Page 39 of Love, Nemesis
The symbol didn’t have any meaning to them any longer, but did losing its meaning mean that the symbol had lost its power? To Ana, it still had meaning. To her, it still had power.
The crowd laughed, the sound grating to a raw degree.
Ana’s eyes focused on the single stage in the center, surrounded by rings, a water tank, silks, a catapult, and a variety of props. A single hot light shone down on the center of the stage, transforming the props into alien shapes and silhouettes that gave some semblance of mutated life.
She saw past the props—the old dissection table in the catapult; the cage bars in the suspended grates and rigs near the ceiling; the dismantled war wagon in the wood that built the stage, all branded with the broken arrow of the Strike and their followers.
Like a patchwork corpse, this production did to her what it did to the audience, issued an invitation to the forbidden past of The Ocean’s War. The difference was that she wasn’t laughing.
The crowd hushed into silence. From the darkness rose a woman unlike any Ana had ever seen.
She had skin marked with black mutations, evenly on each side of her neck, her waist, and down her hips and legs. Her clothes were gold with silver buttons trailing down her chest. The light hit her and blasted over the crowd; Ana flinched until her eyes adjusted.
The woman’s hair was almost silver, half of it braided along her head and woven into a high bun, while the other half hung in brilliant waves to her hips. Her body moved like a serpent’s, the muscles shifting subtly under the exposed skin of her arms, waist, and shoulders. Her movements gave the semblance that her bones bent with her. She walked on long, poised legs like a deer. The light caught the knives serving as her heels.
“You see those marks on her skin?”
She turned to see Lethe standing behind her, a sudden apparition in the midst of the chaos in her mind. His eyes were focused on the stage, and he spoke up again before she could object to his presence. “Those aren’t mutations. They’re intentional. She was cursed to look like she does. A Strike changed her into that exact shape.”
Ana watched as Lethe removed a large metal lighter from his belt in the shape of a skeleton. He pulled a trigger on the skeleton’s skull. Its fanged jaws opened. He released it and they snapped closed with a metal clap.
She startled at the sound and stepped back, hands reaching out to grab something as if a veil had just been removed from her body.
Lethe’s hand pushed against the small of her back, steadying her, but she nudged him off before capturing his wrist and twisting it hard. He grimaced, leaning away as she released his wrist.
“Got it. Got it,” he whispered, and then nodded back toward the stage. “The light hypnotizes. I just loosened its hold,” he explained. “There are cursed things all over this place.” His eyes finally found hers, and he gave her a slight smile. “I’m not the enemy.” He winked. “Not right now.”
She gave him no indication that she believed him, preparing to look over at Jasper to see his reaction to Lethe, but then Evira spoke.
“And now for our final act,” she announced, throwing her sculpted arms out wide, “Madam Helena!”
A woman in a black cloak hobbled out onto the stage in a robe with Mystic designs.
“Madam Helena is from the perilous, strange land of the Mystics, rehearsed in the use of mutated items and abilities,” Evira said as she startled to circle the stage. Helena stood in the very center, dark eyes glimmering against a white face. “And she will be using her gifts as a mutated woman to see what no man or woman can see in all of us. Witness for yourself the eyes of a Mystic witch!” Evira swept her gloved hands over the room, and the crowd cheered.
The Mystic woman hobbled to the edge of the stage and gestured to someone in the audience. She started speaking in the Mystic tongue. Evira translated.
“You’ve worked for thirteen years under Chamberlin in Brideport. He’s involved in a rather unfortunate affair.”
“He’s trading illegally with the Mystic military,” the person in question blurted out from the crowd.
Ana noticed a small boy at the very edge of the stage. He was taking notes.
Evira was sourcing her secrets, using some type of strange hypnosis to lure the truth from the audience.
Ana looked to where Lethe had stood.
He was gone.
She looked at Jasper, who met her eyes in question. Like he didn’t know what she was looking for.Did he not see him?
Ana started scanning the crowd. Her heartbeat rose. Something felt terribly wrong.
She moved forward, glancing back at Jasper with a subtle nod that assured him something was going on.
She searched the tent. Subtle shapes were hiding in the darkness of equipment or people—she couldn’t tell.
She reached the edge of the stage between the chairs. Hypnotized, no one in the audience seemed to notice or care. She glanced up when silence fell to see that Evira had noticed her.
