Thresholder

The waves of anger were deep and unsettling, but perhaps more unsettling was the way that Perry felt perfectly fine once they had passed. For five or ten minutes, he would be himself again, maybe a little bit tired but in no way mentally affected, and it always felt like he was going to stay like that. Then the cycle would repeat itself, and he would transform, just a bit, growing more muscular, hairier, his fingernails extending into claws — or not extending so much as growing out at great speed. He didn’t understand how that was possible, but he didn’t have much time to think about it.

Flora was there with him through the whole of it. He’d taken his aggression out on her in more ways than one.

It was just after noon when one of those breaks from the anger lasted longer than the others, and then just kept lasting, until it had been thirty minutes with nothing.

“I think we’re done,” said Flora. She was sitting beside him on the bed, naked, just as he was. “I’m going to shower.”

“What do I do, if it comes on again?” asked Perry.

“Come find me,” shrugged Flora. She had claw marks in several places, red gashes, which didn’t seem to be bothering her. She had assured him during one of the quiet periods that she would heal. “But you’ll need to learn to live with this, in the long term.”

“You said to save my apologies until it was all over,” said Perry. “So … I’m sorry. Truly, deeply sorry. I’ll do anything to make it up to you. You saved my life.”

“Prove that it was worth saving,” said Flora.

She turned and went to the bathroom. She’d been stronger than him, had managed to weather the storm, but he’d gotten her a few times, especially with his claws. He’d learned as the night had gone on. Even as he was trying to hold back, he was still getting better at knowing how to slip past her. If the night had gone on much longer, he might have more seriously wounded her, not that gashes he’d left with his claws wouldn’t have killed a normal woman.

Now more solidly himself, Perry sat and thought. His thoughts were of Flora, her creamy skin, the way her sweat-damp hair stuck to her forehead as she tried to hold him in place, how good it had felt to hurt her, how enraged he’d been as she held onto his throat with a death grip to keep him from howling at her. She’d managed to keep him mostly silent, through various tactics, and they had wrestled each other back and forth across her apartment. The sounds were those of furious scrambling and slapping flesh.

He tried to ground himself in more practical matters, to take his mind off the complicated feelings the night had brought on.

Being a werewolf had anti-synergy, in some ways. He wouldn’t be able to use the claws while he was in the armor, and transformation was right out. The quick-release from the armor, designed mostly to avoid a major catastrophe, might allow him to change tactics in a heartbeat, but then he’d be left to pick up the pieces of the armor. The extra strength wouldn’t help him at all while the armor was on, and if he was going into a fight, he would be wearing the armor.

The way he saw it — the way he chose to see it — was that he was shoring up a major weakness and giving up relatively little in return. He wouldn’t be constrained by his diet, since werewolves apparently ate more meat but remained omnivores, and he’d need to hide from the moon, but he already had the power armor, which would provide protection. He would be able to move around without worrying too much about an ambush, especially with the sword in hand. He’d have preferred something that added together different strengths, but this was more a matter of different ‘modes’ which could be switched between as the situation called for.

Flora stepped out of the bathroom, still naked, still wounded, seeming unconcerned at his gaze. He had no idea what the sexual mores of this world were, but the women dressed rather conservatively, and he suspected that it wasn’t too far off the late 1800s. She gave him an appraising look as she toweled off.

“I need to go to work,” said Flora. “You should shower too.”

“Work,” said Perry, swallowing thickly. “You’re going to work? After all that?”

Flora nodded. “I’ll have been missed. My partner knows nothing about who I am and what I do, but he thinks I’m flaky already. I’ve proven myself more than once, but that only buys me so much leeway, and there are limits to what he’ll cover for.”

“You haven’t slept,” said Perry.

“I can survive on a deficit,” said Flora. “I’ll come back here and crash once I’m done with my duties as Jade Imperator.”

“You’re going to both jobs?” asked Perry. “Look, last night —”

“We got through it,” said Flora. She raised a hand and pressed her slender fingers against the most serious of the wounds, four red furrows in her skin that ran from her collarbone to the bottom of her rib cage, crossing her left breast. “This will heal. It won’t even scar.”

