Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. XXI – Lady with the Lamp
[The Past – Forward Field Hospital, Southeast Nagorno-Karabakh, Central Caucasus]
The glow trades gentle places with the darkness – subtly exchanging the barest of detail, some hint of what’s ahead – in exchange for the substantiveness remaining secret. Faded lime tiles, once brilliant seacrest green, reveal their intermodal pattern painstakingly arranged by hand along the corridor floor over a hundred years ago. Deep gouges puncture their ceramic faces and ugly cracks thread hairline failure, but they still give the eyes something artisanal to watch as the feet follow.
Thick bundles of electrical cables hastily tied together run where the floor meets wall spaces; their multicoloured, rubberised casing fading to monochrome as the light in my hand leaves them behind. The bubble of light around me is diffuse, and it ebbs and wanes as doorways out to either side swallow more of it to light their ruined interiors. Still, the lamp in my hand lights the way and I follow it.
There is a misconception, made more real by errant war films and dramatisations, that field hospitals are alive to the groan and the moan of the agonised, the sick. The dying. That their pain reverberates around whatever blown-out shell is repurposed to house them in the name of expediency: some sickened choir singing low and weeping.
In reality, it is a place of utter silence. Powerful cocktails of tranquilisers and painkillers reduce the broken bodies in their cots to mewling and burbling. Depressing their breathing until each intake of breath is shallow and slight, the diaphragm hardly so much as trembling with the barest jerk. An all-consuming unconsciousness that almost robs the most automatic functions of life of their motivation to work at all.
The largest ward spreads out in front of me. I believe it used to be a ballroom of some sort, for long-term patients, carers and families to forget their anguishes and traumas when this building still functioned as a sanatorium half a century ago. There are remnants of its old life still clinging on in the shattered stumps of crystal-lined chandeliers above, or the last splinters of varnished oak panelling still anchored to the punched-plaster walls like spindly, creeping vines. A veined-marble floor that had presumably hosted a hundred waltzes and doodlebugs was all but hidden under a hundred plus narrow beds.
It is strange how even robbed of all its vitality, its sensation … How the consciousness that makes a person themselves still lingers, even when all but the most animalistic portions of the brain are suppressed and deactivated. It is both a curiosity of anaesthesiology and the Human Spirit that even under the intense medicating, the most slurred senses can still stir.
He senses me before I am within touching distance, but I am not sure how. It cannot be the light I am carrying – the wounds which saw him carried in here make sure he will never see another thing again. It cannot be the mere proximity of another person: the day staff minister to all the wounded several times a day, and he is surrounded by other casualties who can still communicate, to some extent …
… And yet it is always when I move through this space, in the early hours on a cold, frost-speckled morning. Expectantly, his left hand – still coated in the pulverised grey dust of atomised mortar from the brick wall that exploded and took his sight – trembles and then it tips over to lie palm up. His fingers splay wide open.
I pause over the bedspace, lowering myself down to kneel on the cool marble and setting my lamp down where it chases away the shadows underneath. That is what some of the other staff have taken to calling me. The Lady with the Lamp. Derogatory and sneered by some, said with hope and uplift in their hearts by others. A few prefer the aloofness of Doctor DeLune and regardless of what they think of me, that is the only name ever spoken to my face.
His fingers twitch again and he takes a long, rasping breath. Something wet gurgles at the base of his throat. Reaching into the folds of my coat I pull free a nondescript brown plastic bottle, twist the cap free and empty a half-dozen capsules into his trembling palm. He shifts subtly, in some sort of discomfort, until I gently close his fingers around the pills and he stops moving.
He will be dead by the time the sun comes up. So will a dozen others.
Retrieving my lamp, I climb back up to my feet and continue through the rows of beds. It is an unavoidable burden in a necessary evil. There are not enough resources for them all. Ultimately, those that cannot get back to their feet and get back into the fight are of no use. Not out here, where might is decided by how many rounds are still in your chamber, and how many bodies you still possess to soak up those wielded by your opponent. This is an internecine, brutal civil war. Brother against brother. Friend murdering friend over some ethnic or religious divergence.
