Chapter Text
It didn’t have to be like this.
Did it?
Tally wasn’t sure anymore. Everything she’d been so certain of suddenly seemed scattered and windswept. The flash-quick evolution of impact to fallout, impulse to aftermath left her senseless and sick to her stomach, and now she couldn’t be sure of anything.
Had she known it would end this way? Had she meant for it to? Had she?
No. This wasn’t what she’d wanted.
Was it?
Tally pressed her fingertips to the rubbed-raw skin beneath her eyes and felt the lukewarm kiss of tears. Not the first she’d cried. Not the last. Wasn’t that her proof? That she hadn’t intended for it to happen this way? For it to end this way?
No. This wasn’t the end. It wasn’t.
Was it?
She couldn’t shake the image from her mind. General Alder’s face contorted into something so horribly, beautifully foreign—so unlike the regal portrait Tally had fawned over as a girl. Her idol, a giant among men and women alike, cut off at the knees by the one who couldn’t stop worshipping her, couldn’t stop blaming her. Couldn’t stop.
Tally had clocked every angle, every clench, every shudder. She’d watched the rapid progression from devastation to defeat, exhaustion to relief…heartache as immense and immediate and profound as the regret and the righteousness and the sickening sort of pride that had heaved and smoked like fire in Tally’s lungs at the exact same time.
She couldn’t shake the image of the general walking away. Head up. Chin forward. Shoulders back. Stripped to the nude wool of her formal wear. No medals. No bars. No victories.
All the disaster. All the devastation. None of the glory.
The woman who’d only been a girl when she’d offered her freedom in exchange for her life. Younger than Tally. Younger even than Penelope. A girl who couldn’t have known what it would mean to make those pleas, to promise those promises. A girl who couldn’t have predicted or even fathomed centuries more of servitude, or an endless, haunting hatred that would sprout from its own ashes every few decades like a phoenix resurrecting in flame. Every time she’d start to wonder. Every time she’d start to hope. Every time.
A girl who wanted to survive. Wanted to feel safe. A girl who didn’t want to be afraid anymore. A girl who just wanted a place to call home—a precious place, a sacred place. A witch’s place. The same kind of witch’s place Tally had spent her life yearning for. Praying for. Stomping and stomping her feet for.
“Oh Goddess.” The words were barely free before Tally doubled at the waist and spilled the contents of her stomach into the toilet. She gagged and sputtered, the bitter taste of emptiness and bile twisting her insides further. Her ribs ached. They protested. But she couldn’t stop.
When a second acrid wave lurched up and spilled into the bowl, the bathroom door wrenched open behind Tally, and a half-asleep Raelle stepped into the frame. “Tal?”
When the light flicked on, Tally groaned and hid her face in her arm. She leaned on the toilet, knees pressed to the cold floor and aching, and felt fresh tears burning in her eyes. “I’m fine,” she croaked, then grimaced as the sound echoed around the toilet bowl and brought the sour stench of her own breath back to her.
“How long have you been in here?”
“I’m fine. I promise.”
“Tally.” Raelle’s sigh was tired, knowing. It made Tally’s skin crawl. She had no interest in being seen in that moment, couldn’t handle the thought of anyone knowing how conflicted she was—how sure she’d been before and how unsure she was now. Not even Raelle. Not even Abigail. “I’ll get you some water.”
“I said I’m fine, Raelle.” She didn’t mean for the words to sound as bitter as they tasted, but they did, and she couldn’t bring herself to lift her head, see how they affected Raelle. She couldn’t bring herself to apologize either. All her apologies were taken—pressed into every wrong turn and wrong turn and wrong destination. All her apologies were broken and useless, and they would never, never be enough.
Would they?
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Raelle touched her, a mistake. The moment her fingers curled around Tally’s shoulder, the world tipped the way it had in the hangar, and she was falling again. That face. General Alder’s face.
A sob wrenched up Tally’s throat, and she wept and gagged into the toilet and wished she could disappear if even for only a moment. A day. Long enough to find herself again, find her footing, find her center. Find calm.
Calm. Goddess, when was the last time?
“Tally, it’s been three days.”
Three days.
Three days since she’d opened her mouth like a pin pulling from a grenade and detonated her entire world.
Three days since she’d destroyed a person she cared about, admired, loathed with every part of her body and loved with parts she was still becoming acquainted with.
Three days since President Wade watched every moment of it run its course like the acts of a play then had Nicte Batan executed anyway. Right in front of them.