Perry nodded. She seemed unconcerned. He tried to be unconcerned too, but she was right, this wasn’t just something that had happened that night, this was something he would need to live with in one way or another. He had no illusions that he would be able to hide away for every full moon, but a werewolf could learn control, with time.

Flora began putting on her clothes, and Perry watched her. He was still sitting there, naked, badly in need of a shower, but something was keeping him pinned in place. OHe once he started moving, he would need to deal with things, to accept the new reality, to clean himself up, then clean up the room, then check over Marchand and the armor. It was easier just to watch her. Most of the smaller scratches were already gone. He’d been stunned by the events of the last night, and didn’t know where he stood with her, only that he owed her.

When she was dressed in her uniform, she turned to him. She looked presentable, put together, and his mind called up the images of the night before, sweat and blood, both of them raw.

She walked over and leaned down to kiss him on the lips. It was slow and tender, lingering. Then she left without another word.

It took Perry ten minutes to get up from the bed and go shower off.

He was still getting used to the shower, which was a luxury in this time and place. The water pressure was low and the temperature was lukewarm at best, with the water released by a chain rather than a knob or anything else. The soap seemed to cling to his skin, leaving a thin film that felt terrible, and he probably could have spent the rest of the day listing complaints, though he’d kept those to himself. Seraphinus had only baths, and those more rarely than he would have liked. He was hoping that one of the next worlds would have proper hygiene, or perhaps even something that was another leap of technology above what his own world had been able to offer.

Flora wasn’t the first woman since Richter. There had been another in Seraphinus, a handmaiden to the princess he’d found himself gravitating toward. He had kissed her, which had been a mistake, but nothing had come of it one way or another. That had felt like a betrayal of Richter’s memory. With Flora, that feeling was so much stronger.

When the shower was over, Perry toweled himself off and went out of the bathroom, where he was left to confront the destruction that he’d caused the night before. The bedsheets were likely a total loss, bloody and torn, and there was damage to the bedframe, to the floors, to the walls, so many places and so extensive that there was no hope that he could deal with it. If Flora had a landlord — he didn’t know whether she did — it seemed like cause to evict her, even if she was a gendarme.

Still, Perry did the best he could, and once he was finished, he needed to rinse off again. Flora had done a fairly good job of containing him to one specific area of her apartment, which meant that the kitchenette hadn’t been destroyed, but he worried about how much this would ultimately cost her. Textiles of this era were cheaper, but not so cheap that it was a matter of twenty dollars at Walmart. He resolved to give her another of the gold coins to help pay for a new mattress and bed sheets, though he wasn’t entirely clear on the relative values of money.

Perry had been putting it off, but he finally had no choice but to look at the armor.

There was a sizable dent in the chest, one which went right alongside the vertical cut he’d gotten from his first fight with Cosme. In fact, that cut might have exacerbated the damage, since it gave the armor more flex than it normally would have had.

It was the arm where the worst of the damage was. Perry swore as he moved it, feeling the articulation. The whole thing was gummy with coagulated blood, some of which came off in dried flakes. The metal was some wonder alloy, lightweight and durable, capable of spreading out force, but it was bent, and Perry felt like there was no way that he would ever be able to unbend it, not that it would have helped all that much. The arm wasn’t completely ruined, not like he’d thought that it would be when he was in the depths of panic the night before, but he was going to have to favor his right arm, and the suit would no longer be watertight, let alone airtight.

He put on the helmet.

“March, status report,” said Perry.

“I’m afraid I must report that the status is not good, sir,” replied Marchand. “Damage to the left arm is critical and there’s been some further degradation to core processing since last night.”

“Degradation?” asked Perry.

“Primarily spoilage of the data storage, sir,” said Marchand, tone as level as ever. It was, per Richter, very easy to get AI to do proper tonal alteration, but she’d chosen March to be unflappable and calm in all circumstances, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons (which had apparently happened considerably more than twice in her timeline).

“What did we lose?” asked Perry.

