Chapter Nineteen #2
There was no mechanism. They were lifting me with their minds.
Since I hadn’t been able to do that until after my final instar, it was a good way to remind the people of their power, and why they were in charge.
I could respect the showmanship of it all, even as it failed to lessen my desire to crush them for what they’d done.
Not just to me: to this entire society, all the people like Fetch and Carry who were being born into a world where their choices had been taken away from them before they even existed.
I glared at them, aware that they wouldn’t be able to read my expression, but taking a small pleasure in how human that gesture was.
I knew what I was feeling. I could still feel independent of their desires.
They couldn’t take that away from me without allowing me access to their minds.
The queen at the center of the collective focused on me, and when she spoke, the acoustics flung her voice effortlessly.
She didn’t have to yell. She didn’t even have to speak loudly.
“The cuckoo, designate Sarah, stands accused of destruction of her own kind, both mental and mortal; of the unwilling revision of someone who claimed her as an ally; of the invasion of another dimension without the consent or approval of the locals; and of countless small violations of the ethics by which all telepathic peoples are expected to comport themselves. How do you plead?”
I knew they weren’t actually speaking English, although I wasn’t sure how I could still understand them with as hard as they had locked my mental abilities down, and despite this, I still gaped at her for a moment, stunned.
She raised an eyebrow, looking prepared to continue whether or not I opened my mouth, and so I straightened my spine and snapped, “Not guilty.”
Eyes flashed white around the arena as the watching Johrlac did their equivalent of muttering to each other about my response. The collective allowed it to go on for several seconds before the one in the center spoke again.
“Silence,” she said. “Designate Sarah, you committed the acts of which you stand accused. That is not in question. How can you plead not guilty?”
“Simple,” I said. “I didn’t commit any crimes.
Even if I did those things, I did them in self-defense, or because I didn’t know what I was doing.
If anyone here has committed a crime, it was you.
By exiling the cuckoos and leaving them to wander with no true understanding of their capabilities, you made situations like mine inevitable. Any blood I’ve shed is on your hands.”
Once again, the silence was broken by eyes flashing like strobe lights, telepathic messages flying through the ether. I almost wished I could listen in on them. At the same time, I was almost grateful I couldn’t. That many people shouting at once would have given me one hell of a headache.
“You do not get to make accusations against us,” said another of the collective.
Her voice was exactly the same as the first’s, even down to the inflections.
They really had given up their individuality for the sake of power—although not all willingly, considering what they’d done to Collate.
“You are a cuckoo, outside our hive, outside our people. We are not held to the same laws.”
“I am held to the laws of Earth,” I countered. “And by the laws of Earth, I’ve done nothing wrong. The only people I harmed were harmed in self-defense. I refuse to acknowledge your authority over me.”
“We have the proof of your crimes,” said the first queen. “You cannot pretend to be innocent when the evidence is placed before you.”
“I am proof of yours,” I snapped. “I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t thrown my ancestors out to wreck other worlds and become other people’s problem.”
They ignored me. The speaker raised a hand, and the curtain over one of the smaller boxes dropped, revealing Arthur. He was held in place by manacles around his hands, but he was still standing, and he didn’t look injured.
Of course I couldn’t read his face, but he didn’t look like he was crying or like he had been recently. I lurched automatically in his direction, stopping myself before I could go over the edge. “Arthur!”
He turned toward me, standing a bit straighter. “Sarah?”
“Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”
He managed a small, nervous laugh. “No, and no,” he said.
“Silence. The accused will not speak to the evidence,” snapped the queen at the center of the collective.
“This individual is a revision, and has no right to speak. This … person is a collage of memories and experiences not his own, collected by the accused and assembled into the shape of a man. He does not want for himself, but only as he has been instructed by the accused. He is not real, and has no right to existence.”
Around the arena, eyes flashed white, and I didn’t need to hear their mental mutterings to know what they were saying. The queen’s tone told me everything. She was revolted by Arthur’s existence, and so were they.
