The Withered Husk Of A Gifted Six-Grader

“I don’t know.” She pushed their leg out of the way as she opened the other saddlebag, straining to hear the treatise echoing across the water, but it was impossible to pick out the words from the muddle. Under normal circumstances, she had no notion of what could move Yuen-Fa to reach out a hand to a Midtowner; at this moment, there were few with more reason to be uncharitable.

When the generators roared back to life, she hissed and shaded her eyes against the brightness reaching across the water, touching every shore of the city. She blinked hard, rubbing her eyes as they refused to adjust; Kaia was shaking her shoulder and pointing excitedly, eyes keen on the tiny figure just barely visible on the edge of the harbour, leaning down to offer a hand to her nearest Midtowner. "See, I knew she would."

Yes, of course she would — it was ridiculous to think that she'd let a single freezer go empty over a grudge. Even if everyone in the city took a spot, there would still be room for more: room for Mal and Clover, if she changed her mind yet again. Waves of boats had begun to launch from Delany, floating in V-formation toward the temporary harbour; Mal sat back in her seat as she watched the migration, shoulder brushing against Kaia's, one hand digging into her thigh as the other clenched around the handles of the bike. All of the possibilities hurtled around in her chest like swarming birds, demanding that she make the right choice and know it, even though it was impossible: how was she to know if Clover would happily forget the colour green ever existed, or if she’d hate her Istá for stealing away the chance to know her birthplace? If she’d ever forgive her for staying behind, or if she’d build the Santa Maria herself, just to get away? She pushed her glasses off of her eyes, distancing herself from harsh, high-resolution reality, letting the stark lines blur until the boats looked painted onto the shimmering water. She didn't long for her camera: watercolours would be a better medium to capture this strange mood, the not-quite-true-to-life image she wanted to carry in her mind's eye.

“Mal,” Kaia said, squeezing her shoulder, bringing her back to the present. “What do you want to do?”

She took a sharp breath in and shook her head to clear it: the question was clarifying, narrowing her focus down to the path directly ahead of her, the future limited to the single hour she allotted for herself to get in, find Gwenh, and get out. There was just enough light to see the road; she revved the bike, taking shallow breaths as Kaia locked their arms tightly around her waist. Time slowed with the relative width of her path, seconds crawling by as the pavement bottlenecked to a foot-span of serviceable road, the bridge itself falling away in massive chunks of rubble, rebar breaking through like tree roots; minutes were measured in trickles of sweat and the ache in her knuckles as she weaved and threaded the needle between too slow and too fast.

The roads were only mildly better on the other side of the bridge and further north, but they were less crowded: more and more people drifted by on boats in the channel instead of travelling on foot, lit by lanterns and flashlights strung on the ends of long poles like fishing rods. Midtown’s outposts and checkpoints were all abandoned now that it was time to board the Niña, and by the time they got to the next crossing there wasn’t a soul to block the way — less than a day ago, venturing into Midtown from the Untouchable side required a file in the Database, a series of documents from your employer promising that your presence was legitimate, and a full-body frisk. The bike's engine squealed even louder as they raced over Midtown’s pristine, gloomy roads, the tall buildings interrupting the light from the bay; she could barely hear Kaia’s shouts for her to take it easy, only knowing they were still on the bike by the death-grip of their arms around her waist.

She suspected that she might have been able to find the MEC blindfolded, just by following the steadily-increasing ache in her stomach. She ripped into the lobby and stopped on a dime; her mask felt like it was fused to her face with sweat and dirt as she pulled it off and heaved deep, intentional breaths, taking advantage of what might be the last truly clean air she'd ever get: without the false atmosphere, the air inside the MEC would remain clean for only a day. Kaia stumbled off of the bike, slinging the cradleboard off of their back and holding it close to their chest, hiding it from the cameras — as long as no one realized that the cradleboard was empty, they would hopefully be spared from execution. “Where to now?”

