Mcmolly

Amygdala Circuit

Quinn was too far away to see the way her words effected Roaki, but the silence was enough. The other girl grumbled over the comms, then scoffed.

“Don’t think you’re gonna be doing much talking,” she said. The cruel grin was almost audible. “But you’ll scream plenty.”

Above them, like a hundred holes poked into the sky, there hovered a swarm of drones. Some were doubtlessly from the camps, but most had been sent by news organizations. Casobani, Helburkan, Runan, likely even Euseran. This duel had stretched on for days, three pilots dead, with one more to follow. It was impossible for Quinn to know if the people of Casoban were aware of how new she was, but it was likely, and right now they must have been wondering why their Ministers hadn’t taken Eusero’s aid. Eusero as well must have been watching with a mix of dread and, perhaps for some, a sense of schadenfreude. They should have taken the hand. Now they drown for it.

But if she thought back, thought about the Board, and the Prime Minister, and the Euseran higher-ups, Quinn would know that in the grand scheme, the only true loser was Runa. That Eusero was waiting, circling above the carrion of this field, ready to pull Casoban onto its deck, and let Runa struggle and sink until they took the hand as well.

On the smaller scale, on the one that faced her now, she and Roaki Tormont were playing a game with no winners. If she meant to change that, first, she’d have to survive it.

A beep in the comms, Besca’s voice in her ear.

“Time to roll, hun.”

Across from her, Roaki dashed for the cockpit. Quinn could hear a brief, discomforted straining in the Pilots channel, and moments later, Blotklau shuddered awake.

Amygdala Circuit

---

---

Dahlia had not kept her promise, she had not stayed with Quinn up to the last moment. It ate at her, but only a bit—she didn’t have a choice, after all. The elevator was making its last trip up to the Aerie before the duel began, and so she broke one promise to keep another. She would wait in the hangar, and watch from the screens, and if things turned ugly she would connect.

And she would save her sister.

It was a good thing a bulk of the station’s engineers and hangar staff were at the pavilion. If there’d been actual security here, she might not have been able to make it to Dragon unquestioned. She got a few odd looks on her way up, and made a show of leaving to go to the dorms. By the time she’d circled back to the hangar, no one even noticed her.

So she sat in the open cockpit, tablet in her lap. Between the heating units in her suit and her intense focus on the screen, she hardly felt the cold. The back of her mind was field of worry, sown with the waiting seeds of guilt. If this went wrong, if she did go down there, she would be breaking the Illun Accord. In the best case she would hang. In the worst, there’d be war.

Besca had seemed renewed with confidence that Quinn could do it, that she could beat Roaki. But when Dahlia had said she was returning to the Aerie, there’d been a knowing look shared between them.

Besca knew what she meant to do, and she hadn’t stopped her.

Among those guilty buds in her brain was a sprout of regret for how harsh she’d been. How she’d doubted Besca’s dedication. She’d never apologized for that, but she would. She just hoped they wouldn’t be her last words.

On her screen, the Saviors moved. Blotklau shook to life behind Helburke’s camp, rolling her shoulders and wiping the black slaver from her mouth. She stomped out over the mountainous wall and into the dueling plains and hills.

On Runa’s side it took a bit longer. She watched Quinn ride the lift up, suit donned and looking down at the camp below. With a sudden sting, Dahlia realized she’d never asked Quinn if she was afraid of heights. She didn’t know why that thought had come to her, but it was suddenly the most important thing in the world that she didn’t know, and she had to physically stop herself from logging over to the comms channel to ask her. Now wasn’t the time, and besides, she’d just broken a promise to her. Maybe hers wasn’t the voice Quinn needed to hear right now.

Minutes later, RS4 shuddered and her posture straightened. Dahlia watched as its giant chest heaved in a deep breath, then another, and a third, and couldn’t keep herself from smiling just a bit. Sometimes it was easy to view the Saviors like…cars. Like things that she technically knew had people inside them, but it never felt that way in the moment. Now and then though, the personality bled through. It already had the eyepatch, she wondered what it might look like with a giant braid slapped to the back of its head.

Quietly, shiveringly, Dahlia giggled to herself in the dark.

Then, as Quinn began her own march out onto the field, she noticed something odd on the register. At first she thought it was a glitch, or a typo, but on a second glance she noticed it was intentional. Changed. Her name had changed.

