Episode 30: Bringing Down the House

Pain. My hands go to my throat.
Torn. Blood seeping out.

"Hello, sister."

Sever. Stitch.

Zippora, Raul, Terra, Julian, and Trencher are free, but their thoughts are like little fragments of pain and anger, refracting wildly across the room. Ama-chan's thoughts shine like the sun. Warm. Comforting.

I am bound in cables. Stitch's cables. Arms and legs and throat.
It hurts.

I can feel their thoughts brushing against my mental defenses, but for all the pain and all the blood, I am glad to see them.

"So you're both alive," I say, and it hurts to talk, and there my voice is at least half bloody gurgle. "I'm glad. I was worried."

They exchange glances, and I'm not sure if the troubled look I see there is real or just my own wishful thinking.

I briefly consider the possibility of grabbing Zippora and teleporting away: she's important to Moses.

"Before we kill you, sister, we need to know something from you," Sever says. "Think carefully. Do you know where Aimi went after she killed Amuro Nami?"

My thoughts race. Amuro Nami. I have no idea whatever, but I'm not about to tell them that. "I have an idea," I say, "But why would I give you the one piece of information that's preventing you from killing me?"

Their minds press against my mental defenses again, skittering across the surface like ice on a grill. Stitch looks frustrated, and he gestures.

The chains begin to pull at me, pulling me apart. He means to tear my arms and legs off.
We can't have that.

I vanish.

I reappear next to Stitch, and he whirls around, and his chains whirl with him. In an instant, I am bound again, but with one critical difference: my right arm is free.

"The first mistake you made," I say, "Is assuming that you had a chance in hell of beating me." I strike, aiming for a nerve cluster at the base of Stitch's neck. My aim is true, and he collapses, coughing and choking.

Sever flicks his hand upward in a sweeping motion, and I feel a horrible sense of tearing, and I look down just in time to see a terrible gash open across my body from my navel to my collarbone. There is pain, and blood, so much blood, and I can see my own ribs, and lungs, and something - the ground, maybe - smashes into the back of my head, and everything goes dark.

---------------

The empty void.

First Mind eyes.

Voices. Voices in the dark. Whispers. The Enemy whispers.
"One Who Hopes, will you fulfill your part in the conjunction that is to come?"

Of course I will. It is preordained. Who can escape their purpose?

Ama-chan whispers.
Mikomi, Mikomi, Reikomi, Mikorei...

The Void...

*FLASH*

Two little boys playing in the park.

It had only happened once. Once, when Mama Pain was away on business, and Doctor Soren said that children should play. I was fourteen. I didn't understand what 'play' meant, but Sever and Stitch did, and Aimi, and Malicious.

I sat at a park bench with Doctor Soren and Nero.

Four children playing in the park on a golden day in Geneva Prime.

Ash-gray buildings rose up all around the park, pulsing with spectacular displays of force and energy. All of the playground structures did the same, and all around it was green, green grass that was curiously empty and silent. No force. No energy. Just grass.

There were other children there, too. Other young Biomade, here for recreation. A few Allskin adults accompanying their young. An Allskin child told me my eyes looked funny, and when my mind touched his, I didn't know him. I didn't understand any of the things I saw in his mind. It was like trying to read the mind of the Zipsum that Mama Pain had brought in for us to try to scan. The Zipsum thought in triangles and mirrors. The little boy thought in joy and sunlight and play and family and petty self-will.

I didn't understand.

I watched while the four of them play, with Malicious supervising the games, and for the first time in my life, I felt envy: my own envy, and not someone else's.

Sever and Stitch, laughing, and their laughter wasn't cruel but joyful.

Aimi dashing away from Malicious and shouting at the top of her lungs, "You're it! You're it!"

Malicious racing after Aimi, then darting to the side at the last second to tag Sever. "Sever's it!" she shouted.

"Are you sure you don't want to go play with them, Rei?" Doctor Soren asked.

I looked up at him, and my mind brushed against the surface of his mental defenses. "Play?" I asked.

Nero shot me a sidelong glance, and then said with the savage honesty of a child, "Rei doesn't like tag. She always thinks that she's it whenever anyone gets tagged, because she's defective and can't tell the difference between herself and everyone else."

My cheeks burned, and I sank into myself.

The laughter of children echoed around the park.

--------------

I awake in Una's arms, coughing and spluttering as if I had just been resuscitated after drowning. The pain is gone, and the wound is gone, but the blood is not. My surroundings have changed. We are in the courtyard outside of the inn. Battle rages all around us. Sennin descends towards us, and Heishi are dying everywhere.

I look up at Una. "Sever? Stitch?" I ask.

Her eyes flicker. "Did this to you," she says.

I feel a lump in my throat, and a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. "Where are they?"

