Four Murders
Ruby is the first. With her trusting silver eyes and easy smile, the girl is made to be broken. She is frail, with fingers that snap like twigs beneath Neo's heel, crunch crunch, bones crushed for a giant's meal. Ruby's screams are the breathless, high-pitched screams of a child as she shrinks away, clutching her mangled hands, so Neo kicks her across the jaw once, twice, and when Ruby brings up her hands to shield herself, Neo drives the knife into her lungs, watching blood dye Ruby's dress the same color as her cloak, her hair, her scythe lying broken at her feet. Ruby's sobs turn into mangled gurgles. Painstakingly, Neo rakes the knife across Ruby's chest, crushing muscle and tendon and bone until it reaches that secret, claustrophobic compartment concealed behind twenty-four shattered ribs, a wonderful pumping heart speeding up, up, up, pouring more and more blood through the wound to the point they are drowning in it, hot and sweet and sticky blood, until, swallowing the terror in Ruby's eyes like a child sucking milk, Neo drives the blade forward one last half-inch and silences Ruby's wonderful screams forever.
Compared to her half-sister, Yang is not as easy to break. If Ruby is made to be broken, then Yang is made to take punishment. Torture is an art form; Neo loops the rope – rough, heavy burlap designed to chafe – around Yang's naked body, stringing her up by her hands just high enough that she has trouble standing on tip-toe, just tight enough to cut off circulation but not the sensation of pain, and all the while Yang is cursing her, threatening her, words that tinkle like wind chimes in Neo's ears. The first lash falls on Yang's back. She yelps in pain but it is not the yelp of the defeated or even of pain, merely of surprise. Neo's whip marks Yang's back like a gridiron, raw, bloody lines zigzagging in a maze of purple and red against white, fevered flesh. When each lash no longer cuts new lines but merely retreads old ones, Neo turns to her attention to Yang's front. She flays the skin from her breasts and belly and thighs and that tender place between her legs. Yang is screaming in earnest now, because even a Semblance can only take so much; her screams are guttural and animalistic, devoid of any trace of music, at times morphing into laughter, straddling the line between pain and pleasure. Eventually, Yang's voice gives out. The torture chamber lies silent. Yang slumps against the ropes. Neo tilts Yang's chin so she can gaze into those spent eyes, an inferno snuffed out, still alive but with no glimmer of life, and, growing bored, she slashes open her throat.
Mercury requires a different approach. A childhood of abuse has desensitized him to pain; his greatest enemy is not from without but within. Neo locks him in a cage with water and a knife. For the first few days, he is unfazed, tossing out threats and sarcastic quips. After a week, his words take on a kinder tone. He asks her for food, anything, really, doesn't need to be five-star but some bread and meat, at least, would you? After three weeks he can barely speak. His face has turned haggard, eyes staring out from deep, hollow sockets, all fat gone from his cheeks. His stomach bloats out comically even as his arms are skinned to the bone. In cracked whispers, he begs her for food, but if there is one thing Neo is good at, it's not responding, and in any case the answer already lies with him. Most men are perfectly willing to starve to death. Most men do not have Mercury's survival instincts, the drive to defeat death at any cost honed by living a life on the edge of it. The pinkies are the first to go. He bandages the wound with strips from his shirt. The ring fingers are next. After that comes his left ear, then the meat from his thighs, then the remaining fingers of his left hand, and once those are gone there is no longer any use for his left arm. His cage is covered with blood, stinking like an abattoir. Not all death is beautiful. He survives longer than Neo anticipated, there is the man who will kill even his father to survive, but in the end the body has only so many non-essential parts, too many precious organs, and when Neo visits him in the ninth week, he is legless, armless, eyeless, yellow with gangrene, a corpse attached to a mouth that even in death opens and closes.
If Ruby is the appetizer, Yang the Bordeaux, Mercury the main course, then Emerald is dessert. Illusions are only as real as you believe them to be. One night, Cinder beckons Emerald to her chambers. In the dark they kiss. Emerald is surprised at first, but too overjoyed to wonder why, arms encircling Cinder's back, searching for the zipper that will peel away her dress like a second skin, and Cinder, too, brings her closer with her fingers wrapped around Emerald's neck. Emerald's eyes shoot open, staring into Cinder's pink-and-brown eyes and sees truth staring back at her, but what the brain reasons out the heart is slow to follow. When dreams come true you do not question the dream-maker, the gate-keeper, the web-spinner. Emerald's eyes close again and she makes no move to break away even as Cinder's fingers tighten around her neck, nails digging into the skin hard enough to draw blood, Emerald's body spasming as if struck by lightning, saliva foaming at her lips, so loyal, so desperate, and that is how Emerald dies: in complete bliss.
Neo wakes up and swears that is the last time she eats ice cream before bed.