Sammy

Sammy

by Raúl Gonzálvez del Águila

Sammy towered over six feet two and must have weighed close to four hundred fifty pounds. My neck cracked as I stretched it to confront his triangular head and the small, faceted, inquisitive eyes that watched me, half-concealed beneath the wide-brimmed hat.

“Sammy, right?” I managed to tear my gaze from his head and pretended to check the performance manifesto. “You’re late, rookie.”

I suppose he wasn’t overly impressive for a giant cockroach – in my occasional forays into the city’s Blattella ghettos, I had seen numerous specimens exceeding eight feet in height, their span measured in bodybuilder torsos – but this was the first time I found myself so close to one. Despite the warnings the Zone Coordinator had given me about the nature of my new partner, I had to summon all my training as a ranger not to step back.

The head under the hat tilted to one side, like a puppy chastised for urinating on the carpet.

“I’m ssorry,” he said. “I haven’t been in the City long. Had trouble finding my way. Won’t happen again.”

The hat was perched in such a way that the dawn light masked most of his head and antennae, and the thick overcoat he wore draped over his bulky frame to the ground. To any curious pedestrian watching us from the bridges, we must have looked like just a couple of sewer workers.

“You better. I’m short on time.” I pointed to the old van. “Unload the equipment. I want to be done before lunch.”

Sammy moved slowly, as if he were used to knocking things over due to his size, and began to lower backpacks crammed with blood pipettes, candles, tobacco packs, oil flasks, and other accessories.

Maybe I was being too cautious by bringing so much equipment, but one learns the hard way that it’s better not to be too confident, even if it’s just a routine check. Some seals that closed off the tunnels under this area had worn out in the last few months and needed to be repaired, but after Areta’s death, everything had slowed down a bit for me, and the days of mourning turned into two weeks until the Coordinator assigned me a new partner. He was right. It’s not like I had time to spare.

I noted the rookie’s delay in the incidents manifesto and knelt over the metal sewer cover. That entrance had been sealed a couple of years back, and the remnants of the sealing team’s signature were still visible on the iron, like fine scratches. I touched the nearly worn seal with my index finger and checked that the blood powder – coagulated into granules after all this time – was ashen and almost crumbled. At first glance, it looked like a good job, but it clearly wasn’t, or the seal would still be intact. I shook my head and recorded the apparent neglect in the manifesto.

I asked Sammy to hand me three red opening candles and arranged them in an equilateral triangle on the cover before lighting them.

“Now, silence,” I muttered. “I need to concentrate.”

The wax of the candles contained a good amount of consecrated rat fat, and the acrid smoke hovered a few inches off the ground, thick and unpleasant. I placed my hands on one end and murmured the next forty-nine words of the opening psalm. As I uttered the last, the metal vibrated, warmed a few degrees, and I heard the satisfying creak of internal hinges unlocking.

I extinguished the candles and returned them to their box. The traces of the previous sealing smoked in dark spirals before disappearing completely. I stood up and glanced sideways at Sammy. After Areta’s death, I didn’t have the spirit to protest when they told me they were bringing me another partner. It’s the usual procedure for rangers, of course, but the fact that it was a Blattella was something they hid from me until the last moment.

I suppose they believe in the Department that we’re all xenophobes until proven otherwise. That wasn’t my case, but they weren’t entirely wrong.

“Lift it,” I ordered.

Sammy’s bulky form leaned over the cover, looking as though he might fold in half. Four thick, bristle-covered arms then emerged from the side openings of his overcoat, groped the cover until they found the rings, and then, with a smooth motion, twisted and lifted the four hundred pounds of the lid as if it were a fallen autumn leaf. He set it aside with the same gentleness as those leaves falling from trees.

I suppressed a grunt of admiration. Even with a crank, I would have taken much longer. I lit a flashlight and peered into the entrance. The air rising was stale, scented with the odor of old mold and rodent droppings. I observed the internal hinges fixed to the stone. One of them was rusted, almost black, showing clear bite marks. So, the reports were right: the damn darkrats had found a crack.

“Sshould we fix it?”

One of Sammy’s arms pointed to the damaged hinge. Smart kid, I thought.

“We’ll do it on the way out. First, let’s check the seals below.”

I picked six blood pipettes, a couple of tobacco packs, the camera, and some manual sealing tools which I put in my backpack. Sammy filled his with the same supplies.

“You’ve received the basic training, I assume.”

“Yess, ssir. I wass at the Marssella training camp for ssix months. Got ussed to working with humanss there.”

