The Old Regime Rules
You can only chew through so much duct tape.
Ms. Woeburne's jawbone had been liquidated. It felt that way, at least—but she didn't let hurting stop her. Hurting, if anything, is a call to speed up. Slow-walkers feel the pain in their heels far more than sprinters do.
She bent her face back to her arm and she chewed.
Not the arm.
The tape. The duct tape.
Somehow the teeth kept gnawing away. S.W. chose not to feel the way her individual neckbones ached, the way her nose ran until it burned, the sore mouth. Why would you ever elect to feel that stuff—that your face is a wet plaster mush, that you are made of ticky-tacky? So her teeth kept at it, and with every bite, weak patches broadened in the makeshift handcuffs. Eventually they'd be weak enough to writhe a bit and burst through. First step, chew; second step, snap—yes, cadets, this is how you make it—rocking her trapped arm as much as she could left-to-right. One roll was down to half its original girth, thready strings popping out, strips sagging like old skin.
Good riddance, too, because duct tape is not only hell on the jaw, but it tastes absolutely terrible.
Ms. Woeburne had been squirming, chomping, and grinding at this uncomfortable horizontal for the past three hours. They'd abandoned her, it seemed, to starve. Starvation seemed far away. It, too, is something you just do not opt-in to feel.
Don't loiter. Move.
Don't hesitate. Commit.
Next objective: stand up. Once S.W. managed to tear an arm free, she'd tumble halfway out of this God-awful chair and right herself. The notion sparked a fizzle of optimism that kept her gums gnashing on.
Post-next objective? Ms. Woeburne honestly couldn't give much of a damn—not while residual blood was still rushing to her head in fat, disorienting pulses. She puffed a sodden fork of hair off a badly-bruised nose.
If she was forced into a guess (something the Foreman hated to do), she'd guess this: two more hours. Maybe it would be daytime. Sunlight puts a fast stop to a vampire jailbreak, but it would also prevent Anarch interrogators from carrying out any unfortunate second-thoughts before she could come up with the final leg of her plan. It would give her more time. Which was decidedly a lucky thing. Really, though, it was.
A basement, blunt weapons, and blunt insults; screws digging into her spine; an afterpang of bone meal, a foretaste of ash. She had talked to herself in the black thrash of panic. All right; it's all right; you're all right. Count sevens and elevens. Keep away from sharp edges and let out short breaths. Gain perspective, reel back from what is around you, take it apart. Pull the room to bits and see what is tractable here. When a Ventrue's eye begins to wander, to stray beyond your shoulder or your hands, it is time for the lesser species to worry. They are calculating how to move around you. They are drawing butcher lines to divide your pieces and inventory all the places to put teeth.
Ms. Woeburne is a fine Ventrue. She is as Ventrue as you would have been, were you in her position, in the genepool of tall boots and stout rules. She can assess it from a distance. She knows it is not her prerogative to withstand someone else's abuse. She was dirty. She was all-in. She was matted with finger blood and she twitched and she stank, and frankly, she was getting very fed-up.
Fed-up, tuckered-out, all-in. These things she says are sugar pills. They are a substitute for 'terrified.' A corporal does not acknowledge terrified. Giving room to your terror will destroy you. You must slam the door shut on terror. Squeeze it back in, clench your teeth, and put your head somewhere else.
She yanked out a gunky length of tape with her canines, spat it aside, and had just returned for another bite when there was a sound.
Standing alone, it wasn't a particularly threatening sound. Had Ms. Woeburne's situation been a little less dire and her senses a little more upright, she probably wouldn't have invested much in it. A tiny sound, comprised of bits: a squeak of hinge, the scuffle of plastic soles, weight shifting across concrete. She'd shrugged off more menacing noises in these past few nights. Hell, she could've overlooked her eyesight, too—the brief, sorry sickle of moonlight. It was a breath that furrowed her brow before disappearing, again, sucked behind that ominous door. It was nothing noteworthy. It was nothing, really, at all.
But Ms. Woeburne spotted it.
As did she spot the monster. He had the poker scowl of people who enter your life with bad intent.
Having contended with Free-State knives and Free-State guns and, of course, let's not shortchange the Free-State fists, S.W. had no reason to be particularly impressed by a Brujah boy at this interval. He was red hair and adolescent stubble like fire ants and crinkly unironed clothes. He a few pockmarks over a bunch of knuckles. Two hands, that's all, attached to a body that seemed to hang between them while the two arms stood out. Ten fingers, a decent pair of thumbs. They were rapidly clenching then unclenching, tensing themselves at his tattered khaki pockets.