Three days since Tally burned three lives to the ground, her own included, and there hadn’t been a single second of those three days in which she’d known peace. Or rest. Or anything other than the four walls of this bathroom, their dorm room. Raelle’s sighs and Abigail’s fury. Both of their concern.
Three days since the last time Tally, or anyone as far as Tally knew, had seen or heard from General Alder.
“I’m—”
“Stop.”
Tally looked up, finally. The cold press of the toilet seat stayed on her cheek even after she raised her head. She felt it in her bones. Like she would never be warm again. Or comfortable. She would never be anywhere but here, retching up her doubt like a bad taste in her mouth, a sickness in the pit of her stomach. Her soul.
Raelle’s face was sickly pale in the small dark space of their bathroom. None of them had slept well in days. None of them had spoken about it either. They couldn’t.
Tally couldn’t.
“I can’t listen to you say you’re fine again,” Raelle said, voice sleep-raw and resigned. She rubbed Tally’s back through her tank top, and as much as Tally wished she could be comforted by it, she instead felt it like pressure. Like sandpaper. Like something grating and grinding, and she was already so close to dust. “You don’t have to talk about it. Just stop saying you’re fine. It’s a lie.”
Another thing Tally could add to the list of all she’d done, all she’d become. A liar. Now she was a liar, and all she’d ever wanted to do was tell the truth.
It didn’t have to be like this.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
“Go back to bed, Rae,” Tally whispered and laid her head back down.
“Are you going back to bed?” Raelle challenged. “Or are you going to keep puking up all the nonexistent food you’ve been eating?”
“Raelle.”
“No, Tally, I’m serious. You can’t keep doing this, making yourself sick like this. You’re going to do real damage.”
Tally closed her eyes again and fought the urge to scream. Real damage had already been done. So much damage. So much ruin. So much blame.
With a heavy, bitter sigh, Tally pushed herself off the toilet and off the floor and ignored the way her body protested with every move. She felt weak and tired, as empty as she’d ever been. “Turn the shower on,” she rasped and started to pull off her clothes. “I’ll clean up then go to bed.”
Raelle nodded, seemingly satisfied, and left Tally’s side to switch the shower on. “You sure you can stay upright?” she asked as she put a hand under the spray to check the temperature. “You look like you’re going to pass out.”
“I’m f—” Tally started to stay but stopped herself at Raelle’s warning glance. “I’ll stay upright,” she promised instead as she dropped her underwear to the floor and left them in a pile with her tank top and shorts. She had zero care for her nudity in the moment and even less care for anything else. “Is the temperature good?”
“Yeah, it’s good,” Raelle said, then squeezed Tally’s bare shoulder and passed toward the open door. “Just get me if you need me. Okay?”
“I will.” She wouldn’t.
As she was left blessedly alone again, Tally grabbed her toothbrush and toothpaste from the cabinet over the sink and took both into the shower with her. She scrubbed her teeth and scrubbed her body, washed the buildup of oil from her scalp and hair, and tried to convince herself she could be clean again. Pure again. Innocent.
She couldn’t. That was gone now.
Wasn’t it?
Classes were halted for two weeks. No one could focus. No one could bring themselves to care. They’d been shaken, all of them, every witch in Fort Salem, and none could stop themselves from trembling. Everything, everything, was wrong.
No one talked, not really. Small talk. Dumb jokes. Bitter tastes in their mouths as they pushed around food they could hardly eat. Everyone whispered and worried and avoided and denied, but nobody processed. Nobody dealt. Everybody stagnated. Everyone suffered.
It didn’t have to be like this.
They spent their mornings lounged around tables in the mess hall and their afternoons and evenings wandering the grounds or, in Tally’s case, lying in bed and refusing to move. Hunkered over the toilet, refusing to be well. Pressed under the shower, refusing to be clean.
“Yeah, and now she’s holed up in one of the old matrimonial complexes.”
Tally jolted, the first shock of energy she’d felt in days now coursing through her like electricity. She lifted her head off the table and turned toward the source of the words. Lysander, from Bellona coven. Two tables over, his head was bent over a plate of food that he stabbed with a fork but never brought to his mouth.
Beside him, Paola leaned tiredly into her palm, elbow balanced on the table, and rubbed sleep from her eyes. “The matrimonial complexes?” she asked, frowning. “Out on north bounds? I thought they closed those down?”
