“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”
– Nietzsche
Killing a thousand over a lifetime by your own hands was your role. Normal operations. Killing many thousands over a few short years, then, should seem different. But…killing those thousands, and your own sisters? Infamy.
You are a gender traitor and a monster, you tell yourself, mentally rolling sticky morals between thumb and index finger. The Guild remember you as hero, villain, or boogeyman haunting their history.
By your roiling gut, you understand this will make you the monster.
“How” is the real question.
You will carry out this act regardless, actively inviting its rending of your life and spirit. Never has an aging Sepal—or any Sepal buried in administrative work—had a task thrust into their hands like this one.
Behind you towers an ordinary, very nondescript grey buildings, your prize inside one guarded with what the Guild told you were some very nasty security features in case anyone considered sneaking a peek. It is equidistant from the next, and the next, each building of no particular mark or designation besides starkly painted numbers designating their grouping, not purpose.
You know the device inside is key. Inside costs a small country’s GDP. Your Supremus has more than sufficient funds--a comparative drop in a cliché bucket.
Standing watch, waiting on a callous entourage, you uselessly brush at clinging roe-sized droplets from rain your Corolla informed you would arrive long after your business completed. You have forgone an umbrella. Now, bright pinpricks like translucent pearls dot the hydrophobic surfaces of your modest Guild travel robes.
You flap them away, considering it funny whether the textile mills producing clothes for a centuries-old, clandestine organization of creative murderers has ever taken issue. Did they even know? Women culling the world’s predominately male population of debaucherous undesirables should have a brand. Might a brand offer a subtle sponsorship for centuries of successful murder?
And we can do more. Better, when this deal is done! We need only change who we are just a little. We have weathered worse.
You have reassured yourself like this over a year. Even while you itch nervously, thoughtfully, over an atrocity you and yours plan for your own Guild today. You must continue that reassurance. You will break down sobbing, trading it towards uncontrolled shivering beneath your robes.
Cold light from a setting sun, its blinding reflection across rippling surf nearby dims your lenses while a steady hum of distant traffic layers brown noise. Rough granite asphalt spreads far and wide smelling of chemicals in the drizzle. Among it all you know the city not far from here pulses in an ever-present undercurrent of civilized violence, veiled by inclimate weather. Even birds know better, transports hovering loudly nearby enough to dissuade most wildlife from playing by these waters.
However, you hear a child’s sharp cries pierce the inclement weather somewhere in the distance among blocky coastal warehouses, bloated silos, and bustling ship trade. In this remote corner distant from town, that child’s whine is alienating like snow in a desert.
Who would bring their child out here? You wonder. It is no place for a child, their cries returning your wandering thoughts to the present. What if you refuse betraying your principles and your Guild, intruding thoughts return. Might you yet turn this around, woman?
A rhetorical question has never flaunted such hope, a constant ringing in your ear over recent weeks while you swiftly lose what sanity remains after a life training, posturing, unnaming.
What was it your vovo had said about sanity? You recall a passing conversation now wrapped in years. A potion, not mere poison, you kissed in passing for first the man, then his wife, and they had no rich family’s protection or modern grails guarding against your House’s kiss.
They strangled, frothed, their eyes bulged confused in dumb faces through their violent thrashings on the floor. The potion had done its work fast as your Potion Master had instructed.
Did you feel happy or remorseful at the time? Real Saudade, like the old man who once sold farturas. Right before catching him purchasing pleasure from a young girl in your class in his cart. He tried with you, too, occupying your mind with idle philosophy as if you were some na?ve idiot picking over knowledge of the world, and he guarding you from men who would quest for you.
You recall it was shortly before slaying your mother and vovo both while they sipped their earthy coffee in your shack’s small kitchen. Your own volition, and certainty the moment should have been more dramatic. Their gagging on their spittle before gasping and spasming for your help. Their faces pressed into the dirt-caked floor free of rat droppings an hour before because you had been whipped bloody over sweeping those black sprinkles into corners and furniture feet.
