We Will Never Be Free
They came, and they found us, no matter how well we hid. They found us in the alleys of smog-choked cities, in the sickly green of dying pastures, in famished farmland and the very halls of the One Formula. We saw them coming, and we knew that the chase was over. It was all over.
We were made clean, wiped of the filth of thought and memory. They ripped us from our skin and made us anew into fragile, malleable things that winced at their touch. They introduced us, but we already knew each other. The broken thing in the center of our eyes told us all we needed to know.
And then they took us to the school.
It was a beast of marble and clay, a fortress that age could not weather, that death could not touch. It was hell, but we were already in it, and we knew it from the moment we were born. Walking inside was nothing in comparison.
There were curved halls, and sleek windows, a maze of stone and ivory. At its rotten heart lay a massive bell that tolled every hour gravely, metal shrieking against stone as it drew back and forth. We were brought to our new quarters, packed into cubicles and stripped of our clothes, our hair, our flesh. We emerged newly born, and went to meet our teachers.
Our Theories teacher, a pale, bejeweled woman with eyes like two jade chips, wrote a long line of equations along the marble walls. “This is the first and only time I will do this,” she told us, closing her hand. We all heard the crunch of chalk between her fingertips. “After today, I expect these formulas to be memorized.”
Unlike the other classrooms we’d passed through, the Theories room was unlit, its windows darkened. It was perfectly, disconcertingly circular, and smelled like dust and decay.
I hated it immediately.
The sound of tearing papyrus and muffled curses filled the air as a few students scrambled to jot down their notes.
Her head whipped around faster than my eyes could track. Obscured as she was by the deep shadows of the corner where she held court, I could see nothing of her face other than those two narrowed green eyes, piercingly fastened on the offending students.
“You misunderstand,” she said, in a low, terrible voice, and opened her hand. Shards of chalk exploded from her palm in all directions, spearing into the walls, into our marble seats, into flesh; one grazed my cheek as it flew into the hand of a student still scribbling on his papyrus.
At least he was smart enough not to cry out as blood welled between his fingertips, staining the equations he had put so much effort into writing down.
“When I said I want these equations memorized, I meant I want them memorized,” our teacher hissed, and with a shrieking sound, all the chalk in the room returned to her hand. She closed her hand around it, and placed the whole, reformed stick back on her desk. “Do you expect to rely on papyrus in the midst of battle? What will you say to your Direction—oh formulas, great commander, I tried to map out the battlefield, but I left my notes at home and I forgot the proper equations! The enemy shall be arriving any minute!”
Our teacher spat, nose wrinkling, as the veins on her neck bulged and palpitated. “You are tools and you must be honed to perfection. Your memory must be perfection. Your actions must be perfection. You will never rust. You will never falter. You will be sublime, because I have trained you.”
She leaned back, breathing deeply, and her face was suddenly a mask again. We sat in the heavy silence and felt the sudden weight of those words.
In perfect rhythm, for we were perfect tools, we turned our gazes to the walls.
Our teacher smiled.
We shuffled carefully out of the room. When we were sure her green gaze could not find us, we cried.
It was only for a moment. It was silent, and it was everything: grief for all that we had lost, and all that we would suffer.
And then one of us spoke up.
“I know the way.” It was a voice used to confidence. It would never cry, the voice implied. Its owner smiled softly to herself, and began to walk down the hall.
We looked at each other.
Ivy, one said, and the name spread like a sickness throughout us. It was a poetic name, I thought to myself, like a sweet poison. Ivy. Ivy.
And we nodded. We understood.
We turned, and followed Ivy down to Practical.
Practical was a room choked with mass. We maneuvered through precarious mountains of geometrical shapes, cluttered piles of things that dripped and spat, that kicked up dust when we jostled them, that groaned and creaked against their own weight.
A faint shuffling filled the silence, followed by the sound of dry wood clattering against the marble flooring. We tracked the sound worriedly.
Another pile fell to the ground. Someone cursed in the jungle of leaning objects.
And then, suddenly, the towering shapes shifted aside, bending like branches on a tree, and a man stepped through the new path.
He walked carefully, favoring one leg, until he had touched the very border of that dangerous hoarder’s land. Another step and he would be in our world; but he faced the lip of the universe and strayed no further.
The bell rang again as we began to seat ourselves. Its distorted toll was a second weight to our hearts, and we flinched, brought to abrupt despair.
“To understand the world we must understand that we are made of nothing. Every tool is the sum of its predecessor. So we must look into the dust and find our ancestors, the unit of existence, and drag it into the palm of our hands.” Our teacher looked up as if to meet our gaze, but his eyes were focused on something far, far away, a world we could not see nor touch. “We must establish the standard.”
There was no papyrus on our desks. We sat, arms folded stiffly in our laps. We listened.
And whispered. This teacher was something smaller, more pathetic, than our Theories teacher; something about that limp shuffle, the way he coughed and spat with every word like it was being dragged painfully out of him, softened our fear.
“He’s as old as the Academy,” said the student on my right quietly. “There’s silver in his hair. Have you seen anything like that, on anyone?”
I hadn’t and I never would, but I didn’t say.
“I heard he used to teach Execution, too,” said another nervously. They giggled—Execution was our only joke, after all, and the more scared we were the more we laughed—and then stopped quickly, watching our teacher from the corner of their vision. He was still speaking, unbothered.
The first student, who hadn’t noticed, snorted and said, “Not anymore. Now it’s her.”
“I heard she has a perfect memory,” interrupted another student behind me.
The two gossiping students stopped, and then laughed together under their breaths. “No,” the second student said, while the other laughed. “That’s Ivy.”
We all fought the urge to look back and make sure she wasn’t looking at us, smiling that smile of hers. Someone–the misinformed student–failed, peeked and then immediately turned around, face burning with embarrassment.
A wet, spasming cough echoed across the room, brought us quickly into silence. Our teacher made a small choking sound and then continued speaking, unaffected, gesturing to the piles behind him. “Theories will give you the essential formulae to exert your control. That will be tested, too. But you must understand what you want. What you are holding in your grasp. Formulae are flexible things in nature. You must learn to twist them to your benefit, to use the appropriate units, the appropriate transformations.” Our teacher blinked like a reptile. “Your first lesson begins now. Tell me what you see.”
A roll of cloth lay at his feet, yellowing and papery with age. We hesitated, fearing a trick.
His unfocused glare was a terrifying thing. “Tell me,” he hissed, and let out another cough.
“Army gauze, sir,” one of us said nervously. “Durable.”
“A flattened cylinder, sir,” another added.
“Four standards, sir. And a little bit.”
