LONDON-922001

Last Night

          At midnight, the street behind the Crowne Plaza is dark. Empty, save for the rats skittering about among the rubbish bags chewed to bits on the curb, and the one surveillance camera mounted over a closed coffee shop. Its glaring red light eyes the dark—incandescent, ever-watchful, unfaltering—a silent guardian fixated upon the street, pixelated visual data fed into a nexus of wires connected to some great computer in an enclosed office kept under lock and key, a figure hunched over the desk, pressed against the screen, bathed in its hungry ennui.

I try to envision what he sees.

At 00:01:30: The air distorts, the darkness warps.

At 00:01:31: A burst of light floods the alley, scattering the rats into their shadowed corners. At first it's only a small point, the tip of something very sharp dug into fabric, then, in one fell stroke, it slashes downward, scoring a glowing wound into the dark.

At 00:01:33: A figure, silhouetted in black, steps out of the rip. A woman, a girl from nowhere, fully formed and emergent, sword in hand, some avenging archangel and her infernal weapon. Beneath her combat boot, a crunch of tiny bones and a dissonant squeak.

At 00:01:34: Centred in the frame, perhaps placed strategically, she shakes the crushed rat off the bottom of her shoe, its flattened body peeling off the rubber sole with a sickening squelch. The rip knits itself shut. She turns and looks dead into the camera, obsidian eyes glittering with equal parts menace and mirth. She cocks her head as though she's picked up on the most imperceptible hum of its lens whirring, zeroing on her. She knows.

He's watching.

Wherever he is, in this universe or some other, tracking my every move through a glowing screen. The Sword, warm in my hand, pulses as the luminous glow fades. Total darkness bleeds back into the street, assimilating me whole, my black stealth suit swallowed, one with it.

A disembodied voice, static and choral, humming from some deep, dark corner of my mind perforates the silence.

          THE SWORD: You are no religious icon, just a secular traveller passing through London-922 wearing a stolen artefact in a scabbard strapped to your back. You must act swiftly, decisively. You must leave no trace.

No one is saying the mythic, obsidian blade I'd found embedded in some rock beneath some lake can talk. No one. It must be mere imagination.

And yet.

          Quick, a sharp voice in the back of my head hisses, say something back.

          [ Say nothing. ]

In the after-burn of the moment I see myself two years past, diving headfirst through the gilded doorway in the snow, light swallowed by the blizzard, can feel myself pulling apart, the strange sensation of splitting into smithereens washing over me once more, dissolving me into bits and pieces. Pieces and particles. Particles pulling further and further apart. Particles into nothing. I blink and the image disintegrates, as though someone had stuck a finger in the surface of the water and waved away the mirage.

From a pocket in my jacket, I procure a pistol and a suppressor. Slanting the camera a lackadaisical grin, I tap two fingers to my temple in a mock salute, and shoot out the lens. Not that that will stop him, considering the Crowne Plaza isn't short of security surveillance, but it's more about the message it sends, something I find myself in the habit of recently.

A series of love notes littered across different universes.

After the fact, though, my time is limited. He will come, but I will not be here. So it goes.

I stalk through the hotel suite, following the snail trail of blood smeared across the crimson carpet by the target scrambling across the darkened floor. I flicks the main lights off, leaving only the high wattage heat lamp illuminating the bathroom, bathing the suite in a faint red glow.

Still, the change in lighting does nothing to conceal the macabre tableau of twisted bodies—the naked women and armed men—draped over the bed and the arm chairs, their jaws slackened in sudden death. Each time I yank a knife out of a skull, conveniently collecting my weapons as I pass, the sickening squelch suctioning blood and bits of brain matter out from the wound draws a series of pathetic whimpers from the man crawling on his hands and knees toward the bathroom, his limbs like deadweight.

In the incandescent red light, I become death.

Before he can throw the lock on the bathroom door, I stick a fist through the crack in the doorway, and give a push, forcing my way in with little effort. Slowly, I close the bathroom door behind me, and turn to the man cowering against the toilet bowl.

When faced with death, one reflexively mourns their mortality, a survival instinct rooted in every person I've ever slaughtered, human or other but mortal all the same. The pattern remains. Grief rarely abides by linearity, but I have educated myself on its five stages. Whenever I have the time, I like to test the integrity of the model—or its core elements, at least.

"You won't get away with this," he snarls, toothpick teeth bared in an attempt at fierce bravado, and yet, the cracks in his voice and the tremor in his hands betray his frayed nerves. His gaunt face, drained with fear, while young, bears the weathered years of extensive drug abuse, marked by hollow cheeks and the sagging, dark circles ringing his eyes. Blood streaks his sweat-soaked shirt, plastering the white fabric to his body, the top buttons undone to display a gold medallion on its thin chain resting over his chest. Strands of his blonde hair, matted with sweat, fall over his brow, and his dark eyes, pupils blasted wide from the cocaine, darts between my masked face and my hands. "My father will come for you. He'll ruin you, do you understand me? Whoever you are, you're finished."

