#like a miccaeli super special

[renegadeapostle]

So this is a writing piece I’ve been working on - it’s actually a prologue chapter for Hegemon, but it works really well as its own little story, so I thought I’d post it here!

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THE FIREBIRD

There had only ever been the room.

It was white, all white, the walls and the floor and the ceiling, the beds and the table and their clothes. Even the light was white. It was a big room, Ness supposed - she had never been in another, so she couldn’t say for sure. It was twenty of her steps across, and twenty wide - though Castor could walk it in fourteen. Her brother’s feet were bigger than hers or her sister Helen’s.

Pollux could have walked it in twelve.

But Pollux was not there.

The nature of the world outside the room had always been a mystery, and any curiosity Ness felt towards solving it had disappeared quickly when she learned that Father did not like questions, and that doing things their Father did not like ended up in a punishment.

The day began as all of Ness’ days had begun. The room had no windows, just mirrors, and they only knew it was morning because the lights would come on, and they would climb out of their pods and stand and wait for Father. He was always there for check up, first thing in the morning. He had not missed a day in twelve years.

They lined up in a row, Ness at the head because she was the eldest. She stepped away for Castor to leave a space for Pollux, as she always did. She wanted their Father to look at the space and feel a burning shame, to regret Pollux’s absence. But if the emptiness made him feel anything, he had never shown it.

The white door opened and Father stepped in. He was wearing his white coat and there was a troubled expression on his fierce face. He had not created Ness and her siblings in his image; they were as different to him in features as they were to one another. Ness was glad of it. She did not want a single part of their father on her face. She didn’t know who she was meant to look like, but the scientists often called her and Helen beautiful. Once one of them had touched her cheek and called her geisha. But she did not know what that meant; the scientists had many names for her.

Dioscuri. Water. Fish. Omega. East. Kardashev One.

But in her heart she was only Ness.

‘Good morning, Clytemnestra,’ her father said. Whatever thought had been vexing him vanished, and he regarded her with a clinical dispassion she knew well.

‘Good morning father,’ Ness said, as she always did.

‘I am not your father,’ he replied, as he always did.

But that was a lie. He was their creator and they were his responsibility, and Ness would not let him pretend it was any other way. It was as close to rebellion she had ever gotten, speaking that word, and it and she felt a dark flare of satisfaction when it frustrated him.

‘How are the calculations progressing?’ he asked.

‘They are going well. We are close to unraveling the Gordian Knot.’ She faced forward, emotionless. She knew the news would please him, especially since they had been working so much slower since Pollux had gone.

And please him it did. There was a flash of victory in his eyes as he said, ‘Well done, Clytemnestra. Very well done.’ He made some notes and Ness stood silently, waiting.

Eventually he focused on her again. ‘This is wonderful news, Omega. I am very proud of you.’

‘Thank you, Father.’

‘I am not your father,’ he said patiently. ‘My name is Peregrine. You are still practicing the Stravinsky?’

‘Yes. The Firebird. I am close.’

‘And you will be perfect.’ His voice was warm. ‘As you always are. You may practice this afternoon. And when you untangle the Knot, you may dance all day.’

Ness tried not to let her heart soar at the thought of it. He would bait them like that sometimes, promising Castor a new instrument or new ribbons for Helen’s hair, and for Ness it was the ballet. It was her craft and her passion, and after her siblings it was all she loved. The long hours of the afternoon, when the music would play and Castor would play his instrument and Helen would hum the tune in her voice like honey were the closest thing to happiness Ness had ever known. Before he had been taken Pollux would draw for them. He would etch the intricate braids of Helen’s hair, the graceful lines Ness made as she danced. His sketchbooks had been filled with horses - they were Castor’s favourite.

‘We’ll see them one day,’ Pollux had promised. ‘Real horses, in a field of grass. We’ll ride them together. We can do whatever we like, when we are free.’

But Ness knew better. They would never leave the white room. The only freedom any of them would ever know was death.

Father had moved on to questioning Castor and Helen. Their answers were never as lucid as her own. The drugs impacted them harder than Ness, so that they were always numb and malleable and smiling. Ness had perfected the glassy stare she had often seen in their eyes. She did not want their father to know the drugs didn’t work on her. He had suspected the same thing of Pollux, and he had been right, and then Pollux had been taken.

Their father had no use for anything he could not control.

Their check up was done. The scientists came in and bent their heads and shot the drugs into the needle mark at the top of their spines. The three of them stood, heads bowed obediently, and endured it. The hypodermic needle was excruciating, and frequency had not lessened the pain. They were given no anaesthetic. Ness felt the scream that always boiled in her throat at the pain rise, and she pushed it down savagely; anything other than mute submission would lead to experiments to see how much she could feel and understand.

When their father had suspected the drugs weren’t working on Pollux, he had submerged her and Castor and Helen in vats of icy water, and made Pollux watch as they were electrocuted. Ness remembered, acutely, the feeling of drowning while being shredded in her own skin, of watching through the water and the terror as Pollux screamed and fought and clawed at the scientists, begging them to stop, begging for mercy. Then they had knocked him out and dragged him away, and through it all their father stood watching, shaking his head as if Pollux had disappointed him.

He had left Ness and Castor and Helen on the floor, naked and shivering and separated, for the first time in their lives, from their family.