“Good. Hope they taught you to suck in your gut. You first.”

He tilted his head again, which I took to be his version of a shrug. It wasn’t pleasant to watch his bulky form contract and creak as he squeezed through the gap while his six limbs deftly clung to the damp rungs.

These accesses were over a century old, and they were never intended for use by giant cockroaches. But if the darkrats continued to expand, we’d have no choice but to adapt them, as we would need every magic-bearer we could muster to contain them.

I was holding Areta’s hand when she died. Her body, ravaged by blood cancer, shuddered in a final spasm, and then stopped breathing. I felt then the magic leave that vessel of flesh and return to the Flow, while a small part seeped through her skin and clung to my hand, penetrating my organs until it reached my guts. The transfer made me a little more powerful, a little stronger, and in return, it ate away a few days of the little life I had left.

The day was cloudy, and only a milky light seeped from the sewer hole. The vault had been part of the city’s old sewer system before being sealed, long before the darkrats became first a passing nuisance, then a constant irritation, and finally, an ever-more palpable threat.

I lit the flashlight and offered another to Sammy.

“I ssee perfectly in the dark,” he replied. He lifted his hat until his antennae emerged, waving in circles. “Thankss anyway.”

Down there, with all the silence of the world around us, his voice resonated differently. Concentrated like freshly squeezed lemon juice, and certainly, it didn’t come from his mouth.

Blattellas emitted a wide variety of sounds, but human speech, learned since the first humans arrived in Madagascar, came from their abdomen. This one possessed a series of hollow spiracles located on the fourth segment, through which air circulated, contracted, and was expelled in the same way a vertebrate’s throat would do.

I lit some of the tallow lamps hanging from the walls, and a reluctant, dim glow was conjured. Four repulsion seals were drawn towards the four cardinal points. The North seal appeared almost faded, and the ram’s blood used to activate it had been reduced to a few streaks, the rest gnawed away. Several dozen mummified darkrat corpses lay there, shrunken and probably annihilated by the weak countermeasures of the seal as it was being attacked—a tribute to the persistence of unreason.

I took out the camera, screwed a magnesium bulb onto the reflector guide, and took a panoramic photograph of the entire setup and one of each of the cardinal seals.

“Are sso many necessary?” asked Sammy when I returned the camera to the backpack.

“Cryptography guys are as fussy as a Swiss governess, you’ll see. To them, nothing is enough.” I pulled a cigarette from one of the packs and placed it between my lips at a certain angle. “They’ll use the photographs to find the seals’ weak points and improve them.”

I lit the cigarette, inhaled, and exhaled smoke over the darkrat corpses while muttering a preservation psalm. The smoke condensed on them in a thick snow, covering them like fresh cement. “Rookie, give me a hand.”

We dislodged the petrified bodies, now resembling statues, and piled them aside. Covered in smoke cement, they looked like statues imagined by some Rodin tormented by endless nightmares.

I had a bad feeling as I examined them closely. They all seemed too young, but that was a job for the cryptographers.

“They must have come in through here,” I pointed at the nearly absent part of the North seal, “but I guess the retention must have been too robust for the adults, hence the small bite marks on the hinge of the cover. They were the work of the young ones.”

“Doess thiss happen often here?”

“No. Not that I know of, at least. But if they had cracked all six hinges, we would have had a problem. Let’s go.” I patted him. “Get a ram’s blood pipette and consecrate it. I’ll prepare a provisional retention seal while they send a sealing team.”

Hopefully, they’ll be more competent than the last one, I murmured to myself.

Sammy took out the pipette from his backpack and began to chant the consecration in a low voice. I lit another cigarette and approached the wall, mentally reviewing the sealing psalm. I had to have it clear in my mind before exhaling the smoke or I’d have to start over. I held it for almost a minute, studying the lines of the previous team, trying to recreate those erased by the darkrats, and reconstructing the whole in an almost dreamlike plane. I exhaled, and the cloud of smoke covered the wall from bottom to top. I placed my palms on the wall and recited a retention psalm elaborate enough to be composed of a hundred two words.

The smoke rippled in elongated snakes that overlaid the lines of the previous seal, drawing the mental map I had imagined. The figure glowed in a muted green, and the smoke solidified on the wall. I immediately felt the vibration of the seal completing and the residual heat emanating from the bricks.

I gasped and started coughing. For a moment, pain seized me in a bitter flash that seemed capable of splitting my chest in two. When I regained my composure, Sammy was by my side. He was holding my back and looking at me, and I was surprised that those insect eyes could convey genuine concern.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes. You know—” I gasped. “Occupational hazards.”

