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ADULT CONTENT
This article contains adult content that may not be suitable for all readers.
Sexual References: Features sexual themes or language, without the depiction of sexual acts.
Sexually Explicit: Description of sexual acts.
Sexual Assault: Features non-consensual sexual acts.
Gore: Depiction of blood, gore or mutilation of body parts.
Child Abuse: Features severe mistreatment of children.
Self-Harm: Description of self-harm.
Suicide: Description of suicide.
Torture: Description of torture.
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Content warning: high-impact violence in a sexual setting.
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Previously: Pitch Black
She's so busy she doesn't even notice her new finger for sixteen hours.
Call it carelessness, call it operational efficiency. This is the eighth reality bender Amitha has killed in that many days and she's starting to wonder what they're feeding the children now. Is it something in the milk, she thinks, or the roid-addled avians they call chickens here? When she was in university, there wasn't a man in all of Madras who could light a candle with his mind, much less turn a child to gold. Now there are hundreds of them, each doing God-only-knows with a strength God-only-has.
They are camped out somewhere in the Chihuahuan Desert, a tiny dot of beige amidst rolling oceans of rain shadow yellow, and the criss-crossing lines of cloud left by fighters flying drills overhead. Their target is somewhere between eighty and a hundred miles away; if anyone pinpoints his location too precisely, Pentagram geowarding will pull their brains out through their eyeholes. They've always been paranoid, of course, but Amitha has kicked, punched and spat upon the hornet's nest, so now they're also pissed. An entire nation-state! Angry at her! She takes a deeply unhealthy, and therefore deeply enjoyable pride in this fact.
Anwar was a test case, n = 1. She found a flaw in the Pentagram's theory of security and took his head as a proof of concept. But her enemy will learn, despite itself, and this particular exploit will disappear. And then Six will send her back down to the bunkers to devise another, and the cycle continues, again and again, forever.
Until that day comes, she has but a single order, carved in seven scarlet words on the walls of her skull.
Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.
Today's ritual circle—this one drawn with steel wire, instead of lamb's blood—is big enough to swallow the entire camp and then a few square feet of desert scrub besides. Its central focus is a pulley mounted on a stout steel pole. A steel anvil, etched on every side with obscenities and grawlix from the fall of Babylon, hangs from one end of the pulley's cable.
Egret, with all her misshapen bodyweight, dangles from the other. "Ami!"
"Not now." Thanks to three months worth of refinement, most of the ritual's machinery is held entirely in Amitha's mindscape. The few physical components that remain serve as an excellent hazing for her pet nuisance.
"My shoulder's gonna break," Egret whines. "Again."
"Ten seconds." Amitha paces back and forth underneath the anvil, a subroutine in her mind chanting the mantras-slash-axioms that serve as the bullet in her killing proof. "Can you pass me the hammer?"
Egret lets out a short little scream in frustration, but in a single, impossible pirouette, she swaps the hand holding the anvil for a foot, and reaches into the toolbox at her side for the hammer. There is an audible pop as her hip wrenches out of place under the anvil's weight. With some more indecipherable gyrations, though, the hammer still finds its way into the pocket of Amitha's coat.
"Thanks," Amitha says, and then, as a quiet afterthought, "Babe."
Egret gnashes her teeth impotently, but she is far from subtle enough to hold back a smile. Note to self, Amitha thinks, never try the pet name thing again.
The last lines of the proof complete, Amitha takes in a deep, centering breath, and lifts her eyes to the gleaming anvil. "Showtime."
She lifts the hammer to the sky in both hands and whispers the mathematician's amen—"Quod, erat, demonstrandum"—and swings.
Wait. Her hand. What's wrong with her—
But it is far too late, and her wrist tendons far too damaged by years of sacrificial self-harm, and the hammer hits the anvil anyway.
It does not ring. The world vibrates in its stead. Something hits its head in the basement of the universe and the thud against the ceiling is heard by general relativity and Amitha's skull alike. And, to her horror, that un-sound she feels is undeniably wrong.