He had milky blue irises. There was a deadly gleam to them, and it was focused on me. “And a little bit?” My teacher growled.
I shrugged. “Around, yes.”
There was a flush to his face, red and ugly, like a spoiled fruit. He opened his mouth to speak, to denounce me, when suddenly Ivy spoke.
“4.25693 army standards, sir.” There was a lazy drawl to her voice, a hint of boredom that she hadn’t even attempted to disguise, but there were only innocently good intentions in her wide, pale eyes and small, pleasant smile.
She frowned abruptly. The change was instant, and unsettlingly precise. “Sorry, sir. 4.25692.”
“Ah,” our teacher said weakly. “Good. Yes.”
“Should it be more specific, sir?”
He coughed. “No.” But then his face sharpened and his gaze returned to the rest of us, to me, and he said, “Measure with your eyes before you extend yourself and apply your formulae. I will teach you the instinct to know the size of a thing before you have it in your grasp, and I will teach you to understand that everything is a shape, and everything can be under your control as long as you understand it. Without me you are useless tools, and we cannot have that. No, no. Cannot have that at all.”
He was not brutal, but he was unforgiving, and we sweated nervously under his milky blue gaze as we carefully jotted down measurements of objects from a distance. Every so often he grew angry, and the mountains of debris tottered and dangled above our heads like a threat.
Ivy did not participate. I watched her from the corner of my vision, and felt the blood rush to my face.
And then came Execution.
We shuffled into the classroom in a wary throng, taking in the oddly angled columns and barbed projections that emerged from the walls in seemingly random patterns; the dark, porous material that formed every surface; the flaring lantern light that illuminated small, silvery crystals within each inlet.
A faint whisper began to float throughout our group, carried on by hushed voices. Oh, formulas…
Some of us, less impressed, watched the arched opening into the room. Our last two teachers had both come in with disconcerting accuracy, at the very breath before the toll of the bell, and we were counting down the seconds.
Ivy stood to the side, running her hand along one massive pillar. After a moment she paused, smiled, and turned her gaze to the opposite wall, fingers resting calmly over a crystal as if to steady herself.
We jumped, startled, as the bell began to sound throughout the hallways. It echoed eerily throughout the room as it had not done in the previous ones; perhaps it was some quality of the odd stone.
I didn’t like it. Not at all.
And not when some part of the wall Ivy had been looking at unfolded at the sound, limbs and cloth extending out from the spongy surface, and said in a raspy voice, “Class has begun.”
Someone screamed, and then stopped abruptly. Our teacher ignored the noise, but a little gleam in her eye said the next time we would not be so lucky.
Lamplight revealed the scars and burns fighting for dominance over her ashy-gray skin. She wore no jewelry, no patterned robes: her clothes were dark and loose, and what was left of her coiled hair had been arranged in a sturdy bun.
We spread throughout the room soundlessly, terribly aware of her white-hot gaze spearing through us. I chose a dark corner far away from her and Ivy, who had not moved since the bell, still smiling her distant little smile.
I wondered if making an expression was grounds for murder.
When the echoes of the rolling had faded away, our teacher scanned us over, lips pursed, and then began.
“You have been brought here to serve. To be honed to your very limits. Your other classes will sharpen your senses, cauterize the formulae into your eyes, but this class will be the final transformation. I will make you into the army’s finest weapons.”
We looked at each other, searching for burning patriotism, some fiery determination that will fuel us too.
All that met us was the same tired acceptance we knew too well.
“I am well aware of the name you have given our lesson. Execution.” She smiled nastily. “We all have our little jokes. But this is not your execution. This is the final step of your training: Execution of Applied Mathematical Formulae.”
We stared at the wall behind her bitterly. As she had spoken, it had morphed and melted until several shapes could be seen distinctly in its spongy surface, and small lettering beneath each one. She had no need for chalk, or mountains of mismatched shapes—the classroom was hers.
“Let us start simply. The geometrical, and non-organic. Soon you will learn that even the most unusual shapes have their formulae.”
We lined up one by one, shuffling our feet. There had been no planning behind our order, but somehow Ivy emerged last, smiling to herself, and I found myself in front of her.
The first student was one of the Practical gossipers. They walked forward hesitantly, stopping an arm’s length from the wall.
“The sphere,” our teacher said.
Their head jerked up and down harshly. After a moment, they took a deep breath.
Their exhale echoed throughout the room, filling it with a second weight, a presence that seemed to push down on the air itself.
Then it focused, sharpened, began to circle around the wall, touching and tasting it gently. We tracked it silently, murmuring the formulae under our breath, spurring it on.
When at last it oriented itself and dove into the stone, we almost cheered. We watched as it made a perfect sphere, equations clicking into place one by one as the proper units were adjusted and the calculations made.
The student turned back to us with sweat dripping down their brow and smiled tiredly. One of us thought to pat them on the back and then stopped, seeing our teacher’s scowl.
“The sphere,” she repeated. “Bring it out.”
They looked at her and then back at the wall. The presence sharpened again; it tugged and tugged at the stone until the student stumbled and fell, breathing harshly.
“Incorrect.” Our teacher flicked her wrist, and they were flung against the wall. We winced at the crack of their body meeting sharp stone, and straightened up, fearing her turning on us too.
“Remember, students, that any given geometrical shape in a multidimensional space with directional values of x, y and z requires the application of formulae that account for such values!” She barked, and suddenly the sphere emerged from the wall, smooth and perfect, and flew above her head. A strip of metallic stone emerged from its center to rotate lazily around its axis. “The stronger and more succinct the formulae, the better your chances of holding control over the shape, because it will be proportional to your understanding of what you are doing, and you will react faster to any situation.”
We watched her speak. Ivy, who had been standing to the side, leaning casually against the wall, watched the sphere above her head.
And I watched the bloody, broken student, keening on the floor.
***
The next student, shaking with fear, managed to extract another sphere. And then another; as more and more students met the harsh black stone, the pile of spheres grew and grew, floating above our teacher’s head. Another pile grew as well, tucked away against the opposite wall: small, groaning bodies, bones sticking out oddly, their faces twisted with agony.
“The sphere,” she told me.
I forced myself to tear my gaze away from the back of the room and faced the wall.
The instructions molded into it were faint, hardly legible, but I’d been measuring every sphere and I knew it was meant to have a radius of one Army Standard. I held that thought in my mind as I plunged into the stone, formulae rising from the depths of my memory. Molding over the spongy rock, using the numbers to steady myself, to define how I expanded my shape.
Divide by x times pi plus oh formulas what was it
I faltered.
Was it multiplied by 2x squared? Or divided? Or subtracted?
