Crimson Dusk

Art by: TYT

Prologue

My vision drowned the instant the first light came invading the almost-peace of that brief silence, the kind I had not been granted in decades, and which, in my wildest reckoning, had been spared to me now only by the cruellest means imaginable, a full and total dark laid over my eyes the moment I tried at last to close them. Save that the noises would not stop. They rang in my ears and, worse, deep in the vault of my skull, screaming out their unwelcome existence, and I strained after the words buried somewhere beneath all of it. I failed. Wholly. I could not wring a single meaning from the yelling.

“MY LORD!”

And so the words began to take their shape, and so began the rewinding of the nightmare I had suffered, though I could not turn its images and its colours back into the order they had first arrived in. Perhaps that short and senseless dark I had just passed through had been the last mercy left me, a way to slip free of the whole cataclysm of the real, before the noise came erupting louder and madder still, near enough to storm me back down into the black.

“My Lord!! Please, be awake, we—”

I tried to speak,  but no words came. Only a thick and burning slick pouring up out of my throat, metallic, sharp, and then the ache behind it: empty, suffocating, already filling my lungs from the inside, and it was not entirely blood. Something darker than blood. Undiluted, and heavier somehow, seeping into every corner of my chest.

And the light, that blinding, prismatic, tempest blur, grew only stronger and more vast, another brutal wave breaking over and drowning my sight, and I wished, so hard and so earnestly, only to close my eyes again. But the noises were too loud. And then they began to touch me, to press upon my numb and frozen skin, so cold and so strange that my body would not answer to a single command I gave it. The signal simply guttered out into the ether when I tried, gently at first, to twitch my fingers, and then with more and more feral demand upon every part of me, and not one of them would listen. And then came the smell. Charred, putrid, and burning. Rotted flesh and blood, tangled through my muffled senses with the acrid bite of something electric. It stung at me. And then, at the very last, the pain. It came.

“Quick!! Give it to him!! The SHOT—”

The pain. They roared. And the screaming churned the fog inside my mind, twisting it, flaring it into a violent maelstrom. The words, the odour, the urgent moving dark of the figures, the cold pressing and seeping up into my back, and I understood, dimly, by instinct alone, that I was already not breathing. 

“Portal—GET HIM, NOW—”

“He’s gone!!”

“GO!!” 

It called. 

And then the noises ceased, all of them, all at once. The dark patches that had refused to sharpen even at the very end began, finally, to move. And so did I. And I was light, weightless, drifting up toward the calling of that other light at last.

A greater silhouette came between me and the glare, and a halo drew itself along the outline of it, and through it—a brilliant, splendid figure of jade green, cutting clean through all the haze and all the buzzing, shone down full upon me. And I swore I had seen those flowing golden curls somewhere far back in the length of my life. I swore I had known this shape before, this pair of golden and familiar eyes, that faintly ridiculous line of jaw, and the vast arms reaching out for me now and holding me so tenderly in place. 

The very moment the warmth of the crystal blessed itself over me, the men were gone. And so were the shocking waves of the rift, and the white and maddening noise, and the pain. All of it. Vanished together.

I looked up into his eyes, bewildered, as they welled and spilled with a golden, viscous grief that painted itself down the flawless crystal of his face, and I found I had no words at all. Around us I saw the pieces of the puzzle snap back into their places, and the nightmare arrived like lightning splitting open the void, and after it came the billion blades.

And there he was. The long-haired devil, his features and his eyes almost the mirror of my own, wrapped in those white robes, that lethal smile fixed upon his mouth. The man who wore my father’s face better than I had ever managed to. He stood proud and broad across the whole of the flashback, and the anger came surging back into me, as though the elegant corner of his coat were even then drawing itself across my veins, and the fabric of it still pure, still clean, still untouched by the absolute hatred boiling up out of my core. I watched myself running. My boots hammering against the metal of the floor, every muscle driven past its breaking. I watched my past self level the gun at him. I watched myself fail, as both triggers were pulled in the very same instant. I watched the blinding laser erupt from his weapon and slice the air apart before it punched clean through my right shoulder. I watched my own flesh, my own bone, the glittering grey of it against the mist of crimson, and the piercing light. And I watched, in horror this time, as my own shot drifted wide of him, veering off into the nothing beyond the memory’s edge.

I watched it all fade away. The only burning left upon me now was of the crystalline giant’s tears, and of my own, as my gaze drew back into its tension.

“I told you,” I choked. “You never listen.”

He did not shoot back. Not ever again.

“Why would you not understand?” I murmured, and blinked the tears away.