Maybe there was more of him to see, but she didn't. It was dark and then bright and then dark again, and Ms. Woeburne was a little more concerned with being in this room with an insurgent she didn't know than she was worried about inventorying anything else.
"And who in the hell are—?" She didn't finish. Those knuckles were suddenly in her mouth.
Don't bother looking for the grand philosophy here. This is what Brujah do when they cannot find answers for the questions you ask. If you are a part of the structure—or if it looks too much like you, with picked-clean nails and amber cologne—these people need no real reasons to cause you grief. And she'd given them reasons. So the Foreman should have predicted it.
She also should've felt uneasy to be discovered with tape glue all over her face, but all those messy escape efforts were suddenly a little beside-the-point. Point being: he'd been glaring very deliberately somewhere in the vicinity of her breastbone. A small man, a corpse of perhaps one-hundred-and-fifty pounds, but Ms. Woeburne decided that she did not care for that corpse that sort of fixation. No, hard swing. Not at all.
Without explaining who the hell he was or why, the little bastard pounced full on S.W. there in her unhappy seat.
The chair banged where it hit cold linoleum floor.
You might venture a guess—because she does not like to—as to what, exactly, an Anarch whelp stands to gain by ripping out an older Ventrue's throat. Her hands were crumpled and not terribly strong. This is not just an act of innocent everyday murder, and so she cannot call it "just revenge"; you can get revenge on a Scepter easily enough with spear heads, with broken necks, with false bargains and worse confessions. This is another thing. Her knee bucked but did not find a real mark. In the game of Jyhad, there is a corporate bureau stacked between a Foreman and her death; but here, there was only the shallow flesh of throat alone.
Blue is an insult and it is a claim. Neither definition makes her life more or less than what it is.
Her limbs strained to liberate themselves from the ones that crushed them down. Yes, S.W. was an ancilla middle-child sort, and not fully ripe—but she was descended from an old-generation tyrant. Snapping her bones was a minor victory. Splitting her carotid yielded the eight-pint prize of having victory in your cells.
Diablerie is a fantasy of everyone weak. Do more than kill your betters: become them.
Morality's a little meaningless if you're the one being absorbed. And her she was—a strapped-down blood thermos with a smack like fillet mignon.
Ms. Woeburne felt the sloppy razor burn of teeth in her collarbone.
She didn't panic. She did the worst thing a corporal can do, for a moment.
She stopped.
It hurt. Not badly, but it did. A palm heel was pressing her jaw aside, leaving bright pink finger marks, pushing her left temple against the ground. Screws in the arc of her back. She must've noised something. There was a thunderous echo when her chair screeched a few feet across the concrete. Metal pealed. Teeth clacked loudly within her head. Frighteningly loud, like a gunshot held between her lips.
Then everything started ringing and it became very hard to move at all.
What do you want me to tell you?
Natural selection?
Ms. Woeburne struggled in silence for the first few moments. Her chin swiveled, grimace fierce and hateful; loose strands of hair whipped, turn-over-turn of useless turns. That clammy mitt kept grabbing for and smashing it. She felt more like a child trying to spit out her medicine than someone being killed. It did not feel like incisors in her skin. It felt like great absence of self. She could not use her arms or feet or elbows. She did not know why she did not scream again.
It was a sound that stopped everything short.
It was the sound of something ripping, to be exact. It squealed all that sterling Camarilla indignation to a halt. A maraca of terror rattled up through the horribleness. And you can't do that. You can't.
These are the rules of which you'd be reminding yourself, if you were her, if you framed everything in negatives, in cannots, could-nevers, impossibles. Instinct—a dizziness, a churn that crossed her eyes behind their lids. Her head was pounding in doughy, vicious bolts. There would be no traces. His mouth smelled stale, like liquor and indolence; his free hand was digging rudely into the pliable stomach near her liver. No one could allow this.
What was that ripping noise? Where was the sound?
In terror is traitorous compulsion to submit. You are not a prey animal, a Ventrue swears to herself throughout her life. You are not a zebra with teeth in its withers. What made that noise?
Ms. Woeburne was disallowing, and trying hard, and about cry out—her torso squirming in a desperate effort to pitch a shoulder into the boy's bottom jaw—when she noticed something miraculous.
In the hazy muddle of it all, her right arm had burst free.
The sound? It was tape.
Don't pause.
Don't vacillate.
Whatever a soldier does, she doesn't waffle if she intends to live.
S.W. flicked out her thumb and gouged it all the way into his closest eye.
He was not expecting that—bottom-feeder son-of-a-bitch—and he retracted, a regurgitating python, fangs wet with cooling blood. There a cold rush of strength beneath the lethargy of being fed upon. Three greedy swigs. That's what the Brujah won himself; it was enough to make S.W woozy, to damage her, but not to incapacitate a Foreman. Ms. Woeburne is a stout Party trooper. She does not dally and she does not slow it down.
