Memory 2
I let Nadia take control of our body. It'd been a scarce few hours, and I'd done enough. She's the one who wanted to come back to all of this, so I let her appreciate the present of life and all it entailed; she showered me with pejoratives for handing our body back in such a "messy" state. Though a shower of ill-forged words isn't one of water, and Nadia wasn't keen on showering in a place with so many corpses—sisterly differences, I suppose. Which only left us the Staircase.
Its interior was bereft the turbulence of the exterior, and looked the part of a hallway forgotten; floors and walls weathered, indistinguishable beneath posters and band tags to groups and events long since past—if they ever existed at all—that formed a sparkling typographical sediment wherever the blown-out light of Absence fell. I'd wanted to stay and admire the scene—to the point of insanity if possible, using it to obliterate the memory of Dinah's dimming puppy dog eyes that'd infected me the moment she slumped to the floor. Nothing was effective enough to make me forget; she'd already joined my gallery of broken faces: Lupe, Secretary, Sinaya, Melissa, and now her. However, Nadia was beyond granting me favors and so I trailed after, a ghostly passenger in our body, watching through window eyes as the Real came upon us.
She pushed open the door blocking the way out. The smugglers, or whoever ran the place before them, had an appreciation for 'classical concealment,' choosing to hide the Staircase's entrance behind a trick bookshelf. It took Nadia two shoves to make a crack in the seal—someone had weighed the fucking thing down—before she decided to use ourself as a battering ram; if I'm noncommital than she's impatient.
"It's going to hurt," I said. "You know that right?"
"'It's going to hurt,'" she repeated back, "maybe for you—gold's a soft metal afterall."
I rolled my eye—"Stop it," she shrieked, clutching her face in an instinctual bid to regain control.
Off the record—what does that even mean for us right now, it's all being recorded—I wasn't trying to wrench the body back from her, but the experience of being in your body as a passenger is…strange. The controls just out of reach, but so close that if you moved a pinkie you could graze them. All the world filtered by a window that strips experiences of their intangible authenticity, but denies you the color our brain applies as gloss, unifying these channels of stimuli into something beautiful.
It's a space closer to consciousness than where Anza'centorii was staying—she'd opted to ride in our spirit for the moment. Said there were, "renovations" she'd wanted to make.
Dissassociation then…would that describe where you were, accurately?
A close answer, but not one I love. This wasn't like the night they…my parents…were murdered. Still, accidents cast to the Underside, Nadia wasn't pleased at my minor subversion of her control, and so I raised my proverbial hands and gave her space to work, to live.
She examined the door, teetering between whether the task called for a two-fold or three-fold Atomic Glory—settled on two. Shoulder set, sorcery primed in her hand, she jogged forward, leaped, and cast; she was an azure javelin cloaked in a chalcedony corona. The bookshelf never stood a chance…and it did hurt.
"Alls below, what'd they make that from," she whispered, the pain smothering her words to a mouse.
"Wood," I stated, careful to withhold any mirth. "Told you it was going to hurt,"
Stroking the pain in her shoulder, she whispered, "Forgive me for forgetting just how acute pain could be."
"You wanted to live," I retorted, "and life's pain."
"At least we get to die in the end," Secretary whispered, their voice a sharp prod in the back before dancing away. "Would hate to be you, able to experience heart-wrenching pain again, and again…"
Nadia spun in search of the cruel figment, finding them propped next to the hole in the bookshelf she'd created. Secretary's finger stroked their wound, teasing its rim but not digging inside, and, noticing we'd found them, they held that blood-dipped finger against their lips. "Shh, let them rest in peace."
Them? You weren't alone?
When you're self-absorbed and your main companion is a mental delusion, you never are, but #404's instruction was what incited us to properly examine our context.
And what'd you find?
Carnage, unlike anything I'd made with my claws. Carnage, as a fifty-foot tall abstract painting meant to adorn a shrine to the concept of gore. Carnage, what claimed full lives, solid bodies, and reimagined them as a viscous plaster of meat that coated the room—was the stopper on the bookshelf, dripping from the bookshelf in off-pink stalactites of human mince. I wonder if in their haste to escape to the Underside their occupants forgot which boardgame—the shelves weren't laden with books—was the trigger. In the slurry and viscera there some portions chunky enough to identify an actual organ; I only saw three. A segment of intenstine—lower, a fabric-swatch's worth of tripe, and, bobbing in a puddle of frothed blood, an eyeball. Perfectly round, still shiny, its sclera dyed red 'round a hazel iris—fresh. Recent.