The giant’s hand pressed into his own divine chest, and drew out from it a small, glowing, pounding stone. He broke it in two between his fingers, and laid one half of it against my chest.

Rest, Pie.

 

Amelie

1.

I did not dream that night. I had not dreamed at all, not once, since the rain came back. There was a time I would have begged for a vision, for the warm chamber of the home we once kept below the ground, or that strange giant crystal, or any scrap of memory that might have struck a spark off some answer I was still short of. I do not reach for it so hungrily now. Not since the whole of it was finished and buried under the mornings that came after. I did not dream. Perhaps I only stirred, surfacing in the dead middle of the night to a sound, something faint and finely tuned, the lowest and quickest patter of fingertips over something smooth, soft at first and then pinging out cold and clear into the air. It was just an idle, syncopated rhythm drifting down from somewhere above the ceiling of my room.

“Babe?”

Gerald’s light snoring had stopped the instant I opened my eyes, and I lay there caught up in that familiar, useless little guilt, because in all honesty I was never quite certain whether it was my own nightmare-grunt that had hauled him awake again. Whether I had dreamed after all, and only lost it the second I tried to close my fingers around a hint of the past.

“Hmm.” I sighed. “Did I wake you?”

Of course, it was a “No.” He turned toward me, drowsy and unbothered. I knew he would never once hold it against me. Though I had done exactly this to him nearly three times a week, that first month we shared a bed.

I did not look at him. I kept my eyes on the dark ceiling.

“I need the earplugs.”

“Okay.” He sat up and reached across me for the stand on my side, feeling for the soundproofers. It was probably a delusion of mine, but they had seemed to work better ever since the war. I caught his hand before he could manage it and plucked them out of his fingers myself, knowing full well my man would want to ask why the faintest sound in the whole building could still pull me up out of sleep.

“It’s fine. Go back to sleep.” I soothed him.

“Have you heard anything?” he whispered, one arm curling around me beneath the wool.

“Yes.” I glanced up at the ceiling again. “Father is typing something upstairs.”

“At three in the morning?”

“He does that. It’s the liberation tomorrow.” I had no notion of what he was working at up there, but I understood the man well enough. I would not sleep for a decade either, I think, with a whole country balanced across my shoulders. “Things happened to him. Old habits.”

“Things happened to you too, Amelie.” His fingers drifted over my cheek. “You didn’t sleep well. Nightmare?”

“Sometimes. About…pasts.”

“Before we met?”

“We met at four and you knew that.”

“Alright, I mean,” he snuggled in closer to my neck, mumbling, “before the Deadeye. What happened?”

“Sleep.”

“A few more hours to see the sun. Might as well stay up—nope, babe I know that face. You wouldn’t sleep after even with the earplugs.”

“It’s a long story.”

And it was. The strangest, most stubbornly real history, every jagged piece of it shaped toward this one coming morning, because had it fallen out any other way there would be no morning left for the rest of us at all. Gerald was right, besides. Once a thing had woken me, nightmare or sound, I never did drop back under, because I could not stop the years from running themselves over behind my eyes, the whole long and brutal road that had carried us all this hell of a way to tomorrow.

“We have time.”

I told him all. It was a mess. 

In the centuries before I was ever born into it, humankind had already wrung the water clean out of a water planet, the greediest and most preening species ever to draw breath burning through every last resource and the final scraps of the natural world. And then Inoasis happened. A noble faction of us sealed itself up inside a country of its own making, hoarding whatever usable remained and filtering its gates down to none but the finest genes, and by the time they had, The Fall was already upon us. (Not the meteorites. Not the blight that came trailing after them. Humanity.)

After a century spent living beneath the shelter of that manufactured dark, the Inoasians decided they wanted a second door out. The first was migration, the whole of the nobility lifted clear to some new planet and gifted a fresh freedom once they arrived. Mars we had given up on long before, its poisoned soil and its radiation, but it seemed they had found another world after all, a single lightyear off from Earth and hopelessly short of the fuel it would take to ever reach it. So there was the second option. Stay. But live an altogether new way, inside an altogether new skin. And that was how the New Human came to be, on the back of an invention they called Etoiluene.

I was no noble. I held no birthright inside Inoasis, naturally. I lived in an Underground cavern until the Jacques snatched me up to serve as their lab rat for the Etoiluene work, and shut me away inside a wholly separate, artificial universe. Astragan, they named it. (The planet option, as it turned out, had been a failure of its own, though there were shadows moving behind all those stage lights.) Gravity ran differently there. So did time. So, even, did space itself. But my two sisters and I, and the thousand others forced into New Human skin at our side, kept our own count in Earth time regardless. It came to very nearly one thousand eight hundred Earth days in that prison. I had long since given up on counting them, the way a person eventually stops tending a fire they no longer believe will be seen. 