Denial, check.

In another time, another London, I attended a lecture in Multiverse Theory, not as a student, but to understand the lecturer, who'd died halfway through Depression. In sum, the universe is a vessel of creation, constantly propagating forward, not just a bubble expanding outward as it cools, but a body, a tree. Every decision someone makes creates a new fork in the road, birthing new universes diverging from the node of origin, splitting off from one another to play out independently. When you are lost here, somewhere else, another you might be found.

Which is to say that in another life, I might've believed him.

In another universe, Callahan Mearns might've inherited his father's empire and become something powerful, rather than wasting away his nights and days in seedy hotel rooms partying with escorts and ecstasy. In another universe, he might've become the next cybersecurity giant, just like his father, and propagated the family legacy forward.

Regardless, Callahan's father had bought my contract. So it goes.

I flick the tap on.

Considering there exists only one version of myself, I have no such luxury of finding comfort in imagining myself in another life, a life of better choices. Callahan Mearns, however, can. But he won't know this, nor will he understand even if I tell him.

While I clean the blood and bits of flesh off my blades, silence, thick as curdled milk, smothers us both. In this life, the only way he will leave this hotel suite is in a body bag. I think he realises this, too. How quickly a fortress crumbles.

In another life, he might've been someone established, important. With a nose like that—high, pointed and proportionate to his face, which is perfect in the way of Western convention, entirely unremarkable in its symmetry, a collection of vague, interchangeable features that place him either at the age of twenty or thirty-five—he shouldn't be cowering against the toilet bowl like that, stewing in his own filth. In other words, he's a white man.

"Please," Callahan sobs, the front of his dress pants darkening as the musty stench of urine fills the enclosed space. "Please. I have money! I can give you anything. Just name a figure. I'll go even higher than whoever paid you. I'll double it!"

Passing over Anger and heading straight for Bargaining. As I dry my blades on a hand towel and re-sheathe them one-by-one, I turn toward him, baring my teeth in a grin, unable to suppress my amusement.

I don't need his money.

I just need his head.

          THE SWORD: Keep it clean. Make it honourable.

          [ "I don't answer to you." ]

Despite the arsenal of weapons annexed to my body, hungry and humming for a taste of blood—

          THE KNIVES: USFIRSTUSFIRSTUSFIRSTUSFIRST.

—the sharp hiss of their voices flooding the chamber of my skull in a furious, ferrous Gregorian chant, their bodies crowding against my skin like sentient teeth, I clamp a hand around Callahan's throat, crush it in an iron grip, cutting off his airway. Like piercing the flesh of a grape, my fingers rupture the skin with little resistance. Warm blood slips down my wrist.

Shock blasts over his purpling face, his mouth gaping open and shut like a fish, eyes wide and flaring with life, a million synapses firing at the last second, the final crush of survival protocols and primitive instinct. His heartbeat drums against my palm, blood-slicked and warm, a hummingbird's wings beating against the cage of my fingers, struggling to steady itself.

The sound of skin tearing is a canned echo in the pounding silence.

Blood sprays across the crimson-smeared wall, the white tiles of the bathroom already drenched red as a butcher's killing floor. Callahan folds to his knees on the ground, trembling hands flying to the gushing wound in his neck, all cartilage and jagged flesh. A gurgling sound bubbles from his throat, the blood spilling down his chest, soaking the front of his clothes.

A switch flips, a live wire crackling with a dark energy, striking sparks against the cavity of my chest. In silent rapture, I crouch and watch his mouth gape and close like a fish, as the life drains rapidly from his pallid face, the blood a pool of darkness spreading around his body. The light in his eyes, still wide with shock, seems to flicker, fade, falling deeper and deeper into the abyss.

Then, quickly, the thrill fades. It leaves behind only hollow space. I feel it acutely, carved between my ribs. In my hands, the feral animal of his pulse has gone still. Quiet. I uncurl my fist and shake the torn pieces of flesh and cartilage from my fingers. They strike the mirror with a sharp, wet smack.

It's never as satisfying as the first time round.

From a pocket in my stealth suit, I fish out a black phone and dial the only number saved on it.

"It's done." The phone is hot against my ear, the rasp of my voice amplified in the echo chamber of the bathroom, glancing off the blood-soaked marble tiles. "Let's discuss my payment."

"The Marriott Hotel," comes the stiff reply. "My men will meet you at the reception. You'll receive your payment when I get confirmation you've fulfilled your contract. You have an hour."

I end the call first, extract the SIM card from the phone and flush the broken pieces down the toilet.

