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Yumi flew from the room like a carrier dove, the message to Miyo cramped in the beak of her palm. That oiled the first cog of this phase. The moon was waning, gorging itself with silver every night. Terano had to act before a lick turned into a mouth.
She had given instruction that she expected to be disobeyed. Don’t let them fight you from a motte-and-bailey castle, your feet mired in quicksand mud, she’d said. If they approach you, slip through their fingers like sand. They seem to think you’re small, anyway.
It had been an unnecessary remark to make. Manyuda and Mozu did not dispute it; the first too clever and the second too crude. Yomozuki was unreadable and Rin listened only to his honeyed pride. Terano could never command either Jabami or Ririka either; they were tempests that could not be yoked. Still, though as a remark it was unnecessary, as a precaution it was the opposite: because then, when broken, she’d know who turned on their word first.
But there was a second barrier she was building, and it consisted of two halves. The first sped through the cruise liner crumpled in Yumi’s fist; a proposal inked to her cousin. She calculated that Miyo would preen at something so formal, especially since Kirari had snubbed her from her council. The second was Kirari’s prized organ, studded into her ribs like a red, fleshy jewel. A girl named Igarashi Sayaka, within whom beat the wings of Kirari’s will.
The war Terano was fighting here was a proxy war. Given the ring locked around her finger, she herself was too valuable an asset to squander. What she required were battle-hardened proxies to bear her early wounds. Numbers paved the surest path to victory — and besides, Terano was sure the Guardians were having similar thoughts. Miyo would be easy enough; like Rin, she was stuck in the honey of her pride, her will one reckless foot off the cliff. It was Igarashi who bothered Terano here.
She had chosen her because she knew her to be capable. Her mind was a flint that, when struck, produced magnanimous flame; her recklessness best likened to a car swerving off an oil-chewed path. The issue at hand was that Igarashi was locked within a cage made for a bear.
Terano had seen her in the medicine-white corridors of the ship. Her skull was too heavy for her shoulders, slumping as though the weight of a bowling ball, her face empty as a ditch, eyes grey-skinned corpses buried in its soil. The world had been revolutionised and she’d been choked with its growth.
That was alright. Rin had been choking his entire life. Miyo still couldn’t get the bitter taste of the pill out of her mouth. Terano decided she would breathe life into Igarashi Sayaka’s mouth.
;;
“Igarashi-san?” She was static, like her mind had been converted to a yellow bulb, around which flickered grey moths. Terano was not heard.
She cleared her throat. “Igarashi-san?”
Her nose began to sob. Cranberry pricks of blood crushed her lip, running down like tap water. Igarashi braced herself like a child. She was a dark stain in the corridor’s centre. Terano’s chair creaked as she manoeuvred it closer.
“It’s a matter of urgency. I need to talk to you regarding Kirari.” Terano inserted the key into its blank lock, and it turned, croaked like a wounded boar. Igarashi’s eyes snapped like electric jaws, blood flowing more rapidly from her nose.
“President.” Sayaka flatly, mournfully whispered. “President, I failed. President, President—”
“Shut up.” Terano cut in, a steel knife. Igarashi flared like the sun, threatening to vapourise Terano’s flesh. She was taken aback for a moment. She had forgotten the bear-trap that had padlocked her numb ankle to the ground. The flint that struck fire, sloughing off the family flesh. Igarashi had yoked the election like a charioteer yoked its horses, streaking across the sky like a yellow diamond.
“Nngh!” Igarashi grunted, hands gnawing at her face as if she wished to peel it off. Like she was a rotten satsuma, looking to shed its skin. “Nngh! You—!” A blade named Kirari had cut out her tongue; this tongue that wrapped itself, like a serpent, around her snowy wrists. Sayaka struggled with a bloody stump frothing her mouth.
“Come with me.” Terano said decisively, beginning to wheel herself away. Fatigue set in like necrosis of the bone. “If you want to see Kirari alive again.”
;;
Rin would have jeered at Igarashi for hobbling after her like a wounded dog. Miyo would have sprinkled poisonous salt into the leaking, slug-like red. Terano could not fault either of them for this; Kirari had ruined them, they had every right to pierce her heart with venom.
But, the humiliating fact was, Kirari had never ruined Terano: she had offered her a lonely, golden freedom instead. And Terano’s chains were thick with her hollow response: that if none else could achieve that freedom, it wasn’t for her. The heart was the mindless victim of the brain, forced to beat against a sinewy cavity. It had no will. When the brain died, the heart died with it.
Terano wanted to revive the heart.
They were in a lounge, its walls flickering with eye-shaped flowers — Tsuibami’s flowers — that came in lurid, throaty shades of red. Sayaka was slumped into a creaking, leather chair.
“You serve her mindlessly.” Terano began. Igarashi flickered like a dying star. “This is not an indictment. But you love to be used by her; her will is your will, is that right?”
