PART IV: FATE IS A CRUEL AND EFFICIENT TUTOR

Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall
Atlantic City, NJ
26.08.2017
10:45 pm

Staggering.

Unsteadily, a baby deer on ice may have been able to hold themselves to a higher degree of coordination, as another bloody handprint was smeared across another painted concrete wall searching desperately for purchase.

Amber couldn’t find the air to speak, although her jaw surely tried as though mouthing her thoughts while trying desperately to squeeze a gasp of air past her intentions. A stolen moment as her knees met the floor recklessly once again, sprawling in a concerted attempt to get anywhere faster than her body might allow.

Screaming pain radiating from the centre of her bones did little to hinder, no background noise to the ferocious guilt that cried a malevolent wail through her nervous system. Forcing herself forward on autopilot, headed to the one place that she’d promised forever – only to walk away when she realised forever didn’t mean what she thought it had.

How wrong she’d quickly understood herself to be.

How desperately she’d wanted to change.

How much she’d acted as predictably as expected.

That hurt worse than the bruises and potentially broken bones, hurt worsre than the cut across her cheek that seeped steadily in crimson interweaving into the tangled mane she’d become so recognizable for.


From his slumped vantage point sat on a creaking folding chair, wrinkled hands tapping along the impeccable crease lines running down the front of his trousers, Earl blew his cheeks out with a chestful of air held too long inside a bony ribcage. He glanced over to see Amber stumble around the breezeblock corner, bleeding and mouthing something unintelligible.

Levering himself up with a wince, SCW’s Senior Official didn’t bother to do anything so absolute – and foolish – as try to impede the redhead’s path. Instead, he just shook his gnarled head from off to the side.

“You won’t find him, Miss Ryan,” He said simply. There was still blood on the old man’s fingers. Fexxfield’s blood.

“All of this …” He continued, “Got something to do with that strange woman? One with the hidden face? Saw her back here while you were still out there, once they wheeled Terryl back in.”

He sighed. “Don’t think even Ramona and Devlin as a duo roughed him up as badly as he was just now.”

“Speaking of roughed up …” Earl said with obvious concern painted all across his features. “Want me to fetch a trainer, or a doctor or maybe both?”

Wheeling around like a virulent crimson whirlwind, Amber was almost upon the Senior Official before he could react in any meaningful way. A wild eyed panic barely veiled by the vicious snarl that crossed her features, as the demand for any kind of explanation tried to cross her lips.

“Where is he…”

Through ragged breaths, the blood slowly soaking through the edge of her shirt – torn away towards the collar bone and stained a thickly smeared red.

“You have to tell me…”

Words didn’t come easily, disjointed as her racing thoughts. Hands gripped firmly at the older man's collar as her fiery mane fell across her face like a wall of static flames.

“Miss Ryan, please… I have to insist–”

Infuriated by the response being anything but an affirmation or direction, Amber’s hands dropped from his collar and pressed deeply into his chest as she used him to push off, handprints staining in viscose crimson.

A stagger, then another as knees desperate for reprieve and equilibrium startled way too far to the left to be right. Grasping hands clutched towards anything that might provide a momentary stability as she fought against her own body towards the only place that seemed to make sense.

“I have to…”

Syllables trailed as the thought dissipated in the fight to remain mostly vertical – and failing as the concrete floor met her faster than she imagined. Crawling for the last few feet, the name plastered on the door slipped like a cold hand between her ribs and wrapped a set of icy fingers around whatever was left in her chest with an aching squeeze.

‘Atlantic City Champion - Terryl Fexxfield’

… Not anymore.

... because of her.

Slickened hands shook as they pulled on the handle, trying to seize verticality before it was swept out from beneath her as the door opened with little resistance. Too little.

“I have to tell him…”

It wasn’t even directed anymore, a subconscious stream of thought as fractured and disjointed as the woman they were spilling from, wrought with guilt and failing determination to hold it at bay. Amber’s sprawling hands found blood on the carpet, still damp from the earlier scuffle – however, in spite of the heavy staining that spread further across her skin, that wasn’t what had caught her eye upon an unstable entry.

She tried to pull herself back to a state of normality, even if on her knees wasn’t where she’d intended. A stream of clear cut through the seeping red on her cheek, mirrored by one on the other side – shoulders slumped forward with heaving breaths as the dam started to visibly break. A fedora, worn to hell and stained at the rim in a thick crimson that had seemed to pool – taken up by a hand that shook so badly that she could barely hold a grip, yet she balanced it into her lap. Supremely unaware and entirely uncaring of the small audience that had followed her bloody trail.

Frustration gave way to something else as the deafening background buzzing of activity was pierced by the heart wrenching scream of a woman whose broken heart could no longer shatter into any smaller pieces, cradling the reminder of what she’d been so willing to sacrifice as though it were precisely what she had wanted from the start.

Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. IX – Two Beds and a Coffee Machine

__________________________________________________________________________________

[The Past – Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, USA, Winter 2005]

She fell over the threshold hard, wrists burning against carpet in painful friction. Arcing headlamps threw strange shadows where they met streetlights outside and bent in and through. Where her hands pulled up in reflex they left bloodied smears that drew streaks of red against the matt-brown piles. The door slammed shut behind, rattling in its frame as the unmistakable thump of deadbolts latching into place echoed against the cheap plasterboard walls.

For a moment one listened and the other wept. Combustion engines spluttered and drivetrains groaned but nothing stopped that hadn’t otherwise intended to and no warbling sirens were stretched out by the compressive attentions of the Doppler Effect, or came screeching to a halt in the parking lot beyond. No heavy boots echoing against the asphalt outside.

The typical sounds of a town; as close to an urban calm as anything could be that was made of metal and concrete and noise.

Abigayle watched her stumble but didn’t stop, instead seamlessly skirting around the other woman sprawling across the floor. Mumbling and whimpering something unintelligible or, at this juncture, unimportant. Probably both. She was already moving towards the bathroom, light on and faucet running in a choreographed pirouette of action-following-action. The mirror-backed cabinet over the sink swung open and she collected a half-dozen brown plastic bottles, sweeping them into her cradled arm.

“ … We have to go back …” The other woman gasped. Abigayle ignored her, unwinding a length of gauze and pressing it to the clotting wound dripping down her temple. It splashed against the creased fabric of the summer dress pulled down and out of shape. She brought the collection of medicines out with her free arm and dropped them onto one of two beds either side of a coffee machine ringed by dust, grease and age.

“Please … Abigayle …”

When the woman on the floor made it up to her knees and then to the door, she got no further than reaching for the brass handle – tarnished and dull where so many hands had grasped it over the years – when the hilt of a palm thumped in against the latch a scant inch from her face. She flinched, stumbling back. “Please, we can’t leave him there to–

Abigayle shook her head. “He is already dead, Marylin, if he is fortunate. If not … It is a self-correcting problem.”

Marylin’s breathing came in snatched, twisting gasps. Pained and staccato. “Oh my god … We killed a cop …”

“He killed himself,” The taller woman corrected, twisting the cap free from a bottle and spilling the coloured tablets into a cupped palm. She held it out. “Take four of these.”

“I can’t go back to jail …”

Stepping back around the bed, Abigayle thrust her free hand under Marylin’s chin. “Take these now.”

And she did.

Looking back, it had been a mistake to wait so late to intervene. The situation had spiralled, but all the variables were known quantities and every aspect played out in a way she could have fully extrapolated. Their clientele had taken some time to adapt to Abigayle’s preferred methodology of business – only slightly longer than the girls who served them – and a few had been particularly reluctant to follow the direction of new management. That had been mostly overcome with firm reminders and the odd judicious use of physical punishment, but by and large, her preference for political sabotage and personal ruin when clients overstepped their privilege had kept a relatively stable peace while providing safety and security for their … Unorthodox cooperative.

Disgust had turned to tolerance, and tolerance was rapidly making inroads towards acceptance. Favours flowed in and out; networks formed. Friends in places equally high and low and  therefore equally valuable soon traded in secrets and suggestions. All, in the words of the woman currently panicking on the bloodied carpet below in calmer times, for the price of a fuck and some conversation.

Money was useful, but secrets were a better commodity. Trading in the promise of information to be requisitioned at some point to be decided was an effective futures trading on Human fallibility and nature. It was a sure-fire bet not that someone might make a mistake, but when. And when they did and needed help, or some mechanism to make the problem go away …

Until Officer Roland “Buck” Van Der Madden had taken his last struggling gasps of oxygen-deficient air, staring into Abigayle’s bright blue eyes as she choked the life out of him in the tired interior of a 1998 Ford Galaxy. She could still smell old tobacco and cherry-scented air fresheners.

She wasn’t particularly fearful of the consequences – because she had amassed so many of them now, in so many niche areas each promising the most severe punishments, that the addition of a few more seemed trite. Meaningless. Instead, she regretted the disruption this could potentially cause her new cooperative, and the damage that might be done in the form of revenge should a false narrative end up winning out over the truth.

They were on the cusp of something significant. A sea change; a promotion from trash to purpose. Status instead of stateless. Why should she stand by and watch a mouth-breathing neanderthal threaten everything because he could not stand to see something threaten his way of life with a concept as novel as equality? No. He had deserved to turn burgundy red, blood vessels bursting in his desperate, piercing eyes …

It had been a mistake not to intervene until so late, but it had been equally such a mistake to get into the car with a known troublemaker beforehand. He had threatened to bring it all down, but she had set those events in motion.

“You should not have entertained him.”

Marilyn glanced up, fingers massaging angry red skin marking telltale handprints about her neck. He had continued to throttle her right up until his heart had seized in his chest. “What?”

“You should not have gotten into his car.”

She baulked, pain giving way to confusion, then anger. “Are you serious?”

Bright blue eyes narrowed, and Marilyn shrank, indignation quickly forgotten. “He pays good …”

Filling the sticky percolator jug from the bathroom sink, Abigayle pressed a thumb against the coffee machine sat on a low table between both beds and watched it shudder to life. “He pays well, because he is blacklisted.”

“You can’t just blacklist–”

The taller woman’s head angled around sharply. Marilyn shrank down onto her haunches. “If you wish to go into business for yourself, you may leave.”

She nodded towards the street outside. “There is the door.”

Not all the women had approved of Abigayle’s new management methodology. Some were traditional in that they preferred to be exploited by those they understood well enough in place of someone who seemed to operate in a way that didn’t marry up with preconceptions. She did not blame them, not initially, but it had quickly become apparent that blame was not required to remove elements which threatened her grand design.

And so she did.

Fingers quested around the blotchy red marks strung out like the impression of some heavy necklace. Marilyn shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

Something brown and hot approximating coffee began to leach out from waxy paper filters and hissing nozzles. “It will take significant capital to make this problem go away.”

“Go away?” Marilyn almost laughed, if the fear in her eyes hadn’t been so transmissive. “We killed a cop!”

“I killed a cop,” Abigayle corrected, matter-of-factly. “And yes. There is almost nothing that does not have a price to ameliorate. Our new business model has provided some powerful benefactors. A significant investment in secrets. I would have preferred to spend that goodwill in a different way …”

Marilyn rang her bloodied fingertips together, shakily climbing to her feet. “You really think it’ll be okay?”

Killing someone with impunity was no mean feat, but having ingratiated their cooperative into every facet of local and multiple aspects of state government, she could see it was an established process of the rich, powerful or carefree. Usually both.

Pulling the percolator jug out from its housing, the taller woman filled a chipped mug to the brim and held it out. “I promised you would all be cared for. It was Doctor DeLune’s final wish.”

Taking it into her hand, Marilyn brought the steaming cup up to her blinking eyes and took a long and deep drag of the bitter, sticky tang. For a few seconds she just stared into the contents, teeth biting into chapped lips as she searched for something. The unasked question lazily spun around the room, taking up more and more real estate as it ballooned with hidden meaning and ambiguous connotations.

“Yes?”

She looked up. “Some of the girls talk …”

Abigayle swirled the contents of the jug around, watching it splash against the scored rings circling the glass. There were hairline cracks where too many eager hands had roughly shoved and banged and crashed. “What do they talk about?”

“About Doctor DeLune. They say that, well … That you …”

She pushed the percolator back into its housing and looked over. “That I?”

Marilyn lowered herself down onto one of the beds, broken mattress creaking and ballooning with the slight weight. “Did you?”

Silence for a moment. Then a nod. “Yes.”

“Why?”

Sitting on the remaining bed opposite, Abigayle folded her hands into her lap, palms pressed down against the top of her thighs. For a few moments she stared off into some space in-between, replaying events – decisions and their consequences – back from a vantage point only she could see. “Revenge,” She said, finally.

He had been calm, in the end. She suspected the Doctor had presumed it would be only a matter of time, although she doubted he had any real concept of how long it had been in the planning. In his mind, DeLune had believed that one original sin in the service of something altogether greater would mitigate the resultant sins of the father and their sons. Of course, that was not the case. It could never have been the case.

Mid-sip, Marilyn choked down the turgid coffee. “What? But he helped us–”

“He helped himself,” She corrected, and pulled apart her hairline to reveal a subtle and meandering ribbon of scar tissue underneath the scalp. “It is only happenstance from your perspective that his interests aligned with yours. When that stopped being the case, he would not hesitate to leave you to something much worse. Have you forgotten what happened to Esmarelda?”

She chose not to go into the details of her involvement. That had been at DeLune’s direction and while his justification was sound and the need clear, the circumstances that had driven the former Sister Superior of North Palladium Hospital to end up shuffling free from an unexpectedly truncated mortal coil had been unambiguously, undeniably his.

Marilyn shook her head. “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything,” Abigayle replied immediately. And she meant it.

“How long before … How long did you know, before you were going to …”

“How long beforehand was I aware that I planned to kill him?” She clarified. Marilyn nodded. “Nine years.”

“What?”

The taller woman offered a slight shrug. “Nine years – although I was not in a position to do anything to further that until relatively recently. Until I was confident he was surplus to my requirements. And yours.”

They did not talk again for a while. Between coffee, cleaning wounds and medicating interspersed with the odd moment of sudden stillness as heavy footsteps echoed past the door, or a loud series of rapid bangs passed without incident as spurned lovers begged for one more chance to make amends outside a neighbouring room. Adrenaline burning out like spent rocket fuel, leaving the mind weary and the soul aching, Marilyn drew bruised legs up towards her chest and laid down on her side.

Padding softly on raised toes, Abigayle turned the overhead light out and perched herself on the very edge of the sunken bed. Differential cooling rates made the coffee machine tick as plastic and metal contracted, building a rhythmic mechanical heartbeat for the background clang of the urban landscape.

“I can’t sleep …” Marilyn murmured eventually, still hunched and facing away.

“It will take some time for the medication to do its work.”

Another silence. Pregnant, expectant.

Abigayle shifted slightly, brow creased. Frowning. “Do you want me to–”

“Yes.”

And so she did. She moved over, carefully climbed onto the shifting, lumpen mattress and shuffled in behind Marilyn, draping long arms over the smaller woman to pull her in tight.

Marilyn settled down. “You’ve gotten better at this …”

“I wish you would not talk.”

She laughed. “Why?”

“You make it awkward,” Abigayle replied evenly.

That made Marilyn abruptly spin until the two were face-to-face, or at least, upturned-face to chest. “Are you serious?”

She looked down. “I am always serious.”

Settling in, Marilyn’s words were muffled in against Abigayle. “That’s what makes you so funny …”

She thought about that for a long while. She thought about the last gurgling sounds of Officer Buck as he drowned in his own pink and frothy saliva. She thought about the way DeLune had squeaked in surprise when the blade had pushed in between his ribs, even as he knew it was coming. She thought about the woman in her arms.

She thought about all those things, in every conceivable order, for a long while.

When they crashed through the door four hours later, wood and deadbolts exploding in a cloud of splinters and metal chunks, they found nothing more compelling than a half-filled cup of lukewarm coffee, bloodied carpet tracks and a dozen plastic medicine bottles abandoned in the red-ringed bathroom sink. One of the beds was a tangle of tossed sheets and bunched pillows, the other still immaculately pressed and folded in at three sides.

There wasn’t a whole lot to go on. Flicking his notepad closed, the Patrolman slipped it inside the folds of his jacket and pushed himself up to standing. From somewhere just shy of the doorway, a shadow fell across the light flooding in from an early morning sun. Outside, the rhythmic pulsing of blue sirens reflected off eager faces crowding around upper storey bannisters that lined the courtyard.

“What’s the picture?”

Craning his neck back towards the newcomer, the officer shrugged. “Nothing worth writing home about, Sir. Bloodwork won’t tell us anything we don’t already know – we know who they are anyhow. Just need to stick them to this and let upstate warm up the chair. Forensics from Buck’s car will be our best bet.”

“Won’t get anything out of that scene,” He replied, worn shoe leather squeaking against the threadbare carpet. “Think you’ll find the results a whole bunch of inconclusive once the lab’s done … Analysing them.”

The Patrolman frowned, turning. “Sir? Seems like a pretty open and shut case to me.”

Chewing the inside of his cheek, Detective Terryl Fexxfield shrugged and tugged on the rim of a threadbare fedora sat atop his head. “Funny how hard the easiest things wind up being, when they stop being easy to some.”

_________________________________________________________________________________

[The Rapture]

There is a powerful irony at work here, Crystal. Something which threatens to bludgeon all the subtleties we could pick apart between us under a crashing, rolling, homogeneous wave threatening a singular and irresistible message. Something so painfully inescapable it screens out the intricacies of the words we could otherwise use to draw in such careful patterns of critique and question. A swamping wash of white noise which drowns the precious signal under irretrievable gibberish. It pushes so hard against all the complexities I would so much rather discuss that my hold strains and even mechanically-actuated, composite-reinforced fingers eventually lose grip.

It cannot be ignored any longer … And why should it? Stunning in its simplicity, elegant in the final form of its solution. A primordal truth taken from the hand of God and passed down through his prophets and orators for you to gather with the peasants at the foot of the Mount and listen. 

You are the only one here wearing a mask.

The carved composite on my face is not meant to obfuscate, or hide what should otherwise be in plain sight. Instead it is a facsimile, although not of what lies underneath. In everything I have done, my consistency is elemental and my order as structured as the most linear of processes. My grand design has been laid out in the abstract and built in the reality, a shining machine-edifice of whirling brass and spinning bronze, topped by all the enraptured who have chosen to take the road more suffered. And oh, how they have suffered. From imagination to implementation, everything – all of it – was precisely, definitively, painstakingly, agonisingly laid out as intended.

No lies, no subtle misdirections or false narratives. I did, have done, will do what I always said I would do. Do you not see the truth in that? The honesty? The beauty?

The purity. 

I cover my face not to hide who I am, or what, but to ensure the underlying message is left undiluted by the softness, the vulnerability – the weakness – of my mortality. To show the warmth of skin, the soft hue of cheeks flushed red in chill air, tightness around the eyes as they draw something into sharp focus in scrutiny, perhaps disbelief, or surprise is to suggest there is some ambiguity. Some potential for a change in mind or direction, that at some point I might reconsider all of this.

Impossible. What is now underway cannot be undone, here in SCW and elsewhere. To that end, why not make such irreversibility manifest? Make real that impossibility of a change in course and strap it across those soft, fragile, wavering features that might suggest the answer to the question is anything else but set in stone. Or plastic.

But you do not subscribe to such truth, do you, Ms Zdunich? Ms Millar? Ms Hilton? So many names to one common face, an actress practising her well-hewn craft … And yet it is nothing more than a crass metaphor, swung like a bludgeon to ring some comparative bell. A metaphorical test-of-conceptual-strength contest flanked by renaissance fair reenactors that are simply between jobs. Perhaps now, we have finally found your people and your place. Tell them of ye olde exploits and do not forget to validate their parking. Maybe tomorrow that big break will finally come calling. A golden ticket courtesy of the Zdunich more likely to feature on people’s lips and minds.

How can it be that you are eclipsed, the Moon in her shining, stunning sunlit sky, with so many World Championships to your name? Perhaps for the same reason you no longer carry the name – the names! – which fleetingly brought you to the summit of that Mount. So many former Champions toil in the art of the impossible; doing their utmost to reverse entropy and claim back better times from the past, where they sit in the dark and calcify. Instead, you threw those legacies away. Why?

Were you in search of something more keeping with your station as a transitional pinnacle? A momentary success rarely seen as anything more than a high tide mark for passing talent? Or were you in need of an identity more suited to Megaman-themed tights?

I understand comparisons between the original Zdunich and your apparent reboot are a somewhat sensitive topic, so let me disabuse you of any intentional comparison.

If we step away from your delusion and spend a short while in the real world, it should be obvious that I am not interested in your wife, in much the same way it appears she is not interested in you. Not unless she chooses to make use of the gateway I have built, like you will, and dash herself against the rock upon whose summit I have laid the Internet Championship, just like you will. Or, she makes some foolish decision to interfere in the grand design I have set into motion as intended – as I have always, unwaveringly, intended. My consistency is the metric by which you should truly hesitate before taking my thorn-painted hand, not something so paltry as fear.

Take our renaissance fair and transform it into some ghoulish house of horrors, a fitting venue for something so worn-out as a mere sense of fear. As a wielder of the theatrical, I expected you to have a far more impressive grasp of such subtleties. What is fear, without consequence? It is only the action which gives the concept a meaning or implication. The weapon I wield is pain, not the two-dimensional threat of inflicting it. That is weakness generated by lack of spirit – lack of your strength of will.

Do not paint me as a monster because you are afraid of what is hiding underneath your bed. Instead, rest uneasily but assured that there are far worse things than the anticipation of what waits for you in the dark … Such as what is waiting for you, in that dark.

For such a talented competitor, actress and wife it must have come as a brutal shock to see your much-anticipated address to me “cut for time” (interest) from the company broadcast all those weeks ago. Having listened to those words, and there were not many for someone who seemed so eager to tell the world that they planned to say them, it seemed a justifiable decision. Give the people what they want, and they do not want you.

You talked of how hard it is to be an actress; the demands of all the roles you must learn to play and yet in all your years as a thespian, you have yet to convince anyone that the level of entitlement, arrogance and delusion you exhibit is grounded in reality or justification. A performance so poor, it deserves the attention of something approximating McCartney’s Red Scare and its devastating blacklisting of Hollywood’s elite.

And the up-and-coming “stars” who carried their bags.

Do you hear the things that you say, over the sound of the fans you think clap for your approval?

By what metric do you consider yourself the best wrestler in this world except where the reality in question is constructed, operated and contained entirely within your head? Who challenges who at Into The Void? You come to me for relevancy, recognition. Validity. Not the inverse.

Andrea talked too loudly and too readily about her unassailable strength and standing. The most dominant bitch on the block … And yet she could at least boast a title reign length which suggested an impressive, if bloated basis for cawing and whooping. Her destruction at my thorn-painted hand was inevitable – she doomed herself with her own words – but there was a desperation inside Andrea which could have pushed her further. Threatened my grand design.

What have you achieved by comparison? Fleeting World Championships turned bit-part roles for someone so supposedly talented in adapting, changing, growing?

Did you feel like Andrea could have won as she screamed wide-eyed up at the lights, voice reduced to muffled scream, lips flexing around my prosthetic as it forced its way down her rasping throat? How many must I send into thrashing delirium, courtesy of plastic fingers pushed into soft palettes, before you look beyond the badly-photocopied pages of your latest script and consider the deeper meaning? Further back, behind the teeth. There, where the gag reflex make you choke on such nonsensical words

This is not a slasher flick, Crystal, and you are not the inner final girl. At Into The Void, you will instead find yourself in the starring role of a Greek tragedy beyond any ability to parse and comprehend. Underneath the pitted columns of the Parthenon as it sits as the crown on Athens, you will learn the same painful lesson all others who cross my path have, with one important exception

You are unworthy of my Rapture, and there is no place for you there. Even your mortal enemy turned grudging peer, Miss Hernandez, has been gifted a place in that grand design and celestial machine made burnished and bright. All others have added to its perfection with their own uniqueness, strength of mind and body. But not you.

What could you possibly bring beyond self-delusion and a limitless capacity for bald-faced ignorance in the face of overwhelming truth? I have no need of someone skilled in pretending to be someone else, just as your wife has no real need for you.

If the truth were distilled down into some potent tonic that could be forced into your veins, granting just a few moments of clarity, you are not even the most compelling member of the Bombshells’ division named Zdunich.

Perhaps I will be doing her a favour.

__________________________________________________________________________________

[The Past – Oblivion Garage, Nevada, USA, Summer 2022]

It is remarkable how much variety there can be in black. An all-consuming nothingness that eats the light and reflects nothing in turn. A shiny softness that presents some perfect mirror-finish; reflecting back whatever peers inside. A remarkable range is spread all around, on display in various stages of decomposition, destruction and decay.

I have never shown that much interest in her personal life – not truly. It did not ever seem particularly consequential. After all, she had sacrificed everything internally and externally in the pursuit of three hundred and fifty seven plus days at the summit. It was difficult to imagine anything could compare in terms of such major, all-encompassing importance. Particularly after it had been burnt to ashes and nothingness.

From the doorway, Cassieopia pulls the liner of her strawberry-red coat in tighter, bright candy heels kicking up scraps of charred paper and plastic. She frowns at the destruction all around, nudging aside the detritus with a toe to reveal a scorched concrete floor beneath. Eventually, she glances up and finds my gaze. She holds it well enough, and it is a testament to the increasing confidence of the young woman that her voice does not lilt or sing or show any outward signs of stress.

Still, she is stressed. She fears me. Which is only natural, because with every passing week she becomes more attuned to our cause. More aware of exactly what awaits her when this story reaches its inevitable conclusion and climax. One Cassieopia is regretfully, perhaps, unlikely to see.

“What’re you looking for?” She asks, frowning as her lungs catch on another half-breath of combustion products impregnated into the sagging walls and metalwork turned to slag.