The boy was bleating. It was the most pathetic noise she had ever heard—a sob-shaken wail of being stuck. The Ventrue twisted gracelessly out of the chair, clambering to tender shins and then upon her naked feet. Purple toenails. There were bruises making everything sore but she did not let them. His shut eye had made a vomitous pop inside its socket and lost a mix of salt, mucous and thin redness. God, she had pushed it right out, crushed deep into the sclera. The lightweight anchor of seat was still tethered to S.W.'s left wrist. She struggled to detach it while her enemy, yowling, banged himself into the bricks, but she could not do so; there was not enough time. There never is.
Legs clanged gawkily in the blank space between them. It seemed very wide, bizarrely claustrophobic. She grabbed for her torn neck. Blood sluiced over blouse buttons. He bellowed something at her, strings dangling, a gelatin mess, head whirling; oh my god, how profane a thing to see, how awful; she stood stock still and did not even think to hiss. She thought: Do not look at the face. Do not. Her bottom teeth were shapely and bare through the slackness of jowl. Her fingers were slick and rank. His had splayed on the wall the same way a spider's forelegs do when it prepares to pounce. Do not look at the holes you have made.
The corporal watched his feet instead. When they lunged—dogs do that; they lunge—she strafed towards the blind eye, and swung her makeshift bludgeon. The steel clubbed his skull plates in with echoing, metallic 'thwack!' They both shuddered away from the impact. His blood—not hers—was droplets on the floor.
S.W. could not spare the energy to be revolted. She pawed again at herself, fumbling for the untidy puncture wounds. They were ragged, but Fortitude made them smaller. It would have been a waste to spill, she guessed. 'A waste,' she'd thought, how many times? Herself dead is 'a loss of resources.' Wouldn't want your blueblood shotglass to lose her precious self all over the ground.
Lifting the folding chair over her breast like a riot shield, she surged forward, flattening its back beam against her enemy's face. Both the man's hands threw up a barricade. Stop?—no, she won't. His calves buckled, brain still swimming from the last drive. They were both sprawled across the floor; S.W. hefted every ounce of her weight down, sandwiching him between tile and cheap metal. They'd fallen right on that centerpiece drain. Her knees fumbled for leverage. Her toes bent in an effort to find some unslippery ground.
Don't flag.
Don't let up.
Wouldn't want to disappoint the Raj, sapper. Wouldn't want to stumble and snap your pretty nose.
One Brujah fist grappled for her forearm—but before it could find strength to upend them, Ms. Woeburne bowed forward and pulled out his jugular with her mouth.
A sound like a cough and a burble and the spit of a run-over cat.
It was foul. It was all foul—the remnants of eye; the young essence, steaming poorly; a mouthful of sodium. The Foreman forewent tasting at all and just bit, just shredded him. It was an unconscious thing. She crunched down until every tooth touched through the skin and she shook her head like a bull terrier.
One fierce twist, and the windpipe was laid open. Four and it hung in reeds, her face a warlike red patina. She squeezed her lashes tight to deflect anything that might spurt. By the time her facial muscles managed to relax, the neonate's esophagus was gaping open to tubular blues, mangled beyond repair.
It was the most vile—the most animal—thing that she had ever done, but God help Ms. Woeburne because a corporal would not feel it, should not guess, could not make herself care.
S.W. stood up, bare calves trembling beneath their drenched skirt, watching the man who tried to murderer her die. His one eye bulged and thawed to glossy milk. His vertebrae stuck up through the trachea mess.
Don't cave.
Don't crumble.
Don't lose your step in the jungle, soldier.
These are the rules of being a regime. This is how you belong to conquerors, where rusty links are not tolerated, and only feeble boots limp.
Shock chased reality off. Suddenly the Ventrue was certain she'd be sick, but instead, terrifying blankness: she pulled the key ring from his jeans pocket. She used its teeth to remove any remaining tape. And that done, she turned it slowly in the oversized lock, and she stepped out into free air, still dripping from her jaw.
Don't put your rifle down now.
Ms. Woeburne emerged in a nondescript alley. There were no familiar street signs. There was no sky through the crowded tenement ribs and dimmed streetlamps. There was a night wind and an unseasonal chill. She was alone, save for a stray Siamese that took one sniff in her direction and skittered off into someone's trash bin.
It was ten past five. Forty minutes to dawn, if she was lucky.
She wiped her face in both hands and shut the door behind her.
And the Ventrue fled, barefoot, the soles of her feet and the color on her toenails undaunted by broken glass.