The Blade and the Parade

Schhh. The scalpel glides against the whetstone.

I enter the final line of code into the box torn from the wall. The alleyway explodes below. Emergency dispensers spew cascades of fluorescent foam. Curfew sirens blare out the vocalises of a tipsy diva at the top of their lungs. A cheap carnival, calibrated to the millimeter to dazzle the cameras. The thermal bloodhounds of KARTIKEYA.X rush straight into the trap, drowned under this joyous storm. Thirty minutes of blindness gained.

The Incohérence does its job.

Jade approaches with the forceps. The flashlight projects her broken shadow on the ceiling.

— Don't move a muscle.

The blade brushes my poorly closed collarbone.

That is the exact moment the mask chooses to take its toll. A thread snaps behind my temples. The withdrawal is of surgical precision. The pink shadow rips away the certainty of being safe with my ally. Only an abyss remains.

Jade's eyes change texture behind her glasses. Her fingers tighten on the steel. I look at her face, and find the hunger of a scavenger. A butcher fascinated by the meat. She is preparing to carve up flesh for the sheer gratuitous vice of studying the mechanics of an agony. Why is she lingering on that scalpel? She is calculating the lethal angle.

My right arm twitches. A carnivorous urge commands me to crush her larynx before her blade severs my carotid, a blind survival reflex forged in the filth of the Manille-Drift slums to escape throat-slitters. Blood hammers my eardrums. The murder instinct demands its due.

I anchor myself in the absurd. I lock my kneecaps. I petrify my knuckles. I force my muscles into inertia.

The metal breaches the wound. A warm trickle spills onto my chest. She digs. Her nails scrape the bone cavity.

The pain counts for nothing beside the mute terror asphyxiating me. Is she trying to extract the stone, or digging to tear out the marrow? The forceps sink into the meat. I hold her vivisectionist's gaze. If the blade slips by a single millimeter, I do not know which of us will walk out of this room alive.