Utopia

Chapter Twenty-Seven - I Can't Forgive You

She remembered lights. Cold metal. A hand against her head, pushing her to a seat.

When she woke in the morning, she saw a slate ceiling, felt a hard surface. When she sat, she saw bars.

Even in a copse, even in the dark, there was always someone to hear her. There was never anywhere she could be alone. Where she could be with Lys.

The courtroom lights crawled into her eyes and planted themselves like thornbushes. She had not made bail. None had been willing to put it up for her.

She had called Susannah first. She'd thought they'd had enough friendship left for the lawyer to help her, but the lawyer had told her maybe this is what you need, and then there had only been the empty line. Susannah had called her parents before she could.

Still, they had the nerve to sit in the gallery. They had the nerve to watch her stand before the lights, before the gavel, beside a pro-bono stranger as if—but as if what?

Perhaps it was a mark in Kira's favor that she couldn't yet answer that question. Afterall, what had they done but let her suffer from her own actions?

But while she still lacked the impetus to blame others, she hadn't yet found the forbearance to face herself.

So she was angry, in a muddied, incorporeal way that rewrote the lines of her face into a permanent scowl.

Public indecency. Disturbing the peace. Carrying an open container. Littering. Such a cluster of paltry charges that Kira nearly wondered if Susannah had spoken against her. They sentenced her to six months in a rehabilitation facility—pending review—and she nearly wondered if that had been Susannah's idea too.

It was decided that she couldn't be trusted to return; they took her directly from the courtroom to a van to the facility. They decided that anything that was needed could be brought. Never mind that they would never bring her what was needed.

The correctional officer handed her off to an orderly in pale blue scrubs. He had to gesture for the handcuffs to be removed. Then he led her away.

He told her the rules while they walked. Lights out. Not to leave her room. Attending sessions. Completing chores. Most of all, and she knew it was important because it was a lie, she must remember that this was not a prison. It was rehabilitation.

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Everything clawed everywhere it touched. She burned. She urged to reach up and scrape her skin from her bones, her eyes from their sockets. She writhed against the heat, against the cold. The line of her body—from mouth to stomach to entrails—desiccated and escaped her in puffs of debris each time she breathed. She shook apart. Stripped screws rattling out of overwrought holes.

They tried to give her water. Blankets when she shivered and fans when she sweated. They tried to ease her when she gasped for breath, but she was walking through the world unprotected. It was the construction site, with loose nails and falling tools and jagged boards. Unfinished.

They tried to soothe her.

It will be alright.

Toxins leaving your body.

Drink this.

Breathe.

You're alright you're alright you're alright you're alright, and it was hammers in her head breaking glass.

She wanted to tell them, I was already alright, but she wasn't. She had lived a long and varied life, and it had never quite been alright.

Oh, if Lys could have seen her now. She would have been so disappointed.