by Giselle Ava
Floor twenty-nine.
Arthur.
I open my eyes and I’m staring at the doors of the lift as we stop on the thirtieth floor on the highest tower in London. They begin to tremble and part, and a beam of light comes through, slashing me open. The whine in my head opens its red mouth.
And then it says nothing.
The doors open to reveal a circular room with glass walls. London is on fire, devastating images flooded against every wall. And there’s a man inside this room by a table on wheels, a table with a plate of food on top of it, and a glass of wine. The man smokes a cigar.
I step out of the elevator.
Fortescue Falls
Charles Fortescue, the man behind all my pain, the man who ruined my life, who took everything from me, stands by a glass window looking over London.
With my walking stick in my left hand, I walk from the elevator to the glass chamber. You can hear pops of gunfire, the growl of thunder. Lightning flashes in the tumultuous clouds, lighting them up and flooding the chamber with white light.
“Nobody can doubt your perseverance,” Charles says.
I’m in the centre of the chamber now, roughly thirty feet away from him. I can see his face reflected in the glass as he takes a drag from his cigar and lets smoke sail out before him. Firelight bathes him. It’s a horrible sight. A red dawn. War in London. I glance at the remains of the food on his plate. Chicken bones, peas and mashed potato. His wine glass has only a fraction remaining. The glass is stained with his fingertips.
Now that I’m here, I don’t know what to say.
Charles Fortescue turns around and takes out his cigar, setting it carefully down on his plate. He stares at it for a long time, and I feel that twinge of unnatural power coming alive inside me. A virus. A disease. The pommel of my walking stick turns cold underneath my grasp. A plume of fire leaps up from the city streets and Charles takes a drink of his wine, staring at me while he does it. It’s like looking in a mirror.
“You look startled,” Charles says.
Kill him.
I clench my fist and feel the world shift. An invisible surge of energy pulses out from my chest and the glass walls explode. Wind screams. Rain smashes into me and I feel my hair fly. Tiny shards of glass hang in suspended animation, turning slowly. The air begins to whir and shake, the glass pieces trembling in anticipation. Light refracts through them, creating rainbow aberrations. In slow motion, Charles begins to laugh.
Lightning hits the tower and the glass shards flash.
I turn them into spears and send them upon Charles. Lightning cracks with fury. Charles doesn’t move. The shards explode before they touch him, becoming no larger than grains of salt. At last, he finishes his wine and sets it down on the table.
He’s one of us? Impossible.
I draw my pistol and fire three times at him.
Charles deflects the bullets without moving a muscle. One of them strikes me in the stomach and my legs are taken from underneath me. I crash to my knees. My walking stick makes a hollow rattle as it hits the floor and rolls away.
Get up.
Get up.
I crawl towards my walking stick and my fingers wrap around it. The wood feels cold and rough. Slowly, I pick it up and force it into the ground, using it as leverage. Get up, Arthur. All you have to do is kill Fortescue and this all ends.
Get up.
I glance up as Charles slams his boot into my walking stick, throwing it violently across the chamber, rolling and rolling to the very edge of the building.
He grabs my shoulders and picks me up.
He stabs something into my stomach and my entire body goes numb. I look down to see a long syringe poking out of me. Blood’s dripping from me to the wet floor.
“You’re nothing,” Charles tells me. “You’ve always been nothing. Did you really ever think you were anyone? Did you ever really think you could turn this city upside down?” I feel all power dripping from me and splashing on the floor where glass shards lie scattered. “You’ll die, just as Mildred did. At last, the revolution will be no more.”
Somehow, I manage to curl my fingers into a fist and launch it into Charles’s gut, throwing him backwards. I fall to the ground on my back, pain scorching my spine. I grab the syringe that’s still inside me and rip it out, tossing it across the room.
Get up, I tell myself.
Charles slams his boot into my side and sends me recoiling. Lightning flashes and I squeeze my eyes shut as the wind throws rain across me. Each droplet hurts. The glass on the ground turns red under the reflected light from the fires raging across London.
You did this, Arthur.
You brought war to London. Thousands will die and their blood will be on your hands. The least you can do is get up and finish what you started.
Get up. Get up. Get up.
I roll over onto my hands and knees and cough up blood and mucus. A million whines are singing in my ears, a terrible cacophony of noise. Winds howl and rain spits across me. Gunshots go off intermittently, each one making me jump.
There’s the sound of a pistol being picked up.
Charles checks the barrel as he walks back over to me, his boots crunching the tiny shards of glass on the ground. Thunder roars. My arm collapses underneath me and I fall back down in my own spit. I can only raise my head an inch to see Charles approaching me. Who is this man and where did he come from? How did we come to be connected?
He aims the pistol at my head. “Still feeling sorry for yourself.”
Every word he says sends shockwaves of pain through my head. I can hear a whimpering in the place that whine used to be, a horrible sound.
