ChaoticArmcandy

  Roxa watched Mi carefully. The air in their room felt spent, ft, sour. The silence was terrible.

  Her roommate slumped against the door she had just smmed in Ellie’s face, eyes screwed shut.

  Roxa could see her hands trembling, and then they clenched into fists.

  “Mi?”

  No response.

  Roxa took a deep breath and bulled ahead ruthlessly. “We have to do damage control, now.”

  And then:

  “I’m so sorry.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Mi’s heart was a coal, peeling with bitter heat, smoking her mind with its caustic, acrid fumes.

  Ellie had been in an impossible position. Ellie had betrayed her.

  She couldn’t believe it. She was a fool not to have seen it coming.

  The spirit waters of the Tides swirled so close she could practically hear their susurrus whisperings. The seam between that realm and the visible world was right there, yearning, practically unstitching itself for her. She might reach out and trail the tips of her fingers along it, if she wanted. The veil ached to unfurl for her, to part, to drag her in and down, and there she would find–

  –Ellie pleading, her heart-shaped face drawn and pale and haunted by a nauseous, dawning terror–

  –the underside of this visible reality of sunlight and air, like the other side of a coin. A pce where the rules of temporal power folded, mingled, eddied, whirlpooled. Was there actual help waiting for her down there, or only more of this grinding pain without reason, pain without relent, pain beyond sense?

  She desperately wanted to throw up her hands and be rid of it all. To be alive, it seemed to her, was to cross a desert of salt, into a scorching wind, facing the gring brightness of a terrible world, and all for no good reason.

  Alone. Always alone. Trust was nothing but tinder–briefly warm, and then burnt up, useless ashes.

  –Pazo Finnochio at the burial mounds, standing like a monument beside her, gazing through time with wrath undulled and love unsheathed like a weapon, like a bde thrust by her bzing dark eyes–

  Mi clenched her fists. She could feel faint voices drifting up from the spirit abyss, singing her deep name. Distantly, she marveled at how close they felt, how urgent the cims for her presence were. Did she dare trust herself to walk there, now, in this state of rending heartbreak? What else, other than succor, might come at her call?

  Always, she had lived in a gut-churning vortex of fear and longing of what was on the other end of that siren pull from the other realm. Since childhood, she alone among her Opali sisters had flinched away and fled at the calls of those who haunted the waters of time and death–were they spirits of her mother’s fallen comrades, or ghouls of her father’s hungry empire? Would they guide and shepherd and protect her or just devour her?

  And she–where in the Nine abysses did she truly belong?

  Nowhere.

  Could she really exist anywhere? Maybe she was too Imperiati to be accepted in Opali, and too Opali to survive the Imperiat.

  Mi bit her lip, despair seeping into her heart and clotting her arteries like garbage. At this point, it would be foolishness beyond belief to pretend she had much longer to live, let alone that she would manage to somehow escape Harmine alive. She had to admit to herself that the principles and lifeways that glued Opali together simply did not work here. She had not bothered to learn Aralia’s first lesson, had spurned her as a technocrat corrupted by the system she worked within, and now Mi had come to a grief that was breaking her.

  And wasn’t that her own fault?

  Mi had been betrayed by another tea girl, one she had come to trust in spite of her own bracedness, her own guardedness. And though Ellie had little choice in the matter, there was no way for Mi to ignore that this whole time, Ellie had been a spy for Cordivar.

  But should Mi have expected anything else, coming to a pce like Harmine? Hadn’t she signed up to live on a chess board, hemmed in by pawns and those who moved them? Was it anything less than her own fault that she had let herself be hurt this way? Perhaps the only way to survive in this shark tank of an institution was to become a shark.

  Mi drew a shallow, aching breath. The inside of her body was–

  No. She had no time to feel. Better not to try.

  If she could not survive this pce as the Opali girl she had tried her whole life to be, she would attempt to destroy it as who she really was.

  Maybe she’d known exactly who to be, all along. She was the hybrid mismatch, the neither-nor, the-one-who-walks-between. She was never one thing or the other. How could she be? She would take from every bit of the messy, mixed up soil she had grown her roots from. She would use whatever she had to use to burn down what she hated. She would embrace the monstrous all-and-everything of whatever sea wrack had washed up on her shore and made itself her life.

  Mi swallowed, opened her eyes as if she were baring a bde, and faced this more terrible reality with the same grim steel her mother had leveled at it.

  No mercy, no holding back, no qualms, no quarter.

  Roxa was watching her carefully. Sea-gss green eyes, measuring. “Mi?”

  Mi forced a nod. Her teeth were gritted together so hard it hurt.

