To Karla, because volcanoes.
And to Erin, because finally, right?
“He who fights monsters should see to it
that he himself does not become a monster.
For if you gaze for long into the abyss, the
abyss gazes also into you.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
PROLOGUE
At first there is only the feeling of fire.
Burning. Twisting. Scorching the spaces just beneath my skin, in the emptiness between my fingers. My toes. My lips. It blazes its way up into my brain, destroys every conscious thought. So I’m not sure how long I lie there, body stiff against the cold surface beneath me, before I open my eyes for the first time, and I see.
Sight. It is a glorious thing.
But too much of a glorious thing, too fast.
Far too fast. I don’t dare move at first, while my new eyes adjust and try to make sense of the surface high above me. Eventually I grow braver though, and I look down, see pale hands (five fingers each, no burning around them now) and wrists wrapped with wires that twist out and into a tall . . . something beside me. Something rectangular (a rectangle is a basic geometric shape). It flashes and it beeps, and for some reason I don’t like looking at it.
I turn to the other side and see gray silhouettes surrounding me. Other eyes peering at me, squinting in the dimness. I stare back, and the smoldering haze over my mind clears further. More thoughts and words and definitions begin to flash in my head. They seem pointless at first—annoying, really—but soon they begin to take form, wrapping around the gray shapes and giving them deeper meaning.
Suddenly the darkness in this room doesn’t seem so absolute.
My eyes continue to watch those silhouettes. My thoughts continue to rush rush rush until they reach kingdom: Animalia. Class: Mammalia. Genus: Homo. Species: sapiens. Bipedal. Social. Well-developed neocortex and frontal lobe.
Finally, a conclusion: humans.
These are humans.
I sit up. The group before me takes a collective step back, save for two in the very center—a tall human whose body type suggests female, and another female who appears much younger. The second female’s face doesn’t have the fine lines, the subtle creases that my brain is able to rapidly identify as age markers. I study this one for a moment, taking the pieces of her appearance apart and putting them back together in a way I can understand. Eyes that equal a number first: 006600—the color evoked by an energy wavelength of approximately 520 nanometers. Connotations: nature, grass, hope, youth, envy. Green. Hair that equals 330000, dark brown superimposed over red.
She takes a step toward me. The rest of the humans stay where they are, their gazes downcast, feet shifting, mouths moving with hushed words. And their actions mean something—I know—but what that something is, I don’t understand right away. It’s more difficult than the appearances, than the simplicity of colors I can see and make sense of so easily. It’s a feeling. An emotion. Intangible, untouchable, even as the air slowly chokes with it.
Fear.
The realization slides in and snakes its way around my thoughts, squeezing tight.
It’s fear.
Yes. I’m fairly certain they are afraid of me.
All of them except for the girl with the red-brown hair and the bright green eyes.
She takes a few more determined steps toward me. I sit up fully, my gaze zeroed in on her. The rest of the room fades into the background, into a blur of shadows and sounds without significance or meaning. There is only me, and her, and then her voice loud against the wall of whispers behind her—
“Do you remember me?” she asks, coming to a stop a short distance away.
Memories. Preservations of knowledge. Retained impressions of events. Of places and people. People like her? Am I supposed to have impressions of this female? I close my eyes, trying to focus on a thought—brightness and warmth and a high-pitched sound I don’t understand—that is suddenly flitting around me, up and over my head and just out of reach. But I reopen them almost immediately. I don’t like the deeper darkness that shutting them brings. I stare harder at the girl in front of me instead. Her eyes are shining, because there is a thin sheen of moisture over their green, and it’s catching the little bit of light in the room and throwing it back out. And my mind is racing too fast now to make complete sense of it, but somehow I know my silence is causing that moisture.
Tears.
The knowledge is a weight in my stomach, and I hate it, and I want to sink back into the ignorance of sleep.
But the fear of closing my eyes again is still there. So instead of sleeping, I try harder to grab at that flitting thought, at that strange brightness and warmth that staring at this girl brings. At that noise I keep hearing whenever I look at her. The pitch has changed now; not so high, but it’s the same melody as before.
But the more tightly I try to hold these things, the further away they all seem to slip.
“You don’t, do you? . . .” Her tone is odd. Like she meant to ask a question, only it came out sounding more like an answer. And her expression is equally confusing; her eyes are even more wet now—a profusion of liquid that my thoughts have managed to identify as generally an expression of strong, often painful emotion such as sadness—but the corners of her lips are upturned. A smile. A determined and shivering smile that doesn’t fit with the rest of her face. Our gazes meet again. She inhales sharply. That smile falls open, as if to let more words out, but the older female speaks first.
“I told you not to expect much, Catelyn.” There is no trembling in this other female’s expression, or in her words; the latter seem weighted only by their definitions, and part of me immediately likes her for this. There is nothing extra to understand when she speaks.
The younger one’s—Catelyn’s—attention snaps away from me, though, as if those definitions are not enough for her. “You’ve hardly given her a chance,” she says.