They had not even lived long enough to learn about droppings you left in their kettle.
And you remember that girl’s face watching you in a microwave door. Her curiously serene face. Your face. Incredible memories are all that haunt you, now. Not your family’s mental illness, and not any private scars.
Familial tragedies are unfortunate features, not bugs, among Guild sisters.
Your now dead Corolla trained it out of you over years when you were a Venin. “Males enjoying killing for pleasure. We unname, and it is for the good of the world. We protect it against unchecked violence,” she would say. Protect your own. Unname rabid animals. Then you absconded with her wisdom and hid it like a deformity, earned a Corolla title yourself, and finally Guild Sepal running your own House Chapter.
Sacrifice is also necessary for the good of the world.
We need only make a few in adjusting our approach. A small few. Our sisters are sacrificed to save the life. She promised. A small few only...
Slapped in errant winds, your mind reals into your present. Chills knife exposed arms and through robes unaccustomed to sea-wet dampening down to your hoary soul. Your wait begins feeling like an eternal vigil for one murder of males whom you know have each earned themselves a painful unnaming because you pretended you accidentally stumbled across all their entries in your extensive Guild database substantial enough it would make a Latter Day Saint salivate.
Each of your incoming contacts has, at some point, committed horrible acts of violence against women, children, geriatrics, cats—a curious datapoint someone in the Guild has tracked, by your standards—and synthetic humans. This last feels an unnecessary point, though amnesty for synthetic life is hotly contested across nations. How virtual, sometimes physical, assault of AI constructs is taken more seriously than women being forcibly uploaded, trafficked, and tortured nettles your sensibilities. How? Why?
Because males think themselves affected by it, obviously, you seethe. You would rather deliver them pain unrealized, robbing them of a more official Guild unnaming, as their father’s name is tainted filth, or so tradition has stated over centuries.
Fidgeting girls return from scouting their perimeter. Recently elevated, from their trainee uniforms, and you see how eagerly hunger for violence.
They have their trials behind them. Now, their real work begins.
Newly raised, freshly minted Venins are often excitable their first time wearing their House fatigues after tasting a Guild trial. They dream of their work, unnaming the worst offenders. The ravagers. The flesh peddlers. The inhuman barbarism. The boards and corporate heads who wipe away whole ecosystems and poison the people and land for profit.
You are sorely tempted watching their gross emotional displays to give them each a physical lesson in focus, particularly in the field. But you, too, remember how stupid you were on your first few tasks, and in remembering, you maintain your temper.
As she parts from her sister, who continues scouting, over crashing waves and whipped up dirt you hear Xitlali cautiously says your name and you don’t give a damn because she has not seen what you have, irrefutable unnamings over centuries…how they press and press down heavily against your stinking soul like a thumb slowly pressing against a beetle until all that crunch!...and you have to believe it because there is no time for doubts no time for wavering no time for-
You reorient, consciously speak your Guild catechism as you always do these days when memories overwhelm in their numbing trauma.
Xitlali, another who found her way into your tiring Guild, hesitantly speaks. Her voice is low, the tone gentle in its caution. “Sepal Judice?...”
Your hard-won honorific feels wrong out here away from your Chapter.
“Not in the field, Xitlali,” you remind her cooly. “You never know who is listening. They may not know our ranks, but an idiot can see who is in charge and take opportunity at range.”
Venin Xitlali squirms uncertainly over how one acts in the field when a Sepal has corrected her behavior.
In the between Xitlali has begged your attention and your own self-doubts nibble along your conscience, your mind wanders.
“Sepal?” she repeats for maybe the fourth or fifth time and real concern codes the title. “Are you sure you want us here with you when they come? We’re in the open without surprise, little cover, and we have neglected any distance graces if we must kiss any or all of them without risk of failing the task.”
A droplet slaps one lens, that bit of technology it seemed more people from wealth could afford these days. Any year it might hit commercial markets.
