Page 31 of The Bleeding Woods

I’m falling.

An abyss of unfamiliar darkness surrounds my senses, numbing them.

One at a time, my nerves fall cold and indestructible.

Then they register phantom warmth, the kind created by a slumber-blinded mind.

I gain enough control of my incorporeal body to halt it, to levitate.

If I were to look down, I’d find nothing there.

At the moment, I am only eyes. Only sight.

Only consciousness. I am aware of dark infinity and of every route running through it.

Veins of scarlet light appear around me as though I’d commanded them into existence. On closer observation, I find memories swimming through each one, neural photographs half dissolved in water. They are not mine. They are his.

A pair of shadowy hands take form, guiding my attention to the thinnest river of cerise.

The photograph dwelling within is blurred and obscured by blaring bulbs.

I make out an angular, feminine face. She wears a pair of rectangular spectacles, and in their reflection, an embryo is suspended in a cylinder of crystal-clear fluid.

The hands vanish into plumes of smoke, then reappear along another path of light.

There, the bespectacled woman’s face is obscured.

I can’t make out her finer details, but each becomes clearer as the liquid is drained from above the embryo’s eyeline to below it.

A barrage of gloved fingers juts forward with startling speed and vicious intent.

They claw for the being whose gaze I share.

The next memory shows only piercing rows of pale-blue luminescence on a ceiling of silver tiles. Their glow glints off every geometric, metallic edge. A dozen pairs of goggled eyes accompany them, hungry in their observation, feral with anticipation. Some jot down notes; others only stare.

The next is shown from a steadier angle, one that implies the embryo had tripled in height and gained the ability to stand. Jasper’s invisible touch nudges me closer than I’d dare to venture within the other memories.

I can show you.

His voice reverberates off every atom of my formless self.

I move closer to the thread of liquid reminiscence until a surge of emotion barrels through me.

Darkness sweeps over my vision, but only for a terrifying blip of time.

The shadows clear away as soon as they’d formed, and when they do, I find myself in a body once more.

Glancing down, I find a child’s hand in place of my own.

Its skin tone isn’t remotely close to mine, but it is identical to Jasper’s when he appears as a human mirage.

I turn to survey my surroundings, but the first thing I process is my new reflection, curved and distorted within a pillar of glass.

Two chasms sit where my eyeballs should be, and my cheeks are gaunt.

My lipless mouth is frozen in a downward-facing crescent, just below a hollowed-out cavern taking the place of a nose.

My chest is bony, emaciated in a way that is alien, not starved.

The bones that protrude from beneath my thin, pale skin feel strong but pliable.

I rest a fingertip on my collar, and the structure beneath it writhes.

“Careful, JS-7R,” croons a woman too warped to be discernible.

I whip around to face her, but the motion is not fluid.

Each movement is chaotic and twitching. I feel like an insect operating on a different frame rate, with joints built for jolting speed and brutal precision.

Said joints roll about in their myriads of sockets, the range of motion akin to that of an otherworldly spider.

When I open my mouth to ask what I should be careful of, only a horrible, scratching gurgle scrapes its way up from the bottom of my throat.

It is a deep, crunching, crackling noise, like an ancient floorboard stressed to its limit.

The woman smiles, but her facial details are blurred. She is uncannily distorted as she pulls out a manila folder and thumbs through its multicolor contents.

“Your natural vocal cords operate on a different frequency, JS-7R. You’ll need to form your human ones for me to understand.”

I touch my throat, finding a writhing mass of muscle there.

Though it is painful, I strive to change it, to will it into a different shape.

The shape exists at the backmost corner of my mind as though tossed into a box to be forgotten there.

I rummage through the box. My throat continues to twist and bend.

Then my voice emerges as a small, cautious stream of sound.

“Human,” I say.

“Very good.” She applauds. “You’re getting much better at that, you know. Much faster.”

Something like pride makes my chest tighten.

I lift one of my hands, extending an elongated pointer finger to the left, then the right.

I use it to gesture around the room, at every cylinder lining the walls, stretching toward the titanium sky.

They glow green, sending ribbons of light through the otherwise dim space.

The only thing that implies a world beyond this room of artificial wombs is the pair of sliding metal doors at the end of it.

As they are presently agape, I can see the edge of a long hallway lit by strips of periwinkle blue embedded in the floor.

I continue to gesture, trying to point to every cylinder possible, losing count at around fifty-seven.

“Patience, JS-7R. They aren’t ready yet.” The woman reaches forward, resting her pasty palm on my forearm.

“When?” I squeak, the word tumbling out as though I’d been choking on it.

“Patience,” she repeats. “You won’t be alone forever, I promise.”

This time, when my chest tightens, it feels dreadfully hollow. My gaze falls, but the pale-yellow allure of the folder calls it back. I extend my finger again, this time toward the word Undergrowth, written in neat cursive on the tab.

“What is it?” The raven-haired woman tips her head so that her left ear falls toward her left shoulder.

“Un . . . und . . . under—”

“Your reading lessons have been paying off.” She beams. “Very, very good, JS-7R.”

“Underg . . . grow . . .”

“Project Undergrowth.”

PR-U.

She reaches forward, rustling the strands of midnight-black hair atop my head.

Wisps of it fall over my eyes, and I let them hang there.

I let them bounce as I nod, not to confirm the word, but to request more context for it.

The woman does not oblige my request. She meets it with a knowing smile that is as wicked as it is warm.

Shadows emerge from every corner of the room and swallow me in a single gulp. By the time I regain composure, I am weightless and disembodied again, a wraith in someone else’s mind.

“Show me more,” I demand. My voice is an echo that goes on forever, never finding another surface to bounce off. “I want to know more.”

