The Comfort Of The Knife

In the end there was nothing. A void that wasn’t black because even black was something. My self—what even there was of me—adrift bodiless. Mindless. Everything I’m saying right now, just an approximation of what it felt to be obliterated, or what I thought at the time was obliteration; in that place of no place there was no such thing as sensation—or so I thought.

Dad used to joke whenever he turned on the lights in my room to wake me up for school when I was a kid. He’d say, “And then there was light,” in mimicry of some hoary storyteller. As if light came before everything else. When the truth was sound came first.

A growl ripped through the nothingness. Nothing like what came from Sphinx’s throat, but something more articulated. Electric and fuzzy at the edges. Warm with a hint of stickiness from how the notes—it was sound, music!—wouldn’t fade into memory. Raoooow!

There it was again. Additive to the sound that still haunted the present moment with their echoes. The two noises ripping into each other until the erratic tearing left beautiful sonic ribbons tying them together. Ribbons.

Ribbons of light—strings—cut through the void. Gold as honey. Amber. Sunlight. Morning dawn!

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six beautiful strings. Then bountiful chaos. Energetic. Lively. Life. Each string vibrating as they were struck by some unearthly force. In their motion I knew direction, and with direction I fell.

Down—no—up? Yes. Up and up from the void into the deep dark where once again I saw black. My first taste of something from the mire of nothing I had nearly made home. It was heard I heard the compliment to the wailing guitar that beckoned me siren-like. The voice was raspy, yearning, and dripping with the kind of need that made a mother run in search of her kid. It pleaded to the world and me to come back. To get up. To live.

It was then I opened my eyes. Shoved my head from out beneath a heavy winter white comforter. My hair wild and bonnet half off. I gripped the sheets as I regarded the cabin I’d found myself in. It was simple—wooden with only one large room—and very little furniture. Walls were adorned in photos. Memories of happier days. While across from the bed were two plush chairs, a table, and a fireplace whose flame had gone low. Only sputtering embers remained.

“You’re letting in the cold,” a voice whined. It was so familiar?

Then, no doubt belonging to the voice, a foot collided with my side punting me from the bed. I hit the floor and rolled to a propped up crouch—even in death my mom’s lessons still held. The foot disappeared beneath the blanket before I could see it. Though I did make out the lump beneath the sheets that I realized I’d slept against.

I said, “It’s not really my fault. Someone let the fire go out.”

Grumbling moans seeped out from my unseen cabinmate. An arm thrust out from beneath the blanket. It was the same color as me, but cold in its undertone where I was warm. The fist at the arm’s end shook vigorously in uproar.

“Then go do something about it,” it said. The voice was feminine. “Here, take this.”

I held out my hands as it dumped bright silver-white strands of something into my cupped palms. The first became a flat hand that fanned me away in dismissal.

“Toss it on the fire. Be quick about it. It’s cooooold,” the voice whined again.

Holding the strands carefully, I crossed the cabin toward the fireplace. Tossed them onto the flames and watched as the embers—they were chalcedony?—consumed the strands greedily. Streaks of that beautiful silver-white bringing an energy and a texture to that familiar fire. It was in one burst—a bit of a burp really—that the flames rose and expelled outward. Eating me.

* * *

I screamed as I pushed up from the ground. Around me the imperceptible din of reality flooded my ears at once. My brain took a few moments to resume control of my faculties, and parse the many channels of information that I’d become rusty noticing and ignoring.

“Why isn’t she dead?” an annoying voice—a cheater’s voice—said.

Unbound from the doll-like summoner’s command, I lifted my head. The three of them had clumped together behind Toby as Sphinx fired endless volleys of Atomic Glory at them from the air. Apparently the dire wolf had retreated. Going by the blood that dripped off my glaive’s blade like water off a duck, I figured Sphinx had used the weapon well.

To the left of me was Lupe whose eyes were shut and mouth wide as she sang a wordless song. No, I could feel it resonate with the fibers of my spirit. It was the same way that entities spoke. The way incantations worked—my mind renewed and freed from the grip of adrenaline or Bloodlust made that connection plenty clear.

Lupe sang, “A thousand children who knew only Night/Who played forever bound in Abyssal depths/Remember true that all things die/Though praise the Morning which lives again/Golden blades in both hands/Time shall be cut anew/From black bolts Tomorrow is sewn/And Freedom known as we once knew.”

