SUGAR AND SPICE AND ALL THINGS NICE
Part 8 of 8
The director sat in her office with Mist’ Ŝahin and brandy and a pleasant discussion of financial details when her terminal toned.
“Pardon me,” she said, and he gestured obligingly. She slipped a bit of shell and silver into her ear.
“Scyros,” she said. “What is it?”
“A neonate’s missing,” said her security chief.
“What,” she said, a sudden pain in her chest. “What?”
“A neonate’s missing. Her wetnurse woke and thought she heard a cry. But it’s missing. Like that.”
Her hand swept the interface, and lyrik twenty-seven’s new inventory appeared. Mist’ Ŝahin watched her discomfort, puzzled.
“Which?”
“The Andromache.”
Scyros’s hair tingled, and she began perspiring, brow and upper lip.
She sounded perfectly calm. “Seal the campus perimeter. Watch the roads.”
“And call the militia?”
She hesitated. A word to the column-commander in Helioshad would open more resources at once…
She stared flatly at Mist’ Ŝahin on the scrollwork couch. Already, even knowing nothing, he glanced at the door.
“Not…yet. Let’s resolve the situation, shall we?”
“But…Director Scyros, someone just walked onto the campus and grabbed a neonate—”
She put her fingers to the shell at her ear. “We wait. Do everything else.”
“Yes, Director.” Terse, skeptical.
She put the earphone of shell on her desk, and smiled, teeth bared.
“All well?”
“Very,” she lied.
The door to her office drifted on silent hinges.
Andromache’s silver hair gleamed in the light of the electrics. Breathing hard, she clasped a small bundle to her chest. Scratches striped her shins.
In the bundle, something mewled and wriggled.
“Andromache!” Scyros discovered she was standing. “Or should I now say Andromache Prima? Why do you have her? Why are you away from your lyrik?—Briseis,” she gasped, thunderstruck.
Andromache bared a smile then. The dandily-dressed Investor recoiled from it, so unpleasant on a little girl, so shocking on one of the Facility’s products. “What is it, Miss?” she asked.
“You—you hurt Briseis!” Scyros accused.
“She should not have followed me. That was not proper.”
“Hurting her, taking Andromache Secunda, these are improper things. She was First Girl, responsible for you—”
“Is there something wrong with this one?” the Investor said. “Is she defective?” He shrank away as though she would bite.
He began rising but Andromache fixed him with narrow snakelike green eyes. “Sir, sit.”
He did not get up. He tried. He failed. He grunted.
“Andromache, why—”
“Miss, she is my sister. She is,” she relished the word, “my daughter.”
“You’re damaged. She’s another Andromache, but not like you. She’s not been tampered with. She isn’t spoiled. And you are most certainly not her mother.”
Director Scyros reached for the terminal surface, but Andromache said “No.”
Scyros hesitated, struggled with her hand.
“No,” Andromache repeated. She came further into the room, watching Mist’ Ŝahin warily. “The geneset designer made me,” she said singsong, “to be like I am. Special.” She smiled, secret. “But when another Andromache was needed…I used the designer’s passnumbers to match her geneset code to mine. As I am, she is. But better. She will be better because you will not raise her like me. You will not medicate her like me, mold her like me. She will be all free.”
Mist’ Ŝahin’s mouth sagged. His legs remained jelly, but he clawed, pulling, pushing at the couch. “What kind of a facility are you running? This thing’s dangerous! How is she doing this to us?”
Andromache smiled, but her eyes did not join this time. “When we are grown, sometimes citizens have babies with us, yes?” Voice cold, expression curved with loathing and disgust.
An a-ghastly trickling understanding filled their eyes, and the Investor writhed in place, trying to force himself up.
“Our genes are now in you,” Andromache said gently. “You are not unlike us now. Someone with great skill in the voice can bend your will as you bend ours.” She kissed the baby’s head. “And I have great skill at the voice. I do not need to steal from casinos for you,” she spat at the Investor. “I will make my own fortune, Mist’ Ŝahin.”
Ŝahin gave a twisting shudder, like ripping a rooted plant from the soil, and staggered to his feet, pulling a knife from his silk sash, leaping at the girl with a shout, “Monster! Monster! Monster!” louder than she could speak, to block his ears from her voice.
Andromache cowered, fell back, and pitched her small voice low and plaintive beneath his:
“Mama, mama, help me!”
Bright rage filled Miss Scyros, a clap of light and call of love and of fury that carried her all unwilling, and she moved quickly, quickly, so quick she could not feel herself do it nor think. She had both hands on her terminal screen, ripping it from the desk and swinging it like an axe into the Investor’s head, and she struck him again and again until he collapsed onto the elaborate mosaic floor in coiling red ribbons.
She stood over him, stains on her chiton and her feet and sandals, and he sprawled there spattered.
Scyros dropped the monitor. Bang to the floor.
She held out her hands to Andromache in the far corner. And at Andromache in her arms, who let loose an infantile sob of hunger and distress. Her sister kissed and rocked her.
“Thank you, Mother. He would have killed us.”
“What have I done?” the Director of the Helioshad State Labor Facility begged.
“You saved your daughters,” the ten-year-old said. “Your lovely daughter Andromache…and your baby girl Secunda. Now, you will raise us as your own.”
She approached and took her mother’s hand. “We will be good daughters together for you. And we will be very rich and very powerful. And we will always protect our mother, as she protected us. Yes?”
“Yes,” Miss Scyros said, her mouth dry and the green eyes of her eldest daughter glittering. “Yes, Andromache. Yes. We—we will be a good family. Together.”
“As long as you live,” Andromache agreed.
Gripped by the mayhem, menace, and now murder through it all. The trope of the innocent girl as calculating manipulative monster was well applied, and uet I'm still on her side comoletely, like how? Fucking brilliant craftsmanship, that's how.
Akso, I don't know if there is a term for the method but using descriptors to expose the world to reader, without falling into lengthy explanatory text, or relying on the readers intelligence to connect the dots themselves is again well applied.
It's part of what pulls me and as I invests in building my inner vision of the world and takes me along with the storyline. So well done in giving the reader just enough to keep tying peices together and giving a throat grabbing cunning and mystery. Bravo! 👏🤌💋💯
Perhaps the Director should address her as Reverend Mother...