Memory 4
Then I woke up—
Woke up? All of that was a dream?
All of what?
What happened after you died. You had this whole story you just told me—
I said nothing; there was nothing between the life that Nemesis had ended and the one I was about to regale you with—it's what you want, right? Alls below, it's why I'm fucking stuck here…wherever here is. Actually, where am—
Apologies! I took you off track. You'd just woken up…
…In the Underside, but that's not special—every Black Womb resurrects there. What I don't know—don't remember—is if my supposed 'siblings' also return to the site of their recent shortcomings. I'd returned on the doorstep of the smuggler's hideout; head beside my sister-self's on Anza'centorii's plush lap—a benefit of her pear shape.
"You're awake," she said, pinning the truth to our foreheads.
Nadia rose, stretching toward the unReal sky as if all she could want waited to be plucked from it—in the Underside, maybe it did. I remained on Anza'centorii's lap, reminded of the pillows in Nemesis's home, and that prodded me down a path of perseveration: what if I hadn't gotten up, stayed lying down, could I have avoided death if I'd—
Anza'centorii kissed my brow, lips a matchstick to my foraged concerns.
"You live, puppy," she whispered to the anxious ashes. "Take the win."
Nadia glanced my way, concern a knife-flash. Struck by the unexpected gleam of care, I blinked. The moment passed, and with it any significance I could've gleaned. She was my sister, myself-yet-not, and despite our entangled existence she could be such a stranger to me. And I her.
"We have to do better next time," Nadia said, before muttering to herself. "Not even an hour and you fucking die."
"Alls below," I groaned, "I didn't know she'd kill me."
"You would if you'd listened," Anza'centorii said, smirking as I realized her warning about "dragons and their scales" was for more than just Dinah.
Nadia's brow rose, arching to pounce on the question lurking in the foliage of our miscommunication; her "you" wasn't meant for me.
"I died," she said. "Shattered our neck when my face kissed cobblestone."
I saw the tracks now. "The darkness." Little more than a breathe, the words floated away laden with understanding; what I'd thought was a simulacrum of a corpse-dream was the real thing.
"But if you also died," Nadia said, butchering our captured conundrum, "it means our deaths aren't linked if only one is in control."
"Neither are our bodies," I said, taking over for her. "Alls below, mine didn't even have a black eye."
"'Dirt as diamonds,' my good pup. Even when it's grave-dirt," Anza'centorii laughed. "Perhaps you should consider yourself not a knife but…scissors."
Her laugh was scattered gravel interspersed with insight. Scissors could be seen two ways: the first, as two blades screwed together; the second, as one complete object. In the Underside, we moved as twin blades held in opposing hands, but in Realspace we had to be one object—at least corporeally. However, under whatever loophole exists in the Parliament's Accord, we could decide whether to be conceptually one blade or scissors, the difference between controlling our body as a team or a singular frontwoman. It was also a fucking trap, as outlined by Secretary who'd slunk from whatever psychic lair my guilt and self-loathing called home.
"One little brute dies alone," Secretary sang, rapping their knuckles against the door, "and the other lives free. A Nadia for the grave-black and a Nadia for the living. How might they reunite? Simple, the living one—"
"Dies," I spat, recognizing their verse's conclusion. Leave it to Secretary to say exactly what I didn't want to hear, but that too was Secretary, feasting on my reactions since I first laid eyes on them.
"I prefer measuring," they countered, attention sliding from me to Nadia and back. "You were mine, and I wanted to know you—does anyone know you?"
"Nadia," Anza'centorii asked us, "what are you wrestling when you look inwards?"
"You don't know?" Nadia asked, quick to turn from one invasive query only to skewer herself on another.
Anza'centorii shook her head. "I know what you give me, glean what you're too messy to hide—like the whelts you raise on your heart when your loathing peaks—but nothing else."
Her fingers ran through the fine wire strands of my Metallic hair, teasing its loose curls, trying to tease from me—from us—an answer of any kind. She was my bondmate, and, like those few times when my parents fought, was stuck listening to an indiscernible drama on the other side of a door—one that only Nadia or myself could open.
Did you?
We couldn't admit it.
Were you afraid she'd judge you?
I was afraid she'd have a solution.
"After another bend then," Anza'centorii said, tone dimming in recognition of our delay's meaning. She joined Nadia on her feet, and I followed. " It's time to give life another go."