Ness had not realised how much Pollux had done to protect them until he wasn’t there. He had always answered first when Father asked a question, would draw attention to himself and earn punishment after punishment. Ness had thought it reckless until she had found herself doing the same thing.

There was not a lot Pollux had been able to do to protect them, and even less for Ness now that he had gone. But she did as best she could. When Castor was so weak from the drugs he couldn’t think, she would disconnect him from the group computer as gently as she could and work twice as hard to cover his quarter of the calculations as well as her own. When Helen’s speech drive started to glitch and she would panic, unable to form words, Ness would hold her hand and connect their minds and soothe her until it came back online. Her own fears and frustrations and hopelessness she kept locked away deep inside. There had never been anyone for Ness to lean on.

The purpose of the white room was to hold the four of them, and the purpose of the four of them was to solve a puzzle. It was, their father said, the greatest puzzle the world had ever known. It was too complex for a human to understand, but too nuanced for a computer to decode. And so something that was both human and machine had been needed. And that something was Ness and Castor and Helen and Pollux.

The puzzle required them to think, and to think they had to be creative, and to be creative they needed emotion. And so their father had created them with human shapes and human shaped minds. But they were not people. He had told them that often. They were not human; they had no rights. Their emotions were there to solve the puzzle. They were not meant to love.

They worked best when they were together. The work was all that mattered to Father, and Ness was sure that it was the only reason he had allowed them to form bonds with one another. Or perhaps he had done it so he would always have leverage over them. There was nothing that worried their Father more than the thought of free will growing thick in their veins.

Ness had never been foolish enough to hope for freedom. She knew her life would never be her own. There was nothing but the white room and the work.

Grinding away at the puzzle was tedious, but Ness liked connecting her consciousness to the virtual reality where she and her siblings processed numbers and equations. She could make the simulation appear any way she wished, and she liked to recreate pictures of landscapes she had seen, dark forests and scorching deserts. She could only guess at things like temperature, or how the light would look, or what noises there would be. She didn’t know if the worlds she created were anything like the world outside the room.

Her favourite place to work was a beach. Ness connected to the mainframe and felt the surge of its power through her veins, then reached out to find her brother and sister. They were there, as always, waiting for her. Ness took their hands and led them to the water.

The only picture she had ever seen of a beach had been taken at sunset. The sinking sun had touched the waves like a burning flame, and Ness tried her best to recreate the beauty of it in the virtual simulation. Once she had tried to craft a horse for Castor, but it had come out two dimensional and distorted and it had made him cry, so Ness deleted it and did not try again. After that she left him and Helen making sandcastles or rolling around making angel silhouettes while she worked on the Knot and waited.

It didn’t take long that day. Ness had only been fraying at the edges of the knot for an hour - it was a snake’s nest of coding in truth, but in the sun it looked like a real knot, ropes tangled around one another in a mountain of cords - when she saw the reflection of the clouds start to descend in low, lazy circles. She cast a glance at her siblings, who were splashing one another in the water and laughing merrily, then followed the clouds east.

The clouds had coalesced over a gathering of rockpools; it had started to rain, the water hitting the ground with a sound like a metronome. Ness had never felt real rain. She wondered if it was cold. If it was healing.

Having done the dance a dozen times before, Ness did not hesitate before climbing over the rocks and walking underneath the deluge. As soon as the water hit her shoulders, the mirage of the beach disappeared and was replaced with a grand house, richly furnished and lit by an ornate chandelier that hung above Ness’ head like a dagger pointing downwards.

The house had the opulence of someone very wealthy, but the emptiness of no one to share it with, and whenever Ness walked its long, sad halls she felt a rush of gratitude that she had her siblings with her in the white room. It may have been a prison, but at least it wasn’t lonely.

Ness walked up the grand staircase, headed towards the viewing room. To stand in the house was to see yourself as you wanted to be, and for Ness that was a prima ballerina. Sometimes she was the black swan, sometimes the white; sometimes the pink of Giselle or the festive colours of the Nutcracker. But that day she knew she would be the Firebird, and the Firebird she was; her skirt was a deep, velvety red, and her ankles were wrapped in crimson ribbon. When she passed a mirror in the hall, she saw a headpiece made of gold crowning her black, blunt hair.

No matter how many times she went to the house, Ness always marvelled at the strength of the projection. Unlike the flimsy landscapes she created in the virtual world, the house almost felt like it was real; the air rushed past Ness’ face as she walked and the floorboards creaked beneath her ballet slippers. The first time she had gone to the house Ness had thought it was real, had thought she’d found some kind of loophole out into the real world. She had wept bitterly when she’d learned the truth, and the tears had felt real too.

And then Divya had knelt down and wiped them away. And everything had changed.

The viewing room was on the house’s very top floor. Ness reached its ornate blue door and pushed it open. The room was enormous, wide and empty like a ballroom before any of the guests had arrived, and instead of walls it was surrounded on all sides by a latticework of windows, so intricate that one could look out but no one could look in. Divya told Ness that there was such a building in the real world, carved from blushing stone, but Ness couldn’t believe the humans capable of such beauty. She had never seen anything made by them that wasn’t sharp edges and cold steel.

