ChaoticArmcandy

  I stared at the floor and tried to focus on my breathing, on the gleaming wood floor, on the swirling pattern of the dark grain by my foot.

  A distant part of me felt like a deer being torn apart by wolves, but that awareness was slow, petrified, gssy. Only by sheer, trembling, white-knuckled effort did I hold the doors to the rest of myself tightly closed.

  As long as I was immersed in tracing the swirls and patterns in the wood grain, I didn’t have to think too hard about what was happening to me, what was being done. The conversation in the room went by without being immediately registered by my mind, except perhaps a far-off part of myself that wouldn’t stop screaming. The rest of me was furiously occupied with muffling that screaming.

  For the most part, I clung to the hard, bright knot of certainty in my breast that I was sitting here in Mi’s pce, that I was at least sparing her the butchery of being talked about like this, the fragmentation, the front-row-seat witnessing to one’s own personal dismembering.

  Mi was free. She would go free.

  To me, that was important. That was most important.

  All I had to do was bear this, just a little longer.

  And then I was jolted by the knock.

  “Ah, Prefect Caul,” excimed the Chancellor, injecting his voice with a sudden buoyant warmth and energy that had not been there moments before. “So gd you did not miss the chance to witness our good work here, and satisfy yourself that we have dealt with the stain that infested your beloved Stormcroft. In fact, we were just finishing up. Come, please, sit. Can I offer you a snifter of brandy?”

  I peeked up through my shes, then hurriedly lowered my gaze with a sour jolt of arm. There was a sharply dressed young woman scanning the room, her hand raised to ward off the Chancellor’s offer.

  Penelope Caul. This was not good. A memory from almost forever ago tickled my recall.

  Mi’s dark eyes, intent on mine. “We’ve made a very powerful enemy here, one I think we should warn you about.” A split second’s hesitation. “Her name is Penelope Caul, and she’s the House Prefect.”

  Trying not to move any unnecessary muscles, I drew a slow, careful inhale and bore down again into the densely speckled wood grain of the floorboards. I had no choice but to trust Aralia. Stick to the pn.

  “Finishing up? But I’ve only just arrived.”

  I felt a cold prickle as her gaze raked over me, and stifled a shudder.

  “And it is Factor Caul now, Chancellor, lest we forget.”

  “Indeed,” acknowledged the Chancellor, his voice losing some of its false warmth.

  All I had to do, I repeated to myself for the ten-thousandth time, was to hold myself together under the onsught of the dehumanization—just enough to not come tumbling apart at the seams.

  Just enough.

  Just a little longer.

  “So,” Penelope pronounced, her boot heels clicking precisely as she crossed over to stand in front of me. “This is the menace in our midst? This wretch? What a weak specimen.”

  I stared at the floor, refusing to give any outward reaction. Inside my chest, the rotten ledge of my remaining self-regard crumbled even more as a silent, bitter part of me echoed its agreement with her assessment.

  “You will not be permitted the mercy of ignoring me, scum.” Penelope hissed, seizing my chin and yanking it up. “I have cleansed our commonwealth of your ilk before, and I will do it again—”

  She backhanded me across the face, so hard that I saw stars, then struck me twice more—“And again, and again.”

  The inside of my mouth tasted metallic, bloody. My jaw ached. I blinked, realizing dully that I had bitten through the inside of my cheek. An iron grip tightened on my chin, tilting my face up to meet a scorpion’s venomous stare.

  Penelope gred down into my smarting eyes, her viper-strike voice dripping caustic and acrid into my ears from six inches away. “Your kind stole Mankind’s most precious knowledge, hoarded our most holy technologies of ascension only for yourselves, wasted the best chance we ever had to rise to our evolutionary destiny, all for your own execrable, selfish, twisted, perverted desires!”

  In my peripheral vision, Aralia had gone quite still. If I’d had any fleeting hope of her coming to my rescue, it was now dying face down on the floor.

  There was no one to help me. It was all up to me.

  I flinched as Penelope’s nails dug into my skin, and bit the raw inside of my cheek in an attempt to stifle my reaction. I refused to give her the satisfaction of even one small noise.

