Night: Celia and the Sister Duo

Sister Quatro (Scenes 1-2)

[King Henry]
Let me embrace thee, sour adversity; 
For wise men say it is the wisest course.

—William Shakespeare,
The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth,
Act III: Scene 1

1

With her sister looking on overhead, Mara trudged along the lighted streets of the decrepit Rancaster district, ever watchful of moving shadows or any kind of moment indicative of something lurking. She took a left through one thoroughfare of tattered marquees that had seen better days and stole glances inside them for any clue to the word, 'Clue,' yet she only saw shadows there amidst the dilapidation. She moved on from the thoroughfare of marquees into another thoroughfare full of old storefronts, rolling the 'clue' through her mind for anything that can get her out of this place.

Of course, Mara was far from having the sharpest of minds, but she knew just enough to know that the word 'clue' came from 'clew,' the ball of string that Ariadne had given to Theseus to help him find his way back out of the Labyrinth after defeating the Minotaur. With this in mind, she kept looking for a ball of string or a length of string on the ground or even hanging from a spool on the storefronts, but nothing she saw fit that description.

What Mara actually saw (the line of storefronts along both sides of the thoroughfare) made her take out the letter from her pocket to reread the P.P.S. to herself. "'In 'Clue,' there is one noun (plural), one verb, one preposition, and one noun (singular),'" she said under her breath, then sighed to herself, breathing out another foggy plume in the chilly air. "Why does it have to be word problems?"

Mara looked up into the twinkling night, wishing that her sister was with her without realizing that Nico was above her. If Nico was in this predicament with her, they'd both get out of here in no time. Word problems were always Nico's specialty, after all, especially the ones involving homonyms, so she whispered, "Wish you were here, Nico."

And those very words, barely whispered above Mara's breath, filtered up into Nico's wandering spirit and filled her with warmth and substance. So she descended closer to her sister and breathed a part of her substance into Mara's face.

At this, Mara gasped and looked around the abandoned street for the source of that warmth, wondering if it was Nico or someone else trying to get her attention. Yet after a time, Mara spied the spectral flame emitting from the floating candle overhead just under an old street sign that read, Balfour Street, in peeling paint and rust with the fragment of an idea fluttering through her head.

As the train of logic broke through her mind, Mara looked back at the word, 'Clue,' in the P.P.S. and said to herself, "It's an acronym. 'C' stands for 'Candles,' which is a plural noun."

And with the other letters, she immediately guessed the letter 'e' as 'exit,' the end goal of the game and (she hoped) the end of her ordeal, which was also a singular noun. That left the two middle letters, 'l' and 'u,' a verb and a preposition.

So she concentrated on those two letters the way Nico would have done, tackling the verb that starts with an 'l,' and given the context of her situation, she guessed, "'Lead' is a verb that gets me somewhere, and 'candles' light the way there. Hence, 'Candles lead to exit.'" Then she changed the 'to' to 'unto' and said, "'Candles lead unto exit,'" but she started second-guessing herself and said, "'Candles lead under exit,'" but that four-word sentence felt clunky. So she mulled it over, wondering what Nico would think, then thought of another iteration and said, "'Candles lead underneath exit,'" and then she noted that the 'th' at the end of the preposition was also a contraction of the word 'the,' often used to fit the meter in Renaissance English poetry.

Again she looked up at the floating candle overhead, seemingly unaffected by the chance night breeze, thinking that the exit out of this place was underneath one of these candles. So for the time being, she folded up the letter and placed it in her pants pocket and kept walking, keeping her eyes out for candles and hoping for an exit underneath them.

So for the next ten minutes, she braced herself against the cold and searched through the thoroughfares of the old district, happening on candles floating in the air or hovering just a few feet above the ground. All the while, she had the cold to worry about, shivering more often as her hands and feet got colder from exposure.

Yet after a time, Mara stopped at a small intersection where more than one candle floated in the air, meaning that she had two choices.

