NAGAMORI - I

the Rising Sun Troupe - Desolation Row - the Hiding

Grains of sand on the floor bit into the open wounds in her knuckles as the girl settled on all fours. Her cage was unseen save for when the metal bars blotted out faint slithers of light coming through the backstage curtains. Just outside, the announcer's booming voice and the feral cheers blended together into a foreign, divine tongue. The glint of a key passed over the light and she heard the wrangling of chain as the Troupe master undid the padlock.

"For it is in service that you achieve immortality. Through this, become a paragon of virtue and glory devoted above all else. Across dynasties and far lands, I bind your soul, and by my shoulder, absolve thee."

Under his hand, she lowered her head of unbound platinum white hair and pressed herself against the gravel.

"Remember what you are, a sinner by birth. You would have been buried without our grace."

With that she trotted along the catwalk onto centre stage as the lights went out. The crowd fell silent. That night in the sand pit there was not an ounce left for her of the scorching heat that had tortured them earlier in the day. The fires of Vacuo, her native land deserted. She could just about count seven rings of seats like the whole host of Light in their Ever-After palaces. With them near the bottom, the theatre was a flipped-over ziggurat mirroring the grand structure of Shade Academy above ground. No god to answer that ritual.

A beam of white light bore down on her skin and laid bare the girl's wretched state. Another beam across her contained within another scrawny figure. He was one of the cannonballs who'd grown a blue-black sore in his left heel before they'd left Atlas months before. The rags he wore failed to hide the chipped knife in his hand. Like everyone else, he'd sat with her every morning before the daily bread when the sisters would read to them from the Book of Light, and every evening when they would read from the Book of Dark. In those moments the girl never felt more ashamed of what she was, and never more grateful for her place in the world. She couldn't help but smile from the memory. The boy saw this and backed away before a word from the announcer stopped him in his tracks. Something flickered in his eyes. The blade came up in front of him.

Ear piercing silence reigned as they awaited a sign from above. The boy's gaze strayed off for an instant before his eyes widened a fraction at something off in the distance. The moment dragged on for a quarter minute or so until curiosity got the better of her, and she saw the announcer too frantically looking around, the remote for her shock collar dangling absently in one hand. A row of floodlights had exposed the audience's faces. The unmasked pale men and women were left facing one another in horrified recognition. She didn't know why.

Cackling filled the theatre on cue, holding an unnatural volume until the voice began to strain. The frilled shadow of a schoolgirl's dress flew across the crowd before its caster seemed to perch on the air itself, adorned with a pair of disfigured talons one crossed behind the other in a mock bow.

The Harpy spoke. "My, who do we have here? Asturias, Agrabah, the Rajah minor, Muad'dib… even Watts? Why're you all the way out here? Isn't your fiance back in Atlas about a week due by now?"

"Where are the goddamn huntsmen?" Someone yelled.

The Harpy pulled and a red mist sprayed from the man's throat. He fell back, choking. Then pandaemonium.

"And you didn't think to hand me a microphone for a crowd like this?"

A distinct thud in the sand behind her brought the girl back down to earth. There lay a fallen body in shining plate armour, the cross painted on his barrel helm lined with smoking holes.

"You bloody traitor-"

Her gaze was met with a shower of broken glass and torn white garments. The pair of deer antlers he wore cut a distinct silhouette against the floodlights, shining through more holes across his chest and in each palm. All turned back to the sand pit where the two bodies had appeared, joined by a third man in a suit and fedora.

"Come on now, birdie. A real artist don't need no machine to do the talking for'em. They'll hear us just fine."

"Screw, Bernstein!"

The man cocked the hammer of an old six-shooter. Then he bent down and, from his fallen comrades, plucked seven bloodied gold coins one by one and dropped them in his pocket. The six-shooter shot up into the sky spinning as a cry of alarm sounded through the speakers. Bernstein stood before the announcer. In a fright, the remote for her collar slipped out of his pocket and fell into the sand pit below. The man in black reached out with one hand, letting the microphone drop into it, dangling it off the platform edge.

"Drop it, I'm not wasting my breath on them."

The microphone promptly disappeared and the man in black loomed large behind her. The girl turned and scampered a few feet back while Bernstein spared her a glance that exuded a sick amusement through his round black glasses. Then he caught the descending pistol and in the blink of an eye, appeared at the furthest exit. A light kick sent a domino of fleeing guests back down the aisle. They lived for this.

The girl in the pit limped over dry sand and broken glass toward the cripple boy who remained the one familiar thing in the centre of that maelstrom. Caged underground, the mass trampled over one another in a downward spiral that drew ever closer to them. She saved him from getting run over by some woman gone blind, and pulled him shrieking into her arms. Like ocean waves against a lone rock, the pair settled into an ebb and flow where they were pushed every which way by the crowd and through it all, knelt steady where they were. Slowly more cuts and bruises eroded away at her, opening the lashing scars and brands that littered her bare back. She tightened her embrace, praying not a drop of blood in all this red sea would taint the boy's skin until she felt a stab-

"Heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin'

Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin'

Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter

Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley

And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard

And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall"

Bob Dylan

-in her gut and still she held on tighter. There were crunching sounds behind her and something slick and sticky that ran through her hair. More striking was a certain numbness bearing down on her that made the pain dull and void. The moment she tried to get up however, the girl would be met with the immediate snap of something wrong and a fresh round of screaming straight into her ears. She kept kneeling, content to stare down at the sand pit as the red seeped through each grain, until it dyed the entire canvas and the storm fell silent at last.

