Chapter Text
It was 1 year, 2 months, and 7 days since they'd lost Shannon. Beatrice kept telling herself they should be past it somehow… and they were, in some ways. Lilith had taken over as leader in the field and fulfilled her duties with competence. Camila’s smiles remembered how to bloom without sadness again — thank the divine. But something was still missing. There was an emptiness between them that she could not name.
It was like the bleeding had stopped, the flesh had closed, scar tissue formed, but the wound had been too deep. Whenever she reached out to touch, Beatrice still felt a gouge of missing flesh. Of missing her.
Perhaps it wasn’t them. Perhaps it was only Beatrice.
She was a soldier. Losing comrades was to be expected. But something about the way they lost Shannon rankled inside her.
“Demonic Event.” The mere thought of the words still sparked a quiet anger.
The Bright — supposedly — never caused such a thing, only the Abyss would be at the root of such horror, but nevertheless that night —1 year 2 months 7 days — their team had been called on to deal with precisely that. To fight monsters, people and creatures warped by energies from the beyond. Not the ones that fought with shadow and corruption — like them — as they’d been trained for, but brightly burning things of wind and fire and power.
They’d been underprepared. Insufficiently trained by an institution that refused to acknowledge something like this was even possible. And Shannon had died for it. Died for the sin of trying to save one more life in the middle of a burning hell set loose.
Beatrice’s faith had always been strong. Even through her trials, when she touched the Veil and the wrong side touched her back and her whole life had come crashing down around her, Beatrice had done the right thing, joined a convent, lived a life of prayer and penance to quell the darkness inside her.
If anything it had made her more resolute in her faith, but now… since Shannon…
Her faith was still strong. She knew that to be true. But she couldn’t help feeling like somewhere in the monolith of her convictions a hairline fracture had formed.
—
Summer was once again making itself known in the southern hemisphere of Callida, and Beatrice was feeling its ever present warmth sink into her being and everything around her.
She did not welcome it. It felt strange, unfamiliar somehow.
Beatrice didn’t enjoy the unfamiliar, particularly when a mission was coming up. They’d been on the trail of a local FBC operation for a few weeks now and they were getting closer, she could feel it. Intel expected a good chance of confirmation within the next few days, but to Beatrice it felt like today. Tonight they would go and carry out the will of the church.
She was proven right when Lilith found her during her meditation. She appeared quietly in the doorway, respectful to her sister — today at least — and waited for Beatrice to open her eyes and meet her gaze before speaking.
“Intel came through, we move tonight.” her voice was calm but to the point. “Camila and I are summoning our riders. Will you join us?”
Beatrice took a breath. It was a private ritual and Beatrice was a private person, but she valued the company of her sisters, and especially lately she felt a need to strengthen those bonds.
“I will.” she decided.
Lilith nodded in approval.
—
Some ten minutes later, she found herself in a private chamber, sitting on her knees with her sisters, stripped bare above the waist, golden flickering candlelight dancing around them.
The incense wasn’t needed, the soft droning sound wasn’t needed, the mirror wasn’t really needed though it was convenient, but the whole of the ritual helped her feel at peace, helped her to focus on the task ahead, the mission to come.
They meditated for several minutes as per the ritual. Then the first chime came — a breath — the second chime — opened eyes — then at the third they all reached forward and dipped their fingers in the bowls of pigment in front of them.
That part was necessary. Mastrouza: a substance made specifically for connecting to the beyond.
Beatrice brought her fingers to her chest and began to draw the image of the spirit, the entity she was summoning, as it appeared to her mind. Its front was broad and armored, many hooked claws on long tendrils hiding underneath that shell, the rest of its carapace segmented along its many-legged body, terminating in a strong and rigid tail fin.
She was a skilled enough artist, though that didn’t matter. As the intent of her design took hold in her body, the lines began to shift, taking on a life of their own. Details that weren’t there before sprouted into being and the image began to slowly travel across her skin.
“Dagger again? You’re starting to grow fond of that one.” Lilith remarked to her side.
The ritual got a little more loose around this stage.
“I’m finding him to be dependable.”
“Ah, your favorite quality.”
It was a bit of a tease, but there was no bite to it. Leadership had not been easy on Lilith, but in some few ways it had done her good. Their relationship had — admittedly — become a little more tense, but it felt closer too.
