From the Ashes of Victory: The Complete Series, page 18
part #0 of From the Ashes of Victory Series
When she looked up, Niamh was standing right in front of her. She put her hand on Millie's shoulder.
"If this is your path, you will have to some day be willing to do what I did. I hope not as an avenger, but as a defender. You three are too important to be taken away by some egotistical, short-sighted historical footnote. If the 20th Century is only to be your first, you are going to have to be prepared to earn the next ones the hard way."
The sun that shone in through November's window was a heatless glare, useful only for illuminating her rapidly crumbling optimism. She sat on the edge of her bed in only her underclothes, staring down at her arms. They looked as they always had, as did her tattoos. Black ink indelibly forced into her skin by the sharpest of needles, to remain there until the end of her days and beyond. When she went into the grave for real, they would still be there. They would mark her until she was naught but bones and dust, but until that hopefully far distant day, they were as much a part of her as her heart or her mind.
She ran her fingers over the word for what felt like the thousandth time, and it was just as unhelpful as it had been the first. How could something that inspired her to irreversibly alter herself stay forgotten so easily? It had been nearly a week since Bertram had hauled her out of that frozen hole, and yet all she had by way of memories from before then was one more number: 23.
Not much to show for a life, really.
Why was it so hard to remember? It had been there! Just out of her grasp. She'd felt the tantalising edges of it brush her fingers when she'd strained for it, down in that hole in her mind. That inky, impenetrable, awful place had been this close to giving up its secrets. But like a frightened spider, it had retreated with shocking quickness to an even greater depth and barricaded itself in layers of despair that she didn't know she had the strength to push through.
November. 11. November 23rd. Pain from all three. A single set of clothing; the only clues from which to reassemble an entire life.
A life that had been lived. She had been wearing decent clothing, where had it come from? How had she received the money that had paid for them? Had she been the one to pay for them? She knew she had short hair, who had cut it? Who had given her her tattoos? There was a chain leading back to the origins of what little she had, but the most important links were missing. They lie on the ground before her, limp, useless and just out of reach. Just like she knew she must have parents, she knew that at the very least, the people who had given her those things existed, and knew she did as well.
So where were they? It would have been narcissistic to a degree not seen since the man himself to believe that the shop that had sold her her clothing should be worried about her not returning to buy more within a single week, but when hope was in such short supply, she was willing to latch on to the tiniest grain she could find.
Who taught you to stop bullets? asked a voice in the back of her mind, a voice she wished she could strangle into silence. The same people who taught you to superheat metal in the blink of an eye, it answered before she got the chance.
There were threads she was willing to pull on that might reveal how the garment was put together, or how certain parts connected to other parts. Then there were those that she knew would cause everything to unravel, leaving her standing naked in the cold, more vulnerable than she had ever been. Whatever it was that had allowed her to do what she had done in that pub she knew was the latter. Learning that it was a hallucination brought on by brain damage would be preferable to the reality of what had happened, but she knew such a diagnosis was not forthcoming.
She wanted to find out her name, where she lived, who she knew, who she loved—she didn't want to find out that she was a monster. People feared monsters. Whatever help she was receiving would evaporate in an instant if she said anything about what she had done, there was no question in her mind. Though she didn't know what kind of place she would be taken to if she did, she very much doubted it had an airing court.
Or air of any kind.
Sighing, November stood and went to the window. Flinging it open, she allowed the cold evening air to bite into her cheeks and her exposed arms. She stared into the breeze, holding her eyes open as long as she could. When they started to water and the world went a bit fuzzy, she finally allowed herself to blink.
Who she was, what she was, was obviously going to require some discomfort to discover, as the incident with the washing had proved. If she was going to find any answers, she was going to have to be brave.
Slamming the window shut, she reached for the cable to the service bell and yanked on it.
"Here you are," Jeffery said. "Though I'm not supposed to leave you alone with it."
"Thank you. Could you… could you just wait in the hall? You may keep the door open if you'd like."
Jeffery considered a moment. "All right. I'll be just outside."
Nodding her thanks, November watched him leave before looking down at the back of a picture-frame mirror she now held in her hands. It swayed slightly from how hard her heart was pounding. She had no idea who was waiting for her on the other side, but it had come time for her to find out. Whatever negative consequences of looking she had imagined now seemed trivial compared to the idea of never knowing. With so little information to go on, she would be stupid to continue to deny something so important as her own appearance.
She returned to sit on the edge of the bed, holding the mirror tightly between her hands.
"Just flip it over. Look," she told herself.
The mirror continued reflecting the tops of her legs.
"You've done this a thousand times in your life," she said. It had to be true, she knew. It was normal. Everyone looked in a mirror, it wasn't difficult. It required literally no more effort than it took to look at anything else, she told herself.
Her hands began to tremble with how little effort it took.
"You'll see yourself eventually. Do it now while you have control over it, while you're still feeling some of that bravery you came up with."
She raised the mirror. No good introducing herself to herself with an unflattering reflection.
Eyes closed, she rotated it to face her.
