The soulmaster was a child. Or some kind of being that sounded like a child. I was almost entirely sure they weren’t human. 

The soulmaster had a given name (‘Blake, meet our soulmaster, Miss Kyrah,’ Veil announced) but I called her Blood because she smelled of it. 

‘Lovely to meet you,’ Blood said in a pleasant little voice which didn’t match the wake of chill that followed her words. 

Tears stung my eyes, brought on by the putrid tang, or perhaps exhaustion. I wondered if retreating into mutism (a common side effect of constant dhaheri-overwhelm) would be effective against this new beast. Instinct told me no. Blood would see through the silence to the raw, disastrous hurt and pull out everything that was better left buried. 

‘I haven’t decided about you yet,’ I said.

‘I understand.’

‘Do you?’

‘Of course. Here I am! Something Tassuri has likely taught you doesn’t exist. Or perhaps you’ve never heard of my kind at all. You must be quite stressed.’

‘Interesting. I thought the Keepers of the Scilla Moon worked for Tassuri. Strange of them to approve of the arcane,’ I mused, listening beyond the soulmaster, to the soft breathing on the other side of the door. I smelled stale sweat and wildflowers. Veil and Raeia. Movement fluttered in my womb and my hands ached with longing to touch, to comfort, but I remained still, hiding any sentiments I could from this beast before me. 

‘Focus on me, not them.’

‘What are you?’

If Mom were alive, I would have asked her what this monster was. She could have picked up a book from her library and pinpointed the very pages where the biology and hidden history of a being was written. All the books had been swallowed by the flames. I wanted to ask her how soulmasters made people remember things, and whether they could erase memories too.

‘I am something else. Just like you,’ Blood replied.

‘You are not like me.’

‘Apologies, you are right. I should rephrase, I think. I am Other, just like you. I don’t quite belong here, nor do I belong elsewhere. Does that help?’

‘You’ll have to come back to me on that one.’

I imagined she smiled then. Her brief silence was followed by a small breathy chuckle. ‘You are funny, Ellie Blake.’

‘No one calls me Ellie anymore.’ (They’re all dead or disappeared.) I expected her to tell me that was my fault, that the very reason I was locked up was because I had killed every member of my family, the same way Tassuri agents had repeated every day in Sommersgap. Agents called me Sapphire. Always. Ellie was too docile, too regular a name for them to connect to the beast of a human I was. Sapphire was something more, and looked pretty beside Disaster.

The soulmaster instead asked, ‘You prefer Ellie, do you not?’

‘You can call me Blue here.’

‘Given to you by Miss Raeia.’ 

‘Tell her thanks. I like my new name.’ 

‘She can hear you, but you already know that.’

I smiled despite my hidden face. Something told me Blood could see (or feel) it. ‘You stink. But I think I’m beginning to like you.’

‘Your scent is more acute than the others. It must hurt for you to have me near. I am sorry.’

‘So, do you plan to get me to like you and then pillage my mind?’

‘I don’t pillage.’

‘Sorry. I should rephrase, right? Is this where you delve into the deep darkness of my monstrous psyche?’

Blood chuckled again. It was at once a chirpy sound like her high voice, but also heavy with restraint, as if she wasn’t sure how to laugh and was afraid she might tear her cheeks (I knew that feeling). If she even had soft, tear-able cheeks. For all I knew, she might not look human.

‘Brace yourself,’ she said.

‘For wh–’

The soft, brushing lilt of piano keys drifted to my ears before the melody struck. 

I still sat in my cot in The Arabella, but…no, I wasn’t on the Hell Rock. Though I was keenly aware of Blood in the room with me, I was also aware of simultaneously inhabiting somewhere else. Someplace familiar. I couldn’t see anything, but I knew where I was (fresh sea air; scents of pine and incense), and I knew what I was about to do (the set of weapons I felt on my person and the scent of ignition powder in my backpack). 

