by M F Sullivan
“They’ve got it pretty close. Have you seen the Dining Car?”
“No, not yet—I came straight here! I wanted to see you. Oh, Ninny, Daddy told me about your eye, and I’m sorry. Does it hurt?”
“No, it doesn’t hurt, it’s fine. Look—you want to go to the Dining Car with me? Maybe we can have a bite to eat? Nothing real, but—”
“I can’t, Ninny. I’ve come to deliver an important message and then hurry off posthaste: I don’t have much time to dally.”
Snorting, Dominia glanced down at Basil. “Can’t let you out for too long; you might start getting ideas.”
“Ideas like yours! But Daddy sent me to say that he wants you to come home, Ninny. And so do I.” Lavinia threw the pout of a twelve-year-old, rather than the solemn expression of a near-centennial Princess as worn for official broadcasts. “I miss you. I was so scared when I thought something had happened to you. And whatever’s gone on with your hair?”
“People were going to recognize me.”
“Well, yes, but you wouldn’t have to worry about people recognizing you if you’d come home. I’ve never seen you without your long hair, how funny! You’d make a pretty boy, if you were a boy.”
Trying not to cast any anxious glances down the hall where Miki was blessedly silent, Dominia laughed in as normal a manner as she managed. “Thanks, I guess. I kind of like it. But I can’t go home. Not after what he did to Cassandra.”
“Daddy didn’t do anything to her! Why would you say that?”
“You don’t know what happened.”
“She was such a dreary lady.” Lavinia sighed at the thought, as oblivious to the sting as any child. “I always heard she made an awful fuss about being a martyr, even though she chose it! She was nice enough, I suppose, but since her baby died, after all, I mean—the whole thing was pointless, wasn’t it? Holding on to that for ninety years…weren’t you enough for her? And now she’s causing you so much grief. Why don’t you meet a nice, new girl? A proper martyr?”
She wasn’t going to get angry. She had to maintain reason. The girl didn’t understand. How could the Eternal Virgin of Europa understand anything about love? “It wasn’t pointless, Lavinia.” A thousand kisses and sighs and touches and smiles and lazy evenings and good nights and bad nights and seeing her there, asleep. “There’s so much I would never trade, even for all the pain. The pain was worth it.”
“If the pain was worth it, you wouldn’t have run away clinging to the false hope some liar put into your head.”
Was it worth trying to convince her that the Hierophant had sent René, and had therefore been the one to tempt her into running away? “If the hope is false, then what does the Hierophant want with Lazarus? He could have killed René and me in the Front—but he didn’t.”
“Of course he didn’t. Did you see his broadcast? He’s been so sad, Dominia, he barely eats or sleeps. He looks so tired. I hate everyone fighting like this. Aren’t we supposed to get along? We’re a family.”
“Families fight.”
“They don’t have to!” Optimistic Lavinia’s perception of family life had always been half what the Hierophant told her and half what she selectively gleaned from books, preferring ancient works like the exhausting Anne of Green Gables while ignoring Anna Karenina. “Families can be happy.”
“Or deeply unhappy.”
Frowning, an unpracticed expression on her gentle face, Lavinia looked like she was beginning to understand something long hidden. “Are you unhappy, Ninny? Don’t you love us?”
Dangerous territory. “I love you, Lavinia. Isn’t that enough? Look: part of the reason I left is because of the way he treats you.”
“What—Daddy? He spoils me! I don’t know what you mean, ‘the way he treats me.’”
“Keeping you like…this.” Dominia waved a helpless hand without finding a word gentle enough. Nonetheless, Lavinia’s face fell further. “Not that there’s anything wrong with you! You’re a sweet girl, but it’s the way he—shelters you, and denies you so much of your own life. You must see that sometimes.”
“If I wanted to go into the world, I’d go. I don’t because our cities”—she lowered her voice—“well, a place like Denmark, Old Elsinore—it’s safe for me, isn’t it? Instead of doing something like this.”