"I wonder if they're still here?" they'd asked, laying upon us a raiment of terror.
It was for everyone's benefit I wasn't in charge. The scent of Bloodlust in the air was thick, a slobbering carmine tongue that dragged itself across the window between myself and my corporeal self, but inside my place of remove…it couldn't reach me. Like I wasn't cursed. Though we didn't have the time to properly appreciate it—Secretary's musing having snuffed the candle of my joy, preemptively.
Nadia's tail whipped once, stilled—tense as garrote wire in the assassin's hand. She prowled low to the ground—ears tilted back, ascended up a flight of stairs, entering what might have been a lounge of some kind in an age before that beast had come seeking its own enrichment. Every table was overturned, the booths rent asunder, and the glass shelves had enough in them to waterfall amber oblations to the late owners that had stocked them. In the shadow of the bar Nadia hid us, and set our sights on the designer of this chaos.
Mom loved to paint—watercolors were her favorite. "They travel well," she'd explain, "and I prefer to work in layers." Layers is how I'll describe the creature. Take a tiger—make it bigger than that, it's a tiger—now make it bigger than that. A thing that could never enter through a doorwary despite the vaunted 'bonelessness' of cats—it couldn't enter two doorways even if you'd conjoined them. Yet this is a tiger that's decided to wear clothes, leather to be precise, and it's a jacket, actually. No lapel, but it has sleeves and due to its size it terminates at what is proportionally its 'middle.' Though it's a jacket with tails, similar to a waist coat, but they're long, rounded like the tails on the end of lunar moth's wings. Though this tiger had other fun surprises about it: an extra set of limbs, a mouth that opened like a mantis's more so its three tongues could better probe and scrape the flesh from the smuggler's head in its multi-knuckled paws, and the beast was even wearing a blindfold. A leather blindfold connected to a long cap of shaggy hair—the glossiest black you could ever imagine. Dyed in a balayaga of carmine.
Nadia didn't have a single idea of how to sneak past it. Neither did I nor Anza'centorii, and if Secretary did…I doubt they'd offer it. I doubt it'd matter. The creature paused its rote licking, to instigate a jarring silence; the entire time there'd been this background noise, like a belt grinder, and I'd imagined it was some Old World machinery sequestered off in the building, working on an empty pointless task…but a task all the same; existence's justification. But it was only that thing.
It propped itself up on its foremost paws, muscular stilts that stiffened its shoulders, and then it cracked its back to a baby thunder boom. Only to curl on itself to repeat the process, cracking vertebrae after vertebrae to an ear-shattering sequence better suited for a Declaration of Thunder festival. Then it added a twist in the process—like some living accordion, creating a bizarre U-shape that left its front facing our ambiguous location. In this, I noticed two things I'd be remiss to leave out—first, this tiger's stripes were not black but carmine, rivers overflowing with blood supplied by some impossible never-ending artery; two, its 'blindfold' had eyes that opened, and they were human—twinkling with a gleam that piroutted beneath the few unshattered bulbs swinging in search of an escape they'd never find. I knew those eyes.
"Heeeeey, sis," Nemesis said, with a bass heavy rumble from the depths of the thing's throat.
"Run!" I screamed, no longer caring if it was with a mouth corporeal or proverbial. Nadia didn't call me on it either, she was already running—flitting through space as a series of images unmoored by interstitial motion. Division sorcery done in a moment of peak distress; it wasn't enough. Nemesis was a Duke, and, as I'd learned from being cut in half by her, Dukes are Concepts in motion—a continuous embodiment of whim and desire. What she embodied right then? The perfect face to keep up with usas we searched room after room for an escape.
"Oooh, this is a new trick," she chortled, her laugh a chainsaw slurping at a pool's edge.
"Ah!" we shrieked, flicking off to the next room. Bedrooms with large wooden X's, overcomplicated stools lacking an interior seat, and black lacquered sawhorses. Restroom—lit turquoise and haunting—window!
