Chapter 15: Fruit
Calm had returned, but it brought me no comfort.
I was curled up in a corner of the room, my head buried between my knees, my breathing ragged, my body shaking. My hands, still smeared with blood, clutched at my arms as if hoping to hold back what was threatening to collapse.
Every beat of my heart echoed in my chest like the cracked bell of a ruined cathedral. Deaf. Deep. Unceasing.
I didn't know what to do. Worse still, I didn't even know what I'd done.
Memories of what had happened... blurred, scattered, like shards of broken glass on a black floor. I tried to pick them up, to understand, but each image lacerated me a little more. The scientist's death... I couldn't trace it. My mind refused to show it to me.
There was this block. An invisible barrier between what I was and what I was becoming.
I could feel my thoughts faltering. The room around me seemed to breathe, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath. The air had taken on an acrid smell - a mixture of blood, sweat, and fluids I couldn't even name. But beyond that, there was something else. A sweet, almost sugary scent. An anomaly in this stench of death.
It came from the corpse.
Timidly, I looked up, almost reluctantly. As if part of me still hoped to see him standing. That it was all just a feverish delirium. A hallucination caused by the Infusion.
But it wasn't.
He was there. Lying there. Broken.
His head hung down, held in place by a flap of distended skin. His neck formed a grotesque angle with his dislocated shoulders, as if his own body had been twisted by the will of a cruel god. He was bathed in a pool of scarlet, his blood drawing crazy arabesques around him.
I wanted to look away, but a movement caught my eye.
Above his chest... a glow.
Faint. Trembling.
A trail of light, like a flame suspended in the air, undulated gently, with no apparent purpose. It wavered, oscillating between a golden and emerald hue, as if hesitant too, unsure of its place in this world.
And yet... she seemed to be waiting for me.
I stared at her. Fascinated. Terrified.
My heart began to pound again, faster. The pain of the previous moment mingled with a painful curiosity. An almost animal hunger.
My instinct was to go for it. To grab it.
What's going on?!
My inner voice struggled, but my body... my body had already decided.
As if drawn by a magnet, I crawled towards the light. My arms tightened in spite of myself. My knees slipped on the cold, sticky ground. My vision blurred, my muscles went numb. I was no longer in control of anything.
Every second seemed distorted, infinite and elusive. The air became denser. Almost liquid.
Eventually, I reached the top of him.
He was worse than I remembered. A human carcass. An emptied shell.
And in this mess of flesh and blood, the glow persisted. Unbroken.
I wanted to scream. To vomit. To scream. But nothing came out.
And then my fingers began to move. On their own.
They approached the light, slowly, as if carried by an unknown force. They touched something.
It was neither hot nor cold. Neither solid nor liquid. It wasn't really there. And yet... it was real.
A fruit.
It had no stable form. It pulsed, like a heart. It changed texture, density, color. Sometimes smooth and clear as crystal. Sometimes rough and dark like volcanic rock.
I was shocked, observing this thing, I saw images of the one I had devoured in my city. My mind replayed the scene at high speed. Did that mean that I had... Nausea was taking over me again, I felt my body getting heavier. This truth terrified me, disgusted me.
And yet, while looking at the corpse, I felt a hunger.
Brutal. Wild.
It rose from my chest, up my throat, made my jaws tremble. It wasn't the hunger of a body. It was the hunger of a soul.
I grabbed the fruit.
It throbbed between my fingers, vibrating as if aware of me. As if it had always been waiting for me.
An inner voice whispered to me to eat it. To absorb it. That it was mine.
But something inside me still hesitated.
Then, a sound. Dry. Mechanical.
A click.
The door.
A distant voice.
Another, louder. Closer.
"Stay behind me. Get the restraint unit ready."
Footsteps.
The guards.
Panic swept over me. My breath stopped short. My gaze darted between the door and the fruit. It was clear that it wasn't something normal. I didn't know why it appeared before me, I didn't even understand why all these things happened to me but I had one only conviction.
I couldn't leave it there. Not visible. Not for them. Not in their hands. Even if it had to cost my life, I had to make all my possible, those bastards weren't going to get anything from me.
I stood with my back to the door, right in front of the scientist's still-warm corpse, and took a deep breath. The fruit in my hands was starving me to death.
I swallowed my saliva and, with all my willpower, sank my teeth into it.
I felt them pierce through a hard, crunchy layer from which a sour liquid escaped and spread over my tongue. It was a taste I hated. I felt like I was eating a mixture of soot and uncooked meat, yet my body was forcing me to continue.
I greedily swallowed the contents of my mouth, which passed through my oesophagus to finally fall into my palate with a sweet and at the same time suffocating warmth.
I took another mouthful, then another. Each one was torture. It seemed as if the taste was getting stronger and stronger, and the heat intensified every moment.
Only half of the fruit remained when the door opened with a metallic bang.
I turned, my back to the corpse. I dropped my shoulders, shaking them. My body bent slightly, wobbling, as if still exhausted from the Infusion.
Two men in uniform entered. Their footsteps froze at the sight. I didn't even look at them. My hands, full of blood, fell inertly to either side of my body.
Silence.
My heart seemed to want to tear itself from my chest. My eyes moved in all directions as if looking for a way out.
One of them came closer to me. I gasped, barely able to concentrate on reality as thousands of scenarios flashed through my mind. In each of them I saw the torture they would inflict on me in revenge.
Before I knew it, tears had welled up in the corners of my eyes.
The man stood at the same distance from me and the door. He glanced coldly at the carcass. His eyes bore no emotion except slight disgust and... regret?
He turned to me, and I returned his gaze, the fruit clumsily hidden between my hands and chest. He opened his mouth, his voice echoing with icy coldness.
"Come on, the first test is over."
They'd seen nothing. But me, in the bottom of my heart, I knew.
This day, I... I'd just stolen a soul.