Ymir by Rich Larson

Author:Rich Larson [Larson, Rich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 41

It starts off so well.

His skin splits easily. He only needs a bit of pressure to get the shard through, to widen the incision. Watching his hands, his smooth-slow hands, he feels almost like he’s watching an animated surgeon. Blood seeps out, a red flower blooming on his torpor-paled belly. He wipes it away with his forearm and peers through his abdominal wall.

What he sees is a nauseating tangle, slick and raw-pink. His heart speeds up. He needs the pylorus, the lowest twist of stomach, where a gutjack takes root, but he can’t extract a single feature he recognizes from the quivering mess. He takes a guess, moves the shard, and suddenly the trickle of blood becomes a gush.

Panic slams through the last of his high. He felt nothing tear, felt only the slightest give, but somehow the blood is pouring now. He sees Wickam, sinking to his knees in the silicate pit. He sees Canna spread-eagled in the snow, pumping her life away through a hundred cuts.

There is no one for whom it is well.

He drops the shard and scrabbles for the gelflesh. He tries to find the source of the bleeding, tries to feel it out by pressure. He tears off clumps and slaps them everywhere he can reach. Blood spurts through his fingers and he is not a teledoc and he is not the clanner who nearly escaped, he is Yorick the Butcher, Yorick-Who-Pricked-the-Artery, and it was dumbsick to think he could do this in a dark bubblefab—

The gushing stops.

Yorick barely dares to exhale, afraid of dislodging the gelflesh and letting whatever vein he nicked burst back open. He chants another borrowed phrase in his head: Nothing is wrong. You’re coming out of torpor. Nothing is wrong. You’re coming out of torpor. He lets the air out of his lungs one molecule at a time. The gelflesh holds. He inhales, just as slowly. The gelflesh holds.

His trembling hand finds the shard. He wipes it off on his thigh. There will be infection, and foreign bodies, but it’s hard to care about that right now. He studies the tangle again, sponging away the excess blood. He swims through half-remembered anatomy games on a company tablet, medroid projections in the clinic, every time he ever saw his body or another torn open.

He picks a new pylorus, and this time, when he wriggles through the gap the gutjack is waiting, clinging to his stomach lining with its tiny spines. It’s a small piece of tech, a simple piece. It only has two real functions. Cold-bloods are much more familiar with one than the other.

Yorick reaches for the microtool.

The gutjack gives a curious pulse.

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