  “Listen, we may not have much time. The Ministry itself should be the least of our worries right now. Once a kuffa hunt descends on this pce, we’ll be in exactly the state of exception that Penelope could use to come for you, even here. She won’t miss a chance like this to throw a rally in the Allegiance Court, and a mob would be the perfect cover for her goons to breach a girls dormitory. No matter what, we have to go underground for a while.”

  “How?” Mi said bitterly.

  Roxa hesitated. “I…have a pn, but you’re not going to like it. And it will take too long to expin the whole thing. We just have to do it.”

  Mi stared at her heavily. A long moment stretched, weighing more and more with every moment. What was trust, really, but a growing collection of bruises?

  “Mi–”

  “Seriously?”

  Roxa winced. “Listen, I’m sorry, I know you must be reeling right now, but please, keeping you alive is my paramount mission. I am begging you to believe me on that, no matter what happens from here.”

  “Roxa,” Mi said tightly, her throat hurting. “Don’t ask me to make that gamble. I am already all in. I am fully staked. There is nothing left. I have taken all the risks I am able to take. If you want to help, then shoulder some of them for me, now.”

  Those green eyes, radiating sympathy–did she dare trust them? “I will, Mi. I promise you I can py this game, and maybe win for both of us, but I’m going to need to use you. And I’m not the only one. We’re in the endgame now–I’ll need to trade some pieces, make some bluffs, maneuver the board.” A deep breath. “I wish I could promise that you won’t get hurt, but you likely will. And if we survive, you may hate me for the choices I’ll make.”

  Mi drew a long breath in through her nose and thought of her mother’s voice, full of ember-scar and salt. Her father she knew not, except in the way that Pazo had set herself against him. The grace of a cedar growing into the cold furnace bst of the hurricane.

  “Fine,” Mi growled, in something that was almost Pazo’s smoky tenor. “Do it. Use me, then. But let’s py to win.”

  Roxa bit her lip, nodded, and then crossed abruptly to her desk and snatched up a piece of paper. “All right. Then start mixing more ink for me. I’ll need enough for three copies of a page in my mother’s cypher. And see if you can turn up some envelopes and sealing wax. Here’s what we’re going to do…”

  ~ ~ ~

  Aralia thought she had already lived through her worst nightmare. As well as the next worst. And the next. At this particur moment, she was questioning the hubris of that assumption.

  “Insolent monster,” Penelope hissed, and backhanded Ellie across the face, spinning her whole head round with a crack.

  Aralia could feel the heavy cy-like mask of bnkness forcing her features into neutrality.

  –Kalista, clinging to the bowsprit of the Damselfly beside her, ughing features wet with spray, a lifetime ago–

  How long was she going to just watch this py out, and do nothing? She was rapidly losing her ability to stand her own rigid silence. If she sat idly by and watched these fascists murder this girl, Kalista would never forgive her, in this life or the next.

  –Pasha, his voice slicing sharp as volcanic gss. “It’s time to face the fact that this sentimental little gamble of yours has finally failed, and start pying to win again,” he said mercilessly. “This is our st chance. Time is short. If you refuse, if you hesitate, if you falter–”

  “I will feed you to the abyss.” Penelope’s features were locked in a snarl.

  Aralia almost forgot herself as Ellie spat a mouthful of blood onto the viper’s boots.

  “Go ahead,” Ellie suggested with a gall that bordered on feckless.

  Shut the fuck up, Ellie, Aralia thought in desperation.

  Despite herself, she couldn’t help hanging onto the little idiot’s every fearless word. It would have been beautiful if it wasn’t so suicidally stupid.

  “I stand with all other monsters against your stale, pure, dead world,” the girl fmed, swaying.

  When in the Nine hells did she become such a poet? Aralia marveled.

  Penelope turned on Renfew. “Shut it up now! Gag her!” she cried.

  Renfew, damned moron that he was, flicked his eyes towards Aralia and she was forced not to give any sign lest she betray them both.

  “You useless fools, I’ll do it!”

  Penelope swung her hand in a vicious spellbinding ssh–but not before Ellie, spirits bless her and damn her, twisted the knife.

  “At least I’m interesting,” the tea girl salted back.

  Aralia barely stopped herself from rolling her eyes or throttling the girl herself.

  Then Penelope’s spell shed around her head from neck to nostrils, binding her in a curtain of sticky, viscous shadow.

  –“I am the inflexible messenger of the consequences of your choices,” Pasha intoned mercilessly in the back of her mind–

  Aralia saw Ellie’s eyes widen as she realized Penelope’s intent was murderous.

  There was a horrible, spreading chill of hesitation in her gut. At least the focus isn’t on my operation. Nothing leads back to me, now. Nothing remains to compromise my people. This could be so neat, so tidy, if she let this one girl die, here and now.