“Upstairs,” she said, because she didn’t know the word for 'penthouse' in Kanien’kéha. The lights in the stairwell flashed intermittently in the silence, either as a visual alarm or a result of electrical failure, exacerbating the headache blooming behind her left eyebrow. By the eleventh floor she was staggering under the weight of her rushing blood, pressurizing in her forehead and in her gut; she signalled to Kaia to stop for a moment at the twelfth landing, leaning against the wall to catch her breath. They glanced at the numeral over the door, and looked away with a grim face. She stared for longer, fingers refreshing the five little bruises she had already dug into her thigh, crumpling the fabric of her pants in her palm: without knowing the particulars of Isaiah’s plan, she could only guess if it had gone off without a hitch, or if there were still people trapped inside. Did her responsibilities extend to those hypothetically in need of rescue? Did it matter, when she knew that Gwenh would be in reach of Render, who would in turn be in the penthouse, nowhere near the twelfth floor?

In the end, she wasn't as good a soul as Yuen-Fa. She turned her back on the twelfth floor and kept climbing, her pace varying wildly as she struggled to keep up with Kaia’s longer stride, to breathe with her body instead of against it. Three more flights disappeared behind them, then four, and the final landing opened into a cluster of dusty and disused hallways. She navigated the maze with grim aptitude, towing Kaia along behind her as she carved a sure path toward the northwestern corner of the building. Behind a door identical to all others, the long hallway of photos stretched toward a tiny square of blue-and-amber light, flickering gently like a candle. She paused in the threshold, certain she would vomit, until Kaia squeezed her hand and muttered a reassurance in her ear.

She shook her head and pushed on. The two of them crept silently forward, breathing into their hands to muffle their whistling noses and rasping lungs, Kaia treading in her footsteps to dodge creaky flooring. She couldn’t help but stare as she passed by the prints, all of them off-kilter and slashed to ribbons, or lying on the floor in states of shattered glass and crumpled canvas. The victims of Render's wrath, once he realized that his gambit had failed.

She rocked back as Kaia tugged on her hand; she looked back to find them staring at the photo of Constance and Ben sitting on the loveseat, hanging on the wall with a broken pane and deliberate slashes across their throats. She could hear the faint wheeze of distress as they started breathing harder, eyes brimming with tears.

"His family," Mal whispered, tugging on their hand to try and break the spell. "His son is somewhere in France. His wife is on Proxima."

The information didn't do much to soothe them. Their eyes kept drifting back to the ruined photo, until she took them by the shoulders and physically turned their back on it, coaching them to breathe slow and deep with a forceful hand on their chest.

"We're ending this, tonight," she told them firmly. Her own eyes were stuck on the portrait now, and it took tremendous effort to tear her gaze away and focus on Kaia's pallid face. "Can you hold on, just a little longer?"

Their breathing was still shaky as they nodded, and she wanted to get them somewhere safe and bring them all way back to being okay, but there was just no time. She squeezed their hand and pulled them along, mouth pinching shut as she took passed more destroyed photos, more beds of shattered glass and splintered wood and torn canvas. The destruction hit her with a deep pang, even with so many other things at stake; she forced herself to look away and ignore the taste of blood in her mouth.

But the taste refused to be ignored. Her nose wrinkled at the scent of it as they came within spitting distance of the hallway's corner; she tried to squeeze her knees together as she walked toe-to-heel, hoping to stave off the bleeding for a moment, and only suspected that something was off when she felt the toe of her slipper sink into a wet spot. She was already stepping back when she registered the soft squelch, hoping that the leather wouldn’t stain; Kaia made a soft noise as she accidentally bumped into them, and the sound morphed into a sharp, keening gasp. She swatted their hip and shushed them, though she wanted to gasp herself at the violent, smearing breadth of the fresh blood staining the carpeting, the glistening spray of it on the walls and ceiling, all of it gleaming pitch-black in the flickering light. The spot she had stepped in was vaguely hand-shaped and firmly defined against the white fibres, its twin sitting nearby: someone with a not-insignificant amount of blood on their hands had pushed themself to their feet, right where she was standing. She stared down at the marks, perfectly aligned with her moccasins, obsessively tracing shape and colour and intention, too afraid to look up and see whoever was sprawled motionless at the hallway’s end.

The light from around the corner wavered, shifting to briefly illuminate the bowing of a lopsided auburn braid and the pale stretch of a tattooed forearm. Kaia gasped, and so did Mal: the second wind of grief was no lighter as it raced through the well-travelled roads in her heart.