She continues walking towards the Sennin, carrying me. "... They're dead, Rei. High Dive was too fast."

The world falls out from under me. I push myself out of Una's arms, and she watches me for a moment, alarmed, but I'm not paying attention to her anymore.

There is an explosion near the Sennin, and Una looks torn for a moment, and then rushes over to help the wounded.

Sever and Stitch are dead.

Dead.
Dead, and dead.
What kind of word is that, dead?
A word of endings, darkness, and terror: a horrible, smothering sort of word, and filled with other horrible words like a corpse over-ripe in its corruption, overflowing the measure, and spilling its putrid excess into the terrified mind. A word for we know not what. A word for the descent of the Named into nonentity, and the jury still deliberating over whether any reascent is even possible. A word for all the piles of rotting leaves warming the gutters of the world.

Sever and Stitch are dead.

I'm screaming. I beat my fists against the earth, against the corpse of a dead Heishi.

The question...

And then Ama-chan is with me.

"Amaterasu-chan," I whisper. "... Feed. Take all the mana you can find."

She goes to work, devouring the White-Rock in the DisLocators, and I rise to my feet. I don't see the combat around me. Bullets whiz by my head, and I don't notice.

I open the basement doors and I descend.

There they are, Sever and Stitch, the blood all over the floor, their red eyes staring up at the sky.

Dead.

I stare at them for a long, long time.

"You're not ever going to leave me, are you Ama-chan?" I ask, and my voice is a small, broken thing.

Leave you? I can't leave you. Never ever ever, unless you die. I'm bound to you, remember?

It is a comforting thought. ... I don't want to be alone.

Then I'm back on Sennin. I don't remember DisLocating, but I must have. Kiyoshi is saying something, but I don't hear him. Una takes me by the hand and leads me down to a cabin. Mine, maybe.

It hurts. It hurts more than anything. My brothers are dead.
I cry in Una's arms, and she holds me, and murmurs words of comfort.

My brothers are dead, and it hurts.

Life?

------------

I don't remember much of the rest of the day. I do remember that I told Kiyoshi that I don't blame High Dive for killing my brothers. I was lying to him, of course. But part of what I said was true. You don't blame a soldier for killing an enemy in the course of a battle. You blame the people that sent the soldiers into that situation in the first place.

Katashi Blade.

The name is like acid on my tongue. It's taken me a long time to get here, and many people have died, but I'm here, and I know what has to be done. Katashi Blade sent my brothers on a suicide mission. He couldn't have expected them to survive. At best, he expected them to kill one or two of us before they were themselves killed.

There's something in me now, an emotional state I've never really felt before. It's not anger. It's not hate. It's not fear. It's not grief, though I feel that, too.

It's wrath.

Wrath enough to burn the whole world. I will kill Katashi Blade. I will always remember the broken bodies of Sever and Stitch in that basement: revenge be mine. Even if he is a First Mind, I am at least half First Mind. That has to count for something. He will know fear, he will know pain, and then he will die.

Truth might be changed by victory...

I realize suddenly that my fists are clenched so tightly that I have drawn blood. I am standing on the open-air bridge of Sennin. Moses is looking out at Geneva Prime in the distance. He means to call down another... plague, I suppose. He calls it deliverance. Part of me wants to stop him. Part of me thinks he's going to destroy Cheldrun civilization, but right now, a larger part of me doesn't care. What Moses is doing will draw Katashi Blade to us.

Kiyoshi stands close at hand, Keibatsu drawn. He's been very quiet since he learned what Aimi may have done to Amuro Nami. For a moment, worry for Aimi breaks through the haze of wrath, and I hope that there is enough of the Information Broker organization left intact to tell me what I want to know when this is over.

... I never should have drunk all that sake. But I needed something to make me forget the world, for a little while. I knew that drinking would break down the barriers in my mind that keep me separate from everyone until I'd sobered, but I did it anyways, and now Kiyoshi knows about Aimi and Nami.

Una asked me if I'd be able to resist the control of the First Minds. I told her it was more like being Home than like mental control, but that's not entirely true.

It's both.

Not for the first time, I wonder if I'll really be able to resist them if they ask me to do something.

They're firing on us. Heishi. Teleporting aboard. We've prepared a place to fall back to. A place to destroy all that come after us. Ama-chan laughs delightedly at the thought of eating so much mana in all those dead Heishi. I smile. Battle is joined, and for the first time since Marina, I lose myself to the joy of the slaughter.

Even as Moses calls down his plague, even as a horrible black cloud descends on the city, and the buildings begin to crumble, even as the Goshi Tower tumbles down into ruin, I smile.

Wrath.

Katashi Blade, we are coming for you, and I no longer fear your mental influence: I will take part in your damned fate.

... Life?