Page 10 of Of Monsters Of Kings

“You shouldn’t leave your arm bent like that,” I scolded, pulling her left arm straight. Too fast—her bicep spasmed and locked. I bent her elbow again, then extended her arm slower. “Leave it like this, will you?”

She became more curled and caved with each week. I needed to move her more, exercise her, feed her proper food, and stitch together a bed of clouds she could adjust with the press of a button.

I needed to give my mother so much like she’d given me so much. Yet I couldn’t.

“Strange in what way?” she asked in a sterner voice.

I looked into her blue eyes, so like mine and so like her mother’s. “The skeleton and skull spoke of possibilities. I didn’t understand what they meant, only that they knew more than they should about me. They knew of your withering, and yet they didn’t care about it as they should either. They could’ve used the information to make me obey them or as a bargaining chip with law agents. Maybe they still will. Mother, I felt like a puzzle piece in their company, but they had no interest in figuring out where I would fit in the jigsaw. The skull didn’t like my company. I was grossly unset, he said, and purposeless.” I frowned. I begrudged that comment in a way I didn’t begrudge much ever.

My mother watched me from her corner, skin pale and sickly as always.

I didn’t wish to worry her. “Strange, as I said. Nothing more. They didn’t harm me.” I’d ignore the part where I woke up here without any memory of the journey.

“They affected you,” she rasped. “You are unsettled.”

I was struck by how much she appeared like skin stretched over bones. “Today was an unusual one. I will need another job, and the hotel job gave me such hope for a few months.”

“You will have purpose soon. Do not fret,” Mother said. She smiled right into me, and for a blink, I saw my mother how she’d been—beautiful and stern, full of movement and energy. Then she closed her eyes, and I saw her for what she’d become.

“Here,” I said. “We can’t delay your medicine any longer.”

When she didn’t hold out her right arm, I took her hand, kissed the back, and made quick work of administering the anti-spasm meds.

“Thank you, my only love,” she whispered.

I kissed the back of her hand again. “Thank you, my only mother.”

My only parent.

My father was as unknown as hers and as unknown as all the fathers in our line since The End. Hardly anyone knew their father, though, so there was nothing strange about that. Couples did exist in Vitale, but I’d only met one in my life who was certified to have children outside of the breeding pens. The vast majority of us had an anonymous sperm donor for a father—likely from one of the other seven hundred and thirteen walled cities.

Mother said women used to meet men and be romanced and wooed into lasting unions. She’d spoken of forbidden romances powerful enough to start wars. She’d said that people used to have children without knowing whether the genetic outcome was favorable. They’d had no agenda but love. The time before The End seemed a wild fairy tale, and I could never decide if the lot of them were fools or whether I felt saddened such tales of magic and freedom were now myth.

A haze spread across Mother’s blue irises, one that freed and imprisoned her by turn. I didn’t want her lucidness to go. I hated this haze that stole our conversation away. Despite this, I spent whatever time was available to me in this elevator shaft, watching her slip away like sand through my hands.

What would fill my days when she left me here alone?

“I will stay with you, Mother.” Please stay with me, I silently added.

I lay on the mattress, holding her—my everything—close. She’d been my everything even while warning me that one day, the withering sickness would claim her. Since my earliest memories, I’d lived in fear of that day, then in numbness of it, then anger and acceptance of it, just like forty-nine other daughters in our line.

Twelve hundred years of daughter watching Mother curl in and cave away to death.

This anguish would stop with me.

Mother’s voice rang strong and clear. “Men in threes, I steer clear of thee. Perantiqua, have I taught you nothing?”

Lucid mother was gone. This was the part where she tended to say any number of things and call me by my full name before falling into a drug-induced sleep. I didn’t love this part.

“I remembered, Mother. Just not until too late.”

“Not too late, love of mine. You are too early, don’t you know?” She laughed. “But soon...”

I should humor her. If I didn’t, she got loud. I lived in constant fear the landlady would hear her through the walls, though two empty apartments sat on the other side of us.

“Too early for what?”

“Your possibility.” She laughed again. “For now, there are so many.”

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