by A. W. Cross
In the beginning, it had hurt like hell to have the screws attached to my body, piercing my skin, especially where the shoulder-plate connected to my chest, but the pain had lessened over time, and nowadays I barely felt anything, except when trying to put on clothes in the morning. In fact, the robotic arm was a lot stronger than my left, skin-and-bone arm was, allowing me to lift items I would otherwise barely be able to, so I had learned to live with the mechanical arm, and with the curious looks from the villagers whenever I walked past them.
As I struggled to pull my nightgown over my head, I already spotted a glimpse of the one thing I hadn’t learned to live with.
The deformity did not end at my shoulder. Instead, a small metal plate connected the shoulder plate with the larger plate covering the cavity over my heart. From underneath metal covering my heart, black veins popped up, crisscrossing to the left and right.
Leaning closer to the mirror, I closely inspected the intersecting pattern, tracing each of the veins with my finger, estimating if the line was longer today than it had been yesterday.
I held my breath until I’d traced them all.
They hadn’t changed. Not yet.
One day, they would. The disease that had infested my veins would spread and reach my heart, and the Blight that had killed so many of my town’s people, would destroy me as well.
But not today, I realized as I breathed in relief. Not today.
I changed from my nightdress into a white, long-sleeved shift. Sitting down on my bed, I pulled on a pair of dark green stockings, and tied them beneath my knees with a garter. Ironically, the stockings were decorated near my ankles with golden patterns that matched the colors of the cogs in my arm. Tying up the garters around my legs was a disaster with the fingers on my right hand barely cooperating. Eventually, I could move on to my shoes, which were much easier to put on as they had no laces.
Getting back up, I struggled with the most difficult clothing items to put on: the stays, a leather bodice that fit tightly to a woman’s waist and was meant to support the bust. While every respectable woman wore this item, I wish I could burn it and never have to struggle with it again; not because the stays made it near impossible to breathe, which it did, but most importantly because tying up the laces was pure hell for someone with a mechanical arm.
After muttering curses under my breath for more than ten minutes, I finally managed to tie up the laces. I stared at the light green petticoat I still had to put on, which again had to be tied up with cords.
It would be so easy to just use my magic to tie those threads, much easier than relying on the fingers in my right arm, which were already itching from exhaustion.
My gaze drifted from the petticoat to my desk, where my mother’s grimoire, one of many, lay open the last page I had read last night before bed. Maybe the grimoire had a spell for something like this… And if not, it was probably easy enough that I could conjure up a spell of my own.
But Father insisted I had to practice the robotic hand, or I’d never be able to have it work properly.
I had to try four times before I could finally tie up the threads of my petticoat. By then, the fingers in my right hand itched from exhaustion and I was panting from the effort.
After taking a few moments to recover, I combed my brown hair into a ponytail and stared at my own face in the mirror for a few seconds. A face that looked exactly like my mother’s, according to my father. A mother whose face I could barely remember.
I recalled her voice, the timbre of it as she read me fairytales before putting me to bed. Her eyes, I could picture vividly; their color, the way they softened when she looked at me, the wrinkles that appeared in the corner of her eyes when she laughed. I also remembered her smile, and how it always had that edge of sadness. But what I couldn’t do, was add those features together, form the full picture. It always seemed to be lacking something.
Stop dwelling on the past, Belle. I touched the metal plate covering my heart. Nothing can bring her back, not even all the magic in the world.
I squared my shoulders and, pushing the memories of my mother to the back of my mind, headed downstairs to start my daily chores.
After feeding the three pigs we had left, milking the cow, grabbing the eggs from our kitchen coop for breakfast, and filling up a bucket with fresh water from our well, I headed back inside to make some breakfast.
Our house was small for the four of us living in it. While I was making breakfast, I already heard my sisters rummaging upstairs. Father was probably already tinkering around in his workshop; he was the only early bird in our family, besides me.