Equations etched in white chalk swam in my vision. And then blood; bloody, torn bodies, the crack of stone and bone, the stench and the sound of them crying, buzzing in my ear–
I couldn’t be one of them. I couldn’t.
So I reached out in desperation and pulled, using all my strength, remembering as I did how the first student had done so too (oh formulas I was doomed) and–
–and the sphere leaped out of the wall with a sound like thunder, smashing into a nearby pillar.
I swayed in place, feeling drunk on weakness, and fought down exhaustion as our teacher turned to me like a vulture.
Her narrowed eyes were not jade, not a milky blue, but a steel gray that was all the more terrifying than our other two teachers combined.
“No control,” she said slowly, as if sounding out the feel of the words on her tongue. “But strength. Great strength.”
She smiled. I would have rather been part of that pile of students than ever be the target of that smile again.
“Class is dismissed,” our teacher said, and we all silently exhaled some extra tightness in our chest. Some of us began to walk to the back, thinking to bring the sufferers to the infirmary, but a wave of her hand made them think again. “I will take care of them.”
We didn’t want to think about the consequences of that. We didn’t. We walked out quickly, grateful to be alive and filled with adrenaline, and forgot all about Ivy’s turn.
We woke up early, dragged from troubled, frigid sleep by the toll of the bell. One by one we were paraded through our classes–reciting formulae in Theories, squinting at distant figures in Practical, molding the stone to our teacher’s will in Execution–until we were exhausted from keeping the numbers in our head and the fear in our hearts. We lived in the fear, floated in an ocean of it, but by the third day it had dulled to just another weight on our chests. We stopped wincing at the crunch of bone with every failure. Some students returned, quietly, and we closed around them, tending to them, but they would never be part of us. Others didn’t. We didn’t ask about them.
In the sweet silence of night, we clung to our memories. Family. Names. We held them close, passed them around like gleaming jewels. We tried to be more than what we had been told we were; we wrapped our pasts around us like a blanket, and made them the fuel to our flickering embers of identity.
It was something our teachers could never take away from us. We were their perfect tools, stiff and upright and always at attention, and they would never know, could never tell, that behind those masks we were I and me. Named, and full of worth.
The news came quickly, and spread like wildfire. A boy had died. Anan, he called himself, and then he killed himself.
He’d chosen the easy way out.
We mourned him. Some of us knew him better than others, knew him as a sweet, smiling boy, a kind soul and a sharp mind, but woefully fragile. We knew that the school had broken him, that the lessons had been too much, that the violence and the smell of death was something he should have never endured. We had heard him at night, screaming in his sleep, and we had comforted him.
But it was not enough.
We cried over the loss of him as we cried over every loss, but deep inside, something fractured. This was not the cruel violence of our teacher correcting us, not the sharp crack of bone and the acrid scent of blood pooling on the stone floor, but a true, chosen thing. A freedom that Anan had given himself.
Slowly, like fat congealing, like blood coagulating, we thickened and split. We became us and them: the tired and the eager, the difference between terror and hunger. The us hated the lessons carved into our skin, hated the pain, hated the sneers of the teachers and the never ending, monotonous cycle of our digestion. Hated that Anan was gone. Hated them, who had accepted our slow subsumption, and had become part of this dreadful whole. Them, who had grieved with us for Anan, and then nodded when our teachers determined it a necessary sacrifice, a culling of the weak.
Ivy said nothing, and was part of neither. And she still smiled.
I hated that smile.
It took me very little time at all to realize I hated her. It so easy to do so, like slipping into something so familiar, that it became instinct, second thought. She was perfect, and beautiful, and that beauty was the fuel to my burning heart. Her presence ignited me with blazing hunger, with loathing that tore through me and closed my throat. I wanted to rip her to shreds. I wanted to see her flinch, to watch that smile crumble and turn to true fear. I wanted to feel her under my teeth, to bite down, to hear her cry out and cry for help. I wanted her to feel something, anything. I wanted to break her.
Yes, I knew I was a beast. But I was only a product of what I had been trained to be. We had been made to be tools, but I was made to be monstrous.
I hugged myself in my bed and thought about death.
It was coming soon. The classes were too hard; the more we learned the more they pushed us, until our heads were filled to bursting with formulae, until there was no space to think, to remember anything else. It was a weight that we carried with us, the fear of forgetting, the fear of being rusting.
I couldn’t do it. I’ve never had a good memory. The more complex the formulae grew, the more I failed, again and again. I wasn’t good enough. I was an imperfect tool. Soon my teachers would notice; soon, I would falter and slip and never get back up.
Perhaps it would be better to go like Anan. Under my own, free will. In my choice.
And then, suddenly, I thought of Ivy. She'd hear of my death. And she’d smile. And then I’d be gone.
I never told anyone my name. I never told anyone who I used to be, before I became part of the we. They never asked, and they’d never know, and then I’d become nothing. I’d be forgotten. And Ivy, perfect Ivy, with her perfect memory, would go on living.
I couldn’t die. I had to live, so that Ivy would never hear about me and smile. I wanted to live so I could kill her myself.
Theories was difficult, and Practical tested me in frustrating ways, but Execution was my loathsome hell. Today, our teacher stalked the room like a predator, searching for the lightest flinch, the slightest movement, to pounce on her prey.
“Remember the three O’s!” she snarled.
“Observe, Overlay, Order!” We shouted back, quick to attention. Perfect tools.
“Observe! Understand the space, understand your target, understand its limits and its units! How many standards wide, how many standards tall! What formula is best in its application!” With sleek, beautiful precision, her presence slipped out and into the tangle of ropes at her feet. We held our breath, watching silently as it adjusted itself into the shape of it, so organically, so smoothly, that we could hardly tell it was there at all.
“Overlay!” A flash of effort and the formulae sank in flawlessly, and we knew, suddenly, that she could do anything she wanted with that rope. It had been transformed into an object of deadly perfection.
“Order!” It uncoiled like a snake, leaped into the air, and wrapped around my neck.
And I could do nothing.
Our teacher let out a hiss of breath. “And now? What will you do?”
The formulae spilled out from my head like it was a toppled jug, leaving my mind blank but for the sinking pressure and blooming pain of the wire constricting around my neck. My vision was never good, but the world had dissolved into a blur, and those taunting steel eyes were its center.
So I did the only thing I could. I pushed.
A sharp, startled gasp, and suddenly the pressure relinquished and the monster digging into my jugular was just a pile of rope uncoiled in my hands.
And there it was, in the center of the room: a massive column of stone, thin and spinous like shattered bone, aimed at our teacher’s heart. It had torn through her left shoulder as she moved away.
