***

Ellie

I was quiet when they took me. Ash from the burning house settled in my throat and remained there, shrouding me in unbreakable silence. 

Then the State agents came, swathed me in chains and dragged me to the deepest underbelly of Sommersgap Correctional Facility. Only the most wretched of disasters were imprisoned there, but my silence persisted, even when the interrogations began in too-bright rooms, deep belowground. 

‘How did you do it? The chemical residue is unlike any explosive compound on the market.’ While tiny black chains, slithered across my skin and burrowed deep. 

‘Did you plan to kill your little brother and sister as well? Or was it negligence? Got a little too high again?’ While interrogators replayed the final screams from the Blake home’s security system. The Tassurian government had access to everything, but my father, one of the Tassuri’s most lauded scientists, had managed to hide what made me the way I was – too strong, too violent, too disastrous. 

‘You’ll rot in here, Dhaherite scum.’ While they did unthinkable things that forced my mind to switch off into the protective dark vats of a blackout. Time slipped away and memories grew hazier until they were sealed away entirely behind walls of unscalable stone.

In the beginning, I had remained quiet out of necessity. If I spoke, I might break apart entirely. If I spoke, I would admit to the killing of my family. Even if this particular accusation weren’t true, I had committed enough crimes to serve a life sentence twice over. If I admitted guilt, maybe I would wake from this nightmare, but guilt didn’t stop with a clean cut and a severed end. It was an eternal spool of barbed thread, fraying and catching on organs and bones until everything inside was a seeping wound. Any admission to Tassuri, or to myself, would only lead to more incurable lesions. 

Resistance, however quiet, I could control. 

*

A new interrogator stood outside my cell. This one looked like all the rest. Dark hair, unassuming features, physically fit, wearing a deep green State uniform modestly decorated with white piping, which set him apart from the prison guards who wore black with minor green detailing. Tassuri’s emblem of a wolf circling its howling pup shone silver on his left breast.

‘Sorry we’ve pulled you back into solitary. Seemed you were getting a little too close to your cellmate,’ he said.

I let out a sigh. More than I had offered any previous agents. This one was soft-faced, fists straining despite the nonchalance in his voice, likely fresh out of the military academy if the sudden widening of his eyes were anything to go by. Easy work. I had attended the Kratirios, Tassuri’s military weekend schools for Dhaherite youths since I was ten.

‘If you would like to see your friend again, I’d suggest being more receptive today.’

Back pressed against the concrete wall and legs crossed on the pitiful mat Tassuri had provided for bedding, I looked out through the short stretch between us. A five-foot cube with one transparent wall facing the prison hall had been my home for the past several meal counts. It allowed those outside to see in at all times, but I could only see out when the guards allowed it. The surface glimmered in a way that alluded to constant movement, small enough the average eye would assume it was regular glass, but I could see, and I knew the substance well. Sometimes, the glow from the outer hall’s fluorescent lamps swam across it like oil on water. It was crëglass. My father’s invention.      

‘Twenty-three is a bit old to be stuck off the rails like this, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you be in a secure job by now, not scampering across the continent as a gangman’s dog?’

Twenty-three? I had been just under three months out from my twenty-third birthday when the house had blown up in my face. I cocked my head, pretending to listen while my mind spun with calculations. I'd expected a couple of weeks had passed, but months? The guards had provided irregular meal schedules so those weren’t a reliable time measure. There weren’t windows this deep down to show the dance between the sun and two moons above. There wasn’t a visible clock at the attending guard’s desk situated beyond the sometimes-transparent crëglass wall. 

The man’s knuckles paled under excess strain.  

I liked to name the interrogators and guards after menial features, even if we never crossed paths again. It gave me something to grasp onto when time became nothing and memories unreliable. There had been many, but only a few returned to my mind between the fogs of forgetting. Killer Eyes, Boring One, Extra-Boring One, Blue Boots – who returned most frequently due to her invasive methods – Creepy Eyes, Red Face, Tall Dude and Oldie. This one would be Knuckles. 

