8. ~Vex~
~Vex~
“FIGHT!”
The word goes up like a flare, and the cafeteria answers the way dry tinder answers a spark.
Brawls don’t happen often in here.
The food is bad, the suppressants are worse, and most of us are too foggy by midday to summon the conviction.
But this one, apparently, has been deemed justifiable by popular vote, because another body turned up before the lunch bell—the third in a week, if anyone’s counting, and I am always counting—and once again the finger of suspicion has swung around the room like a compass needle and settled, with dreary inevitability, on me.
Which is genuinely rich, considering I was sitting here minding my own business, eating the extra pudding cup I lifted off the dessert cart for being charming at the right orderly, savoring the small grey miracle of butterscotch in a place that rations joy by the teaspoon.
Now there is an Omega, the approximate dimensions of a vending machine, doing everything in her considerable power to put me on the floor.
The cafeteria is its own weather system at the best of times—a low-ceilinged box where the scent of a hundred suppressed designations curdles together with steam-table gravy and industrial lemon cleaner into something you could chew.
Citrus and gunmetal from the corner table. Bruised peony, thinner now, from wherever the east-wing girls cluster since Wren stopped sitting with them.
And threaded through all of it, climbing as the adrenaline lifts it off my skin, the bright sugared bloom of me—strawberries and warm cake going sharp at the edges the way my scent always sharpens when my blood comes up.
Distress is supposed to sour an Omega.
Mine just turns into dessert with teeth, and the congregation around us breathes it in and bays a little louder for the sweetness of the show.
Somewhere under their cheering I can still taste butterscotch on my tongue, the ghost of the stolen pudding I’d been three spoonfuls into when the word fight cracked across the room and the vending machine launched herself at me with murder in her swollen, weeping eyes.
Such poor timing.
I do hate to leave a dessert unfinished. It feels like a small abandonment, and I’ve abandoned quite enough.
I avoid her.
For theatrics, mostly.
A ring of patients has bloomed around us with the speed only bloodlust can summon—my fellow inmates, my devoted little congregation, cheering the chaos with the bright ugly joy of people who get so few spectacles that they’ll take a violent one gladly.
The guards haven’t arrived in any meaningful number yet.
They will, eventually, in a clumsy thunder of boots and whistles, and I can promise that by the time the reinforcements sort themselves out, I’ll be either pulverized into modern art or bruised past recognition.
If I want to be. Which is the only question that matters, and it’s entirely mine to answer.
Should I, for the plot?
Things are always more interesting when you commit to the bit. A little blood sells the innocent victim far better than a suspicious lack of it.
I tuck the thought away to consider and slide left, letting her next swing whistle past my ear close enough to stir my hair.
It’s a real calculation, not a flippant one, the sort I run a dozen times a day in this place. The performance has rules.
An innocent patient gets overwhelmed; she doesn’t glide through a brawl untouched like a thing that’s done this before in rooms far worse than this one. Bruises are an alibi I can wear on my skin. A split lip is a character witness.
The trouble with looking too capable is that capability invites questions, and questions are the one currency I refuse to spend, because the moment Blackthorn stops believing I’m a lunatic is the moment Blackthorn starts taking me seriously—and a serious Vex is a Vex they’d actually try to contain.
Far better to be underestimated.
Underestimation is a door left unlocked.
She telegraphs everything—grief makes a body loud—and dodging her is less a fight than a dance I already know the choreography to. I weave and pivot and let my feet do the math while the rest of me drifts off to the more interesting puzzle.
This is the part no one in this room would believe if I let them see it plainly: how easy it is.
How slow she looks to me, how legible, every wind-up announced a full beat before the blow arrives, every lunge a sentence I’ve already finished reading. I could end this in three moves.
I could put her on the ground and keep her there and never break a sweat, and the only reason I don’t is that a patient who fights like a trained thing stops being a patient and becomes a problem with a very different paperwork.
So I dance badly on purpose. I make my evasions look like luck. I let the congregation think the pretty lunatic is simply too quick and too crazy to catch, which is a costume, like all my best ones, stitched to fit exactly what they expect.
Why me?
The timing is the part that nags hardest.
