Prog 10 : Ascent

Anderson padded obediently in the Angel's wake as he led her into Mercy, the path illuminated by her incandescent guide. The foyer was as she had remembered it – long, low, bright and clear with carpeting and furniture in pale neutral colors. There was a preternatual order to it, a clinical cleanliness artificial and fragile as a vat-grown bell-orchid. Something about its regularity itched at her mind; not an unexpected presence, but rather an absence. It felt like a movie set, a training simulation at the Academy. She pushed outwards with her mind, trying to psynse beyond sight.

Discomfort enfolded her head – not pain, exactly, but rather the certain promise of pain. Hidden behind obedience, the doors of comfort locked with her own guilt over the avoidance of suffering, her will railed against the bars of its cage; push through it, accept the pain, clear your mind. Without turning, the Angel tightened its grip and she followed after him with scarcely a hitch in her step.

Her attention was focused, her consciousness narrowed to the things the Angel wanted her to see. But in the periphery of her vision, out of the corner of her mind, things caught her attention. Scurrying things that were once human, dank shadows and dark squalor, the creeping horror of decay. Try as she might – and she did not, truly, wish to try, it was easier not to – she could not turn her head or psynses towards them and so any revelation of what might have lurked beyond the Angel's plans was left in quiet darkness; uninspected but operative.

Her naked feet warm on the soft carpet, the Angel led her through the foyer, past the reception desk she'd once had to stand on tip-toes to peer over and now could have comfortably manned herself, to the open archway leading to the central stairwell. Again, her mind itched as the Angel carefully led her not straight forward but in a back-and-forth dogleg pattern, as if there were invisible lines on the floor. It reminded her of a game she'd played as a child in the corridors of Union City; striding and hopscotching over the big square tiles, jumping with your ankles clamped together, hoping on one foot, following an ever-changing and complex set of rules that were the price of admission to a clique as insular as any color-cut gang. Step on a crack, break your mother's back.

Something crunched under her foot and pain stabbed through her sole. She yelped in pain, lifting her foot off the floor and hopping forward so she could lean against the railings to examine it. Around her, the fresh-smelling green of the bright garden atrium faded, the whispering leaves above and colorful shrubs and flowers below withering to brown with a desiccating rustle. Decay mingled with the copper scent of her blood, broken glass sticking to her fingers as she cradled her wounded foot. "Owww . . ." she exclaimed. She lifted her head, looking around the ruin of the once-beautiful stairwell atrium. "What the drokk? Where am I?"

She was alone, surrounded by overgrown ruins, twenty stories of stairs rising above her. Something pushed against her mind, and she found herself letting it in before she got a hold of herself.

You are with me, Cassandra. You are never alone, for I am with you.

Instinctively, her hand dropped to her thigh. Unexpected, confusing, conflicting sensations overwhelmed her – her bare flesh goosebumping with cold and fear, fingers sticky with her own blood, hand filled with a pill bottle. But it was the lack of lawgiver that made her feel truly naked. She clutched at her chest, her unbadged breast filling her hand, the hard block of a prescription pad pressing into her chill-peaked flesh. Idiotically, knowing it was foolish, she cast her head about like a blunt, searching for the source of the words. "That's not the question I asked," she said, with as much bronze as she could muster. Her voice echoed tinnily off the walls, muffled and lost amid the rotting boles and limbs of the trees.

You are concerned with many things, Cassandra. Only one thing is needful. Choose the better part. Come; I will smelt the dross from your . . .

She grit her teeth and put her foot down, leaning most of her weight on it. She heard glass grind against the dirty tile, a savage spike of pain transfixing her foot and stabbing through her ankle, knee and hip. Blood squished between her clenching toes. "Pain sharpens the mind," she whispered frantically, "pain is the whetstone and I am the blade. Pain is the . . ."

If pain was so important – the voice seemed calm, but there was air of desperation to its sudden focus and effort – so useful, if you wish to be the sharpened blade . . . why do you avoid it?

She shifted her shoulders, actually lifting her right heel off the floor so only her toes touched and all of her weight was on her wounded foot. "I don't . . ." she growled through gritted teeth.

You say such things with your lips, but your heart is far from it. Look at your hands, at the shame you carry.

Anderson hung her head, lifting trembling hands and gazing at them through a mist of tears. Just who was she trying to fool? She leaned back, shifting her weight. She shook her head. "It hurts," she sobbed in pathetic justification. It was obvious she wasn't just talking about her foot. "It hurts so much. I can't . . ."

