Root: Part IV, Chapter 12

An unexpected ally helps Hasta to the Bus, but one last obstacle stands between her and an audience with Brahman. Can she take a life in cold blood in order to save the world?

For more on this project, please see “This Year a Serial Takes Root.”

12.0 Hasta

The moment she had solid footing beneath her, Hasta slapped the daemon’s hand away. “Don’t touch me!” she said, stumbling away from him and rising to her feet. She whipped her elbow back, middle finger at the ready.

The daemon backed up a step, raising both hands. His green eyes flared. In fact, Hasta might not have recognized him right off were it not for those eyes. His hat and trench coat were missing, leaving only a cheap, rumpled suit, and every inch of him was caked with dried mud and grime.

“Please,” he said, a whole range of emotions twisting across his face. “I believe us to be on the same side, you and me.”

Hasta edged away from him. “Yeah, right,” she said, not taking her eyes off him. “You’ve been trying to kill me and my friends since last night.”

Her foot slipped on the lip of the pit. Her stomach leaped into her throat as she pinwheeled her arms for balance. The little daemon leapt forward, snatched at her arm, and pulled her back from the brink.

As Hasta lay gasping on the flagstones, the daemon stood over her, his closed mouth twitching furiously. He breathed hard and fast through his nose. His fingers made complicated motions at his sides. “I believe we all were manipulated by a common enemy,” he said, and pointed to the head of the staircase down to the Presidential Trail.

Mr. Sunshine lay there, or at least Hasta assumed it was him. A body was splayed down the stairs on its back, half in, half out of the mist.

“But,” Hasta gasped. “What about the natural order of things?”

The daemon stepped toward her and took her hand. The pit half shrouded in mist. “The natural order of things dictates that, if we are to accomplish anything of use, we must get on the Bus. Now.”

A sob choked Hasta as the daemon tugged her toward the stairs. “But my friends . . .”

“Sacrificed much to get you here. Now come.”

This is what it’s like to die, Hasta thought. First my father, and now Ivan—now my friends. Having to leave them before I’m ready.

They picked their way over and around Mr. Sunshine’s prostrate form, but seven steps down the staircase a hand grabbed Hasta’s ankle. She shrieked and shook her leg. Mr. Sunshine’s head lolled toward her. His eyes opened, glassy behind a pair of incongruous granny glasses.

“It’s all a game,” he croaked.

The daemon tugged Hasta’s hand. “Don’t listen to that human.”

But as she stopped to pry the man’s papery hand off her ankle, she said, “What do you mean?”

“The true nature of things,” he said with a hoarse, wheezy giggle. “Just a big game.”

“Hasta Veeramachaneni,” said the daemon, “we must go. It is urgent.”

“Just a second.” Hasta jerked her hand back and knelt down on the stairs, her face close to Mr. Sunshine’s. “What do you mean?”

He licked his lips with a sound the crackling of a tiny fire. “You’ve been to the Gameplain, surely.”

“You mean the nightmare place?”

Mr. Sunshine nodded, shaking with silent laughter. “People call video games a waste of time, but there was never a better training tool, a more apt metaphor, for the realities of life. You fight the monsters and you fight the monsters and you can’t hope ever to beat them but still you fight the monsters. And even as they’re hacking you to pieces, you have to keep fighting the monsters. Why?” A full-throated cackle erupted from his throat, accompanied by a burst of spittle. “Because there’s no way out of the game until the game decides to let you out.”

The daemon yanked Hasta’s arm. She nearly stumbled trying to keep her balance down the next few steps.

“In the end it’s all meaningless!” Mr. Sunshine shouted.

“Kenneth Sunshine is filled with lies,” said the daemon. “The lies have eaten him until there is little else left.”

“You wish for death a million times,” the man called, “but it only comes when you finally start getting a handle on things!”

Though the fog swallowed him up as they descended, his mad laughter continued to trail them.

“What happened to him?” Hasta asked, shoulders tensed against the onslaught of sound.

