Riley couldn’t tell if she’d blacked out, but she was on the ground, covered in broken glass, and her head was full of a high-pitched whine. Something… something had happened, hadn’t it? Where did all this glass come from? Who was that on the ground over there?
A moment later and it came back to her.
Gaveny.
She got one of her feet under her, then the other. Glass sliced through her left palm, and dragged across her knee leaving a pair of bloody furrows. Fuck it, I’ve had worse.
One staggering step, then a second, and she was at Gaveny’s crumpled form. She looked so small on the floor. So fucking small. Riley’s fingers found her neck.
Pulse. She’s alive.
Fuck, that’s a lot of blood.
There was a cracking sound, something like a dry stick snapping in two, over and over. Crack crack crack crack. Riley realized she was listening to gunfire.
Okay, I’ve got to carry the Headmistress out of this room. If the windows of this room exploded inwards, with Gaveny inside, it made sense that she was being targeted, and not that someone was just going around blowing up windows at random. And that meant that whoever did it was maybe going to come look in and see if they’d hit their target, and do any cleanup.
If she hadn’t been bitching me out, if I hadn’t been there being pinned down and lectured, they probably would have just gotten her.
So that put the Headmistress’s life firmly in her hands. Maybe someone from Logistics was coming to rescue them, but could she count on that? Could she count on whoever that might be arriving before any bad guys?
Who the fuck were the bad guys?
Riley tried to imagine weird corrupted bugs from the anomaly in the City picking up rocket launchers or whatever it had been, crossing over into the Primary, shooting the place up. Probably unlikely. And from what she’d seen of the Academy’s operation here, also unlikely anyone had just randomly gotten past their security.
Okay. Assume more bad guys are coming. What do we do?
Gaveny’s bleeding all over the place. Step one, let’s get that stopped.
That gave a destination. A room with medical supplies. In a hospital, probably not a huge ask. There should be one like, next door, right?
I don’t have any keys or anything like that.
The Logistics agent in the nice suit with the dyed black hair had opened the door for her with a badge. No badge, no entry. She patted Gaveny down for one as she hoisted her onto her shoulders.
Oh fuck, I’m not going to be able to carry her far.
She staggered out the office door with the Headmistress banging against the doorframe. “Fuck, sorry,” she muttered, as though Gaveny could hear her.
At the end of the hall, six doors down to the left, the window was blown out and the nice Logistics lady with the black hair was lying in a pile on the floor, a spray of red all over the wall next to her and most of her head—
red, it’s so red, flashing red
Riley staggered across the hall to the first room there. The door opened, and she dropped the Headmistress on the bed inside. Double room, the curtains all pulled back from around the beds to show the place was empty. Probably there was nobody in any room anywhere on this floor, maybe in this building.
She brushed Gaveny’s matted, bloody hair back from her face. Oh shit.
The glass spray had lacerated her face into ribbons. She was breathing but every breath was a bubble of blood from her torn lips and nose. Her eyes were— her eyes were a ruin.
Okay, that’s a lot, that’s maybe too much, that’s, just need to maybe sit down for a minute here and—
The pooling blood wasn’t coming from Gaveny’s face, though; it was coming from her arm, and the massive gash there. Blood was throbbing out of the opening left by the glass shard that had, it seemed, been knocked free during the transport across the hall.
Pressure. Gotta put pressure on that. She looked around, found a towel. Improvising bandages in a room that probably had roll after roll of the real thing. She folded it in half, then again, and pressed it hard against the open wound.
I gotta tie this with something.
Wires from the monitor station, the thing connected to the IV poles. She took them and wrapped them around the towel, which was already soaking through. This isn’t going to be enough, is it?
You could always—
She cut off the thought. Yeah, the whole fucking past hour of lecture all about how she should not do instinctive magic, and her first idea was ‘let’s summon a demon and see what happens!’
I gotta find someone who knows how to fix this. Riley bit her lip. Therese. If I can get to Therese’s room, I can probably find one of the Healers.
