Mcmolly

Amygdala Circuit

Besca watched Follen closely. He had a particular way of dealing with confrontation, depending on who it was and how much they knew. She’d never seen him faced with an accusation he couldn’t skirt, be it by lack of evidence or quality of his “character”. She’d never forget the first time she’d cornered him after Westwel. It had been right here on the Aerie, at the great window in the observatory. She’d asked him who he was, and watched his amicable façade slough away, watched his eyes go hollow, and saw for the first time that her friend was dead. He’d been indistinguishable from the void behind him.

But this was different. He wasn’t being confronted with anything more terrible than what she’d done, and he knew it. There was no need to drop the mask.

“I do know where she was, yes,” he said, meeting her accusatory tone with one that was at once innocent and repentant. “I’m afraid the orders for her arrest came down while I was mid-procedure. Besca alerted me, and I had just enough time to lock the doors to the OR so I could finish up. They would have brought her down there with her leg stapled shut, still riddled with growths.”

His eyes flicked to Besca. She grimaced but didn’t object; he was speaking the truth. It was a harsh truth, but those seemed to be his favorite. Follen thrived in the worst, most hopeless situations, but not in the way a hero would. Rather, he attended his duty with the unflinching resolve of a headsman.

Pulling a small pen-like device from his pocket, he crouched down to look up at Roaki. She turned her head away, but he held the thing up to her and she didn’t bat at it. There was a small beep. He turned it towards him, reading from a tiny screen on its length.

“The chill hasn’t done her any favors, I don’t think. We had to flush the modium out of her system, and judging by the sweating, I’m going to guess that my advice for pain medication went ignored.” He looked up at them, namely to Besca. “I don’t suppose the Board has had a sudden change of heart.”

Besca shook her head.

“Well, I can get her a bed tonight, but it’s not going to do her much good if she ends up right back down there tomorrow.”

She glanced down at Quinn, then to the slumped, quiet form of Roaki. She sighed. “You’re officially under orders to keep her here. If anyone comes to get her, you tell them to call me. I’ll handle the Board.”

“Sure, commander,” he said, a smile on his lips. “And the prosthetics?”

Again she paused, thought. Breathed. “Measurements are fine. Do it yourself, and don’t list it.”

“Yes ma’am, measurements only,” he said, and then winked at Quinn. “Though I do a bit of tinkering in my spare time. There could be some…coincidental overlap.”

Besca wasn’t sure how she felt about the idea of Roaki running around Aerie Station with high-end prosthetics. But, that was a worry for another time—hopefully a very distant time. “That’ll be all,” she said, turning to leave. “Goodnight.”

Follen rose up, nodded. “Goodnight, you two.”

Amygdala Circuit

In that brief moment during their hug, Besca heard Dahlia whisper down to Quinn: “I’m so sorry too.”

A relief, for sure. Besca was beginning to understand how well-warranted the outburst had been, but still, the last thing she wanted was to see the girls fight. Dahlia would never fight back, and Quinn would likely hate every minute of it. That the matter had been settled—or at least eased—without love lost, was more than her cynical heart was used to hoping for.

That was, she was learning, the problem.

“Can you come with me? I don't want the two of us to be alone.”

“‘Course, hun,” she said, and saw Roaki’s face twist strangely when she did. Besca frowned. It had taken until she’d stopped, until she’d really looked at her to realize the girl was…well, just that. A girl. She would have thrown Roaki’s application into the bin just as quickly as Quinn’s. And here they both were anyway.

Dahlia retrieved the slice of cake, and together the three of them walked out of holding and into the warmth of the station. They parted at the commons—Dahlia splitting one way, the three of them another—and continued on towards medical.

Suddenly, she wasn’t sure how she felt about handing Roaki off to Follen. The fact that he’d performed the amputation hadn’t sat right with her, but he was the only—and, ironically, the best—choice at the time. Of course, the order for Roaki’s imprisonment had come from on-high, and she’d gotten a stern word about wasting resources on an enemy combatant at all, but she wondered if he truly regrated sending her away. With so much modium in her system, had he the chance, he may very well have kept her in the ward, safe and sound.

