Trilogy

No, she shakes her head angrily . . . or at a kinder time, when there was no shards of glass scattered across the floor, it might have been an angry shake; now it was just strangely baffled. No, (another shake of the head), there wasn’t time for that. It was too stereotypical. On death’s door, glaring at it, and thinking about another death. Her life would flash before her now. Shards of it all. All so remarkably restrained, and . . . so very . . . unremarkable (other words are lost to her. They skip away from her fogged mind, teasing). All the roses, curled on the casket, dead. Sliced and dead, the earth burying them, crushing their petals with tireless weight.

She reaches a hand behind her, gathering the mane of hair at the nape of her neck, and pulls it over her shoulder. All this red . . . all this colour . . . She stares at the red strands, strangely confused. This deeper colour, the rich wetness entwined in the thicket of hair . . . Oh. It must be because her head had broken the window . . . It didn’t hurt though. She is too tired to wonder why.

She reminds herself not to look back, not to look again where the body lay, with its red-painted face and the long sliver of glass jutting from the glazed eye. It wasn’t real, she tells herself comfortingly, and finds herself somehow believing the lie. No, it wasn’t real. It hadn’t been real, any of it. The survival instinct that had risen in her, unbidden, terrified, when he’d laid his hand on her; that hadn’t been at all real. She had never thought, before, long before this began, that she was capable of it, but suddenly she had known, fight, fight damn you! And even when his fist and her head broke the window, a furious, horrified part of her kept on fighting, while the other part, the one that she had always assumed was only her, was all there was to her, stood back and watched with shocked eyes. That other, proper, civilized part of her had covered its mouth with shame when her fingers finally found the glass shard, a remainder of the broken window, and shoved it into his eye.

She stares again at the long wet trails of red in her hair, so much redder, so much darker . . .

Then--

There is the sudden crunch of glass fragments beneath a booted foot and she glances up, then down, as he kneels beside her, reaching out with his hand to clasp her head, almost gently. She supposes it would be to stop the blood, but there is so much around her, so much to spare, why would he bother? She looks at him, bewildered.

She has not used her voice in days, not since it began, not since they swept into the house, and it creaks and jumps, when she speaks.

“I know you . . .”

His eyes are bright bright blue. If she looked closely (which she does now, fascinated), she could see herself reflected in their icy depths. He blinks, suddenly, but doesn’t look away. He seems troubled by her unfettered stare.

“. . . but I don’t know your name . . .” she says apologetically. She feels almost embarrassed; she does not know his name, and yet he is here.

“Umber,” he says. She blinks.

“That’s a funny name,” and she smiles, to let him know that it is fine. She likes his name.

“But I know you,” she is almost hopeful, now. “You work for my father. Did he send you?”

He doesn’t quite shake his head, but she knows suddenly that he was not sent. For the first time since it began, something in her breaks. A terrible broken emptiness rises up in her chest, lining her forehead and turning the edges of her mouth down.

“No one was sent . . .” The words are fogged by a red lace as red as the roses in her mother’s hair. No, the coffin was closed, the roses were on the top of it. There were no roses. Just on the lid of the brown, horrid coffin. Her mother had always hated brown.

“I’ll carry you,” he says, and she imagines that the words are sad; he is apologizing for merely coming as opposed to being sent. There is the greatest difference in the world between coming and being sent. She feels the edges of her mouth turn even farther downwards.

“No,” she says, and her voice breaks, miserably. “It doesn’t matter . . . nowwww. . .” The last word is twisted, hidden by her hands, which she puts over her face, so he will not see her cry.

In the hospital, next to the white walls and electric cords attached to fading hearts, he should have looked out of place. It was his height, the way he glanced around out of the corner of his eye, never moving his head. It was the way he was leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded. It was as though he was not afraid of anything.

Even the bravest fear hospitals. Below the white washed walls, below the technological hope, death’s snaked head lay, eyes watching. It was the reducing, the helplessness; there could be no trust, doctors were as human as you or I, they made mistakes, and then not even technology’s greatness can save us. But there is no choice but to trust, absolutely, feverently, as you are wheeled in, strapped, naked, you are no longer a free willed creature, but are placed at some horrific crossroad, a white-coated fallible human being your only link back to that which is safe and healthy. A scream begs in your throat, but you cannot. It would be too weak, and you have always been told ‘be strong, or you’ll die.’ So you are silent, let matters be, and trust.