Her head spinning, she hurls the hammer out into the desert as far as she can, before sprinting for the perimeter. "Egret, drop it. We need to leave, now, we need to—"
She feels stupid for even saying it. There is no running away from this. Amitha's hand—the one she started with—is ragged with time, fire and blood. It is ugly in the way of oil-blackened woks or scuffed steel-toes. The new addition between her pinky and ring, of all places, doesn't even have prints. Much to her irritation, it is also blindingly pale.
When she was eight, Amitha overheard her grandmother calling her father a lump of coal in a pot of milk. If her heart hadn't exploded four years later, this would have probably finished the job. It might well kill Amitha, too.
Chaos magick is flexible enough to overlook the little things; a new scar, a bullet wound, a hip replacement. This? This is not a little thing. This is a portent with enough symbolic weight to pull a satellite out of orbit. Adding it to her working is the sorcerous equivalent of starting a grill with thermite instead of charcoal.
She just wanted to strike the poor fucker with lightning. Now, a bomber is banking hard overhead, almost a full ninety degrees from its previous flight path. As if nothing was wrong, it continues along its new path for a few more moments, perfectly stoic—then a tiny, dark, rectangle, no bigger than an eyelash, detaches from its shrinking form and plummets to the ground.
There is no explosion. There doesn't need to be. There is just the blunt instrument of six hundred kilograms of missile, dropped point-first onto her target's skull.
The anvil crashes to the ground. Egret, so unused to her superior showing surprise, is scrambling towards her on all fours. This is too urgent for the human act. "Babe? What's up?"
In answer, Amitha holds up her hand, and in that moment, she realizes exactly what's happening to her.
Because when Egret goes to brush her hair from her eyes, that very same finger is cupping her face.
"I need to see Six," Amitha says. "I'm going to die."
* * *
It's one in the morning when her summons is answered. They're still camped out in the Chihuahua—with her new hanger-on, Amitha will need to recompute all her teleportation trajectories from scratch. They're stuck here til Six says otherwise.
She is strobing in and out of a whirling half-sleep when the sound of thunder and a voice like a flaming sword booms in the back of her skull.
"YOUR NUMBER HAS BEEN CALLED."
At that, Amitha bolts upright. Egret, at the foot of the bedroll, does the same, taking a moment to pop some of her spare joints and spit out a shed tooth. "You don't get the good timeslots?" she yawns.
"They don't exist anymore," Amitha says. "They haven't since the war began."
The tent was fully dark when she went to sleep, but now there's a hellish red glow and the smell of a gas leak emanating from under the flap. To her consternation, Amitha finds her lantern has stopped working, which leaves the hellfire as her only light source. It takes six tries for her to button her shirt correctly. She doesn't even bother with her tie.
As expected, when she throws open the flap, Amitha is presented not with the desert, but the familiar wooden interior of Six's office. Six herself, as expected, is busy hammering away at her Telex, the Bakelite brick flanked by two gargantuan piles of folders and loose papers. Opposite her, a steaming pot of tea and a pair of cups sit on a tray.
"You're booked for fifteen minutes," Six says, not looking up. "Don't bother with the formalities."
Amitha steps forward into the office and holds the flap only long enough for Egret to follow her through. When she closes it behind her, there is a brief gust of wind as extraneous spatial dimensions are folded away like so much laundry.
At that, Six finally meets their eyes. "Factotum. Archmagus. Please, sit."
There is only one other chair in the room, and its intended occupant is obvious. Egret, happy as can be, bounds over to the right side of the room instead, where she stands at attention.
Amitha slumps into her seat, sinking the height of a hand into its plush depths. Its upholstery used to be the skin of a giant dodo, the frame, its skeleton. "Shall I?" she says, nodding at the teapot.
"If you could." Six's fingers come to rest, and a moment later, she lifts her hands and claps, once. Terminal and papers alike disappear, replaced by a tiny pitcher of milk and a bowlful of sugar cubes. "The usual."
