Interlude
THE MACHINIST
Four years after the blade
The woman had worn the title of the Vindica Ultis for four years now, and though she still was not accustomed to it, it had settled over her shoulders.
She had learned quickly that there was little good business in devoting herself solely to the orders of her goddess.
She lived in a world of darkness and hunger, and from the moment she picked up her blessed blade, she had known that she was better off embracing that hunger than forsaking it.
She had, by now, come to understand that there was little difference between hunting for divine approval and hunting for gold, and the latter was far more useful.
The night she met the machinist, she was on one such mission; blood for coin.
The mark was an easy kill, a sniveling man who had been the type to thrive in the world before the sun fell but failed to adapt to one of darkness.
He had once been a great lord, happy to tread over those he deemed as lesser; but in the end, he begged to be spared, on his knees in the decaying remains of his former life.
This bounty had included items, too, things that the man’s enemies had wanted returned upon his death. The woman was busy hacking off the corpse’s head when a soulless came upon her. The creatures were new, still, at this time—freshly created and unleashed upon the human realms.
The woman attempted to counter the attack, too late. She’d been unprepared. She slipped backward. She thought she would meet her end.
Until a small figure flew from the shadows, and a streak of copper whizzed by, lodging in the creature’s throat. The soulless let out a deafening squeal, writhing, and the woman seized the opening to skewer its heart.
{Far too close,} the blade remarked, and the woman agreed.
She turned, expecting that her savior would be another competing bounty hunter.
Instead, she saw a child.
The girl was perhaps nine or ten years old, with dirty, wavy hair bound in a tail and fingers smeared with oil. She clutched a crossbow—a contraption that was clearly the work of a machinist, clumsy in appearance but flawless in function.
The girl was looking at her with nearly circular eyes.
“You’re—you’re the Vindica Ultis!” she squeaked.
The woman’s heart clenched uncomfortably.
Not because of the girl’s reaction—she was accustomed to this, by now—but because, as she glanced at the list in her hand, and the trinkets that surrounded them, and the metal cuffs on the girl’s wrists, she realized this child was in the inventory to be brought in with the mark.
This thought made her stomach turn.
“Close your eyes,” she told the girl, before leading the child past the corpses and onto the street, where she placed the girl on her horse before the two of them rode away.
As they traveled, the woman noticed the child’s hands shaking. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
The machinist hesitated before answering in a small voice, “I haven’t had hixis in a while.”
{Fierce for such a pitiful little creature,} the blade said, somewhat tenderly.
The woman’s lips thinned. She said nothing more, urging on her horse.
At the shepherd’s office, the machinist sat in the corner as the woman set the mark’s head and the collection of items on the desk. The shepherd took an accounting of the items, muttering under his breath, and then raised his gaze to the machinist.
“She is part of the deal,” he said, dismissively, as if he were talking about livestock.
The machinist shrank down in her chair. The woman’s teeth ground.
“What if she wasn’t?” she said.
The shepherd paused, pen halfway to paper. “She is. The bounty is for her as well. Without her, the deal is void.”
Bounty, he said. The woman despised that word. A bounty was a fee paid for some criminal lowlife. Not a handful of coins in exchange for an innocent child, like a piece of merchandise.
The shepherd glanced down at the pile of money on the desk. “It’s more than she’s worth, if you ask me,” he said. “Look at her. Already sick.”
As if to say, It’s for the best.
The woman hated that tone. It made her want to rip that man’s tongue from his mouth.
Instead, she pushed the entire pile of coins—her payment for this bounty—across the table. “Then no deal. Keep the head. Keep the rest. If they want to come for me over it, then fine.”
Then she reached into her pocket and fished out another handful of grease-stained coins. “And that’s for hixis.”
The machinist child was overjoyed. She threw back the first vial of hixis greedily, and, it seemed, her energy was immediately restored. She trotted along after the woman, letting loose a nonstop string of thanks and gleeful chatter.
The woman spun around. She looked the machinist up and down.
“You can go wherever you please, now,” she said. “Got anywhere you’re supposed to be?”
The machinist’s mouth closed. Her brow furrowed. She shook her head.
Of course, the woman thought. There were many orphans now. She wondered if this child could even remember a time before the darkness.
Then the girl brightened. She said, “But I could stay with you!”
The woman’s chest tightened. A wave of emotion came over her.
She could not identify why, that night. But the truth she would come to realize, many years later, was that she was responding to the hope in that little girl’s voice.
Hope that belonged to a child—hope that belonged to a soul who genuinely believed in good.
It had been many years, now, since the woman had heard that.
She had come to think that it no longer existed at all.
No, that wouldn’t be a good idea. The answer should have been easy. Perhaps it was the truth. Her lifestyle was not one well-suited for a child.
{But what in this world is?} the blade mused.
What indeed.
The woman considered the machinist. Everything about her looked like prey. She was small and ill, and most dangerous of all, she was trusting. This would inevitably destroy her.
But once, the woman thought, someone had thought that of her, too, and they had been wrong.
She eyed the burn marks on the child’s fingers and the smears of oil on her cheeks.
“You’re a machinist?”
The girl nodded.
“What’s your name?”
Her eyes brightened. “Valentina, miss.”
The woman winced. “Don’t call me that.” She extended a hand, and the girl leaped to clasp it before the words were even out of her mouth. “All right, Valentina. I’ll hire you.”
The machinist would spend six years with the woman, and they would be the happiest years of her life. She would nurture a kindness that could not have flourished anywhere else in this dark world, all beneath the canopy of a warrior’s steel love. She would watch, and learn, and grow.
There are other fates, other kinder futures, in which this girl lived to be someone great—a machinist visionary, a talent, a leader. But that is not the world in which this child lived.
Six years later, when she met her final moments, she was thinking of the woman who had become the closest thing she knew to a mother, and all those sharp edges she had been taught to wield.
She used them till the very end. And when a vampire had their teeth in her throat, when she saw death reaching for her, when she was so afraid that she couldn’t breathe and thought nothing could be louder than her terror—
She heard a warrior’s voice, telling her, Load one more shot for spite.
She had pulled that trigger and fired that final bolt, even though she knew it would not save her.
In this world, the machinist girl did not live to become a great visionary. But she carved her final moments into fate itself, anyway, just like a friend, a hero, a mother taught her once.