“They did, like decades ago,” Lysander said, “but that’s what I heard. That she, like, rounded up all the Biddies and moved out there, and she hasn’t come out since.”
“Tally.”
It was a warning. Tally could hear it in Abigail’s voice like a threat. She could feel how wide her own eyes were as she pulled her focus back to her own table. She looked at Abigail, then Raelle. They stared right back, knowing, and Tally felt heat begin to pool in her cheeks. The sickening kind. The kind that made her stomach lurch. The kind that threatened to have her back on her knees, head in the toilet, choking on sour regrets she was now certain she’d never be rid of.
Is this what she’d felt like? Every single day of her long, long life?
Tally was on her feet before she’d even realized she moved, but before she could take a step, Abigail’s hand clamped around her wrist.
“No.”
“I have to,” Tally said, and her voice cracked. She closed her eyes. “I have to.”
“Um, no,” Abigail said, her voice harsh and biting. “You don’t actually.”
Tally felt like she was going to splinter apart from the inside. She’d never been so uncomfortable in her life, like nothing would settle. Nothing would ease. “You don’t understand.”
“No, I understand perfectly,” Abigail snapped, then shot to her own feet. “And I’m telling you to sit your skinny ass back down and stop this.”
They stood toe to toe, nose to nose, and Tally’s breathing suddenly felt staggered and harsh. Shallow and not enough. Tears pricked in her eyes.
“I have to see her,” she whispered. “I have to explain. I have to… Abi, I have to do something.”
Abigail closed her eyes for a moment, shook her head slowly back and forth as she released an angry hiss of a sigh. When she looked at Tally again, her dark eyes were storm and fury. And so much sorrow. So much trauma. So much.
“Tally,” she said and shook her head again, “you’ve done enough.”
When Abigail walked out of the mess hall, resigned, Tally felt like she’d never be able to breathe again. Helpless, she looked at Raelle, who only sighed and stood. She squeezed Tally’s hand. “She just needs time,” she said. “I’ll talk to her.”
Tally nodded and let her go. She and Abigail hadn’t been on the same page in days, not since Abigail had willingly taken a place beside her, ready to suffer, to fight, to die in that hangar for what Tally had been so sure was right. Not since they’d gripped each other’s hands and stood, frozen and shocked silent, as Abigail was forced to watch her own mother, under the President’s command, carry out Nicte's execution in General Alder’s stead.
All the horror. All the loss. None of the triumph.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
Tally’s feet carried her. She shouldn’t go, shouldn’t bother. Abigail was right. She’d done enough.
But she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t not go, not when this was something she could fix. Not when she could apologize. She could explain. She could try.
Couldn’t she?
Would such an attempt even be welcome? A little part of Tally that she refused to acknowledge was certain it wouldn’t be, was certain she wouldn’t be.
She went anyway.
The walk to the north boundary took longer than Tally anticipated. The sun was edging on noon when she finally made it, but it wasn't hot. The air was chilly. Her fingers ached.
Out on the edge of Fort Salem, the old matrimonial complexes stood like ancient bodies left to live out their lives in solitude. Tally could imagine them sinking slowly into the grounds, another tradition lost to the hands of history, to the cold, wet arms of the Massachusetts wilds. Her boots sunk into the soft, spongy ground as she approached the four vine-eaten structures. Two of the buildings, she ruled out immediately. One leaned dangerously. The other was missing a portion of its roof. The two closest to her were in better shape, but only one gave Tally what she needed.
The second building of the four radiated life. It hummed with sound and power. Where the other three sat like shadows in Tally’s Sight, this building sparkled. Tally watched as music drifted and curled around the building like tendrils of smoke painted in blues and greens and purples.
Her feet moved again, carrying her without care or thought. Only direction. One direction. Toward the colors, the music. The energy. Toward her.
The old buildings were designed like duplexes with each complex containing two separate family-sized apartments, which meant Tally now found herself facing two front doors. She used her Sight to guide her, reaching out, pushing through boundaries to sense the energies inside.
They came to her like blurs of color, splotches of paint on canvas. One. Two. Three. Four.
Wait.
Tally frowned. She could make out the presence of four people in each apartment, eight total. She’d been expecting the eight, but not in such an arrangement. Or rather, she’d been hoping for something easier. Something like one apartment containing seven women and the other containing only one. Wouldn’t have been hard to guess which one of those women was Sarah Alder. Instead, Tally had four on each side, which meant only one thing.
She was going to have to knock on both doors.
