Chương 43: Chapter 42: Monster

The nursery was quiet like it always was at dawn, before the manor fully woke and the corridors filled with servants moving too fast to notice a small girl slipping past them. Elma packed methodically. Notebook first, wedged flat against her back beneath the cloak so it wouldn't slap her ribs if she had to run. Dried rations she found in the cupboard. A spare set of clothes rolled tight.

She catalogued the list in her head one more time, checking it against what her hands had already gathered, and found nothing missing. Five days. Maybe less, if she found something useful fast. Maybe more, if she didn't. Her eyes drifted toward the toy box in the corner. She hadn't touched most of what was in there. A stuffed animal with one ear worn thin from teeth marks—hers, back when she still believed they needed to be kept sharp. A rattle she'd never once shaken.

Wooden blocks stacked in a corner, untouched, gathering dust. She looked at the bed. At the lace curtains someone still bothered to wash. At the little wooden desk where she'd built an entire system of measurement out of a gardener falling out of a tree. It was strange, looking at it all with the specific intention of leaving. She didn't want to go. The thought landed somewhere uncomfortable and she didn't know where that was. The manor wasn't safe. She had never once mistaken it for safe. But this room was hers.

She slept here. She thought here. She'd built her entire framework for understanding her own power sitting on that rug, at that desk, under that window. Somewhere in the last month, without her tracking exactly when it happened, it had stopped being a cage she was waiting to escape and started being something else. She stood there a moment longer than she needed to, taking it all in. Five days. She would come back in five days. She didn't let herself finish the other half of that thought.

Elma picked up her bag, crossed the room, and opened the door. A stream of water came roaring from her right. It struck the open door squarely, ripping it from her hand and blasting it outward to the left. Elma froze in the doorway, staring after it. Christa stood with one hand still raised, palm open where the weave had left it, her hair loose and unbrushed, her eyes rimmed red. Mira stood a pace behind her, silent, blindfold catching the pale morning light.

"What is this?"

"You're grounded." Christa's voice came out flatter than usual, the words carrying slightly too far, slightly too loud.

"You're not leaving this room today." Elma's jaw tightened. She had five days. She had a mission, a target, an actual reason to be moving right now instead of standing in a flooded doorway arguing with a hungover noblewoman.

"Why is that?"

"Because I said so."

"But what reason compelled you to say it?"

"I don't need a reason." Christa's chin lifted, unsteady.

"I'm your mother." Elma didn't have time for this. She stepped past the wreckage of the door and started down the corridor. A wall of ice slammed up in front of her, floor to ceiling, sealing the hallway shut. Elma stopped short, genuinely startled for half a second. She hadn't known ice could be woven like that. The only state she could weave water in was room temperature. Another layer of Resonance she hadn't known about. She was starting to get tired of it.

She filed the observation away and reached out, resonating with the structure. Ice or steam, it was still water. She shook it rapidly with her Resonance until it shuddered and gave, the whole wall collapsing into a fine spray of frost and water. Another wall rose in its place before the first had finished falling. Something in Elma's patience, already worn thin from the mission clock ticking down in the back of her skull, finally gave out.

"Have you finally lost your mind?" The words landed hard. Maybe too hard. Elma watched the impact register on Christa's face, saw the hurt flash across it, raw and unguarded, before something colder replaced it.

"At least I'm not cursed," Christa said. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Elma went still.

"You are." Christa's voice cracked down the middle, wine-loose and reckless in a way it never allowed itself to be sober.

"You're the monster who killed Leta."

"What are you talking about?"

"You destroyed the maid house. You killed the Alloys. You nearly killed me." Christa's hands were shaking.

"That day. The attack. It was you." Elma blinked.

"You're serious?"

"I'm not crazy," Christa said.

"I was never crazy. I did everything I could for you." …

"The red sinew… me— I was the red sinew monster?" Christa's face went white.

"No," Elma said.

"Elma—""No." She pressed both palms flat against her temples, as if she could physically hold the thought out.

"You're lying."