I do not really care why they do it. Only that it produces those who are in need of medical expertise, and that is my requisite. My purpose and skill. And a necessary component of that is the ability to triage, to determine need and severity and prioritise accordingly.
To prioritise, to triage, one must judge. And so by day Doctor Abigayle DeLune treats and ministers and heals and by night, the Lady with the Lamp judges and makes the former’s task that much more achievable by sun-up.
An unavoidable burden in a necessary evil.
There are so many who should never have come to fight here. Idealistic young men and women drawn into an idea only to discover the horrifying, practical reality. Who died clutching ragged stumps and begging for their mothers. Others who have survived, but only at the cost of growing into something dark and terrible; a million miles from the righteousness they set out to instil in the wider world.
All too often, the world they sought out to change instead changed them. Poisoned them. Corrupted. Others, of course, are jackals. Drawn by murder and suffering to revel in it far from oversight or consequence. Unfortunately, they are the ones who rarely find themselves at the receiving end of my judgement.
They are generally too good at what they do to require a bed under my care.
With a jerk of my wrist I unlock the side door and push it open far enough to admit a single whip of plunging-cold wind. Crystals of ice spin and whirl on the updraft, until the warmth of the ward melts them out of sight. Outside through the mud-smeared, cracked glass snow falls in thick, ragged plumes from a storm-tossed sky. The old man sitting up in the bed next to me grunts, hand pressed against a stained bandage stretched across his chest and weeping a watery pink fluid. His milky eyes meet mine and he tries to speak, but all of the air he can muster in his crushed lungs only allow for wheezing and groaning.
Still, he looks at where my hand rests on the tarnished brass handle of the door and manages to nod. He understands what to do next. He should never have come here – caught up in the dreams of his past while what little was left of the future wheezed its last few inflamed gasps. Another mistake …
But so many who come to fight in places like this make mistakes like that. He is only relatively unfortunate in being made to pay for it by taking matters into his own hands.
They will come for this place in a few days, as the line pushes back. There will be some token effort to evacuate; to move the sick and the lame but in reality every vehicle capable of moving a warm body is better spent moving their equivalent weight in warm clothing, or ammunition, or food stores. Those that cannot walk out will die on their backs, because the enemy is no more willing to shoulder them as a burden than we were.
Perhaps in more refined times, in more understanding places, a place like a field hospital would be respected. Even spared the worst excesses of fighting, but this is not peer-on-peer. This is not honourable, or measured. Or regulated.
This is Brother versus Brother. War to the knife and the hilt. They will all kill each other, and I have no desire to be there when they do, or waste resources on those that will soon be joining them.
The distinctive thump of artillery makes those broken clumps of chandelier on the ceiling swing lazily, and a half dozen bodies jerk as something instinctual fights through their medically-induced comas to make them flinch.
It is strange how even robbed of all its vitality, its sensation … How the consciousness that makes a person themselves still lingers.
[The Rapture]
I have come upon a revelation, and it has been carried forth on a litany of all those who have tried and failed to put an end to me. A tapestry has been woven of the women – and men – that set out to interfere in my grand design, because every single one of them operated the same curiously group-borne delusion that they alone held some novel insight into what lay underneath my ceramic skin. For my part, I was too focused on destroying what had come before to see the lessons that were painstakingly threaded and weaved together: a new reality coalescing around the dreamscape I had put down without mercy.
Oh, I have spent so long dispersing hurricanes and vanquishing superheroes, that I had not stopped to ask myself a fundamental question. What now?
Amber Ryan is gone. Broken. Crippled. Perhaps she will eventually feel the need to hurt someone professionally again, and given her dubious connections in sin and sinful cities, I have no doubt the requisite medical fitness records or powerful drugs required to make pretending they are legitimate believable will appear without too much effort … But her legend is culled. Fire extinguished. It is over.
Even her so-called protégé, a young girl marked by a Black Thorn, has been silenced by the plastic stranglehold of painted thorns pressed between gnashing, bleeding lips. There will be no renaissance. It is over. Still, she was strong and by the terms of our agreement, she may yet be useful in what is to come. Her part in this, at least, is not yet through.
