Alysha's Fall Read online

  Alysha waited. She could feel the stares of the others in the room; the stench of their terror made her nostrils flare.

  “But you didn’t just play Balance-Maker with one of the girls.” Tiell rolled his fingernail against the spar of one tooth, cleaning it. “You raised your hand against a customer. You showed claws. You opened skin. Not just against one, but against two, the second of which couldn’t even be claimed as self-defense. Showing claws—that’s a mortal offense. I told you when you came here, never, ever to pop them. Not at me, not at anyone. But you didn’t listen, did you?”

  Alysha didn’t answer.

  “Well. I’m not interested in makin’ sure you listen, Steel. You’re a big girl now. You make your own decisions.”

  She heard the others sigh, but something in Tiell’s eyes held back her own relief.

  “No, I’m not interested in makin’ you listen. I’m interested in makin’ sure you never do it again.” Tiell smiled, baring his teeth as he leaned casually against the near wall. He gestured to the wolfine with the bag. “Pull out her claws.”

  Alysha jerked upward, but the male beside her thrust her back into the seat. He wrapped his hand around her throat as the third one came forward and tied her limbs to the arms and legs of the chair. She felt the clamp on her right palm, forcing her claws out of her fingers and holding them immobile, but she couldn’t tear her eyes from Tiell’s. He smirked at her as the Hinichi sat in front of her and pulled out a pick.

  She focused on Tiell to keep from screaming. Oil ran in rivulets over her face. She could hear Rose wailing, but her vision narrowed to a white tunnel with the manager’s satisfied smile at its end. She felt the first two go and then fell into the heart of a star.

  “Steel, Steel, Steel, Steel . . . ”

  Alysha whimpered softly, curled into a tight ball with her hands and feet in the protected center. Her body pulsed, a writhing pain shooting through her extremities to twist the rest of her. The agony so overwhelmed her that she didn’t understand the hands petting her spine, her shoulders, untangling her hair until an endless stretch of time later. She couldn’t tell the voices apart, but she heard them. Her field of vision remained obscured by the blinding white. When they tried to pick her up, she screamed. The soothing hands came again, but the jostling continued until she felt herself lifted. Her body erupted into an oil-sweat that cooled as a light breeze played against one side of her body. She could feel something crushed against half her side, and a heartbeat throbbed through the wall. Alysha listened to it, eyes wide open and sightless. It drove away the other voices, the mutters about trauma and shock and blood loss. Her world faded again.

  She woke sometime later, shooting upward in bed only to be repulsed by the haloarch meld. “No!”

  A shadow crossed her breast as Nathan Lifeweave, the Tam-illee doctor, appeared above her. “Rest, Alysha. You’ve had a bad time.”

  “I can’t. I have to go! Is it morning already? What time is it? My claws!”

  “Hush, curse it! Do you have any idea what you’ve been through? Lie down!”

  The sheer volume of the doctor’s voice convinced her to lie prone, but she attempted to lift her hand and look at it. The force meld stopped her; she couldn’t even feel her fingers. “My hands.”

  “Numbed for now.” Nathan sat on the empty bed beside hers. “We have a great deal to discuss.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s only half past one mark! Relax, kara. Whether you want to or not, you are not leaving here until you rest for a few hours.”

  Alysha’s ears swept back. She tried to clench her fists but couldn’t tell if she’d succeeded; the lack of sensation unnerved her. “Can you stop the field?”

  “Yes, but I won’t,” Nathan said. He sighed. “Will you calm down and listen to me?”

  She took a breath. “Yes.”

  “I just spent two hours repairing your claw beds. They are in an extremely volatile position. I had to leave them open in case you wanted replacements, but the nerves had to be handled immediately. Your hands and feet are in the numb field so you won’t unintentionally flex the tendons, because if you do you’ll break the scabs and start bleeding. Liberally. Your hands and toes, the former in particular, are supplied a great deal of blood.” He folded his arms over his ribcage and leaned back, sighing. “The nerve damage was extensive.”

  “Will they heal?” Alysha asked, lying very still.