‘Ellie?’ My mom’s voice. Beyond her and the rhythm of her piano playing, was the shuffle of Raeia’s clothes and Veil’s laborious, aged breaths. 

‘Ellie, sweetie, please come back inside.’ Her playing stopped; an abrupt end to a song about the decline of Lernich magic. The cool wind whispered between us.

(Ignore it. Ignore it. Ignore it.) I wished I had ignored it. I wished I could slip back through time the way this music and the hums of my crësteel helmet slipped so effortlessly through me. 

‘You can’t keep doing this,’ she said. 

I couldn’t see her. I didn’t remember crossing paths with my mom that night at all. Knowing I had, made what followed so much worse. 

‘Day’s waiting for me,’ I replied. 

‘That boy will do anything you ask of him. If you stop, he’ll follow.’ 

‘Eric can’t get away with what he’s doing anymore,’ I said. ‘I’m the only one he can’t punish for stopping him.’ It was a semi truth. My existence was a punishment, and each day my father made me feel shame for it, but he wouldn’t kill me. That was my privilege. 

Sight came to me like the slash of a whip. Even though it was night, and the two moons left a soft glow in the sky, it was too vibrant. When my dhaheri kicked into gear everything became too much. But I couldn’t close my eyes, no matter how much my reflexes craved for dark. I warred between the bright pain of my past self and the darkness I was trapped in at The Arabella. Which was worse? Forced light or forced dark? 

My mom stood before me, a foot teasing the threshold of the conservatory doors. Behind her was the warm glow of a crëpower fireplace. It made her fair hair gleam like fire. In front of her was the destructive promise of a Crë-gene experiment. I made her face pale and twist in worry. 

‘We can talk about that later. Just forget about your plans and call Day in. We can have a nice–’

‘It’s always later with you.’ I was shocked, witnessing myself. I never snapped at Mom. Well, apparently I did in a blackout. 

She didn’t so much as flinch. Maybe she was more used to this version of me than I was. Comfort surrounded me as though she had enclosed me in a hug, but my mom wasn’t stupid enough to try and touch me in this state. Only Day could do that. 

‘You’re never there when I need you,’ I continued. 

I wanted to slap a hand over the mouth of this memory. My fingers, encased in their steel prisons, twitched. 

‘Then tell me, what can I do for you now to make you stay?’ 

My head shook, brushing a few short strands of hair from my clips so they fell across my eyes. At eighteen I’d decided to shave my hair off. The regrowth was slow and unaccommodating to violence.

(Why did you stop?) I willed my voice to reach the old me. (Why did you bother?) 

‘Destroying your father’s labs and killing his staff won’t reverse what he’s done to you,’ Mom said. 

I was impressed she had the bite to say something so outright. She had never overtly criticised his experiments on me. At least, not when I was lucid. I wished I had remembered this. I wished I could have recalled the edge of disdain in my mom’s face at a time when I could have asked her what she truly thought of him, and of me. 

‘I’ll try not to make too big a mess this time,’ I lied and slipped away from her.

I hoped Blood would pull me back. I hoped she was finished torturing me with a past that was better left lost. My mom used to soothe me when I returned from blackouts. ‘The dark protects your soul,’ she’d say. ‘It’s protecting you from seeing what might hurt you.’ Always stroked rings around my eyes as they returned to normal. A soft, reassuring message to my brain that I hadn’t hurt her, that those eyes (my eyes, my darkness) hadn’t turned on her. But I’d been selling myself a lie. She had seen so many blackouts and so much of the violence I thought I’d hidden from her. Maybe she’d been witness to it all. 

My stomach lurched and I was dragged across space and time. 

I glanced down. The cobbles beneath my feet sloped downward, and between the grooves trickled the thick red fluid of someone’s lifeblood. The same blood clung to my hands.

When I looked back up, the scene bloomed around me like wallpaper unfurling. 