The whispers in the distant crowd grow louder, but the older female doesn’t seem to notice them any more than she notices the girl’s staring. She just keeps watching me in her easy, unconcerned way. “I allowed you to be here when she woke up, didn’t I? Even though it’s clearly confusing her, as I told you it would.” The tone is still mostly flat. Simple. But something about the way she said “her” feels wrong. The word and its wrongness linger in the silence, growing claws that dig into my mind and make me sit up straighter, which for some reason causes one of the woman’s eyebrows to arch. It’s almost as if she is surprised that I have noticed the word at all.
Surprised that I have figured out that I am the “her” she is speaking about as if I am not here, even though she is looking right at me.
I decide I dislike her as quickly as I thought I liked her. And I wonder if it could ever be as simple as that first thought I had of her, if any of these humans truly mean only the words they say, and if those words could be worth anything at all on their own.
“We could get my—our—parents.” More words. Catelyn’s this time, coming more quickly and quietly than before as she looks back at me. “Seeing them might help you remember more.”
“Or it might make her even more confused and overstimulated than you have already made her.”
My hands begin to tremble. I splay my fingers out—try to brace them into stillness—but they keep shaking against the metal below me. The air fills with a hollow echo, a tat tat tatatattat, and my thoughts are rushing again, faster and faster, and I can’t make them stop.
I am not just a “her.”
I am not as confused as you think I am.
I am awake and—
“I have a name.” If not for the way they both jumped slightly at the words, I might not have realized
they were my own this time. But I am, it seems, a fast learner.
I am a fast learner and I have a voice and I can make them listen to me—
“I have a name,” I repeat, trying out that voice again. A bit more deliberately this time, and this time the words are strong and satisfyingly clear. “I have a name. And it is not ‘her.’ ” Catelyn’s eyes mist over again, which, for all my quickness, is still a difficult reaction to understand. Her attention darts from me to the woman and back again. I sift through the tumbling currents in my mind and come back with a word: “nervous.” She looks nervous.
“Yes,” says the woman to me. “You do have a name. But do you remember it?”
A hush has fallen back over the rest of the crowd. They’re just watching me now. Waiting. Everyone is waiting on me. The shaking in my hands gets worse. It sinks into me, makes my insides tremble and my head feel like it is spinning.
Because I don’t remember.
I understand names. I know there is one that belonged to me, though I don’t know why or when or how I got it. I dig and I reach through my thoughts, but I find nothing to grab except ash and dust where my name should be.
The woman tilts her head a bit to the side. My silence doesn’t seem to surprise her as much as interest her. I seem fiercely, terribly interesting to her, and that causes a new emotion to hit me: anger. So easy to feel, and suddenly it is the only thing I want to feel. The only thing worth feeling. The only thing worth thinking.
Because what is the point of anything else if I can’t remember my name, if I couldn’t remember the name of the girl with the green eyes, or the reason I feel brightness and warmth when I look into them?
My head is full and rushing with facts, but they are facts that I want nothing to do with. Facts that seem to be taking up space and pushing out the things that matter.
And I am already so, so tired of them.
My fists clench. The shaking in my hands stops, and my insides feel solid again. Every inch of me feels solid. Strong. Like I could leap across this room and over the entire crowd, and I could run fast enough that I could escape their eyes and their whispers and everything about them—everything about all of this—that doesn’t make sense.
But I don’t do that. I leap only far enough to clear the metal bed beneath me, to jerk my wrist free of the wires that trap it, and I land directly in front of the older female. She doesn’t move. The anger in me burns stronger still, because I wanted her to move. I wanted her to fall back and away, to throw up her hands, to jump aside, to do anything except keep studying me the way she is.
I can’t stand to meet her eyes, so my gaze drops instead to the embroidered letters on the jacket she is wearing.
D-R-J-A-C-Q-U-E-L-I-N-E-C-R-O-S-S
Letters that make words—a name—that I can’t force my mind to put together, either because I don’t want her to have a name when I don’t, or because this anger is doing exactly what I am so glad to let it do: It is scorching away so many useless things. Who cares what this woman’s name is? Who cares what she is saying now, in her unconcerned voice, and with that thin-lipped smile?
Behind me, the rectangular machine that my wrist wires dangle from has started beeping more frantically. It seems to be begging a reaction from me. Each silence-splitting beep tries more urgently to cut through the warm anger that is blanketing me, protecting me.
I want it to stop.
It’s not a thought so much as a primitive need, and that need makes my muscles flex and my arm swing. My fist connects with the machine, sinks in deep, and crunches the metal face and cracks and shatters several of its blinking screens, and the whole thing topples backward, stray wires whipping through the air behind it. It crashes loudly to the floor. A heavy silence sinks over the room. No more beeping, no more nervous shuffling from the crowd—no more nothing, until the woman clears her throat from behind me. I twist back around. My fist is still clenched, and an image flashes briefly in my mind: her face crumpling, shattering the way the metal and its screens did. It was so easy to destroy that machine.
It is the easiest thing in the world, maybe. To destroy.
