Shift (Rewrite)

 

On average, non-Joined healing time for bruised ribs is around two to four weeks. Cracked or broken ribs take approximately four to six weeks to recover from. 

...

Minor cuts take non-Joined around two to three weeks to heal. Large lacerations can take up to three months to fully heal. Stitches may help the wound heal faster in approximately six to eight weeks. 

...

Smaller third-degree burns will take non-Joined around three weeks to heal. More extensive third-degree burns can take a couple of years to heal entirely. If they ever do. 

-- excerpts from 'Superior' by Joined "Sheer" #R42THM268142 - Cycle R42

***

Clara held a scorching red knife to my face, and I shrieked in pain.

I thrashed, but there was little I could do. Clara held my head in a painful headlock and used the rest of her body to pin me to the bathroom floor. 

She was far stronger and heavier than me, but the pain gave me enough adrenalin to buck her around. Well, at least a bit. 

"Stop fucking moving," she growled after two more seconds of searing my face. 

I tried, I really did, but I couldn't keep myself still while she burned me. The agony was so far beyond anything I'd ever imagined that I couldn't help but try to escape. 

It wasn't working, though, and all I was doing was hurting myself even more. Clara wasn't even remotely gentle when she pressed down on me. My ribs screamed with every centimetre I moved and every breath I took. The only positive was that because my face hurt so much, the agony in my chest wasn't as bad as it should be. 

"I'm doing next to your eye next. You fucking move even a bit, and you'll be a fucking pirate wannabe cunt."

All I could do was whimper when she shoved another cut bit of broom handle into my mouth to bite down on. The previous one had splintered from the pressure when she started on my cheek.

***

Clara had started to clean my wound about a few hours before her scorching ministrations, and it had turned out to be heavily infected. The fever and shakes during our trek across the ruins should have already clued me in, but I'd not felt as ill as I did when she started cleaning. 

I was going strong all day, pushing through the various aches and pains with little effort. And then, it suddenly all hit me like a ton of bricks after we took care of the Bug. 

After I'd proven my worth. 

I frowned. I'd been doing and enduring things that I'd never imagined I could have done. All so I would survive. Was I subconsciously pushing myself beyond my limits to make sure I survived this? Or was it the implant flooding me with, uhm... hormones? adrenalin? 

I filed away those thoughts and decided to question my reasoning more while going forward. 

After Clara had removed the drenched makeshift bandage, she broke one of the bathroom mirrors and handed me a shard. I finally got a look at what the laceration on my face had done to me. 

I wished I hadn't. 

I was pale and sweating, my fever blatantly obvious. My eyes were still bloodshot with a few burst capillaries, either from the fight with the Bug a little while ago or yesterday. Or my psychic use the days before. Combined with the short stubble of my hair, it made me look like an escaped lab experiment. That wasn't the worst part; the jagged, oozing wound almost bisecting my cheek was. 

I looked like a fudging zombie. 

Putrid flesh dribbled pus and watery blood, beneath which black bits of dead skin and muscle were showing, like how I imagine frostbite or something similar would look. 

Clara said that she'd never seen an infection progressing as fast as this one before. According to her, it was steadily killing the flesh around it. She'd dispassionately told me it needed to be stopped before it got any further. Or it'd undoubtedly kill me. 

This meant we would have to do something desperate and, incidentally, idiotic. I'm paraphrasing Clara's words about cauterisation, but apparently, extremely stupid was less stupid if not doing it would kill you. 

Who knew?

I gave Clara the go-ahead after taking a long time to stare at what was left of my face. 

She'd made a point of me explicitly agreeing before she'd even start to get things ready. 

Clara also made sure that she'd spelt out what this would do to my face. How not even my mother would love me anymore. I'm sure she got some sort of perverse pleasure from it. 

This was apparently my life now. 

Never in even my most horrid nightmares had I ever imagined I'd be forced to cut off a limb to save the body, so to speak. 

But I didn't hesitate for a moment. 

Survive or Die. 

The choice was that simple, and even with reanalysing my thought process, there was no way I'd just give up. 

Who would?

It had started me wondering if we had cauterised it yesterday, would it have stopped the infection before it began to spread so far? 

I would have been disfigured anyway; there was no changing that, but it would have been a maybe centimetre-wide scar.