"I'm sorry—it's okay now. As long as you have the pendant, it will be okay." Christa took a step forward, hands raised, placating.

"You just need to stay by me. Until we figure it out. Until we fix it—""I can't."

"Elma, please—""You're all liars." The words tore out of her raw. Tears were suddenly there, hot and humiliating.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Christa reached for her.

"Stay away from me."

"Elma, I only wanted to—" Footsteps, several sets, converging fast down the corridor from both directions. Lucien arrived first, still in yesterday's rumpled shirt, Silk a half-step behind him with her hand already on her hilt. Anastasia came next, sharp-eyed and silent. A pair of Alloys rounded the corner after them, and behind everyone, a knot of maids hovering at a careful distance.

"What happened," Lucien demanded, scanning the wreckage of the door, the melting ice. Then he saw the second wall, still standing, its surface glittering wet in the morning light. He grabbed the bridge of his nose.

"That," he said slowly, "is not what I meant when I said you were too soft on her." Christa turned back to Elma, her face crumpling.

"Please. Just listen to me. You always used to listen to me." Her voice broke entirely.

"Whatever happened you're still my daughter." Something in Elma finally broke loose.

"I'm not your daughter." Christa blinked.

"I never was and never will be. I don't know what happened to your daughter." Elma's voice was shaking now, cracked open in a way she hated, but she couldn't stop.

"I'm not her."

"What—" Christa's face had gone bloodless.

"What do you mean?"

"I am—" Elma's eyes found Silk. Everything inside her went silent at once. Green veins began creeping across the floor, winding toward her feet before slowly climbing up her legs. It was the only exit from the corner she'd gotten herself into. The green light took her before anyone could react.

The veins dropped her onto grass that smelled nothing like the Altheris estate. Elma staggered, caught her footing, and looked up into a sky with only one sun in it. White, high, and alone, nothing like the layered gold of Veraxys's three. She turned in a slow circle, taking in the cliff edge a few feet ahead, the waterfall roaring somewhere below it, the flock of sheep scattered across the slope behind her, cropping grass with placid indifference.

An old man stood among them, a thin curl of smoke rising from something pinched between two fingers. He stared at her. Rubbed his eyes with the back of his wrist. Looked again. She'd traveled thousands of miles. Possibly more. The faint pulse of the Shepherd's Veins still thrummed beneath the earth. They could take her anywhere they threaded. She lowered herself to sit at the edge of the cliff, legs dangling over open air, the shepherd's confused muttering fading into background noise she didn't have room for.

She sat there, watching the vastness beyond the cliff. In both her lives, she'd been confined to a specific place. Going outside had always felt like doing something wrong. Be their weapon. Their daughter. Their spy. The world seemed far too vast to care about any of those roles. They were... insignificant. There was nothing she wanted more than to go somewhere nobody knew her name and disappear. Stay away from all of it. But they wouldn't allow it. Sable would come looking the moment she'd stayed away too long.

The monster who killed Leta. Her mind kept circling back to it, no matter how many times she tried not to think of it. She remembered the wound. A gash across her sternum, deep enough to have opened her lungs, the kind of injury that should have ended her outright. She remembered waking the next morning with skin as smooth as if it had never been touched at all. The last time she'd lost consciousness from an injury and killed while unconscious had been back at Beitelham. Back when he still spoke inside her mind.

If she really had been the monster that killed Leta, and she'd done it while unconscious, only to wake up healed afterward, there was only one explanation she could think of. Water gathered above her, spinning tight. A second drill formed beside the first. Then a third.

Then more, faster than she could count them individually, hundreds of them coalescing in the thin mountain air around her, each one narrowing to a lethal point, each point turning inward until she sat at the center of a silent dome of her own weapons, every single one aimed at her. The shepherd had gone very quiet.

"I don't know how you managed to stay silent this whole time," Elma said, her voice carrying easily in the empty air.

"But I know it's you." The drills kept spinning, waiting on her word.

"Other." Her expression didn't change. She let them go. Hundreds of Water Drills converged on her at once, closing in from every direction, and the cliff side was drenched in steam.