Prey to Predator

The first mouthful of rainwater tasted of rust.

No. Of blood.

He was on his back in the middle of the road with his left leg folded at an angle that made his teeth ache just to look at. Warmth crawled out of the back of his skull.

It ran down the hollow of his neck, sticky, and mixed with the cold rain until he could not tell which was which.

The truck that had hit him was already gone, its tail lights shrunk to two red points and then swallowed by the downpour. Only the traffic light at the corner kept working. Red, green, red, green, over a street with nobody left in it.

Somewhere, once, he had read that a person hit by a car is supposed to feel the impact. He had felt nothing. There was a sound. A wet crack he would remember for the rest of whatever this was. Then the road. Then the rain in his mouth.

His fingers dug into the asphalt. They closed on a piece of broken glass and opened his fingertip, and he felt nothing at all. Above him the sky was one long gray smear.

Somewhere down the block a shutter banged in the wind. Closer, water ran into a drain, a sound like someone talking through a wall.

His vision was already going dark before the thought caught up with him, walking the last few steps to his side. He was going to die here, on this road, in this rain, and the city would go on blinking its lights over him until morning.

Three years at MediTech, and he was still the intern anyone could step over. The desk in the corner facing the water cooler, where everybody could see whatever he was doing and nobody ever asked.

Coffee spilled across his files while it was still hot. The laughter that followed it. And the way he had learned to make himself small, small enough that people stopped noticing him.

Three years, and no review had ever managed to fit the word permanent after his name.

He had been the one who stayed late. He had been the one who re-did other people’s spreadsheets, unasked, unthanked. Being useful was the only way he had ever known to be safe. It had not made him safe. It had made him furniture.

That afternoon, HR, with her light, careless phrase. Position adjustment. They had handed him an empty cardboard box and walked him to the door. He had stood on the steps in the rain holding it, with no idea which way to turn.

The rain had gotten into the box before he took ten steps. There was nothing in it worth protecting, and he had tried anyway.

Then the truck came.

In the last moment before the pain stripped everything away, one thought cut through the fog in his head. I don’t want to die.

I want to live. I want the people who looked down on me, who laughed at me, to taste the mud too.

“Do you want to live, or do you want to win?”

The voice went off in the deepest part of his skull, without warning. He could not tell whether it belonged to a man or a woman. It had no breath and no warmth, only a smell of dead flowers, sweet and rotten, close enough to taste.

Then it laughed, soft, right against the inside of his ear, the way a lover laughs in the dark.

Arthur Cyrus coughed up a mouthful of sweet, iron blood. “Is there a difference?”

“Live, and you’ll hate me.” The voice slid lower, pleased with itself. “Win, and you’ll hate them. Both are more interesting than dying on a wet road, don’t you think?”

“Win.”

“Good.” It sank into a sigh that ran down his spine like a fingertip. “But first, you have to live.”

Rain hammered into his open eyes. He could not close them. An invisible finger, cold as iron, climbed his wrist and followed the artery to his heart. It pressed there, gently, at the exact place where stopping would finish him.

Something deep in his body arched toward it, the way a body arches toward a hand.

“You already died. After the eighty-third beat, I held it.” The voice warmed, and the warmth was worse than the cold. “From now on, you stay alive on other people’s Essence.”

“What is that?” His voice came out in a rasp.

“Men’s heat. Their life.” The words rolled over its tongue before it let them go. “And once you’ve had it, little thing, it will be the only thing you can’t quit.”

Before the sentence finished, something hollowed out deep in his abdomen. A thirst tore open inside him, worse than hunger, and it did not ache. It wanted. It wanted the way a mouth wants.

The way hips want. The way a body that has already died once learns to want something worse than air.

He opened his eyes. Seven twelve in the morning.

The yellow-brown stain on the ceiling had not changed. The smell of toast from the street had not changed. His hands and feet moved. The back of his head was dry.

Only his wrist was wrong, cold, as if a dead man’s iron had been pressed into the bone and left there to cool.

He took stock, the way you check a room you are not sure you are allowed to be in. Both legs. Both arms. Ten fingers, moving when he told them to.

The cut on his fingertip from the glass was gone, not healed, gone, as if it had never happened.

He lay still and listened to the building wake around him. A toilet flushing two doors down. A door closing. A woman’s voice in the stairwell, complaining about something. All of it so ordinary that for a moment he could not breathe.

He sat on the edge of the bed and picked at the loose thread on his shirt cuff. Vivienne had mocked it in front of the whole floor the day before. He cut it with his thumbnail, slowly. His hands did not quite trust themselves yet.

Then the script came up across his vision, faint and blue and cold.

[Current status: near-death threshold. Vital signs sustained entirely by Essence.]

[Essence reserve: sufficient to sustain you only until the small hours of the day after tomorrow.]

[Warning: when the reserve is depleted, you will return to the death node.]

He read the last line twice, then a third time. In the bathroom mirror the face was pale and forgettable, the face of a man nobody bothers to remember. But the cringing timidity behind the eyes had burned away clean.

The morning subway was packed.

The train lurched, and the man beside him, in work clothes, knocked against his arm. Sweat and machine oil, a stranger’s heat, hit him all at once, and the hollow in his gut spasmed like something rabid. His throat went dry.

Under his skin a hundred fuses lit at once, all of them running the same direction. The body that had come back was screaming, and it knew its way home, and the way home led only to men.

He locked his hand around the strap and turned his face to the window. The glass showed the faint red at the corners of his eyes. No one had touched him and the body had already leaned in.

At nine, the MediTech lobby was bright enough to hurt.

He did not hurry to swipe his badge.

The lobby held its usual nine o’clock weather. Wet umbrellas stacked at the door. Two women arguing about a meeting. A delivery man being told to use the service entrance.

Nobody looked at him. That, at least, had not changed. He looked past the crowd and found the back at the turnstiles.

Terry Vance, night-shift security. Wide shoulders, long legs, the uniform pulled tight across the muscles of his back, the waist tapered hard and clean. On the day they had thrown Arthur out in the rain, this man was the only one who had held the door.

Terry turned and met his eyes.

A look crossed that rough face, the look of a man who had just seen a ghost. Then his gaze slid down on its own. Past the eyes, past the throat, pausing at the narrow waist, then jerking away as if he had been burned.

His fingers scrubbed once at the seam of his trousers. He dropped his head and pretended to scroll his phone.

The hunger went back down his throat, and something in him turned over.

The script faded. Only the countdown was left, ticking. Forty hours. Long enough to eat a man down to the bone.

He walked toward Terry. As they passed, a rough smell of soap and sun crossed the tip of his nose. The hollow swallowed it down, greedy. The cold Mark on his wrist followed him quietly through the turnstile.