Love and Poetry and Forgiveness

The seaward proximity alarm blasted me awake at 3:30 AM. I rolled out of bed and landed on my feet in darkness. The sky outside was black and speckled with distant city lights and stars competing for the same stretch of darkness. Together, they were enough to trace the shadowed outlines of my room.

I grabbed my computer off my night table and checked the source alarm. Number five sensor. That one bobbed on a buoy, staring past a little sandbar about a hundred meters from the coven’s high cliffs. At low tide it was a strip of fine black sand standing up to the endless hammer of the waves. The women went out there to surf regularly. Sixteen days ago, a trio of teenagers had snuck alcohol out there and nearly drowned when the tide had come in to share the bourbon.

Fearing a repeat of that, I threw on a beach coverup, a sweater over that. Since our glorious leader, Lady Saph had officially made me her girlfriend, I’d dropped the combat coveralls and boots and started dressing like the rest of the artsy lot here.

Except for the equipment belt with my holstered sidearm and non-lethal weapons I threw on as I headed out the door onto my terrace. As the Coven’s security chief, I was on call 26 hours a day, eight days a week. Any emergency, I would come running.

A breeze of cold ocean salt whipped me as I hurried down the cliff stairs and across the beach. If these were drinkers of any age, I was going in yelling. The Coven is meant for healing and recovery but sometimes people do something so dumb that having it scared out of them is the most productive therapy.

As I approached the sandbar, I saw a lone figure silhouetted in the rise and fall of white surf, hair soaked to her neck and hugging her knees to her chest. She didn’t move when I crunched beside her.

I took off my sidearm and other weapons and laid them at the bottom of the launch, then hopped over the gunwale. Cold water snapped at my feet and made anyone bite my lip

I’ve learned to never approach with hostility. Hostility meant addressing them like they were the problem. By the standards of the Coven, no one here was a problem. I walked to her side and sat down. Girl was Marie Letran. I could tell by her black afro and scars up and down her arms where her implants had been repo’d a year ago. I recalled her poetry style of choice was the obscure, idiosyncratic haiku.

“Hey,” I said.

“You’re going to tell me I can’t be out here,” she said.

“I’m going to ask why you’re out here,” I said. Spray splashed me over, and I shivered. I’d never liked the cold. Why anyone would live where the air hurt their face, I never knew.

“My old glitter doc died yesterday,” she said.

“Good or bad?” Another wave soaked my pantsuit thoroughly, so it clung to my body and froze me even more. I should have worn combat coveralls. Those were water resistant and warmer.

“She took part in a program to subsidize augments for factory laborers. Then sold repair rights to a megacorp that charged us back in full price,” she said.

The rug pull scam. A classic for squeezing poor people of the last few drops in the toothpaste tube. Give them something they can’t afford to lose, make them pay extra for it, then take it anyways. “So, thank goodness she’s dead?” I said, hopefully.

“It should be good, but I just feel…” another wave, a big one slammed down before us and sprayed us head to toe.

“You know, surf torture is a method of conditioning we used when training for the Militant Guard. That’s corpie special forces,” I said, in case she didn’t know about the worst of the worst corporate commandos. Militant Guard was a maximum discretion security bonding company; meaning they loaned us out on bond to various corpies, for the highest stakes contracts. I’d only ever killed for C-suite level corpies, and only the most dangerous or elusive opponents.

She twisted to look at me. Salt water dripped off a line of scar tissue where an implant had been ripped from her cheekbone. “I deserve it.”

“Alright. Well, I’ll be right here.”

“I’d rather you not.”

“It’s a security measure. Since you don’t want to leave, I’m staying with you. You are my responsibility after all.”

Her shoulders shuddered. “Please don’t say that.”

Saph had taught me a wonderful phrase for this. “It doesn’t matter how little you think you’re worth, you are still valuable to me.”

She shook her head. Her eyes had an utterly sunken, painful look. I’d done a lot of training on facial recognition. It was why, even though biomechs were faster, I usually got the drop on them. I saw the obvious depression in hers. Then, deeper pain beneath. A common sign of incoming betrayal. That triggered alarm bells. What did you do? I almost said, but that was too confrontational.

