Memory 6
I possessed few questions and asked none when my sister-self's consciousness slumped against my back, a snowbank begging to be let inside, unconscious of the hearth-snuffing chill she'd bring if I did; the risk of knowing, in both memory and heart, what transpired between her and Zuhura was too high. I couldn't. Thus it fell to Anza'centorii to inform me that my sister's task was done, and Morning steadily ascended to her noontime throne—her words, not mine.
Positioning Nadia's sleeping consciousness into my proverbial lap, I assumed control of our body, awakening to a constellation of sparking nerves. Our tail was wrapped about something firm yet pliable. A hand clutched at my breast. Another at my stomach. And with my vision clearing, I discovered Anza'centorii sitting in a chair opposite the bed, legs tucked beneath her plush ass, and at total peace as the unblocked near-to-noontime sun invaded the room, lathering her in a honeyed light.
"Did you watch us sleep?" I asked, unused to the idea of being observed in such an unguarded state.
"Sorry, puppy," she said, "you didn't leave me with some toy I could play with—had to make due with drinking in your tender image."
Tender. Tender? "Now who's ignoring the dragon for its scales?" I shot back—a poor volley.
"Hardly me. Not when I know how sweet the dragon's nectar tastes, or how light of a touch it requires to make her sing. No, my love, your sister didn't let me out to watch."
My thoughts were divided—an irony not lost on me anymore. I had no temptation to know what happened the night prior when it was only Nadia and Zuhura, but the implication that it wasn't just them, that the entity whose form tugged at my attention in every conscious moment was involved…proved enough to stoke my fire and moisten my thighs. Yet, it still wasn't enough to overcome the echo of terror reverberating through me after being touched in that way; reminded of past loves which braided into past failures. Trauma is a room accessed by many doors.
An apt expression. Where'd it come from?
Ishi—my mom—when I didn't understand why Dad went from laughing to sobbing after learning I'd graffiti'd a wall at school, calling it a 'mural.' I wonder how many rooms he had, how many doors. If I could only ask him, do they ever lock or do they only go dormant, waiting for the moment when you think you're 'healed' to trick you back into that space—emotional and temporal?
"Get me out, please," I said, faint arousal softening what had been designed as a firm command—I wanted to be solid again. Anza'centorii acknowledged my request, exiting her chair to curtsy before plucking a feather from her wing, and advanced toward the bed. I cranked my neck, spying Zuhura behind me with an expression of tender fulfillment; she ate well last night, I presumed. A mood swiftly ruined when Anza'centorii swept the feather up and down Zuhura's face, painting it into a frothy frustration until she reached for it…and released my chest.
Quick, I rolled toward freedom. Stalled when my body betrayed me again—I'd forgotten about our tail—and waited to see if she'd wake after my inadvertent disturbance. Moments passed. Nothing. Crouched just past the bed, I made the slightest twist of my hips urging my tail to let go, causing it to slither free from about Zuhura's leg…and graze her labia.
"Hngh," she groaned, lashes fluttering as her hand sought me out, catching my wrist. "Don't leave."
"Help," I hissed to Anza'centorii, but she denied my plea; It's your choice, love. I can't live for you.
It was clear Zuhura was still asleep; she looked at me the way you stare off into a waking dream. We—my sister-self and I—knew that she was a beast like us in the matter of desire, but unlike us she'd never fed to fullness nor learned of how most entanglements, like ours, were evanescent delights. It fell to me to make the choice of how this would end if it ends at all. Me, who'd ruined so many lives with my choices, my greed; it was in remembrance of that greed—everything slipping through fingers that for a single morning's breakfast had it all—that made the answer clear.
Let me be a memory, a sticky dream when no one warms her bed, a wistful story when a proper love is met. There was no need to burden her with a woman—a beast, a weapon—like myself. If she searches for me, it'll be to ends that've never lived. She wouldn't have to know of the walking tragedy that crossed her path, stained her sheets. I'd be no more and no less than a pleasant phantom for future fantasies.
"I'm only going to the bathroom." A lie, but a slight one. I did go to the bathroom…before I left. It was where I found the shirt Zuhura laid out for herself last night—cropped with short sleeves, a round collar, and a silver clasp off to the side of the neck that popped against its black silk make. A gift, something to lend her an air of astral ethereality, make her memorable to the discerning city crowd. Whoever gave her that shirt gave it out of doubt, I swear; alls below, her smile was the crescent moon and her freckles twinkled with every movement. She was beyond beauty, a celestial presence at the beginning of her ascendancy—
I get it, she's so pretty it hurts. Why run?
