Chapter 5: Exploding Bodies and Her Interests
The blue room held the nightmares at bay. It didn’t stop them, but it gave Wren a solid floor to shake on when she woke, sweat-soaked, from dreams of weeping bark and cracking bones. The third time it happened, she didn’t scream. She just got up, drank water from the sink, and stared out at the dark garden until her heartbeat settled. Recalibration. Ivy would call it progress.
At 9:58 AM, she stood outside the workshop door. She wore durable trousers and a simple t-shirt, clothes that could be ruined. Her hands were steady.
The door hissed open before she could knock, revealing the Joker already in motion, a schematic glowing on a tablet in one hand. “Punctual. I’m almost offended. Makes it harder to punish lateness.” He barely glanced at her, striding toward the spatial coagulator. “Component sorting is suspended. We have a variance. Follow.”
The machine loomed, its usual contented hum now a higher-pitched, anxious whine. The beautiful crystalline structure inside the glass chamber had developed a hairline crack, from which a thin stream of violet gas was escaping, hissing as it met the air.
“Leak?” Wren asked, falling into step beside him.
“Ventral seam instability. The crystalline matrix is rejecting a resonance from a nearby energy source. Think of it as a bad song giving it a headache.” He tossed the tablet onto a cluttered bench and grabbed a micrometer. “I need to recalibrate the damping field. You will monitor the secondary containment array.” He pointed to a bank of twelve small, round gauges on the side of the machine. “The instant any gauge jumps into the red zone, you tell me. Not a second after. The gauges control the magnetic seals on the specimen vault.”
He gestured with his chin toward the far wall, where a series of heavy, riveted doors were set into the stone. “Behind those doors are the interesting failures. The things too unique to destroy, but too unstable to let out. If the seals fail, we have a very messy, very dramatic afternoon.”
“Okay,” Wren said, positioning herself in front of the gauges. They all glowed a steady, benign green.
The Joker set to work, his movements a fascinating blend of brutality and grace. He didn’t weld this time; he used tiny, precise tools, his face a mask of uncharacteristic focus. The whine of the coagulator dipped and peaked.
“Talk to me, Factoid. Gauges.”
“All green.”
“Good. Keep talking. Distract me from the incredibly delicate act of not vaporizing this wing of the house.”
The request threw her. “What should I say?”
“Anything. Your voice is a consistent frequency. Useful. So talk. About the room. The nightmares. The way Pam looks at her plants. I don’t care.”
So she talked. She described the blue room, the sound of the floorboards. She mentioned the nightmares, but framed them as data points—the tree’ cries had shifted to sounding like old radiator pipes in her first apartment. She didn’t mention Ivy’s offered tincture. She said, “Ivy looks at the aggressive vines the way my old mechanic looked at a tricky engine. Not love. Specific respect.”
He chuckled, a low sound almost lost in the machine’s hum. “Accurate. Now the third gauge from the left. What’s it doing?”
She glanced. “Flickering. Very faint. Between green and yellow.”
“Ahead of schedule. Noted.” He adjusted a filament. “Keep going. Tell me something true you haven’t told anyone here.”
The question hung in the ozone-thick air. The babbling impulse, the one that had declared them gorgeous, itched at the base of her skull. But this wasn’t terror. This was a different kind of exposure. She watched his hands, steady on the tools.
“On my checklist,” she said, the words coming out flat, “I put fear play as a green. Consensual non-consent. Primal stuff. That’s true. But the reason isn’t just about the thrill. It’s about… proof of trust. Letting someone see you that scared, that animal, and knowing they’ll stop when you need them to. It’s the only time my brain actually shuts up. The silence feels like being real.”
The Joker paused for a half-second, his eyes cutting to her before returning to his work. “The silence after the scream.”
“Yes.”
“And the breath play? The choking?”
“Same family. It’s… a direct line. Total focus. On the one hand. On the need. Everything else goes grey.”
“Good truths,” he murmured. “Practical truths. Gauge.”
“Still flickering. No red.”
He worked for another minute in silence she’d provided. Then, he swore, sharply. The tool in his hand sparked. The coagulator’s whine shot up an octave into a shriek.
