by D K Girl
‘Don’t fight it,’ Cym hissed into her ear. Each word a new flame. A new searing horror. ‘Let go and it will not pain you. Let it take you.’
Tamas stepped in front of her. Blake kicked out. Or, at least, tried to lash out. A straightforward enough movement in her head, but there was no response from her body. Liquid flowed down her face, cool against her blazing skin.
‘Where did you send them, Blake?’ Tamas stood with his hands clasped behind his back, regarding her the same way he had the garden. ‘This can be over very quickly.’
The words forming at the back of her throat ran along the lines of fuck off. But what fell from her mouth was far worse.
‘Melgrove,’ she screamed. ‘I sent them to Melgrove, cabins on the north side of town. We were all supposed to go for Kira’s twenty-first birthday, and I never showed. I was here. I hate myself for that.’ It was a horrifying torrent pouring from her, dragging her far too close to what she sought to hide. Blake’s scream tore at her vocal chords, and in desperation she reached for one undeniable truth. ‘But that was nothing, compared to what she did. She took him away from us. It was her fault, not mine. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there. I was never there. I am never there. But it was not my fault. She killed him. Not me.’
Blake rocked back against Cym, damning them all to silent hell. Whatever serum Cym had injected her with, it plucked almost all of the truth out of her, like a crow on a carcass. The shouting match she’d had with Kira, the fury in her sister’s voice as she demanded to know why Blake was cancelling on them again, had rung in her head for three years.
‘Can you contact her, Blake?’
‘No. No. I can’t. She’s alone. I’ve left her all alone. But I couldn’t . . . I just can’t . . . I can’t stand to look at her sometimes. She looks just like them. Like them both. And I miss them so much. But they would hate . . . hate me . . . my mother would hate what I’ve done. I’ve left her all alone.’
Razors, each and every word, bursting out of the black space she’d hidden them in, filling her mouth. She screamed. The sound rose up out of her diaphragm and engulfed her. Hands clamped around her face. Someone was shouting, their words muffled beneath the weight of the terrible cries jackhammering her ribs. A sting at her elbow and her mouth clamped closed. Blake slumped against Cym. The Syranian wrapped his long limbs tightly around her, muttering soft reassurances against the back of her head.
Tamas crouched on his knees by the window. With one hand pressed to the glass, he rose to unsteady feet. ‘We are done. I will inform the captain. Take the time you need, tidy her up. Get her back on her feet.’ Tamas moved as though to approach, but reconsidered and stopped in the middle of the space dividing them. Blake blinked through the tears that still fell unbidden. If not for Cym’s support, she would slither to the floor, her legs jelly.
‘We have become so much more than we’ve ever been, Blake.’ Tamas echoed his earlier words. ‘I want you to truly see that. You’ll finish what you’ve started. I need you to . . . you will be there at the Final Meld. You are the Technician, and your expertise will be required. What becomes of you after that, I can’t say. You’ve taken that out of my hands, but you will fill your role at the Meld. You will do it. If you don’t want Kira hurt, you’ll do it.’
Blake fought to place her lips around a reply. Tamas was halfway out the door when she finally managed to slur a response.
‘We are less than . . . we’ve . . . ever . . . been.’
Kira - 16
Kira’s head was full of questions, and her bladder full of champagne. If Leona-the-bubble-wonder drove over another pothole, chances were the newspapers and magazines filling the footwells of the car were going to get a soaking. The baby-blue Datsun station wagon’s suspension was nonexistent. And, judging by the way Kira’s butt sagged into the crease between the backrest and the cushion, so were the springs in the back seat. Az rested his feet on a pile of old papers so high it raised his knees above his waist. He clutched the seat in front, which, considering the snail’s pace they drove at, seemed overly cautious.
‘Where exactly are we going?’ Kira asked for the third time in about as many minutes.
