Tokyo Demons: Book 3, Chapter 4, Part 2

Ayase tried to quell her panic. It was like a burning thread connecting her pieces, stretched tight and quivering by her scattered heart.

I don’t know if I’m already dead.

The thought was laughably light in her collective mind; she felt displaced from it, like she felt displaced from her distant body. Or what was left of it. She could sense how many bugs she’d lost–she felt less, like she took up less space, was broken into fewer pieces. It was like she’d been sick for weeks, vomiting up everything inside her and wasting away until she was a small husk of what she’d once been.

But she stifled the fear. She didn’t have time for it, and she was exhausted with being scared. She buzzed back through that window and into the quiet, ominous gas room that still felt like a tomb. The lingering scent of that sweet poison tickled the tips of her antennae.

Shouri was already inside, rolling over the unconscious guards and scooping pieces of Ayase out from under them. The woman lifted the blanket that had trapped Ayase, shook it. She plucked pieces of half-broken Ayase from fabric and hair and the floor.

“Center of the room,” Shouri murmured as she nudged Ayase’s crawling insects. “I’ll bring what I can find.”

That was when Kiyoshi appeared, crawling through the half-open window. “Ayase?!” he called. One of his sneakers narrowly missed a piece of her that dragged on broken legs; he cursed and fell on his knees, careful to avoid her.

His hands gently cupped a smashed point of awareness. She tried to look up at him from it, but her vision there was dark and crooked, and she could do no more than twitch.

The horrified look on his face tightened her thread of panic. No, she reminded herself, flying and crawling to the middle of the room. No. Just keep moving.

“Kiyoshi,” Shouri ordered as she carried a handful of Ayase aloft. “Close your eyes.”

“Huh? Why?!”

“She’s naked when she reforms. I brought her clothes; just give us a minute.”

Kiyoshi grunted through his teeth and rested his squashed insect by Shouri’s pile. He took a moment to collect pieces from the floor outside of her awareness–dismembered wings and crushed legs, barely visible in her blurry vision. He set them down like an offering by the building mass of her living fragments.

He finally closed his eyes. Shouri swept over her last collection as she crawled on hands and knees.

The woman leaned over Ayase, her mouth thin in the darkness. Ayase stared up at her from thousands of compound eyes.

“It’s okay,” Shouri said, her voice softer than her gaze. “Whatever’s left of you… You’ll heal.”

Ayase flapped her wings, snapping the tug of fear.

She braced herself.

And then she melted, pulling her fragmented consciousness together, merging her cracked bodies into blood and muscle and skin. She tried to control the wave of formation, spiraling around the sensation of lungs, a beating heart; her body rebuilt its core, stacking broken pieces into a smoothing tower of flesh. She spread from that core, felt herself form a jaw and lips and tongue, a nose and eyes she refused to open. Only when she felt the edges of her skull solidify did she allow her lower body to spread, beyond the reaches of her torso and its thudding heartbeat.

Her right arm slowly tightened into its usual form; she felt air on the edges of her twitching fingers. Her left arm began to mold…

And stopped.

She gasped in a breath with her human lungs and curled against the cold floor. She panted, her heart pounding, her mind automatically cataloging the new edges of sensation on her small, unfamiliar body. She felt the brush of fabric over her bare back.

“Sh-Shouri-san,” she wheezed, just to confirm she still had a working mouth. But that felt the same. Her throat, her chest, her stomach all felt the same. Her blood pumped through them, strong and alive…

But she had no legs. And her left arm, in its attempt to reform into the limb she knew, had smoothed off into a stub above the elbow–a sculpture aborted when she’d run out of clay.

She swallowed thick saliva and tightened her only fist.

Shouri silently pulled the shirt over Ayase’s head, helped Ayase push her one full arm out of the sleeve. Ayase nudged her left stub out of the opposite sleeve hole and stretched it as far out as it would go, trying to remember the sensation of extending those fingers. Shouri pulled the skirt high up Ayase’s waist, letting it dangle loosely over the stubs that had once been Ayase’s upper thighs.

When Shouri finally let Kiyoshi open his eyes, Ayase dropped her own to the floor. She didn’t want to see his face. She didn’t want to watch people stare at her, to take in her body before it felt like her again…

His hands slid under her armpits and she was suddenly weightless, pulled into the air before being crushed against his chest. Kiyoshi wrapped his arms more tightly around her, pressing her face against the crook of his neck.

“Are you in pain?” he breathed.

Ayase grunted her negative. Her body started to tingle, her vision started to swim.

“You’re so light,” he whispered, aching relief in his voice. “I could carry you all day.”

