Being and something else

[Karakuriya]

In a short six hours, Nicholas had proven his genius. With minimal surgical recontouring of her carbon skull and base musculature, he had created Violet a full head dermal graft that transformed her from a faceless doll into a girl almost too perfect a facsimile of human expression to be implicitly trusted. The flawless symmetry was unnerving, her shocked expression effortlessly convincing. Much moreso than a haircut or a new shade of lipstick, this yet-again reinvention of the girl and its idiosyncrasies would take time to reconcile. However, the jarring betrayal she felt at being confronted with a stranger instead of her own face gave way to a cautions delight as Violet winked at herself in the vanity mirror. This mask's strange dichotomy was uncannily fitting in a way she had never before known. Not too ageless, not too precious, not too idealistically European, not too sexy. Pretty and wry and serious and a little reckless. Violet felt like herself.

Nicholas smiled, exhausted. "Thank God it's better in motion. You almost can't tell..."

Violet gave him a pleasantly accurate quizzical look, but he just shook his head and scooped the comic books into a manila folder. "When I'm done with all you Daedalus girls? I'm retiring."

She was sure he was being paid handsomely for his trouble, so he probably meant artistically rather than financially. "Quit while you're ahead?" she asked, not watching him, missing him blanch with every toss of her head and its twin in the mirror.

"Something like that."

Violet swung gracefully out of the chair and caught his ribs in a hug. "I'm sorry, I just--thank you."

Unsettled, Nicholas patter her gingerly on the head. "You're welcome, Violet."

She strode through the waiting room and watched the eyes upon her, meeting their discerning gazes in a transaction of mascara and mettle. For the first time, Violet felt like she came out on top, something like real confidence blooming warm beneath her skin.


* * *


"What did he taste like?" The implacable Molly, time bandit, exited the elevator a step ahead of her equal and opposite reaction to the feminine condition.

"Well, if he's to be trusted, Miss Doyle didn't drop out of school after all; but, it seems everything else we've heard is true."

Primavera's white, patent leather platform sneakers clopped along the checkered tiles. Her darkly leather-clad companion adjusted a small, canvas satchel slung across her hips.

"So she's stripping her way through a BFA. That's hardly unusual."

"Curiously, no..." The blonde tossed her flaxen curls, flouncing, smug with secrets. "She has a scholarship--a free ride."

The brunette eyed her sister with a sharp look of poignancy. "...Which means she's doing it for all the right reasons?"

"Which means we have a lead." Primavera nodded, a cat-like smile spreading. "A real lead."

"My darling darlings!" Dr. Ashe welcomed them into the sky-lit parlor with arms flung wide. "Welcome home. I trust you're comfortably situated?"

Primavera accepted the hug, but Molly just moved past her into the room: a large, sunny lounge partitioned into intimate conversation nooks by darkly painted walls and laquered hardwood furniture. The floral prints, thick oil paintings, and heavily corniced ceilings were nearly claustrophobic in spite of the skylights. "If all goes well, we won't be here long."

"Come on, Mol, we could use the vacation." The blonde flitted over to the small buffet and marveled at the spread before selecting a lemon curd tart. "Oh, Marie, will the betas be out today?"

Dr. Ashe nodded, hovering near the door. "We'll all be together, for the first time."

Molly poured herself some coffee from a silver chocolate pot with delicately taloned feet, the tiniest smile softening her pretty, if striking, hawkish features. "Merry Christmas."

A moment later, Violet poked her head into the parlor, having snuck beneath Dr. Ashe's hospitality radar. "Am I late?"

All three women turned, faces painted with varying degrees of shock at the purple haired girl who hovered, bright-eyed and cheeky, in the doorway.

"Violet?!" Primavera dropped the remaining half of her tart and squealed, dashing over. "Holy shit, is that really you? Of course it's you! Look at you!" She took Violet's cheeks in her hands. "Just look at her, Mol!"

"How do you feel?" was the tacit woman's replay.

Violet ginned back at her sisters. "Wonderful. Just--perfect."

"Come, sit!" Primavera dragged her toward one of the round tables. "You have to tell us everything!"

Molly sighed and sat, stirring her coffee. "Christ, Lily, let the girl eat first. She's probably been under a microscope all day."

The three gathered around a small, mahogany tea table with fluted edges and munched on sandwiches and sweets and made shy attempts at reacquainting themselves. Primavera asked a score of rapid-fire questions about what it was like to be a hero and whether Catholic school was just like the rumors, and Molly wanted to know if there was a boy in the picture and had she killed anyone, but Violet could only smile and shake her head and say she couldn't very well remember yet.

Eventually Sydney wandered in, having been, perhaps intentionally, delayed by an errand, and was now cleaned up and draped in a dark, pinstriped shirt and looking swarthy. But when Violet turned to see if he was still intent on being icy toward her, he clearly tried to mask a stutter in his step.

"Vi...wow..." He took her hands and kissed her on the cheek, his guilt scheme seemingly forgotten. "You look...like you." She just smiled, pleased.

He pulled up one of the cushioned wooden chairs and straddled it, grinning over the tea party. "Ladies," he greeted the other two.

"Why, hello, Sydney." Primavera smiled sharkily, resting her elbows on the table.

"Syd, it's been too long," said Molly, sarcastically, around a cucumber sandwich.

He reached for a custard tart and Primavera batted his hand away, claming it for herself. "I must say, Sydney, you've grown into quite the dashing young man." She cradled the tart in her fingers, clearly having no intention other than to withhold it.

Sydney grinned wolfishly back. "In some ways more than others."

Molly snorted and Primavera purred, amused; though the boy's attention quickly swung back on Violet and she offered him a cupcake from her plate. He raised it to her with a wink and a quick, smug glare at the other two. "Thanks, dollface."

A shadow passed over Violet's features, her thoughts suddenly transported five hundred miles away. "W-what did you call me?"

Sydney blinked, shrinking under the glare of six glass and tinted foil eyes. "...Sorry!"

Dr. Ashe broke the tension with her return and a crisp flourish. "Ladies...and gentleman. With great pride and honor, please allow me to debut our darling little Beatitudes. Come along, dears!"

With a wave she ushered in a line of identically uniformed eleven-year-olds, and she tapped each one on the top of her unique, but identically cherubic head as they entered, calling them each by name.

"Mara, Angelica, Mallory, Vanity, Miranda, Acadia, Joy, Odette...and Shiloh and Mercy."

Four bright-eyed blondes, four icy-eyed brunettes, and two remaining ghost-eyed red heads, vaguely isolated as though the supposed doom that clung to their very existence was catching.

Violet was struck with a sudden and violent pang of guilt. One face, framed by a beautifully unruly mop of strawberry blonde liberty curls was not counted among them. In her place was a phantom girl with a porcelain face and a lolling weighted eye, dirty sea water pouring from the sockets. Violet hugged her arms to herself, a chill skittering up her bones.

As the others rose to mingle and indulge sweet teeth, Violet found Sydney's hand on the inside of her elbow.

"Are you alright?" His face was close, confidential; his skin was warm.

She tried to dismiss the thought with a shake of her head. "Yes, I'm fine."

"Good afternoon, Violet. My! Don't you look just stunning." Mama's executive croon shook Violet from her dark thoughts as the suit cruised across the room toward her. Violet hadn't noticed the woman and a few of the other Daedalus higher-ups join the party, though she held quite the commanding presence now, short as she was, lips tinted a sophisticated mauve. "How are we getting reacquainted?"

Violet stood and Sydney rose with her, hovering, his eye warily on the skittering girls, their mouths stained with chocolate.

"Very well, ma'am." She smiled fondly. Quite honestly, Violet was very eager to measure up in her mentors' eyes, to be a part of Daedalus proper, to belong, to excel, to be remarkable.

"Excellent." Mme. Sylvia smiled a politician's smile. "You and Rose and Lily ought to relax the rest of the week here and work on team building. I want the Tea Party redeployed in Paragon and back on task before the new year."

The Tea Party. The name rang in Violet's ears. As in the Boston? Or was it the Mad Hatter's? She couldn't quite remember... The ad hoc collaboration between Generations Zero and Aeon: a three-man team, blessed by the Icaria Foundation, that took orders straight from the top. Violet recalled the odd dirty jobs they received in whispered code--espionage, petty thievery, the occasional assassination... Rose and Lily were the experts, as the cool, street-smart Molly and the charming and wild Primavera. Violet was only a field apprentice then; the third had been the dangerously slick Phoenix--who now stood at her elbow and looked dangerously, jealously, bitterly replaced. Replaced by her...

"My little Chroma! Congratulations!" Dr. Quisling strode over, arms wide, and scooped Violet into a bear hug. "I only just heard."

"Hi, Daddy. Thank you."

He set her down and gave her cheek a pinch. "There's that smile I missed. I'll have to thank Nicholas myself."

Mama cleared her throat none too subtly. "Johannes."

The man's broad grin flatlined. "Sylvia."

"I thought you had returned to Hong Kong." Her delivery was deadpan, but her gaze seared.

"I..." Quisling's jaw muscles flexed. He glanced at Violet, and, oddly, Sylvia did as well before they returned to their very mixed, but undeniably near-violent stare down. Then, suddenly, Dr. Quisling stepped back and made a showy bow. "Madame. Mademoiselle." He spun on his heel and left, and, after a curt nod farewell, Sylvia took the opposite exit.

"...So...Chroma..." Sydney tasted her official Tea Party codename. "Congrats."

And then she was alone, beginning to think there was something very wrong about this Wonderland. The tea party buzzed on around her, the quiet epicenter they should have named Alice.

[Karakuriya]

"Bittersweet. It is the whole of human-known existence. Our collective experience. Our Enlightenment. When nothing is sacred, when every subjective whim--every epic poem and every speck of grime--is equal and holy, when we strive to taste all that life has to offer, in the grand scope the greater understanding, driven by passion, bursting with joie de vivre, Enlightenment will follow. We are Bittersweet servants. Our only crusade is play the piper, to lure humanity into every virtue, every vice. We lead by example. We touch and change as art. And you are Her priestesses."

She seemed to aim that last word at Sydney.

All of Daedalus' little angels were gathered in the sunlit lounge to receive a lecture by Doctor Ashe. Ten little girls in perfect uniform drapped their growth-ached limbs over the overstuffed chairs, perched at tea tables with baby-fat cheeks rosy and shining, and arranged themselves on the plush carpeting with their dainty feet tucked under their skirts and smocks in navy and dove gray circles. Normally Violet would be sitting with Sydney, outcast together in some nebulous siblinghood, malformed prototypes of the angel making machine.

But since Molly was present, Violet was expected to sit with her while she hacked at her pocket computer, their ad hoc committee excuse enough to override the generational boundaries and exile Sydney and his scarlet letter Y chromosome. Treated like this since birth, consistently told he was elite but not enough, it was no wonder he had turned out like he had: emasculaled, obsessed, possessive. And tempting.