Then surrender. Give in. I understand. We all understand.

Tears streaming down her cheeks, Anderson nodded gratefully, fumbling the cap off and tipping three pills into her shaking hand. She threw them into her mouth, imprinting a palmprint like a bloody gag over her face. Grateful, she swallowed, shoulders heaving with shame, chest and back beaded with sweat.

All her pains faded. There was no way the analgesics could have hit that quickly, unlikely there were sufficient active ingredients in the dose-and-a-half she'd taken even if they'd had chance to work. It was something else, an acceptance, a surrender to the vision the Angel had for her. She lifted her head and looked up at him, the smokeless-flame brilliance of his massive muscles a burning-coal, glorious against the verdant luxury of the stairwell atrium.

"Yes, we understand your flaws, your tarnished bronze. We understand how pathetic, how weak you are. It hurt once, but does it hurt now?"

She hung her head, biting her lip. "Yes," she whispered. His burning grip closed on her chin, pinching her cheeks, pouting her lying lips. She screwed her eyes shut, but light shone through her cheekbones, red-filtered through blood and marrow, illuminating her retina crimson-black.

"You shalt not bear false witness, not even against yourself. Only if you are true as I am true will you inherit the scepter and the mace. Only then can you be my claws."

She clenched her hands around the shameful icons in her hands, unable to find the strength to let them go. "It did hurt," she sobbed, trying to make her memories confirm to her narrative. They were fuzzy, unreliable – it had been a head wound, for Grud's sake! - but, even so, she knew they didn't. Relentlessly, she plowed on. "It hurt so much, but I had to work through it – we had a week for the operation, everything was ready to go in one-nineteen. It was all so hard. And they were prescribed!" she insisted. "They were! So, it's really not . . ."

"Tell the truth, Cassandra. To yourself, for perhaps the first time. How did you come by that scar?"

She turned a trembling hand over. There was a faint white line curving alongside the knuckle on the outer edge of her index finger. "I . . . I slipped with my knife," she whispered lamely.

The Angel didn't speak. He didn't need to.

"I cut the dispenser open," she admitted. "To get past the metering restriction. But they were prescribed to me! It wasn't as if . . ."

"Yes, it was."

She sobbed anew, shaking her head. "I lost the bottle," she argued fiercely, trying to convince herself. "I did, I really did. You have to sign an affidavit saying you did, and . . . and . . . They should have asked how many I had left." She nodded decisively. "They really should."

"You withheld the truth from them, as if the truth was something they did not have a right too. What are you, Cassandra? Your bronze is not merely tarnished, it is corroded to the core."

"It hurts!" she screamed. "Don't you understand? They're painkillers and . . ."

"You do not seek respite from pain, Cassandra – the wound is long-healed. You debase yourself merely for comfort, a comfort you have grown used to. But you were not made for comfort, you were made for greatness."

Anderson pressed her fists against her temples and clenched her teeth, shaking her head in futile denial. "Then help me," she begged. "You said you'd help me!"

"I desire nothing more than to help you – I long to gather you under my wings, but you reject my love with your weakness and impurity. I will refine you as bronze in a furnace, make of you a glorious weapon to carry my justice and mercy to the ends of earth. But be honest. Admit your weakness and I can draw it from you like poison from a wound. Ask for my mercy and you shall receive it."

She held her hands in front of her, fingers twitching. She just had to open them, turn her hands, let the book and bottle fall to the ground. She could see it in her mind's eye . . . but could not bring herself to do it. "I . . . I can't," she admitted. "I can't. I'm not . . . I'm not strong enough."

"No, you are not. I am the eagle, you are my claws. Without me, you can do nothing." Hands tightening into covetous fists, she nodded and wiped fresh tears of shame from her eyes. "Come. Ascend with me. Climb to the heights where you may dwell far from your weakness, your food and drink in steady supply."