“Goddess, protect,” she muttered under her breath as she approached the first door, the quieter one. This side of the complex was duller, less sound-drenched and painted in Tally’s vision. The music she could so clearly see was coming from behind the other door.
“Do you like civilian music? I enjoy it immensely.”
The words came back to Tally like the whisper of a lullaby, or a nightmare. She shivered and quickly switched doors. Her chest constricted as she raised a hand to knock. Her breath caught hard in her lungs and held there until it started to burn, and Tally knocked before she could talk herself out of it.
The music inside stopped, then Tally heard the shuffling of steps.
She wasn’t surprised when a Biddy answered the door. Eliza, the one with the glasses. Tally remembered Sarah affectionately calling her “Bumble” along the link. Why, she didn’t know. What did surprise Tally was the expression on Eliza’s face.
Tally couldn’t recall ever having seen an expression on a Biddy’s face other than those deliberately dramatized for effect—the animalistic stretch and hiss of anger, the serene smile of gratitude, the concentrated furrow of draining Work. Most of the time, their expressions remained as placid as their behavior and their gait, the mellow flow with which they followed the general and went about their tasks.
But this…this anger was hard and controlled and silent. It was individual. Eliza looked at her as if the slightest ill word from her lips would result in a bolt of lightning to the top of Tally’s head—the same kind of white-hot, instant destruction Tally had only just finished exacting herself.
“H-hi,” Tally forced herself to say, then swallowed. It didn’t help, didn’t soothe. Her tongue felt like a stone between her teeth. “I was looking f—”
“I know who you’re looking for,” Eliza snapped, and Tally’s lips slammed together with such force, she heard the crack of bone on bone. Her gums ached at the top of her teeth. “She isn’t here.”
Eyes wide, Tally stared at her, unable to move her mouth or speak a word. The worst part was that she wasn’t even sure if it was Eliza’s Work that had forced her jaw shut like a trap, or if it was the effect of her own fear, her own shame, her own relentless, gnawing need for something, something she couldn't name. Regardless, Tally felt thoroughly scolded.
She forced another thick, useless swallow and nodded, stepped back from the door. Before she could stop herself, she glanced over at the other, the one she'd first approached. The second she did, a low, threatening hiss whispered from Eliza’s wrinkle-lined lips.
“She isn’t there either,” the Biddy sharply added, and Tally quickly nodded again.
When she didn’t immediately turn to leave, however, Eliza stared her down. The harder she stared, the more crone-line she began to appear, and Tally’s palms started to sweat. Her eyes began to burn. Her jaw was so tight, she felt the strain of it in the sides of her neck, in the spaces behind her ears. A dull ache throbbed in her right temple.
Tally nodded again and forced herself around. As she took several quick steps away from the complex, the tension in her face began to ease. A few steps more, and the sound of a door slamming reached her ears. Then blessed release.
Tally sobbed as her mouth shot open and relief flooded her face like cool water. Tears spilled over her fingers as she rubbed her sore cheeks and jaw. Shame pressed at her insides.
It didn’t have to be like this.
Tally stopped and looked back at the complex, part of her considering risking her life to go back. To try the other door. To beg. To force her way through. To make the general look her in the eyes so Tally could say she was sorry, say she didn’t understand what had gone wrong, say she could fix it, fix them. So Tally could tell her she would make up for it. She would try. So she could tell her it wasn’t an end.
It wasn’t their end.
It wasn’t.
Was it?
Tally was in front of the door again. The other door this time, the first door. A fresh sob jumped through her lips as she laid her forehead to the wood and forced in a breath. Why couldn't she leave? Why couldn't she stop? Her hands pressed to the door, palms to wood, energy to full stop. She felt static and struck. Her breath, shallow and unsteady, hitched in her throat. Her fingers moved without permission, without command.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
No call sounded on the other side, but Tally could’ve sworn she heard the faint shuffle of papers. The pages of a book maybe. She froze.
On a slow exhale, Tally focused her Sight. Swatches of color popped across her vision again, indefinite blurs of energy hidden inside the structure. Tally could see, clearly, that three of those energies were concentrated on the second level of the apartment. Only one was on the ground level. There with her. Feet away.
A whimper crawled up Tally’s throat as she watched the energy move closer, and the closer it drew, the more defined it became.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Tally’s fingers tapped of their own volition. Like morse code, they called for aid. Come closer. Come closer. Bring me home.