My heart quickened at the mournful invocation of an unmet tomorrow. One the singer believed they’d never know yet could only believe in. Without it—the faith—they’d crumble. It was a song for deities that’d never listen nor act. Well fuck them, and fuck that. I rose on unsteady legs. My nerves relearning the best routes through my body. They were too slow, and I didn’t need them anyways. I flexed my spirit and felt it pop. Crack. ROAR.

The corona of fire that accompanied me when using the Inviolate Star this way bulged and flared. Briefly I was a pillar of chalcedony and quicksilver fire. An unnatural wickerwoman come to cut a way toward tomorrow for the pretty girl that asked for me.

“What’d I miss?” I asked.

Lupe ceased singing, but her hand stayed a blur as she strummed strings of amber plasma—sunlight stretched across the neck that also served as haft to an ambrosia gold labrys. Her hair glistened from the sweat that poured down her brow. I couldn’t help but imagine where else she might’ve been sweating. I really was alive.

“Not much. Nearly lost you, but glad I found you. They buried you pretty deep,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, “and now I’m going to return the favor. Sphinx, glaive me, cutie.”

I tugged the mask—it bit into my skin as if unwilling to part—then tore it free. Dropped it to the ground as I raised my hand up toward Sphinx. She opened her mouth and let it tumble through the air and down into my grasp. As if there was no other place it’d rather be.

“Thanks for not slobbering over it,” I said.

Sphinx smirked. “Nadia, I have never once ‘slobbered’ and never will. Now please, can we see to them?”

“Sure, why not.”

I spun the glaive effortlessly in my hand as if the memory of its heaviness was just a fiction. Perhaps it was—they weren’t called Conceptual weapons for nothing. Though as I let it land over my shoulder I don’t even know why I thought it was a weapon. It was my Mother’s Last Smile. An expression of joy, love, sorrow, and the glee she had whenever I told her of how I faced the odds and didn’t let that stop me. Earlier I said Toby and his teammates stacked the deck and dealt the cards. Well, this is where I flipped the table.

I swaggered forward. Glaive swinging light as love on my shoulder. The tiny doll-like summoner’s eyes became narrowed emerald talismans against my advance. So of course I stepped forward again. Again. Howled with laughter as she formed hand-spell after hand-spell to control whatever seal she had put inside of me.

Toby asked her, “Why didn’t you use your best seal?”

She said, “I did. It’d put down anyone that could actually be affected.”

She stumbled backward and looked so small there on her ass. She crawled across the floor like the pitiful creature she’d devolved into upon the sight of my not being dead. I grinned and licked my teeth—were they always that sharp?—as some predatory streak couldn’t help but desire to pin her to the ground by fang or glaive.

“What are you?” she asked.

I let the glaive fall. Pinned it between my back and the crook of my arms. Angled myself and pushed forward fast as a comet. Flame trailed behind me. Toby’s eyes widened. I let my left hand rise and just suggest a thrust through the glaive. In one motion—my body all intent and action without the infirmities of flesh—I skewered the boy.

“A princess,” I said.

Another suggestion of my desire, and the glaive rose with the boy upon it. The first living banner heralding my ascension. In his eyes I saw the burning dream of myself. Bright metal fangs that complimented eyes of primal innocence.

It was that same innocence that guided my tongue free from my mouth to catch the droplets of his blood which fell like rain. He tasted of stardust, of pure ideas untainted. Purest aspiration and highest ideals. Oh if you could bottle that.

“Put…me…down,” he said.

His face was growing pale. He could die. I ran the calculations on if I could hide the body—I’d told Melissa I would only kill for her after all. The numbers weren’t good, and it helped that the third teammate, the one in black, was trying to sneak away. My Omensight was still up, and I watched as the world rippled against her touch. Like blinds, or curtains.

“No slipping away this time,” I said.

I flicked the glaive flinging Toby from his impaled position to collide with the coward who was about to abandon them all. The two fell in a tangled clump. From my shift in attention I hadn’t noticed as the other girl had fled toward the elevators. She held one of them open as she formed a hand-spell.

Strands of Suppression—the colors of which were muted and ugly—wove against the space between her and her teammates. It flared in a dull light that desaturated the threads around it. When the unlight cleared, the team was together in the elevator. I giggled at the creativity. She’d Suppressed distance. Now there was an idea.