That meant going down one floor, though, and one of the stairwells had the nice Logistics Adept’s brain all over the door. Other end of the hall, maybe? Past the nurse’s station?
She tied the looped wire even tighter, higher up, trying to cut off the blood flow entirely. Just for now. Just for long enough to get someone who knew how to Work or fight or heal or fucking anything up here. She was crying, she realized, her breaths coming in hoarse sobs.
Okay, out into the hall again. Turn left, away from the ruins of the Logistics adept, towards the nurse station. She jogged, trying to be cautious, trying not to panic, trying to stay under control.
Nurse’s desk on her right. Opposite the nurse’s desk, an alcove in the hall’s midpoint held four elevators. She looked towards them as she jogged past, trying to decide if they would be faster or slower than—
ding
The gun barrel that emerged from the opening doors was followed by someone in black with a mask and mirrored goggles. That doesn’t look much like a good guy to me.
She ducked past the alcove, hoping the person in black hadn’t seen her.
“Contact!” the man’s voice echoed off the walls of the hall alcove.
Definitely not the good guys. Girls.
There was a spattering of crack noises, none of which were loud like she’d kind of expected. They were terrifyingly loud, but not like, ear protection loud. More like a set of firecrackers, all going off at once.
Keep running, idiot. They’re fucking shooting at you with automatic weapons.
The corner covered her, and then she was approaching the stairwell. Door on the left. Down one floor. She slowed to take the turn into the door
crack crack crack crack
Something terrible happened to her left leg. It just stopped working, all at once, just collapsing out from under her. She refused to look down. No. No more leg trauma horror nightmares, please. She aimed her fall at the door, which crashed open as her weight hit the bar across its center.
“Hit, she’s hit!”
“Get eyes on her, see if she’s down!”
Men’s voices. Riley hadn’t realized how little she’d really missed them.
She tumbled into the stairwell, and managed to grab the railing to drag herself forward. Right side, stairs down. Left side, stairs up. Down. Gotta go down one floor. She pulled herself along the landing, managing to get her weight onto her right foot.
They’re gonna follow the blood trail.
Riley decided that if they caught her, she was going to call up something really nasty, maybe that Sigil Therese had used, and just set it completely loose on these fuckers. If she was going to die anyway, might as well give them something to think about.
bang
Her left foot dragged off the top step and struck the next one down, and she bit down a scream. She felt woozy. Am I going into shock? This might be shock. Isn’t that lethal, though?
Keep moving, Riley. Keep moving. Keep moving down the fucking stairs. Go. You’ve had worse, remember?
bang bang bang
Her foot striking the stairs, and her grip slipped, and she tumbled. Everything was a confusing mess of gravity and lights and pain, and then she was stopped, against the wall. The halfway point, the first landing below the door she entered by. Oh fuck, there was a lot of blood.
She could feel the itch rising in the back of her mind. Fire trying to burn its way into her consciousness.
Keep moving. Keep moving, Riley. Keep moving.
Therese was awake, now, and she could feel her worry turning into fear. She tried to push urgency and alarm at her, but not panic. We’re not panicking. We’re handling this. Just get people moving. Just get them moving, Therese.
The door she’d left banged open, and she saw the black figures moving into the white of the stairwell, just as she dragged herself over the top step of the next flight.
She fell.
Confusion and gravity and pain. She felt a bone break. Familiar pain, grating of bone on bone. Like she was back in the road again. The fire-arcs started to scrape across her mind’s eye, drawing something, some kind of shape, some kind of Sigil—
She landed in a heap against the wall, on the next landing. The door there, the door she’d landed next to, was identical to the one on the floor above, anonymous and grey, with a mounted placard that said ‘3F’ in large sans serif characters. I’ll never reach the handle. I’ll never make it through that door. She dragged herself up to a sitting position, as the sound of heavy boots on the metal stairs above her sounded, thunder-loud.
