The Last Ember

The east sector screens recite their gospel. "The absence of sensation is the cure." Six thousand chins raised, docile, drinking the promise of a clean void.

I know that void. They sell it; I've lived inside it for weeks.

Jade props my shoulder against the concrete, hunts the angle of the master cable under a loosened plate. Her fingers shake. Mine don't. She lifts her head.

— What's left for you to give?

Uzume breathes the price into the back of my skull. I already know which one.

Her. You.

The hole in my chest opens for the last ember — that stupid warmth that rises when Jade ties a bandage crooked, when she stays where she could run. I encode it into the dragon. I throw it at the glass.

The mask swallows.

The sermon corrupts. The certified faces swell, hollow out, become eyeless maws — masks over nothing, an abyss staring at you from inside the screen. My monstrosity spreads across six thousand retinas. The void smiles at them with my mouth.

The square tears open in screams. No laughter this time. They recoil, they stumble, they claw at their own faces to check something's still under there. Our Parade turns the crowd against its own reflection, and the censors no longer know how to file people fleeing their own faces. Their hounds lose the trail in the fuchsia rout.

Jade grabs my wrist, drags me toward the alley. She turns, searches the slit of the mask, looking for the kid.

I look at her worry.

Nothing.

A useful hand tugging my arm. A variable, filed in its box, clean. I know she held me up yesterday. The fact remains; the weight melted with the rest.

She grips harder. I follow because it's efficient.

How many embers left before only the mask stands on its own?