Bitstream

7.10

Something slams into the side of my head with the raw, unrelenting force of a battering ram, the kind you'd see in a medieval siege, only this one's personal, this one knows exactly where to hit. There's a sickening crack, a flash of white-hot agony, and I'm suddenly weightless for the briefest second before gravity asserts itself and the floor rushes up to meet me. My visor splinters right down the middle before fizzling into black. And then there's the pain: not surface-level, not the kind you scream about and shake off, but something deeper, crueller, more intimate, like a hot nail being driven straight through the core of my skull. My vision narrows to a thread, a tight, quivering line of shadow and fractured light, and in that narrowing tunnel, all I can think is: this might be it. This might actually be the moment I die.

I brace myself on my arm, struggling to draw in breath, each inhale a thing that rattles in my throat, trying desperately to cling to the edge of consciousness before it slips away entirely. Then, oh then, I hear it: footsteps, loud, crunching behind me. I lift my head, barely, and there she is, standing like an omen carved from nightmare, a woman I've never seen before in my life, dressed to the nines in a crisp white button-up and tailored slacks. Gloves on her hands, not a speck of skin showing. But it's the mask that locks me in place: that awful, leering thing moulded into a red, demonic face with sharp ridges and an eternal snarl, and those two blinking red lights glowing from the eyeholes like twin beacons to some hellish place where reason goes to die. She says nothing, not yet, but I don't need words to know she's not here for pleasure, not here to play, and definitely not here looking for any sort of braindance.

The woman steps over Rhythm of Rhythm's corpse and strides towards Vander, who barely has time to flinch before she kicks the pulse rifle from his hands. The weapon clatters away into the dark as she passes him by, her focus already locked on someone else: Cierus, still twitching. She drops to one knee beside her, lifts her head with one gloved hand… and just stares, that red demon mask hovering inches from her face.

Cierus lets out a cough, then slowly lifts a shaking hand towards the woman's Oni mask, her finger tracing the sharp edge as if feeling for a pulse. She leaves it there, resting beneath the curve of the jaw. "You're new…" she murmurs, voice groggy, as if crawling up from the bottom of a dream, a really bad one at that. "Are you here to… save me…?"

The woman lets out a dry chuckle, falls silent, just for a heartbeat. And then, without warning, her hand shoots forward; she grabs the obsidian visor across Cierus' face, fingers tightening, and—

Ripppppp!

Cierus screams as the visor is torn straight from her skull, flesh, wires, and circuits ripping loose in one horrible, wet pull. She drives her mantisblade towards the woman with what little strength she has left, but the woman catches her arm mid-swing. A boot pins down her other limb, and then the gloved hand plunges into the rig at her wrist. There's a twist, another pull, and the blade is wrenched free. A second later, the woman shifts to the other side and does the same to the left.

"You bitch," Cierus shrieks. "Get the fuck off me!" She kicks, claws, thrashes with everything she's got, but it's no use. She's overpowered.

"I don't think you truly understand how this works," the woman replies, and there's something eerily familiar about it. Where have I heard that tone before? "You're going to sit and keep your mouth shut. Do you understand?"

Cierus spits the words: "Who the fuck do you think you are?"

The woman answers by pressing her hand down against Cierus' throat. It's only then that I get a full look at her face, what's left of it. With the visor gone, her eyes are exposed: not eyes at all, but scorched optics, fused into raw muscle, blackened and warped like portals into some private hell. The woman grips her chin and yanks it upward, bringing their faces close. And just like that, Cierus goes limp, completely slack, as if something's hijacked her from the inside, an unseen algorithm flipping the switch. Her mouth droops open.

After that, they don't say a word.

Who is this woman? And what does she want with Cierus? Maybe I'm not the only one in this city with a grudge sharp enough to kill for. I try to push myself upright, but my body won't play along: everything's heavy, screaming, done. I manage to roll to one side, digging into my pocket with fingers that barely work, fumbling for a hit of MX. My hand shakes as I bring the injector to my lips and press down. Nothing. No rush of lemony air, no cooling liquid, no relief.