“I am not looking for anything,” I reply, and that is the truth. I have not come here to find something; only to see the latest evolution of my Resplendent Hurricane – one of her finalmost forms as she comes so perilously, beautifully close to finally fulfilling the destiny that has been threatening to come to fruition for so very long.

This was not a discrete act in and of itself, but a catalyst. An accelerant, if the pun is pardoned.

Picking my way between fire-blackened remnants, I pause beside the occasional storage chest and sweep my prosthetic along straight edges warped and skewed by the intense heat. Brushing fine blankets of salt-grey ash clear, strips of silver shine through where torque wrenches, spanners and other tools have survived – insulated against the worst excesses of the blaze. Their survival seems stubborn, but ultimately pointless.

Even if they see use again, it will never be under the same circumstance.

“Did you do this?”

The abruptness of the question catches me a little by surprise and I pause for a few moments. Cocking my head to the side, I glance back towards Cassieopia who has dropped down to her knees to inspect a long, thick pole half-buried in the burnt remnants of a rubber inflation bag. She reaches forward and gently brushes charred plastic away until the thing more fully reveals itself.

A tyre iron.

I stand over her but she does not look away once she has looked up.

“Do you think that is something I would consider?”

She does not hesitate. “Yes.”

I nod, and what little light shines in from the flickering external striplight over the doorway paints my composite face in arcing shadow. “Correct – but no. This is entirely fortuitous and unexpected.”

Her face wrinkles in distaste and she stands. “I don’t see what’s fortuitous about someone’s livelihood being destroyed.”

The sing-song lilt of my laugh makes Cassieopia recoil visibly. It is not important.

“This is not a livelihood,” I tell her, sweeping my prosthetic arm in an arc. “It is a vanity project; a pipe dream. A pretence. Both Miss Ryan and her Husband are wealthy far beyond the need for any of this.”

Her frown deepens. “I don’t understand … What’s this place for, then?”

I step forward, she steps back until I am close enough to sink down and inspect the tyre iron myself. The shaft is misshapen, where its rubberised grip has melted and extruded out in thick, bulging bands. Run-off from molten paint carried somewhere by something has coated its blunt end in a crimson slather, cooled to sticky dregs against the concrete.

Wrapping my plastic fingers about its head I lever the bar free and heft it up. “It is a platitude – an attempt to create something normal to act as a bulwark against the chaos that threatens to envelop them both. This is a fantasy; the idea that someone like Miss Ryan or Mister Bane could ever be …”

The very notion makes me laugh again. “ … Business owners. Partners. That is not what they were meant to be and on some innate level, they understand that. Acknowledge it. Resent it.”

She steps partway through the door, turning back to look at me aside. “You’re talking as if you know them well, like you introduced them or something.”

Cocking my head to the side, I nod. “In a way, I did. Or at least, I created a new love to replace the one that got in her way.”

There is the flicker of something in Cassiopeia's eyes but it is difficult to identify until after the next words leave her mouth. “The Private Investigator?”

Bravery. How unexpected.

I close the distance between us, tyre iron coming up parallel as I force it roughly under her exposed chin. She stumbles backwards, but flailing hands are far too slow to rise in self-defence and end up pinned beneath the bar helplessly. The open door swings open against its stops as she slams backwards hard.

My plastic face presses up against hers and I can hear her breath coming in ragged gasps. Thick reams of burnt paper shift and flutter on a bed of dust kicked up by our urgent footfalls.

“Tell me what you know about him,” I whisper. “ … And how it is you know it.”

“Research,” She says, very confidently for someone in her position. With only a little effort I press the warped metal in and down against the flushed skin of her throat. She struggles.

“Tell me why you are mentioning it now.”
   
Cassieopia struggles, trying to turn her head away for a few extra millimetres of space to expand her windpipe. I press down harder and the words she chokes up are crushed in on themselves and truncated.

“ … Feels like … Something … Is building …” She wheezes.

Satisfied, I pull the bar in and step away as she slides down and forwards onto her knees. Ugly black streaks make the bright red of her coat dingy and matted and a coughing fit stirs all manner of soot and debris. Watching the young woman struggle to regain her composure, waiting for the heart in her chest to stop its frantic thrashing, I spent a moment considering the remarkable foresight in those words.

She is so close now to being unleashed. The ties that bind are loosening, even the strongest reminders of her humanity being unpicked one-by-one until there is no reason to hold back anymore. No purpose in restraint or hesitation. A living weapon that is perilously, beautifully near self-actualisation and realisation. On the very cusp of recognising that there are no limitations, no restrictions.

Hurricanes do not ask for permission, after all.

World Championships, Garages, Bane … Fexxfield. None of those things matter. Or, at least, they will not matter soon.

The plastic fingers of my prosthetic creak as they squeeze the tyre iron. Looking down at the red-tipped metal, I nod.

I think I have found what I am looking for.

_________________________________________________________________________________

[The Rapture]

The only role you have yet to master is one which convincingly portrays a competent challenger. Perhaps you have spent too long in a self-actualised echo chamber composed of flashing cameras and their wielding paparazzi, in front of an audience of one made up of the Zdunich whose name you presumably took for the star power and draw. Tell me, do you sleep in separate rooms? Fashioned from tinsel-draped towns up on sunkissed hills which look down on the six-dollar-stay motels you frequent, clustered on either side of the drag strip bathed in smeared, neon-pink light; sat on creaking mattress springs and clutching dog-eared scripts for big-break roles that mean nothing, are nothing and require someone like you to fulfil. Someone worth nothing.

Perhaps you were late to SCW’s Greek Tour because the world cannot get enough of you. Or perhaps you were sat on a threadbare carpet, knees drawn up to your chest with the stink of bleach and varnished wood permeating all around, eating up precious time in the hopes a synthetic, fashionably-late arrival would give the illusion anyone had any real interest in anything you say, or do.

Do you turn up the radio to drown out the rhythmic thumping of the bedstand next door crashing against the wall while they fuck? While your lips wordlessly stumble over the handful of lines assigned to whatever meaningless background character serves to frame the main event of the motion picture? Tell me, Crystal, how does it feel to be an accessory? To be perpetually assigned to a supporting role? Always the bridesmaid sobbing in the bathroom, never the bride who sweeps in, frowns and asks if you are doing okay.

It is not because you do not deserve it. No. It is because nobody cares.

Look at the ring of granulated sludge burnt to the bottom of the glass in a black ellipse. Turn the percolator jug from side to side, catching streaky dregs in sickly yellow fluorescence courtesy of the buzzing striplights groaning overhead. Squeeze the foil bags in your brightly-painted fingertips and feel the stale hardness resist your shaking fist. Watch coffee fall in thick clumps into water ringed with limescale, and stare at the bleeding orange POWER light as it flickers with transient voltage.

A quick glance towards the bakelite phone – once pink, now rubbed pale white by time and ultraviolet light and greasy palms. It will not ring; they have decided to go in another direction that lies 180° from you, Crystal.

Peel the foil lid from petite plastic cups of individual creamer, tipped into a mug chipped all around its stained rim. They are still fucking.

Shafts of dirty white light stream in through closed curtains no thicker than gauze, courtesy of shuddering trucks which ring and bang against the loose manhole covers outside. Drop down onto one of the narrow beds, sinking into the misshapen mattress, barely large enough to sleep one and watch the mud masquerading as coffee boil and bloat inside the glassware. Next door, through cheap plasterboard and lacquered vinyl panels someone climaxes and finally – mercifully – the rhythmic banging slows and stops. 

Put your blue travel case, your favourite colour, down on the other bed opposite. Finally, as the percolator plops and hisses and stinks, place your head in your hands and sob.

Is this really what you dreamed of?

Strip away the delusion, Crystal, and you are finally left with a truth of your very own. Not one of validation or affirmation – not in the same way my honesty is rewarded with the Rapture and my grand design realised, but something very much Box Office in its impact. A spartan, threadbare, brutalistic reality which finally lets us meet the real you.

What a lonely final girl she is, with only two beds and a coffee machine to her newest name. For just a night until she rouses herself in the early hours, for a provincial airport and a throaty turboprop that will take her indirectly to SCW’s Greek Tour via whistle stops in places where everybody knows your name.

At least, your last name.

There are no big-break auditions, no urgent meetings with talent executives; not even Miss Cassieopia Mearns will take your calls. No successes to fill up your long days, so where do you spend these long hours in the hopes you will convince those that matter that you do, too? Locked away in six-dollar-a-night motels, drinking yourself first to sleep, then to the toilet bowl and back again. Airport terminal bars, where balding, middle-aged men in business suits two sizes too small, so that their zany ties making up for a lack of personality work with their belts to turn them into walking sausage links, offer to buy you ten-dollar cocktails.

You let them, of course. They would buy you a little more for something visceral, something that makes them feel anything other than bone-crushing weariness as their sweat-slicked shirts stick to the faux-leather of departure gate benches.

Sometimes, you do. What would your wife think, Crystal?

Nothing, I would imagine. The same empty volume welling up inside your chest when you people-watch … Watching all those people with someplace better to be than you. Near you. With you.

The truth that is left to you is small, sad and pathetic. All the better to reflect its owner, who emaciated and starved it on a diet of self-delusion and self-aggrandisement. A room paid for in cash, with two beds and a coffee machine, and all the time in the world created inside your head to ruminate and despair and wish that someone – anyone – would save you from this nightmare. Step into this tragic existence and end it on a small mercy.

An American Dream turned Nightmare, ready to complete its transmogrification into Greek Tragedy. It was not enough to talk hard, but work hard. Be hard of nose and spirit and determination. There are many words for such soliloquies but you lack every single one and so to list them would waste time I do not have and time you cannot spare enough of. If you had boasted a shred of talent to scrape across so much nothingness, to pick out a smear of skill or application in an otherwise barren landscape marked as your so-called legacy, I may have reconsidered. Rethought.

Perhaps I could have saved you from yourself, like I have saved so many others before … But no. I do not think so.

I do not want to. 

There will be no mercy, Crystal, to misquote Sheakespare in fair Athens where I will hear you scream. Instead, for the first time, you will be excluded from second chances, made to forfeit an opportunity at redemption. Unlike all those who came before, your path is one that cannot be remade or reforged.

You are transient, I am eternal. You adopt a new face as casually as you learn which walls of the stall cubicle to brace against, while I have carved one which is shown to all the world and all its actors on that blue and green stage. The same one you have no place pretending to know the most inner workings of.

I am a silent fortress, built to endure and last that stands on the overpass above which all must walk a spell. Some will do so loudly, proud, and will be reeducated for their delinquency. Others wander in, fearful, and find something much worse. Still a few – one – comes to see the value in staying a while. You are none of those permutations of things, because your metaphysical journey does not even begin. The first faltering steps are spent pacing from one side of a bleached room to the other, waiting for the telephone to ring. Begging for it to ring and offer you an opportunity.

Come to my gateway, marked by the shine of the Internet Championship and suffer agonies as others have suffered. Break your blue-dyed skull on these rocks, bleed and bruise for the privilege, and know that when the lights of the Ano Liosia Sports Hall plunge out and a convoy of rumbling trucks ring and shudder over shaking manhole covers, sweeping their high-beams through threadbare motel windows and picking out coffee burnt to the glass, nobody will knock and nobody will call.

Welcome to the Rapture. It will not remember your name.

PART II: THE END

Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall
Atlantic City, NJ
26.08.2017
8:30 pm


If he held his breath, Terryl could just about hear the crowd. Not with his ears – they were deep in the thick concrete bowels of the venue after all – but with his bones. Like some sort of ossified transducer. There was a deep-seated thrum, something that reverberated and passed by proxy through water pipes, structural beams, electrical cables and internal fittings. A palpable vibration made from excitement and the aggregation of nervous energy like only a few thousand people squeezed together for some common purpose could build. Their anticipation was building to fever pitch as the evening wore on.

It was almost time for the main event. Fexxfield, Meyhu, Edwards … And Ryan. Four heavy hitters and a whole bunch of ladders, all fighting for one thing …

Peeking out from the folds of his scuffed gym bag, the Atlantic City Championship caught the shine of fluorescent striplights overhead. Smoothing the end of the roll of tape over his circled wrist Terryl reached down, pulled the title free and set it down on the wooden bench that ran along three sides of the dressing room.

Swallowing the last dregs of water from an upturned bottle, he squashed the plastic between strapped fingers and tossed it down onto the matt-grey concrete. Through a small square window set high into the breezeblock wall, the late summer sun hung high in a moody New Jersey sky – fat orange bands, smeared by ribbons of dark cloud that cut blade-shaped gouges in its bright disc.

The fingers of Fexxfield’s right hand tapped against the intricate, embossed lettering of the Championship's main face, drawing circles around bolts which held his nameplate in place. Embarrassingly, he couldn’t immediately place how long it’d actually been fixed there for. He knew it was now the longest continuous time of all the names that had held such pride of place, but as for the specifics?

Terryl wasn’t really a man for numbers, or the quantitative. A lot of men and women had tried to bring that particular record-setting run to an end, but so far none of them had managed. Some he regarded in a purely professional sense as they went about the simple business of trying to hurt him, others he’d held a powerful dislike for. Still Did.

One he loved with everything he had in his heart and in his hands. The same one he was about to visit significant physical harm on, and her in kind on him.

He laughed at the absurdity of it. She could do it, he knew that beyond doubt. Amber was one of the most dangerous people he’d ever had the mis-and-fortune to meet and exchange physical displeasures with. There was every chance she would walk out of the Dead Man’s Hand event with the gold.

Fexxfield hefted the title up. This gold.

Still, Terryl had beaten Amber before. Terryl had beaten every single contender ever since he’d dethroned that Hydra; Devlin and Ramona …

Just the name of the former, that piece of trash, made his teeth set on edge. For the longest time, the Gumshoe had considered this – all of this – just a means to an end. A way to earn green in exchange for spilling red. Usually but not always his own. Even after winning the Atlantic City Championship from Boardwalk’s self-appointed King and Queen, Fexxfield hadn’t taken it personally. No ego, no pride, no hurt. Not really.

But beating Devlin again in the final of the inaugural Manifest Destiny Tournament, to win the whole thing? That’d been mighty special. Intoxicating. Something stronger than the most powerful firewater or gut rot. Dangerous stuff. A dark heart that invited you over the threshold with sweet whispers, until it could sink its fangs inch-deep into your pulsing neck.

Terryl set the title belt back on the bench. Better to be careful with this thing. Don’t believe your own hype too readily. Don’t surrender to its poisonous, Siren-like call. It was just waiting for the chance to consume your whole world. There were antidotes, of course. Balms that could soothe the soul, fortify it against the lure of this sweet gold success. He was particularly fond of one in particular, painted red.

Still, a lot of folk wrote him off. Less these months later, maybe, but most preferred their Champions a little rougher around the edges. Bit more maverick. Sharp. Stormier.

He might lose tonight. Might not. That mattered much less than what he stood to gain afterward. It felt like a whole new beginning was shaping up, one shining brighter than any polished metal could hope to match. Something the Iron Underbelly could never tarnish no matter how long it had to try to corrupt and corrode. Together, they could–

A knock at the door broke him out of his reverie.

“It’s open,” He said, and the very subject of his thoughts stepped through in the very shape of Amber Ryan.

Fexxfield offered her a small smile as he leaned back against the breezeblock. “Can’t win it until the bell rings. Even I know that.”

The Gumshoe tested the flex of his taped wrists, pushing against the strapping pulled in tight around the thumb on his left hand – the one that always gave him trouble. A particularly violent man going by the name of “Big T” had dislocated it years earlier, back in Strike Towers Wrestling, and it had never healed right.

Still did the job, mind you. Did everything asked of it. Just not quite the way it should. A crass but apt metaphor for Fexxfield as a whole. A dislocated thumb trying to do the best it could. He smirked to himself again, looking back up at the redhead.

“Almost time,” Terryl nodded, gesturing at himself with a binded palm. “Try not to mess up the face too badly. Haven’t finished making all the payments yet and can’t get the credit for a trade-in.”

"No promises." Amber murmured as she rolled her taped wrists, reinforced in places with the peek of black kinesio tape from the edges of her T-shirt sleeve.

She didn't want to admit it aloud – but she felt sick. Down to the very depths of her being. Not from the pressure though, nor the spotlight that would soon consume them all. Not even from having to face the ex-boyfriend who'd ghosted her in favour of returning to his own miserable ex-gold digger.

No, it was the fact she knew she had to choose.

Fexx would never present the option, he'd never put her on the spot like that but soon… Soon she'd have to choose.

… And just the thought filled her with an overwhelming dread ‘cause she wasn't sure whether she'd be able to choose 'right'.

"I hate this." Trying to work out the final cricks in her neck, Amber avoided making eye contact with the champion… And his prize. Focusing on the carpeted floor,wondering if the dark patches were less ominous than she assumed. "Anticipation mostly."

Reaching across and over the Atlantic City Championship, Terryl picked up the fedora sat on top of a pair of well-worn loafers. The leather was cracked, robbed of its suppleness and shine by too many long miles walked through a rotten city … And the hat? The hat wasn’t in much better shape. It might have been black once, but exposure to industrial affluent masquerading as rain, thick clouds of traffic smog and too many bar room floors courtesy of its method of transport being knocked off his feet had made the material patchy-grey.

He ran the rim around in his hands and with the striplight directly overhead, saw the shadow of taped fingertips through threadbare material.

“... Mostly,” He echoed, but there was obviously something more loaded into the word. “Got plenty of hate reserved for what we’re about to do to each other, to be plain. Maybe most of that, in fact. All for this thing …”

Fexxfield hefted the title onto his lap and looked down, catching sight of a gold-tinged reflection staring back up. The Gumshoe tipped his jaw left and right, following the mirror image with his eyes as it did the same.

“Suppose it’s worth a fair bit,” He said. “ … The jewels, the metal, the thing itself. Maybe enough to hurt someone for …”

Looking up at Amber, Terryl pursed his lips. “Folk would hurt each other a whole lot more on account of what it stands for, though. Visit some terrible violence to take its legacy as their own. Becomes their whole world, consumes every synapse, every fibre of being. Worst tunnel vision you ever knew.”

He kept his gaze on the redhead. “Reckon you know that though, don’t you?”

Fexxfield smirked to himself, squeezing the leather backing in his hands. “Funny how it all works out. You kill yourself to get it, kill anyone who tries to stop you, then you die trying to stop them taking it back.”

“Not me though,” He continued with a shake of the head. “Not dying for this. Hurt? Sure. Bleed? Surely, but got too much to live for afterwards, no matter what happens. Maybe someone else will go the distance, take this weight off me …”

Running a fingertip around the groove of the main plate, Terryl let his head roll back against the breezeblock. “Give ‘em hell for it, though. Give you hell for it. Stand on my own two feet to get knocked right off them. That’s the way it’s got to be. Only thing I can think of worse than dying for this and missing out on what comes after is to never get the chance to make someone work for the privilege. Nothing worth having ever came easy.”

He stood, heavy Championship unfurling to swing from one hand as he crossed the distance between them. His bandaged hand squeezed Amber’s bicep gently, for just a second. “We’ll do it face-to-face; knock-down and hellfire. You wouldn’t want it any other way, I know it.”

"I wouldn't accept it otherwise." Faint remnants of a smile crossed her lips. Eyes following the man as he moved… Or the belt that hung loosely from his hand. Even she wasn't sure as she found herself wanting for more than she'd ever known…

Want…

No, need.

Need that ran deeper than pride, need that courses through her veins threatening to tear her asunder if she came agonisingly close to having it… Just one. Need that wanted to burst from her chest in the same way it might cave if she couldn't be enough…

Startlingly, Amber shook out the cobwebs as the realization hit home that she wasn't sure if she was talking about the Atlantic City title… Or the man holding it.

Don't obsess. Don't ruin it for yourself now…

Fexxfield’s lips parted as he pulled his hand away, frown creasing his features, but a loud rapping against the door broke the link between impulse and action and they lost the words meant for Amber. “It’s open …” He called out, distracted.

Another series of booming thuds. Heavy. The door itself rattled inside of its frame, joined by the creak of flexing metal hinges.

His frown deepening for an altogether different reason, Terryl crossed over and twisted the handle down, pulling the door open even as a third round of rapping made it jerk and flex. “Now’s not really the best time–”

The edge thrust forward and out from its frame, faster than the Gumshoe could react with anything more than a reflexive, defensive blink. A sharp, hard corner crashed into his temple and Fexxfield staggered, head snapping to the side at the mercy of action and reaction. Clasping the hilt of his free palm to the split beginning to run red above his eye, he looked up in time to see a white-painted fist, picked out in black thorns, fill the entirety of his vision and world.

It hit harder than anything Terryl had ever felt before, shaking the meat inside his skull and he struggled to feel anything beyond pain lancing through every synapse as they fired without rhyme, reason or instruction. Stumbling forward, Fexxfield tried to blink away the fog that made the face staring down at him from above seem opaque and smooth. It looked flushed in crimson and black, robbed of the subtle detail of flesh with a garish grin – looked like a mask …

The Woman – her lithe figure and long limbs giving his subconscious enough clues even as his rational mind hung on to consciousness by metaphysical fingertips – strode forward and took a hold of Fexxfield by the straps of his vest, delivering the point of her knee into his gut as he tried to regain balance. When autonomic reflexes made the Gumshoe try to raise up, she hit him again with that painted fist and he fell backwards and down. The back of Terryl’s skull crashed against the pitted floor and the Atlantic City Championship spun away, landing nearby with the clatter of metal-on-concrete.

Dropping to one knee over his prone form, the Stranger took a rough handful of fabric and pulled Fexxfield’s head and shoulders up; drawing that same shining hand back for another blow.

A shadow loomed over the pair, and the Woman simply turned her crimson plastic face – fashioned in the shape of a wide and embossed smile – up and towards a certain redhead. Bright blue eyes watched, and waited. Fist still drawn back.

In her grasp Terryl mumbled something incoherent, glassy eyes turning towards Amber as she took urgent steps forward . A trickle of red spilled over his lip to mix with the spittle and blood flowing down from the gash in his temple.

"Well, I don't think we've--"

Planting a hand on the Woman's shoulder, Amber shifted her weight and dug her heels into the floor as best as she could manage; a familiar fury of a hurricane beating down on a fishing village. Lithe frame deftly pivoting slightly, Amber wrenched back her hand in hopes of pulling the Woman away from Fexxfield and deterring the next shot.

Admittedly she hadn't considered much after that – focusing more on the pooling crimson that fell in the growing distance the stranger had created between them.
No, close the distance. Two against one.

"--been formally introduced."

Anticipating a reflective strike or something akin to retaining balance, Amber immediately lowered her centre of gravity. Perhaps in hopes of finding an opening of space to fulfil, to sneak into before any more blood was needlessly shed…

It was too soon.

No, it wasn't going to happen like this.

The Stranger didn’t resist Amber’s lunge which took hold of the fabric of her cobalt-coloured blouse and pulled it – and her – forwards. Instead, she leaned into the direction of travel. Pushed off the concrete floor with it. Helped it. The added momentum launched the other woman in an irresistible thrust which saw her drive a shoulder into the redhead’s own.

Amber’s ability to angle away and avoid compromised by planted feet anticipating something else, her speed of reaction almost made up the difference. She twisted left, taking some of the energy out of the impact as shoulder met shoulder. The masked interloper rolled with the momentum, springing up on bent legs opposite, a single forearm supporting her weight with splayed fingertips against the spalled concrete.

“You must be the Painted Hurricane,” She said, head cocked to the side. “That is what he calls you …”

Her bright blue eyes flicker over towards Fexxfield as he rolled onto his side, spitting clear thick ropes of pink. “I am so very glad to meet you.”

When her gaze shifts back to Amber, she slowly climbs up to her feet. “I am Masque. Now we are formally introduced.”

Staggering, finding composure again in the midst of a storm's fury, Amber brushed herself off slightly. Slowly starting to circle as though measuring up for something, anything that might rid them both of… Whatever malevolent influence had come into their existence at thoroughly the wrong time.

"Any other night, I might call it a pleasure. However I tend to believe you have thoroughly overstayed your welcome…" Polite, albeit distant smile folding into a snarl as Amber shifted her stance irritably. Searching for a space between Masque and Fexxfield that she might… Just do anything.

She moved on a strange, hopping gait; extending the flat of her foot out to point, toes angled towards the concrete, smoothly leaping from side-to-side as she circled the other woman.

“Oh, I think I have arrived at exactly the right time,” And then she laughed. Lilting, sing-song. As she moved, Masque turned her head back to look at the Gumshoe who had managed to roll onto his front and up onto forearms smeared with dust and blood.

Her gaze shifted back to Amber. “You must be very excited …” She said, continuing to circle until suddenly, coming to an abrupt halt. At her feet, the Atlantic City Championship sat upturned, leather backing embossed with the bulges of heavy rivets and the scratches of desperate fingertips.

She bent over and picked the title up in her prosthetic, the overhead striplights giving enough glare for the faintest golden hue to reflect against the plastic’s glossy white paint and painted black thornwork. Masque stared at the intricate detailing of the main plate, before slowly tilting the Championship until both her and it stared at the other woman.

“Are you excited?”

Amber couldn't help but eye the belt. Everything she'd worked for, come so close to having… Holding… Claiming as her own. However it didn't linger long, back to the Gumshoe still trying to find his composure as the rattle of something inside his head likely left him still chasing marbles spilled across the floor.

"Only for you to leave." Cooly, Amber scowled. Back to the title… The glow of gold under fluorescence had a way. Back to the Gumshoe, her heart sent aflutter in a way that might worry any reasonable cardiologist.

"Which, by my calculations, should have been… Two minutes ago."

Somewhere behind, Terryl found enough of something to climb onto one shaking knee. Still bracing himself with a hand pressed down on the floor, he smeared clotting red out of his swelling eye and around his face, spitting the rest clear.

Bright blue eyes narrowed slightly, chin upturned. “Oh, that is simply not true my Painted Hurricane. Gold makes people greedy … And you are not doing a particularly good job of hiding the lust in your eyes.”

