Pieces

[Jay Carpenter]

He needed to hold his arm and curl up in a ball.

The need was surprisingly motivating.

His fists were tight coils, plastic ties digging fire into the wrist as he tried to pull them through the loops. Shreds dug needles to the bone, and he screamed defiantly for the strength to pull more. When blood oozed the arm-rests, and still his arms were bound, he sank away. Head rolled back. Sobs wracked his throat already burning from the hours of fucked up bullshittery that this turned into.

The moment passed eventually.

And he was left alone with his thoughts. 

They weren’t pleasant.

He barely noticed when a woman in a white lab coat injected something he assumed to be the same as the contents of the weaponized injectable from the junk yard. It had to be how they were keeping him from the source of his channeling. Nothing changed for better or worse as far as he could tell; there was no power to seize at all. She left just before the blue-eyed man returned.

Jay’s voice was wrecked, but he suffered the words anyway. “I will kill you when I get out of this chair,” he said. The blue-eyed man only smiled, pulled the collar of his shirt, and what was shown turned Jay’s stomach with horror. He knew it was coming, but there it was, the thing he was most proud of in the world.

Three bullet holes in the skull. All the rage and pain of three brothers KIA desecrated by this cockroach. His jaw clenched tight to keep the chin from quivering. He wasn't very successful.

Sparks stormed the dark basement, brightening ice in the man’s eyes. After that, shit got real.

His own flared wide. No. No. NO. NO!

The inner pleading probably made it worse.

He’d been electrocuted plenty of times. Accidentally touching a live wire while changing out plugs in the barn. Falling and reaching out, only to grab an electric fence was enough to throw a teenager completely off his feet. Working on the truck and grazing a hot bolt with a forearm while reaching further into the engine. They left their marks. He’d yelled and cursed at the time. The heart raced. Some burn cream, bandages and Tylenol later and he was fine.

This was nothing like that.

The jolts were not sparks that stopped a millisecond after reflexes released the hot spot. This was an eternity.

Every muscle in his body seized. His arms and legs curled up like a dead spider. Feet and toes flared until they might rip themselves apart. His back arched. His jaw clenched so tight his face spasmed. When it stopped, he shook uncontrollably. He’d bit his tongue at one point, and blood welled up inside his mouth, gushing iron down his throat, until he was too weak to swallow it and just let it dribble out one corner of his mouth.

The smell was the worst. The room spun in circles. Blue-eyed man blurred in four different places. When he looked down, he just stared in disbelief.

Black circles charred his stomach, shoulders, chest and legs, and connecting them all were scrawling lines, purple and black, that crawled up to the neck and traced jagged paths down to the other hip.

They left him alone with the smell of his own carcass and bleak hope of coming out of this alive.

[Jay Carpenter]

Sleep or unconsciousness. It was hard to know which darkness won the day. Either were welcome respites…

He walked through the woods. No; he crept through the woods, careful with every step as though the wrong footfall might detonate an invisible bomb. At the left and right, others purchased similar grounds. It was in the hour before sunrise when the world held its breath before hellish light broke the horizon. He wasn’t tired, though. The opposite. His heart pound in his chest such that he put a hand to his jacket, checking the buttons holding it snug like they might burst open moment. Just an easy, steady pace. Move forward. Leaving his own heart trailing in the dirt was not in the plan. Fingers itching for activity found their comfort upon silk cords at his hip. A touchstone, and he breathed easier.

A wisp of Air brushed his face, their signal, and he halted. They all did. Jay slid to the ground, crawling by his arms forward until he was able to peer down the slope beyond. The house was exactly where he expected to find it, but no pride lit victory within. If anything, his guts twisted to knots for what they were about to do. And he was the one that led them here.

The signal flared and from the distance a storm of the one power surged. Lightning bolts struck the house, and Jay threw an arm to shield his eyes from the brightness. Fire rolled, turning night to day. When the first occupants fled the structure, Jay grit his teeth and gripped the sword hilt tight, but he didn’t move. Soldiers erupted from the compound. The barn doors were thrown open and raken escaped. He paid them no mind and sank his chin to grass. Not yet.. not yet…

Two shapes burst out finally, running low and together, darting from fire to fire. Saidin cauterized the frayed edges of his soul as he struck them down. Two more followed, this time crashing back with fires of their own. He cut them down like blades of grass. Three pairs of damane died that morning.

