CHAPTER 11 - POLYTONALITY III

  Panic and anxiety have molded Siena since she'd been ripped out of her mother's stomach kicking and screaming nineteen years ago. They have molded her—gripped her soul day in, day out and carved it as they pleased with a chisel, shaving her down as she grew. Today, she survives as a bundle of nerves, the only outcome such a life could allow. Shaky, paranoid, zealously overthinking about every little thing and expecting the worst to forever strike her down like lightning.

  This is such a moment, and she fears as she glances through the doorway of her room, hands gripping her bedsheets like a girl terrified of a monster who lurks just beyond the frame. She's frozen. Utterly frozen. Her throat constricts upon itself; every breath is akin to breathing through a crumpled straw.

  Siena will remember this moment forever, she thinks. The sweat dripping down her body. The sound of stumbling outside magnified, the buzzing in her ears, the desperate prayer to the Conductor, the view.

  Yes. The view. This slant of light. An angel peering through her window.

  Time passes. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. The details are inconsequential. It feels like forever. But forever is too long to sit quietly with the thought of dying. Long enough instead for Siena's instinct to survive to bare its teeth and take hold.

  It's subtle at first. Dust and ash under her nails and at the tip of her fingers. Eyes darting around her room for an escape path—escape. Yes, she must escape. Siena crawls out of her bed—she stumbles and falls on her shoulder. With a desperate hiss of pain as agony courses down her arm and up her neck, she clenches her teeth and swears.

  When the pain has faded and breathing comes easier, Siena realizes she's upright again and her hands are already on her window. She doesn't think to take anything with her. Not her phone to communicate with her siblings or to situate herself, not her ID, not her wallet, nothing. The monster's hands shake so much she can't even properly open her window. It rattles, but the latch won't come undone.

  The lights in the living room pause. Siena hears a muffled voice—she grinds her teeth together. There's no time. What if Golden Promise heard? She's going to die like a cornered animal.

  Unbeknownst to Siena, her entire body turns to fine soot as she passes through the windowsill, and rematerializes back on all fours behind her house. She's never—how? There's no time to dwell on it. Her legs carry her before she can think about how odd it feels to become nothing.

  Each step sheds her at the edges. Her heels strike dirt and what should be muscle and bone loosens, fraying into smoke that trails behind her in ragged plumes. She smears across the night, her outline blurring, thinning, dissolving whenever fear spikes too hard. Branches and fences pass through her. When she stumbles, her body scatters instead of falling, reforming a step later in a hurried, imperfect approximation of a girl. She leaves footprints that fade almost as soon as they appear, smudges of soot swallowed by the dark.

  Where to is the issue now that she can think a little clearer. Keisha's? No, she would try to fight. Megan? Maybe, but does she really want to trouble her and link her with when she has the best chance of fulfilling their duty? Somehow, Siena had given something away in class and now Golden Promise was coming to kill her.

  Too late to think back on which moment it had been now—

  Blinding light behind her. An eye forms on the back of Siena's head, and she sees the blinding might that can bring a nation to its knees hovering in the sky brighter than anything else. She's chasing her. It's late at night with few people out, but would Lucienne really execute her in public?

  No. Siena phases through the wall of a closed grocery store and alarms blare as produce falls behind her and soot sticks to this place like glue. If Golden Promise had wanted to kill her, she would have done so already. Is their plan to capture and study her body? Few grains of dust manage to spill through the store; those that do multiply like cells and regrow her body.

  Not her body. Something vaguely shaped like a human. Her true self remains in the store, alarms booming across every corner. This chase has exhausted her. She's pushed her powers to their limit, done things even Maya hadn't seen in practice because of her sheer desperation for survival. Siena coughs up ash as her body slowly returns to skin and bones, supporting herself on one of the store shelves.

  "Damn it," she breathes out. Tears stream down her face. "Damn it."

  Amidst the ruined grocery store, she begins to sob. All of her hopes of living a long, normal life are gone. Her hold on normalcy had always felt tenuous at best, but God…

  "How ruinous," she laments through clenched teeth.

  She'd miss her sisters. She'd miss Gabriel. Maya. The hope that remained until tonight.

  She mustn't stay here long. Her false body wouldn't last forever, and someone may have called the police due to the loud alarm. She would finish composing herself when she was out of state, or preferably out of the country. Maybe she could steal a car to look innocuous?

  She wasn't adept at criminal activities, but she was sure she could easily have someone choke on her ash and obscure their vision while she dragged them out of their car and then booked it to New Mexico—no, not New Mexico. That's maybe where they'd search for first. She'd go somewhere else. California—

  Her hopes and dreams are dashed once again, crushed underneath the power of a God too powerful to even glance at. As if she stares the sun down itself, Siena has to cover her eyes as she stumbles back and trips on a pack of soda cans. She scrambles, palms skidding on aluminum, soda cans bursting and rolling away with a clatter she cannot even hear. One moment she was safe, and the next, Lucienne had simply appeared.

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  The glimpses Siena does manage to catch are like this:

  Her own ash swirling around Golden Promise like the primordial dust the first planets were made of. A silhouette where light has erased all edges and all that remains is a vague humanoid golden shape that seems so unstable as to rapture at the seams. A pressure in the air, as if the space around Golden Promise has been pulled taut. Warmth gently enveloping the store, not hot enough to be uncomfortable but still present.

  Sobbing. The sobs of a little girl with no idea what to do.

  "H—hel—help."

  What.

  What?

  Siena stumbles over her words. "Excuse what you what—" she clenches her jaw shut and keeps slowly crawling away until she hits a wall. Surely she had heard wrong. "W—what did you just say?" Yes. She'd heard wrong amidst the alarm and the panic. She's going crazy.