And just like that, the giggling stopped.

---

---

Quinn sat on her Savior’s shoulder, the sun to her side. The day was calm, and even up here the breezes were gentle and soothing.

Some distance away Blotklau stood, facing her. They’d both walked out onto the hills, far away from the camp, and as per the rules that had been explained to her more or less on her way up to the cockpit, they’d both disconnect and wait another ten or so minutes, in order to negate any phasing advantages from the travel. An odd specification to make, but then, if she thought about Dahlia’s speeds, it made a little more sense.

So there she sat, waiting to hear the green light from Besca. Across from her, if she squinted, she could see Roaki standing on Blotklau’s shoulder as well. A candleflick of white hair blowing in the wind.

Her comms squeaked to life. Was this it? Was it time? It certainly couldn’t have been ten minutes already—

“Oi, deadgirl.” Roaki’s voice was rough in her ears. If she checked, Quinn would see that she was connected to an open comms channel labeled: Pilots. Most of the time it was abandoned—what purpose was there in communicating with someone you were about to fight to the death with? Given it was her first time though, she must have been connected to it automatically.

“The fuck is Ablaze supposed to mean?”

Amygdala Circuit

She’d been right. Of course she’d been right—Quinn was a kid, and for a brief and humiliating moment Besca had forgotten that. She didn’t deserve to be here, fighting for her life against…god, another kid, who she’d been more than happy to spend all night planning the death of. If she had the time to allow herself to feel sick, she would have. But she didn’t.

Quinn cut herself off. It tore Besca’s heart to shreds to hear her apologize, to feel guilty for having a conscience. But it was worse when she asked her next questions.

...How do you live with it?

Does it ever get better?

Besca froze, and this time the pain did reach her face. It was, without a doubt, the closest Quinn had ever seen her come to tears. It was also the quickest she’d ever recovered from it. She reached across the table and took Quinn firmly by the shoulders.

She didn’t know how she lived with it. She had no idea how anyone else could.

But she did know one thing.

“No,” she said, and a hand came up to stroke her cheek. “No, honey. It doesn’t get better. It never gets easier. And it shouldn’t. If something like this has to happen, it shouldn’t be easy, and it shouldn’t feel normal. Maybe there are people out there who do like this, maybe Roaki is one of them. I…I don’t know if I believe that, but maybe she is. What I do know, is that is not you. It never will be. You would never let yourself become that. I know that no matter how much it hurts to do this, no matter how sad it makes you, it won’t make you a monster. Quinnlash, look at me. You are not a monster, and you never could be.”

Amygdala Circuit

Besca’s excitement waned when it became clear that Quinn wasn’t as thrilled by the news as she was, and before she got much of a chance to contemplate why, she was hit with a question that withered her mood instantly, and entirely.

“...Have you ever killed someone?”

How does she mean? was the first thought that came to mind, which was a guilty feeling. She ought to have wondered why, first, or considered how she must have felt to ask such a thing. Instead, Besca found herself wrestling with her conscience for a real answer. If she thought about it for a moment, put her own selfish self-pity aside, no, Quinn likely wouldn’t count Safie, and Ghaust, and Daz, and the rest of Hovvi as someone she’d killed. Nor would she likely include the pilots before her.

She carried those deaths all the same, but for this, she would carry them quietly.

Instead, she addressed it how she imagined Quinn actually intended.

“Yes.” A hard lump had formed in her throat, and swallowing it took effort that almost choked her. “Four. I’ve killed four people. Three before you were even born. One the day Westwel fell.”

Even saying it out loud felt…odd. Like she was drawing on someone else’s memories. She recalled them all through a haze, but at the same time they felt entirely, ineluctably real. Years of separation and callouses helped her to keep the pain from twisting her face, but it was still there, in her eye.

She looked at Quinn, and felt again the unbearable weight of what she was being put through. The injustice. Why else would she ask that question? Why else would anyone ask it?

“You’re afraid. You…you don’t know if you can do it, do you?”

Amygdala Circuit

Quinn had been right—the normalcy didn’t last. As soon as her back was turned she could have felt the eyes return to her, and without much strain she could hear the whispering. Indistinct and worrisome, anxieties she might very well have felt herself, manifesting around her on the lips of people who were meant to be cheering her on.