Arthur tried to jerk to the side, fighting against his manacles. “I’m real!” he shouted. “I exist!”
“You are improperly made, incomplete and unanchored,” said the queen. She reached out and took the hands of the queens to either side of her. “We may require your testimony before this is done, so we will not delete you, but we will repair the damage that has been done.”
Their eyes gleamed white, all five of them.
Arthur made a choked-off sound, then slumped where he stood, not quite toppling over.
I rushed to the edge of my platform, barely stopping before I could topple the seventy or so feet to the ground.
With the psychic blocker on my wrist, if I fell, I’d have no way of catching myself, and I wasn’t Verity.
I hadn’t been practicing safe falls from more than twenty feet since I was in middle school. I would die.
Watching Arthur folding slowly inward on himself like an animatronic that had been forcibly separated from its power source, it was hard not to feel like I would deserve it.
A familiar voice screamed outrage into the echoing air, and I turned to see the curtains blocking another box jerked forcibly aide, revealing a group of four figures.
By their hair and clothing, I identified them as my grandparents, Antimony, and Sam.
Antimony was the one screaming, her hands balled by her sides and limned with flickering white coronas.
She and Thomas were wearing bracelets similar to my own.
I wasn’t sure how sorcery suppression would even work, but it appeared they’d been at least partially cut off from the pneuma that fueled their magic.
It explained why neither of them was setting the place more enthusiastically on fire.
“Fuck you! Fuck you all!” shrieked Annie. “You have no right!”
“We have every right,” said the queen at the center, calmly. “We are the law. You are uninvited, and your own trial is coming.”
“Leave my family alone!” I yelled.
The queen switched her attention to me. The weight of it was oppressive.
I didn’t need to be able to receive her thoughts to feel the sheer power behind her gaze.
“The choice is yours, Sarah,” she said. “The choice has always been yours. You know what you need to do if you want them released unharmed. How long are you willing to be selfish? How far will you go to put your needs before theirs? All this ends when you say the word.”
My heart sank as Annie turned toward me, hands still limned in white. “Sarah,” she called. “Whatever they want, just give it to them. Please. Arthur can’t take much more of this.”
“I … can’t,” I called back. “What they want is me. They want me to join them.”
For a moment, the fire burned brighter. “So join them,” said Annie. “You’ve said before that you don’t understand how to be a person anymore. You can stop. Go be a better cuckoo.”
“Annie…” said Sam uneasily.
“We are not cuckoos,” said the queen, disdain dropping from her voice. “We are proper Johrlac, as we have always been, as we will always be.”
“You all look like big fucking wasps to me, lady,” snapped Annie.
Arthur shuddered in place, still moving as jerkily as a broken animatronic, and then, with agonizing slowness, he stood up again.
The process took the better part of a minute, during which we all just watched him.
Annie stopped yelling at me, which I found much more reassuring than I probably should have.
Maybe she could forgive me. If Arthur was all right, maybe we could be all right, too.
He straightened, putting a hand against his forehead like he was trying to hold his head in place, and groaned. That sound, like every other, was amplified by the shape of the arena, but something about it itched at the back of my brain. It was wrong, in some subtle, almost indefinable way.
Then he took his hand away and straightened fully, opening his eyes.
He looked around the arena, and even I could tell he was confused.
That subtle wrongness followed his every motion, making him look like a familiar stranger, like someone I should recognize but somehow didn’t, just so slightly to the left of my expectations.
“Where the hell am I?” he asked. He looked around at the stands full of identical Johrlac, at the five queens in their box, and then over at the boxes containing the rest of his family. He blinked before focusing on me. “Sarah?”
I went cold, feeling suddenly as if I might collapse. I wobbled, unreasonably close to the edge of the platform, then staggered back from the edge, just staring at him.
“Sarah!” He gripped the edge of his box, pulling it like he thought he could snap the bamboo in half. “Are you all right? Where the hell are we?”