“Gwenh,” she breathed, staggering closer, crumpling next to her, hands clasping on her shoulders. She pressed her ear to her chest, and heard nothing but the sound of her failure, funneled back like a seashell. "Gwenh, wake up," she whispered, cupping her face in her hands. Her mouth was slack, and under the blood Mal could smell the aroma of roses, peppermint, juniper berries: the funeral florals sat bruised between her blood-flecked teeth, a chewed mash of leaves and petals and fruit not even bound by the burlap netting that undertakers used when preparing the bundles. "Gwenh, come on, we gotta go."

She didn't reply, head lolling as Mal cradled her face, body limp as she heaved her up by the shoulders and persuaded her into her lap. That more than anything should have made the truth apparent, but her trembling body kept trying to reject it, unconsciously rocking back and forth as she mouthed apologies against the flecks of blood on her temple. Her knees soaked up the blood in the carpet as her hands unconsciously moved over Gwenh's body, trying to find the wound and close it up again. Maybe, if she fixed the outside, it would fix the inside too—

“Ah, she finally returns.” Every word from Render’s mouth was punctuated by a wet, painful gasp — one of his lungs had been punctured, she distantly thought. “You took your time, Mal. Don’t tell me that you were lying about caring for Twenty-One, too — did she know that you weren't coming back for her?”

Mal lifted her head slowly, eyes struggling to focus between the different focal distances and the blurring tears. She could see his silhouette sitting with his back to her at the head of dinner table, bathed in harsh blue light from the security feeds projected on the wall: most of the feeds were pure static, but those remaining showed the road outside of the MEC, the view of the lobby's elevator bay, the twelfth floor landing, and the corner where she, Kaia, and Gwenh were currently sheltered. Kaia was in full view of the camera and blithely unaware of it, their fingers pressed to the pulse in Gwenh's wrist. They sadly shook their head, the sight echoed half a second later on the wall across the room.

The sight realigned some disconnection between her mind and body, closing a circuit that sent a righteous and unrelenting force through her limbs. She laid Gwenh tenderly down and kissed her forehead, folding her hands over her chest — the florals weren’t enough to mask the smell of blood, but they steadied her a little, nudged her toward clarity. The knuckles of her left hand were bruised and split, her untrimmed fingernails caked with gore, all locked around the hilt of a bloodied jab saw. “Her name is Gwenh, Aris.”

“Was.” He rolled his neck with a sigh, and reached for the half-empty bottle of wine — there were two others sitting on the table, completely drained, and behind the dark curved glass she could see the shape of her camera. The plate before him was full, the food looking dark and charred, same as the plate sitting to his right. The blue light glinted against the blood on his hands, black and drying tacky. “Who’s your guest?”

Too late, it dawned on her that she should have prepared Kaia more thoroughly for this scenario, should have predicted that they'd have their own fears of returning to the MEC, lingering just below the surface and inadvisably disregarded in their rush to help her. She frantically motioned for them to keep calm, but it was too late: they had already spotted the camera over their heads, and the feed on the wall. They froze in terror, eyes locked on the camera, chest heaving in fear as they struggled to keep the cradleboard out of sight. Their body was stiff as stone as she pulled them closer to her.

"Nervous one, aren't you? I knew it was strange, suddenly having a new nurse to keep track of — especially one who trained in a place called Akwesasne." His accent grated painfully on the word, the consonants simultaneously too hard and too soft. "Is that what 'elsewhere' means to you, Mal? I don't appreciate lies: if you had been honest with me, I would have welcomed your spouse and child happily. So many families are torn apart these days; I would do everything in my power to keep the three of you safe, if you would just let me."

It seemed that he had learned to recognize the implicit threat in such a statement and make it explicit, how to leverage the vast differences in their stations to maximum effect. Kaia had their hands pressed against their mouth to contain their shrill, panicked breathing, hiding in her shadow and staring at the camera with wide, terrified eyes. She abruptly stood, reaching for the gun; before she could impulsively put her one bullet through the camera's lens, Kaia’s hand wrapped around the inside of her knee and squeezed, urging her to pause.