The husband of Miss Ryan, Mister Bane, is no longer World Champion and his usurper carries in him the capacity to remember a song I sing with such carefree enthusiasm. Mister Davison thinks he has moved on from the darkness which saw him put his hands on Mac’s wife, but after taking a personal interest in educating the new Champion on my own personal methodologies for crippling, there is still potential to sing it together. A duet would be wonderful.
At last, the Bane-Ryan hegemony is broken and its power distilled.
My Heroine, Miss Johnson, has personal matters to attend to – namely retiring her wife permanently, before she can cause through word of mouth and lack of deed even more agony for their family. Others have tried in that time, such as Miss Vargas, and they have acquitted themselves well enough in the miseries and choice suffering gifted between, but despite the unified desires of the wider company, that same curious group delusion, the Bombshells’ World Championship is still mine.
The heart of this company is still mine. Her heart is still mine.
What now?
The answer has been written in all of my most beautiful deeds, but it has taken until now and a refreshing moments’ pause to glance back and see what it has been waiting to tell me. It is no longer sufficient to simply smash those who crave glory against the rocks of the edifice I have built. It is no longer sufficient to use their own desire and hunger as a convenient mechanism to deliver them within reach of my most wonderful and painful lessons.
No. It is time to go to them. To wander into their ignominy – dark and cold – and bring forth light to see and fight by. The gold faceplate girt by dried red held above my head on sweat-stained, leather backing is my lamp and it will let them know that I am here.
A Bombshell with an Opportunity. A Lady with a Lamp.
And so there is no need to find a lure, a reason to attract my attention. The skills of a Siren are wasted when the target comes of their own accord, and in just over a week I will meet one in the form of Miss Steele. An extrovert by nickname and apparent nature; a broadcaster of noise and effect and a shining light for attracting attention. But it is a curious mix of circumstance that makes you the latest to attempt to pry this title from my cold, plastic fingers.
I think you are here because they have run out of any other names to suffer in your stead. After all, how odd to think that following such an absence and brief competitive return, you have earned the opportunity to become the World Champion so simply. What great competitors did you lay low to earn that right? Perhaps, more likely, you have simply earned the company hierarchy a little more time to consider their options as they desperately struggle to arrange something of heft and weight to act as a bulwark against me.
You must have seen what I have done to all the others, Kath-Lyn? Such a beautiful name. All those blue-haired, bright-eyed, enthusiastic newcomers and battle-hardened, elite veterans. Regardless of their motivations or achievements every single one of them has uniformly failed. Even where they have struck out some singular success – epitomised by Mercedes’ dogged resistance or Roxi’s victory – they were ultimately token examples of meaningless resistance. It was always inevitable.
Compared to such lofty names and vast merchandise-movers, what precisely do you bring that they did not? Is it another tired and two-dimensional assessment of who I am and why I do the things that I do? Will you wax ineffectual lyrical about why I hide my face, or what happened to my hand, or make agonisingly ham-fisted allegories relating to Halloween?
My greatest works are complete, and now I am tired of the chittering, mewling voices that chirp and warble at my feet for attention and succour. For a while I was content to leave them scrambling in ignorance, to step down on their weakling, pulsating forms when one occasionally coalesced into something sufficient to stand and be struck down. But now, I am tired.
I am weary of talking – specifically, the words of those who cannot deny what their eyes tell them but choose to do so anyway. That watch challenger after challenger wilt and buckle to their knees before my Rapture, and still profess it will end all too soon. I am so very tired of talking and so now, it is time to go to them and judge them. Find them wanting.
Let me see the shape of their fear by the light of the Championship – my Lamp – they covet so desperately. I want to see their face contort in the realisation that it was all some terrible, awful mistake. To realise in that singular moment that they should never have come here and should never have crossed me.