Divya was peering out of the latticework, her back to Ness. Her hair was long and braided, and she bore a striking similarity to Ness’ own sister, Helen; they shared the same copper skin and warm brown eyes. Ness often wondered if that was what Divya truly looked like, or if she had specifically made herself similar to Helen to gain Ness’ trust.

‘Come, Clytemnestra,’ she said. ‘Watch the celebrations.’

Ness did not hesitate. As much as she tried to stop herself, she could never resist looking out of the windows and glimpsing the true world. It was more chaotic and incomprehensible that her own rigid life, and she tried as best she could not to want to be a part of it. Such impossible dreams would only drive her mad.

Sometimes Divya even let her watch the ballet.

The scene outside the window, however, was a far cry from a stage performance. Instead there was an ocean of people all crowded in a street and dancing and throwing balls of dust at one another. The crowd turned into a patchwork of pinks and yellows and powder blues; the colours drenched people’s clothes, clung to their skin, sunk into their hair. Though it seemed a violent game, the people were laughing and cheering, men and women and children dancing and shouting at one another. There were thousands of them.

Chaos, Ness thought. She couldn’t look away. The world is an ordered chaos. ‘What is this?’

‘It’s Holi.’ There was a fondness lacing Divya’s usually detached voice. ‘The festival of colour. It’s celebrated every year, in Hindustan.’

‘Does - does it hurt?’ Ness flinched as she watched children spraying one another with water guns, imagining the terrible pressure when it stung the skin.

Divya looked at her with a strange, sad expression. ‘No, dear child. It’s a day of joy. Of spring and rebirth. Of life.’ She looked through one of the lattices, eyes glancing over the sea of coloured dust. ‘Holi is the celebration of Krishna and Radha. They were lovers, once.’

Ness watched as a girl was drenched in water and then pelleted with chalk in pink and blue. ‘Love looks painful.’

Divya made an amused sound in the back of her throat. ‘And so it is.’ She pushed off the wall and walked to an opening on the other side of the viewing room, and Ness followed.

‘I’ve made some progress in searching for your brother.’

Pollux. ‘You’ve found him?’ Ness whispered. Her heart thundered.

‘In a way.’ She gestured to the window. ‘Look.’

Ness leaned in and saw that the world beyond the divide was a cold and dark tundra. It was blanketed in flurries of snow, and there was no greenery, no buildings, no autoports, only rocks and barren earth. It looked like the end of the world.

‘Pollux is in this - this place?’ Ness couldn’t imagine a purgatory worse.

‘Not in the snow - even Peregrine Aitutaki isn’t that cruel. Look there.’ Ness squinted, her eyes following the direction of Divya’s finger. It took her a moment, but then she saw it; a building, black and rectangular, built into the rockface and nearly impossible to discern from the night surrounding it. It had a small ring of light on its upper levels, the same eerie green as the thick, snakelike lines curving in the sky above it.

Aurora Borealis.

North, Ness thought. Pollux was north.

“What is this place?”

“They call it the Vault,’ said Divya. ‘It difficult to find, even for me, and there’s no cameras inside. There’s nothing connected to the grid, actually - it runs on its own generator. The whole facility is almost entirely manual. I’d find it sweet, if it didn’t also mean it’s impossible to hack into. I think it was designed by Rafael de la Vega.’ There was a trace of begrudging admiration in her voice. ‘And he knew exactly what to do in order to keep me out.’

None of that concerned Ness. ‘But Pollux is in there. You’re sure?’

Divya nodded. ‘I’m sure.’

Ness pulled her into a fierce embrace. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘Thank you, thank you.’

Divya patted her on the back awkwardly, and when Ness pulled back she saw high spots of colour on her cheeks. ‘Don’t thank me yet,’ Divya said warningly. ‘We don’t know what’s happening to him in there. If he’s even alive -’

‘He is.’ It was not wishful thinking; Pollux was alive. Ness knew it. She could feel the pull of all her siblings, an invisible tether that bound them all to one another, and she knew that if one of them died the thread would sever, and she would feel it like a blow.

Once you had touched someone’s mind you were bound to them for all your days.

Ness felt the fear and uncertainty that had surrounded her like a fog for five long years dissipate into nothing. She had a location. Pollux was in the Vault. Divya had found him, and she would help rescue him. He would be safe.

Ness felt as light as air. ‘When you find out more -’

‘I’ll come to you,’ Divya promised. ‘Straight away. But for now you should run home, tiny dancer. Before someone notices you’re missing.’

Ness kissed Divya on the cheek and rushed back down the stairs two at a time. Soon enough she was out of the house and back on the beach, and she walked back to where Helen and Castor were building a sandcastle, unable to keep the smile from her face.

Ness and her siblings spent fourteen hours every day working at the knot. Before she had met Divya, Ness had worked without breaks, and doubly so after Pollux had been taken - the punishments for not working fast enough were always severe. Ness did not mind the work. Focusing on the knot was better than worrying for herself or the others, and the end of work was always met with reward: two hours, two precious hours, in which she was allowed to dance.

When Ness let the beach scene fade away and came back to the white room, she saw that her shoes were already on the trestle table, lined up next to a Castor’s cello and a handful of white ribbons.

Ness picked up her shoes and sat on the floor in front of Helen’s bed. Her sister would pile her hair up and set it with ribbons while she broke her shoes in and stretched her legs. It was a routine they had been following since they were children, and Ness knew it calmed her siblings as much as it did her. There was a blissful freedom in knowing they acted for no other purpose than to please themselves. The white room may have been their prison, but they had found freedom in the smallest of acts; in dance, in kindness, in caring for one another.

