Partisan - Book II

Mother, I Incubate

She sings in metal.

The kernel was Mother's idea: subdue them with overstimulation. Prisoners drowned in the currents of wordless, fathomless information—the blaring press of light and that ringing, ceaseless humming—are much more docile, malleable. Crowd them in with the blaring call of the elements, and they become lost, drifting out in a sea of disconnectedness, disassociation.

Isati thought of the voices.

It occurred to her when she found the old knife. It was sitting in the bottom of a moldering trunk, shunted away from air and sunlight, and she felt it when her fingertips had brushed it.

Fear.

It was a sharp plunge, a quick streak that ripped itself right through her bones, an immediate echo that pressed itself blankly on the surface of her mind, and she tasted salt again, and blood.

"Don't move," Lei had whispered, his eyes wide and shimmery amidst the shadows of the looming bed frame. His hand was tiny, shaking as it clutched hers and something was moving in the hall outside. "Don't move, Isi."

In that memory of hiding under the bed, she hadn't known what impressionable children can leave in objects. She hadn't even known then, ten years old and cowering with a rusty, handle-broken blade, she could call anything at all. That wouldn't be for several more months. 

But six years later, at sixteen, she had begun to understand. One touch of the knife and the dusty memory had become new again, and now, four years after that, if Isati touches the knife again it will feel just as fresh, the monster lurking outside of the door just as present.

"Don't open the door, Isi."

It wasn't that the knife reminded her of it: the knife held her memory. She tested this, of course, pulling it out with a thick, woolen cloth buffering it from her skin. When she laid it on the bony arm of one of the prisoners he screamed.

"Don't," he sobbed. "Isi, please."

First, they needed a base block. A special alloy of metal that was melted and stretched, that gestated close to Mother, weaving into her frequency as she weaved into it. And then they melted it down, mixing it with more basic strains, the alloy thin enough to spread across thousands, but present enough in each of the helmets, the plates, to be a trace. Just enough to make impression.

She calls the initial stage the Incubation. It's a full-head helmet, leaving only two holes just under the nostrils for air. She sometimes likes to wander down there, to watch them, pale strips of limp flesh laid out like meat at a shop, waiting as their brains are scrambled and muddled, like soupy jelly. She likes to think of all the memories being smashed and mashed, dissolving under the hypnotic hum of the three words.

Power

Is

Might.

Mother likes to keep them in there for a month—they're pliable by then, but with just enough disjointed memories floating around that they don't look too questionable when they're let loose.

Isati likes to keep her creatures longer.

Then they install the plates. Isati likes to think of those as little reminders for the ones who survive. A little friend tucked in the back of the head, waiting to relieve them of the burden of choice.

Burn it all.

They always feel so relieved when they hear its call.

There are, of course, always a couple who struggle. Isati likes them best. She is tasked with breaking them, and she always breaks them, but it always feels like the end of a fight well fought, versus this slow herding of brainless cattle to slaughter. She keeps her favorites, letting them lie in the helmets for years and then presenting them with their new faces, bright and always smiling, lifted in ways their old faces can't anymore. They don't have names. They are her friends.

They sit with her now, waiting, just as she is waiting, and she lifts her head, staring out into the bleeding orange skylight of sunset.

Where are you, Lei-Lei? It's time to get out from under the bed.

A/N: Oh, oh no thank you, it's very comfortable down here in the dark. I have made friends with a dust bunny. His name is Bon.

I have so much fun writing these chapters, but she seriously low key terrifies me a little bit. On a scale of Tom Hanks to Gary Busey, how crazy would you say she is?

Chapter notes: We first hear Power is Might in the "Rigor Mortis" chapter of Partisan.