  “Most probably. You might end up with a more aggravated case of osteoarthritis in your fingers and toes as you get older, particularly if you choose to go with the implants. Most of them approximate real ones, but there’s still the slight chance of rejection.” His ears flicked back. “Do you want your claws replaced? I can order you a new set. It’ll take a month or so, but you’ll need at least two weeks for the beds to lose their trauma reactions, anyway.”

  “Two weeks?” Alysha asked, eyes widening.

  Nathan scowled. “I’ll remind you that you had the damn things yanked out of your claw beds? With a miniature spoon, no less?”

  “Is that what it was,” she murmured.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I didn’t look.”

  Nathan stared at her and said, “I really should report this, you know.”

  Alysha grew tense. “And lose me my chance to finish school?”

  “A scholarship—”

  “To a girl who used to work as an illegal prostitute?”

  The resulting silence was not at all comfortable.

  The doctor shook his head. “So, do you want the replacements?”

  One glance assured Alysha that she was wearing her sweatsuit, but she still felt naked. “Yes.”

  “I’ll bring the materials catalog for you to—”

  “I know what I want them made of.”

  “You do?” Nathan’s ear twitched forward, and he halted mid-step.

  Alysha nodded. “Breathnache.”

  The Tam-illee stared at her, then rasped in exasperation. “You’re not going to find that in a medical catalog!”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t even know if they make prosthetic claws in that.”

  “Find out.”

  Nathan walked to her bedside and rested his hands on the haloarch. “You’re joking with me, aren’t you.”

  Alysha shook her head, ice-water eyes resting on him.

  “Completely aside from the medical issues, which are surmountable if unpredictable, and the monetary issues, which are only nearly impossible, do you realize what it would mean? You couldn’t extend your claws from your hands even a pinch. You’d could gouge anything, including transmetal alloys! You wouldn’t even notice it if you cut your arm open!”

  “I’ll learn to live with it,” Alysha said.

  “If you absolutely require a rigid replacement, diamond would be cheaper. They won’t have to shape that atom by atom.”

  “I want breathnache.”

  Nathan’s ears new back and he sighed. “Fine. I’ll ask about it.”

  “Thank you,” Alysha answered to his back as he swept out of her meld of view. She flexed her palm, feeling nothing, then said, “Do you think I’m insane as well, Laelkii-alet?”

  An amused chuckle sounded from just beyond her sight. “So you heard me come in, did you? Sharp ears, arii-kara.” The woman approached, her dark bathrobe matching her loam brown eyes. She set a delicate hand on top of the haloarch and looked down at Alysha. “No, I don’t think you’re insane. Obstinate, maybe, but not insane.”

  “Not insane for wanting claws harder than diamond or transmetal alloys?”

  Laelkii slowly shook her head, her messy braid inching over her shoulder at the motion. “No . . . no, I think you need it.” A tiny smile parted her lips. “I call you ‘arii-kara’, but only your body is young. You’re as old as the world you’re moving through.”

  “I didn’t want to lose . . . ” Alysha began, then stopped. “I didn’t want any of this,” she said at last.


  “What did you want?” Laelkii asked, sliding onto the bed Nathan had just vacated. “What do you want, arii-not-a-kara?”

  Alysha stared at the ceiling. “Stars. I want the stars. I want . . . my feet on a deck, to hear the hum of the Well Drive. I want . . . to be more than I am.”

  “Fleet. You’re in the Academe, then, not Terracentrus U.” Laelkii’s voice began to detach from reality as Alysha grasped for the world outside the white film on her vision. She squirmed beneath the field, fighting.

  “Yes. Yes, that’s what I wanted. It just hasn’t been the way I thought it would be.”

  “Tell me.”

  The story came, reluctantly. Alysha could count Laelkii’s breaths, even and then hurried, occasionally halting. From the beginning with her father, walking through the greens, carried on his shoulders to stare at the stars and count the worlds; to her life with her mother, moving to successively poorer neighborhoods . . . her mother’s fall as she decided not to sing and instead worked at Sapphire Slippers, the food and care she desperately needed and never received, her rebellion as she ran from her graduation on the first train to Terracentrus . . . the lack of scholarships and jobs that found her where she was.