Amitha pours Six's cup first—one sugar, stirred three times, starting clockwise then alternating. She adds a spot of milk to her own cup, and then chucks a handful of sugar cubes at Egret, who catches two in her mouth and scrounges four off the floor.
Six takes a sip from her mug and nods. "Competent."
Now that her boss has partaken, it's Amitha's turn to do the same. The lapsang, as always, is perfect, as peaty and rich as a slab of bog butter. Six would never stoop to sullying her drinks with thaumaturgy, but it does feel like it's working some kind of magic anyway.
"She's not a tape, you know," Six says. "You don't have to return her when you're done."
Amitha snorts. "As if you'd take her back. And if it was about her, I wouldn't have done this in person."
"Of course. I should've guessed. Then again, it's getting rather hard to tell you apart, isn't it?" Six looks down at her over the bridge of her spectacles and Amitha has to force herself still. To be subject to an Overseer's gaze is to be an ant under a magnifying glass. There's the animal intimidation factor, of course, but to a trained practitioner, there is the ritual weight. Symbolic gravity binds her as tightly as the literal kind. "You're being assimilated."
"Yes." And it only really dawns on her when Six is the one to tell her, because Six has always been the divider, the god at the crossroads, and her word splits conjecture from truth.
In that motel Amitha ate the fruit of the Underworld. It only took a single nail clipping from Egret's body to turn a mostly-healthy pizza boy into a bag of excess bones and a fresh copy of her bodyguard. When she got shot, Egret fed her maybe ten times that much biomass. It saved her life—if she concentrates, she can recall what her colon felt like hanging out of her stomach—but it's eating her from the inside-out.
She has started a turf war with one of the most aggressive and unkillable parasites known to mankind. Six's medical wards are the only thing that kept her lifespan on the scale of months, instead of minutes.
"Well," Six says. "They say what goes around, comes around."
Amitha looks down at her lap for a moment, keenly aware that both Six and Egret are staring at her. Both await the inevitable. She takes a breath to gather her remaining courage, and ventures forth. "Will you fix it?"
"Good. That's the phrasing I was hoping for, Amitha. Very good. The answer is no."
If Egret were not sculpted from the cells up for maximum obedience, there would be an interjection here, some kind of but or please or why. Instead there is only the faintest contraction of her pupils and a tightened tendon in her fist.
Amitha knows all this without turning to face her, because her traitor flesh is doing exactly the same thing.
Six, for her part, has not turned away from Amitha once. This is news she respects Amitha enough to make eye contact for, and that alone is more praise than Amitha has received from her til now. "Over the course of your recent misadventures, I've come to realize I have grown dependent on you. And any dependence an Overseer has is a fatal one. We hold a hundred thousand dogs on ten times that many leashes. Only deploying one isn't just a risk, it is suboptimal play."
"Naturally." Amitha almost wishes she could fault that reasoning.
"I won't tell you that I'm sorry. But I can say in full confidence that this was inevitable, and I can say that this was necessary. You took on what my actuarial team decided was a suicide mission. You're still alive three months later. You were, and are, exceptional."
"I'm not a fucking charity case," Amitha snaps, but she finds a tear forming at the corner of her eye anyway, her real one. Egret's tear ducts never grew in.
Six purses her lips. "I understand what terminal illness does to the human psyche, and in respect of that, I offer you grace. Do not make me regret it."
Amitha's hands are trembling now, both of them, and she finds herself both unwilling and unable to stop them doing so. "So what now? Did you poison the tea? Am I gonna get reassigned to Archival, or to the thing in Fethiye, or- or- Christ, don't tell me you're wiping me—"
"Amitha," Six says, and the tea in Amitha's cup freezes solid. "You are above this. As before: you are exceptional. I simply want you to prove me right."
"Again," Amitha says.
