The only questions she received going through the three sets of gates were if she wanted to share a drink and celebrate with the guards. Ladgarda laughed at their lewd remarks and flashed them a bit of leg. Entry into the castle would not be so easy, but she had other means to do so.
She shed the bright outer layer of her dress and left it in a heap in a dark alcove. The next layer was black and made of material that would not swish as she crept along. She unwound the length of silken rope that she had around her waist and attached the small grappling hook to one end. Choosing her spot, she climbed over the castle wall and dropped silently into the garden.
The layout to most castles was the same. She could hear the revelry coming from the great hall, and smelled fire and meat from the kitchen. Within the castle, she knew, the guards would be lazy. There were two powerful armies in the city at the moment. That fact would be enough to make even the most vigilant of guards ease off his duty.
Ladgarda entered through the garden door and found the servants’ staircase to the upper levels. At any other celebration, she would not expect Ragnar to return to his room until the sun’s rays touched the eastern sky. This was not just any celebration, though. This was his wedding night and he would have been eager to get his new bride alone in their chambers.
She gnashed her teeth and walked to the uppermost floor. All the servants were occupied below in the great hall and no guards were posted here. It was late into the night and she guessed that anyone who was going to be abed had already retired. She went down the hall and checked each room systematically.
There were a few people sleeping in their rooms, but Ladgarda was quiet opening the doors. One of the men let out a great snore when she peered in, but she knew it wasn’t Ragnar.
She came to the last door at the end of the hall. There was a wreath made of white flowers, a blessing for marriage, on the handle. She pressed her ear against the door, but she heard nothing from within.
Shedding the black clothes, she was left in an off-white shift. It revealed more leg than was proper and stretched tight across her chest. She let down her hair and pinched her cheeks to give them color.
The door was unlocked. No one would think to disturb a couple on their wedding night. Ladgarda slipped in and shut the door, standing motionless in that spot. The only light in the large room was from the fire, quietly crackling to her right. Thick fur rugs covered the stone floor and a large wardrobe prevented anyone in the bed from seeing the door.
She let her eyes adjust and stood listening for the occupants of the room. She heard the steady, heavy breathing of a man. There was no snoring, so she knew that he was not yet deeply asleep.
She crept along the wall until she could see the pair in the immense canopied bed. The princess was lying on her stomach with her long yellow hair splayed out around her. Her breathing was much softer than her new husband’s, but she was sleeping the exhausted sleep of a deflowered bride.
Ragnar was stretched out on the other side of the bed. Ladgarda walked across the room to stand at his side. The moment her body stepped in the way of the fire’s warmth, Ragnar let out a small snort and rubbed his face before opening his eyes.
Ladgarda put up a hand to shush him as he started and made to bolt from the bed. “I’m not here to fight, Ragnar. As you can see, I’m not carrying any weapons.”
He eyed her and leaned back against the headboard. He reached over to his other side to touch Thora and discovered she was unharmed. His eyes narrowed as he looked back to Ladgarda. “Why are you here?” His voice was quiet and rumbling. “You sneak into my room like an assassin. What am I to think?”
“You’d be smart to be suspicious, of course. Yet, haven’t I proved all these years that I don’t want you dead?” Her whisper was accompanied by a sly smile. “I thought I’d give you a wedding present.”
“Really, now? Does it include strangling my new wife?”
Ladgarda chuckled and shook her head. She crooked up a leg onto the bed and leaned forward. “She’s a lovely girl, Ragnar. I’ve seen some of the whores you’ve bedded, but this one is, by far, the most beautiful. Though—” She lowered her voice further so that he had to bend his head towards her to hear. “I bet she doesn’t know a thing about pleasuring a man. I bet she blushed to see you naked and laid there trembling when you took her.”
“Yes, she’s a pretty thing.” Ragnar’s chest puffed out. “And she was a virgin. What do you expect? She was soft and tight and warm. What else matters?”