The pain eased enough for me to straighten up. I moved aside and spat. My mouth tasted of blood, but I was beginning to get used to it. It was another symptom that my time was running out, and there was no way to avoid it. There was no reason to feel sad, I reminded myself. After all, the lung cancer that was slowly killing me was also the only thing that allowed me to control the magic of the Flow.

Two men dressed in strict mourning visited me the day after I received the diagnosis. Much later, I discovered that the Department has eyes in all hospitals, and some doctors receive certain compensations when they recommend a patient for recruitment.

Of course, there are certain inescapable requirements that make one suitable for recruitment and subsequent training. Early stages, but incurable in the long term. Relatively young individual. With little or no direct family. Preferably with previous skills in fields like cryptography, theology, tarot, linguistics, mathematics, etc…

I met almost all of them. Thirty-nine years old, recently divorced, no children, with elderly parents, and no contact with my three older brothers. Ten years working as a crossword editor for all sorts of newspapers and magazines, and enough tobacco in my lungs to have rebuilt the Statue of Liberty from ash.

“If it had been caught in time, you could have been saved,” one of the Recruiters told me as he glanced through a copy of my medical history. “A few months earlier would have sufficed. I’m sorry,” he said, but it was clear he wasn’t sorry at all.

At that moment, I still hadn’t processed the news. I felt fine, apart from an annoying cough that wouldn’t go away, which I had attributed to an overly cold winter. It felt like a bad joke that everyone was intent on playing on me.

So, when those men started talking to me about the Flow, I looked at them as if they were insane, and it wasn’t long before I nearly kicked them out of my house.

Sammy finished going over my smoke seal with the consecrated blood and I allowed him to execute a simple closing psalm. I had five years of experience, considered myself one of the best rangers in the Department, and had learned much about the Flow since the day I was recruited. I thought I had mastered the magic as well as anyone. Until I saw Sammy in action.

He didn’t chant the psalm with the spiracles in his abdomen but vibrated his mandibles like a boy scout making fire with two sticks. The sharp hiss cut through the air, and I could almost see it condensing around the blood, imbuing it with the invisible substance of the Flow. When he finished, it was as if the seal had always been there. I cautiously felt the wall. No trace of residual heat. Sammy tilted his head towards me as if waiting for my approval.

“Not bad,” I grumbled reluctantly. “They taught you well in Marsella.”

He accepted the compliment with another head tilt, but I knew it wasn’t just the training that had achieved that skill. So, it was true what they said. Blattellas could access the Flow more easily and effectively than humans.

“And now?” he asked as he put the empty pipette back in the backpack. “Iss that all?”

I pointed with the flashlight towards the internal tunnels until the beam of light was swallowed by the damp shadows. The sealed channels under the Grand Canal twisted into a maze of labyrinths, whose architecture only partly corresponded to human minds and hands. It was said that there were things much worse than darkrats down there, things that had raised similar mazes of stone beneath every human city, from which to ascend to our world, and that it was to contain them that the Department had been created in the first place. Maybe it was true, but I was in no hurry to find out.

Still, work was work. I checked the location of the next seal on the map: It was at an intersection near an old dried-up collector, one thousand feet from our position. If the darkrats had made it this far, it meant they must have corroded it, at least partially. I would feel more at ease repairing it, and the cryptographers would appreciate the photos too.

“We’ll take a look further ahead,” I said.

The burning in my chest hadn’t fully subsided, but I tried not to let it show as I started walking. I still had strength. I still had some life to squeeze out.

The first thing the Recruiters explained to me was that the Flow couldn’t heal me. No matter how much they tried. And that was the first thing I had to accept if I wanted to join them.

“So, why am I still listening to your nonsense?” I asked, and they shrugged their shoulders and began to explain what the Flow was.

It was, they explained, something like the purest core of reality. A kind of primordial sea settled at the very base of the physical universe we knew, capable of twisting its qualities, as long as one could access it. Humanity had always sensed it, like a shadow glimpsed out of the corner of the eye that never fully condensed. It was what the Celtic druids had called the Stream of Life, or the medieval alchemists, the Quintessence. But only in the last century had we managed to access and somewhat master the Flow.

One of the reasons for such a delay was that access to the Flow did not come easily. Only those humans in whom the end of their lives was as imminent as undeniable were able to achieve it. In jest, we called ourselves the Army of the Dying. There was no other way to put it. It was the damned truth.