"Sis, you really shouldn't—"
We were free, and didn't care about glass tinking off our scales or slicing our flesh. The night stretched above us, bright and beautiful against a morningstar moon—its palaces twinkling promise—transforming Brightgate's skyline into cavity pocked masticatory teeth. Then…we fell. Cast down by that bitch physics faster than Anza'centorii's wings could unfurl. At night, it turns out, the street mirrors heaven far too well—black.
"Nadia?" I asked the quiet. "Anza'centorii? Secretary?"
Silence. I sat in my passenger's place, sinking in the all-encompassing void.
I lay in suffocating ebony for a time indeterminate, musing on if this was the lot of every corpse I'd strewn across my time in Brightgate; if this was Secretary's infinite pasttime. Unlike them, I could take control of my context, of the body Nadia and I held twin ownership of—at least that was my hope. We'd not practiced dying when one of us had absolute control. I'd find my answer if I shifted from passenger to driver…if I made an attempt toward living. An attempt that I'd said very clearly, I wasn't trying to do—living was her desire, not mine. Though what do I owe her when she's hurt, knocked out, or in bondage of a kind? What if my sister needs me? It was the question that set my fingers to twitch, create an anxious itch that squirmed beneath my skin, a parasite intent on nipping every nerve cluster. What if, what if, what if…and I had to know; Nadia allowed me my life and alls below I could do the same—I'd safeguard hers.
Sensation lapped at me as the tide of consciousness does the drifting dreamer in the morning. The lights were low, my head and back supported on a fortress of…stuffed animals? The sort girls back home would squeal and call "ugly-cute." With a demure squeak of the couch, I propped myself up to discover Secretary flipping through actual books.
"So not even a fall like—it's you…my other little brute," they said, their name for me curling like smoke on a cigarette's end. "Noncommital even in death."
"No," I shook my head, before running my hands over it in search of damage—found none. "I wanted to make sure Nadia was safe—that's all. Where are we?"
Secretary closed the book. Replaced it on the shelf, and fully spun to examine me. Prowling past the coffee table and my disagreement to kneel, forcing our eyes into mirrored infinity.
"The tiger's den," they said.
"Nemesis's…house?"
"I'm happy it's you facing this," they said, stroking my hair to the point of summoning tears.
Did it hurt?
No, which was the problem. They were softer than Nemesis' stuffies with me, and I could feel nothing from them. Pliers may hurt, a feather is torture, but Grief's reminder is the ur-agony. #404 knew that, smiled about it, and stepped away to cotinue assessing the situation. We were somewhere in Nemesis's home—a reading nook perhaps, and it was all so plush. Every cushion, pillow, and quilt made from the down of what could only have been an entity—Contentment…maybe Nostalgia. I'd bet a royal it was Nostalgia; I'd not felt so safe beneath a blanket since I was a kid. One of those nights where a fire was racing through the forest, Mom was off with a few others from town to help fight it from expanding beyond what was necessary for the year's maintenance. Dad described what they were doing as a "debt of duty" they all had. That the choices of the Old World cast long shadows.
When does this become comforting?
I don't think it does—that'd be pure Nostalgia, wouldn't it? Memories are so we don't forget. Mine of #404 was the long shadow of a choice as well, after all. I'm the long shadow of a choice. We all are.
"Do you have a reason for pacing?" I asked.
"My reason is you." An explanation of condensed volumes in a language I couldn't read—I'm woefully illiterate in Secretary—so I curled up on the couch, confident that Nemesis could wait but this mattered.
"Are you blaming me?"
"Should I?"
The next words were beyond my tongue. No—yes—please. "You used me!"
"It's about time you hit that stage of Grief, I suppose. I hope you're faster with that one girl—"
"Dinah."
"Have you been practicing your justifications about her death yet?"
"No." Yes.
"Have they been working?"
"Yes." No.
"I thought you weren't practicing."
Fuck. I threw off the blanket, and made my best march over to them, stubbing my toe on the coffee table—gouged out a piece of wood in the process. Hopping about cradling my foot and pride, I moaned.
"Stop reading—you can't read. You're not Real."
"I'm what you Remember me as, little brute," they whispered—to wound me? "The planner, your strategist, your handler—the only person you let handle you, but we both know that's a Lie. Did you let me make all those plans because you trusted me, was it because you loved me, or did you just want to know what the best course of action would be so you could chart your way into an early grave?"
…your answer?
Silence.
Even now?
