Chapter 12: Retrofitting
Satisfied that Josh Taylor was sound asleep, Wicus stepped through the portal with a mixture of anxiety and dread. He'd spied on the young widower for forty-five minutes and felt reasonably sure that his arrival would go unnoticed. Granted, when Wicus had started his task a while back, he used a cloaking spell to mask his movements, eventually deciding it was overkill and abandoning it.
His feet were reluctant to proceed in spite of the energy pulsing through him, believing that it was his body preparing itself for the severity of the work ahead.
At the moment it wasn’t his body he was worried about, his concern centered on the software engineer. The adjustments were plaguing the young man. Wicus wondered if they were having a larger, negative impact on Josh’s health. Every night the horrific nightmares returned.
Not that Wicus doubted his obligation, it had to be done. Emily Wren needed a soul mate. He sighed, growing more irritated with each session. Hating the inadvertent turmoil that he was causing.
Once he entered the bedroom, he heightened Josh's sleep with a wave of his hand, sending him into a magically induced dream state. The spell was guaranteed to keep the candidate under while he worked. Wicus also hoped it might numb some of the side effects.
From what he’d witnessed, it hadn’t.
During the months that he'd been making nightly visits to the Taylor home, he'd made slow progress.
He heard a slight clink behind him. It sounded like a diamond striking metal. One of the candelabra’s no doubt.
"You gonna finish his second marker?" whispered Waxine from the magic gateway. There was no skim on it, when Wicus looked back he saw her hovering there in all of her shinning glory. An inquisitive look on her countenance. How could a metallic face seem so human? he marveled, not for the first time.
He imagined what a shock it would be if Josh awoke and saw a bejeweled candelabra floating in the air. Wasn’t it already bad enough that he was giving him nightmares? Seeing her might make the lad question his sanity. Did she want to send him over the deep end?
"Shh...Waxine... close that portal," he hissed, glancing at the sleeping form of the widower. Josh was under the slumber spell, that didn’t mean it was time to press his luck.
"I'm restless... I want to help," she carped, edging closer to the threshold.
Wicus noticed.
"Don't do that... you can't come over here... channel your energy into something else right now," he instructed in a low tone.
"Like what?"
"Don't I have some other pairings about to be made? Do some recon on that..." he whispered, adding "Please," to soften the sting.
A moment later the portal disappeared.
He felt a pang of guilt.
Obviously Waxine had wanted to come along, she loved exploring and traveling. Since he was actually working in the human world while both men were asleep, they couldn't chance it.
If someone spotted Wicus, he could simply blink on a pair of sunglasses to hide his eyes and he'd pass for human. Waxine on the other hand… well there were not many living candelabras hanging out with people on this side of the veil, he mused, the corner of his mouth twitching.
She did once with an immortal. The sudden thought sent a chill down his sturdy spine. He had faith that she’d get over it.
Time to get to work. It was the same message he thought each night, usually followed by; Don’t screw this up.
Standing there he felt the grip of fear in his stomach. The flat plain would subside after he got going, he knew that.
His mind settled, he turned to the business at hand. Wicus had had a fairly easy time retrofitting the first marker. The second one still needed a bit more work. Surprisingly, the hallmarks offered the most resistance in this human.
Usually hallmarks were easier to change than soul markers, at least in his limited experience, never having needed to do a full scale retrofitting before. But Josh's were identical to his late wife's. Due to the trauma of her passing they were emotionally tied to his soul, linked to memories in his amygdala meaning they were connected to his physical body, that's why Wicus was having such a hard time adjusting them.
Hence his anxiety.
The physical ties had to be completely severed. A painstaking process that made his work all the more difficult. For Josh, it meant that all the painful memories would be dredged up, again and again, until all ties were detached.
Doubt again assailed Wicus’ mind. Should he abandon Josh as a candidate? The young man had been through enough misery already. Had Aaron and Al thought as much during their impromptu visit? Why hadn’t the pair said something? Or had they?
Wicus frowned. In his arrogance had he ignored something? The notion setting off more questions about his judgment.