“It's not worth it,” they hissed, hand and voice trembling with fear. “Let's just take Gwenh and leave—”

“Speak English, would you?” Render’s voice was that of a petulant child. “You're not in Kawehno:ke anymore, you should speak English.”

“Stay with Gwenh,” she told Kaia, tugging out of their grip and approaching the table. All at once, it settled into her mind why Gwenh laid in a pool of blood while bearing no bloody wounds, why Render was struggling to breathe: the many holes perforating his torso were the cause of the mess, weeping blood that shone like obsidian in the shifting light. He was only clinging to life by the sheerest thread of luck, the blade having missed his jugular and carotid and every other part of him that would have secured a quick death. White hot rage coursed through her body, mostly directed at the unfairness of it all: what kind of forces were at play to ensure that Render clung to life long enough to kill Gwenh with his bare hands, when Mal had personally ensured that she had a weapon to defend herself? By all rights, Render should have been dead many times over, long before he ever dared to lay hands on Gwenh and drag her into Midtown.

He stared blearily up at her as she stood just out of reach and mused on how she would tear him apart, inch by inch, if only she could ensure that he wouldn't die of blood-loss two minutes in. She took a deep breath and pulled out the chair to his left, setting the gun on the table as she sat down and leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “You know what comes next, Aris.”

His eyes sluggishly tracked to the gun, and then to the bullet dangling from around her neck, swaying gently as she breathed steady, purposeful breaths. His wounds were making him sluggish, and it felt like hours before he understood her meaning. “I don’t want to die,” he said with a definitive shake of his head. Blood pooled in his mouth and trickled from his lips as he grinned self-assuredly, like this was all one big misunderstanding that would soon be corrected — like he was calling a bluff.

She snapped the chain from her neck, meticulously prying apart the brass jump-rings and loading the bullet into the gun. “What you want doesn’t matter. No one here is going to save you.” She paused as he began to cough, threads of viscera spraying over the table and the wall of projected feeds, his jagged wounds shaking and gushing with the force of his expulsions. She paused, waiting for him to settle down, wiping away the blood that had landed on her cheek. “You are going to die, no matter what, but I get to kill you.” Were she a better, more patient person, more deserving of the love Gwenh had been trying to give her, she would let Gwenh's blows be the last; however, all she wanted in this moment was for it to be over, to reach across an impenetrable boundary to hold Gwenh's hand and have her back, one last time.

“You wouldn’t, not in front of the baby.” Render's breathing was coming faster, turning shallow and panicked. He turned suddenly to Kaia's hiding place, making an aborted movement to get up out of his chair; had he made it more than an inch, she would have killed him where he stood. “I know she's here, I want to meet her — let me hold her, before I die.”

She grabbed his shoulder and forced him to focus back on her. “Why should I? You had your chance with Ben.” She remembered the photo, and the taste of blood bloomed so suddenly across her tongue that she thought she had bitten herself open.

“I’ll do better,” he gasped, tears mixing with the blood on his cheeks. He weakly reached for her gun, bloody fingers sliding over the barrel as he tried to wrestle it from her hands. “I didn't do it right with Ben — I promise I’ll do it right this time—“

“There is no next time. You've had your chance, and now it's gone.” She knocked his hand aside easily, ensuring that she had the bullet waiting in the chamber. She paused, and let herself be cruel: “You squandered your time with your wife and child, Aris, and you have no one to blame for dying alone but yourself. You should have looked elsewhere for your replacements.”

He sucked in a painful breath, and laughed. “Don’t flatter yourself. When I look at you, I don’t see my wife — I see myself.” His mirth was soon overtaken with another fit of agonized coughing. “In you, I see me; in me, see yourself, your future. Your friends will leave you, and so will your daughter. No matter what you do, no matter how you cling to them, you’ll always end up alone. No one else will have you, and there won’t be a day that goes by where you’ll be better off than I was.” He spread his arms wide — or tried to. The left fell limp halfway there, and the right didn’t even move. “Take a good look, Miss Y: this is as good as it’s ever going to get. Killing me won’t change that. I'll die alone, yes, but so will you.”

