The Four Amys of the Apocalypse

(This one’s 10 000 words, kittens! I thought of putting it up in sections, but it doesn’t really have any regular episodic breaks. So, read it bit by bit if the whole seems daunting :P)

It was in class where I met them. There weren’t always four, of course. There were only two on the first day. The teacher called them one after the other, like they were already a team.

“Amy Sorgin.” A tall girl with two black braids said, “Present, Sister Arabella.”

“Amy Stevens.” She was smaller, with a pale brown bob. “Present, Sister Arabella.”

I was last, as usual. Present, Sister Arabella.

We learned about the Geography of Europe.

Lunch was pea soup with brown bread. The first day of term was always my favourite, in the cafeteria, the first day when they were still pretending that the food here was something special. True to form, everyone was chittering happily about the crustiness of the bread, the creaminess of the soup. I was devouring lunch with enthusiasm, but Susie Bell next to me was barely eating.
“What’s wrong?”
“Dunno,” she said. “Not hungry.”

I ended up eating half of hers.

After an uninspiring math lecture by Sister Dorothy, we got to have Free Period outside. Candie Newman pulled my ponytail, but I showed her. She got her big friend Dava to punch me in the stomach, though, and if that didn’t get the nuns running. Dava and I both got detention, but Candie got off scott free. She had a way about her.

Dava and I didn’t get supper, which made me glad I’d eaten Susie Bell’s soup and bread. There were two other girls in there with us, neither of which were in my class; one of them was new, but the other was Annie who was in my dorm last year. I thought I’d get to miss chapel, but I guess they didn’t think detention was more important than mass. They carted us off there and made us sit in the front row, like roast chickens on display, Annie said to me later, and I felt she had something there.
I found out after mass that Amy Sorgin would be in my dorm that year. Two of the other dorm girls were new, and the other four were girls I didn’t really know well. Apart from the Amy with the black pigtails, only Susie Nguyen was in my class.

When Dava came at me again the next day at Free Period, I knew it was war. She’d asked for it – I was smarter than her, even if I was smaller. I could get more people than she could. I promised Jennifer Jones all my pudding for a week to be on my side, and Jennifer Jones was bigger than even Dava. Candie Newman could scheme against me all she wanted. I’d still get the bigger army.
I got detention six times before the end of October. They weren’t going to kick me out, though – I’d just get detention forever. They weren’t allowed to hit me, either, not like in the old days, when my mother had been at the school. I always said nice things in letters to my mother. I always made the nuns look good. She liked the nuns. It was good for me, she said, to get a little reality check, as she called it. She said I was always making up lies. Well, when I wrote to her, she was right.

The third Amy came a week after my worst fight ever. Stephanie Leblanc was kicking at me and so I hit her hard in the face. I didn’t think it was hard enough to make her fall down, though. Or not get up again.
I could see in the nuns’ eyes that they wanted to lash me. But they couldn’t, everyone would hear of it, and they’d get closed down. So they just gave me detention all weekend, and a long essay to write about Turning the Other Cheek.
I found out from Annie later that Steph had only fainted because she hadn’t been eating for days and days. Annie had been in the nurse’s office because of headaches when Steph had come in, white as sheets. She’d hidden behind a cabinet and listened to everything.

The cafeteria food had gotten a lot worse, that was for sure. The oatmeal was watery, the chicken fingers were all breading and no meat, the soup never had salt in it. But was that really enough to stop eating altogether? Nothing could have made me close my mouth to food completely. There were always apples and milk and rice, anyway.
Annie sneaked into my dorm room that night and we talked about what might make a girl stop eating. She said that she’d read in a magazine that sometimes people thought they were fat who weren’t fat, and that they dieted like crazy. She said that in the magazine they’d said that girls our age were especially in danger, because of what was happening to our bodies.
I didn’t know what she meant, and she wouldn’t tell me.
Steph was out of class for a day, though, which made me think that maybe if I timed things right and stopped eating too, I could miss an exam or something. I thought about it long and hard, but then it was lunch, and there was no way I would pass on beef stew. So what if the meat was stringy and hard and the sauce was nothing more exciting that a can of tomatoes and some funny-looking pieces of potato. It was still pretty delicious.
I looked around more, though, not listening to Amy Stevens and Susie Bell talking, even if they were talking about Steph’s absence. I knew Steph was their dorm-mate – they’d probably know all sorts of great dirt on her. But I was watching everyone else, looking around the room and wondering if anyone else wasn’t eating. Thinking, who should I pick on next fight? Looking at the people I knew were in Candie and Dava’s clique, and wondering which ones would be weaker, easier to call victory on.
When Steph came back to class, no one looked at her. Except me, but she wouldn’t look at me back. I guess she hated me. Everyone knew her secret now. Well, she shouldn’t have attacked me if she couldn’t handle the consequences. Within a couple days, the rumors and talking were dying down. That’s when Amy Chan came.

A new student in the middle of November was not something that happened often, so that got everybody talking, and Stephanie Leblanc was forgotten for good then. This Amy was small and thin, with a short ponytail and bangs. She didn’t say much. I don’t know why they put her in our class, where there were already two Amys – I didn’t think there were any Amys in any of the other classes. I started to feel like it was my fault somehow. Like all the weird stuff in the school happened to me.
I didn’t have the energy to fight at Free Period that day. I wasn’t happy there were three Amys – that was enough to have them band up and form a new group, or worse, side with the Candie Girls in the other class. I just sat on the banister of the school’s outside steps, and although I wasn’t allowed, I guess the nuns were happy enough that I wasn’t causing trouble that they didn’t disturb me.

Two other things happened after Amy Chan came. The whole school caught head lice, and I got better at math. Sister Dorothy said it was maybe the lice that were making me smarter. When I said that to Sister June, who was nice but so old that she had taught my mom and who was my dorm warden, she smiled and said that I was smarter than anybody wanted to think, and I guess that was a compliment but it made me feel funny.

Winter came really fast that year, just one morning everything was snow. First snow always made me anticipate my birthday, which is November 14th. But the snow came early and stuck around, and for weeks I kept feeling like the weather was teasing me, delaying my birthday for its amusement. It was a weird feeling.
When the big day finally came, I was sick. I had a fever, and so did Susie Nguyen and two other girls from my dorm, and we were all in the infirmary being miserable, but then Annie ate a lot of pepper that she had hidden for an occasion like this and ran her hands under scalding water, and piped up and said that she had a fever too, and sure enough she came and joined us in the infirmary, so that was all right. I didn’t really have a party but I got to stay in bed and did no homework and they brought us our dinner on a tray.

I got better and it snowed more, and I kicked Dava down into the snow and she fell so hard that she broke a tooth on a concrete patch her face hit. They thought of suspending me then, but I convinced them it had been an accident, and I was doing well in all my classes now so there was nothing apart from the fighting that they could pick on. I promised I’d be good. I wrote another letter to my mother.
Just before the Christmas break Susie Bell stopped coming to class. She wasn’t my friend really, but she had suffered a kick to the knee from Candie’s Girls so I wanted to know what was wrong. Sister Olive who was the warden of Susie’s dorm said that she was sick, but when I asked if she would come back she wouldn’t tell me. I never liked fat Sister Olive anyway.

Then I went home for Christmas and forgot about Susie Bell and the rest. My mother scolded me when I hit my brothers and told me I wasn’t being a lady, and complained that the nuns weren’t doing what they were supposed to, and wished that they would lash me, but I said that I wasn’t making up stories anymore and that I was really checking reality and to prove it, I hit Davey in the arm again, and then my mother had a fit and sent me to my room calling me things. I got sent back to school early, which was okay since I didn’t really fit in at home anyway. The headmistress got a firm note and when classes started up again all the teachers were watching me with eagle eyes all the time, and that was less okay.