Shit.

The woman in the red Oni mask rises, letting Cierus' limp body slump to the junkyard. Then she picks up a broken shard of mantisblade and, without hesitation, drives it straight into Cierus' chest. Cierus lets out one final gasp, and then, finally, she's gone.

Cierus Marlow is dead.

The woman carves through the vest, slicing past fabric, muscle, and embedded steel until she reaches the core, where the operating systems sit locked beneath the plates. With one final twist, she frees them, tossing the bloodied mantisblade aside. She plunges her thickly gloved hand into the cavity, grunts, and yanks free two rectangular OS units. She unzips her slack pocket and slides them in. "I knew Ourovane wasn't a group," she says with a chuckle that chills me.

Ourovane? What the hell is she talking about? What could she possibly want with them?

I don't know, and right now, I don't exactly care. We need to get out of this death pit once and for all.

Time drags, but eventually I manage to shift up onto my knees, though the pain screams all the way through me, down to last atom of my bones. Nearby, Dance crawls forward on his elbows towards his brickie, dragging himself like he's got gravity turned up to eleven. Vander pulls himself halfway upright, braced on one knee, bleeding and swaying. Down the line, Fingers is out cold—I hope not dead—and Cormac lies sprawled across the junkyard, limbs thrown wide, chest rising and falling in awful, wheezing gasps. He needs help, and fast.

"Cormac!" I call out, my voice barely more than a ragged whisper scraping up through my throat.

The woman's head snaps up. She freezes. Not like someone startled, but like a predator scenting blood in the wind. Slowly, she turns to face us. Through the tiny slits of her red Oni mask, I see her eyes shift, just for a second, glowing blue as they scan the wreckage. One body at a time. Dance. Vander. Me. Then, on the other side, they land on Cormac.

Something in her changes.

Her breath hitches, and when she speaks, the word comes out so low and full of venom that I can't tell if she's speaking to him or exorcising a ghost:

"You."

It's not a greeting. Not even a curse. It's a sentence.

Cormac's head lolls towards her, confusion in his broken expression, until it clicks. His lips part to speak, maybe to beg, maybe to lie, but no sound comes out.

And her? She just stands there, like the world narrowed to a single point, to a single man, and for the first time, I realise: this isn't about survival anymore.

This is personal.

"All those years," she growls, stalking forward as she kicks aside scraps of shattered metal, her voice rising with every step, "spent rotting in the slums like a rat, because you were too much of a coward to face what you did. What you caused." She's locked on him now. "You scrubbed your name, vanished from the system, prayed I'd forget. Prayed I'd never see that ugly fucking face again."

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Cormac blinks, dazed, blood in his teeth. "My… is it really…?"

"Cormac," I rasp, trying to make sense of any of this. "What's going on? Who is—"

Before I can finish, she whirls on me, finger stabbing through the air. "Shut your fucking mouth, so help me GOD! One word, one, and I swear to Christ, I'll make you regret ever learning to speak."

Her voice hits like a shockwave, but beneath it, there's a tone I know. A sharpness I've heard before. Not this rage, no. But the shape of her voice. And then I remember it: the brown coat, the woman at the burnt-out door, the story Cormac told me.

My stomach drops.

Oh no…

It's…

"Isolde Crane," Cormac manages to say. "How I've… known this day would come."

No one else moves. No one dares. The air around us feels vacuum-sealed, like one wrong breath might ignite it.

"…Oh, I knew it too," Isolde replies, almost gently. "You think I didn't see it coming? You think I didn't dream of this moment?" Her voice trembles. Not with fear, but with something far older, far deeper. "Do you have any idea what you did to me? What you did to her?"

"I do," Cormac says, and for once, he sounds real: stripped of pretense, no smooth talk, no poet's mask. "What I did… it was the pitfall of my life. I've never come to terms with it. I truly am sorry, Isolde."

"Sorry?" she echoes, and now the rage is gone. She goes still, shoulders sagging. Her arms curl up to her chest as if to hold something precious: fragile, imagined. "Sorry…" she says again.