The door next to her swung open, and three women in well-tailored grey suits were there, each of them holding a short silver rod. Logistics.
The first one through the door looked down at her, and Riley saw relief on her face. “Found her! Let’s get her secured.”
Another voice, one of the other Logistics agents: “Targets in the stairwell.”
The third woman’s voice, behind them. “ROE says take them down. We’ve got people dead upstairs.”
“Yup.” As one of the women dragged Riley back through the door and into the hall beyond, the other two advanced up the stairs. Riley wanted to shout some kind of warning about the guns, but then the stairwell filled with lashing blue arcs of electricity. The rods they were holding were humming, discharging, spraying the walls and floors and railings with whatever celestial power they’d been Worked with.
“Targets down,” a voice called, and then there was noise and chaos as they started ascending the stairs, military in their precision, but making no attempt at stealth.
“Gaveny,” Riley croaked.
“What?” Now out in the hall, through the door Riley had landed against, the woman holding her by the armpits leaned closer. “What did you say?”
“Headmistress. Room 409. Bleeding out. Brachial artery.” She couldn’t seem to get enough air.
The woman looked blankly down at her for a moment, and then dropped her to follow the other Logistics agents through the stairwell door. “Heads up!” she shouted, leaning into the stairwell and holding the door open behind her with one hand. “Gaveny is down and needs immediate Healing! Room…” she paused, looked at Riley. “Room 409! Fucking move it!”
Riley tried to push herself up against a wall, and drag her legs out of the way, as a pair of women in Infirmary robes rushed past. It would be your luck to trip one of them.
The woman who’d shouted, who was now once again taking charge of Riley, squatted down on her heels. “Novice Hawkins, I want to get you into Adept Lasalle’s room. Easier to defend one location until we can get reinforcements to secure the whole site. But you’re going to have to support yourself some, because I can’t carry you without fucking your leg up more.”
“Had… worse,” she gasped, and the woman grinned.
“All right.” She took Riley’s left arm and pulled it across her shoulders, tucking her own right shoulder into Riley’s left armpit to hoist her up and onto her still-functional right foot. “I’m Marta, by the way. Marta Koval. You considered Logistics at all, when you make Adept?”
Is she really trying to recruit me right now?
“Not… really. Just trying to… you know…” She gasped for air through the pain. “Not die.”
“Right, right.”
They entered Therese’s room; Therese was awake, but her eyes were hazy and she seemed on the verge of passing out. Riley sent reassurance. “Therese. It’s.” She hissed as Marta lifted her into the bed, banging her shattered calf against the edge of the frame. “It’s okay. Made it.”
Marta looked her over. “Okay, I’m going to give you a stasis-stone, which is going to make you feel weird for a little while, because time is going to slow down for you. I need to go make sure the Headmistress is secured, and you need first aid, and I don’t have time to do that right now. Okay?”
Riley nodded, and took the smooth round rock the Logistics agent offered her.
Immediately the room got brighter, and her eyes felt slow and tired and her eyelids wanted to close. Marta seemed to vanish, a streak of motion in her wake, like a light-trail of grey suit and white blouse. Therese blurred in her bed, all her little motions merging into one cloud of positions and postures. Shadows pulsed across the window.
And then, abruptly, Marta was there again, taking the stone away from her. With her was a Healer in the Infirmary robes.
“Okay, gotcha. Riley, this is Healer Mahal.”
The small, dark woman grinned. “Please. Kitty.”
“Still have no idea how you get to Kitty from Mahal, you know. You’ve never explained it.”
The woman shrugged. “It’s a long story that involves baby talk when I was two and an auntie. Maybe we just leave it at ‘it’s a Filipina thing and you wouldn’t understand’?”
Marta rolled her eyes. “Anyway. Riley. Kitty. She’s going to take care of your leg.”
Kitty leaned over to look in Riley’s eyes, closely, while Marta headed for the door.
“Wait!” Riley gasped. “Wait. Gaveny.”
