Body Surfing

car.
    A groan stopped him. Q. turned, saw that Ileana had opened her eyes. The fingers of one hand beckoned weakly. He ran to her.
    “Go after Leo .” The huntress’s voice was a whispered croak, and blood spilled from her mouth.
    “I can’t. You’ll die.”
    Ileana reached for Q.’s hand as if to squeeze it, but all her fingers did was graze it and fall to the shaft in her stomach. She groaned and squeezed her eyes shut. It was a moment before she could speak again.
    “We are hunters, Q. That’s what we do.”
    “I won’t let you die.”
    With an effort, Ileana raised her head and looked Q. directly in the eye. Her gray eyes were so icy they were nearly silver, but Q. couldn’t tell if it was her wound that made them so cold, or hatred.
    “I would have. Let you.”
    Q., frozen by her words, could only return her gaze. But just before the huntress’s head fell forward he saw a flash of something. Defeat. Or…or regret.
    “No, you wouldn’t,” he said, and turned to run for the doctor.
    “Q.!”
    The boy turned back. “You’ve got to conserve your strength.”
    “You can’t trust him, Q.”
    “He was my best friend .”
    “Not Jasper.” Ileana shook her head so violently that she cried out in pain. “Thomas .” More blood spurted from the wound in her abdomen, and her lips had turned blue. “I want you to…have something.” The huntress could barely get the words out. “My… watch .”

15
    A bsolute darkness.
    Total silence.
    A lack of all feeling.
    For the first time in his life Jasper Van Arsdale understood the difference between nothing and nothingness . Because this was not merely a void, an absence. The emptiness that enclosed Jasper’s soul—imprisoned it, entombed it—was palpable, almost solid.
    Jasper wondered if he’d finally, really, died.
     
    For a long time that’s all there was. But then Jasper had a thought. He thought. I’m thinking . And what is a Mogran, he told himself, if not pure thought? Either connected to every consciousness on the planet in the fleeting moments between bodies, or else embedded in the mind of a single being. Since there were no other voices in his head, Jasper assumed he must still be in Larry Bishop. This nothingness that held him—it was Larry. Jasper wondered if Larry had died, not him. Was this the hell the Mogran went to—a silent, screaming eternity trapped within the emptiness of a corpse?
     
    But.
    There was that sense of being frozen. Not coldness—Jasper couldn’t feel a damn thing. But there was a…tightness. A rigidity, as if Jasper had sunk to the bottom of the ocean and hundreds of atmospheres of water pressure were squeezing him from every direction, holding him in place. He remembered the vision he’d had before he lost consciousness, of the molecules of his body being transformed into crystals, glittering and perfect, but entirely immobile.
    I am ice , he thought.
    I need to melt .
     
    He made himself imagine Larry Bishop’s body. Remember it. The way it had looked before Q. jabbed him with the syringe, and then the crystalline network that had spread through him as the toxin snaked its way through his veins, jumped from one synapse to another along the electric pathways of his nervous system. Time was another thing he couldn’t sense in that void, so he had no idea how long it took until his before-and-after shots of Larry Bishop’s internal mechanics were complete. But once he had them in his mind’s eye he began to compare the two images, to look for what was different, how they’d changed. How to change them back.
     
    Like the alloferine-based curare in the spike hidden inside Ileana Magdalen’s watch, Erabutoxin B, the venom of the sea snake, binds to the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors on the motor end plate of the victim’s muscles. An influx of positively charged sodium molecules causes the end plate to depolarize, which in turn makes the muscle fibers contract. The fibers are prevented from relaxing, however, by a neuromuscular blockade between the phrenic nerve and the muscle tissue. In the case of the diaphragm, that means all the air is squeezed out of the body and none can get back in. Apnea results; the victim suffocates.
    None of this meant shit to Jasper.
    For one thing, he had no idea that sea snake venom had been in the syringe Q. stuck him with. For another, he couldn’t tell a nicotinic acetylcholine receptor from a nicotine patch. His ability to see the workings of his host’s