Eleven months later
Phoebe let out a deep sigh of exhaustion and sat back on her haunches in the course earth, gazing into the Fade towering over her. She removed her shoes and set them next to her baskets, which sagged under the weight of their bulbous green contents. There were many Fade-talents, but Phoebe loathed this one most of all. Especially since she always woke up in chains in the attic, and Derek wouldn’t tell her why. Her muscles ached enough without a night sleeping in those manacles.
Nadderfruit, she gagged. Damn man made everything out of the stuff. Jams and wines most of all.
The title of "least favorite part of being a slave" was a competitive one, but only when Derek wasn't around. Right now, she struggled to choose between the cuts and scratches on her hands from harvesting Fade-talents, and the burns from the Fade’s gouts of gas. Every so often, the big wall less than a mile away from her would shower little specks of itself, and if it touched the skin, it felt like garlic in a cut. At least for Phoebe, the burns didn't stick. They just faded away after a few minutes. For the other slaves, the ones Derek didn't own who worked the fields north and south of his, those burns were permanent. She didn't know why she was different, but she certainly didn't make a big deal about it. The less unique a slave was, the better.
Phoebe flinched as she wrapped her hand around the wrong part of a plant and pulled. It didn’t cut, but the poky texture wasn’t pleasant, and it’d show if she wasn’t more careful.
Phoebe was too unique as it was. Her lack of scars continued to draw Derek's eye. At first, only his parents would make her work this close to the Fade and risk marring herself, but after he realized she didn’t scar, he made her do it without them. She wore a slave dress sewn for her as a gift from him. A reward for a particularly good harvest a year ago, which revealed more than anything she'd seen another fogcrawler slave wear. He reasoned that as long as her skin was safe from the Fade’s touch anyway, she might as well show more of it.
At least she could be alone when she worked. Derek usually worked his more conventional farmlands near the house, and took care of the chickens while she was out here. She was his only slave, so she didn't have to deal with other slaves competing for resources from her master, but that also meant she received a hundred percent of Derek’s attention. Any percentage of that was too much.
The majority of Phoebe's experience with other slaves was that they would turn her in if she wandered north or south, off her designated plot and into theirs. The rewards, and more importantly the punishments for failing to do so, turned them into pitiable versions of the slave catchers she knew all too well. Phoebe was not a complacent slave, and she never would be if she had anything to say about it. She got herself through most days by scheming to get her engram off, and trying not to think about how many plans she’d already lost and wasn’t even allowed to remember, wiped away in engram maintenance visits.
A mosquito landed on her collarbone. Phoebe crushed it without thinking. She brushed away some snake’s molted skin. It looked old, so she hardly noticed it. She took a deep breath, and exhaled, letting the dry air wash over her aching muscles as soothingly as it could. She ran a hand over her bald head, wiping off sweat that had accumulated there. It was useless; next to the Fade, the wind hardly ever blew. All it did was make Phoebe feel even stickier than the nadderfruit between her fingers already did. Being one of Derek's favorite Fade-talents, that made Nadderfruit’s stickiness even worse. Everything about Derek made stickiness worse. Phoebe would have preferred harvesting a different talent, something else that only appeared at the edges of the Fade, like zukern metal. At the very least, it would give her practice swinging a sharp object, and she could definitely think of ways that would be useful.
"Rather be digging for black diamonds than these," Phoebe muttered. The day was almost over, and so was the nadderfruit season. Just a little longer until sundown, and then all she had left to do was take care of the chickens. At least it was now caskerwol, the half of the year when there was a night time, and not just one sun setting as the other rose. She looked forward to that cool night air.
Just as Phoebe gathered herself enough to finish work for the day, a Barridian beetle bit her shin all the way to the title of "least favorite part of being a slave". She screamed and kicked back at it. She rose to her feet and promptly collapsed after putting weight on the bitten shin. Pain seethed up her leg and through her body like wildfire. Through blurry eyes, she saw the beetle scurry away into the dirt, down a hole she'd been sitting directly on top of.
"Agh … " she moaned, laying her leg across her lap and pulling it close. "How – the hell – does a bug that big – fit in such a tiny hole?"
Phoebe rocked back and forth, nursing the shin where the bite mark was. She pulled her sandals close, but didn't put them on yet. She still had fruit to pick. The basket was heavy, but had enough space left that Derek would have questions and possibly punishments. He was already on edge since this morning, and she didn't know why. Sometimes, he’d look at her in the morning as if she was holding a huge sword. He wished he looked at her that way more often. Certainly beat the other ways he did.
Phoebe felt pain tears welling up in her eyes again. An alarm bell was trying to ring in her head, telling her she needed to get far away from here, but in the commotion of beetle bite pain, it didn’t get priority. She was in no condition to walk. Barridian beetle venom was mostly harmless, after an hour or so of hellish pain. Still, that left her no time to harvest and fill her quota for the day. Derek would have to ride out here on his horse to take her back, once he noticed she missed curfew. Her heart was already racing. It was doing an excellent job intensifying the agony in her shin with each throb. The idea of Derek always made her stress worse. He'd make her work earlier and later tomorrow, once her shin was only mostly healed, and he'd find a way to make back the money he spent on ointment. And he did have to buy that ointment - otherwise, Phoebe’s shin might get infected. She’d be even less useful that way.
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And less beautiful, she thought with a grimace. Gah, to hell with him.
The most dangerous thing about a Barridian beetle bite, however, was that its venom reacted with human blood to create a scent human noses couldn't detect. What could detect it, however, was the Vimovarv Cobra. Phoebe remembered her alarm bell from earlier, and started looking everywhere for the snake to appear. It probably wouldn’t show up so close to the Fade - the snakes were cowards about the mists, much more so than beetles.