So I cleaned up my act, like my mom told me to. Fighting was less fun in a big winter coat, anyway, and it wasn’t worth being looked at like a roast chicken on display all the time. Anyway, Dava and Candie weren’t talking anymore, so I didn’t really have an enemy. Not a good one.

Annie and I were doing our homework together one afternoon while the older girls had Free Period, and that’s when I first saw a real fight. I thought I knew what fights were – I was wrong. Two final-year girls were circling each other, making tracks in the snow. This was nothing like the jumble of people punching and kicking that I was used to, this was scary and real. Our library window was right above them. I pressed myself against the glass, and I could see what I don’t think the nuns at the end of the courtyard could see – something glinting in the hands of the two girls. My breath caught. Those were too small to be knives – somehow, they had stolen scalpels from the biology labs. This was serious. It scared me.

Then suddenly they were together and for some reason nobody was stopping them, and then the nuns came, finally, and then the other students snapped out of their daze and helped pry them apart. The smaller of the scalpel girls was coughing and bleeding, but the bigger one, I suddenly remembered her name was Valerie, she was curled on the snow barely moving.

I felt like I was going to retch. There was blood everywhere, red on white, and the black flapping habits of the nuns, and it was all unreal. But so real. This was a reality check.

They carried Valerie off, and I went to the bathroom to be sick.

=

We lost two more girls that same month, one who was sent home with mono and one who was suspended for trying to kill Sister Arabella with a chair. That kind of thing happened sometimes, but this was too often, too many. Like everyone was angry. Like everyone was sick. Stephanie Leblanc got ill again, too, but I knew what was happening to her at least. I couldn’t believe she’d do it again even though everyone knew, but she did, and one day she too didn’t come back.

That month too I learned what Annie had meant about our bodies changing. I told Sister June and she told me it happened to every woman, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I didn’t feel like I was a woman yet. I didn’t feel like anything.

I stopped fighting after Valerie got stabbed. Nobody else did, though. Everybody else got worse, and for once my classmates were getting more detention than me. My mother wrote to tell me she was happy. I didn’t tell her how I felt. I didn’t tell her why I stopped.

I didn’t tell her that when I looked at my hands it was like they were getting thinner, bonier. That even Karen Rodgett, who was always my class’ fat girl, didn’t look fat anymore. The soups at the cafeteria were water with a piece of carrot, the chicken tasted like cardboard. Everyone complained, and nothing changed. Nothing ever changed just because the students didn’t like it.
I also didn’t tell her that the classroom looked emptier than it had ever been, or that I overheard Sister Clare and Sister Olive talking about diseases with complicated names in a hushed tone.

I did tell her that everyone came down with the stomach flu at the end of February, but that was nothing strange. Candie Newman got sent home after that, though, I guess because she wasn’t getting better either.

This wasn’t normal, right?

The only person I felt I could talk to was Annie, except that I couldn’t talk to her either, because all she wanted to talk about was eyeliner and Burberry and other things from magazines we weren’t allowed to have in school. I tried though, on Saturday afternoon when neither of us had detention. She wasn’t listening to me, like usual.
“But Rachel’s gone too!” I said. Rachel had been with us last year all in the same dorm.
“What? She’s sick too?”
I shook my head. “Her parents took her out because Jennifer Jones broke her arm in a fight. She threw a cinderblock at her.”
Annie giggled. “That’s Jennifer for you. Did I tell you we have bedbugs?” Jennifer Jones was in Annie’s dorm this year.
“Just C Ward?”
“I dunno. Maybe. They just found out, they’re gonna have to fumigate and everything.”
“And you don’t find that weird?”
“I find it gross, I guess,” Annie mused.
“But all this stuff, it never happened before.”
“Like what?”
“Well, you know,” I argued. “People getting sick, and all that. And the fights. And the bedbugs, I guess.”
“Course it did. We were just littler before, we never noticed. We were kids, kids don’t notice anything,” she said, like she was all that much smarter and more classy than before. I got angry at her for like the twentieth time.
“It’s awful here, awful awful, Annie, and nobody’s noticing except me!”
“Aww, I know what you need! A pedicure!”

I stalked out and left her with her own stupidity.

=

By the time the fourth Amy came, I felt so tired, like my last fight with Annie – who by the way wasn’t my friend anymore – had drained all the life out of me, like my anger was a vampire or something. I guess it made sense to put the fourth Amy in our class rather than elsewhere. There was room. She was replacing five girls who had left over the year and not come back. More than any other class in the school.

This Amy was pale and simple-looking. Her last name was Ziff, though, and that did get a reaction out of me. I had always been the last one called in class, always, even the year when we had Yardley, Yates and Yuen. Amy Ziff had taken my spot.

I pulled together my energy, that day, at a Free Period we were allowed to spend in the gym because it was a blizzard out there, and went to talk to her. I couldn’t figure out, as I approached her, why it was making me feel so funny, like I was sick with the flu again.
“Hey. Your name’s Ziff, right?”
“Mm.”
“Mine’s Zane. ” I liked my name. It didn’t matter if people called Zany or whatever. It was the one part of me I really liked.
“Kay.”
“So, before you showed up, it was always me who gets called last in class,” I explained.
“Right.”

I didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t reacting like any other girl I’d met.

“So, you stole my spot,” I said. I felt stupid as soon as I’d heard it out of my mouth. It was such a babyish thing to complain about.
“Right,” Amy Ziff said.

I hesitated before I decked her. It was a stupid reason for a fight. But she was a weirdo.
She didn’t even fight back. And she didn’t get detention.

I was all alone in detention, that day, as it turned out. Sister Clare who was presiding was being lazy and just made me copy the same old Scripture about loving your neighbour, and so it gave me lots of time to think. Think about how mad my mother would be, for one thing. But maybe she’d take me out like Rachel, I thought, and then… then what? I didn’t want to be at home any more than I wanted to be here. Everything was awful here but at least I wasn’t around all of them all the time. I had time to think, too, while I copied, that I had never actually spoken to any other Amy than this one before. Like I’d been avoiding them on purpose. Even Amy Sorgin, in my dorm. Then again, they were all quiet. None of them were chatterboxes like some of the other girls. It was easy to ignore them.

As I thought more, I realized that even though I thought of the Amys as like, one thing, I’d never actually seen them hang out or do homework together. They’d all made friends, except for Amy Chan I guess who sort of never talked at all, but they hadn’t made friends with each other. I wondered how I’d act if I met someone with the same name as me. I didn’t think I’d like it.

So why did I think of the Amys as a gang? I couldn’t figure it. Probably because they were all weird and quiet. Exactly because they didn’t interact with the other girls or the nuns much, except when they had to. They had too much in common to be random Amys. And that kind of Amy density didn’t happen by chance.

I was sent to bed without dinner again, but that didn’t matter anymore, since the food wasn’t even food. I ate an apple I had stolen and hidden inside my mattress. The apples were still apples. Apples were always apples.
I lied in my bed and listened to Amy Sorgin snore and decided that Annie was wrong, that it wasn’t that we were different this year, it was that everything really was worse than before. Last year, there had been no bedbugs. No foodless food. No epidemics of stuff, well, not many. No girls stabbing each other. No Amys.

I couldn’t sleep at all. I felt like I was going to be sick, but then I wasn’t.