Taking a deep breath, she let it out slowly through her nose. When her lungs were finally empty, she opened her eyes.
Blue eyes, as it turned out. Pale blue, like a summer sky, peering out from under naturally long eyelashes. Her hair was jet black, in a severe bob that jutted forward to point at thin, pale lips surrounding perfectly unremarkable teeth, framing a smattering of freckles, much like the ones on the rest of her body, over a nose that was small if not overly round.
She began to breathe again.
That was it? She didn't feel any different. There was no thunderclap of revelation, and she had so far refrained from smashing the mirror on the floor in revulsion or in the fits of some sort of breakdown. She watched her thick eyebrows furrow in consternation, and though while she appreciated that they were such expressive eyebrows, they were not especially helpful.
The mirror fell back into her lap before it shot back up again and she glared at herself with accusatory blue daggers.
"Who are you? Why won't you tell me?" she said, shaking the mirror. She began to pace back and forth before the window, letting the sun strike her at different angles, but no combination of shadow and light made any difference—the face that looked back at her remained resolutely anonymous.
It made no sense! After all her hand-wringing and anxiety about the barest hint of her reflection, when she finally saw it nothing happened. She was just another unrecognised face among dozens in this place. Not even any existential dread about it either, it was just a fact. Her appearance meant as much as her tattoos did.
In her near-despondent dismay, the mirror was surrendered to gravity and shattered on the floor. That November didn't notice until Jeffery came running into the room to check on her was a testament to how shocked she was that it had fallen through her hand on the way down.
As Millie helped Ivy go about her daily tasks in the heat of her greenhouse, she thought of what Niamh had said about what had been done to Ivy and couldn't help the well of sadness that had been sunk into her stomach. Millie had always thought of Ivy as eccentric, but the thought that the Ivy she knew wasn't the real one was awful to even contemplate. A single choice had led to centuries of repercussions, and it made Millie shudder with sudden vulnerability. She didn't know how to feel about functional immortality anymore. It was a consequence of witchcraft that she hadn't given much thought to, even if it was staring her in the face through more than one pair of eyes. She'd thought countless times about how old Selene and the others were, but it never once occurred to her that she might reach such an age herself.
"It's a function of using magic," Ivy said, one green eye blown up to comical proportions behind a magnifying glass. Watching it dart around on such a scale was disconcerting, even if it was in the benign service of checking one of her precious plants for signs of parasites. A shocking green, it was like an aloe plant only spikier and almost animated in the wild twists and curls it grew into, as it looked to Millie, an attempt to strangle its neighbour. "Magic is of life, and using it has regenerative properties. You didn't think we got this old from diet and exercise, did you?"
"Aye, aye, I know, I just… didn't think about it applying to me. To us," Millie corrected. "I guess I still don't feel like a real witch." Not that she had the first clue what that felt like.
The giant eye swung over to look at Millie. It blinked. "I hope you're not talking about Manifesting."
"Shouldn't I be? Niamh can make swords from nothing and Vickie can stop bullets. Isn't that the real magic?" Millie said, irritated and starting to sweat from standing in the all-glass enclosure in spite of the fact it was barely above freezing outside. She sprinkled the contents of her tiny watering can over the soil of something that might have once been holly, careful to avoid getting the leaves wet.
"Nope," Ivy said, punctuating the word with a shake of her head. "It's spectacular magic, sure, but it's no more real. And… not all Manifests are quite so showy." Ivy put down her magnifying glass and stroked the underside of one of the mutant aloe tentacles. In her greenhouse, Ivy was well and truly in her element, lending her a lucidity that made Millie wish she could have known her before whatever horrors had befallen her so long ago had taken their toll.
Then the plant moved in response to Ivy's touch, and Millie was reminded just how formidable she still was.
"You did it, didn't you?" Millie blurted through the dawn of her realisation. "That's why you're so good at this!" Of course, how could she have been so stupid? That was the reason Ivy had been able to make all of those healing compounds and remedies, not just centuries of knowledge and sudden access to a greenhouse.
Ivy said nothing, but the number of teeth Millie could count in her smile neatly quantified the answer.
"Oh," Millie huffed, and began to pace the narrow space between the shelves of Ivy's creations. "All of you Manifested, haven't you? You, Selene, Colette and Niamh."
"Another reason we didn't want to tell you about it until we had to," Ivy admitted, her words trailing thin tendrils of sadness behind them. Or maybe it was regret. "I won't repeat what Selene told you, but I do echo it. Don't make it your goal, Millie. That way lies frustration and despair."
"That's easy for you to say," Millie muttered.
When she looked at Ivy again, the sprite that usually danced behind her eyes was still, and all that remained was age and memory.
"No, it isn't," was all Ivy said before turning her back and her attention away from Millie.
The feeling of Millie's foot in her mouth was as familiar to her as her own voice, she just wished she had a way of keeping the latter from becoming the former with such frequency. She moved to apologise, but when she got a clear look at Ivy's face, it was clear she had already moved on and any further probes about her Manifest would have to remain stowed for later use.
