Chương 44: Chapter 43: A Prisoner Locked Inside a Prisoner

The steam hadn't finished settling over the crater when the boy standing at its center moved. Elma watched from somewhere behind his crimson eyes, a passenger in her own body, feeling the unfamiliar weight of a slightly bigger frame. He straightened her shoulders, making her cloak pull slightly across them, then rolled his neck twice, slow and practiced, like he'd been waiting a long time to do it. She noticed the difference only after.

Her shoulders sat broader beneath the cloak, but the hood seemed strangely emptier around his head. His coal-dark hair was shorter, leaving more space between his head and the fabric than hers ever had. The crater around them still smoked. Hundreds of impact points pocked the stone where the drills had hit. He looked down at his hands—her hands—and flexed them once, examining them with the mild curiosity of someone trying on something borrowed.

Then he looked up at the shepherd, who had gone very still across the slope, then smiled.

"Took you long enough," he said. Stupid. She was stupid. Stupid. Stupid. How had she missed it. Four years. He had been right there. She had looked inward a hundred times and called it absence and moved on. He had been there the whole time.

"Why?" She whispered in his mind.

"You told me to shut up." He said.

"Four years ago, in that void, right after we got our melon chopped. Ring a bell?" He burst out laughing, slapping his knee—their knee.

"' I don't need you,' my ass. Guess who found the one who sent Nagin in one night?" Rita's forehead. The letters. The whispering.

"Was that you?"

"Obviously." He examined his nails, unbothered.

"Took me one night. You'd been chasing shadows for how long? I was getting bored, frankly."

"How."

"I followed the maids that night, and the one you tortured led me straight to him. Pretty easy if you can fly." He snorted.

"You have no idea how many times I've saved you. I can start counting if you want. Sure, trying to hide myself from you wasn't easy, but Resonance..." Something in his voice brightened.

"It eased my existence. It made those short moments when you were asleep more worth the wait. I'm Bio, if that's not obvious. But my Resonance can only work beneath our skin. You get the outside. I get the inside." He spread his hands, presenting the arrangement like a gift.

"I think it's fair. So, are you ready to apologize and acknowledge my usefulness?" A Water Drill shot downward toward the top of his head. He cocked out of the way with more surprise than urgency.

"Are you serious right now?"

"You killed Leta."

"I—""You made me a monster." Her voice cracked on the word, and she hated that it did.

"Christa thinks I'm cursed because of you!"

"I was confused." He raised both hands, all playfulness gone.

"One second we're fine, next there was a blade in our chest and I didn't know what was happening—"" LIES." A Barometric Coffin snapped into place around him, pinning him in position as green orbs descended from the sky.

"Oh, come on—" The green explosions tore into their side of the cliff, shattering the rock beneath them. Great chunks of stone broke loose and tumbled down toward the lake, carrying him with them. Farther away, the shepherd was thrown onto his back by the shockwaves, safely out of reach of the collapsing cliff. Wings tore out of his back, black and membraned. He burst from the debris and smoke, climbing through the collapsing cliff as chunks of rock rained around him.

Water Drills spun through the air in a tightening formation, each one angled directly toward him as he twisted and climbed, evading both the falling debris and Elma's attacks.

"We've killed people before!" he shouted over the wind, dodging a Slag Round by inches.

"Plenty of people! Why do a maid and some guards suddenly matter more than our own brothers and sisters, the ones we gutted every week back home?"

"That was different. We were different."

"I wasn't." Something in his voice went hard.

"Four years, Sister. Four years I didn't say a single word to you. The only other person I ever had a conversation with was that librarian. That's it." He paused.

"Sometimes I thought I was a hallucination. Other times I thought I was you." A Slag Round caught him mid-turn and threw him into the cliff face hard enough to crack stone.

"I hate you," Elma said.

"Why can't you just leave me alone. Why can't you die." He evaded the next few for a moment before his movements suddenly faltered. Elma's words seemed to weigh him down. His eyes closed, his body going slack. Whatever fight remained in him seemed to leave all at once. He made no attempt to dodge as the incoming barrage tore into him. They went down in a spiral of smoke and falling stone, plunging into the lake at the waterfall's base. Cold and silence closed over them. It felt eerily familiar.

The same way it had when they'd died before. Under the surface, something in him seemed to deflate.

"I just… I wanted you to be proud of me," he said in their head.

"I wanted to be useful. I got excited. I just—" This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Idiot. If you'd told me you were there, none of this would've happened."

"You said you didn't want me and… I wanted to prove a point."

"I lied." The words escaped her cramped chest.

"You knew I was looking for you. I thought you were somewhere else. I can't believe I thought you were somewhere else."

"Do you know how hurtful it is to be called a burden all your life? Even when you try everything you can to help?" His voice raw, "Even at our death." There was a pause.

"People get hurt too, Elma. Not just you." … They hit the rocky bottom, and Elma couldn't find anything to say. This wasn't what she had wanted to say. All this time she'd been looking for him, it hadn't been to scold him again. Though tempting, she'd managed to stop herself. He had made mistakes. So had she. And without him, she would have been dead. They lay at the bottom of the blue lake, letting the silence stretch a little longer.