=

On the Monday after the last Amy came, we found out that Susie Bell had died. Even at home she hadn’t gotten better, not for long, not for good. No one said it out loud, but I knew. I knew that she was like Stephanie. She’d starved herself to death.
They brought in Father Thomas to give a special Mass for her soul. He said that she had been innocent and that we should be happy because she was with God and Jesus Christ and all the angels, and that she wasn’t really dead anyway because her body would be raised incorruptible after the Last Judgment so she could live in Heaven forever. Or something like that. I never really listened in chapel, even if I listened more today, because this was more important. I couldn’t really understand that a girl I had known was dead, and that made me think that maybe Annie was right after all, and that little kids don’t understand stuff, and I guess that meant I was a little kid. And Father Thomas talked about righteousness and sin and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and then maybe remembered what the occasion for the Mass was, and toned it down a little again. He made us all pray for her and then we got Holy Communion, and all I can remember thinking as I chewed the wafer, was: This is a lot better than the food in the cafeteria.

Tuesday morning we had a Geography test.

Wednesday, two first-year girls I didn’t know fell off the top of the church tower and died. Jennifer Jones, whose little sister was in that class, told me that the two girls had been duking it out because one had apparently stolen the other’s hair scrunchie, and decided to have the fight on top of the tower, for some reason.

Thursday I threw up all day.
I sat in the infirmary with my knees to my chest and didn’t talk to anybody, didn’t open my mouth except to let the sick out. Nuns and girls chattered around me in low tones about how awful it was that there had been an accident, but no one seemed to find it particularly strange. Was it really just me who was noticing things in this school? Two girls had died just two days after we had a Mass for another girl’s death. For all I knew, this was going to keep going – we were going to lose a few students every few days and no one was going to really care.

Friday I still didn’t say anything, and I just lied on my side, huddled on the infirmary bed, and even if they wanted to get me to class, there was no moving me. They tried to get me to go to the Mass Father Thomas was giving for the two dead girls – they were called Clara Rodriguez and Millie Wilson, I found out – but I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to hear him say that they weren’t really dead, because they were, they were. I didn’t want to hear about the Apocalypse, because it was happening already. In this school, it was happening.

I cried and cried about the end of the world. I don’t usually cry much. Less than my brothers even.

I cried all into Saturday, when Sister Arabella came in and forced me to swallow some broth. But I wouldn’t talk to her, and in the afternoon they sent Sister June, who I guess they knew I was chummier with. I did talk to her, but all I said was, “I don’t want to talk to anybody”. I nodded and shook my head though when she asked me questions, and she came out of there with an idea of what was wrong with me, a totally bogus idea, I have to say. But at least they stopped sending nuns.

I couldn’t tell her what was really on my mind because it was too awful. I had finally understood everything. I wasn’t wondering why they kept putting Amys into our class with the others anymore. I knew. It was like in the Scriptures, like in Father Thomas’ sermon. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse, except this time it wasn’t horsemen but it was classmates, Amys. They never should have put all the Amys together. The nuns should have known better. This had all started happening when Amys came. I tried to remember the horsemen’s names, counting on my fingers. One was War, for sure. And one was Famine. We’d had more than enough of both of those – it made so much sense it made me retch again, and they had to come and give me a new gown and wipe my face. War and Famine had killed three students already. For some reason, Armageddon was happening here. Here.

It made no sense, but it was the only thing that made sense. I thought of the four Amys. Amy Sorgin looked really stark, so she could be either of them, War or Famine, really. Amy Stevens was kind of washed-out and was in the dorm where Susie Bell had been, and Stephanie Leblanc too – who almost starved to death too – so I decided that Stevens had to be Famine, which left Sorgin to be War, which I guess was ok. I couldn’t remember the other two, so I asked for a Bible. Sister Frances, the nurse on duty, seemed very pleased that I was being a pious little girl, and looking for solace in the Word of God, and was more than happy to give one to me. I flipped to the end and looked for my horsemen.

It wasn’t super clear, because the language was all flowery, but part of it lined up with what Father Thomas had said, about Pestilence, and Death. So I guess those were the other two. I closed the Bible. Could Amy Sorgin be one of those, instead? It didn’t really matter. I knew somehow, in my gut, that Amy Ziff was Death. Yes – people had only started dying after she came, after all. And oh God, I’d talked to her. I’d touched her.

I wondered if this meant I was dying, right now. The thought made me retch again, but nothing came out, so that was ok.

I ended up deciding that Sorgin was War after all, and Amy Chan had to be Pestilence, then. I didn’t know what ‘pestilence’ was, but it had to be something really bad. Those four, those four girls had brought this all upon us.
I opened the Bible again. It didn’t look like they gave any advice on what to do if you met the horsemen. Die, I guess. Or hide and hope they didn’t find you.
But that wasn’t right. That’s just what everyone else was doing – all the students, all the nuns. They were all ignoring the obvious – the obvious!! – and going about their business until they were killed. It was like a horror movie, I thought, even though I’d never seen one. It was horrible, for sure. The whole school was going to die because of these four Amys, and there was nothing anyone could do.

But I knew what was happening. I knew it. I could see it even if nobody else could. Why was everyone else being so retarded? Hadn’t the pattern become obvious for anybody else? It was depressing. Someone had to stop it or it would never be stopped until everybody was dead. Well, except the Amys, I guessed.

They brought me broth again and I drank a little of it. I drank and wished that the Amys had never come to the school at all, and then I cried more, and then I was so tired that I went to sleep.
When I woke up the bells for Sunday chapel were ringing, and I knew what I had to do.

Before more girls started being killed by the four Amys, someone had to kill them. Someone. Me.

I’d never killed anyone before. I didn’t know what to expect, or even how to do it. I supposed having witnesses was a bad idea, since everyone knew that bystanders could get in the way of a fight. Also, since I had to kill four of them, I didn’t want people to catch me, stop me after just one.
I wondered what order I would kill them in. Alphabetical made some sense – Chan, Sorgin, Stevens, Ziff. I liked the idea of killing Ziff last, like she was last on the class list, like I’d be last again once she was gone. She’d arrived last, too. Yes, I’d kill Amy Ziff the last of the four.
I’d have to do it all pretty quick, too. I didn’t want anyone to start noticing that Amys were dying, and give the last Amys a bodyguard or something. Not that anyone in this school noticed anything, it seemed. Apart from me.

I was pissed that this chore had to come to me. I didn’t want to kill anyone. It was annoying that I was the only person who knew what had to happen. I considered telling Annie, but she’d never understand, never in a zillion years.

I ate better that day. Beans and something in gravy, and a glass of orange juice. I didn’t retch at all.

Monday I went back to class. I started observing the Amys like it was a really important assignment. Amy Stevens was always early, Amy Sorgin always late. Maybe if I found out what made Sorgin so late every morning, I could get her alone somewhere, and do what I had to, and arrive to class no later than I usually did and no one would miss her for at least ten minutes. Plus, she was in my dorm, too. It would be easiest that way.

I thought about timing. Kill Sorgin first, ideally make it look like an accident or something – to judge from the sad fates of those two first-year girls, no one really cared about accidents here. Then the best would be to wait a couple days, let Father Thomas give his Mass, and then kill the other three the same day, because people would get suspicious otherwise.
How was I going to do it, though? I’d push Sorgin off the roof, that would be ideal. Then, the other three… Maybe I could kill one in the morning, before classes, and one at lunch, and one during chapel. Times where everyone else was occupied with something.
I decided that Amy Chan would be the next to die. She was so quiet, no one would even notice she was gone. I’d kill her before class – she was in C Ward, I remembered, Annie had said so – and then that would only leave Stevens and Ziff. And Stevens would have to be next…

I was so wrapped up in my plans that I didn’t even hear the lunch bell, but I did notice people leaving the class so I followed. I decided to watch Amy Stevens in particular. She was hard to follow – she was small and mousy, but still the most popular of the four, for some reason. For Famine, she wasn’t even especially thin. But then again, I had gotten used to seeing skeletons like Steph Leblanc walking around, so.
Killing Stevens at lunch would not be easy. There were always three or four girls around her – the thinnest ones, I noticed now, why hadn’t I noticed before! – and they sat right in the middle of the cafeteria, not-eating. I ate my biscuit and macaroni with the appetite of someone who hadn’t eaten all weekend. I stole a couple apples.
I was just about to give up on the idea of taking out Stevens at lunch when all the girls left the table. It was maybe fifteen minutes before lunch ended. Did they do this every day? I decided to follow them.
They were going to the bathroom, that was all. But if they always did it as a group, and always at the same time… Maybe there would be a way to get Stevens alone. I followed, I watched, I was laughed at, I left. Nope, no way. They always stuck together. Damn.