Anderson looked up the dizzying height of the atrium, at the stairways and landings zigzagging back and forth, and was overcome with memories and aspirations – not all of them her own. In Mega City One, the vast hab-blocks were cities almost unto themselves – massive arcologies reaching into the sky, level upon densely-packed level, self-contained termite mounds housing tens-of-thousands of forgotten humans out of sight and out of mind of the luckier citizens. Slums for welfare-ticks, that is what people outside of them thought, and – to be honest – they were not wrong. A hundred, two-hundred, maybe three-hundred levels of cramped corridors and cookie-cutter apartments. Schools, shops, restaurants – if you were lucky. A variety of automats if you were not. Poured rockcrete and plasteen, rusting rebar reaching out to snare the unwary. Walls and floor efficient-gray, leavened only by the weathering from pipes leaking chemical spills and bright gang graffiti – tagged and retagged, scrubbed and faded, painted over and defaced, retagged again.

That was where Anderson had grown up, in the mid eight-tenths of Union City in sector 20. 'Mid eight-tenths' wasn't a hard-and-fast rule, but it was a decent guideline. The lower ten-percent of a 'block was eateries, business, public spaces, perhaps a justice-blue Judge-box if you were lucky – apartments there were nicer; not fancy, but comfortable, rented by the employed. If there was 'block security, it would patrol there. A gang controlling those levels would be respectable, hiding the worst excesses of its criminal enterprises, its foot soldiers disciplined, color-cut made-men sophisticated, involved in legitimate business.

The next eight-tenths were a different matter. Above the public face of the 'block, out of the reach of the wealth to be made from commerce and protection, barter and drug dealing were the main industries. Here were the narcofabs, the hit-houses, the brothels, the apartments of the perpetually-unemployed. This was the grinder of Mega City One – citizens went in, and meat came out. The Judges rarely responded – Anderson remembered Peach Trees; she and Dredd had been the first Judges there in years. The gangs ran these levels, and the corridors ran red with blood.

Decent people, good people, like her mummy and daddy . . . and her . . . kept their heads down, just trying to get by. Cashing the welfare checks, hustling a little, maybe selling some plasma or perhaps even selling out to the gangs. Just a little, just this once, just keep telling yourself that as you whored yourself piece by piece just to survive one more day.

She considered; had her mother done that, before the cancer took her? Had her father, before she had brought him here for treatment? What dreams had they had for their daughter? Had they dared have any? Perhaps they idly imagined her as a top-tenther – not thinking how she might have made it in case the impossibility shattered the illusion, merely enjoying the fantasy as a salve against the searing horror of 'block life.

The top levels were the penthouses, the playgrounds of the rich and powerful – the owners of the 'block, celebrities, successful businessmen, politicians, leaders of the most feared and well-respected gangs. The Judges never went there, but the corridors were safe – patrolled by elite private security that was, as often as not, the hardened foot soldiery of the dons and godfathers they were guarding.

Now a Judge, Anderson had risen higher than her parents could ever have imagined – more powerful, more well-connected than any resident of a 'block. She lived, rose and slept above them all – on a floating fortress above the clouds, looking down on the city from her olympian throne, the goddess with the shield.

Is that what he parents would have wanted? Would they be proud of her, of her climb not merely step-by-step, but by leaps and bounds? Her father's interminable failure despite his constant effort had embittered him – what would he have thought of his daughter's rise, elevated by the caprice of fate more than her own effort? Rindón's special girl, Pepper's special girl, the Department's special girl, special selection, special instruction, special assessment, special circumstances . . .

Special, special, special, Cassandra.

All of this went through her mind as she looked upwards. Twenty stories were nothing – Novak would give running up and down that many flights or more as casual punishment, and in Mega City One a building that tall was practically a bungalow. But standing at the bottom of it gave her a sickening feeling – not of vertigo, but the opposite. Of having fallen and failed, a goddess cast down but not yet on her knees, humbled but not humble.

She grasped at herself again with shame-filled hands, at her bare breast and naked thigh. A journey of a thousand miles began with a single step, and an ascent to her throne began with these twenty flights of stairs. If she were ever to be worthy of the black-and-bronze again, of Aegis, of being the instrument of his justice in this benighted city and beyond, she must start over from the bottom. She hung her head and nodded. "Yes," she whispered, and dutifully followed the Angel as he led her up the stairs.

oOo

It was oppressive, but muffled – like the too-loud music coming from a late-night party in the apartment next door. Anderson couldn't stand it – she banged her mind's fists against the walls of her pysche; Keep it down! Some of us are trying to sleep!