"I was going to reveal myself on the same day we were stabbed, you know," he said.

"But after what happened I couldn't bring myself to do it." She said nothing.

"Your life wasn't easy," he said.

"I know that. But you could only imagine how mine was. A prisoner locked inside a prisoner." He lifted one hand, examining it in the dim, filtered light. Dark sickle-shaped marks crossed over one another along the back of it.

"I'm impulsive," he said.

"I don't think before I act and now that I can, I just—go. And I make everything worse."

"Idiot," she said again.

"Still working on it." Elma watched the sunlight breaking apart into ribbons above them, and something in her chest that had been clenched since she was reborn finally, unwillingly, loosened.

"It was empty," she admitted.

"Without you." He laughed, bubbles breaking from his mouth and racing upward.

"You missed me."

"Don't."

"You did. I know you did." He smiled.

"It's okay. I missed you too."

"I don't want you to die. I don't know why I said it."

"I know." He jabbed his index finger against the side of his head.

"We're literally sharing a brain." Elma just wanted to disappear, for the most part. But a feeling that something weighing down her chest had finally lifted washed over her. Breathing suddenly felt easier, even though they weren't breathing at all. They were underwater.

"Shouldn't we get out," Elma said. Gills split open beneath their collarbones, scaled and serrated. He tipped his head back instead, looking up through the water at the light scattering across the surface, at fish drifting overhead in lazy arcs.

"I like the sight," he said.

"What do you think of the sun?" He watched it, filtered gold through moving water, saying nothing for a long moment.

"Didn't disappoint." They remained there for a long moment, suspended in the water. He seemed to drift, completely absorbed in the view, as though he were taking it all in for the first time. Elma supposed this was his way of living: experiencing new things, immersing himself in every sensation he could. She didn't disturb him. Eventually, they rose to the surface and beat their way back toward the cliff, black wings catching the air.

The shepherd peered down from above, tracking their ascent with an expression that suggested he'd finally decided this was too strange even for the smoke.

"I was there when we got reborn," the Other said, somewhere between one wingbeat and the next.

"Heard you talking in our head. Didn't have a clue what any of it meant."

"When did you."

"Month later." A pause.

"Your memories started leaking into mine. That's how I got the rest of it. Beitelham. The pit. All of it."

"Do you remember the deal."

"No. Told you already—I only get what you get." They landed on the cliff's edge, and the Other handed the body back without ceremony, the transformation rippling through them until Elma's own face settled back into place, her own proportions, her own hands.

"So," Elma said, taking off her cloak.

"You're my Internal Reinforcement."

"That's kind of my whole thing. I work the inside. Reinforce, manipulate, whatever needs doing under the skin. That's how I work."

"I think we share the same Lattice Reserve," she said, using her Field to dry the cloak as she noticed the disproportionate drop in her LR.

"Yeah, and I'm bad with it. I like the term by the way." He said it without much shame.

"Christa. That masked woman. That day, they basically just waited me out until I exhausted myself. Though—" a note of pride crept in, "—I still whooped them pretty good before I ran dry. Bet that's why the cat lady never laid a finger on us again." Something in Elma's chest lifted, small and unwelcome and satisfying anyway.

"Sekar," she said. He exhaled, drying droplets scattering as her Field worked through the fabric of her cloak.

"Different beast entirely. I was better at this by then, bigger TRO than him even, but it didn't matter. He was faster. Stronger. Didn't make any sense. I burned most of what I had left just stitching us back together after, then got out while I still could. Landed a few good hits first, though."

"We'll manage it better if we cooperate next time, and you don't just wait me out until I sleep."

"Sure." She still hated that she couldn't do this herself—Internal Reinforcement had been the one door that stayed locked no matter how hard she pulled at it. But having him behind that door instead of nothing at all was better than the alternative. A weapon that couldn't take a hit was worth exactly nothing.

"What now," he asked. She looked at the sky, gauging the angle of the sun, doing math she didn't need a reason to do.

"If we're leaving," he said, "our new mother's not gonna love that."

"I don't care what she thinks." The words came out flat.

"Once Sable's dealt with, we're gone. Nothing keeping us there."

"Sure you don't."

"I don't."

"You care." He said it plainly.

"Whatever you tell yourself."

"She's a weak-minded, crazed noblewoman whose opinion means nothing to me."

"Silk's our sister." Elma went still.

"And Christa likes Silk." He let that sit for a moment.

"Might like us too, given the chance." She looked down at the dirt, at nothing in particular, thinking about the shape of Silk's face—human, the kind of face that didn't have to work to be accepted. If Christa had looked at whatever they were, she would find the same thing everyone always found.

"You don't know that," the Other said, before she'd said any of it aloud.

"And for what it's worth—we look like them right now too."

"I don't need her acceptance."

"Never said you did."

"We're done talking about Christa." He started to say something else. She didn't give him the room. Elma pulled her dry cloak on, fastened it, and didn't look back at the shepherd or his sheep or the waterfall behind them. The green light rose from the dirt at her feet, threading up through the grass and it pulled them both back toward the world they'd been trying, for one short hour, to leave behind.