"Girls," Anza'centorii said, pouting, "you're stalling."
We were, no reason to lie about that. Wouldn't you stall if you'd died only moments before—what you think were moments before? Our first death—also granted by Nemesis—had lost us a year, and hammered into Nadia the realization that what we were returning to wasn't the world we'd left behind. Not like the smuggler's base, which was nauseatingly untouched. Despite the conflagration I'd set off, the systems preserving its artificial Realspace had persisted, meaning the corpses were still there, doing what corpses do. Nadia and I were quick to find the phonemic-converter powering the building's formations, and, harried by the putrescence we'd left for ourselves, opted to solve the problem quickly versus intelligently.
You blew it up?
We blew it up. The scent left, and with it the bodies, lifeless musculatures unspooling to rejoin the tapestry of the world for use elsewhere; "Mother, Every Train, even you Revelation," I'd whispered, "let Dinah be somewhere better. Far from me."
You prayed?
If you call that praying. I have an in—daughter of one Sovereign, niece of another—if they'd listen to anyone, maybe me. She deserved more than that, to be more than a life snuffed out in my passing.
Understood. So you pray…
…And found myself waiting on the threshold of the Staircase while Nadia argued against Anza'centorii's assertion of stalling. "It's a reasonable concern," Nadia hissed. "I died in under an hour."
"A tragedy," Anza'centorii mocked.
"I lasted for at least a couple hours," I said.
"Alls below, you still died," Nadia groaned. "My point here is, maybe we make a plan."
"You're so good at following those," Secretary said from behind Nadia, causing her to jump in her skin.
Tail swishing—betraying the rush of shock and terror still in her system from the scare—she said, "I went eighteen years without dying. Can you understand that going from that to dying in mere hours is fucking awful."
"A lot of lives end in hours—tragic or otherwise," Anza'centorii said. "Try not to worry about it."
"Everyone worries about dying," Nadia protested.
"Debateable. Even in your Old World, with its weapons of devastation to the multi-ton beasts of steel burden they'd casually whip down roads, death was a constant, lurking and invisible. They had every reason to despair, curl inside their little homes—not that walls or blankets would stop death, but they didn't, Nadia, they lived. Drinking, laughing, and—"
"I don't care! I'm sorry, but I don't. Humans suffer one death and they're done, but I can die a hundred times over. Alls below, I can be stuck between…"
Nadia's voice collapses beneath the strain of ebon recollection. She'd experienced the same darkness I had, that expansive nothing, and unlike me she was stuck, waiting until I died. If I hadn't died…alls below, if I hadn't died how long would she be there? Alert within oblivion.
I took her hand in mine—even twined my tail around hers, stilling it. She'd deny it, but the way she squeezed my hand you'd think the darkness was below her and I was her only tether to keep her from falling in.
"Any advice, please?" I asked Anza'centorii. "We only want to live."
Her mouth quirked around a stifled laugh. "Do you now," she said, voice trailing as she sought her words. "I can't tell you, but I'll tell you—you get what you cling to, so let go."
"How cryptic," Nadia said, before unwinding her musculature to emulsify with my own. We'd used the time between destroying the converter and actually going up the Staircase to enjoy one last moment as distinct bodies. I clenched with the hand I'd held Nadia's; an attempt to instill in our flesh the memory of companionship.
"It'll be a quick lesson," Anza'centorii said, signing her promise with a lacerated smile.
It's a character flaw of mine—ours—but I did my best to ignore the many-fanged implications within her smile. Not that I could've parsed them, you're meant to take the long way in matters of Revelation—though that too is an excuse. The totality of my thoughts had subordinated themselves to my heart's concern for Nadia in a bid to excise the ever metastastasizing cancer that was my guilt. I didn't want to return to the world, so I left her alone in a body, a life, a world that's nothing like the one I'd kicked her from, leaving her to an ignoble death and stealing from her experiences that should have been hers. Cake, dancing, pillows, so many soft and lovely things; perfect for a girl like her and anathema to a beast like myself.
No longer weighed down by my reticence nor craving for self-destruction, our ascent up the Staircase was faster than the first time. We only slowed upon sighting the door that was its Realspace exit; a construction of Conceptual metals that pointed to Suppression and Isolation under the Omensight, nothing like the wood backing of the bookshelf that Nadia destroyed on our first return.
