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“And who exactly is this?”
Legato stares blankly at a young woman, teen-aged sitting poised with an icy glare and a shock of blonde hair almost as pale as Lord Knives’ own. He’s still tired from many days spent on the road after being reborn into this second life. He narrows his eyes at her antagonistic tone.
“Legato Bluesummers. He’ll be joining us from now on,” the tired, old doctor says and sighs, walking past Legato to unpack his briefcase on the table.
The girl looks him up and down, like a predator assessing where best to dig her claws in, then smiles with painted red lips turning up into a cruel sneer. “Lord Knives has picked up a pet then? How quaint.”
“Elendira, please play nice,” Dr. Conrad says and is summarily ignored.
“Lord Knives has granted me life and a name. If he wishes me to be a pet, then I will be. So long as I can follow at his side.”
Her smile falls. “And what makes you think he would ever keep a slobbering, mindless stray like you so close, human? You’re farther below him than you could even conceive. You’re barely worthy enough to kiss my feet, let alone Knives.”
“And who are you?” Legato echoes her earlier question.
She swings her feet around, standing from the couch in one swift, graceful move. She stands a few inches smaller than Legato but shows no hesitation as she steps right up to him.
“I’m your superior. Elendira the Crimson Nail. The only true worthy follower of Lord Millions Knives.”
With that, she flips her hair, turns on her heel and exits the room.
Legato hasn’t moved from where he first stood. The girl’s words simmer in him. Worthy? Her? What makes her so presumptuous to think she’s worthy and not I when Lord Knives has given me life?
Dr. Conrad watches this all with his perpetually mild gaze. Under his breath, he mutters, “Like two territorial cats, the both of them…”
In the days and weeks after Legato comes to live at the hidden ship where Knives and his underlings stay, the feud between Elendira and Legato only becomes stronger. Up until then, Elendira grew up as a true apostle among a shifting sea of far more incapable fools who could not believe in Knives’ mission the same way she could. Her loyalty was never questioned by those around them and her usefulness to Knives far exceeded the limits of anyone else. In a word, she was secure in her position.
“Fascinating,” Dr. Conrad says, watching his dials and screens as Knives’ newest little pet stood in the test chamber, glaring down a man twisting himself into pretzels at his feet. Elendira frowns, glancing from the incomprehensible screens of data to the incomprehensible sight of a human exerting unshakeable control of another’s body with seemingly nothing but his mind.
“Your verdict, doctor?” Lord Knives asks, sitting at the back, leaning on one hand as if in boredom. And yet his eyes look far too interested to be truly bored, Elendira thinks bitterly.
“It’s remarkable he picked up this power on his own, but yes, it does seem to be something he has been able to develop well,” Dr. Conrad says.
“How useful would it be?”
“I doubt there’s any unenhanced human that could resist with these numbers.”
Knives narrows his eyes. “And what about not?”
Conrad turns from his screens for a moment. “Not what?”
Both Dr. Conrad and Elendira remain silent for a moment, knowing he must be referring to that unspoken person. No one would dare mention him in Lord Knives’ presence.
“Not an unenhanced human.”
“Well… that I would have to estimate with more—”
“Elendira,” Knives interrupts, attention suddenly on her. He smirks at her. “Why don’t you put him to the test?”
Elendira blinks. Frankly, the thought of letting Legato try to put his gross little mental strings or whatever he calls it on her sounds like the last thing she wants to do, but if Knives orders it, she can only comply. She smirks back, “Gladly, Lord Knives.”
She swiftly removes her coat and readies to go at least take some stress out on the annoying little freak as Conrad puts a pause on the current test, hurrying to switch things out.
“Legato, please don’t remove the test cables, the assistant will come adjust—” he says over the com system, fumbling as he notices Elendira already leaving. “Elendira, do not injure him badly. Elendira!”
Too bad for him, she’s already out the door.
As soon as the test is all set up by the doctor’s little henchmen, Elendira stands before Legato, arms crossed. She glances at the high window where she knows Lord Knives is watching.
“Do anything funny and I will kill you,” she tells Legato.
He sneers. “Hmph. As if I need your permission for anything.”
“Nobody will be killing anybody,” comes the grainy voice over the com. “Alright, go ahead now.”
Legato stretches out a hand and the uncanny feeling of static shock runs up her neck. It’s like the lightest touch of a pen on your skin, except the sensation is on the inside of her skull. She blinks hard, resisting the urge to give any reaction other than impassiveness.
And then, all of a sudden, she feels her body wrest forward. She’s already taken two steps before she can bare her teeth and put her supernatural strength to use in stopping herself. It was the smallest of victories, but Legato still stands smirking at her.
Lord Knives is watching, Elendira hears a voice say.
Now having a better idea of what Legato’s power feels like when exerted on you, Elendira calculates her next move. When the forceful pull comes again, Elendira complies with the instinctual movement of her feet, using it to her advantage to be in close enough range to take Legato’s arm with trained precision, flipping him over onto the ground and ramming her hand like a claw into his face.