A screen overhead played the daily news. The volume was low, but the anchors spoke Casobani, so no one was listening so much as they were watching and reading the subtitles. A pair of minor singularities were set to open this morning, and Casoban’s remaining pilots were split to tackle them one-a-piece. That at least explained why most of the Casoban crew were gone now—shipped out in the middle of the night, most likely. Toussaint remained, which was odd, considering he was allegedly the commander. Perhaps he wasn’t anymore. He didn’t look particularly happy.

To be fair Besca didn’t appear to be doing much better. She looked utterly exhausted, which, she was. She hadn’t slept a wink, had spent all night online, searching desperately for anything that might help them.

By the grin that split her face when she saw Quinn, she must have been successful.

“Hey, hun!” she said, voice scratchy but her enthusiasm didn’t suffer for it. “Listen, hey. I’ve been reading all night on this—on Tormont. Not a lot of publicly available information on the Great Houses, even less is translated, but some of the folks here—never mind, not important. Look.”

She slapped her tablet down onto the table between them. On it were dueling records. The first two Quinn had seen; they were Roaki’s official duels as Blotklau’s pilot. Besca pointed to some lines beside the word Synchronir. They’d been highlighted manually.

“Know what that says? Sorry, dumb question, neither of us read Helburkan. It says, ‘Subject was not observed phasing.’ Remember how our info listed Roaki’s phasing time as ‘unknown’? I assumed that was just cause she was too new, and because neither of her duels reached the average phasing thresholds, so, you know, I figured she just phased average. But then I found these.”

Following the two duels were…more duels. Five. They were unregistered, unofficial in the sense that they hadn’t involved a dispute with another nation. In fact, they weren’t even duels with another Great House.

Roaki had fought five duels against her own family.

Besca’s hands flew to the same word. Synchronir. “These duels were all over the place. One was minutes long. Two reached the average threshold. Another went way past the average, slower than Ghaust’s. Way slower. And the last one…god, I’ve never seen anything like it before. She was connected for thirty minutes. And what does this say? ‘Subject was not observed phasing.’”

Besca’s grin grew teeth, she tapped the screen manically. “Quinn, I don’t think this is flubbed. I don’t think she’s slow, either. I don’t think she can phase at all. That’s why her duels are so fast. That’s why she’s so aggressive. She has to win before the other pilots phase because she can’t just stall ‘til she does too.” Her voice dropped low, conspiratorial. “Hun—I’ve seen how you’ve been practicing. I think, seriously, I think if you can just get yourself phased, you can do this. You can actually beat her.”

Something in Quinn’s chest thrummed excitedly.

Amygdala Circuit

The moon never reformed after Quinn shattered it. The water stilled, but the countless rippled-apart pieces remained with an inexplicable void between them. She could feel her words sinking into the lake, and if she peered down into it, might have for a moment noticed something odd—that it was not black. It was just a very, very dark blue.

Quinnlash’s hands balled into fists, but she turned away from Quinn’s gaze, contemplative, almost ashamed. Instead, she looked out at Hovvi, and for a long time she was silent.

“No” she said, and her hands were squeezed so tightly her shoulders shook. “No, she’s nothing like us! Not broken! Bad!”

With a sharp wince, Quinnlash curled. A hand flew to her head, clutching at a horn that had seemed to grow ever so slightly taller in those angry blinks. In the distance, a great shape loomed over Hovvi. Not a Savior, but much greater, much grander. It was the silhouette of a mountain.

“Stupid Helburkan mutt! Taker! she shouted, and pulled her hand away. Blood like ichor dribbled down her face. “We’re good! She’s evil! Good kills evil! Good kills evil and we’re gonna kill her! We’re gonna kill anyone who wants to take our friends away from us!”

Standing as tall as she could, the girl glared hard at Quinn. Quinnlash’s voice boomed within her, as if it rose up from the lake itself. “Now wake up! Wake up and protect my friends!”

And she was awake.

An alarm beeped softly somewhere far away. There was movement outside the bunk’s doors, and the sound of people.

Dahlia was beside her, back turned with her neck-plugs exposed. She seemed to still be asleep.

The realization hit Quinn—was given to her, without request: today was the day she would kill, or she would die.

