Her presence is electric, and overwhelming. And, if I’m being honest, dark. She’s much stronger now than when I last heard her, as a child, and she’s much more . . .
Angry. In fact, this Girl is really tweaked. She started shouting straight off, the words tumbling over each other in her rush to get them out.
Hope for fuck’s SAKE wake UP get off your sorry ass we NEED you here come and—
And what? I don’t know, because I threw up a mental wall and shut her out. I’ve been cloaking my mind forever—nothing slips in, nothing slips out, it’s a simple matter of survival—but when I’m tired, overly emotional, or inattentive, sometimes the cloak gets loose. The doors come unlocked, and the world in all its terrible, greedy enormity comes rushing in.
She comes rushing in. The Girl, whose name I know, from many prior rush-ins, is Honor.
Even from behind the wall I hear her muffled, angry shouts. I retreat, turn the volume down to zero, then she’s gone. But the questions remain.
Who is she? What does she want from me? And why, like my dream lover Magnus, does she insist on calling me Hope?
I think it’s time Father and I sat down and had a little chat.
Later that night
He said what he always says when I ask questions. “Stop asking so many questions, Lu.” Then he went and sat on the porch, and smoked his entire week’s tobacco ration while sitting in the dark.
Here’s what I know for sure: I can light things on fire. I can get inside people’s minds. I can vanish into a cloud of mist, and smell, hear, and feel things others don’t. I can move things without touching them, and God Thorne help you if I do touch you, because you might find yourself stripped of any special talent you have.
Father found that out the hard way. I accidentally stole his ability to play the piano and speak Czech before he figured it out and started making me wear gloves.
So even if Father won’t answer my questions, they all add up to the same thing I’ve known since I was little.
I’m different. I’m dangerous. I’m almost certainly not human.
And, if I want to stay alive, no one can know.
24 December, 2037
11:37pm IFST
Diary Entry #2987
Father is afraid.
He won’t say it, but I smell it on him. Fear smells like something sour and rotting, the same stench of decay I can never wash out of my hair and clothes after work. I overheard him on the telecom with the Prefect tonight, and his voice shook so badly I thought he might cry. When I asked him what was wrong he said “nothing,” but he looked guilty. He hates to lie.
An odd misfortune for him, since his entire life is built around doing exactly that.
In other news, I had another “incident.”
It wasn’t fire this time. It was actually worse, because at least fire is a natural phenomenon. A fire can be started by a million different things; the fire that caused the credit market to burn to the ground, for instance, was thought to have started from faulty wiring in a fan in the butcher’s stall. That was the official explanation, anyway. The rumors have never really stopped circulating. But a bunch of knives flying through the air and stopping just before they embed themselves into someone’s head . . . well, that’s not exactly something that can be explained so easily.
Talk about a red flag.
It was that bastard Cushing’s fault. He’s always handling the elderly Hospice guests (they’re called guests, though everyone, including them, knows they’re not allowed to leave) too roughly. I’ve seen more bruised arms than at Heroin Park. Anyway, I was in the kitchen helping Lars and the staff prepare Thornemas Eve dinner when I happened to glance out the door. The view from the kitchen into the communal dining room is a good one, and there was Cushing, shoving Mrs. Elkins down into a chair so hard she cried out in pain.
Then what did he do? He pinched her. He grabbed a fold of papery skin on her upper arm and twisted, hissing at her to shut the fuck up.
So, yes. I lost it. Again. Before I could stop myself, I had every knife in the kitchen flying through the air toward that sick bastard’s head.
I caught myself before any bodily damage was done, but the sight of an army of knives hovering in midair around Cushing’s head, held up by nothing, made Mrs. Elkins faint dead away. Cushing wet his pants. The kitchen staff witnessed the entire thing.
I pretended to be just as horrified and shocked as everyone else, but now there will be an inquiry. The Elimination Campaign will have the Inquisitor out to interview everyone at the Hospice first thing in the evening. Just like six months ago, when I overheard the Hospice Administrator call her guests “cows awaiting the slaughter,” and every mirror in the place shattered.
State-sponsored euthanasia is a fact of life in New Vienna, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Along with rations, sun poisoning, and the televised hangings of Dissenters, frying anyone over seventy-five in the CineratorTM after a lethal, “humane” dose of SleepSoft-9 is something I’ll never quite be able to stomach.
First Formers don’t have to worry about growing old, though. Money can buy a lot of luxuries here, as many extra years as you need. In a world run by a corporation only one thing really matters: profit.
Sometimes I wonder how much longer I can survive before the wild, snarling thing inside me breaks free once and for all, and tears this frail and shallow world to shreds.
Thorne help us all if the monster inside me ever gets out.
ONE
December 25, 2037
New Vienna, Austria
Lumina Bohn awoke in the sultry semidarkness to the sound of gunfire.
The sound was off in the distance, a sharp rat-a-tat that shattered the eerie quiet of Curfew. She jerked upright on her pallet, heart racing, then held perfectly still, straining her ears, awaiting the final burst.
There was always one more burst.
Through the sooty window across her cramped bedroom glowed the neon beacon of the megascreen, broadcasting the Imperial Federation’s tagline, “One World In Harmony,” throughout the district. A glance at the slowly rotating screen atop the south tower of what used to be St. Stephen’s Cathedral showed the time as 5:17pm IFST. Curfew didn’t end for another three quarters of an hour.
As another volley of gunfire rang out, Lu said a silent prayer for the poor soul who’d broken it.
A tap on her bedroom door, then her father’s head popped through. “Liebling? Ist alles in ordnung?”
He was whispering, the survivalist habit of one long used to hiding. Behind his wire-rimmed spectacles, his brown eyes shone with worry. He knew too well how much she hated the sound of gunfire.