The hairlike fibers still protruded from all over her body, but they had been shorn close to her membrane, leaving tiny pieces still poking up like stumps in a clear-cut forest.
She shivered, suddenly feeling the loss of heat and sense of protection she hadn’t even realized her cilia had provided. A stench of rot filled the water, growing stronger as they led her away.
The guards poked and prodded her, and another hit-marker floated by, but Lucy paid it no attention.
As a low health warning began to flash red around the corners of her vision, the guards continued to shuffle her along. She didn’t bother to check her energy. That alert had been flashing for some time now.
Just like that, she thought numbly. All my zeal and determination and…
Lucy didn’t even know what to call it, the thing that had driven her forward, to accept this challenge in the first place. Ambition? Curiosity?
From her position now, it looked more like foolishness. Like someone who doesn’t know what they want grabbing the first life-line thrown their way, then thanking the thrower profusely, saying that was exactly the color of buoy they’d been waiting for.
Lucy realized as she was pushed along that her thoughts were making less and less sense as her body began to shut down. She focused, trying to hone in on what she was thinking. It felt important, like she needed to sum up her failure in some way before it was all over.
But in the end, she couldn’t do it. The words wouldn’t come, and the feelings and thoughts stayed locked in her mind like some chimeric beast scrabbling at a closed door. Like a monster she couldn’t quite see or give name to.
Even this last thing, this last clarification and expression of her being, she couldn’t do.
Guess that’s life. She gave a bitter laugh that came out as a heaving sob, wracking her entire body.
The inferno of her pain had settled into an incessant burning along the outside of her membrane, prickling and scraping even when the guard held her still in the water as the other moved to push aside a small partition in the doorway ahead.
I’m going to die before they even have the chance to kill me.
The thought echoed dully in Lucy’s head, and she felt a burbling giggle rise up from somewhere deep inside herself, somewhere still and silent that seemed to have been waiting for this moment to make itself known.
It felt like madness.
It scared her, but part of her was past scaring at this point. She’d been scared to some degree or another since she left her nice cozy life for this hellhole of conflict and combat, and what might have once sent her into panic now just felt numb. There was nothing to be done.
The guards locked her into a small room behind the partition, which one of them lashed tight with the same silky material the ropes were made of.
Guess I get a special executioner, Lucy thought. The whole trip over, she had expected her life to end at any moment, and now here she was, alone in a small dark room just like the one where she’d started this journey. A strangely familiar scent filled the water, but she hardly noticed it.
Mentally closing her eyes, Lucy dimmed her Awareness as she waited for death to come for her. She felt a mild curiosity about it, actually. Why hadn’t they just killed her already? And how exactly would it work, the moment she died? Jade had said that would be it for her, but Simon seemed to have hinted at the existence of an afterlife, at least for certain beings.
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She remembered the dream he had visited, of the blood and the sea-monsters and the teeth. An image lingered in her mind of a tall man in strange robes full of shadowed folds, holding a lantern high like he was beckoning to her.
Then she thought of Jade, and of the garden in which she’d promised to try her best. Of the worms in the dirt and the sunlight and the birds. Promises, and dreams, and ambition.
I did try my best, didn’t I?
She went over the past few days in her head. Her memories were growing murky, but she knew that she had successfully fought off creatures that could have killed her at any moment, and she’d been forced to make decisions that she had no precedent for in her previous life. It had been…exhilarating. And scary. More than the specific events themselves, she remembered the accompanying emotions. She’d been forced to fight and give her all in ways she could never have imagined. At every moment, she had been tested.
And her trials had led her here, to an anticlimactic end at the hands of organisms she didn’t even recognize.
The water in the room was calm, and as Lucy floated in it she tried to come to terms with the fact that her challenge was ending so soon. The loss of her cilia weighed on her like a long-awaited victory snatched away and given to another.
Then she realized something. She hadn’t tried her best. Not completely, at least. Up until her cilia had been shorn away, she had done everything she could, plotting and planning and never giving up. But in the time since that had happened, she had given up. For the last few minutes, she had been locked in a state of despair and hopelessness, not even considering that there might be anything more she could do.
It had felt like the only response possible, her mind following her body into shock as naturally as smoke followed fire. The power of her captors seemed like something she couldn’t face even before they’d taken away her cilia.
Lucy realized something then.
No one was going to jump out and scold her or lecture her if she failed. If she truly wanted to, she could give up. Jade might be disappointed, but she was a Goddess. If she hadn’t known this would happen from the start, she had surely known it was a strong possibility.
Lucy’s thoughts were tangled and knotted. Her family would mourn her. The knowledge of it stung, the thought that even now they were probably searching for her. If she died now, they would never know what happened.
Was that enough to keep her alive? To get her through not only the pain and suffering she felt right now, but also the rest of a potentially years-long challenge?
No, she thought, feeling the cruelty and the truth of it in the weight of her tired mind and the pain of her damaged body.
She couldn’t live for someone else. Not the Goddess or Simon or even her parents.
If she wanted to make the most of her life, she had to accept that it was hers. No one else’s. And it was her decision what to do with it.
The easy thing to do would be to give up. Her body had already done so, in fact.
Jade may be disappointed and Simon pleased if she failed, but ultimately, no one would be surprised. The status quo wouldn’t change.
But sitting there in that dark room, another option presented itself. A way to take one more step forward on her path, even as she waited to be killed.
In the end, Lucy wasn’t quite sure why she decided not to give up hope. She saw the faintest glimmer of a path ahead, and she took it. Something was different here, and the tiny spark of curiosity she felt was enough to put her into action.
Lucy opened up her Awareness, and saw that there was something different about the small dark alcove in which she floated.
The room itself was unremarkable except for the partition that led into it, just a slightly lighter shade of pale grey craggy stone.
But the water had changed.
Was it like this outside?
She couldn’t remember, focused as she’d been on getting away.
Unlike the smooth, featureless flow that had surrounded her in the tunnels, this water had texture to it, like it was pebbled or gritty or—
Or full of tiny bubbles.
At that moment, the intense smell around her clarified, and her way forward grew more clear. She hadn’t recognized it because it was so strong that ithad seemed a different smell entirely, but now that she’d thought of it, Lucy found the identity of the scent slotting into place in her mind, an overpowering, rotten amplification of something she was already quite familiar with.
The smell was sulfur, concentrated so densely here that she could almost taste it, sharp and powerful even with her outer membrane completely closed off to the outside world.
Where is it coming from? she wondered. The smell definitely hadn’t been this strong when she’d arrived.
Opening up her System, Lucy quickly allocated the one point she had to the only place it could do any good right now.
Permeability control.
Unlike the sprouting of her cilia or the fortification of her outer membrane, this upgrade felt like a slight touch, a barely-there refinement of control and increase of efficiency.
Just like the mysterious force that drove her to keep living, it would have to be enough.
Expanding her sphere of Awareness once more to pay attention to any guards coming back or the executioner she still expected at any moment, Lucy took a deep breath.
Then she opened her channels, and fire began to spread through her body.