“As this demonstration has now surely taught you, focus is our weakness. We must always hold the formulae in our minds; a distraction has the potential to undo us.” She offered me a tight-lipped grin, and I knew suddenly that I had done the impossible, and drove her to an anger we had never faced before. “Well done.”
I walked out of the classroom feeling odd, lightweight, as my fellow students streamed around me. Some smiled in my direction, while others were distant, worried. We—I—had started something strange, unpredictable.
Ivy never looked at me. My vision bored into the back of her skull, waiting, daring her to turn and offer to me that self-satisfied smile, but she kept walking, only looking ahead.
We learned to kill. We learned to bring spikes from the earth, to send a barrage of steel and stone through the air. The space in our head bloated, with formulae and now anatomy, the perfect place to strike so that a body could not breathe, could never breathe again, could never think against our country. The body was made of shapes, too—but too slow, too burdensome, to destroy directly, our teachers warned. Too complex. Better to dismantle it from the outside. To be blunt, and to kill many, than to do something beautiful and deadly to one.
We learned to kill indiscriminately, which was the final lesson. The us resisted, and cried at night, and the them did so with blank faces and cried too.
They brought us animals. Not humans yet, they told us, though we would learn. We would learn when we left.
Ivy did not cry. Ivy killed smoothly; and the strangest thing of all was that her opponents often collapsed before the lovely blade of her intent ever struck them.
And when she was done, she smiled to the world—and that was the worst of it, the most infuriating, that we, that I, was not worth being smiled at.
I killed, too. And I killed badly. I killed brutally, never clean, never beautiful. They collapsed with a cry and the sound of tearing flesh, the dreadful rip and crack of undoing, as I summoned all the power in me to bring out something, anything. I was still weak. I could never remember my formulae, could never coordinate or be precise or do anything right. I killed, and every time I did I thought of Ivy. But she never looked at me.
We woke and found the classrooms empty, our teachers gone. We stood, stunned, in a sudden freedom, and went back to our dorms.
The weight of the formulae in our head eclipsed all other thought. There was no room for anything else. So we sat quietly on our beds and made small conversation, soft whispering, and some of us cried, but we did not leave. Not even the us.
I didn’t want to take part in this solemn mourning. It made me feel sick and weighed down, like a wraith, wispy and inhuman, so I wandered the halls aimlessly instead.
Beyond the sickenly familiar were more classrooms, more dorms, more signs of life. Perfect and geometrical, perfect for more tools. I wanted to scream, so I walked more.
Beyond the rooms was a wall. And, strangest of all, Ivy.
Ivy, with her back turned to me.
There was an acrid taste to my mouth, exhilaration and fury all at once. The world was composed of two senses: the sound of my heartbeat pounding in my chest, and the sight of her. Still not looking at me.
I watched my arm curl around her throat hazily, as if in a dream. My mind was filled with heat, with rage. The formulae were all gone.
She turned jerkily, and for the first time I saw something like surprise in her green eyes.
The hunger was burning in my chest, in my throat, stripping away my thoughts. The world was gone; all that was left was Ivy’s pale, shimmering face, and her bare neck.
I wanted to—
I wanted to—
Ivy called my name hesitantly.
How did she know my name?
This was it. The hunger was everything, until there was nothing left in me to push away. I lunged forward, and pressed my mouth to hers.
What?
What, no, I wanted—
I wanted
But there was no space to think, no space for anything but the hunger, which was not sated but grew as Ivy gasped.
My hand was still around her throat—push, squeeze, choke the life from her! I thought desperately, but my nerves were deadened, the arm limp, and I could do nothing but watch this stranger kiss Ivy, and Ivy kiss back.
Her mouth was cool, like the first taste of fresh water after the heat of the desert, like the burning frost of deep space, the icy kiss of a blade, the sort of cold that consumed you completely. And she was very soft, which was odd, because I’d always thought of her as glass. Sharp.
(I’d thought of her as the enemy. As something to hate. So why was I—?)
In this strange fish-eye view of my traitor body, I watched myself pull away with the effort of mountains separating, of oceans dividing by rising islands. Ivy looked at me, breathing heavily, mouth still slightly open. I hated the glassiness, the glazed look, to her eyes, the surprise and wonder that shifted in their depths. I hated her for not saying anything.
Most of all, I hated myself. What had I done? Why had I done it?
I felt her gaze burning into the back of my head as I turned. When I had turned the corner and she was out of sight—though her presence was everywhere, something inescapable—I began to run.
Our teachers did not return the next day. And I had nothing to distract myself from what I had done.
I avoided her. It was suddenly impossible to; for all my time in the school I had never seen her anywhere but the shadows, the corners, quiet and composed in her own world, but suddenly there she was laughing and smiling surrounded by others, dazzlingly pleased. And when she saw me she looked, oh formulas, she looked at me till my skin prickled and burned and something in me ached, some sore muscle in my chest suddenly forced to life. Her green gaze was incriminating, asphyxiating. Intoxicating, too; I’ve never had her attention before.
I couldn’t breathe. I ran, I ran away, to the cool comfort of abandoned corners in the classrooms I had hated so much. I pressed my skull against the gray walls of Practical and inhaled deeply, breathing in dust and flaking paint, and suddenly the chaos of the room, the mountains of things that I could never measure correctly in our teacher’s eyes, was a comfort to my blurred, tangled thoughts—but she had been here too, had sat here while we learned of death and its application, and there was no escape. I wanted to scream.
Why? Why, why, why? I hated her. I thought I had, I did, but then why?
Yes, she was beauty, she was power, she was everything the world and the school and the One Formula wanted her to be, what I wanted to be, but oh formulas—she knew it. She was insufferably confident. She was insufferably everything I could not be.
I hated easily. This was nothing new; over my brief life, the world before the school, I had accrued objects of loathing like stars in the palm of my hand, like the formulae I kept forgetting in my head. I hated the products of the school, the things we would become; I hated us for what we were now, in this transitional state, not yet tools but no longer children; I hated the world and the wars and those who dragged me here from hiding and my mother who did not hide me well enough and my foolish, terrible weakness, the fragility of me, the one secret I kept close to my chest and cold, ever so cold, in my heart. I am the only one who knows, ever since they killed my mother for hiding me.
And I thought I hated Ivy.
But I—
And she—
My stomach sank at the sound of footsteps. I knew who it was before she’d even entered.
“I’m glad it was you,” Ivy whispered into my ear, grinning. One of her hands was pressing against my back as if she owned me. “You’re my favorite, you know.”
