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LEASH /
Gucci looked grimly down at the sleeping Witch in Glass. In her hand she held a leash that she couldn't see, and could just barely feel.
Like this, she almost looked like a woman. Just a woman, and not Else, not More, like she was now. It showed the most in her eyes, which welled up in darkness that was slick as oil.
Gucci had thought of her as her best friend once. Not a particularly good one of course. Gucci was no fool — as much as her recent interpersonal decisions might cast doubt upon the fact. But the best she had. The longest she’d known. One of the few people she could not truly hold at arms-length. Gucci wondered if that said more about her, or the Witch. Gucci wondered if that woman had died half a decade ago, and left her alone here, leashing shadows in the dead of night.
Clem had always slept like the dead. Her eyelashes were stained black. Gucci touched her cold cheek and her fingers came away sticky from ink-sweat.
She leaned towards her neck.
“Clementine. You did well.” Gucci had been calling her that again, since Future. ‘I told them,” she said, "I told them you'd be an asset.”
Which them? Clem almost asked, but kept quiet. Barely. She looked to the cracked open door, to the pretense of nail polish, abandoned for wine. To the short space between them, the plush sheets of her bed. She could not fail here.
Gucci was rubbing her thumb on her index finger. Clementine zero'd in on it. Gucci saw and smiled, a little slyly.
“Looking for this?” she asked, and it materialized into a cloaked shimmering solidity. Clem’s stomach ached.
“I wasn’t,” she denied archly. “You’ll spill your glass. These sheets are fresh.”
The glass was in her other hand, and Gucci’s laughing eyes plainly didn’t believe her. She put it down, and kept up her movements. “It’ll have to stay on for a while longer. Insurance. You understand.” Was Gucci playing with her? It made her angry, or something like it.
Clem put a hand on the invisible leash. Felt its weight – negligible. A bit of secretion smeared the air, betraying her curiosity. How did it work? She only felt it when Gucci wanted her to feel it. It had a wide enough lead that Clem had only felt the tug when Gucci saved her life. She hadn’t questioned it, Gucci becoming her third shadow, until then.
Gucci watched her watch, and made a little twirl in the air with her finger. Clem felt a pressure, light as a feather, on her throat. She narrowed her eyes and fisted her end of the leash, pulling Gucci closer.
Gucci considered the lessening space between them. Considered her, searchingly. “You can change things. The world’s always moved for you, hasn't it?”
“Not fast enough,” Clem said.
“Every step is a step.”
Clem shrugged churlishly, then winced at herself. It was a childish action, a familiar one between them. Not one fit for a queen, a voice she’d rather forget whispered in her head. Not one fit for a visionary. Unsure what else to do, she pulled Gucci closer to drown it out.
“You can ask for things, you know,” Gucci murmured. “Be nice, and I just might...”
“Just might what?”
Gucci sighed. “Come here, Clem.”
Understanding dawned. Well. This would do. She came closer. Gucci closed the final distance, and kissed her.
Ah, Clem thought. She blinked, eyes still open. Yes. I wanted this. She had almost forgotten. It wasn’t their first. But it had been a long time indeed.
Gucci put a hand on her face. She closed her eyes. Movement, in the back of her mind, even as her clenched fist slackened.
Gucci’s skin was hot as a living coal compared to hers. She coaxed Clem onto her back and wove their fingers together. The door creaked quietly, so Clem pressed into her harder, and opened her eyes just as paint-drip limbs surrounded their heads.
Gucci stiffened in shock and gasped, wasting precious air. She tried to yank herself away but Clem held on, sludge welling between them and binding them further. The body of the Iconoclast swelled enough to collapse upon them both, pressing them tightly together. Gucci's freshly painted nails drew blood from Clem’s hands. Red still, but too-dark. She took the pain. She did not let go.
Gucci struggled but it was two against one, and the one was wine-sodden, too smug to be cautious. She could breathe here. Gucci couldn’t. Yes. This was what she wanted.
“Do you still think I need you?” Clem hissed, as victory swelled within her.
Gucci wheezed. Her eyes held a desperate fury that she had never seen before. Then, they slid closed. When all was still, the darkness crept away from them.
