Beyond the Slums - Like a Broken Mirror Calling My Name
May 2068. Nadia Nagase is waiting for an unexpected guest, someone who seems to have access to classified intel about her and her promise to Father Onyango. Someone that shouldn't exist. Someone that might even know her better than herself.
It was no use. The message was not coming back. Pestering her mobile device would have not had any discernible effects, except maybe damaging it. Still, Nadia tried again to undelete that clump of words that until second before populated the display. She couldn’t, it was a futile attempt, and she knew it. Chatburner was a messaging protocol made with self-destructing exchanges in mind. You have twenty seconds to read it, before it’s gone forever. Usually, that would have been unproblematic. Lucia and Rebecca were very parsimonious with words, making it easy to abide by that arbitrary short time limit. Deep inside, though, Nadia’s heart complained every time one of those messages disappeared. It was logical, the right thing to do. If Mr. Magnifico or any of the Renkas found evidence of her talks with the Broken Moon Circus, she would have had a hard time defending her position. Denying the evidence of her involvement in Rebecca’s disappearance would have been almost impossible, which meant…
No, it was better like that. Less risk overall. Moving from dumb, last century phones to Chatburner had been a good idea—she couldn’t thank Nivandra enough for the tip.
Nivandra.
Nadia’s stomach clenched. That thin, scrawny girl had somewhat of a hold on her atrophied feelings. Nadia didn’t understand why, but spending time with Nivandra made her feel a small measure of warmth, of humanity, as if she were able to care about something that wasn’t the promise she made to Father Onyango. Nivandra was her pupil. Her trainee. An Angel that grew stronger every day thanks to her dedication, despite her ungrowing body. The enthusiasm with which Nivandra took every chance to train with Nadia was motivating for her as a teacher—as bad as explaining she knew she was. Now, her pupil was also very active on online forums under a strange alias, spreading love for steamy werewolf-girl-on-werewolf-girl heatmate fiction, which apparently was growing very popular.
Nadia looked at the phone again, groaned.
She couldn’t understand it. The heatmates versus oilmates camps were locked in some sort of long term feud, if the net had to be trusted, with each side taking potshots at the other. Not that Nivandra herself exposed her online activism to Nadia—it was just a serendipitous discovery due to a small mishap. Yes, just a product of a wrong time, right place moment. Pictures of Nivandra’s tablet display flashed in Nadia’s minds, pictures she just happened to glimpse at when entering her room to discuss some unrelated matters. Nivandra had minimized the window immediately, but it was too late.
Nadia’s eyes had recorded it, permanently storing in her long term memory.
Of course, it was an online forum.
Of course, it was about heatmates.
>WolfYuriLover: Can’t get oilmates fans. Heatmates are just better.
>Somedumbo: Yeah, Oilmates ain’t even a real thing. Heatmates is where it’s at.
>RikkRakk: Then what about the Inashi couple? Cool rolesbians 2 hot 4 me
>ShiningStar2nd: If you mean the *Nanaba* duo, the rabbit is *clearly* the bottom. No. Questions. Asked.
>RikkRakk: WTF? Are you serious?!
>ShiningStar2nd: Are you blind?! Like, haven’t you seen that viral clip where that bunny rolls on the floor while crying STEP ON ME, STEP ON ME? How can she be the top?! Heck, I’m more of a top than her *and that says a lot!*
>RikkRakk: Oof. Big if true. But they be a couple, right? That’s enough for me.
>ShiningStar2nd: Yup! My cool rolesbian oilmate aunties <3
>TauntReznor: Nope. INABA officially denied it live on stream. And heatmates don’t exist either. Can’t we focus, like, on *normal*, quality *human* GL media?
>WolfYuriLover: Someone here hates half-furries, huh. Lame.
>TauntReznor: No shades thrown, but fangs and wolf ears ain’t it for me.
>Somedumbo: Heatmates are hot, though. Wolf girl on wolf girl action, mmhhhh
>WolfYuriLover: Blood-Cape Lucia and Black-Mane Erzsebet are totally a heatmate couple!
>WolfYuriLover: My cool lesbian heatmate aunties! They must be so fluffy and cute when they sleep together!
>RikkRakk: How do they do it with those paws and claws? That can’t be easy
>WolfYuriLover: [COMMENT REMOVED BY AUTOMOD]
>RikkRakk: HUH. I never
>RikkRakk: thought that could be
>RikkRakk: HUH
>ShiningStar2nd: Stop shipping real people, @WolfYuriLover, it’s against forum rules!