Now, it would be at least triple that. 

I never considered myself vain, but even with a mixed heritage, I was very securely in the pretty camp before all this. Wrapping my head around what we were about to do had me… 

Well, when we got back home, they might be able to do something with reconstructive surgery. They'd done amazing things, I'd heard. 

I hoped. 

I told myself to survive now. I'd worry about the rest later.

Clara said we'd need supplies because, as it was, we had fudge-all to cauterise with. 

We needed something to start a fire, something that could be used as a cauterising implement, and at least some kind of clean bandages to keep more dirt from getting in after we cleaned it, or we'd be redoing this all again tomorrow. 

If I even lived that long. 

How was I being so calm about all of this?

Clara told me to rest up while she headed out to try and scrounge something up. I recalled that of all the office buildings I'd been in over the years; most modern ones had emergency medical kits prominently displayed on each floor, sometimes multiple ones. 

I told Clara about it. Maybe we'd get lucky, and there'd be something in our building. 

She left me with a look that said she'd decide where to look. 

I sat there for I don't know how long, bouncing around between wanting to run away, crawling into a ball and crying, and sitting there stoically waiting for what was going to happen to me. 

Not that I could do much more than sit there feeling horrible, but I wanted to do something. Anything. 

I guess I wasn't as calm as I thought I was. 

After a while, I added worrying about Clara to the mix. That was when I decided that I could either try and sleep or do something useful. With an effort, I dragged over my bag and fished out my notebook. 

I flipped through the first few pages to remind myself what I'd noted on each page and snagged on the three words on the fifth page: Survive, Hunt & Grow. 

I blinked, then flipped to the sixth page, with the sigils from my Bracer sketched out and two columns in which I kept track of any changes as well as I could. 

I quickly checked the current sigils on my Bracer. 

Integration was still at seventeen per cent, so no change there since this morning. I noted it down. 

I crossed out Pressure as the column name for the second sigil and filled in Strain instead. That seemed to fit better. It wasn't like I was under pressure, but more like I strained a muscle. 

For the indication of Strain levels, I wanted to keep calling the ones I'd experienced Orgasm and Pregnant in my notes, mainly because Jo would find it hilarious when I got back and showed her. 

Instead, I followed my lab experience and noted the two sigils I'd experienced as High and Breaking, choosing my own words instead of what the sigils translated to. 

Having updated the sixth page, I turned back to the previous ones to try and puzzle out something more with what I'd learned about this Earth today.  

***

I jerked awake when Clara banged the bathroom door shut. I gave her a good glare, and she showed too many teeth when she smiled at me.  

She was carrying a metal bin filled with what might be the remnants of a wooden chair and two red medical kits that you saw in every office building. 

I must have fallen asleep while Clara was gone. I put my notebook in my backpack to keep it safe. 

"Those from the halls upstairs?" I nodded at the red satchels, but she ignored my question and tossed the medical packs at me instead. 

"Check them," she ordered, then emptied the bin. 

I'll admit a bit of smug on my part when I struggled open the first emergency kit to check through it and found the small backpack-sized package almost overflowing. 

Gauze pads in multiple sizes. A box of adhesive bandages. Rolls of gauze bandages. Triangular bandages. Moistened towelettes. Cotton balls. Hydrogen peroxide. Betadine. Scissors. Tweezers. Adhesive tape. A box of latex gloves. Even some ibuprofen and one of those mylar heat blankets. 

It was a veritable goldmine. 

The second satchel turned out to be an AED instead of a regular medical kit, but the first one would allow us to take care of most of the wounds we might get. Or at least those that wouldn't kill us. 

That thought sobered my smug up a bit. 

I placed the things that I thought we'd need to clean my wound within easy reach, and after checking with Clara that I had everything, I packed up the rest. 

She'd built a fire in the metal bin with practised ease and used her air-controlling abilities to contain the smoke. 

That was one convenient power when trying to hide. 

After wiping off a table knife, she carefully suspended the blade above the fire and used the bin's lid to wedge it in place. 

It was almost time. 

Sh...ugar.

Without a single sign that she was enjoying herself, Clara cleaned my wound with cotton balls and water, followed by hydrogen peroxide. 

It hurt about as much as you'd expect and had me suppressing my panting with gritted teeth. Tears were streaming down my chin. 