So during the afternoon classes, I decided to think about how to kill her, rather than when. I had already decided to drown Amy Chan in the pond. Maybe poison? Stevens did always have a bottle of water, I guess to compensate for the lack of food. If I found something awful to put in it, maybe that would work best.

My chance came during chapel that night. Instead of going with everybody, I pretended I was sick again. I stayed in the bathroom and told Sister June, who was so kindly willing to wait with me, to go ahead to chapel and that I would be there in a bit. She asked if I shouldn’t go to the infirmary. I said no, and I even made up some lies about how the Word of God was going to make me feel better, and boy did that make her happy. She left me alone. I felt sort of bad about having misled her. But what was there to do.

As soon as I was sure she was gone, I hurried to the Chemistry labs. I had only been in here once before – we didn’t get Chemistry until next year – but I knew there was all kinds of toxic stuff in here. I looked at all the shelves and all the bottles, and picked the one that looked the most poisonous and was the hardest to reach (it even said POISON on it). I left the labs and ran to my dorm, where I hid the little bottle under my mattress, where I hid the apples. After thinking a bit, I rolled it into a pair of socks, so that my apples wouldn’t touch it and get poisonous, and then I’d be the dead one, like Snow White.

I tried to look pale and sick when I came into chapel, and sat and prayed, and Sister June smiled in her nice old way, and I knew that my mother was right, that I really was a vicious little liar.

=

As the days went by, I started feeling worse about what I had to do. You know, maybe I was wrong. Maybe it really was all coincidence. Looking at the Amys so much had made them start seeming real, just girls like me. I kept working on my plan, of course, but I found I couldn’t really start. The timing was going to have to be really perfect, too, and that was scary. I never really told myself to not do it, or anything, but I just sort of didn’t do it, day after day. I started getting into the habit of just thinking about it a lot, and always following one or another of the Amys with my eyes. It wouldn’t be long before Easter, and then it was only a few months before school let out for the summer, and it would be better next year, right?

I was getting used to thinking like this, and then another student died.

This time, it was Dava. She’d always seemed so strong and healthy, but they say it was infection that got her, a pneumonia that spread to the blood. I felt sick again. This wasn’t War or Famine, but it was definitely Death, and when I looked up Pestilence in the big dictionary in the library I understood that Dava’s death had been Amy Chan’s fault this time.

Dammit! I had never liked Dava, but she was someone I had known. A fighter I had respected, with my fists and my knees and my teeth. And now she was dead. DEAD. Killed by something as stupid as disease. It would have been better if she had died fighting, you know? This was so unfair.

I couldn’t put it off any longer. More girls would be killed if I didn’t do something. Next Monday morning, Amy Sorgin would die.

=

I woke up super early. I could still hear Amy snore. I put on my clothes really quietly and waited.

The dorm started waking up. I watched Amy slide out of her bunk, go to the bathroom. She was gone a while, and I worried I might have missed my chance! But then she came back, in her uniform, and she stuffed her night clothes in her locker and pulled out her bag. Half of the girls were still sleeping – I normally would have been too. I’d never paid attention to who left early and who left late, so I didn’t know if Amy was just doing her normal routine or if she knew something was up. But it was impossible that she knew. So I watched her pad out, and I followed.

I had to get her to the tower, so I could push her off. In my careful plan, the one that changed a little every day, she always either went there already, or else I asked her to go there with me and she didn’t say no. When she started going off in the opposite direction from the church, I realised those weren’t realistic options really. I chased after her.

She saw me, and ran. I ran too. She hid behind the wooden shed at the back of the sisters’ vegetable garden, and I ducked behind there too.
“What do you want, Zane?” She scowled.
“I – uh -” Hell! “I want to know what you do each morning.” It was a fast thought.
She looked at me. “Why?”
“…You’re… you’re … I just want to know, okay?” I jutted out my jaw.
She looked at me some more, and huffed through her nose. “Whatever,” she said. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes, put one to her mouth, and lit it. I watched as she took a long breath of it and then let out smoke.

Amy Sorgin was late for class every morning because she smoked behind the shed?
It seemed stupid, and it made me angry. I stood there, not knowing what to do, and she just ignored me, and smoked her stupid stinky cigarette.

How was I supposed to kill her now! I let my eyes glance around. A rake was propped against the wall. That gave me an idea.
“You ever been inside the shed?” I asked.
She looked at me, and I knew it was no.

The garden was dead this time of year, all snow and frozen mud and straw. In the spring and summer, I used to help the nuns in it sometimes. So I knew that the padlock was just for show.
I opened the door against the hard snow and dirt, and Amy and I slipped inside. I pushed the door shut again.

“Huh.” Amy Sorgin looked around. There were smocks and gloves here, and bags of fertilizer and grass seed and earth, and bins with packs of seeds, and trowels, and shovels, and all sorts of gardening tools. It was really cold, too.
“Aren’t these weird?” I pulled on one of the plastic gardening smocks, like the nuns always wore over their habits when working. I put the gloves on too, giggling. “Do I look like one of the Sisters in the garden?”
Amy smirked. “Not really,” she said. She clearly found me weird, but that was okay. She was looking at all the stacked bags when I took a pointy thing the nuns used to pull rocks out of the earth, and swung it at her head.

It was heavy. It struck right between her two braids, and made an unbelievable sound. I yanked it out and hit her again. I was sure I was going to be sick, but I kept my stomach. As she fell, she turned her eyes to me, confused, and angry, and then nothing.

My breath made fast, heavy clouds of mist in the cold room. I hung up the tool, then took off the smock and hung it up too, then took off the gloves and dropped them in the bin with the others. I was shaking.

I had killed a girl. A girl was dead and I had done it, I had hit her with a gardening tool I didn’t that I didn’t even know the name for, and it had gone into her brain – into her brain – and killed her.

I left the shack as fast as I could, pretend-locking it like I had seen the nuns do, and then went back to the main building. I was dazed, and shivering. I went to class and wasn’t even late. No one suspected anything. I had killed War.

I had killed War and now everything would be better. People would stop fighting. I kept replaying the sound of Amy’s skull breaking, the horrible horrible sensation of pulling the pick-thing out of her. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I could only look at my hands, and they were so white, and clutched into fists and I felt as if I couldn’t move them. Amy’s death kept hammering at me, again and again and again and again and again, and then I threw up.
I woke up in the infirmary.
I didn’t remember having passed out, but I guess I had.
I was shivering. Sister Frances told me I had a high fever, and that I’d been unconscious for three hours. She made me swallow some pills with some water and after a bit the fever went down, and I fell asleep again.

=

The first thing I realized when I woke up, later that same afternoon, was that I would have to speed up the rest of my plan. People would notice really soon that War wasn’t in her classes, and they’d start looking. They probably wouldn’t check the shed right away, but we had left a lot of footsteps – I cursed myself – and maybe even somebody knew that she went there to smoke in the mornings. No, I really couldn’t wait a couple days before finishing the job. The other Amys of the Apocalypse had to be taken care of that same day.

