The Perfect Run

They once called it the city of canals. They said it was the most beautiful city in
the world, with tourists coming all the way from China to visit it.
That was before the Wars.
More than a decade after, Venezia had become an open grave, a poisonous
marsh whose canals overflowed with toxic plants and dark mud. Some islands
had sunk, their supports destroyed by Mechron's drone bombardments. Most
houses had fallen into disrepair, invaded by worms and insects, their rooms full of
old human bones; meanwhile, the city's outskirts had been taken over by raiders,
who used boats to attack coastal communities.
At least, they did until yesterday. Until Ryan's group arrived.
It wasn't the teen's choice though. Len’s dad basically dragged them there from
the city of Rubano, when he heard the local raiders had Genomes among their
number. That maniac could never resist the lure of easy targets, leaving the rest
of them to salvage stuff while he went hunting.
The wiser bandits had fled without looking back; the others had perished, their
exsanguinated corpses tossed into the waters. Genomes and normies both.
Nobody could defeat Len’s dad. Nobody. Except maybe Augustus or Leo
Hargraves, but so far they hadn't met.
His face covered by a scarf to protect him from the foul air, Ryan chased away
these dark thoughts and glanced at the stone house in front of him. Dusty, half-
rotten books were piled up in its courtyard, forming a strange staircase to climb
above the walls nearby.
“Riri!” Len called him from within. “Come! I've found a treasure!”
Curious, the sixteen-year old teenager stepped inside the house while whistling.
As expected, it was some kind of library, albeit one unlike anything Ryan had
ever seen. Piled up books formed a true labyrinth of walls and twisting turns, to
the point they could probably crush him dead if they ever collapsed. Unlike other
areas of the city, vegetation hadn't taken over, and marauders had clearly
ignored the building; nobody respected culture nowadays.
He found Len on a boat. Literally. The owners had moved a gondola inside the
library before filling it with books. His best friend laid on her back atop a pile,
reading something.
“Heya, Shortie.” A tomboyish girl his age, Len was a tiny bit smaller than Ryan
and disliked being called out on it; so of course, he teased her mercilessly.
“You're reading Gulliver's Travels?”
“I'm not short, I'm growing!” Len complained, interrupting her lecture to glare at
him with her beautiful blue eyes. Ryan often thought he could see the sea she
loved so much in them. Her skin was pale, her raven hair reaching her shoulders.
Truly a modern Snow White, although she dressed in brown travel clothes rather
than noble gowns. “Now come over here before I throw a dictionary at your face.”
Ryan laid next to his best friend, their shoulders touching, and peeked at the
cover. While ancient and yellowed by age, the book seemed relatively well-
preserved. “Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers, écrit par Jules Verne.”
“Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, written by Jules Verne, French
edition,” Len translated, her eyes all but shining. She already had two copies of
that book, but none in the original language. “You can’t imagine how long I've
been looking for it. The translations are terrible.”
“I thought you couldn't read French, mais non?” Ryan mocked her, Len pinching
his arm in response. “Ouch.”
“You deserve it, Riri,” she replied. “Et japprend la francais, merci bien beaucoup.”
“Le francais,” Ryan corrected her. “And you can remove the bien.”
She sighed. “Just take a book and shut up. I think they have “How to win friends
and influence people’, which you really need to read.”
“I like reading, but not as much as eating,” Ryan said. Len had filled her supply
bag to the brim with books, and nothing else. “Unless you want to make me eat
your Communist Manifesto?”
“If you do that, I will eat you, Riri. With a fork.” She waved a hand at the library.
“This place wouldn't have become a toxic dump, had the communist revolution
happened.”
“Maybe it would have been a gulag instead,” Ryan replied, delighting at teasing
her beliefs.
“People messed it up, but the concept is right,” Len protested, closing her book
and putting it on her chest. “Is it wrong to think everyone should be equal?”
“No, just naive.”
“It could still happen,” Len insisted with cheerful optimism. “Everything has been
rebooted back to zero. The world has changed.”
“Yes, but not human nature.”
“You're too cynical for your own good, Riri.” She closed her book and put it in her
travel bag, behind the gondola. “When do you think Dad will come back?”
Once he ran out of victims. “I don't know.”
She looked at him in silence, their eyes locking. They rarely had moments of
privacy, where they could breathe without her father looking. Ryan looked at
eyes, then at her lips...
Do it, do it, do it.
But he chickened out.
Her face unreadable, Len let out a sigh. Ryan wasn't sure if it was out of relief or
disappointment. “Can you help me remove the books from that boat?” she asked.
“We could make it a bed.”
“You want to sleep there?” Ryan balked at it. The wood was so damaged, it could
crumble anytime.
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. I always wanted to have my own ship. Do you know
more than eighty percent of the ocean is unmapped?”
“You want to sleep in the gondola or put it to use?”
“We could find one,” she said, daydreaming. “A real ship. Or make one. Sail away
like the explorers of old.”
“With or without your dad?” Ryan asked the hard question.
Len didn’t respond, which was an answer in itself. Without a word, she rose back
on her feet and started removing the books with Ryan's help. Once they were
done, Len examined the boat's bottom, her eyebrows narrowing. “Uh,” she said,
thoughtful. “Could it be?”
