Chapter Four: The Refinery

From

The Dossier of Dr. Brink, Volume One, Part One

The forest was dead. That is the simplest way to describe it. The trees closest to the river were skeletal, their bark peeling in long strips, every leaf gone. The ground underfoot was a barren plain of dull brown earth, and the silence was absolute—no birds, no insects, nothing at all. The absence of sound in a forest is one of the most unsettling things a person can experience. Sound is life; silence is the other thing.

We had journeyed at least another two hours upstream, the terrain at first difficult to traverse with its thickets and unpredictable topography, before the foliage fell off around us. I had—unconsciously—drifted ahead to occupy a forward position beside Koss, leading our party farther into the unknown, struggling to keep my perception focused on what lay ahead rather than the ever-intensifying smell of the toxic river. We kept traveling through the silence. Nothing happened for a long time. And then I spotted—lying perhaps one hundred meters ahead of us—a wholly unnatural construction.

Upon our cautious approach, I could begin to identify what I was seeing. It was a building, perhaps only thrice as large as Scur’s hut, sitting at a bend in the river. It was crude, very crude, constructed from rusted metal and planks that seemed to be rotting. A door and a clouded window faced eastward in our direction, and from a pipe jutting from its side, a thick sludge steadily dripped plop... plop... plop directly into the languid river below.

This was, in all honesty, not what I had been expecting. My hypothesis of alchemical industry had conjured in my mind romantic imagery—elongated brick buildings crowned by skylights, the ceaseless clatter of machinery, the coordinative chatter amongst a great mass of workers—rather than the dilapidation I witnessed before me. Perhaps I should have foreseen that an operation with such a lackadaisical approach to ecological and social consequence would have been made manifest through equally slapdash infrastructure.

We had to gather more information and do so carefully. I gestured to my companions: keep low, circle wide through the dead trees, approach from the rear. My stealth over the deadened forest floor was, I will admit, imperfect. I stepped on a branch with sufficient force to produce a crack like a pistol shot, and the three Sauropsians froze in their tracks and looked at me with an expression that required no translation whatsoever. But no one emerged from the workshop. We remained still, and the seconds stretched, and the only sound was the continual drip of poison.

We resumed our maneuver and circled to the back of the building. There was a grimy window, about three meters up, and I assessed the situation practically. I first removed my harnessed mattress and set it gently upon the ground. I pointed to myself, then the window, then made a lifting motion with my hands, and Scur and the escorts understood. What followed was an undignified but effective act of cooperative engineering: Scur and Tetch linked their arms into a living scaffold, Koss steadied me from behind, and I rose, shakily, until my face was level with the filthy glass.

For a moment I nearly fell. My foot slipped on a patch of scaly hide and the whole arrangement lurched. Then something steadied me—adrenaline, or perhaps something more primal, the surgeon’s absolute refusal to drop an instrument at the critical moment—and I found my center and recovered and pressed my face to one of the glass’s cleaner streaks. What I observed inside only served to invert my preconceptions further.

The interior was a small-scale alchemical refinery run amok. Copper tubing and iron boiling-flasks and a furnace were all connected in a tangled circuit that produced the sludge that fed into the outflow pipe outside. The room itself was a horrible wreck—broken glassware strewn about, furniture overturned, scorch marks on the walls—and in a high-backed chair, seemingly bound to it by leather straps and connected to the machinery by tubes that ran directly into their body, was a figure.

The figure’s skin had the same iridescent sheen as the river, barely visible through the clouded pane as contorted bands of spectral light. They were weakly shuddering. One arm was already partially free, a strap dangling broken from their wrist. Dull orange light emanated from the pits of their eyes, now cavities filled with glowing fluid rather than clear vitreous humor. Their head lifted and slowly turned toward me, and in that moment I finally noticed the presence of a latent realization I had been suppressing since we encountered the dead deer: You are in over your head.

At the same moment I noticed this, they noticed me. They thrashed wildly, ripping their remaining bound limbs free from the degraded leather straps and violently tearing the fluid transfer tubes out from under their own flesh. They made a visceral sound like the world ending quietly, and I was down from the Sauropsian platform before the echo died.

⁂

Our party scrambled, then quickly regrouped. Having heard the wretched noise emerge from within, Scur and Tetch and Koss each gripped their spears in determined preparation. They quickly moved to the front of the building, appearing to take ambush positions with a deftness that betrayed their martial experience, and I followed without much conscious awareness.

I did not know what else to do. My working life prior to this event had been—by any typical measure—mundane and secure, and even the most disturbing scenarios I had witnessed had been encountered in firmly professional contexts: hospitals and shipboard expeditions, amongst teams of disciplined colleagues, under the direction of structured leadership. I did not know if the being in the refinery was a victim, a villain, a patient, a monster, or any combination of those things. I felt the rising tide of panic and regret begin to engulf my body.

Then, the door was opened, but it did not open. It exploded, and the being burst forth through the fragments of decayed wood and stumbled into the dead clearing. They stood there, shaking, swiveling their head wildly, drinking in their sudden freedom. In the full light of day within the forest that had ceased being a forest, I was able to use the few seconds of their disorientation to perform the most rapid anatomical survey of my career and observe the full extent of the aesthetic horror that stood trembling before us.

The scene was every nightmare of poor science made manifest. Their skin was a patchwork of pallid flesh and bubbling rust-colored boils, the veins beneath tracing an iridescent web. One arm seemed to be in a state of partial decay, darkened gray skin peeling and flaking off in large fragments, dripping thick oil that stained the bare ground below. Their eye sockets continued to glow orange, still visible even under the midday sunlight. And at last, I was able to recognize the anatomical form I saw before me—scaly skin, bulbous eyes, clawed hands—as a Sauropsian.

