And so it grows…

Snippeting because the monstrosity that is “Dowse and Bleed” is not yet done. I swear this story hates me. It’s a bleeding mess with a protag who refuses to tell it any other way. Ah, well. We’re at 4000 words and counting.

“Hang on a sec,” she muttered, drawing sharp glances from the rest of the Unit. “Running a normal.”

None of them had seen her do it, assumed there was nothing valuable in a regular human type genetic pattern for her to run, just query, but he gave, he gave, and she hated him for it as much as for anything he took.

She settled indian-style on the ground, bent her head to knees, and tangled hands in the lengths of her hair. He’d always liked her hair. “This won’t be pretty.”

It wasn’t. It was a mess of color, sensation, memories gained from every time she read him with a hundred different gifts, every time he touched her when she was cycling—she hated that his was the only touch that could actually make her feel better. Harshness melted into self-loathing, crisscrossed with a moral standard far too high for all the things they’d done, the sharp taste of blood and violence bleeding into tender, brutal intuition—intuition that ran in the family. She grasped for it with another processor’s power, one she rarely pulled, and there. She had it. It was hers.

She threw back her hair and stood, clenched hands, clenched teeth to hold onto a pattern that could only last but seconds, and there it was, the tension hanging in the air. “It’s not a shield,” she said. “Jarod, get me labeling from under the window.”

He settled down beside her and ran through the data he’d been tracking from each one of them, moving back to Rachelle’s chip when they were checking the exit point. “What am I looking for?”

“You’re not.” She peered over his shoulder. “Does this pull my identification methods?”

“If you speak guanine, adenine, thymine, cytosine.”

“Lucky for you, I do.” She glanced over the long list of every residual scrap of genetic material that bit of sidewalk had on it, comparing it to the stuff she had right here. Two and a half matches. This could get dicey.

Prompted by pygmymuse

Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.