I still had that bottle of poison under my mattress. I’d hit Stevens first, then think of a way to get rid of Chan. Or maybe I could poison them both…? First I’d need to get out of the infirmary, though. I talked to Sister Frances, and played the pious card again and said I didn’t want to miss chapel. It was still early for that, it wasn’t even dinner yet, but I knew she’d let me go, she really liked seeing girls care about the religious stuff.

I went to my dorm. I felt sticky and hot and awful, but I couldn’t let that stop me. I was one-quarter of the way done.

I got into D Ward, Amy Stevens’ dorm, while everyone was at supper. The beds were all labelled. Amy Stevens’ bag was there, and in it, her water bottle. I poured half of the poison in it, but not before smelling it first to make sure she wouldn’t know. It didn’t smell anything. Good.
Then I snuck into C Ward. I looked for Amy Chan’s bed, so I could maybe find out more about the least talkative of the Amys.

To my alarm, Annie was there. And she saw me, too – I couldn’t duck out of this one. She looked up, and I saw she had been crying.

“Zia?”
I blinked. “Yeah.”
“What… what are you doing here….?”
I had to think fast. “Uh… I came looking for you,” I lied. “You weren’t at supper.” Probably true.
Annie seemed distraught enough not to wonder why someone she hadn’t been talking to for a few weeks would suddenly worry about her.
“Are you ok?”

She blew her nose. “Y-yeah.”
Obviously not.
Hell! I was stuck with her now. I could feel time ticking. “So-o-o…” I sat next to her, ready to play friend. “So what happened?”

She told me vague stuff about a certain person who was supposed to meet her but didn’t show, and after a while of being confused I realized she probably meant a boy.
“Annie, you have a boyfriend?” I asked, aghast. “The nuns would never let a boy in! Of course he never showed!”
This made her cry more and more, and she buried her face in her tissue.

I sighed. This was not helping my plan. I had to change the conversation – maybe she’d be able to tell me about Amy Chan’s habits, after all.
“Do your dorm-mates know?” I asked.
“Nobody knows,” Annie sniffed. “No one except the two of us. And you, now,” she said. Her pale eyes looked like they were sad, but also really happy to have someone to talk to, and I felt my plan escaping me. Dinner would be over in 20 minutes. Then Amy Chan would be back in here, and I’d have to go to bed.

“Well, I’m sure he’ll contact you, right?” I said, vaguely.
She shivered. “I haven’t heard anything all day…”
“You know, your dorm-mates are pretty nice,” I said, trying something. “I’m sure they’d help you if they understood. Right?”
Annie looked like she disagreed. “Are you kidding? Georgina hates everbody. Kay hates just me. Dava’s dead. Amy doesn’t do anything but sleep, and Jennifer’s been in the infirmary for days….”
Hah! So I knew something I hadn’t known before. That was good, right?
“Oh no, what’s wrong with Jennifer?” I asked. “And is Amy sick too?”
Annie shook her head. “Amy’s never sick, she’s just the biggest sleepyhead I’ve ever seen. Jennifer’s got something wrong with her head,” Annie made a face…
“Really?” I said. “And that surprises me about Amy, she’s in my class, she’s never late, really…”
Annie shrugged. “She sleeps in her clothes, that’s why. So she can wake up after everybody’s already gone, and then just go to class. She has the loudest alarm ever.”

Excellent! This was paydirt. I had my plan.
I gave Annie a hug. “Well. I’m sure your boyfriend didn’t do it on purpose, huh? Be brave. I have to go back to my dorm before the nuns start coming around, you know?”
She nodded, and gave me a little smile that sort of broke my heart. “Thanks, you’re a great friend,” she said, and hugged me again. I patted her back.

Then I left, and went to rest up for the next day.

=

The next morning, I packed my bag with the poison, three apples I’d collected over the last week, and a couple of other things. I left my dorm before anyone woke up and walked to the hallway outside C Ward, where I waited behind a big garbage can, eating one of the apples. I was well hidden, but I could just see the door whe it swung out, and legs as girls left for breakfast, one by one. I counted. One, two… Breakfast wasn’t mandatory, and a lot of girls skipped it. I knew that there were only four girls who were staying in Annie’s dorm right now. I thought I recognized Annie’s legs going by.

Okay, this was my chance. I bravely walked into the dorm, and looked for Amy Chan’s bed.

There. And there she was, in her uniform, sleeping, ponytail poking up. I looked for her alarm clock. It was plugged into the wall – I unplugged it. It went dead. I felt a deep sense of imminent satisfaction.

I pulled the rumpled square of plastic wrap from my bag, and went to look at Amy. She looked dead already. I smiled.

In the end, she did wake up, and squirmed and struggled a bit as she fought for air. But I put a pillow on top of the piece of plastic, so I didn’t have to look at her face. And she went limp, like Sorgin had, albeit slower.

I didn’t know how to check for a pulse like in the movies, so I just put my ear against her chest. Nothing. I rearranged her, as if she was still sleeping. I even plugged the alarm clock back in.

Giddy, I left the room, taking the plastic with me. I chucked it in the garbage, wrapped around my apple core.

This was getting easier.
I did show up late that morning, and missed attendance. But sister Arabella wasn’t that mad – she more looked at me with a bit of concern.
“You didn’t see Amy Sorgin, did you?”
I shook my head. “No, Sister. Not since yesterday.” It was the truth.
Sister Arabella frowned. “Neither have I. Have any of you seen miss Sorgin?” She asked the class. No one had.

I took my seat, trying not to let my nervousness show.

I also tried not to look at Amy Stevens, who was unfortunately alive and sitting right there. Had I put the poison in the wrong bottle? Had she emptied it out? I wondered if trying to kill her that way had been too risky. I watched her sip from her bottle, yes, definitely the same one I’d poisoned. She made a bit of a face but kept drinking. I really tried not to stare. I wondered what would happen to her once the poison started acting on her. If she hadn’t emptied it out, of course.

By the end of the class she still wasn’t dead, but she didn’t look great. I wanted to follow her around, see what she did, but I decided it would be best if I didn’t show too much interest.

At lunch, the skinny girls were talking together. I watched them while I ate my tapioca. Amy wasn’t there.

Amy wasn’t in the afternoon classes, either. I couldn’t know for sure that she was dead, though, and that bugged me. I had to find out.

I was going to go to the nurse’s office with a papercut or something to see if they’d admitted Amy, but it turned out that that wouldn’t be necessary. They’d found her body, contorted in a stairwell. Looked like she’d been trying to get to the dorms but had fallen down the stairs. The fact that her neck was broken even hid the fact that I had poisoned her, even though Stella, the first-year who had found her, said she looked awful and patchy and blue.

Yes! Three down! I couldn’t believe it, I’d actually succeeded in killing off three of the Amys of the Apocalypse, and I hadn’t been caught. Man, would Sister Frances ever be proud of me if she knew! This was way better than pious. I was single-handedly combating the forces of Hell itself.

I pulled out an apple. It was green and juicy and crunchy and delicious, the most delicious thing I’d eaten in months and months and months. Yes, I said to myself, this apple is delicious because Famine has been slain. I felt a shiver of power and joy. I was making the world right again!!

I only had one enemy left to slay. My nemesis, Death. And I would off her tonight.

=

They told us during supper about the death of Amy Chan. They said she’d died in her sleep. I guess it wasn’t obvious that I had suffocated her? Maybe they had thought it was an accident. Annie, who was sitting next to me, had an audible gasp. I played the sympathetic friend. “It’s really awful,” I said.
“Oh Zia, you were right,” she breathed, holding my hand tight. “There really are weird things happening here. Everyone is sick, everyone is dying. You were right,” she sobbed!