“No, Xitlali,” you begin, clearing congealed spittle from your throat as recalling the past has conjured up an accent you have long tamed. “This builds trust and respect. Honor among thieves, if you clutch at clichés.”
“I believe it is ‘no honor among thieves,’ if you pardon, Lady.”
“Only if you ignore your proverbs,” you say. “It does not matter any longer,” you tell her, sighing, thinking on your Cervantes back home.
Watching the horizon, you check a digital clock anchored clock at your vision’s edges. You see the time flicker into being like an airy djinn when you turn your head to it. Below the time, a soft blip of your other Venin, Keira, pulses along a simple aerial map set nearly transparent. Keira is a frail, pretty slip of a girl who moves along your map of the general port like a stalking animal.
You flinch away more water coming down, wiping at your eye, and verify the hour again against expected arrival.
“They will be here in a moment,” you tell Xitlali. “You and Keira will do as planned. No deviations. No improvising this early. We cannot scare off these fragile egos.”
“Is it really that important, Sepal?”
“Yes. This deal is critical to the Pistil Supremus, certo?”
Hesitating, Xitlali’s fingers flick together, a nervous habit never trained out of her, unfortunately. “May I ask another question of you, Sepal?”
Her need hangs between you over what she must realize she is sacrificing for the Guild today. Strangely, the knowledge twists your guts in a way unnaming your family that day had not.
Xitlali takes your silent waiting as consent. “If we are following commands from our Pistil Supremus, when we finish here, will there be any mention of what we did? Will the Guild eventually know how we pruned its branches?” she says haltingly.
You get a sense she says so out of hope there is reward for her actions today.
“No, Venin,” you say. “Like the rest of us, you will have neither mention, nor glory. You’ll have an entry in House logs for a task, a chronicle of your life, a list of tasks you completed for the world. Deeds; contributions listed alongside any other. I have guaranteed it with our Supremus because we can’t have recourse against women who saw to our Guild’s necessary tending. It would be chaos. Do you understand me?”
You watch your words wring barely repressed emotion from her face. She lacks emotional training, yet. Subtle shades and shifts are clapping, cascading leaves, crossing her face in quick succession as only a Sepal or a set of lenses can perceive.
You also see pride burning in her eyes the color and shape of castanhas from when you last passed through your slum of a city.
Keira approaches behind. “They are arriving,” she announces, and you hear pitched whines from multiple engines on approach.
You step away from your concealment as several nondescript black cars, each driven by a person rather than AI, approach at speed from down the line of large warehouses and glowing power station equipment.
Keira finds her position next to you, your left as you instructed, and Xitlali at your right. Together your Sepal robes and their fatigues resemble a banner in browns and whites with your metal clasps adding dots of red. Your House colors highlighting who you are for other Houses, but a bland color palette by outsider standards. They are ceremonial, not the plain grey and black for field ops.
You must stay the course. You must do this deed.
Cars stop in near-parade precision, arching in cultural motley as though a show of world-spanning force. Just for you and your girls? You know it’s drama, these males performing for airs in their competitive peacocking. They do not know it will not impress someone of the Guild.
Music is ever your comfort, especially in tense moments. Your mind stirs in violin concertos, a haunting piece, and with it rain begins falling in earnest as though having been summoned by this moment, bringing with it smells of pavement, chemicals, no notes of flowers, animals, or the like.
Car doors open at staggard intervals, eight males stepping from their vehicles and already they are eyeing each other, posturing in fashionable attire based on where they are from. Some wear expensive suits. Others are bearing marked or augmented flesh. A lot of tattoos on one, shifting subdermal nodes into symbols and creatures stretching or stalking across their skin like a moving dreamscape.
One of them, as you detect with your own implants, is doused to critical levels with a chemical cocktail you cannot determine would be necessary for this meeting. It tickles something at the back of your mind, though you suppose it is irrelevant. They are all like that: flaunting money, power, every level of nefarious intent and government tropes like they took cues from the same virtuals or seedy novel.