“I assume you’re taking Cardinal out as always?”
Lilith’s answer hung poised in the air for just a moment, but she didn’t tell Beatrice that she could just look . That was a private kind of jab, not for when Camila was present too.
“I do play favorites, I won’t deny it.” she went instead. “What about you Camila?”
“Trying Pinchy again,” she said cheerfully, “they did well for me last time.”
Beatrice was about to continue the conversation when she felt the sudden cold shiver travel up her spine as the ritual caught and the entity from the depths beyond reality anchored itself to her body and soul.
She bent over gasping for a moment as the chill rushed through her, then breathed in calmly and deeply as the sense of power followed.
The gasps of her sisters were only moments behind hers. They all centered themselves with a breath, slung their robes back over their bodies, and rose together with purpose.
—
The mission started out, if not routine, then at least no more challenging than any other they’d been on. Deployment was quiet, the silence only broken by the soft hum of the ship’s engines and Lilith’s voice as she made minor adaptations to the plan based on last-minute intel — different entry point, updated sensor readings that slightly shifted the likeliest location of their target, a switch to a secondary route, no change in mission priorities.
But no conversation. No pleasantries.
Not when they were about to kill.
Their missions weren’t all lethal, far from it. And Lilith, ruthless as she could be sometimes, still tried to limit loss of life wherever she was able.
But these were First Born Children, fanatics, even the ones that weren’t abyssal-touched. And according to the reports there was at least one touched with them — likely to be on site. The OCS had a standing authorization to kill FBC members as they deemed it necessary, that should say all that needed saying about how they ranked among the church’s enemies.
There was little doubt that tonight would end in blood.
The abyssal-touched intel had reported on was the secondary target tonight. They were to eliminate him if possible, but the primary target was an artifact the FBC had somehow gotten their hands on. It wasn’t a known relic, intel about it was sparse, but the speculation was that perhaps that was because it was new.
A worrying thought.
The compound of their objective was a little ways outside a small town. Close enough to be able to bring in personnel and supplies, not too near any big population center where the risk of discovery was higher.
With the origin of the artifact unknown, intel was unclear on whether they’d brought it here for a reason, or they’d gotten hold of it nearby and were attempting to keep it safe.
Either way, command wasn’t willing to let them keep it long enough to find out.
They made a clean entry, managing to remain undetected for their initial infiltration. Beatrice sensed the presence of the abyssal-touched vaguely, but not immediately upon them. That would mean he’d be able to sense them too if OCS operatives weren’t trained rigorously in stealth, both conventional and occult. They’d be fine as long as they kept their distance.
They managed to avoid detection all the way to their target location… It wasn’t there.
The chamber intel reported the location of the artifact stood empty. Not even any guards were present.
“Camila?” Lilith whispered.
“Checking.”
Camila got out her datalink to verify the intel. “Last scan was 13 minutes ago and puts the artifact on these coordinates exactly.”
Beatrice placed her hand on a wall and reached out to Dagger. She didn’t ask for help. There was no real communication possible with the entities from the beyond, it was something more primal, more essential than that. No description of it was adequate, but if pressed, she would describe it as a merging of intent. Somehow it was like stepping through the beyond, through her rider, and then back into our reality all at once, in a single act of will.
That was what she did and Dagger’s power flowed with her, enhancing her senses, her hearing, her feeling of the tremors caused by man and machine, and her sense of the presence of living things.
She could not feel the artifact, but she could sense movement, commotion, intent.
“They’re moving it,” she informed Lilith, “right now, heading west from this location.”
Lilith nodded and raised her own head to the air with closed eyes, extending her own senses in the direction Beatrice had indicated. “He’s with them. We’ll have to go loud.”
There was a quiet acknowledgement among the three of them. The time to kill had come.
—
They made straight for their target with frightening speed. He’d be able to sense them coming, give his men some warning, but not more than a few seconds before the three of them were upon their quarry, weapons barking, controlled but aggressive, moving up decisively with every volley as they cut through those that stood in their way.
Combat was one of many things which veil-touched experienced differently from normal people. Their sight allowing them a stone’s throw glimpse into the future, it changed the nature of violence from instinct and muscle-memory reaction to a more strategic game, a play of endurance and efficiency, taking action not just to survive the next few seconds, but to conserve momentum, maintain initiative, build advantage…
The experience was no less chaotic though, because where those more grounded in reality witnessed the violence and bloodshed as it happened, those touched by the beyond witnessed that as well as the thousands of possible horrors blooming and wilting out of each singular moment.