I ran toward them unwilling to let them get away. Toby raised a gun while one of them hammered at the ‘close doors’ button.

“You can’t keep trying the same thing, Toby,” I yelled. “That’s just crazy!”

He flipped me off. Winced as the girl in black had to shift the pressure she kept against his wound. Then, following my advice, he shifted his aim from me to Lupe. Fired. I spun to her and plunged us both into Godtime. I ran back toward her where the stardust bullet hung in space only a few inches from kissing the spot between the eyebrows. That spot which rippled just barely as she focused on playing. Enhancing me of all people. She was a key piece of things and I wouldn’t let her die.

I thrust the glaive forward as I removed us from Godtime. The bullet flattened into a curled back flower against the blade. Ding went the elevator and my retreating foes.

“Lupe, I appreciate the buffs but you have to dodge next time.”

“Sure, but dodge what?” she asked.

“The bullet.”

“There was a bullet?”

Sphinx said, “Nadia, it can be hard to see a flashlight under the noontime sun.”

“What she said. You’re really bright right now,” Lupe said. “Only thing brighter was the smaller girl, she was at Baron, right?”

“She was. Now, we have to go catch them before the taller girl slips away with them all.”

Lupe shook her. “Not likely. Each floor’s spatially enhanced, so the elevator has to be like really spatially constrained. Only way it can connect to each one.”

“Then we can still catch up?” I asked.

“If that’s our aim,” Sphinx said, “then get on.”

We both climbed atop Sphinx as she landed. Lupe’s strumming became more muted and with it so to my flame. I’d been renewed by her spell, but renewing from nearly zero doesn’t necessarily add anything to you. Beyond what you need to get up and out of bed.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “when we get a quiet moment I’ll fill you to the brim.”

“Innuendos are my job,” I said. “Stick to playing with your guitar.”

She rested her head against my shoulder as if my clothes would hide the blush that betrayed her. From between my legs I felt Sphinx rumble and warm. It was a good burn that followed the curve of her spine before she opened her mouth and expelled a concentrated beam of chalcedony at the elevator door. The sorcerously treated metal softened beneath her assault, but failed to fully come undone. So I helped.

I worked my core so I could sit up, and gestured with Mother’s Last Smile. The stroke was smooth—so it was fast as fuck—as a bright edge of light flew from the glaive to shear the weakened elevator door’s in two.

We entered the elevator shaft at such a rush Sphinx had to kick off of the wall to evade ramming into it. She kicked off the opposite one—just above the doorway—before she could finely engage her wings and propel us up after our fleeing foes.

Sphinx even cast Atomic Glory through the patterned eyes on her haunch fur. They burnt hard like the photos of spaceships launching back during the Old World. Though I like to think it was more that she was mimicking a usage I’d already discovered. Whatever the inspiration, we quickly rocketed after them. Were a hair’s breadth away from them. Equal.

Through the Omensight the elevator may as well have been windowed glass from how I could peek at them. They were shaking in fear. The two girls were arguing. While Toby had gotten his feet beneath him, and the pedipalps of his entity had woven bandages tight around his body. A clever enough idea to keep from bleeding out.

“Lupe, I need you to play hard.”

“Normally I save that for the off-the-clock,” she joked, “but for you, anytime.”

She struck the strings of her labrys-guitar, and fanned my flames to a heroic frenzy.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

I said, “Bring some gifts.”

Keep Lupe safe, I thought.

Think of yourself, Sphinx thought back.

Then I jumped from her back. Legs drawn up into a tight isosceles triangle. Glaive clenched tight to my body as it contorted to gather strength. The bladehead caught an invisible light as it glistened—winked—before I thrust it forward. My mother’s other technique on my lips.

“Blind the Stars.”

The elevator’s wall sheared apart as if unseen thumbs were breaking open a pastry to lap at the cream inside. Hands on my weapon, I let it carry me forward into the elevator. I winked as I passed the girl in black. Toby. Before my weapon sheared into the other wall—though I didn’t permit it, as I didn’t want it—and blew that apart as well. Though this order came after I had severed the smaller girl’s arm from the shoulder.

“Gaaaah,” she screamed as she slid down the wall that remained only because I wished it.

The girl in black said, “Inter—”

“No,” I said.