Three days ago I was the institute’s favorite ghost story and nothing more—watched, counted, left alone on my plinth.
Then Doc walked through the door with his fountain pen, and Riot got dragged up from the prison wing in his pretty black cuffs, and Silas drifted in smelling of funeral lilies, and all at once I’ve become the white-hot center of Blackthorn’s attention for every wrong reason on the menu.
Bodies. Suspicion.
A grieving giant’s fists.
Do I mind? Not especially. Attention has always been a currency I spend well. But the timing is a riddle, and riddles are the one thing in this building I can’t leave alone.
Cui bono. Who profits.
Not the lunatic in orange, who has nothing left to win and a deeper hole to lose. But a fortress with a body problem and a spotless public face profits enormously from a tidy, photogenic monster—a sealed file, a buried scandal, a press line with the word contained tucked neatly inside it.
The administration profits.
The CEO and his sacred reputation profit. And a scentless detective who arrived exactly as the corpses began to stack, wearing blockers so no one in a building that runs on scent can read a flicker of what she feels—I haven’t decided yet what she profits.
But I never trust the one person in the room who’s made certain I can’t smell her lying.
Here is what doesn’t add up, and I let myself fully stop to look at it, planting my feet, going still in the eye of all that noise: I do not benefit.
I am the prime suspect for a string of murders, and there is no version of the arithmetic where killing patients serves me. I gain nothing by being here, drugged and dim and rotting prettily in a manufactured fog.
So who profits from gilding me as the monster?
Who gets richer, safer, freer, with my name on every corpse? That’s the thread.
Pull the profit, and the puppeteer comes up with it?—
Three murders in a week, each one quieter and cleverer than this clumsy cafeteria theatre, each one painted to point at me.
And now a fourth attempt staged in front of the whole population, loud and public and witnessed, as if someone has grown impatient with subtlety and wants me removed from the board in plain sight.
The escalation itself is information. Patient killers don’t get loud unless something has spooked them. Something changed three days ago.
Something arrived that the composer didn’t plan for?—
The whole ring shrieks at once, and the sound yanks me out of my own head a half-beat too late.
Miscalculation.
My stall has handed her the opening, and she takes it like a freight train taking a fence.
There’s no clean way to slip a tackle from a standstill, and even if there were, the cameras are rolling and the whole performance depends on my looking like exactly what they think I am—the wrong-place, wrong-time patient flailing to defend herself.
So I let my body go where it doesn’t want to go.
I throw up my arms in a convincing, useless brace, I let the fear flash real across my face for the lens, and I let her hit me.
It has been a long while since anyone put their full weight on me, and I had forgotten, in my comfortable years on the plinth, that a body twice my size landing square is not a thing the mind can fully edit out. We go down hard.
The tile rushes up. And when it meets my spine and skull, I cannot pretend, even to myself, that it doesn’t hurt.
How annoying.
I ride out the next few blows, slipping the worst of them with small turns of my head she’s too far gone to notice, taking the rest on the meat of my shoulder. Then her hands leave their fists behind and find my throat.
Let me say, for the record, that being strangled is significantly less charming when the intent is sincere.
There’s a version of a hand at my neck I quite enjoy—slow, possessive, a question rather than a verdict. This is not that version.
This is all crushing earnest pressure, thumbs digging for the architecture underneath, and there is nothing kinky or coy about it, only the flat ugly arithmetic of a windpipe being asked to close.
My body knows precisely how to end it. Three points of leverage, a thumb bent the wrong way, the soft vulnerable hinge of a jaw—my hands twitch with the muscle memory of a dozen quieter resolutions.
But every one of them would announce me to the lens above us as something other than a victim, and so I let my fingers scrabble uselessly at her wrists instead, playing the drowning girl while the cold professional in the back of my skull keeps her own counsel, timing, measuring, waiting for the move that looks like luck.
Even now, even airless, I will not break character.
The character is the only armor that has ever held.
“You killed her,” she screams into my face, spit and tears and the grief-soured reek of her scent crashing over me. “You killed my Giselle!”
Ah. Giselle.
So that’s the name of the body before lunch, and the source of all this lovely sincerity.