She gasped with shock and surprise as her blows hammered the walls flat, blowing them open so she stood in a pitch darkness. No, not quite – from the echoing sound of her own panicked breathing, she was in a long corridor and needle-thin lines of light lanced from either end. The pain had returned, a dull throb underlain with sharp spikes. She winced and limped, her steps uneven as she tried to keep weight off her injured foot. Something had woken her from the path the Angel wanted her on – she was alone in the darkness.

Her eyes, now her consciousness was using them, were adjusting to the dim light. There was the suggestion of a cross-hatch of bars in the wall of the corridor. She stumbled towards it, reaching out to lean against it while she plucked the slivers of glass from her foot.

He is not for you.

She started back, her hand inches from the grate. Despite herself, knowing it would only push her deeper into the illusion, she answered the voice. "Not for me? What?" She reached out with her mind, pushing her psynes past the portal. There was resistance there, the barrier more than merely physical, designed to keep something in rather than her out.

Raw terror assaulted her mind and she yelped and staggered backwards, her foot torn anew. There was a presence beyond the gate, the shattered remnants of a psyche long-broken and reformed by desperation and cruelty. It was that which had woken her. "Who . . . who is he?" she asked. "What happened to him?"

I helped him.

"Helped him?" Anderson's voice was a shriek, echoing off the walls and floor and bouncing down the corridor like an errant rubber ball. "Helped him? He's shattered, he's ruined! You . . . you . . . there's nothing left there! Nothing but fear! What did you do?"

He always wanted to know secrets, things that were hidden, things people did not wish to reveal. He dug for them, sought them out. He always wanted to help the city, help the Department, help justice itself. It only seemed fair to hold that mirror up to him. Before he sought out the mote in others' eyes, he should have removed the beam from his own.

Anderson could feel sticky psychic fingers raking against the gate. It shielded her from contact, else they would have scrabbled greedily through the dirty corners of her mind, searching for her fears and neuroses, plucking them out, holding them up and forcing her to face them. A name floated up from the files she'd read the night before. "Timor," she stammered. "Judge Timor. He was injured, committed for psychosis . . . you . . . you . . ."

Now he sees clearly.

"You drove him mad," she whispered. "You didn't help him. You never helped anyone! You tortured and murdered and mutilated!" Memories were flowing back to her, hazy and incomplete, building on the ones that had already returned. Snatches of things best-not-remembered – a woman with haunted green eyes, red-hair partially-shaven from a head pierced by wires and probes; the taste of torment thick in the air of Mercy. "You're a monster!" she sobbed.

I did it all for you, Cassandra! The voice was a begging hiss. All for you! You were the one I love, you were my special girl! Timor was not strong enough, none of them were! But you are! You will be my claws, you will carry the torch of my justice! Do you think it was easy to do this? The cutting and the breaking and the reforming? But I did it, I plowed on through the pain and the blood, through everything I suffered. Don't you understand? I did it all for you!

Desperately, Anderson tried to recall the horror in Rhine's files – the disgusting details of Mercy. Somehow, she couldn't. It remained just beyond her reach, clinical and detached, a mere statistic always recorded with an asterisk. It made sense, she could understand it, appreciate its necessity. Weakly, she nodded. Thankful for his presence, she leaned against the Angel in the bright corridor and pulled a splinter of glass from her foot, dropping it to the floor. "I know," she assured him, "and I'm so grateful. You have done so much for me."

"And I will do still more." There was a grim certainty to the Angel's promise. "Soon, you will be ready to bring mercy in my name. I will reveal you to this city and the world beyond, and your heart will sing and your soul will burn with the flame of our justice."

"I am ready! I am! Let me . . ."

"Not yet. You are still weak, still flawed. Your bronze is tarnished and you are not yet strong enough. But I will purify you, from all your idols I will cleanse you. Then you will be ready to face the crucible of the truth. Then you will truly be my special girl. Come, climb higher and leave the broken behind."

A/n : Not a lot to say here – this chapter delves shallowly into some deep subjects (addiction and even abusive relationships) and I don't want to fill an author's note with some huge essay about things I (and, perhaps no-one) is completely qualified to discuss. But I do want to highlight the weakness of Anderson here. She is weak when faced with her addiction, and when trying to resist the seductive lies tailor-made to convince her. But that doesn't mean she is, per se, a weak person – clearly, she isn't; she's very strong. We all have specific things which we are susceptible to, particular temptations it is very difficult to resist.

Anyway, that is that! Please – if you have any comments, please leave a review! Even if you don't have any comments beyond "liked it / didn't like it" please leave a review!