But then the door opened, and there in it stood the most familiar silhouette my life had ever been built around. The safest one. The shape the whole of my infancy had folded itself into: my first adoptive Papa, the best dad in the Underground, Theo Ryanson. 

I was given him one last time. That is the part I have kept. It is also the part I have gone on apologising for ever since, a small stone of repentance I stuffed down into my chest and have never once managed to bring back up, because I held him and I did not know. Not for a single breath did I understand that the words he said next were the last he would ever hand to me.

“It’s okay. Shhhh. Babygirls, you’re safe now. Daddy will get you home.”

His voice had gone hoarse. Five years had scraped things off him, the boldness first, then a good part of that easy spirit he used to give away to everyone as though it had cost him nothing at all. The tiredness came off him the way warmth does when it is nearly spent, the last of it, the kind you feel in the instant before a thing goes cold for good. Years of us kept apart. Years of whatever history had closed over his head while we were down there in the dark, because he too had gone somewhere far darker than I would ever be told in full.

He gathered all three of us into his arms at once, eyes brightened and brimmed the moment he had a proper look at what they had made of us, at what regarded him now through our new eyes, and still he did not flinch. Not one flicker of hesitation, not the smallest heartbeat of these are not quite mine any longer. He held us as though there were nothing in the world to reconsider, as though we were only and exactly what we had always been to him, which was his.

We wept into him and clung to the last hope left to us, and he breathed out one final sentence before he let us go.

“Listen. All of you. Trust the one they call Francis Faucher. He has eyes like yours, purple ones, beautiful ones, yes. And he has a mole behind his ear, but,” a long pull of breath, a glance thrown back over his shoulder while his dark soldiers took the girls one by one, “but don’t you tell him that. He doesn’t know I saw it. He’s a hell of a difficult man, that one. But he’s the good one. Papa has to go now.”

“What?” My head was already swinging, violent, refusing the whole of it. “Where are you going? Stay. Papa, no! No more of this!”

He pushed Joelle and Evelynn toward the men he had brought down into the prison with him, and a robot figure caught little Evelynn up into its arms and lunged away.

“They’ll come and take you again if we don’t win the war.” He said it in the sweet-talking voice, the one I had known since the Underground, the one he reached for whenever there was not enough to go round and he needed us to stay soft about it. He was handling me still as though I were the girl of five years gone, the one who could not yet tell a false hope from a true one. “Biggie. Look after your sisters just a little while longer, alright? I’ll come back. I swear it to you, hun. I did it once, see? I’ll do it again.”

“NO!”

I screamed it. Two of the dark soldiers hauled me bodily off him while he only shouted something into his comm, and then he turned, and then he was walking back into the war. The same way he had walked from me dozens of times in the cavern, down some tunnel that the years have long since finished burying. His silhouette thinned in the doorway and was gone into the mouth of a different one. And I knew, in the deepest chamber of every heart I own, that it was the last time I would ever look upon him.

They carried me past the battleground, past the whitest hell, my skull struck over and over by the shriek of the weapons and the strikes that answered them. My New Human ear could not hold the din. It had not been built to sieve so much screaming out of the air, and no one had thought to warn me that the upgrade arrived with the world made louder in every way a person would rather it were not. Then the Rift took hold of me and drew me down, and I went into a void with no dreams left waiting anywhere inside it.

When I opened my eyes again we were beneath the dark dome, the darkest place on all the Earth, my sisters sobbing in the beds set alongside mine, and someone had left us the notice of a death. General Theo Ryanson.

“HE SWORE HE WOULD COME BACK!! HE SWORE IT, HE WILL!”

I screamed it at an officer, or a soldier, or a medic, whichever of them it was that seemed to know who we were and had been patching us together. I did not spare a thought for which. What did y’all do, what have you done, were the only words repeated that moment. Grief was scouring my mind down to the bare rock of it, and disbelief was doing the work of polishing after. I flung the needle out of my arm and beat my arms against the bed, again, and again, and again, until the skin of them bruised and my ears rang with it, until the very people I would not trust so much as a hair’s breadth, because the one man whose word had ever meant a thing had spent all of it on a stranger, drove another needle into me and pressed me down into a sleep I did not want and sorely needed.