“Video, sir,” replied Marchand. “I had taken the liberty of making redundant backups of text and pictures, but the amount of video the suit has captured over the last three months has been well past operational limits, as I believe I’ve warned you before. Had you connected to the servers as instructed, sir, the loss of data would have been minimal.”

“What did we lose?” asked Perry.

“I’m afraid the answer to that question is long and complicated, sir,” replied Marchand. “There were hundreds of video files across time periods spanning the last five and a half months.”

Perry swore.

“Quite, sir,” said Marchand.

“I had asked you to make transcripts, do you still have those?” asked Perry.

“I do, sir,” replied Marchand.

Perry let out a breath. He was most worried about losing the conversations with Romauld, which were largely about magic, and while Perry had no intent to spend twenty years of his life becoming a wizard, he had thought there was something there. He’d taken scans of books out of the world too, and had hoped to put them to use at some point, if they weren’t outclassed by other things on offer through the many worlds.

“What about video of Richter?” asked Perry as the thought suddenly occurred to him. It was the second most important set of videos to him, maybe the most important.

There was a long pause. “Excuse me, I’m checking, sir.”

Perry sat there, feeling anxious. He knew the videos, their content, the specific clips he’d gone back to from time to time in Seraphinus before swearing off looks to the past.

“I have three videos featuring Mistress Richter,” said Marchand. “I apologize, but I don’t have a firm grasp on how many there originally were.”

“Show me,” said Perry.

They weren’t the ones he’d been thinking of. Seeing her was still like a dagger to the heart, but these were incidental pieces of video, the kind that he almost would have been fine deleting. One was simply from one of the cameras inside the lab, which showed her cross-legged in her chair, typing away with hammer-like force at her keyboard. The whole thing ran for two hours with only a single interruption when she went to make tea.

“Start on recovery efforts,” said Perry.

“I took the liberty of intensive recovery efforts last night, sir,” replied Marchand. “This is what was recovered.”

Perry very nearly threw the helmet against the floor, but it was too precious a thing to do that. Instead, he merely set it down for a moment and took a deep breath. When he put it back on, he asked the question he should have asked from the start.

“How are you doing?” asked Perry. “What does the system check look like?”

“I’m fine, sir, thank you for asking,” said Marchand. “I’m in dire need of repairs and replacement parts, but once that’s taken care of I’ll be right as rain. I ran extensive diagnostics while you were occupied with Mistress Kaminska and concluded that the core programming is without fault. Aside from the data loss and the reduction in overall processing power, I believe I should be able to provide roughly equivalent operational support, including scouting, reconstructions, captioning, and others. There have been only three times since last servicing that I ran into significant processing bottlenecks. I would, however, advise against combat until repairs can be completed.”

Perry let out a sigh. That was not quite as bad as he’d expected. That he wasn’t routinely using March’s full processing power was a given … but when he thought about it, he had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. “March, those three times, can you pinpoint them? Tell me what was going on when they happened?”

“All three occasions were combat scenarios, sir,” said March. “The most recent one was when sensors were covered with blood and I was forced to reconstruct the scene for you from other sources in real time.”

Perry swore. That wasn’t good either. ‘Three times over the past five months’ didn’t sound bad, but ‘three times when there was most need’ sounded a lot worse.

There was something wrong with the display as well, a way in which the colors were off, and while that was annoying, it wasn’t likely going to prove fatal. If Marchand was putting things in false colors though, it was a sign that something deeper was wrong with the AI beyond just a loss of computing power.

Perry spent some time with the armor, especially the injured arm, being guided through further investigation and repair by Marchand. There was nothing that they could do without the proper tools and replacement parts though, neither of which were available. Perry inquired into having those parts made, and Marchand was able to rattle off specifications, but it was going to be hopeless with the materials science that they had available in this world, and Marchand wasn’t enough of an engineer to come up with unique solutions using Victorian era technologies from an alternate timeline.