She cursed, then dug out the letter and opened it and read from the first paragraph, saying, "'I merely meant that you are free to choose your fate. Your fate is in your hands, and in the Labyrinth before you, your fate lies somewhere in those twists and turns.' Ugh, this sucks!" she added. "Seriously, you're gonna make me choose?"

Then the speakers turned on with a hiss of static, and a chuckling Lord Rancaster said, "Yes, darling, I've granted you that much. It wouldn't be fair of me to restrict your God-given privilege to choose for yourself now, would it?"

"Fuck you!" Mara yelled, breathing out big foggy plumes. "What if every choice there is leads to a dead end or a trap?"

"I wouldn't be a good sport, if it were that way."

"I don't believe you!"

"Ah, come, come, darling," Lord Rancaster said. "I'm not—"

"You killed my family!" she yelled. "Why the fuck should I believe anything you say?"

For a time, there was only static over the outdoor speakers, till the man said, "I'll admit that I have my eccentricities, but at least I have a modicum of humanity left in me, just enough to give you a sporting chance at life after the miracle you pulled off on the stage. Because of that, you've more than earned the admiration of the audience, as well as mine, but the game’s still afoot."

At the mention of the audience, Mara looked all around the place for any sign of hidden cameras, then said, "Can you see me? Are there hidden cameras?"

"Perfectly well, and yes,” he said. “They're all around you if you’ve got the eyes to see them."

So Mara kept looking for one camera and spotted one hidden behind old boxes inside a decrepit storefront and yelled so that he could hear, saying, "If you can see me, then this is what I think of you," and she flipped off the camera with both hands. "There! What do you think of me now, huh?"

At this, only static sounded over the speakers for several moments, accompanied by several boos from the audience and then a long peel of laughter from the man himself that quelled the boos. After a moment of silence, Lord Rancaster said, "I'm a patient man, darling, but I have my limits. If you keep defying me this way, if you insist on being a bitch, then I'll treat you like a bitch!"

After that, a grating sound erupted throughout the Rancaster district, shaking the ground beneath Mara's feet, as though several enormous doors slid open on rusty tracks. Then howls filled the moonless night, filling the air with a deep miasma of animal stench like the rotting stench of death.

And as the cacophony of howls grew all around her, a stab of horror shuddered through Mara's heart, and she took off down the left thoroughfare along a decrepit alleyway between two old restaurants, straying from the candlelit path and into an old square where she saw a pair of enormous wolves stalking the rooftops of the stores against a glowing backdrop of neon signs and twinkling street lights.

As more underground doors slid open, grating and screeching on rusted tracks, and as more howls resounded through the night, Mara attempted to change direction, but she tripped over her feet and skidded her hands and knees on the ground, yelping and then cursing herself for yelping like that.

The wolves took notice and howled, attracting more howls from close by and far away, and she heard their footfalls closing in on her location. Then more wolves appeared on the rooftops, while others leapt from the storefronts and into the square, stalking closer and closer and glaring through the darkness with spectral glowing eyes, sniffing the air and growling and snapping their jaws at their prey.

Mara picked herself up, feeling her knees aching from the effort, and ran as fast as she could while cursing in her mind (Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUUUUUCK!) like an escaped convict on the run from pursuing bloodhounds.

And before she knew it, two of the wolves pursued her, ready to pounce, when a darkness more than night flooded through the square and scared off the wolves, now mewling and squealing their way back along the nearby storefronts.

And in that void of no hope and no light and no life, there appeared a hazy figure manifesting in the center of that void, forming into wisps of fog around a pulsing but invisible core of a beating heart. And around that heart, beating like tempestuous waves on a rocky shore, something inside that hideous void imploded and scattered the darkness in stiff crosswinds, toppling Mara to the ground, only to reveal the man in the white suit and black gloves called Lord Aaron Rancaster, 6th Baronet Rancaster, the great and the terrible in all of his glory staring over a frightened Mara Cairns.

