Isaac turned slowly, shrugging the glitter of shattered glass and powdered stone from his shoulders, his movement held back by insurmountable anger. A vein on his neck twitched, coursing with lithe venom.

  “Who’s asking?” His eyes furrowed as they adjusted to the light behind Sam, “If you could make an appointment downstairs, I’ll gladly see to you once I’m done,”

  Sam cocked her head to the side, focusing her attention to Isaac’s chest. She crept down from the platform of air she stood on to reach the solid ground below, taking a second to reacquaint herself with gravity. Never breaking contact with her object of interest Sam moved closer.

  Sam sensed something burrowed deep inside Isaac, a foreign entity lodged in his chest that acted in a way she wasn’t familiar with.

  Twisting her head further in curiosity, she raised her hand from the nest of her coat pocket and made a single beckoning motion with intense, deliberate focus.

  From beneath her thin leather gloves a faint glow of purple and red shimmered, then a lump of gold shot out of Isaac’s chest erupting a torrent of blood from his mouth. The mangled, malformed Caladbolg hovered in place just before Sam’s fingertips. Its surface was still a sprawling tangled mess of thin golden strands, nerves pulled fresh from the body.

  Isaac shivered and seized in place, his anatomy in shock from losing something it didn’t realise it could.

  He looked down at his body, his own blood leaking from the pores on his arms “W… W-what did you… How did-“

  Sam twitched a muscle in her hand and Caladbolg reduced itself to atoms, squealing and wailing in mechanical torture against her command. She turned her head towards Isaac, who now looked at her with horror.

  A flood of colour flashed from underneath her mask and in an instant Isaac’s body slammed into the floor, the force flattening him into a red paste and carving a small crater out of his office. The shock-wave that followed shook the entire building, flinging dust into the air, lights began flickering in and out of life along with an alarm that chirped the warning of an ongoing earthquake.

  Once the room settled Sam pressed a finger to her temple as she recoiled slightly in pain, another headache that followed from pushing herself. She took note of the pain, adding up all the things she had done in succession that caused this in the first place. Eventually coming to the conclusion that it was ‘bearable’, at least compared to some of the others she got from Pillar twelve.

  Flick, still in a state of shock, spoke again.

  “Sam?”

  She turned to face him, the expression in her body language seeming just as surprised as he was.

  “Flick?!”

  The gnarled wood on her mask fell away to reveal her face, it was as un-marred as Flick remembered it being.

  “Oh my God that is you!” Sam smiled, then ran up to hug him,

  Flick laughed in disbelief, “You’re alive?! I mean… yo- how did you- you’re alive?!?!”

  “I know!” She twirled around, “And what about you, Flick? Why are you here of all places?”

  “Well I mean…” He glanced around at the tattered remains of Isaac’s office, “I was trying to look for you actually! Well, I was anyway,

  I tried to look for you but then I was caught by SMILE for a bit and I ended up joining them, did you know they were all kids? They were just trying to rebel against a conspiracy or something and… Well, then me and the SMILE kids made our way here! Trying to stop this… like this Really fucked up plan about cannibalism and stuff?”

  Flick’s eyes frantically darted from place to place suddenly realising how ridiculous he actually sounded.

  “Yeah,” Sam frowned, “Yeah, I know. Its why I came up here in the first place too, actually.” She scrunched her face, then gestured to the red puddle nearby “Aren’t you gonna ask how I…?”

  “You’re different right? Now, I mean” Flick responded “Si told me that if you were alive you’d have some weird… Thing going on with your body.”

  He followed where her finger pointed weakly, “Never thought it’d let you do this though, you’re basically superhuman!”

  Sam chuckled under her breath at the notion, amused at Flick’s comic tinted world-view.

  Flick looked back towards her face, tracing her heavy eyes with his own thoughtfully, and continued. “Are you…Okay?”

  She smiled weakly, “I don’t think so”

  “Uh?” a small voice called from behind them,

  Pop and Scratch wobbled in place, clutching at their tearing wounds.

  “Oh my God!” Sam hurriedly climbed the air next to her like a staircase, “Let me just carry you all down first, we can talk later okay?”

  As she rose Sam flashed her palm to the ground below Flick, Pop and Scratch. A thin line dragged itself around the three, neatly gliding through the steel supports and concrete filling until a small platform was cut free. Then, as she pulled her hand back into the comfort of her pocket, the platform hovered and followed her as if tethered by a leash. Small clasps of thin linen ribbon tied around their ankles, keeping them all in place as the floor slowly wound itself to Sam.

  A thought crossed her mind and, to Sam’s whim, Simon’s presence shimmered in the distance. She wanted to check if he was still in the pillar, and that he hadn’t fled to avoid the inevitable karma for reproducing Six disease.