“After how much my ripper doc changed my life, I wanted to confront her one more time. Once I left this place and returned to society, I was going to find her in her top-arcology neighborhood and confront her. I didn’t want to kill her. I just wanted to find a lawyer who could twist contract law as well as she could and sue her into the ground,” she said.

I nodded. “She at least die horribly?”

She cringed.

“Sorry, it’s how I deal with things. I’m not a poet.”

“You had that one poem, it was very simple but beautiful,” she said. “Does Sappho love you truly?”

“Yes. I trust her completely,” I said.

“What’s it like to trust someone like that?”

“I lie bare in her arms and am completely at peace. She’s got power and I feel completely safe,” I said.

“I’ll find a man like that someday.” She gave me that pained look again. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t mind,” I said.

“No. I…” She looked back into the waves. “I’m sorry.” She stood.

I was up and had my arms around her waist before she could step into the ocean. The sandbar dropped off abruptly to a depth of thirty meters. “Please don’t,” I said.

“No, no. I screwed up. Last year I started saving up for the lawyer. I made a deal.”

I opened my computer and triggered the therapist alert. Marie’s designated therapist was getting woken up by a similar alarm. She’d be following my locator beacon down to the shore.

“What did you do?” I said.

“What should I have done?”

I thought it over. I didn’t come here in the normal way. I wasn’t hired via the secluded channels the Coven used to pluck the few diamonds in the capitalist rough from the arcologies. I also wasn’t selected by secret lottery for the desperate. I came here, because I’d betrayed my bonded company to carry Saph from advanced interrogation and back home. And she’d insisted I stay. I thought about revenge, but I also remembered that Marie was a welder by trade, and not a corporate commando.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What did you do?”

“I broke Clauses two and three. I found some corpie who wanted to do poetry but had no skills of their own. And sold them our work”

Shit, I thought. We have a little code of rules. The big ones are Clauses one through five. Clause two was that we wouldn’t steal another woman’s poetry. Clause three was we wouldn’t sell direct to corporations or people without using our legal team. Two was an obvious matter of trust. Three was about some corpie getting poetry at a fraction of its value and feeding it into an AI machine. Or worse, getting ideas about how to monetize the Coven. We were funded by a fat trust fund, and wealthy success stories regularly contributed to it. Still, the less corpies trying to buy us out the safer.

I breathed in deeply, to brace myself against how this situation should be handled. I should have taken her into custody and dragged her over my shoulder back to the padded emergency containment cell and alerted Saph process of ejecting her from the coven.

This wasn’t a hotel, or a profit-driven mental hospital full of the parasites known in the arcologies as medical entrepreneurs. We were supposed to be about healing.

She slipped from my arms and lunged at the nearest wave. I’d anticipated that and caught her around the waist just before that wave piledrivered into us.

I shivered to the bone as I hauled her back and sat her down on dry sand. “I’m taking you back and meeting your designated therapist. Dr. Manikwas, right?” I said.

“Please. I don’t deserve any more help from this place”

“No. We don’t do things the easy way here,” I said. “Please don’t try jumping again. I promised Lady Saph I would never use handcuffs.”

She didn’t as we walked up the cliff face stairs.

Her therapist was waiting at the top. Dr. Manikwas was a sleek, younger woman with a nose ring and tattoos of birds flying across her shoulders. The youngest of the twenty professionals here. Despite being nearly 4am, her hair was in its immaculate shoulder length bob. She caught Marie around the shoulders and promised her everything was okay.

I escorted the pair to one of our group therapy rooms, the one with the wood fireplace and hot chocolate machine, then went up to change out of my sodden clothes

I did a whole hot shower and a triple shot of rum to drive off the cold. As I dried off, I thought about donning the combat coveralls again. Instead, I found a loose, midnight blue pantsuit with short sleeves and a lovely white lace collar. I headed back out with that, to get the earliest breakfast at the café.