While the doctor ran away with her metaphors, they made eyes at each other across the room, their banter, their little play-war never ceasing. Sydney mouthed creative obscenities, ignoring the two or three cherubs evesdropping and giggling. Given the lecture material, it was practically expected.

"You don't have to do that, you know." Molly finally spoke up in low tones, though her fingers never slowed as she reprogrammed her implanted Probability Engine--a constant chore.

Violet returned her attention and affected an innocent smile. "Do what?"

"Indulge him. Just because Lily wraps her legs around every mark doesn't mean you have to."

She scoffed, not having to reach far for the grace to look surprised and hurt. "No, no. I wouldn't. Sydney's practically my brother."

Molly slowed her typing then and looked up, her features grave. "You, better than all of us, should know the lure of forbidden fruit. All the more reason to be cautious."

Violet glanced back at Sydney where he sagged in his chair, looking bored, one ear on his adoptive mother, and one eye on her. His fingers drummed the darkly varnished mahogany.

"I'm not saying don't sleep with him. But once you do, that game is over and you still have to live with him, work with him." Molly closed her laptop finally and leaned in, an elbow on the table between them. Even in confidence, she deliberately enforced a palpable distance, emotionally and physically.

"Listen to Ashe all you want, no one's gonna flat out tell you this before you go and fuck it up. For us, maidenhood is both an asset and a liability. You have to decide which path to take, and when, and how, and why." Molly eyed her firmly, earnestly. "Don't repeat my mistake." She sat back then and gave her cable a tug, and it recoiled back into the side of her neck like a snake's tongue. "But," she exhaled, glancing briefly at Sydney from beneath the safety of an arched eyebrow, "if that's what you want, he is one of us. It'd be safe...ish." There was a flash of a smirk.

"...You are still learning." Doctor Ashe sermonized on. "When you enter the field, you will still be learning. But fear not. Pefection is not flawless. The purpose of the pilgrimage is the journey. A distraction is simply your heart telling your mind you've forgotten something..."

Violet considered her elder sister's words as her attention drifted around the cluttered, Victorian-style parlor, her gaze falling to a small painting on the wall, dwarfed by a heavy, gilt frame. It was an oil of a forest glade in which sat an aryan maiden barely clad in a sash of white, a silvery unicorn lying tame, its head upon her lap. A beautiful creature with regenerative powers. Luminous, mysterious, dangerous. Kitchiness aside, the image held a quiet strength and not so subtle lascivious undertones.

She rather liked the idea of having a final toe hold against the slippery slope into depravity, a secret for her alone, at least one thing God could not hold against her.

Doctor Ashe had lapsed into pentameter, and in the warmth of the afternoon in the cozy lounge, Sydney's ogling presently no more to her than a one of the sunbeams that played over her skin, Violet's mind drifted off to wonder what or who the unicorns of the world might be.

[Karakuriya]

The next days for Violet were strangely blissful as she was shepherded back into the bussle of Paragon, constantly flanked by her sister-mentors like a precious payload. Days spent acquiring a schizophrenic wardrobe of alias of all tropes; in shady electronics-encrusted back rooms with thick rolls of Euros to trade for custom German chipsets with names like "Ausblutenfreude" and "Engelmacher9;" outside a Starbucks on the RISU campus, sipping mochas under the heat lamps, lying in wait like lazy panthers in the sun; arranging and rearranging her posh new things in her posh new apartments at the top of the Cygne Rouge Boutique Hotel, in a suite they shared and trashed with nights of exotic fruits and cake and too much red wine. Violet felt safe and important and excited to be living the high speed life she had been born and bred for, and never once did it cross her mind that she might have been forgetting something. If she had, she might have said, "Good riddance."

But when Molly announced "mission day" one Friday sunrise, her stork-like strides carrying her from room to room to shake them from dull, hungover dreams, a dread crept over Violet's moods and no amount of shaking would banish it. She knew the life of the Tea Party was neither idle nor easy, and all the allowance, sweets, and designer shoes would only go so far to numb their hearts to the seemingly purposeless crimes they would commit on behalf of the Icaria Foundation. And while Primavera seemed nearly chipper at the prospect of spilling even a little blood, Molly's stark expression took on a detached grimness that nearly frightened Violet more.

"You're getting off easy for this first one," Molly was saying as they sat down to a cold breakfast of coffee and bagels and fruit. "We have to tie up that Gen Zero project ASAP so we can concentrate on the big stuff. We're three again--no excuse to keep fucking around."

Primavera pouted. "Aww, I'm gonna have to quit the Tattler again."

"We don't need a public face anymore." Molly turned to Violet, then, rare and piercing eye contact indicating dread importance. "You're only Chroma now, and when someone sees one of us, they should fear all of us, and that's all anyone needs to know."


* * *


At ten o'clock that evening a brand new, fire red Porsche 911, Primavera's severance present to herself, pulled into the parking lot of the Absinthe. Fingertips playing over the stitching in the leather of the steering wheel, the blonde peered at the other expensive cars in the lot and cooed appreciatively. "Prime time slot at a joint like this? Our girl must be good..."

Molly sniffed. "You're lucky we blend in." She put an arm behind the driver's seat to look at Violet, who sat in the back, and frowned from her purple hair to her "Desperately Seeking Susan" sequined boots, turned down at the ankle. "Jesus, 'Vera, she looks like a kid."

"I am a kid." Violet scrunched up her nose indignantly and tugged at the sleeves of her thin, black and white striped sweater.

"Well, I'm not going in--I'll distract the whole room." The oh-so-humble Primavera probably just didn't want to leave her car, but considering the only place in the world the girl was likely to blend in was Yoyogi Park, she had a valid point. "You're probably more our girl's type anyway." She grinned and mussed Molly's pixie-short hair, much to the latter woman's annoyance.

After some bickering, it was decided that with Violet's Wall Street worthy walk and a coat of cherry lipstick, she could pass well enough to back up Molly while Primavera manned the "getaway car."

The interior of the gentlemen's club was deafening, the undulating bass notes of a Goldfrapp song offering conversations a measure of artificial privacy. The decor was tasteful, all things considered, the atmosphere coming secondary to quality entertainment. The Absinthe needed no theme, no gimmick, just bright lights a lot of machine-washable, green velvet upholstery.

A couple go-go dancers worked each of the two bars that lined just the main floor of the club, while on the T-shaped main stage a remarkably evenly bronzed woman was finishing her set on the catwalk, its large brandy snifters stuffed with greenbacks.

Two women entered the club then, and while that wasn't terribly unusual at the Absinthe, there was an exotic twist in that neither of them was a bride-to-be, and once inside, the shorter girl tucked her hand into the crook of her partner's elbow. The bouncer looked once (from ID to face), and even though the more ostentatious of the trio had stayed in the car, the rest of the room looked twice. They took a spot at a corner of the bar, ordered a spiced rum and Diet Coke and a Red Stripe and sat with their heads together, one eye on the stage.

The music changed: a deep bounce, jazz sax in the middle, and a hook you could forget as soon as Electra took the stage. She was just slip of a girl, barely older than the wide, green-eyed girl at the bar. She wore only a nondescript black silk wrap dress and Lanvin runway shoes; like the club, it let the talent speak for itself. Professionally feathered red tresses fell to her shoulders, and in his heart of hearts, her father was right: Electra Doyle's long, athletic legs were perfect.

Molly excused herself and edged her way across the recessed floor to the rail at the main stage, the crowd parting awkwardly for the tall woman with silvery glasses. But from her seat at the bar, Violet still had a perfect view of the dancer as she suggestively shed the bit of silk she wore; it dripped off her curves and angles to pool darkly on the internally illuminated stage, inert. Now clad only in lacy black lingerie and heels, the girl played to her audience. Like those of the women she'd in music videos, these movements were familiar to Violet, intended to tap into the clientele's preexisting notions of marketable sexuality, covetousness, and consumerism, to whet their palates and compel them to fill the tip jars, to encourage them to encourage the dancer.

The Absinthe was a no-hands club, but made up for it with talent; there would be no C-section scars or perforated septa to be found here, and Electra expertly used the promise of no unwanted groping to tease the men at the rail to the best of her ability. And then she reached Molly, twin mirrors reflecting the the girl's surprised, but bemused expression, and the woman smiled right back, tucking a twenty dollar bill into the nearby glass with two fingers.

Violet knew confidentially that Molly was not, and after working for Daedalus for eleven years, would not likely every be gay, but the Absinthe would never know by her performance. It might have been the generous tip, but Electra bloomed under the attention, shifting her technique to suit more feminine tastes, and the crowd lapped it up, exclusive and new, tantalizing, as though they alone were privy to a glimpse into this secret life of women.

Electra retreated up the catwalk, then, her gaze fixed on Molly, and placed a hand on the brass pole at center stage. She flicked her hair and made a tight spin around the pole to stop suddenly with her back arched against it, and the room exploded in raised glasses and wolf whistles, indicating this was what they had all come to see.

The music changed again, slowing further to "Off with Your Head,"'s dark minimalism and pouty vocals, and the club quieted, mouths open. With a simple swing of her leg over her head, Electra was up the spinning pole like a lynx, thighs gripping, back arching, hands grasping, until she was perched at the ceiling in an erotic inverted arabesque, sliding, spinning slowly to the floor. Her hands, free, ran the length of her body, her eyes closed, her mouth curled in a self-satisfied little smirk. It took Electra the better part of a minute to reach the stage, its underglow lighting the tops of her breasts and the backs of her thighs eerily, and her eyes opened to the world, disappointed.

This dance, feeling herself strain and stretch, scuplting herself into the shape of art, existing in the moment, fully, perfect...and no one to witness it but a sea of spoiled boys and acid green. But the smirk returned and she curled her legs around the pole, her torso undulating with the sleepy drum machine Her lips parted, her breath misting against the brass like she might eat the whole room just to temper an unholy hunger that man could never sate.

Violet, agape at the bar, suddenly, painfully, understood the meaning of Bittersweet. She gulped at the drink she hadn't meant to touch. Her heart broke for Electra.


To be continued...

[Karakuriya]

The Absinthe held its breath for the girl who was meant to leave them panting. She was almost too good, her skill was incomprehensible, her allure just intoxicating. Not woman: art. What, but the most perverted of minds, could imagine ravishing this super-human thing on the stained paisley carpet of the champagne room? You might as easily sign the tits of the Venus de Milo.

Electra's set, though the seconds had seemed to stretch themselves out to match the heartbeat of the song, in reality, was no more than five minutes long. As the music crept back into its normal decibel range and the patrons found themselves blinking from a daze, the tiny dancer made her way back down the catwalk. Instead of strutting a final round to offer a close-up view of her dewy skin and seal her three-figure pull of tips, she strode directly to Molly and crouched down to speak to her. Perhaps Primavera hadn't been just teasing about types.

Violet watched their body language carefully, the older woman leaning over the rail, smiling confidently, while Electra's fingers, tipped with glossy black polish, massaged at a scuff on her shoe. As magical as her ascent, she had become human again: just a lonely girl in a nice pair of heels, a piece of meat on stage.

