Ill Omen's Light (Lux/Jinx)

Chapter 14: A Guy About A Thing

The scratching pen lulls at her thoughts, tugging them back to reality, away from the shriek of grieving, angry voices, and the crackle of blue lightning in her head.

Below, the office is silent save for that sound, still, save for the dart of his narrow-fingered hand with that pen, the slither of pages, the slight turns of his head.

She drapes herself on the rafter on her tummy and curls her cheek onto her arm. She settles to watch him, fascinated.

How could anyone contain so much power and so much anger and be so quiet?

"I'll assume there's a reason for the intrusion."

His voice slices the silence. The pen, though, continues its flickering dance without pause.

"Can't sleep," she mumbles. Her blue eyes are rimmed in darkness.

"Do you ever?" Silco murmurs and his tongue catches the tip of his thumb as he turns another page without looking up.

When he does finally glance up at her, it's with a faint arch of his brow, his general means of expressing his disapproval at her perpetual state of exhaustion.

She lets her eyes fall away, suddenly self-conscious. Given abundance and freedom she'd never had before, she still ate little and slept less. But her body is growing, longer and skinnier, all knees and elbows. Her nocturnal activities have made her wiry and strong.

She sneaks out at night when the pain in her soul is too great – so, every night. Runs, climbs, crawls into all the places she shouldn't be. Up onto the high places where no one would be crazy enough to look for her. Down into the dark places where no one will see her.

The people move around her, oblivious. The users and the pushers huddled in the alleys exchanging the glowing purple poison her father feeds them. The lovers silhouetted behind their window blinds when they're cautious, framed in displays that repulse and entrance her when they're not. The liars and the lonely and all their secrets.

She's collected hundreds of them, useful little gems of blackmail and betrayal she can drop into her new father's ear. She's almost as good at spying as she is at tinkering. By now her bombs work almost every time.

She only wanted to help. Now, finally, she can.

Out there alone in the dark and the cold, she's at her most powerful. It's there that she imagines that the monsters in her head can't get her...

Because out there in the velvety arms of shadow, she's the monster. She's the crawl in people's spines when they feel the eyes in the dark. Always seeing, never seen. And she could get them if she wanted to. She could get any of them...or all of them.

It's a game she's getting better at until she isn't. Until she digs too deep.

It's down there in the Sump that It sees her. She's strayed too far, stumbled into the rancid stomach of the Undercity where the junk and scraps and flotsam and refuse of every layer has slithered gushingly down the throat to end up here to be digested slowly by putrefaction...

And some of that flotsam is bodies. And some of those bodies are children.

As she stares frozen at their bloated doll-like faces staring back at her she doesn't see whatever mangled caricature remains of the people they used to be. She sees Mylo's narrow jaw and buggy eyes swelling in their sockets. She sees Claggor's puffed cheeks and small round mouth turned bruise blue.

She sees Violet's face, staring accusingly, frozen in her rictus of rage. She sees her own face, blood-nosed, streaked with tears and lit by fire.