The All-Consuming World

by Cassandra Khaw

  “So, you won’t come back for Elise?”

  “What?”

  “I’m not joking about that. Elise is alive. We’re trying to get her back. And we need you, damnit. There’s this whole deal with the Merchant Mind—”

  “That fucker again.”

  “—and he wants Elise in exchange for helping us get to Dimmuborgir safely.”

  “Fuck—”

  “But we’re not giving him Elise.” Maya stretches out her hands, like she can court Verdigris’ acquiescence with the sight of her bare palms. “We’re going to let him think he’s getting her. Then, we’re going to bounce. We’re going to take his data and go, make our way to Dimmuborgir.”

  “Why the fuck do you want to go back to Dimmuborgir, huh? It’s what got Johanna and Elise both killed,” Verdigris says, shakily, the light eddying into a subcutaneous lambency, its radiance turning her eyes into stained glass, leadlights through which an alien ocean peers. “It’s stupid. There’s no reason.”

  “The Minds are killing clones.”

  “I don’t buy it.”

  A beat, two, and they’re almost to three when Verdigris, with a wincing laugh, whispers: “That’s not what they do. It doesn’t make sense. If I’m dead, they can’t keep farming me for souvenirs.”

  Maya’s mouth dries. “Souvenirs?”

  Another tremor of a laugh before Verdigris throws on a smile polished for a camera, a bland billboard smile, a primetime smile, a you-can’t-hurt-me-because-I’m-famous smile. “Sometimes, the Minds ask for a finger, or a carving of bone from my knee. My right eye. A sheet of tissue from my left lung, rolled up like a scroll, so they can place it in a private museum.”

  “And you let them?”

  “We’re not going to talk about that.”

  Maya nods. Certain ideas are meant for profanation: the concept of other people’s property being sacred for one. But this kind of trauma? No, that’s holy. The past is a reliquary you keep buried unless told otherwise by the one who interred that hurt-stained horror. “I get that. But what if, Verdigris?”

  “They wouldn’t touch me.”

  “Would you let them kill everyone else?”

  “Fuck. Fuck you and fuck Rita and fuck both of you for knowing exactly the right goddamned buttons to push.”

  Thank fucking god. At long last, there is the emotional distance Maya has wanted: Verdigris, piqued but no longer pushing good vibes on Maya. She bares a wild grin. Rita gave her a script so she regurgitates it wholesale.

  “Come on. This is a chance to make some of it right. We’re never going to get Johanna back, but we got a shot at bringing Elise home. And more importantly, maybe, we got a shot at making the Minds scream.”

  “Rita told you to say that, didn’t she?” A wan smile flits partly to each of Verdigris’ mouths, tongue lolling from the largest, the one at her collarbone. “God, that woman is an artist when it comes to shit like this.”

  “We all got our specialties.”

  “Goddamnit.” Verdigris swallows hard, voices in shambles, soft with resignation. “Goddamnit. One last time for the road, I guess. But you have to make me a promise.”

  “Tell me what it is, and I’ll at least think about it.”

  “We save Elise. No matter what.”

  “I already told you—”

  “I want to hear you promise me this. You, specifically. Fuck the sales pitch. Fuck Rita especially. I don’t trust her. You, though? Maybe. So, I’m gonna need you to promise me: we’ll bring Elise home.”

  “We’re going to try, at least.”

  “No trying,” says Verdigris, practically singing now in bright-bodied triplicate, low contralto in harmony coloratura, whiskeyed alto presiding over it all. “You have to promise. We bring Elise home. We do for her what Johanna never got: a second chance at being human.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Those are my goddamned terms, okay? It’s all or nothing.” She holds Maya’s gaze with those strange, pellucid, cracked-ice eyes and almost, Maya can hear some seditious quadrant of her heart whisper, I’ll do it if you teach me what it takes to make me the reason you look at me this way. “Please?”

  “You got it.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’m glad we have an understanding.” Verdigris grins with all her mouths at once, an expression that doesn’t even veer within the ten feet of her eyes. “But also seriously, Maya, what the fuck?”

