Lil’s wits sluggishly returned to her. Her eyelids felt like sandbags, too heavy to lift. The room felt uncomfortably warm. She shifted, weakly pawing at the sheet drawn over her.
“She’s waking up,” said Prist.
A hand was gripping hers. Somehow, even with the fog of unconsciousness only just parting, she knew it was Nita. The fingers around hers squeezed tighter. She returned the gesture and wrestled her eyes open. The room was dim. Night had fallen, and the only light came from a flickering oil lantern.
“What happened?” she said thickly.
Her mouth had an unpleasant acrid taste, like she’d been sucking on a filthy coin. The room smelled awful, like medicine, and like something else that was familiar but she couldn’t quite identify. As her thoughts cleared, she realized a handful of things that were very, very wrong. The smell clinging to her nostrils was fug. There was a thin haze of it in the room. It wasn’t nearly the thick rolling clouds that made most of Rim uninhabitable to surface folk, but it was enough that she should have been gagging. Nita and Butch were in the room with her, and each of them wore a fug mask and a worried expression. Prist and Lil lacked similar protection. Prist, at least, didn’t need it.
“Wh-what’s going on? Where’s my mask?” Lil said, trying to sit up and grope for the missing bit of apparatus.
Nita eased her back to the bed. “You don’t need it. In fact, you shouldn’t have it. Not right now.”
Prist nodded. “Open the window. Let’s see if she’s had enough for now.”
Butch unfastened the shutters on one side of the room, then the other. A cool night breeze swept through the room, clearing it swiftly of the residue of fug. Lil took a breath of fresh air. It should have been pleasant, revitalizing. Instead it felt oddly lacking, like she’d blown her breath into a bag and breathed it back in.
Nita took off her mask. “How do you feel?”
“I feel like a mess of sand got dumped on my head. What’s this all about? How come there’s fug floatin’ about on Laylow Island?”
“You coughed up something purple and fainted.”
“… I don’t remember that.”
“That’s likely to become more of a problem for you, but we’ll get into that shortly,” Prist said. “If you recall, during your time in Tusk’s clutches you were subjected to the fug in fairly high concentrations for quite a while. You coughed up some purple that day as well.”
“You sayin’ I’ve had some of that gunk cloggin’ up my pipes since then?”
“In a manner of speaking. You’ll also recall, I hope, that you and Nita were tortured while in Skykeep, once again exposed to near-toxic levels of fug for extended periods of time.”
“Don’t remind me,” she muttered. “All this reminiscin’ and whatnot got a reason, Doc?”
“By now you’re well aware that fug folk, and every other creature beneath the fug, either began as or was begot from something that began as a creature of the surface. Exposure to fug usually causes death. But in some, it causes a change.”
“You better not be sayin’ what I think you’re sayin’…”
“I would dearly like to tell you that what’s happened today is temporary or isolated, but when a whiff of the fug steadied you rather than worsened your condition, it confirmed it. You are changing, Lil.”
Lil sat up, shrugging off Nita’s attempts to keep her on her back. “No. That don’t make no kind of sense. You’re up here just fine, breathin’ the air all the rest of us are. You don’t need fug, so why should I? This is somethin’ different. It’s gotta be.”
“Lil, we know very little about the mechanism of the change. Of the several thousand fug folk who live today, the vast majority were changed during the Calamity. It happened all at once for us. As you might imagine, with people dying by the cityful, we weren’t precisely in the position to study the transition. And fewer than five out of every one hundred people who reach the critical level of fug toxicity survive. Combined with the knowledge of that toxicity and the requisite safety steps taken by humans, there has yet to be a thoroughly documented case of a human transitioning to a fug person since then. This is actually a tremendous learning opportunity.”
“I ain’t too pleased about bein’ your opportunity, tremendous or not.”
“I realize that. Now, you’ve been through a great deal. If you would prefer I give you a moment before we discuss the current matter any further…”
“No. If you’re afraid of heights, you take a long look over the edge. Let me know what’s in store.”
“As you wish.” Prist flipped open a small textbook to a marked page. “This is not an area of expertise for me. At least, fug poisoning in humans and the resulting transition are not. But I did focus on the effects of the complex chemical compounds related to ichor. In the hours you were unconscious, I have drawn up a prognosis.”
“I ain’t askin’ for a prognosis. I’m askin’ what’s liable to happen to me.”
“… Yes, that is what a prognosis is.”
“Well say it regular.”
“I shall endeavor to do so. Bear in mind this is all speculation, but it is at least based on the firmest scientific foundation I can produce. You are now in what I would call the early stages of the transition. This should last not less than three days and not longer than three weeks. During this stage, all current symptoms will become more acute.”
“Now what do you mean by that?”
“Episodes of shortness of breath will become more frequent and will need to be treated with doses of fug. Within a week, you will likely be unable to breathe properly without some concentration of fug in the air.”
“I ain’t likin’ this prognosis so far.”
