Twenty-Six Melinoë
Twenty-Six
Melino?
Something is rising behind my eyes as I shoot, a red-tinged wave, blistering at the edges of my vision. This should be the easiest thing in the world. It’s what I was made for. Caerus scientists labored over my body for hours and hours so that I could kill anything that’s put in front of me, without fear and without remorse.
But I’m terrified now, and not just for myself. It’s Inesa, kneeling by my side, who stays at the forefront of my mind. Her blanched face, her panicked stare. The gears of the Dogs whir like helicopter blades as they crush and crush their way inside the cabin.
I shoot, because there’s nothing else to do. And because the whistling of the bullets is so familiar, almost comforting, like a song, a prelude for the end of my life.
Quickly, before I can stop her, Inesa gets to her feet and darts across the cabin. My finger slips from the trigger. “Don’t!” I cry. “Stay down!”
But she’s already skidded to her knees in front of the woodstove and grasped the bottle of kerosene. She meets my eyes, gaze flickering between fear and determination. “What about this?”
What about this?
Somehow, these are words I’ve heard before. The fire blooms upward behind my eyes. I feel like everything is converging, except I don’t know what everything is, only that the flame isn’t a dream, isn’t a glitch in my system; it’s a memory. It layers over my vision and makes Inesa’s face flicker like static in front of me.
“Maybe,” I say, in a voice that seems too distant to be my own. “We have to try.”
My limbs feel dull and heavy as I cross the room to Inesa. I take her hand and pull her to her feet. She swallows and squares her shoulders, as if to steel herself, and then, with a surprising show of strength, she hurls the chair away from the door. Almost dragging me after her, she bursts out of the cabin, into the cold, brisk air that seems to cut my eyes like broken glass.
The fire is so vivid that the real world is just its backdrop now. The Dogs, still caught in the cabin walls, start to reverse, their robotic legs pumping in a furious gyre.
We only have enough time to make it to the trees before they’ve extricated themselves. They back up with mechanical precision, eyeless metal hulls trained on us. Their sides are scuffed with bullet marks, and one of them is limping, the end of its front leg missing.
Inesa still has her fingers laced with mine, the bottle of kerosene grasped in her other hand. She raises her arm, the bottle arcing over her head. I lift my rifle, bracing it on my shoulder, and try to tunnel my vision into the scope, but suddenly everything is engulfed in flames.
And then the real world drops away. Memories flower up in its place. I can feel the heat of the remembered fire, taste the smoke in the air. And I can see Keres in front of me, black hair loose and wild around her shoulders, her eyes smoldering like embers. Their fury sears my skin.
She’s holding a gun—a handgun, not a rifle, silver instead of black. It’s Azrael’s gun, I realize with a start, the one he always keeps tucked under his coat. She raises it until the barrel is pointed at her temple, her finger trembling over the trigger.
Azrael’s voice comes, and it’s too smooth, too casual.
“Put that down, Keres,” he says, as slick as oil. “That’s enough now.”
“ No ,” she bites out.
We’re in her room. I’ve been here a hundred times before. There’s the bed, the sheets tucked in neatly by the anonymous hands of a maid. There’s her wardrobe door, flung open, dozens of identical black suits hanging like strung-up corpses. There’s the window, spreading from floor to ceiling behind her, the City lights gleaming behind the glass. And to her left there’s the fireplace, flames licking upward, the only disturbance in the still, heavy air.
I think I’m too stunned to speak. The rest of the memory returns in increments. Moments ago I had been lying in Keres’s bed, our limbs entwined, our hair tangled on the sheets. And then there was Azrael, wrenching me from my half-dreaming state, pulling me up by my elbow and marching me to the door. And then there was Keres—up on her feet in the span of a breath, grabbing the gun strapped to his belt.
“You can’t keep doing this to us,” she says, her voice strangled with tears that will never fall. “I’m finished. I’m done.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Azrael says. “You’re making a fool of yourself.”
“Shut up!” she cries. “Just shut up!”
Her finger brushes the trigger, but she can’t bring herself to pull it. A hard lump is lodged in my throat and my mind is swimming. All the words I might say are lost to me, falling and falling endlessly through a thousand black spaces.
“Put it down,” Azrael says, more sternly this time. “I mean it. Or I’ll do the final Wipe and you’ll be on Van Wyck’s arm in a week.”
I remember now. I’d been having nightmares about the girl. Sanne. I’d snuck into Keres’s room, in the cold cover of night. She’d blamed herself, for not being able to do the Gauntlet, for Azrael making me do it in her place. She was still woozy from the painkillers, from the antirejection medication, some of her stitches still leaking, and she told me she’d hardly slept in weeks. She told me her body was betraying her. She told me it had never really been her own.
She was a fuse that had burned nearly to its end.