>WolfYuriLover: But you do this with INABA and Nanashi all the time, ShiningStar2nd!!! Why is it fine when *you* do it?!
>Somedumbo: Wut. Are robots real people, now?
>TauntReznor: Chill down, folks. Philosophy discussions are off-topic in blog//yuriworld
>ShiningStar2nd: But what if the robots are very, very sapphic?
>TauntReznor: @Moderators
Nadia shook her head. Damned be her photographic memory. She could remember all of those comments almost as if she were seeing them right before her eyes, even if she’d rather forget about them yesterday. The anonymized utterances were dancing in her brain, white characters on dark background, with colored logos and icons all over the place. They wouldn’t go away, festering in the back of her mind, forcing her to relive that interaction over and over. Nivandra was fanning the flames on purpose, with that heatmate discourse. She was the one mentioning Rebecca and Lucia in her posts, in ways that portrayed them as life partners in love. Why, though, Nadia had no idea and didn’t feel inclined to ask the question or delve more into it. Romantic feelings, attraction to other human beings, arousal… all of those were foreign concepts for her hardware, that construct of flesh and blood she called ‘her body’. So, the idea of heatmates and, in general, of sexual intercourse, was something she simply could not gauge—an unknown variable that she had no interest in pursuing or explaining. Watching internet people up in arms about who was having their way with whom left her with a strange feeling of being cut out. However she thought of it, she could not find a logical reason to waste time discussing such an inconsequential topic. Of course she understood the reason why men gave so much importance to procreation and sex appeal—without it, there would be no human species, after all. Yet, that almost pathological level of interest struck her as a bug, rather than a feature. A bug that she should have purged from Nivandra in some way, if anything to help her focus on what was actually important.
If only Nadia knew what was actually important, that is.
Was it what Mr. Greschnik wanted? Or was there something more to it?
She was a soldier, she executed orders. That was all there was to her. So, when questions like that popped up in her brain, they caused a genuine headache which ravaged her neural tissue. A false contact, a short circuit. Not the kind of thoughts she wanted to linger on.
Except she had no choice. That was why she was there, after all, in a dark corner of Esperia’s train station, under a flickering light. It wasn’t cold, despite the early May time. A simple jacket on top of her usual dark green tanktop and camo pants was more than enough to keep her body warm. In that moment, Mr. Magnifico was somewhere in Euterpe with Claudia. He was probably sitting at a luxurious table, playing real-estate Monopoly with the Bonzaga family during a late memorial for the victims of the Black Lightning Disaster. That gave Nadia enough wiggle room to take a night off duty, with Greschnik’s blessing too. As much as Claudia was unfit to be a proper Angel, she was still strong enough to keep their employer safe. Plus, she was Italian, so she could actually be of some use during conversations. Nadia hated talking with strangers, so, in a way, she was almost relieved that she got that weird notification.
“Meet me at Esperia’s train station, platform four, under the neon lamps. Nine sharp on May 2.”
That Chatburner message was dry and direct. It lasted for twenty seconds, before disappearing. The last after a long exchange, one that started almost by absolute chance. One she thought to be a prank, at first.
Until an even stranger exchange happened.
One that made her almost shiver.
One that forced her to come.
She looked at her wristwatch. Nine sharp. Nadia had arrived two minutes earlier, just to be sure that no trap was set. She had taken her death suppressant in advance too, to avoid suffering withdrawal symptoms if she were captured, at least not for the next twenty-four hours. So, in a way, she was completely ready. She looked at the hands on her watch again. Nine sharp, plus ten seconds. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fif…
“Question: are you Nadia Nagase?”
She lifted her gaze, looked in the direction of that voice.
Meeting two ice-blue eyes aimed at her.
The exact same she had.
**
“One life.”
“One scar.”
That exchange had been so surreal she couldn’t believe it. She would have liked to take a picture of it, to save it, to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating. Unfortunately, Chatburner had already done its job perfectly, erasing every trace of her correspondence with ‘Nana’. Whoever that ‘Nana’ was, she knew about Nadia’s pledge, the promise she made to Father Onyango, a promise nobody else knew of. So, how?
How did ‘Nana’ know how to respond?
