Tongueless
I will find my way to you
Eyeless
I will grind your wires between my teeth
Kalypso took the hit overhand, grunting at the impact. It made the pass high, which she did not like, but at least it made it into the cart.
A fair number of them were not making it into the cart. Every time one didn't, the sound of the ball hitting the floor or the wall grated against her like a scraping knife.
The next approach. Kalypso slipped forward into Duibhne's blocking shadow, watching the set, and at the last moment, committing to either line or the dig lane. It was a terrible way to defend, half-blind but for snatches of feet or shoulders or the crackle of a telling Flare, but it was just two of them on this side of the court and this damned blocker wasn't giving her anything to work with.
This time, she thought she saw Jaegerjaquez's feet turning toward the cross-an amateurish mistake, more fool her for reading into it-and as a result she went left. The ball hammered down deep on the line, and Kalypso finished her pointless leftward shuffle with a hiss.
"Nice," said Duibhne when he landed from the block, as if he hadn't polished the silver and served that meal up for the hitter like a butler himself.
If he'd just play instead of moving like a well-oiled automaton in that same vanilla pattern, there could be an actual dynamic drill here. Jaegerjaquez had remembered where the line was, Kalypso was plucking the strings of his angles and making chords out of them now and again, but this wasn't playing. Not really. It felt good, compared to sitting in her room and doing a hundredth set of push-ups, but it wasn't what she wanted.
And yes, Jaegerjaquez was mixing up his hits, but the sets were all the same. Kalypso wasn't sure who to blame for that. Could be Cu Chulainn was under orders to do nothing but hut sets, but whether that was a demand coming from Jaegerjaquez or Duibhne was unclear.
A boring repetitive set requested by a tilted hitter trying to muscle through it in practice was believable-but Kalypso could not shake the impression that it was Duibhne who was actually shackling them all to one set and one set only right now. When she'd told him to make one-man blocking choices, he'd looked at her like he'd just caught her putting centipedes in his shoes. She, not fancying the assault of yet another Flare, had not pushed the issue. Neither had Jaegerjaquez. He had stopped pretending to cut around a fictional middle blocker, for the most part, and while he wasn't hitting everything, by and large he was being permitted to run amok while Duibhne repeated the same mechanical, worthless block over and over and Kalypso gambled entire sides of the court on millisecond glimpses.
Hell, maybe she should be blocking.
The low flame of a Flare ballooned a bit against her senses. "Spell me, Ixora."
Oho. Had someone finally tired of this tepid excuse for playing? She couldn't blame Cu Chulainn for feeling that way- only for taking so long to say something about it.
He had turned to face her through the net, implicitly forbidding the toss Jaegerjaquez had been about to chamber. The hitter's 'tch' of impatience didn't mean much at this point. Kalypso had learned that he 'tch'ed at everything. No Flare accompanied the sound.
She opened her mouth to tell him that she was allergic to setting nothing but huts, but then the lights in the gym went out.
"Fuck's sake," came the gravelly snarl from Jaegerjaquez's direction.
The darkness was nearly total. There were no windows in the training room-no windows anywhere she'd yet seen in Nike Drive.
With sight gone abruptly, other senses rushed in-the echoing thud of Jaegerjaquez furiously bouncing a ball, the cold trickle of sweat down her back, and yes, of course, the chemical flood that now had once less competing sense to deal with.
Kalypso could feel them in the room. It was like they were heat sources-no. Tesla coils. Connected and severed from each other moment to moment, circling and engaging and devouring each other. When she stared blindly in their directions, oil-slick illusions laced across the darkness. When she closed her eyes, their afterimages were there even though she hadn't really seen them in the first place, formless sparkling tongues of Dominion Flares.
The Lamb instinct in her, in this sudden vulnerable darkness, was to get close to them, to nestle up tight against their sides, to take shelter. To let the Dominions fix it. To be the sweetly tremulous reason why the Dominions would fix it.
The Dominion's greatest imperative is the Lamb. That's what they said, what they all said, the Nike Drive people and the Garden and what every Dominion glance said, too.
