Chapter 80 - Deep Breath
“Come in,” commands Captain Rattakul when I enter, not looking over her shoulder.
She is perched in a chair, almost a throne, that looks through a thick acrylic window out of the front of the vessel. There is a slim deck beyond that is clear of humans in this violent weather. A thin sheet of water shimmers as it is buffeted by the wind across its surface.
Rattakul has a black and gold tricorn hat on her head, and her cane across her lap as she watches outside. From one corner, I can see Pooka dive beneath the gondola and then re-emerge on the other side, his legs stretched and playfully grasping at the wind as he tumbles sideways and disappears from view again.
I look around the small cabin. Bed on one side, a table clipped upright against one wall, cabinets tied shut with plastic straps. No chairs, except her throne. But among the sparseness, small hints of a lifetime lived are wired to the walls. A faded scarf, a paper flower, a handful of written notes. As I draw closer to her, I see the plank of wood I saved for Addie at her feet. It is beaten and splintered, silvered with age, but mostly whole. I feel a jolt of victory. Addie is going to be so excited to see it.
“You’ve got a wild one,” she says.
I straighten my back. Rattakul watches me in the reflection of the acrylic window, almond shaped-eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry?”
“Don’t play games with me, girl. I know a conduit when I see one. There’s less than a dozen of us after all.”
I knew it. She can see Pooka. She can see them all! The rush of the confirmation fills and then drains me just as quickly. The weight of a secret held so tightly it was my personality and being lifts… and suddenly the face beneath, sensitive and vulnerable, is revealed. I’d feel less exposed if I were standing naked before this old woman than I do right now.
“So, what kind are you?”
I barely prevent my voice from shaking. “What kind?”
Rattakul turns and looks at me properly, clawed hand grasped around the armrest of her chair. “Which side does it run on?”
“My mother’s, I think.”
“She not tell you anything?”
“No… I, uh…”
“She dead?”
“No. At least I don’t think so.”
Rattakul’s eyebrows snap upwards, her wrinkled brow bunching beneath the pointed front of her hat. “You are blood-bonded, are you not? For your connection to be so strong?”
“I… what?”
“Fucking wild. You don’t know anything, do you? Girl,” barks Rattakul. “I’m surprised you’ve not gotten yourself killed.”
Sheepishly, I lower my eyes. “I’ve gotten pretty close.”
“I bet. Based on the terms of your secondment to Lyall’s crew.”
“You know about my… implant?”
“Lyall might bark a big game, but I practically raised the lad, knew his father. His business is my business. These operations are all family affairs, for generations, since the scarcity.” Rattakul turns back in her chair to look out at the storm. “Fucking wild.”
“It’s not like I chose this,” I mutter, finally finding some fire.
“Oh?”
“My name isn’t ‘girl’.”
“Oh, ho ho?”
The gondola surges, and I lift a hand over my head to grab the netting and keep my balance. My stumble breaks our impasse, and Rattakul grins from her stable throne. I draw my shoulders back, squaring my stance to brace better against the sudden jolts of the flying gondola.
“It’s Conrada. You could help me, you know,” I spit at her once I have my feet steady again. “I don’t fucking care if you do or you don’t. No one else ever has. But you could.”
“Oh. Is that so?” Rattakul doesn’t even look at me, her eyes out the window again watching the storm pass below us.
“Don’t then, I don’t care.”
“Don’t sass me, girl.”
“I will do what I want. You saw what I could do out there!” I scream, angered irrationally at how quickly she has stripped my armor-like secrets then dismissed me for ignorant, like it’s my fault. How dare she? “I have killed conduits. Did you know that? I am dangerous, and angry, and I’ve been so fucking alone. I thought I was the only one who saw them! My whole fucking life, I thought I was the only one. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know why it took my mother away from me. I don’t know why this secret has poisoned my whole life with its shadow. I don’t need you to remind me of what I am and to judge me for things that are not my fault.”
Pooka appears at the window, claws splayed, beak wide, and screeches at Rattakul. His black wings beat against the acrylic, but it does not shatter like glass, keeping him at bay as he screams his threats at the Captain.
“You would kill me, and doom every crewman on this vessel to death?” questions Rattakul.
My hand shakes as I hang from the netting. I’m too emotionally drained for this, already exhausted from holding back the flood with Pooka. My fraying nerves feel like they are fizzling out; my body feels half not mine. Pooka’s rage bubbles at the edges of my mind, turned at once from the carefree joy during his tumbling to defiant, protective rage.
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Rattakul stands, one hand clenched around her cane. Her eyes are steady and dark as she meets me, but her rigid mouth eases. “Resist him,” she commands, her voice resonant despite her age, firm and yet encouraging. “You are the human. You are the host. He is the wind that blows, and you will not be carried away with him.”
The shock of her sudden command slices through my fraying emotional edges, steeling me and forcing me to view myself objectively instead of letting my emotions slip through my fingers. Pooka screams at the window again, his raw energy threatening to slip unseen through my control. We are one, too often. Sometimes we need to be two. I cannot be ruled by the raw.
Rattakul continues, observing me. “He is emotion and energy, without a logical thought in the mix. It is not controlling him, not like every other human. He can still be free to feel what he is. But you must filter; you must be the human who thinks, who decides what you do and do not do. Who moves with purpose. You are too dangerous to be anything else but exact and masterful in this. Your lives are forfeit otherwise.”
I take a strangled gasp. Too quick, too undisciplined.
“Focus on the human,” commands Rattakul.
I’ve done this before. I know this feeling. My second breath is conscious. I feel my diaphragm expand, my ribs stretching, and I keep breathing in even when it feels like my chest is full. I feel my held breath at the pause, the stillness of my chest as I fight the urge to release. I feel the burn as my lungs fill with carbon dioxide, and animal panic threatens. And I fight it some more.