“Typical,” Charles says as the wind splashes us with hot rainwater. “You’re pathetic, Arthur, living in your fantasies, doing whatever it takes to rid yourself of the blame and put it onto the people around you, the people who trusted you, who loved you.” His snivelling voice cracks and I look up at him. Reach, I tell myself. Reach—
Droplets of water lift from the ground, then quiver, and fall back down. I’m bleeding from my shoulder. I’m bleeding from my gut. I’m bleeding from the place Charles stabbed me with the syringe and paralysed that bitter thing inside me that makes me special.
Charles shoots me in the chest and the breath jumps from my lungs. I flop down on my back, arms stretched out in a puddle of my own blood. I’m gasping for breath and feeling the ground shake underneath Charles’s footsteps.
Get up.
I can’t.
“Mother loved you!” Charles says, his words stinging the back of my head. What is he talking about? Mother who? Nobody ever loved me. They sent me away, locked me up, made me fight in their war. They abandoned me, their child. How I cried for them!
“Arthur, they treated you like you were everything to them,” Charles screams, “but you can’t live with that. You have to make yourself the victim, the one who’s been abandoned, the one nobody cares about, when you were always the special one! Do you remember what you would do, Arthur? How you would use your powers against me? How you would abuse me with those sick, twisted powers that you use to make yourself the victim? When I had the chance to become who I am now, no wonder I took it! But I didn’t want war. I inherited a war. It had already begun. You’re the villain. You’ve always been the villain!”
It isn’t true. He’s playing with my head.
But I can’t move. I can only lie here on my back, staring at the ceiling of the glass chamber. Lightning tears apart the sky and birds fly from the clouds, squawking and making a ruckus. Charles is slowly approaching me. I have to get up.
“You forged your own narrative,” Charles Fortescue says, “just to justify everything you were doing. To justify your evil. To justify destroying London. To take power away from me using the very same sickness you used when we were children.”
He’s lying.
I reach—
There’s a flicker of something and I roll over onto my side. I get one elbow unde
rneath me and begin to push against the ground, leveraging myself onto hands and knees.
“You created me,” Charles says, his voice shaking.
I get my foot underneath me and stand up uneasily. There’s a painful hum coming from my gut and my leg is weak, but I manage to stand on my own two feet, and there’s Charles staring at me through the rain. I take one step towards him.
His eyes are the same as mine.
“You created all of this.”
He fires but all that happens is a spark. I stumble forward and smack the pistol out of his hand. It goes flying. My left hand grabs his and my right hand takes his throat. It’s all I can do before we both fall and I’m on top of him, hands around his throat as rain smashes down around us. His eyes are wide. He grabs my wrists but it’s fruitless.
“You’ll achieve nothing,” Charles chokes.
I tighten my grip. I want to kill him.
I have to kill him.
“You’ll kill me.” He coughs and hacks and I tighten my grip around his throat. “You’ll kill me and just take my place. And then Mildred Piper will rise again in another form and she will wage war against you. And the cycle, it goes on and on and on—”
Don’t listen to him, I tell myself.
Protect yourself. Protect Arthur.
I feel his throat break and that’s the end of Charles Fortescue. I roll off him, crawling through the puddles and rain, gasping for air.
There’s a rumble in the air and an airship emerges from below the lip of the building. Lightning illuminates it. I snatch my walking stick from the ground and use it to stagger to the airship. Leslie Barrow is on it, striding from the helm and leaping onto the building.
“Arthur!” he yells over the storm.
I see his face, full of concern, as he sprints towards me. Yet, somehow, it seems as though he’s slipping further and further away. I reach out to him but it’s with my walking stick hand, and the result is me falling forward, collapsing to the wet ground.
I taste the rainwater against my tongue, cold and dirty.
“Shit!” Leslie Barrow shouts.
London goes silent and I close my eyes at last. Yes, I am the villain they all say I am. They feared us for a reason. They feared me for a reason. When they asked for peace, I gave them war. I failed my brother. My brother is Charles Fortescue and I tormented him for as long as he can remember. I failed Mildred Piper. I failed all of us.
This will outlive me. The people I hurt, they will go on to pick up the pieces and face the consequences for the war I made them fight. The people who trusted me, they will die, or they will continue to rule London with an iron fist. The people down below, the ones who had no part to play in this, they’ll be enslaved by what I’ve created.
I have ruined everything.
The sound of literal gears clinking in your brain, it becomes monotone after a while. The sound of them grinding and snapping into place when you breathe your final breaths. The smell when your skin rips and hot blood drools over them, reflecting the lightning and the fire. It’s horrifying what I have become. It’s bloody horrifying.
The whine, it was never really there. It was just me the whole time. Poor Arthur, the destroyer of London, the destroyer of everything he ever loved.
Everything disappears and, at last, I am at peace.
What Redemption Means
The most unexpected thing happens: I open my eyes.
The first thing I notice is the quiet, a quiet coloured only by the crackling of sticks in a fireplace. I feel the warmth of this fire, like a long embrace in the middle of winter. My feet are on burgundy carpet and I’m in a room with minimal furnishings. It’s the room on the second floor of that London townhouse. There’s a buzzing noise in my ear, like a very distant whine, gradually growing in intensity. It’s coming from the lamp, flickering. Bad wiring.