Azrael takes a step closer. Keres doesn’t move. Her arm is trembling, the barrel of the gun pressed hard against her temple. Her blue eyes are like smoked glass.
“Come on, now,” Azrael says. He’s mere feet away from her. Close enough, almost, to reach out and grab the gun. “It’s not worth this, Keres. I’ll do a Wipe, and you won’t even remember it by tomorrow.”
Her gaze flashes, welling with impossible tears. Her lips pull back into a snarl, half anger, half pain, like a wounded animal, and she says, “ No. You’ll never do that to me again.”
And then she shoots—but not at herself. In the space of a breath, she aims the gun at the base of the fireplace and pulls the trigger. The bullet flies.
“ No! ” I shout. I lunge for her.
But the fire divides us. Her bullet hits the gas tank, and the world explodes in red and gold. Heat billows outward. Smoke engulfs her. I inhale it and it chokes me and I drop to my knees, gasping. There’s the acrid scent of burnt leather in the air. And then there’s Azrael, his hand on the collar of my shirt, dragging me backward as if I’m a dog he’s got by the scruff of its neck. Keres has vanished behind the flames.
The memory melts away and the real world resurrects itself before my eyes.
I’m in a universe of ice and snow. Keres is gone; Azrael is gone; there are only the Dogs pacing toward me, crunching the frost under their robot feet, and Inesa, still holding my hand. The warmth and pressure of her grip bring me back to myself. She’s real; she’s here; she’s alive.
I can save her. I might have failed Keres, but I won’t fail her.
In one brisk, rough motion, I yank the bottle of kerosene from her hand. She’s too shocked to protest, to fight back. Her eyes grow wide with bewildered horror.
I give her a harsh shove and she tumbles backward, falling into the snow. I feel the reverberation of the impact in the soles of my feet when she hits the ground. She scrambles upright, brushing her hair out of her face, but by the time she processes what I’m about to do, it’s too late. I step between her and the whirring, man-made monsters.
“No!” she cries. “Don’t—”
I hurl the kerosene at the Dogs. In the fraction of a second that it’s still airborne, before it can bounce off them and land in the snow, I pull the trigger.
One perfect shot.
Heat. Engulfing me like a cloud of polluted air, heavy and black. Light sears through my eyelids, turning everything a sharp, burning white.
And pain. Pain like I’ve never felt before, crawling up my limbs, scorching every inch of my skin. Caerus has worked hard to prevent this, reaching into our brains and turning off pain receptors, toggling them like switches. Increasing the production of endorphins with injections and pills. But they can’t go too far, because pain is protective, too. It lets you know when your life is in danger. It helps keep you alive.
I can’t move or speak. Every nerve ending in my body is crackling like a fuse. This is the pain that says Run . Hide. But my muscles won’t obey.
The next thing I feel is pressure under my arms. My legs skid across the ground and it feels like my skin is being scraped off, scraped down to the sinew and bone beneath. I manage to choke out a singular sound, but I can’t tell if she hears me. Inesa. Dragging my body through the snow.
My vision returns to me in slow, agonizing increments, in brutal stops and starts, sharpening and then blurring again. I’m lying on my back, head tilted upward. I see the threshold of the cabin, dark wood against the white sky. I see smoke curling in the air. There’s a foul, charred odor, and beneath it, something even more putrid. My own skin, burning like meat on a grill.
“Mel? Mel?” Inesa clutches my face in her hands. Her palms are cool and her touch is soft.
I blink, and her features clarify. Her pink-touched cheeks, freckles strewn like stars. Her earth-colored eyes, brimming with tears. Strands of dark hair falling wildly, caught on her lips and her thick lashes.
“Wait here,” she says—as if I have any other choice. Her voice sounds distant, muffled; the pain is holding me at a distance, like I’m trapped underwater.
I blink again, and she’s gone.
As long as I stay still, the pain keeps a sort of equilibrium. Embers and ashes, not blazing blue flame. More of my vision returns. There are the walls of the cabin, wood warped by water stains, and the gashes left by the Dogs that let the light bleed through. Distantly I can hear fire crackling. There’s no room in me for panic, but I don’t have to worry about whether Inesa will return. She will. She does.
Her face hovers above me, her brows knitted with fear. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “It’s going to hurt.”
I can’t really imagine how she could make it worse, but I don’t say that. Instead, I part my cracked lips and whisper, “Did it work?”
She lets out a breath, almost a laugh, though without humor. “Yeah. It worked. The... the Dogs are dead. Blown to pieces. I don’t think they’re coming back, unless Caerus also dabbles in necromancy. But I guess they were never really alive.”
“No,” I say. The heaviness of exhaustion has settled over me, and I can’t add anything else.
Inesa swallows. “It’s mostly just your legs. It’ll be easier if you can sit up...”
I give a faint nod of permission, and Inesa puts her hands under my arms again, propping me up against the wall. From this vantage, I can finally look down at my body.
