The Case of the Girl with the Broken-Glass Heart

Part I

Mercy General Hospital
Seattle, Washington, USA
14th October 2014

Air shouldn’t sound different depending on who’s taking it deep into their lungs. Just a bunch of oxygen molecules spinning through the ether, bumping into each other every day or a pair of nitrogen atoms every other; maybe on some special occasion, a trace noble gas. The rest of the world whirls and spins and in those quieter moments, just turns for a spell but air is just that. Just is.

Shouldn’t sound different depending on who, or what. But it does.

The ventilator takes another long, stuttering breath on her behalf and pauses at the apex. Like some newborn that abruptly stops and holds it just long enough to make your head whip towards the baby monitor and jerk up from the mattress, it waits until I look over and then finally exhales with a rattle of its stretched plastic diaphragm. The stink of metal, antiseptics and rubber blow out from the rear baffle and swirl the other smells all around the cramped room. Things that really stink, and something that I know can’t really get by on a smell, but lights up the brain all the same.

Death.

The science behind the machine that labours on behalf of the birdcage-like chest of my wife is simple enough. It does the same job her lungs are too atrophied, pulped and swollen to do and yet in their rush to make it work as well as its biological facsimile could, or should, the boffins that put this ventilator together didn’t pay so much attention to what it sounds like as it worked.

Here was something that perfectly replicated the most essential and natural thing for anything that lived – to breathe – and made it sound as unnatural as (in)humanly possible. Long days spent listening had given me plenty of opportunity to think on what was missing. At first I’d settled on feeling, coming to think that maybe it was the fact the machine didn’t ever change its cyclical draw. Real people pant when they’re angry or upset, or their breath slips away to something gentle and soft when they let their eyes roll closed and forget about that whirling world they’re struggling to keep steady footing on. This thing never gets excited, or worried. Or anxious. Or relaxed. It just keeps going.

But that wasn’t it. Turns out, after those long days became long weeks by her bedside, I’d only been half right. It wasn’t feeling the ventilator couldn’t give me over and above what it was giving Annabelle – it was one in particular.

It didn’t replicate the feeling of fighting for your life.

The ventilator didn’t gasp. It didn’t gurgle or cough or hack or wheeze or gag. It didn’t stop doing its job and leave you wide-eyed and scarlet-red flushed, flailing and lashing in autonomic desperation. That was it. This thing underplayed the agony and the deterioration that made it needed in the first place.

It takes another plastic breath on her behalf and breathes out its own chemical excess. This machine doesn’t care about what led to what was left of the woman in the bed needing a proxy. Her whole struggle was marginalized and ignored in favour of just doing the job it was designed so incompletely to do.

The bitter chuckle rolls out from between my dry lips before I can stop it. Struggle? Sounds like some Made-for-TV metaphor for what’s really going on here.

Her long, drawn-out death.

Thoughts of TV and the silver screen quickly kill my chuckle, in much less time than what I’m being made to watch play out will. The ease at which my mind conjures up these brutal comparisons doesn’t jar my sensibilities in the same way each ventilated rasp needles at my patience.

TV and Film have painted a lot of inaccuracies in their long course of distorting the truth pursuing a good story, or at least one you’ll either pay to watch or sit through the adverts between. Most egregious of which is their home-brewed idea of what was going to happen in the bed next to me.

Folk with terminal illness don’t become oracles in their last few weeks. No veil of peace descends over their worldy concerns, rendering their counsel sage and all things to all people. Like some key making a cosmic lock open with a god-given, angel-heralded click and suddenly the meaning of life is something they can just reach in, pull out and understand. That golden plate or whatever that magic box contains doesn’t explain their place in all of it, doesn’t hold some rationale for why they’ve got to shuffle off the mortal coil a few thousand turns of this rock early.

Their last few weeks are filled with all the same kind of fear, uncertainty and confusion that makes each and every one of us hollow. Only difference is they’re out of time to try to figure it all out – and that just makes the whole sorry thing that much more fearful, uncertain and confusing.

Forget about weeks too. The Doctors are almost always wrong. They stick to conservative estimates, that way you can only ever be grateful for more time, not angry there was less … But the fact is life wants to live, and give it a slither of an opportunity to last one more day with the full array of wonder of medical science, and you better believe it will. Forget weeks; they last for months. Longer sometimes.

And every day that lasts one more than expected makes them wish it hadn’t. Depends on what put them there, but in the end it doesn’t matter. It eats them from the inside-out or makes them too weak to take a single breath. Both, if your luck is flat-out like their limp palms, turned up towards the fluorescent lamps in false ceiling spaces above.

Annabelle’s heart swelled up to the size of some under-inflated basketball; straining at her ribs as it struggled to beat in one cohesive thump until eventually, it could hardly manage that. Drugs that made her bleed from her eyes, implanted electrodes that turned her whole chest angry and blotched – all to convince the thing to struggle on while her lungs dried out and gave up their work to the incessant click-gasp of the ventilator still wheezing away in the background.

They don’t just sit in their beds, waiting to die either. Mind withers along with the body and before you know it, you’re watching your wife ask who you are, or talking about careers they’ve never had or friends they’ve never known. Sometimes she used to just try to get up, even when they intubated her and when that wasn’t enough, strapped her down with black cuffs shackled to the stainless-steel sidings of the gurney. She still tried.

They don’t tell you to get ready for the sight and sound of your terminally ill significant other telling you she wishes you’d just fuck off. Or worse.

Don’t tell you to prepare for for the way it makes you feel to hear them beg for you to reach over and squeeze that tube shut tight until they stop flailing. Until the electronic wail and warble of alarming machines cuts out at the same time their breathing does.

But then, they don’t tell you anything.

So I just wait, listening to the staccato gasp of the ventilator as it breathes for her.

Wait for her body – wait for her – to give up and the truth that makes me sick to my stomach, worse than any amount of lukewarm vending machine-finest instant coffee can manage, is that I wish she would. Put us both out of this miserable half-existence. The worst thing isn’t watching her die …

… It’s wishing she would.

A Sunny Afternoon, with tea for Two.

The breeze rustles rose bushes topped with bright pink blooms; petals curling as their heavy heads sway on angled, thorny stalks. Birds flit between them, setting entire rows bowing in motion with a sinusoidal wave.

Sat at one of two iron-wrought chairs painted brilliant, glacial white, interspersed by a spiral-framed table topped by silver serving plates and delectables, the lithe form of SCW’s World Bombshells’ Champion extends out a prosthetic hand and lifts a scalding, bare-metal teapot into the air.

That same breeze rustles the fabric of her bright yellow sundress, making it billow and twist. She purses her lips, visible via the cutout of the red-dipped mask strapped to her face. The ceramic composite skirts a wide detour around the top of her mouth and chin, leaving pale skin exposed.

“Good Afternoon, Doctor Baal.”

Gabriel approached with due care and attention - he dare not rush and seem too keen, nor did he wish to linger and appear unsure. The speed with which he approached was of utmost importance. This was, after all, a game of chess, without a board.

“Good afternoon, Doctor DeLune.” He said with a nod and a smile as he reached the table. “Thank you so much for having me.”

Bright blue eyes tip up to regard her guest, teapot still held aloft. Thick ribbons of steam, from heated plastic fashioned into facsimiles of fingers, waft up into the warm air.

She returned his smile, gesturing with her only flesh-and-blood hand, palm upward towards the chair opposite. “Thank you for finding time to accept. We are all so busy, nowadays. It is important not to spend all of it such that you forget that life exists to live. Would you not agree?”

“Quite.” said Gabriel as he unfastened the jacket of his dark grey suit. He pulled back the chair and sat down, his eyes watching the tendrils of vapor wasting into the air. He adjusted his position, before continuing. “Especially since I'm about to become a father for the first time. I do that a lot, these days. It’s like my goal is to tell people that particular fact as appually as humanly possible. ‘Hello, my name is Gabriel Baal and I'm about to become a father’. As a psychiatrist, I could read an awful lot into that. But one tends not to dwell on the mysteries of one's own psyche. Especially with so much life to live.”

He smiled on the final words, a hint of mimicry. He glanced at the setting on the table, taking in the effort and attention to detail, before lifting his eyes to look upon his host.

“The complexities of the mind were too much for me,” Masque says after a while, letting the spout of the teapot dip to begin to fill the cup in front of Gabriel. “I found the simplicity of the body much more understandable. The heart, specifically …”

She set the pot down and pushed a small decanter forward. “ … Cardiology, specifically. Milk?”

“No, thank you.” Gabriel said with a smile.

Her gaze wanders down towards the rose bushes lining either side. “I shall miss these,” Masque adds, gently cupping a nearby flowerhead with a hard, plastic hand. “This is a peaceful place. Does this say something for my desire to be secluded? By being contemplative, is this evidence of my longing for solitude and a lasting peace?”

She stirs the cup in front of her. “In your professional opinion, of course.”

“Perhaps.” Said Gabriel, musing. “Or perhaps what you yearn for is a self-imposed exile. Subconsciously you may be wishing to, as those with religious faith would put it, pay for your sins. The truth is likely something altogether different. That's the nature of my profession - so often patients look to me to set them on a particular path. The right path. They aren't looking to be fixed, so much as they're looking for someone to fix their life and tell them which road to follow. That way, should that path be wrong, they have someone else to blame but themselves. They wish for me to absolve them of whatever guilt they have for the choices they've made.”

Gabriel lifted the tea to his lips and took a sip.

“Wonderful.” he said quietly, before placing it back upon its saucer. “I suspect you're an exception that proves the rule. I don't imagine you wish for me to absolve you of anything - and if I were to play my part, I would be surprised if it was guilt that you were looking to assuage.”

“Guilt is a reflex made from one’s ingrained moral system,” She replied. “Or, perhaps, Society’s. Your reputation is well-deserved, because you are correct. I have no guilt to cool or damp down; that would imply that I am anywhere other than where I should be. None of the choices I have made could have been made any other way. There is no road to walk down, with junctions offering hypotheticals and could-have-beens. The path is not laid out for us, but the journey is always the same. The destination is fixed.”

She lifts her own cup up, and sips. “This will all end in tragedy, of course. But the certainty is comforting.”

The breeze grows in strength, whipping at the folds of her sundress such that the apex of a line of scar tissue reveals itself. It runs from just below the nape of her neck to disappear in a line so true, it bisects her upper body neatly into symmetrical halves.

“The physical reality was disproved centuries ago, but tell me, Doctor Baal – why do you think we put so much stock into the heart and its role in our emotional wellbeing?”

“Life.” Said Gabriel simply, taking another sip from his tea. “The concept of the soul is one that many find comforting, whether it be spiritually or religiously. The idea of who we are manifesting itself in the tangible rather than the unanswered question. Science has taught us the why of who we are, but not the what. The brain, the logic centre. The heart for emotion. I believe humanity separated the two because the idea that the computer which powers our logical thought could also produce emotion is too limiting for most.”

Gabriel pondered the question further as he looked out across the magnificent vista. It reminded him of his own rose bushes back in Scarsdale. It reminded him of the solitude of their home in the Maldives.

“Physiologically, our bodies have fooled us too. When we feel joy, happiness, love - those feelings aren’t in our mind. They’re from our core. We feel warm, a quickened pulse, something akin to a glow. But the truth of the matter is that those feelings are merely representations of the change in the functions of our bodies. Joy, happiness, love - they raise our temperature. They increase the rate of our heart. We feel that flush, and those flutterings and mistake them for something more than functions. We ignore the fact that those same sensations come from danger as well. Adrenaline has a lot to answer for. Every single physical reaction to emotion is felt in the centre of our bodies. Nearest the heart. It is nature’s greatest trick.” Said Gabriel as he cast a look at the scar recently revealed. “It's the greatest lie.”

He paused for a moment, taking another drink from his cup. He allowed himself a slight smirk.

Lips pursed as he talks, Masque finds herself nodding. “Emotions are simply chemical reactions occurring at the cellular level. It is our consciousness, our sentience – and the subjective reasoning therein we apply in our analysis of those chemical reactions – that lend them meaning. Even the most wonderful, the most intense of those feelings are the interaction of various neuropeptides and enzymes. Nothing more.”

She shifts in her seat, crossing one long leg over the other. “It is fascinating that we ourselves are moved to make decisions, take actions, on the prompting of or in reaction to these make-believe, so-called feelings; giving them justification to exist instead of simply existing without explanation. A positive feedback loop of cognitive reinforcement …”

“But I defer to your field of expertise,” She adds with another smile.

“Is this why you invited me, Doctor?” He asked carefully. “To muse about the complexities of the human condition? Or is there some… Other reason for this pleasant meeting?”

The tall woman offers a slight shrug. “I enjoy our musings – so few nowadays seem to be interested in talking about why, instead of when or how. In terms of our meeting? It was necessary to allow me to amend my mathematical proof.”

The plastic fingers of her prosthetic uncurled as she took another sip, lingering over the cup to let the soft curl of steam billow up against the exposed skin of her chin.

“I have spent so very long cultivating an equation to define a hurricane. Its strength, direction … All coefficients and values painstakingly categorised and understood to understand and ultimately control, to some extent, its behaviour. Its moods. Better to be able to control such a phenomenon or more usefully, dispel it.”

She cocks her head to the side. “Now, I am drinking tea with a new variable I had not encountered before. One which upsets that equation. I cannot modify my theorem until I understand how this new input will affect the overall system. I must understand why you are involved here, now, Doctor, before I can evaluate how much of an interference this presents to my objective. Like understanding a potential new vector for a virus, so that my treatment plan might be made more effective in the wake of its evolution.”

“Ahhhhh of course.” Said Gabriel with the merest hint of a chuckle. “The unknown entity. You wonder, I assume, how my unexpected and - I suspect in your opinion - unwarranted appearance in this particular equation come to pass?

Gabriel didn't wait for the answer to come.

“It is interesting, I'll admit. Those who know me best would tell you that I am never without purpose. Measured in all things, no matter how much anarchy there appears to be. Rogan would likely suggest that my goal is knowledge. Ichabod would muse that I am in search of power. Eden, well, she would no doubt assume I'm missing the opportunity to play puppet master.”

“And which is it?”  She asks.

“All of them. None of them. I'm not entirely sure myself. All that is certain is that nothing is certain. The “what” here is chaos - and I have no way of knowing in which direction that particular wind will blow.” Gabriel said calmly placing one hand atop the other on his lap. “And the why? Well… That is every bit as complicated as those emotions we spoke of earlier.”

Masque glances up towards the wisp of cloud drifting across a blanket-blue sky. “How wonderfully vague. Unexpected? Yes. Unlike so many others around me, I am neither clairvoyant or prescient and I cannot predict the future, despite the obvious utility of such an ability. Unwarranted?”

“I am very used to interference,” She continued. “You would be surprised to know how many faces I have never seen interject in my affairs; to perturb my aims or, very occasionally, co-opt them.”

Absent-mindedly, Masque scratches underneath the soft rubber ring which sits between the base of her prosthetic hand and the truncated stump it bolts to. “I was visited by a Songbird, once, who tried to make me an extension of his will, because he thought all of this was a game.”

Another smile. “He found out, too late, that this is not a game. This is very, very real. I suspect you would not be quite so brazen …”

Gabriel’s lip curled.

“I’ve been called bold, but rarely brazen.” He said as he lifted his tea and drained the remainder from the cup. “The truth of the matter is that I have noticed you, much like I have noticed your hurricane. Both of you intrigue me, and intrigue is so often key to my relationships. I was intrigued by Ichabod and he became as close as a brother, but also a fierce adversary. I was intrigued by Rogan MacLean and he remains one of my most trusted friends, but was once a man with whom I shared abject disdain. I was intrigued by Eden Morgan. She and I once planned to destroy one another - now she is my wife and carries my child.”

Gabriel sat back after placing the cup back into its saucer.

“Eden has always mused that I like to keep those that can cause me most damage the closest. The question I am yet to answer, Doctor DeLune, is as to whether I should keep you or the Hurricane nearest to me.” He added as he picked a thread of cotton from the leg of his trousers. “But I look forward to finding out.”

She pushed the chair back, metal legs scraping against terracotta-shaded tiles as she stood. Stooping over at the waist, she tipped a cluster of roses up to meet her dipping chin and took a deep, sweet lungful of air – letting it run free to join the light breeze swirling around.

“I wonder, Doctor Baal, if you are not a catalyst? It sounds like you describe one with your previous interactions. A substance that accelerates a reaction which would otherwise progress much too slowly to be useful, but somehow avoids being used up in the process. Something untaintable, or at least … Not by its surrounding reactants.”