I…I'm too noncommital for an answer. I couldn't lie to them. Not again.
"Ooph, is this a bad time?" Nemesis asked. She'd come around the corner, toweling off her head while in a oversized tee with a graphic of a cartoony three-headed sheep with chameleon eyes—the mascot for some NewNet band she liked. "Let it be said, I'm a sister who respects the personal time between a girl and her delusions."
Secretary was gone—not in a blink like I'd banished them, but like a candle snuffed. A fantasy blown away. I stretched up, wary of Nemesis despite her casualness—she'd already proved that her ability to kill required no significant emotional investment on her part. She inhaled life and exhaled death constantly, and without warning.
"I'm fine, and not dealing with any delusions," I lied. "Why am I here, though—punishment for evading my last one?"
Nemesis cocked her hip, smirking around my intimation. "Oooh, Nads—"
"Nads?"
"Okay, scratch that one. Naddy, I like that one, do you?"
"Nemesis!"
"Sorry," she said, holding up her hands in mock defeat before side-diving onto her couch. "You didn't evade shit. I very much cut you in half despite the last minute juke—which I will say, very inspired. A vertical slice is much easier to void than a horizontal—"
"But I'm alive," I said, cutting off the budding tangent. "You killed me, and I came back, so…"
"Alls below," she whined, "I'm not a city councilwoman, and, despite what people think, Lodgemasters are beholden to some rules we can't change. Both city ordinance and the Lodge's global ethos, mandated you die…and you did. If they haven't considered that some people can come back from the dead that's their problem. Why be so hung up on this, you were dead for a good year."
"A year?"
"To the day," Nemesis chirped cheerily. "So, you ready to hang?"
"No."
"Why?" she asked, and looked actually confused by my rejection.
"You kidnapped me!"
She blushed, pushing her index fingers together. "Yeaaaah, but you'd have run away otherwise," she said. "Do you know how long its been since I've gotten to do this?"
"Torture someone?"
"No—I do that every Tuesday after tacos. I'm talking about a…" she drummed her fingers against her thighs then threw her arms out wide, "…slumber party!"
Really?
Unfortunately but I said, "Fuck that," and tried to bail. She trailed me down hallway after identical hallway. We passed weight rooms, a kitchen the likes of which I'd only seen in Old World documentaries demonstrating the excesses of the wealthy, a movie screening room, and even a pool. Rooms upon rooms for any possible whim that could've struck Nemesis at one point or another—she'd said as much.
"Yeah, I was really in a swimming phase after reading Moby Dick," she'd rambled. "Like, the whale of that was so cool, and thought—I could probably turn into a whale. They're like ocean tigers—"
"That makes no sense," I screamed, whirling around to confront the source of the duelling inanity and insanity of my situation. "This place makes no sense. Where are the windows or exits? Alls below, if you aren't going to torture me, then show me the way out so I can leave!"
Her mood deflated with the hiss of a lanced boil. "Sorry Naddy, but I don't know the way out."
"It's your house!"
"No it's not."
"#404 told me—"
"Knew you were having delusions," they cheered. I shut up. Slid my hands and body to the floor, curling into a pit of utter failure. I'd broken my short-lived resolution to not live so I could help Nadia who still had a burning desire to do so, and I couldn't even do that right. We were powerless in her grip.
"Naddy," Nemesis said, joining me on the floor, "this isn't my house because it's another cage. Similar to my office, but this one I had built to make sure I couldn't slip out whenever I wanted. The exit is spatially condensed and set to move around the entire place on a twenty second cycle."
"Why twenty seconds?"
"Any longer and I could probably figure it out," she admitted, "and I'm bad at puzzles. It was actually the first thing that disappointed the administrators of Cradle. I was their 'perfect little killing machine' until I wasn't that perfect…and could only kill. S'why I let the others do the thinking, ya know, just easier that way."
I thought back to Secretary's question I couldn't answer—"Makes perfect sense."
She stood and helped me to my feet. Led me back through the mad labyrinth of her cage, and we visited her kitchen where she pulled out of a fridge—"It's a special Time fridge Dr. Heinlein made me one birthday," she gloated—a cake with eleven candles each in a slice segment devoted to a Principe.
"Happy Deathday!" she roared, setting it on a modest wooden table.
"Deathday?" I asked, flat as soda spilled from a table.
