Chapter 12
Kiera
He'd been gone for close to a month.
The weather had broken, once, as if an early spring might come and then, as if determined to make her as miserable as possible, the clouds had socked in the city again.
The sun had vanished and the snow had begun to blow slantwise with the winds.
Inside the crèche, the vampires that came to the girls were maddened, their attentions vicious.
The wizened woman who was their task mistress and minder, the woman with no name she'd ever given them, handed out painkillers like candy after the visits of the vampires to the girls.
She patrolled beds late at night or just before dawn when sometimes the sun would rise briefly.
She checked on bleeding and torn flesh, took girls out of service, provided analgesic creams, opioids and lies meant to hearten.
Nothing worked. The girls stopped working out, stopped getting together for crafts or stories or anything that passed the time constructively.
They began to fight amongst themselves, petty arguments about petty, unimportant differences. Who had taken a longer shower. Who had eaten something someone else wanted.
Who had fucked the kindest of the Vampyren and taken the easier task for the night.
It was a whorehouse, Kiera thought. Maybe the crèche hadn't started that way, but as winter wore on, driving all of them mad in some way or the other, they were there to service, to fuck and be fucked, not to breed. There were no new pregnancies. At least there were no new deaths.
Kiera ate her meals with Lily, Michelle and Davida, the four of them huddling close to one of the fireplaces only because Sydney and her crew couldn't be in every room at once.
Sometimes they got nearly all the way through a meal before they were accosted.
On their own they still went to the once-corporate gym downstairs and worked out, lifting weights, kickboxing and running on treadmills.
They wanted to defend themselves against attacks that seemed certain to be coming and possibly from others within the crèche rather than from without.
Though that was possible. The Vampyren were becoming crazed. The weather was driving them daily into deeper insanity and it was only February. The time change and spring were too far away to hold out hope.
"It would be easier if we were all together," Kiera said as they huddled by the fire one early night.
Close to a month now since Loren had gone and she still missed him.
At the start she'd tried to tell herself it had been some version of Stockholm Syndrome, that he had been the first man to care for her in any way for so long that of course she developed feelings for him. She felt safer with him there.
She hadn't been.
Now she talked with her roommates.
"You're going to suggest we do something again, aren't you?" Davida asked. She'd run her hands through her afro until it looked like something had nested in it.
None of the rest of them were faring well either.
Michelle's long dark hair had become so matted and greasy she took a razor to her head, only to discover she had a lumpy, unevenly shaped scalp and now it was also bloody in places.
That was never a good thing when you were trapped by blizzards in a corporate skyscraper filled with vampires.
When she'd said that, they'd all hesitated for an instant, then burst out laughing, which angered Sydney who was sitting across the room from them.
Not that everything didn't anger Sydney but it was hard to tell what had bothered her the most – their sudden burst of laughter, the volume of their voices, or the fact that they were friends.
This time, with her roommates, Kiera had her arguments set and ready. "Look, we know there are resistance cells forming." She looked from Michelle's dark eyes to Davida's darker eyes to Lily's pale blondness.
Nobody blinked or argued. They never did. They just let her say her piece, then in some polite, girl’s solidarity way, let her know she was crazy and would get them all killed.
"Most of the cells are forming in the rural areas.
" She swallowed over that thought, thinking about her family.
Her phone had worked briefly three days earlier but she hadn't been able to reach her family, which frustrated and frightened her.
Hopefully by now they had gone to a rural area, more than the suburbs they'd been in.
It had been the plan and there was no reason Will and Kate shouldn't have taken their parents and gone.
"You want to go country bumpkin in this?" Davida gestured over her shoulder towards the windows with one thumb.
"It would be better," Kiera insisted. "Rural households are used to losing power. They're used to surviving. There will be generators."
She'd thought that would get a response. The electricity almost always held for their building because the Vampyren were behind a lot of the failures for the city at large: Yet another way to control the humans, with the fear of losing power in the brutal winter.
But the corporate building the crèche and administration was housed in was huge and full of high ceilings where heat dissipated.
The girls spent a lot of time either showering or huddling around the fireplaces when they weren't being bred, or whatever it was the vampires were doing at this point, and the power failed for real sometimes, leaving them in as much darkness as anyone else in Chicago.
"Generators, and freezers and pantries stocked with food.
Because they're used to being cut off by weather.
" She looked from one face to the next, realizing with a jolt that she really did consider these women friends now.
"If we went rural, if we fought back from a place where survival wasn't the only thing we could think about – "
She broke off because a shadow had fallen over them. Before she could even make an identification, horror flowing through her that she might have been overheard by the invaders themselves, Sydney's voice said, "Get out of my seat, bitch."
Half a dozen thoughts flashed through Kiera's mind in the time it took her to blink up at the other woman.
The first was gratitude. If all Sydney wanted was this particular seat by the fire, then she wasn't about to go running to their wizened chaperone, running to tell Marybeth she needed to find a council member or a guard and reporting Kiera and the others for sedition.
The next thought was fear. Sydney was probably a borderline personality, Michelle had said -- whether she wanted friends or not, she would turn on anyone, including her own clique, at any time.
She was unpredictable and tended to be vicious.
Kiera had enough run-ins with her. This needed not to happen, especially given that Loren had once thrown Syd casually across the room and threatened, possibly within earshot, to kill her.
Loren wasn't here right now.
The next was fury. That a small, happy minute had passed between friends and instead of ever working to have the same thing with her girls or be a part of a different group, Sydney only wanted to destroy what she couldn't or wouldn't let herself have.
The other thoughts were a jumble, nothing clear and definitely nothing that smacked of trying to understand Sydney's twisted personality.
She thought, Don't call me bitch! And she thought that she wanted to vanish and she thought that this was less like a beauty pageant – after all, she'd never been in one – and a lot more like what she imagined boarding school would be like: You were stuck forever, day after day, with the worst of your high school enemies.
She thought most of all that the fact that they couldn't work together even now might be what brought down humanity forever.
People were afraid. They were afraid to take steps that might fail and might bring them to the attention of the invaders.
They were afraid of each other, that if they took a chance and took a step or a stand, someone else – a Sydney, say – would go running to the invaders and get them killed.
They were afraid for themselves and they were afraid for the people they loved and she couldn't fault that because all of that was true for her too.
Before she'd thought that the advent of the Vampyren in their wormhole technology ships appearing in the skies over Earth and being there to conquer had been the first thing to finally bring humanity together.
It had felt like a cynical thought, kind of a We're all different and xenophobic as fuck until we're all threatened and then it's better to get along despite hating and fearing each other than not being around to be able to hate and fear at all.
…probably that was still cynical. But now she was afraid that if even a worldwide threat like the Vampyren couldn't cause people like Sydney to be tamped down or to find a place with others even if it was only to survive, then what chance did any of them have?
And she didn't want to feel that way.
I'm no better. She'd not stood up directly to the Vampyren. She'd begged, she'd presented her case, she'd made trades: Me, for my family. Don't hurt this person and I'll… things that she probably could have been forced to do anyway only she did it as a barter system.
She thought she was making progress but maybe all she was doing was keeping herself and her loved ones safe. Maybe that wasn't enough to get the Earth and all its peoples – all its peoples – out from under the grip of the space vampires.
She didn't know how to do that. Not necessarily. It wasn't like she could march into the Council chambers and insist that while she didn't have anything specific that she could even think to demand at the moment, still she needed to demand something.
But she could stand up to Sydney. Not that she hadn't before. But this time was different. This time maybe what she needed to do was fight for the kind of life she wanted.
Whatever that meant.