The flickering gauge snapped solidly into the red. Then the one next to it. Then a third.
“Magnetic seal failure in progress,” Wren reported, her voice louder, cutting through the noise.
“Containment breach is imminent. Secondary protocol.” He was already moving, yanking a lever on the main console. A heavy clunk echoed through the workshop, followed by the sound of hydraulic locks disengaging. “The vault is pressure-sealed. The breach will be internal. But it will rupture the primary crates. It’s going to be visually upsetting. Don’t freeze.”
A deep, metallic groan came from the wall of specimen vaults. One of the riveted doors vibrated, then burst outward with a concussive whump that knocked tools from nearby benches.
It wasn’t monsters that came out. It was a flood of viscous, greyish ichor, smelling of ammonia and rotting honey. And in the slurry, were the bodies.
They were humanoid, but all wrong. Seven or eight of them, tangled together. Their skin was translucent, showing pulsing networks of black veins. Their limbs were elongated, twisted, some fused together. Their faces were smooth blanks, save for gaping mouths stretched in silent, perpetual screams. They were failed experiments, remnants of other debris fields, things the Joker had tried to stabilize and couldn’t.
As the pressurized ichor hit the open air, the bodies began to swell.
“Acidic biomass expansion,” the Joker yelled, grabbing a thick hose from the wall. “Stand clear!”
The nearest body bloated like a grotesque balloon, its blank face turning toward Wren. With a wet, tearing sound, it burst. Shards of brittle bone and ropes of sticky viscera splattered across the floor, sizzling where they landed. Another body popped, then another. The workshop was filled with a cacophony of pops and hisses, a rain of internal wreckage.
A shard of something hot and sharp grazed Wren’s arm. She flinched, but her eyes stayed on the Joker. He was hosing down the spewing vault door with a foaming chemical suppressant, his expression one of intense annoyance, not fear.
Another body, this one with three arms knotted around its torso, rolled to her feet, swelling rapidly. The instinct to run was a white-hot wire in her spine. It’s just debris, she thought, the lesson from the slug and the tree colliding in her head. Failed material. Manage the ecosystem.
She didn’t run. She looked around, saw a heavy, folded tarp on a bench. She grabbed it, and in one fluid motion, threw it over the swelling body just as it ruptured. The muffled thump was satisfying. The tarp contained most of the spray.
The Joker saw it. He didn’t smile. He nodded once, curt. “Valve. On the wall behind you. Yellow. Turn it full right.”
She found it, wrestled it open. With a whoosh, powerful overhead vents engaged, sucking the acidic mist and stench up and away. The geyser of ichor from the vault slowed to a trickle under the chemical foam. The popping stopped. The silence that followed was ringing, broken only by the drip of residue and the hum of the now-calm coagulator.
The workshop was a warzone of gore and goo. They stood in the middle of it, splattered with the remains of forgotten things.
“Seal integrity restored,” the Joker said, dropping the hose. He wiped a smear of grey ichor from his cheek, examined it on his glove. “Messy. But contained. You didn’t freeze.”
“You said not to.” Wren’s heart was hammering, but it was a clean, high-adrenaline beat. She looked at the tarp, soggy and dissolved at the center. “They were just… debris.”
“They were people,” he corrected, his voice oddly casual. He walked over to her, stepping around a puddle of steaming biomass. “Or almost-people. Thinking, feeling things that didn’t work out. That’s the reality of the fields you come from. Not all deliveries are as tidy as you.” He stopped in front of her. “You covered it. That was smart. Not heroic. Strategic. You protected the workspace.”
He reached out, not touching her, but indicating the faint burn on her arm from the flying shard. “Hurts?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Pain is a good teacher.” His eyes, sharp and green, locked on hers. “Now. Back to your truths. Fear play. Breath play. The silence.” He moved so quickly she had no time to react. One hand came up, not to strike, but to settle against the side of her neck, his thumb pressing with expert, precise pressure just below her jaw. It wasn’t a choke. It was a demonstration. A promise.