"Yeah, after all us Black Wombs figured out we couldn't really die the normal way we decided to make this our special holiday. A thing only hybridae can celebrate and not fuck up…like everything else that reminds us how in the eyes of the Nine we're walking abominations."
As she spoke, her flesh split open into a sleeve of skin, and a long red-and-white tiger arm outstretched. Swish, swish—the cake was cut.
"Is that your entity?" I asked, doing my best to not recall the murder chapel she'd kidnapped me from.
"Oh, this, um…" her indecision of how to respond hummed. "Yes-no. Cradle bosses had me bond when I was twelve, remember, so I've never had a great separation between my 'entity' and 'myself.' These days we're basically one and the same. My day-to-day look takes way more effort to maintain."
"Why do it?" I asked.
Nemesis gestured at her body. "This…is easier for humans to rally around."
She handed me a slice of cake—Dreams, unsurprisingly. The flavor was a series of acid berry sparkles on the tongue. Her own slice was Caverns first—a chocolatey ganache that caught the light from the luminescent moth constructs that fluttered amidst the rafters of the ceiling. She beamed at me, catching me observing her, unaware or just uncaring that her serrated smile was full of chocolate.
"Wish the others were here for this," she said. "I think they'd like you. You're spunky—and not in like a crusty sock way."
The mention of the others lanced flavor from my mouth to pipe in a rancid sourness. "The others," I said, "like the ones who killed my parents?"
"You shouldn't hold that against family—"
"They were my family, Nemesis," I yelled, "not you fucking freaks. You killed me! Redacted did…"
Redacted?
Amber Scorizni—Redacted is her actual name, insofar as she has one, and I lost the choreography of my feelings just bringing her up. She'd led me astray, but had she really? She used me for her own vengeance, but in the end…had only wanted to be used by me. I wanted to cast about her shoulders laurels for every wrong of my life, but would I have even met Revelation if it wasn't for her? Amber did a lot wrong, but so had I.
"You can be mad," Nemesis said, backpedaling from her prior stance like…she had to, "and Sovereigns know—even our hybridae shithead one, Redacted—that us Black Wombs are a fucked up little family. There aren't a lot of us, and all of us have a pretty long track record of fucking each other over."
"We also have a track record of fucking each other, it seems," I muttered.
Nemesis chortled at that. "Hey, you get raised in hypertime on a space station with only your siblings, and I bet you'll look at your fellow 'freaks' in a whole new light comparatively."
The admonishment was light as the whipcream on the Seas-slice, and only a smidge tart.
"Before you killed me," I began, pawing through the carcass of my slice for hidden berry flavor, "you'd said you wouldn't rat out family—now I'm family. Can you tell me who killed my parents?"
Nemesis slumped in her chair, pouting like a child caught. "New rule, your big sis won't tell you things that'll get you killed—again."
"I'm a Black Womb aren't I, dying's what we do."
"Living freely is what we do, Naddy," she huffed. "Let me put it this way, I won't tell you who did it but I'll give you the Nemesis Family Power Ranking, so you can try and understand why I don't want to tell."
She used the cake for demonstration. On her plate she added Gloom and Stars to the crumbs of Caverns, and set War, Sea, and Pyres on a new plate. "This," she said, pointing at the first plate, "is the top of the charts—Redacted, Eeny, and Yote. While that, is the bottom. Marduk, myself, and Dr. Heinlein."
"How are you on the bottom?" I asked, incredulous. "You're not weak."
"Aww, no wonder you're such a heartbreaker—so cute," she squealed before recomposing herself. "The 'Family Power Ranking' isn't about strong vs weak. It's a rubric of two qualities: destructive potential and destructive inclination. Redacted, Eeny, and Yote while technically being at the bottom and top of the inclination category, they hands down have the highest destructive potential. Redacted for being a godtender, Eeny for writing almost every book on sorcery there is, and big bro Yote for zir's Chaos factor, literally."
I nodded, partially following. A godtender being at the top for destructive potential made perfect sense, but she'd lost me with her explanations of the other two. I don't think I knew at the time that Chaos was even a Court.
The Public Record's only what we decide to put out there. Is Revelation on there yet?
After you're done with me, I won't be surprised if it is.
"How are you and Marduk on the bottom though? He wrecked Brightgate."