[The Past – Forward Field Hospital, Southeast Nagorno-Karabakh, Central Caucasus]
The first blow drew a red streak across the insulation blanket behind; the second broke something in her jaw. She dropped to the plating and a fist crashed into the bloodstain above, punching clean through and into the machine spaces. Lashing out with a snarl half-strangled by the mouthful of iron, the flat of her boot met a planted shin and won. His leg buckled and with a forearm still buried in the wall, his body stretched out supine and helpless. Abigayle tilted her aching head up and drove a fist hard into the wide eyes staring back down.
The insulation blanket crumbled, and he slumped down on top of her, unconscious.
Abigayle spat clear her mouth. “Remove him.”
With the weight lifted, she rolled onto her front and used the jagged hole in the wall to pull herself up to her knees, fingers cradling the swelling side of her face. The crowd looking down from above bounced their dislike against the metalwork, banging and shaking and raging against the barriers all around. She grabbed a handful of the shirt of the Medical Orderly pressed into service as a Referee – and the skin underneath – as he stooped to check on her opponent, pulling him in with a sharp tug.
“Being unconscious is as blissful as it is going to get for him. Do not be in such a rush to ruin that hard-earned rest.” Something hot and painful worked against her jaw with every word, trying to force it shut. “I think it is time to meet my fanbase.”
Her grip only got tighter and he nodded frantically, groping against the floor as best he could with one shoulder pinned back. She ripped it from his grasp as soon as it got close enough to snatch, sending him down the short distance to the floor with a hard shove. Her slick fingers left damp trails across tarnished metal as she ran her hands across the prize, bringing it close enough to breathe deep the stink of sweat ingrained into the cracked leather.
Her prize.
Struggling up to stand on burning, heavy legs, she held her free hand out to the side and beckoned with a finger back behind.
Picking himself up from the floor with a grimace, the Referee took his cue and Abigayle thrust the old tinpot Championship title up opposite with her raised arm, letting the heavy faceplate flop over and clatter against her wrist. Individual insults about her parentage and the way she looked dissolved into a thoroughbred, powerful roar of disapproval. Her head swam. Dozens of bodies pressed against the barriers forming a circle of seething anger all around and above her head – but they were toothless. Tough on talk and weak where it counted, down here amongst broken jaws and the concussed unconscious. Their toughest man was gargling softly at Abigayle’s feet, pooling red spittle around her toecap.
She flung her head backwards and swept a tangled mess of platinum blonde hair out from her eyes. Then she gave them a look as arrogant as her swollen face would allow, drinking in the hot air and intensifying outrage. Some of them had bet heavy and lost hard tonight; others just craved the sight of her lying face down, warming the rest of the field hospital through conduction between her face and the superstructure. Those with the least about them – and the loudest voices – were probably a little of both. That just made it all the more satisfying. She won, they lost. Twice.
The baying crowd shrank back at the clang of her boot against the first rung of the ladder that led up from the old vehicle inspection pits. Above her head, distorted barriers relaxed into their housings as she climbed and the insults got less explicit and less directed now there might be the chance someone would have to pay for them.
Abigayle was in no rush on the ascent, giving her heart and face a little while longer to recover from the adrenaline high and battering blows. By the time she hauled herself up over the lip, a wide path had split the crowd in two, reduced to murmurs and harsh whispering. She squeezed the thick leather between her fingers and let the metal plates bolted on skip and ring against the floorplates where they trailed.
She forced the deadbolt back into its housing. It could only be opened from the inside, the second change she had made when it became obvious just how popular her time at the top of this impromptu fight club of sorts was turning out. The mesh door was bowed in at either side, squeezed like a fattened hourglass. Bent by years of thrusting hands trying to push their way far through enough to actuate the lock, get inside and even the odds in favour of the stupid bet they’d bet.
The mesh gate swung open with the tip of her boot, spattered cherry red. It swung outward – the first change she had made. The distance down to the fighting floor below was just far enough that she didn’t relish the idea of being killed through strategic use of a door by someone just brave enough to charge her with a steel barrier in-between or surviving the fall but at the cost of having her chin potentially become an internal organ.