Turning around, title belt still held out towards Amber in her prosthetic, Masque looked down at the Gumshoe. “Can you see it written on her face, with a scalpel? Permanently scored?”

Fexxfield grumbled something more, still incomprehensible.

“Look up!” Masque screamed, shrill and bursting with fury. He flinched and he did, blinking and struggling and looking out towards the redhead.

Masque stooped down, knees bent, she twisted the Championship in her plastic hand. “Look at how she covets this. That is understandable, you know you are a target, of course. No revelation here …”

She ran a flesh-and-blood forefinger through the latter on Fexxfield’s face, smearing it around his cheek. “ … But oh, there is more. It is not a matter of wanting something, or even taking it. After all, you two are about to discover who is stronger. Faster. Tougher. Better. Face-to-face. The way it should be …”

And even though her face was all but hidden, the smile was practically audible. “Or are you?”

Masque looked back at the other woman. “Are you … Amber?” 

"It's not like that at all… It's not about you. Not about what you think you know." Amber couldn’t disguise the cracking in her voice, the indecision creeping into something that she'd so firmly come to believe was iron-clad and indestructible. She loved this man with everything she had… But what if this was her only chance at the title. What if there wouldn't be a 'next time'.

Terryl had promised her an after… No matter what. An end to a beginning they weren't supposed to have found together. Amber wondered silently if they could hear her pulse racing as her heart rose into her throat.

"I love him… And nothing you can say will change that." Maybe if she spoke with enough confidence, even she might have believed she was capable. With the shards she could muster though, she felt strongly… She wasn't sure what love felt like, but if it resembled breathing razorblades and drowning in your own heartbeat then maybe this was truly it.

… But what if there wasn't another chance.

She'd never been closer.

"He knows that I want the belt… It's not a secret, as much as you might portray it as such. However… I plan to win it, not inherit it in a will…" With a hiss, Amber reflexively clenched her fist and gritted her teeth, still furtively searching for purchase, for a definable chink in the armour…

Finding only the desperate pleading eyes of someone who knew better.
Suddenly, Masque rolled back to sit on the floor, next to the Gumshoe. She laid the Championship across her lap, tracing the detailing with a plastic finger as she pondered.

“Do you believe that?” She asked Fexxfield. He swayed, still on one knee, still blinking away stars made from excited mercury ions colliding in the glass tubes overhead. Eventually, he just nodded.

The masked woman nodded too. “I believe it … But, of course, we have to test our theory. We must prove it true. Even love had quantifiable parameters. Has …”

The last word was painfully emphasised. “ … Limits.”

A silence, punctuated by heavy breathing and grinding teeth, settled over the three for a while. Busy studying the title resting on her thighs, Masque apparently had nothing she was willing to say and beside her, Terryl had nothing he was able to.

“There …” She said without looking up from the belt. Her prosthetic hand rose up, pointing in Amber’s direction. With a quick jerk of her head, she glances into the blinking eyes of the man next to her. “Do you see it?”

He grumbles something. It sounds like Fuck … Off …

Reaching over, Masque takes a firm hold of Fexxfield’s chin and squeezes – forcing him to look in the redhead’s direction until she decides otherwise. “I said do you see it?”

“She is thinking about chance, likelihood, statistics …” Masque continued. “Very premeditated, but would you really expect anything else from someone so …”

She breathed deeply, blue eyes rolling shut for a moment, “... Dangerous. Powerful. Perfect.”

Drumming her free hand on the title belt, Masque keeps Fexxfield still with her prosthetic and a handful of sweat-slick, blood-tussled hair. “Your world is thinking about whether she will ever have a better chance, your love is considering … What if this significantly enhances her chances? What if …”

“What if …”

Releasing the Gumshoe, Masque claps her hands together. “What if this helps me become everything I have ever wanted to be.”

She nods. “I believe you love her. I even believe she loves you, but it is not monogamous. She loves something else. You are in a love triangle, Mister Fexxfield … The only one in the whole world who does not know it. And that has led you to something wicked. I do not think you will come out the other side …”

Clapping again, Masque cocked her head. “Still, that will not be for me to decide.”

And then she glances at Terryl and back at Amber. “Are the numbers working to your advantage?”

"It's not like that at all…" Amber flinched at her own words, laced with a failing belief that even she couldn't deny.

No secret. It's just… she never thought it might come to this.

It wasn't supposed to.

God, it was never supposed to be this way…

Happily ever after wasn't ever meant to end like this.

"It's nothing like that. Business is business – we both knew what was going to happen…" Locked on Fexxfield, as though he had enough wherewithal left to recieve the tone, the pleas in her voice screamed for something she knew she might never get.

… What if.

"We will get through this." Determination poisoned by guilt, Amber narrowed her glare to Masque. Everything inside screaming for her to step in… To do something aside from standing by and hearing a very painful truth rear through the paper walls they'd started to build together.

"We'll get through this… You and me." Words said what actions denied as her foot shuffled back, even before she consciously realized she had done it. Distance never seemed so far as her heart ached with every fearful thump.

"... I promise."

Climbing back to her feet, title in plastic hand, Masque considers Amber’s words. “Oh, my Beautiful Hurricane, this is not the test. Not the challenge you will both need to overcome. You are a chapter too early. Let me turn the page for you …”

And then she stepped forwards, heavy golden weight in her hands and intent to use it in her bright blue eyes.

Somewhere in the most base centres of his brain, hardwired from neuron to muscle fibre, something animalistic triggered and Fexxfield climbed up to his feet. Adrenaline burned up the blood that hadn’t made it out from cuts and wounds and he launched forwards. Clamping a hand on the tall woman’s shoulder from behind, he spun her in concert with a fist which crashed into her composite face.

She took a steadying step back, unable to resist inertia … And looked out from a cracked porcelain facsimile.

If he’d been more coherent, Terryl might have registered the pain of a broken hand. Pain was only useful in terms of quantification when it served as a warning, and it was all too obvious even to him that they were beyond the point where a warning did any good to anyone.

“Now!” She chirped, clearly excited, glancing back at Amber. “Now it is time for the next chapter. Now, Mister Fexxfield, it is time to see just how comparable your equivalent love is. You think of her as your first star at night. After all, without her light, you would just be lost in space …”

“I wonder,” She pondered. “Whether that star has any use for you? Such a celestial wonder. Burning. Beautiful – unassailable. After all, what use does anything so wonderful have for something so mundane? The rapture awaits. She will get to heaven with or without you.”

Tossing the Atlantic City Championship down to clatter against the concrete between them, Masque looks up. “I was truthful when I told you I had arrived at exactly the right time. I have come to give you such a wonderful opportunity. All you have to do is leave.”

She gestured towards the door. “Walk out, my Beautiful Hurricane. Walk away. Leave your Gumshoe to me and I will take such care of him.”

Pushing her foot forward to tap the edge of the belt, Masque cocked her head to the side. “It is time to ignore your heart; what has it ever achieved other than self-inflicted misery and failure? Disregard it. Deactivate it. It is time for your head to decide. Embrace the cold, white-water, brutalistic logic flowing through its channels and valleys. Let me finish my great work, and you will be all the more likely to finally have what you truly feel passion for. Something that will beat with all that desired virility and essence …”

“Something you can carry on your shoulder instead of in your chest, something that does just as much work in making you feel alive as that lump of meat thumping against the shadow-side of your ribcage.”

Nodding, she fixed her gaze on the redhead. “It is time to choose.”

Stooped over, knees bent, Fexxfield looked up at Amber. Given a little time and respite, the fog that robbed him of any useful sense lifted and coherent eyes watched. “Wasting … That time …” He managed between grimaces. “She wouldn’t … Have it …”

He straightened up, pushing against his thighs. “ … Any other way.”

Another shuffled foot, automatic as it was devastating. Her whole system in a state of shock and virulent rage – words piercing through the armour she'd maintained like it never existed to begin with.

"It's not a choice at all. Not from where I'm standing. Nothing changes regardless what I choose. Only the manner to which it occurs. Just like nothing that happens tonight changes the way I feel…" Choking slightly on the words, her voice trailed off.

It wasn't a decision as advertised, there was no 'right' or 'wrong' because fate had already made it's play. Decided to intervene – only now they were left with the merciful shreds of what could remain.

Another hesitant step back, heart violently resisting the motion but the head overrode as the glint of gold danced along her fraying synapses.

He promised no matter what.

Might never get another chance.

Together.

Champion.

“Oh …” Masque piqued, stooping down to collect the Championship, angling it in the buzzing light so its face reflected Amber’s in its own. “I think she has already chosen …”

She sat squatting, angling gold as if she could set the redhead on fire with the right refraction angle. Perhaps she already had – something under the skin, at least. The taller woman nodded, her voice dropping to a whisper.

“You have already decided … Embrace the decision. Take another step backwards. Does it feel strange? …”

Bright blue eyes dipped in obvious accompaniment to an invisible smile below. “ … How it gets easier with every inch you move towards that door? Do not stop now.”

And then she spun, spatial awareness such that she somehow – intrinsically – knew Fexxfield had stepped into reach with the intent to deliver a decisive blow. Into a kill zone. His, however, not hers. With the edge of the Atlantic City Championship presented as the curved edge of a blade, she swept the title like a knife across his face and split him temple to forehead.

The Gumshoe frowned, hardly moving in anticipation of another hard plastic fist that never came. Then he blinked. Again. Again and again. Within moments he struggled to keep his eyes open and then his shaking hands came up, desperately trying to clear a way through the red curtain flowing free from the choice wound drawn just under his hairline.

Blood splashed liberally against the concrete floor, soaking the ruts pink.

Circling a blinded Fexxfield, Masque kicked out at the back of his left knee and he folded forward, collapsing down. Casually retrieving a towel from the bench as she stepped forward, she wrapped it around his weeping forehead to stem the floor for a while, using it as a restraint to pull his head back hard.

“Look at her …” Masque whispered, porcelain face pressed up against Terryl’s ear. “Open your fucking eyes.”

He did. And he saw her.

“Watch her choose to leave you behind to me,” She said, and when her eyes moved to the Championship dropped on the floor in front, so did his. Glistening red trails filled the embossments and indentations making up the intricate detail of the title plates and where they met, their combined volume spilled over to run down in trickles.

Tightening the towel in her grip, Fexxfield grimaced, neck compressing against the rest of his spine. “Look at those eyes – they have already decided what she loves. Not who.”

Inaction was a far greater evil than anything that she might do, despite the clench of her fists that had sent everything up to the wrist numb. Nerves screamed to intervene, just in the same way they told her to run. A tug of war between head and heart that no one was destined to win.

"You're lying!" Came the hoarse cry, something she hadn't even felt well in her chest until it trickled from her eye. Yet it didn't stop another jarring step back. "You're wrong. It's not like that at all!"

She wanted to swap places, to offer her own existence as forfeit; however everyone in the room knew that's not what was at stake. Masque had already claimed her prize, splattered across the floor and dangling from her hand.

Hearts pouring out in excess, souls bleeding for reasons yet to be defined.

It wasn't supposed to be this way…

No matter what.

Only now, she wasn't quite as sure if she meant the man or the belt.

Masque pulled away. “The head wins,” She offered Terryl finally, before releasing the towel and shoving him forward. He tried to break his fall with groping hands but slick with blood and sweat, they slipped. Falling face to the cold ground, Fexxfield sprawled on the concrete.

“Now, Mister Fexxfield …” She continued. “Do not be rude. Say goodbye.”

Standing over, she picked up the heel of her shoe and pressed it down into the flesh of his deltoid. His head rocked up, teeth bared, but then he forgot about the point of plastic pressing through bruised muscle. His eyes found purchase through the clotting blood and the half-dozen concussions all concurrently delivered waited a spell patiently, giving him a moment of clarity. He looked at Amber.

And he knew.

She was going to leave him.

Lips flexed, in some strange inversion where action wanted to lead impulse. They expected the brain to conjure up something. Anything. Say something. But there was nothing for them to elucidate.

He saw, he comprehended. The impulse could have been there. It could have been carried out. But in that singular, agonising moment – totally distinct from the brutal physical reality –  that clarity delivered the most terrible truth of all.

Sinking to her knees beside his upturned head, Masque dropped onto her chest so she could rest parallel to the Gumshoe. That garish, varnished grin looked at him, then her and stayed there.

“You know …” She mused. “I think he really did love you. Like a storybook …”

She laughed. “Happily ever after.”

Shuddered breaths of realisation racked through the redhead as her foot found the threshold of the door. Waves of cold meeting the violent warmth that radiated from the smouldering embers in her chest.

She loved this man… She loves him with everything she could muster… But it would never be more than the override switch thrown by her head; by a ferocious pride and self loathing that everything she had worked for had to mean something. That she'd give everything to be able to justify her existence…

"I told you I couldn't promise... That I couldn't just put what I am aside.
After everything... In spite of everything."

She couldn't maintain eye contact through the lava flow of tears, the inescapable fissures cracking through her facade – exposing the way that what few fragments of a heart she had left to salvage were crumbling on sight. Words tasted like ash as they tumbled into the void, in hopes of finding something tangible left in their wake…

Love was never supposed to hurt this way.

"I still need you…"

He searched her face – every inch of that beautiful, vitriolic, impassioned, unassailable, inescapable face – for that miracle. Into the pores, through the windows of the soul as if he could see the thought process and their accompanying neurons firing behind. He just needed a miracle. Just one.

Blood gummed everything, making it feel like he was underwater. Maybe he was.

This must be what drowning felt like.

The moment should only have been a moment. Why was it stretching out like this, agonising like it spun minutes into years? His head sank down, fatigue overcoming disbelief and he laid his cheek against the red-slick concrete.

His eyes drooped. He waited for his miracle.

But it wasn’t going to come. Instead, his miracle was going to walk out that door.

God loves a tryer …

No. He doesn’t.

“Close the door, Miss Ryan,” Masque called out. “I do not want to disturb the other competitors.”

Tearing herself away, gripping the edge of the doorway as though willing herself against nature, Amber cast a teary eyed glance back before her deafening footsteps consumed the remainder of the heart she had left in an unforgivable dark. A final act of defiance, a minimal comfort in the face of something she couldn't internally justify.

An act she'd never be able to forgive herself for, for something she might never get the opportunity to attain again.

PART I: WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN

Fexxfield Private Investigations
Atlantic City, NJ
25.08.2017
6:45 pm


"You know, darl…"

Watching the fan spin had become a more recent pastime for the redhead, coloured streamers fluttering softly with every lazy spin. Never seemed to make much of a difference – it was always a furnace or an igloo in the office. Not that its tenant ever seemed to really notice, either.

Unflappable. That was the word for it, Amber mused quietly as she leaned back knowingly in a chair that wasn't hers. Not because it was comfortable, but because the faces that the man across the room would make when he thought she wasn't looking made her heart swell a little more painfully.

"... In just a couple days, I'm probably gonna go out there and kill you for that title." Matter of factly, she glanced across the room while trying to ignore the faint wafting of burnt coffee that seemed to linger prominently, as though ingrained in the walls. A small smirk tracing across her lips playfully as she straightened, resting her forearms on the desktop and her converse trainers back on the floorboards accordingly. "Funniest part though? Nothing really changes…"

She'd been spending most of her free time here in the last six months or so, time an irrelevant construct in an industry predicated on sacrifice over endurance.
No one wanted to be the one to last forever and do nothing. No, it was better to burn brightly and supernova before anyone had a chance to tell you that you weren't good enough.

Even now, she wasn't really sure why… Why she cared, why she couldn't help but smile when he shook his head at her absurd perspectives. How he never seemed to flinch at her worst, yet stepped away at her best. How she'd fallen so hard so fast…

… How he drove her absolutely crazy without ever doing more than just being there.

Stepping through the doorway between an outer waiting room and his inner office, Fexxfield paused on a creaking floorboard underneath his worn loafer. He leaned forward and back, making the warped wood groan. Bringing a chipped mug up to his lips, the Gumshoe took a gulp and grimaced, holding the steaming … Something in some sort of limbo, trapped between an unceremonious return to the cup that bore it or reluctantly – very reluctantly – swallowing.

He chose the latter.

“That is godawful,” He breathed, bitterness providing uniformity across every single tastebud. Slapping his lips together, Terryl glanced upwards. “Make yourself comfortable …” He said, swirling the black poison in his hand around. “ … This stuff can’t possibly taste any better cold.”

Setting the mug down on the edge of his desk, Fexxfield dropped into the chair opposite and threw his legs up onto the tabletop. A handful of ochre-coloured folders toppled down to spill their loose-leaf scribblings across the scored floor.

“Probably will kill me,” He nodded, tipping his head up to watch the fan turn. “Be a real sad end for the longest-reigning Atlantic City Champion of all time …”

He laughed, running a hand through slick-parted hair. “Longest running. World must be taking a restful spell to ever make that a reality. About time someone put things back where they should be.”

He craned his neck to look backwards. The heavy gold symbol in question, the Atlantic City Championship itself, was awkwardly draped over the wooden hatstand off to the side and near the doorway along with a thread-worn fedora. Its shining weight threatened to tip the whole thing over.

Fexxfield looked back at Amber. “Could be you, I think. Been involved and around justice for a good while – think the poetic kind is always the most satisfying.”

"I don't think title reigns come with happy endings." Amber replied softly, thoughtfully as she turned her attention back to the fan. Perhaps the reality of their burgeoning situation was starting to sink beyond the surface that they so effortlessly chose to skate over. Both doing their best to avoid the growing cracks in the glacial facade they'd come to so comfortably wear. "Least not from any worthwhile experience."

Clearing her throat, she rolled her wrists idly in hopes that maybe her fidgeting could be passed off as a delightful quirk instead of the nervous energy that fed from her known destructive tendencies.

"Not that you haven't earned it. I mean, you’ve beaten almost everyone…" Punctuated with a cheeky smile, Amber gave Terryl a sideways glance as she pushed out of the chair. Unable to remain seated as she rippled with uncertainty from continually walking on eggshells.
She couldn't help but catch sight of the Atlantic City title, the big one. The one that had eluded her since arriving in the company almost two years earlier… The one that Terryl Fexxfield had wrested from the grasp of a politically minded Hydra and proceeded to decidedly reign with such a casual dominance that it made her head swim.

He had what she wanted, no doubt. However there was only one thing that she knew her heart needed more… The one thing that left her in direct conflict. Need. Want. Somehow they were bleeding into each other and she couldn't quite stem the flow.

Reaching for the nearby mug Terryl paused with his hand in mid-air, lost in thought for a moment, before slapping it down on the worn leather of the armrest and levering himself up to stand. He turned, watching Amber watch the Championship from behind.

Cracking his knuckles he closed the space, slipped past her and gingerly lifted the heavy belt up and off its unstable perch. The hatstand rocked, threatening to tip. He felt that weight for a second, the leather backing creaking with the strain of holding those heavy plates against gravity’s best effort. Not just a physical weight, there was so much more here at play than just the physical. Then he held it out towards her.

“Take it for a spin,” He shrugged as if handing over that mug of pseudo-coffee. Amber paused, almost jerking to a stop like a physical record scratch – unable to process in that moment that everything she thought she ever wanted was just right there… In the hands of someone she never knew she needed.

"I don't think that's how it works." Resistantly, she folded her arms loosely as though straitjacketing herself in resistance to temptation. "It wouldn't be right… Not until I win it."

Words tumbled out before she had any way to stop them, the train of thought so casually derailing that both of them seemingly shrugged it off as a daily occurrence. More rational passengers lost in the throes of a moment's madness it seemed.

"Besides, for now… I like the way it looks on you."

Shaking his head, Terryl smiled. He looked at the title, then Amber. “Suspect you’re wrong on that one …” He said and the smile widened just a little bit. “Think it’ll look better on you.”

Folding the waist straps underneath the main plate, he walked back over to the desk and dropped the weighty thing down onto the folders and documents so it landed with a muffled thump.

For a time, he looked down at it, fingers drumming against wood scored with thousands of indentations, scratchmarks and gouges. Eventually, Fexxfield nodded to himself, flattened his palms on the tabletop and looked up.

“Real sorry to drop this on the eve of hurting each other for money, glory, power … Good coffee, but think I’ve gone and fallen for you.”

A small scoff, something Amber found herself almost immediately regretting for fear that her inability to react within social etiquette might simply fuck up something she'd been holding back within herself.

"That's really quite unfortunate." Amber declared with a distinctly less sarcastic smile than anticipated. Her tone was as deceptive as it was truly genuine it seemed. "Cause I think I might feel the same way…"

Sheepishly, Amber tried to flick some of the errant red from her face. Perhaps in some vain attempt to save a reputation that has no standing in these walls. Instead it only served to reveal more of the blush growing in her cheeks, quickly obscuring the freckles dotted across her features and resembling a shade not far off the scarlet cascade that fell alongside.

"Yeah, I think it's a problem… Especially ‘cause we still gotta go out there and punch each other's lights out – and all for…" Amber gestured vaguely towards the belt she refused to touch, as though her fingers might burn if she grazed the surface. As though she might be afflicted with something darker than what was already possessed because she craved something that was never supposed to be hers.

"If I win… It doesn't change anything between us. Right?" In hopes of reassurance, Amber paced slowly while the wooden floorboards seemed to creak in tune with her racing pulse.
Everything was happening so quickly, her emotions quickly slipping out of hand. Cool, calm and collected was becoming a quickly distant memory.

Fexxfield dropped his head down – not to look at the title, that never entered into his mind. Not really. Not right now. Instead, the eye of said mind conjured up another woman, previously the preserve of dreams, to join this one taking up his waking world.

“Changes everything,” He said. Puffing his cheeks out, Terryl dropped down into his chair … Or at least, his chair on temporary loan from its apparent new owner.

“Forget the misery we’re scheduled to inflict on each other real soon,” Fexxfield continued. “Before we take another step down this road … Something’s been sitting on my chest a long while that might just be thinking about getting off. But …”

He hesitated, scratching at the stubble under his chin. “Got to tell you about it in case it doesn’t go quietly.”

Reaching forward, he picked up the mug and swirled its rapidly congealing contents around. “I’m …”

He took another deep breath and fingers squeezed enamel tight.  “I used to be …”

“I was …”

It didn’t come naturally. What tense was he supposed to use? But he knew the answer. The past tense. Because she wasn’t coming back. Not ever.

“Was married once,” He finally spat out, pressure of expectation firing the round free of the thinking space it had lodged inside. “Not for long; she was poorly. Had a bad heart that couldn’t keep her ticking …”

Fexxfield put the mug down and pushed it away, fingers flexing together. “Wasn’t sure I could make peace with that, get over it. Made me poorly for the longest time too. Made my heart bad. Until …”

“Until I met a Painted Hurricane. And then all that changed.”

Slowing her pacing to a halt, for the longest time Amber couldn't bring herself to look Terryl in the eyes. Unsure why, something twinged inside her chest, as though she occupied a place in the world far removed from anything she deserved – standing where someone else was supposed to, denied by cruel dates and replaced by a spiteful god.

"That's certainly a lot." More stumbled words, jumbled syllables falling out like toy soldiers on a pretend battlefield. "Never been one to be the positive change in someone's life… Usually it's the opposite, only everyone comes to realise it a little too late."

Scratching at her temple, the sigh escaped long and slow.

"I don't know much about love… Loss, I understand, but love. It's a commitment… Giving a piece of yourself to someone else and hoping they don't just throw it in the bin cause it weighs too much." Amber shrugged, resuming her pacing with a deliberate, methodical cadence. "I don't think I can ever fill her shoes… I don't ever wanna try. What you had was special. Still is…"

Amber trailed off thoughtfully before finally drawing her gaze back to Terryl. To the title. Back to Terryl before settling somewhere in between.

"I can't promise much. I actually can't promise anything in truth. All I know is the way I feel… And how much I don't want that to change." Sincerity gave way to uncertainty as Amber played with the ends of her hair as they trailed over her shoulder. "What was her name… If you don't mind me asking? Feels kinda impersonal to dance around the details I guess. Hell, I thought I was in love a few times before… Never what you had though. That I can tell."

Standing, Fexxfield came around the desk and perched on the corner facing Amber. “Don’t ever expect you to fill her shoes. You aren’t her; this isn’t a comparison and there’s no road you could walk that’d bring you two together. Besides, we wouldn’t be here now if she hadn’t snuck her way out of this big gilded cage we’re all stuck in like some sort of songbird.”

He shook his head. “Definitely been in love, know what it feels like. Recognise the signs. Feel the stomach drop down to squeeze the gut hard. Feel it now …”

“Right now,” He smirked, pressing a palm against his side.

Letting his hands hang loosely in his lap, Terryl looked up at the ceiling fan. “Her name was Annabelle – she was a Doctor. I know, really punched my ticket up there. Used to tell people we met while she was patching me up in an emergency room after a dispatch call gone bad. That never happened. Just a fun story.”

After a few seconds watching the jerking blades struggle to turn, Fexxfield looked back down and held a hand out.

“May I? Rather see what it feels like before it becomes a closed fist in a few hours’ time.”

Amber crooked an eyebrow inquisitively before slowly making her way over, each step somehow landing heavier than the last. Echoing longer, the lead weights unseen around her ankles dragging her further back towards reality. Towards inevitability.

"Only if you promise to tell me the real story later on."

Until her hand met his. Smaller, gnarled and scarred from too many fights and not nearly enough care – it seemed almost out of place in his and yet somehow never closer to home.
As though her palm suddenly radiated the thunder in her chest, each beat coursing out through her fingertips.

"If anything…" Amber remarked as her fingers curled reflexively. "I think you just downgraded. From a doctor to… Well, a carny. Can't say anyone will ever accuse you of having a type."

Closing the distance, her freehand found his and allowed their fingers to entwine. Lock and key, one as misshapen and broken as the other.