“I’m willing to teach her some things for you.” Ladgarda purred and lifted up her other leg to kneel on the bed. She crawled forward toward him. “I could teach her all those tricks I know that drove you wild. I could demonstrate on her so she knows how it feels, and then she and I can practice on you together.”
There was no mistaking his arousal under the blankets. Ragnar wet his lips, looking back and forth between the two women. “This is your gift to me? How do I know you’re playing me true here, Ladgarda? You’ve wanted me always for yourself. You could never let go.”
She kept the seductive look on her face and sat up on her knees, raising her arms above her head. “I know what this marriage means for our country, Ragnar. Plus you get this lovely girl in the deal. I have no desire other than to sate you. Check me if you wish. I have no weapons.”
Ragnar ran his hands along her sides and back, lingering on her taut behind. His hands dipped down and lifted her shift to her waist as if searching for any blades that might be strapped to her thighs. Seeing nothing, not even underclothes, he grinned. “Well now, what a gift this is, mitt hjerte.”
“I had a feeling you would like it.” She scratched her nails along his broad chest and lowered her head to kiss downward across his stomach. He groaned and fell back, linking his hands behind his head.
“Wake the girl before you start,” Ragnar told her. “Maybe later, after we tire her out, you can have me alone like I know you want.”
Ladgarda distracted him with a nip just above his groin as she reached between her breasts. She was as swift as her drekars and far more deadly. She buried the spearhead she had concealed there deep in Ragnar’s stomach. She twisted it and yanked upward. Her cold eyes never left his as she stole his life from him.
“I never wanted you, Ragnar. I only wanted the sea, and that you gave to me.” She thrust the weapon in as deep as it could go. “Now, here you go marrying this bit of fluff. Did you know that doing so would give the Swedes free reign in my waters? I won’t have it.”
He attempted to speak, but only blood burbled out from his mouth. Ragnar reached for her and his hands fell trembling at his sides. She yanked the spearhead sideways to open him up and his intestines spilled out. They steamed even though the room was warm.
Ladgarda pushed herself off him and tossed the spearhead to the side. She glanced at the princess. How the girl was sleeping through this, she didn’t know, but it saved her from having to kill her, too. It was a much more satisfying thought to imagine Thora waking up to the disemboweled body of her new husband.
Ragnar stopped moving. One more bubble of blood popped between his lips and that was the end of the king. She had never loved nor even liked the man. The rest of the world thought what they wanted, but she knew the truth of it. She was the mistress of the sea and she loved no one else.
Ladgarda wiped her hands off on the sheets at the end of the bed and walked out of the room without looking back.
Forget About Me, I Am NO ONE
Megan Neumann
Megan Neumann lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her speculative fiction is usually dark and occasionally sprinkled with humor. Her stories have appeared in such publications as SQ Mag, Dark Futures Fiction, and FrostFire Worlds.
My thoughts may have been my downfall. I knew the rumors of NO ONE and the unfathomable reaches of their collective consciousness. At school, kids whispered NO ONE had planted a device in every child born in the last seventeen years. They had developed a technology t
o decipher our brain waves, a technology akin to telepathy. If any of the rumors were true, Calvin and I never stood a chance.
Two months ago, Calvin joined the collective. I wasn’t surprised. He did terrible in school; nothing interested him for long. He was smart, though—the sort of smart that scared his teachers. Like all kids, he started coding at five, but by eight, he wrote something to bring down every computer in the school. I had loved him ever since.
I had heard of kids from other towns asked to join the collective. That was what NO ONE did—they asked first. If you said no, which you were perfectly free to do, you’d go on living your life. Then a few weeks later, you’d disappear. It was better to join when asked.
Of course, I wasn’t asked to join. They’d never want me—Dana, the perfect straight-A student, not a deviant, not someone who thought outside the box. I didn’t have the right kind of brain.