"Things changed again," I said, careless with words I thought dull. When I tasted salt at the corners of our mouth, I understood their edge wasn't dull but serrated, and every encounter, reminder, that the world walked on while the dead slept in darkness sawed against Nadia's heart. Were her tears for us, twice-dead and alone, or were they for Mom who—
Excuse me, but earlier you'd said, "the eyes were your domain." How do you know they were Nadia's tears?
If they were mine, who'd believe me?
Me. So tell me, if they were yours, who would you cry for?
I don't know—those abandoned by time and anchored with grief? Their hearts stuck in a world their mind-and-body can never return to no matter how they try. Forced to be aware of how little life cares for them in the end. I'd cry for them.
And all that from a door.
It was a very special door, and opened all on its own, sliding apart like the shoji back home. We stepped through, and, to our astonisment, felt cold wood underfoot. Unlike our expectations, the place wasn't some rotted den for maggots and flies—it was clean, sparkling. Even to my remaining eye, developed from constant usage of the Omensight, there wasn't a single ultraviolet bloodstain.
"It seems your sister knows how to clean up after herself," Anza'centorii said, laughing from inside our spirit.
"She's not our sister," we replied, advancing up the stairs.
Her assessment held true even when we reached the main floor of the building. The furniture was fixed, the bottles behind the bar were whole and full of drink, and nothing was out of place save a secretary with electric blue eyeliner sitting on a table and filing their nails.
"I don't have to kill you, do I?" I asked, stepping free of the staircase's shadow.
The Secretary smirked and said, "No, but alls below I would love for you to try—would justify the ass beating I want to give you."
"Why?" Nadia asked.
"Oh, let me think, there's the fact you took forever to get your ass up here, leaving me stuck at this post for nearly two months..."
"We've only been dead for two months?" we asked, joy seeping into our speech.
"Yes, and I'm missing all the festivities," they said. "But really, I want to beat your ass because it's your fault #2—Christy—left."
"#3," I said, recognition dawning on me as to who the secretary was.
"It's #1, now, and don't congratulate me," #1 said, voice dipping into a bitter well, "It's not like I earned the rank."
Disgusted by me, they turned their nose up in the air, body wavering between duty and their desire to break me. If their heart fell toward desire—vengeance—I wouldn't judge them; I'd lost two people and made an innocent city pay for it, beating me up was the least punishment I deserved. Not that Nadia cared—she hadn't made the choices that led to #1's struggles.
"What do you want then?" Nadia asked, brusque and impatient.
#1 turned from their indecision, scowling at the choice they'd made—duty. They flexed their field-spell—Nadia and I hadn't even noticed how thick the room was with #1's spirit, so finely distributed; another example of the benefits in improving one's spiritual motility. In the instant the exertion passed, so too did our sense of #1's spirit, but in its place, appearing in #1's hands, was a cube wrapped in glossy paper—black and covered in silver skulls—bound with a beautifully frail carmine ribbon. They lobbed it toward us, forcing us to catch it or be struck by it. Though when our fingers grazed the box its ribbon disintegrated into a flurry of blood-red butterflies, and the wrapping paper disintegrated into black mist.
"Lodgemaster Khapoor entrusted me with the duty of delivering you her apology," #1 said, "for snapping your neck. She wanted me to present you this gift; a set of casual conweave clothing treated by her. Strong enough to block nearly any Real attack—"
"Don't want it," Nadia said, punting the box of clothes back to #1.
"What?" #1 asked, incredulity spiking through their otherwise monotone and professional affect. "A Duke made these. Do you know how many would kill for this kind of apology?"
"What's an apology if she's not here to give it?" Nadia asked, parrying one question with another and receiving #1's wordless shock as an answer. Deciding that the conversation was over, Nadia had us take the same stairs we'd used as an 'escape' two months prior. We were halfway up when #1 raced over, yelling up at us from the first and only landing.
"Alls below, you're acting like Lodgemaster Khapoor is trying to bribe you," #1 said, face flush from the passion overtaking her.
"Isn't she?"
"She's trying to look out for you!" #1 yelled. "Every time she's returned she'd been naked, and she knew—as is fucking apparent—that you would be too. And her not being here isn't because she doesn't care—she's just busy. Laden with responsibilities and constraints that don't allow her the Freedom to wait on her ass for you to show up."
"Are you done?" Nadia asked.
