The sound is like a gong, but louder and more physical than expected. My bones vibrate to their centers. That’s when I see it. Out of every square millimeter of the walls comes a thick plane of gold dust advancing inward to the center of the room.
My eyes are only on Tegg. The dust hits him from behind as it curls around his head, shoulders, and body. As it passes over the terrain of his mask and mouth, I see it get sucked into his nostrils. He exhales it from his mouth in a puff of sparkling smoke and takes another step closer. It hasn’t affected him at all.
The others around him aren’t immune. The gold passes over them, and they hungrily suck in the glistening fog. Everyone standing hits their knees, their hands cupped over their ears, keening in delirium.
I’m not here to experiment, so before the wave of drug hits me, I hold my breath. It passes. I exhale, unaffected.
Too easy.
Eventually, the drug concentrates at the center of the room in a sphere the size of an apple. The rich, glowing orb plummets into a tiny hole centered in the floor.
Tegg doesn’t come after me, just stands by the door, guarding my exit. He leans against the wall and lights a cigarette.
“Increase infusion to zero point two hertz,” he says, and takes a puff of his cigarette. Immediately, another gold wall of drug puffs out of the walls. Five seconds later, another puff emerges, following the first one in a parallel plane that approaches me. I time my breathing through my mouth, sucking in air and exhaling, dodging the drug. Tegg just watches me. He shakes his head, unsatisfied.
“Increase to zero point five hertz.”
Puff. Puff. Puff. They come out so much faster. I increase my breathing to match the blank spaces of air between the collapsing walls of gold. But this way, I can’t breathe deeply enough. I’m panting like an overheated dog. I accidentally inhale the plain room air through my nose, and the smells overwhelm me. There are too many people, too many problems in their bodies encoded in scent. It’s too much of everything. My timing slips. I inhale a wall of gold air.
I hear a wall of glass shattering, except there’s no glass. The tinkling of broken shards increases to a higher pitch, then changes timbre. Each shard begins to grow into a separate melody, winding around my body and playing each note to extremes of beauty I can’t stand. I’m afraid the perfection will kill me but I don’t want it to stop.
I find myself on the floor, weeping for the threads of melody that can’t possibly be produced by anything born of this earth. This is what the Sirens sounded like before the sailors drowned. And I’ve entered someplace in between, someplace more indistinct than myth. The terrifying nether region between ecstasy and death.
A shiny, tailor-made black shoe stands in front of my foot. I know it’s Tegg’s. I have enough awareness to know that I’m still in an Alucinari Room, but the sounds are too much for me to break free.
“Didn’t get very far, did you?”
When his words hit my eardrums, they transform into tones far more beautiful than those of a simple human voice. He could say he’s about to cut off my head and bake it for dinner, and it would still be the loveliest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
“Get up.” Tegg leans over and pulls on my already tattered shirt. He tries to yank me up and I get halfway to my feet when my weight wins the tug-of-war. Tegg’s still got what’s left of my torn shirt high up in the air, but I’m still on the floor.
“Good lord, what disease is that?” he says, and I follow his eyes down to my body. My skin is all green splotches. The beautiful sounds and noises dancing in my head become muffled. They swirl and shrink, and in seconds, it’s quiet again, except for the humming of the drugged people nearby.
I survey the other people around me. The waves of gold are still coming at high frequency and everyone is still content within their personalized, hallucinatory operas. Why not me? What happened? The same thing happened when Ren pulled off my sleeve and exposed my skin.
The spots. Vera’s borrowed skin. I remember what happened to her after we went to Argent together. How she was short of breath because her body was covered. I don’t need to breathe as often so long as the green spots are exposed. And what’s more, they must be rapidly metabolizing the hallucinogens in my body, like they did with Ren.
I can feel it. There’s a sense of, I don’t know, refreshment with my skin exposed now. The hungry breaths are no longer necessary.
Tegg drops my shirt but is unsure what to do with me. His mouth is still closed. He’s not breathing through his mouth.
He’s breathing through his mask.
I don’t have time to think. I hurl my body straight toward him, the last thing he’s expecting. Tegg puts his hands out to thwart my attack. His arms are so long I can’t reach his face. Finally, annoyed at my squirming and kicking, he grabs my neck and begins to squeeze.
“I’ve had enough of this,” he says. Tegg starts to drag me to the door, but while he’s busy squeezing my windpipe, he’s not watching my hands. I reach into the back of my leggings for Caliga’s knife and flick it open with my fingertip.
I can’t stab him through his armor, but at the junction between his forearm and upper arm, a line of smooth cream-colored skin allows his elbow to bend freely. I aim carefully and stab.
“Argggggghhh!”
Tegg lets go of my neck to shelter his wound. I drop my bloody knife and jump toward his face, grabbing his mask. It’s on tight, sealed over his eyes and nose. This is no cheap Halloween deal with a flimsy elastic string holding it on. His hand swipes at my face, smearing blood across my cheek and jarring my head. Still, I don’t let go. My fingertips dig under the edges of the mask, prying it off. A hard, rocky fist finds my chest and I fly backward, skidding across the floor and leaving a wake of curling gold dust behind me.
Poufs of drug fly up at Tegg as he pats around his body, panicked. He looks like a groom at the altar who can’t remember where he stowed the rings. It’s amusing, really.
“Looking for this?” I wave the mask cheerfully at Tegg. There’s a thin nano-pore filter where the nose goes.
“Give it to me!” He starts to gallop toward me, his face parting the parallel walls of glistening dust. As I jump to my feet to run away, he’s already realized his mistake.
“Decrease . . . decrease rate to seven, no . . . ten hertz. Dammit, off, OFF!” he coughs into the clouds. It’s too late. Though no new drug pulsates out of the walls, Tegg is still surrounded by five bursts of drug enclosing him. I watch a plane of gold funnel into his mouth as he sucks in a breath. Tegg’s eyes are on me, but as he takes one more step in my direction, his hands fly to his face.
He falls to his knees, his eyes rolling back into his head as he feebly swats away the mist near his face. His armored hands slide past his cheeks to cover his ears as he crumples over to the floor. His body jerks once, twice. Then he is still. As I step over him, I hear a faint song vibrating in his throat.
“Enjoy the show,” I whisper.
CHAPTER 31
DYL MUST BE SOMEWHERE IN THIS ROOM, or close to it. I smelled the scent before I saw Tegg. But now the freesia is fainter. Even the other barrage of odors is less chaotic. Which means I’m getting better at processing them (doubtful) or Marka’s pills are already wearing off (likely).
Maybe the bio-accelerant is shortening the length of the treatments I’ve been using—a downside I didn’t anticipate. I can’t actually feel it in me. There’s no magic tingle or garish color change to tell me it’s working, only the effects. But if it’s still working, then my immunity to the Alucinari Rooms won’t last much longer.