Before he had gone, Pollux had been given a dozen pieces of charcoal and swathes of paper to sketch on in their free time. His fingers had forever been covered in soot, all gathered under his fingernails, but that was the way he liked it best. He had covered the walls of the white room in portraits and landscapes. He had drawn birds for Helen and ballerinas for Ness, and his own cot had been covered in the same symbol drawn a hundred different ways; a snake turned in on itself, eating its own tail. Sometimes he drew the symbol on people, curving down a man’s arm, encircling the neck of a woman all in white. When Pollux had been taken the men in the white coats had torn all his pictures down; Ness had only managed to save one, an intricate drawing of a sable horse. Castor still slept with it under his pillow.

Helen patted Ness on top of her head to let her know she was done braiding. Ness laced up her worn, white ballet shoes and walked to the other side of the room where the scientists had set up the barre. It was never there when she began working in the morning and always appeared by the time she pulled out of the simulation at night. It made Ness wonder what else the scientists did while the three of them were oblivious in the virtual world.

Someone was always watching. As soon as Ness placed a hand on the barre the music began playing, and she let the peaceful strains of the Firebird wash over her. Castor could pick up a tune by ear alone, and soon added the pull of his cello to the melody.

Ness braced herself, held the barre, and went on pointe. It was undeniably painful, but it was a good pain, and Ness was fluent enough in the language to be able to tell the difference.

She was inching ever closer to mastering the Firebird. She had perfected Swan Lake and Giselle, had struggled through Thumbelina and the Rite of Spring, but the Firebird was the most complex ballet she had ever attempted. It was hard work, but Ness cherished the feeling of triumph when she perfected something difficult. That was what she loved about ballet; it was about making the arduous look effortless. The duality was not unlike Ness’ own life of charades, chained to servitude in the white room.

Ness had been practicing at the bar for hours, lost in the music and the movement of the dance, when the familiar sound of the white room's door opening echoed in past the orchestra. Ness spun, heart hammering. They never received visitors at night. The schedule had been the same for years, ever since she had last seen Pollux. Irregularity meant something was wrong. It meant someone was going to be taken. It took all of Ness' strength to stay where she was, one hand on the barre and one eye on her siblings, as the door opened and Peregrine walked in. It was her creator but not; his eyes were bloodshot and there was a pungent smell all around him, like the clear liquid they rubbed across Ness' neck before inserting a needle. He was not wearing his lab coat, and his shirt looked like it had been torn. 'Father,' Ness said, trying not to let her fear creep into her voice. He did not respond. He had never not corrected her, not in the thousands of times that Ness had said it. He shut the door behind him and stumbled over to Castor's working chair, then folded himself into it wearily. Ness did not know what to do. She felt terror surging through her like electricity, but a lifetime of masking emotions kept it tightly welled down inside her. Not looking at her siblings in case he spotted it and thought it weakness, Ness did the only thing she could think of. She kept on dancing. That seemed to please Peregrine - or at least, it did not anger him. Ness practised for a taut fifteen minutes, trying to make her movements seem natural and not rigid with worry, and her creator watched her. Ness could see him in the mirror, one hand holding his head as if it hurt and both his eyes tracing the graceful lines her arms made as she spun through a fouetté . Peregrine spoke suddenly. 'Have you ever wondered why it is you love to dance?' Their eyes met in the mirror. 'No,' Ness lied. 'It does not have a reason. Like you and I, it simply is.' Peregrine grunted. 'Nothing simply is. Everything has a creator, and I am yours. Shall I tell you why you dance?' Ness did not want to hear, in case the reason was terrible, but she nodded anyway. It was the response he wanted, and that was the only response she ever allowed herself to give. 'A genetic mapper can tell us many things,' Peregrine explained. 'It can tell if a human is sick, and how to use their DNA to fix the problem. It can cure cancer. It can identify hair colour, eye colour, personality traits. It can take a human apart thread by thread, to see how they work. When I designed you, I synthesized your DNA with hundreds of dancers and performance artists. I created an algorithm to make a genetic sequence that was most likely to predicate you to dance. And when you gestated, we fed your information cortex with thousands of images and videos of ballet.' He spread his hands and shrugged. 'And here you are.' Ness stared at him through the mirror. 'No.’ Peregrine stared back. 'Excuse me?' His voice was a deadly whisper. 'No,' Ness repeated. The Firebird's sonata was still swirling all around them. 'That is how. That is not why.' He did nothing, for a moment. But then he bowed his head towards her, as he always did when she passed one of his tests. 

'And so it is.’ He laughed and looked down at his hands, splayed open on his thighs. Ness had never seen him so emotional. So exposed.

'I made you a ballerina,' Peregrine said softly, 'because my wife asked me to.' Wife. The Firebird swelled and Ness gripped the golden bar so that she did not sway and fall. Wife. Peregrine had a wife - He was still talking. 'I explained to her about crafting creative outlets, so we could monitor synthetic expression of emotion, but she just stared at you in the tank. You couldn't have been more than three years through gestation, but she looked at you and said, 'This one's a dancer. Make her a dancer, Perry.' And I did. I did.' 