"You're really starting to make me question whether I've ever really been…" Her words fell away with her stream of consciousness. Unable to express beyond what little could escape the tightening in her throat. In a few hours this would be a distant memory… in a few hours she'd have to pretend that none of this mattered. "... Loved? In love? Not really sure where I was going but, I think I'm in trouble…"

“Seems like it’s time for my Red Lady to take a risk,” Fexxfield mused, bringing her hands up and kissing the scarred knuckles. “Can’t say I feel totally confident about the plunge it feels like we’re about to take. Like a skydive. Who jumps out of a fully serviceable aeroplane anyway …”

He shook his head. “Maybe you have, maybe not. Thing about the heart is it’s unique to everyone. Not sure they all speak a common language. Not even sure we get what they’re saying most of the time.”

“Can only make you a promise,” Terryl nodded, and he brushed some of that red out from her eyes. “If this leads to some beautiful disaster, I’ll be right there to go down with the ship, aeroplane, wherever this bad metaphor takes us.”

Then, he gestured with his head towards the Championship on the desk. “You knock me right on my mouth to win that tomorrow night, I’ll be there to kiss you congratulations on the morning after, right after they put my teeth back in. Far as I’m concerned, I hold the only thing I’d give everything for in my hand right now.”

He squeezed. “Going to follow a hurricane for a spell, think it’ll be the rest of my life, give or take. Hoping not to be blown about too badly …”

“Still …” Fexxfield smirked. “Got a feeling I might just find the winds favourable this time.”

Returning the squeeze with one of her own, that usual apathetic smirk designed to keep the world at bay softened into something… Real. A peek behind the curtain, a show of something tangible still living in the wreckage of Mother Nature's worst creation.

"You know I can't make the same promise, that I can just put everything aside… After everything I've worked for. I need this stupid belt in the same way I need my next breath… In the same way I think I need you."

Clearing her throat, Amber continued softly.

"Whatever happens though… No matter what we do to each other, no matter what we say. You'll be there afterwards." Amber glanced at the title again, knowing his eyes would follow hers. Unable to deny the longing that fought for purchase in a heart that had lied dormant and unwaveringly for so long. "No matter what… You promise?"

He nodded. “Promise like my life depends on it …”

Sucking in as much air as his lungs can manage, Terryl let it all blow out. All except enough for three little words.

“ … I love you.”

Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. VI – Champion Hearts and their Engines of the Soul

__________________________________________________________________________________

[The Past – North Palladium Hospital, Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, USA, Autumn 1998]

The final-year student got as far as craning his neck up to peer over the lip of the Nurse’s Station, frown creasing his face as a blinding shaft of light pierced the early morning gloom of the vestibule, swinging wildly from side to side until it settled painfully over him.

“What the fu–”

The words are chewed up by a whipcrack snap of something hard crashing against his jaw, and he stumbled backwards, sending reams of folders spinning to the faded green tiles where they spilled hundreds of loose sheets to flutter and float on their way down. He retched, spitting out thick ropes of pink saliva that stretch under gravity and the weight of fragments of broken teeth.

Sinking to one knee, the student groped with a shaking hand underneath the rim of the desk until his palm slid over the panic button and slammed it up. The contacts clicked with every desperate repetition, but the solenoid inside had long since broken – just like everything else. An irresistible hand clamped around the back of his head and drove it down to crash against the oak tabletop. The last vestiges of instinctual, autonomic reflex brought him back up to level for just a moment, before consciousness bled away to join the mess dribbling out from slack lips.

The torchlight followed his body down to the floor, but moved quickly now and where it pointed, the contents were rifled and turned upside down. Drawers are wrenched out, cupboard doors torn from their hinges as they are flung open.

Suddenly, the beam swung away, lured by the faintest echo of music drifting through a large wooden door wedged open at the end of the vestibule. The sound of boots thudding against the floor drowned it all out as they followed, leaving behind the rasping gasps of a ruined throat and the gentle cascade of paper silently gliding down to land in the blood pooling between tile grout.

Esmarelda shrugged off the arm draped over her shoulder, leveraging the other body away until he turned over with a grumble and settled back into a droning snore. She rolled her eyes, equal parts amused and exasperated by the notion that somehow, Marcus managed to demonstrate more closeness and warmth unconscious. Swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, mattress creaking on perished springs, she levered herself up and snatched the dressing gown neatly folded on top of the nearby chair.

Slipping it over her shoulders, the Sister Superior of what was left of North Palladium Hospital padded barefoot through the hall until she stepped into the living room, staring out at the enormous mirror dominating the far wall, quicksilver finish glinting in the dull lamplight. Fluctuating with the degraded magnetic reel, a synthetic and lilting orchestral melody frittered through popping speakers mounted high up in the corners.

It had taken months to get used to the same badly-recorded effort repeating all night, every night, but attempts to replace it with white noise, silence – even other pieces of music – had ended in failure. Sometimes violent failure. So, they’d gotten used to it.

They. She scoffed – it only seemed to bother her.

The mirror was two-way of course; dividing what was once a self-contained living area, designed to keep their most sensitive patients safely and comfortably contained, from the observation room containing all manner of audio and visual reporting devices to allow continuous monitoring and psychometric analysis. Next to the mirror a smaller alcove stood, taken almost entirely up by a single chair facing a shuttered window. Thick reams of dust clung to the slats angled to block the window’s view – there hadn’t been a need to use it since they stopped observing Abigayle and started living with her.

They came through the open, interconnecting hatch silently while she mused and only the narrow width of the doorway gave her the half-chance she ended up taking full advantage of. Esmarelda was across the space between them in a second, before the torch could finish its pan right to left and even as it lit up her face she was already burying a tight fist into his gut. He doubled over and as he retched, she drove her thigh up and crushed soft cartilage against a dancer’s proud kneecap.

The torch dropped to the carpet, rolling in a lazy spiral and as the Sister Superior swept it up, she lashed out with the flat of her bare foot and sent him sprawling backwards, crashing into the other bodies desperately pushing to get through an impossibly narrow gap.

With a grunt of effort, Esmarelda took hold of the hatch with both hands and tried to force it closed. Hinges coated with thick bands of corrosion screeched and groaned, and the heavy steel door inched shut with agonising reluctance.

Then a black-gloved hand snapped around the doorframe, took a hold of her head by the hair and wrenched down. Her half-chance ran out.

Stumbling backwards, Esmarelda held up the torch and blinded the second body in through the door as it creaked back open, swinging the polished silver cylinder in an irresistible arc that caught the groping, blinking thug upside the jaw and sent him spinning away and down. She turned to run, numbers not in her favour when a strong grip caught her around the ankle and pulled hard. The Sister Superior stumbled, falling hard and in time to look up at Doctor DeLune as he stepped into the room, the hilt of his palm rubbing a tired eye.

“Marcus get out of here–”

A heavy rubber sole pressed down on her skull and forced Esmarelda to finish her sentence with lips ground into the carpet, words lost to fibre and lint on her tongue.

DeLune was brought down by a swift blow to the gut without response, slumping to his knees.

Rolling onto her front, Esmarelda looked up into the hard eyes of a powerfully-built man; sporting a familiar torch in his hand and a ruined mass of shattered cartilage that painted his lips and chin bright red.

“Where’s the fucking pharmacy?” He spat, spraying the floor and her chest with flecks of blood and spittle.

She scrambled backwards, craning her neck around to see Marcus unsteadily climb up to one knee only to receive a swift boot to the back and end up sprawled forward in the stained carpet. “It wouldn’t do you any good, there’s nothing worthwhile there.”

He stalked forwards, reached down and hauled her up by the collar of her dressing gown. “You in charge here?”

“I’m … The senior physician,” DeLune wheezed, risking another lesson by sitting up using his forearms. He was the only physician.

Unceremoniously dropping Esmarelda down to the floor, the thug motioned for two of the others – large, burly men – to haul Marcus up to his feet, thick arms pulling his own behind, painfully tight until the shoulder blades threatened to point backwards.

“Ask you again then,” The apparent leader snarled, letting a thick pink rope spill over his bloodied lips and lazily drop down to land on Marcus ’bare foot. “ … Where’s the fucking pharmacy and what’s the access code?”

“Don’t–” She managed, before the fat slab of a bunched fist reared back and made her cut her words short in a jerking flinch.

“One, Two, Three, Four, Five,” DeLune said. “Same combination as my luggage.”

Stepping forward, the ringleader took a rough hold of Marcus by his pyjama top and hauled him forward and behind, his two compatriots dragging Esmarelda likewise until they were both up against the two-way mirror, looking back at the invaders lined up ahead. Like a firing squad.

The same thug spat clear his mouth. “Pretty funny,” He nodded. “See how funny it stays when we make you watch what we do to her.”

Climbing up to her knees, Esmarelda swept her hair out and away from her eyes. “Fuck you.”

He smiled a broken-toothed grin. “Yeah, you will.”

From behind the lineup of awful, morally bankrupt men she watched Abigayle slide into the room. The Sister Superior opened her lips, to tell her to run, but the teenager simply lifted an extended forefinger to her own and bid Esmarelda to be quiet. The girl’s eyes flicked up for a moment, watching a stream of something clear run down her temple from the bandage wrapped tight about her head.

Then she lifted the electrical cable up from the tired tape recorder that had been piping in that same warped orchestral track for weeks on end, stretched tight across both hands. Esmarelda hadn’t even heard it stop …

“Go check the rest of this shithole,” The ringleader said with a thick finger jerked in the direction of two of his men. “ … And take Malone with you and find something to make him forget about that jaw.”

The trio filed out through the narrow hatch, the last thug gingerly holding the broken parts of his face in place as he streamed a constant red trail down onto the damp carpet. Then there were two.

Stooping down, broken nose still streaming, his grin widened to threaten to split his lips too. “You ready to wish you was dead already–”

The ringleader’s words died in his throat, as the latter was compressed by the shiny black cord thrown over and pulled in tight. Abigayle leaned backwards, one foot on the much larger man’s spine and pulled. And pulled. He scrambled, off-balance, surprised, eyes wide. The sole remaining thug turned but he couldn’t get a clear reach in at the girl, because whichever way he angled Abigayle just directed the choking man to shift through her makeshift yoke, using differential pressure to force him to turn left or right and cut-off a direct path.

Blood bubbled up from the ringleader’s lips and his face turned purple, red flecks swimming across glassy eyes. He gave one last jerking heave which briefly lifted the girl off her feet but instead of releasing the grip, she brought her knees up to her chest and made the most of the concentration of mass to tip him backwards.

He fell, spine crashing against Abigayle’s knees and circling the cord end over end, she gave a single, sickening twist and threw herself to the side. He slumped and never got back up.

Free from the body rolling limply away, Abigayle waited until the last challenger got close, too eager to put her down to care about stepping into her reach. She brought the flat of her foot up as he stepped in hard between the legs. Agony bloomed across his fat features and he spluttered, eyes turning towards themselves in painful disorientation, knees bending under the effort of keeping upright. From the cooling body lying face down nearby, she picked up the heavy metal case of the torch that still shone and climbed back to standing.

Abigayle waited until the thug turned his bright red, agonised face up to look at her. And then she swung the torch against the side of his skull so hard the bulb and its focusing lens shattered, sending shards of glass spinning through the air to land along with him.

Briefly looking into the broken end turned towards her face, Abigayle let the dented metal tube drop. It hit the second of two bodies at her feet in the back and rolled down to land on the carpet with a soft thump.

Esmarelda was already up, taking the teenager by the hand and pulling her towards the hatch. When she looked around to urge Marcus to move faster, she saw the Doctor pulling himself up with the help of a nearby radiator bolted to the wall … And smiling.

“What’s wrong with you?” She whispered, voice edged sharp. “We need to get out of here right now!”

Nodding dumbly, still cradling his stomach, DeLune stepped forwards. “It works,” He said simply.

Spilling out into the corridor, moving away and towards the open airlock acting as the only way out of Critical Care, she couldn’t resist the urge to find some logic to his nonsense. “What are you talking about?”

“The procedure,” Marcus replied, gesturing to Abigayle’s bandaged head. “It worked – she showed restraint, calculation, methodical rationality. Waited for the perfect opportunity …”

“ … To kill two people?” Esmarelda shot back.

“They might not be dead,” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. It worked.”

She didn’t say another thing, for fear it would escalate into leaving a third man face down on the floor in as many minutes, and they moved in silence through the ransacked halls of North Palladium Hospital.

Pulled along, the girl just listened. Analysed. Evaluated. Eventually deciding to agree.

… It was possible they might not be dead, she supposed.

_________________________________________________________________________________

[The Rapture]

My dearest Jessica …

Miss Beaufort did not make a mistake, or some ignorant error. She did what you have never been able to do outside of tired storytelling filled with hyperbole and could-have, should-have, would-have – seized an opportunity to confront something bigger than herself and see if such an act would change everything thereafter. David meets her Goliath. And was it not right to do so? She will carry the wonderful things I have shown her for the rest of her life, choice gifts impressed on her mind and skin, explicit and carried inside and depending on your particular brand of faith, perhaps beyond. Dieu seul sait ce que je lui ai montré. Changed for all time. For the worst.

Compare and contrast. She talked an impressive game and when it came time to evidence that intent, prove her providence, stood opposite me for our dance as she said. There is a refreshing honesty, newborn and naive perhaps, in such an approach. It was just as she promised. But not what she imagined. What did you do, Jessica, after you said without doing? After you talked, and nothing more. How did you look to make the world stop and listen? Force it to pay you the reverence missing when people spoke about your incredibly brief title reigns and transitory moments of relevance?

By standing on the sidelines, again, telling tales so repetitive and worn-out that they peel apart like laminate left in sunlight. Faded and jaded. My Rose took note of a world she felt was not timely in giving the expected level of respect. So she demanded an opportunity to state her case; make it stop and listen too.

And oh, I stopped on behalf of this blue marble and I heard everything she had to say. So very brave. Such deeds are the reserve of Champion Hearts that beat strong inside hopeful, intense, determined chests. The best of us.

What did you do in equivalency? Listen to your girlfriends caper and cavort? Rail against being left on the shelf, when you want nothing more than to dangle your legs over the edge up there with the rest of your sparse accouterments and prizes?

I am listening now, too, and I do not like what I hear.

A gaff?

Because she risked more than she knew? Because you would not do the same thing? That much is obvious, Jessica. Roses rush where Angels fear to tread. How was it you described her boldness? In relation to your own lack of proactivity; spinning nothing as something. A laughable boast, that you made no such gaff. You made no such demand.

You took no such gamble. There is only one thing you and Adrienne share, and that is neither of you know what you risked by taking my thorn-painted hand in yours; the only difference being one did so naively in an attempt to seize the day, ironically close to your typical average Bombshells’ Roulette Title reign, and the other has stumbled into it by inertia. By inaction. You hold this up as some sort of evidence of superiority, wisdom, and yet it proves only that you are a paper-thin appearance of a competitor. The idealised vision of someone with no substance or means to do anything but flutter around on the wind. Soar as a leaf. Distracting, sometimes curious enough to make people look up and watch and wonder, but incapable of impressing on something. No mass, no wherewithal. No import. Nothing.

Do not utter her name again as a means to elevate yourself for having achieved the distinction of doing nothing, as if that is something to be proud of achieving. Nothing. A void.

What beats inside your chest, Jessica? A sickly pump cavitating and shaking under the stress of providing enough blood to fuel your mind to ever greater excuses? Fears. A weak generator to power feeble mitigations and shallow justifications? It is delicious in a bittersweetness to see a four-time plus Champion without the associated strength of spirit and conviction – without her Champion Heart, while one of her juniors outshines and eclipses.

You worry about “the cycle” as if this is a recurrent pattern you have trodden before, merely so-called business, something to occupy the time you clearly have so much of in raw resource, but I promise the path you will walk with me is less formulaic and more Mobius Strip in its twisting, Escher-esque direction. I wear more than this mask well. Terrible things.

The suffering to be inflicted on you in recompense for your undeserved, undistinguished, incredible arrogance will follow no linear path. A logarithmic agony is what waits for you in Los Angeles, Jessica. The Angels in that city will weep. Pain that does not double for twice the repetition, but increases in multiple orders of magnitudes of misery.

You will find no opportunity to bounce against me back to where you think you belong. In this last week you have proven yourself subsequently unfit for a place at my side, regardless of the beautiful changes I had planned to make. Instead, I will shatter you. Unmake you, and unlike Miss Beaufort … You will not be refashioned in a new, pleasing form more serving of my grand design. Why remake something so patently unworthy? You are better off broken.

You sell yourself short, Miss Salco. You have provided much in terms of training so-called rookies. After all, through you they have seen what not to be; who not to ape. You have stood as a wonderful example of all the things they should aspire to avoid, unless they wish to take years to accomplish what many of your peers have achieved in months, or even less. The road never travelled. There is value in standing as a testament to failure, of which you are an expert in and master of beyond question or challenge.

Perhaps you could brag about this too, in the next enormous gulf of time between our dance and your next scheduled embarrassment? Another loss to avenge with empty words and an equally hollow chest, thumping weakly and timidly. Barely breathing. I can barely even hear it beat, but I will be close enough to take the time to check so very carefully in Los Angeles.

Perhaps I am looking too closely at feeling or emotion – the qualitative – and should look to fact; reason. The quantitative. Take numbers and attempt to find certainty instead of divination or guesswork. Numbers cannot lie, can they? It is a simple fractional game, with those numbers kindly provided by you in your weak-willed attempts to understand why something you have invited upon yourself can possibly be happening at all.

You have been around – again, such passivity, these things simply happen to you, not because you will them – since Climax Control became double-digits. Late 2014, if records hold true. Almost seven years later …

… And what do you propose to do with that revelation? You attempt to weaponise time itself, as if the passage of it somehow means anything without the achievements it should have been better spent on. Who do you intend to impress by simply having existed, having been around, for seven plus years? Some do not make it that long.

You think the corporate hierarchy values you, Jessica, because you have been here for a while? Part of the furniture, the establishment. Good to have about the place? The reality is your potential is spent, possibilities worn out and there is little worse in the world of business than a prospect with zero forecast growth. Difficult market conditions. Simply put, from the perspective of the company leadership, you offer nothing going forward and so you are nothing now. Unworthy of further investment. Time is money, after all, and you have frittered away so much of the first and by implication cost them substantial amounts of the second.

The answer to how you got yourself into this is obvious, Jessica. Having lived in the past through most of your future, never taking stock of the present until it has joined the former and assuming the latter would someday, somehow join up with the fleeting successes of history to make a loop of repetition, you are no longer of value to SCW. Usefulness outlived. Good luck in your future endeavours. So it falls to me to inflict the same misery I gifted to Miss Beaufort, but for a very different reason.

Adrienne is the future, and you are the past. It is time for you to be changed by my thorn-painted hand.

Changed from being here, to being gone. Forever.

For them, it is not personal. Just business. You did not piss them off, you simply ceased to represent prudent financial sense, earning our scheduled, intimate time together this week in the City of Angels. On the subject of a title you held so briefly as to be worthy of an asterix appended to the record, do you know our resident Bombshell Internet Champion well? Perhaps I will take you up on your offer to ask Miss Hernandez. It is not a social call. Perhaps I will make choice visits to all of your friends and acquaintances, and gift each one something special.

You are a silly little girl who despite getting older – potentially your first observation of use – has somehow managed to avoid the typical accumulation of maturity through experience and lessons learned, with the same effectiveness demonstrated in eluding successes and victories within SCW. Do you really believe you present some insurmountable barrier to me? You cannot stop her. A towering obstacle that I will grind down the nails of my only remaining flesh-and-blood fingertips trying and failing to scale?

I have enraptured Strange Beasts and Beautiful Roses. I have uplifted a Hurricane and made her Resplendent and unassailable. Do not speak to me as if this is a meeting of peers, worthy of mutual respect and admiration. There is no mutual respect here. No, Jessica. This is a simple exercise in the collection and disposal of detritus and offal. You are nothing save expired potential, still walking and talking as if there is more to come but your time is all but spent.

You denigrate your so-called friend because she overreached in her attempt to make something greater for herself. A French rookie by your mouth, a Champion Heart by mine. A specialist in failure, the only skill you have mastered in your pathetic ten years of virtually uninterrupted irrelevancy, punctuated by a handful of moments of transitional but ultimately squandered achievement, is the art of backing down. When the going becomes hard ...

Do you hear the words you speak? Are they divorced from the life you lead that puts you here on this blue marble to subsequently speak them so ignorantly? Does the weak thing in your ribcage that pulses and burbles connect up into the meat stewing and ageing inside your oblivious skull? Use it to think carefully. While you rant regarding Kaiju’s apparent waste of her veteran status, does the hypocrisy you spout not crystallise in the coldness of your underachievement and threaten to freeze your lips together, possibly giving us the blessed relief of your silence?

She had achieved nothing in her tenure? She talks a lot less than you do. Would you prefer more quantification? Picture a simple divisor. The numerator represents what you do, the denominator your talking about it. It is a zero sum game.

If the number on the top remains constant, but the number on the bottom increases, then the overall value is smaller. Have I made this sufficiently less cryptic for you? Do you comprehend the relatively simple arithmetic at play?

While you both may be limited in how much you have achieved – for different reasons – Miss Rainbow waxes lyrical under significantly fewer phases of the Moon and so, the resultant value of her works, her career to date, is greater. With every passing week, made a month, become a year and excruciatingly a decade, your divisor outputs a number that has become so vanishingly small as to be virtually worthless. Infinitesimal.

Perhaps after this High School lesson, you better understand why SCW’s corporate hierarchy has no further use for you.

Those High School gyms in the Sunshine State; a handful of title reigns so perfunctory as to be utterly forgettable; a delusion of competency so complete that you genuinely believe fear is the only means I possess of ensuring you receive all the suffering due … Are these the sum weapons in your arsenal when we meet at the Galen Centre? Are you ready to use them to wage war? Is this the complete list of achievements which make you a greater challenge than Miss Rainbow, or Miss Beaufort?

My Resplendent Hurricane does not fear me – you are looking up at lights which are too bright for your eyes, and in their blindness you are letting your feeble mind run away with itself as you stumble. Stay down there in the mud and the shit, cool and dark. It is so peaceful there. Miss Ryan has stood on the summit and made it hers for almost a year, of which most was done without my presence, let alone intervention. What does she have to fear? She is a whirlwind, a terrible reaping – the Champion Heart of the great celestial machinery I have wrought at the centre of this company to enact my grand design. Untouchable. Unassailable.

Respect? Perhaps you have stumbled on a second truth, something right said for the wrong reasons. A Living Weapon recognises another of its kind, potentially. Even a specialist in failure can accidentally succeed given enough time … And you have had so much time.

You should have stayed in Florida. Enjoyed the warmth. No amount of preparation in your home gym with those already kissed by my thorn-painted hand can make you strong enough, fast enough or resilient enough to resist what you did not even have the strength of character to ask for.

In the literal sense, you could be the heavy metal Bombshell you claim. The shattered fragments of a devastating detonation, sent spinning through the smoke-choked air to land in a broken mass of blackened splinters, charred and twisted. Destroyed. Robbed of all their energy and promised malice. The remainder of something that might have been filled with potential once; the possibility of vibrant, deafening power and terrible reckoning. Now detonated, spent. Without purpose or value.

That truly sounds like you.

They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul, but in their desperation for romantic idealism over reality, they miss the truth travelling hidden in an undertow beneath the skin. The soul does not belong in the head, where thinking and reasoning have residence. No, it is found in the chest, snug and secure behind a prison of bone to keep it from fleeing on some flight of fancy. It is so easily broken if you are not careful. They will not be practical until they are made unbreakable.

The heart is the engine of the soul, Jessica. To find the measure of a person, you must look to what gives them the drive to do their thinking and reasoning; which organ embodies the indescribable life force that puts us all on this blue marble to do different things. Our purpose. Puts me here to enact my grand design, puts you here to provide your so-called rookies with an inverse role model to be avoided and ignored.

There are so many here with such strength. Such Champion Hearts. They are not all equals – Amber and Adrienne both have one, and yet no-one would seriously contend they are peers. Not yet. There are others of course – my Songbird, Matthew Knox. Mister Bane could not cope with a Resplendent Hurricane in the absence of one. These are all mighty engines of their respective souls, thundering with barely-restrained power as wonderful works of biomechanical perfection; slaved to intellects and drives and desires equally sharpened and strong.

Whatever weakly gurgles and twitches in spasm inside your chest does not even come close. Another testament to everything you can never be. Lacking in purpose, drive. Courage. The engine of your soul is worn-out, weeping viscous oils from between perished seals and rusted interfaces ringed with thick orange smears of corrosion. Fit for scrap. Oxide streaks that draw the unmistakable sign of weakness and failure.

It had so very many opportunities to beat with purpose. You could have been like them, Jessica, if you had seized any of the multiple opportunities you allowed to pass you by. Because at those seminal moments, when something of remark or renown came your way, you chose instead to congratulate yourself instead of sacrificing more. Giving more. Giving everything.

You attack what you do not understand, mislabelling the relationship I have with my beautiful Hurricane as something based on fear. A brutal summary based on the transactional, an exchange, instead of what it truthfully is. Transformational. Change. A great undertaking, a grand design.

A celestial machine. An infernal engine powered by souls.

You cannot even comprehend what it is like to hold a gateway through which you must give everything, relentlessly – completely – to retain absolute victory and total respect. A poisoned chalice you are forced to drink from with every passing week. Something that will take everything from you. How could you understand? Such a chalice-by-proxy was ripped from your trembling hands on multiple occasions in the span of days or weeks.

That particular, sweet, opiate was never in your veins long enough to form a habit. It is a blessing.

You cannot comprehend what it is like. If you could, perhaps you would know the kind of fear you think you are talking about.

Do you wonder if I think I have one? When I listen to your sickly heartbeat in Los Angeles, I will let you hear mine. I cannot hear it.

Your time, wasted for a decade, used up to no good effect is over, Jessica. This is your end, and yet even here, you are given another reward you do not deserve from something greater. Merciful. A third truth that somehow spilled from your panicked lips, perhaps liberated as the enormity of what is about to happen to you sinks in. This is your end …

… And so that indeed makes you my Final Girl. I am so very much looking forward to meeting you. Hurting you.