Leona had spent the better part of the drive trying to get a word out of the kid with the terrible bowl cut. But Vail wasn’t talking. At least he wasn’t bawling his eyes out and dribbling words anymore. There was a little damp patch just above Kira’s left boob where the kid had huddled against her all the way down to the car. He was taller than Kira, which meant he’d kind of hunched over her. Couldn’t have been great for his neck but it had taken a few tugs to get him to let her go when they’d reached the car. His pockets jingled as he moved. Each one seemed to be full of coins. All the way down in the elevator he’d kept babbling about something called ‘workings’. His workings had been too strong. They had never been too strong before apparently. He hadn’t meant to hurt her.
The girl, not Kira.
Well, his fault or not, the girl who’d hurtled out the window was dead as a fucking dodo. Kira twisted in her seat, staring out over the flat back of the wagon. It was filled with crap, too: papers, boxes, a pair of hiking boots, a few folding chairs, a couple of bundles of sticks, an empty fish tank. Great. They were on the run with the world’s greatest car hoarder. Something smelled weird, like burnt Christmas cake. No one liked fruit cake, especially in a car with no air-con. This day was just getting better and better. Kira peered over the piled-up junk to the road behind them. If she saw flashing lights, she really was going to piss herself.
‘We’re not being followed.’ Leona said. ‘No one will recall us, not for a little while.’
‘You sound pretty sure.’
‘I am more than pretty sure,’ Leona sniffed. ‘It’s not my first indifference incantation, girl.’
It wasn’t her first missed gear change, either. The crunch sounded like a metal alligator taking a bite out of the engine. One more of those babies and this pile of shit would give it up. This crazy bitch ain’t driving us any further, the car would say in Car-talk-ese. Wow. Kira blinked – she was tired.
Crunch, screech, fucking crunch.
‘Jesus, you’re killing this thing, lady,’ Kira said.
‘Would you like to drive?’
‘No. No I wouldn’t.’ Few things in life were certain. Kira not ever getting behind a wheel again sure as fuck was.
‘What’s your name, girl?’ Leona stared straight ahead, keeping an all-too-polite distance from the car in front.
‘Kira.’ Shit. So much for super-undercover secret squirrel.
‘Well, Kira, I’d like you to shut your ungrateful mouth if you wouldn’t mind.’
Kira considered using her ungrateful mouth to tell the tan queen where to shove it. But quickly decided against it. Whatever that bullshit was back at the hotel, Tan Queen and Bowl-cut boy might have just saved her ass.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘But can this ungrateful mouth ask you where we’re going?’
‘It can, but I don’t have any answer. Didn’t exactly plan on this.’
‘You and me both, sister,’ Kira said.
Sister.
Blake.
Jesus. Now that was a call Kira didn’t want to make. And right now, it was a call she couldn’t make. Kira sat upright, patting at the obviously empty pockets on her body-hugging pants. No credit card, no phone. Most naked she’d ever been.
‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘Does anyone have a phone?’
‘Vail does but it’s no use to you now, I’m afraid,’ Leona declared with far too much perkiness. ‘Not with the level of workings in that room. Fried the circuits. I think I saw smoke rising from the back of that television. Did you not notice that we had blessed silence in the end? No more dreadful advertisements.’
Kira rested back against the seat. ‘Nope, was kind of busy.’
Up ahead, the traffic light shifted to orange. Leona could have floored it and gotten through without much fanfare. Nope. She brought the car to a neat stop
and pulled on the handbrake. This was not how dramatic getaways rolled in the movies. The smell of burnt herbs, cinnamon maybe, niggled at the inside of Kira’s nose. In the ashtray between the driver and passenger, there was a small clump of sticks tied with a fine red string.
‘You know what,’ Kira said, ‘I really think we should get out.’
The woman regarded her in the rearview, her eyes partly hidden behind wayward strands of stark-white hair.
‘Oh, okay then,’ Leona said. ‘So you’re fine with being strangled again by possession spirits? Because they will come for him.’
Kira eyeballed her back. ‘I’m asking you nicely to let us out.’
‘I’m asking you nicely if you have the faintest idea that you’re walking around with a bright one.’
The light flicked to green, but Leona didn’t press the accelerator. The car behind did one of those polite but clear move-the-fuck-on toots of its horn.
‘No need to be a sarcastic bitch,’ Kira said. ‘Az is just a little slow.’