There is the creak of a door, the tap of doctor’s footsteps. The room is full, full of men in suits, women with wide, surprised eyes, which widen even further. All snap to attention. All reach, stretch, all turn, heads on strings, to the closeted hallway from which the noises tap. All except him. His blue butcher’s eyes (so clear you almost imagine that there is no iris, only that black, empty pupil) are turned downward.

Through the swinging doors, then, came her father. The room crackles, eyes bug. He moves straight to the man leaning against the door frame.

“Thank you,” says her father’s mouth, but his eyes are cold, almost frightened, and do not support the words. There is no honest thanks behind it all. Just bewilderment, and fear of a threat.

“Anything I can do . . . Name it.” The words are quietly hopeful, quietly eager. Let it be money, begs the words, let you have done this for money. Her father cannot bear complexities. They stun him, and he stares at the man, hope sliding away, when there is no answer. Her father wants to grab him by the front of that arrogant black coat, shake him and scream why??? If it isn’t money, then what is it? What can it be??

Umber looks at him. He is disgusted with her father, and for the barest second, the expression shows. The plastic, split smile on her father’s face freezes, ridged, obviously artificial. Around them, the eyes watch, waiting. The suited men reach suited hands to their suited hair, smoothing in awkward, embarrassed motions. Her father hears the motions, and tries to cover the moment with words.

“She’s asked for you . . . “

Umber nods, pushes away from the doorframe and walks through the swinging doors, to the sheltered, deathly hospital wing. The doctors gape. The hospital’s fear reaches for the edge of his trailing coat, but all are turned away.

There are no flowers in her room; not yet. Perhaps tomorrow there will be flowers, daffodils and coronations and other fancy, neutral flowers. She hopes someone will take pity on her and send roses. Tomorrow, perhaps.

Her head is bandaged. She’d asked (not begged; she never begged) them not to cut her hair, and they’d compromised by only removing a careful patchwork square, the wound beneath now stitched and cleaned. She could brush the remaining hair over the spot when they took the bandages off. No one would ever know.

She stares at her hands. She can see the delicate blue veins lacing the inside of her wrist, pulsing beneath the wax skin. Blue, bright, brilliant blue, before it reaches the heart and was infused with oxygen. When she was little her mother had told her that story, how the blood is not always red, and she had thought her mother had meant sunshine, outside-of-her-body, because there could be no air inside her. She was a solid being (it was a practical thought, for a child). So when she was little, whenever she cut herself accidentally, or tripped or fell, she would cup a hand over the wound, hiding it from the sun, to see if it would bleed blue. But it never did.

She closes her hand, then clenches it. A horrific fury surges in her. It is wordless and wretched, helplessness flooding her. Three days. Three days. She’d waited, waited, waited, and no one had been sent. Her fist trembles. How much simpler it would have been if they’d killed her.

The door creaks when Umber opens it, and she extends her hand to him. He takes it, wordlessly.

“Son of a bitch.”

The first thing you notice is the surprising abundance of light in the bar. It is a bar, of course, it bears all the markings of one; round, communicative tables (placed just so, tilted so that all may bend their heads towards the round centre, and whisper), smug, hollow bottles lining the west wall of the room, and the television nailed religiously to the far corner. But now the shaded windows are thrown open, the neon tubes of light that ring the bar snuffed, and the room is lit with ordinary sunlight. You cannot imagine a non-dingy bar (a bar as lit by natural light), and peer closer.

You see the man in the centre of the room, broom handle gripped so hard his knuckles are white. There is an expression of staggering disbelief on his face. He stares at the flickering television, mouth open.

“Jesus H. Christ. He got her out. Holy--”

“It’s a little early to take the Lord’s name in vain, don’t you think, Alistaire?” May’s voice is muffled, her head in her folded arms, propped on the bar. It was too light, to early, and she’d been to bed far too late. She glances at the clock on the bar wall, out of the corner of her eye. Then again, she corrects herself, she hadn’t really been to bed at all. Saturdays, weekends, oh gad . . . it made her wish that the human body was not afflicted by the scourge known as the need to sleep. Things happened while she slept. Everything changed while she was forced to sleep. She hated it.

“I can’t believe it . . .” he was still staring at the television, at the doe-eyed reporter, whose carefully plucked eyebrows gave her an expression of shocked bewilderment.