Areta believed that we were chosen. That’s why she faced her moment with a peace I am unable to reach. Every time I mutter a psalm or perform a spell, I only feel like a tool, an old and cracked hammer that would be discarded without a second thought if another way to access the Flow were found.

But there isn’t.

This is what the Recruiters revealed to me that day, and when, tired of their nonsense, I grabbed one by the neck to throw them out, the other simply took out a tiny flask filled with whisky, drank it, and after reciting a psalm, began spitting out gold coins until the floor was carpeted with them.

“Throat cancer,” he explained as he spat out the last one, amused at my stunned expression. “We can’t cure you, friend. But we can give you something almost as good.”

What else was I going to do but follow them?

The next seal was a high-level scapular: a series of interlocking runes, drawn perpendicularly and smeared with consecrated lamb’s blood. It was so complex that its design provided a Flow retention strong enough to contain a legion of darkrats.

It was almost completely erased.

“Thiss doessn’t look good.”

I snorted. “You don’t say.” 

I caressed the scars on the wall, several inches deep. I had assumed the scapular would be slightly worn, and that was what allowed the young darkrats to access the next level, but I hadn’t expected complete destruction. I illuminated the ground. It was empty. My chest began to hurt.

Undoing a scapular by bites would have meant hundreds of dead darkrats when its countermeasures activated. Where were the corpses? Above us, the sound of the waters of the Grand Canal flowed, stirred by recent rains. I didn’t have the equipment or the personnel to remake it, but I could trace a provisional retention seal, and that would be it. We had to notify the sealing team as soon as possible.

“Sammy, take out the lamb pipettes and consecrate them. We’re going to make a patchwork.”

I snapped a couple of hurried photographs of the wreckage and lit another cigarette. The smoke hurt going down, a bit more than usual. One of the tolls for using the Flow was that what worked best for it was precisely what was killing you. The guy with the whisky flask, Lorenzo, was specialized in vocal spells and he died shortly after recruiting me. My specialty was smoke.

I exhaled a puff, and the smoke dispersed, forming the rough shape of a scapular seal. I tossed the butt and pulled out another cigarette. I’d need half a pack before managing something strong enough to deposit on the wall and consecrate it.

Areta would have managed it in much less time. Lymphoma allowed her to use her own blood for consecration, and a simple prick would have been enough to form a complete scapular. She would have smiled, as if it were as natural as breathing, while tinting the wall with her own blood. She, like many others, assumed that the Flow was also the confirmation that death was not the end, just another transition in the universe, and that was why we could access it, like a timorous swimmer dipping their toes before plunging into late summer water.

In the three years we were partners, I tried to see it that way, but never quite managed it. I guess it’s not so easy to stop being a stubborn atheist, even when you witness miracles every day.

With the smoke from the second cigarette, I managed to give the seal some shape and stretch it to the six-foot height of the original. I had to pause to catch my breath. My throat was burning. How much longer could I last? That thought had been haunting me for months. True, the Flow couldn’t heal us, but conventional medicine did its best to keep us alive as long as possible. A significant part of the Department was dedicated to containing the deterioration of the Army of the Dying. Those of us dying from cancer, for example, received radiation treatments impossible to obtain in any hospital, but also hormone injections, acupuncture, or chemical treatments that helped us to maintain a reasonable illusion of health.

Some of those treatments had unpleasant side effects, but at least the Flow itself was capable of mitigating them to some extent. Like walking on a tightrope, stretched into infinity. Sooner or later, a step too confident, or too weary, would make us fall.

The bosses preferred to keep us in the dark about the results of our monthly tests. I understood the protocol, though I initially detested it. What good would it do to know that, despite everything, you only had a few weeks or days left? But I had seen too many colleagues suddenly fade away not to recognize in myself the first symptoms of the end. If I was lucky, I’d be assigned to the Recruiter area, where I could spend a few peaceful last weeks convincing skeptics. If not… well, I’d better hope Areta was right.

I lit the third cigarette and glanced at the wall. Sammy was standing in front of it. He had taken off his hat, and his thick antennae, like living whip handles, traversed it over and over. He hadn’t even taken out the pipettes.

“Hey! We don’t have all day. Get to consecrating.”

He didn’t move. I grumbled and approached.

“What the hell are you doing? Got the rookie freeze?”