Vander taps my shoulder. I turn, and he's holding out an MX inhaler. His eyes flick towards her, then back to me. The message is clear: It's now or never.

I take the hit, the chemical spike hitting my veins. I take a second, then rise slowly, careful not to make a sound. She doesn't notice. Doesn't turn.

Her arms fall to her sides. There's no fury left in her voice now, no spit, no venom. Just an echo of something old and hollow. "I never thought I'd hear that word from your mouth," she says, and the sound of it feels as though it's been pulled out of the pit of her soul. "That word… sorry."

"It's a word every man must one day admit to," Cormac says. "And I promise you, I have always wanted to tell you. But I know that no matter what is said or what is done, it is only a word. It cannot heal or put things right where things have sunken so aimlessly into the pull of The Devil's thinking… so far and so hollow as I know or can tell, with a life built on regret and a ghost in a machine that never quite remembers when to reboot... that I may not even attempt to explain or justify its weight. All I may say, all I can say is that. And I know, it is not enough."

Isolde stays quiet for a moment. A long moment. So much time passes that I'm not sure things are even real anymore. Then, finally, she says in a low voice, "It used to mean something to me. Used to fix things. Used to hold weight, back when I'd look up at that bastard of a tower and ask the sky… I'd ask it, 'Why me? Of all people?'"

I creep forward, blade ready, careful not to breathe too loud.

"You know what's funny, though?" she goes on, with a dry, rueful laugh. "I used to think I was poor back then. Thought I was trash. Thought all the dumb choices I made were dragging me down into some pit I'd never crawl out of. I looked at people like you, Cormac, all polished boots and gold-plated pensions, and I told myself, 'One day I'll have what they have. I'll earn it. I'll get my degree. I'll make something of myself.' And I did, didn't I? Got the job, hey. Got the money. More money than I ever knew what to do with. More than any woman should ever need. But you know what, Cormac?"

Cormac doesn't look away, doesn't even turn to face me as I creep up on her, ever-so-slowly. And most importantly, he does not speak. He lies there, and he listens to every word.

Isolde's voice softens again, and something in it, some cracked, warbling note, makes my skin crawl. "Now? I'm the poorest I've ever been. Because back then, before you and your platoon came storming in like gods with guns, I had something no paycheque could ever buy. I had her. My little girl. My light. My goddamn everything." Her voice begins to rise, sentence by sentence, shaking with every word. "And now I live in a city that doesn't care. That never cared. There's no dream, no fantasy, no hero on the way, just policy and silence and men like you, whose whole fucking purpose was to protect and serve—"

Her fists are clenched, and her eyes lock onto him. She takes one slow step forward.

"But you just had to ignore me, hey?" She takes another step forward. "You just hadddddd to play the big scary sergeant and focus on your killcount, hey? Just stormed into the scene, saw a digusting, low-life, unemployed woman like me and thought, 'She's not worth my FUCKING TIME!'"

I lunge forward, but Isolde twists around and smashes her fist into the side of my skull.

"And now..." she says.

Pain throbs through my skull as I hit the ground.

"NOW YOU WILL FUCKING KNEEL!" she snarls, voice hoarse with rage, glaring down at Cormac. "AND YOU—" she bellows, now shaking, hair wild, shirt flaring in the breeze. "—YOU WILL BURN TO THE FUCKING GROUND LIKE THE USELESS, EVIL PIECE OF SHIT THAT YOU ARE!"

"What the hell is goin' on here?" Dance says, stumbling forward, breath ragged.

Isolde doesn't even turn. She just lifts her hand.

ZZZAP.

Dance convulses mid-step and drops, his body seizing violently on the floor. Vander reaches for the rifle she kicked aside—

Too late.

Another wave of static whips through the air, and his body locks up before he hits the ground. Smoke curls from his fingers.

Fingers stirs in the rubble, groaning softly, broken but alive.