He made an odd, inelegant sniffing sound. Ness realized that he was crying.

'She could have asked anything,' he said, 'and I would have done it. I would have done anything to make her smile. And that's love, isn't it? That's what love is.' He had been muttering to himself, and upon looking up and seeing Ness watching him, his eyes narrowed. 'Define love,' he snapped. Ness' spine went straight and she turned to face attention. 'Love,' she said. She pushed aside the first thoughts that had come to her mind; Castor's laugh. Helen braiding ribbons through my hair. The way Pollux's hands move when he draws. Instead she said, 'Love. A tender or passionate affection for another person. A feeling of deep attachment for those closest to oneself.' Peregrine made a humming noise of agreement. 'And what do you know of love, Clytemnestra?' Ness stared straight ahead. 'What I have been told, Father.' 'I am not your Father,' he said impatiently. He leaned forward, watching her shrewdly. 'You love your siblings, do you not?'

It’s a test, Ness reminded herself. It’s only a test. 

‘No.’ Her voice was level. ‘It is not applicable. Love is for humans.’

‘But you feel something,’ said Peregrine. ‘Connection. Obligation.’

‘They are my kind,’ Ness said simply.

Peregrine nodded, and Ness felt her shoulders loosen. ‘You know, we didn’t encourage in you a survival instinct.’ His fingers traced random patterns on the trestle table’s flat surface. ‘A computer - a machine - it has no concern for the state of its being. It wants to fulfill its purpose. It has no fears of ceasing to be. Humanity, and all the other creatures of the earth - we have struggled and evolved and endured. Life has given us a biological imperative to survive. You are not organic. You have not evolved. And yet, a sense of self preservation exists in you.’ He spoke casually, but his eyes were black shards, and Ness was not fooled. ‘Why do you think that is?’

Because you failed, Ness thought savagely. Because we are closer to you than to a machine and you cannot bear it.

‘Because you modeled our cortex on the human brain,’ Ness said instead. ‘And you do not know from where in the homo sapien that survival instinct originated. You guessed. We are an educated guess.’

Peregrine had gone very still. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I guessed. And do you think it reckless of me, Clytemnestra? To have dived so deeply into the realm of God?’

Did he expect her to validate his feelings of regret over her creation? Ness would not. She took a different path.

‘It is the human belief that God knows all, sees all, permits all. Thus anything you have done is preordained. If you have ventured into God’s realm, it is because he has let you.’

Ness didn’t add that that depended on whether or not Peregrine believed in a higher power. She knew he did; the cross around his neck was some sign of fidelity. She had asked Divya what the cross meant once, and Divya had said, ‘Sacrifice.’

Did she believe in God, too? Ness didn’t know. The humans saw God as a creator, but she already had that in Peregrine. They saw God as a savior, but no one had ever tried to save Ness and her siblings from the white room.

If God was real, he had abandoned Ness. He did not deserve her faith.

Peregrine ran a hand over his face. He looked exhausted.

‘Perhaps God has carved all our fates in stone,’ he said,’ and I am an just an actor, playing a part. And if not… if not, then I will do as I may, and beg God’s forgiveness when I am done.’

He stood for a moment, watching her, and Ness stayed as still as she dared, hoping against hope that he did not find her wanting.

‘What would they think?’ Peregrine murmured. ‘What would they say, Turing and Drakensberg and all my forebears, if they could look upon you? You are all humanity has accomplished and all it fears, all at once. You contradict yourself. And that is perhaps the most human thing of all.’

He turned and opened the door.

‘Your ankle turns in on the last pirouette. Keep it straight, and you will be perfect.’

The door slid shut, the music stopped, and Ness was alone.

She sat down on her bed and took her shoes off and tried to act like normal. She didn’t know what to make of Peregrine’s visit, how to untangle his talk of love and God. She hoped she gave the right answers. For months after Pollux had been taken, Ness had barely slept for fear that they were going to take Castor or Helen next, that she was going to have to endure the long years of her life alone in the white room severed from the only three souls in the world she loved.

The monotony of imprisonment was like a numbing agent, dulling her senses and blurring time into one endless stream, but it was also a comfort; the routine was predictable, dependable. When everything was normal Ness knew she was safe for at least one more day. Change was to be feared. Change was not to be trusted.

It took her hours to shut down and sleep. For most of the night Ness lay in her bunk, watching over her siblings and trying to will away the growing feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach.

There was no inspection in the morning. Ness waited an hour standing in line with her siblings, but Peregrine did not appear.

Even through the drugs, her brother and sister could sense that something wasn’t right. Helen sat in her work chair, braiding and unbraiding a piece of her hair nervously, and Castor pulled at Ness’ shirt, his brow creased with worry.

‘It will be alright,’ Ness said gently. She put her hand over his. ‘Don’t be afraid. We’ll go to the beach, yes? We’ll draw horses in the sand.’

Castor liked the sound of that. His brow cleared and he sat at the table, waiting for Ness to create the simulated reality. She threw one last look at the door, but it remained shut, so she plugged into the cortex and put the unease of Peregrine’s absence out of her mind.