The clatter of the Referee – or the man she’d taken ten years’ life expectancy from – starting their climb reverberated all around against the grimy machine spaces. Abigayle forced the gate shut with the flat of her foot and stepped forward. Some radiated their hate out, staring holes through her they could only wish to cut for real. Others didn’t have the strength of will or feel much like taking the risk of making eye contact. A few cupped their hands around snarling mouths, dispensing their expertise about why her sixty third successful consecutive so-called “title” defence was actually firm evidence of her impending defeat.
Just like twenty-seven. Or forty-nine. Or fifty six.
She pulled the leather through her grip until the big circular plate hung prominent and parallel to her bruised face. Most of the words on it, like the stylised engraving of two men boxing, were meaningless. It hadn’t been used to represent boxing competition in a long time. It was just some convenient physical avatar to identify who was hot to bet on or against, depending on how long they’d managed to keep the trinket their own.
Such were the paucity of distractions available in a warzone.
One word meticulously scribed into the metal was still a reminder. All about the power and the attention. Stealing their attention, reminding them that she was all-powerful, and they were utterly powerless. Emblazoned on what had once been burnished gold, scratched and pockmarked by dents and bulges; deep shadows cast across its face by dirt ingrained into the etched shapes and lines.
Champion. That still meant something. It was the only real agreement that stood wordlessly between Abigayle and the crowd of colleagues, patients and anyone else fit enough to drag themselves across the frozen compound and into the mechanical repair shops where people who should know much better hurt each other for bartership, money and fun. They were all in violent agreement about what it stood for and what it meant, if less united on who held it with a matching sneer.
The pain in her jaw fought and lost with the release flooding through her waking mind. Trembling legs firmed up. She raised her free hand in the air, nostrils flaring at the waft of engine lubricant and sweat. Hers, theirs – it didn’t matter. She could see flecks of old paint spinning and twisting in the light of the overhead strips. The spectators quietened enough for the sounds of a worn-out generator to permeate through; screeches and groans generated by pressure differentials; tuneless melodies belted out through variations in the high-voltage power gear.
Abigayle dropped the dented title belt onto the floor with a clatter and kicked it out into the gap that split the crowd, adding a few more scratches. “Any other challengers?”
A fat head on broad shoulders pushed out from the throng, knuckles tight. He bulged in some of the right places and most of the wrong; a physique turned to fat through too much sunlight, protein, steroids or not enough. She couldn’t pluck a name to match the face, mostly hidden by swollen jowls. Not that it mattered. He opened his fat mouth to say something she did not want to hear.
Her fist slammed into his cheek, swallowed up for a fraction of a second by the thick blanket of padding skin. It kept going until crushed muscle came up against bone, making his head snap back and those balled fists relax.
Glassy eyes stared off into the snow somewhere outside the workshops as his chin dropped back down, a trickle of blood slipping out from between slack lips. Accepting they wouldn’t see a final twist to their liking, arms reached out from the crowd and hooked themselves around her stalled challenger. He sank into their grasp, dead weight.
Abigayle stepped forwards, arm cradling her gut to stifle an ache as she retrieved her meaningless belt. Sixty-four.
[The Rapture]
I can see, Miss Steele, that you pin great importance on dynasty; on tradition and longstanding security. Perhaps it is ingrained into your being given where you have come from, on the distant shores of the United Kingdom, but even so institutionalised there is no legacy that can last for all time. Everything eventually succumbs to disorder and entropy. As your middle-name namesake, Elizabeth, has proven, seventy years after the fact.
You have left behind the death of one monarch only to return to SCW and see the coronation of a new one. As this reign gets underway, I am moved to grant you something of a privilege that I seldom extend to those who wish to do me or my grand design harm. I am willing to help you, Kath-Lyn.
It is obvious that you are not ready to leave the purple velvet-lined, gold-gilt past behind. Memories of the Old Country and everything it stood for. Your Nan … All relics of a past that are hopelessly out of touch and out of sight. None of those things can help you, and the sooner you disabuse yourself of the idea they can, the better placed you will be to grow.