It was just chemistry, though, and she was more than chemistry. It was humiliating and degrading, and Kalypso had no difficulty ignoring it. All her life she had dug in her heels when her body told her to run to the nearest Dominion for help. If the Nike Drive shot-callers expected a bit of a blackout to scare her into anybody's arms, more fool them.
Kalypso moved forward, seeking the ball cart.
"Careful-here, Ixora."
Oh, no, nope.
She recoiled from the hand reaching for her shoulder. Of course Duibhne could feel her just like she couldn't escape feeling him-and of course he'd make a beeline for the unsecured, unclaimed Lamb wandering around in the dark.
"Ah-"
"Sorry, gal." Cu Chulainn was on the other side of the net, but that was no protection. They were hemming her in. Kalypso's breath came hard. She felt hot, knew that the darkness was not going to hide her flush from the Dominions. "They're kicking us out."
"Bastards," came Jaegerjaquez's bitter growl, closer than she'd like it to be.
Kalypso plucked a ball from the cart and skittered left, away from Duibhne who was still reaching for her, and out of the shadow of Cu Chulainn.
"Hey-c'mere, you can't keep playing in the-"
"They'll shut down the ventilation next," Cu Chulainn said. "Abarai and me tried it, first day here. It's a no go."
"Do they want us to play or not?" The question came out of her strained, but didn't squeak, thank god. Being thrust into darkness with three Dominions was bad, and being cut off from training was worse, but Kalypso still had her pride.
"Good fucking question," snarled Jaegerjaquez, from immediately behind her.
Kalypso could have spun around and punched him in the stomach, or lashed out with a foot, or made herself look big, like they say to do about mountain lions, and thrown up her hands and screamed at him to back off. She could have done any of those things, if she'd had her head on straight. Instead of 'fight,' though, 'flight' took over.
Or tried to. Hot fingers seized her arm, vice-tight, turning her attempt to flee into a stagger. Then a hand closed on the back of her head, those fingers burrowing into the ravines of her braid, locking her in place.
Caught like a rat, bared for display, off-balance, throat exposed, feeling his breath stir her hair, Kalypso's blood turned to lightning and her heart to bile. She wanted to howl, to scream, but the shock and the horror and the rapturous Lamb inside her crushed her lungs and left her only silence.
He stepped up against her, his chest against her shoulder, his hip jostling hers-he was so hot, and he was all hard planes and brutal motion, and through their clothes his pulse was battering into her brain-and shoved her bent, forcing her head down, and down, curving her into a bow as she stumbled forward in an animal panic of not-quite stalled momentum.
Jaegerjaquez shoved her down and under the net that she had nearly sprinted into. "Gonna clothesline yourself, idiot."
When he bent to follow her under the net, his grip left her head. His hold on her arm did not, but it weakened, and Kalypso tore herself free. The Lamb in her blood was lighting her on fire, but she was not going to burn.
As he straightened up from his own duck beneath the net, his blue eyes moved through the dark like angler fish lights, predator's lures. Kalypso slammed the volleyball she held into his chest, slammed it into him with her full weight, with all the precision focus of a body trained to unite all its pieces for perfect execution.
He staggered back a step, hit the net, and stayed there, pinned-it was shock pinning him, couldn't be anything else. Kalypso pressed the volleyball harder into his hard chest and held the huge blue eyes glowing down at her through the darkness and the iridescent Dominion heat haze. "Don't touch me," she hissed.
The futility of it made it worse. He could punch the ball out of her hands, lunge off the net, and make her regret being born. He could grab her hair again and drag her backward. He could take the wrists she was bracing against the ball and snap them so she'd never hold another ball. He could laugh. He could sneer. He could smile.
He didn't do any of those things, but he could, and that implication was enough. More than enough for her to hate him.
Kalypso reared back, turned. The faintest, narrowest band of light glittered low, at the seam of wall and floor-the lights were still on in the locker room. She stalked toward it.
"Ixora-"
The volleyball she had taken pounded into the floor with every other stride, cutting off Duibhne's call, knelling her departure.