CHAPTER 10 - POLYTONALITY II

  Trauma Management is structured episodically, meaning that each week, they would go through a different girl who had been negatively affected by the job. Ms. Tams was, and is someone who values cooperation, productive conversation, and debate. Thus, on the third class, much to Keisha and Siena's dismay, she decides to assign people to groups. She claims she doesn't like it when groups are too rigid, and already she'd seen some forming in her class.

  "I don't like cliques," she would say. "This class is a great opportunity for everyone to meet someone new."

  And so it was that she separated the siblings and destroyed their hopes and dreams of huddling together and making it through this class without attracting any outside attention—all these veterans of the force were making them nervous. Keisha was assigned to a group opposite of where she sat with two other girls who seemed quite friendly. They greeted her with open arms and began introducing themselves immediately; Keisha needed none, given her reputation.

  As for Siena?

  The monster feels every hair on the miserable amalgamation of flesh that is her shell stand up as Ms. Tams reads out Lucienne Monroe's name and puts her face to face with one who could kill her with naught but an intense glare. Lucienne hums a horrid tune as she slides next to Siena, always the ever-pleasant facade on her sun-kissed skin. This world's star shines through the windows and illuminates her from behind just right, as if there is a radiant light behind her.

  "Sorry for taking a while. I had to tell Jaden about not coming to her party—you know Jaden, right? Last Whisper?"

  "Uh—yeah." Siena nods; she only knows of her vaguely given her credentials, but anyone looks pathetic next to Golden Promise herself. "So. Uh…" she trails off, not knowing where to look or what to say.

  God, she's bad at this—but also good at this. This is how past Siena would have behaved, but it doesn't stop her from hating her own indecisiveness and incompetence.

  "Did you do the reading?" the dirty blonde asks. "If you didn't, I can catch you up."

  "No! No, I did. Not like there's anything else to do lately."

  Lucienne snorts. "Pfft. I mean, an Overture did happen in Algiers two days ago, so vacation time's over, I'm afraid. The E.U. got it under control, but they were pretty sloppy. Off the record, 'cause anything I say can be a diplomatic incident." She bobs her head back and forth. "I'll be glad to serve when the Choir rears its ugly head back in North America."

  "You want to fight? Isn't it… scary, even for you?" Siena nervously clenches a fist below her table. "I mean—sorry! I don't want to call you a coward—"

  "Oh, I'm sure people call me far worse. You're friends with Keisha, aren't you? She hates me," Lucienne says, shrugging. Before Siena can say anything to deny her, she adds, "no! It's okay, I don't mind. It's a little weird if everyone loves me."

  The conversation is going at too fast of a pace for Siena to parse through the lies, the subterfuge or any hidden intentions. She hadn't been in Golden Promise's head that long, all things considered. Enough time to know her in passing, to understand what makes her tick, her grief for her childhood friend Olivia hidden beneath this fake veneer of kindness when she doesn't care for much at all. But reading in-between each line, each word, each syllable? That is impossible. Siena tries not to look at Keisha, who she hopes is doing the same thing.

  "I asked to be put in with you alone, you know?" Lucienne says with a pleasant smile. "Ms. Tams is a huge fan, so she agreed."

  "What?"

  Siena's mouth dries up. Obviously, obviously she's using her for some reason, maybe to get closer to Keisha who's drawn Agency suspicion. Estelle and her being best friends, there's simply no way she hadn't tattled as soon as Golden Promise had awoken. This girl isn't the type to simply talk to a lonely soul out of the kindness of her heart; that, Siena is certain of. But why admit that she's set up this entire ordeal?

  "Heh. Surprised? I mean, you're intriguing to me, Siena." Unless suspicion had already fallen onto her— "Back in Seattle, when I stepped foot inside the operation room, everybody looked at me." Lucienne's smile fades slightly, faltering and twitching. "You didn't. That caught my attention. People always have strong feelings about me. They love me like I'm God. They hate me like I personally took everything from them—like I skinned them alive or something." She nudges her head in Keisha's direction. "But you treated me like a ghost. You were in your own little world."

  It's not… her.

  It's not her.

  It was the old Siena's doing, her own depression, the all-consuming black hole that takes, takes, and takes until she is a skeleton tripped of skin and a gust of wind can blow her apart. Truth be told, her memories of that evening are hazy, but she faintly remembers a single thought rocking her mind, a single notion growing, dividing, multiplying like an exponential malignant growth turning her mind into a self-destructive abomination as she tightly held onto her scythe.

  If I cannot do this, I am worthless.

  But again, it hadn't been her.

  "I was a little worried. You know, with the… dying," she lies.

  "Oh, you don't have to justify yourself. Obviously you were worried—this wasn't an ego thing. I was just saying you caught my eye. I'm so sorry! God, me and putting my foot in my mouth." She facepalms with a grimace. "Okay, well, what I meant to say is—I wanna get to know you better and maybe be your Trauma Management buddy?"