  He hadn’t.

  She decided in that moment the platform would rest just outside the orphanage Simon was staying at, that way Sam could enact her judgment and make sure Flick’s friends got to safety. She noticed, however, that she was straining a considerable amount moving the platform along at such a glacier pace.

  Up until this point she had never used her power for anything ‘positive’, at least on purpose, not anticipating the restraint she would need to display as to not kill them all from whiplash.

  Sam felt a familiar pressure build up around her forehead, another migraine was quickly approaching. She rationalised it in her head that her power was getting restless, like an animal kept on a short chain being allowed a slither more freedom than usual, it wanted more. She felt that if she didn’t flex her ability further the chain would snap and the headaches would curse at her again.

  Whilst Sam didn’t mind the smaller breaks, only being small annoyances compared to her bullet wounds, she worried the headache would make the control of the platform falter somewhat, almost certainly resulting in the deaths of her three passengers.

  She tensed a fake muscle in her brain, the one she imagined her powers coming from, teasing a thought along it.

  The concrete below Flick turned to a fine soot then to a clumped, earthy soil and from it sprigs of a dozen different flowers materialised. Turning through their beds, they stretched up towards the dome above, only reaching the height of Flick’s knee before budding into steel fans, bearing the same vibrancy of what their petals would have been had they existed naturally.

  Flick didn’t understand why or how the flowers appeared, fancying it as more strange magic from Sam, but he found himself oddly attracted to their appearance, unable to tear his attention away for longer than a moment.

  In the brief seconds he did, he only managed to capture a glimpse of sweat beading on Sam’s face before the flowers captured him again in their allure. He didn’t understand why she kept pushing her magic on things like flowers when it was so clearly exhausting to her. These thoughts only occurred to Flick in-between glances, everything else melted away whenever the flower became his only focus.

  Before long the clumps of dirt beneath them dissolved away, as did the metal flowers, placing them all gently in an alleyway. As the strange haze of the flowers faded from Flick’s mind, a face shimmered into view along with the familiar steam bathed wooden walls of the orphanage.

  “Flick?”

  Simon, grief and horror puling the skin on his face into an expression that Flick had never seen before, pale and cold like the face of a man witnessing his world crumble.

  He gestured gently towards them.

  “Step closer to me,” he said, “Can you do that? Just… Carefully move away from her”

  Sam stayed still, eerily calm and unresponsive to Simon’s fear.

  Flick took a step closer, unfastening his helmet

  “Simon! I am so glad to see you again- listen you need to help the kids, they got hurt and I-I don’t know if-“

  “Its fine,” He responded, calm and slow, “That’s what this is for buddy, see?”

  His left hand, hidden behind the tails of his coat, flashed a small device towards Flick. It was brick like, with buttons and knobs all along its side and a thin needle the length of an arm, that wobbled slightly with every movement. Before long it vanished behind his coat again, Simons hand hovering there like how a duellist hovered over a gun.

  Flick had never seen a device like it before, but trusted his friend anyway.

  “Well get over here and help them then?”

  “Can they walk?”

  Flick shook his head.

  “Okay…” Simons voice trembled slightly, “When she moves, I’ll help them then”

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Flick narrowed his eyes, “What? Dude its just Sam why are yo-“

  “She’s dangerous Flick, she’s really really fucking dangerous”

  “She saved our lives Simon!” He took a step back towards Sam, “Look at us man, if we kept going any longer Isaac would have butchered us!”

  “Isaac? You mean you actually…” Simon looked at the ground, he seemed relieved for a small time before returning back to his feared state. “Even so you can’t trust her Flick, its not safe!”

  “Simon you can’t-“

  Sam put her hand on Flicks shoulder, making Simon hold his breath. “It’s fine Flick.”

  She began walking to her side, away from Scratch and poppy. At the same time Simon walked towards them, keeping a keen eye on where Sam was, making sure he was exactly the same distance away from her as when they started.

  They walked in a wide circle, slowly and quietly, with Flick awkwardly shuffling somewhere in the middle.

  Finally, the two sides swapped places and Simon hurriedly checked the children’s wounds.

  “Shit” he mumbled, “They don’t have long, the girl’s damn near ran out of blood and other ones not far behind.”

  Flick winced at the words,

  He began to speak, “He-“

  Sam, surprisingly, cut him off, “Heal them, now.”

  “No.”

  “Why the fuck not!?” Flick yelled back

  Simon smirked, “Because then you’ll kill me, won’t you, Sam?”

  The air became still, Flick expected some rebuttal from her but nothing was said. He snapped his head towards Sam, giving her a questioning look. She clicked her tongue out of frustration.