  “Listen to me, filth, and listen well—I will never cease or falter in my sanitary duty of hunting you unnatural traitors to the brink of extinction and beyond. While I draw living breath, you will never drag our species into the darkness with you.” Her tone turned coldly triumphant. “Look me, your conqueror, in the eye now, and beg for mercy from the fate that awaits all your kind.”

  Pain singing through my face, I narrowed my watering eyes at her. A hot fme of rage was leaping, growing in my breast, battering down the doors of my mind.

  I didn’t care much for myself, but this bloodthirsty sociopath was threatening all tea girls, all kuffa, every sister who came before me and every sister who could or would come after, to say nothing of the footprints in between that showed the way.

  My vision was darkening to red, my thoughts incandescent with hatred. She wanted to wipe me away? Sure, great. I wanted to eviscerate her. If I wasn’t bound—

  I saw Penelope’s lip curl as she registered my naked ferocity. “There’s that degenerate malevolence,” she murmured throatily. “It rises like the cloud of disease around a leper.” She leaned closer, her voice a cold silk singsong whisper. “First it must be awoken, for only then can it be broken.” A sharp and empty smile drifted over her mouth like a gust of wind over arctic waters. “Or Eaten, as the case may be.”

  Abruptly, she spped me again, then wheeled away as I slumped forward, dazed, head ringing. “When is the inquisition, and after that the disposal? I wish for it to be public.” She tapped her teeth thoughtfully. “A rally shall be arranged, of course. This will all make such a marvelous excuse for some good old-fashioned purging. And Chancellor, make sure the st speaking slot is reserved for me.”

  “Ah. Yes, of course, Factor Caul.” The chancellor leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “Well, first we must find out how the creature exploited the alchemical formus of Apomasaics, my dear. This was not supposed to be able to happen, you understand.”

  Penelope stiffened and cocked her head, as if gauging the distance between her teeth and his jugur. “Permit me to beg for crity, Chancellor. What, exactly, are you saying?”

  Chancellor Basilica cleared his throat carefully. “As I’m sure you are aware, Factor, to fully cleanse an infection, one must ascertain how it first took root. To do otherwise would be negligent in the extreme—unhygienically so. I have allotted the task of finding the alchemical breach that allowed this…travesty…to occur to Factor Cordivar, who assures me the study will take no more than, shall we say—”

  Here he shot a hard gnce at Aralia.

  “One moon’s time,” Aralia said briskly, as if she were not bargaining the span of my remaining life. “Perhaps two, to be sure.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to soothe the hot energy pounding through my veins. Breathed once, in and out. Opened my eyes again.

  All I had to do, I reminded myself—

  —but the seals on all my inner compartments were dissolving—

  Penelope was drawing herself up. “As Prefect of the besmirched house, I am honorbound to defend the purity of Stormcroft. This...thing has made a mockery of every young woman under my roof. I have the right to a speedy execution!” She narrowed her eyes. “And my uncle Lanius would agree, don’t you think, Chancellor?”

  I stared at her, forgetting to act my part. Was this…real? My breast was a furnace, bsting with heat, the whole repressed story of my life up to this point raging as fuel, the arctic freeze inside me thinning, loosening, unclotting. These people were insane.

  I wanted to scream.

  Instead I gnced at Aralia, sitting there cool and calm and composed, and somehow held my tongue.

  Basilica’s face had gone perfectly still. “I trust that my esteemed colleague, your uncle, would be the first to insist that we make quite sure that Apomasaics is a pure and sound foundation for the new social hygiene policies before they are rolled out. I am confident, Factor, that he would not wish us to risk the health of our glorious Nation by being hasty.” The Chancellor hesitated. “As for what happens to the kuffa vermin after that, Factor Cordivar has petitioned me to keep it alive for further study beyond its immediate and urgent usefulness…” He let a pause linger, long and meaningfully. “But perhaps merely its body would be sufficient?”

  Aralia rose and turned to face Penelope with the slow, deadly gravity of a gcier. “I’m afraid not, Chancellor.” Her face was inscrutable. “Surely the Prefect understands that if she insists on liquidating every kuffa agitator we catch, our cutting edge research in social hygiene is doomed to obsolescence?”

