The Knowing Doll, page 21
Delilah sat down again, searching for something in the room to focus on – something to connect her to The Far Lake. There was only the mirror, so she looked straight ahead. She looked herself in the face – and pushed into The Far Lake, watching that broken, heartless, unfeeling, and truest version of herself melt away into the stars.
Delilah surrounded herself, instead, with the serene isolation of The Far Lake. She knelt on the water and pressed her right hand against its surface. And then she saw herself in the lake, her human self, covered in blood, her hair matted over one side of her face, scars visible across her body in a disgusting array, one eye gouged and blood leaking from the hole On the hand that touched the lake, Delilah caught the sight of a trail of blood, leaking from her right wrist, and the ugly wound - poorly stitched shut with fishing wire and dental floss - from which the blood dripped.
Delilah screamed.
All at once, in a breathtaking, all-consuming flash – Delilah hurt.
The pain of fourteen years of wounds tore through her body; a lance of utter agony shredding her skull as she witnessed herself. She saw the gaping, pitch black hole where her right eye had once been.
In the sky above her, reflected in the water, the stars burst, going supernova as she screamed, as her body shook and her lungs tightened, plunging the world above her into complete darkness.
Delilah launched to her feet, waving her hands, gasping for breath, casting The Far Lake away and returning to the awful little room. She looked herself in the mirror again, just to see herself, just a doll, screens flickering out of control and wooden body scratched and scathed.
Delilah pressed her palm flat against the mirror and wished, for the first time in years, that she could cry.
She’d failed her friends.
She pressed harder against the glass.
She’d failed Stonetown.
The glass groaned, creaked.
And for everything she’d put herself through for so many years, the things she’d given up, the people she’d hurt and stepped over, and the people who’d helped her stand up to try and make things better… Delilah was right back where she started.
Because she recognised the room.
Delilah shattered the mirror, pushed her hand straight through it. Each shard burst at her feet until only a few clung to the mirror-back. Delilah stepped away, seeing herself as if truly for the first time, as the broken thing that she was.
Her feet crunched upon the glass as she left the room behind her, as she left her room behind her – praying to never see it again. If she had been brought here, then she had been brought by someone who knew her. That left a small list.
Just as she remembered, the hallway wasn’t much better than the room, claustrophobic and rotting. A place to send someone as a punishment, not a home fit for the living. Yet there were signs of life. The flicker of light at the end of the hallway, the door leading outside and a flea-bitten rug desperately trying to tie the room together. There was a bookshelf with half its rows missing and when Delilah entered the next room, she saw that fragments of the shelf’s rows had been hammered together into chairs around a metal drum that served as a fireplace.
On the other end of the fireplace sat a figure, hunched over, wearing a coat and beanie. Once upon a time the coat might have been a fine garment of warm colour and a warm besides. But those clothes were long past their prime, as was the stranger wearing them.
“Are you...” Delilah began, straining to find her voice for a moment, “who are you? Are you the one who saved me?”
The stranger’s laugh was almost cruel as they raised their head and stared at Delilah. And when she saw the stranger’s face, she had to force her legs to be still and her body to not reel back as the disgust struck her with full force. The stranger’s concave face was bloated with boils and pustules that oozed over angry red burns that seemed to have never been treated. Their nose had been cut from their face, and it seemed as though much of that face was torn up with it, taking an eye along for the miserable ride.
A soggy tear fell from the remaining eye and leaked into the goo of the stranger’s face as their raspy laughter came to an onerous stop. Not once did their… his remaining eye stop holding Delilah’s. She could no longer deny that she knew exactly who this wreck of a man had once been. Who was sitting in the ghost of her Scatterling home.
Delilah was standing face to ruined face with The Prince of The Scatter.
And he wore hatred in his eyes like no one she’d seen before.
“How-” Delilah began, trying to form the question. But there was no point in asking how he was still alive. The answer was simple. Her Uncle chose for The Prince to live, for him to live in this state and to be seen doing so. His suffering served the protectors better than his death – to crush the wills of the people.
“Did you save me?” Delilah asked, and again, The Prince barked out his reeking laughter. This time she could see into his mouth and see that his tongue was cut away. No more speeches for the once beautiful orator. No more inspiration. Simply a shamble of clothing and odours that others should best avoid.
In all the time she’d worked with the protectors, Delilah never asked what happened to The Prince, what had been done with the information she’d given her uncle. She never took assignments related to The Scatter. And this was why. Because right at the bottom of her stomach Delilah knew the truth. She expected to find The Prince hurt this way, or news of him dead. It was easy, with access to all the information of Nadir’s protectors, and her own spy network, to turn a blind eye to her discomfort.
“If you didn’t save me, then why are you here?” Delilah demanded, arms splaying out to the side, “why am I here with you? What do you want with me?”