The whole of our flight out of Astragan is a blur to me now, the greater part of it gone entirely, worn away chiefly because I had been buried alive beneath the sheer weight of that reunion’s joy and then the far heavier weight of the sorrow that came down on top of it, over the man we had cherished above all others and lost for good. Almost five years of waiting, laid down in exchange for not five minutes together, and all of it spent handing the three of us over to a man none of us had ever laid eyes on. An absurdity I would turn over and over in the years that followed and never once succeed in making it sensible.

Only that name, breathed out in the last sentence Papa ever gave me, that difficult creature, hardest nut, that magnificent hell of a stubborn man, lay every bit idle through the whole of the after-war. Half his body blown out of him, half his bones gone with it, sunk so deep into the coma that his soul had been buried somewhere none of us ever knew the road to.

****

They told me it was early 3848 by the time my mind came back to me, and it came back into a different room altogether.

The wall was white. The floor was white. The sheet drawn over me was whiter than anything I had ever worn on my body, and so were the hair and the robes of the women posted at our bedsides, my sisters’ and mine. Everything bleached out to nothing, the whole spectrum boiled down to a single blinding note, and it stood in violent contrast to the dark we had arrived in, that site packed shoulder to shoulder with soldiers, terrified every one of them and still, for all that, the colour of my late father’s armour. The terror had not eased in the crossing to this white place. If anything it had deepened, because the pale women watching over us were programmed into a dreadful stiffness, a human somehow more machine than the steel would ever be, and it left in me no good impression at all.

The ache in my arms told me the whole thing was real. One of the women turned her head, only her head, exactly acute to my face, and turned it back again without troubling a single muscle below her neck. “Subjects awake,” she said to the other, and the flat nothing in that voice yanked me clean out of the last of my grogginess. Instinct threw my head to the other side, hunting for my sisters. They were already sitting up, already reading the danger thick in the air, stunned and bloodless, watching the two women in white glide toward the far wall.

“Hey!”

They did not so much as break stride. They simply dissolved into the surface, some unseen fluid taking them in, and then the wall drew itself back into a hard, seamless plane. I fisted the sheet and gathered myself to bolt after them, and that was the moment I found the fetter. I swung my right leg toward the edge of the frame and a magnetic force did its patient, excellent work and drew it back down, and held it there.

I blinked the dry pain out of my eyelids and hauled at both legs together. The invisible chains only pulled them harder.

“I tried. It doesn’t work.” My second sister, Pony, her whole real name folded away under that nickname, whispered it in a voice worn to rasp, dehydrated, hours of sobbing spent out of her. She had not slept a minute since I went under. “A woman came in, maybe an hour after you went out. Really white, like them. Said she was that Faucher guy’s fiancée, then she just moved us in here.”

“And Papa wanted us to trust him??” I set my teeth and tried the fetter again, and again it snatched me back. “What did she say after?” I was panting now, and the old filth of Astragan seemed to bleed up through all that whiteness and settle back over my skin, and there came the one thought I truly did not need, which was that the bravest man my life had ever known might have spent his last breath consigning the three of us into precisely the wrong pair of hands.

Footsteps. They came pounding against my ears, nearer and nearer beyond the far side of the wall, and then they passed straight through the dissolved plane, which appeared to open for them and them alone. The one who led was new to me. Long moon-silver hair poured down her back as she drifted closer, carried on an elegance that set every nerve in my blood on edge, and over it all that same sickening white, a robe cut from the highest grade the dome could mill and very probably its cleverest tech besides.

“Oh, children,” she breathed, grey eyes hung high and aloof above us, “I do believe you are in want of a longer rest. With rather less movement.” Her cape moved when she moved, its lines drawn sharp across angular shoulders, moonlight sliding down the face of some tall and forbidding monolith, and she was every bit as beautifully cold and as heartless as the picture she made. Her two servants dropped their heads and waited at the threshold, and that alone told me a great deal about the woman in front of us, who was plainly no ordinary officer of this place.

“Where is Francis Faucher?”

“I am Aurora Vidal. Director of Virtual Intelligence and Data Archival. Betrothed of Lord Francis Faucher.” She lifted her chin, and the eyes she turned down on me were a predator’s, appraising a fresh litter of rats. “And I would counsel you to speak of the ruler of Inoasis with rather more wisdom. I shall forgive your haughtiness in taking his name onto your tongue directly, this once, given the filthy blood that runs in your kind.”

Trust him. Trust Francis Faucher. Not anyone else.

I looked at the two servants with their heads bowed low, at the magnet humming its quiet leash beneath my leg, at the whole white cathedral she had raised for the express purpose of holding three exhausted girls to their beds, and I snorted. It came out cracked and it pulled at my ribs and I could not have cared less.