  “Be silent, you half-breed upstart,” Penelope said with cold relish. “Chancellor, this monster sitting bound before you in your office has offered insult to my house, to my name, to my bloodline. Its presence here is a blemish, a desecration on the white cloth of Womanhood itself.” She smiled poisonously. “I cim the satisfaction of purification, as is my right under the Old Law of Drago, the First Law of the Imperiat.”

  Aralia frowned and my stomach twisted with the realization that she was going to lose. She took a step forward, fists clenched. “I must insist on a living specimen, and invoke my authority as the sole Ministry-designated research magister present.”

  Penelope ignored her. “Surely, Chancellor, as a Man of the Imperiat, a Man of Drago no less, you understand the grave threat this unnatural infiltrator poses to the safety of the young Women in your charge? To your personal Manhood?”

  There was a column of bright fire swirling inside of me. It was obvious to me that Penelope was about to get her way. Any move Aralia made she would counter, for the sake of vengeance if nothing else. I was beyond fed up with this charade. All the ice inside me had fsh-boiled to a shing steam. My heart was a raging inferno, my ribcage caught in an uproarious riot that was beyond my power to stop.

  Penelope glided closer to the edge of the desk, pced her hands carefully atop its surface, and leaned forward, facing the Chancellor directly. “I know you will not brook this filthy threat to Virtuous and Sanitary Womanhood itself to draw breath for a moment longer than is absolutely necessary, Chancellor Basilica. My uncle Lanius will hear of your heroism in this matter, I promise you.”

  Before the Chancellor had even opened his mouth, I knew it was over.

  Something broke in me. The living hell these detestable people had made for themselves, with its insipid rules and terrifying violences and putrid silences seemed so small to me, so unfathomably boring. I looked at all of them, standing there, and I was filled with pity and disgust and unquenchable rage at their choices, at what they had made of their own lives, and those of others.

  The realization hit me like heat lightning. My insides were not alight with a confgration beyond my power to stop. The confgration was my power.

  There were hot words beating in my throat like wings, straining to fly. I didn’t care anymore.

  I didn’t give a fuck.

  There is nothing to lose.

  “You are trying to push me off a cliff,” I said with quiet vehemence.

  They all whirled to stare at me in astonishment, as if a dog had just quoted poetry to them. Aralia stiffened slightly, but I was barely paying attention to her.

  “What did it just say?” sneered Penelope.

  My whole body was trembling. “I have desperately cwed and lunged and dragged myself up from the unchosen depths forced on me by people like you. Every single one of my days feels like standing, braced, with my back to an abyss and now you come along, crying menace and ciming victimhood, shoving me towards the edge and the long fall below, denying me any scrap of solid ground to stand and just become myself.”

  “Become yourself?” Penelope snorted. “Oh, the temerity.”

  Aralia was staring at me in horror. She had better control her face soon, because I wasn’t done and someone might notice.

  “Temerity?” The words were running out me like water, like fire. “I have risked more than you ever would or could ever dream. I am choosing to live something more than the endless shadow-life that you are trying to imprison every living thing inside of, and that’s why I’d rather live for a few more minutes as myself than a thousand years as your skinny ghoulish puckered ass,” I snarled. There was a strange brightness suffusing my vision.

  Penelope ughed, advancing on me. “What is this nonsense? What you have done to yourself is an unnatural falsehood, a lie. Your very essence is deception.”

  “Well your very essence is taking whatever they were handing out the day you were born,” I fred back at her. “You’re boring stale bread, Penelope. You call me unnatural but you let men with clocks for souls tell you what you were and what your pce in the world is, and I did not.” I punched home the final word like a battering ram, and aimed again. “And it shows.”

  My voice was alive like a fork-tongued fme, dancing hot and sharp and ferocious. I felt heady with power, an inferno of invincible, clear, diamond sharpness.

  “And that is what you cannot stand about me.” I sucked a breath. “You bootlicker,” I added.

  “You’re wrong,” sneered Penelope. “What I can’t stand about you is that you are pgue spawn, degenerate rot, a hybrid freak.”