Amygdala Circuit

As she looked up at the sky, the unruly stars whirled, it seemed, in tandem with her own doubts. They tilted, unlocked from the great void, and followed her eye like they thought they might find an answer in it. When she sat up, they all winked out at once—though the night did not get any darker.

Quinnlash stared back at her, small face wrinkled in confusion, like Quinn had started speaking in Tohoken.

“Because…” she started, and stopped, and started again with more certainty. “Because that’s the way it is. That’s what we do. We’re a pilot. We…”

She paced back, stood up on the bench and looked out over the water. “We should be killing monsters. That’s what we’re made for. That’s our purpose,” she said. “But they won’t let us do that. Now they want us to do this and…and maybe we don’t have to like killing always, but some people…deserve it. Some people deserve to die. Takers. People like Roaki, people like them.”

She didn’t need to point it out. That cliff in the distance was still bare.

“They’re monsters. They’ll hurt us, they’ll hurt the people we love. And they’ll like it. Killing them…we’re doing the right thing. We’re helping. That’s why we should like it. If we don’t like killing monsters, then…what’s the point?”

Amygdala Circuit

Dahlia didn’t hesitate. “Of course,” she said, nodding into Quinn’s shoulder. “I’ll stay right here all night. And tomorrow, I’ll walk with you all the way to the Savior.”

It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth, either. She would stay with Quinn, she’d stay with her as long as she could, as close to the start of the duel as possible.

Then she was taking the elevator up to the Aerie, and she was getting into Dragon.

She couldn’t tell that to Quinn, though. She couldn’t tell it to anyone, not even Besca. Getting up there would an ordeal all on its own, as would talking her way into the cockpit. But she was determined now, and more with every passing second, that she was not going to let Roaki kill Quinn. She was not going to lose her sister.

“You didn’t ruin anything,” she said. “Someone was awful to you—that’s not your fault. It isn’t. Everything she said to you, you just ignore it. Ignore it, because it was all nonsense. None of that is gonna happen—not to me, not to you.

“I won’t let it.”

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Sleep came much more quickly to Quinn than she might have expected, as if it had been waiting for her. As soon as she shut her eye, it came for her, wrapped her in its gentle embrace, and then she sank.

The boat was still.

When Quinn opened her eye, the sky was dark, and this time the lake reflected the moon and not the sun. Its image was imperfect—a crescent where the one above was full—but a step closer to real than before. The water, however, was still pitch black.

Distantly, on the forested shore, she could see the umbral form of her Savior sat down, with its legs mostly submerged in the water. Beside it, the white, skull-faced deer lay resting.

“How dare she,” said Quinnlash, standing on the edge of the boat, peering angrily out at the water. There were no familiar shadows around. Tonight, it was just the two of them. “How dare she threaten us? Threaten our friends? A taker, Quinn, that’s what she is. A mangy dog, and a taker.

Quinnlash turned to her. For the briefest instant her hair seemed brighter, almost as white as the deer’s fur, but it must have been a trick of the moonlight, because in that same moment it was oaken again. She stared hard at Quinn, incensed—not at her, but incensed nonetheless.

“She doesn’t get to hurt us. She doesn’t get to kill us. And she does not get to say awful things about our family. Our real family,” she spat. Her eyes softened, barely, and just for a moment. Then they were sharp as knives again. “She dies tomorrow, not us.”

Amygdala Circuit

Besca caught it early, like she’d glimpsed Quinn’s mind the moment before she broke, and grabbed hold of her. She felt the tears on her shoulder, saw the looks of the few brass and the Board’s dumbstruck representatives. They pulled out their phones, dialed with unmasked and quickly-growing panic. Part of her was glad—they were about to tell the Board exactly what she had tried to tell them before, that this was a mistake. Part of her wished she could stick around to hear the shrill screams from the speakers, too.

The rest of her wanted to get Quinn away.

“Come on, come on, let’s go. I got you,” she whispered, walking her hastily to the exit. They made it out just as the sobs started, and Quinn’s jellied legs nearly brought them both to the dirt. Dahlia came to her other side, helped how she could.

“It’s alright,” she tried, but must have realized how shaky her voice was, and went quiet.

They got back into the pavilion and all eyes whirled on them. Besca let Dahlia guide Quinn to the small, sectioned-off bunks as Toussaint came running over.

“What the hell happened? Is she okay?”

“No she isn’t okay!” Besca snapped. “She’s fighting a deathmatch tomorrow, and she only drew her weapon for the first time last week!”