  In the silence that followed, Alysha looked away, composing herself. Somehow the story gained a weight it had never had when she’d hidden it in herself. Voicing it made it real. “There was a park near one of the houses we moved to . . . it had a statue of Holly. She’d been standing with a straight spine and an outstretched hand. Nude—not naked, but nude, as she might have been before she led the Pelted off Earth. But not ashamed.” Alysha turned her face back to Laelkii. “I don’t want to live in shame, alet. Whatever happens to me now, today . . . I want to look like Holly when it’s done.”

  The shadows deepened over Alysha’s face as Laelkii leaned over her head. The Asanii’s gray braid coiled against Alysha’s collar bone as the white feline gently kissed her on the forehead. “I don’t think anyone could stop you.” Alysha felt the cool white hand soft on her cheek. “Rest now.”

  “Laelkii . . . ”

  The woman paused.

  “Did something stop you?”

  Laelkii looked away. “I don’t understand.”

  “You seem sad when you look at me.”

  The woman came back, rested her hand on the haloarch again. She fidgeted, glanced away. “I just think I’d want my daughter to be like you.”

  “You have children?”

  A flush touched Laelkii’s ears. “Not yet.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alysha murmured.

  “No . . . no, don’t be sorry.” Laelkii laughed. “I like you. You just . . . remind me of things I’ve forgotten.”

  Sensing a wound, Alysha gently asked, “What things?”

  Laelkii closed her eyes, head bowed. She was frowning. “Old ambitions. An old life. I was in medical school once, too . . . that’s how I met Nathan. But we thought we’d settle down, have children first. . . . ” She shook her head and smiled faintly, then met Alysha’s eyes. “Sometimes things fade away.”

  “Even dreams?” Alysha asked.

  “For some people,” Laelkii said, touching her cheek. “Rest now.”

  Alysha watched her go, but did not sleep for a long time.

  Two days later, Alysha returned to Phantasies into a nightmare, one she didn’t recognize until she walked into the back room assigned to her and found three patrons waiting for her, one of them holding her black key clenched in a massive fist. Her hands and feet throbbed in warning as the men closed in on her, and despite her contract Alysha turned to flee. One grabbed her tail and yanked her back, and then their silhouettes blotted out the lights.

  Four hours later, she couldn’t move. Her fingers and toes oozed blood onto the mattress, one of many eruptions in her body.

  “Steel?” Angel’s face appeared at the door, then broke into a mask of horror. “Naemfili!”

  Alysha managed a thin smile and squeezed the words through a throat raspy with suppressed screams. “Think . . . time t’go back to the clinic.”

  Nathan, the Tam-illee doctor, healed her that time—and each of the successive times Tiell sold her black key to groups of people—Laelkii a white silhouette always nearby. Alysha ignored the pain, studied at school despite it, but the beatings began to occur too frequently. On the day Nathan stated any more of that kind of treatment would destroy her body, Tiell gave her the end of the night off.

  Alysha strode down the alleys on her way back to her quarters on-campus, ducking between pools of wan light. It was almost three mark, and dreams of sleep lured her away despite the manager’s sly smile. The drip from the afternoon’s rain tempted her to dance to a private rhythm, something cleaner than the pieces Phantasies played for her, the ones that forced bodies to gyrate rather than move. A brief memory struck her: Father sitting on the couch as Mother stretched her fingers over the piano in the living room, singing along to her music as the child Alysha had been spun in circles until she fell, dizzied and laughing. A sad smile stretched across Alysha’s mouth as she reached for the cool wall across her path to spring over it.

  The arms that wrapped around her waist and tossed her to the cold ground didn’t seem real to her until her upper back and shoulders skidded against the wet crete. Startled, Alysha glanced up to find herself surrounded by the same three patrons who had bought her key most of the first week Tiell had sold it to groups.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t the little night-dancer.”

  Alysha backed away, skidding across the dark street.

  “Are you sure that’s her? She’s so . . . over-dressed.”

  “Can’t have that, can we?”