As they made their way up to the higher levels, Quinn’s worries were proved true. Eyes followed them, jumping from commander to hero pilot to, finally, the girl in the chair who could only be Roaki Tormont.

The looks were not kind.

No one dared say anything out loud, not with both her and Quinn around, but the whispers were many. Phones came out, the recordings started. She knew by tomorrow there’d be all sorts of videos online, and shortly thereafter, a slew of articles. Helburkan Pilot Paraded through Aerie Station like Hero. Quinnlash Loughvein FORCED to Chauffeur for Enemy Combatant. RISC Diverts Funds, Manpower to Cater to HELBURKAN Pilots.

God, Eusero was going to have a field day.

Their turn into the ward brought them peace, for now. They proceeded down the curving hall in silence until they reached Follen’s door. Three sharp knocks, and a short moment later it opened. There the good doctor stood.

“Commander! Quinn, darling! What a pleasant surprise. What brings you—”

He looked down, to Roaki, who seemed unable or unwilling to look up at him.

“Ah. Is everything alright?”

Amygdala Circuit

Roaki listened—what else could she do? She sat and listened and every word seemed like it had been spoken in a different language. Quinn was at once the most frightful example of a human being she’d ever seen, and something completely and unrecognizably alien. Pilots didn’t think like this, no one who survived thought like this. Mercy was an insult reserved family and other contemptable rivals, and to be dolled out only when absolutely necessary.

There was nothing necessary about this. Roaki didn’t even know what the duel was fought over, no one had told her. No one ever told her, and she never asked. The needs of a fight were simple: there had to be a winner, and a loser. It ended there. She should have ended there. But she’d been spared—saved, and for what? There was hardly anything left of her to save, and what remained was of use to no one.

No home, no family, no Savior, and a ruined body. Her heart lurched as she realized that she’d been wrong. This was mercy, in its truest and purest form. Punishment of the highest caliber, torture to shame a Great House Inquisitor. A great feat, a blow that would have been felt in her family for generations—had she not been so thoroughly excised from it.

So why the fuck was she apologizing?

“S-stop. Stop s-saying that,” she hissed. “Stop saying y-you’re…s-sorry. No o-one is s-sorry. Not…me. Not y-you. Not a-anyone. Never. L-look at us. You won…I lost.”

You’re a pilot. I’m a worm.

The doors opened again. The woman and the pilot returned, the former wheeling a wheelchair in front of her. Roaki grimaced at the sight of them, looking away. She wanted to argue, but she also wanted to plead with them not to take her away. This cell was cold, and hard, and it was exactly what she deserved, but if they took her back to that place, if they took anything else…

But what right did she have to refuse, now? As a pilot she could boast and threaten and fight for the things she wanted, or against the things she didn’t. Now, by all accounts, she was a corpse-in-waiting. Corpses didn’t get to refuse. They didn’t get to speak, either; it seemed she was just as good at being a corpse as she was a pilot.

She’d had it wrong at the duel. She’d called Quinn “deadgirl”, and now here she was.

The woman—Besca, she thought she’d heard—unlocked her cage and stepped in. Roaki flinched away, and she saw hesitation in Besca’s eye, along with a strange recognition. It was like she was seeing her for the first time.

Carefully, she hoisted Roaki up and set her down in the chair. It was soft, softer than the slab and blanket, softer even than her own bed. A tension eased within her and she felt immediately too vulnerable, but kept her silence.

“I can bring her to medical if you want, hand her off to Follen, then meet you two back at the dorms, or you can take her. Your call, Quinn.”

Amygdala Circuit

Roaki’s whole body went rigid the moment Quinn seized her hand. Too slow, she was too slow, too cold to react and now she had it. A pit formed in her stomach, a rose up and choked her—spared her the indignity of screaming when her self-sworn oath was momentarily forgotten. Heart pounding in her chest, eyes wide and fixed on their hands, she felt again a memory of panic. It was as strange to her now as it was then, smaller in scale though only just lesser in strength. A feeling she knew not from personal experience, but from inflicting it upon others.