It took some wiggling to detach their hands. Clementine stared at Gucci's body. She put a hand over her mouth. Breathing. The wine had spilled, irrevocably.
The Iconoclast loomed over them. She knew what it wanted. To be closer again, to meld to this person that had been untouchable on her decree, to shape her to their vision.
Gucci had always been singular. It would be a waste.
“Enough,” Clem said to it, and it melted away.
Once, when they were teenagers, when Gucci had confided to her, full of pride, that her family had been paying to get her soldier’s training, Clementine had demanded she prove it. And Gucci had, smugly carrying a scowling Clem on a run through the hall. She had been so busy resenting that Gucci was, unquestionably, superior in this way that she'd hardly enjoyed it.
She was stronger now than she had been then. Clem hooked one arm under her legs and braced another at her back. Gucci’s head lolled limply against her chest as she walked them out, and dropped her in her own bed.
Clem slipped the leash off her neck, and pocketed it, staring at Gucci once more. A locked door would not keep her for long. And that look in her eyes.
“You’d better not be angry,” Clem said, frowning down at her. “You shot first.”
DEPARTURE /
“I’m leaving," declared Emaline Eccles, staring up at the Witch in Crystal as the Mirage refracted sunset all around them.
Emaline had said this before; in anger, nine months into their miserable, bug-bitten search in the swamps. Now she delivered the message with solemn certainty. The iconoclasts in the room shifted, gurgled at her words, and the steel in them. When they had first begun seeping into the Crown of Glass, Emaline had held her uneasiness at bay by imagining them as nothing more than extensions of the Witch’s power. Now, having seen what they could truly do, the thought seemed foolish, and no more comforting than the reality besides.
A growl, low pitched with a mechanical whine, spilled from the hulking hyena-cyborg that stood at her side. Emaline had named him Chorus after the island where they had found each other and found this new life. He was her truest friend. The Witch had ordered him chained for attacking her monsters, and he was happy now to be free and hungry for vengeance.
“Easy,” she said to him, and braced herself for the Witch’s words.
The Witch in Crystal was slowly living up to her new name. A glass mask was crystallizing across her face, the rotting stems of her former patron having been cleared away.
(– by Emaline, of course. No one else had dared to come close to the Witch as she had raged at some ingrate no one could see, weeping in fury and agony as parts of her died. Shh , Emaline had murmured, taking a tweezer to the withered shrubs at her eyes. Shh . She had touched her face for the very first time and looked into her eyes, which she hadn’t seen in years. The Witch had been in too much pain to push her away.
She had not thanked her. It had taken weeks for the smell of rotting sage to fade from the glass halls.)
“Okay,” said the Witch.
Emaline blinked. “Okay? That's it?”
“What else is there? It would change nothing if I tried to stop you. If you left in the middle of the night, and I hunted you down and brought you back, you would flee again. And it would change nothing if I killed you either. You would still be gone.” She sounded bored. “Do you want me to kill you?”
Emaline laughed. A rough, ringing sound. As a rule, the Witch did not ask Emaline what she wanted. She had spared her life, and in return Emaline had stayed by her side and run her city. But now there were no people here but her, and the Witch did not look at anything but the future.
Emaline had been prepared to fight, and to die. Instead, it seemed, after all these years, the Witch was giving her a gift in return.
“No,” Emaline said. “I don’t. Goodbye, Clementine.”
COMPULSION /
All of Gucci's letters started without a salutation and ended without a closing. It didn't seem she knew how to go about it, so she didn’t try. They were derisive and interrogative, rambling and succinct in turn.
The Witch in Crystal knew they were coming before they came.The galaxy was in upheaval, as she had known it would be, so Gucci had left the Mirage, but her Arboratic messenger – a mechanical bird woven through with tree sap that would refuse to carry anything more dangerous than words – could find Clem wherever she went.
The bird didn’t ferry out of a love for service. It would linger, explore, spread seeds, before it would come for the return letter and be off again. Waiting felt easy, when she could divine fragments of what was to come. She was alone, but she had survived. She had all the time in the world.
Savoring the feeling, she picked up a pen.