What's meant for the stars belongs among stars, and there are no constellations for killers. Out of hubris I'd ignored this and deprived the world of someone even Sovereigns could admire—not again. So I removed myself and that foul shirt from her life, fleeing back into the urban river of packed city streets; it'd be harder for her to find me that way.
"And so a killer becomes a thief," Secretary said, voicing the fragments of molten guilt burning with every comment of, "nice shirt," a passerby offered me. "Something of a downgrade if you ask me."
"It's good I didn't," I muttered back, attention fixed forward rather than follow their flickering phantom form, repositioning each time somebody passed between us, like a sniper hustling from one vantage point to the next. Each comment finding a new angle, a testament to my multi-faceted self-loathing. Perhaps it was because of that self-loathing that I moved through the crowd as I did: head swiveling in search of a punishment I knew—craved?—would catch me. An attention paid to such far off consequences that I'd missed what was ahead of me. Who was ahead of me. Bam!
"Alls below, I'm so sorry," she said even though the blame was entirely mine; my flagging awareness creating a perceptual deadzone big enough that a small stationary woman, such as herself, could go unnoticed. It wasn't like she was even that stationary, the sheaf of flyers fluttering like snow around us proved evidence of her activity, and, after helping her off the ground, assisting in their recovery proved evidence of her character; she'd been advertising for a research collective specializing in sabersight syndrome.
The flyer was light on details about the syndrome itself which in retrospect spoke to its novelty and commonality. Instead it focused on the event the collective's booths were running, 'A Token for a Kiss.' She was quick to note my intrigue but misdiagnosed it; I didn't care about the kiss—though the thought of one reminded me of Secretary's cold lips and burning heart—only the disease, and on correcting her of where my interest was housed she led me through what was, to everyone, common knowledge.
"It all goes back to last year," she said, "when this cult performed a ritual that decimated the Lodge District, and caused an image of an entity to be emblazoned across the sky."
Her open wasn't compelling, but it stripped my extraneous thoughts away like leaves stolen by a storm's rage, leaving only clarity. They, the city, blamed the Lurkers for that event, understanding it as the closing action of the conflict's first act, and had little reason to think otherwise since it was the palaces who'd explained it away as such.
Nemesis, and by extention the Lodge, was rather quiet about everything from what I recall.
And in that quiet, Brightgate found a more acceptable narrative for what'd happened. Allowing them to move on, rebuild, and discover amidst the rubble those children afflicted with sabersight. So named by how those noble rescuers, the first to be claimed by the disease, were cut down by a child's wandering eyes which severed all they fell upon. It was only after uncovering more of the afflicted that they learned just how diverse the illness was; where one child cleaved stone apart with a glance it'd be another who sundered formations while another could split the color from an apple. The only commonalities? All of them perceived the Conceptual and Real simultaneously, and none of them could turn it off.
Neither the Secretary of my thoughts nor Anza'centorii said anything which said everything. In their silence I was condemned to sit with my action's sublime impact; I'd self-actualized when I named myself—I'm sorry, that's not true. It is, but not as a motive. My naming of myself was a middle finger to my cruel fate, to Nemesis—not like she deserved it, and…gravitational? A pull on myself by something beyond me.
Beyond you? Far as I understand—looking over what we've talked about so far—you're too stubborn to be moved, and chase awful ends despite everyone saying otherwise. Who could've made you?
I…don't know. Instinct, I suppose, like when you and a date seem to know exactly what to say to impress the other, falling deep into that warm mutual obsession we call love. That's what it was like to me: there wasn't a conscious drive to say it, but I said it in the same way an apple falls from a tree. This is why the palaces offered their own explanation; how frustrating the mystic can be, how elusive enlightenment. I've been beyond Causality's Rim, had cocoa with the Sovereigns who page through our lives as your boss will page through my words, and I am all the wiser and more lost for it; teased by a context held in the hands of those bound to never gift it.
When we reached her booth, there was nothing for me to say; I'd stopped listening to her explanation long after we passed a stand selling bingfen. What did it matter what they thought caused the disease or could cure it when I knew the cause was me, and even though I of all people should know how to cure it, I was in the dark as much as they were. My entire life has been led in the dark, about my nature, my future, my past. All I could offer would be more mysteries, but I hoped I could contribute a token or two to make amends of some kind.
"Do you really think this is enough?" Secretary sneered.
I knew it wasn't, but I was nothing who owned nothing. I was a coward who couldn't tell them the truth. All I could do was solemnly receive the token slates they had on hand, dip my claw into the well of underink they prepared, and try to put a phoneme worth anything to match up against my guilt. Which is where it all went wrong.