My fist punctuated the order by stamping it knuckle-first into her throat. She froze in a silent scream as her own magic flowed back against her. I marveled at the newly learned consequence to failing to finish an incantation. Pride welled within me as I remembered how long of an incantation Lupe’s spellsong was. She’d done that mid-fight without missing a word.

“Catch,” Toby said.

He’d tossed me a grenade that I caught one-handedly. Weak as he was, it was hardly a difficult throw to receive. I looked at him with a faint sneer of boredom.

“Really?” I asked. “We’ve already established your attacks aren’t working on me. There’s none of your other teammate’s music here to try and weaken my defenses. At best the only thing you did here was blow yourselves up.”

“You talk too much,” the doll girl said.

She’d raised a slip of formation paper in her remaining hand. Threw it against the ceiling where it stuck. Before flattening into the metal; merging with it. Then formed a hand-spell to activate the formation. The script illuminated before it fell around me in a circular curtain of repeating phonemes. I scanned the rivulets of script and parsed the formation’s name, Tower of Sanctuary. My eyes met those doll-like ones as my confusion raised my question.

“For us,” she said. “From you.”

Then the grenade blew up. That one was my fault.

Trapped inside of the cylinder of force, the grenade’s explosion could only flow downward. Which, for whatever reason, the trap didn’t perfectly extend into the floor. A factor which saw Toby and the smaller girl leap into the air and cling to the elevator’s interior. Toby’s entity saw fit to conjure a rope to wrap around the girl in black to save her too. All I could do was cling to Mother’s Last Smile as the explosion pushed down through the metal. Aided by my own weight falling through the absent floor while I clung to the glaive’s shaft. It fell further.

I rotated the glaive so the unsharp inner curve of the blade’s crescent hooked onto what remained of the elevator’s metal. My nails drew blood as the veins of my arms bulged in a bid to hold on. The explosion and lightened weight caused the elevator to rocket upwards faster than its winch could handle. Something high above cracked as the entirety of the lift swung through the air like a flail.

We crashed into the interior of the shaft. Carved through the earth as the formations that constructed the elevator overrode the untreated earth between floors. Only for the wire cable to snap releasing us from any tether.

I wouldn’t let my glaive—my mother—go even as all strength flagged within me. I’d gone beyond the range of Lupe’s song. My vision dimmed as the lobby rotated end over end. Floor then ceiling then floor again. Crack. Everything was white. Another thing in me broke. Then I dropped from the pillar I’d smacked against down to the floor. It was cold.

Bloody coughs worked through my body splatter-painting the wooden floors. The pain screeched through my mind, skewering every thought. I rose again all the same. Clinging to my glaive through force of spirit and blazing will. Even without Lupe’s spell to banish the shadows of injuries I knew lingered in my body, I wasn’t going down into the dark. Not again. The flames flared again, not into a glorious uproar, but a temerous blaze that could only exist from knowing the shadows with which it denied.

The three members of the retrieval team crawled out of the remains of the elevator that had speared—upside down—into the center of the room. They rose to their feet with murder obviously upon the mind. A hunger to put down something that terrified them.

“I’m not that special,” I said. “Maybe you all just suck?”

As a unit they marched toward me with weapons drawn. The girl in black had pulled out a katana while the smaller girl—now singularly armed—dragged a three-section staff behind her. Toby for his part leaned on a spear that had impaled a piece of debris he likely planned to beat me to death with. Despite their assembly and bitter determination they were no less ragged. My violence and the crash had pushed them to the brink. Was only a matter of what snapped first, their bodies or their minds.

“What are you?” the small armless girl asked.

“Told you,” I said. “A princess.”

“You died,” she said.

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Any human would have.”

“Guess I’m just built different,” I said with a wink.

Toby said, “I can’t wait to pull you apart and find out.”

“No one’s pulling anyone apart,” Melissa bellowed.

Her voice boomed down from the darkened ceiling as she dropped like a meteor of garbage from the lunar palaces. The trio hurried backward and waved their weapons in front of themselves as if anything Real could hope to leave even a blemish on her scales.

“What’s that?” the girl in black asked.

“My fiancee,” I said.

“Ex,” Melissa rumbled. “Now put your weapons down or I hose you with a potent neurotoxin that’ll make you hallucinate so hard you rip your flesh from your bones.”

“I’d like to see you try it,” Toby said.

“You really don’t,” Lupe said.

