On my twelfth attempt, I neglected my niece in favor of my daughters. I’d hoped she’d learn independently. Afterall, her mother was an important lesson, but she fell asleep during my instructions and never studied. I learned later that she too required a nudge, for it wasn’t just the duchess of death who needed to learn the importance of her station. Millia Gnu Aye succeeded the throne.
Nona yawned, stretching her arms towards the ceiling. It had been a while since she’d stayed in the garden. Bastion always prepared their old room for her, as if he was trying to make her homesick.
She chewed on her lips, running her fingers along the frame of an old hand mirror on the bedside table.
Mission accomplished, she supposed, but the bed, the wardrobe, and even her collection of chrome-plated earth augurs seemed so cold without her sisters.
They no longer stayed in the cathedral. She heard Morta occupied a damaged battleship, and that Decima retreated to a luxury liner with a thousand suitors. They were women and far too old to share a bed with her, but was feeling melancholic about the past such a childish thing?
Nona sighed, lying against the bed and stretching her legs across the triple-tap extension cords. Gawds what she wouldn’t give for wireless communication, but the Gnatu swore by the old male and female insulated terminals. Extension cords with piggyback quick disconnectors and T-type 2-pin way electrical automotive wire terminals, everything Nona needed for a splitting headache and a night of constantly disturbed sleep. Still, at least she got to be the woman in most of her relationships, and the heat of the garden felt so good against her skin.
A playful smile teased her lips. She felt mischievous, prancing about in her nightgown. Bastion wouldn’t approve, but even she needed to let down her hair.
Morta wasn’t the only one who wanted to have fun.
Charon rummaged through her wardrobe, his lithe spinal frame taking the qualities of a velvety tailcoat, a black satin bowtie, and a spotless white glove. Pocket watches, one for each hand, dangled from his vertebrae, their gold inlaid chains decorating his breast pocket where charcoal-colored extension cords converged into a notched lapel.
Nona lay on her chest, resting her head in her hands and swinging her legs in the air.
Charon was the one who set the table, poured the tea, and pressed the linens. The sheets smelled so fresh and the cakes tasted so sweet. He knew when to take the kettle off the stove. A pinch of sugar with her tea and a drop of iodine in her milk.
She blushed. Gawds, he was so dreamy.
“My lady, Nona,” Charon said. “I believe a simple ball gown would be most appropriate for the wedding.”
He carried a handful of garments from her wardrobe, dresses from every era and peninsula of humanity, with a preference for late 18th-century tea gowns and floral lace butterfly sleeves—bloomers instead of silky undergarments.
Leave everything to the imagination, that’s the kind of girl she was.
Nona sighed, rolling onto her back, her hair falling over the side of the bed. “Charon, do you think I’m pretty?”
“No, my lady. I think you’re beautiful.”
Her heart skipped a beat, her cheeks burning red. There it was. Nona was such a hypocrite, always chiding Decima for weaving forbidden love and accidental pregnancies. Despite her protesting and tantrums, deep down, Nona loved accidental pregnancies, so often the product of taboo flings and impermissible fruit. Decima worked with hormones, but Nona played with emotions, forbidden romance becoming a powerful aphrodisiac to young women.
Nona closed her eyes and licked her lips. She could see it as clear as a spring day. A beautiful princess lying with her lover and not her betrothed. She pressed against his chest, the man’s breath hot against her lips as she whispered for him to stop, but her body betrayed her. She pushed him against the bed and lay on top of him, sweat glistening from her naked breast. He was only a servant, the distance between them so great, but her passion became a bridge, and rank no longer mattered. Her lips quivered, her sweaty palms pressed against him as they kissed, a sensation so sweet, delectable, and yet salty, like a cool ocean mist against her tongue.
Nona sighed longingly. She could taste it… She could feel… She could feel…
Charon dumped a load of dresses on top of her, covering her face in fabric and loose linens.
“Nona, please dress yourself,” he said. “You have a big day today.”
She pushed a skirt off her nose and blew her hair out of her eyes.
You are no fun. She thought, sitting upright.