“What?”
“That type of gondola,” Len said, “Do you know what it is?”
“Sorry, I'm not a ship geek like you.”
Instead of answering, Len knocked at a spot at the gondola’s back end. “You
heard that?”
“Nothing?”
“Exactly,” Len said triumphantly. “This type of boat often has a hidden
compartment. They carried messages, money, or even drugs.”
“You would think marauders already found it,” Ryan pointed out.
“It's not common knowledge, and you must know where to look to find it. All ship
geeks know that!” She could be so smug sometimes. “Also, it's a library.”
Yeah, Ryan doubted many locals had visited the library, and considering the dust
raised when they removed the book, nobody had touched the gondola in years.
Pillagers must have examined the checkout and other obvious spots without
looking too much into it.
“Remove that wooden plank,” Len pointed at a spot. “It's old, it shouldn't be
hard.”
“Hey, why me?” Ryan complained.
“It's called work division,” she replied with a bright smile. “I think, you work!”
“If it's work, that means I'm getting paid.”
“I will let you sleep in the gondola,” Len winked at him.
The things he did for her...
In the end, as Len said, the wood was so damaged by time and termites, Ryan
had no problem removing the planks with his bare hands. And as she thought,
the boat did have a compartment... with one hell of a treasure within.
A hexagonal, metal box, with a helix-shaped lock. The two teens could only hold
their breath at this finding.
“No way...” Len’s eyes widened in shock. “Is that what I think it is?”
“I believe so.” One of the mythical Wonderboxes, sent by the Alchemist to the first
Genomes. The devices which started the Last Easter tragedy and the Genome
Wars that followed. Ryan had no problem removing the lock, having spent years
breaking into deserted homes to find supplies.
The metal box opened, revealing a well-preserved letter and three syringes full of
swirling liquid. One blue, one violet, and one red. Each bore a swirling,
multicolored helix symbol.
Elixirs.
Ryan opened the letter, Len peeking at the content over his shoulder. The paper
was handwritten.
“Congratulations, Mr. Rossi.
You have been selected to participate in a grand socio-genetic experiment of my
design. You do not know me, but I know you, Mr. Rossi. I believe that you are a
fine specimen of the Homo Sapiens species, possessing the necessary skills,
intelligence, and genes to lead humanity into the next phase of its biological
evolution.
I grant you a miracle.
This box contains three Elixirs, selected at random among a selection of over ten
million distributed around the globe. You must have heard about them on the
news. Yes, these serums grant a host of health benefits, including a unique
power based on the color composition:
Green: Life.
Blue: Information.
Violet: Spacetime.
Red: Energy.
Orange: Matter.
Yellow: Abstract.
White: Meta-power.
You are free to do as you wish with these Elixirs; they are ready for inmediate
use and testing in the field. I would advise not to drink more than one, but the
data gathered should be interesting nonetheless.
Now, I must inform you that you are far from the only person to have received
this gift. When you open your eyes next morning, the world you lived in will have
ended; instead, you will wake up in a world where mankind's potential is no
longer constrained by the petty rules of reality. A world where everything is
possible.
I have no idea how this divine experiment will turn out... but I can’t wait to see
the results.
Thank you for advancing the cause of science.
Best of luck,
The Alchemist.”
“He never opened the box,” Len said with sorrow.
“Maybe he died before he could,” Ryan replied. “He probably hid the box before
the bioweapons hit.”
“You think the Blue one can make you a Genius?”
“Maybe,” Ryan replied. Geniuses were a slang for Genomes, usually Blue ones,
with the ability to create advanced technology way ahead of their time.
Mechron, the man who came closest to taking over the world, had been the most
famous one. His self-replicating robot army had swept Eurasia until some
countries pushed their big red button before they could fall next. Nobody
remembered who had fired the first shot, but Mechron responded to the A-bombs
with drone bombardments and bioweapons. Central Eurasia had become a
nuclear wasteland; southern Europe, a mass grave.
At least this city wasn't irradiated, unlike Turin.
“Which one do you want to take?” Ryan asked his friend.
Len paled. “We can't drink this,” she hissed. “Dad will know. He can sense it in
the blood.”
“Yeah, perhaps, but that may be our only chance to get away from him.”
“I'm not abandoning Dad,” Len replied with a glare. “He’s going to get better, I
know that.”
“Fuck no, he isn't.” If anything, he was steadily getting worse. Now that Dynamis
and Augustus had put a bounty on his head, he had to fend off hunters semi-
regularly. “Before he was just crazy and violent, but now he’s violent and
paranoid. He's never going to heal, and I think deep down, you know I'm right.”
Len bit her lower lip, as she always did when stressed and sad. “He’s still my
dad,” she said, with a hint of resignation in the voice. “He will want them all.”
“He doesn't have to know,” Ryan argued. “Your father will get us all kill—"
“Len!” a shrilling voice echoed from outside. “Len! Where are you?”
Speaking of the devil. Quickly, without thinking, Ryan grabbed an Elixir in each
hand and hid them in his back pockets alongside the letter. Realizing his intent,
Len almost seized the last potion, but hesitated for too long.
Ryan had the time to hide the Blue and the Violet Elixirs, when Len’s dad crawled
into the room.
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)
Len’s dad was no longer a man. Not
since he drank one Elixir too many
and underwent a mutation. His flesh,
organs, and skin were@) gone)