As I was cooking the eggs, I nearly bumped into Dollie.
“Woops, sorry,” I said while I put the pan of eggs down on the table, leaning over her.
Dollie beeped in response as she maneuvered past me. The metal plate covering her insides sprang open, and with one of her hook-shaped hands, she retrieved a towel from inside her belly, and started wiping the kitchen cabinets furiously.
Dollie was one of my father’s inventions, a cleaning automaton that dusted shelves, mopped the floors and occasionally bumped into objects. At only about a meter high, she was easy to overlook and bump into while she charged at her intended destination. Dollie had tiny, mechanical arms rising from her bulky, cylinder-shaped body and a small, round head. She rolled over the floor on two wheels, one on each side of her.
I turned to get the plates out for breakfast, nearly stumbling into Dollie again.
She beeped angrily this time.
“I know, I know,” I muttered under my breath. “I should pay more attention.”
Dollie made a sound that I interpreted as a huff, then rushed past me and started wiping the seat of our recliner chair. The major flaw of my father’s invention was that she acted completely random.
Cleaning a house required some degree of logic. If you dusted off cabinet one, logic predicted you should move on the closest cabinet next in line, before starting on something entirely new. Dollie, instead, was all over the place, rushing from one side of the room to the other, cleaning up whatever struck her fancy, or whatever she focused on in that one moment. She sometimes completely abandoned her current task halfway through after she’d spotted another task.
I sighed as I looked at the little automaton, wondering how we could fix these issues. I imagined Dollie’s wiring, which was locked away behind a metal plate in her back. Maybe if I moved that yellow wire, and connected it to the blue one, then…
“Good morning.” Clarice’s voice ripped me out of my thoughts. She was already standing halfway down the stairs, and I hadn’t even heard her coming down. She yawned loudly, moving a hand in front of her mouth. “Sorry, I’m still tired. I had this weird nightmare.”
Clarice was still wearing her white sleeping gown. She’d never been one for getting up early to seize the day, my sister. Two years older than me, she was my best friend in the entire world.
Despite my name being ‘Belle’, she was the beautiful one of the two of us – unblemished, not cursed to live the rest of her life Tainted, with just one arm out of two. But her beauty went beyond that: while my face was plain, she looked radiant, and her skin had an almost magical glow to it. When her blonde hair was touched by sunlight, it seemed like liquid gold.
After nearly stumbling over the last two steps, Clarice dragged herself to the table and dropped down on a chair. She promptly grabbed an apple I’d collected from the apple tree in our garden yesterday and took a bite from it. “Are you tired?” she asked in between bites.
I shrugged, deliberately turning away from her. I didn’t like to lie to my sister, I didn’t even want to keep something from her, but my nightly wanderings closer and closer to the Wall was not something I felt particularly inclined to share with her. “No, I’m fine.”
She huffed. “Oh, so I guess that means I only imagined Father yelling at you to wake up while you were standing outside my window in the middle of the night?” Her voice was
laced with sarcasm. She me a questioning look, one eyebrow raised. “Why haven’t you told me that you’re sleepwalking, and heading straight toward the one thing you should stay as far away from as humanly possible?” She crossed her arms in front of her chest, still holding the apple in her left hand.
“It’s not… It’s not like that.” I wondered if she was thinking about throwing that apple at me; she certainly seemed angry enough to do so.
“So, you’re not sleepwalking? Or you’re not heading toward the Wall? Which one of those factors isn’t exactly how I described them?”
Ignoring her question, I planted the pan with eggs on the table. “Why are you angry?”
“Because you’re hiding things from me, as if I’m an idiot who hadn’t figured out right away that Father put those locks there for a reason.” She gestured to the front door which, ever since my nightly episodes started, had been firmly locked at night with one of father’s state-of-the-art inventions: an automatic lock that changed codes each night and that only Father could open. In theory. Sleepwalking-Belle had managed to crack the automatically generated codes in three days’ time and could now open the door without any issues.
