Twist had noticed Sam’s gawking for some time now. She stood next to her new companion, arms folded and brow fully lax from annoyance. It’s not like her reaction was unjustified, even Twist realised that much, compared to Sam’s haggard condition the organised chaos of rags, pipes and bandages that cascaded before them could steal anyone’s attention.

  Still, she was annoyed. Sam felt a shiver on her neck and realised how immature it was to stare at such a downtrodden city, like it was some amusement or side show.

  “S-sorry…” Sam muttered with her chin at her neck, attempting not to make direct eye contact.

  The worst part was that Sam couldn’t completely tell if she was horrified or fascinated by all of it, and it was something that Twist took note of quite earnestly.

  “Still beautiful isn’t it?” she gestured to the city before them, and like magic tiny little candlelights lit up one by one.

  “Even sheer destruction can’t stop us from creating art out of it I guess, in a way its… beautiful,”

  Sam wasn’t sure whether to call it ‘beautiful’, but it certainly was impressive, to see such raw human determination. Although in all honestly she couldn’t quite tell if a life like this was worth living, it probably would’ve been better for them all to die sooner rather than later.

  Sam flinched at that thought and how callous it was, even if it was technically true.

  Before either of them had the chance to talk more the elevator latched itself into its final place, surprisingly, quite comfortably. The station itself however, was the very definition of temporary; thin sheets of aluminium held up by wires and sticks and nails and glue... probably. There was some adhesive, but Sam couldn’t whether it was actually glue or just spit with how bad the rest of it looked.

  It was practically impossible that something as shoddily made as this could hold under the weight of one person let alone two. And yet somehow Sam and Twist stepped unto it relatively easily, no jitters or shakes to be felt. With all that that had happened recently, Sam couldn’t help but laugh at such a simple oddity. Laughter which was hastily restrained by Twist

  “The hell are you doing?!” her hand covered Sam’s mouth entirely, muffling her voice to a hum “You think this is funny?! I don’t care if you’re a captain or what, you can’t-”

  Sam grabbed twists arm and, with shocking ease, pulled it from her face and down to her side “No of course not… its just- sometimes you forget how weird life can get,” she paced herself to the edge of the platform, an edge that led to a sheer drop into the makeshift residential areas below. “And I’m sure it only gets weirder, right?”

  Without hesitating she stepped off the edge and dropped as if she could tell that it was Twist’s next move, that it was the only proper way to get down from up here. She weaved effortlessly past wires and pipes like it was second nature, and oriented herself perfectly for the landing. Sam expected a loud thud, the floor looked more than hollow enough for it, but instead she heard eery silence like a lost feather finding ground. In fact, the fall itself felt strangely comfortable, even from half this height she used to feel an ache in her knees or a cracking of a bone. But this time? Nothing.

  Twist followed quickly to her side, landing with similar grace that would otherwise be impressive if not for Sam.

  She smiled kindly at Twist and began walking. However, Twists fragile hand pulling at her coat stopped her.

  “Uhm, Sam?”

  Sam turned back to face her. Twists whole frame practically shrunk before her,

  “The tent…” Twist continued, “it’s down this way, that road doesn’t go anywhere”

  Suddenly Sam’s face grew flush with embarrassment, throwing her head down to avoid Twists gaze instead opting to gesture in the general direction of where Twist wanted them to go.

  I could’ve sworn that…

  Sam knew that’s where she wanted to go, something deep inside her was pulling her in that direction, but when she took a moment to think about why she couldn’t explain herself. The thought of an instinctual desire to walk into a dead end, was silly.

  Yeah… Silly…

  Her face scrunched up as she thought about it.

  I need more rest.

  Twist took little notice of Sam’s peculiar behaviour, deciding that this was simply a “7th pillar difference” in attitude and behaviour. Conveniently this lined up with her interpretation of that community anyway, so for the meantime Sam was seen as “normal” by her reasoning.

  She followed behind the thin woman as they weaved down long stretches of rubble-made alleys. Bodies littered the corners connecting the metal walls to the plank laden floors, some conscious enough to mutter to themselves, but most not. Sam didn’t blame the ones that weren’t, seeing the world around them change so drastically would make anyone want to dream it all away. She sympathised from personal experience. What Sam couldn’t understand were the actions of the people that chose to stay awake in this hell-scape, even with what little concentration she had at that moment she could sense the anger seeping from their eyes.