She paused for a moment, taking a moment to consider his words and fight past the knee-jerk denial. “Maybe that’s true,” she admitted carefully. “Maybe we’re exactly the same: that means I can trust you to understand me, right? Maybe better than anyone else.” She raised the gun and cocked back the hammer, taking aim at his head. “I can't let you live: you would have done the same to me, if I had killed Constance.”

“Wait, wait—“ He weakly tried to take the gun from her again, his bloody fingers still sliding over uselessly over the gunmetal, smearing the tacky red over her knuckles. “You said you’re a medic — you’ve sworn to do no harm, haven’t you?”

She grabbed his wrist and forced it down against his knee. “Now, where did you get that idea?” He struggled weakly as she pushed closer, placing the barrel carefully against his temple, exactly where Tai-Song’s bullet had struck him. Her fingers squeezed tightly around his pulse, intent on knowing the precise moment he died. “Kaia’s the medic — I’m just an undertaker.”

***

It took longer than she expected, for a headshot: Render's heart struggled on for almost a minute before fading away.

Her hand stayed clamped to his wrist even after his heartbeat ceased, seemingly welded there to continuously assure herself that he was dead. The shot had passed clean through his skull, the bullet buzzing somewhere in the wall, and she found herself transfixed by the entry wound, the narrow hole that wept a single trickle of blood. She flinched as Kaia touched her shoulder, their voice unintelligible as they spoke to her — she shook her head, muttering something incoherent back. They squeezed her shoulder again and let go, leaving her to sway slightly in her seat; out of the corner of her eye she saw them retreat back to the hallway, and felt untethered from herself as they knelt to lay a bedsheet beside Gwenh's body. Mal couldn’t find it in herself to do anything but hold her vigil over Render, waiting for some epiphany — now that he was dead, it had to be arriving any minute now. She had waited for so long to be at peace: surely a sense of new beginnings was imminent, some kind of understanding or acceptance.

A distant version of herself could hear the elevator ding across the room, the sound of crutches clacking sharply over the flooring as Goose came closer. The beam of a flashlight darted over Render’s slack face, and they sounded inches from vomiting: “Oh, Christ — is he dead?”

“No life signs,” Zed muttered, after a brief pause. “Dead.”

“Good.” She could hear how their grip tightened on the handles of their crutches — she felt a little like she was observing from a distance, from behind and to the right, vividly imagining that she could see how their knuckles trembled under the sudden squeeze, how they shook their head to banish the ugly sight before them, turning to more pressing matters. “Where’s Gwenh?”

She returned to her body with a violent jolt, her shoulders flinching inward, hand shaking as her fingers arched and crushed into Render's wrist: she wasn't strong enough to do real damage, but it would have left a nasty bruise, if he had been alive. The gun slipped out of her other hand, falling to the carpet with a metallic thump; she could barely lift her head, resigned to letting it loll heavily to the right. She could see Kaia kneeling by the shroud, staring back at her. A trail of heat moved down her cheek, and Goose's voice was too loud in her ear, making her flinch:

"Mal, where's Gwenh?"

“Come here,” Kaia called, oh-so-softly, as though beckoning children, gaze lifting from Mal to address the ones behind her. Goose obeyed easily, making it three steps before they choked out a sob, almost dropping their crutches as they lurched kneel at their sister's side; Zed was slower, taking small, dreamlike steps, seeming just as lost as she had been around Tai-Song’s body. Kaia rose and left the two to mourn privately, coming to Mal's side and pulling her chair away from Render, physically turning her away from him to break the sightline. Now facing the window, she let them slide the camera strap over her head with tender, careful hands, let them wrap her into a tight embrace that pressed her forehead into their soft navel. With the weight of their arms around her, the adrenaline finally eased its grip on her heart, and she sagged against them as she began to shake and gulp down heady gasps of air. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath.

“It’s done,” they told her quietly, holding her steady, a hand settling on her nape and gently squeezing. “You’re safe.”

She wondered if the shake in their voice would be permanent, if it'd be her fault if it was, if they would ever forgive her for all that she had put them through. Her overstrung eyes ached. “I need another shroud.”

***