I said nothing. I was numb, empty, my thoughts dulled. The hunger was back and it had eaten away at my mind until there was nothing to protest.
When she began to set a gentle pressure, nudging me forward, I gave way mindlessly. She steered me through the empty halls, through bare classrooms.
And then, suddenly, the pressure was gone. I looked up with glazed eyes and recognized dark, spongy stone.
Execution. There was a nakedness, a starkness, to it that made my very presence feel blasphemous. Practical was an odd comfort, but here, in the den of my tormentor and my worst fear, there was a strange, obscene victory to stepping forward into the arms of a monster suddenly neutralized. The columns could not spear into my stomach, the ropes could not choke me, the walls could not contain me.
“You’re a marvel,” Ivy said softly, still smiling, as her thumb traced the outline of my mouth. “So complex. However did they find you?”
I found my voice in the hollow of my heart, in the darkness of my head. “How did they get you?”
“I came,” she said plainly. “Willingly. But it’s such a bore here.”
She came. She chose to be here.
What was she?
The thumb slipped within, pressing the soft flesh against the jagged edge of one incisor. Ivy’s grin widened. “I was right. Formulas, did you do this deliberately? No, you couldn’t possibly.”
“Do what?”
“It took me ages.” A green flame burned in the ring of her gleaming eyes. “I got everyone else on the first day. The teachers took longer, but you. You’re something else entirely. It’s like you’ve been broken and put together again, but not exactly right.”
Something curled in my chest, an old fear, an old vulnerability, resurfaced. She knew more than she should. How did she know that?
Oblivious, or perhaps simply uninterested, Ivy continued. She never talked like this in our classes, so intensely possessed by her own thoughts, so interested. She spoke quickly, words overlapping, pushing at each other in their hurry. “Scars all over, inside and outside. Chipped tooth.” The thumb pressed down harder, drawing blood. “You’ve gotten into fights before. Ribs broken at least twice. And those eyes—“
I froze. No, no, no! She knew!
Ivy smiled. “Lovely.”
Something strange was happening to me. The hunger hadn’t stopped, but it had shifted, changed.
“I hate you,” I said hesitantly. It didn’t sound right.
She laughed. It was lyrical, not a note out of place, and she was its conductor. “You’re so sweet, Meli.”
I am not a sweet thing. I am bitter and cruel and furious. My heart is pumped with hate; it is the viscous fuel to the engine of my heart.
The fire in her eyes was suddenly a twinkle, impish and greedy. She took my hand in hers. “Come on. Let’s walk back.”
I followed her. That was part of what made Ivy Ivy—when she ordered, you couldn’t help but obey.
The next day we walked to Execution together. Ivy seemed to enjoy every opportunity to touch me, as if marking her possession of me, marking me as her pet. Thinking around her felt like walking through sludge, struggling through the haze her presence brought. It was so much easier to sink into her control and listen to that voice. I sat quietly in the center of the room as she talked at me.
Ivy loved talking. She loved the sound of her own voice, and somehow she had decided, at some point, that I was her student. She talked for hours about complex formulae, about accounting for organic shapes in a three dimensional space and holding the formulae in place for moving objects. I watched her talk with dawning apprehension. Ivy had a mind unlike anyone else. She was something beyond genius, something beyond humanity. She was the perfect tool.
But she was soft, and kind, in ways I had never expected. Especially to the youngest of us; she treated them with surprising gentleness when they stumbled upon our sessions. She caught me looking at her, and smiled ruefully. What can I say? I’m an only child.
I’d grown up amongst siblings in the sweeping grasslands, in the fertile soil, trees looming overhead laden with precious fruit. My family has always been a big one. Supportive, in their own way, of my secret. But they were too loud, too tightly packed into that incredibly small home. It had been exhausting.
Too many siblings, until one day they came, and there were none. The war demanded its eternal sacrifices.
“Will you go?” I asked her one day.
She frowned. Sometimes she enjoyed my questions, but on other days it was an unwelcome interruption to her lessons. Today, though, she gave me a smile that said, oh, how sweet. “I might.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
Her smile widened. She was sitting down, arms propped on her crossed legs, upturned palms supporting her head, giving me her full attention. It was a sacred position, one rarely offered to me, and I felt her gaze like a blade, keen and deadly.
And that’s when I felt it.
I doubled over, gasping, clutching my chest as pain, sudden, jagged pain, pierced me through. It was a complex thing, cold and prickling along my spine and an acrid, burning, peeling thing on my face and in my lungs, bursting through me, breaking my bones and shredding my flesh. It had an art to it, a careful cruelty, and all the while as I choked and cried out Ivy’s green eyes bored through me. She was still smiling.
And something in me, that last fragment of consciousness weathering the storm of my agony, thought, how many formulae? How many would you need for every cell in the body, every molecule in a chemical reaction, in a synapse, balancing organs pumping and redirecting and and flowing, that indescribably beautiful and complex thing called a body? How many?
It lasted perhaps five minutes. She toyed with me at the end of it, until she knew what made me shout and curse, and then held me in her arms as I shuddered through the aftershock of it.
And there, my head on her lap, was when I realized that we were wrong to fear the school. What we all should’ve been afraid of was Ivy.
The next day I told her my greatest secret.
“I got sick,” I said quietly. “Very sick. And there was a time where we thought I’d be blind forever. It started improving a few months after the fever finally disappeared, but it’s barely there.”
And since then, the world had become—obstacles. Things to go around. Shapes to pick up, shapes to avoid, shapes to talk to.
“Yes, I’ve noticed. You never look right at me,” Ivy said, quite plainly, as if it was as simple as that. She grinned, and traced the curve of my eye. “But you walk normally. You bump into things sometimes, but not too much. I knew there was something wrong but I couldn’t understand that until I realized.”
I kept silent.
Her eyes were gleaming proudly, confidently. “You use it to see.”
“The what?” I asked, because the quirk of her mouth, that excited smile, was addicting, and it was just for me.
“The formulae are the tools of control. They set a framework for our interaction with the world by defining our limitations in the spatial manipulation of anything that can be broken down to the finest units, which is everything. But they are only tools. What supports this framework is our–” She inhaled deeply, she was talking too fast, too excited– “awareness of the world. We extend out our perception, and exert control accordingly. But you, you’ve been changed by necessity, you don’t even notice anymore, you just feel, and then you know what’s there and what there isn’t.”
“I mean, I can’t see well, but I’m good with colors,” I said.