“Betroooothed.” I let the word curdle in my mouth. “My dad spent years here fighting for you dome people. He had one name he told me to trust. And it wasn’t yours.” I looked her over, slow, the flawless robe and the two heads bowed at the door and the cold coming off her like a draught out of an open vault. “So that’s kind of weird, right? You’re that big important fiancée, and he never even said your name. Is that ring the only part of him you’ve actually got?” 

“Bred true, I see,” she said, and for the length of one breath every drop of the honey was gone out of her, “mind that tongue before we decide your kind has no further use above the ground.”

“Does your Lord know what you get up to when he’s not around?” I bared my teeth, the nearest thing to a smile I had left anywhere in me. “Your voice is still shaking even with the silk and fancy shits.”

Before I could drag my gaze off her, the world hit my face.

The crack of her palm did not so much hurt as detonate. Sound was the thing my new ears could least forgive, and the flat report of skin on skin went off behind my eyes like a flare, white drowning white, and for a long moment I was blind on nothing but the noise of it. The sting came afterward, late and almost quaint after the blast, a burning, tickling bloom crawling up the side of my face. When the room swam back to me I found her hand still hanging there in the air, and I caught it with my eyes, and I put it somewhere I could find it again.

“My beloved is right,” she seethed, all the grace poured out of her now. “Your kind were only ever the sacrifice the new world was to be built upon. Better that than left to rot in the ground where we buried you.”

“Sister—” Pony’s voice fractured across the room, and she was right to be frightened, because she knew that particular quiet in me, and she knew it only ever arrived a heartbeat ahead of something I would not be able to take back.

I lunged, aimed for the jaw and I found the jaw, and the wrongness of it caught up to me a half second behind my knuckles, because Aurora Vidal did not merely stagger. The Director of Whatever Else went off her feet and folded across a bed frame two down from mine, that moon-silver hair fanning out over the white like something knocked over and spilled, and one of her own servants had to lunge to keep her head off the steel. 

I stared at my own hand as though it belonged to a stranger. I did not know it. Somewhere far under my skin a thing no one had thought to tell me about had woken up and answered on my behalf, and it had answered so much louder than the question I had asked.

“GET HER!”

Two of the white women came at me with their hands flung wide to pin mine, and in the same instant I understood the true shape of my cage. I could move. Freely, wholly, everywhere but off the frame. The magnet owned my legs and nothing else, and so I gathered those legs up under me and drove my whole body upright on the mattress, and the first servant to reach me went away again on the back of my fist.

“Get me Faucher!” I shrieked. “Not you!”

The New Human gene lit some feral thing at the root of me and let it up off its chain. The second woman was almost on me, a needle already bright and ready in her fist, aimed to drop me back down into that unconscious prison, and I took her by the forearm before it could land. I felt the bone give under my grip, felt the shape of her arm answer to a pressure I never meant to spend, and I heard the small ugly sound she made as she fought to twist herself out of my hand.

I stripped the needle out of her fingers with my free hand, spun it round, and drove it into the neck of the first one, the one who had only just clawed herself up off the floor. I pushed the plunger home. She gave a high wounded yelp and went loose against me, the body winding down slow beneath my hand, already going soft.

But footsteps. More footsteps, again.

I dragged the emptied syringe back out of the slackening body and set its point to the throat of the last one still in my grip just as the soldiers came through the entrance. Three of them, weapons up and armour snapping into its seams, and I knew them. I knew them at once—they were the dark soldiers.

“No.” Vidal’s hand shot up, and her whole soul changed in the raising of it, every hard line melting into something soft and tragically merciful, all of it turned toward the armed men and none of it toward us. “Lower your weapons. The dear child was only in flight. This is a strange and frightening realm for them to wake into, nothing more. Cease.”

“THEY ATTACKED US!” I shouted at the soldiers, past caring about the barrels levelled my way. “This! This syringe, right here! She was gonna drug me!”

The soldiers did not move, not at first. Something passed through them, a small fraction of confusion loosening their stance, and then their guns shifted slightly, but only once Vidal had made her grand show of throwing herself into the line of fire on our behalf. They gave ground a little. They did not leave the room.

“We just need to see Franc—Lord Francis Faucher,” Pony pleaded, and I understood the raw arithmetic of her survival even as she said it, that some deep animal part of her would always sooner throw its lot in with the ones who had once carried her out of Astragan and through the Rift, than with the beautiful white thing standing calm in the middle of all this ruin. “Our dad told us to meet him in person. Theo Ryanson, the–the general of your army. We are his daughters.”