It was the kind of thing that could easily overwhelm the undisciplined mind, but Beatrice and her sisters were the phantom hand of the church, and this was their purpose. They wove through the battlefield with grace and deadly determination.
Their target, the abyssal-touched, was easy to pick out even if they hadn’t been able to sense him. He bore the signs of too much exposure to the beyond, scales covering his skin, fins sprouting from the top and back of his head, his eyes dark and clouded over, his teeth sharpened and razorlike.
They closed on him rapidly, bypassing his troops insofar as they could, their weapons firing on him at every step as he shielded himself from the projectiles. With the swell of his power, his rider appeared in phantom images through the air around him: something large and serpentine with bulbous growths along its length.
Veil-touched with their future sight, preternatural reflexes, and reality bending powers were in many ways functionally impervious to conventional small arms, but some did believe in that a little too hard.
The OCS — ever pragmatic — had developed tactics to answer this beyond blade-duels. It was why they carried different individual weapon types: to overload the target with the need to answer multiple threats of varying natures.
Lilith opened with her heavy automatic rifle with its thermal decay ammunition. Cruel enough when used on ordinary folk, but the design was actually intended specifically for fighting veil-touched. The bullets went into a thermal reaction when they impacted solid matter or began to tumble — such as when deflected by a touched one’s shield — forcing the target to spread out their defenses, answering a diffuse cloud of a thousand tiny stings.
Then Beatrice followed up with her semi-automatic. A caliber that no ordinary person could fire standing upright, hammering the target’s shield with heavy, precise blows.
And then as their foe was pressured keeping up with those distinct threats, Camila set up her electric field weapon for the finishing blow.
Lightning arced from the tip of it towards the First Born abyssal-touched… but at the same time his rider spirit suddenly flared and fired more lightning back. Much, much more.
The entire chamber they were fighting in erupted in thunder and debris, killing or injuring several more FBC fighters as Beatrice and her sisters shielded themselves and dove for cover.
“His rider channels lightning!” Lilith shouted as gunfire still cracked and concrete shattered around them. “Camila’s weapon’s no good!”
“Blade work after all then” Beatrice concluded. “I’ll take point. Cover me.”
A sharp nod.
Normally standard procedure would be for Camila to cross blades with the target, but Beatrice didn’t want to put her in close combat with someone of unknown skill. So she tossed her rifle to Camila instead as she broke cover to close on her target.
The enemy abyssal reached out with his power to snatch it out of the air, but Beatrice was faster and Dagger’s claw cut that thread before it could manifest, a move she immediately turned into an attack. The ghosts of dozens of otherworldly claws shot out like bladed whips, sharp as shadow. He evaded harshly to the side, but it left him off balance.
From there Beatrice took the initiative, the sound of tearing and a cold hiss of air heralding her sword’s arrival in this reality, its splintered phantom images crackling together like a mirror breaking in reverse, as it materialized in a hand already in the process of making its strike. A hand completely confident that its blade would be there when it needed it to be.
The abyssal’s own sword appeared just in time to block, a cruel and vicious thing of curved hooks and spikes.
He spent his men carelessly at this point, shouting for them to attack all out in order to force Lilith’s and Camila’s attention away from him for just a few moments.
Lilith cut them down with a burning volley that set an entire section of the chamber ablaze.
The energy coming from his sword gnashed at the air around it with invisible teeth, but Beatrice was not impressed. It only took two moves for her to realize her concern hadn’t been warranted: Camila could have taken this one blade for blade without issue.
He was all rage and brute force, no precision, no discipline.
It showed in his swordsmanship.
She pushed him decisively with a combination attack — a feinting high strike into a powerful thrust — causing him to stumble.
And it showed in his craftsmanship.
As she channeled her power and her sword moved faster than anything physical wielded by a mortal should be able to move, the enemy abyssal’s blade — abstracted for pain and cruelty but not durability — shattered.
He readied to make one final desperate stand, channeling all his power to try and somehow stop Beatrice before she could make the killing blow, but before his power could take effect, his chest burst open in a shower of blood and gore, followed immediately by his face.