Mara managed but a weak struggle to her feet when Lord Rancaster lunged forward and stiff-armed her in the stomach, pinning her to the ground with a gut punch and knocking the wind out of her.

And with his palm pressed up against her stomach, he clawed his fingers and dug down through her shirt and into her skin and drew blood through her shirt, and she cried in an agony of tears, flailing her arms and legs. Then psychic waves kept pressing down on her, preventing her from getting up, as she watched him working his magic in horror, straining against the pressure waves digging into her stomach like knives, endlessly, relentlessly, getting deeper and deeper. Then a seal of black roses glowed on the ground, circumscribing Mara's body under his spell, blades of psychic pressure waves tracing a five-pointed star over her stomach and searing into her flesh. And Nico's blood came pooling up through the ground beneath Mara's body, trailing up over her stomach through her shirt and absorbing into her like a festering cancer.

Spasms and convulsions broke out into fits all over Mara's body, and she threw up bile and blood through gritted teeth, and she even pissed in her panties, a spreading pool of it leaking onto the ground beneath her.

And all the while, a slasher's smile stretched across his face almost from ear to ear, grinning and leering like a demon in heat, like a demonic Romeo lusting after a cornered Juliet. He was anticipating the moment of complete penetration through Mara’s psyche and possession of her bodily self, when he would break into her mind and become her master, and she would become his slave.

Through all of her wincing and cringing and straining against the pain, Mara writhed and twisted but to no avail, the pressure too strong, the pain too great, her nerves frying all over her body. So she squinted her eyes shut from the man's grinning face, but she found herself looking up at his transforming face in the darkness of her thoughts and screamed. Whether she closed them or opened them, she saw his face now grinning and leering and licking his fanged chops. He was hovering over her like a lover that was relishing the moments of her plight and savoring the sour stench of bile and blood wafting around her—

Before the man clamped his mouth onto hers, consummating his spell and digging through Mara’s psyche . . .

2

Mara’s arms and legs flailed anew in the square, bringing her back to reality, and she struggled to turn her head away and break the lip-locked consummation of his spell. Then something warm and slimy snaked down her gullet and into her stomach, making her gag and choke and convulse, then paralyzing her movements and quelling her struggles. She was now hypnotized, not blinking or screaming, not even as tears streamed down her face and onto the ground. She was staring into those hideous glowing eyes, feeling his revolting warmth spreading throughout her body, and she screamed inside her mind once again, till nothing was left in her but a shell of herself, till her heart gave out and her mind split wider and wider apart and her sense of identity divided in half and her soul collapsed into a void. And in that void, Nico's spirit took root and grew, filling the cracks and taking hold of Mara's identity and reanimating her body with a new heart beating a different tune than Mara's, beating like a war drum.

Lord Rancaster recoiled from her body, breaking his seal before completion but still pinning her to the ground with his hand. Something of a glint flashed across his eyes, and he said, "What's this? Who are you?"

Nico began to struggle underneath him, then glared at the man’s hand pressing down on her stomach. And a psychic blast sliced through his hand, and his screams filled the night and shook the grounds of the abandoned district, and he staggered off of her on shaky legs, letting Nico levitate off the ground amidst Mara’s psychokinesis.

He was holding the bloody stump of his wrist with his other hand, cringing and raging against the pain, while the severed hand still gripped at the girl's stomach. Then the hand started moving and crawled like a spider on its fingers, crawling from her stomach and onto the ground towards him. The man picked it up and stuck it onto the stump of his wrist. Bones re-calcified, and veins and muscle fibers and tendons and sinews and nerves reconnected, and skin reformed over resurrecting tissue, while the man gritted his teeth and scrunched up his face in agony, till he fully healed.

After Nico levitated off the ground and back onto her feet before him, she stretched out her hand in an invisible hold, and a kodachi manifested in her grip. Then she spread her feet and bent her knees in a fighting stance like that of a samurai, presenting her body in profile to the man.

And for the first time in a long time, Lord Rancaster stared at her with a smile on his face, then said, "I never saw this coming, I admit it. Give them a good show, I said, and you're giving them the spectacle of the century!"

