Second Skin - Chapter 0015

Chapter 15 — Youngest Child

The ” yes ” was still there when Sebastian mustered the courage to move.

It had settled behind his forehead, exactly where it had landed, like a lightbulb sits in your eyes after you’ve looked away from it. He waited for it to dissolve. He counted the drops falling somewhere deep in the shed, between the machines, one at a time, with the patience of a slow clock, and when he reached twenty, the word was still there, whole, without having lost a single syllable.

He looked around as if someone might have broken in.

Nobody had it. The warehouse was the same as an hour before: the gray beam of light that descended from the trapdoor and died before touching the ground, the rusted trusses disappearing into the darkness of the ceiling, the machines huddled in the corners, nameless and unused, and the counter he had wiped with his sleeve, now covered in crumpled paper, empty chicken crates, four milkshake glasses with bent straws. The notebook, open amidst the mess, was the brightest thing in the place, and the cursor blinked at the end of the last line of the record, waiting. It smelled of cold grease and iron. His fingers still glistened with oil.

Thirteen years. That was all he had to deal with. Thirteen years, a shed that had been closed longer than he had existed, and something inside his body that had just answered a question.

He didn’t know how to do it. There was no manual, no forum, no one had written a post explaining where to start a conversation with whatever lives inside your belly. He could think of the questions. He had learned on Friday that the creature heard what he thought, including what he preferred no one else to hear, and could then ask from within, receive the answer from within, and the whole conversation would happen without him moving his mouth. The idea made him feel slightly nauseous. If he did that, nothing would remain that was solely his. Not even his voice.

The fear was there, too. He knew it well, from Thursdays and Fridays, and he knew that this was his fear: something that emptied him, that made his knees weak and his head white. That fear had come with him to the shed, gone down the iron ladder with him, and sat down beside him at the counter while he ate. It wasn’t going away just because he had decided to speak.

He spoke just like that. Softly, but with his mouth, to the empty shed, feeling the ridiculousness of the situation and swallowing the ridiculousness along with everything else:

“Are you like those things… from that night? From the square?”

She knew the answer. She had heard a “yes” in front of the mirror on Friday, and that “yes” had cost the creature everything she had. She wanted to hear it again. She wanted the whole phrase, from a whole voice, to know once and for all what she was dealing with.

” Yes. ”

It arrived clean. Without the rough strands of Friday, without falling apart at the end, without giving the impression that it was going to die mid-sentence. It arrived ready, like a thought arrives, and the only difference was that the thought wasn’t his.

” The one who grabbed you was my father. ”

He already knew that too. The creature had said “my father” on Friday, in a worn voice, and he had spent the entire night learning who this father was: a name from the documentaries his mother turned off, a red-haired man smiling on his knees on the wet asphalt. Still, hearing the creature say it with such clarity, without any effort, made his ribs throb with anticipation.

“How?” It came out weakly. He cleared his throat and repeated, more firmly. “How is that possible? You were… inside him?”

” When Spider-Man cut off my father’s hand, I went too. ”

There was a pause. It seemed like a different pause this time: the pause of someone choosing how to explain something to someone who will never fully understand it.

” I don’t know if you can imagine. When I was trapped in my father’s body, I didn’t know what part of him I was in. I had no idea. I could move, yes. But moving around in there is like moving in a place without light, without ground, without walls. There’s nowhere to look. ”

” That night I felt my father was different. Agitated. I deduced he was hunting. And I began to move around his body, to feel what was happening. ”

” Little did I know that the part where I left off would be cut. ”

The scene returned without him calling for it: the dark disc piercing the creature’s forearm at the exact crease of the wrist, so clean it made no sound, and the manhole cover embedded in the asphalt twenty meters below, singing. The hand losing all tension around it. The fingers, which remained closed on the ribs even without any arm behind them.

He frowned.

“But if you left, a part of your father left too. Right?”

” Yes. The hand that closed around his body was almost entirely his. Most of the biomass belonged to my father. I was a small thing in the middle of it all. ”

” When we were taken to the top of that building, Spider-Man freed you from his hand. Finger by finger. What was left was dumped on the ground, and the part that lost contact with my father was left with no one. It was my job to take care of it. To claim it. Thanks to that, I kept that part for myself. ”

He remembered the hand falling onto the gravel beside him with a heavy thud, its hands facing upwards. The fingers slowly retracting, alone, like a dead spider. He remembered thinking that exact word. Dead.

“And you became fixated on me.” He didn’t even raise his voice at the end. “Right?”

” Indeed. We symbiotes don’t survive very well outside of a host. You were the only one close to me. ”

” While you were busy, focused on the fight down there, I broke in. I got inside your clothes. Your shoes. And I hid there. ”

Focused on the fight. Sebastian had spent a long time clinging to the parapet of that terrace, his face turned towards the square and his eyes filled with colorful blurs, trying to piece together a battle from flashes, tremors, and sounds. His whole body pointed in that direction. His back to his hand.