He decided to finish work on the second soul marker before trying to sever any more of the physical connections to Josh's hallmarks. He began the delicate task by pulling out part of the widower's soul.
If the entire soul was taken out of the body, Josh would die. A human cannot live without a soul -- even for a moment. And Wicus had no desire to kill the candidate. As a safety precaution, Wicus pulled only a fifth of the soul out at a time.
He paused for a moment as he did every night, marveling at the unrivaled beauty of a soul....its complete vulnerability. Comprised of pure white light, raw and unsullied, more innocent than a newborn babe. He fought the urge to shield it and return it to its host. The protective impulse receding.
No, the die was cast. There’s no going back, he must do this. Press on and complete the task.
"Emily must have her shot," he mumbled, glancing briefly at Josh. No reply came from the snoring engineer, save his taking another deep breath and exhaling with a low gnarring noise in the back of his throat.
Wicus measured the marker and found its dimensions. "Still four ticks too short," he mumbled to the sleeping man.
Reaching one hand into a deep pocket, Wicus retrieved his stardust chisel from within the folds of fabric.
All humans are made out of stardust, accordingly he needed the tool to adjust the soul. Next, he pulled out a mallet of light, which looked like a modified gavel -- slightly larger than a judge's and smaller than the comic book character, Thor's, infamous hammer. One side wielded angelic power, the other not so much. Some souls needed an element of mischievousness added now and then.
Deftly placing the chisel on his last stopping point, wiggling the cutting edge into the groove. His eyes narrowed, focusing their intensity on the spot. This was a demanding affair which he conducted with a great deal of solemnity.
His companion said that he looked like a sculptor as he went to work, except he was hammering on the equivalent of a beam of light. No hard marble or granite here, he thought. A small smile spread over his mouth in remembrance.
Pounding over and over, moving the chisel carefully yet strategically around the soul until the marker gradually yielded to his will. The skills he’d displayed in the past sessions had surprised even himself. How had he figured out so quickly the best way to inflict the meticulous blows? Pleased. He forged on. Sparks flew as the chisel hit its spot, removing particles of soul.
Wicus wished he could gather them up, hating for them to go to waste. When the particles detached, they instantly withered and disappeared. Each uttering a tiny pinging noise that sounded like a minuscule cry.
Blinking several times, he tried to refocus his attention. Distracted partially by the perceived whimpering and partly by his own self doubt, he began to question his judgment about whether the engravings were of the best quality.
One moment the chisel was in the right place, the next it wasn’t.
The mallet striking it hard.
A corner edge came down at an angle, creating a small hole where a line should be.
He gasped aloud.
Forgetting the sleeping figure, he cried out, “Oh my God, No!”
Hastily pulling aside hi
s tools to examine the blunder, his eyes wide. It took him a moment to even check on Josh. Such was his distress. A quick glance reassured him that the young man was still under.
What to do? he cringed. Eyes searching the soul for a remedy. That mistake would have to be repaired. Could it be? A hole was not part of the required pattern. If he didn’t get the pattern right, there’d be no magic.
“I’ll have to go over it,” he whispered. Finding some small relief in confessing his plans to the slumbering candidate. “If I stipple enough holes together perhaps I can reshape it into the line I need….or rather…you need.”
The next hours were arduous to him, every ounce of his being felt possessive over the soul and he struggled against altering it in this manner. His attention and diligence however were not distracted by his discomfort.
Anticipation of the kind of magic that would be released into the world when the two met supplanted his most pressing worries.
He dared not spend more than five hours a night working on either Josh or Charlie. Humans needed time to recover from the effects of the retrofitting. As poor a remedy as sleep was in these cases.
Wicus had hoped that his magical anesthesia would have prevented Josh from having nightmares, unfortunately it didn't work that way.
After that first night, when the adjustments were complete, he’d stood vigil on his side of the portal until the sleeping man ripped the quiet with a shrill cry, clawing the air, evidently battling waves of torment and grief that had threatened to drown him. They washed over Josh again and again like a violent tide, as if sucking him down into a drenching pit of despair.