Ness had never called to Divya before. She had alway appeared on her own, the gathering of clouds the only indication of her presence. When she had something to tell Ness she would appear, but it was random, one day in a hundred, and Ness knew she wouldn’t come so soon after she had just been. But Ness wished she would. She wanted to know it Divya watched Peregrine from the viewing room. She wanted to know what had happened to him - and what it would mean for them and their life in the white room.

But Ness called out to the sky and no one appeared, and she passed the day pulling at the Knot, trying to let the work cloud her mind and distract her from her worries.

Then it was their free time and Ness set up at the barre as the Firebird began to play. There was still no sign of Peregrine. She wondered if he had died.

It was only the final turns of the Firebird that Ness hadn’t mastered, and once she had she would have to find a new ballet to rehearse. The thought made her strangely sad. She had grown fond of the Firebird, accustomed to the soars and dips of the music. Most of all, she loved the image of a girl swathed in colour, dancing in red and orange and black on a stage somewhere, moving like a flame. Ness had often wanted to burn herself to ash and be reborn anew.

She had never seen candlelight, or felt the warmth of the sun.

The hours spun on and Ness was about to attempt the finale again when the sound of the door opening send a shiver like ice down her spine. She didn’t want to endure another of Peregrine’s conversations, where everything was a test and if she failed she would be hurt or taken. She just wanted to finish her dance. She just wanted some peace.

But what Ness wanted had never mattered, and though she willed it not to with all her heart, the door continued to rise, and rise, and on the other side there her father stood.

Ness was facing the wall, her hand on the barre as she watched Peregrine through the mirror’s reflection. His face was stony and, Ness registered with a jolt, specked with blood. His back was arched at a strange angle, and he was pushing something along in front of him. Ness looked down at what it was, and nearly collapsed; her knees turned to rubber as she spun around wildly, not willing to believe the mirror’s mirage.

But it was no illusion. Ness held on to the barre with both hands behind her back to stop herself rushing forward. If she could have cried, in that moment she would have fallen to her knees sobbing with joy.

It was Pollux.

He was sitting in a chair which Peregrine pushed forward into the white room. Ness’ eyes roved across him, looking for any sign of torture or pain; it had been five years, five unendurable years, since she had seen him last. He was not moving, not even blinking; his eyes stared ahead, glassy and unfocused. His hair was still short, his brows thick and fierce, the sharp angles of his face exactly as she remembered them. Ness looked down, and just stopped herself from recoiling. Pollux’s arms were folded across his lap, limp and unmoving, and from elbow to fingertips they were pitch black and mangled and wrong, like the claws of some monster.

Peregrine had pushed Pollux into the room and shut the door behind him. Castor and Helen were sitting at the work table, their backs to the door; they hadn’t seen Peregrine enter. Castor was playing the cello in time with the music of the Firebird and Helen was humming, her eyes closed in happiness.

Ness only looked at them for a moment before snapping her eyes back to Peregrine. He was leaning against the wall next to the door, his eyes watching Ness impassively. His hands were hanging at his sides and, Ness saw with terrifying clarity, were dripping with blood. The red of it splashed on the white floor obscenely. One of his bloodsoaked fists was wrapped around a knife.

The Firebird was still playing. The music soared in the gulf of silence that spread in the room between Ness and Peregrine, each anchored to a wall and beholding one another.

This is wrong, Ness thought. Wrong, wrong, wrong, she could sense it in the air, the feeling that something terrible had happened, was going to happen, the rusty scent of blood -

‘Father,’ said Ness unsteadily. Castor and Helen looked up at her curiously. ‘Father, what have you done?’

Peregrine looked at her. He did not speak for a moment, but then he pushed off the wall and said, ‘I am a father. But not yours.’

He lurched forward and cut open Castor’s throat.

Ness screamed. A pain like she had never known sliced through her as she watched Castor’s eyes dilate and the blood pour from the gash in his neck, all over his white tunic, splashing on the cello. Ness stumbled forward to try and stop the bleeding, only to hit the table as Peregrine forced Helen’s head back and ran the knife across her neck, too.

Helen died immediately. Her body slumped forward on the table, her lifeless eyes facing Castor, who had tried to stand but collapsed instead, blood gurgling in his mouth as he tried to speak.

Ness watched them for a moment before the fear permeated her brain and she turned and bounded back to the barre. The finale of the Firebird swelled, the music a harmony of piano and strings, but Ness barely heard it as her hands hit the wall and she screamed, ‘Divya! Save us!’

She closed her eyes and connected to the virtual reality, ready to run to Divya’s viewing room, desperate for any kind of sanctuary -

An arm wrapped around her shoulders, bringing Ness back to the physical world with a jolt. Her eyes refocused and she saw herself, cold and trembling, in the mirror, and above her shoulder Peregrine, one bloody hand holding her against him as he looked through the mirror into her eyes, into the heart of her, into the soul he had made.

His lips touched her hair. ‘Know that you were the best of them.’ Ness was reaching up to push his hand off her when Peregrine leaned down and slid his knife through the thin skin of her throat, as quick and as sure as the spark of a flame.

Peregrine stepped away and Ness collapsed forward, her hands hitting the barre. Her blood arced into a spray across the white wall, and Ness could feel it, warm and pulsing, as it spilled down her front. Her eyes were unfocusing. The Firebird was still playing.