And the hand was big. He calculated it now, something he hadn’t been able to do at any point before: a five-meter-tall creature, a hand that encircled him from the waist up, fingers as thick as his thigh. It was a lot of material. A lot of biomass, as she called it. On Thursday, when he went down, he was sure the whole hand had stayed up there; on Friday, in front of the mirror, he already knew it hadn’t. And, honestly, trying to remember carefully now, he didn’t recall seeing the hand in the gravel when he left. He didn’t even remember looking. He could barely see beyond his own arm that night, and when Spider-Man returned, the rest of the terrace ceased to exist.

” You must be wondering why you didn’t notice me getting inside your clothes. ”

Yes, I thought so. I hadn’t said a word about it.

” Know that we symbiotes know how to hide very well. Better than anything you know. ”

“But what about the weight?” He pointed to his own chest, as if the gesture explained something. “That whole hand. It must have weighed more than me. So I rode my bike down with it. I climbed six flights of stairs. I…”

” I had to consume it to survive. All of it. That’s why you didn’t feel anything. ”

Consume. The word entered and fit in with others that were already there, without asking permission: the hunger on Friday afternoon, the bucket of nuggets that made no difference, the purple rib on Thursday and just skin on Friday, the scar that disappeared from his finger. He was beginning to understand the reason for several things happening at the same time. He didn’t like any of them.

He hesitated before asking the next question. He leaned his back against the counter, the cold metal piercing his jacket, and let his mind wander from one point to another, the way he would examine an entire diagram before placing the iron on any particular track. He tried to grasp the situation at once. The picture didn’t add up. Pieces were missing, and some of the pieces that were there didn’t match each other.

“You told me that if we separated, we would die.” She stared into the darkness of the trellises. “Am I right?”

” Yes. ”

” Unfortunately, I am very weak. Very weak. That’s why I wasn’t in the attack that my brothers were in. ”

Brothers. The square returned from another angle: the smaller creatures lined up behind the larger one, heads below their shoulders, short steps, mouths closed. He had interpreted the line as obedience. Now it had another name. Those there, those who slid down the facades on all fours, those who threw a policeman over a patrol car as if he were made of styrofoam, were brothers of what lived inside him. A family. And the youngest had stayed home.

“What do you mean by weak?”

” My father says I was born defective. Sick. Different from my siblings. ”

” He nurtured the others for years. He made them all strong. I was the youngest. It was an accident. ”

” Symbiotes take too long to reproduce. Way too long. But my father somehow managed to reproduce faster than our species can. I have no idea how. He did it before I was born. I just know that something went wrong when I was being conceived. ”

” My father says I’m defective. That I need more fuel than others to sustain myself. That I can’t generate mass like my brothers do. ”

Sebastian thought of the creatures in the square. Large. Bulky, with shoulders that wouldn’t fit through a door, with a strength that bent railings and lifted grown men by their vests. Of what was inside him, he knew the reflection in the mirror: a boy made of shadow, thin, with prominent collarbones and knees too wide for his thighs, who copied his movements.

“So you can’t do what your brothers do.”

” Partially. ”

” You need to understand one thing. We get stronger with each generation. Each one carries forward a part of the previous hosts, and the following generations are born with it. That’s what should have happened to me too. ”

” But I’m different. ”

“But you changed my body.” Sebastian raised one hand and looked at her, at the smooth index finger where the soldering iron mark had been. “You did this.”

” Yes. On the first night I managed to heal his vision. I made his bones denser, his muscles too. But it’s not permanent. ”

“What do you mean, it’s not permanent?”

” I need to make an active effort to maintain this. As long as I’m in your body, it will be maintained. If we are separated… ” A short pause. ” I doubt we’ll survive. Either of us. ”

He already knew. He had read about amphibians and cats on the defunct website in the early hours of the morning. Even so, his brow furrowed.

”Like this?”

” Because I am very weak, I had to attach myself to you in a more lasting way than normal. I attached myself to certain organs: stomach, heart, and lungs. It’s the way to extract nutrients more efficiently. ”

” If we are separated, there’s a good chance I could cause you serious internal damage. And the lack of those nutrients would probably kill me soon after. ”

Sebastian rested his elbows on the counter and pressed his forehead into his hands.

Stomach. Heart. Lungs. He knew the diagram from the science books, a figure cut in half with the pieces painted in different colors, and he had never thought of his own body parts as things someone could cling to. He knew he was in a bad situation since Friday morning. He knew it since the rat incident. He hadn’t expected it to be this bad. A month was just a number; he had even written the deadline in his folder, with the date. Now the month had fingers, and those fingers were closed around his heart.