The place had one professional chef and six volunteers from the general population I got the first batch of bacon and eggs and sprinkled it all with fresh fruit. I tore off chunks indiscriminately and ate fat, sugar, and fine fluffy eggs all at once. High energy breakfast for soldiers.

A pair of long, thin arms draped over my shoulders and clasped above my heart. Unkempt brown and gray hair ticked my cheek. I kept eating while breathing in Lady Saph’s sweet aroma.

“I appreciate you more than anyone else in my life,” she whispered in my ear. I pushed the remnants of breakfast away and laid my head on her bare neck. Saph did that to me; compelled instant submission to her wiles.

“Just doing my job,” I said.

“That’s what you always say, with the most graceful sincerity in your words,” she said.

I made sure no one was near our table. The early birds were all up. Our stout gardener and her two volunteers from the population were already in their work coveralls and yawning into their hot oatmeal by the door. A couple of the oldest ladies were holding morning poetry club across the café.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“Severe. Not irreparable, but very severe,” Saph said. “However, Marie seems genuinely regretful so there is hope.”

I straightened up and twisted in my chair to face Saph. Her arms slipped away and she poised to listen to me. “Hey, she broke two of our five main rules. Breaking any of those is grounds for reconsideration. We should be ejecting her. Both as punishment and because if we don’t, they will take the rules less seriously since they know we’re not enforcing them.”

Saph was unyielding in her gentleness. “You are thinking about this in terms of crime and punishment. We are not about that; we are about hurt and rehabilitation here. Our friend Aelia broke a couple of rules before I sent you to help her. Marie will come before a council of her victims, and authorities. She will tell her story and apologize. They will all process everything together. All factors will be considered. If they decide she is to stay, she will stay.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Forgiveness is not taken, it is given. If Marie is not forgiven, then she will be sent home. It will be a few days until she is mentally cleared, and when her council is assembled. We are doing it quietly to limit drama.” She rolled her eyes.

Two-hundred fifty women on an isolated peninsula. Drama. Endless drama.

Saph continued. “I need you to keep all of us, including Marie and myself safe. We have just cut a corpie off from his source of stolen joy. Those people are used to being able to open every door with money. They consider it a fact that they can open any door with the right leverage. Closing one in their face drives them into a blind rage. They’ll do anything, hurt anyone to open that door again.” She laid her cheek on my shoulder.

I leaned over and nipped her lips. “I’ll be there every night. I promise.”

She stroked from the tip of my V-neck up to my chin and kissed me back. Goosebumps ran over my entire body. I leaned into the kiss and drank her in long as I could.

Soon as she was gone, I opened my computer and called my little friend.

Aelia was there in ten minutes and got breakfast. “We’re protecting Marie from her cunt ex-boyfriend?” the strawberry-haired teenager said and slapped her tray down. She’d put on a few pounds since we’d met six weeks ago. Her cheeks were fuller, and I could no longer see the bones in her arms.

“We’re protecting all of us from the corpie she was selling to.” I reached across the table and pressed a finger to her lips. “And shush.”

Aelia nodded. “What the fuck do you need?”

“I need you to find me this corpie. I’ve got a list of stolen poems. Feed them into search engine and feed them a keyword text search,” I said.

“What are you going to do?”

“Make sure our defenses are ready.”

“For a squad of mercenaries stealing poetry?” she said and cocked an eyebrow.

“No. They’ll probably hire a lone merc to plant a data tap in our network to bypass the external firewalls. That would give them access to most of our collective poetry archives first. Then they’ll get a lot more data they could sell off. What worries me just as much is the average freelancer has little regard for life unless they’re being paid not to. Imagine they stumble across someone’s late night stargazing session,” I said.

Aelia gulped and nodded. “I’ll get on it.”

“Eat first,” I said.

“Fuck that, I only eat breakfast to hang out with you.”

“Eat, that’s an order,” I said, and pushed her own bowl of fruit at her. I swear, I should charge extra for babysitting this one.

I closed my eyes and did some breathing exercises while Aelia ate.

“Figured it out,” she said.