The antennae danced one last circle and settled on one of the few bricks that hadn’t been victimized by bites. Sammy extended one of his arms and with its thick hairs brushed away the reddish clay dust covering it. Something was engraved on the surface. A kind of triangular cross that vaguely resembled a Celtic triskelion. I leaned closer. The lines forming it were irregular, broader at the base, and the thin tips where they ended were interconnected, forming loops and knots that seemed to contain infinite threads.

“Damn,” I said, and a little cloud of smoke escaped my mouth. “Is that…?”

The small triskelion flickered in a wave of dim yellow.

“We need to get out of here. Now.”

Sammy then moved faster than I thought possible. He rummaged in his backpack and scattered a couple of pigeon blood pipettes around us. I heard the sharp sound of his mandibles hissing, hastily invoking a psalm, while I stood there like an idiot, watching the seal.

How was it possible? An invocation. So close.

“Insside the circle. Quick,” Sammy’s abdomen voice muttered while his mouth continued to chant.

I barely had time to think that I should take at least one photograph. The triskelion flickered again in a blink, and my mouth suddenly tasted of oxidized copper. I knew that taste. The taste of the Flow’s orientation shifting. Turning darker.

The wall flowed. The cracks from the bites deepened, like tiny mouths howling in unison. They grew. To my left, something viscous splattered to the ground. A darkrat as fat as a bulldog and covered in drool glared at me with furious little eyes. As if pushed from the other side of the wall, more fell. A hairy arm grabbed me and pulled me into the circle of consecrated blood.

But it was too late.

The entire wall was seething, and dozens of darkrats were now falling.

I exhaled a puff of smoke that turned it into a freezing blizzard, spilling over the creatures conjured by the invocation. Some of the nearest animals screamed and writhed before turning into ice statues, but the rest easily avoided my attack, still watching us with slimy eyes. There must have been about fifty scuttling around the circle. They were hairless, and their wrinkled, ocher skin seemed filled with lice jumping from one to another. The triskelion continued to glow in bursts.

“I’m afraid it’ss not jusst an invocation,” Sammy said. “I think it’ss a portal.”

His hurried sealing of the blood circle had been excellent, but it was clear that the Flow was no longer in our favor, and it wouldn’t be long before the darkrats found a way to breach it. We had only been trapped inside for five minutes, but it felt like five hours. And for every creature I managed to take down, two more emerged from the wall.

“It can’t be a portal,” I grumbled. “Not this close.”

But what else could it be? An invocation seal would attract a limited number of darkrats and evaporate once it reached its limit, which didn’t seem to be the case here. Each time the triskelion blinked, the wall rippled again, ready to release more spawn. If it was a portal opening, there had to be at least ten more triskeles around us, disguised among the dusty bricks. But even if I could locate them, I doubted I could undo them before the consecration of the blood was breached.

A darkrat was foolish enough to get close and snap at the inside of the circle. As soon as its snout crossed it, the creature evaporated with a sinister shriek. The triskelion flickered, and two more condensed from the wall, falling in its place. I was beginning to understand.

“Whatever it is, I think we’re responsible.”

My backpack was left outside the circle. I rummaged in Sammy’s and pulled out the two packs of cigarettes he had loaded. I was quite capable of invoking the Flow without smoking, but I needed a level of concentration that would be hard to reach under these circumstances.

“Uss?”

“I’m afraid that by repairing the other seal, we inadvertently channeled the Flow to the triskeles. The bite marks must form a pattern to draw an attractor, probably connected to the seal by the tallow lamps we’ve been lighting. That’s what activated them.”

“And now?”

“With any luck, someone in the Department will have sensed it and they’re sending reinforcements.” Our sensitives were trained to perceive even the slightest changes in the direction of the Flow.

But I knew the protocol in these situations. Seal off the entire area, regardless of who was trapped inside. Questions, if there was anyone left to answer them, would come later. “If we can reach the entrance, maybe we can get out of this.”

It was time to move.

“I’ll summon a retaining palisade.” I toyed with the cigarette, trying to calculate how much I could run. “It won’t be as effective as the circle, but it will at least allow us to move. You’ll have to take care of those that get through, understood?”

I knew well the teeth of darkrats. They not only tore flesh but could also siphon the Flow coursing through our bodies to add to their own. One thousand feet. Two and a half packs of cigarettes. A cancer about to knock me down. A partner to protect. I visualized the speed at which I would need to form the smoky palisade as we moved. Three or four minutes, I estimated.

This was not going to be a walk in the park.

I gnawed the cigarette filter to weave an anchor that would drag the smoky palisade with us.

“Ready?”