  Siena is a rat aboard a ship reaching for new shores, hidden in a bag of flour. She is a tick buried in someone else's hair, a tape worm in someone's gut, bacteria in a spaceship on her way to Europa. She is a parasite not of this place, a survivalist who would do anything to extend her life even by just another minute. She will claw, she will bite, she will lie, she will turn the world to dust if she gets to taste another breath.

  In the back of her mind, she wonders if she could kill Lucienne if she took her by surprise. A quick materialization of dust, solidification into sharp material capable of piercing human skin, and a jab in the jugular all before her next heartbeat. Unfortunately, the notion is fantastical at best and would fall flat on its head even if the most Mary Sue protagonist of a novel had tried it.

  Siena can see danger when it throws itself in front of her. She's inside the eye of the hurricane. She doesn't need to run and call Megan to know what to do, despite a morbidly curious side of her wanting to say yes to this proposal.

  "I don't know, I'm pretty sure Ms. Tams wouldn't like that," Siena says as confidently as she can, which isn't much. At least she doesn't stutter. "Sh—she—" Fuck. "She wanted us to meet new people and all."

  The nuclear warhead wearing human skin nods without a fuss. "You're right, I just got carried away. Plus, you seem like the introverted type and us hanging out would attract a lot of attention. And I do mean a lot."

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  Excellent, another excuse she hadn't even thought about because of her panicked state. "Yeah. I'm honored, truly, but… yeah, let's just get through this case."

  Lucienne's expression doesn't change. Her eyes don't narrow, her smile does not fall, her pleasantness remains stitched to every fiber of her being as if it is truly her and not a scarecrow masquerading as a living thing.

  "Sure thing! Let me get to my notes real quick. I have them saved somewhere…"

  But the monster's been inside her head. She knows her.

  She's patient. Calculated. The opposite of Estelle.

  But she's not used to failure. She has to be frustrated.

  Siena grinds her jaw together and tries to keep her breathing steady. She needs to keep being careful.

  —

  Lucienne isn't frustrated.

  Okay, she is, but this could have been worse. She still has a foot in the door and has established a rapport with Siena. The issue is that her colleague is more guarded than she thought, perhaps because of a mistrust of authority. Lucienne has looked into her life a decent amount and she saw bad parents, bad teachers, bad counselors, and a bad first year at the Agency, so it's no wonder she said no to the face of it.

  Oh right. She has to lead.

  "So this girl, right? Hopeful Spring—she was one of the ones hiding her identity, and because of that she kind of separated her work-self from her civilian self. There aren't many who make it work because of how hard it is to function with a secret identity like that…" she rambles on.

  Lucienne doesn't even register half the shit coming out of her mouth, but she trusts herself enough for it to make sense. Occasionally, she glances at Keisha and sees the suspect behaving normally without any panic; the stares she sends to Siena aren't odd. One would look

  Siena… Lucienne doesn't know how to get her foot in the door. Hair the color of clear ash, she fidgets on her seat and keeps playing with her skirt just so she could do something with her hands. Her grey eyes dart everywhere but on Lucienne, finding their desk a particular place of interest.

  "S—so," Siena sputters. "What I thought this was trying to tell us, uh, why Ms. Tams put this in here, is to show that the human mind can't, like, split itself in two." She swallows, fingers tightening in the fabric of her skirt as if she might pull a seam loose and crawl inside it. " It'll all bleed through. The guilt, the adrenaline, the lying. If you keep telling one side of you that it's just a role, eventually you don't know which one is real anymore."

  "Yeah! Then you can have dissociation issues, identity issues, guilt… it's a lot." It was. It is. Not that Golden Promise is living a double life. Olivia died and took Lucienne's soul with her. "You gotta have people you can trust and talk to, and the Agency-provided mental healthcare obviously wasn't enough. And this one unfortunately had a tragic ending…"

  It still feels artificial. Siena, Keisha, all of it does, as if they're schoolchildren rehearsing a play. Lucienne has lived her life since Olivia wrapped up in so many lies it's hard to discern who she really is sometimes, but that means she has the ability to sniff out liars and bullshitters.

  She misses Liv. How real everything with her was, how she could carve out her chest, pull out her heart and present it to her, beating and raw without judgment. She was her soulmate, her other half, her everything, and not a day goes by without missing that gaping hole in her chest. If only the Luminaries could choose her and give her a wish like Rose Keaton so she could bring her back to life—

  What?

  Her wish…

  Her wish.

  She hears the distorted sound of the ocean, feels the cold tightness around her brain, the perverse violation of her entire life. The water in her lungs, the pressure in her ears, the faint sound of the Choir's music, but she cannot remember what she said. She can't. She can't. It's like trying to recall a dream. A word on the tip of her tongue.

  P&as%. $ #a t !) s(& $m.

  A fleeting whisper. A lost opportunity she will never even hope to understand.

  She has to go.

  —

  "Golden Promise?"

  Siena gets no answer—Lucienne just ups and leaves, golden light emanating from her skin and tears swelling in the corner of her eyes. Murmurs percolate throughout the class as Ms. Tams stands there frozen and her mouth agape. Has the world ever seen Golden Promise cry, even once?