Oh, Annie, not now. I felt torn – my friend (I guess she was my friend again) was finally seeing the light, but for the wrong reason! And at the wrong time. It was too late to ask for her help now. I really just wanted to find an opportunity to kill Death. I didn’t have time to talk to Annie.

They announced that since Father Thomas happened to be on the premises, we were going to have a special Mass for the two Amys they’d found, instead of chapel tonight. That had to be my chance. Everyone would be there, and it would be longer than usual services. I’d need to get Amy Ziff away from it, but once I did that, I had it made. I’d rid the world of the last horseman of the Apocalypse while everyone prayed for the souls of the other three.

Well, other two. I guess no one had found Amy Sorgin yet.

I tried to get away from Annie, who was crying again. She told me, in a terrified whisper, that she was scared that the same thing had happened to her special someone, which didn’t even make sense, but I wasn’t going to go into this with her. Still, unless her special someone was another one of the girls, there was like no chance. Armageddon wasn’t spreading, or at least, I didn’t think it was. I realized then suddenly that the whole world might have been falling apart, for all I knew. We were pretty much locked up in here. Maybe everyone everywhere was fighting and getting sick and starving. Maybe by killing the Amys, I wasn’t just saving the school, but I was saving the whole world.

That steeled me wonderfully against what I still needed to do.

When dinner ended, they carted us off to the church. Annie was hanging on my arm and looking like a big mess, but I managed to lose her when I said I had to go to the bathroom and I thought maybe it was diarrhea. That was all I could think of to have her not tag along with me like a faithful puppy. It worked.
I let her go ahead and hung back, hoping that I’d be able to catch Amy Ziff before she went into the church. I couldn’t see her. I looked for her pale head. Nothing. She wasn’t in the cafeteria anymore.

I ran, then, to the church, by the roundabout way that I knew no one would be taking, and hid. The girls were trickling in, and I could see the nuns ushering larger groups of girls out the doors of the school. Amy was ahead of the pack. She just had to hurry up, so I could pull her aside without anyone noticing.

I realized, as all the girls approached, that I was never going to make it. Everyone would see. There were dozens of students and nuns all around her. Augh! I have to admit this was my lowest moment in my plan. I thought it would all be over. And so close near the end, too! I felt hopeless. I ducked inside the church, and hid in the confessional.

I was finished. One step, one Amy left, one horseman before I had saved the world from the End of Days. One single death to avenge everybody else, and all the sickness, and the bedbugs, and the fighting, and the pain, and the starvation.

I had to. I had to, I had to, I had to.

I started crying. The organist was already playing, a low melody in the distance. I could smell the wood and the incense, and hear the shuffling of feet coming in. We were all going to pray for Pestilence and Famine, and soon they were going to find the body of War, and then it would all be over. I knew that when they found Amy Sorgin everything would change. Because there was no way that could have been an accident or natural. Her head was bashed in with a gardening tool, for God’s sake. By trying to act fast, I’d messed up.

I pushed open the door of the confessional just a slit. The church was full, and Father Thomas was taking his place at the front. I looked for Death. She was in the back row, not even that far from where I was, but leaning against the wall, looking like she didn’t care. There were about six girls between her and the end of the pew. I watched her bored face and felt totally helpless. The only way she would get out of there was at the end of the Mass.

Which, I realized as Father Thomas started talking, I was going to have to sit through in the confessional.

So I did.

It was the same sermon as always, but it felt completely different to me. Every time he talked about the Day of Judgment, I knew it was right now. I knew it was today, that I couldn’t let it escape me. I couldn’t let her escape me. I’d grab her after the service.
Every time Father Thomas talked about the horsemen, I had a little shiver. I knew them! I knew who they were! And I had killed them, me, I had killed three of them and tonight I’d make it four. It was an incredible feeling. For the first time in my life, when I prayed during that Mass, I really, really meant it. I really felt it. Glory to God in the highest, Amen!

I slipped out in the wave of girls leaving as the organ played. I fell in beside Death and tapped her hand. “Ziff. I wanna talk to you. It’s important,” I said, looking earnest and nonthreatening.

She glanced at me, and frowned. “Why?”
“It’s about Amy Sorgin.” That was a shot in the dark – I had no idea if she’d care.
Her frown deepened, though. “What about Amy Sorgin?”
“I can’t talk here,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere.”
She seemed to think it over.
“Yeah,” she said then. “Okay.”

We pulled aside from the main group, and slipped into an alcove.
“This way,” I said, and pulled her into the tower.
The church tower was really tall. We tried to keep out steps quiet, but there wasn’t really any reason to. The organ was super loud, especially here, like the sound just swam up the steps into the sky. We eventually got to the top, and I opened the door, and stepped outside. There was a little platform here and I climbed up on it, pulling Amy with me.
She frowned at me. “Zane, what are we doing here?” Her pale hair blew in the frosty wind and looked even paler in the moonlight. “What do you know about Sorgin? Is this about the lesbian thing? Cause I know that already.”
Well, that caught me by surprise. But I couldn’t let any of this faze me.
“I don’t really care,” I said.
“Me either. So?”

I put down my bag, and rummaged around in it. I pulled out a scalpel. I’d taken it from the biology labs.
I faced her.
“It’s the end for you, Ziff.”

“What?”

I looked at her, advancing slowly, circling like I’d seen those final-year girls do in the yard.
“You can’t come here and expect to go unpunished. I’ve seen you for what you are. It’s over.”

She looked completely appalled.
“Is this about the name thing?”
“Don’t make me laugh,” I snarled. “You know what this is about, Death. I offed your horsemen, and now I’ll off you.”
“You’re crazy!” She looked pale, so pale, in the moonlight. “You’re totally insane!” I could see her glancing to the tower door. Negligently, I’d left it open. The hymns of the organist were still wafting up through it.

“You hear that?” I said. “They’re playing your funeral, Death. It’s the Last Judgment, and you lost.” I grinned triumphantly. “You sent your horsemen in front of you – Amy Sorgin, War, Amy Stevens, Famine, Amy Chan, Pestilence. They came and prepared the school for your coming. And then you showed up, and,” I circled so that I was between her and the door, “instead of just fighting, or just starving, or just getting sick, people started dying. I’ve solved your puzzle, Amy Ziff. It’s over.”

There was a long moment while she stared at me. Then she said:
“……You’re thinking this because we’re all called Amy?” Her face was horror and disbelief. “I don’t even know those girls! Jesus! Did you fall on your head?”
“How did you know War was a lesbian then?”
“Who?”
“Sorgin.” I advanced. My blade was at the ready.
“Someone told me!”

I ignored her. I was going to try to cut open her neck with the scalpel, because I’d heard that was pretty much always fatal. But barring that, a fall off the tower was going to work too. I was so close!

I could hear and see her breathing fast. The organ music stopped.
Then, she had a sick expression.
“Oh my God,” she said, “you killed them.”

I smiled, and lunged for her throat.

We dropped to the tower floor. I stabbed her hand instead, she was protecting herself, fighting back this time, and she screamed. It was shrill in the night silence. I pulled the scalpel out and stabbed again, struggling with her against the wood of the platform. She rolled us, bigger, but I was more determined. I stabbed her in the side of the neck and she had a horrible sound, much louder and rawer than the first scream. She pushed hard against me, fighting for her life. I pulled out the scalpel and tried to go again. I was ferocious. I was righteous. I was right.

She didn’t look human, not at all anymore. Her hair was loose and wild and clinging at me like spiderwebs. Her eyes were dark and wet, her face the same colour as her hair. Her blood was getting everywhere and looked as black as her eyes. I rolled us over and tried to hit for home, and bring this to its conclusion. And that’s when the ground ended, and I felt us both fall into empty space.

