “I don’t want to babysit. You’ve already blurted out your trump card to the doctor. They’re watching you, and we’re running out of time.”

  “M-my doctor…?”

  “Lure him out. He’s only a Bronze Tier; you can handle him.”

  Cold crawled over my ankles; the ship equalized pressure.

  “Try not to scream,” he advised, and the room tilted. I didn’t fall. Down rotated and carried me out, through the aperture, through clean night that bent kindly around the hull.

  Wind took over. The last thing I saw of Oruun was a thin silhouette at the edge of the world. I remembered the rat, in the toilet. I could relate to them so strongly.

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