I’m surprised to see that from the waist up, there’s little damage. My gloves have burned off, but the flame-retardant material has kept my palms unmarred. Even my thighs aren’t too bad, except the patches where my hunting suit has dissolved, leaving my skin raw and bright pink underneath.
But below the knee, my legs are a mangle of flesh and fabric. Long strips of the material have melted right into my skin. Around it, the flesh is raised and puckered, even blackened in some places. There’s already a line of blisters, bubbling with yellow pus. Feeling the pain was one thing. But seeing the ruin is enough to make my throat fill with bile.
Inesa works fastidiously, as if she’s done this a hundred times before. She’s gathered a bucket of snow and very gently presses it in handfuls against the worst of my burns. Pain shoots from my legs and drills into my temple, making me gasp.
“Sorry!” She grimaces, eyes wavering with unshed tears. “I’ll try to be quick.”
The pain is coming in irregular jolts now, whenever the snow touches my skin. I’m not sure about the effectiveness of this particular method, but I don’t question her. I’m not in the City now. There are no Caerus medics to anesthetize me and graft on new skin.
Inesa takes a knife from the table and slowly begins to work at the pieces of my suit the fire left behind. Even the slightest tug is agony. I inhale sharply.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. “I just need to take the fabric off, or it will get infected...”
“Wait,” I say hoarsely. “There are pills. On the table. Pain medication.”
Inesa rises and sorts through the items on the table—the matches, the candles, the bandages, the meal replacement packets—and returns with a handful of tablets. Crouching down beside me again, she asks, “These?”
I nod. I try to reach out for the pills, but my limbs won’t move the way I want them to. Inesa hesitates. And then, very gently, she puts a hand on the back of my neck. Tips my head back. I open my mouth and she places a tablet on my tongue. With immense difficulty, I swallow.
I close my eyes. Luckily the medication works quickly. If there’s one thing Caerus is good at, it’s making you numb. After a few heavy, shuddering breaths, I can hardly feel the pain at all.
“Better?” Inesa asks quietly.
“Much.”
When I open my eyes, she’s staring at me. Her face is close enough that I can see the tears daggered through her dark lashes. The smudges of ash on her cheek. Her throat ticks.
“I watched Dr. Wessels do this once,” she whispers. “He cooled the burns with cold water. Then painkillers. But he said...” She pauses, swallows again. “He said it was important to remove tight clothing. Before the wounds swell.”
Blunted by both the ebbing pain and the painkillers, my mind is slow to grasp what she means. All I can do is blink back at her. Then the word rises, almost unconsciously.
“Okay.”
Inesa draws a breath. Then, with utmost gentleness, she takes me by the shoulders, tipping me forward at the waist. Just enough to reach the zipper on the back of my suit.
As she tugs it down, cool air brushes my bare skin, making goose bumps rise along my spine. I bend over farther, palms against the floor to steady myself. When the zipper reaches the small of my back, Inesa pauses. She repositions herself and then begins to pull the suit down from the front.
The fabric peels off my shoulders. My chest. It feels like my own skin is being cut away, like I’m parting with an essential piece of myself. But by the time my suit has been shed completely, when it’s just a crumpled heap of black fabric on the floor, it feels like nothing at all, and I can’t imagine how it ever seemed so vital.
Inesa brushes my hair back, baring my collarbones. Without even looking up at her face, I can feel her gaze running over me. From the scars on my wrists to the ones on my elbows, the crooks of my knees. My hips. They’re garish and ugly, raised like maggots under my skin.
“They take us apart and put us back together.” I stare down at the floor. “And then they have to cover up how hideous it looks.”
“They’re not hideous.” Inesa’s thumb touches the scar on my wrist. “They’re just... adaptations. It means you’ve survived.”
“Maybe.” Slowly, I lift my gaze. “Maybe that’s all, but...”
My voice tangles in my throat. Inesa just watches me. Her eyes are bright and deep at the same time, like light filtering through the leaves.
“I’m sick of just surviving,” I whisper. “I want... more.”
Fear floods me as I say the words. I’m curled naked on the floor and confession has made me even more vulnerable. Nothing dooms you quicker than desire.
Inesa raises her hands to cup my face. Her fingers are trembling.
“Me too,” she whispers back.
She leans forward, closing the space between us. Our foreheads touch. And then our lips.
It all bleeds away. The pain. The smoke in the air. The cold prickling my skin. All I can feel is the warmth and pressure of her mouth, gentle but insistent. It sends heat through my body, through the marrow of my bones. I wrap my arms around her waist to pull her closer, and she folds into me, as if our bodies were made for this. As if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Maybe it is. Maybe I’ve survived this long so I could know how it feels to hold her. Maybe all my life has been one long gauntlet, running, fighting, searching for her.