CW: Suicidal Ideation
Being held up by a single pistol wasn’t something I was particularly afraid of, especially not when the woman holding the pistol hadn’t even thought to put it to my head. I relaxed for a second, raising my arms into a gesture of surrender. Then I moved, lurching to the side as quickly as I could to put myself out of the line of fire. It worked; the gun went off with a deafening bang, but the bullet pinged off the wall behind me.
The instant I heard that shot going off, I switched directions into a headlong charge. The soldier pivoted, trying to train the gun on me. I reacted on instinct, slashing at her gun hand with the bone saw. It was a clumsy blow made by something not meant for use as a weapon, but it didn’t need to be good when I was moving twice as fast as she was. The serrated edge of the blade bit through skin and into the tendons underneath, sending blood everywhere. The soldier screamed, dropping the gun.
I slammed my forehead into her nose, breaking it and sending her crashing to the ground. She was out for a couple of seconds, just long enough for me to get her completely under control. I took the gun and shoved it into my pocket, and I took her sword as well. Then I had to think about what to do to a struggling woman who, by screaming, had almost definitely just alerted a lot of her friends.
In the end, there was only one thing I could do. I lifted up one of her legs and stomped on it, bending the knee backwards, which would definitely render her unable to chase after me, but also gave me a pang of remorse like nothing else.
“Better than killing her,” I muttered to myself as I ran off.
My memory of the map layout I’d read, thankfully, still worked. I knew exactly which way to turn to bring me out towards the edge of the airship hull, where lay the prison section. With a revolver in one hand—five shots and no time to grab more ammo—and a sword in the other, I felt properly in my element, more than capable of taking on a handful of guards.
Testing showed that the door was unlocked. So after five counts of slow breathing, I burst through the door to the brig. Sure enough, there were guards waiting for me, though none of them had guessed that it was me approaching and not a friend. One went down in the first second, two of my precious revolver bullets going through her chest. The other two stood, drawing pistols of their own as I rushed into sword range.
A bullet went through my midsection, perforating a kidney, but I didn’t slow down. Unarmed, there was little that the second guard could do as I swung my sword down at her, cutting deep into the flesh around her collarbone. She went down in a spray of blood. The final guard, realizing that I wasn’t slowed down by bullets, promptly surrendered.
“Give me the keys to the cells and put every weapon and ammunition in the room in one pile, somewhere I can see it, and I’ll let you do first aid on the other two.”
She complied. Three more revolvers, three more swords, and a small pile of bullets formed on one of the tables while I tried to get a feel for who was around without taking my eyes—and gun—off of the one guard still standing. The brig was a fairly large chamber, divided into two parts by a wall of iron bars. The smaller part of the room was the guard quarters, which had room for easily a dozen soldiers. Everyone except the three I’d come across were out looking for me.
On the other side of the bars was a mass of bodies. Easily fifty people were crammed into a cell far too small to fit them all, sharing a handful of buckets and wool blankets between them. As soon as I felt the third guard wasn’t going to try attacking me, I turned to the prisoners.
“Ikamja! Are you in there? Does anybody know an Ikamja?”
A shudder of activity passed through the pile as many of them muttered to one another in a stonewose language I didn’t speak. They must have recognized the name “Ikamja,” though, as the attention centered on a specific body in the back. She was taking a nap, and upon being roused from it, I saw that what had already been a bad afternoon for Ikamja had taken a turn for the worse. She’d been stripped of her Captain’s uniform and forced into a ragged prisoner’s outfit, and though most of the signs of it had been swept away by her regeneration, I could tell from her too-careful movements that she’d been beaten.
I unlocked the gate to the cell, filling in Ikamja on everything that I could remember from the last few hours.
“You’d been shot in the head,” she replied. “I imagine they were being forced to put you together. Even as she bled out, Tersine was oddly insistent that you be kept intact.”
“She’s probably scientifically curious about how I made it back here.” I glanced back to the three guns and three swords on the table. “Dammit, I wish we had more weapons. Are any of these people yours? Do you trust them with weapons?”
Already the cell was beginning to empty out, the packed-together stonewose and humans spreading out into the room. Ikamja took control, like she always did, barking out orders. She took one gun and one sword, and on her orders, the other two pairs went to two other stonewose. A few of the prisoners fled into the hallway beyond, but most of them realized that sticking together was their best bet and remained in the crowded chamber.
It felt, almost, like we’d recovered. Maybe even made progress, considering we were now inside the airship instead of at the business end of its cannons. Ikamja stood once more at my side, and together we exchanged a familiar look, one that wordlessly asked “what’s next?”
“The map I checked said there was an armory, I was thinking we could go there first.”
“It will be a battle hard fought,” Ikamja replied. “The Cassandrans have more guns than us, and the narrow corridors will make direct attacks difficult.”
