Elliot’s POV
“I wished for my brother to go to university, even if it had cost half of my life. Now it is too late, and it costs my whole.”
—Elliot Starfall
The rapier is ridiculous in my hands, slender and elegant, dressed up even though it is a weapon. Its blade is a fine line that reflects the blue light of the sun, entering the room, and, for a mont, the absurdity of refinent makes laugh.
Steel that could have been a museum exhibit becos an instrunt of survival. Guns are for officers. Mocking the weapon of the dead Blue, my mouth sets into the sort of face that rembers how very human cruelty can be beneath a tailor’s cuff.
The smile slips away. Sorrow settles where humor was; it is thicker, older. Resting my head on my left elbow, I let the rapier lie across my knees. The blank wall beside whispers: newspapers ragged and half-torn lie on the ground, pinned like the mories we are not allowed to keep.
I have read them once, even twice, as if the repetition might teach a lesson for the future. They speak of institutes and adverts, of universities with polite portraits and grand promises. They speak of economies, of Nigil and Zentria, of wars that will swallow whole generations. All of it is a civilized noise for a world that decided so blood is worth more than others.
A strange world, still, it seems like my old one. No, they are monsters; this could never be Earth.
Closing my eyes, my tongue twists while thinking further on the topics of the newspapers: the enslavent, the trade routes across seas that transform people into cargo. On those sheets, they call it comrce; I call it a ledger of lives. Before this, before the schedules and maps, my people were already enslaved sohow. Slaves to fields, to kitchens, to servile smiles all over this continent. One of the few.
I don’t know how, whether they invaded secretly and enslaved us, but that wouldn’t make any sense. The newspaper could also be Propaganda...
Even the clocks here do not mark twenty-four hours but so other arithtic; even ti seems complicit. Clocks show only sixteen hours instead of twenty-four.
Blinking, blue light floods the room again, and the ache returns as a tide. Two and a half, three days—ti curls away in this house until I cannot tell midnight from noon. Cham says I sleepwalk. Gene says the sa with a shrug, however.
We have hidden away the family in the attic; their bodies are wrapped and stacked on top of each other. The house is large enough to pretend, for now, that the world is nothing more than rooms.
I rember waking the first day in unfamiliar sheets and knowing, at the edge of my senses, that sothing terrible had already happened. mory thins with each night. Yesterday I could no longer find.
Night after night, my waking is under Blue, a color that stains the carpets and becos the color of the things I do not want to look at. The first night bled bright and wet; after that, the blood is more like old varnish, crusted over like a varnished lie.
Cham and Gene roam the city while I sit here, breathing ragged and coughing blood. My mind is not my own anymore.
They look for others: a band, a faction, any hand that might take a blade with us and call it purpose. The curtain trembles over the window while my vision flickers.
Knock. Knock.
My heart thuds as if soone has suddenly stepped on a wound. There is a man at the door; he wears a dark-blue suit that catches the light like oil. A cigar pinches smoke into the air, and he checks his watch the way n who sign papers do.
He knocks again with the boredom of a man who knows the world never refuses him.
Red light flares behind my eyes until it drenches my whole vision. Through the gap, the blue light of the sun turns violet. Around him, an almost-visible aura of clear azure coils through his arm and chest like a ribbon of glass. It pulses and makes him look less like a man than an edict co to life.
Kill them all.
The thought arrives like a bolt, not mine wholly but lodged there all the sa; it tastes tallic and ancient. My left arm blazes as if oil has been poured along its veins; my right still feels as if it is there, even though it is long gone, bitten off by the faceless creature.
Doubling over, my whole body folds, left hand planted on the floorboards as the room tilts. Everything around drips red: the wallpaper, the newspapers, the faint halo around the blue-suited man.
My skin prickles as if sothing crawls beneath it—fingers under the at, a verminous procession tracing slowly. My mind races, thoughts oppressing my own.
My teeth clatter. The urge rises. Hunger. It leans up against the ribs of my chest and breathes.
Kill them all.
-----A/N-----
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