The night before he left, Calvin climbed through the window into my room. Our bedroom windows faced each other, our houses only ten feet apart. He had done this many times before, climbing down the side of his own house, over the chain-link fence, and then up a makeshift ladder I had built from sheets tied together.
“Dana, my parents are proud,” he said, his hands in the pockets of his worn jeans. He wouldn’t look at my face, as though ashamed of something. “You know what it means for them, right?”
I nodded. Of course I knew. Calvin in the collective meant they would be safe. Family of the consciousness never feared the prodding or judgment. They could live their lives unafraid of the sudden accusations everyone else feared.
“I’m not proud,” I told him.
He shook his head and put a finger to his lips. He meant for me not to speak harshly of NO ONE. Their sensors listened on every street corner. Who knew how powerful those things were?
“I wish you could stay,” I said, deciding it was neutral enough to say aloud.
“I am honored,” he said. He swallowed slowly. “I will live for all eternity as part of something far greater than me.”
I knew this phrase or some variation of it. The words appeared on giant screens in every city across the world. They flashed across the screens of your television or computer, intermittently, so you wouldn’t expect it: “WE ARE ALL-KNOWING. WE ARE ETERNAL. BE PART OF SOMETHING GREATER. JOIN NO ONE.” The phrase was meant to inspire awe, love, and devotion, but I had grown to fear solidarity. I found comfort in being alone, or with Calvin.
“Then I am proud too,” I said. I reached out for his hand. He pulled away, but I managed to hold his fingertips. They were cold and dry. I held on for a few seconds before he turned to climb out the window. That would be the last time I’d touch his fingers. Or any part of him. No one knew what happened to the body after joining the collective. The general consensus was the body was destroyed. To the collective, only the mind mattered.
At the window, he paused and said, “You’ll be safe now, too. Be happy about that.”
“Of course I’ll be safe,” I told him. He had made a mistake saying I would be safe after he joined. “I am safer with the eyes of NO ONE on me. They protect the weak and fight the corrupt.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “You are right. You’re always right.”
*
Weeks passed without him. The end of the world was coming, supposedly. Rebels and religious types posted signs around town in the middle of the night saying the end was near. I didn’t believe that. The way I figured it, there were many endings and beginnings to the world. Maybe we were getting to one ending. But as soon as that happened, something else would start up again.
Either way, I didn’t care. Calvin was gone. I would live on in a life controlled by the all-seeing eyes of a computer program called NO ONE.
They started out as a group of hackers, bound to one another through hatred of oppression and evil and hopes of taking down the “man.” After twenty-five years of hacking and mischief, their reach had grown large and wide and had matured. Governments feared them. Large companies and their endless corruption stood no chance against the hive of genius hackers. NO ONE knew anything done on a networked computer. Secrets and security were a joke. The United States fell to their power, and anarchy reigned, but not really. We lived under the law of NO ONE.
Then the great discovery: they could combine their minds and give up their physical form. For quite a few of these hackers, those who never wanted to leave their homes, this was their life’s dream. Hundreds gave up their bodies.
My parents made a living as doctors, but just barely. They remembered a time when a medical doctor was respected and might even be wealthy. Not so anymore. Wealth was something I knew from old movies I was occasionally allowed to watch at school. My favorite movie, Citizen Kane, was about a wealthy man. In the end, he lived alone, hated. This movie taught kids a lesson: wealth and power ruined you.
I cried for weeks after Calvin left. When his mom left their house, she would avoid eye contact with me, quickening her pace. I saw it on her face, though. She had been crying, too.
Since Calvin had gone, I walked to school alone. As kids, we would walk stiffly, far apart and afraid to touch each other. In the ninth grade, he reached out and held my hand. It was like that from then on, him holding my hand. Those first few weeks alone, I thought I could still feel his hand when I walked down the sidewalk.