As sunrise lit the landscape, brothers doused the fire before it caught the woods wild. Eventually, Jay joined the cauldron and helped render the farmstead to ash. They stacked the bodies of the dead, lifting them like twigs tossed on to a pile. The raken was stripped of its skin. The leather sold fantastically high, and the Black Tower’s vaults needed replenished like everyone else.

As he rummaged through the ashes and lifted three gleaming collars from the remains. He turned the ter’angreal in his hands; they were always strangely clean. Another successful mission, he told himself.

He started to stand when he noticed the filth caking his boots. Ash washed easily enough, but what grabbed his eyesight wasn’t the flickers of metal here and there, nor the lumps of dying coals, but a motion beneath. It crawled like a rodent, though nothing could possibly survive the pyre of Asha’man incinerations. Jaw clenched, he put a hand to the hilt and backed away.

His foot landed on a knobby ridge. He gasped and spun. Motion crawled beneath the ashes all around him. The One Power flooded, and with one hand gripping the gleaming prize of the night and the other wielding the sword of his great-father, Jay watched with horror as skeletal fingers punched through. A hand clamped onto his toes. He kicked it away and stomped it to bits, kicking ash with the disturbance until it choked the air around him.

Whips of fire swept the ground, but for every arm severed, more took its place. They grabbed his feet. His ankles. He kicked and tried to run, but his feet snagged into a rib-cage and he fell. Black clouds puffed, stinging his eyes, burning his throat. When he looked up, it was to stare straight into the empty maw of a skull. He screamed, scrambling away. One ripped at his arm, tearing the sleeve. They clawed at his chest, the cloud rolling thick. He couldn’t breathe!

The sword! He grabbed the sword and swung in panicked frenzy. Fighting his way out. Arm and chest bleeding. Coughing wracked his lungs. Tears streaked black down his cheeks. Finally, he fell out of the devil’s fog. His fingers clutched at the grass, grateful for escape. Until toes peeked beneath his face. Gray fabric pooled. He looked up to the face of an angel. Dark hair rimmed her cheeks. A gentle, gray dress waved on the wind.

She knelt, tipping his chin with her girlish fingers, and Jay looked into the eyes of a girl he murdered earlier that night. When she stole the collar from his clutches and put it back on her own throat, he started to scream..

He woke with a start. Arm, chest, lungs everything burning alive. Memory hovered two worlds for a moment, reality hung in a balance, until the brute physicality of it all pulled the soul toward the present. He glanced up, and when he beheld the angelic face of a young girl with dark hair and a gray shirt, he froze.

---

Zacarías laid a hand on Alana’s shoulder. “I warn you daughter, he may appear frightening, but I promise you are completely safe,” he said. His daughter was thoughtful but nodded with silent determination that she was ready.

When they entered the room, they found a man slumped in a chair held up only by the bonds snaking his body. A smell lingered, but he did not think Alana would find it too unpleasant. Closer inspection found Jay Carpenter to be as pitiful as his pictures represented. It had been explained that the black streaks coursing his chest were some side-effect of the electricity surging across wet skin. Cords and clamps were tossed aside, waiting the return of Placaso.

Jay stirred, and Alana slipped from her father’s grasp to stand unafraid before the traitor. Zacarías smiled with pride while his daughter confronted the man that so greatly traumatized her.

---

The girl’s eyes were wide with fear. It was entirely possible he was hallucinating. He’d been dreaming, he recalled, even as the memory of it faded to oblivion.
“I saved you,” he said, voice straining above a whisper. It hurt to speak, but he had to get it out. “I’m sorry it happened that way,” he said, mind wracking for an explanation that justified the way her uncle was killed. He had none.

The girl sought something of her father, and Jay raised his gaze to the elder Amengual just long enough to understand. The blue-eyed man joined them, readying his cables, and Jay struggled weakly, but the bonds held. He scrambled for the power, clawed frantically at the cages built up around his mind. “No,” he said, shaking his head, “he was going to kill you,” he said, voice scratches. The blue-eyed man offered something to the girl. Jay couldn’t believe it. The girl he saved the night that started this whole thing thought he was the monster.