I will help you grow. To do so, there must be a catalyst. Something which can expedite your transformation and there is no better agent of change than pain. It forces action, prevents the status-quo from becoming all-consuming. One cannot truly stagnate if they hurt, and through that purity of purpose, I will ensure that you leave Las Vegas with something of value even if it not what you think you want.
You wanted something special to mark High Stakes – something memorable to act as vigil for the loss of someone so instrumental in your life, even though they cannot possibly have ever known you, or even had any reason to care to. I will do as you ask, and I will make you that memorial you so crave. In Las Vegas, I will transform you into a shining effigy of the bygone era you crave so badly, that you earn to see immortalised. You will be fashioned into something that will stand as a testament to the end of what has come before, and a marker of what follows.
I have been looking for someone to help me usher in such a new era. Someone so utterly divorced from reality that they believe anything except annihilation awaits them in the City of Sin, one week from tomorrow. Look at this tapestry, at the names woven into its threads and fibres, and see the shape of the doom that waits. You are not the first or the last, but you are different. Your sacrifice does not further my plans, or bring me some sick personal satisfaction. Instead it gives you the judgement you have been seeking – external validation that has been achingly absent.
Why else would you have subjected us to the self-flagellation seen at Violent Conduct? While you were talking, as you are prone to do given any opportunity, I put a superhero down and took the heart of this division as my own. Since then, they have come and failed and come again and in that time I have only become more practised and more effective in the subtle art of ending dreams. Legacies. Dynasties.
You ache for some third party to validate you. Whether it is drinking with the boss backstage over your mutual love of an irrelevant constitutional monarchy, or dispensing your so-called wisdom between ringropes to those with more poise and grace than you can bring yourself to admit you lack … There is a consistent, burning need to be recognised.
But recognition alone will not bring you glory. It will only bring you heartache. Oh, Kath-Lyn, you have spent so very long shouting for recognition that you have not stopped to think about the consequences of being granted that fervent wish. The light of attention rarely comes soft and diffuse, and at High Stakes it will blind you utterly.
You measure yourself against the pitiful women you overcame to earn your destruction at my thorn-painted hand: Marlowe, Lukas and Krystal. They are nothing. No datum to measure worthiness against, and certainly no exemplar to underline your so-called credentials. It is only more evidence that for your mutual love of Her Majesty, Mister Ward has little reserved exclusively for you.
What else explains the exceptionally low bar for entry into my domain? You are not the first loudhailer to be expedited into conflict with me by those who seek timely resolutions to irritating, recurring problems. More than one plucky, rinse-haired challenger has demanded opportunity and come face-to-pseudo-face with a reality they cannot handle.
I hope you are ready for the consequence that comes with the opportunity you so desperately crave.
And in the end, it cannot possibly be worth it. After all, how many times have you had the chance to establish your own legacy? To produce something of value that could truly stand apart and alone? Be remembered? Your fourth Bombshells’ World Championship opportunity ends the same way as the first three … In failure. In inadequacy. In shame, but offers a new beginning. One in which you will finally be freed of the delusions and illusions that have conspired to make you think you should be somewhere you are simply not good enough to be. Is that not refreshing? To be liberated from ideas that are wholly unrepresentative of your station?
Welcome to the Rapture. God Save The Queen, because he cannot save you.
[The Present -Lorenzi Park, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA]
I do not need four years of college education, seven years of medical school and five further in clinical practice to assess that she is struggling to contain her emotional response. That in turn suggests a similar struggle to contain the accompanying physical one.
“How much fucking longer is this going to take?”
For all her faults, Miss Blackthorn has a wonderful purity of point that makes her significantly less tiresome to deal with than her now-retired mentor. Perhaps the latter developed her long, drawn-out desire to occupy every conceivable advantage in anything – conversation or fist fight – through the same mistakes and errors of judgement that make Avalon much less willing to resist her first impulse response long enough to let it inform her second.
They are not the same, of course. Given the way their original partnership ended, it is apparent even Amber knew a lost cause when she suffered through one.
Still, it makes for more interesting conversation. I tip my masked face over from across the pathway. “This is not a lesson.”