This was what prey felt like.

Her fingers twitched in Quinn’s grasp. She’s gonna take it. The thought came to her like a spear through the gut. She’s gonna take it. She’s gonna take it. She’s gonna take my hand.

But she couldn’t pull away, she wasn’t fast enough. If she tried, and failed, what would Quinn do then? That anger she’d wanted so badly to stoke out of her on the battlefield was suddenly the most terrifying thing in the world. As she sat there, shivering so hard and so deeply that she could not longer tell whether it was from the cold or the fear, she heard words in the back of her head.

A wolf doesn’t have to catch a hare, only outlast it. Their hearts are so small, the fear and the strain of a chase can kill them outright.

Roaki had always thought herself the wolf, but she was sweating through the cold now. She shut her eyes tight, and waited to die a hare’s death.

“Roaki—god—Roaki. I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry, who did this to you...?”

Silence. A long, icy silence.

Roaki opened her eyes. Quinn’s voice…there was something so sincere there, so raw that it couldn’t have been faked. It was pathetic. She sounded like a scared little girl. She sounded like prey, and it was suddenly unbearably infuriating to Roaki that she was the one in the cage. Her heart slowed, and as the panic passed she realized the fear was only part of the reason she was sweating. At some point she’d begun leaning onto the stump of her lost leg, and the pain was finally beginning to reach her.

In that moment she knew that Quinn wasn’t going to hurt her. Yet. She yanked her hand away, the sweat made it easy.

“I did,” she answered. Pathetic as Quinn was, Roaki still couldn’t look at her. She supposed that made her worse. “I d-did it…to m-me. I g-got in…I’m…” her lips curled, sharp teeth scraping her dry lips bloody. “I’m a pilot. I-I’m a p-pilot. I’m a pilot!”

But the more she said it, the less true it seemed. She wasn’t. Not anymore. They’d taken that, too, and she’d have given every ounce of flesh she had left to get it back. Now she’d crawl like a worm for the rest of her life.

Something dripped from her face, dotting the floor. Sweat, she told herself. It was sweat, because she wouldn’t cry for Quinnlash. She wiped her face against her shoulder just to be safe.

“Wh…why? Why didn’t you j-just…kill me?”

Amygdala Circuit

Both the pilot and the woman recoiled at Quinn’s outburst, at first completely shocked and then, Roaki noticed with growing disdain, ashamed. At first she thought it might be the shame of someone caught doing something they shouldn’t—no real remorse, only sorry that they were being scolded. And she could see that at first, especially in the pilot; that hate in her eyes, like Roaki had tried to steal something precious from her, never snuffed, only cooled to a simmer. But gradually she saw it shift into genuine guilt. They were sorry. Roaki didn’t understand it, but she knew it right away, there was regret.

Her own shame burned as Quinn pointed at her, talking about her like some wounded dog locked in their kennel. Perhaps not as far from the truth as she’d hope.

At an order from her they both departed. The woman muttered an apology, the pilot looked about ready to cry, but nodded obediently and ran off.

Who were these people that Quinn could order them around so soundly? The one she knew would be Dragon’s pilot, though in reality she seemed so much more pitiful than expected. The older woman, she had no idea. She’d been at the Henkersmahl, but everyone had looked at her like she was someone important. Brass, maybe? But why on earth would she bend so easily to Quinn’s will? What sort of hold did she have over them?

Come to think of it, the Quinn standing before her now, angry and as cold as the air around them, was nothing at all like the frightened child from Casoban. Sure, she’d snapped at her, but everyone did that when their loved ones were threatened—that was the whole point. This was different.

Maybe the girl was more savage than she seemed. She might not have killed Roaki, but was this fate any better? She thought about the duel, about waking up to the sight of her leg submerged in modium, and the slow agony of the growths sprouting from her marrow. No. No, it wasn’t any better. It was so, so much worse.

And now, what? Why come here—to gloat? To draw out her torture as much as possible. Perhaps her fear of Quinn wasn’t so ridiculous after all.