The creak of wood and spring had Tally pressing her ear to the door. Every muscle in her body tensed. All her apologies, all her justifications sat at the tip of her tongue, ready. Tally felt prepared. She felt terrified.
She felt like she might never breathe again when she heard the creak sound once more. Closer this time. Tally steeled herself and tried again, louder this time, deliberate.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
She closed her eyes and waited. Hoped. She and the general…they could fix this. Couldn’t they? Even if they couldn’t change anything, they could adjust, right? They could survive with their connection intact, some semblance of a relationship. Something more than used-to-be’s and never-again’s. Some part of Tally could make some part of this right again. She was certain. She had to be certain. She had to.
She wasn’t sure she would survive otherwise.
When the door remained closed and the presence inside quiet, Tally opened her eyes and sighed. She pressed a hand to her chest, just over her heart. The heaviness she felt had tipped just over the edge of manageable, and she couldn’t swallow it. She couldn’t endure it.
This wasn’t what she'd wanted. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen.
Was it?
“I’m sorry,” she whimpered, unable to stop herself. She cupped a hand over her mouth as tears burned and welled and broke free, and Tally finally made herself walk away. She wasn’t wanted here.
She wasn’t wanted.
Was she?
The walk back to Sekhmet was like wading through mud, pushing her limbs through an unforgiving current. Every step strained. And when Tally finally made it, she realized she was utterly alone, and while she wasn’t sure that was what she wanted, she accepted it. She could fix things with Abigail tomorrow. With everyone.
She could. Couldn’t she?
Tally crawled into to her bed and reached for her mother’s quilt, the only item she’d brought from home. It was the quilt she’d hidden under since she was three years old, and Tally wasn’t a child anymore, but she couldn’t imagine doing anything else at this point. She pulled the patchwork over her head and pretended she could count away her worries. Pretended she was safe. Pretended she was happy.
She pretended the monsters couldn’t touch her there.
She pretended the monsters weren’t of her own making.
The sky was still inky black when Tally woke sick to her stomach again. Her face was sticky, nose running. Her eyes stung. She couldn’t remember what she’d been dreaming of, or if she’d even been dreaming at all. Part of her was certain she’d broken her own heart, and her body just didn’t know how to stop grieving the loss. Pain pricked in her temples, in the base of her skull, behind her eyes. She was dehydrated and devastated, and still, she found herself moving.
The dorm was silent but for the soft sounds of Raelle snoring and Abigail’s restless shuffling. None of them had slept well since that day—Raelle because of Tally’s late-night trips to the bathroom to vomit up her feelings; Abigail because of the nightmares. Nightmares she wouldn’t talk about, couldn’t talk about it. Even if she could, Tally was sure she wouldn’t be Abigail’s choice to confide in. Not now. Not yet.
Goddess, she had so much fixing to do, and Tally Craven was not a Fixer. That wouldn’t stop her from trying.
As quietly as she could, Tally pulled on a pair of sweatpants, yanked a sweater over her messy hair, and shoved her socked feet into her boots. She was out of the dorm before she had any idea of what she was doing or where she was going. It seemed that was just her way now—her body functioning without thought, the chaos of her emotions driving her without reason. She couldn’t temper it. She could only follow.
Her breath fogged the moment it touched the air, and Tally shivered under the first murky blue streaks of dawn spilling through black. The sun was still beneath the horizon, would be for some time yet, but Tally walked anyway. Cold and dark and alone.
She walked and breathed and cried without meaning to, and before she knew it, she was standing at the north boundary again. The four dying buildings were shadows sinking into the ground in the dark. Nothing welcoming. Nothing warm.
Tally approached anyway.
At the door again, she hesitated. It was late. Or early. So early. Too early. She shouldn’t knock, shouldn’t disturb.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Nothing. Of course, there was nothing.
Tally sighed and turned away, determined to force herself back across base—back to her dorm, her bed, her place. Instead, her feet carried her around the side of the building. Tally was mortified with her inability to stop herself—her body’s relentless insistence that it keep going, keep trying, keep on and on and on. It was that impulse, that urge, that reckless relentlessness that got her in this situation in the first place.
It’s what ruined her.
It’s what ruined her.
To Tally’s simultaneous horror and delight, the side of the building had windows. They were curtained, a fact for which Tally sent up a silent prayer of thanks. No one would see her creeping around in the dark like an absolute stalker. Another part of her stirred with something that felt like hope when she noticed a light in the window farthest from the front of the building.
Someone was awake, and Tally dared to believe it was the exact someone she so desperately needed to see.
