Salt and iron fill my mouth, sharp and bitter on my swollen tongue. Blood pours over my chin and traces my throat to collect at my collarbones. I swallow empty breath after empty breath, adrenaline humming underneath my skin, with only one coherent word stuck on my lips.

Eli.

Thick smoke fills my nostrils and envelopes the air around us. Gray fumes spiral inside tiny craters of the laminate around me, then spew across the ground. A curl of white circles over my shoulders and sticks its particles onto my face, pouring from the lesions in my back. Something pricks my spine. Warm blood drips from one bullet hole to another, it smothers the ground and suctions my cheek to the mold between the cracks. I clutch my hand to my stomach and force my ribs to rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall...

Eli sits at my shoulder, mouth open, his screams lost in the cotton shoved inside my ears. He shakes and claws for me, hands covered in my blood, face speckled with tears and bits of red. He grasps my shoulder, his touch foreign and distant to my numb skin, and holds me as tight as he can.

"Mom, heal," he mouths over and over again. "Mom, heal! Heal and get up! Get up!"

"Eli." I see my hand ball a fist and beyond it, my son. Damn kid thinks he can stop the blood. “Eli, run,” I say. He’s letting go. “You have to run.”

"I can't leave you," he says, just audible above the buzzing in my ears. "Not until you get back up."

Something trickles from my ear and drips into the side of my mouth, salt stinging the sores on my cracked lips. Bile forms at my throat, my tongue bloats against my teeth, and I vomit coffee grounds onto myself. Dark curdled blood splashes across my chin and spatters the tile, adding ink to the combination of moss, mold, and blackened ichor.

"I said run," I say. "Run, now!"

Eli freezes, tremors racing through his tiny frame as he refuses to let go of me. "Not without you," he says. Teardrops trace his cheeks and slide over his lips. "Not until you get up, too."

Heavy footsteps send vibrations through my fingertips, sharp and wooden as if they drag with an injury. I bend my knees beneath me and haul myself to my elbows, the wounds in my back tearing at the edges. Eli shouts in my left ear, choking on his sobs, his skin scrunched and puffy around his eyes and mouth.

"You said you wouldn't hurt her," he says. "You said you wouldn't hurt her! You liar!"

The footsteps halt. A small pop resonates to the right of me, followed by the whistle of something small shooting through the air. Eli chokes, words hitched at the bottom of a sob, as if something had jammed itself into his chest. I scramble through the mess of my own insides and reach for him, heart battering my shattered rib cage.

A blue feather sticks out from his sternum, the needle embedded in his dark skin, where a tiny drop of blood spreads across the back of his shirt. His lashes meet the tops of his cheeks as he blinks at me, pupils expanding to touch the edges of his silver irises, all clouded by tears.

"Mom," he whispers in a drowsy tone, head lulled to his collar bones. "Get up." He slides to the floor and curls up beside me, in his final conscious moment he reaches both his hands to touch my face.

Fix's shadow darkens the pool of blood around me. He holds tight to a light cannon, smoke easing off the muzzle to join the filthy air. I reach to Eli's fingers and grab his tiny wrist, then drag my tattered mess across the ground.

"Y-you f-fucking b-bastard," I say around the fluid in my lungs.

"Ah, but Eden," he says. "You know this is for his own good." His shadow rises, the end of his gun ready to strike. I lift myself up and crawl to my son, begging my feet to curl underneath me, but my spine numbs, my limbs refuse to respond. Fireworks stop me where I lie. Darkness spreads through my body as something warm slides behind my ears. I collapse and bury my face into the blood-soaked tile, television static forever in my gaze.

His sharp metal heel burrows into the side of my face, cold and heavy, it presses until I fear my cheekbone would snap. Rancid body odor fills my nostrils--the stench of a man who lost his fight against Corruption long ago. His bloated shadow leans over its knee, its jaw open much too wide, lesions extending through its cheeks reflected on the tile.

"I really wasn't going to kill you," he says. "But I'll admit, I don't regret this."

I gasp against the bloody tiles, lungs fit to burst as he smashes my head into the floor.