“I’m n-not…going.” She hated the brittleness of her own voice. Hated how the quiet made her sound like a glass doll. “T-this is…where I…belong…”

Her hand curled into a fist, slammed against the metal. Just bringing her eyes up to Quinn felt like a feat of strength. Why was it so hard to look at her?

“S-should have k-killed me. Dead…a-anyway. Just l-leave me alone. Let me…die,” she muttered, shivering down to a whisper. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t scream. “D-don’t take…anything else…”

Amygdala Circuit

Roaki flinched when Quinn lunged at the bars. She hadn’t expected anyone would come down here, and she’d just about made peace with the idea of spending whatever was left of her life in silence. So, as much as Quinn’s presence surprised her, what had made her flinch wasn’t the anger in her eye, or the dull clanging of the bars—it was the look on her face. It was that, lurking beneath the rage, and the horror, was something a thousand times more terrifying.

Pity.

“…because I thought you'd like the company…and I wanted to give you a piece of cake. But this...”

She was being pitied. By Quinnlash.

“I'm getting you out of here, Roaki.” She watched Quinn’s knuckles whiten around the metal bar, speaking through a tight cage of teeth. “I know you hate me. But I'm getting you out tonight. And that's a fucking promise.”

Roaki’s jaw clenched, popped. Every muscle was tense and sore and her bones creaked at the thought of moving but she did. Hunched, slow, she pulled herself along the hard ground. The faint warmth of inaction was shaken off like dust, and fresh, new cold found her. She ignored it.

At the bars, she looked up at Quinn. She’d been short before, she was used to that, but this was different. She’d been brought this low, hers was the view of a worm, in every sense. Staring up at her, it was hard not see the one-eyed girl as a kind of hawk, or a vulture, hungry and circling. For a moment she was back in Casoban, looking over her shoulder at Ablaze, her arm pinned, burning. She felt that desperation again, the flashes of pain even in the leg she’d not had for years.

Chiefly, she felt the fear. Quinnlash Loughvein scared her, and because Roaki had spent her entire life having her face smashed into the things she was afraid of, she reacted in the way she knew best.

She got angry. She got really, really angry.

With a lurch she pushed herself up, just enough to her her hand around Quinn’s wrist. Half leveraging herself against the ground, and half letting the girl’s weight pull her, she managed to bring Quinn down and herself up enough to be at-eyes with her. She held tight, hand wrapped in the dry-bloodied gauze that ran up her sleeve, all the way up her arm and around her neck to hide all the new fades from the modium extraction. Her nails dug shallowly into Quinn’s wrist, but she wished, she wished so much, that she had the strength to snap the bone. She would.

“I…”

Her voice withered into a rasp, but she didn’t fall silent because of the strain. Rather, she didn’t know what to say. She was angry, and she hated Quinn; that should have been enough. It usually was. Of all the things Roaki had struggled with, articulating her anger—effectively if not exactly eloquent—had never been one of them.

The longer she stared silently, the worse it got. Hate her, she thought. Hate her! Tell her how much you hate her! Tell how much you want to rip her apart! Get you out of here? She put you here! She—

Ah. There it was. The realization was harsh and bold and would not be denied.

No, she didn’t. You put you here. Not an easy thing to admit, but a reality she’d been squaring herself with since she’d tumbled out of her seat in the cockpit. You lost, you fucking worm. This is your fault. You deserve this.

Shame filled her. Blessedly her face was already reddened by the cold, so it wasn’t as obvious outwardly as it was to her. Heat came to her, but it was in her eyes and she absolutely refused to entertain it. She had begged the pilot who had cut her out of the cockpit, and screamed with the doctor who had…excised her growths. She would not, under any circumstances, cry in front of Quinnlash Loughvein.

“I don’t…”

Thankfully she didn’t get the chance.

There was shouting from beyond the distant door, which flew open to reveal two familiar faces. One was an older woman who had been at the Henkersmahl, and the other…damn the luck. They both came sprinting, their expressions a mix of panic and worry and, when they saw her, burgeoning fury.