She approached the window as quietly as she could. The soft light behind the curtain was alive, undulating. Firelight. Tally’s chest sparked again with feeling. Yes, hope. Definitely hope.
Tally lay her hand against the cold windowpane and closed her eyes, summoned her Sight. There it was. That blur of color, energy, life. Just across from her. Tally pushed herself, focusing until the blur began to define. Pressure gripped her insides as she pushed herself, as she pushed every ounce of energy she had, and she had very little, into the Work.
She couldn’t stop the cry that jumped from her throat when the swath of green and blue and just a touch of purple defined into the razor-sharp, unmistakable outline of Sarah Alder. Tally capped a hand over her mouth, tears spilling over her fingers unbidden, but it was too late. She watched through her eyelids as the outline of the general’s face snapped sharply toward the window, right where Tally stood shivering, shaking. Shaken.
Somewhere in Tally’s chest, in her stomach, in her thighs, the instinct struck for her to run. But her feet remained rooted, stubborn, frozen. She wasn’t going anywhere, even as she watched the brightly colored shape inside turn fully in her direction. Step toward her. Closer.
Closer until Tally knew the general was right there, just on the other side of the window, the curtain. Closer than she’d been since she’d slammed her forehead into Tally’s with such force that Tally still bore the mark of it nearly a week later. Tally flinched at the thought, the memory, and her Sight fizzled. Her already sapped energy was exhausted. She was empty. Broken and sorry and empty.
She waited for the curtain to rip open, to see the general’s face on the other side—warped by glass and Tally’s betrayal—but it never did. She wasn’t coming. She wasn’t going to give Tally what she needed. One look. One chance to say something, to say so many things.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
This wasn’t what she’d wanted.
It didn’t have to be like this.
It didn’t have to be like this.
It didn’t have to b—
“Craven.”
Tally screamed. She really, really screamed. She screamed like a banshee, so loud and so shrill that her voice cracked into pieces after. “Oh Goddess,” she choked out, garbled, as she pressed one hand over her now thumping-mad heart and clutched the side of the building with the other.
Tally collapsed against cold brick, bracing herself, as she turned toward the voice and found General Sarah Alder standing only feet away, right at the rear of the building. The general’s hair was down, a little wild. She wore her military-issue pants and boots with a form-fitted sweatshirt. The large black lettering printed across the chest was just visible in the lightening dark. ARMY.
The general’s arms were crossed over her chest though her right hand was raised, index finger rubbing at her ear. One of her eyes was clenched shut as if she’d just sucked on something sour. “And they say you can’t sneak up on a Knower,” she said, and Tally felt her entire body burn with embarrassment.
“G-General,” she managed to say, and though the urge to stand at attention struck her like a battering ram to the chest, Tally couldn’t quite make her body cooperate. “I’m sorry.”
“As you should be,” the general replied. “My hearing may never recover.”
Tally frowned, laughed uncomfortably. Was the general making a joke? Was she teasing her? She couldn’t tell. There was nothing in the general’s face but stone, and Tally didn’t know what to do with that. She hadn’t expected to feel so off-kilter at the sight.
“I…I’m sorry,” Tally said again, and the general nodded once. Curt.
“Yes, you said.”
Tally made her legs move. They protested but still wobbled her up to a standing position and stepped her forward. She sighed, relieved. “No,” she said. “I mean I’m…I’m sorry for…” She moved closer, one trembling step then another, certain the general would step back.
She didn’t.
“For everything,” Tally whispered once she was little more than a breath away. Her chest heaved, and she felt her sweater brush the outer edge of the general’s arm, still crossed over her heart. Tally swallowed, thick, painful, and looked right into the general’s eyes, still somehow bright in the dim air of early dawn. “For everything.”
Silence slipped in like a cancer, devouring the moment from the outside in, devouring Tally from the inside out. She was eaten up with it. They’d shared silences before, she and the general, uncomfortable silences, even. But this… It was alien. Hot. It sapped the oxygen from the air around her until Tally felt threatened. She choked on it.
And all the while, the general simply stared at her. She didn’t waver, didn’t blink. Didn’t once look away. Just stared and stared and didn’t say a word, and Tally suddenly wasn’t so sure she should have done this. She wasn’t sure she should have come here. Then…
A sigh whispered over the general’s lips, and finally, she blinked. Tally felt that blink like a snap of tension, slacking her muscles in an instant break. Her legs shook.