As we fell off the tower, I felt peaceful. I knew I’d already won. Death would die by my own hand. I raised up my blade and plunged it, not in her neck, but in her heart.
I saw her stop to struggle, and become like a leaf in the wind.
The fall felt endless.

Before we hit the ground, I felt her die.

an epilogue for The Privilege of the Sword

(Warning: the following contains mature subject matter, i.e. two men in love. Don’t read it if that bugs you.)
(Warning #2: it’s also pretty much entirely made out of spoilers for Ellen Kushner’s Riverside books. Don’t read it if that bugs you, either.)

Richard stretched awkwardly, tired limbs tangled with bedsheets and Alec. The breeze brought in the brisk unfamiliar scents of sea-salt and thyme, and cooled the sweat on their skin.  Sunlight turned the curtains a scalding white, but inside their airy room the shadows were cool and soothing.

“Well.”

Alec, who was occupied prodding his lover’s ribs with a finger, fascinated at watching the flesh gently move, looked up. “Hm?”

“So Kyros exists.”
“Of course it exists,” Alec said. “You thought I’d be taking both of us to our death on the seas?”
“I entertained the possibility.”
“You’re an idiot.” Alec huffed.  Richard reached for his hand, but he pulled it away. “Anyway, where would your honey come from, then, if Kyros didn’t exist?”
“I don’t know about yours, but my honey comes from my bees,” Richard determinedly sought Alec’s hand, and when he found it he pressed it to the bed, curling over him with a smile. “From the hives I have at Highcombe.”
“Hm. Well not anymore.” Alec yawned. His whole body reminded him of honey right now, all slow and heavy and liquid. He tried to squirm from Richard’s grasp, but found he couldn’t really be bothered. “I suppose those would be Katherine’s bees, now.”

This thought made Richard relax his grip, and slide back to the warm space he’d occupied a moment ago.

“Do you think your niece will take well to being the Duchess Tremontaine?”
“She’s always been sensible. She’ll get the hang of it soon enough.”
“Sensible, certainly. But when she realizes that she can’t be a sworsdman forever, that she must marry some suitable fool and produce little Tremontaines and host parties and sit in endless dull Council meetings? When the full weight of adulthood sets upon her, what do you think she’ll do then?”

Alec draped himself against Richard, just because he could.
“I think she may like the parties. She can ignore the Council, it’s a family tradition,” he dismissed. “And I have the ghastly premonition that she may one day marry dear Marcus.”
Richard laughed. “Oh, Alec. You’d like that, wouldn’t you.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Alec shifted. “It would be charming or something.”
“It would be absurd. The Duchess Tremontaine, wed to a Riverside servant? The city would never shut up about it. Someone would bring it up in Council. It would be havoc.”
“He’s not a Riverside servant, you know that.”
“You want them to get married. You want her to be as utterly outrageous as you.”
“Oh nonsense. No one can be as outrageous as me,” Alec gave a bitter smirk.
Richard raised an eyebrow, waiting.
“I suppose I’d give them my blessing, not that they need it,” he admitted with an idle gesture. “Send them a card or something, congratulating them on being so exquisitely inconsiderate of the conventions of society.”

“Hah,” Richard grinned. “I thought so.”

Alec shrugged, too tired and grumpy and happy to give a damn about society right now. He nestled in the crook of Richard’s neck, and tried to believe that everything was over and done, that the life he knew was half a world away, that Richard and he could finally rest without needing to think about anything but each other. It wasn’t easy.

His pale hands clawed at Richard’s skin reflexively, anxiously.

The swordsman stroked his hair for a long time, saying nothing, and in time Alec’s jitters subsided.

Richard’s nearly unseeing eyes were open to the ceiling, taking in ghostly hints of white and blue and gold. The deep faraway light from the window was strangely comforting, but he closed his eyes to it anyway. Alec’s weight on him was better.

“You have to admit it was a gamble, though,” he smiled.
“Mm? What, making her Duchess, or inviting her to stay in the first place?”
“Both,” Richard said.
Alec shrugged.
“Of course it was. I’m mad, after all.”
This got a chuckle out of the swordsman. Alec nudged him.
“And Riverside?” Richard continued, thoughtfully. “Will she tend to that as well?”
“She will or she won’t. It’s not my problem now.”

Richard shook his head with bemusement. “Oh, Alec.” He smiled. “Come here.”
“I am ‘here’. Can’t get much closer,” Alec shifted churlishly.
“Yes, you can.”

~

“She impressed me, you know,” Richard said, later, when the cedars cast long shadows through their open window.
“What?” Alec had been dozing, lulled by the chorus of the bees outside.
“Your niece. She never refused my teaching. “
“Well, why would she? You’re Richard St Vier.”
Richard smiled. “She didn’t know that. And there was nothing keeping her. Nothing obliging her to learn the sword.”
“I was obliging her, did you forget that bit?”
“No,” Richard ran his fingers up Alec’s arm, “you were obliging her to wear trousers and live in my house. She could have disobeyed you, you know. Not unheard of for adolescent girls. She could have pouted or cried or screamed or sat in a corner resolutely practicing needlework instead of swordwork. Yes, I told her to train, but I never forced her to. She picked up the sword day after day of her own will.”
“If that had been her temperament, I never would have sent her to you, Richard. You’d have gutted me alive, saddling you with a watery little chit.” Alec stretched, and inspected his long fingers against the orange light of the setting sun. “I had Venturus make sure of that. The girl didn’t have talent, but I’ll grant that she had spirit.”

“Hm,” Richard let his fingers slowly feel along his lover’s neck, jaw, ear. Going where his eyes had gone, when they could still see. “She has more talent than some, I’d wager,” he said vaguely.
Alec arched into it, eyes closing. Richard’s touch, that he’d hungered for so desperately for a decade, was slowly making itself known as a constant in his life again. It was impossible to think that it was really here to stay. That it wouldn’t be months before the next time they saw each other. That he could go to sleep, and wake up, and go to sleep again, and wake up again, and that always Richard would be there beside him. It was still like a dream.

Richard’s fingers closed tightly on his long hair, and he found himself kissed, with a desperation that reassuringly echoed his own.

“You leave me again, Richard St Vier, and I’ll definitely have you killed this time,” Alec breathed, once they parted.
“By whom, Lady Katherine?”
Alec grinned. “Absolutely. Wouldn’t that be a fitting end? She’s never lost a duel yet, you know.”
“I should hope not. I’ve never taught before, and I doubt I will again. What a sad legacy I’d leave if she was hopeless. Alec,” Richard huffed, “let’s not talk of her anymore.”
“All right,” Alec purred, and pulled Richard close.

(With gratitude, respect and apology to Ellen Kushner, whose books Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword are so wonderful they compelled me to it, really.)

scrambled

My heart feels like scrambled eggs -
Messy, warm, delicious.
Unidentifiable,
Nonetheless nutritious.
Love’s the thing that whisked it up,
Bewildering and breezy -
Scary, but I’ll stick around.
Love’s not over easy.

a tribute to false memories

Did they ever consider this?

Sure, cyborgization was a good idea. It gave mobility and sight and hearing to people who would have previously been crippled by unnecessary disabilities. It made our soldiers safer. Some people thought it would make them immortal, but ghost deterioration soon showed them. Still, for people like me, I guess it sort of did. 70% of my body was destroyed in a train accident. But here I am, walking, talking, writing this.

So, yeah.

But I bet those bright lights who brought the notion of the cyborg out of science-fiction and into medical reality never thought it would have these kinds of repercussions.