“Perhaps.” He said quietly, musing upon her analysis. “Though, I would suggest that given my immediate proximity to those whose lives I touch, I am incapable of remaining untouched. Eden is my wife. Ichabod something of a mentor. Rogan, my closest friend. I would argue that I am… Inescapably linked to those I often seek to destroy.”

He smiled.

“Often it is my best intentions that are the most damaging.” he added, looking away from her.

She cocks her head to the side, towards Gabriel and closes the distance until she circles back behind. Carefully, she plucks a single flower petal otherwise stuck to the fine fabric of his jacket via static with her all-too-human hand. She lets it flutter down to the tabletop.

“Unfortunately, I do not have much dexterity in my prosthetic,” She begins as the plastic fingers jerk open, almost spurred by the inference. “It seems to be capable of applying only the strongest, most crushing pressure. So I must temper it, leave myself at a disadvantage if finesse is required …”

Looking up at the sky, Masque comes back around to tableside. “If longevity factors into your choice as to who to keep close, I would suggest your decision lies with a hurricane.”

“I will not be here for very much longer,” She adds, blue eyes finding Gabriel’s gaze. He lingers, surveying her carefully. He leans forward, elbows on the edge of the table and fingers clasped. Inelegant it may have been, it served it’s purpose to bring them closer.

“Sometimes those that burn the brightest, burn out the fastest.” He said quietly. “I enjoy the abject destruction that this can bring with it. Your star is burning bright, Doctor DeLune. But then again… The most devastating Hurricanes can’t sustain their power forever. So the question is less about which will last the longest, and more about which greater power will keep my attention until their final moment.”

Gabriel tilted his head this time, his eyes focused on hers intently.

“I’ve heard rumors and stories, but I wish to know the truth from you… what is it about her?” He asked. “What is it you see?”

Perching on the edge of the table, she lets her bare feet swing freely. “So many things,” Masque begins, a smile again gracing her lips. “An opportunity for vengeance, against those who visited such cruelties on me. Such a powerful drug that we are all almost helpless to resist. Along the way, a chance to create something so incredibly powerful that none might stand in its wake – to unleash a living weapon free from the tiresome burden of morality, and ethical considerations. To strip away all the softness, eliminate those that would poison her with their warmth …”

The smile fades, something difficult to quantify ghosting across her visible features. “Love, I think.”

“I think I loved her, Doctor Baal,” She says with a nod, watching the swaying, bright-topped bushes. “I am not sure what love is, exactly – but I think I did.”

Masque looks over in his direction. “I think I am still in love with her. But then, so many are. The only difference between them, and me, is I have not lost focus. I have not folded to become just another sycophant or trusted lieutenant …”

Her blue eyes roll closed. “I have almost taken everything from her. Her title – the heart of a hurricane – and her health. I have taken years from her remaining career and have gifted her choice scars that will never heal. Almost everything. But not quite. She still holds on to her humanity. Her moral compass spins errantly, confused, but it is still attached. Still intact.”

“I believe Miss Ryan will end me,” She says with a nod. “But it will take everything she has and more. It will be a cost she can never repay. For all her champions and supporters, and there are so many for such a lone figure and independent power, it will be only myself. And her.”

“We are destined to do this forever … But perhaps forever is not such a long time.”

Gabriel mused for a moment. Chewing on his next words carefully - so often he was a man of prose and poise. Spending time to deliver monologues and fiendish word play. Today was no different. And yet…Now was the time to be succinct.

“Is your desire that Amber come for you?” He asked quietly. “For your story to end, however it is supposed to end?”

“Amber pursues me because she cannot accept having been made second-best,” Masque offered with another smile. “She has lost before; that is a matter of record. But she has never been defeated – comprehensively dismantled and left in pieces on a cold concrete floor … Until she crossed me. She has never known real loss, truthful, powerful, gut-churning emptiness, until she was bed-bound in a downtown Las Vegas hospital and sang into a medically-induced coma, by the soft electronic lullaby of the equipment clustered on trollies around her.”

She looks away, back up towards those blue skies and patchwork cloud. “Even now, she shouts my name in endless, thirsty calls for acknowledgement and opposition. Amber has returned knowing the only path to her salvation, up to and including her destruction, lies in overcoming everything I symbolise. But in her rush to make it to our anointed place of battle, my Resplendent Hurricane has not paused to ask the most important question of all …”

“What if I have outgrown her? What if I am no longer content to stand as an auxiliary? What if I do not want to be her resurrection? What if it is me who no longer needs her? My story will end all too soon … But perhaps I do not think she deserves to be the one to do it.”

“Abigayle,” She adds, almost as an afterthought. “My name is Abigayle.”

“Abigayle.” Gabriel parroted with a satisfied smile. “Well, Abigayle. I suspect I have power to guide whether or not Amber is able to return. I have no plans to forestall her reappearance. In fact, if asked, I will aid her in making her return.”

Gabriel watched Abigayle for a reaction, but none came. She was the picture of tranquil contemplation.

“I wish to see first hand just how destructive the two of you can be. Bear witness to the cataclysm. The unbridled and unyielding chaos that surrounds the both of you.” Said Gabriel calmly.

She doesn’t look away from looking up above. “Are you conducting an experiment, Doctor? A cold, calculating assessment of the damage caused by two hypergolic reactants that need no external stimuli to ignite when they come together? Will you dispassionately note the results and record them for mere scientific curiosity?”

“ … Or will you enjoy the spectacle?” Masque adds, reaching over for a cooling cup and bringing it up to her lips. “Is this less analytical, and more artful? A show to be enjoyed rather than a sterile evaluation?”

Taking a sip, she purses her lips. “There are so many people with so many games afoot. Sometimes I forget which ones I am taking part in – willingly or not so.”

Masque sets the cup down on the tabletop. “Perhaps the true difference between myself and Miss Ryan is for all her bitterness and cynicism, she still believes she is the architect of her own downfall; free to make and continue to make those bad decisions which have come to be her hallmark. I, on the other hand, understand that we are all marionettes, with the only question being how long the strings which make us dance extend upwards.”

“The question remains… Who holds the control bar?” Gabriel mused with a smile. “This has been both delightful and illuminating, Abigayle.”

He watched a prosthetic hand extend out and met it with one of his own, turning it over to look more closely at the composite phalange underneath his overlaid thumb. “Thank you for your time, Doctor DeLune.”

She smiled again and nodded as he stood. “It has been so wonderful to meet you, Doctor Baal.”

And at that moment, both of them absolutely and utterly spoke the purest truth.

Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. XXIV – Fairytale of Las Vegas

[The Present – Las Vegas, Nevada, USA]


A pencil-thin patchwork of frost spreads out along the face of the guttering, standing prouder where it rides over scabs of orange corrosion that lift and break apart faded green paint. Around the outlet it thickens to make a collar of ice; lumpen and shifting from crystal clarity to murky, milky-white opaqueness. It mixes with the effluent and run-off and freezes in a fat, grotesque tongue that spills out onto rutted asphalt.

Steam rises in thick gouts, billowing up from iron gratings sunk into concrete rings between the high-rises. They collect in on themselves rivulets of black and poisoned water, melted from clumps of ice that hang against guttering, fire escapes, corner buttresses and anything exposed to the chill night air. Shapes loiter in the stinking, man-made mist, becoming distinct as they step through and swing a fist.

The first blow cracks the composite over my face, but the mask holds its shape enough to turn a guaranteed haymaker into something more like a mere incredible pressure, brought to bear against my temple. Hard. Physics forces me to take a step back and in that moment, something heavy and rubberised lashes out against the inside of my knee. It folds, forcing me down to the soaking wet concrete. A hand – my only real one – thrown out to break my fall breaks at the wrist. That same boot, recognisable as it fills my vision, sweeps up and catches me flat on the bridge of where my nose would be; at least if it were exposed to the December evening watching this assault unfold with only the cool and full Moon for company.

I know there are only two of them, because one looms above – face all but hidden by the clouds of breath spilling from sneering lips – while another uses the flat of that trusty shoe to force me down onto my side. The fabric of my dress turns grey with black water, shiny under star and streetlight and clinging to my warm skin underneath. My forearm drags across the uneven ground, sharp spurs of hard stone cutting and cutting into soft flesh and making it bleed.

The broken halves of my mask swing on inertia, limply and courtesy of their fabric strapping around the back of my head, like the static and hanging jaws of a Basking Shark. I try to snare them with specific agony I prefer to focus on, roughly throwing the shattered pieces clear with the curled fingers of my prosthetic and leaving my face exposed to the cold for the first time.

Something warm trickles underneath my nostril and tickles. It tastes like iron.

“Huh …” One of them grunts, and between breaths I catch sight of his face. Stubbled, shaved smooth across a scarred scalp, on top of a thickset neck once powerful but turning to fat. “Thought it’d be all cut up or something …”

The owner of the steel-plated boots behind me is less interested. “Let’s hurry it up.”

“Why’s it covered?”

I sink further into the wet concrete, because it serves my purpose not to stir and invite an opportunity to stay down here for longer than is otherwise necessary. Longer than it takes for the pain in my side and inside my skull to subside. With practised, disciplined focus, I slow my otherwise ragged breathing and turn his curiosity into the weapon I will soon use to put him down here, where I am now.

“Kev–”

“Don’t use my real name, you fucking idiot!” The one up above interrupts, his introspection cut short by the slip. His upturned chin and scowl eventually filter back down towards me, once again the focus of his attention and I meet his gaze with mine.

“Huh …” He grunts, again, lacking anything more eloquent. “You’re pretty easy on the eyes. At least right now, before we get done with you. Expected it’d look like you took your car to the crusher and forgot to get out.”

Subtly I climb up onto the points of pained elbows, pulling my prosthetic in underneath my aching chest. He leans down, chipped teeth bared in a dirty, nicotine-stained sneer. “What? Can’t talk? No tongue behind those pearly whites? Is that it?”

A thick slab of a hand reaches out and takes a handful of my hair, roughly forcing my head up to compress the topmost vertebrae in my spine. The distance between us closes imperceptibly as he studies my face, looking for some evidence of why he’s been asked to come here and do this.

He frowns, spreading a tuft of my hair with his spare fingers to reveal the curve of a gnarled scar. “Get dropped on your head as a–”

His last words are swallowed up by his jaw forced shut and broken under the force of my plastic fist, driven up in an irresistible arc. Teeth splinter and skin splits and red splashes across composite phalanges.

Rolling onto my back, I throw my leg in a circle that meets and then sweeps his partner off his feet even as he steps forward, instinctually. Inertia brings my thigh around and letting it pass under my opposite ankle gives me the momentum to push up to standing in a single, fluid movement. Trying to minimise the scope of the inevitable, expensive dental implants required by holding the remains of his mouth in place with a slick palm, the thug ahead lashes out but his other balled fist sails easily over the space previously occupied by my face. A face now significantly easier on the eye than his.

As a matter of convenience over grace, I turn on the spot and drive the flat of my boot against the skull of the one trying to scramble up from the rutted floor. Something breaks with a wet whip crack and he slumps and never gets back up.

Stepping forward, I gently cradle a gushing face in between my hands and drive up my knee to break the nose above a broken mouth. Something trapped halfway between a scream and a whimper tumbles out between slack lips, jagged pieces of dentin and enamel tinkling against the pools of black water below and making them ripple and shiver.

“Cannot talk?” I ask, methodically taking one step for every one he does backwards, until a brick wall bisected with thick power cables and washed grey by storm run-off makes it impossible to go any further.

There is a particular limit to the force one can apply in their grip as a function of pressure over area, and this is dictated by the strength of the musculature and tendons of the hand. Where the muscles are replaced by miniaturised servomotors, and the tendons by titanium alloy rods, the limit is an order of magnitude greater and as the composite fingers of my prosthetic close around his neck, bubbles froth in blood squeezed clear from a shattered mouth.

“Who?”

He struggles but metal beats meat and the pressure crushing his throat is agonising and irresistible. “ … I … Please …”

But my supply of mercy is exhausted, tonight. And so I squeeze.

“ … Field …” He rasps, the syllables dry vowels scraping against swelling gums. I release my grip incrementally; only sufficiently to unstick his fat tongue from the roof of his mouth but not so much as to give him the euphoric high of emptying his trembling lungs of their poisoned chestful of carbon dioxide.

“Fexxfield …”

I let him struggle on the tightrope between conscious thought and oblivion for a little longer, because I am angry. Not at the identity of their mysterious silent partner or client – that much was obvious, all along. Nor at them, because they are employing what little aptitude they possess in the field most suited to their mediocre talents.

No, I am angry at myself. For being distracted by something I perceived to be of greater consideration. To have been so focused on the horizon that I did not pay sufficient attention to the path immediately in front of me. To have obsessed over the future to such a degree that all thoughts of the present were consigned to the past.

The plastic fingers of my prosthetic leave deep pink impressions of their shape in the trembling putty-like skin of his neck, as he slumps down to the frosted ground with a soft thud. His partner has yet to stir from the place where he unknowingly nurses a fractured skull.

Turning back towards the streetlights lining the way ahead, I scoop up the shattered pieces of the mask broken free of my face and turn the parts over in a palm.

Up above, the rain turns to snow. It is time to pay a visit to a threat closer to home.

[The Rapture]


Despite having made somewhat of a lynchpin of a career in denigrating those who arrive at opportunities by any other means but honest and earned, it seems my Resplendent Hurricane has done precisely that in somehow obtaining a match against me at High Stakes. For the Bombshells’ World Championship, no less.

It has been seven long years since our paths first crossed, since she made a choice that at the time had appeared cold, cool and calculating but with the benefit of hindsight, now seems a result only of her superficial lust for glory and kudos. Almost a decade in which she has turned indifference and apathy into an artform, while holding that most precious of works close to her chest in the form of a title she would have – and did – trade her heart for.

Oh, how we have worked a twisted path with each other. Together. How I enjoyed all of the things we accomplished, and when it came time for our partnership to end, how I was thrilled to be the one to put her in a hospital bed for six weeks and intense, agonising physical therapy for months more. These are memories I cherish and ones I cannot easily forget.

So imagine the tumultuous feeling churned up in the pit of my gut and the far reaches of my mind to know that so very soon, I will have the opportunity to do so again. It is an intense feeling, bordering on the intoxicating, to imagine a world in which Amber Ryan is knocked not only from the summit of the mountain she believes built by her callused hands, but also left in the deepest ravine to freeze to death in day-glow windbreakers and waterproof boots. To become a goretex tombstone to any and all who would venture past on their way to replicate her glories.

So imagine, then, how very easy it would be for me to look past you, Melissa, at such a tantalising opportunity to gift such wonderful violence. Consider for a moment, the potential pitfalls of paying such close attention to the blade plunging for my chest that I am instead nicked in the neck and left to bleed from artery or vein until I am on my knees, slipping in my own surprise and blindness.

Such an ignominious end, that is not in keeping with the beautiful story I am attempting to bring to a suitable, thrilling close.

It is important for you to understand that far from being an afterthought, Melissa, I consider you integral to everything that comes next. After all, there can be no greater opportunity for me to demonstrate my credentials, given they appear to be in near-universal doubt despite my accomplishments. All because a hurricane has chosen now to begin to turn again, and in response, we should lock ourselves in safe places and wait out a storm that has deigned to return and take what no longer belongs to them. What it has sacrificed the right to claim as their heart and soul.

Ahead of High Stakes, you are an opportunity to serve as a reminder. A warning. A stark reality for the delusion which is sweeping through this company, perhaps born from desperation as the division singularly runs out of heroes and instead turns to lambs and children to do what wolves and warriors could not.

You are so important to me.

Last week, Amber Ryan showed her disdain for Miss Angelos in every facet of their interaction. The dismissiveness and arrogance, unfounded and illegitimate considering the former only recently regained the ability to visit the toilet unaided and yet chose not to pursue the Roulette Championship because it did not concern her – as if any true predator could resist the iron-stink of red meat for the promise of something more discerning at some other time. Selective starvation is as absurd for so-called top-tier athletes as it is for apex predators.

I will not be so dismissive or disrespectful, because through you I have the chance to send such a powerful message. That despite the hyperbole and bluster, I am the most dominant force this company has seen regardless of gender or division. I am not a shadow waiting for the light of the sun in just the right position to be given purpose, and I am no placeholder for another record-breaking Amber Ryan run.

You are so special.

Together, we can trade such beautiful miseries with each other and such exquisite agonies that there will still be time for you to learn from the lessons I will inflict upon you and return wiser, more prepared. I do not consider this so trite and condescending as a warm-up bout for something greater. No … Through you, I will achieve something greater.