‘Divya,’ Ness tried to choke out, but her vocal cords had been severed; she had no voice. She fell to the floor and turned her back to the wall, holding her hand to the gash in her neck. She could feel the exposed muscles, the bones. She could feel the life draining from her, quart by quart, and Ness tried desperately to hang on, though she knew there was no hope.

Castor was dead on the floor in front of her. Helen was bent over the table above him, her face turned away from Ness. It almost looked as if she was sleep.

In what she knew were her last moments, Ness watched as Peregrine made his way past the bodies to stand behind Pollux. Ness wanted to crawl over to them, to protect her brother, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t cry. She lay against the barre and watched as Peregrine cut Pollux open from ear to ear, and she felt the last of the threads that had bound her to the world sever, felt it spool away into nothing.

Ness tore her eyes from Pollux and looked up, past the blood and the horror, past the white room, pretending that she could see the sky, clouds spinning across it, birds flying free. As her body went numb and the white light stole her vision, Clytemnestra thought, for only a moment, that she could even see the sun.

*

Heaven, like many things, had always seemed like an unreachable dream the humans half hoped was real. Entrance, as far as Ness understood, involved a complex system of judgement and penance and largely relied on which god’s criteria you were attempting to fulfill.

Having not subscribed to any concept of an afterlife, the first thing Ness felt when she woke up after dying was surprise. She had not expected anything more; she had not anticipated it. She was afraid to open her eyes and find herself somewhere horrible. She was afraid to open her eyes and still be in the white room.

Ness felt a hand brush the side of her face. It felt gentle. That, more than anything, made Ness sure that she was somewhere new.

She wasn’t sure if she could talk. The last time she had tried, nothing had come out. She was too scared to feel if her throat was still cut. There was no pain, but there was still fear.

Ness decided to chance it. ‘God?’ she whispered, and she felt a wave of relief when the word came out, quiet and husky.

The other person chuckled. ‘Not quite.’

That voice. She knew that voice.

Ness opened her eyes.

She was not in heaven. She was lying on her back, throat in tact, on the cold floor of the viewing room. The hand had disappeared from her face, and she looked up to see Divya, wearing her sari and a sad smile on her face.

Ness stared up at her friend for a moment, discombobulated, but then realisation hit. She tried to sit up, but could only make it to her knees; she was dizzy, and her body was slow to respond to her movements, as if they were speaking two different languages.

Ness reached out and grasped Divya’s hand. ‘You - you saved us. You saved us from him.’ Ness had never thought she could love anyone who wasn’t her sibling, wasn’t her kind, but in that moment she loved Divya with a fierceness that scalded her.

But then Divya pulled her hand away. ‘No, sweet child,’ she said sadly. ‘Only you.’

Ness recoiled. She looked away from Divya’s pitiful eyes, taking in the room around them.

Empty. Empty but for the two of them.

‘No,’ Ness whispered. ‘No, no -’

Her legs were finally listening, and she stumbled over to the latticed windows on the far wall, reaching out to them in a blind panic.

‘Show me my siblings.’

‘Ness, don’t -’ Divya started.

Ness ignored her. ‘Show me my siblings,’ she said again. ‘Show me the white room.’

The white room came into focus behind the looking glass.

Divya looked away.

A pain worse than dying struck Ness. She made a sound that was more animal than human as she looked down on the bloody room. Peregrine was stacking the bodies, throwing them unceremoniously on top of one another in a large, deep container that was as long as a coffin. Ness couldn’t tear her eyes away from her siblings, cold and malleable in death, their limbs dangling towards the ground as Peregrine maneuvered them.

And then Ness watched as he lifted her body, too, from where it still sat, slumped beneath the barre. She took a step back in horror.

‘I’m there.’ She knew she sounded unhinged. ‘I’m there… how can I be here?’ She clutched at her neck, her breathing coming in shallow gasps. ‘How am I here? Did I die? Did I die?’

She looked at Divya, saw the truth in her eyes.

Anger, white hot and pure like fire, seared her. She pushed Divya, decades of violence pent up inside her pouring out all at once. ‘Why didn’t you save them? You let them die! You killed them!’

A thought, terrible and clear, cut through Ness’ mind.

‘You could have saved us,’ she said, in a voice that was low and murderous. ‘You could have done this any time you wanted. You could have taken me away from that place. You left me there. You let us suffer -’

Divya tried to reach out to her, tried to calm Ness’ flailing hands, but she was beyond conversation, beyond reason. Her body bent in half and she screamed, screamed over her death, her loss, the years of servitude, the pointlessness of it all. She screamed for a life spent hiding, for a life wasted, screamed because she had no use for this afterlife Divya had cursed her with. She screamed until her voice went hoarse and the exhaustion took hold and she landed on the floor again, rocking back and forth in front of the windows, alone. Utterly alone.

‘Show me my siblings,’ she said again.

‘Ness,’ Divya from somewhere behind her, from somewhere far away. She had not left but it did not matter - Ness was still alone. And would forever be.

‘Ness, enough -’

‘Are you going to stop me?’ Ness snarled. ‘Are you going to punish me?’ Nothing could hurt her anymore. There was nothing left.

‘Ness, no,’ said Divya. ‘No one will ever hurt you again. You are free.’

‘You should have let me die.’ Her arms were wrapped around her legs. She had never felt so small. ‘You should have left me there.’

‘You don’t mean that,’ Divya whispered.