Nef

leaving bhfy a shapeless mass of
blood covering the bones. He had
become a faceless, crimson puppet,
his body constantly fluctuating; he
even moved like a string-less doll, his
arms flailing like whips. He left
nothing behind, no bloody footprint.
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Both teens tensed, unconsciously moving closer to the other.
“Ah, Cesare,” the Psycho said upon “seeing’ Ryan. “Good to see you're taking
care of your sister.”
His name wasn't Cesare, and they weren't related.
But Ryan knew better than to say that out loud. Len’s dad was sick. Very, very
sick. Especially in the head. Sometimes, he was Len’s dad, kind, friendly Freddie,
who liked to play board games and watch old movies.
But sometimes, he was just Bloodstream.
And when the Psycho noticed the Wonderbox and the Red Elixir, his body
instantly solidified, his fingers turning into sharp claws. His lingering humanity
vanished, overcome by an addiction stronger than anything else.
Like a feral beast pouncing on a mouse, Bloodstream rushed at the box, brutally
pushing Len out of the way. Her back hit a book wall, some of them falling
behind.
“Len!” Ryan screamed, immediately rushing to her side. Bloodstream ignored
him, grabbing the Red Elixir and smashing the syringe. He didn’t bother to inject
anything, his body absorbing the content with greedy hunger; his blood fluctuated
like a raging sea, before stabilizing.
Thankfully, Len was more stunned than harmed. However, her father frantically
searched the box for any other Elixir, before glancing at the teens. “Where's the
rest?!” Bloodstream hissed at the two, now outright screaming. “Where’s the
rest?!”
“There's nothing else!” Ryan protested.
“Liar!” Bloodstream’s hand turned into an axe. “A son shouldn't lie to his father!”
“Dad, stop!” Len screamed.
As if shaken out of his drug-fueled episode, Bloodstream immediately calmed
himself. His hands returned to their normal shape, and he shook his head in
confusion. The Elixir would help stabilize his mutations, at least for a while.
“Len... I'm sorry. I'm..." Bloodstream put his hands around his skull as if
struggling with a brain freeze. “Sorry...”
“It's... it's okay Dad,” Len said, looking away with her arms crossed. “It's okay.”
Bloodstream looked at his daughter with concern, his hands moving towards her;
however, he backed down when Len flinched at his approach. The Psycho
remained eerily silent, before glancing at Ryan. “Cesare?”
“Yes, Dad?” Ryan asked, loathing every word.
“Len feels sad,” Bloodstream said. “Smile for her.”
Ryan forced himself, although his lips couldn't reach his eyes. Thankfully, Len’s
dad couldn't distinguish a false smile from a real one. He put his bloody hand on
the teen's hair, less like a son, and more like a pet.
“You're a good boy, Cesare,” Bloodstream said, no blood meshing with Ryan's
hair. “You're a good boy.”
Len’s brother Cesare was long dead. Bloodstream just refused to accept it.
Neither teen pointed it out though. The last time Len’s dad had broken out of his
delusion, the Psycho had almost strangled Ryan. He would have killed him too,
had Len not calmed her father. Bloodstream only really listened to his daughter
nowadays.
Sometimes, not even her.
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It was always the same pattern: their
group would settle down for a while,

) c
Len’s dad would have ayes m
gp ole either He iped out the
Ideals or they chased him off. The
trio would have to move on, because
when people realized that they

ey

couldn't kill Bloodstream, they went
after Len and Ryan. Rinse and repeat.
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Ryan had lost count of how many
places they had crashed over the last
few years. One city at a gem
had evenly ly @ahdeted all the way
flor 'Campania to Venezia.
Bloodstream had them constantly on
the move, chasing after isolated
Genomes whose Elixir he could drain
to satisfy his addiction. The content
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chapter there!
“Pack your things, kids,” Bloodstream said. “This place is driving me crazy. We're
going to Aqualand. You will like it, Len? You always liked water.”
“I... yes, Dad. I do.”
“I hope they have ice creams,” Bloodstream said cheerfully, before leaving the
room.
Len looked at Ryan, who didn't think twice. They hugged tightly, and for a second
Ryan wondered if he should let her go at all.
He still had the Elixirs in his pocket.
They had to leave.