"Of course. It's the job." Six opens a drawer of the desk, rummages in it for a moment, before taking out a sealed envelope and sliding it across the table. "Here."
Amitha, grudgingly, stuffs it into the pocket of her coat. "What do you want, Six?"
At the corner of Six's lips, Amitha swears she can see the beginnings of a smile. "Physician, heal thyself."
* * *
Another safehouse. Of course. Every day now is a series of claustrophobic bunkers and barbed-wire fences, and the sunroofs and fuselages that connect them. It reminds her, topologically, of a mouse being eaten by a snake.
When Six throws them out of her office they find themselves in total darkness. Amitha tries to conjure a light and ends up laser-beaming a hole in the ceiling. In the end, Egret has to be her seeing-eye dog, dragging her through this rat's nest by a handful of her collar. It's not even the hundredth most embarrassing interaction she's had with her bodyguard; the ugly, snotty giggles Egret lets out, on the other hand, are vying for a podium finish.
After what feels like an hour spent chasing their own trail, eventually they stop moving left and right and start moving up. It only takes fifty-ish steps before Egret stops climbing, but that's still enough time for Amitha to begin cursing her connective tissues.
"We're here," Egret says. "Step back or I'm gonna break your jaw."
Without further warning, she winds up and throws an uppercut straight into the ceiling. Bolts snap, metal screams, and the door to this basement goes flying off into the distance. Through the jagged opening that's left, the dying light of dusk bathes the stairwell, Amitha, and Egret in gentle orange. When Amitha closes her eyes the sunbeams feel like fingers cupping her face.
She opens them again and finds Egret staring at her, rectangular pupils shrunk to slits.
"Factotum," Amitha says.
"Ami," Egret says, and blinks at her, glacier-slow. "You need a break? I can hear your knees squeaking."
Amitha's tongue is reared up to verbally decapitate her subordinate when it occurs to her: this might not actually be a joke. "Maybe I do."
Egret shrugs and plants herself down on the stone of the staircase. Amitha takes the time to survey her surrounds. They were in a storm cellar, that much is becoming clear, but a specific location isn't coming to mind. If anything, it looks like a composite photo of a hundred different nowheres all across the U.S.
In front of her, dead pines extend as far as the eye can see, each one planted exactly ten and a half feet apart by what she assumes is the hand of God. Even the dead leaves look like they were arranged into neat and perfect piles on the earth. Behind her is something you could technically call a house.
Once upon a time, it would have been a stately little fort, its dated little circular tower giving it the airs of an old Scottish castle. Now it looks like it woke up one morning and decided to eat its occupants. Rows of brick and tile have been turned from ordered lines to jagged teeth, an architectural seismograph. At first Amitha thinks she sees a spiderweb hanging from the edge of the turret's roof, gleaming in the sunset; on closer inspection it turns out to be shards of the windows, held in place by an unseen force.
A completely insane thought bubbles up, unbidden, from the dark of her hindbrain: maybe this is Six's attempt to make her give up. As far as final resting places go, this one's at the top of her list.
But if there's any force stronger than her sense of her aesthetics, it's her pride. And so she soldiers on, towards the house, and the day she dies.
* * *
"The soul is real," Amitha says. "I don't need you trying to pronounce आत्मन्, so we're calling it the soul today."
They've turned the living room into an impromptu lecture theater: the hole-bitten sofa stands in for seating, the wall for a blackboard. It was painted white, but soot—at least, she hopes it's soot—has fallen through the collapsed floor above and turned the surface carbon-black.
Egret, wolf-restless, cat-bored, squirms herself into different shapes over and over on the couch. "With you so far."
"A cure is right out. Nobody knows what you are, let alone how to cure an acute case of you-itis, and if the transplant rejection doesn't kill me, your brain'll just eat mine."
"Hot."
"So. The only option is changing what's gonna happen to me after I die." Amitha says. "In theory, reincarnation does a lot of the heavy lifting for us. All I have to do is make sure my soul ends up in a mostly similar body, and my continuity of consciousness will be… well, not exact, but good enough. The main problem is, humans are high value. Just below cetaceans. And I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm not a very good person."