  “If that’s what you mean by girl, then yes, you absolute psychopath,” I retorted. “Stop pretending you aren’t a farting, retching beast with bad breath and hair growing out of your asshole, Penelope, and that your little performance of superiority isn’t as constructed as you say I am.”

  “You are a wretch! A despicable, worthless insect upon this earth!” She drew herself up haughtily, sputtering. “I-I am a daughter of Men! My fore-mothers bled for Drago and the tilth of that soil birthed a bloodline as ancient and ornate with glory as the sun itself, as the, ah—”

  “What you’re trying to say and can’t even do it right is that I am free, and you are not.” My voice sang like a bde through the air. “And you will never win, Penelope, because no matter how often you force us out of existence, we return.” I felt something like dawn breaking across my face as I smiled through a split lip. “We return with the seas, like the tides, as often as leaves, as numerous as grass,” I said, barely even knowing what I was saying as I said it. “Our bodies always remember the way.”

  Penelope lost her temper. “Insolent monster,” she hissed, and backhanded me. “I will feed you to the abyss.”

  I spat a mouthful of blood back at her. Some of it nded on her boots. “Go ahead. I stand with all other monsters against your stale, pure, dead world,” I said as acidly as I could, swaying.

  Furious, she wheeled to face Renfew. “Shut it up now! Gag her!” she cried. Then–“You useless fools, I’ll do it!”

  She raised a hand and I smelled sorcery. I had time for one st parting shot, so I took it. “At least I’m interesting,” I blurted.

  Then a sh of winding, smooth and binding shadow whipped around the whole lower half of my face, sealing my mouth and nose. My eyes widened as I realized she was trying to smother me, and I began to thrash in my bindings.

  “Chancellor,” snapped Aralia. “She can’t breathe.”

  “You mean the kuffa?” The Chancellor leaned back in his chair. “Perhaps this will teach it to curb its tongue, then.”

  “I need it alive for my work,” protested Aralia.

  Was there an edge of fear in her voice? I couldn’t think about anything else but taking a breath.

  “Surely you can make do with the body,” Penelope suggested smugly, without taking her hungry eyes off my struggling form.

  Little dark spots speckled in my vision, slowly growing rger.

  Aralia was doing something, but my world had narrowed to a sliver.

  My thrashing had weakened. My thoughts swung ponderous, sway-backed, careless.

  I was going to die here, I realized. In this silly little office with these mad, stupid people.

  It was hard to muster any regret, though. Mi was safer for what I’d done.

  I had protected her, somehow, despite all my mistakes, to the very end.

  And I found that a fire that had nothing to do with my burning need for oxygen was lit up like a proud beacon in my breast. To my surprise, I felt emptied, poured out, clear.

  Not much longer, now.

  In the rapidly shrinking space I had left to think and feel with, I felt a sharp pang—

  I had burned so bright and so powerful that they had needed to kill me for it—

  and that, I abruptly knew, put me—

  ...in

  ……good

  ………..company.

  ~ ~ ~

  —From beyond my diminishing awareness, there is a thrum of reverb, jolting me with faint recognition—

  —little sister—

  —as my vision flickers and darkens, I feel my sense of myself go patchy, begin to rippppple and stretchhhh—

  —my mind as I’d know it is dissolving like the tail end of a spray of sparks, losing coherency, and yet some wider part of me gathers herself, just now waking up, gaining…

  ……………there is the sound of rushing water…

  —little sister—

  —I feel them reaching towards me, singing welcome—

  —I reach back, csp into—

  —a great web, connecting us across the years and seasons and ages, forests and mountains and seas—

  —I am lit up with aching silver whispers of homecoming—

  —a vast undution of grief and affection, as old and easily shared as light between stars, swirling into and through me—

  —I feel them and I know they feel me too—

  ………………………….

  ………..and I feel gratitude, so much gratitude, at my welcome….

  ……………………………..and then–

  —my spirit becomes the ripples and washes away into the vastness of the web—

  ~ ~ ~

  And I slipped beneath the current and was gone.

  ChaoticArmcandy