"You're a menace, Eden. Your son deserves something much better than what you can offer him. He certainly deserves someone much better than you."

A fever settles in my bones, it burns along my veins until my insides boil. My ears fill with a sinister screech, loud and unbearable, it presses on my eardrums and fills them with fluid. I search through the darkness for Eli's hands, shouting over the noise, but I can't find the breath to say his name.

Fix lifts his boot off my cheek and lets me grovel on my side, where I allow the fever to overtake the gnawing in my back. Something crawls inside my wounds, like spiders with too many legs--they burst from the lesions in my spine and the footprint on my face. My vision returns, edges rimmed with silver, details sharpened and overwhelming.

Fix crouches before me and wraps my boy into his arms. He stares over his missing nose as I gasp into the ground, squirming beneath a million invisible insects, suffocating in my own blood.

"Look at how you suffer," Fix says. "Why you'd want to live like this is a mystery to me. I suppose you chose this fate, so I guess I'll leave you to rot inside the Beast."

He pauses at the threshold with Eli pressed against his chest, adjusting his gun and spear before disappearing beyond the yellow door.

Laughter overflows my chest and sputters out my mouth in flecks of crimson and black. My spine wrenches upward, inhuman and grotesque, bones snapping against one another as the insects make their way inside my vertebrae. My ribs expand much too far, they press against my skin and mend their own fractures as they shift around my lungs. My first uninhibited inhale is far from easy, with the stale apartment air hot inside my burning chest, but I welcome it all the same.

The bullet wounds close along with my other injuries, stitches swallowed by strange skin textured like thick ropes of indigo flesh. Why the Beast favors my right arm I'll never know. It squirms and expands underneath my shoulder, bulging with inky strands that separate from the blackened tissue underneath. Bones twist against one another through the gaps and trade their ivory tone for a silver sheen.

"What a fool," I say, my voice split in two. "Over the years he's forgotten who I am."

I drag myself to my feet and grasp the tile with strange toes, the silver tarsals malformed and crooked. They pierce the thick leather of my boots and shred the soles until there's nothing left. My knee cracks backward and sends gross snaps echoing around the room. I shed ink and thick blue puddles across the floor as I stand, breaking the laminate with my feet. Breathless, I plunge through the hot apartment air and grab the edges of the door frame. Splinters shoot through the gaps in my fingers, it gives way beneath my strength and shatters. The doorway groans, I leave it a mess of wood, dust, and ink, forever sealing the apartment behind an avalanche of rotted sheetrock and concrete blocks.

The insects beneath my skin squirm, the thick blue armor expands around my silver bones. My mutation grows with every step, reaching from my arm to permeate my chest, lines of ink crawling to my neck--I don't have much time left.

I tear to the bottom of the stairs, mangled wood and pools of ink left in my wake. Thick clouds of smoke meet me at the doorway. My heart lurches against my ribcage. Bullets spatter the fog and rip up the moldy planks across the ground, tables explode into splinters, glasses shatter on the torn bar, bits of paper and fabric sail through the air.

Chaos.

A gun claps. Lightning shoots across the thick clouds of smoke. A howl ricochets to the high rafters, guttural and inhuman, followed by curses that might as well be in another language.

The victim grovels and begs in nonsense words, blood splashing the ground with every attempt to make a sentence--yes, I know what that sounds like, I don't need to look. A hammer clicks, that familiar whine whistles in my ears. Another light charge, a devastating one from the sound of it.

The smoke clears and spirals past rays of gray sunshine pouring through a broken window pane. I creep through the shadows of the bar, dragging spider webs across my face and waving away thick sheets of dust. I follow the sunlight, careful not to leave the shadows, careful not to scrape the wood with my claws or drag my arm across the ground.

In the center of the room I find my Eli, awake, alive, and furious. Fix kneels before him with his bloated hands locked around a hole in his stomach, inky blood seeping through his fingers. His skin stretches and moves, filling with the same creatures that run through mine, but the movement is dramatized, violent. He pleads with Eli, eyes wide and dripping mucus down cheeks lined with dark veins. Eli shows him little grace. He overshadows Fix with his tiny frame, blue feathers stuck in his chest, Fix's light gun clasped in his hands. Eli offers it to him.