Still nothing. Not that he could answer. Delilah, growing angry, scanned the room until she spied a pen and paper. It already had some writing on it, clearly used for a previous conversation. She snatched it off the table and shoved it into The Prince’s twisted, curled hands. “Answer me,” she demanded. The Prince shoved the pen and paper back into Delilah’s hands. Frustrated, she tried to force him to take it, tried to force the pen into his fingers, “You will write dammit!” she snapped, “write something!” The Prince pulled the notepad away and threw it in Delilah’s face.
Without thinking, Delilah shot her hand out and struck The Prince across the jaw. He crumpled down so easily when she hit him. There was no resistance. All Delilah saw was a heap of a thing on the floor, gripping his jaw, fluids and juices leaking from a burst pustule and mixing with the blood in his hand.
The Prince stood upright on his own, still holding himself as high as his broken form could manage and threw another glare at Delilah.
“What?” She asked, “are you waiting for an apology?”
The Prince stared at her, eyes hard, and then he turned. He waved a hand for her to follow, shuffling toward the door. It opened with an uneasy creak.
Delilah followed after The Prince, pushing through the door and into– “This used to be a square,” Delilah said, remembering the open space that had once been in front of her shack, where she had sat by the fire with The Prince and so many others. Instead, she was in an alley, a wall of new shacks built so close that her door couldn’t open all the way.
Delilah looked to The Prince, but he paid her no attention, hobbling through the alley, stepping over filth, kicking old cans, and ignoring that the floor was seemingly invisible for all the litter that covered it.
Bracing her arms against the shack-walls on either side, Delilah pressed through the alley, up and over the same garbage as The Prince, but without his practised step. She slipped more than once, her bare wooden feet stepping in the rotting muck of food she couldn’t recognise.
“Where are you taking me!?” Delilah called out, knowing he could not answer but overtaken by desperation, regardless. “My friends, my friends need help! Sharpe has them. I need help. Your help!”
The Prince, obviously, did not respond. He merely led Delilah on, and the pit in her soul grew ever greater within her. At the end of the alley, Delilah expected it to finally open into whatever was left of the square, but instead it turned into another alley, though this was a far wider one, packed with people. People who walked as the dead, shuffling through the alley with little purpose or direction, shoving past each other. Their torn clothes hung from their paper-thin bodies like the sagging skin on a carcass.
Flies buzzed through the air above them and a haze of smoke filled the air around them from fires lit in barrels or over fireplaces being used to cook whatever scraps they’d been able to get their hands on. And from where she stood the alley stretched forward and downhill, revealing the rest of the Scatter splayed out before them. When she’d seen it from her airship weeks earlier, Delilah had thought she understood how much The Scatter had changed.
As she followed The Prince through these pathways, past the ghosts of people who were once called Scatterlings, Delilah saw what had been done to their home. What she’d helped do to it.
With each step the weight of her body grew harder to bear. She saw the people of The Scatter, many walking as hollow as The Prince, so many more on their way to becoming like that. She never understood their life, not really.
The truth she had known but always skirted around, was that Delilah had only ever been a misery tourist, put in this place in a body that felt no hunger and no pain, that resisted the touch of disease.
It was true that Delilah felt the mental toll of the Scatter’s poverty, but the physical weight and pressure had never been a concern to her, not truly. The cold of her companions in the winters, the smell they had so often complained about. Had it been The Prince to suggest using cloth to spread their message during the Night of Odors or was it Delilah, failing to recall the need for every scrap of material and clothing after being confined to a body of numb wood.
The further and longer they walked into the depths of The Scatter, the more it seemed as though its ramshackle architecture and its crowds of people would swallow them whole. With each block passed, the houses grew by another tier, metal homes stacked higher and higher, held by scaffolding and a wish. Delilah could not begin to guess how they got up there in the first place.
The creaking, grinding, swaying towers of homes had to be stacked together like that, however, because there was only so much stable ground outside the city, within range of Nadir’s flux generators. Everything outside those shields ran the risk of twisting wildly and unpredictably and was impossible for habitation.
So, when they couldn’t keep building outward, the Scatterlings had started building upward. Higher, higher and higher. Walking within the crowds of the sick and aimless, the forgotten and unwanted, in the shadow of the new world, buildings blocking out the sunlight itself, Delilah fell to her knees.
“I’m sorry.”
The Prince stopped ahead of her, turning around to peer down at her through his malformed nose. He did not say anything. He could not. He gave no sign that he cared for her apologies, for how late she’d come to her realisation, for coming to her realisation at all.
The Prince looked at her.
“I’m sorry!” Delilah cried out, hands on the ground, fingers digging into the dirt. She wanted her body to shake and be wrecked by tears and dry heaving. She wanted to give in to sorrow and misery, proof of her humanity, proof that she was still there inside that wooden, unfeeling body.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry… I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Delilah just kept going, kept speaking. Her words spoken not only for The Prince, and The Scatter, but for her friends, suffering under Sharpe, even now as she wallowed in her self-pity.
“Please,” she whimpered. But what was she going to say? Ask him to forgive her? Tell him everything she’d seen, how she never meant for it to happen? How she was a monster? That she just wanted to live? That it was Nadir’s fault in the first place?