You will help me prove what has already been established beyond any reasonable doubt or argument. Empirically, we will demonstrate what is already whispered in hushed tones between catering tables and behind the locked doors of locker rooms in arenas throughout every city turned iron underbelly that hosts our carefully-orchestrated violence.

I am the heart of this company, and it turns like a stage set upon the world with me at its centre.

[The Present – Las Vegas, Nevada, USA]


“Took you longer than I thought it would,” He mutters, facing away from me and towards the expansive window caked in effluent, traffic smog, rain and birdshit. The cracked glass is all but opaque, with only the barest silhouette of the cityscape of Atlantic City distinguishable through smeared grey haze.

I step over the threshold of the open door that had once read FEXXFIELD INVESTIGATIONS, but now leant up against the wall; broken free of its hinges and bent in the middle. Bent by the sole of my boot all those months before, when I had disturbed the previous – illegal – tenants with my Resplendent Hurricane by my side. But those were different times.

Happier times.

“I hoped you would finally learn the lesson I have spent so much of my time trying to teach you,” I reply, and when he glances up to see the reflection of my bare face, sans mask in the mirror ahead, he immediately looks away. “ … But just like her, you are a difficult pupil.”

HIs voice sounds sluggish, no doubt made blurry by the half-empty glass squeezed between his fingers by its sticky neck. “Never thought we were much alike.”

“More than you know – but unfortunately there is no time left for you, or Miss Ryan, to find out how much.”

The floorboards creak under my heels, damp wood bowing with my weight. “I do not understand why you told them.”

The half-hidden reflection in the mirror shows something that might be a frown. He still does not look up.

“Your name,” I clarify. “Why did you tell them your name?”

Something that might have been a laugh, but dry and bitter and paper-thin is my only response for several long moments. When he eventually speaks, it is between long and desperate gulps from the almost-empty bottle in his hands. “Felt like I needed to be honest, if I was going to give you something I could never get back.”

The floorboards groan until I come to a stop directly behind him and I can feel his shoulders tense; back arch ramrod-straight. Closer to the shit-stained window his reflection is that much clearer and in it, I can see his nostrils flare as my perfume wafts past and replaces the smell of wet paper and wood rot with something floral and bright.

“What is it you think you have given me?”

“Self-respect,” He shrugs. “Moral compass. Integrity. Can’t think of a word that captures it all that accurately, but it doesn’t matter. You got it when I sent those ten-dollar chumps in the hopes they might just make you disappear.”

The shattered halves of my mask clatter against the floor in front of him as they spin free of my prosthetic. He jerks back and against me and the feel of my body sends his sense of balance out of kilter and out of tolerance. He overcorrects and falls forwards onto his hands and knees, bottle sent spinning away to slosh out the last of its gold-hued firewater and darken patches of rat droppings that make polka-dot patterns.

“Almost,” I admit, and that is more difficult to say aloud than I had anticipated. “I was somewhat distracted, with the news this will all soon come to an end. The stakes–”

“Couldn’t be higher,” He finishes quietly, forlornly. “Didn’t have your blue eyes on what was right in front of you. Almost tripped for your focus on where you were going and not what you were doing.”

I nod. “Precisely. Almost.”

The plastic forefinger of my prosthetic traces a pattern down his temple and cups the edge of his cheek. He flinches.

“Hope Melissa gives you hell,” Fexxfield mutters. Outside, the snow gentle snowfall becomes a flurry.

My prosthetic rounds to cup his chin, finally forcing his eyes to meet mine. “Oh, my darling,” I reply, my voice taking on the lilt and tone of a woman dead for almost ten years. A voice that makes the so-called gumshoe squeeze his eyes shut. “That will not help you now.”

[The Rapture]


I have sat in such dignified silence, for so long, but my patience wears thin enough to see my frustrations roiling underneath.

In almost a year, I have established credentials that usurped every pretender to equality of achievement; whether through volume of competition or quality in dispatching opposition regardless of their vaunted reputation or legacy. Records – such as they were – cast aside and reforged, remade in my image and left in my wake for others to regard with the tacit realisation they are incapable of matching, let alone exceeding them. All of this in silence, without endless, tedious self-adulation and congratulation.

They worshipped their own mediocrity, revelled in it, and I stayed silent.

For weeks becoming months, I was forced to listen to their averageness trumpeted as some incredible feat. The names blur into a spectrum of failure: Kaijus, Salcos, Bentons, Zdunich A, Zdunich B and every other permutation; Johnsons and Wolfes …

I listened to them champion their blinkered world views and list all the flawed reasons as to why they were untouchable, or at the very least, unafraid. Each and every one of them came to know the error of their ways, delivered by my thorn-painted hand. Each and every one personally reeducated as to the depths of their failure, and made to realise that relentless talk cannot overpower simple, clinical demonstration.

Practical defeats theory in every permutation.

Even as World Bombshells’ Champion, I am forced to listen to their inane, pratling, bleating threats made of cardboard and paper-thin with supporting hopes of making anything approaching a change to their circumstances. The only difference in months of toil is that such bleating rings out in corridors I do not walk down, or spaces I do not pass through, because the heart trimmed in gold plate and precious stones I carry is too bright to look at and question. Instead, they gather in the dark where that light does not shine and mewl for someone – anyone – to make it stop.

But there is not one of them capable of doing so, and that is why, Melissa, you find yourself in this situation. Because there is only one other person who has yet to to be allowed to fail in an official capacity, and she is to be rewarded with that opportunity to do so at High Stakes. Because Amber Ryan is marketable; because Amber Ryan is popular. Because she is all of those things, and you are not.

That is why you have been relegated to the status of tribute act and warm-up. A means to display the two-dimensional villain I have been drafted to play, as all the stage of that world is dressed to prepare for a hurricane’s re-coronation.

But it does not have to be that way. You do not have to play the role so cruelly and callously assigned to you.

After all, what if you are able to do what no-one – not even yourself, most truthfully – believes you are capable of and defeat the reigning World Bombshells’ Champion? What opportunities might germinate; chances for glory, power and prestige that slowly unfurl and reach up towards a corporate sun that might be inclined to shine upon you more favourably, if you can establish yourself deserving. What if centre stage was yours at some prime time, rather than to a half-empty floor bisected by queues for the concession stands?

Is it too much to expect to be given a chance to succeed?

Unlike Miss Angelos last week, I will give you such special attention. It is within my power to show you that dedication, and I will make it yours. Not because I desire some grandiose display of intent prior to High Stakes, after all, how can I deliver any greater example than the shattering of a hurricane courtesy of the tyre iron held in my thorn-painted hand? I have nothing left to prove in that regard, and so it is only right that we focus our efforts together. Grant for you the right to hold the audience in rapt attention.

In rapturous aplomb.

How they will enjoy watching us together, and while you will remember little of it, I promise it will be spectacular. There is no reason for you to be relegated to some meaningless footnote on a page written for those who have self-authored entire books and volumes. This Sunday, on Climax Control, we have a unique opportunity to focus our attention collectively. To forget those with agendas to disseminate and axes to grind on the whetstone of failed dreams and frustrated legacies.

Melissa, I promise you my entire world because you deserve to see it in all its glory and wonder before yours is subsumed within. It has been so very long since I last welcomed anyone into the Rapture; since my grand design began to free-spin and glide on its own cognition and feelings and decisions. Now it has been set free to deliver us all, it is time to remember that there are always improvements to be made. Adjustments. Enhancements.

I think you offer something of value, and I would very much like to add your distinctiveness to it. I regret only that you will almost certainly resist and in helping you to realise that better way, you will likely be irrevocably harmed and hurt by that help.

Still, you will be centre stage. You will be the focus of my attention. Is that not a fair trade?

You should not view yourself through the lens that they do – that of a Queenpin Proxy; a draftee in the Army of a Painted Hurricane press ganged into some initial, frontal assault to test the enemy defences. Instead, accept a new fate; one of being given the opportunity to try and in that, be absolved of the inevitable failure that follows.

My name is Abigayle. Does that help to humanise me? Give you power and influence over me? Miss Ryan knew my name, and it did not make her shoulder any harder to shatter. You may use it if you think it will help, but it will not.

Would it make you feel better, less coincidental and relegated to insignificance, if I addressed her more directly? If I begged your indulgence for just a few moments to offer a simple and pointed statement of intent. Of fact. Of reality.

Hello, Amber. My name is Abigayle and I have no reason to run or to hide. I represent everything you have ever wanted and to realise it – to make it yours and finally banish the sins of so many lives’ past … All you have to do is come and find me. It will not be difficult to do.

What is difficult, what will take all your focus and determination is what you must do next.

All you have to do is stop talking.

Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. XX – Survivor Bias

[The Past – Indira Gandhi Arena, New Delhi, India]

 
Cartilage cracks under the force of my heel as it drives in hard against her throat. What little air is left in my lungs is forced out as I crash down against the mat, but I can always take another breath when the pain subsides and my diaphragm once again accepts the ever-more urgent pleas of my autonomic nervous system for urgent, life-sustaining oxygen. For the Bombshells’ World Champion, the fractured mass of her twisted larynx collapses in on itself and she gurgles and bubbles foaming pink froth that spills over blood-flecked, slack lips.
 
Powered inch-by-inch with every rasping, agonising lungful of air I drag myself across until I can fall over her jerking body and spend a few moments watching the blinding halo of the overhead spotlights high up in the rafters spin and cavort as they circle me. I do not hear the nearby Official and I do not hear a bell but I hear the crowd react.
 
A boiling, swelling torrent of rage that expands logarithmically until it is concussive – almost strong enough to physically assault me as I feel a superhero quiver and shake underneath me. It takes virtually all the strength left in my lactic-poisoned arms to push me over and up onto my knees. Thick ropes of red twist and drip in long, drawn-out spindles pooling down from the exposed edge of my chin, where the reinforced composite porcelain has been shattered and broken off by the careful attention of the Bombshells’ World Champion, Miss Roxi Johnson.
 
Former Bombshells’ World Champion. It is mine now. It is me.
 
The Official hesitantly reaches out with an outstretched arm, off-balance and leaning forward, the weight of the title belt threatening to send him toppling into a place that only fools rush toward. Running out of courage despite the fact I am struggling to lift the shattered remains of my pseudo-face up from the red-splattered mat, he throws the Championship the last metre down and it lands in the blood and the sweat.
 
Those dancing overhead lights pick out the shining gold of the centre plate. With another constrained breath, rib cage pulled in taut with iron bands forged from bruises, I reach out with my prosthetic and drag the heavy leather strap in. The delicate, painted black thorn work which once spiralled around its bone-white plastic fingers are gouged and scratched, and the servomotors within judder and spasm with effort …
 
But it is mine.
 
I have captured her heart, at last.
 
Shards of broken glass spin away as I lift the metal and leather up into my grasp. Such a curious thing – for so many to have given so much for something that seems so tired, so banal. The leather is dried and cracked, made shiny in places and rough where the oil from dozens of worthy and unworthy hands had held tight until it was finally ripped from their desperate grasp. Where it flexes the backing peaks through in splits and slits, and the polished plated gold is worn away at the edges where years of the uncaring attentions of airport baggage handlers, interspersed with the odd exposed forehead driven into edge-on, have combined to strip away the finish and leave the bare silver underneath.
 
And still, so many have given so much. Given everything. Still on my knees, I glance over my shoulder at the murmuring form of the woman I have just taken it from. A Superhero who has just given everything to stop what is happening right before her glassy eyes.
 
I would be lying to say the sight of realisation making its dogged, determined way into her addled and oxygen-starved brain did not thrill me. It did. It does.
 
For a few moments, I think I can almost understand why this title is such a toxic attraction. A shining, cancerous trinket and trophy that hollows out the bones of all those who spend too long in its poisoned presence. But those are only a few moments, because I have taken this, made it mine, for a subtly different reason.
 
Others have simply survived this Championship, but I have set my sights on an altogether loftier purpose. It will be reforged. Remade.
 
It will not change me. I will change it.
 
Even though they are so very high above – too high to warm my sweat-slicked skin – I feel the heat of the overhead lights, and it spreads across my shoulders as it heralds the comingl of something long-promised.
 
The Rapture has finally arrived, borne on the winds of a hurricane and the cape of a superhero.
 
[The Rapture]
 
There is little to be gleaned from those wounds most obviously on display. The angry red welts and criss-crossed scars that mar the skin have already told their stories; they have nothing more to say beyond announcing their presence. The pain they carried has already been inflicted – spent in the past and with limited potential to influence the future beyond limiting the scope of Instagram-worthy pictures.
 
Instead, it is far more illuminating to consider those injuries which are hidden from view. The wounds that did not make it back to the eye of the beholder to be judged and grimaced against. Their stories are still in-progress; still to be understood. Quantified. Their impact has yet to be fully felt. A slow-motion metaphysical car crash in which the occupant is still in mid-agonising whiplash.
 
Thoughts turn to those that were overwhelmed and never returned to show their cowed faces. And there are so many faces: Miss Benton, Miss De Salco, Miss Rainbow … A Zdunich by every other name under the Sun and Moon …
 
Inconspicuous by their absence, because they were never a meaningful challenge or threat. Obstacles to be negotiated in order to move forward, but nothing more. That they failed to reappear, to learn and adapt, is simply reflective of their irrelevance. Perhaps it was for the best, given the likelihood of a repeat performance. There can be no growth without suffering, but misery for the sake of misery is sadomasochistic. A twisted form of pleasure for some, perhaps.
 
Then, there are those who did profess to have something new to offer. Our former Bombshells’ World Champion, Miss Johnson, is one such rare example. Indeed, she can hold the impressive – if purely academic – claim to have been the only individual to inflict a so-called defeat upon me … Though as I hold her title between my plastic fingers, such a claim seems hollow at best.
 
Still, she returned with something approximating growth. Development. A new challenge to be negotiated and overcome. The cuts still healing in subtle pink lines on her belly carry testament to that attempt, ultimately for nought. Those are not the scars, however, that tell the most interesting story.
 
The reality of her defeat, of her vulnerability, leaves twisted track marks all across the inside of her mind. Psychosomatic wounds that pulse and ache with pain; reminding her that in the end she could not save any of them. Not her wife, not her title and not the Division which now looks up on craned necks to see me standing at its summit. Agonies of the spirit she will carry for a great many years, completely and utterly invisible. Those lingering aftereffects are the most intriguing.
 
And so … What of those that do not seem to carry any such wounds of the soul, but choose to reappear? How best to understand where they clamp a hand to their side and grimace with some unseen, unknowable pain?
 
Where does Mercedes Vargas hurt?
 
It is a subtle wound she wears and it is inexorably wrapped up in the curvature of her spine, brought on by the enormous weight she apparently carries. The combined mass of the entire Bombshell Division, singularly placed on her back as she continues to demonstrate without exception her talents and credentials, would force almost any other contender to her knee to scrape bloodily against concrete, but Miss Vargas is made of sterner stuff.
 
Louder stuff.
 
Look through the noise, however, and back into the past. Beyond her victory fresh from the fallout of Violent Conduct, further back to the Climax Control of previous weeks. There, she faced off against a superhero and failed to achieve the victory she so desperately yearned for. Strove for. This is not a particularly hard indictment of her inadequacies – after all, I did not succeed at the first attempt when dealing with superhuman Champions and to expect others to have done so would be purely hypocritical.
 
But we are not the same.
 
There is a desperation to Miss Vargas that pours red and thick to clot on the ground as plainly as the wounds she keeps hidden from view. A growing and ever-more urgent need to take by force what has so far been refused voluntarily; recognition. Respect. Appreciation. Her due.
 
We are not the same, and yet both of us are inexorably linked. For while Roxi was the first to defeat me, per se, Mercedes was the first to survive me. No-one – not SCW’s resident Saviour in a flowing cape, not a Hurricane Painted Red – has remained standing after a mutual exchange of miseries with my thorn-painted hand. No-one, except Miss Vargas.
 
No-one has stood under their own power to look at me and signal without ambiguity or hesitation, that this was not and is not over. Except Miss Vargas.
 
When I was deployed as this company’s resident boogeywoman; used to scare impressionable young women and children into compliance, she sought out confrontation with abandon. That alone is worthy of her much-thirsted recognition and appreciation. It is so much easier when they come out from the wings willingly, and step into the light to share centre-stage of their own free but vastly-misjudged appetite for success.
 
But I am not interested in what I can see in Mercedes; only what I cannot.
 
It is said that in the penultimate stages of the Second World War, aerospace engineers studied the damage patterns of aircraft that returned from bombing missions over mainland Europe; seeking to understand where the design could be strengthened based on that visible damage and distress and the obvious wounds of war.
 