The sky was a haze of pale pink above Vik’s city walls, warning of morning’s approach. The burning had stopped for the most part, and all that was left were bodies on the street and mounds of gathering ash and seared stone. 

‘Let’s go,’ a voice said from beside me. Day’s presence triggered a resurgence of warmth within me, but it wasn’t enough to quell the pits of depravity I’d strolled into.

What would my child think of this version of me?

Day stepped in front of me, grabbed my face in his hands. ‘It’s done, Sapphy.’ Blue eyes scanned my face, bright against the shadows in my heart. ‘You’re becoming cold again,’ he said with a frown. 

‘I’m not done,’ I said, and slid from his grip, taking a dagger from my leg holster as I went. 

The sensation of sitting in my cot at The Arabella became ever more distant, and the split versions of me seemed to converge. I sank into the experience as though it were present; not years ago, not a thousand miles away, not in a different life. But it was still me, so much more of myself than I had presented recently. I missed the chaos.

I stepped around the three bodies spilling out the doorway of the ninth and final cottage. The rising sun glinted across the badges on their chests. Tassuri workers. Father’s workers. They’d tried to run. Beyond them, the remnants of their work continued to collapse. The glass, with its raw copper colouring, was untouched by the fire. Crëglass was far more durable than wood and stone, but I walked by it, uninterested. Small Moon’s surface crust had given me enough trouble for my short lifetime.

The workshop was simple. Eric had kept these ones secret from most eyes, hence the modest exterior in Vik’s industrial quarter. A large stone counter stood in the middle where the crëglass testing took place. From the shape of the shards, it looked like Father was working on lightbulbs again. I walked around the counter and kicked ash aside.

‘Ellie,’ Day called from the street. ‘They’re coming.’

‘Took them long enough,’ I muttered, a grim smile spreading. My bribes (Eric’s money, of course) had worked wonders. The police would come, and some army men, and they would call forensics to scour the scene for clues and I would leave them plenty. Being Eric Blake’s daughter had perks. He would make up another story for the press rather than admit his child had gone on another rampage. It was his fault I was a weapon after all. 

‘In a minute,’ I muttered. My voice was quiet but Day could hear. His ears were even more predator-keen than mine or his brother Enzo’s, who I’d gleaned many a stealth trick from.

I crouched when I found what I was looking for. The latch was well-hidden; embedded in the floor to look like each of the other tiny ceramic tiles that made up the simple white-and-grey mosaic. After some feeling about with my desecrated hands, I pressed in on one of the grey squares which had slight ridges indented on its surface. It popped up a centimetre and I had to edge the rest of it up with my knife. The small hole it left behind was wide enough for an average thumb. I slid my index finger down, and found the hole quite spacious. I thought about my father’s hands, which were (despite him considering it quite degrading) thick-jointed and calloused from his constant experiments. My hands suited the Blake name more than his did. Nimble and hostile. Made for precise destruction, not endless creation. I chuckled as I felt the small button beneath the surface and pressed down.

The mosaic tiles shuddered, sending a chorus of clicking across the quieted street. Then, in palm-sized sections, they descended. A stairway of grey and white tiles opened up for me, and I didn’t wait for the tiles to finish quivering about the place before heading down. Day plucked his way through the debris and followed me.  

At the bottom, I found a dimly-lit room with several glass-doored cabinets along one side. They were filled with canned foods and other non-perishables. I saw Eric’s favourite crisp flavour (prawn cocktail) on one of the shelves beside rows of dehydrated ramen. I imagined he shared more meals with his staff than he ever had with us. A door hung ajar to a small bathroom. In the centre was a wooden table encircled by six chairs. The beds were crisply made, waiting for sleepers that would never come back.

Day rummaged through the cupboards in a haphazard fashion as I wandered around the space. I’d failed again. There were no Crë-gene experiments taking place in this lab. Despair clawed at my heart. I’d been so sure about this one.

‘You shouldn’t still be here,’ said a voice from behind me.