  She recognized a cue as well as anyone and leapt to her feet, launching herself in the opposite direction only to slam into a wall. Disoriented, she staggered, then jumped forward again, trying to climb out of reach. They casually plucked her off the stone and dragged her into their embrace, stripping her in the cold darkness.

  Alysha welcomed the adrenaline surge that tore through her as their hands dug into her and their breath clouded her nose. She opened her mouth to let loose her howl of rage, willing her claws out of her fingers, claws no longer present. The beds had only begun to heal, and blood new from the slits as she broke the scabs.

  The worry on the faces of her attackers fled at the sign of her impotence. Panicked, Alysha flailed in their grasp. Her lack of clothing paled beside her lack of defense. Their laughter choked her ears as they pinned her down, and her mind blanked.

  The wall settled through the fog of skewed vision into an approximate of reality. Alysha became aware of the numbing cold seeping against her cheek, then identified the same sensation along the bony ridges of her shoulder, her hip, the length of one bruised thigh. The condensation of her breath as it lunged from her mouth in short pants distracted her.

  The constant languid drip of the gutters focused as she tilted her ears into motion. Every part of her body screamed its distress, but Alysha heard none of it. The sound drowned in the force of her anger. Its demands proved stronger than her torn flesh, and the world again receded into white mist.

  Alysha clambered to her tortured feet and limped to a walk that became a wrath-fueled jog. She wound her way back through the alleys, tossing herself over the walls she used as short-cuts, her body’s impotent protest streaked across her cheeks. The first snow of the year began to drift across the world, but she barely felt it. When she found the bulk of Phantasies, she uttered a low sound, an aborted sob-snarl.

  The Karaka’An had never entered Tiell’s office. None of the dancers had, though they all knew its location. Drawn by a power greater than pain, Alysha palmed open the door and found his back to her as he worked at his desk. She teetered in the doorway a few precious seconds, then spurred herself forward. Tiell turned, the exasperated remark on his tongue throttled as Alysha tore him from his chair and drummed him to the ground, her knee shoved between his legs and his wrists imprisoned i
n one of her hands. She was not aware of the other hand’s actions, seeing only through the glaze of white that Tiell’s head snapped back and forth, leaping against his neck as if it had gained a separate life and was trying to detach from the rest of him. One last whip of her palm and his nose distorted; she paused in her battery to examine it, found it disturbed her. Beneath the taut cord of her body, Tiell’s hips and legs shook. She did not strike again, briefly overwhelmed by pain. She rolled her lip between her teeth in an effort to fight the sobs of exhaustion.

  The silence in the room broke when a drop of blood and salt water fell from her mouth onto the side of his lip. She saw his swollen eyes crack into yellowed slits. She vomited a wad of spit at him, the force of her contempt so strong she gagged on it.

  Tiell bared his teeth, a faded grimace on his bruised face.

  “You . . . will . . . stop it.” Her voice, like her body, twisted beneath the brunt of her anger.

  The manager’s words slurred through his split lips. “Stop what?”

  “You know!” Alysha snarled. “You know! You send them after me! You sell my key to beat me! You will stop it, or you’ll have nothing left to enjoy your prostitutes with!” Her knee jerked upward, a tiny motion that drained the blood from Tiell’s ears.

  “Let’s talk about this,” he said shakily.

  “No! No talk! One answer! Give it to me now, Tiell!”

  “What’s to prevent me from sayin’ ‘yes’ just to get you off me and then havin’ you killed?”

  “I have friends. They’ll miss me,” Alysha answered, and twisted her knee. “And if you botch the job, I’ll come back and kill you, Tiell. I’ll kill you. I don’t care what they do to me afterwards, I’ll kill you.” She stared down at him until he twitched and glanced away. When he didn’t reply, she struck him across the mouth, and then again, her hand a frenzy as his body bucked under hers.

  “Stop! I agree! I agree!”

  Alysha drew back, then snarled and thrust him away, sitting back on her knees. She managed to climb to her feet, then limped to him and grabbed his shirt, tugging him forward.

  “I’ll be watching you for any sign,” she hissed, breath whistling through the spars of her teeth, “And if I see it . . . you’re a smear in my hands, Tiell. I swear it by every ideal I have, by every ideal you’ve betrayed.”