Camila stood a dozen or so paces away and allowed herself a satisfied little smile at her marksmanship. Beatrice let out a quick breath and nodded in acknowledgement.
With all opposition dead or fleeing, Lilith joined them, some dirt and soot on her from the lightning shower, but no injuries visible on her.
“Nice shooting Camila, everyone still in one piece? Good. I saw a couple of them move a crate as the fighting broke out. They went this way.”
It didn’t take them long to find their primary objective. The only problem was, someone else had gotten to it first.
—
They arrived to find several FBC members unmoving on the ground, and a masked young woman with long brown hair, in the process of putting a spiral length of twisted metal into some sort of backpack, lined with electronics.
She immediately drew a weapon on them.
They returned the favor and all raised their weapons as well of course, that was just proper etiquette in these sorts of situations, but the gunfire itself didn’t feel like showing up to the party just yet.
The woman spoke first.
“Ladies…”
She gave them all an appraising once over.
“... you all don’t look like the owners of this establishment. And you don’t look like the police either. So what do we all say we let the nice young lady take what belongs to her and let her be on her way?”
Lilith trained her rifle directly on the interloper’s head and aimed down its sights for emphasis. “That doesn’t belong to you.”
“More than it belongs to you, I promise.” She kept her weapon trained on Lilith.
A handgun… but too powerful, too big for her, far too much recoil for someone with a frame like hers unless she was veil-touched, but if she was veil-touched they’d have sensed it long before they got this close.
“I’m not about to dispute ownership with you when we have three guns aimed on you and you have one.” Lilith continued, in a level voice but without much patience.
So she used a gun that was too powerful for bravado? No, everything about her was too well equipped. Her gear looked professional and that backpack — while Beatrice couldn’t tell exactly what it was lined with — was certainly high tech.
“Well the guns aren’t really the determining factor here are they? After all —” she fired a shot that missed Lilith’s face by about three inches. None of them moved.
“— you’re all veil-touched, or you’d have shot me or flinched if you didn’t know that was going to miss before I fired it.”
“Then you should definitely know better than to challenge us.” Lilith’s trigger finger shifted slightly.
“I’m just saying it looks like you girls got at least one thing you wanted. Let me leave with something too and we can all be happy, I’d prefer not to have to fight you.”
Something was not adding up. She was too confident in front of three abyssal-touched to not have something up her sleeve. Did she have backup they couldn’t detect? Was she abyssal-touched after all and was she hiding it with some unknown technique?
“Last chance” Lilith said coolly.
No. Something felt wrong. Beatrice was about to advise caution.
Then the world exploded.
It was everywhere and overwhelming. White hot light and a force that could not be withstood. All three of them shielded in time and all three of them were swept away like leaves on a gust of wind. When they gathered their senses again just a moment later the girl was already a hundred meters away and putting distance between them fast.
“What the —”
“She’s bright?!”
“Doesn’t matter! After her!”
She ran like the wind, like an animal, like a thing possessed.
“We need to cut her off!” Lilith shouted.
Beatrice took out her rifle, jumped into the air and channeled Dagger to carry her forward, so she could fire without losing speed. She targeted the girl’s legs and the ground in front of her to try and distract and hopefully slow her down, but to no effect. Her shields blazed to life around her, bullets deflecting effortlessly, as if it took no thought at all. Maybe it didn’t.
What did stop her came just a few moments later when she suddenly dug her feet into the ground hard — alert by something in her occult sight — and dove back towards the three of them as the ground in front of her exploded in a massive salvo of cannon fire.
Camila caught up a second later, her datalink still open.
“What? Why else do we even have a ship?”
Lilith let out a scoff, but it sounded like an approving one by her standards. There was no time to debate tactics, because the girl had risen and stood to face them now. Beatrice decided to forego guns and summoned her sword, Lilith and Camila followed suit.
The girl in front of them… didn’t, curiously enough. She just stood there, no weapon in hand, mantled in golden light an unmistakable power.
The three sisters called their riders close. Ghostly figments of Dagger’s armored shell and agile body swirled around Beatrice, Pinchy’s massive, pockmarked crustacean-like shadow emerged behind Camila, and the rippling apparitions of Cardinal’s leviathan tentacles rose up twisting all around Lilith.
The girl didn’t seem to have any apparitions around her. Just a circle of golden light. Or — was that her rider? If it was, it was like none Beatrice had ever seen or heard of.