As the conversation drew their heads closer, Molly dragged the mirrored glasses down her nose and said something, then, that made every finely chisled muscle in the girl's back tense, hard and pale as marble.

The pounding techno was peaking when, simultaneously, all three women moved. Electra was scrambling to her feet on the slick catwalk. Molly had a foot up on the rail, yelling, albeit unheard, across the room, "Chroma, go!" Violet's tumbler teetered across the bar as the club washed from gray to black, the pacemaker drum of the music now no more than a gestatory heartbeat washing against her soul.

The girl dove across the room at Electra, flickering like smoke in the stage lights, out of the air, into the ether, gaining speed. She would dive-tackle the dancer, slamming into her ego barrier, driving that impossible momentum into her psyche, her body, and put her down hard. Perfect.

But Violet's would-be signature coup de grace was cut short a mere yard from the performer as she inexplicably seized in mid-air, like a moth in a bug zapper, dropping to the stage with a muffled clatter of boots and bones. Immediately, Molly froze, still crouched on the rail, perhaps somehow uncharacteristically frightened, and tensely vigilant. Too stunned, herself, by the sudden appearance of the purple-haired attacker, Electra's retreat faltered, her ankles teetering in her platform shoes as she stumbled backwards up the catwalk.

The club began to stir like an angry hive, eager to save its queen from a pair of kamikaze wasps. Hands appeared on Molly's arms, but still she didn't even so much as glance anywhere but Electra.

Violet climbed to her feet, looking dazed, all three women exchanging uncertain, pensive looks. She looked to Molly, face pleading for help. The brunette only shook her head against those who would pull her down from the stage, her titanium skeleton anchoring her pose, her eyes on the mark.

Electra began to back away, her hands clutched defensively to her chest, and her eyes wild, sliding from Molly to her new threat. Violet's lip twitched into an odd little sneer, and, though she didn't move, she seemed to coil internally, mustering to lunge for the girl again. Her form became a blur and Electra pinched her eyes closed with a yelp, this time, a thick spark visibly springing from Electra's curled fingers to snap Violet on the wrist. She hit the invisible wall again, screaming in pain as her arm seized against her will.

It was clear, now, this was no ordinary brawl, and the would-be rescuers, bouncers and patrons alike, were suddenly having second thoughts. A pair of crazed lesbians with too many drinks was not the whole story here. One more bright jolt to Violet's forehead, and even the bouncers were routed, eager to leave the club and this altercation to the police. The girl arched into an impossibly gymnastic seizure. Molly had yet to blink.


* * *


Ah, the new car smell. Primavera had smelled like that once and it had been a wild summer filled with heart-pounding races and countless boys, their cuticles stained by engine grease. They couldn't get enough of her, the girl who smirked like danger, tasted like fun, and smelled like luxury. In the end, in it was all just a game of power. They lived it, bled it, ate it--and she more literally than the boys who thought they'd won her. Primavera rolled her palm over the leather knob of the gear shift and resisted sinking her teeth into the supple black leather of the upholstery.

She was losing the battle when the liquidated contents of the nightclub began to spill itself onto the parking lot, the pool of agitated young men, uncertain and aimless, coagulated in confused clumps, spreading ever closer to the still-spotless Porche.

Primavera slid out of the vehicle so quickly she might have only just appeared there beside it, the new car fairy with her airbrush detailed cheeks and motor oil slick eyes. She growled like an engine and the crowd parted double quick. She tossed her hair and tried to not look too miffed at the severe reaction as she stalked into the club to see what could have possibly gone so horribly wrong.


* * *


The club was practically empty now except for the blaring music that was attempting to erode the wallpaper. Two leggy girls wrestled on stage in what could have been mistaken for a niche Japanese pay-per-view entertainment. Violet had used her occipital cable to lasso the mark into a half-assed hogtie, and they were both screaming, one in pain, one in fear.

"Jesus, don't hurt her!" Molly could have been yelling at either of them. She was perched on the lip of the stage, seemingly frozen in the middle of a decision to dive in or duck and hide.

Primavera stalked, furious and fearless, down the floor, blowing hair from her eyes. "What the hell is this?"

Molly's eyes slid across her petrified expression like beads on sweaty glass. "It would have been nice to know we had a goddamn shocker, 'Vera." If it wasn't for the music, you might have her her clenched molars cracking.

"Well maybe you should of had your brain shielded by now. Christ, Mol. Fucking antique..."

Muttering, Primavera leapt neatly onto the stage, the underglow lighting her up like a burlesque Christmas tree angel. Even though Violet seemed plenty preoccupied by her disobeying limbs, at the word, "Move," she was disentangled from the girl and Primavera moved to have Electra in an arm lock of her own, the periodic shocks jarring her, albeit far less painfully. She drew the dancer from the floor, her chin in hand, and began to speak into the struggling girl's ear, her gaze moving from Violet to Molly, a disappointed sneer on her lips. Slowly, Electra calmed and Violet allowed herself to sigh, relieved, as she shook the cramping from her limbs. She looked from the backup to the leader, who had seemingly become a gargoyle on the lip of the stage.

Then, suddenly, in a flash of chrome, for-minutes-unmoving-Molly drew a left-handed pistol at the darkness behind her. After a moment of standoff, her aim unwavering, the shadow stirred, resolving a young man dressed casually in army surplus and slim sunglasses. He looked sure and grim and not at all as young as his face betrayed.

Primavera's jaw went slack mid-sentence. "You're fucking kidding me."

Molly's aim held firm. "You know this kid?"

"Cape," she spat the correction.

The brunette's brows furrowed above her twin mirrors, the muzzle of her pistol inching toward its target. "Chroma, blue four-eighty-four! Mike echo!"

The intruder didn't flinch, his muscles already coiled for an attack that never came.

"...Any day now..."

Violet stood rooted on the stage, squinting at the boy in the darkness, her breath oddly panicked.

Molly growled beneath the music, unwilling to stray from the target but out of options. "Violet!"

In a blink, her reverie forgotten, the girl was streaking down the floor at the hero. He raised a hand toward her, perhaps to block the rush, when Molly appeared behind him with a bass pop and a puff of displaced air. Look left. The muzzle pressed against his neck. He saw now that there were actually two Mollys in the room--the first hadn't even moved. Look right. Violet came within an inch of his hand and then simply disappeared. No longer flanked, the boy spun, knocking the gun away as Molly tore a pouch from his belt and disappeared as well, with a pop.

The original Molly raised her right hand and, lightning-fast, formed a number of shapes with her fingers. Another low popping sound and, while Molly never moved, exactly, her hair swayed and the torn pouch now sat in her hand.

The boy frowned, grim comprehension crossing his features. "The Menders know about you?"

• Violet lingered in the ether where she had entered it, near the boy she felt she ought to remember. She watched the pale, hexagonal scales bristle at her presence, even at this distance. His form was clouded with the static of his nanite colony's hive mind. His whole being buzzed, hyper-alert; she tasted electricity.

"Not yet." Molly dared a smug smile. As Violet slowly rematerialized on the stage with a shimmer, Molly tossed the pouch to her, though her mirror-covered eyes and the chrome of her gun reflected only the boy. "Wanna guess why?"

Violet rummaged through the pouch and found a spare MedEvac badge, likely kept for hostage evacuations, and stuck it on Electra's heaving sternum. The girl had calmed considerably, still panting, but at least no longer intermittently electrocuting everything within a yard of her hands. Primavera whispered one last time and activated the badge, and Electra blipped out of the club with a flash.

The boy frowned further, hunching toward the ground as though his arms were growing unbearably heavy. Six gleaming knives slid from his hands.

"Come on, hon, we gotta move." Primavera tugged Violet's arm, but she was rooted again, staring. Dismay dawned on her features like sunrise.

"Mis...?"

If he looked at her, it was impossible to tell.

Primavera dragged her a couple of steps toward the door, but Violet seemed determined to hold her ground until she fully grasped the situation: the forgotten engrams, the bizarre coincidence, the sudden seizure of her organs even though Electra was long gone. Cognizance waxed into a noon of confusion and waned into a dusk of choler. "Why...why is he fighting us?"

"Forget it, come on!" Primavera wrenched the girl's arm and dragged her stumbling out of the club.

Molly rattled her pistol at the boy just in case she didn't already have his complete attention. "This doesn't concern you, little hero. We're not taking anything that isn't already ours."

Molly had barely bit off the last consonant of her monologue when Misericorde launched himself at her, inhumanly fast--faster than Violet, probably faster than anything she'd ever seen. Her mouth formed vowels and they would have to do for curses for now; there was no time. She squeezed a few hurried shots into his chest before he was upon her, those knives in her face. The bullets had done less than nothing: they had wasted time, and there was truly nothing Molly hated more than wasted time. She backpedaled acrobatically over the tables and stools, somehow dodging the artfully careful flurry, and finally blocked with her left forearm. Six claws ribboned her flesh like gift wrap but rang against the alloy of her skeleton. Momentarily locked, Molly found the cheek to smirk unnervingly behind a hand seal and was gone.

A pop on the other side of the room revealed a different face of utter concentration, and Misericorde charged, vaulting cleanly over the intervening tables. A flanking time-double of Molly intercepted him with a foot to his temple, turning the vault into a cartwheel. As he skidded across the threadbare carpet, dragging a fist of claws, there was another pop behind him. Her plan finished, the original Molly dropped her gun and began signing furiously. She had already popped once when the second time-double drove her razor-sharp fingernails into the flesh near Mis' kidneys. With a low growl and a contrail of vaguely luminescent green, he tore himself from her grasp and floored the first double with a single, massive punch. He had halved the distance to Molly when the solution to this time witch's maze, simple, elegant, and already at hand, presented itself.

As Molly started in on her third seal, she stopped suddenly and swore. In a pop, her right arm went limp at her side, a wide, jagged gash in her shoulder and blood-slicked steel glinting pink in the club lights. Immediately Misericorde turned, identically wounding the second double before she winked out of existence.

He whirled again as Molly dropped to her knees, frantically snatching at the fallen pistol with her more functional hand. Out of breath, out of energy, out of blood, out of time, she leveled the gun at the black and green streak, saw his eyes through the glare of the spotlights in his glasses, and fired, adjusted, and fired again.

Two bullets ricocheting through his skull, Misericorde stumbled and went down, if only long enough for Molly to struggle to knit her fingers into arcane shapes and teleport out of sight.

The boy pulled himself from the matted floor and spat lead shrapnel, the club trashed, the villains escaped, and his fears confirmed.

[Karakuriya]

In the end, it was all quite simple. Through this latest election cycle, Geoffrey Doyle had been receiving increasingly threatening pressure by the Tsoo to protect their interests, and the alderman's wayward daughter had only assumed that the Absinthe's unexpected patrons had been some specially hired muscle. But once Electra had been intercepted at the hospital and further calmed and explained to exactly what Daedalus was and why the Tea Party so desperately wanted her, she had signed her life away without blinking. Violet thought it strange, but like like Molly and Primavera before her, Electra had felt she had been waiting for this moment, meant for something greater than her mundane life. What the Icaria Foundation was after: this beautiful, bittersweet world, was well worth fighting for, Violet agreed; but, ultimately, this was not a life she chose, and, deep down, she wished she felt the same righteous upwelling of purpose.