From beyond my ex’s chimeric form and my assembled enemies had landed Sphinx and Lupe. Catching sight of me, Lupe strummed her guitar. I felt my flames increase, banishing my sense of pain that barbed connector between body and spirit. My back straightened as I walked around Melissa to face down the three of them. If you counted Sphinx and I as one—which you always should with summoners—this fight was finally even. While I may have been beaten down to the Underside, so were they and my allies weren’t.

“I have one amendment,” I said. “I do want to tear them apart.”

Melissa looked to me with the soft pain of betrayal in her eyes. I pressed my hand against her monstrous bulk.

“They crossed the line first. They killed Amber.”

Even when she was in her chimeric form, there was a gentle humanness to how Melissa carried herself. Where despite the sharp fangs, envenomed claws, and reptilian eyes she’d still be just as likely to say, “oh shucks,” if she dropped something. When she heard my news it evaporated. Her scales mutated into spikes of unyielding keratin while her maw opened. Super-acid drool dripped between her fangs bringing the wood to a sizzle as acid consumed organic matter. While her claws gouged the wood as she advanced on them.

“Much as I’d love to see you kill in my name, Princess…” Amber’s voice called out.

She passed from beneath the world—through the curtains—with an effeminate boy’s hair wound up within her fist. His steps stumbled into drags as their heights were too disparate. In one hand was a clutched flute while the other latched limply about his throat. Nestled just beneath the knife—Amber’s knife—that had been thrust through his throat. Shiny blood beading around the imprecise and all too sharp plug.

“My death has been greatly exaggerated.”

From how Toby and the girls looked, they were as surprised as me. The girl in black stomped her foot. Her voice high and nasally as she cried at the unfairness of it all.

“Don’t any of you stay dead?” she asked.

“All of us would,” I said, “if you weren’t bad at fighting.”

“Oh shut up, you believed we killed her too.”

“Really, Temple?” Amber asked. “Were you driven mad in grief at my apparent demise?”

“She was,” Toby said.

“Shut up, Toby,” I said. “Amber, I was not ready to say goodbye. So they had to pay for taking what belonged to me.”

“She belongs to you?” Melissa asked.

“Are you all in one polycule together?” Toby asked.

“Toby, shut up before I rip out your vocal cords with my second inner jaw,” Melissa yelled.

Lupe laughed at everything. We’d come out on top, so why not laugh. So I joined in, and let my spirit clench and release in relief. Melissa’s own laughter came out as a bassy purr that teased the bones. None of us died.

“You’re going to go out there and give up,” Amber said, “or I pull this knife from his neck and get to painting the floor.”

Toby said, “You wouldn’t kill him.”

“Seeing as you all tried very hard to kill me,” Amber said, “I might just slip.”

She carefully took the knife between two fingers. Pulled it slowly from his neck. Beads of blood became red rivulets down his throat beneath his thick jacket.

“Shut up Toby,” the smaller summoner said.

Amber stopped the knife.

Melissa said, “Amber, we won.”

“We did, princess, so now I’m negotiating their surrender.”

“We will. All of us.Just tell me, how’d you not die.”

“Easy, I wasn’t the one you ‘killed’. Nahey, if you will,” Amber said.

From an empty space in the room, another Amber—the wounded one with dead lips and skewered by swords—entered from between the curtains. A brightness returned to the mimic’s eyes as it gave a polite parade leader wave at all of us, its audience. Then it fell apart. Collapsing like a tower of sand before becoming a flock of butterflies—Nahey.

The swords dispersed into stardust and nothingness. While the girl in black stumbled backward in complete terror. She leveled an accusatory finger at Amber.

“She’s a liar,” she screamed. “She’ll kill us all.”

“Wren, don’t move.”

“I’m not letting her touch me.”

The girl in black—Wren—swiveled on her foot and ran off between the curtains. None of us were quick enough to stop her. Toby and the small girl looked to Amber and their friend on the edge of death—who by process of elimination was probably Shenshen. Amber scoffed and dropped him from her grip. Then stepped between the curtains herself.

They flitted into the world and back to that hidden place beneath. Their footsteps pounded on the balcony above us. We whirled around just in time to hear them pad across the clover lawn out front. I sprinted out the front door with Sphinx hot on my heels to see Amber drop from nearly twenty feet in the air. The last thing to appear being her hand as both her middle fingers had hooked into the girl’s eyes like one would a bowling ball. Amber, however, treated her head more like a football as she launched her down into the ground.