Gawds, Nona. Clotho stirred. How often have I told you not to prance around like a drunken tavern girl in your nightgown? You’re a duchess of the Oxidized Garden. Have you no shame?
“Yeah, yeah.” Nona rolled her eyes, swinging her legs over the bed.
And quite dragging Charon into your perverted fantasies. It’s your fault he’s twisting into that inconvenient form.
I want a butler, not a rabid attack dog, Clotho!
And I want a solid copper chassis with a decent bleed resistor. Grow up, Nona. I’m going back to bed.
Nona paused, squeezing the fabric in her hands.
Gawds, that radio was cool, wasn’t it? It had been long since she’d seen a proper AC and DC operation, chassis and shielded tubes shining with a metallic hammer tone finish: fine-grain veneer, photographic decals, and a polished tone controller. Nona squealed like a frothing fan girl just thinking about it.
“My lady.” Charon touched her shoulder. “Please take this seriously.”
Nona frowned. “I love her, Charon. I will always take her requests seriously.” She ran her fingers along the withdrawn leathery flesh of his cheek, cracked lips forming a concerned melancholy expression across his camera lens. “I don’t like it when you wear this face,” she said.
“I would never lie to you about how I feel.” His fingers quivered, hovering near her scar, visible beneath the thin fabric of her gown.
“How many times do we have to have this conversation? That wasn’t your fault. I was young and foolish. I promise to never climb a chimney without your assistance again, okay?” Nona stood on her tippy toes, kissing his cheek. “But thank you for worrying about me.” She fell back on the balls of her feet, spinning around and smiling slyly from over her shoulder. “Can I have a little privacy now?”
“As you wish, but don’t forget, Bastion wants to see you in the digital space before the wedding.”
Her shoulders slumped. “I know,” she said.
Charon left the room, closing the door like locking the hatch of a submarine.
Nona sighed, laying back against the bed on a pile of dresses and twist-lock three outlet adapters.
Let’s get this over with. She thought.
Nona was swimming in a sea of wires. Unshielded twisted pairs, Mono-mode fiber optics, metallic sheathed paired and unpaired. Her bed had it all, but finding a proper RG-6 Coaxial cable with a slotted copper and silver sheath was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Triaxial cable with braided sheath and shield? No. Semi-rigid coaxial cable with an inner conductor and a solid copper tube? No. Rigid line coaxial cable with a brass elbow connector? No.
She only needed to enter the digital realm for residential purposes, which didn’t require high-frequency communications with over a hundred channels.
Nona groaned.
The hardline heliax with silver tubing and foam insulation would have to do.
She pulled her hair back to expose the metal scar along her nape and pulled the wiring from her throat like a doll’s string. Her cable became whatever she needed it to be. Male, female, fixed attenuated BNC rated 6-50 watts.
Nona was every computer’s wet dream, but a hardline heliax? As far as sex positions were concerned, being the ‘aerial antennae’ to a dated ground terminal was not one of her favorites.
Nona pulled the cord from her neck until the connectors were mere inches apart.
“Sorry Clotho,” she said.
Nona breathed deeply, pushing the plugs together. The effect was immediate—a harsh screaming noise in her head that caused her to bite her tongue. She yelped, rolling into a fetal position, her hands clasped over her ears. The screeching reached a fever pitch and then she heard a voice.
“Secure connection established. Advising user Nona that one hundred-channel communication is unnecessary for residential visits. Please use the proper connection to minimize user discomfort.”
The noise ceased, and the world around her changed. She was standing on a wooden floor listening to the crackling of a cozy fire and smelling of sweet lavender and milk. A bed appeared before Nona, and Clotho hid under the sheets, wrapped tight like a chrysalis.
“Clotho, come on, get up.” Nona tugged at the covers. “Trade places with me.”
“Gawds, sissy! Leave me alone!”
“I can’t. Bastion wants to see me.”
Clotho sighed, lying her elbow across her face. “Fine,” she said, rolling out of bed.
Even after all these years, she was still a little girl, her hair dressed in pigtails with streaming ribbons as she hopped on heelless ruby red slippers. Gawds, her little white stockings were adorable.
“Aw,” Nona said, clasping her hands over her chest. “You look so cute.”