Egret scrunches up her face in thought. "Why bring all this soul shit into it? Just make a clone and you're back, works for me."
"Wrong!" Amitha jabs a finger in her direction. "It shouldn't. Vidyasagar, Chu, Sanmugasunderam, '59. Read the literature, then ask them to move my name up on the paper, the pigs. We raised fifteen identical clones with full-body sensory cutouts. All of them were watching the same programming; all of them, irreparably divergent by hour five. Turing test, akashic signature, psychographic profile, whatever tests we ran, they failed. The body doesn't make the mind."
"So it's… the other way around?"
"Closer! Closer. Start from what we know." Amitha takes a fresh stick of Hagoromo from her coat pocket, slashes three asterisks into the wall with a sound like a rifle going off. "Point one! You are one of the most evil people on the planet." A rat's nest of underlines for the word 'evil.' "Point two: at that level of karmic debt, your possible reincarnations are a set with measure zero. You could pray every day from now to the death of the Sun and you wouldn't even come back as an earthworm. Point three? You're coming back as a human being anyway." A giant white arrow, the size of her arm. "Conclusion! Something about your body is just as rotten as your character. There's only one person who could've done that to you, and she isn't telling. So here's the million-dollar question: what did Six do to you, Egret?"
Egret opens her mouth and closes it again. She is genuinely, truly silent for five seconds and counting. Record time. Amitha is initially thankful—then, when she sees pitch-black liquid welling in the corners of her eyes, perturbed.
"Egret?" she tries, again.
"I remember," Egret's mouth replies. Every other muscle in her face is still. "Every second of it."
"Then start talking. Now."
Egret's eyes moving to meet hers, slow as a corpse in honey. A tetanic smile, stretching til it touches the sides of her face. "You might wanna sit down for this."
* * *
It takes three hours for Egret to tell her everything to the detail she needs. It takes another three hours for her panic attack to subside.
Obviously, Amitha wouldn't be able to survive what Egret went through. But she doesn't need to. Her karmic debt is maybe a quarter of her bodyguard's; ergo, she needs only a quarter of that maiming.
And then, ideally, she'll die. It's just more efficient.
Even with that constant factor, what she will have to live through is miles beyond the reach of the average fifty-eight year old. Six's warding alone wouldn't do it, either, so it's a good thing it isn't alone. Somewhere between ten and twenty percent of her bodymass has been replaced by one of the hardiest lifeforms on the planet, and that number is only getting increasing with each day.
She runs the numbers. She spends a day calculating the gap between her survivability and what will be asked of her and the day after that working out how to close it. She requisitions what supplies she needs, and then she begins the long, thankless journey to prepare herself for slaughter.
Each day Egret wakes her up with a red-hot poker to the side. They time out how long the burns take to heal while she brushes her teeth. She chokes down a liquid meal of fruit juice, milk, and lamb's blood, and then they go for the morning jog: Egret running through the forest, Amitha chasing her til her ankles give out. This is the one constant of their training regimen. Variety is a top priority, both to build a wide variety of aptitudes, and to keep Amitha from going insane.
In between each of these gruelling workouts, she transfers her brain to paper, one frantically-scrawled theorem at a time. If she dies, she dies, but if she dies without doing her damnedest to preserve institutional knowledge… well. She has toured a number of afterlives with Six, and even built one herself. She wants to spend eternity in none of them.
A lifetime's worth of fieldwork is squeezed into two weeks. She is shot at and stabbed, bones broken and joints snapped. On the first night of their program, she goes to bed with more bandages than bare skin. On the final night, she goes to bed with two fingers missing and wakes up having grown them back.
The face in the mirror is barely recognizable. Both eyes are blue, now, and they see a little ways past the visible spectrum she's used to. Her skin is a calico patchwork of veins, scars and colors, and even her limb lengths are in similar disarray. She finds herself constantly trying to catch a whiff of stray gunpowder or excess aether on the air.