She blinks, arms still folded loosely over her chest but eyes narrowed. Back straightened from the slouch against the lamppost. “Why are we even here then? Isn’t this where you drop some fourth-dimensional, galaxy-brain-sized mindfuck that has me questioning my own sanity?”
Slipping my foot free from a sandal, I let the damp grass twist between my toes. The exposed skin around the short sleeves of my dress prickles as the temperature drops and a breeze picks up. I think it might rain.
“I am not playing games, Miss Blackthorn,” I offer. She scoffs.
“You’re always playing games. Maybe just not sure if you ever finish the same one you start.”
I laugh, sing-song and she flinches at the lilt of it, levering herself forward. “It’s taking everything I’ve got not to–”
“You are here because you could not deliver what you talked about doing,” I interrupt. The plastic fingers of my prosthetic whirl as the wrist rotates in a biologically impossible three hundred and sixty degrees of motion. “If you had not interfered, none of this would have come to pass.”
Avalon snarls, turning away with disgust writ large all across her youthful features. “Expect me to believe that? After what you pulled on Climax Control a few weeks ago? With that kiss …”
“Do you truly believe I could have engineered that?” I ask, allowing open incredulity to seep into my voice in torrents. “All of those things were because you were determined to make the same mistakes she did, but make them yours. And you did. Although she should be thanking you.”
“Why’s that?” Avalon mutters, chewing on the inside of her lip as she counts the blades of grass at the feet of her converses.
“Because if you had not insisted on facing me regardless of the price Amber paid to prevent it, then it would have given her some comfort in rationalisation and justification. As it was, you did what you wanted to do, not what you should do, and made it superfluous.”
Brushing a lock of hair back behind her ear, the young woman fixed me with a stare fuelled with the disdain of someone ten years more senior in bitterness and anger. “You’re a real cunt. I hope Katie Steele takes it all from you.”
Standing, slipping my other foot free and making the short distance barefoot, I cross to Avalon just as she pushes forward to meet me as far forward as she can manage. Not a hint of doubt stares back at me. “I have one question, and then you may go.”
Another scoff, “How generous of you, Ma’am.”
I stand in silence, head cocked to the side until eventually, she relents. “Yeah?”
“Do you think she will?”
A frown. “Do I think who’ll what?”
“Do you think Miss Steele will?”
Another few seconds of nothing, and the wind picks up to rustle the branches overhead. Copper and oxide-coloured leaves twirl and flutter as they rain down.
“No,” She replies after a long while. “Think she’ll go down like all the rest.”
“Why?”
Avalon chews on her lip for a moment, eyes still locked on mine. “Because they never take you seriously until you’ve got that Fisher-Price Chokemaster 5000 rammed down their soft palette, making them eat their own words. Literally.”
She swallows, and I think she is remembering how it feels, but shows no other outward sign. It is obvious she does not regret her actions, only that they did not lead to the desired conclusion. I suspect significant satisfaction was still gleaned from repeatedly introducing my body to a variety of steel-reinforced objects, however.
“Thank you,” and I nod. She doesn’t bother with a parting insult. Simply turning on her heels and making her way back up the winding path. She does not like these meetings, because she cannot piece together my angle. My strategy. After all, why would I have made such a stipulation, to make her my protégé in our match weeks before, if there was not some intricate plot carefully laid out to ensnare and redirect her?
Miss Blackthorn will never find that angle, because it does not exist. There is no plan. I am simply taking a page out of her mentor’s dog-eared, bloodstained playbook. I am living in the moment.
I call out after her. “Next week, I want you to tell me something.”
She stops, but does not look back.
“I want to know why you went to prison.”
Her shoulders square, fingers curling tight to make fists. For a few moments, I think she might simply turn around and tell me something distinctly different with her hands. Instead, she draws in a deep breath and holds it to burn through the gas exchange process inside her lungs. Eventually, her body relaxes.
And then she continues on. What a curious young lady. If only there had been more time, I might have been able to …
Perhaps there is still time. Perhaps I will make the time.