Welcome to the Rapture.

   

She watches the city burn bright in fluorescent, artificial day – a composite of anti-collision strobes pulsing on construction cranes and skyscrapers, late-night workers in ribbons made from office lights and the winding glow of street lamps quivering in a breeze. Grumbling traffic spills greasy high beams through the gaps, bouncing against polished metal and glass and making the grey belly of the clouds overhead shine.

Somewhere high above, the Moon fails to make an impact and night is pushed back to make some sickly twilight by the hand of Man. From here, she can hear the river lap and ebb against the concrete pierside, occasionally crashing hard as the odd barge struggles against inertia through water sporting a multicoloured sheen.

It is not much of a view, but Masque is not interested by what is in front of her; only what – or who – is about to pass. A mook running short on smarts, the desperate or the stupid, any of them might think the redhead scuffing her soles against the winding asphalt path up ahead was lost in thought. Distracted. Vulnerable.

Masque knew better. At some level, base, animalistic, Amber Ryan was never truly disengaged. An instinct to reach out, grab and break clean was never far from the surface. A prowling, patrolling instinct of self-defence honed through a life spent on the attack. A predator.

A living weapon, given just a little more encouragement. The safety was so close to being released now, a round chambered and ready to detonate. So close.

“You should be careful …” She said out loud, voice sing-song in cadence and unmistakable. “This is a dangerous place to be.”

Perched on the very edge of a bench, green paint flaked and faded, she cocked her head to the side. “Not for you …” A pause, and Masque tipped her plastic face up towards the cityscape on the opposite bank. “ … For them.”

Unamused by the triviality, Amber watched the little shards of gravel she was trying to displace finally break free. Having burst from the surface like it didn't belong, another pinnacle targeted for simply being.

Amber didn't respond immediately, that echo fading from the street long before it sunk beneath her surface. Resonating. It was as sickening as it was enlightening. To be willed, to be allowed to simply… react. Not bound by expectation for just a little while… freedom for a caged animal outside the occasional synthetic enrichment.

Tangible. Real…

She felt as dead as she did alive.

"You say that, but no one really gives a fuck… Too busy doing anything else. Being anywhere else… to worry about us." It wasn't really directed anywhere, the musings falling in time with footsteps as worn sneakers padded across concrete and asphalt as her winding path drifted. Meandered. A river of chaos without a definable place left to go.

Standing up from the bench, Masque tucked a long spool of blonde hair back behind her ear with a single, blue leather glove. The plastic fingers of her prosthetic flexed and twirled of their own accord, just visible beyond the cuff of her thick coat. The curious woman walked onto the twisting path as Amber passed, falling into step beside the Bombshells’ Champion.

“We have both had the same experience but I think we have drawn different lessons,” Masque said as they walked. “We each find ourselves back to relying on our own kind, our tournament partners having …”

The tone of her voice got higher, singing, again. “ … Failed to provide a bark to match their bite.” And she laughed. “I took from my defeat affirmation – that only kindred spirits can be relied on outside of yourself. But you, my Hurricane …”

She tipped her mask up, as if musing. “I suspect you have taken a different lesson. I think you learned again how tenuous the centre of your everything truly is, and how it can all be taken from you by someone else’s inadequacy.”

“Of course I watched …” She nodded. “Could you have done more to save him? Perhaps, at the expense of your legacy, but why did he not save himself? Because he was weak. And so he made you weak by association. So we see that even when you are moving the entire Earth as a Titan, you must also apparently reach up into the stars with an entire world on your back and  take care of the Moon, rather than expect a helping hand …”

For a second, she stopped walking to stand still. “And if you are not all-powerful; unassailable. Untouchable. Unbeatable … If you have a bad day, or a bad life … You will lose it all. Then they will crow and mock – this miserable city and everyone in it – and denigrate you, disrespect everything you have achieved …”

“Unacceptable,” Masque said, simply. “ So … What if we made them give a fuck?”

Extending her prosthetic towards the cityscape over the riverbank, she cocked her head to the side. “It is time for me to help you find the strength you will need to make them beg for mercy …”

 … And we are not feeling merciful tonight,” Masque added. turning to look at the bright lights before she glanced back at Amber. “ … Are we?”






The building had fallen on hard times long before these harder times had come calling; tougher than diamond. Thick green tufts of plant life grew vibrant on torrents of rainwater gushing free of broken guttering; entire sections sagging to make creaking crosses over filthy windows that marked the whole place as closed for business. It was impossible to tell what colour the brickwork might have been, originally, now stained black by traffic smog and mottled grey by pulverised mortar washed down towards the trash-strewn streets. 

It stunk on the inside, an overwhelming conglomeration of rat droppings, urine, damp and the ever-present, eye-watering tang of alcohol – and not the good stuff. They passed a wall of letter boxes for clients long since gone or worse, all broken open and ransacked, names scored out or graffitied over. Climbing the stairs, Masque paused for a second as one of the steps creaked loudly near the top of the next floor. Balancing on one foot – the banister looked less than trustworthy – she rocked backwards and forwards and made the wood groan.

“Do you recognise the sound?” She asked, continuing upwards. “Do you remember how he used it?”

She stopped, turning her mask back towards Amber a little behind. “It is important you prepare yourself. You will be very angry, but it must be focused.”

Another laugh. “ … At least for a little while. Until the screaming starts.”

When they stepped onto the landing, Masque gestured towards a wooden door immediately to the right, dominated by a broken glass pane. The door had been painted a dark brown but years of neglect had made it flake away, creating a mosaic of blotches courtesy of damp and termite infestation.

Despite the ugly cracks that bisected the grimy, shit-stained glass, the silhouette of a man tugging on the brim of a hat was clearly visible, circled in a badly-stenciled font clearly applied poorly, by hand.

FEXXFIELD PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS

Voices echoed through the door from the office inside, whooping and crashing.

God, it must have been… five, maybe six years by now.

Ignoring the way her heart determinedly skipped several beats, the name on the door struck at something she'd long since buried. Another time, another flower girl and another man who thought that maybe there was a soul stuck in a hurricane worth saving from itself.

Incredulous, almost insulted by the brazen nature to which Masque had coerced her here… to this place… even without going through the door, Amber could recall the way the ceiling fan lazily spun overhead. Lethargic in its only purpose, the smell of burnt coffee and nail polish seemingly permeated into every surface.

Overstimulated, Amber grabbed for the banister as it shuddered beneath her touch. Threatening to collapse with her audacity to lay a hand on it.

"After everything…" Amber couldn't find the words, not ones that could be articulated beyond animalistic sounds and the kind of hurt promised never to be felt that way again.

If it weren't for Masque…

It was only then that the voices sunk past the sensory wall she'd thrown up, the crash of wood crunching beneath the weight of bodies. Pressure of its own weight perhaps, cause she knew those chairs weren't well made when they were new.

"I don't know what the fuck you think this is supposed to do–" getting vaguely closer towards the door, Amber was sure she heard the voices drop for a second as though they heard the gravelly and gutteral whisper that she was sure didn't belong to her. "–but this… Nah, this is too fucking far this time. You have some serious balls to think–"

“I do not think,” Masque replied, the humour in her voice gone instantly and replaced with something absolutely calculating. “I know exactly what the fuck this is supposed to do.”

She stepped forwards, making quick work of unbuttoning her coat and shrugging it down to the floorboards. “Does it make you feel sick to your stomach? To be here again, after so long? Even for me …”

Her god-given hand settled over her navel, pressing in. “ … It stirs something. How beautiful.”

“Do you know what they are doing in there? Corrupting his legacy, using it for their own ends. Drifters. Malcontents. Trash. Rifling through all those cases – do you remember some of them? I do. The Case of the Flower Girl Named After the Stars …”

She watched Amber grasp the stair rail without moving, breath coming in shuddering gasps as the redhead struggled to put all the pieces of the past back together in an instant. “My favourite was the Case of the Man Who Loved a Hurricane and got Blown Away. Tragedies always make for the best stories.”

“He was never particularly efficient with paperwork,” Masque continued. “I thought that is why he paid Madeline …”

Then she stopped, and looked directly at the Bombshells’ Champion. “Do you remember the awful coffee?”

“All his files, all the cases, left where he last put his feet up … On the desk. Before his unscheduled business trip. And that is where they stayed, office and eventually building abandoned … Until new ownership arrived.”

She gestured towards the flaking door. “They are using those sensitive documents to shake down old clients. Extort. Terrorise. Hurt. Some almost certainly deserve it, but others? Even in this city, there are innocents. Innocents enough, at least. Speaking of …”

“Have you talked to Madeline recently?” And she laughed. “They have.”

“I know exactly what this is supposed to fucking do,” She nodded. “This is going to liberate you, my Hurricane. It has already begun, I think? Oh, how your heart thunders. You are flushing. Ball those fists. It is time to reap a whirlwind.”

And with that, Masque made a fist from the plastic fingers of her prosthetic and sent it through the grimy glass of FEXXFIELD PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS, reaching into the shattered pane and unhooking the latch from the inside.

“Do not think, just feel,” She said, throwing the door open. “Hurt them like they hurt you. Make them suffer, Amber. Like he suffered. Like you did. Like you still are.”

She didn't need to hear the words, to be goaded into falling into a familiar pattern. Warmth flushed into her skin, dissipating the crippling numbness that the now shattered glass had struck so deeply within.

Of course she remembered.

It was part of the reason she never left Atlantic City when she should have, before she went to Baltimore. Before she rebuilt what fractured foundations of a life she'd managed to drag out from the remains of Boardwalk.

Maybe she had moved on with her life, found a new reason to live and love recklessly – but she never quite forgot the emptiness that she could never resolve.

It would have been one thing to be left behind, at least that would have been closure. Masque, in her infinite cruelty, had chosen to sink those prosthetic fingers into the old scar tissue and tear them open so that everything beneath might be poked and prodded for a benefit.

No, she didn't need to be goaded.

She needed to be liberated.

Violently liberated.

[The Past The Present The Future]

“Miss DeLune, right?”

I only have enough time to turn on my heels.

The round punches through the meat of my shoulder and inertia throws me back. My legs scramble in the mud, but momentum has already swept them out from underneath and for a beautiful, singular second, I am at the apex of my fall. Here, just a little longer – please – I float, and the stars up above shine for me and their constellations tell their stories just for me.

The concrete drives the air from my lungs and as the back of my head crashes down a fraction later, I am blessed with exactly what I asked for. Every higher-order thought dissipates on the rain, flashing to steam against bright red skin. Something animalistic rattles the cage of my scrambled skull, screaming to breathe, screeching for my diaphragm to shake itself free of its spasm. Save us. It does not know why, but my heart is spurred to work harder and so thrashes and rages inside my chest, tugging on every artery and vein connecting it to everywhere else.

Bitter iron fills my mouth, spills over my lips. I cough it up and it splashes frothy, cherry red in flecks all across the asphalt and earth.

He stands over me and I retch, gagging as the autonomic reflex to suck air in fights against the agonising, pain-driven, consuming need to scream out. Neither wins so I choke and gasp and in-between stolen breaths I sob.

A coil of smoke tries to curl clear of the muzzle but the downpour cools it to ambient almost instantaneously. The stink of cordite mixes with blood, finding another way to invade my senses. He does not even look satisfied – like doing this was at least worth it. Instead he hovers, reaches down, and snatches up my purse. He never breaks eye contact even as he rifles through it, helping himself to jewelry and cash. Then he drops it, pulls the hammer back with his thumb and curls a finger inside the trigger guard.

Something hot and wet spreads between my back and the concrete in a thick pool, warming my skin in the cold night air. My lips work silently – I cannot spare the air to make words. His finger squeezes down fractionally, the trigger cocks backwards.

He stops. Hesitates. I have seen that expression before. Curiosity. Morbid, insincere; vile. He watches me squirm, some part of my nervous system falling back on firing any impulse in an attempt to do what will not come naturally. The ruined mess of my shoulder, all shattered bone, ruined ligaments and pulverised muscle pulses. Each contortion forces up a fresh red geyser that spills down the purple slopes of skin. 

Hormones burn their way through my insides, desperately trying to stem shock and prime my body for a fight it has already lost. All they serve to do is extend out this agony. Tears spill from between my blinking eyes, struggling to focus on the blurry face still looking down.

He steps forward and puts his boot down on my prosthetic. The input forces an output, and the plastic fingers rail against the weight. Servo motors whine and then scream, hopelessly outmatched as he presses down. The composite cracks, the underpinning metal frame bending under the load. The feeling is indescribable. Not pain – there are no nerves left to carry such a feeling – but an overwhelming synaptic pressure that builds and pushes on my senses. A crescendo of electrical impulses that hurt as effectively as anything biological until, suddenly, he releases it …

… Only to stamp down with every newton of vindictive force he can muster in such a short distance of travel. The prosthetic shatters and I scream with everything left in my bruised chest. It is beyond anything I have ever felt before, since they took it from me the first time. My stump lashes out, and the last shattered fragments spin away from the endoskeleton to leave it swinging feebly in the rain. He kicks it clear of his sightline, breaking the flailing pieces off and with a steel toe cap on the same boot, taps hard against the porcelain of my mask.

Then, he pushes the safety catch on with a forefinger and lowers the pistol out of sight of my spinning world.

“Not yet …” He murmurs, and a wet grin slips across his face.

And that is when Cassieopia puts a round through his back with the small-calibre, silver-plated pistol held between her shaking hands.

She is crying too.

The organ sang its glory to god, and hymns rolled around high-vaulted ceilings, washing against the faces of stern saints hewn from pink marble. Biblical tapestries, thread-worn and colourful, fluttered on a musical breeze made by clusters of towering, tarnished bronze tubes. Polished pews made from old oak sat in patient rows stretched before an altar, lit by candles and decorated with crosses.

Cassie ran her hand against the wood where she sat, feeling glossy veneer give way to rough grain – the product of innumerable worshippers scuffing the varnish and scouring its finish over years and decades.

Her fingers pressed into the cracked leather of the bible held in her hand, and its golden-trimmed pages flexed. The hymn swelled; the sustained, climaxing chord roared and a high-pitched, tinny rattle reverberated where the organ’s towering pipework trembled and shuddered inside the fixings struggling to hold them to century-aged stone. The bible’s cover began to crease under the pressure, turning convex. Cassie squeezed her eyes shut and tasted metal.

Her tongue pressed against the intricate banding clamped around her teeth, compressing upper and lower jaws together and holding them locked to give the underlying fractures time to heal. A slither of pooling saliva spilled over her lip, splashing down the front of her scarlet blouse before she could catch it with an awkward, pressed palm. Pain radiated out across her bruised face from where her hand flexed the scab, breaking it and splitting her lip again.

Cassie fumbled for a handkerchief from her bag and bunched it up against her wet chin.

The air pushed around by the immense power of the organ had hardly stilled when the enormous machine began again, singing new glories and making everything thrum. Cassie tasted more than one kind of metal as she felt the pew beneath shake. The free hand on her thigh began to tremble independent of any vibration, and she clenched the fist tight.

Churches, hell places of worship in general, were uncomfortable for someone like Amber, as she lingered in the back of the sprawling, cavernous space. A promise made in terms full of loopholes about eternal life, a questionable devotion that had done little more than promote violence between zealots.

Admittedly, the redhead never quite saw the appeal of religion.

There was comfort for some no doubt – otherwise the cathedrals would never have been able to reach for the heavens, and despite proclaiming, never really sought to touch God's hand.

Amber spotted Cassie immediately, something about her genuine aura radiated more prominently than those who came for show and social obligation. She came for solace, instead of placating the gossiping tongues…

She was here cause Amber had fucked up again.

She'd let another flowergirl fall.

She couldn't save them all, sure… But even if she could just have saved one…

Soaring choruses and the faint squeal of musical ambition trying to keep up with intent filled the space, the raucousness of sound almost deafening in the same way silence quickly became thick and overwhelming without something to offset it. Virulent, cacophonic white noise.

Prophetic and profound. Fitting almost, for a hurricane coming to make right in the only way she knew how.

In a crescendo that threatened to shake heavy lead candelabras across thick, rich drapes spanning the altar and send them toppling to the stonework below, the organ rattled everyone and everything. A single, ultimate, sustained note. Some of the parishioners winced, bowing their heads and burying their chins in heavy coats to absorb some of the sonic assault. Cassie kept her eyes fixed on the simple cross suspended on iron chains ahead, tracing the ridges of oxidised metal where corrosion had begun to flake and pit the surface.

Satisfied and glorified, valves inside the enormous cluster of brass tubes cycled shut. The bassy rumble, which cavitated the blood like a pump sucking in air; thrashing and twisting and gulping, shrank to nothing in an instant. Silence reigned.

Cassie gingerly pulled the handkerchief away from her lip, dabbing a fingertip in its place and following a trail of drying blood down her chin, around the nape of her neck and onto her dress. Pulling a thick fur coat up from the pew and bunching it in her arms to keep her lower face covered, she waited until the handful of stragglers ahead had cleared away before making her way out and into one of the bathrooms adjoining the transept.

Setting her coat by the side of the basin, Cassie glanced at the splashes of dark across the bright red of her dress, grimacing as best the wiring clamped about her face would allow. Turning in the light, she picked out strips of mottled flesh to either side of her cracked lips that made a rictus, bruised, purple grin. Rummaging in amongst the folds of her coat, Cassie snapped the lid free from an orange plastic tub, tipped a handful of pills into her trembling hand and made short work of downing them.

With an audible groan of pain, she got as close to the running tap as she could and lapped at the water; unable to widen her lips enough to get anything more than a trickle.

At a distance didn't seem far enough to stay out of the blast radius of guilt. Consequences coming to fruition and playing out before her, usually she'd be the one having to deal with the fallout … Grin and bear it, cause she'd wrought it upon herself.

However seeing someone else deal with her poor decision making – it only seemed to solidify her thoughts on what had to be done. How many ways goodbye and good luck could take the form of almost nothing at all.

Amber had said from day one that Cassie would be better off without her influence, however she never really expected to have the visual representation of such things laid so bare for her in a house of worship.

Amber swallowed hard, although whether it was the osmotic backwash of religion – or the bile fuelled by regret and determination to do anything else but set another person's world alight – was yet to be seen. Gently, she leaned in the doorway. Unable to find words that were anything less than insignificant and morose. A mere fragment of what she wanted to express without the sincerity to deliver it.

What she would never do though, musing silently as the flickers of a half smile curled at the edge of Amber's lip, was apologize.

That alone would be the greatest insult of all.

“ Are you …” Cassie rasped, the words a little slurred by the prison scaffolding inside her mouth. “Are you …”

She leaned over the sink, immaculately painted fingernails curling in tight against shining porcelain. Looking up at her own reflection, watching a string of drool spill free and make a rope joining the drain with her chin, she cut it free with a flicker of her tongue and tried again. 

“Are you … Going to say something?”

Casie listened to the silence and her answer, turning the tap off and watching the saliva circle in the draining water. It made a frothy, pink ribbon; striped in washed-out blood.

“I don’t remember it,” She said eventually. “The docks …” Her hand strayed up to caress the staples holding the wound in her scalp closed, courtesy of a hard right that’d knocked her senseless and down to the rain-slicked concrete. “Comes in waves, like flashes …”

Her eyes squeezed shut. She shuddered, biceps trembling with the effort of holding even her slight frame up over the sink. For a while – a few seconds – Cassie was somewhere else. Some composite of a waking dreamscape, equal parts half-remembered and fantastical; jarring pseudo-memories made of painful colours and mad shapes, where her concussed mind simply opened wide and poured gibberish in to fill the blurred gaps.

She tilted her chin up, eyes slowly fluttering open again. “Do you remember the cat?”

Cassie nodded at her own reflection, taking comfort from its dumb agreement. “Yes, I remember the cat. It was grey …”

Her fist clenched, slamming down against the basin. She leaned into the mirror, scrutinising it. Searching her own face. “No!” She snapped, tapping a red fingernail on the glass. “It wasn’t grey. Brown? Black?”

She nodded again, and her reflection concurred. “Black. The cat was black …”

“You gave me the phone, told me to go. I did. I found Mac, then, I … I …”

A frost-white mask, marred with a radial crack reaching out to eight irregular points leered over, cut out around bright blue eyes that saw right through her.

Cassie shook her head and grimaced, holding the stapled line of scar tissue hidden by carefully combed blonde hair. “She didn’t have a face …”

The downpour pooled in her eyes, making it hard to see. The other woman stooped down and wiped the rainwater, tears and blood away with a latex glove. It felt warm against the chill of the concrete underneath. “Are you ready for the Rapture?” She asked. “Suffering is so very good for the soul …”

Interrogating the face staring back, Cassie pursed her cracked lips. “Did she? Did that happen? Or …”

Straightening up, Cassie turned on her heels – pointed and glossy red and inappropriate for someone convalescing – towards Amber. Remember what she told you in the rain. Fumbling with the buttons, Cassie shrugged off her cardigan and let it swing down to graze the tiles, still hanging on by a single sleeve turned inside out around her wrist. Tell the story of your life made a mosaic on your skin …

The glove on her neck had been so warm. So gentle. She turned side-on, presenting Amber with the twisted mass of scar tissue running up her arm and out across her shoulder, cutting a dimpled crescent moon snug tight against the nape of her neck. “You’ve seen this before.”

Cassie turned back towards the mirror, looking for reassurance from her reflection. It nodded. She nodded. Duality in thought and feeling. The Weapon and its Sacrifice. The Alpha and Omega. “At the bar, what were you drinking? It tasted …” She trailed off. Lost for a second. “Revolting. Yes, that’s right. It was awful.”

She tried to smile, but her eyes didn’t follow the gesture and the wire locking kept it compressed tight and pulled out at the edges. Cassie looked down on ridged, twisted skin spread across her shoulder and then back at Amber. “What made these made my faith. Made me a better person.”

She tried to lift a hand up towards her face but the awkward weight of the cardigan hanging against her wrist made her stop halfway. Ignoring the pain lancing through everything, she jerked and whipped her hand until the cardigan dropped to the floor. It hurt so much. Rapturous.

“This …” She rasped, and saliva spilled over her lip, tracking down her chin until it was collected by an obscene ledge made by the scar tissue arcing up from her neck. Cassie gingerly ran a hand carefully along the blotched purple skin, following a smeared smile running almost up to her ear. Suffering is good for the soul. “This …”

“You gave me this,” She said, cradling her jaw. “You made these. Remade my faith.” Made it resplendent.

Cassie took a deep breath. “I’m ready, Miss Ryan. Ready to follow a …”

“Painted?” She glanced back at the mirror. “No …”

“Resplendent?”

A nod. “Yes … I’m ready to follow a Resplendent Hurricane.”

Her fingers closed around the misshapen crucifix hung about her patchwork neck. “He works in mysterious ways – through you.” She works in mysterious ways.

Radiating a level of feigned apathy not experienced since the universe watched man force his way through the stratosphere for the first time, Amber dipped her head with a crooked smile.

"You have a far better memory than I do." Shaking her head in a subtle disbelief, Amber straightened up just enough to impose in such a way that she commanded the small space.
It might have been one of the few things she still had left to control these days. "Still, you tend to put a lot of faith into a lot of things that give you so little in return. I mean I don't wanna stand here and pretend like I don't feel bad considering…"

To say that Amber was 'conditioned' for such things perhaps was a gross understatement and a psychological red flag waved freely. Proudly perhaps. A lifetime of physical abuse created emotional and mental calluses that didn't wear away, the collection of concussions and contusions like a disoriented rainbow of medical horrors.

Still, it was different to the angry masses of scarring that seems to tendril and transverse the otherwise porcelain and pure. Different if only for the fact that Amber continually went back looking for more … An addict looking for their next fix, absolutely sure that this one would be the one to send them tumbling into a self-induced abyss.

"... I dunno. Seems really fucking stupid actually, thinking I could come here and say all the things I wanted to." A weighty pause, the faint drip of a faucet distinctly overt for its lack of influence. A cadence to a conversation that had veered wildly from it's proposed destination. "... Then you look at me like I've done you a favour."

Cassie wasn't the first to invest in the void that Amber had created, persecution via proximity. A void that had been labelled as do not enter and taken as a challenge, never realizing it wasn't about what was inside … But keeping it there. Keeping it from spreading … Growing… That physical manifestation of crippling spite and  self-perpetuating cycles of violence.

"Resplendence is the reason I was here, it's not why I sought this … Although that reason sure feels a lot more rational than what I had in mind." Like poorly arranged papers on the deck of a stormcloud, the plans had gone out the window around the time Cassie started her evangelical pursuit of ultimate suffering and in turn … Paradise. "I don't know what you think you see … You saw … I can't make you not believe. I won't try to tear your faith from your hands, cause that's not my place. What I can do though … Is sever the ties that bind, allow your new-found freedom to exist beyond the cryptids deception we've created.”

"Whatever it is that you think you see in me, Ms Mares … I can only assure you only a debilitating misery lies at the end. A light at the end of the tunnel only shines so bright until everyone tries to recreate the magic.”

“No, fuck the magic… Fuck the idea of miracles and rapture, Cassie. Trying to bend the whims of the universe into just the right paper plane, it's not a game for us and it's sure as fuck no place for you to proclaim your willingness with mutually assured sacrifice."

A small pause overtook them both before Amber reigned in the pretense she'd silently proclaimed.

"I told you this when we first met … Hurricanes, regardless of their regality and resplendence, don't get to choose which houses get flattened … They don't get the option of feeling any way about whatever pieces can be cobbled in their wake.”

“I'm not something to be aspired to … I'm a storm approaching the end of its tether to being, just another terrible thing masquerading as the facsimile of something better than what I deserve."

Amber shook her head, taking a step towards the smaller woman, although whether reassuring or assertive was left to the imagination.

"I never asked you to follow, but now I wish I had never left the impression of it being an option …"

Cassie held her ground as Amber stepped forward, despite the obvious power imbalance inherent in someone – evident by the bruising on their face – who had just established her lack of physical credentials and was now up against a born fighter.