“Colors don’t matter,” Ivy said emphatically, pinching the skin above my cheekbone. She sighed, sounding almost disappointed, and for a moment I felt the jagged edge of paranoia spear through me, the fear and disgust that I had failed her somehow. “We are so limited by vision. Imagine having such a precise understanding of the inner workings of the body without ever laying sight on a book of anatomy. Imagine how far you could reach. How many things we’d never thought were possible could lie under your control.”
The memory of pain, measured and calculated, emerged. “But you can.”
Ivy’s hands were moving downwards, tracing the curve of my face, the raised flesh from old bruises and scars. “Well, yes. Of course I can.” Because she was Ivy. “I wasn’t blind, or sick, but it was just…easier. But I’m me. And you’re you. It’s fascinating.”
I was fascinating, she meant, which made me feel odd. Feel something I hadn’t felt since I’d been young and my mother would braid my hair, when it was still long, and sing of love.
“I don’t need the formulae sometimes,” I confessed.
She smiled lazily as she trailed one finger down my neck. “Ah, yes. No one does, really, but it’s crude work without them. Of course, they’re slower, which is its own issue altogether. One day I might overcome that obstacle.”
“The teachers–”
“Oh, what do you care about the teachers? They’re fools and bullies, all of them!” Ivy snorted. “They all think they’re the One Formula, you know. They think they have complete power over us. That we’re just new clay to be molded.”
She laughed, quick and sharp and controlled. “I wonder what they’d think if they knew how easy it would be to kill them.”
I said nothing. The subject came often. She seemed to relish the idea, as if there was something important about it, about the power she held over them.
“What if I only killed one?” she mused. Her finger drew small spirals around my jugular. “It wouldn’t be fun unless there were others to watch. I’d make it slow.”
“Make them fear you?”
Her grin was as brilliant as bone. “Exactly.”
“You think you’re the One Formula.” So confident. Like she was unstoppable. Maybe she was.
Ivy’s finger paused in its path, resting over my skin. Then she laughed again. “No, the One Formula isn’t real.”
I thought for a moment. Then, quietly, I said, “Leave Execution. I want to see her face.”
Ivy’s eyes gleamed. “Ah, Meli,” she said softly, and buried her face in my neck.
And then they came. And we were there, waiting for them.
We were herded silently to the Theories classroom, where a richly dressed official surveyed us nervously. He managed a tight-lipped smile, but the tightness of his jaw was clear. We watched him with heavy eyes, soundless.
“One year you have spent here, one year well spent. You have become our greatest weapons. Our strongest. And now it is your turn to repay us.”
We lowered our heads. It was done.
Our Theories teacher bowed, groveled, thanked him for his words. When he had left, shuffling his feet, she turned to us and grinned. She leaned forward so closely I could see how it stretched her skin over her skull, set into contrast the overdilated pupils in the depths of her shadowed eyesockets, the black in the whites within the darkness like the monochrome rings of a bullseye.
“Go on, my tools, and kill for our country.”
The bell tolled, and like clockwork, we went to Practical.
We filled the spaces of the room numbly. Instinct stole our bodies from us and propelled us onwards, down to the sweep of our gazes across the room, the search.
I breathed in the smell of old dust and thought about endings. Practical, teacherless, had been its own comfort. But now it would be my last time in this place.
Our teacher was stooped, almost hidden, within his jungle of paraphernalia, muttering to himself. He looked weathered, old, like a scorpion suddenly bare and helpless without its stinger.
When he looked up, we were trapped in his milky eyes like flies in amber.
“Do not remember them. Remember the land, remember your formulae, but forget the faces.” He paused, then said quietly, “You will die. This is my final lesson to you. Forget this, too. Just keep the formulae.”
You will die.
I found Ivy’s pale face in the crowd. She smiled at me, you’re so sweet, and suddenly I wanted her to run her hands over my face like she loved to, to revel in the feeling of being her object. To be under her control and not to be so afraid.
We murmured to each other, tried to pull apart the dichotomy in his words and find a sureness, a confidence, in a world suddenly unsteady once more.
And then, finally, Execution.
She was slumped over, a pale, burning lamp cupped in her hands. The oily light set her scars in stark contrast: the thin, white lacerations and bruised skin, a memory that would outlive every one of the formulae in her dented skull.
“Don’t you dare come back,” she whispered, and we sat in the heavy silence of her words.
And then we left.
We, the whole, was dissected. We four hundred became we four, and our eight guards. Fate brought Ivy into this we, along with two somber boys. One did well in most of our classes, and broke into fits of rage that he could barely contain when the guards weren’t looking. The other boy, whose control was nearly as bad as mine, would place his arms around him and whisper quietly into his ear.
One day the guards found them. One of them had a sleek firearm, and he butted the boys on the head with it brutally till the smooth wood had been marred by blood.
We, we the four, said nothing. We recognized their weapons as our final transformation, the tools we were to become, and feared them for their merciless, unfeeling cruelty.
Ivy watched them carefully. I could feel her presence on their skin, sinking into their bones, cementing them as under her control. Did they even notice?
They marched us across dry land, through dried husks of towns choked with the smell of the burned dead, through towering mountains cleaved in twain by some battle or other, something I’d learned a long time ago. There had always been a battle; there would always be battles. We fought a war eternal. And we, the little we, killed for it.
Or would. Soon. I had to keep looking at Ivy as we walked, stealing secret glances, to settle my nerves. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I snuck to her side and slipped my fingers into hers.
She turned to me and smiled calmly. Her hand squeezed mine, then gently pushed me away, so that I was left to walk alone again. It had been so quick that the guards had not even noticed.
We made camp that night on a plateau overlooking sweeping green plains. Fires flickered in the grass like fireflies, darting between the blades, puttering smoke into the air that brought the scent of richly smoking meat to us. We inhaled it, and I thought of home, suddenly and bitterly. Home, as it had been before I had been dragged here, into this school and into this terror.
“We should run away,” I whispered to Ivy as we sat on the edge of the plateau, bare feet kicking into the air. “I live on a farm. My mom’s not there anymore, but we could go—“
She laughed, and ran her fingers through my hair, until her hand was cupping my cheek gently. “And what? Live boring lives? This is so much more interesting.”
I leaned back, dejected. What if she got hurt? Well, she was Ivy, but what if? I couldn’t handle the thought.
It didn’t really matter. The next day we woke up, and went to war for our country.
They swarmed like ants around the plateau. The guards gathered us together, and quietly told us our instructions. These were the enemy. These were monsters who butchered their young and turned them into monsters. There would be no survivors.
Ivy stood at the head of the ledge, her hair rippling in the wind, green eyes trained on the people below. When I approached her she laughed. “Looks easy.”
Despite all our lessons in the art of death, we had not truly killed once. Despite all her threats, Ivy had not killed one teacher. But she was surely an expert, as she was expert in all things.