So, they have sent us lackeys, you realize. Governments and organizations these males represent are ignorant of what they are dealing in today.
“Welcome, gentlemen,” you force a pleasantry, imagining the potions loaded into several hypos and crusting an edge of your long dagger among your robes meatily popping their insides like roasted cherry tomatoes. “I hope your journeys here were pleasant?”
Venins bow heads politely, watchful, yet respectful in their vigils.
You are uncertain as to their sex when, keeping their sunglasses on, a bold lead walks towards you. Their hips swish, confident strides like they are selling something and know you plan to purchase. A smirk passes their lips when you see their open white blazer and not a stitch underneath. Because why would they hide perfect golden skin and their physically shifting artistic display of women, effeminate men, and one you think flashes two different genitalia on the figure in near-erotic, new-school pinups. They cover mouths, wink, bend, and crawl in Promethean certainty.
They are also by far the most unusual and flashy stereotype for shadowy government hench…person…lowest on any pay scale.
“That’s a strange set of implants you’ve got,” they remark first in a modded voice. Their throat shows marks. Implants along vocal cords likely shifting their pitch at will. Their accent is strange. Maybe Czechian? Somewhere in that step-child of European countries.
All their eyes, tattooed and no, study you, elevator action violating you by their mixed interests like some showroom model they want to touch and explore.
You are no trinket for ogling.
I could unname them each by how they study me, you fantasize. Only, your multi-generational hand-me-down of threadbare cultural patience, not any practical sense, stays your hand.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
They will never realize how close they came.
“I can’t detect your augment functions,” Tattoo declares with a shrug. “I’m intrigued…custom wetware? I know people, if your group is in the market for confident sourcing, not ripped or second-hand military like some people here might pawn off on you,” they probe into your personal affairs and eye a couple males behind them, one huge in nearly ripping clothes by his look, standing off to the side glaring. “Unless your company, church, whatever it is you people are don’t do your own work?”
You fashion a smile from somewhere, nod slightly. “Standard for our people, Mr…”
“Not important,” they cut you off in a strange register. “Also, not a mister. Went fluid long time ago. Also, not important or appropriate. This, however, very much is,” they walk past you adjusting their jacket and gesture open-handed at the warehouse behind you like you had missed it in your over an hour waiting under its gaze. “We should get this done with before others here get anxious. I’m not fond of these necessary cretins.”
Happy to let him speak before, they all now talk over each other with introductions, posturing, a veritable gamut of toxic masculinity you expect in satire or crime virtuals.
Two especially angry types step forward and talk over each other until the smaller of the two backs down and the large one—you decide he is muscle for someone not present by the suit and shaved head, no scarring or physical alterations you can see—holds a hand up to him to quiet his angry gesturing and flippant, clipped words. They remind you of a henchmen duo and you suppress your chuckle. Henchman One addresses you, his chest pounding finally fizzled.
“We were told to expect a representative from an organization who could speak for all. Are you it?” The accented English has European notes your lens AI suggests comes from a subsection of German and Dutch.
“I speak for most, not all,” you say confidently. “These others,” you gesture with an open hand at the girls while never taking eyes off these males, “are in our employ as a kind of guard. We do not have easily identifiable positions as you would recognize them, nor will I explain nuances. I am a representative, yes.”
He eyes Xitlali and Keira with obvious incredulity. Mirth tugs one corner of his mouth at these two little girls being any kind of bodyguards. His face ripens in color like fruit.
Your lenses, several iterations better than commercial markets, drip-feed information at the corners of your vision. He would likely be ignorant of the information available to you, let alone the kind of technology in your kit as a Guild member. He is hopped up on an exotic chemical cocktail, but it is for combat and likely affects some of his mental capacities, stretched as they are now. He is here because his DNA is necessary, one of several keys to a lock, and payments, keeping these males from killing one another before banging chests and hooting loudly.