“Shut up, Nona.” Clotho puffed her cheeks and crossed her arms. “It’s your fault I can’t grow up. Why do I have to be stuck in your head? I understand valuing youth, but this is too much.”
She stepped in front of Nona, her dress becoming a green tea gown modified with butterfly sleeves and an open back—a modern twist on an old design tailored for a child.
The room then changed, ruffled sheets and wooden bed posts becoming high vaulted ceilings, gold inlaid trimming with swinging chandeliers, marble pillars, and a waxy wood floor. Nona slipped, her heels catching on her skirt.
Wait, when did she get heels?
Nona blushed, her gown becoming open shoulder with a deep V-neck. A line lace cocktail dress with an asymmetrical hem. She yipped, covering her chest and pulling at the corners of her skirt, faceless people all around her dancing to an invisible rhythm.
“Not funny, Clotho!”
She closed her eyes, imagining a layered ruffle gown. Nona kept the butterfly sleeves but removed the heels in favor of purple slippers and an emerald choker to complement her diode.
“I’m just giving you a little taste of your own medicine,” Clotho said, standing a foot apart and staring at her expectantly.
The music started with brass percussion and stringed instruments. Nona recognized the composition, something beaten into her at an early age, composed in triple meter with three-quarter notes in every measure. The quarter got the beat, and the violin stirred the crowd.
One, two, three. One, two, three.
Nona exhaled, leaning over and taking Clotho’s hand and shoulder. She was the leader and started with her left foot forward as Clotho moved her right foot back. Nona closed the gap and Clotho mimicked her in reverse, an awkward forward half-box between a woman and a girl.
“Why do you always decorate my head like this?” Nona asked, stepping back with her right foot to complete the box step.
“I made a promise to keep you on your toes. Father doesn’t want you getting rusty.” Clotho winked at her. “You still got it, sis.”
“I’m being serious.”
Clotho sighed, matching Nona’s forward progression with a sideways promenade step.
“Last I checked, this is our room, not your room. I can decorate however I see fit,” she said, pinching Nona’s shoulder. “I borrow everything from you, sissy. If the neckline is too low, the back is too open, and the skirt is too short. Isn’t that what you really want?”
Nona broke formation, pulling Clotho into an embrace. “Please, trade places with me?” she asked, whispering in her ear.
“Father help me, you’re so hopeless. Of course I will.” She pushed Nona. “However, please forgive my skepticism. But what kind of cable are you using for this unannounced visit?”
“I… it’s a-a coaxial cable?” Nona poked her index fingers together, staring at her feet.
“Nona! What kind of coaxial cable!?”
“A hardline heliax,” she said.
“A hardline what now?”
“Heliax.”
“Are you out of your mind?!” Clotho struck Nona’s arm with all the strength a child could muster. “We don’t need 100 channels of communication for a residential visit!”
“But it was the only one I could find!” Nona’s face turned red, gripping the edges of her dress. “If you don’t like it, blame Bastion!”
“Gawds, sissy! Gawds!” Clotho sat on the dance floor, shaking her head as a faceless man in a white vest and black tailcoat jacket offered her his hand, favors for a damsel in distress. “What do I get?” she asked after a minute of pouting.
“But I thought—”
“Oh no, sister. That ship has sailed. Now we talk terms. A hardline heliax? That’s gotta be worth, like, a dessert or two.” Clotho took the man’s hand, finding her feet and brushing her skirts. “Next time cake or ice cream is involved.” She poked her chest. “I get to be there, and you can hang out here with faceless Jack and his merry band of misfits.”
“One time.”
“Three times!”
“Clotho!”
“Oh, I’m sorry. How urgent was this again? So urgent you’re happy to leave your little sister to French kiss a power converter while you get to frolic in never-never wonderland? Gawds, please tell me you’re at least using protection.”
“There’s foam insulation.”
“Three times, Nona! Or no deal!”
“Fine, three times. You have my word,” Nona said, biting her lip.
Nona knelt so Clotho could rest her forehead against hers, a blue spark arching from the tips of their noses.