  Interlude

  Six dead. She cannot conjecture the number. Six of the Dirty Dozen are dead and buried, cremated, leavened into the bellies of vultures and other such scavengers, punted into orbit, composted, whatever. Who gives a shit about the method of disposal? Dead is dead is gone. Maya peruses the obituaries. Four—Meghna, Feng Hui, Annora, Nadia—are just that: terse paragraphs condensing entire lives into epilogues, without dimension, without any marginalia to indicate how fucking badass they’d been in life.

  They made sure there was no fucking way they’d be roped back into this miserable existence, all gone down the path of multitudinous dissections, their organs taken and disseminated between hospitals. Their data banks were incinerated too; every copy of their souls committed to nothingness, a mercenary’s suicide.

  Maya combs the newsfeeds obsessively, metronoming between them and privatized info sources, social media clips, company profiles, anything where she can salvage another scatter of data or better, the flash of a familiar face.

  But she holds out a feeble prayer for that one last name:

  “Rochelle might still be around,” Maya blurts out of the blue. The steerage is a long thin loop of a corridor, badly lit like the rest of the ship, its only redeeming feature its proximity to the engine room. Here alone is it warm-ish. “I can’t find anything on what happened to her.”

  “No news is good news,” says Verdigris, perched on a rail twinned around a baluster, anchoring her. Maya averts her gaze, unable, unwilling to meet those leadlight eyes, especially here where she can be surveilled. “Rochelle always knew how to sneak off to the best places.”

  “Yeah.” This version of Ayane continues to be a surprise to Maya. She possesses a nebulous recollection of Ayane in their heyday, back when they were feral: chambering pejoratives, singing out curses, maenad-wild and gorgeous as a bullet flying true. She’d been happy then. But not like this: unclenched, denuded of everything save for the most rudimentary make-up, hair in a messy ponytail, the loose strands curling over a face gone child-like wonder. Ayane’s looked twenty-three since the day Maya first met her, but she has never looked so young. “You remember when she ran off to that casino planet?”

  “Fuck, I thought Rita was going to kill her.” Verdigris’ laughter detonates through the room. Her attire is austere: black turtleneck, black leather skirt with its hems a crisscrossed maze of thick lace, black boots. Biker-nun in exile, especially with the two revolvers strapped to each thigh left brazenly in view.

  “Didn’t she?” says Constance, slouching into view, a shoulder propping against the wall, her hands curved around a chipped blue mug. Maya knows, even before the olfactory data grazes her sensors and long before her nose puts a name to the memory, the mug brims with watered-down hot chocolate and two plump marshmallows. She knows because she keeps a stash on the shelf that had belonged to Constance, exchanging boxes for fresh doppelgangers whenever the expiry dates were crossed. Waiting, though she’d eat a shotgun before confessing, for Constance to come home.

  “Kill Rochelle?” says Verdigris.

  “Rita didn’t do it,” says Ayane, that old sharpness restored as she knifes a chin in Maya’s direction. “Maya did.”

  “Fuck you,” comes Maya’s barked snarl, born out of instinct rather than intent. She has no place to argue here. She knows better. The guillotine might be a tool, but it still does the work.

  “Following orders, yeah, yeah. I know.”

  Maya narrows her gaze. She remembers, even if the rest of them don’t, when they were a pack, and Rita served as their compass, a sun
for murderers and no one else, lighting the road deeper into the country of sin. Each of them had run the same gauntlet. Sororicide as a rite of passage. “Like you haven’t done the same to me.”

  Ayane had fucking pulped her. So many of her armaments coming in hot at the exact same second, and they’d turned Maya into cheesecloth first before the bombardment continued and the straggling tatters of protein gave up their bloody ghost, washed into a soup of peptides and bone bits, and it’d taken a week to bleach the gore from the wall. No, the Ballistic Queen of the fucking universe doesn’t do anything small.

  “Y’all ever wonder about that?” says Constance, rapping a nail on the rim of her mug. “How she’d insisted we take turns killing each other. That fucking trauma bonding bullshit and all that. Wild, I tell you.”