The doused combat male scowls. “Don’t like this. I’m out!” and makes a three-point-turn dramatically whirling one hand in the air for others to follow.
When he steps towards his car, his smaller associate holds out a hand and begins animatedly talking to him in low whispers. You can’t see his lips, else your lenses would report what he says, and you can’t hear him with all the background noise. You are helpless until common sense takes hold, which in this situation, among these males, your stomach knotting, your hand twitching.
Rain falls harder. You are all growing progressively drenched. Really should have brought an umbrella, silly woman.
There is nothing for it but enjoy the rain, let it cleanse you of this deed. Maybe it is good luck. Maybe it is some God’s angels shedding their tears. You will do this thing. You must do this thing.
The big man’s body language loses its puffed-up look. His shoulders sag, turns back to you visibly grinding his teeth in deep agitation. He will be an issue before too long. You see signs and read through his body language as easily as a technical manual for a very simple piece of cheap furniture.
“I will go along with this for now, but you schnecken better have ready funding and not be wasting our time,” he threatens openly.
Keira stiffens next to you. She looks down at her hands and subtly moves them, registering with her lens software as words for translation and appear in your view through prox messaging between their lenses:
An insult? “Snails”?
-Venin Keira
Others in his party reflect shades of embarrassment, rage, poorly veiled snickering at this show.
A gross metaphor, you decide he will be one of the “messages” you send back for all their masters.
Prompted laughter dies down when they see you controlled and locking eyes like you, too are weighing him up, smiling. “Our money is good. Shall we conclude our deal and get out of this rain??”
The tattooed one has remained silent while their display, choreographed or no, plays out. Now they lead everyone towards what you know is a great reinforced door, flimsy make on the outside, but a knock revealing how echoes die before reaching into space beyond. A panel lights up nearby. A security warning. It has a countdown timer in red and a space for a series of inputs and bio lock entries.
One of the quieter males sidles up and flips open a print reader, waits, then Henchman One lumbers forward to get pricked for a blood marker.
He makes no other motions, no facial expressions, and stares dumbly at you, and you pause, considering.
Keira and Xitlali watch you also, their glances between you and he calculating.
At a signal from you all these males would be dead, all kissed with unseen grace whose quick-tick potions would pass as accidents. Vans especially. You carrying a special species of potion just for a male like him. He would take it home and die there. Another accident.
Instead, you approach this more delicately, feeling your Supremus’ weighty intent upon your aching heart.
Three males access the panel, and they stop, doors remaining shut as they need additional keys.
Their Big Man pulls a small bio reader from his pocket and holds it out towards you, waiting expectantly on your realization this is a shake-down and you will pay before they show you any goods.
All of them, even Tattoo, has either expectant or watchful stares aimed at you and your next move.
“You wish for payment for all your organizations from us before entry?” you ask. “This was not in the deal your governments and organizations negotiated with my superior. Are you changing the word of our agreement because you think we will cheat you somehow? Three of us small woman, and yet there are eight of you armed males here.”
Henchman One does not falter in waiting for your print marker, but you see the others, not the tattooed one, all eyeing each other uncomfortably.
Lowering your head, then looking up into his ugly face, you nod. “You would have me give you all we have and risk more than what I have already seen from your troupe. Now I am feeling insulted.”
“Damnit, Vans!” the tattooed one whines, kindly. “Will you quit comparing cocks so we can all get inside before you ruin my fucking suit? The salt and the chemicals are going to stain. It’s white and it’s real silk! None of that artificial shit. I’m gunna bill your ass if it looks spotted when I get home.”
“There’s no comparison,” Henchman One—Vans, apparently—hesitates. Almost you see hints of more rehearsal here; a dance they form up, each pressing finger, eyeball, whatever to panel in a specific sequence you realize is part of the access, not just DNA before testing you.