“So. One concedes he is not available at present.” Vidal let the words fall soft and mournful, as though the admission cost her something dear. “My bravest comrade. I am sick with worry for him, lugubrious as any bride would be, after the blow this war has dealt us all. Would you truly turn a grieving woman away from the side of her own husband-to-be? And those ladies, and these… fearful children, they have need of his instruction too, would we not agree?”

She even contrived to press a single doleful tear out into the spotlight of herself, one hand cupped delicately over the swelling that had risen along the line of her jaw, and I caught myself wishing the blow I had dealt her had cracked something loose in that scandalous mask as well as in the bone beneath it. She took a step toward the soldiers, who had ranged themselves in a line across the liquefied entrance, and let a tremor into her lips.

“Or might I at least be told where His Grace is kept? I would carry the children to him myself.”

“My apologies, Lady Vidal.” One of the dark men gave a single small nod, once. “We hold no information as to Lord Faucher’s condition, and could not share it with you if we did. Every victim pulled out of Astragan is to be protected by Raven Force under any circumstance, and no outside party is to intervene—”

“I am his betrothed, my dear comrade.” She glided a step nearer. “The wounded he was bound to carry out of that war are my responsibility now, in full, and these,” a slender finger rose and pointed, at us, at me most of all, and I pressed the needle a hair closer to the throat of the woman folded down under my white-knuckled hand, “these were plainly in the gravest distress. I have gone through the scanning data with my own eyes.”

“She just called us peasants!” I snarled, every pulse in the room booming like thunder against my ear. “Is this how you treat victims? There’s chains! On our feet!”

“For assurance of the protocol. Look at their state.” Vidal whipped her head toward us for a breath and gasped at the blooming pain—if only it had been real. “They evidently require constrained monitoring.”

The dark soldiers turned their heads a fraction, still visibly unsettled by an arrangement not one of them had been briefed on, and let their attention drift, plainly, down to the magnetic fetters clamped over our feet. They lowered their weapons.

“My apologies.” The same one again, careful, giving nothing. “Lord Faucher notified us of no such procedure concerning your ladyship. If that was an understanding held privately between yourself and him—”

“This is not a matter of authority, when the wellbeing of Inoasis itself sits upon no certain path, after the chaos I have witnessed. Every soul dragged out of that war is a wound left open in the dome’s own record until it is seen to and set down, and could V.I.D.A.L not lend its abutment against the damage? Stand down, soldiers. You have plainly frightened my dear children.”

The soldiers visibly shrank, their steps already doing the slow backtrack toward the soft wall.

“Yes, my lady.” 

And they left us to the actress, her grey eyes turning atrocious on our faces the very instant the soldiers’ backs could no longer catch it.

Do it, big sister. Stab her, and scream very loud.

I glanced across at the youngest of us, our littlest girl in the far bed nearest the corner, whose face gave away nothing at all but the smallest shift of her lips, breathing that one sentence so low and so subtle that nothing but these cursed ears of mine could ever have caught it. And I roared. I twisted the arm of the servant until the joint finally gave with a snap, and I did not flinch, not even a little, at the crushed break or at the slam of the needle sinking deep into her neck.

“Arghhh!”

The soldiers came swimming back in, and Pony was already up on the mattress, eyes blown wide, shivering as though one of the Underground’s crawling bugs had landed square on her face, her finger shaking so convincingly it half fooled even me. “My sister’s losing her mind! We don’t want to see those white people, we don’t want anything white! Please stay with us, or she’s gonna kill all of them! Please!”

“I don’t want her, and I don’t want her people.” I hissed it, and shoved the broken woman down to the ground. Vidal halted three steps off, my gaze fixed on her and nowhere else.

“We don’t even mind the chains, but look at her. We need actual soldiers from you. Raven Force? It’s Raven Force, right? Yeah. We can wait as long as His Grace needs, that’s fine, but I’m scared, and I need your protection. I guess.”

And that was how we turned the witch’s own magic trick back against her that day. For a week afterward six armed Raven Force soldiers in full tactical dress stood guard over us, most of them trained on me in particular, and I did not mind it in the slightest, because they did nothing at all beyond standing there with their blades asleep at their sides. They did not move us back down to the thousand-odd women at the refugee camp either, because the day before Vidal swept out of our room with her two very damned servants, she had insisted we “be treated separately” on account of the rampage, and offered no word as to why she had taken in exactly three of us. She never once saw us. And yet she knew we were sisters by adoption, though we wore three entirely different faces between us, which meant she had done her shady digging on Papa. I could not stop my mind from tying the sickening white of V.I.D.A.L’s whole aesthetic straight back to the devils of Astragan.