The daemon reached a landing at the bottom of the stairs. Fog and the vague shapes of fir trees hemmed them in on both sides. He raised his clenched fist. “I hit him with some hard truth,” he said. His footsteps crunched onto a gravel path.

Hasta hurried to keep up with him. “No, I mean, what happened in general? How did he get to be that way?”

The daemon sighed. “It’s difficult to say. He’s lived, it would seem, through many dozen iterations of the world, many dozen lifetimes. He achieved at some early point a measure of enlightenment, insofar as he believed he had pierced the world’s veil of illusion and apprehended its true nature. Of course, he had pierced only one veil of many, and his understanding of what he did learn was imperfect.”

The pathway beneath their feet had snaked through two broad curves and now began to rise. “Do you know there’s a hole in the seat of your pants?” Hasta said.

The daemon stopped, craning his neck, and sighed. “What’s done is done,” he grumbled, and kept going.

Hasta shrugged and followed. “So what was it Mr. Sunshine thought he had learned?”

“That is not my place to tell you,” the daemon said. “More to the point is what he did about it. He had lost ones precious to him in his original lifetime, so he responded by attacking the world itself. By introducing anomalies and inconsistencies into the fabric of reality, he sought to so corrupt it that it would be forced to begin again, to restart afresh. And so it did, again and again, and each time he was able to hide in the margins of time, to perpetuate himself from one iteration to the next. But never did the world restore the ones he had lost, and each time around he lost a bit more of what had once made him whole.”

“Then all this drift business,” Hasta said. “What’s that about?”

The daemon paused, clenching and unclenching his fists. “That’s new to this most recent life,” he said. “It provided a way for him to appear to security entities like my partner and me to be helping suppress and control those with anomalous abilities like yours, while in fact he was camouflaging their promotion and spread.”

Hasta’s skin crawled. She felt horribly used. “You said that he’d lived through dozen of versions of the world. How many have there been? How many have you lived through?”

Slowly the daemon turned his head. He seemed lost in memory. “That’s not the type of number my kind keeps track of,” he said.

Hasta quailed before the depths of misery in his eyes. “What is your kind?” she asked. “What are you?”

“Weary,” said the daemon.

The answer embarrassed Hasta somehow. Not knowing how to respond, she looked at the ground. “Don’t we need to hurry?” she said. “To catch the bus?”

The daemon cocked his head. “The Bus is not something we ‘catch.’ It is a conduit, a communication channel, and we’re on it already.”

“We are?” Hasta said, taking a step back and eyeing the gravel beneath her feet as if it were a living thing. “Then this is where I talk to Brahman?”

“No,” said the daemon with exaggerated patience. He pointed up the trail. “Farther along, where the heads are. Obviously.”

Hasta started past him. “Then what are we waiting for? I need to talk to him!”

His arm shot out and blocked her way. “Not yet,” he said. “I’ve helped you. Before we go any further, I need you to help me.”

Uneasy and anxious, Hasta pushed against his arm. The daemon was shorter than she but much sturdier. He held firm.

“Help you do what?” she asked.

He squared his shoulders, looking ridiculously endearing with his mud-caked face. “My name is Lamm,” he said. “I am a system daemon of the Level A guardian class, and by far the lowliest and most unworthy member of my chain. Respectfully I ask that you kill me.”

Hasta recoiled. “No,” she said, raising her hands. “I can’t possibly do that.”

“Yes, you can,” said Lamm, darting forward to take her hand. “You must.”

She backed up a step, head spinning, pulling her hand away. “I can’t.”

Lamm clasped his hands together. “Please. I beg of you. I’m broken. Pursuing you broke me. I’ve lived so unimaginably long already, the only thing that made it bearable was the fact that this was what I was made for. But I’m made that way no longer. I’m remade, and I can’t bear it.”

Hasta shook her head. “Mr. Lamm, I’m sorry. I’m not a killer.”

“You are,” Lamm said, the corners of his mouth twitching. “You killed Dennis Clegg. You killed Flay. You can kill me.”

