Adam's head hurt. He was dreaming again, a confusing jumble of sirens and water, and it ended with the moon rolling like a giant rock towards him, trying to crush the life out of him. He shifted uncomfortably. Someone was taking a mallet and driving it into the bottom of his right foot. He shifted again, trying somehow to get away from it, but his body stubbornly wouldn't move. It drove into his foot steadily.
Someone was kicking his foot again.
He opened his eyes slowly, met once more with Curtis' face and a healthy dose of deja vu. Curtis looked the same; a little uncomfortable and pinched, but he was fine, healthy, and, most importantly, he was alive. He was alive!
"Curtis!" he hollered, the joy of seeing the man alive taking over his body. The sound of his voice didn't cut through the silence. Adam clutched his throat, momentarily confused. Had they damaged his throat? But... he wasn't hearing anything at all. Nothing. Not the creak and subtle groan of the bunker he should have been hearing. Not the rustle of cloth on cloth he should have been hearing as Curtis shifted back and forth.
"What the FUCK," he screamed but he didn't hear that either. He didn't hear anything.
They had deafened him.
The sound of the siren, the sound of his Grandmother's voice, Chase's voice. Music, voices, nature. Nothing. He would never hear them ever again. He wouldn't hear the satisfying noise of a zipper, of the ocean crashing. Nothing. The weight of it fell on him, crushing him to the ground. He had been asked to hold up the sky and he wasn't capable. His eyes burned as he sobbed onto the ground.
"Nothing. Nothing. Nothing! NOTHING!" he screamed as he cried. He could only feel the noise leave his throat. He rocked like a child, his arms wrapped around himself, snot and tears mixing into one substance on his face.
Someone tapped roughly on his boot and he looked up, startled. One of the Ensigns was tapping his foot roughly, his eyes intent on Adam. Once he caught Adam's attention, he began to sign. It was no sign language Adam had ever seen in his life, the movements rolling and sweeping, but Adam understood every aspect of it without even trying.
'Calm down,' the Ensign signed, 'We can still talk to each other. I'm sorry. I really am. We all went through what you did. It's part of the Culling. In order to hunt them, you can't hear their song. They would drown you twice and not even bat an eye.'
Adam stared at him. The Ensign reached forward and lifted up Adam's hands, propping them up.
'You can sign too. It's just like talking, just a little different. It's part of the Culling. Your hands know what to do.'
Adam looked down at his shaking fingers. He had just been talking, been screaming, and all that had come out were noise-less words. He concentrated on his hands carefully, trying to see the words coming to life through his fingers.
'We have to be deaf for this?' he asked. The Ensign was right. His fingers were taking over, deftly signing his words for the Ensign. The Ensign nodded encouragingly.
'It's an unfortunate part of being an Ensign. I promise you, we all went through this, the same as all of you,' the Ensign said. The Ensign pointed briefly at himself, 'I'm Mohammed.'
'Adam.'
He looked away from Mohammed, able to focus for the first time on Curtis standing before him. Curtis looked the way Adam felt. His face was battered, his lip split and a line of stitching holding his right eyebrow together. He was decorated with a smattering of bruises, ranging from a dark, terrifying black eye, to the faint yellow bruises dotted across his right cheekbone. He looked awful. Adam winced at the sight of it, feeling the bruises and cuts on his own face shift painfully.
'Are you ok? You look awful,' Curtis asked him. His eyes seemed more pulled down than usual, but Adam could have just been projecting his own unhappiness onto Curtis. He nodded.
'I don't get it. Nobody ever talked about the new Ensigns looking like they were beaten half to death,' Adam said.
Mohammed nodded, 'By nightfall, you'll be completely fine. It's one of the only perks to the blood.'
'Sorry, what? Blood? Like our blood being spilled on that floor of the bunker?' Adam asked. Mohammed looked at him, confused for a split second, before his eyes crinkled up and his mouth split open, his lips turned up. Mohammed's body shook as he laughed heartily. Adam waited, his fingers balling up tightly into the fabric of his pants. He didn't understand. He hadn't said anything funny, just asked a normal question.
