IMARA
The ward sabotage was almost complete. One more node. One more piece of the pattern.
But Vela is between me and the final node, and she’s faster than she looks. Her blade slashes toward my hand—toward the fingers I’ve pressed against the wards—and I have to pull back or lose them.
Two fingers on the seventh node—not enough to finish, but enough to open the channel. Then her blade. I pull back.
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be.” She advances. “Come quietly. Accept your place. You might even find you enjoy it eventually.”
“Enjoy being bred as livestock?”
“Enjoy having purpose.” Her eyes are fervent now. “You’ve spent ten years fighting the system. Imagine what you could accomplish if you worked with it instead.”
I back away from her. My heel hits the wall. No more room to retreat.
She sees my trapped position. Smiles.
“The Matron was right about you. Too much potential to waste. Too stubborn to cooperate.” She raises the blade. “But there are ways to make even the stubborn compliant. A fewstrategic cuts. Some targeted harvesting. You’ll be begging to serve by the time we’re finished.”
My own blade is in my hand before I consciously reach for it. A harvester’s knife—smaller than hers, equally sharp.
“You could have been something.” Vela’s voice softens. “When you came to me at fourteen, I saw greatness in you. Real greatness. The kind that could have elevated you to the inner circle. Been part of a system that will outlast empires.”
“A system built on corpses.”
“Everything is built on corpses, girl. The question is whose.” She shifts her grip on the blade. “Last chance. Come quietly, or?—”
I move.
My blade takesher in the throat.
It’s not a killing blow. Not immediately. But the cut severs vital tissue—blood fountains across my hands, my robes, the cylinder behind me. Vela staggers. Her ritual iron clatters against the stone.
She stares at me with those iron-gray eyes. Disbelief. Betrayal. The look of one who genuinely believed she could save me.
“You could…” Blood bubbles at her lips. “You could have been…”
“I know.” I watch her fall.
She hits the ground. Her body convulses once, twice. Then she’s still.
I stand over her corpse, blood dripping from my hands, and wait to feel guilt. Horror. The burden of having killed the woman who raised me.
Nothing comes.
And that absence—that absolute hollow where grief should be—is more frightening than anything the Matron ever did to me. I killed the woman who chose me. Who spent years watching my sabotage and saying nothing, who believed to the last that I was worth saving. I drove a blade into her throat and felt nothing shift in my chest. No crack. No weight. Just the tactical observation that the blade found its mark.
I think: this is what they made me into. Not a harvester. Not a rebel. Something that can stand over a body and count it as a data point. I was fourteen when Vela took my hand and began the work of teaching me to feel nothing for the people I was about to harm. And somewhere along the way I stopped having to be taught.
I’m too broken for remorse. Already did too many terrible things to feel much about one more. Or perhaps—perhaps this was always how it was going to end. The student destroying the teacher. The monster turning on its maker.
Vela believed in the clan. She believed the suffering served a purpose, that the order justified the cost. And in some twisted way, she believed she was helping me by trying to bring me back.
But belief doesn’t make cruelty right. Conviction doesn’t make evil good.
She was wrong. And now she’s dead. And I don’t have time to mourn what she could have been.
The ward sabotageactivates without my permission.