It was not until a relatively maverick engineer suggested  what was of interest was less the visible and more the invisible. In other words, the areas without damage were those most vulnerable areas, and those that suffered impacts there simply did not survive to return at all. To consider only the assets which made it back created an implied Survivor Bias which did not represent reality.
 
And so, it is here we must be cautious to ascribe too much heroism, skill and wonder to Miss Vargas simply for the feat of having returned on a second occasion. Where has she been shot through by heavy flak, and does that represent a significant wound or something altogether more cosmetic?
 
Her weakness is not in defeat against the previous Champion all those weeks ago, or even those failures previous to that. No, her vulnerability is in the reaction to that defeat – a powerful need to make amends, to prove she is still capable of achieving great things despite such setbacks. That desire can make a person do foolish things at foolish times, and act with a reckless abandon usually reserved for fools chased by their hapless angels. I am not interested in what Mercedes has failed to do previously; I am intrigued by what she might do in her attempt to redress that failure.
 
What secret wounds lie out of sight, representing mortal blows if only they puncture her thin and stressed skin, sending her tumbling out of the sky trailing thick smoke and flickering flames? We know such miseries have yet to be inflicted upon her, because she stands here. Now. The scars and the aches and the pains are an inconvenience, but hardly fatal.
 
Not now. Not yet.
 
[The Past ERROR]
 
Counter-fire barriers flared into existence, disintegrating the incoming rounds which hit their mark with a swirling detonation so bright it momentarily reduced the surrounding block to a silhouette. The rounds aimed too high exploded chunks of brittle concrete, sending plumes of pulverised masonry up into the air as they collapsed. A pall of choking dust settled over anything and everything below, making it difficult to see, shoot or think. 
 
Undeterred, the deafening crack-crack-crack of a rifle on automatic rang out. Even through the gloom, the unmistakable pattern of light which marked out every hit stopped in its tracks was easily visible, and simply attracted more. Something heavier joined the mix, slower and more deliberate with a bass-like thud as it fired and a billowing sheet of orange flame as it hit. A rolling wind swept out from the impact, bathing the ruins in warmth.
 
It emerged from the afterglow, striding over scorched earth and through the blackened, broken fragments of metal still-burning in the aftermath. Pitted and scratched and still coming. 
 
Shuffling out of sight and into cover, Abigayle pressed her back up against the remnants of a brick wall and stooped down to keep her skull on top of her shoulders where it belonged. Swiftly changing out the magazine, she cycled the rifle once, twice – three times before the battered action overcame the grime and sludge and loaded a round into the chamber. Smearing a grit and mortar aerosol from her features, she pressed the weapon’s stock in against the meat of her shoulder and made to swing around.
 
The wall, now in front, which should have given her the perfect firing position broke apart, shattered by the penetrating power of a hyper-velocity round that could only have come from her own side. The splintering brickwork gave Abigayle just enough time to squeeze her eyes shut. 
 
Dumped on her belly hard, she ground her bloody forearms into the dirt; desperately trying to lift her chest up high enough to relieve the crushing pressure and breathe. Air finally came in hacking, spluttering gasps as her diaphragm jerked back to work. Rolling onto her side, she cradled her ribs and wretched.
 
Abigayle roughly pawed at her ears, grimacing as something hot and slick wet the fingers. Leaving a red streak smeared across her body armour, she reached ahead towards the muzzle of her rifle, protruding from a pile of blasted brick and rock. As she tugged weakly on the still-warm barrel her bloody grip slipped free, staining the metal. 
 
The pale sun in the sky, still struggling to push through the thick blanket of dust and debris suspended in the chill air was blotted out completely. A localised shadow fell over her, the sound of gunfire and her own wheezing replaced by a ringing that swamped out every sound. This great armoured machine, rumbling and shining even through all the dirt and din of battle, looked down on her without any discernible face other than an elongated muzzle. It rolled to a halt, poised to deliver a killing blow with the deadly weapon mounted on its front but the point of the barrel never found her. Instead, it simply rolled over\Abigayle’s prone form, saved by crushed girders and breezeblocks jutting overhead and continued elsewhere. 
 
Gritting her teeth together and fuelled by something equal parts anger, disbelief and tinnitus she scrambled to her knees. With a single whole-body effort she heaved her rifle free of its burial mound and back into her grasp. Abigayle lurched up to her feet, ignoring the taste of iron on her tongue as she stumbled after it, released the safety and squeezed the trigger hard.
 
The first few rounds dug into the ash-strewn dirt, too low and missing their mark by ten feet or more but as they came thick and fast, the brutal recoil kicked the muzzle upwards bringing the rest of the magazine on target. Metal slugs crashed into a familiar, dazzling wall of detonations conjured out of thin air; each impact spreading waves of kinetic energy that radiated out across twisting, seething bands. Dozens of rounds skimmed across an expanding plume of fire, no more effective than stones against water.   
 
The defensive kaleidoscope became a lighthouse; shining so brightly that any surrounding “ship”, and its gun, could see and respond. Withering fire began to coordinate and grow exponentially, a mixture of handguns, rifles and siege-grade weaponry. Missiles and grenades slammed themselves into the counter-fire barrier, competing for space in air already thick with metal. Opaque with the density of the attack, the siege machine beyond the shielding was impossible to see, but it was soon felt. 
 
The beam swept out in an irresistible arc, electric blue and scintillating. It burnt the air itself before it burnt the ground – slicing through concrete, iron, armour, flesh and bone in a continuous emission that disappeared to kill further than Abigayle could see. Methodically the armoured vehicle turned, cutting and vaporising. She watched it boil brickwork into molten slag, and then she watched it sweep towards her–
 
Abigayle’s eyes snapped open as she sat bolt upright, consciousness lagging a few moments behind her heart as it wrenched and twisted inside her chest. Struggling to catch her breath, she ran a shaking hand across her damp, scarred scalp down to rest on the nape of her neck. Overhead, a single irritating strobe light flashed rhythmically. Throwing out a hand, she slammed it down on the nearby panel, silencing the tactile alarml and once again plunged the room into merciful darkness.
 
It had been designed to operate silently; using a pattern of light instead of noise to avoid the worst unpleasantness associated with triggers like shrieking, wailing, crying …
 
Sighing, she grimaced and peeled the sweat-stained sheets away, flinging them over the side of the bed. Pressing the bare soles of her feet down against the carpet, she buried her head in her hands. The warmth of her breath against her palms in the blackness went some way to steadying strained nerves. 
 
By feel alone and patting from the mattress to the nightstand, Kino’s fingers closed around a wide silver bracelet, clamshell-shaped and smooth to the touch. She snapped it closed around her wrist, snug against the flesh. A panel inset into the top of the bracelet lit up in response, and she dismissed its blue light with a tap of her fingertip against the metal. From a hook on the wall Abigayle pulled free a dressing gown that had evidently been bright red once when new, its intricate and embroidered flower-petal shapes faded by time and too many hot washes.
 
Throwing it on and rubbing at her face with the hilt of her palm, she made hard work of trudging to the nearby sink. Shoving her hands underneath the tap automatically brought warm water, and a much less welcome piercing light over the mirror. Screwing her eyes shut, she splashed the water against her face and let it run freely down to join the sweat stains on her vest. 
 
Scooping a palmful into her mouth, Abigayle glanced at the mirror. Her reflection looked terrible, successfully managing to make her appear almost as bad as she felt. She stretched the skin of her cheeks downward, temporarily smoothing out the creases. Pulling her hands away they snapped back into being; re-joining the experiences and the years that had created them. That no smoothing could remove. 
 
The bracelet on her wrist began to vibrate furiously. Patting a towel across her forehead, Abigaye flicked open the lock on her apartment’s door.   
 
They had said her hearing would return soon, given treatment. Given time. Until then, she experienced the world with her eyes and the occasional painful stab of tinnitus.
 
The man stood outside in the spinal corridor was dressed in an impeccably starched shirt, blue like the sky and sporting creases from epaulette to short-sleeve cuff. She instantly recognised the coloured beret on his head – scarlet red – that marked him out as a member of the local security services, and the razor-sharp creases which always followed a veteran’s wardrobe wherever they went. Abigayle frowned as she watched the guard talk, or at least, watched his lips move wordlessly. Her confusion encouraged his and he stopped, awkwardly over-enunciating as though that would make any difference.
 
Realisation dawned and holding her hand up to stop him, she darted back to the nightstand by an embarrassingly unkempt bed. Snatching up a small black orb, she pushed the device inside the inner concave of her ear and held it there for a few moments. A single muted tone conducted directly into her brain brought all the sounds of the world flooding back.
 
Abigayle tapped the side of her head by way of explanation. “I am sorry; you were saying?”
 
“Sorry for the early hour Ma’am.” He dipped his chin sharply and rocked up on the heels of his polished shoes. “There’s been an incident down at one of the camps. They’re looking for any and all able hands— “
 
“Internal or external?” She interrupted, already swooping down to collect her boots.
 
“Internal; ruckus broke out in the food lines and grew from there. For now at least, but that could change at any minute. I thought you might be able to help, given you can still … Well, see well enough. And your hand …”
 
The new prosthetic she wore glinted in the corridor light, fingers flexing in autonomic response.
 
She tried not to look at it, knotting the laces. “Take me to them.”
 
He hesitated. “Don’t you want to finish getting dressed?”
 
“That depends,” Abigayle said. Her words suggested there might be a little hesitation, but her tone didn’t ask for any suggestions. “Do they have the time to spare me?”
 
She fell in behind as he turned and left, silently.
 
[The Rapture]
 
There has been such a change – I hope you can feel it as strongly as I do.
 
It is the beginning of something wonderful, something I have worked so hard to show you all for so long. It is not a continuation of the old, whereby excellence was defined as a counter which ticked up on each successful defence of a symbol that long since stopped representing anything greater than the selfish, individualistic machinations of an army of one.
 
No, this is the culmination of a grand and celestial work carefully and painstakingly assembled from all the myriad parts taken from the Bombshells’ Division. Some willingly, as they gave me their careers and others at the greatest resistance; as I took their hearts. Through submission or subjugation, however, their contributions have finally ushered in something rapturous.
 
The summit of this Division and the wider company is no longer brutal, hierarchical combat. It is altogether more transformational. It is no longer necessary to simply survive and in that, outlive all your competitors. Now is the time for growth, to revel in the miseries and agonies that go hand-in-plastic hand with that self-actualisation and realisation. To become better, one must endure hardship.
 
Thus, as World Champion, my remit is no longer simply to defeat those that oppose me, but to educate them. Improve them.
 
Grow them.
 
And so through all the smoke and screeching treads and booming guns, Miss Vargas becomes my newest student. Not to learn about why she should never have come here, again, but instead the first of many to learn such very important lessons. Lessons which will leave her nursing wounds both visible and hidden but equally choice and measured out.
 
It is not enough to survive, Mercedes. Your singular claim to fame – of simply enduring me to be able to emerge from the other side still standing and drawing breath to tell the world how wonderfully you performed – is insufficient. At Climax Control, this Sunday, you will be placed into the same situation which saw you fail to grow, fail to learn and fail to achieve more than simply continuing to exist from one moment until the next.
 
There are no more unknowns by which learned aerospace engineers can frown and look at the punctured fuselage of your achievements and wonder: how can we make this better? The bias is fully understood and clear. Survival is no pre-qualification to take what I have worked so relentlessly to finally, blessedly make mine.
 
I am your Bombshells’ World Champion, and while I am your future, you are nothing but the past. A flawed, biased dataset which hides the truth from those who would step into the centre-stage light and take the beautiful lessons I have come wearing gold and precious stones to teach.
 
Last time, you survived to win. This time it will not be sufficient. There will be nothing left to look upon the holes and the scars and wonder how to make better, make stronger next time.
 
Welcome to the Rapture. It welcomes return guests.
 
[The Past ERROR]
 
The rain, spat by a furious sky, probed every inch of brick and metalwork on its determined way down to the ground. Where it could, water gathered in swollen rivulets which poured through the torn walls and shattered ceilings it met. Occasional claps of thunder reverberated against these burnt-out, broken shards – competing with the terrific, rolling boom of something else falling from the storm raging above. Something not made there. 
 
Wind whipped against the buckled frame of a window long abandoned by glass, pushing the storm and its ire inside. Other than a pockmarked concrete floor, lined with spiralling cracks and the occasional tile balanced precariously on a fire-blackened, sagging beam overhead there was nothing left for the weather to wreak havoc upon. Even the shattered panes, left where they’d tumbled and broken were further pummelled into fine shards by the elements and washed away; carried by an urban waterfall cascading down from the ruined levels above. 
 
Something that didn’t belong in the sky roared again. Painful, if anyone had been there to hear it and wince. It was close now, shaking the air and buoying the wind with newfound strength. What little that was still left standing shuddered, and more of it fell in on itself. Great chunks of concrete worn smooth by storms and scorched by fire toppled, punching ugly wounds in the floor where it found a way through and down. 
 
Eventually, calm re-established itself and the downpour resumed as the only sound piercing a silent cityscape. 
 
Pooling water had barely recharged ruts scored into the concrete floor before a body stumbling forwards and emptied them, falling hard. With a grunt and excruciating slowness made from pain in every body part, the figure rolled onto its back and blinked away the rain. She laughed.
 
The laughter was strained, interrupted by the occasional splutter and a sharp intake of pained breath. Pulling away the hand clamped against her side, she held up trembling fingertips that stained the falling rain red. Laughter gave way to the roar of the storm outside and in. 
 
The stranger groped about with no coordination, pawing against the pitted concrete randomly until fingers closed around the muzzle guard of a long-barrelled rifle. Drawing the weapon into her body, teeth grinding together with effort, she pulled free the magazine and glanced inside. Six shots shy. 
 
Clutching her gut, the rifle was soon forgotten as a wave of pain reduced the storm, the ruins, the six rounds – everything – to intolerable white noise. A bloodied glove lunged out, sending up grey rainwater and debris as it crashed about in search of something. Closing a fist tight around a soaked fabric bag marked DE LUNE she jerked on the strap, pulled it in and began rifling through. Weatherproof sheeting and dented tins were each flung away until a single grey cylinder rolled free from the confines of the bag, no larger than a finger. Breathing became a more deliberate effort, actions less coordinated with each passing second as she scraped it across the floor roughly, making hard work of tearing off the plastic protecting a tapered end. When it finally sheared, she twisted the cap until a sharp slither poked free.
 
Biting firmly down on her lip, DeLune plunged the point into a crimson-soaked undershirt. Her screams fought the storm still raging and won. 
 
Strings of saliva splattered out across her bloodied chin, joining jaw to the concrete before euphoria flooded her system and gave her just enough presence of mind to wipe them away with an unsteady hand. Slowly she climbed to her knees, rifle in hand as she paused for the luxury of a few relatively pain-free breaths. Shuffling forwards with knuckles pressed into the rainwater, DeLune gradually stretched out as she neared the blasted remains of a window frame until her soaking body lay prone. Parallel with a crumbling ledge, the muzzle of a rifle extended out and down into the wind and weather. 
 
Glancing over a shoulder, her eyes lingered on the red streak painting a short journey to the window’s edge. She sucked in a deep lungful of air as the pharmaceutical high began to fade. It would only continue to diminish. She shifted focus to the scope mounted on top of the rifle and the streets below.
 
It didn’t take long for her gaze to find its mark. Even if the storm and the furious skies sustaining it both departed, those things never made a sound. There were absolute silences that spoke more loudly than them, and in any case of all the senses, only the eye could see something so unnatural.
 
Elegance in such devastated surroundings was unmistakably out of place; something shining cerulean in a washed-out city of black and grey. Reaching forward, DeLune twisted a focusing ring and narrowed the scope’s field of view. She watched it move effortlessly through the destruction below and, bizarrely, with deliberate care which only seemed even more jarring considering the entire city had been shattered with much less hesitancy. Such deliberate gentleness, as though clipping the melted remains of any of the smoking hulks scattered around down below would upset someone. Their owners were long dead by now.
 
It stood easily twice her height on sweeping limbs which bent backwards, not forwards. Gangly in form, appearing slight – almost delicate. Disarming, if she hadn’t bitterly known better and seen worse. Over a shoulder it carried the unmistakable silhouette of a large weapon, the ringed barrel pointed upwards and trained against nothing more threatening than rainclouds. It sported a single arm on the opposite side, fingers and wrist rolled back in on itself so it had the shape of a crude club. From its centre of mass an ellipse bulged, opaque and riddled with fine lines and something DeLune couldn't place. Any number of lights pulsed and cycled within, blinking some incomprehensible message.
 