“Does it have something to do with your…” She paused, searching for the right words. “You know, your…”
“What word are you looking for—ilness? You mean the Blight running through me?” I couldn’t help but sound angry when I said it, even my anger wasn’t directed at Clarice, not at all. I was angry at… At Mother, for letting the Blight kill her when it shouldn’t have. I was angry at the world for being the way it was. This tiny, cramped, slice of the world, hidden behind the confines of the Wall. There was a world beyond, I knew that from the many books I’d read describing the world, and the countless atlases I’d devoured that showed me, black on white and sometimes even in myriad colors, that the world didn’t end beyond our Wall. But the world beyond, starting from the forest to the sea which was, according to the atlases, only a few days’ walking from here, all of it was riddled with the Tainted, those unfortunate souls who had fallen victim to the Blight.
I was Tainted, the black veins decorating my chest proved that, but not in a way the people beyond the Wall were: they acted like rabid animals, tearing up everyone in their path; they could no longer talk or think beyond their basic instincts, and any human they saw, they wanted to kill.
Our village was protected by the Wall, imbued with magic that could keep the Tainted at bay, and by half a dozen Hunters trained to kill the Tainted. But even though they trained day in and out, every so often one of the Hunters got injured or maimed by the Tainted, anyway.
So, given the dangers of the outside world, I would forever be a prisoner of this small village with its Wall to protect us from the disease that had wiped out the rest of the world.
And that was what I was angry about. That it wasn’t fair.
When I was a child, Mother used to read me fairytales. It was one of the few memories I had of her; sitting on the armchair downstairs or up in my room, Clarice and I sitting on her lap while she told us of princesses and fairies and true love and how dreams always come true.
But it was all a lie. Real life wasn’t fairytales and love and a Prince Charming coming to rescue the damsel in distress. It was girls missing limbs because a wicked illness had devoured them, it was mothers dying and children being abandoned, and it was the threat of the Tainted looming over us every day.
“Yes.” Clarice’s voice was small. She knew and understood, more than anyone, how I loathed the disease coursing through me. “Is it because of the Blight?”
I sighed, grabbed a chair and sat down opposite of her. The eggs smelled delicious, but the thought of food already made me nauseous. “Something is calling for me. Or maybe someone, I don’t know. I have no idea who or why, but last night the voice said I should join him. Or her, I can’t really tell. The voice also said that we’re alike.”
All the color seemed to drain from Clarice’s skin. “Wh… what?” She stammered.
“That’s why I sleepwalked toward the Wall,” I explained. “I don’t want to, of course; it only happens when I’m asleep. And like you guessed, that’s why Father added the locks.”
“Go back to the voice.” Clarice narrowed her eyes. “What exactly did it say—you’re alike? Did it clarify in what way?”
I frowned at her, wondering what prompted her to ask that, since it seemed of little relevance to me. “I don’t—”
A door squeaked open upstairs, and Clarice and I shot each other a look of understanding. “Later,” I said. “Promise.”
My sister nodded. “Those eggs look great,” she said in a tone that sounded completely different than she’d sounded seconds before. She scooped half of the eggs onto her plate. “Good morning, Amélie,” she added when our younger sister’s telltale step revealed her presence up the stairs.
Amélie came downstairs, her tread light and fairylike, just like everything about her was. Four years younger than me and six years younger than Clarice, she was our baby sister and we doted on her every chance we got. She had the same golden-colored hair as Clarice, but she had the same facial features as I had; looking at the three of us together, no one would doubt we were sisters, even for a second.
“Want some eggs?” Clarice asked while she demonstratively held up her own plate.
“Yes, please.” Amélie took a seat at the table and frowned at us. “What’s up? You two look like you just got caught doing something you’re not supposed to do.”
“It’s because we’re worried about the Hunters going out today.” Clarice divided the eggs she’d scooped on her plate in half, and dumped half of them on Amélie’s plate. “We were just talking about it.”