She wasn’t given much time to think on it because their opponent stepped forward.
“Alright then,” her voice was lower now, disappointed almost, “let’s do it the hard way.”
They each sent out their power, their riders, all at the same time, and it was like trying to fight a storm. Pinchy might be a stubborn, unwieldy spirit, but its raw strength was enormous and Camila knew how to bring it to bear, and Cardinal was both powerful and precise by any standard, but even all of them together couldn’t hope to match what this girl was throwing out in a direct contest of strength.
Every time she tossed out an arm it came with a wave of energy so massive, so overpowering that none of them could stand against it. They had to retreat, had to scramble to evade the brunt of the force every single time.
“Divine light, how is she doing that?!” Lilith growled, as her and Beatrice evaded a storm of burning light together. “And how is she keeping it up?!” Every single blow felt stronger than the most powerful attack any of them could muster, the kind that would take enormous focus and leave them drained, and this girl was not just exceeding that, but doing it repeatedly and with no apparent end in sight.
Beatrice took a moment to watch her raise her hands in response to a massive battering charge from Pinchy. It landed on shields of violently crackling light that didn’t budge in the slightest.
She was throwing up her hands every time though wasn’t she? She’d been gesturing wildly the entire time. Poorly controlled, poorly disciplined…
“She’s a rookie” Beatrice whispered, and beside her Lilith made an expression that spoke words she would never say aloud.
Are you fucking kidding me?
“No look. Look at her form. And she hasn’t summoned a blade either. I don’t think she has one.”
“Well how does that help us? That ‘rookie’ is still tossing us about like ragdolls.”
“If she’s got poor control, maybe we can get past her blasts, no matter how strong they are.”
Lilith nodded. “Alright, you go for it, Dagger’s the most agile we’ve got here. I’ll see if I can give you an opening.”
Beatrice nodded and slunk off into the shadows as Lilith walked out from behind cover, Cardinal’s powerful tentacles swirling around just as Pinchy’s strength was starting to fail and Camila looked like she was about ten seconds away from passing out.
There was no way Lilith could match the power being thrown at her, but she was a warrior through and through, and a quick study to boot.
As the bright-touched woman turned to face her with a determined look in her eyes and her hand flew up to send another unstoppable wave of force, Lilith evaded by just the barest necessary degree, Cardinal’s tentacles guiding the force, absorbing the blow, redirecting its power back to the attacker.
She moved with the skill and grace she’d been trained for, learning from each interaction how to eke out just a little bit more space and time to counter.
It wasn’t enough. No matter how technically perfect her defenses and attacks, there was too much power to overcome. Her strongest blows could not crack the burning shields, her best absorptions and redirections simply faced too much power for them to handle.
But what it was doing was drawing focus, pulling all the bright-touched girl’s attention to Lilith, so Beatrice could strike.
She still saw it. Despite everything her head still jerked to the side when Beatrice came shooting out of the shadows, but she saw it late. The blast she threw out to knock her back was poorly controlled and not quite on target. Beatrice wove around it and Dagger’s tendrils shot out in a spiral past the massive wave of force.
Her shields were there, too strong to break, but the OCS were abyssal, they didn’t need to break when they could infiltrate, deceive, and corrupt. Beatrice had planned her attack accordingly, and enough of the tendrils shifted and corrupted the focus of the shield to allow just one to pass through.
It hit her in the right shoulder, causing her arm to drop limp to her side.
She looked panicked suddenly, and they knew they had their opening.
Lilith brought Cardinal’s tentacles down from above. The girl threw up a desperate shield at the last moment, but only facing upwards. Dagger got in behind her, his stinger lashing out in one quick strike at the back of her neck, and the girl fell forward, stunned. The storm of light and fire, gone, as quickly as it had appeared.
Beatrice managed to catch her before she hit the ground.
Camila came up to them as they stood there, doing her best to catch her breath after the total exhaustion of power the fight had put her through.
“Well that was… interesting. Now what?”
—
They took her with them.
They had to take her. There was no way they could leave a free agent that powerful to just wander around in the territories they were charged to protect. They had to bring her in and figure out what to do with her.
Camila was keeping her sedated during their flight back to Cat’s Cradle, occasionally commenting about the insane amount of tranquilizers it was taking to keep her under, but it was working and they would be able to make it back before one single 120 pound girl burned through the ship’s entire supply of sedatives.