  At first she assumed it was directed towards her; it wasn’t hard to gather that 7th pillar folk were seen as alien here, if not an entirely hostile entity. It was confusing to a degree, to feel everyone’s burning gaze with every turn of her coattail, but it was the only reasonable thing to assume. Surprisingly though, as the two of them hopped from platform to platform Sam followed the conscious eyes and found Twist to be the one at the centre of it all.

  Her curiosity, still proving to be the gnawing parasite that it was, took over completely

  “Hey…” she started, “why does everyone look at you like that?”

  Twist didn’t answer,

  “I mean you don’t look all that bad personally, if that makes any difference,”

  She started to speed up little by little, in the gaps of silence between Sam’s questions,

  “Wow…” Sam’s eyes widened at her companion’s blatant ignorance, “it’s that bad?”

  Twist was essentially sprinting now, though her upper body seemed much more rigid and tense than before. It was apparent she was uncomfortable with the questions and her choice not to answer was conflicting with her need to obey authority, which Sam apparently was in this instance.

  Sam wasn’t sure whether she should’ve continued asking or not, but something about the situation scratched her brain in a strange way, the silence only made it worse. Regardless of her curiosity, Sam didn’t get the opportunity to probe further as Twist rounded a corner and stopped.

  “Alright,” Twist finally spoke though a clear, fresh, annoyance seemed to lace her words, “This is the place, hopefully you can actually help…”

  It was a dingy shack, almost the same as all the others they had came across so far. This one however had a distinctly more complex air about itself, with a cacophony of wires stringing off of the prior buildings all connecting here. Every wire met huge sockets, for almost comically sized plugs, and draped themselves down and around the walls of the building.

  Even still, the building was run down by Sam’s standards, and the rust stains leaking down the doors and windows couldn’t be out shined by the mess of wires. Another thing that didn’t help her opinion was the large man posted outside its main, technology filled doorway, almost twice the size of Sam and Twist both in width and height, with not a single ounce of fat on his muscular body.

  For some reason this struck Sam as strange, considering the overworked state of Twist she simply assumed all the pillar workers here were armed with the same, skeletal like frame. And yet this goliath of a human was presumably guarding this presumed medical building from people that presumably wanted to attack it?

  None of it made sense, especially considering how infectious six disease was after all. Only a martyr would willingly break into a quarantined building.

  Something was definitely wrong.

  That’s what she guessed anyway; Sam could be well off the mark, which wouldn’t be that surprising considering all the weird stuff happening to her mind recently. Maybe she was crazy?

  Although, the door-sized engine blade strapped tightly to his back hinted otherwise... And Sam’s intuition was rarely wrong. That, and the fact that he was wearing his head mask inside when he clearly didn’t need to, a tradition done only by military divisions of pillars to instil fear. At least, that’s what she thinks she remembers from when she was still founding pillar 7 all those decades ago.

  It was hard to tell if this was even her memory any more though, every other time she blinked she seemed to remember something, even if she could remember how she learned it in the first place.

  “Isn’t it a little… Busted up to be a medical centre though?” Sam inquired while inspecting the sheet panelling hanging by a single bolt.

  Twist morbidly grinned at the question “It’s more of a hospice if anything else,” her smile shifted into a grimace “But if you ask me? It’s a post office”.

  Sam almost laughed, “How so?”

  Her companion didn’t respond. Sauntering over to the giant man at the doorway and flashing the tag attached at her glove, she slid past the crooked entrance. Sam followed behind, trying with difficulty to avoid the man’s predatory gaze as she did. Squeezing past the tight crack in the metal door she immediately found out why a ‘post office’ fit the space all too well.

  Half a dozen men and women dressed head to toe in white and yellow medical garb, all hands clenching stretchers that carried people-sized plastic tubes. Coffins for the ones who couldn’t be touched. As they wheeled down the cluttered corridor, a wall opposite to them opened up to reveal three torpedo-like empty holes. The tubes were swiftly packed inside, and the sound of whirring wind pressure signalled to workers that they had been emptied in an instant. This was the first thing Sam witnessed as soon as she stepped into the facility, and based off of Twist’s nonchalant demeanour, this was the only thing there was to witness.