I nodded in acknowledgement. “A lot of these prisoners are stonewose, yeah? They can take a bullet or two.”
“I do not approve of your use of my people as shields,” Ikamja said with a grimace. “But I acknowledge that it may be necessary. I can ask for volunteers to stand by your side at the front of the line, and I’ll keep the humans at the back.”
“Alright. Better get doing that, then.”
“There is one other thing that you should be aware of. The cell had windows: you should look out of them.”
While she organized the breakout as much as she possibly could, I pushed my way through the crowd to the sloped wall that marked the outer edge of the airship’s body. Sure enough, there were a few small windows. I was confused at first by the total absence of bars or any other measure besides the glass to ensure that the windows wouldn’t become a means of escape. Then I looked through and realized that there was nowhere to escape to.
We must have been a mile off the ground. You couldn’t even see the wall of the airship through that window, and there certainly wasn’t anything more going on below us, so nothing but air and haze separated the tiny viewpoint from the Desolation stretching off farther than I could wrap my head around. Somehow, even though I’d been on modern jet airliners before, the lower altitude made it feel so much more real that I almost staggered with vertigo.
It was so stunning that I nearly forgot that I’d been sent there to look for something specific. Seeing it pushed me out of my awe the same way that a firm shove can push you off the rock and into the floodwaters: the airship wasn’t alone in the sky. Another, similar vessel hovered in the air some number of miles off. It appeared smaller, its gasbags narrower and more streamlined than the massive body of the first airship, though that may have been an illusion due to distance. It was also pointed directly towards us, and I had the feeling that it was closing. I pushed my way back to Ikamja and asked her if it was.
“Of course,” she replied. “It grows larger in vision with each passing moment.”
“Then it’s a good thing we started this when we did. In just a few minutes, the Cassandrans are going to have reinforcements.” I cast my gaze around the room: a few of the prisoners were looking organized, a militia squad amidst everything. “Are you ready?”
“We are.”
We moved out as one, myself and Ikamja’s volunteers in the front, followed by the bulk of the stonewose, then the humans, and then Ikamja and a rearguard. I knew where the armory was, so everyone followed me, slipping around corners and down long hallways. We didn’t go unmolested, of course; at several points we ran into small groups of Cassandrans, two or three at a time. I would rush forward, soaking up fire and giving the stonewose with me time to overpower the smaller, weaker humans. Their guns would be taken, their own clothes used to bind them, and then we would move on.
We were almost there when the real fight arrived. One moment we were moving just like we had been, the armory maybe four doors down. The next we were surrounded, a full squad of Cassandran soldiers in front of us and another full squad behind.
Chaos erupted. There were gunshots everywhere, and everyone who could take cover did. I charged, or tried to, but the volume of fire was too much, and I fell into a doorway bleeding from half a dozen pistol bullets to the chest. The tight passageways were, indeed, a problem. But there was something else going on as well; though all of my injuries healed just as rapidly as always, there was an unaccountable, creeping fatigue slowly embracing my body. What was happening?
Either way, I needed a way to flank around. I checked the door that I was using as cover; sadly, the room on the other side didn’t have a connecting door further down the hallway. People were dying behind me, and further down at the back end of the crowd. Then, while I was stuck, something went strange in the world, like I had gotten transported to a different place. It took me a moment to realize that the shooting, at least on my side of the battlefield, had stopped.
I leaned out of cover, wondering if my allies had found victory while I choked. But no. Something much worse had arrived. Falem was too large for the corridors of the airship, forced to hunch and shrink herself. Even hunched over she was still a terrifying presence, a saber in each hand, methodically observing each and every one of the bodies in front of her. None of the stonewose had my speed or my durability, and none of them had fought Falem before; none of them stood a chance. I rushed out from cover, extending my own sword out towards the automaton.
“So is this how we’re going to handle it?” I said. “A duel of champions?”
“Yes. Tersine wants you alive.”
There was still something viscerally off about that voice. So mechanical, clicking and grinding, yet still able to make coherent speech. It was obvious that the means by which Falem produced words had nothing to do with the workings of the human vocal system.
“Alright then. Bring it on.”
And Falem did. She moved just as she always did, with incredible speed and mechanical precision and force, a simple cutting stroke aimed for the shoulder. It was one of the most basic cuts one is taught when learning the saber, and while a normal person might have been caught off-guard by the extreme speed, I saw it coming a mile away, and knew exactly how to counter it. I turned my wrist into a deflect.
And my wrist was barely able to move. The exhaustion and malaise had increased a hundredfold, leaving my body with an eons-long delay to every movement. Falem’s blade easily slipped past my sluggish, weak excuse for a parry, hewing into my shoulder and tossing me to the side. I staggered, then collapsed. My vision was going dark, and I could hear a strange ringing in my ears.