"Go to hell!" Nico said.

"I've already been there," he said, stretching his hand before himself and manifesting his cane, grasping the handle and pulling out a long straight blade from it. "You should go there for a visit. It'll toughen you up."

At the sight of his sword and his fighting stance, mirroring hers like a doppelgänger, Nico began having second thoughts. Her repertoire of combat consisted of pillow fighting and bed wrestling with Mara, not duking it out with some megalomaniac with a cane-sword and a penchant for French-kissing girls like an exorcism from hell. And on swordsmanship, her knowledge amounted to watching internet videos of kendo with katanas and kodachis out of boredom or half-hearted interest, because Mara wanted her to watch them with her. Neither prepared her for anything like this.

"Are you getting cold feet, darling?" he said.

And indeed, she was, for her feet were blistered and aching on the cold brick grounds of the square, and he was mocking her: death by sword, death by cold, death by pun. She shook off these thoughts and ran for the thoroughfare beyond the square and ran into another barrier, knocking herself onto her butt.

Her kodachi fumbled from her hand, and blood leaked from her nose, but she got up and reached her hand out and touched the cold barrier of glass.

"There's no way out, darling," he said, keeping his position near the center of the square. "I'll admit that this isn't your fight. Your sister started it, but you'll have to end it, one way or another."

At his words, another stab of horror pulsed through her heart, so she cursed, saying, "Fuck, he knows!"

"If you're not up to fighting, darling, you can still end it with honor," he continued, lowering his sword but not sheathing it. "What do they call it? Seppuku? But I much prefer hara-kiri. Just pick up that blade and run it through your stomach like a good little girl, and I promise I'll let your parents know you died with honor."

So she picked up the kodachi, thinking the unthinkable, death by her own hands, for she lacked the strength of will and courage of heart that Mara had. She had done it before under psychic duress on the stage, and she was feeling it now, the unseen force guiding her hands and about to point the blade at her stomach and thrust it home, but ere she did, Mara flashed across her mind, and something within filled her body with warmth and new strength, the strength to endure, the strength to move on.

And in a moment, she wrestled with his spell and broke it, then rose to her feet, vowing to protect Mara's life with everything she had left. If Mara was the sword that slew Nico's monsters, then Nico was the shield protecting her from harm. When Mara attacked, she would defend, and when Nico attacked, Mara would defend. They would act as one, as two sides of the same coin, two expressions of the same will, two shades of the same soul, two reflections of one spirit.

Nico faced her opponent with glaring eyes and stood her ground at the entrance of the square, and waves of psychic energy flooded the space.

When Rancaster moved, she kept her distance. When he pursued her, she ran along the storefronts, keeping to the sides of the square and keeping her distance. But when he charged her and lunged across the square in a blur, she couldn't keep track and let instinct do the rest.

She leaped and rolled, cursing in her mind (Fuck . . . Fuck! FUUUUUCK!) when his sword thrust sent shock waves against a storefront, shattering glass and splintering wood and kicking up huge clouds of dust. She picked herself up and ran to the center of the square, breathing hard and on aching feet, feeling her heart thundering in her chest, waiting for the dust and her nerves to settle.

So she waited and waited.

And a blur of the man rushed out of the cloud and up to her face, wielding his cane-sword, and feinted left with a slash that sent a shock wave hurtling at her, and feinted right with a thrust that sent another shock wave rippling towards her. But she dodged and she rolled and she wheeled to her feet as storefronts shattered behind her to her left, then twisted herself into another roll, just clearing the thrust as more storefronts shattered behind her to her right, and wheeled to her feet and ran back to the side of the square away from the destruction.

She was now winded and wobbly on her feet, feeling cramps in her legs, her thundering heart on the verge of an attack, and now breathing like she had just run a marathon. "This is insane! I can't keep this up for long!"