  “They didn’t do that in the force?” Ayane rakes a look down Constance’s wiry frame, chin set in the heel of her palm. Out of spite, likely, she has commandeered Rita’s favorite chair: a low-backed, scooped-bodied disaster upholstered in peach shag.

  “Hell no,” says Constance. “They don’t make you pretend you’re a woman either.”

  A shocked, slightly guilty, the fuck-do-we-do-now silence weaves between the four, all attention on Constance. Maya is the first to speak, her expression verging on panic. Unfortunately, what springs from her mouth is: “Uhhhh.”

  “Nonbinary,” says Constance, expropriating the conversation before it can nosedive into awkwardness. “They. Them.”

  “Shit,” says Verdigris. “This whole time?”

  A brisk, one-shouldered shrug. “Maybe? Who knows? Whatever the case, it didn’t sink in until about five years ago. Rita spent a lot of time telling us we were badass bitches, insisting on the feminine, and all that shit. I didn’t really have time to think about it. It took thirty-five years for it to kinda click.”

  “Huh,” says Maya.

  “Well. Cool?” says Ayane.

  “Since we’re on the topic: me too.” Verdigris hops from her perch, illuminated again by her menagerie of chromatophores and other cellular modifications, her hair—a mix of keratin and mesoglea, elegantly surreptitious when it’s not lit up like a carnival—contracting onto itself, rounding into a tight pompadour. She dusts each shoulder with elaborate care, the shadows along the planes of her cheeks, their jaw, his brow eddying into new shapes.

  When the transformation is complete, he hip-cocks lithely at the group, head canted at a brash angle, a smirk worn like a trophy hard-won.

  “Goddamn! I did not know modern technology had gotten that good,” Constance whoops, their delight manifested as a slap on Verdigris’ back, the latter returning the favor with a playful one-two punch aimed at the arm not burdened with hot chocolate.

  “You think it looks good?” Verdigris runs a nervous hand through his hair and it is all Maya can do to not kiss the tension from each finger.

  “You look great,” says Maya, immediate. “I might even like you better this way.”

  Verdigris slicks a quiet look at Maya, saying nothing, a smile held out in place of an answer, and it is an expression borrowed from a teenager at prom, corsage in hand, heart beating insecurities onto the door of their chest, thoroughly overwhelmed but fucking delighted to be here. No artifice, nothing but the wide-eyed look of a love who’d still hold your hand tight over the valley between deathbeds. “You ought to do something about it then.”

  Before Maya can reply, Ayane wolf-whistles. “There are a thousand reasons I wish we could have Johanna back. But right now, I wish she was here to see how perfect you look. Like Constance said, goddamn. You know Johanna would have been impressed.”

  “Johanna loved everything, though. She even loved those stupid drones that the Minds sent out. You just needed to put it in front of her and she’d love it like her own children,” says Verdigris.

  “Remember when we ran into the Merchant Mind the first time?” says Constance.

  “Yeah,” says Ayane, gaze abstracted, fixed on nothing in the physical, pinned, instead to that point in the timeline when Johanna was alive. Breathing, smiling, beautiful. “She had so many questions. She was curious. Johanna wouldn’t stop talking about meeting the Merchant Mind for days.”

  “I used to think she’d die happy if she went down in an interesting . . .” Verdigris strangles on the rest of the sentence, the nostalgia wicking out of his expression, exit stage anywhere but here. Her face tightens.

  “Fuck,” he says.

  Ayane unfurls from her chair, crosses the room in three long strides, touches her mouth to the roof of Verdigris’ skull. Maya forgets sometimes those two had loved each other too, even if Ayane and Verdigris had loved Johanna best. “It’s okay.”

  Verdigris, a head shorter, says nothing, only slots his head in the gap between Ayane’s chin and collarbone, the two of them a matching set: exquisite. Like coming home. Like all the ways Maya had ever wished Rita would soften for her.

  Clack. Clack. Clack.

  In the presence of their master, all dogs go quiet.

  “You should have told me,” are the first words to shear from Rita’s lean mouth. As always, she is immaculate: hair in a lacquered bun, scrubs and gloves sterilized of even shadow. A monochrome ghost, particularly anomalous beside the ramshackle hodgepodge vividity of the steerage, with its clutter of mismatched furniture and stolen tchotchkes. Ayane and Verdigris separate, the former gliding forward to put herself between Rita and the other; an arm reached back, palm on Verdigris’ hip, protective.

