Displaced

Chapter 102

Arlette's eyes opened wearily to blackness. With two claps, the crystals embedded in the ceiling began to glow, lighting the room with their soft radiance. Though the crystals were on their lowest setting, the light still made her eyes squeeze back shut. She rolled over and buried her aching head in her pillow, wishing that she didn't have to get up, but the chimes coming from across the room told her that it was already well past her normal wake-up time. She couldn't put off facing the world today any longer.

Slowly, grumpily, she pried herself off the bed and hobbled to the adjacent bathroom. Her body protested the injustice, but she'd overcome such complaints many a time before, and this time would be no different. That is, until the coughing returned. Her arms trembling as she clung to the sides of the sink, her body hunched forward as she hacked and gagged. Soon enough, small flecks of blackened red speckled the basin. Arlette took comfort in how much smaller and drier the splotches were this time. Her healing had come a long way over the night.

That step forward the night before had been a mistake. She'd known it was a mistake even in the moment. Her entire being had screamed at her not to do it. She'd done it anyway; her fury, fueled by the knowledge of why her entire being was screaming at her in the first place, refused to allow any other course of action.

She couldn't put what happened next into the proper words. She'd felt her body begin to break down at a level she couldn't understand. She knew what it felt like to take damage to an organ, and it was nothing like that. It was deeper, like every little tiny piece that made up her muscles and bones and skin and everything else had started to decompose all at once. And that was just her body.

She'd felt the same feeling in her mind, and even in her soulforce. It was like her very self was being splintered into millions of tiny pieces and utterly destroyed. Just that one step had been more than enough to convince her that she could not overcome whatever it was that Sofie had done to her. Down that path lay death. No, more than death: annihilation.

Remembering that moment of existential agony brought another wave of utter revulsion washing through her and she sat down upon the toilet with her head in her hands. She felt so violated, so... so used. Again.

As soon as she'd regained her wits and dealt with the massive pain in the ass that was the still-unconscious Blake with the help of Leo and Gabby, Arlette had retreated to her quarters and cried her eyes out. Why was it that every person she dared to put faith in ended up betraying her? Was it a curse? Punishment of some sort from a higher being? Or just fate? No, Arlette reminded herself, it wasn't everybody. Her second parents had never betrayed her from the moment they'd brought her into their family to the day of their death. She could never allow herself to forget that. But their kindness just made everybody else's betrayals feel worse in comparison.

Most of the night she'd spent on her knees clutching the sides of the toilet as she hacked up large amounts of blood and mentally went through every single conversation with Sofie that she could remember, looking for anything else that blasted girl might have done to her. Not counting the ones from last night, she'd found only two instances, which worried her. That was far too few. How many was she forgetting? The thought made her gut twist in anxiety.

The two commands that she could recall, however, just left her confused and unsure. They weren't like the first command, the one that had locked Arlette into helping Sofie in the first place. They were more... benign, perhaps, and as such, they muddled her otherwise-pure anger, which almost made her angrier but didn't.

The first was a simple one: don't hurt Pari. The order was utterly pointless, of course; nothing in the world could have made her hurt that sweet child, so on the one hand, the resentment from the imposition was almost a formality. Except... she and the others had, in fact, been close to killing the beastkin on that first night when they'd met. Really close. Sofie had saved her from that terrible mistake. Did the end justify the means? She didn't know.