It was only as I hit the floor, and awareness began to fade, that I realized that I knew exactly what was happening to me. I was waking up on Earth. I tried to force myself to remain on Selene, locking eyes on the stonewose struggling and dying around me, on Falem racing forward with her twin swords, motivating my will with the knowledge that people depended upon me. None of it mattered. Willpower couldn’t stop my mind from slipping from one world to another, it simply wasn’t that kind of process.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. But it was too late. My lips on Selene didn’t even move; I was lying on my back in my room on Earth, staring up at the pale, shadowed ceiling.
And I was done. I was done with this endless game, I was done with Earth always dragging me back, I was just done. Done! I rolled out of bed just like always, but that was a mistake: my nerves weren’t firing on all cylinders that morning, so I ended up collapsing onto all fours. My crutch was around somewhere, but in the dark and with my eyes all clouded over from sleep I couldn’t find it. I searched and searched, pushing myself to my limit until my thrashing hand crashed against the metal. When I stood, I was already exhausted, my cheeks hot with tears.
“Fuck this,” I growled to myself. “Fuck everything. Fuck me. Goddamnit. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”
Exertion and exhaustion had turned to fury, the kind of fury that causes people to lash out and cause harm. But I was slow and weak, and Yasmin bore no responsibility for what was happening to me, so there was only one thing left to hurt. I lurched across that tiny, shitty apartment, my crutch slap-slap-slapping against the floor, until I was out on the balcony.
Our apartment was on the twelfth floor. That meant a fall of over a hundred feet, definitely enough to kill. I leaned as far over the edge as I could, leaning until my crutch slammed against the railing and I couldn’t lean any further. Could I climb over? If I did climb over, would I be able to jump? Or would my legs simply give out and drop me off the edge? How long would the fall be? I knew the acceleration of gravity, I knew the distance, why was my brain refusing to supply me with the delay between choice and consequence? Why did I care?”
Colors danced in front of my vision: at some point I’d forgotten to keep breathing, and my lungs took long enough to force the issue that it felt as though I was going to burst. What was I doing? What if I didn’t die, what if I just ended up in the hospital again, even more broken than before? What if Yasmin saw me, what if she thought it was somehow her fault? I collapsed forward, half my body weight falling sharply onto the edge of the railing. My crutch slipped away from me and clattered to the ground.
As I stared down at the street so far below, cars and pedestrians drifting by like streaks of rain on glass or floaters in the vitreous humor of a bad eye, I asked myself the worst question of all. What if there was no escape? What if I was wrong, what if dying on Earth didn’t mean that my mind would be released back to Selene, what if it just meant I’d die for real? I couldn’t risk that.
So I cried instead. But not for long, because soon after that I was interrupted by my most, and least, favorite person.
“Um, Emma? What are you doing out there?” Yasmin said. “Are you okay?”
“No, no I’m not. Don’t worry about me.”
I was still staring down at the street below, so the only sign that Yasmin had decided to completely disregard my request was the sound of her footsteps approaching.
“Um, that railing is kind of old,” Yasmin said. “It’s really not safe for you to be doing that.”
“Huh, I didn’t know,” I replied. “Are you going to actually fucking do anything about it, or just stand there and berate me? If you wanna help, then fucking pick up my crutch, it fell and I can’t reach it from here.”
More footsteps. I was sure for a minute that Yasmin had taken my advice and decided to piss off, but no. My crutch rose up in the corner of my vision, Yasmin’s arm just out of view. I rolled my eyes and grunted with annoyance as I took the crutch and slipped it back under my arm, allowing me to stand.
“Is there anything else you need?” Yasmin asked.
“No. And stop asking.” I thumped past her, on my way to grab something to eat before I got dressed and headed out to the lab.
“Okay, it’s just… It looked like you were about to throw yourself off. I know you’ve been through a lot, but—”
“Goddamnit, stop!” I yelled, twisting around in a clumsy, abortive attempt to swing my crutch at her. It didn’t work as I very nearly collapsed. “Stop asking! Stop! Just stop! You think you know, but you don’t fucking know anything, so just stop! Please!”
I was crying, fully crying, but I didn’t care. I wished that I didn’t need Yasmin, that I didn’t need anybody, that I could just exist on Earth to keep Selene going.
Yasmin looked as though she was the one who had hurt me, and not the other way around. Guilt, pain, regret, all moving in ripples underneath her face. “Alright,” she said. “I won’t ask any more.”
I could have thanked her, but by that point? I was too far gone. I needed to stop thinking about emotional bullshit and get to work so I didn’t lose my job. My crutch thump-thump- thumped on the floor as I retreated back to my bedroom.