She stood there in the silence of the plaza.
The crowd was gone. The Wardens were gone. The black transport van that had swallowed Benny was gone, leaving only the faint scent of exhaust fumes mixing with the falling ash. Even the officer from the Bureau of Social Harmony, with his crisp suit and perfectly polished shoes, had vanished back into the sterile safety of the inner districts.
Violet was alone.
It was a mirror. A perfect, cruel reflection of a day she had lived years ago. She was standing in the exact same stance, with the exact same hollow ringing in her ears, that she had experienced when she was just a child watching her father's execution. The Great Eye of the Empire blinked, and history simply repeated itself.
Mary was dead.
The woman who had poured her tea, who had hidden books under the floorboards, who had offered the only genuine, warm smiles in all of District 4, was gone. Her body had been dragged away, leaving only a dark, spreading stain on the ceramic tiles. The white ash was already falling over the blood, trying to cover the Empire's sin.
Benny was taken.
He was going to the re-education pens. Violet knew what happened there. They would take a boy who loved mathematics and his mother, and they would strip him down until there was nothing left but a biological machine that recited Imperial doctrine. They would erase him.
Violet felt a crushing, absolute hopelessness. It was a physical weight, pressing down on her shoulders, forcing the air out of her lungs.
She stood there for an hour.
What happened next, Violet would never fully remember.
Her mind simply disconnected from her body. The pain was too vast, too entirely consuming to process, so her brain simply shut it off. She began to walk.
She walked toward home in a complete, blank daze.
The streets of District 4 blurred together. The towering, rusted apartment blocks looked like the iron bars of a massive, sky-high cage. The flickering neon signs of the ration dispensaries burned against her retinas, but she couldn't read the words. She didn't feel the cold wind. She didn't hear the hum of the city's massive ventilation fans.
She was a ghost haunting her own life.
She reached the base of her apartment building. The entrance was a dark, gaping mouth that smelled of mold and centuries of despair. She stepped into the gloom, her boots scuffing blindly against the cracked concrete floor.
Suddenly, a hard, solid mass slammed into her shoulder.
Violet stumbled backward, her shoulder throbbing from the impact. The daze shattered, leaving her blinking rapidly in the dim light of the lobby.
Someone had bumped into her. A large man, moving with a frantic, uncoordinated haste. He didn't stop to apologize. He didn't even look back. He just pushed past her, heading straight for the street outside.
"Hey," Violet muttered, her voice raspy and dry from crying.
She turned, operating on pure, numb instinct, intending to catch his arm. As the man pushed through the heavy metal doors into the gray light of the street, the illumination caught his profile.
It was Boros.
He was running. Not stumbling like he usually did when he was drunk, but running with a panicked, desperate sprint. His breath was coming in short, ragged gasps.
Violet's hand reached out, but it stopped in mid-air.
As he had pushed the door open, she had seen his hands. They were completely, entirely soaked in deep, wet crimson. The blood was smeared across his palms, thick and fresh, dripping from his fingertips onto the dirty floor of the lobby. It stained the cuffs of his jacket. It was painted across his knuckles.
A heavy, terrifying silence fell over Violet. She stared at the drops of blood he had left on the floor.
Then, she heard it.
A scream.
It didn't come from the street. It came from above. From high up in the rusted tower. It was a sound of absolute, unadulterated agony. It was a sound that tore through the concrete and the steel, vibrating in the marrow of Violet's bones.
And it was a very familiar voice.
Her senses snapped back together with the violence of a breaking bone. The numbness vanished, replaced by a spike of pure, electrifying terror.
A name entered her mind like a bullet.
Elara.
A new panic flared in her heart. It was different from the hopelessness of the plaza. This was a frantic, desperate terror.
Why? Violet thought, her chest heaving as she spun around. Why is this happening? Why is it all happening today?
She didn't wait for the rusted elevator. The metal cage was too slow, too unreliable. She threw herself at the concrete stairwell.
She ascended the stairs with a manic, terrifying speed. She took them two, sometimes three at a time. Her lungs burned. Her thighs screamed in protest. She slipped on a patch of damp concrete, her shin slamming into the sharp edge of a step, but she didn't stop. She didn't even feel the pain. She just grabbed the rusted metal railing and pulled herself upward, her boots echoing like rapid gunfire in the narrow, enclosed space.
Floor two. Floor three. Floor four.
