Killmaster: chapter 4

Part four

KILL. The command what as direct as it could be. The crowd shuffled back, exposing room for the contestants to swing swords without gutting a bystander. The room would have been quiet save for the pounding in Una’s ears. Sweat on palms, sword in hand, she faced Imat, She felt the kind of fear that one only feels moments before springing into action. Waves of cold and hot moved over her skin, through her core, tightening her muscles and clenching her jaw. They began to circle. Imat moved fluidly, pacing like a cat, a well-oiled machine, muscles expanding and contracting in concert. Una could make out scars on her scalp, her biceps. They squirmed. They stared at one another with animal intensity, teeth all but bared in a grimace. For a moment, she was glad they weren’t friends.

In a flash, Imat lunged, pushing Una back a step. Una countered, Imat blocked. They circled. The jitters were gone. The room felt warmer and the stone felt soft under Una’s feet. The crowd was hushed. 

“Are you afraid?” Imat jeered, “you look scared…’ her words echoed in the cavernous room. Una slammed her sword to the ground, throwing a flash of sparks, and swung hard, Aiming for Imat’s neck with a loud “HAAT”. Imat raised her blade in time but took the brunt of the force to her face, cutting her cheek. She stumbled and paced back, struggling to see. Una took advantage and swung hard, leaning deep into the blow. Imat moved quick on instinct, blindly escaping the blade. Una swung again, low this time and faster, connecting with Imat’s shin.

Imat Howled, a scream unlike any Una had heard. The crowd was ashen faced, Una heard a retching sound from somewhere in the back. She retreated and let Imat gain her composure. Una found the beginnings of anger inside her, the dull, hot throb warming her feet on the cold stone as she tracked blood across the floor. Blood ring; An apt name. Imat was standing now.

“It’s a shame your mothers couldn’t see that.” Imat said, Panting and limping. “They would have been so proud”. Her voice was shaking. Una couldn’t determine if it was a jab, another tactic to force distraction. It could have been honest. Either way, her anger changed color and became rage. Imat was standing tall, shoulders rolled back in mock-confidence, her face blank in the most terrifying way. Tara stood behind her, rapt in attention, clinging to Ifta’s arm. They might as well not have been there.

“They would be glad to see that you fought hard before you died”. Imat continued, breathing hard, sweat apparent on her brow.

 “KILL” the Director repeated, growing impatient. Una ignored it. She kept pacing. Imat had brought a well of emotion to the surface and for a moment Una was overwhelmed, lost in memory.

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Before continuing, here is an important list of things you should know about Una:

Una was once a child with hopes and dreams and a wild imagination

Once when she was eight years old, Una brought home a charcoal picture she had drawn of a bird. Her mothers hung it on the wall of their room and it stayed there for eight years.

Una kept a diary where she recorded her feelings and thoughts about life. There are multiple passages in that diary that no one has ever read, including Una herself, for writing and reading are entirely different things.

Una’s favorite food is sweet potatoes, and she has been known to eat them raw and cut into strips on occasion.

When gardening, Una can sometimes get frustrated when other people talk. She really just wants other people to shut up while she watches the sunrise.

Una did an average job in school. They didn’t have to learn much in the community, and she understood it all, but hated busy work and thought it was bullshit from an early age.

There is a specific corner in the stone passages near the training room where Una goes to cry about things.

Una’s first kiss was in the aforementioned corner.

Una’s parents were both good people. Their names were Mona and Lata.

Una got in a fight when she was fourteen after another girl made fun of her for being short. She was insecure about this and subsequently beat the living shit out of the poor girl and broke her nose. She went to her corner and cried about it afterwards and it took years to get over the shame of hurting another so badly and for such an insignificant reason. She still feels bad about it. That girl’s name was Imat.

Una is twenty-five years old

Una has always enjoyed singing and is surprisingly good at it. In fact, she undoubtedly has one of the best voices on all of mars (which isn’t saying much, at her time there were no more than 5,000 people left on the planet). Nobody knows this except Tara. Una gets nervous when she sings.

Una has had her nose broken in sparring matches multiple times. Proctors and coaches always wished her defense was as good as her offence.

Una has been living alone since she was sixteen. In terms of the community, this means she moved into a barracks where she was definitely never alone. Sometimes these are the same thing to her.

The day before her parents died was kind of a shitty day.

Most of the days after her parents died were kind of shitty days.

Una is awkward. She says the wrong things at the worst times and has a stutter when she gets nervous, which is a lot of the time. Tara says it’s cute, Una tells her to shut the fuck up. She can also be a little harsh.

Una has a mole on her scalp that she needs to tell the lady who cuts hair about every time she gets her head shaved and the lady forgets this every time and makes Una yelp a little when she hits it. This has been happening for twenty years.

Una likes the color black and prefers it over the standard cream-canvas color of wraps that they wear in the community. She only knows this because she liked to try on her mother’s clothes when they were out of the house.

Killmasters are the only members of the community allowed to wear black.

When she was a child, Una found an injured bird in the fields and brought it home. She tried to hide it, but hiding a live bird is a challenge for anyone, much less a nine-year-old. Her parents killed it in front of her because they assumed it would die anyway. It was terrible parenting. Una would never forget it.

Una thought she would be a good fighter because her parents were. This, in a way, was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Una got funnier as she got older and started to make more friends when she figured out that other people’s opinions don’t really matter.

Dancing doesn’t happen often in the community, but when it does Una gets very excited. Una loves to dance.

There is a shallow hole in a sweet potato field where a sister recently uncovered a child’s drawing of a bird in a wooden box. She replaced it quickly and buried it again.