"You're doing a really good thing," she said—the woman who'd led me here. Those six words left me perched on the cusp of writing, long enough for a drop of ink to fall and splatter against the token's surface. It was her expression of confusion that inspired me to look down; phonemes upon phonemes compounded within the token's hazy interior, radiating azure and gold bright as a sorc-deck's lit screen, as a flashlight sweeping through the night, as the baleful gaze of the summer sun…
As the white-clap of a flashbang?
Alls below, it was that and then some. Call it a coward's instinct, but that source of Division which filled the token with all the gentleness of a pressure washer pointed at a porcelain tea cup had secreted me to an alley when it went off—a paracausal pre-emption of where I'd begun to envision fleeing toward.
Nadia woke after the screaming stopped—when everyone realized no one died nor was injured—and the festivities resumed, albeit with a trepidation toward other surprises. I'd settled into a fetal curl in the shadow of an alley alongside windstrewn refuse and the liquid leave-behinds of someone who'd gotten very lucky. Any mood for people, even for the purpose of hiding, shattered alongside the token; not that she knew nor did she particularly care. Unlike myself, whose response to the re-acquaintance of her sister-self's consciousness was the gift of uninquisitive silence, Nadia rejoined me with demands for an explanation already shaping themselves with our forked tongue.
"Alls below, why the fuck are we here?" she shrieked.
"It's what I deserve," I replied, offering her access to my immediate memories in lieu of a verbal explanation. Tying her spirit into mine, she sucked down what I'd seen, learned, and, above all, felt. It happened in the time it takes for the sound of a snap to materialize and die. Nadia's response, which felt more like a rebuttal, was even faster.
"Don't subject our body to your self-flagellation," she ordered. I tapped our head against the brick wall behind us in acceptance of her new rule. I'd have done it again—harder, but she stopped our neck before I could. "What happened to Zuhura's place? It was perfect. She was perfect—"
"And we're not," I groaned. "She's…meant for better things than us, and if we're around she won't reach them. It might not be today, maybe it won't be tomorow, but at some point something—someone—will come for us."
Nadia stood, pacing with our body about five steps before turning back. "She wasn't going to stay in Brightgate. If you asked me anything about last night, you'd know she was leaving town by the festival's end. You'd know that she wanted us to go with her. Alls below, if you saw how she looked at me…"
"I saw…" A girl who had no idea that one resurrection ago I'd ripped out the heart of someone like her who saw so much in me. A girl who didn't know that the last kiss I'd ever had was with someone I'd murdered all so I could consign a city to a bitter battle for a hollow revenge. I'm no one's dream. "…and it doesn't change what's happened to those around us."
"Around you. Not me. You!"
"True," I admitted, turning our gaze toward the jagged glass collage we call a moon that seemed show face if only to taunt us as the sun was still setting, "but we have the same face, the same voice, and, unless something changes as we climb, the same body. What pursues us may be after me, but it ultimately means it's in pursuit of you as well. Unless you'd find some way to turn me, and only me, over to the Tenken-bumon."
A ghoulish breeze framed my words for what they were; we'd opted into something of an alliance, but leave it to a Nadia to point out how easily we could betray those we love. Considering my situation, she might've done just that.
"Fuck off," Nadia said, tears blurring the brick wall opposite us into melted disorder. Whether material or otherwise, it'd been there through each self-resurrection, blocking any escape from true consequence, and while Nadia believed there was some way to surmount it…I thought otherwise. Our parents had been at the peak, our dad gave up everything, and they ran to the most quiet place imaginable; consequences still found them.
I had every intent to let her cry—and before you say it, I know she was the one crying…this time—but peace isn't a friend of ours and Nadia's sobbing was too alluring to be left uninvestigated. Every part of her provoked reactions, be it a turned head or a dip in octave that'd push a woman's tone from friendly to sultry, and never was she more beautiful than when held in sorrow's grip. It meant I wasn't surpised when the tip-tap of a cane—motion's metronome—settled at the alley's mouth.
Instinctual in my protectiveness, I threw myself—spirit and flesh—between my sister-self and this stranger, hissing as I bared my fangs while my tail skewered the air in a beastial threat display. It wasn't a reasonable action, but I've never been good at reason nor emotional support; what I couldn't give my sister-self in terms of a heart I could at least defend her space to process her own. But for whatever reason, the cane's owner—a woman backlit by the day's last rays and clothed in haunting purple teasing toward a darkness broken by a blouse of snowflake white lace—offered me a gloved hand as she asked, "Would you like some tea?"