It was likely because of the clover making the soil soft that she bounced back up. Amber by then had landed. Her foot extended toward the sky like an executioner’s axe before she swung it down, catching the girl in the stomach with her heel. Sphinx crossed in front of me, a bulwark against the pressure wave that spread across the lawn shattering the glass of the facility’s windows and the lamps above the its lawn.

My mouth fell into a scowl as I crossed around Sphinx to discover the crater that Amber and pushed Wren into—used her to create. Another knife was held in Amber’s hand as she menaced questions into the air with its point.

“Out with it,” she said. “Who trained you? The Holly Stars, the North-East Conservatory, or was it just some wandering improv junkie?”

“Amber,” I said.

“Not now, Temple.”

“Is this one of your secrets?”

“Maybe, but it’s none of your business.”

“Shame. You’re still having this in front of me. Can’t help but be my business.”

Amber pushed her back. Calming her raspberry locs into an orderly formation. Shame that same calm did nothing to quench the flames in her eyes. A point in my favor then that I was already on fire, and that look which burned me only days ago could do nothing to me right now.

“Help,” Wren said, “she’ll kill me.”

I sighed, “No she won’t.”

Amber looked about in search of some other woman named Amber. Then glanced at me with her eyebrow raised on stilts of incredulity.

“You aren’t talking about me,” she said. “I am going to kill her. Right after she tells me who taught her.”

“You can get the info, but you’re not killing her.”

Amber said to Wren, “Stay here.”

She drew a second knife from her storage-spell and tossed the two of them through Wren’s hands, crucifying her against the earth. Amber kicked off the ground in one leap out of the crater. Met me there at its edge and towered over me. Her eyes an incinerator of problems.

“She’s dying, Temple.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you that,” she said.

“Sounds like trouble we don’t want,” Sphinx said.

“You know, only Temple’s the cute one here.”

“Still,” I said, “you said if someone doesn’t want to tell you it’s trouble you don’t want. So I don’t want it. She lives.”

“Temple—”

“Do you kill for me?” I asked.

The flame in Amber’s eyes dimmed so she might actually see the steel of my own expression.

“Of course,” she said, pushing bounce into her voice.

“Then I say, she’s not in my way. Which means?”

“I can’t kill her,” Amber said. “Oh, is junior watching or something? Trying to be the moralist despite having already wracked up a body count yourself?”

“Heel, Amber.”

My spirit flexed, unfurling more fire like a flag snapping in the wind. A pronouncement that illuminated the lawn in a small circle about us. Amber’s eyes softened at the sight of my determination and the flame which wound about my body like a raiment. Her fire snuffed. Then a mirth and a sparkle lit up her eyes as a smile twisted across her face. Gooey like an overfilled bun being squeezed until death.

Amber moaned, “Maybe you’re more of a top than I thought, Temple. Still, let’s hope you can handle holding onto my leash.”

She leaped over the lip of the crater. Slid down its side where Wren remained pinned. Amber snatched the veil from her face. Exerted a field-spell over it as she crumpled it between her fingers returning it to a cloud of ebon dust. She inhaled the dust. Smirked, and leaned back over Wren as she met her crying face.

“Hmph, the North-East Conservatory,” she said. “Thought you were hiding something new. Could’ve saved yourself the trouble you idiot.”

She cracked her foot against Wren’s ribs. Then raised her hands in mock apology as she evacuated the crater to return to the building.

Once Sphinx and I had freed Wren—because Amber “forgot” to remove her knives—we’d set about binding the retrieval team using the binding suits that Amber apparently had in her storage-spell. They were like Undersuits—made of a repelling conweave—but not as bulky. Their tightness somewhere closer to a full-body straitjacket. While the repelling portion was internal rather than external so it could trap any magic used within the suit rather than letting any out—ironically, the reason why one could cast in an Undersuit but not risk suffering overexposure.

After we locked the zipper and clasps on Toby, Sphinx took the cable—also courtesy of Amber—into her mouth to fly and hang him from the rig we’d set up onto the many tall lamps illuminating the lawn. Shenshen and Wren were already hanging from their own. I had the fourth suit over my shoulder as I approached the smaller girl.

“I wouldn’t put me in that if I were you,” she said.