"Excuse me, he tried, and would've failed way earlier if Miss Redacted hadn't bailed him out with the bombs. His actual destructive potential is rather low unless you give him lots of lead time for plotting, schemeing, and designing new doomsday devices…you get the picture."
"And you?"
"I'm tied up here with the Lodge and Brightgate," she said. "I have no desire to go stomping about the world kicking down sand castles—it's boring. Plus, my destructive potential is really low. I kill and eat people—that's it. Can barely do that without cutting myself on my gnostic boundary or pissing off Bloodlust."
"I watched you swallow hundreds of Lurkers and entities in one gulp," I said. "Where's the 'barely' in that?"
She shrugged, taking a bite out of her War slice. "Naddy, my claim to infamy is that I'm hard to kill—people's Bloodlust regenerates me. It's why I rarely get a fight worth getting off my couch; everyone who could get me going also knows that if they fought me they're already in the trap."
I steal a bite from the War slice—strawberry and cinnamon. "So a job and your Court is why you're one of the lowest ranked?"
"Also therapy."
I choked. "You've been to therapy?"
"I'm still in therapy—it's a lifelong practice, and my therapist's lineage has been treating me for a solid century at this point. Made sure to smuggle them out of Cradle so I could keep continuity of care."
"Their lineage?"
Nemesis mumbled crumbs and cream, swallowed her bite, and tried again. "Yup. I make sure at least one of them every generation becomes a therapist to be my therapist."
"So you groom them?"
"Nooo," she argued, unzipping her flesh to make two X's with four arms. "Don't say it like that."
"Fine." I let it go, and take a nibble of the Pyres slice—cinnamon, hot honey, and chilis, a subtle honorable burn against my lips. "And that leaves me below the Pyres one?"
"Dr. Heinlein? Nah, you're above him. He's so sensitive about the 'killing people' thing that it depresses his destructive potential, but if that's changed I couldn't say. He dropped off my radar hard after everyone parted ways. Hasn't even checked the family groupchat—even Yote finds time to check the groupchat wherever ze is."
"You have a groupchat?"
"We have a groupchat—and if you're done wanting to kill our siblings, alls below, even if you aren't..I'd like to invite you. Would you want to join?"
"I—I don't know," I said—done with cake, the slow drain of being a person, and overwhelmed by revelations I didn't have enough mental capacity to frame. Even the simple question of joining a groupchat was too much when it should've been an easy answer, but for the past week—year—nothing I'd learned had an easy answer. Nor a clear way forward from it; I'd said our vengeance was founded on something immaterial—Dad was fine dying as Kareem, so what did it matter that my 'siblings' forced the question? Maybe it only mattered because they had forced it, injected themselves as a causal link into what for a lot of people is sheer randomness. Was my only reason for clinging to this that it gave me something to cling to rather than tumble into the Abyss of purposelessness?
In curling inward, I hadn't processed that Nemesis was still offering me more slices, new flavors, was trying to give me something that I couldn't pin…not like I was trying. She mulled over some piece of informational gristle from how her jaw worked silently—she opted not to say.
"You wait a year to finally see your sister again," she muttered, "coming up with all sorts of fun games and plans, and then you just fuck it straight to the Underside. I'm sorry. Maybe this was a mistake."
I raised my head, and discovered a moment that I don't think anyone—maybe her therapist—had seen of her before.
Contrition?
Vulnerability. Wet ruby tugged at her eyelashes—I'd not noticed until now how long her lashes were, presaging a refreshment of the rust-red canals painting her cheeks in false capillaries. Nemesis was crying…I'd made her cry. Why do I keep making people cry—to mirror my own sorrow?
"You cry blood?" I asked, softly.
Nemesis thumbed at her eyes, pouting at being caught by me. "Not exclusively," she mumbled. "My hybridae trait is that basically all my bodily fluids come out like this. Tears, piss, sweat—technically I'm always weeping this weird Conceptual not-blood blood."
"Hybridae traits?" I asked.
"Yeah, we all got 'em," she said. "Eeny thinks they're our fingerprint, denoting the Principle that made us. S'why Marty has the ocean hair or why Redacted has that whole 'cave face' going on."
I snorted—it was a good way to describe her. Nemesis perked up from my laugh.
"So the blood-river tiger stripes…" I implied.
