Dwindle

The next few days made me feel tense. I thought of the admissions I’d made to My Master. I had not even understood them myself, but it felt good to release them into the air.

  She was beautiful, and that made everything hard.

  But it was more than that kind of beautiful. It was a holistic beautiful. An inside beautiful that I hadn’t experienced since I’d killed my last Deviant.

  My insatiable curiosity made my eyes watch her. I drank the sight of her up like I’d never drank water before. When I smelled her when she ventured too close or when she made to tend my wounds if I couldn’t, I felt as if I was lost in a dream.

  She was expressive. My eyes became trained with the sight of her, and I began to analyze what I saw. She carried guilt and anguish. Sometimes, on quiet nights, her eyes looked so lost and frightened and alone. She was also bitter. I heard it in the way she sometimes breathed. And tired.

  Always tired.

  I wanted to help, sometimes. I wished it wasn’t so insane and embarrassing to feel that way, but I did. She was kind, polite, and graceful, even when I made a point not to be.

  I tried to remember the fear I felt at the sound of My Master’s voice. She wanted something, I told myself. I’m alive for a reason. She needs something from me. She knew of our plan and was spying on us to reveal critical information. To whom, I did not know. But the entire scenario was a ruse. Sometimes, when I let myself get carried away, I thought of what I would do to her if such was the case. It would make the murder personal. Emotional. Sloppy.

  But all that much more delicious.

  Poisons worked well, but so did beatings. Bullets. Dropping her from a great height. Knocking her out and tying her to a pole so that the elements would devour her. The wolves obviously weren’t picky, and the Necros certainly weren’t.

  I was bigger and stronger. She was a twig, malnourished and perpetually exhausted. Killing her would be easy. Thoughts like this surfaced after an argument, and there were many of these. She insisted on keeping an eye on me on my mat. I tried to make it irritating, but it wasn’t.

  Actually, I was kind of touched. She tried to make it seem like she was suspicious of me, but I saw that she just wanted the camaraderie. She didn’t want me to be alone.

  Still, we’d fight, and I’d dwell on my dark obsessions, of the things I’d been trained to do.

  At first, this felt normal. These thoughts were reassuring. As the days faded to weeks, the pleasure faded to something pinched in my stomach, similar to nausea. I’d feel sort of sick with myself.

  This sensation was new. My nature was to kill and maim. I was brought up to do war. I knew nothing else. And suddenly I wanted not to know. I was beginning to realize that hurting other people hurt me too, just in a different way. That was why I’d left Probe. I’d been hurt by the sacrifices I had made for them, and they didn’t care at all when I told them I needed to stop.

  That was why I’d run. That was why they’d asked me to come back to dispose of me.

  I was feeling, and that made me useless.

  And just thinking about hurting her made me feel kind of…squishy.

  And I couldn’t get her out of my mind. She was all I thought about. During the day, I pined to hear her crisp accent, at night, I ached to hear her laugh, and at night when I closed my eyes I saw her clear gray eyes, haunting me. I found myself wanting her obsessively, fanatically.

  But she would snarl when I was rude, lash out in defense when I was what she thought to be belligerent. At first, I didn’t know why. But I was beginning to see.

  I didn’t really understand how to talk to people very well. Especially her kind of people. Deviants.

  And I found myself wanting to be better. I felt shame when I was impolite. I felt disgust after a particularly vulgar or gruesome thought crossed my mind.

  I was afraid because I was beginning to want her to like me.

  When I first noticed I was different, I retreated into myself, avoiding her out of fear. Then, incapable of curbing my desire to have her in my daily routine, I gave up on this, and I just instead settled for a sort of desperate helplessness. Something was happening to me, and I had no idea what.

  But I was different – no matter what My Master commanded.

  With Fisher, it was impossible to tell how to proceed. I wondered why I found it so hard. I had found hundreds of Deviants – killed many. Hunted them. Studied them. Tortured them. I knew them better than I knew myself, which wasn’t saying much, but I knew them all the same. They weren’t like us. Deviants were cruel. Cold. Calculating. Not like Fisher. She was warmer to me, and her words were always soft at first. No aggression.

  If she was a Great Deviant, a newer, better breed, it could mean the end to us all. An enemy that looked like us, tricked us into thinking they were like us.

  I’d have to kill her, I reminded myself every morning. What are you doing, I’d ask myself, because you have to kill her?

  But as the days rolled by, the sensation in my lower stomach every time I thought about it, terrible and chilling, grew in intensity. Eventually, it reached a point where it forced my hands to cover my eyes. It took me nearly a week to establish that this pinching sensation was guilt, and when I did, it only ate at me more.

  I was becoming emotionally compromised. This was a killable offense at Probe, and the mere thought fueled my desire to remain composed.

  And yet, it had taken me about five minutes to establish that I was a walking contradiction around her. I wanted her to be happy, yet I did not. As a Deviant, I assured myself, she didn’t have the capacity to be happy. Deviants didn’t feel anything but instinctive pain. They were like animals, and everything they played for us when we tortured them was just an act to get what they wanted. They were masters of manipulation. Next to Fisher, I lived in constant fear of being duped. It made me sick to think I meant so little to her, and that – to me – was sign enough that she had done something unusual to worm her way into my rotted insides.