She burst through the heavy fire door onto her floor. She hit the metal with her shoulder, throwing it wide open.
She hurried down the dark, narrow hallway toward the apartment she shared a wall with.
The door to Elara and Boros's apartment was wide open.
The atmosphere leaking out of that open doorway was mellow. It was almost melancholic. The harsh overhead light in the hallway flickered, casting long, wavering shadows into the apartment. It was quiet for a second. Too quiet.
Then, she heard it again.
A wet, gurgling scream of pain.
Violet crossed the threshold. She entered the room.
And she saw a sight that would forever, until the end of her days, burn behind her eyelids every time she tried to sleep.
The small, dingy living room was destroyed. Chairs were overturned. The small wooden table was shattered. But Violet didn't care about the furniture.
Elara was lying on the floor.
She was in the center of a giant, expanding pool of blood. It was everywhere. It soaked the cheap rug. It splattered against the peeling wallpaper. It painted the legs of the broken chairs.
Elara was screaming in agony, but the sound was weak now, choked by the fluid filling her lungs. Her hands, covered in her own blood, were clutching at nothing.
Violet's eyes moved downward, and a wave of severe nausea hit her so hard she gagged.
Her stomach was gone.
The beautiful, rounded pregnancy bump that Violet had watched grow for months, the bump she had rested her hand against to feel the faint kicks of a new life... it was completely destroyed.
Boros hadn't just stabbed her. He had butchered her. There were so many stab wounds—jagged, savage, hateful tears in her flesh—that Violet couldn't even count them. The mismatched tunic, the one Elara had sewn with such care, was shredded into bloody ribbons. The violence inflicted upon her was so extreme, so entirely focused on the life she was carrying, that it defied all logic. It was the work of a fragile, broken ego taking its ultimate, horrific revenge.
Violet didn't scream. She couldn't.
She dropped to her knees. She crawled through the slick, warm pool of blood, ignoring how it soaked right through the fabric of her own clothes, sticking to her skin.
She made her way to Elara's side and carefully, desperately, gathered the dying woman's head and shoulders into her arms.
"Elara," Violet choked out. Her vision was completely blurred with tears.
Elara's head rolled back against Violet's arm. Her face was ashen, drained of all color. Her lips were blue. She was in so much pain that her body was violently convulsing, small, uncontrollable tremors shaking her limbs.
She couldn't make out words at first. Her jaw worked, but only a wet, ragged clicking sound came out.
Then, with a monumental, agonizing effort, Elara forced air through her vocal cords.
"My... child," Elara whispered.
The sound was so fragile it barely existed.
"Please... no... my child."
Her whimpering, her crying, it all mixed in with the horrific, wet sounds of the blood moving around her. She wasn't crying for herself. Even now, with her body torn to pieces, she was only looking down at the ruined mess of her stomach, begging for the impossible.
Violet was already sobbing uncontrollably. The tears fell from her chin, dropping onto Elara's pale face, washing away small streaks of blood.
"I'm here, Elara," Violet cried, her voice cracking, breaking into a high pitch of total despair. "I'm right here. Please don't cry. Please."
Violet looked up at the empty doorway. She started to shout.
"Help! Someone help me! Please!"
She screamed it at the top of her lungs, hoping a neighbor would hear. Hoping someone, anyone, would come. But she knew the truth. In District 4, when you hear a scream, you lock your door. You turn up the radio. You do not help.
She looked back down at Elara's state. The bleeding was catastrophic.
Violet let go of Elara's shoulders for a second. She pressed her bare hands directly against the worst of the stab wounds. She pushed down with all her meager strength, trying to apply pressure, trying to keep the blood inside the body.
Her hands slipped. The blood was too thick, too fast. It poured over her knuckles, warm and slippery. For every wound she tried to cover, three more bled out entirely unhindered. The sheer number of the stab wounds made it impossible. She only had two hands. She couldn't stop the ocean with her fingers.
"No, no, no, stop bleeding, please stop," Violet babbled, her hands frantically moving from cut to cut, leaving bloody handprints all over Elara's torn clothes. It didn't matter. It was completely futile.
Suddenly, Elara's erratic, terrified eyes stopped darting around the room.
They locked onto Violet.
The pain in those eyes was immense, but for a single second, there was a piercing clarity. Elara reached up. Her bloody, trembling hand grabbed the collar of Violet's tunic. Her grip was surprisingly tight.
She pleaded with Violet. Her voice was weak, fragile, sounding like dry leaves crushing together.