Kira didn’t like it. Didn’t like it at all, the way Leona stared at Az every time she had a chance. Azrael was oblivious. He was still in some kind of mute mode. Hadn’t uttered a single word since they’d gotten in the car. Maybe he was still drunk. Or maybe he felt like she did. Like someone had just thrown her into a screwed-up reality game show with a fucked-up premise – Roll up, roll up, get nearly deaded, watch someone die, run away and hope like a motherfucker no one saw you.
‘You can’t see him at all, can you?’ Leona interrupted Kira’s game-show storyboarding. ‘He’s as bright as the sun, girl, and you have no clue at all.’
Another less polite toot from behind and Leona shifted into gear and pulled the car out into the intersection.
‘I can see him just fine.’ Kira pressed a hand to her belly. ‘Look, I’d really like to get off the crazy bus now.’
Car sickness wasn’t a problem. Not normally. But Kira’s insides weren’t behaving. A crack in the vinyl seat poked at her ass no matter where she shifted, and she was pretty sure she’d pissed her pants a little. She glanced down at herself. And sighed. Realising for the first time since bolting that she didn’t have the faux skin on her arm. Armadillo was plain for all to see. Way to go incognito. At least the prosthetic didn’t seem to ring any bells for these two.
‘Say I let you out here, just drop you off at the nearest Taco Bell. Then what?’ A toss of white hair, a bob of cheap plastic hair clips. ‘You weren’t doing so well dealing with the supermundanes back there. I’m guessing that whoever you are, you don’t know any wardings or incantations.’
‘There was nothing super about those crazy fucking cows. And I have the only incantation I need.’ Access to the Facility. That vapid concrete hell seemed like fucking heaven right now.
‘Ah, but we can offer you the protection of the Maiden. Something I very much believe you are going to need.’
So the woman thought of herself as some kind of killer bubble-blowing witch. Maybe one of the long sticks in the back was her broom. Happy days.
‘Definitely time for us to leave you.’ Kira grabbed the door handle, intending to rattle it. The handle came free in her hand. ‘You’re fucking kidding me. Stop the damn car. Now.’
Vail chose then to show signs of life. He turned in his seat to face her, eyes red-rimmed from crying, the end of his nose damp and glistening with snot.
‘Kira, it’s okay. We mean well,’ he said. ‘Let us help you. I’m not sure you know what’s around you, what those things were.’
His own internal memory of ‘those things’ seemed to jab at him. He flinched, pale as all hell. And Kira couldn’t bring herself to tell him what she really thought of his offer to help. It would be like yelling at a teddy bear. And the kid had had a fucking awful day. But she was tired of this party. She wanted to go home. Surely this wasn’t what Blake had in mind. Death while babysitting?
Taking a breath, Kira focused on Vail. ‘I have somewhere I can go. Somewhere they can deal with this. So thank you, for whatever you did back there, but we need to go.’
She needed to pee like a racehorse. Needed a drink right after that. Azrael shifted beside her, trying to find more space for his feet amongst the papers. Kira glanced at him, about to ask him what his problem was when a flash of black caught her eye. Small, fast, and down near her foot.
‘Rat, a fucking rat.’ Kira hurled herself back in her seat, pushing her butt towards the door. With the jerk of her body weight against it, the handleless door decided to open.
‘Fucking Jesus!’ Kira yelled.
Magazines and newspaper spilled out onto the road.
‘Pull over, Leona. Pull over!’ Vail shouted.
She shouted right back. ‘I’m not blind!’
Someone grabbed Kira’s flailing arm and pulled. Hard. She slid across the cracked vinyl seat as if it were covered in oil, colliding with Azrael. The dude might as well have been a brick wall. Leona jerked the car to a stop.
‘What was all that about?’ she demanded.
‘Your car is shit.’ Kira pulled away from Azrael’s grip, kicking at the junk in the footwell. ‘And it’s got rats.’
‘You bloody stupid girl,’ Leona glared. ‘There are no rats in this car.’
‘I saw a fu . . .’ Kira froze.
Leona was right. There were no rats. But there was something. Perched on Azrael’s knee. A blob of ugly orange and black.
