Date 6: Joan: Part 5

Alan had just finished his late lunch with Joan when the door swung open.

“Hey, do you two mind watching the kids for a bit?” a voice called from somewhere beyond it.

“Um—” Alan started.

Then a bejeweled skeleton marched into the room.

Plastic tunnels and little platforms had been wired through the ribcage and around the limbs, turning the headless skeleton into something between a rodent habitat and a work of deranged luxury art. Gemstones glittered from the joints. Brown rats perched on platforms, bones, and rails. Nagasaki sat on the shoulders, coiled around the spinal column like a queen on a tiny throne.

“Thanks!” the voice called again.

Alan caught sight of a motorized cart disappearing down the hall, piloted by a rat in a lab coat.

“Hi, kids!” both of Joan’s bodies said in unison.

The rats answered with a chorus of “ooh” and “ah” noises that confirmed they were not, in any meaningful sense, normal rats.

“Um,” Alan said carefully, “you’d be Jessie’s class?”

A chorus of “yes!” came back from the skeleton.

The whole structure began unloading rats—or things wearing rat bodies with suspicious enthusiasm. Nagasaki sprang down from the shoulders. The skeleton stood perfectly still once relieved of its cargo.

Joan crouched slightly as one of the rats climbed onto Chloe’s copied body and began eating the shoe.

“What is your story, exactly?” Joan asked it.

“Oh, we’re Class 731,” the rat said.

Its voice was that of a kindergartener. Somehow, that was an improvement over Nagasaki’s normal vocal habits.

“That’s not funny,” Alan muttered.

“Oh, it’s not a joke,” Nagasaki informed him in a perfect copy of his own voice. “Jessie was like ten when she learned about Unit 731. She raised the infants those fuckers killed before her future husband shipped her off to Mary Stuart.”

Joan’s two bodies shuddered in unison.

“What. The. Fuck.”

“Yeah,” said another rat, dropping onto Joan from the ceiling after apparently climbing up there and getting bored. “Aunt Jessie was gonna raise everybody, but apparently that was ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘would make everyone starve,’ so they locked her up.”

“Um, Naga,” Alan said, turning to the small Crawler, “why exactly are they rats?”

“There wasn’t room in Jessie’s dorm for twenty human infants,” Nagasaki said. “This was easier.”

The entire class started laughing.

A few of them were flying around the room on feathered wings.

“Don’t worry,” said one of the rat-things from atop the table, where it had begun gnawing on Alan’s plate. “We all got adopted at school. Jessie’s our teacher and mentor, not our mom. She was eleven.”

Alan noticed then that the creature wasn’t using its mouth to speak. The sound was coming from somewhere else, the way Ariadne and Nagasaki sometimes spoke without moving their lips.

“Oh, got it!” Nagasaki said suddenly.

Nathan’s guitar dropped from the air into Alan’s hands.

“Play for us. I know you’re good.”

“I learned,” Alan said, “but I’m not that—”

A lamp crashed from the ceiling.

Alan sighed and gave up.

He went with a song he remembered hearing as a kid.

“Human, I saw your design,

Too much hinge in the line,

Feet like trouble on the floor,

Ankles talking, hips want more,

Legs go slipping out the gate,

One wrong step and it’s too late,

You call it grace, I call it mess,

A moving plan for failure dressed—”

He stopped.

Joan was staring at him.

“What?”

“Where did you hear that song?” Joan asked.

Alan frowned, thinking back. “Nathan and Kaitlyn said they wrote it. It’s silly.”

“More!” several of Class 731 shouted at once.

Joan kept staring.

“You get that’s a Crawler song, right?”

Alan blinked.

Then, more slowly, he sang the next part from memory, hearing it differently now that Joan had said it.

“I watched you sway,

I watched you break,

All that bend

Makes my skin ache.

You say ‘stand tall,’

I say ‘good luck.’

One hard fall

And you’re stuck—”

“Well, duh,” Nagasaki said, sounding impatient. “He knew Aunt Ari on set.”

“Sorry,” Joan said, still looking stunned. “It just… seemed silly. But if he knew Ariadne at that age, it makes sense.”

“Nah,” Nagasaki said. “She was way older than I was. Like four.”

She laughed.

“That’s like… ten in ogre years? Maybe twelve.”

“How old are you, anyway?” Joan asked.

“One and a half,” Nagasaki said. Then she paused. “Kind of. Like maybe a six-year-old ogre?”

Another crash sounded from somewhere behind Alan.

The class was getting bored again.

So Alan kept singing, hoping music would slow the destruction they were beginning to unleash.

It was a long day for everyone.