“Get away from her!” shouted the other pilot. She slammed into the bars, wrenching Roaki’s hand from Quinn’s wrist. There was murder in her eyes.

Roaki fell to the ground with a grunt, dragging herself back from the bars. The other woman pulled Quinn away, looking her over frantically. She patted her down with gentle hands, and, evidently finding proof that Roaki was as ineffectual a warrior as she suspected, sighed with relief and hugged Quinn tight.

Something within her burned to see that. She looked away.

“What happened?” the woman asked. She was breathing raggedly, her words were thin and strained. “God, Quinn, you scared the crap out of us.”

Amygdala Circuit

It was cold down here, Quinn would feel that first. The further in she went, the less ventilation there was, the less thought there’d been put to the idea that anyone would want to stay down here for any longer than they absolutely had to. Indeed, the idea of a “holding cell” on an installation like Aerie Station was almost absurd; without curated the staff was, how fine-toothed the door to entry to a program like the RISC could be, why would detaining anyone be a worry?

She had the right of it—this place had been turned to storage. The empty cells were stuffed with boxes and tarped outdated equipment that would stay here until someone remembered to ship it down for scrapping one day. Stuff didn’t complain when the air was bitter and cold, when it seemed like the only thing between you and the frigid void was a metal box and your imagination.

The light in the cell flickered as Quinn approached, as though her presence had thrown off some tenuous balance in its wiring. It returned, spitefully dimmer than before. It cast the bars into sharp shadows around her, as though she herself were imprisoned as well.

The breathing she’d followed fell quiet, and in its place was an utterly vacuous silence. When she had finally sat down, and raised her eye, it was not a pleasant sight waiting for her.

The first word would have been: “cramped.” It was a closet, ungloried for how lifeless it was. Cold, gray metal on three walls, a floor, and a ceiling broken only by a single—tempestuous—light. The bars before her were close-set and black like a Modir’s bones. Inside there was only a steel slab welded to the wall, upon which was a blanket no thicker than Quinn’s pinky, and a pillow that looked like it had been dehydrated for shipping, and never quite recovered. A toilet was tucked away in the only dark corner, a dull sink beside it.

A shape sat beside the slab, head uncomfortably leaned against its edge. It wore the thin smock of a medical gown over the short-sleeved shirt and papery pants that were the color of seafoam. One sleeve hung empty, and one pant leg was tied off just below the knee. The other was tied up much higher, almost halfway up the thigh. An avalanche of white hair draped it like a sheet, matted and unwashed and so dirty it was more gray-brown than white, now.

Quinn would recall dun silver eyes on a ghost-scarred face. They seemed somehow duller now for how sunken they were, and unabashedly red. The ghostly scars had expanded on the left side, almost like an entirely different layer of skin, just as dirty as her hair and broken only by now-dried tear streaks.

It took several moments to even tell if the girl had heard her. Her head turned slow, creaking—shivering. Her knee was pulled in close to the chest, but she had to let go to lean off the wall. It looked like she could hardly sit upright on her own.

Dry, crack lips parted, took in a chilled breath. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse, sick. It sounded like she hadn’t spoken in days.

“What the fuck do you want?”

Amygdala Circuit

Quinn’s words sunk in like fishhooks, sent pangs of guilt through them, then dredged them up to the surface. It had been a very, very long time since either of them had thought of an enemy the way Quinn did.

It was like this at the start, Besca knew. A lot of pilots saw themselves like knights, saw themselves as honorable and chivalrous, only ever doing what was necessary. Before long they became disillusioned, and either reveled in the violence for the sake of their fame and glory, or numbed themselves to it. She’d watched it happen to Dahlia, watched her love of piloting curdle on the dueling fields in real time when the Board propped her up as their trump card.

With Quinn…she didn’t know. She just didn’t. Part of her wanted to believe that this was more meaningful than it seemed to many others—that this sympathy, this mercy wasn’t a fluke, and wouldn’t shrivel up the moment things got truly difficult. Quinn was many things, but she was not a quitter, and, to here Dahlia say it, she wasn’t a killer either.