Now, Nadia had finally an answer: the ‘how’ was sitting by her side, kicking the air while wrapped in a dirty, ripped hoodie twice her size. Sporting her same eyes. Her same skin complexion. Her same hair color. Her same general features. Except younger. Defective. Watching Nana made her startled every second longer. A mirror. A broken mirror. A smaller, miniature Nadia, with longer hair, more scars and less limbs. Nevertheless, another Nadia Nagase, humming a cheerful tone while never taking off her eyes from her reflection. Nadia stared back without blinking, never averting her gaze even when her bonsai copy winked semi-automatically. One of her eyes felt more sensitive to light than the other, sometimes blinking on its own.
Nine and seven minutes.
Not a word exchanged yet. That, however couldn’t go on forever. The party would end. Greschnik would call her back. So, Nadia decided to do the first step, to ask the first question. Except, she had no idea of what was a good conversation starter, forcing her to stick to a factual assessment.
“Question: how did you lose your arms?”
Nana didn’t even budge, kept kicking the air with absolute carelessness. Then, opened her mouth, firing back with an equally awkward request.
“Question: how did you get yours back?”
Nadia looked at her for a long instant, before shaking her head.
“Answer: Greschnik had them reattached.”
Which prompted Nana to nod, nod with a strange energy. Nadia noticed something, a weird hint of satisfaction in her expression. What did that mean? She was bad at parsing emotions and that was even more cryptic than usual. She had learned how to ‘read’ Nivandra and Miho, Claudia a little too and even Lucia—mostly, using the tone shifts in her voice. But this creature that looked so much like her? It was something she couldn’t fathom.
“Remark: that’s a convenient cover story.”
Nana’s reply was even more unexpected, causing Nadia to retort almost immediately, to ask a followup question.
“Question: cover story for what?”
“Answer: for the fact that you’ve never lost them.”
“Eh?”
Nana stopped kicking, let out a long sigh. One of her eyes winked, closed under the flickering lights. Then, she opened it again, pouring all of her strength in keeping it up.
“Remark: I was scared to meet you, maxi-me, but I needed to. My flatmate found news that you were coming to Euterpe in May. So, it was now or never, even if I was convinced that you’d kill me on sight.”
“Question: kill you?”
“Answer: I’m property of Stratosphere. It’s your duty to dispose of me or bring me back to HQ.”
Nadia didn’t react at first. True. That was her duty as the First Angel. Always working for her God. Never questioning his judgment. Acting as his lapdog.
That was the past, however.
After Lemur—Katja died, something broke inside her.
Something that sparked a fire in her heart.
A spark of chaos, a seed of rebellion.
A small wave that moved her to do the unthinkable, to help Lucia save Rebecca. That spark was taking root inside of her body, spreading tendrils through her muscles, infecting her brain. Suddenly, she wasn’t a simple killing machine anymore. Suddenly, she had own ideas.
Yeah, something broke. Nivandra was probably the only thing keeping her core intact, after Katja was brutally murdered by Yu. Nivandra’s soothing presence. Nivandra’s real care for Nadia. The small, quiet moments they shared together after training. The complicit subterfuges to send gifts to Lucia and Rebecca. That was what prevented Nadia from snapping, from unleashing a part of her that slept deep inside her soul.
Old Nadia would have probably killed Nana on the spot. But this Nadia? No, not a chance. Not without an explanation. Not without understanding what was Nana’s deal.
And who among she and her was the real Nadia Nagase.
**
“Huuuh, Nadia? Can you, like, come for a second?”
Nivandra was showing her a tablet, her tablet—the same one where she browsed girl-love forums in her free time, now featuring a darker website. Nadia frowned a little. Something something urban legends and mysteries. Father Onyango wouldn’t have approved. Ghost stories were for heathens and people devoted to the devil, so there was no point in believing them. Dreamers, talking flowers, walking TV-heads, living signals, man-eating lampposts… all of that was absolutely uninteresting for Nadia, if not even harmful. Nivandra, though, seemed to like them and used another alias to take part in the conversation. It wasn’t WolfYuriLover, but something more neutral and less on the nose. Still, Nadia couldn’t really follow. Messaging felt very draining to her. Forcing herself to write to Lucia and Rebecca was the most she could do and even then it took her several minutes to compose a message. The fact that Nivandra could exchange so many messages with so many other people was something Nadia couldn’t fathom.
“Question: what’s the deal?”
“Are you, like, pulling a prank on me?”
Nadia frowned at that bizarre inquiry. Jokes weren’t part of her standard expression catalog, pranks even less so. Yet, before she could answer, Nivandra pushed the tablet under her nose.