  Twist turned about herself and walked to where the surgically dressed men and women came from, not feeling the need to describe how desperate of a situation the Pillar was truly in. From the outside the spaceonly appeared as large as a shack with maybe one or two rooms inside, but somehow the single hallway Sam and Twist walked down felt five times as long. Stretchers carrying blood blags and morphine, in place of a shelf or box that wasn’t there, lined their sides with each step they took.

  Endless, Sam thought. Endless, and maddening.

  Even with the occasional wave of surgeons that would charge through them, Sam could only focus on the strange sensation prickling the back of her neck. With every door that shunted opened the feeling became worse, like her skin was being pulled towards them in a bizarre, magnetic kind of way. The feeling was replicated near inner windows, the ones leading to densely packed rooms of infected.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  It was like the stench of death that wafted through the halls offended her body some way, or perhaps even excited it instead. She couldn’t tell which it was until they arrived at their presumed destination.

  A large room opened before Sam, with Twist stood to one side to show her the carnage that lied in it. Rows upon rows of beds and iv tubes, almost as many as the wires that were hanging around the building itself. Men, Women and children were all hooked up the same way, more plastic than person.

  Admittedly, Sam wasn’t sure what she was expecting when she stepped inside. She’d never been inside any sort of medical ward before this, even back before the pillars were made. She never had any need to, she was always very health conscious and didn’t see the need for regular check-ups, as strange as that sounded. Sam knew the sight would be grim, the smell to be stagnant and taste on her tongue to feel almost rancid. It was all something she anticipated, something she prepared for in advance.

  But she had not anticipated the noise, the groans and cries and pleas for help that mingled with each other in screeching white noise. There was screaming too, but even that wasn’t familiar. Their throats were worn to scabbed pulp in their necks, their screams were dry.

  It was then when she realised the tingling on her neck was of offence, whatever was happening in this room made her unreasonably uncomfortable. Before she stepped inside Twist slammed her chest with a device.

  “You need this Sam” she revealed the respiratory mask curled inside her palm

  Sam’s eyes widened, realising she may have just dodged a bullet, “O-oh god right! Thanks for the save Twist,”

  Twist nodded simply and smiled as she slid her mask on, Sam did the same and started inside by her side.

  “As you can see everything here isn’t exactly great” she span around to look Sam in the eyes “and these are better ones…”

  Sam, taken aback by the situation, slowed her pace to inspect the bodies around her. “What? These are the better ones?”

  She skimmed past a man writhing in pain, clutching his chest.

  “Mhm...” Twist responded plainly

  She adjusted the tube next to the man allowing more morphine to flow into him. He quickly quieted down enough to rest.

  Sighing deeply, she continued, “There’s not much to do when someone has Six, just alleviate their pain a little more and hope they die in their sleep”

  The ‘matter of fact’ way that Twist spoke unnerved Sam slightly, she figured that even if you were adjusted to this it’d still upset you a little bit.

  She frowned “Is that all? There’s no other alternative to help them?”

  “Sam, I know there’s not many cases in pillar seven but yes, this is all we can do to help” she continued snaking through the beds affixing tubes and drugs as she did so. “A respiratory illness like this is hard to kill, it seems to target their genetic code directly and break it down”

  “…Like a kind of radiation poisoning?”

  “Yeah kinda... no one knows why yet either. what’s even stranger is this just... popped up out of nowhere.”

  Something about that alarmed Sam deeply, with a disease this cataclysmic it wouldn’t just appear out of nowhere. It couldn’t have appeared out of nowhere. People would’ve figured out the origins by this point, or at the very least would have had theories.

  Her inquisitive side took over yet again

  “There hasn’t been a single theory about this?”

  Twist lightly chuckled to herself before responding, “Oh there’s theories Sam, some people think it’s an attack from another pillar, like it’s the second coming of the pillar war”

  “… well is it?” Sam felt like she should’ve been embarrassed even implying such a thing

  “No of course not! I mean it could be I guess... but there’s a better explanation. The most reasonable one is that the decaying animals beneath the carbon snow have cultivated some weird new disease. That one has government backing behind it too, so its probably true.”

  Sam wanted to respond but suddenly realised they had reached the end of the room, and more importantly that Twist had stopped talking. Instead she stared straight past her in frustration.