My companions seemed to recognize this as well, and they all cried out in a shrill chorus of their language, possibly in an attempt to communicate, or perhaps in pure terror. The being, at last, responded to our presence, turning in the direction of Koss and I, who were positioned north of the door. While I fumbled for my crossbow, Koss approached the being. I was expecting them to raise their spear, to either occupy a defensive posture or to engage in an outright attack, but they did neither of those things. They simply reached out to the being, speaking a rapid sequence of communicative clicks and whines.

This action was met with a violent response. The being abruptly slashed at Koss, tearing at their face with oil-slick claws, sending them flying sideways to impact the wall of the building with devastating force. The disgusting windowpane shattered above them. At this point, I had retrieved and loaded my crossbow, and I stood there—trembling in fear of what I had just witnessed—and attempted to take aim at the being’s chest. Scur and Tetch, who were positioned on the other side of the being, adjacent to the river, growled and rushed forward, spears high. Then, with the unsteady gracelessness of someone who had never experienced combat in the whole of their life, I fired the bolt.

It impacted. With a sickening thwack, the bolt pierced the being’s left thigh—my aim had drifted low—and sent a jolt through their body. They cried out, a gurgling roar, and paused for only a moment before immediately beginning to advance on me. The projectile had no meaningful effect.

My mind was reeling. This situation was profoundly alien to me—I was a doctor, an alchemist, a scientist, and not a soldier—and I did not belong in the position I had found myself in. While this feeling of total inaptitude overwhelmed my panicked body, Scur and Tetch landed their attacks, their spear tips making contact with the being’s back.

The being roared yet again, and swiveled around to face them. It was at this moment, in some sort of serendipity, that my mind suddenly snapped into focus, and a profoundly simple concept crystalized within my awareness. Yes, I am a doctor. That was my primary relationship to the fabric. My entire life had been defined by two intentions: to understand the world and to heal. I slapped my own face and recalled the action I had taken in Scur’s hut the day prior—my impulsive decision to attempt the practice of mental guidance, my concentrated intent, the effective result, and crucially, the fact that it had somehow been easier than ever before—and I realized what I had to try.

With a newfound resolve, I looked up at the being, who was now facing away from me, swatting wildly at the spears being directed at their face. From this angle, I noticed something new: between their shoulder blades sat a nodule, surrounded by several open gashes created by their violent self-liberation from the refinery apparatus and just barely visible beneath a layer of bubbling skin. It pulsed with the orange-lit rhythm of a heartbeat. I drew the conclusion—in actuality a hopeful assumption—that this object was some sort of regulatory nexus, a root of connections deep into their physiology.

The being grabbed Scur’s spear, yanked it away, and pointed it at Tetch. They were now armed. Now or never. I rushed forward, yelling “Hold still,” which was not sensible but felt medically appropriate. I plunged my hand against the being’s back, and confirmed the nodule by touch—the way a surgeon finds a tumor by feel, through layers of corrupted tissue—and focused my intent with all the mental concentration I could muster. I shouted a phrase in Fabrican that evoked every last particle of my desire to heal, to remedy, to do something good. The space between my hand and their back began to glow, and I thought I saw the gashes begin to close, and at last I released a sincere scream of “Get well soon!”

⁂

The detonation was practically instantaneous. One moment there was a person, and the next moment there was a concussive wave and a shower of neutralized, inert gray sludge, and I was lying on my back in the dirt covered in it. The reaction had been like water hitting a hot pan of oil, amplified until it filled the entire clearing, and the being’s body arched in a spasm so violent that the earth under it cracked. It released a visceral shriek, not one of pain—I can only hope, and I have repeatedly told myself—but the sound of a physical system catastrophically encountering its own antithesis. My attempt to heal had unintentionally resulted in a hearty, forceful infusion of damage delivered directly into a body that ran on poison, turning its own life-force against itself, and then it burst.

Scur sprinted over and pulled me to my feet, which I barely found with a dazed unsteadiness in the wake of my unconventional application of the healing practice. For the second time since washing ashore on this continent, I initiated an embrace—partially a genuine act of social relief and partially a need for continued support while standing—and Scur hugged me back, pats somewhat firmer than before. I released an abrupt, half-screaming sob, some sort of emotional release, before releasing the hug and slapping myself several times.

“Comrade Scur,” I cried. “Victory!” I scooped out the small fragments of gray flesh shrapnel that had flown into my mouth upon the detonation. I gagged, and spit, and then my mind immediately turned to Koss. Tetch had rushed directly to them, and when I finally looked, Koss was slumped over against the wall, surrounded by innumerable shards of glass that twinkled in the sunlight like a sparkling starfield. They were taking irregular, heaving breaths that produced a wet rattle that anyone of my profession would immediately recognize.

I moved to tend to them and immediately fell to the ground, dizzy, my vision fading in and out. I crawled—really, dragged myself—over and through the oil-stained dirt and gray remains to Koss’s side. My bag was still slung over my shoulder, and I attempted through my tremors to reach into it and retrieve something that may have been useful, shaking, unable to maintain a grip on anything at all. Scur was low to the ground, pounding it and clicking frantically, and Tetch had wrapped their arms around their own abdomen, quietly whining and growling.

“Fuck,” I whimpered, observing Koss—torn flesh streaking across their face and neck, fragments of glass and gray sludge interspersed with their own vivid blood—and I realized there was one remaining option. They stopped making the rattle sound, and their chest stopped moving. I weakly reached out to place my hand on Koss’s face and murmured in Fabrican. The world blurred around me, and I could barely make out their face being cast in a faint shine. It faded only a moment later. With my last remaining threads of strength and awareness, I whispered the phrase once more and punched their sternum. I felt as though I were being submerged in cold water.

Then I saw the glow again, and my vision went dark, and I stopped experiencing anything at all.