Working the silver nitrate out of my body was one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do. It felt like slowly pulling 10 million tiny needles through my flesh.
And I had to do it without Toll noticing. I couldn’t scream or even think about the pain. All I could do was lie there. I felt like I was going insane.
The demons noticed. Toll was still letting them into the Box, but I couldn’t fight them in my condition. All I could do was think threatening thoughts at them and hope they wouldn’t attack me.
Surprisingly, they didn’t. They seemed to like me this way. They made little human noises and crawled around me and even laid down beside me, like pets. Part of me didn’t believe it could actually be happening; I thought maybe this was it and I’d finally snapped. But as long as I was still alive and still working on the silver, I figured it didn’t really matter whether I was crazy or not. In the end I decided to just go with it.
“I HATE THIS PLACE. HATE, HATE, HATE THIS PLACE,” I heard them thinking. “IT’S JUST ONE COLOR. HOW CAN THERE BE ONLY ONE COLOR? SO, SO GROSS.”
“GO HOME, GO BACK, GO HOME! THE GRAVITATIONAL FORCES ARE NOT THE SAME HERE.”
“HUNGER…”
“THIS ROOM SMELLS OF DEATH.”
I had never really listened to demons before. These ones didn’t seem very happy.
I decided to stop torturing myself for a minute and talk to them. “How did you guys get here?” I asked mentally.
“SPACE!”
“I WAS TAKEN AWAY…”
“WE WERE SWALLOWED BY A FLESH-DEMON SUCH AS YOURSELF.”
At that thought, they all turned to look at me. It was like they suddenly started remembering that I wasn’t one of them.
Talking to them normally wouldn’t work. I had to make my thoughts more like theirs: All yell-y and scattered around. I pulled the silver while I thought, letting the pain distract me.
“Um…so…Toll was the one who brought you here?!” I asked them.
“TOLL??”
“IT SMELLED LIKE ANGELS. ANGEL-SMELLER!”
“LOOKED A LOT LIKE YOU.”
Toll’s hair was green, and he liked to wear red, too. As much as I hated the comparison, he did look kind of like a big version of me. But all I could think in response was, “Gross!”
“GROSS! GROSS! GROSS!” They cheered. They seemed to like that.
When I was in pain, they cuddled me, and when I was disgusted, they celebrated. I always knew demons were sentient, but maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe they bonded through negative emotions.
Still, they were being really loud. Like, actual-noise loud, not just mentally. Toll would probably be down here soon; I had to do something.
“Be quiet!” I yelled. “Or I’ll…beat you all up! I’ll rip you in half and turn you inside out! Then you’ll see some colors!”
They liked that even more. They screamed and shrieked and made all kinds of terrible human noises. They started kicking me around like a soccer ball, which I guessed was their idea of playing with me. It was still painful, though, especially since I’d gotten most of the silver in one spot at that point: every time they hit me in the chest I wanted to die. There was no calming them; it was total chaos.
Then, Toll finally entered the room. All the demons immediately roared at him together. It was the loudest sound I ever heard.
Then they stopped. It was awkward. The biggest demon in the room was holding me; I just hung there and stared at the doorway like a scared cat. I wondered what he was going to do.
He just smiled at me and said, “You’re ready.”
I ended up having to go with him out of the Box. Luckily, the demons weren’t interested in following me; they’re not possessive like that.
As we walked down the hallways, I noticed how quiet it was. I didn’t hear any sounds other than my footsteps and Toll’s. I knew other angels had been around when I’d first gotten there. Where did they go? Were we alone…?
Suddenly, Toll stopped. He looked at me. “Do you ever get tired of society, Knell?” he asked.
“…No?”
He sighed. “Well, you are still a child. You never got the chance to grow up and…be forced to cooperate with your inferiors.”
He knelt down to my eye level. “You know, I became Synthesized about 50 years ago, on our demon-infested home planet. And since then, my life has felt rather…pointless. All the power and authority that comes with being a Saint…what’s the good of it? All it means is that I get to spend my life keeping my idiotic brethren from destroying themselves.
“Science is interesting, at least. But of course, with all the rules and institutions in place, you spend more time begging people to let you do things than actually doing them. It’s degrading…and frankly, I’m tired of it. All of it. A Saint should be doing something else…something meaningful.”
“What does that have to do with me??” I asked, trying to get to the point. I knew he saw everything that went on with the demons in the Box, and I knew he’d come to get me because of it. If he was going to punish me or whatever, I just wanted to get it over with.
Instead, he held my face. “You are MAGNIFICENT,” he said. “Before, I was only trying to assess your skill at assimilating other demons into your body; I never expected you to socially interact with them! Nothing like that has ever been done before, do you understand? And you’ve only just begun!
“You can destroy them, consume them, control them; now you can even befriend them…considering the hold the demons have on this planet, and on every other planet they’ve colonized, you’re on the road to becoming the most powerful person in the galaxy! And I’m going to use you…while I still can.”
I didn’t like the sound of that…or any of the other crazy thoughts that he wasn’t even bothering to hide from me at that point. But what could I do? He could still threaten Clarion, and I still had a big glob of silver nitrate in my chest. Toll had the upper hand, and I would never be able to take it from him. I would be on his leash until the day he died.
Until the day he died.
In the deepest, darkest corner of my mind…I realized what I had to do.
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