- Scene from Sina Household past

  … Dahlia had been thinking about it for quite a while now, but there was a chance that her pocket watch’s one minute wasn’t the same as everyone else’s one minute.

  At least, that was what her mom had always told her. When she’d first gotten into making Swarmsteel out of discarded insect parts nobody wanted, her mom had told her to time herself so as not to get bogged down by the small, insignificant details. This way, she’d be making ‘more’ Swarmsteel than ‘better’ Swarmsteel, and her mom had always been a stalwart believer of ‘quantity over quality’—the exact opposite from her dad, in that sense, who believed every Swarmsteel should be made to fit only one person, down to their exact specifications. He’d never forced her to time herself. He’d never approved of her keeping a closet full of pocket watches, because the rhythmic hurt his sensitive ears and he just couldn’t stand reading around them.

  She’d always wondered how her mom and dad got along with such different outlooks on life, but it wasn’t until now—facing her dad head-on with his feral amber eyes boring holes into hers—that she wondered if maybe they’d simply never considered Swarmsteel as of their lives.

  It was true she couldn’t remember much about her mom apart from the times they’d spent dismantling old Swarmsteel together, and it was also true she struggled to recall the times she’d spent with her dad talking about his work or putting some new toy together out of scrap… but at the end of the day, before they were toy makers and doctors and weapon designers and dismantlers at the old repair shop downstairs, they were a happily married couple.

  Their lives weren’t all Swarmsteel.

  They had other things they cared about, other things they were exceptionally skilled at.

  They weren’t like her, who had nothing in her name apart from the one skill she could claim to be a bit proud of.

  So, the steel thread in her eyes was just a little bit brighter than all ten of her dad’s under the moon.

  Raya struggled to stand using his broken spear as a crutch, so she strode past him and tapped him on the shoulder, giving him a ghost of a smile. To think she’d thought him cruel and cold and distant for five years straight; the reason he’d volunteered to accompany her all the way here was simply because he didn’t like owing people debts, and he felt an obligation to put her dad down for the sake of Alshifa. He was a kind person after all.

  Amula and Jerie, too, who were trying their best to recover while stumbling back into the house—she didn’t exactly know why they’d volunteered alongside Raya, but surely it had something to do with her dad as well. Even though he’d stayed a recluse the past two years, a person to be pitied for being unable to get over the passing of his wife, the people he’d helped as a doctor remembered the softness of the calloused hands that were extended to them… and to see those same hands turned into revolting black claws that could do nothing but cleave and destroy now, well; if her mom couldn’t set him right, then it was up to her to give him a good talking to.

  His were soft and gentle hands, incapable of clenching into fists, incapable of cruelty.

  Were her hands even somewhat similar to his, she wondered?

  Her dad screeched out with each step, with each ragged breath, swiping his claws in a mad flurry. They’d cleaved through walls, shattered stones, parted flesh from bones and felled giant insects five times his size, but he was a doctor who’d not practised with his scalpel for two long years. His steel threads aimed for her throat, and she saw them coming, barely managing to sidestep them calmly before breaking into a forward dash—she saw the space between his attacks and jumped for it, closing the three metre distance in the blink of an eye.

  His extra insect arms swung at her from his waist, as though trying to wrap her in a hug–

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  She threw her upper body to the left, avoided getting bisected in half by the cleaving arms, and pivoted by jamming her scalpel into his thigh.

  His body trembled, a pained growl escaped his throat, and she cut three times along the gaps of his black chitin with her scalpel before kicking the scalpel deeper into his leg—the heavy armoured plates peeled off his muscle strands and exposed them to the air, throwing him off balance. He leaned heavily on one leg, his claws went from sky to ground to cut her face off. In another single, smooth movement, she followed her steel thread and withdrew a single step. Left his attack range. Then she stabbed his wrist with her chisel and slid forward, carving off more chitin plates growing around his arm.

  She ended up behind him, her breaths still held. She’d disabled one of his arms. There was hardly any need for a mirror for her to tell five steel threads were still converging behind her on the back of her neck, but hers was brighter, hers was she whirled on her heels with a burst of speed, cutting in a zigzag eight times down his torso before he even managed one, and then she darted out of the way as more chitin plates shattered directly off his chest.

  He snapped his head and neck at a complete right angle, his needle for a tongue hanging out, the tip sleazing with venom–

  She lunged forward, stabbing her scalpel through the back of his hand to stop him from pulling out another bombardier beetle bomb.

  He came at her swinging, abandoning his plan of using any explosives on her, and there was nothing elegant about his swings this time—he wasn’t following his steel threads. He was just an insect taking the form of a frail, dying man who’d not seen a single ray of firefly light in the past two years.

  She stepped around his claws, using her free hand to redirect his bloody hands, gradually putting more and more distance between the two of them; it was only once he’d completely abandoned all semblance of fighting like a human that her steel thread twirled in spirals around his remaining functional arm, a pretty shape that seemed as though it her to fly in swinging, screaming with all her might.

  She wasn’t going to do that, though.

  When his claws cleaved upwards, she already knew what the attack was going to look like—she’d already seen him do the exact same thing to Raya and the seniors—so she dashed in with a quick half-step, evading and counter-attacking at once.

  Five cuts to each claw joint, severing them by the second knuckle.

  Two cuts in a zigzag across his wrist, cutting the contracting tendons.

  Eight spiralling cuts along the length of his forearm and biceps, freeing his skin beneath from the suffocating plates of chitin.

  Softly.

  Gently.

  And then her steel thread took her from shoulder to clavicle, clavicle to chest, chest into sternum into muscles into fat, leading her to plunge her chisel deep into his heart.