Before I'd recovered from the cleaning, she'd already straddled me, shoved a chunk of broom handle in my mouth, and grabbed the heated table knife. 

I spent the next ten minutes screaming as she worked and the twenty after that sobbing before my thoughts became even remotely coherent again.

"Might've been a bit overkill with both the hydrogen peroxide and cauterisation, but this way, we're sure I got fucking everything." 

Clara was businesslike while taping gauze pads to my face. She'd drenched the wound in betadine and was now just finishing up. 

I was utterly wrung out and hurting something fierce. 

Clara gave me a few ibuprofen and a drink of lukewarm water before draping some towels over me. 

"Get some fucking sleep. We'll see how fucked up you are in the morning."

It might have been almost tender if not for the profanity and her gruff voice. It was probably the most delicate she'd ever been with a patient. 

I tried to sleep, but even with the over-the-counter drugs, the pain and feeling very sorry for myself kept me twisting and turning on the hard ground. 

I spent most of the night looking into the dark around me until I finally slipped into nightmares hours after Clara's breathing had turned rhythmic. 

***

 "Looks about as good as a recently scrubbed puss-dripping cunt. Must hurt like a motherfucker," Clara grinned happily. 

Too many teeth again. 

"Worse," I muttered while carefully chewing my cold green beans. Clara replaced the gauze she'd removed to get a look at my cheek and sat back down to eat her own can. 

"So, explain to me again why you fucking want me to not splatter the next ass-drip?" 

While trying to fall asleep last night, I'd attempted to distract myself from the pain to plan the next test of my psychics; getting past the Bugs' defences. It didn't help me get to sleep, though. 

After I'd woken up this morning, my fever had thankfully broken, but my face still hurt like a... well, burn. 

Still, I felt vastly better than the night before; even my bruises and ribs felt better. 

During breakfast, I explained to Clara that I thought I might be able to get some more from my Ability if I got the chance to experiment a little bit. 

Trying to get her to agree with me had kept my mind off my face and the pain. A little. 

Like everybody else, I'd burned myself with boiling water and a hot pan, which had hurt for days. 

This… this was an entirely new level of hurt. 

I needed a distraction, or even with the painkillers, I'd focus on the pain the whole time. 

I don't think the ibuprofen was doing anything anyway. Blooming hurt.  

"Yeah, like I said," I started for the fourth time, "the Bug yesterday felt like I could get deeper inside its mind before you finished him off. Maybe I can… I don't know, force it to simply lay down and die or do something else? I'm not sure what I can do with what I can do now, but I've been throwing single-word Commands at them, but look at what you can do." 

Still mechanically eating, Clara quirked her eyebrow at me questioningly. I was rambling, barely even understanding myself. Maybe the drugs were having an effect. I ploughed on anyway.

"You can stop sound, make balls of compressed air that decapitate things, and capture smoke in air pockets. That's a lot of different things with just air control. Me just sending out one-word Commands seems a little underwhelming and inflexible compared to that."

Clara snorted. 

"Well, you are a tiny little shitstick. Maybe it's about size. My implant is fuck off bigger, so shouldn't I get more? Bigger is better and all."

I thought that over instead of scoffing and dismissing it out of hand, which, to be fair, her smug tone begged me to do. 

It might be true. More space would mean more room for machinery in the implant, but in that case, why would the legionnaires even take anybody except the largest women and most hulking men? 

This brought me back to the waste of resources rebuttal I noted in my notebook. 

I shook my head. 

"I don't think so. If that were the case, they'd only take the largest people, and they didn't, so it has to be something else. So I need a Bug to test things on. Unless you're volunteering."

Clara took an unconscious half-step back. 

I'll admit it's petty, but every time I mentioned using her as a test subject, she showed how much she detested my Physics. I wouldn't call her scared of it, but it was close enough for my entertainment. 

I kept that enjoyment from my face, though. 

"I'll fucking end you if you fucking try," she growled at me, "Just do a fucking Snowwhite instead of fucking around with the shitguzzlers trying to fucking kill us."

"Wha?" I blinked at her. Sometimes she said something that didn't do anything but confuse me. 