And destruction made the noise stop, at least for a little while.
Would destruction make this woman stop smiling like that? Is she the same as that machine?
I take a step back toward her.
And I believed my thoughts belonged to me and me alone; that this was the way things worked, the reason I had a voice that I could use only when I chose to share those thoughts. But apparently things don’t work this way at all, because though I have not said a word, this woman already seems to know exactly what I am seeing in my mind.
“I wouldn’t try it,” she says.
Footsteps punctuate her threat. From the crowd around us, several people walk forward. They all move with the same tense, practiced stride. They all carry shining black and silver objects in their hands.
Weapons.
Guns.
Destruction. They’re tools of destruction.
But the silent and broken machine behind me is proof that so am I, and so they don’t scare me.
I take another step.
Sounds of movement come then—the clicking and whining of those guns, the shuffling of feet, the tapping and scraping of uncertain fingers against the weapon metal. And then a shuffling much closer, and with it I feel a sudden pressure on my arm. I glance down and see a hand wrapped around it, just above my wrist. The hand is gripping so tightly that every vein of it is visible, every knuckle white and distinct.
“Don’t. Please.” The green-eyed girl again. Catelyn. That’s her name. It’s grown flimsy somehow, a flickering light that keeps trying to disappear back into the shadowy parts of my mind.
“Please,” she repeats. “Please listen to me, Violet.”
Everything stops with her last word. My breathing. That flickering in my mind. The awareness of everything, of anything happening around me. I see her fingers still resting on my skin, but I don’t feel them. And I just keep hearing that same word over and over:
Violet. Violet. Violet.
Again and again until even it feels strangely unreal. Incorrect. But it still refuses to flicker away. Violet. Violet. VIOLET.
A bluish-purple color seen at the end of the spectrum opposite red.
A herbaceous plant of temperate regions.
A given name.
My name?
I jerk my wrist from Catelyn’s touch. The room swirls violently as awareness crashes back into me. My awareness. Violet’s awareness. And with it comes a feeling of nothing and of everything all at once, of an ending and a beginning and a desperation to go back, back to my nameless self. I clawed so frantically for this name only minutes ago, but now that I’m holding it, the weight seems unbearable. Confusing. Loaded down with things that belonged to this Violet that Catelyn knew—things that she wants to give to me but that I can’t possibly take.
Can I?
How could anyone take something like that?
“So you have a name again,” says the woman. “An old name, but this is a new life.” Her voice lowers as she adds, “One I’ve worked very hard to give you. And don’t you ever forget that.”
My balance sways. I lean back against the cold metal bed and breathe in deep, so slow and so deep that I swear I can feel my very lungs inflating with it. Bit by bit. Breathing. A sign of life. A new life.
A life like hers? Like Catelyn’s? Like the lives of all the ones standing and staring at me?
Human. These are humans.
And they have hands like me. Feet like me. Legs and eyes and lungs and names just. Like. Me.
So why do I feel so alone here?
CHAPTER ONE
Six months later
I dive and roll across the cracked concrete floor, missing the fist swinging at me by mere centimeters.
But I take too long springing back to a formidable position. The second fist flies even faster than the first, and it cuts roughly into the curve
between my neck and jaw. I feel warmth oozing, trailing down my skin.
Blood.
Why am I bleeding?
A flash of silver catches my eye. The boy who hit me doesn’t even try to keep me from looking more closely at it; his hand hangs lazily at his side, and around each of his knuckles, there is a band of metal. The edges of each band look like they’ve been filed to a rough surface. A blood-drawing surface. My eyes dart up.
He smiles at me.
All of this takes only seconds, but the distraction lasts long enough to prevent me from dodging the knee that slams into the small of my back a moment later. I fall forward, breath seizing in my throat. The palms of my hands absorb most of my weight. It stings and it stuns, but I grit my teeth and manage to find enough strength to launch myself back into the air; I flip backward and land lightly on the balls of my feet, facing my attackers.
Six of them now.
They started with two—and that was supposed to be the limit. It’s what we agreed on. But judging by the four more who have joined the fun since that agreement, and by the blood drying sticky against my neck, they seem to be rewriting the rules as we go.
So why shouldn’t I?
The one closest to me is a girl I’ve fought several times before—Emily, I think her name is. She wears a smile identical to that of Metal-Knuckles. And I know she’s quick. Much stronger than her tiny frame suggests too. Her right leg is weak, though, still recovering from a year-ago accident that shattered her kneecap; she was hobbling around on crutches the first time I met her. She seems determined to act as though that accident never happened, but my eyesight is much too sharp, my brain much too predatory, to miss the weak way her muscles quiver when she tries to brace that leg. She sees me watching those muscles. That determination in her eyes becomes almost feral.
She darts at me.
I wait until the timing is perfect, bank hard to the left and drag one leg behind me so it catches her right foot and knocks her off balance. As she tumbles, I catch her roughly by the arm and sling her forward—straight into the chest of Metal-Knuckles. The force is hard enough to knock him to the ground.
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