“Weren’t they out hunting two weeks ago? That’s fast...” Amélie grabbed the milk and poured herself a cup.
“Yes, but Charles told me they’re heading out again.” Clarice shrugged, but the worried look in her eyes told me she wasn’t making this up just so Amélie would be distracted and not press on about the real conversation we’d been having. The Hunters were really going outside the Wall today.
Going beyond the Wall was a dangerous thing to do. And if we’d had a proper harvest, none of us would probably ever risk it. But ever since the Blight infected our kingdom, it had also infected our crops and the soil, and our harvest had been barely enough to keep us alive.
If we wanted to survive, some of us had to hunt, and that honor—if it could be called that—befell to our town’s young men, who trained day in day out to avoid being killed by a Blight the moment they stepped outside the Wall.
Sometimes, all that training paid off and they made it back in one piece. Sometimes, they didn’t.
I thought about the last time the Hunters had brought in one of their own when he’d gotten hurt by the Tainted. George… He’d sustained an injury slightly similar to mine. One of the Tainted had bitten his hand, ripping off the skin, and infesting him with the Blight. In the end, we had no choice but to chop off the limb, before the disease could infect the rest of his arm.
My Mother had been the town healer before she passed away. After her, Clarice and I had taken over, learning everything we could about herbs and healing spells from our mother’s grimoires and diaries.
With only a handful of Sorcerers left in town, and the others having zero affinity for healing spells, we didn’t have much of a choice.
“Did Charles say why they’re going hunting again so soon?” I tried to avoid sounding worried; I didn’t want Clarice to pick up on that, and spend the entire day concerned about him.
Amélie snorted. “It’s not like Charles and Clarice actually talk when they go for a walk, or when they meet in the garden. They just kiss. A lot. It’s gross.”
“Hey!” Clarice poked her in the arm. “First, that’s not true. And secondly, he’s my fiancé, so of course we kiss sometimes. It’s basically mandatory.”
Amélie rolled her eyes. “Mandatory or not,
I would never kiss someone like Charles.”
“Amélie, that’s enough,” I intervened, giving her an angry stare. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Charles either, but if my sister approved of him, then so did I. Even if he was a pompous brat who thought we should all kiss the dirt he was standing on.
“It’s fine,” Clarice waived my concerns away. She pushed the remainder of her eggs to the side. “Even I have to admit he’s not the prince charming I’ve always had in mind, but it’s not like there are guys for the picking in town. And besides, underneath all that stuck-up behavior, he’s actually quite nice.”
“Your fiancé is ‘quite nice’.” Amélie scrunched up her nose. “If you ever hear me saying that about my fiancé—not that I ever plan on having one, mind you, I rather spend my entire life as an old spinster than obey what some man wants me to do simply because he received the honor of being married to me—I want you to slap me as hard as you can, knock some sense into me.”
I got up to wash my plate, taking Clarice’s plate over to the sink as well. “First of all,” I said to Amélie, “I have no intention of slapping you now, or ever in the future. Secondly, that’s not what marriage is about at all. Maybe for some people, but not always.”
“Mother and father were happily married,” Clarice said. “They loved each other. Father worshipped the ground Mother walked on.” A hint of sadness crept into her voice and I quickly turned away from her, focusing on the sink instead.
I’d had enough emotions for one morning, thank you.
“Fine, but it’s not like I will find anyone here in town.” Amélie shoved her seat back, got up and handed me her plate.
I dropped it in the water along with the other plates. Even though Father was all about us not using our magic for trivial things, I had zero interest in doing the dishes today. Closing my eyes, I focused on the hollow feeling inside my stomach, on the void inside me that could never be filled. I listened to my own heartbeat, to my sister’s hearts, to the sound of a bird chirping outside, and of the church bells chiming in the distance. I waited for a few seconds, until all the noises had come into sync.