The situation square, the girls then whirled into motion. There would need to be a kidnapping plot and the Tsoo would have to be framed--a fairly easy task if not for that boy hero whom Violet seemed to know. Electra would have to go back to the Daedalus compound for integration, and, after quite the shouting match, it was decided that Violet would accompany her. It was far too risky, Molly had argued, being recognized and, more importantly, not having her head on straight at all times. "Consider it a vacation," Primavera had tried to reason. "Get your memory in order and help Electra settle in."

She tried to be pleasant and helpful and answer Electra's million questions without cynicism, but Violet found herself moping the entire trip back to the Isles. The prodigal child had failed her first practice assignment. Fundamentally, she felt she belonged less and less to this cause every day. Electra's contrasting zeal only sealed her disappointment.

Electra, for her part, was cheery with the excitement, and in the next days the girls tried to stay busy and consoled each other's anxieties with new friendship. Between the strict battery of stress tests, SPECT scans, neurological examinations, and psychological assessments, they shared interests and lunched and got to know one another. Afternoons of reciting poetry, comparing musical interpretations, practicing French inhaling cigarettes, and playing with the Beatitudes frittered a few weeks quickly. Electra could play piano, was an accomplished alto, and enjoyed painting intricate pop art in acrylic, but it was clear that contemporary dance was her forté. Violet happily traded her morning pilates ritual to join Electra at the barre in the ballroom.

Violet had never seen a girl formed so perfectly without tampering. They worked through a slow fondu combination, Electra's long développés stretching her knee clear to her shoulder without a hint of strain. She looked completely content with herself, low-lighted hair and modest breast implants the only indication that she had ever been unhappy with what God had given her.

When you're cyberized, what will you change? It was the question of the morning for a few days now, as Electra's date with Doctor Vosk's scalpel loomed ever closer. She had come up short with answers--it turned out she never liked her nose but didn't know what to do with it--and Violet, jealously, had no constructive suggestions.

"Well, what did you change?" came the inevitable question.

"Oh, God, everything." Violet hiked her leg onto the barre to stretch her hamstring. "Not that I really had a choice at the time. It was do or die--literally."

Electra grimaced as her toes flicked and her head followed the arc of her hand, though her eyes stayed on Violet. "Wow, I couldn't imagine being totally reproportioned like that. Even if I never saw a mirror, I wouldn't feel like me anymore."

Violet lifted her head from her knee to find the other girl still looking at her. "...What?"

Electra performed that uncanny transformation from immutable dancer into girl again. "Nothing--just thinking about proprioception. So maybe...is that why you don't really look at home in your skin? Uh, no offense...!" She nibbled a fingernail.

Violet stopped dancing, too, glancing at herself in the mirrors. "Well..." To be honest, she had been so happy with the improvements over her old body that she hadn't noticed. That she could do exactly what she willed herself to do was wonderful enough, especially this soon. "I wasn't remodeled all that long ago..."

No, the girl was clearly in command of her synthetic form; it was something else about the way she carried herself when not on task: pigeon breasted and pigeon toed. It reminded Electra of a Barbie doll, gold laméd and sexless, bent into a red, plastic Ferrari. A parody, glamorous and fake. Electra smiled subtly, a clever, knowing gleam in her eye.

"You haven't had a whole lotta experience have you?"

Violet balked, the forward girl still catching her off-guard occasionally when she forgot they'd found her half-naked, up a brass pole. "I hardly think that's a concern of...!" she was cut short as Electra snatched a recoiling hand, smirking, now, not unlike she had at Molly in the acid green smoke of the Absinthe.

"Screw this, I wanna swim."

The mischievous smirk was infectious, spreading now to Violet's face as well. Electra encouraged her with an exaggerated wink as she held her hand close, her palms hot and damp from the exercise.

"There's a pool in the basement. If we're sneaky..." Violet's voice was barely a whisper, her breath caught up in uncertain, unspeakable things.


* * *


They had shrieked like children, bare feet slapping against the chilly tiles. The shock of the salty, chlorine-free water was complete: an ambrosial baptism. Violet opened suddenly carefree eyes to see Electra emerge from a cone of tiny bubbles, her red hair framing her face like a halo of smoke as she twisted in the water and grinned. They broke the surface laughing, shaking water from their eyes. They splashed, shared and sabotaged each other's water ballets by tugging on ankles, and whispered echoing secrets about boys and what they seemed to like. In the shallow end Electra took Violet's face in her hands and, shoulders inching up tentatively, kissed her with chilled, salty lips.

It had been a little selfish, Electra later admitted. She'd wanted to know if Daedalus' smooth, cool, polymer skin had tasted as much as it looked flawless, and she hadn't been disappointed.


* * *


While Electra was able to go into surgery without fear, Violet spent a pensive week haunting the compound's empty halls. Occasionally a twittering line of eleven-year-olds skittered from one room to another like a clutch of baby quail darting after their mother from hedge to hedge, but without assignments, little curriculum of her own, and being confined to the clinic building, Violet found herself largely alone again.

On his days off Sydney, perhaps out of pity, opted to stay at the compound. While Violet found it impossible to extract where he would have gone otherwise, he admitted that he'd missed her; and she was grateful for the company. They brunched lazily and Violet recounted the odd circumstances that had landed her on probation. Sydney blithely detailed how, in his continuing efforts to appear to be working against Daedalus, though conveniently failing, had offed a city official with deep ties to Crey's competing projects and then spent three days in jail until the police had realized that the victim was a notable villain and Sydney had inadvertently done them quite the service. He was only charged with unlicensed vigilanteism and vigilanteism with excessive force, and then he promptly posted bail.

With the promise of no phasing through the floor and no tampering with neurotransmitters, they spared in a fight-to-the-checkmate in the clinic's danger room. Violet beat the boy soundly three-out-of-five, finally pinning Sydney to the ceramic floor. Straddling his chest, her knees across his elbows, she grinned smugly down from her perch. These days, she could usually best him more often than not, but today he had fallen for nearly every feint and it had quickly cost him the game.

Sydney blew damp hair from his face and chuckled. "Probation? Really?"

Violet affected her coyest smile. "Electra showed me a thing or two..."

The boy, suddenly not at all irritated by the loss, grinned wolfishly, his eyebrows at a jaunty angle. "Well that would explain all the giggling."

"Aren't you sorry you took that assignment now?"

Violet released her hold on his thighs to cross her arms over her chest, daring and mock-hurt, and Sydney used the opening to buck her off his chest and pin her in return.

"I'm here now." He smiled his double-dog-dare smile.

Sydney's palms, still warm from the fight, pressed into her shoulder and forearm, not unlike he'd held her countless times before in dance lessons or in the halls in the middle of the night. Before, it excited her, their game of dares: the tension and the unknown. But now, all she could seem to think of was how different it was from Electra's gently grasping fingers.

Neither was he the dark-haired mystery boy whose inhuman snicker-snack skulked through her subconscious, roiling just beneath the surface of her memories like a deadly undertow.

Violet wriggled from Sydney's grasp and he frowned subtly as he regarded the black storm overcoming her features.

"Vi, please don't make me regret staying home today."

It was very nearly a threat. He was finally losing his patience with her. Sydney was lonely, too--perhaps more so than the rest of them, and he and she had only been teasing each other mercilessly for years now.

Violet took the boy's hand and rose, leading him a few paces toward the lockers before retreating.

"Meet me in the sun room."


To be continued...

[Karakuriya]

The sun, well past its zenith, illuminated only the wells of the skylights, bathing the rest of the parlor in soft shadows that seemed to hold the day's warmth close and quiet. The pair curled up on a love seat in an intimate, book-lined nook of the room, heads close in the fading light.

Violet gently broke the silence. "Do you remember any of the Minerva Strain?"

The strain that made them siblings--sort of. The only alpha strain that had survived at all.

Sydney sighed through his nose, idly teasing out a lock of her hair. It wasn't exactly the topic he'd been expecting. "Yeah, I knew them briefly, before... What do you wanna know?"

Her pumps abandoned on the plush rug, Violet tucked her feet tighter beneath an empire-waist slip dress. "Just...where we come from. If there's some nature--some pattern or purpose I'm missing."

"But..." He laid his head on the arm that was draped behind her, not understanding why she so persistently begged to share his horrors. "They failed. We're supposed to find our own way, and so far it's working. Why test it?" His face took on an expression of concern, though it waxed into sympathy soon enough. "...I know it sucks, Vi, but they think you've only made it by not knowing everything--by having to rely on intuition. Foreknowledge...it's killed us."

"You're still here."

He shook his head. "But I've failed, too. I can't even handle cyberization without losing everything." Plus he was just that: a he, a point they were both happy to leave unspoken.

"...Please, Sydney?" Violet laid a hand on his knee. "At least tell me what they were like."

The boy sighed, letting his head fall to the cushions behind him.

"Minerva was a Korean girl they discovered in the '40's. I don't know what her powers were exactly, but they were killing her. Doctor Maillardet has a photo of her in his office if you're up for a challenge." He offered half a smile. "Anyway, Minerva's soul distilled into five patterns, and we each got one. Pansy was the first and I only saw her once. She just looked severely autistic, but they said it was because she was born without a soul somehow. Maybe she's still alive, who knows--she'd be...almost twenty by now."

Sydney resettled himself against Violet, as if physical comfort could offset the emotional uneasiness, and she leaned into him.

"Because of all the problems the generation was having, they brought Iris in when she started to develop her powers. She looked just like Minerva, and they treated her like she was some prophet, but she took to it: the ideal, the duty, all of it. She came and went and mastered her abilities in a few years. ...They were like yours," he added. "Just before you got here, though..." He paused again and looked at Violet, his thin eyebrows creasing. "She got lost in the ether and never came back."

"What? Just like that? How?"

Sydney shook his head, uneasy. "I don't know. She went too far out, I guess. I mean, she was the only one who knew what she was doing, and it's not like any of the tracking equipment is all that precise. That's why she was special. And why you are."

The boy went quiet and somber, and Violet placed a hand on his. "And the other one...?"

"Lavender..." He sighed. "Lavender was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. She came in when she was fourteen and looked, I don't know, more like eighteen--curvy and flawless. But that was part of the concern, I guess. She had powers like mine and was starting to have seizures so they ran tests to look for a secondary mutation like mine." He rubbed his forehead in disappointment and disbelief. "And it turned out there was--she was male, too--just immune to testosterone. That's why she looked so perfect. And when they told her...? God, I don't know why they thought me being there would help..." He grimaced and took a breath. "She--he--exploded. Literally. Just--splutch."

"Oh my God, you're not serious."

