Chapter Text
Where we go when he closes my eyes
and under what country:
some blue darkness, farther than hell
She’s not afraid of the dark. The mall is quiet and drafty, a cold wind nearly snuffing her candles out.
Siva’s asleep down the hall. Everyone’s asleep except for her, and the ones standing guard down in the sewers.
Her heartbeat thrums against her skin, pulsates all the way to the tips of her fingers.
Sitting on her haunches on the rug, Ebony tries to remember even one of those moronic deep breathing exercises Tai-San used to swear by. To find your “inner calm.” After roughly a half hour of trying, she’s starting to realise she doesn’t have an inner calm.
Her eyes travel around the room, fixing on the painting above the vanity. An ornate gold frame around a still life. Grapes and pomegranates, the red seeds glistening.
She’s always had a weakness for beautiful things. When the virus came, people raided stores and houses as they pleased but they were looking for food and essentials. Beautiful things were left forgotten on every shelf in every dusty dining room.
Once, after a raid with the Locusts, she came back with a porcelain geisha, pristine and painted. She felt a childish thrill as she imagined it on her bed stand, watching over her, spilling ambiance over her room.
Forgetting herself for a moment, she showed it off with the rest of their loot, cradling it gently in her hands. Zoot was in a bad mood that day.
“What’s this?” He said in his thundering voice “Another useless trinket?!”
Stomach dropping, Ebony shrugged indifferently, covering for herself as the mistake dawned on her. “Just some crap we found in a house.”
“And you bring it back here?! Are you trying to waste my time?!”
He threw it to the ground and as it shattered at her feet, she laughed along with the others to hide her humiliation. Everyone else bought it, but he didn’t. In that moment his stare dug into her, his lip curling with satisfaction. He could see right through her. He always could.
For a moment, the shadows in the corner seem to take on his shape, leering. And the cold breeze gusting by her cheek carries the tenor of his voice. She’s frozen, barricaded in here with her trinkets, her little treasures.
But when she steps out of her room, she’ll be in control. She’ll be a warrior.
“I would stay,” Jay said before he left, his dark eyes searching her face. “I would send someone else, If you asked me to.”
She didn’t. She bit her tongue and spoke with no emotion. “I’m a big girl. I can look after myself.”
He smiled with his eyes and touched her face. “I know you can.”
Maybe she should have asked him to stay, just to call his bluff. Just to see him floundering again. But she didn’t. She told him to go and she refuses to miss him.
Shadows dance around her legs as ghost fingers of dread creep up her sides. Getting up with a huff, Ebony steps out into the vacant hall. Roaming the sleeping mall, she feels like a restless spirit. Nightbound, her black nightgown billowing around her thighs.
There’s a light glowing in the distance. Drawn in, she follows it to Jack’s studio, where she expects to find him or Ellie, working on The Amulet. But it’s Bray, his dark hair falling into his eyes. It’s too long, growing past his shoulders, but he still hasn’t had it cut for some reason. He looks older and younger at the same time, flipping through one of Jack’s manuals with unsteady hands.
Assessing, Ebony leans against the door frame. “Late night?”
His eyes fix on her, resentful wells shining out of a gaunt face. “I hear your boyfriend’s coming back next week...”
I hear the same, she thinks. Her voice is annoyed. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“No?” He looks at her, a new kind of coldness in his voice. “I’m curious, what kind of welcome do you think he’s going to receive?”
“I guess it depends…”
“On?”
She looks him dead in the eye. “On how stupid you are.”
Unspoken things hang in the air between them.
“Tell me,” he says. “After we were taken, how long did you wait to start sleeping with the enemy?”
“The enemy? A touch dramatic, don’t you think..?”
“Dramatic?” He repeats furiously.
“What did you expect me to do, Bray..? Cry myself to sleep at night?”
He scoffs. “I would never expect you to shed a single tear for me, Ebony. But what about Alice? What about Tai-San? They’ve done more for you than anyone.”
“Alice, Tai-San and the rest of you were gone. The world kept moving, so did I...”
“Because that’s what you do right? Look out for number one.”
“Do you blame me? You used to be the same way...” But that was back when they actually had some things in common.
“And then I learned that there are some things, some people worth fighting for.”
And look where it got you, she thinks. “Well forgive me for not being a martyr… I prefer breathing.”
“And Jay? How does he fit into the picture?”
She knows better than to think he’s taken a sudden interest in her dating life. He’s trying to suss out her loyalties. He’s planning something, he has been for weeks. She chooses her words carefully.
“Jay is… Someone we’d be wise to keep on our side.”
“Our side?” He repeats. “Since when are you and I on the same side, Ebony?”
She bites her lip, thinking furiously. “Look, I’m not asking you to trust me. Just have some foresight… Right now, our interests are aligned.”
“And what interests are those?”
“You want to protect the Mallrats, I know you do.”
“And you expect me to believe that’s a thing you care about? Give me a break, Ebony.”
“I do,” she says, a fraught tone entering her voice. “Because I don’t want to take my chances out there again. Fighting for scraps, fighting to make it through every day. I don’t want-” A cold hand wrenches her guts, icily twisting around her spine.
He looks at her for a long moment, anger giving way to surprise. “You’re scared.”
I don’t get scared, she thinks defiantly, but something in her eyes must have given her away. For a moment, she can see the resemblance between the brothers so clearly, it knocks the breath right out of her.
“What happened to you?” He asks.
The night air kisses her naked shoulders, and she takes a step forward into the room, staring him down. “Look, I know what you want. You want revenge. I don’t blame you, but if you go down that road, you better be prepared for what you’ll lose...”
