Darker London

Rachel's dinner with Harley and Imogene had been pretty quiet - on her part. The restaurant they'd taken her too had been dimly lit, full of soft candlelight and Rachel felt like a third wheel on their romantic date. And it was romantic - Harley was going over the top with Imogene, touching her at any given opportunity, taking her hand or stroking her hair or leaning over the table and kissing her while Rachel stared at her food and tried to be invisible and blind.

She could barely eat, she was so uncomfortable. The wine, yes, she could drink, hoping that would settle her nerves. The glass was enormous, meant for swirling the wine around to bring out the scent, but it just made Rachel feel like she was very small. And once the glass was gone, she didn't have any more, because Harley and Imogene still had wine in their glasses and Rachel felt too out of place to try and ask the waited for anything.

The air hung heavily over her head, poised to shatter. She could destroy everything with a few words. Tear this family apart. He's cheating on you she thought, pushing a piece of sweet potato gnocchi through the sauce on her plate. They were only on entrées and Rachel had no appetite. Harley lifted Imogene's hand to his mouth to kiss it and Rachel thought He's lying.

( ... )

Ko and Indigo escaped out of the house long before Imogene crunched back to life, in the cold, concealed puddle of her own blood. Indigo – a minimalist by training – packed light. She’d broken any emotional attachments she had with anything in her room when she’d broken her first neck. “You need warmer clothes than this,” Ko told her.

“Then I’ll buy warmer clothes than this,” she snapped at him, although snapping at Ko did about as much as snapping at a mountain.

( ... )

They were about half way to the hospital before Indigo realised – her brain working slow, so slow – that’s where they were heading. Ambulances went to hospital. Obviously. They’d given her some kind of injection and either that was working or all it had taken was a little more time, but her chest didn’t hurt so much, and in her limbs, the time between uncontrollable spasms was getting longer and longer.

When she sat up, the paramedic tried to ease her down again but she lashed out at him with a fierce “Get off me!” He was a quick one, used to sudden outbursts from patients, and her fingernails missed his arm by an inch.

( ... )

Alexandria had been through many variations of her name as she grew up. From Alexandria to Alex to, last year, Xan. She wanted to be the kind of person who could pull of Xan, it was way more unique than the other variations, short and powerful. But it felt like it took a lot of work maintaining a persona that fit the name Xan, and she’d slowly abandoned it. She was getting older now anyway, she’d turned seventeen recently and wanted her seventeenth year to be one of effortless coolness. Trying too hard to fit into a name like Xan reeked of effort, so Alex rolled her eyes whenever anyone called her Xan now.

She’d thought about going by her last name, Tai, for a while. She liked that too – it was pretty, but it just drew too many ignorant comments from people who assumed she was Thai.

( ... )

In her early teen years, Indigo-Hope Dumire had been all about control. Imogene had drilled it into her so thoroughly that Indigo hadn’t known anything else. Life was lived on a schedule, chores were ticked off on a whiteboard, habitats were perfectly tidy. Earlier, in Indigo’s childhood, the rules took up less of her life. But that was when her father was around. That was before Indigo figured out the truth of her father – well, the multiple truths.

( ... )

The house smelled of blood, rank and disgusting.

The house smelled like victory, control and power.

( ... )

For as long as she could remember, Indigo had known as much as she needed to about her family.

When she was very little, she lived with a big group of them, a few other cousins older than she was, a few aunts and uncles who were also cousins. It was one of them – it must have been one of them who told her that her parents were cousins, and two of her grandparents were half-brother and sister. She’d known that, and known that it was a shameful secret, for as long as she could remember.

( ... )

Cai needed a moment, leaning against his bedroom door like he could keep the rest of the world out. It was safe in his bedroom, comforting, familiar. It wasn’t Dom on the floor of the living room. It wasn’t Nonnie in a rain coat bent over his body.

Cai doubled over, close to throwing up again and only fighting it back because he’d promised Zoe he’d get to Rachel. He managed to keep it inside, but he did burst into tears again; they were too close to the surface to fight. Dom… Dom… Jesus Christ this couldn’t be happening.

( ... )

Rachel’s dad, who was not Rachel’s dad at all, drove her back to her old house. This seemed like a normal enough place to have a conversation about the future, and Rachel wasn’t worried until she and her father had passed the main gate and were on the path, when she looked up and saw her father, sitting at the kitchen table.

She balked, because her father was behind her? Rachel spun, and found she was right. He was behind her. And in the window? Her mind faltered. This did not feel like a normal hallucination, and yet?

( ... )

A full half of Zoe’s grade in Art lay before her on the table; her portfolio, staring back at her with eyes that said I’m not good enough. “Dammit,” she muttered under her breath, reaching across the table to rearrange a couple of pieces to see if changing their juxtaposition would have an effect on the layout of the rest of the work. It did help a bit.

Her theme was displacement, though she’d spent too long at the start of the term changing from theme to theme before she worked this one out. She’d started with war but lots of other people were doing war, and had done war in the past, and besides had parents or older siblings in the army so could tie personal stories into the narrative. Zoe had plenty of personal war stories but a lot of them were a little too fantastical to explain, and she wasn't going to touch the theme of the shooting with a ten foot pole. She’d considered putting some heavy religious imagery to symbolise the Templar but was afraid of pissing them off. Not that the Templar would probably ever see her portfolio but still. The markers would interpret it wrong.

( ... )

Cai sat near the back of his history class, paying cursory attention to the lecture while his mind was really poking and prodding at the vision of the funeral. Danny was going to come to church with him this weekend, and he was planning to tell Danny about the vision afterwards. It didn’t seem right, leaving him out of it.

He better talk to Zoe about it first, though. As a heads up, and to see if she’d told Rachel yet. He didn’t think she had.

( ... )