“It won’t be that eassy,” Sammy’s abdomen hissed. “Look.”

Near the triskelion, two darkrats, which seemed to run on pure instinct, had positioned themselves parallel to each other, rubbing against each other and mimicking their companion’s movements until they danced in unison. A chill turned my skin to ice. The tails of both creatures then twined together like two loving snakes, coiling tightly. Those around them stopped, lowered their wrinkled heads, and growled.

I gasped for air. I wasn’t a sensitive, but there was no way not to feel the gale of the Flow being conjured by the creatures. Reluctantly, I was almost as excited as I was terrified.

After all, one does not witness the birth of a Rat King every day.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, the Flow is not something that can only be perceived and used by humans or Blattellas. Every living being is bathed in it, and each species possesses a trigger that expresses it in a different way. The trigger in humans is terminal diseases. In rodents, it’s a Rat King.

Under certain conditions—plagues, lack of space, or extreme unsanitary conditions—a number of rats can end up joined by their tails, intertwined in such a way that it is impossible for the animals to separate from each other, and they must live in this multiple condition until they perish. In very few cases, this group will be fed and protected by the rest of the members of the colony, becoming a Rat King. And if the King lives long enough, if the number of individual rats that compose it is large enough, then that mass of bodies joined like the beads of an infernal necklace, becomes capable not only of sensing the Flow but also of summoning and using it.

We don’t know for sure if a Rat King was intelligent in the way we understand it, or if it was just an obscene expression of that dark part that runs along the bottom of the Flow. In any case, since Napoleon’s alchemists discovered how to use the Flow, the appearances of Rat Kings had multiplied, and rats all over the world had been transforming into the darkrats that caused so many problems. It was not a coincidence.

I had eliminated many of them in my years as a ranger, of all sizes and colors; chased them through tunnels and dark alleys before ending them with stone and smoke. I had learned to trace the seals that kept them away from our world and had taken a nice handful of bites in the process. But I had never seen anything like this.

More darkrats joined the pair, rubbing against their sides in an almost lascivious manner. The long tails of the newcomers writhed, seeking to join the others, and each time they did, the Flow vibrated more around them.

“You were right,” Sammy said. “It’ss not a portal.”

No, it certainly wasn’t. It was something far worse.

An Outbreak.

“Change of plan,” I muttered as I caught my breath. “We have to dismantle it before it fully forms.”

I rummaged through the backpack. Almost everything left was useless against an Outbreak, except for a pipette of horse blood and the tobacco.

The remaining darkrats trotted in concentric circles around those forming the embryonic King. Every so often, one of them would leave the dance and join the clumped bodies, trying to join the cluster of tails.

I gathered all the cigarettes and crumbled them onto one of the damp slabs. There was no other choice. Even in that state, I reached a vague understanding of what had happened.

A Rat King must have passed the previous seals until it reached the scapular. Weakened by the countermeasures, but still strong enough to trace the outline of an Outbreak over it. Then it had died, unable to go further, but not without first leaving itself invoked among the triskeles, waiting for someone to bring some Flow to them. It could have been weeks, maybe months, waiting for the opportunity that Sammy and I had granted it.

“It’ss a ssuicide,” the Blattella approached, and its pungent smell overpowered the scent of consecrated blood and the acidic stench seeping through the circle.

“I know.”

But what else could I do? The forming creature was a dangerous aberration. A conscious Rat King could drag along enough Flow to collapse the upper vaults and open a direct entrance under the dry channels bordering the Grand Canal. If it managed to escape and hide in the suburbs, then it could place portal seals wherever it wanted. The invasion would be brutal, and many would perish before the rangers could bring it down.

How much life did I even have left anyway? Months, in the best case. But Sammy wasn’t to blame for my carelessness.

I compressed the tobacco into a hexagon and whispered a vivification psalm until the brown fibers began to wriggle.

“You’re going to have to run,” I said. “As soon as I recite the psalm, run as fast as you can to the entrance. Don’t look back. Warn the others about what happened.”

That was all I could do for the rookie. I hoped the dispersion ritual I was rapidly devising in my mind would suffice to dismantle the Outbreak before it was too late. There were only two problems. One, I would have to sacrifice my own connection to the Flow in the process – which would kill me in about three minutes. And two, dispersing the Flow in the midst of an Outbreak was like trying to extinguish a forest fire with a tank of kerosene.