“I’m not a puppet!” She snapped, aggression seeping into the syllables and giving everything an edge that didn’t belong to the young woman. Or hadn’t, at least, before Atlantic City had taught her such a painful lesson.

Fists bunched, she seethed. “You’re talking to me like I’m a fucking idiot! You’re all taking at me! She’s the only one who listens! I just want … I want to … You … to …”

The bathroom began to spin, and Cassie tried to move her feet to keep up with it and so she spun too. She caught a glance at her reflection as it smeared in the mirror, stretching into bands of colour that blurred together. The desaturation spread, taking definition from the tilework, the walls–

It wasn’t the room. It was her.

Cassie stumbled forward into Amber in mid-pirouette, who caught her effortlessly without so much as a step back to counterbalance.

“She told me you can’t …” Cassie wheezed, struggling. “ … You can’t do this on your own. You need me – I need you. Miracles don’t have to be one-way. This isn’t about bending everything to fit …

A fresh trickle of red seeped from her nose, and she pressed the hilt of her palm up roughly against it. “This is about accepting our place in his design. Your agency, his work …”

Blinking away stars, Cassie forced herself to find Amber’s gaze. “I know how important it is to you,” She said, the great championship millstone-around-the-neck conspicuous by inference. “It’s everything you are. Without it …”

She let the implication hang for a second. “I think she can help you. I think I can help you …”   

Thoughtfully, Amber placed her hands at the edges of Cassie's shoulders, steadying the smaller frame as best she could under the circumstances, trying to deflect from that same desperation she'd seen in the mirror before.

"And what if you're wrong … What if we're both wrong. I can't just stand by and have another flower girl on my conscience cause I blindly followed the lead of someone who has had everything but my best interests at heart before!" Amber didn't mean to raise her voice in the confined space, quickly pulling back her tone into something more restrained.

"Listen if your heart commands it, follow if that's what you truly desire… just, just don't put your faith into a suicide booth cause it's masquerading as a confessional."

Amber gripped a little tighter, perhaps hoping that the jolt of something real might penetrate the haze.

"Cassie … the only thing I've ever fought harder for than this big gold anchor wrapped around my throat were the lives of those that she threatened and succeeded in taking … Help isn't always salvation and an outstretched hand could just as easily hold you under as pull you from the ocean's grip." Amber leaned down to eye level, in hopes that there was something still worth salvaging, something that didn't look like the worst of her own reflection.

"If you're going to do this … follow till the ground beneath your feet turns to brimstone and the flames of purgatory fill your lungs, you need to promise me something. No question, just loyalty."

Appealing to her sense of devotion, Amber subtly nodded in hopes that body language and a display of open mindedness might persuade; would reign in a spiraling conversation.

“You’re not in control of this …” Cassie slurred, dropping down to one knee. Her head felt heavy, and she struggled to keep her chin from dipping towards the tiled floor. “None of us are, we’re just pieces on …”

She fell the rest of the way, splaying her hands out on the cold ceramic. “ … On a board.”

Her shoulders shuddered, and Cassie took long rattling breaths. “Different pieces. Different roles. Like a White Knight …”

“ … Or a Pawn,” Cassie continued, pressing a hand against her own chest to underline the role she felt she was here to play. Then she looked up at Amber. “ … Or a Queen.”

Her forehead creased and awkwardly, she sat back staring up at the other woman – the fabric of her dress spilling out in a lopsided petal of red hues. “I’m the second flower girl?” She asked, abruptly shifting the topic of a conversation already struggling to stay coherent.

"Now, stay with me here Cassie." Amber followed her all the way towards the floor, trying to create reassurance when there was only uncertainty. "This isn't about who's in control … you want to play your role, you want to follow the leader … Promise me that if this all goes to shit though, if this isn't everything you'd dreamt it would be … What you were told it would be …"

Swallowing hard, trying to maintain a level in her voice that didn't alarm beyond the already spiking adrenaline levels between them.

"You get out. You run and you never speak a word of any of this – promise me that and I'll tell you everything you think you want to know. Flower girls, after all, are a rare breed in a concrete utopia."

Cassie struggled under Amber’s gaze, shrinking back slightly but when she made to look away, something she co̴u̴l̴d̵n’t qu̶it̴e̴ pla̵c̵e kept her eyes locked. Gave her strength when she felt so weak, tired …

“I promise,” She said, eventually. The room stopped spinning. Gathering the fabric of her dress, Cassie unsteadily got back onto her knees. Amber allowed herself the pent up sigh that had burned in her lungs, acquiescing to the question as tactfully as one could possibly manage.

"Not so difficult …" More of a rhetoric, Amber cleared her throat thoughtfully. "There was another flowergirl before … Tended an abandoned garden in a place where nothing would choose to grow – as much dirt on her patterned dress as there was under her fingernails. Running from an existence that didn't belong to her, for reasons she didn't want to understand."

Amber rummaged around at the inside of her jacket, a small pocket otherwise invisible from the outside. From between her fingers, as her hand emerged, a fragile silver chain swung along its length.

Taking Cassie's hand with her free one, Amber placed the chain into Cassie's open palm. A pendant at the centre, the remains of what was once a tiny angel – her face worn away by trembling fingertips searching for salvation and a wing snapped almost carelessly from her back.

"Never did get to learn why this meant so much to her. Sentimentality will get us all killed, no doubt. It's a reminder though; of what has been and what will come. How unexpectedly it all ends ..."

Cassie felt the slight weight to it and with a single finger, pushed it around her cradling palm. The silver was tarnished, dulled to white and the metal dimpled by relentless, incessant abrasion.

“Are not all angels ministering spirits …” She began to mumble, the verse tumbling from her lips. “ … Sent to serve those who will inherit salvation …”

She looked up. “Did you kill her?”

Amber forced a half smile across her lips, unsure if it was sincere or unsettling. "Would you believe me if I said I didn't?" With an almost sheepishness unheard of from the redhead, she shrugged vaguely. "Nothing was ever proven but there was an admission in hindsight… one that brings us to the very conversation we're having now. You aren't her first flower girl, but I hope that you'll be the last … The one that got away perhaps. Lord knows I don't think I could sleep a wink if I let anyone else down at the moment."

Levity had no place here, yet it emerged unwelcome and unhinged. A chuckle in the face of the ultimately macabre and tragic. "Only thing worse than dying alone … Is knowing someone else did ‘cause of you."

“You’re talking about …” Cassie trailed off, and the fingers of her open palm closed around the little angel, squeezing tight. “ … Her.”

She looked about herself, then scowled. Annoyed. She wasn’t some spectre from beyond the veil. Whatever this mysterious woman was, she was most certainly mortal. Wounded. Cassie had seen it when she felt the hard plastic of that prosthetic. “Masque.”

Even the name made her pause again, for a second. “You’ve met her before, when–”

She stopped, blinking in a silence punctuated by running water gargling softly in pipework above her head. Absurdly, it dawned on her in the third rapid-fire conclusion of as many moments. “Her name was Cassie too?”

"Cassiopeia." Small differentiation that meant everything. "Another flower girl named after the stars."

Amber trailed off quietly, the distinctive nature of names … The connections leading back to a masked women with a porcelain face. Deja vu in a sense, Jamais vu in a worse one.

"It's too similar, Cassie, way too close to home that I can't just ignore the feeling in my gut. Whatever promises she made to you  … I can only imagine have been spoken one before, well practiced on deaf ears."

Pushing back to her feet, Amber paced a few steps in the narrow walkway.

"Maybe I'm wrong … Maybe I'm the problem and I'm manifesting my failures on someone new. Maybe this is all gonna be sunshine and rainbows at the end and for once … For fucking once … Someone actually has better intentions than me."

The smooth silver digs into her closed fist. “I remember her, at the dockyards …”

Cassie squeezed her eyes shut for a few seconds. “I don’t think I would’ve gotten up if she hadn’t been there to …”

Words trail off, with no need to finish the obvious. “But …”

“ … She’s broken. I’ve seen her up close and felt – touched – her imperfections. She’s no better or worse than you. What she’s got is a purpose, like we all do. Sounds like she started out on that purpose a long time ago, with you and Cassieopia.”

Hearing her own name in some strange, third-person perspective reference drove the latest, jarring splinter deep into an already intense cognitive dissonance made worse by mental fog and medication. “How long has it been since you first met? Years? You must know something about her motivations.”   

Amber paused, contemplating the passage of time. As if such a thing made sense in a church bathroom.

"Shit, I dunno… Five years maybe? Six if I squint and hold my tongue in just the right way perhaps… God, it was all in passing. Connected through other people's threads. We were wisps of smoke trying to clutch onto sand passing through broken fingers."

A different time, a different place. When did everything get so hazy?

"Everything I know is hearsay, is conjecture and words from the mouth of the only person I shouldn't have listened to. Feel like I'm chasing shadows … Or they are chasing me."

Chewing the inside of her lip, Cassie frowns. “I understand my place in all this, I think, but I don’t really understand why you’re letting any of this happen.”

She opens her palm, tracing the silhouette of red skin where the metalwork salvation made an imprint. “You’re the strongest person I think I know – maybe that I’ve ever met. Everything you say about her, I just don’t … Why do you even let her look at you unchallenged?

“Amber Ryan doesn’t suffer fools, or angels, or determined corporate talent managers easily. Why let Masque darken your door at all if you don’t believe in the message or anything about her?”

Rolling her tongue through her cheek, Amber stopped her pacing long enough for the dim light to cast its shadows across her face. Of course, the answer was simple as it always had been … But it was one she'd never been able to bring herself to admit.

"Why indeed… Why do people believe in a God that would allow their people to suffer inhumanely in spite of their devotion. Why does Mother Nature allow us to persist when all we do is destroy everything we've been graced with. Why does the sun rise and the moon fall, why do we commit ourselves to unspoken frameworks of time and space?"

Dropping her head with a distant smile, the small shake of her head dislodged a last part of the thought from the back of her throat.

"... Cause there's this little part of me that wants to be proven wrong. That wants to believe that everything happens for a reason, except I don't want it to be at anyone else's expense. Not anymore. It's not about belief cause Masque knows precisely where I stand, however I can't walk away from the uncertainty … I have to know, I just refuse to let anyone else's blood pay my way."

Locking eyes with Cassie, a small glint of humanity peeked from behind the iron curtain of her eyes.

"Humanity has an innate desire to see their rock bottom – but only a few have the means and willpower to actually get there."

Cassie nodded, awkwardly climbing up to stand. “You think you know where this path is going to take you, but … You still want to see whether you were right in the end. So you’re going to walk it–”

She catches herself. “We’re going to walk it.”

Waving the angel on the end of its clinking chain to cut off the inevitable response, Cassie continued. “You don’t trust Masque, or me. But that’s okay. I don’t need you to trust me, because that’s not your part of all this. It’s mine. I’ll do the trusting. In you, in his plan, in where that path ends up taking us when we finally get to lay down our burdens at the end …

Taking a deep breath, the tension in her face melts away, making violet-coloured bruises shrink a little on either side of her sore mouth.

“I will follow you Miss Ryan,” She says and drapes the angel over her neck, setting it centred. Smoothing the ruffled fabric of her dress, Cassie nods. “I will follow you and we will see if you were right when it all comes to an end.”

Subconsciously, she gently runs a hand over old scars twisting her shoulder up. “Suffering is good for the soul.”

Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. I– A Tale of Strange Beasts
__________________________________________________________________________________

[The Now]

I trace the glowing web for just a solitary moment; marvelling at a snapshot of superheated mortar my autonomic nervous system has managed to capture. The gap widens fractionally, brickwork beginning to bulge outwards under incredible positive pressure. The orange deepens, blooming in petals that lick around the crumbling edifice, swirling and twisting and where it sweeps it leaves radial soot shapes like clusters of stars. The web expands, shining strands reaching for each other on driving jets of superheated gas. Flecks of dust transit across the face of the bloating brightness, making a million, infinitesimal sunspots.

I cannot really watch this – it all happens too quickly for any living thing to witness in such intricate detail. Perhaps I see whatever the panicking meat behind my widening eyes produces in those milliseconds of conscious reactivity. Maybe the devastating power being unleashed takes control of these primordial moments and stretches them out to savour. I do not know. I am just a witness, about to become a victim.

With nothing else left to throw blindly into my waking consciousness as primitive, animalistic reflexes reach the hard stop of their instinctual trigger – or satisfied with some independent intent of its own making – the wall explodes out. Time resumes control of the situation. She does not like to be interfered with or made to play spectator.

The blast takes me off my feet. Acrid sulphur dioxides swirl past in racing clouds shaped like spears and take my ability to breathe, reinflating collapsing lungs with poison. Blinding light takes my sight, and I lose the beautiful pseudo-sunrise. It all happens in absolute silence, thanks to a supersonic pressure wave which has already blown out my eardrums before the sound carrying its power can boil the fluid inside them.

Brick broken up into razor-sharp flechettes streak past, tearing through clothes and tracing their chaotic spin through toxic air, using a map made with red trails sliced deep into my flesh.

Finally, blessedly, the pressure differential snaps my head backwards and the recoil crushes grey matter against hard. For just another beautiful, treasured quarter-second, I balance perfectly between consciousness and oblivion, arms out to either side of a tripwire that dissolves in from each imaginary end. This dreamscape collapses in on itself, like the physical world all around me.

I do not remember anything after I lost this balance, but I woke up screaming. Begging for help.

I think I cried for my Mother.

Enough.

The mask digs back into the angry red contour it left, and I am sure if the straps stayed loose it would cling on with composite spite alone. Tapered edges bite into a fleshy furrow running the perimeter of my face. The ratchet clasp behind my head tightens, each click-click-click forcing the plastic and porcelain in against my skin. Constraining and calming. Memories of screaming, weeping, recede and when I breathe in the stink of high explosives, phosphor and atomised mortar is gone. Control reasserts and the past slinks away for a spell. Banished.

In that singular moment I reach for the folded gloves on the desktop nearby, attention elsewhere, still lingering in the eddies of a waking dream. Contentment catches me out. You have forgotten. The bulbous stump of what used to be my right hand hovers in midair, phantom fingers clutching reflexively, impossibly, for something real. Not until the bulb of scar tissue dumbly raps against the dark oak in a blind grope do I look up. Remember. Pain explodes for just a second, as my mind tries to reconcile feeling those questing fingertips with seeing a twisted, truncated forearm. Neurons enter discussion, firing violently against each other, disagreeing. Angry. It settles, as always, and with the other hand I reach for my prosthetic. The weight of it is comforting.

I work the plastic fingers gently with my own, listening to the soft whine of integrated actuators as they almost imperceptibly resist the movements, without power to support them. Lifting the prosthetic up, I let the extended forefinger trail down the nape of my neck. For a moment, I feel it – in my wrist, the one that ends in an ugly soft-silver post clustered by thick ropes of scar tissue. The feeling passes, because it is not really there. A psychosomatic response; my body’s map desperately trying to brute-force back the missing connection.

Someone taps softly at the door, and I take the plastic away. “Come in, Cassiopeia."

A setting sun picks out parts of the wider room. It paints twisting shafts made broken by the prism of the misshapen glass it lenses through, and dirty with the century-old effluence of a city. Smeared and filthy, making it hard to see the jagged cityscape pulsing with anti-collision lights and thankless late-night office workers beyond. Hubris and ruin. Even with her head bowed, her beautiful bruises shine brightly, and the cut above her downcast eyes glints in the last effort of the day. Perfection in suffering. There is a lurch in her step, probably a moderate hip flexor strain, perhaps a sub-dermal haematoma with significant fluid buildup …   

Stop. The training preempts my conscious control and I continue to diagnose. Analyse. Evaluate a treatment option or two. Almost two decades of study and practice try to pick off where circumstances and choices last made that impossible. How long has it been?

The memories feel like external recordings, provided by some third-party. They are mine, it is me, but somehow everything is saturated like a bad copy. A facsimile. My eyes dart down at my prosthetic. Is this psychosomatic too?
 
She does not interrupt my musing. No cough of distraction, or gentle inquisition. A meek statue in a scarlet-red business suit, clutching a clipboard so tightly it turns her knuckles emaciated white. A Possible sign of anemia? Enough.

Control reasserts. To the topic at hand, singularly. “How are you feeling?” I ask, forced back to the matter. Broken, evidently.

Something writhes across her face. It is quick, but powerful. Not serpentine, that suggests subterfuge; this is too aggressive. It is actively restrained, held back and pulled down into the pit of the gut where it languishes with all the braver things she should have said and shown. I did not think she had the capacity. Fight? Good. She will need it.

“I’m well,” She replies, still not looking up.

“When is your next appointment?”

For just a moment her chin tilts and, for an all-too-brief further second, that reflex to make eye contact with someone whose question you do not quite understand seems about to break through. So close. Instead, the clipboard becomes a new raft to cling to.

This is proving to be a difficult lesson. She is a difficult pupil. Under the ceramic composite, my lips curl upwards slightly. The best lessons are always the hardest. They nick and then deform the recipient, leaving a permanent impression at best or a plunging wound at worst. The injuries on display have already made this the latter. A painful but necessary reminder. She will listen or she will feel.

“I’m due back at SCW in an hour,” Cassieopia read with all the variation of a text-to-speech device. “Talent relations meeting.”

“Then you have up to an hour to find it in yourself to look at my porcelain-painted face, before you are late.”

She does not move, except to burn a hole in the clipboard looking for some instruction or inspiration that never comes. Salvation in that particular raft will come from the sky above, not the sea below. She is looking in the wrong place.

This is tedious. “Why are you frightened of me?”

Cassieopia flinches, I continue. “Did I put those bruises on your face?”

“No, Ma’am.”

I stand, prosthetic held in its biological other, she flinches again. “Did I fracture your skull?”

“No, Ma’am.”

I fractured their skulls. Memories swirl, of the dockyards and my intervention a few weeks previously. Unlike before, these feel real. Authentic. This is me. I remember their lumbering swings, choreographed so clearly and plainly, overextending to offer me an opening and then taking everything from them. Their livelihoods, their health – everything except their lives. You cannot learn a lesson if you are dead, after all. And there are so many more things worse than death. The suffering they will see.

Circling the desk, she watches me come closer with the benefit of peripheral vision. She does not step back – good, progress. She is still virtuous. Precious. She shrinks down a little, shoulders hunching. Submissive and cowed. Unnecessary. She is not a prisoner, and her role in the wonderful things we will do is of the utmost importance.

Gently, the upturned fingers of the prosthetic in my hand guide her chin higher and her eyes dart hurriedly to either side seeking something, anything …

… But she cannot look anywhere else, and so she finally looks at me. Transfixed. Held. Close now, only a few inches separate us and the gentle tingle of flowers wafts effortlessly across the short distance to fill my single lung. It tickles my nose. Her breathing quickens, nostrils flare. Swallowing. The flesh around her bruised mouth flushes to match her suit. The star burns a little hotter.

My voice is gentle, soft. There is no-one else here meant for it. “Do you want to go? I will not stop you.”   

Almost immediately, she shakes her head but her eyes never leave mine. “No … I … It’s just …”

So close. Her lips flex looking for words and Cassieopia grimaces in discomfort, as the wire locking clamping her jaws together cuts into the soft palate. Such pain brings clarity, as miseries often do and the truth struggling to be free of the weight of expectation finally, blessedly, tears free and clear. Suffering is so very good for the soul. “I’m scared …”

At last. We are here. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear …” I begin, and something behind her shimmering eyes grows bright. Walk into the light with me. “For fear has to do with punishment–”

“ … And whoever fears has not been perfected in love,” She interrupts. She is mine. “Gospel of John, Book One, Chapter Four, Verse Eighteen.”

Her hand reaches upwards and curls around the upturned, ceramic-white fingers of my prosthetic. Bolder now. I can feel her squeeze the pliant, flexing plastic through its flesh-and-blood facsimile. You shall be perfected in love. “All you need, Cassieopia, is faith. And you have so very much. It is your virtue and strength. I would not have rescued you that night, near the dockyards, if I thought you were weak.” A virtuousness to feed a living weapon. “I need your strength. She needs your strength. You cannot leave us alone …”

With a gesture towards the window behind, I continue. “This city, and all the awful things perpetrated inside it …”

For a second, Cassieopia’s eyes lose focus and I can tell she is recalling the particularly intense feeling of having her jaw broken in multiple places. The best lessons are the hardest. Or perhaps the fracture in her head. Or the creeping fear that makes her whole body shake whenever someone rushing to catch a taxi brushes too closely past in their hurry.

She nods, blinking through hot tears that track pink, meandering curls across her bruises and make the skin sting. She looks down at the prosthetic in her fingers and tugs on it, the slightest pressure. I let go, and she brings it close in against her chest, cradling it protectively inside cupped palms. For a while Cassieopia traces the inset black ribbons running around each digit in swirling, twisting bands.

Eventually, she holds my prosthetic up and out into the short distance between us. An offering. “Can I?”

Nodding, I present her with the stump of my wrist and she carefully tugs a harness loosely tied around the remaining forearm into position. Do you smell the flowers? “Your paperwork’s completed,” She says. “Filed it myself before I left. You’ve been given your first slot at Inception. Another new competitor … Hold on …”

She holds my wrist up in the air over her head, awkwardly squatting as far as her tender hip will allow until she can read the clipboard thrown onto the carpet below. “ … Kaiju Rainbow.”       

A beautiful and mighty name. With all the care she can manage, a flower girl named after the stars pushes my prosthetic onto its titanium post, cemented deep into the remains of my ulna. Despite her gentleness, the bone flexes under the load. It was never meant to float, swaying inside the soft meat of my forearm, tethered by tendons splayed out like guidewires. She rotates the hand locked and the added weight makes something animalistic, autonomic click live in the deepest recesses of my head. Some constant, low-voltage warning signal cuts off, and my body’s image of itself feels a little closer to the divine plan. Focus now.     

“You will help save her,” I say, as she traces a path back to the signal input port puncturing my skin a few inches back from the stump. “She cannot be reborn from the dark without a light to guide the way a while. She will need your virtue.” To draw out morality and hold in her corruption.

You are my canary. Cassieopia nodded and pushed the jack into place. A Lamb of God in the truest sense. “She saved me – I have to repay it.”

You will, and it will cost everything you cherish. My plastic fingers spasm, and it hurts. Transient imperfection. For a few moments my mind makes no sense of the artificial impulses pretending to be something they are not – pretending to be part of me. Imposters. It passes, eventually, and they splay out to lie flat in line with the texture-imprinted palm. She takes my facsimile in her god-given hand.

She squeezes it. Behind us the sun sinks, trading burnt orange for washed-out red; made all the more bleary by dirty glass.  “I’m ready.”

“We will do such wonderful things,” I tell her. Welcome to the Rapture.
__________________________________________________________________________________

[The Rapture]

There is such a lot to a name. Everything. A designation by default, a more attractive label for meatbags that think clever thoughts instead of chewing cud. A useful mechanism for anthropomorphising things that should be used like the mere tools they are. A name, but usually also a story. Sometimes an epic, if the owner goes to their long rest a good while after. That story is sometimes heartening, always tragic. Nobody spends significant time down here in the mud, head craned up at the black and twinkling, without the wounds of just existing. It is so hard. Suffering, after all, is so very good for the soul. Nothing worth having ever came for free and even where so, it is a mathematical certainty, as replicable and reliable as fractals, that someone suffered to make or break it before ever coming into your possession. Someone hurt for it, somewhere.

Kaiju, I know so little about you, and nothing beyond the page or so the company hosts online for those curious enough to look at you and wonder. Who are you? Even this biography, scant and sparse in detail, is data entry by someone else. A stranger’s interpretation. I am far more interested in learning about you from you.

Still, we have never met and so I cannot. Soon, but not yet. So I must approximate; work within the bounds of the known … And all I know is your name. What does it say? I think it has a story. Would you like me to tell it?   

The power and the threat and the glory are all bound in your first name; a sweeping creature of unknowable power, smashing asunder with impunity. Oh, how it excites me to think about. Cries that rattle cities. Made in tall tales and on silver screens, given life through Human grit and perseverance. A vehicle, maybe, for revisiting on the world all the tragedies and hardships and miseries piled on you? A Kaiju – a strange beast in the English translation from the original Japanese – a walking metaphor, iron-hard scales and sweeping, raking claws. Titanic and colossal. It stirs my soul to think of you. Crashing through downtown metropolises, oblivious to the steel rain from screaming gunships. A mighty creature accompanied by an urban symphony, made from the bassy booming of main battle tanks, and the ear-splitting shriek of afternburning jets.

These vast, ordered ranks of violence delivered by land and sea and air to stop you delivering a reckoning for their wickedness, their indifference. Now, you can see them feel. Express something beyond glassy apathy. They cry with dry faces. Screaming in the streets below, panicked. Directionless. Hurt. They will come harder for you yet. It will not make a difference.

Twisting, cavorting missiles burning hard and burying thousands of pounds of concentrated explosive into the freeways and expressways; hurling fractured concrete and blackened, twisted trussing high into the smoke-choked skies. They try to stop you with the sum arsenal of all the terrible things we do to each other, but you are untouched. Untouchable. They destroy everything surrounding you but you.

Names are rarely metaphors – we do not get to choose them for ourselves, usually. But yours is, and I wonder … Did you? If so, we have something in common, and a link I treasure very much. A chain. Kaiju were faceless, incredible metaphors for the terrible things we do to each other given a magnificent, monstrous form drawn from imagination and flavoured with malice. Living embodiments of topics too complex for the common man to articulate made relatable, so long as the vehicle of interaction and required conclusion was fear. It is easy to be scared.