“I—I what?” She put a hand to her head, gasping for breath. “Dennis? He’s dead?”

She sat down hard in the gravel, stunned.

“I understand that it was self-defense,” said Lamm. One tear glimmered in the corner of his eye as he took a step toward her. “It can be self-defense with me. I can—”

“It’s not okay! No!” Hasta shook her head fiercely, scuttling further backward, crab-style. “He’s dead because of me. He had a mother, and a—a father. No.”

Her back bumped into a pair of unyielding legs.

A glorious, indescribable voice from directly above her said, “If you want to save the world, Hasta Veeramachaneni, then this daemon before you must die.”

Lamm looked up with an expression of horror and utter adoration. “Axil,” he said.

Hasta scuttled around and back and looked up too. She immediately raised an arm to shield her face. The woman looming above her in the slate-colored hat and trench coat was even more beautiful and painful to look upon than the two daemons from the hardware store.

Hasta pushed herself to her feet, heart pounding. She held herself as straight and tall as possible, facing the gorgeous creature. “That’s ridiculous,” she said, though she trembled inside. “Axil—is that your name? This man—daemon, whatever—is helping me. Why in God’s name would he have to die?”

It was hard to tell for sure, but the tall daemon’s hair seemed to have the color and texture of fine iron wire. Hasta noticed this because, when the daemon answered, her hair took on the reddish glow of toaster filaments.

“Because that is my condition,” Axil said. “And because this creature has seen fit to ally himself with your cause. You seek an audience with Brahman? Fine. I can command his attention for you—but first, impress upon me the seriousness of your petition. Kill this lowly daemon.”

“Yes, please,” said Lamm, squaring his shoulders.

“I won’t,” Hasta said.

“You needn’t lift a finger,” said Axil. “Merely say the word. I am yours to command. But let him die.”

“No. I won’t do it.” Hasta turned and started up the mist-shrouded path.

A steel-colored blur streaked past her, and now Axil was in front of her, barring the way. “Otherwise you will not pass, Hasta Veeramachaneni. This is my decree. For a chance to save your world, a chance to spare billions of lives, you need only declare this one daemon’s life forfeit—a life, in fact, that he freely gives.”

There was nothing forceful about the daemon’s words, nothing hectoring, nothing threatening. But for all that they sounded reasonable and calm, for all their lack of passion and emotion, Hasta heard in them an insinuating seductiveness.

“I do,” said Lamm from behind her. “I give it freely, in the name of the natural order of things.”

“He doesn’t,” Hasta said. “If it’s my decision, how does he have any freedom in it?”

Axil inclined her head, and the radiance of her face increased. Was that a smile? A sneer?

“Nonetheless, the choice remains. One tiny life in exchange for the salvation of all humankind. Quickly—time is short.”

Hasta thought her face would crack from the effort to stay composed. “I said no. I was raised to respect and honor life, and enough has been sacrificed already. I won’t allow him to die.” With her hand loose at her side, she very slowly extended her middle finger, hoping the daemon wouldn’t notice. “Now get out of my way.”

Slowly, calmly, the daemon Axil lowered herself to her knees. The brightness of her face faded. Back straight, head high, she was still exactly as tall as Hasta. Her eyes gleamed like brushed steel.

“Stand down, Little Hand,” she said. “Lamm believes in you, as do I. Your worthiness is plain. You shall pass.”

An immense wave of relief passed over Hasta, but she turned at the grief-stricken sound that came from behind her.

Lamm’s hand was pressed to his mouth, the eyes in his mud-caked, unshaven face wide with misery and embarrassment. He sniffed hard, though, and visibly pulled himself together.

“Forgive me for impugning your character, Hasta Veeramachaneni, and for asking you to transgress your principles,” he said. “May Vishnu walk with you along the remainder of your path.”

Hasta nodded acknowledgment, too choked up to speak as the little daemon turned and walked away into the mist. √

To be continued…