"Mhmm," she admitted, "those are more me than my entity. Only really visible in that form though, normal humans are also striped but you can't really see it, so I try to hide the blood. What about you, the whole 'dragon girl' look applies how to Dreams?"
I looked at my claws, flexing and unflexing around the decision to admit my difference; Nemesis had embraced me as sibling so quick, but if I wasn't the exact same…
"Oh, little brute," Secretary whispered, their hands reaching through my chest—a reminder they weren't Real—to cradle my heart. "Take my word for it, if you want love you have to risk it."
"It does and doesn't," I said, flicking my eyes from her—away—back to her for a reaction I doubt I could parse even if spotted. "See, um, Ishi—my Mom—City Killer's—I mean, Dad's—Kareem's bondmate had…well…" I pantomimed cradling something small and pressing against my stomach. "Which let me grow despite Cradle going up in flames. Even gave me a second principle, so I have a Court…actually. Division."
I wiggled my talons. Nemesis stared at me, head quirked to the side. A frown—fuck, that swooped up into a smile—what the fuck? She leaned forward like was a parade passing through that she didn't want to miss. The light in her eyes doing somersaults. Why? I'm just…why be happy about me…no one was happy about me—what I am.
"Alls below," Nemesis said, "is this my deathday because I've always wanted a sister that fucking cool! Why are you crying?"
You were crying?
I wasn't crying; Nemesis just wanted to put us in the same boat. I flipped her off—asked, "I've been to a few slumber parties before, let me help make this a good one."
She was a levee shattered after that, running through ideas fast as she could actually run—she wanted to do a 'tv marathon' of an Old World show called Kamen Rider, play drinking games, order and consume food to bursting, make stuffed animals for eachother—which is so not a thing, talk about love, what it was like for me growing up during peace time, and a dance party.
"Why a dance party?" I asked. "You throw a ball every year."
"Once a year," she countered, "and I hardly get to dance. It's more work than anything else, what with being a big target for every idiot that's trying to murder me."
"Sorry about that."
"Eh, don't be. It livens up my days, honest," she said, before going somewhere. A change in her eyes, the light no longer acrobatic, but stilled…to keep memory in focus. "They said dancing was sinful as our bodies. I always knew they were lying; from the vents or lurking as a nootrophic phantom, I watched them dance. The only sin was dancing with us—they didn't want to dull their weapon with worthless things like joy, or a sensation other than pain or murderous euphoria."
"Nemesis," I offered, "do you want me to dance with you?"
Her hope slithered across the table, tentative this wasn't a trap. "Not even the others danced with me. They were afraid I'd break them like I did my pets—only stuffies for Nemesis."
I rose from my seat, circled the table, and held out my hand. "I'm a Black Womb, dying's what we do."
"Naddy, it's living freely."
"Live with me?" I asked. "Show me how."
She beamed, and shouted to whatever system controlled her house. "Play, 'Slaughterfield Siesta!'"
Dragged away, I laughed, "What, not 'Massacre Playtime.'"
"I'm not massacring anything, Naddy."
From unseen speaker, the phonk-y thump of bass, drums, and unReal synth-y noise suffused the house. It was in the floors and walls, rattled the art on the walls—Nemesis's house was full of art, archaeological recoveries of ancient movies, props, and photographs—and by the Nine who wanted to kill us, the phonk was in us too.
We slid past each other, stomped our feet, leaped, and clapped, and whooped, and crashed into each other. Nemesis wasn't a good dancer, but she was an energetic one who used every muscle in herself to express the unvoiceable burden of infinite restraint. She was a Duke in a city where most people tapped out at Baron, and with chains of paper she made herself into a servant for them, gladly she did. With her own family she was on the outs, apologizing forever for a prank.
A prank that you describe as a curse. Is a dance party all it takes to earn Nadia Temple's forgiveness.
No, but I'm an unfair woman to the core. She'd been punished for long enough, and I wanted to allow her this freedom—Freedom like she'd never had. My Sovereign-aunt had said, "Maybe love lies somewhere between what we owe the self and owe one another," and fuck it—Nemesis had paid.
"I'm glad we're doing this," she said. "You definitely needed it."
"Me?" I asked, twirling around her, teasing her cheek with my tail. "You're the one who hasn't danced."
"And you're the one who's wound up so tight it's no wonder you couldn't deploy a field-spell."
"What's being loose have to do with it?"