At the window, Pooka gives one last scream of protective rage, then closes his wings and dives - letting lose his pent-up violence into the dark storm again with a flash of plasma and brilliant violet beneath the gondola. Slowly, I breathe out through my nose.
“Good,” compliments Rattakul harshly, taking a wobbly step with her cane. “Get my dining table for me. The slabs on the side are benches once you unfold them. My legs aren’t as strong as yours in flight like this. It’d help if you flew steadier, Cendra, you great lump.”
I blink and follow her gaze to the straps holding her dining equipment against the wall. With a relieved sigh at having something to do with my hands, I rush to unfold one bench so she can sit. Rattakul gives a creaky groan as she lowers herself, and takes her tricorn hat off one-handed, revealing her steel-colored hair tied in a bun at the nape of her neck.
“You didn’t really kill another conduit?” she asks. Her tone is regretful, but not filled with the sharp judgement of our first interactions.
“I did. He was in his thirties. He had a jackalope… a Lepus.”
“Ah. Him. Covetrus?”
“Yeah.”
“A pity. A real pity,” she sighs. “I’m sorry you’ve been alone, girl. Once, our kind would have had an older mentor to help guide them through the worst aspects of the bond. It’s easy to trust the symbiont as a child when you don’t know any different, more so when you had no idea what would happen at your manifestation. They are as flawed as we are. Despite their age, they gain no wisdom with it and learn no lessons from their memories. They do not understand time and death and consequences like us mortals. Yesterday is just as raw as a thousand years ago, ‘til it is not and they pass on. Just cycles, renewal, rebirth. Memories of things that don’t exist anymore.”
I lower the edge of her dining table and sit across from Rattakul, I feel absolutely exhausted. “He wanted to kill a lot when he first manifested,” I find myself saying. “It’s still his instinct. I think he was there for something that happened to past conduits, a memory of betrayal. He remembers pain and violence and has only just started letting go of it… He hates a lot of things about what happens to other symbionts.”
“He should. They are not meant to be here. And not just that they are silent and unheard and trapped in circumstances far too similar to most of our own. They should not be here,” says Rattakul firmly.
“I saw a manifestation platform,” I say breathlessly. “I felt it… calling for me.”
“The hollow calls for everything. It is an energy sink. A place where things cycle eternal. The fact you heard it call means you are not blood-bonded then?” clarifies Rattakul.
“I don’t even know what that means?”
“You soak the platform with your blood, really soak it. It builds familiarity with the bond and the hollow, a payment of sorts for the silence - blood is the key. Otherwise, the stronger you get, the more it will call you back to it.”
I hesitate. “No. I might be partially bonded or something else. My mum was pregnant with me when she manifested, and I think something happened then. And I’ve… bonded with other humans, I think? There was another employee at Aquila with a Vespa. Her toxin had some odd properties.”
Rattakul hums thoughtfully, tapping one fingernail against the top of her cane. “An unusual path, I do not trust it. You must blood-bond, properly, to be sure. All conduits must blood-bond. It must be red, oxygenated blood, and you must soak the platform with it until you hear it no more. That is how the blood-bond is done.”
“Why?” I ask.
“I do not fully know. Once, conduits were the only humans with symbionts, and they guarded their secrets, only passing them from mentor to mentee. Now, we rely on what we pass to each other with no understanding of why. But you must blood-bond. It is what is done. The manifestation procedures used for all other humans are modified protocols, adapted to provide hosts - that would otherwise be too weak - a bond with symbionts just as empty as they are, dragged up and out of the current of the hollow that travels beneath.” Rattakul speaks firmly, almost poetically, like it is a speech she has memorized. She lifts one hand and holds a finger facing downwards. “The platforms are old tech. They pierce the current below where the hollow flows and siphon it to us, draining the energy there. What once seemed infinite, like everything else on the earth, grows weaker every passing year.”
“The one in Baise was split,” I say firmly, remembering the broken runes and cracked surface.
“Yes, and so Baise was never sealed in a dome. It was a doomed city.”
“I’m employed by Captain Moreau… I can't run off and find a whole one? Can I?”
Rattakul laughs darkly. “No, you’ll die bleeding out on the platform without someone to help you. And, not without preparation and a spare trailer to take with you into the wilds. So you are like me then, you see symbionts?”
I pause, a sudden cold fear washing over me. She can only see them, I guess. Captain Moreau can only smell them. The conduit with the Lepus could only hear them. Dare I confess that I have no such limitation? I swallow once, only to find my mouth has become dry. Why does this have to be happening when I’m so exhausted and unprepared? Not yet then. Let me keep something to myself, at least until I learn more.
“I see them, I always have.”
“Yes, that is how we know who will be a conduit before they even manifest.”
“But only my mother was a conduit, I think. My father has never been anything special.”
“The genetic mechanisms are unknown. Only that odds are higher if you have it on one or both sides. All of my children failed to follow after me. Some powerful and rare symbionts will still manifest for those with a conduit in their bloodline, but we often know whether a cryptid is in our future the day the child is old enough to identify themselves to us - talk of ghosts and strange sounds, that sort of thing.”
Rattakul would have known Rhett was no conduit then, maybe even his father did as well. They would have known for years before he manifested… Did they ever tell him? Or did they wait for him to find out for himself? I do not know how closely they keep their secrets in these crews.
“So if none of your children have manifested a cryptid, your crew-?”
“Watch the clock tick down with a fate unknown, yes. I had four children by three different fathers while I was still young, and between them all, ten grandchildren, and now my first great-grandchildren. And none yet are conduits. So I continue to grimly hold on to life in hope that I will not end my crew’s way of life,” replies Rattakul bitterly. She coughs. “I am too old for so much jabber. I thought I'd called for tea?”
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