"Fucking birds. Or rats. Or any fucking animal at all. They have thinkmeat, right? Just fucking control them like a Disney cocksleeve. You can even fucking burst into fucking song if you want to."

I blinked, utterly poleaxed. 

It wasn't just that she came up with a good idea. But it was an avenue that hadn't even occurred to me. 

I had to stop underestimating her just because she kept spouting profanity. 

"I hadn't thought of that," I muttered, "Haven't seen any rats, but there were a few birds out there, right?" 

"Fuckers are munching on the dead fuckers everywhere. You can go and mindfuck them to your heart's content, Princes," she confirmed with a shit-eating grin, bits of green beans stuck between her teeth. 

It made her look like an idiot. 

***

After ensuring I was well enough to travel, we started heading south again that afternoon. 

Not that I had much choice; we had maybe one more day of food and water with us, and Clara wasn't going to nurse me back to health instead of heading south by herself. 

As long as I was useful, she'd help keep me alive, but I'd be dropped like a bad habit as soon as I was more effort than help. 

She'd made that crystal clear. 

After the cauterisation, I also needed antibiotics more than ever and would love better painkillers. So even if I didn't feel a hundred per cent, or even fifty, I needed to travel. 

SURVIVE.

My fever had broken. My ribs felt tender, but I could almost breathe normally again. I was certain implant shenanigans were going on there, but I honestly couldn't bring myself to do more than add it in my notebook and move on. 

Future-Lana would figure it out.

We'd continued making our way through the ruins of a district with apartments and office buildings as stealthily as we could. About thirty minutes after we set out, Clara hit me with a weak air gust. I looked at her and saw her motioning towards a crow pecking at one of the bodies half a block away. 

It was weird. As soon as I started looking for animals, I noticed the sheer number of dead birds and other animals. 

Pets and wild animals were strewn throughout the streets, mixed with the dead citizens everywhere. 

Maybe the horror of seeing so many murdered people blinded me to the animals that had met a similar fate. The only difference was that most animals were missing their entire heads instead of just the back.  

Which, of course, brought back the questions of 'why?' and possibly 'how?'

I sighed. I was missing too much of the puzzle to progress there, so I focused on what I could do. 

The crow. 

It was a normal-looking specimen, about thirty centimetres long and twenty-five high. I was never interested in birds, so I couldn't tell if it was a male or female. 

The bird seemed oblivious to our presence. Its head dipped forward and snagged on a small chunk of what had used to be somebody's face before swallowing it and looking around again. 

Ignoring the disgusting spectacle, I got ready for my tests. 

I allowed the heat to flow from the machines in my spine into my head. But instead of running it via the route I used for an actual Command, I sent it off in a way more similar to how I'd used it to feel Glasshand's and Ironclaw's abilities. 

[..]

The familiar burn in my head felt distinctly unfamiliar this time. It still burned, but where a Command forged the projected heat into a solid projectile, this was more like a pathway. A conduit or maybe a hollow needle. 

Regardless, I could still feel the crow with whatever form of my psychics I was pushing towards it. That appeared to be one of the constants of my abilities, at least with the three different ways I'd used them until now. 

Connecting to the crow was like touching a wet sheet hanging from a wash line; there was resistance, but it was weak. I could push through it without any problems at all. 

So I did. 

It was like nothing I'd experienced before. My psychic hand slipped into a warm place that was at the same time welcoming and hated me with every iota of its existence. 

It felt like I was an honoured guest at Christmas and a soldier forcing her way into a house where the occupants hated her with a fanatical passion. The rightful owner of all I surveyed and a rapist taking what she wanted from her victim. All at the same time. 

I also instantly knew she was female and slightly hungry but otherwise fine. 

I swallowed back bile when the conflicting sensations and the idea of what I was doing to the bird.

The crow jumped up and took to the air as soon as I barreled past its defences, cawing loudly. 

[QUIET] 

I'd reflexively created the Command and shoved it down the conduit to quiet the bird before it alerted the Anathema, and the caws stopped instantly. 

And I sensed what happened in the bird's mind. 

The Command's effects differed from my previous Commands, which were stopped outside the Bugs and outside of Clara. This one burned down the conduit and slammed into the bird without being slowed down by any defences. 

Like a meteor, it collided with the bird's mind and became part of her. It ripped through who and what she was, wiping parts out with the Command to be quiet. 