May wonders why he cares. She knows she doesn’t. She had found it hard to care of late . . . maybe it was the lack of a cause, as hers had been stripped from her bosom (she smiles at the word, wryly) just weeks before. It had been a shock when they’d finally cured it. It had been a shock, and it had been something else. Something wholly alien and breakable, as she’d stood in the institutional hall, feeling out of place and wrong, with her green hair and faux fur trimmed jacket. And then, with a wave of a white gloved hand, someone had stolen her cause. She’d left the building, not with elation, like those around her, but with the overwhelming sense of “now what?” It wasn’t the curing, it was the dying. The cause died because of the cure. She had felt ill then, ironically ill.

She pushes her face harder into her forearms, and wondered again why Alistaire cared. So some bourgeoisie business magnate’s daughter got held hostage for X number of days, while her kidnappers ranted on about democracy and the free market and on and on and on . . . How tragic. It was ink, wasn’t it? The press adored monied folks, and monied folks in trouble were even better, and worthy of even more ink (at the moment, May was unsure what was more precious to the City; ink or sanitation. It was a thought that had popped into her head when the City’s sewers had broken and puked humanity’s dirty secrets onto the streets and sidewalks. But even more wrenching had been when the Old Daily’s building had burned. People were disgusted by the sewer; knew it was necessary, and did to it what had to be done, but they mourned for the ink.).

May stares past Alistaire, at the television. He is frozen, rapt. Images flicker, a cacophony. The reporter’s eyes widen even farther; her features are almost animalistic, eyes as lidless and shallow as a lizard’s.

“Jesu-”

“Alistaire.” She wasn’t in the mood. Old habits died hard, and her Mum’s stern voice rang condemningly through her head. Don’tdrinkdon’tsweardon’tfightMay.Youhearme?

He turns towards her.

“History always manages to plunge forward during times of violence. I think we’re seeing evolution before our very eyes.”

She is too surprised to say anything.

He walks to the bar and places his hands carefully on the counter, palms down. The light is reflecting off his glasses, but she can see the worried crease between his eyebrows.

“Don’t you think you’re--”

“No,” he anticipates. “No, I don’t think I’m overreacting. I mean . . . That kidnapping, someone thought they were doing something for the good of . . . well,” he frowns, scratching the back of his head. “It was violence, and that’s wrong. They hurt a human being, but actions like that usually have some trigger, some point to them. Someone believed in something, and that belief caused them to take action.”

May blinks at him, and feels a sudden angry sympathy for the kidnapped woman rise in her. A commonality grew between them, the common bond of being female, the fear of not being strong enough to fight back, the wretched fear of being helpless despite years of conditioning that insisted we are equal we can do anything if we put our minds to it. But I couldn’t, May thinks, I couldn’t do anything. If four men came and put a gun to my head, and screamed about how my father was destroying the City, I couldn’t do anything. All the equalness in the world wouldn’t change the fact that they had guns, and I had nothing.

“Al, you saw it. They fricking beat the shit out of her. This wasn’t a cause, it was money. Don’t tell me you fricking believe those perverts who grabbed her are right?”

He shakes his head, still not quite looking at her. He doesn’t seem to notice her anger.

“I know. It was wrong . . . but, it just seems so much more complicated than merely a kidnapping. Why weren’t there any ransom demands? Her father owns half the bloody City, for Christ’s sake.”

He glances up sharply, eyes wide.

“Maybe that’s why, May. Maybe it was because of the owning . . . There must be something behind this. Some quirk we don’t know about. Something her dad’s probably kept secret . . . the bastard can probably afford to anyway, what’s he worth? A couple hundred billion? Money like that buys the best kind of silence.”

“I can’t believe you,” she snaps. “Did she deserve it? Is that it? You think she deserved to be kidnapped and terrorized because her father runs a company that, oh, just might deal shady on the side? Fuck you!”

He realizes he has crossed a line, and backs away, carefully. She has been erratic of late, the disease she’d once been devoted to now cured and cleaned. He is suddenly aware of the shortcomings of his words.

“No, I didn’t mean that.”

May looks away, moving from the bar to peer intently at the bottles on the wall behind her.

“We’re low on Spice. I’ll have to talk to Ed about getting more--”

“May, I didn’t mean it, okay?”

“It doesn’t matter if you didn’t mean it. You said it. You fucking men are all the same.”

May could feel nothing but the helpless common rage, personally ingrained, personally offensive. She crouched next to the bottles, peering at them, ignoring him.

“Why did you say that?” she asks, face still turned to the hollow bottles.