  Penelope would be sated. Loose ends would be tied off. Pasha would not bme her. But living with herself afterwards–

  Aralia drew a deep breath through her nostrils. Could she make that forceful downward shove, that crystalline slice, again?

  –The crumbling bckrock cone of Ani Ay rears close across ten years of distance. Aralia feels for her compartment walls, those chisels of urgency, grasps them, raises them high for the anesthetizing blow. Some things must be done, after all–

  Ellie thrashed like an air-panicked fish. The fshing in her eyes as they met Aralia’s–

  –Face to face on the volcano’s rim, Aralia’s gaze locks with Kalista’s, and a torrent unleashes that tears open the dams of cold necessity, boiling electric down her spine, an undying vow forming in one silent cp of utter crity—

  No. Not this time.

  Aralia was not about to watch this girl be murdered in front of her. In fact, in her bitterest marrow she knew she would never be able to walk away from any girl with that damn look in her eye–as if she were standing, fierce, at daggers drawn with a whole battalion–ever again. She had promised to protect Ellie to her face–she simply could not stand by and let her be killed for daring to protect herself.

  Renfew, she thought with a deadly calm, if you fail me in this, I will cut out your organs and make you choke them down in front of me before you die.

  She did not look at the professor of sorcery, but she made a low sign for his attention down by her hip and covered it by turning to Basilica. “Chancellor,” she snapped, forgetting herself. “She can’t breathe.”

  He looked at her with opaque eyes. “The kuffa?”

  Aralia cursed internally. Of course. She should have said it can’t breathe. How stupid. How dangerous.

  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.

  Ellie’s thrashing had begun to weaken.

  “Surely you can make do with the body,” Penelope suggested smugly, without looking away from the vulture’s feast of the spectacle before her.

  Renfew’s gaze, cynical as frozen lead, met Aralia’s and narrowed in resentment.

  Apollo Renfew, Aralia thought at him. Do not imagine for a second that I will hesitate to burn you alive if I decide I want to. I will immote you. She raised her chin slightly and hardened her gaze.

  Renfew lowered his eyes.

  Aralia turned to Penelope. “Let every one of you here be prepared to stand witness and give testimony on the destruction of my boratory subject. Since the good Factor here insists that dead horses can still pull carts, I will wash my hands of the matter and retire.”

  Almost wearily, as if he knew how awkward it would make things, Renfew stretched out his arm and sliced through Penelope’s spell.

  Time slowed to a crawl and then several things happened all at once.

  The Prefect cried out in indignation as the smothering shadow ran off Ellie’s face and shriveled to powder, disappearing before it hit the ground. Her perfectly coiffed head snapped around to stare at Renfew in shock and outrage.

  Basilica likewise turned to him, more ponderously, frowning.

  Ellie was slumped in the chair, still bound, chin on her chest. Aralia couldn’t tell if she was breathing.

  “Expin yourself,” hissed Penelope at Renfew. “How–how dare you!”

  Aralia was barely listening. She was already across the room. She had two fingers on Ellie’s jugur, trying to find the pulse.

  Renfew was shrugging modestly and tucking his hands into wide sleeves. “I never pass up a chance to make sure Factor Cordivar earns her keep at our prestigious institution. And I believe we had established that the Chancellor’s priority was to find out, at the very least, how to prevent this unfortunate pse from happening again.”

  Aralia made herself stare at him, too, as if she hadn’t just dropped a codeword order that he was forced to obey. There was no pulse she could feel on the girl’s neck.

  Ellie–

  Aralia sent one hand fumbling around in her jacket for a vial. Very important to pick the correct vial, now.

  “You-you–” Penelope sputtered.

  Renfew inclined his head to her. “You’ve clearly lost your temper, Factor Caul. Hysteria, I suspect–understandable in the face of such grievous social crimes and unhygienic behavior…and of course a well known weakness of the feminine disposition. I thought it prudent to pause the situation and let our heads cool.”

  The vial she wanted was bright glycerin orange–an alchemical tacheospasmyodic. Neatly beled. Aralia double-checked. Three careful drops into the girl’s mouth ter, and Ellie gasped and began coughing spectacurly.

  Aralia pursed her lips and turned away, swiftly mastering the relief in her face and hoping her charge would be slow to regain consciousness. They were both still too deep in the shark’s mouth to risk acknowledging each other.

  The room was very still.

  Penelope had gone deadly silent and was looking between Renfew and Aralia with an expression that Aralia did not remotely like.

  She very badly needed to get Ellie out of here.

  And keep her from opening her mouth to speak at all.

  The chancellor cleared his throat.

  ChaoticArmcandy