I came down off the edge once the women were gone. I told Pony what I had begun to feel in my gut, that this witch had some unspoken jinx laid out precisely for the descendants of Theo Ryanson, and that Lord Faucher knew nothing of it. It took hours before Pony finally slept, given her nerves strung tight as tripwire the whole time I was out beside her. 

Then the quiet came back, and I teared up again, fighting to swallow the sound of it as the last moment of Papa rose up in me. We were defenceless against another betrayal, with nothing left to us at all. If, and it frightened me even to shape the thought, this place was only one more elaborate stage built for our torture, then we would crumble like paper dolls.

Collapsed and wrung out, I drifted off too, and paid no mind at all to the dissonance still hanging in that tense air: the terrifying calm, and the strategist’s quiet gesture, with which a nine-year-old girl had just turned the whole table over.

*****

They came back a week later, and this time with excuses there was no arguing against. Raven Force had run short-handed. The House’s elder relation had called in the medical support of V.I.D.A.L, all the more so since the army had lost close to sixty percent of its people in the war and now bore the added burden of a thousand-odd New Humans besides, every one of them unskilled and terrified and pressing on what little resource was left.

The dark soldiers had watched the rage drain out of me. Seven days of routine glucose injections and soft edible cubes that tasted of rotten fish will do that to a person. Someone would pass them the tray, and they would set it down in front of the three of us, and the three of us would force it down into our stomachs. I gave them no harm to report, no madness, not one complaint, not even on the walk to the lavatory and back with two armed soldiers in my fetter, where I kept quiet the whole way and did nothing but mourn.

Not a word came from the Lord man himself. We did not know much about his face.

When the dark soldiers judged my behaviour tame enough and took their leave, the white witches came swimming back into the room, a full dozen of them this time, and without Aurora Vidal anywhere among their number. She was no fool. An audacious, gilded noble of her sort would never again chance herself inside my line of sight, not after the punch that had sent her sailing to the far side of the room, and that fact alone confirmed the conjecture Pony and I had turned over between us during the dark soldiers’ shift change on the third day. The Vitches, we had settled on, a byname for the white robes who beyond any doubt had other plans laid out for the three of us sisters.

“Where is that woman?” I asked, with no real expectation of an answer. They had lined themselves up in front of the bed, well back from us, faces cloned to the same flawless mould, stone statues every one, unmoving and plastic. Pony feigned a yawn. Our littlest sister did not so much as stir out of that strange somnolence of hers.

We waited the night out, with that Underground instinct for the passing of hours that had never once needed a shaft of sunlight to prove itself, only patience and a watchful eye. There were holograms strung up beside our beds, vital signs and the like, though it seemed the Inoasians had gone and invented themselves a whole new language for the express purpose of drawing a line between their kind and the Outsiders. Pony caught the symbols anyway, and the rhythm underneath them. A clock system sat tucked into the right corner of the floating screens, and she read it. We knew well enough that the Vitches had not sent ten more of their number in simply to stand there and watch us breathe.

When the symbol shifted into something close enough to an eleven, they moved on us.

We were feigning sleep by then, all three of us, and through the dark I heard it clear as struck glass with those inhuman ears of mine: the soft draw of a fresh set of syringes slid out from inside their robes. Not the glucose. Not the bright, harmless little things they held up to the daylight and to watching eyes. Something they had kept tucked away for a room with no witnesses left in it.

The hands found my bed frame first. Of course they did. I was always going to be the first name on their list.

So I came up off the mattress swinging, the metal plate I had kept hidden under the blanket for days already gripped in my fist. I opened a line across one forearm, barely a cut, nowhere near deep enough to matter, but enough to send her flinching back for half a breath. And then Pony was screaming.

Two pairs of hands had her pinned, and the plate I had passed her lay useless on the floor.

“Pony!”

My fist caught one of the Vitches full in the face, and in the same instant a fresh, tearing pain lit up my scalp as another fisted a hank of my long hair and hauled. One of them pressed something on the hologram. The fetter answered, slamming me flat to the sheet, and my ankles screamed under a magnetic pull tuned high enough now to hold a beast down, pinning my limbs the way you would pin a specimen to a board. Pony’s scream went on carving its way through my skull. I wrenched one arm loose and drew it in a hard arc across the face of the one still holding the syringe.

Then I found the far bed with my eyes.

Our littlest sister had folded herself down into the deepest corner of it, made as small as a body can be made, and a needle was already at the soft skin of her tiny arm. Already dimpling it.

And all at once, at the far end of the room, three of the watching Vitches dropped where they stood.