The general glanced up the side of the building and back. “Craven, do you know why I came here?”
Tally swallowed again, still thick, still painful, and watched the general’s eyes trace the motion down her throat. Her entire body was hot, burning with humiliation, electric with need. She wanted so many things in that moment, though Tally wasn’t certain she knew what a single one of those things were. “No.”
The general’s eyes met hers again—all her angles still carved from stone, set and unforgiving. Her voice was smooth, even, lethal. “I came here to be alone.”
Tally’s stomach sank straight into her knees. “O-oh.” The word shook itself from Tally’s crumpling soul like a whimper, like shame put to voice and vapor. Hot tears flooded her eyes as the general turned away from her and moved to leave, to return to her space and her quiet and her life without interruption. Without Tally and her stupid, stupid apologies. “Right. Of…of course. I…” She couldn’t stop. Goddess, why couldn’t she stop?! “I just came for… I just… I wanted—”
“You wanted to feel better,” the general said, calmly, coldly. She turned back to Tally and stared her dead in the face. “You wanted me to make you feel better.”
Tally frowned. “N-no.” That wasn’t what she’d wanted.
Was it?
A gasp shredded Tally’s throat with shock-cold air when her back suddenly smacked against the side of the building and General Alder pressed and enveloped every inch of her. The shocked sound was swallowed in an instant as she took Tally’s mouth with hers. Something caught between a moan and a whimper rocketed up from Tally’s gut as she trembled against the warm body now touching her head to foot. This body. Her body.
Tally’s mind exploded with color and confusion, shock and wonder, and so much sudden need she felt consumed in seconds. And questions. Questions. So many questions.
Tally’s body, on the other hand, didn’t have a single question. Not one fucking concern in the world. And it didn’t need instruction. It simply reacted. Her hands shot up, one latching onto the general’s shoulder, the other sinking into raven hair and gripping tight. She kissed back hungrily, greedily, opening her mouth so the general could slip inside, stroke the back of her teeth with her tongue.
Oh. This. This felt good.
When the general’s air-chilled fingers suddenly slipped under Tally’s sweater and pressed to her belly, Tally stuttered out of the kiss and gasped. She pressed her forehead to the general’s and trembled. “What…” She licked her lips, steadied her breath. “What are…why are you…” She whimpered, eyes stinging with tears again. “What are you doing?”
The general’s fingers skirted under the band of Tally’s sweatpants, under the thinner band of her panties. Tally felt the drag of her fingertips through her pubic hair and moaned. She clenched her eyes closed and bucked her hips forward, unable to stop herself.
“I’m giving you what you want,” the general whispered, and her fingers slid lower until the tip of her middle finger hovered just over the top of Tally’s slit. “May I?”
Tally opened her eyes and looked at her. Blue eyes so resolute, giving nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Questions. Goddess, Tally had so many questions.
“Y-yes,” Tally stuttered, swallowing her questions like pride and somehow managing not to choke on them.
The general took her mouth again at the same time she took Tally’s heat in her hand. The cold cup of her palm around Tally’s now throbbing clit was almost too much. Tally cried into the general’s mouth as her hips jolted forward again, rutting her cunt hard against the general’s hand, and she trembled. She was already shockingly close to climax. Goddess, what was happening? How the hell was any of this happening?!
The general released Tally’s mouth to suck at her jaw, her throat, the thump of her pulse. She swiped around Tally’s entrance once, twice, coating her fingers in what Tally could feel was a generous amount of desire, then slowly, gently, she pressed the tips just slightly inside.
A staggered sigh shook itself from Tally’s mouth as she gripped the general’s shoulders and waited, every muscle in her body tensed.
“Relax,” the general ordered against her throat, and Tally’s body obeyed without thought. Even in the wet heat of sudden sex, she couldn’t not think of this woman as the general. Her general. Maybe she was something else once, for a moment, the briefest of moments, before Tally was young again. Before the dreams. Before all of it.
But Tally wasn’t sure she had the right to think of her as anything else anymore.
Tally's breath released in a rush, and the second the tension broke, the general sunk two long digits right into Tally’s heat. Tally cried nearly as loudly as she’d earlier screamed, and the general clamped her free hand over Tally’s mouth but never stopped. She thrust into Tally with near-brutal deliberation. Once. Twice.
Tally watched her, her face, her concentration. The set of the general’s jaw. The way her eyes had fluttered closed when she entered Tally but opened quickly again after. They were unreadable to Tally in a way they never had been before, and it made Tally feel sick to her stomach. Sick and uncomfortable and more aroused than she’d ever been in her life.
