Education #6
“Keep glowing,” he commands. “I know your kind can move in and out of divinity at will, and I need you to stay divine.”
“If I refuse?”
“If you refuse, you have no further value to me,” says John, simply enough. “If you refuse, I’ll start removing parts, and I’ll continue until you glow again.”
“You’re going to remove them anyway.”
“Yes,” he says, almost panting with anticipation.
“But I can make sure it doesn’t hurt as much.
I have tinctures and I have solvents, things that will ease and even dissolve the pain.
Cooperate and this can be an easy release back into the sky.
Refuse, and I’ll make sure you understand every ache and pain the flesh can be subjected to. ”
Deborah stares at him, silver light dancing in her eyes. Then she sighs, and bows her head, and he gets to work.
He doesn’t tell his niece to leave the room.
Floretta lingers behind him, watching him as he carves up the woman she betrayed, and with every cut he makes, another part of the girl she was falls away, unnecessary in this bright new world of art and alchemy.
She was happy in the forest, but now she’s here: she’ll be the person Boston wants her to be.
Deborah bleeds silver moonlight, and Floretta envies her that, a little.
Even if bleeding silver means Deborah has to be the one tied to the chair, it’s still something special and magical, and most of all, visible, out in the world where no one can pretend it isn’t happening.
Floretta would bleed silver if she could.
(And the thought has just enough time to form before it short-circuits itself, dies in a snarl of static like lightning lashing out of a clear night sky. No moonlight for her, no starlight or winter winds. She was made for something more important than any of those things.
She was made for Olympus.)
Deborah screams in the beginning, screams with every stroke and cut, her flesh opening like a storybook behind the motion of the knife, her silver blood washing everything irrelevant away.
Before long, she isn’t screaming anymore.
Before long, she’s just sagging in her chair, head dangling, motionless, and her blood continues to glow where it pools on the fouled canvas beneath her.
There is no drain in this room. Floretta had wondered about that at first: when the farmers back in her village had butchered calves or suckling pigs, they’d done it in places where the blood could drain away.
Here, though, her uncle is trying to gather every scrap of silver.
Blood that glows is probably easier to clean up than the other kind, since you can see every last bit you’ve missed as long as you keep the lights down low.
She’s not allowed to hold the knives, but he gives her little sponges and vials and she dutifully gathers as much of the glowing silver from the floor around her as she can, pressing it out of the edge of the rug with her fingertips, sponging it off her shoes.
It’s the most amazing thing she’s ever done, and it stays amazing as her uncle moves from slicing and slashing to actual dissection, cracking open the impossible geode of Deborah’s body and carefully levering her organs free.
He holds each of them up like the rarest of prizes before he slides them into the cold chest he had prepared for this moment.
It takes forever. It doesn’t take any time at all. It is a moment and an eternity, and when he turns to Floretta, there is a smudge of silver glowing on his cheek, like a streak of impossible starlight. He smiles, approving in a way he has never been before.
“Thank you,” he says. “I was concerned you wouldn’t understand what we do here, but you’ve proven yourself beyond my wildest dreams.”
“What are you going to tell the rest of the staff?”
“Miss Cottingsly understands my work. She won’t need to be told anything, and she’ll see to informing the others. You like your new housemaid?”
There’s something almost perverse about having this conversation over Deborah’s body, but Floretta doesn’t dwell on it; not dwelling will become a hallmark of the woman she’s going to be when she grows up, never looking back, never slowing down. “Not as much as I liked Deborah.”
“Well, whose fault is that?”
She giggles, just a little. “Mine, I suppose. She’ll do. I can teach her to be tolerable, and she doesn’t glow, so the work won’t be wasted. We’re not going to need to worry about taking her apart.”
“That’s for the best.” John starts to turn away.
Floretta seizes her opportunity. “I think I know the name I want now.”
“Oh?”
“Yes.” With the moment upon her, she feels suddenly shy, like she’s doing something wrong by speaking what she’s been dreaming out into the world. “I want to be called Asphodel.”
John blinks, then frowns. “Why?”
“It’s a flower, so I’ll still have the name I had in the beginning. That feels important, like putting the whole road on the map when you sit down to draw it. And it’s Greek. I like my Greek lessons a lot.” She almost squirms under the weight of his attention. “It feels right.”
“It’s not a name.”
“It is a name, it’s just not usually a name for a person. I’ve met people named ‘Rose’ and ‘Lilac.’ Why can’t I have a different flower for my name?”
“A fair argument. Will that be all?”
“No. I want her name too.” She indicates the unmoving shape of what was once Deborah.
“Asphodel Deborah Baker?” asks John, confirming.
She nods once, firmly.
“Very well,” he says, and once again, the future is set. There is only one path forward from here, one inevitable, implausible road between this moment and the future, terrible and glorious as it is. She will be remembered, even as he will not.
That is, perhaps, the most fitting punishment either of them could possibly endure.