“I didn’t say you had to take the fu—fudging Light Rail your first time out on your own. Just, you know, try living your own life. Away from him, and Cicero. You like our cities, so get an apartment in New Elsinore in the Front and live like one of the young poets there; Brooklyn’s a nice neighborhood. Or hang out in your duchy! I lived an anonymous life in Canada for about twenty years…didn’t talk to anybody from the Family until the final years of the South American Conflict.” She relished the thought. “What a nice vacation.”
“I couldn’t do that! I love Daddy and Cicero. And what about the Lamb? Why do you act like they’re such horrible people? All they’ve done for you! Given you!” It was like listening to a feminine clone of the Hierophant. Dominia shut off in a way so visceral that Lavinia noticed; she changed tack, and her features softened. “I know you’re sad for Cassandra, but—”
“Please: I think you’ve done enough damage there. I’m not coming home.”
The girl’s tone dropped to a note of warning. “You really want more people to die?”
“It’s them or me,” she said with a pathetic attempt at a smile. Her little sister didn’t find that funny, from the looks of it, and official worry vibrated in Dominia’s skull. There were other reasons why the Hierophant kept Lavinia away from the world—why she was a walking, talking, singing argument against unregistered martyrings and the martyring of adults, the latter being ironic since she was found as a baby. But because she awoke as an adult, and had, in a vague and technical way, the right to an adult’s agency, she served as paradoxical warning for both cases in one person. Dominia glanced at Miki, who briefly appeared down the hall, now dressed in a chic suit and looking as mundane a professional as anybody else on the train. Though Lavinia’s head turned with the sound of movement, Dominia stepped closer to distract her sister by taking up her hand.
“I don’t want anyone to die, Lavinia. I don’t want to be doing this. You think I wanted to upend my life? Lose my position and power, everything I had? I wrestled with the choice to leave. But the best choice for me—the healthiest choice—was to leave.”
“Daddy said some scummy human offered you a deal.”
“Because the Hierophant sent him,” insisted Dominia at last, in fruitless—and fatal—agitation. As predicted, Lavinia looked offended by the notion. Once, she stomped her foot. Twice, she tapped it. Horror filled Dominia and she scrambled to placate the girl. “But he only sent René because—because—”
“Daddy would never send some gross creep to trick you.” The tapping of her foot became the beat of a metronome. Miki, who had continued peeking (with what she must have thought to be subtlety) from the bedroom, began to move her foot to the rhythm. Everything was lost if Dominia didn’t calm her sister down. Was it possible to escape from a train in a hyperloop tunnel alive? How about with a dog under one arm and a prostitute under the other? That was, assuming said possessed prostitute survived. Lavinia insisted something about the Hierophant’s integrity, and Dominia, fear-deafened, forced herself to tune back in as Lavinia said, “And that’s why Daddy sent me. Because he was worried about you, and sad that you let some human tempt you off the righteous path.”
“I don’t think there is a righteous path,” the General suggested. Her sister sniffed.
“I’m sorry you’re depressed, Ninny. But when we get you home, you can see a doctor! Cicero will help you. He gives me pills to help me sleep all the time!”
Gritting her teeth, Dominia let slip, “If I never see Cicero again, it will be too soon,” which darkened Lavinia’s face more than even aspersions against the Hierophant.
“I guess you’d rather hang out with your garbage friends like René and t
he prostitute. Is she here?” Now graceless as a bossy toddler, Lavinia shoved Dominia aside with a shocking amount of force. Before the dog even barked, the martyr strolled around the corner, her steps marching to the beat she’d tapped: the beat that possessed Miki, whose knee and hip now wiggled with the pace, and whose expression brightened without regard for the threat represented as Lavinia appeared, cheery as ever, her own body moving to a silent dance.
“There you are! Do you know who I am?”
“Lavinia di Forenzzi,” said Miki, unable to stop smiling or, for that matter, dial back the way her legs moved her into the hall. “The Duchess of Florence and the Princess of Europa and like twenty other things, too, right? Do you know what humans call you? Satan’s Pet.”
“Daddy’s not Satan.” Lavinia cheesily mimed tossing a lasso to the inaudible beat, which caused Miki to mime being pulled toward the martyr. “What’s your name?”
“Miki Soto.” The prostituted came to a stop in which she danced, hips and shoulders and chest wiggling in time with the moves of the martyr.