For Wicus, witnessing it, knowing that the man suffered due to his actions was a crippling feeling. He didn’t care for cruelty or being the one to inflict it upon others.
“Forgive me Josh, this must be done…Emily must have her chance,” he’d whispered to the afflicted form.
Josh had thrashed on his bed, his heart beating so savagely, Wicus feared that the young man was going to have a cardiac episode. His posture ached with apparent signs of loss that radiated from his very core, tremors had sent shock waves of anguish ricocheting through his arms and legs until he woke up screaming for his beloved wife. "JULIA...JULIA...JULIA! WHERE ARE YOU...JULIA?"
Josh had sat up blinking as if trying to rid himself of the nightmarish image before his eyes. Confused expression. Like what he saw made no sense. “Why are you threatening her?” Josh asked the darkness -- blinking quickly-- like some image had entered his mind in a flash. One shattering heartbeat later it must have vanished.
Replaced no doubt by Julia’s face. He cried out again, talking to the phantom in his memory, “Julia…it’s you…so fresh and lovely and healthy…I miss you.”
Holding his arms up to whatever image haunted him. No welcoming embrace was returned. Blinking again, he looked around in disbelief. Sanity resurfacing.
Wicus saw the moment when Josh realized that Julia wasn’t there. The young man seemed to choke on the agony of losing her all over again, looking as though a hand had torn through his skin and pulled out his guts, shredding them. Unable to do anything about it -- he broke down sobbing.
Wicus had felt terrible.
Even so, he couldn't stop, it was part of the process. After what he witnessed that first night, he used his time more wisely and spent the rest of the wee hours working on the secondary.
“There …all done,” he told the sleeping Josh.
It took longer to fix the mistake than he’d anticipated. Eventually completing the pattern, he got the second soul marker adjusted.
Wicus eased the final section of Josh's battered soul back into his body and allowed him to rest.
He winced, feeling a little ashamed of himself. There’s no way that he would stick around to hear the screaming that would come from this night’s adjustments.
Instead Wicus opened a portal directly into Charlie Anderson's bedroom. He tried to stand still. It took effort. Tension from the previous hours of work and worry showed in the trembling of his hands. Breathing deeply he tried to slow his racing heart -- waiting for the portal to solidify.
The 26-year-old was sprawled on the bed on his stomach, snoring. Blond head face down on the mattress between two pillows.
Wicus stepped through the second portal.
Charlie choked back another snore and turned his head sideways, his dominate nose which had been broken once or twice gave his handsome face a somewhat high-born air.
During months of making adjustments to Charlie's soul, Wicus had come to realize that the young man was very active in his sleep, had lucid dreams and acted very oddly-- even for a human -- that had nothing to do with the aftermath of retrofitting. Not a night had gone by that the elementary school teaching assistant had not been tangled up in his bed sheets and blanket, his long legs dangling off the side of the bed, feet, toes first, on the floor.
Wicus had watched often enough to know that Charlie didn't start out in that position, the twists, turns and rolls of his sleeping contortions put him that way over the course of the night.
The secondary's two divergent hallmarks were modified to within the correct specifications within the first two months of the retrofitting. One of his soul markers had also been altered, leaving three to go. Wicus had started with Charlie’s hallmarks since fewer of them needed reprogramming. They were much easier to adjust than the other candidate's.
He hoped that his manipulations were correct. They would need to match exactly if this was going to work, he thought, wrestling with a pang of doubt. The stress of this duty weighing heavily on him.
Not that Charlie didn’t present his own share of obstacles.
About six weeks into the retrofitting process, the young man started giving Wicus other problems unrelated to the rigors of altering the soul. That's when Charlie decided to burn the candle at both ends with a new barren.
The romance had stymied Wicus in his task.
Charlie and his new hookup were having sex, lots of it. The young woman was very boisterous, bossy and quite flatulent.
Wicus could have put a sleeping spell on the pair, except the teaching assistant was not getting much sleep, barely a REM cycle a night. Any retrofitting under such conditions could have been dangerous. Fortunately the romance had not lasted long.
