The Dart
She looked at me. Her gaze was striking-- inhuman purple eyes, rimmed with a deep crimson-- but it was cold. Unlike ice, it barely bent against the warmth of human skin. It stood rigid, frozen and unloving.
“You’re not really into this.” She remarked again, as if it were wholly obvious. She looked me up and down. Her gaze, her infernal gaze, combed the length of my stiff body. She wanted to see it. The fevered presence of the Dart. The hungered howls, the screaming sobs-- the animalistic rage that gripped a victim’s trembling frame.
I didn’t dare move. “Apologizes.” I returned, equally as stiffly.
She frowned.
She didn’t want the diplomatic platitudes of a well-educated senator. She wanted froth rippling through the slits of my teeth, eyes brimming with blood and an erratic scramble to draw blood. She wanted the fragile gape of her throat -- oh, and it looked so tender -- ripped from the frame of her bones with my bare teeth. She wanted her false skin torn by the blunt grasp of a once-well-mannered noble’s manicured nails. She wanted gore. She wanted suffering.
I crossed my legs, emboldened by her sudden silence. The Dart, it moved as I moved, it whispered feral urges and they slunk in the dredges of my mind, urged on by the sudden shift of position. The fiery need to rise from my seat and destroy burned at the tips of my fingers. So I kept them woven together, tucked gracefully on my risen knee, trapped.
She pursed her lips. Her face, if I could call it that, seemed to shift from quiet displeasure to… determined. Her brows, made from that odd, off-white strings, furrowed. “You don’t wish to partake in the offerings?” She looked back up to me, searching for a shift in my demeanor.
I would never allow her the pleasure. I smiled, “Your kindness is greatly appreciated, but no.”
“You will.”
“I don’t make it a habit to take from others.” The Dart purred in the back of my head. It rumbled against my skull, sending trembling vibrations of adrenaline down my spine.
She smiled.
So she knew, then. Knew I was struggling to hold back a howl, knew that I teetered between sanity and unending bloodlust.
It was only natural, but how frustrating was her smug expression? How her lips curled upwards, even though her programming should prevent such emotions from being felt. How she had no idea the peril of being alive. How she sat, circuity and straw hairs, a desperate reproach to humanity, unable to be infected and unable to know death.
“Many of our visitors choose to partake.” Her voice was cool, even. Like ice. Like the pinpricks of frost that dribbled onto my nerves, the Dart’s cruel presence nudging my muscles to action. Like the sterile wave of air that circled through the room, devoid of natural scent. “It’s inevitable for those who abstain.”
Partaking.
Indulging the Dart. Listening to it’s terrible whispers and leaning into feral behaviors. Abandoning the thin veil of rationality and embarking an unholy transformation. Gnarled teeth and burning bones, flesh ripping and trickling and slipping onto the concrete.
Inhuman is the kindest term for what you become. A monster, perhaps, is more accurate.
And she embraced partaking.
She and the hollow-boned and the circuit-minded, the casing for conscious without blood nor hearts, encouraged the ritual. Guided by a frame for decisions, bound to a code, forbidden from feeling, they let their human ancestors crawl into boxes, live their horrible desires, before being sliced into ribbons of still-transforming flesh for the second-people to dissect and study.
Once a person partakes, the second-people had every right to cull them.
She smiled again. A mockery of Tulip’s kind gaze. How did they recreate her tight smile? Her thin, pale lips and the slim divots of her dimples? The splay of freckles that wound across her nose like a fish school, seemingly crawling the expanse of her pale skin? “You’ve lasted for quite some time.”
“Longer than others?”
“Longer than most.”
The Dart hummed, as if to say, Not much longer, though. I buried its strange sensations into the back of my mind. Or what was left of my scattering thoughts. It was difficult just to narrow my attention on her. Even with her bright, paper-like hair.
Tulip.
Look at her.
Look at not-Tulip.
With her belly full of wires and her head full of synthetic strands of hair that remained undyed. Her purple irises laden by a cold gaze. How she sits, so unlike the real thing, impossibly straight, with her feet firmly planted on the white tile. She was disgustingly elegant in a way that Tulip could never manage, even under my firm tutelage.
My hands shook beneath my knee.
How could she? How dare it?
Tulip was not sacred. She was a girl. Human and vulnerable, like me. She shook beneath the weight of the world, but who didn’t? Her gaze swept over the silver horizon and it always seemed so sad. Those hands, her pale, trembling hands, longed to grasp the winding tangles of foliage and glide through a gurling river. Who was to tell her she was never destined for such things?
You were. The Dart nudged again, its thin, bulbous shape shuddering beneath my skin. It was delighted that my heart pattered helplessly in my chest, regret billowing through my head like smoke.
I stood over her. Across from her, composure slipping. Letters of rejection nestled in my palm, despite my tutelage. The papers felt crisp. Inhuman in a way that felt like non-Tulip and just as unforgiving as the second-human in front of me.
She smiled again. Her lips drew thin, like a predator. “Something on your mind, Senator?”
A humorless chuckle bubbled from my throat. It was impolite, sarcastic, even. But now, it seemed like the only natural response.
I spoke, and before I could dodge my own impudence, “You,” slipped through my lips. “Just…you.”
She tilted her head to the side, fully aware of what I meant. The sheer lack of calculation on my end. The clumsy honesty that rippled from my throat and scattered throughout the icy air.
She let the nape of her neck slip from her shirt, the not-flesh pale and unblemished. “Go on then.” She murmured. “Think of me. Only me.”
The Dart clicked with satisfaction. I let it guide my movements, relinquishing that trembling shred of control to the impossible fever.
It wanted to rip her apart.
Between chunks of faux-flesh and wires, I found my desire and relished in it.