“Do you like to dance, Miki?”
“When I choose.”
Giggling in that soft, condescending way, Lavinia said, “Nobody chooses to do anything, Miki! You didn’t choose to be born. You didn’t choose the life you’ve lived. And you don’t get to choose how you die, either.”
“I’ll never die.” Miki laughed, inappropriately gay, given the circumstances, but unable to help herself when her extremities forced her to do the hustle. “Ishtar will protect me.”
Lavinia’s pupils shrank with alarming speed while Dominia asked the dog, “Can’t you do something?”
“That’s a dirty word.” Lavinia’s dancing stopped, but her foot-tapping continued as Miki wiggled past, bent to the martyr’s will. “You shouldn’t say words like that. If you do, your tongue will fall out.”
“Ishtar, Ishtar, Ishtar,” repeated the prostitute, singing it to the sound of the beat until Lavinia gave a murderous banshee cry of distaste. After a few more inaudible bars, Miki lifted her hand to her own wide-eyed mouth and stuck out her tongue while saying around it, “No, wait!”
Before Miki began yanking out her own tongue, Dominia was upon her, martyr hands clamping down on delicate wrists and then, with profanity, dropping away to hold the human’s jaw as it shut to gnaw the organ off.
“I don’t ever want to hear you say that word again.” Lavinia’s face was a mask of porcelain fury. “I don’t ever want to hear you speak again! Ninny, what dirty friends you keep!”
While Miki and Dominia wrestled with Miki’s body and Lavinia ranted over the whining of the dog, the General tried to think of a way to solve the problem. The high priority of keeping mass hysteria under control struck Dominia when the front door slid open. An oblivious porter, reading off his paperwork, stepped into the foyer.
“So sorry to disturb, but I was sent to tell you that we are almost to—”
He had looked up: his eyes landed on the struggling women, then on the one who watched. Dominia could only cry, “No!” as Lavinia, with her sunshiny grin, kept up the tapping of her heels and lifted her hands to clap in time. The porter, weaker than Miki and requiring much less exposure to fall under Lavinia’s so-called spell, dropped his papers to clap with her.
“This is going to be so fun! I wish we had music— I’ll call Cicero! He should be in the engineer’s cab by now, I bet he can do it!”
This month was getting worse all the time. The porter danced back to the train car’s hallway and Dominia knew what happened out there. It had happened a few times before, albeit in isolated human villages, and mostly when Lavinia, just awoken, dealt with emotions in a (partially) conscious way for the first time. The effects of her powers had been reported as “outbreaks of mass hysteria, delusion, and paranoia,” and cited as examples of the human brain’s capacity to be controlled by others. More alarmingly, some (Cicero) interpreted it as evidence of the human’s implicit desire for relief from self-control. An almost fair assessment, as the effects of Lavinia’s powers always seemed at first glance to be fun.
Laughter was a common effect. A whole village, starting with one person, would burst into hilarious uproar. The first man’s neighbor would catch it; and that neighbor’s kids and wife would crack up at that; that wife inevitably laughed all the way to the market; and in a matter of no time, every man, woman, and child in town rolled on the floor, asphyxiated by guffaws of sourceless amusement. Dominia and her Family pieced together the cause not that first time, when Lavinia had herself first descended into hysterics as an amazed messenger fell from his bicycle and into the mud on seeing the Holy Family. Rather, it was the second instance that had clarified Lavinia’s influence over the human nervous system. As now, she had caused a different village of humans to forego their jobs and lives for the pleasure of a spontaneous, seemingly choreographed dance, which did not stop until everyone in town dropped dead of exhaustion several days later.
Those were the charming instances. The zany, wacky ones that made every girl on Earth think Lavinia’s life was a fairy-tale adventure. When Dominia thought about the sheer number of sharp objects in the Dining Car, let alone all the candles for mood lighting, electrical outlets, and countless other means of death…she grimaced as Miki’s body tried gnawing off the General’s fingers to get to the tongue that was its target.
“Don’t bite me! If you swallow my blood, you’ll end up one of us.”