“May, I already said I--”

“No, earlier. ‘He got her out.’ He who?”

Alistaire turns his sharp profile back to the television. May frowns. She trusts him, and she trusts his instincts. He has an uncanny, unearthly knowledge of the City’s twisted inner workings, a knowledge laced with insight and stubbornness. It was as though he looked through the dusky City lights, looked through the towering glass buildings, stared through it all until the City was nothing but a ragged, patchwork skeleton, and reached down with his hands to twist the gears of the its mechanical heart. It didn’t make sense, she’d always thought, that someone like Alistaire (shallow, rude, arrogant, over-educated, the list went on…) should understand so completely the organism that was the City, but . . . she sighs. It has to be someone.

“Him,” Alistaire says suddenly, finger stabbing at the television. The camera intrudes, desperate for the story, delighted with the blood. It peers into the circle of people, of white coated paramedics, black-jacketed bodyguards, the staple of the rich and enviable. Yet in the centre of it all are the two figures; she, her blood-soaked red hair dripping over his arm as the man places her carefully on the stretcher. She must be unconscious, May thinks, and doesn’t blame the other woman. Then, the camera spins and twists, turning towards the man. He turns too, and with an almost backwards flick of his hand (May is stunned by the sheer quickness of the movement), the camera shatters and falls, bouncing on the ground, lens broken.

“Third time this month he’s broken a camera,” Alistaire observes wryly.

“Who is he?” May asks, and squints at the now-snowing television. The film snaps back into replay: again he quietly lowers her onto the stretcher, again his hand shoots back to shatter the camera. He does not even look at the lens, and she can only see the bright, pretty colour of his blond hair.

“I’d call him a corporate thug, only he’s not. Not really, at least,” says Alistaire, and his gaze darkens as for the third time the camera is broken.

“Oh!” says May, recognition sparking belatedly into her mind. She remembers. She remembers him. It was the hair, especially, and the blue eyes, and his sheer size, some throwback to ancient Roman day, when men conquered and violence was their lifeblood, their trademark. She remembers him from the streets, from the riots bare years earlier, when brutal ugliness swept across the City and no uniform could still the tide. When fists were raised and the media’s camera the only truth, sweeping from mass to mass, face turned to the surging hate. She has never been sure what prompted it, perhaps they were tired of civilization, its niceties and beauty and could only strike back with wordless emotion.

She remembers crouching in the doorway, clutching the stairs, head down and covered with her arms. Just outside her hiding spot raged the mob, singing in time with shattering bottles and screaming megaphones. What do you want? She’d gasped, trying to bury herself into the concrete stair as a bottle smashed by her curled feet. I’m nothing leave me alone! She’d seen the crowd moments before, picking over a bystander with cruel ease. He’d fought, but had finally gone down, swallowed by the rage of humanity.

She remembers the shocking silence then, the pause in the crowd’s roaring. She’d raised her head, only slightly, to peer over her quivering arms. The crowd milled, uncertain, curious, staring at the figures just opposite them.

He was there, she remembers. How could she have forgotten him, even for a moment? There were police too, battered, exhausted, but he was there too, not uniformed, nor were his friends, but their black coats were all the authority they needed. It wasn’t just men, either, she’d noticed. She’d seen the brunette head of a grim faced woman, no older than herself. And him . . . standing in front of them all, looking carefully at the rioters with his cold blue eyes.

She doesn’t remember what he said. His voice was too low, the roar of the crowd too loud, but she pressed her face back into her arms as the swelling mass rushed forward. Whatever he’d said had been inadequate, and their passion (or lunacy, May often found the two blurred lines) flamed bright.

How odd, she thinks, that I should forget him, yet still remember how the crowd screamed when the tear gas and rubber bullets tore into them.

“I remember him,” says May softly. “When the City went crazy and the police needed help. I remember him from then. He’s her father’s Security. He protects Trilogy.”