  Fisher was the epitome of everything that I hated in the Deviant species, and yet, the possibility that she could be more, that she could be friendly, was too appealing to shut down. It was possible, if barely, that she was the only Great Deviant that existed, the last in a long line of those like her hidden away from time in that desolate place. It was possible that she really was the evil beacon of hope urban legend had made her out to be. But it was also possible that she would save both races from extinction by ending the war.

  Or was that just a fantasy?

  Was it fanatical to suggest that maybe the Deviants were misrepresented in history? Was it heretical to ponder that maybe they were just like us, walked, talked, and acted like us? Was it so strange to wonder if those same Deviants went out from the High Council and reproduced to make the young woman who housed me? Was it so dangerous to guess that maybe the Deviants were just a convenient scapegoat for a biological virus that was a larger problem than anybody could handle? Was it possible that the urban legends about Fisher as a prophet was something created only after years and years of genocide?

  These thoughts frightened me. I’d honestly never questioned them before, and I wondered why. They’d never been wrong, after all. The High Council had written our histories and approved what books we could read. Why would they want war? Then it got me to thinking…if they’d lied about Aios, what else had they lied about? History? Biology? Everything?

  Anything?

  They had the power. What could stop them?

  My kind, Exteriors and our Masters, we were the only ones allowed into the Territories. Everyone else would simply believe what they were told to or be sacrificed.

  Was this wrong?

  But when we looked and acted so similar, who was who? I’d never spent such a long time with a Deviant before. Everything I’d thought about them was being proven wrong, again and again and again.

  This path of questions led me to circles of disturbing maybes, so it was around the time of doubt for my own establishment that I forcib
ly distracted myself. Even thinking such things felt treasonous. If voiced in Freedom’s Progress, humanity’s capitol, my thoughts would have me reconstituted for sure.

  As I continued to fight with myself in the usual exhausting fashion, Fisher walked through the door and threw something at me. I caught it, jumping.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked belligerently.

  There was a tired scowl on her face, a tightness there that wasn’t normally present. Her eyes looked a little red. She’d been crying. My fierce rudeness retreated into a hole as she said,

  “That’s food, obviously.”

  She sounded upset.

  “What kind? Normally it’s some kind of disgusting plant or watery soup. Is this gourmet night?”

  “Mock you my cooking all you want, but this is filling. Pleasure is secondary to sustenance.”

  It was true. It was better not to starve. The thing in front of me was almost a bready substance, obviously stuffed with a mysterious liquid. I ripped it open. Chunks that looked oddly like meat floated in the semi-solid.

  “What’s inside it?” I asked hesitantly.

  “Meat of wolf and bread the farmer made. He didn’t grow it over dead bodies…”

  Fisher looked over at me, smirking. I wasn’t sure what to say, but a flip of pleasure came from the depths of my stomach. She rolled her eyes.

  “That was a joke, my friend.” I felt my face twitch to smile but I resisted. She just said, “It’s safe – if you don’t believe me I can try it for you.”

  It was a good enough excuse for me to begin stuffing the very essence of that same substance down my throat.

  “How is your wound today?” she asked, nodding towards me unnecessarily.

  I shrugged.

  “Hurts a little,” I said dismissively. “No big deal.”

  Being full kept the worst pangs at bay. Perhaps that was why she had brought me the food. To help me. Again, it seemed impossible for one of humanity’s eradicators to help one of its assassins trained to kill her.

  I remembered myself after a moment. Even if she was a Deviant, she still deserved a common courtesy here and there. She had saved my life. It made me say,

  “Thanks.”

  I said it reluctantly. I licked my fingers and then asked,

  “What have you done to my people? They’re never in here anymore.”

  “Living in a hole isn’t healthy, that may be why.”

  Her voice was tight, and I felt my abdomen tense as my entire body stiffened.

  She really was upset, and that distressed me. If I asked her about it, she’d brush me aside, flick me away. I barely restrained a grunt of frustration. She was like the most elusive word in the English language that was always just at the tip of your tongue. You knew it, you recognized it, but it would never come to you willingly. You’d have to rack your brains for hours trying to coax it out, and all that work would make the final discovery all that much more rewarding.

  I wasn’t used to this. I was used to instant gratification. You kill it; it’s done. You demand it; it’s there. I didn’t ever need to earn anything like this.

  She inhaled and exhaled, yanking me out of my thoughts, and I watched her with confused eyes that she could not meet. I wanted her to look at me, suddenly, but I would be damned if I asked her to.

  “Your people are about,” she said civilly. “They seem to be adjusting fairly well. No mention of murder or killing or anything.”

  It was another joke, and this time I couldn’t hide a smirk.

  “Progress,” was all I said.

  She laughed, and some of the tension in her body language dissolved.

  I felt victorious.

