The Water Sign

Hela, Lilith, & Aichus

Hela would say people make their own truth. But my truth was always out of step. It took me a while to learn that my definition of the other gender was not the world’s; it was never beauty or gentleness that I venerated.

I gravitated to Hela because she was a tomboy. She would fight anyone, not intimidated by the stronger boys, and she had a kind of restless energy that seemed always on the verge of erupting and sending someone to the infirmary. She was the only one in our class who got in trouble as much as I did. To me, she was simply the emblem of strength and boldness I had been taught to expect from women. While the other girls disliked her for being a troublemaker, I stood awed. I had found my idol.

We became friends at age ten, the day of her match against Aichus.

It started ordinarily, just another of our many sparring exercises outdoors. Hela often struggled with these. She was rarely able to confine herself to the rules of a given exercise. She’d even clobbered me a few times on accident. But when Aichus was randomly selected as her partner, we all knew someone was getting hurt. The question was who and how bad?

Because where Hela often broke the rules by accident or from enthusiasm, Aichus broke them to bully others. Hela and I, the obvious misfits of our class, were his favorite targets.

When it was their turn on the mat, Hela used her typical high-energy tempo to blitz him the first few rounds. So Aichus started slipping out of the Karate forms required for the day and regained the advantage. (The upper- classmen were never very strict in their reffing and our teachers had many different match-ups to watch and critique.)

But the more Aichus bent the rules, the harder she fought back, and the more she fought, the more the rest of us cheered. Hela, unused to praise from her classmates, had found the morale advantage. And the Strata Mathematica teaches that this is the most important advantage to have. She was rallying her score.

When Aichus realized he was going to lose, he didn’t wait for the refs to start a new round to finish things. After being awarded the point, Hela relaxed her guard for the fifteen-second break. Her new fans were just starting to chant her name. Aichus saw his opening.

I heard the pop of a broken nose as his palm strike smashed her face. She was knocked off her feet but not unconscious. I found myself watching as she clutched her face and began to scream, writhing on the mat. The cheering died. The ref sat motionless, too surprised to even blow the penalty whistle. The teachers hadn’t noticed the new commotion. It was as if time had failed and the world stopped turning. No one moving. Just Hela’s scream, stretching and growing in volume. My vision narrowed to just his satisfied smile.

“Djinn!” the little girls scream as they throw their stones at you. “Abomination! Kill it!”

I came to, sitting on his chest, my hands crushing his throat. Beneath all the blood, his fair face was a new shade of pale. His eyes rolling wildly. And the cheering had started again

—no—

screaming. Screaming for the older students to intervene. I looked up at my classmates absently ... Stop what? Killing who? ... just in time to see Lilith kick me in the ribs. Then I was flat on the mat as well, gasping as the fog of it all cleared away in a sharp spike of pain driven into my chest. The second broken bone of the day.

As the discipline committee rushed to cuff me, I remember thinking it was the first time I’d seen Aichus cry. I felt confused at the painful lump rising in my throat and the string of aghast faces that trailed past as they dragged me away.

The Sisters were right about me, I thought, trying my hardest not to cry in front of them.

From that day forward Hela and I had an unspoken agreement. We stuck up for each other. She was probably the closest thing to a friend I had in those years. But things only got harder for her as graduation neared. Because when Hela turned twelve, her Aspect began to show.