As long as Cayli was safe, it didn’t matter, he told himself as fresh pinches dug razor teeth into his skin. The girl herself toggled the switch that surged her justice. The last thing he saw was the eerie smile of a proud father patting her on the shoulder.

Then all fell black and the nightmares began again.

[Jay Carpenter]

Her voice filtered, but Jay’s eyes did not open. 
“Papa, what is wrong with him?”

Sleep. Just wanted sleep. Maybe he was dying? He’d seen plenty of people die before. He wouldn’t say his was the hand that dealt the final blow. Bullets and bad armor did that. Except for that one time – no that was also a bullet. That other time though. With, uh, Nox. Yeah. The concert. There was some batshit crazy guy the row ahead. He could still hear the screams of his victim. The way her body trembled in his arms when he scooped her up. So maybe he wasn’t the one that sliced the monster’s throat, Nox did that, technically. But Jay helped. Blood was on his hands, too. Surprisingly, it ended up being a fun fucking night.

Amengual’s voice broke like an avalanche, “Puta madre, Placaso. If he dies, I will gut you with my own bare hands,” he said. A blow followed grunts of pain. He wished he’d could have seen the blue-eyed man getting the shit beat out of him, but given that was only likely to happen if he was dead, there wouldn’t be much point. Clearly Amengual was not happy. Nobody answered the girl’s question, though. Jay started to get worried. Why couldn’t he open his eyes? Strangely, the pain was gone. That was probably a bad sign. What was wrong with him?

They shuffled around. The chair was tipped to the ground, sideways. Jay’s temple pattered lightly against the concrete. Palms snaked his cheek, surprisingly gentle. A woman’s voice followed. “He’s having a seizure, Zacarias,” she said. “Get him out of these restraints or he’s likely to break his neck.” His voice raised abject protest, but hers remained hard as steel. “You want him to die then?”

A moment later, his entire weight dropped to the floor. Cold puddled his skin. It wasn’t for long. Boots to the ribs rolled him to his back. He saw her face only a moment before a pinch took his arm: woman, short hair, doctor's coat. Lead flooded his bones heavy. Sleep swarmed a new flood just as he was lifted to the air.

[Lawrence Monday]

Dr. Opal Von Stein

Dr. Von Stein was sitting in her office when an urgent message crossed her desk. She was none too pleased every time the arrogant Zacarias Amengual came around her rehabilitation facility, but neither did she have any say in the matter. Orion funded the research, but it was his strings that arranged their resources. One of his little projects needed attention, so she grumbled and hurried to his beck and call. The only reason she complied with the project on these hallowed grounds was that the object on hand was himself a channeler. Every piece of data she could collect was valuable. Channelers were not easy to collect.

She entered a horrific scene, ordered that he be placed on the ground before he asphyxiated himself on the blood dribbling from his mouth. Seizures often induced tongue-biting, which he must have done. She knelt, scooped his cheek in her hands, and shone a penlight in his eyes. Very little reaction was a poor prognosis. She glared at Zacarias. He was obviously tortured. She wasn’t blind, but it was also obvious that the man did not want his project to die. Neither did she. She checked the readings from the scan-patch taken from one of the few untouched places on his skin, “you want him to die?” she asked. A smirk and she moved aside while stronger men carried Jay away.

“Put him in one of the unused rooms,” she started back up the stairs. That they didn’t follow her turned her on her heel. “He’s neutralized, I gave him the serum myself. I’ll dose him again if you’re worried about it, but he needs anti-convulsants and electrolyte balance or your project is going to be ruined.”

She crossed her arms, “They’re immune to infection, Zacarias, not to torture. Carve out his heart and he’ll die, I promise,” she waited impatiently for the man to come to his own conclusion.

A few minutes later, she was carrying supplies downstairs. They decided he wasn’t worth a bed in the ward, so she had to improvise on the disgusting basement floor. It’d be an hour or so before he woke enough for speech. She intended on being gone by then.