"It was horrifying. And that's why they don't want to tell you anything. Knowing what we're capable of, it's too much for a person to handle; and, given our powers, it kills us. I swear, it's pushing God's buttons. Having the power is one thing, but comprehending how to use it? It's like eating from the Tree of Knowledge. You and me, we're lucky we're alive."

She shook her head, feeling queasy. "'Splutch'? Really?"

"Violet..."

He was in no mood for games, but she wasn't teasing. The girl climbed out of the love seat and straightened her dress as she stepped back into her shoes.

"Where are you going?"

She didn't even turn to face him. "I need to check something."

Sydney caught her hand, then, and a shiver went up her arm. Something about his pensive, pleading look made her heart double-time like she would have just stepped off a cliff if it hadn't been for his grip.

"Please, don't. Just--stay."

Violet sighed sympathetically and bent to kiss him. "I won't get lost. I'll see you after dinner, okay?"

He reluctantly released her hand, frowning in a way that reminder her of someone else, somehow.


* * *


She remembered a room somewhere within the labyrinth of Daedalus' compound: a vault of memories. Maybe she had just dreamt it, but it seemed that in a rare act of pity, Doctor Vosk had shown her once, perhaps hoping she would forget. And she had, for the most part, though a feeling clung to her nightmares: some itch of foreshadowing that she couldn't reach to scratch.

She passed through the halls like a flickering ghost, peering through the wire frames of thick walls and electronically locked doors, looking for something remembered. There.

Violet slipped past the thick, steel door and materialized in a room of gently humming cryogenic cylinders. The rows were twenty units long and each was labeled zero through gamma. Jackpot. All Daedalus was, in one little room. All they were, in one hundred sets of frozen nucleotides. Such centralized storage seemed dangerous--and cocky at best, especially considering that the compound had been compromised before. She shook her head. They danced on the razor's edge, all of them--even the project itself.

Violet found the row labeled "alpha" and followed it to the end. Seventeen: that was her. Counting backwards by fours, her hand brushing against the chilled steel cylinders: thirteen, Sydney; nine, Lavender; five, Iris. Violet knelt down at the footlocker and peered through the ether at its contents. Empty. Not a trace of the girl whose fate she could share. She sighed, frustrated, and scanned the rest of the row. Lavender's was also empty. They all were save for a doll or a set of clothes or a diary here and there. None of them had been here long enough--lived long enough to leave anything behind. As Syndey kept all his things in his room, really, her locker was the only one with a significant amount of effects.

She had knelt here before, looking for answers. Daedalus certainly wasn't going to just give them to her; that was clear now. But Violet could not, in good conscience, continue to do their bidding without understanding the ends to her means. At the very least, she yearned to understand the means to her own sudden end as a normal girl.

She knew she had wanted it, that it had been necessary, even, but she couldn't, for the life of her, remember why. There was a car crash and then...here she was. A sharp sense of déjà vu made her head reel, her depth perception creating a nauseating vertigo rather than a useful sense of object relations in space. Memories of trigonometry classes and dance lessons with Sydney swam in a timeless abyss between "a few months ago" and a faceless "before." And then there were the knives: those six gleaming slivers that whispered like a ghost in her wetware and sent a shiver through her scalp.

She pushed the unease away and threw open the chest. All she had been, in a box; it was a familiar feeling. A middle schooler's clothes, too short and too small; a pair of orange Mary Janes with heart-shaped toes and panda faces; the diaries she had kept in band camp; a small photo album full of purikura stickers. Nostalgia washed over her, curdling her stomach. These objects--this life that had been hers felt mere moments passed, though by logic she knew it had been years since she had been the girl who wore these shoes and wrote these poems, the prodigal violinist who had pierced her own bellybutton on a summer dare.

Violet gritted her teeth and rifled through the locker, turning over trinket boxes and rumpling clothes in anger. There was nothing here but objects. A crumpled note at the bottom of the box yielded a paper cut, but the memories wouldn't come.

"To Violet," it read when she'd tugged the paper free, written, curiously, in her own and current hand. At last!

• Tell Dr. Vosk to leave, then play the tape. You are being lied to. Beware Sydney.

Violet felt she was on the verge of tears. One single line, and it didn't even make sense.

She rummaged for the mini cassette player she'd buried earlier. Could it really be just a note to her future self? But how would the past Violet know anything about the present--or Vosk?

Violet pulled a length of cable from the spool in her neck and plugged into the recorder's headphone jack as it rewound. Maybe she was crazy. Maybe she'd always been.

She pressed, "Play."

• "My name is Violet Quisling and I'm fourteen years old. I'm making this recording because at some point in the future, if Project Daedalus does not go well, I may not remember these things. Tomorrow I undergo cyberization. The surgeons will replace my bones with stainless steel. They will remove many of my organs and replace them with synthetic analogues to support the new electric impulse system. All my muscles will be enhanced to support my new skeleton. A computer will be put in my head that will regulate all the systems and tie my brain to my new nerves.
  
  "Of course I'm nervous. I don't know why I'm here or how I got here. Though I remember everything from before...that is, if these memories are even real...
  
  "I think that's why I'm okay with what they're doing here... It feels so real compared to watching my 'real' life shrink away before me."

The girl in the recording paused, some background noise obscured by shuffling against the microphone. Violet breathed for the first time since it began, sagging into the footlocker and the cold, polished concrete floor. Even that girl hadn't known how she had come to be in Daedalus' care. Even that girl sounded like this one: lost and resigned and fading away.

• "Though it's empty here.

Violet stopped the recording and rewound, spinning the knob on the recorder to its maximum volume. She closed her eyes, willing the signal come in cleaner.

• "What do you mean, 'She isn't coming back'?"

A boy's voice, cracking and hysterical. The response was muffled--too far way from the tiny microphone as cloth or skin brushed against it.

• "Lost? Lost?! No! That's impossible!"

It was Sydney. That much was clear now. Sydney throwing a tantrum was hardly unusual, but something of this magnitude? Perhaps Molly had really meant it that the nearly inconsolable boy had calmed considerably after Violet had been cyberized--become one of them.

• "No. Clearly you're wrong. It's obvious, you don't understand a goddamned thing about us. She wouldn't do that. She wouldn't leave me here!"

There was some more yelling, too far away to pick up. The girl sighed. Someone told her to continue, uncovering the microphone.

• "Though it's empty here. There were supposed to be eighteen more kids like us, but they didn't survive their powers or failed to manifest them as expected. So it's just Sydney Ashe and me. He's a little older and has been here since he was a child. We technically have the same abilities, genetically, but they work completely differently for each of us. I can move through solid objects (and light) and Sydney can break the molecular structure of things. He can even do it to people somewhat; he knows a lot about brain chemistry and uses it to affect emotions. But you can always tell when he does it because his eyes sort of sparkle.
  
  "I think I like him. I hope I still do when this is all over, because I'm sure he'll like me better when I'm perfect. That's what this whole branch of the project is about. I'll still be me, but I'll be the best I can be--the perfect girl. Who wouldn't want that? Besides, it's not like I really have a choice. I'm shrinking away. I'm losing myself. If I go on like this, my own molecules will dissociate. They say I might become a ghost if we wait until I'm eighteen as planned, so we're moving ahead now.
  
  "I remember Mom saying that Grandpapa--Dad's dad--was working as a soul scientist until the end of World War II. His research is what's making Project Daedalus possible. The theory follows that your genes build your body and make a home for your soul, and it's having a soul that makes you more than just a simulation of a consciousness--it's a significance that goes beyond just having sentience, like a Platonic form for what is you. But souls are impressionable and they pick up experience, so even though your genes are what give you things like temperament and meta-human abilities, they attach to your soul, too. It offers an understanding that's beyond simple intellectualizing. And even if your body goes away, your soul remembers everything--even if your brain doesn't. It's like phantom limbs on a spiritual level.
  
  "At least that's how the project partners explained it to me, which is more than a little dumbed down. It's why I like eavesdropping when they talk to each other. They're very excited for our prototype generation even though things have gone wrong.
  
  "The other day I was sneaking around and saw a couple women talking to Doctor Salieri. They had code names of course: Molly and Primavera, and I didn't recognize them, but they seemed familiar somehow. They were talking about recruiting someone for 'The Mad Tea Party,' and then Molly turned and looked right at me. It didn't matter that people always overlook me or that I was actually invisible, even to infrared, at the time.
  
  "I really miss being normal. I miss Mom and Dad. I miss the friends I had before the shrinking. I even miss school. I made good grades and I was going to be a professional violinist... Will I be able to hear real music when I'm a cyborg?"

The tape skipped, the original audio overwritten.

• "Sorry, I didn't mean to ramble off there. I shouldn't talk about before I came here; it's not important. It's easier if I forget it. If you're listening to this, future me, you're lucky because you don't remember. I mean that from my heart--it's not something they told me to say. The past wasn't bad; it wasn't halcyon. But either way, it's gone now. I will be gone tomorrow. I will be you. And trust me, you're lucky."

Magnetic tape, like souls, had memory. Beneath the grim suicide wish lay a palimpsest.

• "I've had the strangest song stuck in my head...ever since I got here. It's haunting. At night it's so quiet here. I close my eyes and the song is there. A woman is singing like a siren. I feel like I'm sinking into dark water and someone takes my hand at the last moment. I can hear her smile and smell gold and diamonds. She whispers seaweed and rose thorns, but I can't hear the words before the current tears us apart and the song takes her away. That's when the stitches ache so--"

The data hit her in a wall of sound.


On a mahogany desk: a photograph of her--no. Don't dare chase the will-o-the-wisp. Sing-song where the lost girls go.

All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Violet together again.

A lie so polished you could see your face in it. How could she forget twin lipstick smiles?

One boy screaming. Twelve girls screaming. Purity screaming--two mouths, all screaming.

The Knives. The Knives!

Said the boy who had no I, "What comes down must go up in flames."

Good-bye lace scratched at her skin. Time worries at its tail. Pop!



A blade of steel.
A heart of gold.
A silver bullet coded.

A kiss like copper.
Fear like brass.
An iron will corroded.

[Karakuriya]

In the hours after sunset the city took on an unearthly, azure hue, the shadows bleeding into the crisp geometry, the glass clouding darkly, the tops of the buildings looming obelisks against the still-light skyline. The worn-rough sandstone still radiated the Spring's tentative warmth into his leather gloves as he scaled stories of barred windows and dull-eyed gargoyles, a vague, creeping splotch of dark on creeping darkness.

He chose a window at the top, securing himself to the embellished, stonework gutter in order to free a hand. With a flick of his wrist that was more habit than necessity, three arcing blades slid to glimmer in the flickering of a distant sodium-vapor lamp. A clang rang out against the old stones and new glass, and the shadow paused, adjusting. He raised his arm again, and another blow rent the window cage loose from its sill. The steel mesh clattered over the loose gravel of the rooftop--more noise and evidence of his passing--but the shadow was already gone.


* * *


A girl sings pansori, alone and far away in her skull. Cat gut strings on brass music box reels wind and tangle the music, wrinkling the sky. AM's self-hatred rides in on rolling thunderheads; miles high they choke the stars.