“When you have reached the point that you must breathe fug, you will have entered what I call midstage transition. This, at least, we know a bit more about. Here you will see a marked increase in physiological changes. Your skin will lighten, your hair may darken. Depending on the nature of your final development, you will follow the anatomical template of a standard or ‘grunt’ fug person and become either leaner or taller. This development will bring with it some combination of advanced strength and increased mental acuity, with strength more prominent in grunts and mental acuity more prominent otherwise. You will likely not regain the ability to breathe outside the fug again safely until the physical transition is complete. That could take as long as two years.”
Lil’s expression became sterner. “You’re tellin’ me if this goes the way you think it’s gonna go, I’ll be stuck in the fug for years?”
“I… Lil, if it goes the way I think it is going to go, you’ll be stuck in the fug forever.”
“Oh, if you think I’m movin’ into Fugtown just because of this nonsense, you don’t know Lil Cooper.”
“Therein lies the issue. It won’t be Lil Cooper living in the fug.”
Lil glanced aside to Nita as her friend’s grip tightened more. The engineer’s face had the distinctive flavor of strength that suggested if Nita let it falter for even a moment, Lil would see the grief beneath it. Prist continued.
“As I said, all of your symptoms will become more acute. That means memory loss as well. It is a near universal fact that the first generation fug folk, the ones created rather than born, lost their memories in the process. Nearly everyone retains basic aspects of education: language, learned skills, etc. To my knowledge only a small fraction of grunts have lost any intellectual capacity of that sort. But I’ve heard of no more than a handful of instances in our entire history where a fug person maintained any but the most basic anecdotal memories. All of the experiences will be gone. The first generation of fuggers chose to take new names, to quite literally bury the past.”
Lil was silent for a few moments, the words trickling through the cracks of her mind like molasses. When she finally spoke, it was with unnerving calm.
“You could have saved a whole lot of breath by telling me I was going to die.”
“No, no! That you’ve made it this far makes it a near certainty that you’re one of the lucky ones who will survive the change.”
“There’s a Lil now, and in a couple weeks there won’t be. That ain’t what I’d call surviving.” She kicked her legs off the side of the bed and stood.
“Easy, Lil. You’re still recovering.”
“I ain’t recovering, I’m dyin’. And a Cooper doesn’t take that sort of thing lyin’ down. Now we done beat everything we came up against so far. We took down the man who’s had his mitts around the throat of Rim since before any of us were alive. There was a cure for what was ailin’ Mrs. Graus down there in the fug, so there’s bound to be a dang cure for this. You just tell us what you know about it, and we’ll find that cure, right?”
Prist straightened up. “Miss Cooper, there is no cure because the process by which my people were created is not a disease. I resent the implication that my kind are a consequence rather than an alternative.”
Lil winced. “Doc, if there’s still a me after this is said and done, I’ll go through and even us up on anything I said that wasn’t proper, but if what you said is true, then I ain’t got the time or notion to be pickin’ and choosin’ words all careful-like.”
Dr. Prist sniffed. “Fair enough. Now, as it stands there is no treatment. Certainly not an established one. A surface person transitioning to a fug person these days is a vanishingly rare occurrence and not one that we find particularly undesirable. It simply isn’t an area that we’ve pursued. However, having observed the symptoms of the earliest stages of the transition, I have insight into the process that others who may have studied the process in passing lacked.”
She flipped through the pages of her book, jumping from bookmark to bookmark. “I have done my best to understand ichor as fully as possible. Until you provided me with the opportunity to work with the Well Diggers—if I may depict those events rather charitably—I’d never had the opportunity to access the well at South Pyre. In the absence of hands-on experience, I devoured all of the literature available. As the backup for the head chemist, I was tested relentlessly on even the minutiae. It so happens I brought this book with me to aid in the formulation of a lubricant for the project Gunner and I are working on, and thus—”
“I ain’t got much time, Doc,” Lil said impatiently.
Prist tightened her lips somewhat and placed her finger on the page. “‘Ichor: Impurities and Contaminants, Chapter 7: Severe Adverse Reactions. Incident seventy-three. A worker became ill following his lunch break. He became short of breath, gasping despite no obvious obstructions to his airways. Violent coughing produced copious amounts of indigo discharge. He collapsed and slipped from the catwalk over the primary outlet of the ichor source. Workers transported him to the nearest emergency medical station. With the exception of a brief subsidence of the hyperventilation in the minutes prior to medical treatment, the afflicted worker asphyxiated shortly thereafter.’”
“That’s a whole lot of talkin’ that didn’t amount to much, near as I can figure, Doc,” Lil said.
“A fug worker had exactly the same symptoms as you,” Nita explained.
“Precisely,” Prist said. “Specifically, he had the symptoms shortly after handling a known component of South Pyre ichor. We call it Contaminant Six. It is a known irritant. As I recall, the answer marked as correct on the examination was ‘death due to acute allergic reaction.’ But in light of the extreme similarity between his reaction and your own, there is the chance that his exposure to Contaminant Six returned him to a state that was vulnerable to the fug. This is further suggested by the brief recovery. If we assume the medical station was near to the main opening of the ichor well, it would be one of the few places in the fug that is kept free of the fug, as the ichor would push it back.”