The needle never went in. It stopped against her skin, hung there half a breath, and then fell away onto the blanket, and it would never, not now and not ever, find its road into my littlest sister’s flesh. The two Vitches nearest her went down a heartbeat behind the first three, blood coming up out of their throats in dark sheets, something buried deep in the vein of each neck.

Pony’s arms came free. She snatched a pillow up in front of herself and braced behind it, bracing for the larger thing she could feel bearing down on the room. More of the white women folded to the floor, blades sunk into their necks, blades punched clean through their throats, and the whitest canvas that place had to offer began at last to take colour, crimson blooming open across the whole of it, everywhere at once.

I pushed myself upright, because every eye and every reaching hand had turned off me now and onto the one among their own number who had never been one of them at all. Palm-sized daggers stood ranked between her fingers. There was nothing left of the manufactured cruelty the others had worn, none of that plastic malice, only clean and exact swings of her arms and a stillness below the waist so total that she never once had need to move her feet. 

The last of them hit the floor with a fresh blade already in her throat, set there to stop her fingers ever reaching the comm at her ear.

“Might I ask where you came by the piece you had in hand?” The disguised woman turned to us. She wore the same greyish eyes the Vitches did, but hers stayed low, moving over the floor, and they never once snapped up wide and fixed like some haunted owl the way the others’ had, not even after the last of the heartbeats around us had gone still.

“The bathroom.” I took a breath, not yet ready to hand my trust so quickly to any woman dressed in white.

“The ledge along the wall. I see.” She crossed to my littlest sister’s bed and laid her palms flat against the hologram, and the fetter came unlocked with a soft click. “A clever one. Your father taught you well.”

“Who are you?” Pony set her legs down to the floor and flinched at the raw cold of it, and there was blood enough spread across it to put her straight back onto the bed.

“A ‘Vitch.’” She let a pause fall. “I must confess myself impressed. The cleverest little word, and coined by ladies of Outsider blood.” She turned, caught the look on our petrified faces, read the slight we had heard buried in it, and shook her head. “You may take it as a compliment. I served alongside V.I.D.A.L once. These days I am Raven Force’s close-combat specialist.”

I was certain Pony and I had kept our voices low, low enough that no one on this earth could have caught the ugly nickname, back during that brief changing of the soldiers’ watch.

“How did you know what we said?” I asked, my feet meeting the freezing floor as I lunged for my littlest sister and hauled her up out of the bed.

“Be mindful of the walls in this place, my ladies. And my soldiers are very well trained besides. You may call me Muli, and I have come to escort you to His Grace’s mansion.”

“He knew about us?”

“He held an agreement with your father, concerning the wellbeing of the three of you. Once you were recovered out of the war, you were each to be granted permanent shelter and care within the House of Faucher, whatever the origin of your blood.” Muli murmured something into her comm, and the dark soldiers came through the liquefied wall and set to work at once on the corpses strewn across the floor. “I am sorry for your father, my ladies.”

Muli led us out of that room, which turned out to be a single cell of V.I.D.A.L’s vast medical laboratory, quartered close up against a full fourth of the army. She told us we would have been moved elsewhere by tonight, had those aids ever found their way into our veins. We had far less sense than we needed of how many parties already knew about the contract struck between Theo Ryanson and the ruler of Inoasis. We had become targets, in the political sense above all others, and Aurora Vidal was plainly no innocent bride-to-be of Francis Faucher. They had not married, not once in two full decades of that arrangement, and that alone told us enough.

“Why didn’t he expose her or something?” Pony’s question ran close alongside the doubt already turning over in my own head, as we followed Muli down to a hidden metro, a tunnel run straight through to the lower ground of the Faucher mansion.

She told us the Fauchers could not move against her. Not yet. V.I.D.A.L’s drugs, its medics, its medical research were among the very backbones that held Raven Force upright, and kept the whole army and the country standing along with it, and that was the entire reason the marriage had been arranged to begin with. V.I.D.A.L’s influence over the elder relations of the House ran deeper than any of them had guessed, and across these last few years it had only pressed the matter harder, insisting all the while that the joining of the two parties brought nothing but good to the people and to the war both. It had left the Lord himself the last man standing on his own line, powerless against the weight of it.

“Where’s he, now? Are we going to meet him?”

I asked, and Muli lowered her head, her whole small frame folding a little smaller around the one question she had no good answer to. She looked human then. A living, ordinary, human woman, and in that moment the air of the train dropped a degree colder.

“He is… not in a good state, my dear Lord.” She breathed it out barely above her lips. “He went to bring your father home. And on the way back, he… died. The drug… It pulled him back. It made his heart beat again.”

“V.I.D.A.L’s drug,” Pony whispered.

 

tbc (reworking because plot holes :((( )