I was pretty sure I'd just obliterated the crow's capacity to ever caw again.

Reflexively, I pulled back on the strength I was putting into the conduit. I brought my psychic hand to the outside of the wet sheet protecting the bird's mind instead of having it sit entirely in the bird's brain. 

But nothing changed; the conduit still burned in my head, and I could still feel like I had at least a finger extending into the crow's mind. 

I then stopped using my psychics completely. 

Again, nothing changed. 

That couldn't be good.

I started to panic; if the conduit kept pulling heat from my spine and burning through my head... 

Fudge. Fudge. Fudge. Fudge. Fuck!

...

Okay, calm down. We can't fix it if we don't think. 

Breathe in. Breathe out. 

Breathe in. Breathe out. 

Come on, Lana, creating the conduit felt natural. Instinctive even. Nobody would force abilities on people that would get them killed by doing something intuitive.  

I concentrated on my connection to the bird, ignoring that any use of my abilities caused a headache at the minimum, burst capillaries when I pushed them and had already proven that they might kill me.

I used my psychics to poke at the conduit, seeing if I could easily break it. I couldn't; the conduit felt as solid as my psychic abilities. Which,... well, logical. 

Instead of trying to forcefully break the conduit, I turned my attention to the heat moving from my spine. It flowed easily from the machinery, through my neck into my head, and funnelled into the conduit. 

If I couldn't break the pipe, I might as well stop the flow. 

The idea was simple, but when I tried to damm the flow from the machinery in my spine, it spread out and bypassed my psychics' block without slowing down. 

Which, again,... logical when I considered I was using the heat from the machine to fuel the psychics with which I tried to block it off. 

Instead of closing off the source, I refocused on the conduit's opening. The heat flowed through it in minute quantities, constantly burning the route it followed from my spine to the link I'd constructed between me and the bird. 

Wrapping my psychics around the flow, I squeezed, and it shut off the heat just like that. 

The sense of how the bird was doing as it flew off disappeared at the same moment, and I breathed a sigh of relief when the constant burning sensation also stopped. 

It took me a moment to notice the conduit didn't disappear, however. I relaxed my chokehold on the heat flowing into the link, and the sense of a panicked bird flying off flooded my consciousness again. 

Okay, that might be a problem. 

"You getting off on brainfucking the birds, princess?"

I held my hand up to her, giving a quick shake of my head. I needed to think this through. 

SURVIVE.

No, I needed more information. I needed to learn if this would work. How it could work. I looked up to see the crow speed off away from us in a panic. I focussed on her and formulated what I wanted the crow to do.

[Come to me] 

The bird wheeled in the air and headed straight towards me. 

I realised that, for the first time, there had been no burning sensation with that Command. It felt a million times better. No burn other than the burn that keeping the conduit open caused. 

There was also no resistance, just a smooth communication of what I wanted, and the bird followed even the multi-word order. 

"It works," I coldly informed Clara, still feeling off about what I was doing to the poor crow. 

I shook my head, trying to free myself of the sentiment before I turned back towards the bird. 

I squeaked when I saw the crow heading straight towards me like a kamikaze dive bomber. 

[LAND]

I reacted with my full force, the conduit filled with the strength of my Command. I felt it erase even more of the crow's mind, and she instantly slammed into the ground two meters in front of me at full speed, smashing herself into meat paste. 

The sense of her presence vanished from my mind the moment she died. The conduit exploded into shards simultaneously and then slapped into me like a rubber band snapping back. 

I physically recoiled. It felt like glass shards were ground into my skull. 

"That's fucking useful," Clara mocked sarcastically. 

I looked at the foulmouthed woman through bleary eyes and couldn't help but agree. Not because I killed the bird or even because the conduit charred me every second I kept the connection to the animal, but because of how it felt when I forced my way into her. 

It exhilarated and disgusted me both on a visceral level. And the fact that it was exhilarating revolted me. 

Experiment over. I wouldn't do it again. 

SURVIVE.

HUNT.

GROW.

I blinked, then looked at Clara and shrugged. 

"Bird minds are a lot more fragile than I thought. Can't push them too hard, or they splatter," I grinned at her, "It worked, though."

I looked around and saw a group of sparrows fifty meters away.  

"I just need to finetune it."