An atomic age, where cutting-edge science broke apart the stuff of matter and our perceived reality, rending apart with the power of laboratory-orchestrated suns to vapourise entire cities. Legitimate war-making targets and families. From weapons potent enough to poison an entire planet, to powering your car and your home girt by white-picket fences. Such cognitive dissonance, to trust the same principles that burnt the silhouettes of the dead into walls but might give you electricity too cheap to meter! A new American Age. Difficult to truly fear something which concurrently protects children and threatens to turn them to ash in a nuclear hellfire. Ring-a-ring-a-rosies …

The most famous Kaiju of them all gave an outlet to that dissonance. A nuclear test, an irradiated island, and a mighty lizard to terrorise and destroy. A powerful warning for the all-too-familiar consequences of science run amok, where the head leads the heart until the latter is broken in the burning streets of downtown Tokyo, crushed by the might and fury of Godzilla.

You are not nine hundred and eighty four feet of fury. Your skin cannot repel high-calibre, armour-piercing rounds. You cannot cleave skyscrapers in half with a wicked whip of your spined tail … And yet, I do not expect any less a challenge when Inception provides a suitable venue for us to get to know each other more intimately. More hurtfully.

What role then, should I play? All of them. Am I to just survive Kaiju Rainbow, in the hopes that when the sun rolls around the world and climbs up to look at the destruction from a late evening’s work in Reno, Nevada, you will be screaming at the scrambling helicopters in the sky somewhere else, and I will still be alive? Perched on the roadside rubble, wrapped in a shining foil thermal blanket while Tokyo burns all around me?

Maybe, I can play a hunter. Slay the beast, save the girl and the world. Damn her. I would make such a very dashing heroine …

Or, perhaps, I could be your keeper. Master. After all, strange beasts exist as teaching instruments – warnings to heed, made for murder,  and lessons to learn regarding who is in charge, wielding these powerful creatures, and who is not. Between the bouts of violence, who will keep you fed and watered? Protected from the elements? Nothing exists in isolation, not even monsters. Loneliness breeds them.

Something has brought you to SCW. Leave now. I wonder what that is? Primal instinct, the pure potential to hurt and slay? Something more cerebral, deliberate. Planned. Are you on a directionless, eternal hunt or is this a flight from someplace … Or some prison?

Less concrete-poured toilets and an hour in an empty swimming pool masquerading as exercise, more a gilded cage. Civilised captivity. Bread and Water and a Faberge Egg? Maybe even something more metaphorical? Fear is a powerful restraint, but there are other feelings which can be just as potent a weapon in the right applications. Fear is so blunt and brutish … I prefer something with more finesse. Too much love kills every time. Used carefully, gently like a delicate blade, love can be the most inescapable prison of them all.

It is remarkable how much more it hurts when the pain is inflicted by the act of leaving, and not in being forced to stay. Leaving is by choice. You could always stay and die. Such deep cuts. Your past accomplishments make me wonder if you have scars to match. Tell me … Why did you leave AFCW?

For so much still to do there, you seemed to leave so quickly.

Whatever role I play – prey, gamekeeper or warden – I will move softly and carry a powerful anti-tank weapon. Finesse has its place, but a scalpel versus a Strange Beast is a zero-sum game I do not want to play.

After all, you are still Kaiju and you are mighty and I will not die weeping on the broken streets of an urban wasteland. Not easily. Not at a price you are willing to pay.
__________________________________________________________________________________

[The Past]

Atlantic City watched Cassieopia lie on the rain-slicked concrete with her back to the business district, and waited for her to die. With a pained gasp, cut short by the irresistible hyperventilating urge to draw in more air before her lungs had even filled all the way, she rolled onto her side and retched. A greasy mix of bile, blood and saliva congealed as it thickened and hung halfway clear of her chin, swinging in a gentle breeze blowing in from the sea and the nearby dockyards.

Her fingers prodded uselessly at the mobile phone resting in the palm of her slack hand. The screen flickered, disturbed from idle with every uncoordinated mash.

“Hu …. Hu …” She rasped, trying for words her broken jaw hung too loose to help shape. Something hot and slick rolled down the back of her skull and autonomously, groggily, she roughly pressed a free hand against the matted hair. It came back red and strange. She forgot the phone for a second, glassy eyes focusing on the clear fluid sitting on top of that all-too-familiar blood …

A vibration in her other palm stole her attention away and Cassie dragged the phone into her body as it shook and flashed. The bright pixel screen was too brilliant to look at, and more pain lanced through her head as she forced herself to focus.

MAC CALLING

With the sum will left after refusing to give Atlantic City its show, Cassie stabbed a thumb on the green indent and connected.

An urgent voice struggled through a tinny speaker, too far away without hands’ free. “Mah …” She tried and the agony made itself an order of magnitude worse; threatening to dissolve everything in front of her into nothingness. “Am … Amber …”

Cassie retched again, with nothing left in her gut but blood to splash in the rain. She pressed her clammy forehead into the concrete. “Huh … Help … Her …”

Eyes flickered closed, and the phone slipped out from numb fingers. As her conscious mind stalled, jerking and screeching as the neural processes which gave it the gift of sentience and self-awareness came to a halt, she prayed. Split lips worked silently as far as her shattered mandible would permit, and she begged something altogether greater than her for an intervention. A miracle. Anything.

Cassie’s urgent pleading was interrupted, long before it could reach its intended recipient. In fact, it never even got out of Atlantic City.

She was dimly aware that the falling rain had stopped falling on her. Then, that embryonic awareness took a gamble and expanded enough to realise someone was standing in its way. They came closer, stooping, and she felt soft fingers brush tangled hair out from her red-rimmed eyes. Cassie watched them reach for the phone nearby, end the call and take it out of her blurry sight.

“Do not be afraid,” A voice whispered in her ear, making the skin prickle and her body shiver. “I will save her, and you.”

She tried to raise her head up, to see the face of her saviour, but there was no spare capacity in such a fevered mind to issue orders to aching, spent muscles. The stranger dropped to their knees, and before the last of her useful consciousness was taken from her, Cassie watched ceramic-white fingers interlock with hers. They felt hard, but warm. She squeezed them, coughed, and fell into nothingness.   

The Stranger traced the blotchy line of swollen bruises joining the edge of Cassie’s mouth and ear with a black-gloved hand. “Welcome to the Rapture,” She said, turning the painted mask over her face up towards the rainstorm. “We will do such wonderful things.”
__________________________________________________________________________________

[The Rapture]

Close the Compendium Of Strange Beasts and How To Slay Them. It cannot help us any more. We must go deeper beyond the book and towards its author. Take their name, and think … What might be behind it? Who are you? Deeper. Allegories tell stories, teach lessons and act as buoys warning against moral hazards in the deep waters and while those stories make people mighty, they are white soaring turrets picked out in smooth stonework. Sweeping buttresses carved in angels, with marble palms turned up to support multi-storey corners on busy office blocks. Whatever gets you through the day.

These are just accoutrements and flourishes, woodwind trilling somewhere in the shining metal and polished wood of the symphony, resting on – relying on – strong foundations. An underpinning strength, on which the sum total of a life rises in pyramidal thrust. Chasing an apex that will never be completed, a personal Sagrada Família began under one vision and continued under another. For the love of the work.

How do we build something to meet our vision, when by virtue of still being alive we are not the same architect who laid the keystone so long ago? Changed by experiences, things we should have done; things we should never have done …

No. We were always meant to do them. They are still mistakes.

We build on these foundations with our experiences, fashioned into new towers and spires that make glories or memorials. Celebrate or mourn, remember and ruminate on what was and might be.

It is a curiosity. We are such wonderful things, to spend so much time building many of these memorials to things that could never have been. We mourn losses that were never ours to lose. Permutations, what-if, hypotheticals. Imaginings. I wonder why we spend all our life wishing it away? We were built to dream.

To understand you, Kaiju, I must look past this pseudo-cityscape and the skyline-of-the-soul, of sorts, made by all the terrible things you have seen and done and, perhaps, something of selflessness. We are all made in his image, after all. Even the most irredeemable have at some point done something laudable. Not every blade finds skin.

Past the fortress, past the projection of you, at where you are strongest. The very anchor of everything you are, on which it all rests – all the trials, tribulations, victories, failures. Within which, we will find the real Kaiju Rainbow. The heart of you. There, at the source of greatest strength must be the most tremendous load. We can deny ourselves, others, but not simple physics. Not force, pressure or area. It is so much to hold up.

What do your foundations look like? Thick slabs of pitted angled stone, made wet by rain and furred by moss? Twelve hundred years in the making? Scoured clear and shiny in brilliant, twenty-first century reflective alloy? Structural. Weighty. Physical. Impassable. Safe.

No. That feels too cold, too aloof. You are not a castle to repel a siege. You are not trying to keep the world out, with barriers, but maybe trying to keep something altogether harder and stronger in. Not the metal, but the fire that forges it. A swirling vortex of dazzling, lashing, violence kept trapped, contained by the weight of all your life built over the top. A soul. A reactor of feeling, powering the conscious and careful mind while ever-probing for weaknesses in that containment, ready to tear through and out. Stretch and see the sky.

There are many names for it, many stories, probably. But it is you. The core, the reactor. It is the heart of you.

I think I would like to meet the blazing sun you carry inside, Kaiju. Wander in the brightness for a while. I would stand in front of its radiance, your magnificence, and feel my skin blister. Die a little to know a little better how you live. Know you.

And then, I would take its light and make it mine. Give it purpose, pleasure. Change it to new forms that please me, serve me. Corrupt it. What use is such power, without careful application? Reach for the Compendium one final time and think: wanton destruction, like a monster lumbering from downtown Tokyo and into myth and legend, is worthless without finesse. Without control. Without reigns and a yoke.

Oh my Strange Beast, I will give you the lesson you are to teach unto others, that has until now been missing and which makes all of this that you have made before our meeting meaningless. Obsolete. Defunct and ready for change. Ready for destruction.

You are potential without application. Pure promise. A powerhouse used to keep the library lights on instead of feeding mighty engines of war. All of this – everything you have built in sweeping spires and soulscapes without a rhyme or reason – needs to be torn down and rebuilt. Made cohesive and fit, in accordance with a plan. A grand design.

I have a plan for you, Kaiju. Rebirth. Let me help you find yourself. Let me show you that suffering will be so very good for your soul, by making you suffer so very much to redeem it. Lose it. There is a grand design of such careful misery, one we will embark on together. It will be difficult, and those glories and monuments you built in your ignorance and accidental-life will fall hard and suddenly, but on the other side of the long night that awaits you in Reno, Nevada, a new woman will emerge. Reshaped. Renewed. Resplendent in the image I have made for you. A terrible and vengeful thing.

There will be nothing left except that swirling vortex, released for a while and wounded. Hurt. She will be such a sight unleashed. I will let you rail a while, hurt me, maybe; hurt others? Without hesitation. Make them feel. Then, you will be sealed away. Weaponised. Part of the arsenal I will come to rely on to deliver my grand design to all of this company and, eventually, beyond. I cannot do any of this without you. It is not a choice. 

And when you are not called to war, but raging and crashing against this beautiful prison I have made for you to stay in, you will soothe and comfort me. Trapped and made a toy. Through a chink in smooth, polished, impenetrable armour I have chosen to cut, you will see a slither of the outside world from inside. A looking glass back the way you came.

From outside and with your tamed light, I will make you a rainbow, Kaiju. All the spectrum, all of you, made discrete and split into bands of thoughts and feelings through me. Cut into parts. I will be your prism, refracting everything you are into myriad colours that amuse and entertain me. A living kaleidoscope. 

You must resist this with all your heart and the proxy, violent vortex it represents – you must be a difficult pupil, or the lesson will not take effect. It will be worse this way. Exert the greatest pressure, so that your foundations burst and everything leaves you. My Strange Beast, you must promise to do your utmost to stop me so that when you are welcomed into my grand design, it is to be rebuilt utterly and completely. Made almost brand new and terrible. 

You will be my first miracle, here in SCW. You will be my reason to believe that there is a chance to remake and remould, instead of reducing everything to ruin. Destruction is so very time-consuming, and it is better to twist and warp and watch it grow into something new than uproot, salt, scour and start again.

I cannot wait to welcome you. I feel as if I have always known you, somehow before we ever trade such beautiful violence in Reno. Only the lights will refuse to look away. We shall do such wonderful things together. There is a path here that I have made for you; walk it with me and cut yourself on these ruby-red thorns and when the way has taken its toll, I will be there to save you. Scrape your palms on the fall to the ground. Remake you. Do not get up. Please.

That beautiful violence we visit on each other will be more than the product served for some seedy, bourgeois cause of filling corporate coffers or the supply against thirsty, baying, whooping, gibbering demand. The feckless and the ignorant will wear away more paint on the handrails, but that is the most they will achieve in advancing anything forward. What they think they have paid to see but are actually blessed to do so, is an offering, something sacred that we will make, together. 

It will be a whirlwind and it will be terrible and it will be wounding. Only the lights will refuse to look away. We shall spin and we shall weave and our dance will be the start of a glorious procession, the path laid out for you to find your salvation.

I will save you with ruby-red thorns in Reno and when you lay still in the aftermath, I will bind the weeping cuts that mark your path through them. Each one will kiss you with a painful flourish, a chord of hurt which read across their totality makes your flesh a songbook. From such wonderful music we will sing together.

A crescendo, a rolling wave of all the rage and fury held under impossible pressure for too long, fashioned into song with the most wonderful of all instruments — the Human Body. I think you will sing so sweetly, when we finally meet.

Welcome to the Rapture, Kaiju Rainbow.
__________________________________________________________________________________

[The Now]

Freeing the ratchet and letting its straps slip free to dangle loosely, I slip my fingers underneath the edges and lift the mask away from my face. Warm air rushes in and soothes the engorged line of angry flesh, where the composite plastic always bites so hard. Tonight, it will fade and be gone and tomorrow, it will be cut in new.

Cassieopia stands immediately behind me, holding my long hair bunched up in the air and out of the way. She does not make any effort to lean forward, to crane her neck. To see my face. Instead, she sets about untangling and brushing. 

I can smell flowers, and the sweetness tickles my nose.

Through cracked lips, I manage a few shallow breaths but something tight presses down on me and when my head shifts a little to blindly follow the flowers, my cheek scratches deep against brickwork. Reflexively, a shoulder rises up and hits hard against something else. Squeezed tight, my heart wrestles and strains inside its pericardial blanket and crashes against the ribs pushed in so close. It twists and bucks and thumps, beating too quickly, making my whole body feel numb. Lips spread further, seeking more air, but it tastes of mortar and dust and my lungs will not take any more. Cannot.

Sweetness in my snatched breaths turns sour and becomes wet. Something hot and metallic makes a riverbed out of my face as it spills into my gasping mouth, thick and congealed with plaster collected from my grey skin. I splutter, but there is not enough air in my labouring, crumpled chest to power the cough. Blood flows now in rivulets, pouring in faster than my frantic gargling can clear it. 

Deep inside my skull, buried in overlapping ribbons of panicked neurons, something primordial ignites and assumes immediate control, throwing aside rising panic. Adrenal glands fire, twisting themselves almost in half in spasm as they dump the biological equivalent of rocket fuel into my veins. Already frustrated, my heart works itself into a frenzy as if it could lift the heavy weight on my chest by palpitation and pulsing alone. 

Scrambling in the dirt and broken brickwork, skin slicing on each sharp spur, fingers manage to work themselves free from a furrow ploughed in the mud until I can put my palm up against something and push. It creaks, I groan in agony, sending thick red ropes of bloody spit up into the air and onto my cheeks. My heart beats faster. I push, it shifts. I beg – try to reason with myself – for a second to rest. I cannot breathe. Please.

No. My heart beats faster. Again.

Panting, a sheen of sweat mixes with the plaster coating my face to make a paste that slides down and oozes into my eyes, blinding me until I blink it away. My voice, wordless, howling, rises as the weight teeters at the full reach of my left arm, on the edge of spinning away. With one last effort I push back up from the ground. Something in my shoulder snaps and everything from the bicep down loses strength, just as the mass tumbles away and into the gloom.

Now illuminated by a sickly yellow disc in the sky, made pale white by thick reams of billowing smoke, I kick at the remains of the overturned concrete pillar. Petulantly.

When I move to sit up, cradling an aching arm in my lap, something pulls me back hard. The recoil is agonising and the back of my skull cracks against debris and rubble. As the remaining adrenaline burns itself out, leaving my senses with nothing to fuel them, everything becomes dim, washed out. With all the effort left in my flagging spirit, I roll over right and come face to face with the remains of a  large, perforated tank. A string of embossed serial numbers run across its burst front, splattered with pink spit and grit.

A fat trail of something thick like molasses spills from a fist-sized hole punched in its nearside, coloured bright orange by the corrosion it carries along the way. At the apex of a buckled plate it gathers together enough to drip down to the mud but instead, it spills onto and over my right forearm, buried under the base of the tank.

Panic grips me. I tug, and then I pull and then I thrash but it stays stuck. Trapped. I try to move my fingers but I cannot feel them. My exhausted heart finally slows and something heavier than the concrete crushing me a few moments earlier settles over. My cracked, slack lips quiver.

It is absolutely silent all around. Fluid from my ruptured eardrums dries in bloodied flecks sprayed across my neck and absurdly, I am glad. It is peaceful. Everything slows down. My fight is exhausted, my flight cut-off and that primordial something buried deep inside disengages, handing back non-existent control to my conscious, rapidly spiralling mind.

I think this is where …

Reaching up, I pull the small curves of warm metal out from behind each ear and set the hearing aids down on the tabletop, next to my mask. The sound of Cassieopia’s brushing, her breathing, my breathing – everything – is instantly cut off. Only the gentle tap of my ever-faithful heart, its resting effort transmitted through my bones, stays with me.

Letting my eyes roll closed, I float in a beautiful sensory limbo. All except one. Rolling my shoulders back, I fill the one, lonely lung in my chest. I can still smell flowers. Cassieopia continues her work. If she wanted to, she could reach over and bring any number of heavy objects down against my defenceless form, step over my bleeding body, and leave.

This is her twelfth such opportunity, but she has not, will not, because she is not my prisoner. 

I press my prosthetic hand against my chest, and the plastic digs into fabric and the skin underneath. It comes to me in full recollection and vivid, swirling brightness. Instantaneously, I know the truth and the memory reasserts itself, almost casually, into the meat inside my skull. Yes, I did. I remember now.

I did cry for my Mother.
__________________________________________________________________________________

It was difficult to imagine that this place had once been anything but a shitty dive bar.

Years before, although Amber had long since lost count of them, it had been a fine little Italian eatery. Outside then, the paint had been as fresh and vibrant as the delicacies on offer and the wine as delightfully crisp as the salty night air that used to drift through open windows.

She'd been here once when it was still that place, with an old-- well, in truth neither of them at that time probably knew what they were.

Only, maybe, that both of them were chasing intercepting shadows and had gotten caught in each other’s crossfire. Professionals in the most unprofessional sense. As close to lovers as one might become never having shared a moment or a kiss. The last night they'd been here, they left a bottle of wine unopened on the table, and even now she wondered what could have happened if anything at all about that time had been different.

Now though, the place has fallen into disrepair. Murky saltwater had eaten at the metal while creeping rust at the water's edge spread upwards as though grasping to escape the murky depths. Paint had been heavily chipped and faded, leaving what remained to be tagged with intentions of recognition and recompense alike.

No longer did the crisp night air rise up to meet her, instead the thick fumes of diesel mixed with something briny and slick. Around the place the signs clearly said 'no smoking' however now they'd resorted to just leaving ashtrays on the tables so people would stop stubbing them out on the bar.

As alone as she might manage at a table of her own, Amber stared down the newest in a long line of drinks that she'd hoped would make her feel better - or at the very least, feel less.

See, getting drunk was easy cause it required nothing more than acceptance. There was no responsibility. No expectations: she could sit here and pretend like she was no-one, had nothing and could simply allow herself to succumb to blissful numbness.

It wasn't her first choice by any means, but she'd ended up running out of places after being somewhat relentlessly pursued by a certain Talent Relations representative who had too many good intentions and not enough sense to simply let misery and recent heartaches take their course.

No, Amber had lost Cassiopeia Mares somewhere in the last couple blocks before the docks.

Perhaps that was a small benefit to having stayed in Atlantic City for longer than necessary, the ability to disappear on a whim… Ah fuck.

“I sometimes think you don’t respect me,” Cassie began as she settled into the chair opposite, jerking up to smooth the fabric of her crisp, white dress. The warped wood underneath groaned. “Maybe because I don’t hurt people for a living, you think I don’t have any kind of edge, subtlety? Empty in the brainbox department? Not sure, but either way, it wasn’t hard to work out where you might be going based on what I know about you and this particularly unpleasant part of the city …”

She looked around, nostrils flaring in distaste. “This place used to be a fancy-dan. Porcelain plates and bowties and fifty dollars for five dollars’ worth of shrimp …”

“That’s why it failed, I think,” Cassie nodded to herself. “Just another pretender in a city full of them.”

“This?” She gestured with painted fingernails, “This is authentic. Real. The people here aren’t trying to craft an image or be something they’re not. All true to their roots …”

Cassie fixed Amber dead in the eyes. “ … Doing what they always do, every single time.”

Amber, whether to her credit or not, leaned back into her chair with hands clasping at the nape of her neck while allowing the knowing-albeit-distant smile to cross her otherwise impassive features. It wasn’t as though the redhead wasn’t prepared to give credit where credit was due for tenaciousness and ability to put two and two together while not making 22, however she just wasn’t exactly in the proper headspace to be stuck in the continuous debate loop of corporate ethics and practicality of heels in a dive bar.

“Believe me, Ms Mares…” Amber lolled gently, rolling her tongue against her cheek thoughtfully. “If I were going to consider you any of those things, I’d have just said it rather than lead you on a wild goose chase. There aren’t enough hours in a day to waste playing pointless games and pretending to like things that I don’t. What I would like to know, though …”

Amber leaned forward, bringing her hands down to the table before steepling her fingers, closing the distance to an almost uncomfortable distance with only a worn, cigarette-stoned tabletop to keep them apart.

“Is what you think you want from me… If you’re so sure of what you know, why do you keep coming looking for answers to questions that haven’t been asked? I’m about as open a book as you’ll find in this fucking industry - yet you prefer riddles and double speak to simply asking a question, then wonder about a potential a lack of ‘professionalism’…”

Amber stared through Cassie in the same way she might through any other opponent squaring up. Not as a tactic to intimidate, but to watch for a flicker of dishonesty or anything that might confirm the nagging suspicions she couldn’t quite pinpoint. Not that her smile ever changed, almost lazy at the edges as her lip twitched revealing a glint of teeth. Quietly savage by instinct.

“Just ‘cause the words in the job title, it doesn't make me a good person.”

Cassie looked up at the tube lights hanging overhead, wrapped in sickly yellow light and caked in grease. She watched them swing gently in the recirculated air of the bar for a few seconds. The cracks arcing out from the bolts holding them in place at either end flexed and twisted.

“You’re a bit strange, Miss Ryan,” She said finally. “You’re defined by your job - or maybe your job is defined by you but fundamentally, both of them are the same thing. One made the other, it doesn’t matter so much in what order. Same qualities, same strengths, same weaknesses. It’s all interlinked together. You fight - you’re a fighter - and you get paid to fight. Pretty simple.”

As she brought an arm up from her lap to rest on the table, a sharp split in the wood grabbed the edge of the bright white material tight, pulling the whole sleeve up to the crook of her elbow. For just a second, before Cassie could pull it back down, tendrils of twisted and hardened scar tissue glinted in the gloom, shiny and faded-red. Bunching and twisting the smooth, pale skin into ugly swirls and streaks.

Cassie smoothed the material back into place but didn’t break her train of thought. “I guess that’s made you apply the same logic to other people, and I understand that. It makes sense. Do what you’re good at; like you. The key difference here is that I’m not defined by my job.”

“I like to think I’m an excellent talent relations manager,” She nodded. “Maybe one of the best, if my performance reviews are anything to go by, but that’s it. That’s where the comparison ends. I’m paid to get the best out of our people; whether that means helping them personally or professionally. I keep schedules, make little problems go away and mitigate bigger ones but I’m not some Machiavellian schemer or puppet-master. I don’t sit at home in my trendy one-bedroom apartment on the west city-side trying to work out how to make Amber Ryan do my bidding.”

“All of this,” She gestures, circling a finger around her painted face, “Is to get you to photoshoots on-time and stop you appearing in small claims court. That’s it. All of this …”

Her finger widens its circle to encompass the bar and then ends its gyration pointing directly at Amber. “ … Is because despite your very best, most strenuous efforts, you can’t stop people from helping other people for no reason other than they’re moved in their heart to do so. Good Samaritan, maybe. It’s what decent people should do.”

Straightening up and perhaps compelled by the outpouring of goodness, Amber unlaces her fingers and takes up her glass - examining the water marks and faint streaks around the edge, while trying to ignore the residue of a lipstick stain she was sure wasn’t hers. Maybe it was the booze or maybe the flutter of butterflies still writhing as they die in the pit of her stomach from the very familiar glimpse of mottled skin, but Amber remained silent for what felt like the longest while before downing the contents in one foul swoop.

“As delightful as you made all that sound, at the end of the day you’re paid to coerce and control… Not to care. Yet here you are, a couch and a notepad short of being an underpaid therapist to the sociopaths and sycophants.”

“I won’t pretend like there aren’t good people who do their good deeds for the warm and fuzzies they get from it - however you also managed to dance around my question. It's still not a reason outside of basic monetary, outside a need to keep face in an industry that depends on smiling just the right way to sell a few extra t-shirts.”

It was Amber’s turn to gesture, except hers was a little more wayward and expressive than she had intended.

“I have given you no reason to keep following, no reason to believe in anything more than what you are paid to; Good Samaritans have their limits, and still you insist on getting under my skin. By all means go digging around in my psyche - I’ll be glad to open that door, but I promise that there's a lot less in there than you think… Maybe I’m strange, but I’m surely not nearly as complex as you make me out to be.”