Garbage littered the street. Trash pickup ran sporadically. Spray paint on a bench on the corner said, “NO ONE WILL FALL. NO ONE WILL DIE.” Directly above the graffiti, on a light post, the all-seeing eyes of NO ONE shone on an LED screen. The face was white like a plastic Halloween mask, but the eyes—the eyes moved back and forth, forever watching. They looked like real eyes, human eyes. They changed constantly. Supposedly, the eyes represented the thousands who had joined the collective, the one remaining part of their human forms.
Since Calvin left, I avoided the screens. I feared seeing his eyes, dark brown and nothing special, but that I would know.
The day after he had gone, the principal announced it in school over the intercom. “It is a great honor for our school. One of our students, Calvin Reiner, has joined the collective consciousness of humanity’s greatest defender, NO ONE. Please wish him well in his endeavor. And know this: do not miss him. He is now with us even more than before. He is everywhere. Watching.”
No one spoke to me about him after that. No one spoke to me at all.
*
On the Monday of the third week, the first sign of Calvin returning appeared. I turned on the computer embedded on the surface of my desk. Years of abuse from previous students had left the screen scratched and difficult to read. I logged into the classroom and started the first assignment of the day. At the front of the room, Mrs. Bates mindlessly twirled her hair between two fingers. Teaching a classroom didn’t take much effort these days, or at least that’s what my parents said. Mrs. Bates monitored us, making sure we didn’t spend the whole day chatting and goofing off.
We did math in the morning until the lunch break. Then the computers on our desks displayed lessons on history and literature—selective history and literature. We studied the great revolutions of the world. We studied the oppressive governments who had mistreated their people. We read literature about characters that were corrupted by power and wealth. My parents said when they were young they too had read a book about oppressive governments—a book called 1984. NO ONE destroyed all copies before I was born, its existence erased from any database. Sometimes at night, my parents whispered the story to me. I whispered what I remembered to Calvin. After I told him the story, he didn’t speak for the rest of the walk. At my doorstep, he said, “We are not to that point yet.” He said, “But soon. Soon.”
A message popped up on my computer as I stared at the first problem. I didn’t recognize the email address, but I opened it anyway, not caring if the school’s computer got a virus.
The message had two lines:
It’s happening now.
L
eave the school.
It had to be a joke. Or someone had sent it to me by mistake. Still, my palms began to sweat. My fingertips left little droplets on the computer screen as I closed the email. I stood without thinking. This was a warning.
“Dana, what are you doing?” Mrs. Bates yawned and rubbed her eyes. “Are you all right? You look sick, girl.”
I shook my head and then cleared my throat. “Yes, I’m sick,” I said. “I need to leave the school now.”
Mrs. Bates shrugged. “Do what you gotta do.”
I moved from my seat too quickly and tripped over a couple backpacks lying in the aisle.
“Watch it, Dana!” someone yelled behind me.
As I dashed down the sidewalk, the white bus drove past me and parked in front of the school. Men in black clothes got out. They carried guns. I moved behind a bush and watched the men. I had only seen guns in old movies. NO ONE had banned them years before I was born. They were mythical things like vampires and Bigfoot—frightening, but only make-believe. The sight of them in the hands of the men made my heart beat fast and my palms sweat even more.
I waited, too frightened to move. The cracking of the gunfire inside the school interrupted the silence outside. I counted a dozen shots, not enough to kill all the students, but enough to get some of the teachers, the ones who had fought. Screams came from inside for what seemed like minutes, but after the last shot, no one made a sound. I was crying silently.
More vans arrived and soon the children and teachers marched out of the school, their arms held behind their heads, their faces streaked with tears and blood. They filed into the back of the vans. In the eyes of the teachers, I saw a hollow darkness, the look of people who have given up completely.
The vans left, but I couldn’t move from behind the bushes. Darkness fell, and finally, I stirred. The walk home passed in a daze. I didn’t remember unlocking my door or finding my bedroom and locking the door behind me. I collapsed in my bed. In the morning, I realized my parents hadn’t come home.
Luna Station Quarterly - Issue 018 Page 9