  “Yes,” she said. “And so I’d like to give you something.”

  She stood and went to the front room, just out of sight. My heart began to race. My blood felt hot. I felt dizzy, and my tongue made it hard to swallow. I was shaking. I was sure I was shaking. I looked around for something to hide behind, but there was nothing.

  How could she give me anything more? How was it possible that she was being so good to me? I wanted her to hate me, like I wanted to hate her.

  Panic arose as she reentered, and she seemed to sense this, to my great shame.

  “Relax, Outlander,” she said, laughing tightly. “I mean you no harm. I just wanted to say that I’d wish you to have this.”

  She held out her hand. It was my sidearm. A pistol. Something I could use to kill her with.

  My heart raced in my chest. I looked at it for a long moment and then back at her. Her smile had faded now entirely, and her eyes revealed some of the anxiety she felt about this.

  She was going out on a limb for me. She knew it was dangerous, but still she was giving me a little more freedom. That made my heart explode with joy. The mounting tension in my limbs melted, my muscles relaxed. She was afraid, but she was trusting me.

  The joy blackened.

  Finally, I looked away.

  It was good she trusted me. But I didn’t trust me.

  Something inside of me whispered, I need more time.

  “Keep it,” I said, waving my hand and looking away. “I don’t want it.”

  She took a step back as if she’d been slapped. My eyes flitted to look at her immediately and I saw in her eyes that I’d done the wrong thing. She was hurt at my rejection. This was a big thing, and I was brushing it aside.

  “I…uh…I mean…”

  I squeezed my fists into balls. How did normal people recover from things like this?

  “Forget it,” she said, rolling her eyes and stowing it on the twine around her waist. “I knew that was a stupid idea.”

  Sheepishly, she made to walk out of the room again. I felt angry with myself, and I knew I shouldn’t allow her to leave. Not like that.

  “No…don’t take it that way,” I said, suddenly sincere. “I just didn’t…expect…to see a gun again so soon.”

  She crossed her arms, her back to me. I was desperate to regain her favor, but I didn’t want to show it.

  “I appreciate the offer,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I was. “But I…don’t really need a gun like that and…and you do. So, actually, why don’t you keep it? You can have it.”

  She turned around at this. And we both just blinked, she in surprise, me, at my stupidity. Did I really just give her the only immediate means I had of killing her? As a gift?

  Something was seriously wrong with me.

  “You don’t want it?” she asked hesitantly.

  I did not know how to recant.

  “I don’t need it,” I said with a shrug. “You need it more than I do.”

  She said nothing and took it from her side again. She held it in her hands, twisting it to look at this way and that.

  “It is very small…” she said, as if trying to convince herself. A small smile escaped her lips.

  “I actually like this very much,” she finally said to me.

  “Then, please, have it,” I said, trying to dismiss the gift now.

  I just wanted to stop talking about the fact that I’d just given a Deviant my first chance to kill her.

  “Paige is with Chess, the Inventor,” Fisher finally said, resuming her seat as if nothing had happened. “He’s showing her the gate, I believe.” Her face was tight when she said it, and she locked her fingers together. “Pierce is speaking with an Elder of government housed near Rhyme. Ali is speaking to Iris. The two of them have very similar poison in their veins.”

  Fisher said it with malice. I blinked in surprise at the real spite in her tone. It was the first time in the weeks I’d come to know her that she’d revealed so much.

  “Who is Iris?” I asked.

  “Iris is a Turk.”

  “Okay, so? What’s a Turk?”

  “Someone not like us. She comes from far from here. I’ve never been there, but I hear it’s very uncivilized.”

  There were guarded tones in her voice.

  “Are
you a racist?” I asked, more to myself than her.

  “I do not know what this means,” she said to me, narrowing her eyes.

  “What’s your issue with Iris?”

  There was a moment of silence. She pursed her lips.

  “She is the lady-friend of Foot,” she finally whispered.

  I understood better with a different kind of cringe. I’d heard about Foot already. I saw her eyes light up, her mouth twitch into a glowing smile. I detected a hint of breathlessness when she spoke of him.

  She was jealous.

  I began to consider mocking her when something inside of me stopped my words.

  “And you…don’t like that?” I asked.

  “It’s…kind of a long story.”

  I said nothing.

  “He is…intimate…with Iris.”

  She paused when I didn’t respond. She looked away awkwardly, asking,

  “You are…” Her face colored, and I found myself wanting to keep her that way, just out of place. I felt a powerful wanting inside of me.

  “You are familiar with my meaning of intimacy, yes?” she finally asked.

  I actually laughed. Her clarification was painfully cute. I hated that things I would have normally mocked were endearing. How was it possible?

  “Yeah…” I finally said. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  “May I tell you a secret?” she asked furtively, glancing at the direction of the front room.

  “Uh, sure. Yeah, sure.”

  My smile did not scamper like it so often did. She smiled again too, bringing her knees to her chest, like she was cold.

  “He used to be mine. He wanted me to live with him.”

  Something about this wounded me, and I had to know more.