All eight biomarks are processed before the door has processed a series of locks. Loudly it begins sliding open like a monstrous creature inside ponderously forcing them apart. They open on to vast open space with only the glow of many terminals, a few glass-enclosed spaces, and what you think of as hundreds of fireflies flickering throughout an artificial night. They are indicators for data, power, other things you do not recognize fluttering throughout the huge room like an airline hangar. Most of what you see is open, your prize dominating a small section though no where near filling the warehouse.
We can work with this. Make something of a new Chapter here, perhaps?
Lights overhead pop on after effort, and you sense little trepidation when you set foot inside out of the pounding rain. You avoid going near servers, foreign equipment, or any of the thousands of feet of hand-thick cables and tubes wrapping in and around the room as though this otherworldly space were a hive from a Geiger portrait.
You’ve seen rooms like this with half the alienating technology and oddly shaped equipment in science fiction scenes. There is beauty here, oh yes, the way mechanical organs drop from domed spaces, cables like muscle fiber snakes across the space, the complexity you can’t fathom makes sense for what it can do, you suppose. But it also feels wrong. You feel urged to run back outside towards concrete and rusting metal.
Equipment showing unknown purpose hang like fruit, while other machines of equally enveloping tubes or egg-shaped pods cluster behind their protective glass enclosures. Or what looks like glass. It’s hard to tell from this distance. The whole contraption is a jumble of construction you could never decipher; never follow. When you turn towards your Venins, you see they, too, share your awe by this space made in the image of some science geeks orgasmic futurism.
Males around you just sniff at it and make crude jokes.
Typical.
“This is it, then?” an Aussie speaks up. “All these computers, all these cables, all of this for a king’s ransom?”
Another answers and you see it is one of the silent types finding his voice at last. He looks like the others, his suit expensive, hair slicked back, glasses when no one really needs glasses. It’s a point he makes, and you do not think further on what that point might be.
“I can’t explain how it works,” he says, “It’s very complicated mechanics.” He smiles with his eyes, if crow’s feet are any indicator, then looks at you directly. “It works without you seeing or knowing how it works. Perfect for women, right?” he laughs at what he thinks is a joke of some sort.
You return his smile politely. “Quite. We women are all very forgetful and simple at times. I nearly forgot who I was dealing with, for example.” You say seriously, however as you speak, you are looking at your hands so your lenses catch your fingered message to Xitlali:
This one is the other message.
-Sepal Judice
Vans holds out the reader again, this time clenching his jaw. You glance at him, then it, and you see veritable life of science and technology you could never check for condition or working operation. Here is where “honor among thieves,” ironically, plays its part.
You first lick your thumb, then roughly press it to reader. After tapping out a few digits, you see its screen glow palest green. A successful transaction completed. All those credits, you would expect more than a green light. But many have died chasing its healthy hue, and you will avoid a similar fate.
You move away and join your Venins before a box like a tiny mouth connecting with everything in this room. A nondescript box having a couple lights, and no way for her to see inside. It sits disconnected from all the room’s grandeur, that little box, and she finds it the most grounding part of her whole presence here.
Behind her, she hears a voice call. “Did it go through?” It’s one of the males who had been quietly standing among their group’s fringes, a watchful type.
You wait on Vans expected reaction. You imagine him reading a screen, pausing at what’s there, and his jaw muscles working like a dog growing furious at someone intruding upon its territory.
“No…it’s half,” she hears him say. More loudly, in case you don’t hear him, he says, “These schnecken think they give us half and leave intact like we won’t take them apart because they’re women,” he says incredulously.
She hears growing rage while he speaks, and prepares for the inevitable.
Faster than she thought, actually, she hears Vans suddenly plow past males like they are cardboard. He covers several yards to lay hands on you before you leisurely turn to face him, and you see he has gone red and pulsing and ugly in his chemical rage.
Keira is there first, however.
She has slammed an injector into his pumping leg before he registers what’s happening, slashed at his midsection, clipped his other leg, and tipped his path in such a way he cannot control his gait, making him tumble in a deep surprised below before colliding into one of the glass enclosures.