With pin-point precision, the general struck the tips of her fingers against the swollen, ridged patch of flesh just inside Tally, like she was striking the strings of a guitar, and Tally clamped her eyes closed as she exploded into the blinding shock-white of orgasm.
She felt her chest boiling with sound, felt her jaw drop to set it free, but nothing escaped. No sound touched the air as she squeezed around the general’s fingers and shook so hard it dizzied her. She was breathless and silent and breathless. And the general was as solid as ever, frozen in place, supporting her, waiting.
Tears wreaked havoc down Tally’s cheeks again as she trembled her way down from climax. Her legs shook as the general settled her, pressed one last soft kiss to her lips, then slowly pulled her fingers from Tally’s heat. The second the digits were free, the general stepped back from Tally and put her hands behind her back. Rigid and militant—face as placid as ever. The sudden change made Tally’s head spin.
She frowned, panted. “General?” It sounded wrong and right at the same time, more wrong than right given the circumstances, but Tally couldn’t bring herself to attempt anything else.
“Dismissed, Cadet.”
Every drop of heat in Tally’s body instantly, excruciatingly, froze. Every muscle tightened to the point of snapping. Her heart clenched into a fist and stayed there. “I…” Her throat was so tight. The backs of her ears ached. “Have I done something wrong?”
Tally remembered the first time she’d uttered those words to the general. She felt just as devastated now. Worse.
“Craven,” General Alder replied, matter-of-factly, “as we’ve established, you wanted me to make you feel better. I’ve done that. Objective achieved.”
“Obje…” The repetition died on Tally’s tongue as she gaped at the general. “Is that really why?” she blurted, voice jumping an octave. Hurt spilled through her stomach like sick. “Is that really why you…why we…”
The general sighed again, slow, quiet. “I’ve learned,” she said, and Tally frowned.
“Learned?” Her underwear was sticky wet and rapidly growing cold, and every inch of her body began to buzz with discomfort. “Learned what?”
General Alder held her gaze, steady. No emotion. No give. “Yes, I’ve learned, quite thoroughly, thank you, that if Cadet Craven doesn’t get what Cadet Craven wants, everyone must suffer the consequences.”
And just as it had in the hangar, when Tally had taken steps and spoken words she could now only hazily recall, the world wrenched violently up and into motion again. It was the coldest, most detached she had ever heard the general’s voice, and Tally felt twisted and tilted by it. Utterly unstable.
All those apologies and justifications she’d been chewing on, practicing over and over in her head, shriveled into dust at the back of her tongue, and suddenly Tally was speechless. She was broken.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
This isn’t what she’d wanted.
It didn’t have to be like this.
General Alder stepped toward her again, hands still pinned behind her back, fingers still undoubtedly coated with sex. Her blue eyes pinned and pressed and refused to relent. “That feeling in the pit of your stomach,” she said, voice dropping, guttural. “That feeling that brought you here...”
Tally knew exactly the feeling. It still slithered in the hollow of her gut. Tamer now but still there. Still very much alive.
Another step. The general was a breath away again, and her tone slipped into something soft. A quiet kind of danger. “It isn’t care,” she said, “and it isn’t contrition.”
Tally’s fingers curled into fists. Her jaw ached from clenching her teeth. But she couldn’t stop. The second she relaxed, the second she allowed herself to feel the words coming out of the general’s mouth, Tally knew she would crumble. She would be ruined. Ruins.
And she couldn’t. Not here. Not in front of her. No.
“Don’t fool yourself, Craven,” the general said with the cold huff of a laugh. “It’s guilt.”
Tally’s heart sank and sank and sank until she could feel it at her feet. Nausea roared in her gut, prickled up her throat. She began to salivate at the same time her eyes began to burn.
“And you must do as we all must do,” the general whispered, leaning in until her hair pressed over Tally’s face like a curtain and her breath whispered just over the hollow of Tally’s ear. “Deal with it.”
When she walked away without so much as a glance or a goodbye, Tally’s legs finally gave out. Her body sank to meet her heart, and suddenly, Tally was on her ass, sobbing. And she didn’t care. There was no chill in the air or wet touch of ground that could rival the brutal, unrelenting cold spilling through her like a raging current.
She would freeze in it. She would drown in it.
It didn’t have to be like this.
Or maybe... Maybe it did.