I opened my eyes and saw her shoveling the last of her fruit in her mouth with one hand, while searching on her computer with the other. “The corpie?”

“Yeah. They own a NeuralStack’ called ‘Visions of Excelsior,’ and they’ve got all the poems on here.” She held up her comp. I read through them, then looked at the author.

“That’s a fake net ID,” I said of the name. You could tell real people’s names from computer generated. Computer generated always had a couple pictures in near identical poses. It was the generic happiness in their smiles, the neat perfection that their names rolled off the tongue. Real people were oddly shaped and rough. “But still, good find. You sure its all the poems?”

“Yeah, I started searching their catalog for whole poems. The titles are all changed but everything is here,” she said.

“Then if they’re hiring a mercenary, it will be soon,” I said.

“Can we see contracts on the net?” Aelia said.

“No.” I stared at her until she felt stupid. “Merc contracts are handled by a fixer. The fixer distributes the jobs. No paper trail. Honor system.”

“Why won’t the fixer just kill the mercs after the contract?” Aelia said.

“There is a loosely organized greater mercenary community. A fixer who stabs their mercs in the back is going to have no clients very quickly. They’ll probably get knifed by one of the merc’s friends too,” I said. “So I have to wait, and sweat it out.”

“Can I get emergency alerts?” Aelia said.

“No.”

“No soldier fights alone, Corporate Commando, you’ll need mission control.”

“I need…” I don’t have any fellow trained ex-corporate commandos to work with. I don’t have even combat hardened soldiers. There were two women who’d been in corporate security, but I’d excluded both from security volunteer duty because they needed to heal from the mental wounds left by their service. “Fine, Trash Gremlin. Just sit and watch some cameras, okay?”

Aelia nodded so fast her hair fluttered over her face. At least she’d been beaten up by corpie thugs before and spat back out. She would be a little more cautious than an average teenager.

“To victory and love?” she said and extended an open palm.

I slapped her a high-five.

Sure enough, four nights later I was awakened by an alarm. The number two perimeter sensor faced open ocean, with no land ahead until the Marion Islands 154 kilometers away. I grabbed the combat coveralls. Instead of boots, I wore slippers insulated so I didn’t make a sound.

I’d packed up my Militant Guard gear in my wardrobe when I came here, and unpacked it every three months since for maintenance. I pulled it out now. Black flexible body armor lined in nano-gel so it didn’t make a sound as I moved. Hood, combat EWAR chip. Estoc. Sidearm. Two custom-built combat drones. The suicide vest strapped over my armor as a last resort. Last of all, I slid my OCu13t over my left eye and ran through all the filters before settling on nightvision.

“Hey,” Aelia’s voice crackled in my earpiece. “I’m up and at my computer. What’s up Corporate Commando?”

“I’m heading out. Just watch the security cameras and tell me if you see something stupid,” I said. It was comforting to hear another voice over the radio, I thought as I headed out my door. I didn’t think she’d be very effective. I was just grateful to have someone else doing this with me.

213 AM. The Coven was silent as I crept through the cobblestone streets, sticking to the shadows of buildings. My blood screamed with a fire I hadn’t felt in years. A fire that filled an empty void in me I’d had since coming here. I ducked into the alley behind the main café. There, I held up my two drones and activated them. They stretched their wings. Their programming was designed to imitate real birds much as possible.

“Welcome back,” I whispered. I sent Hugs flapping up into the air to orbit me at a hundred meters. Mum hovered ten meters directly over my head and soared, wings spread and catching the updraft from the ocean.

I searched with the drone’s cameras. Both my drones had motion-detection RADAR cameras, that painted the world in terms of movement, with backup reflective light sensors.

Some of our people were out, even at this hour. Tamara and half a dozen of the older, grey-haired dames were sitting around the south garden taking turns inhaling impossibly deeply on a hookah. I almost gagged just watching how long they sucked it in for. And there was a young couple making love bathed in starlight, on one of the apartment roofs. If the mercenary ran into any one of them, they could kill them and carry on without a thought.