But there was the other side, and his mind, which never stopped, wandered there on its own. Cletus Kasady was in prison. Delancey84’s post stated this explicitly: Spider-Man cornered Carnage on a rainy night, and after that night Carnage never appeared again, but the man, in an orange jumpsuit, did, kneeling between two policemen. Smiling. If the man was in a maximum-security prison and the creature was roaming freely in the square the day before yesterday, then someone, at some point, had managed to separate the two. There was a way. At least one.

“Do you know of any form of separation?”

” There are some. But they vary depending on the generation. ”

” I’m from a very new generation. I’m very different from the older ones. This could change the way extraction is done. It could change everything. ”

”Like this?”

” Symbiotes have weaknesses. Fire. Certain types of sound frequencies. With each generation, this problem diminishes somewhat. My siblings, for example, had a much greater resistance to fire than previous generations. Even so, they were still vulnerable to some frequencies. ”

”And you?”

” I have no idea. ”

Sebastian lifted his head from his hands.

” Because I am defective, disabled, my father never tested me. He kept me trapped inside him. Isolated from the world. What I know, I know from what I managed to extract from him while I was inside, and it’s not much. Nothing substantial. ”

” I know I’m weak. I know I can’t generate biomass. I know I don’t have the powers my brothers have. ”

“So what are you capable of?” The question came out before he could even measure her. “What can you do?”

” You already know this. I managed to enhance your physical attributes. ”

” And I can emulate Spider-Man’s powers. ”

Emulate. Sebastian repeated the word internally, and as he did so, he noticed again the strangeness that had accompanied him since the first “yes,” a feeling he hadn’t yet stopped to confront. He said “listen,” because there was no other word. But he heard nothing. No sound entered his ears, no vibration came from outside, from the shed. The creature’s words were generated right there in his head, with the same texture as the thoughts he had alone, without him having made them. As if a piece of his own brain answered the questions the rest of his brain asked, and answered things he didn’t know. A strange feeling that he couldn’t explain even to himself. If one day he had to explain it to someone else, he wouldn’t know where to begin.

What the creature had just said, however, transcended all of that and reached its intended destination, and his heart began to pound.

“You can emulate Spider-Man’s powers.” I needed to hear it again. “His?”

” Yes. My predecessor was apparently already connected to him. ”

“Your father?”

It came out crooked. Carnage, the creature that had licked his face and promised he would be the first, that had spilled two years of blood across a New York that no longer existed, linked to humanity’s greatest hero. The image refused to come together. And, at the same time, there were the photos from the forums, all of them, without exception: the black suit, the white spider on his chest.

” Maybe yes. Maybe no. ”

” I know I have a connection to Spider-Man. I don’t know what it is. ”

“How can you not know?”

” As I’ve already explained, we carry on parts of our former hosts. I know that somehow I was already connected to him. When he held us both and placed us on top of the building, I felt that connection. As if a small part of me had come from him. ”

” It’s strange to explain. ”

“You have no idea,” Sebastian said, and for a moment he felt like laughing, without knowing why.

” That’s where I know the abilities I can give you come from. Your strength, your resilience. That doesn’t come from me. It’s a byproduct I inherited from my ancestors. And I believe it comes from Spider-Man. ”

“So…” He swallowed. “So now I have Spider-Man’s powers?”

” Partially. ”

” I’m from a much later generation than the one who had contact with him. I don’t know how much of that reached me. I have no idea what percentage of that power we possess. Whether it’s five percent. Whether it’s one. Right now, I don’t know. ”

“But you already gave me those powers. Right? I climbed that rope. I dodged a punch without even seeing it.” He stopped, because the list was already clear. “It’s done.”

” Partially. ”

” This process takes time. And I need a lot of energy. What I managed to do on the first night was consume some of my father’s energy, the energy that remained in his hand. I absorbed it all. And with that, I made his body stronger, his reflexes faster, I healed his eyes. But it’s not that simple. This can’t be done all at once. ”

” With the energy you provided today, perhaps I can make even more changes. ”

Sebastian remained silent for a long time. His hand lay open on the counter, between an empty box and the notebook, white, with faded freckles at the knuckles, and he looked at it as if he could see inside. That hand had climbed sixteen meters of rope. It had climbed all the way to his mouth on Friday, when he wanted to scream. And now someone was telling him that this was only the beginning.

The powers of Spider-Man. Of Peter Parker. Of the man who knelt on the gravel so the photo would come out at his height, the yellowed cutout on the closet door, the watch on his wrist, the oldest memory he had of his father. The greatest example of life he knew. Sebastian was thirteen years old and didn’t know much yet, but he had been sure of that since before he could read.