***

She leaves the ballroom, unnoticed. At first she is worried they will notice her, and catch her arm, pulling her back into the swirling mass of humanity, and she will be forced to . . . to what? She places red-gloved hands on the balcony railing, staring down into the quiet sea. Her father’s building, rising above the City’s other mundane inhabitants, is perched on the edge of the sea. The terraces and gardens surround it, the creeping arms of the roses encircling the great bulk of the building, gripping it tenderly, yet firmly. Insistently. They are still bonds, she thinks distantly, and tightens her hands on the railing. She remembers smiling only a few hours ago, as her father walked down the long curving stairs with her on his arm. I am so beautiful, she had thought, as the guests raises their masked eyes adoringly. Don’t you wish you were me? With a fortune waiting at my father’s death, with all the wealth and education the world has to offer. Come, I am for the highest bidder. She had turned her head then, to smile at her father, to thank him for the celebration of her good heath, just a week after her rescue. She smiled until the smile became nothing but a perfectly fixed expression, eyes meeting each guest in turn, her hand laced in her father’s arm, until she thought she would die, or worse thought that she must gnaw her hand off at the wrist in order to escape her father’s grip.

Animals do that, she thinks, staring down into the sea. They’ll gnaw through their own limb in order to escape a trap.

*************************BEGINNING OF REVAMPED SECTION***************************************

Behind her, he clears his throat. She turns, dismally, knowing she can’t escape. He is still wearing the long dark coat, but the assurance is gone. Now he looks sad and uncomfortable; out of place next to the spinning party-goers.

“He told me to watch you,” Umber says. She nods. “I’m not sure why,” he continues. “I think it’s a test of both of us. He doesn’t get why I came after you.”

“It never occurred to me to jump,” she says. “I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the party.” She wonders why she is ignoring the second part of his comment. She has wanted to ask him about it since the day at the hospital, when she had felt so very angry. Still, she will get her answers, eventually. For the first time in a very long time she is not content to be silent.

He looks away to hide the sudden smile, a sympathetic twitch of his mouth. A commonality reaches out between them: they both hate this, and the enemy of my enemy is always my friend.

“Did he thank you?” she asks, genuinely curious. It is difficult for her father to thank people, even when they have given everything for him. Perhaps he views it as a kind of weakness. It is easy to stand on the strength of others, but much harder to acknowledge that you actually do so.

“For-? Oh.”

“Yes, that,” she says. She is careful with her hands and places them delicately on the folds of her skirt.

“Yes,” Umber answers. “I was compensated.”

She flinches. She understands the suggestion underpinning the word. Compensation means money, and money means being bought. For her life, he has been compensated.

“I was wondering,” she says, “I was wondering why you came. I suppose he offered something, didn’t he? For me? For those that came after me? How much for a daughter? A couple thousand? A mere million? ...”

She lets the word trail off, and watches him. Around her rises the darkness of the City, the great breathing in and out, the sounds of buying and selling. She watches him, and her eyes half close in study.

He moves out from the doorway, and stands beside her (though still at a respectable distance), in front of the iron railing, looking over the black sea. And she continues to watch him out of the corner of her eye, calculating him in her mind, weighing the long dark coat in one hand, his surprising height in the other. She is suddenly aware of his sheer size, and for a bare instant, is worried about his reaction to her words. Below her roars the sea. If he reached out, with a slight flick of his hand, he could send her plummeting to its hungry mouth. Strangely, the idea thrills her.

“Maybe you shouldn’t ask that, Arkady,” he says. In its own way, the sentence answers the question brutally, and she finds she must grasp the railing, gripping so tight that her fingernails bite into her palm. The terror of the seven days rush back to her, the terror of the man’s hand on her shoulder, the terror of knowing what he wanted ... and the final great horror of finding something within herself that had allowed her to kill him. Three days and the world had spun out of control, irrevocably changed and twisted. Three days ago she could look her father in the eye. Now he was an alien, slippery creature who had sent no one after his kidnapped daughter.

She turns and faces Umber. She knew how the other women in the ballroom looked at him, from behind upraised hands, eyes narrowed under quirked brows, their mouths curved in some secret knowledge. The looked at him, and wished the dark coat wasn’t so long, and that he wasn’t so cold and violent, and tried to forget that just a few days before, he had killed three kidnappers with incredible ease. She felt something strange, facing him.

“I don’t think I would have, two weeks ago,” she says. Everything is changed. You wake up one morning, and the scales fall from your eyes and everything is different.

“I sat there in this place which used to be my father’s summer house – did you know they kept me handcuffed to my bed? It was my bed. I’d had dreams there. I’d slept in past noon. I remember my mother sitting on the edge of it, talking to me about boys when I was younger. I sat there and I waited.”

She feels distant, viewing her words through the wrong end of a telescope. She is miles away, curled into a fetal position, hearing and feeling nothing but her breathing. She hears the men outside the door to her room. Fear is choking her. It is strangling her. She stares into the future and begs it not to allow her to be raped.