“Then we just gotta get a mess of that stuff,” Lil said. “What are we waiting for?!”
“It isn’t as simple as that,” Prist said.
“It didn’t seem all that simple what with me not knowin’ what that stuff was or where to get it,” Lil said.
“As it happens, those are among the lesser difficulties. Contaminant Six is present in South Pyre ichor. If nowhere else, it will be present in some quantity there. And I am quite familiar with the substance, at least insofar as the limited literature dealing with it. The issues are thus. If Contaminant Six itself was the cure, this wouldn’t be an isolated incident. There would have been dozens, if not hundreds of exposures over the years. Not just one. Something else must have happened to activate it. We’ll need to know everything there is to know about that incident if we hope to re-create its effects. And we need to be prepared for a cold reality. It may not work, or worse yet, it may work precisely how I expect it to.”
“That’s bad?” Lil said.
“If it is, effectively, a counter-reactant to the fug and its effect on physiology, then it will do its work with a similar success rate. The lottery you won to survive the transition to fug person shall need to be played again if you hope to survive the reversion.”
“You say that like it ain’t worth doin’ because of that.”
“For all we know, your chance of surviving the treatment could be one in twenty or worse. The only thing making it that likely is the relatively incomplete transition, meaning the reversion will be less severe.”
“The way I figure it, you’re tellin’ me my choices are have a chance at stickin’ around or have no chance of stickin’ around. Ain’t exactly a tough one for me.”
“We don’t know if it will work at all. If you do lose your memory, there’s certainly no guarantee this will restore it. We don’t know to what degree it will restore your body either. You might be left in some in-between state, perhaps appearing as one but functioning as another. You could end up with anything from immunity to the fug to even greater sensitivity to it. The risks!”
“Look, it’ll work or it won’t. That makes it fifty-fifty, far as I’m concerned.”
A genuine smirk came to Prist’s face. “Ignorance and optimism are a potent combination.”
Lil jabbed her chest with her thumb. “It’s what got the Coopers this far. Now we still jawin’, or are we gonna go get what needs gettin’?”
#
Nita, Lil, and Prist took the situation to Mack and Gunner. From the moment a potential treatment was suggested, Mack’s attitude matched Lil’s. If there was a chance, then they would chase it to the end of the world and back. The moment there was a direction to point his prow, Mack snapped into action as though this was a mission he’d had to plan a thousand times before.
“First thing’s first. If Lil here’s going to need fug to keep kickin’, then we’re getting her to Rim right quick. That means the Wind Breaker ain’t involved. The old girl’s weeks from bein’ anything that’ll get a proper crew anywhere they need goin’. Gunner? What we got that’s not a death trap at present?”
“I believe the Rattletrap is ready. It’s that runabout Lil, Nita, Coop, and I pieced together out of one of the lifeboats from the dreadnought. It’s fully fueled and in proper repair,” he said.
“There was the gig from the dreadnought as well, though I wouldn’t trust it for more than two people at the range we need,” Nita said.
“About how many people can we trust in the runabout?”
“Fueled for the Rim trip, assuming we’re headed for Lock, I—”
“Aim for Keystone. It’s a step closer to Ichor Well if we need to head that far, and most things worth knowing pass through that town at one time or another. Best chance we’ll get to learn where we can learn what needs learnin’.”
“I’d say four. Five if one of them is Wink.”
“Get it loaded up. All the burn-slow you need. And grab the fléchette guns earmarked for the Wind Breaker refit to mount on the hardpoints.”
“On it,” Gunner said, hurrying off.
“Nita, it’ll be you, Lil, Gunner, Prist, and Wink,” Mack instructed.
“Captain, that will leave you and Butch alone,” Nita said.
“Ain’t neither of us on the verge of endin’ up dead or empty-headed. Don’t worry about us.”
“At least keep Wink. Without an inspector you—”
“You’re going to be airborne, you’re going to need an inspector to get messages in and out. We’ll be fine holdin’ down the fort. The gig’ll do us fine if we need to get movin’. Now you get movin’. I want you in Keystone in two days, and I want a message sent out to Coop, givin’ him the rundown of what’s been done and what’s to be done. The boy deserves to know his sister’s in a bad way. Him runnin’ all about above and below the fug, he’s liable to have a better handle on where the best info is at.”
“What should I do, Cap’n?” Lil said.
“Keep hold of your marbles. And try not to get yourself killed. Seems that’s about as much as you should have to worry about. Nita, on the other hand, this young lady is your responsibility. She’s all our responsibility, but yours more than anyone.”
“Captain, if you’d given me any task but keeping Lil safe, I’d have disobeyed your orders at my first opportunity,” Nita said.
“Sometimes bein’ a cap’n’s about giving the orders you know’ll get followed. Now get movin’. All of you. There’s work to be done, and I’ll be needin’ both of my deckhands.”
Lil saluted. “Aye, Cap’n!”