Only then did she unclasp her arms that had been unknowingly locked in prayer around the boy like a nest egg in a ring of broken branches, laying him down on the warm sand. That boy who'd come out of the womb wrong, his left heel like a bird's second joint. They'd called him chicken little, saying he'd be able to fly if they shot him high enough. His left leg looked fine enough for what it was at first, until the girl saw the rest of his limbs knotted together, still holding the hilt of a shattered bloody knife in both gnarled hands.

"Knew our lil' toys were breaking just a bit too easy. So that's why."

"Do you think he could have seen this coming?"

She fled, her crawl turning to a full two-legged sprint across the catwalk, oblivious to the web of near invisible wires pulled away from the backstage entrance, paying no mind to the bodies she stepped over along a row of dark, emptied out cages. The girl rounded behind the cover of a few wooden crates and squeezed herself into the cage behind them, locking the bars behind her. Atlas to Vale to Vacuo to Mistral and the Troupe would repeat the cycle again and again. She would have to head east for their next stop, if it even mattered at that point.

Scarlet pupils stood out in the dark. They darted back and forth for anyone she knew who could help, and when she looked to the corner of the cage she let out a sharp gasp. Sat there was the outline of sickly pale hairs, and the figure huddled inside the ghillie suit was chewing on something small in his hands hidden under a wet surgical mask. It dropped out from under his long sleeves, and after a moment of consideration he sent the remote screeching across the sand-riddled floor. The girl winced, and carefully inched back toward the cage door. The figure called out a na-

A flash of light blew apart the padlock and the girl yelped.

-me. Down the far end of the corridor, she caught the glint of a coin falling through the air.

"You could have killed her!"

"Ain't me that done that. You two know how it is, right?"

"Excuses. That girl has more restraint with her Semblance than you've ever shown."

"Please, she don't even know what she's got!"

The girl backed away from the gate once more, this time glancing between the pair strolling down the corridor and the corner of the cage while the remote lay still on the floor beside her.

"Oh, hi there! Is that yours, girl?"

The Harpy pointed from atop the cage. The girl finally noticed, snatching the remote before her partner had the chance to leap for it through the door. Steel bars groaned behind her back as she leaned against them.

"Aww, now ain't that sweet? Like she didn't just see you butcher those sixty over poor men and women out there in that open hall. Same goes for you, savage."

The girl refused to meet his gaze. Instead she balled up with her hands around her knees, clutching tightly that piece of wet saliva-covered plastic with the comically large red button. A wretched sound stabbed into her eardrums from the bars around her, a line of sparks where some invisible force gradually tore through them. The girl screamed as a violent impact shook the cage. Only the bottom half was left bleeding from red-hot wounds. Her head surfaced from under her arms, only to find the Harpy had joined them in the cage as well. On her face was a white porcelain mask carved in the shape of a man's face and worn upside down. She mirrored the girl's squatting posture, leaning toward her.

"Hey, don't look at him, look at me, okay?"

"Why, you're gonna take a peek in that noggin of hers?"

"Hey! Hey, it's okay. They've been using that remote to hurt you, right? If you hand it over, I'll break it for you."

"Oh, just hand it over alright. That's how she gets her hooks in."

"Would you just-" She snapped. "Or we could take off the collar, probably, so you don't have to feel that pain anymore, okay? You're alright now."

She felt the hair on her arms brush against the Harpy's nails and lashed out. The Harpy eluded her strike, pulled back by the other man in the cage. Metal bars creaked and bent further. Bernstein laughed.

She looked at the Harpy, then at Bernstein, then at the ghillie suit man, waiting. He approached on all fours, stopping at arms length to inspect the puddle of blood around her, twirling his index finger in it for a taste. Slowly, he offered an open hand outward. Hesitantly, she took it. He pulled one of her red chipped nails lightly across his suit, leaving a red line between the old fabric. Then sharply he stabbed her hand through his chest. Although the girl felt nothing pushing back against her fingers, when she pulled her arm out there was a whole cluster of hair and fabric and metal plate and bone shards stuck between her fingers. A red stain now decorated the man's surgical mask. Coupled with a pair of narrowed eyes, his mask failed to hide the wide grin beneath.

She leapt to her feet but slipped, and the broken bars of her cage bent further still before collapsing to the ground. Rather than running off, she sat in place with her face in her hands mumbling indistinctly, prayers unanswered.

"Shit, we've really outdone us with this one."

"You're going to do this every time now, aren't you?"

In hindsight that likely scared her more than any familiar threat of pain. The newfound weight of power. Her knees tightened and pressed against the remote, causing sparks to fly from the back of her neck. The bleeding girl winced at pain she didn't feel. Confused, she touched against the back of her neck, eyes widening in horror.

"Oh Brother, so it's gonna be like that."

She pressed the remote again and again. Shivering, her blows escalated from finger presses to smashing down with balled fists. The remote broke, red plastic littering the floor. The blood on her hands slowly darkened and cracked apart, the clotted pieces flaking off and floating out the open cage.

"It's wearing off. At this rate she'll end up offing herself, Birdie."

"How? The remote's broken."

"She'll find a way, alright. She'll find a way."

"Well, she was your choice, you do it! That thing with the Aura! What was it again… For it is with…"

"Take turns with me, there's something else in the way." Bernstein inhaled. "For it is through pain that we reach immortality."

"Through looking past what is and… at what can be, we rise above oblivion."

"Boundless wrath, I liberate you from the woe of this blasted world, and by my shoulder, save thee."

As they recited their mantra she stared blankly at the ghillie suit man like she expected something more from them, something that would spur her onward or command her to rest.

"Now you're gonna listen to me. Don't count on this to save you any more than three times, lesson learned from my old man. After that you're good as dead to us, we clear?"

She didn't answer. They left without her in the morning.