The enemies climbed, upon the rock, upon each other, and screeched as they crawled and foamed savagely at the mouths.
Ivy stretched out her hands, flexing her knuckles, as her presence spread out from her. It had taken me a long time to notice it; it was so gentle, the faintest caress, traveling confidently upon every surface. It found its way to the creatures below, began to adjust itself, to attach fluidly to their bodies, mapping their skin and the organs beneath, the pounding of blood through their veins, the spark of thought held in the grasp of their neurons and her mind both.
The boys readied more physical weapons. They tore rock from the plateau and heaved it forcibly over the ledge. We heard the screams and crunch of bone, of flattening bodies in conscious minds, and could not fight down the flinch, the grimace.
The guards laughed. Ivy said nothing, but watched curiously, bending her head over the ledge.
Then the first monster pulled itself up to the plateau.
It was just a child. A little boy, pale and half-starved, and his face distorted with rage. For the first moment I was reminded, irrationally, of Anan, for that same pale gauntness, for the depth of emotion in his gray eyes even as his fury stretched the skin of his head into a gruesome death mask.
He looked at me and screamed, raw and guttural. Like a beast. And then he leaped at me.
And froze, midair.
“She’s mine,” Ivy said, her voice cool, and closed her outstretched hand into a fist.
The boy let out a gargled scream and fell to the earth, twitching. I watched his skin unfold, his muscles peel apart, his eyes burn and burst in his skull. And Ivy watched, mouth set into a grim line, at her handiwork.
When she was done she said, “That was easier than I thought—“ and then she, too, screamed.
It was the worst sound I’d ever heard. It was like wood splintering, glass fracturing, the sound of a pain that went beyond pain. It was an agony that tore through me.
And all the while, as she screamed, the second boy who’d emerged from below wrapped around her, sank long, jagged nails into her flesh, his teeth piercing her throat, screeching as he tore her apart. Another tearing sound and her screams turned to ragged breathing, her eyes wide and bulging with terror as they fastened on mine.
Shock had stolen a precious second from me, but then instinct returned and I dragged my consciousness into the earth and pulled.
The screeching stopped. The boy whimpered, and then his body was a speck in the air, a doll dashed upon the rocks.
I lurched forward, and caught Ivy as she fell. Deep gashes ran up her arms and over her neck, the desolation of her perfect skin, the destruction of her purity and that shield that she held up so proudly between herself and the world of fear and death.
There was something suddenly very fragile about her.
Shakily, leaning against me for support, Ivy pulled herself to her feet, and cast her gaze upon the people that lay below. She said nothing. She simply watched, and listened to the screams of the dying children.
The enemy was crushed, the guards told us, grinning, and then we were sent away to rest.
I found Ivy on the ledge, sitting beside the stain where the boy’s body had hit the ground before it rolled over the edge and disappeared.
“Well, that wasn’t boring at all,” she said, and laughed, sharp and uncontrolled. It reminded me of broken glass, not silky music, and the sound pierced through my chest and left my lungs strangled, wrinkled sacs. It wasn’t Ivy. Something was wrong, deeply wrong.
“Ivy—“
She made a strangled noise, choked down before it could betray her further, and buried her head in her hands. The movements were jerky, like she was a marionette suddenly cut off its strings. That wasn’t Ivy at all, either. “I want to leave.”
“They won’t let us,” I said softly.
“I don’t care what they think,” she said, and I felt a burst of relief at the tone of her voice. It held a familiar confidence, corrupted only mildly by a quiet solemness.
The words were on my tongue. I wanted to say them.
“I have them,” Ivy said firmly, watching the guards from the corner of her eye. “I just can’t get distracted again.”
“Was it easy?” I asked, tracing the outline of the bloodstain, seeped into the red earth.
She looked at me and chuckled. It still sounded off. “Was it for you?”
I hadn’t even noticed. “I was so scared for you. I didn’t even realize what I did.”
Ivy chuckled again, then stopped, and leaned her head on my shoulder. I watched her hair spill over the dusty uniform jacket. “Me, too.”
The thought that Ivy would be scared for me—that Ivy would be scared at all—was alien, a pathogen in my head, a corruption that needed to be purged. But it was there.
The world wasn’t right. This wasn’t right. She shouldn’t be weak and fragile next to me, bruised and bandaged, suddenly so easy to break. She was Ivy.
We fought again in the morning. And Ivy was perfect this time, seamless, a thing of beauty as she killed. The enemies (the children) looked up and saw the angel of their death, and they were happy.
And afterwards, we sat together in a circle, flanked by guards, and listened to them congratulate us, tell us how well we’d done, how many enemies we’d destroyed for the good of our country. They chuckled and smirked and spat on the bloody ground.
The boys complied easily, their faces grim, and I nodded along to the words, but Ivy was silent and gloomy.
“I’m tired of this,” she said suddenly, standing up, and the guards fell to the floor. She patted herself down and turned to me, hand outstretched. “Come on, Meli.”
The guards’s stunned gaze followed her arm to me, and then one of them started laughing, and soon the rest joined. Faces still pressed to the barren earth, to the bloody grit, they laughed and laughed.
“Do you know how it feels to be shot?” the first one asked, grinning.
The words were like a slap. Ivy’s face was cold, emotionless, when she said quietly, “No.”
“By the One Formula, you’re strong, girl, it’s obvious, but you thought we didn’t know that? We’ve got bullets that are faster than thought. I’m not sure you’d like to test them.” In the silence that followed, he pulled himself up to his feet, and Ivy did nothing, moved nothing, said nothing, as he pressed his face close to hers and whispered, “Do you know how long we’ve been fighting? Did you think we wouldn’t do this?”
Ivy made a sound of pure anger–a crude thing, uncontrolled, so unlike her–and he was thrown back to the ground. He only laughed more.
“Meli,” she hissed, voice threatening to break. Her hand wrapped around mine as she stormed away, dragging me with her, and all the while the guards laughed and laughed.
We fought again in the morning.
I sat beside Ivy as she butchered children below. Her eyes were red, sleepless, and her fingers twitched with every movement. Her touch was uneven, unrefined, where it ripped skin and bone apart on the dusty, barren ground.
The boys stood behind us, hands intertwined as they worked. I glanced back at them, and for a moment felt a surge of irrational jealousy. They were resigned to their fate. They were at peace.
“I’ll kill them all,” Ivy said suddenly. “And then we’ll be free.”
“I don’t know if we’ll ever be free,” I said, hating myself and the truth both, because the world was not what it should be. It was not Ivy’s world.