It didn’t matter. She had no intention of trying to understand. Her leading hand worked its way downwards, creeping along the underside of the barrel. A solitary fingertip reached out and depressed the safety, making the rifle fully capable of killing someone – or something. DeLune reached for the cocking handle, keenly aware she would have to be fast and firm. There’d be no second chance. Depending on her luck, there might not even be a first. 
 
The skin of her palm pressed tight in around the grip grew hot and slick, even as her lips grew dry along with her throat. As she reached for the cocking arm, her hand began to tremble. Grasping the handle, DeLune ratcheted the slide forwards and chambered one of those last lucky six. 
 
Pulsing lights far below changed their rhythm and intensity almost instantly. Faster than she could return to a firing position, his target down below pivoted and brought its own weapon to bear. A building whine, on the edge of sensation at first but instantaneously becoming shrill, signalled DeLune’s death before she had the time to squeeze the trigger in her grasp. 
 
A loud clatter of something-on-concrete out of sight fought to snatch away their duelling focus, but from his vantage point above DeLune couldn’t do anything but watch. Unwilling to take her magnified eye from the colourful phantom even as it whirled about to face this new threat, she reset the focusing ring on the rifle scope and sacrificed detail for a larger field of view. What she saw wore through the last of pain relief that was all but spent. The adrenaline which burnt the blood in her veins for fuel would have to see her through this alone.
 
A shape darted through the collapsed innards of what might have once been a residence block, or a factory, or a store. It had been years since anything in this city had been more than ruins. A child. A redhead. Ragged, running freely and kicking up stones, clutching something stuffed that sported buttons for eyes but missed arms and legs. She emerged from the shadows of twisted steel trussing out into the open. The barrel of the Phantom’s shoulder-mounted weapon instantly swung about, tracking across to find its target. Taking a single step forward it froze, mirroring the little girl who found herself in the shadow of something incomprehensible. 
 
The pattern of those strange lights changed again, slowing down.
 
Snaking her finger inside the guard and taking up the slack on the trigger, DeLune blinked away the opaque, salty combination of rainwater and sweat dripping from her brow.
 
Suddenly the previously trained weapon swung abruptly up, back to threatening nothing more than sky. The Phantom stooped down – something that should have been awkward given its long limbs – somehow accomplished with disturbing grace. The stumped club of its single arm unfolded, until it flexed individual, multi-segmented digits. For seconds that stretched out to make agonising minutes, she watched; transfixed as this child and this thing stood studying each other.
 
Eventually, trembling, the little girl held out her hand. Those lights buried deep within the Phantom pulsed in another incomprehensible pattern and fashion. DeLune’s heart hammered against the prison of her chest in a dreadful, altogether familiar pattern.
 
Growing in confidence, the little girl cautiously offered up the remains of the stuffed animal she held. Taking it from the child with a deftness that seemed incompatible with something so much more massive, it spent the next few moments seemingly deep in whatever passed for thought inside those flowing organic lines. What passed for fingers closed around the toy, until they began to compress its dirty orange fur and cause the buttons for eyes to balloon outwards. Freezing and then reversing its grip, the Phantom seemed enraptured. Captivated.
 
Distracted. Vulnerable. 
 
Agony lanced through DeLune, forcing her to press teeth together hard to keep her jaw shut and the scream confined. Having burnt through medicine and adrenaline, there was precious little left to keep her focused, on track … And conscious. Reaching back inside the shattered window, she pressed a hand against her side and grimaced as something hot and wet warmed the skin. Smearing the ledge red and her hand clean, DeLune took up the target again. The little girl took a step backwards, unwittingly creating just enough space to give her a chance of growing up. She pulled the trigger. 
 
The first of a lucky six rang out, finding its mark with a detonating flash so bright DeLune had to look away from the scope to avoid making her eyes a casualty too. Before what was left of the city below resolved back into existence, a shrieking wail cut through her blindness.
 
The Phantom lurched forward; its long limbs suddenly emptied of all that grace as it stumbled. Colourful coruscating arcs crackled violently between rents in its smooth exterior, exposing intricate silver machinery underneath that was promptly blackened by each discharge. What was left of the weapon on its shoulder veered in random vectors, tracking imagined targets with the twisted snout of its sheared barrel. Impotent. Confused. Still, it screamed as it wheeled about. All but hidden by the erupting electrical impulses which danced between the damage on display, the lights buried beneath a translucent chest flickering furiously as they began to dim. 
 
From her vantage point above and as executioner, DeLune watched the Phantom die, or whatever approximation of death passed for it. Her finger remained taut against the trigger, but with only five rounds left and less than that in full pints of blood, she stayed her hand. 
 
The colourful ribbons of energy drawing lines between the thing’s wounds faded, and the wail softened so it became possible to think about something other than its deafening, all-consuming power. The Phantom’s thrashing diminished until, mercifully, it stumbled into a broken concrete barricade, toppled forwards and did not move again. In a final reflexive spasm, the segmented digits of its single hand splayed open, revealing an undamaged stuffed animal with buttons for eyes. As dead now as it had always been.
 
Jutting her neck outwards, Cooper scanned the scene. Of the little girl there was no sign, or at least no sign of a body. She had probably survived. Or she had died quickly. Only anything in the middle didn’t bear thinking about. 
 
There were already others creeping through the surrounding ruins, bearing down on her even though not one of them had ever even stepped foot within a mile of this killing ground. They didn’t need to; they’d all seen through the broken doll DeLune had just put down as surely as if she’d run each of them through with one of her lucky six. Phantoms brought more Phantoms. Every single time. 
 
A surge of anger fought its way up from the pit of her bleeding gut as she watched a dozen of them begin to converge on her location, twisting her features into a scowl. Not a single one even had the decency to attempt to avoid being an easy target. They picked their way through the rubble; using those long limbs to find a path between concrete, broken brick and mortar all the while presenting ceramic-smooth something to the muzzle of his rifle. Even their shoulder-mounted weapons – each one packing ten times the killing potential of her own – stayed upwards, tasting the rain instead.
 
“Why do you not fucking shoot me!” She shouted, voice distorting against the broken buildings beyond. Pulling herself up to her knees and oblivious to the pain it caused, DeLune rose above the ability of the window’s ledge to hide, but her challenge went unanswered.
 
Twelve impossibly-machined shapes deftly moved through larger, broken city shapes. Pressing her chest back down against the rutted concrete floor, DeLune shifted the rifle back into position. Determination despite the grim odds took control and the scowl soon melted away, joining the great lumps of boiled metal spread across the streets below where her first round hit true.
 
The rifle drove backwards into the meat of her shoulder with a crack, bruising it as she squeezed the trigger and sent a second of six through the surrounding devastation. This time, there was no accompanying flash or harrowing wail. Instead, the round impacted something stronger and thicker than thin air but just as invisible. The targeted Phantom continued forwards, nonplussed by the attempt. Hefting the rifle back up, she picked a new target and fired. Quickly now, with less patience and a deeper twisting of the gut that had nothing to do with anger. 
 
Three, four and five from six found their mark, each one in a new direction and none matched the success of the first. Each one abruptly stopped at point-blank range by something her eyes couldn’t move fast enough to see. 
 
DeLune did pick out movement a few hundred metres to his right, and she turned her head in that direction in time to witness an intense light paint a thin beam from the shoulder of a Phantom all the way up towards her. Concrete left and right blackened, sagged and pulverised under the assault, spewing out billowing clouds of choking dust and shards of masonry. The remains of what had once been a wall in front of her collapsed. Rolling hard, savagely crushing wounds repeatedly against the floor, DeLune pulled her knees up into her chest and tucked her chin down. The attack was uncoordinated, imprecise and the beam simply continued tracking up, cutting into the floor above. Rusted fixtures and broken fittings began to rain down, shattering as they struck the floor if they were delicate or simply punching through and continuing down if not. 
 
Struggling to draw anything but debris into her lungs, DeLune spluttered for air as she groped about in the dusty gloom, blind. Falling back onto her haunches, wheezing, her starving mind took a moment to try to count the spinning particles suspended in the haze. Something bright pierced the haze, disrupting her confused count and forcing her to dive forward. Head crashing violently against concrete, DeLune rolled onto her back, slack-jawed, and stared up helplessly at the beam of light cutting cleanly through everything in its path–
 
Abigayle’s eyes flashed open as she rolled to the side of the bed and gagged. The dream was always the same – real people, who bled and died – replaced by strange facsimiles but she always survived somehow. Walking metal ghosts … Phantoms, impervious to violence and her best efforts. A little girl and her teddy bear. A redhead. Some of it was true; some of it came from memory but others were distortions. Ripplies of the imagination that somehow merged with reality.
 
She brought up a hand to wipe at the sweat staining her cheeks, but met only air. Her prosthetic sat uselessly on the bedside table, a truncated and scarred forearm swinging pointlessly overhead. The fingers she had dreamed were still there only a few moments ago tingled. Not everything survived, it would seem.
But she always survived. Somehow.

She had never been a soldier. Why did she dream like one?
 

Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. XVI – Eyes of the Hurricane


[The Present – Oscar E. McClinton Waterfront Park, Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA]

It runs off her in psychosomatic torrents that ride over the rainwater as it pools around stained, converse sneakers. I think I could smell it, if I were close enough, but from several hundred feet away it glows like some spectral filter applied over my senses. A twisting outline of colour in some strange, warped heatmap of feeling. She stands on the path and the minutes collect together to work their way towards an hour, chin tipped up to look at the storm clouds overhead …

If her eyes were open.

Clammy, slick skin shines under the mercury-ion glow of the streetlights overhead, all framed in red. She takes a single, awkward step forward. A limp, heavily favouring the right side.

I can almost smell it. Sweet and perfumery and uplifting like something wafted in on a sunflower, summer’s day high. Defeat. Surrender …

Acceptance.

There is not so much as a breeze to shift the thick crimson strands plastered tight against her face. The rain falls straight down to splash in fat puddles that soak through her clothes, her skin. Her soul.

At last, after years of wanton destruction and chaos – a force of nature unbowed – it has all come to a soft and gentle end. The hurricane has dissipated and left behind gentle sunlight. A few hundred feet away, a hand subconsciously cradling the surgically repaired musculature of her shoulder, undoubtedly running a thumb over the raised patchwork of scars made by a surgical knife but invited by my thorn-painted hand, Amber Ryan finally gives up.

The fight oozes from her, taken by the storm drains down into the sewers to mix with the run-off and the shit, and then out to sea to swim with the plastic. It is an indescribable feeling; the most potent of feverish highs that makes my only hand that moves without mechatronic components shake. I clench the fingers tight, breathing deep.

It had never been about destroying her. That was an impossibility. Even if I had killed her outright, the essence of what she was – what she is – would have simply lingered on in some ethereal, metaphysical sense made untouchable and therefore completely invulnerable. Short of death, no liberal application of a tyre iron could have achieved what I am now revelling in as I watch and feel. Bones can be reset, tendons reattached. Wounds closed.

What is permanently damaged can be cut away and replaced. Metal in exchange for meat. The plastic phalanges of my prosthetic cycle in serpentine fashion, whirring and clicking at the thought.

No, there is nothing that cannot be repaired, or replaced. The physical is not where the war to destroy someone is best waged. It is not enough to hurt them.

You must force them to acknowledge the futility of continued existence. Of resistance.

And now, at long last … Because I have worked so very hard and waited so very long – My once-Resplendent Hurricane, the irrepressible Amber Ryan, succumbs and surrenders. She yields to me and it is a thrill beyond measure.

For a moment, it eases all my own aches and pains, and there are so many now. Pain builds upon more pain, as all the exploits of my life begin to weigh down on one another, bowing the floor of my resolve until it threatens to collapse in on itself. This is the cost of what I set out to achieve so long ago, the price to be paid in full. The House will not be denied, after all.

For a moment her head snaps right and aligns with mine. Her eyes focus and for a few seconds, I think that she might see me. It is an illusion, of course. From so far away in the dark I am indistinct in the concrete spans and steel trusses of this miserable, rotting city. Even if she did, there is no fight left in her to do anything with such a provocation. Slowly, gingerly, painfully, Amber turns and begins to limp up the shallow hill and the winding path that crowns its top.

It seems strange that here, in this communal park filled with rose bushes and drug users and sordid sex pests, is where the Queen Pin makes her final move. No fanfare, no appreciation. No chants of YOU DESERVE IT … Nothing.

Just tears in the silence and the rain.

It is so sweet a song, and I am so very glad to have heard it. Goodbye, Amber. You were always my favourite.

It is only as I turn to leave that someone else catches my attention as she steps out and into the streetlight opposite. Huddled in a thick coat drawn in around her insubstantial self, I can recognise her from the clack-clack-clack of her heels against the concrete without having to pick out the red accessorization and immaculately styled, coiled hair.

Miss Cassieopia Mearns stands to the side of the Broken Hurricane and the pair exchange a look. Amber continues on and as she passes, Cassieopia’s hand gently touches the small of the taller woman’s back. They move away, up the hill as one.

How unexpected. I should have pushed her off that bridge myself.


[The Rapture]

This should be so straightforward for you, Miss Vargas. No real, meaningful challenge at all for someone so experienced in the ways of physical violence and its associated suffering. The illusion has been dispelled; the curse is broken and the Kingdom saved from the terrible fate that awaited it.

I have been defeated. Surely, now there is nothing more to fear? My reign of so-called terror is at an end, its back broken by a sometimes superhero, sometimes super-sleuther. The Internet Championship torn from my plastic grasp, the World Title likewise all too briefly in my orbit before being accelerated out of sight on some new and dynamic course. It seems almost as if this use of your time is wasteful, insulting.

There is nothing more to say about me, is there? Without the allure of my so-called record and the prattling of mewling lambs arguing over who first should go to slaughter, there is just a painted composite face and empty rhetoric. They will all line up now to take their vengeance on me, now that I am vulnerable. Weakened. Soft.

… Or will they?

Did you read her words yourself, or did they reach your ears second-hand? The Age of the Painted Hurricane is over by her own free will. Tell me, did you ever think you would hear Amber Ryan surrender? Refuse to get up? Embrace ignominy? There are few who did.

But I always believed she could be broken. Not physically, but spiritually. Nothing lasts forever, as the recent voyage of the Sun Princess established, but there is no need to endure for an eternity. All that is necessary is to survive long enough for entropy to do its destructive work. I did not need to defeat Amber – I simply had to survive her and let the fundamental laws of the physical universe pick her apart on my behalf.

It is difficult for me to put into words how satisfying it is to see a cornerstone of my legacy laid underneath a shining sun in its bright, blue sky. A marker that will stand for all time as a testament to what I have achieved that not one other person on this planet can lay equal claim to.

I broke her and now she is nothing.

And yet, there are others here who threaten to follow in Amber’s footsteps. Powerful metaphors, who walk these awful streets and insist on refusing to turn a blind eye. Banners who, in the right circumstances, could become embodiments for all the hope and misery piling up in this sad little world. People like you.

People like Miss Johnson.

I am sure you understand that having plunged a knife into the heart of this company and twisted, I cannot allow life-saving first aid and the possibility – however unlikely – of survival. There is not enough strength left in me to do this all again. I cannot risk my legacy being upturned by someone else who decides to embody all the things she did.

How easy do you expect your victory to be, in the sweltering heat of Jaipuri? Now that all of my mystique has been so effortlessly stripped away by our World Champion, will there be much left to so casually defeat this Sunday? Perhaps it will give you more time to play to the masses, extend out my decline to their whooping, hollering applause.

Tell me, Miss Vargas. Do you think I am easy prey because of the reputation others built for me?

These record books recorded facts. Nothing more. I did not claim superiority; magnificence or superhuman abilities. Unlike Roxi, I cannot fly. There are no such things as monsters, because they are only terrible people doing monstrous things. Just people.

I am only a person. No bogeywoman with magical powers beyond a penchant for inflicting misery on those who go out of their way to invite it. Those who fell before me gather together and flinch at the mere mention of my name – as if it has any power or influence. They croak and they whimper about the doom that awaits any who dare to face me and yet, as you saw only a few short weeks ago, there is nothing supernatural at work here.

I am no longer the Internet Champion. I am not the World Champion. I can be defeated. There is nothing for you, for anyone, to be worried about.

Isn’t there?

But I think, perhaps you feel it stirring. Not the end of my work, but only the close of its penultimate act. A great and long intake of breath before the final, beautiful exhalation. You have come to join me this Sunday, Miss Vargas, on the very edge of my vision made manifest at last. It is almost time. It is almost here. My Rapture is so close now, that I can see its spectral, multicoloured shine with my eyes squeezed tightly shut. It is so beautiful, I feel like weeping.