Moon-silver blades rend the air and plow the earth, the scars bleeding black oceans, clotting forests abloom with cherry and plum. The palest pink--petal dervish, mayfly snow. The prince of trees, he stands alone in a deadened glade; the siblings have withered and bowed in the dark, their lives given and taken. Trunk lashed to trunk, bark has overgrown a crimson sash, long ago tied and forgotten, yet a noose still. The limbs are bent by odd fruit, heavy with blood. The young wood groans.

Her terror is a peach pit: all that remains of something savored, sustaining, in dark days devoured until only stone. Polished, cracked, poison.

Eat me.

This is my body, my blood. A new covenant, he cries. He flares; he dies. Inside the armor his hands are but ashes.

Fairy dust is just as bitter, smells like ozone, tastes of almonds, throbs on her tongue like a pulse. The wails go tinny, machined. Daisy, Daisy...


* * *


He could hear Harvey Maylor sweating over the phone, fat fingers worrying at the plastic.

"So this super girl's been working for me. She's good--not great, but good. Kind of sloppy. Real pretty though. Could actually get close to DeVore with a face like that. Anyway, here's the trouble: I get this voicemail on my tip line. She says it's real hot, Harvey. I've got to get a man in the Isles A.S.A.F.P. And I know we've never worked together, but she drops your name. Only man for the job, she says. Something about Secret Squirrel--says you'd know what that meant."

The red sandstone building hadn't been hard to find. Hiding in plain sight only worked up to a certain point.

Plush carpeting gave silently beneath his sneakers where he crouched just beneath the window sill. A silver trapezoid lay before him, painting the Edwardian flowers and songbirds in shades of gray and shadow, and, on the edge of the rug, a girl.

She sat, shoulders hunched against the light, the back of her loose, white nightgown spilling toward him. A hand played at the edge of the rug, following the cracks of the floorboards, and she turned. Pupils huge, peering through long, stick-straight tresses, warned him that a carpet was the least of what he had tread upon. The gaping of her lashes seemed to draw the room in, daring him to take another step with a wild stare that came only from a fear not of him but of herself.

The rubber of his sole shifted softly against the fibers.

A word, barely whispered: "No."

Was it a seam in her nightgown? It puckered unnaturally, darkening even in the shadows.


* * *


Violet found herself suddenly awake, though her pulse was a slow, steady wash, throbbing in time with the alarm-red LED lamp on her desk. The smothering, black seas were only cool satin sheets now, the piercing star shine far away in solar systems whose names she never cared to memorize.

In automatic, practiced gestures, the girl slid out of bed and began to tug on her leathers. The alarm pulsed on, insistent. What had gotten into her lately? The dreams. The sense of an undercurrent--a whole world shadowed by this one--one she could neither see nor touch but felt stitched between the threads of faded engrams.

That tape. Something vile--no, viral had got into her. It had wound down her brainstem and coiled itself into a knot of butterflies that could have been made of fire for the heat pricking her skin and the way her heart had tried to leap out of her chest.

But it wasn't this new and secreted corruption that bothered her, no. Even though she didn't dare tell a soul that her cyberbrain may have been compromised, it's wasn't for embarrassment. She felt oddly protective of her little payload, as though she had been meant to find it, to carry it as part of herself, its secret mission now hers.

No, what bothered her was that cryptic note. Written as if only minutes from now and then tossed carelessly into some closed time-like loop. Despite the explicit warning, Violet knew that Sydney was the only person in this compound who bore any chance of divulging answers. She would rather brave his snares than live in fear of the unknown. She would rather know evil than frolic like an idiot in this man-made Eden. She would rather know--had to know the lie.

It was as though she could feel the chill of the checkered tiles seep up through the acrylic soles of her clear ankle boots when she stepped into the hallway--an otherworldly sense of foreboding cast in the throbbing red aura of her shadow. Another step would carry her into the fold of black and unknown futures: with one foot, toward obedience; the other, toward knowledge.

[Karakuriya]

The tiles rang like ceramic chimes, white and black keys tapping out a steady dirge of echoes against painted tin and heavy, embossed paper. Ahead, a blade of light from beneath a door and the muffled notes of Beethoven broke the corridor's tomb-like atmosphere. Violet knocked once, softly, and entered.

Sydney's apartments held all the restless solemnity of a wake. He strode heavily about the room with seeming single-mindedness. As though resolved not to acknowledge the intrusion, he rummaged through his wardrobe and lockers, casting bits of armor and equipment about the room, all the while muttering unintelligibly to himself beneath the crackling piano of an antique record player. It was clear this was not his usual preparation ritual. The record changed tracks as he pulled an armored leather jacket down from a shelf.

"So they've come again. Finally. Knew this day would come. Come for her. They'll take her. Take her away. Again. Lose her all over again."

She could have simply turned and left--prevented the crumbling of their brittle, gingerbread world. She could have left the hemlock kiss hanging on her lips, unsatisfied.

"Sydney, what's the lie?"

The boy stopped at his writing desk, his back toward her, as the melancholy strings swelled to life.

"I know everyone has been keeping things from me. Intentionally. Manipulating me. To what ends? Can't I know the truth? Can't I be a willing soldier?"

She awaited a reply, but her surrogate brother and protector stood as silently as he ever had through all the years and trials they had been forced to share. His head bowed toward an open drawer as though he peered down into his own, yawning grave.

"I can't bear it anymore, being haunted like this. Sydney, please. I'd rather die."

Sydney's tan shoulders tensed as he drew his hair up into a knot with a loop of elastic. He turned slowly, his expression calm with resignation, and rested a hand on a bare iliac crest. There was no sympathetic pinching of eyebrows, no scornful glare, no wicked twist of lips; only exhaustion, a threadbare sort of irony, and an unhappy chuckle.

"You really want to know why your mind is such a nightmare?" A few stray strands fell across his cheekbones as he paused, testing her, giving Violet one last chance to save their candied reality from melting behind tears. A barely perceptible sway, in time with his pulse, betrayed his fear of a moment he had long wished would never crystallize.

Her angry, acid green stare dared him to lie this time.

"It's because you're dead, Violet. You have been since you got here. You're a ghost in another girl's body."

• The sedan careened unnaturally, the seatbelt locking against her chest, cutting into her throat. Through her wine-red hair, as it flew about her head like wild agar, she saw the glare of sun, a bed of flora, and dazzling, prismatic sun again before the glass tessellated, exploding in upon them. There was no pain, but the crunching was deafening. Her only conscious fear, in the immediacy of the moment, was of her violin being crushed in this brittle, steel tin.

"You were too important to lose. Iris went after you. But she never came back."

• The meadow was made of purple wildflowers, the nearby forest wrought in magenta and aubergine. Only the wreckage was a vile black, its smoke twisting and writhing in a wind she could neither smell nor touch. But there was a voice: a young woman singing that tugged at her spirit. Made of some intangible matter, she was strange and yet somehow familiar--a stranger similar enough to be a sister. She took her hand and said, "Come home," and terrible screaming faded away into the ether. She then stood alone above a wreck-filled ditch, as naked as the violin cast at her feet.

None of it had been as she had thought: her imagination or a dream confused with memory. Why her past had all but been forgotten, why she never felt quite at home in her own brain--all because Iris had pulled her back from death somehow, rebuilt her broken body, and forced her repossess it; however, the universe knew better, the true state of things, and would not let the sins against it go ignored. The restless guilt and the eerie discomfort--all this time, Violet had been haunting herself.

Their secret, their grief shared, Violet regarded Sydney now with his same defeated calm. A thread of tension spiraled down his arm, white knuckles gripping the back of his writing chair.

"You loved her, didn't you? Iris."

An edge of jealous contempt must have crept into her voice, because his lower eyelids narrowed minutely. "Don't you dare say her name like that."

His sudden venom shocked her. Violet gasped in revelation, outraged by his audacity, driving her fingernails into her palms. "You always resented me! I should have seen it: you were trying to pretend I was her!"

Sydney turned slightly to retrieve his heat-marbled gauntlets from the desk, returning, his features cast in a shadow of a cruel satisfaction. "You didn't seem to mind."

In a flicker and a stride Violet closed the distance between them, dashing the gauntlets from his hands, and they clattered nosily to the floor. She couldn't care even the tiniest bit about anything, now, except hurting him. When nothing in her life was actually hers, save for this rage, how could she?

Sydney was no match for her now. She hooked his knees with a calf, and in a moment he was on the floor and she was upon him, hair tickling his face, her breath hot in his ear.

"So finish it: this sick circle of life. Behind all the games, it is what you've always wanted, isn't it? It's what they've all always wanted." Sin wrapped in pretty paper. That's all it was.

And she was no exception, unafraid now of hypocrisy or irony or loving self-loathing. She was sick of all the endless games. She wanted to win. She wanted to taste the prize.

She felt his thin hands snake around her waist, pressing the worn soft leather into her flesh.

"But is that what you want, Violet?" His lips moved against her cheek, baiting her. "Or do you only want to want it--because that's how they made you?"

She sat up slowly, her expression blank as she stared down at him.

"Fuck you, Sydney."

Her thumbs drove down into his eye sockets, felt them give and burst like rotten fruit. The boy screamed, writhing beneath her, as the area rug surrounding them burst violently into flames.


* * *


White nightgown draped low off white shoulders--a jilted ghost in wedding kimono. Her slender neck arched forward unnaturally, as if straining to escape her body and a strange rippling in the skin above her collar. In moments the rippling became a pucker, the pucker became an incision, and the incision became a huge, bloodless gash in the girl's upper spine. Vertebrae cracked and split into a deformed ring of splintered bone teeth; she cried out in pain.

The boy frowned into the dark. Some security or resistance was to be expected, but not an army of little girls, and certainly not little girls infested with demonic maws, bottomless and brimming with teeth. Anticipating the worst, he drew down his claws.

It was as though the act itself had stirred the monster to life. With a snarl, the faux dentata turned on him as though of its own accord, wrenching its host around. The girl jerked erect and was suddenly rushing at him, feet tripping backwards over the plush rug. He caught her by the shoulders, attempting to hold this inhumanly strong, gnashing maw and attached tween at arm's length.

Staring into this chasm, he could feel a strange, spiritual vacuum forming, tugging at an aspect of his resolve. He didn't want to harm this girl. He'd prepared for this infiltration job, expecting to go to whatever means would be most effective; but, this abyssal mouth seemed to be draining it away--feeding on his very aggression. Slowly, his claws retracted.

The girl began to seize intermittently. A tongue of dark ether lapped at his arms, reaching from some Lovecraftian plane for more. As it lashed and strained toward his face, he finally dropped the girl in revulsion and backpedaled toward the window. She sagged to the cedar floorboards, though the flesh of her back still writhed of its own accord, all wrong in the glow of the nightlight meant to keep lesser monsters away.

The maw puckered, taunting, but there was nothing left to take.

"Will you hurt her?"