It took a moment for #1 to gather the professionalism that'd scattered in their tirade. "Yes," they said, and without handing over any other words—we left.
Nadia retraced the path of her attempted flight to the bathroom window she'd defenestrated herself from. Sweeping a scaled hand along the window's frame—the hardness of which made dust of the glass, she pulled us through and out, our claws gouging handholds from the building's stone exterior. Of which we scurried, swift as a lizard up a fence post, to reach the roof.
There, perched on a corner, I felt Nadia expand—calm. Our spirits were a blend—sharp-edged but still a blend—and I'd failed to notice her distress; how her spirit quivered with every mention of Nemesis's name, how she blazed in indignation at the idea that Nemesis could "apologize" for what she'd done, but I'd also missed the azure sediment that'd formed from this stark divergence in perspective. In my inattentiveness, I even had the gall to chastise her.
"Nadia, it was a good apology," I said. "We need the clothes, conweave or otherwise, and Nemesis isn't that bad—"
"I wouldn't know," she shot back, "she's not here for me to know, and it was her fault we both died."
"No, it was my fault," I retorted. "Both times it was my fault. I deserved—"
"Alls below, what about what I deserve?" Nadia asked, fangs bared. "I only want a life…to find a life, but everywhere I go is tainted by everything you did. Even Nemesis's fucking apology is only for you."
My mouth moved, groping for saber words with which to strike back, but my scabbard was empty. Nadia, our composite and us as distinct beings, is a poor liar, and so we'd made truth our weapon in these verbal bouts and unfortunately Nadia claimed it first. She'd struck me down with evidence clearly evident if I'd turned from the argument to observe Brightgate's skyline—which I did.
Our elevation wasn't such that we could see all of the city, even scarred Brightgate was a behemoth that curled against the coast, a lover whose affair measured in centuries, enduring through the inevitable changes that life forces on all of us. The change I'd struck was visible if you looked toward the bay with its baby-teeth buildings—many little more than ambitious skeletons of a future they'd yet to mature into—standing alongside the carcass of yesterday's Lodge district. How tragic it must have been for Brightgate's people, rebuilding in the shadow of an accumulated greatness that took decades to flower.
"Little brute, you called the city 'ugly' last you'd looked at it," Secretary said, pressing the iron-weighted memory of Dinah's gun to the back of my skull. A reminder of the hatred I'd sown from my deeds.
"She never said that out loud," Nadia countered for me. "You shouldn't know that."
"But you know it, little brute," Secretary said, "it's one regret of many that swims in the ocean of guilt you're drowning in—that I live within. So, tell me little brute, has the city made for a fine 'medium of your vengeful message'? Is it finally beautiful?"
"We don't have to accept Nemesis's apology," I said, speaking to my sister to avoid the inquisitive revenant behind me, "and you deserve a life that I haven't fucked to the Underside and back. Tell me what to do."
"Or we figure it out together," Nadia said, her tone having pivoted from the firey indignation of earlier.
"There can't be a we," I snapped, startling myself into a softer tone. "You're right—I've tainted everything, and if I have any say…I'll do it again. So please, tell me what we do."
I'd given her my absolute submission, and with our shared face, she scowled at it. She deserved so much more and knew it, but also knew I possessed the same nothing as she did. Nadia sighed, turning our head in lieu of turning from me.
"No more killing," she said. "No more Nemesis, or anything else from our time in the exam, and no abandoning me—we live together and we die together. We're scissors, understand."
"Two and one?"
"Two and one," she affirmed. Then, dropping a message down the shared strands of our spirit, she asked "Revelation Living, have anything to add?"
"Nothing at all," she said. "I'd hate to burden your plate with more than one lesson at a time, however much you're begging for it."
I wished those two would cease arguing, but it wasn't as if the early days of our bond to Sphinx were free of stony frustrations. Ultimately, they hadn't been enough to smother our burgeoning connection, and neither were Nadia and Anza'centorii's arguments capable of killing this one. Nadia had Anza'centorii unfurl her wings through us, and we took to sky. In our evacuation of the rooftop I stole a glance backward; Secretary sat on the ledge of the building, watching the sun dance across the bay without a care of what Nadia and I were doing. Far as we were from them their words were pellucid.
"I really do love this city," they whispered.
A memory consoling itself, or an admission of a feeling I'd tossed into that 'sea of guilt' Secretary spoke of?