Half a dozen darkrats already had their tails fused into a single matted mass of filthy flesh. Judging by the spacing and angles between them, they must have been close to halfway through summoning the King. Beyond that point, it wouldn’t matter what I did. Their yellowish eyes sparkled with what I could only interpret as malevolence. The corrupted Flow emanating from them would have swept us away if not for the circle of blood.

“Did you hear me? Use the horse blood to create an armor barrier.”

Sammy didn’t move. The circle of darkrats around the nascent King turned into a wild whirlwind, and another joined the heart of the Outbreak. I clenched my teeth. Damn stupid cockroach. Didn’t he understand what was at stake?

“Hey! Rookie!”

“No,” he said. He didn’t pronounce it with his abdomen, but with his mouth, and it sounded like a blade cutting through oiled glass. “There is another way.”

He walked to the center of the circle and removed the enormous overcoat that covered his insect body. Despite everything that had happened, I still had the energy to be surprised. Sammy’s segmented abdomen was swollen and taut, pulsating like a heart. Stupid, I told myself. How had I not realized?

Sammy wasn’t just a female.

She was also pregnant.

For millions of years, the ancestors of the Blattellas lived peacefully, feeding on the decomposing matter that carpeted the dense jungles of Madagascar, thriving in the cave systems burrowing into the limestone subsoil. At some point, roughly around the same time as it happened with a small group of primates inhabiting the plains of East Africa, the Flow coursed over them in a specific way. They grew. They became more and more intelligent.

The brains at the Department assert that it was the Flow that made us what we are. And in the same way, it had acted upon the Blattellas. Why? No one has the faintest idea.

In any case, the harmless giant cockroaches coexisted peacefully with the human groups that settled on the island, giving rise in the process to hundreds of dark fables and tales about them. And as the stuff of myths, they remained until Napoleon’s troops invaded Madagascar and found them, and the alchemists seeking to domesticate the Flow found in them the switch that would allow them to activate it in humans.

That was one hundred and fifty years ago. In that time, tens of thousands of Blattellas had been sacrificed or enslaved, sold to museums and zoos, treated as cursed curiosities or spawn of the devil, subjected to all kinds of torture that only our species is capable of conceiving. It had only been a couple of decades since they were legally recognized as intelligent and sentient beings. Individuals in their own right. But that, I well knew, hardly compensated for so much suffering.

Once freed from human yoke, small ghettos of Blattellas had eventually flourished among the human cities where their ancestors were brought by force or will. It was in these ghettos where the Department had begun to recruit and train them. And since no one ever bothered to clarify the truth, we always believed that the ability to handle the Flow in them was also reserved solely for the dying individuals. How stupid.

Sammy’s abdomen pulsed in waves, and through the rubbery tissue, I discerned the firm, oval shape of an ootheca.

In fact, now I understood, it was quite the opposite.

“It’ss too late,” she said while her four front arms drew circles over the segments of her abdomen. “You’re deceiving yoursself. You’re weak. Your disspersion pssalm will be inssufficient to sstop it. You know it.”

“Your offspring,” I murmured, barely hearing her. “They are what allow you to access the Flow, aren’t they?”

The formidable back legs that supported her impossible body bent, and she started to gather the half-prepared tobacco.

“You humanss ssee in the Flow ssomething to dominate. Ssomething to ssubjugate and exploit. It’ss your nature, jusst as ourss iss to flow with it.” She carefully compressed the tobacco ball, like kneading, and I couldn’t help but think of a dung beetle rolling its ball. “But that meanss only the doomed oness like you can perceive it with the clarity necesssary to manipulate it.”

She brought the little ball to her mouth and started chewing it with jaws set like horizontal guillotines.

“But alsso becausse of that, you pervert itss usse. You are too contaminated by your old religionss. By your technology. With that guide, you believe you’ve learned to control it, but it’ss only a reflection. The Flow iss not death but life.”

Sammy swallowed the little ball. Her jaws clicked in a muffled staccato. The contours of her abdominal segments glowed phosphorescent green. The voice that emerged was sharper, as if belonging to another being.

“Among the Blattellass, only thosse of uss who carry life can usse it. But the magic doess not originate from uss. It comess from them.” Her arms continued to rub the contour of the ootheca. “From the new life.”

My chest was burning. Life and death. Two extremes. Two access points to the Flow. It was so obvious…

The wails of the darkrats turned into a carousel of blades. Another had joined the central mass, and the others seemed to celebrate it. The half-formed Rat King opened half a dozen mouths with blunt, yellow teeth, swollen with vigor and power.