Technically, they call it an artefact. I have an appointment tomorrow to get it removed. Get my e-brain calibrated so that it doesn’t bug me anymore.

Every minute, waking or sleeping, there in my left hand, a holographic picture of a young woman. I don’t know her. No idea. They say it’s just a misfiring loop of electrons, that it happens sometimes. People get a glitch in their senses. Me, it’s visual. Some other guy heard a car horn constantly for three weeks until they fixed him. They say that normally it’s caused when an abnormal electrical discharge occurs while perceiving something. They say I must have held this picture in my hand once, even briefly, and it became a permanent fixture of my visual memory buffer.

They say that, so I guess they must be right. They’re the scientists, after all.

I’d remember her though, right?
Remember her face?

***

I wish I knew her name. I wish someone else could see her too. She feels like a ghost; I wonder if she’s alive or dead. Whose daughter, whose girlfriend, who?

I’ve gotten used to it – it’s been almost two months. These artefacts are getting more common – the secretary at the clinic said that people used to be able to get appointments faster than I did. She said they’re even looking to hire another doctor.

I’ve gotten used to it, her face staring out at me while I shave, brush my teeth. Every glance at my left palm shows her to me. Even in the mirror, like she’s a part of my body. My sense of proprioception has integrated her into what it thinks is me.

Me. I guess it makes sense – my brain had to reinterpret everything, after the accident. Most of me isn’t me anymore. My face got reconstructed. My left arm, most of my spine, my hips and both my legs are artificial. But they did a great job – even though I shouldn’t feel like myself, I do. I’m 70% cyborg, and it’s as if I was a normal man.

Except for her, of course. My little parasitic photograph.

I look at her again.

What’s your name?

I almost feel like I’ll miss her once she’s gone.

***

She was on the bus.

Screw the appointment, I had to go after her! You’ll understand, right? Two months of looking at her face every day, I couldn’t mistake anyone else for her. It was her. I’m sure of it.

I only noticed as she was getting off. The doors closed behind her and rushing there and battering on them didn’t help. I got out at the next stop, impervious to the dirty looks of the other passengers.

Ran like a fool down the street, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. Dammit! I thought of showing people my hand, saying, Did you see this woman, but that was useless, no one could see her but me.
No one could see her but me. Could her appearance on the bus have just been another glitch? Was I going to start seeing her everywhere, if left untreated? Was this how people went mad?

I ran down a damp alley after the echo of footsteps. Came to a dead end. Of course.

Shopkeepers and landladies all got asked the same question. Me, the crazy guy, looking at my empty hand from time to time as I give them the description of a girl. Them, shaking their heads, or shrugging.

I’m an idiot. Missed my appointment, of course.
I called the clinic and rescheduled. Luckily, there’s a cancellation a week from now. This will be over soon.

***

I still can’t believe I saw her.

I try to make sense of it. Why yesterday, of all days? Was it a sign, telling me to not let go of her picture?

Easy to be superstitious, in a world like this. Robotics and medical advances just made it worse. Everything’s up for grabs now. Easy to pass from ghosts to ghosts. It’s possible to have a shell without a ghost in it – androids are the best example – so it makes sense that you could have a ghost without a shell. A specter. A wraith.

I’m staring at my hand a lot today, at work. Scanning her face for new clues. Maybe I saw her on the bus before. Maybe that’s how this started. Maybe I never consciously noticed, but she’s always been there…

But then why would my memory be of a holograph in my hand?

***

More and more, I’m thinking back to the day of the accident. Eight months ago.
My memories are patchy. They’re not really mine, technically, they got saved and then transplanted into a fancy new e-brain. Not the same circuitry that stored them in the first place. Everything from before the accident is a xerox of what it used to be.

So it’s possible that I lost some resolution, right? That some information got lost in the transfer?
Maybe I knew her before. Maybe she was my girlfriend… Or a coworker, or a relative. But she’s not at work, and no one’s been talking about her. My family hasn’t mentioned someone missing.

Even though I saw her in person last week I keep thinking she’s dead. I got used to it, I guess… Thinking that she died with me on the train, that I was carrying her memory as a kind of testament to someone who once lived, someone otherwise unremembered. Someone to be avenged, maybe.

It’s easy to be superstitious.

***

So my appointment is tomorrow. Again. It’s making me psycho. I’ve decided to skip work. I can’t deal with it. I don’t want to lose her once and for all.

I tried drawing her, keeping a snapshot of her face to keep forever. Angry – she should mean nothing to me, a parasite, a glitch. Why do I even care? Why the hell do I even care?

She’s in the same city as me. I’ve taken that bus every day and never saw her again. Was that my one shot? Is she gone? What if she left? What if she got killed that afternoon? I watch the news every day but she’s never on it. I guess that’s a good thing. I guess.

I’m going to walk through the city today and look for her. I’ve been wondering what her name might be – Chloe, or Alice, or Rebecca. Meredith or Sally or Vera. Hair that might be blond or red, a narrow face, a pointed chin, a sweet and simple smile. If I can find her, I will.

I bring my sketch with me.

***

I guess I’ll never know who she is.

I’m upset – it’s such a weak ending to my day, my week. I really though I’d find her. I wandered through the city thinking at every corner that she’d be there. Took that bus. Showed people my drawing.

Nothing, of course.
I shouldn’t have expected anything different than this.

I’m not sure why I ended up at the train station again.
Eight months ago, I bought a ticket here. I was going to visit my sister who’d just had a baby. We got thirty miles out of the city and then collided with another train. It was the first time since the high-speed was installed in this district that a mistake like that happened. The fact that two trains were using the same line was blamed on a glitch in the tracking system. The fact that we impacted at full speed, 150 miles an hour, was blamed on an electrical failure of the braking mechanism on the train I was on. The first car was almost pulverized. The wreck was spectacular. Eighteen people died, and twelve more ended up patched up like me.

I can see the sunset through the glass ceiling. Another train whizzes away.

I fold her picture into my coat pocket. I throw out my full cup of coffee and head back home.
No answers here either.

***

It’s been a year since an accident nearly killed me.  Two high-speed trains collided, killing eighteen and injuring dozens more; several weeks of staggered operations and adaptations brought me back from the edge of disaster, now mostly cyborgized, but able to reintegrate my job. Live a kind-of normal life.

In this age of heightened interconnectivity, why is it that we’re all so isolated? I feel trapped inside my body, even as my ghost can soar further than ever before, can virtually link with others, can access all it wants with little or no effort. Since I’ve become a little bit more than just human, I’ve been so lonely.

No, not quite that long. I only really started noticing a few months ago. Looking at the guys at work, the people on the street, on the bus, looking at them and wondering if they’re all as alone as me. I’ve taken to eating out at restaurants, trying to get someone, anyone, to look me in the eyes.

They say that there’s such a thing as false memories. That because of some electrical misfiring in your brain, you remember things that didn’t happen.

I wonder if there’s such a thing as false forgetting?

I feel like I’ve forgotten something important, something that never was. I spend the hours after work wandering the city, looking for it in the faces of people I meet.
In this age of constant communication, I feel we’d all get to know each other better if we just shut up.

Is the thing I’ve forgotten life before e-brains?

What did people do before they could hook themselves up in a network?
Why does this feel like I can’t reach out and touch anyone?

There’s a clinic that specializes in recalibrating e-brain circuitry, fixing glitches and so on. They might be able to take care of this feeling – this irrational unease that’s been growing in me, that I’ve lost an important connection. This sense of loss.

Maybe I’ll call them tomorrow.

(Ghost in the Shell fanfiction, but without any of the usual characters or story. Feedback especially welcome for this one – I’m not sure I like how it ends. ?)