“It’s a part of the terms of your surrender,” I said. Amber had added more after Wren’s attempt to flee.

“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t want to remove my seal from you without knowing for sure it won’t kill you.”

“Are we still on this?” I asked.

“I’ve never left it,” she said. “You might think we ‘suck,’ but I passed the prelims. I’m not a bad summoner, and you’re not that great of one either.”

“And what does this have to do with worrying about if I’ll die?”

“You don’t know how Suppression works,” she said. “Most of our seals target something specific. While our spells employ a form of Suppression on the subject. When I fight summoners I use the one seal I know can apply to all of them while I try to find a better fit.”

“Which is?”

“Their humanity. When I incanted your death it should’ve Suppressed all your organ functions. Seeing as I watched you—albeit not fully—die, it worked. And I shoved the seal in as far as I could go.”

“Lupe’s song revived me. Stop trying to get out of wearing the suit.”

She rose to her feet. “I’m the diva of the Goetic Enclave, a collective North of Moontower. Kid, I’m a Baron. My seals are tight enough to keep out a soldier’s spellsong, and even if they weren’t I can monitor what slips past easily. So trust me when I say, none of her magic touched your organs. Can you even feel them?”

My throat was dry. I pressed my hand over my heart as I made a mocking smile. Of course I—couldn’t? There was no beat in my chest against my breast.

“Did you even notice that your musculature is visible in the flames right now?”

I examined my arm and saw the damascus pattern of my metal spirit flesh overlaid atop its corporeal counterpart. The fight was over and now was the time of mortal clarity.

“You’re a tower of blocks right now,” she said, “and we don’t know which are load-bearing.”

“You won’t wear the suit then,” I said.

I glanced to the rest of my team yelling for a secretary to show up. Toby was yelling with them.

I said to the diva, “Then why am I standing?”

“A mystery of magic,” she said. “I’d love to find out, but far as I can tell the girl may not have worked open my seal but she unplugged something that brought up that power of yours. Or maybe I’m wrong. Hard to think when my brain is yelling that the arm—which I no longer have—is itchy.”

The girl walked off yelling for a secretary as well. Eventually one showed up as we all remembered they were even present. Their outfit hidden beneath a black capelet with golden buttons embossed with the sun over the Brightgate’s ancient bridge.

“Now that all parties are unanimous. Let’s go over the forms.”

A stack of papers materialized in their hands with a pen on top. Melissa loped over toward me where I loitered within the beam of light that stretched like a luminescent tongue from within the building.

“You okay?” she asked.

“You heard?”

“The ‘diva of the Goetic Enclave’ is kind of loud. Especially when you have super-hearing from mutating your ears to pick up a broader spectrum of sound at a farther distance.”

“Fair enough. And, right now I don’t know. I think I’ll be fine, but it’s why we need this damn secretary to show up. Once they formally give up we can go home and I’ll get checked out. Besides, I’m not going anywhere until I get some well-earned praise.”

“Hmph,” she said. “My girlfriend or fiancee would get praise for nothing. I don’t know about you.”

“Please, I kept my promise. I didn’t rush off and kill anyone. Technically, I even kept Amber from killing anyone. Everyone lived, can I at least get some praise for that?”

“Nadia, people should usually live.”

Her ears—triangular as a junk’s sails—swiveled.

“Usually, but don’t. Please, I could kind of use a hug right now.”

“No!”

My heart—if it was beating—would’ve skipped and shattered against the ground at her refusal. Instead my eyes only widened as she raced towards me. Her body morphing back into its chimeric form as fast as it could go. She leaped. Grasped my shoulders and turned me until her back was to the distant woods.

Plsssh. Eyes barely peeking over Melissa’s pronounced trapezius, I saw the secretary’s head blow apart like a bat taken to a melon. The retrieval team screamed. Lupe shouted. Amber pushed her back toward the building for cover.

Pwack! I felt a thud, but didn’t burn with the pain of a new wound. Instead I felt the sudden weight of a chimeric Melissa slump against me. Sphinx tugged my shirt and helped me drag Melissa back inside as well.

Free from the doorway I laid her down on her front. She’d grown layered ceramic plates across her back like some mutated armadillo. They were shattered by a spider web of cracks around the sniper bullet that had gored her shoulder into a mess of churned meat.

“Amber, she’s hit!”