Eventually, Mohammed calmed down, wiping the water from his eyes.
'The siren blood. That you drank. It allows you to have certain abilities when you go on a Hunt. Decently faster healing, breathing underwater, ease of movement in the water. You have to have a little piece of the monster in order to be able to destroy them, kid.'
Adam was frozen in place, ice coursing through his veins and dripping through his fingers and off of his fingertips. He couldn't focus on anything but the blood, though Mohammed had called him 'kid' when he was clearly around thirteen, which was far younger than Adam. He couldn't even focus on Mohammed being thirteen and killing things.
Blood. He had consumed, willingly, the blood of one of those... things. A maelstrom was building up, the water swirling around in his fishbowl of his stomach. He didn't even know how the Ensigns had gotten their hands on enough blood for seven people to drink a full glass of it. There was nowhere for the angry, thrashing currents to go. It hadn't tasted like the copper of human blood; in fact he couldn't remember any taste at all. Just that peculiar thickness. Too thick for it to be water, he thought. But maybe it wasn't, he hadn't noticed he had been downing blood at all. The corners of his mouth pulled down unstoppably. They had held the cup to his lips, encouraged him to drink. To drink blood. To drink monster blood, so that he could get enough monster inside him to kill them. The maelstrom pushed against the glass walls of his stomach, creating fissures that spiderwebbed, sending chunks of glass into the lining of his stomach and his intestines. He was part monster now too. He had consumed them. He had consumed them. The maelstrom in his stomach broke free with rage; he launched himself away from Curtis and Mohammed as his stomach contracted. He vomited all over the floor. His throat and his nose burned at the acidity of it. His eyes stung with the moisture gathering in them. He had consumed them. He threw up again and again, until all that was left was bile. When he was done, he sat back on his heels, exhausted.
When he was ready, he turned back to Curtis and Mohammed. Curtis looked clearly sympathetic. He mouthed something to Adam, his lips moving slow with the words, like he was tasting them. Adam's brain struggled to put it together for a long moment. He had never had to lip read before and, despite the intentionally slow nature of Curtis' speech, Adam couldn't quite put it together. Curtis tried again, his mouth still moving the same careful, expressive speed. Adam could just make it out: 'I threw up too.' Adam felt a little better at this.
Mohammed's face was glossed over with disgust, his eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly and intensely judgemental.
'What is with you new guys? All throwing up about it. It's like eating a unicorn steak or something. It's not like they're people. They're murderous fish people. Calm down.' Mohammed's expression was sharp, flat. Adam had the strangest feeling that he was being reprimanded by this thirteen year old Ensign.
'Sorry. I was just shocked. I wasn't expecting you to tell me I drank blood like some kind of leech or vampire or something. I can't say I ever expected to really cross that one off my undead soldier bingo card," Adam shrugged. The accusatory nature of Mohammed's feelings towards Adam and Curtis' reaction had angered Adam. It was strange to sit there, all high and mighty, after he had just participated in the brutalization of both of their faces and forced them to drink blood, like the worst kind of fraternity, and then to yell at them for both having adverse feelings about it. Adam couldn't prevent the slight glare that shot onto his face.
'Ah. I see some of that bloodlust is kicking in. Nice angry face, tough man. A side effect of the blood during the full moon. A nice little extra testosterone for you. Don't let it make you kill people who are on your side,' Mohammed said. He pointed to himself, mouthing what Adam could only assume was 'me'. Adam rolled his eyes.
'Is there someone else I can talk to about this?' Adam asked.
'Nope. Absolutely not, champ. I mean, there probably is, but I don't feel like changing things around just for you. Listen, you're just pissed off because of the blood right now. When the moon goes away and when you've gone through a few cycles, you'll stop being so angry over nothing. I mean, if you make it that long.'
Adam was going to kill this kid.
'I've already been told everything, since I woke up so early. I can handle Adam, if you want to go train?' Curtis broke in. Mohammed turned away from Adam's glare. He looked at Curtis. The muscles of Curtis' jaw moved and his mouth opened; he was speaking slowly to Mohammed, mouthing something, but was turned away from Adam so Adam couldn't read it. Adam felt another one of those tiny pangs of loss.