Marta’s face was somber. “She’s going to live. She’s…” She trailed off.
Kitty clearly didn’t believe in beating around the bush. “She’s blind. Probably permanent. We’ll see what we can do.” She smiled at Riley. “Your tourniquet saved her life, though. Good job.” She waved one hand behind her. “Get out, Marta. Go do secret agent stuff. Let me work.”
Riley sunk down into the pillow again. “Fuck. I should have—”
Kitty’s finger was against her lips. “Hey, nene Riley, you did an amazing thing. We’re all in your debt. Now hush and let me take care of you or I will make you regret it.”
Therese was radiating love and warmth, and with that to keep her company, Riley let herself drift into unconsciousness.
# # #
Therese had expected to get relocated after the attack on the clinic, but Marta had explained that they’d have to do all the same work to secure a new location that they had to do here, and trying to keep their location a secret clearly hadn’t worked.
“Who were they?” she asked, and Marta shrugged.
“Terrorists. Mercenaries. Hired guns. We have no idea. Whoever gave them orders did so through enough layers of misdirection that even with Working to strip mine their memories, we found fuck all. It’s irritating, but it looks like a complete dead-end.”
“Divining might—”
Marta grinned. “Girl, you’re not the only Diviner in the Tower. We have access to your colleagues, you know. We’ve tried it. Trail cuts off. Totally dead.”
“That’s not possible unless they were—”
“Worked on? Yeah, that’s the leading theory right now. Someone rogue, someone loose in the Primary. Maybe multiple someones. We have some ideas.” Marta’s voice sounded dark and full of implied threat when she said ‘ideas’.
Later that week, Therese finally reached her limit with bedpans, and demanded to get up and use the bathroom. Kitty hadn’t been there at the time, and the agency nurses were not prepared to oppose her once she’d decided this course of action, and so she found herself tottering along with a walker, creeping across the floor to the bathroom. Her feet didn’t want to hold her up, and her arms could barely support her weight on the walker’s handles.
Fifteen minutes later, a Logistics agent had to pop the lock on the bathroom door to rescue her from where she’d fallen. Kitty had been furious, but in that smiling way she had where you knew she was going to treat you like a baby for the next few days as punishment for acting like a petulant child and throwing a tantrum. Therese probably deserved it, but she was bored.
Riley had left once her leg had been treated with the usual array of Worked healing devices, and Therese had been petulant about that, too; why was it taking so much longer for her? Riley had been shot, and her whole leg was busted and broken, too. But after two days she was cleared to walk and leave, too.
“Maybe if you get shot, babygirl, you can leave early too.” Kitty was only half-listening at that point, because she’d heard this complaint already. “I’ll tell Marta to bring us a gun, okay?”
What they were actually doing to her was, as she’d understood it, completely rebuilding her body from the inside out. The parasites had burrowed all through her, leaving her a honeycomb of passages and tunnels and hollow spaces. Her bones were brittle, shot through with the same labyrinth of worm-bore tunnels, and it was only thanks to Nora’s Working, the big fire circle that had ended the battle, that they hadn’t been able to burrow into her brain. Even so, her weakness was the result of a thoroughly perforated spinal cord, among other things.
So there wasn’t any way to really heal that, and the next best thing was to reconstruct her body from basic principles. The Workings simulated natural growth, finding gaps and trying to fill them, inferring the missing material from the immediate surroundings. It was imprecise and required constant tuning and checkups and monitoring and sessions spent in a loud metal tube to generate detailed images of the insides of her broken body.
The whole thing was something Kitty had developed when she was still in Theory, and it was both brilliant and terrifying. The principle suggested by the Working was that they could make a whole second Therese, if needed. Just grow her from scraps. Just… make her a spare body.
Kitty assured her it wasn’t that simple, that the body was far more complex than her silly Working, but she didn’t get very specific when she disclaimed the possibility. So now Therese had nightmares of being surrounded by clones of herself, unsure which one was actually her, her mind jumping from one body to another.