That in mind, I scaled the roof nearest sensor five and looked around; I caught a flash of movement  immediately; a hunched figure in black, crouched as they half-crawled across the roofs. The drone cameras caught the faint outline, and the hint of movement. Too much to be leaves or dust. Too little to be anything other than a person dressed to hide. My heart pounded in my ears as I studied them, and slowly made out their form.

“I found them. Going across the south living quarters. Can you see?”

“Yes!” she hissed in triumph. “They’re going past Girlboss Prime’s apartment.

I crept along, and set both my drones to hone in. If they tried to open Saph’s window, they’d be dive-bombed by two fifteen-kilo killing. Then I’d follow up.

Mercifully, they went right past Saph’s dark apartment. I got a closer look from the security camera crouched outside her window.

The mercenary was a tall, sleek figure in black armor. A compact machine pistol was slung across their back. The projectile weapon wasn’t my real concern; it was their arms, which stretched to inhuman proportions as they pulled themselves along.

“They’ve got fully augmented arms,” I said into my radio. I followed them along, creeping on my slippers while they advanced.

“That means super strength?”

“Yes, and probably mantis blades.”

They stopped at the radio spire, where I’d expected them to. I got a good look at their back and legs. Definitely a man.

I signaled to Hugs. He landed on the spire about five meters above, and let out the loudest, throatiest caw he could.

The mercenary froze and zeroed in on it with his augmented eyes.

That was when I strode forwards and drew my estoc. An estoc was a spike of steel sixty centimeters long. An armor piercing sword, perfect for driving through biomech armor and rupturing their soft organs within.

He detected with one step to go, and spun around, a long mantis blade unfolding from his left arm as he swung.

I’d expected that and slid aside as the superhuman strike sliced the air before my face. My counter stabbed him through his arm. Grinning, at the perfect strike, I hit the trigger in the handgrip. An electrical charge overloaded all the safeties in his arm and melted everything with a hiss.

He screamed out like a wildcat caught in a trap.

“Shhh, they’re sleeping,” I said and clamped my hand over his mouth. Then I kicked his right knee out from under him hard enough that my toes stung, and something went crunch in that leg.

I slammed him on his back into the ground and planted a knee on his still intact arm. I ripped the estoc free, dripping molten polymer and metal on his armor with a hiss and toxic stench He kept screaming through my fist as I buried it in his damaged knee, punching through organic and metal.

“I need you to stop. Okay?” I said. I pulled my hand out and the screaming stopped. “We talking now?”

A taser coil unfolded from his other arm. Mum fried its circuits with her EWAR module, and it folded back into his arm.

“Now we’re stopping?” I said, and sat up, ripping his machine pistol away as I did. It was a compact, nasty piece of work with a fifty-round magazine. One would kill anyone here. I dropped it behind me.

My Ocu13s alerted me he was trying to hack me. I gave him a few angry seconds to try, and watched his rage slip into confusion as he found no cybernetics.

Then I yanked a data chip from my armor. Every aug has a socket in the back of their head for data. The chip went in, and a million automated viruses poured out. I targeted his neuroprocessor exclusively. I heard Aelia gasp as she watched the digital handiwork.

The merc was in agony and distracted. His collapsed in seconds under the dumb assault. Now his eyes went wide in terror as I read his life out through my eyepatch.

“Now. Who sent you to install that data tap?” I pressed the estoc to his remaining arm. His destroyed one was glowing forge-orange and stank of melted polymer.

“I don’t know.”

“So you went through a fixer?”

“Y-yes.”

“Which one?”

“Maratha.”

“I know her. Utterly professional.” I kept tabs on the mercenary scene in the arcologies. The number of familiar names dwindled by the year and hers was one of the few remaining. “So, the data is going straight from your hands to the client without anyone looking at it?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I will escort you back to your boat and you will leave. You take that data chip to Maratha and it will pass any inspection. You will accept your pay and say nothing.”

“If I hand the client a poisoned chip I’ll put a target on my own head!” he said, and spat out a string of profanity.