  “You can’t escape what you did Simon,” She finally replied, her eyes avoided Flick’s whenever they could.

  Flick stepped closer to Simon, spinning on his heel to face Sam angrily “Whoa you can’t kill him… Why the fuck do you wanna kill him anyway?!”

  “He’s done terrible things Flick, that disease killed a lot of people.”

  “And we just killed the guy that started it all didn’t we? We don’t need to kill Si, its over now.”

  She tsked, “It’s not that simple, there’s not some big bad you get rid of to fix the problem.” She stepped closer to Simon as she spoke, “You have to get rid of everything bad,”

  “Simon won’t do shit and you know it Sam!” He pointed towards the thin arms behind Simon’s jacket, “You really think a guy that looks like that is going to do what Isaac did again?”

  “He made the disease, he still knows the formulae,” She furrowed her brow, “He could make it again”

  Flick wanted to respond, but what she said made sense. Six disease was deadly, all it would take is someone who knows the ingredients to make a replica and wipe-out a civilisation.

  He stuttered for a moment, attempting to find words to prove Simon’s innocence.

  “Step away from her Flick,” Simon finally said, “I’m not making six disease again, never again I promise you, but I need you to step away from her okay?”

  Flick span around to face Simon, “Would you shut up and help the kids please?”

  “You destroyed pillar twelve didn’t you?” Simon looked Sam square in her eyes

  She stayed silent.

  He rummaged through his pocket, bringing out a sheet of paper and waving it in front of him. Flick noticed the official seal used on government documents that he tended to see on Simon’s desk every so often.

  “I only got it a couple of hours ago, mail runners said they saw the tree lying dead a hundred feet away. That was your work wasn’t it? It could’ve only been you, whatever you are now…”

  Flick slowly looked back at Sam.

  She spoke to him without looking, already knowing the horrified look he had on his face. “I told you Flick, everything.”

  “How… H-how could you…”

  “I tried to help them” she continued, “I tried to cure them, but they killed me, over and over and over again. That’s when I found out, about six disease I mean, the whole pillar was in on it…” She looked to the side slightly, “…Well, most of them were anyway”

  “You destroyed a whole pillar and you don’t even know how many people were in on it?!”

  “I was angry, Flick!” she looked at him finally, “There were just so many and I-I had to do something. I know it was wrong, that’s why I’m making it right now.”

  She pointed at Simon, “First I had to deal with Isaac and now he’s next” she commanded once more, “Heal them Simon, I’ll make it quick if you do”

  “Nope, not doing it” He responded, his smile growing more sinister, “If you can be patient for a second they’ll bleed out, think you can wait that long?”

  The skin on Sam’s face dissolved away, revealing the bright multicolour veins and dark muscle fibre beneath, she was about to use her ability again.

  “Buuuut!” Simon continued, “If you leave right now I can help them. You still wanna do the ‘right thing’?”

  She hesitated for a moment, and then turned away pinching the bridge of her nose out of anger. “…Alright! Alright fine, I’ll go, I’ll get rid of the science district instead. You’re fucking lucky yo-“

  “What?” Flick budged in “Y-you’re going to do what?”

  “Destroy it?” she raised an eyebrow, “Its where six disease was being manufactured mostly, if I get rid of the district no one else can manufacture it here for at least a decade. It was my backup option in case I backed out of killing this loser.”

  “Sam you can’t, that’s this pillar’s livelihood... It’d put everyone out of a job!” Flick stepped further back towards Simon as he spoke,

  “There’s no other option Flick! I can’t let this shit continue, this weird cannibalism culling stuff has to end.”

  “I know that but you cant just-“

  “For fucks sake,” Sam clenched her fist, “Yknow what? If you wanna talk to me about this, meet me there! If you aren’t there in an hour I’m burying everything.”

  In an instant she was on the roof of the orphanage as though gravity had pulled her, and only her, there. She turned back around to yell once more at Simon.

  “Those kids better not have died because of you.”

  The air shifted slightly, and Sam was gone.

  * * * * * *

  Bone fluid was a relatively new concept in the medical industry, a mixture of hard plastic and a binding agent that got tougher the warmer it’s surroundings got. A revolutionary breakthrough for treating broken and fractured limbs, although operating the fidgety machinery that used the chemical needed a fair amount of training first. Simon didn’t, but he had an uncanny ability to nail things the first time he did them with an impressive track record, so long as you ignored the hundred or so times he didn’t.

  He kept a fluid injector in a dusty green box labelled ‘in case of emergencies’ along with stitch guns and band aids.

  “Ow!”