“You’re being a twit,” Kitty said. “The Working only approximates. If the little burrows hadn’t been so evenly distributed, this would fail. It’s… It’s smudging you, just like if you zoom in too far in a picture and it gets blurry.”
Whatever the explanation, the Working was filling her out, restoring her lost substance, a little at a time.
Every day her skin was less slack against her muscles. Every day her limbs felt a little stronger. Every day, her breathing was easier and her heartbeat was steadier. She didn’t have Riley to give her an external perspective so she could look herself over, but after enough days of complaining and arguing and rationalizing, she did eventually convince Kitty to let her have a mirror.
She still looked like a corpse, but now she looked like an animated, fleshy corpse. Revolting, but in a lively way.
So she was animated and fleshy when Nora finally came to visit her. The door opened, and she took a breath to begin her complaints about the bedpan to Kitty, sure that the Healer was back to scold her some more, and beautiful, pale Nora entered instead.
“N-Nora?” Therese’s voice was a whisper. She wanted to pull her blankets over her head, she wanted to crawl out the window, she wanted to regain the ability to walk so she could run from the room. Anything to not be here in this room right now, with Nora, looking like this, sounding like this. Dead. Withered.
Nora turned slowly, and Therese could see her face was half-covered by the fall of her hair, her left eye hidden behind the silver waves. “Therese,” she said, her own voice barely above a whisper. “May I… may I come in?”
Therese was silent for a moment. Nora seemed different. Hesitant. Concern for her fought against Therese’s own fear, and the concern won. “Yes! Yes, sorry, I’m so out of it, I’m so— There’s a chair over here. You can sit. Um. But bring it close because I can’t talk very loud.”
Nora moved so slowly. She shuffled. She dragged the chair, upholstery over steel bars, institutionally patterned cloth to hide stains more readily, and pulled it to the bedside. She sat down, oh so slowly. Fuck. What had happened to her, when she unleashed that Working?
They sat in silence for a moment. Then Therese said, “Nora? Can I see your… Can I look at your face?”
Nora flinched away. Then she whispered. “Will you hold my hand first?”
Their hands met immediately, and Therese’s eyes welled over with tears. I’ve missed her so much, she thought. How could I not have known how much I would miss her?
She tried to squeeze, but her fingers still didn’t have the strength for much more than a tentative grip-and-release. “I’m sorry I haven’t been to see you.” She tried to laugh, and it was a dry and hacking thing. “I can’t really walk yet, and they won’t let me—”
“Did you mean it?”
“Mean wh— oh.” She blushed as best she was able.
“It’s fine if you didn’t. It was a moment. Of um. It was a moment of extremes.” Nora had turned her head so that her face was even more hidden behind the curtain of her hair.
Therese felt herself shiver with the fear of walking into a dark and unknown place, somewhere with no map and no guide and no star to follow. She’s waiting, and you know the answer, so why are you making her suffer?
“Nora, I—” Her breath caught as she tried not to sob. “When I knew I was dying, I only thought about one thing.” She let her eyes drift down to their intertwined fingers. “That I never understood the feeling I had whenever I was around you. That I never told you about it. That I was going to die without ever getting to tell you.”
She looked up and her eyes were shining and tears were coursing down her face. “Oh Nora, I almost lost you.” She sobbed, harsh and coughing. “I almost lost you and I never told you that I loved you.” The sobs wracked her broken body, until she couldn’t breathe and became dizzy and her terror subsided into a gasping, desperate fight for air.
Nora had sat quietly through it, but her hand had tightened on Therese’s with a sure, firm grip that was both soft and completely unyielding. Therese wanted to be held by her, just like that, forever.
“I’ve been dreading today for the whole time I’ve been awake,” Nora said, and Therese felt a chill of fear in her gut. She’s rejecting me. She’s hesitant because she doesn’t know how to let me down gently. She doesn’t want to be cruel to someone who’s still so broken. This is a rejection.