This morning Amitha snatched the poker out of Egret's hand. Hot end first. Before she was even fully conscious she'd driven the thing clean through her bodyguard's shoulder. Her arm outsped the impact, and so the poker produced a sonic boom that painted the bedroom wall cobalt blue with Egret's blood. That alone made everything worth it.
She is an abomination. She is a chimera.
She is ready.
* * *
What she's doing doesn't really sink in til she sees the tarp on the floor.
Egret has set up the workshop in what has served as their bedroom. The arrangement is remarkably good for only six months of practice. Still-sealed packages of surgical steel on the left-hand side of the room, an array of less elegant tools on the table to the right. Tallow candles, placed at the vertices of a regular heptagon, burn around the altar proper: a single slab of basalt from Six's personal reserve, surrounded on all sides by seven feet of plastic sheeting.
And sitting atop that, Egret, humming tunelessly to herself.
She has her back to the door. It is completely bare, besides the thin straps of her butcher's apron; in the candlelight, its knotted scars and zipper stitches look like they were carved out of sandstone. Amitha finds herself watching the muscles beneath her shoulder blades, the way they twitch and ripple as she fidgets.
Her reverie breaks when Egret finally speaks. "You're stalling."
"Fuck off," Amitha says, and slams the door shut behind her. She hates how easy it is for Egret to get a rise out of her; hates how often she gives her the satisfaction.
Egret doesn't turn around, but Amitha can tell she's smiling anyway. "C'mon. I don't bite." She pats the stone beside her, expectant. "Oh, and get your clothes off."
Grudgingly, Amitha peels off her surgical gown and kicks it under a table, before hopping up onto the altar. It is just an inch too tall for her to sit on without her feet leaving the ground, something she assumes was a deliberate choice by either her superior or her bodyguard. The moment she's seated, Egret slides herself towards her, til they're just about touching.
"I thought this was urgent," Amitha mutters.
"We are." Egret turns her head to face her, lets her head hang slack as she smiles. "I just don't get to do this that often. Wanna enjoy it, y'know?"
"I don't."
Egret shrugs. "You're missing out. Lookin' good, by the way."
Amitha does not particularly feel it. "Priorities."
"Right, right." Egret sighs and hops up off the slab. "Lay down. Other way. Arms up. Legs open- little wider, that's it."
It only takes a few moments to tie Amitha down to the table. Even when her limbs are well-secured, Egret insists on spending a little more time on what Amitha can only assumes is artistic flair, draping an elaborate array of knots and cabling over the length of her body. It is patently uncomfortable, a completely unnecessary use of time, and frustratingly pleasing to her eye.
She can hear her heart beating in her ears now. Why couldn't she before?
Egret gives the bouquet a couple of experimental yanks for security's sake. The nylon bites into the stone and Amitha's skin alike, but the ropes stay fast. "Sit up for me." When Amitha fails to do anything except squirm in place, she nods and gives Amitha a satisfied slap on the thigh. "Good. Just one last thing: you need a blindfold or no?"
Amitha shakes her head, or tries to, anyway. The tie at her neck is difficult to negotiate. "We're already cutting this close. Spare me anything and it's not going to work."
"Don't say I didn't warn you," Egret says, and runs the tip of her tongue over her teeth, one at a time.
Before the knives come out, there is the mise en place. With a cartographer's precision and a marker pen, Egret divides the surface of Amitha's body into a dense map of sigils, cities and territories. Once she's satisfied, she decontaminates her work surface—which is to say, she sticks her hand in her mouth, before carelessly painting the lower half of Amitha's stomach in her sterile salivary substitute.
Despite the unnatural heat of Egret's fingers, her spit leaves the same freezing trail as an alcohol wipe. The bizarre mix of sensations raises involuntary goosebumps across Amitha's skin.