Automatically: "No." His voice was alien in his own ears. Elsewhere in the building, fire alarm klaxons began to blare.

The girl pointed to the bedroom door with a skinny, white arm. "Alpha wing."

White-out eyes and black hole mouth followed him across the room until the door clicked shut.


* * *


The girl strode resolutely down the labyrinthine halls toward Daedalus' inner sanctum and its matriarchal minotaur. Hyper-dense doors and fireproofing couldn't save them from the demons they had created. She was a vengeful ghost now, a restless soul on its final haunting. She phased.

Violet stepped back into the center of the small, lavish-yet-tastefully appointed office. Boss Sylvia sat at her desk reading what looked like manuscript, no different than any of the other project partners who spent most of their time with their minds elsewhere. She glanced at the desktop monitor, pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear, and looked up.

"Was that really necessary, dear, setting him off?"

"You should know better than to cage a firebird."

She pressed a button on the PA. "Dispatch Mercy, please." Her eyes never left the girl. "And what about a willie? Shall we dance?" She stood, then, her suit all crisp angles, though small, looking terrifying somehow.

"I want to know why I was lied to." Violet stabbed the air between them with an accusing finger. "Not just kept in the dark about everything, but brainwashed--blatantly manipulated. I may be a ghost, but I'm a human being. I deserve, at the very least, some sort of Goddamn explanation." Her nerves crackled with rage, her hair whipping into her face with every shake of her head.

Madame Sylvia circled the desk, a hand tracing the edge idly. "I suppose you might be old enough now to understand," she crooned patronizingly. "It was because of the Minerva Strain--the pattern of the one soul donated to Generation Aeon that survived. You've seen what has happened to Sydney; he knew everything, he became the worst of everything. So we really couldn't tell you anything without fear of it shaping you."

"So you tell me nothing and watch me become that instead?!"

She sighed and leaned back on the relief roses edging the desk. "We had been raided, you were lost to us for a time. You needed to learn about the ways of the world in order to be truly effective, so we made the best we could of the situation."

Violet was at a loss for words. "And that didn't seem just a little bit risky, leaving your little toys to run amok?"

The woman known as "Mama" pursed her lips. "I knew that any daughter of mine would do anything to survive, to follow her heart, and to see things made right. She had endured before; I knew she could do it again."

Violet blanched in spite of herself. That smile. That tragic smile. The pain in her eyes of all the answers she knew but in telling would only make them harder to bear. Violet felt like her skull was cracking.

"What are you talking about?"

Sylvia looked a little sad then, but unsurprised. "Oh, Violet, you really don't remember, do you? It wasn't so long ago." She retucked the strand. "Almost twenty years ago I gave myself, my womb, my love to this project--to you. We all expected to make great sacrifices, but when they saw fit to take even that love from us..." She looked at her hand braced on the edge of the desk and exhaled, driving back the bitterness, the melodrama peaking. For the greater good. For the project. For the dream. "But look at you now." The smile crept further across aross finely powdered wrinkles. "You didn't need me after all."

Violet found her back to the door now, the rubber plant brushing against her arm. Her data bank was bare, but old imprinted memories tingled vaguely.

A girl's frightened whisper. Sadness reflected in a mother's eyes. A shriek. The crumpling of steel. A naked violin.

She raised an accusatory finger, horror-stricken, her bones rattling in their joints.

"You. You tried to kill me!"

Sylvia spread her arms wide. "I tried to save you, Violet! To set you free from this!"

Violet's breath came short and shallow with dull panic breaking in waves against her diaphragm. They were all mad here in this weird science Wonderland. She had to get out.

A tiny form streaked across the security feed displayed on the computer monitor. Mercy was on her way.

"And you're trying to kill me now!"

Sylvia Lam cackled with delusional glee at her masterstroke. Her perfect purple lips, twisted and wide, perfectly framed a contorted eidolon of motherhood. "Go, Violet! Live!"


* * *


A strange figure stumbled down the hall, behind him a wake of ruin. Sydney crashed on, blinded and covered in his own blood and a patina of first- and second-degree burns across his arms and torso. Everything that fell into his grasp was instantly destroyed as he collapsed into the walls and floor. The paper burst into flames, paint blistered and ran, wood splintered, tiles exploded into dust. All the while, he cried out in long, anguished wails, sobbing without the benefit of eyes.

At each door, he groped for the nameplate, feeling for the information just before the metal turned white-hot and oozed off the wall.

"Shiloh!"

The brass knob came away in his hand. A single pounding fist shattered the door from its hinges.

"Shiloh, where did he go?!"

The girl sat, frightened and exhausted, on her rug where she had been left.

"Behind you."

He swung around and suddenly he saw--not with his eyes, but he knew another girl stood in the hall, with murder in her own.

"Mercy."

The girl with perfect, auburn curls smiled, wide, perverse, and cruel. Her head hinged backwards aberrantly, and her throat opened into Hell.

[Karakuriya]

They met upon the luxurious Persian rug of Madame Sylvia's capacious antechamber, several thousand dollars worth of furniture and months of silence between them.

Though her stride stopped short and she stood soundly upon the plush, her sculpted titanium stilettos driving deep into the fiber, there was a sense that the motion continued, like the final note of a musical phrase, lingering in the acoustics of the room. Her form was unmistakably familiar: a gentle parody of femininity, coated from knee to breast in worn, carbon-colored lambskin, though it had gone all wrong since last he'd seen her--more a clockwork doll in a girl's body than a broken girl in a doll's body. That is, if it was even her at all, and not some identical sister. It wouldn't have surprised him; but, he couldn't be certain with the cyclopsean visor on, perched amidst a silky bob of artificial and violently purple hair. Only her mouth was visible beneath, quirked ever so slightly on one side.

It was he who was the clear intruder, now, garbed in nondescript black denim, T-shirt, and Converse: disposable clothing for an off-the-grid job. The boy, Misericorde, stood impossibly still on the edge of the rug, not even wavering with the beat of his pulse. He was all limbs, like she remembered, graceful even when utterly motionless, his gravity a plumb line of sinew drawn down through his feet, though his arms, though each finger that dropped toward the floor. He wore a strange expression of resolute detachment as he eyed her, absorbing spacial detail, processing, deducing, seeing austere probabilities mapped out in a dance of footprints pressed into carpet.

The girl moved first, taking a single step laterally, then another, in an indulgent pacing of her side of the room. She lingered, savoring the bitter transience of these things, wondering if she would obey her mother one last time.

"Violet." It was as much a question as it was a statement.

One foot drew toward the other, stalling in a Grecian pose. "Oh?" As the girl resumed her stride, her form began to react oddly to the room's ambient light, wavering subtly, a specter painted by cathode ray, degaussing. Her hair went magenta, her lips lacquered black. "Are you so sure?" Her tresses slowly morphed, became a bonnet, a scarf, a hood in red that fell to her mouth.

She didn't even see him move. He was past the reproduction Louis XV appointments and in her face, slender, deceptively delicate fingers clamping over her visor. Her lips formed a small oval of surprise. The muscles of his shoulder bunched and the appliance groaned as if in pain; screws bending, the optics cracked. Finally, something in her head gave--calved, and the thing was rent from her face, coming away in an arc of shorting chips, electrical wire, and plastic shards. She reared against the attack, like a breaching mermaid, her eyes nonexistent pools--not unlike the mouths of her little sisters--suddenly flickering, and then they were hers again: neon foil irises homing in, painting a new target.

It was, indeed, Violet, somewhere behind the glass and microscopic servos; that expression of dismay--the brain in this rogue marionette was still hers. But, all too soon, she affected a toying smirk that was too much a sneer. She...blipped, somehow, in an instant collapsing the distance between them to an uncomfortable fraction. A tiny finger hooked the bridge of the boy's goggles; and, with a childish syllable of triumph, she snapped them from his face. Partially out of surprise, Misericorde took a reactionary swipe, but the girl's form flickered like a disturbed hologram, the single blade passing without resistance, and then she was again at range.

Was this how it would play out? An eye for an eye? The visor coughed an electrostatic death rattle in his hand, and he cast it aside, not daring to watch it clatter over the chessboard tiles, skidding into a corner of the room.

"I'm not going to fight you." There was some frustration there. "You're coming home."

"I am home." A hand at the ready rested on a cocked hip, feigning an indolent decadence, her whole manner, at the same time saccharine and perverse, cloying somehow. "This is my family. I won't let you hurt them. They're mine." There was drying blood caked under her fingernails.

"I got an S.O.S. today. If you didn't send it, who did?"

She sniffed derisively. "A ghost."

Misericorde engaged his claws, six bright blades dropping toward the floor without so much as a whisper of metal whetting on flesh. Unarmed, Violet ducked, hamstrings coiling, angry.

Even Daedalus' high-framerate surveillance system could not capture what occurred in that instant. A plangent clang thundered through the room. One of many brocade love seats tipped slowly backward, the boy now perched jauntily upon it, behind him, the thick rug lay in a trail of ribbons. The girl flickered into existence some meters away, alighting upon a spindly end table, a long knife in each hand. The inconceivably swift teens wordlessly evaluated one another, aware that fleetness alone would not determine this bout. Point, counterpoint. Violet coolly kicked a cordless Tiffany lamp, out of her way.

Misericorde hunched now, his claws barely clearing the carpet, when the next step of the dance began. Rubber soles warm from the sudden stress, sneakers feinted left, then right, in an unbroken stride of zig-zags as he accelerated toward his target, seemingly heavy fistfuls of claws trailing behind him. The teak end table exploded into a cloud of splinters, though Violet no longer stood upon it, instead hanging in the air above, her toes tucked just out of the arc of flashing blades. Unfettered by inertia, she was immediately behind him, a dagger reversed in her palm. Misericorde's torso twisted, a cat righting itself in free fall, as her fist, closed around the hilt of her knife, connected solidly with his mouth.

Skipping backwards weightlessly, Violet immediately regretted the arrogant jab; toying with this opponent would reap steep dividends when she was out of tricks. No wound would slow him down. It was all-or-nothing, and she was already unlikely to have another chance.

He sucked blood from his lip impassively. "Stop." Was he pleading? Or making a statement?

His lip unsplit, unseamed.

Sensing his hesitation, Violet pressed her advantage, inhuman acceleration her only ally. She could ill afford a war of attrition against a foe who recovered so quickly. Her flawless moue compressed into a pout, the precursor to the pained desperation blooming upon her too-symmetrical features. Alloys met, screamed against each other, parted, and met again. Violet reeled with each blow, windmilling, phasing to avoid his riposte. Simple melee tactics would not, could not work here; the boy was implacable. He could continue hammering away at her all night, tirelessly, until she had either made an error or serendipity turned its back on her.

She didn't have to wait long. His attack intensified, strikes and feints that forced her to slink through the field of furniture to the perimeter of the rug with chilling, machine-like acuity. Choreography in ruined carpet they had both foreseen. The music had been chosen for them: the staccato of blades testing each other filling the room as the sound of a storm upon metal rooftops.