A look of shock came over Toussaint’s face, and Besca found it absolutely enraging. “Don’t you dare. This is your fault, Jaime.”

“My fault?” he spat, incredulous. “You’re the one who insisted RISC couldn’t afford to pay restitutions for Magnifique! You’re the one who told me to find another way to keep our countries from splitting!”

“Which I expected you could do without getting duped by your own people! Or do you think Casoban plans to pass up on Eusero after we get trounced here? I’d think you did this on purpose if I didn’t know you were an idiot!”

Toussaint’s face screwed up in fury, but Besca only stepped closer.

“I want you to send a message to your PM, Jaime. I want you to tell him that if he gets what he wants, and Casoban partners with Eusero, and RISC leaves here without Quinnlash Loughvein, that we’re not allies anymore.” She leaned down, so close she could feel his breath shallow. “I want you to ask him if this deal is worth every Savior you’ve got—because I promise you Dahlia isn’t gonna be satisfied until she’s mulched every last one of them. And neither will I.”

---

---

Dahlia had squared Quinn, sitting with her on one of the bunks. She hugged the girl tightly, mind racing. She should have been like this—broken, sobbing, dreading the fact that she was about to lose Quinn to something so absurd.

But instead she was angry. Afraid, but also furious. Indignant. No, no she would not lose Quinn. She couldn’t. Besca had been so adamant about the consequences of interfering but faced with the alternative, she was prepared to cut down every pilot and Savior on Illun if it meant keeping her sister safe.

“Shh,” she whispered. “It’s okay. Quinn. It’s okay—I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Look at me,” she gently nudged the girl’s face up. “Whatever happens tomorrow, I’m not letting her kill you. I…I might have been too slow at Hovvi. I won’t be this time.”

Amygdala Circuit

There was movement instantly, and the screeching of chairs being thrown back as every person in the Parlay collectively stood from their meals. No one said anything—only the barest gasp from Dahlia—as Quinn’s hand came to rest on the glass, and she hissed her threat through it.

For a moment nothing happened. Roaki had clutched the table tight when Quinn lunged, and her eyes had gone wide, but she’d not flinched, or reacted. Herr Donner seemed pleased in his unemotive way, cocking a brow at Besca. He cleared his throat to say something, perhaps the ease the tension, or condescend, or likely both.

Then Roaki stood and threw her table over, splattering what was left of her meal against the divide before she lunged forward and slammed her own hand to the glass, right against Quinn’s, with a dense warble. The impassive stare had left her. She grinned madly, her wide eyes held all the composure of a rabid animal.

That fire in Quinn’s veins flared at an alien stoking. A strong and sickeningly pure urge to Fight was thrust upon her. Fight, Quinn. Kill her now rightnowrightnow and it would not let up as long as their eyes met.

“Do it! Come on!” she shouted, forehead pressed to the glass, staring up at her. “I’m gonna kill you—I’m gonna rip you apart, do you hear me? Slowly. Piece by piece. I’m gonna make them listen to you die” Her fingers curled against the glass, like she was trying to claw into it. Blood mixed crudely with the drool on her lips. “And then I am gonna come for them. I’m gonna start with that one, right there, and I’m just gonna keep going.”

This dog needs to be put down came a cry from within her. They all do.

Herr Donner grimaced, marched over. He took hold of Roaki by the collar and pulled her away from the glass. She made motions to shake him off, but even she didn’t think to strike someone like him.

“I believe the meal is over,” he said, and began to lead her away.

“I’ll kill every last one of them!” Roaki roared, still pulling, still fighting to get back to the glass, to Quinn. “And you know what’s sad? You won’t even be alive to thank me—!”

The door shut, and as the rest of the Helburkans began to clean up, Herr Donner’s words seemed to be true. The meal was over.

Dahlia hurried over to Quinn, Besca not far behind.

“I—I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“Me neither. House Tormont has a reputation for brutality but good god, that’s not normal.” She stroked a hand through Quinn’s hair, brow furrowing at how tense she seemed.”"Hey, hun. Don’t let her get to you. She might be loud, but she’s almost as new to this as you are.”

Dahlia took Quinn’s hand, the one she’d nearly smashed into the glass. “I should’ve stepped in. I’m sorry. Are you okay?”