The day before Una’s parents died, she had a sparring competition. She had gotten her ass kicked multiple times in a row by a rival training group and did far worse than anyone else on the mats that day. When she got home Mona told her that there had been a change of plans and that she would be fighting the next day with Lata, even though partners weren’t allowed on raids together. The Director had changed the plan last minute. But everything would be fine, they said. Una was kind of pissed and went to bed.

When a raiding party returns to the community, an alarm rings throughout the complex announcing their arrival. The day Una’s parents died, there was no alarm.

Once, when Una was a child, she climbed into her parent’s bed because she was afraid of the dark. In the rustling of covers, Una dried her tears while her Mothers held her and told her never to fear the dark because the darkness misses the light too, it’s just as scared and alone.

“really?” she asked.

“really.” Her mothers responded.

This was a lesson that Una would never forget.

On the day Una became a killmaster she looked into the mirror and tried to imagine herself wearing black. She couldn’t. Not without seeing her parents first.

### 

Una kept pacing, keeping in constant motion. my mother did this? She wondered idly, imagining Lata, the kind and funny woman who loved pranks and games pacing this same circle and killing a woman, likely a woman she knew, in a fight to the death. It occurred to her that there was probably a lot she never learned about her parents. She noticed Imat struggling to stand, her strike had been better than she thought. Imat’s shin showed a small corner of jagged bone, leaking blood as she tried to pace. She was angry.

Imat lunged, trying the offensive again. This time Una dodged, shoving the older woman as she passed by, forcing her to sprawl on the ground. Imat struck out as she fell, catching Una across her right calf. The pain was intense and immediate, cutting up the back of her leg. Una tried to take a step forward, to move away, but found she couldn’t weight her leg. Panicked, she began to feel the blood seeping under her heel. She heard Imat scramble on the ground and turned as quick as she could, intercepting a blow on instinct alone, taking it to the ground, tumbling. I will survive. She thought, I will survive.

Una could hear Imat, lurching towards her, hear the horrified hush of whispers in the crowd. For a moment she heard her mother’s voice in the crowd, could feel soft earth under her fingers even as she pressed them to the stone, the unbearable pain in her leg tinting the world red and warping the shapes and shadows all around. As she rolled and tried to stand, she saw blood on the ground, rolling and sinking in the shape of a struggling bird, an image burning into the stone.

Una turned. Imat was above her now, arms raised and sword in hand, falling, taking aim at her throat. Una twitched, thrust forward and felt the familiar jerk of blade meeting flesh, her sword finding it’s place in Imat’s throat and the hot flash of pain as her opponent’s sword pierced her cheek and ground against her teeth. They stayed there for a moment, arms outstretched, both bleeding, Una half upright on the stone floor and Imat half lunging down. The sisters surrounding them were silent, holding their breaths.

Una was whimpering, her opponent’s blade still dangerously close to her neck. She felt the cord wrapping on the handle of her sword distantly, as though her arms were miles away. With great effort, she tightened her grip on the weapon and twisted savagely, wishing she could look away. On Imats’ face, where moments before there had been the strongest look of determination, there was nothing. She choked and fell backward, pulling her sword free from Una’s face and falling limply to the floor, her weapon clattering loudly until it came to rest by her side. The room was watery and distorted, as though the space had decided to breathe with her, to expand and contract with her ragged lungs. There was blood everywhere, streaming in Una’s mouth, soaking her legs and sticking between her toes. Distantly, the Director spoke:

“ UNA, DAUGHTER OF MARS. ARE YOU VICTORIOUS?” There was a rush of whispers as she tried to speak but the wound on her face prevented her.

“ARE YOU VICTORIOUS?” The Director repeated, despite somehow only addressing Una. Doesn’t it already know? Una thought, Is this part of the ritual? She didn’t know, she had never seen the test take place. She made a loud and animal-like noise, before bearing the pain and finally answering.

“yes” she said, croaking. Because it was true, she had won. 

“THEN RISE, UNA KILLMASTER” the director stated. Una tried to rise, but couldn’t. Her leg was still bleeding furiously. She fell down, but was greeted with outstretched arms instead of hard stone. There was a rush of noise as the sisters stepped into the ring, falling to the sides of their respective friends. A group surrounded Imat’s limp body, some in silent reverie, some wailing in grief. Many simply stood and watched as Una was held up and carried away, bandages pressed to her wounds as she was whisked away to the infirmary. The Director was taken to its place, the stool removed and stowed in a closet. Blood was washed from the floor and dissolved in buckets of soap and water, the thin red strings writhing and consuming themselves like snakes before dissipating and staining what little precious water could be spared.

###

When Una had been stitched and patched, she was given a room of her own and told to rest. It was the first time she had slept alone for nearly ten years. She was taken to her new bed and told not to rise for a week. She broke that rule once, to stand (with great effort) in front of her mirror and don a black cloak to examine the fresh set of stitches where her face had been rent open. The light was soft, barely enough to see the writhing slash on her cheek, her cloak night black and formless. She noticed that she had Latas’ high cheekbones, with Mona’s small stature. Despite the pain, she smiled. It was the smile of three women, now one.

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The Director had been taken to it’s rightful place at the lowest level of commune 4. Of course, the small box that spoke in an artificial voice was not the director, merely a representative. The Director took up an entire basement room in the commune. Only it knew this. The box was placed on its pedestal and left to report back, to feed it’s data into the system and process. The director was always processing. The Director watched the fight, “the test” as it had come to be known, and watched it again. It sent up flags of surprise and processed them. It checked its calculations and saw a significant error, an anomaly. This was not supposed to happen, Much less twice! It thought for a moment, processing and processing. No, this wasn’t supposed to happen at all. Una was supposed to die. In fact, she was supposed to die nearly a month ago.