  "Um," the professor hesitates, "we should keep in mind that she's been through a lot for all of us, and I'd appreciate it if we were all… discreet about this."

  "Yeah, we don't want the media in a feeding frenzy," a student says.

  Many more agree, and they all go back to working on the reading as assigned. Keisha, however, is not even pretending to do so. If eyes could speak—and Siena is beginning to think she is good at reading eyes—she'd be screaming to ask if she's screwed. Siena knows her sister. That twitch in her finger. If she's going down, she's going to go down fighting.

  The false Magical Girl shakes her head, and Keisha relaxes a smidge. She doesn't know why Golden Promise froze so suddenly and what she was thinking, but she wasn't making the eyes of someone who was ready to give her findings to the Agency. Plus, Siena hadn't done anything suspicious she could find.

  Part of her wants to follow to see what the heck this is all about, but that's not her place and Siena would rather stay out of that problem magnet's way now that she's stopped her probably dishonest befriending attempts. For the rest of the class, Ms. Tams assigns her to another group, and things go off without a hitch.

  Because she's not busy working in the background for them, Megan is going to join them for their usual lunch today, so she's already waiting

  "You're late—"

  "Not now, Meg. Get in the car," Keisha interrupts her with a sigh. Their dark-haired, stern-looking sibling doesn't like it, but she relents and steps in the passenger seat without fussing while the other two do the same—Siena settles in the back. "Okay. So some weird shit happened today…"

  Megan listens to them with that same unblinking intensity she always carries, a gaze so focused it feels concentrated like sunlight caught through a magnifying glass and held steady against your skin. She stays silent for a few moments, tapping a finger on the dashboard.

  "You're right, Siena; she's using you to get to Keisha. I was correct to be worried." Twilight Ember hums, followed by a long, drawn breath. "The tears could be a lot of things. Bait for you to feel empathy for her and want to befriend her? Tears at the girl you were reading about, maybe?"

  "No. No, that wouldn't make any sense. She wasn't acting that empathetic. Just a normal, human amount," Siena says.

  "Yeah. Like a 'oh God, how terrible! Starving children in Sudan!' But not 'let me donate to help them' type beat," Keisha chimes in. "Cause people are terrible at caring about others not within their immediate circle—God, don't cut me off, asshole!" She slams down her car horn and clicks her tongue.

  "Especially Golden Promise. She just goes through the motions—no, she wouldn't cry for that," she adds.

  Megan frowns and pinches the bridge of her nose. "I don't see it, then. What's the play? Is this amateur hour? Not with her." She shakes her head. "There's something we're missing."

  "Maybe some food will get our brain the energy to think about all of this. Or, and don't yell at me here—we could just rip the band aid off and send me to attack her in her sleep."

  "Keisha…" Siena sighs, "stop joking around."

  "Girl, I'm not joking. I'd be down. I think I actually have a shot. Like a solid fifteen percent chance if I do things just right."

  A long silence stretches for what feels like eternity.

  Megan is the first to break it. "I've been putting in a lot of effort to keep us alive. Worked on salvaging your ailing reputation."

  "You considered it, though." Shadow Lily tilts her head back and forth with a genuine, gentle smile. "That means you think a fifteen—probably lower cause of my fucked up ego—percent chance is something you think is better or at least equivalent to what we're doing now."

  "I mean, the cards are all in their hands. We're sitting ducks. It feels like we're circling the drain." She crosses her arms. "We're also going in circles holding the same conversation over and over. It's getting tiresome."

  "So—"

  "But. You have another thing coming if you think I'm not going to exhaust every other option first."

  Siena feels like she can breathe easy; the monster doesn't want her siblings to die. She wants them to prosper, to grow old, to find friendships and—to enjoy themselves on this planet. But she can't say that out loud.

  She's felt this for a while. For now, she'll do His bidding, for that is her purpose, but… her train of thought being like this?

  It's not like the Conductor is ever taking her back.

  She'll miss Him.

  She smiles. "Let's do Cooper's for lunch."

  "Aw, I don't want friggin' seafood!"

  —

  Siena's day goes by without anything else eventful. Training with Maya, chatting with her siblings (including Gabriel on the phone), doing coursework, thinking about what she could do to make Megan's life easier or how to make Keisha's behavior less rash. Her mind feels more active now than it has ever been, and it's been doing wonders for her mental health even if there's more to defeating depression and a suicidal mind than just this.

  Late at night, when there's nothing to keep her occupied and no one to speak to, the dark thoughts return. Little grains of dust swirling around her brain, obscuring any brightness she would dare to find amidst the ruin that is her life.

  She'd probably unfortunately wake up with her floor covered in ash again tomorrow. Siena tosses and turns in her bed, not knowing how much time passes, until—

  Until two piercing lights drill through her living room, twin cones of white slicing the dim apart like an angel descending from heaven and bearing his grace accompanied by the faint sound of sobbing.

  Lucienne.

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