There was a complication though.
They were all aware of it.
Beatrice was the first one to voice it.
“I don’t understand why she’s bright-touched.”
Her voice was tense and her pitch a touch higher than normal. For Beatrice that was practically shouting.
Lilith for her part seemed to be treating the matter far more casually, or perhaps she just decided that she wasn’t going to care about it until she could do something about it.
“The grace and kindness inherent in her soul, same as anyone I imagine.”
Beatrice glared — actually glared at Lilith.
“You know very well that is not what I mean. She could have glory, luxury, adoration, all handed to her on a silver platter on the core worlds. What is she doing in the Esperia constellation?”
“No idea, but apparently it involves stealing artifacts.”
“An uncatalogued one at that” Camila volunteered. “I think intel’s theory might be right. This could be recent, and it’s bright, not abyssal, on top of everything else.”
They’d put the artifact in containment of course, but Camila had done a preliminary scan and was showing it to her sisters now. The holographic image showed a slightly spiral shape about 50 centimeters in diameter, covered in patterns like the veins of a leaf, but fractal in nature and vaguely evocative of wings, feathers, iridescent membranes, … the markings of the Bright.
“It’s not easy to tell because of the alteration, but it kind of looks like a metal ring that was broken and twisted? Could’ve been part of a machine, or maybe a light fixture or something. Could’ve been a normal everyday object just last week.”
“There’s too much strangeness going on here.” Beatrice’s expression looked mostly neutral, but to her sisters the underlying scowl was plain enough. “I don’t care for this at all.”
“Well, nothing we can do about it for now. We’ll get her back to Cat’s Cradle, break the link with her rider, and then we can take our time and discuss with Mother Superion how to proceed.”
Something else was bothering Beatrice. But she couldn’t voice that part, not yet.
So she waited, as they all did, to get back home and see where the divine light would guide them next.
—
Beatrice was pacing.
She was vexed, and things weren’t adding up and it was too … — darn — warm.
“You’re going to wear a hole in the floor, but more importantly you’re going to get on my nerves well before that.” Lilith was with her. It had been about an hour since they arrived and they’d just gotten out of their initial debrief.
“It doesn’t make sense. It feels like I’m — like we’re missing something.”
“What isn’t making sense?”
“She’s too powerful! I know we’ve faced more powerful opponents before but this — this was a whole new order of magnitude.”
“We took her down just fine.”
“That’s not the point. And also —”
She hesitated. It was a little humiliating even for her to admit, and she knew Lilith would like hearing it even less.
“— she was holding back. Maybe not in power, but she didn’t follow through on any opportunities to kill. If she’d wanted us dead, we probably would be.”
Lilith’s jaw tensed. “You don’t know that. Maybe that was just the extent of her skill.”
It didn’t quite sound like she believed it.
“Besides, I find it hard to imagine someone who dares to attack an FBC operation directly has a code against killing.”
“Fair. Maybe she’s just… reluctant to.”
Lilith’s turn to look pensive.
“Then who is she though? Where does she come from? Unless command has been keeping something from us this is the first we’ve heard of her. And it’s unlikely someone was just keeping her under wraps because then she’d be trained better.”
“Well equipped though. She must have someone she answers to, or some benefactor at least.”
Before they could get into it any further, Lilith’s comm beeped and Camila’s voice came through. “Lilith? Beatrice? Could you come down to medical for a moment. We’ve got an… issue I need to show you both.”
Medical was where they were processing the girl they’d brought in. Camila didn’t seem distressed over the comm, but a vague “issue” at a moment like this was enough to make the two of them hurry their step a little.
Beatrice was the first one to walk into the room, where Camila and one of the Cradle’s medics had the mystery girl on a medical table and there was. far. too much. skin .
Beatrice instantly turned away before she could catch more than a flash, only to face the bemused expression of Lilith coming through the door after.
“It’s just a naked girl Beatrice. She won’t sear your eyes.” she peered around Beatrice.
“She’s not even naked. She has her underwear on still.”
“I don’t have her permission!”
“You don’t look when you do have permission either.”
She couldn’t quite manage a glare at Lilith, but she gave it her best hard expression before quickly shifting gears to the very important question at hand.
“Camila, why is that necessary?!”
“That’s what I needed to talk to you both about. We can’t remove her image.”