Relaxing back into her seat, a fresh waft of dirty salt-stained air mingled with the stale air conditioning that pumped through the place. She knew that those upright and coherent were starting to stare, while their companions, unable to see straight, just swayed with the gentle rocking of the boat as metal creaked around them. A woman in a place like this was a rare enough sight, although many remotely sober found reason to avoid any such lady that would step through the door unaccompanied. After all, whatever baggage brought them here wasn’t theirs to take home with them…

Two though, two changed the narrative. Two insinuated a different ending to the night’s events.

“Let me tell you a story…” Amber started, watching those with enough sense turn away leaving the remainder with bravery boosted by liquor to narrow their gazes under that heady, yellow glow. “It's not the kind that has a beginning, middle and end ‘cause that would imply that there's a shred of linear sense to it…”

Swallowing hard, the flood of alcohol in her veins left her light-headed in the moment but she simply played it off as a pause for effect.

“I knew a girl once, in a flower dress. She didn’t like me and frankly I didn’t blame her… I didn’t like me then either so how could I expect any different. I remember her though, barefoot in a garden, in the middle of a concrete jungle that she didn’t belong in.”
 
“It didn’t stop me wanting to do something, save her maybe… The more she fought to put down roots in an iron foundation, the harder I tried to pull before she became just another weed in the sidewalk. I wasn’t alone though - there was another who fought harder than I did, who seemed to understand the consequence with more weight.”

Cryptic. The words slurred as the recollection grew fuzzy, frames out of order making less sense as the story went on. Amber could feel the lump in her throat hardening, like the air she breathed was turning to dirt on her lips. Even the salt started to taste more musty and green, heady yet sterile.

“A girl in a flower dress named after the stars. I don’t think I need to tell you why that matters…” Amber paused thoughtfully. “She wasn’t the first, as I've come to understand most recently, that I was late for… She’s the one I should have learned from though. First one, Cassidy, I was young and stupid. I could have done more but I was so caught up in my own shit, trying desperately to just be everything for everyone... However, the girl in the flower dress, I had every opportunity to do better..”

Remorse flickers in her smile as Amber tries to chuckle off the resentment piling on her shoulders, too many people had fallen beyond her grasp…. And now another was offering their hand. She didn’t have to be sober to understand how history had a nasty habit of repeating in such cases.

“... And I didn’t. Now, here we are… Another girl named after the stars - except this one wants to try and redeem me it seems.”

Cassie opened her mouth to talk but said nothing for moments that became minutes, lower lip twitching as various words momentarily lived and died. Her eyes narrowed slightly, the smooth skin of her temples creasing but she didn’t look away from Amber. Someone else named after the stars? She didn’t believe in coincidences …

“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” She managed finally, seemingly satisfied with that summation of the impossible, the unlikely and the random. She reached over and picked up the smeared glass, bringing it up to her face to sniff at carefully - as though the firewater coating the bottom might jump out and bite her.

She tipped it back and drained the glass without so much as a grimace. “That sounds like quite a story …” She said, “Maybe more like a tragedy. You mentioned you had the chance to save her, but there’s a difference between opportunity and duty; being able to and having to.”

“Could you really have stopped it all?” Cassie asked. “Would you have made the difference, or are you just chewing over something you were never going to be able to change?” 

Pensively, Amber fidgeted with her glass for far too long, as though it might just magically refill if she moved it the right way in the light.

“If I ever find out, I’ll let you know. How about in the meantime though, you tell me a story... maybe about those scars on your arm.”

Raising an eyebrow, Amber studied the younger woman for a moment in hopes of masking her own silent agitation with thinly veiled curiosity, and overt drunken lack of tact.
Of course, the redhead wasn’t about to tell Cassie how those scars brought her story bubbling to the surface to begin with, that someone she knew sharing such a specific skin mosaic had been the reason she’d failed the girl in the flower dress to begin with… How she’d be willing to perhaps maim on sight for everything they’d taken from her.


Cassie wrapped a hand around the forearm in question, flexing her fingers. She looked down at the spotless material hiding the scars, but her hand moved upwards, passing over her bicep. With an expression that might have been pain she hooked a forefinger under the line of her collar, pulling the fabric away from her neck and exposing that same mass of scar tissue twisting the skin of her collarbone and shoulder.

“It’s my salvation,” She said and as she talked, contraction of the muscles in her jaw and neck made the ribbons of angry, red skin dance where they were revealed. “Through suffering, I was made new.”

No stranger to scarification, Amber herself was riddled thanks to a career’s worth of reckless deathmatch prowess and generally terrible life choices, however she couldn’t put from her mind how she’d seen such angry curls and vines stretching across skin on another before. They weren’t the same though, that was the important difference, even in an intoxicated state she knew they were different… So why did the coincidences still chill her so thoroughly to the bone?

“All this God-speak and such is gonna make me ill. Between that and your distinct determination to give me answers that contain absolutely nothing… I wanna applaud you as much as I’d love to throttle you, Ms Mares.”
 
“Salvation is subjective, just as suffering pertains to the wearer - there are those who consider paper cuts on the same level as the electric chair after all, then there are those who’d just as easily break someone's kneecaps as they would kiss them on the forehead. Black and white; it's all the same when you’re blind.”

More light-headedness, although this time Amber managed to brace with the hopes that her easy, intoxicated smile might continue to mask her unsteady state and slurred undertone.

“God is many things to many people,” Cassie said as she let the material around her neck go, smoothing it back into place. Her left eye fluttered for a second as the fabric of her dress caught on the scar tissue underneath, but it passed after a moment. “Maybe he’s nothing to you, Miss Ryan, and that’s okay.”

She reached down and brought her handbag up to rest on the sticky table. “Faith is a private matter; something between you and the Lord. You talk, he judges.”

“Perhaps though, we’ve done enough talking … And drinking … ” She motioned over her shoulder with a jerk of her chin. “Shall we call it a night?”

Amusedly, despite a brief unwillingness to stop simply for the sake of stopping, the sideways opportune glances that Cassie’s sudden movement had brought upon them quickly changed Amber’s perspective. They’d drawn attention now.

Finding her feet and playing off a slight wobble with the movement of the boat, Amber sidled up beside Cassie just long enough for the harsh whisper to seep from between her lop-sided smile.

“Faith is bullshit … Even God can no longer judge me.”




The cityscape across the river faded in and out of focus, blurred into a jumble of blinking lights and reflective glass by rain sweeping through. Skyscrapers faded from view behind the stormfront, reduced to silhouettes picked out by the bleeding pulse of anti-collision lights on high-rises. Bustling dive bars and establishments of similar disrepute gave way to dockyards and shipping containers; their only common denominator being hard times.

Towering loading cranes dangled heavy, oxidised chains into the night and they jinked and clattered in the wind, adding a bassy rumble to the rattle of rainwater on cheap tin roofs. KEEP OUT signs made almost completely illegible by time and graffiti flanked broken chain-linked gates crumpled inwards. Cassie hesitated at the threshold.

“Miss Ryan?” She called out, gingerly stepping over a coil of rusted blades set into the spalled concrete and designed to shred the tyres of the unwelcome trying to get in. Somewhere up ahead, a voice called back incoherent and distorted against the shipping containers piled ten high on each side.

She clutched her handbag tight against her chest, shrinking further down inside the perimeter of the umbrella in her free hand as she moved forwards. “Miss Ryan - I don’t think … This doesn’t feel like a short cut …”

Something loud and dissonant crashed behind her, and Cassie wheeled around in time to threaten a skulking cat with the point of her umbrella. The animal pawed at the broken sling it had sent tumbling from the top of a nearby container, hissed in her general direction and then darted off into shadows cast by rusting steel.

Cassie had no sooner relaxed, letting her impromptu weapon drop towards the wet concrete than flinched again, as a voice boomed down from above.

“Hey!” Amber roared from the top of a container forty feet above the ground, cupping her hands unnecessarily around her mouth. “Did you see that cat?”

Grimacing as the rain found its way through her hair to pool around her ears, Cassie sighed. “Miss Ryan; if your shortcut means I need to parkour around this entire dockyard, I’ll make my own way home--No!”

She jabbed the point of the umbrella back up towards the sky. “Do not jump down from there!”

Amber grinned, pushed her bottom lip out and spent a long moment balanced on the edge of the container above. Eventually, she shrugged, held her hands up, mumbled something incoherent and shuffled back and out of view.

Cassie sighed again and turned towards the gates: enough was enough. She got no further than a step or two back the way she’d come when the painful glare of headlights swept across her whole vision, swallowing up the whole dockyard in brilliant white. The rumble of an engine nearby beat out the storm and blinking away the stars dancing across her eyes, she squinted at a pickup truck idling between the broken gates.

Blocking the gates.

She stepped backwards, struggling to pick out any detail in the glare. Cassie heard the unmistakable thump of doors closing and boots on concrete. Something heavy clattered against metal.

Silhouettes cut into the headlights’ beam, resolving into detail as they got closer. Half a dozen shapes at least - some carrying bats, others sporting lengths of chain tight between heavy fists. All of them had obvious ill intent; none of them looked lost. Tugging on the shaft of her umbrella, Cassie pulled the vanes in and presented the metal tip with as much menace as she could muster.

“Nice night to make a smart decision,” The closest one said in a thick accent at home with the shipping containers and cranes. “Where’s your friend?”

Cassie made a show of looking around herself. “My friend?”

Slapping the head of the bat held in his free palm, he sighed. “Ain’t my preferred way to spend my time, roughing up sweethearts. Think it’s important you know I don’t enjoy it.”

That made her frown. “So why do it then?”

“Consequences,” He said simply. “You’re cute, so I’m gonna’ give you one last chance. Where’s your friend? She got a reckoning coming her way for what she did.”

Taking a moment to close her eyes, tip her head back to feel the rain and suck in a full chest of air, Cassie steeled herself. “She’ll be long gone by the time you’re through with me.”

The apparent leader of this band of thugs almost looked contrite; a strange mix of resignation washing over his stubbled, weathered features. “Okay, guess you have that right to choose the manner of how this goes down. Let’s get to making you regret that choice.”

He never got the chance, courtesy of the sling sent crashing to the ground earlier by a mischievous cat and subsequently launched into the side of his head courtesy of a Painted Hurricane. Steel broke bone with a crisp crack, sending him down to the concrete hard. The others scattered momentarily, shouting at each other and the wider dockyard and in the chaos, Amber helped herself to one nearly-new bat. Only one previous careless owner, currently bleeding from the brain in the rain.

She felt sluggish, she felt wasted, but adrenaline soon burnt up the mental fogginess and made everything deliciously vivid. Extending the tip of her new bat out towards the remaining group, Amber smirked. “I got your consequences right here. Come and reap them.” 

The first to take her up on the challenge gave his jaw to the cause, spinning away spraying blood, spit and broken teeth. He mewled on the ground, murmuring and pawing against rain-slicked concrete as the second thug was caught square in the throat and dropped to his knees, gasping and retching for air.

The third had some time to plan a strategy more coherent, and he stalked Amber at the limit of her bat’s reach. The fourth thug made for Cassie, who swung her umbrella haphazardly and just effectively enough to keep him at bay for a while. This made for a useful distraction and when Amber glanced away towards the other woman, the circling thug made his move and crashed his forearm into her temple. She staggered, trying to create space but he was obviously a better fighter than a leader - so much for the latter anyway -  because he was on her in a second; repeated fists to her face.

Amber absorbed the hits, pain mixing with the adrenaline and booze-fuelled buzz. One caught her on the side of the mouth and she tasted iron. Ignoring her baser instincts, she allowed her body to go limp for just a few seconds, slumping under the raining blows. He took the bait and paused his assault to bask in satisfaction over her limp form, only to end up on the business end of a bat forced into the sternum. Staggering backwards, Amber was on her feet before he could even so much as look up. The second swing put him on his back, flailing, and the third stopped him moving again.

Stepping over the wheezing body, Amber was just too far away to do anything but watch Cassie take a hard fist to the temple, collapsing like a puppet with its strings cut. Everything - the rain, the blood in her mouth, the pain in her skull - dissipated in a surging white-out of boiling, radiant fury. She just walked through his punches; good, strong hits that should have given her something to think about but went totally, utterly, completely disregarded.

Amber didn’t stop pushing down on the bat across his throat with all her might, even with the stomach-curdling creak of crushed cartilage. First he punched her, then he scratched at her as rational thought broke down. The thug ripped and teared at her jacket, drawing parallel, weeping lines down her cheeks where his fingernails desperately clawed.

She just leaned into the contorting, jerking spasm and pressed harder. Just a short distance away Cassie lolled on her back, glassy eyes finding Amber’s. Lips twitching something unintelligible.

He might have been dead, but Amber kept up the pressure until his collarbone broke. She thought she heard his chest rattle in some incredible determination to stay alive.

A savage boot to the back of her head crushed Amber’s skull against her victim’s with a sickening thud, and her fury evaporated in a single all-consuming moment of agony. She rolled onto her back, bat forgotten, and lifted her spinning head only for a rain-soaked, worn-out tread to descend from the stars and force it back down hard against the concrete.

She coughed reflexively, blood spilling over her teeth as another thug joined in with savage kicks to her gut and back. Amber pressed her cheek into the cool rainwater and saw Cassie trying to pull herself across the short distance between them, that same vacant expression making it obvious nobody was home behind those bright blue eyes.

“Should have brought more guys,” One of the thugs managed between wheezing snatches of air. “Whole lot of effort just to teach this bitch a few lessons.”

“Morley never was a good planner,” One of the others replied in-between kicks to Amber’s spine, glancing over to look at the trembling body lying next to the bloodied sling and the first to eat concrete. “Probably why he’s dead. Looks it anyway.”

Dead? Surely not. It hadn't really occurred to her prior to this moment that she might have even hit that hard. That red-fuelled rage left her as a backseat driver while her body chose violence on auto-pilot.

Self-defence. Reasonable action. Maybe if she'd had a moment to breathe, more than a second to keep her face off the slickened concrete - then perhaps things might have registered beyond the debilitating dizziness and radiating pain from what felt like everywhere.

Cassie.

Not this time.

Failure was a powerful motivator as she desperately engaged whatever strength she had left to twist beyond the impact of another heavy boot, intended to leave her teeth embedded in the ground. It wasn't much, but it was unexpected and those precious seconds were running out fast…

Rolling onto her knees, Amber crawled half the distance towards where Cassie found herself; a little between standing tall on her feet and down in some squatting, heavy tilt. Scrambling beyond the wild swing of something hard and aimed for her head, Amber dropped, scraping a hole through the fabric and into the front of her knee in front of Cassie. One hand clasped tightly onto the younger girl's shoulder, feigning reassurance as more blood trickled over her lips. The other scrambled in her pocket trying to keep a grip with cold, bloody and rain-slicked fingers.

Desperate and raspy, Amber barely recognized the gutteral noise escaping with the first good breath she'd been able to draw in what felt like hours. “Cassie. You need to run, take my phone and go. Head to my apartment, call Mac and tell him to meet you there ... “

With vacant eyes, Cassie stared beyond Amber. Through her maybe, bright blue as clear as the rain splashing off their skin. Amber wasn't even sure she comprehended as she forced her phone into Cassie’s limp hand. It was a gamble, no doubt.

Would have been damn easy to run and just leave her behind as well, another statistic in a newspaper page being turned in favour of the misogynistic and outdated cartoon repeats.

Too easy.


Amber hated easy. There was never anything to be gained from it except a further burrowing hollowness she couldn’t fulfil. Even now, the bloodied redhead wasn’t sure if Cassie could even hear her over the pouring rain - if she could just...

A hard blow broke her train of thought.

Time had run out again as Amber struggled to get her hands out to brace her fall, the sudden surge of new pain almost immediately eclipsed by the relentless agony that radiated from her cheekbone as it slammed into the unyielding floor.  A heavy boot tread left a brand new groove at the base of her skull.

Lights flickered at the edge of her perspective, flashes of brilliance that weren’t really there punctuated by numbing strikes that jarred and drove the breath from her lungs. More metal on her tongue, although she wasn’t sure where it was coming from this time. Besides ... Blood and rain looked all the same in the dark.

Coughing and spluttering for a half-decent breath seemed arbitrary by now, as the edges of her vision blurred and clouded in dark.


“Forget her,” One of the thugs called out as Cassie scrambled away, delivering another stiff kick to the woman lying down at his feet, “She’s plenty roughed up already. Besides …”

He sank down, squatting next to Amber and waved a hand across her bloodied face. She struck out at thin air and he grinned with blood-stained teeth. “About time we put this bitch out of her misery.”

Amber tried to blink away the storm and the stars shooting across her vision, but all she could see were smudges of light and twisted shapes fighting for the last, narrowing tunnel of remaining consciousness. Something grey against the nighttime sky hovered overhead and she narrowed her eyes, turning her head just enough to paint the concrete red with a hacking splutter. Rainwater pooled around the edge of the leather and a worn tread resolved into view. A boot.

“Fuck …” She breathed, every syllable drawn out in barely enough oxygen to function and too much pain to think. “Fuck … You …”

“Nah,” The thug replied with a shake of his head. “No last words. Don’t want to hear them. What about you guys? You want to hear them?”

Her ears rang with the jeers of the rest of the men still standing, augmented by at least three powerful concussions working concurrently.

The boot filled what was left of her entire world, rose up and came down to end everything.

Amber heard it before she felt it - eyes squeezed shut in reflex - but it didn’t feel right. Disconnected; echoing. She was still somehow thinking about never having another thought again. That wasn’t right.

Then she heard another thud. Softer. Not rubber-against-concrete, but flesh and breaking bone followed by a cry cut short at the crescendo of agony. With a supreme effort, she forced her eyes open and let her head drop to the side nearest the violence.

Cassie drove the point of her elbow into the soft cartilage of a thug’s throat, folding it in on itself. As he staggered back, eyes widened in choking, gasping surprise, she collapsed backwards in perfect partnership with gravity and down to the concrete. Swinging a long leg in an irresistible arc, she took him off his feet even as he clutched and massaged and tried to compress a shattered voicebox back together with nothing more than his own hands.

No. Not Cassie. Amber tried to lift her head to get a better angle as she followed the fight, but her addled brain sat stewing in its own confusion against the back of her skull and everything threatened to spin into unconsciousness. She couldn’t even pick out a face; it just resolved into a formless, blank canvas. Like a mask painted in some poor facsimile of features. 

They surrounded her now, all three still left moving under their own power now the rest were out dreaming with the sun. The first swung hard without the necessary grace and she sidestepped, extending an arm around the back of his head as momentum carried him through and past. She clamped hard against his neck and threw her body in the opposite direction - generating a savage counter-torque which promptly broke blood vessels and fractured vertebrae. She landed inclined on the ground with her free arm bent at the elbow, he landed on his back with glassy eyes staring up at the storm.

The remaining pair faltered, exchanged a glance and nodded before moving in together. Unfortunately for the closest thug, his partner took a half-step less just as they closed the distance - deliberately, cowardly - and reduced their numerical advantage to nothing. He threw another hard punch straight-on but she was already inside his guard, batting the blow away with a forearm; levering it across his bicep and trapping the arm snug against her armpit.

He panicked, half-trapped, and desperately lashed out with his remaining fist until he was completely, absolutely trapped and held pinned in place. Without hesitation she drove her forehead in and down, exploding his nose. Again.

Again.

He went limp in her vice-grip. She drove her forehead down a fourth time and when she pulled free, intimate ropes of red linked them together. She let him collapse to the concrete and stepped over his ragdolled body. 

Amber watched this new stranger turn to face the last thug left standing. Gritting her teeth with effort, spilling more blood between them to drip in tracks down her chin, she thought she could finally see something resembling a face. A wide smile. Too wide. Stretched out and curved at the corners and filled with angled, sharp incisors that had no depth. As if they were somehow two-dimensional. Painted. The eyes were impossibly inset; buried deep and looking out …

But they were bright, and blue. And alive with the thrill.

Driven by adrenaline, he finally came at her fast - too fast. In his heart-pounding haste, he lost his footing on the rain-slicked concrete as he came in swinging and slipped. It took him a full second to readjust and turn and half that time again to react to the flat of her foot as it crashed against his jaw. Instinctively he doubled over to cradle his mouth and the stranger followed up with the meat of her thigh applied hard to the chest. Snaking her arms around to meet between his shoulder blades she abruptly dropped, crashing him sternum-first against an outstretched knee.

He wheezed, flailed and she held him tight and held him down. Shoulders trembling with effort, elbows bowing up and out, she forced his ribcage against her knee until it broke and pushed harder until it shattered. Offset at an angle, the thug’s head jerked up to lock eyes with Amber, teeth tumbling from a slack mouth on bloody curtains.

She held him tight and held him down until he stopped moving, and then for a little while longer. Tussling his rain and sweat-slicked hair with her fingers, she sent him spinning away to land on the concrete, broken face-down. Eventually, she stood and for another while tipped her face up towards the storm. Then, she turned and without a shred of urgency befitting the three bodies strewn around in the rain, made her way over to Amber and down to her knees.

A mask of bone-white looked down, bright blue eyes framed by smears and streaks of red.

“My beautiful Hurricane …” She said, and the words were thick. Accented. “Painted into tough times …”

She leaned down, pressing cold ceramic against Amber’s forehead in some parody of a kiss. “I’ve come to save you from yourself. Are you ready?”

Pulling away as violently as she might manage without throwing herself into the ground, Amber jerked back, spitting noisily into the night.

"Between you and me…" Amber's words came out strained and tinny, harshly metallic and stained in something darker than the blood she tried poorly to keep behind her lips. "Think I'd rather die."

Forcing herself further away from the proposed 'savior' in revulsion that bubbled up from the tattered remains of a soul, Amber managed slowly, agonisingly slowly, to get to her knees. Rain washed over her hunched frame in a torrent of swirling red that pooled around her.

"Suppose that's all you ever really wanted. Right?!"

She couldn't contain the laughter, even as it jarred every bone not already displaced. Haunting and empty from a smile painted as heavy as a hurricane in its last throes, head lolling as though hanging by an unseen thread between them. Maybe she should have suspected better, maybe she wished she hadn't. All that seemed to exist was broken laughter and clouded eyes.

"My throat. Your hands. Simple really..."

Stop caring so much. Laugh more.

Foolproof.

"My sweet Amber …"

Amber lifted her heavy, spinning head, allowing the wash of water to briefly soothe the pains shooting through her skull as it ran down the back of her neck. Everything seemed a little fuzzy on the edges, yet somehow the familiar stranger seemed far more defined. If only out of spite.

"I'm sorry this lesson must be so painful ... But you're a difficult pupil …"

A smaller chuckle this time as Amber forced herself up to a single, trembling knee.

"Or maybe - you probably haven't thought about this - you're just a shitty teacher."

The fist came in like a freight train, rocking her sideways as the swirling lights returned like she'd somehow stumbled out into the middle of a busy highway. Still, somehow, Amber forced herself back up, concussion amplifying every sensation and yet dulling anything important.

"When will you accept my intentions ..."

Another punch. This one the redhead never saw coming, even though they were barely feet apart. Creeping darkness seemed to crawl across her vision as the rain faded into the background, she couldn't even feel it on her skin  now … A cold comfort in the face of impending nothingness, lost.

" ... Come from a place of love?"

Love. Was that what she called it all those years ago? Same place and different time. Amber wasn't the most familiar with what love was supposed to be, but she knew it wasn't this … Violence calling itself salvation and love letters written in blood left to flood the gutters with whatever meaning they had left.

Strangers didn't offer love, in the same way lovers didn't offer salvation.

Amber knew the person in front of her could offer neither, but the rest of her defiance was steadily dripping onto the concrete. If this was supposed to be the end of anything then let it be known that it wasn't without absolute and total defiance.

"You must have me mistaken for another flower girl."

Springing forth with everything she had left to give, Amber wasn't sure what she was hoping to achieve, maybe to catch the malicious saviour unawares or off-balance. That somehow, she'd be found with blood under her fingernails and the mask that had tormented her years ago torn away in her hands. That’d be some way to go down.

Legs unsteady, Amber knew before she ever hit her mark that she wouldn't have nearly enough behind her to do more than simply cause a stumble. An inconvenience, like an errant splash of water over freshly-polished shoes.

It was something. It was better than simply accepting.

Being compliant.

After everything...

No. Fuck that.

Scrambling, Amber tried to grasp for anything that might keep her semi-upright. The slope of a shoulder. The curve of a waist. The edge of a masque.

Everything happened in slow motion to the eye, but quicker than the brain could process. An elbow caught her square in the temple like a bloody neon bullseye had been painted right across it.

Spinning off like she'd been blasted by a shotgun at point blank, the darkness finally claimed the redhead long before she ever found the concrete again. If it wasn't so inevitable, it would have been incredibly sad in spite of the laughter’s echo that seemed to fade into the storm.

Masque stooped down into the runoff, reaching out to run gloved fingers against the side of Amber’s face. She softly traced the path of swollen welts and weeping cuts, dancing between each wound, before gently cupping a cheek in her hand. 

Her hand continued down, skirting Amber’s tender jaw until it settled around her throat. She squeezed.

“Now …” Masque said, tightening her grip incrementally, “I think you’re ready to learn.”

Without warning, she brutally forced Amber’s head upwards off the concrete and brought the other woman’s grimacing face level with hers. The Redhead wheezed, struggling to stay semi-conscious in the choking grasp.

“If you listen; if you study hard in my lessons and apply what I teach you … I’ll tell you where he is.”

Something primordial, bestial, ignited in Amber and she strained upwards, bloodied teeth bared. With a tensed arm Masque held her at bay, straining, snarling, and squeezed tight. Her rage, powered by the same fuel as the body it inhabited and with both now starved of air, snuffed out. Amber’s eyes rolled back and finally, mercifully, the darkness took her again and this time, kept her.

Cradling the back of the unconscious woman’s head protectively as she lowered it back down, Masque took a second to wipe a streak of blood from Amber’s lips, before sweeping her up in her arms.

“Welcome to Wonderland,” She said to the storm and the Painted Hurricane.