In her peripheral vision, Egret rummaging for, then tearing open a fresh blade. The glint of the scalpel in the candlelight. Egret, leaning down so Amitha can meet her eyes. "Little pressure, now," she says, and brings the edge down onto her stomach.
For the first few moments, Amitha thinks: this is nothing. She has spent weeks willingly putting herself through far worse, in the knowledge she will have to endure Egret's butchery without having to resort to anaesthesia.
Then Egret actually starts to move the knife, and Amitha's teeth find themselves unable to clamp down on a squeal.
It is at once the most shameful and the most relieving thing she has ever done in her life. Blood rushes to her cheeks and ears, wells and runs from the finger-length line across her stomach. A hundred excuses, immediately: it's the stress; it's the situation; it's the way that Egret looks down at her, half pity, half disgust, all undisguised hunger. Her breath is heavier than she wants it to be, and her head feels like it's started to come unscrewed.
"Let me get that for you," Egret says. She kneels until her chin rests on Amitha's thigh, and unfurls the forked tip of her tongue to trail along the ragged, crimson edge of the wound. Again, like alcohol, it fucking burns.
The noise this extracts from her is even more undignified. She tries to ignore the way her hips strain against her bindings, like she's trying to lift off the table.
Egret clicks her tongue, flecking a couple crimson dots onto Amitha's trembling stomach. "Don't tell me you're ticklish."
Amitha tries her best to say fuck off. What actually comes out is a very tiny "Uh."
"You are! You are, you are, you are." Egret giggles and nuzzles her head into the hard ridge of Amitha's iliac crest, tongue still hanging halfway out of her maw. She's shaved her head on that side; the way the peach fuzz rubs against Amitha's skin sends yet another series of aftershocks through her. "Wow, we're learning so much about one another tonight."
Get on with it. "…More?"
"Mmm." Egret suckles the tip of her scalpel til it gleams in the light. "You sure you don't need the break?"
Amitha wets her lips, forces her eyes still in their sockets. "'m good."
"I bet you are." Egret's nostrils flare, and a moment later her pupils blow out, threatening to swallow her irises altogether. "Oh my God. You're not actually…"
She is. God help her, she is, and there is so much of it. "Dunno."
Smirking, Egret dips her free hand lower; when she raises her fingers to the light again, they're glistening. "Sure you don't."
"Uh," says Amitha, and this time not even her brain has anything smart to add.
All too gently, Egret presses her lips against Amitha's thigh. "You deserve this," she whispers, as much for the benefit of Amitha's flesh as her ears.
"Nn-nn."
"Yeah, you do. C'mon, babe, face it: I was made for you, in every single way. Even the ones you keep to yourself."
The few remaining flickers of resistance in Amitha's brain are screaming now: no, no, no, all of this is wrong. She should be tearing off her bindings; she should be speaking hidden words from before the invention of right angles; she should kill Egret for this.
All Egret sees is Amitha's hips rolling towards her as best they can. Her eyes—usually sharp enough to cut nails—are as soft and wet as fresh clay.
I hope you die, says the rogue half of Amitha's heart.
What she actually says to Egret—well, her pride will not allow her to commit it to memory. It is an infinite mercy that her bodyguard never hears it.
Satisfied by her lack of answer anyway, Egret stands and resumes her grim work. For hours on end, she carves new canyons into the terrain of Amitha's skin, and Amitha can do nothing except exult in the sheer sensation of it. There is pain in her screams, yes; more than anything, though, there is release. The terrible weight of her endless restraint falls away with each inch of skin Egret strips back. She stipples her own back with bruises, carves new lines into her wrists and thighs as she arches and trembles against the unyielding stone and her much more yielding bodyguard. Over the course of her torment the stone grows dark, slick and shiny with spit, blood, and tears, the mixture overflowing the altar's narrow trench and spilling onto the floor.
It is the worst pain Amitha has ever endured. It is everything she has ever asked for.