"I'm not going anywhere with you," he says, dark curls matted to his temples. He spits in the face of his father. "Take your weapon and get out."

The hole between Fix's fingers tries to mend itself, but Corruption bloats and bubbles at the edges of his fat skin. "Eli," he begs, choking on the wad of ink in his mouth. "Eli, please listen to me."

Eli throws the gun on the ground and clenches his tiny fists at his side, then squeezes his eyes shut. "I said, get out!" His gaze flickers to the shadows where I lurk along the sides of the bar, ichor sliding over the tips of my claws. A smile teases the corners of his lips. "You know what?" he says. "Don't worry about it."

The rolls of fat on the back of Fix's neck crunch into one another as he lifts his head from his bleeding stomach. "What do you mean?"

I grasp his shoulder. It bulges beneath my palm, soaked in sweat and covered in ink. I slam my mutated mass of silver bones and dripping ropes of skin through the hidden ribcage of his back.

The wound expands over my wrist, thumb scraping the edge of his spine, until his organs squish between what used to be my knuckles. A foul odor washes over me, reminiscent of decay, as his rotten insides spill down my shredded forearm. Foam drips from his lips and courses down his chin, then erupts into blackened blood and coffee-ground vomit. His skin boils around the parts of my arm lost in his back, strings of torn and mutated muscles begging to be reunited. They reach for one another and threaten to sew up my hand inside his body. I take hold of a mass of bones and tissue, then tear them from his back and scatter them across the floor.

He scrambles through a mess of ichor, the wounds healing with every twitch of a misplaced tendon. Bile adds to the stench of death in the air. I snatch his long metal spear off his back, the thick leather strap chafes his neck, then snaps in two. Ink spills from open sores and closing wounds as he shifts around his skeleton, Corruption at an uproar--his eyes dark with the promise of madness.

I stalk around his bloated body to face him. He shivers and claws for me, eyes darting around the room, pupils drawn to the rims of silver irises. I wring my hands through the front of his soaked shirt, spear placed heavy against his chest. It takes far too much effort to lift his stinking heap off the ground. But power swarms my veins, electricity races to the edges of my body. I drag him across the floor, then smash his head into a metal beam in the wall. The skyscraper rattles with the force--well, no, but I like to exaggerate. Blood seeps around his neck and pools at the spaces between his collarbones, the crack of bone against metal ringing in my ears.

I lift the spear and hold it between two hands, then bear down with all my might--it snaps like a toothpick, flecks of metal shimmering to meet the dust on the floor. The sharpened edge catches my eye. I squint at Fix, aim, then drive the pointed tip through his quadricep. My strange hand slips as I bear down on the staff, crunching through sinew until it pops the skin on the other side. The spear punches through the dirty wooden boards, anchoring him to the floor.

He leans over the metal and spits on his thigh, slapping the handle with weakened hands. Tears stream from his eyes and drip over his swollen lips, he licks them with a rotten green tongue, black spit gathering at the edges.

"Look me in the eye so I can stab you in the neck," I say. I brandish the other half of the spear, brunt end lined with his head. He doesn't answer, he rocks back and forth, spitting words I can't understand.

I click my tongue. "This is sad. You were once so powerful. Now, look at you, broken at the hands of a woman who never loved you."

"Pl-please," he says. "M-mercy."

"Mercy? Tch--" I press my foot farther into his stomach. He leans his head against the metal and groans. "I always assumed the Martians were the lowest of scum. But you're not even fit to lick their boots." I spit onto his face, it spatters across his sunken nose and drips onto his cheeks. "I have no mercy for the likes of you."

He lifts his double chin and gasps for breath, the crown of his head pressed to the metal beam. I cram the spear's end into his throat and slice it to the back of his neck. Skin, vertebrae, veins--they burst around the metal and send vibrations up the staff, as I shove the spear through the concrete and paint the skyscraper wall a vibrant shade of red.

He dangles from the skewers, bulging eyes set upon the rafters.