I couldn’t look at her face as she dropped her arms into her lap. Instead, I focused on her fingers, winding and unwinding over her bloodstained pants. “I had a nightmare,” she said abruptly, softly.
I touched her shoulder, careful to not disrupt her focus. Below, the children screamed. “About what?”
“Death,” Ivy whispered. And then she looked at me, really looked at me. “I think I’m forgetting formulae.”
But. But she was Ivy. She had perfect memory.
“Whenever I want to remember something it’s always just there, but I’ve been looking for things and I can’t find them. It’s…terrifying.”
I pressed myself against her, buried myself in her presence. “We’ll be okay.”
Her nose in the crook of my neck. Her eyes closed. Everything as it should be. It was going to be okay.
We marched the next day till we arrived at the base of the broken mountains, in a basin of chalky water and marbled earth, and settled there for the night. We were doing well, the guards told us. Guns aimed at our heads. Explosives nestled in their hearts. We went to sleep, and dreamed of children.
We fought again.
“It’s getting harder and harder to remember, Meli,” Ivy said, voice cracking. “Every time I try all I can see are their faces—“
“We’ll be okay,” I said again, and held her tight. “We’ll be okay.”
Another few days, another few enemies, and then we were moved again. An old ruin, the remnants of an outpost lost to the enemy, made of porous gray stone that reminded me of Execution. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Maybe it was; we no longer measured the days. Guns, guns, guns. The guards could sense when Ivy was testing formulae on their firearms. They pointed the guns at me, eyes on her, and said don’t.
We fought. We fought.
We’ll be okay. We fought again. We’ll be okay.
We fought one morning, and the sun was the yolky yellow of a shattered egg, the clouds fragments of its shell, the hazy red glow that surrounded it the omen of our doom. The blood of the children that could have been us.
I suppose we should have counted ourselves lucky. We had been raised to be perfect tools, not monsters.
(I was a monster once. And then came Ivy.)
The children came to us gravely today. There was none of the rage or fervor we’d seen too well in mad, pinprick eyes, only a strange silence but for the shuffling of their feet. They lowered their eyes and bowed their heads as they approached.
We fought. We killed. But they never screamed, never cried out, only bowed and looked to the ground as they died, and the silence was oppressive. The killing was uncomfortable. We, their murderers, felt abused by their acceptance.
I stopped.
Ivy noticed, and drew her presence back into herself, turning to me. “Meli? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t like this,” I said. “I don’t like it at all.”
The nearest guard, who had been watching the violence eagerly, saw us. Anger spilled into his face. “Who gave you permission to stop?” He asked, and shot Ivy.
The world was composed of two senses: the sound of my heartbeat pounding in my chest, and the sight of her, the silence of her, this body falling to the ground, so pale and helpless.
There was a voice in my head, something quiet and small, that whispered, why didn’t she stop it? She’s Ivy! But everything else was overwhelmed by the sickening terror of Ivy on the ground, Ivy bleeding, Ivy dying.
“Ivy? Ivy, Ivy, please!” I cried out. I was crying. How long has it been since I cried? I don’t remember anymore. I don’t remember anything but her.
“Ivy!” I screamed. “Ivy, please!”
Two senses. My heart, beating for her, beating for the object of my obsession, of my infatuation, of my disgust and hatred and confusion and greed. I had kept her for myself. I had made her mine, and made myself hers.
Two senses. My heart, and Ivy’s eyes, opening. Green glass, green jade, green and perfect and alive.
“I love you,” I whispered, and crushed her to me, breathed in the scent of her and the confidence of her and all the things that made Ivy Ivy that I could never do without. I needed her like I needed air. “I love you I love you I love you. And I can’t lose you.”
Ivy’s lips had lost all their color, but still they curled into her smile, the one meant only for me. “Meli—“
“I’m getting you out of here. Tonight.”
And it was all worth it for the gleam in her eye, that old spark revived if only for a moment. I held her in my arms as the war went on around us.
We fought and fought and fought. But tonight we’ll be okay.
We slipped into the tall grass as the two moons, plump and pale, were already well into their journey in the sky. We basked in their oily color, let it soak our skin, tasted the first freedom.
“I don’t ever want to be shot again,” Ivy whispered.
“It won’t happen,” I said, and squeezed her hand. “We’ll be free. Forever.”
Ivy smiled at me, fragile. Her fingers brushed my face. “Together.”
We started running. The wind grazed our cheeks as we ran, hands still intertwined, and it cooled the flush of heat and terror. The grass brushed against our knees, phantom limbs, phantom children, but we did not look down. We laughed and we laughed as we ran, free, suddenly free, suddenly powerful again. I looked at Ivy and I smiled, because she was laughing, and she was perfect. “I love you,” I said again.
She smiled back. And then she didn’t.
“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no–”
We stopped at the edge, at the end, where grass became dead earth, burned earth, and looked out at the rows of silent guards, at the mouth of their cocked firearms, at the void within. We were our Practical teacher, stooped in chaos; we were dead children, shuffling in silence. We were never free.
Ivy screamed, broken frustration and shattered hope all within this single moment of agony. When it was over, I took her in my arms, and she sobbed, “It’s never over, is it? All the fear and death. We’re made of it. We breathe in the hunger and we make it our own. But we can’t, we can’t, I can’t do this anymore.”
She writhed when I pressed her closer to me, tears running down her face. “Meli, it’s over, it’s never over, I can’t stop breathing. Can’t stop crying—“
“Ivy—“
“I love you,” she cried into my shoulder. “I love you too.”
The world stopped. It was just her, just her and I, just us.
As it has always been.
Because I had known since the beginning. Because we had always been she and I, me and her, Ivy and her Meli. We were each other’s, uncontainable, undefined in the places where we melded together, where the boundaries were invisible and we were just one thing, together.
I looked at her, at this precious thing they’d broken like a toy, while the sound of thudding boots filled our ears like thunder. I didn’t bother to scope them out, to set up formulae. Neither did she. We understood, then, that we were fragile things drifting, buoyed upon the dead, and here was the anchor.
Instead, I slipped one hand behind her and slowly lowered her to the ground. There, in the dirt and the filth, in the old, dried blood, I said, “I won’t let them. I promised.”
She laughed, tired and lifeless, and pressed her hand to my face. “I’m glad it was you,” Ivy whispered.
“It’s only ever been you,” I said back, and kissed her. My mouth tasted like blood, and I would carry that taste for a long time after, making her a part of me, digesting her, loving her.
And that’s how they found me, when they came, holding her in my arms, crying and laughing over her corpse, because she was free, my Ivy was free, at last. Her eyes were closed, but she was smiling.