Tears in the rain.

Contrary to popular belief, rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. No exorcism of SCW has taken place, and I am neither driven from this place like some mad spirit or somehow rendered impotent because of the events of two weeks’ previous. It is true to say that in some small patch of the Pacific, when we were finished inflicting violence upon each other, I did not get up again …

… But it is equally true to say neither did Miss Johnson, and I am not finished with her.

My Heroine can wait a spell, to quote a Gumshoe who has apparently chosen to likewise refuse to stay dead. Thoughts must focus on what to do with you.

This is not a story of redemption, and I am in no need of salvation. So many eyes are on us an entire subcontinent away in Jaipuri, pensive and thrilled. A few are not sure I will even appear, as if some wicked spirit barred from the stadium; surely like salt has been spread in a great circle around the open-air stands. Others expect some righteous, rageful fury to come tearing through in a whirling dervish of mindless destruction – to reassert my strength and prove I have not lost some imagined step.

Neither of those things will come to pass, because I have nothing to prove with such meaningless gestures. Hyperbole is for actresses, and I have no interest in standing on cutout balconies, making paper kisses and reaching for a painted moon. There will be no dramatic return, no point to prove or example to be made out of you.

This is not a story of redemption, because I have not lost anything. The desperation is not mine, Mercedes – it is theirs. Can you feel it? They so fervently hope this is the end of me, will it with all their collective heart. As the dust curls up in lazy coils to touch the sky and clears, they hope against hope to see that I am still sprawled on the floor, still. Quiet. Gone.

You are not a sacrifice, offered up to help me prove a point. You are simply their unwilling Champion: elected to a position by hypocrites and weak-willed fools who lack the vision and strength to do what they so desperately wish for you to do.

They did not support Miss Johnson, because she is World Champion and almost equally as derided, hated. Resented. They could not bring themselves to do anything other than watch in grudging hope neither of us would leave the Sun Princess under our own motive power. But now? Now they are thrilled – because here is someone who can be backed openly without challenging their own childish games of power and influence. Here is someone they do not perceive to be a threat to their own dream-like visions of the future and what it might be.

How does it feel to be elevated to some unwilling position as Monster Slayer? It does not serve me, or you. Only those who would not so much as dare to speak my name into a mirror, on the off-chance my plastic face appeared over their shoulder when they blinked.


[The Past – Columbia Heights Apartment Complex, DeWitt Avenue, Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA]

“Congratulations …”

I snort something noncommittal, concentrating on the difficult job of climbing to my feet and walking the short distance across the dressing room without moving my neck. Left hand clamped across my shoulder, I grimace at the intense numbness that rides across and down my arm.

Making it over to the sink, I rest my weight on my hands and stoop my head over to lap at the running tap.
Footsteps echo behind, but I stay focused on just drinking. Another twinge fires from somewhere in the small of my back and I subconsciously cup it with a single hand. The silence crosses from being palpable to uncomfortable.

“Are you okay?”

“Do I fucking look okay?” I snap, groaning as the reaction to stand to my full height achieves nothing but flooding my consciousness with pain. Suddenly, whatever’s left of my control dissolves into fairydust and dreams and I slump down to my knees. I’m not quite fast enough to do anything but crash the side of my head against the edge of the sink. Instantly, my vision brightens until I can’t see much of anything except light.

Something darker steers into view, giving my eyes blessed relief from the blinding brightness. The blur descends until it’s close enough to resolve into a face. My nostrils flare, and I drink in the perfume wafting my way. Smells like flowers …

“Cassie … Have I ever told you …”

Her voice is pensive, unsure. “What?”

I laugh, trying to lift my head up from the floor before instantly regretting it. “You smell great.”


She scoffs, pressing one of her hands to my cheek. “Are you okay?”
“Do I fucking … Look … Okay?” I chuckle. Awkwardly, I shift onto my side and begin the laborious process of standing up. I feel Cassie’s arms at my waist, helping take some of my weight from my feet.

“Good for Roxi,” I mumble. Everything attached to me suddenly feels very heavy indeed. “She needed that.”

Cassie frowns. “Do you want me to get a Doctor?”

I shake my head, swatting at her arm with mine. “I’ll be fine. Just got dropped on my head really hard. Always feel a bit groggy after a match.”

“Everytime?” She asks.

“Mostly,” I shrug. “Some are worse than others. This one’s somewhere in the middle.I think they’re getting worse.”

Suddenly, a horrible thought pushes itself through the miasma of my confusion. “I’m getting old.”
My vision clears a little and I can make out the expression on Cassie’s face, even if I can’t read it. “Nothing lasts forever …” She sighs.

She helps me to sit up. “I’ll be fine,” I grumble between gritted teeth. Fuck, everything hurts.

Suddenly, I feel fingers interlacing with mine. I frown, but this oddity is swiftly forgotten by what the young woman opposite is about to reveal.

“You can’t go on like this; especially if you’re going to follow this road all the way to the end with Masque. If you don’t adapt, Amber … You’ll die.”


Throwing my rucksack over my shoulder, I send the door crashing open with the flat of my boot. Ignoring the aching in my hips as I twist, my pace quickens. Somewhere behind me footsteps echo, and one of SCW’s foremost talent managers, an absolute picture in cherry-red, is giving chase.

“Amber!”

I don’t slow down, instead I turn the corner, put my tender shoulder against the heavy double-set door and force it to swing open with a creaking that steps up to a clang as it crashes hard against the wall. The cold night air prickles my skin and I struggle to suppress a shudder.

The full brilliance of a crisp, cloudless night-time sky shines down upon me and for a moment I slow to a halt, tracking familiar constellations with my eye. I’m brought out of this brief moment of contemplation by a hand on my shoulder. I spin around, shrugging it off with a snarl.
Cassie’s features are passive, almost emotionless. That’s new, and gives me pause. “You need to grow up.”

“Are you for fucking real?” I spit. “Just who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

She doesn’t react. Already I can feel myself losing control of this, this whole dynamic feels off somehow. This isn’t how she usually is. “Why do you take it so personally?”

I could say something back, but silent fuming seems more appropriate.

“The way you throw yourself into this …” She continues. “Why does it produce such an effect in you? You’ve lost before, lost a title too, and Roxi’s one of the best in this business. Why?”

My eyes narrow, my voice dropping to something harsh and guttural. “I don’t like to lose.”

“I think we both know it’s more than that,” Cassie almost-laughs. “Just like last week. At one point you were totally content with how all of this was going to play out, like you knew what Masque was planning – as if everything was under control. You told me to trust you, smiled as if it was all worked out and assured. Cool, composed. I guess when I think back … It didn’t really feel like you.”

“Less Painted Hurricane, more Styrofoam rain … Then suddenly, she pulls your strings in some new and subtle way, or someone mentions your name in a less-than-complimentary fashion, and you’re all-in. You fought in that match like your life was on the line, when in the wider scheme of things, it was just about making it all last another day. What was at stake? A number? Three hundred and sixty? You’ve never cared about records or what anyone else has done.”
 
I step forward, right into her personal space. I’m almost nose-to-nose. “You don’t know the first fucking thing about me. You better walk away before you’re carried.”

“I know more than you think,” She bites back, not a single sign of acquiescence or fear in her eyes. “You’re a creature of feeling, pushed and pulled by what others say, and driven to react. Despite all this stuff you’ve done to stay at arm’s length from Masque, it hasn’t worked. You’ve not been complimented or made stronger by it, you’ve just existed in spite of it. You’ve ignored every piece of advice I’ve offered. Just like you’ve ignored your own body telling you it’s time to pick and choose your battles, not fight one every time someone so much as mentions your name or some spectre with a plastic face riles you up with talk from the pulpit.”

It’s my turn to frown. “Great psychoanalysis, did you–”

Without warning, she slaps me. Hard. What the fuck is happening right now. Who is this woman, and what have they done with a Flower Girl Named After the Stars?

“It’s boiling up inside of you about now, isn’t it?” Cassie taunts. “All you can think about is me; teaching me a lesson, proving you can overcome anything I say with action. Applying overwhelming force to the miniscule provocation I’ve provided. That’s why eventually, you’re going to lose; your rematch against Roxi;, your legacy. Everything.”

“I don’t care about legacies!” I shout, my fists balled and my face flushed red where it isn’t already courtesy of her sharp palm. “It’s not all about what you leave behind, or what others think of you!”

Cassie folds her arms across her chest. “If you didn’t care about what you left behind, you’d have gone already. Walked off to chase fireflies. Not giving Masque another opportunity to take you down, not going up against Miss Johnson before you’re ready.”

“You don’t think I can beat her again?”

She shakes her head. “I think you absolutely can … If you’re smart about it. Not like this. Not like you’ve let this coming match shape itself. All the while in the background, Roxi’s been willing herself, training herself, driving herself to this singular point. She’s already learned everything there is to learn about Amber Ryan. Now she’s analysed you, evaluated you … And she’s ready to put what she’s learned into practice. Meanwhile, you’ve stood still, eyes anywhere but where they’re supposed to be – turned inwards instead of looking out.”

“… Or exploding at people  who don’t pose any significant threat. You’re one of the greatest Bombshells in this company’s history. You chose to let Roxi reign, pick your time carefully. Wisely and yet … You’re the one chasing people to places they want to take you. Expending all this tremendous energy for absolutely no gain.”

The anger in my veins starts to cool, giving way to a sort of horrible, hot helplessness. Here’s a youngster with less fighting experience than winters under her belt, and she’s outputting sage advice like she’s been around the whole world twice for good measure. “What the fuck do you want me to do about it?”

“Be smarter. Stop taking trips to places you don’t need to go to,” Cassie says simply. “Stop feeling all the time, and start thinking. Otherwise you’re going to start losing more than a title. Worse.”

Blowing out my cheeks, I glance up at the stars drifting overhead.

Time for one more trip around the moon.


[The Rapture]

It is so important to me that you do not feel undervalued, Miss Vargas.

While others have appointed you as their Champion by virtue of a quirk of scheduling, or the vindictive agenda of this Company’s carefree ownership – they would have supported anyone drawn to exchange miseries with me on the Indian Subcontinent – I see you for the individual you truly are. No ulterior mission, except perhaps to maintain self-respect. I suspect your only real motivation, this Sunday, is to demonstrate that you are not some integer value in an equation to be ignored while the complexities are modelled and the answer derived.

You wish to be recognised in your own right. A Hall of Famer, no less. To do anything less is disrespectful, and I am not like them.

I promise to give you my most undivided, fullest attention. Our interaction will not be about restating goals, or challenging expectations. There are no complex games to play here, or ulterior motives to tease out from the rubber-necked gawkers who leer and clap their hands and hope for an ending in which nobody stands when the dust has coiled up to hang in the storm-tossed sky.

There is no reason to denigrate you, or critique you. Why should I? In a company full of liars, false prophets and the deluded, you may be the most honest woman to call herself a Bombshell yet. Even the much-vaunted Amber Ryan could not always see the truth of things, but it feels like you do, and that is why I must dispose of you with much professional regret. Because, although I have no ego to service, no agenda that demands a restoration of the artificial fear others bestowed upon me, my own work is not yet complete. I cannot stop here, so close to completing my Grand Design. Not now.

Just a little further to go. I need you to help me just a little further.

In Jaipuri, we will do something very special together, something this company has not seen in so very long. We will be honest – utterly, completely. Truly. Free of all the detritus and distractions, we will come together and gift each other our very choicest miseries and see who has the most special talents for inflicting suffering. I think you will show me something wonderful, independent of your unwilling elevation to become this company’s impromptu David.

But, of course … I was never Goliath. None of these things are true. On Sunday, there is no advancement of any cause; no step along some pre-ordained road. The Road to the Rapture does not lie in Jaipuri, so we will take a walk away from it for a while, together.

After all, do I not deserve it? Have I not done you and all of the Bombshell Division a favour of such incredible value? I have retired Amber Ryan – I have taken one of the most powerful forces this company has ever known and throttled the will from her. Broken her not physically, but spiritually. Is the path to all the golden trinkets and championship accolades not that bit more navigable because of the works I have wrought?

It is a miracle, made by my thorn-painted hand. I should be congratulated, thanked personally. Where is Roxi? Her reign is that much more secure because I have eliminated a potent challenger, one who could have taken that title back from her at any moment of her choosing.

Instead, I am ostracised. Vilified. For what? Because I am different? I have done so much for everyone here – those who could not have hoped to face down such a power and emerge intact. Alive. Instead, they can watch from the balconies and know when their fleeting moment comes before being crushed into insignificance, it will come some arbitrary time interval sooner for one the removal of a painted roadblock which would otherwise have destroyed them utterly.

No thanks. No appreciation. Instead, I am made to feel shameful for my difference. Such puerile behaviour. I do not think we will experience such a thing on Sunday.

As I think on it further, I see our meeting as one of reset. Renewal and rebuilding. We can cast away our preconceptions together, Miss Vargas. Take all of the suppositions and ignorance of those who should know so much better, and simply enjoy the arbitrary moment that this otherwise miserable company has gifted us in some faraway spot on the other side of the world.

This is a chance for us to cleanse each other of the worst sin of all: complacency. Now is not the time for self-doubt, to question all the things we have achieved. Instead, we should refocus and believe in what we stand for more strongly than ever before. I think you will help me so much, and I am willing to pause my works, suspend my grand design for a moment, to let you help me achieve that.

I am so very much looking forward to meeting you, Mercedes. I think the Rapture can wait a while.


[The Past – Oscar E. McClinton Waterfront Park, Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA]

I’m full of fatigue and alcohol and right now, I don’t know which one is kicking my ass harder. Every single step I take is some enormous, deliberate effort that feels like I’m crawling up a hill backwards. Having started the evening with a very deliberate set of plans, everything’s degenerated to no more complex a night than trying not to throw up all over my shoes. I’ve never been one to struggle for distractions, but now I’m worried too many have piled up one on top of each other.

Stumbling to a halt, I rest my weight against the railing and just concentrate on breathing. All I can hear is the relentless thunder of the rain as it crashes down hard against the concrete, and my own heavy breathing. My warm breath escapes in a billowing cloud that warms soaking skin for a fraction of a second, before evaporating into nothingness. I roughly push a palm through my sopping hair, forcing the tangled red mess back and up from my face. My eyes drift down towards my feet, drawn by the countless dancing droplets of rain as they bounce and splash on the pavement. Almost imperceptibly, a tinge of something crimson mixes with the water running free from my chin.

Touching my fingers to my nose and mouth a little too forcefully, I grimace in pain. Slowly I bring the trembling hand away so I can see the skin painted with watery blood. The rain, the pavement and the wider world threaten to start spinning and as the strength in my legs evaporates like so much hot breath in the air, I stumble and sink down against the damp concrete.

Resting my head back against the railing, I tilt my face up into the rain.

A voice interrupts my confusion. “You’re an hour late.”

I can’t open my eyes without wiping all the water away, but the tone is unmistakable. So young, so suddenly, uncharacteristically self-assured … So new.

My voice croaks, barely more than a whisper. “I got held up.”

A delicate arm reaches underneath me and despite my protestations and whining, I find myself levered up and back onto my feet. My lips move but there isn’t even enough energy in my tongue to give the sharp barbs I’m contemplating a voice.

“Miss Mearns!” I cough, head lolling to the side. “I had no idea you were so strong …”

She frowns, and roughly pulls me forward. “Just walk. It’s not far.”

With her support, I succeed in the incredibly complex task of putting one foot in front of the other, successively. It’s not much …

But it’ll have to do for now.


Something soft and warm brushes across my face and instantly, my fingers find the responsible throat nearby and close sharply around its windpipe. My eyes – slowed by weariness and booze – are still only a moment behind and they snap open, focusing on Cassie hovering in midair over me. She doesn’t move, and her own gaze is fixed on mine. She doesn’t seem to react beyond growing a little more flushed as her lungs work harder to force air through the narrowing I’ve created with my hand.

Slowly I release my grip, let my head return to the pillow underneath and sigh. Long and hard.
“Sneaking up on someone so you can give them a sponge bath is dangerous,” I mumble. “You can never be too careful what they’ll want in return.”

“Sit still and shut up,” Cassie snaps. Even through the haze of my cotton-wool stuffed head, I have to admit … This version of Miss Mearns intrigues me so.

I grimace as she moves quickly but gently around my face, wiping away the blood that’s dried and caked about my split lip and streamed free from my nose. The warm water still feels sharply cool against the contusions I can feel swelling my face and although I can’t see their blue and purple hues, I suspect they’ll leave a mark.
All-too-soon, she’s done and sits back. “So what did you get up to?”

