But first, he had to clean his body in a hot bath sprinkled with plenty of exotic flavors, to flush the cold stink of death from his nostrils. He grabbed the bracelet to pull it off his forearm, but to his astonishment, he realized he was in trouble. Again. His hearing had almost fully recovered, so he couldn’t miss the deafening noise in the room… or the feeling that the bracelet tightened around his arm as if it was animated by a life of its own.
Suddenly, all the horrors of his narrow escape from the cavern-turned-tomb flowed back into his veins, numbing him. At first, he couldn’t accept the source of the sound. He looked through the windows with his hearts shrunk, expecting to see Baila XXI’s jets surrounding the dome. Nobody was outside. He had heard the noise before. No doubt it came from… the bracelet! Suddenly, he remembered Tadeo’s worried face. He had a bracelet on his arm. Surely, he had tried to pull it off, and then the noise became louder, followed by the explosion.
If the blast wasn’t Baila’s masterpiece, then what were these artifacts? Certainty took the place of bewilderment: he had a devastating bomb on his forearm—and one about to explode! How could it work after so many years?
Overcome by despair, he sank into the nest, burying himself in the flabby fluff as if it could protect him from contact with reality. He had no idea what to do. He couldn’t think of anything else except that Tadeo had died in a gigantic blast from trying to get rid of the bracelet. He had to fight the panicked rush to wrest it off his arm. Most certainly, he wouldn’t die alone. He would take along a big chunk of the city’s outskirts.
He began to examine the bracelet bitterly, without holding much hope of finding something to avoid the catastrophe. His eyes noticed the three-rayed star. He remembered that it was actually a button.
“Why didn’t it cross my tail? The bracelet’s symbols!”
He quickly pressed the star, and indeed, a console opened. The eight symbols resembled the ones on the small object in the skeleton’s fist! The small rod might have been some sort of activation key! Maybe the gods memorized the code before it self-destructed—that’s why it melted in Ernon’s hand! Shaking uncontrollably, he typed the four symbols on the console, hoping to hear the noise disappear. But as soon as he entered the last one, the buzz doubled in intensity.
The ceiling seemed to have fallen on his shoulders. He had to gather all his resolve to avoid getting drowned in the river of death in which Tadeo’s discovery had thrown him.
Maybe the code was from a different bracelet, even though he found it on the same god from whom he got the artifact. Or maybe it didn’t work for a thousand different reasons.
It crossed his spikes to recall the nine essential Guk aromas in the focusing harmonics, but he chased away the bad idea. If he couldn’t solve the puzzle quickly, he’d be long dead before he smelled the stalker’s path.
Why not try typing them again? Maybe he didn’t press them properly… After all, it was the only thing he could think of. Between two heartbeats, he moved his hand to repeat the sequence, but he stopped at the last moment. What if he typed them in the wrong order? The key had a small handle; the reading direction was pretty obvious—from right to left, as Antyrans were used to. The only detail was that the gods were not Antyrans. What if they used to read from left to right?
Driven by instinct, he pressed the symbols in the opposite order. As soon as he pressed the fourth button, he closed his eyes, waiting for the blast. Instead of that, the murderous noise disappeared!
When he realized he was still alive, he finally dared to take a breath of air, overwhelmed by a joy impossible to describe in words… a joy that only someone returned from the land of dead could experience!
His next thought was to throw away the sinister piece of metal. The object was far too dangerous to be handled by anybody. He made up his mind to throw it into the ocean right after the refreshing bath.
As Gill grabbed the bracelet to pull it off his arm, darkness fell. He felt a huge pressure squeezing his temples, and a bloody mist covered his vision. Suddenly, he started to fall into the night with the speed of lightning, convinced that something went wrong, that the bracelet was killing him.
In the next instant, a swirling storm of images began to flow in front of his eyes. When they slowed down a bit, he recognized them. They were memories. His memories. A lot of memories from early childhood he didn’t even know he could still remember came to life in the inner eye of his amazed kyi. Is this the way death’s supposed to happen?
Amused, he went through a childish quarrel and his first tail-fight with the neighbor’s boy, who became his best friend. Other not-so-amusing memories were of his family’s narrow escape in the middle of the night from a town on Antyra II called Bodris. It was a peaceful little rural town in appearance, if not for the nearby coria—their never-ending source of problems, especially after his parents refused to send him to their communal dome to fulfill his ritual education. That was a crime too heinous to be overlooked in their small community, far from Alixxor and the worldly laws enforced by the monstrous bureaucracy called Shindam.
“Careful with the doorstep,” his father whispered just as Gill tripped and dropped the aromatic seed box on the stairs.
It was the one thing he cared about most—and an easy choice for an Antyran, one might say—so he wanted to preserve it by all means. Now, due to their haste and his usual clumsiness, it lay broken into countless pieces. Worse than that, the heavy, round seeds rolled over the metal stairs and down the street, making an awfully loud noise on the titan walkway, its plastoceramic protective quilt peeled away a long time ago.
Another bitter taste… the grueling rite of passage that all kids had to face on their second pledge. He heard again his parents’ anxious advice on how to rub the tail after he picked his sex,14 a ritual that kept him bedridden for several weeks.
His first teenage experience of being in love surprised him with the intensity of the almost-innocent passion that only a youngtail could possibly feel. They weren’t simple memories; he practically moved back in time to the same state of mind he had in those moments. He felt enthralled by her fondling and caresses, by her long, thin fingers touching his face, eyes, gills. Then the taste, the tender taste of her spikes as she offered them to be licked, for the very first time in her life.
His whole life swirled maddeningly fast in front of his eyes, and yet he had enough time to live, to feel everything, to draw the connections he made back then. He felt almost grateful to be allowed to remember all this, even though he had to die at the end.
The kaleidoscope of images began to fade. Then, just as he started to regret that it all ended, came the tastes—metallic, bitter, sweet, and sour—then sounds of every tonality banged inside his skull. His excitement was soon replaced by discomfort, and he wished to reach the end of everything so that he could finally die. However, something puzzled him: he was feeling the nest. He lay in his nest, his tail coiled around him, and he was feeling the softness of the fluff.
While he tried to make sense of the discovery, he became conscious of a foreign presence in his kyi. And then he understood: the bracelet of the gods was scanning his neurons, activating each synapse to find its use. Stop it! he shouted in his thoughts. The artifact must have heard him because the swirl stopped, and the blackness fell again around him.