Relieved. It meant Wicus could resume his duties unimpeded. He suspected that Charlie was too, albeit for different reasons.
Now, feeling rushed -- a feeling he hated, Wicus began work on Charlie's second marker, very mindful of the time. Mallet and chisel in hand, Wicus was ready to pound away. Yet he hesitated.
Doubt racked his brain.
His eyes burned intensely as he paused to look at Charlie’s soul. Well suited to the undertaking, he examined each visible trace, impression, spot, dent, line, shadow or wrinkle in the marker that needed to be changed.
Alarmed, he paused. Irritated to discover a dark stroke where there shouldn’t be -- from the previous session.
“What am I doing?” he hissed under his breath disgusted with his own detected incompetence. “I can’t make these kinds of stupid errors.”
Taking several more deep breaths, he tried to calm down.
It wasn’t a mistake like he’d made with Josh but it could present a problem if he couldn’t maintain the right proportions on the design.
Steeling himself, he went to work.
Despite his protective feelings about the soul, in his efforts, he showed it no leniency. He had to do this right.
Not for the first time-- his mind pondered the reason behind this exercise. Why had both of Emily Wren’s soul mates been killed on the same day? What was behind this culling? Did someone really want to impede the progress of mankind? The idea was insane. Who would benefit? If some unknown enemy was behind this, surely the foe would know that the Paragons would act. Just as he was doing.
Wicus gasped as a new thought struck.
Glancing quickly
at Charlie’s sleeping form to see if his outburst had been heard.
A snuffling snore escaped the young man’s mouth. Clearly it hadn’t.
Was he putting the teaching assistant’s life in danger? It was a chilling notion. One that he didn’t have an answer for.
Wicus shook his head in aggravation and kept working.
Hammering here. Tapping more lightly there. Swiping the chisel across another vein of soul.
He reached a stopping point close to dawn.
Charlie wouldn’t have time for a full REM cycle of sleep, he thought.
“Unless--” he murmured, mentally calculating how long he could allow the young man to sleep and still get to work on time.
“You can forego your morning shower and coffee,” he mumbled to the snoring figure.
Receiving only a gurgled-snuffling sound in reply.
He reset the clock so that it appeared to have suffered a power outage. The alarm would sound, only it would be 90 minutes later than usual.
"That should help..." whispered Wicus, paternally patting the sleeping man's head before opening a portal for home.
It had not been an easy session for either candidate.
As he came through the gateway back into the office, his steps were punctuated with exhaustion.
Waxine turned abruptly. Her burnished gaze narrowed, obviously assessing him.
Wicus hesitated. Briefly closing his eyes, he pinched the bridge of his nose and released a long sigh. Since he’d been keeping erratic hours, he’d grown very moody. The task was causing him physical pain. Every morning he returned drained, suspecting that his pallor was no better than Josh’s. Charlie’s coping ability only a slight improvement.
He opened his eyes. “Why are you staring?” he asked, having quickly speculated and discarded several possible reasons for her scrutiny.
“You look awful,” she said in a tone suggesting that Wicus might not be aware of his condition.
“I’m fine,” he lied.
Her eyes shifted, giving a fretful look at the still open gateway behind him and she added in a more alarmed tone, “Good grief…close that portal before the screaming starts! I have no stomach for the repercussions of this kind of work.”
He did so with a wave of his hand.
“I can’t watch them anymore,” she admitted, shamefaced. “I’ve seen a lot working with you. Most of it far more fun…downright beautiful. But the suffering--” she stopped speaking, her metallic face grappling with emotions. She made a harsh noise clearing her throat, “You weren’t kidding before…when you said this was tough.”
Her burnished gaze looked distant and raw. Shaking her head at whatever inward image she remembered, the movement causing the flames over her invisible candles to sway and the jewels on her bobeches to twinkle casting a rainbow of color around the room.
“The screams and thrashing…especially from Josh’s room…it’s enough to wake the dead.” Her metallic body shuddered. It was clearly too much for the candelabra -- which only goes to show that if retrofitting was that upsetting to a hollow, metal, heartless person, it’s not difficult to imagine how Wicus felt.