I shift my weight slightly, wincing at the unpleasant feeling of numbness that arcs through my lower back. “I told you … I got held up.”

“You got held up …” She clarifies, “Or you held someone up?”

I shake my head, pressing the hilt of my palm against my forehead. “This was entirely defensive.”

Cassie sits up slightly. “Someone attacked you?”

“Not exactly,” I mutter. “He said I looked like I might enjoy a good time. I took that to be an insinuation I’m easy, and construed that insinuation to be a verbal attack on my honour and chastity. So I defended myself. I’m a married woman, after all.”

She shakes her head, amusement and irritation evident in equal amounts. “He hit on you?”
I nod. “I hit him back.”

Reaching over towards the table that’s next to the couch I’m sprawled out on, Cassie retrieves a glass of something amber-coloured and strong smelling. That’s my girl.

“I didn’t think you’d come.”

Tipping the glass back, I purse my lips at the burning aftertaste. That’s the good stuff. “I said I would, didn’t I?”
She shrugs. “You’ve been a bit absent as of late.”

There’s not a lot I can say to that. I settle on a shrug.

“No-one’s seen you since … That exchange with Masque.”

“Uh-huh.” The exchange. Is that the euphemism we’re using now? The hug heard around the world. The hate embrace. I chuckle at that little play on words. She doesn’t like that.

Gritting her teeth, Cassie snatches the glass from my hand and sets it down on the table with a hard clack of glass-on-glass. “You weren’t serious, were you?”

I roll my eyes, “About what?”

“Stop fucking around!” She barks, all traces of playfulness purged. “Buying into her bullshit. Embracing it. Acting as if she was right all along!”

I turn away from her, burying my face against the pillow. “Why the fuck not? What have I got left to lose?.”
A silence settles over us, seconds becoming minutes.

“I don’t understand this …” Cassie sighs eventually. “I’ve never seen you act this way. Not over anyone else.”
A laugh escapes my lips, laden with sarcasm and bitterness. “Masque isn’t anyone else.”

There’s another silence. Suddenly, Little Miss Mearns makes her move. “I never thought I’d see you scared of confronting someone. Fighting them.”

Instantly I launch upwards, all pain forgotten. Pressing my body against Cassie’s I force her back until she’s pinned down on the cushion. Eyes narrow and teeth grinding together, rage boils free from every pore in my body.
“I am not scared of fighting Masque …” I hiss and I know she believes every fucking word.

We’re almost nose-to-nose now. “I’m scared of what doing that means. For me. For you. For everyone.”

Sitting up, I swing my legs away and stand. “Every single time someone wants to fight me, I make them work so hard for it that they always come up short. I’m not just talking about winning because as good as I am at that, it’s not like no-one around here has managed to put me on my back long enough to score a pinfall. That’s cute, but it isn’t the most important thing. The most important thing is getting back up, carrying on where I left off. No-one has been able to put me down around here permanently. Not a single man or woman has what it takes to swipe my legs out from underneath me, and leave me utterly spent like some empty shell casing. Scrap brass on the rifle range to be collected and thrown away.”

Gingerly I cup my bruised cheek with my hand. “I don’t know if Masque can, but something tells me she just might. It’s hard to describe. It’s not fear. I know I’m not scared of her. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I just don’t understand her. Her motivations. It isn’t money, or power. She seems so alien. Unknowable. Makes me hesitate. And somehow, she just seems to know how to push my buttons when everyone else is staring at the control panel, scratching their heads and flicking through the instruction manual. That’s before you even get onto the subject of a rematch with Roxi …”

“I give everything when it comes time to the fight. Absolutely everything. It’s why I was World Champion for almost a year. I’ve become synonymous with excellence, with effort and application. But it wasn’t enough last time, was it? Stopped at Three Hundred and Fifty Seven.”

I turn around, spreading my arms out wide in open question. “So tell me, Cassie – tell me what the fuck I’m supposed to do when I know, before the bell has even rung, that it might not be enough? I’ve fought Roxi so many times the individual experiences have blurred into one long ass-kicking and it always ended the same. Or used to. That last time though … Things have changed …”

“She’s still the same person you put down all those instances before,” Cassie counters. “I’m not sure who this is really about. Her, or Masque.”

I shake my head. “Both? Neither. I don’t fucking know.”

“So what are you going to do?”

The question hangs long and heavy, pregnant with foreboding.

I slump back down on the couch next to her, resting my head against the backing. “I thought about leaving, just getting in a car and driving. After all, what else is there to do? Especially given what’s in store for me moving forward with the plastic-faced timebomb I’ve gotten into cahoots with. I don’t have a fucking clue what Masque’s really up to.”

I fix my gaze against Cassie’s. “Do you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I continue, interrupting her reply. “Even if you did, denying it or even admitting to it won’t change anything. I have no idea what’s going week-to-week. I’m filled with rage against her on Monday, beginning to convince myself she’s the only one who gets me by Thursday. What part of this is supposed to make sense?”

She frowns, “You think it’s a trap?”

“Yes!” I snap. “No? I don’t fucking know. Maybe I’ve outlived my usefulness to her, or maybe the whole Bombshells’ Division senses a change in the air and want to cast me off before I’m grounded on the rocks. The point is everything feels like it’s coming together to a critical point; a crucial and decisive moment. All these players, inputs into all of this, they’re all taking up positions and I’m in the middle. The only benefit to all of this is being surrounded, I’ve realised what I have to do.”

I glance over at Cassie. “I have to fight.”

“I have to fight just as hard, just as long, just as ferociously as I always have. If Roxi wants to cement her place as Number One in this company, she can go right ahead. If Masque wants to dispense with my services, by way of delivering revocation of membership privileges via her boot to my head, that’s wonderful. If the Harbinger of my Apocalypse itself wishes to grant me a preview of the shape of things to come …”

I puff my cheeks out. “I’ll walk hand-in-hand with her all the way to my beautiful destruction.”

Suddenly I shift my bodyweight against Cassie, and plant a kiss on her temple. She looks up with those worried eyes.

“I think it’s almost time for me to die, Miss Mearns … But not quite yet. I’m not dead yet.”

Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. XII – Enraptured

__________________________________________________________________________________

[The Present – Saint Louis, Missouri, USA, Summer 2022]

The stink of iron spilling from her slack lips mingles with sweat and something spiced; a sweet perfume that climbs an unbearably hot column of lazy air to make my head swim, even as she topples backwards. Red hair runs red still, and glassy eyes squeeze open and shut in some hopeless, autonomic, reflexive loop. I do not think she can see me now, only dollops of colour in swirls that bleed around her brain. It is beautiful to see her so enfeebled, so weakened. So defeated.

Many have spoken about doing such a vaunted thing, but none have achieved it. Her legend has crossed beyond internet subculture and catering table talk between respected industry veterans, to become something revered. Even by those who intrinsically hate her.

I did not hate her. Quite the opposite. I think – I am almost certain – that I loved her at some point. It is difficult to quantify, since I am not entirely sure what constitutes the feeling. Still, there are some objective markers. A quickening of the heart, the tremble of limbs made from flesh and blood and not plastic. All recognisable.

All transitory. Fleeting. It was less a love and more an infatuation. Something to be enjoyed, perhaps even coveted but impermanent. Destined to be made obsolete and retired. Oh, how she was retired. The sound of her skull crashing against stonework rings through any number of hazy recollections to make each detail shake at some singular resonant frequency. A natural order of things which produces utter clarity.

Here is a whitewashed Painted Hurricane, bone-breaking winds dissipated and laid low and switched out for warm summer sun on my skin. Dropping to one knee I listen to the wet gurgle of her ruined throat, a diminuendo of increasingly hoarse, guttural gasps that trail off as what little oxygen makes it into her lungs is lost in a panting, heaving wheeze. The sensations feel welcome because I have longed for them for so long, but overwhelming because I dared not dream that I would finally be so privileged to watch her fall.

It is difficult to kill an idea. Especially one so powerful as a Queenpin. It takes root in all those who gaze upon her works and baulk and think: how? How can I defeat it?

You cannot defeat an idea. Instead, it must be destroyed. Scoured from existence, beyond reality and into the memories of those who no longer even look at it. Reach inside what they remember about her and pervert it. Change it. Take a missing conscience and give it back, but primed to poison instead of purify. A Flower Girl Named After the Stars again.

After much planning and hardship, so many sacrifices, I watched her fall.

Fall by my own thorn-painted hand. The cultivation of so many years of toil; of a test set half a decade ago and only now administered and so satisfactorily failed.

The harsh white of my prosthetic, curled in black ribbons of painted points, is flecked in wet splotches of blood that spill over its edges and drip to the rutted concrete in fat splashes. It is at this point I would lean in and hear her sob, but of course, she does not.

She did not. Amber Ryan has never shown such weakness even in her darkest moment – and there were such black minutes gifted from me to her. This one, now, for example. And so my suspension of disbelief twists and stretches and everything dissolves back into what is real and true and several days removed from my dream, turned a warm summer reality.

In this real world she is on a gurney, still breathing in stuttered, wet contractions somewhere in Las Vegas with the rest of her sinful kind. Inside her drug-addled mind, she is bleeding to death on a noir-inspired rooftop, looking for a hero. It does not matter anymore, because her time is over. The shadow she cast over my everything is lifted. I am here and I am free at last.

Free at last. Ahead, the sun squats until only its burnt orange rim peeks over the confluence of skyscrapers and angled roofs that make up downtown Saint Louis. Sweeping in a sterling silver curve, the Gateway to Westward Expansion, A Monument to Indian Killing, the Arch is burnished gold by reflected rays.   

The heat is stifling – a thick blanket of humid wetness that clings to everyone and everything, leaving a shimmer of damp on every surface it coils and caresses. Beads of sweat pool and run in competing sprints around the porcelain rim of my mask until surface tension loses versus volume at the chin, and it drips free to stain the material of my lap a midnight blue from cerulean. A gunshot rings out in the distance, and someone is presumably killed for no good reason at all. Senselessly, callously. Without purpose.

It is so wasteful.

Such reckless use of death. Lacking in finesse, in imagination. In the mad desire to kill, they do not pause long enough to understand everything the act entails. Thoughts turn immediately to what I imagine is the freshly surgically repaired body of my Dissipated Hurricane, lost beneath a scratchy nylon bed sheet and tendrils of snaking tubes pumping disinfectant, blood products and painkillers into her shaking veins. A smile spreads out underneath composite, I nod to the idea of it. Approvingly.

I do hope my present gifted to excite the latter brings her sweet agony for a very long time to come.

People are so very quick – in such a terrible rush – to kill each other. You cannot learn anything if you are dead, and there are so many wonderful things we do not know yet, but could if only given the chance. The lessons. An opportunity. After all, if you kill them, they will not learn anything. A green leotard did not undermine the validity of that particular point.

Sirens wail, distorted and drawn out by doppler effect, glass and steel. Something pretending to be a breeze briefly tries to stir, but settles on tickling my sweat-exposed skin ineffectually. Its feeble efforts are cut short by the slab of broken brickwork that takes me out of sight of the wider city.

The service tunnel is an order of magnitude cooler, thermally blessed by an overhang of thick, cobbled stone which absorbs the numbing heat of day. Chunks of shattered masonry, plastic bottles bleached white and rusted fragments of broken metal clink and topple as my feet sink into the mud and the trash and the shit. Something foetid skitters by on stubby legs misshapen with tumours and boils, stopping long enough to hiss.

An iron gate washed out in orange and scabbed by corrosion hangs open, the remains of the chain and its associated padlock – still locked tight – shining utilitarian silver against the black, wet earth. Up ahead, something red stands in a still silhouette against sparkling city lights and the ground underneath my feet begins a subtle transition from dirt to metal. Soft thumps exchanged for hard, reverberating clangs.

“Why the fuck are you here?”

Cassiopeia sits on a railing overlooking the drop down to the Missouri river some sixty feet below. Her left hand is squeezed tight around the malformed metalwork and blanched white with the pressure of the hold; her right brings a dirty-brown bottle up to cherry-smeared lips and tips back the sticky dregs.

The bottle sails clear from the bridge and down. It has already disappeared from view before it ever reaches the water.

Weakness permeates every part of her being. She stinks of it. Her free hand trembles, bloodshot eyes finally unable to stand the silence of my non-reply before turning to find mine. Her face is puffed, haggard. As if the skin has been wound in tight and sharp against the skull. A wretch.

“Why?”

For such a varied thing as language, capable of incredible prose and descriptive complexity, it can be frustratingly vague. So many response, potential inquiries, it is almost–

“Why are you here?” She interrupts.

She has made such progress in the last few months, and it gives me just a moment’s pause to think about what Cassiopeia might have gone on to be if her usefulness had not so recently concluded and come to its appointed end. A useful tool, no doubt, but one that was only ever capable of a singular task … Now complete and lying in its hospital bed, panting and groaning.

I have kept her waiting long enough. “I am here to complete our final lesson.”

Her face contorts, anger flushing the skin red and making the lips draw back in something like a snarl. “You made it quite clear that I’m superfluous to requirements.”

She is. “You are,” I reply, cocking my head to the side.

Teeth bare. “Then why the fuck are you here!”

It is interesting that for all the rage she appears capable of, it has never surfaced at a moment which might help her resist all the terrible things she has become embroiled in. The missteps and mistakes – and deliberate, overt actions – that have led her to consider throwing herself off this bridge in her hometown … But we will come to that shortly.

The mewling, soul-searching desperation in her voice is unpleasant, but she has always been so patient, so I will indulge her. “I said it is time to deliver your final lesson, Miss Mearns.”

She jerks upright at the tone of that, fingers squeezing the metal railing tight. Her lips work for a few moments, either practising for what is about to come or stuck in a failure of words following the impulse to speak them. Something all too typical shimmers underneath her eyes and she roughly drags the hilt of a palm across her cheek. I am not sure why she chooses to try to hide it now, given how painfully vulnerable she so obviously is. It is pathetic.

“What’s the point …” She sighs, voice cracking like the remains of her self-respect. “You got what you needed, what you did–”

“Enough.” It is my turn to intervene; this has already taken too long and there is so much to do elsewhere. “When you began this journey with me, to walk towards Rapture, I made you a promise. An exchange. This was never transactional or some purely-one-way affair. My aim was always one of transformation, and look what we have changed. It is time now for me to give to you what you deserve …”

Cassiopeia finally breaks eye contact, and her head dips down to look at the rolling river far below. Finally, sullenly sinking below the downtown cityscape the last washed-out halo of the sun disappears and the temperature drops several blessed degrees. “I don’t deserve anything …”

“You are weak of spirit, no doubt,” I muse. She flinches. “But you could not have been any other way and still played your part as her conscience, her moral and ethical centre. It is your fragility that made you something Amber sought to protect, to override all her natural instinct and defences and leave herself vulnerable …”

The tears are flowing freely now, falling so very far down to join the rest of the water.

“I was bait …”

Very good. Despite undergoing such an intense existential crisis, she remains capable of some critical analysis. This whole tiresome process might yet be sped up. “Yes; something to tug at what was left of her heart which be in no doubt despite her protestations, still absolutely exists. I have even seen it break once.”

The image of watching Amber step out from a nondescript dressing room in Atlantic City all those years ago and abandon Fexxfield to his fate is an intoxicating one. It is difficult not to drink so deeply of the memory that there is no reason to think about anything else. No, not yet. There is too much to do to relax so completely.

“Usurp her self-control, defeat her desire not to become messily entangled with “people” and “feelings”. A cancer, in a way. To hollow out her own conviction and strength of will at the moment she needed it most. Part the gates and allow me to walk through and run then her through.”

“Willing bait,” I add. “Because you came to be a part of this beautiful thing of your own free will. And so, it is only right you are rewarded with the knowledge of what now comes next.”

She shifts her weight imperceptibly. “I already know what comes next …” and in a single moment, the straining knuckles of her hand around the barrier relax. Blood flows back into the blanched skin, turning it a bright pink. Over the minutes I have worked my way closer while she drinks her fill of woe and sorrow for herself, and the plastic phalanges of my prosthetic grip tight the collar of her summer dress just as Cassiopeia tips forwards.

Hauling backwards, she cries out in shock, pain, sadness, grief – there are too many competing feelings to accurately tell which one – and collapses into my grasp. She thrashes for a few moments, coming dangerously close to offering something like a punch, but she is slight and her will broken and so she quickly slumps.

