Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

“Then I want to do this.” Sigurd lifted her into the air by her neck. “Open your legs, woman,” he said, and threw her onto the sand sculpture.

She reached into the place where she carried the imprint of a small, half-metal boy lying in a dark place, of all the children lying in dark places because she had ruined them. She thought about the sun on her nanobody. She remembered the touch of Vegar’s hand and the long threads of hair she held aside so that she could put her fingers on his shoulder. She thought of the girl who would have been her granddaughter, who should have been her granddaughter, and of all the things, the human things her body would never be able to do.

She opened her legs.

He shoved his gun inside her, and she opened inside so it would fit. Then he flipped her onto her stomach, grabbing her hair and pushing her face into the sand while he loosened his trousers.

“Can you bleed?” he roared into her ear as he shoved himself into her rectum, which she opened for him as well. “Let’s see if you can bleed!” He spat on the right side of her face, and she closed her eyes while his saliva crossed her nose on its way to the ground. “Let’s see if you can bleed like my sister bled! Let’s see if you can bleed like my son bled! Let’s see if you can bleed like my wife bled!” Akhila’s body rocked with his thrusts, and the gun rocked loosely in her body, but she didn’t resist him, and this only inflamed his rage. He punched her face again and again with his free fist, and when she didn’t respond, he reached behind their joined bodies and slammed his gun into her with a repetitive, jerking motion. When he was spent, an anguished howl escaped his throat, and he held her pinned while he wailed. Tears streamed down his cheeks and onto her face, where they cooled on her lips and eyelids.

The crunch of footsteps on frozen ground and the muffled chatter of worried voices moved toward the arboretum from the monastery. A crowd was gathering, looking for him, looking for her.

“Sounds like your guards are coming.” Sigurd wiped his face on his coat sleeve and leaned down close to her ear. “Why don’t we see if they’re interested in any ‘justice’ before I melt you into scrap metal?” He rose from Akhila’s back and reached for the weapon still buried inside her. But half of the barrel was gone, absorbed. He stepped back, trousers around his knees, and watched as she began to glow. A second passed and she was bright, blazing. A face appeared in the back of her head; hands and arms reached out of her back. Then her body halved. The fiery part of her got up out of the dark self still lying in the sand, whipped long fingers around Sigurd’s neck and lifted him into the air.

“Thank you Father,” she said as she left her other self behind, “for renewing my sense of purpose. You’ll make a fine carrier.”

Bright Akhila was half the size of her whole body, but she began to remedy her lack by drawing sand up out of the sculpture and processing it. As it was diminished, her darker self stirred and rose, a diminutive shadow to that growing brightness. Vegar found them then. She watched him look from her to Bright Akhila and then to Sigurd’s half-naked form struggling against the burning fingers that held him.

He screamed. “Akhila, no!”

Dark Akhila turned to him then and threw out a hand in his direction. “Stay back!”

“What did you do to her?” Vegar turned to Sigurd, but the older man could only roll his eyes in the younger priest’s direction and plead with his lips.

“I couldn’t stop him. I tried. And I couldn’t stop her,” Dark Akhila said and then addressed her other self. “Let him go. Please let him go.”

Bright Akhila sneered up at the man choking in her grasp. “What was it you said? No sanctuary, no redemption, no peace.”

Then Dark Akhila drew the remaining sand up into her body, processing it, growing with it. “I can’t let you make him a carrier. I took refuge among these people.”

“For what? So they could lock you in the dark? So they could rape you?”

“For him.” Dark Akhila’s arm spanned the rest of the distance between her body and Vegar’s. She brushed her hand across his chest, and for a moment he held it close until she slipped it out from under his grip and brought it back to her center. “He said that I’m a person, and I will believe it. I have to believe it.”

Then Dark Akhila blazed blue-hot, her face full of compassion. Her arms extended, elongated, and stretched forward, inviting her brighter half to step inside the circle of her embrace. Bright Akhila turned, a pivoting motion on legs still pulsing with gathered sand, and the rhythm of her body faltered; the leer on her face softened. Her fingers tightened once and then loosened. Sigurd fell to the ground, dead.

A moment passed, and both bodies stilled. Then Bright Akhila fell forward, a scream filling her throat and filling the air. Dark Akhila caught her, brought her close and wept blue tears that fell from her cheeks and dissolved in the mass of pale hair beneath her chin. They shook together for a time, and the barren trees shook with them.

Then Dark Akhila looked up at Vegar. “Is there redemption? Is there peace?” she asked as her body began to wrap itself around Bright Akhila’s seething form.

Vegar’s face was grief-stricken. “I hope so.” He looked down at his broken mentor and added, “For both of you.”

“You need to go now.” Her dark, blue body converged around the raging woman inside her. “This will be hot.”

Vegar turned and ran. As he ran, he could smell hot metal, could hear a crackling sound like the spark of a welding torch, could feel a rising heat chasing him out of the arboretum, could see a reflection like daylight in the night sky over his head. When he finally fell to the ground gasping for breath, the world was cool and dark again.

The Councilor arrived with the military an hour later to take custody of Akhila, but there was nothing for them to retrieve but the mingled ashes and bone fragments of tree, bird, monk and nanobody. Vegar was kneeling in prayer just outside the blast radius, where smoke still rose from the earth. When the Councilor asked if he knew where his mentor was, he fell to his face in the snow and sobbed.

In time, his body healed and the bandages came off, but a reddened, stretched place remained on his chest. As the scars softened, they took the shape of Akhila’s elongated face in the throes of change, pleading for her life. The day he first recognized her face on his body, he packed his belongings and left the monastery to walk the path that had marked him, gathering broken Augments in Akhila’s name, mending broken Organics in Sigurd’s. When the time came, he had his scars limned in black and filled with a blue that shone even when he walked in darkness, which he often did.

Mohammed Muneer’s Twenty-Four Hour Tea Service was a rather long name for a roadside teahouse but Mohammed had liked it from the moment he’d conjured it. Painting the words neatly across an old wooden plank, his hand had cramped twice before he’d finished the first coat. He thought the long name would catch the attention of drivers. Make them slow down. Give their stomachs ideas. But the sign was too elongated for those who were weary so they drove straight on past him and stopped further down. Outside the burger joint with the squat name of Munch , lit up in pink neon by the side of the road.