A perceived opening, realized too late as calculated, she could only watch herself, detached, as panic drove both blades forward in a chance offensive. His weapons retracted or crumbled, it was difficult to discern which, as her knives sank knuckle-, then wrist-deep into his arm, lodged in soft tissue, ligament, bone. She tested her grip, blood-slicked, and found it lacking. He twisted the mangled arm, her refusal to release the handle of her offense forcing her arms to her breast. She would soon be intractably cornered.

"That’s enough, Violet." Another statement-request. Was she supposed to feel guilty?

She made a little gasp, offering him a glare that held no surprise, only venom and mute curses. Misericorde wrenched the deadlocked mess upward, flinging the daggers from her grasp and across the room. Immediately, Violet broke sideways, flickering for speed, and he rushed to intercept, charging across the slick fibers, vaulting furniture she simply ignored, when she disappeared from view.

Unshaken, he held course and slammed into something soft, feminine...and invisible. Misericorde tackled the now corporeal girl who, by all recollection, should have weighed easily three times what she did now, and they skidded clumsily onto the tile with a squeal of tacky polymer on ceramic, her plump doll-mouth caught again in an uncharacteristic oval of surprise. Realizing the futility of her situation, Violet sighed and went limp, surrendering to the grapple. Her eyes begged him not to be cruel, blinked coyly through thick lashes, ever the coquette, even as he pinned her to the floor.

"Catch me, if you can."

With a sly, slow wink, she arched her back as if stretching, and began to sink from his grasp and into the tile itself. Cheshire-like. In seconds she had seemingly melted away, leaving only cool ceramic beneath his palms.

Misericorde rolled heavily onto his back, surveying the mess he'd made of the bone and tissue that struggled only momentarily to remember and revert to its familiar approximation of a human hand. Sullenly, he turned his head, lowering his cheek to the tile to inspect the room. Violet had been known to "dodge" all manner of bullets, blades, even shrapnel from grenades--he'd even seen it himself; but, like most of the others, he'd chalked it up to superior reflexes alone. She had played her final card: phasing her entire body through solid matter. She could now be, literally, anywhere.

Time to face facts; Violet was gone. Doomed from the start, just like...

He bit down on his lip, then released his mantra to failure. "Fuck."

Somewhere in the surrounding labyrinth, a child shrieked in fear or pain. The fire alarm finally tripped on the executive floor, signaling time to improvise an exit strategy. He rose to his feet, sneakers squeaking softly on the tile, unnecessarily testing the "new" hand. As if on queue, Violet shot out of an adjoining office wall, tumbling across the space to collect her knives. She stood suddenly, dispassionately still, looking not at him but at a framed photograph in her free hand.

The picture frame spun from her hand, arced wide, arbitrarily hurled against the far wall. Violet shook strangely, her expression livid, and she began to stalk erratically from one side of the room to the other, opposite him. There was blood on her neck, behind her ear, where her occipital cable, retracting from the visor, had lacerated her.

"Every other time I turn around, there you are, interfering. Every time I close my eyes, it's you!" Her voice rose above the bleating alarm, hysterically shrill and human. He eyed her warily. Was she talking to him? Or herself? "Who are you?!"

Violet was and wasn't, he realized with dull horror. Rewired somehow, reprogrammed. Dubbed over.

She offered little chance to respond, a few flicks of her wrists manifesting two additional knives from her arms. She charged with renewed vitriol; he stood his ground, giving her no cause to flee again.

The girl's form blinked as though under strobe light, appearing just long enough for Misericorde to deflect each attack. To press the attack himself would be to strike blindly; Violet harbored no such qualms. She appeared off his left shoulder, her weapons drawing a neat incision down his spine, shirt and meat parting like a zipper.

"Fight back!" she screamed, raising the last knife high. Her arm went translucent, and the blade plunged into his shoulder in a shower of, not sparks...like hexagonal, fluttering scales of a tiny reptile, iridescent, shimmering, then gone.

Misericorde stumbled close, sagging against her heavily as she bitterly pursed her lips, reaching out to catch him by coded reflex alone: some subroutine wired to prevent the heavy sound of a body hitting the floor from alerting prey, perhaps. Her perfect doll-eyes widened as she found his hands framing her face, one of them sliding through her hair to close around the partially exposed occipital cable that had disconnected from her visor. His arm suddenly swung wide, a blur. She yelped, realizing too late what he had done, looking on in horror as the cord spooled out of her head, parabolic.

A blade appeared from...nowhere, perhaps stored inside a leg. The other leg swung up, past his face to hook his elbow in the crook of her knee, and Violet swiveled closer, her back arched against him as if they danced an improvised mambo. In one smooth motion the knife flashed, severing the thin loop of cord that tethered her to him, and sank into the side of his head. A confetti of neon scales, sparks from her phantasmal blade against the armor of his sentience.

She thought he would never stop falling. Milliseconds crawled by as the boy crumpled against her, sliding the length of her, painting a long, hot stain down her back. Where the past minutes had been too fast to comprehend, she watched Misericorde die in slow motion. She couldn't say why. Neither could she explain why she stood there long after he ceased to respond, staring.

Violet had never before mourned a foe, but she couldn't fight off a pang of disappointment that gripped her now, devastated, perhaps, that she would never know why some schoolboy had fancied himself a hero tonight. Perhaps the attachment was not her own. She found the photograph by the exit, under a layer of shattered glass. Iris could have been her twin.

As she allowed herself a final look at the doomed boy, left to bleed out into the rug, she found herself caught in a painfully swift arm bar. She cried out in alarm, punching the manual release trigger deep in her shoulder, and, with a hiss of gaskets clamping shut, the limb came away in his hands. He threw the mannequin-stiff arm aside as Violet leapt for the ceiling in a final flight, and he scrambled after her, barely managed to grab an ankle, snatching her roughly from the brink of incorporeality. The girl clattered to the floor, lacking two limbs to break her fall, and she began to whimper. Visions of fairy-tale monsters, little girl assassins dragged to Hell. Misericorde yanked her across the tiles.

"Never give up your back," he chided. Too confident. What was he thinking? His eyes held hers a second too long, renewing within her a sudden urge to fight, to preserve herself.

"No!" Violet lashed out with her remaining hand in a desperate, off-balance backhand, but he caught her wrist and jerked her upright again, feet nearly dangling, her arm held high, as though reaching to touch the ceiling. His other arm encircled her waist, held her fast, and he forced his mouth onto hers.

The nanites hit her bloodstream, a swarm of kamikaze memes that painted data like a stippled photograph, then burned up in the atmosphere of her cerebral fluid, bleeding a brilliant aurora across her vision. An ancient tree of buried engrams fired, forked lightning igniting her amygdala. Flash point. Two years of dead memories, never felt, screamed across her neural net.

Violet melted in his grasp, her perfectly rosy cheeks wet with tears. She fought back a sob as Misericorde gently let her to the floor, shocked and trembling. She shook her head, lucidity returning, and studied his face.

"Mis...?" Disorientation corrupted into regret. "Oh, no."

He kissed her this time, carefully, clumsily smeared some of the tears away with his fingers.

"Mis, I'm so sorry."


* * *


Two figures fled through the dappled midnight streets, cones of lamplight catching them: four shadows, hands clasped as they ran. Behind them an old, sandstone clinic erupted. Eight pairs of wonder-filled eyes, eight cherubic faces turned to the sky to see the phoenix spiral into the atmosphere, a tiny doll clutched in each talon. He screeched, anguished, into the night, spread his flaming plumage wide, and exploded into a million dazzling shards.

[Karakuriya]

Violet's bedroom in the penthouse suite the Tea Party shared looked like an exploded doll house. Everywhere lay pretty clothes and rumpled costumes, made of everything from silk crepe to vinyl, run with lace and Kevlar, bits of silicon interfacing, mysterious cable ports. Straight blades of all sizes littered the floor and the furniture, congregated in corners, and protruded from drawers and walls. Books and discs spilled from nightstands and hid beneath cushions. A round table was littered with bits of soups and sandwiches and cakes, half-empty teapcups and decanters of juice. The disheveled, too-soft bed and blood-spotted sheets told a short, pulpy story about a girl with a head full of nightmares.

She tugged the crippled visor out of her hair, letting it fall among the clutter on the dressing bench as she made her way, tired and sore, to the window. She sighed out at the city sunrise, cloaked in a romantic gloom that had seemed to follow them from the Isles. Her wounds were warm, the machine already slowly repairing itself.

"So," she said to the glass. "How did you find me?"

She didn't really have to ask. More she marveled that he came for her after all. Should she have been surprised he kept his promise?

Violet found a clean, unisex shirt and tossed it at the boy. Already showing no sign of injury, his blood-soaked, shredded tee looked like a Halloween costume.

"Your man, Harvey. He called earlier...yesterday." She watched him tug the T-shirt off, use it to scrub away some of the flaking blood, pull the new one on.

The pieces fell together: the note on familiar paper, the garbled audio tape, Molly's admission that she'd tampered with the locker, the force-fed information that had broken the spell. The viruses tasted the same, if one could say such a thing about code. She wet her lips.

"Give me a minute."

Violet dug through the cubbyholes of the writing desk, gathering a portable disc burner, a blank CD, and two pieces of flowery stationery. Jacking into the device, she committed a bit of the viral data to the disc, meanwhile scribing a note to her wayward past self, recreating it as best she could recall. She was burning the S.O.S.-broadcasting hijacker, disguised in data tones, when they heard a key scrape in the lock of the French doors.

Misericorde tensed, but Violet shook her head and scribbled hastily on the other sheet of paper: time, place, and means.

Molly stormed into the suite, nearly slamming the door on Primavera in her wake. She didn't have to see the intruder to guess why Violet was back in Paragon prematurely. By now she'd heard the news of the fire, of Sydney, of little Shiloh and Mercy.

"What the hell, Vi?" Molly looked absolutely furious, staring daggers across the common room to where the girl stood framed by her doorway.

Violet gathered her project, stalked gracefully out of her bedroom, and simply handed the papers and the disc to her sister, whose pretty, albeit harsh features were contorted with irate disappointment at the indiscretion of compromising their hideout.

"I'm not your personal, fucking, trans-dimensional courier."

"Sorry, Mol." Violet had heard the speech so many times it was mantra. "You've already done it."

"Yeah, I know." Molly snatched the package, without bothering to check the address, and shook it at her, scoldingly. "This better be life or death, girlie. Life or death." And then she was gone. Primavera's skirts ruffled as the nearby air moved to take up the vacated space.

The blonde hovered where she had stood at Molly's shoulder, her eyes flicking back to the doorway where Misericorde had edged into view.

"You're leaving."

Violet nodded and was pulled into a lacy embrace.

"You'll always be our little sister. When you're done with school, you come find us, okay?" She barely waited for the next nod. "You'd better get going. I'll send your things and some money."

Violet smiled, her eyes watery. "Thanks, Lily, really..."

The girl just smiled. "Go on. She'll be back soon, when she cools down and realizes you've sent her beyond her limit."