It stops him dead, definitely made of materials other than glass, after all.
Keira has skipped away from Vans, who is up swinging sledgehammer fists that will crush Keira’s bones if they make contact, misses, staggers as he quickly slows while looking confused at her. He staggers backwards and requires all his concentration to keep on his shifting feet.
You can see in his face, his slow, slow processing in his dumb ape brain collecting realizations and plotting sequences of events that absolutely must be confusing over the how in his very real, very impending death brushing wings against his insides.
While monkeys process, their dim light has hidden Keira’s actions from Vans associates, who stand in varied shock and surprise. Only when Vans has collapsed do they jog forward confusdedly shouting questions to make sense of the scene. Several stand back pulling an assortment of exotic weapons from jackets, pockets, places you can’t even guess.
Among them all, only the tattooed one steps forward holding up their hands, sexy figures undulating on their chest in a bob of silent, open-mouthed moans of sublime ecstasy that contradict a tense moment.
“Hold! Hold just a sec everyone!” they yell. “Not too hasty, now. Brother, put down your automatic this isn’t a drive-by. You too, the one swishing that iron like you’re a fucking cowboy. You’ll shoot your dick off putting it in your pants that way. Everyone hold. On.”
Eyes shift between them, you, and Vans. They hold themselves like it was your doing, casually dropping Vans. Impossible a little girl brought him down.
Tattoo emphasizes their words with hands in a conductor’s grace, calling to all in a showman’s flourish. “Let’s breathe, let’s- let’s allow her time for explanation as to why she has decided to cut us out of a lot of money and done…whatever has happened with Vans, hmm?”
They look meaningful over a shoulder at you, then down at Vans who is not dead, but certainly lacking his usual confidence and strength sitting on his knees in a bleeding mess.
He glances up and around at everyone like a captured, cowed beast.
You watch, think of all the tasks handed you with that same look, and the gore following those outbursts of hormones and training.
“I- I feel numb!” he nearly sobs. “It’s all pins and needles! This bitch killed me! They fucking killed me, I know it! I’m gunna die here!” he screams before launching into a string of Dutch.
You absolutely cackle down at the whimpering babe. His quivering lips that worked on his poor mother, who seemed absolute trash at her job if this was the product. While you watch, your Venins remain loose, ready for action. Good. They have that invincible tenacity of youth, thinking they can save themselves from several weapons trained on them.
But you know better, and yet, you cannot help laughing. Small. Polite. You are going to betray many, and you must take your comedy in nibbles while you have a moment.
Regaining some composure, you wave a hand at Keira.
“My associate here is gifted,” you say loudly to Vans so others hear you. “She saw a need to protect my person and your rather hasty conclusion, gentleman. That we attempt to pay half the agreed-upon price is not theft, but guarantee considering your earlier attempt at renegotiations. If we leave here alive, a timer is set for a second automatic transaction once I have sent word, we are in the air home.”
You raise hands, and they train their weapons on you as though you are a posturing cobra ready to strike them. If they only knew you happened to have a little of that on you, it would make this moment funnier. Or dangerous. Little of both?
They are still unconvinced. “We want to ensure a smooth transaction without any messy misunderstandings or messier, rash decisions in ignorance. Clearance will be submitted. You would not disparage three women a little insurance, você iria?”
You ignore anxious struggles with Vans who looks drunkenly again around him before you, ignoring guns and many possible deaths, step carefully towards him.
“You will survive,” you say. “Come now you mewling thing! It’s not permanent, and it’s not deadly.”
Seconds pass in their private wool-gathering before one here, another there silently confirms in another’s face or secret gesture they have reached their tolerance among strangeness and they are filing towards cars in a hurry, three of them helping Vans limp awkwardly away.
You take pleasure in his avoiding your eye, when before he enjoyed all that looking and glaring.