Hard-heeled soles beat the floor in a steady approach. 

‘Any response today?’ The voice belonged to Corina Bain. Overseer of my tortures and a spineless traitor, who'd been gunning to get me incarcerated for years. 

Blood rushed to my head. I closed my eyes and focused on steadying breaths. 

‘I haven’t fully started.’ Knuckles let a smidge of uncertainty taint his tone which was enough to ensure he’d be sent packing. Ellie had seen it happen twice already. I might have smiled if it weren’t for the chill Bain’s presence elicited beneath my skin.

‘Why not? You’ve been here several minutes.’ 

‘I was–’

‘It’s too late. They’ve already assessed you.’ 

‘But she barely looked up at–’

‘You’re finished. Go.’ 

There was a pause and some shuffling, then Knuckles’ footsteps hurried away. 

‘It’s been almost four months,’ Bain said. There was a crackle of cartilage as she lowered to a crouch.

I braced for impact. Whether the blow was mental or physical, Corina Bain never wasted time when she wanted to make me hurt.

‘I saw no record of infertility issues in your file, yet you haven’t had your period since you arrived.’

I nearly flinched. Almost let a hand rise to my stomach. It was still mostly flat, I had checked for a change every time I woke. My muscles had lost density, sure, but that was about all. 

‘Stress related, you think?’ 

I looked up. 

Corina Bain was exactly how she had been when I'd first met her five years previous. Close-cropped black hair. Silk green necktie – only the rich, like her, like my father, chose to wear nooses as accessories. Silver-grey suit, hugging her tall frame. A dark, calculating right eye. A ghastly mechanical left eye that could penetrate even my numbest moments. It was a simple white orb filling an empty socket, framed by veins of fine silver wires that burrowed into Bain’s light brown skin. But that white orb saw things even I couldn’t. 

Bain’s smile spread like acid. ‘I’ve made arrangements.’

*

I sank into a panic when Bain left. My vision guttered, dulling from the exuberant spectrum of my Dhaherite-enhanced sight to a greyscale landscape which signalled I was only a few more pressures away from blacking out entirely again. 

Because of the experiments my father had run on me as a child, I was abnormal, even for a Dhaherite. I was more similar to Eric Blake’s crëglass invention than to anyone else in my own caste. Engineered. 

The average Dhaherite functioned with physical and mental advantages compared to the ungifted, Non-Dhaherite caste. The caste divisions only became Codified in law in AT100, for the centennial celebration of the Tassurian Empire’s foundation. Dhaherite was an ancient, mythic word, which in Tassuri’s Hightongue, translated to disaster– its use an attempted smear on a minority whose existence challenged the Founding families’ power. Non-Dhaherites continued to wield it like a state-sanctioned slur.

Each Dhaherite was cordoned into subdivisions and classes of gifts which children could develop in tailored afterschool programs so they would not be controlled by their abilities. These specific skills were called dhaheri. Some might have inclinations towards gravitational waves, others could become almost entirely invisible, another might have an affinity for tampering flames or water currents. Many had physical advantages of strength, speed and stealth. Rarest, were copycats, able to take on the dhaheri of others and mould them to their will. 

I was a copycat, enhanced by my father’s lunar experiments, and no amount of developmental programs could stop my dhaheri taking control like it was its own sentient being, forever pushing me towards violence.

I was wrong, off-kilter, even among society’s pariahs. 

I tried to hold on to composure, couldn’t risk losing myself. I needed to stay collected enough to plan an escape. Maybe my previous cellmate Theo could help, but that required compliance with Tassuri’s interrogators to some degree. Only, that assumed Knuckles’ negotiations had held any weight. It was unlikely. 

The throb behind my eyes grew to sharp jabs. I wiped them to try stave off the gathering darkness. 

I turned into something else when I blacked out. Violent and ghastly, morality stripped away. To everyone else, I appeared conscious, but episodes could last hours or weeks, and my memory was left wiped as if none of it had happened. Time lost forever.