Page 145 of Circus From Hell

“You’re alive. You’re alive!” Karma jumps atop the table to straddle his waist and smother him.

“Fuck, dead girl. It’s good to see you too.” His limbs are still strapped to the table when he tries and fails to wrap his arms around her. He frowns and looks at the three of us like we’ve grown numerous heads each. “What’s going on? Why do I feel different?”

“You scared us pretty bad, Spiral,” Soren says sternly as he starts to unclasp the leather straps from his arms and legs.

“Yeah, way to get me back,” Micha grumbles, swiping his hand back through his hair as he blinks away the rest of his unshed tears. “Don’t ever do that again.”

“Do what?” he asks as Karma helps to undo the straps around his body.

My lips open and shut. Does he not know what happened?

“Erm… die?”

He looks at me. “I died?”

“Yeah. Don’t ever fucking do it again,” Karma snaps, dragging his face to hers by a grip on his collar. “Because I’ll kill you if you do.” She slams her mouth to his, kissing him like he’ll die again if she takes her hands off him.

“Damn, I’ll keep dying if I get this treatment,” he mumbles between kisses, grabbing her waist and shifting her so she grinds against him.

Micha looks gobsmacked. “Dude, are you not in intense pain right now?”

“Pain? Oh yeah. I was stabbed. By Moxie, no less. I should have seen that coming.”

“No,” I say pointedly. “Because you were zapped and brought back to life.”

He eyes the blown-apart machine. “Wait.” He looks at Karma, who’s smiling brightly, and then down at himself, repeating it another four times. “I’m like you now?”

“Yep,” she says happily.

“So? Are you in pain?” Soren asks, ever the caring one.

Spiral moves his hands back and forth, staring at them like he’ll take flight.

“No. Not at all.” He presses his hands to the sides of his head. “Not even my head hurts. All the pain is gone.”

He starts gnawing on his finger.

“What are you doing?” Micha sputters.

“Testing,” Spiral mumbles. “No pain. Karma, you cured me! I feel no pain!”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Spiral smile like that. A rush of relief washes over me, and I finally start to let myself think that we may be okay. That we can leave this nightmare behind.

“Wait.” Karma holds one hand up. “Why could I hear your heart? I don’t have a working heart, so why do you?”

The group looks at each other like one of us might conjure up the answer. I rack my mind for ideas. “I guess… If Kreo pieced you together, and your body parts don’t match, then they all would have been dead a lot longer. Spiral was resuscitated. You were reanimated.”

“That doesn’t explain why I don’t feel any pain now.”

“What if the electricity shocked your brain to the point it rewired?” Soren offers. “Maybe something was jumbled when you were born, and now it’s unjumbled.”

“Sounds like a load of horseshit to me,” Micha utters. “I wonder if you’ll be more or less crazy now.”

“Well, I’ve never wanted to shove my dicks inside something more than I do right now, so we’ll go with more crazy.”

“That can be arranged,” Karma smirks, shifting back and forth to grind against his lap.

“You filthy thing,” he groans. “I fucking love you.”