I press the sweat-slicked ceramic of my mask against her ear. “I told you once that there are oh so many things worse than death …”

She sobs quietly, I continue. “ … And you think you have experienced them all. That is why I knew you would act rashly, like this. No, Miss Mearns, not yet. The dread that makes you think there is no reason to wake up to face another day is still to age, still to ferment and mature into something far more delicious. It is not time for you to go because you have not learned your final lesson, not yet. But here, now, is your opportunity. Your moment to learn.”

She falls back into my hard embrace, one which cares nothing for her pain or misery. Her shoulders shake, chest heaving with every agony that sputters and chokes through the tears. For a few moments she simply despairs, interspersed with an occasional attempt at speech which descends into sniffed consonants and gurgled vowels.

Dutifully, I sweep the matted blonde out from her swollen eyes with my prosthetic. Cassiopeia struggles in the impossible ambiguity of it after all; desperate for any comfort but disgusted by the notion it might absurdly be me who provides it and so she walks an impossible line – jerking forward before sinking back. Trapped between what she wants and what she hates. Just like a formerly Resplendent Hurricane.

Another gunshot rings out, and she starts up. The plastic fingers of my hand curl around a shoulder and force her back down.

“I think you knew I would be here,” I offer, as much in thought as expression. “Even in such pain and suffering, you cannot commit without some external validation. It must be exhausting to be so … Torn. To lack clarity.”

She says nothing at first, almost petulant. But the temperature continues to fall and the river continues to surge past below and eventually, Cassiopeia has no choice but to respond.

“What’re you waiting for?”

I smile. “Your blessing, to give you what you have waited so long for. The final lesson: living with the terrible things you have done in the dark, because you cannot get out and find the light.”

Her tears fall anew, but this time there is too much metal and hopelessness for them to find the river again.
 
_________________________________________________________________________________

[The Rapture]

The complex ballad of life can be summarised as a series of opportunities to embrace change. There are no constants – no meaningful ones – beyond beginning it, and ending it. The entirety of that span, between those two arbitrary points (mostly) outside of your control, is a gradual conversion from potential to reality as time moves on and the former is used up. Along the way, we all must apply the lessons taught by bitter and blessed experiences to recognise our full potential and achieve all that we can. Only then, can we be the very best version of ourselves.

Why are we here, if not to improve? To grow? And as anything which lives and scrapes together sufficient cognitive ability to recognise that fact, pain and its associated miseries are such a wonderful method for stimulating growth. Nothing easy, after all, was ever worth having.

To plateau is to die the little death. If you are not moving forwards, you are moving backwards. It is with some disbelief then that I find myself doing the unthinkable and repeating what has gone on before. Regression is a hard and closed fist to my existence, because it is forced on me by those who either should know better or do and think nothing better of it. Nothing new, only a retread of a story that was worn-out the first time it was opened and read. A book which has no new lessons to tell me, because I have already moved from cover to cover and found it wanting.

An insult. A tyre iron to the shoulder, to draw another intoxicating memory out. Such sweet Oblivion.

To be granted the chance to learn these lessons, to sit underneath the shade of the hot sun for a while and listen, truly that is a wonderful gift for anyone to receive. Eagerly. And I have dispensed so much of my wisdom across this company and its assets: delivering choice education to those who have carried its subsequent scars onwards as permanent reminders. These wounds I gift as lessons. Each made choice and carefully inflicted, something I am only so pleased to provide safe in the knowledge those that limp and grimace and grip the edges of their sinks in the morning, racked with the pain of those lessons, have taken all my words and agonies to heart. It is in my own small way a contribution to the betterment of others.

And yet, Crystal, you are here again. With a new name. Again. Not only have you failed to show the proper appreciation and respect for the effort I previously gave to disavow you of your flaws, you have embraced the very weakness I so generously showed how to purge. Whether through ignorance or spite, you have chosen to commit the most serious insult I can think to suffer:

Wasting an opportunity I have gifted you; turning away from the lessons I have taught and wrote in scars against your skin and on your mind. Did you experience insufficient pain, necessitating a second dose of reality? I am interested in whatever it is you feel you did not receive the first time you were so brutally put down.

To all those welcomed to my Rapture I gave such time and effort. None were dismissed, although some were treated with the appropriate lack of respect they deserved. A few were targeted with extreme prejudice, as Miss Hernandez can attest. I have not seen her in a while – presumably still walking the block she formerly dominated, now made resident in rent-controlled accommodation courtesy of the reigning Internet Champion.

Was I not generous in my attention? In my haste to move on to deliver my grand design, do you feel as if the pain you suffered was not everything you hoped for? Is this some sadomasochistic attempt to wound yourself for the pain you have caused others?

Is this about Seleana? I regret that there is not the time to spare to dissect that again.

There are such masterful things at work now which demand my attention and effort, and I regret there is precious little time for me to uplift the Bombshell Division at the pace I have done so previously. There are so many deserving women waiting for their opportunity to embrace change through the twin pleasures of misery and suffering, by my thorn-painted hand.

There is one in particular who now carries a heart that used to belong to someone else. Something I would be most interested in reclaiming on her broken behalf. If only because it would wound her more deeply than even the exquisite agonies I have already visited against her. But that is not the task to prosthetic (hand). No, instead I must deal with a Ghost of Zdunich Past. A step backwards instead of forwards.

So consider how deep that depth of insult will be to see you stand opposite on Sunday in Phoenix, Arizona. Lessons already dispensed, wisdom offered – and turned away by likes of you. It is more than disappointing. It is unacceptable. Who are you to deny me? A so-called Hall of Famer who has spent more time in pursuit of success than enjoying it? A handful of precious memories strung out on lights joined by year-long toil in nothing of importance at all. The other Zdunich in name and spirit.

Seleana could do so much better I think.

Over the past few months I have set about building a vast, silver and brass edifice which will change this company. My Celestial Machinery. Its intricate parts fashioned with painstaking precision, built on all those who have come before me and been made better – and enraptured – for it. Even you, before your insistence on a second attempt at the impossible. All it lacked was a heart to power it, to give it life so that my vision, my grand design could at last be enacted.

And that heart began to beat last weekend, when I took it from Amber Ryan’s chest and set it in its place alongside mine. After all, I told her she was the heart of the Rapture but I did not say the rest of her was required to facilitate that new beginning.  She will not need it anymore, anyway – for I have gifted her the greatest kindness of all; absolution. Freedom from suffering and the ambiguities of who she is versus who the world would like to see. A beautiful mercy. A hurricane, dissipated.

Now, Amber can return to the second man to make the mistake of crossing her path with any permanence. Her gift for bringing suffering to others is matched only by her capacity for self-delusion in the face of the obvious. Still, where Mister Bane is diminished, my Songbird is uplifted. It is all in service to the grand design.

Curious that accolades – Championships – do not stay long with the males she invites onto her web. An entomological mystery we do not have time to examine, since there is never to be another chapter in the Case of the Hurricane that Thought it Could … But Could Not.

Still, there is one aspect to her absolution which gives me a moment’s pause. Amber had a protege. Miss Blackthorn. She could yet be of use, depending on how deeply her scars truly run. Her story has such a gilt of tragedy that holds in tandem such appeal. A moment’s pause extends, and thoughts turn to whether I had focused on the wrong woman …

Tantalising but ultimately, another distraction. Something to be considered when I have dealt with the lesser Zdunich again. Such repetition has become boring. Blase.

Still, all of these things that are now coming to pass demand my fullest, most rapt attention … And yet I am distracted, forced to look away from perfection, my Rapture, to look down at you Crystal and ask – ironically, given the ambiguities – “Why?”

Why are you here again?

It cannot simply be because you were told, or assigned, or anything so procedural. SCW has already proven that being directed to face a particular opponent is no obstacle to avoiding them. Otherwise, I would have delivered my precious lessons to Mercedes Vargas and her partner Miss Steele, instead of Dollar Store-discount demons in faux-blood and pseudo-gore. Nobody except fools and little children called Chloe simply do what they are told within this organisation.

Why are you here again?

Are you on some newly-motivated mission to find the happiness you could not find with Seleana? Do you think you will find it in some trinket made from tarnished gold-plate and sweat-stained leather; something you have already tried and failed utterly to take from me? It is dangerous to covet something so intensely that you are willing to be dismantled. On the first occasion, I was willing to reassemble you into something groundbreaking and beautiful. This time, I will leave your parts to rust in that warm summer sun.

Why are you here again?

This world is run-through with sin, sprouting like the tufts of weeds from between cracked sidewalk slabs. The flawed stumble everywhere, their bleached existences competing for the prize of most meaningless and non-contributory. At every turn I am beset by those who should understand their role in the acceptance of the agonies they are assigned by tutors who are trained and educated; from my thorn-painted hand to the wounds on your body. And yet, they drag heavy feet against the stony ground with slack jaws and wide eyes, drawn to simple tokens of success like the Internet Championship. Lured by lights in the distance.

It is dangerous to follow lighthouses because of the lack of anything else in the dark. Just ask Miss Beaufort. There are so many roses clipped from my garden, brought up to my painted face and enjoyed. One must be careful with their thorns, though.

Crystal, you have made the final mistake in a long and inglorious career of errors by turning those wide eyes upon me a second time. You are the epitome of this Division’s bloated form – distended by averageness, engorged on fleeting moments of success as short as they are multitudinous: singular points at which your fingertips brushed against greatness before it continued on and you spiralled down.

Why are you here?

If my prose is too complex, too sophisticated, too flowing, let me offer you something crushed underfoot and deep into the shit. Under the pointed apex of the GCU Arena this Sunday, I will fucking end you.

No complex metaphors spun out on threads of allegory or metaphor. There is no divine purpose for which your suffering can act as tribute or contribution. The sole purpose of my venture at Climax Control will be to inflict such an agony on you that there will be no deluded third attempt at relevancy. You were allowed to leave our first dance together because I gifted you those moves from which to change, to grow – to become something greater than the sum of the half-dozen surnames you have carried so far. Instead, you wear your sins with the same pride you carry in your fleeting accomplishments. You have learned nothing.

You did not listen to me, Crystal and so now, you will feel. I can only talk for so long before action becomes a welcome respite. Even servomotors and actuators become tired if they are forced to repeat the same moment over and over again. Does it not shatter you? To repeat every mistake as it is the first time of making? Drain every sinew, hollow out your bones?

Why are you here?

I will put you flat on your back, staring up at the spinning overhead lights, blood pooling in a halo of failure drawn all around a head that is filled with such incredible imagination to believe you – the other Zdunich – could ever deign to take my gateway, the Internet Championship, from my cold, dead hand. I have turned this accolade, previously a bauble of the former most Dominant Bitch on the Block, into a place of education. Of learning. Here, the brave and the eager and the foolish all jostle for a chance to be transformed. To be given new purpose. Enraptured.

You were once given such an opportunity. Look how you have squandered it, like your marriage and the latest iteration of a life that has been reset so many times that the latent memories of each previous failure begin to form some gestalt additional failure of its own. So many past lives lived in misery, they become some homogeneous error that follows you around for all time.

Sweep those blue locks that induce visual cortex migraines out from your glassy eyes and see what has been achieved in my grand design. I have taken the mightiest Champion of recent time, one who worked three hundred and fifty seven distinct miracles, who defeated all comers again and again and again and broke her. Dissipated her winds, quelled the storm and remade stormy skies sunny. You bask in the warmth of a world without Amber Ryan, who would just as surely dispose of you at the second as twelfth attempt, because I willed it. Because I wrote it. Because I delivered it.

Why are you here?

Is it something more simplistic? Is it less title glory or redemption you seek, but absolution in your complete and total destruction? Tell me Crystal, have you grown tired of the emptiness that comes from being a walking falsehood? An example of bravado, of ego looking for a justifiable reason to exist? Have you simply come to Phoenix this Sunday to die? I will be only too pleased to expedite your request. You stand at the midpoint of a peak you could not climb even before you first understood the difficulty of the ascent, when naivety as to the scale of an insurmountable challenge was still an ally, at least notionally. You have only become older, slower, more fearful and less sure in the intervening time and somehow, you believe this qualifies as reasonable grounds for a second attempt?

Is there a numbness that takes your heart in its nothingness and squeezes tight? A reflection in a six-dollar motel bathroom mirror which looks like you but does not feel like you. Does not feel at all. A paralysis of spirit that leaves the body to move, to respond; to fight and flight but on some autopilot that steers you from one disaster to another. Tell me, Crystal, is your skin cold to the touch? Do you fear failure as much as the success that has eluded you for such vast swathes of the disappointment otherwise marked as a career?

Do you miss the way it feels to be validated? To be something. Someone. You are so very far from home, Miss Zdunich, but there is no path back to Kansas that runs through the Rapture, for I am it made manifest; a swirling vortex of change that has turned this Division inside out and to pause my great work to focus on you is an affront. An offence. You are nothing and that is where you will be returned, so completely neutered and rendered harmless that you will be left to compete with Miss Benton for softest in head and weakest in spirit. A contest more suited to your skillset to emerge as runner-up.

I destroyed Amber Ryan, and that makes me mighty. You have destroyed nothing more significant than a marriage.

Why are you here?

There is one final permutation to explain away the unexplainable. A final solution to the question that has been maddening in its simplicity versus rational justification. Perhaps you are here, Crystal, not because you think you can win, or because you seek an expedited end, but because those with influence and power have realised too late what has come for them and their precious Division – and company.

They were only too pleased to turn their masked boogeywoman on those that frustrated or inconvenienced them. A weapon to be freely employed in reminding those with ideas not consistent in assigned stations of the consequence of crossing authority. You would be a strange choice, Crystal, given your clear inferiority but how many other loyal foot soldiers remain who would take that order at all? There are better candidates to take my lessons and attempt to teach me, but they either will not or cannot do such bidding. Miss Johnson, our current World Champion, is the former. My Dissipated Hurricane, the latter because she cannot stand without medical intervention.

After all, I am not sure your acting career is one to provide sufficient income for the life you have become accustomed to. There is little call for someone who can so effortlessly wield failure and underachievement – a limited skillset in this industry of sanctioned violence and unpleasantness.

There is one aspect by which you can take comfort in what is about to happen to you – again. You will be an exclusive audience of one to a truly memorable moment. Free from the concerns of false goddesses and their compassion-based poisons, it is time for me to deliver my vision to all and sundry. I have walked a long and shining road inlet with the precious metals of all those who have sacrificed themselves: roses, dominant bitches, darling dreamscapes, strange beasts … You. This has prepared the way but the true work is not yet done, and we have a little further to go. The summit of this Division beckons, one which was formerly occupied by a Hurricane but is now the residence of a Superhero. I think it is the perfect place for a Rapture.

You represent a pause I was not prepared to make. With so much to do and so much pain to prepare to inflict, this is a distraction I do not welcome. Still, some wonderful things can spawn from the spontaneous, the unforeseen. The unrehearsed.

On Sunday, Crystal, there will be no script despite the fact that you have already had a rehearsal for what is about to happen to you. No lessons. No place on offer in the Rapture because it is no longer something on the horizon, but a tangible and glorious change here, now. Whether you act as collateral damage which escaped its first scheduled appointment with destruction, or an exclusive audience of one, it does not matter. You are not fodder or fuel – you are simply in the way. Perhaps the question as we prepare to do this again is not so much why you are here, but who you are.

Have cheap motels and B-Movie supporting roles worn thin like the threadbare carpets you pad barefoot over? How did you know she was sick of you? Was it a sudden dissociation at the end of a pink bakelite phone, or the long death of a love suffocated by distance and tamped by apathy? These are the same questions I asked you before but this time, the answers mean nothing to me.

Perhaps, they mean nothing to you. Or at least, the real you.

It must be difficult to pretend to be someone else. Not in terms of profession – but to deny the truth of yourself, to yourself. To spend so long building a facade to present to a world which did not ask to know you and does not care; a silent fortress taken from one of your many silver-screen hits that reveals its flaws and compromises when the camera pans a little too closely. Thick black walls that sport curious patches of white, where hasty primer peels off to reveal soft polystyrene underneath.

I already know you more deeply than any of those who have lent you a new surname over the years. It is impossible to hurt someone as I have hurt you and not know them intimately. Indeed, this is the only aspect of you which truly surprises me, Crystal: that you have chosen to change nothing – to repeat the same mistakes and missteps and assume that providence, god or a wet ring apron will intervene to get it right for you this time.
Is it ignorance? Or the result of some deep-seated soul searching in the few moments before you step through thick felt curtains and pretend you are not walking to your doom. again.

Perhaps, the question you should ask yourself is not why you are here, or who you are … But when.

When will you feel anything, ever again?

On that singular subject, given careful definition, I would be so pleased to help provide the answer: Sunday, in Phoenix.

Welcome to the Rapture.
 

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.

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.”

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.