I should leave now. The calculating part of me, the part that somehow kept me alive in the midst of so much death, is yelling for me to get out of here. But I stay.
“I’ve never heard you admit to being scared before.” I move back toward her, and she actually smiles at me. Her smile still has the same power as always. I feel my center of gravity rise.
“I never had to say. You’ve always known,” she says, “and you’ve always helped me get through it. So okay. I’m here. What did you want to show me?”
I hesitate just a moment longer, then I let my cloak fall open. Bianca sees my tendrils, up above the neckline of my simple shift, and the motion of tentacles behind my head, and lets out a high gasp.
Bianca heaves, and speaks in a guttural rush. “Your body… oh shit… What did they do to you? What did they turn you into? Fuck, are you even human anymore? How can you stand to be— I think I’m going to throw up—” She makes clicking sounds in the back of her throat.
I have a sudden flash of Mouth saying, “I think you’re beautiful,” as though my subconscious is trying to protect me.
“I’m still me,” I plead. “I haven’t changed. I’m still Sophie.”
She spits and thrashes, looking past me. “No. Oh no, no, no, this is worse than I could have imagined. They turned you into… This is so much worse. We’re going to have to study you. Are they planning on doing this to other people? Is this what you wanted to show me, this… this contamination? Is it contagious? Are you going to try and infect me?”
“No, wait,” I babble, because she’s reaching for some velvet cord that will summon guards or servants. “Just wait and listen to me for once, Bianca, I haven’t even shown you what I was going to show you. Please stop. I promise it’ll be okay. I could never hurt you.”
As I lean toward her, I reach for a comforting memory: the pot of tea that we always took from the common room and kept on the squat little table in our dorm room at the Gymnasium. Before all of this, back when life was simple. I remember one quiet moment when she poured tea for me, and I keep it in my head, the fragile stillness of it, so I can give it to her.
But Bianca squirms and lashes out with one fist as my tendrils make contact, and I can’t find the memory of pouring tea anymore. Instead, all I can think of is staring at her from behind the War Monument, with a barrier of misshapen waves between us. My mind skips to the time I followed her and spied on her in a political meeting full of guns, and then standing in the corner of some party in Argelo, observing her. Then I’m watching someone tie a mask around her face as she recedes into a crowd. Studying her and Dash across a crowded nightclub.
“How many times did you spy on me? Were you just stalking me all the time—” Bianca makes another gagging sound.
I can’t come up with a memory that’s not of me watching Bianca from a distance. My heart is shaking itself to pieces and my tendrils tear at my skin with the effort of maintaining contact. I fumble for a happy memory and—
—Bianca is lying next to me on her bed, in our dorm room, whispering in my ear, and her breath makes my skin so sensitive that I would evaporate if she even touched me and then her body touches mine just for a moment and I feel a shiver and I’ve never even let myself want anything with the part of me that rejoices in desiring—
—Now, here, in the Palace, Bianca pulls away from me, just as I’ve realized how dangerous that last memory was, the feelings I’ve never even confessed to myself.
Bianca makes a noise between a roar and a howl, and throws me so hard I land halfway across the room.
“You forced yourself into my mind and you… Standing here with those grubby oily worms coming out of your body, thinking those disgusting thoughts about me. I can’t even stand to look at you. They didn’t turn you into a monster, you were always a monster. How did I not know this?”
Bianca’s words have a thicket of sharp edges, and I’m still paralyzed, thinking about that desire that I never even let into myself. Bianca spits at me that I’m perverted, revolting, a creep.
All the blood is rushing to my head and I’m drowning, but there must be something I can say right now. I didn’t stalk her—and my love isn’t selfish—and I’m scared I overwhelmed her with too many memories at once. I try to blurt an explanation. “I just wanted to save—”
My shoulder is on fire. The pain spreads to my left arm and my left side. A man in a bright green breastplate has come in the door and fired an antique pulse maser at me. The wound mostly cauterized on contact, but blood still dribbles out of my shoulder. I scream.
Bianca yells at her man not to kill me, they need me alive. I pull away as she shouts at the guards pouring into the room not to shoot, for fuck’s sake. I reach the balcony, where I’d plotted an easy parabola—flipping onto the railing and then up to the roof. But I’ve lost flesh, and I’m losing blood. I try to climb, but I slip on my own mess, and I fall instead. My tentacles only just save me, catching on the Palace wall, as I drop to the balcony one floor down.
mouth
Mouth climbed down into the sewer and made her foul way under the Founders’ Square and the market stalls, to the pristine clay pipe that she was pretty sure led into the dungeon’s latrine. The pipe itself was too narrow, so she set about weakening the mortar around one of the big new stones at the base of the dungeon wall. Whoever built this new dungeon had done a poor job with the masonry, probably because Dash had broken their arms for not working fast enough. The big granite block wobbled as the mortar crumbled under pressure from the scraper in Mouth’s belt, but she still needed several lifetimes to loosen the block and pull it out of the way. Then she could climb up through the commode itself, which stunk just as much as she’d expected. She pushed aside the rotting wooden boards over the commode.
The single-room dungeon had one prisoner: Alyssa wore a chain attached to a shackle around her ankle, with the other end bolted to the wall. She looked so much older Mouth didn’t recognize her at first. Her skin clung to an emaciated face, and she bent almost double. Her eyes focused on Mouth with effort.
“You look like hot puke,” Mouth whispered. “Hold still.”
She found a file inside her tool belt and started sawing through the chain on Alyssa’s ankle.
“Make up your mind,” Alyssa hissed. “You ditch me, then you come back.”
“Shut up and let me work.”
“Can’t wait to hear your latest rationalization.” Alyssa sounded like mossy rock being dragged over rotten wood. “Not that I don’t bear some of the blame for this shitfest. I believed in Bianca—like, really believed. I spent a lot of time encouraging her to step up, after you vanished on us. Become the brilliant leader that she was meant to be. I think I may have miscalculated. Pretty much as soon as we finished murdering the entire government, I was suddenly ‘not reliable.’ I mean, fuck. I’m the most reliable person there is.”
“Shhh,” Mouth said. “You’ll have plenty of time to explain how this is really my fault after we get out of here.”
Alyssa shook her head. “You’re just going to ditch me again.”
“No, I’m not.” Mouth was about halfway through the chain, and she’d only had to switch hands three times. Both hands were raw and throbbing.
That was when the alarms started ringing. Not from the dungeon, from the Palace above. Mouth cursed. Sophie.
“I have to go,” Mouth said. “I’ll leave you the file. The commode leads to a stone I removed, then the sewers.”
“You literally said a moment ago that you wouldn’t abandon me.”
Mouth paused with one foot in the toilet, and sighed.