Mohammed shrugged, 'Yeah, fine, whatever. Make sure he cleans that up.' He turned, not even bothering to spare Adam another glance, and flounced from the room. Adam wished he could run after him and break those little thirteen year old stuck up legs. What an idiot. He couldn't believe that kid was an Ensign, that he had survived the ceremony and the training without someone killing him the way Adam was currently fantasizing about. The audacity of the pipsqueak was boundless.
Curtis landed a kick on the bottom of Adam's boot, startling Adam back into paying attention to Curtis. Adam jumped.
'Come on, I'll walk with you to get the mop and stuff. We'll do a tour,' Curtis said.
Curtis led Adam down the hallways of the Ensign half of the bunker, signing continuously as he went. Adam nearly tripped a few times trying to pay attention as Curtis spoke. His brain could inherently understand the signing, he supposed because of the blood, but he was unused to being able to concentrate his vision on more than one thing. Curtis also had to pause his speech occasionally to make sure he was paying enough attention to the world around them. Adam wondered how much longer Curtis had been up and awake. It was definitely a little bit longer than Adam but not much; he also seemed extremely unused to the sudden necessity and reliance on sight over anything else.
The Ensign half was more sparse, but bigger, as each of the Ensigns were given their own room. Adam's name was scratched into a wooden plaque above the door that he had placed Alvaro's armor on, a symbol, Curtis said, of Adam being an honored replacement and not just someone talented enough to be selected as another candidate. The rooms were sparse; just an armor-filled table, a cot that could be strewn up, and that wide, blue window to the sea. The training room was simply a door that led to the outside. Like the other training room, the boots were lined up in a neat pile outside of it, but there were far less; only about four pairs drooped over in their line next to the door. A pile of dull metal swords laid in a dripping pile on the other side of the boots, slightly orange with accumulating rust. The final hallway was filled with small rooms of equipment and bowls of water. Curtis told him that this hallway was how they tracked the frenzy. Curtis had no idea how it worked. And that was it. The Ensign half held two hallways and a door to the outside. No mess hall, no library. The weight of being an Ensign, of this strange half life that Adam had signed up for, filled him like lead. He existed to sleep, to practice killing the frenzy, to find them, and then to kill them. Nothing else.
When they had made their way to the mop, hidden in a tiny little door after all of the Ensign rooms, Adam finally asked Curtis the only question that had been slowly knocking away inside his brain during the tour.
'Are we the only two that made it?'
Curtis shook his head, 'No. There are two others. I haven't seen them since they woke up. The one has been cozy and training and the other barricaded himself inside his room and hasn't left since.'
Adam's mouth fell open.
'Only four of us? Four? Out of seven? And not even enough to fill the thirteen?'
'They've marked three more likely candidates for the next Culling since you've been asleep. They said that I–we–didn't have to participate in that ceremony.'
Adam nodded fervently, 'Good. Good.' There was no way in hell he was equipped to do to someone what had just been done to him. He couldn't even imagine doing it once, much less three times. Seven times.
'The three dead. Did they get kicked to death?' Adam asked.
'I don't know. I don't know if it's the beating or the blood. I don't know if I want to know.' Curtis looked away from Adam and glanced hurriedly down the hallway, like he was expecting someone to suddenly appear and remove him from having to think about the death of the other trainees. When nobody appeared, he told Adam he was going to go train.
'You'll like training,' he told Adam, 'It's so different from training on land. It's easier somehow. I think you'll do really well at it.' He turned to leave and Adam knew he should let him go, but he couldn't stop himself from reaching out and gripping Curtis' arm.
'And... Natsume?'
Their eyes held for a moment, and everything fell away from them, as the soft flame of grief that sprung up in Curtis' eyes was mirrored in Adam's.
Slowly, so painfully, strangely slowly, Curtis shook his head no. Adam felt his body shake briefly, as a tidal wave of guilt threatened to knock him to the cold metal floor.