“I mean, look. Look here.”
Nadia humored her request, glanced at the dark screen with little to no expectations. What she saw, though, caused her to recoil.
>CapeAndCrow: Stop messing with me.
>Nana: Question: how am I messing with you?
>CapeAndCrow: And stop playing innocent!
>Nana: Remark: I don’t understand.
>Nana: Question: am I doing something wrong?
>eNTRopic: Duh, aside from tagging every post with a dumb mood indicator, like a robot? Nope.
>eNTRopic: annoying and edgyteeny? Yes. Against the rules? Nope.
>Nana: Acknowledged. Thanks for the clarification.
>Nana: Remark: I have trouble expressing my emotions, thus I wanted to leave no chance for any misunderstanding.
>CapeAndCrow: @eNTRopic, Nana is impersonating a friend of mine!
>CapeAndCrow: I’ve never met anyone else talking in the exact same way.
>eNTRopic: well, duh, your weirdo friend ain’t got a monopoly on being a weirdo.
>Nana: Remark: I came here to ask about SPREAD_THE_TAPES.mpx, so I will turn my posting to that topic, if that is okay. I will deal with @CapeAndCrow’s grievances in direct chat.
>Nana: Remark: I apologize if my behavior caused any issues. It was not my intention.
Nadia had shivered.
Almost.
Shivered.
Reading those messages.
Reading those lines.
They felt oddly familiar.
It was how she would have written them, for the exact same reason. It was what Father Onyango had taught her to do, in contexts where her toneless voice could be misunderstood. Growing up, she ended up doing it every time. It was a comfort net, one that shielded her from the dangers of being misunderstood. To think another person would use the exact same communication style…
“Wait, so it wasn’t you?”
Nivandra’s voice broke the spell, causing Nadia to almost get startled by it.
“Negative. I… don’t even know how to make an account.”
“Then…”
Nivandra slid her finger on the tablet, turned page to another screen. The label at the top called it ‘direct chat’, much to Nadia’s confusion. Underneath it, the word ‘Nana’ was working as a title.
>Nana: CapeAndCrow, my apologies. I didn’t want to startle you.
>Nana: Question: is your friend there with you? Is it a she?
>Nana: Question: can you show her this address, if so?
That was when Nadia lost it.
The address.
The exact, precise, address of Father Onyango’s church. Down to the street number. That couldn’t be a coincidence. There had to be something more.
“Nivandra. Send this ‘Nana’ my Chatburner temporary id. Tell them to write me now.”
A sudden reaction, one that Nadia didn’t know how to control. In a normal situation, she would have filed it out as a joke, a prank, maybe something concocted by her rival Angels to stab her in the back. But nobody knew about the church. Nobody, not even Greschnik. The address was never disclosed, the identity of her caretaker wasn’t publicly known. So, nobody of them could have sent that message, unless they personally knew Father Onyango or fought the occupation. The church was razed after the riots ended and its existence was scrubbed from the net, together with all the traces of pre-war Johannesburg. No, it was someone from her home country. Someone who knew her. Someone that had connections with her.
Someone she had to meet at all costs.
That’s what brought her to write it, that simple message.
“One life.”
And to gasp in disbelief, once the answer came back.
“One scar.”
Only for Chatburner to destroy evidence of both, erase them from existence twenty seconds after they spawned. That exchange happened, and yet never happened.
It was gone as quickly as it spawned.
But, for the short moment where it existed, it broke Nadia in half.
She could not back down anymore.
She had to get to the core of the deal, no matter the risk.
**
“Remark: you said I’ve never lost my arms?”
Nana shrugged, crossed her legs on the bench.
“Answer: Remember fighting the chaingear, yes?”
Nadia nodded. Nana’s voice sounded so close to hers it was almost like talking with herself—same absence of tone and anything.
“I do.”
Nana shook her head a little, letting her navel-long hair wave under her hood.
“Nadia Nagase lost both of her arms during that fight.”
“I did, yes.”
“No, I did.”
Nana stood up, stared at Nadia deep into her eyes.
“I killed the chaingear. I lost my arms in the Rapture. I was frozen cold in suspended animation for years, so that you could live my life. Until someone smuggled me out of the lab and brought me to Italy, before being killed. That’s why I’m here, that’s why I look younger than you and why I still have all the wounds you’ve forgotten: you were made from me, cloned and engineered using Lilith.”
