Chapter Text
Marcoh leaned - no, huddled, more like - in the corner of the safehouse. He kept his hands shoved in his pockets, his eyes averted. A stray curl of hair fell down over his face, and he let it stay.
At length, he sighed. “I’m not good at these kinds of situations...”
He’d been doing well, up until this. The big man was a quiet sort, but calm, and confident, and he carried himself like a man who’d lived among unseen danger, someone for whom a threat that was knowable and punchable was something of a relief. But a secret shadow had crept into him on the long walk back from the Church of Alll-Mer, with the girl slung limp over his shoulder. He’d wrapped himself up in the shadow while their captive was being secured; while Daan worked, he glowered out of it like an executioner’s hood. It was shame, if Marina was any judge.
And she was. Marina couldn’t bring herself to look at the girl, either.
“Nothing broken, no concussion,” Daan pronounced, sitting up from his patient. “Even the blindness seems temporary. I’m not even sure it was Marcoh that knocked her out. She’s very weak, very - sickly, I suppose. She might have just gotten - overwhelmed, fainted on her feet.” He turned his head and coughed into his sleeve.
“On her feet.” At Marina’s side, Marcoh shifted uncomfortably. “Until I laid her out.” He touched a thumb to his sternum, stile Vaticano .
“Precisely.” Daan stood. He nearly hit his head on the upper bunk; Marina had the sudden notion that the loss of his eye must have been more recent than she had thought, the way he hadn’t learned to compensate for his left side. But if it hadn’t been in the war -
Marina reined herself in - she was avoiding the inevitable, casting about for something else to think about. She should look at the girl. She should look -
Karin stepped up to hand Daan a cigarette, almost automatically, and he took it just as easily. It was a smooth and wordless interaction, and neatly derailed Marina’s train of thought. When, exactly, this rapport between them had developed, and how, was lost on her.
“Is this wise?” Karin gestured to the bar overhead. “Keeping her here.”
“Well... She’s not a monster. She’s not Bremen.”
“We don’t know that.” Not a challenge - a reminder. Karin stared steadily over Daan’s shoulder, at the spindly shape on the bed. Marina still couldn’t - still couldn’t look at her.
“She’s blinded and beaten. She’s handcuffed to the bed,” Daan murmured around his cigarette, as he gathered up the contents of his medical bag. “What are you proposing, anyway? We just shoot her in the face?”
The room was cold. It was the practical thing, maybe. It was what the Festival demanded. They all were thinking about it - it was what they were there for. Marina could not deny there was a part of her that churned for it, for what the girl had done. Or half-done, or...
Karin only stared, one hand in her pocket. Everyone knew by now that was where she kept her pistol. Everyone knew by now - better safe than sorry.
At length, Daan broke the silence. “Save yourself the bullet, at least. You could do it with a well-aimed pail of water. Look: all the Kaiser’s men have been - huge. What did Olivia call them? ‘Anatomically improbable.’ All the monsters we’ve seen have - haven’t been - it’s been obvious, what they were. Not like this girl. Not with...” He made to touch his wrist, then - tore a match from a booklet, and struck it on the bedpost. “She couldn’t hurt anyone if she wanted to.”
“We just watched her kill Marina’s father.”
Marina gasped.
Her first summer in Vatican City, she’d had a roommate who’d gotten careless chopping vegetables, and neatly severed the tip of her thumb. It was the most blood Marina had ever seen prior to the Festival, and the imagined sensation of it - open air on that white tip of bone, the feeling of steel whispering through flesh - it curdled her stomach. Her roommate had taken it well, all laughs and shock-shivers as the house matron wrapped her up. But the morning after, when the gauze had become one great sodden scab that they’d had to rip from the wound to clean it out, then it seemed to hit her all at once. She’d really screamed. It was terrible.
Marina felt that way now - as if a great sheaf of skin had been pulled from her, fast as a tablecloth trick, and left her grief and guilt and vast red rage to run streams down her back and soak through her blouse. The sensation was so sudden, the pain so shocking, that her throat closed up before a cry could escape.
And... There was something else, too, besides the pain. A sensation of - closure. Satisfaction . How could that be?
Marina stood there, wracked, and was silent.
Marcoh shook his head. The rogue curl swung and settled. “We said we wouldn’t kill people.” With stony tenderness, he stepped between her and Karin, swiping the hair back behind his ear. Dimly, Marina registered that his knuckles had bled through their bandages.
Karin pivoted to meet him, holding her ground despite his height. Marcoh had nearly half a meter on her. “We said,” she corrected him, “that we wouldn’t kill each other .”
There was an unsteady moment where all of them wondered what more she might say - how Pav had already broken the vow, how close Marcoh and Marina both had come to killing the girl already - and the mood went taut.
“It ought to be Marina,” O’saa said, and everyone jumped, “who decides her fate.”
“Alll- Mer , man!” Daan snatched his cigarette up off the floor. “Forgot you were there.”
For a man dressed entirely in yellow, O’saa excelled at going unnoticed. And a thousand other things - he was assured, competent, deliberate. If Marcoh’s calm was glacial, O’saa’s was coiled; poised to pounce. He had spoken very little about himself in the time they had spent together, but to Marina, the robes of a Yellow Mage were unmistakable. At first, it had struck her as admirable - his refusal to bend his person or his wardrobe to Bohemian expectation - but now, with the lambent yellow of his eyes bearing down on her, admiration turned to unease. His raiment, a thing of practicality more than pride. Knight’s armor. A butcher’s apron. Alone among the contestants, Marina knew exactly what he was capable of.
Contestants. The Moon’s cruel bondsman was already infiltrating her vocabulary.
“Apologies, apologies.” O’saa laughed. Marcoh had snap-turned in surprise, fists clenched, and as O’saa made his way into the little crowd he patted the man’s bicep as if soothing an anxious dog. Smiling, smiling. He had a kind face, despite it all, but it was a cold kindness.
“Marina,” he said, “this woman has killed your kin. In return, you have taken her captive, taken her sight - ”
“Temporarily,” she breathed. Her voice felt rough and unfamiliar.
“Temporarily, if you wish it so. This is my point: she has wronged you, and you and your allies have mastered her. Her life is yours to do with what you will.” He cast a hand over the shape on the bed. Marina turned, and looked, and saw.
The girl was her age. Daan was right: she was cadaverously thin. Her ribs showed beneath her pinafore, even in the half-light. She lay insensate, her head lolling towards the wall, her hair a pool of tar splashed over the pillow and about her face.
That face... from which Marina had heard only one word escape.
That face, gaunt and grave, smeared with lipstick and dried blood, lay lost amongst the lank black strands like a chip of cuttlefish bone. Where Marcoh had struck her, a bloodless rent had opened beneath one eyebrow, which neither blackened nor swelled. Where Marina had taken her turn, the girl’s eyes still dribbled black smog.
An argument started up somewhere behind Marina. She wasn’t listening.
One arm hung suspended from the bedpost by a pair of handcuffs, and the hand that crowned it - as pale and slight as skim milk - was locked in Second Ankarian, frozen mid-cast. She was from the Ministry, then. A classmate? Marina didn’t recognize her.
“Back to the Church?” someone asked.
Someone else said, “We have to.”
The girl felt... powerful.
No. Not powerful. Rotted by power. Power had passed through her. Like an implacable river, it had cut her, widened her, uprooted everything in her that might have arrested its torrential advance, and when that was done, it had worn smooth whatever was left. She looked dead, or worse - and yet she breathed. And yet, she was...
Radiant.
O’saa pressed a hand to Marina’s back, and a symbol into her mind. Countless hours in sigil-carving classes named it before she even had time to think: Soul.
A thought - his thought, his voice, in her mind - struck her like a dart. If you wish to stay competitive, you will get no better chance than this. Take it, if you like, and nobody will blame you. Marina startled, whirled, dropped the shackled hand of the comatose girl. When had she - ?
“What did you say?”
O’saa stepped back, his hands raised. The picture of innocence, aside from his sly smile.
“I said, we’re going back to the Church of Alll-Mer. You can come with, or you can stay here.” He didn’t wait for her answer, only turned to join Daan and Marcoh, already waiting by the ladder up into PRHVL Bop. Only Karin stood close, one hand in the pocket of her jacket.
In the other, she held out a small key.
“For the handcuffs.” Karin said. “If you want. Olivia and Levi are upstairs. I’ll let them know that you’re - you’re down here. Okay?”
Marina stood alone with her heartbeat.
“Fine,” she said, and reached out to take the key. “Pray for me, I guess.”
Only O’saa laughed.
///
She couldn’t do it, in the end.
Marina stood over the girl’s body for one endless hour, at first with the knife in hand, and then without. Daan or somebody had cleaned it off, and a part of her felt like maybe if it was still hot and slick with her father’s blood she could have drawn on the horror of it all and done something horrible in turn, but she didn’t have it in her. Just the trying made her sad.
She didn’t even know the girl’s name, or why she’d done it. When she’d finally decided to put the knife down, she thought maybe she could wait until the girl woke up, and this - this ghoul, this pallid monster on the bed, with its sunken eyes and bony claws, it would leap at her throat and tear at her clothes and maybe then that would be it, that would be enough, and she could put the knife in the other girl and make her die for what she’d done.
But she didn’t really want to.
She’d cried a bit. Only a little. The whole situation was too complicated - Marina couldn’t quite work out what she was crying for, or who, and the whole time she was down here trying to squeeze out a tepid platitude for a man she’d only ever despised, the world outside shook itself to pieces in fits of emetic apoplexy. What was the death of one more monster, compared to all the other deeds done by Moonlight?
‘Girl,’ he’d called her. His dying words, an unprecedented affirmation. ‘Stupid girl,’ but...
No. She knew things - suspected worse. Had seen the look in Levi’s eye when the haunted hulk of her father’s Orphanage loomed up out of the mist. He must have done unspeakable things. His position, his power. She spurred the thought on, drove it home: he must have killed her mother, too - blown her down by bullet or spell or a knife in the gut, pared away the head and hands that raised her like the dirty ends of a soup vegetable, and fed the rest into that awful welter of flesh that bound him to the church. And all for what?
She’d never know.
So that was that. It would have to be. Father Domek had always taught her not to fritter away pity on the unworthy, and for the first time in her life, she felt inclined to listen.
Eventually, she’d hauled herself up the ladder to fetch herself a bottle of wine and tell the others she was going to try and get some sleep. Olivia had snapped shut the book on her lap the moment the trapdoor slid aside. She was empathetic, and genuine, and gave Marina a little speech she’d clearly been working on, and when Marina assured her she hadn’t actually killed the girl in the basement Olivia had practically swooned with relief. Hell, if not for the wheelchair, she might have jumped for joy.
“Not that I thought you were - that sort of person, but - well, even Alll-Mer took His revenges.” She fanned her rosy cheeks, trying to soothe the blush. It made Marina smile - really smile. They hugged, passed a bottle back and forth, and Olivia had squeezed Marina’s hands in hers. Eventually, Olivia reminded her she had been heading to bed, and so she went.
Outside, where Levi stood watch, sulfur sunlight still saturated the fog.
Who knew how long it had been since she’d slept last. Time was all wrong; they’d worked that out early on. The first day lasted endless hours: thirty or more, Karin had guessed, before the sun began to set. The night felt even longer, haunted as they were by the figure atop the tower, limned in his Master’s light.
When she reached the bottom of the ladder, the speakeasy was much as Marina had left it. It was an L-shaped room, and the light from the solitary lantern over by the beds didn’t quite reach into the little armory around the corner. On a whim, Marina stepped into it to undress, taking a pull from the bottle of Valland red.
A thought occurred to her, there amid the cordite-scented darkness: maybe, being a god of the moon, Rher had little experience of days, and didn’t know how long they ought to be. The thought made Marina giggle.
(Giggling, really? She lifted the bottle up to peer at it, the way the sport fencers at the Ministry would make a show of reevaluating their opponent after a deft touch. It was tart and lovely - so tannic it made her tongue ache. She took another slug and set it aside, vowing to return.)
The first order of business was getting her bra off. The silly things were made for frames a little narrower than Marina’s - it usually didn’t bother her, aside from the petty annoyance of it - but today was worse than usual; she had taken a hard fall that morning, running from something writhing in the fog, and a sharp pain lanced through her shoulder at the strain of fiddling with the hooks.
Marina’s eyes drifted upwards. Maybe she could ask Olivia. She giggled again. How she’d blush! The memory of the other woman’s hands around hers sweetened the idea - but no, no, the ladder down. And even if they managed it, she would have to explain everything -
Marina righted herself, her hands on her hips. What was she thinking? She glared at the bottle of wine - no stranger to her; an old friend, in fact, encouraging her worst instincts. She’d cut her teeth drinking stolen communion wine, goading and being goaded into exploring the old Church dungeons by snookered school friends. By the time she’d arrived in Vatican City, she’d considered herself a veteran in good standing. Alas, in the year since, long nights of study had kept her out of practice. She was, perhaps, in a lighter weight class than she remembered.
With a grunt of mellow irritation, she hauled her bra up and over her head without unbuckling the clasp.
The room was cold, and the sudden sensation of freedom raised a ripple of goosebumps on her chest - like slow sparks, prickling along the contours of her breasts, setting something unspooling in her gut. As she straightened, shivering, the feeling coaxed a little gasp from her. Her hands were warm, and...
She shrugged her blouse back on in lieu of a chemise, feeling flushed and ridiculous - and snorted softly at the nuzzle of fabric against her nipples as she fumbled with the buttons. The damn wine! Worse still was taking off her skirt: in the process of wriggling out of it, the waistband goosed the bulge in her panties. Lovely. Just the thing she needed. She bit her lip, quite beyond giggling now.
She couldn’t act on it, of course. This was the worst possible time, the worst possible place. She’d seen such terrible things in the last two days - breathed the fetid air of dimensions unseen, seen strangers and acquaintances broken and burned. She had -
She had watched her father die , just that morning. And -
And... she was so stressed ...
Marina caressed herself. The little silken bundle offered no counterargument to all her worldly woes, none aside from its sweetness, the simplicity of its request, the way she was already shifting and swelling beneath the fabric, heartbeat by heartbeat. Her hands were warm, warm despite it all, and it would be such a little thing to slip a finger beneath the hem, to touch her cock -
“Marina...”
She froze.
She had almost forgotten - she was not truly alone.
///
The voice was a ragged whisper, spoken through the open threshold of a dream. Marina’s blood turned to concrete in her veins.
What had it said?
Around the corner, out of sight, the bedframe creaked as the shackled woman stirred. Then, a terrible stillness, followed by the rattle-whack of the handcuff being discovered, tested. Marina pressed her back against the wall as quietly as she could.
The knife - where had she left the knife?
“What have I... What did I do ?”
It was hard to think, with her heart pounding grout and battery acid, but - Marina was almost certain - the woman was talking to herself.
“I take it back, I’d do anything to take it back,” the woman croaked. “I - I am so, so sorry. What did I do? What did I do...” She was talking to herself. Marina was sure, now.
She edged closer to the corner of the wall. There was the knife, on the coffee table in the far side of the room, glittering in the lanternlight. She couldn’t see the beds from here, but it seemed well out of reach -
“Kaaa, Samarie, what did you do !”
There was an ugly thwack of bone on wood, and Marina flinched back from the boards. She could feel the vibration in her fingertips - the woman had beaten something against the wall. Her fist?
“What did I do!” Thwack . “What did I do!!” Thwack ! “Whhghh... Dhhh...” The handcuff rattled. If it wasn’t her fist, then - Marina cringed - her face? Gods.
Then - the woman began to weep.
“Why didn’t you kill me?” Her voice was thick and wrong somehow, nasal, bloated by tears and - something else. She must have broken her nose. “I didn’t mean to... Or maybe I did - but I wouldn’t have, if he hadn’t... You should have killed me. Oh, Marina. If only you had killed me...”
Marina drew air through her teeth. There was so much hurt in that voice, so much longing, that Marina couldn’t help but realize. Hearing her name again, it was all as plain as blood on bedsheets. She hadn’t misheard. Back in the church, as the group rushed to stop the stabbing, the blood - the woman had shrieked something.
“Marina...”
Marina hadn’t been mistaken when she thought their eyes locked, even as Marcoh was drawing back his fist - hadn’t misunderstood the look in those eyes, even as they were smothered by smog.
“Wherever you are... I hope you understand...”
What she had seen there was love.
“I did it for you.”
Marina’s heart was pounding. She had a sudden impulse - a mad, wild, impossible impulse - to step around the corner, to reveal herself, to ask, to demand -
Beneath her, a floorboard creaked.
“Who’s there?!” The voice went sharp. The handcuff rattled against the bedpost.
Well. That was that.
Marina took a step forward, as if in a dream. What was she thinking? Her impulses, already given an inch, begged and whined and pressed her for a mile and, after a moment, she gave it to them. She stepped into the room.
The woman clung to the bedpost she was bound to, as if half-drowned. She looked like a ghost. Her hair hung around her face, a black and silken burial shroud, out of which was visible only one eye, still occluded by smoke. She had a birdlike aspect; her body was long and angular and folded up on itself like she was trying to dodge an oncoming future. As Marina stepped into view, the eye twitched and narrowed, tracking her.
Or trying to.
“Stay back!” She lifted a hand. Her fingers flashed: First Ankarian, Third, somatic stop. She coughed and snorted - trying to clear blood from her sinuses - and when she came back up, Marina caught a glimpse of fresh blood on her lips, saw the bruise already creeping into her eye sockets. She had broken her nose. Gods! “I-Identify yourself. Okay? I can’t see you very well.”
Marina stepped a little further into the room. The eye widened.
“You know who I am.”
It was a hunch - more than a hunch - but it struck home. The effect was instant: the woman dropped her outstretched palm and tore her hair from her face. She drew a forearm across her mouth to clean herself, and bit back a scream of agony when it hit her nose. Her arm, normally the corpse-color of tallow, came away smeared black and red.
“...Marina.” She was shaking from the pain. “Hi.”
Marina only stared.
“You… heard all that, I suppose.”
“Yes.” Marina said, clipped. “Everything.”
The silence stretched between them. The only motion was the flicker of the lantern’s flame, and the threads of smoke still curling from the strange woman’s eyes.
“What did you... think?”
“What did I...” Marina groped around in her head for something to say, a normal reaction to have; it took a moment, like an engine struggling to turn over. Then, combustion: she whirled across the room in three long strides, and snatched the knife from the table. When she turned back, hair flying, the knife she held out in front of her shone like the Boatman’s silver lantern.
“I think I want to know who you are, and how you know me, and why you - did that.”
She brandished the blade at eye level - but the other woman only squinted at it, uncomprehending.
“Marina... I thought you’d know me - I’m Samarie. I did it for you.”
With a snarl of frustration, Marina advanced until the tip of the knife hovered scant millimeters from Samarie’s chest. Then, she seemed to understand.
“ How do you know me , I said?”
“I...” Samarie stared down at the length of steel. Gently, she lifted her free hand and placed two fingers against the flat of the blade, as if to confirm what it was. She shuddered, and then - to Marina’s horror - drew closer, so close the blade pricked the linen of her pinafore. Her lips parted. When she looked back up at Marina, even half-blind, her eyes were full of serene, inviolate acceptance. They shone with joy, and tears, and...
A love that transcended feeling.
A golden light that smoke and agony could not dim. Nothing so mundane as firing neurons and electrochemistry - something fundamental to her being, as much a part of her as body and soul. Or - moreso. Samarie had been scoured by other, greater powers. Her body and her soul were all used up, and hardly hers, but Marina knew, before she even spoke: the love in her eyes was all she had that truly belonged to her, and she held it with a crusader’s conviction.
It was her purpose. It was pure. It was worshipful .
Despite herself, Marina was transfixed by its radiance.
“Marina... I... ” Samarie began. “I have always known you, I think. Even as a little girl, I would look in the mirror and know something was wrong. It wasn’t about my body, or my face - or maybe it was all of them, all of me, everything put together - like an equation with undefined variables. Insoluble. There was always something missing. Always. I would wake up in the morning and know something was missing. I would get dressed, knowing it didn’t matter what I wore - something was wrong with me. Walking to school, sitting with friends, laughing, singing, drinking, cutting, it didn’t matter. The - absence...” Her voice had grown murky with drainage. She sniffed, trying to clear her airway of blood. Her lips, Marina could see, were a deep and dreadful purple beneath the lipstick, as if the whole inside of her was a bruise. As she bore back up, as she turned her face blindly upon the woman she worshiped, Marina could see: her tongue was dead black.
“Did you know, Marina, that when you lose a limb, they say you can still feel it? Itching, aching. That’s what it was like, I think. Like my heart had some vast annex that had been torn down before I was even born. And then...” Samarie’s face hardened. It was an expression of necessary discomfort, as if she were disconnecting something inside herself, in case of an emotional surge. She swallowed hard, and forged on.
“I was brought to the Ministry of Darkness early on. They found me out, I suppose, how - how I was. Empty. The knack I had for channeling, I mean. So they brought me to Fiend Petr’s Basilica, they - they brought me under it, to the - N-N-Ninth Circle. Where I was - sequestered. And e-engraved, and used, and...” She broke off.
Marina shivered at the name. She’d heard rumors about the Ninth Circle. Ever since the Old Gods had passed out of the world, men had tried to pull them back, and... Vatican City had access to ancient and terrible resources. Rituals that used children as batteries. And all, all, fruitless. Marina had always thought the place was a boogey-story for disgruntled professors, but… seeing Samarie, her ink-black tongue and soap-colored skin, the way she barely bled - the air of profound abjection she had, of a thing smashed beneath the wheels that move the world - what could Marina do but believe?
“Anyway. After. The Ministry kept me around to study. The hole in me had only gotten bigger, and... I didn’t see much point in... But, um, one day, Marina, when I was leaving the Basilica, I... I saw you.”
Finally, her welling tears overflowed.
“Oh, Marina, I - I can’t tell you what it’s like. The first time I saw you, I felt whole. The pain I had lived with, the - the untouchable, itching agony, it - it was suddenly gone. Replaced, with this unimaginable feeling of, of, euphoria . You were the thing I was missing, all those years. I - I know how it sounds, but - I’ve followed you everywhere. I learned your name by going through your garbage. I learned to read minds, so that I could learn more. Through your eyes, I’ve seen - e-everything. Your true self. How you spend hours every morning just to get your makeup right. How you fall asleep reading, and how you wake up in the middle of the night to finish the chapter you fell asleep to. H-how you wanted your - vile, awful - father, you wanted him d-dead. E-e-everything! And I have loved it all. You are my savior. My purpose. You are a goddess to me, Marina. I... love you.”
Marina found she could not move. Could scarcely breathe. Her heart was beating so fast.
“You never talked to me,” she managed. “We never met.”
Samarie sagged. “No.”
Marina ought to slap her. Ought to drive the knife into her blackened little heart. For her father, for herself, for her safety, she really ought to - nobody would blame you - and yet -
With a sudden surge of desperation, Samarie gripped the knife, pressed the tip into her bony chest so hard that a red spot bloomed on her blouse.
“If - if any of this, my conduct, my actions, if any of me displeases you - if you want me dead now - then that’s fine by me,” Samarie babbled, her eyes shut tight. “Nothing would b-bring me more pleasure than dying at your hand. I’m yours. I’m yours. Y-your flesh to cut, your blood to spill! Yours, Marina. S-so, if you need to punish me... then...”
Marina stood there, swaying. Something was wet on her face - her own tears, she found. She wiped them away, feeling cleansed, somehow, as if she had tensed every muscle in her body all at once and then released them in one aching instant. Something was stirring in her.
What was she thinking? Standing before this girl, with a knife at her heart. Someone who knew her every impulse, who’d seen her twitching at the threshold of every opportunity she’d ever let slip by... Whose life was in her hands, to do with what she will.
It felt safe , somehow. That much power - that much permission, understanding, acceptance - it was like being alone. Nobody would see. There was nothing to explain, and nothing to fear.
Something in her quickened.
“It wouldn’t be much of a punishment,” Marina whispered, “if you’d enjoy it.”
She allowed her voice to dip a little deeper than it had in years, and it felt strong and familiar. Like something she’d kept locked away, something that had grown rooted and potent in the darkness inside her.
Samarie’s eyes opened wide. She went very still. “N-no.”
Marina stepped closer, into the space between Samarie’s legs. “Give me this,” she said, twisting the knife, and Samarie released it. It was slicked with blood: she’d held onto it so hard she came away bleeding. As Samarie pressed the injured hand into her dress, her leg shifted, and her bare knee touched Marina’s.
“M-Marina... Are you not... w-w-w-w...”
Marina had almost forgotten - she was still in just a blouse and underclothes.
“No,” she said, “I’m not. Too bad you can’t see.”
Samarie’s lips parted, speechless and aubergine.
“I mean, that’s how I ought to punish someone like you. Right? Put everything you’ve ever wanted right in front of you. And then...” Marina took three steps backwards, well out of arm’s reach. Samarie pitched forward slightly, as if something vital were being torn from her.
For whatever reason - and Marina could imagine at least two - Samarie’s nose chose that moment to begin bleeding in earnest. As she looked down, a thoughtless reflex, beads of scarlet dribbled gamely into the lap of her pinafore, and she cupped a shaking hand to her sternum to catch them.
“Ka...” Samarie glanced up - her clouded eyes were pleading and panicked.
For Marina, Samarie’s distress drew out an instinctive response. Her face went flush, her mind went blank, but that fierce hungry thing she’d long kept locked inside knew just what to do. She closed the distance with two long strides, the fingers of her free hand plucking a Sylvianite spell out of the empty air. Then -
She took Samarie by the back of the neck and leaned in close. With the other hand, she rested the flat of the knifeblade against Samarie’s collarbone. Samarie squeaked inarticulately.
“You know this spell? Loving Whispers? ” Marina could feel Sylvian’s vigor pooling in the back of her throat, thick and sweet and cloying as syrup. She worked her fingers into the tender hair at the base of Samarie’s scalp and pulled . “Open your mouth, Samarie.”
Samarie did. Her eyes rolled back. When Marina felt the spell quicken, she leaned closer, so close that she could feel the warmth of Samarie’s parted lips on her own, and let the Goddess’s issue spill from her open mouth. As it rolled forward over her tongue, the treacly spellstuff turned gritty and gaseous all at once, like honey-crystal suspended in ether, murmuring as it moved, and by the time it passed between her lips, it was as ephemeral as a prayer. The smell of blood and ammonia and girl rose to fill Marina’s nostrils, and she felt a familiar unspooling sensation roll down her belly and into her groin.
Samarie stiffened beneath her. Already, the swelling around her sinus was receding, and the cut above her eye was starting to close. Fresh tears tracked her cheeks, and she moaned in relief.
Relief, and - well. Sylvian’s adherents had their reputation for a reason.
Marina felt it, too. She tried closing her eyes, but that left her only the one thing to focus on, so she opened them again. Arousal eroded her aloofness, and she had to work at keeping her expression stern and neutral for dignity’s sake.
Samarie had no dignity to defend. Blush kissed her cheeks as she panted and twitched at their proximity. Finally, desperation outweighed propriety, and Samarie craned her neck to make their lips connect. Marina jerked back just in time.
“Ah, ah, ah,” she hummed, and pressed the knife-edge into the base of those straining tendons, “Your punishment... I want you to... Mm.” The spell misbehaved, eddied on her tongue, and with nowhere to go it began to tickle at the back of her throat. And - by careless accident, or subtler scheming than she yet knew - she swallowed.
The knife tumbled from Marina’s hand and onto the bed as she stood up straight.
Warmth flooded her. The wine-heat bloomed and rose in her like the flame of a gas stove. Her throat was raw - she’d screamed her fair share in the last two dreadful days - and the spell love-bit her the whole way down. Then: a starburst inside. The gamey itch of rejuvenation leapt from dendrite to dendrite, working and unworking knotted scar tissue and bone-deep tension and a thousand thousand little hurts she’d long forgotten to feel. It was an instant and an eon all at once - like an orgasm. She even made a rather embarrassing squeal of pleasure as the spell abated.
Remembering herself, remembering the girl she was holding by the fistful, Marina glanced down, cooly as she could, praying that Sylvian had not too badly betrayed her condition.
Her prayer went unanswered. Unlike an orgasm, the spell had not spent her.
The opposite, in fact. It had all happened so quickly that Marina was only just beginning to feel her cock pressing against her panties. Her erections had lessened in both frequency and intensity in the year-and-a-half since she’d started alchemical treatments, and the ones she got were accompanied by a little soreness - “tender and mild,” her diaries laughingly called them - but this one was a sonovabitch, and silk had so little give. She hurt , almost ached to touch, to cradle, to just hook both thumbs into the waistband and free herself right there on the spot, but - well -
Marina had always known herself. When she looked in the mirror, there was no question of who she was, or how she wanted to live. That equation was solved. But - she wasn’t like most other girls. Her shoulders were too wide for her bras. While her classmates commiserated about their periods, Marina could only shrug, and say (quite honestly) that she had never been much bothered by them. And all that was fine - for all her differences, none of them ever caused her to question the solution she had found. But - here, now, in this situation, for someone else to check her math -
Her nerve faltered. Who could blame her?
As Marina released her hair, Samarie’s eyes opened. They were dark and deep and clear, like a pair of moonlit wells, and unobscured by smoke. One spell had canceled out the other. She could see again.
As she had a thousand times before. She’d seen everything. Every morning, and every night. There was no confusion in those eyes, no surprise. Only -
Wonder, worship, adoration and awe. Languor and longing, avarice and obeisance, desire and gratitude and deliverance and joy and love, love, love. She was radiant with it.
“Marina,” she whispered, the way they do in churches. “It’s really you.”
In that moment, all Marina’s uncertainties were gone. She drew the handcuff key from the pocket of her blouse.
“Here,” she said. “Get that off.” Gods, she felt good.
Samarie struggled to comply. Her free hand had been used to catch her nosebleed, and it was still tacky and shaking - and she was uncomfortably far from the bedpost, too - so she had to lean, awkwardly, trying to bring key to cuff. She dropped it twice before getting it into the tiny keyhole, and then finally turned it home, and her hand came free. As she returned to sitting position, rubbing her wrist, her eyes went wide.
“Marina...”
Marina had undone the very last button of her blouse. Now, she shrugged it off.
“What are you d-doing?”
Her breasts were small and pleasantly sloped, and marbled with stretch marks as pink and subtle as watercolor peonies. The alchemical treatments had sculpted her chest with a sober hand - not overgenerous, in Marina’s experience, yet kinder than she’d feared - but she’d been eating better in Vatican City than she ever had in Prehevil, and it was starting to pay off. She leaned in close enough to feel the heat of Samarie’s blush on her sternum, and her nipples stiffened.
“Whatever I want.” She seized Samarie’s hand, as if to demonstrate - the one that had been free, which she’d used to catch her nosebleed. “After all, you’re mine, aren’t you? My flesh, and my blood?” Without breaking eye contact, Marina lifted the slender hand to her mouth and pressed her tongue into the palm. As she worked it along half-remembered divinatory lines and licked the blood from her fingers, Marina felt the fine filaments and delicate bird-bones shifting under her tongue. The copper tang was sickening - but the look of astonishment on Samarie’s face made it all worth it.
She pulled the last of Samarie’s fingers from her mouth with a pop. “There. All clean.”
“Wh, wh,” Samarie whimpered, and oh, what a struggle it was, “why - ?”
Before she could continue, Marina yanked her up by the wrist and slammed their mouths together in a savage kiss. Blood and lipstick and the aftertaste of Sylvian mingled on their lips, on their tongues, in their spit. Samarie was a rough and unpracticed kisser, but passion carried her: her desperation was so pitiful it made Marina’s heart sing and her loins ache.
That ache - it was getting intolerable, now.
She shoved Samarie back onto the bed. She bent at the waist, leaned in close, nosed her way through Samarie’s hair to whisper into her ear. As Marina’s own slate curls fell about her, Samarie drew a shuddering breath.
“Because,” Marina cooed, “these hands are mine, after all.”
She hooked both thumbs into her panties.
“And I intend to use them.”
With a roll of her hips, she eased them down.
“And because, when I do...” She snickered, and stood. Her underclothes fell away. “I don’t want them getting blood all over my cock.” She stepped out of them and kicked them aside.
Samarie bore silent witness. The spell had done her good. There was color in her cheeks - quite a lot of it, actually - and some of the old damage had been undone. She seemed less phantasmal now, less raw-boned, and as she looked up at Marina, all those rarefied glimmers of worship and longing were blurred by a heat-haze of distinctly animal lust. And, of course, the unspoken question.
“Touch,” Marina instructed. Still, Samarie hesitated. She lifted a hand, spit-slick, and - couldn’t do it. As if the instant of contact might annihilate them both.
“Touch me,” Marina commanded. When Samarie dithered anyway, Marina grabbed the other hand and pressed it to her chest.
Both women exhaled.
Samarie’s hand was cool and solid as river clay, perfectly sized to cradle Marina’s breast. Hesitantly, courageously - Marina could see how hard she was working - she dipped her palm lower, to expose the nipple - slow sparks prickling - and pinched it gently between thumb and forefinger.
There, now. Marina sighed, content.
With her other hand, Samarie stroked Marina’s thigh. Questing fingers feathered their way past her hip, paused wonderingly to feel the outlying strands of her pubic hair, then up and in, over the little paunch of her belly. She raised goosebumps as she went. Marina laid a hand atop her head, and Samarie forgot all else - she closed her eyes and leaned into it, and her lips parted just so -
The little motion whispered feverish volumes to Marina’s libido, lending sudden clarity to something her body had already known: she had to fuck this girl .
As Marina’s hand drifted down to her cheek, Samarie recalled herself. With the pad of her thumb, she traced the dimensions of Marina’s nipple. With the other hand, she traced her fingers back down Marina’s torso, down, down, until...
She reached Marina’s penis.
Marina lifted her chin to the ceiling, savoring the sensation - cold, insistent points of pressure, investigating her intimate details.
“Gentle,” Marina murmured. “I’m a little sore.”
“Yes, Marina...”
Samarie thumbed the ridge of her glans, a seam beneath the foreskin. The tip of her was pressed into the crook of Samarie’s palm, as wet as a kiss. Gods, she was so wet...
“Like that?”
She could only nod, vigorously.
Hair brushed her hips as Samarie leaned forward - placing a kiss on the flat stretch of skin above her navel. Her breath tickled. Her lips brushed the tiny hairs around Marina’s belly button. She moved further down, and then off to one side, pressing the ridge of her nose into the divot by Marina’s hip - that got a real giggle out of her.
Then Samarie drew back her foreskin, silk-slick and oh-so-easy, and the giggle became a gasp. A motion of the wrist worked Marina back and forth in her palm, once, twice, and - she lost count - Samarie switched hands, to give equal attention to each of Marina’s breasts - her fingers, sticky with Marina’s arousal, slid easily over the other nipple - and the smell of herself on Samarie’s fingers - she was getting - so -
Samarie pinched one nipple, hard.
“Gods!”
Samarie’s hands hadn’t stopped. “Was that ungentle of me?” Her voice was heady with heat, low and - was that teasing ?
She was gazing up at Marina from behind her bangs. Their eyes locked.
Samarie’s face - angular, saturnine, with cheerlessness carved marrow-deep into its very bones - she was making an expression so alien to its constituent parts that Marina almost didn’t recognize it. It was slight, and sly, but there it was: Samarie was smiling. Beaten, bloodied, her makeup smeared, with a faint purple line across her throat where Marina had pressed her with the knife, Samarie smiled, and said nothing. She hardly had to; even heavy-lidded, her eyes were voluble. This was the happiest she had ever been.
Marina’s heart was beating, beating.
When the moment passed, Samarie’s attention drifted downwards, and an unspoken understanding settled between them. With uncharacteristic initiative, Samarie leaned in to lap a bead of precum from the tip of Marina’s cock with a flick of her blackened tongue. As she leaned back again, a silver thread of spit spooled out, linking her lips with Marina’s aching sex.
“Samarie,” Marina stammered, “for the love of Alll-Mer, will you please suck my di-”
She practically pounced. Took Marina in her mouth, down to the base. Not the feat it might have been, thanks to the alchemical treatments - but for Marina, it was sufficient. A mortifying sound escaped her. With one hand, she covered her mouth. With the other, she stroked Samarie’s cheek.
True to her word, Samarie was gentle. She was - not entirely certain what she was meant to be doing, but she was attentive, and when Marina tensed or hitched, she changed tack. When Marina groaned into her stifling hand, Samarie continued in earnest. The soreness in her sex was a sweet one, as if Samarie were tonguing a bruise gone golden with age, tempering her pleasure with a little bit of pain. The two of them grew looser together - Marina’s stance widened, Samarie scooted forward on the bed to pull her closer; their bodies began to fit , and Samarie’s long arms drew up around her in an orchid embrace. She dragged her nails down the length of Marina’s back, to settle, finally, clutching a fat handful of her ass.
Finally, breathlessly, Marina had to pull herself away. She was getting lightheaded - there was a buzzing behind her teeth, and a numbness in her thighs - she must have had her knees locked. Still, as she tried to find words, she could hardly help touching herself. Her cock was slick and irresistible, and to feel it slide against her palm was an electric kind of magic. She looked down, and gave a jittery little laugh: a halo of black lipstick ringed her base.
“Marina...” Samarie watched, herself fevered, panting. Her eyes had dimmed, and a shade of unease crept into her face. “Is that... as far as we go?” She gestured, shakily, to the sudden space between them. “Is this my punishment?
Marina looked up. “Your...?” Her mind was blank, but for bloodrush and foghorns.
“You said, you’d put e-everything I’d ever wanted right in front of me. And then, you’d...” Crestfallen, Samarie turned away. As a plea, perhaps, not quite daring to look, she spread her legs. Where she’d moved, a damp spot the size of a fist was plain on the bedsheets - she’d soaked clean through her underwear.
Marina found herself again, buoyed by a wry grin. “Did you already...?”
Samarie closed her eyes in shame. “Twice.”
Laughing low, Marina slid a knee onto the bed, alongside Samarie’s leg. Samarie’s head snapped up in disbelief. Her pupils dilated - her face exploded in a smile - there she was, again: radiant.
Her skin was - not quite smooth, but subtly textured, like rice paper, and where Marina ran her hands along the exposed stretch of her thigh, gently lifting her dress away, the texture took on an unusual regularity. Marina shifted, so the lamplight could find her:
Samarie’s thighs were pocked with the sigils of a dozen gods. Some were so fine and faint the scar tissue was like a glimmer of spider-silk, but others had been carved deeply, savagely, and even their commingled Whispers had not quite smoothed the skin. If Samarie was shy about her scars, she made no sign: she grasped Marina’s hips as if they would save her from drowning, heedless of the narrowness which Marina took such pains to dress around, and pulled her closer, closer. Obliging, Marina drove her other knee gently and insistently into Samarie’s crotch, and felt her -
Oh.
But Marina had suspected... that they were both...
Well, it hardly mattered.
“Then - you do want to...?”
“Obviously.” Marina was already sliding a pair of fingers up Samarie’s inner thigh.
“But - my p-punishment...” Her shining eyes glanced away, and Marina paused: there was a little fear there. Marina’s fingers moved on, regardless. She was close enough now that she could feel the soft flesh of both legs was on either side of her hand, and the wetness that clung to them.
“You misunderstand. This is your punishment.” She laid her hand against the moist cotton of Samarie’s panties - uh, wow, no, they were entirely saturated - and Samarie squirmed happily beneath her touch. Marina’s fingers crept higher, to find the waistband -
“How on earth is this a punishment?”
“Follow my logic, Samarie.” There - newfangled elastic. And beneath it, a thicket of coarse hair. And beneath that ... “I could have killed you, before you even awoke.” (Samarie went wide-eyed and still.) “But I didn’t. And good thing, too: you would have loved that. For me to be the one. Wouldn’t you? You said as much.” Samarie nodded - hope and horror intertwined in her eyes. Marina turned her wrist, gathering up the panties in one sopping twist. With the other hand, she plucked the knife from its place among the folds of bedsheets. “I could have walked away, in disgust of you, of all you’d done, but what good would that have been? It was what you were expecting. You would have followed me wherever I went.” She brandished the knife lazily, letting its tip come close, close, to Samarie’s skin.
“And then you called me goddess.”
With the other hand, she tightened the knot of cotton wrapped around her fist. Judging from Samarie’s reaction, it hurt.
“And then I knew just what to do with you.”
With a sudden flash of motion, the knifeblade hissed through the air. Samarie gasped. Another flick of the wrist, another stroke of steel, and Marina cut her panties away entirely, to reveal - her pubic hair, matted and shining with her arousal. Her cunt, waiting, dripping, wanting. The smell of her filled Marina’s nose. Samarie let her head fall back onto the mattress, breathing heavily.
“I thought to myself: what better way to punish a supplicant than to smash all their idols?” Marina tossed aside knife and ruined underwear alike - both tumbled to the floor somewhere behind them. She placed a hand between Samarie’s legs - slick, and hot, like an altar freshly wetted with sacrifice. Samarie’s breathing stilled.
“Samarie. I want to show you something.”
With two fingers, Marina opened her. Like her tongue, her vulva was black as pitch. Marina slid a finger into her, and then another. Samarie moaned - something. It was almost Marina’s name, but not quite. Her cunt clenched as Marina curled her fingers, a beckoning motion.
“This is it, right? All you ever wanted?”
Samarie could not nod, but she tried.
“But you can feel me, can’t you? Touching you, inside you? A goddess can’t do that. Can’t do this .”
Marina brought her fingers out again, and up, until they laid on either side of her clitoris. Samarie was so, so sensitive, she already spasmed with every touch, and it would hardly do to have her cum again now, but - what the hell - Marina pinched her, just a little, and Samarie gave a short sharp squeak.
“All you ever wanted, Samarie, it was never real. I’m no goddess. I’m just a girl.” Marina leaned forward, now, to pull one of Samarie’s legs up over her shoulder, to lay her cheek against it, to position them both for what was next. She pressed the underside of her cock against Samarie’s clit, and rocked her hips, back-and-forth, so, so slowly.
“This is your punishment: knowing that we’re the same. We’re both just girls, and we both just want to fuck each other.”
“To...”
Their thighs pressed sweat into each other, their skin clinging, almost, the way hot pastries do when sugar and steam mingle just so, and when Marina raised herself up for the plunge, they parted and reunited, sticky together.
“Knowing that all this time, this whole time you think you’ve been worshiping me...”
“Marina...”
“I’ve actually been descending...”
“Yes...”
“...into you.”
Marina entered her.
Samarie shuddered, lost. Her hands came alive almost without her, and she remapped Marina’s body by sightless grasping; her hips, her breasts, her neck, her face. With every thrust, her nails dug a little deeper, her legs wrapped a little tighter around Marina’s waist. Marina was already closer than she’d expected - she had to work hard not to look down at their bodies coming together again and again, or feel the slap of their thighs, or hear the little sounds her lover made, lest she succumb in the very same instant. Their hips worked together. Their sweat ran. For a time, the whole world was two bodies wide.
Finally, Samarie was able to bring herself up on one elbow, and Marina found her other arm about her neck. She was sweetly sore from the rutting, wracked with pleasure by every stroke, growing ever-more certain that her time was running out. She met Samarie’s gaze with heavy-lidded eyes and a weary, wandering smile.
“Hi,” Marina ventured, between thrusts.
“Marina.” Samarie’s voice was husky, wavering. “Am I dreaming?”
Marina laughed, and shook her head, and her hair brushed her bare shoulders. “You want me to pinch you again?” Samarie was briefly overcome, and let her head fall back. On predatory instinct, Marina leaned forward, to kiss her lover’s slender neck.
Oh, that was a mistake - she could feel her grip slipping, her thrusts speeding up, a cry building in her throat, as her cock went deeper -
“S-Samarie -”
“Marina -”
Climax was coalescing in her. Nothing to be done for it now - the scintillating sensation along her nerve endings, that insistent pressure, it was becoming a demand, now -
As Marina began to fuck her harder, faster, Samarie’s legs clenched, as if to squeeze out all the vast mad love she harbored -
Marina’s breasts bounced, and her cock was so sore, and it felt so good -
“I love you, Marina - “
“Mm-hmmm -”
And she was -
Marina’s orgasm leapt first up her back, then, as it crested her shoulders, it bucked her forward, like a crashing wave. It was fabulous, the way they sometimes were for Marina, now - full-body and absolute and irresistible, a thunderclap of epiphanic iosis. Samarie came with her - their voices cried out together, their bodies contracted together, like one great muscle, and together, finally, they...
Released.
///
They lay together, afterwards.
Nothing much seemed to need saying - the whole fact of their meeting, of their conversation, of the - well, everything that followed - it was all too complicated to comment on, or pull apart, but their bodies tessellated perfectly in the afterglow, and who were they to question that? They chatted a little - part of Marina’s plan, to get her great lesson to stick.
“Did you have - plans - for the Festival?” Marina asked, fiddling with Samarie’s hair. It was lank and lifeless, but so black. She snorted a few strands from her face, and chuckled: what a ridiculous question. This all seemed so unreal.
“Visiting the Church,” Samarie said. “That’s all.” She clung to Marina, their legs and arms and hands intertwined. Samarie was so slight that when she spoke, her voice vibrated her chest, like the thrumming of a little engine. “Will you try to win the Festival?”
Marina turned to look her in the eye. “You know what that would involve.”
“Yes.”
Marina turned back to the bunk overhead, and squeezed her eyes shut. “Of course you do.” Despite their strenuous exertion, Marina had been unable to convince her of their equality. Ah, well. So long as extremity was keeping her honest, Marina might as well admit: she wouldn’t mind another lesson, if they ever got the chance. It was a hell of a thing, sharing a bed with someone who cared about you more than anything else in the world - would do anything she asked -
“No,” she said. “A bunch of us agreed, nobody would - um - pursue victory. You know.”
Samarie was quiet at that.
“Abella has a plan, she says. There’s these - machines, and...” She raised a hand to the bunk overhead. “Well, I don’t know. We’ll figure it out. Or we won’t, and we’ll die.” She let the hand fall.
“You would... stand against Rher?”
Marina blinked. “I guess that is what that means.”
Samarie pressed her face into Marina’s arm, like a child shying from an argument. “...Okay.”
“What, okay? What’s that mean?” Marina shifted her elbow to prompt her.
“They teach us at the Ministry, there’s very little humans can do once the gods decide to act. You know that as well as I do.” After a moment, she added, “Maybe a little bit less. Than. Than I do. Sorry.”
Marina looked sidelong at her. She was so pale . Like a grub. Certainly she’d been more hands-on experience with the occult than Marina had - more than any but a few damned souls ever had, in this or any age - but at the same time... The Ministry had never taught her anything about hope. Marina had a sudden urge to gather her up in her arms and pull her closer.
And so, she did.
“Wh...”
Marina pressed her lips into Samarie’s forehead. “Fine. Humans are fucked. There’s nothing they can do. They’re meat waiting to rot.”
Samarie stared into her eyes. “That’s so.” For all that could be said of Samarie, insincere was low on the list.
“But - you keep insisting that I’m a goddess. Maybe I can do something.”
Samarie’s eyes dipped, and she shook her head. “It’s... a figure of speech...”
“Maybe we can do something, together. You know a lot about magic. Channeling. You could help us.” Samarie didn’t move, or respond, but their chests were pressed together, and Marina could feel her heartbeat quicken. “If nothing else, we’d die at the same time. How would you like that?”
Samarie shifted against her, pressing her forehead into Marina’s sternum. “I’d like that,” came the muffled reply.
Marina snorted. She had been joking, but...
“You’re one sick puppy, you know?”
“Yes.” The mass of black hair bobbed against her chin. “Yes.”
“Lovesick.”
“Yes, Marina.”
“And it looks like it’s terminal. So you might as well.”
Samarie was quiet for a long time.
Marina got a slow curdling feeling in her gut - as if she’d hit a little too close to home. Whatever they had done to her in the Ninth Circle, it had left her… unhealthy. That much was plain.
If you want me dead now , she’d said.
“Actually.” Samarie shifted suddenly, and pulled herself back far enough to stare Marina in the face with her black-iron eyes. “You’re right. I might as well.”
“Yeah?” Taken with her little fit of independence - and feigning ignorance, perhaps, about what it meant - Marina kissed her. “You’ll help?”
“Yes.”
They lay together in silence, Marina trying to understand it all, and Samarie waiting for instruction. For a moment, though - their heartbeats synced.
And then diverged again.
“...In a little while.”