Her air didn’t cut off. But the threat of it, the absolute control in the placement of his hand, sent a jolt straight through her core. Her breath hitched. Her eyes widened. But it wasn’t fear that flooded her system, turning her skin hot and her thoughts to static. It was a shocking, immediate surge of arousal.
He saw it. He watched the dilation of her pupils, the flush that travelled down her throat. He felt the rabbit-fast pulse under his thumb. His grin was slow, a sunrise of pure, unadulterated discovery.
“Ah,” he breathed, the sound triumphant. “There it is. Not fear. Not even close.” He increased the pressure by a fraction. A whisper of deprivation. Her vision sparked at the edges, her focus narrowing to the points of contact: his hand, his eyes. The grey quiet began to descend, beautiful and hollow. “You don’t just trust us to stop, Wren. You need us not to. That’s the wire. That’s the game.”
He released her, stepping back as she drew in a sharp, ragged gasp.
“Your truth,” he said, wiping his hand on his coveralls, “is the most useful piece of intel in this room. More useful than the coagulator.” He turned to survey the mess, his mood visibly elevated. “Now, clean-up. You’re on biomass duty. There’s a neutralizer in the orange drum. And Wren?”
She was still catching her breath, her body humming with the echo of his touch. “Yes?”
“Welcome to the workshop. For real.” He winked, a grotesque, genuine gesture. “You’re not just sorting components anymore. You’re officially interesting.”
As she fetched the drum, her hands trembling slightly not from panic but from the aftershock of that targeted, clarifying thrill, she understood. The test in the grove had been about obedience. This, the breach, the conversation… this was about compatibility. About finding where her broken parts fit perfectly into their machine.
She sluiced neutralizer across the floor, watching the biological waste dissolve into inert foam. She cleaned up the debris. And for the first time, the chaotic, toxic heart of the place felt less like a cage, and more like a home she was uniquely wired to inhabit.
The neutralizer foam ate through the last of the gore, leaving the workshop floor streaked but clean, smelling of chemical lemons and void. Wren’s arms ached from scrubbing. The Joker whistled as he recalibrated a final gauge on the coagulator, the machine’s hum returning to its contented purr. “Efficiency,” he announced, slapping the housing. “You didn’t waste time being horrified. You saw a problem and you contained it. That’s the job.”
He tossed a clean rag at her. It hit her chest. “Your arm. Dress it. Don’t get sepsis, it’s a boring way to die.”
She caught the rag, dabbing at the shallow burn. The sting was a bright, clarifying punctuation mark. “What were they? Originally?”
“Who knows?” He shrugged, wiping his tools with a practiced motion. “A prayer group caught in a reality-fold? A family sedan that took a wrong turn into a black hole? The fields aren’t sentimental. They just are. We harvest what’s usable. The rest…” He gestured to the now-sealed vault. “We study. Sometimes they pop.”
The casualness was its own kind of lesson. She finished cleaning the wound. “And me? Why didn’t I… pop?”
He turned, leaning against the workbench. He studied her, his head tilted like a curious bird examining a new trinket. “You’re holding a better shape. Lower entropy. Maybe you’re just more stubborn.” A grin flickered. “Or maybe you wanted this more.”
The statement landed, heavy and true, in the quiet between the machine noises. Before she could unravel it, the main door swung open.
Harley stood silhouetted in the hallway light, a paper bag in one hand. She took in the scene: the cleaned floor, the tools, the two of them standing in the aftermath. Her eyes, sharp and missing nothing, scanned Wren’s posture, the rag in her hand, the calm on the Joker’s face.
“Heard we had an event,” she said, strolling in. She placed the bag on a cleared spot. “Brought lunch. Figured you’d forget.” She peered at Wren’s arm. “Ouch. Acid spatter or shrapnel?”
“Shrapnel. From a… swelling thing.”
“Charming.” Harley’s gaze lifted to Wren’s face, then to the Joker. “She useful?”
“Surprisingly.” The Joker didn’t look up from his tool case. “Contained a rupture with a tarp. Monitored the seals. Didn’t scream once. Her vital signs were more interesting during the debrief.”
Wren felt a flush creep up her neck. Harley’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh?”