What?
Beatrice’s head swung back around and she had to jerk her gaze upwards and keep it firmly on Camila’s face and at eye level. The medic was in the process of dressing the young woman again — comfortable slacks and a medical shirt, not her tactical gear — but it was very much a work in progress and she hadn’t gotten to the shirt part yet.
“That’s impossible.”
“Apparently not. We removed all mastrouza from her skin. We just checked to see if there was maybe a secondary image, or if this was part of a larger design, but it’s only this.”
Camila motioned for them to come around and look at the girl’s back where a broad circle glowed faintly on her skin.
“That image is staying without any mastrouza pigment. It’s not coming off and if anything does manage to disturb it seems to reform itself in — uhm — well her blood.”
The medic pulled the loose shirt over the young woman’s torso. Beatrice allowed herself to actually look at her for a moment and by the divine was she beautiful. Beatrice had to take a moment to center herself again.
The girl also seemed to be stirring slightly.
“Is she still sedated?”
“She’s coming out of it. I was thinking of dosing her with blockers.”
“That’s a temporary measure at best” Lilith observed.
“Temporary and also dangerous to combine with tranquilizers. Her powers are no doubt what lets her process them so fast. The amount of sedatives we had her on were enough to kill something five times her size. We’re letting her come out of it so we can safely give her the blocker, or we can put her under again. Your call.”
A groan and a mumble came from the table. “Hmai part ov dis converzation?”
Lilith let out a sigh.
“Alright. Give her the blocker. Might as well have this conversation now.”
She looked around the room.
“Let’s put her in a chair and get some cuffs on her at least until we’re sure the blockers are working properly.”
Together they half helped, half hoisted the still-flirting-with-consciousness girl off the table and into a chair, and closed a set of cuffs around her wrist.
It took her another minute or so to fully regain the awareness of her surroundings and understand that she was on a chair, cuffed, in an unfamiliar room, with some women she may or may not remember having fought a couple of hours prior.
“Ah,” she began.
Then she breathed and seemed to focus, like she was trying to call on her powers. All three sisters tensed for a moment, but nothing happened.
“I see,” she continued.
“Welp! Looks like I’ve gotten myself into a situation, but since I’m conscious and talking I’m guessing I’m no doubt about to be offered a way out of it.”
She definitely looked far more at ease than any ordinary person would be in her situation. She was actually smiling.
A strangely attractive smile at that. Not just beautiful but attractive like a physical force, like she was magnetic.
“Let’s start with the basics.” Lilith began, knocking Beatrice out of her momentary reverie, “Who are you and who do you work for?”
“Oh shit, an interrogation for real? Like in the movies? Like you’re going to slap me and get all growly and shouty when I don’t cooperate?”
Lilith gave it about a second and a half of consideration before shrugging nonchalantly and stepping forward with every intention of slapping the girl so hard she spun but Beatrice’s voice stopped her halfway.
“Lilith!”
The girl in the chair beamed. “Ah, nice to meet you Lilith. Do you prefer Lils or Lily? Either way I’m your mom’s boyfriend, pleased to finally make your acquaintance.”
Lilith let out a long-suffering sigh. Like she’d talked to this girl for all of twenty seconds and she was already three hours worth of tired of her.
“Is that really how you want to play this?”
She raised her chin up defiantly, still smiling. “That’s how I always want to play.”
Another sigh from Lilith.
“Fine.”
This time Beatrice had crossed the space between them and caught her fist at the very start of its arc. “That won’t do anyone any good and you know it.”
“It will relieve some of my frustration.” she growled.
“You’re better than that.”
Lilith scoffed. Beatrice put a hand to her cheek and forced Lilith to look her in the eyes. “No, look at me. I know you’re better than that.”
Her expression softened and she pulled away.
“How about we go and analyze her bloodwork and her stuff? See if that tells us something?” Camila offered from the side of the room.
“Good plan” Lilith’s gaze was holding Beatrice’s for a moment longer. “I’ll go talk to Mother Superion about what exactly we’re going to do with this one.”
Beatrice realized this left her. She made as if to say something, changed her mind, and just went “Fine. I’ll stay and watch her I suppose.”
“Divine light bless your soul. I imagine you’ll need it.” Lilith said flatly, and was out the door the next moment.
“She likes me, I can tell.”
It was going to be a long day.