“Lilith?”
“It’s the name of whatever Greschnik is hiding in his HQ’s basement. The scientist who freed me told me that, but I don’t know more than this, sorry. I hoped to learn more via the SPREAD_THE_TAPES fad, but it was a dead end. I believe that Lilith is real. You might have been created thanks to it.”
Nadia’s voice dried up in her throat. That statement was deranged. A list of unlikely events, a reconstruction that did not match with her own reality. She had fought the chaingear, not Nana. She had her arms reattached. She had become an Angel, which forced her to take death suppressant pills every day. She grew up to be Nadia Nagase. That was the truth.
That was her objective reality.
Yet, Nana was challenging it with her objective reality. A ludicrous reality. So, one of them had to be wrong. There was no chance for both to coexist. But that didn’t mean that Nana was correct.
There were, of course, other explanations.
Nadia looked at that imperfect reflection of herself, slowly, calmly crafted her own theory, the one that her brain had worked on since the moment she had seen mini-her walking around in that hoodie.
“Alternative hypothesis: what if you are an imperfect spare clone of myself? What if I were the one who fought the chaingear and you were an experiment that duplicated my body before the operation that reattached my arms? Maybe using that same Lilith you mentioned?”
“Then why am I the one that doesn’t need to swallow pills every day to survive?”
“Because you’re not an Angel.”
“And you are one.”
“Yes. The First.”
Nine thirty.
Their gazes were crossing, not a sound, not a movement interrupting their eye contact. Not a word to sully that moment, to desecrate it. Nana’s defective eye winked, caused her to recoil in frustration. She grumbled something under her breath, sat again on the bench.
“Acknowledged. In fact, absent an in-depth genetic analysis, your reconstruction is as likely as mine.”
Nadia broke eye contact, turned her gaze to the ground.
“Acknowledged. I agree that you might be correct, though. The fact that my arms were reattached without a scar has always been… concerning. Not even a small one. It is as if they…”
…as if they were never severed.
“Huh-uh. Plasma blades might do that. Clean cuts, immediately cauterized. Very nice shiny toys. The chaingear is so cool, right?”
Nadia squinted her eyes at that miniature version of her.
“I have no feelings towards that machine. I find it superfluous.”
“Well, I don’t. Great robot. Great design. I wish I had a model kit of it. And hands to build it. I mean, I learned how to use my feet and mouth for almost everything, but assembling 1/64 model kits is still so hard, even when my flatmate helps me.”
“A chaingear model kit?”
Nana watched Nadia exchanged a short glance.
“I got my life back by killing it. Just one scar on my shoulder isn’t worth the freedom I received in exchange. I owe it more than that.”
Nadia nodded almost automatically, without even thinking. The way in which Nana reasoned had a sound logic. She found it very easy to follow and share, despite the different conclusions she reached. So, she proffered her hand, fashioned in a closed fist.
“One life.”
Nana raised her foot, gently pushed her sneaker against Nadia’s knuckles.
“One scar.”
For a short moment, something akin to a smile opened up on both of their faces, even as Nana’s eye started blinking again against her will. She shook her head one more time, making a mess of her long platinum hair, before addressing her grown up version one more time.
“Question: would you like to crash at my place? I’m hungry and we still have a lot to talk about.”
Nine forty-five.
Nadia looked at her watch, stared at the hands moving slowly. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Time was slowly running out, even if slowly. Slowly. Slowly. Mr. Magnifico would have needed at least two hours longer, before being discharged.
Still, it was too risky.
She couldn’t put mini-her in danger.
Not before learning more about the whole ordeal.
“I can’t.”
Nana stood up, nodded in the direction of the underpass.
“Acknowledged. Then, let’s keep in touch, maxi-me.”
Her eye blinked one more time, forcing her to fight against gravity to keep it open.
“I’ll write you if I learn more about Lilith.”
Nadia nodded, her hand went almost automatically for her phone.
“Acknowledged. I’ll do that too.”
Nana waved her leg at her one more time, before turning around, disappearing in the night. The pitch black underpass swallowed her minute figure, hiding it from the stars and the flickering neons.
Leaving Nadia behind, alone.
Leaving her core shattered, kept together by a miracle.
Littered with doubts that were growing stronger and stronger inside her.
Eating her like festering worms, chipping away at her sanity.
Making her smile one more time.
An empty smile, one without light.
One that could have meant nothing and everything at the same time.