“I did too,” Jasper replies. His voice is louder than mine, more dominant in this sacred dream dimension that belongs only to him. “I asked every day. Dr. Hemlock told me nothing. All she ever let me know was that I was valuable. Extremely valuable.”

“Those embryos . . . they were—”

“Project Undergrowth. We were all Project Undergrowth.”

“You know more. Show me more, Jasper.”

He lets out a sigh that feels more like a shock wave, a warning of impending nuclear fire. I could have sworn that behind it, the familiar crackling sound of his natural, more comfortable vocal cords lurked.

“You won’t like what you see.”

“Show me anyway.”

Equipped with my insistence and consent, he whirls a thread of red in front of my gaze.

It shoots forward, a bullet of light, blinding me for a single breath.

When sight returns, I find myself on my knees, staring down at the pair of rapidly morphing hands resting on them.

Anger races through my veins, boiling my bloodstream, gnawing at my bones.

My heart races, pounding like a horrible, mutant beast behind a rib cage expanding to accommodate it.

The manila folder sits before me, open, vomiting endless files.

Each one is a puzzle piece, a portion of a much larger picture.

There are maps of the earth, most of them slicing it in half.

Scribbles line every layer of its crust, mantle, and core.

There are pictures of embryos on metal trays, their limbs pinned, their bodies splayed open, and their ribs bent into baskets to hold the underdeveloped organs inside.

There are diagrams of JS-7R at every stage of his growth, indicating every bit of progress made from infancy to adolescence to adulthood.

Notes on his evolving mental and physical state, his evolving abilities beyond the bounds of human capacity, litter the sides of them.

They speak of the way in which he’d stopped aging as humans do, the way he can shape-shift in accordance with his genetic material, and the way he derives energy to do so from fresh blood.

They speak of every facet of his existence, unraveling him like a specimen.

A very valuable specimen.

Dr. Hemlock’s initials sit at the bottom of each page. The elegance of her handwriting is full of pride, full of artful ownership of her work.

“What am I?” Jasper’s voice rattles out from my throat. For a moment, I’d forgotten that this body was once his and that I am a mere consciousness experiencing it in a reanimated memory. I—he . . . we—seem to ask no one in particular, but a trembling breath from behind responds.

Dr. Hemlock wrings her hands together, tugging at the corners of her clean white lab coat. “My son,” she says.

“Liar,” we hiss as one.

“You may be a product of Project Undergrowth, but that does not change what you mean to me, JS-7R. I have watched you grow for over two decades. I was there when you took your first steps, read your first word. You are my life’s work.”

My lips twitch into an unholy scowl, the flesh receding to reveal razor sharp needles of teeth. “But what am I?”

“You are . . . human, and something more. Something new and something ancient. Something far too many are far too narrow-minded to understand.”

“I want an answer, not a riddle. Tell me what I am. Tell me what these notes and maps mean. Tell me what makes me more than human.” I stalk toward her with each demand.

“I . . .”

Her lips tremble, her eyes line with silver, and when I am a single arm’s length away, she drops to her knees. Her body gives out in guilt before her lips confirm it.

“I don’t know. I’m sorry, JS-7R, but . .

. I don’t know. We took samples from a place older than the surface of this world and did terrible, wonderful things with them.

Everyone who knew of this endeavor warned us against it.

We knew the risks, but we pushed forward.

We pushed forward because we knew that it would be more than worth it, that the most pivotal science requires the most bravery.

Discoveries that shatter the status quo cannot be unearthed cautiously.

I don’t know what you are, JS-7R, but I do know that your existence could change the course of humanity’s future for the better. ”

A beat of silence hangs in the air, heavy as lead, light as a feather. It sinks its claws into the open air until it is toxic with trepidation. My heartbeat slows until steady, but Hemlock’s is audible as it pounds behind her sternum.

“What were the risks?” I whisper. Her face blanches. My perfectly human vocal cords let out a laugh, cruel and edged with the flitting tones of wavering sanity. “How could you know the risks of creating me . . . if you had no way of knowing what I’d become?”

She stares wordlessly, but her eyes flick to the ceiling as though a few worthy explanations might fall from it.

“I . . .” she starts. “I suppose . . .”

I laugh once more. The sound accompanies an orchestra of snaps as I will my bones in and out of place.

My movements lose their human fluidity and become rapid-fire twitches.

My legs extend until I tower over Hemlock and over every paper with the swoops and curves of her signature at the bottom.

Her face drains of all its leftover color, and in the reflection of her glasses, I watch myself become a monster.

“JS-7R . . .”

My power rumbles through the room, and for the first time in my life, I produce tendrils of red smoke. They are extensions of me, tentacles of intangible power stronger than any attached limb. They are yet another example of just how not human I am, just how much more runs through me.

Him.

Once again, I have to remind myself that this body—this power—is not mine. This is Jasper’s memory, and I have to be cautious of the intimacy that looking through his eyes ignites.

Hemlock takes off on swift, clumsy footsteps. She does not look back. Jasper knows he does not have to run to catch up, but he also knows catching up is not the sole objective. With a glance toward the horrible photographs still strewn across the floor, he is reminded of another.

I watch as a viewer sitting inside his skull as he kills every scientist that crosses his path.

They set the laboratory ablaze and boil the embryos.

He retaliates mercilessly. When only ashes remain, he climbs through layers of rubble, dirt, and bedrock to reach the surface.

A single wall of barbed-wire fence marks the field beneath which the laboratory had existed.

A single wall of barbed-wire fence would serve as a headstone for hundreds.

I pull myself from this memory, this carnage. I do not wait for Jasper’s phantom touch to lure me back to the present. When I free myself from his perspective, I am in the dark cathedral of his mind again. Every sensible part of me screams out to escape.