Just as she thought she was in the clear, and could go back to suffering in peace, Phoebe spotted a cobra sliding toward her through the desert brush. It slowly slithered its triangular head framed by an imperial black and red hood. The things were supposedly quite rare; Phoebe had been stung by beetles before, and never attracted one until now. She had been dealt a terrible hand today.
With a scream, Phoebe leapt to her feet, only to suck all that air back in and collapse on her back again. That beetle bite had rendered her leg useless, and she made it exponentially worse by putting weight on it. But she needed to run. That snake was after her leg, and if it sank its teeth in, she was done for. On its own, the cobra's venom was lethal in days. Combined with beetle venom, it could kill in minutes.
I'm going to die, Phoebe realized. She scrabbled away with her one useful leg. That thing is gonna bite me, and I'm going to die here, just like that. A mile away from the Fade. I'll never get this engram off. I'll never –
The snake lunged for her shin.
Something inside Phoebe flared. Something she recognized the moment it appeared, and forgot the moment it ceased. The engram on her cheek flared too, but for a second, Phoebe was able to push it aside. With the familiarity of walking, and the speed of a scream, Phoebe raised a rock, and smashed the animal’s head down in mid-strike. Silver light flashed. Somehow, Phoebe's hand and body moved faster than a leaping snake.
Less than a second later, whatever it was passed. The engram locked back up again before Phoebe could realize what was happening.
She stared at the rock in her hand. Bits of the snake's head dripped from it. Its broken teeth peeled off and fell on her dress. The rock itself was cracked, and when she dropped it, it split in two. Phoebe's wide eyes passed between it and the beheaded snake, trying desperately to remember the last few seconds, despite the angry reassertion of her engram.
Then, the pain in her shin prevented any further thought except to grab her basket and start limping back to the farm, before another Vimovarv Cobra came after her. She nursed her screaming leg again, her attention diverted. The Fade’s distant hissing and roiling was an excellent backdrop.
"Damned snake," she muttered. She kicked aside its long, headless body with her good leg. "Serves you right.”
***
“Phoebe,” Derek said in a voice like speaking to a child. “You need to hold still.”
Phoebe jerked away from him again, but his grip around her back was firm. “You already applied the salve,” she said. “Let me go.”
Derek tugged her closer till her feet were behind his back. “You should take a rest while it sets in.”
“Yeah, I should!” she yelled. She pushed as hard as she could on his chest, and her shin already felt much better, but she couldn’t plant one of her feet on the farmhouse porch for leverage.
“Let me carry you up,” Derek said. “That way you won’t have to take the stairs.”
Phoebe knew the look he was giving her way too well. It was a look that said he wasn’t going anywhere after they got to that bed.
“Let me go,” she insisted. “I can make it myself.”
Derek drew his face closer to hers. Phoebe realized in horror that he was trying to kiss her. She pulled her head away as far as she could, but his grip on her leg was firm, and with the other hand, he took the back of her bald scalp and pushed her forward. She gave a muffled scream.
“Come on,” Derek said after way too long. “Don’t you feel better already?”
“Stop touching me!”
Derek gave her a look that said, “it’s been years. Aren’t you over it yet?” He’d said those very words to her before. But she would never be over it. This would never be okay. The day this became okay would be the day Phoebe stopped trying to escape. The day Phoebe stopped trying to escape was the day she’d stop living.
He angled for another kiss.
“I said stop!”
At that moment, several things happened at once. Silver light filled the little space between their bodies. Phoebe was suddenly able to jerk her arms free, and she socked Derek clean across the face. He collapsed backward on the porch with a thud of wood. She scrabbled away from him, but in an instant, she’d crossed half the farmyard on her rump in a blur of bright magic.
Phoebe was frozen in shock. She had no idea what just happened. She gingerly touched her cheek. The engram was there, but it wasn’t hurting. At least, it wasn’t actively stinging her like it usually did when she tried to remember something she wasn’t supposed to.
Then, she got a feeling in her head, a feeling so strong it was almost words. Someone was telling her to get up, to run before Derek recovered, or better yet to finish him off. Derek had propped himself up on one elbow, his other hand on his face where he’d been hit. He stared at Phoebe in disbelief that matched her own.
Phoebe felt a powerful urge to him like that again, and maybe even again. Maybe keep hitting him until he stopped moving for good. It was just the kind of thought she entertained to get through a hard day, and with Derek, every day was a hard day.
But when she rose to her feet, the image soured terribly. It felt wrong. She couldn’t just kill him. She couldn’t. Part of her tried to say it was wrong, but it wasn’t a part of her she was used to. Wrong? Killing Derek? What kind of stupid thought was that, especially for a girl who’d lived under his thumb - and the rest of his body - for years?
Because if you hurt him, who else will you hurt?
Every step she took closer to him, with silver magic glowing in her palms, the more revolting the idea became. She’d never killed anyone before. She’d barely even hurt anyone. At least, that she could remember. Maybe that was why she was so hesitant now, with the engram leaking. As she had the thought, she could hear distant harpsichord music playing. And what sounded like screams. Not of fear, but of rage.
Then, Derek stood up and took a step toward her. Phoebe’s mind, engram, and body did the one thing they could agree on, and she bolted away. She didn’t just run. She zipped away at a speed that should have been impossible, in an eye-watering, windy silver blur that left Derek behind.
Since Phoebe is the main character, do you think Phoebe and Derek have both been given enough POV time?