"Is it getting too much for you?" Rancaster said, sheathing his sword and making it disappear in his hand. "Looks like you're about ready to drop."

"Fuck you!"

"Ah, that's the fighting spirit!" he said, then raised his hand in the air and snapped his fingers, and a table plopped onto the ground, and two semiautomatic pistols plopped onto the table. "Come out, bambina!"

And another girl Nico had never seen before walked out of thin air behind Lord Rancaster and stepped up to the table. She had bobbed dark hair and teal eyes, and she wore a Shad-Row Academy uniform under an oversized hand-me-down jacket draped over her shoulders. It was chilly outside, but she had a blank expression on her face, not minding the chill or the guns on the table or even Nico’s presence in the square. Yet when she picked up a gun, Nico took in a gasp of breath as her hand tightened over her kodachi.

"Why are you doing this?" Nico yelled at her, tensing when she heard her pull back the slide. "Who are you?"

"Her motives and her name are none of your concern, darling," he said. "Just make sure you don't die too quickly. She needs to work on her target practice," and then he added, "Have at it, bambina! She's all yours!"

"Thank you, Father," the 'bambina' said, then aimed and fired, and Nico moved in time, the bullet grazing past her face and shattering a storefront window behind her.

"No head shots, bambina,” he said. “I want her alive. Go for one of her limbs instead."

"Of course, Father," she said, pulling back the slide and chambering another round, then taking aim at Nico's limbs, till Rancaster raised his finger at her.

He then said to Nico, "Each gun holds eleven rounds each, one in the barrel and ten in the magazine. Twenty-two rounds in all, minus the one she just fired. If you survive this, darling, you've earned your reprieve, and I'll send you out of here myself. How does that sound?"

"You're fucking crazy!"

"I'd save my breath if I were you," he said, then smiled sadistically from ear to ear as he lowered his hand. "Happy dodging, darling."

So Nico bolted left along the storefronts as bullets scorched marks on the ground she had trodden, because the 'bambina' was aiming for her legs. She then skipped and rolled, barely avoiding the shots whizzing past her shoulders, then sprang to her feet and sprinted the other way along storefronts with broken windows, crunching over glass strewn on the grounds, seeking shelter from the onslaught, but her luck ran out. When she leaped through a shattered storefront window and rolled hard into the linoleum floor strewn over with glass, she bloodied her hands and skinned her knees and cut the back of one of her shoulders. Bullets shattered into fragments on the floor, jumping like shrapnel and hitting her in the stomach with a warm deep ache flooding through her. She was struggling to crawl, holding onto her stomach and wincing from the pain, now bleeding out onto the floor and leaving a path of it behind her.

The onslaught had stopped just in time for Nico to crawl behind the shelves and pull herself up into a sitting position, now feeling cramps stabbing at her stomach. She had lost her kodachi under a storm of bullets, and all she had now were bloody hands and knees and shoulder and stomach. Her pajamas were scraped and ripped and bloodied, and her shirt was now a dark warm crimson over her stomach.

Now her vision started blurring in and out of focus, and her diaphragm ached every time she breathed. How many times she had been shot, she had no idea, but she knew she was hurting, and that's all she knew.

No, she thought to herself. Mara was hurting, and Nico was already dead. After putting up a valiant effort, Nico had failed her sister, failed to protect her.

Then she heard two pairs of footsteps cracking along the glass shards into the storefront, and she waited for the inevitable. They were talking about something, but she didn't catch the words, for their voices started merging into one continuous stream of auditory static.

At this point, she just wanted the pain to end, so that she could meet with Mara one last time before fading away, one last time to hold her hand and kiss her lips and let her know that she was going away for a long time before Mara would see her again, one last time for a wretch like Nico to be with her own living flesh and blood . . .

When the glass-crunching stopped, she looked up at Rancaster and the 'bambina' staring down at her, their faces blurring in and out as Nico began getting dizzy.

At that moment, her last conscious words were these: "Why are you doing this?"

Then she blacked out into the sleep of the dead.

Tsuzuku