She felt her consciousness fade, dragged inward as her blood rushed through her shortened body. It pounded against the floodgates, heating her skin in an attempt to stretch it, expand it, fortify it beyond its new edges. The rush of throbbing strength sucked the energy right out of her brain.

Her body was trying to heal.

She draped her only arm around Kiyoshi’s neck and fell into blackness.

…

Something was shaking her.

In the hot, heavy darkness, the sensation rattled her. She couldn’t move, but she was shaking. She wanted to breathe, but she was shaking.

It took every ounce of her strength to pry open her leaden eyelids.

A fuzzy shape slowly came into focus in Ayase’s vision. Dark eyes, thick eyebrows, light-colored fabric framing a face. Aisha? Ayase closed her weighted eyes, but firm fingertips pried them back open.

“Ayase,” the woman said, her accent almost guttural on the first syllable. “Stay awake. Awake.”

Ayase tried to protest, but her breathing was too shallow. She couldn’t even groan. She made out the edges of a room in her blurry vision, nondescript enough that it was possibly the safe house. She felt softness under her back and neck and head–a bed, a pillow. A weak twinge of pain streaked through her when she tried to flex the muscles of her only arm; she dragged her heavy eyes down and saw an I.V. impaling her veins.

A cool sense of safety flooded through her, calming the suffocating heat of her throbbing body. She dragged her eyes up again, barely tilted her head back; green eyes stared back down at her.

“I will touch you,” Zayd said softly, almost in apology. “To help you with this. Will you permit me?”

Ayase couldn’t comprehend the question. After a long moment, Zayd’s fingers slid against her temples.

Something seemed to bleed out of them, like he leaked a coolant through her skin. It soothed her, spread over her tingly flesh like a balm. She felt a slight, bracing spread of consciousness return to her.

Aisha started to speak in Arabic. Her firm voice was an anchor, pinning Ayase’s consciousness to reality. The woman rested two hands on Ayase’s stomach and dragged them down and to the right, to Ayase’s abdomen.

She dug in slightly with her fingers, making Ayase twinge in discomfort.

“Appendix,” Zayd translated quietly. “Do you know this? Do you feel this?”

Ayase’s mind whirled. The woman’s fingers dug in again, sparking pain through Ayase’s brain.

“M-maybe,” Ayase gurgled, choking on the word.

“Appendix,” Zayd repeated. “You do not need this.”

Huh?

Aisha’s fingers slid up and around, closer to Ayase’s back. She dug up, almost under the ribcage.

“Kidneys,” Zayd translated as Aisha’s fingers poked them. “You only need one of these.” Aisha’s fingers merged and moved forward, adjusting carefully on Ayase’s left side. “Spleen.” The fingers separated and traveled up Ayase’s throat, settling under her jaw on both sides. “Tonsils. You can remove them all.”

Ayase weakly took a breath, realization dawning on her. Zayd seemed to recognize the look on her face, because his eyes softened.

“Every body is made of pieces, but your pieces can move and heal. You have the strength to change every centimeter of yourself.” He shook his head. “And you have, many times–but perhaps by instinct. We need you to learn more than instinct.” His fingers flexed on her temple. “We need you to learn control.”

Ayase swallowed the torrent of saliva in her throat, building up under the pressure of Aisha’s fingers. She had control. She remembered the feeling of shifting her skin in that dark karaoke parlor, spreading her injury where she wanted it. She remembered reforming on the gas room floor, focusing on building her torso and head before anything else.

She tried to settle her hazy mind on the sensation of Aisha’s fingertips. On the small, round bulges the woman grazed with her fingernails.

Those tonsils were mass. Flesh. They could be insects.

They could be material for Ayase to rebuild her limbs.

Another cool rush of energy flooded from Zayd. Ayase felt her heart lift in her heavy chest, buoyed by his confidence.

Aisha released Ayase’s tonsils. Instead, gently, she gripped a handful of Ayase’s hair.

“The pieces inside of you will be difficult,” Zayd admitted, “and we do not have to do them, if you are unsure. So we will start with something simple.”

Aisha tugged on Ayase’s hair, speaking in Arabic.

“Do you feel the pull of your hair?” Zayd translated. “Do you feel where they are attached to the head, where they grow beneath your skin?” His voice softened into a whisper. “Like seeds in the ground. Seeds you can dig up and plant somewhere else.”

Ayase’s eyelids drooped. She gathered the edges of her weak, desperate attention and folded it all into one place–the faint pain of Aisha’s tugging.

Ayase closed her eyes…

And dissolved her scalp into insects.

Proceed to Chapter 4, Part 2, page 3–>