  “That we were going to hang out?” Constance asks the question around the rim of their mug, brows carefully furrowed.

  “That the two of you identified as you do.”

  “You never seemed interested,” says Constance, the calm of their voice gloving angrier sentiments, although the subtext in their smile might as well be an alarm, signaling the moment for when the wise need to run.

  “I wasn’t,” and it isn’t the words specifically that knock them down like dominos, but the timbre with which they are delivered, the compassion Rita so often withheld. The confession, offered with so much incongruous shame, spoken so quietly and with so much agony, it extracts not empathy, not exactly, but something of a similar phylum. “I was very focused on certain things at the time. Committed to my own fantasies. There were things I wanted for so long and so, I imposed a lot of those wants on you.”

  Maya knows, and Verdigris knows, and Ayane, and Constance, and all those people buried and dead because of Rita’s machinations, they know that flytrap lilt in her voice. But hope—for closure, for answers, for anything that might anesthetize the epiphanous despair that is knowing you’ll have to keep going when the only star in your sky is gone—is an implacable force. It is a credit to the raw animosity Rita has accrued that none of them roll over, bellies bared, before the first sentence ends. They exchange looks instead: Ayane and Verdigris volleying secretive glances between themselves, the two moving to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, Constance cycling their attention between the pair, Maya, and Rita.

  And speaking of Maya, she does as any good guard hound. Upon realizing this is only an uneasy armistice they’ve arrived upon, Maya gets onto her feet, gets to her connate duty, which is to stand in unerring defense of the woman she knows to be the devil. Love’s like that, though. And this is love or whatever mutant cultivar allowed to the extraneous, the ones meant to die. She thinks. She is sure.

  “That’s not an apology if it was what you were trying to go for,” says Verdigris, the playfulness bled out of his voice, burned from her expression. His hair unfurls, relaxing again into a nimbus which spreads along her shoulders.

  “I’m saying I was at fault.”

  “Still not an apology,” Verdigris repeats, eyes finding Maya’s, accusation loaded in their slight narrowing. She mouths why and Maya puts on her best don’t-know-what-the-fuck-you’re-talking-about face, taking on the glassy expression of someone who’s long since consigned morality to crows, so long ago, on balance, that Maya
doesn’t remember the last time she really cared about doing the right thing.

  Except you can’t stop kicking yourself over Johanna, pipes up that stubborn little voice again. Except you can’t get over Elise, can’t stop thinking about how you failed them, you fucking failed them.

  Indoctrination nonetheless is no vaccine for either Maya’s subconscious or the pang which constricts around her ribs as disappointment washes over Verdigris’ face, leaving it blank and smooth as any good merc’s mugshot. Can’t break your heart if there’s nothing to shatter.

  “Hey, back off,” says Maya. She strokes a thumb over the barrel of a gun, arms herself with a fuck-everything grin, and tries not to linger on how she knows her loyalty to Rita won’t buy anything but an unmarked grave.

  “It doesn’t fucking matter. We don’t give a shit about how you feel about anything. We’re just here for Elise,” snarls Ayane.

  “Big talk for someone who was on her knees crying before.” Maya licks chapped lips. “Hypocrite.”

  Through it all, Rita is quiet, has been since drinking in Verdigris’ critique. She drums two fingers on the ridge of a collarbone before sighing, unrepentant: “You’re right. It doesn’t matter. Your private motivations are not my concern. In the end, it is about us coming together to fulfill a mutual ambition.”

  Verdigris, pure cover-fold gloss, again the face that launched a thousand publicity engines, gears up to put her foot down. At least, that’s what Maya thinks as Ayane tenses and Rita adjusts her stance, the air mineral with expectation. Maya rocks onto the balls of her feet, ready to move, ready to intervene, ready to die for faith in duty. Let’s rock, howls instinct and the treble of a soul unwilling to think too hard on what it’s giving up. Both hands now, locked and ready at the trigger.