A bright gleam in periphery catches my eye. I follow the beacon, crouching beside the body to inspect it, to peel back the soaked collar of Callahan's shirt. Against the ravaged hollow of Callahan's throat where the blood pools, the medallion glints under the mellow lighting of the bathroom, its gold eye winking back at me. On one side of its gilded face, slicked with blood, is a coat of arms, a set of winged hawks with their talons interlocked. I give it a sharp tug and the clasp snaps off easily.

Its reedy voice scratches at the shell of my ear.

          DEAD MAN'S MEDALLION: A smudge on the family name. Restore me to stronger blood, wash this weakness off me, lest it cling to me the way this boy has held me captive, has traded in this family name like a currency. You smell it. The lingering fear before you delivered the killing blow unbecoming of a man in this dynasty of arms. Restore me to the collar of someone more worthy.

          [ "What do I get out of it?" ]

          DEAD MAN'S MEDALLION: Money. Power. Glory. This esteemed medallion has been worn upon the necks of many proud Mearns men before this muck. Men who have fought wars, who have built empires with their bare hands, who have only polished the gem of their family name. Upon the neck of this pitiful descendant, I have only tarnished. You have cleansed this bloodline of its blight. You will be rewarded.

          [ Pocket it. ]

Skimming small tokens from my marks has become a ritual of sorts. A pin, a fountain pen with a strange constellation engraved on its lacquered black shell, an old bracelet worn to the seams, a bulbous silver button from an expensive jacket. Insignificant pieces of memorabilia that might be glossed over in an investigation. I don't really understand the compulsion, can't explain it in a way that makes sense to anyone else. Sentiment plays no part in this kleptomania. Maybe I'm more of a magpie than a woman.

I get to work collecting something else far less shiny.

          THE SWORD: There is a hole in your heart, singing like a singularity, a haunting searching for something real, something tangible to draw into its maw. Someone has walked out through its walls, leaving behind a shapeless lack in their wake. It's hole, synonymous with, vacuous, as in, hungry, which is to say you have tried to fill it your entire life, but no matter what you feed it, it will never be sated. You can strip this world barren, suck the rivers dry, run the canals with blood, you can scream and cry and beg and beg and beg, and it will still gape at you from the edge of your rotten heart.

          [ Say nothing. ]

          THE SWORD: Singularities are observed only by the matter surrounding it, a nothingness defined by a somethingness. How do you measure something that doesn't exist? No one will ever understand you but you, and even then you struggle to define your limits. This absence has generated its own gravity, and it only grows the more deaths occur around it, feeding mass into its abyssal mouth. Your defilement of this world defines the hole in your heart. You wash blood with blood, slaughter and sacrilege while searching for salvation.

          [ "I thought I was a secular traveller?" ]

          THE SWORD: Your faith lies in self-destruction. It would take a miracle for this singularity to decay, to turn this nothingness back into radiation. The multiverse would corrode before this can happen, and you will live to watch the collapse.

          [ "How should I define myself, then?" ]

          THE SWORD: How do you measure something that doesn't exist?

           [ Look into the mirror, confront the hole. ]

I drag my gaze to the gore-mottled glass, pull the mask off the lower half of my face. Bathed in the red halogen light burning spots through my irises, I am nothing but carnage. My reflection stares back, something twisted and carnal, barely recognisable in the devouring dark of my dilated eyes. The flecks of blood strive against my clear skin, stark pale in contrast with the crimson. Full brows have been sculpted by hand, dark slender arches sheltering a pair of monolidded eyes within which all feeling has retreated into its depths, withheld and without. Shadows elongated along high cheekbones carve my face into something sharper, fiercer, a carnivorous creature of predation. I can't discern my freckles from the blood spots, I can't divine what's mine and what isn't.

My face is a patchwork project of features borrowed from another, but I have no one to inherit anything physical from that can be traced back by blood, and there's something undeniably unsettling about the symmetry of it all, as though someone had constructed these features based on a golden ratio template without consideration for the human aspect of imperfections. What's mirrored back to me is nothing real, for there is nothing to define it with.

Standing amid the defilement, I try to muster a smile, but the expression feels flat, the movements of my mouth too jagged, too machinated, my eyes gleaming like black beetle shells but with none of the authentic sheen. This, I can define as more of a grimace than a grin. I have never learnt how to appear pleasant, I only know how to mimic, but the imitation often fails to capture the raw moment, the human moment. It has never suited me.

The hole once bore the shape of a person, but as the memory lost structural integrity, the silhouette surrounding it began its metamorphosis into something else.

The expression drops from my face, and there in my chest, the failure echoes tenfold into its depths, swallowed into the nothingness.

Bit by bit, I feed the singularity. It only grows.

So it goes.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.
Welcome to my lifelong headache. I love this book SO MUCH. I've sort of experimenting with the narrative and taking the form of Disco Elysium where Sabine will be interacting with lots of integral objects and abstract concepts here and there that further progress this storyline or inform about the worldbuilding so HOPEFULLY IT WORKS?????? please let me know your thoughts!!!