Isolde stands tall, and in that moment, so help me God, she is neither a mother nor a grieving lost thing bansheeing some awful echo through the brush of an endless forest; she is judgment made of cold, hard flesh, and I can feel it, the way her soul cracks when she steps forward again and unleashes into the world:

"YOU WILL KNOW WHAT IT FEELS LIKE YOU RUTHLESS CUNT!"

She drives a leg hard into Cormac's jaw and it gives. He hurls over onto his side with a groan. He tries to push her back with his arms, wraps his titan of a hand around her arm, but she presses down on it and a bolt of electricity surges along it. It goes limp, and she drives her leg down against the ball-bearing at his shoulder. Little by little, she pulls, pulls, pulls. And Cormac O'Cormac's arm snaps from the pressure. It comes clean off, blood and some yellow coolant pouring out violently, leaving him one-limbed, but she's not done.

Cormac screams in agony as she moves to the opposite side of his body and begins tearing the other limb out. This one takes a bit more time, but it gives, too, and he can do nothing but kick.

"YOU WILL FEEL EVERY LAST BIT OF TORTURE YOU CAUSED HER!"

She grips the other metal limb in her hands, pressing down on his chest with her foot.

Through gritted teeth, through pain, Cormac O'Cormac says, "Do… what… you must…." Another cry.

"Stop!" a voice cries, and when I turn over, I see Fingers trying to pull herself up, trying to lean on the pulse rifle, but she's too weak. "Just fucking stop! Jesus Christ! What are you doing!"

Isolde turns back and, with a clean swoop, hurls Cormac's limb some metres across the junkyard and knocks Fingers into the scrap. Then she looks at one of the giant dead snakes in the distance, covered in sparking circuitry and oil. After a moment, she grabs Cormac by the scruff of his bodyguard suit and drags him along the ground, his pants being torn open by the debris. When she reaches the mechanical snake corpse, she swings Cormac's massive frame into the pool of oil in the undercarriage.

I try to pick myself up, to knock some sense into my spoofer and hack her out of this, but it's not working. She's busted it good.

I know what's about to happen. We all know.

And it makes me sick.

She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a lighter. "Just so you know," she pants, flicking the lighter once and sparking a flame.

Everything goes silent, goes still. The entire universe seems to take a seat and listen to its deterministic state finally come to fruition, to watch what had always been waiting to happen… happen.

"Her name was Elysia Crane."

Isolde tosses the lighter into the pool of oil and circuitry. And it falls, spiralling so aimlessly through the air that it feels as though it might never hit, but it does. Oh, it does. And the flames erupt.

They reach him first. They lick at his suit coat, the delicate fabric igniting in an instant. His long legs flail, beating against the air, against the fire that consumes him. His face twists in agony, tears streaking his cheeks even as the heat blackens them.

No, sergeant. I'm telling you that the woman will never forget it. What I done to her, to her child. That kind of grief lingers, stays, grows into something monstrous. Rots. Becomes something else entirely. And one day, sergeant, I'll answer for it. And you will, too.

Cormac kicks at empty air, powerless to escape his destiny. The flames surge higher, a wall of orange that swallows him whole. And then there is nothing but the fire: roaring, crackling, devouring. Cormac's cries peter into silence.

Silence. Listen now. You. Will. Listen.

And dear Mono, every day that passes, I wonder if she'll finally come for me. If she'll walk through some door, not with fire in her hands, but silence. And maybe that's what I deserve. Maybe that's how this ends.

Suddenly the world goes fuzzy, muffled… attentive.

I hear Fingers scream. I hear the others shouting some inconceivable horrors that I can't quite put into words but can feel on every level that matters.

Guilt, you see, it isn't rational. It just is. Like rust. You can scrape it, bury it, polish the steel, but one day, it gets through. One day, it reaches the core. And when it does, you begin to wonder if maybe the rot's always been there, just waiting.

Isolde Crane stands over his corpse and watches as the snake's inner fixtures collapse.

And when the last coil of smoke slips from the ruin of his chest, Cormac O'Cormac—sergeant, coward, killer—is no more than a broken name beneath a dying sky.