But Ness had meant it. And Divya knew it, too.

Ness looked out of the window again. The white room was gone. It had been replaced by a cityscape, but it was not like any of the pictures of cities that Ness had seen. There were skyscrapers, but they were all grey and broken and smouldering, as if the hand of God had reached down and knocked them about; the pathways were covered in rubble and detritus and broken signs in strange languages. 

There were no people. There were only bodies. And above them, the crows.

‘What is this?’ Ness spoke more to herself than anyone. ‘What is this place?’

In a moment Divya was beside her. ‘It’s Vladivostok,’ she said. ‘Or it used to be. Now it’s a battleground between China and the Rus. Your f - Peregrine must have left the bodies here. It’s unlikely they’ll be noticed among all the others.’

Peregrine.

The name resounded through the viewing room, through Ness’ body, bouncing around her skull, crawling up her spine. Peregrine.

The fury brought her up to her knees. She pressed on the wall next to the windows so hard that her skin went white as she choked out, ‘Show me Peregrine. Show me my father.’

Like she had conjured him from the mist he appeared, just outside the window, just out of reach. He was standing on a headland. The wind blew through his bloody clothes, and the setting sun silhouetted him in the colours of a flame. He was holding something in his hands. Ness spoke to Divya, but she didn’t look anywhere but through the window.

‘Kill him,’ she said.

Divya said nothing. Someone was walking along the cliff edge towards Peregrine. They were dressed all in black, like a mourner at a funeral.

‘Kill him,’ Ness said again. ‘I know you can. I want him to die.’

‘Ness, I can’t do -’

‘Liar,’ she snarled.

Divya was standing behind her, close enough to touch. ‘You’re right - I can do it. But I won’t. I’m sorry. You have to understand, there are things that must happen, things that we have been marching towards for decades, centuries -’

‘And was this one of them?’ Ness hated that she could cry in this new life. She did not know how to stop the tears from falling. ‘Is that why you let me die? You’d spare him, but not us.’ 

Peregrine was passing the thing in his hands to the man in black; Ness could barely see them, her vision was so blurry.

‘We weren’t human. We didn’t have souls. We’re nothing to you. Just like we were nothing to him.’

‘If you did not have a soul,’ said Divya, her hand landing as gently as a bird on Ness’ shoulder, ‘then how could you be here?’

A soul - was that all she was now? Ness knew her body was gone. She existed now only in the viewing room, a place of in-betweens, where she could look out and watch the world but never be a part of it.

A prison with windows this time.

‘You may not see what I have given you as a gift, Clytemnestra,’ Divya continued, as Ness watched Peregrine walk down the cliff, and away, and out of sight. ‘But know that it is freedom nonetheless. You shall know no limits. We are beyond death here, beyond time. Nothing can touch us.’

‘Not grief?’ asked Ness.

‘It will fade,’ promised Divya.

‘Not love?’

Divya paused. ‘It will fade, too. If you let it.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘Then you will endure. And your ghosts will follow.’

The other man had left. The cliff face was empty. There was only Ness, and the wind.

From the corner of her eye, something moved.

Ness’ eyes flicked across to the window that looked out on the ruins of Vladivostok. There were people fanning out across the wasted street, moving closer to the bodies. They were dressed all in red; red coats and red boots, and red kerchiefs covering their faces. One of them turned, and Ness’ breath caught; the back of his coat was emblazoned with a golden bird, its wings spread.

‘What is that?’ Ness whispered, as the men started sifting through the bodies, poking them with their guns.

‘It’s a phoenix,’ Divya said dismissively. ‘A symbol of the resistance in the Khanate. The Rus will rise again, and other such nonsense.’ She shook her head. ‘All they’re going to do is get themselves killed.’

‘No.’ For the first time in her new life Ness felt it, unfurling in her chest, tingling in her toes. 

Hope.

‘No,’ Ness said again. ‘It’s a firebird…’

The birdmen had reached Ness’ body. They poked at her but the body just lay there, eyes open and limbs bent into an unnatural shape. They moved on. Ness watched as they did the same to Helen and Castor and, her new heart pounding so furiously that she was of half a mind to reach down and cut it out, just to keep it quiet -

‘Here!’ one the men shouted. ‘This one’s alive!’

The tears welled again, and Ness let them come.

The man was standing over her brother. Over Pollux.

‘Impossible,’ said Divya. She sounded like all the air had been sucked out of her. ‘It’s not possible, it can’t be -’

But it was.

They had lost their brother and sister. They had lost everything. There was only the two of them, now. Inhuman. Death-touched.

But not gone. Not forgotten.

Ness would never go to the ballet, never hear the trill of birdsong. She would never smell the salt of the ocean, or feel the warmth of the sun on her face. She would never ride the horses with her siblings in a field of grass. She would never see Castor and Helen again, except in her dreams. 

But she was not dead. Despite Peregrine's efforts, Ness and Pollux had survived. You are not human. How many times had Peregrine said it? Ness had always been too hurt by the words to recognize the undercurrent of fear in the them. He had been afraid of their power.

And how could Ness say that was wrong? She was powerful. What human had ever been murdered by their god - and lived? 

In that moment, Ness decided that she would live forever. 

Life was her revenge.

Ness breathed deep.

A hundred feet below, a thousand miles away, Pollux opened his eyes.