Around noon, Perry realized how hungry he was, and finding nothing for him in the chiller and an apartment bare of food, he decided to go out. He slipped the ear bud in, breathing a sigh of relief that it still fit as well as it had. He had changed, but the changes were relatively subtle, more hair on his face and forearms, across his chest, less body fat, more tone to his muscles, a sort of wiry strength that went beyond anything he’d had before. He could smell more keenly, though not make full sense of what he was smelling, and he could see a bit better, more vividly — which was when the other shoe dropped and he realized that it probably wasn’t a problem with the display, it was a problem with his vision. The armor’s display was calibrated for a human’s senses, RGB for the cones of the human retina and activation spikes, or something like that. Maybe he had more cones now, four instead of three, or maybe they were just responding differently, but he had no idea how he’d fix that, or whether it could be fixed without months or years of engineering work to create something entirely new.

Stepping out into the city as an undercover werewolf felt different. He looked, in the mirror, like he was barely restrained by his suit, the animal on him seeming to waft off like a sour scent. No one looked at him though, maybe because of the glamour. He felt his fangs with his tongueteeth, and practiced sliding them down, though they seemed to do it of their own accord sometimes, often at the sight of meat.

He ate a sandwich from a local place, and resisted the urge to pick out the leafy greens from it. He needed to prove to himself that he could survive if the next world only had plants to eat. So far, at least, the worlds had been hospitable, had atmosphere, people, food, water, even if they were like Teaguewater and the air and water were polluted, the city wasting away in its own sickness.

It felt so much better to be out in the open with some real power. He wasn’t so worried about not being armored, because he could bounce back from even severe injuries now. Flora was right, his arm wasn’t fully healed, but it was a dull ache now, hurting when he moved it, rather than the agony that it had been the night before. He’d been bruised during the night with her, but the bruises were already yellowing, and he imagined they would be gone by the next day.

He was itching for a fight.

Flora had said that he wanted to hurt people, and he had to admit that she had a point, so long as they were the right sorts of people. He wanted to test the limits of his newfound power, to get in a brawl and smash someone’s face in. It was hard to know whether this was a result of him being a werewolf now, but he thought that it wasn’t — he felt clear-headed, and a desire to beat someone to death wasn’t exactly new.

Back on Earth, he’d bought into a lot of ideas about justice and power, the ways in which the criminal justice system was failing people, the thought that retribution did approximately nothing for anyone. Rehabilitation was the path forward, and wasn’t it an utter shame that the United States had such a high number of prisoners per capita? That baked-in idealism had hit the face of cold, hard reality when he’d met Mordant, and even then, he’d held onto the tatters of that worldview. He hadn’t finished Mordant off.

He was past all that now though, and when he thought of the anger he felt, the need to fight, it was only with a mind toward doing it in a way that was productive and directed. Last night hadn’t just been a mistake because he’d walked into a trap, it had been a mistake because he hadn’t run when he had the chance. He’d been too ready to throw down when the circumstances didn’t call for it. Better to find his enemies and fight them on his own terms, come at them when they were surprised, not when they had cannons that were specifically brought in order to take him down.

He spent some time around the city, enjoying the newfound sense of security. He was still demonstrably weaker than a vampire, but he had the sword, and a bullet to the gut or a knife to the kidney would no longer be fatal.

He went back to the library, paying their membership fee, and spent some time looking through the books, trying to find some evidence of thresholders. The incidents that Flora had mentioned were a part of history, but the actual events were only in the books as earthquakes or natural disasters, and if not that, then talked about with an air of uncertainty. It was hard to believe that thresholders could reach that power level, but not that hard. He wondered how many worlds they had been through, and what kind of matchmaking there was to place two thresholders of roughly the same level together. Would it always been even, or would there be a blow out? Would he need to worry that he’d run into someone with metal manipulation power that could tear apart the suit? Cosme had better powers overall, less prone to being destroyed or needing maintenance. The history books had no firm answers to Perry’s questions though.