The butchery builds and builds and builds to one final flick of the wrist, which lays Amitha's abdomen open from bottom to top in living color. She makes eye contact with her own intestines, sees Egret's jaws snap wide, and blessedly passes out.
* * *
She stops thinking by the end of the second day, and stops remembering shortly after that.
* * *
When Amitha wakes, she is staring at the endless gray of the sky.
Her senses still aren't all the way connected yet, probably thanks to the deepest sleep she's had in years. The border between her body and the air is difficult for her to find. On instinct, she tries to roll over, fumble blearily for her watch on the bedside table—no matter how hard she tries, though, she just can't seem to perform that simple motion. She tries to push against something for extra support, but her arms and legs only twitch against air.
She's not in bed, obviously. So then where is she?
Amitha's eyes loll lazily, scouring the clouds above for some kind of landmark, until eventually, her gaze drifts down. Down, down, down, all the way to the rust-colored trunk of the pine tree driven through her stomach.
She screams. Her spine is too damaged to do anything else. The sound echoes through the pines for minutes. Then again, and again, and again, until the last of the blood drains from her brain onto the leaves below.
Her vision going dark, she thinks, You asked for this.
And then she dies.
* * *
She is floating in the void.
No. She no longer possesses the dimensions required to float.
She has been squeezed to a single point, up and right and forward and ana swallowed in the all-consuming dark. There is nothing else here, and there is certainly nowhere else.
All that exists is her thoughts, and they are so, so very alone.
She stays there for what could be a minute or a millennium. Already fragmented, each and every one of her memories are recalled and retold, over and over, each time growing more and more indistinct, until they, too, join the dark. Music goes first. Words next, followed by colors, and shapes, and counting. High-level concepts like empathy were erased on impact with the afterlife, but more primal emotions, like lust, hold out a little longer. Not that she could name them anymore, of course.
Last to go, as always, is pain.
Silence.
Oh, blessed silence.
Forever and ever and ever.
Absolute zero is the temperature of a perfect crystal. In this all-encompassing stillness, Amitha comes the closest she will get to perfection. This is the way the world should be, and you are not part of it. Isn't that a relief? Isn't that beautiful?
It is.
Which is why it's too good for her.
A dull, wet, thump ripples through the point that is her being. Words are coming back to her. The first one that goes through her newborn mind is no, shortly followed by, please, and finally, plaintively, I don't want to go back.
But she is falling, whether she likes it or not, into a world of hair and shit and sweat, the disfigured age she maimed with her own hands, faster and faster and faster—
* * *
—breathe. In, and out, the motion almost forgotten.
Amitha blinks coagulated blood out of her eyes, finds herself once again staring up at a slate-grey sky. No: those are tiles, that's a fluorescent light, and that's a ceiling, thank God. Her first instinct is still to make sure she hasn't been staked on yet another piece of landscaping. She isn't, but she's pretty sure she's naked again; it's hard to tell beneath the sheen of blood that paints her from head to toe.
She raises a hand, experimentally, and finds the normal amount of fingers on it. An interesting wrinkle. Part of her enjoyed the novelty of superhumanity, though nothing will make her miss feeling her intestines moving under her skin.
Somewhere to her right: "Ami!"
Amitha sits herself up just in time for Egret to bust into the room and tackle her flat again. When she eventually releases the bear-hug, a thick layer of gore comes off, adhered to Egret's clothes instead of Amitha's skin.
"Please don't die again," Egret says, sniffling. Ichor is running from her eyes again; a couple drops, heavy and viscous, fall from her eyes onto Amitha's face. "I get stressed."
A fan of snappy retorts comes to mind. Amitha opts for none of them. "I'll try."
"Promise?"
"Egret, you just—" Amitha thinks better of saying that in a room she hasn't bug-swept. "—you know what, fine. Now can we please get to a shower?"
Egret presses her face into Amitha's neck and whispers, just loud enough to hear: "We?"
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Next? SCP-7660