Sammy bent a little more and dropped onto the four legs that had served as arms until then. Suddenly, the anthropomorphic illusion she had maintained with the overcoat and among the shadows dissolved. For the first time, I was able to see her as the first soldiers who found them must have. A wild and pure creature emerged from an impossible time, prior to the very existence of humanity. I took a step back. Not out of fear, but choked by the stream of the Flow I sensed around her.

“Make ssure to take them with mine.” The hiss, with her abdomen close to the ground, was bitter and earthy. “Undersstood?”

I had no time to reply. From Sammy’s back, at the height where a person would have had clavicles, two irregular slits opened. A pair of little translucent wings timidly peeked out from under the nearly fused elytra, and began to wave in ever-widening circles.

It was like waving a rare steak in front of a pack of hungry wolves. The darkrats not surrounding the King seemed to go mad. Forgetting all caution, they hurled themselves against the circle of blood, with bulging eyes and snapping mouths. Most evaporated as soon as they crossed it, but some managed to breach and fell beside me, burnt or severed.

Sammy’s wings flapped faster, until the infrasound they produced reached my ears like a persistent tinnitus. The Rat King then looked at us, as if for the first time it was aware of our presence. It bristled its knotty tails, shrieked in a horrendous wail, and leaned forward, ready to attack.

Sammy exploded.

There was no light, but it was as if my eyes were blinded by a thousand suns.

There was no heat, but it felt as if my skin was melting.

There was no sound, but it was as if my ears were being torn apart.

There was no smell, but it was like sinking into a forest of rotting wood.

The gale knocked me down as if I were made of straw. I fell clumsily and rolled over, unable to stop myself.

For a moment I was Sammy and I was Areta and I was the Rat King and its offspring and I was myself, and I was thousands of dead Blattellas and millions of dying humans in their last breath.

I drowned in the placid and gentle Flow, very different from the unruly and indomitable one I was accustomed to invoking, which poured from Sammy’s body.

It stopped suddenly. I got up with my eyes blurred with tears. I coughed dust and blood. There were no longer darkrats that could cross the circle of evaporated blood. I had never felt my chest so heavy and I feared collapsing right there. I recited a psalm of strength to stand up and, at least, the Flow responded as usual.

Most of the darkrats had vanished. The triskelion invocation marks were now smoldering holes. The enormous body of Sammy still lay there, smoking in the same position on the ground. But now it was just an empty shell, as inert and gray as the brick on which it rested. At the end of her abdomen, something shone with a serene and electric blue.

The ootheca was as long as an arm and a long suture crowned its upper end. I touched it. It was warm, and I could feel the living creatures it contained inside. Sammy’s progeny.

There wasn’t much more I could do. I was too stunned to understand, let alone interpret, the display I had just witnessed. I couldn’t even imagine that anyone was capable of using the Flow in that way. I took off my overcoat and wrapped the ootheca in it. I sighed.

We, members of the Army of the Dying, are all too accustomed to the death of our companions, like a never-ending drizzle, but that doesn’t mean we don’t mourn them. I caressed the cracked and discolored carapace and silently muttered our farewell psalm.

If Areta was right, this would help Sammy reach the Flow, dissolve in it, and attain eternal peace. I hoped she was right. I would do my part.

I clutched the ootheca to my chest and started walking. Over the inert bodies of the few darkrats that hadn’t been evaporated, tall tobacco plants grew, and the body of the unfinished Rat King had transmuted into an imposing trunk of black wood, its twisted and knotty branches reminiscent of a whirlwind of rat tails trapped in amber.

The nymphs wriggled and scratched at the walls of their prison, eager to emerge. I pressed it a bit closer, comforted by the sound. They were a light burden, yet weighed like a thousand lives.

It was curious. Perhaps it was the impact of the Flow or because saving those offspring full of future would be the best thing I had done in years, but as I walked in the darkness, surrounded by corpses, sacrifices, and unimaginable miracles, acutely aware of the dwindling weeks of my existence in this world, I felt more alive than ever.

_______________

Raúl Gonzálvez del Águila is a Spanish science fiction and fantasy writer based in Almería. He is a two-time winner of the UPC-Miquel Barceló Prize, most recently in 2024, and a three-time winner of the UPV Alberto Magno Prize, including in 2025 for his novella “Instrucciones para forjar un héroe.” That same year, he was shortlisted for the Minotauro Prize. His short fiction has appeared in Spanish magazines including Sofón and Tentaclepulp, and in English in After the Storm Magazine and Gavagai. More about his work can be found at https://raulgonzalvez.netlify.app/