Incoherent with her mouth full, Miki insisted something to the effect of, “I’m not trying to,” then gagged as the suite loudspeakers crackled with a catchy human pop song. Lavinia bounced in place and clapped her hands the way most ill-informed children might on seeing her.
“He heard me, Cicero heard me! Yay!”
Caught up in her own excitement at the possibility of seeing a dance number just for her, Lavinia charged through the front door of the suite and made an immediate right for the Dining Car.
Was it appropriate to thank Cicero for anything, let alone this? She was tempted. Dominia took a breath and, with a free hand, slipped off the belt stolen from René. Through a quick apology and a bevy of protests, the martyr gagged Miki—not to keep her quiet, though that was sort of a bonus. Rather, with the belt angled between her teeth and buckled in the back of her head, she couldn’t bite off her tongue. When her hands lifted to undo Dominia’s work, the General took the human’s wrists, dragged her down the hall, and searched her massive collection of luggage for the handcuffs the prostitute was sure to have. As they clicked in place, Miki demonstrated control of her faculties enough to offer a lascivious eyebrow waggle. Dominia pulled her out of the room, insisting, “Now’s not the time,” then paused at the great fuss the woman kicked up. “What? What’s wrong?”
Her great dark eyes waggled toward her bag, then down the hall, and Dominia took her meaning after a few seconds but shook her head. Her voice raised over the thundering music. “You want us to haul that massive thing with us? There’s no time.” Fleeting panic that Miki had lied about Cassandra’s diamond being off the train filled her, but she saw in the prostitute’s urgent and angry look that the concern was not for the sake of her duty but for her attachment to the many dresses, makeup pots, and Lamb-knew-what sex toys she’d (for some reason) brought along with her. “All that stuff had its purpose,” consoled the martyr as she hauled the whining, dancing human down the hall, “but that purpose has been served. Look, I need new clothes, too! We can get clothes when we get to Kabul. If,” she added, frowning, “we get to Kabul.”
The porter had come to alert them to the half hour, it seemed, and she had to assume for the sake of her sanity that Cicero was either not planning to conduct the train at all, or was not conducting it yet. If he was, they were in trouble, because it was likely he wouldn’t stop at Kabul and would instead keep going on to wherever it was he was supposed to drop his victims off. And where was the Lamb? Never far from Cicero: his brother, his husband, and his keeper. She daren’t t
hink too much on him, either. And if Lavinia was here, then the Hierophant…
One thing at a time. Before the Holy Family killed them, everyone aboard would die in a choreographed frenzy of self-mutilation. There was precious little she could do about the latter; even diverting Lavinia’s conscious attention would do no good once the proverbial party ramped up. After a certain point, the memetic infection was a self-perpetuating mechanism. A poisonous thought-virus that would sweep every car and compartment it touched. It would not guarantee death, but if Lavinia felt evil enough, it might. Even martyrs could, under some circumstances, become subject to it. This meant Dominia was going the opposite way, which meant dragging a squealing, kicking, gagged, possessed, and angry Miki Soto to the front car with her; making damn sure the train stopped in Kabul; and keeping everybody, if possible, from dying.
Except Cicero. She was almost fine with that fatality. But if she made it up there without any others—any human ones—that would be appreciated. This was possible if she capitalized on her infamy. A great many things were possible thanks to her reputation. Thanks to the Hierophant. She’d might as well take advantage of what he’d done to her already dark name.
“Look”—she glanced between the human and the dog—“this is going to look bad. I’ve accepted that. Sometimes you have to dirty your hands. But that doesn’t mean I feel good about it. Try to remember: I’m a good person, okay? I actually really like people.”
Three minutes later, Dominia stood on a table in the red-carpeted Dragon Car, her revolver having been fired through several rows of machines to keep from puncturing the precious hull of the far larger bullet within which they hurtled. Attention gathered, she brandished Miki like a hostage while the world’s least menacing dog barked and the whole room of people screamed themselves to hushed silence. Amid all the faces, the Disgraced Governess of the United Front roared, “Listen to me, you stuck-up pieces of shit. My name is Dominia di Mephitoli. Yes”—she pointed the gun in the direction of the gasp—“by now some of you have heard rumors that I’m on this train. Yet, you’re still surprised. Do you know why?”