Elendira can play at mind games too. Old, foreign power pulses down through her into her hand like the whisper of feathers rippling over skin. She takes the fraction of a second to enjoy the look of fear in Legato’s eyes as she sends him a false memory of death by her hand squishing his skull like a grape.
“Elendira! Stop! I said not to injure him!”
With a huff, she releases him and gets up, glaring at the window. “He’s fine. This test is over.”
She strides out of the room, muscles still tense. Behind her, Legato lies unconscious on the ground. Good.
Making her way back to the observation room as a few assistants go running frantic past her, Elendira gets her coat back and manages to regain some of her composure. Inside, Dr. Conrad gives her the defeated look of someone who knows her well. She shrugs, unrepentant.
“So he can make even someone like you budge, huh, Elendira?”
Elendira’s attention is drawn back to Knives, standing now at the window, but he’s not looking at her. He’s looking at the test chamber below.
“Maybe you’ll prove useful yet, Legato…”
Elendira frowns.
Years pass, routines settle in, and eventually Legato becomes accustomed to the presence of Elendira in his life. There’s an almost comfortable familiarity to the way they bicker and fight constantly. He has come to accept that Elendira is the more powerful in a fight between them and Elendira seems to have come to terms with the fact that Legato is a permanent fixture in Knives’ employ.
In recent times, Knives has been out more often, only taking Legato or Elendira along occasionally. His plans for bringing about the new world are slow-going, as would be expected of such a long-lived being as him. Still, Legato finds himself concerned occasionally by the looming presence of the mysterious brother who wanders among the humans of the planet and who Knives always seems to have half a mind focused on.
It's on a rare day that Knives is at the ship, but still distracted by his thoughts, that Legato learns why Elendira always refers to humans as so separate from herself and why someone like her seems to have grown up on this ship in the care of Lord Knives.
“A plant…” Legato whispers under his breath, looking up at the giant structure, half covered in sheet and half glowing blue. It’s the first dependent plant that Legato has seen up close and the first that Lord Knives has recovered from the humans.
“Her vitals are looking alright,” Dr. Conrad says.
Knives can barely be nudged from the way he’s looking up at her. “Good. Keep them that way.”
From around the sheet, like a blooming flower, a creature like something out of the tales of old emerges, approaching the glass of the bulb she resides in slowly and carefully.
“Sister…” Knives whispers.
For a moment, everyone stares in awe. Then Knives seems to remember something, eyeing Elendira who has been standing aside solemnly with everyone else. “Elendira.”
“Yes, Lord Knives?”
“Can you hear her?”
A flash of surprise and then something complicated passes through Elendira’s eyes. She looks to the plant. After a beat of silence, she responds quietly, “I cannot, Lord Knives.”
Knives is visibly disappointed. “Try touching the glass. She’s a healthy plant, doing better than the others we’ve tried. Maybe she can get through to her.”
Her? Legato wonders at the strange phrasing and the odd request.
Even more alarming is the nervous posture of Elendira. It looks wrong for someone as endlessly confident as her. Even when they first met and she was still shorter than Legato, she never seemed this small.
“Yes, Lord Knives.”
As she goes to the plant, Legato looks from her to Knives to Conrad in confusion. Conrad seems to notice and takes pity. “Elendira came to us as a child, no more than two or three,” he explains. “Lord Knives had… another sibling—another independent plant that came before him. She was…”
“She was murdered,” Knives interrupts bluntly. His eyes flick to Conrad with a deep, terrifying rage. “By Conrad. And by that woman. And every other human who failed her.”
Legato dares not say anything. Dr. Conrad has the decency to look ashamed.
“Her name was Tesla.”
“We… we still have sample DNA of Tesla. When Elendira came to us, we experimented with combining the DNA of Tesla with a human host,” Conrad continues from Knives. “This is what gave Elendira the power she has now.”
“The experiment is not yet complete,” Knives says. “Not until Tesla is given new life.”
Thus, if Elendira can hear dependent plants as Knives does, she is closer to becoming Tesla. Thus, she is closer to Lord Knives’ vision of her. Thus, she is worthy.
Suddenly, Legato’s mental picture of Elendira becomes clearer.
Meanwhile, Elendira stands before them at the base of the plant’s bulb. She lays hands on the glass, expression hidden to them. The plant leans down, placing one of its many shifting hands over Elendira’s. After a long moment of silence, Elendira steps back from the glass and comes back to where Knives waits, head down.
“I could not hear her,” she reports.
Knives tsks, disappointment and frustration clear. Without another word, he turns and leaves the room, a few directions about the care of the plant thrown over shoulder and naught a word for Elendira.
“Elendira…” Dr. Conrad trails off.
“Don’t bother, Doctor. I know my failures well.”
Legato says nothing, merely observing as Elendira stalks off out of the room and Dr. Conrad sighs, going back to the plant work.
He looks back at the plant. She’s looking in their direction still. He leaves the room as well.
Out in the hallway, Elendira is leaning on a wall, head dropped on her fist with eyes closed like she’s chasing away a headache.
“What?” she snaps when Legato stares for too long.