  Simon clicked his tongue, “Stop complaining dingus, don’t flinch either I can’t keep the needle steady”

  Flick glanced over at the sleeping bodies of Scratch and Poppy to distract himself, they were quiet enough when Simon filled their wounds first, he felt silly yelping so often in comparison to them.

  Simon’s thumb rolled over the joystick on the back of device, bending the needle inside of Flick’s chest to paint the shape of a rib with bone fluid as carefully as he could.

  Flick gagged, feeling the cold metal contorting inside of him, “How much longer?”

  “Stop being a baby”

  Finally Simons finger eased on the device, pulling the needle slowly and wiping it with a clean towel.

  “There.” He reached behind him for the stitch gun, “Wasn’t that hard, was it?”

  Flick huffed in response, looking away from the new device in Simon’s hands, anticipating the sting that would follow.

  He moved the gun closer and began the soldering process, fusing the small cuts on his body that weren’t too gaping.

  “Luckily,” Simon began, “You’re not too bad, nothing major anyway, but them?”

  He looked at the children, the blood staining their clothes.

  “They’re stable, but I have to get them to a doctor,”

  Flick turned his head, “…Thank you,”

  His friend dipped his head slightly, “So I take it that means you’re not going to help me?”

  Flick paused, then turned back away.

  “Flick, you-“

  “I just want to talk to her,” He shook his head, “She can’t destroy the science district, maybe I can talk her out of it,”

  Simon grit his teeth angrily, “Stop it!”

  “No!” he responded “Sam wouldn’t do this, or at least I think she wouldn’t, maybe I can help or-“

  “Flick,”

  Flick paused.

  “You aren’t this” Simon said plainly, “You, are not this.”

  He stuttered before replying, “What do you mean?”

  “You still have stickers on the inside of your locker man!”

  Flick frowned, “The hell does that have to do with anything?!”

  Simon sighed, “You can’t keep jumping after every bad thing Flick, you’re not smart enough for that,”

  Flick raised an eyebrow, but before he could respond Simon cut him off.

  “These things matter! Putting your neck out in this way has impact, it has momentum!” He put the gun away neatly in the box behind him and continued. “You need to be able to look ahead, to at least have a clue about what’s gonna happen next, but you don’t! I can see it on you, you have no idea where you’re going Flick,”

  “I’m going to the science district Si,” Flick interrupted, “I need to just talk to her okay? That’s it,”

  His friend sighed once more, then got up slowly, “…I’m just worried about you man, Isaac was one thing but this? It feel like I’m watching you burn up in real time, right in front of me,”

  Flick watched the expression on Simon’s face change slightly, at first he thought he was upset or mad but quickly realised it was genuine dejection and concern. He wrapped his arms around him tightly, to which he responded by awkwardly standing in place with his arms straight by his side.

  “Get them to the hospital man,” Flick said, pulling away from the hug and dusting himself off, “I’ll be right back okay? I won’t be long, then I can tell you about all the crazy stuff that went down at the tower,”

  “Bu-“

  “I’ll be fine,” He continued, “Go help them, we’ll meet up later,”

  Simon rolled his eyes and finally pulled a metal stretcher out from the side of the orphanage, big enough to carry both Scratch and Pop. Once the two were strapped in he pulled the handles on one side and began shuffling towards the east pillar.

  He considered, for a moment, how his actions involving Six disease indirectly caused all of this. He knew it would be the end of many lives, more than he could possibly count, but he never imagined he would face those consequences directly. That he would be the one behind the stretcher, carrying the wounded.

  Simon had never cared much for his own life as others rarely cared for it too, besides Flick anyway, so the thought of dying didn’t really bother him. Making the disease was easy, even if he was killed it didn’t matter it was like taking a breath of fresh air, he knew he had done something for the benefit of humanity. All he had actually done was project a looming fear and pain onto others that he himself didn’t possess out of sheer ignorance.

  He cursed at himself from under his breath and looked over his shoulder. Flick hadn’t made it that far yet, even from a distance Simon could tell he was lost in thought. The vibrant blues and low humming yellows from lights some several feet away from him coated Flick’s back in a shroud of wispy light, melting into the ground below, defusing into earthy browns. He wasn’t dragging his feet, but he walked slow enough not to leave imprints behind in the dirt.

  Flick was immature, inexperienced, remarkably picky when it came to food, energetic, dumb, rash, directionless and a whole confusion of other traits that Simon would rather call afflictions. He had an impressive way of getting used to things quickly, yet never had the nerve to pursue risk before a week ago.

  Despite everything Flick was, he saw him walk through small plumes of neon without a trail, blind to whatever was in front of him besides the vague notion of right and wrong.

  Even now he didn’t have a direction in mind, and yet Simon was envious.