Water Through the Grate

The dark crust pulls tight on my left cheek.

Vassili raises a cloth soaked in clear water, brings it close to my face, then freezes her gesture three centimeters from my skin. Her fingers stiffen around the cotton before dropping back onto her lap. She did not dare wipe away the blood, averting her eyes toward the bare wall of the hideout.

The Alpha Register nowhere quantifies the distance separating an augmented archivist from a Dissoute, but I calculate it tonight at those precise three centimeters.

I swallow.

The taste of iron stagnates on my tongue. By forcing the dome's door earlier tonight, I refused to hand over the wards to the arithmetic demands of the procedure, compelling the system to deduct the cost of this exemption at the source. It carved a shortcut through my own vessels. The fine flowed out through my nostrils.

Sleep.

The voice of ATHENA.VICTIS strikes beneath my skull like a dry decree, devoid of any human timbre. The flesh collapses. Axiom Zero requires a viable substrate to instruct future disputes, and since you spared the city, I pronounce your sleep.

I close my eyelids.

The injunction seeps into my heavy muscles, demanding relaxation. Under the darkness of my lashes, I try to retrieve the anguish that gripped me before the root of the contracts, that panic of having nearly annihilated hundreds of children. The archive opens. Crisp. Surgical. The probabilities of death appear there in columns and the failure variables remain filed under their reference numbers, but the terror itself has evaporated. I possess the facts. A case file drained of its ink.

I open my eyes to the harsh glow of the room.

Vassili stands up, approaches the metal bucket sitting in the corner, and wrings out the cloth. The pinkish water slips through the grate.