  Sam had no idea why, until she turned around herself to see the twenty or so hands outstretched towards her from dying patients on beds.

  “Oh I’m sorry Sam, they sometimes try and grab people, but the morphine should kick in soon so don’t worry about it.

  “Its the lack of touch that does it I think. Its not like they’ve been here long really, only a month or so at most right now, so you’d think they wouldn’t be craving it too badly… I don’t think its about how long they’ve been without it though, its an understanding that they might never have it again before… you know.”

  Despite it being reasonable to believe what she said, Sam had a different feeling entirely. She could feel that these people wanted her for some reason, she could feel their desperation to reach her somehow. The more she looked at the patients the more she could feel them, sense them even. As she looked at their hands she could see the follicles of their skin shedding away, decaying in real time. When she focused she could feel it on her own hands, like tiny stickers peeling away.

  The memory of pushing through the walls flashed in her eyes, what if she could push through people too? Something told her that she could. That she could touch their lives, quite literally, shape their bodies like the sand or snow into whatever they wanted.

  What would that even feel like?

  “Sam?” Twist’s hand pulled on her shoulder “you can’t touch them too or you’ll get infected…”

  Sam’s hand was only inches away from one of the infected, she hadn’t even realised.

  “Ma’am?”

  Sam hushed out an apology, “Yeah... Sorry, they just looked so sad... so…”

  “Don’t worry, I know” Twists expression softened slightly, in a way that made Sam realise it hasn’t been soft for a while, “There is a bright side though!

  “With all the infections in this pillar it gave us a chance to research the disease. Actually, this was why I brought you here, if we can share our research with your Pillar’s scientists we might actually beat this thing!”

  Sam fervently agreed and followed Twist into the next room, one much darker than the last with only a single panel of glass and a row of monitors lighting it up. Behind the glass a dying man lying still in a single bed, hooked up to a dozen different wires and devices that tracked his vitals on a computer nearby.

  Before Sam got the chance question what was happening, Twist started explaining in detail

  “We track everything that happens to him from this room, if we find anything we write it down over there” she pointed to a rustic notepad with a thousand scribbles of words and equations, “If you want to take a look you can”

  Sam felt inclined to do so, but something also pulled her towards the door that led to the man. It wasn’t just her strange sense that directed Sam this time, it was her own curiosity. Her own curiosity wanted to see this thing up close, and since she could survive the vacuum of space she was pretty confident that a disease like this wouldn’t do much to affect her.

  She pulled open the door and stepped inside, leaving everyone in the room behind to wonder what weird Pillar 7 technique she had in mind. Twist assumed Sam was going to read the equipment directly or gather her own notes on the patient’s condition, but the look on Sam’s face told her otherwise.

  Twist grew tense as she watched her new companion pace around the operating bed.

  The room appeared even more sterile to Sam in person than behind the glass, four walls of blinding white that seemed practically untouched yet ancient in some strange way. This small section of the building was the only one that had any semblance of structural integrity, it carried the distinct feeling of security that an esteemed hospital usually wore with ease. If the whole facility was being held up by this one single room then Sam wouldn’t have been surprised, in fact she almost expected it to be the case.

  It was this perfection that made the bed in the centre all the more apparent, if not for the dying man lying on it who almost drained the life of everything that surrounded him.

  Before she could focus on the man however, she noticed that she could hear voices from behind the soundproof glass that overlooked them both. Mutters between Twist and the other workers in the control room about the past few hours.

  Sam couldn’t quite make out what was being said, to her it was like listening to the world through a piece of paper stuck to her ears. Only muffled noises and words could be made out on occasion; something about a security camera here, another mention of doors and walls and permits, and at some points she heard her name being mentioned, more than a couple of times.

  She had to block this noise out, to focus on the dying man in front of her. The man who had outstretched his arms towards her like the other patients before him did.

  She had no idea why but these people seemed to think she could help, like they could feel that Sam was somehow different. It filled her with some level of hope and optimism, whatever secret could help or fix these people was inside of her. The patients knew it, somehow, and deep down Sam knew it too.

  She had woken up outside, in the void, with nothing but a broken helmet and torn clothes. Stab wounds on her body mysteriously vanished and she could count, what she could only assume to be, the atoms of snow. Something about her was different.