“A practical discussion about her checklist. Fear stimuli. Respiratory constriction. Her physiological responses are… congruent with operational parameters.” He said it like he was reading a lab report, but the sly edge in his voice was a blade.
Harley’s expression shifted, the professional psychiatrist surfacing for a half-second before melting into a wicked smile. “No kidding.” She turned fully to Wren. “So when Puddin’ puts his hands on you to make a point, you don’t want to run. You want to see how far the point goes.”
It wasn’t a question. Wren’s mouth went dry. The babbling instinct surfaced, a flood of denials or excuses, but she forced it down. She met Harley’s eyes. “I want to know where the lines are. So I know what I’m choosing.”
The honesty hung there, stark and simple. Harley blinked, then laughed, a sharp, delighted sound that bounced off the steel. “Hell. Okay.” She reached into the bag, pulled out a wrapped sandwich, and handed it to Wren. “Pastrami. You’ve earned it.”
The Joker snatched an apple from the bag. “Her training shifts. Less fetch-and-carry. More systems. I want her to understand the coagulator’s fail-safes by the end of the week.”
“You’re putting her on primary maintenance?” Harley asked, a note of surprise in her voice.
“She has a feel for pressure. And she doesn’t panic when things get wet.” He took a loud bite of the apple. “Also, she finds my instructional techniques… motivating.”
Wren unwrapped her sandwich, the ordinary act feeling surreal. The bread was thick, the meat fragrant. She took a bite. It was the best thing she’d ever tasted. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, thank the deli guy three towns over who doesn’t ask questions.” Harley hopped up to sit on the workbench, swinging her legs. “So, systems training. That means you get a proper keycard. Access to sub-level schematics. The fun stuff.”
A keycard. It was a small, physical token. It was everything. “What’s the catch?”
“The catch is you’ll actually have to fix things when they break at two in the morning,” Harley said. “And you can’t unsee the weird shit. But, hey.” She nudged Wren’s foot with her boot. “You already see it. Now you get to learn how the plumbing works.”
The Joker finished his apple, tossing the core into a hazardous waste bin with perfect aim. “Start tomorrow. Seven AM. The coagulator’ morning diagnostic is a five-step process. You’ll memorize it.” He walked toward the door, pausing beside Wren. He didn’t touch her again, but his proximity was a live wire. “Think about the silence, Factoid. That’s your calibration point.”
He left. The workshop felt larger, emptier, but the hum was steady.
Harley watched her for a long moment. “You okay? For real. Not the workshop-okay. The Wren-okay.”
Wren considered it. The burn on her arm throbbed. The taste of pastrami was on her tongue. The memory of his thumb on her artery was a fresh, warm imprint. The nightmare-tree’s cries felt distant, less potent than this immediate, complicated reality.
“I’m not okay,” she said finally, which felt truer than anything. “But I’m where I’m supposed to be. I think.”
Harley’s smile was softer now, less sharp at the edges. “That’s the only kind of okay that matters here.” She slid off the bench. “Finish your sandwich. Your afternoon just got free. I’d suggest a nap. Or, you know.” She winked. “A very private think about calibration points.”
She sauntered out, leaving Wren alone with the machine.
Wren finished eating, methodically folding the wrapper. She walked to the spatial coagulator, placing her palm flat against its metal housing. It was warm. She could feel the vibration of its captured chaos traveling up her bones, a rhythm that matched the new, steady pulse in her own veins. She was no longer debris salvaged from the field. She was becoming part of the machine that managed the field. The line between being a kept thing and a keeper was beginning to blur, and the quiet in her head wasn’t fear. It was focus. It was waiting.
It was waiting. The machine’s warmth seeped into her palm, a patient, humming thing. She pulled her hand away, the ghost of its vibration lingering in her bones like a new kind of pulse.
The silence in the workshop was no longer empty. It was charged, thick with the echoes of bursting bodies and hissing gas and a thumb pressed to her neck. She finished wiping down the last bench, the citrus tang of neutralizer clinging to her clothes. Her mind replayed the sequence on a loop: red gauges, swollen flesh, the tarp, his hand, the grey.