  The timer was up, her lips parted for a gasp of fresh air—it didn’t last long. Her dad snarled and shot his hands around her neck, claws removed, but his bloody stumps for fingers were still more than sharp enough to tear into her skin. Dozens of serrated chitin edges ripped into her flesh. She tried to pull back, letting out a small cry of pain before she found her lungs burning for air, her throat screaming for water; tears filled her vision as he lifted her into the air, legs kicking uselessly off the ground.

  There was only pain. His fingers didn’t let up, shifting their grip and tightening as he tried to snap her neck. She let go of her chisel to try to pry his hands off, but her muscles felt like jelly and even the smallest amount of effort brought about agony-induced rigour in her arms. She had no more strength left in her. Sixty seconds was all she had, and sixty seconds was all she had spent. Her dad knew this. he knew this. Even now, his vertical amber slits were watching her quietly, his needle for a tongue hovering dangerously close to her remaining eye, his sharpened ears twitching as he listened to her croaking out his name…

  … And then he dropped her, his bloody fingers flying over the chisel lodged in his chest as he stumbled back into the sofa at the end of the living room.

  She fell onto her knees, spasming and flailing with her whole body, and for a brief while she thought she might be falling unconscious—but no. She couldn’t. She Before she even felt she formulated the single coherent thought in her mind, Eria injected a rush of adrenaline through her veins and made her spine arch, her vision curving like she was observing the world underwater again. Her lungs drew breath. Her limbs plundered residual strength from her deepest reserves. She managed to pull her head and grit her teeth as she crawled forward, making her way to her dad.

  He was sitting motionless at the base of the sofa one second, and then in the next, he ripped out the chisel in his chest to impale his left wrist into the wall behind him.

  Now he couldn’t possibly lunge at her anymore.

  “... Eria?”

  He whispered, his words a bit stilted because of his needle tongue, but she could understand him just fine.

  So she froze, just half a metre before reaching him, and pressed her quivering lips together as she watched him stare right over her head.

  There was nobody in the direction he was looking at.

  He was looking straight out the broken front door.

  “I… must already be dead, huh?” he mumbled, his whole body shuddering lightly as what sounded like a laugh bubbled out his chest. “The realm between the living and the dead. A world without light, a limbo without sound. I can’t… I can’t see you, Eria.

  “Where are you?

  “You’re here with me, right?

  “...

  “... No.

  “This is the trial to determine whether I am free to reincarnate or fated to karmic suffering, is it not?”

  She had to clamp her hands over her mouth so as not to let out a single sound. Faintly she heard footsteps behind her; Raya and the seniors recovering from their injuries, stumbling back in to see what was going on. She didn’t need to shoot a glance back at them for them to know they should stay back.

  Her dad was smiling, still, at the empty space over her head.

  “I’d always thought karmic suffering could be my only end for failing to fulfil my promise to you, but here I… am. Still conscious after death. Still waiting for ‘true’ death,” he said, chortling as he did. “The divine exists. They have given me a chance to perform one last kind act in my life, and now that I have stabbed myself into this wall, I will be able to hurt you no more.

  “I can reincarnate with you now.

  “I can be with you again.

  “So go ahead, first, and I’ll… I’ll catch up with you, after this cursed body of mine draws its last breath.”

  Her self-control shattered. She couldn’t stop herself from crawling forward once again, her breaths quick and heavy, her fingers fumbling around his insect claws for toes before she managed to climb his leg like a tree, pulling herself up over him.

  He was still so, so, much taller than her.

  He wasn’t old at all.

  He wasn’t frail at all.

  He wasn’t pitiable at all.

  He was anything the man everyone knew him as.

  “... I’m sorry, dad,” she whispered, as she leaned in close, tears rolling from her eye, her voice a stammering, blubbering mess. “I’m sorry. I’m… I’m sorry. I didn’t do anything. I knew what’d happened, but I didn’t… I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t research like you. I’m not smart like you. I ran and ran and ran–”

  “I’m sorry too, Eria,” he mumbled, patting her head slowly with his free hand, head lolling round and round. “I’m… no genius of a doctor after all. I couldn’t fulfil my promise. I couldn’t look after Dahlia. It was reckless injecting myself with your blood, and I knew it, but I thought I could… I thought , of all people, could’ve found a cure–”

  “N-No, dad.” She sniffled, wiped her nose, and grabbed his face to glare into his amber eyes; not that he could see anything out of them, anyways. “You a genius. The youngest doctor in Alshifa’s history. Swarmsteel Maker hobbyist. You made half of the school’s equipment, gave off half of your pay every month to the orphanage you grew up in, you worked so hard nobody demanded you to start working again even after two years of silence—so don’t say you’re not a genius. Refusal. You… you’re dad. You looked after me just fine–”

  “Dahlia will be alright, though,” he said, quite plainly, as she swallowed a gulp and let out a shuddering exhale. “She’s… the spitting image of you when you were younger. Quick with her hands. Poor at socialising. I worry she won’t be able to find a boy like you found me, but… hah. She’ll be just alright.

  “She’s the ‘Make-Whatever’, after all.

  “She’ll make her own path, and when she does, she’ll be brighter and more dazzling than both of us combined.

  “I know it.

  “I it.

  “So… I don’t think we need to worry about her all too much.”

  He offered her a weak smile, and her jaw remained clenched with pain as she held him still, refusing to let his head fall—but by now even the unnatural boost of adrenaline had worn off, and she couldn’t hold her arms up anymore.

  They fell, slowly into his lap.

  Her head followed the same path, pressing into the ground.

  And when he breathed his last, his broken face melting into an adoring smile, his bloody fingers reaching into his pocket to hand her a piece of bloodberry candy–

  tonight–

  Dahlia cried.

  Moonlight fell cold and gentle on the back of her neck.

  And she felt she might never be able to stop crying.