For all her apologies, for all the things she’d tried to make right, for all the things Delilah wanted to say, The Prince would still have no tongue with which to forgive her. And that would always be Delilah’s fault.
So, Delilah stood up, head hanging low, walking like the dead. She resumed following The Prince, walking The Scatter as if she’d never left it for a better life. Walking through the future that awaited The Middens, that awaited Stonetown.
She couldn’t stop it. She was powerless.
Delilah followed The Prince into a warehouse, or something close enough to one. A larger building: this one had some brick and mortar in its walls, not just sheet metal and rotting wood. It had openness to its interior that gave them some breathing room, it had hallways that The Prince could lead her down.
And it had armed guards in every corner and shadow, staring right at her. From the warehouse’s entrance to its hallways, there were figures holding guns, knives, swords, spears and machetes. They eyed Delilah with frosty caution, watching her every step.
But she kept her attention forward, her curiosity keeping the smoulder burning in her heart, new questions bursting to life with each step forward. These people were not only supplied with weapons, but infiltration gear, disguises, and most of all… every one of them was fed and exercised.
Most importantly, a slight bloom of hope arose within her. Perhaps, just perhaps, The Prince had brought Delilah to someone who could help her fight Sharpe. The Prince led her to the end of a hallway, to a door guarded by two more men with shiny automatic weapons in their hands. Delilah remembered Jessica telling her once that the most important places were always protected by the guys with the biggest guns. The Prince opened the door and ushered Delilah inside. It was small, darkly lit. There were more guards around them, leaning against walls, sitting at chairs, packed in close together in the shadows. And at the far end, two chairs.
And then Delilah understood. The pieces clicked into place.
She walked slowly, carefully. Her eyes focused on the second chair and the person who sat in it, lounging without a care in the world, as Delilah sat down in her own chair.
“Hello Uncle,” Delilah said.
CHAPTER 26 – The Boot on the Neck of Everything
“I always told you, didn’t I? You were going to end up back here one way or another.”
Delilah hadn’t seen her uncle in years but the weight in his eyes made it seem as though her uncle had aged a decade since they last stood face to face. His crystalline skin, once so finely polished and radiant, was caked with filth and scratches. Indeed, erosion was setting in on the man.
The eyes he held in his hands were shadowed, as if dimmed and diminished. And, of course, his extravagant robes were nowhere to be seen, replaced with much the same style of heavy set, rain-saturated coat as Delilah herself now wore.
There was a long list of things she wanted to say. She wanted to hurl insults; she wanted to launch into rebuttals for arguments years gone by. But Delilah chose to do none of these things. Instead, she simply fell back, collapsing into the chair behind her, body slack, surprise taking over every other note in her heart.
“Uncle...” was all she managed. If she had a jaw, it would have fallen open. As it was, her screens were a fuzz of static.
Delilah’s Uncle inclined his head in acknowledgment, leaning heavily on one elbow and holding up one of his eyes forward to examine Delilah. “I’m going to guess that you have questions.”
“Curiosity,” Delilah recited, “is the beating heart of intelligence. You taught me that.”
Her Uncle nodded “I also recall teaching you that a wise operative understands that there is such a thing as knowing too much. But you always were selective about what lessons you chose to learn from me.”
This sparked something in Delilah, enough of a fire to stir her from her surprise and get her sitting up and forward. “Let’s not pretend you’re worth my learning from right now,” she said, voice dropping to something low and stern.
Hurt flashed across her Uncle’s eyes for just a moment. Delilah noticed the hand holding the lowered eye clasp over it, trying to hide the moment of weakness. But he could do nothing to hide the look in the raised eye, and Delilah met it with her own firm gaze.
“Everyone is worth learning from, Delilah,” her Uncle began, “You simply need make a distinction between what is a victory and what is a vice, rather than abandon them altogether and pretend they have less to offer the world for their failures.”
Delilah wanted to snap back a curt response, she wanted to argue that this was still an act of defining herself by her him, whether in opposition to him or in agreement. But it wasn’t helping. She had been brought here for reason. And now, she had questions for the former Lord Protector.
“How did you end up here?” She finally asked.
There was a hint of amusement in her Uncle’s voice, “The same way you returned to my employ all those years ago. The treachery of someone close to me.”
“Sharpe,” Delilah said with a hint of a smile, “Sharpe turned on you?”
Her uncle blinked an agreement, “That’s the way things are in this business, kid. There’s always someone younger than you, hungrier than you, who wants something on the other side of your fall. The trick is to keep them close when they’re useful and kill them when they get too many ideas. It’s all about balance.” Delilah’s Uncle sighed, his voice turning morose, “I simply failed to balance Sharp correctly. And he beat me. Spectacularly, through a lengthy game that does not bear discussion... How he beat me is not important in the face of the fact that he beat me.”
Delilah’s screens flashed an image of Sharpe, and then an image of her hands around his rodent throat. Only briefly – before once more being overtaken by static. She could barely maintain the images.