I made a fist and jammed it down his throat. I waited until he writhed in panic before withdrawing it. The satisfaction vanished as I did so. Aelia was watching silently, I thought. This wasn’t how normal humans behaved. It wasn’t how Saph wanted me to behave.

“Stop, please,” he whispered.

I composed myself. “You will deliver the chip to Maratha because I now own you, Hiro Sanchez from, Callibar Street, apartment pod number eight. I know your two girlfriends Liz Merrick and Sonja Green, your friends, and every bank number you have. I know your mercenary ID is Izuki. You are mine and you will deliver that chip.”

He nodded, by now eyes wide in terror.

“Good.” I stood,. He remained lying in a smoldering heap.

“I’ve left your other arm functional because you need one to climb back down those cliffs and steer your boat home,” I said. “I’ll be watching.” I extended an arm in the air. Hugs came in for a soft thump of a landing on my shoulder. It had been so long since I’d had his familiar weight there.

Hiro’s jaw dropped. Understanding arrived in his eyes.  “Odin?” he said.

I hauled him up by his collar. Silence was poetic, Saph had taught me. I didn’t need to confirm my old Militant Guard callsign. He knew, and I knew even a decade after my last completed contract my name still inspired terror in the merc world. “Get out.”

“Please, no don’t.”

“I’m not killing you,” I said and hauled him along. I dragged him by his collar all the way down to the cliff.

I kept Mum orbiting at ten meters while he picked his way down the cliffs and to his little boat. I set both drones to track his course back, in case one had engine trouble and the other had to carry it back.

“Aelia, did you see him drop anything during this whole ordeal?” I said. I heard no reply but heavy breathing. “Aelia! Grenades, revenge mine, anything?”

“No, I’ll rewatch the footage.” She said quietly.

I did too, as I walked back into the coven. Nothing. Aelia confirmed.

“Alright, go to bed,” I said. I thought about which apartment to go to. Not mine. I couldn’t be alone with my bloody delight now. My whole body shook uncontrollably. The satisfaction of making that mercenary scream wouldn’t go away. No, I did not regret utterly destroying the guy and sending him off with a crypto bomb. I regretted that it felt better than anything I’d done in years. I needed Saph to replace that feeling.

Except, Aelia was waiting for me outside Saph’s door. She threw her arms around my neck.

“Good work,” I said.

“You’re scary,” she said.

“Yep,” I said and hugged her back. I tried to put some reassurance into my hug. “Been a long time since I’ve don anything like that.”

“It’s okay,” Aelia said.

“It’s not. I enjoyed that too much,” I said.

“Well I still think it’s okay,” she said and squeezed me tight.

I sighed. “Okay, it’s okay. Go to bed.”

She nodded but refused to let go.

“I’m fine, Trash Gremlin. I’ll be fine when I’m with Saph. Go to bed and sleep late, you’ve earned it.”

“Then enjoy the fruits of your labor,” she said, and released me with a wink.

I used the key Saph had given me after my first ever poetry session to get in.She was spread out on her bed, white as marble except the little spots of pink at her lips, her breasts, the scar under her left ear. I stripped my armor and coveralls and piled them all neatly beside her wardrobe. I unloaded the captured machine pistol and stuck it at the bottom. Naked and shivering, I put my knee on the bed and leaned over her. My curls brushed her forehead and she served. “Hey. Corpie problem solved.”

“You won?” she said. Her eyes didn’t open.

“Yeah, we won.” I slid into bed beside her and laid my head on her shoulder. She turned and hugged my face to her warm chest. Her heart thumped gently. Her arms held me down, preventing me from rising back into my blood lusted state.

“My guardian angel,” she whispered into my hair.

“Trying,” I said, and kissed her chest.

“I’m getting up at seven. Councils at noon. Sleep until then.”

I was too weary to answer. I enjoyed the feel of Saph’s fingers gripping my shoulders, their unyielding grasp holding me down. I tucked my hands into the warmest spot between her belly and my chest.