On the balcony, she blinks and looks away from him. He is waiting for her to finish.

“No one came,” she says. In the hospital the thought had made her cry, before he had come to visit her. She had cried violently into the emptiness of the hospital room, because she had never before felt so completely alone.

“No one but you.”

Silence between them. Behind it all the party spins. There is laughter and the smell of alcohol, spinning colours and great flirtation. A part of her is sickened by it all. A part of her does not think it will ever care again. She continues.

“And even for a moment there, it was almost like everything might be fine anyway, because even if my father didn’t sent anyone after me, someone still came. You came. But you—“ she had meant to accuse him about the money again, but he interrupts.

“Don’t be stupid,” he says, but his voice is somehow kind.

“I’m already in a great deal of trouble. There were hostage negotiators and other sorts all begging to take a crack at your case, but your father wouldn’t allow it. Do you know why?”

“Yes,” she says, and the pieces drop into place. She sees them fall, sees how they fit, interlocking with horrific certainty. A week ago she would have leapt to her feet and screamed and screamed and screamed and denied it all because her father loved her. Now she is sure that perhaps he does love her, but … she turns the idea carefully over in her head, wondering if it will break her. Now she still knows that fact, the fact that he loves her. But there are other things he loves too. And for one week, those other things became more important than her.

“My father feeds the drug trade in the City. Below our feet are thousands of boxes filled with thousands of packets of white powder. He fed it to mother for years, and she wasted away, until there was nothing left of her but this dying skeleton with her face. I found the needles behind her bed. The men who came and took me, it was something to do with that, something they wanted my father to stop doing. One of them mentioned a wife, when he was hitting me.”

She pauses. She wonders if the makeup truly hides the bruises.

“It was like he wanted me to understand. He kept saying that he found his wife with a needle in her arm, all dead and rotted. He said it was my father’s fault. I tried to explain about my mother, that I was the same …” her voice catches. She loved her mother.

“He wouldn’t listen to me, even though we were almost the same.”

Suddenly Umber reaches for her. She cannot imagine him comforting anyone. He is too cold, too violent, she cannot imagine him touching anyone with any kind of tenderness. It has no sense next to him.

But strangely he has his hands on her shoulders, and they are full of kindness. She looks up at him, and is humbled that he has chosen her to be kind to, to show this small secret part of him to her alone.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. I would have if I could.”

The world changes again. She does not need to sleep the night and wake up, because the world has changed again right before her eyes, and someone did come for her. She forgives him for taking the money, and understands clearly why he did so.

“He was suspicious,” Umber says. “Your father. If it was just for money that I did it, well, there aren’t any problems there. That’s easy to understand. I was just being reckless and arrogant for the sake of money. But if I did it for something more than that … good God, then I’m completely fucked.”

The swearing makes her grin. No one ever swears in front of her. They stare at each other. His hands on her shoulders connect them, and it is a moment of sudden honesty.

“I can’t take the abuse of someone else’s life,” Umber says. “Do what you want with your own, but if you take someone else’s life and abuse it, you’re a bastard.”

Arkady is overwhelmed by him. Her white face is turned up in strange adoration. She sees him anew, the violence in his eyes righteous and wholly good.

“You are so beautiful,” she says. She had not meant it to come out, had only meant to roll the words over in her head, but then there they are, hanging between them. The words surprise him, and he abruptly withdraws, and is back standing a proper length from her, a guarded man in a long black coat.

“Teach me how to fight,” she says. Something is rising in her. Something terrible and great. An excitement, a wanting, something that will make her seek until she has found the thing that will make her whole.

“I don’t know how. When I fought, it wasn’t right. I was just trying to survive and I didn’t know what to do.”

The party noises echo. She wonders how long she has been out here, on this balcony, talking to this man she barely knows. She came through the glass doors one woman, and will leave another, and someday there will be bodies in her wake. She hopes her father’s will be one of them. She knows it will be.

He nods. “Alright.”

She grins again, gleeful. How different, she thinks, how different I felt in the hospital. There I looked at the veins in my wrist and felt nothing but helplessness. Now... Her eyes are suddenly lit, a burning fever eating them. She reaches out and places her palm on his chest. He jerks backwards, surprised, but the doorframe halts him.

“Last week I killed a man,” she whispers. “Tomorrow everything will change. The boxes below us will burn, and so will the City if it gets in my way.”

She stands on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek.