Elliot's POV

"I wished for my brother to go to university, even if it had cost me half of my life. Now it is too late, and it costs me my whole."

—Elliot Starfall

The rapier is ridiculous in my hands, slender and elegant, dressed up even though it is a weapon. Its blade is a fine line that reflects the blue light of the sun, entering the room, and, for a moment, the absurdity of refinement makes me laugh.

Steel that could have been a museum exhibit becomes an instrument of survival. Guns are for officers. Mocking the weapon of the dead Blue, my mouth sets into the sort of face that remembers how very human cruelty can be beneath a tailor's cuff.

The smile slips away. Sorrow settles where humor was; it is thicker, older. Resting my head on my left elbow, I let the rapier lie across my knees. The blank wall beside me whispers: newspapers ragged and half-torn lie on the ground, pinned like the memories we are not allowed to keep.

I have read them once, even twice, as if the repetition might teach me a lesson for the future. They speak of institutes and adverts, of universities with polite portraits and grand promises. They speak of economies, of Nigil and Zentria, of wars that will swallow whole generations. All of it is a civilized noise for a world that decided some blood is worth more than others.

A strange world, still, it seems like my old one. No, they are monsters; this could never be Earth.

Closing my eyes, my tongue twists while thinking further on the topics of the newspapers: the enslavement, the trade routes across seas that transform people into cargo. On those sheets, they call it commerce; I call it a ledger of lives. Before this, before the schedules and maps, my people were already enslaved somehow. Slaves to fields, to kitchens, to servile smiles all over this continent. One of the few.

I don't know how, whether they invaded secretly and enslaved us, but that wouldn't make any sense. The newspaper could also be Propaganda…

Even the clocks here do not mark twenty-four hours but some other arithmetic; even time seems complicit. Clocks show only sixteen hours instead of twenty-four.

Blinking, blue light floods the room again, and the ache returns as a tide. Two and a half, three days—time curls away in this house until I cannot tell midnight from noon. Cham says I sleepwalk. Gene says the same with a shrug, however.

We have hidden away the family in the attic; their bodies are wrapped and stacked on top of each other. The house is large enough to pretend, for now, that the world is nothing more than rooms.

I remember waking the first day in unfamiliar sheets and knowing, at the edge of my senses, that something terrible had already happened. Memory thins with each night. Yesterday I could no longer find.

Night after night, my waking is under Blue, a color that stains the carpets and becomes the color of the things I do not want to look at. The first night bled bright and wet; after that, the blood is more like old varnish, crusted over like a varnished lie.

Cham and Gene roam the city while I sit here, breathing ragged and coughing blood. My mind is not my own anymore.

They look for others: a band, a faction, any hand that might take a blade with us and call it purpose. The curtain trembles over the window while my vision flickers.

Knock. Knock.

My heart thuds as if someone has suddenly stepped on a wound. There is a man at the door; he wears a dark-blue suit that catches the light like oil. A cigar pinches smoke into the air, and he checks his watch the way men who sign papers do.

He knocks again with the boredom of a man who knows the world never refuses him.

Red light flares behind my eyes until it drenches my whole vision. Through the gap, the blue light of the sun turns violet. Around him, an almost-visible aura of clear azure coils through his arm and chest like a ribbon of glass. It pulses and makes him look less like a man than an edict come to life.

Kill them all.

The thought arrives like a bolt, not mine wholly but lodged there all the same; it tastes metallic and ancient. My left arm blazes as if oil has been poured along its veins; my right still feels as if it is there, even though it is long gone, bitten off by the faceless creature.

Doubling over, my whole body folds, left hand planted on the floorboards as the room tilts. Everything around me drips red: the wallpaper, the newspapers, the faint halo around the blue-suited man.

My skin prickles as if something crawls beneath it—fingers under the meat, a verminous procession tracing slowly. My mind races, thoughts oppressing my own.

My teeth clatter. The urge rises. Hunger. It leans up against the ribs of my chest and breathes.

Kill them all.

-----A/N-----

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