There’s a woman standing before the window, but it’s not the city out there; it’s a white landscape of nothing, as if the world beyond is one incomplete simulation.
She glances at her pocket watch.
“You’re just in time,” she says, and turns around with the hint of a smile. The flames touch her tangled auburn hair, turning each thread a hot red. She wears the only thing I’ve ever seen her wear, the brown coat and the crimson scarf.
I stare at her across the table. You can hear her watch ticking. It’s bronze, a cheap one, and you get the sense it’s ticking too slowly. I don’t say anything. My wounds are healed but I’m wearing the very same clothing I died in. Or did I die at all?
I’m seeing Mildred Piper so I must be dead.
“Please,” she says, motioning to the table. “Take a seat.”
Cautiously, I pull out one of the chairs and sit down in it, feeling the wood creak underneath me. I hear a soft commotion coming from elsewhere in the building. Something heavy is knocked to the floor, like a medium-sized mason jar.
Mildred sits down in front of the window.
“Does this mean I’m dead?” I ask.
“It means your mind has wandered to the place dead minds wander,” Mildred assures me, though I’m not sure what she means. If I’m not dead, I need to get back to the others. I need to know what happens next. I need to be there for them. The job isn’t done.
Mildred smiles and shakes her head as if having read my thoughts. “Arthur, you’re only one man, and believe me, I mean no disrespect, but there’s not much left of you.” I don’t feel the pain now but I know what she means, and I know when I return, it’ll all come back. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’ve done all I can and there’s nothing left for me in London. I think about that ticket the Craxton girl gave me, and I wonder if the trains are still departing.
“What are you afraid of, Arthur?” Mildred asks me.
When she looks at me, with apparent kindness, I feel as though she’s looking at somebody else. You can’t look at me like that, knowing what I’ve done, knowing what I am, and who I’ve hurt, and how I’m the reason she’s dead and she’ll never get to see her daughter.
I will never understand Mildred Piper.
“What am I afraid of?” I ask.
She nods and doesn’t break eye contact.
I give a laugh, grabbing my hands underneath the table to stop them from shaking. There are bits of metal glistening in places the skin can’t hold itself. My chest feels cold and I sense I have the beginnings of a fever. Only twenty-six and yet my bones feel so brittle. Nothing works like it used to. There’s a voice in my head, a voice that tells me all sorts of things.
She’s still staring at me, green eyes.
“I’m afraid of so many things,” I eventually say. “That I’m just as bad as they all say I am. That I’m the villain and that’s all I’ve ever been. I’m afraid that I’ve hurt so many people who cared about me, because I pushed them away, that I wasn’t deserving of their kindness. I’m scared of the way you look at me, because I don’t understand.” I take a moment to collect my thoughts. The room is silent except for a very distant ringing in my ears. “I’m Charles in his ivory tower,” I tell Mildred Piper across the table. “He is everything that I hate about myself, and I fooled myself into thinking that if I killed him, I killed what I hate about myself.”
“And yet the truest act of redemption is not in killing another person.”
“After everything I’ve done, how can I be normal again?”
“Normal is a choice,” Mildred tells me. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about you, Arthur, it’s that things don’t happen to you. You blame your misfortunes on others, external forces, acts of God, but no, you are the force behind everything. You can die now, like a martyr, and London will go on without you. A man cannot outlive a city, a people. Or you can keep fighting, fight the war that comes after this. Become Charles in his ivory tower. Or, and I think you ought to try this sometime, you can take that train and leave.”
“And then what?” I ask her.
Mildred shrugs. “See where the wind takes you.�
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I ponder her words as she stands up and becomes silhouetted again by the bright white light that shines through the window, a stark painting that doesn’t do a thing to colour the room itself. Mildred looks at me, her face half-lit. “They won’t forget you, Arthur.”
There’s a walking stick in my hand now, and a throbbing pain in my leg. I stand up, clutching the pommel of the walking stick under my right hand.
“I’m sorry, Mildred,” I say to her.
She smiles softly. “It’s okay.”
Maybe this is all I needed to hear. I feel a weight fall off my shoulders and I see myself from the outside, for the first time. He’s standing in a warm room with a fire crackling in the hearth, a walking stick in his right hand. His hands shake. They always shake, ever since the war. He was broken before the war, but he convinced himself of it then.
This is Arthur Fortescue.
He has done all he can for the revolution. He is the man who carried on war in London. He is the man who killed the city’s ruler. He inspired people. He fought because he didn’t know anything else. He is a broken man constantly engaged in a private battle.
The biggest war he fought was the one inside his head.
“I’ll be seeing you around then,” Arthur says.
“I’m sure you will,” says Mildred Piper.
And with this, Arthur turns around and walks out of the room. The door swings shut behind him and the last person there is Mildred, staring at the place he’d been.
The city breathes a sigh.
London 1924
Thomas Cobbe sits in a cake shop by himself on the first morning of 1924. It’s been three months since the Great Battle of London, where the Piper Revolution toppled the regime of Charles Fortescue and ushered in a new age. Of what, they’re still working that out. All Thomas knows is that there is no more fighting, so he is content.