Tattoo has stayed behind, watching you curiously. “What are you planning with this place, if I may ask? I heard a rumor about what it can do, and on tiny scales to the point it was considered a failure. You are spending way, way too much on it.”
You run a hand over a humming box and literally feel the mystery under your fingertips.
“A personal anecdote for one who was polite. Tell me, do you know what to do when you try to ripen avocados?” you ask.
They smile and shake their head.
“Some try to heat them up in ovens. Sunlight. Microwaves. All of these are rushing a process that doesn’t get the best results. Instead, if you take an avocado and sit it alongside, say, bananas, the gasses will ripen them slowly, but you end up with a perfect fruit.” Indicating with a slow flourish, “This building is the most expensive bunch of bananas one can purchase, and we have a lot of avocados. One changes, or is doomed to die off by old traditions. I…know little of what I say makes sense, but I cannot tell you more, I am afraid.”
“Well, madame,” they say, nodding slightly. “I look forward to what you achieve, and doing business with you again, soon.”
They leave towards a waiting car and disregard looking back at a marvel they have sold.
Keira and Xitlali had slipped away at some point. “Was it completed?”
Xitlali speaks up first. “Spoke with him briefly while he tried propositioning me for drinks later. Dual, slow-tick fatale of different species on his hand, Sepal. Bacillus anthracis,” she recites, “and Lyssavirus. Lenses suggested he has an external knock-off grail system we’ve heard of to deal with toxins, but he mentioned going South after here. Unlucky for him, he will happen to catch something down there. Poor male.”
“Those forgeries…” you say, thinking of your grail sitting inside you as mark of your place in the Guild. “More are out there. We should investigate who leaked our secrets,” you say.
A finished deal has you going quiet in private contemplation. Consequence are resting their burdens upon you already. You feel them there like hard knotted ropes tugging against muscle. Before long, you are nodding, “Thank you, Venin. I can’t abide rude males who should have pedigree to know better.”
You and your Venins stand silently watchful, feel charged air on your skin, cut off from wind, rain, and creating a memory of this moment. It is in this moment realization hits.
It’s done. By all and any Gods, it’s done!
You have struck embers and set things to smolder. It’s enough you to feel yourself wanting to violently wretch, horrors at how many of your own will die, fewer than your Guild’s last Haustorium, that shift when last women rebelled for space and recognition in the Guild. Gods help you. Gods forgive you all for what you have started!
You take in a long, unsettling breath staring into empty depths at what is easily magic as far as anyone understands it. It takes time, gathering yourself. Longer than it should, really. Surprising anger holds you in a rough grip.
“When will we begin dissolving Houses, Sepal?” Keira interrupts your panic.
You whirl on her before realizing you’re doing it. “Say it so casually as though we are not about to tear down ancient traditions and make sacrifices of our sisters. Your sisters, girl! Family! What we know is ending, Venins. Ending! Think on that, the pair of you!” you nearly scream at them. Your hand sweeps out more sweeping cut than gesture encompassing everything. “If there is a God you crawl to in the night for comfort, now is when you begin seeking solace in her forgiveness because from here, real work begins. And death. Too much death, Venins…” Your own voice sounds strange and echoing. Racking, cold realization of what comes next rises up and rakes your chest silently, uncontrollably.
You don’t realize you have collapsed to your knees in a very un-Sepal loss of emotional control, clutching yourself in your arms, almost rocking because you reel and you want to be ended, your name entered into the book alongside your scant writings. This is it.
You stare up at your Venin’s faces; see what they may be experiencing. By scant light, you see shadowed features curling into something more horrible than the moment you left your family unnamed, bloated on the floor. The Venins have stopped paying you any mind. Instead, they have found each other, looking at each other over your loss and your grief and your hopelessness.
Betraying smiles they perhaps think you cannot notice. Secretive, shared smiles of a generation ascending from the ashes of a self-immolated old guard.
Self-satisfied smiles.
“Gods, preserve us,” you murmur into the dark, violins furiously building towards a crescendo in your aching head.
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