"Violet..." Elara gasped, blood bubbling at the corner of her mouth. "Please... save my child. Please."
She coughed, a wet, terrible sound.
"Save me. I don't... I don't want to die, Violet."
Hearing this, Violet felt something inside her completely fracture.
She felt so wrong. She felt so entirely enveloped by sorrow. She felt so small, and so incredibly, hopelessly helpless. She hadn't felt this helpless in her entire life, not even when the Wardens took her father. Because her father had accepted his death.
Elara did not want to die. Elara wanted to live. She wanted her baby to live. And Violet, with all her intelligence, could do absolutely nothing to grant that wish.
But she couldn't just sit there. She couldn't just watch her bleed out on the cheap rug. The primal, human instinct to fight back against death flared up, overriding all logic.
She had to get her to a clinic. There was a black-market doctor three blocks away. If she could just get her there.
"Let's go," Violet said. Her voice changed. It hardened. The babbling stopped. "I will let nothing happen to you. Let's go."
She had to move her.
Violet shifted her position in the pool of blood. She moved to Elara's head. She slid her arms under Elara's armpits, wrapping her hands around the dying woman's chest, careful to avoid the ruined stomach.
"This is going to hurt," Violet whispered, her own tears blinding her. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
Violet planted her boots on the slick floor. She braced her core, and she pulled.
The physics of moving a dead-weight human body are brutal. Elara was pregnant, heavy, and completely limp. As Violet pulled backward, her boots lost traction on the blood-soaked floor. She slipped, her knee slamming hard into the floorboards, sending a jolt of pain up her thigh.
Elara screamed.
It was a terrible, tearing sound. The movement shifted her torn flesh, aggravating every single one of the twenty-two stab wounds. The pain must have been blinding.
"I know, I know, I'm sorry!" Violet cried out, gritting her teeth.
She didn't let go. She pulled again.
Inch by inch.
Violet dragged her backward. Her muscles burned with the sheer exertion. The friction of Elara's body against the floor smeared the pool of blood into a long, horrific streak across the room. The metallic scent of iron was so thick in the air it tasted like old coins on Violet's tongue.
She dragged her past the broken table.
Pull. Slip. Recover. Pull.
She managed to move her toward the doorway leading out to the hall. Her back hit the doorframe. She was panting, her chest heaving, sweat mixing with the tears on her face. Her arms felt like they were being ripped from their sockets.
During the entire agonizing process, Elara was screaming in constant, unbroken pain. Her head lolled back against Violet's chest, her eyes wide with torment, her mouth open in a continuous wail that echoed down the empty hallway.
Violet took another step backward into the hall, pulling Elara's shoulders over the threshold.
"We're almost to the stairs," Violet lied, gasping for air. "Just hold on. Just..."
When suddenly, she stopped.
The scream cut off.
It didn't fade out into a whimper. It didn't slowly die down. It simply ceased to exist, as if a switch had been flicked.
The heavy, thrashing weight of Elara's body suddenly went entirely slack in Violet's arms. The tension vanished from her muscles.
Violet froze. Her back was pressed against the wall of the hallway. She looked down.
Elara's head was resting against Violet's collarbone. Her mouth was still slightly open. But the movement was gone. Her chest was no longer rising and falling in those jagged, desperate gasps.
And her eyes...
The light in her eyes had suddenly vanished. The terror, the pain, the desperate plea for life—it was all gone. They were just glass now. Dull, empty windows looking at a ceiling she could no longer see. She was never to be seen again.
At first, Violet's mind simply refused to process the data. It was an error in the system. It couldn't be real.
"Elara?" Violet whispered.
She gently shook the woman's shoulders. Elara's head lolled lifelessly to the side.
"Elara. Say something."
Violet's voice began to rise in panic. She let go of Elara with one hand and tapped her cheek, leaving bloody smudges on the pale, cooling skin.
"Elara, please. Say something. Move. Please move."
Nothing. The silence of the hallway pressed down on them.
"Please!" Violet screamed at the corpse. "Please, please, please!"
She looked up at the flickering ceiling light. She didn't believe in the Great Eye. She didn't believe in the Empire's gods. But she screamed at the universe anyway.
"God, why is this happening to me?!" she shrieked, the sound tearing her throat raw. "Why! Why! Why!"