The other part of her despised the fact that the world would take advantage of it. They would see weakness where there was good, and hunt it like bloodhounds after dying game.

Now Quinn wanted to break bread with one of those hounds.

It was hard to think of Roaki the way Quinn did. But it was Quinn she’d tried to kill, and if she could forgive something like that, shouldn’t anyone be able to? Perhaps it was beyond her, at least for now. She wouldn’t able to look at that girl and not see someone who wanted Quinn dead. Wanted Dahlia dead. Whether or not she was a monster made by someone else’s hands, she was still a monster.

“You shouldn’t,” Besca said. “You hurt her because you had to. If you hadn’t…you know you had no other choice. I won’t say you can’t go, but you can’t treat her like you owe her a debt—she’ll collect on it. Just be careful, that’s all. I just want you to be okay.”

“Yeah… Dahlia nudged her empty plate aside. “Just be okay. I’ll leave my phone on, you call if anything is…off. Or wrong. Okay?”

Amygdala Circuit

The cake was good—more importantly, it seemed like Quinn enjoyed it. Dahlia was content with that, and was more than a little bit thrilled by the prospect of getting to spend a few afternoons teaching her sister the ropes. She wasn’t especially well-versed in baking, but if it meant getting to spend more time around Quinn, listening to her laugh, seeing her enjoy herself, then she’d certainly read up.

She was happy. Really, she was, but there was one small seed of concern. In another glance to Besca, she could see that it was shared between them.

“Oh, hun,” Besca said. “You wanted to—you were gonna go tonight?”

Dahlia nodded. “Mm, yeah, you know, it’s kinda late.”

“Late, yeah. Guards are probably off-duty for the night, and she’s…uh…you know, she’s probably asleep by now.”

“Right! She’s probably super tired anyway. I only just got out of medical today, and all I lost were a couple fingers and some bones. I bet she’s clonked right out!”

Amygdala Circuit

Dinner passed in relative quiet, though not for lack of will. Good food made talking difficult, but every now and then, between bites, one of them would chime in with some observation, or a joke, or a little anecdote about their days. Quiet, but contented and pleasant.

When the meal was done, Besca cleaned the dishes while Dahlia took the cake from the oven. It looked plain, but then, to someone like Quinn who’d never seen one before, what else could there be to it? Dahlia showed her. She brought out icings in an assortment of colors, in flavors from chocolate and vanilla to strawberry and pumpkin. Quinn had no preference—no reference to have one—and so let Dahlia decide. With a wide, flat knife, she began to spread vanilla over the cake, and then once she’d demonstrated, handed it over to Quinn and let her finish covering the rest.

That done, handed her a squeezing tube, gestured to the various colors of icing and asked her: “What are we celebrating?”

It took some time, but eventually, Quinn took up the yellow icing—a shade not dissimilar to her eyes, or the streak in her hair—and hunched over the cake. With delicate if imperfect form, she began to push letters onto the flat top. “E”, “V”, and then later a “Y” and an “N”. It was hard to tell what exactly it was that she was writing. Both Dahlia and Besca squeezed in close, hovered over her, and still couldn’t make it out until she finally set the tube down and sat back, proud and excited.

It read: EVERONE’S ALIVE!!!!!

Dahlia and Besca exchanged a look, but it was all smiles soon after. Quinn was right, after all; everyone was alive. Everyone had come back from Casoban together, and that was because of her, because of who she wanted to be.

Because of the kind of pilot she was.

Besca retrieved some plates, while Quinn continued to scrawl little figures onto the top. “Not too much,” Dahlia said, when they were nearly through a second tube. “Icing’s heavy—you’ll want to be able to taste the cake.”

She cut a slice for all of them. Quinn pointed out which figure was which, and Dahlia parsed it so that they each got themselves on a plate. Thick slices, just enough to fill what room was left after dinner.

“What do you think?” Dahlia asked, slicing her piece apart with a fork. “Too sweet? Too hard? Do you like the vanilla, or you think you’d wanna try something new?”