Nora continued. “Having to come here, having to ask that. Having to hear you… hear you tell me no, it had been a mistake, it had been the pain. It had been the fear.”
Oh hell, Therese thought, and felt the chill of fear turn to a thrill of joy. “Nora,” she began, her voice shot through with the agony of their almost-tragedy. “Nora, I—”
Nora tipped her head back to let her hair fall away from the left side of her face, and Therese saw what she had hidden there.
Her cheek and eye and brow were a ruin, shattered, furrows burned by Sigil-fire carved into the surface of her beautiful ivory skin, penetrating down to the bone in places, puckered half-Healed injury still red and angry. Her eye was blinded, white and empty. Her mouth was pulled up in a broken parody of a smile.
“This is what it did to me. The Sigil. Calamities and Endings of the Natural Order of the World.” Nora’s voice was low and hateful, directed inwards, loathing what she’d become.
Therese had frozen, and she realized that Nora must think she was rejecting her. “Oh Nora, please come here and—” She tried to pull on Nora’s hand, but she had no strength, and she cried out with frustrated grief. “Please.”
Nora wouldn’t look at her, but let herself be pulled to her feet and shuffled over to the bed.
“Nora, you’re beautiful and radiant and I want to look at you for… forever. I want to look at you forever.”
“Therese,” Nora started, and Therese could feel the self-loathing there, trying to force itself between them. “I’m, you don’t have to pretend, it’s—”
Therese couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she just dragged as best she could manage at Nora’s hand, pulling herself up as she brought Nora closer, and then finally was able to loop her fragile left arm over Nora’s shoulders.
“Please, Nora,” she whispered, just inches away from her face.
“Therese,” Nora said, also whispering, and then their lips met.
It felt like something burst in Therese’s chest, and for a moment she had a flicker of fear: what if her weakened heart gave out from this flood of emotion? And immediately on the heels of that thought, then I’ll die in her arms, and she surged into Nora’s embrace.
They pulled apart a few moments later, Therese gasping for air as her body betrayed her. Her vision was a blur, like she was underwater, and her eyes felt swollen. “I love you,” she whispered. “I love you, Nora.”
Nora’s face was still just inches away, her right eye closed, and as it flickered open Therese saw that she was crying, too. “I love you, Therese Lasalle. I have loved you since our first year together, and I have been content to be near you, just near you, because it was enough to see you every day and know you were well and happy.”
“Oh,” Therese said, or gasped, because it was really more of an expression of emotion than an intelligible word. She felt like she was going to burst with it.
“And then I saw you die, and I knew that nothing I would find in centuries of life to come would ever fill the hole left by your absence.” Her breath hitched, and she hiccuped. “I would have torn the Tower down to save you. I would have ended reality to save you.”
Their heads were close again, and their foreheads touched.
“I knew that you would see me, monstrous, and recoil from me, and I was prepared, because it was a price I paid to save you, and I would pay it a thousand times over.”
“I would never. Nora, I would—”
“Shhh.” Nora put a finger on Therese’s lips, and simultaneously she thought two things: Wait, don’t take your hands out of my hair; I want your fingers tangled there forever; and at the same time, Shush me with your mouth, love, not your touch.
“It doesn’t matter now. It doesn’t matter. I would have loved you the same if you had pulled away from my ruined face, but it doesn’t matter. I love you. I love you, Therese. I love you.”
And after that, there was only darkness and the spaces between them, their mouths, their hands.
At least they got to kiss before the nuke hit or whatever calamity is next
I've worked out who hired these mercenaries. It's the tower haters. "boooo your verticality sucks!!!!" - them, probably
Well that scene between Therese and Nora made me into a complete mess. Can I have some more?
Riley likely has no small part that just wants to amputate the left leg and replace it with a Worked prosthetic split for durability reasons at this point.
Purely, not split, idk what happened there
I hope that Riley has 100% redeemed herself in the eyes of everyone at the tower, because I honestly don't know what else she could do at this point.