The Sowing

We round a corner. The hall dead-ends into one of the most bizarre chambers I’ve ever seen. It’s a cross between the most gleaming, sophisticated tech that I can imagine and a primordial display of pulsing, tentacular appendages blended together in obscene symbiosis.

The center of the room is filled with rows and rows of capsules arranged in concentric circles; they remind me of cryogenic tubes. Their glass surfaces perspire with droplets of moisture, which makes the interiors opaque. Snakelike, scaly tubes descend from a nest of computer terminals suspended from the ceiling and feed into each of the capsules. I approach the nearest one and wipe the condensation away. I’m surprised to find it frosty, considering the heat being generated by all the blinking gauges and equipment in the chamber. Beneath the glass surface, I can barely make out a dark figure lying perfectly still in the thick, swirling cryogenic fog.

At the head of each of these capsules are digital readout displays that seem to be monitoring the vital signs of the patients inside. But these readouts track power levels and electrical impulses, which is odd. The data seems more like the kind of information you’d get from diagnostic and performance tests given to machinery and equipment, not to live human beings.

Digory looks up at me from the capsule he’s been examining, a puzzled look in his eyes that I’m sure is reflected on my own face.

“Let’s open one,” I say.

He joins me and together we comb the surface of a capsule, searching for the release mechanism to spring open its hatch.

After a few minutes of trying in vain, I slam my palm against the glass. “There’s got to be a button that opens this thing.”

But Digory doesn’t seem to think so. He leaps onto the pod and tears out one of the tubes feeding the pod with his bare hands.

I check to make sure no one’s coming. “Or we can do it that way.”

The hose hisses like an angry serpent. Digory wraps it around his fist and pummels the glass shield. A crack appears on the cryotube, which splinters into a thousand crystal streams before it’s punctured with an earsplitting crack.

The moment the container is breached, the lid bursts open with an arctic blast of mist, evaporating the sweat pooling on my body in an instant. I wave my hand until the haze dissipates enough for me to peer down at the capsule’s occupant.

A familiar-looking face stares up at me. And for a second, I think I’ve lost it.

It’s Crowley. Or at least a part of him. His naked torso seems intact, but his arms and everything from the waist down are covered in foul-smelling slime. It’s some kind of bio-synthetic cocoon. Wires and tubes slice into his skin as if he were a human pincushion. I can see flashing lights beneath the gooey membranes and hear the sickening squish as the substance fuses with Crowley’s skin, which has turned from the pale chalk color it was the last time I saw him to a sickly greenish tint.

Cassius announced that Crowley was dead. Seeing him like this, I wish it were true.

I lean closer to get a better look, and that’s when his hand darts up in a flash and grabs my arm, pulling me toward him. His eyes spring open, irises milky white.

Digory’s at my side in a flash, but I wave him off.

In spite of the horrific condition Crowley is in, there’s something truly pitiful in the way he’s looking at me, a mixture of fright and complete and utter dread that shreds my insides.

“Spark,” he whispers, his voice a thin rasp of its former self. As he speaks, noxious liquid dribbles from the corners of his lips.

I grip the hand that’s clutching me. “What have they done to you, Crowley?”

Milky white tears ooze from his eyes. “They’re changing me… making me one of them…”

His voice trails off, but I don’t need him to finish to know who them is.

Fleshers.

“We’re going to get you out of here.” Even as I say the words, my eyes dart across what’s left of his body and I feel helpless and frustrated.

He shakes his head. “Too late. No time. This whole place…”

His eyes wander for a few seconds. “All of these people… prisoners… Incentives that survived… they change them… turn them into…” His face screws up and an agonized mewl twists from his throat.

My body is racked with the shakes. Crowley is delirious with pain. That’s why he’s talking such craziness. The Incentives that survived… the loved ones of all the Imps… they can’t be in this place. I’ve seen Imposers communicating with their kin at Haven, carrying on conversations in real time. It’s the one carefully greased cog in the machine that keeps them following orders: knowing that those they care about are at least being taken care of, living a life they would otherwise have no chance at, all thanks to the sacrifice the Recruits have made. The continued well-being of what, in essence, are Establishment hostages is at the core of its lethally trained forces.