She needed air that didn’t taste of ozone or rot.
The hallway was a shock of normalcy—just stone, just quiet. She walked without direction, her sneakers silent on the flagstones. She ended up in the conservatory, drawn to the green, living smell after the chemical death of the workshop.
Ivy was there, of course, her back to Wren, repotting a fierce-looking orchid with serrated leaves. “You’re covered in neutralizer,” she said without turning. “And your cortisol levels are spiking. Sit down before you vibrate out of your skin.”
Wren slumped onto a wrought-iron bench. “Had a morning.”
“So I gathered. The breach alarm is hard to miss.” Ivy finished patting soil around the orchid’s roots. “Harley said you were useful. That’s a significant adjective from her.”
“Useful.” Wren rolled the word in her mouth. It tasted less like a compliment and more like a classification. “He’s putting me on systems training. For the coagulator.”
Ivy turned, wiping her hands on a towel. Her green eyes swept over Wren, clinical and penetrating. “That explains the elevated vitals. Not just from the adrenaline.” She stepped closer, her gaze catching on the faint, red mark on Wren’s neck, just below her jaw. A perfect thumbprint. “I see. A practical demonstration.”
There was no judgment in her tone. Only analysis. Wren felt exposed, but not ashamed. It was just more data for Ivy’s ecosystem. “He was testing a theory.”
“He’s always testing theories. The difference is, he’s starting to test them with you, not on you.” Ivy folded the towel neatly. “The tincture for the nightmares. Do you need it?”
The offer, repeated, felt like a hand held out in the dark. “Not yet,” Wren said. “The dreams are… changing. Less about the tree. More about the vault door groaning open.”
Ivy nodded. “The mind processes trauma by integrating it into familiar architecture. Your subconscious is updating.” She picked up a mister, tending to a cluster of deep purple blossoms. “If you’re going to be working on the coagulator, you’ll need to understand the source fields. They’re not just random tears.”
Wren leaned forward. “What are they?”
“Wounds.” Ivy sprayed a fine fog over the leaves. “In the fabric of… everything. Some are old, from cataclysms no one remembers. Some are new, self-inflicted by idiots playing with forces they think they understand. Our estate sits on a nexus. A scar tissue. We don’t just harvest from the wounds. We monitor them. Sometimes we stitch them shut.”
The scale of it was dizzying. “And the things that come through?”
“Byproducts. Cellular debris from dying realities. Sometimes a whole cell survives intact.” She glanced at Wren. “Like you.”
“So I’m… a white blood cell? From a dead universe?”
“I’d say you’re more of a specialized platelet.” A faint, almost-smile touched Ivy’s lips. “You showed an aptitude for containment today. That’s a clotting function. It’s necessary.”
Wren barked a laugh, sudden and rough. It echoed in the glass-domed space. “I just threw a tarp on a popping corpse.”
“You saw a problem and applied an immediate, effective solution without succumbing to hysterics. In this house, that’s a clotting function.” Ivy placed the mister down with a definitive click. “He’ll push you further on it. The breath play. The fear dynamic. He’s cataloguing your stress thresholds the way I catalogue soil pH.”
“And that’s okay?” The question slipped out, small.
Ivy was silent for a long moment, watching a tendril of ivy creep along a beam overhead. “It’s efficient,” she said finally. “We are what we are. He is chaos, measured and applied. I am growth, contained and directed. Harley is the spark between. You…” Her eyes returned to Wren. “You are a curiosity. Empathetic. Resilient. You ask if it’s okay. That question is your core temperature. Never lose it.”
She walked to a shelf and retrieved a small, corked bottle of emerald liquid. “Take this anyway. For when the door in your dreams finally opens all the way. Two drops under the tongue. It won’t stop the dreams, but it will soften the edges.”
Wren took the bottle. It was cool. “Thank you, Ivy.”
“You can call me Pam. When we’re not in the field.” She turned back to her plants, a clear dismissal. “Now go shower. You smell like a laboratory accident.”
The hot water was a blessing. It sluiced away the neutralizer, the phantom ichor, the lingering sensation of controlled pressure. She dressed in soft clothes from her blue room—her room—and stared at the keycard Harley had left on her desk. It was black, featureless, heavy.