“I’ve never seen you like this. I’m merely surprised.”
She sighs harshly. “I should be able to hear her. Tesla… she was entrusted to me. I should be able to.”
“Lord Knives seems to have hope still,” he offers.
“You saw him as well as I did. It’s been years and I haven’t been able to express more plant traits than I did as a child,” Elendira says. “I’m a failed experiment. Nothing more.”
Legato is silent for a moment. “What a blasphemous sentiment, even for you, Elendira.”
“What?”
“You contain a piece of divinity, do you not? That fact alone makes you above humanity. To be ashamed that you cannot be even closer to the divine is blasphemous.”
Elendira blinks then narrows her eyes. “I didn’t ask for your comfort, Legato.”
“And I’m not providing any. I’m merely reminding you of your place.”
She snorts. “My place above you?”
Legato looks consternated for a moment and presses his lips together. Elendira just laughs.
“I won’t thank you,” she says.
“It would be disturbing if you did.”
In the dead of night, Legato wakes screaming. It’s a common occurrence for him, haunted by memories as he is. Chest heaving and sweat sticky along his back, he tries to remember where he is and where he is not, never again. He wipes tears from his face with the back of his hand and suddenly feels disgusting.
Through a lifetime of experience, Legato knows it’ll be no use to try to fall back asleep as he is now. He throws back the covers and leaves his room, hoping perhaps a walk around the ship will clear his mind.
He wasn’t expecting to run into anyone at this early of an hour, but rounding a corner he finds Elendira, sitting in the nook of a window by the kitchen. She’s looking absently outside at probably nothing at all at this dark an hour, a mug of something cradled in her hands on her lap. She looks tired and dimmer than usual, likely with her own dark reasons for being awake.
She spots Legato and sends him a wry smile. “Nightmares again, I presume?”
“None of your business,” he responds. “And why are you here?”
“Your endless screaming woke me up,” she says and Legato makes a face.
At an impasse, now would be the appropriate time to continue on his way, but today he hesitates. Usually the last thing he would want at a moment of weakness is to be where Elendira could prod at it, but that deeply pathetic and human part of him doesn’t want to be alone just yet. So instead of leaving, he goes to stand by her, leaning on the other side of the window nook and peering out.
As expected, nothing but the black of the desert.
For a few minutes, they watch the nothingness silently, Elendira sipping from her mug every once in a while.
“What do you dream about that’s always got you yelling and crying like that?”
He thinks before he responds. “The person I was before Lord Knives gave me a second life.”
Elendira looks at him thoughtfully. “Humanity has been far too cruel to you too, Legato.”
“Too?”
She looks back out the window and takes a long sip of her drink. “Sometimes I dream of Tesla. Or, rather, I remember Tesla’s memories.”
Legato raises an eyebrow. “You have her memories?”
“Some. They’re blurry and I can never really remember properly when I wake up,” she says. “But I know it’s her.”
“Have you ever told Lord Knives?”
“No.”
Legato doesn’t ask why not.
She continues, “You know, I’ve never cried myself before—”
Legato snorts.
“—but I do sometimes wake up with Tesla’s tears in my eyes.”
“Is that why you’re awake tonight?”
“Maybe,” she says. “She didn’t deserve what happened to her. And, Legato, whatever you dreamt about, you didn’t deserve either.”
The words settle the part of him that was still tied in knots over his nightmare. He won’t be grateful to her, at odds as they ever are, but he finds himself glad for just a second that of all the people he could find himself inextricably tied to through service of Knives, it was Elendira.
“Humans are the purest form of evil in this world,” she quotes Knives. “I hate the human in me. It causes nothing but suffering.”
“Lord Knives will eliminate all of the impurity. He’ll free you.” And me.
Elendira meets his gaze. “There is one memory of Tesla’s that I’ve never understood. Her rage, her disgust – those I understand. Those Knives understands and carries on. But… her sorrow. In the face of all the humans did to her, she still felt sorrow that she could not be closer to them.”
She looks away again and smiles bitterly. “Tesla doesn’t want the end of all humans. But I, the unworthy vessel, do. And so I’ll follow Knives until the inevitable end.”
Such blasphemous thoughts and yet Legato feels himself drawn to them. In the concealing darkness of the night, his mind wanders back to the feeling of Knives’ blade at his throat. He would have accepted his blissful end right there and then, the answer to a lifetime of prayers, and yet… he looked upon his new God and wanted a life beside him.
“What contradictory creatures we are,” Legato says. “Perhaps we are far too similar to each other.”
Elendira snorts. “Don’t get uppity on me now.” She turns to watch the darkness again, their reflections glowing lightly back at them. “But that may be the one thing we can agree on.”
Legato takes a deep breath, feeling far steadier and further away from the painful memories. “I’m going back to bed.” She hums in response and Legato turns away.
“Legato,” Elendira calls after him when he gets to the door. He’s turned away, but still he stops and inclines his head to the side for her.
“Don’t die on me too soon. Life would be much more boring around here without you pissing me off.”
“And you as well, Elendira.”