  Could I…

  …use this?

  She turned towards the man as these thoughts swam through her mind, the moment she locked eyes with him his arm gently fell down to his side. After a few seconds she realised that he was bracing, as if he somehow knew that she was about to do something.

  This was the final push for Sam, in that moment she knew, with utmost certainty, that she had something she needed to do. All signs were pointing towards this, and despite the mounting headaches that still passed through her on occasion, gaining strength by the second. She let her brain relax, to release the tension that had been loosely contained until now. In an instant she could pinpoint everything in the room, like the feeling she got in the snow when she was blind and desperate. She could feel the desperation in the man’s body, the fear from the people behind the glass. It was hard to describe, but she just knew.

  This wasn’t just a feeling anymore, not just a simple sensation, she could actually see everything inside of the patients body. She knew things she swore she never learned, body parts and chemical symbols that were completely foreign to her yet she somehow knew everything about them. With every new thing she saw another thing came to her mind, in ways that her conscious mind couldn’t possibly understand. A projector was in her mind flicking through slides like frames in an animation, and yet she understood every detail as if they were left on each for hours at a time.

  The closest thing this could be seen as, described as, would be omniscience.

  But she wasn’t just seeing these things either. The appearance of the man’s body was like the sand she felt in the wall before, and looked just as malleable. Every detail of his body on display, like these were blueprints of life itself and only she held a pen to change them. she felt as though with a simple touch and some willpower accompanying it, anything and everything could be changed to how she wanted.

  She stepped closer to the patient, practically standing over him as she raised her hand to her chest. She wanted to get rid of the disease, to change the man into someone who was immune to it entirely. Her desire echoed around her mind over and over again, a deceleration getting stronger and stronger with every second dedicated to it.

  Sam moved her hand from her own chest to his, positioning it like it was about to plunge into his ribcage. She focused her mind further on her goal, to get rid of the disease.

  And, just for a moment, the thought became crystal clear.

  The skin on her hand peeled away from her, revealing the muscles and veins connecting it to the rest of her body. The fibre of her muscles was darker than red, almost a shade of purple or deep magenta if anything, and the veins around glowed with supernatural energy. They shone in a thousand different colours, some she couldn’t comprehend, colours that could be mistaken for living creatures with thoughts. The colour beautifully reflected off of the walls and the glass like they would on the surface of water.

  Sam lowered her hand closer to the man, pressing her fingers into his chest. Slowly, the biology of her person unravelled like tiny strands of string and phased into his body.

  The feeling of pushing through sand returned to her.

  Half of her arm was submerged into the man, and with surgical like composure she concentrated on her target, the makeup of his being. She prodded parts of his genetic code around, shuffling them in between her fingers weaving them, tweaking him like a mechanic did with a car. She added things in places, chemical combinations that were alien to his body, some entirely imagined up by Sam. At other times she erased bacteria, the ‘Six disease’ that was destroying his body.

  Sam knew, but didn’t know, how she was doing this. Instinct, purely.

  Within seconds she was done, extracting her hand from his body. Sam gasped for air the second the skin on her hand miraculously returned, having accidentally held her breath while she operated.

  The man sat upright. His arms patted parts of his body that used to hurt before but now were calm and pleasant. He breathed deeply, and didn’t find fire rushing into his lungs like they used to. Tears welled up in his eyes, that hadn’t happened in a while either.

  The monitors in the room glowed green, his health was now as perfect as the white walls of the room. Strangely, underneath his clean vital signs, the machine didn’t recognise him has human. With how Sam had essentially played God just now it only made sense that he technically wasn’t human, but he was alive and that’s all she cared about.

  She sighed out of relief, finally being able to relax after doing something so experimental. She couldn’t quite turn her brain off just yet, her senses tingled as they slowly cooled down, all engine like. They still buzzed in her brain, sensing that the man was truly okay, sensing the cold silence behind the glass, and the distinct sound of heavy steel sliding over steel clicking into place followed by a trigger being pulled.

  The glass shattered into a thousand different pieces, becoming powder in an instant. A hail of bullets coursing out of a giant engine blade careened into the room.

  The bodyguard, from outside. Twist and the other scientists cowered behind him.

  The ex-patient turned into a red mist, and Sam became a pincushion of man-made holes, dropping down against the red wall in shock.