She began to thrash around. She let go of Elara and slammed her bloody fists against the concrete wall of the hallway. She hit the wall over and over, not caring as her knuckles split open and her own blood mixed with Elara's. She couldn't figure out why this was happening. She fell back to her knees. She was hyperventilating, her vision darkening at the edges.
Then, she looked down.
She saw Elara's stiff body lying halfway across the threshold. She saw the absolute stillness of her form. And she looked down at her own hands. They were entirely coated in a thick, drying layer of dark red.
The reality finally kicked in.
It kicked in with the force of a sledgehammer to the chest.
Elara died.
She died right here, in Violet's hands. And with her, died her child. The baby that would never take a breath of the gray ash, the baby that would never hear its mother sing. Both of them, gone. Erased by a petty, drunken coward.
Violet stopped thrashing. She stopped screaming.
The fire of panic and rage simply burned itself out, leaving nothing but cold, gray ash.
She sat there in the pool of blood in the hallway. She pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her bloodied arms around her legs, and she stared at the wall.
She sat there for a long time.
She didn't move when the blood on her clothes dried, turning the fabric stiff and uncomfortable. She didn't move when the overhead light buzzed and popped, plunging the hallway into semi-darkness. She just sat there, keeping a silent, solitary vigil over the bodies of her only friends.
And then, once again, the inevitable happened.
Heavy, synchronized footsteps echoed on the metal stairs.
Three figures in pristine, gleaming white armor rounded the corner. Their visors glowed with a cold, red light.
Violet didn't stand up. She didn't fight them. She just turned her head and looked at them with dead, hollow eyes.
She hated the VENERs.
She hated these machines with a passion that went beyond anger. She hated that they mimicked the human form—two arms, two legs, a head—while possessing absolutely no soul. They were an insult to humanity. They were a mockery of life.
One of these machines had killed her father, reading a script while it ended his life. Another one of these machines had just blown Mary's brains out in the plaza, and then coldly calculated that Benny was property of the State.
And now, these filthy, detestable machines had come to retrieve the body of Elara.
What could she even do in this?
She was just a girl. She was smart, yes, but intelligence didn't stop bullets. It didn't stop knives. She was entirely powerless against the crushing machinery of the Empire.
She watched them take Elara away.
Violet slowly pushed herself up from the floor. Her body ached in places she didn't know she had muscles. She walked into her own apartment, shutting the door behind her, leaving the bloody hallway behind.
She walked to her small sink and washed the blood from her hands. It took a long time. The water ran red, then pink, and finally clear. But she still felt the warmth of it on her skin.
A few days passed.
Violet stayed in her room. She didn't eat. She barely drank the bitter water from the tap. She just lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling.
The day of her final evaluation for the Communications Bureau came and went.
The paperwork for the Assistant post, the job that was supposed to save her, was missing. She didn't care. The white walls of District 2 meant nothing to her now. If she went there, she would just be helping the Empire coordinate the very machines that had butchered her family.
She thought about Mary. The woman who had been like a mother to her. The woman who had fed her and smiled at her when the world was cold.
She thought about Elara. The gossip aunt. The woman who had tried so hard to be brave, who had sat on this very bed and mended Violet's clothes with mismatched thread.
They were dead. And Boros, the man who killed them, was likely sitting in a bar in District 3, spending his blood money.
Lying in the dark, a quiet, terrifying realization settled over Violet.
It wasn't a sudden thought. It was a slow, creeping understanding.
Every single person she had ever loved or cared about was dead or gone. Her father. Mary. Benny. Elara. Her baby.
I am a curse, Violet thought, the logic clicking into place with cold precision.
She did not deserve love. It was evident from all the things that had happened in her life. If she loved someone, the Empire killed them. If she cared for someone, the machines took them away.
What sin had she committed to deserve a life without love? She didn't know.
But one thing became clear: She deserved to be alone. If she were alone, at least no one else would get hurt.
She sat up on the edge of her bed. The room was dark, save for the sickly yellow light filtering in from the streetlamps outside.
She looked at her desk. Sitting there, next to the scattered components of her radio projects, was a crumpled piece of paper.
She reached out and picked it up.
It was the pamphlet.
The Deep Horizon Program.
She decided.
Rather than living in this hell, surrounded by the Empire that crushed human souls, surrounded by the detestable machines that wore human faces, she would leave. She would go as far away as the laws of physics allowed.
She would take the Horizon post. She would lock herself in a metal box and fly into the dark.
She decided she would die alone.