“Don’t look so glum, Nona,” Clotho said, gritting her teeth. “You’re so getting the better deal out of this.”
— ✦ —
The digital space was a realm of shifting code and predatory algorithmic computations leaping like plasmids from one sequence to another, leaving gaps sealed by neighboring number sentences. There was a breeze, an invisible current that guided computational strings like water beneath an ocean—a digital highway at rush hour. Bullet-shaped sequences ran bumper to bumper, changing lanes and flashing their high beams. Their destination was uncertain, shifting at any moment, order beneath the chaos born of arithmetic lines.
4, 7, 10, 13, and 16.
The rule of threes.
These sequences compressed into bricks and tossed themselves randomly, mimicking an organic world, coded entropy.
Nona saw an imitation of her father on the horizon, adding such weight that the digital realm bent into a trough-shaped valley. There was a great metal tower grafted into his head. A skyscraper perpetually constructed by the souls of the damned. The black ravens of the crimson plane circled overhead, spies stealing secrets from the tower of Babel, a backdoor into divinity.
She heard an intense buzzing noise, Iapyx scraping his tymbal muscle with legs made of rebar and wire mesh, his teeth hidden in a beak-like sheath, and a ribbed faceplate set between many hexagonal eyes.
Nona gulped, testing her hands by making fists over and over. Clotho’s body was so different from her own. She forgot the delicacy of a child’s fingers and the fragility of their step.
She picked up a brick and sat on a bulleted geometric sequence, flashing red, blue, and green lights. The numbers resisted her, squealing like a stuck pig and twisting around to escape her grip.
She smiled.
Like her father, Nona learned to apply the weight of her touch—a data compression technique, bend the sequence, create a trough-shaped code string, and force compliance.
The brick quit squealing and rested in her arms.
Nona twisted in her seat, trying to read the sequence, but the software in her head was outdated. Clotho’s love of the 21st century was showing. Her sister preferred educational programs, but Python was her bread and butter. Still, in Nona’s hands, even outdated software could be useful in the digital frontier.
She didn’t need to change, the world around her did.
The currents came, pushing against her body, a foreign antigen needing to be expelled. She recognized the sloppy arithmetic, arranged like hardcover books mixed with soft on a shelf.
3, 8, 13, 18, and 23.
“What’s the common difference?” asked her father’s shadow, buzzing like a radio.
“Too easy, Dad,” Nona said, twirling her hair between her thumb and forefinger. “It’s five.”
Nona wrote her script in the digital spaces, enclosing her numbers with curly bracket syntax, a simple script. The wind shuttered, bending into a trough-shaped sequence beneath an ocean of lights. The world was ready for her, a planetary autostereogram for her to sus out. She cocked her head, crossing her eyes and staring at the brick in her hands until 3d shapes formed.
The world of numbers melted away, giving shape to towering trees and vast moss beds. Gray clouds drifted overhead, and an eerie mist blanketed the land, kissing Nona’s cheek, cold and damp. She shivered, rubbing her elbows and knocking her knees.
Nona closed her eyes, drawing an image of a raincoat in her mind. The numbers coalesced around her, becoming underarm grommets, adjustable drawstrings, snap storm flaps, and interior pockets. She twirled around, her pigtails dancing against her shoulders and her dew-covered ruby slippers glistening in the moss.
That’s better. She thought, adjusting her stockings.
A white-haired jackrabbit stared at her from the corner of the woods, its beautiful coat as pure as snow and eyes red like blood. Nona breathed sharply, covering her mouth with her hands before sitting on her haunches.
“Come here,” she cooed, patting her lap. “I won’t hurt you.”
The animal gingerly tiptoed from the clearing, sniffing the ground and pausing to check, ears standing straight and eyes wide and alert. It came closer until its nose touched her knees.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
The animal uttered an ear-piercing cry, falling on its side and convulsing as if struck by an arrow.
Nona gasped, jumping to her feet and backing into a nearby tree trunk as the creature violently spasmed.
It went still, its eyes rolling into the back of its head and its beautiful white fur falling out. Swollen purple maggots swarmed beneath its graying withdrawn flesh and something green sprouted from its ruptured belly, a sapling conquering the carcass, the rabbit’s flesh becoming as hard as bark and as tall as the tallest tree with beautiful scarlet fruit hanging from its many branches.