"Millie, have you seen Colette recently?" Ivy asked as she tended to a plant that looked too much like a spider trying to climb out of its pot. The vines were a dark green, almost black, segmented and tubular, running back to a central bulb covered in fine fuzz. It was both hideous and fascinating, as Millie couldn't recall ever seeing anything like it. But Ivy tended to it like a pet, adding water with an eye dropper in precise locations over and over again.
"No, I haven't. But it's not unusual for her to be gone like this," Millie said, trying not to think of doctors and little triangular hammers as each vine twitched when the water hit it.
"Mm," Ivy said absently, standing up to take in her handiwork. "Usually she tells us first."
"Like Vickie did," Millie said.
"You still haven't worked out why she left?"
Millie shook her head. "No. No idea. Everything in her bedroom looked normal, like she was coming back. The door wasn't even locked."
"Was anything missing?"
"Not that I found. No sign that she was leaving for good. I think she meant to come back, so whatever happened to her must have been an accident."
Ivy made a noncommittal sort of noise, and didn't turn away from her ministrations.
"You disagree?" Millie asked.
"A young woman out by herself at night is at the mercy of more than accidents."
"You think someone did that to her?" The very thought made Millie think of boiling brains, and this time she didn't blanch.
"Mr. Jones indicated a single blow to the side of the head. Does that sound like an accident?"
Millie chewed her lower lip, and had to admit that it did not. "Why would she have been left in an open grave, though? What would be the motivation? Attempted murder?"
"I don't know the answers, Millie. But two witches have left this place and failed to return in only a few days, and that leaves us with many questions."
Millie wasn't yet ready to admit that being true of Colette—she was the only one who had a life outside of ADAM—but if Ivy was, then Millie would have to reconsider. At least they knew where Vickie was and that she was, relatively speaking, safe. She was a Manifested witch, and even without her memories, Millie had a hard time imagining what she had to fear.
Steam rose from the tea November had tenuously cupped in her hands. It had reached the point she was afraid of tea, and that was one step too many. So far, she hadn't leached the heat from it and it hadn't fallen through her hands, but it had only been a few minutes.
Even as she was afraid to hold it, she made note of the cup's solidity, the way it curved under her fingers. It was smooth and hard, as all ceramics were, traits shared by glass, and that hadn't been enough to satisfy corporeality. If what happened to the mirror happened to the cup, would the tea do it as well? Or would she just scald herself because the thing that had held it had left it behind when it fell through her hands?
Madness.
So she couldn't trust her memory, and now the same might be true of her physical body. The chair she was sitting on felt solid, as did the floor under her feet, but would that be enough? Was she going to disappear into the basement because… because why? Why was this happening to her? Someone had to know she could do these things, where were they?
"You should have waited for me," Dr. Garland said from behind his desk.
November didn't look up. She looked at the strange stranger in her tea and beseeched her to tell her what was going on, but the woman in the tea was content to keep her secrets. November sighed. "I wanted to do it while I still had the courage."
"This isn't a race, Miss November. It isn't a test of will, or a trial of your bravery. It's a hospital, and we generally frown on patients taking their care into their own hands."
The woman in the tea chewed on her lower lip. Was she ashamed or upset? November would have liked to know. "You're right."
Whether she believed it or not was still an open question.
"You broke the mirror," Dr. Garland said.
"Far from the most expensive thing that's been broken in this place, I imagine," November said sullenly.
"If your spirits are such that you feel it necessary to be flippant, then perhaps we should adjourn until another time."
November sighed. "My apologies, Doctor. I'm just… disappointed. It took so much for me to look at myself. I had avoided it since waking up, but when I finally worked up the gumption to do it…"
"You expected a revelation, perhaps?"
"I expected something. It was just another fact to add to the others—and as equally useless, it turns out. This woman," November nodded at her reflection in her tea, "means as little to me as any of the women out there. How can that be possible? How can my own face be meaningless?"
"The mind is—"
"Complicated, I know." She took a sip of tea as bitter as she was at that moment. "I would appreciate some degree of simplification."
Dr. Garland stood and began to roam, his gaze hanging on his diplomas. "You know, you speak like you have an education. I'm fairly confident that we can say you weren't a scullery maid or or a fishmonger before this. Tell me, have you found yourself with any particular proclivities since you arrived?"
"How do you mean?"
"Have you been drawn to any pursuits, or been especially adept at any of the tasks you've been asked to perform?"
"Not particularly. I didn't know washing water would be so hot."
Dr. Garland chuckled. "Another sign of an educated woman. I suggest trying the library. If you are as well-read as you sound, you may come across something familiar that way."
"That is a good idea, thank you."
"It's not a large library, I'm afraid, but there may be something enlightening in there all the same. Now, back to what happened: why was the mirror broken?"
November regarded Dr. Garland over the rim of her teacup and thought of monsters. "It slipped. I was upset about what I saw and more or less forgot I was holding it. I was as surprised as Jeffery to hear it shatter."