” I see you’re excited. ”

It was. The creature sensed it, and he sensed the creature sensing it, through the same thread that had been running in both directions since noon, and there was no point in pretending.

“And how could I not?” His voice came out louder than he intended and returned from the back of the shed a little later, alone. “Now I’m just like him.”

” And what do you intend to do? ”

It was as if someone had grabbed his body by the collar and thrown him back into real life.

“To do.” The creature asked with the naturalness of someone asking the time. And the answer that appeared first, before any other, showed Sebastian what the question really meant: to do something with it was to put himself at risk. That’s what heroes did. All of them. He had seen up close on the farm, closer than anyone should see, what happened to those who got involved.

And he had a mother who would come home from her shift in the early hours of the morning and sleep sitting on the sofa. He had a seven-year-old sister who knew the emergency list by heart, and his name was at the top of the list. If he got hurt, if he disappeared, if he ended up on the sidewalk wrapped in a silver blanket, or not even that, there was no one else at home to take care of things. Too much risk. Too much risk for someone who was the adult in the house for half the day.

But…

But helping people was all he ever wanted. He always wanted to be alongside his heroes, on the inside of the yellow ribbon, and he always knew that place belonged to a different kind of people. He was an ordinary human. Not even a mutant. A skinny boy with thick glasses who fixed watches from scrap parts and delivered food in the snow.

Now it was in his hands. The chance to give his mother and Camila a better life. To help those who were outside the tape, on the sidewalk, as he himself had been. It was what he had dreamed of since childhood. And he was still a child, he knew that, even though it had been a long time since he had behaved like one.

“I don’t know,” he said to the counter, to the cash registers, to the blinking cursor. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with this.”

” Okay. I don’t know what you’re going to do. But I want you to know one thing. ”

” If we’re going to do anything, we’re going to need energy. ”

“Are you talking about food?” Sebastian looked at the leftovers on the counter, and the question seemed absurd to him even as he asked it. “I just gave you twenty-four thousand calories.”

” Twenty-four thousand is a lot. ”

” But if we want to maintain it, and carry out all the processes that need to be done in your body, consider providing at least double that amount. Daily. ”

Double. Forty-eight thousand. He looked at the empty boxes, folded the stack over his head, and the shock came before he even finished counting. An adult ate two thousand calories a day, maybe three. What he had just heard was the lunch of sixteen adults, every day, for as long as that lasted.

The shock, however, lasted less than it should have. It wasn’t impossible. He saw it almost immediately, with the part of his head that did budgeting. Thanks to a process that had revolutionized food production years before he was born, fast food was the cheapest thing in town: cheaper than fruit, cheaper than rice, cheaper than anything his mother carefully chose at the market. Nothing healthy. It never had been. He doubted, however, that with that thing inside him he would have any problems with what he ate. Fat, salt, sugar. From what he was seeing, everything turned into energy. Everything was fuel.

The number was still swirling in his head when another idea sparked, coming from a corner that had nothing to do with calories. He almost laughed at not having thought of it before.

“Okay.” He straightened his back. “We’re starting a… relationship here. And I still don’t know your name.”

” My father never gave me a name. ”

It was said without any weight. As a fact, as if to say that the hand was large. Sebastian felt, on the other end of the line, a stillness, and couldn’t tell if it was indifference or its opposite, kept too deep for the creature itself to see.

“So, can I give you one?”

” Try it. ”

He thought.

The father’s name was Carnage. And the whole situation, that family of black things with too many teeth, reminded him of another name, of an old villain who had disappeared in a strange way: he appeared in documentary lists, appeared in old photos, and then simply ceased to appear, except for two or three times when he showed up, without any explanation, helping the Avengers. Sebastian never understood it. A black creature, with white spider-like details on its chest, large eyes, and a tongue too long for its mouth. Venom. He was almost certain it was Venom.

The same species. The one that lived inside him, the one he had faced in the square. The degree of resemblance was absurd, now that he had the life-size model in his memory: the teeth, the tongue, the white eyes. And, if it was the same species, there was a pattern in the names. Venom. Carnage. Names that said what the thing did, what it was, before any other introduction.

He searched. He rolled around a few words and discarded some. None sounded like the other two; most sounded like band names. He sat there for a while, with the wind scraping against the metal sheet above, until one clicked.

“What do you think of Flagelo?”

Silence.

A true silence, which he felt like a closed room inside him. But the room wasn’t empty. Through the wire, Sebastian sensed something moving on the other side, and what was moving didn’t seem to be disgust. The creature was experimenting with the word. Turning it from side to side, as it did with a piece found in the street, to see where it fit.

” It’s not a bad name. ”

And after a moment:

” From now on, call me Scourge. “