  The light slowly sits down against a shelf and seems to sit down, sighing with a treble in her voice. It plays like a musical instrument and carries a steady rhythm Siena finds enticing. This moment, if she could ignore the horror and the confusion, would be strangely beautiful.

  "I'm all apart," Golden Promise cries. "I betrayed someone I care about, I think. And I can't… remember it right."

  It's only now that the monster notices the final remains of her cloned body dissolving at Lucienne's side. Siena needs to stall for time. "So you—" So you don't want to kill me? "So you didn't want to hurt me?" she corrects herself.

  "What?"

  "What?"

  The two girls stare at each other—or Siena does as best she can to do so—and blink.

  "Was that why you were running?" Lucienne asks with a sniffle.

  Siena nods. Why else would she be running?

  "I'm—sorry I scared you." She stares at her hands brimming with light. "I can't control these, it's been like this since I tried going to sleep. It's like I'm thirteen again, and I'm so scared."

  Ignoring the fact that the Golden Promise is admitting of being scared to a stranger's face, Siena still doesn't really know what to say or understand what's going on. This clearly has to do with what happened this morning during Trauma Management, but…

  The alarm suddenly stops. It is so, so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

  "I don't know what I can do to help." Siena's voice is a whisper, barely audible. "Why did you come to me?"

  Lucienne scoffs, wiping her eyes. "'Cause I recognize a bullshitter like you from a mile away. You're a liar."

  Her heart jumps into her throat. "What do you mean?"

  "You hide your true self. And you behave like you know I do it too. I know you do." A pinch of hesitation. "And you remind me of myself when I was younger—which is an odd thing to say considering you're a year older than me. But just… your eyes. Your reclusivity. The artificiality."

  So she had given herself away? Siena tries to keep her face still, but she can feel it twitch and subconsciously pushes herself against the wall as if she could go through it without powers. Already, her hands have turned to ash—

  "No, no, no, no!" Lucienne holds out a hand. "Please, I don't want to—expose you or anything." She hiccups. "I mean, I've given you a pretty big piece of capital."

  The silence stretches for a few seconds. "I mean. It's not like anyone would believe me," Siena says.

  "...fair enough."

  "Look, I'm sorry, but what do you want from me?" Siena finally asks.

  "I—I'll tell you the details, okay? I promise I will, but I would just really want to become acquaintances first."

  "You—you chased me out of my own house and then won't tell me why?" Siena chuckles dryly and kicks away a soda can in frustration. "I don't understand."

  "Well, I was crying for hours and I wasn't thinking straight and…" Golden Promise gestures around as if not knowing what to say. "It's like I'm sobering up from being drunk on grief. Slowly." It's true that the light had been slowly fading away; Siena could stand to look at her now, if only for a short time. "And I'm realizing how much I fucked up, but this has unmade me," she hoarses out. "But this?" She looks around the rundown store and laughs, a sad little thing sounding barely happy. "This is the most honest I've been in years. And it's with you for some godforsaken reason."

  "You're telling me," Siena mumbles.

  She's frustrated. Confused and frustrated. But there's good that can come out of this if she just can think for herself for a couple of hours or she can get all of this information to Megan. It's only now that she realizes there's no phone in her pocket.

  At the very least, it's looking like she'll survive the night.

  "Ahhh." Lucienne lays down with a groan. "I hate this job sometimes."

  Siena doesn't bother to even try to act surprised. She lays down instead too, and they both stare at the ceiling. "I know. I hate it too. I thought…" the old Siena thought, "I thought it'd be more than this."

  A little sprinkled honesty amidst two people whose interest it is to both never tell each other the truth, and they don't even know it.

  "It got my best friend killed."

  There isn't a soul in the Agency who didn't know about Olivia Ruland, and her unfortunate demise in Miami when both girls were thirteen and fresh out of training. What remained of her deformed, folded body could fit in a shoebox.

  "But we keep going, don't we?" Lucienne says. "For the good of the world, we keep going."

  "Yeah."

  "Liar. You don't care," she snorts.

  "I was just agreeing with you. I care about the world, sometimes. Even if it's so scary."

  About the great towering works of Man that make her wince at the waste or gasp in awe. The resilience humankind has shown adversity time and time again. About quiet mornings that arrive anyway after bad nights, the hope that you shall see the sunrise again if you just hold on. Their individuality, their strides for greatness, the collective brilliance.

  And yet it is that same ingenuity that unsettles her—the knowledge that the hands capable of such beauty are just as capable of ruin. Every monument casts a shadow, and that progress, so often, comes at a cost. Humanity is large just as it is small. Greedy, petty, vengeful, murderous and quick to blame others for issues of their own making.

  But there's something beautiful about it all. The discord. No one truly knows what they are doing, and yet it works anyway. Three hundred thousand years of history.

  They're quiet for a few minutes, and that's okay.

  But the sound of police sirens snap them out of that beautiful stretch of silence. Fuck, she'd forgotten about the cops. Siena scrambles to stand up, but Lucienne just… stays down.

  "What are you doing?" the monster hisses. "You'll get in trouble!"

  "I don't care. I'll stick around," she says with a slight smile. "I'll just come up with an excuse; they won't actually arrest me. Thanks for talking to me. I feel better."

  Siena doesn't know what to say.

  "I—"

  I am going home. Say it, she thinks. She glances down at Lucienne, so vulnerable and with only a slight glow remaining around her. The blonde looks at the ceiling with eyes that scream for freedom, as if she can see through it and is reaching for the stars themselves. Siena can't look away.

  "I'll stick around too."

  Lucienne laughs. It sounds like a pretty song.

  This is strictly because she can use her and protect Keisha. It is.

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