A knock came at the door, a rapid staccato. Harley didn’t wait for an answer. She leaned in, now wearing paint-stained overalls, her hair tied up in a messy knot. “You decent? Good. We’re going for a walk. Outside outside. Not garden outside.”
“Why?” Wren asked, pocketing the keycard.
“Because you’ve been coughed up by a reality-wound, vetted by a paranoid ecoterrorist, stress-tested by a living bomb, and you just cleaned up ontological viscera. You need ground under your feet that isn’t thinking about eating you.” Harley tossed her a worn leather jacket. “It’s chilly. Let’s go.”
They didn’t go through the main gates. Harley led her down a service corridor, through a heavy bulkhead door, and out into a sprawling, wild meadow that bordered the estate’s high stone walls. The air was crisp, smelling of damp earth and wild onions. The sky was a vast, indifferent grey.
They walked in silence for a while, the tall grass swishing against their legs. “He got to you, huh?” Harley said, her tone light.
“Was it that obvious?”
“To me? Yeah. I’ve been on the receiving end of that clinical curiosity for a long time. The way you were holding your neck in the conservatory.” She mimicked the posture, a subtle, protective tilt. “It’s not a bad thing. It just is.”
“He said my reactions were… congruent.”
Harley snorted. “He would. He’s gonna design a whole syllabus around it now. You know that, right? Like, tailored fear exposure. He’ll call it ‘resilience optimization’ or some bullshit.”
The thought should have been terrifying. Instead, it felt inevitable. Like a curriculum for a school she’d already enrolled in. “And you?”
“Me?” Harley kicked a stone. It skittered ahead into the grass. “I like you. You’re funny. You don’t try to be, which is funnier. You look at us and you don’t see legends or monsters. You see… people. Broken, nasty, spectacular people. It’s refreshing.” She stopped, turning to face Wren. “So if you’re gonna play in his sandbox of calibrated terror, I’m gonna be your spotter. Make sure the lines don’t get fuzzy.”
“Why?” Wren asked, the wind pulling at her hair.
“‘Cause someone was once a spotter for me. Made all the difference.” Harley’s smile was fleeting, touched with an old grief. “And ‘cause I wanna see what you become. I’ve got a stake in it now.”
Ahead, the meadow dipped into a shallow creek, its water dark and fast over smooth stones. Harley hopped onto a large, flat rock in the middle. “Come on. Best thinking spot on the property.”
Wren followed, the rock cool and solid beneath her. The water’s chatter filled the silence.
“The thing on your checklist,” Harley said, staring at the rushing water. “The consensual non-consent. The wanting to not think. I get that. More than you know.” She looked at Wren, her blue eyes unguarded. “After everything I’ve done, everything that’s been done to me… sometimes the only peace is handing the wheel to someone you trust to drive you right off a cliff. Knowing they’ll bring you back.”
Wren’s throat tightened. “Is that what this is?”
“Maybe. We’re all driving off a cliff here, sweetheart. The trick is enjoying the fall.” Harley nudged her shoulder. “So. You got your keycard. You got your tincture from Red. You got your marching orders from Puddin’. You’re in. For real. What’s going on in that head of yours?”
Wren watched the water, letting the cold, clean sound wash through her. The fear from the grove, the arousal from the workshop, the analytic calm from Ivy, the fierce, spotted loyalty from Harley—they weren’t separate. They were facets of the same impossible world. Her world.
“I’m thinking,” Wren said slowly, “that I’ve never been so terrified. Or so clear. And I’m thinking that I don’t want to go back to the quiet of before. The quiet of driving to a job I hated in a car that would kill me. This quiet…” She gestured around them, at the wild meadow, the looming estate, the woman beside her. “This quiet is different. It’s full. It’s waiting for me to step into it.”
Harley listened, then nodded. “Good.” She stood, offering a hand to pull Wren up. “Then let’s go have dinner. Pam’s making that fungal risotto that tastes like heaven and guilt. And tomorrow,” she said, her grin returning, full of mayhem and promise, “your real work begins.”