"Your spiritual motility," she said. "Eeny's term, not mine. Most people just go fwoom with their field-spells, inflating their spirit, but Eeny refused to let us be that crude with it. Taught us how to make our spirit limber, stretch it out and feel the world…"
Nemesis spun, fell into a dip with her leg pointed to the ceiling. I blinked on the Omensight, and fuck—my sister was beautiful; her spirit encircled us with rose-petal wings—she used them to tug me forward. I stumbled, landed atop her. We laughed, and I didn't immediately get back up.
"…paint with the entirety of our soul," Nemesis said, soft so our lips didn't touch. "What would you paint if you could, Naddy?"
The answer wouldn't come; Secretary's head was on my shoulder, their entire body weightless but clinging to my back. "Please, Naddy, tell me what chalcedony devastation you'd paint."
I scrambled back, surprising Nemesis, who hurried after me—found me curled with my back to the couch. She flew through a hundred apologies like it was her fault; I make it easy for others to blame themselves, I think, and alls below do I—did I—take advantage of that.
"Why do this for me?" I asked.
"Because it's your Deathday, remember?"
"That's it, a stupid made-up holiday," I said, nodding to what I'd thought was ridiculous. "If Marduk was here would you be all, 'hey Marty, happy deathday, no hard feelings about the violence?' Would you?"
She withdrew her hand, closing the door on the her I'd be dancing with. "It's not stupid, and yes I would."
"He's your enemy!"
"He's my brother—whether we fight or not, that'll never change."
"How many of your Lodgemembers did he kill? Do you even care?"
"Do you?" she asked. "You're the one who helped point him at us—me."
"Exactly," I said. "I don't deserve this. I deserve…"
"What?" she asked. "To be dead? You want me to kill you again—I can if that's what you want. I can have a Secretary here in minutes to pull up the official—and current—list of every confirmed death, missing person, and grievously wounded person from last year's shit show. Is that what you want?"
Despite my desire to be dead, her offer was an ultraviolet light that revealed a truth hidden to myself—I didn't want to die.
"That's what I thought," she said, looking away from me. "Everyone always talks such a big game about how bad they feel, how they'd do anything to make it right, and what it always comes back down to is that they feel bad—not for what they've done, but that they're the one who did it. Well, guess what Nadia, it'll always be you who did it. And there's no force of Purgation in all of the Underside that'll make it go away—I've searched."
"Then what do I do?"
"I don't fucking know. Jerk off, go to bed, there's still cake in the fridge," she said. "But I'm tired. House—turn this shit off."
And she left me to my self-pity without even a soundtrack for it. That's all it fucking was anyways. I'm not a good person, the reason Secretary had been haunting me wasn't from guilt of my actions—I just hated that I'm the kind of person who'd do them. City Killer's daughter rather than Kareem's.
But remember…I'm noncommital, and with silence from Nadia, Secretary—who watched me in indecipherable examination, and Anza'centorii…I was lonely. I couldn't be alone, and so I sought out Nemesis to apologize. It took twenty minutes to find her bedroom—her house had eleven bedrooms, ten were, as you might imagine, untouched by their intended occupants. When I found her room, it was the opposite of everything I'd expected—even after all this I couldn't get a proper bead on Nemesis.
Instead of an actual bed or even a futon, she slept in a large circular depressed cushion—a bed for pets—that was a noodle bowl overflowing with stuffed animals. The family she'd said she couldn't hurt, and while not saying it, was the family that couldn't hurt her. I padded across her floor, its long-haired rug, and knelt down to observe my defenseless sleeping sister. How her hair snaked off in every direction, black-and-red as coral snakes I'd seen in picture books. The way her mouth, so big it seemed, rattling off inanities, jokes, and shoveling food into it, was so small; lips painted in two gentle paintstrokes. Alls below, they glistened in the dark, somehow reflecting shadow to better emphasize her mischievous philtrum. Though for all the gentle beauties, she slept freely—limbs splayed like a person pushed from a balcony, and most of her blanket was off.
"Alls below," I whispered, "you'll catch a cold this way."
I grabbed the blanket where it'd scrunched below her knees, and dragged it up to her collarbone where I met her eyes—they'd opened. A piercing carmine whose light was still, fixed on memory.
"Not today, Santa," she whispered.
And swiftly broke my neck, gifting me on my Deathday my second demise.