“And what’s that?” He asks.
“Everything.”
His expression is caught somewhere between frustration and incredulity. “You’re really trying to tell me this guy is that powerful? More powerful than Zoot, more powerful than the Guardian?”
“No… But if you take down Jay, if the Technos fall… You’ll be the guy who’s responsible for making the city go dark…” Her voice is soft, each syllable drawn out and loaded with intent. “And mark my words Bray, they’ll turn on you. They’ll turn so fast, you’ll bring a rain of fire down on all our heads.”
He clenches his jaw, a sense of desperation and fury pulsating off of him. “So what? I should let bygones be bygones? Welcome him into the tribe with open arms?”
She shrugs. “You could take Amber, take your kid, and head off into the woods again. You could start over...”
“And let those uniformed freaks drive me from my home again?” There’s real fire in his eyes. “No, I refuse to let them win.”
“Then I suggest you start digging…”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what they say… Before you set out on a journey of revenge-”
“Dig two graves.” He finishes acerbically. “It’s gonna take more than platitudes to scare me off, Ebony.”
“Then how about this, you’ve got a son, sleeping upstairs, no? You’d really risk him growing up without a father?”
This pushes him over the edge, his voice breaking. “He’s already grown up without a father! I didn’t even get the chance to hold him before-...” His breath is ragged, rageful. “I can see it in his eyes when he looks at me, he doesn’t see his father, he just sees a stranger, because that’s what I am!”
“Keep living in the past and you may never get a chance to remedy that…”
He gives her a look so searing it ought to melt the flesh off her bones, and she crosses her arms patiently. She knows he hates her, but she doesn’t care as long as he gets this into his thick skull. If he tries to go on some rag tag crusade against the Technos, it could blow up everything they’ve got going for them right now. They could go from being the most powerful tribe in the city, to being a band of hated, hunted losers.
“Look,” she says, adopting a softer tone. “I know what it’s like to want revenge, but-”
“You know what it’s like?” Rising out of his seat, he comes to stand in front of her, so close they’re practically nose to nose. “You know what it’s like to wake up in complete darkness everyday for months, as part of some sick experiment? To be force-fed all kinds of different drugs, to be hooked up to some monitor day and night until you don’t know what’s real anymore? And when the kid next to you strokes out, they bring in someone new, to fill the quota? You know what that’s like?!”
He’s so close, his breath gusting across her face and for a moment, she thinks he might actually cross the line and attack her. She braces herself defensively as her heart starts to race. But he storms past her with venom in his eyes, and she watches his back fade into darkness, until he’s just a faint, floating thing somewhere above the staircase.
Knowing the conversation is far from over, Ebony exhales. The shadows seem alive around her, dancing beneath her feet.
Heading back to her room, she pulls open the drawer of her bedside table, picking out a worn piece of paper, yellowing around the edges. She unfolds it and lays down in bed, reading it over and over.
Little by little, she starts to feel a sense of warmth spreading through her tense body.
Jay’s handwriting is small and loopy, hard to read in places, like his mind spins too fast for his hand to keep up. She traces her favorite parts with her finger and tucks the words away inside her chest, in that foolish place where hope still blooms. Heart thrumming, she blows the candles out, and sags into the mattress. Her mind is stuck on a useless loop, between all the things she’s not supposed to want, and forcing herself to remember all the reasons she can’t have them.
She remembers the furrow in his brow the day he told her he was leaving, the way his eyes fixed on her, like he was asking her to understand. They were standing outside, in the concrete lot behind the mall, the sun high in the sky. The beginnings of the new militia were doing drills behind her, and the morning smelled like sweat and paint fumes.
“For how long?” She asked.
“I’m not sure. However long it takes to track down the facilities. Three months maybe, four... But that's just a guess.”
“And when you find them?”
He glanced at one of the Techno officers standing behind him, a young, anxious looking kid with angular features and long black hair. “We shut them down.”
“Is this you trying to make things right..?” She asked.
“No. This is me trying not to cause more suffering.”
“Noble…” She said, her tongue twisting resentfully around the word.
He looked at her, lowering his voice. “I would stay… I would send someone else, if you asked me to.”
“I’m a big girl, I can look after myself.”
“I know you can.”
She knew by the look in his eyes that he wanted to kiss her, but he would never, not in front of his men. And she wouldn’t have let him anyway.
His eyes seemed to gleam with warmth and light as he looked at her. “Ebony?”
She bit her lip, cheeks darkening. “What..?”
“Wait for me.”
Wait for me. Twisted in her black, satin sheets, Ebony reminds herself that she's done waiting for him. Sleep creeps in like a bandit, and her eyes finally drift shut.
She dreams she’s somewhere underground, standing by a large body of water. The world around her is shadow and stone, so vivid it’s like she’s fallen into a painting. Rippling inky water, it runs downstream, deeper into the tunnel, where darkness paws at the edges of the frame. Lost, she follows the current, her feet bare against the slick rock.
The air is stagnant and still, the deeper she goes, it’s a world devoid of movement. There’s a deadness, a sweet rotten stench that sticks to her skin, and something moves beneath the surface of the water.
In the distance, but all around there are voices, a serpentine chorus, beckoning her forward.
Her fate dawns slowly, not an epiphany but a creeping realisation. She knows where she is, where she’s always been. She can feel him in the stones, she can smell him on the air, his echo closing in around her. He’s inevitable, he’s the night that always comes for her, his cold breath caressing her neck. Heart pounding, her legs, her arms go limp, and she falls headfirst into the river.