I was alone in the sheets when I awoke. Somehow Saph had slipped out without rousing me. She’d left half a pot of coffee, and breakfast of bacon and eggs for me on her writing desk. She wrote surrounded by bookcases. Not digital books, physical paper books on old wooden shelves. I ate, then used her bath.

I dressed in my finest pantsuit from my small section of her wardrobe and headed down. The council was held in the little meeting room beneath Saph’s apartment. A circle of seats. The women straggled in individually. Some looked sad, some angry. Saph presided over us all silently, in a gown of white with her hair braided and coiled around her head, secured in a white ribbon.

Marie took the seat at the front of the room. She waved her therapist off, dug her fingers into the thighs of her pants, and sucked in a breath.

Marie started by repeating her story. She told it simply, straightforward, and with no excuses. Soon as she was done, I could tell half the room was against her off the bat. The other half seemed saddened.

The questions came in fast. Had she stopped to consider anyone’s feelings? Where had the credits gone? Her therapist handled account records showing she’d put it all into her lawyer fund.

At this point one of the victims began crying.

I sat there and listened, waiting for any issues of security to come up. The hours went on slowly. I watched Aelia’s fingers start drawing circles on her own knees. That became my way of keeping focused, ears on the drama, eyes on the teenager’s ever-amusing fidgeting.

The lead of the ‘throw her out’ movement crystalized in Janie Lee, a pale woman with deep brown curls. She stared at Marie like a hawk.

“I’ve been betrayed twice in my life. I let my husband leave me, and I let my sister take everything while I wasn’t looking. This is a third betrayal. I’m sure many of you have been betrayed too, and that brought you here to the Coven,” she said and looked around the room.

Good point, I thought. Ironically, I’d been the one doing the betraying, I thought. When I turned on my contractors and saved Saph. The women nodded along with me.

Marie didn’t defend herself. She apologized.

“None of it mattered,” she admitted. “The corpie I wanted, they went and died a week ago. I set my accounts to delete themselves. None of it mattered in the end.”

“Then you destroyed all of our trust for nothing,” Janie Lee said.

Even at Jamie Lee’s outburst she remained impassive as a marble statue.

“We can write more poetry,” a younger woman said.

“But we can’t recover our trust,” Jamie Lee said. “I will never feel safe in the Coven with her here. Just as none of you should either. We can’t do much more than compose poetry, and vote to keep our own safety.”

“She has no reason to do that again,” the younger woman said.

“It does not matter. We’re not safe. What if the corpie wants to come for us now?” Jamie Lee said.

Here it was. My moment that I never wanted. I looked at Saph. She stared back without expression for a moment, then looked to the center of the circle. She wasn’t telling me what to do. Because she trusted me to make my own decision, I thought. I rose.

The entire room looked at me.

“The corpie has been dealt with, you’re all safe from him,” I said.

“Well what do you mean?” Janie Lee said.

“I mean that I have identified the threat to us and dealt with it. The rest is under lockdown,” I said.

“But what did you do? Tell us for the sake of our lives,” Janie Lee said.

“Again, that is under lockdown. It is dealt with,” I said.

“That is not helpful at all. Why should I believe you?” Janie said.

Aelia leapt up as I opened my mouth. “She means that she put corpie bitch in hell where he belongs, so why don’t you cool those icy tits?” She glared around the room.

Someone snickered. Janie looked to me in shock.

A frown flickered on Saph’s face.

I stared back at Aelia until she turned and saw me. She sat down hard.

“Like Aelia said. I put the corporate boy in hell where he belongs,” I said. “There is no more danger. You can afford to forgive someone.”

The room went silent as everyone looked inwards. I sat down, and my brain swirled as I tried to decide if I’d done the right thing.

The discussion petered out. Saph stood, and called the vote.

Every woman voted. Stay, leave, or repair. I waited as each looked Marie in the eyes and gave their answer. The air was sucked out of the room a little more with each one.

At the end, the room was in utter silence. Saph stood.

“You vote to forgive Marie,” she said. “We are done here.”

Marie sat there, crying. Until one of the younger women went up to her side and gave her a hug.

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Thank you for reading!