‘Lizard. Fucking lizard. Get it off him.’ Kira waved her hands near it, not about to try to touch the thing.
‘Bradley,’ Leona exclaimed, ‘for all the Maiden’s braids, what are you doing here?’
The little critter was tiny, but Kira’d seen the way geckoes at the Facility moved. So fucking quick. You had no clue where the little bastards were going. Up your jeans, or under your bedsheets, maybe even into your earhole during the night. Kira shuddered. Disgusting. And this one looked like it had dressed up for Halloween. The folds of skin on its head gave it the look of a mini Triceratops. Its body was pitch black, save for a strip of orange down the centre of its back, flanked by two lines of paler orange dots. Eyes like lumps of coal. It stared up at Azrael, ignoring Kira’s fluttering fingers completely.
‘Don’t touch it, Az. Some of these fuckers are poisonous,’ Kira said.
And apparently hypnotising. Az stared at the thing. And the thing stared back.
Vail threw his door open and raced around to open the door alongside Azrael.
‘Bradley? Are you okay?’ he said.
The reptile turned its bulbous head and bulgy eyes and flicked a pink tongue towards the boy before turning back to Azrael, who tilted his head in mimicry. Thankfully, his tongue stayed in his mouth. He used it instead to speak.
‘What is this?’
For whatever bizarre reason, it still gave her a buzz, hearing his voice. Like a proud mumma with a two-year-old. Leona’s drawn-on eyebrows lifted. ‘So you have a voice.’
‘It’s just a lizard, Az,’ Kira said. ‘It’s not going to hurt you.’
‘No. It is not.’ Azrael’s lips did a weird snaking thing. He just wasn’t nailing the smiling thing.
Vail crouched down beside the car. ‘Bradley is a Tylototriton anguliceps, a newt. Extremely rare. But he is supposed to be in his tank in the lounge room at home. What’s going on, little guy?’
The little guy, all twenty or so centimetres of him, let out a squeaky bark, like an especially tiny chihuahua, and scurried across Azrael’s lap.
‘Shit, it’s moving.’ Kira pushed herself across the vinyl. ‘I’m out.’
But Bradley the newt had no interest in her. Or Azrael. It leapt towards the boy, landing in Vail’s outstretched hand. He whispered to the slimy reptile before placing it on his shoulder. Kira stepped out of the car, blinking. Damn it was bright. The metal of her arm did its usual thing; soaking in the sunlight, turning the glow into something flat and matte. She used the armadillo to shade her eyes and try to get some idea of where
they were. Leona had parked them in a car park, disused if the weed-infested cracks were anything to go by.
‘Az, get out of the car,’ she said. ‘We need to go. Leona, thanks for helping us not die back there. We’ll catch you guys later. Az –’ She turned. He was right there, blocking the light. ‘Shit, Az –’
He took her hand. Metal hand. Kira sucked in her breath. Bracing. But it was gentler this time. A subtle jolt, a rush of all things prickly and nice, a hum that turned her to mushy, tingly jelly. She wondered briefly if her bladder would hold out, then her thoughts were all Azrael. Not sentences or even words, nothing so pronounced. It was all just understanding, certainty, like knowing that you wanted chocolate over caramel.
He wasn’t going to leave.
He was frightened.
No. Kira frowned. A different kind of scared. Not like he’d been about the Facility. This time he was frightened of loss. Kira sighed against the gooeyness. Hard to focus when your whole body tingled like it was about to come. Losing what? She didn’t know how this worked, but maybe if she threw out a thought, he’d throw something back.
Stay.
Clear as a bell.
Stay.
Azrael wanted to stay with these weirdos. And his desperation made her chest ache. Lost.
The ‘bright one’ was so damn lost the backs of her eyes prickled with tears.
‘Oh Jesus.’ Kira pulled her hand free. Screw that shit. She drew the line at tears. Kira cradled the armadillo against her chest.
Azrael stayed right where he was. Too damn close. Watching her the way a dog did when you had a bone in your hand. Leona and Vail weren’t much better. Eyes wide. Mouths open. Like she’d actually just fucked Az in the middle of the abandoned car park.