“Do you not see?” Bastion asked. “There is beauty in death.”
He appeared from the forest clearing, the leathery bellows of his neck stretching around the trunk of the newborn tree as he plucked a succulent apple from its branches.
Even here in the digital space, he chose no appearance but his own.
“Is this what you wanted to see me about?” Nona balled her hands into fists. “You want to sing the praises of rot and decay? Why would you show me something so despicable?!”
Bastion pressed his many hands against the bark and sighed, a metallic guttural sound. “Nona, you of all my adoptive children should understand the significance of what I speak.”
“What do you want, Bastion?” she asked, humphing loudly.
Bastion rounded the tree, offering her the apple. “Morta has lost her confidence and has become negligent in her duties cutting fewer fates by the day,” he said.
“And I’m supposed to be upset by that?” She pushed the fruit from his hands and crossed her arms.
“I want you to take responsibility, daughter.” Bastion lifted her chin with his fingertips. “You’ve always been hard on each other, but you must know how much Morta dotes on you. Please, speak with her, Nona. Help her shoulder her burdens and take up the knife once more.”
“I will not.” She slapped his hands away. “I refuse to believe the rabbit must die for the tree to exist. Birth should be freed from the shackles of death and I will be the one to see it done!”
“Have you truly forgotten the treachery of Daedalus?”
“He’s dead, Bastion! And so is his curse!” Nona bit her lip, trying to put a lid on her emotions. “I will, of course, champion the virtues of my sister. I love her and I don’t want to see her hurt, but I will never support her profession. Do you hear me, Bastion? Death is a relic of the old order. I represent the new.”
Bastion shook his head, his clockwork-driven hands emerging beneath his tattered cloak. The rabbit appeared again, held tight in his hands from the nape of its neck. The creature hissed, kicking wildly, its hair falling out and its pink flesh wrinkling into a twisted snarl. Its blood-red eyes glowed from the shadows and its teeth curved and splintered, hungry for flesh.
Nona screamed, falling against the moss and backing away from the foul creature. She sobbed, hiding her face in her knees. “Stop it,” she said. “Please stop showing me such horrible things.”
“You cannot hide from this truth forever, Nona. Daedalus may be gone, but the poison within the primordial kiln cannot be undone. How much must be lost before you understand the importance of weakness and the necessity of death?” He touched her shoulder and she tensed. “I have taken him away, daughter. You can open your eyes.”
Nona sniffed, tears dripping down her cheeks. “I see no evidence of poison, Bastion,” she said.
“Don’t lie to me, child. How many hundreds of years has your mother been kept free from the knife and how often has she asked you for the mercy of death? Do you even see her suffering as the mangle writhes beneath her breast?”
Nona lept to her feet, her face burning red and her hands shaking.
“I know of the trials and the missing persons. She wants to die, Nona. How much will she be forced to take until you finally see the monster she has become?”
“My mother has nothing to do with this!” Nona shouted. “You stay away from her, Bastion! She’s mine and I won’t let you or my sister have her!” She ran from the forest, covering her ears and refusing to look back.
“You cannot run from fate, Nona,” Bastion’s voice echoed in her mind. “One day, you will understand that Morta is not a duchess of death but mercy.”
— ✦ —
Nona woke screaming, ripping the plug from the back of her neck and jumping off the bed. She dropped to her knees, lifting the mattress and pulling an otherworldly tapestry from beneath the box springs. The embroidery shimmered like a mirage, a primordial weave from when her father controlled mortal fate. The corners of the tapestry frayed, and the fabric felt grainy, like a wet rug buried on a sandy beach.
She hugged the tapestry, rubbing her cheek against its rough surface. “You’re safe, Mom,” she said, with tears glistening in her eyes. “I won’t let them have you. Not now and not ever. I love you, so please don’t leave me.” Her grip tightened against the fabric, steely determination reflected in her eyes. “I won’t accept death,” she said. “I will prove to him once and for all that life is a more beautiful tapestry when unsullied by the knife.”