She said nothing, her lips dry. Like the moisture, their fungal lipstick, had been torn off. She was naked in her uniform, shivering as if soaked.
“That’s alright.” Terano said, though it wasn’t. Igarashi’s eyes were bleak like Hyakkaou’s grey ceilings, hazy and clouded with dust as if to mimic an overcast day. “But tell me, Igarashi-san, is there anything you want? Outside of living as a dog.”
Sayaka bucked at that, Kirari’s reigns eroding like an umbilical cord held to the searing light of day. Distance thawed her, even if it froze her first. “I want— I want…”
She could not answer. Eventually, like a sapling stripped by winter: “I want to be number one.” Her cheeks were a dead-white, like her ambition, its corpse forlorn in her mouth. Terano wanted to feed this worker bee nectar, so it could beat its wings again.
“Does that bring you happiness?” Terano asked, tender as a bruise. It was a careful question. Happiness was the lack of unhappiness, she had once told Yumi. That was why Igarashi’s seams were torn like rusted cables, drizzled to snot by corrosive rains. Igarashi had thought Kirari’s empire was everlasting, and did not appreciate its sun. But now, its light had been extinguished, and its dead mass settled on her shoulders like a whale carcass. It took the lowest of bottom-feeders hundreds of years to strip the blubber from its bones.
Igarashi could not answer Terano’s question. Her fists spasmed, fingers small, white krill nibbling at her palm. Kirari would have found it romantic. Terano flushed.
“Alright, then. I’ll be to the point.” Terano sighed. Though she had wanted to unearth Sayaka’s treasures, that could wait another day. “I need you, Igarashi-san. Your mind is sharper than mine, your desire to unshackle Kirari stronger than mine. I need you in this fight.”
Sayaka trembled with her scoff, as if plagued by rheumatics. “N-No.” She stammered disdainfully, slouched like her spine was a snail. “N-No, don’t—“ she raised her eyes, violet, violent daggers, who pierced Terano in their raw, shredded beauty, “don’t look down on me.”
Terano shifted in surprise. ‘Me’ instead of the passive ‘we’ or ‘she’. That was progress, certainly. Though Igarashi’s rage, blooming like a hypothermic spring, was not. Her face unfurled like a toxic, white flower, a pale basin simmering with poison. Its life was artificial, pollinated by spores of brief, addictive anger. It was only a fraction of the muscle locked within her, struck and snarling from Terano’s weak spur. And— it was entrancing. Igarashi’s individual rage would go down her throat in pink, hoarse chunks — it was, after all, in Terano’s nature to devour.
“What?” She said calmly, with decorum, waiting, with a tension in her neck, for Igarashi to breach it.
“The President is divine.” Igarashi choked out a thorn. The pawn broke conduct and maliciously trotted back a square. Orchid irises expanded like indigo, indignant seas, stigma rearing from a toothy dagger to a silver lance. Terano’s chest was a blood-soaked rose. “She is perfect, she is without a flaw. I am her flaw. I broke her, she did not choose for me to fix her. I— I’m sorry, I’m—“
She was not apologising to Terano. She was erratic and afraid, and shrinking into an apathetic grey cloud. She could not even say Kirari’s name, and yet she worshipped her like she was gold.
“If you apologise one more time, I will kill you.” Terano snapped. This struck pink flint into Sayaka’s cheeks. Her tears froze. “Good. Now—“
Sayaka’s eyes turned black. Utterly black, like a neutron star compressed of all its light. Without warning, she lunged, like the snapping lip of an event horizon, and blended Terano’s throat with her hands. Terano was thrown into the back of her chair, skull lolling against leather, suns dancing in her eyes. Sayaka frothed crazily at the mouth, pushing like she hoped Terano’s larynx would implode, thumbs and their keratin ridges molding flesh like it was dough. Terano coughed, vision blurring, and Sayaka reared back like her leash had been tugged. Terano’s hands shook as they collared her neck.
Sayaka trembled like a leaf, staring at her pale hands as if they were besmirched with blood. “Don’t talk to me like that.” She snarled, tinny. “You have no honour, no integrity, you’re a fraud and— and— and—” a sob stuck in her throat, “you just want her dead!”
“Kirari—”
Igarashi’s divine eyes bulged. “Don’t say her name. Don’t say her name! You’re not worth it!!” Her throat was raw with salmonella, voice a rusted pole dragged through mud. She shouted and flecks of froth flew from her mouth, as if she was a rabid animal. Perhaps Terano was insane, like Kirari seemed to think, but she though she saw a halo glisten around Igarashi’s head.
“So you are alive.” Terano said wearily, leaden in her chair. “Will you fight?” For her went unsaid. Except, Terano didn’t want Sayaka to fight for Kirari. She wanted her to fight for herself.