Flora still hadn’t produced one of the Jade Scholars for Perry. She had said that it presented some difficulties, and he believed her, but it had been long enough now that she should have found a solution to those problems. He needed to know about them, to understand the course of a thresholder’s life, to peek at what was in store for him. There was power ahead, and powerful opponents, but the specifics were too vague. He had books of magic from Seraphinus, stored within Marchand’s drives, and he would get to those eventually, once other low-hanging fruit had been plucked, once he was ready to embark on a course of learning that would take at least a decade — optimistically.

Perry collected more food and returned to the apartment around sundown, having spent most of the day among the books. They’d taught him little, but had made him feel less like a brutish animal and reassured him that being a werewolf wasn’t going to be the end of his ability to think calmly and clearly.

The moon had been out through the day, which was unexpectedly clear, but he’d felt no effects from it. Flora had said that moonlight would be counteracted by sunlight, which meant he’d be safe, but he would need to test the limits of what would make him change. He didn’t know what the change would be like either, since it would be more of a transformation than just a wave of rage coming over him.

When he came back to the apartment, Flora was there, and it was shocking to him how much of an effect she had on him. The intimacy of the night before came back with enough force to crush him, a wave of emotional turmoil and sense-memories. What stuck out most clearly was the kiss she’d given him before she’d left, which had been given freely, unmotivated by a desire to keep him quiet or as a way to redirect his anger.

He felt like they knew each other to their core. It was like she’d ripped open his rib cage and licked his heart. That was a stupid thing to feel, they had hardly begun to share their pasts, they came from wildly different cultures … and it was still how he felt. He wondered whether that was how she felt, how it had happened from her perspective.

“How are you doing?” asked Perry.

“Dog tired,” said Flora. “Last night’s altercation — the one you had in the city, not the one that happened here — raised the alarms all over. Those alarms then got shut down by the Hammer General — the leader of the gendarme, who answers directly to the king.”

“So they were the king’s men?” asked Perry.

“They would almost have to have been, to have that kind of artillery,” said Flora. She rubbed her face. “Sorry, we had so little time to speak with everything else.”

“Get some sleep, if you need it,” said Perry. “It can wait until tomorrow. Are you … okay? The claw marks are healing?”

Flora nodded. Her eyes moved over him. “You were able to contain yourself today?”

Perry nodded. “Honestly, I didn’t feel much different.”

“Just the usual amount of killing intent?” asked Flora, arching an eyebrow.

“I cleaned up as much as I could and went to the library,” said Perry. “Ate some food, enjoyed not feeling like someone was going to stick a dagger in my back.”

“You’re still vulnerable,” said Flora. “No one will be safe from you when there’s a full moon, but under sunlight you’re not much stronger than you were.” She looked at the bed. “Thank you for cleaning.”

The place was still a mess. There was blood, the scent of it heavy in the air, and claw marks, as well as teeth marks in one place, which he thought had been from her rather than him. She had bought new sheets and put them in place, and washed off the mattress as much as possible, but that was clearly a lost cause.

“I’m composing my reply to Cosme,” said Perry. “I won’t send it out tonight though.”

Flora gave an absent nod. “You’re going to bait him out.”

“No,” said Perry. “I’m going to exchange information, then set a date.”

“A date?” asked Flora.

“The next full moon,” said Perry.

Flora’s nod was slow. The gears were turning in her head. She looked pretty when she was thinking, and again Perry remembered the night before, and the unprompted kiss she’d given when she left. He’d have thought that he’d gotten it all out of his system, every molecule of desire squeezed from him, but apparently not.

“There will be preparations to make,” said Flora.

“Yes,” said Perry. “Ideally we have reinforcements, because he’s sure not to come alone.”

“I need sleep,” said Flora. She was still in her gendarme uniform, and began shrugging out of it as she eyed the bed. She needed less sleep than a human, but she’d been burning the candle at both ends, and had gone through the last night with a great deal of effort and exertion. He’d been surprised that she’d gone to work rather than calling in sick. As she shed the uniform, she revealed bare, pale skin and the wounds he’d given her. They had healed less than he would have liked, but the lines were thinner, if no less red.

When she was down to her underwear, she turned to look at him.

“You probably need your sleep too,” she said.

When she went to the bed, Perry followed.